The Book of Other People

by Zadie Smith

  Magda lives in Errol’s house. This is a scandal on Westerbury Road, because Errol is a widower in his seventies, who brought up a family and was expected to eke away his twilight years on DIY, Sunday church and the occasional tot of Wray & Nephew rum. However, Errol likes Wray & Nephew more than he likes church, and last year (according to Lauren at Number 20) he met Magda at a lock-in at the Victoria Arms, one of the least salubrious pubs in our little corner of East London. I’ve been to one of those lock-ins. They do get frisky. Magda is at least thirty, possibly forty years younger than Errol. For a while after she moved in, he pottered around with a smile on his grizzled face, raffishly touching the brim of his baseball cap to us neighbours and whistling as he swept the leaves off his front steps. These days he wears the sour expression of a man who’s been cheated at cards.

  What Errol signed up for was a bit of bounce and warmth and comfort on cold nights. Instead he’s been swept into a world of grand operatic passion. Between Magda and Errol there is a love that can spill out in many directions. It has left Magda sleeping in a rolled-up carpet on the pavement and Errol hobbling across the street to take refuge in my kitchen; during Old Testament times, Errol prefers to keep a door between the two of them - and who can blame him for that? Magda’s wrath is sharp and terrible. It involves a lot of casting out and smiting. The recently smitten include: Errol (obviously), Lauren at Number 20, the Meals-on-Wheels lady and several council workmen, whom Magda battered with one of the stock of road cones she keeps in the front yard. Magda leaves Errol at least once a month. Sometimes Errol throws her out. Frequently, instead of leaving Errol, Magda punishes him by going to the Victoria Arms and finding a young man to bring home and sit with on the steps. For a day or two, Errol will look grim and spend a lot of time in the betting shop. Then things will go back to normal.

  Magda must be excused her foibles, because she is wrestling with the great question of her life: old man or young man? Both have their plus points. Young men have more energy and are less scandalous, unless they smoke crack on the steps or go telling lies to Errol. Old men are more dignified and have houses. Old men are Magda’s weakness: I LIKE A OLD MAN. She mentioned her inclinations to my father (seventy this year), when he came to visit the other week. There was a commotion outside, and I found Magda knowing him against a lamp-post. You are a old man, she purred appreciatively, rubbing up and down against his leg. I like a old man.

  Old man, young man. Which will it be? For all her turbulence, Magda is concerned about the proprieties. She values the good opinion of us neighbours. The other night she came out onto the steps to explain her relationship with Errol. My neighbours, she said, I must tell you why I am here. We rose from our beds and came to our windows. I AM HIS NURSE. He is a old man. He can’t satisfy a woman like me. He is limp and goes to sleep. I need more of a man than such a one. I am a qualified nurse, a gifted woman. He is like a father to me. The problem with you people is this. I will tell you now: You all have dirty minds. Filthy dirty. I think I have said enough. Now fuck off.

  As neighbours, we often fail Magda in this way - with our prurience, our tendency to jump to conclusions. She frequently has to chastise us. Occasionally she does a round of the street and casts us out one by one, which is effortful and very time-consuming. Tonight, before the arrival of the emergency services, she was berating us for our pride and our materialism. I KNOW YOU, she told us. You think you have HOUSES. In Notting Hill they have HOUSES. I have seen them with my own eyes. In such a house is my friend. A young man, not old and worn out at all. Ten, twelve bathrooms at a time in such houses. Enough bathrooms.

  On nights such as tonight, Magda likes to sing. She particularly likes an audience in uniform. You’re my best friend, she sings. I love you but you don’t love me. This song is freely adapted from her CD of country music hymns, the one she plays to get into a church-going mood on Sunday mornings. Magda has built her own semi-professional singing career around such material. She’s appeared in Cape Town and Tottenham and Dalston, she says. Musically speaking, Magda’s congregation must be more avantgarde than most: although her voice is an extraordinary phenomenon, it’s not tonal, at least not as we usually understand tonality.

  Sometimes when Magda comes out onto the steps and speaks, I sit bolt upright in bed. Sometimes it is as if she is in the room with me. My girlfriend has the same experience. Magda’s voice is not simply loud. Loud, yes, but not just loud. It has the penetrative force of a piece of heavy industrial equipment, something with a diamond bit or tempered-steel blades. Often it seems disconnected from her body, as if emerging from the bathroom or under the floorboards or the far end of Westerbury Road. When you look at Magda, who is quite short and (when dressed) usually looks neat and smart and more or less conventionally contained inside herself, you’d never guess she possessed such a voice. And, in a way, she doesn’t, or at least that’s what I believe. I think she’s merely the voice’s host, its point of entry into the continuum of Westerbury Road.

  Magda’s Voice Theory #1: Dimensionality. She is the portal through which the voice emerges. There must be some other world, unimaginably fraught and violent, contiguous to ours but not normally permeable.

  Magda’s Voice Theory #2: Concerning the Nature of Higher-Order Spaces. Its eerie ability to project into my thickly curtained bedroom is evidence of some force as yet unknown to science. Corollary: perhaps higher-order spaces are denser, more difficult as a medium for conversation.

  Whatever the physical cause, Magda is racked by tremendous passions. Wake up, my neighbours, she will often command. Wake up and listen. Tonight I love you. I love you, my neighbours, I am filled with love. But you do not love me, so I say to you this: I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU. That is the truth. Fuck off now. Go. Magda loves us, but she spurns us just as we spurn her. She spurns us out of the vastness of her love. Sometimes she is unhappy and then she will tell us: I am dying. Yes, I have a pain and I am dying, my neighbours. You don’t love me. I am dying and you don’t even know. I love you, but I don’t give a fuck about you. Go now. Go away. Fuck off. Go. I love you. Go. Once she has delivered her tragic message, she will disappear inside to call an ambulance. When it comes she will be ready on the steps with an overnight case. Having told the paramedics briefly about her pain, she will push past them and sit in the back, waiting to go, fuck off, go.

  Magda’s Voice Theory #3: Metaphysical Origins. After a recent row with Errol, Magda brought home a young Muslim to sit on the steps. He wore a dishdash and a white skullcap. He had a wispy beard and a cardboard suitcase and a bemused expression. I think she’d found him at the station. He looked about twenty-one. Magda waved her rum bottle and told him about the thieves who sometimes steal her parking space. She demonstrated her concern for parking security on Westerbury Road by making a few minor alterations to the construction of wooden planks and road cones she uses to protect the space outside Errol’s house. I wasn’t sure the boy spoke English. From the suitcase, I’d say he had just arrived in London. Still, he listened intently, ignoring the bottle in her hand. Even if he didn’t understand the words, he seemed to recognize something, something worth listening to. Could he have heard divinity in Magda’s voice? At one point that afternoon I passed the steps on my way to the shops. She called out to me: Don’t worry, he’s my brother. He has very dirty ears. I’m just checking his ears.

  It’s gradually dawning on the policemen that they will have to effect an arrest. It will be a slippery business. I wonder if they train for this. Are there special holds? Written protocols? Magda can see the way their devious minds are working. She has the element of surprise. I KNOW YOU, she warns, sportingly.

  Andy the drummer chooses this moment to drive down the road and park outside his house. He has been out late, gigging somewhere. He once told me he gets a lot of work in Leeds. Andy is a favourite of Magda’s. All right, boy, she says. You. Yes, you with the red car. I love you. I’ve seen this car many a time. I’ve seen this car a lot of times, I tell you. Go
away now. I’ve done with you. Go, OK? Fuck you. You probably have a small cock. Go. Andy waves to her and starts unloading his drum-kit. YOU ARE A YOUNG MAN, she calls out, blowing him a kiss.

  Thinking she is distracted, the policemen advance up the steps. Magda emits a long, high-pitched wail, which rattles the windows and pierces deep into the souls of us neighbours, watching from our upstairs windows.

  MVT #4: A survival from the ancient world? Primal, atavistic. Greek mourner. Mammoth-feller. She slithers out of their grasp, waddling down the street in the direction of the main road. Though she’s slow, she has a chaotic, lumbering motion that makes her hard to catch. At last two of the policemen grab hold of her, one gripping her arms, the other circling her waist in a sort of static rugby tackle, his head pressed into the flesh of her stomach so that he’s eyeballing the triangle of acid-green nylon that is all that stands between his nose and her most intimate zones. Magda’s fierce resistance reminds me of the time when her need for a young man led her to climb into the basement of Number 18, where a crew of builders were fitting a kitchen. As they cowered behind the sink unit, she wedged herself halfway through the sash window. I LIVE WITH A OLD MAN, she growled, wiggling and straining. I HAVE A CONDOM. LINE UP. I AM READY.

  Walkie-talkies crackle. Doors slam. Magda is placed inside the police van and I climb back into bed. For a few minutes, red and blue lights make flashing patterns on my ceiling, then all is quiet and dark on Westerbury Road. Magda will be back tomorrow. They never keep her for long. She’ll sulk for a day or two, listening to pirate radio in Errol’s back garden, then she’ll forgive us and return to her place on the front steps. What we, her thieving-neighbours-so-smug-in-our-houses don’t know is the power of love. Love conquers all. One day we’ll discover that this is true and then we’ll be sorry. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we returned Magda’s love. If we believed in her, she could do great things for us. But our problem is we are faithless, our problem is we are stupid. Our problem is we just don’t listen.

  The Monster

  Toby Litt

  (for Ali Smith)

  The monster didn’t know what it was - what kind of monster or even, now and again, whether a monster at all. It had lived for what felt like a long time without mirrors, which didn’t exist, or puddles, which it instinctively avoided. There were other monsters in creation, or the monster assumed they were other monsters (it did not philosophize on the nature of monstrosity - all could be monsters, without a norm from which to deviate), and, had it asked them, these other monsters would probably have described it to itself, using the few words and concepts available to them: monster, creation, sun, tree, fruit, merd, good, bad, up and down. But the monster was for some reason averse to this, just as it was averse to puddles, and had only learnt of the practice by overhearing one monster being described by another. The sentence it overheard was: ‘Monster up up good fruit, down down bad merd.’ And so the monster had always found out most about itself by touch. There were two soft floppy growths upon each side of its head, and its long curved back felt rough at the bottom, like the skin of a fruit. The monster couldn’t see its own feet because its belly, which was huge, got in the way. Every time the monster explored itself, though, its hands (it definitely had hands) seemed to encounter something different. With no written language, it was impossible for the monster to record these changes or the supposed status quo which had preceded them. For example, the monster had a vague sense that, sometime in the distant past, it had either been smaller or had walked upon four legs rather than two. It didn’t have a very good memory, but it was disturbed by the thought that once upon a time it had had to look up at things which now it looked down at, yes, and it had had to stretch on tiptoes to reach things which were now at eye level. Most of these things observed and grabbed were fruit, fruit on trees, and of course trees grew, too - as the monster rediscovered countless times. But not everything in creation grew at the same rate, as the monster had rediscovered more rarely. The monster tended to conclude that one of the best explanations for its sense of bigness was that it was growing faster than the rest of creation. Also, the memory of walking upon all fours could be deceptive: if the monster wanted to, it could still do this - just as, when tired, it would lower itself down until its back was flat on the ground. Because of the size of its belly, the monster could lie in no other position but this. Again because of the belly, the monster had only an intimation of what sex it was - and this it gained socially, from the kinds of monster which most commonly approached it with what seemed to be sexual intent, meaning an intent to sexually describe. ‘Up up good fruit down down good good sun creation fruit.’ Our monster, however, was not interested in pleasure or reproduction - it was put off the latter by its doubt as to its own nature, the former by its misery. At night, it slept - under the stars, there were many stars in creation, and its dreams were frequently of absolute certainty of being. I am this thing. This thing is me. Waking, the fact of waking and the quality of it, was invariably a disappointment. Despite its morning rage, the monster was almost always gentle with the world of creation. It had never killed anything, and if it had harmed anything, that harm had been done accidentally (except, that is, harm the monster had done to itself ). It knew of the quality of good and constantly aspired towards it. And it was this sense, rather than a visual image of beauty or handsomeness, that the monster thought of as its true parentage. Someone had taught the monster not to be unnecessarily cruel, and that was mother, someone had warned it never to be unwarrantedly proud, and that was father. Whatever kinds of creation they had been, the monster’s memory had finally failed any longer to remember them. Perhaps this was because the monster had lived so many days and nights. Among all the things it monstrously lacked, an accurate sense of time was the most disturbing. It knew there were days and, halfway through the days, it believed there were nights. Just after waking, it knew that the time of dreaming had passed in a different way to the time it was now in; just before sleeping, it felt joy: something was about to change and for the better. One definite experience was pain. When our monster hit its head against a tree, by accident or at full force, it knew for certain it had done it. The sharp stab at first and the dull ache afterwards helped it locate parts of its body in relation to one another. The monster wondered whether this behaviour, being cruel to itself and proud of its badness, was bad behaviour. For periods, the monster gave it up - but then it came to an indistinguished lump of time, usually during the middle of the day, and its desire for certain knowledge grew into an unbearable anguish. If the monster could have been content with the pain of anguish rather than the pain of pain, perhaps it could have been content in all areas of its life - though this thought was beyond it. The monster wandered around the areas of creation it knew best, aware that certain features were identities: trees were always different or the plural was a lie; in other words, there was only a single tree which was sometimes close to, sometimes far away from, where the monster had slept, or there were multiple trees but placed so far apart that they were not visible, one to the other, and by the time the monster had walked far enough away from one tree to find another, it had forgotten the memorized features of the first, and so was able to make a comparison. On the tree or trees were fruit, which were tastily colourful - the monster reached in the morning to touch their brightness, then found itself with half of one in its mouth. Eating had been reinvented, yet again - and the monster knew it was something that had happened before. It knew this because the action felt, like mother, both comfortable and comforting; the sensation of chewing seemed repetitive and, thus, repeated from before. This was probably, apart from the moments just after a headbash, when our monster came closest to happiness. Excretion, too, unexpectedly occurred. But, being a business of the unseen nether regions, beneath the belly, the monster wasn’t all that involved with it. Just as the fruits were bright, off the ground and attractive, so the merds were dull, underfoot and repellent. Whether by instinct or not, the monster
only deposited them at some little distance from the tree or the nearest tree. And when the slight straining was done, which took care of itself, the monster would walk away - usually without looking. Again, because of the belly, if the monster did become curious about its merds, it couldn’t examine them from close up - not from above, anyway. The monster could have lain down and rolled towards the dull round smelly objects, but, before it ever did this, a feeling overcame it that nothing dull and smelly was worth the effort of rolling towards. Round objects, the monster had no objection to - and in the case of fruit was actively attracted towards. In hope, sometimes, the monster thought of its belly as a big round fruit. But just as often, in despair, the belly’s roundness was that of a merd. It, the belly, was where merds came from, after all - though the monster was capable of forgetting this. The trees were also possessed of leaves. If these taught the monster any lesson, it was one of uselessness - and use. By mistake, the monster sometimes ate some leaf along with the fruit. It wasn’t a bad taste, not proud or cruel like a monster could be, but it was useless. The monster spat them out, away from the tree, towards the merds. When the leaves became useful was when the sun overhead became too hot. This was when the cool beside the tree-trunk was the only good place. Several monsters would gather. ‘Down tree down sun good.’ The leaves were also useful when it rained and made puddles. Then, they stopped the monster becoming too cold. One day, the monster set off to - but no, there was to be no quest for true identity, no storing up of fruit for the long journey into the away-from-this-tree self. No. One day, one day of that sort, would never come. One day, instead, would continue to be one day - one day very like the day before and almost indistinguishable from the day after. The monster had no story, unless being a monster is story enough.