by Zadie Smith
But Kelso, caught in the slipstream of life, without the hindsight of either reader or author, could think only of his own pain, which, by this point, was not stabbing, sharp or occasional but radiating, unceasing and mind-consuming. He let Mal dance with Olivia. He did not sing along or make much comment on anything. He did his best to read the words in his lap. It was a foreign story, Russian, translated and made shorter for the convenience of the working man, and it concerned the death of a lawyer. For this reason, Kelso had turned to it with a special interest: the law was his own aspiration; he hoped one day to afford to study it. But the story was heavy going. It had come to him by way of a costly subscription—two bob for the year—the price of which he tried not to think of too often, for if he did he knew he would cancel it. The trouble was, it was near impossible to say at what point a working man, such as himself—for whom every shilling counted—had even done two bobs’ worth of reading, and it was also very difficult to say whether the things you did read—even if you read them cover to cover, every month, and for the full year—were worth two bob in the first place. Words were obviously not like records or silk handkerchiefs or the sorts of spiffy waistcoats he happened to favor—the only other material items on which he had ever considered spending two bob. No, words were not like that. What were they like? There just didn’t seem to be any way at all of knowing. He didn’t imagine even the rich and educated knew the answer, any more than he did—they just didn’t miss the two bob either way.
This particular story he had been reading for a month at least, and freely admitted to himself that he was not really following it, but still he liked it well enough for those sentences that seemed, every now and then, to be about himself—that is, about Kelso—although of course he understood that they actually referred to this mysterious Russian character, Ivan. Who lived in a house Kelso could not visualize, in a time and a place surely too distant in history to feel real to any reader, be he working man or no. Last week, the story had felt especially far from his own reality—almost to the point of being incomprehensible. What he had thought would be a tale of the law had turned out to be more about pain, excruciating pain and miserable death, and each paragraph felt like a swamp you were being forced to wade through. Yet now that he was in such unexpected pain himself he found certain lines shot out at him directly, as if addressed to him only, with personal intent:
Those about him did not understand, or refused to understand, and believed that everything in the world was going on as usual.
Yes, he felt just like that!
* * *
• • •
It was almost four. A look passed between Olivia and Kelso, which Mal, good-humored by nature, did not take personally, corking what was left of the ginger wine and tucking the bottle jauntily under his arm. And his brother, who loved him dearly, and saw him do this, did not take any offense. You shared what you could and took back what you needed, for nobody was living like the Queen of England over here, were they?
“Well, I’ll be seeing you, Kel, man,” said Mal. He would not, not ever again, but wasn’t to know. Kelso, for his part, was not eager to move his hand from its rigid position and left the good-byes to Olivia, who gave her almost brother-in-law a kiss on each cheek, closed the door behind him and then took her place in the armchair next to Kelso. They had two such chairs. She considered this one of the many advantages of marrying a carpenter. What foolish people threw out, Kelso could mend and make good, and Olivia’s contribution was a pair of decently sewn slip covers, and if only the room itself were bigger they’d have had many more people round to admire their handiwork. She looked over at her love, still reading, clearly in pain. She picked up her sewing basket, a little dutifully. On Saturdays, by mutual agreement, they tried to “uplift” themselves and not waste the precious hours on too much foolishness. Kelso did his book reading and she tried to busy her hands in a way that was not labor, that had something leisurely about it. But leisure did not come naturally to her, and if he caught her darning a sock or hemming a curtain he certainly didn’t like it, and let her know he didn’t. Why couldn’t she understand that she deserved a “weekend” as much as any other Londoner? He was especially adamant about her doing nothing useful during bank holidays, so now she passed over the torn skirt that sat on the top of her basket—and urgently needed her attention—reaching instead for a perfectly pointless piece of embroidery she’d been working on almost as long as Kelso had been reading his Digest. It was a pretty oval, text in the middle and bluebells round the edges, and, if she ever finished, it would sit on the wall above their chairs, a touch of home:
Words are to be taken seriously.
I try to take seriously acts of language.
Words set things in motion.
I’ve seen them doing it.
But she had only got as far as the second “seriously,” which she now noticed contained a foolish error—it was missing a “u”—and so began, with a little sigh, to unpick it.
* * *
• • •
A few minutes later, Kelso surprised her, raising his knee, letting his book fall shut, standing up suddenly.
“Livvy, the thing is we must get out of here. It’s hot as the Devil in here! And, you know, it’s not too late.”
By which he meant that they were not too late for Speakers’ Corner, where they usually went after Mal had left them: it was part of their weekend of uplifting and betterment. Some people thought of Saturday only as sweet relief, as domino and rum, but Kelso didn’t think that way, and she was glad he didn’t, even if there were times she wished he didn’t frown so on going to the pictures. “All you will see at the Odeon is advertisements for America and I can tell you I’ve been to America and it is not at all what is advertised!” Olivia found this sentiment unusual, and very impressive. At the same time, she never inquired too deeply into his American experience, suspecting, from little things he had said here and there, that it had been a moment in his life when the Devil was pulling on his collar. But that had been another woman’s problem, and a different Kelso. “And every Saturday around five,” she had written home to her mother, in the letter that contained the news of her engagement, “we go to Speakers’ Corner down in Hyde Park, to hear all the people talking.” It was both uplifting and less painful than the Odeon on her pocketbook. Still, her girlfriends thought it an odd habit. They had no experience of a man with a plan, who thought beyond tomorrow, but Kelso was ten years older than Olivia and her friends and the difference told: he had learned to save his money. One day he would be a lawyer in a strange white wig. Now she picked up her bag and put on her hat and checked her change purse for the train fare. They stepped out into the hot streets in their shiny shoes, their clean, formal clothes, and she felt a certain pride. Going to the Corner of a Saturday was like everything else, it was like the way she and Kelso dressed, the way they walked, the careful precision of their habits—all these things marked them out, in her mind, as a special couple, with a special destiny.
* * *
• • •
The man in front of them was old and white, quite bald, with only a little gray hair on each side and dark, furry eyebrows. Evidently a French poet. He stood on a simple slatted box, the kind used to transport those fruits that fall ill at the least lack of air, and he peered into the crowd with interest, as if trying to discern what type of audience this might be at his feet. This suggested to Olivia that there was more curiosity than authority about him. She liked people like that. Kelso himself was like that.
“The thing about narrative,” said the speaker, on the crate, “is that it is inherently inauthentic. It is prearranged information in a certain pattern. It will always have a motive. It will always be a manipulation . . .”
“Look at his bushy brows!” crowed a foolish woman behind Olivia. “Don’t he look just like a snowy eagle!”
“Oh, hush up and listen,” said Olivia, but
under her breath, and without turning round. “If you listen you might even learn a little something.” (Kelso restricted himself to sighing and looking up, with renewed scholarly intensity, at the curious figure on the crate.)
“And if this manipulation,” the Frenchman continued, “if it comes from the right, well, then we call it propaganda, and if from the left we tend to consider it not only humane but beautiful. We think of literature as humane and beautiful. It matters very much who the ‘we’ is in this proposition. I am a French poet. I do not include myself in that ‘we.’ And would it not be better to place the humane and even the human to one side for the moment and to deal only with material facts? To say, with me, like an incantation: the darkness, the street light, the stiletto knife, the puncture, the wound, the blood, the cobbles, the tarmac, the curb . . .”
The speaker went on like this for some time. It was a hot day to be near so many other bodies, listening to such a forceful oration. Kelso and Olivia were familiar with oration—as we have seen, they came to hear it most Saturdays—but they were not accustomed to the heat, at least not here, in England, where they had learned to wear sweater vests and cardigans with everything, no matter what the early-morning sun on their windowpanes implied. Now each stripped off a layer, which Kelso hung over his left arm, crooked to a ninety-degree angle, and found the elevation helped the pain. Olivia, tiring a little of the French poet, turned her attention to an American voice on her left, which turned out to belong to a woman not unlike her own grandmother: the same lion’s face, the same wealth of hair.
“The function,” said this woman, “the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Your reason for being! thought Olivia, and gripped Kelso’s good hand a little tighter. The fresh pressure was a counterbalance to the pain in his other hand, he could use the one to distract from the other. This worked for a moment. Then the pain re-established itself, more persistent than ever. He could not attend to this woman. He could barely attend to anything.
* * *
• • •
At a quarter past six, a great flock of swallows took flight from the top of Marble Arch and swept over the crowd, so low that many crouched—including most of the speakers—after which everybody straightened up again, the speakers carried right on speaking, the tricky thing became knowing when to leave. Neither Kelso nor Olivia ever wanted to be the one to say: “Let’s go.” They had to place the decision outside of themselves, in the weather or some other external cause, for to leave was to give up on betterment, or to suggest betterment was less fun than the pictures, or the market, or a million other, easier things.
“How’s your thumb? It pain you still?” asked Olivia, in a sudden leap of inspiration. He was holding his left hand to his chest with his right like someone about to say something terribly sincere, an oath, maybe, or a profession of love.
“Oh, Livvy—it’s murder!”
* * *
• • •
They walked back to the station. At the entrance, a newspaper boy was changing the hoarding poster from today’s headline: SIGNS AND SYMBOLS! to tomorrow’s: FORESHADOWING! Kelso stopped, rolled a thin cigarette and lingered a while so as to read the front page, which this particular lenient newspaper boy—they were not all like that—did not stop him from doing. As the boy busied himself cutting the strings off several towers of the Daily Express, Kelso read of venality, poverty, crime, corruption, murder.
“Madness, madness, everywhere,” he murmured, feeling almost as sorry for the world as he did for his mangled thumb.
“Kel, the train soon come!”
* * *
• • •
An old woman sat opposite them. She had a pink scarf tied over her gray curls, too much powder on her nose, and a look on her face like she wished them both dead. Olivia thought: Oh, Lord, even if I hated anyone that much I wouldn’t want to look that way as I did it! How ghoulish this woman looked, snarling like that—almost like Enoch himself. Olivia turned to Kelso to see if he’d noticed but his head was bowed, he held his wrist as if to cut the blood from the offending hand, so that he might feel nothing at all. Olivia raised her own gaze fixedly to the illustration of the Piccadilly Line, choosing to focus on the names of the stops—Cade Bambara, Ponge, Tolstoy, Morrison—mouthing them silently to herself, finding this calmed her, and at the next station the ghoulish woman got off.
* * *
• • •
By the time they got home it was past eight. They’d walked through a summer rowdiness—music from every pub, women dressed as they shouldn’t be, drunk lads revving up their mopeds—and Olivia was more than ready for her bed. The heat in the room was stifling. She hung her coat and hat on the little hook Kelso had fashioned for the purpose, turned back and found him pacing the small space, his coat still over his arm, his hat crushed in his good hand. She watched him dump his small change out on the table, where it could serve as evidence against a botched robbery. He took another turn around the room, moaning.
“You want me to go with you?”
“No, Livvy, no point in two people in a waiting room when only one is sick.”
She put his hat back on his head. Warned him she might be asleep by the time he got back.
* * *
• • •
It was already mostly drunks in St. Mary’s and ragged, homeless white people, the existence of whom still very much surprised him, even after five years in the country. He sat slightly apart from them all, his thumb pressed between his knees. An hour went by. A nurse called him into a small corner, marked off with curtains on a rail. She undid the bandage and the splint and showed him the correct way to hold the throbbing joint until a Dr. Rooney arrived. Another hour passed. Then a surprise—a woman! Livvy claimed there were two women doctors at her hospital, but he had never seen an example for himself. This one was alarmingly young: her pale ears poked through her poker-straight hair; she looked like a schoolgirl. He asked her if that was an Irish name. She nodded, but said nothing more. She took his thumb, pressed it between her own thumbs to align it, then set it in a fresh splint, with a fresh bandage, all the time speaking very little to him, but going about her business with a serious intent and also a delicacy Kelso admired: she did not look at him, for example, when he yelped. As she worked, he watched her. He wondered whether he himself could have been a doctor, had he been dealt different cards. What she was doing did not seem so very distant from carpentry.
“There you are,” she said, and smiled, for the first time. She passed Kelso her prescription. It was formatted strangely, like an e-mail from one writer to another:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Not having any academic background in “creative writing” I’ve never really understood the injunction “show don’t tell,” but now I think maybe it’s communicating the same basic concept—that there are some ideas impossible to understand or accept as direct statements, but just marginally, fleetingly comprehensible in the form of stories. At times, I do wonder if there’s something slightly dishonest in this approach, that it turns the novel into a kind of parable or illustration of a precept instead of an honest narrative.
Kelso took it gratefully. He thanked the good doctor and started for home. He walked down the Harrow Road and over the Grand Union Canal. Water went with water in his mind. The green and murky lagoon behind his great-aunt’s house—where he and his cousins had often picnicked in the black sand and swum in the early evenings—seemed to lie, in his mental geography, at the other end of a channel of water connecting Antigua to this gray canal beneath his feet, and stretching all the way back to the New World, to the Potomac and the Hudson, both of those so very cold and filthy. Perhaps if he had lasted longer in the States—or in that bad American marriage—he might think of whi
te sands and warm waves, but all his American water had been on the East Coast. Stacking shipping containers at Vesey Street might put a man off water for life, he supposed, yet without water you cannot be reborn, and daring to cross an ocean one more time had been his own form of rebirth, a second baptism. He had tried America, then he had tried England—how many could say that? And he was still standing, despite many setbacks and missteps. He felt he knew his own worth. Livvy knew it. Mal knew it. The lads at work knew it . . . No, no, he wasn’t at all like the Russian gentleman in the story, unloved and disrespected, and it was a shame to have such an idea walking home alone, it was really very silly and morbid. He turned his mind to Olivia. He considered the whole back line of her body and how he would soon press into it and sleep, feeling less pain than he’d experienced these past four days. Oh, if there was anything wonderful about pain it was the moment when you stopped feeling it! When feeling nothing became its own incredible gift. And in a few more days, God willing, he’d be back there in that place, with everybody else, in the land of nothing, of no pain. Yet if he could only wipe those American years, that woman . . . the wrong path, the years wasted. But that was the kind of pain you just had to live with. He’d give everything on this earth to be twenty-one again, to step into the river of time with Olivia, but have them both be the same age, and have everything else exactly as it was now, except with those lost years rolled tight in his fist, not yet unraveled.