Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  People passed this way and that. Seagulls alighted on the path and on the railing by the river, looking around for opportunities with their cold yellow eyes. He wondered if what he’d just said was really close enough to the truth. For it wasn’t just what she’d said that had embarrassed him, was it? It was who she was. Even if she’d just said hello, he’d still be feeling like this.

  ‘You were embarrassed when I said it in front of her,’ Michelle said, ‘but when I said the same thing to you a few minutes before . . . well, okay you laughed at me, you said it was like talking to your nan – even though you’re telling me now that even your nan wasn’t that fucking stupid – but you didn’t seem to mind. In fact, you actually admitted there was some truth in it. You said you wondered sometimes if artists were like that emperor in the story where no one dares tell him he’s got no clothes on.’

  ‘It’s true, I did.’

  ‘So how come you were embarrassed when I said something you think is true?’

  It was a good question and he had to think before he could answer it. ‘Because “A kid could do it” really is a very old cliché,’ he said. ‘It’s quite possibly the most clichéd thing that people say when they don’t know anything at all about art. And I was particularly embarrassed by you saying it because I was already embarrassed by the situation.’

  ‘I know exactly what embarrassed you,’ she told him. ‘You thought, “What sort of sad fuck do I look like to Letty, turning down a beautiful sophisticated woman like her for a thick little chav from Norfolk who might be pretty but knows fuck all about anything?”’

  Harry had promised to be honest but, if he was to keep that promise, he’d have had to admit that what Michelle had just put to him was an almost exact description of how he’d felt. ‘You’re not thick,’ he finally said, and at first he was addressing himself as much as her. ‘You’re no more thick than I am. You’ve just spent less time being educated, and don’t live among highly educated people, so of course you’re not so familiar with the things they talk about. And you’re not a chav either, whatever that means.’ (I’ve looked into the word ‘chav’, incidentally. It’s definitely pejorative and, though its precise meaning is rather hard to pin down, it always refers to people who are of a lower class than the speaker.) ‘You and I have different backgrounds. We grew up with different expectations and among different kinds of people. If we carry on together, we’re going to find that difficult. I don’t think I’ll find your people easy to be with, either. But . . . ’

  Somehow, while he’d been speaking, his feelings had completely changed again. Standing there in front of him shivering in her neat grey dress, Michelle seemed inexpressibly precious to him.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Oh Michelle, I’m trying hard not to get carried away, I’m trying not to say silly over-the-top things, but . . . ’

  She peered up into his face. Behind her stood that huge industrial shell that had once stunk of soot and engine oil and hummed with brutal energy, but now contained gluten-free salads, and miniature bottles of cabernet sauvignon, and those strange, arch creations that constituted art in the latter part of the Western Hegemony. ‘But what, you stupid man?’

  ‘Well . . . okay, if you really want the truth, I look at you now and I just . . . I just love you.’

  He admits to himself later that ‘some dumb, vain, adolescent part of me actually believed that when I said that she’d melt’, but of course that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Michelle exploded, her anger blasting through him like white-hot shrapnel, devastating the contents of his mind, and reducing what had been furnished rooms inside his head into splintered wood and crumbled masonry.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Harry! This is mad! This is totally fucking mad! Ten minutes ago you were so ashamed of me you wished you could just make me disappear into the ground. Ten minutes ago! And now this! You do know that loving someone doesn’t just mean wanting to have sex with them, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I—’ began Harry.

  But she was in mid flow and wouldn’t be stopped. ‘It means wanting to be with them,’ she said. ‘Wanting to be with them when they’ve got their clothes on! Wanting to be with them when other people are there! And being fucking proud of them.’

  Harry had never been good with rage. Overwhelmed by the fierceness of her anger, he shook his head repeatedly while holding up his hands as if to ward off the blast she was directing at him. He tried to turn away from her towards the river where (so he later remembers) a tug was shoving six barges, lashed together into a single block, against the force of the turbulent water. But she wasn’t having that.

  ‘Look at me, Harry! Look at my face so I can see you’ve heard me! I don’t want to be anyone’s guilty secret!’

  ‘I do want to be with you,’ he told her, wondering what he really meant by his words even as he was speaking them, given that she was quite right, and that ten minutes ago he had indeed felt exactly the opposite. ‘It’s not just about sex. It really isn’t. I’m sorry about what happened. I’m ashamed of having been ashamed. I’m completely crap when it comes to things like that. But I . . . I think I want you to help me be someone else.’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh no. No, no, no. No chance, mate. I’m not having that either. That’s what Fudge used to say. He’d hit me and call me names and then he’d cry and say he didn’t want to be that way but he needed my help to change.’

  Again Harry turned away from her, not in anger, but because he needed respite, and this time she didn’t stop him so he walked over to the railing that separated the path from the river. The tide was going out, and that tug and its barges were still beating their way slowly upriver against its flow. He had a tendency, he knew, to get carried away and speak his feelings in the moment rather than restraining himself until he’d made a realistic, grown-up appraisal of his state of mind. He could see this was a weakness. It was selfish of him, and childish. And now, in a flash of insight, he realized that it was also extremely manipulative. When it was convenient to feel love, he felt and expressed it, but when it wasn’t convenient, he shut love down at once and felt something else entirely.

  For a moment, presented with this ugly reflection of himself, a surly child stirred inside him. ‘But it’s not only me who’s been impulsive,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It’s her too.’ Not just once, after all, but on two different occasions she’d wanted to go right ahead and have sex with him when he’d tried to be grown-up about it and suggested they needed to be careful!

  But his moment of insight had been just powerful enough not to be extinguished in that way, and he recognized the game that his inner child was trying to play. He’d played it often enough, after all, with Janet, deflecting self-examination by telling himself that she was just as bad or worse.

  He turned back to Michelle. ‘I’ve honestly never hit anyone since I was nine years old,’ he told her. ‘And as for calling people names, well Janet and I said some pretty brutal things to each other, but I’m fairly sure that if she were here, she’d confirm that being a bully is not one of my many faults.’ He reached his hands towards her. She didn’t reach back. ‘I do get why you’re angry with me, though, Michelle. If you wanted to call it a day now, I’d understand. All I can say is I don’t want to.’

  She studied his face, her raw grey angry eyes searching his troubled brown ones. Her coat was still inside the gallery and she was hugging herself against the cold. Finally she nodded. ‘Okay. So what do you want to do now?’

  ‘We’ll forget the gallery, yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry, I know you paid a lot of money for that show, but I don’t want to be in that place any more.’

  ‘I understand. Me neither. Let’s go and get your coat and bag and go somewhere else.’ He put his arm round her shoulders and pulled her against him to rub her back. ‘You’re absolutely freezing, aren’t you?’

  As they queued at the cloakroom, he asked what she usually liked to do when she came to London. She
said the only reason she ever came to London was for shopping trips with her mum, or Jen, or Jules. ‘I remember we had a school trip here once,’ she said, ‘to a big museum with dinosaurs and whales and stuff like that.’

  ‘The Natural History Museum? I used to love that place. I haven’t been there since I was a kid either. Do you fancy going there now?’

  Michelle took pictures in the Natural History Museum and at one point had a passer-by take a picture of the two of them together, standing in front of a dinosaur skeleton, which she went on to post on Facebook. (Harry was uneasy about that, and confides to his diary that he didn’t like the idea of people in Breckham he didn’t know studying him, evaluating him, teasing Michelle about him . . . But he knew better than to speak this thought out loud.) I’ve spent a long time looking at that picture, the two of them side by side, arm in arm, their heads leaning together, each putting on their photo smile. They seem quite happy together in that moment and there really is something alike about the two of them. However different their backgrounds and their outlooks, there’s a similarity in their stances on the world. For one thing, I notice their size. Harry had become suddenly aware of Michelle’s physical smallness during the encounter with Letty, but, though he is much more stockily built than her and half a head taller, he’s not a big man himself. For another thing, they’re both good-looking people, but neither has that particular kind of self-confidence that often goes with good looks.

  They both separately report in their diaries that they had a happy time in the museum among the dinosaur bones and the stuffed animals that they’d both enjoyed as children, almost as if they were children again now. A few times, Harry admits, he was shocked by her lack of knowledge – she seemed to think that cavemen lived alongside dinosaurs, for instance – but he was strict with himself about this. After all, what did he really know himself? It wasn’t as if he truly understood the world around him. He had no idea how his phone worked. He didn’t really know what electricity was (okay, he knew it was ‘electrons’, but where did that really take you?). He had no idea what he was looking at if he lifted the bonnet of his car. And, in spite of hundreds of hours of Brexit conversations, he had to admit, if only to himself, that he was still a little unclear about the precise difference between the ‘Customs Union’ and the ‘Single Market’.

  There existed in Harry’s tribe a certain level of shared general knowledge that allowed him and his friends to feel that they were reasonably well-informed: you knew humans appeared long after the end of the age of dinosaurs, you knew that cubism’s rejection of the literal representation of the world might seem childlike but was in fact a carefully thought-out strategy . . . But these bits of shared knowledge worked in rather the same way that a few leaves painted in detail at carefully chosen points on a canvas deceive the eye of a viewer into thinking they are looking at an entire forest-full of leaves when in fact, apart from those few, all that’s really there is a mass of paint in various shades of green.

  ‘I feel embarrassed now,’ Michelle said, when he had to remind her that a whale was a mammal. ‘You must think I’m such an ignorant woman.’

  He kissed her and said everyone was ignorant about most things, and the world was still pretty much a mystery in spite of science and TV and computers and all the rest. ‘I reckon we just don’t notice that most of the time, because we all know just enough to get through our day, and deal with the people around us.’

  ‘My flat’s like my car,’ Harry warned her, as they climbed the stairs. ‘It does the job, but it’s nothing special.’ He was worried that she’d expect something stylish – he was an architect, after all – but he’d done nothing to his rather anonymous rented apartment beyond hanging a few pictures and moving in some of the furniture from his old house.

  Michelle seemed to find no fault with it, though. He poured her a glass of white wine and while, at the kitchen end of the flat’s open-plan living space, he finished preparing a fish dish whose ingredients he’d got ready in the morning, she wandered around the main part of the room looking at his things.

  ‘Who’s this old guy?’ she asked, picking up the miniature enamel portrait that was still lying unhung on his mantelpiece.

  ‘Gideon Providence Roberts,’ he said. ‘The man who supposedly turned my family into posh middle-class types like me.’

  ‘He looks a miserable old sod.’

  ‘He does, doesn’t he? He was all about self-discipline and self-improvement, by all accounts. Not much fun at all, I imagine. I think that was done in about eighteen hundred.’

  ‘You actually know your ancestors back that far? I don’t know mine any further than my grandparents.’

  She looked at the books and magazines strewn on the glass coffee table in front of the TV. There was a sketch pad and some pencils there, and she asked if she could see what he’d been drawing.

  ‘Be my guest.’ He slid the fish into the oven. ‘But there’s not much in there, to be honest. My big plan to become an artist hasn’t really got very far.’

  She leafed through the pages. He’d done various deliberately stylized drawings of trees, and the view from his window, and ordinary household objects, trying to find his way to a visual language that wasn’t just a rehash of someone else’s. ‘They’re good, Harry. I reckon if you turned these into paintings and hung them in that gallery, no one would know you weren’t a famous artist like the bloke we saw today.’

  ‘That’s nice of you but no. I have got reasonably good basic drawing skills, but I’m beginning to think that’s as far as it goes.’

  ‘Can I draw something?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yeah, of course, go ahead.’ He assembled the ingredients for a salad and chopped them up. When he looked up again she was completely engrossed in what she was doing and didn’t even notice him watching her. There was something rather touching about her rapt face.

  ‘You’re really getting into that!’ he said at length. ‘At one point you were actually sticking out your tongue!’

  ‘Oops. I did that when I was a kid. Trevor always used to tease me about it.’ She snapped the pad shut. ‘That fish is smelling nice.’

  ‘It’ll be ready in half an hour or so. Aren’t you going to show me what you’ve done?’

  ‘Oh, don’t look at it now. I was only having fun.’

  ‘Let me see it.’ He sat beside her and picked up the pad. Her drawing was in a completely different league from what he’d anticipated. She’d done a recognizable and very competently executed pastiche of the cartoon-like pictures they’d seen in the Tate.

  ‘Bloody hell, Michelle, that’s good!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Harry, it’s just a scribble.’

  ‘No really, Michelle, I know about drawing, it’s part of my job, and, trust me, that is good.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’ She seemed oddly indifferent to his praise, almost as if she hadn’t heard what he was saying.

  ‘Seriously,’ he persisted. ‘That’s a real talent you’ve got there.’

  ‘Well, I was okay at drawing at school. I quite enjoyed it.’

  Harry was puzzled. Why wasn’t she pleased that he was impressed? ‘No, I mean it, Michelle,’ he said again. ‘I’m not being nice, that really is good!’

  She shrugged. ‘Okay, great. But why are you making such a big thing about it? I’m still just me, whether I can draw or not.’

  Harry was puzzled. ‘Well, of course, but . . . ’

  ‘But now you’ve got something to tell your friends about when they think I’m just a thick chav?’ She put on her posh voice. ‘“I know she doesn’t seem like much, but you should see her art. It’s absolutely extraordinary.”’

  ‘Oh come on, Michelle! I’m just saying your drawing is good.’

  He went to check the fish. It wasn’t actually necessary to do this but he felt hurt, and he needed a moment to get over his disappointment that she’d gone right back to their row outside the Tate. As he opened the oven, though, it struck him that she was completely r
ight. His feeling on seeing her drawing hadn’t just been pleasure. It had also been relief. She had shown potential. She had demonstrated that, given the opportunity, she was capable of being something other than what she was.

  The fish was, of course, fine. He pushed it back. ‘Okay,’ he told her, still standing behind the kitchen counter. ‘I understand what you’re saying, but the fact is I was very happy to have you here in my flat before you started that drawing – surely you could see that? – and I would have been equally happy to have you here if you hadn’t drawn anything at all, or if your drawing had been completely crap.’

  ‘You’re happy to have me in your flat, Harry, I know that. But what about outside? What about meeting your mates?’ She didn’t leave him time to answer. ‘You know what I hate? I hate it when there’s been a plane crash or a bomb’s gone off or something, and when they talk on the news about the people who’ve died, it’s always the one who’s just got a scholarship they go on about, or the one who was about to climb some mountain in Africa or something. Like their deaths mean more than the others. Like achieving stuff is the only point of being alive, and the only people who matter are the clever people who do clever things.’

  She picked up the drawing she’d done, glanced at it, and put it down again. ‘I don’t want to be your project, Harry. I don’t want to be improved by you. And if you ever again make me feel like you’re so ashamed of me that you wish I was someone else, that’s it, all right? That’s the end of us.’

  Harry was annoyed. ‘Fair enough, but let’s make a deal, shall we? If I promise not to do that again, I want you to promise not to be so fucking defensive that I can’t praise your talents or tell you about something I think might interest you, without you accusing me of trying to improve you. It’s not a crime to be good at things and to want to get better at them, for God’s sake! It’s not a crime to learn! You like Strictly, don’t you? Isn’t that what Strictly’s all about? People learning to do difficult things, and working at it, and getting good at them?’