by Deborah Levy
The wind hurls plastic bags up from the gutter and into the air. They fly like strange torn birds battered in a gale. Sheets of metal and bits of scaffolding fall from buildings on to the pavement. Mothers clutch their children and hurry home. The sky is the colour of dead fish. A man shuffles towards J.K., losing one of his slippers on the way. Beery breath, face much too close to hers, he whispers, ‘Little woman, you have blood under your crotch,’ and limps off into the swirling litter, a deranged prophet on the edge of the desert, walking into a swarm of locusts.
Lillian Strauss is planting red pokers in her garden. She digs and digs. Sometimes she buries bottles in her garden, binliners full of bottles; vodka, whisky, gin, wine, and once as a joke, an SOS, tucked into a very special bottle of malt whisky, a secret note for someone to find in the future. ‘My red-hot pokers will bloom,’ says Lillian Strauss, ‘even in this bloody English soil.’ And then she says to J.K., who hands her airmail letters so she can write to her sister in Singapore, ‘You are a fool even though you are cunning and let me tell you this dear, you’re hardly a matinee idol.’
‘We’re going to celebrate us in style J.K.’
Ebele orders two glasses of champagne and a plate of chips. Seven foot tall, in a suit and little red fez, he shows her his shoes. They are full of holes which he’s stuffed with newspaper so he creaks every time he walks. His wrists jingle with bracelets and they are in a bar in Oxford, surrounded by pale young couples eating salmon cakes; somewhere, bells are ringing, ringing through the Muzak and neat pastel blouses.
J.K. dips a chip into a puddle of ketchup, circling it round and round, smiling and looking away, and then looking straight into his black eyes – just as the Muzak drawls, ‘Loooovin’ you whah whah oooooooooooh.’
Ebele so big, the glass of champagne small in his hand, in his beautiful wide-palmed hand, bells ringing through his fingers, as he creaks and jingles, rocks backwards and forwards on his chair. He tells her he is a twin and how his twin brother died at birth, weighing two pounds. He, Ebele, weighed eleven pounds, and when the cord was cut, his brother died next to him, thin and sickly, and he a giant baby freak screaming on a slab in Sierre Leone, nose to nose with his starved dead brother.
‘I felt a murderer y’know . . . for years after, so when I come to the West, first thing I do is look up a book to see how twins lie in the womb.’ Ebele scoops up a handful of chips into his mouth and sips his champagne as if it were Guinness. ‘I learn it was my mouth that was wrapped round the food supply innit.’ His mouth is full of potato. ‘Yeh. But the spirit of my twin brother is always with me. My baby brother. He is my lucky charm. When things go wrong in life I feel him with me. He is the boy who stops the planes I fly in from crashing.’
He claps his hands and the tassels on his fez shiver under the air conditioner.
‘My hands feel so weak today. Look at my fingers. They’re like spaghetti.’
Lillian Strauss has very thin earlobes and very thin lips. She has a Biro in her hand and while she talks she doodles. The word Aristotle appears twice, and underneath it, a tortoise carrying a little red flower in its mouth. That’s my insignia, she says. Like people have tartans, I have tortoises. Her daughter laughs. In response to the laughter Lillian Strauss sketches a young girl holding a long-eyelashed cat by the lead. Good night angel, she says, I can’t drive you home because of my night blindness, and while she describes what it’s like not to be able to see in the dark, J.K. looks at her mother’s collection of tigers. They are arranged in little groups all over the house, striped heads and glassy eyes. Good night angel, she says, and her voice is panicked, breathless, just as it always is when she expresses affection. And then when everything seems okay, the words Good night angel, the puckering of lips to kiss, there is a sea change. Lillian Strauss says, you hate all my family, you don’t want to know about my childhood in Singapore, you think I am a w.a.s.p., you ignore half your blood, and she begins to write in the same biro, a ‘hymn of hate’ to her daughter. The tigers look on. They look straight into J.K., yowling great cries into her heart.
There is a beast inside J.K. It is a mammoth, frozen in ice. It inhabits the colony of her interior and sometimes it stirs. While her mother writes the hymn of hate, she can feel it nudge its big ugly head against the ice. When her mother says, ‘I love you so much,’ it lies down again, and rests. ‘You are going away again,’ says Lillian Strauss. ‘Good riddance.’
Starlings fill the sky. They circle a large whitewashed mansion with green shutters raised above the bay. Scarlet blooms grow in turquoise pots and trees bend in the breeze inside the walls of the garden. There is shade in that garden. And a hammock strung between lemon trees. There is health in that garden. Cool walls and birdsong. I’d get to look young in that place. I’d come home to rest in that place. I’d stop running, running through airports and railway stations, running through European cities looking for rooms and coffee and company and comfort. I would stop running away from this beast inside me. We would rest here and stop being frightened of each other.
Lillian Strauss has sold her house, sold her car (‘four hundred pounds and it’s yours’), sold a carpet, sold some silver cutlery, sold a bronze buddha, and moved to another suburb in London. She drinks a bottle of dry white wine at 11 a.m. and says to her daughter, I want a sea funeral, I want to be buried at sea. J.K. says, ‘You’ve always liked the sea,’ and gives her a clay tiger she has brought back from Spain. By 1 p.m. her mother has finished the wine and is making scones. She is not a scone-making mother, but her mother made scones and she is trying to remember the recipe. She breaks lumps of butter into the flour and says, this is to let them breathe. The smell of scones cooking fills the kitchen and Lillian Strauss folds her arms over her soiled cardigan. She stares at her new tiger with dull eyes.
‘I saw a park full of picnicking women yesterday afternoon. Young mothers and their children. They were picnicking on rugs and they were happy. I wanted to buy cherries and for us, you and me, to sit in the park and soak up the sun. I wanted to be as easy, as free and easy as those young mothers when I was a young mother.’ She stops and her cheeks are burning. ‘You have that horrible look on your face. You’re always plotting.’ Lillian Strauss is in one of her rages. She opens the oven and with her bare hands takes out the baking tin. Half the scones are sweet and half sizzle with melted cheese. She plunges her hands into them, tears them apart and throws them against the walls of the kitchen, her burnt hands writhing like snakes through the bone-white grass of her discontent.
Ebele brings J.K. one of his paintings for her birthday: an orange hand, its palm laced with henna, similar to Indian brides at weddings.
‘Count the fingers,’ he says.
‘Six.’ She smiles. ‘Six orange fingers.’
‘From your alien friend. They tell me I’m an alien at the airport.’ He holds up his own fingers and tells J.K. to count them. One, two, three, four, five. She kisses his hand and then bursts into tears. Afterwards, as they walk in the park hand in hand, kicking piles of new mown grass into smaller piles, she tells him about her mother’s blistered hands laced with sizzling cheese.
Lillian Strauss arrives at her daughter’s house with a large tin of tomato soup and a black pudding sausage. The hem of her dress is held together with safety pins and her calves are scratched and bloody. Ha ha laughs Lillian Strauss. ‘Just from the pins dear. They come undone. What did you think they were?’ Her cheeks are covered in a nerve rash. She thumps the black pudding on the table.
‘Guess where I got the money to buy that.’
‘Where?’
‘I finished the Times crossword and won twenty quid.’
As they eat, Lillian Strauss points to the sausage pronged on her fork.
‘What’s this?’
‘Meat.’
‘No my dear. This is congealed blood.’
She puts it in her mouth and chomps with relish.
J.K. thinks about how much she loves her mother.
&n
bsp; The panic of the raging beast. J.K. wears a summer dress the colour of the lemons she glimpsed in the walled garden. The colour she saw standing on the wrong side of paradise. Ebele stands behind her, plaiting her hair, brushing it, smoothing it down, weaving lemon ribbons into the braids.
Lillian Strauss takes a hammer and thrashes the ice tray. It is six o’clock, time for gin and tonic, a little bowl of peanuts, intimacies and brittle jokes. As the gin bottle empties, her hand tightens around her glass and laughter changes to melancholy. She begins to name all the cats she has owned and how each one of them died. ‘I would have liked grandchildren to get sober for,’ she weeps. One day J.K. gives her a present. Five papier mâché Chinese children. Round faces and black hair. There are blossoms painted on their clothes. Lillian Strauss arranges and rearranges them on a little straw mat, and J.K. observes that her mother has no half moons on her fingernails. Just as she is thinking this, Lillian Strauss flings one of the Chinese children to the floor and stamps on it with her square brown heels. ‘What you need is a good kick up the arse. It’s big enough.’ The papier mâché baby lies crumpled on its stomach, cheek pressed into the carpet, and on the sole of Lillian Strauss’s shoe, a little hand with three broken fingers.
Her mother points to the red hot pokers thrusting out of the stony soil of her garden. ‘What do you think of my red garden, J.K.?’ She leans over and strokes the stem. ‘Your pink camellia, my dear, is for the cowardly.’ The noise of the day fades.
When Lillian Strauss turns round to face the heat and silence behind her neck, she thinks her garden is on fire. And then she sees a mouth, a massive mouth, opening, opening, until it fills the whole of her eye, a quivering thing, standing in the blaze of her red-hot pokers. She clenches her fist and thumps it into the mouth of the beast, alone with the child she created.
3
Re-imagining the Stranger
He walks in although she has no memory of leaving the door open. When she turns round to face him, he says, ‘You are barefoot, you have one tooth missing, and you are wearing a blue dress.’
‘Why do you always describe me?’
Silence.
‘Your lips are cracked,’ she says.
They are sitting together on the sofa. It is a warm night, the heat of the day pouring in through the windows. He takes out a wad of papers from his brown leather bag, the bag travellers strap across their chests, a few essentials packed with care. A book, a pen, a bottle of orange flower water, a passport, a photo, a slab of chocolate, a wallet heavy with foreign coins.
‘Currency,’ he says.
‘I have been thinking about strangers,’ she says.
He smiles and looks out of the window.
‘How a stranger never belongs to a person or to a place. He can be an insider and an outsider at the same time.’
At that moment he puts his arms around her and her eyelash touches his cracked lips.
In bed they laze about for a while and then she climbs on top of him and says, ‘Tell me about zones and frontiers.’ He is kissing her shoulders, his lips are cool and he is saying, ‘Um . . . ooh . . . there are um naked frontiers, take off your blue dress, and there are . . . um zones you can go into and zones you can’t. Do you like being touched here or here?’ She considers telling him where she was born, how old she is and what she does for a living.
‘What’s your name?’ He puts his hand on her breast.
J.K.
She notices that this time (they have only been naked once together before) he shuts his eyes when last time he kept them open. She thinks he has his eyes shut because he is feeling something he did not feel before.
‘You are naked apart from three silver bracelets,’ he says.
‘You’re describing me again.’
‘That’s what strangers do. When they are in an unfamiliar place they describe it.’
‘We are intimate strangers,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
They lie side by side, heads touching as the sky deepens and shops pull down their shutters.
‘Do you want a glass of German champagne?’
‘Was it a present?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why German?’
She shrugs.
‘There’s a story you’re not telling me. That’s how you keep someone a stranger.’ And then, ‘HEY you’ve got your shoes on. How can that be? You didn’t have shoes on when I arrived. When did you put them on? We’ve been screwing and you’ve kept your shoes on!’
J.K. ties up the laces.
‘These aren’t just any shoes. They are made for walking long distances.’
She goes to fetch the champagne and, just as they open it, she lying across his back, there is a knock on the door. She says, ‘That will be Zoya. A friend of mine.’
He is shy and surprised and puts his hand into the silver curls of his hair.
‘But it’s late . . . it’s . . .’
‘She has driven one hundred and ninety miles to see me.’ J.K. pulls on her blue dress and leaves him naked in her bedroom.
Zoya wears little horn-rimmed spectacles (even though her eyes have perfect vision), a mantilla comb in her hair, and carries a small spherical black suitcase.
‘It’s the doctor,’ she guffaws. ‘Where does it hurt?’ Despite the humidity of this unnaturally warm night she also carries an overcoat. ‘Got no love to keep me warm,’ she says, and takes a pineapple out of her spherical black bag. She saws through the thick skin with a bread knife and sucks a ring of pulpy flesh. ‘Those are the green plates you bought in Brixton market.’ She points to a shelf above the fridge, catching the juice running down her chin with a cupped hand. The stranger walks in and strokes J.K.’s hair.
‘You are wearing a blue dress, three silver bracelets, walking shoes, and you bought six green plates in Brixton market.’
Zoya adjusts her spectacles and lights a cigarette.
‘Are you going to introduce us?’
Silence.
‘This is J.K.,’ he says.
The migrant stranger and the migrant Zoya sit together in another room while J.K. cooks. They begin to find oceans, motorways, railway lines, bus routes, facial characteristics, languages, bread, fruit, fish, jokes and musical instruments in common. When J.K. returns with plates of food and sits on a chair opposite them, she feels like a stranger.
The next evening, London is divided into two zones – by telephone. Inner and Outer, Central and Suburban. 071 and 081. The Post Office Tower celebrates by spinning laser beams into the sky. Zoya and J.K. are walking down Charlotte Street, West London, looking for a place to eat lamb kebabs.
‘How can I wo-rk when the sky’s so blu-e. How can I wo-rk like other wo-men do,’ Zoya croons.
‘I miss my family,’ she says.
‘You’ve never said that before.’
They sit down at a little café with tables and chairs sprawled on the pavement.
‘It’s the smell of lamb and heat.’
The waiter takes their order.
‘I used to be able to speak Urdu as a child. Then this country beat it out of me. One night I got drunk in Berlin and remembered everything. I even remembered languages I didn’t know I spoke! I remembered the house I grew up in, what part of the garden had shade and how I used to swill out the yard with buckets of cold water while my brothers played football. I was beside myself, babbling in tongues.’ She takes off her fake spectacles, puts them into a red fake leather case and snaps it shut. ‘And then I looked up into the cold grey eyes of the man sitting opposite me.’
‘What man?’
‘He told me he sold early Max Ernst etchings for millions of marks, all the time chasing a ribbon cut from the cheese he was eating across his plate. And then he talked about how he wanted to breed heavy horses . . .’
J.K. laughs.
‘This was balm, J.K. I wanted to escape from the bloody pain sticking through my ribs, and heavy horses were just the thing. It could have been tortoises, stars, a list
of rare ivy, buttonholes. He wore a crisp white shirt and citron cologne, and it was perfect, our difference was perfect. Like the Irish poet Patricia Scanlan who pushed all the grief of Belfast out of her head by writing lists of every sweet she bought as a kid at the local shop, I asked him the names and types of all the horses he wanted to breed.’ She giggles. ‘He told me he liked the idea of rubbing them down at 5 p.m., when they were hot and panting! And I said things like hmmmm in-neresting, like I was a B-movie cop. I think he thought I was a headcase but he couldn’t resist a rapt audience. We went our separate ways and I bought you a bottle of champagne to celebrate.’
‘I drank it with the stranger.’
The waiter pours wine into Zoya’s glass.
‘This wine is the colour of health. It’s not like other wines. This is medicine.’ The waiter who is still standing by Zoya’s side smiles and says something to her in a language J.K. doesn’t understand.
‘He says he will read our coffee cups.’
‘You are flowers,’ he says, and disappears into the heat and bustle of the restaurant.
‘I miss my family too.’ J.K. sucks a long green chilli.
‘But they only live a tube ride away.’
‘I know.’
Someone has taken a photograph of them. A sweet peppery perfume and a blinding flash. They look up into the golden teeth of a middle-aged man, trousers belted high over his paunch, carnation in his buttonhole.
‘For you, girls. Only five pounds.’
He waves the Polaroid through the air so that Zoya and J.K. can see bits of themselves developing second by second.
‘Are we here yet?’
Two women sit at a small slanting table covered with a plastic cloth. One has a glass of wine between her finger and thumb, hands resting on a red spectacle case. Her shoulders are turned in towards her friend and her lips make the shape of the word ‘medicine’. The other has her legs crossed, bread in hand, chilli in the other. Her cheekbones are burnt from a day in the sun and her lips have just finished making the shape of the word ‘family’.