An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  Terry continued: ‘You have spoken well today, friends, and your message has been heard. Now we need to go back to our posts. Let us’ – he opened his arms to suggest Wayne, Tendai and himself – ‘speak on your behalf and negotiate with BCW at the Workplace Forum we’ve set up.’ He paused; Wayne translated. ‘Terry says that the Workplace Forum speaks for you and we have to go back inside. I say that he has done nothing for us, nothing, and that we ignore his advice and send him back to the office to waste someone else’s time.’

  Terry blustered again. ‘Management have told me if we don’t clear the car park and move away from the main entrance they will be forced to call the police, who may make arrests. I don’t know your individual circumstances, but they will check papers. As you are on an illegal strike, your union can’t support you.’

  A woman screamed from the back: ‘Bastard. Go back to Mummy or we’ll spank you!’

  Terry turned to Tendai, his eyes wide, his lips puckered and tensed. Tendai raised his arms in a slow, dramatic shrug. There was a cheer. Tendai’s locks flowed over his shoulders; his coat was too small, the sleeves above his wrists; a silver chain was visible on his open neck; his taut body, stripped of fat, stood tall. When the cheering subsided the same woman jeered affectionately and called out, ‘It’s Jesus. It’s the black messiah!’

  Tendai’s insolent, drawn face was serious. He shook his head and spoke in English: ‘This man says we must return to our jobs, to the insults. He says if we don’t, the police will come and arrest us and send some of us home. The union won’t fight for us.’ Tendai paused, then spoke more loudly. ‘I say that we are the union, and if we fight then the union is with us!’ There was another cheer. Tendai’s voice carried over the heads of the strikers to the offices and departments above the car park. ‘There are no foreigners here except the bosses.’

  That was the end of it. Terry was jostled from his place and the crowd rejoiced as though they had already won. They embraced each other, linked arms, kissed. Then they marched around the university singing in Spanish, Polish and Shona – exclaiming, encumbering the streets, the road filled with their bodies. Two London buses were forced to stop. The passengers stared down from the top deck, smiling despite themselves. The last of autumn’s leaves rained on the marchers, who danced and skipped like children.

  *

  Viktor always counted on the clean getaway. By this he meant that he could let Rosa down gently, according to a formula that he had worked out. Two days before their separation he would announce, at regular intervals, the exact time of their separation, explaining to Rosa that they would see each other again soon. Although he might be a large, floppy elephant of a father, always losing his wallet, unaware that his shoelaces were undone or that his daughter was hanging on his arm, tugging him for attention, repeating in her old, patient way that it was bad for his eyes to focus for too long on his phone, he would remember – and he always did – to call her the day after they’d parted and talk like they did when they were together. So when they reached their last day together, Viktor, following his tested technique, declared that Rosa was the most important person in his life, that he loved her and that it was only his relationship with Nina which had broken down.

  ‘Imagine a really good friend, Rosa, and that you play together every day at school, but suddenly, and over and over again, you start to fight and bicker ...’

  ‘What’s bicker, Dad?’ she asked.

  ‘It means to argue over silly things. So after a while you decide it’s better not to meet up in the playground or go round to each other’s houses after school or have sleepovers.’

  ‘Is that why you’re not staying with us any more, Daddy? Because of the bicker and sleepovers?’ Rosa asked.

  ‘Well it is, I suppose, sort of.’

  ‘But Daddy, I don’t make babies with my friends.’

  Viktor was silent for a moment. ‘Yes, that’s true. You don’t. Maybe that’s where the comparison breaks down.’

  He would always say that he had not stopped loving Rosa. In fact, though he never said this, he loved her more fiercely with each month. When their final day together came with a heavy thud, Viktor believed they should have expunged their emotions; rid, freed themselves of the horror, this odd couple facing imminent rupture and loss.

  The dreadful climax of separation was never lessened by their waiting or by Viktor’s preparation.

  On the last visit, the night before the end, Rosa had sat on him, folded herself into his lap, and refused to permit any bodily severance. Even during the day she had skipped to his oversized strides, following him even to the toilet, insisting on crouching on the floor until he had finished. Nesting her head under his neck, kissing him there, with the words, murmured and intense, that she too loved him, that he was Number One, a place he shared jointly with Nina.

  When she read the first page of the story on the fold-down futon they shared, Viktor commented, ‘Your reading, Rosa, is much better than mine was at your age.’

  She said, as though she knew he was going to say this, her answer ready, ‘But Dad, that was the old days, when everything was dumb.’

  Always an answer, this daughter of his, to assuage his guilt, tell him it was going to be okay. How did he draw out the nurse even in his six-year-old child?

  Viktor and Rosa arrived late, huddled together on the train, then the bus, longing somehow to stretch the tunnels and tracks and create infinite distance between the grimy stations. They sat away from the doors, two rows behind the driver, to avoid the blast of cold air, as the bus stumbled and jolted towards their separation. Rosa’s eyes were dry. Through the whole ordeal she even forgot the purpose of their journey, animated by the familiarity of the area and the anticipation of her grandfather’s embrace.

  Rosa started to explain the area’s topography: ‘There was a charity shop just here, where Granny bought me this cardigan, but it’s closed now.’

  ‘A charity shop closing? That’s unusual in this cursed country.’

  ‘Yes, Daddy, but it’s not the only place. Over there by those houses, behind the boards where I would play, Granny says there’ll be a McDonald’s, though we will never eat there.’

  The sorry eyes of Nina’s mother greeted them. Viktor had always liked the woman. She enveloped Rosa and exchanged pleasantries with baggy, hopeless Viktor, and still Rosa did not cry. When Viktor knelt to give his valedictory speech – perhaps his fifth that weekend – she put her thin fingers over his lips, the infant flesh already gone from her body, sealing them closed, and pulled from her open raincoat a folded piece of pink paper. She told him to read it when he was alone.

  They waved, each of them, the awkward grandmother, Viktor and Rosa, all the arms, a whole chorus of farewells raised skyward.

  Around the corner, already proud of himself, composing the sentences he would speak to his parents, he opened the folded paper and read:

  Dear Viktor, I will always love you with all my heart. The love-hearts I gave you can help you when you miss me. Give this letter a hug or a kiss and I will receive it. I can also send you hugs and kisses. Lots of never-ending love, from Rosa.

  Next to these words she’d drawn a heart, framed in a pink box, circled by smaller hearts. He bent over, suddenly winded, unable to breathe, his head splitting. One hand covering his face, he sobbed and sobbed, as men do, in shame.

  In the days that followed, trying to patch himself up with faint assurances, Viktor tended – in a system of thought every bit as rigorous as his formula for separation – to stir up a hurricane of regret that gathered and swelled into a storm that sucked in each person in his life. He thought of Nina’s mother, her patient, tolerant welcome of him into her life and their Thursday ritual of phone calls. This generous, unsuspecting woman had accepted Viktor only for him to betray her hospitality. Her visibly drooping limbs and atrophied muscles were evidence of the path to extinction onto which he had casually thrown her.

  In the storm Viktor’s mind went next to N
ina; in the week after his weekend with Rosa, he longed for her and questioned each hesitant step he had taken away from her. That path too had been cast by his hand, and it had led Nina into the arms of an even more volatile lover. Nicholas, Viktor had heard, was Nina’s college friend and was unable to leave his wife but was granting Nina, to Viktor’s strange consternation, casual sex. Such a ripple of misery, arcing continuously away from the one fatal mistake he’d made – to leave, to hesitate, to tear himself from Rosa and Nina.

  Worse still than the damning of his parents, his ex-mother-in-law, Nina and even his daughter, was Viktor’s inability to be with Rosa without an eye on his watch – keeping a mental note of the passing days until he would be free to answer the urgent queries from his website, on his Facebook page, to press on forever with his PhD. He was sure she saw the distracted flicker in his eyes when she stared up at him and searched his face with hers.

  ‘You know, Daddy,’ Rosa said in one of those eye-to-eye appeals, ‘when I am with you I miss Mummy, and when you go I miss you.’

  Viktor curled his arms around her and did not answer. What could he say? That it was better like this? That unlike other children, who saw each parent every day, at least their time together was unusual, each moment savoured? You see, Rosa, we have made of our relationship a turning point, so each occasion we’re together we turn away from the ordinary and move in a direction that no one else has taken. We represent a break from the crowd. Life, sweetie, is not worth living unless it is made into a turning point, a new path. Do you see, Rosa, how special we are? What else did he have, apart from his theorising? Yet Viktor knew that she really needed something else entirely: to have her father as part of the crowd. Present. Rosa needed dense, predictable, ordinary everyday life.

  Viktor realised that his mind was not at rest. Nothing was right because there was no act. Yet still his thoughts ran into him, crowded him, and he realised that all his words, his blogging, his thinking, was for nothing. Not for the first time, he understood that he had to make these things in him die – for his incessant doing was without life, and without the act we are nothing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tendai paced the room in a pair of Viktor’s old tracksuit bottoms and an off-white T-shirt, moving on his large, creased feet. In one hand was an open book of Cabral’s writings. He needed to speak – he had a whole sleepless night of thoughts and plans to discuss. He wanted to read this essay, the one about revolutionary suicide, the nation and commitment. Tendai waved Viktor down and commanded him to sit in his desk chair by the wall, next to the door.

  ‘It’s no good, Viktor, these things you have made,’ he said, pointing to the pile of cards stapled to thin strips of wood. ‘They are too artistic, too much writing. We need slogans, simple, a few words. You need help. We’ll set up a Strike Publicity Committee. Your posters are beautiful, but what are these? There—’ Tendai held a single poster in front of Viktor, the words cramped like a newspaper, with emblems at the bottom: a bird, a square box with a capital F. ‘These ... what are these?’ Tendai spoke curtly, so that the words seemed to come out as accusations.

  ‘Those symbols tell people that we have a Facebook page and a Twitter account. They are there to direct our supporters to the online campaign.’ Viktor spoke slowly, calmly, to Tendai’s agitation and excitement. He always slowed down to irritation, spoke lethargically, attempted to redress the balance and bring the atmosphere level again.

  ‘That’s not right. We don’t want that. We don’t want art, articles, an online campaign. We need something to stir the rage. To keep the fire alive.’

  It was true: Viktor, who had a talent for drawing and had once seen himself as an artist, had sketched pickets, black figures marching and fat BCW bosses, their stomachs bulging out of their waistcoats, their pockets stuffed with money. Over these elaborate drawings he had printed the strike’s demands: Equal Pensions, Equal Pay, Equal Sick Pay. Beneath each was a paragraph.

  The drawing had been for Rosa, perhaps even more than for the strike.

  When he had Rosa at the weekend during the strike, they had stayed up late in his bedsit, the coloured thick-nibbed pens strewn over the floor, the two of them on their knees, planning and discussing. On one placard Viktor had drawn an entire scene: children holding their parents’ hands, the same child in a marching crowd, identified in the different scenes by the red scarf tied round her neck. Rosa loved it. That night, before they had to surrender the posters to the strike committee and before he had to surrender Rosa to Nina’s mother, she slept with them next to her. She surveyed the posters from different distances, from the back of the room, held out in her stalks of arms and then inches from her face. When she was asleep he worked on other posters, drew a frame of ivy around the website address, added the slogan We are no longer scared. On one poster he drew the strikers with Rosa at the front, marching closer and closer in each frame. Carefully, so as not to wake her, he slid the new placard over the old so she would wake to the new scene, her small, scarfed body growing larger and larger, until in the last frame the girl on the poster was alone. Viktor’s own pleasure matched Rosa’s. She said nothing in the morning, only stared at the card, running her hand over it. This was how they spent the weekend, in a fever of creation, each drawing, breaking for lunch, until the girl was still and there was a pile of twenty posters.

  With her finger on each frame Rosa followed herself approaching, growing and then retreating back into the crowd until the girl was hand in hand with a man she knew was her father. Father and daughter became the emblem of the strike, the space for text overrun by their battle for two-dimensional presence; the strike, its reasons and arguments, had become their context. When they arrived at Bristol she clung to the cards, the bundle Viktor had tied together with string and that she had asked to carry, and then she clung to him.

  He wanted to take Rosa to the picket line, make her his protest, his affirmation of life, and show Tendai, Moreblessing, Gary and Wayne that this was what he was fighting for – that if the strike won, if they started to win, all of them, against the company, the university, the unquestioned routines of daily life, then victory would look like Rosa: the black hair across her face thrown upward as she ran, her arms out, fingers apart, her dark eyes challenging the world to be as generous as she was in her forward, limitless rush into his arms at the station.

  Viktor stood his ground and brushed aside Tendai’s criticism. ‘No, we will use these posters and I will make some more with your slogans.’ That was it. Tendai did not pursue the matter and no Strike Publicity Committee, beyond the ad hoc, informal one of Viktor and Rosa, was formed.

  *

  Day after day, Viktor saw Moreblessing leaving the office where Tendai was camped. Early in the morning when he arrived, he saw her hitching up her tights, adjusting her shoes, pulling the BCW waistcoat over her dress. Viktor battled with himself, uttered in a low voice some basic principles: that Tendai’s business was his own, that what he did, what they did, in the office was the concern of no one except the two consenting adults. No potentate, king, politician, friend, comrade, man had a right to comment. Tendai’s sex life, his longings, his need to quench his loneliness each night on the floor of this office, was his alone. But when he saw not just Moreblessing coming and going but other women he didn’t know or recognise, and the faces of union members he vaguely recognised, he did not approve.

  ‘Tendai, I want to speak to you about something.’

  ‘Fire, man.’

  ‘I am uncomfortable with the way I always see women leaving the office. First, I said that you could stay here, but it’s risky. Second, it concerns me that you may be having all of this, this ... intercourse.’

  Tendai threw his head back and roared with laughter, exposing his long, sinewy neck, his Adam’s apple pointing into the room. ‘Intercourse!’ he repeated. ‘Brother, I don’t have intercourse. I fuck. I express myself. I explode into the world. I shine my blackness down, down, down like a radiant black star
. I combust, like the Big Bang. Intercourse, hah, not me, man.’ Tendai’s voice was raised when he finished. He held his crotch and gyrated to the echo of his own singsong polemic.

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, how do the women feel about your Big Bang? Do they know how many of them there are?’

  Tendai stood with his feet apart, his arms on his hips. All the life-generating joy and humour fell from his voice. ‘Does the force of a black man’s sex upset you, Viktor? Do you disapprove of fucking and loving? Is your idea of life all this, this ... art’ – he waved one of his hands over the pile of Viktor’s posters – ‘and handshakes? Ask the women if I haven’t lifted them to the heights. If I haven’t taken away the misery of your city for a few hours, helped them escape in these arms, with my force, the toilets, the shit, your shit, that they clean day after day, man. Ask them, white boy. Intercourse. That’s what the dead do. The racists.’ Tendai stared at Viktor, daring him to speak.

  Viktor boiled slowly. He weighed and calculated. ‘You confuse my sentiments. I am only asking about the women. Do they feel the same way about your force? Is the experience really as escapist as you say?’

  Tendai felt the pulse hammering in his temples. The blood pounded and pulsated in his wrists, in his groin, his breath grew short, he started to sweat. When he tried to answer this boy’s insolence, the words swelled and choked him, blocked his throat. He breathed in deeply and walked closer to Viktor, so that he was standing a metre from him. He pulled down the front of the tracksuit with one hand and with the other pulled out his penis. The veined penis was pale, as pale as Viktor, the circumcised oval crown like the head of a garden snake. Involuntarily Viktor pushed himself back in the chair, less from the shock of exposure than the sudden revelation that this man, his friend, was showing his modest, perfectly normal penis, unremarkable, like his – smaller, even. Tendai released the elastic so the trousers snapped closed, sending his penis flying upward until it disappeared again into the tracksuit.