by Ananda Devi
Whether he had died quickly or slowly made no difference to Mary. She still woke up alone.
Time went by, and her hopes of Howard’s return faded. Her statuettes now only described absence. Yet they allowed her to feel alive, to continue her strange exploration of the world, to imagine that she was involved in things, not some insubstantial being that mirrors and glass panes just happened to reflect back.
Time went by, so fast—so slow. One day, many years later, her potter’s hands stopped their work on a bit of clay they had been shaping and refused to let go.
With barely a glance, the doctor pronounced his diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. Eventually, he said, you won’t be able to work with your hands at all. He didn’t need to add that this was the first step of her descent into poverty.
She considered her hands, the purplish-blue lines of her veins where she could almost see the blood flowing, the thickness of her sharply bent fingers, and she felt betrayed by her body. She had never imagined old age coming like this, like a death sentence, rather than a slow metamorphosis; a cleaver that had come down and cut off her hands.
The clay and the plaster and the resin would stay in their airtight bags, merely hinting at what they could have become: from now on she would only be shaping them in her mind.
Overnight, the streets turned icy. The familiar paths changed direction. None of the territories that she had conquered remained hers. The damp all around her awoke pains so deep that they seemed to be embedded in her skin. She had to shut all the doors, seal the cracks and gaps, and hide under her duvet, the extra heater turned all the way up and the oil radiators expelling smoke without actually offsetting the November chill. No matter what she did, she was frozen.
Mary could no longer bear winter, but she couldn’t leave. She had been reborn in this town, on this street, the very day she had come here. There was nowhere else she could possibly go. All she had was this refuge on Portobello Road.
Everything closed in around her. No matter where she went, the air was saturated and licked her with an icy tongue, constricting her, reducing her so completely that she could no longer see herself when she looked at her body: no head, no feet, no belly; just a shadow, sometimes reflected in a window pane, one of those old women people avoided seeing at all.
Until, more than sixty years after Howard, someone else came into her life to fill the void her pain had created.
Did she still have a face or had the city forced her to rub it away with her mottled fingers?
So many years had gone by. The world was no longer the same. She was so old that she was starting to disappear along with the past. A dissolution that, all too soon, would be complete.
She was no longer assured of making ends meet: her hands had betrayed her. Her old-age pension was barely enough to cover her expenses and her food. This became such an urgent concern that, one day, at the local supermarket, fixated on the cost of various tins, she had picked up dog food. The salesgirl had paused, and then, with false cheeriness, asked: Oh, so you have a dog now, dear? Mary had jumped and reddened as she realized her mistake, then, mortified, knowing that everyone could see what had happened, simply answered with a yes. She had left with five tins of Friskies. She set them on the kitchen table and stared at them. She had read the labels, which hadn’t been of any help. She had turned the tins over and over in her hands.
She put on some water to heat up and carefully peeled off the labels.
That evening, through the window, London had sniggered while watching her. The sky’s downward gaze had given her dinner a strange, morbid taste. This was no longer the city of her earliest days, her own city, tamed by long walks, formed by well-trodden paths rather than particular destinations. This was no longer a city of legacies and ghosts of the war. It was a city that trod old people underfoot, a crowded yet glorious city that crushed the weak and rewarded the strong. She hadn’t recognized it in decades.
That night, she ate, hunched over her plate as if to hide herself, turning her face away from the weak light. Even the photographs of her dead parents seemed too heavy for her to bear. She chewed this tasteless stuff that seemed to resemble herself in its lack of flavor, a shapeless mixture of memories of what had once been alive but hadn’t been for a long time, of what had lost all identity; she swallowed it all and remembered that this food was supposed to appeal to dogs, to their voracious appetites, to their fondness for raw meat. As it went into her mouth, this dog food tainted her a bloody purple, draining her of her own color. She refused to vomit, but she couldn’t bring herself to look in the mirror as she brushed her teeth.
Everywhere she turned, the city was wearing the same mocking look. The parks that usually enveloped her in their turbulent greenery now evinced palpable hostility toward her. She would enter a park and immediately get hit by a Frisbee or step into dog shit or be caught in rain when, just five minutes earlier, it had been so nice out. One day, in Kew Gardens, an old horse chestnut tree that she had always loved had rained conkers upon her. She was so dumbfounded that she hadn’t been able to move and a girl had to grab her hand. Are you all right, love? she’d asked with a strong cockney accent that, for once, Mary hadn’t found disagreeable. But all right? No, she wasn’t all right; she would never be all right again. Old age had caught her by surprise and there was no way for her to shrug it off; she was sentenced to wander through this city full of pitfalls for the elderly.
Every time the social workers came to see her, she pretended to be out. She worried that one day they might come with backup, surrounding the house and capturing her like a bird in a net. They were dying to put her in an old people’s home and seize her house, this tiny house even older than Mary herself, but which would fetch a tidy profit in this neighborhood where everything had become prohibitively expensive.
It was only a matter of time. But she had promised herself that she wouldn’t go without a fight.
And just as she was at her wits’ end, as she struggled not to sink into invisibility, there came Cub …
His dreadlocks. His overlarge shirts, his army trousers, his basketball shoes. His heavy eyes, his lips. Cub.
From across the street the boy watched her, not brazenly, but calmly, self-assuredly, as if the world belonged to him—which maybe it did. To him and not to her, that old, moribund woman as pale and yellow as an autumn day in the suburb he’d come from. He seemed so firmly rooted to the ground. Nothing would dislodge him, not thunderstorms, not terror, not a hostile gaze.
From across the street, leaning against a wall, he watched her house, its crannies, the bathroom window that never shut. Mary came out of her house, she opened the front door slightly, poking her nose and her toes out as if she were wading into a chilly ocean. She undid and redid the wool scarf around her neck five times, pulled down her hat so it would cover her ears. Even so, her entire body violently protested these first steps out of her house, her feet testing the ground and finding it slippery, her mouth refusing to open and let out a sigh that would condense in the cold, her eyes already tearing up, and her hands, her hands above all, clenched tight deep within her pockets as if ready to tear into their fury and their pain.
She saw him and stopped. He went on chewing his gum, his hands stuck in his motorcycle jacket. She waited, unsure, undecided, in case he crossed the road to her side. Never had her path crossed the path of his kind, never in this kind of direct confrontation. A welter of possibilities came to mind from what little she could see of his face under the yellow-and-blue striped cap.
Oh, that face. That face. Smooth as vanilla or cocoa cream, smooth as those sweet flavors she could lick right off a spoon. A smoothness sharpened by the chill that would have turned paler complexions blotchy red. The color of roasted chestnuts, which she suddenly smelled in the air, the two sensations merging indelibly in her mind: the skin of Cub, the smell of chestnuts. Dark and murky and unreadable eyes with an odd gleam of gold as if spangled with flecks visible only at a particular angle. Mary, who was now pas
t seventy-five, gazed upon a beauty that cut to her core and shook her as if she were still fifteen; and this beauty was contained in a small Jamaican boy who couldn’t have been more than thirteen and who, with his hands in his pockets and his gum in his mouth, was watching her house for some reason she didn’t want, at least just yet, to guess.
It was she who finally ended up crossing the street. She walked up and stood in front of him. The boy’s eyes, glancing far too quickly over her, indicated nothing. He held out his hand and said, “Good morning, ma’am,” and, unthinkingly, she shook it. It wasn’t a routine gesture of meeting: the two palms touched, the thumbs crossed one another, a momentary and almost imperceptible handshake. Mary turned the boy’s hand just enough to set it above hers, his palm facing downward, and Mary’s thumb, ever so gently, stroked it, seeking out that warm haze that she had just seen on his face.
He said nothing, did nothing. He waited as if he had all the time in the world. There might have been some hidden contempt in his eyes for everything she represented, everything that was unfamiliar to him. But his gaze shifted downward to their hands together. And so she saw what he was looking at: their difference.
When she finally let go, he nodded—knowingly? pityingly?—and asked her if she needed someone for odd jobs. “Like fixing this window,” he murmured. “No,” she said, then: “Yes.” And, undecided, a bit lost, she suggested that he come back the next day. With that, she left, shaky, pale, stupidly happy, having forgotten what it was she meant to buy, but what did it matter, what did it matter, she had just witnessed true beauty.
Mary walked without seeing anything, without any real understanding of the wholly extraordinary tenderness swelling within her for this boy whose world was so unlike her own.
She had never had children, and so she had scarcely imagined that she might ever hold someone’s hand in this way: deferentially. Neither of them had been in a hurry to let go. She had gripped this little hand and felt the texture of warm clay again, solid yet malleable, a completeness she hadn’t felt since her ailments had contorted her fingers.
For a moment, Mary was scared of herself. No, she said, don’t go there, he has nothing to do with you, there’s no space for him in your life … But the truth was that there was far too much space in her life, too many rooms to fill. She was past seventy-five, her hands were practically paralyzed, she could no longer bear this loneliness nor this emptiness. She would rather that her final years, or months, or weeks, or days, or hours be shared. But with whom? Or what? The thoughts flowed past her and she was astonished to find herself thinking that, if he came back tomorrow, she would bake him a lemon cake, not too much sugar, slightly bitter, and he’d dip a slice in his tea before letting it melt in his mouth.
But did he like lemon cake? What did kids eat these days? She looked around, stupefied. Saw a McDonald’s, a kebab stand, an Indian restaurant, a wine bar, a Starbucks. She walked into the coffee shop and contemplated the American desserts, the brownies, the cookies, the enormous muffins and the endless varieties of coffee with incomprehensible names.
No mirabelle tarts, she realized. I never did learn how to make them.
The fact that she’d never stopped thinking about Howard made her smile. Her memory of Howard had been such a constant presence in her life that she had never felt lonely. There had always been someone beside her, in the living room, in the kitchen, in her bed, even fleetingly, intangibly. But after this encounter with that boy, she had to accept the fact that Howard had no substance. The energy that child had exuded, the solidity of his flesh, his muscles, his lips, left her with the reality that Howard was nothing more than a ghost. This boy was the opposite: an incarnation of Mary’s clay statuettes, but far heavier, far more pliable, far more changeable, far more—the word astonished her—erotic.
Mary staggered down Portobello Road, oblivious to everyone around her, unresponsive to their friendly hellos. The vertigo that had just overcome her was so strong she was terrified of collapsing on the pavement. Somehow she managed to continue walking, her fingers clenching the thick fabric of her coat. She stepped into a bookshop and found a cookbook. It was only when she got to the till that she saw that it cost twenty pounds. She didn’t have that sum, and, with an apology, she left it on the counter and walked out of the shop. As she stood outside, she looked around and saw that everything had changed: a will to live blazed from every corner of the city, a will that was taking root within her.
Cub didn’t know why he was watching this house on Portobello Road. He had ended up there at random. He stared at the open window. Why was he staring at the open window? What did he imagine was behind those walls? It was curiosity, he thought to himself, just morbid curiosity that had made him stop and examine this old woman’s residence reeking of damp, archaic dust, or maybe it was because one of his friends had pointed it out the night before and said, “See that house? There’s some crazy old hag there, and the place is worth millions.” Millions … Cub didn’t really believe it, although maybe the others, in better shape with fresh coats of paint and elegant curtains, could fetch a sum like that—but this one, more gray than white, with shutters that had once been yellow but were now closer to the color of urine, and the square of muddy earth where a few withered bushes held out against the weeds and the rubbish that passersby had thrown thoughtlessly, no, it couldn’t ever be worth that much, but all the same, that woman, maybe she was rich, maybe she needed company …
Then she had come out, and in the space of a single instant he had seen her face, blurred by old age into something unremarkable, something forgettable, transform. It was as if his presence had sparked a light within her. He had felt an unfamiliar sadness as he saw the weight of her loneliness, like a white shadow draped over her shoulders. He explained himself by talking about work he could do, and she took him at his word, she told him to come back the next day, and this short conversation had taken place as she’d held his hand and stroked it gently with her thumb. Another conversation, a silent one, had played out between their two hands.
The next day, when he remembered her, the recollection caught him by surprise. He’d hung out with the gang, smoked a joint with them, turned down some crack because he didn’t have any money and also because his mother would have killed him straightaway if she ever found out that he’d had some. He’d gone back to the house and fixed his brother Toothpick’s scooter, since Toothpick somehow managed to break everything he laid hands on. A day like any other, lazy but full, with an odd aftertaste of bitterness and incompleteness.
It was only as he was getting ready to head out later that evening that he remembered the old lady. He wondered if he should go to see her, just like that, for no reason, maybe to make sure that the white shadow had been real, maybe with the hope of getting some money out of her, but really for no reason, just because he felt like it. He’d never done anything like that. He’d just been getting on with his own life, his own routine. But for some time now he’d been noticing things, lives being lived right beside his own, thinking about those worlds that never touched, and he wanted to know more. His own life had become too narrow.
He was no longer a child, if he had ever really been one. His mother, his sisters and his little brother had been like satellites orbiting around him, and he was the sun. He was starting to take measure of his strength. Of his attractiveness. The golden gleam that shone in the eyes of women of all ages, of all races, when they saw him, the gleam that had taken him a while to understand but which now he understood all too well. It was a game he hadn’t fathomed at first; now he was starting to figure out the rules. It was a pastime he’d come to enjoy more and more, as he gazed at himself in the mirror through lowered eyelashes, his inscrutable eyes, his lips pouting in a way that made his face even rounder, even fleshier, even more succulent.
He heard high-pitched teenage laughter on the other side of the partition. His sisters. Jasmine and Sondra were probably gossiping about boys at their school or trying on clothes or shoes
or joking about girls who weren’t as pretty as them. The somewhat pleasant smell of grilled food rose up from the kitchen, even though he knew that it was just the frozen hamburger patties his mother always bought so she wouldn’t have to cook. His little brother was trying to do his homework in the bedroom the two of them shared, but he was also browsing the web for some porn: the fatter the women, the harder Toothpick got. In the bathroom, there were always reminders of the girls. Their cosmetic products, their underclothes, their hair-removal creams, their shampoos. Their straightening irons, which they used every morning to smooth out their hair until it fell as straight as black straw down to their shoulders (they hadn’t succumbed just yet to the wigs or weaves displayed in the shop windows of Brixton, where they were in demand). Cub couldn’t understand why they kept doing such boring things over and over. He couldn’t bear the ammonia stench of chemical products and burnt hair. He tried his best not to breathe in their presence, despite their charming features, their radiant bodies that were stirring up dangerous glimmers in his friends’ eyes, and their dizzying laughter.