by Ananda Devi
Their climax was simultaneous, a moment of extraordinary violence.
Did anyone see them?
Did someone watch them through the window? The two of them, there, sleeping intertwined like an old couple. Easily overcoming in their blissful ignorance the breach generally considered impossible, the mysterious finality, the last of all taboos. The ultimate prohibition for the living because, for the dead, there were none.
This love was not visible to anyone, did not renounce anything, did not elude any possibility, thought Mary. I’d love my son just the same way I’d love a man just the same way I’d love a father. A thousand ways and all of them the same.
Even so, Mary, tossing and turning in her sleep, didn’t want to wake up because all her certainties would collapse in front of the open eye. She saw what was irrevocable. She clenched her fists around her sleep, her arms around Cub. Morning would only bring ruin, and the despair of a light too raw to let anyone believe in angels and miracles.
All that would remain of her would be the short, trampled grass she had always been. An entire city had gone over her body. An entire city had entered her body. Its weight, its matter, its texture, its place beneath a blue or gray or black sky. Steel, concrete, brick, stone, terracotta, granite, quartz—strata built up over millions of years that she thought she could feel in her hands, supple or rough, burning or porous, she had experienced it all, she had explored the labyrinths of the past, she had been part of the flesh of this land, nothing could separate her from it.
She would have liked to give Cub another world that they could have watched being born at his birth, a world they could have lived in together. A world built out of something other than monoliths of steel, Leviathans of iron, layers of gas.
Her only chance at love was Cub. The round, swelling love of a glorious monster.
To lose him … She opened her eyes and forced herself to look those words straight on. She thought she could see a tear starting at the bottom of her torso, between her thighs. She propped herself up on her knees and looked at his face. She felt humble, prayerful. Nothing mattered now. She waited for the bit of daylight that would glide over his eyelids and eyelashes, that would awaken him. His sullen mouth would let out a painful groan as he woke up and his young body would stretch out its limbs even as it had yet to understand the extent of its joy and its beauty.
Lose him? No, Mary swore, keeping her gaze fixed on him. I’d die before I lost him. I’d kill before I lost him.
A sliver of awareness within her knew the risk she was taking. The social workers were there, ready to ambush her. If she didn’t put up a fight, they would seize her and throw her in one of those prisonlike places where the dead, having no fight left in them, went to die. Where each one ended up alone with their crumpled-up memories, even though they were never really alone. Where each one was trapped in a hostile world. The old people looked like aliens, Mary thought, barricaded in their loneliness and their foreignness. They were stripped of all humanity by rigid regulations, revolting food, surveillance, suspicion, sometimes even violence. They no longer had a right to intimacy, no longer had a right to anything, they had to do their business under the cold glare of someone else, pull down their underwear while looking at their feet, let themselves be washed like hideous babies. And there they stayed, imbuing the air, layer upon layer, with their stench, their thoughts, their distress.
In this way the souls of old people were reduced to larvae haunting the mortal seasons until, one terribly cold or horribly hot day, their life finally agreed to loosen its hold and let them sleep, sleep for good in the soft, weak bed of their skin.
In this way the old people went, if they didn’t fight.
I won’t go, Mary thought. I’ll fight. I’d rather die first. And I’d rather kill first. She clenched her arms around her sleep and her fists around Cub.
Cub woke up and looked at her. She was sure his gaze was loving. Maybe she wasn’t wrong.
Cub walked in the snow, stomping it here and there into mud beneath his trainers, sometimes floating above it without leaving a trace. A bus dipped into a lake of half-melted snow, splattering him with liquefied ice. He stepped to the side, but too late. A few people nearby sniggered, despite their frozen faces. The sky was so low it could almost be touched. Cub didn’t reply with curses or a raised fist as he once would have; he was following a narrow path, living enchanted days, he was following the siren songs of seraphim toward a light so near it could almost be touched.
From a café there wafted the aromas of warm drinks and melting butter; a small newspaper seller smiled at him under her red beret, standing behind a barricade of nude women on glossy paper. He heard the squishing of his own feet and the screech of car and bus axles, and he saw the burst of red that was the young girl’s beret. He started running and his footsteps pounded a melody in his head.
It was a rhythm he knew well, although he had no idea where it had come from. Tip tatap tatap tip. Skater skirts, not from his time so much as from his mother’s time, when she was young and she rubbed cream on her smooth, perfectly oval face and painted her nails garnet to go out to the clubs and, when she came back late at night, she would kiss them, and her stilettos, on the floor, click-clacked in a familiar way, yes, this was his mother’s rhythm, tap tippy tap. These days, girls only ever wore trousers or miniskirts that clung to their bottoms and crop tops that were tight around their breasts, and this seemed cute and sexy to him, of course, but what he was hearing in his head made him think of a skirt made from thick, smooth fabric, lined with silk, swirling around a woman’s calves, a red beret on her head.
Tip tatap tatap tip.
Running, racing, rushing into the foamy snow that crackled softly, dusting Cub’s hair with icing sugar as if he were a succulent pastry. For a few seconds, just a few seconds, the city was as white and light as a silk-lined skirt, it skated on high heels and the sun reflected in the crystals of snow poured warm gold into his eyes through the threads of flitting cloth, the living cloth of the city, scarf, bus, cars, magazines, phone booths, tip tap tippy tap tip.
Cub had never realized that he could love this city, find it both unnerving and alluring. Nothing was as it had been before, everything had changed since meeting Mary on Portobello Road. Ever since the night before, each of his steps had felt padded. The road had been made of clouds rather than snow. Ever since the night before, all the women had been within reach.
He didn’t understand himself, he didn’t know what had happened the night before. Something—or maybe somebody—had entered him. His spirit refused to dwell on it for too long: he knew he would have to make sense of it at some point. Of what? I smoked too much, I slept and dreamed, he thought, but deep down a warmth made it clear that there had only been a dance and then sleep. Mary had been changed, transformed, made beautiful. The illusion of wings spreading out. A strange, wondrous dance. He shook his head to stop thinking about it. (An old hag, she’s just an old hag—no, not at all: she’s Mary.)
Forgetting the lights of Portobello Road and its vicinity and making his way into the hustle and bustle of Brixton, Cub went from one world to another. He still had the warmth of desire in his core and eyes filled with beating wings, but he was coming back, little by little, to the real world he’d known before Mary, the color of everybody’s face here was familiar, as were their quick smiles and sly looks, the sounds and smells reaching out to bring him back to reality.
Graffiti blazed on the walls. Boys and girls were walking with a nonchalance that felt dangerous. Jobless men tried to disappear into the sidewalks. The women’s jaws were clenched. He saw the barricaded, boarded-up windows, the corners where he could buy his choice of drugs, guns or girls. These were fortresses that the police, in their powerlessness, avoided. Brixton thrived on this toxic trade, which threatened the entire city. The deeper anyone went down these alleys, the clearer it became that a rigidly structured guerrilla organization was biding its time. He knew the landmarks that divided the territo
ries. He knew which neighborhoods he shouldn’t wander into, because the other gangs wouldn’t do him any favors. He knew which shirt colors and which symbols meant danger and violence. He knew where a new coat of paint covered huge splatters of blood and brain matter.
A few eyes met Cub’s. Some he recognized, and some recognized him. Rather than the gestures they usually made, he saw hesitation, glances slipping out of reach. Someone turned away and sniggered. This didn’t bother him. Teenagers trying to act like adults, in gaudy clothes and gold-plated bling, shrugged as they saw him, as if to warn him that he was headed down a dangerous path, a path of no return, if he didn’t return to their ranks straightaway. A shrug of their shoulders, an elegant “tsk,” a brief wave to say, there are preordained paths you should follow, and others you should avoid like the plague: you need to pick a side.
Cub had already gone too far beyond his old life and his old ways to contemplate how he could return. And he wasn’t so sure he even wanted to. He was more intrigued by the freedom that Portobello Road had granted him, a freedom that may have been cold and strange, but was still seductive, as if he had grown up before his time and had got a taste of the powers that adults had, of the powers that even adults did not have.
He had the impression that the light was absorbed by particular neighborhoods while others were plunged into semidarkness. Brixton had developed like so many other neighborhoods that had once been scorned by the city, with trendy shops and restaurants and bars, but his heart still belonged to those shadows from which he had emerged. These areas were designed to keep their hold on humanity. So many doors, so many mouths opening up to swallow up people. They would always swallow up the unwary Jonahs who wandered in. And the taller the buildings rose, the deeper men sank in their vertigo.
In the building where his mother lived, the walls weren’t even visible anymore. In the entrance hall, the reek of joints weighed down the air of this glebe. The unpainted walls exuded damp and, in the darkest nooks, mushrooms. (One morning, in their flat, his mother had burst out laughing when she saw the gray living-room carpet covered in mushrooms that had sprouted overnight.) In Cub’s building, everyone blindly groped their way forward just to live. Some ended up walking straight out open windows.
As he came closer, Cub felt no shiver of sentimentality. He knew this place where he had been born by heart. He felt no shame at having lived there, just as he had felt no shame at leaving it. Here, there was no strange attachment nor indulgent nostalgia. He didn’t dress up his memories in finery. He set them somewhere so they would have no further hold.
He rang the doorbell. He heard shouts and barking. The door opened and once again there was the smell of something burning, just like the other day, as if he’d been living the same day forever. His little sister, Sondra, looked at him, her face wet with tears. She was holding a shirt with holes in it. Their mother appeared, glanced at Cub distractedly, pulled the shirt out of the little girl’s hands and threw it in the bin. She started shaking her so hard her teeth chattered. “I’ve just bought this shirt for you and you’ve managed to burn it!” A dog yipped excitedly. Jasmine came out of her bedroom, her face caked in makeup. “You look like a slut! Yes, a slut! A slut!” Wanda yelled. Jasmine, wearing a yellow crop top that didn’t even try to hide her heavy breasts, stretchy jeans that molded her bottom and stilettos that were more like stilts, shrugged and shook her hair, which now came down to her lower back. Her teeth gleamed brightly in her lipsticked mouth. Cub could tell that she was trying to piss off their mother.
She shoved Cub aside as she stomped out of the flat. On her face was a slight smirk, as if she wasn’t bothered one bit by Wanda’s hysteria. She started making her way down the stairs rather than bother to wait for the elevator, and Cub suddenly heard it, that familiar tippy tap tippy tap. It had been passed down to a new generation. It was this willowy yet padded, firm yet flowing body that now held him in place. The locks of hair bounced gently, with the exact same rhythm, on her plump buttocks. Cub shut his eyes and let his mind be carried away by that mysterious pattern. It didn’t matter if the past was burning: the rhythm would go on bouncing happily from one generation to the next, and it would never be lost.
He turned back to his mother. She was standing rigidly straight with her fists clenched and her eyes filled with tears. The last time he had seen her, she had smiled at the gift of a handbag. He sensed that she didn’t have any money left at all and that she didn’t know how she’d make it to the end of the month. How she’d keep them all alive. Her misery was so clearly etched in this empty gaze. He pulled a twenty-pound note that he’d taken from Mary out of his pocket and held it out to her. She grabbed the note with a sort of fury. Then she sighed and went to sit down in her usual chair. He followed her.
“Where’d you get this money from?” she asked. “I don’t want you getting mixed up with gangs. The Brixton cops already arrested some boys this week. They were all the way from eleven years old to sixteen. Tell me the truth. Where’d you get this from?”
He didn’t answer, and she kept going. She wrung her hands, bit her lips, tapped her bare feet—she hadn’t worn high heels in ages. Cub noted each of her thoughts, each of her feelings. He cursed himself for not being older, so he could help them all out. He knelt down, took her feet in his hands and began massaging them.
“Mum, I’ll take care of you and everyone else. Don’t worry.”
“You haven’t got a job. How are you going to get money? I’m the one who has to take care of you, Cub. You should go back to school, I know you haven’t been going, the teachers called and told me.”
Because he had no excuses, Cub tried to offer some semblance of the truth.
“There’s an old lady on Portobello Road who’s taken me in. I’ve been doing work on her house, I’m running errands for her and she’s been paying me. I’ll bring you the money each week.”
“What’s her name?”
“Mary. Mary Grimes.”
As he said it, Cub realized he had made a mistake. But it was too late. And besides, she had every right to know. His mother’s eyes darkened.
“And why does she want you living with her? You can do your work without living in her moldy house!”
“Mum … How do you know her house has mold?”
“I know what it must be like, what she must look like, your old woman with her house on Portobello Road … Everything must be falling apart, and even then she’s going to feel superior to you because she’s paying you!”
He sighed. There was no way he could possibly explain Mary Grimes to her. He could feel the jealousy that was making her shake.
“Cub … She’s an old white woman … she’s using you. You don’t need to do that to live … I want you to go back to school. I promise you I’ll manage.”
Of course he knew she would. Tap tap tippy tippy tap … His mother had had rhythms that Mary would never know.
“Mum …”
He didn’t know what to say. He kissed her hands one by one, and Wanda’s eyes filled with a sort of stupid happiness. He knew that, when he left, she would ask herself all the same questions any mother should ask. She looked at him but could not understand; she only sensed just how much he had changed, no, not changed, transformed, completely from the inside out. She was slowly losing Cub, her Cub, the child she’d always loved, always hoped for, the one she trusted when she stonewalled the other children, because some witch had captured him. She held his face in her hands.
“Stay here, don’t go back there. I’ll pull myself together, I’ll find another job and sort everything out. Stay, I need you here.”
He shook his head, knowing he couldn’t come back. It was too late for that. “We’ll figure it out, don’t worry,” she said, wearily. “Don’t go back there, Cub.”
He kissed her forehead and saw the fear hidden in her eyes. It was because of Cub. She was scared for him—or maybe of him. She clung to him and refused to let go. Cub had to extricate himself as gently as he coul
d.
“Watch Jasmine,” he said. “She’s going to get into trouble.”
“She already has,” his mother said, almost indifferently.
Cub noticed that there wasn’t a television in the living room anymore. Almost no furniture. The paint was peeling off the walls. A draft was blowing in through a broken fanlight. He had the feeling that their flat was soon going to look just like the house on Portobello Road, and that worms would start falling from the ceiling. Maybe they’d all been caught in a gust of dilapidation that would spare none of them?
“I can’t do anything to manage Jasmine,” she said. “Not by myself I can’t. I know how she’ll end up, with a bun in the oven and no baby daddy to be found. Just like me. Just like me.”
“Mum …”
“Don’t say anything, Cub. It’s not worth it. I’ll have to buy clothes at Oxfam soon. And I’ll get a summons in the post.”
His eyes shifted to the window. He stopped there. He pressed his body against it, filled with both desire and terror.
“Mum, I swear to you this old lady’s going to help us. She’s going to die soon, she doesn’t have anybody, maybe she’ll leave me her house! Do you hear me? A house on Portobello Road! We could all live there easy. Just wait, hang in there. I know what I’m doing.”
Cub was saying anything he could to distract his mother from the temptation of the window.
He tried not to think of Mary’s eyes, but pushing her out of his mind felt like a betrayal.
“I don’t understand what that woman wants from you. You know they have the police after people who have done less?”