Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  THE TAJ

  NEW YORK LONDON DELHI

  with the intention that the existence of these other distant branches, in other cities of lights, might draw people to their burgundy tikkas and reheated kormas. Near the bottom of the high street was a library which still adhered to dated Wednesday closing, refusing to accept that words had relinquished their midweek sleep. Next to that was a siren-abused children’s playground in a park lined by tower blocks, then finally, upon a five-way gyratory encrusted with the worst of the traffic, a supermarket a little bit smaller than Japan. No matter where you were, in the Japan car park or standing next to a silver birch tree in one of the back streets, or even in the surrounding areas of Beckenham, Catford or Penge, it was possible to see the Crystal Palace tower, soaring over the landscape, appearing and disappearing in the gaps between the buildings. There were in fact two towers – another, lesser than the lesser Eiffel, stood further out at the top of Beulah Hill, mimicking the first. Together they were a tall, far reminder of that long-ago glass kingdom, which was rebuilt on the south side of the Thames after its arduous horse-drawn journey.

  The glass itself was bought anew. It arrived at the site in wooden crates lined with straw. Three hundred thousand panes. Two hundred acres of space. This palace would be three times larger than its original self. The land sloped down in the east so a basement storey was added. The central transept was expanded and needed two new wings for balance. There were several courts, Byzantine, Egyptian, Alhambra and Renaissance. The tomb of Beni Hassan was placed in the Egyptian Court. The statues of the lions were arranged in the Alhambra Court. After ninety days of crossings, the velvet, the Welsh gold, the shackles and the rhubarb champagne all found their places. There were birds in the aviaries and lilies in the flower temples. In the gardens the renditions of the dinosaurs were established in the shrubs overlooking the lake. When everything was done the wide staircase to the entrance was swept, the fountains and the water towers were switched on, the kingdom rose again, a palace on the hill, a sprawling house of glass, with a shining, see-through, ferro-vitreous roof.

  At the bottom of the high street, a few blocks past the library, Melissa turned left, and parked halfway up Paradise Row, on the right-hand side.

  The house was thirteenth along a terrace of its siblings; they were numbered consecutively, odd and even together. It was a slim, white Victorian, with a skinny front door and twins of windows. Inside, at the top of the narrow staircase, there was a skylight, through which on clear nights distant stars could be seen. The rooms were bright though small, and had a slight crooked quality. The path to the front door was very brief. The hallway was not wide enough for two people to walk along side by side.

  It was owned previously by a now-divorced couple and their daughter, and over the years had undergone various alterations and modifications leaving an awkwardness of structure, particularly of doors. Someone had wanted to move the bathroom downstairs so a flat-roofed extension had been added past the kitchen, enabling a third bedroom upstairs. Someone else had felt that the front room was lonely and pokey in its separation from the dining room, so had removed the connecting wall during the trend for open-plan living, leaving a wide ecclesiastical arch below the ceiling. And the previous owner Brigitte’s ex-husband Alan (before he became her ex) had felt that a set of double doors would be so much nicer to separate the kitchen from the bathroom than the sliding broken pleated thing that Brigitte had asked him to replace. He had wanted, of a magnificent sun-stroked morning, say, to come downstairs in his silky dressing-gown and stride through into the kitchen en route to the bathroom, and instead of hauling open another awkward and unromantic plastic pleated thing, he had imagined throwing open a pair of stylish white hardwood double doors with his chest full and his head up and his heart open, ready to face another day of his marriage. So he had gone to Homebase, situated a short drive away in a ferro-vitreous building. Although he hated Homebase, he had walked committedly up and down the aisles looking for his materials, then spent the next four weekends installing his doors. He had sawed and sanded. He had squatted for long periods making his thighs ache. He missed a date with his mistress. He injured his wrist. And on the fourth Sunday, as evening was falling, a beautiful, pink-flecked dusk, it was done. Double doors. Majestic, grand double doors, tastefully demarcating consumption from digestion. Brigitte would be pleased. Their love would be rekindled. He would never again have to sleep in his car. But what Alan had not duly considered in the making of this dream was that there was not really enough space for it here. There were already too many doorways in this small passage. The throwing open was therefore not as magnificent or uplifting as he had imagined, the stepping through was disappointing. What he had created instead was a jumble of doors of which his were the most crooked, and which caused morning congestion and the annoying catching of dressing-gown belt loops on brass handles. Brigitte was not impressed. Not long after that, Alan moved out.

  Melissa had met Brigitte, along with her daughter, on her second, lone visit to the house (she had not been completely sure, there was ‘a feeling’, as she had put it to Michael, that worried her, more than just the number). She was a gloomy brunette in office clothes, standing rigidly next to the dining table, close to the bottom of the stairs, while Melissa asked her questions about mice and neighbours and burglaries. Only when she was about to leave, having been told by Brigitte not to go into the second bedroom upstairs as her daughter was sleeping in there, had she moved away from the table into the hall. There had been a sound from above, the sound of someone moving. Melissa looked up, and there at the top of the stairs, directly beneath the skylight, was a little girl. She was seven or eight years old, wearing blue pyjamas and a yellow dressing-gown. She was unnaturally pale, especially her hands. A piece of cool winter sunlight from the glass above was balancing on the helm of her white-blonde hair.

  ‘Lily,’ Brigitte said with anger in her voice, ‘you’re not supposed to be out of bed.’

  ‘I’m not tired,’ the girl replied.

  ‘Go on, go back up. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  But Lily didn’t move. Brigitte turned, remembering Melissa’s presence. ‘Sorry … my daughter. She’s not very well.’

  ‘Not very well,’ Lily said, in exactly the same tone. She began to descend the stairs. She was limping, and on her face was a small, mischievous smile, a faint wickedness. Brigitte backed away from her. When Lily reached the fifth stair up, she sat down and said to Melissa, ‘Are you the lady who’s finally going to buy this house?’

  Despite which, all of it, the ‘feeling’, the number, they did buy it. The ceilings were high. The light was good. That charming butler sink in the kitchen, the persuasive underfloor heating. The garden was nothing more than a paved cubic courtyard a little bit bigger than a stamp, but they needed a house, they needed upstairs and downstairs so that dreaming could have a floor of its own and breakfast and new days could be descended into. By then they had been searching for over a year. They had looked in the north – too pricey. They had looked in the east (the darkness of Walthamstow, the barren lawns of Chingford), and it was only here, on this sloping street in Bell Green, in the deep deep south, that they could picture and also afford this upstairs dreaming and downstairs breakfasting, Ria sleeping in a room of her own, bookshelves in the alcoves, the birds and dancers on the walls, the heroes in the passage of too many doors, the peace lily in the light of a window twin.

  So four months later the saloon was unloaded to form a bewildering mountain of things on the new through-lounge floor. The old laminate had been replaced by a buttery varnished oak flecked with the inner blackness of its trees. The walls had been washed down with extreme bicarbonate to eliminate the traces of Brigitte’s cat. Further feline toxins were tossed out with the blue carpet on the stairs and landing, and in its place came a warm paprika similar to the kitchen and bathroom tiles. Ria’s room, her court, where Lily used to sleep, was painted yellow. This room would eventually also
belong to the baby, who kicked and kicked, whose feet-shape could be seen on the surface of Melissa’s skin. And the master court, at the front of the house overlooking the street, became a rich, dark, husky red, the colour of enduring love, the colour of passion. Raffia blinds were draped across its three windows. The twilight dancers were hung on the wall opposite and the birds of Tanzania on the landing outside. A king-size bed, bought new from a Camden boutique, was placed in the centre of the room, like an enormous hulking ship, and one night when all of this was done, when the mountain was gone and all that was left was the gradual arranging of the smaller things that make a house a home – the positioning of ornaments, the erecting of tea-towel hooks – Melissa was lying beached on her side in a black cotton slip in the heat of July, unable to sleep, when she felt a large, grasping wave move up and down her body, more grasping and more commanding than all the others before, a pair of big phantom hands gripping her stomach as if about to throw it, and she flicked open her restless eyes and stared wide at the dark and quiet night. She had arrived at the precipice. She was thoroughly alone. Nativity was nigh.

  Melissa came from a family of women who handled childbirth with warm and willing stoicism and natural might. Her mother had delivered three girls and a stillborn boy in the screaming days before the mass use of the epidural. Her sisters, Carol and Adel, had survived on only basic pain relief, refusing to pollute their babies’ birth canals with unnecessary drugs. They were earth mothers. The child was the leader, the body was the ship, the pain was the sea, a beauty, a giving, an embrace by the universe, embrace it back. Melissa was not an earth mother. This had been confirmed at the arrival of Ria, who after three days of beautiful embracing pain was cut from her stomach like Macduff. She had been fully intent, this time round, on not visiting at all the house of horror, the cruel sea, and heading directly to the cutting room, until around the fifth month of incubation when it had occurred to her while practising pregnancy yoga to wonder what it would actually be like to witness the mighty movements of the canal, the emptying of the swollen womb, the crowning of the head. The wondering had increased, until she had announced to the midwife that she wanted a VBAC, the term referring to the category of women who are stupid enough to try it again the natural way, to return to the vagina, to risk the rupturing of the caesarean scar in order to know what it feels like to experience the profound and ultimate summit of womanhood.

  Standing the next morning then in the cubic courtyard after another grasping phantom wave, she gathered in her brain all that she had been told by the earth mothers, her VBAC hypnosis CD, her antenatal classes, the pregnancy yoga book Carol had given her, and let the sensations – not pain, they were sensations – lead her gently to (the house of horror), which the hypnosis CD had not quite succeeded in persuading her to think of as a benign and relaxing shore, a nice … gentle stroll … by the calm … water’s edge. She swayed and hummed and breathed in the magnitude of what was about to happen to her, each phantom grasping a low song, each rise and fall a misty climbing up and down with her breath, picturing in her mind the helpless, harmless little cub who was also terrified. Imagine what it must be like, an earth mother had written in the sleeve notes of the CD, to be a floating small thing in a warm, protecting darkness, and all of a sudden the waters start to tremble and judder and you’re faced with this colossal, difficult upheaval into the world, the noisy, tumultuous, sharp-edged world. Wouldn’t you be terrified? Wouldn’t you want to stay right where you were and put up every possible resistance you could? If the mother and child are together in one mind, if there is an emotive connection and sympathy between them, the passage will be easier, she had said. So Melissa held it firmly in her mind and in her heart, the fear and the dilemma of her defenceless cub, as the sensations travelled outwards from the centre towards every part of her, down her legs and around her hips, most sensationally of all into her back, where a hard metal plate was forming. She hummed and she blew. She walked elephantine up and down listening to Jeb Loy Nichols, thinking of the good things ahead such as when she could go back to zumba and when she could resume size eight. The plan was that she would accommodate the sensations herself, in the comfort of her own home, until they became ‘over-challenging’ and she required hospital assistance. Babies, the earth mothers opined, do not like hospitals. They are full of forceps, unhelpful stress and premature interventions, and they should be avoided for as long as possible.

  By lunchtime, though, Melissa was thinking that maybe they weren’t so bad. Surely she was close, surely she had made centimetres, what sensations! Michael was home from work, giving her humble, loving looks and gathering bags. He was on the other side of the canyon, a distant friend, necessary but also useless. From where he was standing he could see her magnificence and her great bloom. She was the house that held their future, she was giver of life, an avalanching force. He was frightened of her and pitied her at the same time.

  ‘Remind me not to get into a car with you the next time I’m having contractions!’ He was taking speed bumps like a drunk. He was nervous as hell, and he hated driving even when he wasn’t nervous. Melissa was leaning far back in the passenger seat as another wave took surge. She held on to the window frame, breezy summer air rushing by, the southern sirens of the afternoon, the towers in the far distance behind. They parked on a back street in Camberwell because the hospital car park was full, and she waded, she waddled, Michael holding her arm, into the foreboding building with its reflective windows and sliding doors, where a sad-eyed Indian doctor told them it was time to go to the labour ward. She sent them up in a lift to the third floor, where they sat in the waiting area with two other avalanching women. Strange that waiting rooms are simply waiting rooms at a time like this, a vending machine, magazines, posters on domestic violence and breastfeeding, that women wait together in such extremity of circumstance, in a normal, angular room, not womb-shaped, with uncomfortable chairs.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Melissa said to Michael.

  ‘Melissa Pitt?’ a voice called.

  A woman in a blue cloth hat and white overalls emerged from the corridor that led within. She appeared as a fixture of a nightmare, white hairs flailing out of her hat, a pink, tired face with one eye higher than the other and a cruel walk, a careless stomping, as if in the many years of her midwifery she had used up all of her sympathy and now it was just plain old work. ‘Come on through,’ she said. Michael was told to stay in the waiting area as if he had nothing to do with any of this, while Melissa went reluctantly with the white-haired witch, who stomped next to her down the hall into a ward and deposited her behind a pale-blue curtain next to a stretcher, an aluminium sink and a wiry machine. ‘Someone will be with you shortly,’ she said, and left.

  Shortly was five minutes, then ten minutes. Meanwhile sensations mounted. Out in the corridor two overly relaxed women were talking among themselves. ‘Is anyone coming?’ Melissa asked them. ‘Is someone coming? I was told someone would come soon and no one has come. I’m having contractions?’

  These two NHS labour ward administrators were used to such rambling and moodiness. Between them they tried to decipher who it was who was going to come. They were bored, underpaid women. They were continuing with indignation the long affiliation between the West Indian immigrant and the National Health Service. ‘We’re very busy today,’ one said. ‘Someone is coming soon, don’t worry.’

  So she went back to her corner, and found that it was less sensational to bend over the stretcher with her head in her hands during the surges. They were getting more violent, more difficult to ride. In another ten minutes, a hand gently, finally, pulled back the curtain, and a pretty, kindly-looking woman in an NHS-blue smock appeared.

  ‘Hello,’ she said softly. ‘I’m Pamela. How are you?’

  This came across as an absurd question. Melissa repeated that she wanted to go home. Pamela smiled, pulled out the wiry machine from the end of the stretcher and began to unravel it. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘first let�
�s check if it’s safe for you to go home.’ She looked at her folder. ‘Oh. You’re a VBAC. I don’t think you’ll be able to go home if you’re VBAC. It’s dangerous.’ She measured dilation at just one and a half centimetres. So it was true, Melissa thought. It was going to be Macduff all over again. She wanted to cry.

  ‘Just lie back now,’ Pamela said, lifting the ends of the wires and taking hold of the rubber pads used for monitoring the waves. Lying down was the worst thing. Lying flat on your back with the waves raging up and down, yet Pamela insisted, and Melissa let her place the rubber pads on her stomach as another surge began. They were coming faster and faster. She concentrated on trying to be an earth mother but it was becoming increasingly unfeasible, especially in this position. Pamela said she would be back soon, and for a while Melissa lay there as surges came and went, making spectacles of themselves, happy on their new supine stage, singing gloriously, swirling in deepening currents. During this time she forgot all about the feelings of the cub. The earth mothers went up in flames. A giant wave came up that she was unable to accommodate, and she hauled herself off the stretcher and began tearing at the wires. Pamela reappeared.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going home. That’s it. No more. This is unbearable.’

  ‘Look, why do you want to go home so much?’ Pamela said. ‘Most women, we have trouble sending them home, they want to stay in the hospital where it’s safe, but you, you want to go home. Why?’