Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  Then the conversations joined again and they discussed together the things they all had in common, their fixed-rate mortgage packages and primary schools and home improvements, frequently using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ to refer to themselves as individuals. ‘I’ was the lost pronoun in the language of the couple. They spoke queenly of themselves, including the other and undervaluing the self, so that they all became diluted. To escape, Melissa kept checking on the food and went upstairs to put Blake down and look in on the shrinking. Everyone was the same size as before.

  ‘Mm, this is delicious,’ Stephanie enthused at the dining table. ‘I love curry.’

  ‘Me too,’ Michael said. ‘Melissa made it.’

  ‘He made the rice.’

  ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it,’ Stephanie said, ‘how stew, or curry, is one thing all over the world. It’s the same thing, tomatoes and onions and some kind of stock all cooked together into a gravy. But at the same time they’re all different – in Russia it’s stroganoff, in Italy it’s bolognese, in India it’s curry, in Morocco it’s tagine …’

  She was sitting next to Damian, who was sitting opposite Melissa, who was sitting next to Michael. Damian was trying hard to block out Stephanie’s voice and not look directly at Melissa because he was afraid he would stare at her and everyone would see him staring. Why was she so lovely now? Why did he have this bizarre feeling that he was supposed to be with her and the couples were the wrong way round? It was difficult to behave as if everything was the right way round. He lost track of the conversation in his absorption, and didn’t understand what she meant when she asked him, ‘What about you, Damian? Ever think of moving back?’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘To London.’

  The children were sitting on the rug on the other side of the ecclesiastical arch, having a dinner picnic. Amy Winehouse was singing in her way, as if she were not going to remember the next line, though she always did, she always returned.

  ‘I think about it a lot,’ he said. ‘I’d love to move back.’

  ‘Really? Why? It’s so rough,’ said Stephanie. ‘How many teenage stabbings or shootings or whatever have there been so far this year? Forty or something? Jerry, don’t wipe your hands on your top, use the napkin.’

  ‘Twenty-eight,’ said Michael.

  ‘Twenty-eight. Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘Those are the ones reported anyway.’

  Damian took the last sip of his wine (he was driving home). ‘You shouldn’t hang on to every word of the news all the time,’ he told Stephanie. ‘It’s not a realistic picture. Just makes you paranoid, creates panic. You watch too much news, man.’

  ‘But there is a problem with gangs here. That’s a fact, isn’t it? I’ve seen them.’ She told them the story about the man with the rock at the mini-roundabout in Forest Hill and how that had been the last straw. ‘Some of these kids, they look as if they’d kill you. It seems like they’ve lost all scruples, all sense of boundaries. It’s not their fault, I know, it’s their environment. But what’s being done about it? What are they going to do about crime?’

  As if in answer to Stephanie’s question, a siren whizzed by on the high street at the bottom of the road. ‘See. You don’t hear many of those where we are.’

  ‘There’s sirens everywhere, for all kinds of things,’ Michael said. ‘It’s not just about their environment. It’s about who they are, knowing who they are and what they could become, and having control over it. These are exactly the kind of kids I used to work with at the youth clubs,’ (when Michael was doing radio presenting he’d run workshops sometimes in youth centres around London). ‘Some of them were just plain bad, through and through, no lie. But most of them weren’t. They were just … inchoate.’

  ‘And that’s when they’re most in danger,’ Damian said.

  ‘Right. You can’t just round them all up and throw them in jail. What a waste. Let them find something they love, music, science, architecture. If they’re enthusiastic about something the gang life isn’t attractive any more.’

  ‘I read somewhere once that boys in gangs have homoerotic tendencies,’ Melissa said.

  ‘I want to be in a gang!’ cried Jerry.

  ‘No you do not,’ Stephanie said firmly, but laughing with everyone else, and going over to wipe his face. ‘This is what I mean, though. I’d hate them growing up around all this trouble and strife. London may be the centre of the world to some people,’ meaning Damian, ‘but I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’s a very good place to raise children.’

  There was a cry from above, loud and insistent. ‘Blake’s crying,’ Ria said, still wearing her white glove on her left hand. ‘Can we go back up now?’

  ‘I thought you wanted to watch TV?’ said Michael. Melissa was getting up, but Stephanie asked, ‘Can I go? You relax, I’ll get him.’

  She went, eventually the crying stopped. She came downstairs holding Blake, his face thick with sleep, his hair flat against the back of his scalp over the golden patch where he’d been lying. She was cradling him against her, soothing him with a soft murmuring, ‘you lovely, tired thing, you little blast of sunshine, look at you, such a prince, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ and he was content, languid, limp in her embrace. When he saw his mother his arms made a sudden glad song, his body jerked and flinched, a small smile exploded. Melissa took him.

  ‘I tried to put him back down but he wasn’t having it,’ Stephanie said. ‘I think he was cold. It’s quite cold in that room.’

  ‘Really? I find it cold in there too sometimes.’

  ‘Well if you find it cold, he’d definitely find it cold. Why don’t you give him another blanket?’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous, too many blankets?’ Since the night of the bad omen, Melissa had been wary of too much heat. Now she was worried about too little heat. In motherland there was always something to worry about. She felt she was learning everything all over again. ‘I read something in The Baby Whisperer about —’

  ‘Oh, whisperer-shmisterer,’ Stephanie balked. ‘Don’t listen to those stupid books. He’s your baby, you know what to do. There’s so much literature around these days about how to look after your child, it’s just bossy, don’t you think?’

  ‘No. I find it quite useful.’ Sometimes Melissa peered into these books in the middle of the night when Blake wouldn’t stop crying. Sometimes she clung to them with both hands, desperately seeking a wonder sentence, a celestial bean of wisdom to get him back to sleep. Sometimes she reached for them before she went to sleep, instead of reaching for one of the novels she was trying to reclaim, or some good poems, and this seemed a dangerous thing. ‘I don’t read all of them,’ she said defensively, ‘just that one and the Gina Ford, to remind me …’

  ‘Gina Ford!’ Stephanie’s voice was getting louder from the wine. ‘That woman doesn’t know the first thing about being a mother. She hasn’t even got any kids! She’s a nanny, for god’s sake. What gives her the right to go around telling people how to look after their own babies, telling them they have to wake up at 7 a.m. and go back to sleep at 9 a.m. and have lunch no later than 11.30 and have their nappy changed at 2.24 p.m.? You can’t put a baby on a schedule like that, it’s cruel, it’s unnecessary. You change the nappy when? When it needs changing! You put him to sleep when? When he —’

  She was interrupted by a knock at the window.

  ‘What was that?’

  Michael went to look, pulling aside the venetian blind. ‘It’s Mrs Jackson. In this weather. Jeez.’

  Mrs Jackson lived five doors down at number eight. She was in her seventies and lived alone, and she was in the process of forgetting herself, what her name was, where her coat was, what number she lived at. Every couple of days she would walk up and down Paradise Row, usually in her slippers, her hair wild and unkempt, trying to explain to people that she couldn’t remember where she lived, but they didn’t always understand what she was saying because her sentences got lost on th
e way and ended up in unrelated things.

  ‘I better take her home,’ Michael said, and went out into the darkness.

  Mrs Jackson liked Michael because of his kind face and kind way. She was wearing only a green housedress, no coat, her thin brown calves poking out from the hem like sticks. The wind railed against them as they walked.

  ‘It’s too cold and late for you to be out like this,’ he told her. ‘It’s number eight, see? Here’s your house, this one, with the yellow door.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Mrs Jackson held his hand with both of hers and smiled up at him. ‘Thank you, darling. You are so kind. You look just like me son Vincent, he is coming back from America on Saturday, he always bring clothes and saucepans and shoes, he’s such a good boy …’

  ‘Someone needs to look after her,’ Melissa said when Michael returned. ‘It’s the third time this week.’

  ‘The poor woman,’ said Stephanie.

  For dessert they had New York cheesecake with pistachio ice cream. Damian drove home in silence, the occasional fox appearing at the edge of the road, its flashing eyes making him think of the glinting tassels on her top, the curve of her neck where it met with her hair, the particular shape of her nose in profile. He did not write anything when he got home.

  Later that night, Melissa lay awake in the master court. The children were asleep in the second room. As usual she had checked on them last thing, that Blake was breathing, the blanket was not over his face, and that Ria was unshrunk, which she was, her cardboard house closed for the night. Tomorrow she would play with it some more, and they would pass a long familial Sunday in the culture of the crooked house – a visit to her mother across the river, the roasting of a bird, anticipating Monday, when Michael would go back to work and she would stay here in Paradise with Blake.

  Michael was also asleep. He liked the romance of recent rain, and he had reached for her amidst the red, his hands across her waist, asking, but she could not tune in to his eventual beauty, to the boomerang light next to his heart. Outside the fast wind was still blowing, shaking the raffia, most vigorously at the left-hand window where the draught was coming from. Melissa got out of bed and tried to open it again so that it would close properly, while doing so glimpsing the dark windows opposite, the front doors, the square front gardens. She missed the view of the sky from the old place. It had been on the seventh floor of a tower block. The stars had been so close there, the moon at the window. She had become used to an affinity with the Milky Way, and this view of the houses on the other side of the street felt like a theft.

  No matter how much she pushed and tugged at the handle, the window would not budge. She began to have a strange sensation, as she was standing there, that there was someone standing behind her, very still – a night thing, her mother used to call them, beings who walk in the night hours, not quite human, who watch us. It had always frightened Melissa when Alice mentioned them. She turned around to look, but there was nothing there, only the shadows in the room, the door ajar, beyond it the landing, the skylight. The window shook and trembled in its frame. It was almost as if someone, or something, were trying to get in. Or possibly out.

  4

  I CAN MAKE YOUR ZOOM ZOOM GO BOOM BOOM

  Michael took the bus to work, preferring it to the tube as he could look out of the window and anyway he had read somewhere once that a seat on an average Central Line train is less hygienic than licking the bowl of a toilet. Even if he had wanted to go by tube, residing now in the London the tube forgot, he would have to get a bus to Brixton or Elephant & Castle first and then change, down into the crowded tunnels and stairways, and he didn’t like being underground over long distances. To get his stride going he walked the long way through the back streets to the Cobb’s Corner roundabout, his bag slung over his shoulder and in it a small bottle of sanitising hand gel, and waited there for the 176, which took him around the back of Forest Hill via Upper Sydenham, through Dulwich and Camberwell, into the fuchsia explosion of Elephant, onwards to Waterloo, and over the river to the other side. Because he got on near the first stop he usually got his favourite seat, the top deck, second from the front on the left-hand side, and all the way he stared out at the knuckled city trees, the pigeons grouped greyly on the grasses, the early smokers at bus stops, the winter palms outside Dulwich Library, the building projects paused in recession, babies pointing from prams with concern in their faces, the suya hut in the shadows of the fuchsia, the Walworth Road nail salons, the trough-like tenement balconies, the evacuated Aylesbury Estate, the community police officers performing slopey walks, the church steeples amidst the rooftop satellite dishes, the shady high-street hotels, the men on their phones, the women in their clothes, the boys with their boxers showing and their new uncuddly brand of urban pet dog, the rail tracks, the hedgerows, and the peeping greens and streams. On the approach to the river the roads widened into boulevards and became in fleeting moments almost Parisian, the buildings slightly smoother and the stonework somewhat grander, shaking off a downbeat southern mood and a roughness of edge like a woman with messy hair neatening it up as she walked across the water which glittered, which churned and twisted and rolled with the wind as she went, the vista of the north rising up before her, the Houses of Parliament and Somerset House with its pillars and flags and the children in stucco on the roof trim. In the centre of the city it was a different kind of dirt, the dirt of money and extreme lack or excess of it, and it became a little like New York along the glitzy stretch of the Strand, then onwards towards the last stop at Tottenham Court Road there was the great wide opening of Trafalgar Square where Nelson soared up and the galleries flanked, where so many birds swooped, as if it were holy, on to the cold blue fountain pool.

  On the bus it was easier to convince himself that he was not part of the rat race. He was wearing a suit, yes, he had three suits, the black, the navy and the grey, two of which he had acquired only recently when starting work at Freedland Morton. But he wore it with nonchalance, with a sense of disconnection between skin and fabric. His real self was untouched, unaffected, was actually wearing khakis, and over the suit he had on a large, quite trendy winter coat so he looked less square, less like a cardboard box with legs. On the bus there was a greater mix of people, and rather than facing each other and staring miserably into the murky darkness of below-ground-level windows, they faced the front. They were private and unscrutinised in their journeying, and not all of them were going to work. Here was a woman in a yellow hat with a little girl a year or two older than Ria, possibly on their way to the passport office in Victoria or Madame Tussauds or the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green (this was a game Michael liked to play in his head, to imagine other types of living, other types of Monday or Tuesday). Here in the front seat in the opposite aisle was a middle-aged man, drunk and pink and grey, slumped forward over the bar and being shifted from side to side with the hurlings of the deck (job centre on Walworth Road, or the pub, to wait at the entrance until it opened, or maybe he was red-bus-rovering without meaning to, he gets to the end of the route and doesn’t know where the fuck he is so gets on another bus same thing again). And here were two teenage boys in school uniform (‘If you beat him, yeah, I’ll give you ten pound. Ten pound!’) who were not on their way to school. Michael knew what youngsters looked like when they were not on their way to school. He himself had been not on his way to school many times as a kid, and there were only three places he would go, the park, the shopping centre or to his friend’s house, with a silly cocksure swagger and a loudness overcompensating for his fear. Down Denmark Hill they came, these strangers, past the hospital where Blake was born, past the rundown Pentecostal church on the shopping parade, and Michael pretended that he too was going somewhere different, somewhere spontaneous, someplace where less was required of him. He didn’t really want to be a corporate responsibility coordinator at Freedland Morton. Deep down he identified with that old pink drunk. He had always thought of himself as the type who could either die yo
ung or end up a crying park-bench bum. He had been sure that he wouldn’t make it past thirty, and now that he was thirty-seven he was slightly bewildered, mindful of the projected alternative. If he were ever released, or ejected, for whatever reason, from the grave and beautiful responsibilities of this life, he sensed that he would sink down easily to a truthful reunion with a shabbier self, like a hot-air balloon that had lost its flame.

  En route he listened to his iPod. There were a handful of artists on his Most Played list, including Shuggie Otis, Nas, Dolly Parton and Jill Scott, but the Most Played album was John Legend’s 2004 debut Get Lifted, which was a journey of a different kind. It began with a little waterfall of piano and an invitation from John to go with him and see something new, and in a surging sequence of warm, gospel-percolated melodies it followed, as Michael interpreted it, the odyssey of a man changing from a womanising, nightclubbing, phone-number-collecting, good-time cheat into a responsible, mature and committed life partner. It was a slow and difficult road, strewn with conflict and temptation. He loved his girlfriend but he loved his freedom also, and couldn’t his girlfriend see, he sang in She Don’t Have to Know, that just because he slept around it didn’t mean he didn’t love her? Just because he snuck off to Washington DC so that he could hold hands with the other woman in public wearing sunglasses to shield his identity, it didn’t mean she wasn’t still his Number One? No, she did not see, and the thing was that this girlfriend, this Number One, was not just any girl. She was special, she was bombastic, she was ‘off the hizzle!’. Snoop Dogg scolded him about it in I Can Change. He said, ‘When you find one like that, you got to make that change, man, cos they don’t come too often, and when they do come, you got to be smart enough to know when to change.’ It is a moment that warrants a grand and decisive destruction of the wayward phone-number-collecting guy, a passing over on the bridge of justice to all that you can be, your best self, someone who is deserving of her. And he didn’t want to do it. Oh it was tough, he loved those women, all of them, all the warm and luscious women in the world. But he did it. And he spent one song in an agony of uncertainty called Ordinary People, where his love was undeniable but constantly running into hardship and there were arguments every day and no one knew which way to go. There were two choices, to Stay With You, or not to stay. He stayed. And at some point beyond that crossroad he, they, reached a sublime plateau. They came out into the wild and peaceful air of the ninth cloud and there was wonderful lovemaking and deep understanding and they walked onwards, together, So High, into a future that would repeat their parents’ lives, that is, the ones who were still married. When it was cold outside they were a Refuge for each other, a sweet washing of the soul, a sunny path. He came to embrace the value of family and developed a nostalgia for the simple days when the family was central. Those were the important things, to spend time with the people you loved, to continue to love them. He had grown. He had arrived on the other side. He was lost but now he was found, and all the way through, piano, strings flying in the distance, fingers clicking, cymbols whirling, John’s voice like rich autumn gravel. He ended on a high note with Live It Up, a definitive, undulating bassline, the violins euphoric, a final celebration of love, of life in all its struggle and complexity and fullness. It was one of the best soul records ever made.