Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  Michael, in this his thirteenth year with Melissa, did not quite know where he was positioned along this narrative. He would like to say that he was at So High or the less exciting Refuge, but this would not be true, although there were sometimes fleeting moments of these, particularly the latter, for example when the children were asleep in the evenings and Melissa was doing something in the kitchen or surfing the Internet at the dining table and there was a feeling of calm and warmth and safety in the house. He had long ago passed the one-song agony and made the decision to Stay, but it seemed at times that he was slipping back, wondering whether he would be happier with someone else, or on his own, a bachelor again, living in a one-bedroomed flat in Catford, near the children, taking them at weekends to soft play or the Broadway Theatre or to his mother’s. Maybe he should be one of those men, who fathered from a distance. Perhaps he had never really deep down achieved that grand and decisive destruction of the phone-number-collector and he was still in the vicinity of She Don’t Have To Know. Because frankly these days it felt like he and Melissa were nothing more than flatmates. In the not too distant past, when he would arrive back home from somewhere, she used to walk into his arms and embrace him, smile that dust-busting, magnificent smile of hers and they would talk, immediately, in tumults, about what had happened that afternoon or who they’d seen or something they’d read or something cute Ria had said or their next trip away. Their talking was like a river, always flowing, delirious with movement. It was oblivious to their physical separation and continued within, so that their coming back together was merely an increase in volume. It was not like this any more. Now when he got home from work, wearing his suit, Melissa would be standing at the kitchen sink and would hardly look up. There was no smile, no hug. She no longer put kisses on the ends of her texts or emails during the day. Now it was only, ‘Can you pop to Lidl on way hm, chick thighs, pots, tissues, milk’, or, ‘Bog roll pls’, or, ‘Can you be home by 6.30 so I can go to zumba?’ He would go upstairs to change into his tracksuit and there would be three plastic bags on the floor next to the washing basket containing his hair-cutting clothes, which she was waiting silently, with mounting irritation, for him to wash. Then once the children were in bed they mostly retreated into their separate realms, he on the sofa in front of the TV, and she in the bedroom reading. They lived in two different houses in one small house. Relationships can get old, John sang as the 176 approached the river, have a tendency to grow cold.

  Michael’s romantic odyssey had been similar, though less brazen, to John’s, this Mr Legend, walking in a better tailored suit than his down the aisle of a church in the CD artwork. Like him, or this man he had created in his music, he, Michael, had also enjoyed his share of women before settling down. He was shy in love, inquisitive, and they had liked him for it, the fellow Politics student at SOAS, the model from Honduras, the girl he’d met in Tesco. With all of them he had held a part of himself back, sleeping with them in percentages, only going to a hundred when he felt it was warranted and when he was sure he would not catch a sexually transmitted disease. He was preserving himself for something, someone, whom he had no concrete idea of, only that she would be softer, purer, higher. His passion was imperious. He was a man who was made for a great love. And in searching for this love, like John in Used To Love U, he also, at one point, had found himself in a relationship in which he was dissatisfied, in which he had fallen out of love, or further still, in which he had come to question whether he had actually been in love in the first place. Her name was Gillian and she had adored him with a molten desperation that had left him suffocated. She was studying to be a paediatrician and played the flute. She had soft, rich, flutey lips. She was gifted, she cared about the world and making it better, she made soaring silver birds with her mouth. But she had wanted him too much, more than everything else she was capable of having. On her twenty-second birthday, when Michael was twenty-three, she had asked him across their table in a Brick Lane curry house to marry her. She was a little drunk but she had meant it, and Michael said ‘maybe’, maybe one day, without really meaning it, because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her, for she had experienced terrible pain in her life. There were men at every turn who had wanted to harm her. Her foster father had fondled her in secret nights. She was molested by an athletics coach when she was twelve. Then there was the man in the cupboard (she didn’t like cupboards because of it, especially when they were closed, she had a habit of keeping them open) who had come initially to fix the boiler, but finding her there, little, in her green summer shorts, had ended up touching her inappropriately in the cupboard while no one was looking, and then fixing the boiler. It was amazing, she told Michael, how many men there were in the world who just wanted to take a girl for a minute to quench some passing horrific urge. It was incredible how many.

  Gillian had a thick, downward way of walking as if she were forever going down into a cellar. The only time she seemed light was when she was playing the flute. She cried easily. When she and Michael were in public she wanted them to walk arm in arm or hand in hand, to appear as a woman on whom a claim could be made, a woman who was protected. She enjoyed cooking for him. She liked the spaces tradition had made for a woman and did not object to the alleged constraints, the great shadow of the patriarchal umbrella. While she was with Michael she eased herself into the warmth of his happy family, which was the only happy family she knew, this strange collection of people laughing, these loving smells emanating from his mother’s kitchen, this quiet house in the suburbs. She stayed with him three nights a week, four nights, five, loved him in the early morning when his parents were sleeping in the opposite room, slipped her mouth around him asking for nothing, only that he would lie there breathing beneath her and cover the back of her head with his palm in that mode of protection. Michael thought of her now in the chorus of Used To Love U, although she was not the kind of girl John was singing about, a girl for whom nothing was good enough, who had a high opinion of herself. Gillian had thought nothing at all of herself, it was the central manifestation of her trouble. She considered herself lucky that someone like Michael, someone good and clean, had accepted her, and once she had him she had nestled in his life like a small and fearful animal. His father had adored her. She was just the kind of girl he’d hoped for, someone who would love his younger son in stern abundance, someone with sensible career plans. He came to see her as a daughter (once, while out shopping in Wood Green, he had introduced her to someone as his daughter-in-law).

  All of this had made things difficult for Michael. Two years into the relationship, he came to the conclusion that he didn’t love Gillian and never would. They did not, the combination of them, amount to what it took to send two people off the cliff-edge in faith that they would float as one. He tried hard. He tried to position his mind permanently at the exact point during lovemaking when she set him out to sea and he was awed by her power, or at some point in their first few months when she was completely new to him, a gift still to be unwrapped and containing unknown possibilities. But it wouldn’t hold. He slipped back into a sensation of wanting to be away from her, a feeling that she was trampling on his life and preventing him from seeing and thinking clearly, from being. He began to dislike certain expressions on her face, the blank serenity when they were sitting on a train together, the absorbed, oblivious way in which she ate, almost roughly, or the habit she had of playing with the ends of her braids. When he was out at clubs or bars he began to look at other girls. He didn’t have the courage to end it with her, so like John in She Don’t Have To Know he played around, in low percentages, and was eaten by guilt. He found every excuse not to be with her. Eventually she became suspicious, and it was only then, at the tail end of an argument, that he told her he wanted to end it. She responded exactly as he had feared, tears, begging. But then she had quietened. She sat down on the edge of his bed, looking downwards into her cellar. After a while she quickly stuffed some of her things into a bag and left, politely saying goodby
e to his parents, not hugging them like she usually did. Eight months later he received a phone call from her during which she asked for him back, but by that point he had met Melissa.

  When you find one like that, Snoop said, you got to make that change. Melissa the mermaid. Melissa with the distant eyes and glistening skin. Melissa walking lightly along a London street in khakis, trainers and bracelets and Michael walking behind her with his friend Perry (‘Look how fit she is, she is fit’). She was the softer, purer, higher. She was way, way, way off the hizzle. She liked to swim. That was where the glistening came from. If she didn’t swim she felt too dry, like something beached, her mood would descend. The day after he first met her in Jamaica, at the carnival in Montego Bay (they were both covering it, Melissa for a magazine, Michael for radio), they were on a beach, Michael and Perry and a few other reporters, talking, sunning, playing ball games, and she broke off and went into the water. She was wearing an old-fashioned black swimming costume with a diagonal white stripe across the middle that covered her to the tops of her thighs. He watched. He watched her walk into the waves with her body for days, the water reaching for her as she went, alone, fearless. She swam out. Her brown body twisted in the blue, her mermaid flow, she was a new world turning. She went further and further out and he watched the waves rising and falling, coming in and slipping back. He saw her strong brown arms wheeling in front crawl. He saw the edge of the sea where it turned with the circularity of the earth until he couldn’t see it any more and he saw the rocks and the island across. He kept his eye on the brown arms turning but it became harder and harder, the sea took over in its expanse. Then he lost sight of her. She was gone. She had turned the ocean corner. Or maybe she had slipped under, maybe she was being pulled down. He began to panic. He felt his heart quicken, that she was here, this shining new thing that he wanted to know more of, and now she was not. He couldn’t swim a stroke but something took hold of him then and he started walking. He rolled up his jeans and waded out, long-legged. He had no idea what he was intending to do, and when he got as far in as he could go without swimming he stopped, and waited, looked around the corner as far as he could. But he couldn’t see her. After a while he went back, soaked, and stood stupidly on the shore in his wet jeans, wishing he could rescue her, wanting so much to be her hero, feeling already, as he often would in the future, that he was not enough for her. Then he began to feel angry with her, that she could just go like that and worry someone and act as if she didn’t exist, as if he didn’t exist. She came back twenty minutes later, laughing and out of breath. All the anger fell away as she walked towards him, her strength, her thighs, her face, her happiness, ‘what a sea,’ she said, ‘what a swim,’ and he was laughing too, ‘I thought you’d drowned’. That was she. She was The One. He wanted her. He wanted to make her zoom zoom go boom boom. He liked her so much that it felt dangerous. He said to Perry, ‘One day she’s gonna break my heart. I know it.’

  Her hands were small like her feet, she wore silver rings with jade and amber stones. She was doll-like, almost sexless. Her profile was dreamy. He stared at her a lot. She liked adventures. She wanted to go to Argentina. She had heard that there are a series of mountains at the top of Argentina that are red, especially during sunsets. She wanted to go to Seville and the south-eastern coast of Corfu. She wanted to go to Mexico and visit the house of Frida Kahlo and climb the Andes in Peru, to live somewhere other than England, to exist elsewhere from where she had begun; she wanted to eat the world. She was unlike Gillian in every way, self-heeding, self-possessed, defiant. She said that she would never be tied down and she would never occupy a space in which she felt trapped. Michael was full of questions, more so than with any woman before, and she liked him for it, the way he listened, so closely. He wanted to know every corner of her mind, every corridor. There was no end to her unwrapping. The more he found the more there was to explore. She had a mystical perception of the future, in that she seemed to believe that she was going to a different place from everybody else, that life would not happen to her in quite the same way, that in every moment she was preserving herself, enriching herself in secret like Michael Jackson in his glass coffin, remaining at a distance from people so that she would not be distracted. Those far-off eyes, always cryptic. What are you thinking about? he asked her on the beach in the evening, right now, right this minute? He tried to catch her in stills. She was slippery. I’m looking into my thoughts, she said, instead of ‘I am thinking’. She expressed herself in the picturesque literal. Later she would write him poems, a line while she was away in Rome: I miss my mouth in your pubic chin (a reference to his goatee).

  What followed, after that first meeting in Montego Bay, were three months of talking on the telephone, during which they discussed their pasts and their futures, the two houses of Edgar Allen Poe, the drama of Mary J. Blige, the depths of Cassandra Wilson, the National Front, the police, Margaret Thatcher and the things she did, volcanoes, their mothers’ countries and the times they’d spent there, the decreasing distinction between R&B and pop. He made her laugh. That was the thing, she used to laugh a lot. She used to laugh so hard that he could hear sticky sounds at the back of her mouth, she embarrassed herself, she told him, because the office she was working in at the time was small and everybody could hear her. During these conversations there was nothing else but the talk, they were completely absorbed in each other’s voices, seeped in chemistry, yet it took him three months to lie with her. She was living in a room in Kensal Rise with a sink in the corner and she would let him stay after a party or a date but he always slept on the floor. Their first kiss happened only after he asked her, he couldn’t find another way, it made him timid, how much he liked her, and this feeling that she would break his heart. They were standing by the sink and they had eaten a meal of spaghetti with fake mince (she also ate pumpkin seeds, muesli and other things meant for birds). She was wearing a blue and pink dashiki with explicit armholes and all evening he had been peeping and trying not to peep into her brownness, her sweet shallow mounds, and now the evening was over and he was about to leave because her friend Hazel was coming over and he still hadn’t kissed her. So he came out with it and asked her, like a boy, to which she said yes, like a girl. He bent. Their lips arrived together, and the softness, the warmth of it was a swirling, explosive surprise, it was a kiss that needed no input, it operated by itself, was fully formed, intrinsically euphoric yet nonchalant, had its own psychology and personality, could be called Franklin or Desdemona or Angelina, and he was so taken that he lifted her up on to the bed so that she was above him where she belonged and went with his hands inside her dress and touched, at last – and then they were interrupted by Hazel’s knock at the door. It was the interruption, the cutting short of the thing, that made it even more momentous.

  After that with long nights and hashish she let him in. She was bashful. She was loosely innocent. She hid herself, even after everything, behind the wardrobe door when she was changing, but she also went bra-less and oblivious in her flowing African dresses, allowing him the secrets of her little breasts, the gentle line of her upper back. By the time she moved into the flat on the seventh floor they were more or less itemised and he soon moved in with her, although she still courted him like he was some kind of accessory that she might one day leave on a train. He asked her once, when he was already too deeply in love with her to call it healthy, ‘What is this? What are we doing?’, because he felt like he was drowning, to which she replied, in her infectiously reasonable, noncommittal way, ‘Do we have to define it?’ She was always at a slight distance, withheld. It was not that she was unaffectionate, at least not then. Their lovemaking was constant. It was impulsive and ecstatic. It made them shout. It made the man who lived downstairs bang the communal central heating pipe in protest. They would leave the bed in the afternoon with the light swinging in from the balcony and go to the kitchen for toast, and in the kitchen just sitting there watching the seventh sky beyond the railing and talkin
g, always talking, it would begin again by some long touch on a waist or the comparing of their different-sized hands or a linking of eyes or something else that made her laugh, and they would go back to the bedroom, or to the living room where the windows looked out on the city all the way to the river, and the night would fall in sepia upon their bodies. Every Sunday evening she would steam her face over a basin of essential oils. He remembered one time in particular when he had stood naked in the doorway, watching her like that, swaying under the towel to Tracy Chapman or Al Green or some other steam voice, in her blue satin slip, and she had eventually lifted her head and seen him standing there, smiled at him in that gorgeous way that made him feel so full and happy as if she were pouring sunshine into him. The tower block became the palace in the sky. It glittered like the lesser Eiffel at night. She said that she could ‘just be’ with him, that she didn’t have to pretend or put on a front, and he felt the same way, for they were united in a large disquiet with the world, instilled partly by its everyday cruelty, partly by a common, second-generation distance, that no matter how much they tried to belong here they were never fully accepted, never fully seen. ‘I’ve found you,’ she said. ‘My sweet brown, I’m so glad I’ve found you.’ They warmed each other. They burned for each other. They just be’d, and more than once during these times when they were just being they spoke of marriage, he would ask her to become his empress one day, she would say of course I will, seeing as it’s you, as if it were nothing at all, or as if she were speaking in a dream, it seemed a foregone conclusion, like a station they would arrive at on a train. In that seventh floor palace they went through Ordinary People, Stay With You, Let’s Get Lifted Again, So High and Refuge. If they argued they always came back to a good place, they forged on, they continued, always returning, the flame still high only harder to find. John sang it on the replay, as the 176 took The Strand: