by Diana Evans
Oh I will stay with you
Through the ups and the downs
Oh I will stay with you
When no one else is around
And when the dark clouds arrive
I will stay by your side
I know we’ll be alright
I will stay with you
Even after eleven years together, on his birthday, Melissa had dedicated a Pussy Cat Dolls song to him, Stikwitu, about how no one else could love her better, no one could take her higher, that she must ‘stikwitu’ for ever. And gliding along now in the dancey haven of his iPod, Michael remembered one day in Finsbury Park after a job interview, back in those first halcyon years. He was wearing his big black puffa coat and it was freezing cold. Throughout the interview all he’d been able to think about was her, his empress, about going home to her, back to the palace, that she would be there, waiting for him, and that was all that mattered, all that he needed. He didn’t care about the job. He didn’t care about money. He just wanted to be with her, to be made complete by her. Next to Finsbury Park station there is a roundabout. In the descending dusk, in the rush-hour traffic, he bounded across the road, bypassing the pedestrian crossing with giant, euphoric strides, and found himself stuck in the middle of the green grass circle. The cars were going round him. He took out his phone. She was on him, in him, all around him, she was the dusk, the greying light, the green, he was dizzy with her, spinning in her universe. He laughed at the sound of her voice when she answered the phone. ‘How did it go?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’ ‘When you coming home?’ she said. ‘I’m on my way.’ Then, ‘Melissa, I love you,’ he cried. He shouted it, ‘I love you!’
So how do you get from that, to this? How do you get from ‘I miss my mouth in your pubic chin’ to ‘Bog roll pls’ no kiss? What happened to Angelina, to Desdemona? How can all that love just disappear? Michael did not doubt that he still loved Melissa. His passion for her was unwaned. She could harden him at the removal of her rings, a catch of light in her collarbone, the taking off of a sock. She was in his heart through all the hours and all the strides of his day. But he doubted whether she still loved him. Would she listen to Stickwitu now and see her truth? Did she look at him and feel herself melting like she used to, like she’d told him she did? How could she, when she could look at him in that other way, this new way, with utter coldness, as if she wanted him to vanish? He disappointed her, he knew it, his uninteresting job, his inferior thirst for adventure. He embraced the land while she hungered for the sea. Adventures, for him, were inside, of the heart and spirit, whereas for her they were outside things like volcanoes. He was in the way of the volcanoes. He was her dam, her Gillian. There were days when Michael really questioned his sustainability in this relationship, when he wondered whether he had come full circle to Used To Love U, and Melissa was now a different kind of woman, the kind John was singing about, superior, demanding, judgemental. Maybe that other Melissa was gone for good and he should just let go. But he couldn’t. He still believed that somewhere the fire was burning and she remained there as she had been, waiting for him. As the bus moved slowly along The Strand, past Charing Cross station, past St Martin-in-the-Fields where he’d taken Ria to do brass rubbing – the memory of this causing him to well up (the warmth of her small hand in his, her skippy walk) – the words of Used To Love U resounded in his head, about living a lie and being tired of it, no longer being willing to justify it. He felt, with a new, emergent spite, that yes, Melissa was this type of girl now, unkind, materialistic, a Puffy-wanter, a Jay-Z-chaser, that yes, they had come full circle, and all he had to do now was just try to stop loving her. Simple. Simple, yet so difficult. And arriving at Trafalgar Square in the final mist of the morning with the swirl of people and the swift walking and the birds in descent towards the icy pool, he was taken by that memory of the roundabout at Finsbury Park, the world turning around him and she a green universe, the perfection and the joy of it, and how sad it was that even such things disappear.
Coming off the bus, down the dirty narrow stairway, avoiding the poles even though he was wearing gloves, he had an urge to stand in Trafalgar Square and tell her again that he loved her, to make her remember. But he did not. He went down Whitcomb Street. A young woman came out of a building and walked past him, glancing (they often looked twice). He turned left towards his office and just as he approached it he turned off the music. It was very important that the two forces, the music and the office, remained separate, so that the music would retain its power, would remain untouched by the too bright panelled ceilings, the dead serenade of the photocopier. Now Legend was gone and Michael assumed his official façade. He went in through the shiny turning doors. He proceeded through the leafy, marble-speckled lobby, towards the circular island at its centre, another green circle, where three dynamic receptionists spoke coolly yet pleasantly into their headpieces, tapping buttons, crisp, clear and infallible in their rendition of the company’s standard telephone greeting, ‘Good morning, Freedland Morton. How may I help you?’ He went by, taking a clandestine look at the one on the right with the long, thick black hair and the absolutely beautiful eyes, god those eyes, mysterious and somehow mournful, a type of caramel, almost golden, shaded by sharp and sweeping eyebrows. He did not know her name. They passed each other sometimes going to and from the office and they always tried not to look directly at each other for there was an obvious attraction, but it had come to a point where it seemed rude not to say hello, then once they had started saying hello the chemistry between them had become too pronounced and she sometimes flushed a little (she was a flushable colour, olive-toned), so that now they were at a kind of stalemate where sometimes they said hello and sometimes they did not.
Today, he did. He even waved, lightly, by accident. Uncertainly, she waved back. They smiled at one another, embarrassed.
5
MEANWHILE
‘Good morning, babies! Good morning, mummies! I am so happy to see you all – I hope you’re ready to have some fun! My name is Chun Song Li and I am your Baby Beat instructor!’
Chun Song Li, sitting cross-legged at the helm of the rectangle of women and babies on primary-coloured mats in the high-ceilinged hall of the Nunhead Christian Worship Centre, opened her arms wide, smiling with equal breadth and effervescence and leaning forwards in a gesture of determined outreach and inclusion. Melissa was to her left, the fourth woman along, wearing a Prada blouse she’d got free from an Open photoshoot and feeling overdressed, while Blake was in front of her, ignoring Chun Song and staring instead into the kaleidoscope of his early-life confusions. To Chun Song’s immediate right was a thin black woman, Chun Song’s protégée, whose face was steeped in boredom and the friction it was encountering in trying to appear enthusiastic. Melissa smiled at her, out of a vague, old-fashioned comradeship, but she did not reciprocate. It was 9.30 a.m. and nobody in the room was wearing shoes.
‘Now,’ Chun Song said, picking up a set of cards. ‘For those of you who are here for the first time,’ she smiled and leaned towards Melissa and another woman opposite whose baby was wearing a denim dungaree dress but was otherwise androgynous, ‘we start every Baby Beat session with some fun and happy songs and baby signing! Don’t worry if you don’t know the signs yet, they are very easy to learn. Just sing along and give it a go, OK?! OK, babies? Everybody ready?’
Chun Song’s protégée pressed a button on the CD player. A soft, twinkling music flowed into the room and Chun Song started to sway. With one hand she held up the cards, one at a time, on each a singular naturalistic object such as a sun, a cloud or a flower, and with the other hand she demonstrated the sign for the group to copy. The sun, for example, was a circle formed by the joining of the tips of the thumb and index finger, the other fingers splayed out to suggest rays. For the sake of their sign-literate babies, for whom this could mean the difference between a grammar school and a comprehensive, the regularly attending mothers swayed also and sang along, holding a
nd assisting their babies’ hands in front of them:
The sun is warm and bright
The clouds are soft and white
Flowers and trees are green
And rain makes them so clean
Reluctantly, Melissa joined in, swaying and singing at a minimum, making the signs with her hands in Blake’s line of vision while also trying to look into his eyes encouragingly like the other mothers. She felt ridiculous, but she told herself that it was only an hour and she was doing it for him. After five months of relative seclusion from the parent-and-baby community, not a rhyme-time, not a breastfeeding café, she had come to the decision that it was time to take Blake to a place frequented by other small beings. This was her Baby Beat taster session, which, as Chun Song had explained over three telephone messages and a long email, would be free of charge if Melissa signed up for ten classes at the end of the class – that’s ten sessions for the price of nine – and if they came on Monday, today, she and Blake would have the delight of experiencing the pirate-ship adventure!
The pirate ship was the large bright plastic object in the centre of the rectangle moored on top of a shiny blue aluminium sheet evocative of the sea. It was manned by four teddies wearing pirate hats and had a large orange sail, fixed to the deck with a red pole. Beyond the rectangle, in the further expanse of the hall, a second shiny sea of high-quality toys awaited the little people. There were multicoloured abacuses and scintillating rockets, building blocks, rattles and touch-and-listen play mats with woollen creatures dangling above them from arches made of felt. There was an inflatable ball pond, a psychedelic tent, a variety of light-up walkers and a scattering of noisy fabric books. White sunlight fell in from the tall windows, suggestive of a distant outside world, making the colours even brighter, more saccharine.
‘Wasn’t that fun!’ said Chun Song. ‘And now we are going to discover some very exciting noises and textures, before we go for a ride on our wonderful pirate ship!’ The protégée handed round tissue paper, ribbons, maracas and pompoms from a decorated crate, and when everyone was adequately provided for, the babies already shaking the maracas and filling the air with the sound of fizz, Chun Song shouted, ‘Now, mummies and babies, we’re going to have some more great music and shake our instruments to the beat! Can you do that? Mummies, make sure you help them shake if they need it! OK?!’
The music resumed, an upbeat acoustic folk, and the babies, some of them dumbfounded, made jerky grasps at the ribbons and paper, which they scrunched up in their arms or put in their mouths or accidentally rolled over on top of it all in moments of maternal failure. Blake had a startled look on his face, his default expression, but it was tinged with a deep interest and abandonment as he toyed with a maraca in one instant and squashed tissue paper in the next. Melissa was in the process of deciding not to sign up for ten sessions for the price of nine, but it was Blake’s enjoyment that kept bringing her back to the bittersweet idea of sacrifice. When the shaking was finished the babies were encouraged to climb on board the ship. It was big enough only for one or two at a time, but the child in the dungaree dress wanted to be resident captain. Her mother cajoled her to share, in a shy, extreme tone (‘You’ve got to share the ship, Isabella’), but two babies were elbowed overboard and another hit in the face. For a while it was a mini riot, clambering limbs and bellies shuffling along the ocean in the development of motor skills. ‘It’s not designed for younger babies,’ a woman next to Melissa complained under her breath, stealing a mutinous look at Chun Song.
Then it was bubble time. Out they came floating from the momentary mirrors of the soap mixture, blown by Chun Song and her assistant as they circled the rectangle, dipping and pausing like saints offering holy things. ‘Aaaaah,’ said babies, and ‘Oooooo,’ said mothers. Little arms reached up to catch. Warm cherubic faces lifted. They stared, spellbound, as round air danced before them, fleeting and translucent and suddenly bursting, all by themselves, like happy deaths. Chun Song began to blow the bubbles outwards towards the second sea, coaxing the children towards the waiting toys, they followed, jumping and reaching and clapping at the air. Once there they became engrossed in fascinating buttons and things that spun, in the luminous inner pink of the tent and the throwing around of feather-light balls. Their mothers sat near them on the floor, having disjointed, anxiety-fuelled conversations about such things as nappy brands, nurseries, infant rice cakes and the healing benefits of arnica.
‘I did baby signing with my first child,’ one woman said. ‘It took her almost a year to pick it up, but eventually she had a vocabulary of about eighty words.’
‘I pulverise absolutely everything,’ another said. ‘He eats the same thing as us, just mashed up. Minus the salt.’
Melissa was drawn into a conversation with a tired-looking woman by the ball pond. ‘It’s harder to keep them entertained in the winter,’ the woman said. ‘I got one of those stretchy things you attach to the door with elastic on it so he can practise his walking. He’s almost fourteen months now and he’s still crawling.’
‘My daughter started walking at fourteen months,’ Melissa said. That thing was happening again, where her mouth made sentences it wasn’t interested in saying and her voice came out flat and monotonal. The talk bordered on the competitive. If one woman said she never used manufactured baby food, another would feel inferior and try to justify her use of manufactured baby food. If one said she used the Ferber method to get her baby down, another would explain the long-term attachment benefits of rocking an infant to sleep. Melissa was guilty of it herself. It was a highly contagious, psycho-verbal leprosy. She thought of Michael out there in the larger world and could not help but feel resentful towards him. In this room men were elsewhere. They were distant, virtual beings referred to in the Queen’s English – ‘we don’t use a pram’, ‘our three-year-old gets jealous’. Here was the continuance of an old and indestructible tradition. History was here, fully intact, wearing modern clothes yet fundamentally unchanged, like a dirty secret.
During this chatty interval, Chun Song Li meandered around the play mats mingling with the mothers, showing interest in their babies and reminding them of the ten-for-nine deal (she had given up a high-flying career in investment banking to fit Baby Beat around caring for her own children and marketing was key). As she crouched down next to Melissa, Blake vomited on to the Super Scribbler. Melissa fished in her bag for baby wipes, while the woman she had been talking to gave off a faint air of distaste. ‘Oh dear,’ Chun Song said. ‘Is pumpkin sick?’
The second half of the session was given to a name game, a dance stand-off and more signing, finishing with a goodbye song which involved waving to each other across the rectangle.
‘So?’ Chun Song said at the registration table afterwards. ‘Would you like to sign up for ten sessions?’
‘I don’t think I can come next week.’ Melissa was desperate to get out of there. She felt like she was suffocating in the ghost mist of the happy deaths of the bubbles. ‘I’ll just pay for today and maybe come back the week after.’
But Chun Song’s face darkened at this reply. She said in a scolding tone, ‘You don’t get the free session if you do that. It has to be ten consecutive weeks.’ She looked deeply into Blake’s eyes, wiggling his hand. ‘Did you have fun, Blake? Did you like the pirate ship?’ Blake simply stared at her in his worried, startled way. ‘I can give you until Friday to sign up for the ten sessions if you like,’ she told Melissa. ‘Just give me a call. After Friday, though, I don’t know if there’ll be a free place.’
With that she capitulated. She smiled and waved at the babies and the mummies as they dispersed from the hall, gathering their bags, their milk bottles, their coats, their slings, talking in twos and threes and fours about the excellent high-quality joy they had just delivered to their offspring. Outside a slow line of three- and four-wheeled buggies formed, rolling up the ramp back on to the street, where they waded away into the white day beneath the stark November branches of the pl
ane trees, to lunch, to naps, to empty houses.