Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  ‘Ah, here,’ he said, pointing to the bottom of the fridge. ‘There’s some. Predictable. That’s where people often forget to clean. Half the job of getting rid of them is making sure there are no crumbs anywhere. That’s what they’re after, you see. They use the house as a feeding chamber.’

  He knelt down to open the kickboards, revealing murky regions unconsidered, and placed a bright-blue substance held in transparent hexagonal containers in the dark space. Poison. He also put some under the bath and behind the fridge. ‘It’s the gradual kind. It doesn’t kill them instantly. They’ll eat it and then go and find somewhere to die, hopefully outside.’

  ‘What if they don’t make it outside?’

  ‘Oh, then you’ll smell something, eventually.’

  ‘And what then?’

  The Rentokil man looked at her, apparently confused by the obviousness of her question. ‘Just sweep it up with a pan and brush and pop it in the outside bin.’

  ‘Urm, I don’t think I could do that.’

  Melissa had a frightened look on her face, which he noticeably registered. He smiled a little. The sight of a terrified woman. Is this why he had gone into the field of mouse attack, to see women scared on a regular basis? Might he otherwise have been a rapist? She was aware that this was a twisted thought.

  Now he rose, drawing attention to his creaking knees, and sat down at the dining table with his miniature printer and walky-talky which connected him to the rest of the mouse-attack world. ‘I’m almost finished here,’ he said into it. ‘I should be there in about thirty-five minutes. Over and out.’ He concentrated on preparing her report. To make conversation – for she was overwhelmed by the smallness, the crucifying mundanity of this moment (such a large man, for such a small job) – she commented on the dinkiness of his printer. It turned out that this was not an original observation.

  ‘If I had a pound for every customer who’s either expressed an interest in this thing or said they were going to buy one of their own, I’d be a rich man,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s very nifty, isn’t it? It fits in your pocket. I remember the days when I used to have to take all the notes back to the office with me and print the reports there. It was so much more drawn out. Now I just print and go. Don’t know where I’d be without it.’

  Melissa was nodding stupidly. As he handed her the report, she asked him if he knew how many mice there were. He said about four. ‘They tend to go in pairs, like married people. The real problem comes if they start breeding. That’s what really increases the activity.’ And can they get upstairs? ‘Oh yes, they can use the stairs.’ Across the landscape of her inner eye, she began to see marriages of mice, not just under the bath but bounding upstairs and entering darkened bedrooms, nestling in the warm caves of quiet shoes and relieving themselves obliviously. The yellow sentence was dead. She was at full attention as he gave instructions to keep the house as clean as possible, to check the poison every three days for signs of consumption, to fill any outside holes with wire wool.

  ‘Can you just check upstairs?’ she asked as he was going out into the hall.

  He agreed. The bedrooms were clear, but of the loft, he said, ‘It’s a bit strange up there. Wood chippings. I’m thinking something bigger than a mouse. Possibly squirrels.’

  ‘Is that good? I think I’d rather have a squirrel than a mouse.’

  But he was shaking his head. ‘Now that’s where you’re wrong. Squirrels are like rats. They just have better publicity. They’ll eat through your plaster. They’ll shred your carpets. They can get through wood. They work very hard to get what they want, whereas a mouse will just eat whatever’s available. Anyway, keep an eye on it.’

  He opened the front door, revealing a slap of crystal daylight. He would be back in two weeks to check for bodies.

  Blake’s crescendoing cry surged into the air five minutes later. They went to pick up Ria from school, and the rest of the afternoon was spent in the craze-making realm of housewifery, which involved trying to fry plantain while holding the baby while exemplifying patience in the overseeing of Ria’s homework, sweeping rice grains and bits of damp salad off the floor, discovering that they were low on washing-up liquid and texting Michael (hugely devoid of Desdemona) to get some, and answering the telephone to a market research company who wanted to know if she was happy with her home broadband package at exactly the point when Blake bashed his head with the edge of a spoon and howled, causing her to go into the bathroom to scream. When Michael got home at 6.37 p.m. she was calling him bad names in her head, making her lips curl in on themselves with the inward mouthing of the words. Michael saw her like that, standing at the sink in her housey clothes, the Prada blouse was gone, her hair in disarray, not even a turn of the head in his direction, and it saddened him. The digital radio was playing Pietro Locatelli’s violin sonata in D major on Classic FM, the type of music Melissa would have balked at in the days of the palace, deeming it tedious and morose, but now endorsed as pacifying, mature-making, educational, and more sophisticated than Busta Rhymes or Nelly and Kelly as a children’s mealtime soundtrack, thereby further marking the disintegration of her character and a fading awareness of her identity, her likes and dislikes.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  This came on the tail of Ria and Blake’s daily celebration chorus of Daddy coming home. ‘Dad-dy! Dad-dy! Dad-dy!’ Ria sang, out of her chair dancing, Blake pumping his arms in the air and trying to sing along. They were overjoyed, every day, by this sight of him. Ria ran into his arms and he swung her around in the way of men returning from work, and Blake wanted to be swung too so he lifted him out of the highchair, making it more likely that he would puke, and swung him around as well. They were all so high on each other, the three of them, that the ‘hey’ directed at Melissa had a rotund, glorious air to it, full of a complete, resounding happiness and well-being. She managed a quiet, monotonal ‘hi’ in return.

  Michael had prepared himself for this. Walking back from Cobb’s Corner he had tried to anticipate her mood on the basis of the day’s communications, the kissless washing-up liquid text, apart from that nothing. And the weather was grey, which was also a factor. It was not looking good. He had pumped himself three times on the chest turning the corner into Paradise Row. Don’t get angry. Be positive. Be understanding.

  ‘How was your day?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, it was full of joy and bright, vivid colours.’

  He did not know what to say to this so he took out his phone for reassurance. He was slightly terrified by the chilliness of the deep sarcasm in her voice, as if she were a mask of herself, an imposter.

  ‘How was your day?’ the imposter asked.

  ‘Cool,’ he said, which infuriated her. Cool did not mean anything. Cool was his answer to many questions and did not answer questions, a question, in this case, whose answer she had not been interested in anyway. She did not want to speak to him. She did not want to speak to anyone, but then he dared to ask her – in order to express caring, to be understanding – whether she’d managed to do any work today.

  ‘Work? Work? Me? Hah!’ she cried, like Bette Davis in Nights of the Iguana, throwing back her head, flashing a furious look at him in his thin suit. She hated seeing him in a suit. Suits did not suit him. They made him look angular.

  ‘No I did not manage to do any work today,’ she snapped. ‘Blake wouldn’t go down and then the Rentokil man came. He said the mice can go upstairs and get married. He said there might be squirrels and the squirrels are like rats but they have better publicity. Have you had to think about things like this at any point today, hm? Did you know,’ she said, leaning with one hand on the side of the sink making her elbow jut out and her other hand holding a knife, ‘that the average mouse shits eighty times a day?’

  ‘What?’ Michael said.

  ‘Yeah. It’s true. Sometimes even more than that. And they’re weeing, all the time weeing, wherever they go.’

  Michael sat down on the edge of the sofa and mouthed ‘fuc
k’, so the children wouldn’t hear. Mouse piss, all around them. What an unbearable thought. He needed to look at his phone. He glanced at it, and Melissa clocked him glancing at it. Then he actually looked, steadily, at it, like someone on the edge of a pool, preparing to softly dive, he would go in, the water of technology would submerge him, he would sink into the neon serenity of his iPhone …

  ‘He put poison down,’ she was saying. ‘They might die inside and then we – you – have to sweep them up and put them in the bin. There’s something weird about this house, you know. Today when I was changing Blake – Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked back up at her, like a soldier in line before his colonel.

  ‘You haven’t even been home for five minutes and you’re already staring at your phone. Can’t you just be here now that you’re finally here? Can’t you just be present?’

  ‘I am present.’

  Melissa thought that when Michael was looking at his phone he was basically just sitting there doing nothing, but she was wrong. When he was ‘staring at his phone’, as she put it, he was not just staring at his phone. He was looking for more exciting jobs he might apply for. He was checking for important messages, checking the news, keeping up to date with Barack Obama and Lewis Hamilton developments, checking house prices in less crime-ridden areas they might move to, buying music, getting a recipe for chicken patties, and now, very usefully and imperatively, he thought, asking Google for any sure-fire tips on eliminating mice. Everything, life, was in his phone, a whole world of information and activity. She was so yesterday. She was so prehistoric.

  But still hopeful of a peaceful evening, he put the phone back in his pocket and walked to the kitchen, to make her see that he was actually here, all of him. She was holding Blake on her hip and she kissed him with her tight lips which untightened for the moment of the kiss – Blake, the immediate transformer, a little wizard, the fact of him a wand. ‘He said we have to put wire wool in the holes on the outside of the house,’ she carried on, wiping the countertop with a frantic motion, ‘because they come in from outside to use the house as a feeding chamber. So we need to buy some wire wool. It’s wool, made of wire.’

  ‘OK. Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘OK.’

  Michael was hungry. His stomach was growling. He opened a cupboard, looking for food. There were some crackers, some apple rice cakes. There was a pot of rice cooking on the hob but nothing to go with it, apparently, not that he was expecting her to have cooked him dinner, hell no. He opened the fridge. A box of eggs (Michael did not like eggs), some pulverisations in little tupperwares, some condiments and a few other things like that, and a fromage frais the size of a thimble.

  ‘God there’s no food, man,’ he said.

  Melissa bristled inside. Her inner man-hating despiser of patriarchy was computing that he had just berated her for not maintaining their domestic plenty during her non-working day.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ he said, because in fact he had been half speaking to himself, exclaiming, rather, at the lack of existent munchies, which he always liked to indulge in on arriving home from work ravenous. But she didn’t see it that way.

  ‘Are you complaining,’ she said, bearing down on him, or bearing up because she was short, but it felt like bearing down, ‘that I haven’t made you some dinner?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘It sounded like you were.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was —’

  ‘Do you actually expect me to have your dinner ready for you on the table when you get home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think I spend the day preparing for your empty stomach?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think I have nothing better to do with my time than look after your children?’

  ‘They’re our children.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘our children,’ and she roughly handed Blake to him. ‘The children we both made together, remember?, and are supposed to be looking after together. Except that we’re not. So now, I am going for a swim, and you can stay here and look after our children. Blake needs a bath. Don’t forget to take Ria’s bobbles out before she goes to bed. And can you listen to the rice, it should be done soon. I’m outta here.’ She left the room but immediately came back again, realising she was still holding the dishcloth. ‘If you don’t want me to behave like a housewife,’ she added, ‘don’t treat me like one.’

  She slammed the dishcloth down by the sink and was gone. Michael was left in the kitchen with Blake trying to pull off his glasses, feeling deflated and misunderstood, wondering what she’d meant by listening to the rice. He was too afraid to ask her before she left, and while she was gone he forgot about the rice entirely, apart from once when he looked at it cooking in the pan for a while, even bent slightly to put his ear to it, acknowledging its wet, bubbling sound. It was only later when he smelt burning that he remembered. He ran to the cooker, dismayed, fearful for his future. Melissa returned refreshed by her backstrokes, her shoots from the edge, her wheeling arms and watching the night sky through the slats in the ceiling of the swimming pool, all of which was quickly superseded when she discovered this new failure. Listening to rice, Michael learned that evening, means listening out for when the wet bubbling sound becomes a dry popping sound, and when it does, you’re supposed to turn off the heat and put the lid on the pan. This allows the hot air to do its final intrinsic softening in ‘the house of the rice’ (these were her words).

  6

  MULTICULTURALISM

  In case the people of Bell Green had not noticed, or not duly appreciated, the variety of nationalities and cultures living in their vicinity (the Africans and Caribbeans, the Eastern Europeans, the Indians, the Iranians, the Turks, the Nigerians, the Jamaicans, the Chinese, the Greeks and so on), Ria’s school held an annual cultural evening in December to celebrate the rich and expansive meeting of all these disparate lands. There were folk songs and dances performed by children wearing their national dress. There were poetry readings in high-pitched voices exploring the positivity and mellifluousness of diversity. There were comedy sketches and gospel singers, recorder recitals and carnival choreographies, a fashion show in which adults and children alike paraded up and down the makeshift wooden catwalk in the cramped assembly hall flaunting their far-flung fabrics, their wrappers, their saris, their headwraps and their dashikis. In the adjacent hall was an array of international food donated by the parents, an aromatic meeting of fufu with samosas, of moi moi and egusi stew with tabbouleh and baklava – and while you were there you could also get your hair braided or your palms hennaed or your face painted at one of the stalls, or take part in a spot of Tamil calligraphy, or Polish Wycinanki. This year there was going to be a guest appearance by a former pupil of the school called Justin, who had been strong in music and was going to sing for them.

  Michael was taking Ria to the show. It would become one of her favourite memories, she knew, walking with her tall father up the road, right at the top, left at the church and left again in the early-winter darkness. Blake would be in bed but she wouldn’t, because she was oldest and mature, and they would go up the ramp into the busy, bustling hall where her school friends would also be up late, Shanita, Shaquira, Emily. They would watch the show, and afterwards they would go into the other hall to eat crisps, custard creams, Haribos, Chupa Chups and other things that were forbidden at that time of night, and they would peruse the stalls, and just skip and jump around. Michael would lose her in moments as she revelled in all this fun, and catch sight of her in a corner twittering with Shaquira or negotiating jellybean portions in the corridor with Emily. They roped him into their games and made him give them swing rides. He was the comedian father, one of those easy adults who understood the importance of playing, who could do it almost as well as them. Ria was not taking part in the show. She preferred to watch, craning her neck and peering to get the best view
. At the end of the evening she and Michael would walk back home in the even deeper dark, the moon there, the lamplights, the quiet streets, and she would fall asleep without protest on a long, smooth slide made of joy.

  The preparations for the event went on for many weeks, for that time robbing the children of PE. Instead they practised their songs, they rehearsed their dance moves, or if they weren’t performing they made the backdrop, or painted the national flags to be hung on lines of string across the ceiling. At home the parents got costumes ready. They found wrappers, and if they did not have wrappers they hemmed pieces of cloth to make wrappers, and if they did not have pieces of cloth they went to Brixton or Peckham. The recent women of Africa considered what headwraps they would wear, how they would wear them, with what quiff and shape, with how much coverage of ear – half, whole or none, depending on the sensitivity of your gristle and whether or not you wore glasses. They talked to their less-recent children who had never been ‘home’ about how they were going to take them home one day, so that they could see the true country, where they were really from, and if they were naughty children or showing signs of possible future street-gang involvement, they would focus on the educational virtues of that country and how respect for your elders and authority was an unquestionable, unnegotiable part of life on the basis of important ancient customs, and the declaration about taking them home would bear a tone of threat. Meanwhile, the peoples of the Mediterranean dug out their historical skirts, and those of the Indian subcontinent assembled little tunics and saris so that they could watch their cubs twirl around on stage, celebrating all together the wonderful exuberance of the beige nation, which was something that just did not really occur to them on a day-to-day basis.

  Ria had a wrapper and matching top that Melissa had made for her to wear to a Nigerian wedding last year. But she wasn’t going to wear it because she wasn’t in the fashion show and the audience didn’t have to dress cultural, they could wear whatever they wanted. She was going to wear her new grey Primark jeans, the Moshi Monster top her grandmother on Michael’s side had bought for her, her black and pink trainers, and her white puffa. And she wanted her hair all out and bushy with a hairband in it. Melissa and Michael also planned to take their children ‘home’ one day, to both Nigeria and Jamaica, but these were expensive, complicated trips (multiple vaccinations, high flight costs out of school term times, a visit to the Nigeria High Commission in Northumberland Avenue, where you would have to wait in a hot, overcrowded basement for possibly hours with a lot of annoyed Nigerians, only to be told when you got to the counter that you had to come back next week), so they were going to wait until Blake was at least old enough to know where he was and what it meant when they were there so that they could get their money’s worth of heritage awareness. Melissa did sometimes attempt to make eba and stew – Ria always enjoyed eating it at her mother’s, and Alice was eager for all of her grandchildren to eat Nigerian food – but it never tasted as good when she made it herself. She could never get the consistency of the eba right and the stew was not as tasty, and it was such a long drawn-out process, getting the yam and shaving off the bark and boiling it and mixing it with the gari and mashing them together in a pestle and mortar, and for what? For a sub-par, second-generation travesty. So the occasions when Melissa did make it had become just that, occasions. She preferred to take the children to her mother’s so that they could have the real thing. To Ria, though, it was all irrelevant. People were not black or white. They were brown, beige or pink.