Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  ‘Mummy,’ she said one afternoon on the walk home from school. That day she had been painting the Jamaican flag. ‘I’ve got three countries in my blood – Nigeria, Jamaica and England.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Melissa said.

  ‘I’m half English, a quarter Jamaican and a quarter Nigerian.’

  ‘No, you’re a quarter Nigerian, a quarter English and half Jamaican.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m half Nigerian and half English, and Daddy’s completely Jamaican.’

  ‘But I want to be completely Jamaican too,’ Ria said. ‘I want to be all of them.’

  ‘You can’t be all of them and only one of them at the same time. You can either be just one thing or a mixture of things. Anyway, you’re British as well.’

  ‘So I’m four things?’

  ‘No. British is your nationality. This is where you’re born and bred.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pardon, not what.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you say about bread?’

  ‘Not bread that you eat. Bred means growing up.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ Then she skipped off ahead and waited at the corner opposite the church for Melissa to approach with the pram, at which point she jumped out spectacularly in front of Blake with her arms in a flourish and her mouth wide open and made him laugh. His laughter was a new toy and she did everything she could to make it go.

  Every day they did this walk, other children skipping nearby with their mostly female guardians of the afternoon. They saw the same people, the short, very white girl from the estate with the large head and hard face, the slow man in the tracksuit who walked like a cat, the leopard-print woman with the leopard-print leggings and relaxed burgundy hair clasped at the back with a matching clip. As they walked they talked of many things, sometimes the hood of Ria’s coat would be balanced on her head, the arms left unused. They talked about insects.

  ‘Ants can get under any door they like,’ Ria said.

  ‘Yes, they can,’ Melissa replied.

  ‘Flies can’t. They’re too big. What if lots of flies wanted to crawl on me? I like it when flies crawl on me.’

  ‘Do you? I don’t.’

  ‘I do. What if a line of flies was queuing up to crawl on me?’ she laughed. ‘Not all over me, though. I wouldn’t like to have flies crawling all over me, especially on a hot day. Mummy, why do flies like bins?’

  They talked about the Queen.

  ‘My friend Aaliyah said she’s been to Buckingham Palace and met the Queen and stayed there for a month. She had to wash her feet –’

  ‘Whose feet?’

  ‘The Queen’s feet, and scratch her feet as well and wash up and cook her dinner. She had to do loads of stuff, I can’t remember all of it. I think I should start learning to cook.’

  They talked about ghosts.

  ‘Mummy, do you want to die peacefully or not peacefully?’

  ‘I definitely want to die peacefully.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘Because then I won’t get to come back as a ghost. It would be fun being a ghost. You get to stay up late all the time.’

  And the perils of Coke.

  ‘If you drink Coke it makes your teeth shrink. If you drink it every day then after about two or three days all your teeth shrink smaller and smaller and then they just fall out. My friend told me.’

  From the corner opposite the church they could see the Crystal Palace tower in the distance beyond the rooftops and treetops and telephone wires. And they talked about that palace too.

  ‘You know in Crystal Palace Park there used to be a massive big palace made of glass and it got set on fire and burnt down?’

  ‘Yes,’ Melissa said. ‘In 1936.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I read it in that book we got from the library.’ Ria had recently done a school project on it. ‘Do you know about the train as well?

  ‘What train?’

  ‘The one that got stuck in the tunnel with the people inside it?’

  ‘What? Did they all die?’

  ‘Probably. If it’s true, that is.’

  ‘That means there must be ghosts there. Can we go to Crystal Palace Park and see one day?’

  ‘OK.’

  Ria had inherited Melissa’s wanderlust. They were adventurers, explorers. It was not just talk. They would go and see.

  ‘When?’ she said.

  ‘Soon. I think you can get to the tunnel entrance through the woods. It’s sealed, though, so we won’t be able to go in, just look.’

  ‘OK.’

  The houses either side of them, the red-stone witch-hat terraces. The gardens, the stony driveways, the silver birches, the estate. There they turned left and came down Paradise Row, along the bend, across the road to their line of Victorians with number thirteen halfway down and the high road at the bottom where the sirens ripped crazily through the air. They were a constant presence, their endless wail of trouble. Like Stephanie, Melissa did not want Ria and Blake to grow up with this sound, to develop the hardness that enabled you to become insensitive to it. She wanted them to live somewhere calmer, somewhere greener, somewhere the emergency services were less busy, so that they in turn could be calm, and keep the purity of themselves. She was aware that in the area in which she chose to live, in walking Ria to school, taking Blake to the park, to the local shops, in the things they came across on these journeys, she was assembling their childhoods, building their store of memory. Would Ria remember the sirens? Would she remember the day they walked home from school and the road opposite the church was blocked off by white ribbons?

  That day Melissa went to pick her up as usual at 3.30 p.m. They went to the administration office to give in a reply slip, then exited through the school gates. They crossed the road, turned right, turned the bend, playing a game of I-spy, but when they reached the church they had to stop. There was a white cordon ribbon blocking the way. Another was fluttering in the wind further along, while inside the two ribbons was a police van and several policemen standing about. A group of onlookers had gathered by the church. It was not difficult to guess what had happened. There had been a shooting, right there at the top of Paradise Row, at 3.35 p.m., as children were walking home from school.

  To address the problem of women’s equality, Blake had started going to a childminder twice a week, Ria’s friend Shanita’s aunty. She was a loud, buxom Jamaican with a red weave. She said, ‘Hi there, sweet bwoy!’ snatching him out of Melissa’s arms at the front door. He didn’t like being left and he cried a lot. She could still hear him crying as she walked away, feeling lopsided, as if she had misplaced something very important. Blake was more attached to her than Ria had been. She felt that in leaving him there she was tampering with the natural order of things, depriving herself of an offering, a new direction. She looked back at the house and regretted that she would not know the tissues of his day – the tissues used to wipe his nose, and the tissues of his new mind experiencing moments.

  Michael said, ‘He’ll be fine. He’ll settle.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He will. He has to.’

  In the second week he cried less, and set a brave face when the door was closed. But Melissa still rushed to him when the day was over, desperate to reclaim him.

  ‘How do you manage it,’ she said, ‘spending so much time away from him? You see him for a minute in the morning and two minutes in the evening. Doesn’t it bother you? Don’t you feel bad? Is this just a woman thing?’

  ‘It’s different for you. You’re his mum.’

  ‘Well, you’re his dad …’

  ‘I know, but …’

  During that walk to the Cobb’s Corner roundabout in the mornings and the ride on the 176, everything fell from Michael’s consciousness, the house, the baby, the dust, the draining board and whether it was full or not. The world was distraction an
d extraction, from smaller worlds. It was getting more and more between them, this imbalance, the hours spent with and without. It was another presence, darkening and becoming solid.

  ‘Your life hasn’t changed,’ she said.

  ‘My life has changed. How can you say my life hasn’t changed?’

  ‘How? Tell me.’

  And he told her, about the after-work drinks he didn’t go to, the meet-ups he couldn’t make, the rush to get home every evening so that he could be ordered in an unfriendly tone to listen to rice. He did not like this Melissa with the hard mouth and loveless eyes. He wanted the other Melissa, that old, original Melissa, with the soft and skyward face, the gentle dreaming eyes. Where had she gone?

  ‘OK,’ he said angrily, ‘how about you get the 176 at 7.35 every morning instead? You’re never satisfied! You go out to work then, and I’ll stay here.’

  ‘I do work,’ she said. ‘I don’t need your money. I can make my own money.’

  This exchange took place at the intersection between the living room and dining room, beneath the ecclesiastical arch, Melissa standing at the bottom of the stairs, Michael sitting on the sofa in front of the TV. Afterwards Melissa went upstairs without saying goodnight and Michael poured himself another glass of red wine. When he lay down next to her later in the red room he thought to encircle her in the way of the old palace days, but she was all closed to him, breathing deeply on their ship, as if their bodies had never belonged to one another. In the morning he got up before her. Blake called for his mother and he lay him next to her in the place that he had just vacated. He put on the grey suit. Before leaving he went to say goodbye to Ria. She was awake, lying on her back. He sat down next to her.

  ‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘It’s Thursday today.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you know what that means.’

  ‘I know what that means.’

  ‘Can you stay with me for a minute?’

  ‘OK. A minute.’

  ‘A long minute.’

  ‘I’ve got to go to work now.’

  ‘But it’s too early.’

  ‘I’m going to a breakfast meeting.’

  ‘A breakfast meeting? What’s a breakfast meeting? Do you eat your breakfast together with lots of other people or something, with different cereals?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of, and talk about work.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ria pondered this. ‘I don’t like breakfast meetings. I think you should have your breakfast first at home and then go to work and talk about it there. You’re always at work, Daddy.’

  Michael laughed. ‘I know, but them’s the breaks.’

  It was a holiness, the sight of this child. She had a power over him that no one else had. She washed him clean of any darkness, any disappointment or yearning. With this holiness in the palm of his hand, he stroked the side of her head and her rich hair. ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ he said.

  Ria beamed. Multiculturalism was nigh. ‘Tonight! I can’t wait!’

  Egusi was stewing. Chapattis were frying. Rice was steaming and plantain was undressing. Later that day the tables in the second hall were pulled into place, making loud scrapes across the parquet floor. The flags of the world were hoisted on their strings across the ceiling of the first hall and rows of child-sized blue plastic chairs were laid out for the audience, with the piano set just so at an angle to the stage. Across Bell Green traditional outfits were ironed and final-checked, and the light was falling early in its new frame of mind. It was not yet winter, but the season was already well underway on this island of eager coolness. The green chandeliers of the birch trees were gone, their arms naked above their stoic white trunks. Snow was coming. You could feel it, in the knife of the air, in the rip of the breeze. It was almost dark when Ria came home from school. It was thick and deep by the time she’d eaten dinner and changed into her uncultural clothes. She unleashed her hair. She chose her Hello Kitty hairband. She put on her socks. She put her things into her fuchsia felt bag, and waited eagerly for Michael to get home.

  After the breakfast meeting, Michael went to the office and passed the girl at reception with the beautiful eyes and said hey. Now they always said hey, he hey, she hi. He even knew her name, Rachel, because they had found themselves in the lift together one day and he had said, ‘Michael,’ offering his hand, and she had said, ‘Rachel,’ accepting it, and the discomfort of avoiding each other was thereby resolved. He worked through lunch so that he could leave early to get back for the show. On his desk he had a picture of Ria and Blake which he looked at periodically and got a warm and purposeful feeling from. At 4.45 p.m. he cleared away his things and headed for the door, and he would have got back in time if it had not been for a number of things, as he tried to explain to Melissa later that evening. First of all (this is the bit he didn’t try to explain) he ran into Rachel in the lift again and they got chatting about cricket (her father, it turned out, was once a national player in New Zealand, where she interestingly had lived until she was ten before moving to England, and Michael of course had played lots of cricket when he was a teenager, so there was much to enthuse about, the white running, the flight of a ball, full of chance, the seeking in the arm). They carried on talking as they left the lift and walked through the lobby together, during which he noticed how pleasingly tall she was and how her hair smelt nice, flowery, and it turned out that she also was leaving for the day so he waited just very briefly for her to get her bag from the island and they carried on out the door shoulder to shoulder, even walked a little way through the streets together until they parted on Charing Cross Road, next to one of London’s last red telephone boxes. For a moment there he had felt like John Legend in sunglasses in Washington DC walking out with his forbidden woman, and it had given him a thrill, another pinch of yearning doubt about where he was in the Get Lifted narrative. Who was she, inside, this Rachel, this fellow aficionado of cricket? He looked back at her as she walked away, her leather handbag tapping against her hip, her thick legs and that slightly heavy walk. What might she feel like, touch like, be like in her newness? How might it be? Those eyes, the luxuriance of them, such depth, such gold …

  And then he had the most horrendous journey home. He waited ages for the 176, he told Melissa, ages and ages, twenty minutes at least, in the deepening city-lit darkness, but it didn’t come, which is very unusual for the 176, and indicative of the unusual, somehow otherworldly nature of this particular journey home. So he had no choice but to get the tube (who gets a bus, anyway, from central London to the deep south, during rush hour? Melissa interjected as he was telling her this). He ran – for now it was 5.40, the show started at 6.30 – to the crowded tube entrance at Charing Cross, bracing himself as he began to descend from the safety of the upper air into the claustrophobia of the lower air, the tunnels, the dreaded tunnels, stretching and shooting through miles of dirt, populous with all kinds of incontinent vermin, susceptible, he could not help but imagine, to disastrous collapse and random bombings, as demonstrated by 7/7 which had marked the beginning of his serious tube boycott. The stairs were crowded. The ticket hall was teeming, there were wide walkers everywhere, the name he gave to people who wade rather than walk, or have bags on either side of them, or have some other kind of inconsiderately expansive gait. He finally got through the barriers and down the escalator on to the southbound Northern Line platform, only to find that also was crowded, two trains went by before he could even get on. Same thing at Waterloo, where he changed to the Jubilee line, though thankfully the one he did get on was less crowded and there was at least some room to breathe. He stood there, bound for London Bridge, listening to Jill Scott on his iPod, reading the ads above the windows, studying the tube map, looking at the people around him but too anxious to play the ‘where are they going?’ game – the man with the guitar in the suede shoes, another man with bright-green eyebrows who kept opening and closing a piece of paper and mouthing words from it. He found that
if he focused on these small things, the suede shoes, the green eyebrows, he could cope better with the problem of being under the pavements, though what he was predominantly thinking about was Ria waiting at home for him, the minutes going by, 5.54, 5.56, 5.58. At 5.59, as if purposefully to madden him, somewhere in the blackness past Southwark, the tube came to a gradual, infuriating halt.

  Darkness enfolded. The silence was total. No word from the driver. Sighs, tuts, shufflings, teeth kissings. Michael started to sweat. People were rubbing their necks, scratching, folding their arms. From somewhere further along the tunnel there was a tremor. From somewhere closer there came a jolt. People glanced at each other. Another jolt, closer still, a door at one end of the carriage opened, and a man stepped in, wearing a dirty coat and emitting a bad smell. Holding on to the two poles where the seats began, he cleared his throat and gave the following speech: ‘Now listen for a minute,’ he said. ‘I’m not a drunk or a junkie or anything. I’m unemployed, got a sick wife to support, lost my job last year then became homeless cos I couldn’t keep up the bills … Now as I said, I don’t drink or take drugs, I’m just going through a rough patch, you know, we all have rough patches … If I’m gonna eat and feed my family this evening, I have to raise six pounds. I ain’t got no money, but there’s enough of you here to help me eat even by giving me just a few pennies each … I don’t do this all the time, honest, only when there’s nowhere else to go. Thank you for listening, and if you can’t hear me you don’t want to hear me.’