by Diana Evans
He shuffled through the carriage holding out a bag for people to drop their pennies into, which a few of them did, more so towards the other end of the carriage, Michael gave him two pounds. The train moved off again, the beggar went into the next car, and at last they arrived at London Bridge where Michael shot out through the open doors, weaved through the wide walkers – oh so many wide walkers! – up the escalator, through what seemed like a series of more and more tunnels and walkways so that it began to feel as if he were going nowhere and would never get anywhere ever again. He passed a busker who was playing Aaron Neville’s Hercules on the guitar, and another busker playing a flute, the silver trail of sound suddenly making him think of Gillian. He was running now, up the final escalator, and then, after all that, he told Melissa, he had to wait ten minutes for an overground train – that is, an actual train, as opposed to a tube – to take him to the London the tube forgot. It was not until seven o’clock that he was running down the high street gripping his Oyster card past the chicken shops and the pound shops towards Paradise Row, full of a violent, stomach-churning guilt that Ria had missed the beginning of multiculturalism and it was all his fault. To his surprise, the house was empty. This is because forty minutes earlier, sacrificing the evening order of the Gina Ford bedtime and thoroughly piqued, Melissa had gathered up Blake, put his bodysuit over his pyjamas, put him into the pram, and the three of them, she, Ria and Blake, had gone up Paradise Row in the dark and the cold, right at the top, left at the church, up the slope, and into the brimming first hall, where they found a seat in the fifth row and waited for the show to start.
The pianist was in position. The stereo was playing highlife. The children who were performing were sitting on the floor in front of the stage, while their mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles or grandparents were sitting in the rows of chairs behind them, their buttocks, some denimed, some legginged, splurging over the edges. The room was hot and getting hotter, as the chairs filled up and more people gathered, standing at the back, leaning against the climbing frames along the walls, or watching from out in the corridor when there was no space left in the hall, as Michael did when he arrived halfway through the show. All the windows were open and misty with steam. There was a feeling of bright, accepting chaos, of gushy expectation, the smells of many stews drifting in from the second hall.
Presently, the headmistress, Mrs Beverley, stepped up on to the stage, with her grey cornrowed crown, her cultural effort of Kente dashiki top and fishtail wrapper with fluorescent orange sling-back heels. She had squinty, bespeckled eyes and always lurched forward when she spoke in a mode of grand compassion. The audience quietened. She pressed her hands together and thanked everyone for coming. ‘I am always so impressed with our children and all you dedicated parents who make the effort to come to our show every year,’ she said, her earnest eyes blinking, ‘It really makes it all worth it, doesn’t it, children?’ and she swept an affectionate gaze at the ones waiting and assenting below her. ‘Now, the children, as you know, have been working very hard to prepare for tonight, learning their songs and helping to decorate this hall – doesn’t it look wonderful?’ The audience agreed that indeed it did. Blake did not agree because he was starting to cry. Melissa bounced him up and down on her knee while Mrs Beverley asked everyone to switch off their mobile phones and to extract ‘overwhelmed’ infants from the hall if they really weren’t happy. She finished her speech with a request for some encouraging applause for the opening act, and the performance began.
First up were two young Tamil dancers in red and turquoise saris, biting their lips and looking at each other. As the music played they span and bent, letting their viscose fabric flow, then rose up again and checked what the other was doing to see if they were doing it right. Too frightening it was to smile out at the audience or attempt eye contact, their mothers and fathers and possibly especially their mothers being the most frightening people of all to be studied by in public, so there was a complete absence of audience–performer connection, which made them more endearing. ‘Ahh, bless ’em,’ said a woman next to Melissa, who was sitting next to the one from the estate with the large head. The Tamil dancers were followed by a gospel song from the school choir, then a middle-aged Greek solo dancer, somebody’s mother, in a traditional dress with frills at the front, embroidered hems of aubergine velvet and short puffy sleeves, accessorised by green sequinned gloves to the elbow and a pair of tight gold pumps on her chubby feet. She was a stark contrast to her dancing predecessors, with her absolute lack of shyness and her bull-like, charging movements. Every time she did a skirt-lifting spin or something flourishing and climatic with her sequinned arms the audience clapped. She had a white flower in her hair and a black clip. Her musical accompaniment was throaty and substantial, thick with guttural strings and a heavy continental bass. During her performance she began to sweat. It glistened in the emerging wrinkles of her forehead and darkened her armpits, but she continued unabashed until the music reached the peak of its crescendo and she finished, victorious, one knee on the floor and arms extended. There was a blast of applause from the crowd, honouring the bravado and lustre of her performance, her commitment to celebrating life whatever your age and setting a shining example to the children. It’s never too late. Live. Live completely. Dance like no one’s watching.
After this came the Trinidadian carnival troupe, then a recital of a poem by Benjamin Zephaniah. The final act was Justin, the ex-pupil who had come to sing, though, it turned out, not as well as people were expecting, considering the build-up. He was given a magnanimous introduction by Mrs Beverley and a round of applause as he climbed the steps to the stage, wearing an ordinary white polo-shirt and Adidas trainers. He walked with his head tipped back, as if he were about to ask the world a question. There was no overture to his song. He did not smile or speak, merely took hold of the mic with both hands, looked blankly ahead, and delivered a crucifying rendition of Robbie Williams’s Angels. He put that song on a hard black nail and mounted it to a deathly cross on a dark and desolate hill, where it died slowly over many long and painful bars. ‘Oh my god, who told that boy he could sing?’ the woman next to Melissa said. He was no Legend, not even a Robbie, and when he had finished the relief was palpable, the people who had been trying to close their ears invisibly by using the muscles inside them could relax again, they sat back and watched the fashion show, frills and fabrics swishing up and down, the earless ladies in headwraps.
Michael took Ria to Wycinanki, hair-threading, fufu-sampling, henna-palming and Haribo-munching afterwards while Melissa went home in a huff with Blake. Later he would explain the horrendous journey home complete with the Hercules busker and tunnel pause but she was icy with him. Definitely no Desdemona. Was Desdemona dead, and all of her offshoots?
It went on like this. They fell to distances. Her body forgot his hands. They were partners, in the very tedious sense of the word, and the difficult thing was that they couldn’t talk to their best friends about it, because they had been each other’s best friends. One night Melissa called her friend Hazel instead.
‘I need to go shopping,’ she said.
‘Me too!’
‘You always need to go shopping.’
Hazel was always beautifully dressed. Probably even now on this gloomy Sunday evening she was sitting in her swinging designer wicker chair in a dress and lady slippers.
‘Life is cloth,’ she said.
‘I believe you. Retail therapy. Works every time.’
‘Why, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh really.’
‘So when are you free?’
‘Next Saturday?’
‘OK.’
‘OK.’ And they arranged to meet at Topshop.
7
DESDEMONA
‘I don’t understand women sometimes,’ Michael said to Damian.
‘Me neither,’ said Damian.
‘Like the other night, I went to give her a hug and you kno
w what she said?’
‘What?’
‘She said you just want me to service you.’
‘Service?’
‘As in petrol. She’s Esso, I’m the tank. I’m not a tank, I told her.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said you are. All men are tanks. You use women like fuel. You come home and expect me to be lying there waiting for you wearing Ann Summers underwear.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said that’s not true. I was just showing a little love and affection, remember that? And she goes yes, you want to be loved passionately your whole life, don’t you? And I said well yes, I do, what’s wrong with that?’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said I need to get real and life ain’t like that any more and it can’t run like that now. I don’t know what’s happened to her, man. It’s like she’s turning into a different person.’
‘Maybe it’s postnatal depression. Stephanie had that after Summer was born, it makes them crazy. You have to just go with it and be meek.’
‘Meek.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t wanna be meek.’
‘I know, but it’s the only way.’
‘God.’
‘So how did you leave it?’
‘She went to bed. Then I went to bed.’
‘The same bed?’
‘No. I slept on the sofa.’
There was a grave silence at the seriousness of this disclosure.
They were in the Satay Bar in Brixton on a Friday night having an after-work drink. They had initially met at the station and walked down to the Arcade to find a bar, but they were alarmed at the lack of black people in there, they were nowhere to be seen, it was as if they had been shooed away into small, dark mouse holes where the buildings met the streets, so Michael had said cha man, let’s go to the Satay. And here they were, a fuchsia glow at the glitzy end of Coldharbour Lane, opposite Kentucky, around the corner from the Ritzy cinema, meeting point for dancing at Plan B. It was one of the few places in Brixton that had triumphed against the bleaching conquest of gentrification. It was full of weaved women, dressed to the maximum in shimmer tops and cute jackets and silky dresses, their hair flowing smoothly from their fibbing scalps, their fingernails dynamic. This was a place you made an effort for, guys too, well-snipped, best denim, musculature optimised if applicable. Damian felt conspicuously lame and provincial in his bad suit. Michael was wearing a suit as well, but his was a better cut, a slick faint navy, more fitted, and there was only half of it, he was wearing jeans and a trendy belt, and his stomach didn’t bulge out against the belt the way Damian’s did. They had discussed before the wearing of the suit and how they felt about it. Damian could never seem to pull it off, the shoulders were always a bit too wide for him and the trousers too tight, and no matter where he’d bought the suit it always looked like it came from Blue Inc on Oxford Street. Although he claimed also to struggle, Michael did not share these failings. He power-dressed powerfully. He had swagger. For him it seemed effortless, like many other things.
In order to attend to the issue of his ailing mental health, as Stephanie thought of it, Damian was trying to spend more time in London, to reconnect with himself, and it was his idea to meet up tonight. What a relief it was to walk along Brixton Road in the evening hubbub and to be sitting here now in these cosy leather armchairs next to the bar with a good friend and a bowl of wasabi nuts and Roy Ayers playing from the speakers. It made him yearn again for his former life, and the dangerous thing was that the feasibility of returning to that life seemed less impossible, sitting here with Michael, than it ever did in Dorking. He could get a studio flat somewhere, he was thinking, it wouldn’t have to be anything fancy just a roof over his head, he could visit Stephanie and the children at weekends, finish his novel, surely in London he would finish it, maybe even get a publishing deal. The idea of it was making him sweat, as was the bad pleasure he was feeling at Michael pouring out his heart to him like this. All was not well in M&M paradise. He was enjoying every word.
‘It’s oppressing me now, this relationship,’ Michael was saying. He was on his second whiskey. ‘Sometimes I feel like walking out, like not going home after work, just going somewhere else instead.’
‘Like where?’
‘I don’t know, to a hotel, a club, just somewhere.’
‘But that’s the thing,’ Damian said. ‘There isn’t anywhere. It’s a fantasy.’ At least this was the theory he tried to live by.
‘Is it?’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘You know the one thing that stops me from leaving?’ Michael said. ‘The kids. I wanna be with my kids, man. I wanna be there when they wake up. I wanna smell their morning breath.’
‘Yeah, I know. It’s all about the kids.’
‘But it shouldn’t be all about the kids. I don’t want to live like that either.’
Melissa did have a point, Damian thought, about Michael needing to get real. Marriage, it was all about the kids. He himself had accepted this a long time ago, that children claim the love, they change it, they drink it, they offer it back to you in a sticky cup and it never quite tastes the same. The romantic love from which they sprang becomes an old dishevelled garden visited on rare occasions fuelled by wine and spurts of spontaneity, and the bigger, family love is where the bloom and freshness lie. But Michael and Melissa were not married. That was the difference. They had not crossed that line, and Michael could keep on walking without paper, and he could look around at all these fit, shimmering women – as he was now, intermittently, particularly at the one on the table over there in the ivory dress who was looking back at him – and wonder at other futures, more experience, more pleasure. Damian did not dare look at them. If he looked at them, really looked at them, he would be faced with the ugly and excruciating abstinence of his own life.
Michael turned from the honeys and stared into his drink with deepening bleakness. He wanted Melissa, not them. But he didn’t know how to get to Melissa any more. He was stuck. It was hard to stay and hard to go.
‘What do you do,’ he said, ‘when you reach a point where you know it’s just not going to work out with someone? It’s never going to be good again. What do you do, huh? You have to make a decision, right? You accept unhappiness, or you do something different. I’ve been thinking about this a lot.’ He moved his drink to the side of the table and drew a square with his finger. ‘There’s a window. This is the window. Everyone, at some point in their lives, is faced with this window, and in the window you can choose not to become what you seem to be becoming. You can take a leap, do something off the wall, something reckless. It’s your last chance, and most people miss it. They just walk past it. Then one day it closes, and once it’s closed it’s closed for ever. This moment right here with Melissa, this is my window. I can either risk it and jump, or stay where I am.’
‘But could you jump?’ Damian said. ‘Do you have the courage to jump?’
Michael pondered, sighed. ‘I’m such a coward.’
They drank from their glasses, both looking through this metaphorical window, which for Damian was closed (or was it?) and for Michael was still open.
‘When are you two gonna get married? This long engagement is one long engagement.’
It had been announced in the closing embers of the last century. There had been the meeting of respective families, the gathering of friends, champagne, cashew nuts, then nothing. The century turned. Babies, a house. What were they waiting for? They should just damn well get married and put the nail in the coffin like everybody else.
‘I think we’ve missed that boat,’ Michael said.
‘It’s never too late.’
‘Ain’t gonna happen.’
‘Have you ever thought that might be half your problem?’ Damian said, energised, calling on a line of reasoning he employed often with some doubt. ‘That you haven’t taken that step together? That final step? You have
n’t fully committed. The grass on the other side is still available to you. You think it’s greener but it’s not. You’re torturing yourselves, man. Just close the door, seal it shut, and get on with your lives. Deal with what you’ve got, innit.’
‘That sounds like a really dry reason to get married,’ Michael said, at which point Damian felt belittled and stripped of the protection of his reasoning and a bit irritated, and wanted to do something mildly violent like poke him in the eye.
‘Do you and Stephanie ever fight?’
‘Yep.’
‘I can’t imagine you fighting.’
‘We do it by not talking.’
Which ranks high on the list of dangerous domestics, close to the exit door. When you are only tolerating each other, avoiding each other, becoming to one another mist, vapour, ether. Damian went to work. Stephanie took the kids to school and went to work. In the evenings they put the children to bed and did their own thing. All was not well in D&S land either, though Damian was less open about it, there seemed more at stake. He was not exactly contemplating divorce, but last week while Stephanie was putting the colander in the kitchen cupboard and he saw her bending down like that with her shoulders all thrown into it and the side of her face flushed from the kitchen heat, then standing up and leaning on the edge of the counter, just at that moment he had felt like being perfectly and devastatingly honest and saying, ‘I can no longer live this life and I am going to go and save myself.’ But of course he didn’t. He couldn’t. The evening passed, the next day came, and things went on as normal. If you entertain and act on every impulse that passes through your mind, went his line of reasoning, you will find yourself in chaos. Hold on to the things that bind you. The self is a doomed and wayward creature. It can be neglected and this will not kill you, at least not in every way.