by Diana Evans
‘You look beautiful,’ Michael tried at some point between the mains and the desserts. At exactly the same instant, the candle in the middle of their table went out.
‘Thanks,’ Melissa said. A deep melancholy was rising within her. She wanted to be miles away from him. But they were here. And here was her chocolate cake. It had a bitter orange-peel edge, a dark chocolate cream running out of it. She ate it with a grave and absolute absorption. When the desserts were finished, Michael checked his watch.
‘You ready?’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘Come on.’
He got up and pulled out her chair for her. He held open her coat as she slipped in, and it was something, these small attentions, it might still turn out well. Around the corner, off Westow Hill, there was a black car parked at the kerb. A man got out as Michael approached it, they conferred for a while, then Michael opened the door for Melissa to get in. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked him, but she was beginning to enjoy the mystery, to remember, the evening was changing. Michael just smiled. He got in next to her and they took off at some speed down the hill.
The driver was playing loud R&B. He was a bald, plump Ghanaian in a black polo-shirt, the Ghanaian flag dancing from his rear-view mirror. He drove like a maniac, down and up over crystal hills, through the southern quarters, ripped through them as if he were evil, as if he were Knievel, as if there were no paying customers in his car. Melissa leaned into the enclave of Michael’s arm. Grey tinge of night leaves in the curves of Honor Oak, flares of lime flowers and holly leaves in the secret crescents, they flew by, the driver knew all these back streets, silver birches were here then gone, mere suggestions in the night and the speed, other trees, fast lights, sweeps of green. He beeped at slower cars, driving right up to their bumpers. He jerked at turns. Every brake was an emergency. When he almost jumped a red light, Melissa was thrown forward in her seat.
‘Will you slow down!’ she shouted over the music.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ The driver slowed, momentarily, bopping to Jodeci, but soon charged off again. The next time he slowed down was to swing into a petrol station, where he pulled up next to one of the tanks and got out. ‘Wait now, back in a minute,’ he said.
‘Hey, you can’t stop for petrol when you’ve got customers!’ Melissa baulked.
He filled the tank anyway and went off to the kiosk. Michael refused to pay him the whole fare, which Melissa said was only right. ‘We’re your customers not your homies.’
Looking at her in his rear-view mirror, the driver said, ‘You are from Nigeria, I know.’
‘I’m half Nigerian.’
‘Your mother or your father is Nigerian?’
‘My mother.’
‘Eh, I know.’ He chuckled. ‘You are just like my wife. She is always making trouble.’
He chuckled some more, and drove on with continuing recklessness towards the river, along the vast urban tarmac of the A2, turned off at the exit to the O2, and there ahead of them was that once-failed Millennium Dome with its twelve yellow cranes sticking out of it like monstrous and very painful acupuncture, pointing to specific points in the solar system, a suggestion of alien transmission. So much grand expectation had been placed on this building at the turn of the century, to be mighty, to be showy, to be somehow sci-fi, and they had gone too far futuristic with it and forgotten all about beauty. People were disappointed with the thing after all that hype, and once the new century had begun no one knew what to do with it for a while. What do you do with an empty, 80,000-square-metre, disc-shaped spaceship grounded in an ugly concrete desert off the A2? What else? You give it to music, let music make it sing. Here in this enormous space, in these stretching auditoriums, popstars and crooners, the angels of the modern age, delivered their voices. Prince had sung Kiss here, wearing a pair of high-heeled white boots. The Spice Girls had made a comeback over seventeen consecutive nights. Beyoncé would come and swing on a flowery trapeze with her weave flowing. The O2 was the Wembley of the south side, and it had better acoustics, most of all in the IndigO2, the smaller auditorium where the lesser divinities sang, the ones not quite arena-famous, the niche, the lovers rock line-ups and R&B revivals, a jazz hip hop soulstress from Philadelphia known as Jill Scott, who stood there, swaying in green smoke and a misty light, as Melissa and Michael entered.
‘It’s Jill,’ Melissa said.
‘Yeah, it’s Jill.’
She was their early music. The music of the palace, the seventh sky. She had seeped through the rooms with her honey molasses and her love moans, her hip hop beats which sometimes pumped and churned and then slowed again, or disappeared entirely. Jill Scott shimmering before them in pale-green smoke. It lifted from the stage, whispering to her afro puffs, wafting around the band. The backing singers wore black and did the finger-clicking gospel two-step. The pianist was lost in jazz, and Jill was gently dancing, her wealthy waist, her wide American smile, her voice deep and saccharine at the same time. From a distance away her eyes glittered. The lights went pink, went yellow. She was singing Do You Remember. In between songs she made chains of words. Whether she was speaking or singing, her voice was constant melody.
In the audience were soulheads and hip hop fans, observers of the culture, headwrapped Afrocentrics and followers of the new jazz. Couples swayed against each other intoxicated by her sound. There were single people sipping at her wisdom, men in good shirts looking for women, knowing that this was a place to find them, that Jill would make them open and heat them up inside. Jill had the power to make a world, with her sweetness, her girlishness, which was soft and malleable and wholly woman. Sometimes she sang hard, wanna be loved, sometimes the guitars stilled and she brought her voice down to a whisper, and everyone in the room if they closed their eyes felt almost that she was whispering only to them. They listened, spinning on her axis. The trombone went submarine. Trumpets cascaded in flashes of gold.
In the middle of a song, Melissa felt Michael’s hand on her waist. He wanted to dance with her. In a gentle closing around her with his arms he sent them moving, he behind her, she with her back to him. But here, even here, in this musical mirage, there was something else that was not right. They didn’t dance right. They never had danced quite right together, because of how they were different inside when it came to rhythm. Melissa was obedient to it, directed by it, she danced on top of the beat. But Michael instead went inside it and did his own thing, slower than the beat, loose and nonchalant, as though he believed that his inner rhythm was superior to that provided by the music. The effect was that as they swayed they did not sway as one. There was friction, a slight forcing. Halfway through the song, the music slowed down again. The trumpets hushed, the drums subsided, the piano watered down until it was gone. A single blue spotlight centred on Jill. She was going to talk to them again.
‘Ladies,’ she said, ‘Fellas, I wanna tell you something. Can I tell you something? Come here … come closer …’
The audience stilled. They were held in her palm, in this big disc by the river, huddled in her light.
‘Tonight,’ Jill said, ‘I stand before you a divorced woman.’
The music returned for a brief twirl and subsided again.
‘Yeah … I was married, and I gave him all of my heart … I gave him everything, we were happy in our love, in the morning, in the evening in those cold – night – hours … I loved him all the way through. I was married for life, for always … But you know what he did? Ladies, do you know what that man did?’
‘What?’ the women called.
‘Well, he went to somebody else’s house. Hmph, yeah. You’d think he woulda known there was nobody else like me, nobody’s love so fine like mine …’ now she was fully singing again ‘one is the magic number …’
It was a message for the world but it seemed to come directly for them. It was the loudest moment of all, louder than the trumpets, the brass, even than the finale when Jill came back on for an encore. The music that had marrie
d them was now telling them to divorce. There was no more dancing after that. Michael went to the bar, and while he was gone Melissa looked around her at all the other people, other couples, other men, and wondered. Those words were sitting on a swing in a back garden in her mind, going back and forth, I stand before you … a divorced woman …
The drive home was quiet, very quiet. There was no canoodling in the back seat and the tipsiness was private and going dry. As they approached Bell Green the disappointment of the evening thickened. It manifested in the bleakness of the high street, the stony mannequins in their bridal gowns, the sinking into Kent. In the distance the towers were half cut by a thick fog that had descended, smothering their peaks, so that they were half of themselves. And this man and woman sitting in the back of the cab were just like those two towers, in their distance from one another, their separateness, he was Beulah and she was Crystal, and there seemed no way, in this fog, in this pretence, that they might come together as one. The cab turned into Paradise Row and slowed at number thirteen. The house glared out at them with its narrow face, the window twins murky, foreboding, tightly shut against the cold.
Hazel was mid-doze on the sofa in front of 4 Music, where a host of bikinied girls were languishing around Nelly’s musculature. She came to at their footsteps.
‘Oh hi, you’re back. I conked out. How was it?’
‘Good,’ they both said, their faces tight like the old couple in the restaurant. ‘We went to see Jill Scott,’ Melissa added.
‘Did you? Oh yeah, I heard she was playing – was she good?’
And while they filled her in on the amazingness of Jill – that voice, that sass, what poetry – a hard, nudging pressure built up in their midst, reminding them of what they all knew must now be done, that thing up in the red room, that overdue sail, the drowning ship. Hazel started getting her stuff together, her nail varnish, her Russian hat and her red coat. ‘By the way,’ she said before she left, ‘does Ria sleepwalk? I found her standing at the top of the stairs and she didn’t hear me when I called her. I took her back to bed and everything, she’s fine, it was just a bit weird, that’s all.’ Soon afterwards she was bound for the west with her satnav (which was working again) and craving Pete, hoping that she had contributed in some way tonight to the preservation of long-term romantic love in London, while her chocolate pair were left stranded in their hallway, burdened by the task ahead.
‘I’m going to check on them,’ Melissa said.
She had that flash again of Lily under the skylight as she was going up the stairs, except that now it was Ria under the skylight, asleep, unhearing as Hazel called to her. She was glad of this distraction. She had been hoping for Blake’s bleating cry, a pressing need, a detour, but both of them were supine in their swathes of cotton, breathing deeply, Blake lying on his front with his mouth open and one tiny arm stretched upwards. She rearranged his blanket, for it was cold in there, colder than usual, most of all next to Ria’s bed closest to the window. Looking down at her – the crescents of her lashes were completely still, a sliver of moon lay across her cheek – she wished that she could sink into the newness of their years, that she could fall into their innocence. It was such a strong wish that for a moment she had the sensation that she was falling down into Ria’s body, and she was not sure any more whose mind she was in. When she left the room there was a sadness, faint but definite, enough to make her look back, that this childhood room was no longer her world. He was waiting for her.
Passion, at its truest and most fierce, does not liaise with toothpaste. It does not wait around for toning and exfoliation. It wants spontaneity. It wants recklessness. Passion is dirty, and they were too clean, once their faces were washed, their mouths freshened, the doors, windows, cooker and taps checked so that the house would not burn, flood or explode. Michael had wanted to undress her, to prise her out of the red dress in the red room, but he was again too late. By the time he got there she was hanging the dress up in the wardrobe. She was wearing the rich cappuccino gown, the same colour as the raffia. He took in the sight of her, the shape of her gentle brown waist and the soft, shadowy dunes of her thighs beneath the satin. Oh how she threw him, electrified him, by doing almost nothing, just standing there with her back to him, her gold arms raised. He wanted to drink from her sweetness and break her until she was set to flowing. He wanted to take her higher, like a Legend, past the sublime plateau, into the wild and peaceful air of the ninth cloud. Tonight he was going to lift them up from under this old love and make it new again.
But the wardrobe is so dusty, Melissa was thinking, so much dust on my red dress, on my clothes. The air in here is so old. The floor is creaking. The window is shivering. It needs fixing, he hasn’t fixed it. She tried her best to relax as he kissed her neck, but the light was still on, it was freezing, she wanted to get under the covers. Once these things were done she tried once more to relax, to think of the sensation, how nice it was. This is a nice thing that people do together, a nice … gentle … stroll … along the calm … water’s … edge. And it is available to you, this warm, relaxing thing. Think about nothing else. She held his head with her palm. It felt like the fur on a newly skinned animal. She wandered across the plane of his back and his whip marks with trailing fingers as he smelt her for chicken but found none. He was breathing deeply, quickly. He was racing towards her, in fact almost past her, she could hardly keep up.
The kiss. Kissing her on the mouth. This is the centre, the core. This is how you know. He kissed her, a long, moist, demanding kiss. But it was so far away from that first, fully formed kiss, the one with its own psychology and personality. Desdemona was not around. Neither was Angelina. It was dry despite its moistness, neither swirling nor euphoric, and he had the feeling, as he was kissing her, that while she was kissing him she was also pulling away from him. This kiss was mean and finite, whereas Desdemona had been infinite and boundless, was in some form possibly existing even now, in some other young new kiss. A little saddened, he drew up, unbuckled his belt. There was a scramble between them to pull away the denim, she out of an eagerness to be proactive and helpful, and he out of her failure to be the latter. He became self-conscious at the falling fabric, too aware of his feet, one of which got caught in the hem as he was trying to struggle out so that he lost his balance and almost fell down on top of her. With the socks it was no more graceful. He stood up to take them off to avoid further stumbling, the floorboards groaning beneath his weight, an ugly serenade to their clumsy foreplay. But you can’t make love in socks, unless passion allows it.
Meanwhile Melissa shrugged off her gown, her skin was free, his skin was free, the light next to his heart the shape of a boomerang which made the skin a touch yellower there, was free, he came back to her. There was another, meeker kiss, warmer and tender this time though still not wholly satisfying, so he moved southward to seek a better kiss in her breastplate. The left, the right. This old order, this weather-beaten script. She yearned for something new, something else. He wished that she would tell him what she liked, where she wanted to be touched, with what pressure. He didn’t know any more. He couldn’t read her. Michael had always tried to propose a path of adventure, to keep things interesting. Adventures, he believed, were in the cavities of what already exists, in the folds and possibilities of your own life. You do not need to travel to the south-eastern coast of Corfu or climb the Andes or go to Chile. You can travel right here, in spasms and leaps, to heavens close by. He had tried new things, new shapes, different kisses, bolder gestures, but such flamboyance was wasted on her. She was no match for his level of aspiration, and eventually, reluctantly, he had accepted this slow moderation of the burning inside of him and succumbed to routine. They had become missionaries, she below, he above. After all, it worked. It was highly adequate.
And all was quiet, so very quiet, hardly a moan, hardly a tremor. Melissa let it continue this grazing around breastplate along torso, concentrating on the feeling, the actual biology of it, but her mi
nd was wandering (Blake’s blanket, school-dinner money, mice who might be coming upstairs, the night thing, Ria under the skylight …). But then he kissed her hip bone. And when Michael kissed her hip bone that meant only one thing, the next thing, that lush and rhythmic licking, the thing she always came back for, if she was sailing over the south-eastern coast of Corfu or climbing a mountain in Peru or considering celibacy. He stayed there a long time, calling her, swirling her, drowning richly. Her sex to him was a celebration, its soft and falling walls, its avalanching liquid, she was a waterfall. She stretched out the blankets over them to keep them both warm, and she lay there with her arms by her sides swimming out to him, in a kind of soft self-erasure, for part of her still remained elsewhere, was in a cave, where the truest part of her lived, waiting for the glorious summit to pass, that frightening yet delicious surging, that oh my god what’s going to happen? sensation, which often felt to her like rising to a peak with great expectation and the peak being less than what was promised, an explosion that disappeared as it happened, or a train arriving at a station that was no longer there.
Afterwards she felt that she should return the gesture, and she held him in her hand but her hand was dishonest. This dishonesty had an effect on her heart, was a kind of poison, though she continued with it, with a sense of terrible duty. She took him in her mouth, made flowers on the head with her tongue, making everything seem all right for a while, almost natural, and he surged and came up full again. Yet there was something cold and clinical about it all. He still, even now, did not feel fundamentally desired. He was racing, reaching, breathless; she was cool, reticent, retreating. They were not flying. There was no ninth cloud in sight. They had not even left Bell Green. Irritated with her, yet ready, needing, he went inside and she received him. It took her breath away, how he filled her, but so disappointed did he feel at the prospect that it should end like this, in this awful monotony, that in a ferocious reach for that Legendary cloud he encouraged her to turn over, though she didn’t quite want to so she clung to him, resisting. With these conflicting longings they rolled on to their sides in complete disharmony until she gave in, feeling herself fading, becoming just biology, just the science. For the sake of love, for the sake of chocolate, for the sake of their children, she did what he wanted.