by Diana Evans
Currently he was sitting in his green chair, TV-centred, a wrinkled leather pouffe by his feet, next to a knee-high table upon which he dealt with business: lunch and dinner, the cleaning of one-sided bifocals, the unwrapping of presents, for which he used scissors. Ria was sitting on the floor next to him, as she often did when they came here. She felt a wild pity for him, and a fascination and a distance. He was so old. He couldn’t jump. He couldn’t run. He was like an old street that had been rained on and walked on and wheeled on and hailed on for a long time. There were potholes and dents all over his face. His hands were grey-veined like the remains of a mercury volcano and somehow blind also. At intervals she watched him, by way of exploration, which Cornelius did not much seem to mind or notice.
Warren and Lauren were sitting on one arm each of the sofa, with Melissa and Carol between them talking about yoga, specifically, how long to hold the warrior poses of the primary series. Michael was over at the dining table beyond the partition, drinking Dragon Stout and playing with Blake, while Alice and Adel were in the kitchen with Clay. The TV was on. Conversations rose and fell. Lauren was talking about her forthcoming eighteenth birthday plans. ‘I’m gonna hire a limo,’ she said, ‘a pink one.’ Ria asked what a limo was.
‘It’s one of those stupid long cars with twats inside it,’ Warren said. He was wearing a red sweatshirt with GOLDDIGGER printed across the front.
‘What’s a twat?’
‘Language, Warren, please,’ Melissa said. She hated being in this house. Every time she came here she tried not to stay for too long, and she found it difficult to converse directly with her father, she could still see thunder in his eyes. When she was a child that thunder had felt as if it could break the house, as if the house were made of glass. It was always easier when Carol was here too.
‘You can hire one for seventy pounds,’ Lauren was saying, holding a hot comb which she was pulling down through her weave. ‘They’ve got TVs inside. You just drive around, drive to the club, whatever. They take you home afterwards as well.’
‘Yeah and who’s paying for it?’ Warren said.
‘I have a job. I can pay for it myself, innit.’
‘It’s my birthday too,’ Ria said. ‘I’m going to be eight. Can I get a limo?’ This made everyone laugh. Cornelius said, ‘Ssssshhhhh!’ turning up the TV. He was trying to watch Dad’s Army.
From the kitchen Adel came in looking flustered. ‘Isn’t anyone going to help with the food?’ She was hard done by and taken for granted, but at the same time she did not want to relinquish control of the food, and when Michael went in to help she eventually told him he wasn’t needed, muttering that Carol should help because she hadn’t done anything yet and never did.
‘What are you doing to your hair, Lauren, are you relaxing it?’ Carol said. She sported dreadlocks and believed in the Nubian approach to the contested afro follicle.
‘I’m straight-combing it.’
‘You should just be natural. Just be you, be free.’
Lauren had smoke lifting off her head. She was trying her best to supersede herself. Her hair had once belonged to someone else, someone Indian, she revealed, which was why it had been expensive. Her eyebrows were drawn on, sharply defined and dark. She wore tight blue jeans and a yellow blouse a similar colour to her skin, upon which, once a week, she applied bronzing cream, to darken her too-light beige-nation complexion. She was a fantasy of herself, permanently materialising.
‘You’re hot-combing someone else’s hair,’ Melissa said.
‘It’s my hair.’
‘It’s on her head,’ Warren confirmed, ‘so it’s her hair.’
Meanwhile, Ria and Clay had gone out into the hall and were sitting halfway up the stairs. They were eating the chocolate Santas and playing with Clay’s stickers.
‘I’ve got lots of bones in my body,’ Ria said to Clay.
‘I haven’t,’ said Clay.
‘Yes you have. You’ve got one here, here, here,’ she pointed at them.
‘No,’ Clay said. ‘I haven’t got any bones. I’ve only got one bone, in my belly button,’ and he pulled up his jumper to show it to her.
Back in the living room the adverts were on, Warren was watching music videos on his tablet. Cornelius was intrigued by this new kind of screen, smaller, maybe better for one eye. He watched it. People, things passed across it, music of the new world, rappers with bulky arms and tattoos and very white teeth.
‘I saw you on Facebook last week,’ Melissa said to Lauren.
‘Is it? What did you think of my Facebook page?’
‘It was … nice?’ Melissa was not much of a user.
‘Fanks,’ Lauren said.
‘Let’s see it.’ Warren looked at Lauren’s phone. Both their phones were ever out. There was group Facebook perusal, meanwhile watching the music. A tune was on, 50 Cent’s In Da Club.
‘Is that P Fiddy?’ Cornelius said suddenly, his voice breaking in to the midst of them with a familiar foreign tone soaked in the building fog of senility.
‘I think you mean Puff Daddy,’ Warren said.
‘But I thought he’d changed his name.’
Warren and Lauren were astounded by their grandfather’s unexpected pop-culture awareness. It was particularly surprising because these days he said a lot of things twice and forgot names, and the names within the names, words like ‘table’ and ‘wire’.
‘He did change his name,’ Warren said. ‘He changed it to P Diddy, though.’
‘Well, that’s what I said.’
‘No. Diddy,’ said Lauren, ‘not Fiddy.’
‘But isn’t there someone called Fiddy?’ Cornelius said, confused.
‘Oh, Fiddy,’ Warren laughed. ‘You mean 50 Cent. He’s called Fiddy for short.’
Into the room now came Alice, wading, gliding, her head up, her glasses shining in the light of the ancient chandelier, her wrapper and slippers swishing, holding a glass of sherry. She took a seat by the window, the Christmas tree floating next to her, adding to her mysterious light. She was looking forward to going back to her empty pink flat. On the subject of yoga, she felt that both Melissa and Carol were foolish to try and keep it up while raising children and she regularly told them so. And on the subject of night things, which Melissa had talked to her about upstairs earlier, Alice had various recommendations: you hang up some garlic by the front door, cut an onion in half and leave it on the windowsill, put Vicks on the place where the night thing is coming and some cayenne pepper on top of it, and you pray.
‘Another thing,’ she said, after taking a sip of her sherry, the voices continuing on in the background, ‘use salt water in the bath, and make it very, very hot.’
‘OK, Mum,’ Melissa said dubiously.
‘And sometimes you put one plantain under your pillow at night.’
‘What, a whole plantain?’
‘Yes. It stop it going inside your mind.’
Of this last observation Melissa took no notice whatsoever. She had also dismissed her mother’s theory that if there was a night thing in her house it was because it had a downstairs bathroom.
‘One day you get a better house than that,’ Alice said.
*
Two days after Christmas was Ria’s birthday, and around that time two things happened that convinced Melissa once and for all that there was something jinxed about 13 Paradise Row. The first was to do with fire.
For Ria’s fourth birthday, she had been given a fairy dress with wings. She had immediately put it on and climbed on to the sofa. She had stood there, preparing herself, anticipating the first hover and the higher air. When this did not happen, when she had simply landed on the floor like any other jump, she had shouted, ‘Mummy, these wings don’t work! You have to buy me some more!’ So every year now they went to the theatre, Melissa with Ria, to offer her flight of another kind, to reward that she had so deeply believed. This year they were going to see The Nutcracker, a first ballet. Ria wore a new black dress with sequi
ns across the bodice and a full skirt that became a semi-circle when she lifted it at both sides, which she did, standing beneath the skylight, then soaring down the stairs with the black satin billowing after her. Before they left, Melissa told her to put some cream on her hands because her skin was dry.
They took the train into town, Ria’s feet just touching the floor, swinging. Melissa felt an enormous pride in her and a great protection. They saw the blue-lit trees along the riverbank, the misty dome of St Paul’s in the distance. The whole city was blazing, the lights all around, the way they fell and danced on the water. ‘I like having my birthday for Christmas,’ Ria said as they walked along The Strand. She ran ahead as usual, her red tights sparkling, a dirty city wind was blowing, and it occurred to Melissa that Ria was who she was in part because of this city, that she, they both, belonged to it.
The lobby of the theatre was crowded. They went up a circular staircase and found their seats near the back of the auditorium. They were high up, the stage waited, closed and secret, to give the afternoon a dream. Soon the curtain rose, and here was Christmas most of all, a giant tree in the corner surrounded by presents, a pretty, ornate room in a made-up house. The orchestra was gold and silver, lit up in the pit with the conductor’s dancing arms. A little girl, Clara, tiptoed into the room, and then the bigger dancing began. The ballerinas were synchrony, together on their toes, weaving across the space. Ria stared at them, straight-backed, she whispered, ‘I can’t believe my eyes.’
The simultaneous arms, the turns and glides, the certainty of direction.
‘How do they know what to do?’
Melissa told her they’d been practising.
‘But how can they point their toes like that?’ Then, ‘Why is Clara dancing in her pyjamas?’ And, ‘Why is the Christmas tree made of paper?’ Meanwhile sucking on a lemon Chupa Chup.
‘Is that blue man the handsome prince?’ she asked.
‘Is that the king mouse?’
‘Is that real snow?’
All this before the interval. After the interval, ‘Why is that gold thing on the curtain going up?’ ‘Why didn’t those people on the stage have any food?’ ‘I don’t believe that Clara’s still wearing her pyjamas.’ ‘Is it finished?’ ‘Is it finished now?’
Back out in the lobby, from the bottom of the circular staircase, Melissa took a picture of Ria standing at the top holding up her skirt in a semi-circle. One foot was in front of the other. Her legs were crossed, as if infected by the ballet. There was a smiling look on her face containing the kindness and the selfishness of children. This would be the last picture of her taken on two good feet.
But first the fire, which happened that evening over the birthday cake. Ria was sitting at the dining table, still wearing her dress, and Michael was standing opposite her holding Blake. Eight candles. The lights went down. Melissa emerged from the paprika glow of the kitchen with the cake as they were singing. There was a feeling of deep togetherness in this singing, that in the singing was the ribbon that linked them all together, and Michael lost his sense of nagging unease for a moment and laid his hand lightly on Melissa’s back. Melissa put the cake down on the table. When Ria bent to blow out the candles, her loose hair got caught in a flame, and the flame then lifted. A high orange sweep went up, quickly monstrous. To Ria it felt like just some warm air by her neck; what upset her was the sudden look of horror on her father’s face, even on Blake’s face. Frantically, Melissa batted her hand against the flame. It went out, and Ria was not hurt, but the image stayed there in Melissa’s mind, a burning child’s head, a terror at the dining table. It was another bad omen.
A week later Melissa and Ria went to the woods to find the tunnel as they had said they would, the tunnel where the train got stuck on the way to the Crystal Palace. They entered the woods from the street, and walked down the dark, uneven path to the clearing where the light opened out and there were stretches of thin, tall oaks and hornbeams. The sound of the traffic slipped away. There were only birds and the rustling of the trees above. They had stood for centuries, these trees. They had witnessed the walking of yesterday’s beasts, the egrots, the beavers. There were bats and owls here, and three kinds of woodpecker. Dogs flashed through the trunks, their tails in the air, upward with freedom.
‘Can we go inside the tunnel?’ Ria said as they walked. A bit of her hair on one side of her head was shorter than the rest and singed a lighter brown.
‘I think it’s sealed,’ Melissa said. ‘But let’s see.’
They reached the footbridge from which Camille Pissarro had painted the view of his time – a pale open sky, a train taking a bend away from him, empty fields on either side. They went past the algae pond that didn’t move and threw a stick on it and watched it not sink, past the golf course and the rope swing, and eventually, at the bottom of a slope, they came to the tunnel entrance. It was black, sealed shut. A tiny blue bird flew out from a slit at the top. Ria was disappointed. She had wanted to walk all the way through it to the glass world on the other side. She had wanted to see Leona Dare hanging from her hot-air balloon, doing gymnastics in the sky.
‘I saw pictures of her,’ she said. ‘She used to hang from her mouth. It cost one shilling to watch. How much is one shilling?’
‘About ten pence.’
Ria imagined crowds of people in long dresses and high hats at the other end of the tunnel, looking up at Leona. Melissa imagined it too, walking through the tunnel, past the ghostly abandoned train, and it was very quiet, and she was walking into history. Michael was not there. He did not exist. They did not exist. It was a beautiful kind of solitude. The way was wide enough for two people to walk side by side. When she got there she wandered through the courts, saw the frescos and tombs and the lions in a circle in Alhambra, and had a glass of rhubarb champagne.
‘We should go back,’ she said. The light was changing. ‘It’s going to get dark soon.’
‘OK,’ Ria said. They began making their way back up the slope.
That was when the second thing happened. Just as they reached the top, Ria stumbled in the mud and twisted her ankle. She carried on walking, but near the algae pond she stumbled again and started to cry. She held on to Melissa, hopping and limping, or being half carried, for the rest of the way out of the woods. By the time they got back to the car it was dark, and her ankle had swollen to the size of a tennis ball.
Instead of going home they went to the hospital. The anklebone was fractured at the outer edge. She would wear a cast for two weeks. She lay on her front on the stretcher as the nurse arranged plaster of Paris around her thin brown calf. She fell asleep like that and dreamt of the palace. It was after midnight, in the London borough of Lewisham.
9
CONFESSION
The man on the radio was saying, ‘We’re always reminding them, myself and my wife, that we’re a gang, we’re a team, we work together, and anything we’ve got, we’ve got because we all make it happen. So say they ask for the latest DS game or whatever, we’ll say to them, well, there are some children who don’t have a DS at all, let alone the latest game, and we’ll encourage them to do something else with their time if they’re bored like play cards, we play cards with them a lot, play games, you know, remind them of the concept of the team, encourage them to make the most of what they already have. That’s not to say that they never get what they ask for, because they do, only in moderation. And we never do that thing, that terrible thing of going on about how much things cost and how hard we had to work to buy them, but we try and make sure they appreciate things. And really, as a result, birthdays and Christmases and Easter and all that are no big deal to them. It’s not this crazy extravaganza of presents and things. It’s a time when they get to see their grandparents a bit more, some quality time with the family, you know? So it’s about what we teach them, the messages we’re sending them as they grow up …’
Despite the irritating, sanctimonious, somewhat nasal voice of this anonymous parent, Melissa
was making a mental note, while driving the children to soft play, of the worthier elements of his sermon – the importance of the team, the thing about not going on about how much things cost, which of course was terrible, and she was wracked with guilt and self-loathing at the thought of yesterday when she had told Ria off for putting her Hello Kitty Cool Cardz in the bath as part of an impromptu science project, stating that they had cost twenty-seven pounds. What, indeed, was twenty-seven pounds to an eight-year-old? An eight-year-old on crutches, with a hard white left leg, who was isolated from her school friends and needed to find in-house entertainment to keep her occupied. That Cool Cardz experiment had been conducted on one leg, bending over the bath, with the bad leg supported by its big toe and the crutches leaning against the wall. She had limped there, as she limped everywhere, clattering around the rooms, hopping, leaning, holding, sometimes swinging a crutch around and throwing things off the bookshelves, but how determined, how exploratory, how imaginative, how much more physical and disability-refuting than sitting on the sofa watching CBeebies. And all Melissa could do was berate her for it.
On and off for the last nine days, after an initial appearance at school where Ria received leave of absence and immediate celebrity status (‘Lord have mercy, what happened to your foot?’ and ‘Wow, let’s have a go on your crutches!’), she and Melissa had been united in their daytime occupation of 13 Paradise Row. Melissa spent as much time as she could in her office working, and the rest of the time with Ria, making lunch, making snacks, encouraging homework, ensuring adequate fresh air through occasional walks and clattering expeditions into the garden. There is only so much you can do with a leg in Paris. No running, no swimming, no scooting. All is hoppy and slowed and sedentary, and Ria spent many hours sitting at the dining table engrossed in imaginary worlds made of Lego, Peppa Pig furniture and chess pieces, muttering to herself, enjoying her freedom from fractions and this new, homely independence while Melissa longed inwardly for her to go back to school. When Blake was home with them, like today, Friday, a freezing, dreary morning in the second week of January, it was worse, and she had decided on the expedition to soft play to make things easier. It was not the obvious place to take a cripple. She couldn’t climb, she couldn’t slide, but perhaps she could sit on the edge of the ball pond and she and Blake could throw balls at each other, or she could roll around on the cushioning or fiddle with the netting, while Melissa, she hoped, could finish her column (she was late with her deadline). It had been cumbersome getting them both into the car, Blake and his straps and Ria with her crutches. There had been hardly any time for Melissa to make herself look nice, she was wearing her grey anorak with the roughly sewed-up rip in the hem, a beige jumper accentuating the thus far unflattened calamity of her postnatal stomach, and her trainers which were still muddy from the fateful walk in the woods. She had applied some lipgloss at the last minute, but this, apparently, was the only allusion left to the high-flying, world-eating woman who had once edited the fashion and lifestyle pages of Open. She had put the radio on to provide an alternative to her bad mood and the chattering in the back (‘Mummy, when my cast comes off can I go swimming with Shanita, Shaquira and Emily?’, ‘Mummy, where did you put that Brat doll that came with my shoe?’, ‘Mummy, did you know that little lies lead to big lies and big lies lead to terrible lies?’). They were passing Tesco Express. A drizzle was falling on to the windscreen. She turned the radio over to Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, Jenni Murray’s soothing, determined voice, a moment of reinforcement, a reminder. She turned up the volume.