Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  ‘Mummy, can you turn it down, please?’ Ria said.

  ‘I’m listening to it.’

  ‘But it’s too loud, and I can’t read.’

  ‘You’re not reading, you’re talking.’

  ‘Now I’m reading.’

  ‘Oh, now you’re reading. What about me? What about what I want? I am a person too, you know. I have desires and pastimes and hobbies, thoughts, emotions and feelings too. What am I supposed to do while you’re so desperately reading? Just sit here looking at this grey street, this grey rain, huh?’

  ‘Oh just forget it’.

  Urged again by guilt, Melissa turned it down a tiny bit. Then Blake started to cry. She tried to calm him down by reaching back and holding his foot, which did nothing for him.

  ‘He’s tired,’ said Ria, smugly familiar with his not-quite-working Gina Ford routine. ‘Now, Blake, remember what we told you,’ she said. ‘You wake up in the morning and then in the daytime you can have two little sleeps and one big nap then an enormous sleep all night long, and then you wake up again in the morning and you do the same thing over and over and over and over again, OK?’

  To this he cried harder, obliterating the radio. He cried all the rest of the way to Little Scamps apart from just as they got there when he unhelpfully fell asleep. There was further clattering getting Ria out of the car, the unfolding of the heavy Maclaren which Blake didn’t want to inhabit just now, so Melissa carried him with one arm, pushed the pram with the other, and the three of them proceeded awkwardly through the icy wet air into the house of hell.

  The path to Little Scamps is a three-turn slope downwards into an underground dungeon composed of primary-coloured apparatus, shoe pouches, and a small café. On the first slope you brace yourself, on the second slope you sense that you are drowning, on the third you are fully submerged. You hear the shrieks, cries and wails of scamps of all sizes and ages and that is the only music. You are surrounded by netting and padding. Everything is padded, the walls of the ball pond, the runways of the fun, netted tunnels, the stairs going up to the fantastic curvy slide and the landing strip at the bottom. The scamps bounce and cling against the netting, their shoes stored in the red, yellow and blue pouches, running, leaping, climbing, whooshing. Their mothers and generally not their fathers sit nearby on hard wooden chairs with lines lengthening on their faces, cowering over their beverages or even reading material if they are very ambitious about this being a chance for me-time amid the frequent requests for crisps, juice, toilet, inter-scamp conflict resolution and alternative entertainment if they are bored. And then there is the other kind of mother, who takes a more hands-on approach, or rather feet, who has taken off her shoes, who steps, flushed and clammy of forehead, into the ball pond to help her baby enjoy the blowing machine which makes the balls hover in the air with a clever magnetic mechanism, she dangles little Jimmy or whoever it is above it and he laughs and laughs, she hopes, or else just dangles there feeling windswept and bewildered, at which she presently deposits him back on the padded floor and lets him sit, and she will also sit, with her legs tucked underneath her in minimal comfort, maybe chatting to another of these mothers who is also sitting in the ball pond, both accepting that although they are two large bodies obstructing some of the children’s passage between net tunnels, they have just as much right and purpose to be there, more in fact, because they are needed. Melissa belonged to the former of these categories.

  ‘How many children are you signing in?’ said the green-shirted Little Scamps warden at the desk.

  ‘Two.’

  The girl looked Ria up and down, taking in the crutches in her armpits, and tentatively handed Melissa two wristbands. ‘Sign them in, please,’ she said, pressing the gate-release button. It swung open, bright-yellow and also netted, and submersion was complete.

  The ball blower wasn’t working today. Some of the children were using it instead for something to stand on and jump off but the babies weren’t interested. It being a school day, Ria was the only one here of school age. There was no one for her to strike up a spontaneous, soon-to-be-forgotten friendship with. She would not be able to climb the nets or run through the tunnels, only play alone amidst the padding or be a medium-sized duck. Permeating the thick subterranean air was a warm smell of food additives and coffee, of cheese toasties lately consumed, evidenced by some stray crusts on the floor by one of the chair legs. Melissa made her way to a relatively deserted corner, steering the pram along a crooked path between the chairs and tables with Blake still hoisted by her free arm. Ria followed and took a seat at their table while Melissa removed Blake’s shoes. Nearby two women sat talking, another sat alone over a newspaper.

  ‘Mummy, can I have some crisps?’ Ria said.

  ‘We just got here. Go and play.’

  ‘But I can’t.’

  ‘Yes you can. Go on, take off the shoe. Wait, put some cream on first. I told you, you need to keep creaming your hands. Why are they so dry all the time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She creamed her hands and took off the one proper shoe. The other was a huge felt flip-flop designed for legs in plaster. Melissa put the three shoes in the pouches and Blake in the ball pond, asking Ria to keep him entertained. She watched her for a while, she was lovely in her limping, in her flared blue skirt, her one actual thin leg sticking out of it. She and Blake threw balls at each other, laughing, while Melissa ventured tentatively back to her corner and took out her laptop. It was difficult to concentrate, trying to keep one watchful eye at the same time, but she managed to write a sentence. Soon, though, there was an approach of UGG boots, a powder-blue coat, a large four-wheeler. ‘Hi, Melissa!’ a voice said. It was Donna, a motherland acquaintance, also frequently run into at the local playgrounds and in the aisles of Japan. She motioned to take a seat, but Melissa was not quite smiling, her fingers shadowing the keyboard.

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ Donna paused with her vehicle. ‘Am I disturbing you?’

  ‘No, no … it’s OK, sit down …’

  Donna wore blue glasses the same colour as her coat. The eyes behind them seemed always staring and blank, through her light, foody chatter, about mousse preferences, good cakes, the difference in quality, for example, between a low-fat Marks & Spencer’s blueberry muffin and a Sainsbury’s low-fat blueberry muffin. There was no one who could beat Marks & Spencer’s for their low-fat muffins.

  ‘I’m more of a savoury person,’ Melissa said. ‘Give me a packet of crisps over a doughnut any day.’ The more they talked the more the world receded, they were sinking, the dungeon was going down deeper, and deeper. Around them the voices of the scamps whipped through the air, beneath the ugly neon lights, beneath the ground itself, and among these shouts came a sharp, distinctive cry belonging only to Blake. He was lying on his front on the padding, crying. Ria was limping back over to the table with only one crutch.

  ‘Mummy, Blake’s stuck in the balls.’

  ‘Where’s your other crutch?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, where did you leave it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Melissa collected Blake and went to look for the other crutch, which she found lying under a table. Blake didn’t want to play in the pond any more He wanted to go inside the tunnels, to rise into the upper echelons of the netting like the bigger kids, but the only way he could do this would be for his mother to aid and accompany him, and thus take off her shoes. Intent on his wish, he lunged towards one of the padded mounts leading to the first level.

  ‘Blake, come here. Blake, you can’t go up there,’ Melissa said.

  He arrived at the mount and pulled himself up to standing, attempted to mount it, cried when he couldn’t, and looked around for his mum. She was now on all fours. Donna was watching with her staring eyes. Melissa entered the tunnel, keeping her shoed feet outside, trying to coax him away. ‘Sweetheart, you’re
too small. Come here, come out.’

  Then he was wailing, mouth wide open, full volume, throat visible. At some point in the parenting war between what you know you should do and what you do not want to do, there is capitulation. You must let go of yourself, perhaps only for a little while, though these many little whiles may gradually build into larger and larger whiles, joining together like cells and building another person, until you are no longer quite yourself. There was her son, her crying little crawling son, who only wanted to rise, and how could she deny him this, when she had already denied her crippled daughter the full enjoyment of a wet Hello Kitty science experiment? When you try to be selfish in a situation that requires selflessness, there is unhappiness. There was only one thing to do.

  ‘OK, Blake,’ she said. ‘OK.’

  She sat down on the bright-red padded ground. They would climb together. They would rise. She untied her muddy laces, took off her trainers, and placed them in the pouch next to the others.

  After lunch the mouse man came back to Paradise, which looked more and more now like a live, menacing structure with its white and stony face and those two window eyes looking out, holding in. Dust was swirling in the air. The crooked floors were getting crookeder. The narrow hall was getting narrower. During lunch Ria refused to eat her fish fingers. ‘Don’t cut them,’ she ordered, so Melissa cut them, out of spite. ‘Mummy, if you do that again you’ll make me angry, OK?’ and she left them on her plate, also out of spite. Melissa considered what to do about this affront – should she force them down her throat, punish her, over a fish finger? ‘Motherhood is an obliteration of the self,’ she said. ‘What?’ Ria said. ‘Pardon, not what.’ ‘Pardon. What?’ ‘Motherhood is —’ Then came that tight, British knock at the door. She recognised it. Rentokil. The same anorak and hat, the same Hitler moustache.

  ‘So,’ he said, striding into the kitchen with his clipboard. This was his third and final visit. Ria stared at him from the table with her scaly hands. ‘Any other sightings? Any bait bites? Droppings?’

  ‘Bait bites?’ Ria said. ‘What’s bait bites?’

  Blake was careening out of his high chair in such a way that it looked like it was about to tip over so Melissa got him out of it. He shoved some mashed potato into her ear, found this hilarious, and tried to do it again. Meanwhile she provided a mouse update, no more sightings, no droppings.

  ‘I didn’t check the bait, though.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said loudly, bending down by the kickboards. ‘This one’s been eaten into, look.’

  There were sinister bites in the blue poison, which meant that something was dying, here in these walls, or was already dead. The corpse could be anywhere. ‘Do you know when? When it was eaten, I mean. How long it takes for them to die?’

  ‘Oh, who knows, who knows?’ the Rentokil man said, apparently satisfied at the opportunity presented by the question. ‘It depends on the size and the constitution of the little fella. Whether it managed to make it outside before the poison began to take effect. Inside deaths definitely take longer. The cold speeds things up a bit, you see … But I would say,’ he rubbed his chin, ‘judging on the size of the bites here, that it’s a smallish mouse. The smaller they are the quicker they go and the less likely they are to get outside. They don’t want to go outside, that’s the thing, especially when they’re expiring. They want to stay here in the warm chamber.’

  Melissa laughed. The warm chamber! So much information, so much specificity. The Rentokil man didn’t think it was funny. He looked at her, mystified, his eyes glinting with empathy for the soul of the lost one who had bitten. And suddenly Melissa thought of Brigitte. Brigitte had wanted to leave this house. That was why she’d lied about the mice, why she’d tried to keep Lily hidden away in her room. The house was poisoned. There was something wrong with it. Brigitte had wanted to get out of here and she hadn’t wanted to let anything stand in her way.

  ‘Actually, is there anything else?’ she asked the Rentokil man. ‘I’m kind of busy, so …’

  Onions. Garlic by the front door. What else had her mother said?

  ‘I just need to print off your invoice,’ he said, sitting down opposite Ria and getting out his nifty machine again.

  ‘Don’t worry about the invoice. Post it to me.’

  She practically threw him out. He started to say something more about the mice, something conclusive, a rounding off, handing over to her the baton of kindly extermination, but she had no ears left for it. He scuttled away, letting the gate slam after him. It was January in Lewisham, and she was still in Lewisham, in the London borough of.

  *

  Lidl was cheaper. How ingenious that Dieter Schwarz who had made it possible to buy granola for a quarter of the price you could get it for in Japan. How much cheaper their chicken, their kitchen towel, their fruit juice and their vegetables, all of adequate quality if you stayed away from the lowliest brands. It was half factory, half shop. Why go to the trouble of taking hundreds of items out of their distribution packaging and putting them on a shelf, when you can keep them in the packaging and put that on the shelf one time, and people can just take it out themselves? And is there really such a great inconvenience in buying four tins of Heinz baked beans instead of one or two, or a pack of four kitchen towels rather than a pack of two? There is a quiet delight in the hearts of people who shop in Lidl, and with it a mild camaraderie. They have been changed. They buy in bulk and have discovered new names, new tastes, such as honey-flavoured walnuts from Denmark. Those freezers full of meat and pizzas and ice cream and seasoned rice they feel almost affectionate towards, as if they were their own freezers, so little do things cost. There is no unnecessary music, no ‘Lidl Radio’. It is just bare, barren, basic silence. And what does it matter that there is hardly any room at the tills next to the cashier’s elbow to pack your goods, or that you have to queue for longer than you would in Japan because there are only two cashiers, who, incidentally, are underpaid and the women penalised for becoming pregnant and denied the right to join unions, when you can walk away with a receipt for only eighteen pounds and forty-seven pence for a week’s sustenance for a family of four? You could even buy a tent at the same time if you wanted to. Lidl was a miracle.

  Michael had received a grocery text (without kiss, as now standard) from Melissa in the afternoon and was walking through the aisles looking for things, the things that she had asked for and other things he might come across – at the moment he was studying a large packet of tikka-flavoured crisps. He found Lidl comforting. It was a poor man’s shop, an arcade for the working class. There was no pretence, everyone was on the same level, all united in their recession-inspired economising. Also browsing was a dark-skinned man in long white Islamic dress and hat pushing a trolley full to the brim, with an engrossed, good-natured look on his face. They came across each other again by the soya milk, where Michael was trying to decide whether or not he should get the unsweetened one. The man pointed at it saying, ‘It’s good, that one’s very, very good’, and although Michael was in his way for a second, there was no impatience, no trolley rage, which is rare in Lidl. They both just carried on about their shopping with a faint and fleeting brotherly connection. It was pleasant. It was soothing.

  On this particular cold and drizzly Friday night, Lidl was also a place to hide. He did not want to go home. Friday nights, traditionally assigned to partying and relief and enjoyment, were becoming increasingly depressing. He did not want to go home at the end of yet another week to the woman standing at the sink with the different mouth, to feel the wide emptiness that gripped the house after the children were in bed, he so wanting, of something, some loving heat, and Melissa wanting something too, but not him, something else, somewhere else. He did not want to live this way, and in addition to this, he was burdened with guilt about the thing with Rachel. They had seen each other a couple more times since that first time, once in her flat, again in the vicinity of the sink, the other time at a hotel, because of the sink, when
he had gone as far as to book a room for the evening and lie to Melissa about where he was. Both times she had given him that heat, that fast enclosure that he needed, her soft and open body, and he felt that her heart was truly kind, but for him the quenching was purely physical. Afterwards he was left with a profound sense of spiritual shrinking, a self-loathing that walked with him everywhere he went, and when he looked into the children’s faces the love in their eyes was hurtful, the power of it, it could not wash him clean any more. It was easier, in fact, to look at Melissa, even though it was she he felt he had most wronged, because in Melissa’s eyes there was no love to receive and he could meet her in her blankness, her withholding of what she, and he, might feel.