Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  He had never been with a white woman before, not to a hundred per cent. It was minimal, physically, the difference between them, his brown against her cream. The real difference was in her life, in her history. She could never know him completely because she had not lived as he had lived. She did not belong to the brown world in which he had learned his fear, his fury and his distrust. He found himself explaining things to her and not liking that he had to explain, whereas with Melissa, or with Gillian, all the others before, they already knew those things and he didn’t have to tell them anything. Even if they had not felt it themselves, they knew it, because they were of the same texture, or a variation of that texture. The difference between him and Rachel was inside, in the lenses behind their eyes, in the prisms of their minds, as defined by the outer side. And when he walked with her, the tension he felt, besides the obvious worry of being a cheat, was not what people might think, of him, of them, as a possible couple, but that she did not know what he saw when he walked, the necessity and the laughter and the sadness of the blackness around him – the beauty of three black boys singing in the street yesterday, or the menace in a St George’s flag hanging from a deep-southern balcony, and in that same deep south the never-ending sorrow for Stephen, for all the Stephens and the murdered ancestors of Stephen. Or the sweetness of that moment at the soya milk just now, that passing brotherliness. She would not smile. She would not know, as Melissa knew. Her life was a different language.

  Michael admitted to himself now, in the safety and the glaring lights of Lidl, that Rachel could not give him anything, no matter what she gave. Nothing lasting, nothing enough. Rachel was just a way of missing Melissa. Rachel was a way of needing Melissa. Melissa was the hizzle, she still was the real hizzle, while Rachel, anybody else, was lesser, and in realising this he understood that he had betrayed her, his empress, his mermaid, pointlessly, because he had known it all along. All that he was left with now was this need for her, physical, and in his soul, in his mind, he wanted all of her, he still did, and he wanted her to need him too, the way she had in the beginning. But the only way to make this even remotely possible, to return to a place where it was good, was to tell her about Rachel. The knowledge of this was like a strike coming out at him from the granola shelf, because it was only Melissa who ate the granola and he was thinking very hard about which granola to buy, the orange and cranberry or the coconut and tropical fruit. You have to tell her, the granola said, and you have to do it now, tonight, so that you can begin again with the truth firmly intact, with a perfect honesty. Truth is the only foundation for broken things, as earth is the only foundation for the rebuilding of a house. Go home. Go home to your house and tell your woman what you have done, and whatever happens, however she responds, take it as it is, be prepared for anything. Let avalanching stones fall down on your shoulders. Let lava flow. It’s the least you can do. And it was the coconut and tropical fruit granola specifically, he felt, that was telling him this, so he put it in his basket and went immediately to the unspacious till.

  Down the high street into the belly of Bell Green he went, light rain falling on his forehead, the smell of the long winter in the air, the sound of the early weekend sirens. The tower blocks surrounding the green next to the library were lit up in their windows, along with the estate at the top of Paradise and the thin houses along the sloping bend. Mrs Jackson was out again. He took her home again and she stared up into his face the way she always did. ‘You look just like me son Vincent.’ He waited a while to make sure she stayed inside, though really he was stalling. Outside number thirteen he paused at the door, frightened.

  The first thing he noticed going in was that there was some garlic hanging up by the front door, on one of the coat hooks. He heard the sound of bathwater. Melissa came walking through with Blake wrapped in a towel, she gave him a sharp snap of a smile and said, ‘I’m going to put him down, he’s tired.’ ‘I’ll do it,’ Michael said. He hadn’t seen him since dawn. How had he grown through the hours? What new expressions on his face? You could miss so much. You could miss so many small moments of a whole boy turning into a whole man. He took him upstairs and dressed him for bed. He read him The Little Red Hen and laid him down in the second room. He watched him as he fell asleep, the diminishing of blinks, the extraordinary youth of him, his innocent face, untravelled by circles, lines and time, and he had the reassuring sensation that this was the only thing that mattered, the preservation of this small but crucial kingdom. Before going back downstairs he got out of his work clothes and put the world away so that he could concentrate fully on the task at hand. While he was doing this he noticed half an onion lying on the windowsill next to his wardrobe. He picked it up, confused. The granola was still whispering to him, Now, you have to tell her now.

  ‘There’s something wrong with this house, Michael,’ Melissa said when he came into the dining area. She was picking up place mats, wiping them and putting them in a pile. Each time she added one to the pile she pressed it down hard, as if it could walk away. ‘I know it. Don’t ask me why, I just know.’

  ‘Why is there half an onion in the bedroom? I found it on the windowsill. It smells.’

  ‘Did you move it? Put it back where it was, I put it there on purpose!’

  ‘Why? And what’s with the garlic, what’s going on?’

  ‘My mum said it would help.’

  ‘With what?’

  She looked at him doubtfully. He wasn’t going to understand. When she’d mentioned the night thing to him he’d been dismissive, saying ghosts didn’t exist, even though she’d tried to explain to him that it wasn’t a ghost as such, it was an energy, a pressure, a dark touch in the air.

  ‘Have you noticed Ria’s hands lately?’ she said. ‘They’re really dry, like sandpaper. I keep reminding her to put shea butter on them but it doesn’t seem to be making any difference. They’re – dusty. Like this house. Can’t you see the dust? It’s everywhere. And there’s this white gunk on my flip-flops? I think we should move.’

  She waited for him to speak, some encouraging response, which must not include the word cool.

  ‘I think you’re overthinking it,’ he said, slowly putting the onion away from him on the table.

  ‘I knew you’d say something like that.’

  The avenue of communication was clamping down. How would he find the channel for his crummy revelation? He must tread carefully and not let her think he thought that she was mad. He must obey the granola. It might not speak to him again with the same force and then they would be lost for ever.

  ‘It’s an old house,’ he shrugged. ‘Old houses have excess dust, I guess.’

  ‘Which gets into a child’s hands, and dries them out?’

  ‘What’s the dust got to do with Ria’s hands? It’s probably just eczema or something, man, just take her to the doctor.’

  ‘I take her to the doctor?’ Melissa said waving a place mat for emphasis. ‘Not you take her to the doctor? Why am I always the one to take them to the doctor, the dungeons, the Baby Beat, the fields in the middle of the day, the hospital, to Little Scamps?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, not this again. I’m at work. It’s not like I’m —’

  ‘Yes all right, all right, I know. It’s the Unsolvable Problem, isn’t it? But anyway, I’m digressing. Did I ever tell you about Lily?’

  Michael held back his anger, obstructed as it was by this question. He didn’t know what she was talking about. She wasn’t fully present to be angry with. He sighed. ‘Lily who?’

  ‘The girl who was here when I came to see this place that second time. Brigitte’s daughter. She had a limp. Well, she had strange hands. I remember them. They were very white, dry-looking, almost powdery. Maybe …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe there’s something here that … She was off-key, that girl. There was something wicked about her. It was like she wasn’t, I don’t know, like she wasn’t a real person, in a way? Or she was possessed or something? I can’t explain it �
�’ Here she trailed off, because Michael was looking at her in an erasing way so that the strength of every word faded once it had entered the area of his auditory range.

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said.

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Yes I am. You think that girl Lily’s got something to do with the dust and Ria’s rash, and that —’

  ‘It’s not a rash. It’s different from a rash. And anyway it’s not just that, it’s her leg, her hair caught fire – remember that? – right here at this table. Ever since we moved here there’s just been – oh for goodness sake, Michael, will you please stop picking your dick when I’m trying to talk to you!’

  Like many men, Michael had a habit of adjusting his scrotum for comfort of positioning when he was at home, a private thing that he felt he had a right to do in his own house, which was fair enough, but no matter how much she tried Melissa couldn’t stand it.

  ‘Look,’ he said exasperated, ‘I have a penis, OK?’

  ‘I know, and I feel sorry for you. Why can’t you just keep it to yourself, huh? Why do you always have to make me aware of it in such a crude way?’

  This seemed like the perfect time, as they were in the subject area, to make his confession, which under the circumstances did not come out in quite the way he had intended, as there was a touch of nastiness in it. He wanted to make her feel bad, to remind her, indeed, of the importance of this very scrotum, its neglect at her hand, which had thus necessitated the excursion into another aperture. He said, ‘Well, someone’s got to be aware of it. In fact someone has been aware of it, someone … else —’

  Then he stopped, losing scrotum, therefore adjusting it again in his anxiety which made Melissa hate him, more, actually, for this second adjustment in such a short space of time, than for the content of his confession, which in this moment seemed quite by-the-by.

  She laughed at him. ‘Oh, really? So what, you’re seeing someone now?’

  He became meek, like a little boy anticipating punishment, but there was a smugness in it, he wanted the punishment. ‘I wouldn’t say I was seeing someone. I’m not seeing her. There were just a couple of times, when, stuff happened. It’s not still going on …’

  But she didn’t seem to be listening any more. She was neatening the place mat pile with a crazy exactitude, not even looking at him. Her face had faded from awareness and turned its dark corner. ‘Those mats are straight,’ he said. ‘Do you hear what I’m saying to you? It was just a stupid glitch when I was feeling like I needed some attention.’ He was thinking of the John Legend song in his head, Number One, the gist of which was going to be the finale of this explanation. ‘And I wanted you to know about it, so that we could —’

  Again she laughed, giggled this time and shook her head. Melissa had a tendency to giggle when extremities of feeling were all cluttered together in her brain – frustration, anger, hurt, disgust, hunger. ‘Men think they are better than grass,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s from a poem, by W.S. Merwin. Men really do think they’re better than grass. I understand exactly what that line could mean now. I didn’t quite get it when I first read it but I liked it so I made a note of it. I mean, what makes you think I give a shit? Grass grows. Trees stay standing. Wind carries. You men think the whole world is your dick. Well, I can tell you that it’s not. You can spare me all the details and the emotional backstory, honestly, it’s fine, Michael, you are free to wave it where you please. Frankly it’s one less thing for me to think about.’

  Michael was taken aback. Where was her lava, the avalanche? Where was her feeling, her goddamn heart? ‘Hold on a minute. Do you love me?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She turned back to him from her departure into the kitchen, pausing in the doorway, against the fiery glow of the paprika floor.

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Why are you asking me that now?’

  ‘Because I seriously want to know. I’m interested. Go on.’

  His face was twisted, older than it had been just a few minutes ago. He looked shabby and weak. Melissa felt sorry for him, and she was suddenly full of an old image of their big love and it made her sad. She missed him. She missed them. Somewhere she was hurt, because he had belonged to her through that love, but she couldn’t quite feel the hurt as her own, couldn’t work out whether it was there only because it was supposed to be there. Who was she, really, inside? It was as if there were two of her, one at the back, drowning, and one at the front.

  ‘It’s not exactly the absolute greatest time to ask me a question like that now, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Of course she loves you, Daddy,’ came a smaller voice from beyond, through the double doors, from the bathroom. The door kicked open, there was a clattering of crutches, and there was Ria, naked, leaning with one arm on a crutch and the other hand holding the door handle. Her damp black curls were loose and sleek and falling down her face like a slow black prehistoric waterfall. Her eyes were huge, bulbous and shining, the lashes like sooty sunrises. She was a vision of early brownness, the most beautiful broken thing they had ever seen.

  ‘Hey,’ Michael said softly, crouching, reaching out his hand to her, as though to a saviour.

  She hopped towards him. He wanted to cry. There is something monstrous about seeing your child limping.

  ‘Can you buy me a present?’ she said when she reached him, when he was holding her hands and looking up into her face. ‘For when my cast comes off?’

  Ria knew, at this moment, that she could ask anything and would receive. She smiled for them, enjoying the attention. She knew her power.

  ‘Just one,’ she said, ‘a small one.’

  Michael grabbed her, folding her into his lap, glancing down at her hands.

  10

  SOMETIMES IT SNOWS IN FEBRUARY

  In February it snowed. It was a wild, white surprise. The snow fell for days, in a confusion of climate. Long past Christmas in the wings of spring, the world was white. Ice on the corners. Snow on the hills. Traffic formed on the A roads and the back roads. The white stuff piled on rail tracks, halting trains and increasing signal failures. London does not know what to do with snow. It lives in hope that if it falls it will do so lightly, and leave smoothly, pulling away into ice, the ice disappearing into light, the streets returning to themselves. But this February, no. The fall began on the first day and came down heavy. Before it could disperse there was more, another layer of difficulty which smothered the rooftops and the tiny surface areas of the thinnest of naked branches, making pretty winter trees. Cars would not start and schools were closed. All the buses were cancelled and Heathrow was closed. Even in the centre of town, in Piccadilly and Covent Garden and Trafalgar, those places whose endless activity had the power to nullify movements of weather, where the city itself was the defining factor of experience, making songs of rain, laughing and tooting in the face of sleet, even they could not shrug this off. It was covered, everywhere, the city, the suburbs, white. The Thames formed rafts of ice, and closest to the water was coldest of all.

  Damian was at work in Croydon, whose high metallic skyscrapers were also icing capped, as were the tips of the telephone masts, the railings of the ugly flyover, and the ledge of the fifth floor window that looked in on the blue-carpeted area of his desk. There were three other desks in this corner, belonging to Angela, Mercy and Tom, who watched EastEnders religiously and owned a tie with prints of tiny pineapples on it. Angela and Mercy were talking.

  ‘You know what happen?’ Angela said, her red earrings matching her red fingernails, her black braids swirled into a bun. ‘When you climb on people’s heads to get to the top? Well, guess what? When they all leave, you fall right back down to the ground.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Mercy said, munching her mid-morning marshmallow, which matched her baby-pink shirt. ‘And you think someone’s gonna come and put out their hand to help you up when you’re down? No. They’ll just be watching you and laughing innit.’

 
‘You know. And not with you, but at you. What goes around comes around. God is just,’ said Angela. ‘Treat your neighbour as you would want to be treated yourself.’

  ‘Reap what you sow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Their fingers clattered for a while over their keyboards and Mercy offered Angela another marshmallow which she accepted, even though, as everyone was aware, she didn’t like marshmallows because they were an unsatisfying, disappearing kind of food, but the snow was such that it caused aberrations of character and habit. The person they were talking about, Heather, had recently been promoted, using, they felt, underhand and treacherous tactics. They now decided that they were going to just go the whole hog and bitch about her.

  ‘She’s one of those people,’ Mercy lowered her voice, ‘who thinks she’s better than everyone else, better than you or me. I hate people like that.’

  ‘Going around with an inflated sense of themselves, yeah.’

  ‘But you can’t hide who you really are.’