by Diana Evans
‘Are you OK?’
He was hunched on the floor, staring at the turntable. He breathed deeply, a long, violent exhale. ‘God, it’s amazing how music can make up your life, your whole life, and bring it back to you in bits, things you thought you’d forgotten.’
She agreed with him, and he felt that she was gently listening to him. ‘Are you thinking about your dad?’
The song played on, both of them inside it. ‘It just struck me that he was alive once. I mean, really alive, before he died in his life. Do you understand what I mean? That’s what happened to him. He was already dead.’
‘The greatest challenge in life is not to die before we die,’ Melissa said. ‘I read that somewhere. It happens to a lot of people.’ She was going to add, ‘I think it’s happening to me,’ but didn’t.
They were both a little drunk by now. They were next to each other on the rug with their backs against the sofa in the zigzag lamplight. Damian wanted to put his arm around her, to hold her, just for a minute. He’d never talked like this about his father to anyone and he felt lighter, as though a touch could carry no guilt, no reproach.
‘I think my dad’s going to die soon,’ she said. ‘He’s getting frailer and frailer, every time I see him. I should go and visit him more.’
‘Why don’t you?’
She paused. ‘It’s a long story. It’s in the past and I don’t like to go there … Lots of people have difficult childhoods. The important thing is how you rise above it to meet yourself.’
‘Where did you read that one?’
‘Nowhere.’
There was an extended silence, for the dead and the undead. The vinyl too fell silent, in the space between songs. Melissa finished her wine. ‘Have you tried writing about it,’ she asked, ‘about what it feels like, in a diary or something? It must rock your foundations when a parent dies, no matter how you felt about them or how close you were. You should just splurge it all out. That’s what I used to do. It helps.’
Damian had never kept a diary. ‘It seems depressing, staring your problems in the face like that, writing them out … I have written about him, though, in a way, a long time ago. I wrote a novel that was sort of based on him.’
‘Did you?’ She sounded impressed. ‘Did you finish it?’
‘Kind of. Not properly. It fizzled out in the end.’
‘What’s it called?’
He was shy. ‘It doesn’t really have one title. There were two or three of them. “Canon and the Storm” was the main one.’
‘Canon and the Storm. Hm.’ She rolled it around on her tongue. ‘Canon. That’s an interesting name. Is Canon the father? … I like it. It’s a good title. It’s intriguing.’
‘So it gets your approval?’ Damian was overjoyed. It was beginning to come to him again, the finger-tingling writing feeling, the cocooning thrill of it. She even said, ‘I’d like to read it some time,’ glancing over at the empty bottle on the table and draining her glass again, even though it was definitely finished.
‘Are you serious?’ he said.
‘Yeah, seriously. Email it to me.’
‘OK, I might.’ (He would.) ‘Once I’ve got it all together …’
‘God, I don’t know how anyone could write a novel. It must take ages. All those words. All those sentences.’ She was getting up, clinging to the edge of the sofa. ‘I couldn’t do it. Two thousand words is about my max.’
The music had ended again, throwing the room into emptiness. ‘You know what I’d really love right now?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘A cigarette.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I don’t. I used to.’
‘I’ve got some Marlboro Lights if you want one.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I didn’t. I gave up.’ On giving up, that is. On New Year’s Day, to spite the resolution culture. Don’t stop, start. Stop denying yourself and live. Life is long, not short. Smoking kills? Life kills. This was Damian’s current philosophy, and it had been enabling abundant Marlboro Light puffing in the driveway at home and subsequent gum chewing to hide the smell, which wasn’t working.
Melissa tried to fight the craving but gave in. ‘Let’s have one, I don’t care any more,’ she said. ‘We have to go outside, though. You know it’s minus out there.’
She went to check on the children. Blake was sleeping through now, returning to her the night. It was Ria who had been restless recently. She had tried to sleepwalk downstairs at 2 a.m. with one crutch, before the cast was removed, and Melissa had found her under the skylight. But now she was sleeping deeply. They had gone out in the snow today, in the morning, and on discovering that the school was closed, they had gone on towards the park, along the silver birches, in through the gates. It was deserted, the snow a white floor untroubled. Amazed, Ria had run across the field, a decreasing figure advancing towards the tenements, her small dark footprints a trail of recent Rias. There was a slight limp in her left leg, which the doctor had said would disappear in time.
And they had made snowmen, a family of three, in the garden, who stared with their hard sultana eyes as Melissa and Damian lit up. Their noses were carrots. One of them, the tallest, was wearing Michael’s scarf. Other inanimate beings in the garden were the yellow teddy bear sitting stiff-haired on the red bench, and the toy figures in the white-topped playhouse. The sky was cold and lilac. The snow was turning to ice, making the snow family lose their definition. The wind chime sang as the ice wind blew.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Damian said when he offered the pack.
‘I’m sure.’ She took one. It felt big between her fingers. The first inhale was air-spinning, gorgeous against the wine. They had found more to drink at the bottom of the fridge, a half bottle of leftover Liebfraumilch which was pleasantly sweet. ‘Sometimes when you want something you just have to let yourself have it,’ she said.
For Damian too, it was one of the best cigarettes he had ever smoked.
‘Just don’t blame me if you start again.’
‘I won’t. I don’t wanna get cancer.’
‘If you smoke it to only halfway down it’s not as bad. Most of the cancer’s in the butt.’
The arms of their coats were touching, which didn’t seem a thing. They blew up at the sky, the skeletal aerials and the silhouettes of the chimneys. Long clouds lay out, some moving and pink and slipping away, and at one end, to the south, the moon slid full, round and golden into a case of silver wisps, until it was swallowed, whole, and all that was moving was a fading glow like a sun reduced to a common star. A bay tree, blackened in the darkness, stood up above the fences, watching over them with its still, black leaves.
‘I like it out here,’ Melissa said. ‘Sometimes I come out here at night to think, to be by myself. It’s not that private – I feel like people are watching me from the windows over there – but I can hide behind that tree.’ She looked up at it. ‘That tree is my friend. It understands me. It knows.’
‘What does it know about you?’ Damian said.
‘Everything.’ He was looking at her profile. She could feel him looking at her in a certain way. It reminded her of how Michael had looked at her in Montego Bay, waiting for her to answer his questions. ‘Everything I was and what I am now,’ she said, ‘whatever that is. I’m not sure I know any more. I seem to be losing a sense of it. It’s quite frightening. Do you ever feel like that, like you’re losing track of who you are?’
‘Most of the time I feel like that.’
She turned to him, stealing her profile away, emboldened. ‘And you’re looking for yourself, but can’t find it? You don’t even know where to look any more? Like you’re groping around in the darkness?’
Dominant in her face was that look of extreme youth he’d seen when she’d opened the door to him. The face of a child, the façade all gone.
‘It’s because we’re in the wrong place,’ he said. ‘It’s because we’re not living ho
w we were supposed to live.’
‘Why, though? Why don’t people live the way they’re supposed to live? It should be the easiest thing in the world.’
He shrugged and lit another cigarette. ‘It’s scary. That’s why.’
So quickly does smoke enfold. Melissa wanted another and motioned for one. She took it in deep, right to the bottom of her throat before blowing back out, adding smoke clouds to cold clouds. The wine and the snow and the smoke were a red and white dance inside her and she felt carried with it, afloat.
‘Can I tell you a secret, Damian?’ she said.
‘Yeah, course.’
‘I’ve never told this to anyone before. I’m almost afraid to tell it to you.’
‘I won’t tell anyone, I promise.’
‘It’s not that. It’s not that kind of secret. I’m just worried something bad will happen if I do.’
But she wanted to tell it, to say it out loud, in this quiet pure white, so she moved her fear out of the way.
‘When I was younger, before I had children, before I met Michael, when I was around twenty-four, I used to have this feeling. I’d had it all through my life, right up until about that age, twenty-four – that’s the age when I can still remember it being completely intact, as much as a feeling, a sense of something, can be intact.’ Her hands were shivering, partly from the cold. She took another sip from the Liebfraumilch, followed immediately by another inhale. ‘You might find this strange, or arrogant maybe, it was a feeling that I was protected by something, a kind of guide. A guardian angel, if you want to think of it like that. I had my own angel watching over me. It walked with me. She, I think it was most like a she, was there, everywhere I went, through everything that happened. I felt like I was untouchable, invincible. I used to walk across roads without looking, convinced she would stop the traffic. I used to take all kinds of risks with myself …’
‘What kind of risks?’
‘Oh, things I wouldn’t do now. Staying in strange men’s flats, getting into meat vans with them, jumping off —’
‘Meat vans?’
‘Another long story.’
‘OK.’
‘Anyway, the point is that I’m scared now, and I didn’t used to be scared. I used to live off my instincts. The instinct was guided by the angel and the angel by the instinct.’
Before Michael had left, Melissa had taken to going out alone in the evenings. She hadn’t felt like seeing friends. She’d go to the V&A, to galleries, to look at pictures, to see if maybe she could find it, what it might look like, this angel that she had always taken for granted. At the Tate Modern she had found something, a painting by Gaugin of a woman standing facing the sea. It was called In the Waves. The woman had long, bright hair and she was naked, the sea rising around her. She was open and unhindered, alone and whole in her nature. Melissa had stood there for a long time, gazing at this picture. There it was. That was what it looked like. How could she get back there?
‘So that’s my secret,’ she told Damian. ‘I can’t feel it any more. That thing that belonged only to me, that no one could ever take away. It’s not there any more. I think it’s gone.’
‘It hasn’t gone,’ he said.
‘It has, it has. Where is it, then? I’ve looked for it. I’ve been thinking maybe Blake’s taken it. Maybe that’s what happens with sons, they take their mothers’ souls away. Do you think he’ll give it back? He’s quite good at giving things back, like if I ask him usually he gives it back, whatever it is, my hair clip, my wallet, he’ll just give it back to me. Did you give your mother’s soul back to her? When does it happen?’
‘My mother never gave me her soul, so I never had to give it back.’
‘Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry. It’s so cold, I’m so drunk now I don’t even know what I’m saying any more. I must remember to think positively. Put your arms around me, let’s keep each other warm. I don’t want to go inside yet.’ He did what she asked, rubbing her shoulders to warm her, feeling that this was enough, they had transcended something.
‘It sounds like you’re talking about God,’ he said. ‘Your angel, your guide. Isn’t it God?’
‘It’s my own god. What do you do when you lose your god?’
‘You haven’t lost it,’ he repeated. ‘I can see it. It’s right there.’
‘Where?’
‘There. In your face. Your face is beautiful.’
She looked past him, into the lilac, the mist. ‘But I can’t feel it,’ she said, with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t know who I am.’
He slept on the sofa, aware of her above him, every movement, the noise of the floorboards under her feet. He was the sea churning and drifting beneath her bow, and he fell asleep in the liquid motions of this longing and dreamt of the fishes he’d seen in the aquarium last week with Avril, the snake pipefish making question marks with its tail. In the morning, in the very early light, she came downstairs. He was already up and was standing pulling on his trousers. She paused, for just a breath of time, in which they reached for each other from inside themselves, only with their eyes, in that first purity of morning. She saw him, the whole possibility of him. Her vision swept up and down him and he felt it. He would have gone to her, right then. But he couldn’t move, only look at her, asking silently for her to remember. Then the moment was gone.
‘Morning,’ she said, and went to warm Blake’s milk.
11
THE INITIATION
White ribbons blowing in the breeze around the chicken shop. The police in the road. The song of the sirens. Apart from that there was a hush. The air was slow. The sun was incongruous. Last night the streets had felt the lifting of a boy. His blood ran down and his soul ran up. No one knew who he was in the first hours except for those who had lost and those, less so, who had killed. By morning everyone knew. His name was Justin. The boy who couldn’t sing, the boy who had crucified Angels.
A woman on the corner said, ‘I never go to that park. Now you see why I never go to that park.’
Another said, ‘They chased him, like a pack of dogs. Animals. They’re animals.’
It was possible to get the story by walking up the street. Further on by the church, ‘It was Pauline’s boy, the younger one.’
On the next bend, ‘He ran to the chicken place for help …’
‘… the ambulance was too late …’
‘… thirteen years old …’
‘I am so angry. I am so angry,’ a mother said, leaning against a garden wall, one hand on her pram, a flush of early white roses behind her. ‘When I heard the news I just had to pray.’
‘Yes. Yes,’ another one said.
‘You know the kind of prayer – I prayed and cursed at the same time. God is so cruel. Why does he let this happen? My faith is shaking.’
‘It has to stop.’
‘Too many of our children are dying.’
What happened was this. Justin had an older brother, Ethan, and Ethan was Justin’s beacon in the world. It had always been so. When Ethan ran, Justin ran. When Ethan rode his bike at high speed down the park road to the roundabout, Justin wanted to do the same, though his wheels were smaller, and his legs were shorter. He wanted to be as tall as Ethan, as fast as Ethan, as cool as Ethan, with his cap sideways on his head like Ethan, and his jeans slung low on his hips like Ethan, to walk like him, a broad, soft, cat-like tread, his trainers smooth and neat and guarded on the pavement, knowing of it, every turn and crack of his manor, owning it. And watching them, Pauline had always worried. She knew that there were limits to her power, that Justin would always go with Ethan, he would always follow him. Ethan had not finished school as she had hoped, so all the hope she had left for her sons was in Justin, who had always been good, capable, hardworking, a good student, she pictured him as a lawyer one day or a professor, tall and proud, in a smart suit. Ethan liked to hang out with the boys around the way, the boys who also did not finish school, who smoked on the corners in the moonlight, in the courtyards outside
the flats, in the deserted children’s playground, who had nothing special to do. The things they did, they were shady things. They slung weed, hustled skunk. They aimed for Ferraris that way, not the other way, the right way, which was too hard, too long, too compromising. In this kind of life there were distant hierarchies and contentious postcodes. You could step into Dulwich and be doomed. You were barred from Peckham, from Camberwell. There were showdowns, between these young postcode armies, with silver-blade weaponry and sometimes gunfire. And last night, there was one such showdown in the park next to the library opposite the TM Chicken joint between the tattoo parlour and the barber shop not far along from the bottom of Paradise Row, because Ethan and his crew had had a fight with some people from Catford about a gun he’d asked Justin to hide for him and that Pauline had found and taken to the police, who had then traced it back to the owner, and now that crew from Catford wanted blood, specifically, at the hands of their newest and youngest member, a fourteen-year-old girl, who happened to have not yet earned full initiation into the crew with a bad enough act.
Aside from asking him to hide the gun (which originally hailed from Berkshire, where there is a gun factory), Ethan had also let Justin hang out with him a few times in the courtyard, after school when their mother was still at work. But mostly he told him no, you have to do what Mum said and do your homework. Last night as well he told him no, standing before the mirror in his room putting on his cap and his studded belt and assessing himself overall to see whether he looked like a hard enough man. In the mirror he could see Justin sitting on the bed behind him, still wearing his white school polo-shirt and black trousers, saying, I wanna come with you. Justin liked the feeling of being Ethan’s young partner in the pack. He liked the way they all called him Little Man but treated him like a big man. They also called him The Singing Professor, because of how much he studied and how much he liked to sing and listen to music, all kinds of music, especially his mum’s old soul records. Come on, let me come, Justin said to Ethan. No, Ethan said again. Well I’m coming anyway. You can’t stop me. I can walk where I wanna walk. You best stay here, man, I ain’t joking with you now, Ethan said. Just stay here. I’ll soon come, all right? All right? All right, all right, Justin said, and he went into his room to change his clothes, jeans and a yellow T-shirt, his favourite T-shirt, a T-shirt he felt was down, because he was surely going out to the park tonight no matter what Ethan said. Justin was getting to an age where he felt he could almost equal Ethan, where Ethan’s word was almost level with his own word. Plus he was worried by something, the tone in Ethan’s voice just now, the sudden frightened flash in his eyes. In the mirror Ethan took one last, long look at himself, and put a blade into the pocket of his jeans in case he would need it. It was a small, sharp Swiss brand, small enough for discretion, large enough for defence. He took one more last look, knocked his brother’s shoulder with his fist in the living room, left him there watching TV, and went cat-like in the twilight down Paradise. The day had walked into night without a look back. The clouds were thick. They had joined themselves and made darkness.