by Diana Evans
‘I heard it was a gang initiation, a dare. That’s what someone said.’
‘Where’d you hear that?’
‘Just round the way. Apparently it was a girl who did it.’
‘A girl?’
‘Fourteen years old.’
Michael tried to digest this information. He had to sit down to do it, on the paprika step, shaking his head. A long, beaten sigh came out of him. ‘What is happening in this country, man?’
He often walked past these kids on the high street, standing outside the chicken shops, smoking by the park, looking out at the world and refusing it. He always wanted to say things to them, to tell them how enormous one person’s capacity was to achieve, how intrinsic we all are to the mechanisms of this world, and the reason why it didn’t work properly was that we lacked the crucial combination of power and hope. He wanted to slap their faces and tell them that the world did not owe them anything, it had only led them to believe that it did by taking away their power, and by expecting some compensation, some consolation for this theft, they were continually forsaking their power. It was unjust, but it was so.
‘I love you,’ he said.
Melissa paused, her hands raised to her waist. She was separating the eba into chunks, arranging the bowls for the stew. It was a comfort to watch her, to witness her smallest gestures and movements, which in some way seemed to take place inside him, to be connected to him. Despite the frustration and dismay he was feeling, there was a supreme sense of balance in his body as he watched her.
‘Love you too,’ she said softly, without looking at him.
They carried on talking. She told him about the car and the men with the clubs outside and the boy being dragged away. ‘I mean it now. We need to move away from here. It’s not just about this house, it’s this whole area. It’s not safe. I want the kids to live somewhere safe.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, and he liked that she was saying ‘we’, as if this ‘we’ were not contested. ‘Move where, though?’
‘I’m not sure – Sussex, maybe? Kent? Somewhere near the coast?’
‘What, you mean leave London?’
Michael was having images in his head of the children playing on an empty beach in foul weather, with lots of white people in the distance.
‘We could …’
‘I’m not leaving Londinium,’ he said adamantly. ‘I need to be around brown people.’
At this Melissa felt a familiar tightening sensation in her face, the cold hand squeezing around her mouth. Michael’s reliance on brownness was a prison, hers as well as his. It cut him off from other possibilities, from certain unknown skies and distant blue grasses. He did not want to go to France because his race-detector read high levels of fascism. He did not want to go to China, to Australia – too backward, too white. But what about the sunsets there, or the mountains, the canyons, the particular lights, and other beauties? Colour was in his way of all the other colours. It had given him a script for his life, or forced it upon him, and he was compelled to follow it. If the script were taken away, who would he be?
‘London is not the only place,’ she said, spooning the stew into the four bowls. To each she then added the okra. ‘Ria and Blake are more important than what we need. It’s about what they need. I don’t want them to get killed by a stray bullet one day just walking to the shops to buy toothpaste.’
‘They won’t be, stop exaggerating. You sound like Stephanie. They need brownness too, you know. I’m not only thinking of myself. If everyone started packing their bags every time something like this happened, there’d be none of us left.’
‘But they are their brownness. It’s inside them. It’s part of them. God, why are we even talking about this? It’s so basic.’
She shoved past him with two of the plates. Blake was crawling across the room away from the TV towards Michael to try and stand up by holding on to his back. It was that same old predicament. He did not understand who she was. He would never understand, because they were different creatures. When Melissa tried to see the world through Michael’s eyes she could not see all of it. It was half closed. Yet as she brushed past him again on the step, his wide shoulders taking up most of the doorway, Blake grasping them with his thick infant fingers, she still saw a home for herself, a place that she could inhabit, somewhere to sink into. She was being pulled away from him and towards him at the same time.
He went on, persisting with his point. ‘I want my kids to see black folk around them, not just feel their blackness inside.’ Those words, blackness, black people, whiteness, they were crude, contagious. The children would be infected by them, dragged also into this prison, this malady, this towering preoccupation, robbed also of a love for canyons, for particular lights. ‘The less they see it around them,’ he said, ‘the less they’ll feel it inside.’
‘No, the more they’ll feel it.’
‘Yes, but in a bad way.’
There was a brief silence. Melissa said, ‘It wasn’t like that for me, though, Michael, the way it was for you. I had other things to worry about when I was a kid.’
They ate, the four of them, at the dining table under the white light. The eba calmed them, it soothed them. Like Alice, they ate it with spoons, dipping it into the stew, adding some chicken with a fork or curtailing the goo of the okra. Blake used his fingers, Melissa helping him. It was good chicken. The taste went right down to the bone. The chicken essence that had once lived in Melissa’s neck seemed to Michael now to live more widely, to have caught her hands that made the chicken, that stabbed it, seasoned it and cooked it. Whenever he ate her chicken he still thought of her neck, and the hollows of her collarbones …
‘The eba’s still not right,’ she said. ‘It’s too grainy.’
‘I like it,’ said Ria, who did not yet understand the nuances of eba consistency. She ate two more helpings, saving a wing for the end, pulling it apart with her hands.
‘Do they sell gari in Sussex? Plantain?’ Michael joked as they were clearing away. Then Ria called him into the living room and they danced there together the two of them in that way she liked where he held her and they twirled slowly and at the end he bent her backwards over his arm and looked down at her with his eyes full of adoration. Melissa watched them from the kitchen doorway. That very slight limp in her left leg, it was still there.
Afterwards he went upstairs with Blake, beneath the skylight, past the birds of Tanzania, past the indigo dancers on the wall of the master court. He was glad there was no onion or garlic hanging around any more – it was true, it wasn’t about the house, it was more than that and he was glad she could see that now. Standing by the window, he was aware of the street below and the darkness of it, thick with vengeance and violence. There was unrest in Bell Green. The skies were rich with sirens. He had a yearning to be back on the other side of the river, the other side of the divide, where he knew the people better, where he understood them more. People in the south were too rash. They would take something further than it should go. There was a sharper edge, a lawlessness in the air.
‘Maybe we should cross back over the river,’ he said.
She had heard him coming down the stairs, the sound of his weight on the timber, the tumbling as he took speed. She missed, too, that tumbling sound of him.
‘It happens across the river as well,’ she said. ‘It’s everywhere. This whole city is infected.’
There was a song playing on the system by I Wayne, Living In Love, lamenting the fighting among his people, the bloodshed. It made them think of Justin and the blood on the pavement, and the children north and south who were dying in this war. It seemed an endless war. The weapons were becoming more deadly. The children were getting younger and younger.
‘You know what the worst thing is?’ Michael said. ‘I don’t understand my people any more. The things they do, how their minds work to make them do those things. I don’t know my community.’
She couldn’t help it any more. She could no longer s
uppress the desire to be in the place inside his arms, that warm country. She remembered something Carol had said on the phone the other night, that if there is someone in this world whom you love, whom you think you can share a life with, it is important to hold on to them, to work to do what it takes to keep it strong and good. She stepped into him, where he was sitting on the bench, stood between his knees and brought his head to rest easily against her, and his arms came up all the way around her. Octopus.
‘You know me,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ He looked up at her. ‘I know you. You’re my woman.’
She liked the sound of that, the ownership in his voice. It was sensual, the same supreme sensuality that had drawn her to him in the beginning. Maybe love was ownership, she thought as she was kissing him. All the things she had avoided for as long as she could remember: safety, settlement, home, surrender, a step away from the spiky demands of the self into sweetness; a reduction, yes, but an opening. Was there so much shame in belonging to someone? Could it imply not weakness, but sheer strength, the risk of it?
This kiss was like another first kiss. In fact it was an advance on that kiss because of everything that had come since, all the absence and distance of the past few weeks and months. Desdemona was present, in full effect. So was Angelina. And like before, those thirteen years ago by the sink, he slipped inside the armholes of her dress so that his hands could roam her skin.
‘We’re Londoners,’ he said, as another siren rang out and the night sky flashed blue.
He was aware that he was supposed to go, back out into that blue, back to the hotel. He didn’t want to go, but he needed to be forgiven.
‘I’m sorry, for everything,’ he said.
‘Don’t say sorry. Stay with me.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I don’t want to be by myself. This is no time to be alone.’
So he lifted her and went with her to the rug, her smallness in his tallness, and they lay down there before the window twins. All he knew was that he needed some part of her in his mouth, in his hands, against him, in every moment. She pulled his work shirt away, pulled him out of the world that detained him. He lost himself in the kingdom of her body and they moved into the safety of one another, until she was swirling in her river and dancing low, and this time when she approached the top of the mountain she did not fall back down just before the summit but went right high over it and fell down the other side, the right side. This time it was not erasure. It was addition, fullness, completion. Now they were travelling, high over Bell Green, high above the towers, away from the city, further and further out towards the ninth cloud of Legend.
‘I didn’t know we could still be like this,’ she said when it was over.
He was still lying on top of her, their arms wrapped around each other. She basked in the weight of him.
‘Let’s go away somewhere at least. I need to get out of here. I need to get off this island.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Where d’you wanna go?’
She was thinking of Jamaica, how much she’d loved it there. She had felt so at home, the warm air, the bright colours, the black country, the lack of inner questioning.
‘Somewhere pretty,’ she said. ‘Completely different from here. Somewhere where there’s no English people.’
‘I’m with that.’
‘And soon.’
Outside at the top of Paradise Row, the light in the living room of Pauline’s flat remained switched off. She was inside, listening for the newly historical sound of one person’s breath.
12
NEAR TORREMOLINOS
Not Chile, not Peru. Not Jamaica or Brazil or Madagascar, or even the unspoilt, rugged country along the south-eastern coast of Corfu. Not Sicily, not Tuscany. No orchards or olive groves, or some remote village pleasantly untouched by a tourist footprint. Not even to Morocco, or Tunisia, or some other shore along a different, browner continent that would feel like they had really travelled. They went to the Costa del Sol. Mass-market Spain. A two-hour flight on easyJet. Crawling with Brits. A little place near Torremolinos amidst the bays, dunes, cliffs and estuaries of the wide, flat valley between the two mountain ranges of the Baetic Depression. The shopping centre by the beach featured an Indian restaurant and an Irish pub. There was bingo above the discotheque. Almost everybody spoke English, and the paellas were less than Spanish.
Not a cottage in a long-grassed wild or woodland vicinity. Not a barn with original features and rustic charm, or a cabin by a river, or a lighthouse, or a tower, or some other circular gesture of architecture. This villa was square. The rooms were sharply angular, the roof a flat, square asphalt plane, conducive, albeit, to group yoga, which Melissa initiated in the mornings. The floors were cool speckled tiles devoid of rugs, apart from one, beneath the Moorish coffee table in the lounge, which was stained with circles from the drinks of previous Thomson Holidays package-deal customers. A hard staircase led from the hall into the upper rooms, four bedrooms and two bathrooms; a fifth bedroom with its own en-suite was situated downstairs off the lounge. There were two faux-Roman terracotta pillars flanking the main sofa at a distance, and an arch into the kitchen. Everything else was either square or rectangular and the overriding colour was magnolia, except for passing wisps of colour in the occasional painting, amateur renditions of Baetic landscapes, one signed by a Q. Bertonell, and the ugly brown and yellow curtains behind which a dragonfly was discovered on arrival by Stephanie, who did not express her alarm in order to set a good example to the children. Another major insect was found by Michael, a cockroach, floating dead on its back in the middle of the swimming pool. He fished it out with a net and cast it into the crisp, dry bushes surrounding the garden, hoping that Melissa would think him heroic.
They were here with Damian and Stephanie, their respective children, and also Hazel and Pete, who were still rapt in the first throes of new love and finding it impossible to keep their hands off each other. All the time they were kissing and touching and caressing and sitting on each other and massaging each other’s feet and rubbing suncream into each other’s backs. Pete was a strapping, six-foot, six-packed, bronze-toned hunk of a man with dark designer stubble across a wide and chiselled jaw, a diamond in one ear, seductive eyes and a slow smile. In his presence most other men paled into aesthetic inadequacy, and he knew this, Hazel knew this, Michael and Damian knew this, but everybody tried their best to ignore it and not be jealous. It had all come about when Hazel, intent on her foursome idea, had suggested to Melissa a week in Spain with their men – she had a friend who worked for Thomson and could get a cheap deal. Melissa was so desperate to get away by then that she’d said OK, but they’d have to bring the kids, which was fine with Hazel, her being permanently broody, but then Michael had invited Damian, partly for moral support, and somehow it had become a sixsome, plus the five children, in one big villa for seven nights in May. They would all get to know each other. They would have rolling, raucous fun, stay up late, get drunk, jump waves, play games. In the middle of the night everyone met at Stansted airport and offered their lives to easyJet. They touched the Depression at dawn and came out into the valley of heat with the sun already high. The parents found taxis and checked the children’s seat belts, feeling middle-aged and boring as Hazel and Pete, seasoned from a recent backpacking tour around Central America, decided to take a bus. ‘A bus?’ Stephanie queried, ‘Yes, a bus,’ Hazel replied, ‘you know, one of those vehicles that takes people to places for a small fee?’ And they watched, pretending not to notice, pretending not to be irked by it, as the fresh new lovers wandered away along the line of airport palms with their arms around each other, both in their G-Unit flip-flops, Hazel’s hair falling down her back, in the deeper distance she hooked her thumb into the khaki shorts pocket upon Pete’s right buttock and just left it there, and they were gone.
Now everyone was in the garden, after yoga, which all the adults had participated in except for Stephanie. Damian in par
ticular had struggled with the balancing postures of the primary series, almost falling over twice in trying to keep his palms pressed together above his head while standing on one leg. Michael, though, was surprisingly supple, Melissa had discovered; he had a hidden Buddha. He was sitting in a white plastic chair next to the white plastic table on the patio, upon which were the remains of a late breakfast, Nutella, the spread of holidays, a chocolated knife lying across the upturned lid, brioche, croissant crumbs and a carton of orange juice, all gently congealing beneath the shade of a dirty Heineken parasol. Melissa was nearby, sunbathing and reading Tar Baby on a deckchair while Blake played on the grass beside her, apparently nodding his head to the sound of Justin Timberlake coming from the speakers. On a neighbouring sunbed were Hazel and Pete in an affectionate straddle. Hazel was wearing an orange bikini and kept laughing as Pete made little taps on her abdomen in a private game, which was getting on people’s nerves. Meanwhile everyone else was in the pool, the children splashing through the water doing handstands, jumps, dives, flips and float rides. Balancing cross-legged on a foam island, sun-kissed and sailing across, was Ria, her back perfectly straight, her arms the shape of champion. Since arriving here her limp had disappeared and her hands were no longer dry. Avril was watching her from the edge of the pool, afraid to jump in. Stephanie tried to coax her.
‘Come on, sweetie,’ she said, her arms raised, thick and untoned by the primary series, which Damian could not help but notice. ‘I’ll catch you, come on!’
‘I don’t want to,’ Avril insisted.
‘Just jump!’
It was important to Stephanie that her children did not entertain fear. Avril had a lot of it, and she didn’t quite know what to do about it. She went closer and got hold of her hands.