Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘No.’

  Damian said, ‘She doesn’t have to jump if she doesn’t want to.’ He was sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs in the water, looking on. ‘Let her be, man.’

  ‘Can you stop saying “man” all the time around the kids? I’m always telling you that and you don’t seem to take it on board.’

  This was said with no attempt at discretion and Damian was embarrassed. He said quietly, ‘I shouldn’t have to change the way I speak.’

  ‘But you do. You do have to change.’ Stephanie also lowered her voice. ‘You’re selfish.’

  These tiffs were frequent now in the Hope household, and here in the Depression they continued. At Stansted they had fought about how many bags to put in the hold. In the taxi they argued about Jerry’s forgotten inhaler (‘you said you were going to pack it, so I assumed you’d packed it!’). In the kitchen, before the first evening meal, they had argued about the cooking. It was not even about Damian and his father any more. It had gone beyond that, and now they just couldn’t seem to get along. The situation was exacerbated by the presence of the others, the canoodling of Hazel and Pete especially, and the apparent harmony of Melissa and Michael, who were less demonstrative in their passion but still linked hands sometimes, still were friendly with each other. Damian had thought it might go the other way, that out in the sun, extracted from their normal routine, he and Stephanie might reconnect. There had, admittedly, at Michael’s invitation, been a flicker of excitement within him at the thought of spending more time with Melissa, but that absolutely had nothing to do with his agreeing to come.

  Avril did not jump. She went instead to play with Blake, whom she liked. Damian walked over to the patio, sharing a fleeting moment of eye contact with Melissa on the way, and picked at some brioche.

  ‘It’s hot, man,’ Michael said, one eye open, squinting.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You cool?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m cool.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Hi! Hi!’ A woman appeared in the garden, entering from the side, raising a skinny, tanned arm and heading for the patio. Under the other arm she was carrying a folder. The Thomson holiday rep, due at noon to offer general tourist advice and check whether everything was OK with the villa.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ Hazel jumped up. ‘Are you the rep? I was wondering, do you have any other mattresses? My bed is so hard.’ (Hazel and Pete were sleeping in the ground-floor bedroom.) ‘And do you have a salad-dryer as well?’

  ‘A salad-dryer? Um, I don’t think we have a salad-dryer,’ the rep said. Her name was Debbie. She was vaguely wishfully blonde, her elbows saggy, her neck wrinkled from the Andalusian sun. Her accent was possibly Billericay, possibly Bermondsey, and she belonged to the category of British expatriot who believes that work should be kept to a minimum, should not cause any undue stress whatsoever. ‘Anything you want you can buy from the supermercado on the main street, no?’ she said, with the Spanish twang at the end. ‘But they don’t sell mattresses there. We can’t change the mattress. Those are just, the mattresses.’

  Avril thought Debbie was a witch and it made her feel homesick.

  ‘Have you been down to the beach yet? You’ve seen the information pack in the kitchen been left there for you? It tells you where everything is, no? The supermercado and where you can change your money an’ that.’ She mentioned a castle they could visit and some sightseeing tours on offer in her folder.

  ‘We asked for a cot,’ Melissa said, ‘but there isn’t one. We had to keep the baby in the bed with us last night.’

  ‘Oh,’ Debbie glanced again at her folder, ‘It should be there if you booked it, no? Did you look in the wardrobe? Sometimes they put it in the wardrobe.’ Michael went to check. ‘I’ll get one sent over then,’ she said when he returned, and before anyone could ask anything else (the black people were always so demanding, she found), she went on her way.

  ‘Helpful lady,’ said Hazel.

  ‘I can’t stand holiday reps,’ Melissa said, yearning again for somewhere more like Jamaica.

  ‘Shame about the mattress. At least the sheets are clean, though, and a little hardness isn’t necessarily a bad thing.’ Hazel gave Pete a sweet, sly look and went and sat back down on their sunbed.

  ‘I’m just looking forward to firing up that barbecue,’ Pete said, his diamond blinking in his ear, his chin coming to rest on her shoulder. The barbecue was a rusted, burnt-out cave submerged in foliage at the edge of the garden. Hazel smiled about him and rubbed his leg.

  ‘You can get my fire going any time, sweet thang.’

  After lunch Melissa and Stephanie opted to go to the supermercado to do a big grocery shop. Stephanie wanted to make sure there would be enough wholesome food for the children to eat amidst all the beer, wine and Haribos that had been requested, and Melissa wanted an open-road drive. They had hired a car for a few days, a green Fiat. They took off out along the sizzling highway while the men stayed at home with the children and Hazel and Pete had an early afternoon ‘nap’ in their room.

  ‘Oh wow, this is just what I needed,’ Stephanie said, her hair flying back in the wind, the sun doing salsa on her eyelids. ‘Sometimes you have to just get away, no matter where you are.’

  ‘I know,’ Melissa said.

  An expanse of ease and spaciousness opened out between them with the unfolding of the landscape. Stephanie was a different atmosphere away from her children. Usually her propriety, her conventionalism, made Melissa feel uneasy, but she was looser on her own, less parental, less alert. She spread out the map on her lap and perused it without commitment.

  ‘Do you ever feel that men and women were not meant to live together or raise children together?’ she said. ‘That they were meant to live in separate villages, maybe visit each other sometimes?’

  ‘Are we talking about Damian here, by any chance?’

  ‘Oh god. Sometimes I want to kill him. Sometimes I want to cut off his head and throw it in the sea. He just riles me these days. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. I’m seriously considering asking him to leave.’

  ‘Is it really that bad?’ Melissa was surprised by Stephanie offloading like this. They were not generally so open with each other about their relationships. She wondered if she knew about Michael’s recent defection from Paradise. Had Damian told her?

  ‘It’s about as bad as it’s ever been,’ she said. ‘We don’t see eye-to-eye on anything any more. He doesn’t help me. You saw what happened with Avril earlier when I was trying to get her into the pool. Whatever I’m trying to do he comes in and makes it harder, and in front of the kids too. He refuses to form a united front with me. I’m just trying to help her get over this fear she has. I don’t understand where it’s come from. She didn’t used to be like this. She used to love the water and now suddenly she’s terrified of it.’

  ‘Did something happen to make her scared of water?’

  ‘No. Not that I know of.’

  ‘Ria’s scared of toilets. There’s something about water that’s frightening to them maybe, the way it swells up and overflows …’

  ‘Hm, maybe.’ Stephanie leaned her head back against the headrest and looked out of the window at the boundless hot blue sky, the hills of ivory sand and the ocean appearing and disappearing as they went. Her mind was full of all the things she wanted to say to Damian but would not be able to remember when she set eyes on him again and resumed the struggle of being in his company. She forgot all about the map-reading.

  ‘Wait, are we supposed to turn off soon?’

  ‘Oh shit! Sorry!’

  They ended up in a different supermercado to the one that they’d intended, in the next town. It was full of salmon-coloured Brits in shorts. They cruised the aisles of Mediterranean fruit, the heat-softened apples and the Italian salami. They found a friendly system. Stephanie pushed the trolley and Melissa fetched, sausages, burgers, cereal, Red Stripe, vodka. There was a barbecue planned for
the final night. The idea was to save some of the alcohol until then but the likelihood was that they would have to restock – Hazel and Pete drank like fishes.

  ‘I think I agree with you about the village,’ Melissa said when they were driving back. Stephanie had been talking again about Damian, this time in a calmer way, more resigned. She had been interested to hear that Melissa had been going through a similar thing, and impressed that it had led to an actual split, if only temporary.

  ‘Aren’t things better now, though, after some time apart? You seem happy. You always do.’

  ‘Please don’t say we’re chocolate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what Hazel always calls us.’

  ‘Oh. No, I wasn’t going to say that.’

  ‘Things are better, I guess,’ Melissa said. ‘But they’re the same as well. It’s the same problems. Life consumes us. We get caught up in it and forget about each other. Sometimes I think we’re just fundamentally not enough – he’s too much for me and I’m not enough for him, or the other way round, I don’t know. It must be that, what you were saying. Relationships and children simply don’t belong in the same place.’

  ‘It’s because we want to do things our way, how we see fit,’ Stephanie said. ‘Instead of some big hairy man coming along and messing everything up.’ They both laughed, and Damian was so extremely hairy, she added. ‘You have to live with these things. You put up with them. What for?’

  ‘But say there were these two separate villages,’ Melissa said, slowing towards a roundabout, ‘isn’t it a bit unfair, the kids staying with the women? Why wouldn’t they stay with the men? Why should we get dumped with all the work?’

  ‘Because they belong with us. They came from us.’

  ‘You sound like my mum. That’s just what you’ve been taught –’

  ‘No, it’s true.’

  ‘… women and men, we’ve all been given this old script and don’t know how to let go of it. It seems indestructible, almost. We’re stuck. We’re all stuck. We haven’t moved forwards at all in some ways. Society makes patriarchs of decent men.’

  ‘Oh, listen to you, Susan Sontag or Germaine Greer or whatever your name is. Are you sure you’re not the one with the script? See, I’ve always steered clear of feminism because they’re always so het up about everything instead of just getting on with their lives and just living, you know? It might have done a lot for women in the long run, but I think an essential thing it’s taken away from us, or at least contested in us, is an innocence of instinct. They talk about choice, yet they seem to look down on a woman’s choice to prioritise her children, as if she’s been forced into it. I’m not oppressed. My children don’t oppress me. They free me. It’s the man that’s the problem.’

  Melissa did not see it that way, but she liked the boldness of Stephanie’s thinking, this great freedom inside of her. She admired her ability to exist loose from external expectation. She didn’t care what anyone thought. She had a pure singularity of purpose and there was contentment and safety in that. She was a solid, straight house. It was not crooked and it would not fall down.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ she concluded, ‘is that things don’t necessarily have to be the way they’ve been put.’

  ‘OK, Gloria Steinem. And by the way, men have been given their oppressive pre-assigned roles as well, you know. It’s not just us.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s easier to settle into the dominant position than the inferior one.’

  They drove the rest of the way in silence, listening to Spanish radio. It was a warm silence, with waves of understanding and connection going through it.

  When they got back to the villa the activity in the garden had shifted from lounging in the sun to doing press-ups and sit-ups on the grass in some kind of testosterone-fuelled strength competition, in which Pete was in the lead and Damian and Michael were clambering somewhere behind. Damian was sweating profusely, the hair on his short legs clinging to his shin bones, for he was not and never really had been a man of exercise. He was only joining in because he felt compelled to compete with Pete, no matter how futile and ludicrous an idea this was. When he saw Stephanie and Melissa entering the garden with the shopping, he exerted himself even harder with his nineteenth press-up, though Michael was less eager to impress, and at the extremity of the press-up collapsed and flopped over on to his back, panting. Spurred by this demonstration of his friend’s apparent physical inferiority, Damian soldiered on, right to the fortieth punishing push, by which time the women had disappeared into the kitchen.

  Damian had not seen or spoken to Melissa, until that dawn meeting at Stansted, since the night of the snow. He had taken back with him to Dorking otherworldly memories of their white cocoon, their secret hours with Millie Jackson and Susana Baca, their intimate smoking in the garden by the black tree, and that lasting image of her at the bottom of the stairs in the early morning looking so wild and sweet, just out of sleep. For weeks and weeks he had been falling asleep next to Stephanie and thinking of Melissa, not in an obvious way, purer than that, more profound, he wanted to help her find her lost angel. Every day he thought about leaving, to go and live on his own, to find his own lost angel, and once he almost had left, in the middle of a Wednesday night, he had taken a suitcase out of the cupboard under the stairs and started to pack. He had even got as far as writing part of a note to leave on the bedside table for Stephanie, but Avril had woken up and come out of her room and asked him what he was doing, and the sight of her, her creased pyjamas, her sullen face, as if waiting to be hurt, had stopped him. The needfulness of his children, the shattering of their perfect normalcy and his fixture within it. He had put everything back where it belonged and thrown the note away. After that he had continued on as usual, work and back, work and back, the long, imprisoning weekends, falling asleep to thoughts of Melissa, who now was almost a phantom in his mind, swollen and blindingly bright, with special powers, such as the ability to float and twirl in mid-air.

  It was difficult, then, this sudden domestic proximity to her, in the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon, especially in the night, when she lay just across the hall in her stripy vest-and-shorts pyjama set, which he had seen when she was coming out of the bathroom yesterday. It was difficult, also, in the presence of both Michael and Stephanie, neither of whom should sniff or have the faintest inclination of his discomfort. He must assume an amiable, natural ease. She must not appear singled out for him in any way. Whenever he spoke to her he tried his best to achieve the exact right pitch of eye contact, not so little that he seemed evasive (he wanted to hold, after all, to that snowy closeness they had found), yet not so much that it became over-meaningful, which of course it was, to him, which was why eye contact was the trickiest thing. He tried hard to engage with the general jovial banter flying around, the constant gags and one-liners (Pete and Michael had hit it off straight away), and the two, implicit shores of maleness and femaleness that had established themselves almost immediately. The men watching football on TV at siesta, the shopping having been packed away by the women, the afternoon all quiet and still, and the three of them, he, Pete and Michael, staring at the screen as if it were the most important ball in the world, while drinking beer. How he wished to be a breaker of moulds, a different man. Hazel, admittedly, was watching it too, and at one point Melissa came in from her sunbed and stood behind the sofa, her hands leaning on the cushions, his cushion, almost touching his head.

  ‘Ah,’ she said after a while, watching the little long-socked men running around in the grass. ‘Now I understand why men like football. It’s a sexual analogy. It’s about trying to score and the obstacles they face along the way. It’s actually all about penises.’

  Michael was appalled. ‘No it’s not!’ he said. Damian laughed, or rather giggled.

  ‘It is,’ she said. ‘You’re trying to get the ball into the net. The net is the vagina. The ball is, well, the balls. What could be closer to a metaphor for sex than that? I can’
t believe I haven’t realised it before. No wonder men are so into it.’

  ‘And women,’ Pete said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Hazel.

  ‘I’m not saying it’s only men who like it, just that they’re prone to liking it.’

  They all carried on watching, in a slightly different way, except for Michael who was used to this two-dimensional, uninformed downgrading of the game. Hazel said, ‘She does have a point, though, when you think about it. In fact most games are about scoring, getting it over the net, getting it into the net, getting it into the hole. Golf, cricket.’

  ‘Now you’re being disgusting.’

  ‘Chat ’bout, you started it!’

  ‘Yeah but you always have to take it there, don’t you.’

  Hazel threw her flip-flop at Melissa’s head.

  ‘It’s about technique, man,’ Michael said. ‘There’s a strategy. It’s mental as much as physical.’

  ‘Innit,’ said Pete, leaning forward over his wealthy, gladiator knees. ‘Tactics, the route they’re taking, who they’re passing to, how they’re passing, wait –’ A roar went up in the stands, then sank. There was almost a goal. The pundits chastised the culprit. ‘Come on, he’s not penetrating enough!’ Pete shouted.

  ‘And there you have it,’ Melissa said. ‘Exactly my point.’

  Over at the dining table on the other side of the left pillar, Stephanie was sitting with Summer who was doing homework. Summer was writing, Stephanie was watching, her hands in her lap, waiting for any need for help, while also encouraging of the determination not to ask for help unless it was necessary. Damian wished she wasn’t there. It made him more self-conscious and it became harder for him to join in with the other men. She had hardly spoken to him since their disagreement this morning in the pool.

  He preferred it when he and Melissa came across each other in passing, for example when he slipped off on his own to read for a while, as he found himself having to do quite often, the perpetual communalness being too much for him. Just before dinner that evening he was reading Tolstoy on the landing, sitting on the top step – he was at the bit when Pierre and Prince Andrei are having their long talk after Andrei has returned from war – when Melissa came bouncing up the stairs after a swim, humming along to Always On Time by Ja Rule.