Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  ‘Oh, hi Damian,’ she said. ‘Reading again, I see.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said shyly. She smelt of the swimming pool, she was wearing her wrapper and a thin white cotton smock that was damp from her costume underneath. There was a pause, a nice, wanting-to-stay-here-chatting kind of pause.

  ‘What is it?’ She peered as he displayed the cover. ‘War and Peace. God, I had to read that for my degree. I couldn’t finish it. It’s just so long. Why is it so long? I gave up at around page seven hundred, I think. I just couldn’t justify the amount of time I was spending on reading just this one book, d’you know what I mean?’

  ‘Hm, it is long,’ he said, ‘it’s true. But I’m enjoying it. I like Pierre.’

  ‘Is he the fat one?’

  ‘Is he fat? I don’t know …’

  ‘I think he is. That’s one thing about that book I do remember. It gives a very physical sense of people. You really know what they look like.’

  ‘And what they feel like too,’ Damian said. ‘That’s why I like it. It gets right inside their hearts, so you know what they’re thinking, how they’re responding to things, why they do the things they do. Like that scene when Natasha almost elopes with Anatole and she gets sick afterwards because she’s so humiliated. I think he does go on too much sometimes, though, in those sermons, well, they’re essays really, on war and morality and philosophy and all that. I don’t think they had proper editors in those days, that’s probably why. If they had, a lot of that stuff would’ve been edited out. But still, I like the fact that he was bending the rules, playing with form. Who says a novel can’t be an essay as well, or a sermon, or a philosophical text, or whatever?’

  Melissa was looking down at him patiently. ‘Yeah, I agree,’ she said, but he sensed that she was losing interest, and he had gone on for too long. ‘Speaking of which,’ she gave him a light, scolding shove on the shoulder, ‘how’s yours coming along? You still haven’t sent it to me.’

  ‘Um, I’ve looked at it …’ He had, and had realised, as he had feared, that it was terrible, that there was no other more rambling, self-pitying, stilted even in its ramblingness, leaden and torturous offloading of male twenty-something angst than this piece of literary shit, and this realisation had led to a newly rekindled depression lasting about five weeks, which had ended roughly six days ago, that is, as much as depressions can actually end.

  ‘And?’ she said.

  ‘And … well, it needs … work.’

  ‘OK. OK, that’s good. Positive. Remember what we said, Damian, positivity is the way to go. It’s our mental landscape that holds us back.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘I’ve been reading Thich Nat Han,’ she announced.

  ‘Thich Nat who?’

  ‘He’s a Buddhist monk. My sister told me about him. He writes a lot about the importance of meditation and experiencing the present. You should try it, it’s really been helping me with my stress and general state of mind. I’ve started meditating every day, or trying to, trying to stay aware of each moment, and it does make me feel calmer. It really does.’

  ‘Actually,’ Damian said, going back to the issue of the bad novel (now that he had opened this can of failure the stench of it was demanding more of her attention), ‘I’ve been thinking of working on something completely new,’ (but somehow trying to relate it to Thich Nat Han so that she wouldn’t think he was being dismissive or self-obsessed), ‘you know, living in the present, letting old things go. I’ve been thinking I should maybe just bury that novel and write something different, in a different form. Maybe a script or something.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ she said, ever bright, reassuring. ‘Follow your feeling. Have faith in yourself.’ Then Michael came along with Blake. He had fallen asleep in his arms. ‘Oh he’s not sleeping is he? What about our evening? How long’s he been asleep?’

  ‘Not long,’ Michael said, meaning since just before her swim. He had been having a Red Stripe with Pete under the parasol and they’d been talking about boxing – and how comfy it had been, Blake getting heavier and heavier in his lap, and how cruel it would have been to wake him up then, when the sun was setting so peachly, and the air was so warm and silky, and the beverage was going down so cool and wet.

  ‘Well, you’re gonna have to wake him up, aren’t you,’ Melissa said, in a different tone of voice, and went to take a shower.

  The next day they went to the beach, everyone, on foot, an exodus of flip-flops and beach towels and swimming apparatus and suncream, and buckets and spades bought en route from the shopping strip. The cool blue sea at the helm of the bay. The sandy shingle shore smothered largely with frying Brits. The heat was high and mighty. Ladies lay splayed in their deepening colours, sweat seeping saltish into the crevices of their thighs, and men with vast stomachs basked on their backs with their toes pointing upwards, floored by the meeting of beer and sun and breezelessness – for today there was none, only out there on the sea beneath the moving current, where the swimmers sought refuge. Brown heads bobbed among the buoys. The waves had attitude, a secret pulse and a throbbing surge that sent their white frills gently crashing. Stephanie headed straight for them, once her blanket was laid down, once her children were creamed and set to making sandcastles. ‘I’m going for a swim,’ she said, and charged out there in her flowered tankini, past the bodies, sunbeds and parasols, strode straight on into it. Melissa joined her, and they became two brown heads bobbing with the buoys, very far out, so far that Blake cried, and Michael was reminded of that time in Montego Bay when she had disappeared around the ocean corner and come back laughing, as she did again, this time with Stephanie, that particular look of oceanic elation on their faces, flopping down on to their towels. Weaving among the bodies was a man selling doughnuts, calling, ‘Ah rosquillas!’ with his basket of sugared wares. They were warm and jamless, a hole in the middle, and sold well; the children, and Pete with his sweet tooth, slowly followed by the others, all together in the atrium of the heat eating from these soft rings of sweetness, the afternoon burning on, the light making glitter on the ocean.

  As usual Hazel and Pete spent much of the time sprawled next to each other with their limbs entangled, their bodies well-oiled from mutual suncreaming, their ears almost touching and their lips continually moist from young and superior Desdemonas. Pete had a serene and blissful look on his face, he gave a long sigh of pleasure, ‘Aaah, this is what I’m talking about,’ and Michael could not help but feel envious of him. Somewhere in the skies past Stansted and the Baetic, it seemed that Melissa had left her love suspended. Up there in the softness of an inaccessible cloud they were perhaps embracing still, mythologies of themselves, dream figures, still languishing on Legend’s number nine, but down here on earth the link had gradually loosened. She had cooled to him, like day to an evening, slipped back, stepped out. She had withdrawn her passion, changed her mind, did not come to him as Hazel went to Pete and lay her cheek in the less sinewy cushion of his shoulder. There was no original Desdemona here in the Depression, only forced, scrawny likenesses, a passing peck this morning on the patio, or a caress in the forgiving wings of dawn. He wanted her to stroke his head the way Hazel did Pete’s, to cream his back with that same tenderness, to treat him the way she had when he’d moved back in, clinging to him in the nights, holding his face to her ribcage as if she were going to crush it. Since their reunion he had been trying his best to make things up to her, to be a good, faithful, attentive, non-phone-number-collecting life partner, father and potential husband, and for a while everything had been fine. But reality had slowly crept back in, the children, the hours spent with and without, the strangulating domesticity, and his efforts began to feel more and more draining, even futile. He lay next to her on the towel and felt the mist of the cool droplets of water on her skin from the sea, wanting so much to reach her again, to return to their special place. ‘Hey,’ he said, touching the damp small of her back, wanting her to remember, to think of it, ‘how was the water, mermai
d?’ She looked down at him, holding back a piece of her smile. ‘Amazing,’ she said, then turned away and looked out towards the ocean.

  She was looking at a woman lying on a blanket further down by the water, wearing a black swimming costume. She was middle-aged, somewhere in her forties, and sitting with her was a man of a similar age and two teenage girls. They all looked alike, the four of them. They all had straight brown hair and rosy lips, and the similarity of gesture that only happens in families. After a while the man and the two girls got up and walked into the sea to swim. The woman lay there and watched them go, the sturdy stride of her man, his thickened, hairy navel, and the two narrow-hipped girls, thin, with jutting teeth. Melissa watched her watching them, and she sensed a feeling of sorrow, a despondency, in the woman’s beached body, slumped in the sand, seeing her family from a distance, this enclosure in which she lived. It was a way of watching herself from the outside, in different manifestations, and she would never escape it, this source of her love and this source of her constriction. In this woman Melissa glimpsed a slice of her own future, one of exhaustion and deflation and imprisonment, and it repelled her. She wanted to be at the beginning of something again, rather than in the eventuality of something. Out here in the midst of this jumbled sixsome, it felt as though Michael, she and Michael, were an old, safe place, and however high they went, to whichever number of cloud, they would always arrive back in this same safe and dusty place, where there was nothing left to discover, where the future was dressed in the past.

  ‘Don’t you just love it?’ Hazel said from the next towel along, to everyone and no one in particular. ‘I love this, that we can just do this, you know, come out here like this. We should definitely do it again. Maybe next time we’ll have a sproglet of our own, hey sweetness?’

  Pete murmured something in reply, opened one eye and closed it again, which Hazel took as adequately positive. She had whispered to Melissa in the bathroom last night, ‘Isn’t he perfect? I really think he might be the one. I really think he might be.’

  And the children were architects. Castles were built. Moats were burrowed and the sea fell in at the visitations of the waves. As the tide came in the castles crumbled, and were taken out. They built more, further in, huddled together with their tools, patting rooftops, making grainy drawbridges, their skin getting browner in the heat. Dusk fell blue and quiet on the mountains and there were evening birds. Only then did they make their way back, the children finally acquiescing, allowing themselves to be led away from the shore to the square white cool-floored house, to a late meal around the long dining table, the dark Spanish night so close and strange at the windows as they slept.

  The following evening the children were put to bed early, as Stephanie wanted to maintain some semblance of order and normality amidst the debauchery of late-night drinking and music, which the girls, sparkled by doughnut sugar and Pete’s endless offerings of Haribos, were often privy to at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping. They had heard the conversations about the resurgence of fascism in the West. They had heard the argument about the superiority of Foxy Brown over Lil’ Kim. They had heard it when Hazel had announced that she liked having her big toe sucked during lovemaking, and everyone had since been instructed to keep their voices down, there being no door separating the staircase from the lounge. Now it was after eleven, there was a bottle of vodka being worked through on the coffee table, Damian was outside smoking, while the others were splayed across the sofa and armchairs, Michael on his phone, Melissa and Hazel playing a game of blackjack. Stephanie was watching a bad Spanish drama on TV during an interlude from the wine and cards, when there came a sudden rush of activity down the stairs, a flurry of pyjamas and gowns, Summer, then Ria, holding Avril’s hand. Avril had a desperate look on her face.

  ‘Mum, there’s something wrong with Avril,’ Summer said. ‘She keeps saying she wants to go home.’

  Stephanie stood and looked her over. Avril immediately clutched on to her, squeezing the fabric of her dress. ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ she said.

  ‘Please let me go home! Please, Mummy!’

  The tone in her voice was shrill and unnerving, like someone being hounded. Stephanie hugged her and stroked her back. ‘But we can’t go home now, honey, it’s too late. We’re going back on Saturday. Why do you want to go home all of a sudden?’

  ‘I just do.’ She burst into tears, just as Damian came in from the garden and asked what was wrong.

  ‘Gosh, you’re shivering,’ Stephanie said. ‘Look, come here, it’s all right, it’s all right.’ She carried on rubbing Avril’s back and up and down her arms, crouching in front of her, but this didn’t seem to help. Her eyes maintained that wild, petrified look and her breathing quickened.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Stephanie asked Damian, raising her voice.

  He went and got hold of Avril’s hands. She gazed right through him, breathing frantically. The expression on her face reminded him of the night she’d found him trying to leave. He carried her to the armchair, sat her down and told her, ‘Avril, listen now. The plane to take us home is ready on Saturday. Then we can go home. The plane’s not ready right now, OK? So we’re going to stay here until then and have some more fun, OK?’

  ‘But Mummy, Mummy I can’t – I can’t breathe!’

  This sent Stephanie into a frenzy. She grabbed hold of her child and pulled her close. ‘Get some water, someone!’ she cried, ‘Oh my god, what’s happening? What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with my baby?’

  ‘I think it’s a panic attack,’ Hazel said, ‘I used to get like that sometimes when I was younger.’

  Panic attacks, coming from a family where outward expressions of mental extremity were uncommon, were nonexistent in Stephanie’s pool of parenting knowledge. She knew what the best hayfever tablets were and how to bazooka a verruca and what to do about chicken pox, but she did not know how to simmer anxious shivering or restore the ability to breathe, and her futility in this scenario she found terrifying. She lashed out at Damian, ‘It’s because of you. She wasn’t like this before. You’ve made her, we both have, we’ve —’

  ‘Steph —’

  ‘No, it’s true, I know about this. They can feel it when there’s tension, it makes them frightened … doesn’t it? Oh darling, it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re fine, everything will be fine, sssshhhhh come here …’

  It was clear that Stephanie was not the best person to comfort Avril, but she wouldn’t let go of her. Damian went to get a glass of water. He stood uselessly watching as Stephanie stroked her head, rocked her, trying to calm herself down at the same time. Hazel gathered some cushions on the sofa. ‘Let her just sit down quietly. She’ll be fine. She just has to feel safe. If we all be calm, she’ll be calm too. Show her the yoga breathing, Lis.’

  And it was easier, Avril found, concentrating on sitting still like this, concentrating on breathing in and out, from the pit of her belly. Eventually she settled down. It was like a crashing wave changing its mind inside her and slowly turning back. Maybe it would not take her all the way out after all. Maybe she would be safe and the castle would not be washed away. She lay her head on the arm of the sofa and felt her mother smoothing her hair, making her sleepy, saying, her voice high and thin, ‘Ssssh, sssh, ssshh.’

  When she was calm again, her eyes beginning to close, Damian carried her back upstairs. Watching him go, Melissa felt sorry for him, the defeat and sadness in his shoulders, yet that warm paternal strength that endured regardless.

  She was still thinking of this when she was lying awake next to Michael in the small hours of that night. She had been falling in and out of sleep. She had had a strange, brief dream, almost just one image, of Damian leaning over her in the darkness, his thick torso, his large hands carrying her in some way, and there was water all around them. There was a sense that the water was very cold but they themselves were warm within it, and that this heat was coming from his body. It was such a rich, immediate image th
at turning to find Michael’s exposed back next to her, expanding and sinking with his breathing, made her disorientated. She heard a noise coming from downstairs, like a chair being moved, and wondered if it was Damian.

  When she went down, she found Stephanie sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing-gown, drinking black coffee. She was disappointed. She had imagined talking to him again in this quiet night darkness, just the two of them. She wanted to tell him something, something that no one else would understand.

  ‘Coffee? At this time?’

  ‘It helps me sleep. I’m backwards. Literally.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Stephanie shook her head, dropping her chin into her hands. She was still upset about Avril. ‘I was a mess before. I was ridiculous. I couldn’t have handled it more badly, could I?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, you were overwhelmed.’

  ‘But I should’ve known what to do. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Stephanie.’ Melissa dropped a chamomile teabag into her cup and came and sat down. ‘You can’t expect to always be the perfect mother, in every situation, in everything that happens. It’s not feasible. Take me, for instance, I remember once I didn’t even know the right thing to do when Ria had a high temperature. I kept putting more clothes on her, thinking she was cold.’

  ‘Really?’ She laughed, with a hint of scorn. There was a passing coolness between them. Stephanie began explaining, in a distant, more vulnerable tone:

  ‘It’s all I ever wanted, you know, the children. To look after them, raise them well, to bring them into this terrible world and make them shine in it and make it brighter. When they were babies, I remember there was this feeling of impermanence. It’s all new. You’re so afraid. You’re thinking only of keeping them alive and seeing that they’re healthy and growing. Later it’s different, though. It gets more complicated, when they’re leaning towards their own independent selves and there’s less you can do to save them. That frightens me more. I can’t always be what they need any more. I can’t help them … I know, you think I’m a dinosaur, don’t you?’