Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  Carrying the basin carefully in both hands, he went downstairs and placed it on the floor underneath the desk in the dining room. He switched on the laptop and opened a Word document, then he sat down and put his feet into the water. It was just how he liked it, his calves were bare, his feet were cold. Finally settled, ready, he stared at the screen for a moment before bringing his hands to the keyboard. Just as he began to type, he remembered about calling in sick.

  Mercy answered the phone. There were wet patches on the floor around his feet.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said, eating a marshmallow.

  ‘There’s been a death.’

  *

  In the lost city to the north, Michael was surround sound. He was the hot high-street air and the common song blasting from car windows. Beat It whipped by and then Thriller. Liberian Girl sailed down Westwood Hill with The Way You Make Me Feel on its tail. The music was the crying bright June, slipping through the leaves of the birches, soaring up to join the white smoke trails of passing aeroplanes. It was gloriously free now, this music, no longer shrouded by its maker. Now that he was over, the songs were as pure as their first days, every beat was fine, the melodies pristine, the people were hearing them for a new first time and oh, such wide, sweet lamentation! There was a sense of moonwalking. There was a desire to walk backwards. In Paradise, out of respect and admiration for him, Ria put on her one white glove and watched the songs on TV, transfixed.

  Almost as soon as they had returned home from the Baetic, on stepping over the thirteenth threshold, Ria’s limp had returned. The same left leg. The same crooked gait. There was an ache in the left ankle which turned into a pain, and when the pain subsided it did so only as far as the ache, and so she limped, up the stairs, along the landing, down the stairs. ‘Why are you walking like that?’ Melissa asked her. ‘It hurts,’ she said. And not only that, but her hands became dry again, and pale. There was a white, powdered look to their surface. She had to use shea butter four or five times a day.

  As for the house itself, something had happened in Paradise during their time away. It had deteriorated. Either it had happened quickly, over those seven days, or it had been happening already, and now, on returning, it was more visible. It was no longer white, the slim stone façade, but a slight and murky grey. The front gate was rusty and loose on its hinges and the sills of the window twins were cracked, big starfish weeds pullulating in the seams of the concrete underneath. Inside, the hallway was narrower than before, the floors and doorframes more crooked than before, and the dust was like a snow all across the surfaces, building in its occupation. Giant dustballs had gathered in corners. The white film had thickened on Melissa’s shoes between the two wardrobes of the master court, where the accumulation was greatest, along the headboard, for example, the picture rails, the bedside tables. Downstairs in the kitchen a gash had appeared in the wall above the dustbin, releasing a sawdust when pressed, another kind of dust, which came spilling out on to the paprika. And strangest of all, there was a black wavy line going up the stairway, just above the dado rail, which Melissa was sure had not been there before.

  ‘Did you do this?’ she asked Ria.

  ‘No. Maybe it was Blake.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be able to reach.’

  Ria shrugged and went into her room.

  Another thing that had happened during their absence was that Mrs Jackson had gone. She had been taken away, to a home, a neighbour said. Michael no longer had to rescue her in the street on his return from the office, after the journey back on the 176, as usual wearing a suit, now one of four. The suit was becoming a part of his shape. Even in this heat he wore them, the jacket flapping open and his slim hands hanging out from the cuffs. The khakis were no longer underneath. They were being worn away by the rat race and the panelled ceilings and the dead serenade of the photocopier, which was partly why he looked thinner. And partly it was that he was thinner, and the bounce in his walk was lesser, as he took the road to Cobb’s Corner in the mornings with his sanitising hand gel, which he was using more and more often. He had not mentioned the idea of marriage again to Melissa. He was trying to find a way to leave, but like Damian he couldn’t do it. He kept waiting for things to change his mind, which the children did, every day, but not Melissa, though the children were almost enough. This is what happens to a man who was made for a great love and not a suit when he does not feel the love. He closes in. He becomes weary. On the bus he looked out of the top-deck windows and saw less of life and felt less sturdy, less sexy, less rich. He was beginning to forget his magnificence. A darkness was coming down over his face like the pulling of a shade.

  Since Spain, Melissa had been attempting to banish from her mind all thoughts of Damian. She was ashamed. She was paranoid that someone had heard or seen them in the pool, one of the children perhaps. After the event, she had slept on the sofa in the villa, the room buzzing and spinning from the alcohol, and the next day she had found it hard to look anyone in the eye, especially Michael. She felt that she should tell him what had happened, yet she knew he wouldn’t understand, he would take it at face value, so now it was another thing between them, which made being back in Paradise difficult, the narrowness, the sleeping side by side, the daily routine. As much as she tried to force herself to carry on as normal, the chaos and disarray in her head was overwhelming. It was everywhere, in the walls, the furniture, the light switches, the sloping floors. You have made the ground beneath me uneven, she said to Damian in her mind. You have made poltergeist of everything that was still.

  The week after Michael Jackson died, she had a meeting in Waterloo with the Open editor, Jean Fletcher. They had dim sum, sitting on glossy black benches using black chopsticks. Jean was a dark, heavy woman with surprisingly bad dress sense for someone who ran a fashion magazine. She always wore primary colours, different combinations of them, and for this reason had been nicknamed by her colleagues ‘the primary coloured woman’. Today she was wearing a red pleated skirt, a nursery-blue sleeveless blouse, enormous yellow earrings and yellow sandals. Her weave was damp from the heat, wisps of it clinging to her temples.

  ‘So how is everything with you? Your new life, your beautiful baby, your wonderful man.’ She perused the menu. She ordered a heap of dumplings, the chicken ones, the beef ones. ‘I’m terrible,’ she said when the rude waiter had gone away, ‘I start off the day with such good intentions but by lunchtime I can’t remember what they were.’

  It had taken a long time for Melissa to decide what to wear that morning. She couldn’t get out of the bedroom. She kept checking in the mirror, changing her shoes, which now were hurting, and misjudged, she felt, along with the flowered top-dress (too hippy) and the neck scarf. She wasn’t out in the fashion world enough any more, in the world itself, for that matter, which was why she was here.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about coming back,’ she said, ‘being on staff again. I miss the office.’

  ‘Really?’ Jean was amazed. ‘You miss the office? Are you sure, Melissa? You don’t miss the office. All that politics and bitchiness. You’ve just forgotten it. You couldn’t wait to get away from us, remember? You said you felt like you were dissolving in vacuity. Those were your exact words.’ She stuffed a whole dim sum in her mouth and munched on it. Jean ate in public places with a sheer lack of inhibition – she drank from ramen bowls, breakfast meeting bowls, all kinds of bowls.

  ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Melissa said, although it was coming back to her now. She had been desperate to get out of there. It had become unbearable, soul destroying and demoralising, compiling lists of party dresses, the cocky photographers, the undernourished models, that basement office full of other women, only one man, the art director. She used to run into Bruce Wiley sometimes at shoots and once she had even cried on his shoulder about how unhappy she was (after which he had tried to sleep with her, but she didn’t hold it against him).

  Jean said, ‘Anyway, my lovely, we’re stripped down to the bare basics now
with this recession. It’s terrible. We’ve had to make redundancies. Malcolm’s doing all the accounts himself. We’ve merged the fashion, lifestyle and culture together to reduce overheads, and a lot of our freelancers,’ she reached over and put her hand on Melissa’s, ‘I’m sorry, we’re having to let some people go, I’m afraid. We’ve got to do it all in-house …’

  There was a dawning, eating pause, during which Melissa was determined to appear unflapped. She looked down at the platter, the pale dumplings like warm dead brains, their stuffed inner selves bulging against the skin. They looked revolting.

  ‘I fought for you, I really did,’ Jean was saying. ‘You’re one of the best columnists we’ve got … but Malcolm’s doing the sums. We just can’t afford you any more. We can’t afford anyone except for ourselves.’ She squeezed her hand again, leaving a shred of ginger on Melissa’s knuckle.

  ‘I remember that feeling, though,’ she said after paying the bill (her treat, a leaving present), ‘of wanting to get out. I felt like that when mine were very young. It’s like going underground …’

  There was only a month’s notice and of course no severance pay. On the tube home people were sitting there in their suits and skirts and outfits, and she remembered being one of them, a swish hem, a ruffle here, some nice boots, a purposeful leather bag on her shoulder. She felt ridiculous and small in her hippy flowers, badly assembled. She leaned against the glass that separated the seats from the standing area, looking down at the carriage floor, and missed her stop, ending up in Crystal Palace. While she was there she wandered into the park, around the ruins and among the incorrect dinosaurs, climbed the steps up to the stretch of gravel where the palace had stood before it had burnt down. Not far from the base of the transmitting tower, she found a headless woman in the grasses, a broken statue from the days of glory. Melissa felt connected to the statue. She empathised with it. She and the statue sat together in the sun for half an hour, and then she went to get the children and take them back to Paradise. As she went inside, she became the woman who lived inside, and left the woman who had lived outside outside, because the doorway was too narrow for her to get in, and the hallway too narrow for her to walk along.

  *

  After the days of glory, when the people had come from miles and miles and across oceans to see the colossi of Abu Simbel and the tomb of Beni Hassan, the Egyptian mummies, the hemp, the Welsh gold and the rhubarb champagne, the Crystal Palace embarked on its long and steady decline. Joseph Paxton, the father of the palace, was dead. His gardens and fountains no longer sprang with the bright silvers of flora and water. The shine no longer dazzled from the so many acres of glass in the ferro-vitreous roof, for it was dirty. And Leona Dare no longer made shapes in the air above that roof with her famous elastic limbs. A year after Paxton’s death, there had been a fire in the north transept, leaving interminable ash. The sculptures in the Grecian Court were crumbling. The frescos in the Italian Court were fading. At the top of the staircase leading to the entrance at the central transept, a Sphinx had lost its nose.

  In order to get rid of the dust, Melissa cleaned and hoovered every day, because she still believed that the dust had something to do with Ria’s hands. She attacked the swirling microscopic freedom around the TV. She clattered up the stairs with Mr Miele, which she thought of now as a cantankerous old man a little bit like her father. She went to visit her father, and she hoovered his house too, the armies of crumbs beneath the kitchen lino, the ash around the armchair. Cornelius smoked as she did so, insisting that he could do his own hoovering even though he couldn’t and had trouble recalling the actual word ‘Hoover’. The old house was like a shroud around her, full of bad memories and smothered resentments. ‘You didn’t prepare me,’ she said quietly to her father in the living room, but he didn’t understand what she meant. He offered the children Eccles cakes and Ribena. Then they went to Alice’s flat in Kilburn and had eba. Ria didn’t want any eba. She had gone off it.

  ‘What’s wrong with her leg?’ Alice said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Melissa said. ‘I think it’s the house.’

  ‘Did you put the onion and garlic, the pepper?’

  ‘Yes, I tried it.’

  ‘Take her to the doctor. And make her lie down in very hot water, with salt.’

  Sometimes night things could get inside people, Alice said, and if this happened you absolutely had to use the plantain under the pillow. It was the only thing that worked. That was what Alice herself had done when Melissa used to sleepwalk as a child. She had made Cornelius drive to Harlesden to get the plantain.

  ‘One day you get a better house than that,’ she said. ‘Bathroom supposed to be upstairs.’

  In the car on the way home, Ria told Melissa about a dream she’d had about the palace: she’d gone to the woods, and while she was walking another girl joined her and they went through the tunnel and into the maze, had a boat ride on the lake. ‘It was so funny,’ she said. ‘In the maze we couldn’t find each other, then we bumped into each other and she disappeared.’

  ‘That’s a weird dream,’ Melissa said.

  The doctor told them the limp would go with time – if indeed there was a limp. In the surgery Ria was walking fine. When they got home the limp came back again.

  ‘Are you doing this on purpose?’ Melissa said to her in the hallway.

  ‘What?’ Ria said, and just as she did so, Melissa noticed another black wavy line on the wall going up the stairs, on the other side this time. She stared at it. ‘I didn’t do it,’ Ria said, beginning to cry. ‘Stop it, Mummy, you’re making my heart seep.’

  Garlic was reinstated by the front door, some onion on the bedroom windowsills. Vicks was introduced as well, a film of it on the same windowsills and on the banister post under the skylight, with the cayenne pepper sprinkled on top. At the end of July a card came through the letterbox addressed to Lily (there was no surname). A card of the same square shape had come this time last year, also for Lily, when Blake was just born. Melissa opened it. It was a birthday card, from a grandmother who still did not know that Lily no longer lived here.

  She didn’t mention the card to Michael, she put it away in a book, but she pointed out the wavy lines, insisting he take them seriously. ‘I told you. Somebody is drawing on the wall.’ Michael looked at it, still wearing his suit, sweating, dying for a slow red wine. The hall smelt of garlic and he wanted to throw it in her face. Every time he removed onion halves from the windowsills she put them back while he was at work. Now he tried to muster some convincing receptivity towards the far-fetched and, yes, crazy belief in the mounting supernatural happenings occurring in their yard. ‘I’m tired,’ he said.

  ‘So?’ she said, not hearing him. ‘Ria keeps saying it’s not her.’

  ‘So it must be Blake.’

  ‘But he can’t reach. He’s one!’

  ‘Well, who is it then? You? Are you sure you’re not doodling the place up when you should be working?’

  This was meant as a joke, but it didn’t land well because work was a very sore issue with Melissa at present, with the final Open column filed and a job rejection from Vogue, a job she hadn’t really wanted anyway but rejection was rejection. Plus school was out. The country had entered the mass endless meandering of millions of small people over six maddening weeks, where the weeks got longer as they went by, and the days went slower inside the weeks, and September seemed a far mirage of mercy on the cruel and distant horizon. School was a box in which a child could be contained with worthy educating and in-house entertainment. The summer holidays were a swamp in which the dreams, lives, personalities and everyday equilibrium of their carers were submerged and often swallowed.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she replied, without a hint of a laugh or smile, while inside she was thinking, I know who it is, but she didn’t say this out loud because he would look at her again in that erasing way and then she would disappear even more.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to call Ghostbusters,’ he said
.

  The Melissa who lived inside the house and not outside was further unimpressed. ‘Why do you have to make a joke of everything all the time? Can’t you take anything seriously? You’re like a kid. You know what I think? I think it’s us that’s the problem. We’re the ghost. We haunt each other. We don’t work any more. I had a dream last night that we were in a boat and I was standing at the helm, rowing across the Thames. I was mad. I was wearing this old grey sack-dress thing and cackling like a witch, and you were lying down in the bottom of the boat, dead, completely dead. It was horrible. Is that what we’re doing to each other? You’re dying and I’m going mad?’

  ‘Look, I’ve had enough of this,’ Michael said. ‘I’ve tried and tried to make you happy and nothing ever seems to work. I give up. You’re impenetrable. Pete was right. He said to me in Spain that no woman is for ever, it doesn’t last, and I really think he’s right.’

  ‘Has he told Hazel that?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Well, he should,’ Melissa said. ‘She wants to marry him. He should do her the courtesy of letting her know he’s not marriage material.’

  ‘Oh what, like you let me know? That thing you said about not wanting to be someone’s wife? Or don’t you remember?’

  ‘I was drunk,’ she said, looking away. ‘I don’t know half the things I said that night.’

  ‘You said that wife was a horrible word and you were never getting married. How do you think that makes me feel when you say something like that? Don’t you think it might affect me even just a tiny bit? Sometimes I think you don’t have any feelings, period. Not just for me, but for anyone. Maybe it’s true, that dream you had. Maybe that is what’s happening to us.’

  Melissa had turned from him and was looking again at the black line on the wall. Last week in Japan she had been in the detergent aisle with Blake and he was crying because he wanted to get out of the pram and she wouldn’t let him and she’d wanted to scream. Something had smashed on to the floor at the other end of the aisle, some lightbulbs, all by themselves, as if enacting the scream.