Ordinary People

by Diana Evans

  ‘Nothing is inanimate,’ she said absently. ‘Everything is alive.’

  ‘Really? That’s good to know,’ said Michael, ‘because I sure don’t feel alive.’

  Desperate for his wine, he sloped to the kitchen and unscrewed the lid of the bottle. All through this dark and feverish summer he drank like this, before he had even taken off his jacket, a full stop at the end of the working day, an aperitif to sometimish dinner. How deliriously and utterly he wanted to make love to her, to rise above all this friction and get back to what was important. But night after night they slept like soldiers in the red room, estranged. Morning was a cold white hand that lifted them by their clothes and dragged them up, both of them covered in dust. The mildew in the wardrobes was thickening. The dancers on the wall were dwindling. The joists beneath the floorboards were rusting.

  One morning Michael tried to bridge the hostilities. He got hold of her when she was coming out of the shower. She was all wet and brown and shiny, and her thigh was so thick, he couldn’t help it. His love for her was still deep and wide, it shattered him, it was destroying him, and while he knew that this was so he wanted it to carry on until the last drop was poured out of him, even though he knew that there was no last drop, no end, no way out. He slipped his arms around her and became the darker brown against her caramel. But only limply she held him back. She patted the backs of his shoulders, friendly, distant, and did not appear to experience any particular excitement or even registration of the weight of his forlorn warm sex against her leg. After an awful, empty moment, she extracted herself from him and dried herself with her towel. She was not there, the girl of the ocean. She did not put on her bracelets any more, her rings. She was nowhere in sight. The mummies in the Egyptian Court were vanishing. The statues in the Roman Court were withering. The flowers at the entrance to the Assyrian Court were dying. The arches of the Medieval Court were splintering.

  And Thich Nat Han could not help with any of this. He said be present in each moment, notice the flowers and the little animals. Feel the calming surety of your breath, going in, and out, going in, and out. It was too basic. In fact it was infuriating, and during a lunchtime meditation session she threw the book across the room, hitting the picture of the twilight dancers which then fell down, violently, with more force than seemed warranted. When she put the picture back on the wall it was crooked. Every time she tried to straighten it, it gradually slipped down on one side again. The dancers looked so closed in in their indigo, as if they also were trapped, in their movement. Their arms were stiff and oddly shaped. Their feet were too small. After a while Melissa no longer tried to straighten their world. She accepted that the thing that lived in the house wanted everything to be crooked. Most of all Ria.

  She limped. One white glove on the Michael Jackson hand and the other hand dry-white. Sometimes she whispered to herself. She got clumsy. At Little Scamps one day she fell over and hurt her wrist. In the park, in the playing fields, the swimming pool, all the places they went that summer to survive the swamp, she had that same crooked walk, and it always got worse the minute they stepped into Paradise, where the woman who lived in the house was waiting in the hallway mirror to take Melissa when she looked into it. She had harder eyes and a thinner mouth. She felt much tighter inside, joy was another country, her smile was a jetsetter. Frantically, Melissa searched for ways to get back into her body. She went swimming and looked at the weather through the slats in the intermittent ceiling, floating on her back, and came out still floating but the ground came back too soon. She went walking by herself in the evenings without telling Michael where she was going. He would picture her, a flash of denim, glinting through the city, her tasselled boots, the way she walked, with a shy power. She went to the Tate and looked at In the Waves again to see if she could get back that way. Another day she went to a yoga class at the lido in Brixton, where evening fell as they were breathing, and the teacher with his crossed legs spoke softly, almost inaudibly, about the way to peace. There it was, in the darkness of her, ever still, not destroyed, only disturbed by passing tremors. When the class was over she walked with this peace out into the park. She saw the grass spread across the hills and the few shy stars in the smoke of the vista. Tenements glittered. Brixton was night-blue. She skipped down the steps to the street, happy to be with herself again, but when she entered the house it was like entering a cave. It seemed that everywhere she went there was a cave, the same one, with different entrances.

  On a Sunday evening after a visit from his parents (he looked tired, they’d said), Michael was sitting on a chair before the window twins shaving his hair. Out of habit, he waited for Melissa to finish it for him, according to the custom, to glide up with the blade from his neck to his crown, neatening the edges, rubbing at the stubborn patches. She stood very close to him to do it, her arms up over him, but this time he did not stroke lightly down the backs of her legs as she stood there. She was tense, silent. He was still, slouched. She rode with the clippers over his scalp and made tracks. Brown paths through black fields. The shape of his skull. He closed his eyes. She went harder over the stubborn hairs that clung to him, and as she did so she felt more and more taken, that she was another creature. He could feel it too. ‘Careful,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. Do it harder, said a voice inside. It was low-pitched and cruel. It was the other side of sadness, the voice of the dark. So she did it harder, and the voice went on to claim her body, and then the hand twisted and she cut him, behind the ear, drawing blood.

  ‘Fuck! Be careful!’ He slapped his hand over his ear.

  ‘Sorry. These clippers are blunt,’ she said. The floorboards upstairs creaked. Some sawdust slipped silently from the gash in the kitchen wall.

  In August Blake got sick too. Red patches on his cheeks. Temperature ascending. The doctor said keep him in. But in the house the sicknesses were contagious. Melissa, the other Melissa, also tripped over, became clumsy like Ria, bumped into things, or things fell on top of her, the lid of the Dutch pot on her foot, the photograph of her, Michael and the children on her head when she was dusting. All by themselves these things seemed to fall, like the dust, a raining of certainties, of fixtures. One morning she woke up and there was a small dent in her forehead, which darkened and became a scar. She did not know how it got there. It had no mother. The only explanation was that it was the real Melissa trying to get back into her body during the night when the doorways were more flexible, and there had been a struggle.

  The night after that she couldn’t sleep. She was worried about being dented again. Michael’s slumped form was turned towards the raffia. She had heard the twist of his bottle top earlier, the groan of the floorboards as he came to bed smelling of Listerine and the ghost of his drink. The floorboards were so loud now that they were like a demon presence, they were senile. She got out of bed and tried not to make a noise as she went out of the room. There was another wavy black line above the dado rail, this time stretching from the top of the stairs to Ria’s room. When she touched it with her finger it smudged. And when she pushed open the door to the second room and looked inside, she saw Blake there, lying as usual on his front, his face to the wall, but Ria’s bed by the window was empty, and the window was open.

  She went down the stairs, past the wavy black lines. The window twins were silent and still in their frames, not moving, not open. The ecclesiastical arch was still attached to the ceiling and the paprika floor was low and being obedient to its gravity. She had expected a chaos of structure, a hump of a hurt child in the back of the courtyard, underneath the open window, but she was not there. She found her in the bathroom, whispering. She was washing her hands. She was wearing her dressing-gown – yellow, the same colour as Lily’s.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the other Melissa said.

  ‘Oh, hi Mummy. I went to the toilet.’

  It did not sound quite like Ria’s voice. It was deeper. ‘I know you did this,’ she said when they reached the top of the sta
irs, Ria limping, one step, one slower step, one step, one slower step. She was afraid to hold her powdery hand to help her. ‘It’s fresh, look. You did it just now.’

  ‘I didn’t, I didn’t, Mummy!’ the little girl said.

  She let her go to sleep in Ria’s bed but she didn’t kiss her goodnight. Before she left the room she found the box of crayons and felt tips and took it away with her and put it under her own bed. In the morning she was going to make her lie down in hot salt water, like Alice had said, and she was going to go to the high road and buy plantain to put under her pillow. But in the morning Ria did not get up. She slept through Michael’s kiss on leaving for work. She slept through Blake’s coughing, through the early sirens, through breakfast. At ten o’clock Melissa went upstairs and put her ear to the door. They were whispering again. The whispering stopped as she went inside. The walls of the Renaissance Court were quivering. The floors of the Byzantine Court were trembling.

  She was lying in bed, wide awake. Her prehistoric hair was spread out around her face on the pillow. Melissa was afraid to go very close to her, but when Ria smiled and said, ‘Hi, Mummy’, in her own voice, she went and checked her temperature, as a mother is supposed to do. ‘Are you sick?’ she said. Ria nodded. ‘My throat hurts.’ Her forehead was unusually hot. ‘I think I’ve got Blake’s thing.’

  She gazed up at her, those bulbous eyes, their sooty sunrises, the innocent, reddened cheeks.

  ‘Can you stay with me for a minute?’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘A long minute.’

  ‘Who were you whispering to just now?’ Melissa sat down next to her on the bed, feeling relieved. It was a warm and beautiful day. The sun was coming in through the window. It was tonsillitis, only tonsillitis, and Ria was just herself, her uncommon child with her coming and going teeth and her imaginary friend. ‘Is it Coco? I thought you’d lost touch with her. Is she back now?’

  Ria gave a coy smile and put the covers up over her mouth. ‘No,’ she said, starting to laugh. She wanted to play the game where Melissa had to guess which of her invisible friends was in the room, there had been so many.

  ‘OK,’ Melissa said. ‘Is it George?’

  Ria shook her head, giggling.

  ‘Is it Taffy Bogul?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Charlie R?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Charlie K?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shanarna.’

  ‘No,’ Ria laughed.

  ‘Oh, I give up.’ Melissa threw up her hands. ‘Who is it then?’

  ‘You know who it is.’ When she said this, she poked her arm out of the blanket for emphasis, the one with the hurt wrist, and the hand looked bigger. Also her voice had changed again, that lower pitch, with a wickedness in it.

  ‘Who?’ Melissa said, beginning to feel afraid.

  ‘It’s Lily.’

  Now Melissa stood, took a step away from the bed. Ria was smiling up at her as if she couldn’t believe how stupid she was for not guessing. Her eyes were still very large but they looked a different colour. There was grey in them, the colour of the dust.

  ‘Who is Lily?’ she said slowly.

  But Ria typically did not give information about her friends, only their names.

  ‘Is she the one who’s drawing the lines?’

  She shook her head and folded her arms, adamant.

  ‘Is she – here now?’ Melissa said.

  A flicker of something passed across Ria’s face then, a worry. She glanced over towards the door, to her right. Melissa glanced also.

  ‘Is she? You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Promise,’ Ria whispered.

  ‘Promise.’ They did the wishbone vow with their little fingers.

  Carefully, Ria turned her head again to the right. ‘There,’ she said, still whispering, ‘by the door. She always stands by the door.’

  Melissa looked, but saw nothing. She had never actually met any of Ria’s friends, but somehow she was expecting to meet this one. This one was different.

  ‘She’s wearing a brooch,’ Ria said.

  ‘A brooch? … Do you mean a broach?’

  ‘Yeh, a broach.’

  And the more she looked, the more she did begin to see a faint round shining by the door, the height of a little girl’s collarbone or just below. There was nothing else attached to it, just the small round shine afloat there.

  ‘Can you tell her I don’t want to go to the palace today?’ Ria was saying. ‘It’s not nice there any more and I’m scared I’m going to get trapped in the train if we go.’

  ‘The train? What do you mean? I don’t understand.’

  The voice sounded all wrong and she seemed groggy. Melissa went to touch her forehead again but stopped just short of it, almost out of repulsion. There was a fire coming off the skin. She needed medicine. She needed a salt bath. But to get the medicine and the bath she would have to go past the door. She didn’t want Ria to go past the door because then Lily might walk into her and take her completely, the way Brigitte had taken Melissa. The only thing to do was to leave her here while she went to get the medicine – and anyway, she also remembered, she had left Blake alone downstairs in his high chair. She ran down, pulling the door open wide to get out of the room without touching the broach (when she got close to it she couldn’t see it any more, which made this difficult).

  Blake was crying. She didn’t know how long he had been crying for. His face was soaked with tears. When he saw her he cried harder, shouting at her for neglecting him, she wrenched him out of the chair and went to the medicine cupboard for the Calpol. Going back up the stairs, Blake trailed his hand along the wavy line and she batted it away, and going back into the room she shielded him from the shine, which became visible again once she reached the vicinity of the bed. That lullaby was playing from the chest, Hush little baby don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. She could not remember having put the music on.

  ‘You have to stop this now,’ she said to the girl in the bed. ‘You’re frightening me. You’re not welcome here, do you understand? Get out. Get out now. Let me give her the medicine.’

  Ria coughed and lifted her head. She drank two spoonfuls of the Calpol and lay back down. She didn’t want to eat. She didn’t want to get up, so Melissa let her sleep some more, into the afternoon, relieved that she did not have to look into those dusty eyes or hear that too-deep pitch in her voice. At three o’clock she came downstairs. She ate half a slice of toast, a little cheese and an apple quarter while Melissa was running the bath. She ventured outside into the baking courtyard but the sun was too bright, soon she wanted to go back to her room, she refused to get into the bath. Melissa backed down and gave her some more medicine because she didn’t know what else to do and she was afraid of her, as Brigitte had been afraid. She waited, wringing her hands together, for Michael to get home, but by eight o’clock he had not come. It started to rain. With it thunder. The sky broke. Silver spears flashed through the clouds, electrifying the towers, knifing the air, a dark-grey colour over everything. Through this sudden storm some time after midnight Michael walked, with a loose whiskey stagger, over the hill past Cobb’s Corner, down the high street, expecting the house to be still and at peace, the small breathing of the children from the second room, the meaner breathing of her from the master court. He was alarmed, then, when she was there in the hallway, wearing her cappuccino slip, her shoulders bare, her breastplate bare, a slice of light from the skylight piercing down on her, her hair all wild and unkempt. He had a mind to grab her immediately on seeing her like that, to rush at her and lick at her shores, to capture her, suck her, eat her, fill her up and make her burst in a storm of love all over him, succumb to him the way she used to. But she said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

  And he was smiling nevertheless because he couldn’t help it, because of the swirling she was making inside him just by standing there like that, that she could still do this to h
im, even now, even after everything. ‘I went for a drink,’ he said, his shoulders wet from the rain.

  ‘Where? With who?’

  ‘With Damian, in Brixton. The Wileys were doing a thing so we passed through afterwards.’

  She snorted, looking disgusted and appalled. ‘And you couldn’t even call to say where you were? I’ve been trying to call you for hours. You couldn’t even answer the phone?’

  ‘It’s out of battery,’ he yelled.

  ‘Well, why didn’t you call? Didn’t it even occur to you to call? What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, OK!’ He swayed, and she saw that his mouth was loose from drink. ‘Jesus, man, it’s Friday night, I went out. What, I’m not even allowed to go out now?’

  She kissed her teeth to the highest octave she could manage, which was quite high. Her teeth-kissing had advanced over the years. She had adopted some of his Jamaicanness. It endeared her to him more. The whiskey-haze was awash all over her, in her contours, her curves, her lines. He went towards her with soft eyes.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said, pulling her into an embrace, ‘Come here, my empress. Just come here and tell me you love me.’

  His arms were around her, the octopus engulfing her, his smell of booze and dry-cleaned suit. She struggled against it but he was stronger than her. He did not realise quite how strong he was being in that moment, how strongly he was applying that strength. The bulls of the Assyrian Court were stamping. The lions in the Alhambra Court were roaring.

  She shouted, ‘Get off me,’ and pushed him with such a force that his grip loosened and he was caught by a strange fury that seemed not quite his, to belong to an older version of himself, one that had been suppressed, by her, by living by her scripture, by the world outside. He retrieved his grip. ‘You’re supposed to be my woman,’ he said, ‘you’re supposed to be my wife, remember? You’re playing with me. You’re supposed to love me, don’t you know that?’