by Diana Evans
She turns and looks at him. The same face, still bright, older.
‘Joyce?’ he says.
She smiles and opens her arms, gives him the biggest hug he has been given by another adult in a long time.
‘Look at you all grown up,’ she says in a far-off voice, which resounds deep inside his head. ‘You’re a man now, and guess what? Everything is going to be fine. Just fine. You watch.’
He sat there with her and they talked, until his flowers blended with hers, and the gold buttons faded away.
A day of reckoning. The writing was finished. A play, this time, about Michael Jackson faking his death in order to experience his glory. Nothing might ever come of it and that was OK, for he would find the way. He would find his path. From Hither Green he went to Blackfriars and took the tube to Embankment. By now it was evening and darkness had fallen on the river. Whenever he came to the South Bank he always got off the tube at Embankment rather than Waterloo so that he could walk across this river, and feel what it meant to be a part of it, containing as it did in its spirit the abundance of the city, the history of it, the souls of its people. He watched the silver of the lights on its ever-moving surface, felt the deep breathing of its tide out towards the ocean. And he beheld the magical sight of the blue-lit trees along the southern bank, which was always festive, always reaching for Christmas. The entire wall of the Royal Festival Hall was covered with a glittering curtain of white lights, cascading down in a diagonal direction. There were crowds of people drinking on the terrace, walking among the trees, waiting at the carousel. He relished it, this power of London to allow an escape from the self, for just a little while, in a munificence of surrounding, an enormous activity and excitement.
He had arranged to meet Michael by the Madiba statue outside the Royal Festival Hall, at the top of the terrace stairs. They had not seen each other since their last drink at the Satay, when Damian had been locked inside the madness of his writing, his feet deep in cold water most evenings and his calves bare. He had been happy, riveted, oblivious to almost everything, despite being on the brink of losing his job, despite Stephanie demanding that he set up a bed for himself downstairs until they decided what to do. He would work late into the night, like the old days, and smoke in the driveway during breaks, feeling connected to the stars as he looked up at them, their exquisite loneliness. When it was finished he had saved it on to a USB, sent it to himself via email so that cyberspace would cushion it, then he had risen, taken his feet out of the water and gone out for a run. Dorking had looked so different during that run, greener, colourful. He even discovered a basketball court down an alley off one of the neighbouring streets, which he had started using with the children.
Michael had not been forthcoming about this meeting, which was understandable. Damian had persisted, though, desiring of some essential punishment, yet standing there in the cold next to Nelson he had no idea what he was going to say to him or what either of them could be expected to get out of seeing each other. Perhaps he should have let it lie. Perhaps he should have forced himself to forget that they had been friends, but the thing was that he missed him, it was partly selfish, he wanted to apologise, but he also wanted to know how he was. So when he saw Michael’s head, adorned in a flat cap, appearing on his ascent up the stairs, bent at first then lifting, Damian’s first instinct was to go and knock his shoulder and give him dap, he was that pleased to see him. But he didn’t. He waited dutifully for the tone to be set. He was looking sharp, he noticed, a thick black coat and a suit, a whole suit, walking the power of it, in full effect. There was no shoulder-knock or shake-hand.
‘What you sayin’,’ Michael said, and Damian replied also with a question, ‘What’s up,’ neither of which were answered strictly and thus do not require question marks. Damian said, ‘You look well,’ as Michael’s face became stern, firmly set against him. Two months ago he had wanted to destroy him. Now he felt a mere disconnection, along with an awkward kind of gratitude.
‘Been looking after myself. Been running a lot,’ he said.
‘Is it? I’ve been running as well.’
Michael did not reply. He had not come here to chat. There was a prickly silence between them while people went wading by in couples and trios and crews, in their leggings and cowboy boots, their dinner jackets or skinny jeans, or symphony clothes, depending on which level and which building of the South Bank complex they were visiting. There was such an atmosphere of sociability around them but they were not part of it, they couldn’t quite drink together, definitely not eat together, and Michael maintained a metre’s distance from Damian, facing outwards and away towards the river.
‘Shall we walk or something?’ Damian said.
They fell into step, and there was a little less bounce in Michael’s step. He walked closer to the ground. He could still feel it, a coolness around his shoulders, the absence of something reassuring. She was no longer with him when he walked. There was only one dimension now. He was concentrating on strengthening it, and being here wasn’t helping. Did Legend go for a walk with the guy he cheated at? He shouldn’t have come.
‘How are the kids?’ Damian asked as they reached the bottom of the stairs, turning towards the bank. It seemed the safest place to start, yet was tinged with guilt.
‘OK … considering,’ Michael said. ‘Ria had that swine flu, though, back in summer. It was horrid, knocked her out.’
‘No. That was bad. I heard about that in the news. Was it really to do with pigs?’
‘Yeah, it was. Something about the farms.’
‘Nasty, man.’
‘You know say I’ve given up the pork now.’
They came to the book market and paused, a breather. The cold was lifting off the river. Boys were making curves in the skatepark underneath the bridge, boats drifting by with parties going on inside. Further down along the blue trees there is a quieter place with some restaurants and bars set in a lane and they came to that eventually. Michael had left Paradise, he revealed, and was living in a flat, an ‘apartment’, he called it, not far away. He had the children at weekends, Melissa had them during the week. She would also be moving soon.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ Damian said. ‘I really didn’t mean for it to happen, you have to know that. I was in a mess.’
‘Oh please, we’re all in a mess. You want to apologise? It’s too late. It’s irrelevant.’
‘But it’s completely wrong. You two should be together.’
‘Why?’ Michael said angrily.
‘Because you work.’
‘We haven’t worked in a long time.’
‘She loves you.’
Michael gave a fierce, condescending look made blue by the trees and Damian was crushed by it. There would never be another side from this. They would not be able to get there. The water was too deep.
‘It wasn’t you, you know,’ Michael said in the end. ‘That wasn’t the reason. You were just a device in the machine of our breaking, and we needed to break. It’s not so bad, when it finally happens. You think the world is going to collapse around you but it doesn’t. You can see yourself clearly again. You realise that the fear was the worst thing.’
They did drink together, for they were thirsty, in a bar down that quiet lane. It would be a last drink, and they spoke of other things, for as long as they lasted.
On the train on the way home Damian thought about this, this idea of seeing yourself clearly again, of the fear being the worst thing. Somewhere in the pit of him he was not quite envious, more watchful, accepting. They had taken that devastating step. Bags had been packed. Schedules had been arranged. The physical reconstruction of domestic life had taken place. He had imagined it so many times, what his life might look like, feel like, in that singular ‘apartment’, on a narrow London street. But to bring it to fruition was another thing, and he understood now that he did not have that kind of courage. He was a stayer, a settler. He had less spirit, perhaps, less adventure inside him. That d
ifficult, more glorious, complex way was for the others, the people who had enough light inside themselves to bear the loss of some of it. Or so it seemed to him, on this side of the water.
When he got home, Stephanie was sitting at the dining table working on a collage of family photographs to put up on the wall. This was something she did at the end of every year. She gathered all of her favourite pictures, of holidays, days in the park, school plays and moments she wanted to remember at a glance around the house, and spread them out on the table. She surveyed them, the highlights of their lives, looking for a pictorial order, a symmetry of love. Then she made slow and careful selections and placed them in a meaningful arrangement on a piece of card, sticking them down only when the position of each photograph was just so, relating to the ones next to it, the whole thing conjuring an enduring celebration of how they lived. When this was done she framed it and found a place for it – there was one in the kitchen, in a curlicued brass frame, two above the stairs, another in the hallway and one in each of the bedrooms. In this way their lives were caught in moments of rightness. Any chaos or discontent was brought to a point of stillness and calm. It gave hope to the coming year. It gave her faith in their continuance.
She did not look up when he came into the room. He had been trying, since finishing his play, to retrieve her – talking with her, holding her sometimes, being present, engaging in the children’s lives again – but some of her coolness remained. The house smelt of warm food recently cooked, lasagne, tomatoes. Usually she did the collage in December, in the days between Christmas and New Year. ‘You’re early,’ he said.
‘I know. I just felt like it.’
A photograph of Summer, Avril and Jerry at Stonehenge that spring had been chosen for the centre. ‘I don’t remember that one.’ Damian went closer and peered over her shoulder.
‘You weren’t there,’ she said. ‘We had a fight that morning in the driveway? So I took them by myself? We had a lovely time actually.’
As he sat down with her at the table she asked after Michael. He told her. He didn’t want to lie about anything any more. He was going to tell her everything she needed to know, because she was strong and good. She was a gateway to peace. He had felt it walking towards the house, walking up the path, opening the door. She was home, a place to stop and just be.
‘They broke up? But why?’
How should he explain it? The February snow, the black tree and the cigarettes, and the Baetic night, the big disappointment of it, a balloon descending, sinking to nothing.
‘There was a device, in the machine of their breaking … And that device – I think …’
Stephanie was looking at him and there was something in her eyes, a mixture of gladness and concern, a surge of pride, of righteousness. She didn’t let him finish. ‘Are they working it out? They’ve got to work it out, for the children’s sake.’ And she thought of the marriage guidance leaflets she’d picked up with the bereavement counselling ones back in January. She had not shown them to Damian. She hadn’t wanted to, they’d seemed useless, draining, but she’d kept them just in case. She glanced towards the sideboard, trying to remember which drawer they were in. Then her eyes returned to the photographs, with a renewed sense of vision.
‘That’s why people get married,’ she said. ‘When you’re married, it’s harder to walk away. You’re stuck with each other.’
‘Is that how you see it?’
‘Isn’t that how you see it?’
‘No.’
He picked up one of the photographs. It was of the two of them together, before they got married, taken in London, in Camden by the canal. ‘This is so old, man. Look how young we look.’
‘Well, I’ve been having problems finding recent ones of us. There’s none from this year, obviously, unless you’ve got some on your phone. I haven’t.’
‘It’s been a difficult year,’ he said.
‘You think?’
As they worked on the collage together, Stephanie looked up and out at the garden at one point and placed her hand on her stomach under the table. She was about to say something. It was still early and she had wanted to wait, but perhaps now was the right time. She had already decided that everything would be all right, with or without him.
‘What?’ he said, noticing her watching him.
Her eyes melted. She smiled, but looked down again. Another time. Soon. Let the life grow, regardless of what was outside.
‘Do you have one of your dad?’ she said.
Later, when she was getting up from the table, the edge of her slipper got caught in the leg of her chair. He went to free it for her, smelling the gist of her bright hair. She looked so pretty in that instant. He bent down and gently pressed the slipper back on to the heel of her foot.
15
ACROSS THE RIVER
Over the river to the north. River through the heart of this city. River of centuries, of black and white histories. The passage from the south. The river that divides the divide. Driving across in a red Toyota saloon, the spires of Parliament and the great slow eye of London that hardly moves when you are inside it. The quiet arches of the bridges and the water trembling through; and the trees on the bank behind you as you cross, and the birds as they soar.
Onwards to Victoria, along the high Buckingham Palace wall to the roar of Hyde Park Corner and the pricey tip of Knightsbridge, passing there, coming off the roundabout, Park Lane northbound. Melissa was going to see her mother. The children were in the back, Blake on the left, Ria on the right. On the passenger seat were a bag of fruit (mangos, apples and melon) and a bunch of pink roses (Alice liked pink). She took the North Carriage Drive off Marble Arch and they sped past the wild grass and the Sunday runners, the Serpentine lake in the distance and the ghosts of the summer bladers who rolled alongside it, weaving in and out of skittles. Now the cold sun of December glittered across the planes. The trees were so many expired afros and fallen weaves, only the roots left, brown and naked in the austerity of winter. Then out again into the traffic of Bayswater, up westwards, approaching Kilburn, where Alice waited in her pink flat in her house hat and dashiki, her cardigan and her slippers, calling ‘Is that you?’ when Melissa buzzed, and coming down to answer the door clutching her walking stick. There she was, a shrunken woman in a foreign land, yet home to her children when they most needed it.
This is where Melissa had come that time, when all the glass had fallen and the Sphinx had lost its nose. She had come alone with a suitcase and stayed for a week. This is where you come when you are lost, when you feel that you are never going to find the place. You go to the first place, the first country, to her net curtains and her singular food, to her safe and open door. You lie down. You eat. You listen to her. And you know that this house will not fall down. This house is sturdy and is made of bricks, and the wolf will not come and blow it down.
‘You cut your hair!’ Alice said. ‘Why you cut your hair? It’s too short!’
‘It’s not that short,’ Melissa said, touching the back of it. It was short. She had been to the hairdresser and truncated the fro. She wore it pasted down to her scalp with gel, giving a boyish, 1920s look; a new hair, a new her, with a grey streak. She had also been shopping with Hazel in Carnaby Street last week and dived into the clothes, feeling alive and fabricy again. She had bought a poncho, which she was wearing today.
‘You look nice,’ Alice smiled, but she did hate the cutting of fros, anyone’s, especially the good ones, when so many people struggle. ‘Why you didn’t dye that grey, though?’
‘I like it.’
Alice laughed. ‘You cannot walk around with white hair. It’s secret of age.’ This was a lost argument already and she knew it. ‘Go in,’ she said. ‘Mind the stairs with baby.’
She had come up these stairs, alone, in old clothes and her longer hair carelessly tied back. She had ascended to the pinkness of paint, the heavily ornamented, hand-cushioned living room, the cluttered kitchen where it was always warm, like
a warm, dark womb, where the smell of egusi filled the room and Radio 4 was playing and her mother was heating up some akara for her under the grill.
‘Sit down, Omo,’ she had said, putting the akara in front of her. ‘Eat.’
And she did, because you do not refuse the voice of your mother at a time like this, in fact at any time, unless she is commanding something unreasonable or ludicrous, like ‘don’t talk to boys’ or ‘don’t go out at night’, when you are thirty-eight years old. She ate, neither of them talking much, just being comforted by the sound of Alice swishing and shuffling about the room, stirring the stew, mashing the eba, pouring the tea. The eba was fine eba, even through her tears which came here and there, even through the images that kept passing through her mind of that terrible night, her bare feet on the concrete, coming back to the quiet house and Michael waiting there, his face so drawn and resolute, Where’s Ria? Where’s Ria? She’s upstairs, she’s asleep, leave her be.
‘Her leg is better,’ Alice said now, having inspected Ria’s climb up the stairs. She went to play with Blake in the living room, where Alice had laid a piece of material over the carpet for them to mess up as they pleased. Blake especially liked the plastic telephone with the old-fashioned cord, which he dragged across the room with him making calls. Ria still liked the animal lorry that flipped down its door so that they all came tumbling out. Her hands were better too, smooth again.
‘I’m so glad to finally be out of that house,’ Melissa said, sitting in the same chair where she always sat at the kitchen table. Alice was putting the roses in water. The akara was heating under the grill and the eba was already mashed and separated.
‘One day you find a better house,’ her mother said.
But Melissa did not want another house. She was happier in the flat with the two bedrooms on the fourth floor in Gipsy Hill, high up again, the towers in the distance, which had become a landmark of home, a necessary reminder. She no longer wanted upstairs and downstairs and a view of the houses on the other side of the street. It had been a relief, the mountain of boxes ready for leaving, the packing of the Czech marionette and the Cuban moka pot, the emptying of her wardrobe in the master court, then leaving, up Paradise, left at the top, right at the end, away, away. (Behind the fridge, when she was turning it off for the last time, she had found a dead mouse, its face closed and faded, covered in dust. Someone had scribbled over the word ‘Paradise’ on the street sign at the top of the road.)