Ordinary People
Page 33
So today it was the four of them sitting down to eat the eba and stew on the plastic checkered tablecloth in the warm kitchen. Alice separated Blake’s eba into small pieces. She was adamant that they should eat with their right hands, that any sign of left-handedness in a child should be destroyed as soon as it became apparent. To be left-handed was virtually to be disabled, she maintained, even though Melissa regularly pointed out that Barack Obama was left-handed and it didn’t seem to have affected him in a negative way. Alice’s answer to this was that Barack’s achievements were increased by the fact that he had become president despite his handicap, that if he had been able-bodied, things would have been easier for him and he would have become president sooner.
‘How is new job?’ she said.
‘It’s OK.’ Melissa had started teaching journalism at an adult education college.
‘That’s right.’
‘Are you still going to your keep-fit classes?’
‘It’s too expensive,’ Alice complained. ‘At first it was forty pence. Then they said one pound. After that they say it’s two pounds. Now, five pounds!’
‘Thieves.’
‘Eh-heh!’
‘More, please,’ Ria said, and Alice got up, satisfied.
After the eba, in her old clothes and her eyes swollen from crying, Melissa had dragged herself next door into the living room, where the pinkness was at its peak. It was a huge Victorian parlour, big enough for a single bed on one side separated off by a curtain, where she had slept during that week. There was a cascade of turquoise butterflies hanging from the curtain rail at the window, and scores of photographs and ornaments, Warren and Lauren when they were little, Melissa and Carol at graduations, Alice and Cornelius on their wedding day, then two ebony elephants, a milkmaid, a sewing machine, various bunches of plastic flowers, crocheted doilies, fans, feathers, several cabinets. There was such a paraphernalia of object in this room that it was impossible not to lose some of the urgency of your own personality when you were inside it, and to let yourself sink into the world of Alice, her unbroken cord with the motherland, her individualness, her private whispering. Here Melissa had lain down on the sofa with its hand-sewn cushions, and even though it was summer then, Alice had put a blanket over her to keep her warm in case she got cold when she was sleeping. Before she went to asleep, Alice had also lent her her stress-buster brick, given to her by a church friend. It was soft and made of rubber. ‘You squeeze it in your hand and make you feel better,’ she said, and she demonstrated with her wrinkled, chocolate-coloured hand, offering it like a pusher, with the deepest and most sincere faith, as if she had invented it herself rather than appropriated it.
As Melissa had slept, alone in that room, Michael on the other side of the river and the children with him, she had dreamt of him, in dreams made of memories. They were making love on the forest floor on a summer’s day, the trees towering above her in the sky. He was sitting by her on the bed at Paradise as she was sleeping, watching over her, the great love, the early man, shining down, the sun coming up in the morning. And now they were walking together across the grass of the University of Greenwich, towards the bank of the Thames, he in a white suit, she in a strapless electric-blue dress. A memory of a possibility, a future that had never happened. A part of her still wanted that blue and white picture to happen. She wanted to see him in that white suit, to wear that electric-blue dress, to hold his hand and walk together towards the water. But the way was unclear now. She could not get there without losing herself, which she had still not found. What she was experiencing was a strange opening out of herself inside, so that she could sense what she truly, harshly was, the core of it, which was dark and empty and cold, waiting to be filled from within, and she must guard and hold on to it to stop it from breaking.
She was woken by the sound from the kitchen of her mother peeling apples. She woke with a purity of thought, blank and calm, the way she always woke in this room. Soon Alice came in with the apples and sat down in the armchair next to her. She offered Melissa a quarter. She had put sugar on it. Everything was still and quiet, the butterflies, the milkmaid, the elephants. There was a single candle burning on the mantelpiece for Alice’s stillborn child from long ago.
‘Mum, how did you feel when you left Dad?’ Melissa asked.
Alice leaned her head back in her armchair and thought. She had never articulated how it had felt.
‘It was the right way,’ she said eventually. ‘After a very long time, I was going in the right way. I couldn’t live with him any more.’
‘I’m not sure I’m going in the right way,’ Melissa said. ‘I don’t know what the right way is.’
‘You find it,’ said Alice.
‘How do you know?’
But there was no reply. Melissa went on to say, the calmness of a few moments ago disappearing, ‘I don’t know myself any more. I can’t seem to find the way back to who I was … before …’
‘Before the children,’ Alice said, nodding her head slowly. ‘Children change everything. Family change everything. You must cross the river, to the other side of yourself. After that you find it.’
When Melissa heard this, she became very alert, like a small animal caught by a light. She pictured that day, last year, driving across, their loaded red wings and the peace lily toying with Michael’s nostrils. She knew full well her mother meant more than that. ‘But I did cross the river,’ she said, in a higher, childish voice. And she knew also that her mother knew that she knew it was more than that.
‘You must cross it properly,’ Alice said, offering another piece of unnecessarily sweetened apple.
Alice still believed that Melissa and Michael would get back together one day, this month, this week or next year, just as soon as Melissa had crossed the river properly. She tried a little bit not to go on about it during these visits but she went on about it.
‘He is a good man, much better than your daddy.’
‘You get better house and live together as you supposed to.’
Today she didn’t offer the stress-buster because Melissa didn’t seem stressed or unhappy, but as it was winter, and your babies are always your babies even when they are thirty-eight, she did give her a hot-water bottle with a yellow and pink cover that she had crocheted herself, and order her to go and lie down in the living room, which Melissa of course obeyed. The hot-water bottle went behind her back. The blanket went over her. The children were next to her on the floor, extensions of her, separate though physically felt, like veins, like ribs, like cubs.
‘No, Mum,’ she said. ‘I think when I’m older I’d like to live on my own, like you, just like this, where I can be completely myself.’
Yet when she slept, the same image came to her. For it was true, she missed him, his boomerang smile, the light by his heart, the whirl of his mahogany waist. The image kept reappearing, waiting at the edges of dreams, drifting by the water, unfolding on the shore. That blue and white day. She in the electric dress and he in the white suit with khakis underneath. Out they walked from the vaulted room of the old colonial building of the university. Their families and friends stood and watched as they walked across the green and silver grass. As they approached the black railing that holds back the river, Ria and Blake ran out to join them, and the four of them became the fine silhouettes of the dusk, four black shapes against the water’s gleam. Boats went by. Bridges stood strong. Like a glittering evening shawl the river wore the night. There they stayed, until all was dark and all the lights had gone out.
*
On New Year’s Eve the Wiley brothers threw their annual NYE bashment. They put the chipboard over the bookshelves, the note on the bathroom mirror telling people that this was someone’s house and not a nightclub, and left the Ofili on the centre wall. Melissa and Hazel got ready together in Gipsy Hill. The town was red. They were going to paint it more so. They would shimmer in the notes. They were going to find the perfect meeting of beat and feet. Hazel in four-inch heels and
her fingernails in fuchsia. Melissa with her new hair and charcoal jeans.
‘Ready,’ she said in the mirror.
‘Looking good,’ said Hazel.
Pete had come to nothing. He had cheated on her with a removal company administrator who went to his gym. She put on her new jacket, a white puffer with a silver zip. She wasn’t so sure about it, if it was for a woman of a certain age. ‘Is it too hip hop?’ she said.
‘You know you could wear a pleated skirt made of Tesco carrier bags and still pull a Pete.’
‘I don’t want to pull a Pete. Petes are prats. I want an ugly man who will be good to me.’
This ugly man turned out to be Bruce Wiley. He was infatuated. They danced together to Busta Rhymes and found the place where the feet met the beat. And while they were making this unexpected electricity Michael turned up, with a woman he had met at the CD shop in Catford. Melissa said hi, he said hey. She saw his eventual beauty and wondered whether it was also eventual to this new woman or whether it was straight away and therefore lesser. And Michael’s first instinct was still to smell her neck for chicken even though he knew it wasn’t there, but somewhere he permanently believed that it would come back and he wanted to be the one to find it.
‘He loves you,’ Hazel said.
‘It’s over,’ Melissa said.
‘Chocolate is never over.’
Now they were sitting on a wall in Stockwell at 4 a.m. eating chips. While they were sitting there they happened to witness the last lunar eclipse of the year. They saw the whole thing, the darkness, the intensity of that darkness, then the light coming back like a new time.
‘Amazing,’ Hazel said.
‘Like being hugged by the night.’
The salt, the vinegar, the cones were just so.
‘These are good chips.’
‘Yes. They are.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Arts Council England (Grants for the Arts, funded by the National Lottery), the Royal Literary Fund and the Authors’ Foundation for facilitating the writing of this book. To the Santa Maddalena Foundation for providing time and space to write (fittingly, in a tower). Likewise Omi International Arts Center for a spell in the Hudson River Valley. My agent Clare Alexander, editors Poppy Hampson and Clara Farmer, and the rest of the Chatto & Windus team. Also to Rebecca Carter, Claudia Cruttwell, Diriye Osman, John R. Gordon, Jennifer Kabat and Sarah Ee for readings and revelations when needed.
Thank you most of all to Derek A. Bardowell and the little ones for conversation, music and other fundamentals.
For the playlist for Ordinary People, go to diana-evans.com
MUSIC CREDITS
‘Stay With You’ Words and Music by Dave Tozer and John Stephens © 2004, Reproduced by permission of Sony/ATV Melody, London W1F 9LD
‘I Can Change’ Words and Music by Calvin Broadus, John Stephens and Dave Tozer © 2004, Reproduced by permission of My Own Chit Music and Sony/ATV Melody, London W1F 9LD
‘I Can Change’ Words and Music by John Stephens, Calvin Broadus and Dave Tozer
Copyright © 2004 BMG Sapphire Songs, John Legend Publishing, My Own Chit Music and Tozertunes Publishing
All Rights for BMG Sapphire Songs and John Legend Publishing
Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights for My Own Chit Music and Tozertunes Publishing
Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street,
Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
‘Stay With You’ Words and Music by John Stephens and Dave Tozer
Copyright © 2004 BMG Sapphire Songs, John Legend Publishing,
Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Tozertunes Publishing
All Rights for BMG Sapphire Songs and John Legend Publishing
Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights for Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Tozertunes Publishing
Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street,
Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
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First published by Chatto & Windus in 2018
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