by Tessa McWatt
“Now change—cha cha!” the instructor shouts and Manuel moves her forward and back, one-two-three. She searches for Patricia and sees her with one of the middle-aged men. She’s not smiling, but not unhappy either as she concentrates on her steps.
“Rum makes me stupid,” Francine says to Patricia in passing, after they are instructed to switch partners. They dance for hours, and the beat will not give up. When she stops for a rest, Manuel takes the rum and Coke from her hand, places it down on the table and leads her again to the dance floor.
“You are good,” he says, after he twirls her as the music changes, goes slow and thumpy. He brings her in close, and, yep, there it is, his hand on her giant ass like a butcher with a prime cut. She holds her breath. “You are very sexy,” he says in her ear. This is not happening. She says nothing. He pushes her back and holds her at arm’s length, looking her up and down.
She laughs, which he seems to like, and he pulls her close again and gives her a peck on her cheek that feels nearly like a lick. A tingle at her neck, along her arm, to the tips of her fingers and she squeezes his hand. Oh shit. She didn’t mean to do that. She is the opposite of a thirteen-year old, but feels exactly the same. Maybe the thing that love comes with is seasons. She sees Patricia smiling proudly at her from the side of the room.
They close the place, are the last ones out, even after Manuel and the women he gravitated towards at the end of the night, who are young but do not have Francine’s life raft of a butt, of which she is a tiny bit proud.
“Let’s get something to eat,” Patricia says, and out they head and turn onto Old Compton Street, where Francine smells urine and is convinced she hears bones clacking. She stops and stands on the spot to watch. The black cast-steel bollard, the warped brick of the corner building, the corrugated iron that covers the shop window: she is small and soft beside these.
“That was special, no?” Patricia says, coming close.
Francine tries to smell her but the familiar butter and lavender are lost amongst the piss and beer on the pavement. Iron, rust, fried onions, exhaust fumes, tobacco. She smiles but doesn’t answer, doesn’t say heck, yeah Patty! Because she’s wondering how much a landscape gardening programme might cost her, wondering if she’ll make more than minimum wage in any future job, and she doesn’t want Patricia to look at her with horror when she tells her that she’s quitting her job in QA and going to tell Larry he’s fat. She doesn’t want to worry Patricia or for her to think it’s false solidarity in the face of her redundancy. Instead, she leans in towards Dancefloor Patty and kisses her on the lips, and holds her mouth there. Patricia doesn’t pull back, not first in any case, and when Francine is again aware of how she feels, well, she’s certain it’s only a hot flash.
OLIVIA
Oi. She flicks away the wasp on her wrist. It’s hot even in the thick-as-paint shade of the yew tree outside the crematorium at the Rippleside Cemetery. Holy, holy, holy, like a beat girl poet, ’cos Olivia is now down with ceremonies as though they are the new #Demo. Though there’s no knowing the religion of Diyanat Bayar, who Ed thinks is Turkish, or maybe Armenian, which would change things, the service is about making praise, even though it’s not in the chapel. Diyanat’s UK passport might even have been stolen, forged, and so the truth is that no one knows a thing about this body that is about to be burned and disposed of. The twenty-seven-year-old Diyanat, if that is his name, has no family in the UK. The Turkish consulate is busy with Turkish nationals, the coroner told Ed, and haven’t been able to trace anyone yet. The coroner who registered the death also told Ed that Diyanat has a tattoo on his arm of an anchor, but there’s no link to Diyanat being a sailor, because Diyanat’s last job was in the bakery where he’d been hired only a few months ago. Holy, holy, holy.
Olivia watches as Ed arranges the bouquet of lilies on the top of the cardboard casket. This is his last funeral. Ed wanted her to be here, saying he had something to show her, something that he thought would make her happy, and something that was on account of her.
When Olivia was still researching her dissertation, way back in May, which was the last time it was hot like this and the last time she saw Ed, she read about three people of the same family discovered dead by the police in their apartment in the northern district of Tokyo. Electricity and gas had been cut off; there was no food in the house and just a few one-yen coins on the table. The grotesquely thin bodies belonged to a couple in their sixties and their son in his thirties, and they had all died of starvation. The management property reported getting no rent, and the newspaper said that the family had asked a neighbour for help. The neighbour told them to go on welfare, which they didn’t do, on account of losing face. The report went on to say how lonely deaths are increasing in Japan. In the winter two sisters in their forties were found dead in their freezing apartment on snowbound Hokkaido.
“Thank you for coming,” Ed says to Olivia, as she is the only mourner in attendance. The funeral director and his assistant stand off to the side, looking like they’re daydreaming about the cold pint they’ll have as soon as this is finished.
“We are here to pay our last respects to Diyanat Bayar, who was too young to be leaving us, really,” Ed says and then looks down at the casket. The breeze around them is soft and she feels gooseflesh rise on her arms despite the heat.
Ed looks older. Not so much in wrinkles or greying or geezer-like stuff, but just in the way his mouth falls when at rest. Right. She will not worry; she is working on this part of herself in relation to everyone else. He will find another job. Just look at him. Wood is strong, worthy, a man with a good head. He takes a piece of paper out his pocket and unfolds it, catching her eye with a look that says: This is it, here, now.
“I would like to read something for Diyanat—something that was written by a friend of ours, a while back. He gave it to me and asked me to read it the next time I had the opportunity, and this is that opportunity, so please allow me,” Ed says, and gives her a nod.
Olivia feels the gooseflesh grow and spread up towards her neck.
Ed looks down at the paper and begins.
“The chessmen are rigid on their chess board,
I can hear little clicks inside my dream,
Auntie stands by the kettle, looking at the kettle,
If I were a cinnamon peeler,
That strength, mother: dug out. Hammered, chained.
What can I say about the storms?
An eagle does not know who he is,
Who modelled your head of terracotta?
Chalk and beaches. The winter sea,
I wonder at your witchcraft
One morning Don Miguel got out of bed,
Let us go then, you and I,
Not a tent of blue but a peak of gold,
No getting up from the bed in this grand hotel.”
Ed looks up proudly at her. But Olivia doesn’t think she caught it right. There’s nothing she understands about the poem and what it means. She wants him to read it again, to take his time, because what is Robin saying here?
The funeral director and his assistant make their way to the casket, looking annoyed, as though their time is being wasted in this boiling July heat for this man and his daughter to work out some puzzle between them. They wheel the casket towards the back door of the crematorium and Ed watches as Diyanat takes his leave. Olivia leaves the shade of the yew, headed towards Ed, practising her one-foot-in-front-of-the-other strategy. Since her last exams she’s been calmer, been spending days sleeping when she wants to, nights with Jaz who is single once more, and she is slowly starting to allow Catherine to talk to her again. She has a paid internship with the Citizens Advice Bureau starting in August and she’s had the time not to feel panicked.
“What did you think?” Ed says.
“Yes, yes,” she says. “I’d like to hear it again.”
Ed holds the page up to her. “You take it,” he says.
“No, it’s yours,” she says and pushes his hand back.
There’ll be no more use for this poem, she knows, but she’s afraid to read it for herself now. And maybe she doesn’t need to.
“I should get going,” she says. She doesn’t want to go to the A13 today; she wants to stay out in the sun.
“Okay,” Ed says, and she has to resist the dented feeling in her chest. Wood is proper nang. Wood is going to be all right. This is not where she’s from, but this is more like who she is.
She kisses his cheek and stands back, turns and walks towards the gates of the cemetery. The sun is wicked and makes the back of her neck ping like there’s a message for her. If Nasar still has the same number, it will be in her phone.
Right.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was possible thanks to the insight and inspiration I gained from my students and colleagues; the quiet writing space generously provided by friends; and the generous feedback from special readers. My thanks to—among other students, too many to be named here—Danielle Jawando, Samantha Dodd, Jo Berouche, Joe Caesar, James Moore, Annette Kamara, Sandra Majchrowska, Erica Masserano and Naida Redgrave, who inspired the fighting spirit of the students in this novel.
Thanks to my colleagues at the University of East London for their support, resilience, and good spirits during difficult times: particularly to Stephen Maddison, Marianne Wells, Kate Hodgkin, and especially to Tim Atkins for poetry, humour, and Zen. I am grateful to the University of East London for research support and leave that enabled me to finish this book.
Thanks to the green mamba for Ned Time, to Andrew Ruhemann and Jennifer Nadel for Paris, to Mike Perry for Ffynnonofi, and to the Morris family for kindness and Wood. I’m indebted to Marko Jobst and David Friend for crucial feedback on early drafts; to Fides Krucker for writing companionship, banana bread, and voice insight; and to Stephanie Young for being there, reading fast, and knowing what a first draft is. Eternal gratitude to John Berger for his wisdom and generosity.
Thanks to Andrew Kidd for belief, rigour, telepathy; to Anne Collins for courage, enthusiasm and invaluable support; and to the kind people at Random House Canada for making this book happen.
“I’m the pen your lover writes with” is from a poem by Bernadette Mayer; her poetry experiments inspired Robin’s poem, which is formed by the first lines of the following poems:
Derek Walcott, “White Egrets”; Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”; Jo Shapcott, “Somewhat Unravelled”; Michael Ondaatje, “The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife”; Anne Carson, “That Strength in Decreation”; Dionne Brand, “Ossuary IX”; Al Purdy, “Man Without a Country”; Ted Hughes, “The Earthenware Head”; Anne Michaels, “Fontanelles”; Daniel Wideman, “Glass Eater”; Don Paterson, “Two Trees”; T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; Seamus Heaney, “Death of a Painter”; and Carol Anne Duffy, “Cuba.”
Quotations from Gilles Deleuze are from Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
TESSA McWATT is the author of five previous novels and There’s No Place Like …, a novella for young adults. Her second novel, Dragons Cry, was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Awards and the Governor General Literary Awards. Her other novels include This Body, Step Closer, and Vital Signs, which was nominated for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She teaches creative writing at the University of East London where she developed the BA and MA in Creative Writing and founded the UEL Writing Centre.