At three o’clock he began to work on the straightforward developing. The afternoon would hurtle by as he gazed at pictures of people enjoying themselves. It was a kind of lie, these moments of bliss, as if entire lives consisted of parties and holidays, grinning ‘cheese’, beaming at one another. He knew this, but still he would lose himself in the fantasy of other people’s happiness.
There was a whole roll of film devoted to the interior of a Victorian house, each room photographed from various angles. The man gazed at the barren hall, the meticulous living room, wondering what purpose the pictures would serve. Each room was immaculate and sumptuous as the interiors featured in coffee-table magazines. He wondered who had deposited the film. He couldn’t fit a face to a customer he had met that day with the name on the envelope.
‘Fancy a smoke?’ a colleague called on her way to the alley at the back of the shop. The man was in the narrow darkroom, adjacent to the toilet. Sometimes he liked to stand outside talking with Michelle, although he did not smoke. A tall, near shaven-headed woman who wore skirts with army boots, he found her baffling but entertaining.
‘Ah, not today,’ he replied. ‘You can go.’
She smiled at his use of English and disappeared with her cigarette.
The bare-chested man who had jumped the queue was staring out at him. His eyes looked glazed. He was sitting on a white plastic chair, with three other men, around a white plastic table littered with glasses of beer. Apart from the bare-chested man, they all wore sunglasses, but none of them wore shirts. There were many scenes involving this group of men: looking very pale in an airport lounge, sitting on a crowded beach, among a larger group of men and women at a nightclub, a disordered hotel room. Sometimes the bare-chested man would be in a photograph, but more often he was not.
It was difficult to work out which country they were in. The people seemed to be Muslim; the men wore kaftans, while the women – but not all – wore chuddahs. It could have been North Africa or the Middle East; the man was not sure.
A woman in one of the photographs began to appear more regularly. Her auburn hair was short, in a pageboy cut, and her frame was slight. You could see the intelligence in her face without searching. There was a print of the woman and the bare-chested man together, although he was wearing a T-shirt this time. They both carried small back-packs and wore fishermen’s hats and sunglasses as they smiled into the lens. The man guessed that the camera was held by a stranger, a passer-by. The two seemed to have broken away from their own groups. They were beginning another adventure now.
At six the man, the smoker Michelle, and two other colleagues, Darren and Mike, walked a short distance to a local pub. It was officially the weekend now and they liked to celebrate. By the time they arrived at the building they had broken into a light sweat. Inside, the pub was stifling. The pavement outside was covered with drinkers. There was nowhere for them to sit, so they stood with the people decorating the street.
‘I tell you what,’ Darren was saying. ‘I can’t take much more of this. It’s all right when you’re on ’oliday, but not ’ere. Not in the city.’
‘Oh, it’s not so bad,’ Michelle took a drag on her cigarette. ‘ ’Cept for the nights when you can’t sleep for the heat.’ She exhaled and the smoke lingered. There was no breeze. There didn’t seem to be a perfect day when people would not complain about the weather. The man had noticed this. They drank their beers until Mike announced he had to leave. Then Michelle said she couldn’t stay long, and soon they all dispersed.
The man took the Tube to Charing Cross station and caught a train to the southern part of the city. People seemed less energetic in the heat, but happier. He enjoyed watching their faces, the stripped-down bodies, the bare roasting limbs. A woman wearing khaki shorts and an embroidered tunic shirt sat diagonally across from him. Every so often he would seek a glimpse of her legs, the outline of her braless breasts against the tunic. At one point she caught his glance, but she didn’t seem perturbed; she gazed out of the window with a faint smile lacing her eyes. When he turned towards her again, she noticed and they both looked away. The other passengers read their books or newspapers or closed their eyes against the closeness of the carriage. The train rattled on, spilling passengers out and hauling others in. The eyes of the two met once more. They flitted from faces to clothes to the views from the windows, and then to each other again. Soon enough the train arrived at a busy station and the woman rose and disembarked. She did not look back. It was a game and it didn’t mean anything.
‘Is that you?’ the woman called as the man tried one key and then another. He was already tipsy from the beer and the heat. He shut the door behind him and didn’t answer, but made straight for the kitchen where she stood stirring a saucepan of stew.
‘Oh, there you are.’ She glanced at him. ‘I’m making casserole for dinner. Casserole and rice. That all right, babes?’ She reached across to kiss him.
‘Perfect,’ he replied. ‘I am so hungry – I had only a sandwich all day, can you believe?’
He showered to wash away the stickiness of the day, and dressed in pleated black trousers and a sunset-orange long-sleeved shirt – the clothes he had already chosen for their evening out. He laid the table for two and went to fetch a can of beer from the fridge.
‘There you are,’ the woman said again, busy with the pots. ‘It’s nearly ready. Hope you can wait.’
He gazed at her as he leaned against the door to the kitchen. She wore a tan linen skirt and a plain white blouse with the sleeves rolled up. She had wrapped her dyed blonde hair into a messy bun to prevent it falling into the stew when she bent to taste it. He thought of the woman on the train, the secret of her breasts behind the embroidered tunic. Her smooth bare legs.
‘I cannot wait,’ he smiled and squinted at her, sipping the beer.
She turned sharply to look at him. ‘Not now, babes,’ she said. ‘Let’s eat first, at least. It’s almost done.’
He moved across the kitchen in his bare feet and drew his free arm across her waist and pressed himself against her as she cooked. They made slow dancing movements at the edge of the stove. He took another swig of beer and she stirred the stew to prevent it from sticking to the pot, but it was already too late.
‘How does it taste?’ she held the spoon to his mouth, across her shoulder.
‘Just right,’ he replied, though he knew he would add salt to his own plate later. He turned off the gas rings and waltzed with her to the bedroom. They could not wait to remove their clothes and within minutes they were breathless and empty from the exertion.
They were from different countries, the man and the woman. He came from a part of the world where you might be fed if you knocked on a stranger’s door, but it was not unknown to witness a corpse by the side of the road or a child begging for its blind father. He had moved away from that. He had managed to shape a life elsewhere: a man, a woman and a child. Now the child was dead and the woman had left him. He had lost his job and then his house. It was as if he were starting all over again: the current job, the flat, the woman who lived there. Everything was temporary for him.
The woman came from a town across the border – where people spoke with a gentle lilt, where they had their own language, where neighbours greeted each other in the morning as they collected bottles of milk from their doorsteps. They knew each other’s affairs. She had fled from all that to lose herself in the excitement of the city.
They both lay staring at each other, not touching, just breathing. They did not speak.
When they had eaten and the sky was growing dark, they left for the place they frequented on a Friday night. There were other couples there who led similar lives, who shared an interest in a type of music that emphasized movement, that gave off heat. Often the man and the woman would dance with other partners – friends of theirs, or strangers. What was important was the Latin rhythm and the feeling of connection to themselves and to the other people who swayed and twisted and drew as close to o
ther bodies as perfect strangers were able to.
The man looked across the floor towards the woman. She was dancing with a man whose head barely reached her eyebrows, but he was nimble and his shirt strained against the stretch of his muscles. At one moment the woman whirled across the space in his grip, her face alive with rapture, and the man experienced a twinge of envy, but it didn’t last. The woman he was dancing with was taller than his own lover, but she did not share her abandon. Her movements were slightly awkward – she dragged when he tried to second-guess her – but she was an adequate dancer. He liked the look on her face when she expressed surprise at the way he held her, cupping his hands more intimately than was necessary, touching her so that she would widen her eyes like a woman kissed with ice cubes in the small of her back.
‘Is so hot,’ she fanned herself with her fingers. Her name was Consuelo. The man smiled but he didn’t say anything. They continued to dance until the music changed and then he gestured, ‘You want to drink? You want to drink something?’
She nodded and they wandered towards the bar where he ordered four cocktails: for himself, his lover, Consuelo and the squat Englishman. The couple on the dance floor soon joined them and they talked and drank watching the other people move. The men’s shirts were stained wet with perspiration, and the women travelled back and forth to the toilets to refresh themselves.
‘We take them to Florida soon, Tom and me,’ Consuelo was saying to the woman. ‘Before the school begin again. At the end of the holiday.’
‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to go to America!’ The woman screeched to make herself heard above the music. She was already more than tipsy. It was their custom to drink hard and steadily at the end of the week. ‘Ever since I was a girl. Some of my friends went once, but I never.’
‘You two have kids?’ Tom asked. He jiggled about as he stood, in time with the music, spinning his arms in front of his chest, a dancing boxer.
The woman glanced at the man, but he looked quickly towards the dance floor. ‘Nah!’ He waved the air aside as if he were shooing a fly. There was nothing more to say. ‘Look, we must dance again!’
The man was first to drain his glass. As he waited for the others he thrust his hands into his jacket pockets. There were the leaves and the dead flowers and the dirt, the soiled handkerchief, either side of him. He had forgotten to empty his pockets all day. He thought of the boy then, in the middle of the spirited club. He leaned heavily against the edge of the bar. His legs were trembling.
They caught the night bus home and by the time they slammed the door behind them it was past two a.m. The whole house shook. The air outside had cooled by only a few degrees, and the woman threw open the bedroom windows. She stumbled to the bathroom to shower, while he undressed and fell onto the bed. By the time she had dried off, the first whistle of a snore had escaped from him.
‘Hey, wake up,’ she called, and then louder, ‘Wake up! I’m here! Wake up, babes!’ In a few moments there was the complaint of the broom from the flat below.
He squinted at her as she knelt over him. Her hair, falling onto his face, reeked of cigarette smoke. The tips were damp. She moved her lips from his face, along the length of his body, but he did not respond. She wanted him again but he could not summon up the desire. He sat up and lowered her, so that her head lay at the foot of the bed, but whatever they tried was of little consequence. He had ruined himself with drink. He fell beside her at the end of the bed. He tried to lever himself up, but his limbs were flaccid. She watched him and laughed, her head lolling from side to side. ‘Bloody hell,’ she moaned again and again.
Finally he sat on the edge of the bed and then stood and swayed and fell to the bed again.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ the woman continued to laugh. ‘You’re on top form tonight.’ She heard a stream of liquid running to the floor. She turned to him as if for the first time. He was beyond himself now, there was no control, the body not doing what the mind required. The urine washed against the side of the bed, spilling onto the wooden floor. For a time that was the only sound they listened to. Then she was up, pushing him off the bed, screaming. It was always like this: the drinking, the fighting, the release of held tensions. She stood over him as he sat on the floor, barely conscious.
‘Look, you’ve pissed yerself,’ she hissed. She could barely contain her rage. And then she was laughing once more and chanting, ‘You’ve pissed yerself,’ over and over again.
The banging from the downstairs flat sounded like a mallet being driven through the floor, as if the neighbours were trying to break in. Bang, bang, bang, the blows rained upwards. The woman was dancing now, singing, her breasts leaping up as she jigged. She seemed to find the situation comical now, her footfall like hard hooves on the wooden floor.
Mid-morning when the woman woke, the man had already cleaned the room. She could hear him moving about the flat, humming to a tune on the radio. She heard the faint churn of the washing machine in the kitchen. She could smell the start of a meal they would eat later, but apart from frying onions, she could not guess the ingredients. She knew he would have woken hours earlier, as he always did, seeming to survive on little sleep.
She turned in the bed to face the chestnut tree, its leaves fluttering quietly in the still of the morning. The blue sky gave off an intense heat. The curtains lapped at the edge of the window, but the breeze was hardly felt.
They would eat the meal the man prepared as they did every Saturday afternoon. They would begin to speak, moving warily around each other. The only force keeping them together was their terror of being alone.
The woman sighed and turned from the window. She would sleep again until she could sleep no longer and then wake to face the day.
NOW THAT I’M BACK
MAMA’S ALWAYS TELLING people what I can and cannot do.
‘He can get that for himself, Esme! Leave him be!’ she hisses.
Me, reaching up for Whirlies on a supermarket shelf. The Cheerios are too high up, so I’ve plumped for the generics down below. I’d rather not have Mama humiliated in front of Esme Severin, née Duchamp.
We steer away from cereals and trundle down the aisle. Esme, Mama powering the trolley, me in my own set of wheels.
‘Louis, will you go get two tinned tomatoes? I forgot.’ She says this nonchalantly, head turned the other way as if she’s got weightier matters on her mind. If her friend weren’t here she’d have got them herself. Esme doesn’t usually come with us, so Mama’s showing off today.
‘Praise Jehovah!’ Esme says, regarding me. ‘Young man so independent.’ She thinks I’m out of earshot, but I can hear every word.
‘Amen!’ Mama sighs. ‘Amen.’
Esme is Mama’s friend from St Lucia, though they met in church just up the road. She’s an angel right here on earth, Mama says. But I’m not so sure about that. I caught Esme gawping at the man in frozen foods, the one wearing tight shorts and fluorescent trainers. Her eyes zoomed in on him. She could make out the goose pimples on his amplified biceps, I reckon, the patch of sweat at the neckline of his T-shirt. Some angel. Mama sees what she wants to see and that’s fine. But Esme’s no angel, that much I know. Mama’s the angel, you can take it from me. She’s never done a wrong thing.
The sportsman turned and spotted Esme. He looked at me, looking at Esme, looking at him. I looked away. He spun around on one shocking yellow heel, an ersatz figure skater, sped off into another aisle.
‘Don’t take him long,’ Esme says to Mama. I’m wheeling back to them, tinned tomatoes warming in my crotch. ‘That was quick, sweetheart,’ she says to me. Aunty Esme, I call her. I am twenty-three years old.
It’s Friday night and the supermarket is pumping with libido. In the area where we live there seems to be a disproportionate number of single people. Perhaps that’s London-wide. Everyone’s looking at what’s on offer – not fruit and vegetables – the human produce on display. Esme’s half concentrating on what Mama’s saying, on what I’m saying.
She lets her eyes wander off and feast. Mama starts to hum something indistinct. ‘Awake, My Soul, and Rise’, I think. She’s with the Lord now, not in the horny cradle of this place. She’s perfect in every way, Mama. I try to live by her example, but it’s hard. I try; every day is a struggle. Temptation. That’s what I’ve got to fight against.
There’s an assistant who works here, but I haven’t seen her tonight. Sometimes I insist we visit all the aisles just for a glimpse of her. She always says hello. Once Mama left me alone with her and bustled off for tuna steaks. Rosa, she said her name is. I just stared at her and smiled. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Pardon? Oh … I, I’m Louis.’ I held out my hand as if we’d met for the first time.
She told me she was studying architecture or archaeology. I can’t remember which. She works part-time. She said other things then, but nothing registered. I couldn’t concentrate. I don’t think I said anything myself. I could only focus on her smile, the movements of her mouth. The nervous dance of her hands, for emphasis. A swift ballet.
When Mama returned, she listened for a moment. Then she swung me round herself. She hardly ever does that. ‘So nice chatting,’ Mama added, her head half-turned away. Then she was pushing me off elsewhere. Picture me, neck craned round for a last glimpse of Rosa, Mama’s bulk blocking the way. We’re flying down the aisle like we’re in a marathon. She’s muttering under her breath and, excuse me, but I don’t think she’s praising the Lord.
Saturday morning, Mama’s up early to clean. She’s singing along to the vacuum cleaner for all the world to hear. ‘Amazing Grace’. I’d like to help, but she won’t let me. I’d only get in the way. I follow her from room to room to watch and listen. Her voice rises high and clear above the din of the machine. How sweet the sound, she sings. Sometimes the neighbours complain – it’s seven a.m. and it’s the weekend – but we don’t care. It’s a shame to want to stop something so glorious; Mama’s a joy in the church, but outside she’s often a nuisance. Occasionally, I’ll join in, but my voice isn’t strong. Mama doesn’t want me exerting myself. Besides, her voice is powerful; it’s best just to listen. I prefer to listen anyway.
A Life Elsewhere Page 12