by Zadie Smith
129. Return
The commute was ‘killing’ her. Sometimes a simple choice of vocabulary can gain traction in the world. ‘Killing’ became the premise for a return to NW. ‘And what about my commute?’ protested Frank De Angelis. ‘Jubilee line,’ said his wife, Natalie Blake, ‘Kilburn to Canary Wharf.’ Carefully she drew up a contract, negotiated a mortgage, split the deposit in half. All for a Kilburn flat that her husband could have bought outright without blinking. When the deal went through Natalie bought a bottle of Cava to celebrate. He was still at work at six when she picked up the keys, and still there at eight – and then the inevitable nine forty-five phone call: ‘Sorry – all-nighter. Go on without me, if you want.’ Motto of a marriage. Natalie Blake called Leah Hanwell: ‘Want to see me carry myself over the threshold?’
130. Re-entry
Leah turned the key in the stiff lock. Natalie crept in behind her, into adult life. Notable for its silence and privacy. The electricity was still unconnected. A clear moon lit the bare white walls. Natalie was ashamed to find herself momentarily disappointed: after camping in Frank’s place all these months, this looked small. Leah did a circuit of the lounge and whistled. She was working from an older scale of measurement: twice the size of a Caldwell double.
‘What’s that out there?’
‘Downstairs’ roof. It’s not a balcony, the agent said you can’t –’
Leah went through the sash windows and on to the ivy-covered ledge. Natalie followed. They smoked a joint. In the driveway below a fat fox sat brazen as a cat, looking up at them.
‘Your ivy,’ said Leah, touching it, ‘your brick, your window, your wall, your light bulb, your gutter pipe.’
‘I share it with the bank.’
‘Still. That fox is with child.’
Natalie thumbed the cork out. It bounced off the wall and dropped away into the dark. She took a messy swig. Leah leant forward and wiped her friend’s chin: ‘Cava socialist.’ Now watch Natalie recalibrate the conversation. It is a feminine art. She places herself halfway up a slope that has at its peak Frank’s friends, all those single young men with their incomprehensible Christmas bonuses. She found it pleasing to describe this world to Leah, who knew almost nothing of it. Chelsea, Earls Court, West Hampstead. Lofts and mansion flats unsullied by children or women, empty of furniture, fringed by ghettos.
‘Correction: there’s always one big brown leather sofa, a huge fridge and a TV as big as this Oat. And an enormous sound system. They’re not home till two a.m. “Entertaining clients”. In strip clubs, usually. It all just sits empty. Five bedrooms. One bed.’
Lean flicked the end of a joint towards the fox: ‘Parasites.’
Natalie was suddenly stricken by something she thought of as ‘conscience’. ‘A lot of them are OK,’ she said quickly. ‘Nice, I mean, individually. They’re funny. And they do work hard. Next time we have a dinner you should come.’
‘Oh, Nat. Everybody’s nice. Everybody works hard. Everybody’s a friend of Frank’s. What’s that got to do with anything?’
131. Revisit
People were ill.
‘You remember Mrs Iqbal? Small woman, always a bit snooty with me. Breast cancer.’
People died.
‘You must remember him, he lived in Locke. Tuesday he dropped dead. Ambulance took half an hour.’
People were shameful.
‘Baby born two weeks ago, and they haven’t let me in yet. We don’t even know how many kids are in there. They don’t register them.’
People didn’t know they were born.
‘Guess how much for eggs in that market. Organic. Guess!’
People were seen.
‘I seen Pauline. Leah’s working for the council now. She always had such big ambitions for that child. Funny how things turn out. In a way you’ve done quite a bit better than her, really.’
People were unseen.
‘He’s upstairs with Tommy. He spends all his time with him now. They only come out of that room to go and charm the ladies. Jayden and Tommy spend all their time and money charming the ladies. That’s all your brother thinks about. He needs to get himself a job, that’s what I keep telling him.’
People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence.
‘Owen Cafferty.’
‘Mum, I don’t remember him.’
‘Owen Cafferty. Owen Cafferty! He did all the catering for church. Moustache. Owen Cafferty!’
‘OK, vaguely, yes. Why?’
‘Dead.’
Everything was the same in the flat, yet there was a new feeling of lack. A new awareness. And lo they saw their nakedness and were ashamed. On the table Marcia laid out a fan of credit cards. As Marcia talked her daughter through the chaotic history of each card Natalie made notes as best she could. She had been brought in for an emergency consultation. She did not really know why she was taking notes. The only useful thing would be to sign a large cheque. This she couldn’t do, in her present circumstances. She couldn’t bear to ask Frank. What difference did it make if she turned figures into words?
‘I’ll tell you what I really need,’ said Marcia. ‘I need Jayden to get up out of here and get married, so he can run his own household, and your sister’s little ones don’t have to be sleeping in the room with their mother. That’s what I need.’
‘Oh, Mum … Jayden’s not going to ever get … Jayden’s not interested in women, he –’
‘Please don’t start up that nonsense again, Keisha. Jayden’s the only one of you takes care of me at all. This is how we live. Cheryl can’t help anybody. She can’t hardly help herself. Number three on the way. Of course I love these kids. But this is how we’re living like, Keisha, to be truthful. Hand to mouth. This is it.’
People were living like this. Living like that. Living like this.
132. Domestic
‘I can’t stand them living like that!’ cried Natalie Blake.
‘You’re making unnecessary drama,’ said Frank.
133. E pluribus unum
Certainly exceptional to be taken back into the Middle Temple fold, but Natalie Blake was in many ways an exceptional candidate, and several tenants at the set thought of her, informally, as their own protégée, despite having really only a glancing knowledge of her. Something about Natalie inspired patronage, as if by helping her you helped an unseen multitude.
134. Paranoia
A man and a woman, a couple, sat at a table opposite Natalie and Frank, having Saturday brunch in a café in north-west London.
‘It’s organic,’ said Ameeta. She referred to the ketchup.
‘It’s bad,’ said her husband, Imran. He was also referring to the ketchup.
‘It’s not bad. It doesn’t have the fourteen spoonfuls of sugar you’re used to,’ said Ameeta.
‘It’s called flavour?’ said Imran.
‘Just bloody eat it or don’t eat it,’ said Ameeta. ‘Nobody cares.’
Around them, at other tables, other people’s babies cried.
‘I didn’t say anybody cared,’ said Imran.
‘India versus Pakistan,’ said Frank – he referred, in a jocular manner, to his friends’ countries of origin. ‘Better pray it doesn’t go nuclear.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Natalie Blake.
They continued on with their breakfast. Breakfast tipped into brunch. They did this once or twice a month. Today’s brunch seemed, to Natalie, a more lively occasion than usual, and more comfortable, as if by rejoining a commercial set and acting, at least in part, for the interests of corporations, she had lost the final remnants of a troubling aura that had bothered her friends and made them cautious around her.
135. Contempt
The eggs came late. Frank argued chummily with the waiter until they were taken off the bill. At one point employing the phrase: ‘Look, we’re both educated brothers.’ It occurred to Natalie Blake that she was not very happily married. Goofy. Made lame jo
kes, offended people. He was in a constant good humour, yet he was stubborn. He did not read or have any real cultural interests, aside from the old, nostalgic affection for Nineties hip hop. The idea of the Caribbean bored him. When thinking of the souls of black folks he preferred to think of Africa – ‘Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the Sphinx’ – where the two strains of his DNA did noble battle in ancient stories. (He knew these stories only in vague, biblical outline.) He had ketchup by his mouth, and they had married quickly, without knowing each other particularly well. ‘I like her well enough,’ Ameeta said, ‘I just don’t particularly trust her.’ Frank De Angelis would never cheat or lie or hurt Natalie Blake, not in any way. He was a physically beautiful man. Kind. ‘It’s not tax avoidance,’ said Imran. ‘It’s tax management.’ Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. Were they any unhappier than Imran and Ameeta? Those people over there? You? ‘Anything with flour gives me a rash,’ said Frank. On the table lay a huge pile of newspaper. In Caldwell, newspaper choice had been rather important. It was a matter of pride to Marcia that the Blakes took the Voice and the Daily Mirror and no ‘filth’. Now everyone came to brunch with their ‘quality’ paper and a side order of trash. Tits and vicars and slebs and murder. Her mother’s pieties – and by extension Natalie’s own – seemed old-fashioned. ‘It’s an insurgency,’ said Ameeta. Natalie pressed a knife to her egg and watch the yolk run into her beans. ‘Another thing of tea?’ said Frank. They were all agreed that the war should not be happening. They were against war. In the mid-Nineties, when Natalie Blake was sleeping with Imran, the two of them had planned a trip to Bosnia in a convoy of ambulances.
‘But Irie was always going to be that kind of mother,’ said Ameeta. ‘I could have told you that five years ago.’ Only the private realm existed now. Work and home. Marriage and children. Now they only wanted to return to their own flats and live the real life of domestic conversation and television and baths and lunch and dinner. Brunch was outside the private realm, not by much – it was just the other side of the border. But even brunch was too far from home. Brunch didn’t really exist. ‘Can I give you a tip?’ said Imran. ‘Start on the third episode of series two.’ Was it possible to feel oneself on a war footing, constantly, even at brunch? ‘She owns a child of every race now. She’s like the United Nations of Stupid,’ said Frank, for one elevated oneself above an interest in ‘celebrity gossip’ simply by commenting ironically on it. ‘A “romp” with two strippers,’ read Ameeta. ‘Why’s it always a “romp”? I’ve never bloody “romped” in my life.’ Sexual perversity was also old-fashioned: it smacked of an earlier time. It was messy, embarrassing, impractical in this economy. ‘I never know what’s reasonable,’ said Imran. ‘Ten per cent? Fifteen? Twenty?’ Global consciousness. Local consciousness. Consciousness. And lo they saw their nakedness and were not ashamed. ‘You’re fooling yourself,’ said Frank. ‘You can’t get anything on the park for less than a million.’ The mistake was to think that the money precisely signified – or was equivalent to – a particular arrangement of bricks and mortar. The money was not for these poky terraced houses with their short back gardens. The money was for the distance the house put between you and Caldwell. ‘That skirt,’ said Natalie Blake, pointing to a picture in the supplement, ‘but in red.’
As brunch tipped into lunch, Imran ordered pancakes like an American. After decades of disappointment, the coffee was finally real coffee. Wouldn’t it be cruel to leave, now, when they’d come this far? They were all four of them providing a service for the rest of the people in the café, simply by being here. They were the ‘local vibrancy’ to which the estate agents referred. For this reason, too, they needn’t concern themselves much with politics. They simply were political facts, in their very persons. ‘Polly not coming?’ asked Frank. All four checked their phones for news of their last remaining single friend. The smooth feel of the handset in one’s palm. A blinking envelope with the promise of external connection, work, engagement. Natalie Blake had become a person unsuited to self-reflection. Left to her own mental devices she quickly spiralled into self-contempt. Work suited her, and where Frank longed for weekends, she could not hide her enthusiasm for Monday mornings. She could only justify herself to herself when she worked. If only she could go to the bathroom and spend the next hour alone with her email. ‘Working the weekend. Again,’ said Imran. He had the fastest connection. ‘Shame,’ said Natalie Blake. But was it? If Polly came she would only sit down and speak of her good works – police inquests and civil litigation and international arbitration for underdog nations; recently published opinions on the legality of the war. Headhunted by a new, modern, right-on set, where she was both very well paid and morally unimpeachable. Living the dream. It was the year people began to say ‘living the dream’, sometimes sincerely but usually ironically. Natalie Blake, who was also very well paid, found having to listen to Polly these days an almost impossible provocation.
136. Apple blossom, 1 March
Surprised by beauty, in the front garden of a house on Hopefield Avenue. Had it been there yesterday? Upon closer inspection the cloud of white separated into thousands of tiny flowers with yellow centres and green bits and pink flecks. A city animal, she did not have the proper name for anything natural. She reached up to break off a blossom-heavy twig – intending a simple, carefree gesture – but the twig was sinewy and green inside and not brittle enough to snap. Once she’d begun she felt she couldn’t give up (the street was not empty, she was being observed). She laid her briefcase on somebody’s front garden wall, applied both hands and wrestled with it. What came away finally was less twig than branch, being connected to several other twigs, themselves heavy with blossom, and the vandal Natalie Blake hurried away and round the corner with it. She was on her way to the tube. What could she do with a branch?
137. Train of thought
The screenwriter Dennis Potter was interviewed on television. Some time during the early Nineties. He was asked what it felt like to have a few weeks to live. Natalie Blake remembered this answer: ‘I look out of my window and I see the blossom. And it’s more blossomy than it’s ever been.’ Once she got within network she would check the year and whether or not that was the correct wording. Then again, perhaps the way she had remembered it was the thing that was important. The branch lay abandoned outside a phone box at Kilburn Station. Sitting in her tube seat, Natalie Blake moved her pelvis very subtly back and forth. Blossom was always intensely blossomy to Natalie Blake. Beauty created a special awareness in her. ‘The difference between a moment and an instant.’ She couldn’t remember very much about the philosophical significance of this distinction other than that her good friend Leah Hanwell had once tried to understand it, and to make Natalie Blake understand it, a long time ago, when they were students, and far smarter than they were today. And for a brief period in I995, perhaps a week or so, she had thought that she understood it.
138. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=kierkegaard&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient, as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.
139. Doublethink
Commercial barrister Natalie Blake did pro bono death row cases in the Caribbean islands of her ancestry and instructed an accountant to tithe ten per cent of her income, to be split between charitable contributions and supporting her family. She assumed it was the remnants of her faith that made her fretful and suspicious that these good deeds were, in fact, a further, veiled, example of self-interest, representing only the assuaging of conscience. Acknowledging the root of this suspicion did nothing to disperse it. Nor did she find any relief in the person of her husband, Frank De Angelis, who objected to her actions on quite other grounds: sentimentality, woolly-mindedness.
&
nbsp; 140. Spectacle
The Blake-De Angelises started work early and tended to finish late, and in the gaps treated each other with an exaggerated tenderness, as if the slightest applied pressure would blow the whole thing to pieces. Sometimes in the mornings their commutes aligned, briefly, until Natalie changed at Finchley Road. More often Natalie left half an hour to an hour before her husband. She liked to meet early with the pupil with whom she shared a room, Melanie, to get the jump on all the business of the day. In the evenings the couple watched television, or went online to plan future holidays, itself an example of bad faith, for Natalie hated holidays, preferring to work. They only truly came together at weekends, in front of friends, for whom they appeared fresh and vibrant (they were only thirty years old), and full of the old good humour, like a double act who only speak to each other when they are on stage.
141. Listings
It was around this time that Natalie Blake began secretly checking the website. Why does anyone begin checking a website? Anthropological curiosity. The statement: ‘I have heard that people are on this site’ is soon followed by: ‘I can’t believe that people really visit this site!’ Then comes: ‘What kind of people would visit this site?’ If the website is visited multiple times the question is answered. The problem becomes circular.
142. Technology
‘I have it for work.’ ‘It’s for work – I don’t pay for it.’ ‘I’ve got to have it for work, and actually it makes a lot of things easier.’ ‘It’s my work phone, otherwise I wouldn’t even have one.’
143. The present
Natalie Blake, who told people she abhorred expensive gadgets and detested the Internet, adored her phone and was helplessly, compul-sively, adverbly addicted to the Internet. Though incredibly fast, her phone was still too slow. It had not finished fully downloading the new website of her chambers before the doors closed on the elevator in Covent Garden Station. For the length of a twenty-minute tube ride the screen in her hand obstinately froze on the sentence