by Zadie Smith
‘Why do you insist on taking the scooter if you know you’re not going to want to use it?’
The child spoke with her wet lips brushing the flesh of her mother’s ear: ‘I don’t know what I’m going to want until when I want it.’
The mother looked into her children’s wire baskets.
Naomi: toothpaste, rubber ball, sticker set, big red pitchfork, book.
Spike: rubber ball, rubber ball, flashing plastic duck, Brillo pads, plastic sword.
Five pounds each, five items. Poundland. Natalie could remember doing this with Marcia in Woolworths, back in the day, but then it was one pound, and you got so much more for your money, and everything had to be ‘useful’.
‘I’m interested in the decision-making process here.’
‘I helped Spike choose. But he chose that.’
‘You don’t want a Brillo pad, honey.’
‘I DO WANT.’
Natalie picked up the pitchfork.
‘It’s for Halloween.’
‘Nom, it’s August.’
‘I DO WANT!’
‘Seriously,’ said Naomi, with a very serious look, ‘it’s a bargain.’
At the counter they were selling the Kilburn Times for twenty-five pence.
ALBERT ROAD SLAYING.
FAMILY PLEA FOR WITNESSES
On a tatty sofa a Rastafarian gentleman sat holding a picture of his adult son. Beside the father sat a beautiful young woman, clutching the left hand of the father between her own. There was a depth of misery in both these faces that Natalie found she could not look at in any sustained way. She turned over the top copy and folded the paper in half.
‘And one of those,’ she said.
They had time to kill. Natalie had no idea what was to happen to them all after the time was killed. They walked to the pet shop. Natalie manumitted robot dog. She watched robot and robot dog run down the entrance ramp, to freedom. She unfolded the paper and tried to walk and read and push the buggy and keep an eye out for two beautiful children as they wandered about the cavernous store talking to lizards or arguing about the difference between a hamster and a gerbil. She felt an urge to call Frank – he had a stronger gift for reality than her, especially for chronology – but calling Frank would involve explaining things for which she had no explanation. Two nights ago. Six p.m. Albert Road. Her eyes kept returning to the same block of text, trying to squeeze a little more meaning from it. She could not tell whether she was trying to insert herself into somebody else’s drama – as Frank often said she was wont to do – or whether she really knew something of what had happened at that hour on that road. Now she tried to draw the word ‘Felix’ out of the photograph within a photograph. The dimples and the cheery, laddish expression. The crisp black and yellow hooded top. It was easy to do. He was local, and she recognized him, without being able to say anything else definitive about him. Except perhaps that he looked exactly like a Felix.
She raised her head from her newspaper. She called out. Nothing. She walked to the Tsh, the lizards, the dogs and the cats. Nowhere. She reassured herself she wasn’t the hysterical type. She walked at only a slightly faster pace back around the circuit she had just completed, calling their names in a perfectly reasonable tone. Nothing, nowhere. She abandoned the buggy and moved quickly to the counter. She asked two people a very simple question to which they replied with an infuriating lack of urgency. She went back to the Tsh, and the lizards, shouting. She understood that her children were not kidnapped or murdered or likely to be further than fifty feet from where she was presently standing, but running through this logical series of statements did nothing to halt the falling away of everything that now happened inside her. She peered over into the pit that separates people who have known intolerable pain from people who haven’t. Instantly she was sweating all over her body. A man in an apron came over to tell her to calm down. She pushed past him and ran out into the street. And it was into this pit that she had so nearly placed Frank, her children, her mother, Leah. Anyone who had ever cared for her.
She took a step to the left, and stalled: it was a direction instinct for some reason rejected. She reversed course and ran into the next-door warehouse, and down another ramp into another cavern, filled with faceless mannequins in hijab and great swathes of black silk folded and arranged in many square piles on long shelves. She ran without any design around the racks of fabrics and scarves and embroidered gowns and then back into the street and back down the ramp into the pet shop, where she spotted them at once, sitting on the floor right at the back in front of the rabbit hutches.
She fell to her knees and gripped them with both hands. She kissed them all over their faces, an offering they accepted without comment.
‘Can you eat a rabbit?’ asked Naomi.
‘What?’
‘Did you ever eat a rabbit?’
‘No … I mean, people do. I don’t. Wait – that’s my phone. You shouldn’t disappear like that. You freaked me out.’
‘Why don’t you eat rabbits?’
‘Honey, I don’t know, I just never wanted to. Let me just answer this. Hello?’
‘You eat pigs and chickens and lambs. And Tsh.’
‘You’re right – it doesn’t really make sense. Hello? Who’s this?’
Michel. She could hear at once he was very distressed. She stood up and took a few steps backwards from the children and held a finger up to signify that they should stay where they were.
‘She’s lying out there in the sun,’ said Michel. ‘She won’t speak. I don’t know what to do any more. Why does she hate me?’
Natalie tried to calm him down. She took on Frank’s role: establish chronology. But none of it made sense. Something about the pharmacy. Photographs.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Natalie Blake, a little impatiently.
‘So then I ask her: what’s wrong? What’s really wrong? She says: “Look in the box in the drawer.” So I look.’
‘And what was it?’ asked Natalie, feeling that really the story was being milked for every last drop of unnecessary drama. She was eager to return to her children.
‘Pills. We’ve been trying for a year! I don’t know if she’s been taking them the whole time. They got your name on them. Did you give them to her, Natalie? Why would you do that to me? What the fuck, man!’
Natalie’s children came now to her side and each took a leg and started pulling, as Natalie defended herself against the imputation of collaboration. Normally all of her energies would be in defence – she was trained in it – but as she spoke her mind travelled to what felt like open ground, where she was able to almost imagine something like her friend’s pain and, in imagining it, recreate some version of it in herself.
‘I’m really so sorry.’
‘Why does she lie to me? She’s not herself. She told me she started praying. She’s not herself. Ever since Olive died she’s not herself.’
‘No, she is. She’s still Leah.’
‘Why does she hate me?’
‘Mum – let’s go, Mum. Now! Let’s go!’
‘Leah loves you. She always has. She just doesn’t want to have a baby.’ Clarity. Bright, blinding, free of judgement, impossible to contemplate for longer than a moment, and soon transfigured into something else. Still, for a moment it was there.
‘Please come.’
The three of them sat at the bus stop outside Poundland waiting for the 98. A lady in her seventies with a fetching white streak in her black hair explained how she had escaped the revolution with a Yorkshire terrier in her hand luggage on a plane chartered by the Shah himself. Not this terrier, the one two before this one. But in a sense I really did not become a good Muslim until I came to Kilburn. This is where I really became very holy. I thought dogs were haraam, said Natalie. Not my dog. Mindy-Lou is a gift from God. Let her lick your children. It’s a blessing in disguise.
The bus came. Natalie sat with her forehead rumbling on the glass.
The Cock Tavern. Mc
Donald’s. The old Woolworths. The betting shop. The State Empire. Willesden Lane. The cemetery. Whoever said these were fixed coordinates to which she had to be forever faithful? How could she play them false? Freedom was absolute and everywhere, constantly moving location. You couldn’t hope to find it only in the old, familiar places. Nor could you force other people to take off their clothes and give it to you like a gift. Clarity! And when I realized Mindy-Lou could actually speak to me through my mind, well, then I really had a moment, like in a storybook or a film, and I knew I would always be watched over and loved by everybody I met forever the end. OK, said Natalie, and lifted up Naomi and manoeuvred the buggy to the doors. It was nice chatting with you. We get off here.
At the door Michel took Natalie’s hand and led her down the hall, through the kitchen and across the grass as if it were an expedition and she wouldn’t be able to find her way without him. ‘Maybe I should get a new dog. I don’t know what she wants.’ He was in pieces. Such a sweet man. Natalie put a hand to her brow to block the August sun. She spotted Leah lying in the hammock in the garden, totally exposed. Here she had lain for several hours, refusing to speak. Natalie had been brought in for an emergency consultation. She tried to approach quietly with her kids, but they were dragging on her, both too hot and crying, slowing her down. Michel offered to take them into the kitchen. They clung to their mother. ‘Maybe fill these,’ said Natalie, and passed Michel two plastic drinks holders. ‘Kids, go. Go with Michel.’ She sat down on the bench across from the hammock and said her good friend’s name. Nothing. She asked Leah what the matter was. Nothing. She took her sandals off and put her bare feet in the grass. With what was left of clarity she offered her friend a selection of aphorisms, axioms and proverbs the truth content of which she could only assume from their common circulation, the way one puts one’s faith in the face value of paper money. Honesty is always the best policy. Love conquers all. Each to her own.
She spoke and Leah did not stop her, but Natalie was wasting her time. She was in breach of that feminine law that states no weakness may be shown by a woman to another woman without a sacrifice of equal value being made in return. Until Natalie paid up, in the form of a newly minted story, preferably intimate, hopefully secret, she wouldn’t be told anything in return, nor would her good friend Leah Hanwell listen to any advice.
‘Leah,’ cried Natalie Blake, ‘Leah. I’m talking to you. Leah!’
She heard Spike wailing; he was running towards her, silver paint running down his face, and was soon upon her, and she picked him up and tried to listen and understand the injustice he believed had been done to him. Leah turned her head to Natalie very slowly. Spike was laid flat out in his mother’s lap. Leah’s nose was burnt and peeling.
‘Look at you,’ said Leah. ‘Mother and child. Look at you. You look like the fucking Madonna.’
A child. Children. Not babies, not something to be merely managed any longer. Beautiful, unknowable, and not her arms or legs or any other extension of her. Natalie pressed Spike so tightly to her person he started to complain. It was knowledge as a sublime sort of gift, inadvertently given. She wanted to give her friend something of equal value in return. If candour were a thing in the world that a person could hold and retain, if it were an object, maybe Natalie Blake would have seen that the perfect gift at this moment was an honest account of her own difficulties and ambivalences, clearly stated, without disguise, embellishment or prettification. But Natalie Blake’s instinct for self-defence, for self-preservation, was simply too strong.
‘I’m not going to apologize for my choices,’ she said.
‘Oh God, Nat, who’s asking you to? Let’s just forget it. I don’t want to argue with you.’
‘Nobody’s arguing. I’m trying to understand what’s really the matter with you. I don’t believe you’re sitting here flirting with skin cancer because you don’t want a baby.’
Leah turned in her hammock and showed Natalie her back.
‘I just don’t understand why I have this life,’ she said quietly.
‘What?’
‘You, me, all of us. Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road. It doesn’t make sense to me.’
Natalie frowned and folded her arms across her body. She had expected a more difficult question.
‘Because we worked harder,’ she said, laying her head on the back of the bench to consider the wide-open sky. ‘We were smarter and we knew we didn’t want to end up begging on other people’s doorsteps. We wanted to get out. People like Bogle – they didn’t want it enough. I’m sorry if you find that answer ugly, Lee, but it’s the truth. This is one of the things you learn in a courtroom: people generally get what they deserve. You know, one advantage of kids is you don’t have so much time to sit in hammocks getting depressed about these kinds of abstract questions. From where I’m sitting you’re doing all right. You’ve got a husband you love and who loves you – and he’s not going to stop doing that if you just tell him the truth about what you’re feeling. You’ve got a job, friends, family, somewhere to …’ said Natalie, and carried on with her bright list, but it had by this point become automatic, self-referential, and her only real thought was of Frank and how much she wanted to speak to him.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ said Leah Hanwell.
Michel came across the lawn with Naomi, a tray of drinks, two sippy cups and a bottle of white with glasses.
‘Does she speak?’ he asked.
‘She speaks,’ said Leah.
Michel poured wine for the adults.
‘Please,’ said Leah, accepting a glass, ‘I don’t want to do this in front of the kids. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘I think I know what happened in Albert Road,’ said Natalie Blake.
First they sent an email. A police website for anonymous tips. But that was anticlimactic, not very satisfying, and once it was done they stared at the screen and felt disappointed. They decided to make the call to Kilburn Police Station.
‘At the very least,’ said Leah Hanwell, who seemed infused with a new energy, ‘Nathan Bogle is a person of interest. From what you’ve said. Added to what we already knew. About his character. At the very least he’s a person of interest.’
Certainly a person of interest.
‘You’re right,’ said Natalie Blake, ‘it’s just the right thing to do,’ and a few minutes later, as they went over the disparate bits of the tale once again, Leah said the same thing back to Natalie.
Through the glass doors they watched the children spinning on the lawn. Leah found the number online. Natalie dialled it. It was Keisha who did the talking. Apart from the fact she drew the phone from her own pocket, the whole process reminded her of nothing so much as those calls the two good friends used to make to boys they liked, back in the day, and always in a slightly hysterical state of mind, two heads pressed together over a handset.
‘I got something to tell you,’ said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.
Acknowledgements
For creating the time: Mariya Shopova, Sharon Singh, Seeta Oosman, Freedom©, Self Control©.
For creating the author: Yvonne Bailey-Smith.
For reading the book: Simon Prosser, Georgia Garrett, Ann Godoff, Sarah Manguso, Gemma Seiff, Hilton Als, Tamara Barnett-Herrin, Devorah Baum, Sarah Kellas, Darryl Pinckney, Sarah Woolley, Daniel Kehlmann, Anelise Chen, Josh Appignanesi.
For being local: Jim Ford, Len Snow.
For knowing the law: Alison Macdonald, Matthew Ryder.
For inspiration: The Black House, by Colin Jones, a model for ‘Garvey House’.
For being an ideal friend: Sarah Kellas.
For all of the above, much more, everything: Nick Laird. Thank you.
Permissions
The publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce the following extracts:
‘Welcome To Jamrock’ Words and Music by Ini Kamoze, Damian Marley & Stephen Marley © Copyright 2005 Ixat Music In
corporated/ Universal Songs Of Polygram Incorporated/Biddah Muzik Inc./Universal Music Publishing Limited/EMI Music Publishing Limited/ Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited.
‘You really got me’, words and music by Ray Davies © 1964 Edward Kassner music co. Ltd for the world. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
‘Village Green Preservation Society’ Words and Music by Ray Davies © Davray Music Ltd & Carlin Music Corp. – London NWI 8BD – All Rights Reserved.
‘Willesden Green’ Words and Music by Raymond Douglas Davies © 1971. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W8 5SW.
‘If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)’ by Nas, Allan Felder, David Reeves, Kurt Walker, Jean Olivier, Jean O’Bryant, Samuel Barnes, Norman Harris © Universal Music Publishing Limited/ Warner Chappell/ Chrysalis One Pub/ International Music Network. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.