Assembly

by Natasha Brown

  She lifts the mug to her mouth, and drinks.

  Metal drags against metal as the men join poles together, forming abstract outlines. Blunt and earthy: the striking thuds and grunts reverberate as the men tether the structure to grass. The mother purses her lips – oo – as she listens. How long will it take the lawn to recover? From these posts and poles hammered, driven in. And soon the guests; their bodies weighing down on to it, heels puncturing it, as they wander or mill around.

  ‘Ellie will be down soon,’ the mother says. ‘To give me a hand with all this.’

  She waves at the busying scene in front of us. A few other people, catering staff I guess, carry boxes or chairs or bundles of long-stemmed flowers over from somewhere left of view.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she says, when I offer to help. ‘Ellie’s coming.’

  She dusts the crumbs from her hand on to the empty plate and tells me about a friend of her son’s, something of an old flame, actually. All that is ancient history, she assures me. I’m not to worry. Still, she says, this friend often pops by early on these occasions, to lend a hand.

  ‘I’m positively overrun with helpers.’ She makes a gesture of mock exasperation.

  I mirror the mother’s amusement, recognizing her practised enunciation; how deliberately she forms consonants around laboured vowels. She is wholly illuminated, in this moment, here, in her stunning kitchen. Then she clears the plates, and we return to our performance of host and guest. We make small talk, absently, until I hear at last the warbling approach of the baby with Ellie, as promised. Ellie responds matter-of-factly to the baby’s ambiguous noises, as though they’re engaged in a real, and tiresome, conversation. Brisk – she finger-waves a greeting to me, then mother and daughter huddle to talk logistics. Where the cars will park, what time the band will arrive – things I assume must have been considered already and agreed weeks prior. The baby reaches out to me, fussing, leaning over and wriggling out of the daughter’s arms. She parks him in a highchair – a stylish, walnut contraption. He kicks, then swings, his little feet. Again, his hands reach out towards me.

  It feels like a touch from the mother, her gaze cloying and silky as spiderwebs against my skin. I turn to look at both, mother and daughter. The elder’s face stretches into another smile.

  ‘All this party talk,’ she says, ‘you must be bored senseless.’ Before I can answer, she points me to the solution: a garden stroll.

  ‘Fresh air is so invigorating,’ she says.

  So I cross the kitchen and pass through, out into the garden, careful not to disturb the staff arranging tables and decorations. The lawn extends in all directions into geometric eruptions of flowers and leafy plants. Further back, stone steps lead down to a mossy fountain, framed by hedges and still more flowers. It’s all beautifully cultivated, with just a touch of overgrown wildness. Presumably achieved via attentive gardening. I look back at the house, up at the sweeping, creeping ivy grandeur. It’s a mansion, really. Toad of Toad Hall – my embarrassingly childish frame of reference surprises me. But it’s true, this place looks like the delicate, sprawling watercolour illustrations I remember from childhood. And somehow I’ve stepped into it. Here I am, on the inside.

  Ey-hey. Pretty lay-day.

  One of the labourers, carrying a large folded table under his arm, calls out from a few metres away. When I look over, he stops walking, sets the table down and leans against it.

  Pretty lady, you think it’s fair? You stroll in the sunshine while I work, eh? What a world!

  His sing-song voice rings sour. He’s older – maybe late forties. Damp hair sticks flat to his brow even as he shakes his head.

  I wonder, who else in this household would he say that to? In his preferred social hierarchy, his understanding of fair, who is allowed to walk, to breathe, to enjoy a Saturday? He has bluish bags beneath his eyes and pronounced jowls. His entire body slumps as he stands there, waiting for his answer. He disgusts me, I realize. His impotent anger, his need to assert himself – to tell me who he thinks this world belongs to. I turn away, and start towards the steps at the back of the garden.

  Pretty lady? he calls after me. Joking, pretty lady come back!

  I keep going until I no longer hear his laughter.

  It’s cooler by the fountain. A few fat, silvery-orange fish loop around the pond beneath. I watch them dart between rocks, disappearing and reappearing, glinting in the rainbow refracted light. Convince the lowest white man… LBJ had accurately diagnosed the importance of a coloured other to placate his people. I’ve watched with dispassionate curiosity as this continent hacks away at itself: confused, lost, sick with nostalgia for those imperialist glory days – when the them had been so clearly defined! It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach – won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just viscous, random chance. And then, compounding.1

  I let myself out, lifting and replacing the rusted lever to lock the fence behind me. Even from the periphery, just here, the house seems already quite far. I am not much of a rambler, but right now I want to walk. Further than even their ample garden will allow. I want distance. I think. Up through the hills.

  I walk to it.

  It spreads, the doctor said when I asked her how it’s killing me. She explained the stages. Said if I leave it too long, let it spread too far, the damage will be unsurvivable. Metastasis: it spreads through the blood to other organs, growing uncontrollably, overwhelming the body.

  There is a basic physicality to the family’s wealth. The house, these grounds, the staff, art – all things they can touch, inhabit, live on. And the family genealogy; all the documents, photographs. Books! A curated history. I press my palm against the rough bark of a tree trunk and look up at its branches. Cool and leafy, the air here tastes like possibility. Imagine growing up amongst this. The son, of course, insists the best things in life are free. All this was, is, free to him. The schoolchildren here don’t need artificial inspiration from people like me. They take chances, pursue dreams, risk climbing out to the highest, furthest limb. They reach out – knowing the ground beneath is soil, soft grass and dandelions.

  I can even understand Lou, considering all this. The underdog he sees in himself, believing in his own fairytale of overcoming; from Bedford to midway up the corporate ladder with a two-bed two-bath in a W9 postcode. Lou will make it, I expect. He’ll have all this. He’ll upsize, then upsize again, soon enough. Get the kids on waiting lists for the right schools. Schmooze up to the right people, get that next promotion, the ski invite, start buying better suits. He’ll evolve. Until he slips in, indistinguishable. His children will grow up knowing only this. Believing it’s free.

  The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate… Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion – disappear! Melt into London’s multicultural soup. Not like Lou. Not here. Not into this.

  I have lived life by the principle that when I face a problem, I must work to find an action I can take to overcome it; or accommodate it; or forge a new path around it; excavate the ground beneath it, even. This is how I’ve been prepared. This is how we prepare ourselves, teach our children to approach this place of obstacle after obstacle. Work twice as hard. Be twice as good. And always, assimilate.

  Because they watch (us). They’re taught how to, from school. They are taught to view our bodies (selves) as objects. They learn an MEDC/LEDC divide as geography – unquestionable as mountains, oceans and other natural phe
nomena. Without whys or wherefores, or the ruthless arrows of European imperialism tearing across the world map. At its most fundamental: the nameless, faceless, unidentified (black) bodies, displayed, packed, and chained, side-by-side head-to-toe, into an inky-illustrated ship. Conditions unfit for animals. In perpetuity, they’re shown these pictures, over and over in classrooms again. Until it becomes axiom; that continuous line from object,

  to us.

  And then, they look:

  Fig 1.

  He’s not shy about it. He stands there, legs apart, in rubber-soled shoes and a cheap suit. Watching. Just two metres away. His eyes, expectant, hold on to your body, his fingertips tap at a two-way radio. The deafening static of his suspicion builds as he trails you through the aisles. He stays a few strides behind you, wherever you go. Your movements are calm and deliberate, but you feel your pulse pound in your neck. You should look right at him. Confront him. Demand a reason, at least. But you can’t.

  You know you can’t.

  A buzzing in your bag startles you. You hesitate, nearly ignore it. But then pull yourself together. Say, come on, and fish the phone out from your bag. Feel the crackle of his attention down your neck and along your arm, through your palm and into your fingers as they fold around smooth plastic and your thumb slides up.

  Hello? says a disembodied voice.

  He’s watching, watching watching.

  Fig 2.

  Outside the corner shop, over the road from your secondary school, there’s often a queue of girls waiting. A shop assistant – turned bouncer for the after-school rush – stood at the door. Two at a time, get in line, one-in-oneout, he intoned, as if reciting from a holy text. But then he’d wave in two or three girls who hadn’t bothered with the queue. Schoolgirls with cherry’d lips, clumpy black eyelashes, and blonde hair that fell in limp curls about their shoulders, he waved them in. Then he glared at the queue, told it to keep the noise down.

  Fig 3.

  New York Sunday night, London Saturday morning. You fly the round trip regularly for work. But the attendant stops you. At Heath-row, Sunday afternoon, the attendant lunges into your path before you can reach the business desk. Places a firm hand against your upper arm. The attendant’s fingers – who knows what else they’ve touched? – now press into the soft, grey wool of your coat. You look down at this hand on your body; at the flecks of dirt beneath its fingernails, the pale hairs sprouting from its clammy skin. And then its owner, the attendant, points and speaks loudly, as though you won’t understand, says: Regular check-in is over there.

  The attendant won’t acknowledge your ticket, no, just waves you over to the long queue. It winds back and forth, penned in between ropes, all the way to the regular check-in desk. The attendant says: Yes, there’s your line, over there.

  Fig 4.

  Walking from the library back to college one evening, you spot them huddled on the bridge. Faces lit sickly-green by their phones. A couple have bikes, one girl leans over the side, spitting into the river below. Talking slows, as you approach, they twist and turn their attention towards

  you keep your pace. Left foot, then right. Keep your head down, keep going. There is no back, or even forwards; realize this. There’s only through it, endlessly, treading it. This hostile environment. This hostile life. And then, that word – that close-sesame word that imbues even kids on a bridge with the wealth and stature of this great, British empire; its architecture, its walls, statues loom magnificent on every side – that word the spitting girl spits at you, before spraying more saliva through her teeth. Rips into silence, not water, this time

  they’re laughing and you’re past them and you don’t look back, you just keep going, and ignore behind you the winding kick-spun sound of pedals spinning fast on their bikes

  don’t look

  The doctor said I didn’t understand —

  I recall Lou, eating lunch at his desk while Philando Castile’s death played out between paragraphs on his screen. He held his burrito up above his mouth and caught falling beans with his tongue as he peeled the foil back from soft tortilla. The doctor had said I didn’t understand, that I didn’t know the pain of it; of cancer left untreated. I’d wish I’d acted sooner, she said. Pain, I repeat. Malignant intent. Assimilation – radiation, rays. Flesh consumed, ravaged by cannibalizing eyes. Video, and burrito, finished. Lou’s sticky hand cupped the mouse and clicked away.

  (understand: the desire is to consume your suffering, entertain themselves with the chill of it, the hair-on-edge frisson of it; of suffering that reasserts all they know as higher truth / jolts and thrills and scratches the throat as they swallow it whole / that same satisfaction of a thread pulled, of pulling, unravelling, coming undone)

  In walking, the crunch and rustle underfoot has yielded to dusty whispers; weightlessness, soft treading. I am lost both literally and in the larger, abstract sense of this narrative. Though looking back, down, I still see the house: red brick towering high behind a white marquee. It seems the house and the marquee and the distance are the only things here now at all. Why am I doing this? I’ve reduced the son, the family and their home, to choice moments, flashes, summaries. Stitched them together from the words and actions of others. Of people, real and complex individuals. Transcendence. I am lifting them up here with me, to these as-yet-unconquered metaphoric planes. Where we can play-act who we are to one another on simplified terms. Which is to say, I am thinking. The mother is right, the air invigorates.

  Still, I remain physically here. And I do not feel safe. My presence unsettles colleagues, strangers, acquaintances, even friends. Yes, I’ve felt the spray of my co-worker’s indignation as he speak-shouts his thoughts re affirmative action. Fucking quotas. Even Rach, her soft hand on my shoulder as she says she understands, of course. She understands, but it’s still tough, you know? It’s like being a woman isn’t enough any more.

  The unquestioned assumption is of something given; something unearned, taken, from a deserving and hardworking –

  Though these hills are empty, and I am free to walk them, there’s the ever-present threat of that same impulse. To protect this place from me. At any moment, any of them could appear, could demand to know who I am, what I’m doing.

  Who told me I could do that here?

  The son – he loves the stories of monstrous men doing hideous things in glossy offices and Michelin restaurants. He takes voyeuristic delight in the pain and righteous struggle, before the eventual overcoming. Afterwards, he smiles and squeezes my hand, he sits easy. Assured by his participation in the quiet, the happy ending. The solution.

  He introduces me to his political friends from across the spectrum. Conservatives who oo and ah and nod, telling me I’m just what this country is about. And so articulate! Frowning liberals who put it simply: my immoral career is counterproductive to my own community. Can I see that? My primary issue is poverty, not race. Their earnest faces tilt to assess my comprehension, my understanding of my role in this society. They conjure metaphors of boats and tides and rising waves of fairness. Not reparations – no, even socialism doesn’t stretch that far. Though some do propose a rather capitalistic trickle-down from Britain to her lagging Commonwealth friends. Through economic generosity: trade and strong relations! Global leadership. The centrists nod. The son nods, too. Now that, they can all agree to.

  They take their modern burden seriously; over Beyond Meat burgers with thick-cut chips drizzled in truffle oil.

  Per bell hooks: We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival… yes, yes! But I don’t know how. How do we examine the legacy of colonization when the basic facts of its construction are disputed in the minds of its beneficiaries? Even that which wasn’t burnt in the 60s – by British officials during the government-sanctioned frenzy of mass document destruction. Operation Legacy, to spare the Queen embarrassment. The more insidious act, though less sensational, proved to have the greatest impact: a deliberate exclusion a
nd obfuscation within the country’s national curriculum. Through this, more than records were destroyed. The erasure itself was erased.

  With breathtaking ease, the facts of Britain’s non-war twentieth-century history have been unrooted, dug out from the country’s collective memory. Supplanted. Vague fairytales of benevolent imperial rule bloom instead. How can we engage, discuss, even think through a post-colonial lens, when there’s no shared base of knowledge? When even the simplest accounting of events – as preserved in the country’s own archives – wobbles suspect as tin-foil-hat conspiracies in the minds of its educated citizens?

  When I am in the schools, I could try to say something. To the assembly halls of children seeking inspiration. Because even today, the mother country hasn’t loosened her grip. Britain continues to own, exploit and profit from land taken during its twentieth-century exploits. Burning our futures to fuel its voracious economy. Under threat of monetary violence. Lecturing us, all the while, about self-sufficiency. Interfering in our politics, our democracies, our access to the global economic stage; creating LEDCs.

  Best case: those children grow up, assimilate, get jobs and pour money into a government that forever tells them they are not British. This is not home.

  Should I say that?

  No, I can’t charge at it head on. There are conventions, the son says. Familiar, palatable forms. To foster understanding. That’s how they do it in speeches, he says. (He sometimes writes political speeches.) Sugarcoat the rhetoric, embed the politics within a story; make it relatable, personal. Honest, he says. Shape my truth into a narrative arc –