by Zadie Smith
Natalie sprung from her chair. Standing she found that holding little Carly limited her dramatic options. The child had fallen asleep on her shoulder. In a dynamic unchanged from childhood, Natalie became irate as her sister grew calm.
“Excuse me I forgot: no-one’s allowed to have friends in this fucking family.”
“Family first. That’s my belief. God first, then family.”
“Oh, give me a fucking break. Here comes the Virgin Mary. Just because you can’t locate the fathers, doesn’t make them all immaculate conceptions.”
Cheryl stood up and stuck a finger in her sister’s face: “You need to watch your mouth, Keisha. And why you got to curse all the time, man? Get some respect.”
Natalie felt tears pricking her eyes and a childish wash of self-pity overcame her entirely.
“Why am I being punished for making something of my life?”
“Oh my days. Who’s punishing you, Keisha? Nobody. That’s in your head. You’re paranoid, man!”
Natalie Blake could not be stopped: “I work hard. I came in with no reputation, nothing. I’ve built up a serious practice—do you have any idea how few—”
“Did you really come round here to tell me what a big woman you are these days?”
“I came round here to try and help you.”
“But no-one in here is looking for your help, Keisha! This is it! I ain’t looking for you, end of.”
And now they had to transfer Carly from Natalie’s shoulder to her mother’s, a strangely delicate operation in the middle of the carnage.
Natalie Blake cast around hopelessly for a parting shot. “You need to do something about your attitude, Cheryl. Really. You should go see someone about it, because it’s really a problem.”
As soon as Cheryl had the child in her arms she turned from her sister and began walking back down the corridor to the bedroom.
“Yeah, well, till you have kids you can’t really chat to me, Keisha, to be honest.”
147. Listings
On the website she was what everybody was looking for.
148. The future
Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were 28 when the first emails began to arrive. Over the next few years their number increased exponentially. Photo attachments of stunned-looking women with hospital tags round their wrists, babies lying on their breast, hair inexplicably soaked through. They seemed to have stepped across a chasm into another world. It was perfectly possible that her own mother was arriving at the houses of these new mothers, with her name-tag pinned to her apron, pricking their babies’ feet with a needle, or sewing up the new mothers’ stitches as they lay sideways on a couch. Marcia must have seen one or two of them, by the law of local averages. They were new arrivals in the neighborhood. They were not the sort of people to switch off the lights and lie on the floor. Mother and baby doing well, exhausted. It was as if no-one had ever had a baby before, in human history. And everybody said precisely this, it was the new thing to say: “It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.” Natalie forwarded the emails to Leah. It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.
149. Nature becomes culture
Many things that had seemed, to their own mothers, self-evident elements of a common-sense world, now struck Natalie and Leah as either a surprise or an outrage. Physical pain. The existence of disease. The difference in procreative age between men and women. Age itself. Death.
Their own materiality was the scandal. The fact of flesh.
Natalie Blake, being strong, decided to fight. To go to war against these matters, like a soldier.
150. Listings
After opening an e-mail about a baby, she went to the website, and contributed to the website. She went upstairs to bed.
151. Redact
“Where are you going?
Natalie Blake shook her husband’s hand from her shin and rose from bed. She walked down the hall to the spare bedroom and sat in front of the computer. She typed the address into the browser as smoothly as a pianist playing a scale. She removed the contribution.
152. The past
“Nathan?”
He sat on the bandstand in the park, smoking, with two girls and a boy. Two women and a man. But they were dressed as kids. Natalie Blake was dressed as a successful lawyer in her early thirties. Alone, he and she might have walked the perimeter of the park, and talked about the past, and perhaps she would have taken off her ugly heels and they would have sat in the grass and Natalie would have smoked his weed, and then told him to get off drugs in a motherly sort of way, and he would have nodded and smiled and promised. But in company like this she had no idea how to be.
It’s well hot, said Nathan Bogle. It really is, agreed Natalie Blake.
153. Brixton
It was a long-standing invitation but she hadn’t called or sent a text to say she was coming. It was an impulse that struck her at Victoria Station. Fifteen minutes later she was walking down Brixton High Street, exhausted from court, still in her suit, getting in the way of merry people just starting their Friday night. She bought some flowers in a garage forecourt, and thought of all the scenes in movies where people buy flowers from garage forecourts, and of how it is almost always better to bring nothing. She found the house and rang the bell. A queeny guy with his ’fro dyed blonde answered.
“Hi. Jayden about? His sister, Nat.”
“Of course you are. You look just like Angela Bassett!”
The kitchen was confusingly full. Was it the queen? Or one of the white guys? Or the Chinese guy, or the other guy?
“He’s in the shower. Vodka or tea?”
“Vodka. You all heading out?”
“We just got in. The only thing to eat right now is this Jaffa cake.”
154. Force of nature
When had she last been so drunk? There was something about being in the company of so many men with no intentions toward her that encouraged excess. She was learning many things about her little brother she had never known. He was “famous” for drinking White Russians. He’d had a crush on Nathan Bogle. He loved fantasy fiction. He could do more one-handed press-ups than any other man in the room.
The vodka ran out. They took shots of a blue drink they found in a cupboard. Natalie realized that there was no special or chosen man in this house. Jayden had managed to find for himself precisely the fluid and friendly living arrangements she herself had dreamed of so many years earlier. If it was not quite possible to feel happy for him it was because the arrangement was timeless—it did not come bound by the constrictions of time—and this in turn was the consequence of a crucial detail: no women were included within the schema. Women come bearing time. Natalie had brought time into this house. She couldn’t stop mentioning the time, and worrying about it. If only she could free herself from her body and join them all at the Vauxhall Tavern, for the second wave. In reality, she had ten texts from Frank and it was time to go home. The time had come.
“And all in the same week,” said Jayden, “all in the same week, she told this rude boy kid in our estate who was on my case to back off, she just ran him off, right after she came out of that last exam. Straight As. Bitch is real. Sista’s a force of nature, believe!” The room was dipping and revolving. Natalie did not recognize this story. She did not think these two things had happened, at least not in the same week, perhaps not even in the same year. She certainly did not get straight As. It had occurred several times this evening, these conflicting versions, and at first she had tried to tweak or challenge them, but now she leaned back into the arms of a man called Paul and stroked his bicep. Did it matter what was true and what wasn’t?
155. Some observations concerning television
She was watching the poor with Marcia. A reality show set on a council estate. The council estate on television was fractionally worse than the council estate in which she sat watching
the show about a council estate. Every now and then Marcia pointed out how filthy were the flats of the people on television and how meticulously she took care of her own, Cheryl’s mess not withstanding. “Guinness. At ten in the morning!” said Marcia. Natalie, who had not seen the show before, asked after the character arc of one of the participants. Marcia grabbed both arms of her chair and closed her eyes. “She’s on crack. All she cares about is make up and clothes. Her brother is on sickness benefits but there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a disgrace. The dad is in jail for thieving. The mum’s a junkie.” In the show poverty was understood as a personality trait. “Look at that! Look at the bathroom. Shameful. What kind of people would live like this? Did you see that?” Natalie pleaded innocence. She was checking her phone. “All you do is check that phone. Did you come round to see me or check that phone?”
Natalie looked up. A topless lad with a beer bottle in his hand ran across a scrubby patch of grass between two tower blocks and lobbed the bottle into the sole remaining window in a burned-out car. Music accompanied this action. It had a certain beauty.
“I hate the way the camera jumps all over the place like that,” said Marcia. “You can’t forget about the filming for a minute. Why do they always do that these days?”
This struck Natalie as a profound question.
156. Melanie
Natalie Blake was in her office making some notes on an arcane detail of property law as it pertained to adverse possession when Melanie walked in, tried to speak and burst into tears. Natalie did not know what to do with a crying person. She placed a hand upon Melanie’s shoulder.
“What happened?”
Melanie shook her head. Liquid came out of her nose and a bubble appeared in the corner of her mouth.
“A problem at home?”
All Natalie knew about Melanie’s private realm was that her boyfriend was a policeman and there was a daughter called Rafaella. Neither the policeman nor Melanie was Italian.
“Take a tissue,” said Natalie. She had a snot phobia. Melanie fell into a chair. She took a phone from her pocket. Between heaving fits of weeping she seemed to be trying to find something on it. Natalie watched her thumb, frantic on the rollerball.
“I just really need to not be here!” This problem sounded interesting, and quite unexpected coming from plain-speaking, reliable Melanie, whom Natalie often described as “her rock.” (It was the year everyone was saying that such and such a person was “their rock.”) But now Melanie turned blandly practical: “Not all the time! The fact is I’ve got Rafs and I love her and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t have Rafs anymore! Look at her—she’s so bloody brilliant now, she’s almost two.”
Natalie leaned forward to peer at an image on a screen. A grand seigneur to whom a frightened peasant has come, with a confession about the harvest.
157. On the park
Natalie Blake was busy with the Kashmiri border dispute, at least as far as it related to importing stereos into India through Dubai on behalf of her giant Japanese electronics manufacturing client. Her husband Frank De Angelis was out entertaining clients. They were “time poor.” They didn’t even have time to collect their latest reward for all their hard work. Marcia kindly went to get the key before the estate agent closed, and Natalie met her mother and Leah at the front door. They whispered as they entered. It was unclear why. There were no blinds in yet and their shadows rose over the fireplace and up to the ceiling. Natalie led them around, pointing out where sofas and chairs and tables were to be placed, what would be knocked through and what kept, what carpeted and what stripped and polished. Natalie encouraged her mother and her friend to stand in front of the bay window and admire the view of the park. She recognized in herself a need for total submission.
She ran a little ahead to admire a bedroom. Look at this original cornicing. Here is a working fireplace. She waited for her mother and Leah to join her. She picked at a piece of loose plaster with a fingernail. When she had been a pupil and on the “wrong” side of a criminal case, Marcia had wanted her to “think of the victim’s family.” Now if she was instructed by some large multinational company, she had to listen to Leah’s self-righteous, ill-informed lectures about the evils of globalization. Only Frank supported her. Only he ever seemed proud. The more high profile the case, the more it pleased him. Cheryl, years ago: “Every time I try and go back to school, Cole tries to knock me up.” There but for the grace of God. Thinking of Cheryl was always helpful in moments of anxiety. At least Natalie Blake and Frank De Angelis weren’t working against each other, or in competition. They were incorporated. An advert for themselves. Let me show you round this advert for myself. Here is the window, here is the door. And repeat, and repeat.
Natalie was opening the door to what she had decided would be her office when Marcia said something probably quite innocent—“Plenty of space for a family in here”—and Natalie manufactured a row out of it and wouldn’t back down. She watched her mother walk the black and white tiled hallway to the door, no longer the indomitable mistress of her childhood, but a small, gray-haired woman in a sagging woolly hat who surely deserved gentler treatment than she received.
“You all right?” said Leah.
“Yes, yes,” said Natalie, “it’s just the usual.”
Leah found some tea-bags in a kitchen cupboard and a single cup.
“People actually think I’m early QC material. Doesn’t mean anything to her. All you have to do with her is move back in. Cheryl’s her angel now. They get on like a house on fire.”
“You’re difficult for her to understand.”
“Why? What’s difficult about me?”
“You have your work. You have Frank. You’ve got all these friends. You’re getting to be so successful. You’re never lonely.”
Natalie tried to picture the woman being described. Leah sat down on the step.
“Trust me, Pauline’s the same.”
158. Conspiracy
Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were of the belief that people were willing them to reproduce. Relatives, strangers on the street, people on television, everyone. In fact the conspiracy went deeper than Hanwell imagined. Blake was a double agent. She had no intention of being made ridiculous by failing to do whatever was expected of her. For her, it was only a question of timing.
159. In the park
Leah was late. Natalie sat in the park café, outside, at one of the wooden tables, protected from the drizzle by a broad green umbrella. The first ten minutes she spent on her phone. Checking the listings, checking her e-mail, checking the newspapers. She put her phone in her pocket. For ten further minutes no one spoke to her and she did not speak to anyone. Squirrels and birds passed in and out of view. The longer she spent alone the more indistinct she became to herself. A liquid decanted from a jar. She saw herself slip from the bench to the ground and take the shape of an animal. Moving on all fours, she reached the end of the damp tarmac and passed over into the grass and mulch. Continuing on, quicker now, getting the hang of four-legged locomotion, moving swiftly across the lawn and the artificial hillocks, the Quiet Garden and the flowerbeds, into the bushes, across the road, and on to the railway sidings, howling.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry. Central line. Jesus, it’s like a crèche out here.”
Natalie looked up at the kids and chaos at every table and smiled neutrally at her friend and wondered at what point during their lunch date she should give Leah her news.
160. Time speeds up
There is an image system at work in the world. We wait for an experience large or brutal enough to disturb it or break it open completely, but this moment never quite arrives. Maybe it comes at the very end, when everything breaks and no more images are possible. In Africa, presumably, the images that give shape and meaning to a life, and into whose dimensions a person pours themselves—the journey from son to Chief, from daught
er to protector—are drawn from the natural world and the collective imagination of the people. (When Natalie Blake said “In Africa” what she meant was “at an earlier point in time.”) In that circumstance there would probably be something beautiful in the alignment between the one and the many.
Pregnancy brought Natalie only more broken images from the great mass of cultural detritus she took in every day on a number of different devices, some handheld, some not. To behave in accordance with these images bored her. To deviate from them filled her with the old anxiety. She grew anxious that she was not anxious about the things you were meant to be anxious about. Her very equanimity made her anxious. It didn’t seem to fit into the system of images. She drank and ate as before and smoked on occasion. She welcomed, at last, the arrival of some shape to her dull straight lines.
Of the coming birth her old friend Layla, who had three children already, said: “Like meeting yourself at the end of a dark alley.”
That was not to be for Natalie Blake. The drugs she requested were astonishing, transcendent; not quite as good as Ecstasy yet with some faint memory of the lucidity and joy of those happy days. She felt euphoric, like she’d gone clubbing and kept on clubbing instead of going home when someone more sensible suggested the night bus. She put her earphones in and danced around her hospital bed to Big Pun. It was not a very dramatic event. Hours turned to minutes. At the vital moment she was able say to herself quite calmly: “Oh, look, I’m giving birth.”
Which is all to say that the brutal awareness of the real that she had so hoped for and desired—that she hadn’t even realized she was counting on—failed to arrive.
161. Otherness
There was, however, a moment—a few minutes after the event, once the child had been washed of gunk and returned to her—that she almost thought she possibly felt it. She looked into the slick black eyes of a being not in any way identical with the entity Natalie Blake, who was, in some sense, proof that no such distinct entity existed. And yet was not this being also an attribute of Natalie Blake? An extension? At that moment she wept and felt a terrific humility.