NW

1

The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. A good line — write it out on the back of a magazine. In a hammock, in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.

Four gardens along, in the estate, a grim girl on the third floor screams Anglo-Saxon at nobody. Juliet balcony, projecting for miles. It ain’t like that. Nah it ain’t like that. Don’t you start. Fag in hand. Fleshy, lobster-red.

I am the sole

I am the sole author

Pencil leaves no mark on magazine pages. Somewhere she has read that the gloss gives you cancer. Everyone knows it shouldn’t be this hot. Shriveled blossom and bitter little apples. Birds singing the wrong tunes in the wrong trees too early in the year. Don’t you bloody start! Look up: the girl’s burned paunch rests on the railing. Here’s what Michel likes to say: not everyone can be invited to the party. Not this century. Cruel opinion — she doesn’t share it. In marriage not everything is shared. Yellow sun high in the sky. Blue cross on a white stick, clear, definitive. What to do? Michel is at work. He is still at work.

I am the

the sole

Ash drifts into the garden below, then comes the butt, then the box. Louder than the birds and the trains and the traffic. Sole sign of sanity: a tiny device tucked in her ear. I told im stop takin liberties. Where’s my cheque? And she’s in my face chattin breeze. Fuckin liberty.

I am the sole. The sole. The sole

She unfurls her fist, lets the pencil roll. Takes her liberty. Nothing else to listen to but this bloody girl. At least with eyes closed there is something else to see. Viscous black specks. Darting water boatmen, zig-zagging. Zig. Zag. Red river? Molten lake in hell? The hammock tips. The papers flop to the ground. World events and property and film and music lie in the grass. Also sport and the short descriptions of the dead.

2

Doorbell! She stumbles through the grass barefoot, sun-huddled, drowsy. The back door leads to a poky kitchen, tiled brightly in the taste of a previous tenant. The bell is not being rung. It is being held down.

In the textured glass, a body, blurred. Wrong collection of pixels to be Michel. Between her body and the door, the hallway floorboards, golden in reflected sun. This hallway can only lead to good things. Yet a woman is screaming PLEASE and crying. A woman thumps the front door with her fist. Pulling the lock aside, she finds it stops halfway, the chain pulls tight, and a little hand flies through the gap.

— PLEASE — oh my God help me — please Miss, I live here — I live just here, please God — check, please—

Dirty nails. Waving a gas bill? Phone bill? Pushed through the opening, past the chain, so close she must draw back to focus on what she is being shown. 37 Ridley Avenue—a street on the corner of her own. This is all she reads. She has a quick vision of Michel as he would be if he were here, examining the envelope’s plastic window, checking on credentials. Michel is at work. She releases the chain.

The stranger’s knees go, she falls forward, crumpling. Girl or woman? They’re the same age: thirties, mid-way, or thereabouts. Tears shake the stranger’s little body. She pulls at her clothes and wails. Woman begging the public for witnesses. Woman in a war-zone standing in the rubble of her home.

— You’re hurt?

Her hands are in her hair. Her head collides with the doorframe.

— Nah, not me, my mum — I need some help. I’ve been to every fuckin door — please. Shar — my name is Shar. I’m local. I live here. Check!

— Come in. Please. I’m Leah.

Leah is as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their families, or their countries. She knows the way people speak around here, that fuckin, around here, is only a rhythm in a sentence. She arranges her face to signify compassion. Shar closes her eyes, nods. She makes quick movements with her mouth, inaudible, speaking to herself. To Leah she says

— You’re so good.

Shar’s diaphragm rises and falls, slower now. The shuddering tears wind down.

— Thank you, yeah? You’re so good.

Shar’s small hands grip the hands that support her. Shar is tiny. Her skin looks papery and dry, with patches of psoriasis on the forehead and on the jaw. The face is familiar. Leah has seen this face many times in these streets. A peculiarity of London villages: faces without names. The eyes are memorable, around the deep brown clear white is visible, above and below. An air of avidity, of consuming what she sees. Long lashes. Babies look like this. Leah smiles. The smile offered back is blank, without recognition. Sweetly crooked. Leah is only the good stranger who opened the door and did not close it again. Shar repeats: you are so good, you are so good— until the thread of pleasure that runs through that phrase (of course for Leah there is a little pleasure) is broken. Leah shakes her head. No, no, no, no.

Leah directs Shar to the kitchen. Big hands on the girl’s narrow shoulders. She watches Shar’s buttocks rise up and against her rolled-down jogging pants, the little downy dip in her back, pronounced, sweaty in the heat. The tiny waist opening out into curves. Leah is hipless, gangly like a boy. Perhaps Shar needs money. Her clothes are not clean. In the back of her right knee there is a wide tear in the nasty fabric. Dirty heels rise up out of disintegrating flip-flops. She smells.

— Heart attack! I was asking them is she dyin? Is she dyin? Is she dyin? She goes in the ambulance — don’t get no answer do I! I got three kids that is home alone innit — I have to get hospital — what they talking about car for? I ain’t got no car! I’m saying help me—no one did a fuckin thing to help me.

Leah grips Shar’s wrist, sets her down in a chair at the kitchen table and passes over a roll of tissue. She puts her hands once more on Shar’s shoulders. Their foreheads are inches from each other.

— I understand, it’s OK. Which hospital?

— It’s like… I ain’t written it… In Middlesex or — Far, though. Don’t know eggzak’ly.

Leah squeezes Shar’s hands.

— Look, I don’t drive — but—

Checks her watch. Ten to five.

— If you wait, maybe twenty minutes? If I call him now, he can — or maybe a taxi…

Shar eases her hands from Leah’s. She presses her knuckles into her eyes, breathing out fully: the panic is over.

— Need to be there… no numbers — nothing — no money…

Shar tears some skin from her right thumb with her teeth. A spot of blood rises and contains itself. Leah takes Shar again by the wrist. Draws her fingers from her mouth.

— Maybe The Middlesex? Name of the hospital, not the place. Down Acton way, isn’t it?

The girl’s face is dreamy, slow. Touched, the Irish say. Possible that she’s touched.

— Yeah… could be… yeah, no, yeah that’s it. The Middlesex. That’s it.

Leah straightens up, takes a phone from her back pocket and dials.

— I’LL COME BY TOMORROW.

Leah nods and Shar continues, making no concession for the phone call.

— PAY YOU BACK. GET MY CHEQUE TOMORROW, YEAH?

Leah keeps her phone to her ear, smiles and nods, gives her address. She mimes a cup of tea. But Shar is looking at the apple blossom. She wipes tears from her face with the fabric of her grubby t-shirt. Her belly-button is a tight knot flush with her stomach, a button sewn in a divan. Leah recites her own phone number.

— Done.

She turns to the sideboard, picks up the kettle with her free hand, fumbling it because she expected it to be empty. A little water spills. She replaces the kettle on its stand, and remains where she is, her back to her guest. There is no natural place to sit or stand. In front of her, on the long windowsill that stretches the room, some of the things of her life — photos, knick-knacks, some of her father’s ashes, vases, plants, herbs. In the window’s reflection Shar is bringing her little feet up to the seat of her chair, holding her ankles. The emergency was less awkward, more natural than this. This is not the country for making a stranger tea. They smile at each other in the glass. There is goodwill. There is nothing to say.

— I’ll get cups.

Leah is naming all her actions. She opens the cupboard. It is full of cups; cups on cups on cups.

— Nice place.

Leah turns too quickly, makes irrelevant motions with her hands.

— Not ours — we rent — ours is just this — there’s two flats upstairs. Shared garden. It’s council, so…

Leah pours out the tea as Shar looks around. Bottom lip out, head nodding gently. Appreciative, like an estate agent. Now she comes to Leah. What’s to see? Wrinkled checked flannel shirt, raggedy jean shorts, freckled legs, bare feet — someone absurd, maybe, a slacker, a lady of leisure. Leah crosses her arms across her abdomen.

— Nice for council. Lot of bedrooms and that?

The lip stays low. It slurs her speech a little. Something is wrong with Shar’s face, Leah notices, and is embarrassed by noticing, and looks away.

— Two. The second’s a box. We sort of use it as…

Shar meanwhile burrows for something else entirely; she’s slower than Leah, but she’s there now, they’re in the same place. She points her finger in Leah’s face.

— Wait — you went Brayton?

She bounces on her chair. Elated. But this must be wrong.

— I swear when you was on the phone I was thinking: I know you. You went Brayton!

Leah perches her backside on the counter and gives her dates. Shar is impatient with chronology. She wants to know if Leah remembers when the science wing flooded, the time Jake Fowler had his head placed in a vise. In relation to these coordinates, like moon landings and the deaths of presidents, they position their own times.

— Two years below you, innit. What’s your name again?

Leah struggles with the stiff lid of a biscuit tin.

— Leah. Hanwell.

— Leah. You went Brayton. Still see anyone?

Leah lists her names, with their potted biographies. Shar beats a rhythm on the table-top with her fingers.

— Have you been married long?

— Too long.

— Do you want me to call someone? Your husband?

— Nah… nah… he’s over there. Ain’t seen him in two years. Abusive. Violent. Had issues. Had a lot of problems, in his head and that. Broke my arm, broke my collarbone, broke my knee, broke my fuckin face. Tell you the truth—

The next is said in a light aside, with a little hiccupping laugh, and is incomprehensible.

— Used to rape me and everything… it was crazy. Oh well.

Shar slides off her chair and walks toward the back door. Looks out on the garden, the parched yellow lawn.

— I’m so sorry.

— Ain’t your fault! Is what it is.

The feeling of feeling absurd. Leah puts her hands in her pockets. The kettle clicks.

— Truthfully, Layer, I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy. It’s been hard. But. Got away, you know? I’m alive. Three kids! Youngest is seven. So, some good came, you get me?

Leah nods at the kettle.

— Got kids?

— No. A dog, Olive. She’s at my mate Nat’s house right now. Natalie Blake? Actually in school she was Keisha. Natalie De Angelis now. In my year. Used to have a big afro puff like—

Leah mimes an atomic mushroom behind her own head. Shar frowns.

— Yeah. Up herself. Coconut. Thought she was all that.

A look of blank contempt passes over Shar’s face. Leah talks into it.

— She’s got kids. Lives just over there, in the posh bit, on the park. She’s a lawyer now. Barrister. What’s the difference? Maybe there isn’t one. They’ve two kids. The kids love Olive, the dog’s called Olive.

She is just saying sentences, one after the other, they don’t stop.

— I’m pregnant, actually.

Shar leans against the glass of the door. Closes one eye, focusing on Leah’s stomach.

— Oh it’s early. Very. Actually I found out this morning.

Actually actually actually. Shar takes the revelation in her stride.

— Boy?

— No, I mean — I haven’t got that far.

Leah blushes, not having intended to speak of this delicate, unfinished thing.

— Does your mans know?

— I took the test this morning. Then you came.

— Pray for a girl. Boys are hell.

Shar has a dark look. She grins satanically. Around each tooth the gum is black. She walks back to Leah and presses her hands flat against Leah’s stomach.

— Let me feel. I can tell things. Don’t matter how early. Come here. Not gonna hurt you. It’s like a gift. My mum was the same way. Come here.

She reaches for Leah and pulls her forward. Leah lets her. Shar places her hands back where they were.

— Gonna be a girl, definite. Scorpio, too, proper trouble. A runner.

Leah laughs. She feels a heat rising between the girl’s sweaty hands and her own clammy stomach.

— Like an athlete?

— Nah… the kind who runs away. You’ll need one eye on her, all the time.

Shar’s hands drop, her face glazes over once more with boredom. She starts talking of things. All things are equal. Leah or tea or rape or bedroom or heart attack or school or who had a baby.

— That school…. it was rubbish but them people who went there…. quite a few people did all right, didn’t they? Like, Calvin — remember Calvin?

Leah pours out the tea, nodding fiercely. She does not remember Calvin.

— He’s got a gym on the Finchley Road.

Leah spins her spoon in her tea, a drink she never takes, especially in this weather. She has pressed the bag too hard. The leaves break their borders and swarm.

— Not running it—owns it. I go past there sometimes. Never thought little Calvin would get his shit together — he was always with Jermaine and Louie and Michael. Them lot was trouble… I don’t see none of them. Don’t need the drama. Still see Nathan Bogle. Used to see Tommy and James Haven but I aint seen them recent. Not for time.

Shar keeps talking. The kitchen slants and Leah steadies herself with a hand to the sideboard.

— Sorry, what?

Shar frowns, she speaks round the lit fag in her mouth.

— I said, can I have that tea?

Together they look like old friends on a winter’s night, holding their mugs with both hands. The door is open, every window is open. No air moves. Leah takes her shirt in hand and shakes it free of her skin. A vent opens, air scoots through. The sweat pooled beneath each breast leaves its shameful trace on the cotton.

— I used to know… I mean…

Leah presses on with this phony hesitation and looks deep into her mug, but Shar isn’t interested, she’s knocking on the glass of the door, speaking over her.

— Yeah you looked different in school, definitely. You’re better now innit. You was all ginger and bony. All long.

Leah is still all of these things. The change must be in other people, or in the times themselves.

— Done well, though. How come you aint at work? What d’you do again?

Shar is already nodding as Leah begins to speak.

— Phoned in sick. I wasn’t feeling good. It’s sort of general admin, basically. For a good cause. We hand out money. From the lottery, to charities, nonprofits — small local organizations in the community that need…

They are not listening to their own conversation. The girl from the estate is still out on her balcony, screaming. Shar shakes her head and whistles. She gives Leah a look of neighborly sympathy.

— Silly fat bitch.

Leah traces a knight’s move from the girl with her finger. Two floors up, one window across.

— I was born just there.

From there to here, a journey longer than it looks. For a second, this local detail holds Shar’s interest. Then she looks away, ashing her cigarette on the kitchen floor, though the door is open and the grass only a foot away. She is slow, maybe, and possibly clumsy; or she is traumatized, or distracted.

— Done well. Living right. Probably got a lot of friends, out on a Friday, clubbing, all that.

— Not really.

Shar blows a short burst of smoke out of her mouth, and makes a rueful sort of sound, nodding her head over and over.

— Proper snobby, this street. You the only one let me in. Rest of them wouldn’t piss on you if you was on fire.

— I’ve got to go upstairs. Get some money for this cab.

Leah has money in her pocket. Upstairs she walks into the nearest room, the toilet, closes the door, sits on the floor and cries. With her foot she reaches over and knocks the toilet paper off its perch. She is rolling it toward her when the doorbell goes.

— DOOR! DOOR! WILL I?

Leah stands, tries to wash away the redness in the tiny sink. She finds Shar in the hallway, in front of a shelf filled with books from college, drawing her finger along the spines.

— You read all these?

— No, not really. No time nowadays.

Leah takes the key from where it sits on the middle shelf and opens the front door. Nothing makes sense. The driver who stands by the gate makes a gesture she doesn’t understand, points to the other end of the street and starts walking. Shar follows. Leah follows. Leah is growing into a new meekness.

— How much do you need?

There is a shade of pity in Shar’s face.

— Twenty? Thirty… is safe.

She smokes without hands, squeezing the vapor out of a corner of her mouth.

The manic froth of cherry blossom. Through a corridor of pink, Michel appears, walking up the street, on the other side. Too hot — his face is soaked. The little towel he keeps for days like this pokes from his bag. Leah raises a finger up in the air, a request for him to stay where he is. She points to Shar, though Shar is hidden by the car. Michel is short-sighted; he squints in their direction, stops, smiles tensely, takes his jacket off, throws it over his arm. Leah can see him plucking at his t-shirt, trying to shed the the remnants of his day: many tiny hairs, clippings from strangers, some blonde, some brown.

— Who that?

— Michel, my husband.

— Girl’s name?

— French.

— Nice looking, innit — nice looking babies!

Shar winks: a grotesque compression of one side of her face.

Shar drops her cigarette and gets in the car, leaving the door open. The money remains in Leah’s hand.

— He local? Seen him about.

— He works in the hairdressers, by the station? From Marseilles — he’s French. Been here forever.

— African, though.

— Originally. Look — do you want me to come with you?

Shar says nothing for a moment. Then she steps out of the car and reaches up to Leah’s face with both hands.

— You’re a really good person. I was meant to come to your door. Seriously! You’re a spiritual person. There’s something spiritual inside you.

Leah grips Shar’s little hand tight and submits to a kiss. Shar’s mouth is slightly open on Leah’s cheek for thank and now closes with you. In reply, Leah says something she has never said in her life: God bless you. They pull apart — Shar backs away awkwardly, and turns toward the car, almost gone. Leah presses the money into Shar’s hand with defiance. But already the grandeur of experience threatens to flatten into the conventional, into anecdote: only thirty pounds, only an ill mother, neither a murder, nor a rape. Nothing survives its telling.

— Mental weather.

Shar uses her scarf to blot the sweat on her face, and will not look at Leah.

— Come by tomorrow. Pay you back. Swear to God, yeah? Thanks, seriously. You saved me today.

Leah shrugs.

— Nah don’t be like that, I swear — I’ll be there, serious.

— I just hope she’s OK. Your mum.

— Tomorrow, yeah? Thank you!

The door closes. The car pulls off.

3

It is obvious to everyone except Leah. To her mother, it is obvious.

— How d’you get so soft?

— Seemed desperate. She was.

— I was desperate on Grafton Street and I was desperate on Buckley Road, we were all desperate. We didn’t go robbing.

Static cloud of sigh. Leah can well imagine: the snowy fringe flutters, the floral bosom lifts. A well-feathered Irish owl her mother has become. Still in Willesden, perched for life.

— Thirty pounds! Thirty pounds for a taxi to The Middlesex. It’s not that to Heathrow. If we’re giving money away you might chuck some in this direction.

— Might still come back.

— Christ himself’ll be back quicker than she will! Two of them here on the weekend. I saw them coming down the road, ringing on bells. Knew them straight off. Crack. Filthy habit! See them down our end every day, by the station. Jenny Fowler on the corner opened the door to one of them — said she was high as a kite in the sky. Thirty pounds! That’s your father in you. No-one who had my blood in them would fall for something so idiotic as that. What’s your Michael saying?

Easier, finally, to permit Michael than to hear Meeee-Shell swill round the mouth like the taste of something dubious.

— He says I’m an idiot.

— Well that’s no less than what you are. You can’t con his people so easy.

All of them are Nigerian, all of them, even if they are French, or Algerian, they are Nigerian, the whole of Africa being, for Pauline, essentially Nigeria, and the Nigerians wily, owning those things in Kilburn that once were Irish, and five of the nurses on her own team being Nigerian where once they were Irish, or at least Pauline judges them to be Nigerian, and they’re perfectly fine as long as you keep an eye on them every minute. Leah puts her thumbnail to her wedding ring. Pushes the band hard.

— He wants to go round there.

— And why shouldn’t he? You were robbed on your own doorstep by a gypsy, weren’t you?

Everything translated into its own terms.

— Nope. Sub-continental.

— Indian, you mean by that.

— Somewhere in that region. Second generation. English, to listen to.

— I see.

— From school! Crying on my doorstep!

Another static cloud.

— Sometimes I think it’s because there’s just the one of you. If we’d had more you might have learned more about people and how people really are.

No matter where Leah attempts to begin, Pauline returns to this point. The whole story gets run through: from Dublin to Kilburn, a rare Prod on the wing, back when most were of the other persuasion. Heading for the wards, though, like the rest of the girls. Flirted with the O’Rourke boys, the brickies, but wanted better, being so auburn and fine-featured and already a midwife. Waited too long. Nested at twilight with a quiet widower, an Englishman who didn’t drink. The O’Rourkes ended up builder’s merchants with half of Kilburn High Road in their pockets. For which she would have put up with a bit of drink. Thank God she retrained. (Radiography.) Where would she be otherwise? This story, once rationed, offered a few times a year, now bursts through every phone call, including this one, which has nothing at all to do with Pauline. Time is compressing for the mother, she has a short distance left to go. She means to squeeze the past into a thing small enough to take with her. It’s the daughter’s job to listen. She’s no good at it.

— Were we too old? Were you lonely?

— Mum, please.

— I only mean you’d have a better understanding of human nature. Now, any news? On that front?

— On what front?

— On the grandma front. On the ticking clock front.

— Still ticking.

— Ah, well. Don’t worry too much, love. It’ll happen when it happens. Now is Michael there? Can I speak with him?

• • •

Between Pauline and Michel there exists nothing but mistrust and misunderstanding except in this blessed alignment, once rare, now more frequent, in which Leah has been an idiot and this fact forms a coalition between natural enemies. Pauline excited and pink and sweary. Michel exercising his little store of hard-won colloquialisms, treasure of any migrant: at the end of the day, know what I mean, and if that wasn’t enough, and I says to him, and I was like, that’s a good one, I’ll have to remember that one.

— Unbelievable. Wish I’d been there, Pauline, let me tell you. I wish I had been there.

To avoid listening to this conversation Leah steps into the garden. Ned from upstairs is in her hammock, which is communal and so not her hammock. Ned partaking of the herb under the apple tree. Lion hair graying now, gathered in an ignoble elastic band. An ancient Leica rests on his stomach, awaiting the sunset over NW, for the sunsets in this part of the world are strangely vivid. Leah walks up to the tree and makes the victory sign.

— Buy your own.

— Quit.

— Evidently.

Ned places a smoke between her splayed fingers. She takes it in hard, harsh against the throat.

— Pace yourself. From Afghanistan. Psychotropic!

— I’m a big girl.

— Six twenty-three today. It’s getting longer and longer.

— Until it gets shorter.

— Whoah.

Almost anything Leah says to Ned, no matter how factual or obvious, he finds philosophy in it. A serious smoker, time congeals around him. Simple things take on a stretched-out significance. It seems to Leah that he has been twenty-eight since they met, ten years ago.

— Hey, did your visitor return?

— Nope.

It goes against the grain of Ned’s optimistic nature. Leah watches him fail to find a story that will fit.

— On time. Real beauty.

Leah looks up. The sky has gone pink. The Heathrow flight paths streak white against it. In the kitchen, Michel is enjoying himself.

— That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that one. Jesus Christ himself!

4

The young Sikh is bored. His turban leaks sweat. He looks down at his father’s counter where a pocketful of change is trying to add up to ten Rothmans. A cheap fan whirrs pointlessly. Leah is also bored, watching Michel squeeze pastries that will never please him, that will never be as good as they were in France. This is because they are made in the back of a sweetshop, off Willesden Lane. Real croissants may be purchased from the organic market, on a Sunday, in the playground of Leah’s old school. Today is Tuesday. From her new neighbours Leah has learned that Quinton Primary is a good enough place to buy a croissant but not a good enough place to send your children. Olive hoovers up the crumbs from the sweetshop floor. Olive is somewhat French, like Michel. Her grandfather was a champion in Paris. Unlike Michel she is not fussy about croissant. Orange and white, with silky Restoration ears. Ridiculous, adored.

— and need to see a proper doctor. A clinic. We keep trying. And nothing. You’re thirty-five this year.

Said Frenchly: nussing. Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets.

— We can’t afford clinics. What clinic?

The small figure at the counter turns. She smiles at Leah first before anything else — out of the instinct that pairs recognition with happiness — and then a moment later, remembering, bites her lip and puts her hand to the door, making the little bell ring.

— That’s her. That was her. Buying the fags.

Leah expects a clean escape. Shar is out of luck. They both are. An elderly woman of dimension heads in as Shar attempts to leave. They do the awkward doorway dance. Michel is quick and bold and can’t be stopped.

— Thief! You’re a thief! Where’s our money?

Leah grips the finger that’s pointing and pulls it down. Each red freckle has flared and a flush is working up her neck, flooding her face. Shar stops dancing. Shoulder-charges the old dear out the way. Runs.

5

Leah believes in objectivity in the bedroom:

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this. He can’t deny that he is more beautiful. It is easier for him to be beautiful. His skin is very dark and ages more slowly. He has good West African bone structure. Here is a man lying across a bed, naked. Brigitte Bardot in Contempt lay on a bed, naked. If only the man were like Brigitte Bardot, who never had children, preferring animals. Then again, she became inflexible in other areas. The woman tries to talk to the man who is her husband about the desperate girl who came to the door. What does it means to say the girl lied? Is it a lie to say she was desperate? She was desperate enough to come to the door. The husband can’t understand the woman’s preoccupation. Of course, he is missing a vital piece of information. There is no way for him to follow the submerged, feminine logic. He can only try to listen as she speaks. I just want to know if I did the right thing, says the woman, I just can’t work out if I

But here the man stops her to say

— the plug for the thing on your side? Mine’s gone. But there’s nothing to do. It’s the usual. A crackhead. A thief. It’s not so interesting. Come here, and

When they met, the man and the woman, the physical attraction was immediate and overwhelming. This is still the case. Because of this unusual, acute attraction, their chronology is peculiar. The physical came first, always.

Before he spoke to her he had already washed her hair, twice.

They had sex before either knew the other’s surname.

They had anal sex before they had vaginal sex.

They had dozens of sexual partners before they married each other. Dance floor romances, Ibiza flings. The nineties, ecstatic decade! They were married though they needn’t have married, and though both had sworn they never would be. It is hard to explain — in that game of musical chairs — why they should have stopped, finally, at each other. Kindness, as a quality, had something to do with it. Many things were easy to find on those dance floors, but kindness was rare. Her husband was kinder than any man Leah Hanwell had ever known, aside from her father. And then of course they had been surprised by their own conventionality. The marriage pleased Pauline. It calmed the anxieties of Michel’s family. It was pleasing to please their families. Beyond this, the proper names “wife” and “husband” had a power neither party had expected. If it was voodoo, they were grateful for it. It allowed them to stop dancing round chairs without ever admitting they were tired of it.

Things moved quickly.

They had one pregnancy before they married, two months into their relationship, which they terminated.

They were married before they were friends, which is another way of saying:

Their marriage was the occasion of their friendship.

They were married before they noticed many small differences in background, aspiration, education, ambition. There is a difference between the ambitions of the poor of the city and the poor of the country, for example.

Noting such differences, Leah was in some sense disappointed in herself that they did not cause real conflict between them. It was hard to get used to the fact that the pleasure her body found in his, and vice versa, should so easily overrule the many other objections she had, or should have had, or thought she should have had.

— Her mum could be dead. She could be dealing with that and just forgot. She might have put it through the door and it gets caught up with the junk and Ned throws it out. Maybe she just can’t put her hands on that sort of money at the moment.

— Yes, Leah.

— Don’t do that.

— What do you want me to say? The world is what it is.

— Then why’re we even trying?

To be very objective about it, it is the woman’s fault that they never discussed children. For some reason it had never occurred to her that all this wondrous screwing was heading toward a certain, perfectly obvious destination. She fears the destination. Be objective! What is the fear? It is something to do with death and time and age. Simply: I am eighteen in my mind I am eighteen and if I do nothing if I stand still nothing will change I will be eighteen always. For always. Time will stop. I’ll never die. Very banal, this fear. Everybody has it these days. What else? She is happy enough in the moment they are in. She feels she deserves exactly what she has, no more, no less. Any change risks fatally upsetting this balance. Why must the moment change? Sometimes the woman’s husband cuts a red pepper down the middle and pushes the seeds out into a plastic bowl and passes her a courgette for cubing and says:

Dog.

Car.

Flat.

Cooking together, like this.

Seven years ago: you were on the dole. I was washing hair.

Things change! We’re getting there, no?

The woman does not know where there is. She did not know they had set off, nor in which direction the wind is blowing. She does not want to arrive. The truth is she had believed they would be naked in these sheets forever and nothing would come to them ever, nothing but satisfaction. Why must love “move forward”? Which way is forward? No one can say she has not been warned. No one can say that. A thirty-five-year-old woman married to a man she loves has most certainly been warned, should be paying attention, should be listening, and not be at all surprised when her husband says

— many days in which the woman is fertile. Only, I think, three. So it’s no good to just say “oh, it’ll happen when it will happen.” We’re not so young. So we have to be a bit more, I mean, military about it, like plan.

Objectively speaking, he is correct.

6

We are the village green preservation society. God save little shops, china cups and virginity! Saturday morning. ALL KINKS ALL DAY. Girl. You really got me going. You got me so I don’t know what I’m doing. On Saturday mornings Michel helps the ladies and gentlemen of NW look right for their Saturday nights, look fresh and correct, and there, in the salon, he is free to blast his treacly R&B, his oh baby oh shorty till six in the mawnin till the break a’ dawn. On Saturday mornings she is free! God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards! Preserving the old ways from being abused. Protecting the new ways for me and for you. What more can we do? Stomping around in pajama bottoms, singing tunelessly. Ned is in the garden. Ned approves of loud music of white origin. He sings along. Well I tried to settle down in Fulham Broadway. And I tried to make my home in Golders Green. In this weekend abandon there is always something manic and melancholy: the internal countdown to the working week already begun. In the mirror she is her own dance partner, nose to nose with the reflection. The physical person is smiling and singing. Oh how I miss the folks back home in Willesden Green! Meanwhile something inside reels at the mirror’s news: the gray streak coming out of the crown, the puffy creases round the eyes, the soft belly. She dances like a girl. She is not a girl anymore. YOU REALLY GOT ME. YOU REALLY GOT ME. YOU REALLY GOT ME. Where did the time go? She only realizes the doorbell has gone when Olive begins barking madly.

— My mum had a heart — a heart attack? Five… pounds.

This girl has hair burned flat by a curling iron. Either fat or pregnant. She looks down dully, puzzled by frantic Olive weaving between her legs. She looks up at Leah and laughs. HA! Too far gone to remember her lines. She turns clumsily on her heel, a dancer executing a move too late. Heads back down the path to the street, swaying and laughing.

7

Apple tree, apple tree.

Thing that has apples on it. Apple blossom.

So symbolic. Network of branches, roots. Tunneling under.

The fuller, the more fruitful.

The more the worms. The more the rats.

Apple tree, apple tree. Apple. Tree. Which way is forward? Tick, tock.

Three flats. One apple tree. Freehold, leasehold. Heavy with seed.

In the tree-top. When the bough breaks, the baby will

Dead man’s ashes. Round the roots, in the roots?

Hundred-year-old apple tree.

Sitting on your laurens. Under an apple tree. Have a little boy?

New branches. New blossom. New apples. Same tree?

Born and bred. Same streets.

Same girl? Next step.

Appletreeapple

Trunk, bark.

Alice, dreaming.

Eve, eating.

Under which nice girls make mistakes.

Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.

— which I’ve always believed. Look: you know what is the true difference between these people and me? They don’t want to move forward, they don’t want to have nothing better than this. But I’m always moving forward, thinking of the next thing. People back home, they don’t get me at all. I’m too advanced for them. So when they try to contact me, I don’t let this — I don’t let drama in my life like that. No way! I’ve worked too hard. I love you too much, this life. You are what you do. This is how it is. I’m always thinking: is this me? What I’m doing? Is this really me? If I sit and do nothing I know that makes me nothing. From the first day I was stepping into this country I have my head on correctly; I was very clear: I am going up the ladder, one rung at least. In France, you’re African, you’re Algerian, who wants to know? There’s no opportunity, you can’t move! Here, you can move. You still have to work! You have to work very hard to separate yourself from this drama below! This is my point: I don’t like to let it in. But this is what you do, perfect example, this girl, you let her in — I don’t even know what is in your mind — but I don’t allow this drama in. I know this country has opportunities if you want to grab them, you can do it. Don’t eat that one — worm hole, right there, see? Look at your mother — we are not such great friends, but please look at what she did: she got you out of that nightmare over there, into a proper place, proper flat, mortgage… Of course, your skin is white, it’s different, it’s more easy, you’ve had opportunities I didn’t have. The redder ones don’t taste so good. We’re all just trying to take that next, that next, next, step. Climbing that ladder. Brent Housing Partnership. I don’t want to have this written on the front of a place where I am living. I walk past it I feel like oof—it’s humiliating to me. If we ever have a little boy I want him to live somewhere — to live proud—somewhere we have the freehold. Right! This grass it’s not my grass! This tree is not my tree! We scattered your father round this tree we don’t own even. Poor Mr. Hanwell. It breaks my heart. This was your father! This is why I’m on the laptop every night, I’m trying to do this — because it’s pure market on there, nothing about skin, about is your English perfect, do you have the right piece of university paper or some bullshit like this. I can trade like anyone. There’s money to be got out there, you know? Market is so crazy right now. That’s what nobody tell you. I keep thinking what Frank said at the dinner: the smart guys get right back in the game. It’s crazy not to try to get some of it. I’m not like these Jamaicans — this new girl, Gloria, whatever is her name, up there, she still has no curtains. Two babies, no husband, taking benefits. I’m married, where’s my benefit? When I have children, I knew, I said it to myself: I’m going to stay by this woman that I love, that I really love so much, I’m going to always be with her. Come here. The bottom line is like this: I was never just OK to sit on my laurens and take charity, I never was interested in that. I am an African. I have a destiny. I love you, and I love where we are going together! I’m always moving toward my destiny, thinking of the next achievement, the next thing, taking it higher, so we, so both of us, can make that next–

— Laurels.

— What?

— Laurels. And you rest on them, you don’t sit on them. You sit on your arse.

— You’re not even listening.

It’s true: she is thinking of apples.

8

Elsewhere in London, offices are open plan/floor-to-ceiling glass/sites of synergy/wireless/gleaming. There persists a belief in the importance of a ping-pong table. Here is not there. Here offices are boxy cramped Victorian damp. Five people share them, the carpet is threadbare, the hole-punch will never be found.

— of money coming in. Question: how did this get so far down the line without intervention? I’d really like to know. Checks and balances, people! Because when you do it like this you’re handing our heads metaphorically on a plate, to them, meaning my head also. And the next thing you hear: efficiency savings. Not meaning reusing the teabags. Meaning your job and mine. Which is exactly how

Here a nation’s bad bets morph into a semblance of the collective good: after-school play groups, translation services, garden clearance for the elderly, quilting for prisoners. Five women work here, their backs to each other. Further down the hall, the rumor of a man — Leah has never seen him. This work requires empathy and so attracts women, for women are the empathic sex. This is the opinion of Adina George, Team Leader, who speaks, who will not stop speaking. Adina’s mouth opens and closes.

Tooth gold tooth tooth gap tooth tooth tooth

TONGUE

Tooth tooth tooth tooth chipped tooth filling

Former prison guard, social worker, local councilor. How did she get anything done with those talons? Long and curved and painted with miniature renderings of the Jamaican flag. Clawed her way up through the system. Born and bred. Is wary of those, like Leah, whose degrees have thus installed them. To Adina a university degree is like a bungee cord, lowering in and pulling out with dangerous velocity. Of course, you won’t be here long. Look, I don’t want to give you projects you’re not going to be here to finish…

Six years have gone by: such things aren’t said anymore. It occurred to Leah today, when Adina referred to her as “the graduate,” that no-one — not the institution that conferred it, not her peers, not the job market itself — has a higher estimation of the value of her degree than Adina.

— which is essential for the smooth running here. The decision-making is obviously about relatability and yeah, empathy, and a personal connection but it’s also about follow-through and visibility in the sense of value for money, that we get to be conscious of via a process of paperwork. Paperworkpaperworkpaperwork. In the current climate every i has to be dotted and every t crossed so when I am put in a position, as Team Leader, by the people upstairs I can say: yup, fully accountable. Here’s x, y and z, fully accountable. Not splitting the atom, ladies, I should hope.

Question: what happened to her classmates, those keen young graduates, most of them men? Bankers, lawyers. Meanwhile Leah, a state-school wild card, with no Latin, no Greek, no Maths, no foreign language, did badly — by the standards of the day — and now sits on a replacement chair borrowed six years ago from the break-room, just flooded with empathy. Right foot asleep. Computer screen frozen. IT nowhere to be seen. No air-conditioning. Adina going on and on, doing that thing to language that she does.

— This was a question of communication? A blockage between parties. Who should have a tighter grasp on how their behaviors are impacting others?

This too will pass. Four forty-five. Zig, zag. Tick. Tock. Sometimes bitterness makes a grab for Leah. Pulls her down, holds her. What was the point of it all? Three years of useless study. Out of pocket, out of her depth. It was only philosophy in the first place because she was scared of dying and thought it might help and because she could not add or draw or remember lists of facts or speak a language other than her own. In the university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be. It is wishing yourself anywhere else, in a different spot somewhere in the multiverse which is a concept you will never truly understand. In the end, only one idea reliably retained: time as a relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. Like right now, when a minute seems to stretch itself into an hour. Otherwise useless. An unpaid, growing debt. Along with a feeling of resentment: what was the purpose of preparing for a life never intended for her? Years too disconnected from everything else to feel real. Edinburgh’s dour hill-climb and unexpected-alley, castle-shadow and fifty pence whisky chaser, WalterScottStone and student loan shopping. Out of her mouth: a two-syllable packing company Socrates, a three-syllable cleaning fluid Antigone. Never, never forgotten: the bastard in that first class, sniggering. I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY, Leah writes, and doodles passionately around it. Great fiery arcs, long pointed shadows.

— Questions? Problems?

A pen breaks noisily. Plastic shards, a blue tongue. Adina George looks over and glares but Leah is not responsible for the Albanians. She has a mouth full of pen but she is not responsible for the Albanians nor their misappropriation of funds meant for a Hackney women’s refuge. That was on Claire Morgan’s watch. Although Leah has a blue tongue and a fancy degree and a hot husband and no offense, but for the women in our community, in the Afro-Caribbean community, no offense, but when we see one of our lot with someone like you it’s a real issue. It’s just a real issue that you should be aware of. No offense. (Brighton weekend, team-building exercise, hotel bar, 2004.) What kind of issue exactly was never made clear. Sweet Love sang Anita Baker, and Adina fell over a chair trying to get to the dance floor. Blockage.

Leah spits plastic shards into her hands. No questions or problems. Adina sighs, leaves. The folder-shutting and bag-packing begin with an eagerness no different from when they were all six years old and the bell rang. Maybe that was the real life? Leah plants her feet on the ground and pushes back in her chair. Lifts and coasts to the filing cabinet and this is the most enjoyable thing that has happened today. Bump.

— Oi! Fuckssake, Leah. Careful!

The great swell of it. Leah is nose to Tori’s belly-button and observes how this innermost thing now thrusts out, marking a physical limit. Beyond this point we can’t continue and be human.

— Just be careful. You coming or what? Last day drinks. You got the e-mail?

Piled up in a corner of the Internet with the bank statements, student loan reminders, memos from management, maternal epics, in that place where not to be opened is not to exist. She knew perfectly well there was an e-mail and what it was about, but she is on the run from people in Tori’s condition. She is on the run from herself.

— Me, Claire, Kelly, Beverley, Shweta. You’re next!

Tori counts the names off on swollen fingers. She’s in the final stages. Her face has a leonine cast, the cheeks puffed up, newly prominent. A big cat’s smile. Predacious. Leah stares at the thumb meant to represent her.

— Trying. It’s not so easy.

— Trying’s half the fun.

A room full of women laughing. Some shared knowledge of their sex to which Leah is not party. She puts her hands either side of the bump, and smiles, hoping that this is the sort of thing that normal women do, women for whom trying is half the fun and “you’re next” does not sound like the cry of a guard in a dark place. Then they get going, a traditional round in which no voice is separated from the other and Leah lays her head on the desk and closes her eyes and lets them take the piss:

Specially when he looks like yours. And he’s so lovely.

He’s so lovely your Meeshell. Lovely way about him.

Bev, d’you remember when we was round Leah’s that time and my car window weren’t working and Meeshell got on his knees with a wire coat hanger? After I’d been telling Leon about it for a MONTH.

He’s proper sensitive. Proper family orientated.

Whenever I’m thinking: where did all the good brothers get to? I think, breathe: at least there’s Meeshell.

Yeah but they’re all already taken!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA By the white girls!

Nah, don’t be like that. Leah she’s only messing with you.

Don’t mess with Leah! Not her fault Leon’s a useless bastard.

Leon’s all right.

(Bloody useless. “Leon, what you doing tonight? “Chillin with my man dem.” He’s always bloody “chillin.”)

Leon’s all right. Seriously tho, you’re lucky.

She gets a blow dry thrown in!

A man who can do your hair. That’s paradise right there. He can do cain row, he can do extensions…

Kelly, what she need cain row for? She’s not Bo Derek.

HA! (Nah, Leah, no offense — sorry that’s funny tho.)

I’m talking about he’s a professional. I’m talking about he can do any kind of hair.

And he’s straight. Innit!

Innit! Hahaha Innit, yeah. (He best be!)

That’s what kills me! Best of both worlds! You have though. You don’t know you’re born.

She doesn’t, she doesn’t know she’s born.

You don’t know you’re born.

You don’t. You don’t know you’re born.

Finally, five o’clock. Leah looks up. Kelly slaps the top of her desk.

— Quittin’ time!

Same joke every day. A joke you can make if you are not Leah, if you are not the only white girl on the Fund Distribution Team. In the corridor the women spill out of every room, into the heat, cocoa buttered, ready for a warm night out on the Edgware Road. From St. Kitts, Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, in their forties, fifties, sixties, and yet busts and butts and shiny legs and arms still open to the sexiness of an early summer in a manner that the women of Leah’s family can never be. For them the sun is fatal. So red, so pale. Leah is wearing long white linen everything. Looks like a minor saint. She falls in step. Passes the scene of the crime, a wastepaper bin filled with vomit and tucked behind a pot-plant in the break room because the bathroom was too far.

9

From A to B:

A. Yates Lane, London NW8, UK

B. Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK

Walking directions to Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK

Suggested routes

A5

47 mins

2.4 miles

A5 and Salusbury Rd

50 mins

2.5 miles

A404/Harrow Rd

58 mins

2.8 miles

Turn left on Yates Lane

40 feet

Head southwest toward Edgware Rd

315 feet

Turn right at A5/ Edgware Rd

1.6 miles

Continue to follow A5

Turn left at A4003/Willesden Ln

0.7 mile

Turn left at Bartlett Avenue

0.1 mile

Destination will be on the left

Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK

These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, weather, or other events may cause conditions to differ from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly. You must obey all signs or notices regarding your route.

10

From A to B redux:

Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only — quicker to walk! Escapees from St. Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking, old lady wheeling herself in a wheelchair smoking, die-hard holding urine sack, blood sack, smoking. Everybody loves fags. Everybody. Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World. Unlock your (stolen) phone, buy a battery pack, a lighter pack, a perfume pack, sunglasses, three for a fiver, a life-size porcelain tiger, gold taps. Casino! Everybody believes in destiny. Everybody. It was meant to be. It was just not meant to be. Deal or no deal? TV screens in the TV shop. TV cable, computer cable, audiovisual cables, I give you good price, good price. Leaflets, call abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted Jesus as your personal call plan? Everybody loves fried chicken. Everybody. Bank of Iraq, Bank of Egypt, Bank of Libya. Empty cabs on account of the sunshine. Boom-boxes just because. Lone Italian, loafers, lost, looking for Mayfair. A hundred and one ways to take cover: the complete black tent, the facial grid, back of the head, Louis Vuitton — stamped, Gucci-stamped, yellow lace, attached to sunglasses, hardly on at all, striped, candy pink; paired with tracksuits, skin-tight jeans, summer dresses, blouses, vests, gypsy skirts, flares. Bearing no relation to the debates in the papers, in parliament. Everybody loves sandals. Everybody. Birdsong! Lowdown dirty shopping arcade to mansion flats to an Englishman’s home is his castle. Open top, soft-top, drive-by, hip hop. Watch the money pile up. Holla! Security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees, Tudor, Modernist, postwar, prewar, stone pineapples, stone lions, stone eagles. Face east and dream of Regent’s Park, of St. John’s Wood. The Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians, the Americans: here united by the furnished penthouse, the private clinic. If we pay enough, if we squint, Kilburn need not exist. Free meals. English as a second language. Here is the school where they stabbed the headmaster. Here is the Islamic Center of England opposite the Queen’s Arms. Walk down the middle of this, you referee, you! Everybody loves the Grand National. Everybody. Is it really only April? And they’re off!

11

So close to home, just on Willesden Lane. Strange convergence. She is leaning into a broken phone box, chewing the stick of an ice-lolly. Thick shattered glass, cuboid shards, all around. A few yards from Cleopatra’s Massage Emporium. Leah opens her eyes wide to store the details for Michel, which is one of the things marriage means. Drawn to the wrong details. Baggy gray track bottoms, off-white sports bra. Nothing else, no top. No shoes! Breasts small and tight to her body. It’s difficult to believe that she has had children. Perhaps that was a lie as well. A neat waist you want to hold. She is something beautiful in the sunshine, something between a boy and a girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all that. Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical: you are walking toward her, at great speed you are walking toward her, and then what? And then what? Leah is quite close before she is spotted in return. It’s been three weeks. Shar drops the receiver and tries to cross the road. The traffic is rush hour frantic. At first Leah is grateful to be without Michel. Then her face turns into his face and his voice comes out of her throat or this is a marital excuse and it is her own voice in her own throat:

— Proud of yourself? Thief. I want my money.

Shar cringes and slips through the traffic. She is running toward two men, tall and hooded, with hidden faces, standing in a doorway. Shar enfolds herself in the taller. Leah hurries on home. At her back she can hear the ricochet of incomprehensible abuse, aimed at her, a patois like a machine gun.

37

Lying in bed next to a girl she loved, years ago, discussing the number 37. Dylan singing. The girl had a theory that 37 has a magic about it, we’re compelled toward it. Websites are dedicated to the phenomenon. The imagined houses found in cinema, fiction, painting and poetry — almost always 37. Asked to choose a number at random: usually 37. Watch for 37, the girl said, in our lotteries, our game-shows, our dreams and jokes, and Leah did, and Leah still does. Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine. Now that girl is married, too.

Number 37 Ridley Avenue is being squat. Squatted? The front door is boarded up. A window is broken. Human noise from behind torn gray nets. Leah moves from the shadow of a hedge to the forecourt. Nobody spots her. Nothing happens. She stands with one foot hovering off the ground. What would she do with 37 lives! She has one life: she is en route to her mother’s, they are going shopping for a sofa. If she stands here staring much longer she will be late. In the front bay window: Mickey, Donald, Bart, a nameless bear, an elephant with its trunk ripped off. Fabric faces against dirty glass.

12

— You took your time. Feeling OK? You look a bit peaky. We’ll take the Jubilee, will we?

Pauline steps out of her front door backward pulling a tartan shopping bag on wheels. Always a little older than expected. Smaller, too. From the street it must look like human perfectibility: each generation improves upon the last. Fitter, healthier, more productive. From the owl rises the phoenix. Or rise only to descend again? Longer and longer until it’s shorter.

— Worried about you. You seem all through yourself.

— I’m fine.

— And if you weren’t you wouldn’t tell.

What’s to tell? On the look-out for her, still, almost a month later. Expecting her out of this shop, from behind this corner, by that phone box. The girl is more real to Leah in her absence than the barely signifying bump that is with her all the time, albeit hidden by a sweatshirt.

— I’ve only this blouse on and I’m sweating like a pig already. It’s not natural.

The Hindu Temple has the colours of a block of Neapolitan ice cream and is essentially the same shape. A block of Neapolitan ice cream with two upturned cones at either end. Old Hindus stream down the front steps, unconvinced by the warm spell. They wear their saris with jumpers and cardigans and thick woolly socks. They look like they have walked to Willesden from Delhi, adding layers of knitwear as they progress northwards. Now they move as one to the nearest bus stop, a crowd that takes in Leah and her mother, carrying them along.

— That’s lucky. We’ll hop on. Save time.

— Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

— Sugar, I’ve left my pass! What’s that, love?

— Thatcher. Back in the day.

— One for Kilburn tube, please. Two pounds! She was a terrible cow. You can’t remember, I remember. Today this is Brent. Tomorrow it could be Britain!

— Mum, sit there. I’ll sit here. There’s no space.

— Front of The Mail. Today this is Brent. Tomorrow it could be Britain! The cheek of some people. The rudeness of them.

Sat opposite, Leah stares at a red bindi until it begins to blur, becomes enormous, taking up all of her vision until she feels she has entered the dot, passing through it, emerging into a more gentle universe, parallel to our own, where people are fully and intimately known to each other and there is no time or death or fear or sofas or

— and may have had our differences, but he loves you. And you love him. You should get on with it. Council’s set you up very nicely really, you’ve a little car, you’ve both got jobs. It’s the next thing.

You’re next. It’s the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings. A covered girl on her mobile phone steps on as they step off and disturbs the narrative by laughing and dropping her aitches and wearing makeup but Pauline is anyway compelled to say what she always says, with elegant variation, depending on the news cycle.

— Just two people kissing, this is Dubai — facing twelve years each. It’s just not permitted, you see. It’s ever so sad.

But this sadness is quickly outstripped by another, more local, sadness. A dirty gypsy girl and a tall fella doing the herky-jerky dance by the self-service machines. Pauline breathes on Leah’s ear.

— I’m grateful no child of mine ever did any of that.

A quick parade of past delights flicks through Leah’s mind, the memory of which is almost intolerably pleasurable: white and brown, natural and chemical, pills and powder.

— I don’t see that there’s anything funny about it. Ach, I can’t believe I left it at home. I always have it in this pocket.

— Wasn’t laughing at that.

Travelcardtravelcardtravelcard.

— What’s she saying, poor love?

— Selling their travelcards, I think.

Very sad, but also an opportunity for a saving. Pauline reaches up to tap the fella on his shoulder.

— How many zones? How much do you want for it?

— One day travelcard. Six zones. Two pound.

— Two pounds! How do I know it’s not some fake?

— Mum. It’s got the date on it, Jesus!

— I’ll give a pound, no more.

— All right, Mrs. Hanwell.

Look up. A jolting form of time travel, moving in two directions: imposing the child on this man, this man on the child. One familiar, one unknown. The afro of the man is uneven and has a tiny gray feather in it. The clothes are ragged. One big toe thrusts through the crumby rubber of an ancient red stripe Nike Air. The face is far older that it should be, even given the nasty way time has with human materials. He has an odd patch of white skin on his neck. Yet the line of beauty has not been entirely broken.

— Nathan?

— All right Mrs. Hanwell.

Good to see Pauline flustered, the sweaty tips of her hair curling up her face.

— Well how are you, Nathan?

— Surviving.

The shakes. Been sliced, deeply, on his cheek, not long ago. It’s an open, frank face, still. Not pretending anything. Which makes it all much harder.

— How’s your mother, your sisters? You remember Leah. She’s married now.

— Is it. That’s good, yeah.

He smiles shyly at Leah. Aged ten he had a smile! Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people’s parents. At ten she would have done anything, anything! Now she sees ten-year-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age.

— Long time.

— Yes.

Longer for him. About once a year she sees him on the high road. She ducks into a shop, or crosses, or gets on a bus. Now missing a tooth here and there and there. Devastated eyes. What should be white is yellow. Red veins breaking out all over.

— Here’s that pound. You take care of yourself now. Remember me to your mother.

Quickly through the barrier, bumping into each other in their haste, and then quickly up the stairs.

— That was horrible.

— His poor mother! I should stop in on her one of these days. So sad. I’d heard, but I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

The train pulls in and Leah watches Pauline regard it calmly, step forward to the yellow line. This realm of Pauline’s — the realm of the so sad — is immutable and inevitable, like hurricanes and tsunamis. No particular angst is attached to it. Normally, this is bearable; today it is obscene. So sad is too distant from Pauline’s existence, which is only disappointing. It makes disappointing look like a blessing. This must be why news of it is always so welcome, so satisfying.

— You carried a torch for him, I remember. Went inside for a few years, later on, I think. He’s not the one who killed somebody, now, no, that was somebody else. Sectioned, was he? At one point? Beat his father to a pulp, that much I’m sure of. Though that man had it coming or something like it.

Leah lifts two free papers from the pile as the train pulls out because reading is silent. She tries to read an article. It is about an actress walking her dog in a park. But Pauline wants to read an article about a man who was not really who he said he was, and she wants to talk about it, too.

— Well, if you will claim to be infallible! Say what you like about our lot but least we don’t claim to be infallible. Men of God, are they? Those poor children. Lives ruined. And they call it religion! Well, let’s hope that’s an end to the whole business once and for all.

Seeing as how they are speaking to the whole carriage, Leah mounts a mild defense, thinking of the smell of the censer, the voluptuous putti babies, the gold sunburst, cold marble floor, dark wood carved and plaited, women kneeling whispering lighting candles InterRailing nineteen ninety-three.

— Wish we had confession. Wish I could confess.

— Oh grow up, Leah, will you?

Pauline turns the page with violence. The window logs Kilburn’s skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety rollercoaster. Higgledy piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden. Number 37. In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at once — houses, churches, schools, cemeteries — an optimistic vision of Metroland. Little terraces, faux-Tudor piles. All the mod cons! Indoor toilet, hot water. Well-appointed country living for those tired of the city. Fast forward. Disappointed city living for those tired of their countries.

— Vol-can-ic air-borne ash man-i-fest-a-tion?

Pauline enunciates each syllable carefully, doubtful of its reality, and brings the photo too close to her daughter’s nose. Leah can make out only a great swirl of gray. Maybe this is all there is to see. The matter is also discussed by the hipsters opposite. Gaia’s revenge, says the girl to the boy. Give it out long enough you get it back. Pauline, always alive to the possibility of a group conversation, leans forward.

— No fruit or veg in the shops, they’re saying. Makes sense if you think about it. Of course, it’s an island we’re on here. I always forget that, don’t you?

13

— Finished with the computer?

— Need to wait till they close.

— It’s almost seven o’clock? I need it.

— It’s not seven online. Why don’t you get on with your own things?

— That’s what I need it for.

— Leah, I’ll call you when I’m done.

Currency trading. The exploitation of volatility. She can only understand words, not numbers. The words are ominous. Add them to that look Michel has, right now, of arrested attention. Internal time stretched and stilled, inattentive to the minutes and hours outside of itself. Five minutes! He says it irritably whether thirty have gone by or a hundred or two hundred. Pornography does that, too. Art, too, so they say.

Leah stands behind Michel in the darkness of the box room. Blue shimmer of the screen. He is two feet away. He is on the other side of the world. Why don’t you get on with your own things?

She has the idea that there are a lot of things she has been waiting for weeks to do and now she will do them with the bright quickness of montage, like the middle section of a movie. In the living room the TV is on. More blue light in the hallway. In the box room, the computer plays angry hip hop, a sign that things are going badly. Sometimes she says to him: have you lost it? He becomes furious, he says it doesn’t work that way. Some days I lose, some days I win. How can he be losing or winning that same eight thousand pounds, over and over? Leah’s only inheritance from Hanwell, their only savings. The money itself has become notional, a notion materialist Hanwell — who kept his real paper money in a cardboard box in a mahogany credenza — would never understand. No more does Leah understand it. She sits on a chair in the open doorway between kitchen and garden. Toes in the grass. The skies are empty and silent. Outrage travels from next-door’s talk radio: It’s taken me fifty-two hours to get back from Singapore! A new old lesson about time. Broccoli comes from Kenya. Blood must be transported. Soldiers need supplies. Much of the better part of NW went on holiday, for Easter, with their little darlings. Maybe they will never return. A thought to float away on.

Ned clonks down the wrought-iron steps, looking up at the sky.

— Really weird.

— I like it. I like the quiet.

— Freaks me out. Like Cocoon.

— Not really.

— Town was totally empty. Arbus at the Portrait Gallery with no crowds. Awesome. Real experience.

Leah submits to Ned’s long, excited description. She envies his enthusiasm for the city. He does not pass his time with his ex-countrymen in their suburban enclaves, cracking beers, watching the rugby: he does everything to avoid them. Admirable. Exploring the city alone, seeking out gigs and talks and screenings and exhibitions, far-off parks and mystery Lidos. Leah, born and bred, never goes anywhere.

— is really about integrity of like a, like a, like an idea? Blew me away. Anyway. I’m starving. Gonna go up and make myself some pasta and pesto. Listen, I’ll leave you a couple to be getting on with.

He sets three on the window sill, pre-rolled. She looks at them lined up in the flat of her palm. She smokes the first quickly, to the orange cardboard butt. Olive chases rustlings through shadows. Then the second. The upstairs windows are open: Gloria screaming at her children. You nah listen! Me nah got all day to tell you da same damn ting over and over! Leah calls to Olive, who comes lolloping. Leah scoops her in both arms. Shammy leather skin. Vulnerable little ribcage with a gap for every finger. Wrong to love a dog so much, says Michel, who has wrung the necks of chicken, slit the throat of a goat. Olive’s throat between Leah’s hands — how could a child be held with any more tenderness? Post-Olive it is easy to believe in consciousness of animals. Even the bubble-breathing crabs in the fishmonger’s have taken on a tragic aspect. Yet she eats them all, still. What a monster she is. Don’t let me come over dere and box you! She smokes the third.

It gets dark slowly, then suddenly. Fairy lights wrapped student-wise in the apple tree. Contact lenses so dry it’s hard to see. Beyond the tree, the fence, the railway, Willesden. Number 37. It is from this direction that her father walks toward her. He comes no closer than Ned’s failed rosebush. He wears a hat.

How’s your little dog, he asks.

Leah finds she can answer him without opening her mouth. She tells him about all the things Olive has been up to since he died, last November, every little thing, all the little things! Even the dullest detail of the dog’s day entertains him. He says, dear oh dear, and brushes the crumbs off his ratty blue cardie, chuckling. He is dressed exactly as they dressed him in Morehurst, except this trilby she’s never seen before, which is the only word Leah knows for the old style of hats. He has a white stain on his thigh, like semen, crusty in a ridge of his faded brown cords that no one has bothered to clean. Those pretty Ukrainian nurses who never stayed long.

Behind here it’s nothing but bleedin’ foxes, says Hanwell, sadly.

It’s really an epidemic. That is, they were always there, in the same numbers as they are now, but now it is called an epidemic. A recent headline in The Standard, NORTHWEST FOX EPIDEMIC, and a photograph of a man kneeling in a garden surrounded by the corpses of foxes he’d shot. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Dozens and dozens! says Leah, and that’s how we live now, defending our own little patch, it didn’t used to be like that, but everything’s changed, hasn’t it, that’s what they say, everything’s changed. Colin Hanwell tries to listen. Really he isn’t very interested in foxes and what they might symbolize.

Well, I can see how they got that impression, says Hanwell.

What?

I say I can see how they would have got that idea, the way you carry on.

What?

If you tell me you’re happy, says Hanwell, you’re happy and there’s an end to it.

The talk turns to other matters. You never get your own pillowcase back from laundry. The really important things is that Chef Maureen accepts your frozen wheat-free lasagnas, that you might be allowed to eat these while others have their dietary requirements ignored and as a consequence shit blood and have convulsions and contract hiccups that never stop. Yes, concedes Leah, yes, Dad, perhaps. Perhaps shitting blood is worse than symbols and sadness and the global situation. You can’t speak to doctors like that, whispers Hanwell, you might be overheard, you never know when they’ll come by. You just have to pray that they do.

Leah begins to feel she is in control and that she might shape what remains of this meeting to her own satisfaction. She starts to make her father say things, directing him, moving his arms and manipulating his expressions, first innocently, and then with deliberation, so he says I love you, you know. And then: Love, you know I’ve always loved you. And: I love you don’t worry it’s nice here. And even: I can see a light. After a while he looks strange doing it and Leah feels ashamed and stops. And still he stays, and by doing so holds out the delicious possibility of madness, such a lovely indulgence. If she didn’t have this everyday life to go to with its admin and rent and husband and work she could go mad! Why not go mad!

And remember to lock the gate with the water pressure where the gas is hot in the oven of the plug to switch it off when you leave it using only red onions and a pinch of cinnamon then getting back before you need to use a minicab—without drinking, advises Hanwell.

She can’t make him come any closer. Yet his hand seems to be in her hand and his cheek is on hers and Leah kisses his hand and feels his tear in her ear because he was always such a sentimental old fool. She presses his hand between her hands. They are autumn dry. She can feel the pulpy bruise of the persistent wound, in the center of his hand, still not healed because at a certain age these things stop healing. It is purple and fills now with blood, scraped so lightly, so insignificantly, months and months ago, on the edge of the games table in the community room. The skin fell away. They rolled it back and taped it in place. But for all of that last year it stayed purple and full of blood.

Leah says, Dad! Don’t go!

Hanwell says, Do I have to go somewhere?

Michel says, Computer’s free!

14

A great hill straddles NW, rising in Hampstead, West Hampstead, Kilburn, Willesden, Brondesbury, Cricklewood. It is no stranger to the world of letters. The Woman in White walks up one side to meet the highwayman Jack Sheppard on the other. Sometimes Dickens himself comes this far west and north for a pint or to bury someone. Look, there, on the library carpet between Science Fiction and Local History: a knotted condom filled with sperm. Once this was all farm and field with country villas nodding at each other along the ridge of this hill. Train stations have replaced them, at half-mile intervals.

It’s a little more than a month since the girl came to the door — late May. The horse chestnuts look fine in their bushy fullness, though everyone knows they have blight. Leah is on one side of the Brondesbury ridge, climbing in the glare, unaware of who or what rises to meet her. She is so surprised she resorts to a reflex emotion: contempt. Cuts her eyes at the girl the way kids used to do at school. Coming so late and so close to Shar’s face it is a gesture more violent than intended. If Michel were here! Michel is not here. Leah attempts a last second side-step, hoping to pass by. A little hand grabs her wrist.

— OI. YOU.

Her head is uncovered. Thick black hair falls free everywhere. In between its cloaking folds, Leah spies a catastrophic purple yellow black eye. Water weeps out of it, tears or something else involuntary. Leah tries to speak but only stutters.

— What you want from me? What you want me to say? I robbed you? I’m an addict. I stole your money. All right? ALL RIGHT?

— Let me help, maybe I can… there are places that… that help.

Leah cringes at her own voice. How feeble it is! Like a child pleading.

— I aint got your money, yeah? I’ve got a problem. Do you understand me? I AINT GOT NOTHING FOR YOU. I don’t need you and your bredrin fuckin with me every fuckin day. Pointin, shoutin. I can’t take no more of it to be honest with you. What you want from me? Want me on my knees?

— No, I… Can I help you, somehow? Can I do something?

Shar releases, shrugs and turns, wobbles, almost falls. Her eyes roll up in her pretty head. Leah puts out a hand to steady her. Shar pushes it roughly aside.

— Take my number. Please. I’ll write it on this. I work with, I’m connected to, a lot of charities, through work, you know, that could maybe…

Leah pushes a crumpled envelope into Shar’s pocket. Shar puts her finger in Leah’s face.

— Can’t take no more. Can’t take it.

Leah watches her stumble over the peak and down.

15

On the 98, a woman sits opposite with a baby girl on her lap. She presents a pack of illustrated cards to the child for the purposes of stimulation. Elephant. Mouse. Teacup. Sun. Meadow, with moo cows. The child is particularly stimulated by the card with a human face. It is the only card for which she reaches out, giggling. Clever Lucia! Her fat fingers claw at it. Then she reaches up to her mother’s face with the same violence. No, Lucia! The child threatens tears. Some things are people, explains her mother, and some things are images and some things are soft and some things are hard. Leah looks out the window. The rain is relentless. The planes are back in the sky. Work is work. Time has ceased being uncanny. It is just time again. She has taken some literature from work, from the literature cupboard. Professional organizations offering professional help. This is “as much as you can do.” Now it is time for the addict “to make their own decisions.” Because “nobody can force anyone else to get the help they need.” Everyone says the same things. Everyone says the same things in the same way. Leah gets off at Willesden Lane and starts walking quickly but the bus pulls up beside her and stalls. She has the lower deck as an audience as she doubles up over a hedge outside of a church. Vomit that is mostly water, indistinguishable from the rain. This church of her childhood, in which she was a Saturday Brownie, has been converted into luxury apartments, each with its own section of jaunty stained-glass window. Outside, a gathering of sporty little cars parked where once there was a small graveyard. The bus lumbers off in the direction of the high road. She straightens up, wipes her mouth with her scarf. Walks briskly with one hand gripping an inadequate umbrella and rain trickling down her right sleeve. Number 37. She flicks through the leaflets quickly like a good girl at a post-box checking the postage is sound before pushing them through.

37

She had hoped to find another method. Some old wives’ remedy that might be discreetly applied at home using everyday products from the bathroom cabinet. Anything else will be expensive. Anything else will show up on the joint account. On-line she finds only moralists and no practical advice at all besides the old horror stories from the pre-moral past: gin baths and hat pins. Who has hat pins? She is here instead, with an old credit card from college days. Strange place. No place. Could be a dentist, a chiropractor. Private medicine! Plush sofas, glass-topped coffee tables, privacy. No clipboard. No-one to ask:

a) Is it your own decision to undertake the procedure?

b) Do you have someone to take you home after the procedure?

Here is a girl to ask whether she would like a glass of water, how she would like to pay. That is all. Money avoids relationship, obligation. It is quite different. Back then she was nineteen, the university nurse organized everything. She sat with a kind ex-lover in their summer skirts on the edge of the hospital bed, legs dangling, like little girls scolded, and the thing that interested them most was the workings of anesthetic.

— It seemed like he held my wrist, said ten, nine, eight and the next second—the next second—was just now, was you kissing my forehead.

— It’s been two and a half hours!

In its way, a greater revelation than the confusing lectures on consciousness, on Descartes, on Berkeley.

Ten nine eight….

It’s been two and a half hours!

• • •

No book could ever have convinced her as that day did. Ten nine eight… oblivion. Kind girl! It was more than she needed to do. One of the advantages of loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far beyond the call of duty. Ten nine eight. Back to life. Kiss on the forehead. And also a child’s transfer, half rubbed off, on the wall in front of her eyes. Tigger and Christopher Robin and Pooh, all missing their heads. Spare bed in the children’s ward? She remembers only ten nine eight — the painless death-rehearsal. A useful episode to recall in moments of mortal fear. (In small planes, in deep water.) That first time, she was two months gone. The second time, two months and three weeks. This is her third.

The receptionist is limping across the room. Sprained ankle, grubby white bandage flapping. Leah flushes. She is ashamed before an imagined nobody who isn’t real and yet monitors our thoughts. She reprimands herself. Of course, all this was not a question of her own non-existence, of course, but rather of the non-existence of another. Of course. Yes, that’s what I meant, what I meant to think, of course. The sort of thing normal women think.

— Mrs. Hanwell? In your own time.

16

— Not relevant? What do you mean? How could you tell me that whole story and not mention the headscarf?

Natalie laughs. Frank laughs. Michel laughs hardest. Slightly drunk. Not only on the Prosecco in his hand. On the grandeur of this Victorian house, the length of the garden, that he should know a barrister and a banker, that he should find funny the things they find funny. The children wheel manically round the garden, laughing because everyone else is. Leah looks down at Olive and strokes her ardently, until the dog is discomfited and slinks away. She looks up at her best friend, Natalie Blake, and hates her.

— Leah… always trying to save somebody.

— Isn’t that your job?

— Defending someone is very different from saving them. Anyway, I mostly do commercial these days.

Natalie crosses one bare leg over the other. Sleek ebony statuary. Tilts her head directly to the sun. Frank, too. They look like a king and queen in profile on an ancient coin. Leah must stick to the shade of something Frank calls the gazebo. The two women squint at each other across an expanse of well-kept lawn. They are annoying each other. They have been annoying each other all afternoon.

— I keep bumping into her.

— Naomi, stop doing that.

— She was at school with us. It’s hard to believe.

— Is it? Why? Naomi stop it. Come away from the barbecue. It’s fire, hot, come here.

— Never mind.

— Sorry, tell me again. I’m listening. Shar. Don’t remember the name at all. Maybe it was during our “break”? You were hanging with a load of people back then I never met.

— No. I never knew her in school.

— Naomi! I’m serious. Sorry — so, wait: what’s the issue?

— No issue. Nothing.

— It’s just in the scheme of things it’s not very…

–“She said, trailing off.”

— What? Naomi, come here!

— Nothing.

Frank comes over with the bottle, as expansive with Leah as his wife is brusque. His face is very close. He smells expensive. Leah leans back to let him pour.

— Why is it that everyone from your school is a criminal crackhead?

— Why’s everyone from yours a Tory minister?

Frank smiles. He is handsome his shirt is perfect his trousers are perfect his children are perfect his wife is perfect this is a perfectly chilled glass of Prosecco. He says:

— It must be comforting being able to divide the world in two like that in your mind.

— Frank, stop teasing.

— Leah’s not offended. You’re not offended, Leah. Of course, I’m already divided in half, so you understand for me it’s hard to think this way. When you guys have kids, they’ll know what I mean.

Leah tries now to look at Frank in the manner he seems to intend: as a projection of a certain future for herself, and for Michel. The coffee color, those freckles. But aside from accidents of genetics, Frank has nothing to do with either Leah or Michel. She met his mother once. Elena. Complained about the provincialism of Milan and advised Leah to dye her hair. Frank is from a different slice of the multiverse.

— My mother-in-law in her wisdom says if you want to know the real difference between people do the health visitor test. Ring the bell, and if they lay on the floor and put the lights out, they’re no good.

Michel says:

— I don’t get this. What does it mean?

Natalie explains:

— Sometimes people don’t want to open the door to Marcia, they’re worried it’s connected to social work, or the benefit office. They want to be off the radar, basically. So if my mum ever rings your bell, for Godssake don’t lie on the floor.

Michel nods seriously, taking this advice to heart. He can’t see it, as Leah does. The way Natalie taps her finger on the garden table and looks at the sky as she speaks. He can’t see that we’re boring them, and they wish they were free of us, of this old obligation. He won’t shut up, he says:

— These people, they would lie on the floor. They’re on Ridley Avenue. And we work it out that they’re all living in a squat, together, on Ridley Avenue, maybe four or five of these girls who are working on the streets, ringing doorbells, and there are some guys, too, we think. Pimps, probably. But this is the stuff you deal with every day. I don’t need to tell you it, you know it. You must see people like this every day, every day, right? In court.

— Michel, honey… It’s like asking a doctor at a party about a mole on your back.

Michel always speaks sincerely, and it is strange that exactly this trait — highly valued by Leah in private — should so embarrass her in public. Nat is following the progress of Spike as he toddles in a flowerbed. Now her attention swings back to Leah and Leah takes its measure: serene, a little imperious. Insincere.

— No, I am interested, go on, Michel, I’m sorry.

— This other one, this guy, he’s also from your school. He asked her for money a few weeks ago on the street.

— That’s not what happened! He’s talking about Nathan Bogle. He was selling travelcards. You know how he does that, you’ve seen him do that, at Kilburn, at Willesden sometimes?

— Hmmm.

It’s humiliating being the cause of so much abject boredom in your oldest friend. Leah is reduced to bringing up these old names and faces in an attempt to engage her.

Frank says:

— Bogle? He the one who was caught for heroin importing?

— No, that was Robbie Jenner. Year below. Bogle wasn’t in that league. He dropped out to become a footballer. Spike, please don’t do that, baby.

— And did he? Become a footballer?

— Huh? Oh — no. No.

Perhaps Brayton, too, no longer exists for her. It’s gone, cast off. She is probably as surprised to have come out of Brayton as it is surprised to have spawned her. Nat is the girl done good from their thousand-kid madhouse; done too good, maybe, to recall where she came from. To live like this you would have to forget everything that came before. How else could you manage?

— He was a sweet kid. His mum was St. Loo-shun. St. Looshee-yan? All our mums knew each other. Very nice looking, very mischievous. Played the drums? Quite well. He sat next to Keisha. Back when she was Keisha. I was very jealous about that, when I was eight. Innit, Keisha.

Natalie chews at a nail, hating to be teased. She dislikes being reminded of her own inconsistencies. Leah dares herself to put it a little stronger: hypocrisies. Leah passes the old estate every day on the walk to the corner shop. She can see it from her back yard. Nat lives just far enough to avoid it. Anyway all meetings happen here, at Nat’s house, because why wouldn’t they. Look at this beautiful house! Leah blushes as an illegal word thrusts itself into her mind, Shar’s word: coconut. And then Michel speaks, and makes it perfect.

— You changed your name. I forget that you did this. It’s like: “Dress for the job you want not the one you have.” And it’s the same with names, I feel.

Ruined for Leah, though, by this depressing I feel, which he only ever says here, in this house, and which is embarrassing. Natalie’s eyes widen; she lunges at a change of subject, which children always seem to provide.

— Michel, you can help me: what should I do about this?

Nat grabs two handfuls of Naomi’s hair and demonstrates the knots by trying to pass her fingers through the nest of it as the child squirms beneath.

— She won’t let me touch it, so I should give it to you to shave off, right? She can come in to the salon tomorrow and see you and get it all shaved off.

Naomi cries out. Michel answers the question, kindly, carefully, sincerely. Advising against drastic action, he recommends hair-food and coconut oil. Even after so many years in this country the English fondness for torturing children with irony remains strange to him. Nat keeps her bright smile pinned to her face.

— OK, OK, Naomi. NAOMI. Mum was only joking… No-one’s going to… yes, plaiting it in the evening should help, Michel, thank you…

Frank says:

— At my school there was no such thing as “school holiday.” My mother never saw me till Christmas.

His wife smiles sadly and gives him a kiss on his cheek:

— Oh, I bet there was. Knowing your mum she just probably never came to pick you up.

Not so funny, says Frank. Pretty funny, says Natalie. Leah watches Nat accept a daisy chain that Naomi has begun. Split a stem with a thumbnail, thread the next daisy through.

— I’m not sending my children to a boarding school. Completely alone in a class of thirty white kids. You’d have to be crazy.

— Our children. Twenty white kids. Didn’t do me any harm.

— You’re wearing loafers, Frank.

Not so funny, says Frank. Pretty funny, says Natalie. Often Leah tries to diagnose a sickness here, between these two — something rotten, something virulent — but the patients persist in leaping from their beds and wisecracking. Kissing each other on the cheek.

— You’re breakening it!

Leah looks at the daisy chain. Naomi is correct: Nat has breakened it. Now Spike finishes the job, snatching it and scattering the pieces back over the lawn. The screaming starts up. Leah assumes the bland smile of child appreciation. Frank stands up and gathers a kicking child under each arm.

— They’ll be going to church school, for our sins.

Frank’s default mode with Leah is a sort of self-parody. Leah thwarts him by faking innocence, forcing him to spell out whatever he is trying to say obliquely.

— Church school? Already?

Natalie says:

— It’s all ridiculous: it’s a free school, but apparently we need to start going to church. Put the effort in now. Otherwise they won’t get in. Somewhere not too stressful, I hope. What’s that one Pauline goes to?

— Mum? Maybe she goes once a month. To St. Somewhere, I don’t know it. I’ll ask, if you want.

Frank releases his children and sighs.

— Isn’t it your turn soon?

Michel takes that one. His topic, his realm. A conversation now begins about the inside of Leah’s body and how, if Michel had been listened to, it would have been far busier these past few years. Leah concentrates on Natalie. She is here in her body but where is her mind? At work? In some glamorous extra-marital passion? Or just wishing these people would leave so she could get back to her real life, family life?

— Damn! The banana bread. I forgot about it. Naomi, come and help me serve it up.

Leah watches Natalie stride over to her beautiful kitchen with her beautiful child. Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversation that can’t be heard. How do you get to be so full? And so full of only meaningful things? Everything else Nat has somehow managed to cast off. She is an adult. How do you do that?

— So… Michel. How’s it going, man? Let’s get an update. How is the hair business? Do people still… in a bad economy?

Frank’s face registers the mild panic of being left with his wife’s strange friends.

— Actually, I am moving into your region, Frank, in a small way.

— My region?

— Day trading. On the Internet. After we spoke last time, you know, I bought a book and…

— You bought a book?

— A guide… and I’ve been trying a little myself, small amounts, just to begin.

Frank’s face suggests a further explanation is needed, he detects an improbability somewhere. It is a very subtle form of humiliation but it will still be passed from Michel to Leah in some converted form, like a liquid turning to a gas, later today, or tomorrow, in an argument, in bed.

— Well, Leah’s father left her, us, a small amount.

— Oh, OK! Well, a small amount is a good place to start. But now look, I don’t want to be responsible for you losing your shirt, Michel… I work for one of the big boys, you see, and we have a sort of safety net, but when it comes to individual traders, you know, it’s worth remembering that—

Leah sighs, loudly. It’s childish but she can’t help it. Frank turns to Leah with a pacifying, weary smile. He places a corrective finger on her shoulder, a little tap.

— Michel: all I was going to say is it’s worth signing on with an online site, like Today Trader, or something like it, and playing with fake money first of all, get in the swing of things…

— Can I be excused? I think Olive needs a shit and I don’t want her to do it on your perfect lawn.

— Leah.

— No, no, no, it’s fine. Michel, we’ve known each other a very long time, Leah and I. I’m used to her funny ideas. Spike, why don’t we take Olive to the corner and back, before she goes home. Let’s go find some bags, OK?

Leah and Michel are left sitting in the grass, cross-legged, like children. This house makes her feel like a child. Cake ingredients and fancy rugs and throw cushions and upholstered chairs in chosen fabrics. Not a futon in sight. Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

— Why do you treat me like an idiot all the time?

— What?

— I ask you a question, Leah.

— I didn’t mean to. I just can’t stand him talking down to you like that.

— He didn’t. You did.

— Who is she? Who is this person? This bourgeois existence!

— Bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois. I think this is the only French word you know. You’ve become one of these English people… who hate all their friends.

Frank re-emerges through the French doors. If Frank were more observant he might catch them in their Punch and Judy mode, frozen in attitudes of disgust and fury. But Frank is not terribly observant, and by the time he looks up they are what they always seem to be: a happy couple in love.

— Do you know where the lead is?

Behind him, Nat strides back out, looking serene, unreadable. Naomi is hitched up on her hip like the baby she was not too long ago. Her wild afro curls shoot out in a million directions. Leah observes Michel staring at the child. He has an expression of deep longing on his face.

17

— Auntie Leah! Auntie Leah! Mummy says SLOW DOWN.

Leah stops, looks back. There is no-one and then round a corner Nat appears, sighing dramatically. The buggy is empty, Spike is in her arms, Naomi is tugging at her t-shirt. Gulliver, about to be pinned to the ground by Lilliputians.

— Lee, you sure this is right? Doesn’t look right.

— End of this road. On the map it sort of winds round and back on itself. Pauline said it’s hard to find.

— I can see the magistrates’ court and… a roundabout? Kids, stay close, stay in. It’s like walking the hard shoulder on the motorway. Nightmare. Kennedy Fried Chicken. Polish Bar and Pool. Euphoria Massage. Glad we took the scenic route. This can’t still be Willesden. Feels like we’re in Neasden already.

— The church it what makes it Willesden. It marks the parish of Willesden.

— Yeah but where is it? How does Pauline even get here?

— Bus, I spose. I dunno.

— Nightmare.

The road winds. They find themselves on a thin strip of pavement with a bollard at the end, clutching the children as the cars zoom by either side. To their right a foreclosed shopping arcade and a misconceived office block, empty, every other window broken. To their left, a grassy island nestled beside a dual carriageway. Intended as a green oasis, it is a fly-tipping zone. A water-logged mattress. An upturned sofa with ripped cushions, foully stained. More eccentric items, suggesting lives abandoned in a hurry: half a scooter, a decapitated Anglepoise, a car door, a hat stand, enough rolled-up lino for a bathroom floor.

In a pause between cars they run as one animal across the wide road, and then release each other, panting, hands on knees. Advised to “take it easy” for forty-eight hours, Leah feels a lightness in her head. She turns away, lifting her head slowly, and spots it first: an ancient crenellation and spire, just visible through the branches of a towering ash. Another twenty yards and the full improbability of the scene is revealed. A little country church, a medieval country church, stranded on this half acre, in the middle of a roundabout. Out of time, out of place. A force field of serenity surrounds it. A cherry tree at the east window. A low encircling brick wall marks the ancient boundary, no more a defense than a ring of daisies. The family vaults have their doors kicked in. Many brightly tagged gravestones. Leah and Nat and the children pass through the lych-gate and pause under the bell tower. Blue clockface brilliant in the sun. It is eleven thirty in the morning, in another century, another England. Nat uses the baby’s muslin to wipe her forehead of sweat. The children, till now raucous and complaining in the heat, turn quiet. A path threads through the shady graveyard, the Victorian stones marking only the most recent layer of the dead. Natalie maneuvers the buggy over uneven ground.

— Crazy. Never seen it before. Must have driven by hundreds of times. Lee, you got that thing of water? Probably why Pauline likes it. Cos it’s so old. Because you can be surer of the old ones.

Leah folds her arms flat across her bust and becomes her mother, assumes her mother’s face: mouth drawn downwards, eyelids fluttering against the world’s specks and their determination to fly into Pauline’s eyes. Natalie, mid-glug, laughs violently, spreading water down her front.

— I wouldn’t be liking the newer churches, no. I wouldn’t be dying over them. You can be surer of the older ones, so you can.

— Stop it — I’m going to choke. I lived here my whole life I never knew this place even existed. All those years stuck with Marcia in that Pentecostal tin-can when we could have been here. Keisha, hear me now. I just want the spirit of the Lord to settle upon us all.

They can ridicule their mothers but they can’t break the somber spell of this place. The children step gingerly between graves, they want to know if there are really and truly dead people underfoot. Leah speeds up, abandoning the path and tramping into high grass, leaving Nat equivocating with her brood upon the difference between the recently dead and the long dead. Leah stretches her arms out either side of herself. Her fingers brush the tops of the taller monuments, a broken stone urn, a crumbling cross. Soon she is behind the church. The alien past crowds round, partially legible on worn stones set at disappointed angles. Child death and lethal confinements. War and disease. Massive tablets covered in ivy, in lichen, in spots of yellow mold and moss.

Emily W___ of this parish was taken from this life in her thirty ____ year of life

In the year of our Lord eighteen ____ seven

Leaving behind six children and a husband Albert

Who joined her soon after in this ______

Marion _____ of this pari__

Died 17th December 1878 aged 2_ years

And also of Dora, infant daug__ of the above

Died 11th December 1878

Take it easy for forty-eight hours.

In this terrible sun.

Take it easy, Leah Hanwell of this parish.

Only daughter of Colin Hanwell, also of this parish.

Take it easy for the rest of your life.

Leah leans against a stone tall as herself. Here are three figures in haut relief, almost entirely effaced. She fits her fingers into the mossy grooves. A lady in gathered skirts is clutching something to her body, a featureless lump, something she has been given, maybe, and two young boys in frock coats reach out for her on either side. She is no one. Time has eaten away all detail: no name no date no face no knees no feet no explanation of the mysterious gift—

— Lee, you all right?

— Hot. It’s so hot.

They pass through a pair of heavy wooden doors to the interior. A service is just finishing. The queer incense smell of high church lingers. They walk round the perimeter and avoid the eyes of the faithful. Deliciously cool in here, better than air conditioning. Natalie picks up a leaflet. Congenital autodidact, always wanting to know. It must have been that break. The break made the difference. She became Natalie Blake in that brief pause in their long history, between sixteen and eighteen. Educated herself on the floor of Kensal Rise Library while Leah smoked weed all the live-long day. Natalie always picks up the leaflets, the leaflets and everything else.

— Parish founded in 938… nothing of the original church remains… present church dates from around 1315… Cromwellian bullet holes in the door, original…

Naomi runs ahead and climbs the font (c. 1150, Purbeck marble). Leah tries to escape the aural range of Natalie’s lecture. The service ends: the parishioners begin to file out. In the doorway, the young vicar attempts to engage them. He holds a hand to his doughy waist like a nervous old woman, a flop of brown hair falls across one temple. He has a face that hopes to please but cannot owing to chinlessness. He is as he would have been in 1920 or 1880 or 1660. He is the same, but his congregation is different. Polish, Indian, African, Caribbean. The adults sharply dressed in shiny suits and clinging dresses from the market. The boys wear three-piece pinstripe, the girls clutch tiny Spanish shawls, their hair elaborately pressed and kiss-curled. The congregation pity the vicar, who is full of gentle suggestions. Let’s see if we can start on time next week. Anything you can spare. Anything at all. They smile and nod, not taking him too seriously. The vicar, too, is not listening to himself. He is intent on Leah, seeking her over the heads of his fleeing flock. Light streams in from the east. Leah moves that way instinctively, toward a monument in black and white marble hung upon the wall from which she learns that IT WAS HER HAPPINESS TO MAKE HIM YE JOYFUL FATHER OF 10 SONS & 7 DAUGHTERS AND IT IS HER PIETIE TO DEDICATE THIS MONUMENT TO YE PRESERVATION OF HIS MEMORY. HE DIED IN YE 48 YEAR OF HIS AGE. MARCH YE 24 1647. Nothing further is said of Her. Leah is drawn to put her fingers to the letters to measure their coolness. But Natalie says better not to, she says Spike don’t splash the holy water WOW the same sculptor fashioned the tomb of ELIZABETH 1ST no darling not that one she was a queen darling from LONG AGO no darling from before then even but did you know it was once W I L S D O N meaning well meaning spring at the foot of a hill which is where this water’s coming from I SAID STOP SPLASHING. Leah is suddenly so thirsty, she is made of thirst, she is only thirst. She kneels to examine the tap, reads the sign. Not Potable. Holy, but not potable.

— Mummy!

— No, not Mummy. This is somebody else. “Thought to be more powerful than the traditional Madonna, she has miraculous powers, including: the gift of serendipity, restoring lost memories, resuscitating dead babies…” Marcia would love this — sometimes people see visions of her in the churchyard. Marcia’s always having visions. Usually of white Madonnas, though, with blond hair and nice blouses from M & S….

How did she walk past it? At her back a Madonna, fashioned of jet limewood. The Madonna holds a mammoth baby in swaddling clothes. The Christ Child it says on the sign, his arms stretched out at either side, his hands big with blessing it says on the sign, but to Leah there seems no blessing in it. It looks more like accusation. The baby is cruciform; he is the shape of the thing that will destroy him. He reaches out for Leah. He reaches out to stop any escape, to the right or to the left.

–“becoming the famous shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, “The Black Madonna,” destroyed in the reformation and burned, along with the ladies of Walshingham, Ipswich and Worcester — by the Lord Privy Seal.” Also a Cromwell. Different Cromwell? Doesn’t say. This is where decent history GCSE level teaching would have come in helpful…. “was shrine here since—” wait is this the original then? 1200s? Can’t be. Very craply written, not clear which — NAOMI COME AWAY FROM

37

“How have you lived your whole life in these streets and never known me? How long did you think you could avoid me? What made you think you were exempt? Don’t you know that I have been here as long as people cried out for help? Hear me: I am not like those mealy-mouthed pale Madonnas, those simpering virgins! I am older than this place! Older even than the faith that takes my name in vain! Spirit of these beech woods and phone boxes, hedgerows and lampposts, freshwater springs and tube stations, ancient yews and one-stop-shops, grazing land and 3D multiplexes. Unruly England of the real life, the animal life! Of the old church, of the new, of a time before churches. Are you feeling hot? Is it all too much? Did you hope for something else? Were you misinformed? Was there more to it than that? Or less? If we give it a different name will the weightless sensation disappear? Are your knees going? Who are you? Would you like a glass of water? Is the sky falling? Could things have been differently arranged, in a different order, in a different place?”

18

— Oh, I used to faint a lot. A lot! They thought it was a sign of a delicate constitution, sensitive, a bit artistic. But everyone went into the nursing or secretarial back then, you see. That’s simply how it was. We didn’t have the opportunities.

— It was just hot.

— Because you had a lot of potential, no, listen, you did: piano, the recorder, the dancing, the thing with the… the… what’s its name now, oh you know — sculpting — you liked the sculpting for a while, and the violin, you were a wonder on the violin, and lots of little things like that.

— I brought one pot home from school. I played the violin for a month.

— We made sure you had all the lessons, fifty pee here, fifty pee there, it all adds up! And we didn’t always have it! That was your father — God rest him — he didn’t want you to grow up feeling poor, even though we were poor. But you never really settled on the one thing, that’s what I mean. This lawn needs watering.

Pauline stoops down suddenly, coming up with a handful of grass and earth.

— London clay. Very dry. Of course, you girls do everything differently now. You wait and wait and wait. Though what you’re waiting for I don’t know.

Almost purple with the effort, the bowl of white hair damp and flat round her face. Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

— Eugh. Probably put the mud down now, Mum.

• • •

They sit together on a park bench Michel discovered some years ago. Somebody had left it in the middle of the road, up at Cricklewood Broadway. Calm as you like! Just sitting there in traffic! It looked like it had grown out of the tarmac. All other cars swerved to avoid it. Michel stopped the Mini Metro, put the seats down flat, opened the boot and wedged it in, with Pauline adding an unhelpful hand, to a chorus of car horns. When they got it home they found it had the seal of the Royal Parks upon it. Pauline calls it the throne. Let us sit on the throne for a wee while.

— It was the heat. Olive, come here, baby.

— Not near me! I don’t want my eyes going up! That’s my grandchild, there. Only one I’m likely to get if things go on the way they are. I’m allergic to my own grandchild.

— Mum, enough!

They sit on the throne in silence, staring out in different directions. The problem seems to be two different conceptions of time. She knows the pull of her animal nature should, by now, be making the decisions. Perhaps she’s been a city fox too long. Every new arrival — the announcements seem to come now every day — feels like a terrible betrayal. Why won’t everybody stay still? She has forced a stillness in herself, but it has not stopped the world from continuing on. And then the things that happen only serve to horribly close down the possibilities of all the other things that didn’t happen, and so number 37, and so the door opening at the moment that she stands there, her hand full of leaflets, and Shar saying: put those down, take my hand. Shall we run? Are you ready? Shall we run? Leave all this! Let’s be outlaws! Sleeping in hedgerows. Following the railway line till it reaches the sea. Waking up with that long black hair in her eyes, in her mouth. Phoning home from fantasy boxes that still take the old 2 pees. We’re fine, don’t worry. I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another. Don’t look for me!

— and just trying to help, but I’ll get no thanks for it. I can’t tell if you’re even listening to me. Anyway. It’s your life.

— What d’you want with a shrine anyway?

— What d’you mean by that, a shrine? Her Ladyship? Oh, I don’t bother myself about her. She’s perfectly harmless. It’s says Anglican on the door and it’s been Anglican for a thousand years. That’s good enough for me. People from the colonies, and the Russiany lot, they’re superstitious, and who can blame them? They’ve had a terrible time. Who am I to deprive a person of their comforts?

Pauline looks pointedly toward their old estate, full of people from the colonies and the Russiany lot. Today, as it has been almost all days since the sun began, the foghorn girl is out, locked in debate with whoever is on the end of her handless device. You disrespecting me? Don’t disrespect me! Whatever else is to be said of her, she is of unmistakable Irish descent. Short criminal forehead, widely set eyes. There is a special contempt Pauline reserves for the fallen members of her own tribe.

— Not even the virgin could help the likes of her. Well, hello Edward, dear!

— All right there Mrs. H!

— Oh, it’s good to see you, Ned. How are you love? You’re looking well, considering. Not still smoking the dope, I hope.

–’Fraid so, ’fraid so. I like the flavor.

— It’ll rob you of your ambition.

— I’ve only got the one ambition anyway.

— And what would that be?

— Marrying you, of course. Can’t rob me of that now can it?

— Oh go on with you.

Quite happy, really quite happy, and the sun thins out and purples and arranges itself in strips behind the aquamarine of the minaret and what breeze there is ripples the flag of St. George, on top of the old estate, hung from a satellite dish in preparation for the football. Maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

— Leah love, that’s your phone.

Look at that: the fence on the right side almost completely done for. The ivy from the estate invades the gaps and smothers anything Michel tries to grow, apart from the apple tree itself, which grows despite them all, unaided. She writes to the council, they don’t listen, Ned never writes, nor Gloria, they live communally but she is the only one who thinks communally and oh Christ that poor homeless worm livid in the sun. Like foreskin moving forward and back, forward and back, over itself. Nobody loves me everybody hates me because I’m a wriggly worm. But who is this

this voice

so quiet

and so violent, right in her ear, and she thinks she must have misheard, she thinks she must be going crazy, she thinks

— Excuse me?

— You hear me? Don’t be coming round this place.

— Excuse me? How did you get this number?

— That girl is my business. Don’t be coming round this place pushing shit through the door, you hear me? Watch for me. I know you. You come here again you best watch for me.

— Who is this?

— Fuckin dyke cunt.

The worm grinds its middle together, having nothing else. Flagstone to the left of it, flagstone to the right.

— and then in Poundland the very same box — same brand, mind — is only two forty-nine! But if you shop in these places you’re simply a fool to yourself, and that’s all there is to be said. Leah love? Leah? Leah? Who was that? On the phone? You feeling all right?

19

A wife’s honor must be defended. It is a primal thing, he explains, referencing the great apes in a documentary. As female ape defends baby ape so male ape protects his female. Michel is very happy in his anger, they are drawn together under its canopy. It is the nicest time they’ve had together in months. She sits at the kitchen table clutching herself while he walks up and down waving his arms in the air like a great ape. She is a good ape, too; she wants to contribute to the greater happiness of her ape family. It is this perfectly decent desire that makes her say:

— I think so. I think it was him. It’s hard to tell from a voice. Look, it’s almost twenty years since I knew him at all well. But I would say: yes. If you’re asking me for a hundred percent, then no, I can’t say it like that but my first thought was yes that’s him, that’s Nathan.

So little happens in this corner of NW. When there is a drama it’s natural enough that one should want to place oneself in the picture, right at the center. It sounded like him. It really did. She tells Michel. She tells Michel all of it bar one word.

20

On the way back from the chain supermarket where they shop, though it closed down the local grocer and pays slave wages, with new bags though they should take old bags, leaving with broccoli from Kenya and tomatoes from Chile and unfair coffee and sugary crap and the wrong newspaper.

They are not good people. They do not even have the integrity to be the sort of people who don’t worry about being good people. They worry all the time. They are stuck in the middle again. They buy always Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay because these are the only words they know that relate to wine. They are attending a dinner party and for this you need to bring a bottle of wine. This much they have learned. They do not purchase ethical things because they can’t afford them Michel claims and Leah says, no, it’s because you can’t be bothered. Privately she thinks: you want to be rich like them but you can’t be bothered with their morals, whereas I am more interested in their morals than their money, and this thought, this opposition, makes her feel good. Marriage as the art of invidious comparison. And shit that’s him in the phone box and if she had thought about it for more than a split second she would never have said:

— Shit that’s him in the phone box.

— That’s him?

— Yes, but — no, I don’t know. No. I thought. Doesn’t matter. Forget it.

— Leah, you just said it was him. Is it or isn’t it?

Very quickly Michel is out of earshot and over there, squaring up for another invidious comparison: his compact, well-proportioned dancer’s frame against a tall muscled threat, who turns, and turns out not to be Nathan, who is surely the other boy she saw with Shar, though maybe not. The cap, the hooded top, the low jeans, it’s a uniform — they look the same. From where Leah stands anyway it is still all dumb show, hand gestures and primal frowns, and of course some awful potential news story that explains everything except the misery and the particulars: one youth knifed another youth, on Kilburn High Road. They had names and ages and it’s terribly sad, an indictment of something or another and also not good for house prices. Leah cannot breathe for fear. She is running to catch up, Olive clattering along beside her, and while she runs she finds herself noticing something that should not matter: she looks older than both of them. The boy is a boy and Michel is a man but they look the same age.

— I don’t know what you’re chattin about bruv but you BEST NOT STEP TO ME.

— Michel — please. Leave it, please.

— Tell your mans to step back off me.

— Don’t call my house again, OK? Leave my wife alone! You understand me?

— What the fuck are you chattin’ about? You want some?

They bump chests like primates; Michel is knocked back in an ignoble stumble to the pavement, landing next to his ridiculous dog, who licks him in his ear. Now his opponent towers over him and draws his foot back, preparing for a penalty kick. Leah inserts herself between the two of them, stretching out her hands to separate them, an imploring woman in an ancient story.

— Michel! Stop it! It’s not him. Please — this is my husband, he’s confused, please don’t hurt him, please leave us alone, please.

The foot, indifferent, draws further back, for greater range. Leah begins to cry. In the corner of her eye she observes a young white couple in suits crossing the road to avoid them. No one will help. She puts her hands together in prayer.

— Please leave him alone, please. I’m pregnant — please leave us alone.

The foot retreats. A hand looms over Michel as he struggles to his feet, a hand in the shape of a gun, pointed at his head.

— Step to me again—brrp brrp! — you’ll be gone.

— Fuck you. OK? I’m not scared of you!

In a blink the foot is drawn back once more and released into Olive’s belly. She is propelled several yards into the doorway of the sweetshop. She makes a noise Leah has never heard before.

— Olive!

— You’re lucky your gal came for you bruv. Otherwise.

He is already half way across the road, shouting over his shoulder.

— Otherwise what? You fucking coward! You kick my dog! I’ll call the police!

— MICHEL. Don’t make it worse.

She has a hand to his chest. To any bystander it would appear that she is holding him back. Only she knows that he is not really trying to push her away. In this way the two men part, abusing each other roundly as they go, playing with the idea that they are not finished, that any moment they might turn back and set upon each other. It is only more make-believe: the presence of a woman has released them from their obligation.

21

Leah believes in objectivity. She is a little calmer now, they are almost home. Who was that woman at the moment of crisis, screaming and weeping, begging on her knees in the street? Silly to admit it, but she had thought of herself as “brave.” A fighter. Now she is introduced to a deal-maker, a pleader, a tactical liar. Please don’t destroy the thing I love! And her petition had been heard, and a lesser sacrifice made in its place, and in the moment she was simply, pathetically grateful for the concession.

Afterward, too, she could not instantly put herself back together. It is Michel who holds Olive in his arms, and thumps upon their own front door while Leah goes on not being able to discover which shopping bag contains the key.

— Is she OK?

— She’s fine. Unless she’s hurt inside. To me she looks fine. Shocked.

— Are you OK?

The answer is in his face. Humiliation. Fury. Of course, it’s harder for a man to be objective. They have the problem of pride.

— Ned!

— Guys, you OK?

— Help Lee with those bags.

They go into the kitchen and lay the beloved dog in its bed. She looks OK. Feed her? She eats. Throw a ball? She runs. Maybe she’s OK, but for the humans there is still too much adrenaline and trauma to move on. Leah tells Ned the story, purging it of any possible fury or humiliation. Michel the brave! Michel the defender! She puts a hand on her husband’s arm. He shrugs it off.

— She pretended she was pregnant. He took pity on us! I was lying on the floor like an idiot.

— No. You stopped it getting any worse than it needed to be.

She puts a hand on his arm again. This time he lets her.

— Do you think we should leave her tonight? I don’t know. Ned, could you keep an eye out? Call if there’s any problem? Or maybe we should just stay in. Cancel.

It’s dinner, says Michel, I don’t think we can cancel. She’s OK. You’re OK, baby, aren’t you? You’re OK? The two humans look into the animal’s eyes for reassurance. Leah struggles to be objective. Wouldn’t one of the humans have said the word “vet” by now if they did not fear how much money saying “vet” would entail?

22

Hanwell never gave dinner parties. Nor did he go out for dinner. That’s not true: on special occasions he took his little family to Vijay’s on Willesden Lane where they took a table near the door, ate quickly, and grew self-conscious of their conversation. Nothing in Leah’s childhood prepared her for the frequency with which she now attends dinner parties, most often at Natalie’s house, where she and Michel are invited to provide something like local color. Neither of them know what to say to barristers and bankers, to the occasional judge. Natalie cannot believe that they are shy. Each time she blames some error of placement but each time the awkwardness remains. They are shy, whether Natalie believes it or not. They have no gift for anecdote. They look down at their plates and cut their food with great care, letting Natalie tell their stories for them, nodding to confirm points of fact, names, times, places. Offered to the table for general dissection these anecdotes take on their own life, separate, impressive.

— or just ran. I would have run like the bloody wind and left them to it. No offense, Michel. You’re very brave.

— And then did you just both go your separate ways? “Thank you, I’ve been your potential murderer today, now I must be off…”

— Ha!

–“Got a rather full day of muggings to attend to with my pretend gun.”

— Ha!

— Can you pass that salsa thing? Do you think if you make a gun sign with your fingers that means you actually have a gun or that’s like basically your only gun? Recession bites everyone, I suppose… why should gangsters be immune? Look, I’ve got one, too. Brrrp!

— Ha! Ha!

— Wait, but, sorry — you’re pregnant?

Twelve people at Nat’s long oak dining table stop talking and laughing and look at Leah caught wrestling the breast of a duck.

— No.

— No, it was just something she said, you know, to stop him.

— Very brave. Quick thinking.

Natalie’s version of Leah and Michel’s anecdote is over. The conversational baton passes to others, who tell their anecdotes with more panache, linking them to matters of the wider culture, debates in the newspapers. Leah tries to explain what she does for a living to someone who doesn’t care. The spinach is farm to table. Everyone comes together for a moment to complain about the evils of technology, what a disaster, especially for teenagers, yet most people have their phones laid next to their dinner plates. Pass the buttered carrots. Meanwhile parents have become old and ill at the very moment their children want to have their own babies. Many of the parents are immigrants — from Jamaica, from Ireland, from India, from China — and they can’t understand why they have not yet been invited to live with their children, as is the custom, in their countries. Technology is offered as a substitute for that impossible request. Stair lifts. Pacemakers. Hip replacements. Dialysis machines. But nothing satisfies them. They worked hard so we children might live like this. They “literally” will not be happy until they’ve moved into our houses. They can never move into our houses. Pass the heirloom tomato salad. The thing about Islam. Let me tell you about Islam. The thing about the trouble with Islam. Everyone is suddenly an expert on Islam. But what do you think, Samhita, yeah what do you think, Samhita, what’s your take on this? Samhita, the copyright lawyer. Pass the tuna. Solutions are passed across the table, strategies. Private wards. Private cinemas. Christmas abroad. A restaurant with only five tables in it. Security systems. Fences. The carriage of a 4x4 that lets you sit alone above traffic. There is a perfect isolation out there somewhere, you can get it, although it doesn’t come cheap. But Leah, someone is saying, but Leah, in the end, at the end of the day, don’t you just want to give your individual child the very best opportunities you can give them individually? Pass the green beans with shaved almonds. Define best. Pass the lemon tart. Whatever brings a child the greatest possibility of success. Pass the berries. Define success. Pass the crème fraîche. You think that the difference between you and me is that you want to give your child the best opportunities? Pass the dessert spoon. It’s the job of the hostess to smooth things over, to point out that these arguments are still hypothetical. Why argue over the unborn? All I know is I don’t want to push something the size of a watermelon out of something the size of a lemon. Nurse: bring on the drugs! Have you thought about doing it in water? Everyone says the same things in the same way. Conversations tinged with terror. Captive animals, contemplating a return to nature. Natalie is calm, having already traveled to the other side. Pass the laptop. You’ve got to see this, it’s only two minutes long, it’s hilarious.

Water shortage. Food wars. Strain A-H5N1. Manhattan slips into the sea. England freezes. Iran presses the button. A tornado blows through Kensal Rise. There must be something attractive about the idea of apocalypse. Neighborhoods reduced to scavenging zones. Setting up schools in abandoned supermarkets and churches. New groupings, new connections, multiple partners, children free of all this dull protection. On every street corner music streaming out of giant jerry-rigged sound-systems. People moving in great anonymous crowds, leaderless, in wave formations, masked, looking for food, weaponry. “Steam rushing” Caldwell, on a Sunday, running down the halls in packs, ringing every bell. Those were the days. Weren’t they, Leah? Those were really the days. Pass the whisky. Because it’s a facile comparison: you can’t be responsible for a complex economic event in the same way you’re responsible for going out on the street with the intention to steal. Pass the coffee. It’s not any coffee, it’s extremely good coffee.

— It’s just disappointing.

— It’s so disappointing.

— Especially when you’ve really gone out of your way to help somebody and they just throw it back in your face. That’s what I can’t stand. Like actually what happened with Leah — Lee tell them about the girl.

— Sorry?

— The girl in the headscarf. Who came to the door. It’s a really sad story. All right: I’ll tell it—

It’s only when they have been kissed on both cheeks, when the heavy front door closes, when they are released once more into the night, that Leah and Michel come alive. But even this camaraderie of contempt can quickly fall apart. By the time they reach the mouth of the tube, Leah has somehow said too much, complained too much, and the delicate spirit level of their relation, their us-against-them, slips, and shows a crooked angle.

— Don’t you think they’re as bored as you are? You think you’re somebody special? You think I wake up every day so happy to see you? You’re a snob, just in the other way. Do you think you are the only one who wants something else? Another life?

They ride home in silence, infuriated. They walk through Willesden in silence. They come to the door in silence, both reaching for separate keys at the same time. They do comic battle at the keyhole, and Leah is the one to crack. By the time they are in the hallway they are laughing, and soon after, kissing. If only they could be alone all the time. If the world was just you and me, says Leah, we’d be happy all the time. You sound just like them, says Michel, and puts his tongue in his wife’s ear.

The next morning, they arrive in the kitchen in mellow mood, in t-shirts and pants, sloping into the wide expanse of a Saturday morning. Leah goes to check the post. She sees her first. Innocent, beloved little animal, cold, not yet stiff, far from her bed, under the table in the box room, on her side. Bloody foam at her mouth. Michel! Michel! It won’t come out loud enough. Or he is in the garden, admiring the tree. The doorbell goes. It is Pauline. Olive’s dead! She’s dead! Oh my God! She’s dead! Where? Says Pauline. Show me. It’s the nurse in her. And when Michel comes and sees and is no less hysterical than Leah, Leah is surprised how grateful she is for her mother’s practical way of being in the world. Leah wants to cry and only to cry. Michel wants to go over and over the order of events. He wants to establish a timeline, as if this would change anything. Pauline wants to make sure the area under the table is made antiseptic and that the shoebox is buried at least one foot under the communal grass. No point asking the others, says Pauline — meaning the other occupants — they’ll only say no. Hurry up now, she says, try and pull yourselves together. We need to get this done. Have some tea. Calm down. She asks: did it not occur to you she didn’t bark when you came in?

23

It could be said that one of Michel’s dreams has come true: they have gone up one rung, at least in the quality and elaboration of their fear. It is in Leah’s nature to blame Michel for this — their new wariness, the Chubb lock, the fact he now picks her up from the station, the way they cross the street to avoid “certain elements” and continually discuss moving out. Michel is longer at the computer, dreaming of a windfall that will transport them to another urban suburb more to his taste, which means more African, less Caribbean. To which Leah offers no comment. She is submerged, July is a lost month. She lets these little changes happen, up there, on the surface, while she walks on the bottom of the ocean. She is in terrible mourning. She is unfamiliar with the rules concerning the mourning of animals. For a cat: one week. For a dog, two will be tolerated, three is to begin to look absurd, especially in the office where — in the Caribbean spirit — all animals smaller than a donkey are considered vermin. She is mourning for her dog. She thinks the sadness will kill her. Spotting one of Olive’s many twins shuffling up the Edgware Road, suffering in the heat, she is overcome. At work, Adina squints at her puffy tear-stained face. Not still the dog. Still? And if it is indeed false consciousness, if the mourning is for something other than her dog, it can make no practical difference to the mourner: it is Olive that she knew, and Olive whom she misses. Leah has become the sort of crazy person who stops other dog owners in the street to tell them her tale of woe.

Walking back from a training day in Harlesden she finds herself lost in the back streets. She takes a series of random left turns to keep moving, to lose a surely innocent hooded stranger, and then here is that strange little church again, tolling six o’clock. She goes in. Half an hour later she comes out. She does not tell Michel or anybody. She begins to do this most days. In late July, Michel insists: they must go forward. Leah agrees. They are placed on the NHS waiting list. But every morning, she locks the bathroom door and takes her little contraceptive pill. Stolen boxes from Natalie’s bathroom cabinet, hidden in a drawer. She doesn’t want to “go forward.” For Leah, that way is not forward. She wants just him and her forever.

August comes.

August comes.

• • •

Carnival! Girls from work, boys from the salon, old school friends, Michel’s cousins from south London, all walk the streets with a million others. Seeking out the good sound systems, winding their bodies close to complete strangers and each other, eating jerk, ending up in Meanwhile Gardens, stoned in the grass. Usually. Not this year. This year they finally accept Frank’s annual invitation to a friend of a friend’s with “an amazing carnival pad.” An Italian. They turn up early on the Sunday morning, as advised, to get there before the street is closed off. They feel a bit stupid, wandering around the empty flat of people they do not know. No sign of Frank or Nat. Michel goes to help in the kitchen. Leah accepts a rum and Coke and sits in a corner chair, looking out the window, watching the police lining up along the barricades. In the corner of the room a television talks. It talks for a long time before Leah notices it, and then only because it names a local road, one street from her own.

— on Albert Road, in Kilburn, where yesterday evening hopes for a peaceful carnival weekend were marred by reports of a fatal stabbing, here, on the border of the carnival route through North West London, as people prepared for today’s festivities—

• • •

Albert Road! shouts Michel, from the kitchen. Leah shouts back:

— YEAH BUT IT’S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH CARNIVAL–IT WAS LAST NIGHT. IT’S JUST—

Michel walks through the door.

— it’s just typical sensational reporting. They want there to be—

— Leah can I hear it please?

The television says:

— The young man, named locally as Felix Cooper, was 32 years old. He grew up in the notorious Garvey House project in Holloway, but had moved with his family to this relatively quiet corner of Kilburn, in search of a better life. Yet it was here, in Kilburn, that he was accosted by two youths early Saturday evening, moments from his own front door. It is not known if the victim knew—

— He was murdered! Why does it matter where he grew up?

I put music on now, says an Italian, and switches off the television. We need to move out, says Michel. I don’t want to move, it’s my home, says Leah. She accepts a kiss on her neck. No arguing, says Michel, OK? Let’s try and have a nice time. I’m not arguing, says Leah. OK, but you’re being naïve.

In ill temper they separate. Leah goes up one floor, to a terrace. Michel returns to the kitchen. Now the flat fills very quickly. The doorbell rings continuously. It would be easier just to leave the front door open but the host is anxious to see each guest on the videophone before they come in. People stream into the party like soldiers into triage. It’s hell out there! I thought we weren’t going to make it. Everyone takes turns to stand on the white stucco balconies, dancing, blowing whistles painted in Rastafarian colors at the carnival crowds, far below. Very soon Leah is drunk. She started too early. She can’t find Michel. She spots Frank, not difficult to find in this crowd. They stand in the hall. The music is so loud, both outside and in, that information can only be passed sparingly. Nat’s coming later. She’s with the kids on one of Marcia’s church floats. Sausage roll?

— So what’s the secret?

— What?

— OF YOUR HAPPINESS. FRANCESCO.

— I CAN’T HEAR YOU. ARE YOU DRUNK?

They move into the kitchen where the bass can’t find them. She repeats her query. We tell each other everything, he says. Punch?

The kitchen is packed. She needs water. She tries to make her way to the taps. Clean cup or glass or mug? Fags and food in the plughole. Time has not stood still during this procedure. Frank is lost. Michel is lost. Who are all these people? Why do they keep telling themselves what a good time they’re all having? No need to queue for the toilets, no accumulated street filth between the toes, no six pounds for a can of Red Stripe. See! I’ve been telling you all these years! Perfect spot. You can see everything from here. And suddenly there’s Nat, standing in the balcony alone, looking out. She turns. Frank is in the doorway. Leah is at a midpoint between them, unnoticed in the crowd. She sees the husband look at the wife, and the wife look at the husband. She sees no smile, no nod, no wave, no recognition, no communication, nothing at all. Bowls of disposable cameras in cheery colors are being distributed. The host encourages people to record the occasion. Everyone takes turns trying on the Rasta wig. Leah surprises herself: she has a great time.

37

— What do you mean they’re not here? I dropped the camera in two hours ago. It’s a one-hour service.

— I’m sorry, Madam, I can’t find anything under that name.

— Hanwell, Leah. Please check again.

Leah puts both hands on the pharmacy counter.

— Are you sure it was today?

— I don’t understand. Are you saying you’ve lost them? I was in two hours ago. Today. Monday. A man served me.

— I have no record of the name you’re giving me. I just got here, Madam. Do you know who was serving you? Was it a young man or an older gentleman?

— I don’t remember who served me. I know I came in here.

— Madam, there’s another pharmacy at the station, are you sure it wasn’t that one?

— Yes I’m sure. Hanwell, Leah. Can you look again?

A queue forms behind her. They are trying to decide if she is crazy. Sectioning is a common procedure in NW, and it is not always the people you’d think. The Indian woman in the white coat behind the counter flicks once more through her box of yellow envelopes.

— Ah — Hanwell. It was not in H. It’s been put in the wrong place, you see. I’m so sorry, Madam.

She is not crazy. Photographs. Easy to forget about real photographs, their gloss and pleasure. But the first is entirely black, and so is the second; the third shows only a red aura, like a torch held beneath a sheet.

— Look, these aren’t mine, I don’t want these—

The fourth is Shar. Unmistakable. Shar laughing at whoever is taking the picture, pressing herself against a door, holding a little bottle of something, vodka? Underneath a dartboard. No other furniture in the filthy room. The fifth is Shar, still laughing, now sat on the floor, looking destroyed. The sixth is a skaggy redhead, skin and bone and track marks, with a fag hanging out her mouth, and if you squinted—

— I’m sorry, Madam. Let me take those, somehow we’ve had a mixing up.

Michel, who has been looking at shaving creams, comes over. He is not surprised. Infuriating, this perverse refusal to be either amazed or surprised.

NW, a small place.

With two pharmacies.

Photographs get mixed up.

Sounds reasonable but she can’t take it reasonably. She is enraged by the possibility that he does not believe her. This is the girl! Don’t you believe me? That’s an insane coincidence! Her photos are in my envelope! Don’t you believe me? But why should he believe her when she has lied about everything? The queue shuffles impatiently. She is shouting, and people look at her like she is mad. Michel yanks her toward the exit, the little bell over the door rings, it is all over so quickly. It is somehow the brevity of it that muddles things — those too few seconds, in which she looked and saw what was there. The girl. Her photos. My envelope. That’s what happened. Like a riddle in a dream. There is no answer. Nor is there any way that she can take back what she has so loudly proclaimed, in front of all these decent local people, or to ask to see photos that are clearly not hers, again. What would people think?