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1. These red pigtails

There had been an event. To speak of it required the pluperfect. Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell, the protagonists in this event, were four-year-old children. The outdoor pool — really a shallow trough in the park, one foot at its deepest end — had been full of kids, “splashing all ways, causing madness.” There was no lifeguard at the time of the event, and parents were left to keep an eye as best they could. “They had a guard up the hill, in Hampstead, for them. Nothing for us.” This was an interesting detail. Keisha — now ten years old and curious about the tensions between grown people — tried to get at its meaning. “Stop gazing. Lift your foot,” said her mother. They sat on a bench in a shoe shop on the Kilburn High Road getting measured for a pair of dull brown shoes with a t-strap that did not express any of the joy that must surely exist in the world, despite everything. “I’ve got Cheryl acting wild in one corner, I got Jayden in my arms bawling, and I’m trying to see where you are, trying to keep it all together…” It was in this ellipsis that the event had occurred: a child nearly drowned. Yet the significance of the event lay elsewhere. “You rose up with these red pigtails in your hand. You dragged her up. You were the only one saw she was in trouble.” After the event, the mother of the child, an Irish woman, thanked Marcia Blake many times, and this in itself was a kind of event. “I knew Pauline to look at but not to speak to. She was a bit snooty with me back then.” Keisha could neither contradict nor verify this account — she had no memory of it. However, the foreshadowing could be considered suspicious. Her own celebrated will and foresight so firmly established, and Cheryl already wild and unreliable. Also, Jayden could not have been born at the time of the event, being five years younger than Keisha. “Keep still now,” murmured Marcia, pushing the steel bar down to meet her daughter’s toes.

2. Kiwi fruit

In the lethal quiet of the Hanwell flat a highlight was snack-time. It was taken seriously by Mrs. Hanwell, who kept a trolley for the purpose. Three tiered with swiveling wheels of brass. It was too low to the ground to be pushed without a person bending absurdly as they did so. “There’s no point bringing it all out for two, but when there’s three I like to get it out.” Keisha Blake sat cross-legged in front of the television with her good friend Leah Hanwell, with whom she had bonded over a dramatic event. She turned to monitor the trolley’s progress: food delighted Keisha Blake and she looked forward to it above all things. Blocking the girls’ view, Mrs. Hanwell now asked the television a question: “Who are all these dangerous-looking fellas in a van?” Leah turned up the volume. She pointed to the TV, at Hannibal’s gleaming white hair, and then at her mother, in reality. “That hair makes you look well old,” she said. Keisha tried to imagine saying something of this kind to her own mother. Silently she mourned the loss of the biscuit plate and whatever novelty was contained in those furry brown eggs. She put her feet together ready to stand up and go home. But Mrs. Hanwell did not start yelling or hitting. She only touched her bowl of hair and sighed. “It went this color when I had you.”

3. Holes

The stick jammed the doors of the lift — this had been the whole point of the exercise. An alarm sounded. All three children went screaming and laughing down the stairs, up the incline, and over the boundary wall to sit on the pavement on the other side. Nathan Bogle pulled his knees right up to his chin and put his arms around them. “How many holes you got?” he asked. Both girls were silent. “What?” said Leah, finally. “Down there”—he jabbed a finger at Keisha’s crotch to demonstrate—“How many? You don’t even know.” Keisha dared lift her eyes from the road to her friend. Leah was hopelessly red in the face. “Everybody knows that,” countered Keisha Blake, trying to muster the further boldness she sensed was required. “You should fuck off and find out.” “You don’t even know,” Nathan concluded, and Leah stood up suddenly and kicked him on his ankle and shouted, “But she does though!” and took Keisha’s hand and ran back to the flat holding hands the whole way because they were best friends bonded for life by a dramatic event and everyone in Caldwell best know about it.

4. Uncertainty

They found Cheryl watching television, plaiting her own hair, from the back of her head forwards. Keisha Blake challenged her elder sister to say how many holes there were. It was not good to have Cheryl laugh at you. It was a loud, relentless laugh, fueled by the other person’s mortification.

5. Philosophical disagreement

Keisha Blake was eager to replicate some of the conditions she had seen at the Hanwells’. Cup, teabag, then water, then — only then — milk. On a tea-tray. Her mother was of the opinion that anyone who is in another person’s flat as often as Leah Hanwell was in the Blakes’ forgoes the right to be a guest and should simply be treated as a member of the family, with all the dispensation and latitude that suggests. Cheryl took a third position: “She’s always hanging round here. Don’t she like her own place? What’s she up in my makeup all the time for? Who does she think she is?”

“Mum, you got a tea-tray?”

“Just take it in to her. Lord!”

6. Some answers

Keisha Blake

Leah Hanwell

Purple

Yellow

Cameo, Culture Club, Bob Marley

Madonna, Culture Club, Thompson Twins

Rather have the money

Be really famous

Michael Jackson

Harrison Ford

Nobody. If I had to, Rahim.

Top secret: Nathan Bogle

Don’t know

Daisies or buttercups

Doctor or Missionary

Manager

Leah Hanwell

Keisha Blake

World peace in South Africa

No bombs

Deaf

Deaf

Hurricane

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

E.T.

E.T.

7. Filet-O-Fish, large fries, apple pie

It was a Caldwell assumption that plumbers did very well for themselves. Keisha saw little evidence of this. Either the personal wealth of plumbers was a myth or her father was incompetent. She had in the past prayed for work for Augustus Blake, without results. Now it was almost midday on a Saturday and no news had arrived of pipes leaking or backed-up toilets. During periods of stress Augustus Blake stood on the balcony and smoked Lambert & Butlers and this he did now. Keisha could not tell if Leah felt the anxiety of the phone not-ringing in the flat as the rest of them did. The two girls lay on their bellies in front of the television set. They watched four hours of morning shows and cartoons. Each one they ridiculed in turn and spoiled for Jayden, but there was no other way of explaining to each other why they should want to watch the same things as a six-year-old boy. When the lunchtime news began, Gus came in and asked where Cheryl was.

“Out.”

“More fool her.”

Squeals, and a small hand-holding dance. Apart from Marcia scoring a point off the situation—“See how quick you all get yourselves ready when you’re going somewhere you want to go?”—joy was unconfined, and everything colluded to extend it; Marcia did not make them talk to every church lady on the high road and Gus called Keisha “Madam One” and Leah “Madam Two” and did not get angry when Jayden ran ahead toward the twin arcs of the golden M.

8. Radiography

But on the way home they bumped into Pauline Hanwell, alone, pulling a shopping bag on wheels. It was true she looked like the actor George Peppard. Jayden held the toy of his Happy Meal up for Mrs. Hanwell’s inspection. Mrs. Hanwell did not see it — she was looking at Leah. Keisha Blake looked at her friend Leah Hanwell and saw the red climbing up her throat. Mrs. Blake asked Mrs. Hanwell how she was and Mrs. Hanwell said fine and the reverse inquiry was made with the same result. Mrs. Hanwell was a general nurse at The Royal Free Hospital and Mr. Blake a health visitor affiliated with St. Mary’s, Paddington. Neither woman was in any sense a member of the bourgeoisie but neither did they consider themselves solidly of the working class either. They spoke briefly about the National Health Service, with a mixture of complaint and pride. Mrs. Hanwell told the Blakes that she was retraining to become a radiographer and Keisha could not tell if Mrs. Hanwell realized she had told them the very same thing a few days ago in front of the bins. “Now, Augustus: Colin said if you’re still wanting those parking permits for your van, he can help you.” Mr. Colin Hanwell worked for the council. His main responsibility was bike safety, but he had also some minimal power in the matter of parking. Keisha thought: now she is going to say she’s heading to Marks & Sparks and when this was exactly what she did say Keisha experienced an unforgettable pulse of authorial omnipotence. Maybe the world really was hers for the making. “Leah,” said Mrs. Hanwell, “you coming?” The gap between the posing of this question and its answer was experienced by Keisha Blake as an intolerable tension extending far beyond her ability to withstand it and almost infinite in length.

9. Thrown

It was clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed the boundary wall of Caldwell she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as “intelligence.” Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary — in search of something like “completion” —and every book led to another book, a process which of course could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and indeed it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things — could not resist wanting to read things — and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn’t it possible that what others mistook for intelligence might in fact be only a sort of mutation of the will? She could sit in one place longer than other children, be bored for hours without complaint, and was completely devoted to filling in every last corner of the coloring books Augustus Blake sometimes brought home. She could not help her mutated will — no more than she could help the shape of her feet or the street on which she was born. She was unable to glean real satisfaction from accidents. In the child’s mind a breach now appeared: between what she believed she knew of herself, essentially, and her essence as others seemed to understand it. She began to exist for other people, and if ever asked a question to which she did not know the answer she was wont to fold her arms across her body and look upward. As if the question itself were too obvious to truly concern her.

10. Speak, radio

A coincidence? Coincidence has its limitations. The DJ on Colin Hanwell’s kitchen radio could not always be between tracks. He could not always be between tracks at the very moment Keisha Blake walked into the Hanwell kitchen. She made inquiries. But Leah’s father, who was at the counter shelling peas from their pods, did not seem to understand the question.

“How d’you mean? There isn’t any music. It’s Radio 4. They just talk.”

An early example of the maxim: “Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.”

11. Push it

It had never occurred to Keisha Blake that her friend Leah Hanwell was in possession of a particular type of personality. Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. Leah Hanwell was a person willing and available to do a variety of things that Keisha Blake was willing and available to do. Together they ran, jumped, danced, sang, bathed, colored-in, rode bikes, pushed a Valentine under Nathan Bogle’s door, read magazines, shared chips, sneaked a cigarette, read Cheryl’s diary, wrote the word FUCK on the first page of a Bible, tried to get The Exorcist out of the video shop, watched a prostitute or loose woman or a girl just crazy in love suck someone off in a phone box, found Cheryl’s weed, found Cheryl’s vodka, shaved Leah’s forearm with Cheryl’s razor, did the moonwalk, learned the obscene dance popularized by Salt-N-Pepa, and many other things of this nature. But now they were leaving Quinton Primary for Brayton Comprehensive, where everybody seemed to have a personality, and so Keisha looked at Leah and tried to ascertain the outline of her personality.

12. Portrait

A generous person, wide open to the entire world — with the possible exception of her own mother. Ceased eating tuna because of the dolphins, and now all meat because of animals generally. If there happened to be a homeless man sitting on the ground outside the supermarket in Cricklewood Keisha Blake had to wait until Leah Hanwell had finished bending down and speaking with the homeless man, not simply asking him if there was anything he wanted, but making conversation. If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed. Within Brayton she befriended everyone without distinction or boundary, but the hopeless cases did not alienate her from the popular and vice versa and how this was managed Keisha Blake had no understanding. A little of this universal good feeling spread to Keisha by association, though no one ever mistook Keisha’s cerebral willfulness for her friend’s generosity of spirit.

13. Gravel

Walking back from school with a girl called Anita, Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell found themselves being told a terrible story. Anita’s mother had been raped by a cousin in 1976 and this man was Anita’s father. He had been put in jail and then got out and Anita had never met him and did not want to. Some of the family thought her father had raped her mother and some did not. It was a domestic drama but also a kind of thrilling horror because who could say if Anita’s rapist father wasn’t living in NW itself and/or watching them from some vantage point at this very moment? The three girls stopped in the gravel courtyard of a church and sat on a bench. Anita cried, and Leah cried too. Anita asked: “How do I know which half of me is evil?” But parental legacy meant little to Keisha Blake; it was her solid sense that she was in no way the creation of her parents and as a result could not seriously believe that anybody else was the creation of theirs. Indeed, a non-existent father and/or mother was a persistent fantasy of hers, and the children’s books she had most enjoyed always began with the protagonist inheriting a terrible freedom after some form of parental apocalypse. She made a figure of eight on the ground with her left trainer and considered the two pages she had to write about the 1804 corn laws before tomorrow morning.

14. That obscure object of desire

The red and white air technology of the Greek goddess of victory. Keisha Blake put her hand against the reinforced shop-front glass. Separated from happiness. It had been everywhere, the air, free for the taking, but she had only come to desire it now that she saw it thus defined, extracted, rendered visible. The infinitely available thing, now enclosed in the sole of a shoe! You had to admire the audacity. Ninety-nine quid. Maybe at Christmas.

15. Evian

The exact same thing had been achieved with water. When Marcia Blake spotted the bottle hiding under a bag of carrots she cussed Keisha Blake, snatched it out of the trolley and placed it back on the wrong shelf next to the jams.

16. The new timetable

“There: he’s in your French class. And your drama class.”

“Who is?”

“Nathan!”

“Bogle? So?”

“!”

“Oh my gosh, Keisha. We were babies. You’re so dumb sometimes.”

17. GCSE

In the office of Keisha Blake’s Head of Year baseball caps and inappropriate jewelry were confiscated and hung from the wall on hooks. Keisha Blake had not been called in for a reprimand, she had come to discuss her options for a set of exams still three years in the future. She did not really want to discuss these exams, she simply wanted it to be noted that she was the kind of person who thought three years ahead about the important things in life. As she got up to leave she spotted a silver chain from which drooped a tiny pistol picked out in diamante crystals. “That’s my sister’s,” she said. “Oh, is it?” said the teacher and looked out of the window. Keisha persisted: “She doesn’t go here anymore. She got expelled.” The teacher frowned. He took the necklace from the wall and passed it to Keisha. He said: “It’s hard to believe that you and Cheryl Blake are even related.”

18. Sony Walkman (borrowed)

That Keisha should be able to hear the Rebel MC in her ears and at the same time walk down Willesden Lane, was a kind of miracle and modern ecstasy, and yet there was very little space in the day for anything like ecstasy or abandon or even simple laziness, for whatever you did in life you would have to do it twice as well as they did it “just to break even,” a troubling belief held simultaneously by Keisha Blake’s mother and her Uncle Jeffrey, known to be “gifted” but also “beyond the pale.”

19. Detour into the perfect past tense

(Sometimes Jeffrey — who was not a member of the church — cornered his thirteen-year-old niece and told her perplexing things. “Look it up! Look it up!” he had said, yesterday, at Cousin Gale’s wedding. Keisha could only presume he was referring to a prior conversation, that had taken place many weeks earlier. Therefore he had meant: “Look up the CIA’s practice of flooding poor black neighbourhoods with crack cocaine and you will see that I am right.” How? Where?)

20. Sony Walkman redux

That two such different personalities as her mother and Uncle Jeffrey should hold an opinion simultaneously lent that opinion some force. Yet surely none of you would begrudge Keisha Blake this present pleasure of thinking to music? Oh, this outdoor soundtrack! Oh, this orchestral existence!

21. Jane Eyre

When being bullied Keisha Blake found it useful to remember that if you read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon found that being bullied was practically a sign of a superior personality, and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to be avenged at the other end of life, when qualities of the kind Keisha Blake possessed — cleverness, will-to-power — became “their own reward,” and that this remained true even if the people in the literature and the movies looked nothing like you, came from a different socio-economic and historical universe, and — had they ever met you — would very likely have enslaved you or, at best, bullied you to precisely the same extent as Lorna Mackenzie who had a problem with the way you acted like you were better than everyone else.

22. Citation

Further confirmation of this principle was to be found in the Bible itself.

23. Spectrum 128k

For her fourteenth birthday Leah received a home computer. Keisha Blake read through the accompanying booklet and was able to figure out how to program a basic series of commands so that in answer to particular prompts text would come up on the screen as if the computer itself were “talking.” They did one for Mr. Hanwell:

>> gt;>> gt;WHAT IS YOUR NAME

“I’m to type it in here? I feel silly.”

>> gt;>> gt;COLIN ALBERT HANWELL

>> gt;>> gt;VERY NICE TO MEET YOU, COLIN.

“My word! Did you do that, Keisha? How do you do these things? I can’t keep up with you these days. Pauline, come and look at this, you won’t believe it.”

After they had finished dazzling the Hanwells, they did one for their private amusement:

>> gt;>> gt;WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

>> gt;>> gt;LEAH HANWELL

>> gt;>> gt;OH REALLY? THAT’S JUST FUCKING FASCINATING.

24. The number 37

On Sundays, Keisha Blake attended Kilburn Pentecostal with her family, minus Cheryl, and Leah often came along, not because she was in any sense a believer, but rather motivated by the generosity of spirit described above. Now a new policy revealed itself. When they reached the corner by the McDonald’s Leah Hanwell said to Keisha Blake, “Actually I think I might get on the 37, go to the Lock, see that lot.” “Fair enough,” said Keisha Blake. There had been an attempt over the summer to mix that Camden Lock lot with this Caldwell lot, but Keisha Blake did not especially care for Baudelaire or Bukowski or Nick Drake or Sonic Youth or Joy Division or boys who looked like girls or vice versa or Anne Rice or William Burroughs or Kafka’s Metamorphosis or CND or Glastonbury or the Situationists or Breathless or Samuel Beckett or Andy Warhol or a million other Camden things, and when Keisha brought a wondrous Monie Love 7-inch to play on Leah’s hi-fi there was something awful in the way Leah blushed and conceded it was probably OK to dance to. They had only Prince left, and he was wearing thin.

25. Vivre sa vie

This sudden and violent divergence in their tastes was shocking to Keisha, and she persisted in believing that Leah’s new tastes were an affectation, unrelated to anything essential in her being and largely taken up to annoy her oldest friend. “Bell me later,” said Leah Hanwell and jumped on the bus’s open rear end. Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a mauvais quart d’heure wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

26. Relative time

A number of factors — modest style of dress, early physical maturation, glasses — combined to make Keisha Blake look considerably older than she in fact was.

27. 50ml vodka

Instead of being known as a “personality,” Keisha Blake now became indirectly popular as a function. She bought alcohol for a lot of people who believed they looked too young to get it themselves, and the irrational belief in Keisha’s “talent” in this area became self-fulfilling, as invested with all this belief in her infallibility she came to believe in it herself. Still, it was strange to buy booze for Leah. “It needs to be the size to fit in my back pocket.” “Why?” “Because there’ll be two hundred people moshing up and down and you can’t be pissing around with a wine glass.” As the event did not start until late, Leah first came to Keisha Blake’s room to hang out and drink and talk until it was time for her to go. Probably later she would meet someone with hair in his eyes and do sex. “I saw Nathan at the chippy yesterday,” said Keisha. “God, Nathan,” said Leah Hanwell. “He’s not coming back next term,” said Keisha Blake. “They turned it into an expulsion.” “That was a matter of time,” said Leah Hanwell, and opened the window to have a fag. Leah drank some more and spent a long time twisting the radio knob looking for a pirate station she didn’t find. At around ten fifteen p.m. Leah Hanwell said: “I don’t think women can really be beautiful. I think they can be so attractive and you can want to shag them and love them and blah blah but I think really only men can be completely beautiful in the end.” “You reckon?” said Keisha, and disguised her confusion by drinking deeply from her mug of tea. She was not at all sure to whom the second-person pronoun was meant to refer.

28. Rabbit

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday a gift was left for Keisha Blake, outside the flat in the corridor. The wrapping showed a repeating butterfly pattern. The card, unsigned, read UNWRAP IN PRIVATE, but the slant of the p and the pointy w told her it was the hand of her good friend Leah Hanwell. She retreated to the bathroom. A vibrator, neon pink with revolving beads in its gigantic tip. Keisha sat on the closed lid of the toilet and made some strategic calculations. Wrapping the dildo in a towel, she hid it in the room she shared with Cheryl, then took the box and wrapping paper down to the courtyard to the public bins by the parking bays. The following Saturday morning she began approximating the early signs of a cold, and on Sunday claimed a severe cough and stomach ache. Her mother pressed her tongue down with a fork and said it was a shame, Pastor Akinwande was going to talk on the topic of Abraham and Isaac. From the balcony Keisha Blake watched her family walk to church, not without regret: she was sincerely interested in the topic of Abraham and Isaac.

29. Rabbit, run

But she had also privately decided she was a different kind of believer from her mother, and could survive the occasional anthropological adventure into sin. She returned inside and raided an alarm clock and calculator for their batteries. She did not employ any mood lighting or soft music or scented candles. She did not take off her clothes. Three minutes later she’d established several things previously unknown to her: what a vaginal orgasm was; the difference between a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm, and the existence of a viscous material, produced by her body, that she had, afterward, to rinse out of the ridges along the vibrator’s shaft, in the little sink in the corner of the room. She had the dildo for only a couple of weeks but in that time used it regularly, sometimes as much as several times a day, often without washing in between, and always in this business-like way, as if delegating a task to somebody else.

30. Surplus value, schizophrenia, adolescence

“We should go like this here,” said Layla and sang a new note and Keisha made a notation. “Role models,” sang Layla, in the new key, “bringing the truth, bringing the light.” Keisha made a further note. “Making it right,” said Layla, and then repeated the same words but sung as music, and Keisha nodded and made a further notation. Layla was genuinely musical and her voice was beautiful. Her mother was a well-known singer in Sierra Leone. Keisha could not sing and played the recorder rather badly. She had taught herself musical notation in a few weeks using piano music taken from church. As with everything that involved symbols and/or signification it had not been difficult for Keisha to do this and she did not know why that should be so or what such facility meant, nor why her sister Cheryl had not been similarly blessed, nor what she was meant to do about it or with it, or if “it” was a noun or a verb or had any material reality at all, outside of her own mind. The two girls were writing a song for the under-12 faith group that met in this back room on Thursdays after service. They were good friends, Keisha and Layla, though not as close as Keisha and Leah. The fact was they had not been bonded by a dramatic event, although in the mind of the church they belonged together in a natural and inevitable way. “Leading the way,” sang Layla. Keisha made a note. She could smell her own vagina on her hands. Now Layla reverted to speaking: “Or something like, ‘Sisters today, leading the way.’” Keisha made a note of this and placed parentheses around it to signify it was not yet a lyric set in stone. If these are “talents”—the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation — what kind of a thing is “talent?” A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what? “We follow the truth, we follow the light!” sang Layla, which had already been set in stone both musically and lyrically. With nothing to note down Keisha became anxious. Across the room hung a mirror. Two admirable young sisters, their hair still plaited by their mothers, sat on the edge of a makeshift stage, one singing and the other transforming music into its own shadow, musical notation. That’s you. That’s her. She is real. You are a forgery. Look closer. Look away. She is consistent. You are making it up as you go along. She must never know. “And then from here to here,” sang Layla, singing these words and therefore putting the instruction itself to music. Keisha made the notation.

31. Permission to enter

Though they were five, the Blakes occupied a three-bed, one bathroom unit, in which only the youngest boy, Jayden, had a room of his own. As far as Keisha could make out, privacy did not seem of any importance to her brother, who was eleven, and still prone to streaks of domestic nudity, but for her own person it was a necessity, more so with every passing day, and the arrival of the dildo prompted her to reopen an old debate with her mother.

“It’s a human right!” cried Keisha Blake. History GCSE module B16: The American Civil Rights Movement. Module D5: The Chartists.

“If there’s a fire you’d burn up in your room,” said her mother, “This Cheryl’s idea? People who want locks got something to hide.”

“People who want locks just want a basic human right, which is privacy, look it up,” said Keisha, although with less heat this time, alarmed that her mother, in the general reach of a maternal cliché, should have gathered in the truth so precisely. She retreated to her room and thought about Jesus, another deeply godly person who was not understood as godly by the sort of clichéd people who called themselves godly, though to be fair those people were probably also sometimes godly in their own uneducated way, but only by accident, and only a bit.

32. Difference

A clitoral orgasm is a localized phenomena restricted to the clitoris itself. Perversely, direct stimulation of the clitoris tends not to provoke it, causing instead pain and annoyance, and sometimes an intense boredom. A vigorous and circular manipulation of the clitoris and the labia together, with a hand, is the most direct route. The resulting spasm is sharp, intensely pleasurable, but brief, like male orgasm. On the charged question of clitoral versus vaginal orgasm Keisha found herself to be an agnostic. One might as well be asked whether blue is a superior color to green.

A vaginal orgasm can be provoked by penetration, but also by simply moving one’s pelvis forward and backward in a small motion while thinking about something interesting. This latter method is especially effective on a bus or a plane. There seems to be a small piece of raised flesh — about the size of a ten-pence piece — halfway up the wall of the vaginal canal on the side nearest your belly-button that is stimulated by this “rocking,” but whether this is what is meant by the phrase “g-spot” and whether it is the cause of the almost unbearably pleasurable sensation, Keisha Blake could not verify one way or another. However it is achieved, what is noticeable about vaginal orgasm is its length and intensity. It is experienced as a series of spasms as if the vagina itself is opening and closing like a fist. Perhaps it is. But whether this is what is meant by the phrase “multiple orgasm” was also unclear to Keisha Blake, though it seemed typical of the unassuming tendencies of feminine descriptors to accept one “close of the fist” as an orgasm in and of itself. It was perhaps simply a phenomenological problem. If Leah Hanwell said the flower is blue and Keisha Blake said the flower is blue how could they be sure that by the word “blue” they were apprehending the same phenomena?

33. For the prosecution.

Marcia found Leah’s gift during one of her routine sweeps. These sweeps really had Cheryl as their object — she had begun disappearing on Fridays and returning Monday — and nothing would have been easier for Keisha than to add dildo possession to her older sister’s already ruined reputation. Unable to look any longer at Marcia brandishing the plastic bag, Keisha Blake threw herself face down on the bed to commence fake crying, but in the middle of this procedure found herself locked in a genuine struggle, unable to countenance blaming either her sister or Leah, but equally unable to imagine the second option — her father being informed — with which she was now being presented. Keisha Blake thought to the left and thought to the right but there was no exit, and this was very likely the first time she became aware of the problem of suicide.

“And don’t tell me you bought it,” said her mother, “because I don’t know where you think you would have got the money.” In the course of this interrogation Marcia went through most of the girls on the estate before working herself round to the painful possibility of Leah and finding the confirmation in her daughter’s face.

34. Rupture

There followed a break between Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake, enforced by Marcia, followed by a cooling off that could not be blamed on Marcia alone. The girls were 16. This period lasted a year and a half.

35. Angst!

In the absence of Leah — at school, on the streets, in Caldwell — Keisha Blake felt herself to be revealed and exposed. She had not noticed until the break that the state of “being Leah Hanwell’s friend” constituted a sort of passport, lending Keisha a protected form of access in most situations. She was now relegated to the conceptual realm of “those church kids,” most of whom were Nigerian or otherwise African, and did not share Keisha Blake’s anthropological curiosity regarding sin nor her love of rap music. To the children of her own background she believed, rightly or wrongly, that she was an anomaly, and to the ravers and indie kids she knew for certain she was the wrong kind of outcast. It did not strike Keisha Blake that such feelings of alienation are the banal fate of adolescents everywhere. She considered herself peculiarly afflicted, and it is not an exaggeration to say that she struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experienced the profound isolation and loneliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.

36. Your enemy’s enemy

In Keisha Blake’s break with Leah Hanwell we must admit that Marcia Blake spied an opportunity. The break coincided with the problem of sex, which anyway could no longer be ignored. A simple ban would have backfired — they had been through all that already with Cheryl, who was presently twenty years old and six months pregnant. Pushing Keisha Blake toward Rodney Banks was Mrs. Blake’s elegant solution: at exactly the moment her daughter was about to detonate, she was defused. Rodney lived on the same corridor, attended the same school. He was one of the few Caribbean children in the church. His mother, Christine, was a close friend. “You should give Rodney some time,” said Marcia, passing Keisha Blake a plate to dry. “He’s like you, always reading.” For precisely this reason Keisha had always been wary of Rodney and keen to avoid him — as much as that was possible in a place like Caldwell — on the principle that the last thing a drowning person needs is another drowning person clinging to them.

38. On the other hand

Beggars cannot be choosers.

39. Reading with Rodney

Keisha Blake sat on Rodney Banks’ bed, feet tucked underneath her. She was already five foot eight, while Rodney had stopped growing the previous summer. To be Christian to Rodney Banks, Keisha Blake tried to sit in most situations. Rodney had in his hand an abridged library copy of an infamous book by Albert Camus. Both Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks sounded the T and the S in this name, not knowing any better: such are the perils of autodidacticism. Rodney Banks was reading the text aloud, with his own skeptical running commentary. He called this “putting faith to the test.” Pastor liked to recommend this muscular approach to his teenage flock, although when he did so it is unlikely that he had Camus in mind. Rodney Banks looked somewhat like Martin Luther King: the same rounded, gentle face. When he made a point that interested him, he scribbled a little illegal note on the page, which Keisha read and tried to admire. She found it hard to concentrate on the book because she was concerned about when and how the heavy petting would begin. It had happened last Friday and the Friday before, but she had not known it was going to happen until the very last moment since they were both somehow unable to refer to it verbally, or build up to it in a natural manner. Instead she had launched herself at Rodney both times and hoped for a response, which she had received, more or less. “We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking,” read Rodney, and then made a note by this sentence: “So what? (fallacious argument.)”

40. Rumpole

The cooling-off period between Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell continued through their A level exams, and this was partly a pragmatic decision on Keisha Blake’s part. Leah Hanwell was by this point taking the popular club amphetamine Ecstasy most weekends and Keisha did not have the faith that she herself could be involved in that life and still pass the exams she was beginning to comprehend would be essential. Which comprehension arrived partly through the efforts of a visiting careers officer. Reader: keep up! A young woman, from Barbados, new in the job, optimistic. Name unimportant. She was especially impressed by Rodney, taking him seriously and listening to him when he talked about the law. Where Rodney Banks had even got the idea of “the law” it was difficult to say. His mother was a dinner lady. His father drove a bus.

41. Parenthetical

(Much later in life, while taking a long walk through North West London, it occurred to Keisha Blake that the young man she had turned into a comic anecdote to be told at dinner parties was in many ways himself a miracle of self-invention, a young man with a tremendous will, far out-stripping her own.)

42. Good place/No place

The Baijan told Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks they must have a plan. All three were aware that Marcia Blake had her own plan: enrollment in a one-year Business Administration course at “Coles Academy,” really just a corridor of office space above the old Woolworths on the Kilburn High Road. A racket, an unaccredited institution, taught by some Nairobi acquaintance of Pastor Akinwande, and requiring no move away from home.

43. Contra

The careers officer from Barbados chose five institutions for Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks — the same five; they had decided they could not be parted — and showed them how to fill in the necessary forms. She wrote to Marcia on Leah’s behalf. It won’t cost any money. She’ll get a full council grant. There’s a church. The train goes straight there, she’ll be safe, she won’t be the only one. Keisha Blake was advised to carry on this campaign of reassurance through the winter. Rodney was told to do the same with his mother, Christine. Keisha did not expect these campaigns to succeed. Marcia had been to the “countryside” and did not consider it a safe environment, preferring London where at least you knew what you were up against. Then in April, that “poor defenseless boy”—Marcia invariably called him that — was stabbed at an Eltham bus stop, overwhelmed by “a pack of animals.” Keisha Blake, Marcia Blake, Augustus Blake, Cheryl Blake and Jayden Blake gathered round the television to watch the white boys walk free from court, swinging punches at the photographers. The boy’s body was taken to Jamaica, buried in Marcia’s parish.

44. Brideshead Unvisited

The front door was on the latch. Rodney walked straight through into Keisha and Cheryl Blake’s bedroom and said, “Where is it?” and Keisha said, “On the bed,” and Rodney said, “Let me see it,” and Keisha showed him the strange letter stamped with a coat of arms and said, “But if you’re not going, I’m not,” and Rodney said, “Just let me read it,” and Keisha said, “It’s only the interview offer. I’m not going to go. Anyway, it must be big money,” and Rodney said, “If you get in, government pays for it. Don’t you even know that?” and Cheryl said, “You two better shut up, man, baby’s sleeping!” and Keisha said, “I don’t even want to go!” and Rodney said, “Can I just read it please!” and after he read it, he did not mention it again, and neither did Keisha Blake. That night they went to the Swiss Cottage Odeon to see a film about a man dressed as a woman so that he could keep an eye on his children for reasons Keisha found herself too distracted to even begin to comprehend.

45. Economics

The interviews for Manchester were scheduled between ten and eleven a.m. To reach Manchester from London’s Euston station would require taking a train that left well before 9:30 a.m. These trains cost one hundred and three pounds return. A similar — even more expensive — problem ruled out Edinburgh.

46. Pause for an abstract idea

In households all over the world, in many languages, this sentence usually emerges, eventually: “I don’t know you anymore.” It was always there, hiding in some private corner of the house, biding its time. Stacked with the cups, or squeezed between the DVDs or another terminal format. “I don’t know you anymore!”

47. A further pause

In popular science magazines they give the biological example, the regeneration of cells. Many years after the events presently being recounted, at a dinner in her own house, a philosopher sitting to the right of our heroine suggested she undertake a thought experiment: what if your brain cells were replaced individually with the brain cells of another person? At what point would you cease to be yourself? At what point would you become another person? His breath was nasty. He put his hand on her knee, which she didn’t remove, not wanting to make a fuss in front of his wife. Mrs. Blake had become by that point quite extraordinarily well-behaved. The wife of the philosopher was a gray-haired QC. In the philosopher’s brilliant mind she was too old to conceivably still be his wife. And yet.

48. Residents’ meeting

At a meeting of the Caldwell residents’ committee — at which Leah and Keisha, compelled by their parents, were the only young people in attendance — Keisha saw a seat free next to Leah but did not go toward it. Afterward, she tried to get away without being noticed but Leah Hanwell called from across the room and Keisha turned and found the familiar open face smiling at her, unaffected by Keisha Blake’s own attempts to imaginatively traduce it.

“Hey,” said Leah Hanwell.

“All right,” said Keisha Blake.

They spoke of the boredom of the meeting, and of Cheryl’s baby, but the other subject could not be repressed for very long.

“What did you think of Manchester? Did you see Michael Konstantinou? He was your day. But he’s for Media Studies.”

“We’re not going there, anymore,” said Keisha Blake. She put a deliberate emphasis on the plural pronoun. “It’s either Bristol or Hull.”

“I see Rodney in history. Never speaks a word.”

Keisha, hearing this comment as a personal insult, began defending Rodney robustly. Leah looked confused and fiddled with the three rings that hung from the upper cartilage of her ear.

“No, I meant: he’s got no questions, he knows it all already. Silent but deadly. You two will just fly through for sure. At least you can say C in maths. Mine’s a U. A lot of them won’t even consider your A levels if you failed your maths. I’m on a wing and a prayer at this point.”

Keisha tried to backpedal from her overreaction by suggesting her old friend Leah Hanwell join Keisha and her new boyfriend for study sessions.

“I reckon I need to just get down to it and concentrate. It’ll be OK. Would be good to see you soon, though, before the move. Pauline’s loving it. I don’t care, I’ll be in Edinburgh by September anyway — we pray. She’s acting like she’s given me some big present. A new life. ‘It’s practically Maida Vale. Better late than never, I suppose.’” This last was done in Pauline’s voice.

49. Mobility

The Hanwells were moving into a maisonette. Practically in Maida Vale. Keisha had already heard all about it from Marcia; the shared garden, the three bedrooms. Something called a “study.”

50. Rodney makes a note

“Our pre-eminence: we live in the age of comparison” (Nietzsche).

51. Undercover

Rodney Banks didn’t cause chaos in class nor did he speak and the combination made him invisible, anonymous. Keisha Blake asked him why he never spoke to the teachers. He said it was a strategy. He, like Keisha, was fond of strategies. This was one of the things they had in common, though it should be noted that the substance of their strategies was quite different. Keisha meant to charm her way through the front door. Rodney intended to slip through the back, unnoticed. Rodney Banks highlighted so many passages in Machiavelli’s The Prince it became one block of yellow and he didn’t dare return it to the library. “The difficult situation and the newness of my kingdom force me to do these things, and guard my borders everywhere.” He always seemed to have this book with him, along with the King James, a combination in which he saw no contradiction.

52. Parity

By July Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake had been offered university places. Both had lovers. (Leah’s lover played the bass in a band called No No Never.) Both the universities and the lovers were of an equal standard, despite their many differences. Both girls had grown into decent-looking women with no serious health or mental problems. Neither had any interest in tanning. It was Leah’s plan to spend a large part of this final NW summer under the shade of an oak tree on Hampstead Heath, with an assortment of friends, a picnic, a lot of alcohol, a little weed. She kept inviting Keisha, who longed to go. But Keisha was working part-time in a bakery on the Kilburn High Road, and when she was not in the bakery she was in church, or helping Cheryl with the baby. At the bakery she was paid three twenty-five an hour. She had to wear regulation flat black shoes with rounded toes and chunky soles, and a brown and white striped outfit topped off by a “baker’s hat,” with an elastic rim, under which every last strand of your hair was to be placed. It left an indentation along her forehead. She had to wash out the croissant molds and get to the donut sugar that caught in the thin gulley between the presentation case and the glass. And many other bits of drudgery. She had thought she would prefer it to clothes retail, but in the end even her great enthusiasm for sausage rolls and iced fingers could not sustain her. She kept the university’s prospectus in her locker and often spent her lunch break slowly turning the glossy pages.

Every other Saturday she had a half-day and on a few occasions she managed to sneak to the heath, alone. Rodney would not enjoy the scene on the heath and could not reasonably be told about it, for this would lead to questions about the two sets of accounts Keisha was in the habit of keeping. On one side of the ledger she placed Rodney, Marcia, her siblings, the church, and Jesus Christ himself. In the other, Leah was lounging in the high grass drinking cider and asking her good friend Keisha Blake if she would take the opportunity to kill PW Botha if he happened to be standing in front of her. “I’m not capable of murder,” protested Keisha Blake. “Everyone’s capable of everything,” insisted Leah Hanwell.

53. Nirvana

Leah would surely be in her room, clutching his picture, weeping. Keisha found it difficult to suppress a feeling of pleasure at this imagined scenario. Then, in the middle of the news report, Marcia said something incredible, quoting a doctor at the clinic as a source, and the next morning Keisha went directly to the library to investigate. She was infuriated to find that statistically speaking Marcia’s boast was correct: our people hardly ever do that.

54. Further education

That autumn, Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks began attending a church in the Bristol suburbs, the Holy Spirit Ministry, identical in spirit to Kilburn Pentecostal — it came with a recommendation from Pastor. They did most of their socializing there, that first term, with an assortment of kindly people, all in their sixties and seventies. With young people of their own age they were less successful. Rodney left church literature under every door in Keisha’s corridor, and after that they were avoided by fellow students and avoided them in turn. There seemed no point of entry. The students were tired of things Keisha had never heard of, and horrified by the only thing she knew well: the Bible. In the evenings Rodney and Keisha sat at either end of a small desk in Keisha’s room and studied, as they had studied for their school exams, wearing earplugs and writing everything out by hand, first in draft copies, then in “best”—a habit picked up from Sunday school. There was a newly built computer center in the basement of Keisha’s building that might have made their lives easier: they went in the first week to check it out. A boy in a wide fedora with a leather thong hanging from its brim sat playing Doom, that dark corridor opening on to itself over and over. The rest were either programming or using some early intra-university form of e-mail. Keisha Blake glanced over a shoulder at a chaotic-looking screen.

55. Keisha’s first visit

Their material circumstances were quite different. Keisha occupied a 60s-build dormitory of indifferent architectural design. Leah a 19th-century terraced house, with a defunct fireplace in every room and nine housemates. Instead of a lounge, a “chill out room.” Enormous speakers, no sofa. Keisha had not expected a party on her first night nor had she worn the right sort of skirt for sitting on a beanbag. The volume of techno or whatever it was made conversation a chore. Everybody was white. Leah was giving a speech and holding the fridge open. It was making the whole kitchen cold. She had been holding it open for a long time. She seemed to have forgotten why.

“Look, say you’re Einstein and you’re just thinking, moment to moment, and suddenly you have your big thought, about the nature of the universe or whatever. So that thought, it’s not like the other moments, because though you’ve had the thought within normal time, the thought itself is basically about the nature of the universe, which is sort of infinite? So that’s a different kind of moment. So Kierkegaard calls that an “instant.” It’s not part of normal time like the others. It’s a lot of stuff like that. I have to pinch myself in class. Like: what am I doing here, with all these smart bastards? Has someone made a mistake somewhere?”

Keisha scooped some hummus up in a pita bread and looked into her friend’s dilated pupils.

“I was thinking about doing philosophy at one point,” said Keisha, “but then I heard about all the maths.”

“Oh, there’s no maths,” said Leah.

“Really? I thought there was maths.”

“No,” said Leah, and turned from Keisha to pull out a bottle of beer finally, “there’s not.”

The boy who was sleeping with Leah was also awkward. If you did not keep asking him questions about himself, or about his short films, he stopped talking and stared into space.

“About boredom,” he explained.

“That sounds interesting,” said Keisha Blake.

“No. The opposite. This party, full of interesting people, is a perfect example. It’s totally uninteresting.”

“Oh.”

“They’re all about boredom essentially. It’s the only subject left. We’re all bored. Aren’t you bored?”

“In law,” said Keisha Blake, “there’s a lot of boring memorization. Like in medicine.”

“I think we’re talking about two different things,” said the boy who was sleeping with Leah.

56. Family romance

The phone in the communal hallway rang. Rodney nodded. Keisha stood up. When the phone rang it was usually for Rodney or Keisha — either Marcia or Christine — and they took these calls interchangeably. They were like siblings in every way, aside from the fact they occasionally had sex with each other. The sex itself was cozy and familiar, without any hint of eroticism or orgasms vaginal or clitoral. Rodney was a careful young man, preoccupied with condoms, terrified of pregnancy and disease. When he finally allowed Keisha Blake to have sex with him it turned out to be a technical transition. She learned nothing new about Rodney’s body, or Rodney, only a lot of facts about condoms: their relative efficacy, the thickness of rubber, the right moment — the safest moment — to remove them afterward.

57. Ambition

They were going to be lawyers, the first people in either of their families to become professionals. They thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization.

58. Leah’s third visit

Springtime. Blossom overhead. Ms. Blake waited in the coach station of eagerness and hope, unable to remember why she had ever experienced any tension whatsoever with regard to her very dearest friend from home, Leah Hanwell. The coach arrived, the doors opened. Human figures with faces streamed into view, and Ms. Blake’s brain sought a match between a recent memory and a material reality. Her mistake was to cling to ideas that properly belonged to previous visits. Ideas like “red hair,” and “black jeans/black boots/ black t-shirt.” Fashions change. University is a time of experimentation and metamorphosis. The person who gripped her by the shoulders could no longer be mistaken for a member of a riot grrrl band or a minor Berlin artist. She was now some kind of dirty blonde warrior for the planet, with hair that was dreadlocking itself, and army trousers that would not pass an inspection.

59. Proper names

It was not that Ms. Blake hadn’t noticed the white people walking around with the climbing equipment, or the white people huddled in stairwells discussing the best method to chain themselves to an oak tree. She had experienced her usual anthropological curiosity with regard to these matters. But she had thought it was more of an aesthetic than a protest. The details of the project were hazy in her mind. “This is Jed,” said Leah, “and this is Katie and Liam and this is Paul. Guys, this is Keisha, she—” “No: Natalie.” “Sorry, this is Natalie, we went to school together,” said Leah. “She goes here, she’s a lawyer. It’s so weird to see you guys!” When Leah proceeded to offer these people a round—“No, you sit, we’ll get”—Natalie Blake panicked, her budget being extremely tightly managed with no space for rounds of drinks for Crusties to whom she had never before spoken in her life. But at the bar, Leah handed over a twenty and Natalie’s only job was to arrange six pints on a round tray best suited for five.

“Lee, how do you even know these people?”

“Newbury!”

60. And the scales fell from her eyes

It was apparently important to “keep the pressure up” if they were going to stop the government building this byroad. Rodney listened but only pointed at the books on his desk, which had the imposing heft of the law, thousands of pages long with brutal, functional covers. Leah tried a different tack: “It’s basically a legal issue — there’s a lot of law kids down there right now. It’s good experience, Rodney, even you would agree, even Judge Rodney of the court of the world.” Natalie Blake found herself smiling. She could at this moment think of no more wonderful thing than sitting up a tree with her good friend Leah Hanwell many hundreds of miles away from this claustrophobic room. Rodney raised his head from his tort casebook. He had a ruthless look on his face. “We don’t care about trees, Leah,” he said. “That’s your luxury. We haven’t got the time to care about trees.”

61. Coup de foudre

“Mr. De Angelis, could you carry on from ‘the power of habit’—top of the second page,” said Professor Kirkwood, and an extraordinary young man stood up in the front row. He was not a law student, but he was here, in a “philosophy of law” lecture. He was made of parts Natalie considered mutually exclusive, and found difficult to understand together. He had a collection of unexpected freckles. His nose was very long and dramatic in a style she did not know enough to call “Roman.” His hair was twisted into dreadlocks that were the opposite of Leah’s, too pristine. They framed his face neatly, ending just below his chin. He wore chinos with no socks, and those shoes that have ropes threaded along the sides, a blue blazer, and a pink shirt. An indescribable accent. Like he was born on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean and raised by Ralph Lauren.

62. Montaigne

In one country, virgins openly display their private parts while married women cover them. In another, male brothels exist. In yet another heavy golden rods are worn through the breasts and buttocks and after dinner men wipe their hands on their testicles. In some places they eat people. In others the fathers decide, when the children are still in the womb, which will be kept and brought up and which killed or abandoned. Kirkwood put his hand up to halt this narrative. “Naturally,” he said, “all these people find their own habits to be unremarkable.” A few students laughed. Natalie Blake and Rodney Banks tried to find the essay between the covers of the cheap edition they shared (they tended to buy one copy of a text book, and then, when it was finished, immediately sell it back to one of the secondhand stores by the university library). The title did not seem to be in the contents or the index, and the fact that they were still not talking to each other made cooperation difficult. “What is the lesson here for a lawyer?” asked Kirkwood. The notable young man’s hand went up. Even from where Natalie Blake was sitting she could see the jewelry on his brown fingers, and an elegant watch with a crocodile-skin strap that looked older than Kirkwood. He said: “Although you may turn up in court armed with reason, we live in an unreasonable world.” Natalie Blake tried to work out if this was an interesting answer. Kirkwood paused, smiled, and said: “You put a lot of faith in reason, Mr. De Angelis. But think of last week’s example. Hundreds of witnesses stand in the dock: good friends, ex-teachers, ex-nurses, ex-lovers. They all say That’s Tichborne. The man’s own mother gets up there and points: That’s my son. Reason tells us the Claimant is ten stone heavier than the man he’s claiming to be. Reason tells us the real Tichborne could speak French. And yet. And when ‘reason prevailed,’ why did people riot in the streets? Don’t put too much faith in reason. Look, I think Montaigne is more skeptical. I think his point is not that you, the lawyers, are reasonable and they, the people, are unreasonable, or even that the laws the people submit to are unreasonable, but that those who submit to traditional laws have at least the defense of ‘simplicity, obedience and example’—Can you see that? End of the third page? — While those who try to change them, that is, the laws, are usually terrible in some way, monstrous. We see ourselves as perfect exceptions.” Natalie Blake was lost. The young man gave a slow, approving nod, the kind a man gives to his equal. His confidence seemed unwarranted, not following from anything he’d said or done. A piece of paper passed round the room. The students were asked to add their full name and from which department they hailed. Even before writing her own Natalie Blake looked for his.

63. Reconnaissance

Francesco De Angelis. 2nd year Economics. Universally known as “Frank.” Running for African and Caribbean Soc president next month. Likely to win. Attended a “second-rate boarding school.” This from someone who attended a “grammar school.” Further: “His mum’s Italian or something. His dad was probably some African prince, that’s usually the case.”

64. Educational parenthesis

(Some schools you “attended.” Brayton you “went” to.)

65. 8th March

It happened that Leah’s third visit coincided with a dinner for International Women’s Day. A useful excuse not to see Rodney. Leah wore a green dress and Natalie wore a purple one, and they got ready together and walked to the dining hall arm in arm. The obvious pleasure they took in each other, their deep familiarity and ease in each other’s company, made them more attractive as a pair than they ever could have been alone, and perfectly conscious of this fact they emphasized their similarities of height and build, and kept their long legs in stride. By the time they reached their table Natalie was quite giddy with the power of being young, almost free of a man who bored her and soon to embark on a meal of more than two courses.

66. Menu

Honeydew melon with tiger prawn salad

Chicken breast wrapped in pancetta with green beans and Juliette potatoes

Warm Chocolate fondant with vanilla bean ice cream

Cheeses

Coffee, mints

67. Desire

“Who that?” asked Leah Hanwell.

“The dean,” said Natalie Blake, and licked some chocolate off her teeth. “If she stopped speechifying we could go to the bar.”

“No, the girl at the end of that table. In the top hat.”

“What?”

“Chinese or Japanese — there.”

“Oh, I don’t know her.”

“She’s so beautiful!”

68. Valentino

Korean. In the bar she put her hat on the table, and as Natalie Blake spoke to someone else in their booth, she, Natalie Blake, frequently reached out for this hat and stroked its satin brim. At her back she could hear her good friend Leah Hanwell talking to the Korean, whose name was Alice, making her laugh, and when Natalie went to the bar to buy drinks she had an unobstructed view of Leah as old-school lothario — one hand over the back of the couch, another on Alice’s knee, breathing on the girl’s lovely neck. Natalie Blake had seen Leah do this many times, but with boys, and there had always seemed something a little shocking and perverse in it, whereas here the relation looked natural. This thought made Natalie wonder at herself and where she was with God these days, or if she was with him at all. Unable to stop staring she made herself walk over to the jukebox and put on the song Electric Relaxation by A Tribe Called Quest in the hope that it would relax her.

69. The invention of love: part one

Frank was not at the bar or anywhere else in view.

70. Partings

On the bus back to the coach station, after what had been, let’s face it, a significant visit, perhaps even approaching the status of a dramatic event, Leah Hanwell said, rather sheepishly: “Hope it was all right, me disappearing. Least you and Rodders got the room back,” and this was all that was said that day about Leah Hanwell’s night with Alice Nho, nor did Natalie Blake mention the fact that she had not asked Rodney to come to her room that night and never again would do so. The bus started to climb what felt like a vertical hill. Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were pressed back in their seats and against each other. “Really good to see you,” said Leah. “You’re the only person I can be all of myself with.” Which comment made Natalie begin to cry, not really at the sentiment but rather out of a fearful knowledge that if reversed the statement would be rendered practically meaningless, Ms. Blake having no self to be, not with Leah, or anyone.

71. Helping Leah get her heavy rucksack up the steps to the coach

Natalie Blake had an urge to tell her friend about the exotic brother she had seen in Kirkwood’s class. She said nothing. Quite apart from the fact that the doors were closing she feared what, precisely, the gaping socio-economic difference between Frank De Angelis and Rodney Banks might say to her friend Leah Hanwell about her, Natalie Blake, psychologically, as a person.

72. Romance languages

Many of the men Natalie Blake became involved with after Rodney Banks were as socio-economically and culturally alien to her as Frank was, and were far less attractive, but still she didn’t approach Frank, nor did he approach her, despite their keen awareness of each other. A poetic way of putting this would be to say:

“There was an inevitability about their road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route.”

73. The sole author

More prosaically, Natalie Blake was crazy busy with self-invention. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word. She found politics and literature, music, cinema. “Found” is not the right word. She put her faith in these things, and couldn’t understand why — at exactly the moment she’d discovered them — her classmates seemed to be giving them up for dead. When asked by other students about Frank De Angelis — she was not the only person who had noted their fundamental compatibility — she said that he was too full of himself and vain and posh and racially confused and not her scene at all, and yet the silent and invisible bond between them strengthened, for who else but Frank De Angelis—or someone exactly like Frank De Angelis—could she ask to accompany her on the strange life journey she was preparing to undertake?

74. A sighting

Five rows in front at the midnight showing of Black Orpheus, looking up at his doppelganger.

75. Activism

Natalie was cycling down University Walk when a young man she was sleeping with stood in her path, blocking her way. He had a frantic look about him and at first Natalie thought he was preparing to announce his undying love. “Have you got half an hour?” asked Imran, “There’s something I want you to see.” Natalie wheeled her bike round to Woodland Road and chained it up outside Imran’s halls of residence. In his small bedroom there were two other girls from their year and a grad student she didn’t know. “This is the action group,” said Imran, and put a video into the player. Of course, Natalie was aware of the Bosnian conflict, but it would be fair to say that the war had not been uppermost in her mind. She told herself this was because she had no television and spent most of her time in the library. Similarly, two years earlier the existence of a country called “Rwanda” and the reality of its genocide had come to her simultaneously, in a single newspaper article. Now she sat cross-legged and watched the soldiers marching and listened to the recorded speech of the crazed man screaming, and read the subtitles about racial purity and a fantasy place called “Greater Serbia.” This had just happened? Just now? At the end of history? She thought of all the times she and Leah had asked themselves — for the sake of a thought experiment — what they would have done, had they been in Berlin, in 1933. “We’re going to drive an ambulance of supplies to Sarajevo,” said Imran, “to help with the reconstruction. You should come.” To do so would break the first commandment of Natalie Blake’s family: do not put thyself in unnecessary physical peril.

For the next several weeks Natalie threw herself into the organization of this trip, and made love to Imran, and thought of this period, years later, as representing a sort pinnacle of radical youthful possibility. Of sex, protest and travel, fused. That she never actually went on the trip seemed, in memory, some how less important than the fact that she had fully intended to go. (A quarrel with Imran, a few days before. He didn’t call, so she didn’t call.)

76. Abandon

Natalie Blake took out a large student loan and made a point of spending it only on frivolous things. Meals and cabs and underwear. Trying to keep up with “these people” she soon found herself with nothing again, but now when she put a debit card in the slot and hoped that five pounds would come out, she did it without the bottomless anxiety she’d once shared with Rodney Banks. She cultivated a spirit of decadence. Now that she had glimpsed the possibility of a future, an overdraft did not hold the same power of terror over her. The vision Marcia Blake had of such people, and had passed on to her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behavior? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: “To give them no excuse.”

77. A Sighting

Dressed as Frantz Fanon on a staircase at a party at which Natalie herself was dressed as Angela Davis. His costume consisted of a name-tag and a white coat borrowed off a medical student. Natalie had made more effort: a dashiki and a combed out ’fro, that did not stand up well due to years of damage with a hot iron. The costume party was in the shared house of four philosophy students and the theme was Discourse Founders. His date came as Sappho.

78. A theory about the tracking of Michelle Holland

It is perhaps the profound way in which capitalism enters women’s minds and bodies that renders “ruthless comparison” the basic mode of their relationships with others. Certainly Natalie Blake tracked the progress of Michelle Holland with a closer attention than she did her own life — without ever speaking to her. Besides Rodney, Michelle was the only other person from Brayton in the university. A math prodigy. She did not have the luxury of mediocrity. Raised in the brutal high-rise towers of South Kilburn, which had nothing to recommend them, no genteel church culture, none of the pretty green areas of Caldwell nor (Natalie presumed) the intimate neighbors. What could she be but exceptional? Father in jail, mother sectioned. She lived with her grandmother. She was sensitive and sincere, awkward, defensive, lonely. It was Natalie’s belief that she, Natalie Blake, didn’t have to say a word to Michelle Holland to know all of this — that she could look at the way Michelle walked and know it. I am the sole author. Consequently Natalie was not at all surprised to hear of Michelle’s decline and fall, halfway through the final year. No drink or drugs or bad behavior. She just stopped. (This was Natalie’s interpretation.) Stopped going to lectures, studying, eating. She had been asked to pass the entirety of herself through a hole that would accept only part. (Natalie’s conclusion.)

79. The end of history

When Natalie now thought of adult life (she hardly ever thought of it) she envisioned a long corridor, off which came many rooms — each with a friend in it — a communal kitchen, a single gigantic bed in which all would sleep and screw, a world governed by the principles of friendship. The above is a metaphorical figure — but it is also a basically accurate representation of Natalie’s thinking at that time. For how can you oppress a friend? How can you cheat on a friend? How can you ask a friend to suffer while you thrive? In this simple way — without marches and slogans, without politics, without any of the mess you get ripping paving stones out of the ground — the revolution had arrived. Late to the party, Natalie Blake now enthusiastically took her good friend Leah Hanwell’s advice and started hugging strangers on dance-floors. She looked at the little white pill in her palm. What could go wrong, now we were all friends? Remember to carry a bottle of water. Anyway, it was all already decided. Don’t chew. Swallow. Strobe lights flash. The beat goes on. (I will be a lawyer and you will be a doctor and he will be a teacher and she will be a banker and we will be artists and they will be soldiers, and I will be the first black woman and you will be the first Arab and she will be the first Chinese and everyone will be friends, everyone will understand each other.) Friends are friendly to each other, friends help each other out. No one need be exceptional. Friends know the difference between solicitors and barristers, and the best place to apply, and the likelihood of being accepted, and the names of the relevant scholarships and bursaries. “You choose your friends, you don’t choose your family.” How many times did Natalie Blake hear that line?

80. Ideology in popular entertainment

In case anyone was in danger of forgetting, the most popular TV show in the world pressed the point home, five times a week.

81. The Unconsoled (Leah’s sixth visit)

“Oh Jesus I just saw Rodney in Sainsbury’s!” said Leah, distraught, dropping two shopping bags on the table. “I looked in his basket. He had a meat pie and two cans of ginger beer and a bottle of that hot sauce you put on everything. I came up behind him in the queue, and he pretended he’d forgotten something and hurried off. But then I saw him a few minutes later at a far end queue and he had exactly the same four items.”

82. Milk round

A festive, chaotic scene, as well attended as the Fresher’s Fair, although this time the banners were not homemade, and instead of Tolkien societies and choral clubs they had printed upon them the melodic names of law firms and the familiar names of banks. Girls in cheerleader outfits bearing the logo of a management consulting firm went round the room giving out little pots of ice cream and cans of energy drinks. Natalie Blake twisted the can in her hand to read the tag that ran round it. Claim Your Future. She dug into the ice cream with a little blond wood panel, and watched the green balloons of a German bank slip from their tethers and float slowly up to the ceiling. She heard Rodney’s voice coming from somewhere. He was three tables along, sitting with monstrous keenness on the very edge of a plastic chair. Opposite him, an amused man in a suit and tie made notes on a clipboard.

83. Mixed metaphors

A year and a half later, when everyone had returned or else moved to London and Natalie was studying for the bar, Rodney Banks sent a letter c/o of Marcia Blake that began: “Keisha, you talk about following your heart, but weird how your heart always seems to know which side its bread is buttered.” Frank De Angelis took this letter from Natalie Blake and kissed the side of her head. “Poor old Rodney. He’s not still trying to become a lawyer, is he?”

84. Groupthink

A television advert for the army. A group of soldiers leap from a low helicopter to the ground. Chaotic camerawork: we’re to understand these men are under attack. They run through a harsh landscape of wind and dust, through a clearing, emerging at the edge of a chasm. The wooden bridge they hoped would take them across is half-destroyed. The broken slats tumble into the ravine below. The soldiers look at the ravine, at each other, at the heavy packs they carry.

85. Lincoln’s Inn

A crowd of new arrivals in eveningwear sat watching this advert, slouched over chairs and sofas, making boisterous conversation. Natalie Blake was a new arrival too, but more shy. She stood at the back of the rec room, trying to busy herself at the refreshment table. Now some text appeared, branded with hot irons into the screen. It was accompanied by the voice of a drill sergeant:

IF YOU’RE THINKING HOW DO I GET ACROSS, THE ARMY’S NOT FOR YOU.

IF YOU’RE THINKING: HOW DO WE GET ACROSS, GIVE US A CALL.

“I’m thinking: how are you getting across.”

He was pointing at the television, and all around him people were laughing. She recognized his voice at once, its louche trace of Milan.

86. Style

The dreadlocks were gone. His dinner jacket was simple, elegant. A starched pink handkerchief peeked out of the top pocket and his socks were brightly clocked with diamonds. His Nikes were slightly outrageous and box fresh. He no longer seemed strange. (Any number of rappers now dressed like this. Money was the fashion.)

87. The first Sponsorship Night dinner of the Michaelmas term.

Natalie Blake was “captain” of her section. She was unsure what this meant. She stood behind her dining chair at the appointed table and waited for her sponsor, a Dr. Singh. She looked up at the vaulted ceiling. A white girl in a satin gown came and stood next to her. “Lovely, isn’t it? That majestical roof fretted with golden fire! Hello, I’m Polly. I’m in your team.” Next to Polly came a boy called Jonathan who said that “captain” only meant the food was served to the left of you. Portraits of the venerable dead. Heavy silverware. Fish forks. The Benchers filed into hall in their black flapping gowns and bowed. A Latin grace began. Bored, contented voices repeated alien words.

88. The invention of love: part two

Natalie Blake flattened her thick linen napkin over her lap and spotted Frank De Angelis running late, moving toward her table, spotting her. He looked devastating; more like Orfeu than ever. She was flattered by his reaction: “Blake? You look great! It’s great to see you. Oh Captain my captain…” He did a little bow and sat down extremely close, thigh to thigh, examined the menu card, made a face. “Cottage pie. I miss Italy.” “Oh, you’ll survive.” “You two already know each other?” asked Polly. And there was indeed something intimate about the way they spoke to each other, heads close, looking out across the room. Natalie fell so easily into the role she had to remind herself that this intimacy had not existed before tonight. It was being manufactured at this present moment, along with its history.

The bad wine flowed. An ancient Judge rose to give a speech. His eyebrows sprung owlishly from his head, and he did not neglect to mention Twelfth Night’s first performance or paint a bloody picture of marauding peasants burning law books: “… and if we look to Oman’s translation of the Anonimalle Chronicle, we find, I’m afraid, a somewhat dispiriting portrait of the profession… For, upon being cornered in our own Temple Church, our not-so-noble predecessors did little to deter the angry mob. If I may quote: It was marvelous to see how even the most aged and infirm of them scrambled off, with the agility of rats or evil spirits… These days I can reassure you that beheading — in London at least! — is gratifyingly rare, and abuse of lawyers generally limited to…” Natalie was enthralled. The idea that her own existence might be linked to people living six hundred years past! No longer an accidental guest at the table — as she had always understood herself to be — but a host, with other hosts, continuing a tradition. “And so it falls to you,” said the judge, and Frank looked over at Natalie, trying to catch her eye and yawning comically. Natalie folded her arms more firmly on the table and turned her head toward the judge. As soon as she’d done it, she felt it was a betrayal. But who was Frank De Angelis to her? And yet. She looked back at him and raised her eyebrows very slightly. He winked.

89. Time slows down

A Polish waitress moved discreetly round the table, seeking the vegetarians. Frank spoke, a lot, and indiscriminately, lurching from topic to topic. Where she had once seen only obnoxious entitlement Natalie now saw anxiety running straight and true beneath everything. Was it possible she made him nervous? Yet all she was doing was sitting here quietly, looking at her plate. “Your hair’s different. Real? That your butter? Have you seen James Percy? Tenant, now. On the first try. You look good, Blake. You look great. Honestly, I thought you’d be gone by the time I got here. What have you been doing for a year? Here’s my confession through a mouthful of bread: I’ve been skiing. Listen, I also fitted in the law conversion. I’m not totally the waste of space you think I am.” “I don’t think you’re a waste of space.” “Yes, you do. No, I’ll have the beef, please. But what’s up with you?” Natalie Blake had not been skiing. She’d been working in a shoe shop in Brent Cross shopping center, saving money, living with her parents in Caldwell, and dreaming of winning the Mansfield scholarship, which had actually—

An apologetic Dr. Singh materialized, displacing the turbaned worthy of Natalie’s imagination with a petite shaven-headed woman in her thirties, a purple sink blouse peeping out from between the folds of her gown. She sat down. The Judge finished. The applause sounded like braying.

90. Difficulties with context

Natalie Blake turned from flirting with Francesco De Angelis to listing all her academic achievements to Dr. Singh. Dr. Singh looked tired. She poured some water into Natalie’s glass: “And what do you do for fun?” Frank leaned over: “No time for fun — sista’s a slave to the wage.” Surely meant as a joke, if a cack-handed one, and Natalie tried to laugh, but saw how Polly blushed and Jonathan looked down at the table. Frank tried to rescue himself by making a wider, sociological point. “Of course, we’re an endangered species around here.” He looked out across the room with one hand to his brow. “Wait: there’s another one over there. That’s about six of us all told. Numbers are low.” He was drunk, and making a fool of himself. She felt for him deeply. That “us” sounded strange in his mouth — unnatural. He didn’t even know how to be the thing he was. Why would he? She was so busy congratulating herself on being able to empathize with and correctly analyze the curious plight of Francesco De Angelis that it took her a moment to realize Dr. Singh was frowning at both of them.

“We have a very effective diversity scheme here,” said Dr. Singh primly and turned to speak to the blonde girl on her left.

91. Wednesday 12:45 p.m.: Advocacy

Four students and an instructor took their places at the top of the classroom. Appellant and respondent were given Happy Family names: Mr. Fortune the Money Launderer. Mr. Torch the Arsonist. At this point Natalie Blake was forced to leave the room and seek out the toilets, to deal with her hair. The weather was unseasonably warm, she had not planned for it. Sweat leaked from the roots of her weave, fuzzing it up, and the more she thought about this the more it happened. Ambitious though she was, she was still an NW girl at heart, and could not ignore the coming crisis. She hurried down the hall. In the toilets she filled the sink with cold water, held her hair back and put her face in it. By the time she returned the only free seat was next to Francesco De Angelis. Had he kept it for her? The invention of love, part three. As she sat down, she felt his hand on her knee. Above the table he passed her a pencil.

“Sorry about the other night, Blake. Sometimes I’m an idiot. Often.”

This was a phenomenon previously unknown to Natalie Blake: a man spontaneously recognizing an error and apologizing for it. Much later in their lives it occurred to Natalie Blake that her husband’s candor might be only another consequence of his unusual privilege. But this afternoon she was simply disarmed by it, and grateful.

“Best be quick, you’ve missed a load.” He began whispering the Agreed Facts in her ear, over-confidently and with enough bluff and extraneous commentary that she had to edit him in real time as she scribbled the information down, making bullet points of the grounds for appeal. “And now here comes the Junior Counsel. That’s it — you’re up to date.” The Junior Counsel rose. Natalie turned to look at Frank in profile. He was really the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Broad, imposing. His eyes a shade lighter than his skin. She turned back to examine the Junior Counsel. He looked pre-pubescent. His presentation was awkward; he barely moved his eyes from a thick sheaf of A4 paper and twice called the female instructor “Your Lordship.”

92. Post Prandial

“Where are we? Why am I here?”

“Marylebone. London doesn’t begin and end on the Kilburn High Road.”

“I’ve got my room in the Inn.”

“Mary’s argument.”

“Frank, take me back. I don’t know where I am.”

“Good to be uncertain sometimes.”

“We’ve got moot in the morning. Mate, that food was so bad. And too much wine. You go home, too.”

“I am home. I live just here.”

“No one lives here.”

“O ye of little faith. It’s my grandmother’s. Why don’t you just try to enjoy yourself for once?”

93. Simpatica

The only thing in the fridge was a large pink box from Fortnum & Mason. Inside were four rows of macaroons, in tasteful pastel shades. Natalie Blake brought these over to where Frank sat, shipwrecked on the kitchen “island.” White space in all directions. He took the box from her and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Blake, try to relax.”

“Can’t relax in a yard like this.”

“Inverted snobbery.”

“I’m so hungry. That food was nasty. Feed me.”

“Afterward.”

He carried her upstairs, past paintings and lithographs, family photographs and a fainting couch in the hall. They went into a little attic room at the very top of the flat. The bed sat right under the eaves; she kept knocking her elbow against a bookshelf. Law tomes, Tolkien, a lot of 80’s horror paperbacks, memoirs of businessmen and politicians. She spotted a solitary friend, The Fire Next Time.

“You read this?”

“I think he knew my grandmother in Paris.”

“It’s a good book.”

“I’ll believe you, Junior Counsel.”

94. The pleasures of naming

Perhaps sex isn’t of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. The gestures themselves are limited — there are only so many places for so many things to go — and Rodney was in no way deficient technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank’s silly, uncontrolled, unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a bedroom.

95. Post-coital

“He was from Trinidad, he lived in South London, he worked for the trains. She says ‘driver’ for effect — not true. A guard. Later he worked in an office somewhere. She met him in a park. I never knew him. Harris. Really I should be ‘Frank Harris.’ He’s dead. That’s it.”

Even naked he blustered. Natalie Blake maneuvered until she was on top and looked into his eyes. Boyish expressions of vulnerability, pride and fear were all still perfectly visible in the adult face. It was of course these qualities that compelled her. “Back to Milan pregnant with me. It was the Seventies. Then Puglia. Then England for school. It’s not a problem, it was a great way to grow up. I loved my school.” An only child. A storied family, rich though not as rich as they once were. “Once upon a time every decent family in Italy had a De Angelis gas oven…” No-one had known what to do with his hair. No spoken English. Dangerously pretty. Eight years old.

96. The sole author

“But you’re making me sound like a victim, my point is I had a very good time, these were just small things, I don’t really know why we’re even talking about them. All your questions are leading. Rare Negroid Italian has happy childhood, learns Latin, the end. Then nothing very interesting happens between 1987 and tonight.” He kissed her extravagantly. Perhaps she would always look after him, help him become a real person. After all, she was strong! Even relative weakness in Caldwell translated to impressive strength in the world. The world asked so much less of a person, and was of simpler construction.

97. Nota bene

Natalie did not stop to wonder whether Frank’s boarding school might have done the same job for him.

98. Sixth-month anniversary

“Frank, I’m going downstairs, I can’t work with the telly on. Can I take Smith and Hogan?”

“Yeah, and burn it.”

“How are you going to pass this exam?”

“Ingenuity.”

“What is that?”

“MTV Base. Music videos are the only joyful modern art form. Look at that joy.”

He reached forward on the bed and put his finger over a dancing B-girl in a white shell suit. “I was in Puglia when he died. Nobody understood. Some fat gangster? Who cares? This was the attitude. It’s not even music as far as they’re concerned.”

Everything he said sounded wonderful. He only lacked what the Italians call forza, which Natalie Blake herself would provide (see above).

99. Frank seeks Leah

The sun pierced through the blinds in long shadows. Natalie Blake stood in the doorway of the lounge, nervous, holding a tumbler of vodka, ready to smooth over any rupture. Leah and Frank sat side by side on his grandmother’s Chesterfield. Natalie could see how Leah had grown into herself. No longer gangly: tall. No longer ginger—“auburn.” The experimental period had ended. Denim skirt, hoodie, furry boots, a thick gold hoop in each ear. Back to her roots. Natalie Blake watched her boyfriend Frank De Angelis cut out crooked white lines on a glass-topped table, while her good friend Leah Hanwell rolled a twenty-pound note into a thin tube. She saw how he listened intently as Leah spoke of a man called, in her pronunciation, Me-shell. They’d just met in Ibiza. Frank was taking the task seriously. He understood that there could be no loving Natalie Blake without loving Leah Hanwell first.

“Here’s something that interests me: you girls — you like your Eurotrash brothers. But isn’t it true? It’s a strange coincidence. There aren’t that many of us. Is it a competition?”

“Look, mate: you’re Eurotrash. He’s from Guadeloupe! His dad was in the underground resistance movement thing — basically, he went on the run, the whole family had to. His dad’s a school janitor in Marseilles now. His mum’s Algerian. She can’t read or write.”

Frank dipped his head and made his mouth into a comic moue.

“Points to Hanwell. He certainly sounds like the salt of the earth. Child-of-a-freedom-fighter. I am forced to cede the moral high ground. I am decidedly not the salt of the earth.”

Leah laughed: “You’re the cocaine on the mirror. The badly cut cocaine.”

100. Natalie seeks Elena

A Mayfair lunch. A beautiful woman slips an oyster down her throat. Her phone is so slim and light it sits easily in the silk pocket of her blouse. “And he is working hard?” she asks. Elena De Angelis tapped a thin cigarette on the tablecloth and gave Natalie Blake a sideways look of fierce cunning. Before Natalie could even stutter an answer, Elena laughed. “Don’t worry — I don’t ask you to lie. It’s not going to be the law for ’Cesco, of course it is not. But I hoped it would be a useful thing generally, for his character. It was like this for his uncle. Well. He met you. You are the first real woman he has ever brought to meet me. This is something. Tell me, is it true you have to have dinner a certain number of times in the year or you cannot be a barrister?” Natalie watched Elena tap ash into her dinner plate. She urgently wanted to know how this woman loved and lost a Trinidadian train guard. “Yes,” she said, “twelve times. In the great hall. Used to be thirty-six.” Elena blew two jets of smoke through her nostrils: “What a curious country this is!” A waiter came over and the bill was settled somehow without any ugly groping after purses and money. “’Cesco, please call your cousin. I said you would ring two weeks ago, and they can’t hold a position forever. It’s embarrassing.”

101. Onwards, upward

Frank flunked the bar spectacularly, turning up forty-five minutes late, leaving ten minutes early. Afterward the first thing he did was call his mother. Natalie saw how this conversation cheered him. Elena was the kind of woman to prefer a spectacular disaster to a conventional failure.

Leah Hanwell found a bleak flat south of the river, in New Cross, and Natalie Blake, out of respect for an old friendship, became her flatmate. She read briefs on the long triangulated tube rides: New Cross, Lincoln’s Inn, Marylebone. She slipped into Frank’s bed. Slipped out. Slipped in. “What time is it?” “Eleven fifteen.” “I’ve gotta chip!” She tried to force herself to get up and onto a night bus, heading south. “Your principles spend more time in that dump than you do,” he observed. She sank back into the pillows.

Perceptive in sudden, hard-to-predict bursts.

Goofy and always affectionate. He called a lot.

Going through the ticket barrier, the phone he’d bought her rang:

“Natalie Blake you’re literally the only person in the world I can stand.”

That was the year people began saying “literally.”

Frank was at his desk at Durham and Macaulay Investments, betting on the future price of things he was quite unable to describe to her. More symbols, she presumed, though of a kind she coudn’t decode.

102. Save yourself

To explain herself to herself, Natalie Blake employed a conventional image. Broad river. Turbulent water. Stepping-stones. Caldwell, exams, college, the bar — pupillage. This last gap was almost too wide to jump. There were no scholarships, and no way of earning any real money through the first half of the pupillage year. It had to be another loan, combined with the building society savings, untouched since childhood. This building society, a local concern, happened also to operate at the level of conventional images.

103. Capitalist pigs

He was called Peter: he had a coin-shaped slot in his back. Marcia Blake had kept the little red pocket book, and dealt with the cashiers. As certain key sums were achieved (twenty-five pounds, fifty pounds, a hundred), the child received first Peter, and then various members of the building society’s branded pig family. In the Blake home these pigs were considered ornaments, and stood all together on a shelf in the lounge. Sometimes Marcia would offer a glimpse of the “credit” column with the extraordinary (untouchable) sum of 71 pounds or something like that. Natalie never touched it, and now, twenty years later, it had finally amounted to something. Ah, memories! And perhaps she even remembered handling the old one-pound paper notes? Hard to say: nostalgia is such a distorting force.

“You in this line?”

Natalie looked down at the feisty old lady at her elbow, clutching her little red book. She raised her own red book vaguely: “I think so.”

But the line was an amorphous crowd of noisy NW people holding pocket books and shouting and pushing. Someone said: “We need system up in this queue, man! Always chaos in here!” Someone else: “These people don’t know what is British queue.”

The aluminum poles that should have been planted at intervals in the filthy carpet had not been set out. Natalie could see them piled up in a corner by the cashiers’ desks.

“You now. Go!” said the old lady and Natalie Blake, uncertain whether justice had been done or no, walked up to the desk indicated, had a disturbing conversation with a teller called Doreen Bayles, made her way out of the scrum to the Kilburn high road, leaned on a bus stop and wept.

104. One hundred and ten percent

“I am so angry with Pastor,” said Marcia, weeping. “It’s so terrible, when I gave it to him in good faith, and he absolutely promised me it was one hundred and ten percent guaranteed your money back — he promised me with his hand on his heart, because it’s for the church, and it’s short term! We’re growing the church in Laos, getting the word out over there, where the people really need it. I can’t believe it because I was just going to take it out and put it back in and you weren’t even going to notice because it was short term, it was just as a bridge, that’s what he said, and I believed him, of course! He’s a good man. I’m so angry with Pastor right now, Keisha! When I found out I went crazy for real. I’m just too trusting, this is the thing, which is the worst thing, because I think people are telling the truth when they’re being very deceptive, very untruthful. It’s very difficult after that to have trust. Very difficult.”

105. A romantic scene in Green Park

Natalie had established a rule that romantic activities should be affordable for both parties. Sometimes this caused a row. Today it was unobjectionable. Weekend papers. Celebrity interviews. Movie reviews. Opinion. Lonely Hearts. Strong sun. Packed lunch. Red Stripes.

“Oh, and I talked it over with Elena — she agrees.”

“There’s the guard. Frank, let’s just move to the grass — I’m not paying two quid for a deck chair.”

“Are you listening to me? I talked with my mother. We want to give you the money.”

Natalie put down the Saturday magazine, turned from Francesco De Angelis, and pressed her face into the canvas, expecting to weep, to be “overwhelmed.” Instead her face was dry, her mind strangely occupied.

106. Parklife

Female individual seeks male individual for loving relationship. And vice versa.

Low-status person with intellectual capital but no surplus wealth seeks high-status person of substantial surplus wealth for enjoyment of mutual advantages, including longer life-expectancy, better nutrition, fewer working hours and earlier retirement, among other benefits.

Human animal in need of food and shelter seeks human animal of opposite gender to provide her with offspring and remain with her until the independent survival of aforementioned offspring is probable.

Some genes, seeking their own survival, pursue whatever will most likely result in their replication.

107. Let’s not argue, boo

He was still talking. He had his grown-up face on, the one he wore daily to work. She knew it was a fake. The reason he couldn’t explain to her what he was doing at work was not because it was too complicated for her to understand (though it was) but because he himself didn’t truly understand it. He bluffed his way through each day. She had known all along that his ego was delicate and built on uncertain foundations and she considered this trait — universal among men, as far as her own experiences went — to be a small price to pay for his aforementioned honesty and sexual openness and beauty.

“… which then I just said to Elena: this girl gets the second-highest pass in the year — even if I didn’t love her, it doesn’t make sense to let this kind of ability go to waste for the lack of means — it doesn’t make economic sense. Your family for whatever reason refuse to help you—”

“They don’t refuse to help me, Frank — they can’t!” cried Natalie Blake, and launched into a passionate defense of her family, despite the fact she was not speaking to any of them.

108. Politics on the move

“Cheryl could stop having children. Your brother could get a job. They could leave that money-grabbing cult. Your family make poor life choices — that’s just a fact.”

“You should stop talking because you really don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to talk about this on the damn tube.”

It seemed that Natalie Blake and Francesco De Angelis had opposite understandings of this word “choice.” Both believed their own interpretation to be objectively considered and in no way the product of their contrasting upbringings.

109. John Donne, Lincoln’s Inn, 1592

A commotion could be heard in the clerks’ room above. Polly provided a clever phrase for it: “a cockney symphony of expletives.”

“Nat, what time’s your flight?”

“Tomorrow morning at seven.”

“Look: where would you rather be: Tuscany or West London Youth Court? I’m serious, get out of here while you still can.”

They were the only two left in the pupils’ room. Everyone was either in court or already in the pub.

“You can even take my last fag. Consider it part of the trousseau.”

Natalie put her arms in her coat, while Polly worked the lighter, but they were not quick enough to avoid a clerk, Ian Cross, appearing at the bottom of the stairs carrying a brief.

“Oi: put that out. Concentrate. Who wants this?”

“What is it?”

Ian turned the brief over in his hands: “Junkies. Robbery. Bit of mild arson. That’s young Mr. Hampton-Rowe’s notes on the back of it — over at Bridgestone. He got a higher calling last minute. That Reverend Marsden fuck-up. High profile.”

Natalie watched Polly blush and reach out for the brief with an imitation of mild interest: “Reverend who?”

“You’re joking, aren’t you? Vicar cut up a prozzie and dumped her in Camden Lock. Been wall to wall. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Not those sort of papers.”

“You should join the 21st century, love. There’s only one kind of paper these days.” As he smiled, the port wine stain around his left eye crinkled horribly. Another of Polly’s clever phrases: “a whole personality constructed round a stain.”

“Give it here. She can’t. Nat’s getting married Sunday.”

“Salutations. Everyone should do it. No man is an island, I always say.”

“Oh, that was you, was it? I was wondering who that was. Nat, darling, flee from here. Save yourself. Have a drink on me.”

110. Personality Parenthesis

(Sometimes, when enjoying Pol’s capsule descriptions of the personalities of others, Natalie feared that in her own — Natalie’s — absence, her own — Natalie’s — personality was also being encapsulated by Pol, although she could not bring herself to truly fear this possibility because at base she could not believe that she — Natalie — could ever be spoken about in the way she — Natalie — spoke about others and heard others spoken about. But for the sake of a thought experiment: what was Natalie Blake’s personality constructed around?)

111. Work drinks

Natalie Blake hurried up the steps and past the clerks’ room to avoid any other briefs. She stepped out into the slipstream of Middle Temple Lane. Everyone flowing in the same direction, toward Chancery Lane, and she fell in step, found two friends, and then two more. By the time they reached The Seven Stars they were too large a party for an inside table. The only other woman — Ameeta — offered to get the drinks and Natalie offered to help her. “Vodka shots or beer?” They had forgotten to ask. Ameeta, another working-class girl, but from Lancashire, was anxious to get it right — as working-class female pupils they were often anxious to get it right. Natalie Blake counseled for both. A few minutes later they emerged in their sensible skirt suits holding two wobbly trays sloppy with foam. The men were lined up by the railings of the Royal Courts, smoking. It was a lovely late-summer evening in London. The men whistled. The women approached.

112. Sir Thomas More, Lincoln’s Inn, 1496

“Someone give this girl the bumps! She’s getting married. Ah, the good die young. What’s his name again? Francesco. An eye-tie? I move for a mistrial. Half-Trini, actually. IT’S POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD. Seriously, though, Nat. Best of luck. We all wish you the best of luck. I don’t believe in luck. Where’s my invite? Yeah, where’s my invite? Watch that glass! No one’s invited, not even family. We want to be alone. Ooh, exclusive! Someone lift her up. Pol says he’s loaded, too. Durham and Macaulay. Quickie in Islington town hall. Honeymoon in Positano. Business class. Oh, we know all about it. Oh yes, we know. Blake’s no fool. Ouch! No hitting. Point is, you’re joining the other side. Enemy camp. We will be forced to continue the hunt for love in your absence. This Francesco fellow: he approve of sex after marriage? Italians tend to. Catholic, we presume. Oh, yes, we presume. Frank. Everyone just calls him Frank. He’s only half-Italian. Jake, get her right leg. Ezra, get the left. Ameeta get the arse. Put me down! You’re on arse duty, Ameeta, love. Objection! How come Ameeta gets the best bit? Because I do. Objection overruled. Why can’t a gentleman refer to the posterior of a lady anymore these days? I TELL YOU IT’S POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE — oh, fuck it. One two three LIFT.”

The trainee barristers carried Natalie Blake across the road, whooping. Her nose came level with the arch of 16th-century doorways. So far from home!

“SHE’S GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING.”

“Morning after. Who’s that statue, up there?”

“My Latin’s rusty — I have no fucking clue… Which way we heading? North? West! Which line do you need, Nat? The Jubilee?”

113. Miele di Luna (two weeks)

Sun.

Prosecco.

Sky, bleached.

Swallows. Arc. Dip.

Pebbles blue.

Pebbles red.

Elevator to the beach.

Empty beach. Sun rise. Sun set.

“You know how rare this is, in Italy? This is what you pay for — the silence!”

Oh.

He swims. Every day.

“The water is perfect!”

Wave.

English newspapers. Two beers. Arancini.

“Is it all right if we put it on this card? We’re in room 512. I have my passport.”

“Of course, Madam, you are the newlywed suite. You mind I ask something? Where you from?”

Wave.

The waiters wear white gloves. Obituaries. Reviews. Cover to cover.

Rum and coke. Cheesecake.

“Can I put it straight on the room? The other guy said it was OK. 512.”

“For sure, Madam. How do you call this, in English?”

“Binoculars. My husband likes birds. Weird saying that word.”

“Binoculars?”

“Husband.”

The public beach is at the tip of the peninsula. Four miles hence. Whoops. Screams. Laughter. Music from loud speakers. More bodies than sand.

Wish you were here?

Empty.

Exclusive.

“This is really like paradise!”

oh

wave

Lone family. Red umbrella. Mother, father, son. Louis.

LOOO-weee! Pink shorts. WAVE

Nowhere and nothing.

LOOO-WEEE!

Vodka cocktail.

“Have you got a pen? Do you know where they’re from?”

“Paris, signora. She is American model. He is computer. French.”

Louis stung by a jellyfish.

Dramatic event!

Rum Cocktail. Prawns. Chocolate cake.

“512, please.”

“Madam, I promise you this is not possible. There are no jellyfish here. We are a luxury resort. You don’t swim because of this?”

“I don’t swim because I can’t swim.”

Linguine con vongole, gin and tonic, rum cocktail.

“Signora, where you from? American?”

“512.”

“This is your boyfriend swimming?”

“Husband.”

“He speak very good Italian.”

“He is Italian.”

“And you, signora? Dove sei?”

114. L’isola che non c’è

“You should at least stand in the water one time,” said Frank De Angelis, and Natalie Blake looked up at her husband’s beautiful brown torso dripping with saltwater and returned to her reading. “You’ve been dragging those papers around since the plane.” He looked over her shoulder. “What’s so interesting?” She showed him the wrinkled, water-damaged page of personal advertisements. He sighed and put on his sunglasses. “‘Soulmates.’ Che schifo! I don’t know why you love reading those things. They depress me. So many lonely people.”

115. The Old Bailey

Ian Cross put his head round the pupils’ door. A room full of pupils looked up hopefully. Cross looked at Natalie Blake.

“Want to see a grown jury weep? Bridgestone need a random pupil to make up the numbers. Court One, Bailey. With Johnnie Hampton-Arse. Don’t worry, you won’t have to do anything, just look pretty. Grab your wig.”

She was excited to be chosen. It proved the efficacy of her strategy as compared to, say, Polly’s. Don’t get romantically involved with the star tenants of criminal sets. Do good work. Wait for your good work to be noticed. This innocence and pride was preserved right up until the moment she took her seat and spotted the victim’s family in the gallery, unmistakeably Jamaican, the men in shiny gray double-breasted suits, the women in their wide-brimmed hats topped with sprays of synthetic flowers.

“Watch and learn,” whispered Johnnie, rising for opening remarks.

116. Voyeurism

The defense was constituted along the same basic lines as transubstantiation. Someone else had used the vicar’s flat to chop up Viv. Someone else had deposited her body in a series of bin bags by Camden Lock, twenty yards from his own back door. He claimed the key was freely passed among his parishioners; many people had a copy. That his sperm was found inside her was only evidence of further coincidence. (The papers had dug up a series of suspiciously similar-looking local prostitutes, all claiming to have known the vicar in the biblical sense.) “But this is not a trial about race,” said Johnnie, directing the jury’s attention to Natalie Blake with a slight move of his arm, “and to allow it to become one is to submit the evidential burden — your first concern, as jurors in a British court — to the guilty-cos-we-say-so principles of our lamentable gutter press.” The distressed huddle of Viv’s family kept clinging to each other in the gallery, but Natalie did not look at them again.

The prosecution offered a PowerPoint presentation. Grubby-looking Camden interiors. Natalie Blake sat forward in her chair. The point was the flecks of blood, but it was everything else that interested her. Four modish 60s-era white chairs, unexpected for a man of the cloth. The too-big piano in the too-small room. Mismatched sofa and ottoman, a top-of-the-range TV. Out-dated fitted kitchen with a cork floor, unfortunate, the blood soaks in. Natalie felt a nudge from the junior advocate and began taking down the pretend notes she’d been instructed to scribble.

117. In the robing room

As Natalie Blake turned to shuck off her gown, Johnnie Hampton-Rowe appeared behind her, put his hand on her shirt, pulling it aside with her bra. She had a delayed reaction: he was pinching her nipple before she managed to ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing. With the same sleight of hand she’d just seen in court, he turned the fact of her shouting into the crime. Backed off at once, sighing: “All right, all right, my mistake.” Out of the door before she’d turned round. By the time she had collected herself and come out of the room he was at the far end of the hallway bantering with the rest of the team, discussing the next day’s strategy. The junior advocate pointed at Natalie with a pen. “Pub. Seven Stars. You coming?”

118. Emergency consultation

Leah Hanwell arranged to meet Natalie Blake at Chancery Lane tube. She was working close by, as a gym receptionist on the Tottenham Court Road. They walked to the Hunterian Museum. It began to rain. Leah stood between two huge Palladian columns and looked up at the Latin tag etched on gray stone.

“Can’t we go to the pub?”

“You’ll like this.”

They made their tiny donations at the desk.

“Hunter was an anatomist,” explained Natalie Blake. “This was his private collection.”

“Have you told Frank?”

“He wouldn’t be helpful.”

With no warning Natalie prodded Leah into the first atrium, as Frank had done to her a few months before. Leah didn’t scream or gasp or cover her hands with her eyes. She walked right past all the noses and shins and buttocks suspended in their jars of formaldehyde. Straight to the bones of the Giant O’ Brien. Put her hand flat against the glass, and smiled. Natalie Blake followed her reading from a leaflet, explaining, always explaining.

119. Cocks

Thick and squat and a little comical, severed a few inches after the head, or perhaps simply shrunken in death. Some circumcised, some apparently gangrenous. “Not feeling that envious,” said Leah. “You?” They moved on. Past hipbones and toes, hands and lungs, brains and vaginas, mice and dogs and a monkey with a grotesque tumor on its jaw. By the time they reached the late-stage fetuses they were a little hysterical. Huge foreheads, narrow little chins, eyes closed, mouths open. Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell made the Munch face at each other, at them. Leah knelt to look at a diseased piece of human material Natalie could not identify.

“You went to the pub.”

“I sat there for twenty minutes looking at the grain of the table. They talked about the case. I left.”

“You think he did the same with this Polly girl?”

“They had a ‘thing.’ Maybe it started the same way. Maybe he does it to everyone.”

“The plot thickens. I hate plots. The gym’s the same, full of cocks making drama. Drives me insane.”

“What’s that bit? Cancer?”

“Of the bowel. Dad’s kind.” Leah moved away from the jar and sat down on a little bench in the middle of the room. Natalie joined her and squeezed her hand.

“What are you going to do?” asked Leah Hanwell.

“Nothing,” said Natalie Blake.

120. Intervention

A few weeks passed. Dr. Singh cornered Natalie Blake in the pupils’ room. It was clear she had been sent as a sort of emissary. Some people upstairs — unnamed — were “concerned.” Why had she stopped participating in the social life of the set? Did she feel isolated? Would it help to talk to someone who’d “been through it”? Natalie took the little card. Without realizing it she must have rolled her eyes. Dr. Singh looked wounded, and drew a finger under a line of letters: QC, OBE, PhD. “Theodora Lewis-Lane was a trail-blazer”—this was meant as an admonishment—“no us without her.”

121. Role models

A fancy cake shop on the Gray’s Inn Road. Natalie was fifteen minutes late but Theodora was twenty, demonstrating that “Jamaican Time” had not quite died out in either of them. She was fascinated by Theodora’s chat-show weave (having recently abandoned her own, upon Frank’s request), and the subtle, glamorous variants she bought to the female barrister’s unofficial uniform: a gold satin shirt beneath the blazer; a diamante trim to the black court shoes. She was at least fifty, with the usual island gift of looking twenty years younger. Surprisingly — given her fearsome reputation — she was no more than five foot two. When Natalie slipped off her chair to shake Theodora’s hand she looked disconcerted. Sitting, she reclaimed her gravitas. In an accent not found in nature — somewhere between the Queen and the speaking clock — she ordered a tremendous number of pastries before proceeding without any encouragement to tell the story of her gothic South London childhood and unlikely professional triumph. When this tale was not quite finished, Natalie Blake took a fastidiously small bite of a croissant and murmured, “I guess I just really want my work to be taken on its own merits…”

When she looked up from her plate, Theodora had her little hands folded in her lap.

“You don’t really want to have a conversation with me, do you, Miss Blake?”

“What?”

“Let me tell you something,” she said, with a sharpness that belied the fixed smile on her face, “I am the youngest silk in my generation. That is not an accident, despite what you may believe. As one learns very quickly in this profession, fortune favors the brave — but also the pragmatic. I suppose you’re interested in a human rights set of some kind. Police brutality? Is that your plan?”

“I’m not sure yet,” said Natalie, trying to sound bullish. She was very close to tears.

“It wasn’t mine. In my day, if you went down that route people tended to associate you with your clients. I took some advice early on: “Avoid ghetto work.” It was Judge Whaley who gave it to me. He knew better than anyone. The first generation does what the second doesn’t want to do. The third is free to do what it likes. How fortunate you are. If only good fortune came with a little polite humility. Now, I believe this place does wine. Will you have a little wine?”

“I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a good tip for court: don’t imagine your contempt is invisible. You’ll find out as you mature that life is a two-way mirror.”

“But I don’t have contempt—”

“Calm yourself, sister. Have a glass of wine. I was just the same at your age. Hated being told.”

122. Theodora’s advice

“When I first started appearing before a judge, I kept being reprimanded from the bench. I was losing my cases and I couldn’t understand why. Then I realized the following: when some floppy-haired chap from Surrey stands before these judges, all his passionate arguments read as “pure advocacy.” He and the Judge recognize each other. They are understood by each other. Very likely went to the same school. But Whaley’s passion, or mine, or yours, reads as ‘aggression.’ To the judge. This is his house and you are an interloper within it. And let me tell you, with a woman it’s worse: ‘Aggressive hysteria.’ The first lesson is: turn yourself down. One notch. Two. Because this is not neutral.” She passed a hand over her neat frame from her head to her lap, like a scanner. “This is never neutral.”

123. Bye noe

hi finally

that wasn’t so hard now was it

just don’t like downloading things

me no like computerz

from the internet at WORK. Weak gov computers. One little virus

me fear the future

and they die innit

is it

shut it blake.

That’s just so fucking FASCINATING

Hello hanwell DARLING. What brings you to the internets this fine afternopn

noon

woman next to me picking nose really getting in there

tried to call but you no answer

delighteful.

cant take private calls in pupilf room what’s up

big news

You got cat aids?

free may sixth?

You catch cat aids may 6th? I am free if not in court. I big lawyer lasy these days innit

Big lawyer lady jesus

shit typer

lady jesus I am getting married

!!!!!?????

on may

that’s great! When did this happen???

Six in registry same like u but irth actyl guests

I’m really happy for you seriously

Actual guests.

Iz for mum really.

right

also, I really love him.

lust him.

Important to him and he wants to.

It’s what people do innit.

sorry clerk one min

enough reasons?

I think I’m going to wear purple

Also for Pauline

And gold like a catholic priest

Hello?

Sorry that is really great — congrats!

Does this mesn

Mean procreation??

FUCK OFF WOMAN

FUCK OFF WITH YOUR SMILEY FACE

cant believe you getting hitched

whats happening to

me too

universe?

we iz old

we’re not fucking old

at least u achieving something. I’m just slowly dying

this my 2nd year as pupil. May be pupil for rest of

dying of boredom

life

don’t know what tht means

it = not good. Most peole tenant after ONE YEAR

anyway boring — can I ask question and you not get off

offended sorry

fuck most people

haha I am so not getting off right now

can I?

when u get hitched you have to give up everyone else anyway.

that’s the idea, isn’t it?

Stupid idea.

haha

So just more people to give up.

That answer your question big lady jesus?

Haha yes. You iz mind reader for realz

and when all else fails:

www.adultswatchingadults.com

passes the time

you know what I’m chatting about. Come on girl!

Oi mate don’t leave me hanging!

Sorry. Work shitstorm gotta go love you

bye noe

“bye noe”

124. A tenancy meeting question

Ms. Blake, would you be prepared to represent someone from the B.N.P.?

125. Harlesden hero (with parentheses)

Natalie Blake did not expect to be offered tenancy. To convert an external judgment into a personal choice she told herself a story about legal ethics, strong moral character and indifference to money. She told the same tale to Frank and Leah, to her family, to her fellow trainee barristers and to anyone else who inquired after her future. This was a way of making the future safe. (All Natalie’s storytelling had, in the end, this aim in view.) When, contrary to her expectations, she was indeed offered tenancy, Natalie Blake was placed in an awkward position vis-à-vis her personal ethics and strong moral character and indifference to money (or, at least, as far as the public representations of these qualities were concerned) and was forced to refuse the offer of tenancy and take the paralegal job at R senb rg, Sl tte y & No ton that she had been talking up for several months. A tiny legal aid firm in Harlesden with half its stencilled letters peeled off.

126. Tonya seeks Keisha

Natalie Blake’s clients called at inappropriate times. They lied. They were usually late for court, rarely wore what they had been advised to wear and refused perfectly sensible plea deals. Occasionally they threatened her life. In her first six months at RSN, three of her clients were young men who “went Brayton,” although they were much younger then Natalie Blake herself. This caused her to wonder if the school had gone downhill — further downhill. She snatched lunch from the jerk place opposite McDonald’s, sat on a high stool and had trouble keeping the oil off her suit. Pattie, fish dumpling and a can of ginger beer, most days. She tried to vary this menu, but at the counter any spirit of adventure abandoned her. A long-term plan existed to meet Marcia and Marcia’s sister Irene, who lived nearby, for lunch, but this fantasy appointment, with its two hours of idle time and no need to read briefs, never seemed to arrive, and soon enough Natalie Blake understood that it never would. Fairly often she saw her cousin Tonya on Harlesden high street. On these occasions — despite her new status as a big lawyer lady — she experienced the same feelings of insecurity and inadequacy Tonya had compelled in her when they were children. This afternoon Tonya wore sweatpants with HONEY written across the posterior and a close-fitting denim waistcoat with a yellow bra underneath. Her fringe was purple, the hoop of her earrings brushed her shoulders. Her platform heels were red and five inches high. Despite the toddler and the baby in her double buggy Tonya retained the proportions of a super-heroine in a comic book. Natalie meanwhile was sadly “margar,” as the Jamaicans say. To white people this translates as “skinny” or “athletic,” and is widely considered a positive value. For Natalie it meant ultimately shapeless, a blank. Tonya’s skin was never ashy but always silky and gorgeous and she was not prone to the harsh pink acne that sometimes broke out across Natalie’s forehead, and was present today. Where Natalie’s teeth were small and gray, Tonya’s were huge, white, even, and presently on display in a giant smile. As Tonya approached, Natalie was sure she, Natalie, had dumpling oil round her mouth. But perhaps all this displacement of anxiety into the physical realm was a feminine way of simplifying a far deeper and more insoluble difference, for Natalie believed Tonya had a gift for living and Natalie herself did not seem to have this gift.

“These children are so good-looking it’s criminal.”

“Thank you!”

“Look at André—he blatantly knows it.”

“That’s his dad. His dad bought him that chain.”

“Now he’s like: I’m a three-year-old playa.”

“You know what I’m saying! Seriously.”

Underneath the smile, Natalie saw that her cousin was disappointed with this exchange, wanting, as usual, to make a deeper “connection” with Natalie, who wished to avoid precisely this intimacy and as a consequence retained a superficial and pleasant exterior with her cousin as a means of holding her at bay. Now Natalie put down André and picked up Sasha. Neither child ever seemed real to her no matter how many times Natalie felt their weight in her arms. How could Tonya be the mother of these children? How could Tonya be 26? When had Tonya stopped being 12? When would her own adulthood arrive?

“So I’m back up in Stonebridge, with my Mum. Elton and me are done, that’s it. I’m finished wasting my time. It’s all good, though. I’m back to school, up in Dollis Hill? College of North West London. Tourism and hospitality. Studying, studying. It’s hard but I’m loving it. You’re my inspiration!”

Tonya put her hand on the shoulder of Natalie’s ugly navy skirt suit. Was that pity in her cousin’s eyes? Natalie Blake did not exist.

“How’s your mate? That nice girl. The redhead one.”

“Leah. She’s good. Married. Working for the council.”

“Is it. That’s nice. Kids?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You lot are leaving it late, innit.”

Tonya’s hand moved from her cousin’s shoulder to her head.

“What’s going on up there, Keisha?”

Natalie touched her uneven parting, the dry bun, scraped back, unadorned.

“Not much. I never have time.”

“I did all this myself. Microbraids. You should come by and let me do it. It’s just six hours. We could make it an evening, have a good proper chat.”

127. The connection between chaos and other qualities

At RSN Associates the law burst from broken box files, it lined the hallways, bathroom and kitchen. This chaos was unavoidable, but it was also to some extent an aesthetic, slightly exaggerated by the tenants, and intended to signify selflessness, sincerity. Natalie saw how her clients found the chaos comforting, just as the fake Queen Anne sofas and painted foxhounds of Middle Temple reassured another type of client. If you worked here it could only be for the love of the law. Only real do-gooders could possibly be this poor. Clients were directed to Jimmy’s Suit Warehouse in Cricklewood for court dates. Wins were celebrated in-house, with cheap plonk, pita bread and hummus. When an RSN solicitor came to see you in your cell, they arrived by bus.

128. “On the front line”

Now and then, in court or in police stations, Natalie bumped into corporate solicitors she knew from university. Sometimes she spoke with them on the phone. They usually made a show of over-praising her legal ethics, strong moral character and indifference to money. Sometimes they finished with a back-handed compliment, implying that the streets where Natalie had been raised, and now returned to work, were, in their minds, a hopeless sort of place, analogous to a war zone.

129. Return

The commute was “killing” her. Sometimes a simple choice of vocabulary can gain traction in the world. “Killing” became the premise for a return to NW. “And what about my commute?” protested Frank De Angelis. “Jubilee line,” said his wife Natalie Blake, “Kilburn to Canary Wharf.” Carefully she drew up a contract, negotiated a mortgage, split the deposit in half. All for a Kilburn flat that her husband could have bought outright without blinking. When the deal went through Natalie bought a bottle of cava to celebrate. He was still at work at six when she picked up the keys, and still there at eight — and then the inevitable nine-forty-five phone call: “Sorry — all nighter. Go on without me, if you want.” Motto of a marriage. Natalie Blake called Leah Hanwell: “Want to see me carry myself over the threshold?”

130. Re-entry

Leah turned the key in the stiff lock. Natalie crept in behind her, into adult life. Notable for its silence and privacy. The electricity was still unconnected. A clear moon lit the bare white walls. Natalie was ashamed to find herself momentarily disappointed: after camping in Frank’s place all these months, this looked small. Leah did a circuit of the lounge and whistled. She was working from an older scale of measurement: twice the size of a Caldwell double.

“What’s that out there?”

“Downstairs’ roof. It’s not a balcony, the agent said you can’t—”

Leah went through the sash windows and on to the ivy-covered ledge. Natalie followed. They smoked a joint. In the driveway below a fat fox sat brazen as a cat, looking up at them.

“Your ivy,” said Leah, touching it, “your brick, your window, your wall, your light-bulb, your gutter pipe.”

“I share it with the bank.”

“Still. That fox is with child.”

Natalie thumbed the cork out. It bounced off the wall and dropped away into the dark. She took a messy swig. Leah leaned forward and wiped her friend’s chin: “Cava socialist.” Now watch Natalie recalibrate the conversation. It is a feminine art. She places herself halfway up a slope that has at its peak Frank’s friends, all those single young men with their incomprehensible Christmas bonuses. She found it pleasing to describe this world to Leah, who knew almost nothing of it. Chelsea, Earls Court, West Hampstead. Lofts and mansion flats unsullied by children or women, empty of furniture, fringed by ghettos.

“Correction: there’s always one big brown leather sofa, a huge fridge and a TV as big as this flat. And an enormous sound system. They’re not home till two a.m. ‘Entertaining clients.’ In strip clubs, usually. It all just sits empty. Five bedrooms. One bed.”

Lean flicked the end of a joint toward the fox: “Parasites.”

Natalie was suddenly stricken by something she thought of as “conscience.” “A lot of them are OK,” she said, quickly, “nice, I mean, individually. They’re funny. And they do work hard. Next time we have a dinner you should come.”

“Oh, Nat. Everybody’s nice. Everybody works hard. Everybody’s a friend of Frank’s. What’s that got to do with anything?”

131. Revisit

People were ill.

“You remember Mrs. Iqbal? Small woman, always a bit snooty with me. Breast cancer.”

People died.

“You must remember him, he lived in Locke. Tuesday he dropped dead. Ambulance took half an hour.”

People were shameful.

“Baby born two weeks ago, and they haven’t let me in yet. We don’t even know how many kids are in there. They don’t register them.”

People didn’t know they were born.

“Guess how much for eggs in that market. Organic. Guess!”

People were seen.

“I seen Pauline. Leah’s working for the council now. She always had such big ambitions for that child. Funny how things turn out. In a way you’ve done quite a bit better than her, really.”

People were unseen.

“He’s upstairs with Tommy. He spends all his time with him now. They only come out of that room to go and charm the ladies. Jayden and Tommy spend all their time and money charming the ladies. That’s all your brother thinks about. He needs to get himself a job, that’s what I keep telling him.”

People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence.

“Owen Cafferty.”

“Mum, I don’t remember him.”

“Owen Cafferty. Owen Cafferty! He did all the catering for church. Mustache. Owen Cafferty!”

“OK, vaguely, yes. Why?”

“Dead.”

Everything was the same in the flat, yet there was a new feeling of lack. A new awareness. And lo they saw their nakedness and were ashamed. On the table Marcia laid out a fan of credit cards. As Marcia talked her daughter through the chaotic history of each card Natalie made notes as best she could. She had been brought in for an emergency consultation. She did not really know why she was taking notes. The only useful thing would be to sign a large check. This she couldn’t do, in her present circumstance. She couldn’t bear to ask Frank. What difference did it make if she turned figures into words?

“I’ll tell you what I really need,” said Marcia, “I need Jayden to get up out of here and get married, so he can run his own household, and your sister’s little ones don’t have to be sleeping in the room with their mother. That’s what I need.”

“Oh, Mum… Jayden’s not going to ever get… Jayden’s not interested in women, he—”

“Please don’t start up that nonsense again, Keisha. Jayden’s the only one of you takes care of me at all. This is how we live. Cheryl can’t help anybody. She can’t hardly help herself. Number three on the way. Of course I love these kids. But this is how we’re living like, Keisha, to be truthful. Hand to mouth. This is it.”

People were living like this. Living like that. Living like this.

132. Domestic

“I can’t stand them living like that!” cried Natalie Blake.

“You’re making unnecessary drama,” said Frank.

133. E pluribus unum

Certainly exceptional to be taken back into the Middle Temple fold but Natalie Blake was in many ways an exceptional candidate, and several tenants at the set thought of her, informally, as their own protégé, despite having really only a glancing knowledge of her. Something about Natalie inspired patronage, as if by helping her you helped an unseen multitude.

134. Paranoia

A man and a woman, a couple, sat at a table opposite Natalie and Frank, having Saturday brunch in a café in North West London.

“It’s organic,” said Ameeta. She referred to the ketchup.

“It’s bad,” said her husband, Imran. He was also referring to the ketchup.

“It’s not bad. It doesn’t have the fourteen spoonfuls of sugar you’re used to,” said Ameeta.

“It’s called flavor?” said Imran.

“Just bloody eat it or don’t eat it,” said Ameeta. “Nobody cares.”

Around them, at other tables, other people’s babies cried.

“I didn’t say anybody cared,” said Imran.

“India versus Pakistan,” said Frank — he referred, in a jocular manner, to his friends’ countries of origin—“better pray it doesn’t go nuclear.”

“Ha ha,” said Natalie Blake.

They continued on with their breakfast. Breakfast tipped into brunch. They did this once or twice a month. Today’s brunch seemed, to Natalie, a more lively occasion than usual, and more comfortable, as if by rejoining a commercial set and acting, at least in part, for the interests of corporations, she had lost the final remnants of a troubling aura that had bothered her friends and made them cautious around her.

135. Contempt

The eggs came late. Frank argued chummily with the waiter until they were taken off the bill. At one point employing the phrase: “Look, we’re both educated brothers.” It occurred to Natalie Blake that she was not very happily married. Goofy. Made lame jokes, offended people. He was in a constant good humor, yet he was stubborn. He did not read or have any real cultural interests, aside from the old, nostalgic affection for 90s hip hop. The idea of the Caribbean bored him. When thinking of the souls of black folks he preferred to think of Africa—“Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the Sphinx”—where the two strains of his DNA did noble battle in ancient stories. (He knew these stories only in vague, biblical outline.) He had ketchup by his mouth, and they had married quickly, without knowing each other particularly well. “I like her well enough,” Ameeta said, “I just don’t particularly trust her.” Frank De Angelis would never cheat or lie or hurt Natalie Blake, not in any way. He was a physically beautiful man. Kind. “It’s not tax avoidance,” said Imran. “It’s tax management.” Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. Were they any unhappier than Imran and Ameeta? Those people over there? You? “Anything with flour gives me a rash,” said Frank. On the table lay a huge pile of newspaper. In Caldwell, newspaper choice had been rather important. It was a matter of pride to Marcia that the Blakes took The Voice and The Daily Mirror and no “filth.” Now everyone came to brunch with their “quality” paper and a side order of trash. Tits and vicars and slebs and murder. Her mother’s pieties — and by extension Natalie’s own — seemed old-fashioned. “It’s an insurgency,” said Ameeta. Natalie pressed a knife to her egg and watched the yolk run into her beans. “Another thing of tea?” said Frank. They were all agreed that the war should not be happening. They were against war. In the mid-nineties, when Natalie Blake was sleeping with Imran, the two of them had planned a trip to Bosnia in a convoy of ambulances. “But Irie was always going to be that kind of mother,” said Ameeta, “I could have told you that five years ago.” Only the private realm existed now. Work and home. Marriage and children. Now they only wanted to return to their own flats and live the real life of domestic conversation and television and baths and lunch and dinner. Brunch was outside the private realm, not by much — it was just the other side of the border. But even brunch was too far from home. Brunch didn’t really exist. “Can I give you a tip?” said Imran. “Start on the third episode of series two.” Was it possible to feel oneself on a war footing, constantly, even at brunch? “She owns a child of every race now. She’s like the United Nations of Stupid,” said Frank, for one elevated oneself above an interest in “celebrity gossip” simply by commenting ironically on it. “A ‘romp’ with two strippers,” read Ameeta. “Why’s it always a ‘romp?’ I’ve never bloody ‘romped’ in my life.” Sexual perversity was also old-fashioned: it smacked of an earlier time. It was messy, embarrassing, impractical in this economy. “I never know what’s reasonable,” said Imran. “Ten percent? Fifteen? Twenty?” Global consciousness. Local consciousness. Consciousness. And lo they saw their nakedness and were not ashamed. “You’re fooling yourself,” said Frank. “You can’t get anything on the park for less than a million.” The mistake was to think that the money precisely signified — or was equivalent to — a particular arrangement of bricks and mortar. The money was not for these poky terraced houses with their short back gardens. The money was for the distance the house put between you and Caldwell. “That skirt,” said Natalie Blake, pointing to a picture in the supplement, “but in red.”

As brunch tipped into lunch, Imran ordered pancakes like an American. After decades of disappointment, the coffee was finally real coffee. Wouldn’t it be cruel to leave, now, when they’d come this far? They were all four of them providing a service for the rest of the people in the café, simply by being here. They were the “local vibrancy” to which the estate agents referred. For this reason, too, they needn’t concern themselves too much with politics. They simply were political facts, in their very persons. “Polly not coming?” asked Frank. All four checked their phones for news of their last remaining single friend. The smooth feel of the handset in one’s palm. A blinking envelope with the promise of external connection, work, engagement. Natalie Blake had become a person unsuited to self-reflection. Left to her own mental devices she quickly spiraled into self-contempt. Work suited her, and where Frank longed for weekends, she could not hide her enthusiasm for Monday mornings. She could only justify herself to herself when she worked. If only she could go to the bathroom and spend the next hour alone with her e-mail. “Working the weekend. Again,” said Imran. He had the fastest connection. “Shame,” said Natalie Blake. But was it? If Polly came she would only sit down and speak of her good works — police inquests and civil litigation and international arbitration for underdog nations; recently published opinions on the legality of the war. Headhunted by a new, modern, right-on set, where she was both very well paid and morally unimpeachable. Living the dream. It was the year people began to say “living the dream,” sometimes sincerely but usually ironically. Natalie Blake, who was also very well paid, found having to listen to Polly these days an almost impossible provocation.

136. Apple blossom, 1st of March

Surprised by beauty, in the front garden of a house on Hopefield Avenue. Had it been there yesterday? Upon closer inspection the cloud of white separated into thousands of tiny flowers with yellow centers and green bits and pink flecks. A city animal, she did not have the proper name for anything natural. She reached up to break off a blossom-heavy twig — intending a simple, carefree gesture — but the twig was sinewy and green inside and not brittle enough to snap. Once she’d begun she felt she couldn’t give up (the street was not empty, she was being observed.) She lay her briefcase on somebody’s front garden wall, applied both hands and wrestled with it. What came away finally was less twig than branch, being connected to several other twigs, themselves heavy with blossom, and the vandal Natalie Blake hurried away and round the corner with it. She was on her way to the tube. What could she do with a branch?

137. Train of thought

The screenwriter Dennis Potter was interviewed on television. Sometime during the early nineties. He was asked what it felt like to have a few weeks to live. Natalie Blake remembered this answer: “I look out of my window and I see the blossom. And it’s more blossomy than it’s ever been.” Once she got within network she would check the year and whether or not that was the correct wording. Then again, perhaps the way she had remembered it was the thing that was important. The branch lay abandoned outside a phone box at Kilburn station. Sitting in her tube seat, Natalie Blake moved her pelvis very subtly back and forth. Blossom was always intensely blossomy to Natalie Blake. Beauty created a special awareness in her. “The difference between a moment and an instant.” She couldn’t remember very much about the philosophical significance of this distinction other than that her good friend Leah Hanwell had once tried to understand it, and to make Natalie Blake understand it, a long time ago, when they were students, and far smarter than they were today. And for a brief period in 1995, perhaps a week or so, she had thought that she understood it.

138. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=kierkegaard&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.

139. Doublethink

Commercial barrister Natalie Blake did pro bono death row cases in the Caribbean islands of her ancestry and instructed an accountant to tithe 10 percent of her income, to be split between charitable contributions and supporting her family. She assumed it was the remnants of her faith that made her fretful and suspicious that these good deeds were, in fact, a further, veiled, example of self-interest, representing only the assuaging of conscience. Acknowledging the root of this suspicion did nothing to disperse it. Nor did she find any relief in the person of her husband, Frank De Angelis, who objected to her actions on quite other grounds: sentimentality, wooly mindedness.

140. Spectacle

The Blake — De Angelises started work early and tended to finish late, and in the gaps treated each other with an exaggerated tenderness, as if the slightest applied pressure would blow the whole thing to pieces. Sometimes in the mornings their commutes aligned, briefly, until Natalie changed at Finchley Road. More often Natalie left half an hour to an hour before her husband. She liked to meet early with the pupil with whom she shared a room, Melanie, to get the jump on all the business of the day. In the evenings the couple watched television, or went on-line to plan future holidays, itself an example of bad faith for Natalie hated holidays, preferring to work. They only truly came together at weekends, in front of friends, for whom they appeared fresh and vibrant (they were only thirty years old), and full of the old good humor, like a double act that only speaks to each other when they are on stage.

141. Listings

It was around this time that Natalie Blake began secretly checking the website. Why does anyone begin checking a website? Anthropological curiosity. The statement “I have heard that people are on this site” is soon followed by “I can’t believe that people really visit this site!” Then comes: “What kind of people would visit this site?” If the website is visited multiple times the question is answered. The problem becomes circular.

142. Technology

“I have it for work.” “It’s for work — I don’t pay for it.” “I’ve got to have it for work, and actually it makes a lot of things easier.” “It’s my work phone, otherwise I wouldn’t even have one.”

143. The Present

Natalie Blake, who told people she abhorred expensive gadgets and detested the Internet, adored her phone and was helplessly, compulsively, adverbly addicted to the Internet. Though incredibly fast, her phone was still too slow. It had not finished fully downloading the new website of her chambers before the doors closed on the elevator in Covent Garden station. For the length of a twenty-minute tube ride the screen in her hand obstinately froze on the sentence

highest standards of legal representation in today’s fast-changing world.

144. Speed

At some point we became aware of being “modern,” of changing fast. Of coming after just now. John Donne was also a modern and surely saw change but we feel we are more modern and that the change is faster. Even the immutable is faster. Even blossom. While buying a samosa in the filthy shop inside Chancery Lane Station (one remnant of her upbringing was a willingness to buy food from anyone, anywhere) Natalie Blake once again checked the listings. By this point she was checking them two or three times a day, though still as a voyeur, without making a concrete contribution.

145. Perfection

For some reason this proposed picnic was very important to Natalie Blake, and she set about planning it meticulously. She cooked everything from scratch. She determined upon a hamper with real crockery and glasses. Even as she was ordering this stuff online she saw it was really “too much” but her course was set and she felt unable to change direction. At work she was deep into a dispute between a Chinese tech company and its British distributor. At the first video conference the Chinese Managing Director had been unable to conceal his surprise. She should not be going to a picnic. She should be in the office making her way through the other side’s fresh disclosures. Natalie continued along her path. She picked an outfit. Glittering sandals and hoop earrings and bangles and a long ochre skirt and a brown vest and hair in a giant afro puff held off her face by means of one leg of a black pair of tights, cut off and knotted at the back of her head. She felt African in this outfit, although nothing she wore came from Africa except perhaps the earrings and bangles, conceptually. Her husband passed by the kitchen at the moment she was trying to force three extra Tupperware boxes into the gingham-lined hamper she had bought for the occasion.

“Jesus. That’s ours?”

“She’s my oldest friend, Frank.”

“They’ll both be in tracksuits.”

“A picnic is not just weed and a supermarket sandwich. We hardly see them anymore. It’s a beautiful day. I want it to be nice.”

“OK.”

He edged round her theatrically. Doctor avoiding a lunatic. He opened the fridge.

“Don’t eat. It’s a picnic. Eat at the picnic.”

“When did you start baking?”

“Don’t touch that. It’s ginger cake. It’s Jamaican.”

“You know I can’t eat anything with flour in it.”

“It’s not for you!”

He left the room silently, and it was not quite clear whether it was the beginning of a row or not. Probably he would decide later, depending on whether there was a practical advantage to be had in discord. Natalie Blake put her hands on the counter and spent a long time staring at the yellow kitchen tiles in front of her face. Who was it for? Leah? Michel?

146. Cheryl (L.O.V.E.)

“Just move that.” With Carly screaming on her hip, Cheryl bent down to sweep the Barbie and junk mail to the floor. Natalie found a hardback annual of some kind and put the mugs of tea upon it. “Let me try and get this little one down then we can go in the living room.” They sat opposite each other on their old twin beds. Natalie believed she had a memory of lying beside her sister on one of these beds, tracing spidery letters on her bare back, which Cheryl had to then guess and spell out as words. Cheryl gave Carly her bottle. She sat very straight with her third child in her arms. An adult with adult concerns. Natalie crossed her legs like a child and kept her fond memories to herself. Wasn’t there something juvenile in the very idea of “fond memories?”

“Keesh, pass me that rag there. She’s chucking it all up.”

Pocahontas printed on the closed blind. The sun made her golden. The room was not much changed from the old days except it was now roughly divided between a boy and a girl zone; the former red, blue and Spiderman, the latter diamanté-encrusted princess pink. Natalie picked up a dumper truck and drove it up and down her thigh.

“Two against one.”

Cheryl’s head lifted wearily; the baby was fussy and would not settle to eating.

“Just — the pink-blue war. Poor old Ray won’t survive now there’s Cleo and Carly.”

“Survive? What you on about?”

“Nothing. Sorry, carry on.”

On every surface there balanced things upon other things with more things hanging off and wrapped around and crammed in. No Blake could ever throw anything away. It was the same in Natalie’s place, except there the great towers of cheap consumer dreck were piled up behind cupboard doors, concealed by better storage.

Cheryl plucked the bottle from the child’s mouth and sighed: “She ain’t going down. Let’s just go through.”

Natalie followed her sister down the narrow hallway made almost impassable by laundry strung from a wire along both walls.

“Can I do something?”

“Yeah, take her for a minute while I have a piss. Carly, go to your auntie now.”

• • •

Natalie had no fear of handling babies; she’d too much practice. She placed Carly loosely on her hip and with the other hand called Melanie to give a series of unnecessary instructions that could have easily waited until they were both in the office. She walked up and down the room as she did this, jiggling the baby, talking loudly, entirely competent, casual. The baby, seeming to sense her extraordinary competency, grew quiet and looked up at her aunt with admiring eyes in which Natalie spotted even a hint of wistfulness.

“But the thing is, yeah,” said Cheryl, as she walked back in, “Jay’s gone, there’s plenty of space here. And I don’t want to leave mum on her jacks.”

“Eventually Gus is going to finish building. She’s going to move back to Jamaica.”

Cheryl put both hands to the base of her back and thrust her stomach out in that depressing motherly gesture Natalie felt sure she would never perform, if and when she herself became a mother. “That’s way off,” said Cheryl, yawning as she stretched. “He sent pictures. Not e-mail — photos in an envelope. It’s a corrugated box with no roof. It’s got a palm tree growing out the bathroom.”

This reminder of their father’s innocence, of his optimism and incompetence, made the sisters smile, and emboldened Natalie. She pressed her niece to her breast and kissed her forehead.

“I just can’t stand to see you all living like this.”

Cheryl sat down in their father’s old chair, shook her head at the floor and laughed unpleasantly.

“There it is,” she said.

Natalie Blake, who feared more than anything being made to look ridiculous — or being perceived, even for a moment, to be on the wrong side of a moral question — pretended she did not hear this and smiled at the baby and lifted the baby above her head to try and get her to giggle and when this did not work, lowered her to her lap once again.

“If you hate Caldie so much, why d’you even come here? Seriously, man. No one asked you to come. Go back to your new manor. I’m busy — ain’t really got the time to sit and chat with you neither. You piss me off sometimes Keisha. No, but you do.”

“When I was at RSN,” said Natalie firmly, in the voice she used in court, “you know how many of my clients were Caldies? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see you and the kids in a nice place somewhere.”

“This is a nice place! There’s a lot worse. You done all right out of it. Keisha, if I wanted to get out of here I’d get another place off the council before I come to you, to be honest.”

Natalie addressed her next comment to the four-month-old.

“I don’t know why your mum talks to me like that. I’m her only sister!”

Cheryl attended to a stain on her leggings. “We ain’t never been that close Keisha, come on now.”

In Natalie’s bag, by the door, there were three Ambien, in the inside pocket next to her wallet.

“There’s four years between us,” she heard herself say, in a small voice, a ludicrous voice.

“Nah but it weren’t that, though,” said Cheryl, without looking up.

Natalie sprung from her chair. Standing she found that holding little Carly limited her dramatic options. The child had fallen asleep on her shoulder. In a dynamic unchanged from childhood, Natalie became irate as her sister grew calm.

“Excuse me I forgot: no-one’s allowed to have friends in this fucking family.”

“Family first. That’s my belief. God first, then family.”

“Oh, give me a fucking break. Here comes the Virgin Mary. Just because you can’t locate the fathers, doesn’t make them all immaculate conceptions.”

Cheryl stood up and stuck a finger in her sister’s face: “You need to watch your mouth, Keisha. And why you got to curse all the time, man? Get some respect.”

Natalie felt tears pricking her eyes and a childish wash of self-pity overcame her entirely.

“Why am I being punished for making something of my life?”

“Oh my days. Who’s punishing you, Keisha? Nobody. That’s in your head. You’re paranoid, man!”

Natalie Blake could not be stopped: “I work hard. I came in with no reputation, nothing. I’ve built up a serious practice — do you have any idea how few—”

“Did you really come round here to tell me what a big woman you are these days?”

“I came round here to try and help you.”

“But no-one in here is looking for your help, Keisha! This is it! I ain’t looking for you, end of.”

And now they had to transfer Carly from Natalie’s shoulder to her mother’s, a strangely delicate operation in the middle of the carnage.

Natalie Blake cast around hopelessly for a parting shot. “You need to do something about your attitude, Cheryl. Really. You should go see someone about it, because it’s really a problem.”

As soon as Cheryl had the child in her arms she turned from her sister and began walking back down the corridor to the bedroom.

“Yeah, well, till you have kids you can’t really chat to me, Keisha, to be honest.”

147. Listings

On the website she was what everybody was looking for.

148. The future

Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were 28 when the first emails began to arrive. Over the next few years their number increased exponentially. Photo attachments of stunned-looking women with hospital tags round their wrists, babies lying on their breast, hair inexplicably soaked through. They seemed to have stepped across a chasm into another world. It was perfectly possible that her own mother was arriving at the houses of these new mothers, with her name-tag pinned to her apron, pricking their babies’ feet with a needle, or sewing up the new mothers’ stitches as they lay sideways on a couch. Marcia must have seen one or two of them, by the law of local averages. They were new arrivals in the neighborhood. They were not the sort of people to switch off the lights and lie on the floor. Mother and baby doing well, exhausted. It was as if no-one had ever had a baby before, in human history. And everybody said precisely this, it was the new thing to say: “It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.” Natalie forwarded the emails to Leah. It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.

149. Nature becomes culture

Many things that had seemed, to their own mothers, self-evident elements of a common-sense world, now struck Natalie and Leah as either a surprise or an outrage. Physical pain. The existence of disease. The difference in procreative age between men and women. Age itself. Death.

Their own materiality was the scandal. The fact of flesh.

Natalie Blake, being strong, decided to fight. To go to war against these matters, like a soldier.

150. Listings

After opening an e-mail about a baby, she went to the website, and contributed to the website. She went upstairs to bed.

151. Redact

“Where are you going?

Natalie Blake shook her husband’s hand from her shin and rose from bed. She walked down the hall to the spare bedroom and sat in front of the computer. She typed the address into the browser as smoothly as a pianist playing a scale. She removed the contribution.

152. The past

“Nathan?”

He sat on the bandstand in the park, smoking, with two girls and a boy. Two women and a man. But they were dressed as kids. Natalie Blake was dressed as a successful lawyer in her early thirties. Alone, he and she might have walked the perimeter of the park, and talked about the past, and perhaps she would have taken off her ugly heels and they would have sat in the grass and Natalie would have smoked his weed, and then told him to get off drugs in a motherly sort of way, and he would have nodded and smiled and promised. But in company like this she had no idea how to be.

It’s well hot, said Nathan Bogle. It really is, agreed Natalie Blake.

153. Brixton

It was a long-standing invitation but she hadn’t called or sent a text to say she was coming. It was an impulse that struck her at Victoria Station. Fifteen minutes later she was walking down Brixton High Street, exhausted from court, still in her suit, getting in the way of merry people just starting their Friday night. She bought some flowers in a garage forecourt, and thought of all the scenes in movies where people buy flowers from garage forecourts, and of how it is almost always better to bring nothing. She found the house and rang the bell. A queeny guy with his ’fro dyed blonde answered.

“Hi. Jayden about? His sister, Nat.”

“Of course you are. You look just like Angela Bassett!”

The kitchen was confusingly full. Was it the queen? Or one of the white guys? Or the Chinese guy, or the other guy?

“He’s in the shower. Vodka or tea?”

“Vodka. You all heading out?”

“We just got in. The only thing to eat right now is this Jaffa cake.”

154. Force of nature

When had she last been so drunk? There was something about being in the company of so many men with no intentions toward her that encouraged excess. She was learning many things about her little brother she had never known. He was “famous” for drinking White Russians. He’d had a crush on Nathan Bogle. He loved fantasy fiction. He could do more one-handed press-ups than any other man in the room.

The vodka ran out. They took shots of a blue drink they found in a cupboard. Natalie realized that there was no special or chosen man in this house. Jayden had managed to find for himself precisely the fluid and friendly living arrangements she herself had dreamed of so many years earlier. If it was not quite possible to feel happy for him it was because the arrangement was timeless — it did not come bound by the constrictions of time — and this in turn was the consequence of a crucial detail: no women were included within the schema. Women come bearing time. Natalie had brought time into this house. She couldn’t stop mentioning the time, and worrying about it. If only she could free herself from her body and join them all at the Vauxhall Tavern, for the second wave. In reality, she had ten texts from Frank and it was time to go home. The time had come.

“And all in the same week,” said Jayden, “all in the same week, she told this rude boy kid in our estate who was on my case to back off, she just ran him off, right after she came out of that last exam. Straight As. Bitch is real. Sista’s a force of nature, believe!” The room was dipping and revolving. Natalie did not recognize this story. She did not think these two things had happened, at least not in the same week, perhaps not even in the same year. She certainly did not get straight As. It had occurred several times this evening, these conflicting versions, and at first she had tried to tweak or challenge them, but now she leaned back into the arms of a man called Paul and stroked his bicep. Did it matter what was true and what wasn’t?

155. Some observations concerning television

She was watching the poor with Marcia. A reality show set on a council estate. The council estate on television was fractionally worse than the council estate in which she sat watching the show about a council estate. Every now and then Marcia pointed out how filthy were the flats of the people on television and how meticulously she took care of her own, Cheryl’s mess not withstanding. “Guinness. At ten in the morning!” said Marcia. Natalie, who had not seen the show before, asked after the character arc of one of the participants. Marcia grabbed both arms of her chair and closed her eyes. “She’s on crack. All she cares about is make up and clothes. Her brother is on sickness benefits but there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a disgrace. The dad is in jail for thieving. The mum’s a junkie.” In the show poverty was understood as a personality trait. “Look at that! Look at the bathroom. Shameful. What kind of people would live like this? Did you see that?” Natalie pleaded innocence. She was checking her phone. “All you do is check that phone. Did you come round to see me or check that phone?”

Natalie looked up. A topless lad with a beer bottle in his hand ran across a scrubby patch of grass between two tower blocks and lobbed the bottle into the sole remaining window in a burned-out car. Music accompanied this action. It had a certain beauty.

“I hate the way the camera jumps all over the place like that,” said Marcia. “You can’t forget about the filming for a minute. Why do they always do that these days?”

This struck Natalie as a profound question.

156. Melanie

Natalie Blake was in her office making some notes on an arcane detail of property law as it pertained to adverse possession when Melanie walked in, tried to speak and burst into tears. Natalie did not know what to do with a crying person. She placed a hand upon Melanie’s shoulder.

“What happened?”

Melanie shook her head. Liquid came out of her nose and a bubble appeared in the corner of her mouth.

“A problem at home?”

All Natalie knew about Melanie’s private realm was that her boyfriend was a policeman and there was a daughter called Rafaella. Neither the policeman nor Melanie was Italian.

“Take a tissue,” said Natalie. She had a snot phobia. Melanie fell into a chair. She took a phone from her pocket. Between heaving fits of weeping she seemed to be trying to find something on it. Natalie watched her thumb, frantic on the rollerball.

“I just really need to not be here!” This problem sounded interesting, and quite unexpected coming from plain-speaking, reliable Melanie, whom Natalie often described as “her rock.” (It was the year everyone was saying that such and such a person was “their rock.”) But now Melanie turned blandly practical: “Not all the time! The fact is I’ve got Rafs and I love her and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t have Rafs anymore! Look at her — she’s so bloody brilliant now, she’s almost two.”

Natalie leaned forward to peer at an image on a screen. A grand seigneur to whom a frightened peasant has come, with a confession about the harvest.

157. On the park

Natalie Blake was busy with the Kashmiri border dispute, at least as far as it related to importing stereos into India through Dubai on behalf of her giant Japanese electronics manufacturing client. Her husband Frank De Angelis was out entertaining clients. They were “time poor.” They didn’t even have time to collect their latest reward for all their hard work. Marcia kindly went to get the key before the estate agent closed, and Natalie met her mother and Leah at the front door. They whispered as they entered. It was unclear why. There were no blinds in yet and their shadows rose over the fireplace and up to the ceiling. Natalie led them around, pointing out where sofas and chairs and tables were to be placed, what would be knocked through and what kept, what carpeted and what stripped and polished. Natalie encouraged her mother and her friend to stand in front of the bay window and admire the view of the park. She recognized in herself a need for total submission.

She ran a little ahead to admire a bedroom. Look at this original cornicing. Here is a working fireplace. She waited for her mother and Leah to join her. She picked at a piece of loose plaster with a fingernail. When she had been a pupil and on the “wrong” side of a criminal case, Marcia had wanted her to “think of the victim’s family.” Now if she was instructed by some large multinational company, she had to listen to Leah’s self-righteous, ill-informed lectures about the evils of globalization. Only Frank supported her. Only he ever seemed proud. The more high profile the case, the more it pleased him. Cheryl, years ago: “Every time I try and go back to school, Cole tries to knock me up.” There but for the grace of God. Thinking of Cheryl was always helpful in moments of anxiety. At least Natalie Blake and Frank De Angelis weren’t working against each other, or in competition. They were incorporated. An advert for themselves. Let me show you round this advert for myself. Here is the window, here is the door. And repeat, and repeat.

Natalie was opening the door to what she had decided would be her office when Marcia said something probably quite innocent—“Plenty of space for a family in here”—and Natalie manufactured a row out of it and wouldn’t back down. She watched her mother walk the black and white tiled hallway to the door, no longer the indomitable mistress of her childhood, but a small, gray-haired woman in a sagging woolly hat who surely deserved gentler treatment than she received.

“You all right?” said Leah.

“Yes, yes,” said Natalie, “it’s just the usual.”

Leah found some tea-bags in a kitchen cupboard and a single cup.

“People actually think I’m early QC material. Doesn’t mean anything to her. All you have to do with her is move back in. Cheryl’s her angel now. They get on like a house on fire.”

“You’re difficult for her to understand.”

“Why? What’s difficult about me?”

“You have your work. You have Frank. You’ve got all these friends. You’re getting to be so successful. You’re never lonely.”

Natalie tried to picture the woman being described. Leah sat down on the step.

“Trust me, Pauline’s the same.”

158. Conspiracy

Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were of the belief that people were willing them to reproduce. Relatives, strangers on the street, people on television, everyone. In fact the conspiracy went deeper than Hanwell imagined. Blake was a double agent. She had no intention of being made ridiculous by failing to do whatever was expected of her. For her, it was only a question of timing.

159. In the park

Leah was late. Natalie sat in the park café, outside, at one of the wooden tables, protected from the drizzle by a broad green umbrella. The first ten minutes she spent on her phone. Checking the listings, checking her e-mail, checking the newspapers. She put her phone in her pocket. For ten further minutes no one spoke to her and she did not speak to anyone. Squirrels and birds passed in and out of view. The longer she spent alone the more indistinct she became to herself. A liquid decanted from a jar. She saw herself slip from the bench to the ground and take the shape of an animal. Moving on all fours, she reached the end of the damp tarmac and passed over into the grass and mulch. Continuing on, quicker now, getting the hang of four-legged locomotion, moving swiftly across the lawn and the artificial hillocks, the Quiet Garden and the flowerbeds, into the bushes, across the road, and on to the railway sidings, howling.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry. Central line. Jesus, it’s like a crèche out here.”

Natalie looked up at the kids and chaos at every table and smiled neutrally at her friend and wondered at what point during their lunch date she should give Leah her news.

160. Time speeds up

There is an image system at work in the world. We wait for an experience large or brutal enough to disturb it or break it open completely, but this moment never quite arrives. Maybe it comes at the very end, when everything breaks and no more images are possible. In Africa, presumably, the images that give shape and meaning to a life, and into whose dimensions a person pours themselves — the journey from son to Chief, from daughter to protector — are drawn from the natural world and the collective imagination of the people. (When Natalie Blake said “In Africa” what she meant was “at an earlier point in time.”) In that circumstance there would probably be something beautiful in the alignment between the one and the many.

Pregnancy brought Natalie only more broken images from the great mass of cultural detritus she took in every day on a number of different devices, some handheld, some not. To behave in accordance with these images bored her. To deviate from them filled her with the old anxiety. She grew anxious that she was not anxious about the things you were meant to be anxious about. Her very equanimity made her anxious. It didn’t seem to fit into the system of images. She drank and ate as before and smoked on occasion. She welcomed, at last, the arrival of some shape to her dull straight lines.

Of the coming birth her old friend Layla, who had three children already, said: “Like meeting yourself at the end of a dark alley.”

That was not to be for Natalie Blake. The drugs she requested were astonishing, transcendent; not quite as good as Ecstasy yet with some faint memory of the lucidity and joy of those happy days. She felt euphoric, like she’d gone clubbing and kept on clubbing instead of going home when someone more sensible suggested the night bus. She put her earphones in and danced around her hospital bed to Big Pun. It was not a very dramatic event. Hours turned to minutes. At the vital moment she was able say to herself quite calmly: “Oh, look, I’m giving birth.”

Which is all to say that the brutal awareness of the real that she had so hoped for and desired — that she hadn’t even realized she was counting on — failed to arrive.

161. Otherness

There was, however, a moment — a few minutes after the event, once the child had been washed of gunk and returned to her — that she almost thought she possibly felt it. She looked into the slick black eyes of a being not in any way identical with the entity Natalie Blake, who was, in some sense, proof that no such distinct entity existed. And yet was not this being also an attribute of Natalie Blake? An extension? At that moment she wept and felt a terrific humility.

Very soon after there were flowers and cards and photographs and friends and family who came round bearing gifts that demonstrated different degrees of taste and sense and the mysterious black-eyed other was replaced by a sweet-tempered seven-pound baby called Naomi. People came with advice. Caldwell people felt everything would be fine as long as you didn’t actually throw the child down the stairs. Non-Caldwell people felt nothing would be fine unless everything was done perfectly and even then there was no guarantee. She had never been so happy to see Caldwell people. She could not place Leah Hanwell in this schema with any accuracy, as it is hardest to caricature the people you’ve loved best in your life. Leah came round with a soft white rabbit, and looked at Natalie as if she had passed over a chasm into another land.

162. Evidence

Fourteen months after her first child was born, Natalie Blake had a second. He was meant to be called Benjamin, but he arrived with a little tuft of hair on top of his head, like a spike, and they called him Spike for three days, and then recalled a romantic, childless afternoon, years earlier, spent watching a matinee revival of She’s Gotta Have It.

Frank was joyful, and forgetful of practicalities, and for a while Natalie found she had to treat him as a third child, a fourth child — if she included the nanny — to be managed and directed along with the rest of them so that time was maximized and everybody got to where they needed to be. Only Natalie herself was allowed to waste time, sitting at her desk, looking through digital images of her brood. This action, considered objectively, was identical to the occasions in which she had been called upon to review photographs of a crime scene. One morning Melanie caught her midway through this reverie and could not hide her delight. Hidden behind the image of Spike was another window, of listings. Natalie submitted, irritably, to a hug.

163. Architecture as destiny

To Leah it was sitting room, to Natalie living room, to Marcia, lounge. The light was always lovely. And she still liked to stand in the bay and admire her view of park. Looking around at the things she and Frank had bought and placed in this house, Natalie liked to think they told a story about their lives, in which the reality of the house itself was incidental, but it was also of course quite possible that it was the house that was the unimpeachable reality and Natalie, Frank and their daughter just a lot of human shadow-play on the wall. Shadows had been passing over the walls of this house since 1888 sitting, living, lounging. On a good day Natalie prided herself on small differences, between past residents, present neighbors and herself. Look at these African masks. Abstract of a Kingston alleyway. Minimalist table with four throne-like chairs. At other times — especially when the nanny was out with Naomi and she was alone in the living room feeding the baby — she had the defeating sense that her own shadow was identical to all the rest, and to the house next door, and the house next door to that.

All along the street that autumn the sound of babies crying kept the lights on, late into the night. In Natalie’s house on the park, the shock of The Crash dislodged a little plaster in the wall in a shape of a fist and stopped plans for a basement extension. Off work and eager to feel useful, Natalie Blake waited till Spike’s nap, opened a Word document and with a great sense of purpose typed the title

Following the money: A wife’s account

She had a professional gift for expressing herself, and it was infuriating to listen to attacks on the radio and television upon what she thought of as the good character of her husband. As if poor Frank — whose bonus was, proportionally speaking, negligible — were no different in kind to all these epic crooks and fraudsters.

She was keen to engage him on this subject when he came home. He looked up from his take-away.

“You’ve never asked me a single thing about work, ever.”

Natalie denied this, though it was substantively true. In the name of journalism, she pursued her point.

“It shouldn’t be a question of individual morals, should it? It should be a legal question of regulation.”

Frank put his chopsticks down: “Why are we talking about this?”

“It’s history. You’re a part of it.”

Frank denied being a part of history. He returned to his chow mein. Natalie Blake could not be stopped.

“A lot of our tenants write pieces online these days, for the papers. Thought pieces. I should be doing more things like that. At least it’s something I can do from home.”

Frank nodded at the remote control. “Can we watch TV now? I’m tired to death.”

There was no relief to be found on the television.

“Turn it over,” said Frank, after five minutes of the news. Natalie turned it over.

“If the city closed tomorrow,” said Frank, without looking at his wife, “this country would collapse. End of story.”

Upstairs the baby started crying.

Over the next few days Natalie was able to add only two more lines to her attempt at social criticism:

I am very aware that I am not what most people have in mind when they think of a “banker’s wife.” I am a highly educated black woman. I am a successful lawyer.

She blamed her slow progress on Spike, but in fact the child was a good sleeper and Natalie had the Polish woman, Anna. She had plenty of time. A week later, in the course of attending to her e-mail, she caught sight of the document on her desktop and quietly moved it to a part of her computer where she would not easily stumble across it again. She watched TV in the living room and fed her child. The light failed earlier and earlier. The leaves turned brown and orange and gold. The foxes screamed. Sometimes she checked the listings. The young men on television cleared their desks. Walked out with their boxes held in front of them like shields.

164. Semi-detached

Each time she returned to work, the challenge was perfectly clear: make it happen so it seems like it never happened. There was much written about this phenomena in the “Woman” section of Sunday supplements, and Natalie read this material with interest. The key to it all was the management of time. Fortunately, time management was Natalie’s gift. She found a great deal of time was saved by simple ambivalence. She had no strong opinions about what young children ate, wore, watched, listened to, or what kind of beverage holder they utilized to drink milk or something other than milk.

At other times she was surprised to meet herself down a dark alley. It filled her with panic and rage to see her spoiled children sat upon the floor, flicking through past images, moving images, of themselves, on their father’s phone, an experience of self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence — outside dream and miracle — until very recently. Until just before just now.

165. Stage directions

Interior. Night. Artificial light.

Left and right back, high, one small window. Closed blind.

Front right, a door, ajar. Bookshelves to the right and left.

Simple desk. Folding chair. Books upon it.

Nat comes through door. Looks up at window. Stands close to window.

Opens blind. Closes blind. Leaves. Returns. Leaves.

A pause.

Returns with urgency, opens blind. Removes books from chair. Sits. Stands.

Walks to door. Returns. Sits. Opens laptop. Closes. Opens.

Types.

FRANK [mechanical tone, out of sight] Bed. Coming? [pause] Coming?

NAT Yes. [types quickly] No. Yes.

166. Time speeds up

Now that there was so much work to do — now that the whole of her life had essentially become work — Natalie Blake felt a calm and contentment she had previously only experienced during the run up to university examinations or during pre-trial. If only she could slow the whole thing down! She had been eight for a hundred years. She was thirty-four for seven minutes. Quite often she thought of a chalk diagram drawn on a blackboard, a long time ago, when things moved at a reasonable pace. A clock-face, meant to signify the history of the universe in a twelve-hour stretch. The big bang came at midday. The dinosaurs arrived mid-afternoon sometime. Everything that concerned humans could be accounted for in the five minutes leading up to midnight.

167. Doubt

Spike began to speak. His favorite thing to say was: “This is my mummy.” The emphasis varied. “This is my mummy. This is my mummy. This is my mummy.”

168. African minimart endgame

She had a new urge for something other than pure forward momentum. She wanted to conserve. To this end, she began going in search of the food of her childhood. On Saturday mornings, straight after visiting the enormous British supermarket, she struggled up the high road with two children in a double buggy and no help to the little African minimart to buy things like yam and salted cod and plantain. It was raining. Horizontal rain. Both children were screaming. Could there be misery loftier than hers?

Naomi threw things in the cart. Natalie threw them out. Naomi threw them in. Spike soiled himself. People looked at Natalie. She looked at them. Back and forth went the looks of paranoia and contempt. It was freezing outside, freezing inside. They managed to join a queue. Just. They only just managed it.

“I’ll tell you a story, Nom-Nom, if you stop that, I’ll tell you a story. Do you want to listen to my story?” asked Natalie Blake.

“No,” said Naomi De Angelis.

Natalie wiped the cold sweat from her forehead with her scarf and looked up to see if anyone was admiring her maternal calm in the face of such impossible provocation. The woman in front of her in the queue came into view. She was emptying her pockets onto the counter, offering to relinquish this and that item. Her children, four of them, cringed around her legs.

Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she’d stopped being able to speak, or even to understand.

169. Lunch with Layla

Her old friend Layla Thompson was now Layla Dean. She’d left the church many years earlier. She worked at a Black and Asian radio station as the head of music programming. She was married to a man who owned and ran two internet café/copy shops in Harlesden. Damien. Three children. Whenever Natalie Blake was having an argument about education (she had arguments of this kind constantly) she held up her old friend Layla as a positive example of all that she was trying to say.

When using Layla as a positive example in this manner she usually neglected to mention that she had not seen Layla for a couple of years. Layla had been having her children and Natalie had not been having children and during this period Natalie had found it difficult to have lunch with Layla, Layla’s concerns seeming so myopic, so narrowly focused. Now that Natalie had children of her own it occurred to her that she would really love to have regular lunches with Layla once again. There were so many things she would be able say to Layla that she had not been able to say to anyone else. Lunch was arranged. And now she found herself speaking very fast and fully availing herself of Layla’s hospitality at this beautiful soul food restaurant in Camden High Street. There was a sense in which she couldn’t speak fast enough to get out all the things she wanted to say.

“‘It’s such a relief not to have to pretend to be interested in the news,’” said Natalie Blake, quoting another woman, and eating a small china ladle full of prawns in coconut milk broth. “And I just sat in a circle of these freaks and thought: I really don’t belong here. Show me the exit. I need people I can go out dancing with.” Outside, a car passed playing “Billie Jean.”

“I’ll come dancing with you, Natalie.”

“Thank you! There’s an old school hip-hop night in Farringdon somewhere, my brother told me about it. We could go next Saturday. I could get my friend Ameeta on board. Beats singing Old Macdonald.”

“I like those kid classes. I used to go all the time.”

“Not this one. This one’s posh. But the bit I really can’t deal with is when they all—” began Natalie and continued in this vein through most of the main course. Men came with punch, they came with punch. Her glass was never half empty or half filled but always filling. Men came with punch. Outside, a car passed playing “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.”

“What?” asked Natalie Blake. She was really too drunk to return to chambers. Her friend Layla was smiling, a little sadly. She was looking at the tablecloth.

“Nothing. You’re exactly the same.”

Natalie was in the middle of texting Melanie to warn her she would not be in now until tomorrow morning.

“Right. It’s not like I have to become another person just because—”

“You always wanted to make it clear you weren’t like the rest of us. You’re still doing it.”

A waiter came over to ask about dessert. Natalie Blake, though eager for dessert, felt now she could not really order one. She was struck with dread. Her heart beat madly. She had a schoolgirl’s impulse to report Layla Dean née Thompson to the waiter. Layla’s being horrible to me! Layla hates me! Outside, a car passed playing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.”

Layla did not look up at the waiter and after a moment he went away. She had a thick white napkin she was twisting in both hands.

“Even when we used to do those songs you’d be with me but also totally not with me. Showing off. False. Fake. Signaling to the boys in the audience, or whatever.”

“Layla, what are you talking about?”

“And you’re still doing it.”

170. In drag

Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.

171. Me, myself and I

Natalie put Naomi in her car-seat and locked the buckle. Natalie put Spike in his car-seat and locked the buckle. Natalie climbed up into the giant car. Natalie closed all the windows. Natalie put on the air conditioning. Natalie put Reasonable Doubt in the stereo. Natalie instructed Frank to mute egregious profanity as and when it arrived.

172. Box sets

Walking down Kilburn High Road Natalie Blake had a strong desire to slip into the lives of other people. It was hard to see how this desire could be practicably satisfied or what, if anything, it really meant. “Slip into” is an imprecise thought. Follow the Somali kid home? Sit with the old Russian lady at the bus-stop outside Poundland? Join the Ukrainian gangster at his table at the cake shop? A local tip: the bus stop outside Kilburn’s Poundland is the site of many of the more engaging conversations to be heard in the city of London. You’re welcome.

Listening was not enough. Natalie Blake wanted to know people. To be intimately involved with them.

Meanwhile:

Everyone in both Natalie’s workplace and Frank’s was intimately involved with the lives of a group of African-Americans, mostly male, who slung twenty-dollar vials of crack in the scrub between a concatenation of terribly designed tower blocks in a depressed and forgotten city with one of the highest murder rates in the United States. That everyone should be so intimately involved in the lives of these young men annoyed Frank, though he could not really put his finger on why, and in protest he exempted himself and his wife from what was by all accounts an ecstatic communal televisual experience.

Meanwhile:

Natalie Blake checked her listing. Replied to her replies.

173. In the playground

You can’t smoke in a playground. It’s obvious. Any half-civilized person ought to know that.

Yes, agreed Natalie. Yes, of course.

Is he still smoking? Asked the old white lady.

Natalie leaned forward on the bench. He was still smoking. About eighteen years old. He was with two other kids: a white boy with terrible acne and a very pretty girl in a gray tracksuit and neon yellow Nikes. The girl was doing what Natalie and her friends used to call “lounging” or “plotting,” i.e., she sat between the white boy’s legs with her elbows on his knees in a lazy summertime embrace. And they looked quite nice together, lounging on the roundabout. But it could not be denied: the smoking boy was standing on the roundabout. Smoking.

I’m going to give them all a piece of my mind. Said the old white lady. They’re all off that bloody estate.

The old lady went over and at the same moment Naomi ran from the paddling pool into her mother’s arms crying TOWEL TOWEL TOWEL. In case you were wondering, this was indeed the same pool in which the dramatic event had occurred, many years earlier. Natalie Blake wrapped a towel around her daughter and put plastic sandals on her feet.

The old lady returned.

Is he still smoking? He was very rude to me.

Yes. Said Natalie Blake. Still smoking.

PUT IT OUT. Shouted the old lady.

Natalie picked Naomi up in her arms and walked over to the roundabout. As she approached, a middle-aged woman, a formidable-looking Rasta in a giant Zulu hat, joined her. The two of them stood by the roundabout. The Rasta folded her arms across her chest.

You need to put that out. This is a playground. Said Natalie.

NOW. Said the Rasta. You shouldn’t even be in here. I heard how you spoke to that lady. That lady is your elder. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Just put it out. Said Natalie. My child is here. Said Natalie, though she really did not have strong feelings about secondhand smoke, particularly when it was outside in the open air.

Listen if someone comes disrespecting me, said the boy, I’m gonna tell them to get off my fucking case. Did she address me respectfully though? Don’t lie, cos they all heard you and no you didn’t.

YOU CANNOT SMOKE IN A CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND. Shouted the old lady. From the bench.

But why did she have to get in my face in that manner? Inquired the boy.

She has a right! Insisted the Rasta woman.

Just put it out. Said Natalie. This is a playground.

Listen, I don’t do like you lot do round here. This ain’t my manor. We don’t do like you do here. In Queen’s Park. You can’t really chat to me. I’m Hackney, so.

• • •

This was an unwise move, rhetorically speaking. Even the lounging girl groaned.

• • •

Oh, NO. Said the Rasta. No you didn’t. No no no. You having a laugh? I’m Hackney? So? SO? Listen, you can try and mess with these people but you can’t mess with me, sunshine. I know you. In a deep way. I’m not Queen’s Park, love, I’m HARLESDEN. Why would you talk about yourself in that way? Why would you talk about your area that way? Oh you just pissed me off, boy. I’m from Harlesden — certified youth worker. Twenty years. I am ashamed of you right now. You’re the reason why we’re where we are right now. Shame. Shame!

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Said the boy. The girl laughed.

You think this is funny? Said the Rasta. Keep laughing, my sista. Where do you think this leads? Said the Rasta, to the girl.

Me? But I ain’t even involved! How am I even involved?

Nowhere. Said Natalie. Nowhere. Nowhere. NOWHERE.

Mummy stop shouting! Said Naomi.

Natalie did not know why she was shouting. She began to fear she was making herself ridiculous.

I feel sorry for you, really. Said a previously uninvolved Indian man, who now joined the circle of judgment. You’re obviously very unhappy, dissatisfied young people.

Oh my days don’t you fucking start! Cried the girl. The white boy she was lounging with looked at the gathering crowd and opened his eyes very wide. He started to laugh.

You lot crease me up. He said.

How did this even get like this to this level? Asked the girl, laughing. I’m just sitting here, chillin! How am I even involved? Marcus, man, you’re bait. This is on you. Next thing I know I’m on fucking Jeremy Kyle.

Why are you laughing? Asked the old white woman, who now stood with the rest, by the roundabout. I don’t think this is very funny.

Oh man, this is long. Said the girl. This one’s back at it now. Old Mother Hubbard’s on the fucking case again. Shit is crazy!

All of this? Asked Marcus. For a fag. Is it really worth it though? Just sit down back where you was and calm yourselves. Go handle your business. Sit down, man.

Fools. Said the girl.

Just put it out, man. Said Natalie. She had not ended a sentence in “man” for quite some time.

Oi, Marcus. Said the girl. Just put that fag out please, shut this woman up. This is just getting to be ridiculous now.

You should be ashamed of yourself. Said the old white lady.

I was willing to chat with you, right? Said the Rasta. Adult to adult and try and comprehend your point of view. But you just lost me with that nonsense. Shame on you, brother. And the sad thing is I’ve seen where it leads.

Don’t worry ’bout me. Said Marcus. I get paid. I do all right. Said Marcus.

Marcus popped his collar. This gesture was not convincing.

I get paid, I do all right. Repeated Natalie. Her lip was curled up in a snarl. I get paid, I do all right. She repeated. Yeah, sure you do. I’m a lawyer, mate. That’s paid. That’s really paid.

These people are fucking mental. Said the girl.

If she come over and ask me respectfully, yeah? I would have just done it. Argued Marcus. I’m actually an intelligent young man? But when someone don’t respect me then they’re disrespecting to me and then I’m going to step to them.

If you had any real self-respect or self-esteem, argued Natalie, one person asking you to put a cigarette out in a fucking playground would not register as an attack on your precious little ego.

• • •

A small crowd had gathered, of other parents, concerned citizens. This last point of Natalie’s was a great popular success, and she sensed her victory as surely as if a jury had gasped at a cache of photographs in her hand. Easing into triumph, she accidentally locked eyes with Marcus — briefly causing her to stutter — but soon she found a void above his right shoulder and addressed all further remarks to this vanishing point. Around them the argument devolved into smaller disputes. The girl argued with the old lady. Her beau argued with the Rasta. Several people joined together with Natalie to keep yelling at poor Marcus, who by this point had finished his cigarette and looked utterly exhausted.

174. Peach, peonies

She couldn’t find the address and walked past it several times. It was a non-descript door with a double-glazed panel, squeezed between Habitat and Waitrose on the Finchley Road. Run-down, a 1930s block. She pressed the button and was immediately buzzed up. She stopped to examine some plastic flowers in the hall, extraordinary in their verisimilitude. Four flights, no lift. Natalie Blake stood at the inner door for a long time. In order to ring the bell she had to perform an act she later characterized to herself as “leaving her own body.” Through the glass she could see peach carpet and peach walls, and a corner of the living room where a puffy white leather sofa stood, with walnut legs and arms. Opposite the sofa she spotted a matching chair and giant pouffe, done in the same style. On a hallway table sat a newspaper. She strained to see which one and concluded it was a copy of The Daily Express, partially obscured by an old-fashioned finger dial telephone, also in cream with a brass handle. She thought of the listing, which had described this couple as “upscale.” Two bodies approached the door. She saw them clearly through the glass. Much older than they’d said. In their sixties. Awful, crepey white skin with blue veins. Everyone’s seeking a BF 18–35. Why? What do they think we can do? What is it we have that they want? She heard them calling: Come back!

175. Golders Green Crematorium

It was not difficult for Natalie Blake to get dressed for a funeral. Most of her clothes had a funereal aspect. It was harder to dress the children and she made this the focus of her anxiety, banging cupboard doors and throwing whatever got in her way to the floor.

In the car her husband Frank De Angelis asked: “Was he a good guy?”

“I don’t know what that means,” replied Natalie Blake.

As they pulled into the car park there was not a face in the rearview mirror that she didn’t recognize, even if she lacked their names. Caldwell people, Brayton people, Kilburn people, Willesden people. Each marking a particular period. Surely she was no more than a narcissistic form of timepiece for them, too. And yet. She stepped down from her car to the courtyard. A friend of her mother’s touched her arm. She moved toward the memorial garden. A man who ran the Caldwell Residents Association lay his big hand on her neck and squeezed. Was it possible not only to have contempt for the people who kept time for you? Was it also possible to love them? “You all right, Keisha?” “Natalie, good to see you.” “All right, love?” “Miss Blake, long time.” The weird nod of recognition people give each other at funerals. Not only was Colin Hanwell dead but a hundred people who had shared the same square mile of streets with the man now recognized that relation, which was both intimate and accidental, close and distant. Natalie had not really known Colin (it was not possible to have really known Colin) but she had known what it was to know of Colin. To have Colin be an object presented to her consciousness. So had all these others.

People spoke. People sang. And did those feet, in ancient times. Natalie was forced to come and go as each of her children kicked up a fuss. Finally the curtain opened and the coffin disappeared. Dusty Springfield. There are things you can only learn about people after they’re dead. As the congregation filed out, Leah stood in the doorway with her mother. She wore a terrible long black skirt and blouse that someone must have lent her. Natalie could hear well-meaning strangers burdening Leah with long, irrelevant memories. Story-telling. “Thank you for coming,” said Leah, mechanically, as each passed by. She looked very pale. No siblings. No cousins. Only Michel to help.

“Oh, Lee,” exclaimed Natalie Blake, when it was her turn, and wept and held her good friend Leah Hanwell very tightly. If only someone could have forced Natalie Blake to attend a funeral every day of her life!

176. Oblivion

The Cranley Estate, Camden. More N than NW. A skinny man who called himself “JJ” and looked not unlike her uncle Jeffrey. And an Iranian girl, with an equally unlikely moniker: “Honey.” They were in their early twenties, disasters. Natalie Blake assumed crack, but it could easily have been meth or something else again. Honey had one tooth missing. Their living room barely deserved the name. Nasty, filthy futon, TV on the whole time. The whole place stank of weed. They were sat on beanbags, barely conscious, watching Deal or No Deal. They did not appear nervous. JJ said: Chill here first for a bit. I just got in and I’m bushed. He did not indicate a chair. Ever accommodating, Natalie Blake found a spot on the floor between the two of them.

She tried to concentrate on the show, having never seen it before. Her phone kept beeping with texts from work. JJ had an elaborate conspiracy theory about the order of the boxes. The only thing to do was to accept the joint and let the weed take her. Quite soon she lost track of time. At some point the TV watching finished and JJ started playing a videogame: goblins and swords and elves talking nonsense. Natalie excused herself to go to the loo. She opened the wrong door, saw a leg, heard a cry. That’s Kelvin, said JJ, he’s crashing here right now. He works nights.

The toilet seat was see-through plexi with a goldfish print. The water out of the tap was brown. Head and Shoulders. Radox. Both empty.

Natalie wandered back in. JJ was busy speaking to the screen. Tell me where the friggin’ grain store is. An enigmatic peasant woman smiled back at him. Natalie tried to make conversation. Had he ever done anything like this before? A few times, he said, when there’s fuck all else to do. They’re usually mad ugly though and I kick them out before they get in the door. Oh, said Natalie. She waited. Nothing. Honey, bored, turned to her guest. What you do Keisha? You seem nice girl. I’m a hairdresser, said Natalie Blake. Oh! Listen, she does hair. That’s nice. I am from Iran. JJ made a face: Axis of Evil! Honey smacked him, but with affection. She stroked Natalie’s face. You believe in auras, Keisha?

More weed was rolled, and smoked. At some point Natalie remembered that Frank was also working late. She texted Anna and bribed her with time-and-a-half rate to stay till eleven and put the children to bed. JJ arrived at a castle where he was set a new list of tasks. Honey started wondering aloud about some MDMA powder she’d left in a gum wrapper somewhere. Natalie said: I don’t think this is going to really happen, is it? JJ said: Probably not, to be honest with you.

177. Envy

Leah wished Natalie Blake would speak at a charity auction for a young black women’s collective Leah had helped fund. She kept going on about it. But the hall they’d managed to rent for the occasion was south of the river.

“I don’t go south,” protested Natalie Blake.

“It’s a really good cause,” insisted Leah Hanwell.

Natalie Blake thanked Leah for her introduction and stood in front of the podium. She gave a speech about time management, identifying goals, working hard, respecting oneself and one’s partner, and the importance of a good education. “Anything purely based on physicality is doomed to failure,” she read. “To survive, your ambitions should be in the same direction.” One day she would probably find herself having to say something of this kind to Leah. Not right now, but some day. She would water it down, of course. Poor Leah.

In between the top of page two and the beginning of page three she must have been reading out loud and making sense, there must have appeared to be an unbroken continuity — no one in the audience was looking at her like she was crazy — yet she found her mind traveling to obscene tableaux. She wondered what Leah and Michel, who always seemed to have their hands on each other, did in the privacy of their bedroom. Orifices, positions, climaxes. “And it was by refusing to set myself artificial limits,” explained Natalie Blake to the collective of young black women, “that I was able to reach my full potential.”

178. Beehive

The lovely voice came through the speakers in the park café. Natalie Blake and her friend Leah Hanwell had long ago agreed that this voice sounded like London — especially its Northern and North Western zones — as if its owner were patron saint of their neighborhoods. Is a voice something you can own? Natalie’s daughter and many other children were bouncing up and down and dancing to the song as their parents discreetly nodded their heads. The sun was out. Unfortunately Leah Hanwell was habitually late and soon the song had finished and Naomi was screaming about something and Spike had woken up and Leah had missed a perfectly staged demonstration of the joy of life — of family life in particular. “She’s really depressed,” said Natalie to Frank as they waited. “She thinks I can’t see it. I see it. Completely stuck. Stasis. She can’t seem to dig herself out of this hole she’s in.” But as soon as she’d said it the possibility confronted her that this judgment had merely arisen from the song, was really only a final verse Natalie herself had added on the spur of the moment, and that by saying it out loud she had made herself ridiculous. Frank looked up from his paper and caught her face arrested in its state of calamity. “Leah and Michel are happy-as-Larry,” he said.

• • •

Some time later Natalie saw the singer interviewed on the television: “When I was growing up, I didn’t think I was anything special, I thought everybody could sing.” Her voice was the same miracle Natalie had once heard, through a pub window, in Camden. But the woman who did or didn’t own it had all but disappeared. Natalie stared at the knock-kneed girl-child, hardly there, almost nothing.

179. Aphorism

What a difficult thing a gift is for a woman! She’ll punish herself for receiving it.

180. All the mod cons

Charming Primrose Hill. After much negotiation on e-mail, a daytime assignation was agreed: three o’clock. The woman opened the front door and said Phew! Weave, dressing gown, heels, beautiful, unmistakeably African. Her main objective was curling an arm around Natalie Blake and getting her into the giant house before anyone saw. Sartorially, Natalie kept to the same theme: gold hoops, denim skirt, suede boots with tassels, the hair bobble with the black and white dice, and her work clothes in a rucksack on her back. Catching herself in a huge gilt mirror in the hall she found herself convincing. At this point she was determined. At least they were attractive. Natalie Blake still believed that attraction was what mattered.

Farrow and Ball Utopia Green (matte) in the hall. African wall sculpture. Modern minimalist pieces. A gold record framed. A picture of Marley framed. Front page of a newspaper framed. A sort of horrible “good taste” everywhere. Natalie Blake looked up and saw the husband or boyfriend at the top of the stairs. He was especially handsome, with a shaved head, finely shaped. Good-looking couple, they looked like each other. Like something from an advert for American life insurance. He smiled at Natalie and showed a lot of dentistry, luminous and perfectly straight. Silky dressing gown. Cheesy. We’re so pleased you’re here, Keisha, we weren’t sure you were for real. Can you believe she’s for real? Too good to be true. Come up here Sista so I can really take you in. Soul music playing upstairs. 2009 limited-edition Bloom baby highchair, like a space station, levitating in the kitchen. MacBook Air open on the kitchen table. An older Mac closed on the stairs. He stretched out his hand. Beautiful crib you got, said Natalie Blake. You’re beautiful, he said. Natalie felt his wife or girlfriend’s hand on her backside.

Upstairs she was introduced to a sleigh bed, of the kind that was fashionable about five years earlier. The shoe cupboard was open. Red soled from floor to ceiling. Above the bed they had that too-familiar tube map with the stops replaced by icons of the last millenium, gathered in cliques and movements. Natalie looked for Kilburn: Pele. On the bed an iPad played pornography, threesomes, and this was the first time Natalie had ever seen that particular piece of technology. Two girls ate each other out while a man sat on a desk with his dick in his hand. They were all German.

The beautiful African woman kept talking. Where are you from? Are you in college? What do you want to be? Don’t ever give up. It’s all about dreaming big. Having aspirations. Working hard. Not accepting no for an answer. Being whoever you want to be.

The more Natalie Blake stood there, fully dressed and unresponsive, the more nervous they got, the more they talked. Finally Natalie asked to go to the bathroom. En-suite. She climbed into a reclaimed Victorian bath clad in brass and porcelain from The Water Monopoly. She knew she was finished here. She lay back. Acqua di Parma. Chanel. Molton Brown. Marc Jacobs. Tommy Hilfiger. Prada. Gucci.

181. Easter Holidays

Anna had gone to Poland for a few days to see her family but now the volcano meant she could not return. Natalie googled. She stared at the great cloud of ash.

“You’re more flexible than I am,” argued Frank, and left the house. The basement was back on track. Builders were everywhere. Frank had worked hard to put things back on track. They both had. They deserved everything that was coming to them.

Got any more tea, love? Better keep these kids out of the way, they’re liable to get hurt. Don’t spose there’s a biscuit going begging?

By ten a.m. she found herself trapped in a white painted box with two mysterious black-eyed others who seemed to want something from her that she had no way of either comprehending or providing. Men in orange tabards went back and forth. This milk is off, love. Got any jam? She gathered the children in her arms and left this building site, her kitchen. She took them to her mother’s flat. To the park. To the zoo. To Kilburn market. To the African minimart. To Cricklewood Toys R Us. Home.

Naomi related this odyssey in far greater detail to her father when he came home.

“You’re amazing,” said Frank, and kissed Natalie Blake’s cheek. “I would have just sat around wasting my time, playing with them all day.”

182. Love in the ruins

They were nice young men, and clearly astounded that anyone had replied to their premise. Natalie felt certain they must have posted when they were pissed. Cousins? Brothers? A 1950’s semi, in Wembley, facing the North Circular, double-glazed to within an inch of its life. It was a family house with the family missing. What Brayton kids used to call a “Cornershop Villa.” Natalie Blake could not explain why she knew they weren’t going to kill her. She had to recognize in herself a perfectly irrational belief that whether or not a person has murderous intent toward you is one of those things “you can just tell” about people. Certainly it helped that when they opened the door they looked more scared than she did. Oh my days. I told you, Dinesh. I told you. I told you it ain’t no bloke. Come in, love. Come in, Keisha. Oh my days. You’re fit and all. What you saying that for! Why not? She knows and we know. She knows and we know. No surprises. Oh my days! Go that way, lovely. We ain’t gonna hurt you innit we’re nice boys. Oh my word, no one is gonna believe this, man. I don’t even believe this. Go in there. We gonna take turns or what? What? I don’t want to see you naked, bruv! That’s some gay madness. Yeah but she wants to double team innit! That ain’t one then another! That’s two simulty-simultany-simu — at the same time. Don’t you know what double team means bruv? Double team. You don’t know what you’re even chatting about. Double team! Shut up you joker. Natalie listened to them arguing in the hall. She sat waiting in the kitchen. A large puddle of water surrounded the freezer. All the doors said FIRE DOOR. They came back in. Shyly they suggested that everybody adjourn to a bedroom. It was peculiar how shy they were, given the circumstance. Constantly bickering. In here. Are you mental? I ain’t doing it in there. Bibi sleeps in there! In there, man. Chief. Follow me, Keisha, make yourself comfortable, yeah? Dinesh man there ain’t even no sheet! Go get a sheet! Stop using my name! No names. We’re gonna get a sheet, wait right here don’t move.

Natalie Blake lay back on the mattress. On top of the wardrobe there was a lot of boxed-up stuff. Stuff that no-one was coming back for. Surplus to requirements. There was something terribly sad about the whole place. She wished she could take the boxes down and sift through them and save whatever needed to be saved.

The door opened and the young men re-emerged in only their Calvin Kleins, one black pair, one white, like two featherweights in a boxing ring. No older than 20. They got out a laptop. The idea appeared to be like roulette. You click and a human being appears, in real time. Click again. Click again. Eighty percent of the time they got a penis. The rest were quiet girls playing with their hair, groups of students who wanted to talk, shaven-headed thugs standing in front of their national flags. On the rare occasions it was a girl they would at once started typing: GET YOUR TITS OUT. Natalie asked them: boys, why are we doing this? You’ve got the real thing right here. But they kept on with the Internet. It seemed to Natalie that they were stalling for time. Or maybe they couldn’t do anything without the Net somewhere in the mix. You try it, Keisha, you try it, see who you get. Natalie sat at the laptop. She got a lonely boy in Israel who typed YOU NICE and took out his penis. You like being watched Keisha? Do you like it? We’ll leave it there, on the dresser. How d’you want it Keisha? Just tell us and we’ll do it. Anything. And still Natalie Blake knew she was in no danger. Just do what you want, said Natalie Blake.

But neither of them could really manage it at all, and soon they blamed each other. It’s him! It’s cos I’m looking at him, man. He’s messing with my groove. Don’t listen to him he ain’t got no groove.

They were satisfied to play about like teenagers. Natalie became very impatient. She was not a teenager anymore. She knew what she was doing. She did not feel she had to wait around hoping to be penetrated. She could envelop. She could hold. She could release.

She sat the boy in the black Calvins on the edge of bed, rolled his foreskin down, got on him, advised him not to touch her or otherwise move unless she said so. A narrow cock but not ugly. He said: you’re quite strong-minded innit Keisha. Know what you want and that. They say that about sistas don’t they? And to this, Natalie Blake replied: I really couldn’t give a fuck what they say. She could see the boy had no useful rhythm — it was better for both of them if he simply stayed still. She ground down on to him. Rocked. Finished very quickly, though not as quickly as his circumcised friend on the other side of the bed who gave a little groan, spurted dribblingly into his own hand and disappeared into the bathroom. Dinesh you little chief. Come back in here. Um. This is a bit weird. Where’s he gone? Just you and me. You come already, yeah? Fair enough. You know what I don’t think I’m gonna get there right at the moment Keisha. I feel a bit hot and bothered right now if I’m honest.

She released him. The boy flopped out of her, much reduced. She tucked it back in his pants. She started putting her clothes back on. The other one re-emerged from the loo looking sheepish. She had a spliff left over from Camden, and together they smoked it. She tried to get them to tell her something, anything, about the people who lived in this house but they wouldn’t be distracted from what they called their “chirpsing.” We should worship this girl man. Sista, are you ready to be worshipped? You’re a goddess in my eyes. All night long baby. Till you’re gonna be begging me to stop. Till six in the morning. Dinesh, man, I gotta be at work at eight.

183. Catching up

Natalie Blake fired Anna and hired Maria, who was Brazilian. The basement was completed. Maria moved into it. A new arena of paid time opened up. Natalie and Leah went out to the Irish.

“What’s up with you?” asked Leah Hanwell.

“Nothing much,” said Natalie Blake. “You?”

“Same old.”

Natalie told a story about a boy smoking in the park, emphasizing her own heroic opposition to persistent incivility. She told a story about how mean and miserable their mutual acquaintance Layla Dean had become, in ways intended to subtly flatter Natalie Blake herself. She told a story concerning the children’s preparations for carnival, which could hardly avoid demonstrating the happy fullness of her life.

“But Cheryl wants all ‘the cousins’ on a church float. I don’t want to go on a church float!”

Leah defended Natalie’s right not to accept religion disguised as carnival fun. Leah told a story about her mother being impossible. Natalie defended Leah’s right to be outraged by her mother’s misdemeanors, be they ever so small. Leah told a funny story about upstairs Ned. She told a funny story about Michel’s bathroom habits. Natalie noticed with anxiety that Leah’s stories had no special emphasis or intention.

“Did you ever see that girl again?” asked Natalie Blake. “The one who scammed you — who came to the door?”

“All the time,” said Leah Hanwell. “I see her all the time.”

They drank two bottles of white wine between them.

184. Caught

“What is this? ‘KeishaNW@gmail.com.’ What the fuck is this? Fiction?”

They stood opposite each other in the hallway. He waved a piece of paper at her. Six feet away their kids and the cousins and Cheryl and Jayden were practicing dance routines to be performed on a carnival float the following morning. Marcia was helping sew sequins and feathers on to dayglo leotards. Hearing raised voices, the many members of Natalie Blake’s family paused what they were doing and looked into the hallway.

“Please let’s go upstairs,” said Natalie Blake.

They got up one flight of stairs to the spare room, which had a charming Moroccan theme. Natalie Blake’s husband held her wrist very tightly.

“Who are you?”

Natalie Blake tried to free her wrist.

“You have two children downstairs. You’re meant to be a fucking adult. Who are you? Is this real? Who the fuck is wildinwembley? What is that on your computer?”

“Why are you looking at my computer?” asked Natalie Blake in a small voice, a ludicrous voice.

185. Onwards

Frank sat on the bed with his back to her, a hand over his eyes. Natalie Blake stood up and left the spare room and closed the door. An odd sense of calm followed her downstairs. On the ground floor, in the hall, she bumped into the Brazilian girl, Maria, who regarded her with the same obtuse confusion of last week, when she’d arrived and discovered her employer to be several shades darker than she was herself.

Past the hall where her laptop sat on a side table, the screen still open for anyone to read. Past her family who called out for her. She heard Frank running down the stairs. She saw her coat slung across the banister, keys and phone in the pocket. At the door she had another chance to take something with her (on the hallway table she could see her purse, an oyster card, another set of keys). She walked out of the house with nothing and closed the front door behind her. Out of the bay window Frank De Angelis asked his wife Natalie Blake where she was going. Where she thought she was going. Where the fuck she thought she was going. “Nowhere,” said Natalie Blake.