Grand Union Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  White Teeth

  The Autograph Man

  On Beauty

  NW

  The Embassy of Cambodia

  Swing Time

  NONFICTION

  The Book of Other People (editor)

  Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

  Feel Free

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Zadie Smith

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin General, a division of Penguin Random House UK, 2019

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  ISBN 9780525558996 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780525559009 (ebook)

  ISBN 9781984879196 (international edition)

  PThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Maud

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Dialectic

  Sentimental Education

  The Lazy River

  Words and Music

  Just Right

  Parents’ Morning Epiphany

  Downtown

  Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets

  Mood

  Escape From New York

  Big Week

  Meet the President!

  Two Men Arrive in a Village

  Kelso Deconstructed

  Blocked

  The Canker

  For the King

  Now More Than Ever

  Grand Union

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  About the Author

  How can anyone fail to be

  —“Yesterday Down at the Canal,” Frank O’Hara

  THE DIALECTIC

  “I would like to be on good terms with all animals,” remarked the woman, to her daughter. They were sitting on the gritty beach at Sopot, looking out at the cold sea. The eldest boy had gone to the arcade. The twins were in the water.

  “But you are not!” cried the daughter. “You are not at all!”

  It was true. What the woman had said was true, in intention, but what the girl had said was true, too, in reality. The woman, though she generally refrained from beef, pork and lamb, ate—with great relish—many other kinds of animals and fish, and put out flypaper in the summer in the stuffy kitchen of their small city apartment and had once (though her daughter did not know this) kicked the family dog. The woman had been pregnant with her fourth child, at the time, and temperamental. The dog seemed to her, at that moment, to be one responsibility too many.

  “I did not say that I am. I said that I should like to be.”

  The daughter let out a cruel laugh.

  “Words are cheap,” she said.

  Indeed, at that moment the woman held a half-eaten chicken wing in her hand, elevated oddly to keep it from being covered in sand, and it was the visible shape of the bones in the chicken wing, and the tortured look of the thin, barbecued skin stretched across those bones, which had brought the subject to mind.

  “I dislike this place,” said the daughter, definitively. She was glaring at the lifeguard, who had once again had to wade into the murk to tell the only bathers—the girl’s own brothers—not to go past the red buoy. They weren’t swimming—they could not swim. There were no waters in the city in which to take lessons, and the seven days they spent in Sopot each year was not long enough to learn. No, they were leaping into the waves, and being knocked over by them, as unsteady on their feet as newborn calves, their chests gray with that strange silt which fringed the beach, like a great smudge God had drawn round the place with a dirty thumb.

  “It makes no sense,” continued the daughter, “to build a resort town around such a filthy and unwelcoming sea.”

  Her mother held her tongue. She had come to Sopot with her own mother and her mother had come with her mother before that. For at least two hundred years people had come here to escape the cities and let their children run wild in the public squares. The silt was of course not filth, it was natural, though no one had ever told the woman exactly what form of natural substance it was. She only knew to be sure to wash out all their costumes nightly in the hotel sink.

  Once, the woman’s daughter had enjoyed the Sopot sea and everything else. The candyfloss and the shiny, battery-operated imitation cars—Ferraris and Mercedes—that you could drive willy-nilly through the streets. She had, like all children who come to Sopot, enjoyed counting her steps as she walked out over the ocean, along the famous wooden boardwalk. In the woman’s view, the best thing about a resort town such as this was that you did whatever everybody else did, without thinking, moving like a pack. For a fatherless family, as theirs now was, this collective aspect was the perfect camouflage. There were no individual people here. In town, the woman was on the contrary an individual, a particularly unfortunate sort of individual, saddled with four fatherless children. Here she was only another mother buying candyfloss for her family. Her children were like all children, their faces obscured by huge clouds of pink spun sugar. Except this year, as far as her daughter was concerned, the camouflage was of no use. For she was on the very cusp of being a woman herself, and if she got into one of those ludicrous toy cars her knees would touch her chin. She had decided instead to be disgusted with everything in Sopot and her mother and the world.

  “It’s an aspiration,” said her mother, quietly. “I would like to look into the eye of an animal, of any animal, and be able to feel no guilt whatsoever.”

  “Well, then it has nothing to do with the animal itself,” said the girl pertly, unwrapping her towel finally and revealing her precious, adolescent body to the sun and the gawkers she now believed were lurking everywhere, behind every corner. “It’s just about you, as usual. Black again! Mama, costumes come in different colors, you know. You turn everything into a funeral.”

  The little paper boat that had held the barbecue chicken must have blown away. It seemed that no matter how warm Sopot became there would always be that northeasterly wind, the waves would be whipped up into “white horses” and the lifeguard’s sign would go up and there would never be a safe time to swim. It was hard to make life go the way you wanted. Now she waved to her boys as they waved at her. But they had only waved to get their mother’s attention, so that now she would see them as they curled their tongues under their bottom lips and tucked their hands into their armpits and fell about laughing when another great wave knocked them over. Their father, who could very easily be—as far as anyone in Sopot was concerned—around the next corner, buying more refreshments for his family, had in reality emigrated, to America, and now fixed car doors onto cars in some gigantic factory, instead of being the co-manager of a small garage, as he had once had the good fortune to be, before
he left.

  She did not badmouth him or curse his stupidity to her children. In this sense, she could not be blamed for either her daughter’s sourness or her sons’ immaturity and recklessness. But privately she hoped and imagined that his days were brutal and dark and that he lived in that special kind of poverty she had heard American cities can provide. As her daughter applied what looked like cooking oil to the taut skin of her tummy, the woman discreetly placed her chicken wing in the sand before quickly, furtively, kicking more sand over it, as if it were a turd she wished buried. And the little chicks, hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, pass down an assembly line, every day of the week, and chicken sexers turn them over, and sweep all the males into huge grinding vats where they are minced alive.

  SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

  Back then, she unnerved men. But couldn’t understand why, and sought answers from unreliable sources. Women’s magazines—women themselves. Later, in midlife, she came to other conclusions. Lay on the grassy pavilion above the Serpentine café, admiring a toddler, her own son, as he waded in and out of the paddling pool. Suddenly her daughter appeared at her shoulder: “You look at him like you’re in love with him. Like you want to paint him.” This daughter had just emerged from the lido, she was covered in duckweed. The toddler wore a huge soggy nappy hanging behind him, hardening like clay. It was something to consider. In the river Christo had placed a flat-topped mastaba, eighty feet tall, formed from many red and purple oil barrels, set atop each other. Pedalos shunted round it. Bold women in wetsuits swam by. Seagulls perched on top of it, shitting. This was also meant to be something to consider. The clouds parted and the late summer sun embraced Christo’s eternal house and everything else, even her daughter’s furious green face. Both the women’s magazines and the women had placed their emphasis on lack and error. The problem was you were “missing” something. Now, a quarter of a century later, she saw that what had looked like a case of lack was in fact a matter of inconvenient surplus. A surplus of what? Can you have a surplus of self?

  But it was true: she’d always thought of men as muses. Always treated them that way.

  * * *

  • • •

  Darryl was the first to like it. He wasn’t very tall. But so beautiful! He had the African backside she wanted for herself; he was compact and muscular all over. Adorable cock, nothing too dramatic, suitable for many situations. She liked it best when it pressed flat against his belly, pointing to a woolly line of hair that thread upward and then spread in two soft plains over his symmetrical chest. His nipples were alive to the world, crazy about it, they were like an insect’s quivering antennae. The only bit of her body like that was her brain. She especially admired the hair on his head, soft and even, with no sharp sides. Her own head had been completely shaved after years of abuse from hairdressers’ chemicals. She was starting afresh, trying to make it grow thicker, hoping to revive the African roots, but no one in that small college town had seen anything like it and she became an inadvertent sensation. But he knew.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Have you met Darryl yet?”

  “But you should meet Darryl! Oh my God you’ve got to!”

  The college as an organism was adamant that they meet. They were two of only four black faces on campus. “Darryl, Monica. Monica, Darryl! Finally!” They tried to be offended but the truth was they were grateful for any facilitation, being shy. They sat with their legs hanging over the water and discovered they’d grown up in the same postcode, ten minutes from each other, without ever meeting, and had been offered similarly low conditional grades—she some Bs, he some Cs—to demonstrate how deserving they were or how little was expected of them or how liberal the college was. It was hard to know. They both vaulted over this low bar, acing everything. As social experiments they were unimpeachable.

  * * *

  • • •

  They became aware that to the college, and on paper, they looked much the same. But they knew better. Street names, school names, the existence versus the absence of fathers. Glancing through the Metro, between Darryl’s stop and her own—having not seen him in twenty-five years—she read a brutal news story and thought, yes, from my school emerged one England football player and two and a half pop stars; from Darryl’s, this grinning loon who just decapitated someone in Iraq. On the other hand, the very first boy Monica ever kissed went on to stab a man to death in a chip shop around the same time she was fixing a mortarboard to her head. Between Darryl’s stop and her own she wondered lazily about what her life might have been had she married Darryl, or that murderous boy, or no one at all. Probably her husband had his own dull map of roads not traveled. You grow conventional in middle life. Choices made over time present themselves as branches running off the solid oaks that line the overground route to Kensal Rise. You grow gray, and thick in the hips. Yet, on happier days, she saw the same small, high breasts, the same powerful long legs, the familiar and delicious brown animal looking back at her, almost never ill and very strong. How much of this was reality? How much delusion? This was the question of the age, as far as she could tell. And the difference between now and being twenty was she was never sure, not from one moment to the next. Next stop Canonbury. Next stop menopause and no more denim. Or was it? Blind worms churning mud through their bodies is a better metaphor for what happens than roads not taken or branches unsprouted. But no metaphor will cover it really. It’s hopeless.

  * * *

  • • •

  Six months prior to meeting Darryl, when she was still in London, she spent an interesting summer with a six-foot-six photographer’s assistant, a white boy from Brixton, ex-skateboarder, who had once been a big name in tagging. There was a Bakerloo train that had one of his purple dragons sprayed down one side. She discovered an irrational admiration for very tall people. Kneeling in front of him felt like a form of worship. One day they were in the bath and she told a lot of jokes, and made him laugh, but like a comedian kept pursuing further laughs, with an increasingly heavy hand, and receiving less return for her efforts: quieter laughter, sighs. She changed tack. Three paragraphs on his ice-blue eyes, and Leni Riefenstahl haircut, and nine-inch, uncut penis. In the spirit of experiment, she went underwater and headed toward him with her mouth open. He got out of the bath and went home and didn’t call for a few days and then wrote a very high-minded letter about being compared to a Nazi. A letter! Arriving in college, she had this cautionary example in mind. Don’t talk about them like they’re objects, they don’t like it. They want to be the subject in all situations. Don’t you try and be the subject. And don’t try to make them laugh and don’t tell them they’re pretty.

  * * *

  • • •

  All these rules had to be adapted for Darryl. He loved to laugh and delighted in physical worship. There was no aggression in him. He lay back and waited to be adored. The easy way she took him into her body, for example, painlessly, subsuming him, providing him with temporary shelter, until it came time to release him. But it was the nineties: the language was not on her side. You didn’t “release” men, they “pulled out.” They were the subject. It had become normal to hear them mouthing off in the pubs, thrilled with the new license to speak sex aloud: “I rammed it right up her” or “I fucked her in the arse.” But with Darryl, Monica discovered that this was just talk, masculine bravado, and in fact the largesse was all the other way around. One afternoon, after they had fucked all the way through the time allotted for morning lectures, she tried out the idea on him:

  “In a matriarchy, you’d hear women boasting to their mates: ‘I subsumed him in my anus. I really made his penis disappear. I just stole it away and hid it deep inside myself until he didn’t even exist.’”

  Darryl was cleaning himself with a tissue at the time, frowning at the brown stains. He stopped and laughed, but then lay back on her sperm-stained blue futon and frowned again, taking the noti
on seriously (he was studying Social Political Science).

  “‘I really swallowed him up,’” Monica continued, getting louder, without meaning to, “‘I took his flesh and totally nullified it with my own flesh.’”

  “Yeah . . . I’m not sure it’ll catch on.”

  “But it should! It would be NICE.”

  Darryl rolled on top of her, no taller and no shorter, and kissed her all over her face.

  “You know what would be even nicer?” he said. “If there was no matriarchy or patriarchy and people just said: ‘Love joined our bodies together and we became one.’”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  There is an old cliché about street life: you leave, the streets follow. In Darryl’s case, this was literal. Monica—who had nothing to do with the streets except living in them—had brought with her only a few pictures, a potted plant, and a fake Senufo stool her mother picked up in a Kenyan airport. Darryl had brought Leon, a third-generation Irish petty criminal from South Kilburn. Not in spirit, or metaphorically, but in person—he was living in Darryl’s college room, on an airbed Darryl deflated each morning and hid in a suitcase so the cleaning ladies wouldn’t find it. It was a strange arrangement, but the oddest thing about it, in Monica’s view, was that Darryl didn’t find it strange. He and Leon did everything together; they’d been friends since they were three. Attended the same local nursery and primary schools, and then on to the same secondary. Now they were going to be undergraduates together. Irrespective of the fact that Leon had failed all his GCSEs, had no A levels, and was not enrolled at the university.

  Very quickly Monica realized that any relationship with Darryl must also be one with Leon. The two friends ate together, drank together, punted together, even studied together—in the sense that Darryl went to the library and Leon sat next to him, feet up on a desk, listening to Paul’s Boutique on his MiniDisc player. The only time Monica had Darryl to herself was when she was nullifying his flesh in her flesh, and that was often over for only a few minutes before they heard Leon’s hearty beatboxing at the door—his “secret signal.” Darryl and Monica had then to get dressed, and the three of them would adjourn: to the college bar, to the river to get high, to the roof of the chapel to get higher.