N.W. Read online

  On Albert Road Felix fell in step behind a tall girl in tight red jeans and black spaghetti-strapped vest. She had broad shoulders and a square trunk. She had more muscles than Felix, and as she walked her muscles moved together, fluid and complicated: the way the arms attached to the back and to the backside and to the hips. Not like Grace at all, who was shorter and curvier and softer. This woman could pick Felix up and run with him all the way home, put him down on his doorstep like a baby. She wore a lot of cheap silver rings, green round their bands, and running down one forearm a tattoo of a flower with a long, winding stem. Her heels were dry and cracked. The label on her top was showing. Should he tuck it in? A trickle of sweat ran from her ear, along her neck and down her back, straight down that muscled division – strongly Defined – between her left side and her right. Her phone rang. She answered it and called somebody ‘Baby’. She turned right. Another life. Felix felt someone push two fingers hard into his back.

  ‘Money. Phone. Now.’

  They were either side of him. Hoods up but perfectly visible. Same two from the train. Not much taller than he was. Not much wider, either. It had just turned six o’clock.

  ‘NOW.’

  He felt himself being jostled, manhandled. He looked up at their faces. The talkative one, the one doing all the cussing, was truly a kid; the other, the silent one, was closer to Felix’s own age, and too old for such foolishness. He had ashy hands, like Felix’s own, and the same dull sheen to his face. Along his cheek a scar ran. He was local somehow, familiar. Felix tried turning away but they swung him back round. He swore at them at length, creatively, and looked to his right: four houses down the tall girl put a key to a lock and went inside.

  ‘Listen, I ain’t giving you nothing. Nothing!’

  He found himself on the pavement. As he got back up on his knees he heard one of them say: ‘Big man on the train. Ain’t the big man now.’ And instead of fear, a feeling of pity came over him; he remembered when being the big man was all that mattered. He reached into his pockets. They could have his phone. They could have the lone twenty in his pocket if it came to that. He’d been mugged many times and knew the drill. When he was younger they might have wounded his ego; now the old fury and humiliation were gone – they could have it all. Everything he cared about was elsewhere. He tried to laugh at them as he handed over his meagre valuables: ‘Should have caught me two hours ago, blud. Two hours ago I was loaded.’ The kid gave him a dead-eyed look, face set in a violent pout. It was a necessary mask, without which he could not do what he was doing. ‘And the stones,’ said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.

  ‘You’re dreamin’,’ he said.

  He turned once more towards the street. A breeze passed over the three of them, filling their hoods and sending a cloud of sycamore leaves spinning to the pavement. A firm punch came to his side. Punch? The pain sliced to the left, deep and down. Warm liquid reversed up his throat. Over his lips. Yet it couldn’t be oblivion as long as he could name it, and with this in mind he said aloud what had been done to him, what was being done to him, he tried to say it, he said nothing. Grace! Down Willesden Lane a bus came rumbling; at the same moment in which Felix glimpsed the handle and the blade he saw the 98 reopen its doors to accept the last soul in sight – a young girl in a yellow summer dress. She ran with her ticket held high above her head like the proof of something, got there just in time, cried out: ‘Thank you!’ and let the doors fold neatly behind her.

  host

  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 square 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 swivelling 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 colour 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, fuelled 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, tea bag, 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 make-up 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 anxiety 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 Oat 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 the joy; 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 towards 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 enquiry was made with the same result. Mrs Hanwell was a general nurse at the Royal Free Hospital and Mrs Blake aChealth visitor afiliated 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 boundary, 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. As might be expected, this route through 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 for far longer than other children, be bored for hours without complaint and was completely devoted to filling in every last corner of the colouring 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 upwards. As if the question itself was 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 enquiries. 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, coloured 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, learnt 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 becau
se 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 wilfulness 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.