18
— Oh, I used to faint a lot. A lot! They thought it was a sign of a delicate constitution, sensitive, a bit artistic. But everyone went into the nursing or secretarial back then, you see. That’s simply how it was. We didn’t have the opportunities.
— It was just hot.
— Because you had a lot of potential, no, listen, you did: piano, the recorder, the dancing, the thing with the… the… what’s its name now, oh you know — sculpting — you liked the sculpting for a while, and the violin, you were a wonder on the violin, and lots of little things like that.
— I brought one pot home from school. I played the violin for a month.
— We made sure you had all the lessons, fifty pee here, fifty pee there, it all adds up! And we didn’t always have it! That was your father — God rest him — he didn’t want you to grow up feeling poor, even though we were poor. But you never really settled on the one thing, that’s what I mean. This lawn needs watering.
Pauline stoops down suddenly, coming up with a handful of grass and earth.
— London clay. Very dry. Of course, you girls do everything differently now. You wait and wait and wait. Though what you’re waiting for I don’t know.
Almost purple with the effort, the bowl of white hair damp and flat round her face. Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.
— Eugh. Probably put the mud down now, Mum.
• • •
They sit together on a park bench Michel discovered some years ago. Somebody had left it in the middle of the road, up at Cricklewood Broadway. Calm as you like! Just sitting there in traffic! It looked like it had grown out of the tarmac. All other cars swerved to avoid it. Michel stopped the Mini Metro, put the seats down flat, opened the boot and wedged it in, with Pauline adding an unhelpful hand, to a chorus of car horns. When they got it home they found it had the seal of the Royal Parks upon it. Pauline calls it the throne. Let us sit on the throne for a wee while.
— It was the heat. Olive, come here, baby.
— Not near me! I don’t want my eyes going up! That’s my grandchild, there. Only one I’m likely to get if things go on the way they are. I’m allergic to my own grandchild.
— Mum, enough!
They sit on the throne in silence, staring out in different directions. The problem seems to be two different conceptions of time. She knows the pull of her animal nature should, by now, be making the decisions. Perhaps she’s been a city fox too long. Every new arrival — the announcements seem to come now every day — feels like a terrible betrayal. Why won’t everybody stay still? She has forced a stillness in herself, but it has not stopped the world from continuing on. And then the things that happen only serve to horribly close down the possibilities of all the other things that didn’t happen, and so number 37, and so the door opening at the moment that she stands there, her hand full of leaflets, and Shar saying: put those down, take my hand. Shall we run? Are you ready? Shall we run? Leave all this! Let’s be outlaws! Sleeping in hedgerows. Following the railway line till it reaches the sea. Waking up with that long black hair in her eyes, in her mouth. Phoning home from fantasy boxes that still take the old 2 pees. We’re fine, don’t worry. I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another. Don’t look for me!
— and just trying to help, but I’ll get no thanks for it. I can’t tell if you’re even listening to me. Anyway. It’s your life.
— What d’you want with a shrine anyway?
— What d’you mean by that, a shrine? Her Ladyship? Oh, I don’t bother myself about her. She’s perfectly harmless. It’s says Anglican on the door and it’s been Anglican for a thousand years. That’s good enough for me. People from the colonies, and the Russiany lot, they’re superstitious, and who can blame them? They’ve had a terrible time. Who am I to deprive a person of their comforts?
Pauline looks pointedly toward their old estate, full of people from the colonies and the Russiany lot. Today, as it has been almost all days since the sun began, the foghorn girl is out, locked in debate with whoever is on the end of her handless device. You disrespecting me? Don’t disrespect me! Whatever else is to be said of her, she is of unmistakable Irish descent. Short criminal forehead, widely set eyes. There is a special contempt Pauline reserves for the fallen members of her own tribe.
— Not even the virgin could help the likes of her. Well, hello Edward, dear!
— All right there Mrs. H!
— Oh, it’s good to see you, Ned. How are you love? You’re looking well, considering. Not still smoking the dope, I hope.
–’Fraid so, ’fraid so. I like the flavor.
— It’ll rob you of your ambition.
— I’ve only got the one ambition anyway.
— And what would that be?
— Marrying you, of course. Can’t rob me of that now can it?
— Oh go on with you.
Quite happy, really quite happy, and the sun thins out and purples and arranges itself in strips behind the aquamarine of the minaret and what breeze there is ripples the flag of St. George, on top of the old estate, hung from a satellite dish in preparation for the football. Maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.
— Leah love, that’s your phone.
Look at that: the fence on the right side almost completely done for. The ivy from the estate invades the gaps and smothers anything Michel tries to grow, apart from the apple tree itself, which grows despite them all, unaided. She writes to the council, they don’t listen, Ned never writes, nor Gloria, they live communally but she is the only one who thinks communally and oh Christ that poor homeless worm livid in the sun. Like foreskin moving forward and back, forward and back, over itself. Nobody loves me everybody hates me because I’m a wriggly worm. But who is this
this voice
so quiet
and so violent, right in her ear, and she thinks she must have misheard, she thinks she must be going crazy, she thinks
— Excuse me?
— You hear me? Don’t be coming round this place.
— Excuse me? How did you get this number?
— That girl is my business. Don’t be coming round this place pushing shit through the door, you hear me? Watch for me. I know you. You come here again you best watch for me.
— Who is this?
— Fuckin dyke cunt.
The worm grinds its middle together, having nothing else. Flagstone to the left of it, flagstone to the right.
— and then in Poundland the very same box — same brand, mind — is only two forty-nine! But if you shop in these places you’re simply a fool to yourself, and that’s all there is to be said. Leah love? Leah? Leah? Who was that? On the phone? You feeling all right?