She looked triumphant. He watched her coke-jaw grinding against itself.
“My life? My life is easy?”
“I didn’t say it was easy. I said you find it easy. There’s a difference. That’s why I like the ballet: it’s hard for everybody. Felix, let go, it hurts.”
Felix let go. Touching each other for so long, even in anger, made the anger unsustainable, and they both softened, and lowered their voices, and looked away.
“I’m in the way, I see that. Well. No harm done. By which I mean of course: nothing but harm done.”
“Every time I come round here, same drama. Same drama.” Felix shook his head at the floor. “I don’t get it. I never been nothing but nice to you. Why you trying to ruin my life?”
She gave him a penetrating look.
“How funny,” she said, “but of course that’s how it must seem to you.”
After that they walked to the door quite calmly, the man slightly ahead. A stranger coming across the scene would have thought the man had tried to sell the woman a bible or set of encyclopedias, with no success. For his own part, Felix felt absolute certainty that this was the last time — the last time of passing this picture, the last time seeing that crack in the plaster — and in his mind he said a little prayer of thanks. He almost wished he could tell the woman he loved all about it, so fine an example was it of all that she had taught him. The universe wants you to be free. You must shake yourself free of the negative. The universe wants only that you ask, so that you shall receive. Behind him now he heard this woman quietly weeping. It was his cue to turn round, but he didn’t, and at the threshold the weeping became a sob. He hurried to the stairs, and was a few steps down when he heard a thud on the carpet above as she went down on her knees, and he knew he was meant to feel heavy, but the truth was he felt like a man undergoing some not-yet-invented process called particle transfer, wonderfully, blissfully light.
NW6
Felix inched deeper into the carriage. He gripped the safety rail. He considered the tube map. It did not express his reality. The center was not “Oxford Circus” but the bright lights of Kilburn High Road. “Wimbledon” was the countryside, “Pimlico” pure science fiction. He put his right index finger over Pimlico’s blue bar. It was nowhere. Who lived there? Who even passed through it?
Two seats came free in a bank of four. Felix roused himself and sat down. The guy opposite nodded to a loud break-beat. His friend next to him put his feet up on the seat. Pupils enormous, laughing into his neck every now again, amused by some private delirium. Felix established a private space of his own, opening his legs wide and slouching. At Finchley Road, as underground came over ground, his phone revived, bleeping to register a missed call. His thumb worked hopefully down the list. Same number, three times. It had only one physical referent in the world: a battered public call box, riveted to a wall, halfway down a concrete corridor. He had seen it many times through the reinforced glass of the visiting room. He put his mobile back into his pocket.
• • •
The thing with Devon was you wanted to talk to him, but at the same time, you didn’t want to. It wasn’t Devon anymore, really, but a hard-voiced stranger, who rang and said hard things, hurtful things. Jackie talking, through Devon’s mouth. She was sending Devon letters. Felix learned this from Lloyd (Devon had not said; Felix had not asked). Their mother had a strange power over people — Felix did not discount witchcraft. (Jackie claimed a Ghanaian grandmother. These things were not unknown there.) She surely had a power over Felix, once upon a time. A power over the girls. But she was a person with whom there would always be a “last straw.” Devon would have to learn this, as Felix and the girls had all learned it. The end for Felix was clearly marked. On that occasion it was eight years since her last “visit.” The girls refused to see her. Always sentimental, Felix took her in, cautiously, promising nothing. For moral support, he asked his brother to come round. Devon began the evening at the other end of the room, standing against the wall, glaring. He ended the night cozy on the sofa, accepting Jackie’s sloppy kisses all over his face. Felix softened, too. He brought down the white rum from a high shelf. Foolish. Tia called it early, as did Ruby. Lloyd. Everybody called it. Jackie’s sister, Karen, said, “Listen to me: put her out your door and change the locks.” But at the time it had seemed that Devon’s acquiescence allowed — necessitated — Felix’s. He had suffered so much more than Felix over the years, yet held no grudge.
She turned up in high summer. Many days spent smoking weed together on Hampstead Heath, laughing madly, rolling about in the grass like young lovers. Jackie, Devon, Felix. At nights they sat up drinking. “I can’t believe how yellow this boy is! Look at them curls!” Emerging from the kitchen with a pack of biscuits, she told poor Devon quite casually that his father had died, some years ago — drowned. To Felix, it sounded like a tall tale. He kept quiet. In the end they were half-brothers: it wasn’t his business. He had his own father, his own troubles. In the early hours she stood in the middle of the floor, as if on stage, and spoke of how lonely and miserable she’d been in England, as a young woman. This Felix had never heard; he found he wanted to hear it, although he knew perfectly well she could have exchanged this life story for any other narrative and he would have accepted it just as readily. He wanted to love her. He tried to imagine life in notorious Garvey House, being “spat at by NF kids in the grocers.” She talked out her various conspiracy theories. These Felix did not interrupt. He wanted to be happy. There was one about the towers. There was one about the moon landings. The Virgin Mary was black. The planet was getting colder. 2012 would be the end of everything. She seemed to have spent the past few years in Internet cafes around the country, gathering this information. Devon followed her willingly on every point. Felix, more skeptical, let it wash over him, without comment. She had her hair tied in two thick plaits like a Red Indian, a thin gold band tied across her forehead. And lo, there would come a perfect future world with no money and no shops, just storehouses in the middle of town, with everything you needed in them and no locks on the doors. People living all together with no religion. Her eyes, he knew, had the taint of madness.
The next day she was gone, with Felix’s cashpoint card, his watch, all his chains. Two months later Devon walked into Khandi’s Gem Express and Jewelry on the high road, with a kid from South Kilburn, Curtis Ainger, and a gun. Smile, you’re on CCTV. Nineteen when he went in. Twenty-three this summer.
• • •
“Sorry, could you ask your friend to move his feet?”
Felix took out his earbuds. A white woman, hugely pregnant and sweating, stood over him.
“I’d like to sit down?” she said.
Felix looked at his motionless “friend” opposite, and thought it best to speak to the other one. He leaned forward. This guy had his head against the glass, oblivious and half hidden by his hood, nodding to his music. Felix touched him lightly on the knee.
“Oi, bruv — I think the lady wants to sit down.”
The guy removed one can of his bulky earphones.
“What?”
“I think the lady wants to sit down.”
The pregnant woman smiled tightly. It was a hot day to be in that state. Looking at her made the sweat break out across Felix’s nose.
“Yeah? Why you asking me though? Why you touching me?”