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.