“Oh, Nat. Everybody’s nice. Everybody works hard. Everybody’s a friend of Frank’s. What’s that got to do with anything?”
131. Revisit
People were ill.
“You remember Mrs. Iqbal? Small woman, always a bit snooty with me. Breast cancer.”
People died.
“You must remember him, he lived in Locke. Tuesday he dropped dead. Ambulance took half an hour.”
People were shameful.
“Baby born two weeks ago, and they haven’t let me in yet. We don’t even know how many kids are in there. They don’t register them.”
People didn’t know they were born.
“Guess how much for eggs in that market. Organic. Guess!”
People were seen.
“I seen Pauline. Leah’s working for the council now. She always had such big ambitions for that child. Funny how things turn out. In a way you’ve done quite a bit better than her, really.”
People were unseen.
“He’s upstairs with Tommy. He spends all his time with him now. They only come out of that room to go and charm the ladies. Jayden and Tommy spend all their time and money charming the ladies. That’s all your brother thinks about. He needs to get himself a job, that’s what I keep telling him.”
People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence.
“Owen Cafferty.”
“Mum, I don’t remember him.”
“Owen Cafferty. Owen Cafferty! He did all the catering for church. Mustache. Owen Cafferty!”
“OK, vaguely, yes. Why?”
“Dead.”
Everything was the same in the flat, yet there was a new feeling of lack. A new awareness. And lo they saw their nakedness and were ashamed. On the table Marcia laid out a fan of credit cards. As Marcia talked her daughter through the chaotic history of each card Natalie made notes as best she could. She had been brought in for an emergency consultation. She did not really know why she was taking notes. The only useful thing would be to sign a large check. This she couldn’t do, in her present circumstance. She couldn’t bear to ask Frank. What difference did it make if she turned figures into words?
“I’ll tell you what I really need,” said Marcia, “I need Jayden to get up out of here and get married, so he can run his own household, and your sister’s little ones don’t have to be sleeping in the room with their mother. That’s what I need.”
“Oh, Mum… Jayden’s not going to ever get… Jayden’s not interested in women, he—”
“Please don’t start up that nonsense again, Keisha. Jayden’s the only one of you takes care of me at all. This is how we live. Cheryl can’t help anybody. She can’t hardly help herself. Number three on the way. Of course I love these kids. But this is how we’re living like, Keisha, to be truthful. Hand to mouth. This is it.”
People were living like this. Living like that. Living like this.
132. Domestic
“I can’t stand them living like that!” cried Natalie Blake.
“You’re making unnecessary drama,” said Frank.
133. E pluribus unum
Certainly exceptional to be taken back into the Middle Temple fold but Natalie Blake was in many ways an exceptional candidate, and several tenants at the set thought of her, informally, as their own protégé, despite having really only a glancing knowledge of her. Something about Natalie inspired patronage, as if by helping her you helped an unseen multitude.
134. Paranoia
A man and a woman, a couple, sat at a table opposite Natalie and Frank, having Saturday brunch in a café in North West London.
“It’s organic,” said Ameeta. She referred to the ketchup.
“It’s bad,” said her husband, Imran. He was also referring to the ketchup.
“It’s not bad. It doesn’t have the fourteen spoonfuls of sugar you’re used to,” said Ameeta.
“It’s called flavor?” said Imran.
“Just bloody eat it or don’t eat it,” said Ameeta. “Nobody cares.”
Around them, at other tables, other people’s babies cried.
“I didn’t say anybody cared,” said Imran.
“India versus Pakistan,” said Frank — he referred, in a jocular manner, to his friends’ countries of origin—“better pray it doesn’t go nuclear.”
“Ha ha,” said Natalie Blake.
They continued on with their breakfast. Breakfast tipped into brunch. They did this once or twice a month. Today’s brunch seemed, to Natalie, a more lively occasion than usual, and more comfortable, as if by rejoining a commercial set and acting, at least in part, for the interests of corporations, she had lost the final remnants of a troubling aura that had bothered her friends and made them cautious around her.
135. Contempt
The eggs came late. Frank argued chummily with the waiter until they were taken off the bill. At one point employing the phrase: “Look, we’re both educated brothers.” It occurred to Natalie Blake that she was not very happily married. Goofy. Made lame jokes, offended people. He was in a constant good humor, yet he was stubborn. He did not read or have any real cultural interests, aside from the old, nostalgic affection for 90s hip hop. The idea of the Caribbean bored him. When thinking of the souls of black folks he preferred to think of Africa—“Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the Sphinx”—where the two strains of his DNA did noble battle in ancient stories. (He knew these stories only in vague, biblical outline.) He had ketchup by his mouth, and they had married quickly, without knowing each other particularly well. “I like her well enough,” Ameeta said, “I just don’t particularly trust her.” Frank De Angelis would never cheat or lie or hurt Natalie Blake, not in any way. He was a physically beautiful man. Kind. “It’s not tax avoidance,” said Imran. “It’s tax management.” Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. Were they any unhappier than Imran and Ameeta? Those people over there? You? “Anything with flour gives me a rash,” said Frank. On the table lay a huge pile of newspaper. In Caldwell, newspaper choice had been rather important. It was a matter of pride to Marcia that the Blakes took The Voice and The Daily Mirror and no “filth.” Now everyone came to brunch with their “quality” paper and a side order of trash. Tits and vicars and slebs and murder. Her mother’s pieties — and by extension Natalie’s own — seemed old-fashioned. “It’s an insurgency,” said Ameeta. Natalie pressed a knife to her egg and watched the yolk run into her beans. “Another thing of tea?” said Frank. They were all agreed that the war should not be happening. They were against war. In the mid-nineties, when Natalie Blake was sleeping with Imran, the two of them had planned a trip to Bosnia in a convoy of ambulances. “But Irie was always going to be that kind of mother,” said Ameeta, “I could have told you that five years ago.” Only the private realm existed now. Work and home. Marriage and children. Now they only wanted to return to their own flats and live the real life of domestic conversation and television and baths and lunch and dinner. Brunch was outside the private realm, not by much — it was just the other side of the border. But even brunch was too far from home. Brunch didn’t really exist. “Can I give you a tip?” said Imran. “Start on the third episode of series two.” Was it possible to feel oneself on a war footing, constantly, even at brunch? “She owns a child of every race now. She’s like the United Nations of Stupid,” said Frank, for one elevated oneself above an interest in “celebrity gossip” simply by commenting ironically on it. “A ‘romp’ with two strippers,” read Ameeta. “Why’s it always a ‘romp?’ I’ve never bloody ‘romped’ in my life.” Sexual perversity was also old-fashioned: it smacked of an earlier time. It was messy, embarrassing, impractical in this economy. “I never know what’s reasonable,” said Imran. “Ten percent? Fifteen? Twenty?” Global consciousness. Local consciousness. Consciousness. And lo they saw their nakedness and were not ashamed. “You’re fooling yourself,” said Frank. “You can’t get anything on the park for less than a million.” The mistake was to think that the money precisely signified — or was equivalent to — a particular arrangement of bricks and mortar. The money was not for these poky terraced houses with their short back gardens. The money was for the distance the house put between you and Caldwell. “That skirt,” said Natalie Blake, pointing to a picture in the supplement, “but in red.”