“This is a nice place! There’s a lot worse. You done all right out of it. Keisha, if I wanted to get out of here I’d get another place off the council before I come to you, to be honest.”
Natalie addressed her next comment to the four-month-old.
“I don’t know why your mum talks to me like that. I’m her only sister!”
Cheryl attended to a stain on her leggings. “We ain’t never been that close Keisha, come on now.”
In Natalie’s bag, by the door, there were three Ambien, in the inside pocket next to her wallet.
“There’s four years between us,” she heard herself say, in a small voice, a ludicrous voice.
“Nah but it weren’t that, though,” said Cheryl, without looking up.
Natalie sprung from her chair. Standing she found that holding little Carly limited her dramatic options. The child had fallen asleep on her shoulder. In a dynamic unchanged from childhood, Natalie became irate as her sister grew calm.
“Excuse me I forgot: no-one’s allowed to have friends in this fucking family.”
“Family first. That’s my belief. God first, then family.”
“Oh, give me a fucking break. Here comes the Virgin Mary. Just because you can’t locate the fathers, doesn’t make them all immaculate conceptions.”
Cheryl stood up and stuck a finger in her sister’s face: “You need to watch your mouth, Keisha. And why you got to curse all the time, man? Get some respect.”
Natalie felt tears pricking her eyes and a childish wash of self-pity overcame her entirely.
“Why am I being punished for making something of my life?”
“Oh my days. Who’s punishing you, Keisha? Nobody. That’s in your head. You’re paranoid, man!”
Natalie Blake could not be stopped: “I work hard. I came in with no reputation, nothing. I’ve built up a serious practice — do you have any idea how few—”
“Did you really come round here to tell me what a big woman you are these days?”
“I came round here to try and help you.”
“But no-one in here is looking for your help, Keisha! This is it! I ain’t looking for you, end of.”
And now they had to transfer Carly from Natalie’s shoulder to her mother’s, a strangely delicate operation in the middle of the carnage.
Natalie Blake cast around hopelessly for a parting shot. “You need to do something about your attitude, Cheryl. Really. You should go see someone about it, because it’s really a problem.”
As soon as Cheryl had the child in her arms she turned from her sister and began walking back down the corridor to the bedroom.
“Yeah, well, till you have kids you can’t really chat to me, Keisha, to be honest.”
147. Listings
On the website she was what everybody was looking for.
148. The future
Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were 28 when the first emails began to arrive. Over the next few years their number increased exponentially. Photo attachments of stunned-looking women with hospital tags round their wrists, babies lying on their breast, hair inexplicably soaked through. They seemed to have stepped across a chasm into another world. It was perfectly possible that her own mother was arriving at the houses of these new mothers, with her name-tag pinned to her apron, pricking their babies’ feet with a needle, or sewing up the new mothers’ stitches as they lay sideways on a couch. Marcia must have seen one or two of them, by the law of local averages. They were new arrivals in the neighborhood. They were not the sort of people to switch off the lights and lie on the floor. Mother and baby doing well, exhausted. It was as if no-one had ever had a baby before, in human history. And everybody said precisely this, it was the new thing to say: “It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.” Natalie forwarded the emails to Leah. It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.
149. Nature becomes culture
Many things that had seemed, to their own mothers, self-evident elements of a common-sense world, now struck Natalie and Leah as either a surprise or an outrage. Physical pain. The existence of disease. The difference in procreative age between men and women. Age itself. Death.
Their own materiality was the scandal. The fact of flesh.
Natalie Blake, being strong, decided to fight. To go to war against these matters, like a soldier.
150. Listings
After opening an e-mail about a baby, she went to the website, and contributed to the website. She went upstairs to bed.
151. Redact
“Where are you going?
Natalie Blake shook her husband’s hand from her shin and rose from bed. She walked down the hall to the spare bedroom and sat in front of the computer. She typed the address into the browser as smoothly as a pianist playing a scale. She removed the contribution.
152. The past
“Nathan?”
He sat on the bandstand in the park, smoking, with two girls and a boy. Two women and a man. But they were dressed as kids. Natalie Blake was dressed as a successful lawyer in her early thirties. Alone, he and she might have walked the perimeter of the park, and talked about the past, and perhaps she would have taken off her ugly heels and they would have sat in the grass and Natalie would have smoked his weed, and then told him to get off drugs in a motherly sort of way, and he would have nodded and smiled and promised. But in company like this she had no idea how to be.
It’s well hot, said Nathan Bogle. It really is, agreed Natalie Blake.
153. Brixton
It was a long-standing invitation but she hadn’t called or sent a text to say she was coming. It was an impulse that struck her at Victoria Station. Fifteen minutes later she was walking down Brixton High Street, exhausted from court, still in her suit, getting in the way of merry people just starting their Friday night. She bought some flowers in a garage forecourt, and thought of all the scenes in movies where people buy flowers from garage forecourts, and of how it is almost always better to bring nothing. She found the house and rang the bell. A queeny guy with his ’fro dyed blonde answered.
“Hi. Jayden about? His sister, Nat.”
“Of course you are. You look just like Angela Bassett!”
The kitchen was confusingly full. Was it the queen? Or one of the white guys? Or the Chinese guy, or the other guy?
“He’s in the shower. Vodka or tea?”
“Vodka. You all heading out?”
“We just got in. The only thing to eat right now is this Jaffa cake.”
154. Force of nature
When had she last been so drunk? There was something about being in the company of so many men with no intentions toward her that encouraged excess. She was learning many things about her little brother she had never known. He was “famous” for drinking White Russians. He’d had a crush on Nathan Bogle. He loved fantasy fiction. He could do more one-handed press-ups than any other man in the room.
The vodka ran out. They took shots of a blue drink they found in a cupboard. Natalie realized that there was no special or chosen man in this house. Jayden had managed to find for himself precisely the fluid and friendly living arrangements she herself had dreamed of so many years earlier. If it was not quite possible to feel happy for him it was because the arrangement was timeless — it did not come bound by the constrictions of time — and this in turn was the consequence of a crucial detaiclass="underline" no women were included within the schema. Women come bearing time. Natalie had brought time into this house. She couldn’t stop mentioning the time, and worrying about it. If only she could free herself from her body and join them all at the Vauxhall Tavern, for the second wave. In reality, she had ten texts from Frank and it was time to go home. The time had come.