“Sorry, sorry, sorry. Central line. Jesus, it’s like a crèche out here.”
Natalie looked up at the kids and chaos at every table and smiled neutrally at her friend and wondered at what point during their lunch date she should give Leah her news.
160. Time speeds up
There is an image system at work in the world. We wait for an experience large or brutal enough to disturb it or break it open completely, but this moment never quite arrives. Maybe it comes at the very end, when everything breaks and no more images are possible. In Africa, presumably, the images that give shape and meaning to a life, and into whose dimensions a person pours themselves — the journey from son to Chief, from daughter to protector — are drawn from the natural world and the collective imagination of the people. (When Natalie Blake said “In Africa” what she meant was “at an earlier point in time.”) In that circumstance there would probably be something beautiful in the alignment between the one and the many.
Pregnancy brought Natalie only more broken images from the great mass of cultural detritus she took in every day on a number of different devices, some handheld, some not. To behave in accordance with these images bored her. To deviate from them filled her with the old anxiety. She grew anxious that she was not anxious about the things you were meant to be anxious about. Her very equanimity made her anxious. It didn’t seem to fit into the system of images. She drank and ate as before and smoked on occasion. She welcomed, at last, the arrival of some shape to her dull straight lines.
Of the coming birth her old friend Layla, who had three children already, said: “Like meeting yourself at the end of a dark alley.”
That was not to be for Natalie Blake. The drugs she requested were astonishing, transcendent; not quite as good as Ecstasy yet with some faint memory of the lucidity and joy of those happy days. She felt euphoric, like she’d gone clubbing and kept on clubbing instead of going home when someone more sensible suggested the night bus. She put her earphones in and danced around her hospital bed to Big Pun. It was not a very dramatic event. Hours turned to minutes. At the vital moment she was able say to herself quite calmly: “Oh, look, I’m giving birth.”
Which is all to say that the brutal awareness of the real that she had so hoped for and desired — that she hadn’t even realized she was counting on — failed to arrive.
161. Otherness
There was, however, a moment — a few minutes after the event, once the child had been washed of gunk and returned to her — that she almost thought she possibly felt it. She looked into the slick black eyes of a being not in any way identical with the entity Natalie Blake, who was, in some sense, proof that no such distinct entity existed. And yet was not this being also an attribute of Natalie Blake? An extension? At that moment she wept and felt a terrific humility.
Very soon after there were flowers and cards and photographs and friends and family who came round bearing gifts that demonstrated different degrees of taste and sense and the mysterious black-eyed other was replaced by a sweet-tempered seven-pound baby called Naomi. People came with advice. Caldwell people felt everything would be fine as long as you didn’t actually throw the child down the stairs. Non-Caldwell people felt nothing would be fine unless everything was done perfectly and even then there was no guarantee. She had never been so happy to see Caldwell people. She could not place Leah Hanwell in this schema with any accuracy, as it is hardest to caricature the people you’ve loved best in your life. Leah came round with a soft white rabbit, and looked at Natalie as if she had passed over a chasm into another land.
162. Evidence
Fourteen months after her first child was born, Natalie Blake had a second. He was meant to be called Benjamin, but he arrived with a little tuft of hair on top of his head, like a spike, and they called him Spike for three days, and then recalled a romantic, childless afternoon, years earlier, spent watching a matinee revival of She’s Gotta Have It.
Frank was joyful, and forgetful of practicalities, and for a while Natalie found she had to treat him as a third child, a fourth child — if she included the nanny — to be managed and directed along with the rest of them so that time was maximized and everybody got to where they needed to be. Only Natalie herself was allowed to waste time, sitting at her desk, looking through digital images of her brood. This action, considered objectively, was identical to the occasions in which she had been called upon to review photographs of a crime scene. One morning Melanie caught her midway through this reverie and could not hide her delight. Hidden behind the image of Spike was another window, of listings. Natalie submitted, irritably, to a hug.
163. Architecture as destiny
To Leah it was sitting room, to Natalie living room, to Marcia, lounge. The light was always lovely. And she still liked to stand in the bay and admire her view of park. Looking around at the things she and Frank had bought and placed in this house, Natalie liked to think they told a story about their lives, in which the reality of the house itself was incidental, but it was also of course quite possible that it was the house that was the unimpeachable reality and Natalie, Frank and their daughter just a lot of human shadow-play on the wall. Shadows had been passing over the walls of this house since 1888 sitting, living, lounging. On a good day Natalie prided herself on small differences, between past residents, present neighbors and herself. Look at these African masks. Abstract of a Kingston alleyway. Minimalist table with four throne-like chairs. At other times — especially when the nanny was out with Naomi and she was alone in the living room feeding the baby — she had the defeating sense that her own shadow was identical to all the rest, and to the house next door, and the house next door to that.
All along the street that autumn the sound of babies crying kept the lights on, late into the night. In Natalie’s house on the park, the shock of The Crash dislodged a little plaster in the wall in a shape of a fist and stopped plans for a basement extension. Off work and eager to feel useful, Natalie Blake waited till Spike’s nap, opened a Word document and with a great sense of purpose typed the title
Following the money: A wife’s account
She had a professional gift for expressing herself, and it was infuriating to listen to attacks on the radio and television upon what she thought of as the good character of her husband. As if poor Frank — whose bonus was, proportionally speaking, negligible — were no different in kind to all these epic crooks and fraudsters.
She was keen to engage him on this subject when he came home. He looked up from his take-away.
“You’ve never asked me a single thing about work, ever.”