NW (21 page)

63.
Reconnaissance

Francesco De Angelis. 2nd year Economics. Universally known as “Frank.” Running for African and Caribbean Soc president next month. Likely to win. Attended a “second-rate boarding school.” This from someone who attended a “grammar school.” Further: “His mum’s Italian or something. His dad was probably some African prince, that’s usually the case.”

64.
Educational parenthesis

(Some schools you “attended.” Brayton you “went” to.)

65.
8th March

It happened that Leah’s third visit coincided with a dinner for International Women’s Day. A useful excuse not to see Rodney. Leah wore a green dress and Natalie wore a purple one, and they got ready together and walked to the dining hall arm in arm. The obvious pleasure they took in each other, their deep familiarity and ease in each other’s company, made them more attractive as a pair than they ever could have been alone, and perfectly conscious of this fact they emphasized their similarities of height and build, and kept their long legs in stride. By the time they reached their table Natalie was quite giddy with the power of being young, almost free of a man who bored her and soon to embark on a meal of more than two courses.

66.
Menu

Honeydew melon with tiger prawn salad

Chicken breast wrapped in pancetta with green beans and Juliette potatoes

Warm Chocolate fondant with vanilla bean ice cream

Cheeses

Coffee, mints

67.
Desire

“Who that?” asked Leah Hanwell.

“The dean,” said Natalie Blake, and licked some chocolate off her teeth. “If she stopped speechifying we could go to the bar.”

“No, the girl at the end of that table. In the top hat.”

“What?”

“Chinese or Japanese—there.”

“Oh, I don’t know her.”

“She’s so beautiful!”

68.
Valentino

Korean. In the bar she put her hat on the table, and as Natalie Blake spoke to someone else in their booth, she, Natalie Blake, frequently reached out for this hat and stroked its satin brim. At her back she could hear her good friend Leah Hanwell talking to the Korean, whose name was Alice, making her laugh, and when Natalie went to the bar to buy drinks she had an unobstructed view of Leah as old-school lothario—one hand over the back of the couch, another on Alice’s knee, breathing on the girl’s lovely neck. Natalie Blake had seen Leah do this many times, but with boys, and there had always seemed something a little shocking and perverse in it, whereas here the relation looked natural. This thought made Natalie wonder at herself and where she was with God these days, or if she was with him at all. Unable to stop staring she made herself walk over to the jukebox and put on the song Electric Relaxation
by A Tribe Called Quest in the hope that it would relax her.

69.
The invention of love: part one

Frank was not at the bar or anywhere else in view.

70.
Partings

On the bus back to the coach station, after what had been, let’s face it, a significant visit, perhaps even approaching the status of a dramatic event, Leah Hanwell said, rather sheepishly: “Hope it was all right, me disappearing. Least you and Rodders got the room back,” and this was all that was said that day about Leah Hanwell’s night with Alice Nho, nor did Natalie Blake mention the fact that she had not asked Rodney to come to her room that night and never again would do so. The bus started to climb what felt like a vertical hill. Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were pressed back in their seats and against each other. “Really good to see you,” said Leah. “You’re the only person I can be all of myself with.” Which comment made Natalie begin to cry, not really at the sentiment but rather out of a fearful knowledge that if reversed the statement would be rendered practically meaningless, Ms. Blake having no self to be, not with Leah, or anyone.

71.
Helping Leah get her heavy rucksack up the steps to the coach

Natalie Blake had an urge to tell her friend about the exotic brother she had seen in Kirkwood’s class. She said nothing. Quite apart from the fact that the doors were closing she feared what, precisely, the gaping socio-economic difference between Frank De Angelis and Rodney Banks might say to her friend Leah Hanwell about her, Natalie Blake, psychologically, as a person.

72.
Romance languages

Many of the men Natalie Blake became involved with after Rodney Banks were as socio-economically and culturally alien to her as Frank was, and were far less attractive, but still she didn’t approach Frank, nor did he approach her, despite their keen awareness of each other. A poetic way of putting this would be to say:

“There was an inevitability about their road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route.”

73.
The sole author

More prosaically, Natalie Blake was crazy busy with self-invention. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word. She found politics and literature, music, cinema. “Found” is not the right word. She put her faith in these things, and couldn’t understand why—at exactly the moment she’d discovered them—her classmates seemed to be giving them up for dead. When asked by other students about Frank De Angelis—she was not the only person who had noted their fundamental compatibility—she said that he was too full of himself and vain and posh and racially confused and not her scene at all, and yet the silent and invisible bond between them strengthened, for who else but Frank De Angelis—
or someone exactly like Frank De Angelis—
could she ask to accompany her on the strange life journey she was preparing to undertake?

74.
A sighting

Five rows in front at the midnight showing of
Black Orpheus,
looking up at his doppelganger.

75.
Activism

Natalie was cycling down University Walk when a young man she was sleeping with stood in her path, blocking her way. He had a frantic look about him and at first Natalie thought he was preparing to announce his undying love. “Have you got half an hour?” asked Imran, “There’s something I want you to see.” Natalie wheeled her bike round to Woodland Road and chained it up outside Imran’s halls of residence. In his small bedroom there were two other girls from their year and a grad student she didn’t know. “This is the action group,” said Imran, and put a video into the player. Of course, Natalie was aware of the Bosnian conflict, but it would be fair to say that the war had not been uppermost in her mind. She told herself this was because she had no television and spent most of her time in the library. Similarly, two years earlier the existence of a country called “Rwanda” and the reality of its genocide had come to her simultaneously, in a single newspaper article. Now she sat cross-legged and watched the soldiers marching and listened to the recorded speech of the crazed man screaming, and read the subtitles about racial purity and a fantasy place called “Greater Serbia.” This had just happened? Just now? At the end of history? She thought of all the times she and Leah had asked themselves—for the sake of a thought experiment—what they would have done, had they been in Berlin, in 1933. “We’re going to drive an ambulance of supplies to Sarajevo,” said Imran, “to help with the reconstruction. You should come.” To do so would break the first commandment of Natalie Blake’s family: do not put thyself in unnecessary physical peril.

For the next several weeks Natalie threw herself into the organization of this trip, and made love to Imran, and thought of this period, years later, as representing a sort pinnacle of radical youthful possibility. Of sex, protest and travel, fused. That she never actually went on the trip seemed, in memory, some how less important than the fact that she had fully intended to go. (A quarrel with Imran, a few days before. He didn’t call, so she didn’t call.)

76.
Abandon

Natalie Blake took out a large student loan and made a point of spending it only on frivolous things. Meals and cabs and underwear. Trying to keep up with “these people” she soon found herself with nothing again, but now when she put a debit card in the slot and hoped that five pounds would come out, she did it without the bottomless anxiety she’d once shared with Rodney Banks. She cultivated a spirit of decadence. Now that she had glimpsed the possibility of a future, an overdraft did not hold the same power of terror over her. The vision Marcia Blake had of such people, and had passed on to her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behavior? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: “To give them no excuse.”

77.
A Sighting

Dressed as Frantz Fanon on a staircase at a party at which Natalie herself was dressed as Angela Davis. His costume consisted of a name-tag and a white coat borrowed off a medical student. Natalie had made more effort: a dashiki and a combed out ’fro, that did not stand up well due to years of damage with a hot iron. The costume party was in the shared house of four philosophy students and the theme was
Discourse Founders.
His date came as Sappho.

78.
A theory about the tracking of Michelle Holland

It is perhaps the profound way in which capitalism enters women’s minds and bodies that renders “ruthless comparison” the basic mode of their relationships with others. Certainly Natalie Blake tracked the progress of Michelle Holland with a closer attention than she did her own life—without ever speaking to her. Besides Rodney, Michelle was the only other person from Brayton in the university. A math prodigy. She did not have the luxury of mediocrity. Raised in the brutal high-rise towers of South Kilburn, which had nothing to recommend them, no genteel church culture, none of the pretty green areas of Caldwell nor (Natalie presumed) the intimate neighbors. What could she be but exceptional? Father in jail, mother sectioned. She lived with her grandmother. She was sensitive and sincere, awkward, defensive, lonely. It was Natalie’s belief that she, Natalie Blake, didn’t have to say a word to Michelle Holland to know all of this—that she could look at the way Michelle walked and know it. I am the sole author. Consequently Natalie was not at all surprised to hear of Michelle’s decline and fall, halfway through the final year. No drink or drugs or bad behavior. She just stopped. (This was Natalie’s interpretation.) Stopped going to lectures, studying, eating. She had been asked to pass the entirety of herself through a hole that would accept only part. (Natalie’s conclusion.)

79.
The end of history

When Natalie now thought of adult life (she hardly ever thought of it) she envisioned a long corridor, off which came many rooms—each with a friend in it—a communal kitchen, a single gigantic bed in which all would sleep and screw, a world governed by the principles of friendship. The above is a metaphorical figure—but it is also a basically accurate representation of Natalie’s thinking at that time. For how can you oppress a friend? How can you cheat on a friend? How can you ask a friend to suffer while you thrive? In this simple way—without marches and slogans, without politics, without any of the mess you get ripping paving stones out of the ground—the revolution had arrived. Late to the party, Natalie Blake now enthusiastically took her good friend Leah Hanwell’s advice and started hugging strangers on dance-floors. She looked at the little white pill in her palm. What could go wrong, now we were all friends? Remember to carry a bottle of water. Anyway, it was all already decided. Don’t chew. Swallow. Strobe lights flash. The beat goes on. (I will be a lawyer and you will be a doctor and he will be a teacher and she will be a banker and we will be artists and they will be soldiers, and I will be the first black woman and you will be the first Arab and she will be the first Chinese and everyone will be friends, everyone will understand each other.) Friends are friendly to each other, friends help each other out. No one need be exceptional. Friends know the difference between solicitors and barristers, and the best place to apply, and the likelihood of being accepted, and the names of the relevant scholarships and bursaries. “You
choose
your friends, you don’t choose your family.” How many times did Natalie Blake hear that line?

80.
Ideology in popular entertainment

In case anyone was in danger of forgetting, the most popular TV show in the world pressed the point home, five times a week.

81.
The Unconsoled (Leah’s sixth visit)

“Oh Jesus I just saw Rodney in Sainsbury’s!” said Leah, distraught, dropping two shopping bags on the table. “I looked in his basket. He had a meat pie and two cans of ginger beer and a bottle of that hot sauce you put on everything. I came up behind him in the queue, and he pretended he’d forgotten something and hurried off. But then I saw him a few minutes later at a far end queue and he had exactly the same four items.”

82.
Milk round

A festive, chaotic scene, as well attended as the Fresher’s Fair, although this time the banners were not homemade, and instead of Tolkien societies and choral clubs they had printed upon them the melodic names of law firms and the familiar names of banks. Girls in cheerleader outfits bearing the logo of a management consulting firm went round the room giving out little pots of ice cream and cans of energy drinks. Natalie Blake twisted the can in her hand to read the tag that ran round it.
Claim Your Future.
She dug into the ice cream with a little blond wood panel, and watched the green balloons of a German bank slip from their tethers and float slowly up to the ceiling. She heard Rodney’s voice coming from somewhere. He was three tables along, sitting with monstrous keenness on the very edge of a plastic chair. Opposite him, an amused man in a suit and tie made notes on a clipboard.

83.
Mixed metaphors

A year and a half later, when everyone had returned or else moved to London and Natalie was studying for the bar, Rodney Banks sent a letter c/o of Marcia Blake that began: “Keisha, you talk about following your heart, but weird how your heart always seems to know which side its bread is buttered.” Frank De Angelis took this letter from Natalie Blake and kissed the side of her head. “Poor old Rodney. He’s not still trying to become a lawyer, is he?”