Authors: Zadie Smith
“And all in the same week,” said Jayden, “all in the same week, she told this rude boy kid in our estate who was on my case to back off, she just ran him off, right after she came out of that last exam. Straight As. Bitch is real. Sista’s a force of nature, believe!” The room was dipping and revolving. Natalie did not recognize this story. She did not think these two things had happened, at least not in the same week, perhaps not even in the same year. She certainly did not get straight As. It had occurred several times this evening, these conflicting versions, and at first she had tried to tweak or challenge them, but now she leaned back into the arms of a man called Paul and stroked his bicep. Did it matter what was true and what wasn’t?
155.
Some observations concerning television
She was watching the poor with Marcia. A reality show set on a council estate. The council estate on television was fractionally worse than the council estate in which she sat watching the show about a council estate. Every now and then Marcia pointed out how filthy were the flats of the people on television and how meticulously she took care of her own, Cheryl’s mess not withstanding. “Guinness. At ten in the morning!” said Marcia. Natalie, who had not seen the show before, asked after the character arc of one of the participants. Marcia grabbed both arms of her chair and closed her eyes. “She’s on crack. All she cares about is make up and clothes. Her brother is on sickness benefits but there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a disgrace. The dad is in jail for thieving. The mum’s a junkie.” In the show poverty was understood as a personality trait. “Look at that! Look at the bathroom. Shameful. What kind of people would live like this? Did you see that?” Natalie pleaded innocence. She was checking her phone. “All you do is check that phone. Did you come round to see me or check that phone?”
Natalie looked up. A topless lad with a beer bottle in his hand ran across a scrubby patch of grass between two tower blocks and lobbed the bottle into the sole remaining window in a burned-out car. Music accompanied this action. It had a certain beauty.
“I hate the way the camera jumps all over the place like that,” said Marcia. “You can’t forget about the filming for a minute. Why do they always do that these days?”
This struck Natalie as a profound question.
156.
Melanie
Natalie Blake was in her office making some notes on an arcane detail of property law as it pertained to adverse possession when Melanie walked in, tried to speak and burst into tears. Natalie did not know what to do with a crying person. She placed a hand upon Melanie’s shoulder.
“What happened?”
Melanie shook her head. Liquid came out of her nose and a bubble appeared in the corner of her mouth.
“A problem at home?”
All Natalie knew about Melanie’s private realm was that her boyfriend was a policeman and there was a daughter called Rafaella. Neither the policeman nor Melanie was Italian.
“Take a tissue,” said Natalie. She had a snot phobia. Melanie fell into a chair. She took a phone from her pocket. Between heaving fits of weeping she seemed to be trying to find something on it. Natalie watched her thumb, frantic on the rollerball.
“I just really need to not be here!” This problem sounded interesting, and quite unexpected coming from plain-speaking, reliable Melanie, whom Natalie often described as “her rock.” (It was the year everyone was saying that such and such a person was “their rock.”) But now Melanie turned blandly practical: “Not all the time! The fact is I’ve got Rafs and I love her and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t have Rafs anymore! Look at her—she’s so bloody brilliant now, she’s almost two.”
Natalie leaned forward to peer at an image on a screen. A grand seigneur to whom a frightened peasant has come, with a confession about the harvest.
157.
On the park
Natalie Blake was busy with the Kashmiri border dispute, at least as far as it related to importing stereos into India through Dubai on behalf of her giant Japanese electronics manufacturing client. Her husband Frank De Angelis was out entertaining clients. They were “time poor.” They didn’t even have time to collect their latest reward for all their hard work. Marcia kindly went to get the key before the estate agent closed, and Natalie met her mother and Leah at the front door. They whispered as they entered. It was unclear why. There were no blinds in yet and their shadows rose over the fireplace and up to the ceiling. Natalie led them around, pointing out where sofas and chairs and tables were to be placed, what would be knocked through and what kept, what carpeted and what stripped and polished. Natalie encouraged her mother and her friend to stand in front of the bay window and admire the view of the park. She recognized in herself a need for total submission.
She ran a little ahead to admire a bedroom. Look at this original cornicing. Here is a working fireplace. She waited for her mother and Leah to join her. She picked at a piece of loose plaster with a fingernail. When she had been a pupil and on the “wrong” side of a criminal case, Marcia had wanted her to “think of the victim’s family.” Now if she was instructed by some large multinational company, she had to listen to Leah’s self-righteous, ill-informed lectures about the evils of globalization. Only Frank supported her. Only he ever seemed proud. The more high profile the case, the more it pleased him. Cheryl, years ago: “Every time I try and go back to school, Cole tries to knock me up.” There but for the grace of God. Thinking of Cheryl was always helpful in moments of anxiety. At least Natalie Blake and Frank De Angelis weren’t working against each other, or in competition. They were incorporated. An advert for themselves. Let me show you round this advert for myself. Here is the window, here is the door. And repeat, and repeat.
Natalie was opening the door to what she had decided would be her office when Marcia said something probably quite innocent—“Plenty of space for a family in here”—and Natalie manufactured a row out of it and wouldn’t back down. She watched her mother walk the black and white tiled hallway to the door, no longer the indomitable mistress of her childhood, but a small, gray-haired woman in a sagging woolly hat who surely deserved gentler treatment than she received.
“You all right?” said Leah.
“Yes, yes,” said Natalie, “it’s just the usual.”
Leah found some tea-bags in a kitchen cupboard and a single cup.
“People actually think I’m early QC material. Doesn’t mean anything to her. All you have to do with her is move back in. Cheryl’s her angel now. They get on like a house on fire.”
“You’re difficult for her to understand.”
“Why? What’s difficult about me?”
“You have your work. You have Frank. You’ve got all these friends. You’re getting to be so successful. You’re never lonely.”
Natalie tried to picture the woman being described. Leah sat down on the step.
“Trust me, Pauline’s the same.”
158.
Conspiracy
Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were of the belief that people were willing them to reproduce. Relatives, strangers on the street, people on television, everyone. In fact the conspiracy went deeper than Hanwell imagined. Blake was a double agent. She had no intention of being made ridiculous by failing to do whatever was expected of her. For her, it was only a question of timing.
159.
In the park
Leah was late. Natalie sat in the park café, outside, at one of the wooden tables, protected from the drizzle by a broad green umbrella. The first ten minutes she spent on her phone. Checking the listings, checking her e-mail, checking the newspapers. She put her phone in her pocket. For ten further minutes no one spoke to her and she did not speak to anyone. Squirrels and birds passed in and out of view. The longer she spent alone the more indistinct she became to herself. A liquid decanted from a jar. She saw herself slip from the bench to the ground and take the shape of an animal. Moving on all fours, she reached the end of the damp tarmac and passed over into the grass and mulch. Continuing on, quicker now, getting the hang of four-legged locomotion, moving swiftly across the lawn and the artificial hillocks, the Quiet Garden and the flowerbeds, into the bushes, across the road, and on to the railway sidings, howling.
“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.