Common People

by Kit de Waal

  A first date should be like summer flowers. There should be colour in it. My clothes should have been bright, my face highlighted. There should be a boldness in my stride. Scent sprayed over my body and neck, and poured into the cleavage of my chest. At least a hint of which would have been visible, because I would have worn a dress.

  In a different life, I’d have been a different woman. I would have shaved my legs, my underarms, those crucial places, just so I would have felt the sensuality of my own naked smoothness against lace. And during our conversation my whole cleaned, primed body would have shivered in anticipation of your touch, the scales of my skin sensitive and tremulous like a butterfly landing on the edge of a fragrant, feather-thin petal.

  In a different life, you’d have been a different man.

  You wouldn’t have been escaping from your own nightmare.

  Since your return from war, and before. Your finances a mess and an official inquest ahead and promises to your dead comrade. Promises made before—

  That word haunts us both: before.

  Before you met me you had a drive out to the hills, where you would have ended it all if you’d had your own gun. You longed for a Glock 17. Three times you told me that detail. That manufacturer’s name.

  For the truth is in the detail, so I was told after the video interview.

  If you’re lying, you can’t give the finer details. You can talk of a crime and describe it lightly. But you can’t dig deep into every second of scratching action. You can’t describe in detail how he took his rough hands and sharp nails and held apart your rigid—

  And you can’t keep repeating it. Intimately.

  Nor remember words used as weapons to hurt: ‘Frigid.’

  Detail. Glock 17. I believed you. Saw the need in you, saw the fear too.

  So down I go to a future I still don’t know and there you are: big eyes and big hands and a man, so of course I’m wary. You and Phoebe are cosy together on a low bench and I sit at a safe distance and regard you for what Phoebe says you are: a friend who will help do her extension and someone she clearly trusts. She’s surprised that I’m surprised to see you.

  ‘Haven’t you two met before?’

  We regard each other and shake our heads in synchrony. ‘No.’

  We know we haven’t. We know we’d remember. Our brown eyes are the same shade as we stare.

  Phoebe brings coffees for the three of us and you two are planning, so I sit and listen. Soon you are joking in a Peter Kay way. Twinkly eyes, cheeky smile. When you show Phoebe a video on your phone, I move across to sit beside her so I can see as well.

  At first Phoebe’s next to you, leaning low over your shoulder, and I’m hunched alongside, staring wide-eyed at your friend’s dodgy, drunken karaoke. We all laugh, but then Phoebe goes to get something from the kitchen and suddenly you and I are alone.

  You move closer. Out of nowhere a sentence that floors me.

  ‘You remind me of Emily Brontë.’

  Of all the women in all the world, you pick her.

  I think of that Jerry Maguire film where Dorothy says, ‘You had me at hello.’

  Well, you had me then, at Emily.

  You ask, ‘Do you know her?’

  I laugh. ‘Of course. I’ve written a book about the Brontës. Didn’t you know?’

  No, you didn’t. You didn’t know I wrote. You didn’t even know I existed until that night.

  ‘I love their writing, the wildness of it,’ I say, and feel a flare of returning life.

  You nod. ‘I’ve walked those moors. I love them.’

  ‘Me too. I’ve been several times.’ I can feel my face glowing.

  Your eyes are bright with excitement. ‘Anne’s buried at Scarborough.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been there.’

  You stare right at me – right into me, it seems.

  ‘Of all the people,’ I say, still knocked off-balance. ‘Of all the women in all the world to pluck out of the ether, you pick a Brontë.’

  Phoebe comes back. She’s given up on sorting the extension plans and sends me off with you to the shop for wine and cigarettes. She tells me it’s because you’re on your motorbike and can’t carry anything and also because you don’t know where the shop is and I do. If there’s any other reason than those, I never know.

  You start the straight talk in the car. Your questions prompt me; soon words are falling like clothing.

  Sometimes it’s easier to talk to strangers than to people who’ve known you for all your life.

  They say the truth comes out in the end, but that’s a lie.

  If you try, you can hide it until you die.

  ‘Be bold,’ you say abruptly.

  I say I will be.

  Because I haven’t been.

  You know my voice was silenced but you don’t know why, so I tell you and I don’t even cry and I’m driving you, a man I hardly know, and I’m speaking the secrets of my soul.

  Two days after this, I am booked to sit down in a closed, oppressive room with a woman I have never seen before while being monitored by a man I will never remember.

  There will be a camera pointing at me – the judgemental lens not even hidden by the dusty curtain – and I will be asked to talk in ever-increasing detail about my past misery.

  I did not know then how harrowing that would be.

  How the ground we would go over and over would open up to swallow me. Such dirt to be immersed in, smothering my thoughts.

  How I would sense the pain in my body and flesh afresh. How I would feel soiled and ploughed inside. How the taste in my mouth would be of him again. Stale, foul. Intense.

  How nobody would be holding my hand. How I would clench instead the swabs of squashed tissues drenched by distress and how I would have to keep speaking and keep speaking and keep speaking.

  Here’s how he lifted my stiffened, coiled body to rearrange the fixed limbs into his desired position. Like manipulating the artist’s mannequin I bought him.

  That was when he clawed at and parted—

  Yes, it hurt. Yes, he knew. I curled up crying afterwards.

  The truth is in the detail. Over and over.

  Describe those actions I had long kept silent about on parts that are supposed to be private.

  Talk of places I can’t bear to be touched. Where I can no longer imagine love.

  Raw and exposed before people I will never know.

  ‘Harrowing,’ the policeman said months later, his gaze shifting away.

  But that’s all in the future.

  Meanwhile, we pull up at the shop and the outpour stops.

  In the Spar you bring out the Peter Kay-style banter again, teasing in the same tones Peter used for ‘Garlic Bread’: ‘Shi-raz, Shi-raz. What’s that?’

  You brag that you never drink, but you stock up on cigarettes. We laugh with the shop assistant about which is the worst vice: my wine versus your cigs. It’s nice.

  I drive back, looking for a gap in the hedge, because I know something is shifting and I need a chance to clear my head. When I see the distant abbey – solid, spiritual, safe – I park the car in a gateway and we get out and stand looking over a field of still-green wheat.

  You never wanted to speak out. Nor did I.

  I kept silent during the marriage to protect the children, now I speak out for the same reason.

  But it’s not easy to return to those years.

  The police informed me that it will take months to investigate, and that in the criminal court where the emphasis is solely on evidence and not justice, truth must be provable with dates, words, witnesses and reports.

  The solicitor has already said, ‘In police terms, it’s his word against yours.’

  They warn me he will deny everything.

  They are right. Not only that, he will quote fantastic phrases provided by professionals. He will tell the court official that I want to ‘emotionally castrate’ him because I’m jealous and want him back. My ‘vengeance’ will be his def
ence. He will say that my description of events is merely the ‘pathetic attempts’ of a ‘bitter woman’ desperate to destroy him.

  And of course he will talk louder and longer because he is practised at speaking. He is not breaking a concrete wall of silence.

  You say that you kept silent at the time of the incident, but now you think your comrade’s family need the truth.

  But I wonder, do they? How important is truth, after all?

  Does truth soothe a tormented soul? Does it defuse a volatile situation?

  You thought you got to him in time, but you were wrong, he was almost gone.

  You ask me, should you tell his children that as the blood choked in his throat you couldn’t make any sense of his last sentences? Those dying words might have been meaningful or they might have been awful, a blur of fear and pain.

  You wonder, should you make up something they might want to hear?

  You think his family need the reasons why he died, but do you want them to be fighting the ‘whys’ for the rest of their lives? An ongoing inquest in their minds?

  You can only surmise he would have been alive if you’d got properly equipped medical help in time. You can never be 100 per cent certain.

  And 100 per cent certain is what the legal system prefers. Reveres.

  His family will never stop missing him, but can you stop them reliving it?

  And how can you talk so freely, even recklessly to me, when you can’t talk to anybody else, not even those closest to you?

  Though I could ask myself the same question.

  ‘Be bold,’ you say again in the gateway. ‘People need to hear your voice.’

  You are the second person to say that to me that week.

  ‘Nobody can hear you if you don’t speak.’

  I swear the land has shifted beneath my feet. I put my hand to your arm – the soft pressure gives a warm surge of connection. I want to say something else – something tectonic, but I stop.

  ‘Phoebe will be wondering where we’ve got to.’

  So we go back to find that Phoebe has gathered friends. Down beneath the fairy lights nestled in the trees, a fire is alight and a guitar has appeared. She knows you can play, so she’s been next door and borrowed one from the twenty-something singer who has come along with his parents. Summoned by texts and calls, more friends are at the door.

  You and I are suddenly shy of each other.

  Phoebe leads you to a chair in the centre and passes the guitar. You begin to tune it, covering your awkwardness by complaining about its strings.

  I sit back down at the low bench, nowhere near you, so as not to draw notice. Yet it’s obvious to me, as clearly as if there were drums beating, that there is something resonating in the space between us.

  You must feel it too, because soon you move your chair to be next to me. Your arm brushes mine and my hand shakes my wine. Daylight is falling from the sky, slipping down like the scarf that drops from my shoulders. I pull it up, quick.

  The fire licks at the wood from the old shed and takes hold. Two bright planets come out of the darkness. More people arrive and sit down. We say nothing.

  You start singing. A familiar one: ‘Half the World Away’. People smile and sing along, but the lyrics speak differently to me. I look up to you and you smile and pat my head like I’m your child or your dog. You go on to play ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ and my soul slides towards you.

  As the last of the daylight disappears to reveal the secrets of the universe, the fire becomes bolder and ravishes the shed. Night is naked now; even the small, distant stars are visible. You tilt the guitar towards me, your brown eyes gazing into my mine as you sing, and our arms touch again. I sense in my skin a tingling that I had forgotten existed.

  For the first time in a very long time, I realise I want to be kissed and held.

  Though nothing else.

  The weight of his acts crushed into concrete every nerve ending. For years I had no pleasurable sensations left in my skin and my body felt solid as stone. He labelled me ‘frigid’, though I was loving and giving when I met him. A counsellor told me ‘desensitisation’ and ‘dissociation’ were an armour of protection in a traumatic situation. Technical jargon that I looked up and learned from.

  I understood it, but it didn’t change anything.

  That night was the first time my skin had come alive.

  Yet anything further was frightening.

  Then your girlfriend rings.

  I hear you saying, ‘At Phoebe’s, she got a guitar out,’ which jolts me back to reality in an instant. I can’t lift my eyes to look at you.

  We say our goodbyes and you go, though not without you pressing your number into my phone.

  ‘In case you can get any work for me,’ you say, as though you need to explain to onlookers.

  I resolve that I will, if only to redefine our meeting into something else.

  After you’d gone, Phoebe and her friend were teasing me.

  ‘What was wrong with you? You were like a puppy staring at him with those eyes!’

  ‘He’s got a girlfriend.’ Phoebe’s friend said piously.

  ‘I know.’ I was chastened. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  Phoebe laughed. ‘It was the wine!’

  ‘No it wasn’t! It was the stars and the firelight and the music and his eyes.’

  ‘It was the wine!’ they both chimed.

  ‘OK, it was the wine.’

  Because it was easier to agree than to try and explain that I don’t know what happened, but you swept me away.

  In a dark, pre-dawn hour, Phoebe’s cat climbed on top of my sleeping bag as I slept on the sofa. When I woke at five, my usual time, I was conscious of it lying there. Its body was warm and heavy as it nestled in the folds of fabric, so instead of getting up, I stayed still, thinking.

  Thinking sombre thoughts in the early morning is not good. Like soft mud, the sludge sucks you in.

  With another day until the interview, I had plenty to do. Paperwork to wade through, a messy house to clear, a difficult past to put behind me and a new life to find. Soon I began to feel overwhelmed.

  I listened to the sound of light rain dropping softly onto the ivy leaves outside the open window, the throaty thrum of a wood pigeon purring in the pale dawn, thought back to the magic night, and cried.

  But the tears sank into my parched soul and I knew that some part of me was revived.

  So after a while I got up, went home and carried on.

  Looked up the music you sang for me, and played it on my phone.

  Class and Publishing: Who Is Missing from the Numbers?

  Dave O’Brien

  Class, to paraphrase academic and literary critic Raymond Williams, is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is, indeed, because of both its history and how it has come to be used by academics, governments, individuals and communities.

  On the one hand ‘class’ is quite a technical term, based on the jobs people do. On the other, it forms a crucial part of the sense of identity many people in Britain hold as part of their everyday lives, as well as their cultural expressions.

  This short concluding chapter will try to introduce the ‘technical’ and the ‘identity’ ways of thinking about class. It is important to understand both ways of thinking about class together. When taken together, identities and technical measurements help us to show how occupations such as publishing are highly socially exclusive and begin to explain why this is the case.

  The technical use of the term ‘class’ is about understanding how society and the economy are organised. Another way of thinking about how society and the economy are organised is to ask how they are structured. This is where technical understandings of class come in. The most widespread and best known of these is the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC).

  The NS-SEC clusters occupations together into eight groups, from I (higher managerial and professional, which incl
udes doctors, CEOs and lawyers) to VII (routine occupations such as bar staff, care workers and cleaners), with VIII covering those who have never worked and the long-term unemployed.

  The NS-SEC groups are based on the way that jobs in each group have similar characteristics. For example, for the professional and managerial jobs, this is the terms of their employment contracts, their pay, the amount of autonomy or control they have in their workplace, and the careers they are part of.

  The NS-SEC gives a clear definition of class based on employment and occupation. It allows us to map jobs on to the categories of ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ which are the terms people use in everyday discussions of class. As well as giving a clear definition of class, the NS-SEC means we can be clear about class-based forms of inequality. We can see, through this technical approach to class, how workers in different occupations have differing characteristics.

  So far this explanation probably seems very dry, particularly for a subject as emotive as class. Moreover, it is especially dry if class is a crucial part of social inequality, another importantly emotive subject. So we need to think about the other way people understand class, which is as part of their identity.

  Social surveys often show a big gap between the numbers of people who would be classified as working class, because their occupation is in the NS-SEC VI–VII categories, and those who describe themselves as working class. Part of this self-description is about describing the feeling of being ordinary, just like everybody else. It is also a self-description that tells us about people’s class origins.

  People’s class origins, in technical terms, are about what parents’ occupations were when they were growing up. This tells us a great deal about their class origin when we’re thinking about the big picture of who is from which occupational NS-SEC starting point. In turn, we know there is a relationship between parental profession and other social resources, such as family wealth or attendance at particular schools and universities. There are also other social patterns associated with occupation, and parental occupation, such as forms of cultural participation and consumption.

  As with class, occupational understandings of social origin only take us so far in understanding people’s lived experiences and their own sense of identity. Counting the numbers of people with parents who are doctors, compared to the number with parents who are cleaners, can tell us about the patterns of class in society. This type of information, along with understanding the differences, or similarities, between people’s origins and their occupational destinations has been a central concern for research on social mobility.