Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  ‘You’re quarter Italian? You didn’t tell me that! But if that’s the case, I would have thought that—’

  He broke off, dismissing what he’d been about to say with a wave of his hand. ‘You’re descended from migrants, so why aren’t you in favour of immigration?’ was, when he thought about it, a very silly and superficial question not just in one but in several different ways, including one whose silliness he himself had explained to his brother-in-law only a week previously. ‘I suppose what I didn’t like is that you seemed to be blaming those builders personally, given that they’re every bit as entitled to be here as they would be if they’d come here from – I don’t know – Sheffield. You hear of Eastern European people being abused in the streets these days, or attacked, when all they’ve done is move here to do a job.’

  Michelle shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t abuse those guys in the street. I say hello, I smile, I laugh if they make a joke. Trevor takes it more personally. He is a bit racist, if I’m honest – me and his daughter are always telling him off for it – but I’m pretty sure even he isn’t rude to those blokes when he meets them. He’s an awkward sod at times and, as he admits himself, he’s really thick, but he’s got a kind heart deep down.’

  ‘I’d be interested to meet him.’

  She laughed, a little bitterly, refusing to be deflected. ‘So, anyway, you didn’t like what I said and you wished you hadn’t slept with me, but then you changed your mind again and emailed me. How come?’

  She was poised, defensive, almost hostile.

  ‘I didn’t like what you said. It seemed mean and small-minded, like the kids in your school being unfriendly just because you came from Essex. But it struck me that it was no worse in its own way than things I hear my friends say. In fact, no worse than things I’ve said myself. And I kept thinking about you, and how close we’d felt that night, and how—’ He broke off. He was determined to speak the truth, but that was proving surprisingly difficult. Absolute truth was against all the normal rules of social interaction, and perhaps even beyond the reach of language.

  Michelle waited, still turning her wine glass absently back and forth between her fingers. She wore rings of various kinds on all of them, even her thumbs.

  He looked straight at her, into her grey, flayed eyes, their rawness somehow at odds with her neat, groomed presentation. ‘And, like I said before, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. In the end, I talked about it with my sister Ellie, and she told me I was being stupid, and I should get in touch with you. She said you were a grown-up and you could decide for yourself if that was what you wanted.’

  Michelle seemed to soften slightly. ‘I remember you telling me about your sister. She’s a doctor, yeah?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Do you think she’d like me?’

  It was a surprising question and it momentarily threw him. ‘Er . . . yes, I think she would. The same as I do.’

  ‘She’s your twin, isn’t she? What does she look like?’

  He took out his phone, found a picture of Ellie taken at Christmas.

  ‘She looks nice,’ Michelle said. ‘Really pretty, too.’

  ‘Well, everyone says she looks a lot like me, so I’m good with that.’

  She kicked his foot under the table. ‘Talk about fishing for fucking compliments, Harry!’

  The waiter came for their order. Harry asked Michelle about her family. ‘It sounded as if you were very close. I remember you saying both your brother and sister moved to Breckham when you and your parents did, even though they were both married by then and had kids. That must have meant giving up jobs, and all sorts.’

  ‘Well, my mum and Jen are practically joined at the hip,’ Michelle said. ‘Jen always says Mum’s her best friend. They see each other every day. They do all their shopping together. No way was Jen going to settle for being seventy miles away. It would have done her head in. And that left Trevor on his own. His first marriage was breaking up by then, and he’s a bit of a mummy’s boy himself deep down, so he sort of followed on.’

  ‘That is a very close family!’

  ‘Do you think? I don’t think we’re closer than most people’s. Cheryl sees her mum most days. And they go shopping to Cambridge or Bury nearly every weekend.’

  ‘I suppose I’m just comparing your family with people I know. I mean, I see my sister every six weeks or so, and when my dad was still around, I went up to Norwich to see him maybe six times a year. More when he was very ill, obviously, but until then once every couple of months at most.’

  ‘Well, not all families get on. Jen’s husband Ken fell out with his brother when he moved to Breckham and now he never sees him at all.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean that. I get on very well with my sister. I got on perfectly well with my dad. It’s just a different kind of family life, I suppose. Most of my friends’ families are spread out over a wide area and only see each other once in a while. My wife Janet’s parents are in Scotland, for instance, her brother’s in Madrid, her sister’s in Los Angeles.’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘And I honestly can’t think of any woman I know who would say their mum was their best friend, or see her mum every day unless she was ill or something.’

  She frowned. ‘Are you saying there’s something wrong with being that close to your mum?’

  ‘No! Not at all,’ he said, though actually the idea of family members being that involved with each other felt to him quite stifling, in much the same way that he found the idea of living in Breckham stifling, and to his ears there was something a bit pathetic about a daughter saying her mother was her best friend, like a woman who’d never quite grown up. ‘I’m just noticing a difference. It’s as if we came from different countries, and I was noticing your country has different customs.’

  Michelle nodded. ‘Well, family’s important in my country. Although I wish Jen would make a few friends her own age. What’s she going to do when Mum’s gone?’

  Their food arrived at this point. Platefuls of meat, I expect. Or, if not, something made with cheese. They couldn’t get enough of their animal products back then: a third of the dry land on Earth was given over to feeding the animals they used for food. Michelle picked up her knife and fork. ‘I’ll tell you one thing. You talk about completely different things from any bloke I’ve ever been out with.’

  ‘Really? What did they talk about, then?’

  ‘Oh, their jobs, how much money they earned, their cars. Maybe their motorbikes, if they had them, or boats or stuff like that.’

  Harry smiled. ‘Like bowerbirds.’

  She stared at him in bewilderment. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ve not seen them on the nature programmes?’

  ‘I don’t really watch nature programmes, to be honest.’

  ‘Well, they’re a kind of bird that makes a little structure called a bower to attract a mate, and fills it up with pretty things to impress her.’

  ‘Yeah? I guess it is a bit like that. Trying to impress me. It gets a bit boring, to be honest. Like I give a damn what kind of bike they’ve got, or how much it cost. But you . . . I really can’t tell if you’re trying to impress me or not. You haven’t even mentioned your job. You haven’t mentioned your money or the things you own. And I mean, you’re an architect. You must be doing all right, but you’ve got that little Renault which must be at least ten years old, with dents and scratches all over it.’

  ‘That seems strange to you, does it?’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you what car you drive, isn’t it? But most people I know like to have a decent car.’

  ‘I did like him,’ Michelle writes later. ‘He’s lovely to look at, he’s way more interesting than most blokes, and he’s a better listener too. But he is weird. He was really stressed about those Polish builders. It’s like he doesn’t know there’s a world out there where everyone says stuff like that. And then, after we’d finished the main course, we got on to Brexit and I told him I’d voted Leave, and he got all tense
again and made me explain exactly why. I felt I was being tested, to be honest. I felt he liked me a lot, but he was worried I might turn out to be someone he wasn’t allowed to be with. Like that funny kid we had at school back in Romford – Cathy, I think her name was – who had to wear a headscarf all the time and wasn’t allowed to be friends with anyone that didn’t have the same religion.’

  Michelle told Harry she didn’t like the idea of having to take laws that came from Brussels.

  ‘Well, we help to make those laws too.’

  She laughed. ‘You might, Harry, but no one ever asks me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t mean you and me personally, obviously, but we can vote for the European Parliament and we can choose our own government, which sends ministers to the European Council.’

  ‘With loads of other countries, though.’

  ‘Twenty-seven. But we have the same say as all of them.’

  ‘Well, why can’t we just make our own laws and leave them to make theirs, like it used to be? Plus I don’t care what you said about me and those Polish guys, I don’t like us not being in charge of who comes to this country and who doesn’t. That should be for us to decide.’

  ‘Well, we are still a separate country. We’ve got our own government, our own foreign policy, our own army, but one of the great things about being in the EU is that you and I are entitled to live and work in any one of those other twenty-seven countries whenever we want!’

  That just made Michelle laugh. ‘Well, whoop-de-do! Why would I want to live in another country? I haven’t lived anywhere but Breckham since I was fifteen! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love going to Spain or Greece for a holiday, but why would I want to live there? They speak a different language, they do things differently. I like having people round me I can relate to.’

  ‘Your Italian grandpa adjusted, I suppose?’

  ‘Well, sort of, but he had to, didn’t he? He came over here because he needed the money, but all his mates were Italian. In fact, never mind Italian, most of them were Sicilian like him. He didn’t have much time for north Italians. I don’t know if it was really true, but he always claimed he couldn’t understand their language. Yeah, and anyway, Harry, he came over here before the war. There was no EU then, was there? But people were still allowed to come over here if there was work for them. What’s wrong with that? Plus, I don’t see the point of sending all that money to Brussels, when we could—’

  ‘That three hundred and fifty million quid a week? We were lied to about that, Michelle! We get a rebate from the EU. The real figure’s under two hundred million.’

  Harry was looking so serious that she had to fight an urge to burst out laughing. He seemed to think that what he’d just said would be shocking news to her. ‘Oh, I know that. Of course I do. They were always arguing about it on TV. But it’s still a big number, isn’t it? And I don’t know about you, Harry, but once numbers get into hundreds of millions, big is all they really mean to me.’

  She poked at the food left on her plate. ‘And anyway, politicians always exaggerate. They always promise things that won’t happen. That’s not news, is it? You have to decide with your gut in the end, don’t you, and hope for the best? They’re all out for themselves, anyway, or out for their sort of people anyway. But at least our politicians are in England. At least they speak the same language as us and live in the same country.’

  She watched his face, puzzled and amused. What she was saying seemed to torture him, yet to her it didn’t seem controversial at all.

  What struck Harry was that Michelle was barely even aware of all the arguments that his fellow-Remainers had been rehearsing obsessively since the vote in June. All this time, the people of his tribe had been getting themselves more and more angry and distressed about a menacing and unknowable Other, far beyond the edge of the pool of light in which they lived: a brutish, loutish, hate-filled Other, which, for its own primitive reasons, had committed an act of pointless and even spiteful vandalism against something that to his people was integral to how they saw themselves. But Michelle and her friends hadn’t been listening. They’d been part of a completely different conversation about the way that the centre of power was moving ever further away from them, both literally and metaphorically, and no longer cared about what mattered to them or how they wanted to live.

  ‘And you’re not bothered at all by the consequences of leaving?’ Harry asked. ‘Because you know, whatever the Leave side said, the fact is that our whole economy’s tied up with Europe. It’ll take years, maybe decades, to readjust.’

  Michelle laughed, not so much at what he said, as at the earnestness with which he said it. ‘Do you really think that’s an argument for staying, Harry? Sounds to me like a reason for leaving.’

  ‘A reason for leaving? How come?’

  ‘Well, if we’re already so tangled up in it that it’ll take years to disentangle ourselves, doesn’t that mean we should get a move on and get out before we get tangled up even more?’ She smiled. ‘Reminds me of my garden shed, actually. It’s got ivy growing all over it. You know what ivy’s like, it pokes itself in between the planks and slowly breaks them apart. It’d take me ages to clear it all off, but if I don’t do it, it’ll be an even bigger job next year, and in the end I won’t have a shed at all.’

  ‘But I don’t think of Europe as creeping ivy,’ Harry protested. ‘I think of it as extra connections, like extra helping hands. I mean, this is one world, isn’t it? There’s only one planet. Only one human race.’

  ‘We’ve got to look after ourselves first, though, haven’t we? I mean, you and all your friends, you’ve got nice houses, I’m guessing, you have nice holidays abroad, you have nice— Oh wait . . . scratch that . . . I was going to say you have nice cars.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Michelle. Leave my poor car alone!’

  She smiled. ‘What I mean is that you look after yourselves first, yourselves and the people near you, don’t you, the same as everyone else does? So, okay, you talk about one planet and one human race and all of that, and it’s true in a way, but at the same time . . . ’

  The waiter came and cleared their plates.

  ‘But at the same time we’re hypocrites,’ Harry said.

  ‘I used to go out with a bloke called Brett from one of the American bases we’ve got round here. We met this other American guy in the pub once. I think he was a professor of some sort, and he started going on about how America was stolen from the Indians, and it was terrible, and they should have it back. In the end Brett said, “Okay, so find out which Indian tribe used to live where you live now and give them the deeds of your house.” The poor bloke didn’t know what to say!’

  Michelle glanced at the dessert menu which the waiter had given her.

  ‘Mind you, I’m just the same. I worry a lot that we’re fucking up the world. You know, with this climate thing, and plastic and everything. It really bothers me at the moment, I don’t know why, the idea of everything coming to an end. None of my friends seem worried and Cheryl says I’m nuts, but sometimes it keeps me awake at night, like this huge black bird hanging over me. I say to Cheryl, “You’ve got kids and one day they’ll have kids too. What kind of world are they going to have to live in?” But she tells me I’m just obsessed. “You don’t do anything about it any more than I do,” she says, “so how are you helping anyone just by worrying?”’

  *

  That sort of statement is quite powerful when you know that people like Harry and Michelle were indeed fucking up the world, and that theirs was the first generation in history knowingly to fuck up the world, and yet still carry on doing it. That’s why some people these days refer to their era as the Age of Selfishness. But I do sort of get it as well.

  It’s lonely and stuffy inside my damp little flat and I lean out of my window and watch the life below me: the mantises hunting for moths on the wall, the boats nudging round each other, the people passing back and forth on the wooden walkway. It’s a kind of company, and it cheers
me up.

  As ever there are children and old people fishing and from time to time there’s a little flurry of activity and laughter as another eel is lifted from the water, either to have its head lopped off on the walkway there and then or to be tossed into a bucket and killed later. Little Joe’s down there as usual hunched beside his bucket, pretending to be the genius fisherman utterly absorbed in watching his line, so as to explain why there’s no one sitting near him. But I’m looking to cheer myself up, not to make myself unhappy, so I turn my attention to a couple of little girls a few metres along from him who are shouting triumphantly after catching a particularly large eel.

  Normally I’d enjoy the spectacle of their delight but, I suppose because of my unease about Joe, I find myself wondering for a moment what it’s like for the eel to be suddenly yanked out of its world by a sharp, barbed, stinging thing that clings to its mouth and can’t be shaken off. But I brush away that thought as you brush away a fly. I don’t doubt eels are capable of suffering – I can’t really see why their capacity for pain should be any less than mine – but I haven’t enough peace and contentment to spare just now to worry about little boys who no one loves, let alone to worry about eels.

  I sometimes think this lies at the heart of our human dilemma. Without empathy we’re nothing, but unless we set limits to empathy, none of us would ever be happy at all.

  Harry drove Michelle back to her house. When he pulled up outside she gave him a soft kiss and invited him in.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should just leave it like this today?’

  She pulled back from him, frowning. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Harry. Don’t tell me I’ve said something wrong again?’

  He laughed and grabbed her hands. ‘No, Michelle, not at all. Nothing like that, I promise you! Right now the only thing that’s holding me back from having my hands all over you is that we’re sitting here in full view of all your neighbours.’

  ‘Same for me,’ she said. ‘So if we go inside, we both get what we want, don’t we?’