Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Hello, Baker’s Arms! How yer doing? All right?’ Nathan yelled out, the T of ‘all right’ silent, the L and the R merged into a sort of W. Nathan had got over his original nerves, it seemed, and was now at home in his rock-star persona.

  Greg began to play gentle arpeggios, having selected an almost harpsichord-like timbre for his instrument, and, as Nathan launched into a tender love song, his singing voice shifted into another accent again, American-tinged this time, mid-Atlantic, but still full of glottal stops so as to give it a rough, untutored vulnerability that was reinforced by a repeated double negative in the concluding line of each verse which he would never have used in everyday speech: ‘There ain’t nothing in my head but you!’ he sang with a glottal stop for the final T in but. This kind of music was meant to be vernacular and unrefined. It just wouldn’t work if you stood there sounding like your mother was a GP and your father was a professor of medieval history.

  They played another song then, harsher and more political, about a popular uprising against the super-rich. ‘You cut our money but you don’t cut yours,’ sang Greg at the keyboards. ‘You send us off to fight in your endless wars,’ screamed Nathan, pushing his guitar aside so he could contain the microphone with both hands, ‘but we ain’t gonna stand for it no more.’ And again, Harry noticed the double negative which Nathan would never use in any other context, and the Ts lopped off from ‘cut’ and ‘fight’. But Michelle didn’t seem bothered at all.

  Karina left early to go home and get the food ready. Richard and Lucy went to help Greg load his keyboard into the car and then drop him off somewhere where the band were going to spend the rest of the evening. Phil and Ellie had to do likewise for Nathan. So it was agreed that Harry and Michelle would make their own way to Karina and Richard’s apartment.

  ‘I’m too fucking pissed for this,’ Michelle said.

  ‘You’re fine, dear. No more pissed than the rest of us.’

  She took his arm.

  ‘I wondered what you thought about Nathan switching out of his posh accent when he was on stage?’ Harry said.

  Michelle laughed. ‘What do you mean, switch? He talked posh all the time. Just like you do. I can’t believe Karina’s been on MasterChef and you didn’t even warn me!’

  ‘Honestly, I didn’t know. I’ve never seen MasterChef in my life.’

  ‘I can’t wait to tell Jen. She will be so—’

  ‘Don’t go on about it, though, Michelle. Karina knows she’s been on TV. She doesn’t need you to keep telling her.’

  Michelle stopped dead. ‘Oh God, Harry. It’s happening again, isn’t it? It’s like in that art museum. You’re ashamed of me.’

  He put his arms around her. ‘You know that’s not true. You know I love you like you are.’

  She was unyielding, as stiff in his arms as if she was a tailor’s dummy. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Michelle! Relax! Really and truly, you’ll be absolutely fine.’

  ‘That’s not what you just told me, Harry. What you told me is that I can’t relax, I’ve got to be careful what I say, because if I put one foot wrong, those people will look down on me. You might as well ask me to have a nice relaxing swim through a pool of crocodiles.’

  ‘It’s not like that at all. Listen, you know you drew that picture and I said how good it was and how that was a talent you could make something of? You had a go at me, remember? You told me that whether or not you had a talent for drawing made no difference to who you were. And you were quite right. What you said really made me think about how shallow it was to look at life as if it was all a big competition to notch up achievements and be as important as possible. All I’m saying now, Michelle, is that if you go over the top about Karina being on the telly, you’ll be doing exactly what you told me off for. Do you see what I mean? I’m saying that if you think achievements aren’t all that important, then act like they aren’t! Hold your head up! Don’t abase yourself. Be proud of being who you are.’

  ‘I won’t drink any more,’ she decided. ‘I’ve already had too much.’

  ‘I’m sure you—’

  ‘I wish I’d never come here. Ellie’s lovely, but the rest of them . . . Well, I don’t think Phil even likes me. And—’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about Phil, Michelle. He’s a typical boarding-school boy, that’s all. He’s a little bit afraid of pretty women until he gets to know them.’

  ‘And as for Karina and Richard and Lucy. They looked right through me, like I was so thin and empty there was nothing here for their eyes to see. I feel absolutely fucking terrified.’

  ‘Don’t be. Ignore what I said. I can see I’ve made things worse and I’m really sorry, but I honestly didn’t mean to. You’re worth ten of them, dear one. You’re worth a hundred of them. Just be yourself. Don’t take any notice of my crap.’

  She was still completely stiff in his arms. ‘I won’t ask her about being on TV.’

  ‘No, do ask her! It’s something to talk about, isn’t it, and I’m sure she’ll enjoy telling you. It must have been quite a big thing for her, I would have thought. It’s not like she does it all the time.’

  ‘But I thought you said—’

  ‘I didn’t mean you shouldn’t ask. I just meant there was no need to get all excited about it.’

  ‘So I can ask, but I have to pretend not to be impressed? Even though it was a big thing even for—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Michelle. It really doesn’t matter. Just be yourself. Be proud of being yourself.’

  THIRTY

  One of the features of early twenty-first-century television food shows is the recurring trope of what might be called the fantasy dinner party. I’ve already mentioned the segment of MasterChef in which prominent food writers are served dishes by contestants as if in a restaurant, but there was another genre of cookery programme in which a celebrity chef was the star of the show and would cook a whole meal for the instruction and entertainment of the viewers. In such programmes the chef is often shown serving up the dishes that she or he has just prepared to a group of friends who are sitting round what is apparently the dining table in the chef’s own home.

  These scenes were in fact constructed in TV studios, but they were presented in such a way that viewers could imagine themselves to have been given a glimpse into the lifestyle of the successful and famous. So the setting, like the food itself, would be designed to suggest a combination of good taste with homely comfort, high status with ease and relaxation, the cosiness of the old with the sharpness of the fashionable and new. And, as with the food, there is about the whole package a certain kind of carefully constructed informality which appears casual but nevertheless manages to get everything just right. Each detail is very artfully placed to achieve a heightened carelessness that actual carelessness could not hope to reach.

  The guests, often celebrities themselves, laugh and chat in this milieu of good food and fine wine served up in gracious surroundings. They’re completely at home in the company of one of the nation’s best-known chefs who, after all, is not to them a dauntingly famous person, but simply their friend and social equal. What is being offered to the viewers in these scenes and images is, in part, vicarious pleasure – they can enjoy imagining what it would be like to feel at ease at that mythical table, bantering elegantly with the assembled celebrities – but they are also being provided with a role model, something which, at least to some degree and insofar as their resources allow it, they can imitate, in the belief that what they’re being taught is one of the elements of the refinement that separates the higher classes from the lower ones.

  When she and Harry entered that glass apartment block beside the river, to be let through the security gate by the concierge and carried upwards in the glass lift with its views of the river and the city lights, it seemed to Michelle that she was actually being taken to one of those imaginary dinner parties. And when Richard opened the door of the flat, and she saw the amoun
t of space in there, the elegant furnishings, the carefully chosen and understated colours, the tree in its pot in the little garden high above the world, and the enormous plate-glass windows with their views of the shining metropolis, these things only confirmed her feeling that she had entered a world that to her was almost mythical. Once they’d all gathered together in the dining room, all the essential features of the fantasy dinner party were in place: (1) Someone beautiful from the TV, (2) Confident and wealthy hosts with top-of-the-range accents, (3) A selection of confident and well-spoken guests who were familiar with the host and completely at ease in her company, (4) A large and beautiful dining room whose decor combined order with charming informality, (5) The food itself, which also combined artfulness with the particular kind of informality that is in fact a higher level of artfulness, like the apparently effortless brushstrokes of a great painter.

  Of course, given time, she’d get used to it (as I’d get used to it if I was suddenly and unexpectedly elevated to full membership of the Guiding Body). Given time, she’d find out that, after all, a meal is still just a meal, and TV people are just people. But she wasn’t used to it now. It was still magical. And it was impossible to relax and enjoy the experience because of her sense that she didn’t belong here and that, in her nervousness and excitement, she’d make a fool of herself.

  Over the starter, Richard and Karina, as hosts, engaged Michelle in polite conversation, asking her about her hairdressing business, and about the town of Breckham (which Richard somehow seemed to know a great deal more about than Michelle herself, having looked it up on his phone on his way home). Both of them, it seemed to her, were polite but distant. Trying to generate a less stilted conversation which they all could share in, Harry began to talk about the evening’s performance, which kept things going for a while. And then Ellie said something to Michelle about wanting advice on her hair, at which point Richard disengaged immediately from the general conversation and began talking directly to Phil, Lucy and Harry about football, politics and the news.

  Michelle, at least outwardly, had overcome her earlier panic. She asked Karina what it was actually like behind the scenes on MasterChef and what the show’s main judges were like as people, and was pleased to hear in her own voice a genuine grown-up curiosity rather than the giggly star-struck excitement that Harry had cautioned her about. And Karina, as Harry had said, was not a regular performer on television, and so was interested in her questions and seemed to enjoy talking about just how different a show like that was in real life to how it appeared on the camera. She explained that the room in which she and her fellow food writers had been served was not really a room at all. She said there were long waits while lighting or sound was adjusted, with the participants frequently being asked to repeat things they’d said until they came out sounding right, sometimes many times over, to the point that, on one occasion, they had ended up pretending to taste food that had gone almost completely cold. The end result was, Karina said, that what viewers imagined to be a continuous scene was in fact a collage assembled by the programme’s editors from different moments in a constantly interrupted process: ‘If you watch it on TV, it seems like a single conversation, but when you’re actually there you realize you’re just generating the raw material from which a sort of idealized conversation is going to be constructed by the editors.’

  Ellie said something to Karina about how she and Michelle had discovered their jobs were actually much more similar than most people realized. Richard picked up on this somehow, and briefly paused in the middle of saying something to Phil about the rise of China as a global power to observe that, of course, surgeons and barbers had once been one and the same profession. But then he returned to China, while Karina asked polite questions about Shear Perfection and listened with such a show of interest that Michelle increasingly experienced it as a performance of interestedness, such as you saw when a politician or a member of the royal family was shown on TV listening to a member of the general public.

  Richard gathered up plates and Karina went to fetch the main course. Michelle remembered a funny moment from the pub earlier and mentioned it to Ellie, which made them both laugh and then, emboldened by how well things seemed to be going, she leant across the table to ask Lucy what work she did. She hadn’t stopped drinking after all.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The eight-wheeled car pulls up. The front doors open and the driver and the bodyguard climb out into the sticky grey heat of the London summer. Out over the river, seagulls shriek. The driver opens the rear door for the passenger, while the bodyguard keeps watch. She is a woman of about my age (and so a little older than Cally). Tall, lean and with curly hair cropped short, she’s wearing one of those grey Mao suits that, with their connotations of thrift and seriousness of purpose, have recently come into fashion in the upper echelons of the Guiding Body. In terms of facial type, she has quite fair skin and Mediterranean, or perhaps South Asian, features. She takes a white cloth from her pocket and wipes it over her brow.

  ‘Good evening, everyone!’ she calls out to the inhabitants of the shacks as she approaches the gate. She wrinkles her nose and waves her hand in front of her face to drive away the flies. Behind her the bodyguard scans the scene with his goggled eyes, like a radar sweeping the sky.

  ‘Evening, madam,’ mutters the little group that has gathered round myself and Cally.

  ‘I hope you’ve all had a good day?’ asks the woman in the Mao suit.

  Yes, they say, they have, and their hands sweep away the flies.

  ‘Excellent. I’ve been having a look at the flood defences along here. All very impressive. I expect some of you work on them, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, madam, I do,’ says Jane’s husband, who has come out of the shack holding the baby.

  ‘You’re doing a fine job,’ says the woman in the Mao suit, ‘and we’re very grateful to you.’

  Jane’s husband bows his head very slightly in minimal acknowledgement of the compliment. From inside the shack comes the sound of the old woman wailing. ‘Jane? Where are you? Jane? Jane?’ Two parrots fight noisily in the ditch.

  ‘Why’s that car got a star on it?’ asks Jane’s little bare-bottomed girl.

  Her father shushes her, but the woman in the Mao suit laughs cheerfully. ‘Well, I wonder if we can figure it out together. How many points does that star have, my dear?’

  The girl hides her face in her father’s grubby trouser leg and won’t say, but the little boy from next door counts out the points out with gusto. ‘Nine!’ he shouts triumphantly.

  ‘Jane!’ wails the old woman inside the shack. ‘Jane? Jane? Where are you?’

  ‘Nine indeed,’ the woman from the car says, ‘and do you know why it’s nine?’

  ‘No!’ Georgie shouts with the same vigour as before, apparently every bit as pleased about his ignorance of the Guiding Body’s emblem, as he is about his ability to count.

  ‘It’s to remind us of the Nine Principles, dear,’ the woman says, brushing a fly from her face, which is now beginning to shine with sweat. ‘I wonder if you can tell me what they are.’

  The boy looks round at his grandfather in bewilderment and I sense all the adults shifting uneasily as it occurs to each of them that the woman may turn to one of them to list the nine wise, humane and rational principles that Hu Shuang distilled for us from the history of human thought.

  The woman ruffles the little boy’s hair. ‘Never mind, dear. Time enough to learn. They are very important, though. They show us all how to live happier lives and free ourselves from ignorance and superstition.’ Her eyes narrow slightly as they alight on myself and Cally – no doubt she’s wondering who we are and what exactly we’re doing here – but she doesn’t linger on us for more than a second. Her bodyguard’s goggles will have identified us and recorded our presence, so she can check us out later on at her leisure if she feels like doing so. She could even look into our screens and see what we’re working on.

  ‘I won’t k
eep you,’ the woman says to the little crowd. ‘I’m sure you all have lots to do. I just wanted to thank you for the work you’re doing along the Thames here in London and down at the estuary to protect us all from floods, and to increase food production. We do notice, I promise you, and we really are all very grateful!’

  She glances for a moment in our direction – what are women like me and Cally doing among folk like these? – and then turns back to her car.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Eight storeys up from Jane’s shack, and 250 years earlier, Richard, Lucy and Phil started on Brexit. The three of them had pretty much abandoned any attempt at general conversation and Harry had turned his attention to Michelle, Karina and Ellie. But during a brief lull, when Harry and the three women had finished one topic and were casting about for the next, Lucy happened to raise her voice at the other end of the table.

  ‘The vote is irrelevant,’ she was saying very firmly. ‘Most people are economically illiterate and the decision was simply wrong. We need to stop beating about the bush and just say it. A vote doesn’t make something true if the evidence shows it to be false. The referendum result should be set aside.’

  To her own surprise Michelle responded. ‘So votes only count if you agree with them, do they?’

  Lucy looked across at her with her fierce, confident, intelligent eyes. Her father chewed on his lip.