The chicken is sizzling. It’s ten to three. ‘Chairs!’ shouts Marsha.
The first to arrive is Marsha’s older boy Curtis and his family. Suddenly the hall is full of childcare clobber as Curtis helps five-year-old Ruthie off with her coat, and baby Theo is scooped up from his carry-cot to ride on Lisa’s hip, and then held up to be squooched, no hands, by Marsha, who is still in the last convulsions of the cookery. Ben takes the mixing bowl from Marsha, the carry-cot from Lisa. But at once the doorbell goes again, and there on the step are Marsha’s sister Gloria, regal in an outfit even more spectacular than Marsha’s churchwear, and beaming next to her in a three-piece suit, and holding out a bottle of champagne, her lawyer husband Julius Ojo. Their daughter Addie is parking the BMW just up the road. Gloria gives a slightly stagey cry of joy and hugs Marsha, who still is having to hold her hands up and out of the way of the silks.
‘Now, if you’re not ready, you must let me help,’ says Gloria.
‘No,’ says Marsha.
Ben takes the champagne and puts it in the fridge.
‘Good man,’ says Julius, his voice a reverberant courtroom bass.
Gloria offers Ben a cautious, eyes-averted cheek to kiss – she is not sure about her sister’s eccentric choice, or maybe she is sure, and not to his advantage – and he gets them all moving through the lounge towards the French windows. Marsha washes her hands, stacks plates. Just in time: up the garden path are coming the late-departed Clyde Simpson’s younger brother Otto, a pale-brown guy in glasses with a beret and a raincoat and a jazzman’s frizzy tuft of beard, looking very like the ceremonial picture of Marsha’s husband on the lounge wall, except for the beret and the beard, and except for the wary expression, which he shares with his partner Margaret, also a teacher. They both look braced and ironical round the eyes, as if already looking down on events from a prepared position somewhere to the rear of their literal bodies. This isn’t the look on the face of their daughter Grace, though. Grace is nearly fourteen and big with it, in the awkward place between child and teenager. Today she wants to be a child, and she hugs her auntie, and pushes on straight through the hall in search of Ruthie, who adores her. Ben picks up the coats that have fallen down.
No point in shutting the door again. Addie is coming up the road, twirling the car key round her finger; and in the other direction, under a tree, Curtis’s younger brother Cleveland is in sight, with his arms round the girlfriend no one has met yet. Not, by the look of his body language, having a snog; more a case, as he strokes her long fair hair, of calming her down, or nerving her up, for her meeting with the assembled clans. Here they come, Cleveland gently propelling her along. They meet Addie at the gate, and she says something that makes Cleve laugh and the girl smile, and then they’re in, twelve – thirteen – fourteen, and that’s everyone, the clans have assembled. High-achieving pots-of-money Tory-voting Ojos to one side, public-sector on-the-committee-of-Carnival brushes-with-the-law Simpsons to the other; in the middle, Marsha’s two boys, the shy accountant and the can’t-make-up-his-mind student. Not to mention Marsha herself, showing off to all sides a replacement for dead Clyde who is a spindly, weird, white, mental-patient sous-chef. So many possible disasters. So much that can go wrong.
Marsha serves up like a demon, plate after loaded plate dispatched into the garden. Ben runs about with beers, juices, the champagne, and a huge jug of Fanta tinted pink, which is a Nigerian thing, apparently. In between times he flips chicken. The whole of the backlog that he already barbecued is used up in a flash, and he gets the next lot cooking. The younger ones mingle, but their elders have picked out lawn chairs in separate encampments, Ojos by the French doors, Simpsons towards the shed. And there is no sign of Marsha. Sometimes she needs to be prised out of the kitchen. If he doesn’t fetch her now, she may decide to stay put in there until second-helping time, hiding from her own party. In he goes; and as he passes the Ojos, he hears Gloria grumbling about the seasoning of the Ewa Agoyin.
‘Well, I think it tastes exactly like yours, Mum,’ says Addie. ‘I mean: exactly.’
‘Well, of course it does,’ rumbles Julius. ‘They both learnt it from their mother. It’s the same damn recipe.’
Oh dear.
‘Come on, love, come out,’ says Ben to Marsha. ‘Everyone wants to see you.’
‘All right, all right,’ says Marsha. But she takes off her apron and follows. There is an empty chair over on the other side of the garden, but as Marsha comes up, Addie gets up and pats her own seat next to Gloria.
‘There you go, Auntie,’ she says, and takes her own plate off towards Cleve and Curtis’s encampment. Marsha sits down with a bit more emphasis than is natural, doing an impression of a relaxed person.
Gloria lifts her chin towards her receding daughter. ‘She is doing really well, you know. Already a star in her chambers, they say.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ says Marsha.
They watch Addie go: heels high enough to make holes in the lawn, creakingly tight skirt, perfect curves and perfect hair and perfect cheekbones and perfect purple nails. Ben knows, from what Marsha has told him, that Gloria and Julius struggled to have babies, and that Gloria minded bitterly being the childless older sister while Marsha popped out boys, even if they were slightly inferior boys, conceived with the feckless Clyde. Addie’s perfection is supposed to represent a kind of devastating reply. Marsha is supposed to look at the future Adesina Ojo QC, and to mind that Curtis operates from behind a plastic fascia on West Bexford Hill, doing the books for one-lorry haulage firms. And yet the sisters also love each other. And yet Addie, as well as looking like some kind of West African goddess of success, is in fact a miraculously nice person, with a considerable soft spot for both her male cousins and no time at all for the status games Gloria tries to play against them using her. She’s over there now, flirting decorously with Cleve, ruffling Curtis’s hair as broken nights with the baby, and Marsha’s food, threaten to send him snoozing off. When she was a little girl, she was worshipfully fixated on Curtis the way Ruthie is on Grace now, and it still shows. The quarrel is stupid. The quarrel is stupid, but Ben has never dared to intervene in it. What would he say?
‘How is the café going?’ Julius asks Ben. (It’s the only question he can ask, Ben supposes, there being no other kind of professional achievement to ask safely about, where he’s concerned.)
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Really good, in fact. We’re thinking of taking on some more people.’ And this is true. Since they took the plunge and acquired the Gaggia machine that steams and hisses on the counter, they seem to have picked up a lot of trade from the incomers in the Rise’s Georgian houses. Café Metro is full of well-off twenty-somethings, reading the paper and happily paying more than a pound for a cappuccino.
‘Of course, it’s a very small business,’ says Gloria.
Ben has no idea what to say to this. Marsha’s hands are knitted together in her lap. Her empty lap.
‘You’ve forgotten to get any food for yourself,’ he realises, and retreats to the kitchen to load Marsha a plate. He isn’t fleeing; no.
But when he gets back he finds that things have already escalated to the point where the sisters have switched into rapid Yoruba. He doesn’t understand a word of it, but Julius’s jovial face is strained; Addie, sighing, is heading back over too.
‘Honestly!’ says Ben without forethought, standing over them with a knife and fork in one hand, a mounded plateful in the other. The two women, startled, look up at him. ‘Honestly!’ he repeats. ‘You always remember that you like each other in the end. Why can’t you remember it quicker? Why can’t you just remember it now?’
Gloria starts to say something, stops, looks at her lap. Marsha blushes.
‘Hmm,’ says Addie, leaning forward to study their faces. ‘Naive – but effective.’
Julius starts to laugh. Marsha covers her face with her hand, and groans. Gloria coughs, taps her sister on the knee, and says, ‘You know, this is delicious.’
‘Well, Ben, this is delicious.’
‘She taught me everything I know,’ says Ben, nodding at Marsha; and again everyone laughs, including him, though it is only the literal and absolute truth he is speaking.
After that it becomes one of those afternoons when goodwill, once established, goes on reinforcing itself, making a deeper and deeper groove down which the party happily rolls. Ben flips chicken pieces and more chicken pieces; Marsha produces, to applause, the vast pie, covered with soft brown peaks like a meringuified ocean in a storm; the men settle down and obediently eat, and eat, and eat. After a while Otto comes over, hands Julius a new beer, and starts a conversation with him about cricket. It expands to sports in general and absorbs Cleve. The women, more mobile, perch and travel, perch and travel, passing baby Theo from shoulder to shoulder, and periodically clearing away. Ruth runs about, looking over her shoulder to make sure Grace is following, and when Grace comes to rest, Lisa talks to her about school and makes her feel she has a junior spot among the matriarchs. Margaret hesitates at the edge of the group at first, but Addie draws her in and soon she is laughing and taking a turn with Theo.
Ben watches. He’s comfortable like that. Marsha catches his eye across the garden and he salutes her with his barbecue tongs. But Cleve’s girlfriend drifts his way and lingers, fanning the spicy-greasy smoke away from her face. (The weather is behaving itself too, bright blue only deepening as teatime goes by and the evening comes on.)
‘Chicken?’ says Ben, though she’s not holding her plate out.
‘Oh, no thanks,’ she says. ‘I’m a vegetarian.’ She gazes at the crisped and spiced skin, dripping fat that makes little gouts of flame. ‘Doesn’t it, you know, bother you? That you’ve got, like, all dead things on there?’
‘No,’ says Ben firmly. He looks at her again, and then he gets it: Cleve is busy and she’s anxiously presenting herself over here, despite all the evil carnivore-ism, because he’s the only other white person in the garden. It’s not that he forgets that himself, exactly. His sister was eloquent about it, when he announced that he was moving out to live with Marsha. It came up a lot, in a different way, between him and Cleve, who was still just about living at home then, and let Ben know that he minded, and that he was creeped out by his mother sharing her bed with ‘an albino fucking spider, man’, and that he didn’t expect Ben to get any ideas about fatherhood, step- or otherwise. But today he hasn’t been thinking about that, just now it’s the Ojo/Simpson difference that’s been the pressing one. Ben puts down the tongs and applies himself. ‘So, you’re at uni with Cleve? What are you studying?’
She is studying hotel and catering, she says. But she is not sure that it’s really right for her. It’s not what she really cares about. Mmm, says Ben. Has she found out what she does really care about, because it’s not always easy to tell, is it? No, she says, that’s right! Maybe, she says, it might be travelling. She feels really alive when she’s travelling. Mmm, says Ben, who has never been beyond London’s bus map, except to hospital. And there is a place she dreams of going, she says, somewhere that sounds completely magical, she says, and that’s Thailand. Really, says Ben. Oh yes, she says, it’s very spiritual. And of course the food’s amazing. Mmm, says Ben.
‘Hey there,’ says Cleve, joining them. ‘You bending Ben’s ear?’
‘He’s really easy to talk to!’
‘Isn’t he?’ Cleve says, grinning, and it’s probably ironic, but he doesn’t say it, now, in an unfriendly way. If anyone is being teased, it’s the girl (whose name Ben hasn’t caught).
‘D’you want some more chicken?’ asks Ben.
‘Nah, I’m good.’ Cleve pats his stomach and stretches. He’s the good-looking one of Marsha’s boys. ‘Looks like peace has broken out, man,’ he says, surveying the scene by the French doors.
Julius and Otto are smoking Julius’s cigars, Ruthie is riding on Grace’s shoulders, Gloria has said something which is making Marsha laugh and laugh.
‘Yeah, thank heavens,’ says Ben.
‘Mum’s looking happy.’
‘D’you think so?’ Ben asks, instantly anxious.
‘For sure. Probably,’ he adds, looking at Ben sidelong, wickedly, ‘’cause you let her boss you round all day long …’
‘Cleve!’ says the girl, not sure what Cleve means, only that it’s a wind-up.
‘No, it’s not that,’ says Curtis, who is coming over yawning, having surfaced from his nap and caught the end of what they were saying. He’s slighter than his brother, large-headed, mild. There’s sleep at the corner of his eyes, there are the yellows and greys of tiredness in his skin. You can see the middle-aged accountant in the thirty-year-old one. ‘Not just that, anyway. It’s because you’re not like our dad.’
Cleve gives Curtis a glance, not a joking one.
‘I know she misses him,’ says Ben. He doesn’t know that, but he’s thought a lot about the absent Clyde. The space he left seems unfillable to Ben, so surely it must to Marsha.
‘Yeah, well, everyone’s got stories about how great he was,’ says Curtis.
‘Well, he was,’ says Cleve.
‘When he was up, yes. Then he was, like, officially, a Fun Guy. The Fun Guy. Life and soul. But he was bloody moody too. Sulks that lasted for days. “Get out of my face, boy.” “Can’t we have a bit of peace in here?” “Ah, don’t feed me no more of that African shit.” You remember, Cleve.’
‘True dat,’ says Cleve.
‘And the good times were mostly when he was out, and the bad times were mostly at home, so Mum had to, you know, soak them up. So you’d get this happy guy, this cool musician guy, with this weary-looking woman on his arm, and all his friends would be like, “Relax a little, darling, eh?”’
‘Like that ever helps!’ says the girlfriend.
‘Yeah,’ says Cleve, not looking her way. ‘And there’d be this … expression round her mouth, like she was always having to keep, like, a grip on her face, yeah.’
‘Haven’t seen that for a while,’ says Curtis.
‘No,’ says Cleve.
‘Because she’s not doing it any more. Because Ben here isn’t sticking his lip out, like, “I’m miserable, woman, and someone needs to pay for it.”’
‘Well, of course not,’ says Ben, puzzled. ‘She’s wonderful. Why would I be miserable?’
‘Yes, why would you?’ repeats Curtis quietly, as if he’s proved something. And he pats Ben on the arm.
‘Well,’ says Cleve, and he sounds almost embarrassed. ‘Well! You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to nip behind the rose bushes, and spark up a J.’
‘Great!’ says the girlfriend.
‘Fancy a smoke, bruv?’
‘Don’t let Mum smell it,’ says Curtis. ‘Nope, not for me; I’m trying to wake up.’
‘How ’bout you, Ben,’ says Cleve, studying the roses.
How to explain that for him the dope was always oblivion not pleasure, that now he doesn’t need his mind wiped. But then he realises that he doesn’t have to, he doesn’t have to give reasons. He just has to smile at them.
‘I’m good,’ he says.
Much later, when everyone has gone but Curtis and Lisa and the kids, and they’re packing up, he’s out again in the garden, raking out the barbecue before putting it away. It’s dusk, the blue of deep water stretching right around the dome of the sky except in the absolute west, where the last of the light stains a couple of puffball clouds red. There are burned chicken bones among the ashes and for a second something stirs but just as quickly is gone again. He gazes. A rose-coloured scratch is travelling on the blue, high and far. The last plane of daylight. The celestial clock is revolving and bringing on the night. Even happiness can’t stop it. Time is his friend now, but it goes by so fast.
Ruthie comes running.
‘Grandpa Ben!’ she cries, as if she’s caught him out in something. ‘Nana says come in right now!’
; Val
Ring, ring.
‘Hello, Samaritans.’
‘I, I. I don’t know if this is a good idea.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘…’
‘I can tell you’re very upset.’
‘Yes!’
‘All right. Now, I need to just ask you this. Are you thinking about taking your own life?’
‘No? I don’t know? I’m just desperate. Am I still allowed to talk to you?’
‘Course you are. Course you are, petal. You can talk to us about anything. Why don’t we start off with you telling me your name.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Okay, that’s okay. It’s fine if you don’t want to. Well, can you tell me what you’re upset about?’
Light Perpetual Page 19
