The Invisible Crowd

by Ellen Wiles

  And Nina loved every minute of that course. I remember visiting her there, and she was all smiles, saying how she was happier than she’d been in years. She looked amazing too – she’d filled out a bit, dressed creatively and styled her hair. I wish people from school could have seen her. The ugly duckling personified. Not that she was ever ugly to me.

  She did an MA the following year at the Royal Academy, and at their end-of-year show, her stuff was noticed by this big-shot collector who bought a piece of hers for way more than she’d priced it, and on the back of that she was offered a solo show – everything was going in the right direction. I remember her telling me she had no idea why she ever imagined that making companies fire people might be a better career choice than making art. The only problem was, once she was out of the cocoon of the MA, she started feeling anxious about the scrutiny that came with all the attention she was getting. Especially since her tutors had told her she had to put out this narrative about her work that characterized it as a kind of therapy for her ‘severe’ anxiety. Like, I remember her telling me how they expressly told her to edit her blurb to include the word ‘severe’. I mean, it was the truth, in a way, but she felt like selling her work under that label diminished its value, even if it made her more money. Which I thought was rubbish; I mean, most art now is talked about as conceptual and autobiographical, right, so if you’ve got a distinctive personal issue to make you stand out, why not embrace it? I did get how it would make her feel self-conscious. But then she started getting really paranoid that people were watching her all the time for signs of weirdness, and I got a bit impatient with her – I mean, she was doing so well compared to her peers; that’s what they were really thinking, I was sure of it.

  In the meantime, I was objectively struggling. I was barely getting any commissions, and living in this tiny, shitty room in a shared house with a bunch of people I didn’t like. I felt like a failure compared to Nina. But I didn’t want to bring her down by talking about it. Plus I was sure I’d get my break soon enough and it would all take off for me too.

  And then Nina had Clara. The birth itself didn’t sound bad, relatively speaking, but after that her anxieties mushroomed. She couldn’t seem to get out of the house, couldn’t deal with all the shitty laundry, couldn’t cope with how her own routines were all screwed up because of the baby. I mean, I’m sure it’s hard for all new mums, but for someone with Nina’s personality I could see it was a nightmare. She seemed to retreat completely – at least, I barely ever saw her any more. She’d had a couple of shows lined up but pulled out of them. I kept asking how she was doing, but she’d hardly ever reply, or would just send a two-word text weeks later, and there never seemed to be a good time for me to go and visit.

  Obviously Quentin should have been there to support her more. But he was always working, and she didn’t get much support from her mum either – they never got on all that well. When I texted Quentin to say I was worried about her, he texted back saying something like, ‘your concern is noted but we’re fine’. Feck off, basically. I felt really low, then: I was still going nowhere with my job, I was tutoring most evenings to make enough to pay the rent, but I couldn’t bring myself to go back to accountancy just yet, so I really needed a friend, but my bestie had been swallowed up in a whirlpool of nappies and was being shielded by a snarky husband.

  Luckily Nina got better, by the time Clara turned one, but she stayed way too thin – I had to go round and force-feed her wine and chocolate, and endure her going on about sleep routines and competitive parenting (not that she called it that), and barely ever asking how my work was going. Not that there was ever much to tell. I remember one evening like that, when Quentin’s campaign was getting going, when she finally asked, and I gabbled something along the lines of ‘Oh, all right, but it’s so hard to get commissions, and just to be in the right place at the right time…’

  When she said, ‘So, I’m really worried. I’m pretty sure Mum is employing this illegal immigrant man, and having him round at her house when she’s on her own, and not listening to reason, and Quentin’s furious, because if it came out in the press his career would be shot to pieces, but she won’t listen…’

  ‘Don’t stress about Quentin!’ I told her. ‘I mean, realistically, what journalist is going to find out?’

  It wasn’t long after when Nina called me and asked if I was free for a drink, which I wasn’t, as I was just heading out to tutoring. I was about to hang up, when I heard a break in her voice and asked what was wrong. And she blew her nose like a trumpet down the phone and said, ‘He’s had an affair!’ And then she cried through what sounded like rivers of snot, and I knew before she’d even told me that it was his fecking campaign manager. Alice, her name was. Pretty. And young. I’d seen her with him, giggling at every other comment he made, and nodding seriously at the next, like he was Woody Allen crossed with Socrates. In hindsight, it seemed obvious. Inevitable. Like, of course Quentin was just the type of egotist to abandon his wife-in-need while she was struggling to care for their child so that he could scramble after his political ambitions and have himself a bit of fun on the side.

  Nina was distraught – understandably. I told her that if he didn’t even have the guts to own up and apologize and promise it was over, she should just leave him, but she said she couldn’t – she’d ruin Clara’s life. I reminded her that my parents broke up; it happens, and what about her self-respect? But she’d got too upset to really talk. So I said I’d cancel tutoring and come and see her straight away, but she told me not to, said she would be okay – she didn’t want to mess up my work – so we made a plan to meet later in the week.

  So the next morning, while I was getting dressed in my pokey room, trying to drown out my housemate’s morning techno rave with John Humphrys and thinking about Nina, I had a brainwave: I could be the one to make it come out, that story she had come up with, the one that she’d foreseen would bring Quentin down before he’d cheated on her! Now that she wanted his campaign to implode, it was the perfect hypocrisy scoop.

  Conservative parliamentary candidate Quentin Lambourne, who has been calling for a clampdown on illegal immigration, has chosen not to mention that his mother-in-law is employing an illegal immigrant…

  I could see the text in my head, as clearly as if it had already been printed! And then it was. Now look, I do know Nina’s mum really well, from spending half my childhood at their house, and I never wanted to get her in trouble. I mean, I was never going to name her directly. But still, in hindsight it was inevitably going to be easy to identify her, so I do feel bad about that. Having said that, she shouldn’t have been employing the guy illegally, right?

  I can see you still think I’m a bitch. But have you tried getting into freelance journalism? It’s tough, especially when you’re struggling to pay the rent and you’re single in your mid-thirties so you’re totally priced out of the property market, and all your best friends are married with kids and houses they own and lives that revolve around a 6 p.m. dinner at home and weekends at the playground, and you try to make your single life sound way more exciting but in reality you spend all your time scouring dating sites or watching TV alone, or panicking about the biological clock, or wondering whether or not just to settle for a guy you just met and felt queasy kissing, simply because he has sperm and can probably put an Ikea flat pack together better than you… Your mummy friends tell you you’re so lucky that you have time to focus on your career, which means your career starts to look even more crucial. And that means any opportunity that comes your way needs to be seized. You see what I mean? And in this case, there was public interest to think about too. But… all that aside, I never meant to get Molly investigated or risk my friendship with Nina. She was my best. . . God, that ‘was’ makes me want to cry. I honestly thought I was helping her.

  So, she called me when the story came out, and she was livid. Nearly spat down the phone that I was the most selfish, duplicitous person she’d ever met and if she’
d known this was how I saw our ‘so-called’ friendship, she would have ended it years ago. She’d never, ever, spoken to me like that before.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ I told her, genuinely contrite. I should have asked her permission first. I had started drafting her an email, actually, but failed to send it. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ I said. ‘You remember what you said to me about Quentin’s campaign, and you said you were leaving him, so…’

  ‘I hadn’t decided whether to leave, and I didn’t mean you could just go ahead and expose him, and my mum!’ she said. But weirdly, she seemed most upset about the bloody immigrant guy. ‘He was just trying to learn, and survive in this city,’ she said. ‘Mum was giving him a chance, and she was thriving on his company, then you went and blew it for both of them. How could you be so cruel?’

  I mean – what? She didn’t know the guy any more than I did, to my knowledge! And last time I heard, she’d been actively trying to persuade her mum to get rid of him. Plus, Nina had never told me she disagreed with Quentin’s basic campaign message that illegal immigration was the plague of modern society. And the police almost certainly wouldn’t trace the immigrant guy on the back of my article anyway, without a name or any other evidence in there. So I could not understand why she was so caught up on him! And then she cut me off. I couldn’t believe it. I was utterly gutted.

  Career-wise, it was brilliant: the paper headlined the story, and I suddenly got loads of commissions, including a spin-off piece about Quentin’s rumoured affair, to which I thought: why not? It might help salvage our friendship and persuade Nina I was on her side in all this. (Risky, I know. It didn’t work.) And my editor was so happy, he offered me a regular column! Of course, as soon as I’d got that, all I wanted to do was crack open a bottle of fizz with Nina.

  And Quentin responded in the worst way: he published a reply in the paper accusing me of having a personal vendetta against him and his wife, who he described as a ‘former’ friend of mine, and pronounced everything I’d ever written to be unprofessional rubbish. He flatly denied he knew of any ‘employment relationship’ between his mother-in-law and the immigrant, whom he’d clearly understood was a student she’d been teaching voluntarily. He added that if he had known she was employing an illegal immigrant then he would have been the first to report her. (Nice, right?) And, predictably, he denied the affair as well, which he described as a ‘baseless and offensive accusation’, and said that the spin-off article was a prime example of ‘irresponsible and reprehensible’ journalism. But who wasn’t going to believe he hadn’t cheated on his wife with that Alice? (Who, I’ve got to admit, is hot.)

  It wasn’t long until I could afford to rent my own place, and was engrossed in my dream job (or near enough). I didn’t regret shafting Quentin to get there. In fact, I felt vindicated watching him getting quizzed over it – though, surprisingly, his campaign didn’t crash and burn over it like I’d imagined. All publicity is good publicity, I guess, and clearly some of his constituents liked the fact that he came out even more strongly against immigration in his defensive mode.

  The only thing I really regretted about it all was hurting Nina. I would wake up every morning with a physical ache at losing her. I posted her and Molly cards and flowers, apologizing again, and explaining. But neither of them replied. And I didn’t see or hear from Nina for months – until I spotted her, in the street, and couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Chapter 13: Yonas

  ‘I WAS POSSESSED BY ANCESTRAL AFRICAN SPIRIT’: ASYLUM SEEKER’S ASTONISHING DEFENCE OVER NOISE COMPLAINTS

  Yonas sat on the bucket chairs of the waiting room in the Refugee Legal Centre, rubbing his fingertips together, then twisting his hands, then stilling them so as not to look nervous, then twisting them again, then rubbing his fingertips together. Was he right to have come? And to have given the receptionist his real name? It was Nina who had assured him that he wouldn’t be at risk by talking to this lawyer, that his meeting would be confidential – but then she had lied to him, and exposed him in the papers, so why should he trust her? As soon as the lawyer called him in, he would ask for confirmation that the interview couldn’t be used against him before going ahead. But what if the police were still trying to track him down on the back of that article – what if they asked the lawyer for information for their investigation?

  Nina was a conundrum. How could she have transformed from being so prickly when they first met, to being so warm and helpful to the point of researching accommodation and lawyers for him, taking him out to a gallery, and giving him a phone, with credit on – only to go and inform on him to a journalist? And putting her own mother in the spotlight too… Was she unhinged? Sadist one minute, altruistic saviour the next, then back again?

  He pulled the phone out of his pocket and turned it around in circles between his fingers. NOKIA. The screen was cracked, but it worked fine. He had been so incredulously grateful to receive it at the time, but now Nina’s past ownership of it taunted him. The last time he saw her was back at Molly’s house, when he went round to do some weeding and have a lesson. Perhaps it was the last time ever. She wasn’t there when he arrived, which had irrationally disappointed him, but turned up in the afternoon with her daughter Clara in tow, a scowling little blonde girl with bright blue eyes, who refused to say hello to him and hid behind Nina’s legs instead. After making a bit of small talk, Nina had pulled the phone out of her bag and handed it to him like it was a spare set of nail clippers or something – not worth even talking about, no big deal. He’d half-heartedly tried to refuse, but she’d insisted she never used it, and said she thought it might still have a pre-paid SIM card inside…

  She had been interrupted by Clara yanking at her top and whining that she wanted to watch TV. Nina asked her gently to play with toys instead, to which Clara said NO. And then Molly offered to read Clara a story, to which Clara said NO, even more loudly, and instead started whacking Nina’s leg, whining, ‘But I WANT to watch TV!’ Aren’t you going to discipline her? Yonas thought, but Nina just tried yet again, quietly, and completely ineffectually, to persuade her to desist, before backing down, taking her to the living room, and switching on the TV. He tried to imagine Lemlem behaving like that, and what Melat would do in response, but he couldn’t. No Eritrean child he knew would even try.

  Yonas had stayed in Molly’s kitchen, staring at the phone in his hand. All he had to do now was get through to Bin Man Joe and give him the number, and Gebre could contact him directly, any time. When Nina came back to the kitchen, she handed him a slip of paper with a number on that she said he could call for free whenever he needed to check how much credit there was left on the phone.

  As soon as he’d said goodbye to them that day, and headed back towards the squat, he’d dialled the number to see. You have… twenty pounds… credit remaining, the automated woman informed him. He’d wanted to jump in the air – twenty pounds! – and then was embarrassed at himself, as it occurred to him that such a round, high number probably meant that Nina had topped it up for him deliberately. Which felt demeaning. He had never accepted money from Molly before unless he’d worked for it. But credit seemed different if it was already inside the device, and anyway, some proverb about gifts and horses was on the tip of his tongue, so he went ahead and called Melat. With all that money, he could afford to get past a functional catch-up for once, and he spent at least ten minutes telling Lemlem a story, swallowing up £7. He’d wondered if Nina had any idea how much he appreciated this, or, if not, what he could do to thank her. He tried Bin Man Joe next, but didn’t get through.

  Nina had been the first one to call him, a few evenings later when he was covering a cleaning job for Jean. ‘Hi! How’s it going?’ she’d said cheerily. ‘I just wondered whether you’d like to go to another exhibition with me tomorrow. It’s at the Tate Modern. Quentin’s taking Clara out for the day…’

  He’d agreed, as casually as he could, as if he knew the place well, as if gallery trips were just what he
did now. But after the call ended, as he was spraying and scrubbing the disabled toilet, he’d felt so ebullient he couldn’t resist singing out loud.

  Te’akeba emache weAlla

  Sergaya welbasa wetgedela…

  He’d got up from his knees to grab the bleach, and as he swivelled back to squirt it he couldn’t stop twirling around once again, twice, three times. He strummed on an imaginary krar, and heard the kebero keeping the beat… He hadn’t danced for so long, his limbs were aching for it.

  Te Ande Qa wenaberit abshla

  gasha biye shaym wogebayla

  He increased the volume, and bobbed up and down on one leg, then the other, spinning around the cubicle, dodging the flush… He was back in his grandmother’s village, it was evening, and he was watching a wide circle of dancers, each taking turns to go forward into the centre, the women crouching down low in front of the men and then rising up again, swinging their hair from side to side, and his mother – his mother standing back, then being pulled by the hand to join in, and there was a huge wave of clapping and hooting as she shook her hips and joined in line with the other women, their bodies bending together as they circled around, making spiral shapes in the dust… He imagined Nina dancing in a group of women like that, her hair flickering like a firefly. He could teach her – she would probably start off like a robot with jerky stiff hips like most white people, and maybe she would have no rhythm, but he would take her hips in his hands—

  A knock on the door had interrupted him. Excuse me. I need to use this toilet. Yonas had scooped up his bucket and materials and walked out, avoiding the woman’s gaze and trying to invert his grin. Out of the corner of his eye he could see stiff brown curls and machete eyes.

  Back at the squat, he’d told Emil about Nina’s text, who’d wolf-whistled and said that the Tate Modern was an awesome converted power station by the river, and that if his date wanted to go there, she must be really into him. Yonas was still grinning when he got on the bus the next morning to go and meet Nina… until he picked up a newspaper from the seat behind. He was about to tear out the headline: