by Zadie Smith
40 feet
2. Head south-west towards Edgware Rd
315 feet
3. Turn right at A5/Edgware Rd
1.6 miles
Continue to follow A5
4. Turn left at A4003/Willesden Ln
0.7 miles
5. Turn left at Bartlett Avenue
0.1 miles
Destination will be on the left
Bartlett Avenue, London NW6, UK
These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, weather, or other events may cause conditions to differ from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly. You must obey all signs or notices regarding your route.
10
From A to B redux:
Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only – quicker to walk! Escapees from St Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking, old lady wheeling herself in a wheelchair smoking, die-hard holding urine sack, blood sack, smoking. Everybody loves fags. Everybody. Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World. Unlock your (stolen) phone, buy a battery pack, a lighter pack, a perfume pack, sunglasses, three for a fiver, a life-size porcelain tiger, gold taps. Casino! Everybody believes in destiny. Everybody. It was meant to be. It was just not meant to be. Deal or no deal? TV screens in the TV shop. TV cable, computer cable, audiovisual cables, I give you good price, good price. Leaflets, call abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted Jesus as your personal call plan? Everybody loves fried chicken. Everybody. Bank of Iraq, Bank of Egypt, Bank of Libya. Empty cabs on account of the sunshine. Boomboxes just because. Lone Italian, loafers, lost, looking for Mayfair. A hundred and one ways to take cover: the complete black tent, the facial grid, back of the head, Louis Vuitton-stamped, Gucci-stamped, yellow lace, attached to sunglasses, hardly on at all, striped, candy pink; paired with tracksuits, skin-tight jeans, summer dresses, blouses, vests, Gypsy skirts, flares. Bearing no relation to the debates in the papers, in Parliament. Everybody loves sandals. Everybody. Birdsong! Low-down dirty shopping arcade to mansion flats to an Englishman’s home is his castle. Open-top, soft-top, drive-by, hip hop. Watch the money pile up. Holla! Security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees, Tudor, Modernist, post-war, pre-war, stone pineapples, stone lions, stone eagles. Face east and dream of Regent’s Park, of St John’s Wood. The Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians, the Americans: here united by the furnished penthouse, the private clinic. If we pay enough, if we squint, Kilburn need not exist. Free meals. English as a second language. Here is the school where they stabbed the headmaster. Here is the Islamic Centre of England opposite the Queen’s Arms. Walk down the middle of this, you referee, you! Everybody loves the Grand National. Everybody. Is it really only April? And they’re off!
11
So close to home, just on Willesden Lane. Strange convergence. She is leaning into a broken phone box, chewing the stick of an ice lolly. Thick shattered glass, cuboid shards, all around. A few yards from Cleopatra’s Massage Emporium. Leah opens her eyes wide to store the details for Michel, which is one of the things marriage means. Drawn to the wrong details. Baggy grey track bottoms, off-white sports bra. Nothing else, no top. No shoes! Breasts small and tight to her body. It’s difficult to believe that she has had children. Perhaps that was a lie as well. A neat waist you want to hold. She is something beautiful in the sunshine, something between a boy and a girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all that. Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical: you are walking towards her, at great speed you are walking towards her, and then what? And then what? Leah is quite close before she is spotted in return. It’s been three weeks. Shar drops the receiver and tries to cross the road. The traffic is rush-hour frantic. At first Leah is grateful to be without Michel. Then her face turns into his face and his voice comes out of her throat or this is a marital excuse and it is her own voice in her own throat:
– Proud of yourself? Thief. I want my money.
Shar cringes and slips through the traffic. She is running towards two men, tall and hooded, with hidden faces, standing in a doorway. Shar enfolds herself in the taller. Leah hurries on home. At her back she can hear the ricochet of incomprehensible abuse, aimed at her, a patois like a machine gun.
37
Lying in bed next to a girl she loved, years ago, discussing the number 37. Dylan singing. The girl had a theory that 37 has a magic about it, we’re compelled towards it. Websites are dedicated to the phenomenon. The imagined houses found in cinema, fiction, painting and poetry – almost always 37. Asked to choose a number at random: usually 37. Watch for 37, the girl said, in our lotteries, our game shows, our dreams and jokes, and Leah did, and Leah still does. Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine. Now that girl is married, too.
Number 37 Ridley Avenue is being squat. Squatted? The front door is boarded up. A window is broken. Human noise from behind torn grey nets. Leah moves from the shadow of a hedge to the forecourt. Nobody spots her. Nothing happens. She stands with one foot hovering off the ground. What would she do with 37 lives! She has one life: she is en route to her mother’s, they are going shopping for a sofa. If she stands here staring much longer she will be late. In the front bay window: Mickey, Donald, Bart, a nameless bear, an elephant with its trunk ripped off. Fabric faces against dirty glass.
12
– You took your time. Feeling OK? You look a bit peaky. We’ll take the Jubilee, will we?
Pauline steps out of her front door backwards, pulling a tartan shopping bag on wheels. Always a little older than expected. Smaller, too. From the street it must look like human perfectibility: each generation improves upon the last. Fitter, healthier, more productive. From the owl rises the phoenix. Or rises only to descend again? Longer and longer until it’s shorter.
– Worried about you. You seem all through yourself.
– I’m fine.
– And if you weren’t you wouldn’t tell.
What’s to tell? On the lookout for her, still, almost a month later.
Expecting her out of this shop, from behind this corner, by that phone box. The girl is more real to Leah in her absence than the barely signifying bump that is with her all the time, albeit hidden by sweatshirt.
– I’ve only this blouse on and I’m sweating like a pig already. It’s not natural.
The Hindu Temple has the colours of a block of Neapolitan ice cream and is essentially the same shape. A block of Neapolitan ice cream with two upturned cones at either end. Old Hindus stream down the front steps, unconvinced by the warm spell. They wear their saris with jumpers and cardigans and thick woolly socks. They look like they have walked to Willesden from Delhi, adding layers of knitwear as they progress northwards. Now they move as one to the nearest bus stop, a crowd that takes in Leah and her mother, carrying them along.
– That’s lucky. We’ll hop on. Save time.
– Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
– Sugar, I’ve left my pass! What’s that, love?
– Thatcher. Back in the day.
– One for Kilburn tube, please. Two pounds! She was a terrible cow.
You can’t remember, I remember. Today this is Brent. Tomorrow it could be Britain!
– Mum, sit there. I’ll sit here. There’s no space.
– Front of the Mail. Today this is Brent. Tomorrow it could be Britain! The cheek of some people. The rudeness of them.
Sat opposite, Leah stares at a red bindi until it begins to blur, becomes enormous, taking up all of her vision until she feels she has entered the dot, passing through it, emerging into a more gentle universe, parallel to our own, where people are fully and intimately known to each other and there is no time or death or fear or sofas or
– and may
have had our differences, but he loves you. And you love him. You should get on with it. Council’s set you up very nicely really, you’ve a little car, you’ve both got jobs. It’s the next thing.
You’re next. It’s the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings. A covered girl on her mobile phone steps on as they step off and disturbs the narrative by laughing and dropping her aitches and wearing make-up, but Pauline is anyway compelled to say what she always says, with elegant variation, depending on the news cycle.
– Just two people kissing, this is Dubai – facing twelve years each. It’s just not permitted, you see. It’s ever so sad.
But this sadness is quickly outstripped by another, more local, sadness. A dirty Gypsy girl and a tall fella doing the herky-jerky dance by the self-service machines. Pauline breathes on Leah’s ear.
– I’m grateful no child of mine ever did any of that.
A quick parade of past delights flicks through Leah’s mind, the memory of which is almost intolerably pleasurable: white and brown, natural and chemical, pills and powder.
– I don’t see that there’s anything funny about it. Ach, I can’t believe I left it at home. I always have it in this pocket.
– Wasn’t laughing at that.
Travelcardtravelcardtravelcard.
– What’s she saying, poor love?
– Selling their travelcards, I think.
Very sad, but also an opportunity for a saving. Pauline reaches up to tap the fella on his shoulder.
– How many zones? How much do you want for it?
– One-day travelcard. Six zones. Two pound.
– Two pounds! How do I know it’s not some fake?
– Mum. It’s got the date on it, Jesus!
– I’ll give a pound, no more.
– All right, Mrs Hanwell.
Look up. A jolting form of time travel, moving in two directions: imposing the child on this man, this man on the child. One familiar, one unknown. The Afro of the man is uneven and has a tiny grey feather in it. The clothes are ragged. One big toe thrusts through the crumby rubber of an ancient red-stripe Nike Air. The face is far older than it should be, even given the nasty way time has with human materials. He has an odd patch of white skin on his neck. Yet the line of beauty has not been entirely broken.
– Nathan?
– All right, Mrs Hanwell.
Good to see Pauline flustered, the sweaty tips of her hair curling up her face.
– Well, how are you, Nathan?
– Surviving.
The shakes. Been sliced, deeply, on his cheek, not long ago. It’s an open, frank face, still. Not pretending anything. Which makes it all much harder.
– How’s your mother, your sisters? You remember Leah. She’s married now.
– Is it. That’s good, yeah.
He smiles shyly at Leah. Aged ten he had a smile! Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people’s parents. At ten she would have done anything, anything! Now she sees ten-year-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age.
– Long time.
– Yes.
Longer for him. About once a year she sees him on the high road. She ducks into a shop, or crosses, or gets on a bus. Now missing a tooth here and there and there. Devastated eyes. What should be white is yellow. Red veins breaking out all over.
– Here’s that pound. You take care of yourself now. Remember me to your mother.
Quickly through the barrier, bumping into each other in their haste, and then quickly up the stairs.
– That was horrible.
– His poor mother! I should stop in on her one of these days. So sad. I’d heard, but I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
The train pulls in and Leah watches Pauline regard it calmly, step forward to the yellow line. This realm of Pauline’s – the realm of the so sad – is immutable and inevitable, like hurricanes and tsunamis. No particular angst is attached to it. Normally, this is bearable; today it is obscene. So sad is too distant from Pauline’s existence, which is only disappointing. It makes disappointing look like a blessing. This must be why news of it is always so welcome, so satisfying.
– You carried a torch for him, I remember. Went inside for a few years, later on, I think. He’s not the one who killed somebody, now, no, that was somebody else. Sectioned, was he? At one point? Beat his father to a pulp, that much I’m sure of. Though that man had it coming or something like it.
Leah lifts two free papers from the pile as the train pulls out because reading is silent.
She tries to read an article. It is about an actress walking her dog in a park. But Pauline wants to read an article about a man who was not really who he said he was, and she wants to talk about it, too.
– Well, if you will claim to be infallible! Say what you like about our lot but at least we don’t claim to be infallible. Men of God, are they? Those poor children. Lives ruined. And they call it religion! Well, let’s hope that’s an end to the whole business once and for all.
Seeing as how they are speaking to the whole carriage, Leah mounts a mild defence, thinking of the smell of the censer, the voluptuous putti babies, the gold sunburst, cold marble floor, dark wood carved and plaited, women kneeling whispering lighting candles, InterRailing nineteen ninety three.
– Wish we had confession. Wish I could confess.
– Oh grow up, Leah, will you?
Pauline turns the page with violence. The window logs Kilburn’s skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety roller coaster. Higgledy-piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden. Number 37. In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at once – houses, churches, schools, cemeteries – an optimistic vision of Metroland. Little terraces, faux-Tudor piles. All the mod cons! Indoor toilet, hot water. Well-appointed country living for those tired of the city. Fast-forward. Disappointed city living for those tired of their countries.
– Vol-can-ic air-borne ash man-i-fest-a-tion?
Pauline enunciates each syllable carefully, doubtful of its reality, and brings the photo too close to her daughter’s nose. Leah can make out only a great swirl of grey. Maybe this is all there is to see. The matter is also discussed by the hipsters opposite. Gaia’s revenge, says the girl to the boy. Give it out long enough you get it back. Pauline, always alive to the possibility of a group conversation, leans forward.
– No fruit or veg in the shops, they’re saying. Makes sense if you think about it. Of course, it’s an island we’re on here. I always forget that, don’t you?
13
– Finished with the computer?
– Need to wait till they close.
– It’s almost seven o’clock. I need it.
– It’s not seven online. Why don’t you get on with your own things?
– That’s what I need it for.
– Leah, I’ll call you when I’m done.
Currency trading. The exploitation of volatility. She can only understand words, not numbers. The words are ominous. Add them to that look Michel has, right now, of arrested attention. Internal time stretched and stilled, inattentive to the minutes and hours outside of itself. Five minutes! He says it irritably whether thirty have gone by or a hundred or two hundred. Pornography does that, too. Art, too, so they say.
Leah stands behind Michel in the darkness of the box room. Blue shimmer of the screen. He is two feet away. He is on the other side of the world. Why don’t you get on with your own things?
She has the idea that there are a lot of things she has been waiting for weeks to do and now she will do them with the bright quickness of mo
ntage, like the middle section of a movie. In the living room the TV is on. More blue light in the hallway. In the box room the computer plays angry hip hop, a sign that things are going badly. Sometimes she says to him: have you lost it? He becomes furious, he says it doesn’t work that way. Some days I lose, some days I win. How can he be losing or winning that same eight thousand pounds, over and over? Leah’s only inheritance from Hanwell, their only savings. The money itself has become notional, a notion materialist Hanwell – who kept his real paper money in a cardboard box in a mahogany credenza – would never understand. No more does Leah understand it. She sits on a chair in the open doorway between kitchen and garden. Toes in the grass. The skies are empty and silent. Outrage travels from next door’s talk radio: it’s taken me fifty-two hours to get back from Singapore! A new old lesson about time. Broccoli comes from Kenya. Blood must be transported. Soldiers need supplies. Much of the better part of NW went on holiday, for Easter, with their little darlings. Maybe they will never return. A thought to float away on.
Ned clonks down the wrought-iron steps, looking up at the sky.
– Really weird.
– I like it. I like the quiet.
– Freaks me out. Like Cocoon.
– Not really.
– Town was totally empty. Arbus at the Portrait Gallery with no crowds. Awesome. Real experience.
Leah submits to Ned’s long, excited description. She envies his enthusiasm for the city. He does not pass his time with his ex-countrymen in their suburban enclaves, cracking beers, watching the rugby: he does everything to avoid them. Admirable. Exploring the city alone, seeking out gigs and talks and screenings and exhibitions, far-off parks and mystery lidos. Leah, born and bred, never goes anywhere.
– is really about integrity of like a, like a, like an idea? Blew me away. Anyway. I’m starving. Gonna go up and make myself some pasta and pesto. Listen, I’ll leave you a couple to be getting on with.
