But here I am,
still
stood, still
at the station.
I really should
21 : 04
LONDON PADDINGTON [PAD]
TO
NEWBURY [NBY]
When the drinks trolley stops, I buy another miniature bottle of non-specific red wine. The train hurtles on. On from London, from the office. Fields and trees, shrubs, parallax past the grubby window.
I’m unsure about this weekend. It seemed fine, even enjoyable, when proposed. Months away, abstract.
But here it is, now, and here I am, too. And this train – very real, very concrete and travelling fast – is tearing us together.
Close your eyes.
•
I remember hospitals as large, confusing, dirty places. Rows of sick beds, separated only by thin track curtains and a charade of privacy. A miserably small shared sink beneath a dim window that looked on to the ward corridor. Trios of bolted-together plastic chairs. Evening visiting hours; seeing her there, laying not-quite comfortably. Drips and buttons and tubes. A kitchen-towel-lined tub of grapes on the bedside cabinet. The smell of disinfectant couldn’t convince, didn’t erase.
But now, for me, it’s private rooms. Fresh-cut flowers and espresso.
•
Serious, the doctor labours the word. Tells me I need to take this seriously.
Her blouse is caramel. Her blouse is satin. Its satin swoops out, then in, to the waist of her slacks. My eye is drawn to the bumps and outlines of a lace trim beneath, a cursive M crowning her chest.
Are you listening? she says.
Syrupy light fills her small consultation room. Suspends us both like fossilized insects in amber. She extends a hand towards me, then stops. My own are arranged one over the other, on my lap.
I shake my head, attempt a smile.
Sorry, I say. I’m listening.
I am not sure why I do anything, sometimes. Why do I inhale? Why do I apologize? Or say I’m fine, thanks. And you? Why do I stand back from the platform edge?
These aren’t sophisticated or clever questions. But still, sometimes, I can’t answer. I can’t remember the right answer.
•
Waiting for the Central Line at Liverpool Street, I once saw a man’s Blackberry slip up out of his hands, then drop down, comically, on to the tracks. He stood for a moment. Blank. A toddler before the tantrum. Then the eruption – a hot stream of profanity. His face reddened. His satchel flap flopped about and his suit jacket billowed as he thrashed his arms around like a flightless bird. He peered over the platform edge. Leaning, looking, out on to the tracks. Contemplating climbing down? Fuck, he said again. Then ran both hands back through his hair and left the platform.
•
I feel. Of course I do.
I have emotions.
But I try to consider events as if they’re happening to someone else. Some other entity. There’s the thinking, rationalizing I (me). And the doing, the experiencing, her. I look at her kindly. From a distance. To protect myself, I detach.
•
Recorded delivery? Yes; seven pounds extra; please. Alright, the assistant said from across the Snappy Snaps counter. He grabbed a printed slip and pressed it between his lips as he dropped my passport into a little plastic envelope and sealed it. Then he looked down at the sealed envelope and swore. The forgotten paper parachuted from his mouth, drifting back-andforth, down to his feet. Buoyed by that small gust of irritation. He tore open the envelope with an exaggerated two-handed motion that stretched the thin, grey plastic to breaking. Out popped a flash of maroon; it met the table with a limp slap.
•
Love. It’s a sip of Coke, not that pleasant, sharp on the tongue, but fizzes delightfully from can to mouth to dampening throat. She was speaking, slightly chorused, from the periodically placed televisions around the office floor. Wearing a red suit overexposed to pussy pink, her red lips over-stated her place in women’s history. They played it again: The country I love. Her face crumpled like an empty can on love, stamped down. She turned away from the podium – so quick. I wanted to hear it again; but she was turning, heading back up to that black door; love, again! And the door opened, then closed up around her. Cut, back to the studio.
•
I love you, he said, a timid voice, that first time. After four pints of deniability. Now it’s with an everyday, pragmatic brusqueness. Love you! When I leave for work. Love you! Before we hang up. And sometimes also, tongue in cheek, je t’aime!
I say it, too, of course. Perhaps that’s all it is? The saying of it, and then the acting it out.
•
Unstructured time is unusual for me. Too much thinking. I don’t know what to make of myself. I have my phone, I should catch up on emails. There’s always more emails. Merrick’s probably firing things over right now. But the train reception is patchy.
And I’d rather sip wine.
•
Back when I bought the flat, the solicitor said I needed a will. After exchange, her colleague in Estates Planning leafed through my binder: statements of assets, accounts, insurance policies – home, health, life. Expressions of wishes. My net worth, at least an attestation to it, lay open on his desk.
Well, he said, sitting back. Aren’t you a clever girl?
I suppose I can understand his bemusement. Why would he expect me to have such a well-presented stack of printouts and photocopies?
In his playful moods, my boyfriend tells me I’ve got lots of money. Much more than him. He says I’m the one per cent.
Well, money is one thing. He has wealth. Tied up in assets in trusts and holding companies with complicated ownership arrangements. Things he pretends to refuse to understand. Compounded over generations. What’s the difference? he asks. I tell him. One of us goes to work at six a.m. each morning. The other sits browsing the papers at the café down the road.
This lawyer, now, my lawyer, in planning my estate, has his colleague, some sort of analyst, produce a cashflow model – future earnings and returns, projected under speculative scenarios. This is a complementary service, included in the estate-planning service, intended as a taster for another service which, the lawyer explains, is quite suitable for a young lady on my financial trajectory.
Wealth management, he smiles.
•
My grandfather brought his drill set. I’d bought two pairs of goggles. He laughed when I held one out for him. We took a photo, both of us dusty and smiling. My new shelves floating behind. He advised on other problems around the flat. My languishing plant – he said to cut the dying palm leaves away. Months later, it’s green and thriving.
•
Swish. The doctor leans forward and speaks soft. She says I’m strong, I’m a fighter. Says she can tell. I can’t just do nothing, that’s – that’s suicide. She tells me to be responsible. Think of my family. Make a choice.
Nothing is a choice.
But I don’t trust myself to say what I mean, so I just say I’m leaving. It’s time to get back to work. I look around for my things, I need to go.
Nothing is a choice.
And death is not a no-op. It has side effects. I think of the cashflows: the immediate-death scenario. It’s the tallest bar in the chart, a grab at money from years to come. A present valuation of me.
It won’t be beautiful – she’s warning now – it isn’t poetry. It won’t be what I imagine. Oh and I do know that, I know but – what do I care of beauty?
Nothing is a choice.
And I want it. I reach for my bag, then stand and turn. Unhook my coat from the door. She stands, too. Her face a creasing expression of concern and disapproval.
Listen, she says.
•
The train lurches forward again and I touch a hand to my chest. No incision, no pound of flesh – just a needle, a pinch. That was it. Then, the politely evasive phone call, the follow-up scheduled at my earliest convenience. Now they say an operat
ion, weeks of downtime. Adjuvant therapy, after, possibly, radiation or – chemo, even. Make a choice. Untold disruption to my career.
The promotion.
These directives: listen, be quiet, do this, don’t do that. When does it end? And where has it got me? More, and more of the same. I am everything they told me to become. Not enough. A physical destruction, now, to match the mental. Dissect, poison, destroy this new malignant part of me. But there’s always something else: the next demand, the next criticism. This endless complying, attaining, exceeding – why?
•
I don’t know which firm, specifically, the protests were targeting. I was a new grad back then, in crispy Primark shirts and soft M&S trousers. Excited, terrified, eager to work. The guards had cordoned off the building’s entrance with metal barriers. I pressed through the crowds; a mass of sandals, blonde dreadlocks and body odour. Their poster boards and voices jeered from all sides. Arms crossed, I kept my head down and walked quick, focused on the ground ahead. Some shouted as I showed my card. Security lifted aside the barrier to let me through.
Their eyes held. They watched me cross the divide and disappear through revolving doors.
•
Let’s say: A boy grows up in a country manor. Attends a private preparatory school. Spends his weekends out in the barn with his father. Together they build a great, stone sundial. The boy, now a young man, achieves two E-grades at A-level, then travels to Jamaica to teach. His sun shadows cycle round and round and he himself winds up, up. Up until the boy, an old man now, is right up at the tippity-top of the political system. Buoyed by a wealth he’s never had to earn, never worked for. He’s never dealt in grubby compromise. And from this vantage, he points a finger – an old finger, the skin translucent, arm outstretched and wavering. He points it at you: The problem.
Always, the problem.
•
The other day, a man called me a fucking n—r. A panhandler at Aldgate, big guy, came up too close, and trapped me – between him and the steep drop down to the tracks. He leaned right into my face and spat out those words. Then, laughing, he just walked away.
You don’t owe anything.
I pay my taxes, each year. Any money that was spent on me: education, healthcare, what – roads? I’ve paid it all back. And then some. Everything now is profit. I am what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit. A natural resource to exploit and exploit, denigrate, and exploit. I don’t owe that boy. Or that man. Or those protestors, or the empire, the motherland, anything at all. I don’t owe it my next forty years. I don’t owe it my next fucking minute. What else is left to take? This is it, end of the line.
I am done.
•
There’s no time in October for more than peanut butter, traffic lights, and liberated slaves. It’s disorientating, prevents you from forming an identity. Living in a place you’re forever told to leave, without knowing, without knowledge. Without history.
After the war, the crumbling empire sent again for her colonial subjects. Not soldiers, this time, but nurses to carry a wavering NHS on their backs. Enoch Powell himself sailed upon Barbados and implored us, come. And so we came and built and mended and nursed; cooked and cleaned. We paid taxes, paid extortionate rent to the few landlords who would take us. We were hated. The National Front chased, burnt, stabbed, eradicated. Churchill set up task forces to get us out. Keep England White. Enoch, the once-intrepid recruiter, now warned of bloodied rivers if we didn’t leave. New laws were drawn up; our rights revoked.
Yet, some survived. And managed somehow, on meagre wages, to put a little aside. Eventually enough to move wife, husband and child from a rented room in a house shared by five families, to a two-up two-down all of their own. That they owned. And an ethic, a mindset, a drive was established then, that persists now. A relentless, uncompromising pursuit.
•
Transcends race, they say of exceptional, dead black people. As if that relentless overcoming, when taken to the limit, as time stretches on to infinity, itself overcomes even limits, even infinity, even this place.
•
I only know Jamaica from stories. Visiting aunts and uncles, cousins – family. Unwrapping wedges of breadfruit; Julie mangos; fruit cake; a rich buttery pear sliced open, spread on to harddough bread; stories about family, sitting out on a veranda into the night, all together, telling each other other stories. A promise of a welcome, warm, loving family, always, retreating. They all fly back.
I stay here. Their English cousin.
•
I went to school with this boy – haven’t seen him since Year Six, but I remember his parents used to make him stand at a desk in their front room to do homework each evening. As soon as he got in. No food, drinks, or bathroom breaks. Just stand there and work. His mother bragged about it at the school gate. He even told me, the way kids tell things sometimes, that he’d wet himself one night, stood there. And his mother made him stay. Wet trousers cooling, sticking to his legs, until all the homework was complete.
He got his scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s. His well-thumbed brochure boasted a twenty per cent Oxbridge acceptance rate.
•
But what it takes to get there isn’t what you need once you’ve arrived.
A difficult realization, and a harder actualization.
I understand what this weekend means. Pulling back the curtain, he’s invited me to the chambers beyond. It’s not acceptance, not yet. It’s just a step further, closer. I must learn to navigate it. Through him, and Rach, I study this cultural capital. I learn what I’m meant to do. How I’m meant to live. What I’m supposed to enjoy. I watch, I emulate. It takes practice. And an understanding of what’s out of reach. What I can’t pull off.
Born here, parents born here, always lived here – still, never from here. Their culture becomes parody on my body.
•
Sitting here, I feel cramped and prickly. My handbag is stowed above. Coat folded over on my lap. I’m hot and my skin is crawling. I want to be off this train, back in my flat, peeling off these scratching clothes and sliding between cool cotton sheets.
I just want to rest. Stop. Just for a minute.
This kind of thinking leads to undoing. Or else, not doing, which is the slower, more painful approach to coming undone. So much still to do. Yet so much, done, already.
I’m still here, aren’t I? Soon, it might be over. Maybe I can stop caring. Stop trying – no, I mustn’t be rash, can’t close doors just yet. It could take years. Luck. It’s just opportunity and preparation.
•
My exam prep was meticulous. It was everything. Morning to night, every hour accounted for in my self-devised schedule. I had an absolute dedication, back then, that I’ve never since recaptured. No distractions, no lost focus. No idle thoughts. It was a meditation. And after months of that devoted study, I walked once more from the station to the school, across the busy junction. I was ready.
And I saw all: forty years stretching indefinitely, racing along a cobbled and sparkling road. Boats and champagne, flights, panoramic views, the board room, flashing trading screens; flickering lights, the corner office, the dark corner of the members’ club; green, sprawling grounds. Clouds streaming like wet-stretched cotton; wool, strung across the sky. A sky blue, and cold. Swish, the windscreen wiper wipes across dry glass and –
A lady is shaking my arm and scream-shouting WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? There’s a car, at a wrong angle, spanning two lanes, others honking and pedestrians stopping to look. It’s all stopped – temporarily, the lady has pulled me back on to the island. Shaking me, still.
I aced the exams.
Premonition or plan? Doesn’t matter, I keep chasing.
•
I’m greedy for a hundred years from now.
•
This is the boom
and this is the climb, you’ve twinned it, followed it up. Not euphoric, as you’d imagined. But perhaps it never is, when you
’re in the thing. It can’t
last, though, you know. And so, you put it away, you save. It rains every day in England! Here you are, with your accounts and now your accountant, and you put things into bonds, into funds; you pound cost average. And you brace yourself for it. Hold cash in accounts, in a wallet, in a box beneath the bed. Gold – you start to consider. Seriously, something is always coming. Words embossed – into brass, into aluminium, you watch videos of men, pouring fire into buckets; the charred, white-hot remains. Money is just belief, reality is perception, so why not? Stow some there, some everywhere. Be careful, though, and save
you see others – Rach, Lou, they spend. They enjoy it. But is their current lifestyle peak truly a new floor? You don’t know. But you can weather an emergency, stress-test yourself, you will not be undone by a small thing. You hope. There’s only hope. Hope it’s enough to weather any bust until the swing back around when you can grab hold, pull up and start the climb again.
•
The small envelope is government-brown in a pile of white. I open it and find my unsmiling face twice amongst the pages. Name, date of birth, citizenship. I am appalled at my relief and at this sort of relief – thin and substantive only as the paper it’s printed on. We’ve seen now, just as then, the readiness of this government and its enterprising Home Secretary to destroy paper, our records and proof. What is citizenship when you’ve watched screaming Go Home vans crawl your street? When you’ve heard of the banging, unexpected, always, at the door? When British, reduced to paper, is swept aside and trodden over? The passport cover feels smooth and new in my hands. Slip it, away. Into the folder at the back of the bottom dresser drawer.
•
Rach sorts efficiently. Pack, storage, charity. The pile on the bed beside me, pack, is the largest. Her dresses, knitwear, blouses. Soft fabrics rustle as she places each item down. I breathe the musky-citrus scent. She’s already set aside the complementary tools: dedicated brushes, combs, shampoos, sprays. All sorts. Her clothes have complex care requirements, detailed on sewn-in tags.
Assembly Page 3
