Collected Stories (10 page)

‘Curry breath, curry breath, curry breath!’

The bus rushes on. I’m flummoxed.

*

She emerges at last, my Nadia, sleepy, creased around the eyes and dark. She sits at the table, eyelashes barely apart, not ready for small talk. I bring her the food and a glass of wine which she refuses with an upraised hand. I press my eyes into her, but she doesn’t look at me. To puncture the silence I play her a jazz record – Wynton Marsalis’s first. I ask her how she likes the record and she says nothing. Probably doesn’t do much for her on first hearing. I watch her eating. She will not be interfered with.

She leaves most of the food and sits. I hand her a pair of black Levi 501s with the button fly. Plus a large cashmere polo-neck (stolen) and a black leather jacket.

‘Try them on.’

She looks puzzled. ‘It’s the look I want you to have. You can wear any of my clothes.’

Still she doesn’t move. I give her a little shove into the bedroom and shut the door. She should be so lucky. That’s my best damn jacket. I wait. She comes out not wearing the clothes.

‘Nina, I don’t think so.’

I know how to get things done. I push her back in. She comes out, backwards, hands over her face.

‘Show me, please.’

She spins round, arms out, hair jumping.

‘Well?’

‘The black suits your hair,’ I manage to say. What a vast improvement on me, is all I can think. Stunning she is, dangerous, vulnerable, superior, with a jewel in her nose.

‘But doesn’t it … doesn’t it make me look a little rough?’

‘Oh yes! Now we’re all ready to go. For a walk, yes? To see the sights and everything.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘Of course not. But I’ve got this.’

I show her.

‘Oh, God, Nina. You would.’

Oh, this worries and ruins me. Already she has made up her mind about me and I haven’t started on my excuses.

‘Have you used it?’

‘Only twice. Once on a racist in a pub. Once on some mugger who asked if I could spare him some jewellery.’

Her face becomes determined. She looks away. ‘I’m training to be a doctor, you see. My life is set against human harm.’

She walks towards the door. I pack the switch-blade.

*

Daddy, these are the sights I show my sister. I tow her out of the flat and along the walkway. She sees the wind blaring through the busted windows. She catches her breath at the humming bad smells. Trapped dogs bark. She sees that one idiot’s got on his door:
Dont burglar me theres nothin to steel ive got rid of it all
. She sees that some pig’s sprayed on the wall:
Nina’s a slag dog
. I push the lift button.

I’ve just about got her out of the building when the worst thing happens. There’s three boys, ten or eleven years old, climbing out through a door they’ve kicked in. Neighbours stand and grumble. The kids’ve got a fat TV, a microwave oven and someone’s favourite trainers under a little arm. The kid drops the trainers.

‘Hey,’ he says to Nadia (it’s her first day here). Nadia stiffens. ‘Hey, won’t yer pick them up for me?’

She looks at me. I’m humming a tune. The tune is ‘Just My Imagination’. I’m not scared of the little jerks. It’s the bad impression that breaks my heart. Nadia picks up the trainers.

‘Just tuck them right in there,’ the little kid says, exposing his armpit.

‘Won’t they be a little large for you?’ Nadia says.

‘Eat shit.’

Soon we’re out of there and into the air. We make for South Africa Road and the General Smuts pub. Kids play football behind wire. The old women in thick overcoats look like lagged boilers on little feet. They huff and shove carts full of chocolate and cat food.

I’m all tense now and ready to say anything. I feel such a need to say everything in the hope of explaining all that I give a guided tour of my heart and days.

I explain (I can’t help myself): this happened here, that happened there. I got pregnant in that squat. I bought bad smack from that geezer in the yellow T-shirt and straw hat. I got attacked there and legged it through that park. I stole pens from that shop, dropping them into my motorcycle helmet. (A motorcycle helmet is very good for shoplifting, if you’re interested.) Standing on that corner I cared for nothing and no one and couldn’t walk on or stay where I was or go back. My gears had stopped engaging with my motor. Then I had a nervous breakdown.

Without comment she listens and nods and shakes her head sometimes. Is anyone in? I take her arm and move my cheek close to hers.

‘I tell you this stuff which I haven’t told anyone before. I want us to know each other inside out.’

She stops there in the street and covers her face with her hands.

‘But my father told me of such gorgeous places!’

‘Nadia, what d’you mean?’

‘And you show me filth!’ she cries. She touches my arm. ‘Oh, Nina, it would be so lovely if you could make the effort to show me something attractive.’

Something attractive. We’ll have to get the bus and go east, to Holland Park and round Ladbroke Grove. This is now honeyed London for the rich. Here there are
La
restaurants, wine bars, bookshops, estate agents more prolific than doctors, and attractive people in black, few of them ageing. Here there are health food shops where you buy tofu, nuts, live-culture yogurt and organic toothpaste. Here the sweet little black kids practise on steel drums under the motorway for the Carnival and old blacks sit out in the open on orange boxes shouting. Here the dope dealers in Versace suits travel in from the suburbs on commuter trains, carrying briefcases, trying to sell slummers bits of old car tyre to smoke.

And there are more stars than beggars. For example? Van Morrison in a big overcoat is hurrying towards somewhere in a nervous mood.

‘Hiya, Van! Van? Won’t ya even say hello!’ I scream across the street. At my words Van the Man accelerates like a dog with a winklepicker up its anus.

She looks tired so I take her into Julie’s Bar where they have the newspapers and we sit on well-woven cushions on long benches. Christ only know how much they have the cheek to charge for a cup of tea. Nadia looks better now. We sit there all friendly and she starts off.

‘How often have you met our father?’

‘I see him every two or three years. When he comes on business, he makes it his business to see me.’

‘That’s nice of him.’

‘Yes, that’s what he thinks. Can you tell me something, Nadia?’ I move closer to her. ‘When he’d get home, our father, what would he tell you about me?’

If only I wouldn’t tempt everything so. But you know me: can’t live on life with slack in it.

‘Oh, he was worried, worried, worried.’

‘Christ. Worried three times.’

‘He said you … no.’

‘He said what?’

‘No, no, he didn’t say it.’

‘Yes, he did, Nadia.’

She sits there looking at badly dressed television producers in linen suits with her gob firmly closed.

‘Tell me what my father said or I’ll pour this pot of tea over my head.’

I pick up the teapot and open the lid for pouring-over-the-head convenience. Nadia says nothing; in fact she looks away. So what choice do I have but to let go a stream of tea over the top of my noddle? It drips down my face and off my chin. It’s pretty scalding, I can tell you.

‘He said, all right, he said you were like a wild animal!’

‘Like a wild animal?’ I say.

‘Yes. And sometimes he wished he could shoot you to put you out of your misery.’ She looks straight ahead of her. ‘You asked for it. You made me say it.’

‘The bastard. His own daughter.’

She holds my hand. For the first time, she looks at me, with wide-open eyes and urgent mouth. ‘It’s terrible, just terrible there in the house. Nina, I had to get away! And I’m in love with someone! Someone who’s indifferent to me!’

‘And?’

And nothing. She says no more except: ‘It’s too cruel, too cruel.’

I glance around. Now this is exactly the kind of place suitable for doing a runner from. You could be out the door, halfway up the street and on the tube before they’d blink. I’m about to suggest it to Nadia, but, as I’ve already told her about my smack addiction, my two abortions and poured a pot of tea over my head, I wouldn’t want her to get a bad impression of me.

‘I hope,’ I say to her, ‘I hope to God we can be friends as well as relations.’

*

Well, what a bastard my dad turned out to be! Wild animal! He’s no angel himself. How could he say that? I was always on my best behaviour and always covered my wrists and arms. Now I can’t stop thinking about him. It makes me cry.

This is how he used to arrive at our place, my daddy, in the days when he used to visit us.

First there’s a whole day’s terror and anticipation and getting ready. When Ma and I are exhausted, having practically cleaned the flat with our tongues, a black taxi slides over the horizon of the estate, rarer than an ambulance, with presents cheering on the back seat: champagne, bicycles, dresses that don’t fit, books, dreams in boxes. Dad glows in a £3,000 suit and silk tie. Neighbours lean over the balconies to pleasure their eyeballs on the prince. It takes two or three of them working in shifts to hump the loot upstairs.

Then we’re off in the taxi, speeding to restaurants with menus in French where Dad knows the manager. Dad tells us stories of extreme religion and hilarious corruption and when Ma catches herself laughing she bites her lip hard – why? I suppose she finds herself flying to the magnet of his charm once more.

After the grub we go to see a big show and Mum and Dad hold hands. All of these shows are written, on the later occasions, by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

This is all the best of life, except that, when Dad has gone and we have to slot back into our lives, we don’t always feel like it. We’re pretty uncomfortable, looking at each other and shuffling our ordinary feet once more in the mundane. Why does he always have to be leaving us?

After one of these occasions I go out, missing him. When alone, I talk to him. At five in the morning I get back. At eight Ma comes into my room and stands there, a woman alone and everything like that, in fury and despair.

‘Are you involved in drugs and prostitution?’

I’d been going with guys for money. At the massage parlour you do as little as you can. None of them has disgusted me, and we have a laugh with them. Ma finds out because I’ve always got so much money. She knows the state of things. She stands over me.

‘Yes.’ No escape. I just say it. Yes, yes, yes.

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Yes, that is my life at the moment. Can I go back to sleep now? I’m expected at work at twelve.’

‘Don’t call it work, Nina. There are other words.’

She goes. Before her car has failed to start in the courtyard, I’ve run to the bathroom, filled the sink, taken Ma’s lousy leg razor and jabbed into my wrists, first one, then the other, under water, digging for veins. (You should try it sometime; it’s more difficult than you think: skin tough, throat contracting with vomit acid sour disgust.) The nerves in my hands went and they had to operate and everyone was annoyed that I’d caused such trouble.

Weeks later I vary the trick and swallow thirty pills and fly myself to a Surrey mental hospital where I do puzzles, make baskets and am fucked regularly for medicinal reasons by the art therapist who has a long nail on his little finger.

Suicide is one way of saying you’re sorry.

*

With Nadia to the Tower of London, the Monument, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace and something cultured with a lot of wigs at the National Theatre. Nadia keeps me from confession by small talk which wears into my shell like sugar into a tooth.

Ma sullen but doing a workmanlike hospitality job. Difficult to get Nadia out of her room most of the time. Hours she spends in the bathroom every day experimenting with make-up. And then Howard the hero decides to show up.

*

Ma not home yet. Early evening. Guess what? Nadia is sitting across the room on the sofa with Howard. This is their first meeting and they’re practically on each other’s laps. (I almost wrote lips.) All afternoon I’ve had to witness this meeting of minds. They’re on politics. The words that ping off the walls are: pluralism, democracy, theocracy and Benazir! Howard’s senses are on their toes! The little turd can’t believe the same body (in a black cashmere sweater and black leather jacket) can contain such intelligence, such beauty, and yet jingle so brightly with facts about the Third World! There in her bangles and perfume I see her speak to him as she hasn’t spoken to me once – gesticulating!

‘Howard. I say this to you from my heart, it is a corrupt country! Even the revolutionaries are corrupt! No one has any hope!’

In return he asks, surfacing through the Niagara of her conversation: ‘Nadia, can I show you something? Videos of the TV stuff I’ve written?’

She can’t wait.

None of us has seen her come in. Ma is here now, coat on, bags in her hands, looking at Nadia and Howard sitting so close their elbows keep knocking together.

‘Hello,’ she says to Howard, eventually. ‘Hiya,’ to Nadia. Ma has bought herself some flowers, which she has under her arm – carnations. Howard doesn’t get up to kiss her. He’s touching no one but Nadia and he’s very pleased with himself. Nadia nods at Ma but her eyes rush back to Howard the hero.

Nadia says to Howard: ‘The West doesn’t care if we’re an undemocratic country.’

‘I’m exhausted,’ Ma says.

‘Well,’ I say to her. ‘Hello, anyway.’

Ma and I unpack the shopping in the kitchen. Howard calls through to Ma, asking her school questions which she ignores. The damage has been done. Oh yes. Nadia has virtually ignored Ma in her own house. Howard, I can see, is pretty uncomfortable at this. He is about to lift himself out of the seat when Nadia puts her hand on his arm and asks him: ‘How do you create?’

‘How do I create?’

How does Howard create? With four word-kisses she has induced in Howard a Nelson’s Column of excitement. ‘How do you create?’ is the last thing you should ever ask one of these guys.