‘They get along well, don’t they?’ Ma says, watching them through the crack of the door. I lean against the fridge.
‘Why shouldn’t they?’
‘No reason,’ she says. ‘Except that this is my home. Everything I do outside here is a waste of time and no one thanks me for it and no one cares for me, and now I’m excluded from my own flat!’
‘Hey, Ma, don’t get –’
‘Pour me a bloody whisky, will you?’
I pour her one right away. ‘Your supper’s in the oven, Ma.’ I give her the whisky. My ma cups her hands round the glass. Always been a struggle for her. Her dad in the army; white trash. She had to fight to learn. ‘It’s fish pie. And I did the washing and ironing.’
‘You’ve always been good in that way, I’ll give you that. Even when you were sick you’d do the cooking. I’d come home and there it would be. I’d eat it alone and leave the rest outside your door. It was like feeding a hamster. You can be nice.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Only your niceness has to live among so many other wild elements. Women that I know. Their children are the same. A tragedy or a disappointment. Their passions are too strong. It is our era in England. I only wish, I only wish you could have some kind of career or something.’
I watch her and she turns away to look at Howard all snug with the sister I brought here. Sad Ma is, and gentle. I could take her in my arms to console her now for what I am, but I don’t want to indulge her. A strange question occurs to me. ‘Ma, why do you keep Howard on?’
She sits on the kitchen stool and sips her drink. She looks at the lino for about three minutes, without saying anything, gathering herself up, punching her fist against her leg, like someone who’s just swallowed a depth charge. Howard’s explaining voice drifts through to us.
Ma gets up and kick-slams the door.
‘Because I love him even if he doesn’t love me!’
Her tumbler smashes on the floor and glass skids around our feet.
‘Because I need sex and why shouldn’t I! Because I’m lonely, I’m lonely, okay, and I need someone bright to talk to! D’you think I can talk to you? D’you think you’d ever be interested in me for one minute?’
‘Ma –’
‘You’ve never cared for me! And then you brought Nadia here against my wishes to be all sweet and hypercritical and remind me of all the terrible past and the struggle of being alone for so long!’
*
Ma sobbing in her room. Howard in with her. Nadia and me sit together at the two ends of the sofa. My ears are scarlet with the hearing of Ma’s plain sorrow through the walls. ‘Yes, I care for you,’ Howard’s voice rises. ‘I love you, baby. And I love Nina, too. Both of you.’
‘I don’t know, Howard. You don’t ever show it.’
‘But I’m blocked as a human being!’
I say to Nadia: ‘Men are pretty selfish bastards who don’t understand us. That’s all I know.’
‘Howard’s an interesting type,’ she says coolly. ‘Very open-minded in an artistic way.’
I’m getting protective in my old age and very pissed off.
‘He’s my mother’s boyfriend and long-standing lover.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘So lay off him. Please, Nadia. Please understand.’
‘What are you, of all people, accusing me of?’
I’m not too keen on this ‘of all people’ business. But get this.
‘I thought you advanced Western people believed in the free intermingling of the sexes?’
‘Yes, we do. We intermingle all the time.’
‘What then, Nina, is your point?’
‘It’s him,’ I explain, moving in. ‘He has all the weaknesses. One kind word from a woman and he thinks they want to sleep with him. Two kind words and he thinks he’s the only man in the world. It’s a form of mental illness, of delusion. I wouldn’t tangle with that deluded man if I were you!’
All right! A few days later.
Here I am slouching at Howard’s place. Howard’s hole, or ‘sock’ as he calls it, is a red-brick mansion block with public-school, stately dark oak corridors, off Kensington High Street. Things have been getting grimmer and grimmer. Nadia stays in her room or else goes out and pops her little camera at ‘history’. Ma goes to every meeting she hears of. I’m just about ready for artery road.
I’ve just done you a favour. I could have described every moment of us sitting through Howard’s television
oeuvre
(which I always thought meant
egg
). But no – on to the juicy bits!
There they are in front of me, Howard and Nadia cheek to cheek, within breath-inhaling distance of each other, going through the script.
Earlier this morning we went shopping in Covent Garden. Nadia wanted my advice on what clothes to buy. So we went for a couple of sharp dogtooth jackets, distinctly city, fine brown and white wool, the jacket caught in at the waist with a black leather belt; short panelled skirt; white silk polo-neck shirt; plus black pillbox, suede gloves, high heels. If she likes something, if she wants it, she buys it. The rich. Nadia bought me a linen jacket.
Maybe I’m sighing too much. They glance at me with undelight.
‘I can take Nadia home if you like,’ Howard says.
‘I’ll take care of my sister,’ I say. ‘But I’m out for a stroll now. I’ll be back at any time.’
I stroll towards a café in Rotting Hill. I head up through Holland Park, past the blue sloping roof of the Commonwealth Institute (or Nigger’s Corner as we used to call it) in which on a school trip I pissed into a wastepaper basket. Past modern nannies – young women like me with dyed black hair – walking dogs and kids.
The park’s full of hip kids from Holland Park School, smoking on the grass; black guys with flat-tops and muscles; yuppies skimming frisbees and stuff; white boys playing Madonna and Prince. There are cruising turd-burglars with active eyes, and the usual London liggers, hang-gliders and no-goodies waiting to sign on. I feel outside everything, so up I go, through the flower-verged alley at the end of the park, where the fudge-packers used to line up at night for fucking. On the wall it says:
Gay solidarity is class
solidarity
.
Outside the café is a police van with grilles over the windows full of little piggies giggling with their helmets off. It’s a common sight around here, but the streets are a little quieter than usual. I walk past an Asian policewoman standing in the street who says hello to me. ‘Auntie Tom,’ I whisper and go into the café.
In this place they play the latest calypso and soca and the new Eric Satie recording. A white Rasta sits at the table with me. He pays for my tea. I have chilli with a baked potato and grated cheese, with tomato salad on the side, followed by Polish cheesecake. People in the café are more subdued than normal; all the pigs making everyone nervous. But what a nice guy the Rasta is. Even nicer, he takes my hand under the table and drops something in my palm. A chunky chocolate lozenge of dope.
‘Hey. I’d like to buy some of this,’ I say, wrapping my swooning nostrils round it.
‘Sweetheart, it’s all I’ve got,’ he says. ‘You take it. My last lump of blow.’
He leaves. I watch him go. As he walks across the street in his jumble-sale clothes, his hair jabbing out from his head like tiny bedsprings, the police get out of their van and stop him. He waves his arms at them. The van unpacks. There’s about six of them surrounding him. There’s an argument. He’s giving them some heavy lip. They search him. One of them is pulling his hair. Everyone in the café is watching. I pop the dope into my mouth and swallow it. Yum yum.
I go out into the street now. I don’t care. My friend shouts across to me: ‘They’re planting me. I’ve got nothing.’
I tell the bastard pigs to leave him alone. ‘It’s true! The man’s got nothing!’ I give them a good shouting at. One of them comes at me.
‘You wanna be arrested too!’ he says, shoving me in the chest.
‘I don’t mind,’ I say. And I don’t, really. Ma would visit me.
Some kids gather round, watching the rumpus. They look really straggly and pathetic and dignified and individual and defiant at the same time. I feel sorry for us all. The pigs pull my friend into the van. It’s the last I ever see of him. He’s got two years of trouble ahead of him, I know.
When I get back from my walk they’re sitting on Howard’s Habitat sofa. Something is definitely going on, and it ain’t cultural. They’re too far apart for comfort. Beadily I shove my aerial into the air and take the temperature. Yeah, can’t I just smell humming dodginess in the atmosphere?
‘Come on,’ I say to Nadia. ‘Ma will be waiting.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ Howard says, getting up. ‘Give her my love.’
I give him one of my looks. ‘All of it or just a touch?’
*
We’re on the bus, sitting there nice and quiet, the bus going along past the shops and people and the dole office when these bad things start to happen that I can’t explain. The seats in front of me, the entire top deck of the bus in fact, keeps rising up. I turn my head to the window expecting that the street at least will be anchored to the earth, but it’s not. The whole street is throwing itself up at my head and heaving about and bending like a high rise in a tornado. The shops are dashing at me, at an angle. The world has turned into a monster. For God’s sake, nothing will keep still, but I’ve made up my mind to have it out. So I tie myself to the seat by my fists and say to Nadia, at least I think I say, ‘You kiss him?’
She looks straight ahead as if she’s been importuned by a beggar. I’m about to be hurled out of the bus, I know. But I go right ahead.
‘Nadia. You did, right? You did.’
‘But it’s not important.’
Wasn’t I right? Can’t I sniff a kiss in the air at a hundred yards?
‘Kissing’s not important?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s not, Nina. It’s just affection. That’s normal. But Howard and I have much to say to each other.’ She seems depressed suddenly. ‘He knows I’m in love with somebody.’
‘I’m not against talking. But it’s possible to talk without r-r-rubbing your tongues against each other’s tonsils.’
‘You have a crude way of putting things,’ she replies, turning sharply to me and rising up to the roof of the bus. ‘It’s a shame you’ll never understand passion.’
I am crude, yeah. And I’m about to be crushed into the corner of the bus by two hundred brown balloons. Oh, sister.
‘Are you feeling sick?’ she says, getting up.
The next thing I know we’re stumbling off the moving bus and I lie down on an unusual piece of damp pavement outside the Albert Hall. The sky swings above me. Nadia’s face hovers over mine like ectoplasm. Then she has her hand flat on my forehead in a doctory way. I give it a good hard slap.
‘Why are you crying?’
If our father could see us now.
‘Your bad behaviour with Howard makes me cry for my ma.’
‘Bad behaviour? Wait till I tell my father –’
‘Our father –’
‘About you.’
‘What will you say?’
‘I’ll tell him you’ve been a prostitute and a drug addict.’
‘Would you say that, Nadia?’
‘No,’ she says, eventually. ‘I suppose not.’
She offers me her hand and I take it.
‘It’s time I went home,’ she says.
‘Me, too,’ I say.
It’s not Friday, but Howard comes with us to Heathrow. Nadia flicks through fashion magazines, looking at clothes she won’t be able to buy now. Her pride and dignity today is monstrous. Howard hands me a pile of books and writing pads and about twelve pens.
‘Don’t they have pens over there?’ I say.
‘It’s a Third World country,’ he says. ‘They lack the basic necessities.’
Nadia slaps his arm. ‘Howard, of course we have pens, you stupid idiot!’
‘I was joking,’ he says. ‘They’re for me.’ He tries to stuff them all into the top pocket of his jacket. They spill on the floor. ‘I’m writing something that might interest you all.’
‘Everything you write interests us,’ Nadia says.
‘Not necessarily,’ Ma says.
‘But this is especially … relevant,’ he says.
Ma takes me aside: ‘If you must go, do write, Nina. And don’t tell your father one thing about me!’
Nadia distracts everyone by raising her arms and putting her head back and shouting out in the middle of the airport: ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to go!’
*
My room, this cell, this safe, bare box stuck on the side of my father’s house, has a stone floor and whitewashed walls. It has a single bed, my open suitcase, no wardrobe, no music. Not a frill in the grill. On everything there’s a veil of khaki dust waiting to irritate my nostrils. The window is tiny, just twice the size of my head. So it’s pretty gloomy here. Next door there’s a smaller room with an amateur shower, a sink and a hole in the ground over which you have to get used to squatting if you want to piss and shit.
Despite my moans, all this suits me fine. In fact, I requested this room. At first Dad wanted Nadia and me to share. But here I’m out of everyone’s way, especially my two other half-sisters: Gloomie and Moonie I call them.
I wake up and the air is hot, hot, hot, and the noise and petrol fumes rise around me. I kick into my jeans and pull my Keith Haring T-shirt on. Once, on the King’s Road, two separate people came up to me and said: ‘Is that a Keith Haring T-shirt?’
Outside, the sun wants to burn you up. The light is different too: you can really see things. I put my shades on. These are cool shades. There aren’t many women you see in shades here.
The driver is revving up one of Dad’s three cars outside my room. I open the door of a car and jump in, except that it’s like throwing your arse into a fire, and I jiggle around, the driver laughing, his teeth jutting as if he never saw anything funny before.
‘Drive me,’ I say. ‘Drive me somewhere in all this sunlight. Please. Please.’ I touch him and he pulls away from me. Well, he is rather handsome. ‘These cars don’t need to be revved. Drive!’
He turns the wheel back and forth, pretending to drive and hit the horn. He’s youngish and thin – they all look undernourished here – and he always teases me.
‘You stupid bugger.’
See, ain’t I just getting the knack of speaking to servants? It’s taken me at least a week to erase my natural politeness to the poor.