Pause, feel the signal switch, the muscles that have caught and stabilised you reverse over to become those that will propel you back. She is swamped by a pair of Lee’s old Adidas tracksuit bottoms which she has rolled up and one of his T-shirts, far too big for her, that she always wears in tribute. As she leaps she sees her reflection in the glass, caught between the grey dawn and the antiseptic gym lights, seeming to ripple and flutter through the air, a series of strips and folds billowing along behind her, undulating up then layering tent-like around her tight, balled-up body.
The body is amazing; you have such abilities, capacities, powers latent within you. So much that goes unexplored, is never dragged up to surface. There is a life within you, your body’s life, burgeoning, reticulated, poised and waiting just as your death is waiting – think of yourself not crawling between heaven and earth but caught instead in an uninflected state between the body’s life and the body’s death. No matter how much she loves her, Laura doesn’t understand it, can’t be persuaded of its existence, having never experienced it, the extraordinary, elevated clarity of the body’s penned up energy, honed, channelled, doubled and redoubled, mounting, peak upon peak into a rare, pure seam of elated clarity. Not just the runner’s high, the post workout buzz, but the hormonal balance, the chemical surfeit, the body’s extraordinary capacity to generate opiates, endorphins, dopamine, to sweat out toxins, oxygenate the blood, heighten all the senses. Lee knew this, loved this, didn’t drink, dodged KFC, kept his diet clean and explored his body’s capabilities, this was where his interest lay. Lewis understands it too, she picked it up off him she supposes, used to help him with his workout routines, all bodyweight, pushing the table back and trying press ups and lunges and leaps and he never told her no, you can’t do this, you are a girl, quite the opposite. He told her try, try again, think about it, practice, the first time it is impossible but the fiftieth time, the hundredth time, your body is not a given any more than your mind is, it can be altered, it can grow, develop, learn.
She hears the same things from her mum about studying. When she can’t understand something, her mum says, come at it from a different angle, you explain it to me, and then often she finds that yeah, she does get it, or is closer to grasping it. Now read more, don’t worry about getting it all straight away, tackle different books on the same subject and read, read, read, your brain will do all the hard work for you if you just get out of its way, your brain is smarter than you are, grant it autonomy. Your body will reward you for letting it live, just as your brain will. Patience, patience. It happens. She reads up on physiology and diet and the way the body is a whole, interconnected system of tissues and tendons, ligaments, nerves and neurons, constantly converting and breaking down food, manufacturing chemicals in a set of extravagantly complex interactions and interdependencies. She knows the theory that we have three brains, the ancient brain of the instincts and drives, the affective brain, and the cerebral cortex, the nexus of imagination and memory, and she feels that perhaps we have three bodies, the inert body, the stagnant body, the sedentary, daily body, the alienated body cut off from its purpose, its nature, which we only experience negatively now, a drag on us, a burden, most present to us in illness or pain; then the smothered, primal body of constant activity and exhilaration developed over millennia to toil and sweat and be pushed, to operate at a high level of chemical and hormonal production; and then the affective body, the joyful, sensual body of touching and caressing, of stimulation and sex, the untouched body, dead and dormant and ready to spring suddenly to life at the lover’s behest.
Lewis takes a deep breath and leaps. Some day soon she will perform the impossible and it will seem commonplace and natural, she will look back and wonder why, how come, at some point she just couldn’t get there. She will land on one leg with the other straight out in front of her and settle into a perfect, stable, solid, squat. One more attempt and her workout will be done. Then a shower, back to the flat to eat and help her mum with Lee before she has to leave for work. She goes into the changing room sometimes and sees girls in there taking photos of their abs or their arses in the mirror, pouting, knowing they’re going to put them up on Facebook or Twitter or upload them to Tumblr praying for a like or a retweet or some accolade like
DAT AZZZZZ
!!!! or
HNNN
!!! And she hates that people do it for the wrong reasons, she wants them to fuck off out of her gym, has to control her anger and just leave, stamp back up Resolution Way and past what she can only think of as the Other Gym, The Fascist Gym that has taken up residence in the arches under the railway bridge. All she sees in there is white people. Middle-class white people paying double the rate of Wavelengths, pretending to be soldiers in a separate space filled with barked commands and quasi-military insignia and that worries and disgusts her as much as the girls doing selfies in the mirror or spending all their time chatting shit to the fitness instructors or on their hands-free in full makeup and box-fresh gym gear, walking at 3.4 mph and trying to get eye contact from every boy that goes past. She jumps again, and feels her heart thump hard enough against her ribs to pin her up there in the air at the peak.
Sometimes it almost all comes into focus, she feels on the edge of a system, a holistic system of her own, the body within the body, the mind within the mind, the world within the world, the interrelation and interdependence of these things and somehow, more and more, she begins to think in terms of blackness. She watched a documentary that she found in a box of old
VHS
tapes in her mum’s room a few weeks ago called “Baldwin’s Nigger”, intrigued by the title, and she was blown away. She has read everything she can get hold of by Baldwin now and is in love with him. There is a line in the film she remembers, that struck at her and stung her into an even greater state of wakefulness, “we are the flesh that they must mortify”.
She thinks of Laura, how she is entranced by her body, loves to see all that voluminous pale flesh gathered up in her small, dark hands. And in truth she even actively encourages her to grow bigger, fatter, imagines her as a yielding, mountainous, rose-pink and white continent over which she joyously scrambles just as Laura sees her perhaps as an adventurous, determined son, powerfully and doggedly, demandingly plucking pleasure from her. The desire within desire. These rings and knots and circuits, feeding back and shifting in an endless, ungraspable exchange. At least, ungraspable for now, for her, but she will read, and listen and watch and study, and then she will strike and turn the world inside out, so that its buried truths may liberate us all.
She knows that she will die young, that it is inevitable that she will hurl herself at the world, exhaust herself in the attack, know no limit to the danger she will put herself in, and that this will mean she is destroyed.
Her mother is talking more these days about her life when she was Lewis’ age or thereabouts, more wistful, talking about the first really serious relationship she had. Lewis prompted the conversation, spotting the shoebox on the table one day, back from the library having picked Lee up from the improvised day-care centre set up in the Albany, feeling bad about having to call Joolzy and get him to come round and help her get the wheelchair up the stairs.
She asked what it was and her mum gave her the whole story. Since then she has been looking through the box, half curious, reading the part of the novel that’s in there, which doesn’t really grab her and besides there’s too much other important stuff to discover. Her mum seems pleased she has shown some interest in it and so she pretends to be more engaged in it than she really is, and she is sure this boy she fell in love with at University was very nice and very talented but she distrusts this dwelling on loss and failure and tragedy and victims.
She will die young but this will not be tragic, nor will she be a victim, nor will she be heroic, nor noble or any of those things; victim is not a word she will ever use in reference to her own life.
Yes she loves her mother but sometimes she thinks she has invited tragedy into her life, she says melodramatically sometimes that she is cursed and Lewis gets angry and accuses her of racism, of thinking that they are subject to some kind of magic, and her mum reacts angrily, saying Louise, you can’t control your life as much as you think you can. But you can, if you are prepared to pay the price.
An intense, brilliantly disciplined attack, that’s what she will be, none of this drifting confused through the world and giving up before you have even started. She loves white men too much, that’s her mum’s problem, and she’s getting to that age where she has started getting flirty. White middle-class boys, she’s got a thing for them. Arty, soulful white boys, like this one she’s flirting with now online and letting into their flat to look at the writing of some arty sensitive white boy she had a crush on back in her Ecstasy days.
She finds her fists are clenched her teeth tightly locked, breath coming rapidly through her nose. This room is too small, the flat is too small, she decides to go out for a run, changes into Lee’s old grey Nike hoodie and some black Adidas tracksuit bottoms. She will head up the hill to Blackheath, go round Greenwich park, back along Creek road, past the Waitrose, back to the flat.
When she comes back in, feeling better, lighter, more forgiving, having told herself on her run that well, there’s plenty of arty white boys she likes too, just not in that way, but Laura’s white anyway and people give her shit for that and her Dad was black and well. It’s complicated, but you can’t let it get too complicated or what? You end up just sitting there looking confused while they fuck you over again.
Her mum has dug some photos out from among all the boxes that are piling up in the living room and has spread them out on the table.
I went out for a run, she says.
Did you take your pepper spray?
Yeah.
Her mum looks at her questioningly. We have had death threats, Louise? You know that don’t you?
She pulls the top two inches of the spray can out of her hoodie pocket as proof, gives her mum a sighed OK.
OK.
Anyway, she says. I am not the one who has been letting strangers into the flat.
Lewis can’t believe she has been so dumb as to let someone into the flat when there’s no one there, someone she doesn’t even know.
Lewis, Paula says, do you think it matters now, do you think this flat isn’t full of bugs, do you think they aren’t listening to everything we say or watching everything we do? You can lock the door, but they’re already in here, everywhere, and anyway, I checked him out, he’s a writer, a critic.
A journalist?
Not that kind of journalist, no. And journalists have helped us, remember, Louise. Dawn. Evan.
Is this who you have been flirting with on the phone?
Paula raises her eyebrows.
It’s true even if her mum doesn’t want to admit it; she has noticed how over the years it’s changed. When she was a little girl, her mum used to keep her eyes down in the street, not ashamed or intimidated but not wanting to offer encouragement to the men who stared, and they did, she understood, her mum was pretty. She thought, maybe secretly liked the idea when she was a kid that when she grew up she would be pretty too. Is she? Laura tells her she’s gorgeous. Well anyway, she is what she is.
But her mum, she’s seen it now, how the situation’s reversed, increasingly trying to catch someone’s, anyone’s eye out and about, the looks and stares she had taken for granted have fallen away so she finds that for all she hated them, now, mid-forties, even if she looks younger, she’s drifting into invisibility. She shouldn’t care; she should be relieved, even. But she’s just not used to it. When you start to get desperate you make bad decisions, choices of which you are only dimly aware of the motive, and then disaster strikes.
Looking through old photos. Lost youth, faded beauty, happier times, all that.
This is him, she says as Louise takes both earphones out and peers over her shoulder, holds it up. The two of them in a field somewhere. Her mum looks young, wow. She guesses she’s never actually seen photos of her before she got together with her Dad, maybe some of her when she was really a kid. Do they look alike? Lewis glances at herself in the mirror on the opposite wall. Not too much, really, though Lee’s similar.
Keep that photo out, she says, put it in the box, with the other things.
Sure, she says. She glances at it again as she goes into the bedroom to change. So there he is, the boy who died young, the boy whose work she’s reading, listening to, looking at. Mostly it’s the music that interests her, if she had any artistic impulses probably they would go in that direction; she has a pretty good voice and sometimes when everyone’s out and she knows no one’s around she likes to take the opportunity to sing as loud as she likes. Joolzy keeps trying to get her to listen to the soul tradition, her roots, and she has deliberately gone back the other way to piss him off, claims a love for Bon Jovi, Tom Petty, Queen, but in reality after a night searching on YouTube with Laura for exactly the kind of music that was likely to upset him she did suddenly get into the Eurythmics and then Yazoo, and a couple of days ago with the flat empty she sang along to Only You so loud and so fervently that she went up on tip toes, her heart swimming free, and then worried at the end that she might collapse back down into tears.
Music and love and sentimentality; dangerous drugs. Be careful, Louise, remember your time is short, remember you have work to do.
Out on Deptford High Street Lewis is skulking outside the White Horse watching the
TASTEE
£ sign get fitted up by where the pub’s name used to be, two paint spattered guys on a ladder, the rooms above it being converted into flats. She knows her mum was involved in a group opposed to the sale, but that it went ahead anyway.