She wasn’t dead – that body with its countless familiar coves and promontories, where the two of them had nestled and slept when younger – it did finally rouse itself after some time. But Nia saw it as one of those gestalt moments that people write about. Where all your understanding coheres into a meaningful whole, and you can see it flaring on the horizon, how it all fits together. All of their mother’s desires and impulses were circling those bottles, she wanted them so much more than Mira or Nia, or anything else.
She ruminated over it all constantly once she’d left, waking at night in fits of sweat and loneliness, pressuring herself to understand it, as though wisdom was like a mathematical proof, eluding her only because she was messing up one of the steps. When it became too much, she would reanimate her mother’s image back to someone who was a real, empathetic human. A mother who had no fear of spiders, would pick them up by their legs and release them to freedom out the door. A vegetarian mother who still craved a good hearty lasagne in the winter – she had made it with soft aubergine oozing around the solid crunch of celery. Mum could knit a stylish cowl when she had the wool – who knew where she got the pattern. She still wanted to go to night school and study something. Above Sharon Collins there always hovered the spectre of those parents they never saw – shadowy figures about whom Mira and Nia often speculated. Did Mum’s father beat her? Or was it the other thing, even? They didn’t know what led to her demons and they didn’t want to ask.
And so, Nia fled to London because someone at college knew someone who had a spare couch: ‘Till you get yourself sorted,’ they said. It was such an optimistic idea, that one could just go out and get oneself sorted, and when the black came upon her, on those days that were stencilled with despair, she would recite it to herself with different emphases. Lightly, say, effortless. Just till you get yourself sorted, mate. Or kindly, like you’d imagine of a lady serving bara brith in a café, fat slabs of raisin-studded comfort on paper-cut doilies. Just till you get yourself sorted, love. And in Nia’s mind it stayed, there was no one to really discuss these things with in those days. The fledgling university friendships she had formed were quickly wilting under the grey cumulus of youthful embarrassment at her circumstances. They were of course all still there, those people, continuing on the undergraduate track, tunnelling their way through parallel futures in what she imagined by now to be a huge Borgesian library, a universe twanging with string theory and discourse, full of infinite options. The failure felt so epic in its dimensions. Already she was looking back at life and saying to herself, I was young then, as though that idea of youth was over. She had the sense that she’d do this always, whatever her age in the future, struggling with this curtailed experience, pushing forward on the treadmill of the moment even as it carried her back, over and over.
She used most of her earnings for rent once she had lodgings (a spare room in a basement flat in Brixton that she had found in the paper, a junior doctor for a flatmate who was mostly absent), and ate at the restaurant. There wasn’t much left but she used what she had to buy cheap clothes, taken with the idea that she could fashion herself and her future place in the world if she got the outer layer right. A handful of tiny fabric roses, turquoise, each smaller than the nail on a pinkie, to stitch onto a plunging neckline. Large vinyl flower buttons as well, candyfloss pink with a vanilla calyx, to customize a second-hand coat from the market and propel it into the realm of the sublime. A military coat, that one, made from new cloth but faded to vintage, carefully ‘distressed’, and yes, she would think of this word too, as she walked to and from the restaurant in that coat, feet instinctively avoiding the undertow of the street: kebab polystyrene, glass splinters, the glossy slips of pub flyers. Consider its meaning as though it could yield wisdom – fancy that maybe you could manage your life’s distress in this way, spread it over your face to maximize aesthetic potential.
Even as a child she was always taken with the story of Cinderella, in spite of it being sexist and all, just for the idea of transformation. It was surely the most appealing inhabitant of the fairy-tale canon: the idea that a dress could change you like that, a pair of shoes, materialize you in the moonlight so that you were finally visible. That it could be so easy.
She had her mother’s curves and hair, but a new voice by now, shorn of the Welsh wool. That was one of the first things she did at Oxford, along with getting rid of her home-bleached locks. She remembered wearing those new vowels like furs, feeling that showy and ridiculous. It wasn’t just the accent, it was the timbre of her voice. She’d worked on lowering it from the baby-girl pitch to which it sometimes leaned.
Mira was still stuck there with Mum, and the guilt of this was constant. But they weren’t really speaking and there was no way Nia was going back. Instead, being around Tuli in that restaurant, right there watching the granular decisions he held like sand in his palm, so fearlessly every day, she hoped that she would learn how to spread light instead of darkness.
When she walked to the bus stop alone each night she could hear a soundtrack in her head – she was a character in a film, she would nod her head to it, revel in the cinematic suture with normality, let it lance the space between her ears. In a long narrow alley once, floodlit with dirty yellow from a lamp post, she could remember running, leaping, swinging herself round it and almost howling at the moon, rejoicing in the space, willing herself into being, willing her life to begin again.
Shan
He can tell it is a different kind of crowd tonight, mainly by the way in which Ava breezes in and out of the kitchen with a lightness in her step. She is enjoying her role in the group, it is casual, there is none of the harried atmosphere that accompanies the weekends, for example, when the local wealthy take up the tables downstairs.
‘Slow down. Slow down!’ he says when she turns to leave with a platter of prawns in garlic and chilli that he has just cooked on a lazy lick of flame, slowly, over many minutes. He puts a bowl of wooden cocktail sticks onto her tray and they look to him, these sticks, as though they are all lying in each other’s arms, soldiers sleeping in a mass, unaware of how close they are.
‘Are you mad? I am not a slow person, matey,’ she says, laughing. ‘You got the wrong person, it is not in my style to be slow.’
‘Taste one?’ He spears a prawn and boldly holds it near her mouth. There are only two other cooks in there at this point and he is emboldened by the fact that their backs are turned. They are rolling out pizza dough amidst a stream of nutty vowels and consonants, using the absence of the group eyes for a moment of quiet intimacy.
She laughs at him, presents a face of perfect perplexity and almost skips out of the room.
He wonders what Ava sees when she looks at him. His pride has always been his hair – the big thick improbable swirl of it, faithful to the egotistical requirements of his head. His father’s hair, his grandfather’s too – worn regally, whatever the era – matched for audacity only by the full slant of his nose. He touches his cheeks. The side lines of beard are there, he still shaves them in but there is always too much fullness in the moustache area. Still, it is good to have hair, that much is true. Even now, it doesn’t fall out or turn white, it seems astonishing to him, how it has endured. But he has lost his signature quiff, its grandiloquent height and presence. Those luxury tinctures he used to apply: the styling creams and potions, they are from another life.