“Do you think they’ve been yet?” Veronica attempted to sidestep, ignoring George’s edginess. “The noise unit?”
“No idea.”
“Well,” she started carefully, “will you call them?”
George exhaled loudly and turned towards the wall.
“George, don’t be like that. I’m only asking if you’ll call them.” Veronica’s own voice was edged now, fringed with frustration.
“They told me before they only work till four.”
“So what are we meant to do?”
He sat up. “Why are you having a go at me?”
“I’m not. I’m just… exhausted. Can you please just try them again?”
“Why don’t you call them?” George demanded, flapping his hand toward her.
“Because you spoke to them before.”
He didn’t move.
“Why is it so hard to make a phone call?”
Theatrically, George picked up his phone and dialled the number, then with a great show of action, dialled the number again. “Answerphone,” he declared eventually.
She rolled her eyes, and huffed, and found herself wondering in a way that was also new but also increasingly frequent, how she hadn’t seen this aggressive, petulant side of her husband before. He wasn’t loving – he was insensitive, and stubborn, and emotionally stunted. Within the space of the following minute, she shortcut the more and more familiar spiral of internal rumination, and she was on to divorce, and how that might work, and how she would declare it to George, imagining herself empowered and liberated and bold again. Secure in the reliability of impermanence. But then, as always happened, her mind caught a glimpse of it, and the thought of waking up without him flooded from mind to gut, choking her with the dark, suffocating, unbearable notion of his absence.
Lying back in bed this time, George switched off the bedside lights and turned again towards the wall. Veronica did the same. The space between them felt cold and barbed, uncrossed by outstretched palms, not even softened by the smooth cream waffle.
In the darkness, the music continued. And the coarse singing continued. It seeped through the wall onto the clean slate of their bedroom. And then, at 4.48am, from the other side of the wall, a baby started crying, a baby just like the one they longed for, and its wails carried on way past five, and long after the music was finally turned off, and far beyond the time when, Veronica imagined, everybody in Primrose Hill, except for her, and George, and this poor, unheeded baby, were asleep.
Simone
The remnants of Jasmine’s crisps are squashed between the floor and her cheek, though Simone is not sure if the stickiness is from them. She imagines hot, cleansing water rushing over her, washing her clean. But the dirt is caked thick. The grime. It was always the grime that struck her most, at the beginning, seeping into her, clinging to her clothes, as though it knew that this time she was there for good, conjoined, no longer a thing to be brushed off at the end of the day.
She had been to the estate often. She’d been staying at Noah’s, preferring his warmer smaller rooms, and his richer poorer parents. The estate was where they played, hanging off the wall outside the bet shop with a cig and a beer, waiting to score something better. She’d swished her arms with the pride of the enlightened as she walked the familiar route to his family flat, hauling her suitcase behind her. There was a garden on the east side, where she often paused to admire the carefully dotted colour of the bedding, and she stopped then. She chatted to the old woman pruning. The woman asked about school, about her friends, about her romance with Noah, as though they were not separated by walls, or five decades. Three floors above them, the confident smells of home cooking wafted out of the rooms of an Iranian family bustling in sing-song tones, and Simone glanced up, breathing it in. A little further along, there was a wall plastered with posters – for a church meeting, a bingo night, a local art exhibit. Simone had not yet attended any of these events, but they wrapped themselves around her, plumping the imaginary nest she was building.
Until that first evening in their real, own flat (blagged by way of her expanding belly), unpacking a suitcase of stuff she’d pulled from neat cupboards and squashing them into a single broken drawer, she saw everything differently, as if for the first time: the dirt and the darkness; the way the stairs smelled of piss; how rubbish littered doorways; how pairs of random, dishevelled people were always loitering.
After a while, months or maybe years, these were quirks she stopped noticing, or else she began to blend in with them, became like them too, even if some people still called her a posho.
Until Noah died, and she started giving out hand jobs in exchange for a hit, and then nobody thought her posh at all.
There were whole days, afterwards, when she sat on the wall in the Concourse and stared at the families unlike her own. The ones wrapped up tight in determination. Sometimes they were English, but as often Romanian, Syrian, Afghani, Somali, indiscernible from each other in the way they kept to themselves, focussed, and then moved on. She could not focus. She could not move on. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She clasped her cig and her beer, and something better.
Time blurred.
There were others. Some old granny banged with her shopping trolley up the stairwell every day at exactly 11am. Her hair was always immaculate, her shoes polished, and she would stop to tell loitering kids not to litter the corridors. They waited respectfully till she had reached her flat, till she had closed her door, then chucked their crisp wrappers on the floor.
Sometimes Simone was approached by the estate’s do-gooders, people intent on rallying, improving, starting up resident groups, handing out petitions, talking about the ‘community’. They made pains to notice her sitting there. They said hello, they asked how she was, they cooed at Dominic crying in his pram, or perhaps it was Jasmine. They invited her to things. And into their flats, only a floor up, or down, or across from her own. Often these people were local councillors, or teachers, or NHS workers, or churchgoers, professions of care, pretending they cared, pretending like they wanted to know. But they didn’t know her. Because in the daytime they went to work, and in the evenings they made dinner for their kids, and okay, maybe their salaries didn’t stretch to the end of the month, same as Simone’s benefits, and maybe the rubbish in their hallway wasn’t cleared either, and maybe their kids had been mugged too; but still they lived a world apart. They weren’t like the people Simone knew, the people she had come to know, since Noah. Since Terry. They didn’t even see them.
No, she and Dominic, and Jasmine, lived separately, in the shadows, in invisible cracks. Though there were enough others who occupied those dark spaces with them. Equally unseen.
Like the family where the mum was always in jail for shoplifting. Or another family, two doors down, where the step-dad fiddled with the three daughters, and nobody blinked when one of the girls got pregnant. Then there were Terry’s brothers, two of them anyway, who everybody said for sure had a hand in things when their mum OD’d. And there was Dominic’s little friend Lacey, whose mum threw herself off a bridge.
These were the people that Simone knew, that Simone saw. More and more she saw them. Illuminated in Dominic’s gaze. Because these were the people he was growing up with – united not by money, or lack of it, not by ethnicity or religion, not by the estate, but by just one thing: the way they hurt each other, generation after generation, round and around. They kept each other bound by that, like an inescapable magnet. Hurt people hurt people, don’t they?