Zadie Smith - NW

• • •

“Felix! Felix Cooper. ’Sup, bruv?”

A giant kid, with a foolish gappy smile and mono-brow and thick black hair sticking up the back of the t-shirt. Felix wedged the heavy envelope under his armpit and submitted to a laborious, complicated handshake. He was standing only two feet from his own front door. “Long time… You don’t remember me innit.” Felix found he disliked being punched like that, too hard, and on the shoulder, but he smiled thinly and lied: “Course I do, bruv. Long time.” This satisfied the kid. He punched Felix again. “Good to see you, man! Where you headed?” Felix rubbed his eyes. “Family business. See my old man. Gotta be done.” The young man laughed: “Lloyd! Used to come in for his Rizlas. Ain’t seen him for time .” Yeah, old Lloyd. Yeah, old Lloyd was all right, still up in the old estate, in Caldwell, yeah, never left. Still Rasta, yeah. Still got his Camden stall. Selling his knick-knacks. Still doing all that. Felix laughed, as he understood he was meant to, at this point. Together they looked over at the towers of Caldwell, not five hundred yards away. “Apple ain’t fallen far from the tree, bruv, for real.” This trigger gave up at least the surname: Khan. Of Khan’s minimart, Willesden. All that family looked the same, many brothers, running the place for their father. This must be the youngest. Caldwell boys back in the day, two floors below the Coopers. He didn’t remember them being especially friendly. Felix had arrived too late in Caldwell to make good friends. To do that you had to be born and bred. “Good times,” said the Khan kid. To be polite, Felix agreed. “And you living back here now?” “My girl lives just there.” He indicated the supermarket sign with his chin. “Felix, man, you properly local. I remember when you was working in there. “Member when I saw you on the tills that time I was like—” “Yeah, well, I ain’t there no more.” Felix glared over the boy’s head to the empty basketball cage across the street in which no-one had ever played basketball or ever would. “I’m in Hendon now, innit,” said the kid, a little bashfully, as if it was too much good luck to confess to. “Loving it. Married. Nice girl, traditional. Little one on the way, Inshallah.” He held up a twinkling ring finger for Felix to inspect. “Life is good, man. Life is good.” People got to have their little victories. “Oi, Felix, you going carnival?” “Yeah. Probably just Monday, though. I’m getting old, man.” “Maybe I’ll see you down there.” Felix smiled nicely. Pointed his envelope toward Caldwell.

NO DOORBELL.

He had seen BROKEN DOORBELL many times before, also KEEP OUT. NO DOORBELL suggested a new level of surrender. Where the Post-it was peeling Felix thumbed it back down again. He knocked for a while without result: the reggae was loud enough to rattle the letterbox on its hinges. He stepped across to the kitchen window and put his mouth to the four-inch gap. Lloyd wandered into view, barefoot and bare-chested, idly munching a piece of toast. His locks were secured in a bun, a wooden spoon thrust through them like a geisha’s chopstick.

“Lloyd — I been knocking. Let me in, dred.”

From around a dead cactus on the windowsill, Lloyd plucked a single key strung on a once-white shoelace, and passed it out to his son.

“Like a sauna in here!” Felix dropped his coat to the floor and kicked off his trainers. In the narrow hall he remembered to give a wide berth to the first of several molten radiators, which, if you made even the faintest contact with them, burned your skin. His feet sunk into the carpet, a thick, synthetic purple pelt, unchanged in twenty years.

“Listen, I ain’t staying. Got to be in town at twelve. I just brought something to show you.”

Felix squeezed into the galley kitchen behind his father. Even this room was a mess of African masks and drums and the rest of that heritage whatnot. More every visit, it was piling up. A huge pot, bubbling yellow at the rim, sat on a gas ring. Felix watched Lloyd wrap a cloth round his hand and lift the lid.

“That book came — that Grace found?” He held out the envelope. “You should take all this stuff to the stall, man. Weather’s good for it. You could sell it at carnival.”

Lloyd dismissed his son with a hand. “No time for that nonsense. That’s not my music anymore. It’s just noise.”

The dishes were piled high in the sink and a small hill of bed linen had been stuffed in a corner, not yet taken to the launderette. A bulb hung naked. Half a blunt smoldered in an ashtray.

“Lloyd, man… You need to do some cleaning. Why’s the immersion on? Where’s Sylvia?”

“Not here.”

“What do you mean ‘not here?’”

“The woman is not here. The woman has gone. She left a week ago but you ain’t phoned for a week — it’s news to you. Ain’t news to me. She long gone. This means freedom, this means lib-er-ty !” These last lines came from the song presently, fortuitously, playing. Lloyd danced a woozy two-step toward Felix.

“She owed me forty quid,” said Felix.

“Look at this. Gray!” Lloyd pressed his hands along his own hairline and pulled: a little nest of white hairs sprung forth. There were only seventeen years between the two men. “The woman made me gray. In three months she made me an old man.”

Kept your flat clean. Hid the spliff till midday. Brought in a little money so you didn’t come begging off me. Felix looked at his fingers.

“This is it, Fee, this is it: how can you stop people going when they want to go? How can you stop them? You can’t stop them. Listen: if you can’t stop a grown woman with four kids then you can’t stop a stupid girl like Sylvia who’s got nothing. She got no one .” This emphasis drew his lips back for a moment and he looked just like a dog. “People need to go their own way, Felix! If you love someone, set them free! Never go out with a Spanish girl, though, seriously, that is serious advice. They ain’t rational. For real! Their brains ain’t wired normal.” Something moist fell from above onto Felix’s shoulder. The constant central heating, the cooking, the lack of ventilation, caused large mold flowers to bloom on the ceiling. Scraps drifted down now and then, like petals. “Listen, I got along without your mother. I can get along now. Don’t stress, man — I’ll be all right. Been all right this long.”

“What happened to the lampshade?”

“I woke up and she’d stripped the place. Honest to God, Felix. I should have called the police. She’s probably back in fucking Madrid by now. DVD player. Bath mat. Toaster. If it weren’t screwed down, believe — she took it. She took the van. How can I sell anything without the van? Tell me that.”

“She owed me forty quid,” said Felix again, although it was pointless. Lloyd clapped his son’s face affectionately between his hands. Felix held up the envelope with the book in it.

“Why can’t your fine woman come and see it though?” said Lloyd, taking the package from his son, “I want to impress her not you, man! That’s the whole point, right? That’s the whole point of the exercise! She wants to know a real Garvey House man. You was just born there. I lived it, bruv. Nah, I’m joking you. Let me take a piss first. There’s ginger tea somewhere.”

• • •

In the lounge Felix tore the envelope badly: a cloud of gray fluff exploded over the carpet. In little rusted heart-shaped frames his siblings sat on top of the TV watching him make a poor job of it. Devon aged about six, in the snow, in Garvey House, and the twins, Ruby and Tia, more recently, sitting on different concrete steps in a stairwell somewhere on Caldwell estate. Whichever way he tore the mess got worse. He took a big breath and blew, clearing the glossy back cover. Twenty-nine quid! For a book! And when would he get paid back for it? Never. Hard backed, large like an atlas. GARVEY HOUSE: A Photographic Portrait . Felix turned randomly to a page, Russian roulette. No bullet: a shy couple, just married, skinny, country-looking, with uneven afros and acne scars, done up in someone else’s too-large wedding gear. No wedding guests, or no guests in the shot. They were celebrating alone with a half-empty bottle of Martini Rosso. He bit his lip and flicked forward. Four handsome sistas in headscarves, covering a stretch of graffiti with a tub of fresh paint. (Color unknown. All was black and white.) In the background, broken chairs and a mattress and a boy smoking a blunt. Felix heard the toilet flush. Lloyd came back out, sniffing, suspiciously perky. He drew a freshly rolled one from his pajama bottoms and lit up. “Come on, then. Let’s be having it.”