Zadie Smith: NW

Leah is still all of these things. The change must be in other people, or in the times themselves.

— Done well, though. How come you aint at work? What d’you do again?

Shar is already nodding as Leah begins to speak.

— Phoned in sick. I wasn’t feeling good. It’s sort of general admin, basically. For a good cause. We hand out money. From the lottery, to charities, nonprofits — small local organizations in the community that need…

They are not listening to their own conversation. The girl from the estate is still out on her balcony, screaming. Shar shakes her head and whistles. She gives Leah a look of neighborly sympathy.

— Silly fat bitch.

Leah traces a knight’s move from the girl with her finger. Two floors up, one window across.

— I was born just there.

From there to here, a journey longer than it looks. For a second, this local detail holds Shar’s interest. Then she looks away, ashing her cigarette on the kitchen floor, though the door is open and the grass only a foot away. She is slow, maybe, and possibly clumsy; or she is traumatized, or distracted.

— Done well. Living right. Probably got a lot of friends, out on a Friday, clubbing, all that.

— Not really.

Shar blows a short burst of smoke out of her mouth, and makes a rueful sort of sound, nodding her head over and over.

— Proper snobby, this street. You the only one let me in. Rest of them wouldn’t piss on you if you was on fire.

— I’ve got to go upstairs. Get some money for this cab.

Leah has money in her pocket. Upstairs she walks into the nearest room, the toilet, closes the door, sits on the floor and cries. With her foot she reaches over and knocks the toilet paper off its perch. She is rolling it toward her when the doorbell goes.

— DOOR! DOOR! WILL I?

Leah stands, tries to wash away the redness in the tiny sink. She finds Shar in the hallway, in front of a shelf filled with books from college, drawing her finger along the spines.

— You read all these?

— No, not really. No time nowadays.

Leah takes the key from where it sits on the middle shelf and opens the front door. Nothing makes sense. The driver who stands by the gate makes a gesture she doesn’t understand, points to the other end of the street and starts walking. Shar follows. Leah follows. Leah is growing into a new meekness.

— How much do you need?

There is a shade of pity in Shar’s face.

— Twenty? Thirty… is safe.

She smokes without hands, squeezing the vapor out of a corner of her mouth.

The manic froth of cherry blossom. Through a corridor of pink, Michel appears, walking up the street, on the other side. Too hot — his face is soaked. The little towel he keeps for days like this pokes from his bag. Leah raises a finger up in the air, a request for him to stay where he is. She points to Shar, though Shar is hidden by the car. Michel is short-sighted; he squints in their direction, stops, smiles tensely, takes his jacket off, throws it over his arm. Leah can see him plucking at his t-shirt, trying to shed the the remnants of his day: many tiny hairs, clippings from strangers, some blonde, some brown.

— Who that?

— Michel, my husband.

— Girl’s name?

— French.

— Nice looking, innit — nice looking babies!

Shar winks: a grotesque compression of one side of her face.

Shar drops her cigarette and gets in the car, leaving the door open. The money remains in Leah’s hand.

— He local? Seen him about.

— He works in the hairdressers, by the station? From Marseilles — he’s French. Been here forever.

— African, though.

— Originally. Look — do you want me to come with you?

Shar says nothing for a moment. Then she steps out of the car and reaches up to Leah’s face with both hands.

— You’re a really good person. I was meant to come to your door. Seriously! You’re a spiritual person. There’s something spiritual inside you.

Leah grips Shar’s little hand tight and submits to a kiss. Shar’s mouth is slightly open on Leah’s cheek for thank and now closes with you. In reply, Leah says something she has never said in her life: God bless you. They pull apart — Shar backs away awkwardly, and turns toward the car, almost gone. Leah presses the money into Shar’s hand with defiance. But already the grandeur of experience threatens to flatten into the conventional, into anecdote: only thirty pounds, only an ill mother, neither a murder, nor a rape. Nothing survives its telling.

— Mental weather.

Shar uses her scarf to blot the sweat on her face, and will not look at Leah.

— Come by tomorrow. Pay you back. Swear to God, yeah? Thanks, seriously. You saved me today.

Leah shrugs.

— Nah don’t be like that, I swear — I’ll be there, serious.

— I just hope she’s OK. Your mum.

— Tomorrow, yeah? Thank you!

The door closes. The car pulls off.

It is obvious to everyone except Leah. To her mother, it is obvious.

— How d’you get so soft?

— Seemed desperate. She was.

— I was desperate on Grafton Street and I was desperate on Buckley Road, we were all desperate. We didn’t go robbing.

Static cloud of sigh. Leah can well imagine: the snowy fringe flutters, the floral bosom lifts. A well-feathered Irish owl her mother has become. Still in Willesden, perched for life.

— Thirty pounds! Thirty pounds for a taxi to The Middlesex. It’s not that to Heathrow. If we’re giving money away you might chuck some in this direction.

— Might still come back.

— Christ himself’ll be back quicker than she will! Two of them here on the weekend. I saw them coming down the road, ringing on bells. Knew them straight off. Crack. Filthy habit! See them down our end every day, by the station. Jenny Fowler on the corner opened the door to one of them — said she was high as a kite in the sky. Thirty pounds! That’s your father in you. No-one who had my blood in them would fall for something so idiotic as that. What’s your Michael saying?

Easier, finally, to permit Michael than to hear Meeee-Shell swill round the mouth like the taste of something dubious.

— He says I’m an idiot.

— Well that’s no less than what you are. You can’t con his people so easy.

All of them are Nigerian, all of them, even if they are French, or Algerian, they are Nigerian, the whole of Africa being, for Pauline, essentially Nigeria, and the Nigerians wily, owning those things in Kilburn that once were Irish, and five of the nurses on her own team being Nigerian where once they were Irish, or at least Pauline judges them to be Nigerian, and they’re perfectly fine as long as you keep an eye on them every minute. Leah puts her thumbnail to her wedding ring. Pushes the band hard.

— He wants to go round there.

— And why shouldn’t he? You were robbed on your own doorstep by a gypsy, weren’t you?

Everything translated into its own terms.

— Nope. Sub-continental.

— Indian, you mean by that.

— Somewhere in that region. Second generation. English, to listen to.

— I see.

— From school! Crying on my doorstep!

Another static cloud.

— Sometimes I think it’s because there’s just the one of you. If we’d had more you might have learned more about people and how people really are.

No matter where Leah attempts to begin, Pauline returns to this point. The whole story gets run through: from Dublin to Kilburn, a rare Prod on the wing, back when most were of the other persuasion. Heading for the wards, though, like the rest of the girls. Flirted with the O’Rourke boys, the brickies, but wanted better, being so auburn and fine-featured and already a midwife. Waited too long. Nested at twilight with a quiet widower, an Englishman who didn’t drink. The O’Rourkes ended up builder’s merchants with half of Kilburn High Road in their pockets. For which she would have put up with a bit of drink. Thank God she retrained. (Radiography.) Where would she be otherwise? This story, once rationed, offered a few times a year, now bursts through every phone call, including this one, which has nothing at all to do with Pauline. Time is compressing for the mother, she has a short distance left to go. She means to squeeze the past into a thing small enough to take with her. It’s the daughter’s job to listen. She’s no good at it.