Zadie Smith - NW

52. Parity

By July Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake had been offered university places. Both had lovers. (Leah’s lover played the bass in a band called No No Never.) Both the universities and the lovers were of an equal standard, despite their many differences. Both girls had grown into decent-looking women with no serious health or mental problems. Neither had any interest in tanning. It was Leah’s plan to spend a large part of this final NW summer under the shade of an oak tree on Hampstead Heath, with an assortment of friends, a picnic, a lot of alcohol, a little weed. She kept inviting Keisha, who longed to go. But Keisha was working part-time in a bakery on the Kilburn High Road, and when she was not in the bakery she was in church, or helping Cheryl with the baby. At the bakery she was paid three twenty-five an hour. She had to wear regulation flat black shoes with rounded toes and chunky soles, and a brown and white striped outfit topped off by a “baker’s hat,” with an elastic rim, under which every last strand of your hair was to be placed. It left an indentation along her forehead. She had to wash out the croissant molds and get to the donut sugar that caught in the thin gulley between the presentation case and the glass. And many other bits of drudgery. She had thought she would prefer it to clothes retail, but in the end even her great enthusiasm for sausage rolls and iced fingers could not sustain her. She kept the university’s prospectus in her locker and often spent her lunch break slowly turning the glossy pages.

Every other Saturday she had a half-day and on a few occasions she managed to sneak to the heath, alone. Rodney would not enjoy the scene on the heath and could not reasonably be told about it, for this would lead to questions about the two sets of accounts Keisha was in the habit of keeping. On one side of the ledger she placed Rodney, Marcia, her siblings, the church, and Jesus Christ himself. In the other, Leah was lounging in the high grass drinking cider and asking her good friend Keisha Blake if she would take the opportunity to kill PW Botha if he happened to be standing in front of her. “I’m not capable of murder,” protested Keisha Blake. “Everyone’s capable of everything,” insisted Leah Hanwell.

53. Nirvana

Leah would surely be in her room, clutching his picture, weeping. Keisha found it difficult to suppress a feeling of pleasure at this imagined scenario. Then, in the middle of the news report, Marcia said something incredible, quoting a doctor at the clinic as a source, and the next morning Keisha went directly to the library to investigate. She was infuriated to find that statistically speaking Marcia’s boast was correct: our people hardly ever do that.

54. Further education

That autumn, Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks began attending a church in the Bristol suburbs, the Holy Spirit Ministry, identical in spirit to Kilburn Pentecostal — it came with a recommendation from Pastor. They did most of their socializing there, that first term, with an assortment of kindly people, all in their sixties and seventies. With young people of their own age they were less successful. Rodney left church literature under every door in Keisha’s corridor, and after that they were avoided by fellow students and avoided them in turn. There seemed no point of entry. The students were tired of things Keisha had never heard of, and horrified by the only thing she knew well: the Bible. In the evenings Rodney and Keisha sat at either end of a small desk in Keisha’s room and studied, as they had studied for their school exams, wearing earplugs and writing everything out by hand, first in draft copies, then in “best”—a habit picked up from Sunday school. There was a newly built computer center in the basement of Keisha’s building that might have made their lives easier: they went in the first week to check it out. A boy in a wide fedora with a leather thong hanging from its brim sat playing Doom, that dark corridor opening on to itself over and over. The rest were either programming or using some early intra-university form of e-mail. Keisha Blake glanced over a shoulder at a chaotic-looking screen.

55. Keisha’s first visit

Their material circumstances were quite different. Keisha occupied a 60s-build dormitory of indifferent architectural design. Leah a 19th-century terraced house, with a defunct fireplace in every room and nine housemates. Instead of a lounge, a “chill out room.” Enormous speakers, no sofa. Keisha had not expected a party on her first night nor had she worn the right sort of skirt for sitting on a beanbag. The volume of techno or whatever it was made conversation a chore. Everybody was white. Leah was giving a speech and holding the fridge open. It was making the whole kitchen cold. She had been holding it open for a long time. She seemed to have forgotten why.

“Look, say you’re Einstein and you’re just thinking, moment to moment, and suddenly you have your big thought, about the nature of the universe or whatever. So that thought, it’s not like the other moments, because though you’ve had the thought within normal time, the thought itself is basically about the nature of the universe, which is sort of infinite? So that’s a different kind of moment. So Kierkegaard calls that an “instant.” It’s not part of normal time like the others. It’s a lot of stuff like that. I have to pinch myself in class. Like: what am I doing here, with all these smart bastards? Has someone made a mistake somewhere?”

Keisha scooped some hummus up in a pita bread and looked into her friend’s dilated pupils.

“I was thinking about doing philosophy at one point,” said Keisha, “but then I heard about all the maths.”

“Oh, there’s no maths,” said Leah.

“Really? I thought there was maths.”

“No,” said Leah, and turned from Keisha to pull out a bottle of beer finally, “there’s not.”

The boy who was sleeping with Leah was also awkward. If you did not keep asking him questions about himself, or about his short films, he stopped talking and stared into space.

“About boredom,” he explained.

“That sounds interesting,” said Keisha Blake.

“No. The opposite. This party, full of interesting people, is a perfect example. It’s totally uninteresting.”

“Oh.”

“They’re all about boredom essentially. It’s the only subject left. We’re all bored. Aren’t you bored?”

“In law,” said Keisha Blake, “there’s a lot of boring memorization. Like in medicine.”

“I think we’re talking about two different things,” said the boy who was sleeping with Leah.

56. Family romance

The phone in the communal hallway rang. Rodney nodded. Keisha stood up. When the phone rang it was usually for Rodney or Keisha — either Marcia or Christine — and they took these calls interchangeably. They were like siblings in every way, aside from the fact they occasionally had sex with each other. The sex itself was cozy and familiar, without any hint of eroticism or orgasms vaginal or clitoral. Rodney was a careful young man, preoccupied with condoms, terrified of pregnancy and disease. When he finally allowed Keisha Blake to have sex with him it turned out to be a technical transition. She learned nothing new about Rodney’s body, or Rodney, only a lot of facts about condoms: their relative efficacy, the thickness of rubber, the right moment — the safest moment — to remove them afterward.

57. Ambition

They were going to be lawyers, the first people in either of their families to become professionals. They thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization.

58. Leah’s third visit

Springtime. Blossom overhead. Ms. Blake waited in the coach station of eagerness and hope, unable to remember why she had ever experienced any tension whatsoever with regard to her very dearest friend from home, Leah Hanwell. The coach arrived, the doors opened. Human figures with faces streamed into view, and Ms. Blake’s brain sought a match between a recent memory and a material reality. Her mistake was to cling to ideas that properly belonged to previous visits. Ideas like “red hair,” and “black jeans/black boots/ black t-shirt.” Fashions change. University is a time of experimentation and metamorphosis. The person who gripped her by the shoulders could no longer be mistaken for a member of a riot grrrl band or a minor Berlin artist. She was now some kind of dirty blonde warrior for the planet, with hair that was dreadlocking itself, and army trousers that would not pass an inspection.