Zadie Smith - NW

“Keesh, pass me that rag there. She’s chucking it all up.”

Pocahontas printed on the closed blind. The sun made her golden. The room was not much changed from the old days except it was now roughly divided between a boy and a girl zone; the former red, blue and Spiderman, the latter diamanté-encrusted princess pink. Natalie picked up a dumper truck and drove it up and down her thigh.

“Two against one.”

Cheryl’s head lifted wearily; the baby was fussy and would not settle to eating.

“Just — the pink-blue war. Poor old Ray won’t survive now there’s Cleo and Carly.”

“Survive? What you on about?”

“Nothing. Sorry, carry on.”

On every surface there balanced things upon other things with more things hanging off and wrapped around and crammed in. No Blake could ever throw anything away. It was the same in Natalie’s place, except there the great towers of cheap consumer dreck were piled up behind cupboard doors, concealed by better storage.

Cheryl plucked the bottle from the child’s mouth and sighed: “She ain’t going down. Let’s just go through.”

Natalie followed her sister down the narrow hallway made almost impassable by laundry strung from a wire along both walls.

“Can I do something?”

“Yeah, take her for a minute while I have a piss. Carly, go to your auntie now.”

• • •

Natalie had no fear of handling babies; she’d too much practice. She placed Carly loosely on her hip and with the other hand called Melanie to give a series of unnecessary instructions that could have easily waited until they were both in the office. She walked up and down the room as she did this, jiggling the baby, talking loudly, entirely competent, casual. The baby, seeming to sense her extraordinary competency, grew quiet and looked up at her aunt with admiring eyes in which Natalie spotted even a hint of wistfulness.

“But the thing is, yeah,” said Cheryl, as she walked back in, “Jay’s gone, there’s plenty of space here. And I don’t want to leave mum on her jacks.”

“Eventually Gus is going to finish building. She’s going to move back to Jamaica.”

Cheryl put both hands to the base of her back and thrust her stomach out in that depressing motherly gesture Natalie felt sure she would never perform, if and when she herself became a mother. “That’s way off,” said Cheryl, yawning as she stretched. “He sent pictures. Not e-mail — photos in an envelope. It’s a corrugated box with no roof. It’s got a palm tree growing out the bathroom.”

This reminder of their father’s innocence, of his optimism and incompetence, made the sisters smile, and emboldened Natalie. She pressed her niece to her breast and kissed her forehead.

“I just can’t stand to see you all living like this.”

Cheryl sat down in their father’s old chair, shook her head at the floor and laughed unpleasantly.

“There it is,” she said.

Natalie Blake, who feared more than anything being made to look ridiculous — or being perceived, even for a moment, to be on the wrong side of a moral question — pretended she did not hear this and smiled at the baby and lifted the baby above her head to try and get her to giggle and when this did not work, lowered her to her lap once again.

“If you hate Caldie so much, why d’you even come here? Seriously, man. No one asked you to come. Go back to your new manor. I’m busy — ain’t really got the time to sit and chat with you neither. You piss me off sometimes Keisha. No, but you do.”

“When I was at RSN,” said Natalie firmly, in the voice she used in court, “you know how many of my clients were Caldies? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see you and the kids in a nice place somewhere.”

“This is a nice place! There’s a lot worse. You done all right out of it. Keisha, if I wanted to get out of here I’d get another place off the council before I come to you, to be honest.”

Natalie addressed her next comment to the four-month-old.

“I don’t know why your mum talks to me like that. I’m her only sister!”

Cheryl attended to a stain on her leggings. “We ain’t never been that close Keisha, come on now.”

In Natalie’s bag, by the door, there were three Ambien, in the inside pocket next to her wallet.

“There’s four years between us,” she heard herself say, in a small voice, a ludicrous voice.

“Nah but it weren’t that, though,” said Cheryl, without looking up.

Natalie sprung from her chair. Standing she found that holding little Carly limited her dramatic options. The child had fallen asleep on her shoulder. In a dynamic unchanged from childhood, Natalie became irate as her sister grew calm.

“Excuse me I forgot: no-one’s allowed to have friends in this fucking family.”

“Family first. That’s my belief. God first, then family.”

“Oh, give me a fucking break. Here comes the Virgin Mary. Just because you can’t locate the fathers, doesn’t make them all immaculate conceptions.”

Cheryl stood up and stuck a finger in her sister’s face: “You need to watch your mouth, Keisha. And why you got to curse all the time, man? Get some respect.”

Natalie felt tears pricking her eyes and a childish wash of self-pity overcame her entirely.

“Why am I being punished for making something of my life?”

“Oh my days. Who’s punishing you, Keisha? Nobody. That’s in your head. You’re paranoid, man!”

Natalie Blake could not be stopped: “I work hard. I came in with no reputation, nothing. I’ve built up a serious practice — do you have any idea how few—”

“Did you really come round here to tell me what a big woman you are these days?”

“I came round here to try and help you.”

“But no-one in here is looking for your help, Keisha! This is it! I ain’t looking for you, end of.”

And now they had to transfer Carly from Natalie’s shoulder to her mother’s, a strangely delicate operation in the middle of the carnage.

Natalie Blake cast around hopelessly for a parting shot. “You need to do something about your attitude, Cheryl. Really. You should go see someone about it, because it’s really a problem.”

As soon as Cheryl had the child in her arms she turned from her sister and began walking back down the corridor to the bedroom.

“Yeah, well, till you have kids you can’t really chat to me, Keisha, to be honest.”

147. Listings

On the website she was what everybody was looking for.

148. The future

Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were 28 when the first emails began to arrive. Over the next few years their number increased exponentially. Photo attachments of stunned-looking women with hospital tags round their wrists, babies lying on their breast, hair inexplicably soaked through. They seemed to have stepped across a chasm into another world. It was perfectly possible that her own mother was arriving at the houses of these new mothers, with her name-tag pinned to her apron, pricking their babies’ feet with a needle, or sewing up the new mothers’ stitches as they lay sideways on a couch. Marcia must have seen one or two of them, by the law of local averages. They were new arrivals in the neighborhood. They were not the sort of people to switch off the lights and lie on the floor. Mother and baby doing well, exhausted. It was as if no-one had ever had a baby before, in human history. And everybody said precisely this, it was the new thing to say: “It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.” Natalie forwarded the emails to Leah. It’s as if no-one ever had a baby before.

149. Nature becomes culture

Many things that had seemed, to their own mothers, self-evident elements of a common-sense world, now struck Natalie and Leah as either a surprise or an outrage. Physical pain. The existence of disease. The difference in procreative age between men and women. Age itself. Death.