Zadie Smith - NW

Their own materiality was the scandal. The fact of flesh.

Natalie Blake, being strong, decided to fight. To go to war against these matters, like a soldier.

150. Listings

After opening an e-mail about a baby, she went to the website, and contributed to the website. She went upstairs to bed.

151. Redact

“Where are you going?

Natalie Blake shook her husband’s hand from her shin and rose from bed. She walked down the hall to the spare bedroom and sat in front of the computer. She typed the address into the browser as smoothly as a pianist playing a scale. She removed the contribution.

152. The past

“Nathan?”

He sat on the bandstand in the park, smoking, with two girls and a boy. Two women and a man. But they were dressed as kids. Natalie Blake was dressed as a successful lawyer in her early thirties. Alone, he and she might have walked the perimeter of the park, and talked about the past, and perhaps she would have taken off her ugly heels and they would have sat in the grass and Natalie would have smoked his weed, and then told him to get off drugs in a motherly sort of way, and he would have nodded and smiled and promised. But in company like this she had no idea how to be.

It’s well hot, said Nathan Bogle. It really is, agreed Natalie Blake.

153. Brixton

It was a long-standing invitation but she hadn’t called or sent a text to say she was coming. It was an impulse that struck her at Victoria Station. Fifteen minutes later she was walking down Brixton High Street, exhausted from court, still in her suit, getting in the way of merry people just starting their Friday night. She bought some flowers in a garage forecourt, and thought of all the scenes in movies where people buy flowers from garage forecourts, and of how it is almost always better to bring nothing. She found the house and rang the bell. A queeny guy with his ’fro dyed blonde answered.

“Hi. Jayden about? His sister, Nat.”

“Of course you are. You look just like Angela Bassett!”

The kitchen was confusingly full. Was it the queen? Or one of the white guys? Or the Chinese guy, or the other guy?

“He’s in the shower. Vodka or tea?”

“Vodka. You all heading out?”

“We just got in. The only thing to eat right now is this Jaffa cake.”

154. Force of nature

When had she last been so drunk? There was something about being in the company of so many men with no intentions toward her that encouraged excess. She was learning many things about her little brother she had never known. He was “famous” for drinking White Russians. He’d had a crush on Nathan Bogle. He loved fantasy fiction. He could do more one-handed press-ups than any other man in the room.

The vodka ran out. They took shots of a blue drink they found in a cupboard. Natalie realized that there was no special or chosen man in this house. Jayden had managed to find for himself precisely the fluid and friendly living arrangements she herself had dreamed of so many years earlier. If it was not quite possible to feel happy for him it was because the arrangement was timeless — it did not come bound by the constrictions of time — and this in turn was the consequence of a crucial detail: no women were included within the schema. Women come bearing time. Natalie had brought time into this house. She couldn’t stop mentioning the time, and worrying about it. If only she could free herself from her body and join them all at the Vauxhall Tavern, for the second wave. In reality, she had ten texts from Frank and it was time to go home. The time had come.

“And all in the same week,” said Jayden, “all in the same week, she told this rude boy kid in our estate who was on my case to back off, she just ran him off, right after she came out of that last exam. Straight As. Bitch is real. Sista’s a force of nature, believe!” The room was dipping and revolving. Natalie did not recognize this story. She did not think these two things had happened, at least not in the same week, perhaps not even in the same year. She certainly did not get straight As. It had occurred several times this evening, these conflicting versions, and at first she had tried to tweak or challenge them, but now she leaned back into the arms of a man called Paul and stroked his bicep. Did it matter what was true and what wasn’t?

155. Some observations concerning television

She was watching the poor with Marcia. A reality show set on a council estate. The council estate on television was fractionally worse than the council estate in which she sat watching the show about a council estate. Every now and then Marcia pointed out how filthy were the flats of the people on television and how meticulously she took care of her own, Cheryl’s mess not withstanding. “Guinness. At ten in the morning!” said Marcia. Natalie, who had not seen the show before, asked after the character arc of one of the participants. Marcia grabbed both arms of her chair and closed her eyes. “She’s on crack. All she cares about is make up and clothes. Her brother is on sickness benefits but there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a disgrace. The dad is in jail for thieving. The mum’s a junkie.” In the show poverty was understood as a personality trait. “Look at that! Look at the bathroom. Shameful. What kind of people would live like this? Did you see that?” Natalie pleaded innocence. She was checking her phone. “All you do is check that phone. Did you come round to see me or check that phone?”

Natalie looked up. A topless lad with a beer bottle in his hand ran across a scrubby patch of grass between two tower blocks and lobbed the bottle into the sole remaining window in a burned-out car. Music accompanied this action. It had a certain beauty.

“I hate the way the camera jumps all over the place like that,” said Marcia. “You can’t forget about the filming for a minute. Why do they always do that these days?”

This struck Natalie as a profound question.

156. Melanie

Natalie Blake was in her office making some notes on an arcane detail of property law as it pertained to adverse possession when Melanie walked in, tried to speak and burst into tears. Natalie did not know what to do with a crying person. She placed a hand upon Melanie’s shoulder.

“What happened?”

Melanie shook her head. Liquid came out of her nose and a bubble appeared in the corner of her mouth.

“A problem at home?”

All Natalie knew about Melanie’s private realm was that her boyfriend was a policeman and there was a daughter called Rafaella. Neither the policeman nor Melanie was Italian.

“Take a tissue,” said Natalie. She had a snot phobia. Melanie fell into a chair. She took a phone from her pocket. Between heaving fits of weeping she seemed to be trying to find something on it. Natalie watched her thumb, frantic on the rollerball.

“I just really need to not be here!” This problem sounded interesting, and quite unexpected coming from plain-speaking, reliable Melanie, whom Natalie often described as “her rock.” (It was the year everyone was saying that such and such a person was “their rock.”) But now Melanie turned blandly practical: “Not all the time! The fact is I’ve got Rafs and I love her and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t have Rafs anymore! Look at her — she’s so bloody brilliant now, she’s almost two.”

Natalie leaned forward to peer at an image on a screen. A grand seigneur to whom a frightened peasant has come, with a confession about the harvest.

157. On the park

Natalie Blake was busy with the Kashmiri border dispute, at least as far as it related to importing stereos into India through Dubai on behalf of her giant Japanese electronics manufacturing client. Her husband Frank De Angelis was out entertaining clients. They were “time poor.” They didn’t even have time to collect their latest reward for all their hard work. Marcia kindly went to get the key before the estate agent closed, and Natalie met her mother and Leah at the front door. They whispered as they entered. It was unclear why. There were no blinds in yet and their shadows rose over the fireplace and up to the ceiling. Natalie led them around, pointing out where sofas and chairs and tables were to be placed, what would be knocked through and what kept, what carpeted and what stripped and polished. Natalie encouraged her mother and her friend to stand in front of the bay window and admire the view of the park. She recognized in herself a need for total submission.