David Mitchell - The Book of Other People

It is 4.30 am and Magda would like us, her neighbours, to know that she is a very talented woman, a woman of accomplishments. Magda is a nurse, a qualified pilot, a businesswoman and philanthropist, a gifted and sensitive lover, the holder of certificates in computing and English grammar, a semi-professional country singer and a mother. Yes, a mother! Magda has a daughter. Who came out of this pussy right here.

Right here, she says. Out of this pussy. RIGHT HERE. And all along the street we come to our windows to twitch the net curtains and face the awe-inspiring truth that is Magda in her lime-green thong. She’s standing on the top step, the lights of the house blazing behind her, a terrifying mash-up of the Venus of Willendorf and a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, making gestures with a beer can at the little knot of emergency service personnel gathered on the pavement below.

One of the younger and less experienced constables has obviously asked her to accompany him to a place where, as an agent of the state, he will feel less exposed. A police station, perhaps. Or a hospital. Anywhere that will tip the odds a little in his favour. Magda has met this suggestion with the scorn it deserves. She knows she outnumbers these fools. YOU KNOW ME, she says. Then, with a sinister leer, AND I KNOW YOU.

Being known by Magda is a messy and unavoidably carnal experience. All of us neighbours are known by Magda. Last time she knew me, she pushed me up against the side of my car. I know you, she breathed huskily. I knew I’d been known.

In their big reflective jackets, the policemen appear crumpled and insubstantial. They are visibly trying to block out the knowledge of her knowledge, no doubt using mental techniques they were taught at the training school: I am a powerful person. I control my own destiny. Behind the ambulance, one of the paramedics is taking a quick nip of oxygen.

They don’t realize what they’re up against. Magda is the daughter of Nelson Mandela, major world leader and saviour of his country. Don’t these Day-Glo fools see the resemblance? It’s staring them in the face. If they have any doubts, ANY DOUBTS AT ALL, she tells them, they have only to consult the autobiography Long Road to Freedom . Read the autobiography! Read page 37 and page 475! They will see. THEN THEY WILL KNOW.

Magda is coated in something that I suspect is coconut oil. She has the air of a woman who has roused herself from titanic erotic exertions to be here with us on Westerbury Road tonight. She has been INTERRUPTED. She has THINGS TO DO. There’s no sign of Errol. I hope he’s all right. Errol is quite fragile.

Magda lives in Errol’s house. This is a scandal on Westerbury Road, because Errol is a widower in his seventies, who brought up a family and was expected to eke away his twilight years on DIY, Sunday church and the occasional tot of Wray & Nephew rum. However, Errol likes Wray & Nephew more than he likes church, and last year (according to Lauren at Number 20) he met Magda at a lock-in at the Victoria Arms, one of the least salubrious pubs in our little corner of East London. I’ve been to one of those lock-ins. They do get frisky. Magda is at least thirty, possibly forty years younger than Errol. For a while after she moved in, he pottered around with a smile on his grizzled face, raffishly touching the brim of his baseball cap to us neighbours and whistling as he swept the leaves off his front steps. These days he wears the sour expression of a man who’s been cheated at cards.

What Errol signed up for was a bit of bounce and warmth and comfort on cold nights. Instead he’s been swept into a world of grand operatic passion. Between Magda and Errol there is a love that can spill out in many directions. It has left Magda sleeping in a rolled-up carpet on the pavement and Errol hobbling across the street to take refuge in my kitchen; during Old Testament times, Errol prefers to keep a door between the two of them – and who can blame him for that? Magda’s wrath is sharp and terrible. It involves a lot of casting out and smiting. The recently smitten include: Errol (obviously), Lauren at Number 20, the Meals-on-Wheels lady and several council workmen, whom Magda battered with one of the stock of road cones she keeps in the front yard. Magda leaves Errol at least once a month. Sometimes Errol throws her out. Frequently, instead of leaving Errol, Magda punishes him by going to the Victoria Arms and finding a young man to bring home and sit with on the steps. For a day or two, Errol will look grim and spend a lot of time in the betting shop. Then things will go back to normal.

Magda must be excused her foibles, because she is wrestling with the great question of her life: old man or young man? Both have their plus points. Young men have more energy and are less scandalous, unless they smoke crack on the steps or go telling lies to Errol. Old men are more dignified and have houses. Old men are Magda’s weakness: I LIKE A OLD MAN. She mentioned her inclinations to my father (seventy this year), when he came to visit the other week. There was a commotion outside, and I found Magda knowing him against a lamp-post. You are a old man, she purred appreciatively, rubbing up and down against his leg. I like a old man.

Old man, young man. Which will it be? For all her turbulence, Magda is concerned about the proprieties. She values the good opinion of us neighbours. The other night she came out onto the steps to explain her relationship with Errol. My neighbours, she said, I must tell you why I am here. We rose from our beds and came to our windows. I AM HIS NURSE. He is a old man. He can’t satisfy a woman like me. He is limp and goes to sleep. I need more of a man than such a one. I am a qualified nurse, a gifted woman. He is like a father to me. The problem with you people is this. I will tell you now: You all have dirty minds. Filthy dirty. I think I have said enough. Now fuck off.

As neighbours, we often fail Magda in this way – with our prurience, our tendency to jump to conclusions. She frequently has to chastise us. Occasionally she does a round of the street and casts us out one by one, which is effortful and very time-consuming. Tonight, before the arrival of the emergency services, she was berating us for our pride and our materialism. I KNOW YOU, she told us. You think you have HOUSES. In Notting Hill they have HOUSES. I have seen them with my own eyes. In such a house is my friend. A young man, not old and worn out at all. Ten, twelve bathrooms at a time in such houses. Enough bathrooms.

On nights such as tonight, Magda likes to sing. She particularly likes an audience in uniform. You’re my best friend, she sings. I love you but you don’t love me. This song is freely adapted from her CD of country music hymns, the one she plays to get into a church-going mood on Sunday mornings. Magda has built her own semi-professional singing career around such material. She’s appeared in Cape Town and Tottenham and Dalston, she says. Musically speaking, Magda’s congregation must be more avantgarde than most: although her voice is an extraordinary phenomenon, it’s not tonal, at least not as we usually understand tonality.

Sometimes when Magda comes out onto the steps and speaks, I sit bolt upright in bed. Sometimes it is as if she is in the room with me. My girlfriend has the same experience. Magda’s voice is not simply loud. Loud, yes, but not just loud. It has the penetrative force of a piece of heavy industrial equipment, something with a diamond bit or tempered-steel blades. Often it seems disconnected from her body, as if emerging from the bathroom or under the floorboards or the far end of Westerbury Road. When you look at Magda, who is quite short and (when dressed) usually looks neat and smart and more or less conventionally contained inside herself, you’d never guess she possessed such a voice. And, in a way, she doesn’t, or at least that’s what I believe. I think she’s merely the voice’s host, its point of entry into the continuum of Westerbury Road.