A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

Meg walked on, this time beyond her boundary and up into Beauchamp Place.

This isn’t supposed to be … There aren’t enough people like me for me to be with, I won’t find another, I’ll be … I’ll just sit in rooms and listen to strangers telling me all about the wonderful fucking stuff they do now they don’t drink and I’ll fucking be alone, I’ll fucking be alone, I’ll fucking be alone.

Shopfronts winked and glimmered, full of things women with men would wear to be with their men and to be successful with their men, full of things worth more than she ever could be.

I think he is sorry and this doesn’t make sense if he’s sorry … He said he was sorry and why bother to say that if you’re telling somebody goodbye and you needn’t be kind?

You’re not being fucking kind, so why try to be kind?

If he’s sorry, then he shouldn’t have …

I think he is sorry.

Everything she could see was laughing at her.

Fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him.

And it wouldn’t do to fold herself up here and sit on the kerb.

I can’t feel like this. I need to stop feeling. I need to feel something that isn’t this, or else I’ll bloody die.

There is a certainty — calm and high — that she will be killed by her own emotions, that it could be possible this will happen.

And there is no room on the kerb because of the nice cars parked up nicely beside it and there is no corner to hide in because of the nice lights and the glitter from the nice windows and the shapes of the nice people outside the nice cafés with their shisha water pipes and the nice smell of sweet tobacco, hot fruit, is swaying along the nice pavement, narrow pavement, and Meg is not a creature that belongs here. She isn’t nice.

Fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him.

Meg is thirsty. She is so thirsty. This is in her like a law of physics — this rule that governs her actions and sometimes sleeps or fades but never leaves her.

Fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck him.

Inside the café — this still-open café — they have things which are things to drink. When you are thirsty, you have to drink. This is simple, like the edge of a cliff, like the edge of a knife, like the edge of this happy pantomime you were acting out when really you didn’t belong there — you belong with a drink.

Meg opens the door and goes in because this is better than going home.

A family sits in a café: mother, father, child — an infant child. They are happy.

This is a weekday afternoon and the place is quiet. Outside there is drizzle and greyness, viewed through a window which is stacked and lined and mounded with perfectly manicured cakes. The display is impressive, even when viewed from behind, and it seems to keep the weather, the grey day, at a bearable distance. And the premises are bright and warm, the staff independent and talkative. Being here feels unusually pleasant. It feels like a treat. The decor, the ambience, the glistening cakes: they are all designed to make any customer feel they are in some generous person’s home — the front room of a jolly and energetic baker — and that now they are getting a treat.

At the end of their stay, they will pay for the treat, but they won’t mind.

The mother is breastfeeding the child, which seems very tiny. The father watches while the small body rests against his wife, completely surrendered to peacefulness. The mother sometimes drinks her tea and sometimes chats to her husband in a low, sleepy voice. Both parents seem sleepy, not so much in the sense of being tired, but in the sense of dreaming. They appear to be alive inside a large and agreeable dream.

After forty minutes, perhaps a touch longer, the baby — still slightly lost in her new clothes — has finished feeding and the father lays her on the table and begins wrapping her up for the outside air, then fitting her into the harness he will wear to carry her.

Now that the mother is no longer preoccupied, the woman next to her discusses babies and the children she already has. This is the mother’s first time — she tells the woman that she worries, that she finds everything so strange. She does not look worried — she looks illuminated. The woman tells her, ‘You’ll do fine.’

The father is now standing and has the baby strapped in neatly, tight to his chest. He smiles. The other occupants of the room turn to him, perhaps because he is so noticeably content. They smile, too.

And he walks to each of them and shows them the baby, his daughter, and some of them smile at her and some stroke her hair or her cheek and she watches them with clever eyes, hungry for everything. And the father says, ‘This is Nina.’

People tell her, ‘Hello, Nina.’ And she listens to her name and, somehow, this inspiration of her father’s has become a little ceremony.

His daughter is being introduced to the world.

And the world likes her. And she likes it back.

Even when she has left with her parents, the room continues to be filled with this.

‘SWEETHEART, I’M REALLY sorry.’ Jon was apologising into his phone — or trying to — sitting in his second gridlocked cab of the day. Outside he could see the night’s tally of supercars barging themselves along beside him, heading the other way. Their absurd engines were shouting, overperforming for any high street — even Kensington’s. It all aimed to make one look. So Jon didn’t look.

Why would you want to own a car with a predator’s face, a silhouette that speaks of sharks and bullets and a lack of imagination? And they have to be too low-slung for comfort. Why would you want to be lying down when you drive?

‘Darling, I wanted to call and … This is so that you can know I’m sorry.’

Tinted glass, ungenerous windows — they’re a kind of wilful blindness — the usual menu of sharp-muzzled toys: Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Porsche, Audi, Ferrari, I don’t care, I wouldn’t know …

I do know I’m in favour of comfort.

I truly am.

He was leaving a message, calling out to a phone which was possibly turned off and possibly broken and possibly lost and possibly owned by someone who would not currently make him welcome.

I am not a bad man.

‘I just … I know it’s late and … I hope you’re OK. I hope you’re resting. I didn’t mean to …’

I never mean anything — trained not to and now I can’t help it. Or something like that.

‘Becky, look, I’m sorry I had to run and I did want very much to ring before you went to sleep, but I’ve missed you … obviously … I am glad if you are asleep. That’s good. Do rest. And I am thinking of you and wishing you well and I will call you in the morning, not too early and maybe we’ll … It’s a Saturday, that’s a day off.’ He felt this swing of pressure, this lighting of pain in his face. ‘And you’re right, I do need to … retire. That’s the thing. Retiring. Leaving. But I …’ His words coming out childish, foolish, selfish …

All the things that I am.

‘Night night, darling, or good morning, or hello. I love you. I do. I do.’ This last was a dash at sounding functional, being useful. It left him clammy and the sound of it seemed to pull out through the height of him, as if he was being unthreaded, unstitched in some terrible way.

I am not a bad man, but I can do bad things. A good man may quite easily do bad things.

And a bewilderment slapped at him, as if he were eight again and back in Society Street and trying to understand why his Christmas wasn’t being a Christmas and why his father was out in the garden, sitting on a lawn that was silver with frost in the light from the living-room window and why Dad was staring out at some kind of unseeable something and why his mother was in the kitchen and cooking pancakes and using up all of the flour and all of the milk and why this was happening in the absolute dark of the night. It turned the dark into a new place he had never heard of, a box you were dragged up into where time stopped and stared and hated you and made you little.