Maggie Gee - The White Family

Leaving Shirley standing there wondering. How could Susie be so different from her? Faster, slicker, brighter, sharper. Therapist, journalist, talker, world traveller …

But maybe I would have been like her. If I had finished my education. Is that what makes women lean and quick? Instead I stand here. Solid. Slow.

She’s a fly-by-night. I suppose I’m a stayer.

Upstairs, Shirley found the sun had come out, sweeping across through the glass swing-doors and catching the jewellery in its nets, flashing and glinting from gilded counters, the middle-aged customers warmly lit, floating along through deep golden valleys where sun-warmed scents of rose and vanilla, oranges, musk, peaches, lemons, wafted on balmy winds from Perfumes.

All of us here are in paradise, she told herself as the sun embraced her. Everyone’s walking, everyone’s well. This is heaven, compared to the hospital.

All shall be well … Let all be well … Make all our family well, she prayed.

Dirk was sitting thinking of the final reckoning. The glorious day when it would all come right, when the goats and black sheep would really get sorted.

Then George said ‘You’d better go and get a bit of lunch.’ Just like that. As if it was normal.

‘What?’ — Dirk never, ever got a lunch break, because George couldn’t manage on his own ‘I’ll nip out and get some sandwiches, then.’

‘I’ll hold the fort. Go on, take your time. They say the new Burger Bar’s quite good. There’s a Sushi Bar opened, if you’re feeling ambitious.’ George laughed, nervously. ‘Not really your scene.’

Dirk stared at him blankly. ‘What, eat out ? Not come back to the shop with it? — I can’t afford it, in any case.’ Perhaps the asthma was affecting his brain.

George’s eyes had a funny kind of glint. ‘Feeling a bit guilty about this morning. Making you wait outside in the rain. You’re a good lad. I couldn’t have managed without you.’

And then Dirk got it.

He thinks he’s going to die. That’s why he’s talking about himself in the past. He really is thinking of giving up the shop. He probably is going to leave it to me.

What followed was even more amazing. ‘Here’s a fiver. Towards your lunch.’

‘Thanks George.’ Dirk felt himself going red. He was really pleased. George was giving him a present . Maybe he wasn’t such a bad old bugger. He had never done that before, not once, not in nine years of working for him. ‘Are you sure you can manage?’ Dirk knew he couldn’t.

‘If I can’t manage, I’ll shut up shop.’

Dirk wished he had asked him for a tenner, since a fiver didn’t go far these days, but it was good to hear the shop door ring behind him and step out into the rain with a fiver in his pocket. In the middle of the day. A free man.

I’ve never really felt that. Free, or a man.

So maybe soon I’ll have the keys to the shop. MediaNet. And I’ll expand next door. Buy up Windsor Drainage before it goes bust.

I’d like that, buying up the lav shop. And I’ll drive those other buggers out of business, the poncing Patels with their gifts and their greeting cards and more computer magazines than us. (They opened their shop, on purpose, less than a hundred yards down the road from us. Our shop’s been there since the beginning of time, then the Pakis try and blow us away.)

Not actually, of course. They don’t use force. I wish they would. We could fight to the finish. They can’t fight, Pakis, they’re soft and weak. I remember them at school; swots, pansies. We could crush them like flies. We’d break their legs …

The other blacks are different, of course. Very very violent people, blacks.

We could still smash them, even if the blacks joined the Pakis (which isn’t likely, they hate each other’s guts) — we could still win through. Because we’re — motivated . I read that in Spearhead and I agreed. We could still break them, because our cause is just. To free our streets of crime and fear . That’s the way they put it in Spearhead .

And they are our streets. They always were. When George and my dad were little boys, these streets were safe for kids to play in. My dad always talks about it down the pub. How all the kids were normal then. Normal white. And there wasn’t any crime. Not everyone beating the shit out of each other. Not everyone hating everyone else. There was brotherhood then. We were all English.

Hillesden was a village, in those days. I sometimes think I was born out of my time. It’s just my luck to be born now, with no opportunities for native English. And prejudice against us just because we’re white.

‘Ozzie! Ozzie!’ My mate Ozzie. ‘Oi, Ozzie, are you going in here?’

‘Going down the pub.’

‘I’m supposed to be working —’

‘Buy us a beer.’

‘All right, just one.’

I really meant it to be just one. But three’s not many. Not for me. I can hold my liquor. So Dad always says. I got some peanuts and half a ham sandwich. I’d have got something hot, but it was frigging curry. Even down the pub. My local pub. I wanted something English like spag bol or a burger, but all that was on offer was frigging beef curry.

I was back on time, give or take a few minutes.

There was a sort of atmosphere when I got back. I’m sensitive. I can feel an atmosphere. As if I had come back too soon. As if George didn’t want me here. And there was — this man, messing around.

He’s still in here, by the magazines. I say a man, I mean a Paki man. I’m not that good at telling them apart — can anyone really tell them apart? — but he looks familiar, he looks like one of the oily geezers who tried to buy the shop. The geezers George was amusing himself with. I try winking at George and pointing to the man but George looks funny, as if he’d gone blind. Normally he hates people messing about. He hates people standing there fingering the goods … I suppose this moron can’t read English, because there are signs all over the shop, handwritten signs George did himself, a bit faded now but in nice big letters, Please Do Not Touch The Goods, and by the papers, two different versions of No Reading Allowed, one in ink, one in red biro. Now the Paki’s picking up a dirty magazine, he’s got a wank mag off the top shelf, grinning all over his ugly mug, he’s got down a Big Ones International (which is very popular round here, at three pounds fifty, thank you very much), and he’s laughing at it, trying to look all superior, but enjoying it too, getting his rocks off, he thinks he can get his rocks off for free, you’d think he bloody owned the place –

‘George,’ I hiss, to attract his attention, he’d sort of sunk down into himself, he’s normally so quick on things like that. ‘George, that man.’

‘What?’ he says, lifeless, quiet, not George at all, not the George I knew, not the George of old, not George and the dragon, George who got lively at times like this. The only time, really, that George got lively.

‘That man’s got Big Ones International.’

‘Well he’s not doing any harm.’

It must be softening of the brain. And he’s whispering, too, as if he’s afraid, as if he doesn’t want the Paki to hear him.

It’s over to me, then. All down to me. My dad is in hospital, and George is dying. The older generation is on its way out. Up to us lot now to keep the torch burning. Up to us lot now to — what was the phrase? The very good phrase they used in Spearhead , the phrase that made me think of my dad — up to us now to hold the pass . Up to us to dam the flood .