26a Page 2

  Gladstone’s house was still standing at the top entrance to the park. It hadn’t been his house exactly, Georgia knew, he’d just stayed there sometimes with his friends the Aberdeens when Parliament got too much. But as far as she was concerned, it was Gladstone’s house. The duck pond and the lines of oaks, the reams of gleaming green grass had all been his back garden. Bodiced ladies in ruffles and high hats used to sip wine there under their parasols, and children hid in the shade of trees. Gladstone liked parties, but he also liked peace and quiet, a dip in the pond, and lying in his hammock between two trees. Georgia had seen a picture of him. Serious eyes in a fleshy face, a clever mouth, long white sideburns and white wispy hair around his balding crown. He looked nothing like her father.

  Last Christmas, when Gladstone’s garden was thick with snow, Aubrey had taken his daughters to the park with sleighs. They’d dragged the sleighs to the top of the hill where the ducks were shivering and whooshed back down again and again. Aubrey had decided to join in, even though Bel warned him not to because of his bad back, which he often suffered from in winter, or when he felt particularly agitated. In his long navy trench coat, the thick glasses slipped into an inside pocket, he’d sat down on a sleigh and pushed himself out into the soft slide down. Bel said in a foreboding voice, “He’s going to hurt himself.” They all watched and thought about what would happen if Aubrey hurt himself. At first it was a good thought. But then Aubrey began to scream and despite everything Kemy said, “Don’t hurt himself, Daddy!” and the four of them began to run. He screamed a deep, toneless man’s scream, all the way down and they ran after him calling, frantic, afraid for his back and even his heart. He looked strange, a grown man on a sleigh with his short legs out in the air. When they reached the bottom, touching his arm, pulling him up, Kemy in tears, he said he was fine, his back was fine, and stop fussing, goddammit. He had stayed in bed for a week afterward drinking Ida’s milky tea and not speaking much. This had been a very good week for the rest of the family, who spent it catching up on sleep, not standing in corners, and watching forbidden television.

  It might not be that bad, Georgia was thinking now, if they ended up sleeping there, in the park, after divorce. They were driving around the edge of it on the way to the vet in the royal-blue estate with three rows of seats. Ham was next to her with the What is it? still in his eyes. Aubrey was at the wheel.

  Georgia imagined it like this: She and Bessi would knock on the door of the house and one of Gladstone’s great-grandchildren might open it, or better still, Gladstone himself looking sweetly ancient in a waistcoat. He’d ask them what he could do for them and it would be at this crucial point that Georgia would tell him that she and Bessi were in his class at school, green for Gladstone, and she’d show him her badge. He couldn’t refuse. He’d say, Well, I was just serving tea to the haymakers, but do come in and make yourselves comfortable. And he’d let Ham in too. They’d all wake up the next day to the silver kitchen sounds of an oncoming party and wait for the ladies to arrive for their wine.

  So that was a Yes. That was an Oh-yes. She nodded.

  Aubrey, at this moment, was not in the best of moods. Last night he’d stayed up shouting about the boiler being broken and how his family were a bunch of ungrateful sods, especially Bel because she’d started to wear lipstick. No one had slept much; they all, regardless of age, had bags under their eyes. And to make things worse there was a traffic jam on Dollis Hill Lane, and there were never traffic jams on Dollis Hill Lane. It was “preposterous,” “damnable” and “a flaming nuisance.” That’s what he said. Kemy, sitting on the other side of Ham, asked what pre-pos-ters meant, thinking it was possibly something to do with Michael Jackson, but Aubrey ignored her. Georgia stepped in, for she had been pondering this too, arriving at the conclusion that it was something to do with extra. Extra posters. Extra normal. Extra or-di-na-ry, which was the same as normal, she knew this, she was “a very clever girl” (her teacher Miss Reed had said only last week). So she said, “Extra posters and more ordinary.” And Kemy looked at her for a while with her shiny brown eyes that throbbed for being so big.

  The traffic had advanced and the car in front was failing to keep up. Aubrey beeped and raised his voice, “Come on, woman! What are you waiting for!” Bessi was stuck fast to the passenger seat by her seat belt, feeling sorry for herself after a fight with Kemy about not sitting in the front. She studied the outline of the head in front that Aubrey was come-on-ing. It definitely looked like a man to her, lots of grizzly hair and massive shoulders. “I think it’s a man, Daddy,” she said. Aubrey dug the end of his Benson furiously into the ashtray, blowing out smoke from the very back of his throat. When the smoke was fresh, when it drifted, it resembled the eventual color and texture of his hair, which was also fading away.

  They stopped on a hill and Aubrey had to use the hand brake. He jerked it up with such force it shook the car and made a loud ugly squeak that made Kemy laugh. “Ha ha! do that again, Daddy!” Her skinny legs flippered and she kicked the back of Aubrey’s seat. “Do it again!” He threw a glare over his shoulder. “Will you settle down, bloody hell, just settle down!”

  Ham sneezed softly in his cage and closed his face.

  THERE’D BEEN AN accident at the lights. The police were clearing the road and as they drove past they saw a red, ruined car smashed up against a lamppost. The hood was crumpled. The lamppost was leaning away from the windshield, away from the death, who was a woman, who was dying in the ambulance flashing toward the hospital. Georgia caught a wisp of her left in the front seat, a cloudy peach scarf touching the steering wheel, and a faint smell of regret.

  FOR TWENTY YEARS Mr. Shaha had been the only vet in Neasden. He’d come to London from Bangladesh after the bombs of World War II. “They destroyed Willesden completely,” he told people (his grandchildren, his wife’s friends, his patients—the dogs, hamsters, budgies, cats, gerbils, and the occasional snake), “terrible, terrible things. But life must always go on, that is the way of the Shaha.” There were two framed documents on the wall of his waiting room, which radiated the permanent stench of animal hair and animal bowels: his creased veterinary certificate, and a misty black-and-white photograph of his mother, with a folded letter written in Bengali, hiding her neck.

  Ham scowled and chattered his teeth as they waited amid the meows and grunts. He shuffled around in his cage picking at dried rose petals, while opposite him a panting Labrador winced and scratched its balls. When Mr. Shaha called them in, Kemy had fallen asleep and Aubrey had to carry her. Mr. Shaha, old and fat, atrocious eyebrows, with his crooked spine only suggested beneath his lab coat, slowly took Ham out of his cage and looked him straight in the eye. “Now, what’s the matter with you?” he said. “Hmm?”

  “It’s Ham. His name’s Ham,” said Georgia. “He’s d’stressed.”

  “He’s got a cold,” Bessi added.

  “And he doesn’t want chocolate.”

  Ham was airborne, on a warm free hand. Mr. Shaha’s breath smelled of kippers from his lunch. He put Ham down on the examining table and Ham kept bolt still.

  “Is he going to die?” Georgia asked.

  Mr. Shaha gave her a serious look. “Little one, we are all going to die one day, and I suppose it is better if you are prepared.”

  There wasn’t much he could do for Ham. He checked his mouth and his eyes, one of which was closing, and recommended warmth and lots of sunlight. “Try to keep him active,” he said. Aubrey bought a checkered tie-on body blanket from Mr. Shaha’s accessories cabinet (which had proven to be quite lucrative over the years), and on the way home Georgia secured it under his throat and belly. “There,” she said. “Isn’t it better now. You won’t die anymore.”

  But Bel had another one of her dreams, and Bel’s dreams were never taken lightly. She had once been told by a fortune-teller at the annual Roundwood Circus that she possessed “the powers of premonition,” which had made her shudder, as she was only ten at the time. Ida, who had been
harboring suspicions about Bel’s psychic status on account of a certain piercing mystery in her eyes that reminded her of her paternal grandmother, Cecelia Remi Ogeri Tokhokho, who had also been prone to clairvoyance, had held Bel’s hand and looked at her very intensely. “Don worry,” she’d said, “it means you are a wise one and you will know many secret things.” As she got older, Bel’s dreams became more and more reliable, to the extent that sometimes Ida would consult her on matters such as forthcoming natural disasters in Nigeria or whether Kemy would catch chicken pox from the twins (which she had—they had scars on their backs).

  The night after the visit to the vet, Bel dreamed of a wedding held in a muddy field. She tossed and turned. There was no bride and groom. There were no guests. There were only a few waiters wandering around with stacks of empty plates, and the only sound was a dog barking frantically outside the tent. Bel woke up and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. She knew what was coming.

  Over the next two weeks Ham moved less and less. The apples began to thump and Bessi was joyous. She banged a frying pan with a wooden spoon and led her army of harvesters up into the wild. Under Ida’s supervision they peeled and chopped and mixed, frilled in aprons, getting sweaty. And while Bessi was standing at the stove, busy with the applesauce and the future, Georgia walked silently out into the sun lounge every hour to check on Ham. She felt, in those last days, that she and he were traveling together to the end of What is it? and there was only so far she could go.

  Ham sat through the days with his nose glistening. He was making a decision, and when the decision was made, he simply stopped moving. And closed the other eye.

  Then it was possible, Georgia noticed, to choose the time, to leave when you were ready. The heart sends a message of surrender to the brain and the brain carries out the formalities, the slowing down of blood and the growing cold, the gathering of stillness and the inside lights retreating. Ham’s fading vision caught the angry man walking about in the middle of the night and shouting something. There were tender strokes along his back from the little girls, and roses, new roses. He could hear the faint echo of bells. But it all was history. He had decided and it had happened and now he was ending toward what was next. Toward another shock, another scale. It had been very small, this life.

  The last thing he saw: the two of them enclosed in a yellow hula hoop, edging out into the garden.

  2

  The Wedding

  Diana Spencer steps from the glass carriage, holding her skirts, and lifts her head in the way she has of still keeping it down. Her veil is silk taffeta, as long as centuries and just as heavy. She steps into a July full of kisses and dares not look all the way around. Because the universe is watching her, and she is just a shy young girl from Norfolk. Her tiara is leaping with diamonds. Into the cathedral she walks, slowly, in case she falls, which would be dreadfully unforgivable. Her prince is waiting. He seems to wait—he and God’s creatures on the ceiling and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Nelson in the crypt, the city, the half of England outside and the other half along with the rest of the world in the cameras, and her almost mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II—for eternity. She needs her whole blood family to ease the weight of the veil.

  Most of Neasden was inside the cameras. It was the same with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. There had been street parties elsewhere, in Kensington and Clapham and the East End, as there were street parties now, local carnivals with orange squash, dirty aprons and soggy barbecued drumsticks; but save for the rare adventurer who sped into town on the tube to join the fans and tourists straining their necks and sighing outside St. Paul’s, the folk of Neasden stayed at home. That year there were other things to think about. The Brent depression and the increase in muggings down the alley that led to the shops, the roadworks on Parkview and, for the Little Ones, how they’d get ice cream if the ice cream van’s speaker wasn’t working, which it wasn’t. It arrived with a loud wheezing engine instead of the much more alluring “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” The Hunters stayed at home and ate chicken.

  In the kitchen there was a lone shelf stacked with books on English cookery that Aubrey and his mother had bought for Ida since her arrival in London. Some of them had the corners of pages turned down, suggesting an interested reader, but Ida rarely looked at them. She preferred to follow her own way, within the confines of roast dinners and bacon and eggs and onion-soaked liver on Mondays. Her roast potatoes were sometimes burned at the edges, her boiled vegetables were soggy on occasion, particularly after a long bath, but when it came to chicken, Ida was beyond the teachings of any book. Ida knew what to do with chicken. She did not seem to add much seasoning, nor did she cram the insides with year-round stuffing or cloves of garlic. Bel and the Little Ones believed that Ida spoke to the chicken. As she basted it with oil in the sun lounge and sprinkled the skin with mysterious grains, she bent and whispered, “You are delicious, you are tender, you are the chicken of kings and queens.” And the chicken obeyed. It swelled and juiced in the oven on its journey to food, it gathered in its flesh all the bliss and passion of taste, and it fell lusciously into their mouths, brown and moist and holy.

  Bessi was busy with the parson’s nose. It was the best bit of the chicken, Aubrey said. All juice and salty tantalizing squidge. She ate it (Bessi’s Best Bit) every time they had roast chicken, which was every fourth Sunday and on special days such as this. A fairy-tale wedding, and for Georgia and Bessi, a possible sway against divorce.

  Much later, too late for Bessi to get over it, it emerged in conversation that the parson’s nose was actually the chicken’s bum. The arse of the chicken. Bessi was dismayed. It had never occurred to her before, but of course, it had always been far too big to be a nose. She would blame the onset of her eczema on the bums. She’d calculate that in her lifetime (that is, between the ages of six and fourteen, because thereafter another parson’s nose would never pass her lips), she would have eaten approximately one hundred and sixty-eight chicken buttocks and fourteen turkey buttocks. These were drastic proportions.

  As Diana negotiated the red carpet, Bessi munched innocently on a buttock. There was no bacon anymore for her and Georgia. Not now. The death of Ham had been the end of bacon, the delicate curls of it cooked with the chicken, the end of sausage rolls, the end of Spam, the end of pork itself. (Though Bessi had secretly eaten a pork sausage at Christmas, but that was all, just once. She loved pork sausages. She was ashamed of herself. She’d savored every delicious moment of it.)

  Ham had been buried by the apple trees in a ceremony solemnly led by Georgia—she’d been the one to find him, slumped to one side in petals and droppings on a Sunday morning. The funeral was also attended by Bessi, Kemy and Bel (who was late). They’d sung “Kumbaya” and Hot Chocolate’s “No Doubt About It,” the only song Ham had ever responded to, up on to his hind legs, staring into the music. They dressed in the black they had, which wasn’t much—knee-high socks, school shoes, leggings and tight tops of Bel’s which were baggy on them—and prayed for Ham’s safe journey to the road: “We know, Lord, why Ham had to go,” Georgia had said with her palms and her eyes squeezed together, feeling hot. “Please let him be happy now, and tell him we love him. Thank you. Amen.”

  For today, a tossing sweltering Wednesday with heat showing on the roads, everyone was allowed to eat in the living room so they could see The Wedding better. Eating in the living room meant that when they’d finished they didn’t have to say, “Please may I leave the table thank you for a good dinner,” because there wasn’t a table. Kemy was sitting between the twins, the three of them in a line on the sofa being careful with their plates and by now assuming more and more the condition of triplets—although there was only so far Kemy could go, there were twin things she could never understand, and this made her snug up to them closer still, wanting to know, wanting to see. She tried to decode their looks over dinner and was still hoping to be included in one of their deciding sessions at 26a.

  Diana had reached th
e top of the stairs. Her bodice gripped her waist and her arms were ivory balloons. She looked like a princess snow woman who was getting lost in her ruffles.

  “Her dress is silly,” Kemy said, swallowing cabbage (there was no point in arguing) and looking at the twins. “Isn’t it.”

  “No,” said Bessi, “but a bit because she can’t walk very fast.”

  “You don’t have to walk fast when you’re getting married,” clarified Bel, who was secretly wearing eyeliner and, less secretly, a miniskirt that showed leg when she sat down. “You’re supposed to walk slowly. Like Mum.” Ida walked slower than anyone else in England and Bel was the only person in England who could bear to keep pace with her.

  “Not that slowly,” Bessi said. “When I get married, I’m going to walk faster than that anyway.”

  “So am I,” said Georgia. “Look, she’s going to take all day.”

  “Bloody hell!” Aubrey’s carrot wouldn’t stay on his fork. The bank had given him the day off work and he was sitting over there in his chocolate armchair with the corner of a paper napkin tucked into his collar. He managed to get the carrot into his mouth and leaned back, looking relaxed again. There were little silver men on the mantelpiece next to him which he had been collecting for years. They were a comfort and a source of fascination for Aubrey, braced as they were in various states of movement, a horse rider bent low into the wind, a helicopter and pilot on an axis. One of them, recently pushed, was doing full swings on a crossbar.

  On the other side of the room, in her rocking chair by the curve of windows, was Ida, her glasses and earrings shining in Waifer Avenue sunlight, across her shoulders a red crocheted shawl.

  Like Georgia, Ida gave the impression—the quietness, the sideways look—of someone who was always leaving and had never fully arrived, only hers was a different place altogether. It was on the map in the hallway, with Italy, in yellow, and British Airways could get her there. Nigeria and Ida, parted now for sixteen years, with one two-week visit with baby Bel and a new British passport in 1969, had never let each other go. There was red dust still in her eyes. It got in her way when she ventured farther than Neasden Lane without Aubrey, and when she asked directions from passersby they never understood what she was saying. So she didn’t go out much. Sometimes to the cash ’n’ carry for birthday presents, very slowly, wearing her nearly black wig with the fringe, but mostly she stayed in, wrapped up, shaded, talking to Nne-Nne, who often made her laugh.