Two Tribes Page 6

  ‘Of course I’m okay! Don’t I look like it?’

  ‘You do, but sometimes, you know, in the cold light afterwards . . . ’

  ‘You regret it. I usually do, to be honest. But not this time, Harry. How about you?’

  ‘Me neither,’ he said and meant it. ‘No regrets at all.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Things felt a little more precarious now, it was true. Harry was aware that this was going to feel strange in the morning, but he was still glad that he’d come to her bed and hadn’t just crept off to his own (where, as he rather indelicately puts it, just in order to be able to get to sleep, ‘I would probably have had to wank myself off imagining what this would have been like’). Life was hard and full of pain, but sometimes it offered a spoonful of pure sweetness that, even if only for a little while, redeemed it completely. Surely only a fool turns that away?

  He kissed her, very gently, on that scar on the right-hand side of her upper lip (it was the result, she’d told him, of a bicycle accident when she was nine years old). ‘That was lovely, Michelle, so lovely that I can’t begin to put it into words. I honestly can’t remember when I felt as . . . I don’t know . . . as held as that. If I ever have at all.’

  She kissed him back. ‘You posh git! It was only sex.’ But he could see she was touched by what he’d said.

  ‘Very sweet,’ Cally says. She shakes off a large praying mantis that has alighted on her arm. ‘But I must admit, Zoe, that part of me wonders why we should be interested in these people? The Catastrophe was unfolding. The air was getting hotter. The ice was melting. The forest fires were more frequent. All those wonderful creatures were dying out – I mean, have you ever seen those pictures of coral reefs? – and, well, it’s nice that these two lonely people found something they had in common, but do we really care, when we know what was happening around them and what was coming down the track? I mean, these were people who knew quite well they were fucking up the world but carried on anyway. Why should we give a shit about their love lives?’

  We are strolling on the slightly rotten wooden boardwalk that allows you to walk along my street, now that the road itself is underwater. The ground floors of what were prestigious apartment buildings in the early twenty-first century are no longer used except as boat houses, and the boardwalk is fixed at the level of the first floor, where many of the apartments have become shops of various kinds.

  ‘I know that’s the important story as far as we’re concerned,’ I say, ‘but I can’t help being interested in what life was like for them.’

  We’ve come down from my third-floor flat to get some Shaoxing wine in a store run by a woman called Mrs Thompson, who makes the stuff herself with rice her husband brings back from the paddies in Kent. In the flooded street below us, men and woman pole shallow punts up and down between the dry ground at one end and the Thames at the other. Children and old people sit on the edge of the platform, dangling their legs as they fish for eels in the muddy water.

  A six-year-old girl snags one as we’re walking past her. The slimy thing writhes in agony on her line, and she slaps it down on to the wooden walkway to saw off its head with an old kitchen knife. ‘Three yuan, miss, if you want it?’ she says, noticing me looking at her, and she proffers the bloody and still squirming body. I shake my head.

  A little further on, a small boy called Joe is fishing by himself. He’s about eight years old and has lost both his parents, so he now lives in the flat below mine with an aunt who leaves him by himself all day while she’s away at work on the flood barriers. She obviously resents his presence. I’ve never heard her say anything warm or kind either about him or to him.

  ‘You all right there, Joe?’ I ask him, looking into his empty bucket.

  ‘I’ll soon catch a load of them,’ he says defiantly. ‘I’ll catch more than anyone because I’m the best.’ But his boasting façade is so thin and threadbare that it fools no one. Everyone can see the appalling well of emptiness beneath it, and all the other children avoid him so as not to be contaminated by his loneliness. Whenever he sits here to fish, there’s always empty walkway on either side of him.

  ‘Well, good luck with that, Joe,’ I tell him, because it makes me feel better if I force myself to be friendly and kind to him, even though I too fear contamination, and even though I doubt my attempts make any more difference to him than a single drop of water would make to someone dying of thirst.

  We enter the bare interior of Mrs Thompson’s store and she pours us two glasses. Some militiamen pass by outside, their hard boots clomping on the wooden boards, and one of them turns to look towards us in the shady interior of Mrs Thompson’s. Darkness isn’t a problem for them, of course. Those clever goggles can adjust themselves to any light.

  ‘Your Michelle does seem a bit desperate, I must say,’ Cally says when the shadow has passed. ‘It’s kind of risky, isn’t it? Letting out a room and then taking your guests to bed.’

  SEVEN

  Michelle’s diary entries are much shorter than Harry’s and, though she does occasionally engage in philosophical speculation, they’re usually much more focused on the daily events of her life. Often she just tells stories about things that happened in the shop, which she decorates with her own cartoons. But she’s worried about her life. She’s aware of her age, and (just like Harry) she has a sense of time slipping away through her fingers.

  ‘I actually liked Harry,’ she writes, the day after he returned to London. ‘That’s the one thing that’s different from the other blokes I’ve been with lately. He seemed a nice man. He listened to me. He treated me like another human being. And okay, I could tell from the off he liked the way I look, but there was no pressure from him, no flirting. Nothing like that at all. I did appreciate that.

  ‘My head was terrible in the morning. So was his. We had a laugh about that, and it hurt so much that we laughed about that as well. It all felt a bit weird when we were having breakfast together because he’d said all these lovely things the night before: darling, sweetheart, precious . . . And I knew even at the time it was just because he’d been lonely for a long time, and because he was grateful, and all that, and it didn’t really mean anything but still I felt those words were sort of hanging in the air between us.

  ‘But anyway, then it was time for him to go and suddenly, just like that, all his warmth and friendliness shut right down like it had never been there at all, and he was just some stranger who had no interest in me and couldn’t wait to get away from me.

  ‘Cheryl could see I was upset about something. I told her it was just a hangover, but when we closed for lunch she got the story out of me. “For fuck’s sake, Michelle,” she told me, “get yourself on a dating site and find a decent bloke who lives round here and actually wants a relationship. You’re throwing away your life.”’

  But Michelle had missed the precise moment when Harry’s warmth shut down. They’d both stood up and were preparing for what must surely have felt like a particularly complicated farewell hug, when a workman’s van drew up outside the house opposite. She went to the window to look out.

  ‘Bloody Poles,’ she said. That Estuary accent smeared out the L in ‘Poles’ and suddenly sounded to him horribly mean and crabbed. ‘They’ve taken so much work from my brother, you wouldn’t believe. We’ll be glad when this Brexit business is sorted out and they go home.’

  To her, I think, this was just a throwaway remark, like a comment on the weather, which she’d made in an effort to make the parting feel less uncomfortably intense. But Harry froze. And in that single moment, his sense of their whole encounter flipped completely and he realized that a combination of sentimentality and lust and booze had blinded him to what she actually was: a woman who hadn’t had the curiosity, let alone the ambition, to do anything with her life, or even to rise above the petty small-town prejudices of the people around her.

  ‘You’d think in a dreary little place like Breckham,’ he says later, ‘anyone with the slight
est spark of life would positively welcome the arrival of newcomers. But she didn’t even have enough generosity of spirit to feel positive about a few strangers who came to her town for a better life.’ The hug had to go ahead anyway – he could hardly get out of it now – but there was no affection left on his side of it. She was doubtless a nice enough woman within her own narrow limitations, but she wasn’t really his kind at all, and it had been shallow and embarrassingly desperate of him ever to have imagined otherwise.

  ‘It was really really lovely to meet you, Harry,’ she said, still in his arms, and not yet aware of his sudden coldness. But when she drew back from him, she saw it. He knew she did, because he could see the dismay in her face.

  ‘It was lovely to meet you too, Michelle,’ he made himself say as they released one another, though he could barely bring himself to meet her eyes.

  He walked back to the garage and arranged for his alternator to be replaced, then filled in the waiting time by walking round the streets. Breckham oppressed him: the public library from the 1970s with white paint flaking on its clapboard façade, the United Reformed Church, the tiny dusty museum, the small and shabby park with its swings and slides . . . The word ‘provincial’ came to mind: a word that means outside of the capital city, but also small-minded, unsophisticated, unambitious, second-rate. You didn’t get much more provincial than Breckham.

  At one point he became aware that the rather amateurish sign above a small shopfront across the road from him read ‘Shear Perfection’ and he quickly turned around and walked the other way.

  But that was not the end of it by any means! For page after page, day after day, Harry’s diary goes over that night and, increasingly, he feels not just shame at the shallowness of his own judgement, but guilt. He feels he’s taken advantage of her. She initiated the sex and they’d agreed together that it was just for that night and nothing further would come of it, but she’d been drunker than he was, and more shaken up, and (contrary to Michelle’s own impression) Harry feels that he’d been flirting with her all evening. He knows that he has a certain way of behaving in the presence of women to get them to like him, a way of laying on the charm. He doesn’t do this deliberately, exactly – in fact, it’s almost Pavlovian – and, on a conscious level, he isn’t completely sure what it consists of, but he knows when he’s doing it, and he knows he was doing it that evening.

  But there is one particular aspect that he really struggles with, to the extent that it becomes almost comical to watch him trying simultaneously to name it and to avoid doing so: he fears he abused his social status. This, in our day, seems quite a straightforward idea, but, though his own generation was aware of social disadvantage and talked a great deal about gender, race, disability and half a dozen other social divisions, it was almost as coy and prudish about class and social rank as the Victorians were about sex.

  ‘All my friends are things like doctors and lawyers and academics,’ he finally manages to squeeze out. ‘So that just seems ordinary to us, and we forget that for a lot of people a doctor or an architect is a seriously big person, impressively so, dauntingly so, a bit like a film star would be to me. I am sure Michelle was aware that I was much posher than she is and I’m sure it touched and flattered her that I seemed to find her interesting.’

  And then he crosses it all out, so thoroughly that I have some trouble reading it.

  Harry struggles on, lambasting himself in a way that seems quite disproportionate to that single drunken encounter. But the reason for that lack of proportion is painfully apparent on every page for, whatever he keeps telling himself, he just can’t stop thinking about Michelle. He only has to think about her smile, her voice, the scar on her upper lip, her grey eyes, the way she wriggled into a different position in bed, and he finds himself positively aching with desire. And the loss of that sweetness twists inside him like a blade.

  He battles against this. He tells himself that he couldn’t possibly build a relationship with a woman whose world was so very much narrower than his own that a handful of hardworking foreigners could feel like some kind of threat. But then he thinks about the sounds she made, or her laugh, or the way her lashes felt when he gently kissed her eyes, or her wry smile, or her hands with their rings and painted nails, and it all feels exactly right, as if there was a Michelle-shaped hole inside him which has ached all his life to—

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ he tells himself flatly. That was just biology. That was just the pairing instinct at work, driving its hapless human vehicle. He’d felt that way about Janet once. He’d felt that way about his very first girlfriend when he was fifteen. He just needs to get over this and he will feel it again about someone else, someone more suitable, someone who might actually be able to share his life with him.

  ‘Yes, but her smile . . . ’ says the other side of him at once.

  After a while it all becomes a bit ridiculous, even to Harry himself. ‘I’m like one of those cartoon characters with an angel whispering in one ear and a devil in the other,’ he says. ‘Not good versus evil, perhaps, but reason versus emotion, head versus heart.’ (A binary pairing which, as it happens, had been a major part of the collective narrative of Remainers after their defeat. They were the voices of reason, of evidence, of science. The Leavers represented primitive and atavistic emotions: fear of change, hatred of the other, blind adherence to empty symbols.)

  ‘I’m overthinking this,’ Harry tells himself, and it’s hard to disagree, though in my experience overthinking is usually a cover for underthinking, a smokescreen of elaboration to avoid one particular line of thought.

  ‘I need to put this out of my mind,’ he says, ‘because nothing more can be done with it. The one grown-up conclusion I can draw is that I would very much like to be in a loving sexual relationship again after a very long time without. I should have had a drink with that nice woman Letty I met on the marsh.’

  EIGHT

  Michelle doesn’t write about Harry after that first day, not even a single mention. She talks (as usual) about people in the shop, the amusing things they said, the various troubles in their lives. She mentions an evening watching TV with her mother and her sister Jen, and another time when her niece Jules came over to hers. And she devotes two whole pages to a difficult conversation in a pub with Cheryl. Cheryl’s boyfriend was an airman from the nearby American base. It turned out that Cheryl had suggested the drink because she wanted to tell Michelle that she was going to marry him, and they were planning to move to America when his tour of duty ended, along with her two children who Michelle had known all their lives. Michelle had been fairly stunned by this news but Cheryl, perhaps out of guilt at the thought of abandoning her best and oldest friend, had unwisely chosen this moment to have another go at her about getting on a decent dating site, sorting herself out a decent man and starting to build a life of her own. Michelle had suddenly snapped. She told Cheryl to ‘get the fuck off my fucking case’ and stormed out of the pub. They’d made it up later in a long phone conversation that continued into the early hours.

  On the Sunday, Michelle went for a walk with Pongo in the forest that surrounded Breckham. It was a commercial plantation, laid out in a grid, with large blocks of pine and only smaller patches of greener trees, but you could walk for miles there, see foxes and deer and often not meet another human soul at all, once you’d got away from the car parks. (The forest is still there, by the way, but much broken up by squatters attempting to grow things in the poor, sandy soil, which was the reason for it not being farmland in the first place.)

  Michelle had a favourite spot, some way from the road and at the edge of a small clearing of pale yellow grass, surrounded by silver birch trees. Hardly anyone but her ever seemed to come here, and she’d seen foxes, and deer, and, a few times, on hot summer days, snakes sunning themselves on patches of earth. (Cheryl had said ‘Ugh!’ when she told her about them, but Michelle had enjoyed their strange presence.) She had a favourite birch tree. Many years ago she’d even scratche
d a tiny M into its bark, which was still just visible. She sat down in front with her back against it, took out a packet of cigarette papers and a small bag of dried cannabis leaves and rolled herself what she called a ‘spliff’. It wasn’t something she did every day, but she did it regularly, buying the stuff from a wizened old friend of hers from her druggy days who she refers to as Splodgy. There was a feeling of autumn in the air, a low grey sky, a smell of mushrooms and bracken, leaves here and there beginning to turn yellow or gold.

  She lit up and inhaled. People who live routine lives in small places where nothing much happens have to appreciate the ordinary things that stay the same, and cannabis helped her with that (as I suppose it still helps many people now since, in spite of the militia, you often see those green dama bushes with their spiky leaves growing in the little plots of the poor). The drug stripped away the dull limescale of familiarity to uncover the strangeness and unknowableness of everything, even the streets of Breckham and those houses that to Harry had seemed almost bewilderingly dull. When she was done, she leant back against her tree and, gently stroking Pongo’s head and ears, she watched the movements of the dry grass stems in front of her as they made visible the movements of the invisible air.

  The forest, as usual, was very quiet, but it wasn’t silent. She could hear birds around her – their calls and songs, the whoosh and flutter of their wings – she could hear the rustlings of the leaves, she could hear a branch somewhere behind her creaking whenever the grass in front of her bent in a gust of wind. One of the effects of the drug was to make the sounds seem to be inside her and not just outside, as if her mind and the forest had become a single entity, a single web, with tremors and ripples passing through it.

  Three roe deer came into the clearing from the trees on the far side. Pongo tensed and she took hold of his collar so he wouldn’t chase after them. The deer spotted her and Pongo immediately but they didn’t run, just stood there, side by side, watching the two of them while they watched them back. As she remembered it afterwards one of the deer was brown like most deer, one was white and the other was black. But she’d never seen a deer that wasn’t brown before and when she wrote about them she wondered if she’d really seen this detail of their being three different colours, or whether she’d imagined and elaborated it in the dreamlike state that the drug induced, rather like another vivid memory she had of a hawk that had alighted on a branch above her with a little bird in its claws, and how the hawk and its prey swivelled their heads to look at her at the same time and with the exact same beady curiosity, even though one was about to eat the other. She could never make up her mind if that last part had actually happened.