NW (10 page)

Felix looked closely. Garvey House spilled out into the concrete backyard. Kids barefoot, parents looking like kids themselves. Afros, headscarfs, cain rows, weird stiff wigs, a tall, skinny, spiritual-looking Rasta resting on a big stick. He could not be sure if he had a memory of this, or whether the photograph itself was creating the memory for him. When the council rehoused the Coopers, he was only eight years old. “Fee, look how fresh we were, though! Look at that shirt! Kids don’t fresh it up like that anymore. Jeans hanging down your batty crease. We was fresh!” Felix had to concede it: style without money, without any means whatsoever. Charity-store nylons worn sharply. Battered Clarks coming off like the finest Italian shoes. BLACK POWER sprayed in three-foot-high letters on the garden wall. Strange to see here, confirmed in black and white, what he had all his life assumed to be a self-serving exaggeration. “Let me find you a proper one of Brother Raymond. How many times I told you about Raymond! He was the reason.” Lloyd flicked sloppily through the glossy pages, missing wads of photos at a time. He passed Felix the spliff; Felix declined it silently. Nine months, two weeks, three days. “If it weren’t for Brother Raymond I’d be sleeping in Kings Cross to this
day
. He was a good man. He never—” “Wait up!” Felix thrust his hand into the book.

•  •  •

P
age 37. Lloyd flat out on a stained mattress reading
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Broad flares and little glasses, shirtless here, too. Barely aged. Not the familiar locks but a well-kept afro, about four inches all round. “See? You never believe me: always reading, I was always reading. That’s where you kids get your brains. They called me ‘Professor.’ Everybody did. That’s why Jackie hunt me down in the first place. She wanted to get in
here
.” Lloyd tapped his own temple and made a face to suggest the mysteries inside were frightening in their intensity, even to their owner. “Vampire business. She was sucking out the knowledge.” Felix nodded. He tried looking more intently at the photograph. He asked after the names of three other guys in the picture—sat round a card table, smoking and playing Black Jack. “Two of them boys went down for murder. That one with the little face, can’t remember his name, and him, Antoine Greene. Hard times! You lot don’t even know. People now . . . That fool-man Barnes. What’s he talking about? ‘The struggle!’ He’s the one with the three-bedroom flat, isn’t he? Full pension coming from the post office in a couple years. I don’t need no lessons from that fool. I
seen
the struggle.” Lloyd hit his fist against the wall for emphasis, and Felix’s thoughts followed the reverberation to next door,

“Barnesy’s safe, man. He’s a good guy,” he said, in an automatic way, to defend a particular set of memories. Playing with Phil’s daughters round by the bins, looking through Phil’s fossils, growing mustard cress on cotton wool on Phil’s balcony. Growing up, Felix had imagined that the adult world would be full of men like Phil Barnes. That they were as common in England as wildflowers.

“He’s a fool,” said Lloyd, and found his glasses between two cushions on the sofa.

Felix took control of the page-turning and quickly landed on Brother Raymond, seen clearly this time, helping to rebuild the front wall. “You see the Holloway Road, right? So where the Job Center is now—that’s where it was.” Brother Raymond turned out to be a small man, with a neat Trotskyite beard. “You said he was a priest.” “He was!” Felix traced a finger under the caption: “Self-appointed social worker.” “Listen: brother was a priest. In spirit he was a priest.” Felix yawned, not too discreetly. Lloyd grew annoyed at the captions. “Yeah, sure, OK, that was Ann. So what? Ann something or another—it was thirty years ago, man! Everyone been with Ann. She was loose! So what? Who said you could take a lot of pictures? We weren’t in the zoo!” Felix recognized the mood arc of the weed. Next door in the kitchen an old-fashioned tin kettle whistled on the stove. “Fee, go make us some tea.”

Opening the cupboards, Felix found the honey jar on its side, sticking the box of tea to the shelf. He went to work with a damp tea towel. Lloyd shouted at him through the thin wall: “Little white geezer—I remember him! Snap snap snap, bothering us, you know? One of them who wants to get in on the struggle when it ain’t even his struggle. That fool next door the same way—same mentality. We was trying to get on with our own business. Sometimes he was lucky to get out alive, you understand? Them boys weren’t fooling, they were not fooling at all. Nobody said nothing about a book, though, nothing about money. The council would have wanted to know about it, you understand? If you take an image, Felix, OK? If you take an image of a man, right? That’s copyrighted!” Lloyd appeared at the kitchen door, eyes bloodshot. “That’s his soul in a way of speaking. How you gonna just sell that under English law? There’s no way. In a public building from the council? I don’t think so. Go to the library, look at the law books. Where’s my money? He’s selling my image on the internets?
My
image? I don’t think so. Where’s my rights under the English law? Put a bit of honey in mine.”

•  •  •

F
rom the doorway, Felix watched Lloyd settle into the old gray velour couch with his book, arrange a little pile of Hobnobs on the glass side table, the tea next to it, carefully balancing the joint at a genteel angle so the table was saved while the ash crumbled to the carpet. He considered asking his father when he’d last spoken to Devon, but chose, instead, the path of self-preservation. “Lloyd, I’m gonna chip.” “You just got here!” “I know—but I gotta chip. Got shit to do.” Felix slapped the doorframe in what he hoped was a cheery, conclusive way. “For who?” said Lloyd coolly, without looking up, “For you or she?” It was that particular tone, inquiring and high—and suddenly Jamaican—coiling up to Felix like a snake rising from its basket. He tried to laugh it off—“Come on now, don’t start that, man”—but Lloyd knew to place his poison with precision: “I’m trying to train you up, right? It’s not that you don’t hear me, Felix, it’s that you don’t want to hear me. You’re the big man these days. But let me arks you some ting: why you still chasing after the females like they can save your life? Seriously. Why? Look at Jasmine. You nah learn. The man cyan’t satisfy the woman, right? Don’t matter how much he gives. The woman is a black hole. I’ve gone deep into the literature, Felix. Biological, social, historical, every kind of oracle. The woman is a black hole. Your mudder was a black hole. Jasmine was a black hole. This one you got now is the same, and she’s nice looking, too, so she’s gonna suck you in
all the way
before you realize she’s sucked you dry. The finer they are, the worse it is.” Lloyd took a large, satisfying slurp from his tea. “You give me jokes,” said Felix, weakly, and just about managed to make it out of the room.

In the hall, forcing his feet back into his Nikes, Felix heard Lloyd’s hand come down hard upon a page. “Felix: come!” He returned to find his father bending the spine of the book back, pressing at the crease between two pages until it was flat. “Right there at the edge: with the flowery dress—I remember the flowers, they was purple. Hundred and twenty percent. Serious! Why you always doubting me? That’s Jackie. Listen, when she was big with the girls she wore flat shoes, right? Always. Never wore flats unless she had to, right? Too vain.” Lloyd reached out for his smoke, content with this logic. Felix sat on the arm of the sofa and looked down at the alleged elbow and left foot of his mother. Some hopeful muscle in him tried to flex, but it was weak from past misuse. He leaned against the wall. Lloyd moved to bring the book closer to Felix’s face. It was a greenhouse in this place, it was unbearable. The walls were sweating! Lloyd slapped the page again. “That. Is. Jackie. Hundred and twenty percent.” “I’ve got to chip,” said Felix, kissed Lloyd briefly on his cheek, and fled.

•  •  •

T
he air outside was cool by comparison; he wiped his face and concentrated on breathing like a normal person. As he pulled the door to, the next flat along did the same. Phil Barnes. Sixty, now? He was trying to lift the heavy flower pot that sat outside his front door. He peered over at Felix, who smiled and pushed his cap back off his face.

“All right, Felix!”

“All right, Mr. Barnes.”

“Held him on my knee. Now he calls me Mr. Barnes.”

“All right, Barnesy.”

“More like it. Christ, this is heavy. Don’t just stand there looking like a ‘youth,’ Felix. Like a ne’er-do-well YOUTH. Give us a hand with this, will you?” Felix held the pot up. “That’s the ticket.”

Felix watched as Phil Barnes looked up and down the walkway like a secret agent, dropped a key on the floor and kicked it underneath.

“Terrible isn’t it? Me, worried about my property like an old lady. Like a PLUTOCRAT. Before you know it I’ll be saying things like ‘You can never be too careful!’ Just kill me when I get to that point, all right, Felix? Just put a bullet between my eyes.” He laughed and took off his little round Lennon glasses to clean them with his t-shirt. He looked searchingly at Felix, suddenly mole-like and vulnerable. “You off to carnival, Felix?”

“Yeah. Probably. Tomorrow. Saturday today, though, innit.”

“Course it is, course it is. My brain’s failing me. How’s your dad? Not seen him out and about much, recently.”

“Lloyd’s all right. Lloyd’s Lloyd.”

It touched Felix that Phil Barnes was kind enough to pretend, to Felix, that he, Barnes, and his neighbor of thirty years were on speaking terms. “That’s eloquence, Felix! ‘A word can paint a thousand pictures!’ Well it can, can’t it? Though thinking about it, isn’t it the other way round, come to think of it: a picture can paint a thousand words?”

Felix shrugged pleasantly.

“Ignore me, Felix! I’ve become one of the doddering old. Must bore you to tears listening to the likes of me. I remember when I was young, I couldn’t be having it, old people complaining, going on. Let the young get on with it! Have a bit faith in them! Let them do their own thing! I’m a bit anti-establishment, you know, but then I was a Mod, wasn’t I. Still am, in my own way. But these days,” said Phil, and put a hand on the balcony rail, “well, they just feel no hope, the young people, Felix, no hope, we’ve used all their resources, haven’t we, used them up, well, we have! And now I’m giving you another lecture, aren’t I? Run away! Run away! I’m like the ‘Silver Tsunami!’ You read that? It was in
The Guardian
the other week. ‘Silver Tsunami.’ That’s me, apparently. Born between 1949 and 19 something else. Selfish baby-boomer. We’ve taken all the resources, you see. I said that to Amy and she said, ‘Well, what have we got to bloody show for it?!’ That made me laugh. She’s not very politically minded, Amy, you see, but she means well. She does mean well,” said Phil, and looked troubled, for he had strayed too far from small talk right to the center of things—it happened more and more these days—and now must try to return to the things that didn’t matter. “How old are you now, Felix?”

Felix punched a fist into his other waiting palm. “Thirty-two. I’m getting
old
. Ain’t even funny no more.”

“Well, it never is, is it? That’s why they complain all the time, the old. I’m beginning to have some sympathy with them, I can tell you—aches and pains. Press that button now, will you? Broken? Ah well, let’s take the stairs—better for you. Those lifts are really a disgrace.” Felix pushed the fire door wide and held it open for Barnesy. “On the other hand they’ve got nothing else to do, have they, these kids? That’s what gets me. That’s what someone should say.”

Together they made their way down the narrow breeze-block stairwell, Barnesy in front, Felix behind. From the back it was a sort of time travel to look at him, no fatter or thinner, no change in the clothes, no sign of the twenty-year distance between then and now. His fine, fair hair was turning white in a subtle silvery way, so it seemed to be simply getting blonder, and it still fell, in a young man’s style, just to his shoulders, which were rounded and bear-like and soft as they always had been. He still wore a black waistcoat, undone, with a CND badge on the lapel, over an enormous white t-shirt, and elasticated jeans in a light blue wash. In his back pockets he kept a pair of soft slippers, for putting on the moment his rounds were finished. You’d see him in Rose’s café on the high road, slippers on, eating his lunch. Felix had thought this an eccentric touch until he, too, delivered the post, for five months only, at the turn of the century, and found it to be the most exhausting work he’d ever done.

“They always say ‘youth’ don’t they?” said Phil and stopped once more, halfway down the stairs, in a thoughtful pose. Felix leaned against the handrail and waited, though he had heard this speech many times. “Never the boys from the posh bit up by the park, they’re just boys, but our lot are ‘youths,’ our working-class lads are youths, bloody terrible isn’t it? They come round here, Felix—I was trying to tell your dad, but he wasn’t bothered, you know him, usually thinking more about the ladies than anything else—the police come round here asking after our kids (not our kids, literally, obviously our kids are long gone) but the community’s kids, looking for information, you know. Save their big houses on the park from our kids! It’s shameful, it really is. But you don’t care about all that rubbish, do you, Felix, your lot? Just wanna have fun. And why shouldn’t you? Leave them kids alone, I say. It’s my opinion—the wife thinks I’ve got too many, but there you are. This new lot in here, they just don’t want to know. Breaks my heart. Just watching all that reality TV, reading the rags, all that bloody rubbish, just shut your mouth and buy a new phone—that’s how people are round here these days. They’re not organized, they’re not political—now, I used to have some good conversations with your mum way back when. Very good conversations, very interesting. She had a lot of interesting ideas, you know. Of course, I realize she was troubled, very troubled. But she had that thing most people don’t have: curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers but she wanted to ask the questions. I value that in a person. We used to call each other ‘Comrade’—wind your dad up! She was an interesting woman, your mum, I could talk to her—it’s very hard, Felix, you see, if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and philosophies of the past—it’s very hard to find someone round here to really talk to, that’s the tragedy of the thing, really, I mean, when you think about it. Certainly I can’t find anyone round here to talk to anymore. And for a woman it’s even harder, you see. They can feel very trapped. Because of the patriarchy. I do feel everyone needs to have these little chats now and then. Yes, very interesting woman, your mother, very delicate. It’s hard for someone like that.”