Resolution Way (8 page)

Who’s this
they
? Who’s this
us
, who is this
them
you keep referring to? Am I an “us” or am I a “them”, I mean? One of her colleagues, Ralph, asked a week or so ago at an after work drink she had reluctantly agreed to. Her temper snapped at his lofty air, his puzzled face, wrinkled nose. Don’t be so fucking childish, she said, then went to stand in the toilet for a minute or two. When she returned her line manager suggested she perhaps ought to apologise as Ralph sat there, arms folded, eyebrow raised.

Ralph, she said, I am sorry. I have been under a lot of strain recently.

Well, he said, I don’t see what that has got to do with me, if you can’t handle social situations.

The Police crippled my son; we have been through a long court case in which those responsible were acquitted. We have been the focus of a concerted smear campaign by the media and we are also being evicted from our home. I have had my benefits cut and have had to return to work, meaning my daughter has had to leave school to care for my son and I don’t know when she will be able to go back.

She wants to say all this but doesn’t, just breathes out slowly and nods. She knows what Ralph will say: well what does any of that have to do with me? Why should your life impinge on mine, why should your suffering intrude into my world? She can see the anger in his face and is at a loss to know where it comes from, has seen it a thousand times before, read it in the death threats, the comments boxes, the tweets and Facebook messages, the murderous hostility you will provoke if you will not suffer silently, if you have the audacity to protest the world, to suggest that the contentment of some is predicated on others being condemned.

Well, she said with a smile as Ralph gently shook his head at her.

OK, he said with a grudging sigh, a long drawn out,
well
…

Object to anything and you will be playing the race card, have a chip on your shoulder, be obsessed, a racist yourself, a naïve, politically correct fantasist, a conspiracy theorist, a militant, a danger, an extremist, a failed woman, an irresponsible mother, someone who should put up and shut up, who should just leave if she doesn’t like it. Don’t you see? All your experience, everything you have seen, known, felt, read, discussed, understood, lived, is an illusion, the world as you have bitterly suffered it day-after-day does not and has never existed and for you to insist that it does will bring an almighty wrath down upon you.

Do not speak. Exist only as much as we will allow you and no more. Be visible only when and only in the ways we command.

Was it always like this? No, she doesn’t think so. It has got worse, surely since she was a girl. Perhaps back then she was just more shielded from it.

And yet, it felt when she was younger that things were coming together, the backdrop of her life was the assumption that somehow differences were evaporating, that we were making progress, that by the time her daughter was ready to go to University the world would be transformed. She thought those raves, the music, the attitude prefigured something, a more joyful, accepting, pluralistic form of life that was coming that would somehow just spring forth from these experiments, this collective effort at dissolving the structures of the world. Was that naïve? Was that naivety a consequence of her own relative privilege, going to University, having parents who were teachers?

As for Louise, well, no wonder Louise is so angry. Paula tries hard to be moderate and controlled but sometimes her own rage and despair are palpable, filling up that tiny flat. She imagines she can smell it, some acrid fumes that have come pouring off her, and she lights a perfumed candle, a gift from Joolzy she never imagined she’d use, to try and neutralise it.

People comment on her strength, Penny said it to her once; you have absorbed blows that a lot of people never recover from. She knows that’s true; some people are wounded, disappointed, see their hopes crushed early on and never readjust, recover. Vernon was one of those, damaged just by the act of being launched into the world, like a ship with its hull breached, taking on water from day one.

But you just keep on going, somehow, don’t you? Paula Adonor asks herself, looking at her face in the mirror in the morning as she cleans her teeth, wonders whether perhaps there isn’t something wrong with her, something pathological. To still be up and functioning – why hasn’t she been driven mad by it? People talk about how much she cares, but perhaps it’s that she hardly cares at all, and what drives her on, inures her, allows her to fight for justice is precisely a lack of compassion, an attachment to something more abstract than flesh and blood.

Is it bad luck, is she cursed, or has she invited all this into her life. Has she needed this, disaster after disaster, to thrive, to live, to give her a sense of self, a mission?

She remembers something Vernon liked to quote, she forgets who said it. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Or a curse, perhaps.

She rolls over in bed and hears, she thinks, her daughter rolling over, restless too in her room, the walls in these old flats so thin, and Lee, mumbling and crying out in his room, locked away forever inside himself.

She’s drifting off to sleep and moments return to her, swirling in, mingling and overlapping, a comforting confusion of place and time and persona, losses restored, the dead sprung to life, the past intensely and vividly present. Then sleep and muffled dreams backed by her son’s soft and continuous moaning.

She hates to ask Penny to keep Lee for an extra hour or so but she is keen to talk about Vernon and surprised to find herself so keen to do so.

This email message from Alex Hargreaves has come out of the blue, as so much does. Another sense of obligation, now, to the past, to those who have passed, remnants of what remains.

Still, it might help to take her mind of things, to remember something, if not exactly positive, then at least a period of optimism, when they were young and radical and filled with ideas about how they would change the world, hadn’t yet run up against the sheer, monolithic weight of money and power. She feels that if she was ever angry with Vernon that all that has evaporated over the years. At the time she believed they had answers to everything, back when they thought that truth made a difference or that it only took someone to point out how unfair it all was for those who benefitted to step aside abashed.

Pure innocence really, to believe that love and brotherhood would somehow sweep all the old world away. Will her daughter have any such moment of innocence now?

No, and perhaps that’s for the best. Of course, her daughter will be poorer than she was, has already grown up in a tougher area, Deptford, as opposed to her own childhood in white and leafy Wimbledon. Some of her friends from back then, from school, who she doesn’t have much to do with anymore except for the occasional obligatory likes or positive comments about kids or domestic triumphs on Facebook, occasionally console her for having ended up in SE8 and she knows she could never explain to them that she wanted to live here, chose it, for her, for her kids. They see it as just one more tragic outcome in her broadly tragic life.

And now they are getting kicked out anyway. Paula Adonor will be the last to leave, her situation a little more complicated than the rest, her resources, her grasp of how the system works a little better than most, and so she has forced them to find her something suitable before she ups and leaves her home of nearly twenty years. How she will cope once Penny isn’t around she has no idea. She can ask Sissy, Joolzy, but they have their own lives and once they are relocated, if Paula Adonor can’t find another job, then Louise will have to do the full time caring.

Swish new riverside homes. Up and coming. Breath-taking river views. A short hop across the Thames to Canary Wharf. Ironic, really, she remembers Vernon, Rob, Howard hanging on in Hulme Crescent twenty plus years back now, shifting along block by block as the place got demolished. Here she is doing much the same.

These thoughts are occupying her as she cuts out of the
DLR
and down Deptford Broadway to Greenwich High Road. She spots Alex Hargreaves immediately, his shining face and neat, Edwardian haircut, both slick and severe, and extends her hand.

Coming back from the doctor, just a check-up, everything fine, Paula Adonor is tired, dead tired, eyes raw, limbs leaden. She doubts she will make it to the gym today for her spinning class. An early night is what she needs. As she crosses the courtyard to the block she nods a greeting to the girl from Wardens who is occupying a flat on the floor above, there to keep an eye out for squatters, people trying to break in and strip flats of anything saleable, report problems. A nice girl, ex-sociology student who understands her role in helping USG force everyone out of the estate, but needs a place to live as she does her internship at Greencorp. No mum and dad to bankroll her, rent sky high. I am sorry, the girl said when Paula and Penny questioned her one day on the stairs, struggling down with Lee as she came trotting up, the lift deliberately decommissioned to make their lives more difficult. I am sorry; I just don’t know what else I can do.

I know, Paula said. I know. That’s how it is, we are all caught up, compromised, trying to balance demands, live the right way even as we figure out what that might be.

And as to compromise, well, people say that she should just accept what has happened to Lee. That her pursuit of justice is fruitless, will only bring more strain, stress, and pressure down upon her, calumny, despair. To bring a case against the Police is madness, futile, but she will pursue this futile action it seems beyond any appeal to health or sanity. The need for justice is savage, uncompromising, all consuming, as basic as hunger or thirst. She knows she is on some database somewhere, some set of blacklists, that her calls and movements will be monitored, that any preferences she might have as to where she will be relocated or transferred within work are sure to be ignored. Perhaps they should just up and leave of their own accord rather than hang around, contesting every package, refusing every offer.

If she dropped the whole thing, maybe life would be easier.

Maybe they could go to Wales. She remembers that day they drove down from Manchester to the Brecon Beacons for the big outdoor rave in ’94. What a beautiful day that was. How dazzled they were by the light and space, the clearness and openness of the sky. She was in love with Vernon of course, but with her friends too, with everyone in that field and with the times, the future. Coming up on the pill that Rob gave her she thought she might not stop, that they all might suddenly burst through their skins and atomise, a vast, misted dome of intermingled, multi-coloured drops. She cried out, hands above her head, feet pounding, and Vernon took off his sunglasses and leaned in to grab and hold her as the bass drop sucked all the air out of the world and catapulted them up, spiralling skyward through wave after wave of pleasure and release until night fell, a beautiful band of deepening purple filtering up from the earth, the stars, the air warm, the heat of bodies, the mountains, the sense that they would somehow, through sheer force of love, stop time and live there forever. The next afternoon, coming down in the back of the van, up after a few hours sleep and smoking a spliff, Rob cracking open a can of Special Brew and splitting it, watered down with lemonade, someone outside with a boombox was playing a tune that went,
never lose that feeling, never lose that feeling
.

How could they have had so much energy then, get by on so little sleep? After that it really started to fall apart. She remembers Vernon and Rob made a track sometime later where they took a sample of Queen’s
Too Much Love Will Kill You
and wove it in and out of a series of dark keyboard stabs and off centre, over-cranked percussion and she felt that was right, they had all understood, too much will kill you.

But then, so will too little.

Putting her health at risk, that’s what they say. Well, how different then is she in that respect from Vernon after all? At least she has people pulling her back, urging her to relent whereas with Vernon, Rob actively encouraged him in it, even when he began to self harm, though they didn’t exactly have a term for it back then. Rob was a bad influence, they had that competitive bravado she sees too often in young men, this pushing each other beyond all reasonable limits, the glee in each others’ destruction. She can’t forgive Rob for that, when she thinks back she sees something malicious in it that at the time, instinctively, she was uncomfortable with but which all their polemic and theorising swept away. She began to doubt her own judgments.

Why was she so stupid? Why didn’t she take a stand against it, especially when Vernon started turning up with his arms covered in burns?

Well, she was young, they all were, and she was under-confident in some ways. Rob was always antagonistic too, sexist, thought of her as a mere girl, not
hardcore
enough. That was Rob, not good with or comfortable around girls. He treated Fran appallingly. Wonder where she is now. She was fragile. Has gone down under the wheel of the world, as so many do, all the unrescued ones who but for a few kind words, a little thoughtful intervention, someone or something to live for, some trust or kindness, have withered away.

Well, come on Paula, making a cup of tea now, Earl Grey, always loved it, Lee parked in the living room, there was nothing you could have done about it.

She needs a break but even the idea of it fills her with guilt, even though no one would begrudge her one. She raises the tea and takes a sip. Small pleasures, should she deny herself even those? A cup of tea, a bath, a loving embrace, clean sheets, allowing her imagination and memory to roam.

Another day, up at 5.30 and bathing and changing Lee, getting breakfast for sleepy, sulky Lewis, checking Penny’s OK to have him for the afternoon and is stocked up with everything he needs, and then the quick, tense check through the post for all the demands and notifications and appeals and orders that she will read through standing up on the train as it crawls the few miles to London Bridge. All this before the day’s work has begun, then another journey home at rush hour, more delays on the Overground, with a box file full of legal papers she needs to trawl through clasped to her chest, no right to use the Soft Rail extension that whizzes the Wharf workers back and forth from their million pound riverside cubicles in Greenwich, Surrey Quays, Canada Water. The repeated delays and cancellations despite all the station upgrades and infrastructure investment and tax- payers’ money poured in to fund it all.