فصل 15

15

To: MrandMrsBernardClark@yahoo.com

From: BusyBee@gmail.com

Hi, Mum,

Yes, Halloween is kind of a big deal here. I walked around the city and it was very sweet. There were lots of little ghosts and witches carrying baskets of sweets, with their parents following at a distance with torches. Some of them had even dressed up too. And people here seem to really get into it, not like our street where half the neighbours turn their lights out or hide in the back room to stop kids knocking. All the windows are full of plastic pumpkins or fake ghosts and everyone seems to love dressing up. Nobody even egged anyone else that I could see.

But no trick-or-treaters in our building. We’re not really in the kind of neighbourhood where people knock on each other’s doors. Maybe they’d call out to each other’s drivers. Also they’d have to get past the night man and he can be kind of scary in himself.

It’s Thanksgiving next. They’d barely cleared away the ghost silhouettes before the adverts for turkey started. I’m not entirely sure even what Thanksgiving’s about – mostly eating, I think. Most holidays here seem to be.

I’m fine. I’m sorry I haven’t called much. Give my love to Dad and Granddad.

I miss you. Lou x

Mr Gopnik, newly sentimental about family gatherings in the way that recently divorced men often are, had decreed that he wanted a Thanksgiving dinner at the apartment with his closest family present, capitalizing on the fact that the former Mrs Gopnik was headed to Vermont with her sister. The prospect of this happy event – along with his schedule of eighteen-hour working days – was enough to send Agnes into a persistent funk.

Sam sent me a text message on his return – twenty-four hours after his return, actually – to say he was tired and this was harder than he’d thought. I answered with a simple yes because in truth I was tired too.

I ran with Agnes and George early in the morning. When I didn’t run I woke in the little room with the sounds of the city in my ears and a picture of Sam, standing in my bathroom doorway, in my head. I would lie there, shifting and turning, until I was tangled in the sheets, my mood blackened. The whole day would be tarnished before it had even started. When I had to get up and out in my running shoes, I woke up already on the move, forced to contemplate other people’s lives, the pull in my thighs, the cold air in my chest, the sound of my breathing in my ears. I felt taut, strong, braced to bat away whatever crap the day was likely to greet me with.

And that week there was significant crap. Garry’s daughter dropped out of college, putting him in a foul mood, so that every time Agnes left the car he would rail about ungrateful children who didn’t understand sacrifice or the value of a working man’s dollar. Ilaria was reduced to constant mute fury by Agnes’s more bizarre habits, such as ordering food she subsequently decided she didn’t want to eat, or locking her dressing room when she wasn’t in it, so that Ilaria couldn’t put her clothes away. ‘She wants me to put her underwear in the hallway? She wants her sexytime outfits on full display to the grocery man? What is she hiding in there anyway?’

Michael flitted through the apartment like a ghost, wearing the exhausted, harried expression of a man doing two jobs – and even Nathan lost some of his equanimity and snapped at the Japanese cat lady when she suggested that the unexpected deposit in Nathan’s shoe was the result of his ‘bad energy’. ‘I’ll give her bad ruddy energy,’ he grumbled, as he dropped his running shoes into a bin. Mrs De Witt knocked on our door twice in a week to complain about the piano, and in retaliation Agnes put on a recording of a piece called ‘The Devil’s Staircase’, and turned it up loud just before we went out. ‘Ligeti,’ she sniffed, checking her make-up in her compact as we headed down in the lift, the hammering, atonal notes climbing and receding above us. I quietly texted Ilaria in private and asked her to turn it off once we had gone.

The temperature dropped, the sidewalks became even more congested, and the Christmas displays began to creep into the shopfronts, like a gaudy, glittering rash. I booked my flights home with little anticipation, no longer knowing what kind of welcome I’d be returning to. I called my sister, hoping she wouldn’t ask too many questions. I needn’t have worried. She was as talkative as I had ever known her, chatting about Thom’s school projects, his new friends from the estate, his football prowess. I asked her about her boyfriend and she grew uncharacteristically quiet.

‘Are you going to tell us anything about him? You know it’s driving Mum nuts.’

‘Are you still coming home at Christmas?’

‘Yup.’

‘Then I might introduce you. If you can manage not to be a complete eejit for a couple of hours.’

‘Has he met Thom?’

‘This weekend,’ she said, her voice suddenly a little less confident. ‘I’ve kept them separate till now. What if it doesn’t work? I mean, Eddie loves kids but what if they don’t –’

‘Eddie!’

She sighed. ‘Yes. Eddie.’

‘Eddie. Eddie and Treena. Eddie and Treena sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.’

‘You are such a child.’

It was the first time I had laughed all week. ‘They’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘And once you’ve done that you can take him to meet Mum and Dad. Then you’ll be the one Mum keeps asking about wedding bells and I can take a Maternal Guilt Trip Vacation.’

‘It’s “holiday”. You’re not American. And like that’s ever going to happen. You know she’s worried you’ll be too grand to talk to them at Christmas? She thinks you won’t want to get in Daddy’s van from the airport because you’ve got used to riding in limousines.’

‘It’s true. I have.’

‘Seriously, what’s going on? You’ve said nothing about what’s happening with you.’

‘Loving New York,’ I said, smooth as a mantra. ‘Working hard.’

‘Oh, crap. I’ve got to go. Thom’s woken up.’

‘Let me know how it goes.’

‘I will. Unless it goes badly, in which case I’ll be emigrating without saying a word to anyone ever for the rest of my life.’

‘That’s our family. Always a proportionate response.’

Saturday served itself up cold, with a side order of gales. I hadn’t known quite how brutal the winds could be in New York. It was as if the tall buildings funnelled any breeze, polishing it hard and fast into something icy and fierce and solid. I frequently felt as if I were walking in some kind of sadistic wind tunnel. I kept my head down, my body at an angle of forty-five degrees and, occasionally reaching out to clutch at fire hydrants or lamp posts, I caught the subway to the Vintage Clothes Emporium, stayed for a coffee to thaw out and bought a zebra-print coat at the marked-down bargain price of twelve dollars. In truth, I lingered. I didn’t want to go back to my silent little room, with Ilaria’s news programme burbling down the corridor, its ghostly echoes of Sam and the temptation to check my email every fifteen minutes. I got home when it was already dark and I was cold and weary enough not to be restless or submerged in that persistent New York feeling – that staying in meant I was missing out on something.

I sat and watched TV in my room and thought about writing Sam an email but I was still angry enough not to feel conciliatory and wasn’t sure what I had to say was about to make anything better. I’d borrowed a novel by John Updike from Mr Gopnik’s shelves but it was all about the complexities of modern relationships, and everyone in it seemed unhappy or was lusting madly after someone else, so in the end I turned off the light and slept.

The next morning when I came down Meena was in the lobby. She was minus children this time, but accompanied by Ashok, who was not in his uniform. I startled a little at the sight of him in civvies, rootling under his desk. It occurred to me suddenly how much easier it was for the rich to refuse to know anything about us when we weren’t dressed as individuals.

‘Hey, Miss Louisa,’ he said. ‘Forgot my hat. Had to pop in before we head to the library.’

‘The one they want to close?’

‘Yup,’ Ashok said. ‘You want to come with us?’

‘Come help us save our library, Louisa!’ Meena clapped me on the back with a mitten-clad hand. ‘We need all the help we can get!’

I had been planning to go to the coffee shop, but I had nothing else to do and Sunday stretched ahead of me like a wasteland, so I agreed. They handed me a placard, saying ‘A LIBRARY IS MORE THAN BOOKS’, and checked that I had a hat and gloves. ‘You’re good for an hour or two, but you get really chilled by the third,’ Meena said, as we walked out. She was what my father would have called ballsy – a voluptuous, big-haired sexy New Yorker, who had a smart retort for everything her husband said, and loved to rib him about his hair, his handling of their children, his sexual prowess. She had a huge, throaty laugh and took no crap from anyone. He plainly adored her. They called each other ‘baby’ so often that I occasionally wondered if they had forgotten each other’s names.

We caught the subway north to Washington Heights and talked about how he had taken the job as a temporary measure when Meena first got pregnant, and how when the children were school age he was going to start looking around for something else, something with office hours, so that he could help out more. (‘But the health benefits are good. Makes it hard to leave.’) They had met at college – I was ashamed to admit I had assumed they were an arranged marriage.

When I’d told her, Meena had exploded into laughter. Girl? You think I wouldn’t have made my parents pick me better than him?

Ashok: You didn’t say that last night, baby.

Meena: That’s because I was focused on the TV.

When we finally laughed our way up the subway steps at 163rd Street I was suddenly in a very different New York.

The buildings in this part of Washington Heights looked exhausted: boarded-up shop fronts with sagging fire escapes, liquor shops, fried-chicken shops, and beauty salons with curled and faded pictures of outdated hairstyles in the windows. A softly cursing man walked past us, pushing a shopping trolley full of plastic bags. Groups of kids slouched on corners, catcalling to each other, and the kerb was punctuated by refuse bags that lay stacked in unruly heaps, or vomited their contents onto the road. There was none of the gloss of Lower Manhattan, none of the purposeful aspiration that was shot through the very air of Midtown. The atmosphere here was scented with fried food and disillusionment.

Meena and Ashok appeared not to notice. They strode along, their heads bent together, checking phones to make sure Meena’s mother wasn’t having problems with the kids. Meena turned to see if I was with them and smiled. I glanced behind me, tucked my wallet deeper inside my jacket, and hurried after them.

We heard the protest before we saw it, a vibration in the air that gradually became distinct, a distant chant. We rounded a corner and there, in front of a sooty red-brick building, stood around a hundred and fifty people, waving placards and chanting, their voices mostly aimed towards a small camera crew. As we approached, Meena thrust her sign into the air. ‘Education for all!’ she yelled. ‘Don’t take away our kids’ safe spaces!’ We pierced the crowd and were swiftly swallowed by it. I had thought New York was diverse, but now I realized all I had seen was the colour of people’s skin, the styles of their clothes. Here was a very different range of people. There were old women in knitted caps, hipsters with babies strapped to their backs, young black men with their hair neatly braided, and elderly Indian women in saris. People were animated, joined in a common purpose, and utterly, communally intent on getting their point across. I joined in with the chanting, seeing Meena’s beaming smile, the way she hugged fellow protesters as she moved through the crowd.

‘They said it’ll be on the evening news.’ An elderly woman turned to me, nodding with satisfaction. ‘That’s the only thing the city council takes any notice of. They all wanna be on the news.’

I smiled.

‘Every year it’s the same, right? Every year we have to fight a little harder to keep the community together. Every year we have to hold tighter to what’s ours.’

‘I – I’m sorry. I don’t really know. I’m just here with friends.’

‘But you came to help us. That’s what matters.’ She placed a hand on my arm. ‘You know my grandson does a mentoring programme here? They pay him to teach other young folk the computers. They actually pay him. He teaches adults too. He helps them apply for jobs.’ She clapped her gloved hands together, trying to keep warm. ‘If the council close it, all those people will have nowhere to go. And you can bet the city councillors will be the first people complaining about the young folk hanging around on street corners. You know it.’ She smiled at me as if I did.

Ahead, Meena was holding up her sign again. Ashok, beside her, stooped to greet a friend’s small boy, picking him up and lifting him above the crowd so that he could see better. He looked completely different in this crowd without his doorman outfit. For all we talked, I had only really seen him through the prism of his uniform. I hadn’t wondered about his life beyond the lobby desk, how he supported his family or how long he travelled to work or what he was paid. I surveyed the crowd, which had grown a little quieter once the camera crew departed, and felt oddly ashamed at how little I had really explored New York. This was as much the city as the glossy towers of Midtown.

We kept up our chant for another hour. Cars and trucks beeped in support as they passed and we would cheer in return. Two librarians came out and offered trays of hot drinks to as many as they could. I didn’t take one. By then I had noticed the ripped seams on the old lady’s coat, the threadbare, well-worn quality of the clothes around me. An Indian woman and her son walked across the road with large foil trays of hot pakoras and we dived on them, thanking her profusely. ‘You are doing important work,’ she said. ‘We thank you.’ My pakora was full of peas and potato, spicy enough to make me gasp and absolutely delicious. ‘They bring those out to us every week, God bless them,’ said the old lady, brushing pastry crumbs from her scarf.

A squad car crawled by two, three times, the officer’s face blank as he scanned the crowd. ‘Help us save our library, sir!’ Meena yelled at him. He turned his face away but his colleague smiled.

At one point Meena and I went inside to use the loos and I got a chance to see what I was apparently fighting for. The building was old, with high ceilings, visible pipework and a hushed air; the walls were covered with posters offering adult education, meditation sessions, help with CVs and payment of six dollars per hour for mentoring classes. But it was full of people, the children’s area thick with young families, the computer section humming with adults clicking carefully on keyboards, not yet confident in what they were doing. A handful of teenagers sat chatting quietly in a corner, some reading books, several wearing earphones. I was surprised to see two security guards standing by the librarians’ desk.

‘Yeah. We get a few fights. It’s free to anyone, you know?’ whispered Meena. ‘Drugs usually. You’re always gonna get some trouble.’ We passed an old woman as we headed back down the stairs. Her hat was filthy, her blue nylon coat creased and street-worn, with rips in the shoulders, like epaulettes. I found myself staring after her as she levered her way up, step by step, her battered slippers barely staying on her feet, clutching a bag from which one solitary paperback poked out.

We stayed outside for another hour – long enough for a reporter and another news crew to stop by, asking questions, promising they would do their best to get the story to run. And then, at one, the crowd started to disperse. Meena, Ashok and I headed back to the subway, the two of them chatting animatedly about whom they had spoken to and the protests planned for the following week.

‘What will you do if it does close?’ I asked them, when we were on the train.

‘Honestly?’ said Meena, pushing her bandanna back on her hair. ‘No idea. But they’ll probably close it in the end. There’s another, better-equipped, building two miles away and they’ll say we can take our children there. Because obviously everyone round here has a car. And it’s good for the old people to walk two miles in the ninety-degree heat.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘But we keep fighting till then, right?’

‘You gotta have your places for community.’ Ashok raised a hand emphatically, slicing the air. ‘You gotta have places where people can meet and talk and exchange ideas and it not just be about money, you know? Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.’

There was a brief silence.

‘I love you, baby,’ said Meena, and kissed him full on the mouth.

‘I love you too, baby.’

They gazed at each other and I brushed imaginary crumbs from my coat and tried not to think about Sam.

Ashok and Meena headed over to her mother’s apartment to pick up their children, hugging me and making me promise to come next week. I took myself to the diner where I had a coffee and a slice of pie. I couldn’t stop thinking about the protest, the people in the library, the grimy, potholed streets that surrounded it. I kept picturing the rips in that woman’s coat, the elderly woman beside me and her pride in her grandson’s mentoring wages. I thought about Ashok’s impassioned plea for community. I recalled how my life had been changed by our library back home, the way Will had insisted that ‘knowledge is power’. How each book I now read – almost every decision I made – could be traced back to that time.

I thought about the way that every single protester in the crowd had known somebody else or was linked to somebody else or bought them food or drink or chatted to them, how I had felt the energy rush and pleasure that came from a shared goal.

I thought about my new home where, in a silent building of perhaps thirty people nobody spoke to anyone, except to complain about some small infringement of their own peace, where nobody apparently either liked anyone or could be bothered to get to know them enough to find out.

I sat until my pie grew cold in front of me.

When I got back I did two things: I wrote a short note to Mrs De Witt thanking her for the beautiful scarf, telling her the gift had made my week, and that if she ever wanted further help with the dog I would be delighted to learn more about canine care. I put it into an envelope and slid it under her door.

I knocked on Ilaria’s door, trying not to be intimidated when she opened it and stared at me with open suspicion. ‘I passed the coffee shop where they sell the cinnamon cookies you like so I bought you some. Here.’ I held out the bag to her.

She eyed it warily. ‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing!’ I said. ‘Just … thanks for the whole thing with the kids the other day. And, you know, we work together and stuff so …’ I shrugged. ‘It’s just some cookies.’

I held them a few inches closer to her so that she was obliged to take them from me. She looked at the bag, then at me, and I had the feeling she was about to thrust it back at me, so before she could I waved and hurried back to my room.

That evening I went online and looked up everything I could find out about the library: the news stories about its budget cuts, threatened closures, small success stories – Local teen credits library for college scholarship – printing out key pieces and saving all the useful information into a file.

And at a quarter to nine, an email popped into my inbox. It was titled SORRY.

Lou,

I’ve been on lates all week and I wanted to write when I had more than five minutes and knew I wasn’t going to mess things up more. I’m not great with words. And I’m guessing only one word is really important here. I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t cheat. I was an idiot even for thinking it.

The thing is it’s hard being so far apart and not knowing what’s going on in your life. When we meet it’s like the volume’s turned up too high on everything. We can’t just relax with each other.

I know your time in New York is important to you and I don’t want you to stay still.

I’m sorry, again.

Your Sam

xxx

It was the closest thing he’d sent me to a letter. I stared at the words for a few moments, trying to unpick what I felt. Finally I opened up an email and typed:

I know. I love you. When we see each other at Christmas hopefully we’ll have time just to relax around each other. Lou xxx

I sent it, then answered an email from Mum and wrote one to Treena. I typed them on autopilot, thinking about Sam the whole time. Yes, Mum, I will check out the new pictures of the garden on Facebook. Yes, I know Bernice’s daughter pulls that duck face in all her pictures. It’s meant to be attractive.

I logged onto my bank, and then onto Facebook and found myself smiling, despite myself, at the endless pictures of Bernice’s daughter with her rubberized pout. I saw Mum’s pictures of our little garden, the new chairs she had bought from the garden centre. Then, almost on a whim, I found myself flicking to Katie Ingram’s page. Almost immediately I wished I hadn’t. There, in glorious technicolour, were seven recently uploaded pictures of a paramedics’ night out, possibly the one they had been headed to when I had called.

Or, worse, possibly not.

There was Katie, in a dark pink shirt that looked like silk, her smile wide, her eyes knowing, leaning across the table to make a point, or her throat bared as she threw back her head in a laugh. There was Sam, in his battered jacket and a grey T-shirt, his big hand clasping a glass of what looked like lime cordial, a few inches taller than everyone else. In every picture the group was happy, laughing at shared jokes. Sam looked utterly relaxed and completely at home. And in every picture, Katie Ingram was pressed up next to him, nestled into his armpit as they sat around the pub table, or gazing up at him, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder.