33 West Page 3

  Maria’s attentions strictly followed those of her father. In the beginning, she only entertained Natasha, laughing loudly, smoothing their hair down in the toilets, joking easily with the boys, ignoring the young and the new and the untalented. But when one night in her fourth month at Copthall, Mr Lombardini set Laura a session with the girls in the group above Gaby, Maria smiled at her when they were stretching, and the next week she waved hello. Natasha still glared at her only, but Laura couldn’t help but watch in awe as the two of them did their strides and jumps and swung their muscular legs one by one onto the fence around the track. ‘Never seen a nigger before?’ Natasha threw at her one day, catching her watching.

  ‘Fuck off Natasha,’ Gaby spat back, fearless, but Laura said nothing.

  On Sundays, instead of the track, the whole group met at the entrance to the stadium, stretched on the grass and then began the gruelling Shaftesbury Four – a four-mile slog, as the name suggested, that started at the track and wound its way down the pulsating Great North Way, around the tamer residential roads with their quiet semis and their parked Hondas, through the muddy graveyard, up the hill over the train tracks, and back past the football pitches over the slow humps that returned them to the stadium. Mr Lombardini set them off at staggered intervals, Gaby starting first, the rest following in specified increments, a game of cat and mouse. Gaby didn’t seem to mind always being the mouse the rest of them were chasing, or as Laura improved, begrudge the growing gaps between them. Occasionally, she mock-grimaced when Laura caught her early, rounding the corner at the ancient Mill pub where, if nobody else was around, they took a shortcut through the car park. But afterwards, they always warmed down together, dissecting the days since they’d seen each other last, and comparing where they’d spotted the Wheelbarrow Man.

  Sometimes, they saw the Waving Man too, at the bus stop on Page Street, grinning inanely and shouting, ‘Hello, hello!’ to all who passed him. Once, when they were taking the hill together, Gaby waved back and the Waving Man was so overcome with shock and excitement at this rare slice of human reaction that he seemed to lift from his spot and for a moment looked as though he would dart after them, and they had to run faster to contain their giggles. Very occasionally, the Walking Man would cross their path. Wearing only shorts and trainers, his bare back hunched over almost to his knees, he would appear arms swinging by the busy road and they would have to run wide to avoid him. But they thought it sad, these two men, mental suffering driving them to the point of two dimensions, and didn’t dwell on them. It was only the Wheelbarrow Man, who they could not explain or understand, who disturbed their stride. In the early spring, if he was crouching amongst the headstones, his dark green coat would camouflage him with the burgeoning daffodils so that when he stood he startled them, and once made Gaby fall and gash her knee so deeply that Laura had to practically carry her to the main road and flag down a car to call an ambulance, which took Gaby to hospital for six careful stitches that kept her off training for three weeks. But by April, when the place was a flood of yellow trumpets, they saw him well in advance, standing scarecrow, or filling his wheelbarrow with those un-guessable goods.

  ‘Body parts, probably,’ said Maria one Sunday, a year after Laura had joined the group, by which time she was doing the occasional session with Maria and Natasha, who still barely spoke to her and elbowed her as they were rounding bends. Laura had offered up the Wheelbarrow Man in an effort to make conversation, carefully toning down the sharpness of her accent and remembering to drop the letters off the ends of her words, and Maria found the idea of their pariah-like character hilarious. ‘Or rope to tie up his victims. God, I saw the freakiest Yid by the Hendon roundabout today. He was one of those black-hatted fucks and had these bits of hair that looked like rope, and rope hanging from his pants. Probably uses it to tie up all his money. Hey, maybe the Wheelbarrow Man’s a Jew and he’s heaving around all his cash.’

  ‘Laura and I are Jewish,’ said Gaby, but Laura said nothing.

  It was the first time that Laura had experienced prejudice first hand, not repeated to her via history books, or news clips, or grandparents who could still remember it being sewn forcibly onto sleeves. ‘You don’t look Jewish,’ Maria had told her the following session, as if in conciliation, but Laura didn’t know how to answer such softly-couched enmity, and so merely smiled and tucked it away as they lined up to start another 300m, along with the rest of the suffocating facts of her existence too confusing for her to sort. It was not the tangible elements of her life that made her feel like running, but something elusive, that somehow was everywhere. Natasha sulked off when Laura finished before her.

  After training on Sundays, Gaby and Laura would get on the 113 bus and go for bagels in Golders Green. The mix of Hebrew and Yiddish and English that flew across Carmelli’s take-away counters somehow salted the conversation like the expertly rolled dough, and this is where truths were unpicked, differences unravelled, similarities weighed. Lighter and heavier than their gold necklaces.

  Gaby was proud to be an outsider. It was an intention as well as an unavoidable state and she said provocative things to prove it. She lived in the leafy suburb of Mill Hill with her mother who was onto her second nose job, and in Hendon with her father who was onto his second wife, and an elder brother who was at Leeds University and rarely home. Her father insisted on traditional Friday night dinners with candles and challah and kosher wine, and synagogue on Saturday mornings, but this was with his new family – two perfectly bronzed boys and a baby girl who shared Gaby’s red hair – so usually Gaby would pretend that her mum wanted her home, or that she didn’t believe in participating in such archaic irrelevance. A few years later, when Gaby quite suddenly grew into her hair and her features and became beautiful, and popular, and wore short skirts with whore boots, and had boyfriends who she cheated on, she would spend Friday nights at Chinawhites or other clubs where they no longer asked her for ID, and told both of her parents that the other one wanted her.

  Unlike Gaby, Laura was an outsider more because of a particular sensation that convinced her of it, rather than a consequence of desire or circumstance. An only child, she lived with her dentist-lawyer parents in a large house on the border of Golders Green and Hampstead Garden Suburb. As a teenager, this meant little to her other than the benefit of being in suburban-sized surrounds, yet still a walkable distance to buzzing Golders High Street, with its all-night falafel take-aways and Chinese all-you-can-eats, and the Woolworths with pick-a-mix, and the giant Blockbuster, and the cafes from which she could watch every colour and class of person, the likes of whom she never saw at her private girls’ school nor tended to spot in the Mercedes-littered suburb. But in later life, depending on who she was talking to about her childhood, Laura picked one of these two geographies methodically, to illicit reaction; it was helpful shorthand sometimes to watch the response to the twin crosses of ‘rich’ or ‘Jew’. Not that they were either particularly. Neither of her parents believed in god though they made her go to synagogue every week for a year before her batmitzvah - where she had her first kiss in the toilets with the rabbi’s son who was shorter than she was but had curtains in his hair and a dimple in his chin. Her mother kept two sets of crockery to separate milk and meat, but when they were out she was allowed to eat cheeseburgers at McDonald’s. And their house was big, but they only went on holiday once a year, never skiing like the girls Laura met later at university, and she didn’t have a trust fund, only £10 pocket money a week, which was enough at the time to buy tickets and snacks at the Odeon. They were middling. Comfortable. Not one thing nor the other but cut-up pieces of competing flavours, like the ingredients her mother grabbed from the cupboard and threw into the knish she made on Friday nights. Not British, wholly. Not Jewish, only. And not excessive about anything, except history. This however was something that seemed to emanate from every gold-leafed book and framed certificate, and faded war-time photograph that adorned their home, and followed her through
the streets where the grocer asked after her grandmother, and there was a ‘Jewish Interest’ section in the bookshop, and the shops bore Hebrew writing, and in December the council erected not only twinkling Christmas trees but also giant menorahs, and during Purim even the orthodox kids with their curls and their otherness wore fancy dress and looked like everyone else who took part in the Halloween-esque celebration that only she and those with equal measures of history were privy to. And made them different.

  As a child, she didn’t notice the abnormality of it all. But perhaps the dichotomy cut without permit into her soul, because it was suffocating sometimes, being both an insider and out, seeking both freedom and belonging, defined unconsciously but always by an inherited, self-proclaimed, connected, disparate otherness that in her bubble-wrapped borough she could sense but not see. Perhaps it was this that prompted her to start running. And to make friends with other types of teens, like Maria, and even Natasha eventually. Perhaps it was this that made both Gaby and Laura create a close-knit community of two, culminating in a moment when they were 17 – a week after exams had finished, at a party where the boys were goading them, their respective red and jet-black hair already mingling on drunken, giggling shoulders – when they threw their arms dramatically around each other’s necks, and kissed.

  ‘I love you Lor,’ whispered Gaby, but Laura said nothing.

  A week later, Laura went away for the summer. In August, when they got their exam results, they spoke on the phone and congratulated each other on their places at university, but by the time Laura returned home Gaby had already left for her gap year in Israel. Laura got ready for Oxford. She continued to train at Copthall, but Maria had shin splints and was no longer running, and Natasha was working by then, and Mr Lombardini had started delegating the leading of sessions to one of the boys, so she ran the Four with the younger girls who watched her stretching, and was usually alone through the graveyard where the grass was overgrown, and the daffodils were resting, and occasionally, she caught sight of a man with a wheelbarrow who irrationally frightened her still. At the very end of the summer, Mr Lombardini came to watch her race in the Southern’s and punched his hand in the air when she pushed all the way through the line and took Maria’s title. ‘I always knew,’ he told her in passionate, lilting vowels that took up all of his attention. ‘Keep running at Oxford.’

  At Oxford however, Laura didn’t sign up for the track team. She ignored too invitations from the Jewish Society and instead joined the debate team and the student union. She wrote for the paper and went salsa dancing, she got a boyfriend and learnt how to ski, and that Christmas she didn’t return to Golders Green or Hampstead Garden Suburb, but to a new house in Cornwall where her parents had moved and where there was no local menorah in the high street but Christmas trees only, and where everything felt cleaner and clearer and less complicated. When Gaby called and told her that she too had met a boy, and that she was not returning to take up her place at university but was staying in Israel where she was getting married and living on a kibbutz, it felt to Laura like merely an extreme change in a catalogue of changes, and barely noticed nor pondered the absence of Gaby from her life.

  She got married herself, eight years later, to a man who was not Jewish and didn’t know how to salt the bread on a Friday night nor noticed the lack of candles, but who shared her love of politics and bought a flat with her from which it was a short commute to Westminster. Together they held dinner parties with friends who were as ambitious and engaged and eclectic as they were, they took weekend breaks to Europe, they rode bikes, they joined book clubs, they studied the contours of their perfectly matched frames; and at night Laura lay in his arms and wondered how inside them, while so perfectly wrapped, she could still feel like an outsider.

  Gaby called in the March of 2008. She was back in London visiting her parents and they arranged to meet in Golders Green, though not at Carmelli’s because they wanted to sit properly now, and catch up on a decade, and had more than £10 to spend. Over the phone, except for the new, almost American twang, Gaby had sounded exactly like herself, and as Laura drove through the streets she had once pounded and loved and hated, and never visited, time flickered, like Shabbat candles.

  But the woman sitting at a table with six children looked nothing like Gaby. She wore a skirt down to the floor, a long-sleeved, high-necked shirt, and a tea-cosy hat, from underneath which it wasn’t possible to spot even a tendril of red hair. Had she not stood up and called out to her, Laura would have walked right by. ‘You look exactly the same,’ Gaby laughed, embracing her while Laura stood, trying to work out if this tactile closeness was allowed, now, and Gaby’s six children stared.

  Over lunch, Gaby broke off now and then to referee a dispute between her kids. Before each of them ate she reminded them to say their bracha, and she washed her hands and said her own. But, amidst stories about her rabbi husband, and her tiny, kibbutz community, slivers of the old Gaby slipped from beneath her careful shrouds, and it struck Laura that not so much had changed. Except everything.

  ‘It’s not like we thought,’ Gaby said meaningfully, cutting into their conversation as though reading Laura’s silent scepticism. ‘It’s the truth, you know. And I’m content now. Inside it.’ She took a slurp of her soup and grinned devilishly. ‘My dad is still furious.’

  And as if to make her point, to him, to the world, when Gaby and her brood started down the road, they faded seamlessly into the uniquely Jewish high street where their religiousness was both ordinary and other. And familiar and absurd. And unexpectedly made Laura feel like running.

  The Wheelbarrow Man was older and more fragile. His Doc Martins were as robust as always, his raincoat as dark, his beard as heavy, the grey tarp as ever present and opaque. But he seemed thinner somehow, and he cast less of a shadow across the graves. The daffodils were early and Laura spotted him at once. She stopped running and cut across the grass.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The Wheelbarrow Man didn’t take his eyes off the horizon.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Laura tapped him lightly on the arm.

  Now he turned slowly, as though it had been years since he’d moved from this outpost. Laura panted a little, not as fit as before.

  ‘Excuse me. Sorry. Can I ask? What’s in your wheelbarrow?’

  The Wheelbarrow Man smiled, his face cracking into deep, time-trodden creases. And he laughed as he said, ‘Where’s your red-haired friend?’

  ‘You noticed us?’

  ‘You two were always sprinting away.’

  Now Laura laughed, and smiled back at him, seeing suddenly and for the first time the girls that they were, hurtling by with matching necklaces they didn’t then understand and that for too long Laura had left languishing in her jewellery box. ‘What’s in the wheelbarrow?’ she asked again.

  Slowly, he lifted the grey tarp. ‘Daffodils,’ said the Wheelbarrow Man.

  And Laura smiled again, but said nothing.

  KENSINGTON & CHELSEA

  The Truth About the Dishwashers

  Tena Štivičić

  Helena ran her hand across the leather surface of the desk.

  ‘It’s an early Victorian mahogany pedestal partner desk, very well preserved,’ the shop assistant said, his low voice appropriate to the exclusivity of the item.

  ‘Mhm,’ Helena said. A neutral reply.

  Silvija stood a couple of steps behind looking bemused. The price, when turned into her currency of Croatian kuna didn’t make sense to her as no desk could cost that much. Unless it came from a museum, in which case she felt that that’s where it should remain. She found her daughter’s unperturbed face still more surprising; it was as though she was stroking a particularly finely assembled Ikea piece.

  The desk was, in fact, out of Helena’s price range at the moment. She could imagine it in Andrew’s study and thought it would work really well with the eclectic style, but it wasn’t the right time. Doing up a new house had sucked in most of what they had put
aside. Which is how things inevitably go. The right house at the right address is worth the risk. Nevertheless, her years of living in London, even before she met Andrew when her lifestyle drastically changed, had taught her that one always keeps a neutral face when discussing prices. Outrage quickly discloses far too much about one’s background.

  Helena and her mother descended a few floors to the Harrods food hall. Silvija stood mesmerised. She watched her daughter gliding round the counters laden with choice. Silvija kept falling behind. Each time she lost sight of Helena it brought on a slight sensation of panic. Why did she feel so intimidated? Yes, maybe twenty years ago, before capitalism extended its tentacles to the virgin ex-socialist territories and conquered them without a drop of blood, but now… Now when there is much choice even in Croatia and she usually feels a sense of superiority over the hysterics surrounding the ‘having’ and the ‘owning’ and the ‘needing’ of stuff…

  She was holding a bag of pea shoots that said £3.59. She estimated that came to around 30 kuna and decided it couldn’t be right. She should probably carry a calculator.

  ‘What would you like to eat?’ Helena’s voice snapped her out of her calculations. Silvija looked around. She realised that each counter in this massive room was a restaurant of its own. There was an oyster bar and a Fromagerie, there was a place called the Iberico Ham house, a sea grill and a Caviar House and something called Dim Sum. Her mind stopped. It was all alien. Who eats oysters in the middle of the day in a department store? She couldn’t think. She wanted a sandwich but was embarrassed to ask. It would almost be sabotage asking for a sandwich in a place like this.