NW

The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

— Come by tomorrow. Pay you back. Swear to God, yeah? Thanks, seriously. You saved me today.

Leah believes in objectivity in the bedroom:

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her.

Look up. A jolting form of time travel, moving in two directions: imposing the child on this man, this man on the child. One familiar, one unknown. The afro of the man is uneven and has a tiny gray feather in it. The clothes are ragged. One big toe thrusts through the crumby rubber of an ancient red stripe Nike Air. The face is far older that it should be, even given the nasty way time has with human materials. He has an odd patch of white skin on his neck. Yet the line of beauty has not been entirely broken.

She has taken some literature from work, from the literature cupboard. Professional organizations offering professional help. This is “as much as you can do.” Now it is time for the addict “to make their own decisions.” Because “nobody can force anyone else to get the help they need.”

— Why do you treat me like an idiot all the time?

The boy is a boy and Michel is a man but they look the same age.

— He was murdered! Why does it matter where he grew up?

Sounds reasonable but she can’t take it reasonably. She is enraged by the possibility that he does not believe her. This is the girl! Don’t you believe me? That’s an insane coincidence! Her photos are in my envelope!

Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K: “You can’t sleep here, son. You either need to move it along or we’ll have to take you in to the station to sleep it off.” You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap.

“She’s knows what she’s about. She’s conscious.”

“And the stones,” said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.

“You’re dreamin’,” he said.

“You rose up with these red pigtails in your hand. You dragged her up. You were the only one saw she was in trouble.”

Keisha Blake thought to the left and thought to the right but there was no exit, and this was very likely the first time she became aware of the problem of suicide.

It was not that Ms. Blake hadn’t noticed the white people walking around with the climbing equipment, or the white people huddled in stairwells discussing the best method to chain themselves to an oak tree. She had experienced her usual anthropological curiosity with regard to these matters. But she had thought it was more of an aesthetic than a protest.

Perhaps sex isn’t of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. The gestures themselves are limited—there are only so many places for so many things to go—and Rodney was in no way deficient technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank’s silly, uncontrolled, unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a bedroom.

“Then I realized the following: when some floppy-haired chap from Surrey stands before these judges, all his passionate arguments read as “pure advocacy.” He and the Judge recognize each other. They are understood by each other. Very likely went to the same school. But Whaley’s passion, or mine, or yours, reads as ‘aggression.’ To the judge. This is his house and you are an interloper within it. And let me tell you, with a woman it’s worse: ‘Aggressive hysteria.’ The first lesson is: turn yourself down. One notch. Two.”

Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she’d stopped being able to speak, or even to understand.

“I wish we could have talked more often.”

“Everyone loves a bredrin when he’s ten. After that he’s a problem. Can’t stay ten always.”

Here nothing less than a break—a sudden and total rupture—would do. She could see the act perfectly clearly, it appeared before her like an object in her hand—and then the wind shook the trees once more and her feet touched the pavement. The act remained just that: an act, a prospect, always possible. Someone would surely soon come to this bridge and claim it, both the possibility and the act itself, as they had been doing with grim regularity ever since the bridge was built. But right at this moment there was no one left to do it.

In her daughter’s eyes Natalie saw her own celebrated will reflected back at her, at twice the intensity.

On a tatty sofa a Rastafarian gentleman sat holding a picture of his adult son.

“You, me, all of us. Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.