Family Album (27 page)

Paul says, “Don’t come near me.”

The pigeons on the opposite roof take off. Go on.
Now
.

The policeman says, “I’m going to the Arsenal match this afternoon. Are you an Arsenal fan, Paul?”

There is no traffic going below anymore. There is another police car slewed across the end of the street.

“Hot out here,” says the policeman. “Would you like a drink, Paul? Bottle of water?”

Paul looks down. He looks into the upturned faces of the people below. His stomach seems to liquefy and he has to look up, across at the roof opposite, where a fresh pigeon has arrived. He studies this pigeon, its iridescent breast, its bobbing head.

The policeman shifts his feet, a little scraping sound.

“Don’t come near me,” says Paul. “Or . . .” He looks down again.

And now the other policeman speaks. He too is out of the window and standing on the balcony. When did he do that? “Paul,” he says, “why don’t you get inside and we can have a chat.”

Paul turns his head towards him. “Don’t come . . .”

Strong arms grab him around the waist and pull him backwards off the parapet. The two policemen converge and between them they heave him through the window and into the room. He is helpless.

“Good lad, Paul,” says the first policeman. “Well done.”

He goes, the policeman. Both of them go; they melt back into that morass of people in the head, and Paul is relieved. He does not care for that particular site; he would like to junk it but you don’t choose what gets junked and what does not, do you?

“And the first thing to do,” said Gina, “is to quit that bloody contract cleaning company. Of all the duff jobs . . . Now listen, I’ve got a plan . . .”

“Don’t tell her,” said Paul. “Don’t tell them. About . . . that. Swear?”

Gina sighed. “I’m trying to tell
you
about my plan. All right. Though personally I think they should know.”

“I’ve said all right. Now
listen
. . . I’ve found this training scheme.”

Paul does not care to revisit that site either. Training schemes were never his thing. They went on and on, you couldn’t ever see to the end of them, you were bored with whatever it was you were being trained for after a few months, or weeks. The thing was to hop off the conveyor belt before it was too late, before you were processed into being something you didn’t want to be.

He stares up at the Allersmead ceiling, and it seems to him that Allersmead itself had been a kind of training scheme. Growing up. Growing up here, thus. But six of them had undergone it, and look at us, he thought. Not exactly consistent, as products.

Allersmead settles itself around him—those familiar nocturnal creaks. He is six again, or ten, or sixteen.

 

 

 

 

G
ina is thirty-nine. You are supposed to be in a slight panic at thirty-nine, about to hit the buffers at forty, but as it happens she is pretty contented, perhaps more so than ever before. She can thumb her nose at forty; work is going well, and there is Philip.

Gina has always regarded relationships as shifty business: count on nothing, nothing is forever. Some early mistakes and betrayals taught her this. She knows that she herself has been at fault, as often as not. The six years of David have been her record, and that alliance foundered in due course, as she had always glumly anticipated.

But now there is Philip.

She finds herself thinking that perhaps this time. She finds herself hoping that perhaps this time.

Gina recognizes something of herself in Philip. He too is restless, quickly bored or irritated, hardworking, curious. These qualities can lead to the occasional spat, but more often they mean enjoyment, appreciation, the satisfaction of shared responses and reactions. And she likes the way he looks, his thin face with that expressive mouth—the set of his lips is eloquent—those intent brown eyes. She loves his roaming interest, his furious concentration. She loves him in bed.

Philip’s life is not like hers. He is not forever poised to catch a flight on order. He’s got more sense, he says. He is a producer, a deskman for long stretches of time, a planner and contriver for the most part, with occasional bursts of action. He is amiably derisive of Gina’s globe-trotting existence: out of your minds the lot of you, he says, drama addicts. But she knows that this masks respect and, frequently, concern. She is on the phone home more often than ever before, seeking the comfort of his voice from hotel rooms in some other continent. She knows that this existence does not foster abiding relationships. For the first time, she has considered giving up foreign assignments. Back to the dog shows and centenarian interviews, in some more elevated form: party conferences, outbreaks of foot and mouth disease. When she floated this with Philip, he smiled: “You’d be manic within a month, lusting for Heathrow. It’s habitual now—you’re branded. I know why you’re suggesting this, and I’m flattered. But don’t do it.” She was relieved, and grateful. All the same, she noted that her colleagues on the road were many of them without the tether of a partner. Some of the men had a wife and children tucked away in Surrey; the women were for the most part unhampered. Or unhappy?

They had talked only once of children. Briefly. Something we should get sorted, he had said. I’m up for it if you really want to. Otherwise . . . Otherwise? said Gina. Otherwise I’ll pass. Well, me too, she had said. And anyway I’m thirty-nine. So that had been that.

He had no children from his marriage. The ex-wife had dithered, busy with a compelling job, until children were no longer a sensible idea, with the marriage on its last legs. Just as well, said Philip. No collateral damage.

Gina knew that she might one day regret this decision, if decision it had been. As it is, ironically, her life is full of children. When disaster is afoot, the world over, it is children who are in the front line, who furnish the story, the camera shot, who will hang around thereafter in Gina’s head—mute, wide-eyed, with stick limbs and swollen bellies, ulcerated, malformed, with a stump for a hand or a leg. She confronts these children because it is her job, they are why she is there, the world must know about them. She sends them into a million comfortable homes, to prompt unease.

Gina leads two lives. There is life in London, at home in the flat with Philip; the tube journey to work, the Saturday supermarket shop, the lunches or suppers with friends, the jaunts to a film or a gallery. A life in which distresses are minor ones and rapidly addressed: toothache (pick up the phone to the dentist), a bout of bronchitis (antibiotic), a leaking pipe (plumber). The bandages are all at hand, in Gina’s life, and in the lives of everyone she knows. Once in a while, something awful happens to someone—the car crash, the cancer diagnosis—but these are exceptional events, so removed from the norm that you are shocked and startled, outraged even at this intrusion, this malign reminder.

In Gina’s other life everyone lives on the cusp. She parachutes into worlds in which all is awry, worlds where people are routinely starving, or are shot at as a matter of course, are diseased, HIV-positive, mangled by land mines, beaten up by the henchmen of despotic rulers. People for whom some toothache or a plumbing problem would pass unnoticed. Gina and her camera crew move amongst these people, face their situation but know that they do so from behind an invisible screen, distanced from them by the flight tickets in their baggage, by their passports to a place where things are done differently. They are voyeurs, she sometimes uncomfortably feels, and has to remind herself that this voyeurism is benign, it may lead to something, someone may help.

The children of these distorted worlds have never known anything else, for the most part. Distress is the norm, and that is all. It is not that they accept starvation and brutality, simply, they are not aware that there is an alternative.

Gina thinks of childhood at Allersmead. Sheltered, privileged. But sharing that universal attribute of childhood: the Allersmead world being the only one they knew, they could not conceive of an existence that was otherwise. Until, of course, they grew up a bit and looked around and saw that families come in other sizes and shapes, that not all homes have a cellar and a kitchen table that seats twelve, that other parents are different but still recognizable as parents.

She remembers these perceptions as a revelation. She remembers—suddenly? gradually?—finding that she could stand beyond Allersmead and look at it with a kind of detachment, as though she was someone else. She looked at her parents, and saw them with fresh eyes: a cool,

Gina sometimes wonders if it was this early exercise in scrutiny and assessment, in questioning, that directed her into her present trade. Journalists ask questions. Gina questioned her own circumstances, early on. She then began to question many circumstances, as a matter of course.

Gina tells the minister for education that the government’s handling of the miners’ strike has been a disgrace. The minister for education says a little tartly that he has not come to the college to discuss the miners’ strike, though he notes her views; he is here to meet sixth-form students and to explain the government’s education policy. Gina has plenty of questions about that; the minister leaves feeling a trifle ragged. You do not expect to be grilled by a kid at some college out in the sticks. He bares his teeth politely at the head teacher and says that it has been an edifying experience, some interesting points made by that lass who had so much to say; she’ll go far, that girl, no doubt. Just so long as it’s as far as possible from me, he thinks.

Gina enjoys the sixth-form college. It is satisfyingly different from school, you feel grown-up, there are more likeminded people than there had been at school, the work is more challenging.

But she had had to fight to get there.

“You were never my favorite child,” she says. Mum says. And Gina is thrown. She is thrown in a way that is entirely uncharacteristic. She is the one who is capable, self-sufficient, independent, who takes what comes her way and deals with it.

She stares at her mother, who is now once more in full flow. “. . . Well, if you must go, I suppose you must go, but I do find it
odd,
I mean, here you are with a lovely family home, everything done for you, lovely home-cooked meals—you do realize you’ll have to take your clothes to a launderette and goodness knows how you’ll manage for eating—I simply can’t see the point, for a different sort of teaching, you say, I mean, you’ve been doing fine at the school . . .”

Had she said that? Did those words spill out, now washed away? You were never . . .

“. . . you were always like that, getting some idea in your head and can’t leave it alone, writing to the prime minister if you please I remember, got to have a typewriter last year, months of pocket money, cash only for birthday and Christmas, talk about obsession, and now it’s bolting off to some sixth-form college forty
miles
away . . .”