Assembly(14)

Pretty lady? he calls after me. Joking, pretty lady come back!

I keep going until I no longer hear his laughter.

It’s cooler by the fountain. A few fat, silvery-orange fish loop around the pond beneath. I watch them dart between rocks, disappearing and reappearing, glinting in the rainbow refracted light. Convince the lowest white man… LBJ had accurately diagnosed the importance of a coloured other to placate his people. I’ve watched with dispassionate curiosity as this continent hacks away at itself: confused, lost, sick with nostalgia for those imperialist glory days – when the them had been so clearly defined! It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach – won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just viscous, random chance. And then, compounding.1

I let myself out, lifting and replacing the rusted lever to lock the fence behind me. Even from the periphery, just here, the house seems already quite far. I am not much of a rambler, but right now I want to walk. Further than even their ample garden will allow. I want distance. I think. Up through the hills.

I walk to it.



It spreads, the doctor said when I asked her how it’s killing me. She explained the stages. Said if I leave it too long, let it spread too far, the damage will be unsurvivable. Metastasis: it spreads through the blood to other organs, growing uncontrollably, overwhelming the body.

There is a basic physicality to the family’s wealth. The house, these grounds, the staff, art – all things they can touch, inhabit, live on. And the family genealogy; all the documents, photographs. Books! A curated history. I press my palm against the rough bark of a tree trunk and look up at its branches. Cool and leafy, the air here tastes like possibility. Imagine growing up amongst this. The son, of course, insists the best things in life are free. All this was, is, free to him. The schoolchildren here don’t need artificial inspiration from people like me. They take chances, pursue dreams, risk climbing out to the highest, furthest limb. They reach out – knowing the ground beneath is soil, soft grass and dandelions.

I can even understand Lou, considering all this. The underdog he sees in himself, believing in his own fairytale of overcoming; from Bedford to midway up the corporate ladder with a two-bed two-bath in a W9 postcode. Lou will make it, I expect. He’ll have all this. He’ll upsize, then upsize again, soon enough. Get the kids on waiting lists for the right schools. Schmooze up to the right people, get that next promotion, the ski invite, start buying better suits. He’ll evolve. Until he slips in, indistinguishable. His children will grow up knowing only this. Believing it’s free.

The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate… Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion – disappear! Melt into London’s multicultural soup. Not like Lou. Not here. Not into this.

I have lived life by the principle that when I face a problem, I must work to find an action I can take to overcome it; or accommodate it; or forge a new path around it; excavate the ground beneath it, even. This is how I’ve been prepared. This is how we prepare ourselves, teach our children to approach this place of obstacle after obstacle. Work twice as hard. Be twice as good. And always, assimilate.

Because they watch (us). They’re taught how to, from school. They are taught to view our bodies (selves) as objects. They learn an MEDC/LEDC divide as geography – unquestionable as mountains, oceans and other natural phenomena. Without whys or wherefores, or the ruthless arrows of European imperialism tearing across the world map. At its most fundamental: the nameless, faceless, unidentified (black) bodies, displayed, packed, and chained, side-by-side head-to-toe, into an inky-illustrated ship. Conditions unfit for animals. In perpetuity, they’re shown these pictures, over and over in classrooms again. Until it becomes axiom; that continuous line from object,

to us.

And then, they look:

Fig 1.

He’s not shy about it. He stands there, legs apart, in rubber-soled shoes and a cheap suit. Watching. Just two metres away. His eyes, expectant, hold on to your body, his fingertips tap at a two-way radio. The deafening static of his suspicion builds as he trails you through the aisles. He stays a few strides behind you, wherever you go. Your movements are calm and deliberate, but you feel your pulse pound in your neck. You should look right at him. Confront him. Demand a reason, at least. But you can’t.

You know you can’t.

A buzzing in your bag startles you. You hesitate, nearly ignore it. But then pull yourself together. Say, come on, and fish the phone out from your bag. Feel the crackle of his attention down your neck and along your arm, through your palm and into your fingers as they fold around smooth plastic and your thumb slides up.

Hello? says a disembodied voice.

He’s watching, watching watching.

Fig 2.

Outside the corner shop, over the road from your secondary school, there’s often a queue of girls waiting. A shop assistant – turned bouncer for the after-school rush – stood at the door. Two at a time, get in line, one-in-oneout, he intoned, as if reciting from a holy text. But then he’d wave in two or three girls who hadn’t bothered with the queue. Schoolgirls with cherry’d lips, clumpy black eyelashes, and blonde hair that fell in limp curls about their shoulders, he waved them in. Then he glared at the queue, told it to keep the noise down.