Choice, page 5
Luke lifts his hands from the steering wheel and brings them down on it hard, twice, his teeth bared. The horn beeps twice in response to the bangs. He shouts, ‘Your politics belongs to the high-school debating society. It’s puerile, puerile.’
The car swerves across one lane of the M11. Irate drivers zoom past blaring their horns in long-held notes of irritation. The children in the back, so far cowed into silence by the display of hostility, now scream, ‘Baba! Daddy, Daddy!’
Ayush laughs hysterically. The children are now utterly confused. Spluttering, almost choking with laughter, he says, ‘Remember you told me about that professor who you once TA’d for, the one who said, You have to do math till it hurts, the one who set up a cottage industry by making it obligatory for the hundreds of students who took the course to buy the textbook that he wrote? Remember? The one to whom all the students had to certify with the barcode of the book that they’d actually bought it, not cadged an older version or borrowed from the library? I suppose grifting is great because you’re maximizing your utility, no? If I were the right age, I’d say “lmfao” now.’
Luke, taken aback by this sudden digression, struggles to say, ‘How come a matter of private failing demolishes our whole discipline?’
‘Because, as an economist, you could have thought about the poor students in your class who could not afford the three-figure price-tag? Because professors shouldn’t be making money off their students in side-schemes? Because if I were to confront you with that, you’d bluff me off with some kind of market explanation for why this is, how do you put it, optimal, ah yes, optimal for all parties, or some bullshit about matching or whatever? Because there are no rights or wrongs, only market solutions? Because wrong is only something that you can’t get away with?’
There are flecks of his spit on the windshield. The children are beginning to whimper in the back. Spencer licks their faces, then positions himself gingerly down into the well and stretches the length of his body out there. Ayush has noticed this before: whenever he and Luke argued, Spencer left the room, but if the argument was in the children’s presence, Spencer, never far from them, took up what Ayush could only call a guard position in front of Masha and Sasha, sometimes laying himself out flat as if to indicate You’ll have to climb over my body in order to get to them or to make himself the landing cushion should the children fall from the sofa on which they sat. Watching Spencer take the protective stance now in the car takes Ayush out of himself.
As if a switch has been flicked, Ayush says, ‘Oh, look, exit here, Luke, Epping Forest. Ragazzi, we’re here. Aren’t we going to have a fun picnic in the forest?’
Among the great trees, Ayush and Spencer, on his leash, walk several feet ahead of the rest. The chatter of Luke and the children is almost inaudible. Ayush looks back to see Luke kneeling at the base of a giant beech tree with something in his hands, probably some burrs, explaining something to the children, who are listening intently. In an effortful attempt to note something positive about Luke, Ayush thinks: He knows about beechnuts. Very few economists do. I must not forget that. He knows that beechnuts provide food to deer and pigs. He knows that if a novelist sets a sex scene under a beech tree, that novelist knows very little about nature since the shade under a beech tree is the most uncomfortable place to lie upon because of its carpet of burrs. It’s the worst nightmare for the princess in ‘The Princess and the Pea’. I must remember that he knows this too. He swallows hard, once, twice. Spencer keeps turning his head to see if his full pack is following. A biscuit-gold creature, darting, leaping, alive, his tail like a pennant in a Renaissance painting, moving through the still, stationary, alive green. Two different manifestations of time and motion, one visible, one not. The great trees are breathing; Ayush wants to still his heart to hear them.
Spencer sniffs at the great roots, lifts his leg under a hornbeam and marks it, then turns his head to sniff at some undergrowth. He occasionally lets his tongue hang out in a doggy smile. The world is a whole map of smells. He follows them and thinks, Ha, a squirrel has been here, and here there is the faintest trace of a fox, the Upright following him, the leader of his pack, will know it too, but he is lagging behind, looking up, looking ahead, what a strange thing, when the world lies below and under him, on the ground. The other three Uprights of his pack are farther back. Why don’t they hurry up? He cannot contain himself: he must run back to round them up.
The trees look down and ahead and in all directions. The hornbeams and ilexes and oaks in this sector of the forest know each other intimately. They look in all directions, feel and see the birds sitting or landing on them, the humans and squirrels and dogs and the dozens of other creatures below flitting by, so quickly that their passage should be imperceptible. Would humans register something that flickers across their senses for the tiniest fraction of a second? The trees’ unit of time is so great that the smaller calibrations of time among other living things, the creatures that move through the forest, should mean nothing to them. They think of the seasons, of all the work they need to do, relentlessly, to stay alive and to propagate – the stomata under their leaves opening to let out oxygen; the auxin gathering in the leaves during the autumn and turning them red and yellow; the water going up the xylem, the sucrose going down the phloem to be circulated everywhere. But, wait – do they actually think that? Do human beings think – Here’s our heart pumping blood, whooshing out through the ventricles; here it goes down the veins and arteries to carry oxygen to all the tissues and cells and organs? No, they don’t. It would make a good children’s book to make trees think about their biological processes. Surely, there must be several already? There’s moss on their bark and maps of lichen archipelagos. A stand of towering lime trees is perfuming the air. What a strange flower – you stick your nose in the blossom and it hardly smells of anything, but, amassed, they create a cloud of the most astonishing fragrance.
How much longer will they be here? he thinks.
How much longer? Spencer thinks, looking at the woodland stretching in every direction.
How much longer? think the trees.
7
Who is he? Is it even a he? Is it an implicit bias that Ayush thinks of Opie as a man? How does Ayush imagine the author? What is the mental image that forms in his mind’s eye when he reads one of his stories? Is that a valid or even empirically correct way to think? When we read a hunting scene in which the actors are two Russian men, Levin and Stepan Arkadyich, a dog, Laska, some roding woodcocks, what do we imagine – the marsh, the streams, the aspen copse, the two men, the dog, the flying birds, or the white-bearded, intense, slightly deranged-looking man who wrote it and whose face we know from a photograph or two? Who has an image of the author in their heads rather than of the imaginary characters when they’re reading fiction? Perhaps no one, but what terrible ideas the author photo and the author bio and litfests and all the attendant shitshow have been. How can you read an author’s book after you’ve heard her speak? Wouldn’t that real voice get in the way? Is it a good thing, then, that Opie refuses to show himself, thereby liberating Ayush into a bigger interpretive field where he, the reader, can run and sing and dance and turn somersaults and roll and kick a ball or sit still or lie down or or or? And that mental picture of Opie? It changes from story to story: sometimes it’s a black man, sometimes a white woman, at other times a black woman . . . an Indian woman. Academic. Caribbean (woman, no, man, no, woman, again). British Jamaican. White British. British Asian. Migratory bird. Not British at all, just a naturalized Caribbean or Asian. Not naturalized. Immigrant. Guest. Foreigner. Traveller. Temporary leave to remain. Opie is not there: there’s no author photo, nothing online, no biographical detail, nothing he will yield, so you’re free to picture him however you want: it’s a mirror held up to your own face.
Should Ayush put a blue line under ‘caliginous gloom’? Certainly ask for more details about London, its ever-morphing sights and smells and sounds, to be scattered throughout the story of the early-modernist academic: ‘What does the air smell of here?’, and ‘What does she see littered on the pavement?’ Also: ‘acceleration – the simple dynamo of fiction. Think about this?’ And then an intuition, perhaps inspired, although there wouldn’t be any way of knowing for sure: what if he were to ask Opie to create a sort of diagonal semi-connection – a dotted line rather than a complete line – between the project the academic is contemplating towards the beginning and the newer one that she feels impelled to write about as the story progresses?
8
The head teacher of the children’s school sends an email, requesting a meeting, to both Luke and Ayush. On the appointed day, Mrs Bennell tells the fathers that Marielle and Alexander have been miming being sick over other children’s lunchboxes and causing some to become disconcerted by their stories of blood and of animals screaming and dying in pain. ‘Ham comes from blood and the pig screams and screams and dies and looks at you.’ That is apparently what Alexander had said to one child at lunchtime when she was eating her sandwich.
‘Was it a ham sandwich?’ Luke asks.
Mrs Bennell carries on as if she hasn’t heard. While of course the school warmly welcomes children of widely different backgrounds and cultural practices, indeed it is their mission to be as diverse as possible, it is also their aim, as enshrined in their charter, to instil in the children a spirit of tolerance and understanding, of mutual respect, and she is sure that the fathers, she means parents, of course, parents . . . Ayush instantly wonders if an outsider can notice, now that the children are growing, their East Asian features, and if this is what made the head teacher stumble, not the gay parenting.
Luke breaks the silence after they have left. Walking down Brixton Hill to the Tube station, he comments, ‘That fool. Do they come from central casting? Is this how they’re taught to speak in teacher training school?’
Ayush is surprised – he was expecting Luke to reprimand him for putting ideas in the children’s heads. Ayush has prepared himself for an argument, which, in line with all their arguments, will move swiftly to the big questions about individual choices and agency, about efficiency and effectiveness and the superiority of market solutions, yadda yadda yadda.
Luke is saying, ‘What a waste of fucking time. Do you think she thinks this is the best use of my time? And yours?’
Ayush knows that Luke does not accord their times equal weight, but he says nothing. Equality is a lie. Nothing is, can be, equal, not by any objective definition. All the lies that we live by. Such as Brixton being a poor, edgy place, it occurs to him yet again. The gentrification must have happened when he was not looking. But all these roads off Brixton Hill, with their classical names, their Victorian terraces, are not exactly urban poverty material, have never been. A lettings agency, a bookmaker’s, a Nisa Local, then a shop that sells organic chicken, organic rhubarb, upright bundles of asparagus tied with purple silk that oddly look like the fasces on the flag of Mussolini-era Italy, chef’s hats of cronuts at £6.50 each. On the other side of the road, the locksmith is still there but flanked by an artisanal pizza place, and a hipster coffee shop, which also sells microbrewery beers and ales and has a sentimental-kitsch mural by a bestselling children’s author on the outside wall on Arodene Road. A number 159 coming in their direction seems to list towards the pavement; Ayush and Luke instinctively move inwards. The bus stop has a changing display board, which at that moment is advertising a council-sponsored exhibition on the history and contributions of LGBTQ+ people in Lambeth. Then the display shifts, with a whir-and-click, as they walk by, to a new broadband company’s offers. They cross Brixton Water Lane and walk down the path through Rush Common, the fifty-feet-wide strip of green island between Brixton Hill on the left and the council estates on the right. This long park has always felt like a surprise to Ayush, tucked incongruously between a trafficky road and ugly public housing. In March, the ground is a patchy carpet of violets cleaving tightly to the grass, like purple embroidery on a green scarf, and the unmistakable fragrance, which never fails to remind him, inexplicably, of nail varnish, drifts in and out of existence. Spencer had once rolled amongst the flowers as a puppy, trying to bury his face and straightened-out body in the sunny grass, thinking he was hidden completely from Ayush’s view, then leaping out to surprise him: Looky, looky, I’m here. His silky golden throat and chest had smelled of violets for a brief second, then the scent had disappeared. Ayush had sat on the ground, sniffing Spencer’s chest for another hit of that elusive perfume, but it was gone. And here is another incongruous thing – an urban orchard at the crossing of St Matthew’s Road and Brixton Hill, full of giant fountains of silver-grey cardoons, a triffid of a sunflower here and there, small mounds of geraniums, nepeta bushes, tall artichoke plants with their punk heads erupting in tufty violet hair, mallow, salvias, and, miraculously, about a dozen apple trees, enclosed in chunky wooden enclosures, the wood all blackened with time, arranged higgledy-piggledy along two sides of the orchard’s perimeter. One apple tree, on the far side, near the wall separating the orchard from the houses, is a Beauty of Bath, Ayush knows. The same variety that Dr Henry Selwyn gave to the narrator and his wife, Clarissa, in the first section of The Emigrants. And now M.N. Opie’s sad Richard Johnson comes to mind: did he pace this very green, distraught, halfway to being broken, calling for Blackie, with the world swerving away from him in fear and repulsion?
‘So, will you, or would you like me to, or shall we both, but at different times?’ Luke is saying. They’re at the station. Beside the entrance, an incense seller is burning some of his samples – the smell of something artificially floral-chemical hits Ayush’s nose. Bang opposite the stall, next to the traffic lights, a man is shouting into a handheld megaphone, ‘And I say unto you, ask, and it shall be given; seek, and you shall . . .’
‘Have you been listening to me at all?’ Luke asks, a little piqued.
‘What? What? Yes, yes, of course, I will, don’t worry about it, your, um, opportunity costs are greater,’ Ayush extemporizes, having no idea what Luke is talking about. It is only when he is changing to the Northern Line at Stockwell that he understands that Luke was urging Ayush to talk to the twins. He has no intention of doing that.
Months have passed in trying to get something out of M.N. Opie. Nothing. Polite replies to e-mails from the publicists, asking for the author questionnaire to be filled in, ending in polite but flat refusal. To Jessica Turner’s increasingly firm emails, a reply that ultimately bares its teeth: ‘I am afraid I’m beginning to find that these communications are putting a lot of pressure on me. I’m very happy to move my representation elsewhere if these importunate messages do not cease.’ After which Jessica can do nothing but let Ayush deal with the matter; she is relieved, he can tell. His own entanglement is more complex, edgier: he does not want heavy air hanging between editor and author before the editorial process is completed, but at the same time he is inwardly thrilled that a writer, a class of people not exactly renowned for their reluctance at being whores, is refusing to play the game, and he does not want to discourage Opie in the stance that he has taken. But this thrill is multifaceted, for Opie’s refusal gives Ayush an ally in his own eternal truculence with his professional world: he is forever, always against his own side and for his authors’, therefore for Opie’s.
The editing process itself is, surprisingly, rewarding. There are real conversations, by email, of course, since Opie won’t show himself. For someone who feels that the medium has been a kind of drowning and that the best people can manage on a regular basis, just to keep their heads above water, is to send unsigned, often unpunctuated messages saying ‘OK thx’ and ‘Cc-ing in X, who is leading on this’, Ayush finds it easy to modify his habits and treat this exchange as a form of letter-writing. He had begun the process with the usual formal note accompanying an attached Word document containing a list of editorial comments and suggestions: please see this as the beginning of a conversation rather than as prescriptive guidance, etc. It was Opie’s careful, considered, expansive, and immensely literary reply that had brought out a long-repressed side of Ayush. All that long academic training before he decided to turn his back on the humanities and enter publishing; he had had to beg Luke to stop saying, ‘If you’re so unhappy in the publishing world, you should think of reactivating the academic side.’ Of the many replies Ayush could have given to this, he had chosen the most minimal, that it was not possible to change one’s career more than once, and he had already done it. But editing Opie now, Ayush draws on his distant literary training to respond; soon it becomes an intellectual exchange between friends. A mention of an observation about a Coetzee story leads to a bigger discussion about reference points for fiction: when journalists are busy beating up novels for failing at this or that, surely they must have a reference point for what works, and how it works? What about the kind of philosophical fiction to which Coetzee turned in his late career? Could you have long stretches of dialogue that argue out opposing philosophical or moral positions as long as the dialogue is not (as it is not in Coetzee) expository, what they call an ‘information dump’ in creative writing courses? What if the characters are involved, in a way organic to the story, in such discussions or arguments? Can ideas be discussed openly as ideas, or do they always need to be disguised under drama and action and emotional development and all that rubbish, like vegetables smuggled into food for children? Opie writes. Ayush has no meaningful answer to give. Through years of habit of keeping editorial conversations on the level of entertaining anecdote instead of literary-critical discussion, maybe inserting a comment about how X and Y are just names on the page, not fully-fleshed characters we can believe in, or how the dialogue here says too much, there too little, he now finds himself succumbing to that old anecdotal gravity and telling Opie about the time he, Ayush, accompanied an author to a literature festival at which a very well-dressed novelist – she seems to be known for this – on a panel despaired about what awful hair Penelope Fitzgerald had when the late novelist’s name was brought up by a fellow-panellist. That is all that the sartorially dazzling novelist can say, effectively shutting down any literary conversation, because who would want to talk about, or even listen to anyone talking about, books if there can be chit-chat about hair?
