The Mullerian Eminence

The Müllerian ducts end in an epithelial [membranous tissue] elevation, [called] the Müllerian eminence… in the male [foetus] the Müllerian ducts atrophy, but traces … are represented by the testes… In the female [foetus] the Müllerian ducts… undergo further development. The portions which lie in the genital core fuse to form the uterus and vagina… The hymen represents the remains of the Müllerian eminence.
In adult women, the Müllerian eminence has no function.
— Anatomy of the Human Body, Henry Gray, 1918
Charu Deol lived in the large cold city for five months and four days before he found the hymen, wedged between a wall and a filing cabinet in the small law office where he cleaned on Thursday nights. The building was an old government-protected church, but the local people only worshipped on the weekend, so the rector rented out the empty rooms. If Charu Deol had been a half-inch to the right, he might have missed the hymen, but the dying sunshine coming through the stained-glass window in streams of red, blue and green illuminated the corner where it lay.
Charu Deol thought it strange that a building could be protected. There were people playing music on the trains for money and two nights ago he’d seen a man wailing for cold in the street. He thought the government of such a fine, big city might make sure people were protected first.
Still, he’d known several buildings that acted like people, including his father’s summer house, with its white walls and sweating ceiling and its tendency to dance and creak when his parents argued. They’d argued a great deal, mostly because his mother worked there as a maid and complained that the walls were conspiring with his father’s wife. Charu Deol was also aware of a certain nihilism in the character of the room where he now lived – the eaves and floor crumbling at an ever-increasing and truculent rate. When he ate the reheated kebab with curry sauce his landlady left him in the evenings before work, he could hear the room complaining loudly.
The hymen didn’t look anything like the small and fleshy curtain he might have imagined, not that he had ever thought about such a thing. At first, it didn’t occur to Charu Deol that he’d found a sample of that much-prized remnant of gestational development, the existence – or lack thereof – which had caused so much pain and misery for millennia. He hardly knew what a hymen was, having only ever laid down with one woman in his life: the supple fifty-something maid who worked for his mother.
Away from his father’s summer house, his mother had her own maid, because what else did you work for, after all? The maid had offered warm and sausagey arms, the sweet breath of a much younger woman, and a kind of delighted amusement at his nakedness. After he’d expelled himself inside her – something that took longer than he’d foreseen, distracted as he was by the impending return of his mother – she’d not let him up, but gripped his buttocks in her hands, pressing her entire pelvis into him and pistoning her hips with great purpose and breathlessness.
He was left quite sore and with the discouraging suspicion that she’d used him as one might a firm cushion, the curved end of a table, the water jetting out of a spigot, or any other thing that facilitated frottage. Afterwards, she treated him exactly as before: as if he was a vase she had to clean under and never quite found a place for.
He used the side of his broom to pull the soft, tiny crescent-shaped thing toward him, then, bent double, he touched the hymen with his forefinger.
First, he realised it was a hymen. Next, that the hymen had lived inside a twenty-seven-year-old woman, for twenty-seven years. When she was twenty-four, her boyfriend returned home, bad tempered from a quarrel with his boss. When she asked him what was wrong one too many times, the boyfriend – who prior to that moment had washed dishes and protected her from the rain and gone with her to see band concerts and helped her home when she was drunk and collapsed laughing with her on the sofa – grabbed her arm and squeezed it as tight as he could, causing a sharp pain in her shoulder and her heart. When she said, ‘You’re hurting me’, like the women in movies and books, he squeezed all the tighter and looked happy doing of it, and the little flesh crescent inside her slid through her labia and down the leg of her jeans and onto their kitchen floor. The boyfriend swept it up the next day. The bin bag burst in the apartment rubbish dispenser; the hymen got stuck to the edge of someone’s yellow skirts and, helter-skelter, this little pink crescent was pulled along the cold and windy city streets.
Now it was gently pulsating in Charu Deol’s horrified hand.
The knowledge inside the hymen did not manifest in good and tidy order, like a narrative on a TV screen. It was more, thought Charu Deol, like being a djinn or a soul snake, slipping inside the twenty-seven-year-old woman’s skin and looking out through her eyes. He had the discomforting feeling that her body was a bad fit, and stifling, like a hot-water bottle around his thinner, browner self, baggy at the elbows and around the nose. He knew the woman was still with her boyfriend, and that she thought about what she’d do if he ever squeezed her arm again. Charu Deol knew they pretended that the arm squeeze and the not-stopping was a nothing, or a small thing, instead of the cruel thing it was, and that the hair on her arm where the boyfriend gripped her was like a singed patch of grass that never grew again.
Charu Deol sat down on the floor of the law-office church and saw that his hands were shaking. The hymen felt like thin silk between his fingers. What was he to do with it? To discard it was like throwing out a prayer book or a sacred chalice. Before he knew what he was doing, he took a new dusting cloth from his cart, carefully wrapped it around the hymen and placed it in his pocket.

When he got home, he stole a small, plastic bag from his landlady’s kitchen – the kind she packed with naan and Worcestershire sauce and tied up with a plastic-covered piece of wire for work. She would be angry when she discovered his theft, so he left a pound coin on the floor, to the left of the refrigerator, as if he’d dropped it.
She’d put the coin in her pocket without asking if it belonged to him.
Alone in his room, he unwrapped the tiny, silken, throbbing thing and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He was assaulted with the woman’s story again: the squeeze, the disbelief, the lurking, tiny fear. This was why, when the boyfriend slapped the backs of friends or laughed too loud, a small part of the twenty-seven-year-old woman winced and moved away.
Charu Deol placed the hymen inside the plastic bag and sealed it, setting it on the nightstand where he could see it.
He was a witness, and that was important.
He couldn’t sleep, conscious of the lumpy mattress, the large cupboard that took up most of his box room, the smell of the thin blue blankets his landlady stole from the old people’s home where she worked. ‘No one wants them,’ she said, ‘no one has any use for them.’ He didn’t know why she stole them; all she did was stack them in the cupboard.
He thought of his father, a man who had never held him or as far as he knew, been proud of him at all.
He got up and slipped the plastic bag in between the ninth and tenth blue blanket. Before he did so, he examined it one more time. In the dim light, the hymen looked like a beautiful eye: brown and dark and soft and wet, its worn edges like eyelashes, an expression he couldn’t fathom at its centre.

Charu Deol took long walks. That was what big city people did. He went to a small and well-manicured park during the hours he should have been sleeping. He bent his head near the small park pond and dipped his long cracked toes in the water until someone stared and he realised he was up to his ankles at the cold, dank lip. He watched a man teach his two girls cricket with a tennis racket. He watched an orange-helmeted man run down the path, holding his son’s scooter, laughing and calling, ‘Use your brakes!’ He thought about city people soaking in baths and whether they noticed the scum floating to the surface like bad tea, and about the landlady asking him if he’d like her bath water after she got out and how he’d stammered, ‘No thank you.’
‘That’s the way you do it here,’ she said, and her face reminded him of his mother’s when his father’s wife went out to get sweet biscuits at the end of a meal.
A woman walked past with a shrill voice and a plaid shirt and a friend eating grapes, while he dried his cold feet on the grass. When they were gone, he saw the small, iridescent thing by his big toe and wanted to ignore it, or to decide it was a lost earring. He closed his eyes. But he could not leave it there, forsaking his new knowledge, as if he had no responsibility.
Charu Deol lay on the grass, curled around the hymen, and played nudge-chase with it, like a cat with half-dead prey, snatching at the air above it, using his thin sleeve to push it around under the soft edges of the setting sun. The shrill-voiced woman’s hymen was not as soft or simple as the brown eye that lay between the ninth and tenth blue blankets in his room. This one was round, with seven holes in its centre, reminding him of the way thin, raw bread-dough broke when you dragged it across a hot stove; but he’d never seen dough encrusted with stars. This hymen glittered so ferociously against the wet grass, he thought it might leave him and soar into the sky where it belonged.
He touched it, expecting it to burn him.
The woman with the shrill voice had been raped twice before her tenth birthday, each time by her father, who smelled expensive then, and still did now. It was not the pain the woman remembered, but the shuddering of her father’s body and the way he closed his eyes, as if he could see the burning face of God. She had never had an orgasm because she couldn’t bear that same shuddering inside of her; if it broke free, it might kill all the flowers that ever were. Charu Deol knew all this and also that the shrill-voiced woman sometimes wondered: Why no more than twice? Was it because her father had stopped loving her?
Charu Deol shivered on the grass. After a while, he picked up the silver-star hymen and put it into the plastic bag in his coat pocket because part of him had known another would come. He watched the geese until a park attendant nudged him with a broom.
‘What’s up, chappie,’ he said. He was an older man, with the dark chin of an uncle.
‘What do you do when evil comes?’ asked Charu Deol.
The attendant took out a pack of mentholated cigarettes. He sat down next to Charu Deol and smoked two cigarettes and watched the geese. ‘I don’t know,’ said the park attendant. ‘But I think you have to be rational and careful about these things.’
Charu Deol took the plastic bag out of his coat pocket and showed it to him.
‘I think you’re very emotional,’ said the park attendant, and bared his teeth. He didn’t seem to see the bag. ‘Chin up, laddie,’ he said.

Charu Deol sat on his lumpy bed that night and examined the bagged and beautiful hymens. Surely, he thought, they belonged to virgins. But neither of these violated women were pure. Was this a strange sickness of city women that no one had thought to tell him? Certainly, he hadn’t known city women before, with so many ideas and so many of them about him. More than once, he’d found himself feeling sorry for them, even the ones who looked at him strangely on the 453 bus and moved their purses to the left when they saw him.

His Tuesday job was for a company that made industrial bleach. He liked it best there. Despite the smell of ammonia, his cart shone – and the teeth of his lady boss shone, and she looked into his face, not through the back of his head, and laughed loudly when he told her about the cracks in every one of his landlady’s china cups.
‘Is your country very beautiful, Charu?’
He thought it very familiar of her to address him so. He could see she was made of the same stuff as his mother’s maid, very different from the finer skin of his father. She lifted the hair off her neck, which was something he thought she should only do near a man she knew well. Nevertheless, he nodded politely and when the boss lady left he went to the large unisex toilet and scrubbed yellow and brown stains out of the bowls, his rubber gloves rolled all the way up his wrists and forearms.
When he backed out of the stall and turned around, there were three hymens on the floor. One of them was like a piece of thunder, singing a dark song and rolling back and forth – the hymen of a woman in her fifties who got something called a good backhander when she talked too much, and a pinch on the waist when her opinions sounded more clever than her husband’s. The second reminded him of a teardrop. When he lifted it to his face, it filled him with memories of a woman whose husband once ironed the inside of her left thigh like a shirt. The third one slipped him into the skin of a woman who had a happy life except she remembered walking home from school and the stranger who crept up behind her, put his hand up her skirt and clutched her vulva.
Charu Deol was so startled by the sudden feeling of invasion that he dropped her hymen in the soap dish and had to fish it out again. Two more hung from the rolling towels, like wind chimes, twins: one raped, one not, but he knew the untouched sister stayed with the violated twin because she wished it had been her instead. He clutched the sink; he couldn’t see his reflection because there was a spray of crystalline hymens across the mirror, each smaller than the last. He bent closer and realised it was only one after all, exploded across the glass like a sneeze. The woman it belonged to had clouted her best friend’s fiancée when he’d tried to hold her down. He hit her so hard in return he made her deaf in one ear. She had never told her best friend, but she didn’t go to her house anymore and that had caused problems between them. The blood from her ear had tinged the hymen spray a shy blush-pink.
Charu Deol set about gathering them all.

He thought them safe, slipped between the blue blankets, and so they were for a few days, but he had forgotten his landlady’s monthly clean-out, and returned that Friday to find her shining his floors with a coconut husk and changing the sheets on his bed, her fat, brown back unexpectedly familiar. The blue blankets were stacked on the floor, one plastic bag peeping out from a crevice. He was so frightened she might have thrown them away, or hurt them, that before he knew it he was speaking in his father’s baritone, demanding she respected his privacy, please and thank you, and if she couldn’t, she could find someone else to pay her every Sunday for this shithole. It was a city word and he felt powerful saying it to her.
The landlady stared at him, as if he was a new and rare object.
‘Please yourself,’ she said, and shuffled away from the half-polished room. ‘Do someone a favour,’ he heard her muttering as he scooped up the plastic bags, ‘look what you get.’

He bought himself a long coat from a charity shop. The coat had many pockets and after his Sunday job, he sat on his bed and sewed more into the lining. His Sunday job was at a university, where he cleaned staff offices and found thirty-eight hymens. Some were like bright cherry-red fingernails; one s-shaped, glimmering wrought iron; he tapped it and heard a ting-ting sound like his mother’s bracelet on her kitchen pots. One reminded him of a cat’s paw; another smelled like fresh sea urchin. It surprised him to find that eleven of the hymens were from women abused by scholarly, well-respected men.
As the numbers increased, anxiety took him: the risk of forgetting even one precious story. To forget would be sacrilege. He stole two reams of recycled typing paper from his Sunday job and wrote the stories of the women down and read them at night, trying to commit them to memory. On Wednesday, he was fired from his Wednesday job, for refusing to take off his suspiciously bulging coat for the security guard. On Thursday, the landlady left a note from his Sunday job, to say he must not come back – their cameras had recorded his paper theft.
At his Tuesday job, the boss who was overly familiar left her hymen on the edge of her computer desk.
It was so pretty he mistook it for a small, white daisy. When he touched it, his head reeled with alcohol: cranberry vodka and alcopops. Last Friday she’d gone around the back of the pub with two men who seemed quite nice; she was sexually aroused but also frightened and when one of them said something lewd and dark, she wanted to run back into the pub, but the second one had a hand on her hip and she decided she might as well bite her lip because making a fuss might. Might. Might just.
Hurt.
She found Charu Deol weeping for her, his cheek hard against her computer screen and fired him for the way he looked at her, his face broken open. She said if he told anybody about unfair dismissal, she would say he tried to rape her.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘You don’t know.’

Charu Deol’s head is light and empty as he walks through the early morning sunshine. The coat full of hymens rubs his ankles; the satchel on his back is stuffed with scribbled paper. He is concerned about himself. He has taken to muttering in public places, to stopping men on the road to tell them about women. He needs help. He cannot witness these stories alone. If he could just explain, if he could just ask them, politely, not to hurt anyone; if he could just talk to enough of them, it might stem the tide. Most thrust him away, mistaking him for drunk.
‘It’s not true,’ say the few who listen when he tells them that it’s one in every three women he sees. ‘It’s complicated,’ say the men. ‘What can I do?’ they say.
He doesn’t know.

His skin hurt. He feared it was transparent, exposing his internal organs. This was not a job for one man, not for a man who needed to pay rent, although he found himself less concerned with such banalities. He avoided speaking to women at all, worried he might hurt or offend them. He was practically servile with his landlady since his last harsh words, cleaning not just his own room, but the entire house, including her roof and digging her backyard until she yelled at him. He was relieved that she was among the unscathed, and marvelled at women on the streets for their luck or stoicism.
One tall lady left a trail of hymen strands behind her like golden cobwebs, a story so long and fractured and dark that he bent over in the busy street and cried out his mother’s name. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again; if he could bear to take the risk, now that he was witness. He watched the golden cobweb woman laughing with a friend, swinging her bag, her heels clicking. How was she standing upright? How did they restrain themselves from screaming through the world, cleaving heads asunder, raking eyeballs? How did the universe not break into small pieces?
He became convinced that the hymens in his coat were rotting. Despite their beauty they were pieces of flesh, after all. At other times, he imagined them glass; feared he would trip and fall and shatter them, piercing his veins and tendons. Still, he walked every day and gathered more. They littered his room, piled under the bed and towards the ceiling.
He bought a lock for his door.

On Monday, or perhaps it was Thursday, he took himself to the church that was a law office. The gravestones ached with the weight of early Spring daffodils. The rector found him bent over one of the graves, inserting his fingers into the damp earth, hands going from coat pocket to soil. When he said, ‘Son, can I help you?’ Charu Deol asked if this was blessed earth, and would it protect blessed things. He clutched the area around his heart, then the area around his neck, and whined like a dog when the rector tried to soothe him.
‘Can you not see them?’ Charu Deol said.
‘What, my son?’ asked the rector.
Charu Deol grasped the man’s lapels and dragged himself upright. He was weeping, and frightening a holy man, but the hymens were thick on the ground like blossom, and the task was suddenly, ferociously beyond him. He dropped the rector and ran through the graveyard, past clinking, bleeding, surging, mumbling pieces of women.
The hymens were a sea in his landlady’s front yard. He crushed them underfoot, howling and spitting and weeping, feeling them splinter, break, snap, squelch under his heels like pieces of liver. He tried his key, once, twice, again, wrenched it to the left, and pushed inside. The place was quiet, the usually dull and lugubrious walls mercifully blank, his bed cool against his face.
The landlady knocked and entered. ‘Lawks lad,’ she said, ‘I’m worried about you. It can’t be all that bad, now.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him.
He remembered a son she’d once mentioned; he’d never taken the time to listen.
‘Tell me of your son,’ he said.
She did, saying that she knew young men. All they needed was a firm hand and a loving heart. The two of them, they’d got off to a bad start, but now she saw he was in need of help. Would he like a cup of tea? He was too handsome a lad to get on so. Charu Deol sniffed, tried to smile, inched forward, put his head on the soft knee. She patted him awkwardly, and he felt a mother’s touch in the fingers, and a fatigued kind of hope. He crawled further up her knee, put his face into her hipbone. She smelled familiar. His teeth felt sharp, his fingers sweaty. He could hear flesh outside, beating on the door, crawling up the windowpanes.
He didn’t see the hymen inching down her thigh, like a rubied snail, like torn underwear.

Love Silk Food

Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. She can tell, because the love is stuck to the walls of house, making the wallpaper sticky, and it has seeped into the calendar in her kitchen, so bad she can’t see what the date is, and the love keeps ruining the food – whatever she does or however hard she concentrates, everything turns to mush. The dumplings lack squelch and bite – they come out doughy and stupid, like grey belches, in her carefully salted water. Her famed liver and green banana is mush too; everything has become too-soft and falling apart, like food made for babies. Silk food, her mother used to call it.
Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. Not with her, no.
She gets away from the love by visiting Wood Green Shopping City on a Saturday afternoon. She sits in the foyer on a bench for nearly two hours, between Evans and Shoe Mart. She doesn’t like the shoes there; the heels make too much noise, and why are the clothes that Evans makes for heavy ladies always sleeveless? No decorum, she thinks, all that flesh out-of-doors. She likes that word: decorum. It sounds like a lady’s word, which suits her just fine.
There are three days left to Christmas and the ceiling of the shopping mall is a forest of cheap gold tinsel and dusty red cartridge paper. People walk past in fake fur hoods and boots. A woman stands by the escalator, her hand slipped into the front of her coat; she seems calm but also she looks like she’s holding her heart, below the fat tartan-print scarf around her neck. Then Mrs Neecy Brown sees that the woman by the escalator is her, standing outside her own skin, looking at herself, something her Jamaican granny taught her to do when the world don’t feel right. People are staring, so she slips back inside her body and heads home, past a man dragging a flat-faced mop across the mall floor, like he’s taking it for a walk.
She trudges through Saturday crowds that are smelly and noisy. The young people have fat bottom lips and won’t pick up their feet; she has a moment of pride, thinking of her girls. Normal teenagers they’d been, with their moods, but one word from her or one face-twist from Mr Brown, and there was a stop to that! She had all six daughters between 1961 and 1970: a cube, a seven-sided polygon, a rectangle that came out just bigger than the size of her fist and the twin triangles, oh! The two of them so prickly that she locked up shop on Mr Brown for nearly seven months. He was so careful when he finally got back in that their last daughter was a perfectly satisfactory and smooth-sided sphere.
All grown now, scattered across North London, descending on the house every Sunday and also other days in the week, looking for babysitting; pardner-throwing; domino games; approval; advice about underwear and aerated water; argument; looking for Mamma’s rub-belly hand during that time of the month; to curse men and girlfriends; to leave pets even though she’d never liked animals in the house; to talk in striated, incorrect patois and to hug-up with their daddy. Then Melba, the sphere, who had grown even rounder in adulthood, came to live upstairs with her baby’s father and their two children. The three-year-old sucked the sofa so much he swallowed the pink off the right-hand cushions. The eight-month-old had inherited his father’s mosquito face, long limbs and delicate stomach, which meant everyone had to wade through baby sick. Then Lara, Melba’s best friend from middle school, arrived in a bomber jacket with a newly-pierced and bleeding lip so long ago that Mrs Neecy Brown didn’t even remember when, but regarded her with fond absent-mindedness, not unlike a Christmas decoration you’ve had so long you don’t know where it came from. And the noise. Oh dear, oh Lord.
In between all of this, her husband’s bouts of lovesickness.
He’d proved no good at marriage: the repetition, the crying babies, the same good mornings, the perfectly decent night-dresses she bought – Lord woman, you couldn’t try a little harder? – but there was nothing wrong with her pretty Marks and Spencer cotton shifts, lace at the décolletage, and little cream and brown and yellow and red flowers. He seemed to crave what she privately called The Excitement Girls. She thought of them as wet things: oiled spines, sweating lips, damp laps. She saw one of them once, kissing him goodbye no more than fifteen minutes from their home. She’d scuttled behind a stone pillar to peep. The girl turned away after the kiss. She looked happy. Her chest was jiggling, bra-less, the nipples like bullets.
So that’s what they look like then, thought Mrs Neecy Brown.

She paused at the entrance to Wood Green tube station. One turn to the left and she’d be on her street. No, she wouldn’t go home, not yet. He’d be there for his tea, pirouetting through the house with his broad grins and smacking her bottom, his voice too loud. How stupid he thought she was; didn’t he know she could see, that she knew him? In love he was alternately lascivious and servile and too easily tempted into things – brawls, TV shows, games of poker for too much money. Gone for too long and out too often, and when he came back he would lunge at the family: Come, let’s go to Chessington Park next Sunday, or-we-could or-we-could, and he’d get his grandchildren excited, and she’d fry chicken and make potato salad and buy Sainsbury’s sausage rolls, 39 pence the packet of ten and pack tomatoes like a proper English family, in a proper hamper basket with thermoses of tea. Then, when all is ready, the greatest of apologies he comes up with. Once he even squeezed out tears: Can’t come, Mrs Brown, he calls her, or Mummy on affectionate days, Can’t come, my dears. They working me like a bitch dog, you know. Errol, she murmurs, language! Then he’s heading out the house, tripping up on his own sunshine, free, free. Make sure you come back in time, Errol boy, she always thinks, in time to wash that woman’s nipples off your neck-back.
After all.

She loves the London underground; it still seems a treat, an adventure, paying your fare, riding the escalator, choosing a seat, settling back to watch the people. So many different kinds, from all over the world! She settles into a corner and watches a Chinese boy struggling with a huge backpack. The straps are caught in his long hair. She’ll ride with him all the way to Heathrow, she thinks, see if he untangles the hair before Green Park. Then ride the way back. She leans her head on the glass partition and steps outside of her body.
Last night, Mr Brown did something he’d never done in all these years of his lying, stinking cheating.
Walking in, midnight or thereabouts, easing himself onto the edge of the mattress – she pretending to be asleep as usual, groaning a little, turned on her side – he rolled into the bed, after casting one shoe hither and the other thither and his tongue was in her ear, digging and rooting. Snuffle, snuffle, like a pig. Then she became aware of the smells. Vicks Vapour Rub. Someone else’s perfume, and… Mrs Neecy Brown lay trembling and affronted and frozen in the first rage she’d let herself feel for a long time – not since the first time he’d cheated, and repented and wept so much and talked to Pastor for weeks and then just went out and did it again, and she’d realised that it was a habit, this love-falling, and that she could never stop it, only fold her own self into a little twist of paper and stuff herself near the mops and brooms in the downstairs cupboard. No not since then had she let herself cry.
He’d come to her bed unwashed, with the smell of another woman’s underneath all over him.
She’d felt as if her head was rising; would never have expected to recognise such an odour so immediately when it assailed her. But it was just like the smell of her own underneath, the one that she made sure to clean and dress, like a gleaming, newly-caught fish, lest it flop from between her thighs and swim upriver.
She clapped a hand over her mouth as he snuggled into her, so she didn’t leap up and scream it at him: Is so all woman underneath smell the same, Errol?
If they were all the same, why turn from her and seek another?
No, she wouldn’t cook for him. Let him eat what bits he could find in the fridge for tea, and vex with her. Let him use it as an excuse to storm off to she.

The Chinese boy has sagged next to the centre pole, holding on for dear life. There are empty seats, but perhaps getting the mammoth backpack off and on makes the option too tiresome. There’s another young man sitting to her right. He’s wearing a creased blue shirt and stained navy-blue pants. His black socks are covered in fluff, like a carpet that hasn’t been hoovered in days. He has a dry, occasional cough and he sits with one hand akimbo, the other on his jaw. His eyes dart around. He’s a man in need of a good woman, if ever she’s seen one. Then she looks closer and sees she’s wrong – someone has creamed his skin and it gleams amongst the other imperfections.
Furthest away are a mother and daughter, stamps of each other, but even if they hadn’t been, she would have known. Mothers and daughters sit together in particular ways. Mother is shorter, more vibrant. She rubs her temples, manipulating her whole face like it’s ginger dough. Daughter has a face like a steamed pudding, two plaits that begin above her ears and slop straight down over them. Her hand’s a wedge of flesh, rubbing her eyes. She smiles at Mrs Neecy Brown, who finds she can’t smile back. She can’t take the chance. She presumes that Mr Brown finds his girls in north London. He’s lazy. This latest one is near, she can feel it; she could even be this young woman. She wonders whether they know her face, if they’ve ever followed her.
The train stops, empties, fills, whizzes past stations: Turnpike Lane, Manor House, Finsbury Park, Arsenal, Holloway Road. Where was she, this latest one, casually breaking off bits of her husband and keeping them for herself? She’d had to feed breakfast to a limbless man at least twice; can’t forget the week he didn’t smile at all because some selfish woman had stolen his lips.

She doesn’t realise that she’s been asleep until she wakes up.
‘Hello, ma’am?’
Balding head and a large beauty mark on his left jowl. He hunches forward in the seat; he’s been sitting like that for years; she knows the type – bad habits you couldn’t break by the time your fifties set in. There’s something young about his chin: it’s smooth and plump and might quiver when he cries. He’s wearing a horrible, mustard-yellow jacket and red trousers.
The man is bending forward, gesticulating, and Mrs Neecy Brown sees that her tartan scarf has fallen to the floor. She leans forward, feeling creaky, bleary, feeling her breasts hang, glimmers at the man who’s smiling at her and beats her to it, scooping up the scarf and placing it delicately on her knee, like a present.
‘Thank you.’
‘You welcome.’
She looks around; they’ve reached Heathrow. She must have fallen asleep soon after Green Park, half an hour at least! The train hisses. People come in slowly. They’ll be heading back soon. She’d like to be a movie star, she thinks – to pack a perfect set of matching luggage and leave the house, a crescent, golden moon above her. She would come to Heathrow and… what? She sighs. The fantasy won’t hold. She doesn’t have a good suitcase any more, because triangle number one borrowed it and still hasn’t given it back, and she knows what that means. Last time she asked for it, the triangle brought her three packs of heavy-duty black garbage bags from Sainsbury’s, where she works.
The train jerks and the scarf jolts forward again and spews onto the floor. The man picks it up again, before she can move.
‘Look like that scarf don’t want to stay with you.’
Sudden rage floods her.
‘What you know about me or anything? Mind you bloody business.’
‘Oh my,’ says the man. He touches a hand to his forehead. ‘I’m very sorry, lady.’ His voice is slow and wet, like a leaf in autumn. A crushed, gleaming leaf, in shades of gold and red and yellow.
She grunts, an apology of sorts. He recognises the timbre, inclines his head.
She thinks of her girls. If any of them is a cheater, it’s the second triangle – with her vaguely cast-eye and that pretty pair of legs. Never could stop needing attention. She sighs. Anger will help nothing.
‘You alright, sis?’ The autumn man looks concerned.
‘What business of yours?’
‘Just…’ he gestures. ‘You look like something important on you mind.’
‘Nobody don’t tell you that you mustn’t talk to strangers on the underground?’
He hoots. ‘That is the rule? Well, them tell me England people shy.’
Silence. The train doors close and it starts back home. The man has a suitcase. Marked and scrawled. She remembers arriving in London, so long ago, and how it seemed everything was in boxes: the houses, the gardens, the children and how big and cold the air was and how the colour red snuck in everywhere: double-decker buses and phone boxes and lipstick. Mounds of dog doo on the street, and you could smoke in public places those days. She, a youngish bride, Errol like a cock, waving his large behind and his rock-hard stomach. He’d kicked up dirt in the backyard that he would eventually make her garden and crowed at the neighbours. Mrs Smith, from two doors down, came to see what the racket was; she brought a home-made trifle and was always in and out after that, helping with the girls, her blonde, cotton-wool head juddering in heartfelt kindness. She’d needed Mrs Smith.
‘So you come from Jamaica?’ she offers.
‘St Elizabeth. Real country.’
‘Where you headed?’
The man consults a slip of paper from his lapel pocket. ‘32 Bruce Grove, Wood Green.’
‘Well, that’s just near where I am, I can show you.’
They regard each other for some seconds.
‘You come to –?’
‘You live near –?’
Laughing and the softening of throats, and her hands dance at her neck, tying up the scarf. He has a grin perched on the left hand side of his face.
‘Ladies first,’ he says.
‘You come to see family for Christmas?’
He nods. ‘My daughter married an English husband and her child is English. So I come to see them.’ He seems to let himself and his excitement loose, slapping his hands on his thighs and humming. ‘Yes boy, my first grandchild.’
She smiles. ‘I know you have a picture.’
He scrabbles in his wallet and passes it over. His daughter is dark black, big-boned and big-haired, her husband tall and beaming, the child surprisingly anaemic and small-eyed. She has a snotty nose. Mrs Neecy Brown thinks that an English person must have taken the photograph, for anyone else would have wiped it. But they look very happy. Grubby but happy, Mrs Smith would have said. Dead now a year or so. She hands the picture back.
‘Pretty.’
He nods vigorously, slaps his thighs again, stows the photo carefully back inside the dreadful coat, blows on his clenched fists. He must be cold, she thinks.

Night lies down on Wood Green station as they puff their way up the escalator and stand gazing at the road. My, how they’ve talked! Not easy; she can’t remember the last time she spoke to a man who was listening. The sound of her voice was like a tin, she thought, rattling money. But he’d opened his mouth and made sounds, and so had she, all the way home. The smell of vinegar and chips from a nearby shop; three boys play-wrestle in front of the cinema across the road – some wag had named it Hollywood Green. She doesn’t know whether she thinks it’s clever or stupid. She points.
‘What you think of that name?’
He reads, shakes his head. He doesn’t have an opinion. She smiles. That’s just fine, with her.
A cat tromps by, meowing. Lord, the noise.
Mrs Neecy Brown drops her handbag and grabs the autumn man’s arm, and reaches up to his shoulder, fingers scrabbling, her wedding ring golden against his terrible jacket. She hates cats. They don’t seem to care. He puts his suitcase down and pats her hand. They stand like that, arms interlinked, her hand on his shoulder, his hand patting. She is aware of happiness.
Eventually she moves away and he picks up the suitcase. Her fingers tingle from the shape of his shoulder. She waves towards the darkened roads. ‘I show you where.’

– Vision.

– Nutrition.

– Plus, minus, equal.

– No Excuses.

– Learning.

– Creativity.

– Controlled Risk.

– Hacking the ‘10,000 Hour Rule’

– Writing.

– Happiness is Not About Metrics

– Antifragility

– Reinvention.

– Influence.

• To be motivating, you need meaning in your life. Something you strongly believe in. This becomes infectious.
• Always address objections. This establishes trust.
• Likability. People will agree with you not because you make a rational argument but because they like you. Find common ground with the people you meet. Build from there.
• People are irrational. Using rational arguments are not the key to winning people over.
• Ask dumb questions. Gives people a false sense of power.
• Focus on their needs, not yours.
• Be as specific as possible.
• Give a sense of urgency.
• Don’t be afraid to go silent in a negotiation.

– Don’t Kill Yourself For a Job.

– Energy is your main asset, Don’t waste it.

– Finding your loves.

– Scene, Community, Network.

– Bigger is not better.

– Experimentation.

– Play.