Assembly Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2021 by Natasha Brown

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover © 2021 Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: September 2021

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  ISBN 978-0-316-26846-2

  E3-20210730-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Alright

  What It’s Like

  After the Digestif, He Gets Going

  ASSEMBLY Conversations

  Strategy Onsite

  Lou!

  Here I Am At The Station, I Should

  21 : 04 LONDON PADDINGTON [PAD] TO NEWBURY [NBY]

  TRANSCENDENCE (GARDEN PARTY)

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

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  This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

  Alright

  You have to stop this, she said.

  Stop what, he said, we’re not doing anything. She wanted to correct him. There was no we. There was he the subject and her the object, but he just told her look, there’s no point getting worked up over nothing.

  •

  She often sat in the end cubicle of the ladies’ room and stared at the door. She’d sit for an entire lunch break, sometimes, waiting either to shit or to cry or to muster enough resolve to go back to her desk.

  He could see her at her desk from his office and regularly dialled her extension to comment on what he saw (and what he made of it): her hair (wild), her skin (exotic), her blouse (barely containing those breasts).

  Over the phone, he instructed her to do little things. This humiliated her more than the bigger things that eventually followed. Still, she held her stapler up high as directed. Drank her entire glass of water in one go. Spat out her chewing gum into her hand.

  •

  She had gone to lunch with her colleagues. They were six men of varying ages, sizes and temperaments. They ordered four plates of the beef nigiri and, during the meal, occasionally referenced her situation via vague innuendo and accusatory observations.

  One of the older ones, fat with a thick greying beard around his thin pink lips, put down his fork to talk straight. He began slowly: He knows she’s not one to take advantage of it. He knows that, he knows. There, he paused for effect and to savour the thrill of telling the girl how things were. But – but now, she must admit, she had an advantage over him and the others at the table. She could admit that, couldn’t she.

  He smiled wide, opened his arms wide and leaned back. The other five looked at her, some nodding. He picked up his fork again and shoved more raw meat into his mouth.

  •

  His office was glass on three sides. Rows of desks stretched out to the right and left, a spectators’ gallery. She had centre stage. He sat talking to her, quite animated.

  He hoped she would show some maturity, he said, some appreciation. He was getting up from his chair, walking towards her, brushing against her though the office was large and he had plenty of space. She should think of the big picture and her future and what his word means around here. He said this as he opened the office door.

  •

  It was nothing. She thought this now, as she thought it each morning. She buttoned up her shirt and thought it, then pushed small studs into her ears. She thought it as she pulled her hair back into a neat bun, left her face bare, smoothed down her stiff, grey pencil skirt.

  She thought it as she ate, even as she forgot how to taste or swallow. She tried to chew. It was nothing. She barked that she was fine, then softened, looked around the living room. Asked her mother how her day had been.

  •

  Dinner after work, she’d agreed to it. Outside the restaurant, before they went in, he grabbed her shoulders and pressed his open mouth on to her face.

  She watched his eyelids quiver shut as his slow tongue pushed and poked at hers. She pictured her body, limbs folded, packed away in a box. He stepped back, smiled, laughed a bit, looked down at her. He touched her arm, then her fingers, and then her face. It’s alright, he told her. It’s alright, it’s alright.

  What It’s Like

  No, but originally. Like your parents, where they’re from. Africa, right?

  Here’s the thing. I’ve been here five years. My wife – seven, eight. We’ve been working, we’ve been paying our taxes. We cheer for England in the World Cup! So when the government told us to register; told us to download this app and pay to register, it hurt. This is our home. We felt unwelcome. It’s like if they said to you: Go back to Africa. Imagine if they told you: no-no, you’re not a real Brit, go back to Africa. That’s what it’s like.

  I mean it’s – well, you know. Of course you do, you understand. You can understand it in a way the English don’t.

  After the Digestif, He Gets Going

  She understood the anger of a man who himself understood in his flesh and bones and blood and skin that he was meant to be at the head of a great, hulking giant upon whom the sun never set. Because it was night, now, and he was drunk. He felt very small, perhaps only a mouth. A lip or a tooth or a rough, inflamed bud on a dry white tongue slick with phlegm at the back, near the throat. The throat of a man with a sagging gut and thinning hair cropped short. So, when that mouth opened up and coughed its vitriol at her, making some at the table a little uncomfortable, she understood the source of its anger, despite being the target. She waited for the buzz of her phone to excuse her and – in the meantime – quietly, politely, she understood him.

  ASSEMBLY

  It’s a story. There are challenges. There’s hard work, pulling up laces, rolling up shirtsleeves, and forcing yourself. Up. Overcoming, transcending, et cetera. You’ve heard it before. It’s not my life, but it’s illuminated two metres tall behind me and I’m speaking it into the soft, malleable faces tilted forwards on uniformed shoulders. I recite my old lines like new secrets. Click to the next slide. Giant, diverse, smiling faces in grey suits point at charts, shake hands and wave behind me. The projector whirrs and their smiles morph into the bank’s roaring logo. Time to wrap up. I look out around the rows of schoolgirls. Thank them for listening, before taking questions.

  One asks if I live in a mansion.

  It was a hit, the programme coordinator tells me and the head teacher nods a frazzled bob of greying hair. Her tense lips part, fla
shing coffee-yellow teeth. We’re walking round and down a small back stairway and I’m gagging on the warm air, that boiled-veg school smell. The head teacher thanks me for coming, says the girls were all inspired. Shrieks, laughter and a booming, melodic chatter echo around us as the students splash out of the assembly hall and into concrete corridors. Simply inspirational, she says.

  Back at the office, Lou’s not in yet. He rarely shows up before eleven. As if each morning, fresh mediocrity slides out of the ocean, slimes its way over mossy rocks and sand, then sprouts skittering appendages that stretch and morph and twist into limbs as it forges on inland until finally, fully formed, Lou! strolls into the lobby on two flat feet in shined shoes. Shining, tapping, waiting for the lift to our floor. Nodding to the Beats buds in his ears. He’s never roped in to all this. I do these talks – schools and universities, women’s panels, recruiting fairs – every few weeks. It’s an expectation of the job. The diversity must be seen. How many women and girls have I lied to? How many have seen my grinning face advocating for this or that firm, or this industry, or that university, this life? Such questions aren’t constructive. I need to catch up on the morning’s lost hours.

  For much of my own childhood, I lived next to a cemetery. Through the front windows, I’d watch funeral processions snake along the road: black horses followed by black hearses followed by regular cars in different colours. Sometimes a man marched in front with a top hat and cane. Then the people: getting out of the cars and the hearses and gathering themselves, carrying wreaths, carrying hats. Carrying coffins, too, I guess. I don’t remember seeing that. They’d gather by the mounds of fresh-dug dirt and wait around, wreaths piled neat beside them, or they’d just stand there holding flowers. Or holding each other. Little faraway creatures, clinging together for comfort. I watched from above.

  Last year, I bought the top floor of a Georgian conversion in an up-and-coming area. The other two flats are each rented out by youngish, anxious couples. A tense argument over music volumes escalates nightly between them.

  The improbably named Adam and Evie have the ground floor. When we met in the stairwell, Evie introduced herself first, as Adam’s girlfriend. She brushed wispy strands of blonde hair back from her forehead and told me she worked in publishing. When the music’s too loud, she’ll knock at the flat above and implore them to please, turn it down. Just a tad. Her cut-glass exasperation sends shards right up through my own floor.

  The other couple is sullen and reclusive. They rarely speak, though I’ve heard their enthusiastic wailing over 90s bangers. They’re both pretty; brunettes with sharp features and small feet. Two pairs of tiny, muddy football boots lie drying outside their front door every Thursday morning.

  The familiar rhythms of our stacked lives have become a kind of closeness.

  At work, I think of the flat as parents must pine when they see their kids’ smiling faces framed and propped up amongst the papers and cups on their desks. My friend Rach – small, spoilt, energetic – waves away her own home in a leafy West London suburb. Says she wants a bigger house, a better boyfriend, more money! She wants all these things without shame or subtlety and I’m both fearful and admiring of her appetite. My own is gone. I’ve sunk too deep, pulled down further by a creeping, winding tightness around my limbs. Still, I hold my breath.

  What else is there?

  Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much – for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.

  Ah – here’s Lou.

  Conversations

  Yesterday, as I sat waiting in the bright reception area of the private oncologist’s Harley Street office I had visited now three times, I experienced a detachment – not imagined; no, it was a tangible, physical phenomenon. Something had plucked within. An untethering of self from experience.

  I quite liked going there. The receptionists – young, pretty, interchangeable – were polite, always. And welcomed me as though we were at a spa. The flowers that day were huge lilies with gaping petals and thick stems. Stamens, snipped clinically, left smudged red pollen on the white petals. You couldn’t un-see O’Keeffe. Two of us were there, waiting. With the un-rushed certainty of time blocked out in Outlook playing out as intended. From a tufted ottoman beside the window, I looked out at the street below.

  My mother was always telling me over the phone about people who had recently died. Reminding me of so-and-so. Oh, of course I knew her – remember she used to stop by with her niece (sweet girl, you two were friends). Yes, yes, her. Well, she died last week. Isn’t it? Terrible. I wasn’t sure why this conversational habit bothered me so much. It wasn’t gossipy, there was no malice. In fact, these frequent reports felt propelled by an unspoken loss. An exhaustive proof that we, whatever it was that bound us all together within the first-person plural, were not surviving. I decided my complaint was primarily formal, the set-up and punchline structure she employed; making me remember knowing, invoking memories of a person, of a life, then unveiling the death. It induced a rollercoaster lurch within my solar plexus. Tinged with a guilty numbness as I considered the absurd luxury aesthetic of my company healthcare provisions. The screenings, pre-emptive tests and speedy follow-ups that sustained life. I knew that we, the children who remained, would do so with weakened bonds. No common country or culture linked us other than British (which could only be claimed hyphenated or else parenthesized by the origins of those whose deaths our mothers detailed over the phone). It was survival only in the sense that a meme survives. Generational persistence, without meaning or memory.

  I’d told my boyfriend it was fine. I was fine. He didn’t need to accompany me. Still, he insisted we at least meet somewhere after work for a drink. An outing to lift the spirits. Fine. It was a nice enough evening, unseasonably warm for September. We drank beer on the grass outside the old pub near Blackfriars station. And everything, I told him, was fine. False alarm. False words could feel true. He was easily convinced, accustomed to happy endings and painless resolution. Nothing to worry about, we clinked the necks of our bottles together.

  ‘I know I’ve been distant,’ he said, ‘not myself.’

  I looked at my legs, shining brown in the evening sun. We’d moved on from biopsies, consultations and assertions of relief to talking about his work; big, important things he was peripherally involved in at Whitehall.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve been good company of late,’ he said.

  The weekend before, he’d slept with his head pressed against my chest, curled up like a foetus. Monday morning, he’d wrapped his arms around me so tight that I stayed in bed for an extra while and stroked his hair. Until I had to leave for work.

  ‘Sometimes, I just –’ He stopped and picked at the label on his beer bottle. It looked damp and soft from condensation and he tore off little pieces at a time, balled them up between his finger and thumb and flicked the sticky globs into the grass. When we’d first dated, he would brandish his name to maître d’s with a booming exuberance. I wondered whether that sense of self had been picked away, or whether his self were only a dinner jacket he put on and then took off again. Head tilted back, he glugged from the bottle. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed and I imagined cool beer flowing down his throat, along the curve of his chest and sloshing into his belly.

  We met at college, he liked to say. Though I barely knew him back then. He was already in third year when I matriculated. I didn’t remember ever speaking to him, though I knew his face and name from student politics. No, he only noticed me in the years after, at events in the occasional intersection of our overlapping social circles. My own social capital had increased – infinitesimally, immeasurably – since my student days. Money, even the relatively modest amount I’d amassed, had transformed me. My style, my manner
isms, my lightly affected City vernacular, all intrigued him. He could see the person I was constructing. And he sensed opportunity. He’d read of Warren Wilhelm Jr’s transformation to Bill de Blasio.

  Accidentally-on-purpose, he bumped against me at a rooftop barbecue in a Stepney warehouse conversion. Laid the Hugh Grant charm on thick as we sipped warm, fruity Pimm’s from Mason jars. Canary Wharf gleamed and ached, beautiful, behind him. He had seemed too much, then, as though he were caricaturing himself. Over the ensuing months and years, I began to appreciate the elastic nature of his personality. I watched him jostle and mess about with his close friends. Debating big ideas with bigger words and a brutal sense of group humour. They poked fun at one another mercilessly, then chortled: bent over, knee slapping, in a near-parodical show of mirth. After, in the back of a minicab, he’d greet the driver by name and navigate expertly from idle chit-chat to unlocking a life story. He asked thoughtful followups and never interrupted. He was polite, yes, but not stuffy. He softened his accent. Said, ‘Good night, man,’ sincerely, punctuated with a clasped two-hand handshake, before climbing out of the car.

  ‘This is nice,’ he said finally, almost smiling. And it was. Tomorrow seemed further away. Though the upcoming weekend with his parents still loomed large; their anniversary party hosted at the family’s country estate. What should have felt, if not casual, then at least pleasantly exciting, was instead rapidly materializing into hard reality. I nodded, and he turned to face the cars lined up at the crossing.

  ‘I’ve been – I mean my ex.’ He paused, then started again. ‘My ex has been texting. She got a puppy.’