Melina

I'm walking along the high street observing my surroundings as if behind glass, detached, viewing people as characters in plays, playing themselves; the tall man in faded denim lumbering in front of me on crutches, calling out to a man he knows at the bus stop in a strong Irish accent, “see you later Tommy;” a young mum in beige, pushing a pram; a woman, early 20s, overweight, wearing leggings and a cycle helmet, wheeling her bike up the high street. They pass me in slow motion, images stretching and twisting as if at the end of a reel of old cinema film. I wonder about their stories, the worlds they inhabit and then I meet Melina.

She has a wide, laughing mouth and wears tight dark blue jeans, an aertex AJ Hacket shirt splashed with bright, primary colours, and Arsenal cap hiding her short dreadlocks.

She’s in conversation with a man up a ladder and can tell from the way in which he’s painting the sign that he in fact is more than a painter of walls and signs, the muscle movement and careful strokes indicate to her, she who has taken the time to observe, that he is a craftsman. He learned his trade on the shop floor and he now owns the shop whose sign he is painting. She tells him this and he confirms her assessment. She is pleased with herself, and strides off, announcing to the man up the ladder that he has done well for himself and to the world in general that society needs more positive action taken. This phrase finds my ears and she and I smile at each other.

She rattles questions at me, gruffly and in haste, whilst telling me that she has to pay wages today, she owns a construction business, a client has gone to Italy on holiday, she did psychology at University - and I answer some of them, others she answers for me. To one I respond that I have moved back to my Mum’s for a bit, she nods “recently divorced?” Her intuition is intriguing. I nod in confirmation. She says she’s been divorced for 2 years, married for 14, had her son when she was 31, went to New York for peace. For peace? I ask. Yes, he was stalking me, I needed to hide. I don’t ask who he is. She will tell me if she wants to.

We arrive at the bank. She grumbles about a man who had her train some workers for him and then cut her out of the deal. He’s dodgy, she says, I just need £100 a day profit, sometimes they offer me £70 a day but I cannot work for less than £400 a week! Impossible. Maybe I’ll let them all go and just project manage the next job, she muses as the hole in the wall spits out wages for her staff.

I suggest we go for a coffee. We enter an Arab-style café with mosaics, dark wooden cushioned seats, ornate mirrors adorning the walls and patrons enjoying hookah. We reject the café as Melina sent her son to New York for the summer to stay with family as she doesn’t want him to become a Muslim. They hang around parks and places looking for young, lost people to recruit, she says, many suicide bombers are recruited as lost teenagers, not born to the religion. They are weak, vulnerable, preyed upon and snatched away from reason.

We to go to the Turkish bar instead. On the way this time I tell Melina something about herself which is that she’s from Trinidad. She says oh, you know about these things and orders a Guinness from the Polish girl behind the bar as she is vegetarian and drinks two a day of these "for the protein content." I have a coke. It’s flat.

She tells me that her father used to work for the Trinidad Express Newspaper, she has a brother who is in prison. He went down a bad path. He had keys to all our apartments and was always bringing in women. Will he be in prison long? I ask. Yes, she says, he was an accessory to a murder. He was the driver of the getaway car when a robbery in an Italian deli in New York went wrong. They had planned with the manager of the store to rob it but, “there was a gun,” and the owner of the store was shot.

Her brother’s imprisonment shattered her life, she said. She pauses briefly, smiles, picks up some blue-tinted glasses and puts them on her face. These are my son’s, she says, I miss him. He was staying with her sister in New York somewhere but packed up his-self and went to Queens to stay with a brother. He’s a brat, says Melina, probably my sister told him something he didn’t want to hear and when his uncle annoys him, he’ll pack up his-self again and go to his next aunt or uncle or maybe bug the family to send him to see his cousins in DC.

She knocks on the window to indicate to the Polish girl who is sweeping the pavement outside and weeding the plant pots, that she has customers inside waiting to be served. The windows are double-glazed and the girl does not hear Melina’s insistent knocking however Melina thinks the girl was wary of her from the instant we walked into the bar. “I’m not being racist,” she says, “but the Eastern Europeans undercut me constantly.”

She tells me about the low-lifes in her building. She shows me photos on her phone of opened mail as irrefutable proof of society crumbling. She tells me that her mother had 14 children but one died, that her mother’s cancer is back but that she and her mother never really got on anyway. There were always au-pairs around and her father had 2 "outside children." Maybe this is why I’m like how I am, she says. My whole family is in New York, my brother calls me to say let me buy you a ticket to the farm in Venezuela, you can relax by the pool. Why? Says Melina, I have to work. I suggest it’s a good thing to have family who care. She agrees yes, but it’s too much at times.

She punctuates her sentences with street names: do you know Etchingham Park? I did a loft there, the woman was an atheist, she has a 4 year old child, the loft is all for the child. Can you imagine? I can well imagine so I only smile and say nothing. Do you know Nether Street? I did an office there, they only wanted me, no one else. She constantly shows me photos of work she’s done and photos of her son who’s 12, “he thinks he's a rapper but he’ll do a Masters. His grades are all 90%.”

Does he see his father? No, he doesn’t want to. The divorce did not deal with custody or money so she fears that if MJ went for a weekend at his father’s, he would keep him. The father has said that he’ll take him when he’s 14. Melina says let him start the custody proceedings, I don’t have money for all that.

They had lived in a house nearby. When it was sold, he went to the bank and withdrew all but £1,000 of the proceeds of sale from their joint account. I look at her incredulously, eye-brow raised. She looks at me. We shake our heads, spread our hands, shrug our shoulders. She smiles again, shows me another photo of her son. Said that she had wanted to be an architect but, “we had a mortgage.”

She met him soon after his divorce. We had a good life together, she said. Arsenal is her team, he worked there, they had a season ticket to all the games. The season ticket is what I miss most from the marriage, she laughingly explains. Well, I miss sex too but you can get that anywhere.

I ask her what happened to her season-ticket life?

She says, “my son was born on the same day as my husband’s murdered daughter” and the air which had been sluggish and on pause, rushes back in as if we had all been holding our breath.

He was a father to a murdered child. He and his wife had sent her to England for a better life and her throat had been slit by the woman who was supposed to be looking after her. She pleaded insanity and did not serve even one full year.

They would visit her grave on her birthday, her death-day, the day of the trial result. The birth of their son ended the constant vigil for Melina who did not want to take MJ to visit the grave of his long-dead, never-met-never-would-meet, bloodied, half-sister on his birthday. The ghost tightened her grip and her father would spend evenings at home drinking and staring at photos of his loss whilst his wife and son disappeared like snowflakes in the rain, out of his life.

Melina smiles a lot, showing her gold teeth. She is not beautiful, but she is impatiently alive. She asks me why I talked to her. I cannot find the answer that fits so murmur that it was her comment about positive action but in reality, she was technicolour on a deaf, dumb and blind high-street, her story sought out a teller and chose me.

She tells me she coaches basketball and various other sports. She could swim 60 lengths at once but now she smokes she probably couldn’t do it any longer. Do I swim, she wants to know. Yes, I tell her, quite regularly now. Am I good, she wants to know. Yes I say, I always was. Who’s my team? I say I have none, that my support of Spurs was really my support of my brother’s support of Spurs when we were children together. Despite my support of her nemesis, she continues. Do I read, she wants to know. Yes, lots. What’s the last book I read? I bring The Age of Shiva out of my bag and briefly say it’s about choices and where they lead.

She examines the book, glances at the back cover, returns it to me and is already onto the next question, stories from her scattered mind escaping from her mouth to anyone around to receive them.

Glove

Clapham High Street. I’m upstairs waiting for the right sort of wine to be poured in the pub behind me, having a smoke. I’m sat on the jutted out part of the pub below the grimy windows, in front of the bickering doormen, a torn-poster away from the couple to my right. It’s chilly but not quite raining. Water particles in the damp air cling to exposed skin and settle heavy in the lungs of passers by.

For entertainment I look up to the road. My view is blocked by a partition made of black plastic material, which separates the pub’s piece of pavement from the public’s piece of pavement and the kerb. I muse at the advertising potential there and wonder if in a few years' time we’ll project screens onto barriers such as these to provide distraction for a lonely smoke. I glance to my left.

Cars drive slowly past. Cyclists meander. People walk to and from their evenings, wrapping scarves around themselves, hugging jackets close, pulling beanies over wet fringes. One glove lies on the pavement. Palm up. A left hand. Grey suede. Its fingers curled up and beckoning.

Did the owner fling it at someone, challenging them to an duel; “retract those words Sir, or suffer the consequences. She is a lady, I will not hear speak of her in that way. Prepare to die.” Perhaps the now de-gloved one was bundled into a taxi, against his will and, having perceived this possibility, smuggled a pre-written note into one of the fingers to leave a clue as to his strange disappearance; “this map will lead you to a buried key and the address of a safety deposit box where there is a note. I can say no more for fear of your endangerment. Do not alert the police. They are involved at the highest levels and you will be placed in even more danger. This glove will self-destruct in 30 seconds.”

I am dripped on from the awning above me. I remember that I’m in Clapham and stand up with a sigh; the abandoned glove is almost certainly the result of a drunken transition from pavement to car – no international spy mystery or misplaced, broken-hearted, honour-killing in sight. My wine is poured, my friend awaits me downstairs, I start off down the spiral staircase out of the cold. The doormen, now on the other side of their quarrel, move to let me pass.

I recall years ago, at law school, I lost a glove.

Luckily, there was a man on the course who only had one hand. Students advised me not to ask him, don’t draw attention to the fact that he only has one hand, don’t make an issue of it. Like it would be possible for him to forget that he only had one hand - reaching for a pen and losing his balance as his body naturally followed through his movements, trying to scratch his brow but it remained stubbornly, tantalisingly itchy, holding his girl's hand but actually shoving her into the gutter, giving a nothing to the bus driver instead of the bus-pass in his back pocket. Oops, silly me. Where oh where oh where did I leave my hand? Oh yes, that’s right. I left it in a car when I was 6 where I also left my arm and my parents. Cheers. I’d forgotten until you asked about your glove.

Undeterred I approach him. Simon, I lost a glove. Would you like the remaining one? He smiles at me. Would I? Do you know how hard it is buying just one glove? This is great, thanks!

It fit perfectly.