NW by Zadie Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

also discussed by the hipsters opposite.
Gaia’s revenge
, says the girl to the boy.
Give it out long enough you get it back.
Pauline, always alive to the possibility of a group conversation, leans forward.
    –No fruit or veg in the shops, they’re saying. Makes sense if you think about it. Of course, it’s an island we’re on here. I always forget that, don’t you?

13.
    –Finished with the computer?
    –Need to wait till they close.
    –It’s almost seven o’clock? I need it.
    –It’s not seven online. Why don’t you get on with your own things?
    –That’s what I need it for.
    –Leah, I’ll call you when I’m done.
    Currency trading. The exploitation of volatility. She can only understand words, not numbers. The words are ominous. Add them to that look Michel has, right now, of arrested attention. Internal time stretched and stilled, inattentive to the minutes and hours outside of itself. Five minutes! He says it irritably whether thirty have gone by or a hundred or two hundred. Pornography does that, too. Art, too, so they say.
    Leah stands behind Michel in the darkness of the box room. Blue shimmer of the screen. He is two feet away. He is on the other side of the world. Why don’t you get on with your own things?
    She has the idea that there are a lot of things she has been waiting for weeks to do and now she will do them with the bright quickness of montage, like the middle section of a movie. In the living room the TV is on. More blue light in the hallway. In the box room, the computer plays angry hip hop, a sign that things are going badly. Sometimes she says to him: have you lost it? He becomes furious, he says it doesn’t work that way. Some days I lose, some days I win. How can he be losing or winning that same eight thousand pounds, over and over? Leah’s only inheritance from Hanwell, their only savings. The money itself has become notional, a notion materialist Hanwell—who kept his real paper money in a cardboard box in a mahogany credenza—would never understand. No more does Leah understand it. She sits on a chair in the open doorway between kitchen and garden. Toes in the grass. The skies are empty and silent. Outrage travels from next-door’s talk radio: It’s taken me fifty-two hours to get back from Singapore! A new old lesson about time. Broccoli comes from Kenya. Blood must be transported. Soldiers need supplies. Much of the better part of NW went on holiday, for Easter, with their little darlings. Maybe they will never return. A thought to float away on.
    Ned clonks down the wrought-iron steps, looking up at the sky.
    –Really weird.
    –I like it. I like the quiet.
    –Freaks me out. Like
Cocoon.
    –Not really.
    –Town was totally empty. Arbus at the Portrait Gallery with no crowds. Awesome. Real experience.
    Leah submits to Ned’s long, excited description. She envies his enthusiasm for the city. He does not pass his time with his ex-countrymen in their suburban enclaves, cracking beers, watching the rugby: he does everything to avoid them. Admirable. Exploring the city alone, seeking out gigs and talks and screenings and exhibitions, far-off parks and mystery Lidos. Leah, born and bred, never goes anywhere.
    –is really about integrity of like a, like a, like an idea? Blew me away. Anyway. I’m starving. Gonna go up and make myself some pasta and pesto. Listen, I’ll leave you a couple to be getting on with.
    He sets three on the window sill, pre-rolled. She looks at them lined up in the flat of her palm. She smokes the first quickly, to the orange cardboard butt. Olive chases rustlings through shadows. Then the second. The upstairs windows are open: Gloria screaming at her children. You nah listen! Me nah got all day to tell you da same damn ting over and over! Leah calls to Olive, who comes lolloping. Leah scoops her in both arms. Shammy leather skin. Vulnerable little ribcage with a gap for every finger. Wrong to love a dog so much, says Michel, who has wrung the