NW by Zadie Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

necks of chicken, slit the throat of a goat. Olive’s throat between Leah’s hands—how could a child be held with any more tenderness? Post-Olive it is easy to believe in consciousness of animals. Even the bubble-breathing crabs in the fishmonger’s have taken on a tragic aspect. Yet she eats them all, still. What a monster she is. Don’t let me come over dere and box you! She smokes the third.
    It gets dark slowly, then suddenly. Fairy lights wrapped student-wise in the apple tree. Contact lenses so dry it’s hard to see. Beyond the tree, the fence, the railway, Willesden. Number 37. It is from this direction that her father walks toward her. He comes no closer than Ned’s failed rosebush. He wears a hat.
    How’s your little dog, he asks.
    Leah finds she can answer him without opening her mouth. She tells him about all the things Olive has been up to since he died, last November, every little thing, all the little things! Even the dullest detail of the dog’s day entertains him. He says, dear oh dear, and brushes the crumbs off his ratty blue cardie, chuckling. He is dressed exactly as they dressed him in Morehurst, except this trilby she’s never seen before, which is the only word Leah knows for the old style of hats. He has a white stain on his thigh, like semen, crusty in a ridge of his faded brown cords that no one has bothered to clean. Those pretty Ukrainian nurses who never stayed long.
    Behind here it’s nothing but bleedin’ foxes, says Hanwell, sadly.
    It’s really an epidemic. That is, they were always there, in the same numbers as they are now, but now it is called an epidemic. A recent headline in
The Standard
, NORTHWEST FOX EPIDEMIC, and a photograph of a man kneeling in a garden surrounded by the corpses of foxes he’d shot. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Dozens and dozens! says Leah, and that’s how we live now, defending our own little patch, it didn’t used to be like that, but everything’s changed, hasn’t it, that’s what they say, everything’s changed. Colin Hanwell tries to listen. Really he isn’t very interested in foxes and what they might symbolize.
    Well, I can see how they got that impression, says Hanwell.
    What?
    I say I can see how they would have got that idea, the way you carry on.
    What?
    If you tell me you’re happy, says Hanwell, you’re happy and there’s an end to it.
    The talk turns to other matters. You never get your own pillowcase back from laundry. The really important things is that Chef Maureen accepts your frozen wheat-free lasagnas, that you might be allowed to eat these while others have their dietary requirements ignored and as a consequence shit blood and have convulsions and contract hiccups that never stop. Yes, concedes Leah, yes, Dad, perhaps. Perhaps shitting blood is worse than symbols and sadness and the global situation. You can’t speak to doctors like that, whispers Hanwell, you might be overheard, you never know when they’ll come by. You just have to pray that they do.
    Leah begins to feel she is in control and that she might shape what remains of this meeting to her own satisfaction. She starts to make her father say things, directing him, moving his arms and manipulating his expressions, first innocently, and then with deliberation, so he says I love you, you know. And then: Love, you know I’ve always loved you. And: I love you don’t worry it’s nice here. And even: I can see a light. After a while he looks strange doing it and Leah feels ashamed and stops. And still he stays, and by doing so holds out the delicious possibility of madness, such a lovely indulgence. If she didn’t have this everyday life to go to with its admin and rent and husband and work she could go mad! Why not go mad!
    And remember to lock the gate with the water pressure where the gas is hot in the oven of the plug to switch it off when you leave it using only red onions and a pinch of cinnamon then getting back before you need to use a