“
Irie stepped out into streets she’d known her whole life, along a route she’d
walked a million times over. If someone asked her just then what memory was,
what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you
were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right
now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was
permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the
tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by
these sensations. Despite opting for a life of dentistry, she had not yet lost all of
the poetry in her soul, that is, she could still have the odd Proustian moment,
note layers upon layers, though she often experienced them in periodontal terms.
She got a twinge – as happens with a sensitive tooth, or in a ‘phantom tooth’,
when the nerve is exposed – she felt a twinge walking past the garage, where she
and Millat, aged thirteen, had passed one hundred and fifty pennies over the
counter, stolen from an Iqbal jam-jar, in a desperate attempt to buy a packet of
fags. She felt an ache (like a severe malocclusion, the pressure of one tooth upon
another) when she passed the park where they had cycled as children, where they
smoked their first joint, where he had kissed her once in the middle of a storm.
Irie wished she could give herself over to these past-present fictions: wallow in
them, make them sweeter, longer, particularly the kiss. But she had in her hand a
cold key, and surrounding her lives that were stranger than fiction, funnier than
fiction, crueller than fiction, and with consequences fiction can never have. She
didn’t want to be involved in the long story of those lives, but she was, and she
found herself dragged forward by the hair to their denouement, through the high
road – Mali’s Kebabs, Mr Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries – she could reel
them off blindfold; and then down under pigeon-shit bridge and that long wide
road that drops into Gladstone Park as if it’s falling into a green ocean. You
could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She
jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million
times over, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect.
”
”