Class Identity and Social Mobility Theme Analysis

The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

— Come by tomorrow. Pay you back. Swear to God, yeah? Thanks, seriously. You saved me today.

— Why do you treat me like an idiot all the time?

The boy is a boy and Michel is a man but they look the same age.

— He was murdered! Why does it matter where he grew up?

Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K: “You can’t sleep here, son. You either need to move it along or we’ll have to take you in to the station to sleep it off.” You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap.

“She’s knows what she’s about. She’s conscious.”

“And the stones,” said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.

“You’re dreamin’,” he said.

“You rose up with these red pigtails in your hand. You dragged her up. You were the only one saw she was in trouble.”

It was not that Ms. Blake hadn’t noticed the white people walking around with the climbing equipment, or the white people huddled in stairwells discussing the best method to chain themselves to an oak tree. She had experienced her usual anthropological curiosity with regard to these matters. But she had thought it was more of an aesthetic than a protest.

“Then I realized the following: when some floppy-haired chap from Surrey stands before these judges, all his passionate arguments read as “pure advocacy.” He and the Judge recognize each other. They are understood by each other. Very likely went to the same school. But Whaley’s passion, or mine, or yours, reads as ‘aggression.’ To the judge. This is his house and you are an interloper within it. And let me tell you, with a woman it’s worse: ‘Aggressive hysteria.’ The first lesson is: turn yourself down. One notch. Two.”

Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she’d stopped being able to speak, or even to understand.

“I wish we could have talked more often.”

“Everyone loves a bredrin when he’s ten. After that he’s a problem. Can’t stay ten always.”

Here nothing less than a break—a sudden and total rupture—would do. She could see the act perfectly clearly, it appeared before her like an object in her hand—and then the wind shook the trees once more and her feet touched the pavement. The act remained just that: an act, a prospect, always possible. Someone would surely soon come to this bridge and claim it, both the possibility and the act itself, as they had been doing with grim regularity ever since the bridge was built. But right at this moment there was no one left to do it.

In her daughter’s eyes Natalie saw her own celebrated will reflected back at her, at twice the intensity.

On a tatty sofa a Rastafarian gentleman sat holding a picture of his adult son.

“You, me, all of us. Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.