Free NW by Zadie Smith Page A

all right?
    –Hot. It’s so hot.
    They pass through a pair of heavy wooden doors to the interior. A service is just finishing. The queer incense smell of high church lingers. They walk round the perimeter and avoid the eyes of the faithful. Deliciously cool in here, better than air conditioning. Natalie picks up a leaflet. Congenital autodidact, always wanting to know. It must have been that break. The break made the difference. She became Natalie Blake in that brief pause in their long history, between sixteen and eighteen. Educated herself on the floor of Kensal Rise Library while Leah smoked weed all the live-long day. Natalie always picks up the leaflets, the leaflets and everything else.
    –Parish founded in 938 . . . nothing of the original church remains . . . present church dates from around 1315 . . . Cromwellian bullet holes in the door, original . . .
    Naomi runs ahead and climbs the font (c. 1150, Purbeck marble). Leah tries to escape the aural range of Natalie’s lecture. The service ends: the parishioners begin to file out. In the doorway, the young vicar attempts to engage them. He holds a hand to his doughy waist like a nervous old woman, a flop of brown hair falls across one temple. He has a face that hopes to please but cannot owing to chinlessness. He is as he would have been in 1920 or 1880 or 1660. He is the same, but his congregation is different. Polish, Indian, African, Caribbean. The adults sharply dressed in shiny suits and clinging dresses from the market. The boys wear three-piece pinstripe, the girls clutch tiny Spanish shawls, their hair elaborately pressed and kiss-curled. The congregation pity the vicar, who is full of gentle suggestions. Let’s see if we can start on time next week. Anything you can spare. Anything at all. They smile and nod, not taking him too seriously. The vicar, too, is not listening to himself. He is intent on Leah, seeking her over the heads of his fleeing flock. Light streams in from the east. Leah moves that way instinctively, toward a monument in black and white marble hung upon the wall from which she learns that IT WAS HER HAPPINESS TO MAKE HIM YE JOYFUL FATHER OF 10 SONS & 7 DAUGHTERS AND IT IS HER PIETIE TO DEDICATE THIS MONUMENT TO YE PRESERVATION OF HIS MEMORY. HE DIED IN YE 48 YEAR OF HIS AGE. MARCH YE 24 1647. Nothing further is said of Her. Leah is drawn to put her fingers to the letters to measure their coolness. But Natalie says better not to, she says Spike don’t splash the holy water WOW the same sculptor fashioned the tomb of ELIZABETH 1ST no darling not that one she was a queen darling from LONG AGO no darling from before then even but did you know it was once
W I L S D O N
meaning well meaning spring at the foot of a hill which is where this water’s coming from I SAID STOP SPLASHING. Leah is suddenly so thirsty, she is made of thirst, she is only thirst. She kneels to examine the tap, reads the sign. Not Potable. Holy, but not potable.
    –Mummy!
    –No, not Mummy. This is somebody else. “Thought to be more powerful than the traditional Madonna, she has miraculous powers, including: the gift of serendipity, restoring lost memories, resuscitating dead babies . . .” Marcia would love this—sometimes people see visions of her in the churchyard. Marcia’s always having visions. Usually of white Madonnas, though, with blond hair and nice blouses from M & S. . . .
    How did she walk past it? At her back a Madonna, fashioned of jet limewood. The Madonna holds a mammoth baby in swaddling clothes.
The Christ Child
it says on the sign, his arms stretched out at either side,
his hands big with blessing
it says on the sign, but to Leah there seems no blessing in it. It looks more like accusation. The baby is cruciform; he is the shape of the thing that will destroy him. He reaches out for Leah. He reaches out to stop any escape, to the right or to the left.
    –“becoming the famous shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, “The Black