Carnival

Jackie has the week off and Karen is covering her walk, which is the one next to mine. Fay is immediately behind, covering Crystal Palace Road because Richard is also away. I hear someone ask where he is.

Juliet's head pops around the corner of the frame. 'He's probably at home having a smash innit,' she reports with mischievous glee.

'Really Juliet,' I say with mock indignation. 'I'm surprised at you.'

'All right then,' she adds, somehow taking my faux outrage as a request for clarification. 'He's at home having a wank!' She does the hand gesture in illustration of her hypothesis.

'Must run in the family,' says Danny without looking around.

'Fuck off,' suggests Fay, who is Juliet's older sister.

'Are you going to the carnival?' Karen asks.

'You must have nearly all of your tea set now, yeah?' Danny continues. 'Just a few weeks to go. You must be excited.'

'Fuck off.'

'Harsh,' says Andre as he walks past, loaded down with parcels.

'Did she just tell you to fuck off?' asks Joel from the frame on the other side of Danny.

'You can fuck off too,' says Fay, directly addressing Andre for some reason.

'Don't say that, Fay,' Andre smiles.

'Fuck off.'

'Just think, your whole tea set might be finished soon. That should make you happy, yeah?'

I asked about the tea set last week. Danny told me that Fay has a subscription to a weekly magazine, one which comes to the sorting office because she lives in the area. It's something to do with the late Princess of Wales, and each issue of the magazine comes with a souvenir item of fake commemorative crockery building up into a sort of Lady Diana tribute tea set with cups, sugar bowl, fancy spoons and so on and so forth. Our amusement derives from this being the very last thing anyone would ever expect of Fay.

'Lady Di would be very disappointed to hear you talking like that, Fay,' says Danny.

'Fuck off.'

'So ladylike!'

She kisses her teeth. 'You better watch I don't cut you.'

'Don't be like that, darling,' says Andre.

'And after I've cut you, I'm going to kidnap your dad and do him up the arse with a strap on,' Fay adds, almost casually as she continues to sort mail into the frame. 'And I'll make your mum watch innit.'

Andre doesn't have an answer to this one and walks off, silent with laughter.

Everybody pauses in their work to look at Fay, impressed. She smiles to herself and basks in our admiration.

'Are you going to the carnival, Fay?' Karen asks again.

'I'm going to have to see. I don't know what him indoors wants to do, you know.'

'Bring him along. Tell him you'll be doing the bogle innit. That might help him make up his mind.'

'That's that dance, isn't it?' I say, because it's one of those things I've been wondering about. 'The bogle, I mean.'

'What dance?' says Karen.

'You know,' I say, and I put my letters down and step back into the walkway. I put my hands on my knees and stick my arse in the air, moving it up and down whilst impersonating a dancehall rhythm with my mouth. 'That dance.'

'Fay, have you seen this?' says Karen.

Fay looks around and chuckles. 'Oh my days.'

'But is that the bogle?' I get back to my letters. They still haven't answered the question.

'You want to come to the carnival with us, Lawrence?' Karen asks.

'I dunno. Sounds a bit lively for me, Notting Hill and all that.'

'You should come with us. You ain't got nothing on this weekend innit.'

'I don't know. It'll be all that bashment stuff.' It occurs to me that I had another question. 'What is bashment anyway?'

'What's bashment?'

'Yeah - I keep hearing that word on the radio, so what is it? Is it just like dancehall and that?'

'He can't go. His misses won't let him innit.' Juliet has turned up out of nowhere.

'Well, I don't know about that,' I say, although I sort of do. I try to imagine herself at the Notting Hill carnival, doing her best to stick to the white bits with the whole food and hand knitted goods while bending over backwards to identify with black people and getting it all wrong because she doesn't actually know any, apart from Nadia. She has it in her head that I have a thing about Nadia, which I suspect is a misinterpretation of my talking to Nadia like she's a human being rather than my black friend.

'I'm going,' says Juliet, and like everything Juliet says, or at least everything Juliet says to me, there's something in there that I don't quite understand - possibly an invitation, an element of amusement although nothing cruel. She has a fierce little face, like a black Minnie the Minx. She's trouble but in an interesting way.

'You can go with us lot,' says Karen.

I bite my lip and keep on sorting the mail, wishing the world was just a little bit different to how it is.