Pure, Fucking Profit

It’s​ a while since I saw Cléo de 5 à 7, but I remember that it opens with a tarot spread. The tarot reader draws cards in groups of three, for past, present and future. The young woman with her, Cléo Victoire, her blonde hair elaborately curled back onto her head like a Parisian Dusty Springfield, bites her fingers, covers her face, and after confessing that she’s come to hear her fortune while waiting for the results of a biopsy, explodes when she sees the Death card. It’s a scary image: a skeleton swings a scythe, with severed heads and hands under his feet. Agnès Varda films the tarot cards in full colour, but the women’s faces (along with the rest of the film) are in black and white. The tarot reader says she shouldn’t be alarmed: they are hands and heads, not bones and skulls, and the card’s message is not annihilation but transformation. ‘Don’t talk,’ Cléo says, not listening any more. ‘I’ve known for two days.’ She offers her palm, and when the reader hesitates to tell her what she sees there, runs out the door and into a ninety-minute film about the last hours before a death sentence – after which uncertainty can no longer be found in a deck of cards, or anywhere else.

The unnamed protagonist of Natasha Brown’s first novel, Assembly, isn’t the sort who would turn to a tarot reader. She went to Oxbridge, works in finance, owns her flat, employs a wealth manager. Her healthcare is private, and she quite likes going to her oncologist in Harley Street: the stamen-snipped lilies in the waiting room make her think of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her doctor wears caramel satin, and her peeping camisole is trimmed in lace. ‘Serious, the doctor labours the word. Tells me I need to take this seriously.’ The prognosis makes her think of the wealth manager’s bar charts, because her imminent demise is also the most lucrative type of death, according to her life insurance policy.

The next day she goes to a party at her boyfriend’s country seat for a celebration of his parents’ long marriage. She tells him everything’s fine. ‘He was easily convinced, accustomed to happy endings and painless resolution.’ (I felt for the boyfriend, momentarily: he doesn’t yet know what sort of book he’s in.) Assembly takes a character who seems to have the best our society has to offer young women in the early 21st century – no surprise: it’s still money, status and love – and shows us why she still might consider her best response to the doctor’s news to be to do nothing. It’s a simple, freighted story, but the simplicity of the narrative allows complexity in the form: over barely a hundred pages, broken into prose fragments that have been assembled with both care and mercilessness, Brown presents the world as seen by someone young, gifted and Black – and sick of it all. For a reader to see what she sees, it’s necessary for certain pillars to crumble, even if they’re narrative ones.

Assembly opens with a tarot spread of its own. Brown presents three moments, each with its own title. The first, ‘Alright’, is the Sexist Boss card: ‘He could see her at her desk from his office and regularly dialled her extension to comment on what he saw (and what he made of it): her hair (wild), her skin (exotic), her blouse (barely containing those breasts).’ The second, ‘What It’s Like’, is the Hostile Environment card: ‘We’ve been working, we’ve been paying our taxes. We cheer for England in the World Cup! So when the government told us to register; told us to download this app and pay to register; it hurt.’ The third, ‘After the Digestif, He Gets Going’, is the Angry Man card: ‘When that mouth opened up and coughed its vitriol at her, making some at the table a little uncomfortable, she understood the source of its anger, despite being the target.’ They seem to represent three political movements: MeToo, Brexit and BLM. Or they are just three things that happen to the heroine on three consecutive days: three things to which her response must be controlled. Her boss eventually tries to kiss her – ‘he grabbed her shoulders and pressed his open mouth on to her face’ is the way Brown puts it – and what can she do but what she does? She imagines her body closed to him, folded away, and accepts the limp apology contained in the words ‘It’s alright.’ To the England supporter downloading the Home Office app, she gives a listening silence. To the post-prandial vitriol, she brings the knowledge that speaking up is probably pointless, and the hope that her phone will buzz soon. But it is costly to keep meeting this sort of hostility with politeness.

After the tarot spread, the title card: Assembly. The assembly is at a school, where she shows the girls what they could have if they work hard. In front of a PowerPoint presentation, with the bank’s logo floating above her head, she speaks:

It’s a story. There are challenges. There’s hard work, pulling up laces, rolling up shirtsleeves, and forcing yourself. Up. Overcoming, transcending, etc. You’ve heard it before. It’s not my life, but it’s illuminated two metres tall behind me and I’m speaking it into the soft, malleable faces tilted forward on uniformed shoulders. I recite my old lines like new secrets. Click to the next slide.

This is the storyline she has been following herself until now: don’t give up, get on your bike, work twice as hard as a white man, stiffen your lip, thicken your skin, do it because your grandmother couldn’t, never complain, never explain, smile while you’re doing it. She knows that she speaks it rather than lives it: ‘How many women and girls have I lied to?’ Overcoming, transcending, etc. Her life – and we’ve shifted from watching her squirm at a third-person distance to being able to hear her thoughts in the first person, from black and white to colour – is a weakened appetite, a held breath. ‘But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted,’ she thinks. ‘Perhaps it’s time to end this story.’

The deus ex machina of the caramel-satin doctor steps in, delivering an end to the story that the protagonist doesn’t have to do anything to bring about. But other characters offer other endings. Her boyfriend, with his Hugh Grant charm and 5 mg of citalopram daily, wants to celebrate her not-dying with bottled beer. His relief provokes the faux-guilty admission he’s been texting with his ex. ‘She got a puppy.’ Can she see a picture? ‘Forget it. I shouldn’t have mentioned the puppy.’ Sleeping beside him after sex, ‘cock pink against his thigh’, she asks herself if she truly prefers this to sleeping by herself. Their relationship doesn’t seem to be about love, or even about comfort, but it works as a part of the overcoming, transcending, etc narrative. It is an alliance that makes sense: it de-drearifies him and burnishes her. Old wealth and new money. ‘We said we. This seemed a necessary aspect of life, like work. Or exercise.’

Rach, her best friend (a term they use with ‘post-postmodern earnestness’), offers her a prediction for the weekend: the trip means big things, ‘things she abstracted to diamond ring emojis’. Can our heroine bring herself to want that, a complete melding with the class that enslaved hers? For her boyfriend’s father, the Harry-Meghan marriage is ‘inspiring stuff’, but for her? ‘I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of the ascent.’ ‘Love. It’s a sip of Coke,’ she sneers a few pages later, in an excoriating riff on the abuses of that word, ‘not that pleasant, sharp on the tongue, but fizzes delightfully from can to mouth to dampening throat.’

Merrick, her boss, offers a different ending. ‘The unpleasantness is behind us,’ he says, beaming in from the US on the conference screen. He umms and aahs before getting out the word that’s on the tip of his tongue: ‘diversity’. It’s a move upwards, but not hers alone. ‘So, look, of course I agreed to share the promotion,’ her colleague Lou tells her. He grew up ‘dirt-fucking-poor’ in Bedford. ‘Of course. You deserve this, just as much as me. OK? OK. Don’t let anyone tell you different.’ Overcoming, transcending, etc. The hard work is paying off. Everything is falling into place. The diamond ring is waiting crouched in a box; the embossed business cards only need reprinting. And yet the sky is melting. ‘This is everything,’ she registers. ‘I have everything.’ (These two sentences are paragraphs in themselves, as if she’s willing them to sink in, or feel more true.) Then she gets on a train to the boyfriend’s parents’ place, twist-cracks open a miniature bottle of red wine bought from the trolley, closes her eyes and heads irreversibly into the future.

This is where the novel becomes unstoppable, hurtling her, the boyfriend, his ex and his parents towards a still-secret cancer diagnosis and a marquee that must be raised on time. The narrative fragments fuse together under the pressure, like sedimentary rock. The past comes close:

After the war, the crumbling empire sent again for her colonial subjects. Not soldiers, this time, but nurses to carry a wavering NHS on their backs. Enoch Powell himself sailed upon Barbados and implored us, come. And so we came and built and mended and nursed; cooked and cleaned. We paid taxes, paid extortionate rent to the few landlords who would take us. We were hated. The National Front chased, burnt, stabbed, eradicated. Churchill set up task forces to get us out. Keep England White. Enoch, the once intrepid recruiter, now warned of bloodied rivers if we didn’t leave. New laws were drawn up; our rights revoked.

If you had survived this, you would want your story to be about overcoming, transcending, etc. You had given up the veranda in Jamaica, where stories are different. There, they are about family, they are heard deep into the night, they are told when you are all assembled, sitting together. ‘A promise of a welcome, warm, loving family, always, retreating.’ She is ‘what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit. A natural resource to exploit and exploit, denigrate and exploit.’ To herself, she is barely a person. ‘This is it, end of the line. I am done.’

When she arrives at the house, the emotion keeps rising, counterpointed by wry description: the mini lampposts casting pools of light on the drive, the shabby floral two-seater sofas, the mother, ‘efficient with a blunt knife’, scraping butter over burned toast. On the walls are a mixture of framed exhibition posters, proper oil paintings and things the children once drew at nursery. Her boyfriend becomes ‘the son’, belonging to the dynasty rather than to her. ‘What am I doing here?’ she keeps asking herself. Time only goes forwards, and yet she doesn’t want to be part of this.

At the end of Cléo de 5 à 7, Cléo meets a soldier on leave from the Algerian War. He lives with death too. They walk around Parc Montsouris, they talk, and when her doctor catches up with them and confirms what Cléo and the tarot reader already knew, Cléo says she is, or perhaps just realises she is, happy. There is nothing so romantic in Assembly. Or maybe there is. The heroine’s body has kept the score (it whispers: enough!) and this offers her a way out. ‘I’m not sure I understood that I could stop, before this. That there was any alternative to survivable. But in my metastasis, I find possibility.’ If it’s not a story of overcoming, transcending, etc, what will it be? You must change your life, but only you know how.