by Ami Rao
‘The police. They can’t find him.’
Ameena covered her mouth, not letting the sound escape, more for her mother’s sake than her own. ‘The police? Mum, what’s going on?’
David had come in and he stood by the door, a concerned look on his face, but she barely registered his presence. Or maybe she did register his presence and then gestured for him to leave, or maybe he decided to leave on his own because a few minutes later, he went back outside, closing the bedroom door behind him. She heard the squeak of the door hinges, the click of the latch, his footsteps as he walked away. Everything sounded amplified.
Inside the bedroom, Ameena rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers.
‘Mum? What’s going on?’ she repeated purposefully, forcing herself to keep calm.
‘We won’t know till we find him.’
‘Have you looked in Faisal’s house?’
‘They can’t find Faisal either. Both are gone.’
‘Gone? What do you mean, gone? They’ve got to be somewhere, haven’t they? I mean they couldn’t have vanished into thin air! Have you asked at the mosque?’
‘Yes. Nobody knows anything, or they don’t want to say. Ameena, I’m scared.’
‘Don’t be silly. He’s probably gone to the Arena or wherever to watch football or music or boxing or whatever those boys do when they’re all together.’
A long pause. And then Zoya said quietly, ‘No… no… I think something bad has happened.’
And then Ameena knew; some part of her already knew.
‘Mum, what are you not telling me?’
‘Nothing. You don’t worry. I will call you tomorrow,’ her mother said and then she hung up without saying goodbye.
Ameena stood up and slowly walked out to the living room in her underclothes. Then she looked at David and frowned.
‘I think my brother’s done something terrible,’ she said.
3.18
Three days. Five. Eight. Ameena spoke to her mother daily, but no one had heard anything more about the missing boys; the police were involved, her mother reported, they had a search underway, but so far they’d come up with nothing. Later, Ameena confided to David that she felt her parents were hiding something from her, only she didn’t dare imagine what.
She tried to keep herself busy, spending long hours in the office, or in the studio, painting. On David’s insistence, she went out a few nights with her friends from work, but despite a brave front, she carried an anxiety inside her those days, an edginess that made her jump every time her phone would ring or beep or flash. She barely slept, lying awake at night, wondering where her brother might be, what terrible fate may have befallen him, her mind wandering to innumerable dark places, until finally sleep would come and cover her like a blanket, uncoupling her, at least temporarily, from her own thoughts. And so, when she heard David’s voice – uncharacteristically loud and unnaturally irate – in the darkest alcoves of her mind, she thought at first that it was a dream.
‘Okay, what’s this?’ David was saying loudly, walking into the bedroom, waking her up. She opened her eyes. He was holding it in his hands.
‘Ummm… what?’ she murmured sleepily. ‘Oh, hi… Yahrzeit candle… for your mum.’
‘Ameena, are you kidding?’ he retorted angrily. ‘You know I’m not… I haven’t… I don’t do this kind of thing.’
But then he looked at her face, propped up on the pillow, her eyes heavy with sleep. She didn’t speak. She didn’t get up. She just lay there looking very sad, and he sighed.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just… I walked into the apartment and I haven’t been sleeping enough with this crazy double life and I was so tired, and it was dark, and I saw it burning there and it made it all come back, you know… all the memories, her face, the instant she… went someplace else. It made everything very real again. Sometimes, it’s just easier when it’s not, you know, real.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a small voice, covering her face with her hands, ‘I should have asked you first. I… well, I knew what date it was today… and… I heard you play the other night and you were better than ever, and I thought, God, classical or jazz, on the piano, that’s as good as it gets, she’d have been so proud of you… and I… I had my own family on my mind, but I mean I can’t presume to understand what it must feel like to lose a parent… I’m so sorry.’
‘Aaah… come here,’ he said, and in two strides he was sitting on the bed next to her. ‘This stuff is complex, Ameena, and uber-multilayered. A man’s feelings when it comes to his dead mother. Mixed with a discussion on classical music vs. jazz. Mixed with the phases of Jewish bereavement. Twelve PhDs worth of analysis right there. Not solveable by Yahrzeit candle, really.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, burying her head in his chest.
‘Don’t worry, sweet,’ he said, drawing her into him and caressing the back of her neck, ‘you meant well. Anyway, luckily for you and unluckily for me, I find it impossible to stay mad at you for too long.’ Then he pulled away slightly, so he could look at her. ‘Where did you even find that?’
‘The Judaica store.’
‘The Judaica store?’
‘Yeah. I think they all thought I was Jewish. I kind of played along…’
David looked at her questioningly. ‘Played along? Like how, exactly?’
‘Well, for some reason they thought I was from Israel.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know why. The accent maybe. But I didn’t really correct them. So then, I created this elaborate story. I said I came here, to this country, for love. For you. They were all very moved.’
David opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it again. His eyes widened in a sudden flare of emotion. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
3.19
‘Hi Sally,’ David said genially into the speakerphone on his desk, ‘what’s up?’
‘Oh, nothing – your girlfriend’s here.’ The office secretary lowered her voice into a conspiratorial hush. ‘You didn’t tell me she was so attractive.’
‘Ameena? Ameena’s here?’ David asked, surprised, picking up the receiver. He hadn’t really taken Ameena to be the surprise-giving type. In fact, it was quite the opposite with her; she liked things to be planned, she always planned – meticulously most of the time.
‘Yes,’ Sally whispered, ‘she was standing right here in front of me. I asked her to take a seat while I called your office. So, now, she’s sitting right here in front of me. God David, you really didn’t tell me she was so…’
‘Attractive… yes, yes, you said that. Okay, I’ll be there in five minutes, I just need to get this pitch across to Hershel before he starts to moan again.’
‘Oh yeah. Hershel’s moany voice. Always a treat, that.’
‘Yup, like Halloween candy. We’ve had a surprisingly long run without hearing it though, haven’t we? Almost scared to breathe around him, lest the spell gets broken. Right, see you shortly. Offer her a coffee or something. She likes it hot.’
‘Ooh, David!’
‘Her coffee, Sally, her coffee. She likes her coffee hot.’
David smiled as he put the receiver down, although he was still slightly perplexed that Ameena hadn’t mentioned anything about visiting. He looked at the watch on his wrist – one of his father’s old treasures, a rare piece that he’d been told was worth a lot, though he would never think of selling it, no that seemed totally wrong, immoral even, like peddling his father’s memories. It was five thirty in the evening. He wondered if he could go over the Burt Teabags pitch with Hershel and then just call it a day, leave with Ameena, get a drink by the river, make an evening of it.
It was more than an hour later when David emerged from Hershel’s office. They had conferenced in the client, a young, particularly offensive trust-fund type named Burt Davies, over the phone and gone through
the presentation together – a proposal outlining what they believed was a novel approach to marketing stringless tea bags. But what David had hoped would be no more than a quick progress check rapidly went sideways…
‘It’s all wrong, guys,’ Burt whined in his objectionably nasal voice, ‘just horribly wrong. I mean, we don’t want them to think, “That’s nice. That would be nice to have.” This isn’t a new food processor. This is not nice. This is a breakthrough! This is about us being environmentally forward and socially conscious. This is about bigger things. Think of all the good this will do to the environment. We are actively combatting global warming here. I mean, fuck! I mean, booyah! And well, I don’t get any of that from what you’ve put together. The problem is, and it’s a big one – your services are not exactly inexpensive. Like, basically, what I’m saying is that you’re gouging my eyes out. Well, let me tell you, that this, whatever it is you’re trying to sell me, isn’t worth a bag of stale bagels. No disrespect.’
David, who felt more than slightly sceptical about the general idea of teabags being ‘booyah’ – strings or no strings – drummed his fingers on his knee and wondered if he had ever encountered anyone, anyone, more pompous than Burt Teabags. But Hershel – Hershel, who ordinarily would have cried (actually) at the mere thought of losing a client – got on the speakerphone and cleared his throat in a way that made David grimace.
Then, in a display of such anti-Hershelesque sangfroid as seen never before, he said, ‘You see, the thing is, Burt, how I see it, is that we are small, dedicated bunch of people who eschew ego, melodrama and individual agendas in favour of openness, collaboration and the greater good, so if you feel someone else can do a better job…’
And David, full of horror at Hershel’s obvious recklessness, for the client was lazy, boorish and unintelligent, surely, but business was business and you never drove away business no matter how lazy, boorish and unintelligent the business may be, felt the need to overrule Hershel on this matter. And so, out of a sense of loyalty to Hershel – who had gone loopy clearly, totally bonkers – rather than any kind of goodwill for the client, he clapped his palm on Hershel’s mouth, and while Hershel gurgled and gulped, he said into the phone, ‘…you should wait until you see what we came up with just this morning. Is what Hershel means to say.’
David then spent several minutes trying to appease the client enough to at least temporarily get rid of him. He spent another several minutes trying to assure Hershel that he needn’t trouble himself any more with the stringless teabags – ‘I’ve got this one, trust me’ – and only when he saw that Hershel had finally stopped looking so hopelessly loopy did David leave the office, but all that had taken much longer than he expected and when he got to reception, he realised that there was no one sitting in the waiting area and that Sally was giving him a particularly apologetic apologetic look.
‘She’s gone,’ Sally said, as if to expound upon her particularly apologetic apologetic look.
‘Fuck. When?’
‘I’m sorry David, but I didn’t even see her leave. She didn’t say she was leaving or anything. One minute she was there and the next, she was gone.’
‘Oh boy, I’m in a whole lot of trouble I think.’
Sally snorted. ‘Well, it’s a bit harsh if you ask me, to show up without telling you and then get upset when you can’t get out of work immediately. I mean this is your workplace.’
David laughed. ‘Thank you Sally, I appreciate the moral support.’ Then he ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. ‘Well, I’d better go try and fix this.’
‘This is the problem with these exotic types,’ he could hear Sally muttering to herself as he stepped into the elevator, ‘so high and mighty…’
It was close to seven in the evening when David arrived home, the mirrored panes of glass on the tall buildings reflecting the light up and down the gridded streets, giving the city the hazy, somewhat wistful look of an overexposed photograph.
‘Hel-looo?’ he called melodiously as he walked into the apartment. ‘Ameena?’
Ameena’s keys were on the little wooden plank immediately to the right of the entrance that served as their console table – a rectangular piece of heart pine they had found together on a recent trip to Vermont, on a walk through the woods, lying on the ground, stupendous in its colouring and its large, unevenly split knots. In a moment of sentimentality, David had picked it up and carved their names on it, and then of course they had to bring it home and give it legs, and now they used it as a console table on which they placed their keys and sundries.
He placed his keys next to hers and wandered in quietly in case she might be on the phone; perhaps there had been news for her from home. But she wasn’t in the bedroom and David found her instead in the studio that was at that moment bathed in a floating tangerine glow. Ameena was kneeling on the floor with earphones on, painting a large sheet of paper with broad, furious brushstrokes. The image, which to David’s quick glance seemed almost complete, was that of a young woman in a vivid blue dress, framed by the violet-hued evening light, rising from a chair, her face captured in a split second of anticipation. The artist herself, he noticed, was wearing ankle-length jeans and a white ribbed sleeveless vest, and with her hair tied up in a bandana, an accidental streak of blue paint on her left cheek and that characteristic look of intensity in her eyes, she conjured up a vision that made him want to lift her off the ground and kiss her mouth.
Ah, but would she kiss him back? He pondered it for a second – it was hard to tell these things with women. It was hard to tell anything with women. She hadn’t even noticed him come in. But maybe when she did… Wait, was it wrong of him to be wondering such things when she was clearly angry with him? Was it utterly idiotic? Was he such a complete fool?
But she did that to him, he realised, she could do that to him by doing nothing at all. She was doing it now. Driving him to distraction. Reducing him to a creature with only two functioning organs, both of which were thinking about her face and how it changed sometimes when he touched her, how her lips parted and her eyelids trembled and her eyes rolled back all the way into them, moments before she was going to come. That. Her pleasure-face.
And then she moved her real-life face slightly and noticed him. He smiled. Ameena pulled off her earphones slowly, first one, then the other, and the rocky, slightly unstable tones of Nina Simone filled the room. Still unspeaking, she leaned over him, her back arched like a cat, her body brushing his ever so slightly to reach the stereo, and then turned the sound off abruptly. ‘Mississippi Goddam’ cut to silence.
‘Fuck you,’ she said with a cold, quiet, deliberateness.
‘Ameena, I’m so sorry you had to leave like that.’
‘Huh?’
‘I’m so sorry you had to wait so long, I had to do this damn pitch for Hershel and—’
‘David, I just happened to be two blocks from you, I wrapped up an interview early with a buyer, I was right there, I thought I’d surprise you, say hi, it wasn’t a big deal. You were busy, that’s cool.’
‘Okay?’ he said, confused.
‘I don’t give a fuck about waiting.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No!’ she said incredulously as if she could hardly believe the exchange that was taking place between them.
‘So… so, why are you mad then?’ he asked, brows furrowed.
She made an exasperated noise and then – ‘David, you bought the painting and put it in your office?’
It took him a few minutes to grasp what she was saying and then it came to him, exactly what was going to happen. It was going to be all wrong what was going to happen, but it was going to happen anyway.
He braced himself.
‘You bought the painting and put it in your office,’ she repeated, a confirmation this time.
The painting. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The painting. Hershel had insisted it be
hung ‘front and centre’, and like a moron, he had agreed, been flattered even, and so it had been hung at reception, on the wall directly in front of where she would have been sitting waiting for him. David swore silently. This whole thing was his fault of course, the flip side to his prized in-the-moment existence, this chronic failure to anticipate how the future might unfold. The painting. Of course, she had seen the painting.
And now, this.
‘Okay, hang on,’ he ventured valiantly, ‘which part of that is bad? That I bought the painting or that I put it in my office?’
Ameena pulled the bandana off her head with a quiet forcefulness, and her hair, her magnificent mane of hair fell around her shoulders, catching the sun in a cascade of angry red tangles, framing her face like an aura, making it glow in that light, a kind of beautiful accident of place and time.
David looked at her, at her impossible, ravishing, rageful beauty, and he felt completely helpless.
‘Ameena… I…’
But she tilted her chin, gave him a slow, sardonic smile.
‘Just when I thought we were back on track,’ she said, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘How could you?’
‘Ameena, I was only trying—’
‘Please don’t tell me you were trying to help,’ she said firmly. ‘Please. Please don’t do that.’
‘But Ameena, I was only trying to help.’
‘David,’ she replied, her eyes steely, ‘go to hell.’
The next morning when the alarm rang, shrill and terrible, jolting them both out of sleep, Ameena didn’t bring up their fight from the previous evening or the fact that she had told him to go to hell. Nor did she expound upon where she herself had gone after that, for David, half-asleep in their bed, had reached across for her several times in the middle of the night, and had found only her absence. Several hours later, in the brand spanking newness of the morning, he thought, wherever she’d been, it was clearly to someplace nicer than hell, because the blackness was gone from her mood and she seemed relaxed and happy.
