by Ami Rao
Nevertheless, she feels it and then she finds herself running to him, abandoning her suitcase in the middle of the busy arrivals hall, not caring about, not even noticing, the annoyance of the other passengers who have to stop mid-stride and negotiate their own luggage around hers, but running, actually running, a rhythm in the soles of her feet, a rhythm she cannot control. And him, marvelling at how magnificent she is in the cream-coloured overcoat that dramatises the colour of her eyes, catching his breath for a second, then catching her, drawing her into his arms, delaying it by four full beats for no good reason, but then lifting her off the ground, her arms round his neck, her legs wrapped round his waist, in front of those same strangers, melting their annoyance, making them smile. Americans are soft like that.
‘Hi,’ she says, ‘I’m so happy to see you.’
And he knows that she means it, that she doesn’t do anything without a reason, or say anything she doesn’t mean, that she has always been her own thing, so strong in her flavour and her power and her energy. And he is glad that he came, that he surprised her in this way.
‘God, I missed you,’ he says, looking at her, wanting to preserve this image of her face forever.
And she?
She pulls her face back and contemplates his, and imagines then, in that New York minute, that if her face is the moon, then his is the sun, whose light lights hers.
3.29
Ameena saw her school friend Denise briefly when she was in Manchester.
They’d kept in touch over this time that Ameena had been away, but when Denise answered the door, Ameena wasn’t expecting to see the unmistakeable round swell of her stomach.
‘You’re pregnant?’ she asked incredulously.
‘Yeah,’ Denise said, laughing happily, holding the round thing from the bottom with both her hands as if, if she were to let go, it might have bounced right off her skinny frame.
She was wearing a long, loose-fitting dress in a bright yellow print. She looked like a queen, Ameena thought, with her full lips and her almond eyes and her hair tied up at the very top of her head in a small bun.
‘You didn’t tell me?’
‘I wanted to surprise you, love,’ Denise replied affably, ‘I would have, obviously, if you weren’t coming. It’s only just gone four months. No one knows except, you know, family…’
‘Who?’ Ameena asked.
‘Pete,’ she whispered the name although it was just the two of them.
‘Pete?’ Ameena Gasped. ‘Peter Martin?’ Because she knew that Peter Martin and Sarah Adams – with the blue-blue eyes and the blond-blond hair – belonged to similar families, the kind of family that had art on their walls and kept fruit bowls on their kitchen counters and holidayed together somewhere in France.
Denise’s family did not holiday in France. Denise still lived with her parents in the council block they had always lived in, facing the main power station, a ten-minute walk from the school where Ameena and she had first met. Ameena looked around the flat she had spent so much of her own childhood in, a small, boxy space divided into rooms by way of flimsy makeshift walls. On the windowsill over the sink, there was a new addition – some kind of green plant, sturdy enough to survive in low light. But besides the plant, they were alone.
Denise giggled and nodded happily. She was, Ameena noticed, wearing pearl drops in her ears. Her skin, which had always been smooth and fresh and enviably blemish-free, bloomed even more than Ameena could recall. Her way of speaking too had changed – no dropped ‘g’s’, no slurred syllables, no trace of the familiar Indo-Carribean rhythm in her speech. In fact, she sounded remarkably like the white, middle-aged English teacher who had once taught them the ‘proper’ way to speak.
Ameena marvelled at this side of her friend. Denise never wore jewellery. Denise never giggled. Denise never paid attention to enunciation.
Denise was terrible and beautiful and wild.
Denise was going to be a mother?
They had met, Denise and her, on the first day of school, walking through the tarmacked path of the schoolyard, each holding their respective mother’s hand, and they had stared at each other, in the way that children do when, for whatever reason, they find themselves attracted to some latent quality in another child. And then, after the mothers had left – Ameena’s reluctantly, Denise’s gratefully – one of them had spoken to the other, neither remembers who had taken that first brave step, but that had then opened up the way to a firm and loyal friendship for the next thirteen years.
Although they had never discussed such things explicitly, Ameena knew that she had been protected many times over those thirteen years because of that first tentative hello on the school playground, for Denise from the very beginning had been a force to reckon with. She was feral, quick to hit back, unafraid to use filthy language that would stun her would-be foes into a kind of shocked silence. The girls didn’t come near her, the boys didn’t dare take her on, even the teachers were afraid of this dazzling, sharp-tongued thing, who wore her working-class roots on her bi-racial face like it was some rare and precious gift.
That was the thing, Denise had never needed jewellery.
‘I’m really sorry about what happened to your brother,’ Denise was saying. ‘We heard…’
‘Thanks,’ Ameena sighed, ‘but I’d rather talk about you.’
Denise nodded. ‘Sit, sit,’ she said, ‘can I get you some juice? Ribena? Oh, it’s pouring outside, I didn’t even realise. Tea?’
Then she said dreamily, before Ameena could answer, ‘We’re going to get married, after the baby comes, you know, when I can fit into a proper dress again. And after that I’m going to keep modelling. Pete likes me modelling,’ she explained shyly. ‘He says we will get a nanny for the baby, like someone with proper qualifications, from one of those nanny agencies. He had one himself. A Nigerian nanny. Retired now, but they’re still close.’
‘And your folks?’ Ameena asked, more interested in grappling with the present than in Denise’s bold vision of a future that was yet to materialise.
‘My folks,’ she replied, ‘are terrified.’
‘And his?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘they’re terrified too.’
‘And you?’ Ameena asked gently.
‘You know me, girl!’ Denise said, chin up bravely. ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’
Ameena nodded, not in understanding exactly, but in a kind of acceptance, as if she had just become aware of a big and significant ignorance inside her, for otherwise, how could she not have suspected earlier that this was exactly how Denise would have ended up.
3.30
The morning Ameena is due to return to New York, David thinks of a question she has asked of him before.
‘What matters?’ she had asked. An impossible question. But now, he takes a crack at it.
What matters? The (evolving) list of David Greenberg. In no particular order:
Jazz
Honesty
Miles Davis
America
The band
Democracy
The smell of her
The taste of her
Listening
Her paintings
Her painting-face
The piano
History
Johann Sebastian Bach
The Holocaust
Forgiveness
Freedom
Art
Expression
Art as an expression of freedom
Ruthie Greenberg (the memory of)
Slavery
The Path
Zen
Her hair
Literature
Inclusivity
Her pleasure-face
Studying her pleasure-face
Balance
Spirituality
/> One-ness
The Art of Fugue
The Art of Improvisation
The Art of Lovemaking
The Art of Ameena
3.31
‘Take me home,’ she says as they leave the airport building and then she wants to cry, and she doesn’t. But David does, she sees the mist in his green-brown eyes and she pretends not to notice, and she says nothing.
They hold hands in the backseat of a yellow cab, the windows open, their faces exposed to the brittle October breeze, not speaking.
Not needing to speak.
Not needing the need to speak.
They are familiar with this feeling, attuned to these private silences that only they share.
She can hear her suitcase sliding around in the boot.
The taxi driver swerves to change lanes, too quick, no blinker, no brakes, swears loudly, she falls sideways into David but when she tries to straighten up, he grips her arm, holds her back. Stay like that, his body tells hers.
And then a while later, when they come off a curve on the road, they spot it at the same time, that first glimpse of the skyline, as they rattle and jolt in the beat-up yellow cab.
He squeezes her hand. She shakes her head in wonderment.
Manhattan gleams in brazen glory like some great and magical city, its buildings washed in the glow of the afternoon sun, thousands of twinkling mirrors floating in the sky, and just in beholding it, their touching bodies tingle.
‘New York,’ she says simply, and the name is full of meaning.
The car next to them beeps loudly. A spate of angry beeps follow. The sun is so bright that the driver has to put his visor down and he grumbles in a language that only she understands. But he keeps driving, dangerously fast, and as they come closer and closer, the buildings appear taller and grander. She notices how when the sun hits them at a certain angle, their edifices glitter and wink; shards of glass planted at different depths, like wildflowers in a field.
Then the cab makes a turn and the skyline is temporarily lost.
3.32
In Manchester, it is night-time.
Kareem steps out of his room furtively, then looks around, his eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness. Even through the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, he can hear his father’s loud rhythmic snoring.
He pauses, then, satisfied that he will not be intercepted, he tiptoes softly down the stairs.
He is barefoot. In his arms, he carries an object, smooth flat metal.
When he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he lays the object down carefully on the pale Oriental runner that adorns the entrance of the house – a gift from his grandmother, all the way from a factory in Lahore where he knows tiny, dexterous fingers have woven those colourful silk threads together.
He uses both hands to unlatch the front door, but still it creaks, too loudly for his comfort, and he freezes, the door half open.
Any minute now, he imagines the lights coming on upstairs, voices heavy with sleep, switching quickly to panic when the eyes that belong to those voices see him, catch him red-handed like that. He would not be able to explain himself.
But there is no sound from anywhere.
With the door half ajar, he creeps back into the house for the object and then, carrying it in his arms, he steps out into the night, pulling the door shut behind him silently, awkwardly, using his elbows.
It is a still, dark night. No moon, no stars. Far away he can hear the yippy bark of a fox.
Kareem lets himself into the garage; it is soundproofed – the previous tenant was a drummer who used the space as a studio, and Kareem knows no noise will travel from here into the house; he and his mates have put this to the test many times.
But his heart is beating too fast, and in his hurry he slams the garage door right onto his hand. He jerks back but it is only reflex, triggered instinctively, and he is surprised that he feels nothing, only a dull numbness somewhere in the tips of his fingers.
Once he is safely inside, his pupils trace the outline of the red Citroen AX that his father insists on parking inside the garage after what his son has done to someone else’s car. Kareem unlocks it and watches as it comes to life, headlights almost blinding him temporarily, the omniscient eyes of some divine being.
He blinks once, then he bends down and places the object on the concrete floor of the garage, directly behind the front right wheel of the car. He does this carefully, methodically, then he stands up and surveys his handiwork – placement, he knows, will be key. Satisfied, he gets into the driver’s seat and starts the ignition, cringing at its loudness. He reverses backwards, slowly and deliberately, just enough for the front wheel to drive over the object, just enough for him to hear the unmistakeable crunch of metal underneath him. He stops the car and glances in his rear-view mirror – he is inches away from the back wall of the garage. Then he drives forwards, the same tiny motion, feeling the wheel go over the object and then off it, listening again for that muffled grinding sound.
Backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards he goes. He does this fifteen times to a count. Then he turns off the engine and gets out.
He bends down to look under the car and is pleased with what he finds. Slowly and systematically, he gathers up the mangled remains of his laptop and puts them into an empty rubbish bag he has left there earlier in the day. Then he leaves the garage, and after looking around to make sure there is no one in sight, he shoves the bag at the bottom of the already full rubbish bin that he knows is emptied every Tuesday morning at eight.
He has already acquired a shiny new laptop that is, at this moment, hidden away under his bed, bought from the money he has made by waiting tables at Salim’s curry house in Rusholme every evening after lectures. A new laptop identical to his old one, but with an unused, unsullied hard drive, its memory wiped clean before it had even arrived at the store he has bought it from. This new machine has no trace of what his fingers have typed or where is his mind has strayed or what history he has cached. So now, there is no way for anyone to ever know what he has thought or how often, how many times he has looked up ‘ways to make a home-made bomb’ or ‘ways to blow up a car’ or ‘ways to kill a man’.
Does thinking bad thoughts make you a bad person? he had asked his sister.
I don’t know, she had replied.
But he knew. He knew. He knew. He knew.
He knew, and the computer had known.
But now the computer is lying dead and disembodied at the bottom of the rubbish bin, millions of mutilated pieces of plastic and metal and secrets that can never be pieced together again. Kareem allows himself a small satisfied smile at the thought of that.
Back in his bathroom, when he turns on the light he notices the exposed flesh on his index finger where the nail has come clean off.
He turns on the tap.
And he waits for the pain to come.
3.33
In Tel Aviv, Abe is smoking a joint.
Next to him, lying asleep on the bed, is a beautiful girl.
Both the bedroom that he is in, and the bed that he is currently sitting on the edge of, as he smokes the joint, belong to the sleeping girl.
In front of him, facing where he is sitting, are glass doors that lead out onto a pretty terracotta terrace adorned with hanging pots of pink geranium.
In front of the terrace lies the shimmering sweep of the Mediterranean Sea, flat, glistening like a gold coin.
He thinks about the girl. He thinks about her tenderly. He has only known her a few weeks...
He meets her one dusty afternoon haggling for watermelons at the Shuk Ha’Carmel and is struck by how relentless she is in her negotiations. The vendor pleads penury, eight children and a cruel, penny-pinching wife, but no, the girl will not budge on her price and eventually the vendor throws up his arms dramatically and gives in, still grumb
ling about the heartlessness of all womenkind.
His father’s early dedication to schooling him in Ivrit means that Abe can speak the language falteringly, but the girl speaks with the rapidity and fluency of a native speaker and much of what she says is lost on him; he only knows that she is in possession of three watermelons that she has obtained at a price of her asking, and he is impressed by her resolve.
There is something else about her that holds him there, as he stands hidden in the shadows, face half-obscured by the bunches of hanging apples and grapes. Maybe it is the way her hair falls over her shoulders and down her back, in iridescent rivulets. Maybe it is the expert way she holds those watermelons, the way she balances them in her arms, against her chest, close to her body like she is protecting them, now that they are hers.
She turns to him then, aware, if not of him specifically, then only of his large presence, but whatever it is, him or his shadow, it irks her, and she says in Hebrew, her dark eyes flashing, ‘Do you think this is some kind of show? What are you staring at?’
Or at least that is what he hopes she says.
And he replies, but in English, because he cannot trust his Hebrew, not at this moment, for the stakes are too high and he feels unarmed, vulnerable: ‘At you. You are beautiful.’
She cocks her head back then, dismissively, and says, ‘American’, in a tone of such contempt that Abe feels not indignation, but a kind of obligation towards his entire country and all its inhabitant countrymen. He has no choice now, he thinks, but to partake of some worthy cause on their collective behalf, so that he, single-handedly, can rid them of her contempt forevermore.
And so, he comes out of the shadows and offers heroically, ‘Shall I hold your melons?’
It is unsurprising then when she looks at him with even greater contempt and, meeting his gaze directly, forces a smile and says, ‘No.’
But he follows her anyway, subtly he had thought, but midway she turns round and says, ‘If you’re going to follow me, you may as well help me with these. You look as strong as a donkey anyway. Here.’ And he stands by stupidly speechless, as she places the watermelons in his outstretched arms.
