Part One
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Nia
There he is, in memory, standing behind the bar of the restaurant, pouring that vile drink he used to love, a sickly Martini from the long bottle with those big empty letters on the label. Kind eyes, imperious too, the leather trench coat all the way to the floor, its seedy sheen reflected somehow on his face. There is the face itself: angular, the brown depth of his colouring, black kinks of hair rippling to his shoulders like a soft perm, the bizarre gold hoop in the right ear. The hi-lo voice is there, insinuating itself through twists and turns like mercury in a barometer when he speaks – taking the temperature of things, divining the climate. All of this distracting the eye from his looks, which are striking, exceptional even, you would probably have to call him beautiful.
She is right there, in the same memory, about to reply, but a bit more blurred around the edges. It is likely that she was dressed up, she wanted a job of course: so it would have been the black jersey dress, tight on the bust, hemline a bit too short, and inappropriate shoes – the chunky maroon creepers with massive silver buckles. Aiming for ‘voluptuous’, but without quite the correct regalia of accessories. One of the three outfits she was circulating in those days, and the only one that could aim to satisfy the criteria of ‘smart’ in the advert. Sometimes she would wear a crimson Kashmiri shawl with it, lifted from her mum’s cupboard, drape it over her shoulders, a bit of red lipstick to match, as though she was going to a formal winter event, like a prom in the fifties or something.
She can’t remember if she had the shawl on but she remembers the feeling well – that she looked confusing, that he was eyeing her with a curiosity that he didn’t bother to conceal. Mostly, she can watch the two of them in this memory without rushing ahead, slip inside the vein that funnels the language between them, and marvel that it is happening, pretend she does not know what will come next.
‘I do apologize,’ he says, offering her a cigarette. ‘Would you like some tea? Coffee? A glass of wine? Just … do let me know, lah! Some water?’
She is shaking her head. The attention is intimidating.
‘Nah, I’m good,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry.’
And that is when she first experiences his smile. She is just nineteen, lying her way through the world but telling him the truth for some reason, and he’s thirty-three, thirty-four max, giving it the big patron act in the restaurant, lighting up a cigarette and funnelling the smoke through the side of his mouth as he raises his eyebrows and regards her at leisure. Tac! The palatal click of satisfaction as he taps the ash into a square vessel of smoked brown glass. His fingernails are fastidiously clean and she is curling her own away from sight in response.
He’s good. Surely he is good? He is the altruist we need on each street corner. The one who’s got your back, can help you stand up after the fall. He’s wise: King Solomon capable of enough empathy and hubris to decide who deserves the baby. He is a walking set of choices and consequences: love thy neighbour, the greater good, take your pick. This image of him – of them – filters and echoes through her memory, there are a thousand iterations or more. She can never be certain of its imprint or impact.
She tells herself the story as it unfolds from this moment. She does it to understand him, and so to believe in his cure.
Shan
Shan is walking in Archway, cheered by the discordant heat as he moves alongside the massive dual carriageway outside his estate of residence. He stops at the traffic lights, lets the buses sear their crimson optimism onto his retina. Colour, his mother would say, brings joy, wonder, power.
He can see the kid who comes with his mama every day on the way to school. He fascinates him, this kid, he has long brown curls that bounce to his shoulders, pale flushed skin, he rides a beat-up blue scooter, four years is he, or five? Lifting his leg up behind him as he goes down the road, like a dancer, the same pride, the same demonstration of ease, someone skating on ice, not a narrow pavement next to a huge river of traffic. Look, I can do this, his body says silently, as he sails past Shan at the crossing, almost at exactly the same time every day. Today there is blossom in his hair, in Shan’s hair too – the road is planted with mammoth trees that bestow leaves and the tiniest of white-sheened petals on them all, from on high. This is London, thinks Shan, this contrary indication of motor-loud madness and real, actual breathing life. Humans, trucks, petals.
The kid is staring at an older man in an electric wheelchair who sometimes joins them at this 8.34 a.m. confluence at the lights. The man: pink-cheeked, grey-haired, tidy short sideburns, is raised momentarily from the cautious expression that he tends to employ when he is motoring along, raised to smile at the boy, and up at his mother.
‘Why is that man in a chair that moves along like that?’ says the boy, curling back against his mother’s body, suddenly shy at the man’s smile. His voice is high, sonorous, the sentence dances like the melody on a bansuri, an up-turn of curiosity at the end. Like tha-a-at? He is sweet, thinks Shan: some kind of pale honey skin he has, long lashes, a dream-sweet.
‘Because maybe his legs don’t work right now,’ says the mother, crouching down so she can hush up her voice.
‘Why his legs doesn’t work?’ sings the boy’s voice, dancing over the articulated lorries, the tangled chain of cars and bikes. And again, the descant high, louder, when he gets no response:
‘But WHY his legs doesn’t work? Why, Mama, why?’
She hides a smile and instead of answering tucks some dark blonde strands back into her ponytail, fingers at her collar, one hand is enough for the job, the other is on her kid, getting ready to guide him with his scooter. The lights change and they walk across quickly. Shan can hear the boy still shouting on the other side.
‘WHY DOESN’T HIS LEGS DOESN’T WORK?’
Give him an answer, thinks Shan, also smiling as he watches the boy reattach himself to his scooter and flamboyantly sail off, right past the charity shop and always-empty optician’s to the roundabout, where he halts, obediently, for his mother to catch up. Surely you can make one up. Stop his anxiety, really? There are so many reasons why someone’s legs wouldn’t work. You could choose the most benevolent, make something of it, use it to teach the kid something.
His own son is a couple of years older. What is he doing right now? The question assails Shan without warning, pollutes him with despair, a toxin that is suddenly in his lungs as he crosses the same fat zebra path and walks to the tube station. It’s his own fault. He relaxed too much, didn’t guard against it. The mind betrays when you loosen control.
His mother comes to him again, wringing out wet clothes during an afternoon in Jaffna, giving him the eye of concern. If you wash a cloth, over and over, it becomes bleached out, she’s saying in this memory, relishing the chance to impart life lessons when presented with such useful methods of illustration. Such is the test that life throws at your honour. Your honour is the colour of the self, it should be steadfast. To be dishonoured, to be found out, to be revealed to be false – it is to be leached of all your colour as a person, to watch it dissolve into the water and slip away through the gutter down the alley.