Cry

Omar, in a meeting, that Friday morning, wants to rip Billie Jean's heart out. He is at the Whitechapel Day Center, the place where he detoxed nine months earlier, the place where they took his money, his keys and his phone, when he came in, which had gone into a locker; where they'd stripped him down to his rotting skin and taken all his clothes, which had been burned, or shredded, or chemically dissolved, he is unsure which: destroyed, in any case, professionally, conclusively, obliterated.

It's Terri's turn again. To talk, to give feedback, not on anything Omar has had to offer today, but to Billie Jean, who is here to chair the meeting, to give back to these boys, these young men, what she received freely when she came in, now more than four years ago.

Billie Jean, in black Converse high tops and jeans, who slathers women onto her canvases with a painter's knife--whose paintings read SHE CLAIMS I AM THE ONE.

She is freaking these lads out a bit. Her straight, skinny frame is more boyish than some of theirs. Anwar, for instance, sits looking at her with a baffled smile. He leans back in his chair; his chest, like two small puddings, resting on the soft bun of his belly.

I relate to what you said about being, like.. Terri is saying, uncertainly. ..Proper wasted.

Billie Jean, today, is far from wasted. She exudes glamor of a raw, animal kind, a prowess fueled by sheer presence of mind, of heart--an endurance of the present, of pain, that puts most of these men to shame.

She confuses Omar. He doesn't want her. He wants, he feels, with growing dread, to be her. This is such an unwelcome sensation, he wants to flee the room. He sits in his chair, under the strip lights, which buzz with a vengeance. He is staring, not at Billie Jean, but at the door. On the other end is the stairway, those overlit concrete stairs he would find himself awake on, at some point, in the dead of night, just nine months ago. He is reborn, today, a new man. A man freed from the shackles of gear, of crack, from the relentless stealing that left him barred from even hostels and hospitals, banned from every local charity, from church fetes, from soup kitchens and shelters, from every mosque in the borough. Today he's a free man, a man surrendered. To God.

What does that mean, Omar thinks, if he now wants to be a woman?

Billie Jean is nodding at Anwar.

I am more than the child, Anwar is saying, of two crack addicts. 

A councillor told me, he adds, yesterday.

I struggle, Anwar continues, with that. 

His voice fades out. The lights buzz.

I'm trying to get, Anwar says softly, my nut around it..

Billie Jean's straight shoulders nod in sympathy.

Omar checks himself. It's true. He feels no desire, whatever, for this woman. None. He feels envy. Rage. An acute need to establish the packing order. He is sinking, feels lost, and helpless; impotent. Women, he thinks simply, should not be this way.

At home, later that afternoon. Dusk. The council flat. The land line. Yes, he is nodding, into the phone, I am fasting. I am praying, Mama.

She gathers up again, as if rounding up the day, the circle of her children, his mother, calling each living child by name, touching lightly on professions, and family status, updating him, as is her habit, of the minutest change in each of her children's affairs.

He nods and listens as she talks, without menace, as she practices her particular brand of human interest, an interest in blood, wholly devoid of any of its usual connotations. Blood as Rumi, the Sufi Master, had put it,

A living, luminous flow.

She is luminous, his mother, beautiful. Even now. He pictures her by the door of her kitchen at dusk, framed by flowers hanging from the grilled fence of her ground floor flat. She was a beauty as a girl. He knows this not from photos, but from her stories, infers it from the backdrops to his childhood tales; the places in her mind's eye, the hanging gardens, the crystal transit lounges, the concourses.

Her tales are filled with fabled woodwork. Gilded walkways. Cool spots under domes made of lime and mud, and ancient beams. Light falling in at a slant.

She married his father, a young gun with the Addis ministry of Foreign Affairs, aged thirteen. They are today, Omar thinks, thirty-nine years married. Left behind, after a homeland coup, the leafy North London residence he grew up in, and settled here, in a sprawling Tower Hamlets flat.

Thirty-nine years. He's not managed to stay paired with a woman a single one. If that. He really couldn't remember. They are hazy, the soft, pretty faces of his women. He sees, more clearly, in his own mind's eye, the hardened ones of other people's, the women hanging with his mates, the ones he, invariably, would get tangled up with, and even then, he sees not their faces, but the rooms he mated in. He sees, talking on the phone, the walls he must have stared at, stripped of wallpaper to light fires on winter days. He sees a particular, projectile blood stain, sprayed from floor to ceiling, sees it, talking to his mother, sees now with near supernatural clarity, a spike tree, a tree built from used needles, like a gleaming, skeleton X-mas tree, celebrating not the birth of this particular prophet, but His death, a death not even, Omar thinks, Christ's own blood could have redeemed, a death deeper than death, because it is chosen, self inflicted: it is life itself found wanting, the humans in it unacceptable, relatives rebuked, women deemed lacking; beauty, love annulled.

His mother is saying, Abeche. He notes the tone of his sister's name on her tongue, his youngest sister, catches the high notes, their flow, their sweetness, rolling from his mother's lips.

The skeleton tree stands in his mind's eye, against the luminous flow of his mother's tale, a black tree, blood frozen in its needles.

He sits on the floor of his kitchen, holding on to the phone, amidst the smeared walls of his own, silent, tales, as the spiked blood branches reach for the ceiling, wondering what this backdrop might tell his mother about love, about beauty: about him; the tree of Death of his own fables, what she might infer from that.

..Baby, his mother says.

She sighs.

She says baby, with a sigh, and it's not to him--it's not about him, he realizes, with relief so sharp it takes his breath away, as he finds himself smiling, mutely, into the phone, for an instant, before blurting out, I know.

The baby. Abeche. 

I know, he repeats, dumbly. His sister's pregnant. The grin still sits on his face, wide as a boat, the smile itself now opening the gateways, it seems, of heaven, the flood gates, of kin, of blood; a luminous flow coursing Omar's veins, lighting up his body, from the inside, as he sails away, on conversation, with his mother, into the sunset of her garden, the flowers hanging from the bars of her Tower Hamlets fence.

Dusk. Time for Omar to open the holy fast of Ramadan: a hasty swill of tea, too hot, glass after glass of water, standing by his kitchen tap, luke warm, but Omar has no patience to wait for the reserves of cool, life-giving liquid--which must exist somewhere underneath all this, the flat, the building, the estate--to find their way up the East London plumbing.

It is properly after evening prayers now, Iftar: a handful of his girlfriend's rocket lettuce, organic, he reads on the package, two cold samosas, half a left over ploughman's sandwich, all eaten straight from the fridge. Whatever.

Allah. He could eat a whale--a boar, a dog, for all he cares. 

This is the problem with fasting. By the time he should eat he is beyond the edge of reason. I know, I know, he thinks, I should plan. Spend the daytime thinking about food, what to eat, where, when the day finally comes to a close and the blessed evening opens up before me. 

He should, Omar thinks, spend the day like any good muslim, savoring every projected bite, shopping and cooking and preparing the table. But I have, Omar despairs, zero impulse control. If I think about food at all, it's usually because I look down and find I am half way through stuffing my face.

As it is, he just stands in the kitchen, with the lights out, chewing another handful of rocket. His appetites are haywire these days, his belly as violently erratic as Godzilla below, a raging, unholy duet, a Godley and Creme of confusion, You don't know how to ease my pain; a shape-shifting team bellowing from his sphyncter, You Make Me Wanna Cry.

For all the haze of his former girlfriends, their faces blurred to one, generic smile, less personable than a toothpaste ad, his current one, Nouche, is grafted into his retina, every eye lash, every single toe, each bloody nail implanted into his cornea, her terse body, it seems, engraved in his mind's eye, as if slathered out of his own brain with one of Billy Jean's paint knifes.

This body, moreover, appears hardwired to the ungodly duo below, screaming You don't know; every stirring in his lower regions morphing into her face. 

Omar stands in the cold glow of the fridge, eating hand after hand of dry lettuce. Allah. Just thinking of his hunger gives him a hard on. He can picture the dog, the boar, crying up from his groin, lip-synching the entire goddamn Godley and Creme video. You don't know what the sound is darling, It's the sound of my teardrops falling.

He is, in fact, a vegetarian. Loosely: it's in his blood, the house and the land he grew up in.

The pig meanwhile has, like everything else these days, shifted shape again, and taken on the face of his girlfriend, taking up the tune where the boar left off. And you cheat, she is miming, And you lie, and it's her lashes he sees, as he stands there chewing lettuce: her pearly toes, her sleek, waxy vulva, singing CRY.

There is no way to ease his pain, no way to soothe his urge, alone, in the kitchen, in the dark. He is caught in the light of the fridge, unable, suddenly, to go backwards or forwards, unable to breathe, for fear of losing it, altogether: losing this, his kitchen, his home, the nine months. His rebirth. Unable to breathe for fear of his screaming, raging urge to plunge--into her, or someone else, anyone, anything, the urge to plunge in a knife or an outfit. You don't know how to play the game, he thinks, crying. 

You don't even know how to say goodbye. He is paralyzed. He is losing her. He panics at the grandiosity, the impossibility of his longing. He freaks at the urge, to kill the need with the needle. To creep back under the tree of Death, to spend his days among projectile stains, lame and wanking without hope or desire. 

The boar is sneering. You don't know what the sound is darling.. 

The sound, he thinks, of outfits snapping, of needles crackling, as some junkie crosses the floor behind him. The sound of his own wrist, pumping nothing but dry blood, crusting from his foreskin.

Cry, he thinks, in the dark, in the kitchen. Cry.

The rest of the evening is improbable. It ends later, much later, well after midnight. But it starts here, just after dusk.
It starts with the bell. This is, of course, Nouche. The girlfriend.

Not only is she dark and morose, she is terse, her very essence: like a coil or a spring, looped in and locked up, inside herself, inside her silence; waiting to be sprung. She is carrying a grocery bag from Sainsbury's, and a painting, wrapped up in plastic, which is wet. She is drunk.

Before he does anything else, that long, long Friday night, Omar is fed. This is not for the weak-hearted. Nouche, to put it mildly, is no vegetarian.

Raw meat, is what she rolls between her fingers, plucking bits of chopped steak straight from the bag, as she sits on the tiles of the kitchen, in the dark. Like his mother's, her interest in blood is without malice. She is here to feed him. Whatever else she may do tonight, before the moon strikes midnight, however she may choose to draw the curtain on this day, she has dropped her painting, the tunnel, the blood red passage, against the kitchen counter, and left it there. If it is an exit, it is one into the past, left behind, for now. She is here to feed Omar, and blood, raw, chopped, straight from the tray, is what she pushes, gently, with each bite, between his lips.