There is not a decent version of Islands in the Stream online. This song, which by all rights, should be soothing Omar's nerves, is, in every version he gets on YouTube, making him insane. He once constructed a tree out of used needles, lived on little but rocks and gear for seventeen years. Still, crack is nothing, he feels today, compared to what Kenny Loggins did to this blinding tune.
Here is Omar, in the Whitechapel Day Center, gritting his teeth through the demo version, by the BeeGees, the seventies pop group who originally wrote the song.
Islands in the Stream
That is what we are
No one in between
How can we be wrong
Sail away with me
To another world..
Billie Jean, meanwhile, is mouthing something.
Something something, she is saying.
Omar stares at her, her lips moving across the table. Here, inside his own head, she is soundless. All he hears, on repeat, is Barry Gibb and Islands. Omar put the tune in his phone this morning, and has been listening all through the meeting, from the minute Billie Jean walked into the Whitechapel Day Center room.
Billie Jean is a recovering addict herself, a few years into the program. She is here to support an event the Center is putting on next month. Billie Jean is speaking, across the round table of the assembly room, to a middle-aged West Indian from the Tower Hamlets borough, who is wearing a hot pink skirt suit.
Money, the woman answers.
She smiles. Her eyes are laughing, leaving her face smooth as chocolate parfait. Like Omar’s mother, Aatifah, who shares this plump, glowing skin.
Money.
It is the only answer, it seems, at this point, to the questions before them.
Right, Billie Jean says. She is wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. Her hair is chopped short to frame her delicate face. She looks relieved.
Err, she says. ..How much?
The woman laughs again. Anwar and Terri, who came into the program with Omar eleven months ago, are smiling, awkwardly, too. Even Chris, their Day Center counsellor, is wearing a grin.
Tower Hamlets council will, the woman says, look at your proposal, and your budget. I understand you want us to fund the event..
Yes, Chris says.
And a recording..
Everyone nods.
Of the.. performances, the woman says.
Yeah, says Billie Jean. The others sit nodding again. They all look up at Omar, who nods in turn.
Omar has not a clue what he is assenting to. Of course, he’s aware of the meeting, the council lady, who looks like his mother. He knows why he’s here. The birthday party, next month. His own performance. He is to put in a bit of Spoken Word. A poem he wrote, based on a painting, by his girlfriend, Nouche.
The thought of Nouche makes him queasy, with something--anger, fear: he doesn’t want to know. It makes him mute, and deaf, determinedly so, at this particular moment. He knows, in a general sort of way, what he’s here for. Omar nods, wordless, at the meeting, the council woman, Billie Jean: still plugged into his phone, still listening to Barry Gibb, still listening to Islands in the Stream.
That is what we are
No one in between
Billie Jean. She should be dead, he thinks, or cowering, hiding away somewhere, in terror. Instead, here she is, across the table, in a plain black t-shirt.
Outside it rains. It is November. With the winter clock, a chill has fallen over the city. The air seems to have grown fangs, despite the rain. Cold bit at Omar, the moment he left his flat this morning, and even huddled in a wool jumper here, glowering in his seat, opposite Billie Jean, he wonders if this shivering he appears to feel in his very marrow, may be somehow encoded in his genes. Is the cold, the tremor, simply in his bones?
There she sits, Billie Jean, skinny legs stretched out before her, toned shoulders, bare arms slung on the table, fiercer, more manly somehow, than Omar. He could drink her blood.
Sail away with me
To another world
He has Barry Gibb, and the BeeGees, to thank, he supposes, for being here in any capacity at all. He has not walked out, has not pulled Billie Jean across the table. He has not slammed her down the Whitechapel Day Center concrete stairs.
Omar is here. Present. Sort of. If, to all practical purposes, mute, and deaf, to the meeting, to his peers, to Anwar, Terri, all, like Omar, eleven months into the program, this week. Like him, they're here to plan this, their first birthday, next month, that magical, monstrous hallmark.
One year clean.
Omar is deaf, particularly, specifically--spectacularly, he thinks--to Billie Jean, who, four years clean and a painter herself, is here to help them set up the bash, the birthday event, lending financial muscle by offering one of her works up for auction.
Omar sits glaring, in his earphones, deaf, mute--letting Barry Gibb, of the BeeGees, do the talking, for now.
You do something to me
That I can't explain
Omar had left Nouche, last night, between the black walls of her apartment. They had just then visited his mother, Aatifa, in her Tower Hamlets flat. Omar had watched the two women, that evening, his mother and his French girlfriend, side by side, at Aatifah’s council kitchen counter: his mother in her stiff white robe, Nouche in cashmere and heels.
Nouche will have been divorced from her Paris TV host ex-husband, Alain Mouille, for two years next month. Nouche still carries, even there in Aatifa's kitchen, in her shoulders, in the angle of her chin, of her hair, some spark, some reflection, of the chandeliers, the cascading armatures, the studio lights she’s been accustomed to.
Omar’s mother, Aatifa, too, has grown up beautiful, a fact not only apparent, that night, in her dark face, but from the glow, the lustre, of her stories. Aatifa had married Omar's diplomat father at thirteen. Taking little Omar to Mecca in the seventies, she had not, as, then, any young Eritrean mother might have done, simply sailed him across the Red Sea. Aatifa had flown the child to Mecca, not just from Addis or Asmara, but from across the continent, from the airports, the royal concourses popping up around the Gulf of Oman like desert diamonds, like jewels in the crown of Arabia; from Dubai, and Qatar.
Here, last night, they had been in Aatifa’s wintry, Tower Hamlets kitchen together. Nouche, Omar, his mother. Omar had watched the women at the counter, under the bleak buzz of the neon fixture. Aatifa, chopping onions, Nouche extinguishing a half-smoked Gaulloise under the tap. Aatifa passing on the cleaver, and Nouche, her small, cashmere back beside Aatifa's, taking it and running the blade under the tap. Slipping his mother's ancient, battered knife, without thinking, in the drying rack on the counter.
The women, backs turned, had seemed somehow connected, to each other, to the knife, to the act of paring down, of clipping away at dead bits. To the act of cutting themselves out of corners, of pruning, of cutting back themselves, their own lives.
He had looked from his mother, her neck lined in the unkind light, to his girlfriend. Nouche had seemed somehow translucent, as sheer, he had thought, as her stockings, her pearly feet in their heels. For some reason, he'd had a sudden vision, then, of Nouche, months earlier, carrying a painting, up and down the East End.
The very painting, he realizes, he based his poem on, the one he is here now, in the Whitechapel Day Center meeting, to discuss. A painting of a tunnel, a scarlet passage, marked WAY OUT.
He sees his girlfriend before him, again, that day in August, carrying that same canvas, then newly finished. Tottering to her dealer in Shoreditch, who’d had, as it turned out, by the time she got there, closed shop. Omar pictures her, standing before the dark window of her gallery, the bare, blind walls. He sees her, peering in the dark, staring into the tunnel of the empty shop: the dead end, he supposes, of her own career.
He thinks of her in his mother’s kitchen, just last night. Back turned, running the blade under the tap, and laying it in the rack. Again, the image, in his mind’s eye, turns back into Nouche on the pavement before the gallery that day in August. Peering in the dark window, holding the painting, wrapped in plastic, in the wind, and the rain.
She frightens him.
His mother’s battered cleaver frightens him, swerving across the council kitchen counter in Nouche’s pale wrist. The two women scare him, side by side, under the neon light, their lives stripped down to knuckles and bones. He wonders what’s left for them to clip at, what, next, will have to go.
Whatever it is they dream of still, whatever it is the two women in his life may need, Omar thinks, it is something he has not a hope in hell of providing, hanging on here by a thread, hanging on to the meeting, to the Whitechapel Day Center, to Islands in the Stream.
The council woman’s hot pink nails scrape across the table as she returns a print of one of Billie Jean’s paintings.
We appreciate your contribution, she says. I understand auctioning your work may attract a bit of attention, she continues. Billie Jean shrugs.
And fetch a nice sum, the lady adds. A grin appears on Billie Jean’s face.
Anything.. she shrugs, again.
The council woman nods. ..To keep this lot off the street, she says. Or, she corrects herself, to keep our children in the street..
But not out of it, Terri cuts in. Skagged up to the eyeballs.
Keepem in-na street, Terri raps, And on their feet..
The deafness is a mercy, Omar thinks, meanwhile, staring at Billie Jean, who has taken up Terri’s rap. He wonders why he can kill her voice but not her face. How can it be so easy to turn the BeeGees full blast on the phone and blot out sound--yet impossible to simply stare Bille Jean out of her seat, to stare her into extinction? Why is it beyond him to, even, just look away?
Tender love is blind, Barry Gibb sings.
It requires a dedication
Last night, after dinner in Aatifa's winter clock kitchen, Omar had dropped Nouche off at her own apartment, across from the mosque on Brick Lane. He had watched her pick her way across a pool of vomit in her heels, between two restaurant doors, to unlock her own, and go up the stairs in the dark.
Omar had walked home in the November cold to his own council flat, toward Whitechapel, leaving behind the brawl of Brick Lane, to traverse the silent, deserted night of the Hanbury Street estates.
Islands in the Stream
That is what we are
We got rap, the council woman smiles at Billie Jean. Obviously.
Terri grins.
Your budget includes video recording, the woman continues. Chris, the Day Center counsellor, nods. We got rap, he says, and Spoken Word.
Everyone looks up at Omar.
Omar, meanwhile, is still musing. Verily, he thinks, there is a blessing in deafness. Unlike muteness, which is potentially disastrous: considering he is here to talk. About speech itself, as it happens. Spoken Word. He feels, still plugged into the phone, the stares, from Chris, from the council woman, the one who looks like his mother. She is here, he thinks, to hear him speak.
You do something that I can't explain
Hold me closer
And I feel no pain
He doubts, somehow, he can let Barry Gibb do the talking there.
No. He needs to man up, get a grip. He is getting looks, too, from Anwar--and from Terri, which is worse as Terri, 'the Cunt', is not known for either his social skills or his gentle, constructive criticism. Not that Omar can be sure either one is actually looking at him, from his sideways vision, as Omar's own eyes are still glued, mutely, murderously, to Billie Jean's.
We rely on each other; ah-ah
From one lover to another; ah-ah
Omar has, finally, stopped shivering in the cold, and is now suddenly sweating. Allah.
It's not like good, wholesome warmth has enveloped him at last, either; it's cold sweat he feels trickling down his jumper, the foul, stinking kind.
He is going to have to look away: look another way. Sometime. Soon.
Also, more pressingly, he is going to have to unplug his ears, and cut this lifeline, the one to Barry Gibb, which, he realises with rising dread, is impossible: which he, at this point, is physically incapable of.
Baby when I met you
There was peace unknown
Omar is no more able to pull the plug on Barry than he is able to either sit here in the meeting, alone, without the music--or to take his eyes off Billie Jean.
She glances up, straight faced. Billie Jean lounges in her seat, her shoulders leaning back, her bare, muscled arms swung unapologetically on the table. She might be pretty, Omar agonizes, if she'd apply herself at all. Instead, here she sits, gazing back, raw, open, a hint of a smile, or a snarl, on her lips. He feels not a shred of desire, could not get it up to save his life. Women, Omar despairs, should not be like Billie Jean.
The tune, the song, meanwhile, Islands, flows along, like the words, the stream of its title. It is balm. It is honey. He can't explain. All he knows is he needs to hear it, constantly, on repeat, on his earphones.
I can't live without you if the love was gone
Everything is nothing when you got no one
All he knows: he can't unplug.
He wishes for the melody to drift free somehow, free from the Brothers Gibb, free from the backing track. To sit here alone with him in the dark.
Floating there, in Omar’s mind, just under the surface, is a different vision of Nouche, of around the same time as the closed down gallery, last August: a different memory. It flares in the dark, on and off, half hidden away. Not that windy, rainy day, on the pavement, with the painting, but the next. The next morning, when it was Omar’s turn to carry the painting up and down the East End. Here it flares up again, the memory: His girlfriend, asleep still, at noon. Billie Jean’s square arms framing her like a trinket. She glowers, in the centre, Nouche, like a gemstone, in his mind’s eye, then fades away into the frame, Billie Jean’s embrace, which in turn fades to black.
Omar sits fixed to the Day Center chair. There is nowhere to go, he panics, nothing to do, but sit here, mute, and wait for the ground to start giving way, for shit to start, seriously, coming down. He doesn't know what he fears more, Terri, and his comments; or his mother, oops, the council woman, and her withering look.
Or himself, reaching across the table, and disemboweling Billie Jean.
Knocking her down the concrete stairway, step by fucking step.
It is later, that afternoon, that he is alone, at last. The meeting is over. Islands is not. Omar walks home, to his flat, the song still playing. He walks the Tower Hamlets pavement, which is cracked, and dirty, and littered. He doesn't know. What he's doing. Where he's going. Home.
What does that even mean, after seventeen years of being out here in the November chill, of living on the streets? What does it mean, to walk home today, clean, sober, saved, more or less--no blood on his hands, no guts, no one left for dead, at the table; not much harm done, altogether? He has not managed to talk, has sat through the meeting silent, exchanging looks with Chris. Omar kept still, right through to the end, a rock in the flow, in the stream. Now he's walking home.
It is cold. His sweat has long dried up to a dry stench, and now just leaves him feeling foul, and shivering. He walks, passing the corners he knows so well, each bearing the imprint of some transaction, some crime; some transgression.
Baby when I met you
He left her on her stairs, last night, his girlfriend. He doesn't know where she is, either. Home, he supposes. Her home. Though god knows what that might mean to Nouche, who used that term for Maison Mouille, her ex-husband's 5th arrondissement residence; for their eighteenth century windows, overlooking the Quartier, the Boulevard; for their Saint-Michel double doors.
Home. He is headed there, himself, his home, the council flat he was allocated five months ago, and which is still bare save the table in the lounge, two straight-backed chairs, and the painting, left there months earlier, by Nouche, after the dark gallery window--that same painting, that same windy night in August.
He doesn't know where Nouche is this afternoon, hasn't seen her since last night. Is she happy? He doesn't know. Is she sad? Depressed? He doesn't know that, either. He may add the questions to a long list of things he has no way, today, of knowing, of even guessing at.
Is she safe?
He thinks of the canvas, the red tunnel marked WAY OUT, stacked, still, against the wall of his flat. Again, he sees her wandering around Shoreditch with it, that August day, in her heels. She is broke, he knows that much. She's a painter, and she's not selling, she is not, currently, even showing.
It is Billie Jean, he thinks, passing the tower estate on the corner of Hanbury street, Billie Jean who has been sipping orange juice at openings, her openings, one of which was on the eighth floor of this very building.
Omar glances up. It’s a place he might have called home himself, as it happens, at some point in the skag-ridden seventeen years he spent before meeting Nouche. Omar, years ago, used to live on one of these crack house floors himself.
He looks up the grim stack of concrete balconies. This is the place, he thinks, where he'd pass out under the tree he’d built, the needle tree. The Tree of Death.
Home.
There will be no welcome mat waiting, when he gets home today, in the new, council flat. No mail, no messages. This is it.
Islands in the stream
He walks the November streets, thinking of his girlfriend. Is she safe? Again she flares up in his mind, a gemstone, set in a frame he does not wish to dwell on, a frame instantly blacked out, replaced by August wind and rain, as he sees her before him, walking away from her gallerist that day, stooped under the canvas, picking her way in the street, drizzle blowing in her face. The rejected painting before her, the red tunnel, the blue square at the center, the WAY OUT.
Is she even here? Omar thinks, walking home today--Is she even planning to be here tomorrow, to stick around?
Or is she planning a way out of her own?
Again he wonders which part of her life may have to go, next, what is left for her to cut away at. He thinks of her face, her dark hair, her brooding lips, and knows he doesn't know.
He knows nothing.
That is what we are
No one in between
How can we be wrong
What he knows, is that he needs the brothers Gibb to keep singing.
We ride it together, ah-ah
Making love with each other, ah-ah
Again, she flares up, center stage, Nouche: crystalline, and red, like cut amber, framed by the darkness at the edge of Omar’s own mind. He had walked up her dim stairs, that August morning, the painting before him.
He’d stepped in, among the black walls. The blinds had been drawn. Light streaked onto the bed. She slept, lips parted. Cheek resting in the cup of that straight, toned shoulder. His key in the lock, his feet on the boards, did not as much as wake them.
He stood in the room.
Billie Jean’s black, skinny jeans, her phone, lay on the chair. Her wallet on the table.
Her hard body folded around Nouche, who shone in the slanted light, like a jewel in a crown.
He’d left. This is what he can’t get past. Before he knew it, he’d backed out. Stood out in the hallway.
No. That’s not what kills him. He’d gone back.
Does she know?
That he turned on the doorstep, and crept back in, to pick up the canvas, and carry it back, all the way, carry it past the silent Hanbury street estates in the rain, under the concrete crack house tower, the Tree of Death? Home?
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know a thing.
What he needs, right now, pacing home from the Whitechapel Day Center, is the song,
Islands in the Stream.
He needs it alone, just the words, and the melody, loose, single notes, scattered downstream. Floating away, naked, bare. Just the essence, the balm. No explanation. Just this. Going home. The song, and the empty Tower Hamlets streets. The cold, and the dark.
Later, that evening, it’s her, on the phone, and later, still, it’s her at his door.
They sit at the table, in Omar’s bare room, on the straight-backed chairs. He hands her a mug. Tea. She looks, he thinks, slightly drunk. He is unsure.
It’s his first birthday, next month, one year clean and sober, his first year, in seventeen, of wearing clothes, of sleeping in a bed. His first year, next month, with her.
She has not, over the past year, grown to him familiar. She is not somebody he knows.
Does she know? Does she know he knows?
Across the room, the painting still sits against the wall. Even last night, in his mother’s kitchen, he had recited to her, by heart, the poem he’s written for the birthday bash, next month, based on this very painting. A poem called IN.
WAY OUT, he’d whispered, Is Spelled Backwards. WAY IN.
Does she know he’d crept back, into the room, past the chair, the jeans, the wallet on the table, to pick up the canvas? That he’d backed out, again, carrying the painting, backward, under the Hanbury Tower, home?
Nouche sets down the mug. She leans across Omar’s table, her wine breath in his face, sharp like crack, like the floor he used to wake on, under the Tree of Death.
He stares at her. What could have possessed him to go back? Even he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know a thing. Omar closes his eyes. She’s an island. A place he doesn’t know.
It is not until he opens his mouth, his own lips, to meet hers, that he knows this, this stream, this aliveness; this other thing. That he knows what he does know.
