By the time his girlfriend finally draws the curtain, that Friday, it is midnight. She is pictured against the powder blue drapes, cut off by the window frame like a Degas dancer. Like Degas' petites danseuses, she's straight and pale. There's something terse though, and inward, about her poise, her pose, something self-absorbed, like Michael Jackson's moonwalk.
Across her shoulder blades, a plummy cardigan. She turns around, and shrugs it off.
A Youtube playlist is dying away between her black walls, Althea and Donna, early eighties ska music. It's the last sumptuous notes, echoing lazily in the room, but it doesn't matter: Nouche, the dancer, is moving to a tune of her own. The cardigan hangs from one hand, from one shoulder, Michael Jackson style. Billie Jean, she's humming, Is not my lover.
Omar, meanwhile, is watching every move. Like her, he is caught in his own train of thought, hearing his own song. Omar, the dancer's Eritrean boyfriend, is playing his own greatest hits, all of which, these days, revolve around her.
He is rewinding his favorite scenes, the parts--her parts: her body, his favorite bits--scratched into his brain with a painter's knife, he thinks, like the nudes carved into the canvas, De Kooning-style, by Billie Jean herself, a fellow recovering addict he'd sat across from, earlier that day, in a meeting at the Whitechapel Rehab center.
Omar has tunnel vision. Everything he looks at, these days, even Billie Jean, will turn into Nouche, eventually, the girlfriend: like watching a private, home movie.
Now, by the end of this Friday night, he sees Nouche's straight shoulders, the pale skin against the plum red brassiere. He can count her lashes. He can reach out and lift her, between her legs, lift her from her pearly toes onto the bed.
It is late.
It is windy, too. Outside her pale blue curtain, her black walls, it may storm, but this detail--happening on the fringe, just outside his tunnel, his vision--he could not possibly tell.
This is how this particular day, a FrIday, in the holy month of Ramadan, will end. All this, the moonwalk, the curtain, Omar's vision, is round about midnight.
Now: how it started. Friday began, for Omar, with the meeting at the Whitechapel Day Center, where, nine months earlier, for the first time in seventeen years, he got clean.
A meeting chaired by Billie Jean, as it happened, who, four years into all that, carries her brave, bruised heart on her sleeve. She is tiny, in high-tops and skinny jeans, wearing the raw, lion's heart outside, on her skin, like a coat of armor. Billie Jean, this morning, had shrugged her boyish shoulders in sympathy, as Omar's peers, grown men, had sat in the meeting, and cried.
By the time, over there, the first tears had flowed, Nouche, on the other end of the East End, had just been getting out of bed. She was taking the new painting to her dealer. It was a tunnel, as usual, a bright red one, this time: a passage she'd varnished, in the end, in nail enamel.
The dealer had a shop in Shoreditch, around the corner--Nouche thought, stepping into her panties--from her waxist, a Brazilian, a young mother with a baby working out of her council estate flat. Nouche needed a different waxist. She'd pictured the Brazilian's flat, carpeted from ceiling to ground in dusty polypropylene, bills stacking up among the purple tufts. Nouche wanted marble floors.
The canvas, this Friday morning, of course, was impractically large. It was wrapped up in layers of packaging. Even descending her own stairs now in a maroon little cloak and heels, she had trouble not just tumbling down after it. Walking down to Spitalfield market for a cab, passing the listed facade of Gilbert and George's Fournier Street Georgian, she worried about the wind catching her work like a sail, and carrying her off with it, out into the stratosphere, not the one of Georgian townhouses and openings and cocktails at Tate Modern, cameras, she thinks, lights--but the silent nowhere, beyond, of stumbling down the street alone in the wind: the outer space of Marly-Gomont, of the bleeding haystack she grew up in--of divorce, of her TV-host ex-husband's Soiree set gone dark, the stars all blacked out.
She flags down the cab. The driver--an obese man with the kind of inbred, pit-bull look she would, in any other scenario, have been scrambling away from--just sits there, and so she finds herself, this Friday morning, in the reverse kind of scene where she is knocking herself about, trying to cram both her body and the painting into the serial killer's car.
Then it's time to repeat the whole thing, backwards, and she ends up ten pounds poorer, on the Shoreditch pavement, with the painting, in the wind, which is now a wet, drizzly kind of daytime darkness blowing up her skirt and down her cloak, her cleavage; a persistent, cold sneeze in her neck. The shop is closed.
The dealer. Her gallery. It's dark. She checks her phone, for the date, the time. Did she not talk to the man this morning? Did he not tell her to drop in any time? She redials the number. It is now starting to, seriously, rain.
Paul.. she starts.
Nouche, he booms on the other end. Cherie.
Where are you pumpkin, she says.
Au Salon, he croons. His broken French is moderated by a low bass, the kind of deep, broad chested voice she associates with Mouille, the ex-husband; with large men in Cardin, with Gaulloise. It makes her sleepy. Makes her want to sit down on the pavement and close her eyes and listen, as if she's on the line with Barry White. Paul could be telling her he's about to burn all her hair off; all she will hear, right now, is Don't Go Changing.
I Love You Just the Way You Are, Paul is singing. Hang on, she thinks.
Anytime, my darling, she hears now, actually spoken, by Paul, into the phone. Still in Barry White's voice though. Drop in anytime, he is saying. Cherie.
Part of her wants to murmur back into the phone, I will darling--wants to go to sleep on his chest. Part of her wants to scream.
I'm here.. she says, peering into the dark window, in the rain. There is something overly bright about the gloom inside.
Angel, Paul interrupts her thought, at a brisk Cockney pitch now. Hold a sec, luv.
There is a crack somewhere in the background, then silence.
She waits, until the screen goes black, then drops the phone. She is still gazing in the dark tunnel of the gallery window. That blankness. The long wall. It's empty. She redials. The line, of course, is silent. She touches the screen, to turn the speaker on, and drops the phone, again, as it rings, on the other side, in the wind and the rain, until, finally, somewhere inside, on the other side of the glass pane, somewhere down that long, bare wall, Paul's voicemail clicks on, booming, once more, in the Barry White voice. Hey..
Minutes, or hours, later, she, the painting, and her soaked little cloak are draped around the bar. A musician, a kid with a violin she keeps taking for a skate board, is gesturing for a refill. Still later, she is lying spread eagled around the corner, on a table, the Brazilian, the waxist, the one with the baby, working away, with both hands, at her crotch. The Brazilian rips at the wax as if Nouche, between her legs, has grown a bear, or a boar. She holds up each used, furry, strip in triumph, like a Pre-Columbian headhunter, as if she's scalping some private, secret, animal kingdom.
Nouche, at this point, of course, is beyond caring. She drank away the afternoon with the kid with the skate board. Violin, she corrects herself. The kid with the violin. Though the instrument had been covered in graffiti, it had sounded nothing like a skate board. He'd played her Billie Jean.
Now, the rain has stopped, and a weak light plays with the dust of the waxist's purple carpet. Nouche lies, her toes pointing to opposite ends of the table, her vulva rising in the middle, like a silver moon. She lies on the table and--as she will when moonwalking later, that midnight--hums.
Omar, about this time, as his girlfriend gets scalped by the Brazilian, is on the phone himself, on the landline, a lifeline, he thinks, to his family, his relatives, his blood, the people he has found he is connected to, by birth, by faith, since his recent rebirth, nine months ago. Nine months sober.
He is talking on the phone, rounding up the day, another one in the holy month of Ramadan--talking and sailing away into the sunset with his mother.
Later this Friday, later tonight, he will kneel before an empty fridge, and cry. Still later he will lick raw blood from his girlfriend's fingers, and hold her, rocking, on the kitchen floor.
Now, though, it is late afternoon, and she is back on the street, lugging, still, her painting, and squinting in the light. Shoreditch is still windswept, and Nouche is now both more sluggish, and more light-headed, than this morning. She pauses in front of another window, another gallery, one reading She Says.
Nouche picks up the painting, and clicks on, in her heels. A gust of wind catches her cloak. She ducks into the doorway to pull down the maroon hem, then steps out again, before the gallery's second window, which says,
I Am The One.
It's a different show from one she saw earlier that week, in some other, pop-up, East End place. Same stuff, though: De Kooning-style nudes, with a touch of Francis Bacon in the middle, splotches of red. Billie Jean.
Again the wind threatens to take hold of her own canvas, again she has visions of being lifted, like Dorothy, in her heels, and skirting off into the sky, not to Oz, but instead--in another one of today's movie reversals, like cinematic moonwalks--to be whirled straight back to her own private Kansas, Marly-Gomont.
Marly-Gomont. Poison green, like Van Gogh's peasant cafe, like a green moonscape, a crater, around the haystack where she was deflowered, in silence; the only sound the single, hourly, toll of the bell.
By the time the waxist had been done, just now, Nouche's buzz had been wearing off. The kid, the violin, the Cabernet had drained from her system, and she'd been breaking for the waxist's doorway, away from the stench of lactation, of reused shopping bags and unpaid bills, pulling her wallet and practically throwing cash at the Brazilian. Her twenty pound notes had hovered there, in the doorway, over the purple polypropylene pile of the carpet, while Nouche herself had already been outside the building, possessing neither the patience to wait for her change, nor the desire to touch anything, any longer, in or out of that council estate.
Nouche is now standing in the street, pretty much broke, holding on to her painting in the sun, in the wind, in the glow, from the gallery's window, of Billie Jean's rising star, and waiting to be Ozzed off to Kansas, to the silent meals among cattle of her youth, the bare kitchen table, the ice box empty save half a stinking pint from a home-milked cow.
She hates, with a vengeance, Alain Mouille, the TV host ex-husband, she hates the show, Soiree. She hates this other show, Billie Jean's, in the stupid window. She Says I'm The One.
She hates, she realizes, Michael Jackson.
She hates, standing here on the Shoreditch pavement, the stars: hates them all, the lot, their smug, rich and famous faces. She hates the sun, and the wind, as she stands here, about to be tunneled off, herself, into extinction, into poverty, into nowhere: the Van Gogh landscape of her childhood, Marly-Gomont, the crater, like a black moonscape, Starry Night--the lights all painted out.
It is time, she decides, for another drink.
Omar, around this time, hangs up the phone. He is smiling, still, the same smile he was wearing just now, wide as a boat, on the line with his mother. His sister, Abeche, is having a baby.
It is an hour or so later, that this particular buzz, too, has burned off, and he stands in front of the fridge, chewing on cold, dry rocket lettuce. Organic. Hers.
This is when Omar is having his own flashes of Billie Jean's painter's knife: in the visions carved into his brain. The same ones he will be having at midnight. Now, though, it's dusk. Iftar, time to open the holy fast of Ramadan. The fridge is barren, save his girlfriend's greens. He could eat a pig.
He has a hard-on just thinking. This is where his hunger goes haywire: where the unholy trinity of his desire, for sex, drugs and food, has created a direct pathway, a neuro superhighway, a wormhole, from his groin directly to his mind's eye, a tunnel leading straight into his girlfriend's naked body. It is splayed before him, her body, open like a pig's carcass, displayed on his retina, De Kooning-style, Francis Bacon style--its penetrability in direct reverse to its actual availability, as he stands here alone in the blue sheen from the door of the empty fridge.
Later, she stumbles into the flat, with a painting, and a Sainsbury's carrier bag. Still later that night, she moonwalks in front of the powder blue curtain, undressing before Omar's eyes. But that is not now. Now, she is hungry. She drops the painting, sinks down beside him on the floor, in the dark, and feeds him raw meat, with her fingers, straight from the bag, straight from the container. Pushes bite after bite into their mouths.
Then she nods, and passes out.
He holds her, on the kitchen floor.
The intensity, the immensity of his desire, immobilizes him, for the moment. He simply can not take this. It is too much. He holds her, literally, gnashing his teeth. He cries.
It's the baby. He doesn't know this.
Omar is only nine months old, himself. Nine months, only, of feeling anything at all. His nerve ends, like Billie Jean's, glower on his skin, fester and ache. He is exposed, like a newborn, his skin just another organ.
It is open, his skin, permeable, unsecured. He feels defenseless, like one of those rings displayed on bits of velvet cardboard, as he wanders around Tower Hamlets sometimes, negotiating gangs and bike thieves, lock picks and jihad recruiters, burglars and plain old scum; and yet this is nothing compared to the way he feels here, tonight, in his own kitchen, in the arms of his own girlfriend, whose limbs are grafted to his baby ones, whose face is grafted onto his own, whose lashes and toes, whose deep dark passage, lead straight into his groin, his neural pathways, into his infant brain. There, his urges are all connected: a single, undivided cry.
All he wants to do is suckle.
He wants sugar, and milk--sweetness, honey, the nectar of her passage, of her insides, as she clasps her pearly toes around him. He wants it mindlessly. He wants it only. Madly, inconsolably.
He reaches for her feet, and takes the red heels off.
Then, on the kitchen floor, he cries.
Omar cries like a baby, tonight, holding a grown, stockinged woman in his arms. He sobs into her hair.
As he cries, for minutes, hours, a long time, perhaps just seconds, after all; as he sits and cries into her sleeping crown, something shifts, something happens, and he finds that this is it, the thing inside him, the urge: it is the need for tears themselves, this flood streaming down his cheeks and chin, carrying with it the very things he's been clinging to for life.
It's his fear, that's streaming out. Fears he never even knew he carried, of being barren, of ending his line, of extinction. Fear of death. There it goes, out with the water, for the moment. Next is relief, the joy of his sister's conception. Still he cries, extracting from himself even this pleasure, in his tears, a living, luminous flow, streaming from him in great heaves until finally, he lies beside her, his woman, feeling empty, feeling drained, feeling calm and present, and sleepy, until at last he is no longer driven, but drifts himself, safe within her arms, out into the blissful sea of equanimity. Surrendered, he half thinks, half sleeps, half dreams: to the One Love of the Sufis, of his childhood. To God.
She wakes, moments later, with a head ache. She thinks, first, of the painting, and groans. It leans against the counter, wrapped in plastic bubbles, wettish, but, she thinks, apparently alright. What's she doing, though, beneath a counter, on Omar's kitchen floor? She groans again, thinking of the canvas, and her heels, and the long way home in the dark, windy night, back to the comfort of her black sheets, her bed. She needs down cushions, silk pillow cases. Now.
She needs money, she thinks.
This thought, at some level, catches her by surprise. She wonders if she's still drunk. She decides she is, probably, instead, not drunk enough, and gropes around, in the dark, for her shoes. It's the real beauty of Brick Lane, she thinks. It never sleeps. Unlike her gallery, she groans, again, which is now officially, she supposes, comatose. Which is probably beyond the sleep of the living, which is, in all likeliness, probably dead. Like her career, which, unlike Brick Lane, seems to never wake, which is, she muses darkly, worse than dead, her paintings dead on arrival, not to be resuscitated. Not even the Blood of Christ, she thinks, will revive her work, as she hates Him, hanging from the cross over the bare table of her childhood, banging that single note as she'd get banged in the haystack under the church clock, she hates him with a Passion normally reserved for the poor--or the rich, of course. The Stars. She is, she admits, perhaps a little pickled still.
Omar, around this time, too, finds himself waking, drifting back out of sleep, out of the deep sea of equanimity, of the living: the luminous flow, of Islam, Surrender--of God.
He watches her stretch, get up, watches her red-nailed fingers smooth down her skirt, the little, maroon cloak, watches her stockinged feet step into her heels.
Leave it, he says.
Leave it here. I'll take it round, he adds. In the morning.
She nods, glancing at the painting, and lights a Gaulloise Blonde. She exhales. Thank you, she says.
Bon soir. Good night.
Omar is alright after that. He is alright for the moment, as he crosses the lounge in the moonlight, on his way to his own bed, a strange, slow kind of moonwalk, still submerged in the ocean, of living. The sea of the Sufi masters, of Rumi, of being present, of being here, now. Surrendered, to this life, to God.
He's alright, alone in his bed.
It is later, that the visions start. Nouche, by then, is drawing her curtain.
She's picked up things--people, places, she hums--along the way. Like the Pied Piper, she thinks. Then, once home, she played Anthea and Donna, on YouTube. Upton Ranking, the Irie, rocksteady riddim rocking between the dark walls of her flat.
It's a syncopated beat, a split beat, like the one of her own heart. It is pounding, her heart, a split, blind rhythm, propelling her forward, into the night.
It's driving her on, one foot in front of the other--one heel in the past, one stockinged toe in the future. A split beat, moving her on, the floor lighting up under her soles, like blue squares, like the squares under Michael Jackson, singing I Am The One.
One foot in the past, one in the future. Pissing on the present, on god; pissed off, or just plain pissed. Whatever, she thinks. She is doing her moonwalk.
This is when Omar's buzz, the God thing, starts wearing off. He is in bed, alone.
He's back at square one.
She dances before him, her body Bacon-ed into his skull with a knife. No, she's not in the room. She is worse. She is poor and depressed, somewhere just outside his scope, outside his Vision. Is she suicidal? He doesn't know. She moves to her own tune, which is silent, a private moonwalk, performed in plain sight but out of reach, out of touch, in some parallel realm of her own.
She moves before him, impervious to Rumi, the Sufi masters, to the Living, luminous flow of the present, impervious even to YouTube--Irie: to the blessed rocksteady music hallowing the room, the walls of her own flat.
She is humming, Billie Jean.
Omar is alone. It is midnight. His girlfriend is splayed before him, Bacon style, a pornographic version of her he doubts she would approve of, although it is certainly her, her essence, an abstract of her, even sharper, terser, than the actual spring of her own body.
It stares at him, this body, making him insane. He cannot remember with any accuracy the faces of even one of his girlfriends, before her. He is used to seeing with precision only the others, the ones he'd get at in the dark, behind some back or the other, the ones he'd turn to the wall, or the ones he would call up in private, from a life of violence, of women tormented and displayed on film, in magazines, online, for this particular purpose.
Today, he is tortured by his own woman. This makes him want to cry. All over. Is he a man?
He wonders, thinking of Billie Jean's stoic face at the Whitechapel Day Center, this morning. He'd felt no desire for her, no want whatsoever, just rage, and envy: he'd wanted to be like her. He wanted her place in the scheme of things: her heart, her endurance in the face of pain.
You don't, he imagines her sneering, lip-synching the words to an old Godley and Creme tune, Cry.
You don't even know
How to play the game.
He'd wanted to rip it out, her heart, and eat it.
He himself, is helpless. He is possessed.
He needs his cock back, he thinks. Pronto. Now.
Then it dawns on him. Nouche is his, for the taking. He can do with her as he bloody well likes. God, he thinks, will understand. God knows he's at the end of his tether.
She dances, in his mind's eye, in her window, shrugging off her cardigan, and humming Billie Jean.
Next, she is splayed on the table, and then on the floor, she is more bacon than Francis Bacon. She is the deep, red passage of her painting, the pulpy mess of his own brain carved in her image with the paint knife, like Adam fashioned after Eve. She is the very putty of lust, a bleeding idol.
This is where it's her, he imagines miming the song--not Billie Jean. And you cheat, And you lie..
Cry, she taunts.
Nouche herself, meanwhile, is singing a different tune altogether. YouTube fades from her room. She hums, doing the moonwalk, in front of the curtain.
Then she is on her satin sheets, her toes pointing in different directions, the past and the future, as she herself sinks away in the middle, escaping both, for the moment, as she moonwalks somewhere in the middle, in silence, down--down the passage marked, for the present, WAY OUT
Omar, helpless, needs to start over. You Cheat, Godzilla cries, cringing, from below. You Lie.
He needs truth. It is a hunger inside of him, it's the God thing, he supposes, a force greater even than the unholy trinity of his appetites combined, put together, a hunger deeper and more dementing even than his hunger for filth, for crack, for gear, for the body imprinted on his retina, a hunger perhaps underlying, fueling even, in the greater scheme of things, all his other appetites, as they converge and spike, this night, in his desire for her, his own woman, the one scratched, with an old, used needle, onto his eyeballs.
Allah.
Here she is again, willing, pliant. He enters her again, feeling free this time, light headed suddenly, heady with his sense of purpose, divine purpose, he feels, as if he has succeeded, finally, in transmogrifying Billie Jean's courage, in eating, and incorporating, at last, her lion's heart. He is here to take possession, of his desires, of his woman, of himself. He is here to fuck. God knows he wants to.
This is where he is flooded, not just with the bliss of the moment, and, finally, ungrudgingly, his own seed--but with truth, with pain.
It's sweetness he's been craving, all along, the Mother of Desire, sugar and milk. Sweetness he's been hungry for. The pot of honey, at the end of the rainbow, at the end of the tunnel, the end of the passage. Sweetness: her deep dark throat, as she comes, contracting around him.
She breaks his heart.
He is shattered, alone in his bed: his courage, his possession fractured, scattered, cast out, washed into the sea, the dead wide ocean of the night. He is lost, held together by no more than honey, the honey of her rainbow, of her contractions, her essence--held by nothing but the nectar, the sweet ambrosia of her.
He is beyond hope or reason, Omar despairs, the dumb, wide, grin back on his face, as he cries in the dark.
He is in love.
She meanwhile, at just this moment, actually is coming, too, is orgasming, through some strange feat of synchronicity, herself. Her lover, like Omar, is heavy: hard and boyish. That is, Nouche decides, what she, in the end, must like most about her.
She is solid, raw and manned up, with an air of dominion, like the Lion King. Billie Jean, Nouche decides, is just like Omar.
God knows how these things work, she thinks, nodding off, or passing out. Blacking out, in any case. Exiting the stage. Billie Jean is now her lover, God knows how or why, and Nouche has fallen asleep, sailed out on her own perplexity, and hoping, in some corner of her mind, the single bit of light still on in a sea of dark and unawareness, He will understand.
