She's in the window. Reaches up to close a powder blue blind. The walls are black.
Her shape is a cut out against the pale blue curtain. Like a dancer, like a shadow puppet Degas.
An eighties soul singer, Anita Baker, fades away on YouTube, her song still heavy in the room.
Omar watches as the Degas dancer shrugs off, back still turned, a dark, fluffy cardigan. It falls away from her shoulders in shimmering halves, white skin appearing like double cream from under a tin foil lid.
Her shoulders are straight, and thin, as if held up by the lace of her brassiere. Aubergine strings. She shakes off a pencil skirt, revealing the shadow between the small, white mounds of her ass through more dark lace. She steps out of the skirt and turns to face him.
He picks her up and lifts her onto the bed. Her bare feet are impossibly delicate.
From the pale blue curtain, a prayer call now drifts into the room. A truck rattles down the lane below. Inside the black walls, on the black covers of the bed, her body glows. He stares at her, as she gazes back.
Omar enters her. She grins. Her body, so thin and straight in its lace, melts around him, like marshmellow in a flame. He gazes in her eyes, still smiling at him. He cannot read her. She is a foreign type face, encrypted, in a distant language, an alien script, a different tongue. It's not her paleness. He's had his share. It's her. Looking at him. Nothing he sees her seeing, computes with what he knows. He doesn't know the man she's looking at, the man she's smelting, smiling, around. Who is he? Omar's plunging in, aching with happiness and fear, rides a tide of glittering confusion, like a wave, mastering the deep below, gaping beneath, king of the tides, absolutely certain he is nowhere, he is lost, he is nothing, nobody.
He's in love.
Afterwards, rattling down her stairs, he curses under his breath. He hasn't eaten since last night, he's fasting. He's faint, his knees buckling, knocking into the dusty staircase. He opens the door out into the East End grime. It's London, the month of Ramadan. It's Sunday. As every other day this week, he slept through the pre-dawn meal of suhur. He is not to eat or drink until the moon reasserts itself, redefines itself, again, from the sky, at dusk, tonight. It is the month of atonement. From dawn to dusk, there's no smoking, no drinking, no anger, no hate. No lying or cheating, no stealing, no envy, no greed. He stands in the street, as the first of the Sunday hipster crowd drift about him under the weak East End sun, as clouds pass overhead, as from the mosque across the street bearded youngsters step out into the brick road, their feet slipping back into their shoes. He's shaking. Shadows pass over girls in White Stripes shirts and denim hot pants, over the white caps of the haji's now streaming out. Clouds drift in and out of the pavement, across sunglasses and skinny jeans, like dry ice obscuring and refracting the shapes on a dance floor. He wishes, for the moment, he'd heeded the Prophet's call to wake in the dead of night and eat, before dawn this morning, 'For Verily, there is a blessing in suhur.' He has, however, just slept till noon, then fucked his French girlfriend. Nouche.
Approaching Brady Street he pauses. Whitechapel's Sainsbury's is under construction, scaffolds and scarlet tarpaulin slapping in the wind, pounding with pneumatic drills. He's here to shop. Omar's second sister, Abebech, his youngest, is to visit his flat later tonight. She is now married, to a skinny boy in slippers and white socks, with a struggling bit of fluff on his chin. For verily, Omar thinks, there must be a blessing in beards. The boy will drop her off tonight, as he has been doing, occasionally, over the past few months.
Three, Omar counts. Three months.
He has now been off gear for nine months altogether, off all crack. Nine months. Enough to be renewed, reborn, he thinks, enough to be born again. Like a baby. Omar, baby brother, to Abebech, his baby sister.
A fucking rebirth, that's what he's had, he thinks, turning the corner, into Brady Street, heading for Sainsbury's side entrance. Here to get a box of cup cakes, to serve to his married sister Abebech, baby steps, left right, knees still shaking, down the stained, battered pavement. Nine months, of living indoors. Three months of seeing his sister, his mother, his four other siblings, his tall, robed father Alem Neh. Of talking on the phone, a landline, not the pay as you go mobile, not the public phones he only ever used to call a dealer, three months now of sitting indoors, sipping Tetley's, and talking to his mother on the phone.
He turns the corner, baby steps, one foot in front of the other. Machines hammer like a poltergeist from behind construction tarps. Omar sniffs the air, spiked with burnt plastic and newspaper. Half pushed into the corner of the scaffold, a low tent crouches on the pavement. A toothless face waits by a small fire of plastic bottles and paper cartons. Beer can, cut open, blistering on the flames. Omar passes the tent. He's counting off items, cake, milk, matches. He passes the bearded bunch of rags bent over the flames. Jimmy. It's Jimmy.
Omar reaches in his pocket. Bless you, he says, laying a coin in Jimmy's crusted palm. Ariel, he thinks. Cup cakes, milk, and he's out of detergent. Omar presses Jimmy's hand, and moves on, away from the sputtering fire, the blackened beer can, the charred casserole bubbling angrily inside. Allah, he's hungry.
In front of the shop, he hesitates. He could quickly run around the corner and dip into the library. Oops, the Idea Store. The Tower Hamlets Whitechapel Library is now called the Idea Store, a multistory green glass facade. Rumi, is what he wants, craves, suddenly, more than caramel cupcakes. Rumi, the Persian poet, the Sufi master of rhythm and rhyme.
The way I look is so fragile,
yet here in my hand
is an assurance of eternity.
He's glad to see the new guards at the door. He passes the metal detector gates, still grateful to slip into a public building after decades of being thrown out, banned, barred from hospitals, hostels, GP surgeries; decades of lying, in convulsions, on some public doorstep. Baby steps, he thinks, tiptoeing into the hall, one foot in front of the other.
Posters on the wall of the Idea Store show the historical East End. He stops at his favorite sign: Soup Kitchen For The Jewish Poor, across the entire Victorian facade, with the doorways, in addition, just to be absolutely clear, marked WAY IN and WAY OUT. The signs and their language are so devoid of human imagination, of rhythm or rhyme, so devoid of Rumi's fragile, or hand, or eternity--so painfully literal, they never fail to cheer him.
A shelf of Ramadan Quick Picks offers Rumi right in the hallway. He presses the Selected Poems to his chest and browses. Arabic scrawls sit side by side, on the neighboring Science Year display, with the bold black type face of The God Delusion. He picks up a copy, an audiobook, he reads, by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. Read by Lala Ward. He sets the book back on the shelf. Right, he thinks, they're married.
Omar checks out the Rumi and emerges from the gates, again, without incident. Lala Ward traded Doctor Who for Dawkins. Now there's a let down, he thinks. She claimed it was love at first sight. Surely she means it was genes at first sight, jumping to promulgate themselves in the quest for world dominion?
He's back on the corner of Whitechapel Road. Brady Street looms in the green sheen of the library, a dark, stinking alley, more potholed than the roads of Addis under Mengistu. Lala Ward! Fallen for the love delusion. With Dawkins, the secular Pontiff, the pope of militant Atheism. Only the Brits, he thinks. They are so bloody-minded, so literal, they call a library, a place to find ideas, a store of books and rhyme and poetry not the Well, or the Stream, or the Fountain, but the Idea Store. The French may have proclaimed God's demise, but only the Brits would call faith itself The God Delusion.
Nothing's changed in this place, he thinks, from the days of the Soup Kitchen For The Jewish Poor. Everything is literal, a society organized like a lab, named and labeled with all the imagination of a New Labour Victorian, a civil servant in a white coat. A sign reading WAY IN on the left, SOUP/ SCIENCE/ CULTURE/ IDEA STORE plastered across the bit in the middle, and on the right the sign, WAY OUT.
When I first arrived, he muses, turning into Brady, I used to think the Brits were just taking after the Americans, dumbing down. I was wrong, he thinks. It's the Brits wot was dumb first. The Yanks's just dumb cause their lot was Brits to begin with.
On the pavement, a large, human turd lies.
I should be voting Tory, he thinks.
At least they hate me for believing. Labour only condones my faith because they think it's backward. They think it's cultural. They think I'm backward, and my faith is backward, but it's not my fault. It's just my culture. By acknowledging my culture, they don't have to blame my nature. Which makes me, despite being manifestly backward, not innately backward. Which, and this is the whole point of the exercise, makes them not racist for thinking I'm backward to begin with.
It just makes me more fodder, more Jewish Poor, to be lined up at the WAY IN sign, and led through the Soup Kitchen, the Idea Store. In their haste to absolve themselves, they manage to bypass, entirely, the fact that my backward little culture means surrendering to God.
To God, he thinks. To the Here, the Present, the All, the Undivided. To Rumi's hand, to his assurance, the One Love, his eternity, the Everlasting Now.
I am surrendered, he thinks. Surrendered. To the East End sun, to the English clouds drifting overhead, casting their chill across Brady, turning the emerald glass of the Idea Store a grimy bottle green. I am surrendered even to Labour--New, Old, patched up, bent over backwards.
And it's this affirmation, he thinks, that brings about eternity. The most backward thing in the world, Surrender. And the hardest to accomplish. To acknowledge the present, directly, in the here and the now, and not through some WAY IN/ WAY OUT concept of how it should be or how we should be in it. That's what Rumi was pointing to, that's what the Prophet was talking about, and that maligned martyr you revere, on his Cross. They weren't talking about no SCIENCE/ SOUP / IDEA STORE.
Your Son of Man did not wash the feet of the Pontiffs, the WAY IN/ WAY OUT know-it-alls.
The feet of the lost it was, of the hopeless, of the NO WAY OUT: the wandering, the helpless, Rumi's fragile. Jimmy's feet.
I am surrendered, Omar thinks, the weak, dry ice shadows passing across his face, to the English clouds. To Tower Hamlets, to this stinking road I'm standing in, to the pot holes under my soles, deeper than the holes of Addis. I am surrendered to life, to God, to Jimmy's turd sitting right in front of me on the pavement.
Mama, he says, dropping his shopping on the counter, and picking up the phone. Salam mama.
Yes, he nods. I'm fasting mama.
He opens the fridge and shoves in the box of cakes.
Yes, he repeats. I'm praying.
He pictures his mother, her high shoulders and straight back, as she sits on a wood bench outside the kitchen wall, behind the tall grill fencing in a large, ground floor council flat. He imagines dropping the phone, and listening for a moment, for the clear pitch of her voice, its shrill notes carrying across the few, cloud-swept streets that separate his own council kitchen from hers.
He shakes his head. Not much news mama. I'm reading Rumi.
He takes out the Ariel and sticks it under the sink.
Nine months. A rebirth. Talking to his mother, on the phone, hearing her crystal voice, seeing her before him, her back resting gently against the wall, her robe crisp and white among the potted plants. He nods into the phone, as she discusses her five children, his four siblings, his young sister Abebech, the twins in the middle, his eldest brother Wendimu.
He reads her Rumi, in English.
If, for penance, you crush grapes,
you may as well drink the wine.
You imagine that the old sufis
had dark sediment in their cups.
It does not matter what you think.
He hears his mother, breathing on the other end. Go on, she says.
As everyone drifts off to sleep,
I am still staring at the stars.
His mother sighs.
Separation from you does have a cure, he reads.
There is a way inside the sealed room.
He sees black walls, black sheets, little, perfect feet, and blushes.
If you will not pour wine,
at least allow me half a mouthful
of leftover dregs.
His mother murmurs. He can see her, too, her white dress stiff behind the freshly painted grill of the fence; pots, flowers, dangling from its wrought iron curls.
You need no name.
You are the ocean.
I am held in your sway.
Again, she sighs.
When I am outside you,
life is torment.
Her children number not five but seven.
She's lost two--the thought fires up under Omar's skull, like a flare in the night. It instantly dies in the deep dark sleep of day, where it slumbers again, hidden, dormant, as it has, throughout his life, throughout his days, his waking hours. Omar is still sitting on the floor, under the sink; his mother on her bench outside the kitchen door. The children, a little brother, an unborn sister, even their names, lie buried once more in the ground between them. They are gone, and all that's left is Omar's deep, intimate knowledge of his mother's heart; and her breathing on the other end of the line. Rapture, he thinks. Surrender.
He himself was lost to her. She may have crushed grapes for penance, he thinks. She may dwell with sufis, drink the darkest sediment: she may surrender, to God, drunk on the wine of rapture. But, he thinks, she has not seen a bottle of spirit in her life. There is not a way in this world she could comprehend the words crack cocaine.
Nine months, he thinks. Baby steps.
Then Solomon walks back into Jerusalem, he reads,
And a thousand lanterns illuminate.
Nine months, a fucking rebirth.
He can see his mother, behind the bars of her gate, her white robe brilliant, her children gathered at her feet--conjured out of the council air by the tender hiss of their names on her lips. He presses the phone to his ear, although he hears her breathe now not through the line, but across the Tower Hamlets estates.
The divine glory settles
into a mountain nest.
He reads her these last lines, into the phone, but, really, just mouths them out loud, as though speaking straight into her ear--as though being really, finally, back in that nest--back on the other side, on the inside, of her grill fence.
Later, he climbs the stairs of the Whitechapel Detox class room. It is dusk, past eight: time for Iftar, the opening of the fast. The meal however, blessed or not, will have to wait till after the meeting. Verily, Omar has worn his own personal grooves into these steps, which are not baby steps, he thinks, not baby steps at all, but rock-hard, granite monsters, steep, unyielding fuckers. These stairs are the kind of concrete he used to wake on, colder, less giving, than the unnamed, faceless hands of hell. These are the kind of stairs he would find himself trying to go back to sleep on, the kind sitting smack under a battery of strip lights, like a flood-lit, concrete grotto, the kind he would have passed out on, lulled by some warped sense of security, only to wake, moments later: blinded, strung out, hypothermic, and persecuted by the relentless buzz, the blaze, the overkill of light overhead; murderous with fright.
He is carrying a mug of tea up the stairs, which will have to do for Iftar, and which he, now, deposits on the first available surface in the room, as he is here, first and foremost, to receive. He is hailed, first by Edward, then Dicky, Josh, Marquis, Terri, Said, a long, serial hug he receives and returns, a recovery relay race. By the end of it he is aglow, the mug forgotten on the table, then remembered, picked up, brought to his mouth, like a chalice, touched to his lips. Water. It goes down, like the dark dregs of the sufis. The old sufis he thinks, or Anita Baker, Caught up in the Rapture of Love.
I am, he thinks, surrendered.
You are, Terri says, a nasty cunt.
It's later, the lights in the room have been turned full tilt, and Omar has just read out a sixteen page version of the story of his life.
It's feedback time.
Omar nods at Terri.
He looks around the room.
Marquis nods, Said nods, the entire room sits nodding away, in accordance, it seems, with Terri's verdict.
Verily, Omar thinks, there is accordance. And in accordance, he thinks, surely there's a blessing.
He closes his eyes, allowing himself to float, for the moment, on the spirit of unanimity, of brotherhood in the room. He sits, eyes closed, in the silence, allowing himself, momentarily, to be lulled, into a fresh sleep; the calm wake of truth. He opens his eyes, to the concrete walls of the class room, to the strip lights buzzing overhead, and thinks, Verily.
A cunt.
Abebech is dropped off at his front door. He shakes hands with her young husband, who slinks off, his white-capped head held high, to the last prayer of the day in the mosque around the corner, the same one Omar watched empty out as he stepped into the street earlier today, descending from Nouche's stairs.
He is reminded, watching the boy disappear down his own tiled hallway, of a canvas, leaning against her black walls this morning, something Nouche'd been working on for days.
She'd been painting it after a photo of a London underground walkway: parallel lines of blackly gleaming tiles, and neon fixtures, converging in the middle. There, where the tunnel should end, she had replaced the blind, end, wall with a single, blue square, flat and luminous, like a matt, framed star.
Watching his sister's white-robed husband--my brother, he thinks, for an instance--watching him disappear, patting down the dark hall in his slippers, he is reminded of that square, the white cap on the boy's head bobbing in the distance, in the gloom, like a flame.
He turns to welcome his sister.
In the kitchen, as she goes through messages on her iPhone, he pours her Tetley's. She is in the middle of a rant about being kept waiting at the sweltering Oxford Circus Apple Store this afternoon, her appointment to get her phone fixed running late, her shopping sweating on the counter at home. As always, when she slips from Amharic into English, he is drawn to her young face, a near perfect, near-black sphere in its long veil, her small, sharp features so stark against its white she looks modeled out of onyx flesh and blood.
..And I tell them, she's saying, I'm fasting, I'm dizzy and tired and need to still start on the cooking..
He pictures Iftar, spread out before her youthful husband this evening, the round table covered in soft ijera, lentil and beef wats sitting each in their own, spotless little heaps.
He's hungry, suddenly, for the first time in hours, and realizes he still has not actually eaten. Caramel cupcakes then, for what is in effect breakfast, lunch and dinner. Baby food: his own, baby Iftar.
He is sure he's had worse.
In his room, white, bare apart from two straight-backed chairs and the small table now bearing the platter of cakes, he watches his sister glance at a postcard he has taped to the wall, a flyer, actually, for a group show Nouche was part of. It features another of her works.
In it, she has painted Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, from the inside. The outsized space, in the painting, is empty, like a gigantic, concrete crater. Parallel lines converge around the grey expanse of the back wall, which too is left empty, save a single square right in the center. Another framed blue star.
His sister, lifting a bite of caramel icing, glances back at the postcard, the painting.
It's like.. she says, slipping back in Amharic. ..The Kaaba.
Slowly, she drops the fork and suddenly, he is an eldest brother, and she, again, his baby sister. She whispers.
..A blue Mecca.
Abebech's eyes widen, as Nouche appears in the doorway. Thinking it was the young husband, here to pick up his sister after prayers, Omar has just buzzed her in. Now he is struggling with her in the doorway, his leonine instincts having led him to both squeeze against the wall to welcome her in, and now to somehow scramble past her into the room. He is tripping over his feet in an array of conflicting urges, an erratic wildfire of gallantry which bewilders even himself.
Finally, she stands, in the middle of the room, under the bare lightbulb. Slight, almost transparent, in a silk skirt and heels. The fluffy mohair cardigan wrapped around her shoulders. All he has to offer her is the straight-backed chair, and he is already doing so, with gusto, with both abandon and, he realizes, dread, as he settles her, finally, at the small table--right opposite his sister.
Nouche is tiny but grand, somehow, a powdery, ragged elegance radiating from her very pores. She's perfectly amiable, and his sister's stark features too, are softened with smiles. He himself however is on edge, silently demented, all over the place; his instincts run riot. His young sister is solid as a house in her ankle-length robe, her veils hiding her hands down to her scrubbed pink cuticles. His girlfriend, by contrast, appears to be held in her seat by no apparent force of gravity, might be touching on the room solely with her own nails, long, dark and oxblood, resting on the table. Abebech is back, for some reason, on the topic of Apple Store queues (Nouche sleeps with her Mac on the black sheets of her bed), his sister picking away at the caramel icing, then a first cupcake and, as Omar stands watching, helpless, enthralled, a second. Nouche would not touch a cupcake if it was the Last Supper, he thinks. She'd opt straight for the Cross, instead.
As he watches Abebech toy with the third, a feeling starts in his gut, a new, fresh dread, unnamed as yet, a new sense to contend with the array playing havoc on his nerves as it is, his raw, bare, baby nerves, nine months old he thinks.
It has been nine months, at most, that he's had feelings in the first place. Not that he would have known: he has learned, the hard way, Terri's way, to identify them. Feelings: weird, seismic changes in outlook. He cannot remember having had any, ever, before. He was a mountain, an iceberg. Calm and even: unperturbed in a polar sea, his shipwrecks reliable, constant, but distant, remote, occurring always on the outskirts, and, somehow, on someone else's watch.
Now he is one of the ships. One of the wrecks, constantly running into large, submerged objects, subject himself to upheaval, unannounced, to clear seas without warning turning the exact shade and color of a tombstone, descending, closing, wham, over his head.
Rumi, Omar thinks. The way I look is so fragile.
He stands by the table, faint with effort, gazing at the postcard on the wall, the concrete crater, the grotto--the tiny, blue square at the heart. Surrender, he thinks, sinking to his knees. He is moved, suddenly, to tears, by that blue square, like a doorway, marked WAY OUT.
He looks at his sister, who is smiling, looks at her round cheeks, surprised to find himself still standing, on his own two feet, in his own room: not actually in a heap on the floor, or, for that matter, crying.
She's pregnant, he thinks. And she doesn't know.
Not quite. Not yet.
In the kitchen, Abebech runs a thumb across the plate and, like child, lands it in her mouth.
Again, he blushes, thinking of his girlfriend's white legs, her feet pointing to opposite ends of her sheet, a small, creamy hand resting in between.
His sister rolls her eyes at the room and whispers, frowning, She's old.
Why am I always catching the end, only, of that song, he thinks, later that night, as Anita Baker dies out, again, on YouTube. Nouche is curled up on her bed, her back against the wall, staring at her unfinished canvas on the opposite end of the room. The empty glass dangles from her fingers, which lock over her knees. She is brooding, a darkness emanating from her bones.
In the painting, black tiles lead into the tunnel. Strip lights reflect on the floor, more parallel lines converging, in the blind wall at the end, which is not actually there: whose absence--like a portal, a gateway--even now, brings back for him the onslaught of this evening, both the old master's fragile, and his eternity: his sister's whispered Blue Mecca.
Again he is tearful, watching the deep furrow in his girlfriend's brow. She is hating the painting, he can tell. He watches her dark mood, his gaze, he feels, like an X-ray, cutting straight through her mohair, her sulking silks, to her marrow, that oxblood stew of longing, of thwarted desire. She is airless, the tombstone, momentarily, locking her into the grotto, the underground, the black-tiled tunnel, of her discontent, her own disenchantment. So fragile.
He sees through her, reads her like a poem, could drink her, like her own claret, like the dark dregs of the sufis. It is rapture she's after.
Still, even staring at her own painting, her own blue square, her Kaaba, her own doorway marked WAY OUT, she fails to read, to even see, the sign.
There is no way in the world, he thinks, she could comprehend the word Surrender.
He picks up his Rumi, and reads, this time to her.
The blood in our bodies carries
a living luminous flow.
He aches to show her her own painting, through the eyes of the sufi, aches to tell her, let go. He is piling on words, a mountain of words, an iceberg, anything to jolt her boat, to show her that once she is out in the open, surrendered, she will be free.
But watch when it spills out
and soaks into the ground.
He glances around the page, frantic for the right word, the right sentence. He should write his own. He could write an entire story. Rapture.
He looks up at her small, intense shape, wrapped up, caught up, in her own arms, like pale, crossing guns.
It would never work.
Omar sighs, and returns to the poem.
That is how speech does, he reads.
Overflowing from silence.
Silk on one side,
cheap, striped canvas on the other.
She yawns.
Lazily, she drops the glass, her arms, and lowers her knees, spreads them, her small white feet pointing, again, to opposite ends of the black sheet.
Omar thinks, still, a line or two, but really, they are lost in the room. His words, his speech, like cheap, striped canvas, is fading, petering away, like Anita Baker's last notes, as he plunges, has plunged already, long since by now; has lost himself, all over, in the dark pit of her tunnel, her dead end, her bright blue star.
