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Lights

Camera, lights. Rolling. 

Nouche watches from the middle. The Day Center Auditorium is a madhouse. Billie Jean is shooting. Omar is on stage. Terri has gone awol. Boy George hovers in the wings.

It is December, at last, Christmas lights flickering all over Whitechapel. Outside, the shop fronts present a unified, if epileptic, take on this Christian affair. Tinsel trees bloom in their halal doorways, rainbow fairy lights flash in mad, syncopated unison.

It’s the birthday bash. Not just Our Lord Christ’s--but this lot’s. Marquis, Anwar, Omar, the Whitechapel Day Centre peer group. They’re one year clean.

In the Auditorium, steam rises from the crowd. Drums roll from the decks. The strobe fires, phased to the grimy beat. Marquis, lithe, grimly handsome, clutches a headphone to his shoulder, as he drops in a deep, rolling bass. The floor groans. Dancers, hoods pulled over their faces, bob to the bass and light, as if caught in their slipstream. 

These boys have sold crack to school kids. They mugged moms on welfare, robbed corner stores, have stolen everything from Mercedes to strollers. Marquis himself got fucked up the ass just up the road in Dalston more times than even Boy George. He throws another plate on, spins it back, one ear on the vinyl, one ear on the floor, holds the record in place, then, as he counts, over the bobbing hoods, lets it rip.

Deeper, the crowd is sinking, deeper in sync, deeper in all of this, the sweat, the music, the strobe. Lights.

Omar waits on stage. Terri, their rapper, was meant to go on first, before Omar. Terri needed these firecracker beats, whereas Omar, for his own Spoken Word thing, could do with something a bit less hectic. He’s about to recite poetry, he thinks, not to incite the crowd to burn down every Christmas tree on Whitechapel High Street.

From below, Nouche watches the confusion. Her painting, a red tunnel with a blue square at the heart, hangs centre-stage. It’s beautifully lit. She follows as Billie Jean’s camera pans the stage set, passing over Omar’s tall black silhouette, and zooming on the painting, which flares up and disappears back into the night in the strobe light, like a secret doorway in the Auditorium, a passage, a blood red gateway, into another world.

Nouche grew up clicking her heels around the famous Alain Mouille, whom she’d married at twenty-three. She’d been raised on claret and steak, under studio lights, her paintings sparkling under the cameras. She’d been La Petite Mouille. Her husband, a psychoanalyst TV host, undressed the Paris boheme, magnates and politicians, in front of all of France, in a talk show called Salon. Politics, art, literature, were all boiled down to their core. Authors, actors, artists, gathered around Alain Mouille’s table, each to be returned, under the crystal chandeliers, to their individual motive; their deepest fear, innermost desire.

In the Auditorium, Billie Jean pans out over the crowd, which is kicking up a sweat. She rolls along the floor, where black hoods ride Marquis’ wave under the strobes, like a ballet of mobster monks, a Trappist gangster troupe.

Where is Terri, their rapper? God only knows. Nouche, meanwhile, watching the cola-fueled mob, could use a drink. This whole clean and sober dancing business is deep and dark. Freaky.

It’s been a year today for Omar. A year since he woke, on a concrete parking lot somewhere, the Whitechapel Sainsbury’s, possibly, he’d been thinking--only to find it was dark, dusk. His eyelids, as he glanced about him, crackled with the frost. He’d sat up, and the notion had occurred that it was Christmas Eve. That he was freezing up from the inside, his teeth clattering all the way from his marrow, which was cringing, crimping. Then, that this stop-freeze feeling, did not stop with him, Omar, but that he seemed to spread it out, that the whole world was contaminated, implicated, shutting down in turn. Low-level frenzy, desperation, was in the air. The world of traffic, of exchange, was grinding to a halt. He jumped to his feet, his bones crunching under him, and bolted for the bright doors in the distance, Sainsbury’s entrance, where, just as he arrived, the fat guard was turning his back. Omar tried the glass doors, which would open. Bismillah. He leaned against the glass, pushing in his full weight. Just then, the guard turned around. He lifted one palm, buttressing the door. Closing, the guard mouthed. No one in.

From the awning, the parking lot, as it started to snow, Omar watched with agony the customers still idling down the aisles, piling up turkey at the check out. Not that he cared about food, but shoplifting happened to be his single marketable skill, and he was clucking, after being awake barely three minutes. He was feeling sick, already, convulsions jolting his joints, with not seconds, not minutes, not even hours to get through, but three fucking infidel days.

That’s when he sank back down to the concrete ground. Allah. Never again. 

Sat there with nothing, no hope, just carols and tinsel and lights in the dark, all around, stars in the street.

It was later, that same Christmas week, that Nouche had been locking her bike in the snow, to the fence in front of the mosque in Brick Lane. She’d been divorced a year then. A year since she’d left Maison Mouille, the Quartier, street lanterns glittering off her antique windows on Boulevard Saint-Michel. She’d fumbled in the dark, in the grimy East End snow, over the lock, her fingers rigid with cold. The lock was frozen shut. In the light from the doorway, she’d pried at it with an ancient pocket knife, a knife which had belonged to her father, back in Marly-Gomont where she was born. An old Bangladeshi in a robe had gently taken it from her aching hands, and she’d watched, in the falling snow, how at last the bike had been locked to the fence. Going up her stairs in the dark, she’d prayed the slippered men, creeping in and out of the mosque, a converted church, all through the night, would somehow watch over it, keep save her bike from the thugs, the thieves; the freezing, starving, clucking Brick Lane night.

She’d ended up watching over the street herself, that night, watching from her own dark window, the men, in the soft light from the mosque. Knife in hand. It sat in her palm, as snow covered over the tracks on the road, the footsteps coming and going from the chipped, cream wooden doors. She’d thought of her Saint Michel view, the 5th arrondisement at her doorstep. Mouille, who’d taken her from the one-street hamlet of Marly-Gomont, to the chandeliers, the spotlights, of the Salon studio. 

She remembered the Christmas fetes they’d thrown, the food, the guests, the stars. Lagerfeld, Deneuve, Huppert, she remembers being cornered by Kristen Scott Thomas and her impeccable French. The unimaginable Sophia Loren, who’d made Nouche, whose posture is straight from Degas, feel like a piglet. Laughing in the wings with Charlotte Gainsbourg, just a few years younger than Nouche, in stitches, like a little sister.

Nouche had found herself, finally, that Brick Lane night, last Christmas, in the bath. Her legs silvery in the pink water, the whole tub cupped inside the black walls of her bathroom. She’d lain in the middle, swaddled in steam and oil of Tuberose. The battered wood of the knife slowly flicking in one pale wrist; the blade scraping away at the other.

Tonight, Nouche watches from below, as Billie Jean records. Marquis phases the entire scene from the decks, thunder and strobe, like a mad God conductor. Omar has climbed from the stage, and is now in the crowd, his long limbs both solid and loose, like lava, bubbling, evenly, in sync with the floor, with the night. The stage is bare, apart from the strobes, the painting: the unearthly passage, the flickering gateway.

Anwar, a tall, baby-faced man with a pouch, is gesturing over the din, to Chris, the Day Centre counsellor who has helped them get the birthday bash off the ground. Their rapper, Terri, is still missing. Billie Jean, from behind the camera, seems to be putting in a word with Chris and Anwar, while talking, simultaneously, in her phone. Boy George. He is on the other side of the stage, also on the phone. Nouche has met him, too, on set, at Salon, she suddenly realises, although she doubts he might remember.

It’s Billie Jean, it appears, who brought him in here. She nods into the phone, without taking the camera off the crowd, registering the mayhem around her with a slow, steady pan.

Apart from Billie Jean’s lens, the only thing on the itinerary running smoothly, on track, just as planned, is the crowd. Omar’s lot sure have pulled in the punters tonight. The Day Centre Auditorium is packed. God knows where these kids have come from, but the austerity-plagued council of Tower Hamlets, who bankrolled the evening in hopes of promoting drugs-free street culture, must be pleased; they’re getting value for money.

Marquis, of course, was once a dub-step DJ packing punches from Berlin to Goa, before ending up in a crack house, renting out his arse in Dalston. It’s Anwar though, soft, pudgy Anwar, who’s about to shift the whole thing, the whole night, into a different gear.

Anwar had come in a year ago, violent, obese, mute. He’d opened his mouth to speak only months later, after weeks in detox, after months of counselling sessions and, upstairs in the conference room, Whitechapel Day Centre meetings. It’s Omar, who remembers. I am more, Anwar had whispered in the silent meeting room at last ..Than the child of warring parents.

Now Anwar’s gesturing over the din, still, to Chris. Billie Jean cuts to Marquis, the God conductor. The Auditorium shakes. She rotates around the room, over the dancers, who flash in the light, past Omar, the volcano, whose solid shoulders seem to smoulder in the dark. Billie Jean skims over Omar as she pans across the floor, halting on Nouche. In the shade, in floaty silk, Nouche’s small, straight body is sharp as a cut out. Then, with each flare of the strobe, she catches fire, the fine, pleated dress glowering like skin.

On her end of the lens, Nouche holds her breath. To her right, Omar’s height, his bubbling, lava shape, projects from the crowd. Left, Billie Jean, bare-armed behind the camera, is a cannon, terse as string in black jeans and sneakers. She zooms in on Nouche, who is burning a tiny, syncopated, hourglass figure in the viewer.

Billie Jean. Is she her lover? 

Nouche doesn’t know.

Billie Jean wields the lens, like a gun, a ray gun, fixing Nouche in her gaze. Nouche dances, her pearly dress clinging to her body. It’s a pale dance, a moon dance, she thinks, like that windy night, months ago now, in August.

But here’s another day, a different day, for you. This is the morning after Nouche locks the bike, that Christmas week a year ago, to the fence of the Brick Lane mosque. She descends her stairs the next day, steps out into her street, where a drizzly rain has washed away the snow. Omar, by this time, has spent the past three days on the Whitechapel Detox ward. He feels shattered, insane, but somehow, madly, alive. Reborn. Allah.

Omar has come out to pray. That is not how Nouche finds him, though, that morning. Omar has entered the mosque in a clean white shirt, only to be thrown out by the same short, dark man who has routinely chased him off the premises for the past seventeen years. As Omar has been chased from every other Tower Hamlets charitable institution, not to mention supermarket, doctor’s surgery and homeless shelter. He’s been banned from pretty much every doorstep he has managed to cross in his near two decades on the streets.

Omar sits on the steps of the mosque, in the rain, and the clean shirt, as Nouche steps from her doorway to unlock her bike. There is something, she remembers thinking, crossing the road. Something about him.

Her bike’d been gone.

Back to the booming Auditorium. She remembers the thought. Something, she thinks, now, a year later, dancing across from her boyfriend. Still. There is something, still, about him.

She remembers thinking it the first time, remembers the rain, the shirt.

Most, she remembers her buzzer, at dusk that same December day. She remembers parting the curtain, and lifting the heavy pane, to find Omar, standing, in the street below. With a bike. Nouche’s bike. Omar beaming up at her.

What she forgets, is pain shooting up her arm as she opened up that window.

Omar does not. He remembers. Even here, perhaps, tonight, on the dance floor. Even as he watches her flare up in Billie Jean’s lens. Watches her burn in the light. Buried deep somewhere in his lava body, there bubbles that memory; the bandaged wrist.

Chris, meanwhile, gestures to Anwar. He’s pointing up. The ceiling? Nouche wonders, in the thunder from the decks. She sees Anwar agree, and too, lift a finger to the ceiling, trying to get Omar’s attention. Meeting, he mouths. Ad hoc. Omar nods back. Chris sticks up both hands in reply, miming, In ten.

Never again, Nouche, the butcher, had thought, the year before, that night, in the bath. She’d watched her body change colour in the tub, her silver limbs turning rosy with the water. Never ever again.

If she crossed her road the next morning, to cross paths, with a complete stranger, someone who had not a claim on her in the world, perhaps it was this thought, never again, which had connected some wire, burned some pathway, and prompted that other thought. Something. Something about him.

Under the neon fixtures of the Whitechapel Day Center meeting room, the floor softly booms as below, in the Auditorium, Marquis still rules. Here Anwar, Chris, Billie Jean have taken seats around the conference table. Omar has led Nouche, too, up the concrete stairs. It is Nouche’s first time up here. 

..A moment of silence.. Chris is saying, ..For the still suffering addict.

There is not a sound in the room, apart from the buzz of neon, the thud from below. Anwar, Billie Jean, sit with eyes closed. Nouche blinks in the strip lights. Omar’s dark face, to her right, glows. Traces, of thoughts, dreams--something, she thinks--ripple gently, as always, along his brow. Always something, Nouche is thinking, About him. 

Across from her, Billie Jean is chiseled. Her delicate face is unperturbed under her short, dark hair. A slight knit in her brow seems to convey something of Billie Jean’s essence, even as she sits here wordless, eyes closed: seems to proclaim her presence in the room, like a rogue, brooding star of Bethlehem.

It will be Omar’s turn, later tonight, to go on. He will read a poem called In. The one he wrote about the painting, her painting, the doorway marked WAY OUT. It looms behind him on the podium, her passage, the colour of blood.

Way Out.. he’ll say, the syllables rolling from his tongue, molten, again, like lava. 

A low riding dub rhythm will back up the flow.

..Is Spelled Backwards, Omar continues.

Baby.

Way Out.. he says, Is Spelled Way In.

In. Nouche is in the crowd. In the auditorium, in a sweat, in a silk dress, in a dance, in a band of merry fools, of hoodlum Trappists, of reformed addicts and thieves, all stone cold sober, all deeply, darkly, in to it; into all this.

Next is Anwar. They’ve lost their rapper, by then, poor Terri. The cunt. Thank God they’ve got Boy George, sipping a seven-up, to replace him. It’s Anwar though, mute, obese Anwar, who clambers onto the stage now, beside Marquis, who has just stepped up the pitch a notch or so, whipping the diet-coke infused pit back to a frenzy.

Nouche watches from the fringe, with Boy George. He doesn’t stand a chance. Anwar is a menace, spray gunning the crowd with verbal rhythm. Spewing it out, insurgency-style, turning Whitechapel into an East End West Bank, a dance hall Jerusalem.

Can’t believe.., a girl in a silver mini groans, I’m dancing..

She pants. ..To Anwar.

But all that is later. First, Nouche sits in the impromptu meeting. She looks around the table, the closed, silent faces. She wonders what they’re doing. What is it this lot does in a meeting? Pray?

She thinks of Christmas with Mouille, of La Loren, La petite Gainsbourg. The holly, the game, the wine, the candelabras. The river glittering in the studio windows, the City of Lights.

Perhaps this is where she remembers the wrists. Perhaps not. The moment has passed, anyway, as a great crashing noise shakes the room and Terri tumbles from the door, stumbling over a chair and sitting down in a corner.

No one moves. Silence returns under the neon lights. Nouche continues to watch the faces around the table, their eyes closed, lost in something she cannot fathom. Another crash from the corner, then a carrier bag loudly crackling. More hiss, crack-snap, fizz: plastic foil being torn from something inside Terri’s bag, as the concrete floor softly stomps under the table, the lights buzz overhead, deep breathing emanates from the small circle gathered at the centre of the room.

Now a big clatter, as Terri stumbles, again, and dunks onto the table, thud, a man-sized carton box. There it sits, like a bomb, ticking away, while Chris scrapes his throat, and Omar, Billie Jean, Anwar, open, finally, their eyes and seem to return to the room.

The box is black, gold ribbon hastily ripped to shreds. Terri sits slumped in the corner. Billie Jean glowers. Even Omar, pudgy Anwar, radiate gloom.

Chris sits staring ahead, tight-lipped. The floor thumps like a hollow, concrete heart.

It is Nouche, the carnivore, at last, who cuts through the air of woe. Who flicks a pale wrist. 

Is this where she remembers? The bath, the blade? Who knows. 

Maybe, sitting here, between two lovers, she remembers that other night, in August. Moon dancing for Billie Jean. 

Are they lovers? Not since. 

Billie Jean had been waiting for her, by her door, that August night, waiting to lead her upstairs. All she herself had done, Nouche thinks, was dance.

As she’s done this evening, the lens zooming in on her, as she will do later tonight, at midnight, when Anwar, who sits here in the meeting still a war child, a boy, will open his mouth, and become the man of the hour. When Nouche’s tight little shape will again burn a figure eight before the camera, Music and Lights, on the dance floor.

Does Omar know? 

Nouche doesn’t know. Can he tell?

Terri’s black box still ticks on the table. What Nouche doesn’t know, is that whatever Omar knows, or doesn’t know, he will not forget the bandage. Omar remembers.

Behind the box, Anwar sits picking mutely at a scab. Billie Jean seems frozen in a glare. Below, a lone raver blows a whistle, a shrill, piercing call, caged in concrete.

It’s Nouche’s pale wrist, up here, that catches the light, and dances, over the glum table.

It hovers over the box. Her Chanel nails pick an outsized, pearly chocolate. For an instance, it floats there in the air, the white glaze flickering in the neon light. With no stretch of the imagination would Nouche, the butcher, in fact eat this.

She looks around the table. Again, she thinks of Mouille, of the spreads of game, the candles, the wine. Nouche holds up the chocolate, lifting a lazy lash, to Billie Jean, left, then Omar, right. 

She would have chosen, she thinks suddenly, neither. It was Omar, a year ago this week, who chose her. Who had chased his own thieving lot all across the East End that morning, to appear at her door at noon, bearing the rusty bike. 

Next, it had been Billie Jean, who’d been waiting by that same door, that windy night in August. Who had somehow managed, step by lionhearted step, to lead Nouche up her own Brick Lane staircase.

The chocolate still hovers, white between scarlet nails. Nouche again feels her spine tingle, as she remembers the moon dance, undressing between her own black walls. Before Billie Jean. 

Slowly, the wrist descends, as Nouche realises it is not the woman, bare armed, across the table, she is in thrall of. It’s not the smouldering man either, beside her. 

It’s the soft spot, Nouche thinks, inside herself--a blood red passage--she can’t help but stare at. A gateway. It’s not for weak hearted. 

Nouche had, she sees now, not even chosen Mouille. It was he, who’d appeared on a Paris platform one day and, in a fit of mad brille, slung off his Pierre Cardin jacket. Hurled it to the tiles, right where she stood waiting for the metro, in her heels. Flung it before her toes.

All she does, Nouche realises now, is wait. 

The bonbon still hovers, mid-air, over the stomping floor, the gaping box. 

The weak heart, Nouche knows, is hers. The choice is not. 

She yawns. 

It’s theirs.

Meanwhile, she’s in. 

She’s in the meeting. In with this band of fools. In, even, with poor Terri, who’s passed out in the corner. The cunt. 

She places the bonbon before her, on the table. Then she lifts the box, and hands it to Omar. 

Below, an entire troupe of ravers--reformed, Nouche supposes--now seems to have landed at the party. At least a dozen whistles shriek with that particular pitch of madness that will cut straight through absolutely anything, even the reinforced ceiling of the Auditorium, the concrete floors of the Whitechapel Detox Center.

Later that night, Nouche’ll be in with Anwar, as he climbs his way up the podium, and moans, shouts, bites his way through the most demented bits of Marquis’ set. Nouche will be in then, even, with the ravers, in their tunics and Dr. Seuss hats, in silver minis and bras, hounding on, toasting, Anwar with their whistles. 

She’ll be in, finally, that night, with Boy George--who, as she feared, has not the faintest memory of either Salon, her, or entire chunks, for that matter, of the City of Lights, but will dance with her nonetheless. Fat and bald, she’ll think, like Father Christmas. Gorgeous. Radiant.

That evening though, up in the conference room, she places the bonbon before her, and waits, the pale glaze sitting under the neon buzz, like a melting dance card.

From Nouche, Omar receives the box. He scans it for fudge, his favourite. 

In the corner, with a bolt, Terri wakes. Omar hands the spread to Anwar. Behind Billie Jean’s stony frame, Terri tumbles from his chair. Chomping, Omar glances around the table, where Nouche’s confection still sits and waits. Even Billie Jean, at last, surrenders, and passes on the box, to Chris. Omar snatches up the bonbon. 

The Whitechapel Day Center meeting can begin. 

Islands

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.

Cat

Winter falls early in Aatifa Wahabzadah's Tower Hamlets kitchen. The clock has fallen back, in the early Sunday hours, and it is now, suddenly, black as night, as Nouche, a diminutive Parisian, lights a Gaulloise Blonde at Aatifa's kitchen table. Her flame lights up the walls, the Arab scrawl framed over the furnace, the portraits of Aatifa's children, Omar's siblings. Omar, Aatifa's second son. Nouche's boyfriend. He sits across from her, in the dark, his black face briefly glowing in the flare. 

Aatifa herself left the kitchen in the middle of preparations for dinner, in what now seems hours away, when it was afternoon still, which is, in fact, just minutes ago. Aatifa left to pick up the phone in the next room. They can hear her talking, through the kitchen door. 

Aatifa's voice, from the sealed lounge, is both wildly exotic, and utterly familiar, depending on the point of observation. It's like Schrödinger's cat. In this quantum physicist's thought-experiment, a cat is locked in a sealed room, where the state of a particular subatomic particle determines whether it will live or die.

The catch is that the state of the particle, theoretically, is subjective, depending on whether or not we are looking. Until we open the door, the cat is thus famously, and absurdly, both alive and dead. 

The cat may stand, tonight, for our glaring incapacity to grasp even the most basic facts of our own lives--let alone the world at large. 

Back to Aatifa, still in the other room, still speaking Eritrean, on the phone. The couple here, sitting in the dark.

Nouche, the Parisian, in a little powder blue dress and maroon heels, hears a high-pitched chatter she associates with markets, with auctions, with, for some reason, red and white: with the cream of lacy, silk garments; and scarlet--with raw slabs of meat.

Omar hears his mother. He hears the easy conversation, the luminous flow, of kin, of blood. He hears his mother, talking to his sister, on the phone, her voice muted by the door. His baby sister, Abebeche, who got married at twenty-two this summer, and who will be three months pregnant this week.

Nouche's Gaulloise is a star between them in the dark. She would not have lit it in front of his mother, who neither smokes, or drinks, or wears, for that matter, the silk skirts and shiny, ultra-sheer stockings Nouche herself will favor. Nouche, who is thirty-eight, divorced, and childless. Not to mention slightly drunk, which, fortunately, is not something Aatifa would notice, as she has so rarely in her fifty-two years encountered a real-life bottle, its effects would take some actual pointing out.

Neither Nouche, nor Omar, is in fact, really, listening to Aatifa. The phone, the cat, the other room, the thin sheen of light peering from under the kitchen door, are all a bit beside the point. Here, dusk has fallen, an hour early, before dinner; night has descended over the kitchen counter, over a pale blue tea towel, over the open bowls and chopping boards strewn with peels and diced bits, a cleaver gleaming softly as Nouche, again, inhales. 

Nouche is listening not to Aatifa but, instead, to Omar, whose lips glow in the dark. He, in turn, is miming words, words which, just minutes ago, lay scribbled between them, neatly lined in the open notebook on the table, and which now, like the terry towel, the food, the counter, the framed pictures, have disappeared into the wintertime night, so suddenly upon them. They float between them, now, those lines, as rumors only, tremors, on Omar's tongue. Words.

He whispers, That is how speech does

Silk on one side

Cheap, striped canvas on the other

Omar is, in fact, quoting Rumi, the Sufi master. He is quoting ancient Persian, muslim poetry.

He is, however, also talking about writing itself, drawing attention to the poems he himself has been writing, which is what the notebook, now near invisible on the table, contains. Drawing attention to the fact that these poems, silken as they may sound, were drafted, sketched out, fabricated. Voiced.

Nouche is listening to this as she smokes. She hears Omar's low, glowering notes emitted in the dark, spun between them, like silk. Inhaling, she sees both the sheen of speech, its finish, its glow--and, as she exhales, the Gaulloise going dim, she sees the matt canvas, the cheap linen, the drawing board, of Omar himself: his lips moving in the night, tongue and throat, to be guessed at only in the dark, the baritone of his chest, his heart. The other side of speech, the canvas, where this, his voice, is not yet art: it's craft. A man, laboring away.

Nouche knows about canvas. She is a painter. She knows about labor. She knows about coat upon coat of oils, layer after layer. She knows a silk gloss varnish from cheap, coarse linen, knows the front of her canvas, from the back.

They have been working together. Nouche paints tunnels, passages, things marked WAY OUT. 

Omar talks. 

His voice is a tunnel of its own, channeling Rumi, the Sufis, his childhood faith.

The faith of his mother, still talking, in the other room. 

Aatifa has no way of knowing that with the Parisian at her kitchen table, she has not so much gained a daughter, as recovered a son. Omar could no more have told his mother what crack has done to his life over the past seventeen years, than he could have spoken to her from the grave. His mother has less conception, even, of drugs than she has of drink. The crack-house floors Omar used to wake on, five inches deep in waste, in discarded hypodermics, in strangers, stretched out on beds of splintered needles, sometimes dead for days. 

Today, clean less than a year, Omar sits at his mother's table at dusk: a large, black outline against the kitchen tiles. The holy month of Ramadan has come and gone. Eid has come, with its tide of magnanimity and forgiveness, but nothing could have bridged the sheer abyss between life as he has known it until eleven months ago, and this, his mother's kitchen, except this single, miraculous fact, of sitting here clean.

This is one tunnel Omar has crossed, one passage he's traversed, one exit he's found.

Here he sits at the table, in the dark, with a beautiful woman, a woman from France.

She paints, he whispers.

Nouche listens. Omar has moved on to new lines, a new poem, one of his own, one from the sheets lying between them.

She spells 

WAY OUT

Eyes closed

Ankles open

Like anything.. he continues, reciting from memory--the lines, the table, the kitchen, the notebook lost in the dark--..Like faith, like sin

WAY OUT

Is spelled 

Backwards

Blind.

Blindly, he whispers. Baby.

Spelled 

WAY IN

That's what it's called, the poem. IN. Unlike the painting it refers to, her painting, one she did awhile before. A painting she lugged all over the East End, one wet, windy day two months ago. A red canvas, a tunnel, glossed in a rock-hard coat of scarlet nail enamel. A red passage, ending, in the middle, in a single square, the fairest, faintest blue. Called OUT.

In the kitchen, today, they are tying her exit to his entrance, his ins to her outs: putting Omar's words to her image: a collaboration of sorts. He has been invited to read at the Whitechapel Day Center, the place where, not a year ago, they burned the clothes he came in in, while he lay hallucinating, crawling out of his own skin in the detox ward. Now, his peers, the small group left of those he came in with--Terri, Marquis, Anwar, have offered to host an evening of drugs-free street culture, with him, Omar, headlining. Nouche's tunnel paintings will be part of Omar's spoken word performance, with the borough of Tower Hamlets funding a video recording, to go onto the council website, and, of course, on YouTube.

Cameras. Lights.

Listening to Omar in the dark, in the Tower Hamlets kitchen, Nouche is closer than she has been in eighteen months, to the Paris world she left behind. The world of Soiree, of Alain Mouille, her TV host ex-husband. The Paris of rock starlets, of goblets and books, of authors and conceptual artists gathered around Mouille's table, of politics and couture and desire discussed under the cascading, pitch perfect crystal of studio armatures.

Aatifa, just now, bursts through the door, a tall, pitch dark woman in white robes, long fingers catching the switch on the wall.

Both Omar and Nouche sit blinking under the sudden floodlight, the neon strip crackling overhead.

What, Aatifa bellows, Are you two children sitting here for, in the dark?

She picks up the cleaver, and slashes an onion. Allah, she says, looking up at the wintertime clock. 'It's midnight,' she says, 'Before it's afternoon.'

It is Aatifa, that evening, who returns Nouche to the City of Lights. Aatifa, who was born not here, in Tower Hamlets, who, in fact, has relatively recently settled in the large, ground floor council flat. Aatifa has lived half her life in Hampstead, in the leafy North London ambassador's residency Omar grew up in.

To Aatifa, there has been no crackhead Omar. There is the baby she drove around with, in Addis Ababa, in the back of a white Peugeot 504, the driver in front sweating as he swerved the main potholes on the broad boulevards leading to her young diplomat husband's offices. 

There's the toddler asleep in her lap, in Khartoum or Djibouti or Asmara, as a porter would appear from some terminal with her family's luggage; the stack of cases topping his head, the porter's short, bow legs, all mirrored across a marble airport floor. 

There's the Omar ignoring the Dubai Zoo apes as he spent a blistering noon getting in and and out of a signal red push car, getting behind the wheel of his first ever automobile.

There is, to Aatifa, the Omar reading under the trees in the Hampstead garden, the tall youth running in place in the driveway, weightlessly moving on the concrete, suspended among the roses, as she would watch from the kitchen window; the long-limbed youth almost levitated over her lawn, until, in one split moment, she would look up and he would be gone, her lawn deserted, dust visibly whirling the air.

There is the man, tonight, at the council kitchen table.

The years between, in ways fundamentally inexplicable, not least to Aatifa herself, have, like Schrödinger's poor cat, been both dead and alive; have both happened and not happened, depending on the point of observation. Yes, of course, there has been the morning when Omar, instead of appearing around the Hampstead corner, pearly drops streaming into the soft terry cotton neck of his sweat suit, remained the dust in the air, the empty imprint on her lawn, an absence, suspended somehow in her driveway: something only waiting to happen. Does that mean it happened?

Of course there have been years in between. There were light-years, between the North London home, and the Tower Hamlets estate. The homeland coup, her husband's fall from grace, may have been the least of it. There has been murder. There's been death matching that of Omar's absence--his life, or what passed for it, carefully dissected from his mother, removed at the root. The root, which was his heart, in which the two, his mother and his need for a buzz, were both the same thing, and mutually exclusive. 

Neither of them, Omar or his mother, will talk of the Omar hiding under his mother's white gown in the Addis car, as the young driver would speed them through the dark, through the night, where blood ran black, potholes filling up with bumps it bore no thinking about, a night too bewildering to even start organizing it in terms of kin or clan, coming or going, ins or outs. 

When human ties, blood ties, become, just simply, blood.. 

When blood, instead of flowing, slow and luminous--the stream of life--starts simply pouring out into the street.. What does that mean in terms of Schrödinger's cat: what, then, is it, you're observing? What is it, even, that may or may not be happening?

Omar, like his mother, has things to remember and things to, more pressingly, forget. Questions, things to ask--and things better left unsaid. Questions, thoughts, to pose, and thoughts left alone, left to fester or die, in your head.

To Omar, up till the age of twenty-one, the impulse to forget may have been identical, to the one to hide in his mother's gowns. Up till the age of twenty-one, he and his mother would forget together, side by side, her slicing onions in the kitchen, him running in place in the driveway. 

Then one day off he sprinted. 

He must have run, at some point, into kids he didn't know, got offered a can of something he'd not seen before. Beer, a spliff, the usual perhaps on most Hampstead lawns, excluding, of course, his own. In any case. Forgetting, once tried among peers, separate from his own clan, proved a habit there was no turning back from. It became a need of its own, and then an absence, a negation in its own right, the way out--the empty imprint left in Aatifa's life, a massive black-out in his own. Did any of that ever happen?

Here he is in the kitchen, watching Nouche stretch her sheer, slender legs and click across the kitchen floor. Her back, in powder blue cashmere, is tiny, beside his mother's great white robe at the counter. Nouche runs the tap, her half-smoked Gaulloise hissing out. Nouche's back is soft as a kitten next to Aatifa's imposing taft, but just as straight; the women like negatives, somehow, of some same, basic principle. Aatifa was built to traverse the marble floors of one or the other North African terminal, a child asleep on her hip, a porter teetering under her cases, her robes and gowns. Nouche was made to be lit with perfection, crystal reflecting every small curve, every angle; to cross a Paris studio floor in her heels. Watching both women, side by side at the Tower Hamlets council kitchen counter, Omar is not sure wether to get on his knees, and kiss the ground they stand on--or to cry.

Aatifa shakes the onions from the board, into a pot, and hands the knife to Nouche, who sticks it under the tap, and slips it onto the drying rack. Both may be naturals when it comes to wielding big, razor knifes, to cutting away at the past--both have the shoulders, the posture to proof it. 

Nouche did not grow up in Paris. She is from Marly-Gomont, a Northern hamlet of scrawny, home milked cows lost in flat fields stretching all round, like a massive, green crater; a place of inbred women gossiping under the church clock, its blunt little steeple Marly-Gomont's single aspiration, the one thing, lamely, reaching for the sky.

She married Mouille, the Paris TV host, at twenty-three, still in art school. A large, gregarious man, with a lust for getting to the bottom, a man who turned her inside out. She hates him, still, with a vengeance, his penetrating mind, his endless probings, his showy, moneyed appetites, all leading nowhere, dead-ending in a shallow, sordid divorce.

She now lives in a single room in the East End, opposite the local mosque. This is where she met Omar, three weeks clean. Eleven months ago. On the street, thrown out of the building, where he had gone to pray.

Crackhead Omar. The one who, like the cat, is, and isn't, here, today, in Aatifa's kitchen. Crackhead Omar had lived in the street, on whatever he could pilfer from the pavement, from the stones. He was banned from hospitals and hostels, had been barred from every shop or store in Tower Hamlets, was routinely thrown out at church fetes and charity bazars, was stopped at the door at the NHS; was turned away, that morning, at the Brick Lane Mosque.

Nouche had just stepped from her door, to unlock her bike, her third in two months, chained to the grill fence across the street, right before the entrance, where, she hoped, the constant coming and going of slippered men, all through the night, would somehow safeguard it. Their murmurings, escaping from the soft-lit hallway, the stained glass windows, would, like a mantra, a spell, keep the bike safe, she'd pray, from the thieving Brick Lane night, each night, till dawn.

Omar had sat by the doors, that morning, on the ground, in a new white shirt and too-wide pants, as she clicked into the street. A dark face, like any other, perhaps a bit more anguished, more determined, more raw. There was something about him, she'd found, halfway across the road, herself thinking, for no reason at all in the world. Just that. There is something about him.

The bike was gone.

What Aatifa doesn't know is that, instead of gaining a daughter, with Nouche, she has recovered her son. To Aatifa, there is no Crackhead Omar. There is no crack. There is little Omar, and there's the man she knows, without having to check, to be sitting behind her, at the table, as she stirs the pot.

Of course, there have been light-years, between the North London driveway, her fitted Hampstead kitchen, her Aga--and this, the cramped counter, the chipped little council furnace. There has been murder. There's been another coup, a revolution. There's been blood. She has lost uncles, cousins. 

Salam, her daughter. 

There has been death, matching that of Omar's absence, of whatever was left of his life--the Tree of Death, built from broken needles, like a skeleton Christmas tree, that he hulked under, on a crack house floor; the people sleeping beside him, to never wake again. 

Aatifah lost another child. 

There's been death, matching Omar's--bone by bone.

Has any of it happened? She empties a bowl of mushrooms in the pot. The ijeras are prepared, her wat is bubbling away. Aatifah hands the bowl and the cutting board to Nouche, who leaves them dripping beside the cleaver in the rack. Behind them, Omar's chair scrapes on the lino. He appears beside the women at the counter, his tall, broad back sandwiching Nouche's blue sweater to his mothers gown, his large hands holding nothing, not a clue, to any of it. Wielding nothing but a towel, the powder blue square; his mother's dish cloth.

Nouche had left the painting, the one with the square at the end of the red tunnel, the one called OUT, at Omar's house, that night, months ago now, the wet and windy day she had taken it to her dealer, in Shoreditch, only to find the window dark, the walls empty, the gallery closed. She had stood on the pavement that day, in the rain, with the painting, thirty-eight years old, childless, divorced, and now, also, officially, careerless. Moneyless. Poor.

She had, still carrying the canvas, passed a different gallery then, around the corner. Billie Jean's. 

Billie Jean, who tonight, at Aatifah's wintertime counter, is further away than Marly-Gomont or even Addis, but who, then, that rainy August day, being a recovering addict herself, had both held an inspirational talk at Omar's Whitechapel Day Center, and had a succesful show of her paintings in the thriving Shoreditch gallery around the corner from Nouche's, which was dead.

Tonight, Billie Jean is remote, a shadow, distantly involved in the project Omar and Nouche are working on, the spoken word performance at the Whitechapel Day Center. The poem, IN, the painting, OUT. 

The notebook is still on the table. Omar's lines now lie out in the open, exposed under the neon fixture. It doesn't matter, one way or the other: he knows them by heart. He dries the dishes, as Nouche washes, and his mother stirs. He's not sure Nouche gets the poem. He doesn't know. The piece itself reflects a tunnel, the one he does know, the one he traversed, his own WAY OUT. Out of one life, which was dead, the one spent under the needle tree, the Tree of Death--and into the next, which is here, tonight, in the Tower Hamlets kitchen: his feet on the ground, the very same ground, holding up these two women. The way in.

Does she get that? Does she get this, that he is loving her, he is half mad with desire and gratitude, just to be happening beside her? 

And that this is the way in?

And if not, if she doesn't get it--is this, what he feels for her, still happening? 

He doesn't know. He has no answers, just the dish cloth, which he uses, serving the women--that, and the sense, in his chest, that this is his life, this is the way in; this is faith. The faith of his childhood. That this is it, it's what Rumi was on about. The God thing.

Billie Jean, tonight, is remote, a distant chink in the IN/OUT project, involved with the council, with funding the video, the cameras, lights, Nouche had been conjuring up as Omar recited his poem at the kitchen table in the dark. Now, at the counter, it is Aatifa who transports Nouche back to the City of Lights.

To Aatifah, in ways unfathomable even to her, there is no in-between. There's the concourses she carried Omar across on her hip, the chilled, shiny floors. There's the North African palaces her family were invited into, the packed mud walls reaching straight for the sky, a setting sun slanting in through a port hole high up in a crest, the air descending warm and gold like honey in the cool sanctity below.

To hear Aatifa speak, tonight, there has never been anything in the world, but elegance, and grace. Anything else is, like Schrödinger's cat, in the eye of the beholder, a mere question of perspective--a lack of observation.

Omar has not seen his taut, intense girlfriend this loose, this happy, in weeks. She has returned to the table, her legs pulled up under her, her small feet, her pearly toes, bare in their stockings.

She listens, as Aatifa is describing the Dubai Zoo, little Omar climbing in and out of the seat of the red toy car, Aatifa watching from an airconditioned shelter; Nouche listens as Aatifa moves on to a banquet in the Dubai hotel, skipping gaily to dances back in Addis, the women in their robes moving across the floor like pieces on a chess board under the white, modernist trellis, the concrete palisades, out under the stars.

Music and lights, he thinks, folding both women into the warmth, the light, the happy rhythm of his chest.

Nouche had been happy, and loose, that rainy, windy August night. She'd been drunk. She'd stretched out on her black sheets. She'd been feeling Omar, in the hard-bodied arms reaching under her, with exhilarating power, lifting her ass from the bed. Her feet were slung over the straight shoulders before her. 

Omar, right then, was seeing her. He saw her red passage, glossy like the tunnel, the painting, left by Nouche earlier that evening against his own kitchen counter. He was burning up, his desire for her, his own girlfriend, making him insane. He was having visions, all of her, and of her legs slung over his shoulders, his hands under her, pulling her in: the only way out. He came, shamefully, not even imagining his own dickmanship; his own triumph--but hers, her long, lithe-limbed, languid contractions.

Music and lights.

The next morning had been equally rainy. Omar had stood in his kitchen at nine, sliding away from the fridge door the painting, wrapped in plastic, still wet from its trip all over Shoreditch, from one gallery to the next, the day before. This was an abysmal August, a BBC weather voice announced, as Omar stood on the tiles, staring at the open fridge. It was the holy month of Ramadan, still, and he had slept soundly, of course, again, all the way through the pre dawn meal. 

Verily, Omar thought, staring at a tray of raw steak, left by Nouche the night before, There is a blessing in Suhar.

The night before. Nouche had lain on her black sheets, looking down the mounds of her breasts, down her own creamy belly, to the smooth, silvery crest of her vulva. At the shoulders before her, the strong, toned arms. Billie Jean was holding her up with one arm, the other inside her. 

Billie Jean is clean, and, unlike Nouche, stone cold sober. She has no excuse. Doesn't need one. This is her thing, the one place where she cannot, and will not, hold back. She suffers the disgrace of being here, at all, not just in the room, but on the planet. Being here, with all her brain cells intact, all her nerve ends zinging. She bears it and grins. 

Billie Jean takes each fresh day on the jaw, minute by goddamn minute, breath after fucking breath. She will not go back to anaesthetics, not to heroin, not to crack: she chooses to be here, if it kills her. 

It is this determination, this lion-heartedness, that Nouche, looking down her own legs, is giving in to, this fearlessness, this choice. Nouche wants it, all of it, yielding in radiant waves to the great cat before her. Billie Jean, she thinks, is meat, bloody and raw. Just like Omar.

If Omar is clasping himself in both hands, seeing Nouche, her open legs, her lazy, luminous glow, at this particular moment, and Nouche, under Billie Jean, is mouthing, Omar--what, of all this, in Schrödinger's terms, is actually happening?

Aatifa would insist on grace. On elegance. She, tonight, this dark, October evening, insists on the City of Lights. It is global, Aatifa's city, boundless, stretching from Addis to Dubai, from Mecca to Asmara. It includes Marly-Gomont, and lights up even the Tower Hamlets estate. It is radiant, like the stockinged, languid woman at her table, not quite a daughter, perhaps, but here, tonight, happening, to her son.

Both, Omar and Nouche, that August night, had looked down their own bodies, had stared down, shuddering, at their own crotches, thinking, fucking hell. Both had been happy, shattered, grateful, appalled. Alive.

It is the next morning, that the rest kicks in, all this, the weather, the rain, the wind, the painting, still bubble wrapped in Omar's arms, as he carries it up the stairs, the dark, dusty Brick Lane staircase opposite the mosque. She left it in his kitchen, the night before, drunk, dismal. He's promised to take it round.

Here he is, key in hand, grateful to be of use. He fiddles with the door, which is open, unlocked. He picks up the canvas, nine months clean and sober, prepared to take life on life's terms if it kills him. His determination matches Billie Jean's, still sleeping, bone by bone, by bone. Omar walks in the room, carrying the painting, the red passage, the WAY OUT, before him--determined to be alive, to be here now, to be in.

Lover

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.