by Ami Rao
Hai Allah, Zoya thought. This country has finally done her in.
To Ameena, she said, ‘Is it the English cook?’
Ameena shook her head. Zoya ploughed on.
‘No? Not frightful English cook dishing up the lunch? Then what? You going hungry? Not enough gruel? Stingy? No? The other way around – too much? Too much shepherd’s pie? Wanton wastefulness? No? Tch tch tch. The food itself then. I knew it. Enough to break the sturdiest of stomachs. What is the matter with the food? Tell me. Too soggy? Too salty? Too bland? Too British?’
But Ameena, still sobbing, shook her head each time.
Eventually, after what seemed to Zoya to be a tiresome eternity, in between the whimpering and the sobbing and the gasping for air, together they discovered the root of Ameena’s deep sorrow.
There was a new system in place at school. The children were required to put on red aprons at lunchtime. Ameena didn’t know how to put hers on and she was too self-conscious to ask for help. Nobody wore an apron in her house; what would the other girls think of her? Of her family?
The red apron terrified her.
Othering: A phobia.
3.14
City nights.
David doing what David does best.
Ameena sitting as close to the front as she can, listening with her eyes closed, chin cupped, swaying, tapping her feet.
The sparkle was back in her eyes, David noticed, as she opened them momentarily to look at him, at his fingers dancing over the keys, the fire that he had found himself so irresistibly drawn to, even in that first instant on the train.
And Ameena?
Ameena feels, as she watches David on the piano, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his eyes closed, shrouded in some unknowable emotion, that he is playing this song just for her. He is playing a tune called ‘The Wind in the Night’. The male character is the Wind, the female character is the Night; she knows this because he has introduced the song to the audience in this way.
This much and nothing more.
But Ameena knows there is more. She can hear him do it, in the shapes he makes. He is expressing something through the piano, some voice from within, pristine and particular, and she can sense it in the atmosphere, how the room has been shifted slightly by it.
She had always been moved by the way he played, but there was a certain intimacy he shared with his music that night – a kind of protracted lovemaking – and she marvelled at it, at how that intimacy transferred from artist to art to audience, she felt this connection, and she knew that everyone else in that room was probably feeling it too. This was more than a performance, she realised, this was a going-through.
‘You were magnificent,’ she told him when it was over, ‘simply sublime.’
‘It was a love song,’ David said softly, ‘about a couple that has broken up after a long relationship and they have to divide up their shared belongings. It was a song I needed to play.’
She understood, then, how close to the end he must have felt they had come – she knows the performance couldn’t have been that good without it. David, in playing the tune that night, had felt the power of his own music, it had opened a path to his subconscious, and he had submitted, because of them – because of her – to a kind of total body experience of the song. Ameena, in listening, had felt it too. And clearly so had David’s bandmates, the same three guys she had met the very first time she’d heard him play. The contribution to the song had been total – the piano had told the story of the man’s heartache; the saxophone had conveyed the woman’s. The bass had supported their two voices, subtly and brilliantly, expressing the pain of the separation, the physical act of moving out. The drums had joined in then, bold with the promise of hope, and then all four had come together to speak of the new beginning that comes after every end, a kind of affirmation of life. Their music that night had been swinging and emotional and steeped in a bluesy feel so deep it reached her toes.
The kitchen clock ticked to half past midnight when they got back home.
‘Do you remember,’ she said suddenly, as she pulled off her heels right there in the entryway and walked barefoot into the living room, ‘do you remember the story that Suzy told me? About that painter of hers, who quit?’
‘Yeah,’ David said, ‘the graffiti guy? I think so.’
Ameena sat down on the sofa with her legs outstretched and started to take her bra off, reaching under her dress to unhook it, then slipping the straps off her shoulders one by one.
‘I looked up her artist list the other night. That guy didn’t just quit painting. He died of a heroin overdose.’
‘Oh?’
‘He quit quit.’
‘That’s horrible, Ameena, but I’m sure there must have been loads of other issues there. Some kind of profound internal conflict. You don’t just kill yourself over…’
Ameena stood up then suddenly, while he was still speaking, an unusual look on her face, a kind of determination, he thought, but also pride and maybe a little fear, and walked wordlessly towards the bedroom.
‘Where are you going?’ he said, but she didn’t respond nor stop nor turn around. She didn’t close the bedroom door behind her, however, leaving it open, so he could come in if he wished or not, if he didn’t – that decision, she thought, was his and not hers. Then, she opened her closet and rummaged through her clothes until she found her mother’s hijab, and underneath it – shielding it from prying eyes – the watercolour, the only other relic of love that she had carried with her from home, and in a moment of such clarity that she knew it had to mean something, that it couldn’t possibly not mean anything, she pulled out the painting and looked at it, at the pale face of Sarah Adams and the blue eyes staring back at her.
‘Who’s that girl?’ David asked quietly from somewhere behind her.
‘That girl,’ Ameena replied, ‘is the reason I started painting.’
3.15
The air softened and the dust settled. The heat descended in waves over the city. David and Ameena found themselves on a creative crest.
Ameena had converted the small spare bedroom that she and David shared as a workspace into a proper creative studio. She changed the lighting and repainted the room and rearranged the furniture with the care and detail with which he imagined some women would design nurseries.
She knew David liked to work facing the window, and so she positioned his piano like that, up against the wall so the sky seemed to begin where his piano ended. On a little desk next to it, she set his headphones and the composition paper and pencils he worked with, as well as the tattered poetry books he liked to have at hand while he worked on his music, an old superstition.
Angled against the back wall, she created her own workspace, her papers and mounts and her watercolours and her medley of painting aids – sticks, palette knives, cling film, kitchen towels, toothbrushes, masking tape, grains of rice… so the light coming in from the window was always tempered when it hit her easel, no matter how bright the day.
The curator of the new gallery, an unusual and instinctive man of Haitian descent, had gently encouraged her to experiment with her painting style. ‘We can’t choose what we want to be; we have to accept who we are. If you’re shying away from something to protect someone else, you’re more often than not trying to protect yourself,’ he had said gently, and Ameena had both grasped his meaning and been amazed by how quickly he had discerned something in her that had taken her this long to fully understand in herself.
At the magazine, things were busy. Whitney and her boyfriend had finally found their baby girl after months of searching and mounds of paperwork. ‘You wouldn’t think there are 150 million orphans around the world, with what they put you through,’ Whitney said dryly, when she brought the baby – Lucy – into work one day and watched her being passed around with more tenderness than Ameena could have imagined Whitney was
capable of. With the change in Whitney’s personal life, Ameena had taken on more editorial responsibility without an official pay rise or promotion, but David didn’t hear her complain once.
At David’s own workplace, Hershel seemed a different man, calm, relaxed and filled with a renewed zest for life, but no one knew why. David had unexpectedly been offered a generous pay rise and an increase in his holiday entitlement (‘for your jazz shtick’), but again no one knew why. That all of these developments were connected in some way seemed reasonable, but not verifiable. Rumour had it that Hershel had got a divorce. Or that he had reconciled with his estranged son. Maybe both. Or neither. That’s the problem with rumours.
Outside of work, David played jazz every chance he got. ‘It keeps me going,’ he remarked to Ameena, ‘it sustains me, like lifeblood.’ And with whatever spare time he found, he dedicated to making his own music with a happy but cautious optimism given the development on the film-scoring front.
Ameena had become comfortable painting with David in the room. Where before she felt the need to work in complete isolation, now she welcomed David working alongside her, his very presence offering her a kind of muse. ‘Your music takes my mind to a different place,’ she told him. ‘It helps me to not overthink. I find myself just going along with it, and it’s beautiful, allowing for the surprises and incidental happenings that sit at the heart of a water-based piece. Like the characters in a story create the narrative, so those initial brushstrokes shape the painting. For the first time in years, David, I don’t feel like I’m fighting something, or wrangling with that tremendous anxiety that used to grip me if the finished product was different from the idea I had in my head. I feel – free. It’s showing in the work, the artistic process is so fluid that the effort feels in some way hidden… like a performance… like one of yours.’
As for David, he loved having Ameena as his first listener. He would put together several pieces of music, different sections of the score, then improvise over them and play them to Ameena. He found that she was an honest critic of his work, as he was of hers, and they valued this about each other greatly. One time, he put together a tune mixing himself and Charlie Parker’s ‘Perhaps’, playing the melody one quarter note apart in the right and left hand. She put her brush down and listened to it with her eyes closed, head nodding, fingers and feet tapping. ‘It’s your mother,’ she said to him when it was over. ‘That was a thing alive – her spirit lives on in your music.’
All in all, for David and Ameena, you could say that things were slowly beginning to get back to normal.
3.16
The illuminated hands of the beautiful antique clock that once belonged to David’s father and now graced her bedside table, told her that it was nearly two in the morning when he crept into bed.
‘How do you sleep so little and go to work the next morning?’ she asked, stifling a yawn. David had been sitting in on sessions, playing nearly every night for the past few weeks, driven by a certain courage and also a certain stubbornness that she picked up on, and understood was necessary. He didn’t talk about it too much, but Ameena knew he was at a crossroads in his creative life; if he was considering giving up his day job to become a full-time professional musician – perhaps the most significant decision of his life yet – playing as much as he could was something he needed to do. You need conviction to own your truth; she knew that, from her own experience.
‘So sorry sweet – didn’t mean to wake you,’ he said snuggling under the covers. ‘Ah you’re so lovely and warm.’
‘But how?’
‘Again, please?’
‘How do you sleep so little and go to work the next morning?’
‘I’m a cat.’
‘I prefer dogs.’
‘Okay, for you, I can be a jazz dog. But only for you.’
She laughed and propped herself up on an elbow, wide awake now.
‘I went to the Met today after work.’
‘Oh ya?’
‘It was a revelation.’
He chuckled. ‘I’m sure they’d be delighted to hear that – how so?’
‘So, you know, I never really went to museums growing up.’ She sighed. ‘I guess I didn’t follow a lot of these intellectual pursuits growing up. Anyway, today, when I was there, I realised that so much of the work I loved best wasn’t by someone who had necessarily studied art or art history or had a string of degrees or qualifications from fancy places or anything… they were just inspired by the work of other artists or sometimes even just by life.’
David nodded. ‘Yes of course! That’s the beautiful thing about art. You can be a genius without formal education. It doesn’t hurt to have it of course, but above everything, it’s emotional integrity that makes great art.’
‘Yes! Exactly. So, listen!’ she said, and even in the dark, he could see her face inside his head, how delightfully animated it became when she was excited about something. ‘I went to the Met to see this special exhibition they had on, called The Artist’s Artist, and I stopped in front of this painting – it was like the tenth or eleventh work down the row, and it was a portrait of the artist’s father. And David! I found my feet were rooted to the floor, I couldn’t move – I was transfixed by it. It was a painting of a man sitting on a chair and the man had no face.’
‘That’s pretty cool,’ David said, nodding, ‘I like that.’
‘You see what he did, right? He skipped what was perishable and went straight to the essence of the man. It was so simple, so basic, nothing big or flashy or elaborate. And yet, there was something about it that kept me there the whole time. All the time I had budgeted for the whole exhibition, I stood and stared at that one painting. And then, after I finally walked away from it, my whole point of view changed. Everything I saw was transformed in my brain into a painted surface; I looked at people and they transformed into portraits, I looked at shapes and they transformed into stories. But David – everything, everything had a distinct physical presence. Everything had life.’
She lay down on her stomach and turned her head to face him.
‘He said to me,’ and David knew she was speaking of the Haitian curator, ‘sometimes you’re so keen to paint a flower accurately, you become tight and literal. He was right. A bunch of tulips can convey the same sense of drama as a face – if you get it right, the anticipation is so intense, a box of emotions ready to explode at any moment. The painting of the man with no face proves that! I need to trust my heart more. Ivanov was not a complete cunt.’
David, wisely, said nothing.
‘Just a partial cunt,’ she said with a smile that made David’s eyes shine with amusement.
‘Say it again?’
‘What?’
‘That word. Say it again, ten times, slow.’
She tapped him playfully on the arm. ‘Shut up.’
He laughed. ‘Fine, I’ll shut up. Go on.’
‘So, I went back,’ she continued, ‘the museum was closing, they were shepherding people out, but I couldn’t leave without looking at it again. That face without a face. I wanted to understand how all of it was even possible. It reminded me of something I haven’t painted yet.’
3.17
The summer stretched out the daylight, elongating it like Nefertiti’s neck, shifting the balance between light and dark, trapping people into the smug illusion of expanded time.
Ameena left work on one of these summer evenings, when the air was hot and sticky and the light lingered for much longer than expected, and she wandered into a second-hand bookshop, one of those monuments of pleasure she knew were getting rarer and rarer, even in New York.
There she spent a few blissful hours lost in the sweet surprise of discovery, and when finally she left and began walking the city blocks towards home, lighter both of wallet and of heart, it had turned into one of those warm summer nights that almost never happened in England.<
br />
She would read one of them that very evening, she decided happily as she stepped out of the elevator, one of her new old books, pre-owned and pre-loved, with its smell of aged paper and its unknown author who had probably spent an entire lifetime writing about people who didn’t exist and who no one remembered. She would read this with a glass of wine, with the apartment windows open, with the sounds of the city carrying in the breeze, with Ella on the stereo…
But when Ameena leaned forward to unlock the door, she jerked her head back in surprise, for from inside her home – surely it wasn’t from inside her head – she could hear the unmistakeable notes of Ella’s distinctive voice.
She smiled. She hadn’t expected David to be home.
‘Hello!’ she called warmly. ‘This is a nice surprise!’
He had been sitting on the sofa, reading; he looked up now as she walked in. ‘You look so beautiful,’ he said with a kind of marvel in his voice.
‘I do?’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Always. But particularly this evening.’
She shook her head. ‘You’re so lovely, David, the things you say. Do you know that? And do you know, I was walking home with exactly Ella on my mind! Let me get out of these clothes, be right there.’
She was halfway through changing out of her work clothes when her phone rang. She frowned, but with one leg out of her grey silk trousers she hopped towards where she had placed her phone, face down, on the bedside table and her frown deepened when she flipped it round and saw the number on the display.
‘Mum?’
‘They can’t find him,’ Ameena’s mother said, in a hoarse whisper.
‘What? Whom? Wait, isn’t it like the middle of the night for you?’
‘They can’t find Kareem,’ her mother repeated, louder now, but blank, eerily emotionless.
‘What do you mean, they can’t find him? Who can’t find him?’ Ameena asked as she sat down on the edge of the bed and yanked the trousers off her other leg with her free hand.