33 East

by Susannah Rickards

  And that’s when it happened.

  Although no one person had any idea of the bigger picture and how it all fitted together and the ramifications of what could have happened if any one of them had acted differently.

  First, the frail man lost his footing and fell. Eva went over to see if he was okay and, as a consequence, took her eye off Milly, who decided to run across the normally unused road between the town hall and the Empire. Susan turned to walk to the Tesco’s on Morning Lane and saw the blue car with a tea-tray spoiler and stickers race around the corner and do a handbrake turn into the road. At this she yelled. Keith immediately looked up and saw that the car was heading straight for a little girl. He jumped forward and grabbed her and fell forward. Somehow he managed to hold onto her and his wine as the car raced off and two police cars sirened after it.

  Then suddenly it was quiet.

  And everyone was okay.

  And the day, a day peppered with tiny acts of trust and warmth and smiles and helpful people, simply carried on.

  HARINGEY

  Hollywood

  Bobby Nayyar

  If there’s one thing I love about London, it’s that cinemas are still part of communities. They haven’t been exiled to the outskirts of the city, they are there with the people, changing like the seasons, struggling just like everyone else.

  People raise their eyebrows when I say that my favourite cinema will always be the Hollywood on Wood Green High Road. They then ask if I’m taking the piss. Oh no. You could hop on the Piccadilly line to Leicester Square and pay 21 big ones to watch a film, or get off a couple of stops earlier and watch something arty (read: unintelligible) at the Renoir. On Tuesdays all films at the Hollywood used to cost a Paltrow £4. Sure you’d get the youts talking on their mobile phones, couples thinking it’s OK to chatter as long as they don’t use English, and frustrated generation y-ers lashing out at said youts. But you also get something rare in Broken Britain: value for money. A reasonable viewing experience tempered by a little noise is a fair compromise. A bit like the NHS.

  On Tuesdays, or more precisely, every second Tuesday, I would wake with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, for I – Tarsem Singh – am one of the three million unemployed in this fair green land. Coming on to twelve months, ever since I graduated. Mother is happy her ladhla is back home. Her prodigal. She’s been assiduously fattening me up with samosas, tandori chicken, kim mar and sarg. Laundry and ironing. I have a feeling she’s trying to Benjamin Button me, it wouldn’t be long till I’d be in swaddling, then passing back through the maternal canal. Best place to be. Father hasn’t been quite so magnanimous, he’s stopped saying it, instead he’s formed a new facial expression that says, ‘Get a job you beevecouf.’ He hasn’t even mentioned getting me a job at the factory, that’s how disappointed he is. And that’s just the start. Every second Tuesday I would go to the Jobcentre Plus on Mayes Road and sign on. No university course prepares you for that feeling.

  I’d sugar the pill by popping into the Hollywood after my visit. A matinee screening. Occasionally I’d get lucky and be the only one in the auditorium. Just me, the silver screen and my dreams. Nothing could touch me in those moments. It was during Star Trek (the new one with all the youngsters) when all this changed. When Sae Nakamura walked into the Hollywood.

  I remember clearly. She entered the auditorium a moment before the lights dimmed, surveyed the room, then walked up the sticky stairs with a quiet dignity and poise. She was tall, wearing a navy blue coat that reminded me of a painter’s smock, black hair tied back. For all the choice available, she sat at the end of my row, giving me the faintest of nods as she sat down.

  Manny popped into my head. My friend of many years. A believer in NLP and the rules of The Game. ‘When a woman looks at you, you have a window of opportunity of no more than 3 seconds. After 3 seconds you may as well not exist.’ Oh Manny. I waited 127 minutes. Spent most of the film mulling it over. The legitimacy of such a move, the whys and the wherefores of picking a cinema seat, suitable lines of introduction. I got so wound up I missed the end of the film. Sae glanced at me as she gathered her things to go. What a gift. Three more seconds!

  ‘What did you think?’ I blurted as I grabbed my jacket and stood up.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch you,’ she replied. I caught the glint of a smile as I neared her. I repeated my question.

  ‘I thought it was OK,’ she said with an American twang, ‘It didn’t have the kitsch quality of the TV series.’

  I nodded, stalling for something else to say.

  ‘Say, would you like to go for a cup of coffee?’

  She stifled a laugh and looked at me head to toe, a body scan of sorts.

  ‘That’s quite a line,’ she said dryly. ‘Has it ever worked for you?’

  ‘First time I’ve used it. I swear.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Tarsem.’

  ‘I’m Sae,’ she said slowly, emphasizing the vowel sounds, sA-Eh.

  We made our way to the lobby, emerging to the light of a fine summer’s day. Sae looked at me, I looked at her. She was beautiful. Lightly tanned skin, a dusting of freckles, dark eyes, delicate lips. My heart sank. I had that peculiar Asian male trait: thin legs and arms with a rounded belly, a bit like a frog I guess. I wasn’t vying with anyone for her attention yet I felt that I had already lost.

  ‘So, do you want to go?’ she said, noticing that I had slowed.

  Outside the air was peppered with exhaust fumes, kids played hooky, groups of people congealed by bus stops. There wasn’t much choice nearby: McDonald’s or a Wetherspoons. You gotta love Wood Green.

  ‘Why don’t we go here,’ I said nodding at the former.

  She made an indifferent sound. We bought our drinks and sat upstairs by the windows overlooking the street. Sae told me she had arrived in London a couple of weeks ago. She was studying a summer art course at Central St Martins, was from a town called Matsuyama, which was on the Shikoku section of Japan. Her father was some sort of industrialist. Before London she had been in Paris. Before Paris, New York.

  ‘So what about you?’ she asked.

  I had been to the Jobcentre. Plus.

  ‘You could say I’m between things,’ I muttered.

  ‘What things?’ she said with a hint of irony as she lifted the lid of her coffee.

  ‘Today and tomorrow.’

  That struck a chord with her, I could see the change in her face, almost as if she was reassessing her opinion of me. Spurred by this I told her that I had always wanted to be a poet, that I wrote and performed compulsively through my student days but had never quite made the transition to something more real.

  ‘This is the challenge of the artist,’ she said straightening her back, ‘to find a focus. I think I can help you,’ she said, taking out a scrap of paper from her bag. She wrote down her email address and mobile number. ‘Write me a poem. If I like it, I’ll go out with you again.’

  With that she was gone.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then she was gone.’

  Manny looked down at his steak and shook his head. We were in the Columbian restaurant on Stroud Green Road. The steak was thin but wide, served on a wooden board with rice and a plantain.

  ‘That’s the most implausible story I’ve heard from you yet,’ he said taking off his glasses.

  I tried to laugh it off.

  ‘It’s a classic: boy meets girl, boy and girl drink coffee, girl asks boy to write poem.’ I showed him Sae’s scrap of paper. I kept it in my wallet where money was supposed to be.

  ‘And have you written your poem?’

  ‘Worked on it for a solid three hours. There’s me, then Dante, then Petrarca. I emailed it to her this morning.’ Manny lifted his chin. ‘No news yet, but I’m hopeful. It’s quite a feeling to be writing again.’

  He put his glasses back on and cut his steak across the middle with one broad stroke. I was eating salad.

  ‘And what about
the email I sent you?’

  Fair dues. I had walked straight into that one. I couldn’t complain, of all my friends Manny was the only one who stuck by me. We search for unconditional love, but unconditional friendship is a greater gift. He had forwarded me an email about an entry level job going at his … bank.

  ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘Well don’t think too long. The deadline’s next week. Look, it’s just a job. What was it you said when I started?’

  I bit my bottom lip. I knew he’d use that line against me.

  ‘I said that even T. S. Eliot worked in a bank.’

  Manny took a breath as if to speak. The sound of my mobile beeping interrupted him. I set my smile to smug. It was Sae.

  ‘What did she say?’ Manny asked, finally believing me.

  ‘She’d like to see me on Saturday.’

  ‘Where?’

  Mother watched me suspiciously as I put on my shoes. I had made a rookie mistake by combing my hair.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked turning the volume down on the TV.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Alexandra Palace.’

  ‘Why?’

  It went on like this for a couple of minutes. She hadn’t bought it, her eyes narrowing, eyebrows raising to divine my intentions. She switched to Punjabi and told me that I better not be doing something naughty. She had me Button-ed to an age of twelve or thirteen.

  Sae met me by the pub at Alexandra Palace. She was wearing three-quarter length jeans, ballet flats, and her trademark blue coat. She walked ahead of me, crossed the road, the whole of south-east London enveloping her like a mist. Guided by the torn sound of the wind, we negotiated our way past couples and young children before choosing a dry patch of grass. The sun on its descent behind us, we sat watching the city blinking to a thousand lights ahead.

  ‘In Japan they call people like me a “freeta”,’ Sae said, sadness in her tone. ‘People who are free, but always falling from one thing to another. My father pays for me, wherever I go, whatever I do. When I was nine I came home from juku and found him with another woman. Not my mother. I’ll never forget the look on his face. And he’ll never forget the look on mine. Two people trapped by a moment, maybe for the rest of our lives.’

  She had tears in her eyes. She inhaled and took a piece of paper from her jacket pocket. ‘Then there was a line in your poem that reminded me of this:

  Like a sycamore seed falling through the years as if in flight.

  It’s a beautiful line but it reminded of much sorrow.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it in reference to you. I was thinking more of myself. Of how I just can’t seem to find a path.’

  ‘Maybe we’re not so different then. Maybe that’s what an artist is. Someone who thinks he is flying when he is really falling.’

  The distance between us closed, Sae leaned her head upon my shoulder and touched my hand. It’s hard to think that beautiful people get lonely. We sat in silence, watching the pauses of light spread across London.

  ‘I want to show you my work,’ she whispered, grasping my hand.

  We walked down the slope, emerged in Muswell Hill where we caught a bus to Crouch End. Something profound had changed in Sae, her face revealed a disquiet mixed with tenderness. She held my hand, and watched me as I watched London unfold from street to street.

  Her studio flat was in the top floor of an Edwardian house on the crest of a hill not so far from the Broadway. I waited in the corridor while she made sure everything was tidy. She asked me to come inside. The main room was large, dark wooden floors and small lamps turned on to avoid using the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a single bed in the corner of the room, and by the only window, which looked out towards Alexandra Palace, was a plan chest that doubled as a sofa. The focus of the room was the wall by the kitchenette, which was covered in drawings. I inspected them like I was in a gallery, while she made some tea.

  ‘I only draw from memory,’ she said, her back turned to me. ‘It’s more interesting when you go back and try to recreate the things you have seen, rather than copy what is in front of you.’

  It was uncanny. Each drawing was made in ink, meticulously formed. I was sure I recognised some of the faces from Wood Green. There were the proud Africans and Bangladeshi mothers, the Crouch End couples with baby, pram, and a copy of the Observer, the directionless and the driven, all competing for space. It was life.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked, handing me a mug.

  I nodded and told her I recognised some of the people.

  ‘It’s what I like about this place. Matsuyama is not like Tokyo or Osaka, you don’t get so many different types of people. Here there is always something new around the corner.’

  We sat on the plan chest. The sun had long set, the floor lights cast an apologetic light making it feel like we were far more advanced into the night. Sae leaned against me.

  ‘When I saw you at the cinema,’ she said a little apprehensively, ‘I thought you would be the perfect subject for a portrait. “Man alone in cinema”. Something like that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But then you kept looking at me. You thought I wasn’t noticing, but I found it quite cute.’

  ‘Did you draw me?’ I asked glancing at the wall of portraits.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s harder for me to draw someone I know. Emotions control memory. Have you ever thought that?’

  I placed my mug on the windowsill and held her hand. The room grew darker, the tea turned cold, we both knew we were at that point where I either left or stayed the night. Sae brushed her leg against mine.

  ‘Do you want to?’ she asked meekly.

  ‘I don’t know. Do you want to?’

  ‘Maybe. It depends if you want to.’

  It was the not-lovers-yet fugue, which could have gone on for hours if I hadn’t reached out and kissed her cheek, my left hand on the small of her back to bring her body closer to mine.

  Ah, the walk of shame. Well, actually it was a walk, bus ride, then walk again down the Haringey ladder. The lights were all on at home. I expected that mother had spent the night fretting and searching for me under beds and in closets. She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen as I opened the front door.

  ‘Where have you been!’ she snapped, then reeled off Punjabi expletives. She smacked my shoulder and sniffed near my neck. I had the faintest scent of Sae’s perfume on my skin. ‘You bescharum,’ she continued, ‘you go upstairs and take a shower. When you come back down you’re getting married,’ at which she stormed back to the kitchen to make father his breakfast.

  I took off my jacket and shoes and went to the living room. Father was there, for a change he had a wry smile on his face.

  ‘So you finally achieved something?’ he said, trying not to laugh, patting the sofa space next to him. I sat beside him and nodded my head.

  ‘If you do things like this, then you can also get a job.’

  ‘I know.’

  We both sighed.

  ‘Son, what do you want to do with your life?’

  I told him.

  ‘Then go do it,’ he said, putting his arm around me.

  And that was it. Life went on. I saw Sae only one more time after our night in Crouch End. It wasn’t like the movies, we were both awkward and mismatched, no amount of one liners or musical montages was ever going to change that. Mother stopped swaddling me, laundry and ironing stopped first, then my favourite dishes, then came talk of me paying rent. I was one step ahead of them, I got a job as an administrator at an arts charity. A lowly wage and measly work but it left my mind free to fall and to fly. And it kept the people around me happy and secure.

  Even the Hollywood closed in late autumn, yet another chapter of my life ending. The cinema came back rebranded, another piece of London’s cultural identity lost. One of the screens had been converted to show films in 3-D. I tried it – it didn’t seem as real no matter how many
CGI swords were thrown at the audience. I took refuge in books and wrote on weekends.

  In January of the next year I received a package from Madrid. It was a journal, the kind put together by a collective of artists to give to friends and gallery owners. A postcard of Velázquez’s Las Meninas marked out a page. The card was from Sae. It read:

  Tarsem,

  I hope you have been writing. I am still a sycamore seed.

  Love,

  Sae

  The page was a portrait of me sleeping in Sae’s single bed. There was a smile on my face. I looked peaceful and happy. The title of the drawing read:

  The Poet of Wood Green.

  ISLINGTON

  Real People

  Ariana Mouyiaris

  Barnsbury had changed. And it was questionable if this was for the better. Copenhagen Street was a foreign land where geographical markers (by way of taps and local brew) had been usurped; taken over by profiteers and a new English underclass. The Cloudesley Arms had been converted to flats; King Edwards to The Church on the Corner. The Lord Nelson demolished and the Milford Haven, a Chinese bakery. Not even the Sutton Arms, an old stomping ground for Arsenal supporters, had been saved although salvation could be found (or so its Pentecostal followers preached) within the Gothic walls of the Celestial Church of Christ where baritone and off-key undulations, praising the word of the Lord happened regularly and with gusto in strained falsetto notes that rung off the roof, spilling into otherwise quiet, very Victorian Cloudesley Square.

  For the most part, Barnsbury’s squares had been opened to ‘the people’, generous mandates to posterity after the landed could no longer afford their land. Had they known the resultant cultural behaviours that would befall their once prized playgrounds they would, undoubtedly, have questioned their benevolence. Middle-aged mums battled it out with their adolescent daughters, parading their dogs on looping tours of the landscaped grounds. It was a gymkhana of sorts with a tiered point system for pissing on the flower beds: one point for daffodils, three for crocuses and a whopping fiver for roses. Spitting was also game, although this tended to come from the human instead of the canine variety. Despite the fact that the pigeons were still a lovely blue grey: fat and feathered with the white collars of clergymen, their foul-footed cousins – the peskier variety – still hankered around the periphery. And, the same could be said for the neighbourhood’s residents.