I started partying around fifteen, before I took my exams. Suldaan had moved in and hooyo was distracted with her new baby. As long as she saw me at the kitchen table doing my homework while she made dinner, she let everything else slide, maybe cos she felt guilty marrying some asylum seeker. It pissed me right off, you know? Suldaan came in with his brown, Tooting Market suitcase and started saying that it was haram for me to wear my normal clothes in my own home. I had to sit there, burning up, watching telly with my hijab on. Then it was my scent: I couldn’t wear perfume around him, because “it ignited the libido.” Please. What’s he hanging around outside my room for then? When hooyo’s off trying to get the baby to sleep and I’m getting changed for bed. Such a goddamn nacas.
I ain’t even playing, if he comes at me, he’ll get a shank straight through his black heart. I told Mum that to her face, and she just stares at me and says, “What have I raised?”
Anyway, the partying, yeah, it was all right. Used to go to Dalston and those ends with my GBFs. A bunch of white kids with skinny jeans and daddy’s credit card and us—tearing it up on our EMA and travelling home on free bus passes. We bounced into those places looking like something out of Aladdin, all three of us misfits bespeckled and stunting on dem. I’d cut my hair short cos it was tangling every day under the scarf and I looked more like a boy than Yusuf (who’s a full-on drag queen now) with his pretty lashes and long, Princess Kaur Singh hair. Every time, and I mean ev-er-y time, Sulaiman would get falling-down drunk, thrashing about and speaking in tongues, his leather jacket left in some bar, his cheap mobile glowing in the pocket as we kept ringing. I’d have pills flowing through my veins, the stars turning into disco balls as we went out to smoke, a warmth pouring out of every inch of my skin and into the cold winter night.
I got into Oxford even with all that going on. Was on some bad come-downs during those sixth-form exams but ended up getting max on some papers. Chose English. Matriculated at the Sheldonian with a bunch of tufty-haired public school boys. Did the Beowulf thing, hated it, moved on to some proper stuff: Baldwin, Morrison, Donne. Got roughed up a bit by boys who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. Ran outta money, piled on more loan, ran outta money. Had a breakdown or something like it. Sent home, Suldaan had gone and the house was bare quiet, even the baby had become this surly, silent boy. Went back, finished what I started and got a First, thank you very much. Had missed the Milk Round so went back to London to sign on.
They tell you all this at Oxford: how you’re at this great place and are gonna be great yourself but I had a hard landing. Sulaiman had bunned uni and got a job straight outta sixth form working for a French designer, so I hung out with him in his ridiculous flat in Knightsbridge and smoked and read all of the things I hadn’t had a chance to.
It seemed like I blinked and a decade fell away, people had bought houses in Zone 5 and 6, had kids! Even Yusuf was busy Googling American surrogates that he couldn’t afford. Madness. I had nothing but my childhood bedroom on a council estate that no one seemed to leave and a pocketful of antidepressants.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; jokes, it was just the worst. You could say that I was looking for someone to make it all better, but that doesn’t really go where it needs to go, it was more that I needed someone (but not quite anyone) to make the rest of my life worth living. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” as Milton said, and my cosy, dole-given, curtains-closed heaven was pure hell. I did the internet thing and felt I was searching through a catalogue of undiscovered serial killers. I went to a few clubs with Yusuf but the music was not my own any more. Sitting on a barstool, bass speakers hammering at my head, I held a few too many yellow pills in my hand and thought about calling it quits. Halas.
I don’t know why it took me so long but I realised that inside me was Hiroshima, Dresden, Hargeisa. I found my mother’s depression pills and we were on the same shit, the same doses; it was brutal. Even the boy (now a wasteman of epic proportions) was self-medicating, smoking enough skunk to fumigate us the hell outta there. We were all in small pieces that didn’t fit together; too many countries, too many scars, too many secrets inside us. I sat down on my mother’s bed, her thin back facing me, speaking to the sad green wall more than to her and I just said, “It’s gotta change, hooyo, we’re not dead yet.”
We’re not dead yet. We’re not dead yet. I’m not dead yet. That became my mantra, my prayer.
I started running, found a pair of my old ghetto trainers and jogged around the deer park, trying to shed the bloat that my bohemian indolence had piled on me. I chucked the pills. Finally began to put words on paper and to ease the pressure that had clouded my mind. The writing and running made me euphoric, almost too much; I started texting everyone, saying how good I felt, how I was going to write a masterpiece. People thought I was on speed or something but it was just me, all the cogs and wheels and pistons working again. Yusuf trained me in how to look like a woman, he dragged me up and even put a long weave on my head; we blew the last of my money on a blitzkrieg around Topshop. I was good to go, he said. Small enough, plain enough and broke enough for most men to wanna date.
For all my mum’s talk about me being a dhillo, I straight-up feared talking to men, if they weren’t gay something made me tense up and die a little. I hated seeing myself mirrored in their eyes, with all that clarity and opacity. I stood in bars, clothed but naked, looking from their eyes to my feet and back again. Still there was the longing to contend with: the heavy, bloody, chemical urge to consume another body and spit out its bones in a new child. How do you make a stranger so intimate when they could so easily destroy you? How did women do that every day? How did hooyo do that with Suldaan and, even before that, with my father? How? How? How?
I found out.
It was his smell.
I had never known anything like it.
He had come to our door asking for help, like a jinn in one of Shahrazad’s tales, holding out a piece of paper with an address written on it. Forming his fingers into a mock phone by his ear, “Can I borrow?”
He had shoulder-length black hair and a smile that belonged to the devil. A guitar slung across his back and shoes that had seen a century of dust.
I could hear my mum’s feet on the landing upstairs, taking the position she always did when strangers knocked on our door. I looked at the note and saw the address written was on our block.
“It’s just nearby,” I said, “there,” pointing as he padded on to our synthetic carpet, the plastic runner squeaking under his feet, the guitar chiming against the narrow walls. His smell was not of cologne or detergent but neither was it sweat or grime, it was the honey of lilacs hanging over brick walls.
I instinctively blocked his way in, and gestured for him to go back outside.
“What does he want?” hooyo called down. “Is he from the council?”
He backed out with his silhouette lit up in the dim light, the breeze blowing in and through me; he stopped on the doorstep and stared at me. I thought he was about to eff and blind at me but he just stared and then went, “You are very beautiful”—no sarcasm, no laughing, completely serious. I stood there, dumb look on my pillow-creased face, my hair all tangled, a dirty sweatshirt on, and then slammed the door in his face.
He moved in a few doors down, into one of the raucous flats filled with scrappy migrants. His accent was difficult to place, his face even more so. We sat on the railings as my mother watched from the window. He read my writing and I listened to his songs. He busked so all of his money was in coins, silver and gold that spilled from his pockets and into my hands; he danced too, in a shamanic way that made his eyes glint. I took the weave out and kicked off the high heels; I knew he didn’t need them. I wrote and wrote and wrote, somehow both animated and doped by him, I wrote long sentences that looped around themselves like bees following a scent.
I took down the dark curtains in my room and let the light
in. I told hooyo that I forgave her and let the light in. I took him in my arms and let the light in.
TRANSFERENCE
ESTHER FREUD
“NOTHING’S GOING TO HAPPEN,” he said, standing and striding towards the door. At least that’s how I pictured it when I thought it over later—but it couldn’t have been that way because the next time he spoke he was sitting in his chair. “It’s not as if we’re going to jump into bed together.” He was under the window then, so close our knees were almost touching, although in reality he can’t have moved because a moment later he was still there, facing into the room, the low glass table between us.
I’d gone to him for help with my obsessive thinking. I was fixated on my boyfriend, his coldness, his resistance to getting married, and the discovery, still fresh, of his unfaithfulness. “Why don’t I just leave?” I sobbed through my first session. But instead of leaving, I spent hours running over past events, bewailing my passivity, recasting myself as the fiery, outspoken woman I wished I was. I’d sit at my desk, my work neglected, and re-enact how it might have been—standing up to him, storming out, throwing my possessions into the car and driving off. How powerful I felt when I was speaking the truth. But that was inside my head. On the outside nothing had changed.
“It’s a torment,” I told him. “Like being in some kind of trap. He says he loves me, but . . .” I cried and gulped water, tissues and tumblers helpfully lined up, while he looked at me in a sympathetic way and waited. It didn’t take long before I started up again, listing the endless cycle of events that made up that week’s sorrows, stopping only to blow my nose and swat away new tears. “I’m so embarrassed,” I said eventually, rising up for air. “This isn’t who I want to be.”
That’s the first time I sensed that he’d come closer, although of course he hadn’t moved. “I don’t mind,” he said.
I know you don’t mind. It’s me that minds. I’m embarrassed for myself. But I didn’t say these things, because that’s why I was there. I didn’t, couldn’t say.
Each week I dragged myself to see him, crossing London from west to north, walking through terraced streets, compiling lists of things we might discuss—longing, regret, forgiveness, marriage. But as soon as I was in his room, had removed my coat and then, with some embarrassment, another layer—for it was always hot—I forgot about the lists. Instead I started on the story. It was as if I had to get it out—the poison silting up in me—on and on, if only I could stop, or at least fall silent for long enough to give him a moment to respond. But the next week there was always more. “I’m just going to have to tell you everything, and then, I promise, I’ll pause for breath.” And I’d start—each event in order—what I’d said, how my boyfriend had reacted, my threats, his promises, all recreated with my exquisite memory.
And then, one day, finally I stopped, and I looked at him and smiled. I was smiling at him and he at me, and we held the look for what felt like an indecently long time. “That was a beautiful moment,” he said. I nodded. He didn’t look the type to use the word beautiful. Not that I’d ever really looked at him. Just accepted his presence, moving as it did around the room, so that when I remembered things he’d said, questions he’d raised, he seemed always to be in a different position. Like sex, I thought. And I packed that thought away.
That was the week I had the dream. I woke from it. A light lit up inside me. We’d been sitting in a train carriage, our feet touching across a cushioned seat, our backs against the panels of the walls. There was a current of love running round us, a visible light that formed a circle. And, as if for the first time, I could see him. His hair, the green that seams through copper, the flecks of grey, the close shave of his face, and something I had never noticed, his top lip which disappeared when he smiled. I leaned across and kissed him.
All day the light stayed on in me. And all that night. I was kinder to my boyfriend. Thought only once or twice of the hurt of his transgressions. I hummed, and turned a crazy pirouette in the middle of the kitchen, and although I ate my meals as usual, my body felt buoyant.
On the day of my next session I was stricken with nerves. This is ridiculous, I told myself, last week I would have been hard-pressed to describe him to a stranger, and now, even before he appeared in the doorway, his image was electric. I sat down and he sat down. He looked reserved, his eyes guarded, his face tired, his hair savagely cut. I started tentatively—how I’d been wondering what my relationship was based on, whether I even wanted to get married at all. “I’ve been thinking a lot about love,” I told him, keeping the dream to myself. “What love really means.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you,” he said, and he moved his hand to his heart. Or did he? And the terrible thing is I’ll never know, or what he might have said next, because I interrupted him.
“When I said I’ve been thinking a lot about love”—I was surprised to find that I was angry—“I meant the love in this room,” and I drew a circle with my hand to encompass all the places we had been. What happened then is still unclear—I’d give a lot to switch it with all the things I forensically remember—but I must have looked stricken because he asked, “Why are you so challenged?”
Why? Of course I’m challenged! My therapist is confessing he’s in love with me. Or is he? I was too cowardly to ask. And anyway, what would be the least disturbing answer: Yes? Or no?
I had to dig deep, and when I spoke I used words I didn’t even know I knew. “The way you look at me, the empathy with which you listen to my troubles, the thread of light between us, that’s what I want in my life. And that’s what I can’t imagine that I’ll ever have.”
He nodded wisely, sagely. As if he was, after all, a therapist and not a man.
We talked about empathy. About love. About what was possible between two people. And then I asked: “What happened? It didn’t used to be like this in here.”
He smiled, that beautiful lip-disappearing smile. “You started to glow,” he said, “and I saw you, and I wanted you to know that you are loved.”
I might have moaned. Or put my head in my hands. But I did neither. He saw me anyway. “It’s all right.” And that’s when he said it. “Nothing’s going to happen. It’s not as if we’re going to jump into bed together.”
Whoaaa! My heels were digging in. You’re so ahead of me. A few days ago you were no more human to me than a stuffed bear and now we’re talking about sex! And dismissing it. Although I dismissed the dismissing part. One step at a time.
That day on my way home I missed my Tube connection, and when it was my stop I failed to get off. The light from my dream was blazing, turned up to full, and my head, my heart, the blood that ran through each and every vein, were roaring. My boyfriend was out. He’d gone away on a work trip, and later, after I’d twisted and turned and failed to sleep, I was grateful for that.
The next day I wasn’t glowing. I looked at myself in the mirror. What the . . .? And unable to concentrate on work, I took the bus to Hampstead Heath and set off on a walk. Sometimes it seems most people in North London are therapists, or training to be therapists, and it wasn’t long before I bumped into a friend from university, meandering along after her dog, who had, in the years since I’d seen her, retrained as a couples counsellor. I asked her how her work was going and then, as if it meant nothing to me, about the relationship she had with her . . . what did she call them . . . patients? “What are the boundaries?” I asked. “Are you allowed to say that you’ve been thinking about someone outside of the session?” And I told her how, some weeks before, I’d sighed and said I didn’t want the session to end, and he’d leaned his then quite ordinary head towards me, and said, “No, neither do I.”
A look of alarm flashed over her face. She was wrestling, I could see it, with her dual role of therapist and friend. “Sounds unorthodox for sure.”
I tried her with some more, and her eyebrows shot up. Quickly I stepped in to defend him. “Maybe he’s just very skilled?” I offered. “For the fi
rst time in years I’m thinking about things that make me happy—for the first time in God knows how long, I feel attractive.”
“Yes . . .” She wasn’t sure, and later that day she emailed me guidelines on sexual boundaries in the therapeutic workplace.
I didn’t read them. I hate instructions. And I didn’t want to discover anything that might make me cancel my next session. But as the days passed I became increasingly disturbed. The two of us in that room, meshing, moving, so that I had to remind myself of the photograph he kept in my eyeline, a portrait of his children, a perfect boy and girl, and the references he’d made, in earlier, less glowy times, to his wife.
I could hardly sleep, was struggling to eat. I felt responsible—if I wasn’t strong enough to go back and see him he’d know he’d gone too far. I must relax, I told myself. For him! And I booked myself a massage.
“Your pulses.” The masseuse kept her fingers on my wrist. “They’re jumping all over the place.” So I told her the whole story. I couldn’t help myself, although I reassured her too, that nothing, obviously, was going to happen.
“Not necessarily.” She waited while I kicked off my shoes, and when I’d lain down on the low bed, she confided how her own father, an analyst himself, had ditched her mother for a woman who’d come to him for help. “To be fair,” she sighed, “she was an awful lot younger, richer and really, if I’m honest, nicer than my mother.” I would have laughed, as she did, but she had hold of my neck, and she was stretching it. “They stayed together for ten years and then when he retired, it was as if the scales fell from her eyes and she accused him of taking advantage. Her feelings for him were surely transference and should have stayed that way.”