Issue 21

Mannika Mishra

So far, she had seen only one person wearing sunglasses indoors.

The sky outside was stripped to brazen blue and inspired recklessness; grim forecasts for later in the day couldn’t possibly be right. Clothes racks looking like they had been dashed around by an overzealous salesman were strewn across the corridor; as far as she could see all the clothes were military style jackets in neon pink and green. She was sitting on a bench which was barely adequate, a narrow protuberance in the wall that could not be smoothed over, and she had to keep moving around to make herself comfortable.

Young people too fresh rushed past her snaking a smart tattoo of heels in their wake. Her own shoes were until five minutes ago perfectly adequate. They were old brogues of her father’s that she had kept in direct contradiction to her mother’s instructions. For the ones who rushed past her, these shoes and something unmistakable about the upturn of her wrists marked her out prominently—perhaps she was unaware quite how much—as someone who did not belong, and so an extra effort was made to avoid catching her eye.

Then he came out of the door from her right wearing a puffy blue shirt, puffy because stiff with starch, but she had no way of knowing, really. Is it easy to become famous? It seems so easy, so natural. He had a mother who had died young and a partner who was the same age as his dead mother from whom he had recently split.

Come apart, frosty, astringent were the civil euphemisms used to describe an ugly break. The mother looked lost in the picture that Una had seen of her, as if here for once she was at one with the viewer and wondered with them what it was like to die young. It was stitched portentously into the downturn of her mouth, something which in a more frivolously inclined woman would have been called a—droop. Back, one hand compulsively stroking the small of his back, he smiled distractedly at her and she realized that he wasn’t who she thought he was. She had been listening to his songs every day for the past month now, and these flashes of recognition were beginning to happen more and more often in public places. Something of an apology I didn’t mean to pry in your life, infect your privacy seemed warranted. One of the first things she had been warned about by the HR person was that there was a lot of talent roaming about, and if a famous singer or dancer or face, really, because that’s what they all boil down to should burst out from a door she was on no account to lose her head.

“Never ask for autographs or pictures, in fact aim at not making eye contact at all.”

She had been alarmed by this. The man who was not the poet-who-fancied-himself-a-singer she had thought he was, was gone. She looked down at her wrist and discovered afresh that she had, on principle, decided never to wear a watch. Several doors opened and shut in the interval that followed.

“No, the flowers are all wrong—”

“Damascus gave them the go ahead—”

The place or a person? She knew from grave viewings of action films that in the influential corridors of high office people often reduced millions-strong countries was Damascus a country? to only their names, but this also happened to be a luxury fashion house, and she imagined that they would actively seek the sort of person who would willingly call themselves “Damascus.”

“Una Nkosi?”

Suspenders and long eyelashes. She had never seen a man like this before, never fraternized with morticians, with his tall stoop and cadaverous face. His lips were curved in somewhat pillowy fashion, Rubenesque, and his hair was so closely cropped that she couldn’t tell if it was blond or gray. He looked like the sort of person she would least expect to find here.

“Una Nkosi?”

Too careful about things like weather forecasts, she was being reckless here and waited to see if he would say it a third time.

“I know I’m pronouncing it right. I’m Max, I’m the head tailor.”

Not, then.

“Yes, and you’re quite alone in that. The pronunciation, not the tailoring.”

He stood staring at her and then turned and beckoned.

“One of my assistants had the same name.”

He probably thinks I’m such a woman they passed a row of vivid lemon jackets with sequinned pink frills lining the shoulders.

He said nothing as they walked through an assortment of corridors, stepping over clothes that had dropped to the floor. She had walked behind many men and they had all had a springy electricity which arced importantly through their gait. He, on the other hand, was a shrinking sort of man. Wavering, willowy; holding his head carefully forward and nearly cowering away from all the cloth and all the people who passed them by. Una began to find him a bit beautiful.

“Through here.”

She followed him into a room that appeared to be the inside of the shoe in which the old woman lived. It was hot and dry. There were no sides to speak of, rolls of fabric were crammed into corners and an assortment of drapes of every size was nailed on top of each other and crowded inwards, muffling and distorting sounds in odd, echoing ways. The only window in the room had bars fitted outside and feathers hanging inside, their hairs stuck and splayed against the glass in a rush of moisture. She thought she had unknowingly banged her head on the door while coming in, and had subsequently entered a new world where the strands trailing on the window over the bars caused her some strange pain.

A circle of stuffed animal heads looked down from the ceiling at a large table with wheels which stood in the middle of the room. Scraps of fabric and sketches were scattered over it. He pushed aside a chair and used both hands to sweep everything off the table.

Una thought this was a little unnecessary. A pen had broken during this display and had begun to leak into the carpet.

He sat and waited. Like any reasonable person, Una disliked and feared spiralling silences but her fear was so all consuming—an unfortunate result of reading too many self-help books—that rather than pre-empt silences, she would misguidedly and actively prolong them. Now, she made an uncertain and lengthy circuit of the table and finally sat down in a chair right next to him.

“Where are you from?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes.”

“Your accent is odd.”

“Oh, I—”

“No, I have it down here, you were born there?”

“Yes.”

“I used to live nearby. I still stay in touch with some people there, you know.”

“Oh?” she offered, after a pause, a morsel to a dying man, “You all still sound tight. With each other.”

Tight?

“No. Not really.”

His hands lay naked and still on the table.

Oh, poor boy. We can stop the interview and go out. We can just walk in silence.

“What do you think is your greatest weakness?”

God knows. Debt? Ignorance? Not knowing my weakness? “Erm. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping after a stressful day, my friends are always commenting on it. Not always, but often.”

“That’s very revealing, yes, very revealing indeed.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. Most of the time people say things like ‘I’m too perfect’, and ‘I work too much and make too much money’, and it’s very boring for me.”

“Then it’s a good thing?”

“Sometimes I don’t sleep either. Have you tried melatonin?”

“I heard those were rubbish.”

He leaned back and put a hand under his chin. How very donnish he was, suddenly aware of his horn-rimmed glasses which caught the light in a way that surely even the most restrained person would be forced to describe as “dashing.”

“Really?”

He wasn’t wearing a ring.

“What is your weakness?”

All things were possible, this was like the euphoria from drink.

“Mine? I am too timid. I hate speaking up.”

“I am, too.”

“Where are those shoes from?”

“I stole them from my father.”

He now leaned forward in excitement. She felt him breaking through something, a pleasant breach of appearances.

“I like them. At university I used to scrounge around in the skip for inspiration, and that’s how I met a woman who designed the most magnificent pair of high-heeled brogues for me, they managed to be so delicate, it was symphony.”

His hands wafted air into her face as she sat rapt, and his hair seemed to grow and darken, the turns of his neck became those of her poet singer, his cheeks became fuller and his hair brushed his nape. She had been right, he was beautiful. More than that, there was a definite resemblance between the two of them. Organs played in the air somewhere. Not a physical resemblance, but he had the same precision of serious boys because they were always boyish which was so effective, a tactic so prone to indulgence by others as they sought to charm and disarm. Something to do with distant fathers, combined so effortlessly in their parted hair and poky glasses and sprawling leanness. Every gesture ran gentle stirrings of air over her breast. You’re going to lose your shirt anyway. Already gone.

“What makes you think I enjoy it? It’s hard for me.”

What? When she looked up, he was trembling, eyes fixed.

“And he took me with him, he was an ‘explorer’—far too much money—and he took me to the Arctic where there was blue imprinted on the snow. It was the worst I had, the worst.”

“I know. I understand.”

And though it felt good for her to say that and hope, she found this disturbing. His edge of fright had let loose violent images in her head, polar bears splashed across the snow and small animals drowning from tiredness.

“Ask me questions.”

“Sorry?”

“Go on, ask me questions.” He checked his watch.

“What would the work be like?”

“The thing I have discovered about people is that the more sought-after you become the fewer conventions apply to you. It’s not useful to me. I need conventions, otherwise I’ll be out of work.”

“No, my work.”

“Oh. I don’t know much about that, actually. I would like someone who doesn’t yell. And no exclamations, I hate those, they disturb the environment. The vibrations become too strong for me.” He smiled at her. It was really rather charming the way his eyebrows met over his nose.

And the resurgence of the buried memory struck her like too much salt on the tongue. Homework from school years ago—talk to a grandparent, tell a story. She had gone about it so seriously and prepared a folder which she carried importantly into her grandfather’s study; a room thick with piety even though no religious signs were visible. She had been an aggressive interviewer and had asked un-journalistic leading questions to tell the story she wanted. Her grandfather embarrassed her when he did not answer as expected, when he looked blank or said the wrong thing.

She had sat in her room, staring at the finished interview nestling in the folder for some time afterwards. Then picked up a pen to begin annotating and crossing out parts of it. Everyone at school had been deeply impressed with the result and one of her teachers had even asked for a copy, so full of amusing quips and charming innocence. Only now did she think of her grandfather sitting bowed and his face falling with tiredness at her attempts to steer him, rejecting him question by question with tuts and grimaces which too plainly rendered him outdated.

She did not know why she said what she said next. It was shocking even to her, and someone else in her position would perhaps have not understood the loneliness that fed such bold declarations. But what else do lonely people have but their own stark preferences? Surely the earth itself spins in time to such laws.

The next thing she knew, she was being escorted outside. Later, and unbeknownst to her, this moment would help hone her best version of the self-satisfied tone that she used while freelancing as the agony aunt for a local newspaper.

Her phone rang. Mother.

“Hello?”

“I wish I had had another child.”

“What?”

“I said, did you get the job?” her mother shouted down the phone.

“Wait, there’s another call—hello?”

“We regret to inform you that we have decided to go with another candidate. Please accept this as our final ‘no.’”

And dispatched thus, she started to laugh as she switched back to her mother.

“No. I’m coming back now; do you need anything from the shops?”

A pause. Tickles of electricity hummed over her clothes in anticipation of the storm.

“No. It’s going to pour, and I don’t want you stranded on the train. They’re saying it’s a bad one.”

She didn’t mind being stranded on the train, and in fact rather liked the idea of being stranded in its bland envelope.

“They said that about the last one.”

There was a post-box near the train station where she stopped and posted a letter—her seventeenth—to the poet-singer she had been listening to nearly every day for the past year. She was sure he would eventually reply.

As she began climbing down those dangerously steep steps that they have for underground stations, she realized that it was a person she wanted, the person who she wished existed, and so she wasn’t a leech, she was a people person. She cared. Or, she longed to care, which was just as good. People scurried past her and she considered them benignly, before she realized that they were running to catch the last train and then her feet skidded down, touched her card at the stile and struggled with it before running up another flight of steps and onto the platform, pushed the woman in front of her aside sorry and arrived panting on the platform to look at the back of the train growing slowly smaller.

She walked back, picking up a fallen clementine on the way and rubbing it clean, aware of the astringent underside of its peel, and held it to the woman she had pushed past. She was kneeling to gather everything that Una had spilled from the brown corduroy bag when she knocked it out of the woman’s hands. Tiny things wrapped in thick blue plastic, plastic hair-clips and a tiny plush windmill. The woman’s hair hung hiding her face and she thrust the clementine back at Una, before she stood up suddenly and hurried away without a word.

Alone in the half-light of the platform, there was a lump in her throat that wouldn’t go away oh god is it cancer? But she sat and realized that there was no one else, that the train was carrying its comforting sway away from her, and there was no future Una waiting for her at the end.

Now it was an angry sky that burgeoned over her daughter’s beating, upright body.

She watched Una walk slowly up from her vantage point by the living room window of their fifth-floor flat, folded into herself against the wind and the rain. Inside the flat, the only noticeable sign of the storm’s ferocity was the blinkered, tranquil sound of the bamboo wind chimes hanging on the balcony outside.

It hurt her to see her daughter come towards her like this instead of walking away. Una was now in the spotlight with her hands held to the dark and an expression of such desperate yearning, such rank concentration as a warping of what her mother had gradually layered, perhaps violently chiselled, onto her features over the years. When she saw her like this, she felt something close to grief. That someone, much less her own child, that anyone could be so frightened.

Her shoes were ruined, she saw. Una stood slumped and sopping in the door.

“My shoes are ruined.”

“Let’s have a look.”

She took the shoes off Una’s feet and put them in front of the fire.

Una took out a roll of rye bread, sliced it, spread some honey on it, and ate it, using a finger to mop up the fallen crumbs, before remembering something and taking out a clementine from her handbag.

“Here.”

She did not look at her mother and went up to the sofa by the window and curled up on it.

As she watched, Una’s eyelids closed in a globe-like turn and her breath became more even. She felt hectic with violent impatience at the waste. All this insecurity and touchy sensitivity, and for what? She thought that she had never known Una to have any convictions except for the preservation of her own comfort, and all this was just desserts as far as she was concerned. They had never been like that, so soft. Inevitably, a moment later she felt shocked and ashamed all of it under love. That’s what matters. I will sit here with her until she wakes.

Una’s mouth had fallen open. Her teeth were sharp and ridged and the curve of her mouth was feral. Her breath came through clenched teeth like a whistle. She was frightened suddenly because she had seen this before, all the time, she had seen so many of them with that same cast to their faces walking in the streets. This animal leanness disconcerted her the more she gazed into it, it swallowed up her certainty to the point that she couldn’t bear to look any longer and got up, looking back at that hungry mouth once more in doubt before leaving.