For the first time

It seemed that, for the first time in a while, the mother was living with the daughter. Maybe this stemmed from the daughter’s pregnant state. The way she lay in the house throughout her muffled day, un awakened by the teetering of birds as they scrambled to the top edges of adjacent and unstable twigs and branches. Undisturbed by the churn of day and night as the workforce is tossed unsafely out onto naked pavements with reluctant, unremitting bodies. Unaware of the growl of the bus and the high soar of the motorcycle.

  The girl’s mind was congealed. Molded to the place she hadn’t called her home before. Now, unpasting herself from its dim surface would have entailed the sticky noise of detachment- the release of the pegs and hooks and other bounds that instinctively held her here in its cradle, cohered to this new ground.  Just as a nomad might sweep the floors she finds, not because they are portioned according to her ancestral lineage or have drained the blood of victory or defeat of some inherent emotional ethnic attachment; but because it is the portion of the great ground allocated to her most immediate future.

  The daughter was watching over the doorways and curved corridors, with perhaps a janitorial concern, if that word is meant in the sense of the highest American ideal, a conviction in the dignity and worthiness of all professions that fuel a larger unexplained, purpose.  She was watching the evening settle. But the road outside the window frame at once shielding and opening their sitting room was no more significant than a television screen broadcasting far away events, the characters in whose stories might be mused over by a distant and contemplative audience. Especially on Fridays, when an aggravated nervous fear swept through the establishment and necessitated an extra police presence. Wide hipped, swaying men and women with round, childlike faces despite the inathletic middle age of their bodies. They paced past the shop fronts, which were transformed from fast food cafes into full course restaurants as the mosques spilled young families, leisurely students, worried mothers and it seemed strange to her and harrowing to them, no doubt, how young the congregation was. How un tapered with generational hierarchy. How could religion still be so valid when only pomp and the sort of stoic duty one owed tradition had preserved Christianity to the dreg ends of the last century? Perhaps they’d all read their curriculum issued history books too avidly and had forgotten to look outside and register the jigsaw of the seasons as they bartered and exchanged for portions of the ever rotating year.

“Don’t look”

A man, apparently loafing on the street corner opposite, screamed at the shrill height of his own voice.

The car driver turned towards him, demurely surveying his other shoulder for competitors in traffic, and saw a young boy, muffled by a black bomber jacket slide to the ground from his bicycle and turn two times around.

Writhing, he retook his full posture and started chiding the gang of hooded youths clouding the curb.

“Don’t cross when its RED!!”

The young boys laughed in sudden incomprehension, feigning innocent aghast, at the student’s spiny outburst.

All of a sudden, it was clear that the plaintiff was from the established University, the one with the more obscure, less understood and yet equally robust channels to pay one’s way in. But they were only boys, much less students, floating by, allowed by their bureaucratic petroleum affiliated fathers; a way to see the other side of the world alone. But, barely out of their teens, they compensated by desperately retaining all the herd-like impulses they’d known and part resented at home.

The Cambridge boy, on the other hand, knew how to be alone. All of his stature and the scarlet hue of his chaffed jaw line spoke this. Days of reading, away from anyone, wouldn’t jeopardise his strength. He could speak only by text for a weekend and still go out to a bar at the end of it and pull a fresh girl. Whereas they were too shy, too daunted and thus perceived of as incoherent, simple, rude, to do this. They spluttered self righteousness among themselves. Aware that the curves and curb of their language allowed them to draw simple ridicule on the boy’s strange, peripheral confidence. And yet their laughter also made them feel pack-like and childish, as if it were a gaunt recourse in the absence of other, richer kinds of communication. They wished they could have blended more coherently into the tarmac wash of this town, that they were as truly  unobtrusive and invisible to it as they were now to their father’s eyes. Perhaps a few of them were also aware that at that moment their language had only scratchy incomprehension for that billowing crowd of winter shoppers that swallowed their swaggering progress down the paved boulevard. It had the itch that Hilter’s German had held for their 1930s working class predecessors. To the listeners, or more precisely chance hearers, these boys spoke in a strange contortion of tongues which rendered them unreasoned, insensible and liable only to conform.

   The Cambridge cyclist peddled on, a new anecdote had filled his mind and the wind blew strong, howling a kind of primeval message which reminded him of one of Hardy’s poems.

   She felt her breast by the bay window again for that stale smell, with all the accompanying warm forgiveness of milk. It didn’t come yet. The baby popped in her womb, these pops were satisfying to her, they seemed at once part of him and herself. They seemed defiant, like the smack of lips, they seemed alive, like the splash of water or the maturing of some muscle, the sticking out of a tongue, the admiring pronunciation of a name upon whose empty guise, love has fallen.

   She felt like you did when you crunched crisps as a little girl, when you peeled a label from its damp, clinging surface in one successful piece. Or when you when you burst a tight thick parcel  of bubble wrap.

  The wind blew up the oars and tummies of conversation without allowing her to taste its real hull. She knew that there were people around who spoke in the same sighs and tones, with the same distraction as herself, although she hadn’t seen them and didn’t know the subject of their chatter.

  Some of them might even have babies as well, people with whom she could perhaps slide into a sort of prepared relationship with, despite her exemption from all the normal prerequisites attached to procreation in her social grouping. A house, a job, a man (who also had a job), a common sense of future – a shared linguistic and emotional vocabulary. No, for them, the baby was supposed to be the master tailor, the proficient stitch maker, the sewer of all loose holes. Everything was to begin with him, as if he would bring revolution to the world (not so bad, she thought, since many children have to break ties to achieve this status – we are accruing it upon him from birth).

   But she did wonder whether the fact that she was living alongside her mother, with this sort of bubbly echo inside her, in the absence of her father, whose money they still spent on their weekly grocery shop, might become a sort of resentment, on either side. But not prone to introspection, she was the eternal viewer of all others and thus she assumed her mother might harbour some objection. The fact that her daughter had come back after 9 years and accordingly demanded a solidity inside their household might show itself in all its injustice on looking back. The daughter was ardently aware that in the tenuous strains of their growing up, the stability which she now pretended had never even existed. She feared that inside her mother, might  lurk  the same long incubated and yet adamantly denied disdain that the abandoned feels on the return of her feuding lover, only after the other woman has failed him.

   The mother, nostalgic and somewhere unfulfilled, was not concerned with apportioning blame. But the daughter nevertheless wondered, given the luscious lifespan still ahead of them both, whether, with the courage of hindsight, she would see this phase as an undue advantage ripped quickly, strategically.

  The daughter’s dreams had been occupied by sex with vaguely known boys. The boys were all involved in some tangle of a story beforehand. Some maze of an adventure and a secret yearning that she’d thought was un returned until their eventual, fumbling union. The latest was on the marble floor of a very grand house in Damascus. They’d both entered, after some paradoxical story that involved capsizing boats and making a film. This one was angel eyed and golden headed, she’d met him before and always regarded him as younger than herself although he was, in fact, also 22. Under the marble dome he said he didn’t when she asked if he objected to the fact that she was pregnant with someone else’s child. The others had shied away and been diverted, the others were older, more recognisable people in her life. An awareness perhaps ignited by the simple spotting of their name on a chat or facebook page. Some such connection. She awoke to David Bowie’s Changes projected through the wall they shared with their neighbours.

  She knew these dreams represented defiance, bridges built high and sharp arched, traversed only  by the stealthiest of itinerant crossers, who did not fear the vicious swell below. She knew they represented a sly desire for escape. Or the absence of an instated stuporic schedule between them. She had always been aware of the possibility of this immanent turn in their relations. Now one side was solid and the other, still as sticky as a malleable kind of purity, as defiant as glue, eager to form abstract shapes in her hands.

   The fact that commitment was either an individual decision or a personal state of being, added untold complications. For him there was merely an open latch that needed to be closed. And a child was a matter of course- or did she over simplify?

 Her mother was discussing schedule in her rushed way. She listened, not exactly herself (she still believed her real self was an ethereal unwound being, best expressed either in conversation or mere glances with strangers as yet unmet, though strangely known). The baby was coming soon and she wanted to have the carpets cleaned. And yet, her daughter interrupted her. With the slow spacey tone that makes a white man think an African’s caged, defiant eyes contain rudeness when in fact they are filled with honesty and stark conviction, she told her she wanted to get the old bouncing chair they had used as children down from where it had been stowed in their loft.

   The mother looked tight. She cut the silence. Yes and no, well, you’re bulbous and liable to fall, and I, I, she could have flagged before she spoke the specifics of any of ailments, which most certainly were there.

  “Maybe we could wait until Azzadine gets here”

Azzadine – the word was over-pronounced and somehow dulled in her mother’s pronunciation. It had begun to routinely slip off her lips with a liberality that the daughter feared, since her mother knew him only so slightly. She imagined his tottering figure at the top of a strained ladder. She immediately replaced him with herself. Not only because she had a greater likelihood of success but also because she could rely. At this thought,  she could feel herself become less ethereal. Azzadine, on the other hand seemed foggy and impermanent,  more liable to fall.