Salima

‘What’s the moral of this story?’. ‘Sir, this is the 21st century, stories don’t need morals anymore’. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to mark you down’. ‘But sir…’. ‘I’m going to give you a D. Next time think of the moral of the story before you even begin writing it’. ‘But sir’. ‘No buts’.

She bowed her head. And it was with a bowed head that she traipsed with leaden steps up the beige dusty street that had become the signature of her adolescence, clutching her story to her chest like you would carry a baby. She had to report straight home after school and only had the beige dusty street to creatively inspire her before she got there. It was flanked by garages with dark interiors that belched out the sounds of clanking, drilling and the thin crackling song on the radio. She plodded by in big angry steps and chunky masculine boots, breathing in the intoxicating smell of petrol for solace, dainty and delicate like a flower growing from railroad tracks. She looked much younger than her 18 years and the mechanics who looked up from their work as she walked by gave each other curious glances as if they didn’t know what to make of this heavily guarded and veiled girl wandering through their midst fearlessly and unsupervised.

She had worn her groove in this road through years of schooling and proceeded to wear it even deeper when she enrolled at a nearby university. By this time she was allowed to wander further afield and now when she slid into the mouth of the cavernous tube station at the end of the road, she could go any direction she liked along any coloured line, North, South, East, West, Purple, Brown, blue, yellow, to go to friends’ houses, museums, shopping centres and religious gatherings. She was queen of the London tube (zones 1-4), and felt her world had expanded infinitely. Even as she visited the same places repeatedly (Charring Cross, Edgware Road, Piccadilly Circus) they were always full of new surprises, new people, new exhibitions, new Broadway advertisements. What better city could she have chosen for her captivity than this?

The smaller the space of her physical environment, the bigger it was conceptually and the more her imagination could burgeon. Take the dusty labyrinth of her university library with its firelight ambience. She spent hours at a time in just one section on just one book before the sunlight falling across it turned orange, which signalled it was time to make her way home. She would often carry the book home with her, reading it in the dim light of a tube carriage whilst the shadows of other passengers obscured the communiqués of the obscure ancient world she was conversing with.

Dozens of such books lined her floors and spilled over her desk at home; bottle green, black, brown and burgundy leather bound volumes with gilded and embossed letters and cafe au lait pages. In amongst, underneath and on top were glossy paperback books of gaudy yellows, oranges and blues with bleached white pages and huge capitalised clinical titles. This marriage of new and old information was a familiar theme she remembered from childhood when she liked to peruse her parents’ books which alternated from old religious tomes to the latest in textbook psychiatry. This was the main reason for her lingering interest in that discipline that had started from her days of childhood boredom where, in-between finishing household chores and watching endless repeats of safe family viewing with the rest of the family, she would leaf through her mother’s books to entertain herself. She knew all about how when people had no problems they could still be sad, but couldn’t quite understand it. Not just sad, but suicidal. She thought this was a lovely sounding word when she had first heard it from an audio book on depression, a word she remembered because it rhymed with impression.

The years dragged on and depression became so much more than an impression. It became a dirty dark consolation. She thought it was an embarrassment, a weakness and a less than human state to be in. But when she reached a dead end and didn’t know what else to do, the vision of the word popping up in her mind, interchangeably coloured, flickering, flaming and moving, was calming. A lot of these dead ends were made of glass and that way were all the more painful. They were Plexiglas. She could see where she wanted to go, but she couldn’t get there. Whenever she came up against one of these walls, palms flat on it and nose squashed against it, she became so disconsolate that everyone around her came to the conclusion that she must be depressed, and it happened so often that she became known as a depressive. That was after she was known as a moody teenager.

It all started when she fell in love with the boy at the back of the class. Joshua was beautiful, she thought, yet the paragon of manliness. He had a wonderful head of thick chestnut hair that stood up on end, with a convex hairline that made him look like he always had a quiff. He sported a bit of chestnut fluff around a pair of pink cherub lips and had two large round eyes that were deep wells of swirling green and black ink that drank up the world around them hungrily. Their gravitational pull sucked in the world around him and her along with it like two black holes. Joshua was the only devastatingly handsome boy in the class who wasn’t paired off with a fresh-faced, lip-glossed and hair-dyed female. Add to this an enigmatic and reserved personality, and perfection did not find a better expression in the view of a broody teenage girl. Every time he spoke in his hushed monotone, commenting on a piece of literature or a political concept her heart rate galloped and her stomach turned in unbearable nausea.

This nausea became so acute that she sometimes took days off school. But only when she had no lessons with Joshua. She took these days off as an opportunity to daydream and surrender herself to the painful yet titillating excitement his memory brought her in the comfort of her bedroom. Her excitement would reach fever pitch when she recalled her inklings that the princely Joshua reciprocated her humble desires. Such a wonderful thing was so much to bear that she would spend the afternoon sleeping the thrill off. In her state of half slumber she would go through her mental records of all the moments when his eyes met hers, not in numbers but photographically, in individual instances. Each of these instances was uniquely placed and distinguished by the angle of the gaze, its duration, and most importantly its circumstances. When she recalled these gazes and replayed them repeatedly in her mind it was their circumstances she chose: was it the time he looked at her during the Nazi invasion of Poland or the time during the rise of Thatcher and the New Right? Soon it no longer mattered and the gazes began to merge into one so that all she saw were the wells of his eyes penetrating her every night before she went to sleep.

And they haunted her for many years after. The inky swirls became wells of indefatigable sadness and remorse. Remorse that she never spoke to them and told them how she felt, sadness that she could not speak to them, and never would be able to no matter how many opportunities she had had. Even if she had seen them glinting in a dark alleyway, with nothing but empty sleeping neighbourhoods separating her from the reprimanding and watchful eye of the legions of her superego, she would not be able to speak. At times when she saw her parents buzzing about the house, nonchalantly toiling in their daily routine, their aloofness subtly exuding the hold they still had on her life, despite the fact they no longer fended for her, rubbed her wounds or rocked her to sleep, she felt resentful. So resentful at the sight of them and their distant yet overbearing presence in her life, that she vowed she would defy them should she ever get the chance. It was they who thwarted what she thought her only chance of happiness; should she get another chance, she would not cower under the thought of their reprimanding eye. She would defy them to the death.

‘What’s wrong, Salima?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Being a moody teenager again?’

‘Dad, I’m 22.’

‘You know what I mean; you’re acting like a teenager.’

‘NO, I’M NOT!’

‘See what I mean?’ Resentment wasn’t the word. The festering negativity became so toxic she needed to release it before it poisoned her very being. She spent the following week watching the spindly hands of the mahogany clock eclipse each other as an hour passed every time before she gave up on trying to muster the courage to confront her parents and ran off to the refuge of her room.

‘I’m really worried about Salima,’ said her mother. ‘It’s just adolescence,’ reassured the father. ‘No. You heard her. She’s not a teenager anymore. She’s a grown woman. Girls her age have already gotten married and had children. I feel she’s nowhere near ready for marriage… I’m worried about her.’

‘I don’t think it’s serious.’

‘I do. She’s depressed, without a doubt.’ Her father let out a long drawn out sigh and went back to trying to read his newspaper. Her mother took a sip from her strong coffee and placed it slowly and thoughtfully on the table in front of her. They sat in the gloom of the overcast afternoon in silence while only the sound of the mahogany clock could be heard ticking, punctuating their shared reverie. 600 ticks passed before Salima walked silently into the room and sat on the shiny brown leather sofa opposite them.

‘Hello, Salima. Are you okay?’

‘No, I’m not.’ The parents exchanged knowing glances, while all Salima saw was the tight weave of the Persian carpet. ‘Won’t you tell us what’s wrong?’

‘My life, that’s what. I can’t do anything. I’m completely trapped…by you. I’m 22, and I can’t do anything because of you!’

‘What is it you want to do that we’re not allowing you to do?’ Her mother asked, baffled. A silence followed. ‘Salima?’ Salima looked up with anxiety and frustration etched in the contortions of her features. ‘I’m not allowed to go out,’ she murmured after a while. ‘What are you talking about? You go out all the time.’

‘I’m not allowed to go out with certain people.’

‘Who?’

‘Just…certain people.’

‘Who?’ She tried to speak but all that came out were abrupt sounds and grunts. She couldn’t bring herself to speak the unspeakable. The tightening of the muscles in her face reached such a climax that she had to run out of the room to release them. ‘See? Stroppy adolescent.’

Back in her room, she picked up a burgundy leatherbound book of English romantic poetry from her bed and read herself to sleep. She awoke in a sea of books, which made her smile briefly before she remembered the gaping hole at the centre of her being. She set out to walk the grey streets of London under its grey skies, past its redbrick buildings, in the gloom that made the dull colours merge in a two dimensional patchwork. Like a fatally wounded animal searching for a familiar place to die, she visited all her old haunts: her school, her road, her train station, all which reminded her of her sweet pain. The nostalgia for a time when she was in love, but couldn’t express it, when she had a reason to get up every morning, but nowhere to go. Nostalgia for something she had never even had.

She knew all about Joshua, that he had studied Politics at a Russell Group university and was now working for an environmental charity. How she envied him, but more so those who worked with him. She even tried applying to the same organisation. But what was the point? She would stare at him from behind the glass wall just as she was doing now when browsing his social networking profile. She monitored it every week to check if he was still single, and lo and behold, the profile never disappointed her. It told her he was single and interested in women. Her heart raced every time she saw this and she thought about herself as a woman. A desirable woman. One of the women Joshua might be interested in. The flames of impulse were igniting inside her and licking her bowels with the cool fingers of rationality. She reasoned that she was a mere mortal whose time for happiness and enjoyment was finite. And even if it wasn’t, she couldn’t pass by her best chance for earthly delight, at spring of her lifetime, just for an eternity of ethereal bliss. Why did one pleasure have to cancel out the other? And even if it did, there was no doubt as to which she should choose.

On these grounds she one day unequivocally decided to shed all feelings of fear and shame. She took the image of her parents, their friends, her entire community, and their judging eyes, and pushed it to the deepest recesses of her mind, lifting her two fingers in the air to wave a defiant goodbye, not caring who saw. That same night she lay curled up like a foetus in her bed, shivering and wondering how she could have even contemplated such a deed. She spent months pressed up against the wall, staring, dreaming, thinking, daring and then scuttling back to the safety of her hermetically sealed life. After five months of sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, febrile dreams, chronic nausea, psychological self immolation and much last minute chickening out, it happened. She and Joshua became lovers in a surreal acceleration of events that never stopped feeling like a dream.

His eyes had dulled a bit, he had crow’s feet when he smiled and his hairline had travelled back a few millimetres. The Joshua she first pined for was gone forever and she still felt the pangs of nostalgia, the yearning for the irretrievable, but he was still the beatific being he always was. She could let out a long exhalation and finally be at peace in the assurance that cosmic justice had been dealt out to her. The next steps she took in the consummation of her act of daring were not spontaneous. This was a rational and well thought through lifestyle choice, after all, so she waited until she finished her university finals before running away from home in order to gain the dignity of freedom and full sovereignty over her own person. Her dad was finally convinced that the problem of Salima was more than just adolescent stroppiness. She was after all 22. Her mother kept her professional and cool exterior but was falling to pieces inside, worrying about what actions her daughter would take next in her mentally unfit state. Oh, if only she would come to her senses momentarily, enough to come back home so she was safe and secure and her dangerous degeneration could be contained.

Meanwhile, Salima was drunk on her own good luck. The sudden transition of impossible to possible was too joyful to even bear and the sunny joys which were beyond words at first began to darken as she grew perturbed and confused. She was horrified at the thought that she could ruin this most perfect cosmic coincidence by letting her perverse psychology get the better of her, but how could she stop feeling like an unanchored ship, so confused and totally alone in the universe without the bedrock of family and community? Her soul’s most desired companion didn’t even seem to make up for that superficial social safety net and this thought made her utterly wretched. Fear, confusion and a slight discomfort began to dog her uncertain existence in the dank East London bachelor’s flat she now found herself in. The matted brown carpet reflected her emptiness every time she gazed at it during the long summer afternoons when she had nothing else to do between her sporadic attempts at cooking and passing the time in reading all the fascinating books she found around the flat. The waves of ecstasy from their shared happiness, their shared living and their shared sensual pleasures, like when they kissed and had a Chinese takeaway, were huge, intense, but depressingly short lived. One month passed. A time period long enough to make her sojourn from her routine feel satisfying and short enough to make her escape seem like an aberration in her comfortable day-to-day existence. She had experienced the highest highs, but was consequently now in the depths of the lowest lows. The dullness of conformity never seemed more appealing. Joshua came home one day to find Salima and all the objects associated with her gone.

‘Oh, Salima! Thank God you’re back. Why did you do it? Why did you leave us?’ said her mother, tearfully smothering the silent and rigid frame of her child. Salima didn’t speak for days, which turned into weeks, then months. She hadn’t come back to comfort but a newfound despair in the Plexiglas bubble she was to occupy for the rest of her life. Her parents tried to get her to see a doctor but she refused. It was when she had also stopped eating that she found it hard to resist when her parents dragged her to the doctor who then diagnosed her with depression. Her mother kicked herself for knowing all a long and not trying to intervene earlier. Salima eventually and weakly submitted to what treatments were on offer. With time, and to her parents’ utter delight, she went back to being the shy, quiet girl she had always been.

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