SHADOWS

SHADOWS

ZEHRA MUSTAFA

The writer who did not write moved by feel alone, was eaten

by his words, by drink, his own hand casting a line, drawing

empty river.

P SMITH

“Eve of all Saints

Chapter One

    “Papatya, Patti, you know why we are all here, don’t you,” Sally looked at me, narrowing her eyes as she sought out recognition behind my eyes. I nodded my head gently as I glanced around the lavender painted room. They sat behind a table, they were my judges; two bearded men, one cleanly shaven, and Sally. “We have to decide and come to some form of agreement as to what the next step should be.” I nodded my head again, doing what I thought they wanted to see, not appearing too over excited or too subdued, I had to get it right. Only they could tell me if I was ready to leave, and it was only they who knew.

    I felt sick with fear, I dreaded the prospect of remaining as one of the many wide-eyed, vacant-headed patients who resided there, but I also knew what was out there. The walls and barred windows held my family back, along with my loving boyfriend and my dear Esther. In essence, for six whole months, it had held back life.

    “Do you think you are strong enough to leave?” Sally leaned on her elbows whilst the others sat back as far as they could in their chairs, afraid of catching my disease.

    “Yes,” I answered, the men scribbled something down. The man with the shorter beard now spoke.

    “Do you think you’ve improved Patti?”

    “Yes,” they wrote again.

    “What makes you think you’re ready to leave?” asked the red bearded man, his pen poised at the ready to sentence me.

    “I just know, I need a chance to show that I can do it.”

    “How do we know that you won’t try to harm yourself again?”

    “You won’t know unless I try not to.”

    “This is why we’ve drawn up this agreement,” the shaven man pushed a piece of paper toward me with his right index finger, quickly moving it away as my hand edged towards it.

    “What is it?”

    “It’s for you to sign, it says that if you show any signs of self harm, despondency or depression you are to be immediately readmitted.”

    “I don’t really have to sign this do I?” I pleaded looking over at Sally.

    “It’s for your own good Patti” Sally pleaded. I knew that Sally wanted me out of there, and she knew that I would have to convince the others. I picked up the pen and signed, watching the dots bleed and merge with my name.

    My life is deteriorating fast in front of my eyes, it was meant to be full of promise, and rewards. Rewards of the fruitful kind nonetheless. Plans were easily made, and just as easily dropped. I was going to be a writer, a famous poet. I was meant to write. You see, let me try to explain to you what has happened here, but as you can already tell, I’m not actually all too clear on what has happened here. What I do know, is that I have fallen into some kind of low ebb. Is that the right word to use? Maybe the word is decay, no it’s too dramatic, maybe deterioration, that’s more like it, so scrap that sentence, and here we go again, but please do forgive me if it sounds a tad dramatic, but I need some space to move here, so here it goes.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Well, that’s what they say, is it not? Not that I really know who they really are, but I know, I’ve definitely heard it said before, and maybe that’s why I’m thinking of it right now, in this very instant. No, but really, why am I thinking of it right now? Why here? Why now? I think to myself. Maybe it’s that maddening sound the kettle is making, the way that it is rumbling and shaking, letting the odd spit, splatter out of its old crumbling mouth, poor thing, it really is holding onto it’s last rumble and tumble with all of the lime scale clogging up it’s little arteries. I watch it intently, the way a mother watches their baby’s chest rise and fall as they sleep, but I’m sure that it’s shaking too much, almost to the point that it looks as though it’s finally reached its breaking point. I’m certain that the water is going to burst it’s way out of there any minute now, the lid is simply going to give in and lift away, pouring it’s burning hot liquid all over me, and I would just stand there, saying, “Well, did you see that? What did you expect; you knew this was going to happen, sooner or later.” No, but that can’t be the reason why I thought of that saying. But of course, I know full well why I thought of it ; I’m simply trying to procrastinate a little longer, just to see how long you would be able to hang on in there, just to see if you had already given up, because, I think I have. But I can’t of course; everything depends on my getting out of this rut. This is my last chance.

I’ll try to return to the root of my thoughts; I think about how it is that people end up the way that they do.  I don’t think anybody is actually able to fully posses or comprehend how it is that they ended up where they are, or the condition that they arrived there in. All they know is that it wasn’t easy, yet, it was. It really was. Just as Alice found herself beguiled and lured away into that unknown world, it turns out that it is just as easy for the rest of us, there’s nothing special about us. We can sit there waving our heads and tatting at Alice, saying “silly girl, did she not know the story of the big bad wolf, did she not know that she had to stay on the path, and to never accept sweets from strangers?” but the fact is, we all follow our own rabbits that cross our paths in all sorts of guises, and eventually down a very deep hole.

I ransack my moth- bitten memory, watching it, as shiny particles of dust fall through the holey net that it has become. I have become frantic, turning this way, then that, searching for what it is that I have left out, and of course, I too am searching for that defining moment which swept me haphazardly, along the path. And now, here I am, and there you are, promising to stay with me till the bitter end; even with my fevered mind. Waiting, waiting, waiting, and more waiting. But by searching my memory, I encounter many problems; everything has become blurred as reality melts into some form of undecipherable fantasy.

     Fact becomes mixed up with tales and myths that I had read as a child, the very same tales that I still pull out as an adult. I put my face close to the page, making sure that nothing has changed, making sure that all the faces have remained the same. I loved stories, the great, the dark and the fantastical, each one of us hold a story deep inside of ourselves, begging to be reached; for the dust to be removed, and read out aloud, a story that so desperately needs to be let out and go forth into the word, each one with a distinctive voice. But my voice, my poor wretched voice becomes hushed, and stuck. But it can no longer be contained as it begins to leak at the seams, and then, all at once like a burst dam, in one fluttering gust of uneasy and excitable energy, it gets all mixed up, becoming a transfusion of reality and fantasy, then, when there is nothing else left, all that there is left is the truth.

“You have to take it Patti,” his shaky voice just about held together. “Don’t you want to get better?” his hand felt warm. “Why isn’t she looking at me?”

“She will, just give her time,” spoke Esther.

“She hasn’t spoken in four days! What am I supposed to do?”

“John, listen,”

“Look at her, she’s not even moving her eyes,” he was crying now. It was the first time I heard him cry.

“Just give her some time,”

“I love her so much.”

“I know,” Esther soothed him, “I know. We all do.”

“Then why?”

“Papatya is strong. I’ve seen her like this before, and she got better, she’ll get better again, I know she will. I promise.”

“But how can she, she’s not taking the medication, and she just lies there, staring without blinking- how is that even possible!” he shouted suddenly.

“You heard what the doctor said; she needs to find her own way back.”

The room is dark; accept for a light streaming in from the corridor. The night nurse sips her coffee and pours over her Mills and Boon. There is a beeping noise coming from somewhere- but from where, I’m not sure. I close my eyes again. There’s only darkness.

    “Good morning Papatya” a man in a white coat smiles at me. “And how are we today?” A scream sounds from another room, then a bang, then many feet shuffling around in excitement.

    “Do you feel like talking today?” Silence. He pushes down the top of his pen and writes on the pad before placing it into the slot at the end of the bed.

    “You’re mother is looking forward to seeing you. How does that sound?” I turn around, there’s a wall.

    “She’s started taking the medication, and that’s a good sign. But I can’t give you an exact answer as to when she’ll take to it.” I recognise the man’s voice, but now my eyes don’t open.

    “But, what happened?”

    “I know it’s difficult,” the man spoke.

    “Don’t tell me what’s difficult, I’m her mother, and I need to KNOW!”

    “From reading her case file, all I can say now, is that your daughter had some form of breakdown…” the voices quieten.

It’s night. There’s the light again and the beeping noise. And then a piercing scream. The nurse rushes over to my bed. There’s a searing pain in my right arm. Then quiet.

The day begins.

Unfortunately, the day begins just as the last one, the one before that, and probably the way that tomorrow shall go too. That’s the way they grind you down, in a sickening motion of green, for green is the only thing that I can see. But I have already told a lie, as today is not going to be like yesterday, I can see that as I gaze hard at the white piece of paper in my crumpled hand which has become alien to me as I stare at it I note its lumpy mounds and wrinkly twists, denouncing any action that may be born from them.

The days, weeks and now months hadn’t been going so well for me, I can’t say why, if I could provide an answer, then maybe I wouldn’t be in this mess. The paper, is a map, a map of how my day is meant to progress. The clever little person behind this ingenious, gruelling task is my boyfriend, John. Oh John, John, John, my saviour, hah! no it’s not going to be one of those stories where I get rescued by a shining knight and all that dribble, you will have to excuse me, and give me a little more credit than that. John is the “half-glass-full” kind of guy, he can’t bear to watch people wallow in self-pity, and he has taken it into his all-mighty power to save me from my wretched self, after all “woe is me.”

This is how it goes. My day, a day that is not supposed to be like the last, begins with my faithful attempt at following the time table that John has drummed out for me on his worn out, slowly-but-surely dying computer. I listened to him tap away at the rickety keys, as the whole thing sighed the way old buses do. I look at him with an unearthing sense of contempt as I stare at the plan that he has devised for me, in order to keep me sane, what ever that may be. I think that it’s a clever little ploy to prevent me from plotting out any well thought plans that I may have for mass domination. There really is nothing bad about having such a grandeur thought you know.

The time table.

I won’t bore you with all the details of this magnificent, well structured plan which graciously allocates an hour for reading, something that I haven’t been able to do for a long while now. The reading, however, is specific to the taste of the young man who has constructed it. It is to read, each day a chapter of a graphic novel which John has been desperately trying to get me to read, it’s called Watchmen. He’s always trying to get me into these darn comic books, because that’s what they are; they are a strange hybrid of fantasy mixed with reality, something that the Brain Doctor did not order, but I guess they are sort of fun. John recommends the best, I mean, he would know, seeing as he works in a comic book shop. Don’t immediately draw up the stereotypical image of the geeky comic book lover, because that would be a mighty mistake on your behalf.

The small shop sits at the end of a short parade of shops; it’s placed firmly between a stinky McDonalds and a sage-smelling health food shop. I call his comic book place the little shop of wonders, it’s far more interesting than those huge chains, they’re “so “blah”, and it really is not blah at all, in fact, it’s a place that arouses a sense of wonder, from the very ting of the bell hanging over the blue door, to the ping of the sticker covered cash register. The very first time I walked in, I suffered a huge sensory overload from the incredible amount of colour that pored off of the covers; it was wall to wall of comic book madness. However, after you’ve recovered from the bombardment of colour, you are able to regain composure and notice the man sitting on a wobbly stool at the end of the shop

     He has his face only inches away from the table, and it is covered with tension and excitement all at once. His lips are tightened to the point that they are almost blue, with his tongue, ever so slightly protruding out at the left corner of his mouth. He is trying to construct something out of an old deck of cards, but it is indistinguishable. No, this is no ordinary twenty-four year old comic salesmen, this is a man who had a dream to become an architect, but funds dried up after two years of university. And here he is, still dreaming and hoping. I’m not sure if he knows how he got there. I do know that he doesn’t plan on staying.

    I glance back at the time-table that is supposed to pull me out from under my dark slumber. John places great emphasis on spending an hour focused on lunch, as recently I’ve had a tendency to forget to eat altogether, what’s the point?

“You have to spend the entire hour, eating,” he smirked with his crooked lips.

“If I spent an entire hour eating, I would be the size of that wonky shaped building that you made out of rubber!” I half-joked at him.

I run my finger down the list knowing that the day is far too tedious already, but still, I continue. After ‘lunch’ I manage to drag myself from the confines of my house in order to deliver my CV to two independent book shops in Blackheath, honestly, sometimes it is as though I am setting myself up or failure, I just hoped they wouldn’t  bring up the six month gap on the damned thing.

    University life had finally drawn to an end, and it didn’t take long for self-doubt to settle in. A week after graduation, when waking up whenever I pleased, had lost its charm and being free only felt like a life-long sentence, Esther and I met up at our usual café. We sat at our favourite spot hidden behind and alcove and against the wall, a space that would cut you off from the other customers. Esther was hoping to put some water over the fire that was me, as I pondered about what to do next.

    “I wouldn’t stress over it too much Patti,” she calmly sipped her espresso, exuberating elegance in her well ironed shirt buttoned all the way to the top. Esther had changed over night; she swapped her drab clothes for creaseless shirts, black blazers and a silk scarf.   

    “You can say that because you’ve already made plans!”

    “Plans-shmmans”

    “I thought I had a plan,” she laughed at my confusion as I tightened myself up against the wall.

    “So what Patti,” she placed the cup down into the saucer without rattling it, “you forgot to make plans, you’re not the first or the last person to do that,” she spoke matter-of-factly.

    “I just don’t see it; I just don’t see the real point of the last three years!”

    “Calm down, you’ll figure something.”

    “I mean what was I thinking,” I stopped listening to Esther’s calm voice, “what good are all those philosophers and all those dead romantic poets going to actually serve out here?” I waved, gesturing towards the world, “how did I ever persuade myself that English and philosophy were going to save me?”

    “Patti, you’re working yourself up, I don’t want to have to ask the owner for a paper bag for my hyperventilating friend again!” I stared at Esther, sipping her coffee, whilst looking irritatingly calm.

    “God” I said, “we’ve been such snobs looking down on people who leave school at sixteen, we’ve got it so wrong!”

    “We’ll get over it,” she slurped the last dregs, set her cup down into the saucer without making a noise and smiled. 

Fourteen months later, I had proven Esther wrong. I was right to have been in a high state of panic. There was nothing impressive on my CV, I had found out that even helping out the British Red Cross didn’t earn any brownie points. I had no prospect, and I really shouldn’t have bothered leaving my bed, I knew this as soon as I stepped over the threshold.

    Bookshop number one declared, “I’m sorry dear, we are unfortunately trying to cut back on staff.”

“Could I possibly leave my CV with you…just in case?” I ask with a tight smile, but I’m already thinking, what’s the point? as all hope begins to slowly diminish and I begin to wonder why I was even attempting to be a part of the real world.

“Sure, we can take it anyway” the shopkeeper declares, knowing full well that I know he’s trying to amuse me.

Book shop number two comes out with “we only hire in October.” October was four months ago, “let me take a look at that CV,” the woman stuck out her hand on which her skin was pealing slightly. “I see there’s a fairly large gap here.”

    “Yes,” I bit the right side of my cheek as she waited to hear my explanation. “I went travelling.”

    “Where did you go?” she pried, taking any real interest in me for the first time since I set foot inside the shop.

    “Switzerland,” I responded quickly, remembering that Esther had been there recently.

“I adore Switzerland, especially at that time of year. Which parts did you travel?”

    “The north-east,”

“Beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” she waved her head side to side idiotically, “but which part?” she pushed once more.

    “Zurich” I said, thinking of the bank.

    “I’ve stayed there, it’s so peaceful,” she fell silent as she reminisced over her beloved Zurich, meanwhile I stood there feeling like a fool. “Well, I’ll take your CV, but I wouldn’t bank on any work for a while, not a this time of year.”

    I hung my head down, in shame and degradation, screaming at myself for allowing myself to think that there was a mere chance. I walk back home thinking about the classic thing that junkies and alcoholics say “I wasn’t always like this you know!” and I too want to scream this out to those that brush against me as they pass me by. I want to say to them, “I didn’t just wake up this way you know,” but that would be a lie, it feels as though, one morning, I just woke up like this, and I knew that everything was wrong. I couldn’t pinpoint a specific event or anything that could offer me a tangible reason, it was everything.

One morning I woke up, and nobody was at home, I was completely and utterly alone. All alone, alone. But I had been alone many times before and usually enjoyed the peace and quiet that was so hard to come by in my household, especially since my return home. It wasn’t the fact that everyone was out there, getting on with their lives, it was the thought of knowing that I had somehow malfunctioned. I didn’t know how to pick up the phone to trouble John at work, and Esther was somewhere out there in the Congo taking pictures of insects and interesting looking people. I had nobody left. Writing had failed me, the camera had failed me, and the wells of inspiration had run completely dry, all that was left was dust. I could no longer bear the thought of living a second longer. Thoughts of death evaded my mind in those seconds of unrelenting anguish, and I thought that this was surely to be the end.

    At eleven twenty-eight on a Monday morning, pushing the sway towards death aside, all that I could do was return to my bed and pull the covers over my dishevelled hair and wait until somebody finally remembered me and discovered my crumpled body, bearing the weight of my fiery brain. “Help, help, help, please somebody help me,” I cried out helplessly into the empty house as though I was drowning, but my pathetic attempt at screaming didn’t even rouse the sleeping dogs, they simply disappeared into an open crack at my feet where it fell into a bottomless pit without a sound. I urge you to remember with a desperate plea, that I wasn’t always like this, I was like you once, I was that girl who was able to pull themselves out of anything, you name it, I was able to do it, I could even spin crap into gold, that was me, that was me! But now… this is me, this is me, completely helpless in a sea of green, with it’s heavy weight bearing down on my tiered chest, hoping, wishing, and preying that I will not be around to hear myself rant on and on about my crazy woes. I promise you; it won’t be, for I now know the end. I lay my head back down in my crumpled heap, with my crumpled body and crumpled hands, thinking that maybe all that I needed was to lay still and hope for the best.

    I return home, first passing the old flaking red post box, where I notice a large web that a spider had spun in the corner of the boxes’ receiving mouth, and then finally, I manage to pass my own gate and walk back. Letting out a sigh, I turned the key, I was home. I returned as deflated as a balloon that had landed into the grasp of an over excited child and with each leaden step, I made my way up the wooden stairs. Creak, creak, the sound drummed in my head, which hung low, as though it no longer knew any other way to be, and if I had a tail, I’m sure that it would be have been comfortably perched between my trembling legs. One step, creak, two steps….creak, each step is harder to climb; I repeat “what a lark! What a plunge!” which I can’t get out of my head since I re-read Mrs Dalloway. “Oh Virginia”, her words permeated my anguish from so far away. They infiltrated my itchy skin, and flowed through my hardened veins. Words suddenly break the barrier that nestles deep inside my head, as I begin to repeat words which have flooded inside my mouth without invitation and I start crying out at the top of my voice “unhinged, unravelling, plunging, unreal, AHHHHHHHHH!.”

        “Is that you Papatya?” a familiar voice calls out my name, pulling me out of my shell, whilst the sharp pronunciation of my name caused a ripple in the air. Oh dear god! I’ve gotten mother’s attention, and my unhinged mind will be bare to her psychoanalytical scrutiny. But maybe it’s safe, maybe I will be safe after all, she might not leave the confines of her studio to speculate her daughter’s situation, maybe, just maybe, I am able to somehow crawl away on my hands and knees. But truly, just how far could I get away like that? I mean, I gave it a shot and everything. I got down onto my hands and knees, having time to make note of the little red and white patches as they gradually appeared on my hands, and the nails turning so white that they looked as though they were about to pop off. Where would I crawl to? My bedroom was too obvious, I searched around me, attempting with desperation to get the hell out of there. I knew that I could do it, you know, the whole skulking away business, without being detected, just the way they do in the Green Beret. But just with everything else, it’s far too late, because there she is, standing above me, standing assuredly with plumes of smoke wafting above my head from one of her French cigarettes which have left numerous holes in old carpets and bed sheets. I watched lumps of turquoise paint hang limply from her long, thick, wavy hair, the hair of a sultan’s wife. I can see the gaze from her almond brown eyes, as they penetrate mine; she is wandering why her intelligent twenty-three year old daughter is on her hands on knees, interrupting her old Persian rug by folding it at the corners by her boot.

        “Papatya, what are you doing?”

        “Oh, I thought I dropped my earring,” I scuffled haphazardly around on the carpet, pretending to look for the imaginary earring. I stood up, brushed off the old dog fur, yup, I got away with it, a very good recovery I thought to myself. I looked at her, her eyes staring at me, fixed as if looking for something within me, what are you looking for?” I asked her with my mind. Only mother could look at me that way, as though she had caught me out, as if she could read my mind. But she couldn’t and I knew that for certain now, or she could, but shied away from my trembling darkness.

She still hadn’t caught on that I was not alright, that I was in fact on the brink of falling again; it was only John who always knew. I sighed and thought about “poor John”, who remained on guard, forever on the look out for my unhealthy mood changes, but that’s all boring and always magnified beyond exaggeration. I looked away, but not before stealing a quick glance at mother, knowing that she was about to say something, or ask a question that I knew I wouldn’t want to answer.

“What are you up to young one?” she asked, shifting her weight from the left foot to the right. She could never keep still; it was as though she was terrified of becoming frozen. No, she’s really not like me at all, I thought as she smoked, I could sit in the same spot for hours, sometimes I’d sit in my chair staring out of the window, not realising or feeling a scrape from time passing me. I returned another glance at her as she shifted from one foot to the other again; making the sequence in her large pantaloons hit the streaming light, they caught my eyes as they gleamed like little dancing stars. Only mother could get away with such eccentric trousers, it was a display, a sense of pride of her origin, she tried to bring back as much as she could from Turkey, almost as though she couldn’t bare the thought of losing her Turkish identity. Anyway, why was she calling me “young one” still? I was the eldest. She knew how I detested it and this gave her some form of enjoyment as she watched me squirm at the mention of it. As if I had fallen out of time, I suddenly came to, and remembered she had spoken last and was waiting for me to react; she stood calmly now smoking above my head.

“Job hunting,” I muttered with a sense of implacable shame.

“You do not have to work, you have your words. You should be using them to liberate that over-worked mind of yours,” her golden beauty began to wither away with each word, each word only proved my worst suspicions. She really didn’t know me. Anger bubbled through me, I could feel my blood spit and splutter, I could feel my feeble body quiver under my heavy clothes.

“I think, Belkös, that’s the problem, at the moment, my mind is like a buzzing flat line,” she knew I was serious as I spay out her name with venom, but her eyes did not shift from her fixed gaze upon me.

“You and your father are the same, think, think, think, think until your brain has been turned either into jelly or as hard as stone,” she patting her head.

“Thank you mother, I knew I could depend on you for support!”

“If it is support you want, well write then. Go to Lewes, take a break, you don’t need money. Write.” She flung her arms into the air, making everything sound so obvious, her eyes were laughing, as she looked at me, probably thinking that I was a silly child. I was shocked to hear her suggestion, although she pretended not to fuss on me, she hadn’t really taken her watchful eye off of me since I had left the hospital. Her grip had loosened but her gaze had become tighter, as if I had become trapped by an invisible yet blinding light.

The thought of Lewes immediately made me feel at ease, I hadn’t even thought of our family retreat until mother mentioned it. The thought of being alone hadn’t entered my mine, I didn’t know if I could really trust myself. Mother’s eyes narrowed again, lines creased around her hawked nose and without saying a word further, she whipped around, her hair flying in the air whilst little grey and silver ashes fell on to her much loved Persian, returning to her beloved work in her studio. Thank you mother, yet again.

Another world.

Mother’s studio, the second largest room in the entire house, had always felt like a world that belonged to the other. It felt as though it had no right being in the midst of our chaotic home. As children we were well advised to stay out, especially when she was hard at work in there. Whenever I passed her room, I could see the words KEEP OUT in bold flash through my mind. We didn’t really understand what it was that she did in there day and night. It was hard to understand what it was that kept our mother away from us. Sometimes dinner would be forgotten because mother was busy doing her “work” and father had no idea about operating anything mechanical other than the mechanical sharpener, he would say;

    “You should never interrupt a genius at work girls, ever.” And so, we didn’t. It was as simple as that. From a young age, we simply knew that the idea of space was crucial and we had to give it to one another, even if you had to eat baked beans and crackers rather than the succulent chicken that had sat defrosting in water for dinner. Like with a lot of things, I grew up thinking, “That’s just the way it is,” there was always too little space between us, or too much.

    The studio became a challenge for Leyla and I, it was off limits, and there couldn’t be anything more enticing than a “keep out” zone. We would wait for the right moment, we didn’t mind waiting, as it made the excitement reach its highest peak. But we could wait, we waited until the right moment, and when we finally made the plans and grabbed a chance, we finally made our way into a secret world that had been denied to us for such a long time. Within minutes of mother picking up her sack-bag and leaving the house, at last, at the ages of seventeen and fourteen, we made our way into the forbidden land. With me at the front and Leyla behind, holding onto my jumper as if there was a booby trap set up to capture us, we made our way in. As our feet crossed the border, a familiar aroma that always followed mother around hit our noses; it was a blend of her French cigarettes called Gitanes infused with oil paints and white spirit. Like an impenetrable force, the light flooded through the bay window in waves, spilling over every surface, making a silver layer on everything that it touched.

    I had never seen so many canvases in my life, piles of them in different sizes pressed against the walls and propped up on the floors. I couldn’t believe that my mother had produced them, and with this thought, I suddenly felt ashamed looking at them, it was as though I was peeking into a private journal, into the deepest inner thoughts that were meant to be kept hidden until it was time for them to be released into the world. Each frame held an insurmountable intensity, each colour, with each brush stroke had been carefully placed, they were so sure, so defined and bold, and it was as though they could push their way straight through me.

    Paintings from our childhood lay against the wall at the far right end of the room. Paintings of old mosques lay next to them, each golden glimmer upon the minarets showed off a piece of history, and next to those paintings were ones of the green mountains which had been her home for a short time when she was eighteen. For a while I had been feeling detached from my mother, but the painting suddenly acted as a small bridge, bringing us together for a few moments. I glanced over at unfinished paintings that had been recklessly tossed to the side; I looked closer, noticing an impression of a foot and a fist, leaving a dent from the large amethyst ring that she wore on her right middle finger. In was unearthing to think of mother being capable of such rage, this made her human just like the rest of us, but she couldn’t be I thought, she’s my mother. I stepped back, as if cowering away from a scene of violence, only to notice a painting which allowed my mind to move away from violent images of mother being out of control.

    My eyes were drawn to the dark corner of the room, even the long tentacle arms of light could not reach their way to this corner. I found myself face to face with a portrait of a man. His face was stern, but maybe it was the way that his left eyebrow seemed to rise in the middle, as if pulling his left side up, turning his face into a small growl. Yet, I couldn’t help but think that there was a sense warmth; the contrast confused the viewer, where they meant to fear him, or feel protected by him? Which one it was, I wasn’t sure. His eyes were fixed so hard, that I was sure that if I was to move either to the left or the right, that his blue eyes would follow me. His look made me take a sudden step back, I knew this face, but from where? Did I ever meet him? I asked myself.

    “It’s grandpa.” Leyla spoke without taking her eyes away; she too had become completely transfixed by the bushy eye browed man with piercing blue eyes.

    “His eyes are so blue!” I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Mother’s father had died when she was fourteen; it was something that she hadn’t really gotten over.    

    Death was rarely spoken about; it belonged to the other along with everything else that became hushed. I stepped closer to the painting, feeling safe now that I knew he wasn’t going to climb out of the frame.  I couldn’t help but wonder if this was possibly the last image of grandfather on my mother’s mind? Did she feel great love for him as she made the eyebrows bushier, pulling them up in the middle? Did she feel cold as she painted those blue pools for eyes, or fall into their warmth like two small whirlpools? I had to quieten my mind of these questions, as I knew that I would never get an answer, because I would never ask. I couldn’t stand there asking questions too long anyway, as our adventure had come to an abrupt end, as we listened to mother’s footsteps climb the stairs. Our time was up, and it felt like we were saying goodbye to her. Well, at least till the next time.

I look back at the timetable once I am safely behind my bedroom door, but my eyes make the words blur and wobble on the ripped page, and a humming noise starts up. I slump down into my chair that mother had rescued from the streets, it’s mustard yellow skin made me feel sick, so I covered it in a throw with elephants dancing all over it. I crumple up the paper into a ball, making it as tight as possible and throw it out of the open window, and rubbing my hands together I say to myself, “done.” But nothing feels done, everything looks undone, I look out of my window which faces the outstretched greens and yellows of Greenwich Park, and realise that words are failing me. As each letter of each word leaves me, my dream of becoming a writer slips through my fingers. My deepest yearning to be a poet, a beatnik, a shaman of words, a real person fades, fades and fades…