New York
NEW YORK
Spring sun streams into his studio, the shadow from the window panels creating aesthetically pleasing patterns on his white desk. Kian has been staring at the blank A3 piece of paper in front of him for the last forty minutes. Each time he thinks he knows what he will sketch, he collects his 3B pencil from the table, bends his body to begin, and then it is gone. His mind is not on his work. Understandably, really. Everything reemerging with Rob Grayson has Kian thinking about the past. He opens Twitter and, among the noise, there are articles about the walkout or think pieces about what freedom of speech really means when the speaker is a racist. He sees pictures of Shirin at the front of a crowd, raising a placard, shouting into a megaphone. It is the most confident he has seen her in public. It is the version of her that he always saw within her privately; he is glad she has allowed the world to see this side of her.
He is thinking about the aftermath of his expulsion. He tries not to consider what could have been, but the past year it has been impossible not to. He thinks about all the things we want to tell the people we love, but don’t. He saw the world so differently at sixteen, and he wonders now what else he got wrong. He gets up from his desk and heads out to a coffee shop, intending to add further caffeine to his body, which will no doubt exacerbate the jitteriness already coursing inside him.
Later, on his way back from the coffee house, his takeaway cup in one hand and his phone in the other, he calls Mehdi. It is midday in , early evening in Manchester, where his brother lives. It rings and rings, though Kian is persistent and stays on the line until Mehdi eventually answers.
“Hello?” Mehdi says.
In the background Kian can hear his nephew and niece babbling away, although their voices fade off into the distance, as he imagines Mehdi going into another room.
“Hey,” Kian says. “What you doing?”
“Watching Peppa Pig, ” Mehdi says with derision. “Fucking Peppa Pig . I’ve seen this episode at least twenty times.”
He is laughing and Kian chuckles too. This is his brother’s life now—so far away from his difficult youth. Mehdi is a good father. Better than Kian expected he would be, though such thoughts feel unfair. He is incredibly patient with his children and speaks to them like they are adults, with a level of respect that prompts them to reply as though they are adults too, or at least as close to adults as toddlers can be.
“How’s things?”
Kian crosses the road, jogs to the other side, and leans on the brick wall outside his studio building. The conversation feels more private out on the streets, rather than indoors. He watches people pass with such determination; everyone has somewhere to go and walks as though they’re late. He takes a sip of his cappuccino. It is bitter. More because he has already had three coffees today and his taste buds are tired.
“All right, all right,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about when we lived in Hull.”
“What about it?” Mehdi asks, distracted.
“There are things I never said to you, back then.” Kian shuts his eyes when he says this. It is painful—shockingly painful, really. He assumed he was over all of this, that if he wanted to, he could speak about his past with more ease. He thinks of all Shirin has done to confront her past, and what scares her—the kind of advice he has given her, which he hasn’t followed himself. It is this that propels him to continue. “I always felt guilty about you going to prison. When you were in there, but even more so when you left prison and struggled to find a job. I’ve always felt like it was my fault.”
His brother blows air out of his nose, the sound audible through the telephone. “What you on about? It wasn’t your fault. It was all me.”
Kian’s shoulders have loosened; he hadn’t realized until now how tensely he was standing. He downs the rest of his coffee. “You went down defending me—”
“I would have gone to prison regardless, Kian. I was doing some bad shit. If it wasn’t that fight, it would have been something else,” Mehdi says. “Listen to me when I tell you that I never for one minute blamed you.”
Relief floods him. “I always wanted to ask: why do you think you acted out, when you were younger?”
Mehdi lets out another laugh. “Well, this is unexpectedly deep. I was just angry. Where we lived, in that time, it was racist and people bothered me. I made the decision—one I regret now—to be ‘hard’ and to show people they couldn’t mess with me anymore. I got in with the wrong group and, when you’re in it, it’s difficult to see what’s right and wrong.”
“Ages ago, when you had a bruise on your back… was that what started it?”
Mehdi sighs on the end of the phone and takes a moment before replying. “Things happen how they’re meant to happen. This was all Allah’s will. I’ve found Islam now, and while I wish I could undo the hurt I caused others, part of me thinks it all happened how it was meant to happen. It shaped me. Kian, man, stop thinking about the past. It’s all okay now.”
Kian hears his niece Yasmin asking Mehdi who is on the phone.
“Let me speak to my niece then,” Kian says, a smile in his voice, his body shaky from the weight that has finally been removed.
When he returns to his desk, he is less restricted as he sketches, though his mind often returns to Shirin. After all this time, she is still at the forefront of his thoughts. He is more than three thousand miles away from everyone he loves—and he thought an adventure was what he needed, but now he is not so sure. He wants to hold Shirin, to feel her against his body, instead of their video calls, which are not the same. But he does not say any of this when he texts her. Instead, he simply tells her that she is amazing.