PART ONE/ ANNIE PLATT IS WHITE

Annie Platt is white. She comes from a solid middle-class background, from which she has always wanted to escape. Her father is a retired dentist, a kindly distracted man who gently pats her arm and, she suspects, finds her dull. Her mother is a stay-at-home mum, with the resentment this provokes, repressed of course, and subtly manifested throughout Annie’s childhood. Her mother is a clever woman: a decade later she might have been a teacher, and a good one, or worked in publishing. But a mixture of circumstance and an endemic lack of confidence caused her gradually to relinquish any professional ambition and bring up her three daughters without apparent demur. Hers has been a life on the road, picking up and dropping off her children – the school run, piano and violin lessons, tennis matches, dance lessons, the weekly disco club – involving selfless driving through traffic, back and forth with a quick goodbye wave from the curb.
Annie is in her late twenties, with a comfortable body, at least a passer-by might think so, and a kindly face. People stop her randomly in the street for directions, come up to her naturally at parties to chat and find it easy to like her. Indeed her small group of girlfriends confide in her to an alarming degree. Mostly she would prefer if they didn’t. The weight of their secrets lies heavy on her.
If I tell you Annie has short fair hair, which is cared for by the local hairdresser, Franny, who often suggests cuts and colours rejected by Annie as being too extreme, that she has  glowing skin, clear blue eyes and a slightly rounded figure, you will get an initial picture of her. She sometimes wears bright red lipstick, which seems startling and at odds with her natural beauty, but never other makeup. She knows she should go to a gym, but never does; she pedals off on her bike to her web-design studio each morning, mostly late for work,  and feels this is plenty. Initially Annie seems an unremarkable person. If you were to know her however, you would enjoy her company; a blend of humorous optimism, warmth and constancy of mood. Sometimes you hit a streak of anarchy, a quirky fault line running through her like a sudden blast of cobalt through granite. You might step back, amused at this, and wonder who exactly she is.
Why has Annie been so eager to leave home? Why does she feel on another planet from her older sisters, who seem to sally forth, no questions asked, on a path of quasi-identical life-styles? They have houses which they decorate, husbands of whom they complain, children whose education is constantly in crisis, a dwindling sex life – as they freely confide to Annie, to her extreme discomfort – and are both plagued with an unformed unsettling feeling of missing out.
Earlier on I described Annie as being comfortable within her body. This is inaccurate, false even. The reality is that she has learnt to ignore the constant tug within her, always present. There is disquiet running down the very centre of her body at all times.
If I tell you she never had a boyfriend at school, and none at university despite being quietly popular, you might begin to ask questions. There is no special reason that Annie can give for this, and you can imagine she has been questioned repeatedly by her family and girlfriends. By now, however, the topic has been put aside as unresolved.
Annie has simply steered away from men whenever possible, although she has long friendships with several of them. She sometimes looks back at her past, to work out why this is. She can find no major trauma, no peg to hang on her sexual and romantic indifference to the male sex. Neither has she any kind of particular sexual urge:
Charlie Parker’s sax solos make her skin tingle, and one evening on the Atlantic coast of France when she threw back her head and swallowed the freshest oyster ever, she felt a tremor of sensual pleasure, but as yet these mild sensory reactions have been unrelated to men. One morning she telephones a therapist and is given an appointment at seven on the following Friday evening. Walking up to the first floor of the Victorian building, pushing the bell, sitting in the silent waiting-room and staring at a large black and white portrait of Mahatma Ghandi proves curiously demanding. She feels exposed. Later she finds herself facing a woman with pale patient eyes, a box of tissues and a potted aspidistra by her side – Annie dislikes the plants intensely – and is almost overcome by the horror of her situation. ‘Yes?’ from the therapist, followed by silence, I must go on, Annie thinks, staring into her lap. She hears an unexpected sound coming from the chair opposite, and looks up. Gentle snores are issuing from her therapist’s mouth, and her head has dropped down to her chest. It is, after all, seven on a Friday evening. Annie’s discomfort goes unresolved.
But before we go on, let me tell you something about Aaruni Abbasi.

PART TWO/ AARUNI ABBASI IS NOT WHITE

Aaruni is not white. She grows up in a semi-detached on Clements Road, East Ham.
The houses are perfectly alike yet none are quite the same. Each has its own discreet feature, some a dark mottled glass entrance, others a metal-grey front panel or an arrangement of glass bricks round the front door. Her own house is perfectly plain.
At home no-one worries about interiors. A brown carpet covers the living room floor, enlivened at one end by a red carpet from Lahore, two worn sofas face each other next to a spectral gas fire, and on the wall hang over-coloured photographs of the extended family, most of whom are taken in her grandfather’s living-room, wearing their best saris and glassy smiles. Aaruni Abbasi hardly knows them. On her road live only families from Pakistan and Bengal, except two doors up, where a musician from Colombia and his friendly wife live with their two smiling daughters. Ethnically they are the odd ones out: they must work harder to make contact with their neighbours. This makes Aaruni Abbasi smile: it’s so often the other way round. Aaruni does well at school. ‘The local school, ninety percent Asian, her father says proudly, and my children turn out to be in the other ten percent. Ha!’ This is supposed to be funny. However, what were the odds that she and her brothers should turn out so academic?
She  goes to University College London for two reasons: it has a good course in Librarianship, ‘Rated eighteenth in the world, ha!’ and her auntie Ayesha lives near her college with Arham, her portly husband. The following story she has never told anyone, specially her aunt. One night she comes home later than usual, after an evening talk at uni. The house is quiet, it seems everyone is asleep. She is heating milk for a cup of hot chocolate, her back to the door, when she senses Arham behind her: she recognizes his thick sweet scent. Before she can move away he is squeezing into her from behind, his penis hard, his hands all over her belly and inching downwards. Aaruni takes hold of her pan of hot milk, not boiling yet but definitely hot, and turns in a sudden movement towards him, flinging the content of her pan into his face. Arham does not utter a sound and disappears clutching his face. This is never discussed, and Arham avoids her whenever possible.
Possibly because of her quiet sense of herself and her surprising confidence, she steers clear of overt racism, although it is ever a subtle component of the air she breathes.
She forms a small group of mainly non-English friends and gets a good degree. Auntie Ayesha, who tragically for her has no children, has become very fond of her niece, and suggests she stay on. Aaruni soon gets her first job as an assistant in the Maughan Library, an imposing building on the Strand Campus, Kings College. She has been there for a couple of years when this story begins, and is, as you can imagine, competent but private. Her colleagues enjoy her efficiency but say amongst themselves at the coffee machine, ‘There’s no getting to know Aaruni’, and this is how she likes it.
A few words about her general appearance: she wears smallish round black spectacles that make her dark eyes seem larger than they might, and somehow liquid. She has a ponytail, and wears loose clothing, one of her many bright scarves always hiding the front of her body. She has clear skin which makes you want to stroke her cheek immediately, although something steely in the back of her eyes forbids any casual intimacy. She discovered sensuous pleasure alone in her bed at night when she was a teenager. It makes her feel slightly ashamed but she finds it irresistible: she often wonders if other female members of her family indulge in this, and whether it might be unnatural to enjoy her stifled orgasms so much. She has a precise way of moving, as if her body works outwards from a mysterious place, deep in her body. You do not forget Aaruni once you have met her: something entirely original and transparent emanates from her, and then passes on to you.

PART THREE/ AARUNI MEETS ANNIE

The Maughan Library closes at one, which suits Aaruni. That Thursday, a few minutes before closing, Annie strides quickly into the building, looking for a particular poem of Sylvia Plath’s which has been on her mind for several days. She is in a hurry, the padlock on her bike being too skeletal for central London. She is on a lunch break from work; she is almost running, having presented her card at the door impatiently and got a dark look from the man at the desk: libraries are not hurrying places. Her shoulder bag is swinging crazily from side to side. Suddenly, as she hurries by, it hits something and Annie stops. She looks down and sees Aaruni crouching beside her, searching for a book on a low shelf to her right. Aaruni looks up, surprised, and rubs her arm. Annie comes down to Aaruni’s level and says softly, ‘Sorry. I’m looking for a book of poems by Sylvia Plath. Actually’. The word makes Aaruni smile. They both stand up and Aaruni says, ‘Follow me’, and leads her round the arcane maze of alleys that make up the library’s ground floor. Annie walks behind, watching Aaruni’s carefully pinned hair, her slender neck and prettily formed body, and feels something heavy move inside her, like a stone. They reach alley 43b and twentieth century women poets, and Aaruni flicks the books about before taking out a tablet and tapping on it with quick brown fingers. ‘Copies back tomorrow. There’s been a rush. New book out on her’. Annie says, too eagerly, ‘I did the cover. Actually’, and regrets it immediately, but Aaruni just smiles. The radiance she gives off is blinding. Then Annie stutters something, begins again, and manages the bravest thing she has ever said in her life: ‘Wondering if you want to…to…have lunch.’ Aaruni nods at once. ‘Yes. Actually.’
They both laugh. Then in one sudden gesture Aaruni slides the elastic band from her ponytail, shakes her head and her thick black hair comes tumbling down to her shoulders in a glorious jumble.

PhR August 2023

My mother would tell the same story over and over again relentlessly. 
This particular one took place during the war, when she was in the WAAF.
She would begin with her cigarette suspended, hovering mid-air as she took a deep breath, her darkened eyebrows arched, eyes agleam. Then she would dive full-throttle into her tale: ‘Darling, have I told you this one before?’
No time to react, to interject tactfully with ‘Well Mum, actually’…before the story hurtled along, unimpeded. No stopping the flow.
Something would lurch inside me, like a heavy stone slowly falling downwards through my entrails. There was no-one around to save me. The surrounding silence weighed on me like a tomb. The heavy gold brocade of the sitting-room curtains gleamed, the cigarette box seemed to grow, the royal blue carpet loomed and almost came up to hit me in the face. 
‘So, I walked out of the canteen with my girlfriend, arm in arm, very jolly it was, and some-one said as we passed, Elaine, you look full of beans!”
I must have heard this story twenty times at least. Although a mere few hours in her company drove me to a frenzy, I had a great aching tenderness for my mother, and I did not want to cause her any upset. 
So began the struggle within me, always the same, where a terrible desire to leap up and shout, ‘Stop, Stop! Mum, I’ve heard it a million times before!’, encountered a desire for patience, for understanding, for love. 
The two opposing forces met within me, facing one-another like the antlers of two stags, colliding, pushing, forcing, gaining one inch here, one inch there, as though a warring camp had pitched its tent within my body.
‘And guess what, I said, well Elspeth, I’ve just devoured a plate of baked beans in the canteen, so I AM full of beans!’ 
And her crimson mouth would pucker at the amusement, the sheer hilarity of it: her war-time memories, her youth, her years with the girls, walking arm in arm in uniform, their brogues clicking on the stony path, their nylons carefully darned, buoyed by a sense of purpose, matiness, being part of the great effort…
‘Darling, I haven’t bored you with this little tale before, have I?’
I sat there, perfectly still, holding on tight, tight, tight, until the antlers had been lowered and the stone had settled, and I was able to say carefully: 
‘No Mum, you haven’t. It’s lovely’’.

PhR July 2023

for my daughter Penelope

I developed recently a preference for non-fiction.
While I was growing up I devoured fiction hungrily. My parents even used to ration me, to get me to read slower. As a lonely child, aged 8, Enid Blyton saw me through the endless boredom of long school holidays. Tolstoy helped me get through months of convalescence after a dire car crash aged 18, lying on my front with War and Peace propped up beneath me. As a drama student Doris Lessing opened me to feminism and the bid for creative independence.
I have been an avid reader of fiction all my life.
But for a while, I was drawn to the intensity of raw life, as it comes: awkward, untidy, incomprehensible and tragic, more than the tidy re-enactment of it as fiction.
Let me give you a vivid example of this.
Last year I went to the theatre with my daughter. We were both looking forward to this, and had stall seats in the iconic Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris. It was a production of slapstick comedy performed by two marvelous ‘physical’ actors we knew. We sat side by side, happy to be together, pleasantly waiting for the show to begin, the pre-show buzz sounding like music to our ears, our coats tidily piled on our knees. Fifteen minutes into the performance we were already intensely engrossed when our attention was taken by some startling movements and noises nearby. The lady sitting on the next seat to me, a slim dark-haired young woman dressed in red, had started jerking violently and making strange throaty sounds. It was clear to us as she fell back, shuddering, her arms shooting out at crazy angles, that she was in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
The show went on.
From the darkness a man whispered ‘Je suis médecin’, crawled forward from somewhere and crouched half in the air, half on what looked like someone’s head in the row behind. He rolled the woman onto her side and undid the top buttons of her blouse. He tucked what looked like a ballpoint pen into her mouth to check her tongue, and held her hands down. She writhed, she groaned. To see someone convulsing is deeply upsetting. You feel distraught. You feel helpless. It is a violent spectacle. I felt very badly for her and wondered how the hell to help.
The show continued.
The actors were obviously aware of the commotion but struggled on, concentrating on the precise timing of their physical gags and trying to keep the audience’s attention, despite craned necks and whispers. Finally, the theatre manager must have called an ambulance. Just as the young lady’s fit was coming to an end and her convulsions lessening, a second doctor, dressed in a sort of white astronaut’s uniform, came up the central aisle from behind the stalls clutching an officious folder and a huge walkie-talkie that emitted brutal little sounds of the kind you only seem to hear these days in TV shows about cops. The seizure ended. The young lady lay still, quite unconscious. The emergency doctor covered with a blanket. 
At this point my daughter and I tried to turn our attention back onto the actors, but found it impossible. The action on stage glided over us, making no dents, no impression. The emotion whirling within us was too strong. The actors went on, plainly disturbed. Physical theatre requires perfect timing, and an exquisite sense of comedy. Difficult when the audience is distracted: moving heads, shuffling and muffled conversation do not enhance performance. We were an inadequate bunch for their extraordinary talents: I felt sorry.
After a long while the young lady opened her eyes and was helped to a sitting position by the emergency doctor. Head bowed, eyes open, she sat perfectly motionless for a long time, slowly pulling back from the foggy hinterlands of her mind into our reality.
I wondered if she realized where she was, coming to her senses in a crowded theatre with hot lights shining down and the sound of intermittent laughter. Did the surroundings seem hostile? I hoped not. I wanted her not to feel afraid and wished I could put my arms around her and give her some comfort.
Instead, my daughter put hers around me, and whispered kindly -sensing my state-
‘it will be all right Mum’, which was the perfect thing to say. We both felt shaken.
The performance ended. The woman was helped up by the doctor: she seemed so fragile. She moved slowly, leaning on his arm, and they made their way out of the theatre.
Here was life colliding with make-believe. Here were two performances enacted simultaneously in a parallel universe, and no question as to which was the more compelling of the two. We were a mere audience for one: for the other we were highly emotional participants. For all their obvious talent, the actors on stage seemed like puppets. Our neighbor’s seizure represented suffering, played live: an intimate moment endured and publicly exposed, an imposition of fate that affected us intensely.
Similarly, events have been playing out on our world stage and in our most intimate lives centrally during the last year. We are actors in an unfolding series of performances. Reality is deploying a chain of life incidents, lethal attacks on our sensitivity, sanity, beliefs and understanding. We are not only witnesses, but actors on the stage of a pandemic outbreak; our storyline has been loneliness, isolation, death and tragedy, a surge in mental illness, chaos, extreme suffering and political incompetence that must impact our life-view forever. We feel powerless, angry, sad, bored, all at the same time.
There is no escape.
Next to this ‘life performance’, the ancient and revered art of storytelling feels remote and disconnected, even at its most refined.
I have closed the pages of my last book of fiction for some time now.
Our screens at home proliferate non-stop with news: tablet, phone, computer, television.
When I wake early tomorrow I will turn on the radio, first thing.

PhR April 2023

(From recordings made in Encausse of Yvonne Maurens’ life in post-war Gers)

Maman’s voice whispers softly in my ear, ‘Lucille, it is time’, and my eyes open I am lying curled on my side, my right hand under my cheek. From my bed, I see a bar of white light shine under the door, feel my sister’s warmth on my back, hear the blackbird call: ‘It is time to get up. Lucille’, he chirps, ‘Lu-lu-lucille’.
The flagstones are cool beneath my feet. Maman has heated the water in my basin. 
I stand quite still for a moment, my hands on the warm porcelain, the smells and sounds of the farm settling around me, the scent of wood wafting in from the kitchen, the chickens squawking as Grand-Père gives the morning feed. We always keep them the peelings from our evening supper. I don’t want to pull my white nightgown over my head just yet, or feel the roughness of the cold wash-cloth on my skin, or catch sight of my thin body in the little mirror on the commode, or see my whiteness, with the strange dark hairs newly growing on my private parts, my breasts becoming uncomfortable bumps, so unfamiliar on my chest. Shocked by the sight of them, as always, I pull on my thick grey tights and black skirt as quickly as possible. Yolande stirs behind me: she has been watching, I know. I can feel. She is two years younger and always spies on me.
The blue bowl stands on the table in the kitchen: warm milk and maize bread which Maman makes each week. By Friday it is so hard you must break it into pieces and soak it in the milk. The cat sits on my knee as I eat, and slowly light fills the silent kitchen. A ray of sun catches on the basket of herbs and illuminates it. I know there is a kind of beauty there, in the room, but I have no words to describe it.
Later on today the other girls will sit at the on the school benches, pen in hand, purple ink darkening their fingers: Bernadette, Franchette, Camille. Their parents run the chemist, the village baker and Camille’s father is the doctor. I am a bright girl. I know this because I sat in the front row and Mlle Bézières patted my head and smiled. I got the Certificat d’Etudes at thirteen and could have gone on to study in town. The nuns offered Maman a job in the school laundry in exchange for giving us an education. But our grand-parents needed us and Maman couldn’t leave the farm. We have seven hectares and there are only Maman and us two girls to help run the farm. 
Our Papa died two years ago. Maman does everything: she toils in the fields and cooks, finds the money to mend our boots and buy a fresh apron once a year. She is very clever, Maman. She makes us each a change of clothing in September so we don’t need to wash our clothes every evening and dry them in front of the fire, as the people next door must do, a family of Spaniards who have fallen on bad times. They are so poor the little ones are sent out at five years old to weed the rich people’s courtyards. In exchange they are given un sou: they run to the shop to buy a hot roll, which they share with their siblings.
Maman is magnificent. She worked first as a scullery maid in the Château when she was twelve years old. Before her marriage she toiled as a young seamstress in a local atelier. 
They treated her very roughly, Grand-Père told me. One year she made us two new coats with some blue cloth Grand-Mère found in a trunk. The coats had three little pleats down the back and little gold buttons all the way down the front with collars, they were… so beautiful. Fabienne, who runs the grocery said, ‘You look like two princesses’.  
She only has a nephew, Fabienne, no children. She is kind: sometimes she gives Yolande and me a small present from her shop, but not as big as her nephew’s. Sometimes we can choose a pencil, or a rubber, or share a bille de chocolat, but the nephew must always have the best. 
When we are tired and sad, sitting round the table, Maman jumps up, puts her hands on her hips and says, ‘Listen: Yolande, Lucille, there is no going back. Only forwards’. 
With that she quickly does up the buttons of her black house-coat, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and bends to lace up her worn leather boots; then she strides out to pick the ‘haricots’, which we sell at the market each Saturday. 
We must pick them early in the morning, often it is my job, before the burgeoning heat makes them burst open, and then you might as well throw them out to the pig.
I hate the earth. I hate the land, the farm, hate the howling wind, the curves of the low hills that cut us off, hem us in, imprison us. The land is a monster, it devours everything: our Papa, my time at school, our dreams. The farm pushes you forwards with your nose down, always down, towards the earth. Plants never stop growing, crops always need cutting, animals get hungry, there is never a pause. The earth pulls Yolande and me out of our warm bed at dawn, it forces us to labour all day until the evening: stooping, crouching, scrubbing, raking, sweeping, pouring, cleaning out the animals and feeding them. 
No moment to lift up your head and linger, and look with wonder at the horizon. 
I hate our cow because twice a day I must milk her. 
I hate the rabbits, because I must clean out their stinking cages.
Most of all it’s the ducks I loathe, because I must cook the maize and help Maman stuff it down their throats.
‘Lucille is a sullen one’, they say. It’s true I rarely smile.
I got home the other day, and Grand-Maman asked me what our neighbour’s wife gave me to eat for helping to strip their garlic. She knew it would be cabbage soup with a potato. 
It always is.
‘Rat’, I shouted, ‘She cooked us a rat’. 
And then I laughed.

PhR March 2023