Untitled Document

The Hex of Roop Milan

I am on a train, westbound District Line heading back to Mile End. There's a bracelet on my left wrist, bronze and ugly, inscribed with letters that I can't read. It forms a perfect circle round my skin; I can find no join and my eyes slip over the surface of the bracelet again and again, looking for something that isn't there. I had worried about the cost. "It'll come out of my commission," Anita had said. "Don't worry. I loved you; you know that, but things move on. Keep it and remember that."

Anita had designed the bracelet for sale at Roop Milan. That is, she said, how she made her money now. She had given it to me out of pity. That hurt me almost as much as the loss. I stare at the bracelet as the train rattles on, and it seems to grow heavier, dragging at my arm.

Mile End: my stop. I struggle off the train, muscles weak, the metal binding me and weighing me down. I have to stop and watch as the train clatters back into the darkness. I can't stand it any longer, can't stand what has been done to me. I tear off the bracelet and throw it on the track, let it lie with all the other crap between the rails.

Free of the bracelet, I feel I have no weight, no body. People walking down the station steps stare through me as if I am not there. The streetlight penetrates me. Cars carve trails that are distant and alien; nothing to do with me. Nothing of any of this is to do with me.

I wait at the Mile End Road crossing.

I can see Anita in my mind, far more solid and real than all of this. I remember her stitching fabric or sketching with her head bent, making precise movements, always talking as she worked. "Everything's connected," she would say. "You, me, the cotton plants, the women who wove this fabric together in a factory somewhere. Run your hands over it and feel it all bleed together." I never understood but that didn't seem to matter. I watched her, entranced, and said nothing. "All you have to do is pull in the right place," and if she were sewing, she would pull the line of her thread and watch as the material gathered neatly up, "and you change the whole world."

Later, when it was beginning to go wrong, I would shout at her when she said these things. If she could work such magic, why was our relationship such a mess? She would look at me with cold eyes and reply: "you don't understand magic. It doesn't work like that."

She was right. I don't understand magic. I never have.

Light still pours out of the Red Man. Cars still pass, carrying their cargo East and West. I have become a ghost. My heart is so wracked, so hot and molten that it should bend and burn the air, and yet instead I leave no mark, no trace. Nothing leaves a mark on me. Anita said that everything is connected, but I don't feel it at all; I don't feel her out at Green Street, flowing down through the roads and into me. Everything keeps to itself, discrete and disconnected. I reach out to touch the railing and feel only metal.

The Red Man hides and the Green Man tells me to walk.

I obey, heading up Grove Road towards home. I'm hoping that, when I get there, Laughing Panda will tell me what to do next. Each street light I pass marks out time, drops lurid orange blossom over passing cars. It is that time between nightfall and the pulling of curtains, when people move about their rooms exposed, brought out into the open like the mechanical figures on old clocks. They all follow the same patterns; every room is both the same and yet different. I walk beneath the bridge where the first V1 came down. I try to imagine it, try to let it connect with me, wanting to feel the destruction rippling out from bricks and mortar, wanting to hear the screams that have been buried for decades under the green of the park, wanting to feel the heat of its flames blistering my skin.

But it is dark and cold. Canary Wharf blinks behind me, its corona of light smeared across the sky. All that stuff in the past is dead, and I feel nothing. Nothing but constant, unbearable love.

There it is: the red red bricks and scarred concrete path of home.

I had loved her a long time, and hadn't dared to say. Then it seemed she loved me too, and it seemed we had found the centre of each other and were happy. I believed in the connectedness she talked about because I saw it everywhere around me, I saw it spilling out in great waves from everything we did, in the way my love had infected her and made her love me back. I felt I understood her by all the thingsaround us; they all pointed to a path, and all we had to do was follow.

I followed it and so did she; for her it seemed to lead the right way and for me it didn't. We left university and I got a job in the Post Office, needing the money and marking time until the right thing came along. She started work at Roop Milan, choosing fabrics and design as well as just helping with the sales. Things started going wrong between us almost immediately. It was that place; Roop Milan. The hex of that place.

Key in the lock and the door swings open. Then another key, another lock, another door. Tramping up the stairs, all the memories I could conjure if I wanted to, so little separating us. We have both inhabited this space, the same dusty walls and carpet surrounding us. She is split from me by time, a trick of the mind, her voice and her scent so vivid that sometimes I think she's still here.

The heating hasn't come on and it's cold. Yesterday's dirty dishes are still where I left them. Laughing Panda is waiting for me.

I put the kettle on.

"Do you think," I ask Laughing Panda, "that everything is connected?"

She looks at me curiously. "Didn't you once say that you thought it was? At least as far as the letters were concerned?"

"That was then. Now it's different."

"Really?"

"I don't feel her now. I don't feel her at all. And I so, so desperately..."

"Use the letters," Laughing Panda says. "You have power over them, don't you? The power over where they go? Use the letters and they'll lead you back to her."

Then she is quiet. I get the feeling it will be a long time before she speaks to me again. She has never liked giving me advice. The kettle boils and I make myself a cup of tea.

The television is on and splashes cold light across the room. Actors perform their pantomime for me. It makes the world the way it believes it wants to be and not some other way.

The same is true of Roop Milan. From the same drab dull asphalt and brick that runs its poisonous river everywhere, Roop Milan shimmers, a breach of reality. For Anita it presented endless possibilities: roll upon roll of different fabrics in dazzling colours, all waiting to be brought out by the right cuts, the sleight of hand that knew how to fold them over women's bodies, how to cover them in sequins and jewellery. Anita saw that she could feed the hunger in women's eyes, model their bodies into dreamstuff, transform them into Hindi film heroines or Rajput princesses, simultaneously themselves and yet not. Roop Milan is slowly bleeding itself into the outside, slowly changing the world into something it never was and it never will be.

I think about what Laughing Panda said about the letters. She is right; I used to believe in them. If Roop Milan is concerned with changing the world into what it is not, then the letters kept the world the way that it was.

The way that it is.

Everything is inscrutable. I knew that watching Anita as she worked. I know that with the letters. The letters are immutable, secret things. They pass from place to place leaving everything unchanged. Millions of them every day, they reach me and I touch them and they move on; nothing happens, there is no sleight of hand, nothing changes. Watching them blur through the sorting machines, seeing their arrival, their departure, I lay here and realise Laughing Panda is right. They connect everything together. They move without transforming, they carry the messages in from the ends of the earth without altering them, as television would. They are time travel; a way back to when they were sent, a method of breaking the barrier that separates me from Anita, nothing in space but everything in time.

"Use the letters," Laughing Panda said. I switch off the television and try to sleep.

The next morning, after my round, my boss calls me into his office. Complaints from the houses I deliver to are up. I am formally cautioned. Later, off the record, he tells me: "just deliver the fucking letters. Put them in the right fucking holes, that's all you have to do." Now I have what I want, now I have the letters, I find it difficult to care. I can't make that connection; it doesn't exist. Only the letters exist. The hard cold instruction.

Falling in love is, I suppose, a failure to understand someone else. Anita became part of me. Part of my obsessions and my wants. I made her into my dream, however much I fooled myself into thinking the contrary. Love came over me and that was it. It was like the wind had changed and left me forever with the expression I had been wearing. I still talk to her in my head. I still look for her in the street, still judge others by their comparison to her, and because they are not her I always find them wanting. I see things I think she could have designed and I feel my heart contract. The words fashion and seamstress make me cry; if ever I should hear them I find myself imagining her. Roop Milan hangs before me each night in my dreams, a gateway of promise through which I was sure she would lead me, through which we would have been transformed, lived happily ever after, and I wake with tears traced across my skin, the pain of her image receding and her touch lost. That is it. That is me, the finally and immutably shaped rock at my core. You are gone and I cannot let go.

But I have the letters and they will lead me back.

Laughing Panda has indeed gone dumb. She sits in the corner of the room and says nothing to me. I make myself a cup of tea, switch on the television and spread out the letters in front of me. I have: Anita Havelock, 74 Pelter Street; Anita Choudhury, 1 Ravenscroft Street; Anita Ryan, 56 Cremer Street; Anita Myers, 49 Wellington Row; Anita Lakhani 12 Barnet Grove; Anita Davies, 18 Claredale Street; Anita Sanders, 14 Claredale Street; Anita Richardson, 15 Chambord Street; Anita Solanki (proprietor), 15 Columbia Road; Anita (no surname), 9 Swanfield Street; Anita McDonnell, 16 Turin Street; Anita Springfield, 36 Old Bethnal Green Road. Some I took from my round, some I stole from the sorting machine. If I stare at them for long enough I know they will align, and tell me how to return to her.

This separation, this disconnection, is unbearable. I feel I have lost the centre of my being. What went wrong - well, that can be worked out, everything can. She has to realise what it is I feel; I have to somehow get it out of my head, make it into a thing outside me, binding us. She has to understand; she will; the long chain of letters pulls us both back together, inexorably, inevitably.

This morning I walked the streets of my round and felt it. The roads seemed to know it, the cars, the people stumbling out on their way to train stations or bus stops. It hummed in the sky, in the singing of telephone lines and satellite dishes, it was spelled out in the trails left by planes, it bathed my body in broadcast frequencies, the invisible chatter of television programmes and mobile phone conversations, data packets, music on the radio. The sinking moon whispered it, the city streets bent and twisted to write its name across the map. I felt everything connect again, the city like the lines on my palm like the stitching of a dress, everything is one and everything is possible. "All you have to do is pull in the right place," Anita had said. "and you change the whole world."

She was right. And I will do it.

The letters are spread in front of me, brown envelopes mostly, some white, some with addresses neatly printed, some scrawled. I wait for them to speak.

Anita left Roop Milan shortly after she left me. I tried to phone her there and got another girl. "Anita? No. She's gone off to make jewellery." That was all.

After so long talking to you, so long in your life and thinking I knew so much about you, it hurt me to have it ended that way. No goodbyes, no explanations, just this other voice and then the cut-off line. A hole had opened up in the world, an emptiness that swallowed me.

But silence is still hope, however small, and so I waited. I couldn't do otherwise. I still held conversations with you in my head, still knew what you would say about things, and I hung on because you hadn't said goodbye, because I couldn't give up. This would always be my only love; I could not give up on it. And even though eventually your voice died within me, still I waited.

And now everything is leading me back to you. Looking at the letters and waiting for them to resolve themselves. The names, the numbers of the addresses, the numbers of course are letters themselves and suddenly I know what the answer will be, see it curling up in Anita's shape from the floor in front of me.

I know where I have to meet her again.

Resolving it is easy. "Use the letters," Laughing Panda had said. The house numbers are letters, 1 to 26, and anything higher must be reduced, one taken from the other before it can become a letter to be used. So 74 Pelter Street minus 49 Wellington Row, no, wait, 74 Pelter Street minus 56 Cremer Street and 49 Wellington Row minus 36 Old Bethnal Green Road, and all the rest can be used. I get a pencil and write them down in order. A, I, L, M, N, O, O, P, R. Shuffle the letters about, my heart racing, overcome by a feeling of drowning, of cloying sweetness choking my lungs. Take the world and change it. Yes, here: ROOP MILAN.

The magic Anita had shown me.

I take the District Line eastbound to Upton Park. As I leave the station the sun is sinking behind the buildings, fools' gold shimmering in the western sky as darkness gathers in the east. The streetlights flicker on as I turn up the street and begin to weave my way through the crowd.

The people chatter and flirt and argue around me; families with pushchairs, little groups of girls throwing smouldering looks after the boys, a line of traffic fouling the air, music thudding out from closed and tinted car windows. Fairy lights ring the mosque entrance in dazzling formations; outside the Lakshmi temple women stand gossiping; light spilling generously out from shop fronts and restaurants. I watch the girls for signs of Anita, staring at the blood on their lips and their dyed blonde hair, the clothes and boots and polished nails. I could almost twist them out from these litter-smeared streets and into some imaginary and perfect world, the world of the impeccably clad models staring mockingly out of floor-to-ceiling photographs, policed either side by stiff rows of impossible mannequins; all the same thing, all different. Shaking in anticipation, I sniff the air for the scent of her and find myself filled with the sharp sting of petrol fumes, cheap perfume mingled with the sweetness of jalebis fried on the street, spicy pakora, sweat and desire from bodies; heady hints of blood. I am swept onwards, straining to crack this hard outward world and let my feelings rush out into the street before me, beautiful and naked and visible.

Roop Milan: nothing's changed, I feel like I've walked back through time, full circle to accompanying Anita here for her first day at work. The silks and vibrant cotton prints are still just as overwhelming, the cascade of colours buckling the air, pushing through the drab pavement and blackened bricks, the grimy tube trains, all the leaden autumn days that I have waited, the bus journeys I have taken and the streets I have walked, the peeling paint on doors and unkempt porches, the fading flowers fixed to railings after road accidents, the temple offerings, the call to prayer. All the endless press, the empty swirl of days and here I am, this fantasy reaching out and infecting me, love pouring through me like fire. I cry, and can't see anything for long moments, blurs of colour in transcendental images, Anita's endless different forms unveiled, her overwhelming generosity and beauty, her power to redeem the dullness of life.

I blink and it's gone, replaced with her, the fullness of her form, real, in front of me. She's talking to the shop assistants, showing them jewellery. After so long, after so long she's there in front of me again and I feel ready to crack, to split open under the strength of my feelings. I knew I was right, I knew I could draw her back to me, like a thread drawing a piece of cloth to harmonious order, the pattern falling into place. My heart breaks with sweetness.

I rush in to embrace her. She covers her face with her hands and breaks into a sob.

10.

Jethro Perkins
Canning Town
10/12/04