Page 1 of People Change

Brixton

Now

They arrive at the house-warming party at 10 p.m. The Edwardian house sits squarely between Brixton and Herne Hill stations. Shirin Bayat does not particularly like going to Brixton because she feels complicit in the jarring, and ever-increasing, gentrification each time she is in the area. And that is likely because she is. She begrudgingly enjoys the overpriced coffee shops, with their excessive number of plants, millennial-pink sofas and rose-gold accents, spending money on various vegan dishes that even she can make at home for a fraction of the price. Every so often, to alleviate her guilt, she will go to the shops and restaurants that have been there long before the gentrification began, and she will buy something she might not even want. It never quite clears her conscience though.

There are clusters of people in the living room, some sitting on the three-seater sofa, others standing. The interior of the house could be sponsored by Ikea, the furniture white and familiar. There is a Malm dresser in the living room, and she is reminded of making said dresser many years ago and it eventually crumbling, the drawers breaking one by one. She remembers the many ways she tried to fix it because shecouldn’t afford another one, until in a fit of frustration she threw the planks of wood down the chute outside her East London flat.

Millie leads Shirin straight to the living room, like she has been here before, and kisses her boyfriend Henry on the lips in greeting. Millie is wearing red lipstick, and he rubs his lips after they kiss, to remove the stain. Millie has been with Henry coming up for two years now. Shirin dislikes Henry, dislikes being in the same room as him, and tries to avoid all gatherings he attends. It is difficult to be around them because Henry critiques most of what Millie does, due to his own sad insecurities. He has an air about him as though he is better than his girlfriend, although Shirin is not sure where his inflated ego derives from. He is the type to go on Twitter and reply to women’s tweets that what they’re saying did not happen, with his profile picture as an anime character. He will encourage debates about race or sexism, playing ‘devil’s advocate’, though she suspects he believes the racist, sexist side. He is not quite an online troll but almost, teetering on the edge of what is acceptable online, though Millie cannot see this side of him. She is, sadly, too far gone.

Henry went to the same university as Shirin, and her first memory of him was when he added her on Facebook during freshers’ week. She later discovered he had added more than fifty girls from university whom he deemed attractive, as though he were Robert Pattinson – or some other universally attractive man – and had a chance at sleeping with all of them if he so pleased. He was not and did not. He is best described as akin to a mole. Shirin does not mean to be derogatory tomoles, but that it is the animal Henry looks most like. But her friend loves him, so that is that.

Millie returns to Shirin’s side, looking off towards the connecting kitchen, and says, ‘That’s one of Dylan’s housemates. I’ll introduce you.’ She lightly touches the top of Shirin’s arm, before leading her towards the other side of the room.

Indeed, Shirin has gone to a house-warming party for people she does not even know. She found herself with nothing to do on a Friday night – an ever-increasing problem as she ages – and Millie reassured her that more was merrier, that it would be fun. The final push came when Millie added, ‘You should have just stayed in Hull if you don’t ever want to leave your flat.’ Millie always knew the precise words to fire Shirin up and make her do something she didn’t want to do – it was always like that at university, and Millie has only got better at it once her friend graduated and progressed in her career in public relations.

And that is how Shirin found herself here.

The man Shirin is being taken to meet has dark hair, short on the back and sides and long at the front. His shoulders are broad, his waist slender and he is tall. Very tall. It is curious that how much space one is able to take up is often seen as attractive in a man, but is seldom the case for women. She can only see him from the back, but he’s wearing a black T-shirt in a soft jersey fabric.

‘Kian, hey,’ Millie says.

He turns around and then Shirin’s breath catches. There is a painful feeling in her chest, an acute ache, from the surprise.

Millie had said that Henry’s friend Dylan was moving into a flat in Brixton. She had said that he was moving in with three other boys. What she did not say, though, because of course she didn’t know, was that Kian Rahimi went to Shirin’s school and they have not spoken in ten years.

Someone I Used to Know

‘Shirin,’ Kian says, lips parted, his eyes squinting slightly, like he is wondering whether he is mistaken, whether it is really her. Shirin is also taken aback by the image of him before her. In her mind he is always sixteen, baby-faced but beautiful. His face has developed a sharpness to it that it didn’t have back then – his jaw and cheekbones strong and well defined. It is the strangest sensation, to see someone you once knew very well as a teenager standing before you, matured, as though out of nowhere.

‘Hi,’ she eventually says. She has imagined this moment many times before and she always says something much grander thanhi.

‘You know each other?’ Millie asks, looking from one to the other.

‘Yeah, we went to school together,’ Kian says. ‘Back in Hull.’

Seeing Kian again after all these years makes Shirin regret coming here. Her gut, she knows, is usually right about these things, and she should have listened to it. Being so close to him now brings memories to the surface, up out of her belly, almost spilling out of her throat. Even him saying ‘we’ makes her heart thud wildly and pathetically.

‘Oh. Small world, I guess?’ Millie says, uninterested by this moment that is so monumental to Shirin. She tucks a blonde strand of her hair behind her ear, before continuing to say, ‘Well, I’m sure you have lots to chat about …’

And Millie is gone, returning to Henry, and Shirin is left reeling, thinking: Please, for the love of God, don’t leave me alone with this person I used to know.

‘Well, hello,’ Kian says, beaming. It is an uncomplicated smile. The kind of smile Shirin cannot imagine having. She struggles to smile on cue, her face a permanent frown that she often tries, and fails, to soften. Like now, the tops of her lips are raised upwards, but the rest of her face is unmoved. The smile does not touch her eyes because, when she looks at Kian, she does not just see a person she cared so deeply for, she sees all of the shit from her childhood that she has worked so hard to leave behind.

‘Long time no see,’ she says, her voice cooler than she feels.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came here with Millie. I didn’t know you lived here.’ She scratches her neck to have something to do with her hands, and to mask that they are shaking.

Kian tells her that he sometimes hangs out with Henry – because Henry is Dylan’s home-town friend – and that Dylan went to university with Kian. It is a too-coincidental and long-winded connection. What are the chances, she cannot help but think, that these two people from Hull have found themselves in a connecting friendship group ten years later? Isn’t that the whole point of moving away from your home town, so that things like this don’t happen?

‘It’s weird that we’ve not seen each other before, at parties and stuff, when I’ve come down to London,’ he muses.

Due to her avoidance of Henry, it is not that weird. But the fact that Kian, of all people, is tenuously linked to her friendship group is. In the past, Shirin attempted to look Kian up on social media, curious to see what he was doing with his life. His Instagram, however, brandished no photos of him, instead showing landscapes lacking in filters so that they looked dull, or his paintings, which Shirin thought were impressive and experimental, almost dizzying if you looked at them for too long. She admired that he had continued with his art. She’s realised how easy it is to lose sight of your passions, of who you were before adulthood kicked in.

‘So, you’ve just moved here?’ she asks.

‘Yeah. I was living in Manchester before. You’ve been here a while though, right?’