Page 19 of People Change

‘He is?’ Shirin puts Phoebe on speakerphone and google-searches Jordan Young. She knows she shouldn’t, that she should put boundaries in place with Phoebe, as she has with Kian, on what they can talk about. Though she can never imagine saying this to Phoebe. Her friend would say she needs to get a grip, perhaps rightly so.

The first webpage that comes up is aHull Daily Mailarticle detailing Jordan’s conviction. It says he had a string of previous offences and it was racially aggravated battery that put him away. The boy he beat up was only eighteen; he had come from India to study at Hull University for hisundergraduate degree and had allegedly pushed ahead of Jordan in a takeaway queue after a night out. The pictures on the webpage show a stock image of a splattering of blood on white-tile flooring. Shirin curses under her breath.

‘Tom has really turned his life around though,’ Phoebe says. ‘George has mutual friends with him.’

Tom always hung around with Jordan and Rob. He very rarely would start something on his own, but in a group setting he did whatever they told him to do. Shirin’s lip twitches again now; it is an automatic response. Having even three degrees of separation from a racist smells racist to her. She has sometimes wondered whether George is low-key racist. Whether, on a night out, he might slip up. She’s seen it, the way drunk people switch; and she thinks if that is what they act like drunk, they are clearly thinking it sober, too.

‘And obviously Rob is like crazy famous now. He bought his mum a huge house in Kirk Ella, you know. She used to live near me in a tiny terraced house. My mum is always asking why I didn’t become a comedian or something, like him, and buy her a house.’ Phoebe is laughing, while Shirin clenches her fist. She is not an angry person, but she wants to hit something. Instead, she squeezes the pillow on her bed tightly for a few seconds.

‘They’reallawful people,’ Shirin reminds Phoebe through gritted teeth. ‘They were quite nasty to me.’ She is playing it down.Quite nasty. Jordan once pushed her down the stairs and she sprained her arm. He denied it, said he accidentally knocked her, and Shirin even doubted herself in front of the teacher, wondered if she was imagining themalicious intent. When she faltered, said it might have been an accident, it was swiftly branded an accident, nothing more. When the teacher turned his back, Jordan winked at her. It was the day before she was supposed to perform her solo in the school orchestra, and she had practised her flute every evening for the past few months. Instead, she watched them play from the audience, her arm in a sling, bitter and sad. That was just the start, anyway. And for all of Jordan’s physical violence, it was what Rob said – and subsequently did – to Shirin that she can never forget, or shake, even after all this time.

‘Oh, really?’

There is a long, unpunctuated silence. This happens sometimes when they mention school. Phoebe was in most of the same classes as Shirin, and yet she somehow did not see what Shirin experienced. She is reminded why she chooses not to speak about it.

‘Anyway,’ Shirin says slowly. ‘How’s George?’

‘Fine, nothing new to report really.’

Shirin can tell Phoebe has something more to say, by her tone.

‘What?’ Shirin says.

‘What?’ Phoebe repeats back to her. Shirin lets the subsequent silence drag on because she knows Phoebe will fill it. ‘Oh, fine,’ Phoebe concedes. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but … we’re trying for a baby.’

‘Oh, wow. That’s amazing!’ Shirin lets her voice go high-pitched, but she is straight-faced and all the enthusiasm resides in her tone. She is lying on her bed, looking up at theceiling, and can hear two different housemates having sex on either side of her room.

She does not know what questions to ask because this is the first time a friend has said this to her, and objectively, while it sounds like it would be a thing one would find exciting, to Shirin they still feel like children themselves. She looks at babies in coffee shops, or when her colleagues bring theirs in on their maternity leave, and she thinks they look ugly and not cute, but says ‘Aw’ when their mother or father looks for validation. She cannot imagine Phoebe with one – or pretending to find Phoebe’s baby cute.

‘How long have you been trying?’ she finally asks.

‘Only a month now – it could take ages, but I had to tell someone.’

‘That’s so, so exciting,’ Shirin says.

When they end the call, the flat is quiet, bar the footsteps of people coming in and out of the bathroom, post-sex. She puts on the sound machine next to her that blasts white noise. Then she retrieves a packet of Night Nurse from her bedside table. It is expensive and she rations out her use of it. Tonight she pops one capsule in her mouth with a large gulp of water and turns her lamp off. It doesn’t stop the intrusive thoughts though. Her mind is so busy – more so lately. In the daytime her thoughts flicker from worry to worry, but at night it is existential emptiness that consumes her. She wonders at the pointlessness of life. Or her life, more specifically. At the fact that she strives continually for things that she thinks will bring her happiness and yet she is never happy. She wonders if it is her that is the issue in all of this. Whether her work, herfriends, her life – all of it – should be enough for her. Whether there is something inherently wrong with her that means she will never be happy. This thought remains until the Night Nurse kicks in and lulls Shirin into a heavy sleep.

Shirin hands Kian an advance reader’s copy ofYou Peopleby A. K. Hosseini. To get said copy she had to beg Mariam to ask her friend in another department for a proof. At lunch Mariam said that they didn’t have any spare, which led to Shirin sneakily taking a copy from the publicity cupboard. When Kian’s eyes light up and he says she’s the best, she simply says, ‘It’s no problem – they were giving them away.’ She does not condone stealing, but when it is from a multimillion-pound company that still pays its entry-level staff £18,000 a year, she can justify it. With that, and since her conversation with Lilian about what Sally said at the author party, right now Shirin has no affinity towards a company that does not value good morals.

They are in New Cross, in a coffee shop just down the road from Goldsmiths. Kian said that he was visiting his studio space there, and it is seven minutes on the train from her office, so she said they could meet here. She has never been to New Cross before and is initially taken aback by the sheer number of people walking along the pavements, the liveliness of the area, with its strip of pubs, takeaways and cafés. In the distance she can see a tall grey building with a squiggly metal sculpture atop it. She imagines it has something to do with the university, though it contrasts with the other buildings, which are rundown and graffitied.

She is not sure coffee past 5 p.m. will be good for her, or her sleep issues, but asks for a soya latte anyway. Kian gets up to order their drinks, and while he is away from the table she quickly smooths down her hair. Old-school R&B plays over the speakers, and there are several students seated around them, working on their laptops. There is art on the walls made by local artists in the area. She studies one of them. It is a painting of a woman with her legs open, exposing her labia. It is painted in different shades of pink and red. The woman is smiling, her teeth sharp and pointed. Disturbed, Shirin looks at her phone instead.

Lingering in her mind are questions about what she is doing here. Is it a date? It feels too casual to be one, but what Phoebe said has her thinking. They were never close romantically as teenagers, but in adulthood she is not sure they can maintain the same kind of relationship. She is not sure she wants that because being near Kian now, she feels awkward and excited, which is to say that she thinks she likes him as more than a friend. But they are stuck in this place of knowing each other but not really knowing each other, not any more. She isn’t sure how to get to know Kian again for the first time, or whether it will be difficult trying to.

When he returns, she can smell his aftershave; it is fresh and ever so slightly fruity. A marked change from the Lynx Africa of his youth. He is wearing a long-sleeved striped T-shirt and navy Nike shorts, and she is also wearing a striped top and a tennis skirt. She debates making a joke of this.

‘What I need to know,’ she says instead, ‘is how you went from your parents not letting you study Art at A-level todoing an MFA in it?’ She has been thinking about this, after the initial shock of Kian returning had dissolved from her mind. It is so at odds with the Kian she knew, who loved his art but was so cautious about taking it seriously.

Something in his usually soft face changes then. His eyebrows furrow together, and she notices his jaw tighten ever so slightly. Shirin knows she is perceptive of how other people are feeling; a psychic told her she has a third eye, which she took very seriously. It is a curse in some ways because, like right now, she cannot ignore that something has shifted, that Kian is annoyed by something she’s said, when she thought she was asking an innocent question.

He scratches his chin, then says, ‘I saw my friend Ahmed earlier at the mosque and he asked the same thing. Well, he told me it was stupid to spend years studying it further and that it’d be better for me to get a real, well-paid job.’ He shrugs. ‘He’s probably right, but here we are.’

Everything he says is loaded. She has so many questions and he didn’t even answer her original one. ‘Ahmed from Hull? He lives here?’

Kian nods. ‘He was always the clever one; he’s a lawyer now and lives in Greenwich with his wife and son.’

‘Wow, okay. I mean, for what it’s worth, to me what he said sounds like rubbish. If you love something, why not pursue it? And also, not being funny, but would you want a wife and kid right now?’