Page 53 of People Change

He picks up his phone and then ‘Here Comes the Sun’ plays over the speakers.

‘I didn’t know you liked The Beatles. It feels a very white thing to like.’

He barks out a laugh. ‘So rude. I was never a massive fan, but I’ve got into them lately.’ He smiles bashfully and her heart soars. She has never really considered The Beatles before and would rather hear a different song, but doesn’t sayanything more about it. Kian returns to the canvas, concentration back on his face.

‘So, tell me, do you always paint the girls you’ve been with?’ she asks.

The side of his mouth turns upwards in a smirk. ‘The girls I’ve been with,’ he repeats slowly.

She remembers the painting she saw in here last time, which is now gone. He doesn’t say anything else, which prompts her to say, ‘Come on. I’m curious.’

He puts his utensils down, but does not walk towards her, the canvas a barrier between them. ‘No, not really.’

It doesn’t answer her question, but she nods anyway, accepting this. She doesn’t know why she particularly cares. She thinks she must want confirmation that this moment between them is special, because she doesn’t always get these things right – but this time it feels different.

He begins his painting in earnest now. He mixes red, blue and yellow together, so it makes a brown colour. Then he adds white and more yellow to make her skin tone. Lightly his paintbrush caresses the canvas. He is skilful in his approach.

They discuss the fallout from Rob Grayson’s book being cancelled. Although Kian has the appearance of being unbothered, she can see excitement in his eyes. She feels bolder now around him, so asks him why he pretends not to care – and he says he thought if he pretended, it would eventually be a reality. She remembers that that’s what she used to do at school. It’s curious, she thinks now, how their roles are reversed. How it’s often Kian giving Shirin advice, when before he leant on her – and part of her liked that.

To preserve her unsteady sanity, yesterday she muted Rob Grayson’s name on all her social-media platforms. Over the past month she would see his name pop up – in a news article, Twitter thread, or one of his own tweets that someone she knew had retweeted and so it appeared on her feed, and it wouldn’t quite derail her, but she would feel a heaviness inside her, like she is still bound by her past.

‘Did your brother come over for Christmas?’ she asks.

He nods. ‘With his family, yeah. You can bet I got a roasting from everyone about doing my Masters and not settling down with a “real” job. Somehow they still compare me to Mehdi – only now I should be more like him, less “artsy” and more realistic. And when I mentioned my residency abroad, they lost their minds. They forget how miserable I was before, working a nine-to-five job in Manchester. And my parents can’t talk – they left their entire family in Iran for England permanently, and I’m only talking about six months abroad.’ He speaks quickly, slightly self-conscious when he finishes his rant.

She looks off past his shoulder and attempts to keep her face neutral when she says, ‘Abroad?’

His hands still and they look at each other. His eyes squint slightly. ‘Yeah, I told you about it, didn’t I?’

‘I don’t remember,’ she says slowly. ‘Do you know where?’

‘New York is my first choice. Berlin my second.’

Rather than spiralling and letting her mind linger on thinking,Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, she tells him that sounds amazing. Kian says he might not even get it anyway, and to change the subject he asks, ‘So, when was your last relationship?’

She lets out a humourless laugh, the kind of laugh that is more to preface that you’re not bothered about what you’re going to say next, when really you are. ‘Great subject change. I don’t know – years ago. I’ve only really had one official boyfriend. I was twenty-one and had just graduated. We were together for two years. I’ve seen people since, but nothing serious.’

Shirin met Paul at Rye Wax on a night out with Hana, and their relationship was tumultuous. They consistently broke up and got back together again. She lost her virginity to him. It was this that made her cling to him and want to make it work. Hana calls him a softboi, which Shirin googled to find out means an artsy fuckboy. He fits the criteria. Paul is with a lifestyle influencer now, who has 104 k followers on Instagram, and Shirin respectfully hates them both.

‘So you’ve not had a boyfriend since then?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think that’s me being picky, like Millie often says. I’d say selective, rather.’ She thinks if the person she is dating might eventually be inside her, it makes sense to be selective, and she says this, too, to Kian.

He bursts out in a surprised laugh at this. ‘Jesus! Fair enough.’

‘What I’d like to know is,’ she begins, ‘what really happened with Salma? You were vague before.’

His smile falters now, his hand gripping more tightly onto the paintbrush between his fingers. This alarms her. She wonders, startlingly for the first time, if she is a rebound. She had assumed that what this was between them was muchmore than that, even if it wasn’t yet serious. She thought herself worth more to Kian than simply a distraction.

He looks up at her, his eyes a little darker, sadder. What he says next is in some ways worse. ‘I broke it off because she suggested we try long-distance if I get my residency, and I realised I didn’t want to do that, that actually I didn’t want something serious right now. It didn’t seem fair to her to continue things if I knew this, too. I don’t think long-distance would work for me, if I do get a place, especially when I chose to drop everything for this course. I don’t want to have any regrets, or wish I savoured the moment more. Does that make sense?’

‘It does, yeah,’ she says. Of course.

Tate Modern

Hana is late. Though this is not unusual, Shirin is conscious of people around her waiting too, their friends arriving and them leaving together. Nine separate people have completed this cycle, and she is still waiting. Each time Shirin texts Hana to see where she is, she says she’s five minutes away, but when five minutes have passed, she says another five minutes. And on, and on, and on.

Her Maman Bozorg calls her while she is waiting. Whenever they speak it’s hard to end the conversation, so Shirin lets the call ring out. Doing so elicits a pang of guilt because they keep missing each other’s calls. She has quickly found herself back to being overwhelmed and busy at work, often working late into the evenings, which results in her forgetting to call her grandmother back. She resolves to phone her on the weekend.