The Nine-Chambered Heart

I LOVE YOU. I almost hit you.

You’re lodged in a corner, screaming at me, and I raise my hand. I can still see your eyes widen, your mouth round into a silent ‘O’ as the words die in your throat from surprise. And fear.

The evening didn’t start out this way. No, we didn’t start out this way.

Years ago, I remember. I see you across a bonfire on New Year’s Eve. All soft and glowing, lit by the light of the flames. I’m rolling a joint and you catch my eye. After that, millions of sideward glances, a small smile or two, laughter. A reshuffling of places as people stand to refill their drinks, use the loo, seek cigarettes and matches. At some point, we find ourselves seated next to each other. I pass you a joint and you take delicate puffs, most of the smoke escaping your mouth. I wish I could say something witty, or smart. That I could quote a line from a book or something, so that whatever we might share after this, however extended or fleeting, would always have this beginning. Instead, when you hand the joint back, I hear myself say, ‘Good stuff, no?’

And in an instant, everything becomes forgettable.

You’re older.

I’ve just begun university and you’re in your final year.

‘Please don’t ask “what next” …’

I was about to, but protest, saying I wasn’t, and comment on the weather instead. Something truly meaningful about it being cold. You make no reply.

Fuck. It’s some terribly banal conversation I’m attempting. But you make me nervous. Even if I’ve just met you, I feel I must appear more than I am, or have ever been. A better version of myself, shinier, somehow more brilliant. Much later, I will put it down to something simple. Awe. Like you’re some rare bird visiting a garden. Stupid as it might sound, at the time it feels like a privilege, that you should choose me. I’ve never been gladder that I left home, a small town in the east of the country, and moved to the capital, the city without a river. I’ve always had a sense that everything beyond is so much larger, that it moves to crazy rhythms, and contains people like you. That night, I sit next to you, joint following joint, expanding my senses into the sky. This is what it was like, I think, for explorers, perched on the brink of an expedition. You an undiscovered continent. A land that hasn’t been charted. And in a way, for me, the world.

That night around the bonfire a discussion breaks out.

We’re an odd group. All of us having headed out for the weekend to this hill station. Cheap. Good weed. Popular with backpackers. The place we’re staying in has a terrace, and there we all congregate. Some foreigners, some locals, a large college bunch from the city. It isn’t yet midnight, but late enough for a friendly buzz rising with the fumes of cheap alcohol. Small talk has been made, travel stories swapped. Time then for drunken philosophizing.

Someone asks, ‘What would you do if it could be seen?’

‘What?’ I ask. I haven’t been paying attention.

‘Grief.’

I say I don’t understand.

Future grief in the face of someone you’ve just met.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Grief that you will cause. Someone you will be with. If you could see it, would it deter you? Or would you be willing to take the risk, test the prophecy?’

I say I would.

A clash of opinions come flooding in. It’s cruel. No, surely now that one is aware, it can be avoided. Yet, isn’t that the thing about prophecies? They are self-fulfilling. The argument continues. I lose interest. You, I notice, remain quiet.

Later, I go back to the room of a French tourist. It isn’t my first time. I’d slept with a girl in my hometown a few months before I left for the city. We had lain naked on the bed of a friend’s ground-floor bedroom, and heard abuses hurled through the darkened window, along with the clatter of stones on the roof.

‘What’s happening?’ she had asked in fright.

‘Someone saw us,’ I said. Probably our friend’s nosy and deeply religious neighbours. ‘Should we stop?’ she asked.

‘No.’ I was almost in her. And when I pushed myself inside, I shuddered and was still in less than a minute. It isn’t that quick with the French girl. She emits tiny, excitable squeals that distract me. It’s cold. The bed a slab of ice. I’m clumsy. She likes biting, and I wince as she almost draws blood from my lip. I like her blonde hair though, and her shapely waist, her long legs that wind around me. Finally, I bury my face in her shoulder, above her small pear-like breasts, thrust hard and quick, and it’s over soon enough. I’m thinking of you at the bonfire.

I don’t meet you again until a month later. At a student party, back in the city without a river. One of those unwieldy gatherings that usually ends in a drunken brawl. I find you on the balcony, looking as though you’re waiting for no one. This time, I think, I’ll say something memorable.

‘Where were you while we were getting high?’

For a moment you look confused, then you smile.

‘I came back with another joint … and you were gone.’

‘It was cold … I was sleepy.’

I light a cigarette and lean on the railing.

‘Did you have a good time … that night?’

I nod, remembering, in a flash, the blonde girl. ‘Would’ve been better if you were there …’

‘I’m here now.’

‘For how long?’

You glance at your almost empty plastic cup. ‘As long as the alcohol lasts.’

‘So that’s ten more minutes, then.’

When you laugh, I want to kiss you.

It turns out you too are from my small town in the east of the country. But from a different, posher, neighbourhood. Also, you’ve lived here for quite a few years now. ‘And maybe at some point, elsewhere,’ you add. I have a feeling you might be more of a drifter than I am. For even though I want to get away, I know my roots. I drop you back to your flat that night on my motorbike. I drive slowly, because I want to reassure you that I’m a safe driver. Also, I want the ride to last. Your hands gripping my sides, the feel of your chest on my back.

When we arrive, I ask, ‘I’ll see you soon?’

You nod. Then, with a wave, you’re gone.

I’m amazed by how we begin with so little, or no, conflict.

It’s not what I have known.

I’m only twenty-two but life has been long.

I started out studying something my parents thought useful. Two semesters in biotechnology though, and I’d failed every exam, spent all the money I’d been given for the year, and switched courses. To the fury of my physician father, of course. But my mother, the gentler of the two, persuaded him to let me be. If it was visual studies I wanted to pursue, so be it.

I never told them that all I really wanted was to be a musician.

‘You play well,’ you tell me.

We are at a house party, sitting in the living room where I’ve found a guitar. ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I taught myself.’

I don’t tell you yet that my parents only sent my younger sister for piano lessons. That they thought, being a boy, I wouldn’t – no, shouldn’t – be interested in such frivolities.

You move closer. You’re wearing a long woollen skirt, a frayed leather jacket, and a polo neck. Your hair is tied up, loosening around the edges.

‘What would you like me to play?’

‘Ooh, he’s taking requests,’ someone shouts from the other end of the room.

‘Not from you, Bongo,’ I shout back.

Since you say ‘anything’, I play the songs I know best. Some Marley and Led Zep, some Dylan and Clapton. You sing in snatches, in a soft, pleasant voice.

‘Something by the Beatles?’

Suddenly, I feel like I have only one chance to pick the right song. That it will make all the difference. I run through the ones I know in my head. ‘Come Together’. ‘Penny Lane’. ‘Yellow Submarine’. ‘Eleanor Rigby’. They all somehow seem inappropriate, until I remember the one about a blackbird and broken wings. Sweetly complex melody, and sweetly simple lyrics. Turns out you know all the words. Verse after verse. The room falls silent, with only the guitar and your voice filling the air. I know, no matter what, that when I drop you home that night, we will kiss.

You live in a flat you share with two other girls. It’s a nicer neighbourhood than the one I live in, with trees and wide roads. Your room, when I get to see it, has multicoloured curtains drawn over the windows, a low bed, a ragged carpet, and photographs pasted on the cupboard. You’ve twirled a scarf over a tall paper lamp. I like it better than the place I share with three boys, littered with used plates, discarded footwear and empty bottles. We are quite lucky, you say, when I first stay over, that the landlord doesn’t live in the building, and so can’t express his disapproval over these ‘indiscretions’.

I’m taller than you but we fit on the bed, oddly sized between single and double, if I press my back against the wall. And if we don’t move much.

We don’t move much, but we talk. I like you because when I say, late one night, in the dark, that I want to start a band, you don’t laugh.

Bolder, I make you listen to a song I recorded, secretly, in my room in my hometown. It’s stark and sad, about a man who drinks in parking lots. I don’t think it’s very good now, but you listen intently, and say you think I’ve done well.

‘But I can do better.’ With you, I want to add, I feel I can always do better.

You, though, rarely talk about yourself. Only once you tell me about your parents, and how they always lived away from you because of your father’s job.

‘I’d tell people they were dead. That they died in a car crash.’

‘Why?’ I ask, bewildered. ‘Why would you do that?’

Your voice is soft in the darkness. ‘Because I was angry. They kept promising they’d come back for good, but they never did.’

Another night, after we’ve had more than a few beers each, you tell me that once, when your parents left after their yearly visit, you were so upset you fell ill with a fever that lingered for weeks.

‘I was eleven … twelve … I couldn’t understand why I was always left behind …’

Silently, I promise I’ll never leave you.

But it’s a promise I eventually find impossible to keep.

When summer comes around, we turn nocturnal.

We return from university to darkened houses, the sound of other people’s power generators studding the air like quiet gunfire. It is impossible to sleep. The heat seeps out of floors and walls, out of every surface we touch. We throw down buckets of water, we soak the sheets, but the heat is insidious. So we drive out on my motorbike and head to the centre of the city, where the roads are wide and all the filthy rich sleep in their beds under the cool purr of air conditioners that never trip or turn off.

‘Bastards,’ we yell as we cross their gates, my motorbike roar shattering the silence. Then we stop at some patch of grass, with all the poor others who’ve found their way there in those restless, insomniac nights. Sometimes, we buy orange ice lollies from the man with the ice cream cart, and while I bite into mine whole, you suck at the juice until the ice turns white.

‘You’re a vampire.’

And you pretend to bite my neck, and I pin you to the grass, and I want to lift your dress.

We are wild children.

Once the summer cools, and the rains lighten in the north, we head to the hills. Our first trip away together. It is also the first time we have a terrible fight. The first of many.

To begin with, we miss our stop. We were meant to disembark at six in the morning, but we were fast asleep, buried in our jackets and shawls on the cold hard seats. By the time we awake, we’ve overshot our destination by three hours and must make our way back on a rumbling local bus.

When we arrive at the town in the mountains, we disagree over where to stay.

‘This is too fancy,’ I hiss into your ear at the hotel that charges five hundred bucks a night.

‘Where do you want to go then?’

‘Somewhere else.’ I don’t add ‘cheaper’.

‘We’ve just spent twenty hours on the road and you want to walk around some more?’

‘This is the first place we’ve looked at.’

And so we do, but everywhere else we look for cheaper, you detest. Too dirty. Too small. Damp walls. And so we end up back at the place where we started.

‘I’ll pay for both of us,’ you declare.

And that annoys me even more. ‘It’s not about the fucking money,’ I say. It is, but it also isn’t, and I know you won’t understand.

That evening, when an unquiet calm has settled, we head into town. Almost immediately, we’re accosted by a sad, red-eyed rat of a peddler who walks next to me asking if I want some hash.

‘Ignore him,’ you say, but it’s too late. I’ve already said, ‘How much?’ I couldn’t help it. It’s instinctive.

He names a price, insane as it is, and then won’t leave us. You don’t say a word but I can feel your anger, hot and silent. When the rat pushes the hash into my jacket pocket and then pretends like I’m the one not paying up, I get really mad. I give him his thousand and then throw the stuff into the nearest dustbin.

‘Okay I’m sorry, all right?’ I offer, but you stay quiet.

We find our way to a rooftop restaurant where backpackers are sitting on cushions around the edges, drinking beer. The walls are graffitied, and lanterns dangle from bamboo poles. Our moods improve after some food. We start making conversation again. You dig your socked feet under my thigh to keep warm. I tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. Night falls thick and fast, and the mountains behind us disappear into darkness. The alcohol warms us. Someone passes us a joint. We sit closer. Then a guitar is brought out from downstairs.

‘Who can play?’ shouts the owner.

You pull up my hand.

And the night passes by in a blur of song and music, and faces and smoke. People gather around me, bottles in hand, glasses glinting like stars. My voice, and their voices, and ours, rise over the rooftops. There’s a woman with long, dark blonde hair, wearing a Tibetan jacket, smiling at me. A boy with an earring passing me spliff after spliff. We sing endlessly. The songs we all somehow seem to know. It’s one of those moments when you feel music will make everything all right, and the world isn’t such a shitty place after all. If we just keep singing, it will all stay the way it is, frozen in that moment.

The next day, you’re gone.

I wake up alone in the hotel room. A crumpled, slovenly mess. The bed, not me. Although I don’t feel well either. Across the sheet, emptiness, a pillow. I call out to you. Maybe you’re in the loo. I call you again. I heave myself up and check, now stung by fear and worry. Your side of the bed looks slept in, I think. Anyway, how can one tell? I’m sure we came back together. Am I? Yes, I think we stumbled back together at dawn, me glowing in the aftermath of performance. For a real, live audience. I feel I’ve never played better, or more skilfully. I remembered lyrics, and manoeuvred my way through complicated chord progressions. When we reached our room, I groped you drunkenly, I remember, from happiness, lifting your sweater, moving my hands over your breasts, kissing your neck. I think you pushed me away. I must’ve tried again before slumping asleep.

Now, in the late morning, it comes back to me in flashes.

I’m not sure where to start, but I head out. The guy at the reception is clueless when I ask if he’s seen you. The town is small, but feels endless when I step outside. I walk down to the main road, the one flanked by matchbox clothes stalls, still-closed restaurants, and women in shawls selling steaming dumplings. Maybe you were hungry and came looking for food. Maybe I’ll find you standing by one of these makeshift street-food vendors, eating momos. ‘Here,’ you’ll say, holding one out to me. Your eyes, as usual, will be rimmed by the kohl you didn’t clean off, your hair bundled untidily into a bun. Suddenly, your absence feels like a stab in my stomach. I must find you. Somehow my feet make their way to where we were last night. Up the stairs, to the rooftop restaurant, which is all but deserted apart from a group of trekkers eating breakfast. Oddly, I can’t remember where you were while I was playing the guitar. Next to me, of course. Or was that the lady with the dark blonde hair and the Tibetan jacket? She was very friendly. At one point, hadn’t she asked me to show her how to strum?

In half an hour, I feel I’ve exhausted all possibilities and walked that main road to death. I’m beginning to waver now, between anger and fear. Why the fuck are you doing this? What if something happened to you? I’m hungry and hung-over, and the weed has left a bitter, burnt taste in my mouth. I wolf down a plate of dumplings and then feel guilty. I shouldn’t waste any time. I must find you. When I think I’ve run out of options, I walk down the road that takes us out of town, towards the highway. Here too are shops and a sprinkling of small eating joints. I pass one that’s placed higher than the rest, on a raised platform, with outdoor tables and chairs.

Sun Moon Café it’s called, and I think that’s the kind of place you would like.

There’s someone sitting outside, reading. It looks like you. It is you.

I yelp in relief. You look up at me, and turn back to your book. ‘What the fuck,’ I mutter, as I run up the steps.

‘Where were you?’ I say. I realize it’s a stupid question even before you reply.

‘Here.’

‘Why did you leave like that?’

You shrug.

‘I was worried, man.’

I hear you mutter something.

‘Is this about last night?’

‘What do you think?’

I hate it when you do this. Turn the question back at me. I’m only trying to figure out what the fucking matter is. I care enough to do this. Why isn’t that good enough? I take a deep breath, trying to keep the glimmer of anger at bay.

‘Something about last night upset you … except I don’t remember much …’

You snort, in laughter, disdain.

‘What, man?’

‘So convenient.’

‘We drank a lot …’

‘Yes, we did. Except that still didn’t make me throw my arms around some blonde stranger.’

‘I was showing her how to strum!’

‘Oh, is that what you call it, you wannabe rock star?’

I am struck, at this moment, by how precisely we know how to hurt the ones we love.

It doesn’t go on for long, this argument. Mostly because I think we’re exhausted, or at least I am. And also, no matter what, I’m relieved to have found you.

We return to the city without a river. Something has changed. We are closer, yet further apart. That doesn’t make sense, but it does. Our quarrel revealed how much we care for each other, but it wounded deep. Here I am, a fucking contradictory wreck. I look to you to feel good, but I realize that if I give someone that power, they can also make me feel like shit about myself. You never say ‘wannabe rock star’ again, although other hurtful things are hurled around the room. We are knife throwers in a circus. Bring on the clowns, and the little dog in a big bow that jumps through hoops. Sometimes, I think I am all of them rolled into one.

It is worse because I have never seen you this way. Suddenly restless and complaining all the time about the city, your flatmates, your university. You feel it’s all a waste.

‘This is not what I’m meant to do,’ you say. And when I ask what it is that you do want, you don’t reply. You don’t know, and I think that’s what annoys you. I don’t know when you’ll snap next and for what reason.

The other night, I asked if I could borrow a couple of plates from you for a shoot in college. Some video project for class.

‘No.’

‘It’s just some plates, man.’

‘No,’ you shouted back, your eyes filling with tears. ‘You’ll break them.’

‘It’s just a fucking shoot,’ I yelled back and left, slamming the door behind me. By the time I returned, you were in bed, the lights were off. I don’t know if you were asleep, but you didn’t speak.

One evening, we watch a movie. Something that had been screened in class that I wanted to share with you. We do this often. You recommend books, that I admittedly don’t read, and I bring back films in my hard drive, filched from friends at university. Within the first five minutes, barely after the opening credits, we are arguing. A shot of a woman lying on a bed in her underwear, from behind, and I remark on the camera’s ‘male gaze’. It’s something our professor had mentioned.

You roll your eyes.

‘What?’

‘The movie’s directed by a woman … so perhaps this is somewhat subversive.’

We don’t finish watching the film.

The night I almost hit you, we are headed to a blues bar hosting a live act. These are my favourite evenings in the city. Back home, the streets fold into themselves by six. Here, nothing begins until late. Even if I’m not performing, nothing makes me happier than being someplace where someone is. You seem all right when we leave. We get on my bike and head south. You seem all right even when we get there. When we climb the stairs and step into a dimly lit room. There’s the stage. The audience, with drinks in hand. The band is setting up. Sound check. The first number. They’re good. Not brilliant, but I don’t really care. You seem all right even when you meet a few people you know, and make conversation. When you sip your drink, and bob your head to the music.

See, that’s the thing, I can’t tell the moment when you’re not all right. It’s a switch that takes seconds.

Suddenly, you’re tugging at my sleeve saying you want to leave.

‘Why?’

‘I want to go …’

‘But they’ve just started.’

‘This place is awful …’

‘It’s fine … I want to stay …’

‘And I don’t want to.’

It carries on like this, and the band’s really getting into it now. Something strong and bluesy bursts into the air. I’m beginning to get annoyed.

‘You stay,’ you say, ‘I’ll go.’

‘No,’ I shout over the music. ‘We came together, we leave together.’

‘That’s ridiculous …’ you begin to say when I walk out. I only know you’re following when I hear your feet clatter behind me on the stairs. We step out into the evening. You’re saying something, but I can’t hear you through the throb of my anger. I feel something strike me on the side of my head.

‘What the fuck?’ I roar, turning. You’ve flung a magazine at me. For a second, I pause to wonder where you got it from. Strange, isn’t it, the things that occupy us even at moments like these?

Back at your flat, the argument continues.

‘It wasn’t a big deal,’ you yell. ‘You could’ve stayed … I could’ve left.’

‘We went together, we leave together,’ I shout back. I don’t know why, but I’m hung up on this line. It’s become precious to me, this idea. We are loud, and I’m sure people outside, downstairs, upstairs can hear us. I don’t give a shit. We shout at each other.

‘You threw that magazine at me …’

‘Because you wouldn’t stop and listen.’ Your voice is shrill and piercing. I cannot bear it.

It seems like you’re raising your hand against me. So I raise my hand too. Your eyes widen, your mouth rounds into a silent ‘O’ as the words die in your throat from surprise. And fear.