Alexandra Singer (2 page)

Only a few hours later the cry from the mosque was sounding out the call to prayer. Already the day had begun. In the light of a new day, Maia now noticed a small spiral staircase in the corner
of her room. Pulling herself from the bed, and drawn by curiosity, Maia went up the stairs anticipating only another dark and dusty room. Fumbling with the keys, she eventually found one that fit
and the door swung open into the pale light of daybreak. Standing there on the rooftop, Maia watched the last of the night slip away as the sky came alive.

The thought of George entered Maia’s mind, and she wondered if she had been right to leave him for this.

She lay back down on the bed, and enclosed within the four dark walls, thought of her time with George. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, Maia recalled being back with him and the
abrupt ending of their four years of togetherness, love and hate in one short afternoon.

‘This is the best thing we can do,’ he insisted, confusing her further as he pressed her tenderly against his chest. ‘This will all be over, all our arguments and
lies.’

‘My lies, not yours.’ She looked up at him.

‘Let’s not argue again.’

They were his lies, reflected Maia calmly; the deceptions were only his. At the time, she thought that she was behaving calmly and accepting, watching him walk away. She thought that she could
see a limpid truth in his eyes.

Maia was well aware of the weaknesses of which George was so fond, and she had long ceased to worry about them. They made no impact on her. It was his emotional infidelity which was her greatest
concern. Things between them had changed subtly, then slightly more noticeably, until it was finally impossible to ignore the chasm between them. The rumours that surrounded George had suited her
image. She preferred they discuss her in hushed and horrified tones than pity her.

It was rare that Maia felt threatened. So secure she had been in her own image, with her dark hair and pale skin. At an exhibition by a Milanese artist, an effusive gallery owner had informed
her; ‘You look like a fragile Russian doll.’

‘Why? Do you suppose that you may unwrap me, only to continue to find smaller and smaller versions of me?’

‘That would be delightful!’ he said loudly, and then in lowered tones, ‘I would certainly like to unwrap you.’ As he leaned towards her, Maia smelt his stinking
breath.

A quick exit left Maia ensconced inside a cubicle, finally able to enjoy a break from the incessant socialising which now consumed most of her evenings. She was, however, unfortunate to hear
herself being discussed by Claudia, an acquaintance of George.

‘She thinks she’s an artist,’ Claudia said, and the other girl, who earlier had been questioning Maia all about her own work, acquiesced all too easily. Claudia’s face
was a perfect heart shape, with delicate features, lips that flushed naturally and dark rimmed eyes. Her long, ruffled straw-like hair was expensively coloured. When Maia had first encountered
George and Claudia together, she had been amused by the way in which they maintained a strange distance for the rest of the evening. Yet on shaking one another’s perfectly manicured hands,
and looking into one another’s kohl swept eyes, Maia scrutinised the revelations of their body language. At first, Maia had tried hard to look past the initially beautiful face. The inane
giggle which emitted from Claudia and her habit of subtly demeaning Maia’s work irritated her. Outside the cubicle the conversation before the mirrors continued:

‘I saw an article on her in the paper yesterday; it said her work was ghastly. Obsessed with colour, to detract from her inability with technique, confusing, utterly
self-obsessed.’

There came a hushed, mutual snigger, perhaps with hands draped elegantly over painted mouths as the heavy door shut quietly.

When Maia slipped out of the cubicle, and returned to the table, she began to look upon Claudia with a considerably less benevolent gaze. Later that night, as she examined herself in the mirror,
Maia wondered if men really did see her as fragile. It was not how she viewed herself. With her child-like size and coquettish airs she was able to observe the gigantic egos with unhindered ease.
The things she saw! These people held a great fascination for Maia, with their houses, their money and their marvellous, marvellous complexes. Life no longer held any aspirations for them. So tired
they were, so jaded, that they searched in vain for new sensations with which to amuse themselves, in the interminable periods between this holiday and the next. They had everything and they had
nothing.

On a separate occasion, Claudia had once explained to Maia her own private philosophy of the milieu of people in which she found herself.

‘Being rich is wonderful, because it gives you the freedom to go anywhere and do anything.’ Only in theory, thought Maia, was this true. In practice, once you leave the protective
bubble, and enter the real world, you find it simply to be an expansion of the same familiar world, with the same familiar people as before. But Claudia would simply have laughed at this. She never
had any trouble.

It was George who introduced Maia to this world, but by observing the people and their values, she became tainted by them. The eroding of her former self happened slowly and unconsciously.

Maia knew she had adopted the prejudices of George and her new circle. Maia’s old friends now no longer recognised her. Sometimes, she found herself no longer acknowledging them.

Maia discovered that in her time with George, her life had become a comical miniaturisation. Her work had become as mediocre as her environment, and people began rejecting her paintings, when at
one point they had been so in demand. Her preferred art school told her that they were short of places; the financial backing she had been promised by acquaintances dwindled, and then disappeared.
Tarred with the brush of even temporary failure, her social circle diminished. This too was the time that while George was holding her close he was searching wildly for an escape route. Maia
watched his boredom and she knew. For a while, the situation was indefinable, but then there came the sneers, which were as difficult to catch as butterflies, but there just the same. She began to
suffer the sinking feeling of a woman who knows her time is up, and towards their parting, his deceit emitted a scent so pungent it lingered about him.

Maia no longer felt the excitement that she had experienced when she had first come to London. The city’s allure quickly palled until it held no interest for her, and without interest,
London was pointless. All she could see were the bundled up people, trailing onto the buses, going home alone to their bedsits and shared flats, eking out an empty existence only to meet the
extortionate rates that the city demanded of its inhabitants merely for the privilege of living in the capital. In the mornings she watched how the people shoved themselves out of bed onto the
underground trains, day after day, for the sheer pleasure of the body odour emitted by their fellow passengers and the newspapers so rudely flicked in their faces.

When she received the Historian’s unexpected offer, she accepted immediately.

But she was not due to arrive before the summer, and in the meantime she found that she was unable to relinquish George completely. Occasionally she encountered him at some place they had once
frequented together, but he was elusive and refused to be engaged in conversation. Maia fled to Paris, where several weeks later George decided to follow her. She let him into her tiny apartment
and he stayed for a week.

‘I can’t pretend I am not pleased to see you, but I don’t understand why you are here.’

No answer came, just emotionless eyes blinking at her in the dark.

On their last afternoon together, she felt that she was making love with a demon; he bit her so hard he drew blood. He was unusually energetic, as he pushed her down onto the bed. Maia drew back
from him in an instinctive act of self preservation, but then in a surge of pure hatred threw herself towards him. The late June heat glared through the shuttered windows into the apartment, so
that she imagined herself free from George’s hold of her. She blinked away her tears of disappointment.

They parted on the corner just as dusk was falling. From an old, misplaced duty, he accompanied her to the Metro. Maia thought that she imagined the old companionship was still there; their arms
brushed together, but he then became conscious of it and suddenly uncomfortable.

‘Good luck with everything,’ said George.

‘Good luck? What do you mean? What an odd thing to say.’

He looked at her and he knew that this was not what she had been expecting. But with those words he conveniently and effortlessly closed the shutters on their relationship.

Now when she saw the distance between them, Maia could barely believe how they had passed the afternoon. Maia watched George retreat; the last reminder of a false idealism now on his way to his
own form of normality, through the flashing lights and the advertisements for cheap and perverse sex. He never looked back, and eventually, Maia turned and walked away. At Pigalle, two hard faced
policemen were frisking an African at the entrance to the Metro. His carved wooden animals were scattered forlornly over the pavement. As she went underground, her Carte Orange irritated her by
sticking in the barrier.

She hoped that she could forget about George. Maia was astonished at how the years of involvement with one man might be destroyed in one amicable afternoon. Now, in the heat of a foreign city,
his face came up again and again before her in the darkness. She was ashamed at how she had crumbled before him; now she wished that she might have been able to salvage at least some dignity. But
there was no point. He had been successfully making a fool of her for years.

Now she wanted to be out of touch, and Morocco was the perfect place to go. For her it was a sort of revenge; a revenge for always being kept waiting, a symptom of an underlying, deeper
dissatisfaction. Under the pretext of needing space to paint, Maia’s plan was to become unobtainable.

In the bed, she wept, why she wept she didn’t know. She sensed the light change in the room, telling her that outside it was moving seamlessly from morning to dusk. As she settled back
down into the shadows, the day slipped on and the sun sank ever lower over the city. In between her bouts of unconsciousness and wakeful lucidity, her dreams were still rotten. In the courtyard
below the maggots fell from the orange trees and dropped into the shallow pool as outside the people teemed into the city streets and came awake for the night.

The moment Maia stepped outside the house, the hassle in the narrow streets was tremendous. So overwhelming was the noise that she was barely able to think, barely able to
understand where she was going. From the labyrinthine alleys the Arabs seethed into the streets, and above the wailing of the muezzin a relentless drumming could be heard which seemed to take her
by the hips and shake her. Everywhere she turned, men were there blocking her way, hands grabbing and faces sneering at her. She composed herself; surely it was better to appear impassive and
resolute, but somehow the men perceived her as ever more provocative. They intercepted her as she walked, and one man stuck out his foot before her and defiantly met her eyes as she stopped
suddenly short before it. The crowd pulled her in one direction, pushed her in another, towards their shops, to a café, to meet their brothers, to help her find her way, caving in upon her
as she desperately pushed her way through.

“Gazelle, gazelle, come with me! I am Berber, real Berber!”

The young man who was shouting at her stepped out from his position at the entrance to a store, its windows so heaped with spices that it was impossible to see inside. As she continued to force
her way up the street his mocking shouts followed her for a few paces, and then he seemed to give up. She allowed herself to look back and saw him give his waiting friends a pathetic little shrug.
Maia moved on quickly, past the men decaying in the smoke of their hazy enclaves, and the dirt that seemed to be everywhere. The heat rose from the earth and crackled along the pavements as the
people and the buildings surrounding her emerged as if through a fog, moving towards her like phantoms. Her legs shook and her head spun. Maia sat down upon a low step in an attempt to regain some
control. A few moments later, she felt calmer and rose up to meet the narrow streets. Now she walked at random through the twisting maze, the heavy aroma of spices, of sumac and cinnamon drifting
from the stalls. As she walked, her mind continued to wander and she sank back down so deep into the heat that the city was warped once more before her eyes. Men were hawking ill formed packages in
the streets as shrill women beckoned and children ran wildly through the crowd. A young woman was sitting on the ground, scrabbling at dust, as a wizened man crawled on by. Swathed only from the
waist down in his filthy rags, his skin missing and one leg curling beneath him, no-one in the crowd noticed him in his shame. Donkeys brushed past Maia, burdened down with their packages and
Berber women sat cross-legged upon woven, multi-coloured rugs.

Car horns blared and strangers shouted to one another, in friendship and in hate, in old enemies and new acquaintances. Men were indolently standing outside their shops to talk; selling
handcrafted items, intricately decorated bags, huge wrought iron lamps and furniture, Arabesque art, complexly patterned wall hangings, the variety of colour throughout the woven material. In large
baskets, vegetables were being sold next to foreign electronics and stolen goods. Maia stumbled upon a courtyard, lit by a bright beam of sunlight, and in a moment the air filled with the scent of
sweet perfume. A heavy door opened, offering a glimpse of the house within, before slamming shut behind the entering visitor. As she walked on and entered the pulsating heart of the city, the
streets narrowed and wound more tightly around one another.

Through the climbing alleyways she walked in perpetual night, passing dank squares where she found only dead ends. Behind these commercial streets there lay small, private courtyards where water
fountains coursed into small pools, and cool silences pervaded. But now as Maia retreated through an uninterrupted darkness amongst beggars who stretched out to her their gnarled hands, moaning in
the dirt as they eked out their lives. A hunched man sat on the ground, almost prostrated, and Maia shuddered at his right eye, protruding lazily from its socket. The city mirrored the discarded
geography of her mind, and it unfolded itself to her like a story without structure, a sinister repetitive tale with neither beginning nor end.