The Colour of Love

‘I can’t wait to see you, ma cherie.’

‘Me too. When you’re back it’s all going to change. I love you, Jean.’

All I had to do was wait one more day and all the pretence could stop.

The Guru had given me the energy to make all obstacles appear surmountable and later that evening I returned to thank him for what he had done. He prescribed one more session for the following day, just to make sure I would keep on track. How I wish I had stopped there.

The next morning the Guru’s door was slightly ajar so I knocked on it and walked in. He had his back to me and was lighting his candles, humming away and swaying to Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York', which was playing loudly. It got to the alien bit when the Guru turned around. He looked startled when he saw me and immediately stopped the tape recorder, saying that he was sampling the music that was corrupting the youth of today, and promptly changed the cassette to a whinging sitar.

‘Sting is not a corrupting force,’ I said. ‘In fact, he’s against deforestation.’

The Guru glared at me when I said deforestation like he didn’t know what the word meant, but now I think about that look – eyes narrowing, brows furrowed – it was probably more that he remembered he had a job to do.

He signalled for me to sit on the floor and held my hands. They tingled with warmth again as he whispered kind words and then he began humming and chanting. Then the Guru asked me to lie down and he proceeded to touch me, moving slowly from my hands to other parts of my body, my neck, my feet; incantations and gods’ names being chanted all the while as he healed the negativity that shrouded me, asking me to let it go. As he unbuttoned my clothes and took off my top, his breath became rhythmic, his chanting louder, his beads pressed against my chest. I closed my eyes, wanting to believe that I was lost between the gods’ names and that none of this was really happening. It couldn’t happen; a holy man wouldn’t do this, he couldn’t do this, this wasn’t supposed to happen. His beard brushed against my skin, his fingers circled my mouth, I pretended that my trousers had not come down.

I have often asked myself why I didn’t get out of there sooner and how I had got myself into such a position. I didn’t want to believe what was really going on, because if I did, nothing whatsoever would make any sense – and the only thing at that point in time that I had left to hang on to was my belief. I didn’t want to believe what his dry, filthy hands were doing because I would have had to concede that whoever was responsible for sending me signs had sent this Guru, who was into an altogether different kind of spiritual feeling. Nobody could be that cruel.

As he placed his salivating mouth on my lips and pulled up his robe, I smelled him, and it was this that made something inside of me snap. He smelled of coffee. I kicked him, pushed him off me and managed to get out from under him before he used his magic wand.

‘No,’ I shouted.

‘You’re cursed,’ he screamed as I ran out of the door. ‘Cursed, and I will make sure of it.’

How I had sunk to such depths still remains a mystery but, essentially, that is where my journey began. I was confused and desperate, feeling wholly inadequate, riddled with self-doubt and dirty. I wanted to call Jean Michel and tell him but he would kill the Guru. So I tried to block it from my mind and pretend that nothing had happened.

The train I was on stopped. Some old man with the same rotten teeth as the Guru got on. It’s funny how that happens; reminders of the things you are trying most to forget. He smiled at me and I felt physically sick. My hands began to shake. ‘It didn’t happen,’ I kept saying to myself. ‘It’s all in the mind, it didn’t happen,’ and I reached into my handbag to get a mint. While I was fishing for it I found an envelope that was marked urgent.

It was a contract that I had looked over for a client, and which had been sitting in my handbag for the last two days. I had promised to send it back the next day and had completely forgotten. But today it was all going to change. I had to hold it together.

‘All change here,’ announced the driver. Although running late I was determined to buy a stamp, find a postbox, and personally post this letter. Posting it myself would be symbolic of my commitment to getting my life back on track. But, wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a postbox in sight.

‘You’re cursed,’ I kept hearing, and the more I heard it, the more adamant I became that I would find a postbox and put everything behind me.

My boss, Simon, was slightly concerned when I arrived late. I was never late.

‘Is everything all right, Nina?’

‘Fine, just fine,’ I said, making my way to my desk.

I turned on the computer and looked out of the window. The buildings were grey and dreary and set against a grey winter sky. So many times I had sat looking out of this window, imagining the sky to be orange, wishing that I could soak up the rays of an orange sky, fly out of the window and have the courage to do something else, something that gave me meaning.

I had been working at Whitter and Lawson for the last three and a half years, representing all kinds of artists but mostly those who had issues over copyright or needed contractual agreements with galleries drawn up. I read somewhere that people work on the periphery of what they really want to do so that they don’t have to cope with rejection. So, someone who harboured desires to be a racing-car driver would be a mechanic on a racetrack but not actually drive the car. It was like this for me in a sense: I’d always wanted to be a painter and so I worked with artists. But my job wasn’t really about art, it was about making money, dealing with boosting egos. Feeling increasingly cynical and secretly thinking that I could do much better. But I couldn’t – it wasn’t really rejection I feared, it was disappointing my father and sabotaging his investment in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I’d known I wanted to be a painter since the age of six. My brain had always had difficulty engaging with my mouth and I was unable to fully articulate any emotion except on paper. So anything I felt, I produced in a swirl of finger-painted colours that nobody could quite manage to understand. When I found out that my sister wasn’t coming back I did more of the same. My parents didn’t hang the pictures on the fridge door with a magnet – they didn’t know that that is what you were supposed to do with the nonsensical pictures that your children produced. They didn’t even lie and tell me how good they were. Instead, the pictures were folded up and binned while my father would sit with me and read me bits from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, extracts that even he didn’t understand. He was preparing me for a career in law, or ‘love’ as he mispronounced it.

His career choice for me was not based on any longstanding family tradition. He was a bus driver and I think he just wanted to give me the best possible start, and make sure I would not have to face the instability that he had suffered. That’s why when the encyclopaedia man came round when I was young and sensed the aspirations my father had for me, he blatantly incorporated me into his sales pitch by saying that the books would set me on course for a high-flying career. My dad bought the whole set, which he could clearly not afford, taking on extra jobs like mending television sets so he could buy the entire set and receive the latest volume, year after year.

At sixteen, when I expressed a desire to go to art college he went ballistic and didn’t speak to me for weeks. When he did it was to say, ‘Nina, I have not sacrificed the life so you can do the hobby, the lawyer is a good profession. Not that I am pressurising you, not that I came to the England to give you the good education and work every hour and make sacrifices.’

Put that way I could clearly see his point. So I did an art A level without him knowing about it – just in case, by some miracle, he changed his mind. He didn’t and so I went to university to study law.

Whitter and Lawson was where I did my training, and I worked incredibly hard so that they would give me a job after I had finished; at least that way I could be around artists and connect with their world. Everyone around me said it was impossible, there were hardly any Indian lawyers representing artists and it was a place where contacts mattered. People said that I would need a miracle to be taken on by the firm but I busted my gut and worked every single hour I could, going out of my way to prove everyone wrong.

I remember making promises that I would do a whole series of things if I got the job, like give away ten per cent of my future earnings to charity and buy a Big Issue weekly. To whom these promises were made I couldn’t really tell you; maybe just to myself. So I should have known that the first visible signs of wanting out was crossing the road, making out like I hadn’t seen the Big Issue man when he was blatantly waving at me. But I pretended, pretended that I was lucky to have a job and make lots of money and be in that world. My dad always said this was what life was about – working hard, being disciplined, making money, surviving in a ‘dog eating the cat’ world. But then my best friend Ki died and none of that made sense anymore. An uneasiness began to set in.

Felicity, the PA, called me to say that Boo Williams was waiting for me in reception.

Ki disintegrated rapidly at twenty-five. She had felt a lump in her leg while she was away travelling but decided it was nothing. By the time she came back it had spread throughout her whole body. There was nothing anyone could do. I pretended it would be fine; didn’t even see the head scarf and the dribbling mouth and the weight loss. She whispered lots of things to me and I made a whole heap of promises to her. I’m not sure exactly what I said, I wasn’t really there so couldn’t remember any of it. Not until that moment, the moment I sat at my computer thinking about how I’d not taken responsibility for anything.

What I had promised her was that I would live my life passionately and do all the things I really wanted to, not just for me but for her.

The day she told me about her condition she dropped it in like it was something she forgot to mention on a shopping list. Ki had got back from Thailand a couple of weeks earlier, and we had spent virtually every day together since. That day we were off to Brighton, and her dad was in the driveway cleaning his car.

‘It’s hot weather, na?’ he asked.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ I replied.

‘Makes me want to go and visit some bitches.’

I looked at him as Ki came out. He continued, ‘Na, beta, saying to Nina we must visit some bitches.’

‘It’s beaches, Dad, beaches. Yeah, we’ll visit loads and we’ll make sure we do it soon.’

I remember thinking that comment was strange as she normally took the piss out of his mispronunciations.

‘Yours is into bitches, mine thinks I’m into porn,’ I said walking back in with her.

‘What?’

‘I didn’t realise that the Sky box downstairs was linked to the one upstairs, and I was flicking through it and lingered on a few porn channels and this lesbian talk show.

She looked at me.

‘It was just out of interest, didn’t know I was interrupting Mum and Dad watching their Zee TV. Then in the morning I heard my dad tell my mum to talk to me, to have a word, maybe marriage would straighten that out. So she just left a couple more CVs on the table.’

‘When will you tell them about Jean?’

‘Soon,’ I said.

‘Tell them soon, Nina, it’s not worth the wait. Do what makes you happy. You’ll make sure you’re happy, won’t you?’

I looked at her. Where did that come from?

‘I’ve got cancer, Nina, and it’s bad. Phase three, that’s what they called it. Don’t think they can do much with chemo but they’ll give it a go.’

She said it just like that, like she had bought some new trousers from French Connection and had forgotten to tell me.

She hadn’t told her parents. Outside, her dad was blissfully ignorant; bucket in one hand, sponge in another, cleaning his shiny silver car and talking about bitches, unaware that shortly his life would change forever.

I deluded myself that chemo would sort it. I knew if I bargained hard and made a whole series of promises, it would be all right. Right until the last minute I believed that. Even when she died, I held on to her, not letting go. Her dad had to pull me off her.

The phone went again. ‘Ms Williams is waiting for you in reception, Nina.’

‘I heard you the first time,’ I snapped.

My colleagues turned and looked at me. I never lost it. No matter what, I was always calm. Calm and reliable Nina, who worked twelve hours a day if necessary. Calm and dependable Nina, who did what was asked of her; who went to the gallery openings that nobody else in the firm wanted to go to.

I got up and went to reception to meet Boo. She was dressed in black and wore bright red boots, the colour of the dried tomatoes she had put into Venus de Milo’s sockets.

‘Sorry to have kept you waiting.’

‘Quite,’ she replied.

And that was it, the word that tipped me over the edge.

‘Quite,’ I mumbled.

‘Yes, I’ve got better things to do with my time,’ she replied.

‘Like make apricot statues?’

Felicity looked up from behind the reception desk, shocked.

‘I don’t like your tone, Nina,’ Boo said.

‘I don’t like your work, but there’s nothing I can do about that, is there?’

‘Nessun dorma', which was playing in reception, seemed to be playing unusually loud in my head as Boo started ranting. I wasn’t really listening to what she was saying but just gazed blankly at her, watching her lips move and hearing the Guru’s words telling me again and again that I was cursed. The only thought I had was to get out of there.

‘Boo, Nina has been under the weather recently, haven’t you, Nina?’ Simon said, hearing her shouting and coming out of his office to try to placate her.

‘Yes, under the weather, under a cloud, a dirty grey sky. I have to go, I have to leave.’

There was silence: the kind of silence that is desperate to be filled.

And Simon didn’t stop me. Over three years at the firm, sweating blood, pampering over-inflated egos and making him money and he didn’t even say, ‘Come into my office, let’s talk about it.’

Maybe if he had I would have stayed, because all that I needed was some reassurance that I was worth something.

‘Right,’ I said, getting my coat. ‘I’ll come back for the rest of my things later.’

‘I’ll make sure Felicity sends them on to you,’ Simon replied.

I splashed through puddles, wandering aimlessly, feeling numb. I should have been elated, relieved at least that I had left work; but the way it had happened was out of my control, he was essentially showing me the door. After everything I had done, that’s how much I meant. What would I say to my parents? Not only would I crush them by saying that I was marrying Jean but now my dad’s biggest fear of me losing my job had come true. Perhaps it was better to break it to them all at once: if I didn’t have a job I couldn’t go through with their list system anyway so that didn’t matter, and at least I had Jean. Jean would be there no matter what. He would return home later that evening and between us we could find a way to break it to them so that it wouldn’t completely crush them. Things weren’t that bad, I tried to convince myself. I’d just attempted to put the whole Guru thing behind me – there were good things to look forward to. Jean and I could finally settle down. I felt excited at the thought of seeing him again, having him wrap his arms around me and reassure me that everything would work out. As I had time on my hands I decided to go to his flat, make us dinner and wait for him: he was due back around six.

A short time later, my shopping basket was bulging with colourful vegetables. I had no idea what I was going to do with them but anything that had any colour went into the basket. Jean liked chicken so I decided to throw one in and figure out how to cook it later. I picked up a recipe book, some wine, flowers and candles and made my way to his apartment.

I smiled at the concierge as I entered the building, but instead of smiling back he glanced down at his feet.

‘Busy morning, John?’

‘Yes, miss,’ he replied, calling for the lift. I could sense that he wasn’t in the mood for chatting so I waited in silence for the lift to come down.

The tiles and mirrors reflected the huge ceilings of the apartment block and the lift was rickety and had an old-style caged door. I had always thought I’d get stuck in it. Before Jean Michel went away on his trip he had stopped the lift as we were halfway down. I had panicked. ‘I’ll take care of you, cherie,’ he said. ‘Always, you know I will. Nina, I want you to marry me.’

And although I was overwhelmed the first word that came out of my mouth wasn’t ‘Yes’ but ‘Dad'. All I could see was my dad’s face, so absolutely crushed.

Jean tried not to appear disappointed. I asked for time to think about it. He said he understood, but now my head was clear I would have a chance to make it up to him.

We had met two years earlier at a party. The moment he walked in half the women in the room turned to look: he was six foot two, with blue eyes, jet-black hair and a big smile. I watched his every move from the corner of my eye and my heart jumped with disbelief as he made his way towards me.

‘Are you OK?’ he said in a deep, confident voice, as if he had always known me.

I turned to check that it was me he was talking to and that I wasn’t mistaken: out of all the women in the room, he had chosen to speak to me.

We talked for hours and as I left he said he’d call. The days seemed interminable as I waited and my stomach did all sorts of things each time the phone rang. He called two days later, said he had wanted to phone straightaway to see if I got home safely but had held out as long as he could. There was something very solid about him: he was confident yet also excitingly passionate and spontaneous. There was no routine in our lives, no planning; things just happened.

He whisked me away from the world of the semi, Croydon and list systems, away from practicality and duty, and made me feel beautiful. He had all the qualities I lacked and when I was around him I never felt inadequate. Ki said he was what I needed; that he made me see things differently, beyond the values and concepts that had been drummed into me.

She, like Jean, was also a risk-taker, but ended up with someone who seemed safe, reliable and predictable … although he didn’t turn out to be in the end. Ki was laid out in her coffin in her red bridal sari. Her boyfriend, who was supposedly madly in love with her, hadn’t wanted to marry her, but her mother insisted that that was the way that she wanted to be dressed. Had she known towards the end that her boyfriend’s visits had become more and more infrequent? He didn’t even manage to make it to the funeral and three months later he was seeing someone else.

Jean Michel saw me through that period. Although my way of coping was just to get on with life and try not to think about things too deeply, I knew if I needed to talk he would listen. He always listened; he always tried to understand.

I turned the key to Jean’s flat and it wasn’t double locked.

‘Careless as usual,’ I thought. ‘Goes away for four days and forgets to double-lock the door.’

I carried the shopping into the kitchen and thought I heard a noise. Maybe the cleaner was in, although it wasn’t her usual day.

‘Hello,’ I shouted. Nobody responded so I began unpacking the shopping. The fridge had half a bottle of champagne in it along with some pâté. There was another noise.

‘Hello, is anyone in?’ I said, going towards Jean’s room.

Jean suddenly came out, making me jump.

‘Jean, I didn’t know you were home. When did you get in? Didn’t you hear me? I’ve got so much to tell you.’

He looked very pale.

‘Are you ill? What’s wrong?’

His bedroom door clicked closed.

‘What’s going on? Who’s in there? Who is it, Jean?’

‘No one, Nina,’ his voice sounded odd. ‘Don’t go in there.’

I went in and saw this woman emerging like some weasel out of a hole. She had a mass of red curls and was half-dressed.

All I could think about was the concierge, party to as many secrets as he was keys. He could have said something like, ‘Miss, don’t go up there, the gas men are seeing to a leak, come back in a few hours.’ I would have listened.

I stood there, completely frozen, trying to comprehend an obvious situation. There were no clichés like, ‘It’s not what you think’ or ‘She’s not important.’ In a way I wish there had been because in those moments of silence I understood that he could not possibly love me and that he loved himself much more. He expected me to say something, to do something, but I just stood there in silence, staring at him. And then I walked away.

I ran down the stairs and out of the building, cars beeping as I flew recklessly across the road, not caring if they knocked me down. I ran like I never wanted to stop but when my sides began to ache I couldn’t go on any more. Stumbling on a bench in Green Park, catching my breath, the tears began to trickle down my face.

The only other person apart from Ki who knew me inside out was Jean. I had showed him who I truly was and he had rejected me. Was I not good enough? Was that it? Was I fooling myself that he loved me? Did he mean it when he asked me to marry him? Did I make that up too? Was it because since Ki’s death I had been distant, or was it because I made him wait? He said that he would wait for as long as it took.

My arm and my chest, the ugly blotchy creases – he had pretended that they didn’t matter? Did she have ugly blotchy creases that he ran his fingers down while whispering that he loved her, every single part of her? Was that it? Was he touching her, saying that he was there for her, while the Guru was touching me? Did he pretend to love me because he pitied me?

Tears streamed down my face.

‘Help me, Ki, please, I need you. Show me a sign if you’re around. You said you would. Please. Are you seeing all this? Are you?’ Nothing came. ‘You lied to me. You said you would always be with me but how can you be? If you were with me you wouldn’t let any of this happen. None of this. But you’re dead and dead people can’t do anything, can they? I trusted you and you lied. I let you give up because you promised you would always be with me, but you deceived me just like everyone else.’

The rain began falling. I sat on the park bench thinking that there was really no such thing as fate: imagining providence having a hand was just a way of not feeling alone, a way of making sense of a pointless journey. ‘I’ll give you one last chance. Speak to me like you said you would. Go on, I’m listening now. Do you want me to beg? I’ll beg if you want.’

I crawled down onto my hands and knees. ‘See, I’m begging you. Please.’

Still nothing came.

Clutching at the blades of grass I fell forward on my knees onto a patch of muddy wet grass and began sobbing my heart out, oblivious to who was watching me. I looked up at the grey, miserable sky and the bursting rain clouds. ‘Fall harder, go on, is that the best you can manage? I don’t care what else you throw at me, send someone else to feel me up, go on, I don’t care any more. You’ve taken everything, everything. Do you hear me? You probably don’t even exist, do you? All made up, all of it, lies.’

I sat back on the bench and was aware that I was making an awful gut-wrenching sound. The wailing came from feeling cheated by the death of my closest friend, cheated by love and the injustice of being touched up and having my faith simultaneously taken away. Unable to fight any more, I let the rain pour down on me. It soaked through my coat as I sat there continuing to think. I thought about the nature of love and how that too was a lie. Ki’s boyfriend had left her to die. Jean Michel had fooled me into believing that it was possible to love. All along my parents had been right. Life wasn’t about emotion, emotion was for people who had nothing better to do with their time. It was about coping and easing the struggle, being practical and realistic, that was what my dad was trying to prepare me for. Their ideas about love were practical, they left no room for emotion and no room to be hurt, let down or disappointed. They were right: romantic airy-fairy notions of love did not exist, and if they did they were impractical and could only lead to disappointment. Life was all about survival. Trust no one as everyone was out for themselves, have no expectations: that way you could not be let down.