Excerpt from Tangerinn
BY EMANUELA ANECHOUM, TRANS. BY LUCY RAND
I had knocked on Liz’s door after seeing an ad for a single room in a two-bedroom flat looking out onto a quaint garden. I was twenty and I wanted to forget myself as quickly as I could. I was sleeping in a hostel, in a mixed dorm, and I wasn’t used to the smell of men. Everything scared me, but I forced myself to face up to the new reality that I had chosen: a game of balance between longing to be seen and being terrified of it.
In fabricating the new me, the first thing I needed to find was the set: the place I would come home to each night. I had a clear idea of how it should look. A Victorian house, in a little street of clean, tidy, identical terraced houses. I found comfort in predictable architecture. The interior was important too, and there needed to be a certain atmosphere: a mysterious lamp with tassels, a dark velvet armchair, a Persian rug brought back from a holiday or from one of those second-hand markets where, I imagined, the new me would spend hours rummaging through old trinkets. On the walls there would be brightly-colored art work that would draw a certain kind of gaze. A blocked-in fireplace and on its mantelpiece some books of poetry that I would pretend to read on Sunday mornings when, in reality, the half open book would lie upturned on the table like a dead animal while I scrolled through Instagram instead. I wanted to feel surrounded by inconsequential beauty, which would protect me from the eyes of others.
Liz’s house was near Canonbury station, an area inhabited mostly by Turks and other young people from southern Europe who had jobs as waiters and a passion for shakshuka. A couple of tube stops away was Hackney, the city’s hip neighborhood, where people who didn’t have the guts to actually live there went on the weekends and pretended to be woke. It was a well loved activity in this city, the practice of brushing shoulders with those less privileged, to feel illumined, involved, but not having to make too much effort: to be in proximity to untidy, complicated, miserable lives.
A few years later the area would be invaded by people who were nearly thirty and recently made managers. Those who’d had the money to buy their own council houses, once reserved for people who couldn’t afford rent, would sell them for half a million pounds to some young lawyer, disintegrating the community of the neighborhood. The cost of rent and soup from the deli would go up and I, like others, would no longer be able to afford it. Then I’d feel like a loser, incapable of keeping up with the pace of gentrification. Now the woke weekenders would have to watch a cult film like Frankenstein Junior or Mean Girls on some rooftop with peeling paint in Brixton or Peckham for twenty pounds, popcorn not included, surrounded by people exactly the same as them, while the local residents would be forced to go elsewhere, to make space, to avoid conflict.
I was one of them, and I wasn’t. The only difference between me and them was that I knew Liz.
On that first day she appeared at the door as everything I had ever wanted to be: slim, sinuous, thick red hair, snow white skin. She glided barefoot around the flat with the ease of some one who was born rich; she wore a red robe with embroidered white flowers and bat sleeves, which swished on the floor as she walked, a glass of wine in one hand and a joint in the other. There wasn’t a hair out of place and her face was peppered with freckles. She hugged me like a sister and invited me to leave my shoes outside the door. I asked her where she got her amazing robe from, and she answered that the silk was organic.
Liz had inherited the flat from her grandmother, an English lady who was very respectable apart from when she drank, who had been considerate enough to die at seventy so that her beloved granddaughter would never have to worry about paying rent. She had also left her plenty of money. Liz cheerfully told me these things while showing me the various rooms. I struggled to follow the flow of her words and in my faltering English I asked, and your parents? But she didn’t hear me.
She had skillfully paired the inherited furniture, which was a bit dated, with modern minimalist pieces: vases, lamps, and rugs in earthy, muted colors, soft shapes and an excessive number of plants. She was very good at handling beauty. It came naturally to her because she perceived it as part of herself. That was the first thing that attracted me.
The room she was renting out was small and dark, with mold stains in the corners, full of delicious but pointless objects: shapeless ceramics, a glass bottle with dried lavender in, a mandala from Urban Outfitters on the wall, a dark green rug in the shape of a crocodile next to the bed. I lingered for a moment on these details. I knew that I would do anything to live there: I was already hopelessly enraptured by Liz, by her movements, her dreamy yet careful way of speaking, aware of the effect her aura had on her surroundings. I didn’t yet know the difference between what a person is and what others see, and my conviction that Liz was simply perfect hung around for a long time. She, on the contrary, didn’t seem struck by me; I must have seemed so provincial. I didn’t know what to do to impress her and I was afraid that my desire for approval was seeping out of my skin in desperation-infused sweat.
A few minutes later we were sitting in the garden: a damp but wonderfully decadent square of grass. Liz had prepared a short questionnaire to decide whether or not I was the right person to share her flat with, and thus to some extent her time and life. Like in all big cities, proximity was a fundamental component of any relationship. On Tinder you looked for love within a radius of a couple of kilometers—that was the radius of intimacy. The Italian barman at the Queen’s Head, the pub at the end of the road, was occasionally my lover, sometimes my therapist, often my father. I don’t think he knew my name but he’d say Are you alright, love? in English, and I’d feel special.
What kind of person are you? Liz asked, looking down at the sheet of paper. Until that point I hadn’t responded well to her questions: I hadn’t seen the TV series she talked about, I didn’t read much and I didn’t listen to podcasts. I hadn’t travelled. All of those things horrified her.
I don’t know yet, I responded. A vulnerability that I would soon learn to hide, but that she seemed to like. She looked at me with renewed interest.
Your surname doesn’t sound Italian, she commented.
My father is Moroccan.
Oh, cool! She exclaimed with an energy that might have concealed a thread of resentment, as if she didn’t expect that from someone like me. I want to have mixed-race children, she declared, I’ve already decided. I want to fall in love with a North African chef who lives in Paris, so we can take the train to see each other at the weekends, each of us maintaining our own lives, because I can’t just uproot myself for a man. It would be perfect, because then our children would grow up trilingual, with Arabic and French, and everyone knows that mixed-race people are naturally more attractive than normal people, like Zendaya or Lenny Kravitz. Have you read any Zadie Smith? You speak Arabic and French, I imagine. We should totally or ganize a trip to Morocco. I’ve been there tons of times, one of my friends has a villa in Marrakech, but it would be amazing to visit with someone who knows all the authentic places. These days everywhere has been swallowed up by tourism, places get ruined to make everything more instagrammable for us white people. It’s weird if you think about it. You go often, I guess. Is your family still over there? I have Scottish and German heritage and the first time I went to Berlin I felt such an intense sense of belonging that I thought I’d been born again. Do you know what I mean?
I didn’t say no, I didn’t know what she meant because I’d never set foot in Morocco and I didn’t speak Arabic or French, because you had never had time to teach me, because you were always working and life was already hard.
I’m an ally, she revealed, and I didn’t understand. I intuited though that to be her friend you didn’t need to talk much, and that was a comfort to me. She put a glass of wine in my hand. She wanted to know everything about me, she said, and thankfully she interrupted me immediately.
She was kind, generous, beautiful, rich, and powerful, and I couldn’t believe she had chosen me.
I still wonder what convinced her, in that first meeting, that we would become best friends. I knew a lot of rich blonde girls in the small town I came from, and none of them had seen me as a project worth spending their time on. But Liz did. She wanted to work on me like on a broken mirror: put me back together, sand down my edges, polish me so that I could better reflect her image back to her. I also wanted this. She wanted to be seen with me in the bars in Soho where interesting people met other interesting people, and I wanted to be seen with her, in the places where it was important to be seen. She wanted to advise me on what to watch, what to eat, and to tell me what was right and what wasn’t. She was always available to explain things, to illustrate aspects of the world that I didn’t know. She talked to me about feminism and about how it’s connected to the class struggle, and lent me books to read that didn’t make me feel stupid like I did at school. I was happy to learn. She took me along to exhibitions of new Afro-descendent artists and to concerts where sad women sang heart-wrenching songs and all the girls swayed to the rhythm of sisterhood. She always paid and I always followed gratefully. She encouraged me to educate myself and she scolded me if I made observations that weren’t sensitive toward this or that minority until I stopped doing it. She introduced me to her friends, she pulled me out of the shame of my obvious loneliness. She gave me dresses she no longer used, and when we ate out she always bought the wine so that, she’d say, we could get a nice bottle. I spent a lot of time staying silent so that I’d appear more intelligent than I was, but in the silence I seemed to change. Liz reminded me continuously that I had to aspire to be the best version of myself, while I dreamed of becoming her, and I liked thinking about how I would feel then: safe and happy.
Thinking about it now, I realize that Liz lived suspended in an eternal adolescence of privilege and false rebellion. Her egotism was the natural individualism of city life: it was necessary for survival, which meant it couldn’t be considered a defect. Everything about her seemed to say I am, without ever having to apologize, ask permission, or question herself. I had never imagined you could live like that and now, watching as she smiled at herself in the mirror, I wanted it too. I wonder now what she was like when no one was looking, but it’s a silly question, because each of us only exists when we are seen, and she made sure she was never not seen.
Sometimes I peed in her conditioner bottle and shook it up. It wasn’t mean, I told myself, because her hair never seemed to suffer as a consequence, but for some reason I got a strange sense of wellbeing from it. I was trying clumsily to rebalance the invisible weights that held me beneath her. I did other things too, like filling up her carton of soy milk with normal milk, which she was allergic to. I saw her running into the bathroom a little while later with her hands clutched over her stomach. But it wasn’t mean, I told myself, because she recovered quickly. One time, I went shopping with her and as she passed me things from the changing room—they all looked great, she’d buy the lot—I told her I’d wait at the till and ran to swap them for a smaller size. I asked myself why I was doing it—I felt sorry, I felt guilty, I thought: she’s your friend, you can’t hate her. But I did hate her. I hated her because I envied her all those things she thought she deserved just because she had them: her skin, her house, her security. At the same time, it was crucial that she loved me, because it was her I wanted to be like; it was her I wanted to impress. I had never had a friend before and her attention quickly became something I couldn’t live without.
Sometimes I would get into her bed and we’d fall asleep, holding one another. In those moments she was like a child: she whispered in a high-pitched voice that she was scared of the dark and she was happy I was there with her. She made me feel part of a secret game, just the two of us. We sought refuge in one another, safe from solitude but also from the risk of real intimacy, which we carefully avoided. Our conversations were always interesting and never dangerous. We never talked about our parents or our sad teenage years. I was unaware of her insecurities, and she ignored mine. We were alone together, in the shelter of our shadows.
Sometimes we touched each other. Her body fascinated me; I wondered why it was so different from mine. Hers was more beautiful. I don’t know why she did it—perhaps she too wanted to be part of something. Perhaps she too, deep down, was looking for a refuge.