by Monica Ali
‘Sweetheart,’ said Gabe. ‘Don’t.’
‘For six months she have not speak.’ Lena lapsed for a few moments into her usual silence. Gabe inched closer to her on his knees. ‘Only slowly words are coming. And she have no teeth here at front, the pimp have take out to make easy for give blow jobs.’
‘Hush,’ whispered Gabe.
‘I have not tell you best part of story,’ said Lena. ‘Why you tell me hush?’ She chewed a fingernail. ‘They take her back home,’ Lena continued after a while. ‘Her family think she have work in restaurant. Then they learn what happen to her. And the father take his shotgun – and he kill himself.’
Gabe looked at the food on the floor. ‘You don’t have to go back,’ he said. ‘Stay. Stay for as long as you like.’
She was quiet.
‘You want to stay in London?’
Lena laid her head on her knees.
‘I’ll help you,’ said Gabriel. He’d said it often enough. He would really do it. There was nothing he wouldn’t do. ‘I’ll find Pasha for you. I’ll help you both get jobs.’
Lena still said nothing. She rocked a little, hugging her knees.
Gabriel’s own knees were hurting. He shifted his weight back on his heels. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you’re doing fine.’
‘You know how they prepare new girls ready for working? You can guess?’ She brushed his cheek with her fingers. ‘Boris bring six men for my first night. This was party for them.’
Gabe got to his feet. ‘Come on.’ He took her hand. ‘Let’s watch some television. I’ll clear this up in the morning.’
She let him lead her out of the kitchen. In the hallway she pulled back. ‘I fight them,’ she said.
‘I know.’ He squeezed her hand a little, trying to coax her through to the sitting room, thinking they’d be safe once the television was on.
‘I kick and scream. I bite. I think they will not keep doing what they are doing to me when they see I am not whore.’
‘Sweetheart. Please.’
She looked at him properly then, and it was with the contempt he deserved. ‘This is not nice story for you?’
‘I don’t want you to upset yourself.’
But she had already receded, the blind look in her eyes once more. She spoke softly, wistfully, full of wonder at the mysteries of the universe.
‘They laugh,’ she said. ‘This men. When I kick and cry. I think maybe they are crazy. They have lose their minds. But next day it happen also and also after that and then I start to think, this is normal. This is how things happen. Is me – I am crazy one and this is why they laugh. And then … then, I don’t cry any more. I don’t fight. And Boris he come, he say, good – you are ready now. And I – ’ Lena smiled. ‘I have want so much to see this world.’
They settled in front of the television and did not speak for a while. Gabe examined Lena’s face. In the tricky reflected light her eyebrows were barely visible, two small thin scars arching across her brow. She pulled at her earrings. He said, ‘Lena, those men were evil. You know that, don’t you?’
She shrugged.
‘Psychopaths. Crazies. Not you, them.’
She seemed not to hear him.
‘And all the men who came to the flats, when you were … when you were working, they were evil too. But most men aren’t like that.’
She kept her face turned to the screen.
‘It must be hard for you to believe it, but most men are basically good.’
Lena, without turning, said, ‘Like you, Gabriel? You are good?’
‘I hope so,’ he said, ‘I’m not like those men who …’
‘They are OK,’ she said, ‘most of them.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She yawned. ‘They are OK.’
‘But what they …’
‘Is one man who want for me to wear high shoe and walk on him. He is good customer. He never touch me. Never.’
Pervert, thought Gabriel, but he kept the thought to himself.
‘Only one customer,’ said Lena, ‘is very bad.’ She got up and switched off the television. She drifted over to the window and leaned, blackly silhouetted, against it.
Behind her the London night streamed by in a haze of headlamps, streetlights, neon signs and window lights.
‘If I see this man,’ said Lena. ‘If I see this man, I kill him. This is how I promise myself.’
Gabriel always wanted Lena to talk to him. He wanted information. He would take the pieces of her, like a jigsaw puzzle, and arrange them, every fragment. But now that she was talking he wished that she would stop. The more she spoke, the further she drifted away from him. He did not wish to hear any more.
‘He is … yes, I think,’ said Lena, only a shadow against the window frame. ‘I think he is evil, this man.’
‘You’ll never see him again,’ said Gabe. ‘Don’t think about him now.’
‘When I close my eyes, I see. Very ugly this man. Sit on my bed, push marriage ring round and round on finger.’
He looked around at the bland bedroom furniture seeking an anchor, a clue to the man who lived here and who would not touch this girl. A pine chest of drawers, a watercolour print, a bedside cabinet, a hardback book waiting to be read. He trembled. Lena had shut her eyes. Close to tears, he sat on the edge of the bed and took hold of her feet. He appraised each toe, the pearly nails, each little knuckle, the delicate articulation of each joint. He slid his fingers around them and down her soles and rubbed gently on the heels, marvelling at how truly she was flesh and bone, his Lena, his ghostly girl. And the anklebones, they were real all right, the shin-bones and the knees, and she raised her hips lightly so he could raise her dress. He worked slowly up her body, connecting every part of her, putting her back together again.
He smoked a cigarette in bed and Lena lay on her stomach with one hand trailing on the floor. Once, early on, she had put on a show, an old habit, pretending to enjoy the sex, but now she merely submitted to his claims. If it surprised her, his nightly examination, his intricate pawing that began with her feet, she did not show it. She was used to worse, he supposed. Another client fetish, better than others she had endured. After a certain point he could not stop himself. His desire was a foul creature that climbed on his back and wrapped its long arms around his neck. What did it want with him? He would cage it if he could. One day he would have the strength to kill it, for it was not part of him.
He stubbed the cigarette out in a saucer. Lena sat up and stretched, displaying her fatless rack of ribs.
‘I find frame for photo of Pavel. You don’t mind this?’
‘Who’s Pavel?’ he said.
‘Pavel. Pasha. My brother.’ She opened the drawer next to the bed and took out a frame studded with beads of coloured glass. ‘Is OK to put on table?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said.
Lena held the frame on her knee and traced a finger across the glass. Gabe put his arm around her and studied Pasha too. If there was a family resemblance he couldn’t see it. Pasha’s head was almost square and his hair and eyes looked black.
Lena put two fingers to her lips, kissed them and transferred the kiss to the glass. A spark of warmth fired in her cold blue eyes and Gabriel understood what he should have seen at once: the man on whom she had bestowed a tender kiss was not her brother. Lena had a lover. This was the man whom Gabe had promised to find.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
STRIDING DOWN LOWER REGENT STREET, ON HIS WAY TO MEET Rolly and Fairweather, past sushi and burger bars, sandwich shops and wholefood cafés, Gabriel felt a pang of hunger though he had, for a change, eaten a reasonable lunch today. London wasn’t the brains of the country, as people said; it certainly wasn’t the heart. London was all belly, its looping, intestinal streets constantly at work, digesting, absorbing, excreting, fuelling and refuelling, shaping the contours of the land.
Where the road ran into Pall Mall, he looked up at the Crimean War Memorial, cast in bronze out of the cannons
captured at the siege of Sebastopol. Charlie had told him that, when they strolled arm in arm to the park one day. Most people (Gabe included himself) were blind to the history around them. He crossed into Waterloo Place, flanked on either side by the white stone and discreet grandeur of clubbable London. How often had he passed through without sparing a glance at the monuments? He checked his watch. Franklin, the Great Arctic Navigator, he read, and his brave companions sacrificed their lives in completing the discovery of the North West Passage in 1848. The monument was erected by the unanimous vote of parliament. You could feel the pride. Gabe passed to and fro between the Victorian field marshals, noting their conquering stances, the manful sweep of their coats, the way they held their swords. They had the look of implacable confidence, of men who had turned the course of history, and for whom it would never turn again. They held their heads high to the future and turned their feet out to the Empire. Here was John Fox Burgoyne, field marshal, and here John, first Lord Lawrence, Viceroy of India. Lord Clyde stood high above Britannia, who was seated on a lion, those twin symbols of the nation which now could only be viewed with an ironic smile. Gabe cast a final look over the square and the bright gold Britannia sailing high on the Athenaeum seemed to turn to him and wink.
He flew down the steps beneath the Duke of York’s column, his feet hardly touching the ground, and along Horse Guards. It was a mild December afternoon and several small groups of tourists crunched over the gravel towards the Household Cavalry Museum. They looked to be hurrying and Gabe, who had never seen the Changing of the Guard, decided he might as well walk down Whitehall. He cut across and arrived in the courtyard as a fresh pair of Life Guards was marched out for inspection. In their red coats and white gloves, their spurred boots and spiked helmets, chin bands at lips and visors pressed over the eyes, they looked like toy soldiers, a re-enactment society, fakes. The tourists lapped it up with grins and digital cameras. This was the Britain they liked to see.
He hurried along the reassuringly wide sweep of Whitehall, a broad pair of shoulders on which the country could rest. London plane trees, with their camouflage trunks, lined the avenue, shedding their spiked little fruit. He passed the caged entrance to Downing Street, looked up at Big Ben, the scrubbed stone and moon face, and ducked through the underpass to emerge at the Houses of Parliament. Security, of course, was on high alert. Gabe walked past black railings, checkpoints, men with mirrors on sticks inspecting the undercarriages of cars, warning signs, ramps and barriers and policemen with machine guns. It all had to be done for security but it made the place look dangerous rather than safe, as if this were a siege situation, the hostage democracy itself.
Processed through the St Stephen’s entrance, Gabe loitered by a marble statue of Walpole while he waited to be collected by a minion, but it was Fairweather, leather folder tucked under his arm, who charged across the hall.
‘You’ve made it!’ He offered congratulations as though Gabe had completed a solo Atlantic voyage. ‘Admiring our first prime minister, I see. Lovely bit of marble. Can’t help wondering,’ he dropped his voice, ‘what they’ll do for the PM when he goes. Something a bit more modern, suit the medium to the message, a video installation perhaps?’
He hooted and pushed back his long blond fringe.
Gabe said, ‘I’ve never been in here before.’
‘Welcome to the asylum,’ said Fairweather, leading the way. ‘Would you like a tour? See the chamber? It’s rather dull, I’m afraid. No, I don’t blame you, to be honest it’s better on the box. Well, they show the highlights, and the whole shebang looks more impressive. It’s a bit of a disappointment, frankly, for visitors when they see this modest sort of public hall and, you know, I’ve watched them sitting up in the gallery and guess what they end up doing. Looking at the screens. And I don’t blame them, no, it looks less dowdy somehow, more real than the thing itself.’
Fairweather talked on as he breezed down the cabinet-lined corridors, oozing congeniality, nodding left and right. Gabe tried to say that he would, in fact, like to see the debating chamber but found his attempts smothered in a blanket of ministerial charm. It occurred to Gabriel that he had underestimated this man, seeing only the amiable surface, which Fairweather used to great effect.
‘Here we go,’ said Fairweather, ‘the Pugin room. Technically speaking, we’re in the Lords, notice how the carpet changed from green to red, but we swapped it for some committee room years ago and they’ll never get it back. Shall we have coffees or something stronger to celebrate? Rolly shouldn’t be a minute. Someone will show him up.
‘See that chap over there,’ he said, after ordering a pot of coffee, ‘chair of the Catering Sub-Committee. Minister for the interior, as he’s commonly known.’
‘It’s how you met Rolly, isn’t it?’ said Gabe. ‘Being on that committee.’
‘It’s all done in-house, you know, the catering,’ said Fairweather. ‘He came in on some consultancy gig. Can’t so much as sell a sausage roll without a consultant these days.’
‘And is it any good?’
‘What, the food?’ Fairweather grinned. ‘Oh, for one of Bellamy’s veal pies!’
‘Should I take that as a no?’
The right honourable member leaned in close, as if a plot were about to be hatched. ‘This should be the best place to eat in London. What chef wouldn’t like to try his hand in here? I think’ – he dropped his voice – ‘I think we could be seeing some movement pretty soon on contracting out, and we’re talking a turnover of four to five million as a starting point.’ He leaned back. ‘Anyway, first things first,’ he continued, becoming hale and hearty again. ‘Got to get up and running, establish the brand, as it were.’
‘You’ve got the lease?’ said Gabriel.
‘Lucinda’s signed,’ said Fairweather, opening the folder. ‘Place your paw print … just here.’
‘Lucinda?’ Gabe hadn’t so much as met Fairweather’s wife, and now he was going into business with her, it seemed.
‘A formality. We are allowed to have business interests, as long as we register them, of course, but it keeps things simple this way.’
Gabe looked at Fairweather’s rosy schoolboy cheeks, his expensive and casually rumpled suit, the air of self-assurance that enveloped him like cologne.
‘It’s tricky with your ministerial position, you mean.’
Fairweather sighed. ‘I’m only one step up from a PPS, you know. And I get approaches – all these media offers – which I have to keep turning down. I’ve done one or two things before that seemed to go down rather well.’ He fiddled modestly with his wedding band. ‘But now I’m pretty much limited to the Today programme and Question Time. Entre nous, I’ve asked to be shuffled out.’
‘You want to be demoted?’
‘When the PM rearranges the paperclips. It’s not a lack of loyalty, it’s … well, I’ve decided it’s my last term in Parliament and if I’m going to build up some outside interests …’
‘Media work?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m keeping my options open. There’ll be the restaurant, of course. And it won’t hurt the profile to do a bit of media stuff. But there’ll be opportunities in business. I’ve made some contacts over the years.’
The waitress who brought the coffees, a skittery blonde with blacked-up eyes, made a meal of laying out the cups and saucers, the sugar and the cream. Fairweather practically rubbed his hands together, sizing her up like a parliamentary perk. She ventured little glances in return. Lucinda, remembered Gabe, spent most of her time at the constituency house.
‘Ah, Mr Rawlins,’ cried Fairweather, jumping up.
Rolly unbuttoned his coat and unwound his scarf. ‘That girl who brought me up here says she’s got an Oxford degree. Be better off as a bellboy, doing all that running around, least she’d get some tips.’
‘Well, here it is,’ said Fairweather, ‘the final draft, the clean copy. Lucinda’s signed and Gabe’ – he pulled a pen from his suit – ‘was about to
borrow this.’
‘Was I?’ said Gabe. He could imagine Fairweather in a committee room, seamlessly moving the business along, taking words out of people’s mouths or placing them there, quietly suffocating all opposition with his frank and pitiless charm.
‘Let’s get it over,’ said Rolly, working through the next few minutes in silence. Fairweather, thought Gabe, liked to hide his intellect. He was clearly sharp as a knife, but the sharpest knives were always sheathed. Rolly was more like a grater, likely to graze your knuckles on contact, unlikely to inflict a mortal wound. Thicko third son, he’d once said to Gabe. Proper dunce at school. Doctor and lawyer, the first two, and I went into trade. Someone called me flamboyant, this one time, I must have been wearing one of these shirts. And that was it. Hey presto – flamboyant businessman. I wasn’t arguing. Made more money than the doctor and the lawyer put together. Shows what a thicko can do.
‘Seems to be in order,’ he said now. Having signed he pushed the folder to Gabe, who added his name.
‘A snifter,’ proposed Fairweather, beaming. ‘We must have a toast.’ He’d bring the punters into the restaurant, thought Gabe, of that there was no doubt.
‘So the money will go out of the account, what, Thursday, Friday? If you saw my cash flow you wouldn’t be asking me to celebrate.’ Rolly wore another of his ‘flamboyant’ outfits. He’d taken his coat off to reveal a Hawaiian shirt.
‘A stiffener, then,’ said Fairweather.
‘No time,’ said Rolly. ‘I only came over to sign and, oh yeah, I’ve got a proposal from an interior designer.’ He handed Gabe an envelope.
‘Très bien,’ said Fairweather. ‘But Lucinda’s had a few ideas too. Somewhere in this folder …’
‘You’re taking the piss.’
‘Oh, well, she’s not a professional. Rather talented amateur, I’d say.’
‘No, sorry, I don’t work with amateurs. Look at young Gabriel here, rightly puzzled, scratching his head.’
Gabe slipped his hand beneath his thigh and trapped it there.