Later she could recall their whirlwind romance and regret the love that had died under his savagery. The fantasy match, which her friends had all envied, come to this. She had waited long to find the right man. So long, that her mother had started to despair, dropping none-too-veiled hints about grandchildren as yet unborn. Hints, which Margaret chose to ignore. She had been cautious, and she thought that she had chosen wisely.
Nothing in her experience could have prepared her for this. Little had she known of the black seed that grew within. Neither could she comprehend the demon that powered this evil. Although she had been forewarned, witnessing a hair-trigger temper on their second date as he cursed, kicked and spat at a flat tyre. But she had dismissed it, even found the childish display somehow endearing. Laughable, as an adult sniggers at a child who, arising after a spill, hits the offending bicycle in a fit of pique. And she swore then that she would never draw that ire upon herself.
The moon rose and fell. Upraised sickle and plummeting full. No longer a hand, but the colliding of planets inside her skull. Not content to pummel this heap of human flesh, Bob pulled her to her feet, holding her limp body against the wall by her throat. The hand arched round, and sound ceased as the impact caused the tympanic membrane to explode. It left behind a ringing. A high-pitched skreigh that was enough to drive her mad.
Another stroke. Something in her face gave, and if felt like her nose was being driven into her skull. Just as his words, punctuating his passion, drove shards into her brain that she could only understand in context. A king in his castle, man had the right to chastise an unrepentant wife.
His attention waned. Her mewling compliance sickened him and he turned his back - the dark side of the moon - withdrawing in disgust and returning to the living room and his drink. Back to the television where he had been before his attention was drawn away by the growl of the dishwasher.
With his harsh attentions gone, there was time suddenly to rue her marriage. Often she thought, perhaps, her decision to wed had been based on hormones and the silent ticking of the biological clock. The woman shook her head, still unwilling to believe, and the very motion set it to throbbing so that her temples kept time with her heart.
Margaret pulled herself into the bedroom. Inside her head, voices shrieked recrimination for unknown sins, not quite obliterated by the tinnitus of the shattered eardrum. Deserved and deserving, she endured it. For the baby, she would endure it silently.
She dragged herself upright to gaze into the cot. The sounds of London traffic receded beyond the pale of pain, and she sagged flaccidly against the wall, wondering what had gone wrong. When their marriage, so optimistically begun, had changed. And what she had done to deserve it.
The chittering voices supplied the answer in an echoing word: Sin . . .
Her ears rang and rang, and the voices that seem to have insulated themselves inside her head shrieked derision. T’was a woman’s lot.
Society condoned punishment and pain as retribution for sin. The teachings of the church, unheeded for years, whispered in the back of her brain. For the sins of Eve; the sins of woman ever loving man. The serpent smiles, and a woman dies a thousand tiny deaths each and every day. The moon waxes and wanes, cartilage crunches against bone. Small loss, small pain3 small sacrifice against the millennium of blame. Eden lost.
Margaret gazed out the picture window, her eye drawn away from her immediate surroundings. She hated it here. The Docklands reminded her of some futuristic ghost town, devoid of life and human heart. Their building was virtually empty. It emphasized her isolation. For here, there was no one to hear her cries, and it seemed as though Robert understood this, for his violence had increased lately. And to whom could she turn for help? Not a neighbour. Margaret had none.
She had paid for this home, dearly - her husband taking his ire out upon her person when he learned that the extension to the tube was cancelled and realized his astute investment had gone suddenly awry - and they were trapped in this soulless place.
The wages of sin . . .
Outside the summer sun sank into the west in a blaze of carnelian and topaz. The Thames below turned to bright crimson and lay like a bloody plaster across the capital. From here, Margaret could see the London skyline beyond the bristle of cranes. On a clear day, she thought she could spot the domed top of St Paul’s. The sight had inspired her once. This evening it left her unmoved.
The baby breathed softly, and Margaret gulped audibly.
Poor child! No daughter should be forced to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Already Margaret knew that the fury must inevitably spill upon the child. Twice, the mother had been beaten as she interposed herself between father and child when the baby’s wails rang too loud. Once she had had to pull Robert off before he had done any real harm.
Margaret levered herself from the wall on shaky feet and turned to face the mirror. Her eyes were swollen and red. One was closed. The crimson flush was starting to darken to magenta. Her nose, it seemed, was skewed as though someone had slapped it on her face as an afterthought. She made a strangulated noise in the back throat as mocking laughter reverberated inside her mind.
And then she turned again to the sleeping infant and breathed her name, Ruth. The baby opened her eyes and Margaret saw herself reflected therein. And the woman trembled, with fear and poignant pain.
Let not the sins of the mother be visited upon the child. And what greater sin could she think of than marriage to this man? Margaret would not, could not, let her daughter suffer at his hands.
The voices whispered on, reverberating inside her skull, filling the hushed room.
Her gaze drifted to the empty bin liner. It lay where she had left it on the bedside table. Her husband’s tirade calling halt to her activities as she tidied up Ruth’s room for the night. On top of the bag, the cord and the mobile she had brought that day lay, ready to be hung over the cot.
Let not the sins. . .
The tiny face screwed up to bellow, and Margaret felt a stab of panic, fearful should the baby’s howls bring the avenging angel of Robert in upon them. She lifted her hands before her and waved them from side to side before the child’s face, in negation, as though she could silence Ruth with the gesture. The infant’s small pupils focused fuzzily on the motion and tried to follow their movement. Ruth sighed and drifted back into slumber.
Let not the sins of the father . . . and before Margaret fully realized what she was doing she picked up the bin liner and the string. Then she lifted the baby, cradling Ruth in her arms, crooned to her through cracked and split lips, and slipped the sack over the tiny head. The woman froze, waiting for the child to cry out, or wake in fear, but the opposite happened. Finding comfort in her mother’s arms, the breathing deepened and the little body relaxed.
Margaret returned her daughter to the cot, grabbed the short length of string, and then threaded it under the tiny neck. Crossing the loop, end over end, and drawing the string closed in barely perceptible stages, still humming a sweet lullaby. Until the bag began to bunch at the neck. Biodegradable plastic grazed the skin, and again her movement was arrested as she anticipated the child’s cry.
Nothing. Silence.
Tighter.
Aspel quipped, and in the living room Robert chuckled on cue, his wife forgotten.
Margaret’s daughter would never know agony and such pain.
Tighter.
The soft susurration of breath, the bag expanding like a balloon.
The child’s hopes would never be raised only to be dashed upon the rocks of reality.
Tighter.
The balloon deflated, and a tiny hand clenched at the blanket.
Her daughter would never feel the fire of her father’s fist upon her face.
Tighter.
The bag drew in further, showing an imprint of nose and lips upon white. Satisfied that no oxygen could reach her, Margaret gently tied the cord.
<
* * * *
JULIAN RA
THBONE
OF MICE, MEN AND TWO WOMEN
R
anjit Singh owned a tiny corner shop in Walthamstow, one of the more run down suburbs of north-east London. Since he was some distance behind the high street and a good half mile from the nearest superstore and another good mile from the nearest street market it was a handy little business. His shop closed for eight hours in every twenty-four and during the other sixteen sold bread, milk, cakes, biscuits, crisps, newspapers, pork pies and sausage rolls, condoms, aspirin, and from a cold cabinet with a steel grill which was meant to be kept locked, Lambrusco wines, halfs of scotch and vodka, blue thunderbird wine, strong lagers and Kinder eggs.
Through a variety of means, including extortion with menaces, bribery, and other malpractices, a property firm called Casby, Casby, Casby and Sun, had acquired ninety-nine year leases on the three terraced properties next to the shop and planning permission to convert them not just into the usual six flats but, through cunning exploitation of the fact they owned three linked shells rather than three separate buildings, ten. There were actually no Casbys extant in the firm and Sun was Kai Won Sun late of Victoria Island, Hong Kong.
When he read the request for planning permission Ranjit had been delighted: ten families instead of six would mean that much more custom. He had been far less pleased though when the first skip arrived on his doorstep and the banging and crashing got under way as the dwellings were gutted, and planks and piles of wet cement appeared on the pavement. Worst of all the progress of his regular customers to his shop-door was impeded by trundling wheel-barrows and a startlingly beautiful Afro-Caribbean male who stood in the pocket handkerchief gardens of the houses and heaved into the skips the timber and plaster his mates chucked down to him. His name was Lennie Enfield.
Not that Ranjit was much bothered personally. He was rarely in the shop these days, leaving the work to his wife Amirya, and a succession of ill-paid school-leavers. A thin, dried-up man, prematurely aged at sixty, he was now deeply into study of the seven gurus of his religion and confined his shopkeeping to examining the accounts less attentively than he did the scriptures.
About Lennie Enfield’s beauty let’s just say it reminded elderly white females of Harry Belafonte in Island in the Sun, and while we’re at it we might add that Amirya’s recalled in the hearts of elderly white males the transcendent loveliness of Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, but a Gardner with an all-over tan. Amirya herself came from Trinidad and was well-westernized in her ways. However her parents maintained the formalities of Sikh culture, and her marriage to Ranjit, who did indeed hail from the Punjab, had been arranged.
Lennie was twenty, she was thirty and the oldest of the three children of her loveless marriage was already fourteen years old. All right, we all know that most arranged marriages are not loveless, but hers was. She was unlikely to have any more children since Ranjit had given up on sex as well as commerce.
Lennie fell in love at first sight. There was nothing romantic about it in the Mills and Boon sense of the word though Byron might not have found the cosmic energy of his lust alien to the Romantic Imagination. Nor would elderly white males who still remember Ava Gardner.
He waited though, after his first sight of her, not for seven centuries nor for seven years but seven minutes, until the shop was empty: then he swung through the chiming door and stood in front of the low glass-topped counter and looked across at her. His thumbs were hooked in the wide belt of his tight jeans, his biceps stretched the short sleeves of his green sweatshirt. Outside the late April sunshine danced through the motes above his skip and made an aureole round his bronze head, silvered the sweat, glanced off his shining skin, glittered in his single earring.
He flexed his pectorals and said: ‘Twenty Embassy, and please, woman, would you fuck with me?’
Since this precisely fitted the fantasy she had been working on ever since she clapped eyes on his torso through the shop window above the video poster for Basic Instinct just six minutes earlier, a fantasy that had caused her to give change for a placido when the customer had tended her a fiver, she was not surprised, or frightened. Indeed the fact that he had said ‘would you’ and ‘with me’, and ‘please’, though that probably related to the cigarettes, added tenderness to passion.
She smiled, those teeth, those full, plum-coloured lips, and sighed - that large heavy but well-shaped bosom - leant across the counter and, in a gesture that was almost maternal, brushed white plaster dust from his chest, letting her hand discover the hardness of the muscle beneath.
‘That would be nice, man. But where?’
‘Woman,’ he said, and she fancied it was more a growl, the sort of growl a tom-cat makes prior to the moment of truth, than any noise Belafonte ever emitted, ‘next door we have twenty-eight empty rooms. An’ some of thems still ’as beds in.’
* * * *
The affair was brazen. Ranjit was not popular in the neighbourhood: he gave tick to no one, not to Afros finding themselves out of bread of both sorts on a Sunday morning, nor to old cockney ladies who claimed they had been mugged on his very doorstep. When the children of BBC (Radio) producers came for adult videos he sent them back and made their parents collect the videos in person. Moreover, there was no Sikh community in the area: Ranjit had picked the shop from an Evening Standard advertisement and had not minded moving the five miles or so from Tower Hamlets. So no one in the near neighbourhood was going to tell him his wife was having it away with an Afro stud ten years her junior.
She found plenty of excuses to get out while the teenagers and school-leavers minded the shop: down the cash and carry for something he had forgotten, an open afternoon at the primary school, aromatherapy and reflexology classes, and the Asian Women for Peace Association were already on her list for calls in the few hours he allowed her to be out each afternoon. Once clear of the shop she had only to duck down a service entry and into the tiny alley that ran behind the terrace to where Lennie would be waiting for her at one of three gates, alone.
The old biddies told her: ‘Go on ducks, get it while yer can, they won’t look at yer’n ten years’ time, we won’t tell, and I think I’ll’ave a packet of the Belgian meat paste while I’m at it, my good-ness’e can’t really want 87p for a sliver like that can’e?’ And she sold the Afro kiddies ciggies, but still whacked them over the earhole if they tried to steal, which they respected her for, and when Ben, from opposite, wrapped a copy of Penthouse inside his Independent just as his wife came in to remind him to get some green lentils, she didn’t let on at all. She charged him though, of course. And in return for these little favours everyone kept quiet about her.
Lennie’s mates really were mates, even the foreman was only twenty-five and had not yet turned class traitor: when the contractor came round at an inopportune moment he always said that Lennie was the reliable one, the one he sent out for a kilo of nails or a five litre can of paint-stripper if they’d run short, when actually he was bonking Amirya in the upstairs back of number eight. And once, when the contractor, a podgy grey man whose car component business in the north Midlands had gone into liquidation two years earlier questioned the rhythmic beat on the ceiling above, the foreman explained that it was a minor plumbing problem they were getting on the top of, indeed Lennie was down B and Q looking for some washers right now.
And so in upstairs rooms, filled with dust, lit from open curtainless windows, often with only a bare mattress considerately left for them to lie on, they made rapturous sunlit love in just about every way you can think of. The air around them was laden with the perfume of narcissi, then lilac and finally roses; outside lascivious sparrows chirped rhythmically while the blackbirds sang smugly of territory held and eggs hatched in the depths of untended privet. Occasionally Lennie would bring a joint of best Colombian red, and once or twice, knowing her husband would be out way beyond when Lennie would have to go, and breath fresheners would have time to remove the evidence, she brought up a half of Bell’s with nan br
ead and a wedge of dolcelatte, These extra delights were not there to stimulate exhausted desire but rather to celebrate its happy satiation. No one had ever told them that sadness follows copulation, so for them it did not.
But one by one the mattresses went, new doorways smaller even than before were made good, and the heavy smell of modern gloss paints poisoned air that had been redolent with the sour sharpness of fresh wood shavings. Amirya longed for decent comfort. And so one Sunday evening late in May she told Lennie that since nine o’clock next morning Ranjit would be out, she expected Lennie to be in, and dammit, she’d close the shop. He, for his part, had come to tell her that since the full skips could not be collected until the late morning he and his mates would be down Hackney Marshes on another job until one o’clock, but he agreed they’d cover for him.
London Noir - [Anthology] Page 17