‘Balla asson’ee? Sharifa keta horra? Baht hai lisson’ee. Bhai-sahb ye keta hoi la?’
He listened anyway. He was surprised to hear the flood of Bengali. He’d never heard her talk so much. She didn’t make it sound so bad. Not like the ignorant Pakis in the shops all gabbling away. Gora this, gora that. That’s when you knew they were slagging off white people.
‘Ai tam nai. Ami kham erchta faissee gorro roybar zaga assé. Sinta horrio na. Sinta horrio na. I love you.’
The line went dead. Beauty looked at the phone in her hand.
Mark heard her sniffing and went into the sitting room.
‘You OK?’ He offered her a roll of grey toilet paper.
Beauty thanked him.
Things were OK. They weren’t looking for her, not yet anyway. Her mother had told her that Dulal was convinced she’d be back within a few days. Let her come home on her knees, begging for forgiveness, he’d said. And if she didn’t, he’d bring her back.
But it was easier to deal with her brother’s punches than her mother’s pleas for Beauty to go home. And why had Ama hung up suddenly? Someone must have come into the room. The old man would scream if he found out she’d phoned.
Maybe they told Mum to ring, and make out she was suffering.
‘Families, man,’ Mark said.
Beauty smiled.
‘Was that yer mum?’
She nodded.
‘Was she telling you to go home?’
‘Not really. I just miss her. Sorry.’ Beauty pressed the tissue to her nose again.
‘Do’ mind me,’ Mark said. ‘Ay they gonna come looking?’ He looked at the pretty Bengali girl on his new sofa and hoped not.
It was just about the rent money, right?
‘They think I’ll go back in a couple of days.’
*
Mark wanted to cheer her up. She looked miserable. He knew what it meant to be alone, trapped inside yourself, trapped in jail, trapped in a house where no one came to visit. You needed someone to talk to. Not about anything in particular. Just things.
He drew the curtains and switched on Midlands Today. The halogen heaters would make it cosy. She could watch TV while he fixed the computer.
‘Y’m all right now though. Y’ve got a roof over yer head, if you want it, and a job lined up.’
Beauty looked at Mark as he sat hunched over the back of the computer fiddling with the wires, at his closely shaven dark hair and sideburns and the sharp line of his jaw and chin. He was right, wasn’t he? Not long ago she’d been running through the streets, with nowhere to go and no money. Who was he? How come he was in the street just when she had needed someone? Maybe this was her tochdir, her kishmut. Fate, or whatever white people called it.
Maybe Al-lh sent him.
To make me live with a strange man?
It aynt haram if you’re in danger.
‘Anyway, y’m better off on yer own in this life,’ he said. ‘Least, that’s what I reckon.’
‘Don’t you get on with your family?’ she asked. How could it be better with no mother or sister near you?
Let him talk.
‘Put it this way … they dey get on wi’ me.’
Mark closed one eye as smoke drifted into it.
‘Give ’em too much grief as a kid,’ he said.
Beauty thought of her older brother and the times she had cleaned up his puke when he’d come home drunk. And the smell of ganja coming from his room.
‘All kids do wrong things. Thass normal,’ she said, and looked at him to see what was in his eyes.
‘Not like me,’ he said, and was silent. She might be shocked by how much time he’d spent inside. But why was he bothered what she thought? ‘Anyway, I caar blame ’em. I was bad.’
He looked at her to see the effect.
‘I ay like that no more,’ he added. He wanted her to know that he’d changed. And that life wasn’t better on your own.
‘What did you do?’ Beauty asked. What if he’d killed or raped someone? He didn’t seem that type. You could tell a pervert by his eyes. The way they look at you. The mullah, his brother, cousins, men in London, Iraqis …
Mark watched Beauty tapping ash into the saucer on the arm of the sofa. He wondered what her hair looked like under her scarf.
‘I started pinching cars when I was eleven years old.’
‘Why?’ Beauty asked. Stealing!
‘For a laff. Getting chased by the old bill.’
‘Thass fun?’
Mark thought about it, the flashing lights in the rearview mirror, the understeer and handbrake turns, ditching the car and running.
‘Ye’man!’
But the time inside hadn’t been fun, and that period in his life was over. He decided not to tell her about the thefts of two hundred motor vehicles he’d had Taken into Consideration. Pinched to order, most of them. You got three hundred quid for a Cozzie back in them days. At fourteen he was making and spending a couple of grand a month.
‘I ay diwin’ that shit again. Put my family through hell, dey I? Thass why they ay bothered wi’ me now, d’you know woddamean?’ He shrugged. ‘I ay bin in jail now for nearly two years, and I ay giwin’ back. I wanna show me mam.’
‘What about your dad?’ Beauty asked.
‘I ay sin ’im since I was six.’
He wrapped two wires with tape and cut it with his teeth. Why was he telling her all this? He’d never mentioned it to the counsellors in jail. Not even the ex-wife. It felt right telling Beauty. Like they were in it together.
‘I ay blamin’ ’em though. I were a pain in the arse, but I’m diwin’ all right at the minute. Got me dogs, and the rent paid by the social.’
Beauty looked around the room and nodded.
Mark was pleased with her approval. ‘And I could sort me business plan out if I dey have to go on that fookin’ course. You won’t have to if y’m on Incapacity. What did the doctor say?’
‘I told him I had to leave home,’ Beauty said. ‘He gave me a sick note for three months and some pills.’
‘You do’ wanna be tekkin’ pills. They gimme tons a that shit in jail. Proper messes wi’ yer head, them things. Mek you feel ten times worse. What am they?’
Beauty took the slim box of tablets from her pocket.
‘Wossit say about the side effects?’ Mark asked. ‘Thass what you godder watch out for.’
‘I dunno,’ she said, passing the packet to him.
Mark took it from her. ‘Caar you read?’ he asked. He didn’t make it sound bad.
‘I got a problem with it, aynit.’
He didn’t laugh at her, and she didn’t feel embarrassed in front of him. It felt right to tell him. ‘I didn’t go to school much,’ she explained. But she didn’t tell him that they’d tried many times to make her read. She’d sat at tables at home and stared at the letters on the page. She copied the words when the mullah’s pervert brother shouted, but none of it made sense. And she’d believed them when they said there was something wrong with her. She was thick, she’d never be able to do it. Anyway, what did it matter? She was a girl. What her brothers did at school was more important.
Mark passed back the pills. ‘I taught misself to read in jail. Went to a few lessons, like. It’s a piece a piss.’
Beauty didn’t want to shame herself in front of him. ‘I tried loads of times. I’m a bit thick,’ she said.
‘Bollocks. Iss like riding a bike or driving a car – you godder practise. Tay hard. I’ll teach you if y’m staying for a while.’
Beauty watched him as he turned back to the computer. Wouldn’t it be good to tell Sharifa that she could read?
‘I could have another go, I suppose.’
Mark took the screwdriver from his mouth. Did that mean she might stick around?
‘Nice one,’ he said, and grinned.
He’d clean out the kitchen the next day.
27
Peter looked at the light around the curtain of Mark’s sitting-room
window. Was Beauty there? Should he knock?
He went back inside and closed the front door. His house was silent, the television unplugged. Neither would do any more. He wanted her to come round, had felt in limbo since he’d last seen her. It bothered him that he hadn’t been able to enthral her with the prospect of her freedom. Her mind was a blank canvas waiting to be filled. He knew that he’d once had the words to describe mankind’s accomplishments and make a person’s heart sing. But if he was no longer able to summon up his own sense of wonder, how could he inspire anyone else? And what did that say about the time he had spent shunning the madding crowd’s ignoble strife and devoting himself to the pursuit of knowledge?
It was different when she was there. Her innocence and ignorance were an inspiration, as well as her exquisite looks. He’d felt alive in the thirty minutes of her visit, had lain awake for hours afterwards fantasizing about guiding her through all the pleasures of life which she’d been denied.
And peeling off her clothes, although he’d tried to keep this to a minimum.
He paced from the back door to the front and peered at himself in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs. His eyes were glassy and red and he knew he’d smoked too much.
At least he still recognized his own image. Not like Baudelaire.
‘Today I felt the wing of madness brush my cheek.’ Or something like that.
If his thoughts could still turn to the poets maybe he could dredge up some joie de vivre. Maybe even a raison d’être.
But the Frenchman had died of syphilis in his early thirties. Beguiled and poisoned by a woman.
He returned to the kitchen and looked through the window into the darkened backyard, at the uneven outline of the slatted wooden fence and the roofs of the houses beyond. Once, he would have found some melancholy beauty in it. Or in the dreary faces of those he passed in the street. All that had gone.
What was the point of thinking about Baudelaire and the finer things in life unless she was there to share it? Beauty.
He sat down on the sagging sofa and shut his eyes. He wasn’t thinking straight. She was just a charming distraction.
He’d go to Asda shortly. At least there would be housewives and forty-somethings to smile at over the fruit and vegetables. Or had that lost its allure too?
The minutes passed in silence. Would she come again? And did he really think he could have his way with her? Did he really want to? Surely his interest in her wasn’t just sexually motivated. Had he really become that shallow, as well as dissolute?
No, he hadn’t! She was good company, she was interested. Her eyes were keen and bright. It was proof that you could have a more stimulating conversation with a religious devotee than with a metropolitan phoney like Kate. She would have asked him what he was ‘banging on about now’. Beauty had a nascent, timid intellectual curiosity. If he could overcome her irrational fears of transgressing the mores of her repressive belief system, he would be doing his bit for womankind. He could rediscover life’s mysteries through her exploration of them. And he might yet intellectualize his lustful thoughts for her. Let undressing her become a metaphor for stripping away the blinkers of religious dogma, or vice versa.
And if not her, then someone like her. Unformed, enquiring and innocent. The girl he’d met in the pub when he went out with Mark, what was her name? Louise. Wouldn’t she appreciate being lifted out of the darkness of satellite television and the hand-chapping grind of scullery work?
No. It had to be Beauty. The cultural gulf was a greater attraction. The promise of Eastern mystery. He tried to fight the thought that she was probably still a virgin … and of a wedding night on a flower-strewn bed in Rajasthan. Couldn’t he have a quick peek online at some Indian porn? There must be some.
No! It was wrong. It debased his noble thoughts about her.
It was Kate’s fault. She’d held him back for the last few years. Her endless talk of home improvements and ‘clearing out the loft’, the pseudo-intellectual conversations at dinner parties with her lowbrow media-generating and consuming friends (where everyone’s opinions were of equal validity by simple virtue of being opinions) had almost left him without the will to live.
With the right woman he might have done more over the last five years. His thirties had passed him by. Kate hadn’t understood his brilliant mind, he decided. Maybe that wasn’t even necessary in a woman. Perhaps all you needed was someone quietly supportive, who understood that she didn’t understand but who wanted to; a woman who hadn’t imbibed an over-inflated sense of her centrality in the universe from the pages of glossy magazines. Did such women exist? Otherwise you were better off alone. At least you weren’t pulled down from the stars – the rightful place for a thinking man like himself – by trips to Homebase every Sunday afternoon.
Kate. Her text message asking him whether he loved her had so far gone unanswered.
Of course I do. It had always been easier than telling her the truth.
Kate Morgan hung up. Peter wasn’t answering. That was three missed calls. What was he doing? Why didn’t he ring back? He knew she’d be anxious; that she needed to talk things through with him, to discuss their relationship and where it was headed. Wasn’t she his partner? They were supposed to be in love, weren’t they? Didn’t that mean being together, doing things together, sharing?
‘Bastard,’ she said aloud.
She was physically exhausted and mentally drained, and couldn’t afford to wait forever. Life was slipping by. She wanted to share it with someone who made her feel special, like a … woman, someone who loved her for who she was. Was that too much to ask? If Peter wasn’t able to make that kind of commitment, then what was the point of being with him? She could get other men. She knew they looked at her in the street. Revolting van drivers still honked at her in summer.
But the thought of being alone until she found another man was frightening. At least Peter listened. Maybe he did still love her? She knew she was difficult to be with, high-maintenance, but that’s what love was all about, wasn’t it? Maybe he just felt challenged because he didn’t have enough money to buy a house. The thought had crossed her mind before.
She needed to be positive.
Didn’t she have a right to be happy, too?
She’d go and see him.
She’d need a repeat prescription of antidepressants before she went. Maybe some more Citalopram, or Lofepramine.
That would show him what he was doing to her.
Peter splashed some water on his face, checked himself in the mirror and left the house. He drove the short distance to Asda, safely past the chip shop and the murderous-looking gangsters, yobs and hags in Graiseley Park.
The bright lights of the superstore blinded him momentarily, and he wandered around, unable to decide what to eat. There was an entire aisle of sliced white bread. He looked into other people’s trolleys for inspiration but everything was in boxes. A couple of women flicked their hair at him among the cheeses, but they reminded him of Kate. How soon before they started talking about house prices and saying things like ‘I’m thinking of knocking that wall through into the lounge to make one big space’?
Peter knew he could never go back to that type of life. But what were the alternatives? Giving up altogether? Staying here and slumming it with the underclass in the freezer section? Why not? It couldn’t be more worthless an existence than living in London, on the edges of what passed for society. Were the downtrodden welfare masses, filling their trolleys with oven-ready chips, less fitting company for him? He watched an impoverished, elderly man in a thin coat inspect a bag of chicken nuggets through pale, watery eyes, and place it carefully in the bottom of his basket, next to a bottle of tomato ketchup, with a liver-spotted hand.
Peter was no ragged-trousered philanthropist. There was nothing romantic to be found in Asda.
And there was nothing to eat either. He put the basket back and went to the car. What if Beauty came round while he was out?
It bothere
d him that he could find nothing with which to entertain himself, other than the thought of the Bangladeshi girl and her possible reappearance.
He was restless, that was all, and had latched on to the nearest thing to drag him out of his ennui.
But he feared spending the rest of his days in a bare sitting room on someone else’s sofa. In Wolverhampton.
The West Mids.
Alone in front of the computer.
After Beauty had gone to bed, Mark sat at the computer and scrolled through the list of tunes he’d downloaded. He couldn’t get into the chatrooms. But for the first time since the line had been cut, he didn’t mind.
She was nice. And he liked talking to her. Beauty.
He’d told her about growing up in Burntwood, what it was like in jail, and how he was never going back. He’d asked her about her brothers and gripped the arms of the chair when he heard how often they used to beat her up. They needed a damn good kicking.
But she didn’t tell him much, he knew. Something bad had happened to her. He recognized the dead-eyed look she had sometimes. He’d seen it in other boys in care, when they were talking of one thing and thinking about another.
Mark smoked and swung round slowly in the chair, thinking of ways he could help her. He fantasized about protecting her in the streets from her brothers, or from those Asian blokes in the car. He’d take a couple of blows, knock one out and headbutt the other on the bridge of his nose, then push her into a car that he’d have to hot-wire. Maybe get chased across Wolves and lose them with his superior driving skills.
And he liked the idea of teaching her to read.
Beauty lay on the bed and listened to the wind in the trees outside. The dogs barked when they heard Mark in the kitchen below. She liked the different threats he yelled at them through the open window.
He’s all right.
She wondered again whether Allah had sent him, and tried to imagine what would have happened that night if he hadn’t been there. She might be at home already, packing her bags for Bangladesh, or that other place.
As soon as she had enough money she’d find her own place to live. Even if God had sent him, she shouldn’t live with him if there was somewhere else to go. That would be haram.
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