Beauty

by Raphael Selbourne

  This girl had found work and somewhere to stay. She was keeping it together. Still, she’d been referred. Puja would need to probe further, to satisfy herself that Beauty was not at risk. The Bangladeshi girl’s reluctance to talk might be a front to avoid dealing with difficult issues. A natural defence mechanism. It could take weeks for a patient to open up. Sometimes they never did.

  Beauty didn’t need any help, and she didn’t like the questions about her family life. Not from a nosy Asian. What did she understand anyway? She’d not suffered anything, you could tell from her eyes. Beauty was the one who should be working here. ‘Listen, I went through a lot,’ she said. ‘But I aynt mental.’

  Puja smiled at her use of the word, but she would reserve judgement. She knew what ‘a lot’ could mean. The ones who didn’t go under often turned out tough. Which one was this girl? She’d invite her back to talk again, just for a chat, to see how she was getting on.

  Beauty didn’t want to come for a chat. The idea of working here had taken root. She knew what girls went through. She could help them. Her own kind. Wasn’t she going through the same stuff?

  ‘I don’t need help,’ she said, and asked what she had to do to get a job at the women’s centre, like she was doing at the care home. ‘Phone them. They’ll tell you I aynt mental.’

  Puja recognized the aggressive-defensive tone in the girl’s voice. She wasn’t out of the woods yet. But Beauty seemed to have a strength most of the women upstairs needed, and Puja was always short of volunteers, especially at night. Maybe she could help and comfort some of them. It might also be a way of getting her back to the centre, where Puja could keep an eye on her.

  But it was tough work, physically. Would she be able to handle it? The women they helped were there for a variety of reasons. Domestic violence and abuse, self-harm and attempted suicide, eating disorders, depression and nervous breakdowns. Some had severe learning difficulties. They had a small team of counsellors and volunteers who tried as best they could to provide some comfort. They helped with accessing benefits, housing and jobs too. But funding was always a problem.

  Beauty didn’t understand everything. She knew what suicide was, but what was a nervous breakdown? What kind of abuse was the woman talking about? And didn’t Beauty have learning difficulties?

  Puja keyed in the security code for the heavy door at the top of the stairs and held it open for Beauty. She pointed out some of the residents’ rooms and mini-apartments. ‘We try to encourage independent living,’ she said.

  They stopped at the communal dining room, and Beauty looked through the glass panes in the door.

  A dozen Asian women, Pakistani and Sikh, and several girls the same age as Beauty sat around a long table. Large Jamaican women in plastic aprons brought bowls of rice and curry, and plates of chapattis from a serving hatch. One Sikh lady had a black eye and a plaster over the bridge of her nose. A long-haired Pakistani girl had razor stripes on her forearms and bandages around her wrists. The women didn’t eat much. The eyes around the table were dead. The lips of the older women mumbled continuously, but not to each other. An emaciated Indian girl in jeans and a fleece swept her plate of chicken and rice to the floor. The woman with the broken nose leaned towards her and patted her hand, while one of the Jamaican women came to clean up.

  And on the floor in the corner was a girl in a black salwar with embroidered trim and a brown headscarf. Her knees were clasped to her chest, her face pressed between them. There was an untouched plate of rice by her side, and a small rucksack. She looked up and stared at the door, searching it, until her eyes met Beauty’s through the glass.

  Beauty stared back at herself, and her legs trembled.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She started at Puja’s voice, and looked back into the dining room, but there was no girl on the floor, no plate of rice or rucksack.

  ‘I thought I saw … a friend,’ Beauty said.

  Puja took her to see other communal areas, a kitchen, the television room, a library with internet access. Beauty tried to concentrate. She felt sick and dizzy, and wanted to sit down. Was she going mad?

  They reached a staff bedroom on the top floor. It was bright and clean. She looked out onto the main road and a primary school playground. Children in black trousers and blue sweatshirts chased each other, the noise of their excited cries reaching her over the traffic.

  An eight-year-old girl with a long black plait, like Beauty’s used to be, stood in the playground alone.

  ‘What we really need is weekend staff,’ Puja said.

  Beauty came away from the window. ‘How do you help them women get better?’ she asked.

  Puja explained that some were on courses of medication, counselling and therapy; others had learning difficulties and would return to their families. The victims of abuse and domestic violence were often the hardest to help.

  She accompanied Beauty to the top of the stairs. ‘Grab our literature on the way out. It will give you an idea.’

  Puja couldn’t force her to talk, but the girl agreed to come back.

  Beauty had no idea what ‘literature’ was, but picked up the leaflets by the door.

  Outside, the children’s shouts sounded louder. She stood on the doorstep and searched the playground but couldn’t find the girl with the long plait.

  Dust blew into her eyes and the hissing brakes of a bus hurt her ears as she crossed the road. Were the drivers of the cars looking at her? She tugged at her headscarf and kept her eyes on the pavement.

  I aynt mad. I aynt like them women in that place. People helping them to eat. I aynt like that. They must have went mental from the pressure. They couldn’t take it no more.

  She knew what they’d been through. How many of them had been touched by men, raped, beaten, forced to marry, forced to go back home, forced to have abortions, forced to give up their love-babies?

  Corner-girls.

  Evans Street was quieter, sheltered from the wind.

  I aynt mental.

  I seen a ghost, thass all.

  They were the spirits of grown-up dead babies. She’d never seen one before, but she knew they existed. Her brother had seen one back home. Usually they lived in tamarind or mango trees. But in this country they stayed in parks.

  Beauty quickened her pace past brown tower blocks, their windows occasionally boarded up, blackened by the smoke from fires. She knew what she had to do.

  The house was quiet. Mark stopped typing his CV and swivelled in the chair. He’d slept well and had a good bath. He had two hundred quid in his back pocket, and was wondering how to spend some of it. On her. They could go somewhere for their tea, maybe. He looked up when the door opened from the street. She looked pale and beautiful, and stared at him as she caught her breath.

  ‘Can you teach me to read?’

  38

  Beauty changed into a pair of jeans. She didn’t like the idea of having ‘learning difficulties’. And she didn’t want that Indian lady to think she was thick either. She wanted to help those other women. She’d prove she wasn’t loony, that she didn’t have ‘learning difficulties’, by learning to read.

  And if she had seen ghosts, that just proved people were right about them. It wasn’t anything to worry about. Back home an old lady bhout had got inside her mum once when she was a little girl. She’d trodden on a shadow and the ghost came out of the tree. The old man had walked in ghost wind and got his neck twisted for two days.

  But how can you see a ghost of yourself?

  Mark waited for her and remembered the few English lessons he’d had in jail; how he’d struggled with some fucked-up spelling rules and spent hours on his bed after lock-in getting his head round it; and how he’d taught that lad he’d shared a cell with. If Beauty knew the alphabet it would be a start. She’d need to know the sounds each letter made, alone and together. He felt confident he could do it, and he was happy to help her. It would give him an excuse to be with her. Sit near her. It didn’t go any further than tha
t.

  He couldn’t, didn’t, imagine sex with her. It wasn’t right. The word was even embarrassing. She was probably still a virgin. That was a big deal.

  Spending some time with her would be a good thing. She’d get to know him more and see that he was a good bloke.

  Beauty came in and sat on the sofa. ‘Promise you aynt gonna laugh?’ she asked.

  Mark saw the begging look in her eye. ‘Do’ worry. I dey learn till I were sixteen misself.’

  He took some paper from the printer and searched for a pen on the computer desk. ‘D’you know the alphabet?’ he asked.

  ‘A-B-C stuff?’

  Beauty knew she would sound thick at first. There was nothing she could do about it. But she did know the alphabet.

  ‘Giw on then,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Loud?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  She recited it steadily to the end.

  ‘Thass all right,’ Mark said. ‘Can you write it?’

  She could, but not very well.

  ‘Both ways?’ he asked.

  What did that mean? Big and small?

  She could do that as well. She told him what the problem was. She knew the letters, but when they were put together it didn’t make no sense. Even her own name. How could bee, ee, ay, you, tee, why make ‘Beauty’?

  Mark listened. It was like diagnosing engine problems. He searched for a simple explanation. Each letter made a different sound, he told her. Sometimes more than one. When you knew what they were, you could start putting the letters together. The letter ‘A’ could be ‘ay’ as in ‘I dey do something’, or like in ‘at’; you didn’t say ‘bee’, it was ‘buh’ like in ‘buh-nana’.

  He checked she knew what sounds each of the letters made.

  Beauty asked him how she was supposed to know which way to say some of the letters, like ‘c’ and ‘g’. He told her she’d get used to it. He’d keep it simple to start with, he promised, and wrote three-letter words on a piece of paper. They sounded them out slowly together.

  She saw how to do it. You didn’t always say it the A-B-C-D way. It was the first bit of each letter, ‘d’ not ‘dee’, ‘o’ not ‘oh’, ‘e’ not ‘ee’. P-e-n. Pen. B-e-d. Bed. It was slow.

  Mark sat next to her, helping, but not telling her the answer. He pulled the coffee table closer and wrote all the three-letter words he could think of. Beauty sounded out each one, letter by letter, over and again until the words took shape before her. M-a-n. Man. D-o-g. Dog.

  She sat cross-legged on the parquet floor and read the words to him, surprised and delighted each time the snaking letters revealed their meaning. The tiredness from her sleepless night vanished. She felt awake, the room seemed brighter, everything was clearer, not just the words on the piece of paper.

  I aynt mental.

  I aynt got ‘learning difficulties’.

  I aynt dumb.

  She could read. Not well, but she could do it. Mark was patient. He went over the letters with her until she got it right and didn’t need his help.

  *

  Hours passed. He made tea and rolled cigarettes. She took one to please him. It tasted horrible at first and made her head spin.

  Then he called out words from the list and she tried to write them down, repeating each word over and trying to work out the letters. It was harder than reading but when she got it right it felt good. ‘I’ and ‘E’ were difficult.

  Mark watched her fingers grip the pen as she wrote. He willed her on and planned what to introduce next. He was pleased with her progress and his skills as a teacher. When he was satisfied she’d got the hang of it he introduced some harder stuff. Two letters together, like ‘st’ and ‘th’.

  Beauty’s finger hurt from pressing the pen. She stretched and leaned back, brushing against his leg.

  She was happy. She wanted to tell her little sis that she could read, and her mum.

  No one had explained it to her like Mark had. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to listen. Her family told her she was dumb, so she had been dumb for them. It helped block them out, their noise and shouts. Then the old man said she was mad, so she was mad for them.

  No one had been patient with her or encouraged her like Mark did. No one had ever asked her how she got on at school. They didn’t ask Sharifa either.

  Mark was different. How was it that a stranger had done more for her than her own family? She knew he liked her, but he looked at her from far away. The white gunda was shy. He was a tough guy but he couldn’t hold her eye for long. It was sweet, and she knew she’d be safe with him if they got a house together. He was kind, too. And lonely. He wanted people to like him. He was arwa, innocent, even though he was a scary racist type, with a cap tipped to the back of his head, the England shirt and dogs.

  But he had done something for her they never had.

  Al-lh give him long life. Keep him shanti; give him money, good health, and kids that respect him.

  From now on she’d pray for him every day.

  Mark told her she’d need to spend a lot more time on her reading. They could do a bit every day. She could practise down here, or in her room. He talked about moving house, showed her the lists he’d picked up that morning from the estate agents and housing associations in Chapel Ash, and told her to circle the ones that said DSS/PETS OK.

  Mark switched on the heater and they watched EastEnders and Coronation Street together, and his favourite programme – police camera recordings on Car Crime Street Wars UK.

  39

  The two women walked up Darlington Street towards the town centre. Beauty wondered how long this would take. She hadn’t wanted to go with Kate. She only had her pink salwar to wear, the old-fashioned one her mum had given her, and had wanted to go to the launderette before it closed. The lady had pulled up in her car as Beauty was returning home from her morning shift. She’d begged Beauty to let her take her out for tea, to apologize for how she’d behaved. Peter had explained everything to her, she said. Beauty winced at the thought of these strangers talking about her and told the woman there was no need to say sorry. But Kate had insisted and it had been easier to go.

  Kate Morgan strode ahead and looked at the shabbily dressed people, the women in cheap high street clothes from many seasons ago. It was another world. Kate was glad she hadn’t worn anything too ostentatious. Her D&G overcoat and scarf, Diesel jeans and trainers were enough. Lots of designers made urban-chic clothes these days.

  The Indian girl next to her – Bangladeshi, Peter had corrected her irritatingly – was a funny one. That thing she was wearing really was peculiar. Kate would have felt sorry for her, but actually it was quite embarrassing. She looked like an old woman with all the excess material bunched between her legs. Maybe she was religious. Or straight out of a village. Other Asians in the town didn’t dress like that.

  Beauty.

  Her name was a bit cringeworthy too.

  Beauty struggled to keep up. The lady didn’t want to go into any of the cafés. They looked dirty, she said, so Beauty took her to the Wulfrun Centre instead.

  The coffee bar was in a roped-off section in one of the plazas. As they slid into seats opposite each other, Kate apologized again for the night before. Her nerves had been on edge, she said. Her relationship with Peter had hit a rocky patch recently, and she hadn’t known where she stood with him.

  Beauty eyed the passing shoppers for her brothers’ faces. Would they dare do anything if she was with a white woman in a public place?

  ‘Everything’s OK now,’ Kate said.

  She watched the pretty girl break off a small piece of cake and put it in her mouth … ever so daintily. Was she sweet and naïve, or was it just an act? And did it matter, now that Peter had shown Kate how he really felt? She’d let this one know about it, just in case. You could never really trust another woman.

  She beckoned the Bangladeshi girl to come closer.

  Beauty leaned forward. She was glad t
he lady was smiling and happy today. But why did she want to tell a stranger her private stuff?

  ‘We had wonderful sex last night!’ the woman said.

  Beauty didn’t move.

  ‘He literally tore my clothes off.’

  She tried not to hear her words. Her cheeks stung.

  ‘Grabbing me … touching me everywhere. And he was so hard!’ She’d never had such intense orgasms with him. ‘You know that feeling when you literally melt?’

  Beauty didn’t want to listen, didn’t know what the woman’s words meant.

  Yes, you do.

  Kate sat back in her chair.

  ‘It was such a relief,’ she said. ‘I’d been suffering these terrible anxiety attacks that he didn’t love me any more. You can imagine what I thought when I saw you there! That’s why I just had to say sorry for being such a cow. I’m usually a very chilled-out person.’

  Beauty let out her breath. ‘Does that mean you’ll get married now?’ she asked, and reddened in case it was another of her arwa questions.

  Kate smiled at the girl’s innocence. There was nothing to fear. She was a complete child; likeable, too. And she was a good listener, just what Kate needed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve felt so low about it over the last couple of years, I don’t think I’ve got the strength left in me to keep on struggling. I was on the floor the day before I came up here.’

  Beauty wondered what the woman had been doing on the floor. She watched the passing shoppers – white, Asian, black, Chinese, Iraqi faces – and hoped the lady would finish talking soon.

  Kate scraped the cream from the plate with the side of her fork. ‘Here I am, banging on about myself! What about you? Are you going out with anyone at the moment?’ she asked.

  Beauty wanted to tell her that Muslim girls didn’t have boyfriends. Or if they did, they didn’t talk about it.

  ‘I’m waiting for the right bloke,’ she said. Did that sound white? The woman nodded, so it must have done.