Beauty

by Raphael Selbourne

  ‘That’s what bothers me about Peter,’ Kate said. ‘Sometimes I think, “Is he the right person for me?” You know, a man’s got to be supportive, sensitive and caring? As well as good-looking, interesting and all the rest of it. He has to make you feel like a woman?’

  Beauty waited. Was there more?

  ‘Then there’s his bloody family!’ Kate felt the familiar stabbing pain in the pit of her stomach at the thought of Peter’s mother. She’d never been good enough for Mummy’s precious little boy. ‘His mum’s an absolute cow.’

  Beauty winced. How could anyone say that? And how much longer would she have to listen to this? Was she supposed to say something? ‘What about your parents?’ she asked. ‘Do they get on with him?’

  ‘Well, that’s another thing that’s ruined my relationship with Peter … and all my other boyfriends actually,’ Kate said. ‘Nothing’s ever been good enough for my mother. She’s so overbearing and critical, you know, about everything I’ve ever done. It’s really screwed my self-confidence and self-esteem with men.’

  Kate ripped at the corner of a serviette. They’d never been there to support her when she’d been at her lowest points, she said. She’d done everything for them. Who was it who’d been there when her mum was weeping down the phone about how badly Kate’s father treated her? And what about that time her mum had been physically sick in Kate’s toilet, when Kate had told her that Dad had been out to dinner with another woman?

  Beauty watched the growing pile of torn paper. What was the woman talking about?

  And what was ‘self-esteem’?

  Kate looked up and saw the blank expression on the face of the girl opposite her. What could she understand? Unless you’d lived through these things yourself, you couldn’t possibly know about the awful chains of guilt which Kate’s parents had made her drag around.

  ‘My mum’s never done anything for me,’ she said.

  Beauty choked and coughed to hide it. Had she heard right?

  She gave birth to you!

  ‘She’s an utter bitch,’ Kate said.

  Beauty felt the tears fill her eyes. Her heart beat in her ears. What kind of shaitan could say that about her own mother?

  Al-lh, if my daughter said that about me, I would stab her.

  Kate noticed the girl’s eyes shining strangely. Had she put her foot in it? Peter had mentioned something about her having only recently left home. Well, it wasn’t Kate’s fault, was it?

  ‘Don’t you get on with your parents either?’

  Beauty’s chest hurt.

  ‘Peter said you’d left home?’

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Don’t tell her anything.

  ‘I can’t blame them,’ she said.

  You aynt never told no one.

  This one needed to hear it though.

  Beauty stared at the empty coffee cup on the table. ‘He started touching me when I was ten years old …’

  Kate closed her mouth.

  ‘… and tried to rape me when I was twelve.’

  She shut her eyes, and listened.

  ‘My old man pretended he didn’t know what was going on, cuz of the shame; then he blamed me for being a slapper; I started cooking and cleaning for the whole family when I was nine; they forced me to marry an old man when I was fourteen. And I never went to school.’

  Beauty couldn’t look up, didn’t care what the woman thought, didn’t want to see her face, and felt no shame. Not any more.

  And a man’s voice beside her said: ‘Causing trouble, sis?’

  40

  Dulal Miah stood on the other side of the rope and motioned away with his shaven head. ‘Let’s go.’

  Beauty glanced at the white woman …

  Help me!

  … and back to her brother.

  His jaws were clenched in the smile she recognized, which had always come before she got a beating. ‘Nah, man. I’m staying here,’ she said.

  Man? No Bhai-sahb?

  She saw his eyes narrow, nostrils widen, his fists grip the rope. He’s gonna lose it.

  ‘Tarra amarray marri lar.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You gotta do what’s right.’

  ‘I aynt marrying no one.’

  The white woman still had her eyes closed.

  ‘Think about Sharifa and Faisal. How they gonna get married?’

  ‘They’ll find someone.’

  ‘Tui amarray arr derchtay nai.’

  Kate Morgan opened her eyes, saw Beauty’s look of fear and an Asian man leaning over the rope, his hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  ‘Take your fucking hands off her!’ Kate shouted.

  Dulal looked at the faces turned towards him. White faces. Fathers with blond-haired five-year-old children in short-sleeved shirts.

  Kate felt the rage in the man’s eyes turn on her, something deranged and uncontrolled.

  ‘Who’s the white bitch?’ Dulal said to his sister, without taking his eyes from the white woman.

  Kate felt as if she’d been slapped. ‘I beg your fucking pardon!’

  The chair tipped over as she leapt to her feet. Beauty felt more eyes turn to them as the lady screamed.

  ‘WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’

  Kate had never been spoken to like that in her life! She wasn’t going to let this ape get away with it. Or come near Beauty, for that matter. Not after what she had just heard from the girl.

  Beauty watched a white bloke in a red football shirt and heavy gold jewellery making his way through the tables towards them.

  ‘Bhai-sahb, please, just go. I aynt coming,’ Beauty said. Now there’d be more trouble.

  The man appeared at Kate’s side. ‘Y’m all right loov?’

  He nodded at the Paki hassling two birds in the middle of the Wulfrun Centre, for fook’s sake. ‘Is this bloke bothering you?’

  He stepped over the fallen chair towards Dulal Miah.

  ‘Tar gor zolai limu,’ Dulal said to Beauty, and was gone.

  Kate searched the crowd until she was sure he’d disappeared. The man in the football shirt picked up her chair.

  ‘Thanks for the help,’ she said, sitting down. ‘We’re fine now.’

  ‘Am you shooer?’ he asked.

  Kate nodded.

  The man shrugged and made his way back to his table.

  The two women looked at each other in silence. Kate saw the anguish in Beauty’s face, the horror of her words and experiences.

  Touching me when I was ten years old … tried to rape me … beat me until I married a forty-five-year-old …

  This was no TV news story to be dismissed, undeserving of consideration because it came from a backward and savage culture. It was something real, tangible, in front of her. And more serious than her own.

  Beauty took a tissue from the sleeve of her jacket, uncomfortable under the woman’s gaze. She didn’t need pity. Not from someone who called her own mother a … that word. But she was grateful to her for making Dulal go away.

  ‘Was that your brother?’ the woman asked her.

  Beauty nodded.

  ‘Peter never said anything,’ Kate said.

  Beauty pushed the tissue back up her sleeve. ‘I don’t talk about it. I only told you, cuz …’

  Kate averted her eyes.

  The two women were silent again.

  ‘My God, I’m shaking,’ Kate said.

  She held out her hand to show Beauty.

  ‘What did your brother say?’ she asked.

  ‘That I’m killing them back home.’

  ‘Did he threaten you?’

  ‘No. What can he do?’

  Tar gor zolai limu. I’ll burn his fucking house down.

  ‘You should not have to put up with this,’ Kate said. ‘You’re a person, too. You’re entitled to a life. I think you need to talk to someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A professional. And you need a refuge, somewhere away from all this.’

  ‘There’s
one here for mental Asian women,’ said Beauty.

  Kate felt an overwhelming sadness for the young woman chewing her lip in front of her, the weight of long suffering across her features. Helping her would go some way to … ‘Come on, girl, let’s get you back to Peter’s. You need a hot bath and a back rub, and we’ll look for something on the internet – a quiet and safe place in the country where you can get some peace. I know where to look, believe me. You can’t live like this any more.’

  Peter wouldn’t be back from work yet, and he would have left his laptop at home.

  It was almost dark when Kate pulled up outside the house. She went upstairs to prepare a bath for Beauty. She’d brought her aromatherapy bath set with her as well as a new towel and dressing gown. OK, so the essential healing oils wouldn’t solve anything, but they couldn’t hurt. And it felt right to look after her. Considering … everything.

  While Beauty was in the bath Kate went through Peter’s cupboards until she found a comforting hot drink to make for them both. She switched on the heating and the lamp in the sitting room, drew the curtains, and pulled the coffee table up to the sofa so that they could both see the laptop.

  The boiler fired up in the kitchen. Kate decided to get started on the internet. It would occupy her thoughts. She typed in ‘Asian women refuge’ and opened the links. She’d expected more. Most were havens from domestic violence offering community language speakers, counselling, therapy and help in accessing training, education and benefits. Few gave addresses. One, in Derbyshire, had photos of the premises: a converted manor house in large, well-kept grounds, with a river, chickens, sheep and vegetable gardens. To Kate it looked ideal. She returned to the search engine and tapped in ‘Asian women’s mental health’, opened the first page, and scanned the links.

  … suicide and self-harm among young women twice the national average; psychosocial, spiritual and physical health problems; relationship difficulties within the family; izzat and family honour; the pressures from the family to behave ‘well’; hard-to-achieve cultural expectations of women as daughters, daughters-in-law, sisters, wives and mothers; abuse and isolation; fear of speaking out …

  Kate stared at the screen. She could imagine the horrific effects that might have on a person’s mental state.

  Couldn’t she?

  When Beauty came down the stairs wrapped in the bathrobe, a towel twisted around her head, Kate didn’t turn round. She looked pale.

  Kate patted the sofa for Beauty to sit beside her.

  ‘I found a few things,’ she said. ‘There’s one not too far from here. It’s a lovely place.’

  Beauty felt clean and warm after the hot bath. The lady was trying to be kind, and hadn’t said a word about herself since Beauty had told what she had been through; had avoided looking her in the eye, too.

  Kate hit the ‘back page’ key, but she’d visited so many sites that the path didn’t return her to the original results. She clicked ‘History’, tapped in ‘Asian women’ and scanned the list.

  www.AsianWomenBound-And-Gagged.com

  www.AsianWomenFuckedHard.com

  www.AsianWomenUp…

  Kate’s throat hurt and she struggled to breathe as she scrolled down the list, but she managed to find the site she had been looking for. She opened the photos of the manor house. There was no need to see any of the websites Peter had visited. Nor to tell Beauty about it. She didn’t need such degradation on top of everything she had suffered. Let the girl at least be spared whatever squalor lay behind the pages and pages of links.

  ‘You see, it looks wonderful.’

  While she rubbed her hair dry, Beauty looked at the photos of the old house, the green lawns and countryside around it. It was nice. Quiet. And the chickens running around reminded her of Bangladesh – the good way. But she noticed the woman’s hand shake as she moved the mouse and a drop falling on the keyboard.

  ‘You OK?’ Beauty asked.

  Kate took the scrunched-up tissue paper offered her and wiped her nose. ‘It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

  It didn’t. Compared with what Beauty had been through none of her own crap mattered.

  This new low of Peter’s was just more of the same thing.

  Peter Hemmings switched off PM News on Radio 4. It ended at six o’clock and there were only the listeners’ banal emails on the day’s world events to read out: one-line solutions to Middle East conflicts and global warming.

  He was looking forward to getting home, and had been all day. In fact, he was surprised by how much he had thought of Kate while driving around. And not sexually, although there had been that, too; he’d even found himself becoming aroused, in Walsall, at the thought of what she could expect when he got home. Did that mean he actually wanted her to stay? Christ! Surely he couldn’t have changed in such a short space of time?

  How long would it be before her ways began to grate on his nerves again? Three days? Two? It would depend on the amount of analysis she made him suffer. It was his fault, he realized at the roundabout on Stafford Road, for failing to pull her out of the psychotherapy crap. He had no influence over her, nor could he have expected to: he’d failed to fulfil his duties towards her as a male. How long could a woman wait for a man to get through his extended youth and do the right thing? How long could she deny her reproductive needs? Wasn’t that what he wanted, too? What else was there in life apart from fulfilling one’s biological role? Yes, to intellectual striving and achievement, but maybe spiritual and philosophical contentment only came to those who provided for a wife and child. The creation of a new life would take him to a place of selflessness and cut the chains of his all-too-human weakness and vanity. Or was he losing it?

  Peter parked in the street outside his house, relieved to see that Kate’s car was still there and that there were lights around the curtain in the sitting-room window.

  How long before his eye roved to the flesh with which the world was so abundant? If he had to satisfy his urges, would his conscience allow himself the occasional, carefully controlled fling?

  It would, he decided.

  It was part of the male condition. A genetic defect.

  Peter walked to the front door and slid the key into the lock. He stepped into the sitting room as Beauty slipped past him and out of the house.

  41

  The bus stopped again. Beauty didn’t mind the traffic. She was early for the shift at the care home. She’d washed, dressed and left the house as soon as it was light, glad to get out of her bedroom and be among other people. The white woman in a fast-food restaurant uniform sitting next to her leaned into the aisle to see why they weren’t moving.

  Beauty rested her head against the window and the voices returned from the night before.

  ‘Tui amarray arr derchtay nai.’ You’ll never see Mum again.

  Her brother’s hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Take your fucking hands off her.’

  Where had the lady learned to speak like that?

  She’s white. They can say what they like.

  Thass good, aynit?

  ‘You do not have to put up with this.’

  The woman was right.

  Good she said it.

  Beauty shuddered at the rage in her brother’s face and lifted her head from the vibrations of the window. What did the white lady really know anyway? Beauty didn’t understand what Kate’s mother had done that was so terrible, but maybe they had problems too. White stuff. She looked at the white faces on the bus around her, women in their fifties on their way to supermarket jobs, and rested her head against the window again.

  ‘Homla’s coming! You got to be there … or you’ll never see Mum again.’

  Her brother’s words were less scary with other people around. She’d turned over in bed a thousand times that night, sat up, smoked, and lain down again. Her head spun at what she had to do; the future; the choices she had to make. The white bloke was right. She was free to make choices and control her future. But what
if he was right about the other stuff he had said?

  There is no God.

  And she had jerked up and smoked another cigarette in the light of the city sky falling on her bed.

  From the window, Beauty stared at the reflection of the bus in a car showroom. Her eyes pricked with tiredness. She’d managed to sleep the night before but it hadn’t seemed any different from being awake. Her head had felt heavy, something pressing inside, the same faces and questions swirling around her.

  Who would make sure that Sharifa did well at school, that no one forced her to marry a freshie or an old man?

  ‘Get your fucking hands off her!’

  When would she be with her mother again?

  ‘You’ll never see us again.’

  And she’d arrived at the place the white woman had shown her on the computer, with the green grass and the chickens and the stream. And for a few moments in the darkness of a stranger’s house she’d managed to stroke the sheep and shoo away the cockerels scratching at the flower-beds, a dog at her side wherever she went.

  Dogs is haram.

  So what?

  They were almost people, too. If only they could talk.

  And she’d shaken her head and whispered aloud in the dark: I am going loony. And the ducks on the river at the bottom of the garden faded.

  Anyway, could she live in a place like that and not think about … stuff?

  Could she start a new life alone in a different city?

  Why not? Lots of people did.

  White people, though. Not Asians.

  You’ll never see us again.

  She closed her eyes.

  If only I could stay like this forever, in the dark behind my eyes.

  And as she’d turned in the night, the sheet had wrapped itself around her like a shroud.

  It felt cool and clean, and the spinning in her head stopped.

  The bus lurched to a halt and she opened her eyes.

  ‘For fook’s sake,’ a man said behind her.

  Beauty pushed the tea trolley back into the empty kitchen and loaded the dirty cups and saucers into the dishwasher, relieved to have something to keep her from thinking. She enjoyed serving tea in the morning. The old people woke to the noise of rattling plates and teaspoons as she bumped into the sitting room.