Bonemill Street was quiet. The road twisted under railway bridges and ran alongside the canal. She looked at the broken windows and smokeless chimneys of the factories around her, at the rubble and rusting iron gates and forecourts overgrown with weeds.
Beauty’s chest and throat tightened. She took in deep breaths to calm her heartbeat.
They gonna turn their backs on me?
No. Her older brother loved his family. He’d do anything to get her back. Wouldn’t he?
At the bridge on Cannock Road, she stopped to look down at the dark water of the canal.
What if the old man aynt given up?
He can’t force me. They know that … I’ll leave again.
But was it really her destiny to live alone and not look after her parents as they grew old?
Better not to live.
Toba, toba, astaghfirullah.
The rain came down hard at the end of Grimstone Street. She looked around for shelter and ran to a telephone box.
It was the same one from the night she’d left home. The handset had been repaired and the dial tone purred in her ear. She replaced the receiver on its cradle, rested her head against the window and watched the rain run down the glass. That night she had cried to God for help. He had listened to her and sent Mark, Allah give him a good life.
But she still needed His help.
They gonna give up? They gonna try and take me back to Bangladesh?
No, that wouldn’t happen now. She’d tell them she had a job, that she would be expected at work, that she had friends who would phone if they didn’t hear from her. They couldn’t lock her in a room.
But she didn’t want to threaten anyone. She’d salaam the old man, touch his feet and beg his forgiveness. It wasn’t his fault. He’d been poisoned by the mullah’s pervert brother’s lies that she was flirting with men.
Anyway, Bhai-sahb would make the decision.
Dulal aynt gonna tell me to marry no one.
He’d agree to keep her there. She was still young. She could stay unmarried until she was twenty-five before she was considered old.
They want me back.
And they aynt gonna hit me no more.
They aynt gonna swear at me neither.
Had she given them an excuse by acting loony? Had she flirted with boys to wind them up? They said she did it, so she did it. It wasn’t her mum’s fault either. How many mothers like hers were there, sitting in kitchens complaining of aches and pains, old in their fifties? She hadn’t had the strength to fight for her daughter.
‘You’ll never see your children’s eyes.’
She didn’t mean it. They told her to say them things.
But could everyone pretend nothing had happened?
It didn’t matter, as long as they let her look after her parents. Asian girls didn’t want to do it these days. Not the ones born in this country. How long before there were care homes for old Asians, too? Did they exist already? She shivered at the thought of old Bengalis sitting in a line of armchairs. She’d heard her cousin-brothers’ wives and how they talked about their mothers-in-law. How could she trust anyone else to do her job properly?
The rain had stopped. She pushed open the door of the phone box and headed towards the squat block of flats on the grassy mound.
The shop next to the Chick King Burger Bar was open. Beauty wanted a cigarette before she went up to the flat. Last one. She’d throw the rest away. A girl shouldn’t smoke.
The Jamaican guy with the long-eared hat and padded jacket stood at the counter paying for a can of Kestrel Super.
‘Yo, sister!’
She stood next to him in front of the chocolate bars.
‘Hi.’
He looked at her from headscarf to sandals.
‘Whe’ ya bin?’
‘Staying at a friend’s.’
‘Ah well, welcome home.’
Beauty stood at the bottom of the concrete stairwell and lit the cigarette.
Al-lh help me, whatever happens. Give them Rahmut. Let them understand.
Would He still help her?
Yes.
She was making her future, like the white bloke said. She was free. Before she wasn’t, and now she was. How?
Take your fucking hands off her!
That’s what the lady said.
You do not have to put up with this.
She’d said that, too.
Al-lh, let me look after my parents.
Don’t let me come back down these steps with nothing.
She dropped the cigarette on the damp-stained paving and stepped on it. A boy ran down the stairs past her, his face hidden by the peak of his cap.
Beauty stopped at the foot of the last flight. Her legs shook. She gripped the cold handrail and pulled herself up the first step.
Wouldn’t it be better if she stayed away? The little ones would get used to it. They’d forget her. She didn’t have to go back home.
She closed the front door behind her quietly. The hall was empty. She breathed in the smell of home – last night’s cooking and her father’s cigarettes. Voices came from behind the closed kitchen door. She looked up the stairs. Her mother would still be asleep, but she hoped Dulal hadn’t gone to bed yet.
Beauty walked along the corridor and stopped at the door. She could make out the low voice of her brother and the blur of shapes through the ribbed glass.
‘Asalaam alaikum.’
Beauty Begum stood in the open doorway and looked at her brothers and sister: Dulal in his vest and pyjamas, his cheeks unshaven, Faisal’s gelled, spiky hair and straight nose, the milk on his soft moustache, and Sharifa’s thick hair, her eyes shining with contained excitement. The old man looked away.
Her younger brother closed his mouth. ‘Sis,’ he said.
Dulal kicked him under the table. ‘What do you want?’ he asked her.
Beauty’s heart seemed to stop. Was he telling her to get out?
‘I wanna look after Mum and Dad,’ she said. And make sure Sharifa went to college and married a good man her own age. And everything else: the cooking and cleaning, until she went to sleep exhausted on the sofa. That was her job, wasn’t it? A daughter’s job.
Dulal looked at his sister, at the bag on her shoulders and the mobile phone in her hand. Her thumb hovered over the call button.
‘You gonna get your gora to set his dogs on me, too?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You didn’t see what he done last night?’
Beauty remembered the bruises on Mark’s hand. What had happened?
‘He aynt my white bloke,’ she said.
Dulal Miah told the kids to go to the sitting room. Faisal looked disappointed, but followed his younger sister. The door closed behind them.
‘You stayin’?’ he asked her.
Beauty didn’t move.
‘That depends.’
She saw her brother’s jaws clench. It wasn’t good talking to him this way.
‘I’ve got to go to work later,’ she said.
Her brother snorted. ‘Kun zagat?’
‘In a care home for white people. And in a place for Asian women.’
She saw him look again at the mobile phone in her hand. Good. Let him think she had arranged for someone to call her if she didn’t turn up at work. Someone who would go to the police if she didn’t answer the phone. Beauty thanked God again for having sent that other lady, too. Take your fucking hands off her!
‘I aynt dumb no more, Bhai-sahb,’ Beauty said. ‘I learnt to read.’
Dulal grunted and sipped his tea. ‘Go to work. No one’s gonna stop you,’ he said.
The old man mumbled something. Beauty wondered why he didn’t speak. Had there been a fight?
‘What about the mullah?’ she asked.
Beauty stood in front of her father and brother and waited for an answer.
Her brother picked at the crumbs of toast on the table and rubbed them from his fingers onto the plate.
She saw her brother smile. Or was he sneering at her?
You do not have to put up with this.
You’re entitled to a life.
‘Otherwise … I aynt stayin’.’
She could survive on her own now, she had a job, she could read and work, she had somewhere to live and people to be with.
Dulal Miah stood up and stretched.
‘We’ll talk later,’ he said.
He passed her on his way back to bed without looking at her. Her father got to his feet and shuffled to the fridge. Why didn’t he say anything? Did Dulal make the decisions now?
Beauty slipped the rucksack from her shoulders as the children came back into the kitchen. She took the pot from the table and went to fill the kettle. The old man would want more tea.
Beauty asked Sharifa if she had prayed.
‘Yes, sis.’
What would happen when Sharifa started looking at boys? Would her parents find her good husbands to choose from, or let her meet a boy at college and marry him?
‘I prayed too,’ Faisal said.
Beauty nodded her approval.
Why was he being sweet? Was the bullying and swearing over? What would Dulal say later? If he was going to kick her out he would have done it by now. But why would he do that? It was better to have her at home unmarried than not here at all.
‘Eat,’ Beauty said to the little ones. Sharifa ate her toast. Later, she would want to know everything Beauty had seen and heard, where she had been, and what white people’s homes were like inside.
The old man shuffled out of the kitchen.
After the children had gone to school, she took more tea to him in the sitting room and put two pounds on the arm of his chair for cigarettes.
*
Later, Beauty watched from the window as he appeared from the stairwell below her and headed towards the shops in the rain. Her eyes ran along the doorways of the block of flats opposite, looking for signs of life. It was no longer a strange world. She’d been out there and was free now. No one could force her to do anything. She would look after her parents and make sure her sister married a good man one day.
She thought of Mark. She knew he understood. She’d left the money from the dole office on the pillow in the bedroom and wished she could have done more for him. He was a good man. The best.
She’d pray for him every day.
Outside, the sky was low and grey over the tower blocks. Beauty turned away from the window and went to make breakfast for her mother.
About the Author
© Stefano Luigi Moro
RAPHAEL SELBOURNE was born in Oxford in 1968. He lived in Italy for many years, where he worked variously as a teacher and translator before moving to the West Midlands in 2004.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Tindal Street Press for publishing Beauty, and to DB for her help with all things Bengali.
Beauty Page 26