fucking nigger?’
Beatrice scowls at him. She is neither afraid nor shocked. You get used to such things, living in this city. It is the price you pay for safety. Besides, she has known worse abuse. The police at home had stripped her, forced her to walk through her village naked, then beaten her unconscious and left her on a concrete floor for days without food. Verbal abuse was nothing compared to that, to the humiliation of it.
And then there was the bigger pain, the one she chooses not to think about. Every time she senses the ugliness encroach, she makes herself imagine something else, something easy and sunny and smooth and clean-smelling like bleach in a bath-tub.
But sometimes, in spite of her best efforts, a flash of it will come back to her when she least expects it. She will hear the echo of a muffled scream while she is waiting to cross the road. The traffic lights will slip from amber into red and she will blink, forgetting where she is, finding herself back there, back in the faraway bedroom with his weight on top of her, a bead of his sweat dropping into her open mouth. Or she will be doing her weekly load at the launderette and she will suddenly remember the sour-cream taste of him in her mouth and she will have to sit down to gather her breath before she finds enough strength to continue pushing the clothes into the washing machine’s metal drum. Or she will simply be sitting, staring into space, and a splinter-clear piece of remembered past will slice into her mind’s eye and it will come back to her in its entirety: the force of it, the mass of him, the sickness that followed, the sense of betrayal and the shame she was angry with herself for feeling.
By the time Beatrice gets back to her flat on Jamaica Road, it is after 1 a.m. and her legs feel so heavy she can barely make it up the four flights of stairs. She slides her key into the lock with relief and goes straight to the electric heater to plug it in. Five years in this country and the cold still seeps into her bones.
Beatrice flicks on the light. Her flat is small and basic. There is a bed-sitting room with a single mattress that doubles up as a sofa and, to one side, a galley kitchen with two gas rings and a rickety grill. A grimy bathroom is situated behind the front door, the tiles spotted with black along the grouting, the shower head covered with a rash of limescale. A smell of damp pervades. When she hangs up wet clothes, they never seem to dry.
She rents the flat from Mr Khandoker, a Bengali man with heavy eyebrows and a permanently sour expression. Mr Khandoker owns several properties in this block, including the ground-floor porter’s flat which for months has had sagging cardboard pressed against empty window-frames. The cardboard has the word ‘Shurgard’ spelled across it in black block capitals and there is a rip at the base of the letter H through which Beatrice can sometimes catch a glimpse of movement: a rapid shifting through the shadows. She is never sure if the movement belongs to humans or rats and has never wanted to find out. It is better, in this block, to keep your curiosity to yourself.
Beatrice tried not to have too much to do with Mr Khandoker. He would turn up on her doorstep every week wearing a pale yellow salwar kameez dotted with oily stains which she assumed were from the spit and fizzle of a too-hot frying pan and she would hand over her rent money in worn £10 notes. Once, Mr Khandoker had offered to cash a cheque for her and when he returned with half the amount she had been expecting, he explained to Beatrice that of course he had to take interest and did she think he was a charity, handing out free money to worthy causes? No, he said, he was a businessman: one of Thatcher’s children.
She didn’t make that mistake again. And really, she has cause to be grateful to Mr Khandoker. He is nowhere near as bad as some of the private landlords Beatrice hears about. If she pays him on time, he leaves her alone.
She tries to remind herself of her luck but her mood remains heavy and listless. Beatrice makes herself a slice of toast under the grill, waiting for the corners of the white bread to curl with the heat. She butters the toast thickly from a tub of Flora then rips open a packet of sugar taken from the hotel and sprinkles it generously across the margarine. She bites into it, feeling the sweetness hit the back of her throat.
She wipes the crumbs from her mouth and sits on the bed to take off her clumpy flat shoes. Then, as she allows herself to do for a brief period every single night, she starts to cry. Her shoulders slump forward and she holds her head in her hands, her breath coming in gulps, tears dropping onto the bare floorboards. For five minutes, she summons all the stored-up pain and buried memory and lets the sadness wash over her. She will not let anyone else see her do this, ever. She will not allow them – the man in Room 423, the drunk on the bus, the police back home – to know her weakness. This sadness is hers alone. A precious, shielded thing.
After the tears, Beatrice feels lighter, more herself. She strips off her black clothes, hanging them carefully over the back of a wooden chair without creasing so that she can wear them again tomorrow. She is saving up to buy an iron.
As she goes through to the bathroom, she catches sight of the photograph of Susan, hanging on the wall from a crooked nail. Susan is smiling and the sun catches her hair. Her cheeks are sweating lightly – Susan always hated her cheeks and said they made her look fat but Beatrice loved them. They reminded her of plumped-up pillows. She’d taken the photograph in the café they went to on their first date, although, of course, neither of them would admit what it was until later.
In the photo, Susan is holding a glass of Coca-Cola with a straw. She always drank full fat, never Diet. Said she didn’t like the taste.
Beatrice kisses the tips of her fingers and lets her hand rest on the frame for a few moments. She has no idea whether she’ll ever see Susan again. The two of them had been split up, shortly after they’d escaped over the border to the Congo and paid a human trafficker to take them to the UK. It had cost Beatrice £21,000. She’d given the trafficker a plot of land her father owned. For the first and only time in her life, Beatrice had been grateful her father was dead and that she’d inherited a share of his fortune.
‘It’s not safe for both of you to go at the same time,’ the trafficker had said, chewing on one end of a cocktail stick. He had grubby fingernails and wore a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off. ‘One of you only. The other will follow.’
They’d had no choice. Susan squeezed Beatrice’s hand.
‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow.’
‘But …’
‘You’re ill. You should go first.’
Beatrice was still recovering from the effects of the police beating. Her back was pitted with sores. The cuts on her arms were not healing. The corner of one eye was still tender from a brutal punch.
If she had been stronger, more like herself, she wouldn’t have let Susan stay behind on her own. She would have thought of something to keep the two of them together. Because what was the point of any of it if they were separated? Why had they fought so hard if they were going to end up alone?
They couldn’t be together in Uganda. They’d be arrested or murdered before the year was out.
‘Devil-child’, that’s what Beatrice’s mother had called her.
Her own mother.
She’d looked her eldest daughter in the eyes and said it.
But by then, Beatrice hadn’t cared, had only had space in her head for thoughts of Susan. She’d been obsessed, crazed. And Susan … she had been in love with her too, of that she was sure. And yet … she’d never followed her to London.
They’d made a plan to meet outside Buckingham Palace, which was silly looking back, but it was the only landmark they could
