Paradise City (16 page)

Eventually, Beatrice had found her voice. The first thing she said was, ‘Thank you.’

The lady smiled. ‘What for?’

‘Being kind.’ And then, bit by bit, over the course of several months, Beatrice was able to tell the woman, whose name was Emma, the bare bones of what had happened. She talked about Susan as a friend and skated over some of the more intimate details. She was scared, of course, but it was also that she simply didn’t have the language. All her life, she had been taught not to admit what she was.

But then, after Beatrice had been dropping in to the centre for a few weeks, Emma leaned across, patted her hand and asked:

‘Was Susan your lover?’

It was so simple, the way she asked it. As if there were nothing to hide.

‘Yes,’ Beatrice said.

Emma nodded. ‘Well that’s what we need to tell the Home Office.’

That’s when Beatrice had started fighting again. And it felt good to take them on – all of them; all of the blank, expressionless civil servants who interviewed her; the judges who ruled against her; the solicitors who asked the same questions over and over again. Some people got broken by the system. Some people said the trauma of dealing with it was worse than the terrors they were fleeing from. Some gave up. Some were deported when all the life had been squeezed out of them. Some paid money to set up fake marriages. Some turned to crime because it was easier. Some killed themselves, jumping into the brown, pounding currents of the Thames, arms spiralling, mouths gasping, the ferocious rush of wind snatching their screams away as they slammed against the water with a crack of snapping bones.

Others, like Beatrice, found a determination so profound it bordered on the obsessive. She began to believe again in her own strength. So when a man in a brown suit sat across a table from her in an official interview and asked her, in his nasal voice, what kind of sex she liked, whether she’d ever slept with a man and how could she prove she was a lesbian, how could he believe her, Beatrice was able to look him directly in the eye and laugh.

‘I don’t need to prove anything to you,’ she had said. The man had looked shocked, then affronted, then confused.

And it felt good. It felt like watering a patch of dried-up soil and watching green shoots rise again. She got refugee status after that. She had fought the system and, in a small way, she had won.

So now, when Beatrice sees new arrivals slinking unsurely through the doors at RASS, she feels frustration. She wants to shake them, tell them to wake up and fight. The best bulwark against desperation, Beatrice has discovered, is having something to rail against.

Injustice rankles. The casual arrogance of privilege angers her like nothing else. And Howard Pink had got to her more than the others. Because of what he did. Because he had not looked at her once and that, when it was over, he seemed so complacent, as though he believed she had enjoyed it, had actively sought his grubby attentions.

It reminds her of another time, another room, another man. A viciousness she never imagined. The bead of sweat in her mouth. The taste of must and salt. The dampness of the sheets. The disgust rising in her gullet – disgust at herself or at him she has never been sure.

Beatrice glances at her watch: 11.30. Her shift starts at 2 p.m. She decides to go in early and visit the National Gallery. It astounds her still, after five years in London, that she does not have to pay to get in. She is caught between enjoying the freedom this gives her and thinking it absurdly wasteful of the UK government. In Uganda, she never went to art galleries. It had never even crossed her mind that it might be a pleasurable thing to do. At school, the nuns occasionally showed slides of great religious art: a succession of gold-leaf Madonnas with plain white faces and an overgrown man-child in their arms, their beatific skin imbued with an oddly greenish tinge. But in the National Gallery, Beatrice has found herself drawn to the later paintings – the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oils, with their glassy surfaces. She admires the way the large canvases are hung imposingly on the walls, contained by swirly gilt frames, all in careful order.

She finds peace in the glazes, in the translucent rendering of fabric: a curtain swag in the background of a Vermeer, a flower-patterned fold in the dress of Madame Moitessier. The smallness of detail appeals to her. It is the portraits that draw her in. The landscapes, with their earnest reimaginings of Roman pastures and sun-blessed waterways, leave her cold.

Today, with her mind unsettled, she thinks half an hour of staring at the paintings will restore her calm and make her ready for a long shift at the hotel.

She catches the bus into town. When she first arrived, she hadn’t been able to afford the bus. Even now that she earns a good enough wage, she feels guilty doing so. Shortly after meeting Emma, Beatrice had applied, on her advice, for an English Language course at Southgate College. Her spoken English was already fairly fluent but she had wanted to improve. More than that, she had wanted something to do.

The College invited Beatrice for an assessment. It was January and very cold and Beatrice had no money so she’d left early in the morning and walked there from Bermondsey. It had taken her two hours. After the interview, one of the teachers gave her £10 to cover her travel expenses. Beatrice took the note in her hand. It was crisp and smelled lightly of tobacco, but she hadn’t wanted to waste it and in the end, she walked all the way back, putting the £10 in an empty jam jar in her kitchen cupboard and screwing the lid tightly on top, saving the money for some day when she really might need it.

The £10 note is still there in the cupboard, like a charm. The red-and-white-checked jam jar lid now has a patina of dust. Beatrice is saving it, just in case.

In Trafalgar Square, several dozen American schoolchildren in brightly coloured anoraks are sitting around the fountain, unwrapping cling-filmed sandwiches and playing tinny music on their mobile phones. Their voices seem to exist on a higher frequency than anyone else’s, self-confident and brash, easy laughter bubbling under each elongated vowel. Beatrice frowns at them as she passes and hunches further into herself, wrapping her arms tightly across her torso. She knows they won’t notice her as she walks past. She moves beyond the reach of their understanding, slipping by in the shadows. And yet, she reminds herself . . . and yet I exist.

Then, just as she reaches the stone steps leading up to the Gallery entrance, she thinks she sees him and her breath stops. He is standing at the edge of the group of schoolchildren with his back to her, head stooped slightly forward, tight black curls close-cut against his scalp. He is tall, much taller than her, and there is something about the set of his shoulders, the way they slope off sharply into muscular arms, that makes her wince in recognition. He is wearing a navy-blue hoodie and bright white trainers. Box-fresh, he would’ve said, grinning so that she could see the glint of gold filling at the back of his mouth.

The sight of him makes her shake. She feels the ground warp and contract and dissolve and, just as her knees buckle and she realises she is about to fall, she reaches out blindly for something solid to grab hold of.

‘Are you all right?’ The voice comes from far above her and when she looks up she sees it belongs to a man in a dark brown suit and a pink tie clutching a package wrapped in greaseproof paper. He moves towards her and she is assailed by the overpowering smell of tuna fish and for a moment she thinks she will be sick. The man is still talking, his words sliding into each other. She can make out the odd phrase, ‘feeling faint . . . wait here . . . too hot . . . take off your coat . . .’ and she tries to say that she’s fine but soon she is sitting on the cool grey stone and the man is crouching in front of her, peering into her face and offering her a white plastic cup.

‘Just take a drink of water and you’ll feel much better,’ he is saying.

She takes the water and drinks it gratefully. The empty cup makes a crackling sound when she flexes her fingers. She glances at the man in the brown suit and attempts to smile.

‘Thank you. I just . . . I thought I saw . . .’

She twists her neck and looks at the crowd of students, the blood in her head pumping wildly. If it’s him, she thinks, I need to get away from here right now. I need to start running. If it’s him, it means he’s followed me. It means he’s still angry.

And then the boy in the navy-blue hoodie turns round and she realises with a cool wash of certainty that it isn’t him at all. His face is too narrow, his eyes too close-set. The boy is fiddling now with his phone, swiping at the screen with rapid fingers until an unrecognisable rap tune starts to play and he begins to bop his head in time with the beat as his friends look on. He is a teenager. Too young.

‘I’m fine now,’ Beatrice says, breathing deeply. ‘I’m sorry for the bother.’

The man looks concerned. But then he checks his watch, takes his sandwich and brushes down his trousers with the palm of his one free hand.

‘If you’re sure . . . ?’ He leaves before she has a chance to answer.

Beatrice gets up slowly, allowing the bright dots in front of her eyes to disperse. She looks straight ahead, breathes. It wasn’t him, she tells herself. It wasn’t him.

She climbs the stairs and wends her way automatically through the crowds to her favourite painting. It will calm her to look at it. The painting is tucked away in one of the larger halls, hung almost as an afterthought because there is no name attached to either subject or artist. It is called
Portrait of a Lady
and all the information card can impart is that it is French, nineteenth century.

‘This was once thought to be a portrait of the singer Madame Malibran, but there is no evidence to support this identification,’ the neat, typed font reads. ‘The work has been attributed to both Ingres and John Vanderlyn (1775?–1852), but neither suggestion is satisfactory.’

The brusqueness of this summary usually makes Beatrice smile, as if whoever wrote it was unable to disguise their frustration at not being able to work out anything more about the painting. That single word – ‘satisfactory’ – redolent, as it was, of uninspiring school reports, amused her. But today, the painting does not have its usual soothing effect. Her thoughts are in too much disarray.

Breathe, she reminds herself. Just keep breathing.

Beatrice stands about a foot away from the painting. She likes to be close, but not so close that she is peering across the rope and has to be motioned back by a security guard. The lady in the portrait is wearing a white dress and a velvety stole. She has delicate features and is leaning forwards slightly, looking at something to one side of the artist, her eyes darting out of the frame as though caught deep in her own imagination. There are gold-ringed diamonds on each earlobe. Her hair is tucked behind her ears on either side of a central parting.

When Beatrice was a little girl, she had always wanted hair like that: white woman’s hair that was shiny and fine and straight, dropping like a waterfall over her shoulders when she let it down. Instead, her own hair was wiry and frizzy and had a wayward mind of its own. In Uganda, she used to sleep with a silk scarf to keep the moisture in. She’d lost the scarf somewhere along the way. It had been purple, she recalls, with swirling yellow butterflies.

The lady in the painting has an ambiguity that Beatrice finds appealing: the freshness of her skin and the simplicity of her dress give her the innocence of a newly plucked flower. But there is mischief in the tiny upturned corner of her mouth, the gentle arch of her face that makes you think it would be foolish to underestimate her.

Looking at the portrait, Beatrice feels that the artist – whoever he was – wanted this woman and that she, in return, had toyed with his emotions. Not because she was flighty or heartless but because power, for a woman, could only be exercised in certain limited ways. It was a sexual power. A tacit acknowledgement that a man could be undone by the uncontrolled nature of his desire while a woman could look on, with laughter in her eyes, at his self-debasement.

Beatrice looks at the woman in the painting for what feels like a long time. It would have been easier for her, Beatrice thinks, with her inherited wealth and her position in society. She wouldn’t have understood what it was to be powerless, wouldn’t have known what it was to be cast aside even though all you had ever done was allow your heart to love freely, even though you didn’t think of the way you loved as an unnatural mutation. The woman in the painting wouldn’t have allowed herself to be abused. The woman in the painting would have stood up for herself, Beatrice is sure of it.

And that, she thinks in a burst of clarity, is what she has to do. She must stop being chased by ghosts and move forward. She has to remind the world she is worth something – and it starts with Howard Pink.

Howard

Howard sits, with his head in his hands, his elbows on the gleaming surface of the conference table. He has read a few novels in his lifetime – generally thrillers bought in airports with big gold lettering on the front – and he has always thought the idea of someone putting their head in their hands to denote desperation was lazy writing. But now, here he is, doing exactly that. Sometimes, he thinks grimly, a cliché is a cliché because it’s true.

‘Howard.’ A voice that he recognises echoes across the expanse of shiny black granite. He remembers ordering this table five years ago when black granite was a marker of exorbitant wealth. They’d had to winch it up through the window. It had taken six workmen the best part of a day. By the time it was
in situ
, a heavy rectangle propped up on eight leviathan-sized table-legs hewn from substantial blocks of stone, even Howard thought he was mad. The black granite stared back at him now: a vast, static lake, seeping like oil to the corners of the room.