Paradise City (21 page)

It is a hand. The decomposing bones of a human hand.

The gasp of surprise sticks in her throat.

Beatrice

She wakes screaming. it is the dream again, the one where she is running down an endless narrow corridor. Someone is chasing her. A man. He has no face but Beatrice knows who it is. The more she runs, the stickier the ground becomes. The man keeps chasing and her feet are sucked under and she is trapped, half devoured by an inky muddiness. She tries to free herself, wriggling her torso frantically to dislodge herself from the thick, gloopy substance, but with every movement, her energy is sapped and her muscles become loose with exhaustion. Beatrice can hear his quickening footsteps behind her and all she can do is raise her arms over her head in a useless attempt to protect herself and then, just as he is about to get to her, she wakes, dripping with sweat and confusion, gasping for air.

She’d had the same dream every night for the best part of a year when she left Uganda. It was particularly bad when she was struggling to get a National Insurance number. Ngozi, an acquaintance at RASS, had persuaded her to use a Nigerian woman’s ID.

‘But I don’t look anything like her,’ Beatrice had protested. She had assumed, sensibly enough, that the National Insurance card would carry a photo. It seemed ludicrous to her that it wouldn’t.

Ngozi had laughed and sucked her teeth. ‘Mmm-hmm,’ Ngozi had said, her chest jiggling with mirth. ‘Child, even if it mattered, we all look the same to them.’

It didn’t take long for Beatrice to realise that Ngozi was right. She found her first illegal job listed in the back of a free newspaper. It was cleaning an office in Docklands, a tall building of steel and tinted glass with nondescript corridors covered in fraying carpet tiles and bathed in harsh fluorescent strip lighting that made everyone’s faces look pouchy and dull.

The supervisor had barely glanced at her, let alone her fraudulent National Insurance details. He had simply wanted to know how soon she could start, whether she had a problem with being paid cash in hand, which, of course, she didn’t. The work had been stultifying in its repetitiveness. There was a particular kind of boredom, she discovered, that came from carrying out a succession of mundane tasks late at night, when everyone else had gone home and the only sound was the sporadic mechanical whirr of the photocopier shutting down. Occasionally, Beatrice would come across the odd straggler: slack-skinned businessmen shuffling paper and trying to avoid going home. They would never look at her, these men, even when she passed within 3 feet of them, pushing the industrial vacuum cleaner with tired arms and gathering up the looping orange electrical flex behind her. She wasn’t sure whether they were deliberately ignoring her or whether they were nervous of reminding themselves of their own realness. She began to think of them as waxworks, like the ones she had read about in Madame Tussauds: startlingly realistic, disturbingly motionless representations of actual human beings. Waxen men.

And then, one night, she found one of them dead. He was hanging from a coat hook in his office, his face purple and distended, eyes bulging like a grotesque tribal mask. She had stood there, with her hand on the door, shocked into a moment of complete stillness. She hadn’t wanted to get involved. She knew that if she reported the suicide, the police would probably want to talk to her and then she would be found out and deported. So Beatrice had closed the door, leaving the vacuum cleaner where it was, orange flex still plugged in, and she had walked back down the corridor, into the lift and out of the building’s revolving doors into the night air. She hadn’t gone back to work the next day or the one after that. The worst part of it was admitting to herself that she hadn’t been that upset; that the sight of the man’s inert body had not moved her as it might once have done. Was she losing herself? Was her capacity to feel being squeezed out of her?

The relief when she was finally granted permanent status had been palpable. The dream with the man chasing her down the corridor seemed to retreat. She hadn’t had it for ages. And now, here it was once more, reminding her of the incident she had tried so hard to forget, the dark, ugly thing that she has painted over in her mind, hoping it would never resurface. But she has come to realise that memories always do. Especially the bad ones, which rise like bubbles of damp through paint.

Beatrice glances at the radio alarm clock. It is 3.22 a.m. The sharp-edged traces of the dream prick against her scalp. If it had been a couple of hours later, she would have got up, convincing herself that she had meant to rise early in order to have a productive day filled with necessary tasks so that she didn’t have to think any more. As it is, she feels alone and small. Underneath, she feels scared.

She twists her head on the pillow, trying to shake off the dream, trying to cough up the bitter taste it has left in her mouth. It doesn’t work. She stills herself, bracing and clenching her muscles for what she knows is about to come.

The memory sweeps towards her like a wave, stretching up to its full height, looming over her tiny, stick-man form standing on the tideline. In a moment, she will be engulfed in it, pulled down by its magnetic current. The wave rushes towards her. And then it breaks.

Lying in the dark, eyes open, chest tight, Beatrice surrenders herself. She tries to think about it as dispassionately as possible, so that the memory comes back as a series of objective facts, written up for the purposes of historical record and future analysis. She tries not to cry.

It was a day in November. Six years ago. They were in Susan’s modest, single-storey house, snatching at a spare half-hour in the late afternoon. Beatrice was lying half-naked in bed. Susan was sitting on the edge of the mattress, the knotted curve of her spine visible beneath a thin cotton shirt. Beatrice can remember smiling at the sight of those familiar vertebrae, poking out like pegs on a clothesline. She wanted to reach out and trace the shape of them but, for some reason never fully explained, she stopped herself just before she touched the taut warmth of Susan’s skin.

She had been happy. It is important to remember that because it would be so easy to forget, knowing all that had happened between then and now.

As Beatrice withdrew her hand from the not-quite-touching of Susan’s back, there was a brutal explosion of noise. A crack-slash-slice like a bone being broken.

The door shattered and splintered, buckling on its hinges and slamming to the floor, releasing a cloud of red dust.

Both of them started scrabbling to cover themselves with whatever clothes came to hand. But before they had a chance to disguise the bareness of their bodies, Susan’s brother was on the threshold wearing big black boots, stamping his feet, breathing heavily so that his nostrils flared with each exhalation.

For a moment, neither Beatrice nor Susan knew what was happening and in that first bout of confusion, they reached for each other, the tips of their fingers grazing too briefly over the bed sheet.

The sight of that small almost-motion, that single half-expression of closeness, seemed to enrage Susan’s brother. He shouted, the words slipping into each other so that they were a torrent of gushing sound neither of them could make sense of. He marched into the room, gesticulating wildly, madness in his eyes. He screamed so hard the spittle gathered in bubbles at the corner of his mouth like spattered coconut juice. He accused them of bringing shame on their families. He called them a disgrace. He said the sight of them disgusted him.

Susan sprang out of bed to try and calm him but her brother lashed out with one arm, slapping her cheek with the flat of his muscle and sending her skittering to the ground.

Beatrice rushed towards them, calling out her girlfriend’s name. There were tears of panic in Susan’s eyes. Beatrice bent over to stroke her cheek without thinking. It was a natural response when you loved someone.

Wasn’t it?

Watching them, huddled on the floor, Susan’s brother became silent and the silence was worse than the noise. It had more intent behind it.

He walked towards Beatrice, keeping his gaze level with hers, his face slicked with sweat, the veins in his neck standing out. Quickly, so quickly she had no chance to defend herself, he grabbed her arms in his hands, his fingers gripping and pinching her skin like he was wringing the neck of a chicken. With his hands still on her arms, he twisted his leg round, nudging into her kneecap from behind so that, in one swift movement, she was on the bed, with Susan’s brother lying heavy on top of her.

He laughed.

‘Whore,’ he said, his face pressed up against hers. ‘You get on your back for anyone, you filthy fucking whore.’

And even in the midst of it, even knowing what was about to happen, even as he took his cock out and forced it into her mouth, Beatrice had time to think that the language surprised her. Because this was Susan’s younger brother. The one who had a sweet smile. Who had looked so harmless sitting on the steps of the Endiro Café in Kisementi, drinking Coca-Cola from a bottle through a straw, proudly wearing his box-fresh trainers. And now he was pushing down her pants, unbuttoning his trousers, grunting at her through gritted teeth, all the time leaning on her with his full weight so that, for a moment, she feared she might stop breathing altogether.

He didn’t look at her as he was raping her.

Rape. It deserves the word.

Her mind turned white. She tried to focus on something else, something everyday and reassuring, and her thoughts fixed on the image of five potatoes and one onion they had left drying on the step outside in preparation for dinner. Five potatoes and one onion. Five and one.

When it happened, she remembers thinking it wasn’t so bad after all. It was the terror of anticipation that had made it so vicious. It was the
thought
of being ripped through, for the first time, by a man that sickened her. It wasn’t the actuality of it. Because while he was inside her, she remained outside herself – dislocated, unreachable, inviolate. It was so unlike her acts of love with Susan that it belonged somewhere else entirely, somewhere beyond her own sphere of reason, a snow-globe turned upside down with flakes of white drifting towards the sky.

And afterwards, he seemed embarrassed. He left her lying there, the dribbling ooze of him dampening her thighs. He pulled up his trousers and walked out of the house, the tread of his feet sounding heavily on the bare floor.

The last image she ever had of him was of his back receding: sloping shoulders, muscular arms, black boots. It was this image that kept recurring, rising up when she least expected it. She saw him on tube escalators, at café tables, on the top deck of buses. Once she thought she saw him reading a magazine with a film star on the cover on a bench in Hyde Park. The boy in the blue hoodie listening to music in Trafalgar Square had been him too.

On the bed, lying there with a clotted numbness between her legs, Beatrice heard him go. The thud of black boots. The slam of the front door. The silence punctuated by birdsong that seemed, suddenly, obscene.

Susan started crying, rocking backwards and forwards on her haunches in the corner of the room. Beatrice stayed on the bed, staring for a long, long time.

And the most painful part, more painful by far than what he had done to her, was that Susan didn’t come to comfort her. In the days that followed, Susan had acted as though it were somehow Beatrice’s fault. And then the villagers found out.

Nothing between them had ever been the same after that.

In her bedroom in Bermondsey, Beatrice wraps the duvet more tightly around her. She turns onto one side so that her cheek lies flat against the cotton of her pillow. She draws her legs up to her chin like a child and closes her eyes. She tries to imagine a field of sheep and then to picture each one of them leaping over a fence in spirited single file. She counts them as they jump. Someone had once told her this is what English people do when they can’t sleep. Beatrice thinks it’s stupid but, at this point, is willing to try anything.

She gets to twenty-five before her overactive thoughts get the better of her. She begins to visualise the sheep like whirling fluffy clouds and gives them individual faces and different coloured wool. She imagines them bright pink and purple and with yellow polka dots. She plants flowers in the grass that grow big, angry petals with teeth like a Venus fly-trap. She makes the fence higher and higher so that the sheep struggle to clear it. And then, finally, one of the sheep gets stuck on the topmost ledge and he is left there, his feet scrabbling against the wood, bleating uselessly to the flock down below.

She opens her eyes again, shaking her head to rid it of such nonsense.

‘Stop your stupidity,’ she says out loud so that her words reverberate uselessly into the empty room.

The time on the clock flashes towards her: 3.35 a.m. She switches on her bedside light and presses back her hair with the palms of her hands. She tries to find something to make her laugh or to make her angry or to coax a fieriness from her belly so that she doesn’t have to admit what it is she is actually feeling, which is frightened. Because being frightened makes you weak. She will not be weak. Not today of all days. Not the day when she is due to meet Howard Pink.

She swings out of bed and finds her slippers with the tips of her toes. In the bathroom, she turns on the shower so that it has time to heat up properly. She wants to submerge herself in water that is almost too hot to bear. She wants to feel the electric tingle of it on her skin: a purge.