Paradise City (22 page)

Under the hot stream of water, Beatrice rehearses what it is she wants to say to Howard Pink. She still has trouble believing she will actually confront him, that the email she wrote in Manny’s café in a fit of – of what exactly? Frustration? Determination not to be ignored? – has had such immediate consequences.

And yet it seems to have worked. A man named Rupert had got in touch with her a few days after she sent her original email. He had called her mobile from an unknown number. She’d been cleaning one of the bigger hotel suites and was in the middle of emptying a bin full of minibar bottles and spent condoms, knotted at the end, when her phone went off. Beatrice wasn’t meant to have it on while she was at work but it was so rare for her to get phone calls that she answered anyway.

‘Is that Beatrice Kizza?’ a posh male voice said on the other end of the line.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you in a place where this conversation can be overheard?’ Beatrice scanned the room. She was on her own. Ewelina was in the next-door suite. She pushed the door closed, putting the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the outside handle.

‘No,’ Beatrice said.

The man spoke.

‘My name is Rupert Leitch. I work for Sir Howard Pink. I think you know why I’m calling you.’

His voice was icy and bored. Beatrice imagined him with a white moustache and a purple jacket, sitting in an enormous leather armchair by a roaring fire, like Professor Plum in the old Cluedo game she’d grown up with back home. She stayed silent.

‘I’m calling you on Sir Howard’s orders to arrange a meeting between the two of you.’

She scrunched up the duster she was carrying, put it back on her cleaning trolley and sat on the end of the bed. She was disturbed to see she was shaking.

‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right.’ There was the sound of the top of a biro being clicked over and over in Rupert Leitch’s hand. ‘Sir Howard is an extremely busy man but he has a window next Tuesday at 8.30 a.m. You will come to the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington where we have booked a suite. Do you have a pen?’

Beatrice reached for the notepad underneath the Louis XVI-style lamp on the bedside table.

‘Yes.’

Rupert Leitch gave her the address, his tone still terse.

‘When you arrive, you will be met by me at reception. Do not give your name to anyone. If you are asked, you say simply that you are meeting a wealthy anonymous client for a job interview as his housekeeper. Do not discuss it any further. Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to make it absolutely crystal that, as far as anyone else is concerned, this conversation never took place,’ he continued. ‘Your total and utter discretion is required. If any word of it gets out, if you speak to any person about this – a friend, a family member, anyone – we will . . .’ He seemed to gather his force. ‘Unleash hell.’

He stopped, then added, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, ‘Do you understand? I mean, do you speak English?’

She was too taken aback to be insulted.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Sir Howard is an extremely powerful man with friends in influential places. I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you any more than that given the . . .’ He paused. ‘Well, shall we say, the delicacy of your situation.’

‘I understand,’ Beatrice said, her throat tight with dislike. She sat up straighter.

‘Good.’ Rupert Leitch dropped his voice, moistening each syllable with a slight lisp. ‘It was Sir Howard’s own decision to meet you. I was – and remain – entirely opposed to the idea. Our lawyers tell us we’d have a watertight case against you for extortion and attempted blackmail.’

Beatrice said nothing.

Quickly, as though no threat had ever been uttered, Rupert Leitch assumed the brisk manner of a jolly headmaster.

‘Good. See you Tuesday.’

In the shower, she shakes despite the heat of the water. Why had she done it? What had possessed her to send the email? It is quite simple: she is sick of being a nobody.

She is sick of men getting away with it.

She wants to stop being a faceless person among the masses of other faceless people afraid to make a noise, fearful of disrupting the precarious equilibrium of their existence. She wants to rediscover her courage. She wants to remind herself who she was: Beatrice Kizza, the girl who could climb to the top of the avocado tree in her auntie’s garden when all the boys were scared.

Because somewhere along the way, she had lost a bit of herself. She tried, each day, to put on a front, to arm herself with a defensive shield that would make her impenetrable, and yet there was a softness, still, at the core of her. And that weakness came from Susan, from the absence of her. Because there were no answers. Because she didn’t know, any more, whether Susan had felt the same. Because it had cost Beatrice so much to love her and now there was nothing to show for it.

Perhaps, Beatrice thinks, scrubbing at her skin with soap, Susan doesn’t want to be found. In her lowest moments, she torments herself with this thought: that Susan has gone back to her family, to her rapist brother and her wretched parents and forgotten all about her girlfriend. That everything they said to each other was a lie.

She steps out of the shower, dripping water on the cold tiles, watching the imprints of her toes slip into each other and form a larger puddle. She rubs herself dry roughly, punishing herself with the discomfort, and then walks back into the bedroom, throws on tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt and picks up her keys. She slams the door behind her, not caring if she wakes her neighbours. From the open balcony, she can see that the sky is still dark, stars studded into the blackness like drawing pins. The lift is out of order, so she takes the stairs. On Jamaica Road, she starts walking, picking up her pace until her breathing is ragged and her thoughts begin to shift and scatter. She pumps her arms up and down, the rhythm of movement helping her mind to become clear. She can feel the sharp tingle of a blister forming on her right ankle. After an hour or so, the blister is all that she is focusing on. The unspoken anxieties disperse.

By the time the sun has risen and the traffic has started to fill the roads, Beatrice is more prepared for what the day has in store. She runs up the stairs to her flat. She puts the kettle on, takes out a sachet of coffee and pours it into a chipped mug, the inside of it stained the pale brown of a mushroom skin. She is too nervous to eat anything, so she takes her coffee back into the bedroom, turns on the radio as loud as it will go and lets the pumping beats of a pop song fill the flat.

The night before, she had carefully pressed her best clothes with her new iron. Hanging from a hook on the wardrobe door is a knee-length grey skirt she’d found in the Trinity Hospice charity shop and which fitted her perfectly once she’d taken up the hem, a white shirt given to her by the volunteers at RASS when she first came over – it has worn out a bit around the cuffs but is still pretty serviceable – and a navy-blue jacket she bought in the sale at TK Maxx to treat herself last Christmas. The jacket is baggy around her shoulders, which have always been slender, but otherwise the cut is flattering. Beatrice tries to make the best of herself, even though nice clothes are a luxury she can’t really afford. She has always enjoyed the act of getting dressed. Susan used to make fun of her for it.

‘You spend so long getting ready we might as well not go out,’ she’d say. And then she’d get that mischievous look in her eye and Beatrice knew that Susan didn’t want to go out anyway. She wanted to stay in, to lie on the bed with her and kiss and stroke and tease and lick and hold and love.

Beatrice frowns at herself in the mirror. It is better not to remember. It is easier to cauterise each emotion, to become a shell, a screen, an empty page. It is safer not to allow anyone else in. Not even John, she thinks. Not even her brother. Did he know what she was? Had he been told?

She slips the skirt on over her thighs and breathes in to zip it up. She has noticed a slight bulging around her hips and belly and wonders whether she should make an effort to eat more healthily. But then, almost immediately, she thinks: What does it matter – who will see me anyway? And when she puts on the shirt and jacket, she feels better. She looks at herself critically in the full-length mirror, then nods at the reflection, satisfied. Professional and neat: a person to be taken seriously.

He will pay attention to me, Beatrice thinks.

She shuts the wardrobe door. She must focus her mind, concentrate on what it is she needs to say. There had been a book once, left behind by a hotel guest, that Beatrice had glanced at. It was a self-help manual and she had intended to flick through it only to scorn the contents and reassure herself that rich white people will believe any old nonsense. But she had been drawn into the first chapter in spite of herself. The book had a purple-and-blue cover and was written by someone called Dr Aaron Toll-Furstbender. The author picture on the back showed Dr Aaron to have a neatly cropped beard and a gleaming smile. He was wearing a polo-neck and a well-meaning expression. Dr Aaron had written about ‘the power of positive visualisation’.

‘Every morning, look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself, “I can do this; I CAN do this,”’ Dr Aaron wrote. ‘Research shows that 74 per cent of adults are more likely to achieve their life goals if they positively visualise achieving them. So what are you waiting for? Reach out to your future! Go get it!’

Looking in the mirror, she tries to believe she can do anything, but instead she just feels exhausted. The sky outside is flat and grey. The window rattles gently against the ill-fitting metal frame. She has no money for the gas meter. She needs to do something for herself, for her future. After so many years of extremes she hungers simply for predictability.

All she wants is some respect, a place in society, a sense of herself once again. A life beyond merely existing. She wants to belong to something bigger than she is. She wants to inhale without worrying where the next breath will come from.

It takes a conscious effort to gather her things – keys, phone, lip balm – and to lift her head and tilt her chin. On her way out, she blows a kiss to Susan’s picture and double locks the door.

She tells herself, with a confidence she does not feel, that she is ready.

Howard

He tells Jocelyn to get the Bentley out and clean it up a bit. If he’s going to face this woman, he has decided he will do it in style.

He puts on his favourite suit, tailor-made for him by a man on Jermyn Street who does not advertise but whose reputation has spread over the decades through discreet word of mouth. The tailor, whose name is Billy, has made a life for himself and his family by relying on little more than well-mannered nudges in the right direction from people of impeccable social breeding. Billy’s career has, in fact, been founded on a fragile edifice of hushed conversation: a whisper behind a cupped hand at the Cartier Polo, an embossed business card slipped across the table at the Jockey Club, an address jotted down with a Mont Blanc pen on the back of a Le Caprice menu, accompanied by the necessary reassurance that ‘Billy’s a good chap. None of that awful flash stuff you see nowadays.’

Billy. A curiously bulbous name for a man so tall and slight. When Howard thinks of Billy, he always sees him in exactly the same setting: tape measure over one shoulder, standing in the back of the shop amidst a man-made sculpture park of moulded plastic torsos displaying expensively hemmed jackets and pocket-square handkerchiefs. Billy would stoop forward like a toothpick-limbed bird when Howard entered the shop, so that his long neck and narrow face could be spied through the shadows. He was a fluid conglomeration of angles underneath sparse and stretched skin, arms tapering into long fingers and his forehead jutting over his eyes like an eroding cliff. Ada used to have a children’s book about a Big Friendly Giant and the sketches in it looked exactly like Billy.

Howard had learned of his services through a member of the House of Lords he had sat next to at a gala evening in the Victoria and Albert Museum to raise money for a children’s charity. The peer had been boring company, with appalling table manners. Howard recalled, with unfortunate exactitude, that the peer’s breath had smelled as though a small woodland creature had taken up residence in his gullet and died some years previously. When he ate, the protruding nature of his buck teeth meant that it was difficult for him to close his mouth completely with the result that spittle-strewn globules of Parmesan and shaved pistachio were launched across the table in giant arcs like pieces of bait masterfully cast into a salmon river. As if to compensate for his digestive defects, the peer was incredibly well dressed. When Howard had enquired about his dining companion’s suit, he was rewarded with Billy’s details and a light showering of the face with bread. Howard wiped the crumbs off with a napkin and made a mental note to call Billy the next morning. Since then, he has never looked back.

The suit he chooses to wear this morning is dark blue, almost black, in colour. The tailoring is sharp and has the gratifying effect of making Howard look as though he has lost a few pounds. The hems are so beautifully turned up that the stitching reminds him of his mother’s – and he can think of no greater compliment to pay than that. His John Lobb shoes have been freshly polished. His Eton shirt crackles softly as he does up the buttons. Howard’s one concession to individual zaniness is a pair of Paul Smith socks, patterned with bright stripes in yellow, orange, purple and green. He believes, mistakenly, that these socks show the world that he gets the joke, that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, that he retains his child-like sense of wonder and silliness, that he isn’t like all those boring, stuff-shirted toffs in the Square Mile. He doesn’t like the socks much but he feels it is important to keep abreast of the fashions especially when you’re head of a multinational clothing conglomerate. It was the kind of thing journalists picked up on. You’d be talking to them about the banking crisis and government red tape and all they’d be focusing on was a small patch of bright material on the ankle. Looking for some ludicrously tenuous link – colourful socks, colourful character . . . that sort of thing.