Paradise City (38 page)

She has grown more experimental with the biscuits of late. Today, she’s bringing in American chocolate cookies she got from Poundland. Last week, she brought in a tray of sweet, nutty baklava from a bakery on the Edgware Road. Tracy had loved the baklava despite always saying she was on a diet, although in Beatrice’s opinion she didn’t need to be. Tracy had a lovely figure – petite but curvy – and she dressed well too, in muted colours and tailored suits that were only ever accessorised by a modest silver chain with a pearl on the end. Beatrice had asked her once where the necklace came from.

‘It was a gift,’ Tracy said as she spooned granules of Nescafé into their mugs. ‘From a man I was in love with, if you must know.’ She smiled as she handed Beatrice the coffee. ‘No good ever came of it.’

‘But you got the necklace,’ Beatrice pointed out.

They laughed. She was getting better at laughing.

‘Yes, Bea, you’re right. So it wasn’t all bad.’

To her surprise, Beatrice also likes the work. She has her own desk and her own computer. She has even started bringing in small objects to make her feel more at home. She now stores her pens in a pale blue mug with white polka dots and a broken handle she’d bought at the charity shop. On the partition between desks, she has Blu-tacked a postcard Tracy had sent her from her recent minibreak to Barcelona. The postcard has a picture of a cathedral on it and the entire building looks like it is melting into the ground. The information on the back says it was designed by Antonio Gaudi.

The job itself is easier than she had anticipated: a simple matter of opening letters from customers, analysing what they wanted and then replying accordingly with the correct template. After a few weeks of showing herself to be efficient and sensible, Beatrice was allowed to give out a certain number of £10 vouchers to customers who had valid complaints.

If, for instance, they had bought a faulty item of clothing with a thread unravelling from the hem or a skirt missing a button at the back and they can prove this with an accompanying photograph and a dated receipt, then Beatrice is at liberty to send out the money-off voucher and to pass the complaint on to Tracy who, in turn, passes it on to a senior manager and then Sir Howard himself.

Occasionally, Sir Howard will dictate a personal letter to a customer who is particularly outraged and will sign it in his own handwriting. Beatrice is impressed by this, by the concern it shows. She had been inclined to dismiss Sir Howard as yet another of those callous, money-grabbing fat cats and bank bosses she keeps reading about in the
Metro
. But now, grudgingly, she has to admit he seems to care about his customers, albeit in a way that continues to protect his profit margin.

He has been good to her too. Beatrice isn’t stupid. She knows he didn’t have to give her this job, that he was taking a risk by doing so. He could have pulled strings to have her deported, she is sure of it. Or he could have refused to meet her and, when she had gone to the press, he could simply have denied everything. Beatrice knows she probably wouldn’t have stood a chance against the full might of his legal team, even though she had kept the black trousers, stained with his sperm, just in case. He thought he’d been so careful, but he’d left his mark. The trousers are folded over a hanger and hanging at the back of the wardrobe. There is a pale white smear on the back of them, just below the waistband. Insurance. You could never be too careful. You could never trust anyone. Even those you loved.

But so far, thinks Beatrice as she walks into the office building, swipes her pass through the gates and smiles at the security guard she remembers from her first day, Sir Howard has been generous. Her salary at Paradiso is twice what it had been when she was a chambermaid at the Mayfair Rotunda and she has been told she can expect a Christmas bonus, as well as discounts in all his stores.

Beatrice sees Sir Howard sometimes as he strides along the corridor, dispensing bonhomie as he goes and calling everyone by their first name. He never speaks to her directly but he sometimes glances in her direction and Beatrice always makes sure she smiles so that he knows she is grateful. She thinks, perhaps, that he is ashamed of what happened. Or maybe that’s what she wants to imagine. It is a quality he has, she realises. People warm to him. They see in him what they wish to believe.

Sir Howard has a large corner office with an oak desk and leather chairs. Tracy took her in there once when he wasn’t around and Beatrice had been hypnotised by the generous sweep of the view. She stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows and stared at a panorama of London that stretched all the way to the horizon. It was an overcast day and it looked as if the outline of every block of flats, every church spire and railway line and council house had been drawn by a giant hand in blunt pencil. At this distance, London displayed all its grubby glamour, all its twisted secrets and oozing promise.

Inside, Sir Howard’s walls were hung with framed caricatures of himself culled from various newspapers (but only the flattering ones, Beatrice noted) and a black-and-white picture of his mother, standing outside a market stall with the words ‘Pink’s Garments’ written in capital letters on a banner across the top.

‘He’s such a love,’ Tracy had said once, standing at Beatrice’s desk to load the printer with more paper. ‘He pretends to be this big, important businessman but inside he’s a total softie. You’ll see.’

Beatrice didn’t reply. Her silence seemed to make Tracy defensive.

‘You might not believe it now, Bea, but you will. He’s been through so much. He’s never got over . . .’ She stopped and pressed her lips firmly together.

‘Got over what?’ Beatrice asked.

‘His daughter disappearing like that,’ Tracy said in low tones. ‘You must know about it. It was all over the papers.’ A pause. ‘I mean, in this country,’ Tracy added, ‘it was a big news story.’

‘I know,’ Beatrice said. ‘Did they ever find out . . . ?’

Tracy shook her head. ‘No, never.’ She was on the verge of tears and Beatrice thought it was odd, this unchecked emotion for a man Tracy had only ever known as her employer. ‘It destroyed him. His marriage broke up. He couldn’t speak about her. I’d call round with all these documents he needed to sign and he would just sit there, tears rolling down his cheeks. You’ve never seen a more devoted father, Bea. He just thought the world of Ada, he really did.’

The ping of an email arriving in Beatrice’s inbox made Tracy jump.

‘I shouldn’t be standing here nattering like this,’ Tracy said, pressing a button on the printer and checking the paper was correctly aligned in the tray.

‘What was she like?’ Beatrice asked.

‘Who, Ada?’

Beatrice nodded.

‘Oh, she was . . .’ Tracy got a faraway look on her face. ‘She was a lovely little girl. Used to come into the office sometimes with her mum and give me home-made fairy cakes with all these sprinkles on top. But then . . .’

Beatrice waited.

‘Something happened. It wasn’t just a moody teenage thing, it was more than that. She never seemed happy even though she had so much. I saw her once, at the summer party, just after her GCSEs, and she had all these scars up her arms. Wearing short sleeves like she didn’t care.’ Tracy chewed her lip. ‘She drank too much and Howard was embarrassed, I could tell.’

The printer whirred into action, as if in acquiescence.

‘Then she went off to university and I never saw her again. The funny thing was—’ Tracy turned away, as if considering what she was about to say.

‘You don’t need to tell me,’ Beatrice said.

‘No, no. To be honest, Bea, it’s good to have someone to talk to. Most people here either don’t care or don’t want to be reminded. And I wouldn’t dream of raising it with Sir Howard. He never even mentions her name. No, what I was going to say was that the funny thing was I wasn’t surprised. When Ada went missing, I mean. It felt like it had been on the cards for a while. It felt like . . . oh, I don’t know . . . like she couldn’t make sense of life.’ Tracy broke off and fiddled with the silver stud in her left ear. ‘Does that sound mad?’

‘No.’ She wanted to take Tracy’s hand and squeeze it but she wasn’t sure if she should. In Britain, she could never tell if physical contact was appropriate. The rules were so different here.

‘Not at all,’ Beatrice said. ‘I know what you mean.’

Tracy looked relieved. She smiled and went back to her desk. For a moment, Beatrice was reminded of that long-ago memory of the white man in Hotel Protea for whom she had brought a citronella candle to ward off mosquitoes. It was amazing to her how such small acts could be rewarded with such warmth. She had grown unaccustomed to kindness, to the simple expression of it without the expectation of a payback.

Beatrice had never had many friends. At school, she knew plenty of people to say hello to but as soon as she started to realise she was different, that she had feelings about girls that went beyond the usual crush, she began to distance herself. It was only later, at university, that she discovered the underground gay clubs in Kampala but even then she hadn’t wanted to let her guard down. Too many of the people she met in these clubs were into drink and drugs and Beatrice didn’t fit in. She felt vulnerable in their presence, and unable to be herself.

At home, her mother started to drop hints about marriage and Beatrice found she could no longer tell the truth. To do so would be to break her mother’s heart, but it would also put her family in danger. The law said it was an offence not to report a gay person to the authorities if you knew they were homosexual. She didn’t want to put her mother through that.

So the lies started to accumulate, like a pile of stones that soon became a wall and then an edifice of fabricated rooms and a maze of corridors that Beatrice could no longer see her way through.

Until she met Susan, the only person Beatrice could truly relax with was her younger brother John. As a toddler, he had been so accepting of everything, so willing to take joy and laughter as his due. She remembers lifting him high above her shoulders, then swooping him low so that his head was upside-down and he was screaming and giggling at the same time. It was the best sound ever.

Since coming to London, Beatrice had deliberately kept herself isolated. Apart from Emma at RASS and occasionally Manny and some of the girls at the Rotunda, she barely spoke to anyone. Her silence made Susan’s absence more bearable, she found. It meant she didn’t have to acknowledge the truth of it out loud.

But Tracy was the first person Beatrice had met in Britain who didn’t judge. She had the same openness of spirit, the same child-like innocence as John. When, after a few days in the office, Tracy had asked Beatrice to tell her about where she was from, she did so with complete naturalness. It wasn’t like when the loud people coming home from the pub spat at Beatrice in the street and shouted at her to go back to where she came from. There was no malice to what Tracy asked, just curiosity and an apparent desire to get to know her better.

‘I come from Kampala,’ Beatrice said. ‘In Uganda.’

‘What’s it like?’

Beatrice laughed. Tracy blushed.

‘I suppose that’s a stupid question really.’

‘No. It’s a nice question.’ For a second, Beatrice thought she might stop there and draw the conversation to a close. But she didn’t. ‘Normally people say, “Oh, is that where Idi Amin is from?” or they ask about the film
The Last King of Scotland
and they wonder if we all boil up each other’s bones for soup or abduct our children to become soldiers.’

Tracy’s eyes widened.

‘Oh,’ Tracy said.

‘There’s been civil war in the North for years, but Kampala is different,’ Beatrice started to explain. And then she tried to tell Tracy what it was like, about the boda-boda motorbike taxis that careened through the streets, about the market stalls by the side of the road that sold everything you could possibly want – trainers, phone cards, metal suitcases, bananas, second-hand dentist’s chairs – about the lushness of Entebbe and the rust-red dirt tracks that led to the edge of Lake Victoria, about the battered combi vans with mottoes on the back like ‘God is not late. Not early. Just on time’, about the Kololo district with all the rich houses and wide avenues with white-painted walls topped with swirls of barbed wire, about the pristine grass of the Uganda golf course, unused by locals, and the Endiro Café where NGO workers could get Americano coffees with soya milk.

She described the house where she grew up: the pinkish-brown metal roof, the black metal gate, the brick perimeter wall, the tiled floors, the mosquito nets over each bed that swayed gently in the breeze and the single bookshelf displaying novels by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and poetry collections by Jack Mapanje and Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.

She tried to tell her about how Kampala felt, about how an electric pulse seemed to beat just beneath the ground, about how it didn’t have the same silent menace as other cities.

She told her all this. But she did not tell her about Susan.

When Beatrice finished, she noticed that Tracy was leaning forward intently, propping her chin up on her hands, and that she had been talking for the best part of fifteen minutes. It was as if it had all been waiting to come out of her, all these years.

‘Bea, that sounds beautiful,’ Tracy said. ‘Do you think you’ll ever go back?’

‘No,’ she said, too quickly. Then, more softly ‘My life is here.’