Beauty Read online

  Beauty carried on stirring the meat with the melting onions and decided to make some dal. There was nowhere but the kitchen for her to go. Faisal would hear if she went to Sharifa’s room and tell her to get out. They didn’t want a sinnal like her influencing their little sister. Sharifa might turn into a slapper, too.

  She finished cooking, laid out the dishes behind her on the sideboards, sat down at the kitchen table and waited for them to come in.

  Why do they always call me a slapper? Sinnal this, slapper that. Magi, too. And tramp, tramp, tramp.

  You went out with that Sikh boy.

  I didn’t even kiss him! What would they do if I wasn’t a virgin like Fatima, or Lucy, Uncle Abdul’s daughter? Her husband found out on her wedding night!

  They’d tell you to use honey so he wouldn’t know.

  Beauty wasn’t sure how the honey helped, but a cousin-sister had once told her your husband wouldn’t know that you weren’t a virgin if you used it.

  It makes it small again, aynit. Down there.

  *

  The door to the sitting room opened and the old man appeared. He stared at her from the end of the corridor, before turning to go upstairs.

  So what they gonna say this time?

  The mullah’s pervert brother’s hassling the old man here and his family’s hassling from back home. It’s shaming him.

  Beauty closed the kitchen door and sat down again. She put her foot on the chair, continued biting her fingernails and listened as the toilet flushed.

  They went on at me night and day. Took me to imams, put curses on me – khalla zadu – to make me say yes. The old man said he’d kill himself.

  What was I supposed to do? They told me to say yes – hobbul – and I could go back to England the next day. Thass how I got married, Muslim way, but I didn’t let the mullah anywhere near me. They told him to wait, so he backed off.

  And she had cooked, cleaned and looked after her uncle Mukhtar and his family for five years, washing their clothes by hand.

  Seventeen people! Even his slave started bossing me, after he got her pregnant – Allah give him guna one day.

  Then they thought she’d gone mad so they left her alone.

  Aynt I?

  Al-lh, what am I gonna do now?

  Get out!

  The kitchen door opened.

  ‘Crazy bitch is talking to herself again,’ Dulal Miah said over his shoulder to the old man.

  6

  Somewhere in North London, Kate Morgan jerked awake in her Victorian end-of-terrace ground floor flat with original features, and reached for her mobile phone.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said. Seven o’clock in the evening and he hadn’t even bothered to send her a text message. She must have nodded off waiting for him to ring back.

  Kate yawned and stretched. Emotional and physical exhaustion were typical symptoms of depression, she’d read, and her therapist had confirmed it. She let the phone fall to the floor, propped herself up against the pillows and scrunched her dark, shoulder-length hair.

  The bed felt empty.

  Was another woman in his?

  She’d stopped it from happening once before. Who was to prevent him from doing it again?

  But Kate didn’t think he would. Peter was sexually inactive. In the six months before he’d left he’d not come near her once. She was still attractive, had good boobs and hadn’t put on much weight around her bum since her early twenties. Even her GP agreed that she was suffering from the sense of rejection and her uncertain relationship with him. Worse was the damage he’d done to her self-esteem.

  Kate picked up the hand mirror and tweezers from the bedside table, started to pluck her eyebrows and wondered whether Peter might be gay.

  By half seven he still hadn’t phoned. She’d have to take some St John’s Wort and a cup of herbal tea to stay awake. She got out of bed, put on a heavy towelling dressing gown and, clutching it around her, shuffled to the door. The flat was so cold.

  Halfway down the corridor she was struck by dizziness, and literally had to drag herself along the wall to the kitchen. She made it to the kettle without blacking out completely, then pulled herself along the worksurfaces to a chair. She sat down, wincing. The stabbing pains in her legs and back were coming on again. Actually she’d been feeling a lot worse recently, and was positive she was coming down with something. She shouldn’t let Peter make her feel like this. Her low self-esteem was deepening her depression, making her more prone to whatever illness was going around.

  ‘I’m an attractive and nice person,’ her therapist had urged her to say aloud.

  Perhaps she should take the initiative and confront Peter: demand to know if he still loved her and whether he was seeing someone else. Time was passing her by. How long could she afford to wait?

  Peter paced between his reflection in the kitchen window and the mirror at the bottom of the stairs. He ruffled his short, fair hair to bring out the widow’s peak of the maturing male and admired his straight nose and hazel eyes. He still felt very good-looking.

  He picked up his phone from the coffee table and slumped onto the sofa. Should he call her? He’d have to. He had to be stronger and make a clean break. This was supposed to be his prime, when attractive women in pencil skirts and white blouses offered him their phone numbers. It was Kate’s presence in his life, even if only at the end of the phone, which still held him back. And look where he’d ended up to escape her hooks and chains.

  He pulled up her number and let his thumb hover above the call key. He’d tried to leave her before, but both times she’d had herself referred to a clinic by her counsellor – ‘therapist’, she liked to call him. He knew he should have left her then, but he’d felt sorry for her and guilty for a fling he’d tried to have with another woman. When she’d sobbed from the hospital bed that she loved him, what could he do?

  Kate was still the attractive and sometimes interesting woman he’d met five years ago; still more or less rational for three weeks in a month. He’d tried to talk to her about PMS when the GP had prescribed antidepressants, but she’d hurled a book at his head. The pills had made her ‘mood swings’ worse; that much psychobabble he could accept. He soon noticed that she dropped the names of the drugs into conversation at the art gallery openings and shows for which she lived, as she did the names of famous people, familiarity with which rendered her acceptable to the self-obsessed in-crowd, sipping from glasses of bad white wine.

  Peter put the phone down, sat back and shut his eyes. He’d wanted to leave without telling her the truth, without having to watch those unnerving scenes and sobbing fits which had weakened his resolve last time. This time he’d lied his way out. He was depressed, he’d told her – this surely she would understand – by his lack of success. If he sorted himself out financially, maybe even ‘got on the property ladder’ somewhere affordable, perhaps then he could think more clearly about the future.

  He knew he hadn’t dealt with it very well, and so far the physical distance between them hadn’t helped either. She phoned every day to describe at great length the day’s torments and to tell him how much she missed him. He missed her, too, he said. At least he had managed to avoid going to see her. He was tired by driving all week. She said she understood, and hadn’t shown any interest in coming to Wolverhampton.

  The thug from two doors down had been right. Perhaps not ‘fook off’. But Peter knew he had to deal with it properly.

  His thumb pressed the call button and he waited. Kate answered at the second ring.

  ‘Hu-llo?’ She sounded more relaxed, friendly.

  ‘Hi,’ Peter said, tensely. He needed to keep some steel in his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier. I’ve been feeling really low all day,’ she explained.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He was pleased with his clipped tone and new determination.

  ‘It’s been hard for me, you know … since you went away,’ she said.

  Peter remained silent. Voices pas
sed the window. Let her get it out. He’d wait for his opening.

  ‘I’m not coping very well,’ she went on. ‘It’s knocked my confidence. It’s like I’m being rejected … like I was no good.’

  Peter stifled a groan. Here came the disarming plea to his sense of pity. But he wouldn’t let it work this time.

  ‘Kate, it’s not like that …’

  ‘It hasn’t made me feel very special,’ she said. ‘It’s really undermined my self-esteem, you know?’

  Peter winced at the familiar phrases. She must have been to see her counsellor. She always came back from her appointments belligerent and accusatory. Assertive, she called it.

  ‘You know why I had to get out of London.’ Peter heard the pleading tone in his voice. This wasn’t going how he’d intended.

  There was the sound of a choked sob.

  ‘So, if you had a better job here you’d still want to live with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he lied. This was a disaster.

  ‘You’re not seeing someone else, are you?’

  Peter clenched his fist. ‘No!’

  ‘Do you still love me?’

  Here was his chance. But how could he tell her?

  ‘Of course,’ he said, cursing his weakness. ‘It’s just that … look, maybe we do need to talk.’

  ‘About what?’ Her voice was cold and suspicious.

  ‘I mean … it’s been hard for me too, these last couple of years,’ he said, amazed that such words were coming from his mouth, finally.

  ‘What do you mean “these last couple of years”? What’s been hard?’

  ‘Well. You know. I’ve tried to …’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To be there for you.’

  Silence.

  Then, ‘Oh, I see! You mean my illness has been hard for you? If you love someone, you help and support them. That’s what people do, Peter.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve tried to do.’

  ‘By leaving me without a support network?’

  ‘You’ve got all your friends, and your mum and dad.’

  ‘My parents are no fucking use. What have they ever done for me?’

  ‘You’re all right now, though, aren’t you?’

  ‘Depression’s a mental illness. It doesn’t just go away!’

  Peter rubbed his temples, pain creasing his forehead. How long would she persist with this?

  ‘You’re not ill, Kate. It’s all in your head.’

  Silence again.

  ‘Very fucking funny, Peter. Don’t you dare belittle my suffering!’

  He could imagine her rocking and hugging herself on the floor next to a radiator. He’d never been able to find out exactly what her suffering consisted of – something about being criticized by an overbearing mother and made to feel worthless. The counsellors she’d seen had convinced her of it, Peter was sure.

  ‘Don’t forget what you put me through two years ago,’ she hissed.

  Maxine, the blonde from Head Office. Maxine. The one with the fantastic figure. It wasn’t as if anything had really happened. Not the way he’d planned it. Kate had found his phone and the messages arranging the rendezvous before he’d had chance to consummate the affair. And then there was the miscarriage Kate had had. She’d seen the relief on his face and had never forgiven him.

  Guilt deflated him, as it always did.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’

  The phone began to burn. Peter switched it to the other ear. How much longer would he have to endure this?

  ‘I just wish you could love me for who I am,’ Kate said. ‘But you obviously don’t care what happens to me.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Of course I do!’

  ‘Don’t you raise your voice at me. I deserve a bit of fucking happiness too, you know!’

  The line went dead.

  Peter switched off the phone. He knew that wouldn’t be the end of it, but he wasn’t going to call her back. In defiant mood he got up from the armchair and turned on the laptop. Analsluts.com might help keep up his resolve. He sat at the shaky computer desk watching the egg timer on the screen, then decided to take his time over it and went to the kitchen to make more coffee. There was nothing to do until EastEnders. Perhaps he could have a smoke, too.

  By the time he settled down in front of the screen the search engine was waiting for him. He went to a free listings page, an A to Z of sexual preferences, and started at the beginning, following the links to the thumbnail galleries.

  ‘Anal fisting.’ Too grim.

  ‘Beads – Gorgeous Busty Blonde Inserts Beads.’ He couldn’t quite make it out, but it looked like long red fingernails poking a line of rosary beads up a woman’s arse.

  ‘Big boobs.’ Too dull.

  ‘Butt plugs.’ He’d save that for later.

  ‘Camel toe.’ Too much up-skirt schoolgirl stuff. Tempting, but he didn’t want it on the hard drive.

  ‘CBT.’ What the hell could that be? Surely not Kate’s Cognitive Behaviour Therapy? Psychiatrists taking advantage of patients on couches?

  Peter opened the link. Clothes pegs attached to men’s genitals.

  Cock and Ball Torture.

  7

  Mark Aston sat on his new sofa in the warmth of the halogen heater. The mess in his front room didn’t look so bad in its glow. That bloke Pete seemed all right, and it was good to have a white neighbour you could borrow a smoke off of. Pete’s house was much better, too. Clean and well-decorated. Mark’s was shit. He’d laid the carpet himself, but after a few months the dogs had pissed on it that many times he’d had to take it up and stuff it in the cupboard under the stairs until the smell had dried out. He’d put it back down three weeks ago and it was all right. The rest of the house was fucked, though, apart from the back room, which he never went in. He was saving it for Honey and her pups. This time, he couldn’t afford to lose any. Last time it had been that Paki landlord’s fault. He’d given Mark a shit house. No central heating or double glazing either, and three of the puppies had died from the cold.

  Still, at least he ay been round to pick up the top-up on me rent what the housing benefit do’ cover.

  Missing that appointment at the Crown House Jobcentre had been a real choker. The bastards had signed him off and cut all his money, without any warning. He’d gone straight up there as soon as he’d discovered he hadn’t been paid. It looked like others had missed appointments, too. People were shouting at every desk, demanding their money immediately. The two feeble security guards couldn’t cope and had called for back-up over their radios.

  He’d had to reapply for his housing and council tax benefit, as well as his Jobseekers’ Allowance, which they wouldn’t pay until his new claim had gone through the system. In the meantime he’d had to make do with a hardship allowance of thirty-seven pounds a week until he’d served a six-week sanction period for missing the start of the course at RiteSkills. The housing benefit for the six weeks might not get paid either; they were deciding that at the minute. Just for missing an appointment!

  Still, he’d started the course now. The JSA would get paid from next week, plus the extra tenner, and he had enough money from selling the phone to get a five of weed before he went up town that night.

  He waited until it was darker before going to the phone box at the bottom of the street to call Paula. She’d been raided again recently and didn’t like giving you the weed in daylight. The cops hadn’t been able to do her though; she never kept anything in the house. She knew one of the neighbours had grassed her up, but not which one, so two nights after the raid she’d slashed all the tyres of every car on the street.

  Fair play to ’er.

  Mark hoped she wouldn’t send her son Darren out to bring him the weed. You could always tell he’d pinched a bit by the way he never wrapped the clingfilm like she did. He was only twelve, so what could you expect? Mark had done worse by his age.

  At the phone box some Kosovan was shouting down the line in a foreign language.
Mark waited impatiently for less than a minute, wishing he’d brought Titan with him, then decided he didn’t need the dog. He opened the door and asked the startled man if he was going to be long, mate, because he had an important call to make.

  The Kurd hung up and made way for the white man.

  ‘Ta,’ said Mark.

  Paula’s number rang. She only lived up by the shops but didn’t want people coming round to the house.

  ‘Oright Paula? It’s Mark.’

  ‘Ullo bab! Am y’oright, am y’?’

  ‘Ar, sowund.’

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Can I come and fetch a five?’

  ‘Where am you?’

  ‘At the phone box on Dunstall Road.’

  ‘Darren’ll bring it. There’s too many five-oh rowund ’ere.’

  ‘Nice one, Paula. See you.’

  ‘Ar, see you, bab. Tra.’

  ‘Tra.’

  Mark kept the phone pressed to his ear. He might as well stay out of the cold. The Kosovan could wait for a bit. Darren would be there soon anyway.

  Two minutes later he hung up as he saw the boy’s white cap rounding the corner at the end of Leicester Street. He left the phone box and walked towards him, stopping in the darkness between lamp posts.

  ‘Oright Daz?’ Mark said.

  ‘Sowund.’ Prick, the boy thought.

  Mark gave him the five-pound note and the twelve-year-old took a small cellophane wrap from the pocket of a new Bench jacket. Mark held the weed in his fist. It felt all right.

  ‘Say hello to yer mam for me,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ the lad answered, wheeling away on his bike. He didn’t like Mark. He was too friendly.

  Back at home Mark inspected the clingfilm. It was untouched. He’d roll a fat one, get a can from the fridge and listen to some music in the bath. That would kill some time before he went out. He’d need to iron some clean clothes dry, too. He could do that in front of EastEnders.

  By eight o’clock Peter had only got as far as P for Panties. The tightly stretched white cotton made his chest ache and he saved some of the images for a soft-to-hard full-screen slide-show of the evening’s findings. He ignored Pantyhose – the word made him cringe – and left Peeing and Puffy Nipples for later.