Beauty (27 page)

The morning was grey over the roofs of the terraces opposite, the dark slates polished by the rain.

Beauty put the lady’s envelope with the train ticket and the address of the refuge in her breast pocket. She closed the front door behind her, slipped her arms through the straps of her rucksack and looked up at his window.

Mark Aston heard the front door close and pulled back the curtain in his bedroom. She looked up, raised her hand and smiled. He watched until her rucksack disappeared at the end of the street, and let the curtain fall back.

At the end of Prole Street Beauty headed towards the mosque on the corner of Stafford Road. The rain spotted her face but she didn’t mind. The shops in Graiseley were closed, their metal shutters pulled to the floor. Paper stuck to the wet road and pavement.

It was too early for the white people walking their dogs.

Mark sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his pale, thin legs against the mauve carpet. The dump valve on the black bloke’s car from down the road sneezed as it changed gear passing the house.

She’d gone.

She had his phone number if she ever needed anything. It was all he could say when she told him she was leaving. He understood why.

He’d call her from time to time to check she was doing all right, he said.

And who knew … perhaps he would see her again?

Mark was glad he hadn’t stolen the car. If he’d been pulled over driving to Burntwood he’d be heading straight back to jail. His mam wouldn’t have spoken to him again. At least if the Pakistanis came back, Beauty wouldn’t be there. He could look after himself.

His mam.

Should he go and see her?

Nah, he’d get a job first – show her he was working and invite her to the house, now that it was clean. If Poles and Kurds could work fourteen hours a day on minimum wage, so could he. He’d be better off than getting dole and he wouldn’t need the housing benefit any more. He could use the money to build decent kennels out the back, start the breeding as a sideline and save up for a mechanic’s van while he waited for his ban to expire. In a few months he could be up and running, could even think about appealing his driving ban … and trying to make his mam proud of him.

Would he see Beauty again?

At the bend in Dunstall Avenue Beauty saw figures crossing the road towards the mosque. Old men in long shirts and skullcaps passed through the high gates, and young men in Pakistani clothes and trainers, with beards and shaved upper lips.

Did that make them holy?

But they didn’t scare her any more. Not now that she was free.

Mark had read Kate’s note aloud to her. They were expecting her at the refuge in Derby. She just had to give them a ring before she left. The address was written on a scrap of paper attached to the train ticket and a fifty-pound note. She’d have all the peace and quiet she needed, a long way from this city, far away from her brothers. She’d stroke the horses she had seen in the photos, hold the chickens in her arms and plant things in the vegetable garden. She’d go for long walks in the fields around the house. But better than anything else, she’d have time to think about herself, to find out what she wanted to do with her life.

Beauty thanked the white lady in her heart. She hoped the lady would be forgiven for the wicked things she’d said about her own mother. If her mother didn’t, neither would God.

At the Stafford Road roundabout she turned away from the train station, into Fox’s Lane, towards home.

Was it too soon to go back? Beauty counted the days since she had left.

Ten.

Would they give up the wedding talk?

Or was it too late? Would they take her back? Would her brother lose it and kick her out again?

Bonemill Street was quiet. The road twisted under railway bridges and ran alongside the canal. She looked at the broken windows and smokeless chimneys of the factories around her, at the rubble and rusting iron gates and forecourts overgrown with weeds.

Beauty’s chest and throat tightened. She took in deep breaths to calm her heartbeat.

They gonna turn their backs on me?

No. Her older brother loved his family. He’d do anything to get her back. Wouldn’t he?

At the bridge on Cannock Road, she stopped to look down at the dark water of the canal.

What if the old man aynt given up?

He can’t force me. They know that … I’ll leave again.

But was it really her destiny to live alone and not look after her parents as they grew old?

Better not to live.

Toba, toba, astaghfirullah.

The rain came down hard at the end of Grimstone Street. She looked around for shelter and ran to a telephone box.

It was the same one from the night she’d left home. The handset had been repaired and the dial tone purred in her ear. She replaced the receiver on its cradle, rested her head against the window and watched the rain run down the glass. That night she had cried to God for help. He had listened to her and sent Mark, Allah give him a good life
.

But she still needed His help.

They gonna give up? They gonna try and take me back to Bangladesh?

No, that wouldn’t happen now. She’d tell them she had a job, that she would be expected at work, that she had friends who would phone if they didn’t hear from her. They couldn’t lock her in a room.

But she didn’t want to threaten anyone. She’d
salaam
the old man, touch his feet and beg his forgiveness. It wasn’t his fault. He’d been poisoned by the mullah’s pervert brother’s lies that she was flirting with men.

Anyway,
Bhai-sahb
would make the decision.

Dulal aynt gonna tell me to marry no one.

He’d agree to keep her there. She was still young. She could stay unmarried until she was twenty-five before she was considered old.

They want me back.

And they aynt gonna hit me no more.

They aynt gonna swear at me neither.

Had she given them an excuse by acting loony? Had she flirted with boys to wind them up? They said she did it, so she did it. It wasn’t her mum’s fault either. How many mothers like hers were there, sitting in kitchens complaining of aches and pains, old in their fifties? She hadn’t had the strength to fight for her daughter.

‘You’ll never see your children’s eyes.’

She didn’t mean it. They told her to say them things.

But could everyone pretend nothing had happened?

It didn’t matter, as long as they let her look after her parents. Asian girls didn’t want to do it these days. Not the ones born in this country. How long before there were care homes for old Asians, too? Did they exist already? She shivered at the thought of old Bengalis sitting in a line of armchairs. She’d heard her cousin-brothers’ wives and how they talked about their mothers-in-law. How could she trust anyone else to do
her
job properly?

The rain had stopped. She pushed open the door of the phone box and headed towards the squat block of flats on the grassy mound.

The shop next to the Chick King Burger Bar was open. Beauty wanted a cigarette before she went up to the flat. Last one. She’d throw the rest away. A girl shouldn’t smoke.

The Jamaican guy with the long-eared hat and padded jacket stood at the counter paying for a can of Kestrel Super.

‘Yo, sister!’

She stood next to him in front of the chocolate bars.

‘Hi.’

He looked at her from headscarf to sandals.

‘Whe’ ya bin?’

‘Staying at a friend’s.’

‘Ah well, welcome home.’

Beauty stood at the bottom of the concrete stairwell and lit the cigarette.

Al-l
h help me, whatever happens. Give them Rahmut. Let them understand.

Would He still help her?

Yes.

She was making her future, like the white bloke said. She
was
free. Before she wasn’t, and now she was. How?

Take your fucking hands off her!

That’s what the lady said.

You do not have to put up with this.

She’d said that, too.

Al-l
h, let me look after my parents.

Don’t let me come back down these steps with nothing.

She dropped the cigarette on the damp-stained paving and stepped on it. A boy ran down the stairs past her, his face hidden by the peak of his cap.

Beauty stopped at the foot of the last flight. Her legs shook. She gripped the cold handrail and pulled herself up the first step.

Wouldn’t it be better if she stayed away? The little ones would get used to it. They’d forget her. She didn’t have to go back home.

She closed the front door behind her quietly. The hall was empty. She breathed in the smell of home – last night’s cooking and her father’s cigarettes. Voices came from behind the closed kitchen door. She looked up the stairs. Her mother would still be asleep, but she hoped Dulal hadn’t gone to bed yet.

Beauty walked along the corridor and stopped at the door. She could make out the low voice of her brother and the blur of shapes through the ribbed glass.

‘
Asalaam alaikum
.’

Beauty Begum stood in the open doorway and looked at her brothers and sister: Dulal in his vest and pyjamas, his cheeks unshaven, Faisal’s gelled, spiky hair and straight nose, the milk on his soft moustache, and Sharifa’s thick hair, her eyes shining with contained excitement. The old man looked away.

Her younger brother closed his mouth. ‘Sis,’ he said.

Dulal kicked him under the table. ‘What do you want?’ he asked her.

Beauty’s heart seemed to stop. Was he telling her to get out?

‘I wanna look after Mum and Dad,’ she said. And make sure Sharifa went to college and married a good man her own age. And everything else: the cooking and cleaning, until she went to sleep exhausted on the sofa. That was her job, wasn’t it? A daughter’s job.

Dulal looked at his sister, at the bag on her shoulders and the mobile phone in her hand. Her thumb hovered over the call button.

‘You gonna get your
gora
to set his dogs on me, too?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You didn’t see what he done last night?’

Beauty remembered the bruises on Mark’s hand. What had happened?

‘He aynt
my
white bloke,’ she said.

Dulal Miah told the kids to go to the sitting room. Faisal looked disappointed, but followed his younger sister. The door closed behind them.

‘You stayin’?’ he asked her.

Beauty didn’t move.

‘That depends.’

She saw her brother’s jaws clench. It wasn’t good talking to him this way.

‘I’ve got to go to work later,’ she said.

Her brother snorted.
‘Kun zagat?’

‘In a care home for white people. And in a place for Asian women.’

She saw him look again at the mobile phone in her hand. Good. Let him think she had arranged for someone to call her if she didn’t turn up at work. Someone who would go to the police if she didn’t answer the phone. Beauty thanked God again for having sent that other lady, too.
Take your fucking hands off her!

‘I aynt dumb no more,
Bhai-sahb
,’ Beauty said. ‘I learnt to read.’

Dulal grunted and sipped his tea. ‘Go to work. No one’s gonna stop you,’ he said.

The old man mumbled something. Beauty wondered why he didn’t speak. Had there been a fight?

‘What about the mullah?’ she asked.

Beauty stood in front of her father and brother and waited for an answer.

Her brother picked at the crumbs of toast on the table and rubbed them from his fingers onto the plate.

‘I don’t have to get married yet,
Bhai-sahb
. Tell Habib Choudhury’s family you tried. Tell ’em I’m going to college to study something.’

She saw her brother smile. Or was he sneering at her?

You do not have to put up with this.

You’re entitled to a life.

‘Otherwise … I aynt stayin’.’

She could survive on her own now, she had a job, she
could read and work, she had somewhere to live and people to be with.