Paradise City

She glances up at the digital display board to find out how long the next bus will be but it is broken so she has to sit here, patiently, waiting for a bus that might or might not come in the next half-hour. Waiting always seems to take so much longer when you don’t know how long it will be for, she thinks.

Mrs Dalloway, that was what the book had been called. It had seemed so far removed from her own experience and yet here she is, living in the same city it described, all those years ago. London wasn’t recognisable to her when she first arrived, despite having read so much about it. It was so much bigger than it had appeared on the page, so much more foreign, and although Beatrice should have been intimidated by this, she found instead that she took a kind of comfort from the hugeness of the city. She craved London’s anonymity, the constant reinvention of the streets, the silence of strangers that would, in any other context, have been unfriendly but which gave Beatrice space to breathe for what felt like the first time in years. She grew to love the overlooked beauty of the urban sprawl, the mismatched things you wouldn’t expect: the evening sunlight glinting against a steel girder on the Westway, the flat sheets of cardboard in the Waterloo subway where people slept huddled against the wind, the angry graffiti scrawled across a tube carriage, the flaking paint on advertising billboards, the tin-foil glimmer of a flickering street-lamp bulb against white birch bark. All of it felt to Beatrice like freedom.

She wonders what happened to her copy of Mrs Dalloway. She’d had to leave it behind, like everything else. She had been good at school. She wishes she’d been able to stay at university. Hard to remember now but she was studying to be a lawyer.

Across the street from her, there is a bulky shadow, hunkered down in the doorstep of a gentlemen’s outfitter’s. Her eyes adjust gradually to the dark and she realises the shape conceals a person, coddled tightly in a sleeping bag like a caterpillar snug in its cocoon. She can just make out the tip of a head, covered in a beanie hat, and a flash of skin beneath.

A drunken group of men in matching rugby shirts are trailing their way through the Square, slapping each other’s backs, loudly reciting the course of the evening to anyone who happens to pass within earshot.

‘Gagging for it, mate,’ she hears one of them shout. ‘Fucking all over you.’

Men. All after the same thing.

Up on the fourth plinth, Beatrice’s attention is caught by a dull strip of gold, picked out by the soft moonlight. She read in the Evening Standard that some artists have put an oversized boy on a rocking horse there, where normally you would expect to see grave-faced generals on horseback. She likes the idea of this. It makes her smile. There is something in the rocking-horse boy’s carefree attitude – one arm raised aloft in pure, unencumbered happiness – that reminds her of John, her little brother. He would be ten now, she thinks, and a heaviness tugs at her heart.

After a quarter of an hour, a Number 47 swings into view. Beatrice stands, feeling the stiffness in her shoulders and her calf muscles. She slips her Oyster card out of the fake-leather handbag she bought in the Primark sale last year and swipes it across the reader as the driver looks at her with tired eyes. He has light, youthful skin and wears a turban.

He nods at her, just the once, just to let her know that he feels the kinship of the night-worker, that he understands what it is to be one of those silent, uncomplaining people who clean rooms and drive buses and stack shelves and sweep streets into the early hours, who fuel this vast and friendless city, who feed its pavements and drains with sweat and silent submission, who stay hidden from view, passed over by richer residents who believe it all happens without any effort. She sees the bus driver convey this in the smallest inflexion of his head, in the tiniest upturn of the corners of his mouth. She wants to lean over and hold his hand, through the gap in the screen, simply so they can reassure each other that their blood runs warm, that life still pulses in their veins, but she stops herself – just. She smiles at him, then moves to the mid-section of the bus, sliding into the window-seat. The grey upholstery smells faintly of curry.

She leans her head against the glass and dozes, lulled by the juddering of the engine and the tinging of the bell for request stops. A man behind her is burbling to himself, talking in a stream of swear words and furious rejoinders to an imagined opponent. When she turns round, she sees he is swigging from a clear bottle, the neck of it protruding from a brown paper bag.

‘What are you looking at, you fucking nigger?’

Beatrice scowls at him. She is neither afraid nor shocked. You get used to such things, living in this city. It is the price you pay for safety. Besides, she has known worse abuse. The police at home had stripped her, forced her to walk through her village naked, then beaten her unconscious and left her on a concrete floor for days without food. Verbal abuse was nothing compared to that, to the humiliation of it.

And then there was the bigger pain, the one she chooses not to think about. Every time she senses the ugliness encroach, she makes herself imagine something else, something easy and sunny and smooth and clean-smelling like bleach in a bath-tub.

But sometimes, in spite of her best efforts, a flash of it will come back to her when she least expects it. She will hear the echo of a muffled scream while she is waiting to cross the road. The traffic lights will slip from amber into red and she will blink, forgetting where she is, finding herself back there, back in the faraway bedroom with his weight on top of her, a bead of his sweat dropping into her open mouth. Or she will be doing her weekly load at the launderette and she will suddenly remember the sour-cream taste of him in her mouth and she will have to sit down to gather her breath before she finds enough strength to continue pushing the clothes into the washing machine’s metal drum. Or she will simply be sitting, staring into space, and a splinter-clear piece of remembered past will slice into her mind’s eye and it will come back to her in its entirety: the force of it, the mass of him, the sickness that followed, the sense of betrayal and the shame she was angry with herself for feeling.

By the time Beatrice gets back to her flat on Jamaica Road, it is after 1 a.m. and her legs feel so heavy she can barely make it up the four flights of stairs. She slides her key into the lock with relief and goes straight to the electric heater to plug it in. Five years in this country and the cold still seeps into her bones.

Beatrice flicks on the light. Her flat is small and basic. There is a bed-sitting room with a single mattress that doubles up as a sofa and, to one side, a galley kitchen with two gas rings and a rickety grill. A grimy bathroom is situated behind the front door, the tiles spotted with black along the grouting, the shower head covered with a rash of limescale. A smell of damp pervades. When she hangs up wet clothes, they never seem to dry.

She rents the flat from Mr Khandoker, a Bengali man with heavy eyebrows and a permanently sour expression. Mr Khandoker owns several properties in this block, including the ground-floor porter’s flat which for months has had sagging cardboard pressed against empty window-frames. The cardboard has the word ‘Shurgard’ spelled across it in black block capitals and there is a rip at the base of the letter H through which Beatrice can sometimes catch a glimpse of movement: a rapid shifting through the shadows. She is never sure if the movement belongs to humans or rats and has never wanted to find out. It is better, in this block, to keep your curiosity to yourself.

Beatrice tried not to have too much to do with Mr Khandoker. He would turn up on her doorstep every week wearing a pale yellow salwar kameez dotted with oily stains which she assumed were from the spit and fizzle of a too-hot frying pan and she would hand over her rent money in worn £10 notes. Once, Mr Khandoker had offered to cash a cheque for her and when he returned with half the amount she had been expecting, he explained to Beatrice that of course he had to take interest and did she think he was a charity, handing out free money to worthy causes? No, he said, he was a businessman: one of Thatcher’s children.

She didn’t make that mistake again. And really, she has cause to be grateful to Mr Khandoker. He is nowhere near as bad as some of the private landlords Beatrice hears about. If she pays him on time, he leaves her alone.

She tries to remind herself of her luck but her mood remains heavy and listless. Beatrice makes herself a slice of toast under the grill, waiting for the corners of the white bread to curl with the heat. She butters the toast thickly from a tub of Flora then rips open a packet of sugar taken from the hotel and sprinkles it generously across the margarine. She bites into it, feeling the sweetness hit the back of her throat.

She wipes the crumbs from her mouth and sits on the bed to take off her clumpy flat shoes. Then, as she allows herself to do for a brief period every single night, she starts to cry. Her shoulders slump forward and she holds her head in her hands, her breath coming in gulps, tears dropping onto the bare floorboards. For five minutes, she summons all the stored-up pain and buried memory and lets the sadness wash over her. She will not let anyone else see her do this, ever. She will not allow them – the man in Room 423, the drunk on the bus, the police back home – to know her weakness. This sadness is hers alone. A precious, shielded thing.

After the tears, Beatrice feels lighter, more herself. She strips off her black clothes, hanging them carefully over the back of a wooden chair without creasing so that she can wear them again tomorrow. She is saving up to buy an iron.

As she goes through to the bathroom, she catches sight of the photograph of Susan, hanging on the wall from a crooked nail. Susan is smiling and the sun catches her hair. Her cheeks are sweating lightly – Susan always hated her cheeks and said they made her look fat but Beatrice loved them. They reminded her of plumped-up pillows. She’d taken the photograph in the café they went to on their first date, although, of course, neither of them would admit what it was until later.

In the photo, Susan is holding a glass of Coca-Cola with a straw. She always drank full fat, never Diet. Said she didn’t like the taste.

Beatrice kisses the tips of her fingers and lets her hand rest on the frame for a few moments. She has no idea whether she’ll ever see Susan again. The two of them had been split up, shortly after they’d escaped over the border to the Congo and paid a human trafficker to take them to the UK. It had cost Beatrice £21,000. She’d given the trafficker a plot of land her father owned. For the first and only time in her life, Beatrice had been grateful her father was dead and that she’d inherited a share of his fortune.

‘It’s not safe for both of you to go at the same time,’ the trafficker had said, chewing on one end of a cocktail stick. He had grubby fingernails and wore a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off. ‘One of you only. The other will follow.’

They’d had no choice. Susan squeezed Beatrice’s hand.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow.’

‘But …’

‘You’re ill. You should go first.’

Beatrice was still recovering from the effects of the police beating. Her back was pitted with sores. The cuts on her arms were not healing. The corner of one eye was still tender from a brutal punch.

If she had been stronger, more like herself, she wouldn’t have let Susan stay behind on her own. She would have thought of something to keep the two of them together. Because what was the point of any of it if they were separated? Why had they fought so hard if they were going to end up alone?

They couldn’t be together in Uganda. They’d be arrested or murdered before the year was out.

‘Devil-child’, that’s what Beatrice’s mother had called her.

Her own mother.

She’d looked her eldest daughter in the eyes and said it.

But by then, Beatrice hadn’t cared, had only had space in her head for thoughts of Susan. She’d been obsessed, crazed. And Susan … she had been in love with her too, of that she was sure. And yet … she’d never followed her to London.

They’d made a plan to meet outside Buckingham Palace, which was silly looking back, but it was the only landmark they could be sure of. On the appointed day, Susan hadn’t come. For twelve hours, Beatrice had waited in the drizzle, hugging her too-thin coat closer with every passing minute, not wanting her teeth to chatter. Her toes had grown numb, her legs ached with standing but, almost from superstition, she refused to move. She would not shift from her spot by the dour-looking statue of Queen Victoria, facing the gates and the flag, where they’d agreed they would find each other. She told herself that, if she moved, even just an inch to the left or right, Susan wouldn’t come. She made a deal with God in her mind: if I stand here, stock-still, for another hour, Susan will appear.

Beatrice waited until all the tourists had dispersed and the light had changed from rosy pink to sludge-grey and then slipped into dark blue dusk. Still no sign of her.

She’d gone back the next day and the one after that, thinking to herself that Susan must have got delayed or confused or was trying desperately to get a message to her and that she should be there, just in case, to welcome her to this strange city. She should be there, as promised, to prove her love.

But Susan never came. The drafts folder in the email account they’d set up in case either of them needed to communicate remained resolutely empty. Days, then weeks, then months and Beatrice never got word from her. Something must have gone wrong. The trafficker had gone back on his word. Her family had found her and dragged her back to Uganda against her will. Or she’d been taken by the authorities and thrown into a detention centre and it was only a matter of time until they were reunited. Surely that was it? Surely there was some sense to everything they had been through, some reason why?

Beatrice turns away from the photo. It is not good to think like this. Too many futile thoughts and she will become depressed again and when she is depressed, she cannot work, cannot so much as crawl out of bed for fear of the sky collapsing on her and the heavy grey clouds pinning her to the floor. When she gets like that, everything acquires a new, horrifying edge. The world around her sweats with an alien light. Buildings and roads and cars slough off their skins and become unfamiliar beings and Beatrice can’t leave the flat through sheer terror of what she might find on the other side of the door.

She must not let that happen. She needs the money to survive. She needs to buy an iron.

She brushes her teeth thoroughly, splashes soap and water on her face, then gets into bed. Something crinkles under her pillow and, when she slides her hand underneath, she realises it is that weekend’s paper. She’d picked it up on a bus for the TV listings. Beatrice throws it to the floor. The pages fly open and a photograph catches her eye, along the bottom of page seven.

Her gaze snaps into focus. It is the man from Room 423. He is much younger in the picture but she recognises his piggy little eyes and florid cheeks. Beatrice props the paper up on her knees to read it more closely. It is an article about optimism written by a girl called Esme Reade and the photograph caption identifies the man as ‘self-made millionaire’ Sir Howard Pink.

A millionaire, Beatrice thinks. She narrows her eyes. He should have paid her.

Howard (#u718a0743-1663-5813-9828-8e6b38fbb191)

Howard had bought Eden House in the mid-1990s, as London property prices were rocketing skywards and when just about anyone with a 5 per cent deposit could find themselves with an interest-free mortgage and a substantial duplex in Chelsea before the day was out. Eden House was a sprawling Victorian-era mansion behind High Street Kensington, built for a painter Howard had never heard of, at a time when moneyed bohemians liked to believe they were re-creating a pastoral idyll in the heart of the city. Luther Eden had aspired to be William Morris but had never quite made it. All that was left of him was a garish oil painting full of impasto brushwork and overenthusiastic representations of hellfire, hung in an ignored corner of Tate Britain.

As a result of Eden’s arts and crafts fascination, the house was set back in a large walled garden and dotted with stone-carved representations of forest nymphs and sprightly animals every which way you looked. A goat, curled in on itself with a dazed expression, was to be found at the intersection of a piece of guttering. A charming elfish figurine, complete with a quiver of arrows, peeked out humorously from beneath the window ledge of one of the first-floor bedrooms.