Paradise City

She tries to slip her right leg out from underneath his bulk, but Milton stirs and she is caught between wanting to get back to sleep and needing his company. She lies there, eyes open, legs twisted at odd angles. If she just keeps still and tries to relax, then maybe a tiredness will ‘wash over’ her like it always does in books.

A dull glow from the street lamp outside filters through the curtains, casting a buttery grey light over the bed. She traces the beam of it as it dips and curves across the crumpled duvet and imagines the slopes and valleys of a vast desert, the sand poured across her by some unknown hand as she slept.

She had been to a desert once, with Derek, in Tunisia. It had been a package holiday a few years back, one of those deals he found on the web. He was ever so good on the computer, was Derek. He had always been able to find nice places to stay whereas she never knew where to look. He’d tried to teach her how to do the grocery shopping online at Tesco once but she’d never got the hang of it. And part of her didn’t trust the idea of it anyway: she liked to touch her fruit and veg. You couldn’t smell a cantaloupe melon through a screen, now could you?

The Tunisia deal had been ten days fully inclusive in a four-star hotel on the island of Djerba. Neither of them had a clue what to expect: all they had wanted was guaranteed sunshine, a ground-floor room for easy access and a swimming pool that Carol could lie by and read her books.

When they got there, ashen and sweaty from the flight over, the hotel had exceeded all expectations. It was an enormous white building with marble floors and balconies layered on top of each other like a wedding cake. The staff had been impeccably efficient and polite. Their room overlooked the pool and was only a short walk from reception which was good for Derek, given how bad his leg was.

For the first couple of days, they hadn’t done much, which suited them fine. They’d wake every morning at 7.30, like they did at home, then go to the restaurant for breakfast. The buffet was laden with every type of food: pastries, cereal, cheese, flatbreads, muesli, little bowls of chopped-up dates and several trays of cured meats (there were a lot of Germans, Derek pointed out with slight displeasure. Carol told him to stop being narrow-minded. ‘The war’s over, Derek, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ He’d had the grace to look shamefaced).

After breakfast, Carol would set up her sunlounger underneath a parasol by the pool, slather herself in lotion and take one of her thrillers out to read until lunchtime. For hours she lay there, stately as a galleon, while Derek pottered about indoors doing heaven knows what with his crosswords and his gadget-instruction manuals he’d brought over especially from England.

‘What do you want them for?’ she’d asked when she spotted him packing the leaflets into his leather satchel. ‘How to’ manuals for digital radios, microwaves, dishwashers, broadband connections and the like.

‘I don’t get a chance to concentrate properly when I’m at home,’ he explained, turning to look at her with an affronted expression. ‘I like to know how things work. No harm in that, is there?’

She smiled, patted him on the shoulder.

‘No love, none at all.’

At lunchtime, still full from breakfast, they’d waddle over to the poolside bar and have a salad or some fresh fish. Derek would drink a bottle of the local beer. Carol would order a fresh fruit smoothie. They’d retire to their room for an afternoon nap and then, in the early evening before dinner, they’d watch a DVD from one of the selection the hotel had on offer. On Golden Pond was a favourite. Carol cried when she saw Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, all shaky with age and set in their ways. There was something so moving about people in love growing old. It’s a future you never imagine for yourself when you’re young. And yet she knew, without quite admitting it out loud, that the characters in the film weren’t that much older than her and Derek.

But on the third day, one of the hotel staff had asked if they wanted to go on an organised excursion to the desert and Derek had signed them up, even though Carol wasn’t sure.

‘It’ll be an experience,’ he said, holding her hand. She noticed the thinness of his fingers, the brittleness of his pale nails.

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ she said. She was nervous of the unexpected. Derek thought it was one of her failings. No sense of adventure. People were always talking nowadays of the need to ‘get out of your comfort zone’ but Carol would really rather stay inside it, thank you very much. If you were already comfortable, why would you choose not to be? That would be like deciding to sit on a hard wooden chair rather than a big soft sofa. It wouldn’t teach you anything apart from the fact you didn’t like hard wooden chairs and she knew that already.

‘Come on, poppet,’ Derek cajoled. ‘It might be fun.’

His eyes were bright at the thought of it. She saw that he’d caught the sun without even trying: his cheeks were pinkish-brown and the tip of his nose was beginning to peel. He was still a good-looking man, she thought, even now, two years shy of his seventieth birthday. His face had filled out as he got older and the extra weight suited him, made him look dignified.

He was five years older than her. When she first met him, at her friend Elsie’s twenty-first birthday party, he had reminded her of a dark-eyed bird: rapid and precise in his movements, his face a combination of angles and planes, his nose beaky, and with a shock of brown hair that seemed to blow about even when there was no wind. He had been skinny, almost too thin, and yet she had seen something comforting in his shape as soon as he walked through the door, bending to fit his gangly height into the small, smoky room. She had felt, even then, that she could tell Derek anything and he would understand. He didn’t need to say anything and still he would be in tune with everything she thought.

‘All right then,’ Carol said, kissing her husband lightly on the tip of his peeling nose. ‘Let’s go to the desert.’

And in the end, it had been amazing. They’d been driven in an air-conditioned jeep across a Roman causeway that connected the island to the mainland and then on to Ksar Ghilane, an oasis lined with date trees and criss-crossed with shallow drainage ditches. The night had been spent in a spacious tent and, although Carol had been worried about the heat, the temperature dropped, and she found that she slept deeply, her dreams accompanied by the rhythmic tautening and loosening of the linen canopy.

The next day, the tour operators had laid on an evening camel ride into the desert.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Carol asked, spearing a fresh chunk of pineapple on her fork over breakfast. ‘You know what you’re like with your leg.’

Derek smiled at her. ‘I’ll be fine, sweetheart.’ He leant back in his chair and stretched his arms out wide. ‘I feel like a new man.’

Getting on the camel had been the hardest part for both of them. The animals were trained to sit still while clueless tourists attempted to clamber on to the saddles, but then there was a moment as each camel stood up when you felt as though you were going to be pitched over and thrown onto the ground below. Carol shrieked loudly, much to the amusement of the Berber guides. But Derek took it all in his stride. He’d grown up on a farm, Carol reminded herself, feeling a little foolish at all the fuss she’d made.

They’d trekked for an hour, just as dusk was beginning to creep in across the flat horizon, giving the smooth, sandy slopes a reddish hue, lit up from the inside like paper lanterns. The desert light resembled nothing she’d ever seen: translucent, shimmering, as though the landscape had been freshly painted that morning and they were the first to walk through it.

Neither of them spoke for the length of the trek. They didn’t need to. They could sense, without talking, the calm happiness radiating from the other.

Later, they sat around a campfire and were given delicious couscous to eat in clay bowls. The Berber guides sang and played drums and encouraged the others to dance. Derek, exhausted from the ride, declined but Carol found herself wiggling and jiving and clapping her hands along with a pair of dreadlocked Scandinavian backpackers.

They slept in sleeping bags underneath the open sky. The stars, like everyone had said they would be, were brighter but Carol was most taken with the blueness behind them, which was clearer, deeper than at home. She sensed, if only she could reach out and touch it, the sky would feel like velvet against her fingers.

When they got back and printed out their photos, none of the images did justice to their shared memories. It is one of the things that makes her most sad, she thinks now, shifting uneasily underneath the duvet: the knowledge that there is no one else alive who would have experienced the same things as she had, with whom she could lean across the table and say, ‘Do you remember when … ?’ and be assured of a complicit smile, a nod of the head, a hand patted with familiarity and love.

Milton has stopped purring and fallen asleep. Carol, shifting her right leg, feels the jab and tingle of pins and needles. There is a moistness on her cheek. When she wipes at it with the back of her hand, she is surprised by the confirmation of tears.

Stupid, really, she tells herself. Stupid to cry over something that you can’t do anything about. She takes a deep, raggedy breath. She feels wide awake.

Admitting defeat, Carol looks at the alarm clock. It is one minute past five in the morning.

BEATRICE

Beatrice sits on a plastic bench in Trafalgar Square, waiting for the night bus to take her back to Bermondsey. Her legs are aching from an eight-hour shift of cleaning and folding, wiping and sponging. But the most tiring part, she finds, is the endless tramping up and down the long, windowless corridors that wind through the hotel, each one identical to the last so that it would be easy to forget where you were unless you had the room numbers to remind you. At work she misses the daylight most of all. The building seems hermetically sealed, kept alive only by recycled air. At Catholic school back in Uganda, she’d read a book by Virginia Woolf that talked about a hotel being a place where even the flies that sat on your nose had been on someone else’s skin the day before. That is how the Rotunda felt: arid, stuffy, loveless.

Normally, she didn’t mind it too much. She had been a waitress for a short time at the Hotel Protea in Kampala when it opened, serving ladlefuls of posho to rich tourists and Kenyan businessmen, and she had got used to the peculiar rhythm of hotel etiquette, the small niceties that would ensure a bigger tip. Once, a white man had left her a $50 note simply because she had brought him a citronella candle when the mosquitoes started buzzing. She had noticed him when he walked into the restaurant, skinny and worried-looking, wearing a beige money belt and two mushroom-coloured bands round his wrists that were meant to protect tourists from insect bites except they never did. His face had been flush with relief when she brought the candle. It gave Beatrice pleasure to see it and, for a brief moment, she had felt valued.

The Mayfair Rotunda was different because she worked behind the scenes and hardly ever got tips. Every day, she cleaned up after people, emptying their bins of used condoms, scooping out their hair from the plugholes, wiping the mirrors free of toothpaste flecks. It was draining work with minimal satisfaction. Beatrice liked things to look clean but then she would come back the next day and the room would be in disarray, as if she had never been, as if she didn’t exist.

Today had been particularly bad. The man in Room 423 … she shudders to think of him, pressed up so close against her she could feel the bristle of his stubble against her neck, could smell the rottenness of his breath. A coil of anger tightens in the pit of her stomach. How she hated men like that, men who believed they could take what they wanted and treat her like meat. She feels humiliated – not for herself but for them, that they could be so pathetic.

It is part of the job, she has come to realise. Bitter experience has taught her it is better not to resist but to be pliant, to allow them to do their silly business and get it over with. All the maids have the same problem: oversexed businessmen and adulterous foreigners. They tend to clean in pairs now, each one doing an adjoining room, so that if anything ever gets nasty or goes further than you want it to, you can scream out and bang the walls. Otherwise, if you’re not being asked to do anything you don’t want to, it can be a handy way to make extra money. Some of the girls have regular clients. Ewelina, from Poland, has a guy called Franz who comes over from Austria every month and has given her a Rolex watch. Beatrice is pretty sure it is fake but hasn’t the heart to tell her.

But the man today – the fat one in the robe, with hairs growing out of his nose – had not paid Beatrice. Once it was over, he’d tightened his belt, patted her on the bottom and leered at her, as though she had been a willing participant, as though she had wanted him to rub against her until he came. Stupid idiot. Beatrice had stared at him sullenly until he’d been forced to look away. She left the room without replacing his bottle of Chablis or drawing his curtains. She hoped she wouldn’t get in trouble for that.

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.