Elizabeth Day - Paradise City

He died when she was fifteen of an illness she hadn’t known the name of until she was older. And even then she hadn’t understood. They said it was sexually transmitted, the thing that made him lose weight until his flesh had sunk into his bones, that scarred his conker-smooth skin with scab-sore marks the texture of sandpaper.

AIDS. An odd label for a disease, she always thinks, when, according to her big, red English dictionary, ‘aid’ is a synonym for ‘help’.

Would her father still have loved her had he lived to know the truth of who she was? When the police discovered her and Susan in bed together, tipped off by a surly-faced villager, was her mother right when she said Beatrice had brought disgrace on the family? Would her father have disowned her too?

She will never have the answers. She likes to think he would have understood but people can surprise you. Even the ones you think you know better than anyone. Even the ones who are meant to love you.

She pours a sachet of Mayfair Rotunda instant coffee into a mug of boiled water for breakfast, then gets dressed in deliberately bright colours. After ten days of black uniform, Beatrice is desperate for a change. She picks out a neon-yellow T-shirt from TK Maxx and jeans that she found in a charity shop. They are a bit too tight, but the T-shirt is long enough to cover the slight flabbiness of her stomach. She zips up a red puffa jacket because she knows, even though it is sunny outside, she will still feel the cold. It is one of the things she fears she will never get used to in this country. That and the dark evenings. When she first arrived in London, at the B&B in Manor Park arranged by the trafficker, it had been winter. She did not know what to think when the sun disappeared at 4 p.m. and the temperature dropped. It was as if God had turned off the lights.

It had taken her a long while to acclimatise to the darkness and the damp. She felt as though every breath she took of London air was soaked through with a moisture that blocked her nose and thickened her throat. And then there had been the fog. Beatrice had read about the city’s opaque, settling mists in Dickens, but still her first experience of London fog took her unawares. When it had swept up from the banks of the Thames, rolling through the streets like smoke, she had felt unanchored from her surroundings, cocooned in a strange cotton-white numbness that served only to make her feel more alone. The fog seemed to settle in her chest. She had wheezed for days and when she coughed it sounded as if a small rattling ball had lodged itself in her windpipe.

Beatrice grabs her Primark bag and puts her wallet, the newspaper cutting and her mobile inside. As she leaves, she presses her fingers against the frame of Susan’s photo, and checks her fingertips for dust, automatically. Clean as a whistle, she thinks, proud of the colloquial turn of phrase.

Once outside, she walks up the Jamaica Road to a small stretch of shops: a chemist, an internet café, a Halal grocer and a Chinese takeaway. When Beatrice makes extra tips from work, she likes to treat herself to Peking duck pancakes. Just thinking of the sweet-salt taste of the glutinous plum sauce and the cooling slivers of spring onion is enough to make her mouth water. She doesn’t have enough money this week. Tonight, it will be her regular meal of white bread smeared with tomato ketchup, accompanied by a few Tesco Value chicken nuggets on the side. She isn’t much of a cook and doesn’t particularly like the nuggets but she knows it’s important to eat protein to keep her strength up. And that’s the cheapest way she can do it. She thought she’d miss Ugandan food when she first came here but her taste buds have changed. Or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t want to be reminded of home, of her mother’s matoke and juicy pineapples and the nutty sweetness of a freshly picked banana. Better to have no memories. Better, after everything that happened.

Beatrice pushes the door of the internet café. Manny, a tall, bespectacled Somalian, is standing behind the counter, tinkering with a screwdriver and a laptop. He glances up when he hears the door.

‘Hey, Beatrice! How are you doing, my friend?’

He leans across the counter and does his special handshake: bent fingers, knuckle pressed against knuckle, a sweep of palm. His hand is dry. Beatrice smiles. Manny was the first friend she made in Bermondsey and has been a fund of useful information about housing benefits, community grant applications and government welfare schemes over the years. He has an extraordinary aptitude for making sense of complicated things, whether it be a computer chipboard or an eight-page form from the council, needing to be filled out in block capitals. It was Manny who had given her a mobile phone, handing it over one day with a sheepish smile.

‘I can’t take this, Manny …’ Beatrice had said.

‘Sure you can, sister.’

‘Where did you get it?’

Manny had ignored her and she knew, without him having to say anything more, that she was not to ask too many questions. In the end, she’d accepted the gift gratefully. One day, she knew, Manny would call in the favour. She was ready for it.

‘I’m good, Manny, good. How’s business?’

‘Oh you know what they say: Can’t complain. Mustn’t grumble.’ Manny throws his head back and roars with laughter, his mouth wide open so that she can see the startlingly red tip of his tongue. ‘How’s the hotel?’ he asks.

Beatrice shrugs.

‘Hey, listen. Do you mind if I use a computer?’

‘Be my guest,’ Manny says, gesturing towards the nearest terminal. ‘Number 4. Anything I can help you with?’

‘No. Thanks, Manny.’

He stares at her lazily. His pupils are dilated and his breath smells of marijuana smoke. She always wonders how much of Manny’s laid-back demeanour is the result of generous self-medication. Sometimes, on her way to a late shift, she’ll see Manny sitting on the low wall just outside the tube station, brazenly smoking an enormous spliff without any concern that he might be seen or arrested. He gathers waifs and strays around him, greeting them all with the same approachable smile, and if you didn’t know him, you’d think he was the nicest, softest person you’d ever seen. But she’s seen Manny turn, his temper gleaming and rapid as a flick-knife. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. So far, Beatrice had managed not to.

For some reason, Manny had liked her from the start. She’d walked into his internet café one day on the edge of tears because she’d just heard her refugee status was up for review and needed to do some research but was struggling to understand the Home Office’s impenetrable bureaucratic language.

‘Why are you so sad?’ he’d asked, as if it were the most natural question in the world. And because it was the first time in months that a stranger had asked her how she was, the whole story had tumbled out of her.

Almost the whole story.

She hasn’t told Manny she is a gay. She still hasn’t been able to find the words. Suppression does that to a person. Besides, she doesn’t kid herself: she knows that, if Manny is attracted to her, he will be more willing to do things for her. She is caught, internally, between thinking this is a dishonourable way to behave and believing, bitterly, that it is the least the world owes her. If she is to be forced to live a lie about her sexuality, Beatrice reasons, then at least she will live it to her own advantage.

None of this is Manny’s fault, of course. But he is a man. An African man. She has heard him talk about women. Sometimes, when she is in the internet café, the electronic bell will ring and it will be one of Manny’s many friends. They will saunter up to the counter, these friends, with their sleazy smiles and lazy gaits, with their hair close-cut to their scalps, their muscles slicked with the sweat of the night before. They look like young boys playing dress-up in jeans that are too big for them, slung low on their waist with their underpants on display for anyone to see.