Elizabeth Day - Paradise City

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.