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.
These friends do not notice Beatrice sitting there, like a small, unimportant shadow of someone who used to be. Nor do they acknowledge the sullen, tattooed girl in the corner, tip-tapping on the keyboard with gel-tip nails to update her Facebook page. They do not notice the woman in a hijab, silently typing up her CV. They do not register any woman who has not expressly packaged herself to attract male attention. Instead, these friends walk straight up to Manny who stands there, like a king awaiting his courtiers, his face emerging from behind the refrigerated drinks shelves that are always optimistically stocked with faded cartons of exotic fruit juice: lychee, mango, papaya.
Yes, Beatrice has heard Manny talk about women: she has heard his dirty laughs and his whispered jokes and the slap of the palm of his hand in a congratulatory high-five. She knows men like Manny, who need sex and power like most people need bread and water. Even his name is a distillation of masculinity. She wonders, occasionally, whether Manny is a nickname, given to him by an admiring coterie of young men in acknowledgement of his sexual prowess. Or perhaps it genuinely was the name his parents gave him and the way he turned out was a fateful coincidence. ‘Nominative determinism’, they called it. She’d heard a discussion about it on the breakfast radio after a man called Mr Diamond had been forced to step down from his position as head of a failing bank, only to be replaced by a colleague called Mr Rich. She smiles at the thought of this.
‘Now that’s what I like to see!’ Manny reaches into the refrigerated shelves and hands Beatrice a carton of lychee juice. ‘A lovely smile on a beautiful woman.’
He winks. She rolls her eyes, accepts the juice and takes her seat at the computer.
‘Hey, Beatrice, one day you’ll realise we’re meant to be together.’
‘Yes, Manny. And one day pigs will take to the sky with wings.’
He guffaws then disappears into a back room to turn up the radio. A thumping reggae beat rings out just as Manny re-emerges and starts to dance, swaying his hips suggestively, eyes half-closed as he clasps an imaginary partner to him. An unlit joint is tucked behind his ear. She can’t help but laugh. Yet she tilts the screen ever so slightly away from the counter so Manny can’t see what she’s doing. There are elements of her life that Beatrice knows it would be wiser to keep private. Howard Pink, for instance. That was something she wanted to do on her own.
She logs on to the computer, double-clicking on the internet icon. She types ‘Sir Howard Pink’ into the Google search bar. Rapidly and methodically, she clicks through the relevant documents, assimilating information. It feels good to be using her brain again. She finds out that Sir Howard had started in business at the age of fifteen, selling clothes from a market stall. At twenty-one, he’d bought his first shop. By thirty, he was a millionaire. By thirty-five, after an aggressive corporate takeover, he had bought out the Paradiso Group of clothing shops. He was routinely in the top fifty of the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated fortune of £3.3 billion. He has a reputation for throwing lavish theme parties, which turns up a number of unexpected images: Sir Howard in an Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt on his fiftieth birthday, celebrated on a private Greek island with six hundred of his closest friends (and a performance by Stevie Wonder); Sir Howard laughing riotously while dressed up as a medieval pope; Sir Howard sporting a giant sombrero accompanied by an unsmiling blonde woman in a nurse’s outfit. Then there was all the stuff about his daughter, Ada, who had gone missing at the age of nineteen in mysterious circumstances. Beatrice skims over these stories. They aren’t what she needs to focus on. Everyone has sadness in their lives.