Margaret levered herself from the wall on shaky feet and turned to face the mirror. Her eyes were swollen and red. One was closed. The crimson flush was starting to darken to magenta. Her nose, it seemed, was skewed as though someone had slapped it on her face as an afterthought. She made a strangulated noise in the back throat as mocking laughter reverberated inside her mind.
And then she turned again to the sleeping infant and breathed her name, Ruth. The baby opened her eyes and Margaret saw herself reflected therein. And the woman trembled, with fear and poignant pain.
Let not the sins of the mother be visited upon the child. And what greater sin could she think of than marriage to this man? Margaret would not, could not, let her daughter suffer at his hands.
The voices whispered on, reverberating inside her skull, filling the hushed room.
Her gaze drifted to the empty bin liner. It lay where she had left it on the bedside table. Her husband’s tirade calling halt to her activities as she tidied up Ruth’s room for the night. On top of the bag, the cord and the mobile she had brought that day lay, ready to be hung over the cot.
Let not the sins…
The tiny face screwed up to bellow, and Margaret felt a stab of panic, fearful should the baby’s howls bring the avenging angel of Robert in upon them. She lifted her hands before her and waved them from side to side before the child’s face, in negation, as though she could silence Ruth with the gesture. The infant’s small pupils focused fuzzily on the motion and tried to follow their movement. Ruth sighed and drifted back into slumber.
Let not the sins of the father… and before Margaret fully realized what she was doing she picked up the bin liner and the string. Then she lifted the baby, cradling Ruth in her arms, crooned to her through cracked and split lips, and slipped the sack over the tiny head. The woman froze, waiting for the child to cry out, or wake in fear, but the opposite happened. Finding comfort in her mother’s arms, the breathing deepened and the little body relaxed.
Margaret returned her daughter to the cot, grabbed the short length of string, and then threaded it under the tiny neck. Crossing the loop, end over end, and drawing the string closed in barely perceptible stages, still humming a sweet lullaby. Until the bag began to bunch at the neck. Biodegradable plastic grazed the skin, and again her movement was arrested as she anticipated the child’s cry.
Nothing. Silence.
Tighter.
Aspel quipped, and in the living room Robert chuckled on cue, his wife forgotten.
Margaret’s daughter would never know agony and such pain.
Tighter.
The soft susurration of breath, the bag expanding like a balloon.
The child’s hopes would never be raised only to be dashed upon the rocks of reality.
Tighter.
The balloon deflated, and a tiny hand clenched at the blanket.
Her daughter would never feel the fire of her father’s fist upon her face.
Tighter.
The bag drew in further, showing an imprint of nose and lips upon white. Satisfied that no oxygen could reach her, Margaret gently tied the cord.
OF MICE, MEN AND TWO WOMEN by JULIAN RATHBONE
Ranjit Singh owned a tiny corner shop in Walthamstow, one of the more run down suburbs of north-east London. Since he was some distance behind the high street and a good half mile from the nearest superstore and another good mile from the nearest street market it was a handy little business. His shop closed for eight hours in every twenty-four and during the other sixteen sold bread, milk, cakes, biscuits, crisps, newspapers, pork pies and sausage rolls, condoms, aspirin, and from a cold cabinet with a steel grill which was meant to be kept locked, Lambrusco wines, halfs of scotch and vodka, blue thunderbird wine, strong lagers and Kinder eggs.
Through a variety of means, including extortion with menaces, bribery, and other malpractices, a property firm called Casby, Casby, Casby and Sun, had acquired ninety-nine year leases on the three terraced properties next to the shop and planning permission to convert them not just into the usual six flats but, through cunning exploitation of the fact they owned three linked shells rather than three separate buildings, ten. There were actually no Casbys extant in the firm and Sun was Kai Won Sun late of Victoria Island, Hong Kong.
When he read the request for planning permission Ranjit had been delighted: ten families instead of six would mean that much more custom. He had been far less pleased though when the first skip arrived on his doorstep and the banging and crashing got under way as the dwellings were gutted, and planks and piles of wet cement appeared on the pavement. Worst of all the progress of his regular customers to his shop-door was impeded by trundling wheel-barrows and a startlingly beautiful Afro-Caribbean male who stood in the pocket handkerchief gardens of the houses and heaved into the skips the timber and plaster his mates chucked down to him. His name was Lennie Enfield.
Not that Ranjit was much bothered personally. He was rarely in the shop these days, leaving the work to his wife Amirya, and a succession of ill-paid school-leavers. A thin, dried-up man, prematurely aged at sixty, he was now deeply into study of the seven gurus of his religion and confined his shopkeeping to examining the accounts less attentively than he did the scriptures.
About Lennie Enfield’s beauty let’s just say it reminded elderly white females of Harry Belafonte in Island in the Sun, and while we’re at it we might add that Amirya’s recalled in the hearts of elderly white males the transcendent loveliness of Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, but a Gardner with an all-over tan. Amirya herself came from Trinidad and was well-westernized in her ways. However her parents maintained the formalities of Sikh culture, and her marriage to Ranjit, who did indeed hail from the Punjab, had been arranged.
Lennie was twenty, she was thirty and the oldest of the three children of her loveless marriage was already fourteen years old. All right, we all know that most arranged marriages are not loveless, but hers was. She was unlikely to have any more children since Ranjit had given up on sex as well as commerce.
Lennie fell in love at first sight. There was nothing romantic about it in the Mills and Boon sense of the word though Byron might not have found the cosmic energy of his lust alien to the Romantic Imagination. Nor would elderly white males who still remember Ava Gardner.
He waited though, after his first sight of her, not for seven centuries nor for seven years but seven minutes, until the shop was empty: then he swung through the chiming door and stood in front of the low glass-topped counter and looked across at her. His thumbs were hooked in the wide belt of his tight jeans, his biceps stretched the short sleeves of his green sweatshirt. Outside the late April sunshine danced through the motes above his skip and made an aureole round his bronze head, silvered the sweat, glanced off his shining skin, glittered in his single earring.
He flexed his pectorals and said: ‘Twenty Embassy, and please, woman, would you fuck with me?’
Since this precisely fitted the fantasy she had been working on ever since she clapped eyes on his torso through the shop window above the video poster for Basic Instinct just six minutes earlier, a fantasy that had caused her to give change for a placido when the customer had tended her a fiver, she was not surprised, or frightened. Indeed the fact that he had said ‘would you’ and ‘with me’, and ‘please’, though that probably related to the cigarettes, added tenderness to passion.