She smiled, those teeth, those full, plum-coloured lips, and sighed – that large heavy but well-shaped bosom – leant across the counter and, in a gesture that was almost maternal, brushed white plaster dust from his chest, letting her hand discover the hardness of the muscle beneath.
‘That would be nice, man. But where?’
‘Woman,’ he said, and she fancied it was more a growl, the sort of growl a tom-cat makes prior to the moment of truth, than any noise Belafonte ever emitted, ‘next door we have twenty-eight empty rooms. An’ some of thems still ’as beds in.’
The affair was brazen. Ranjit was not popular in the neighbourhood: he gave tick to no one, not to Afros finding themselves out of bread of both sorts on a Sunday morning, nor to old cockney ladies who claimed they had been mugged on his very doorstep. When the children of BBC (Radio) producers came for adult videos he sent them back and made their parents collect the videos in person. Moreover, there was no Sikh community in the area: Ranjit had picked the shop from an Evening Standard advertisement and had not minded moving the five miles or so from Tower Hamlets. So no one in the near neighbourhood was going to tell him his wife was having it away with an Afro stud ten years her junior.
She found plenty of excuses to get out while the teenagers and school-leavers minded the shop: down the cash and carry for something he had forgotten, an open afternoon at the primary school, aromatherapy and reflexology classes, and the Asian Women for Peace Association were already on her list for calls in the few hours he allowed her to be out each afternoon. Once clear of the shop she had only to duck down a service entry and into the tiny alley that ran behind the terrace to where Lennie would be waiting for her at one of three gates, alone.
The old biddies told her: ‘Go on ducks, get it while yer can, they won’t look at yer’n ten years’ time, we won’t tell, and I think I’ll’ave a packet of the Belgian meat paste while I’m at it, my good-ness’e can’t really want 87p for a sliver like that can’e?’ And she sold the Afro kiddies ciggies, but still whacked them over the earhole if they tried to steal, which they respected her for, and when Ben, from opposite, wrapped a copy of Penthouse inside his Independent just as his wife came in to remind him to get some green lentils, she didn’t let on at all. She charged him though, of course. And in return for these little favours everyone kept quiet about her.
Lennie’s mates really were mates, even the foreman was only twenty-five and had not yet turned class traitor: when the contractor came round at an inopportune moment he always said that Lennie was the reliable one, the one he sent out for a kilo of nails or a five litre can of paint-stripper if they’d run short, when actually he was bonking Amirya in the upstairs back of number eight. And once, when the contractor, a podgy grey man whose car component business in the north Midlands had gone into liquidation two years earlier questioned the rhythmic beat on the ceiling above, the foreman explained that it was a minor plumbing problem they were getting on the top of, indeed Lennie was down B and Q looking for some washers right now.
And so in upstairs rooms, filled with dust, lit from open curtainless windows, often with only a bare mattress considerately left for them to lie on, they made rapturous sunlit love in just about every way you can think of. The air around them was laden with the perfume of narcissi, then lilac and finally roses; outside lascivious sparrows chirped rhythmically while the blackbirds sang smugly of territory held and eggs hatched in the depths of untended privet. Occasionally Lennie would bring a joint of best Colombian red, and once or twice, knowing her husband would be out way beyond when Lennie would have to go, and breath fresheners would have time to remove the evidence, she brought up a half of Bell’s with nan bread and a wedge of dolcelatte, These extra delights were not there to stimulate exhausted desire but rather to celebrate its happy satiation. No one had ever told them that sadness follows copulation, so for them it did not.
But one by one the mattresses went, new doorways smaller even than before were made good, and the heavy smell of modern gloss paints poisoned air that had been redolent with the sour sharpness of fresh wood shavings. Amirya longed for decent comfort. And so one Sunday evening late in May she told Lennie that since nine o’clock next morning Ranjit would be out, she expected Lennie to be in, and dammit, she’d close the shop. He, for his part, had come to tell her that since the full skips could not be collected until the late morning he and his mates would be down Hackney Marshes on another job until one o’clock, but he agreed they’d cover for him.
Among the shop’s most faithful customers were Ben and Amanda who lived across the road on the ground floor of a terrace house just like all the rest apart from its lilac door. Amanda was a social worker who moonlighted counselling the terminally ill. She could spot an abused child from fifty paces, inoperable cancer from forty. Ben was an assistant producer for BBC Radio Five. They had many friends, gave small barbecue parties on Sundays in summer when they could use the strip of lawn at the back, and attended various action groups supporting the more obviously deprived or endangered human sub-species, but drawing the line at the elderly who are difficult, depressing, and live next door. And occasionally, when she had a manuscript to deliver to her publisher, Amanda’s sister Beatrice came to stay.
Beatrice, whose given name was Veronica, wrote detective stories set in mid-Victorian London and against the background of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement which she had researched to the bone and beyond. Her publisher, who ran a small but flourishing business with a cheerful efficiency quite alien to the industry in general, and all from a couple of rooms just two stops down the Victoria Line, believed that if only she would settle on the one detective, Thomas Carlyle say or Ford Madox Ford, he’d have the next Ellis Peters on his hands.
And on that Sunday evening Beatrice walked into Ranjit Singh’s shop and asked for a bottle of wine. Always she forgot, until the very last minute, to bring a bottle. Amirya remembered that it was Sunday, checked that it was past seven, unlocked the cabinet. Beatrice, fumbling inside found a Lambrusco medium white; Amirya gave her change for a five pound note, and watched the thin rather drab middle-aged lady cross the road. Beatrice bumped into the skip and coming out from behind it she was almost knocked down by a pick-up truck that swung into the kerb and parked between the skip and Ranjit’s Transit van.
‘Daft bat,’ Amirya said to herself, but already her heart was beating faster, for the pick-up was Lennie’s.
Monday mornings are the deadest part of the week for corner shops. Consequently when his fellow students (themselves mostly shopkeepers in the same mould) proposed to him they should meet Monday mornings in the Sikh temple in Tower Hamlets to attempt to fathom their fathomless scriptures, Ranjit willingly agreed. Thus Amirya was able at last to compound the last betrayaclass="underline" she took Lennie into the matrimonial bed.
It did not suit him. It was too soft and it creaked. The room was dark and cluttered with furniture Lennie stumbled over, it was filled with smells more alien than those of paint. For the first time in his life, the organ they had nicknamed ‘Marley’ refused to perform. Poor Lennie. He was upset.
‘Every little thing goin’ to be all right,’ Amirya murmured as she gently but ineffectually caressed it. It stirred, thickened, but as soon as she pulled him in towards her, or attempted to mount him, flop it went again.
Lennie was humiliated, hurt, deeply bothered, and finally, as macho men do (and really he was not much more than a lad) when something they can’t explain interferes with their manhood, became very angry. He smashed his fist in the bedhead, stormed round the room shaking and scolding the recalcitrant member, and let out a howl of frustrated pain as inadvertently he hurt himself.