The Sitar

  Chapter 6

  Ruby Ansari Khan was fully aware that she may have been perceived as racist, but she was knew that was the type of sweeping judgement preferred by the programmatic thinking that arose out of a fallen Labour government. People, as sheep, just went with it. Where along the way people began to discard fashionable xenophobia -after estate agents tried so hard to kettle away the Windrush generation- she didn’t know. Now, as the sunlight shone through her window and hit her right foot, she sat wondering if there was any other schoolgirl like her.

  She had read Paul Gordon’s text last night and daydreamed til she fell asleep about how desired she had felt when he had called her ‘babe’.

  He was weak; he couldn’t be sure that her skin colour didn’t penetrate beyond her dermatological peripherals, but he, as the rest, Went With It. Ruby sat awake, and nobody dared disturb her. School was unimportant today, her and Paul needed to plan their attack tomorrow night. He was giving her the present of the Double Whammy (he said it til it became a noun and all emotion had vanished from it; in quick succession ‘doublewhammy’, like it was officiated military jargon) and would provide for her, tomorrow, a theatre of sorts.

  She felt groggy this morning (it was the morning after the night she had watched a quadruple bill of The Simpsons, surfed some second rate porn on the internet, masturbated and fallen asleep cradling a can of cider). The kind where she was tossing and turning under the duvet which was lank from her body rub-offs but too tired to do anything productive. Her head was simmering with the over bubbling anticipation that preceded Action! and was tucked away waiting for the trigger, holding back the frontline that was chomping away, slowly, at the tethers that held it in.

  Ruby was sick of political correctness. She was so two dimensional in her hatred which lacked any angles whatsoever, that often she would leave herself gasping for air as it overwhelmed her in its own self-destructive resentment. There WERE differences in DNA; there WERE differences for fuck’s sake, and they needed to GO BACK HOME. The freshies, the fobs, the perverts who would spit on the roads and undercut prices and labour charges, clutter up the streets with bullshit street boards and open cockroach infested restaurants and make entire streets smell of curry. The strange fair skinned dark haired new ones that hung around their shops practically living on pavements, smoking and jeering, jumping like fleas from city to city to feed off whatever open sore they could dig their hooks in to.

  She hated them and their volatile thick temperaments and inconsistent behaviour and their bloody arrogance; their grand ideas and overblown sense of self, their completely offensive inability to adapt to their surrounding and their parasitic pursuit of sex. They trudged the streets thinking a spare bit of road was there to be filled with their rubbish or their person, talking in garbled tones and feeling like they owned the place. They took liberties, they made everyone else feel guilty and they raped the social welfare system and Ruby’s beloved NHS of all it was worth. They killed each other for the most trivial of reasons and burdened the taxpayer with court cases and police costs. They had crap diets full of oil and spice and pulled on doctors’ time, and there was uproar if they were even asked to learn English against their will. Their literacy levels were low; they never bothered pulling out the carrier bag from the branches in tree-lined streets.

  And god, they stank.

  She kicked off the duvet and stomped to the toilet. She scrubbed her face rigorously and gargled several times with Listerine Total Care, before scooping out any foreign substances from every crevice of her body in the shower. She dried, and in the process got sweaty all over again. Her hair was straightened and mascara was put on; she put on a pair of baggy khaki trousers, some shocking red lipstick, smeared foundation on that was two shades lighter than her natural skin colour, pulled on a black t shirt and around her neck, a loop of rusty chain she had found on the street outside a burnt down mosque; she pulled on a pair of canvas pumps and roughly painted her nails black.

  The walk to Paul Gordon’s house flew by. It was 40 minutes, and she listened to the various noises on the way there and wondered how much of it was from the immigrants; the beeping of a reversing truck, yelps of delight as a girl was pulled in for a kiss, rustling of paper bags, wheels on tarmac, hushed chatter at the bus stops, mobile phones ringing, the clanging of loose scaffolding, the friction in the joints of the cranes.

  By the time Paul had opened his door to her, her face was already creased with the ignorant obnoxious stupidity of a soldier ready for battle. Paul grinned and pulled her in, controlling himself and waiting to fuck her until after their attack.

  Neon signs, cocaine and Boost energy drink were assaulting Jaya’s every sense. She had hoped to get high, but planned not to. The tugging of the two added to the tail-chasing punk-high that made her constantly run her fingers though her hair; the strategically placed diagonal fringe was all but gone and a dull pain was ebbing in her shoulders. She thought her eyes were wide open and made a conscious effort to blink every now and again, but concentrating on what should have been a reflex was taking up so much brain capacity that all she wanted to do was lie down and chatter bullshit with her eyes closed.

  Kulsuma walked alongside her, with the rest of the Lassi Lesbians stumbling behind, like a bastardised group of ducklings:

  ‘Mate, I’m pissed outta my fuckin’ bastard face right now,’ Kully burped, and the rest of the girls laughed; it rolled along the narrow side streets of the Birmingham gay scene and seemed to stir the slumber of the various Vauxhall Corsas and Peugeots sitting dejectedly in the car park. A few drag queens hanging between the cars pretended not to notice them.

  As was the way of certain narcotics, Jaya suddenly became hyper-interested in everything, and very responsive (for Kulsuma, the half-glass of lemonade she sipped on was in anticipation of bathing in the waves of an enhanced version of her beloved without any clouding); it seemed to be a state of mind that was completely oblivious to the swathes of accumulative white noise and bueraucracy that filled the world when nobody was looking and irritated every space between almost everything (and, Jaya thought, ate away at the isles of the Higher Pleasures til they were sinking and scientists could have, if they wanted, predicted its demise in less than 13 years).

  They were walking up the backstreets of industrial, commercialised, sterile buildings that attracted only the whiffs of people and left their essences at the doorstep; the Ibis hotel, Legs 11 Strip Club, Chung Ying Gardens that seemed so stereotypically named that Jaya wondered if it actually meant anything in reality; skinned ducks hung in the windows and the acrid aroma of fagsandbooze and latex hit them in the face when they turned the corner and felt the bass vibrate through the concrete, making their eyelashes dance.

  High pitched laughter and pump soles scratching the ground, glasses clinking and cash machines bleeping formed the hyperpolyglot of sounds that filled the night air; cars beeped (to either scarper or beckon) and curb crawled; bearded taxi drivers with half-chewed cigarettes hanging out of their mouths eyed the fun-boys with a distant curiousity.

  Everything was so loud! There seemed to be no consistency with anything; the lights were too dull and some street lamps shone so brightly she was forced to squint! O the concoction of sex in the air and alcohol in the nostrils and the biting winter evening rolling over her skin and pinching her cheeks was so liberating! She felt so restless and stared for far too long at passing strangers, her smile seemed to have a life of its own and her slim waist was rising and falling in short sharp increments as her heels assaulted the pavement; her hips rolled and snapped and sent slivers of excitement through Kulsuma (the aggression that built up in her with every one of Jaya’s steps made her want to eat her own tongue; but nobody wanted to preserve the masterpiece more than her).

  Whenever Raj or Smeeta or Mira came across another gaysian they would hoot; and it was the kind of night where they’d get a similar response back. They dry humped and stumbled and hitch hiked rides on various strangers’ ba
cks all the way to The Loft Lounge which transformed from being a pretentious sterile place with whitewashed walls and leather couches in the day, to becoming a sparkling haven for gays who pronounced their t’s and ordered drinks other than beer and mojitos in the evening.

  In the schoolyard tussle that was the scene on a Saturday night, pickings were as rich as they came. For most of the girls, they were blind to looking at anybody a shade darker than them. For Kulsuma, everybody was just an obstacle to Jaya. And for everybody else, whose eyes usually flickered over the crowd, Jaya was a settlement of the gaze for just a few seconds longer.

  She wasn’t oblivious to this, but thoughts of Eleven intoxicated her tonight. She was going to be the one who revelled in her crowd-induced loneliness tonight.

  ‘Bradley Simmons!’ Jaya squealed (Kulsuma rolled her eyes) and threw her arms around the neck of what seemed to be a certified Muscle Mary.

  ‘Jaya the Play-a!’ He air kissed her and put an arm around her waist; his bright blonde quiff and bulky arms swallowing her subtlety with their robust ripplings. ‘Goddamn I love rhyming your name. Jaya the Slayer. Jaya the Mayor. Jaya the Payer!’ He clapped his hands. ‘Not tonight though darling, I’m paying. What can I get you?’

  And in the way that Jaya often did, she consumed Bradley with her diluted pupils, and wrapped him the way that only females could. Kulsuma and the girls ordered drinks (Apple Sourz, Cherry Sourz, Bacardi Breezer, Corona and tonic water) and aimed for the only piece of free floor space there was, Kulsuma leading them as they squeezed their way through the laughing, oblivious, jovial punters who were probably talking inconsequential bullshit about bullshit upon the shit of the bull.

  ‘Kully, you on the pull tonight?’ Raj leaned over and her indelible signature scent of hair oil plundered Kulsuma’s nostrils.

  Her eyes flickered to Jaya involuntarily. ‘I’m always on the pull man, you know it!’, with a wide and patronising smile intended to startle and distance drunks.

  ‘If anyone catches your eye, you let me know.’ Raj was slurring her words already. ‘You lemme know.’ One of her eyeballs seemed to stray slowly to the left.

  Kulsuma’s logic maintained that on a night where pernicious whisperings haunted her (she looked again at Jaya and Bradley laughing; what the hell did they have to laugh about so loud?), it was best to drink up and meet Jaya on her cloudy level of false joviality.

  But in her failings of recent times, she knew she was not the best conversationalist (inherited through years of second-guessing everything she had ever been taught; a tradition that spanned from the first utterance of a Begum in the year 1666 where oppression obliterated any sense of self worth for Shahanara on her tiny island as her sari was unwound forcefully, sending her twirling and twitching in a violated heap on the floor). The unrestrained growth of the naysayers maintained their survival within their geographical boundaries, unmoving, illiterate, forever the patient stander-bys and gorging on unrequited love and opening their desperate mouths to catch any trickle of wisdom that dripped from Those Up Above.

  Which is why, as she stood being shoved this way and that in the middle of a crowd of people who should have been on her side, Kulsuma Begum, with her humble roots, suddenly felt irrationally angry. No, she did not feel as though the world owed her anything, but why were there so many barriers indicated in the area around people’s eyes? Why was it not possible to just walk up to somebody and start talking to them? When did that particular trend end? And why did she have to judge somebody before making a certain type of joke? And why the fuck did nobody let her know that the world was so closed up? It was clear that everybody just tolerated each other. The entire world was just in a perpetual sphere of tolerance; embracing had stopped long, long ago, where it had faded so much in to the distance that to evoke would attract cries of insanity! Desperation!

  She was no heterophobic, she had straight friends (in the same vein as every straight person’s defence against homophobia: ‘I have gay friends!’) but why did they start separating the sexual deviants from themselves? Who even specified that that was a difference that even needed to be noticed? On which plane of humanity did somebody say ‘where you put your mouth is what divides you from us?’ Who suddenly made that a criterion?

  She momentarily stopped thinking when she heard a man talk a hundredmilesanhour in a high pitched voice, throwing about his wrists, a group of pursed-lipped businessmen standing around him holding beers and nodding.

  Ok , so there were some differences. But surely they were just caricaturing themselves because the pre-requisite criterion had separated them in the first place? In the hotly pursued human quality of relativism, the need for balance presented itself and these gays, these ones who pilfered away their money and lived for the weekend, could easily be out-gayed by any heterosexual who was willing to take up the cause. So why didn’t they? Why was gay marriage only introduced a few years ago in the 2000’s, (which still didn’t seem that far away) and why was Kulsuma, who watched in the distance, completely sidelined by her own minority? In an effort to cool-hunt and turn what is authentic and genuine in to a trend for mass consumption, They had sub-marginalised her in the margins. They had Carried The One and forgot to add it in later.

  (O Explainer and Seer of all that is worthy in existence!) Jaya, was becoming docile and floppy. If only Kulsuma could reach her, it would be an easy strike to get her head to rest on her shoulder. It was all the warmth Kulsuma needed to last her for a few weeks.

  The Lassi’s were yabbering, talking in loud tones about god only knew what, overcome by the desire to foam words from their mouths as the contagiousness for Bullshit spread about the room. Kulsuma wasn’t falling for it. She wanted to be a miserable soliloquising bitch tonight and she was allowed the indulgence. This whole scene was a joke; a superficial, over sexed, under-informed, misled, venomous pit of a joke. And in an age where those who granted you your rubric then used it against you, only resignation was possible.

  But she knew they didn’t grant her her identity; Jaya knew where it was, but she was over there being lived through vicariously as one of the Beautifuls. Abba, who had always lived in a state of permanent resignation, throbbed in her head.

  The ultimate meme of cynical inaction temporarily set in and she, that night, resigned herself, in the fashion of her ancestry, to watch from the sidelines.

  ‘This weekends gonna be massive man.’ Mira shouted in her ear. ‘Saathi tonight, London G-A-Y bar tomorrow.’ She put up her hand for a high five. Kulsuma floppily responded. She was exhausted, but (as people with mixed blood often did, with that knack of sixth dimensionality) her sense of time and consciousness was tied, like a cluttering empty can on a string, to Jaya, and her watchful eyes didn’t leave her for a minute.

  In the face of the UK smoking ban (which was so militarily stamped out by the government that it seemed strange to think once such a preposterous thing was allowed), people needed other things to do with their hands. None more so than the punters of Saathi night who kept their fingers preoccupied with typing, masturbating, holding protest banners, cooking, driving, holding alcopops (disco piss, tart fuel etc) and tucking their testicles in; it was an aspect of common humanity that they shared with almost everybody else (but the similarities didn’t run further than this).

  It wasn’t a coincidence that the outdoor smoking phenomenon had burgeoned and sexual deviance had seemed to decrease amongst the gaysians of Great Britain (‘where did they all go?’ Bradley would lament, ‘they’re not online, they’re not in the clubs?’). It has to be remembered that the various beer gardens and outdoor drinking parlours where people were then forced to smoke, had significantly more light than indoors. Patio heaters and solar powered outdoor lamps (and even a stolen floodlight from the Aston Villa football ground, in the case of Saathi) all reflected a rude kind of revelation on to the irises of the innocent punters who thought they had done well for themselves. And there was something about a club being filled with the blue smoke of
communal cigarette consumption; something positive, as though a spectrum had been created through which Anything Goes, that worked in good symbiosis with the fuzzy feeling of alcohol.

  So it was no wonder that when the spectrum is lifted and everyone has to be outdoors, suddenly sobered up by the bright lights and cold, that nobody got off with anybody anymore. The less that happened, the less people came.

  Yes in some perverse inverted way –although the smoking ban’s contribution in this was debatable- the declining state of the gaysians happened at precisely the same point in history as the increasing of the straights coming to the club. Suddenly, boom pow pow! there appeared in the outgoing puffs of smoke a series of people who looked and did things exactly as you saw on the street; they pointed and laughed at two muscly 6 ft cain-rowed basketball vest-wearing men tonguing each others ears and couldn’t rip their eyes away from two mini-skirted, be-heeled femme fatales holding each others waists. They had suddenly become spectacles in their own homes.

  The lesbians were the first to go in this conveyor belt of meat-crunching nihilistic consumerist cynicism:

  “Over recent years Saathi Night has started to attracted [sic] a very large number of asian clubbers who are straight. This has had a very mixed response from our regular clubbers understandably.

  Therefore we have decided to launch a new club night. My Man is a men only club night aimed at Asian Gay and Bi men.”

  So for the gaysian girl who already felt she didn’t quite fit in to the British class system and had adopted a new community, it was to the highest degree a humiliating bite in the arse. She’d been publicly shamed, spewed out and left to ebb in the public spectacle of pointing fingers and burning looks. Thrown to the dogs, etc etc. Unable to stop and reflect on the (un?) fairness of this situation because of the forceful effort needed to either sink or swim, she was caught in an unenviable limbo period against which resistance was futile, for the moment.

  This knotted muscle in the anatomy of the chequered-shirt wearing, fat suede booted gaysian wasn’t so much a problem –it was an opportunity since they held on actively to the apron strings of past feminists- but to the quiet quivering long haired femme who had been conned in to thinking that the feminist cause was no longer needed, it caused a series of twitches; and teamed with being on the slush pile of Office Friends because of their brow-furrowing sexual deviancy, the femmes of Britain were having a hard time massaging out the difficulty of this predicament.

  Jaya, like most of the femmes who simply chose to retain her dignity and ignore it, found it best not to bring up in conversation the shame this rejection had on her. In the pursuit of young society’s illusion of a good quality of life it was a necessary omission.

  But of course for Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty the idea grated against her utilitarian ideologies. The short statement on the Saathi website made her head spin (but like somebody caught picking their nose chose to quickly move on and pretend there was nothing to see here) and like a rejected lover, roll around in a succession of why’s and wherefore’s. Like any good social climber, it was best to ignore one’s original roots lest somebody should suddenly feel obliged to apologise –the ultimate acknowledgement of fault. So she continued having drinks and laughing with Bradley and skulking in the corners of booths having half-coherent conversations in the semi-dark of Saathi (which ironically meant ‘friendship’), quietly coming to the realisation that the interim ground had become just that.

  The most pernicious of misapplications of this new revelation was whether this would force the women to integrate in to society at a faster pace. But that wasn’t the issue; Jaya, as always, wanted the option to not integrate.

  So, like the bowing-out act at a circus, the Lassi Lesbians continued their fumbling half-baked joy on the dancefloor among the drag queens and the fun boys talking Punjabi, Hinglish and a myriad of other neither-here-nor-there languages, smelling of cologne and cum, perfume and pussy, listening to badly mixed bhangra musich and third floor Bhangra and Urban Fusion or even Middle Eastern Bad Boi Beats in the basement, Management Reserve the Right To Refuse Entry Concessions Available, and laughing; always laughing…

  ‘O my god, you guys, there’s a huge fight going on outside.’

  Still reeling from the outgoing pulls of cocaine and the lulling withdrawal of alcohol in her body, Jaya looked enquiringly at Kulsuma. It was the end of the night, Kumar Sanu was warbling through the speakers and the sticky dance floor was emptying. Kulsuma, worried that the fight might somehow affect the unending peripherals of the far-scoping Jaya and reluctant to let her see the ugliness of true humanity, grabbed her by the wrist and beckoned the rest of the Lassi’s to follow. They were leaving right now and not partaking in any further spectacles.

  But cries of ‘Shit! It’s Ajay! He’s one of ours!’ stopped them at the threshold.

  The audacity of extremities to impinge on the borders of The Average took shape in front of them; a skinhead boy whose fast, robust movements disturbed the rest of the slow moving Saturday night post-club ambience, drew his fist back, his arm outstretched behind him, and brought it hurtling down on to the slim jaw of Ajay. There was no scuffle, it was a one-way battering; the bottom half of Ajay’s body lay on the floor, legs askew, his feet rolled outwards at an awkward angle in the middle of the road, and the upper half of his body was held up by the white boy, like a rag doll.

  There was a dull thump as his knuckles met that weak jawline, a crack as it became dislocated and hung off his face, and droplets of blood fled from the split lip. The force threw Ajay’ face to the side, and in a glorious finale that could have been set to the jaunty beats of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, he released a torrent of repeated kicks and punches, one after the other in quick and fast succession thwackhisscrack, alternating between fists, bending over and beating the lump of meat in front of him like a gorilla tenderising his meal. The punches bit at every inch of available torso, and the rhythm became faster; the white boy’s teeth were clenched and his lips drew back, taut and thin, his brow creased in concentration as spittle dripped from his chin.

  Relentlessly the hits came down hard; his glowing white trainer flew in to Ajay’s sides and stamped on his stomach, making his body wobble and settle before the next blow. There were small pools of blood gathered in the tarmac on either side of Ajay’s head, which resembled a bruised kiwi.

  In the few moments of pause while the skinhead panted with his tongue resting on his bottom teeth and his eyes opened and focused menacingly on Ajay’s pathetically flat crotch, a swathe of people ran from the club in to darkness, and the rest stayed put inside. A defiant line of people stood outside, tutting and looking disapproving; the Lassi Lesbians tacked on to the end of that line, looking drunk, shocked and awed.

  But Jaya wasn’t watching the bruised pulp of a body lying on the ground; her eyes followed to the area behind the skinhead, to the dented silver car parked hurriedly half on the curb, where the skinhead’s eyes had occasionally flickered mid punch.

  Ruby Ansari Khan was shaking with delight in her seat. She felt like she was the VIP at a special showing by History and her hands were clapping and her smile was wide and her red lips looked venomous encircling her white teeth. Her chest rose and fell as she was overwhelmed with victory, and with her stunted internal vocabulary leaving her mind unable to express the superlatives of what she was feeling, in the face of a complete lack of any concise or precise way of expounding the sheer oomph she was feeling RIGHT now (and because there was nobody else in the car), Ruby Ansari Khan the honorary white girl baptised by a boy so incredibly White he was practically transparent, shook with glee and vengeance.

  The camp boy who was being decimated by Paul was the embodiment of all that was wrong with Britain; these confused kids were pissing all over natural rules of selection, and doing it in packs like they were back home! Who were they kidding when they gathered like this? Why did they think there was any purpose to gathering like this?

  She was alr
eady planning their next attack; it would be in Manchester and they’d smack the jaw of that one too –no! In fact, what they would do is castrate the motherfucker. And maybe even do it to one of the girls too! The media would have a field day! And all it would take is a few nights, a spray can, and Paul’s fist.

  She trembled at the ambiguity of the words.

  They would ruin an entire community. They would stamp out GAY ASIANS, a term so embarrassingly ugly that she felt humiliated just saying it. Twice removed from normality, these insects crawling around in the fissures of Britain made her skin crawl. And the loyalty, the straightforward non seditious ploughing-ahead of Paul Gordon made her so horny she almost wanted to call out to him right now.

  But o! Look at that pathetic doll of a guy lying in the street! That was definitely going to be a lasting image in the journey of Ruby Ansari Khan’s history of empowerment.

  And look, see the girls! See them! Look at the state of them! The rug-munching lettuce-licking pubic-hair-out-of-teeth picking dykettes of Britain’s scummy scummety scum!-

  And suddenly she stopped mid-clap. A glowing face was staring at her through the crowd.

  It emerged slowly as she focused on it a bit more; it was a subtle look; a girl, her hair ruffled, her arms folded in the cold, her head facing the fight but her eyes looking point blank at Ruby, a small, confused line disturbing her forehead.

  Ruby’s mind dislocated from Paul and the boy, in the split second of realization that her privacy had just been severely violated, and she withdrew an inch away from the window. The Kashmiri flower which had blossomed on the mountain of a teeming population of an immigrant herd, finally seemed to lose a petal. The small hairs on her stem stood rigid; a chill passed down her spine.

  Often all it took was a look to check somebody; not a look with an agenda, but a look of disappointment from somebody who can make someone else think they should know better, an elevating look that interlocked its fingers and invited a leg-up. But it wasn’t the distancing qualities of that look that shook Ruby to the core. It was an understanding that they were the same.

  It was a vacuuming suction to the past of a hundreds of years ago when, in a parallel point of history, in a marble palace or a desert plain or a paddy field somewhere, two girls who were practically sisters were sitting in cotton or silk clothes on elaborate chez lounges or squatting in a field, talking about something non-consequential without the need of back-talk because they understood each other.

  But the line of confusion in the girl with the glowing white face’s brow, a vertical line hovering above the bridge of her nose, between her eyes, was a valley of Ruby’s (could it be? Had The Fear taken hold of her?) discontent, gathered over the years as they tricked down from the prominent peaks, to form this micro-valley of-

  What was it? Ruby’s eyes scanned the gay pakis to remind herself. What was it? What was it that was nestled in that line that scared Ruby so much?

  The surrounding areas were of affinity, that was sure. The girl didn’t look disgusted; possibly mildly confused, but nothing else. But the sheer force of the iron grip of the girls gaze bore in to Ruby’s own –they made eye contact for a millisecond- and the image was emblazoned in to her memory like the white hot image of the sun on the eyelids.

  Effectively caught with her pants down, Ruby had had a snap shot taken of what she always guarded as a bitterly private part of her life, which was only allowed to flourish within the confines of a mutual hatred, with one person in her life. And he wasn’t even fully in; he bounced off the edges and the resonating sounds were what made it to the core.

  A year she had taken to fully form her egg, squatting over it as the shell hardened from it malleable soft outer layer in to hardened alligator’s capsule it was today. And she grew with it, deferential to the right people to make sure they wouldn’t eat alive the only thing she knew how to nurture. For years she had nestled comfortably on this little blob of comfort, thinking it would be her key to empowerment.

  But now as it burst open, it seemed a shuffling rippling blanket of spiders emerged, beginning to eat her alive. Now, as all of her mothering materialized in front of her, leaving in its wake temples trickling with blood, it was another type of glowing white face that violated her spawn (which had already begun eating her. Ruby Ansari Khan it seemed, had fallen to the bottom of the pecking order).

  As often life would surprise people with pounds in sofa bottoms and good-lookers at the local old-man-pub or a sunny day in the middle of January, it was a simple look that surprised Ruby. For all the silly-billy minutiae of life which had surpassed Ruby in her Great Big Quest, it seemed that they had secretly been gathering like an army of ants, and now nestled in the furrow of the glowing white face, unleashing their stealth attack at the moment where she thought the empire would fall.

  And suddenly, the image of her mum, and all her empty shallow wrinkles that had never affected Ruby, floated through her mind, with the elusiveness of a shadow but the definitiveness of a full stop: she was sat in her wicker rocking chair with the fan heater at her feet, the corners of her mouth turned down in concentration and her head slightly raised, like her brows, her eyes pointing down at a torn salwaar of Ruby’s which she was sewing up… a bright green, silk pair of trousers that Ruby had stopped wearing 6 years ago… preserving for the sake of preserving, a present which had been gifted by the only surviving member of Mum’s family, the only link to a maternal Other, being mended by Mum despite its uses having petered out years ago…

  The car shook as Paul slammed the door shut and the engine spluttered to life; he smelt of rain and concrete.

  ‘Faarkin’ ‘ell mate! Sheeet,’ the wheels screeched as the car started moving and they had turned the corner within a matter of seconds and were speeding down the dual carriageway while hotels and casinos and Caribbean restaurants blurred past.

  ‘Fuck yes!’ Paul boomed, shuffling his bottom back and forth in his seat, sometimes pushing his chest in to the steering wheel, sometimes pushing back in to his seat. ‘Babe, did you see that? We proper Paki bashed just then!’ He was smiling maniacally, red splodges appearing on his cheeks, down his neck, like a raw spanked turkey, goosebumps on his skin as though he’d just been de-feathered. Spit and blood were smeared across his boots. The bright orange lining of his black puffa jacket was torn, and beige fluff peeped out. He was breathing heavily, as they speeded, clumsily crossing lanes, towards the motorway.

  She was expressionless.

  ‘Shit, Paul, pull over. I’m guna be sick.’

  ‘Just do it out the window man. Lotsa paki’s live round these ends, it’ll be something nice for them to wake up to.’

  Ruby Ansari Khan spewed out what seemed days worth of rice pudding-like vomit, yellow with green lumps, heaving her upper body out of the window just in time for it to explode out of her mouth and hit the wind. It trailed in the air behind them for a few moments like an over exposed picture. Bits of it streaked across her cheek and slid along her hair before disappearing in to the night. The cold air slammed in to her face and forced her to shut her eyes as she retched, over and over, until it was only bile dripping from her lip when they stopped at a traffic light. It was all gone. Out. Exorcised. She had over indulged. It seemed Ruby had forgotten that the hunt was better than kill.

  Paul chewed his lip in anxiousness. ‘You alright babe?’ He pushed a bottle of water in to her hand. Her head rested floppily out of the window, as though she was on a guillotine.

  ‘What are we doing?’ She half whispered.

  ‘We’re going back to mine and getting you to bed.’ He sniffed up a load of phlegm and swallowed. ‘We can talk about things in the morning. You get better.’

  Ruby never did retract her head from the cold air during that car journey; as though she could no longer stand the stench inside the car, it hung derelict outside, wobbling at every pothole, rolling side to side with every jerky gear change.

  And as she lay awake that night in Paul’s bed ign
oring his erection pushed up against the crack of her bottom, on the brink of fulfilling every fantasy she had ever had about him, the realization sank in that perhaps, perhaps maybe, Ruby had just been slapped in the face and taught about her lineage by the very people who seemed to be defying theirs.

  There was no sudden empathizing, no epiphany, no cry for help, no doubling over in pained confusion, no dark recesses of her mind that became a darkened gothic refuge for pain-laden ill conceived thoughts of anguish.

  And sleep crept upwards from her toes tonight, as though for the first time, things were working their way up from the foundations.