A Matter of Marriage (5 page)

W
HEN
R
OHIMUN HAD
returned from the shops, as late as she possibly could, Simon was still lying on the couch, a whiskey glass next to the ashtray on his chest, watching
Countdown
in a fug of ganja smoke. She'd walked past, with her head up, bracing for his comments, which never came, then continued awkwardly to the bathroom, her jaw aching with tension, the retorts she had been holding ready for him trembling in her mouth. “Well, fuck you, I'm going,” she'd whispered to herself as she quickly showered and began dressing in the bathroom with the door locked. “You can't stop me.”

But here she was, still carefully choosing the kind of clothes that Simon would be least likely to object to: a black cocktail dress that he'd bought for her ages ago, and high heels. The dress was far too tight, she should have known, and she could feel herself starting to get warm as she scrambled into it, anxious about the time. So close now.

Finally, Rohimun stood up straight, sucked in her stomach, took a firm hold of the dress's side zip, gingerly pulled it upward and for once it ran smoothly from hip to underarm. She felt hot and uncomfortable and exposed, but if it avoided any arguments and got her into the V&A without a drama, it would be worth it.

When she came out into the sitting room, Richard Whiteley's audience still screamed and cheered, but Simon was gone, thank god, probably to the pub. The invitation remained on the mantel, and Rohimun kept her eye on it as she picked up the phone and ordered a mini-cab. But as she put down the receiver, Simon swaggered out of the bedroom, cigarette smoke swirling around him like a pantomime villain. He was in his dinner jacket, freshly shaved and with his hair spiked. Her heart jumped in her chest, and she retreated to the kitchen and pretended to wipe the counter.

He started to move in her direction, and she froze, clutching the cloth in one hand, while her other hand, down by the cupboard door, clenched into a fist. Was it one of Tariq's friends that had told her, years ago, always tuck your thumb under your fingers if you're going to punch someone? She couldn't remember.

“You ready then, love?” Simon diverted to the mantel, plucked the invitation, then moved to the other side of the countertop and looked at her with reddened eyes, posing theatrically with the spliff-end held up between his fingertips. He flicked it toward her.

She met his eyes and refused to flinch as it flew and fell, just short of her, into the kitchen sink.

He gave an odd, angry giggle. “You're trussed up like a Christmas ham.” He leaned forward, still staring at her, and hawked noisily and spat on the spliff-end.

She was gripping the cloth so tightly that it was dripping water onto her foot. This was it. She took a breath, to finally tell him that she wasn't scared of him, that he was a
casra charsi
, a sponger on his parents, the son of a dog. But then she felt a movement under her arm and looked down to see the zip, still closed, tear away from her dress's seam from bust to waist. Her flesh, imprinted with the fabric's tight ruching, bulged immediately and triumphantly through like a rising omelette. Simon started to laugh but stopped, as if overcome by tact.

“It's all that butter chicken, love. Look, dressing up's just not your thing. Why don't you put your jammies on and watch the box.” He rested one hip companionably against the countertop, his voice gentle, mock-understanding, as he picked a fleck of cigarette paper from his lip. “I'll go on ahead, love, tell you all about it.”

Rage rose in her, but she had lost the words that she was going to say. She could see the invitation's red slash above his black-jacketed heart. Simon was looking elsewhere, lighting a cigarette and brushing some ash off his lapel close to the invitation, as if by coincidence. She dropped the cloth into the sink and walked to the bedroom with as much dignity as she could muster. As she reached the bedroom door she called out, “I'm still going.” Her voice sounded half strangled, but at least she'd managed to get the words out.

As soon as she was inside, she crossed her arms, seized the bottom hem of the dress and pulled it straight up over her head. It stuck halfway off, and she thrashed and pulled at the fabric, surrounded by ripping sounds, until it came loose, her chignon raining hairpins and shifting to the side of her head. In the mirror she looked like some kind of demented conjoined twin. She swore again, dropped the dress on the floor, kicked off the stilettos and started to rake her fingers through the remains of the ruined chignon, pulling it to pieces. Fuck him, and fuck this shitty
gora
hairstyle. Hairsprayed chunks of hair stood up at unnatural angles and crackled as she brushed fiercely. Now she looked like Bride of Frankenstein. Her fingers flying, she plaited it into one long thick braid and snapped a hair elastic over the end. Done.

She ransacked the wardrobe, then the chest of drawers, for something, anything, that she would still be able to fit into, but everything was too casual or too dirty or too small. How ridiculous that she of all people was having a clothes crisis. In despair, she spotted an orange and pink sari and blouse of her mother's, at the bottom of her old college duffel bag. God knows how long it had been there, but it wouldn't need ironing, or squeezing into. And she could lose the too-small strapless bra that burnt like fire across her back.

Rohimun's hands shook as she fastened the hooks and eyes on the blouse and folded the sari pleats. She pinned them flat with one of Mum's yellow, duck-shaped nappy pins, found lying at the very bottom of the bag, and which brought tears to her eyes as she tucked it inside her waistline. She couldn't face putting the heels back on, so slipped on her everyday flat Indian sandals. That would have to do.

When she came out, Simon was standing by the open front door, methodically kicking it with the toe of one shoe so that it rattled against the wall. He stared at her, swinging her handbag on his forefinger and chewing gum with a rapid, unceasing, almost violent motion.

“You going to bring some takeaway? Hand out the pappadams while we're there?”

She ignored him and edged past, gingerly retrieving her bag and trying not to think about what else he'd taken while she was changing. Just let her get there tonight.

Outside, a dirty orange mini-cab was waiting. The driver, a big Rasta in Adidas, was filling most of the front. Not Asian or Muslim, thank god. Simon could pick them as easily as her now, loved their reaction when they saw him with Rohimun, would goad them with references to bacon breakfasts and getting pissed. Then she would try to ignore their open contempt or, even worse, their efforts to bring her back on the true path of Islam, sister, while Simon would listen, his forehead wrinkled with simulated sincerity and concern.

The mini-cab ride was tense and quiet, except for Simon blowing contemplative raspberries between bouts of chewing. His left arm lay all the way along the top of the seat, so she could not lean back. In that hand he was holding the invitation, and every so often he flicked it so that its edge dragged against the back of her neck. Rohimun tried not to think about making a grab for it and perched forward, balancing against the car's cornering.

At a red traffic light around Soho, she stared out the cab's windscreen, past the driver's eyes in the rear-view mirror. Ahead on the left was a recessed doorway partway down an alley, perhaps a nightclub entrance. Above it a neon light shed a dirty yellow, the color of old urine, its looping script spelling out
Mecca
. For that shade, deep cadmium yellow mixed with a smudge of lamp black, put on with a thin, dried-out brush so that the texture was flawed, scratchy. The card flicked against her nape and she could not suppress a shudder.

“What is it, love? What's the matter?”

The cab moved on, and soon they were out the front of the V&A, and Simon was in a hurry to get out. He left her to pay the driver, then wriggle awkwardly out of the back seat, sari skirt wrapping around her sandals.

He was holding open the door of the cab with the tips of two fingers but would not acknowledge her, was waving instead at a group further on: some of his stockbroker mates were here in their perfect dinner suits, with their perfect blonde girlfriends that always seemed to be at these things. Well, fuck you, fuck all of you, she thought. She'd go in on her own. But then she remembered that he was holding the invitation so she was stuck with trailing behind Simon as he caught up with his mates. She exchanged fake smiles with a lot of tall skinny blonde
gora
totty girlfriends—well, what other kind of totty was there—she being the ethnic mascot for the night.

She hung back on the edge of the group as they chatted and laughed, looked longingly toward the main entrance. The doors weren't open yet, but the red carpet, already dark from the rain, had been laid in one wide strip from the road and up the middle of the steps to the main doors. It was partially covered by a yellow plastic awning, bright under the streetlights. More people of Simon's type, men in suits and dinner jackets, and long-legged women in silver and black and grey, wandered under the awning in apparent disregard of a small group of dishevelled men sitting on deckchairs taking photographs.

Something was digging in under her blouse: it felt like one of Mum's spare safety pins. She turned away from Simon and his lot, trying to run a finger under the shoulder of her blouse without being too obvious, and caught the eye of one of the security guards, a Sikh, looking at her like she was from another planet. Thanks, she already knew that.

Flashbulbs were going off: someone must have arrived, and now Simon and his posse had disappeared. Rohimun scanned the gathering. There they were, almost inside, all heading up the steps together. Despising herself, she scuttled after them to catch up, her bag banging unrhythmically against her bottom, but as she ran, another group of people moved in front of her, blocking her way. The crowd on the red carpet had become a queue for the doors, opened now, and she stopped and rose awkwardly amongst them on tiptoes, just in time to see Simon present her invitation to security and disappear inside. Blank backs hemmed her in, and she whispered
you bastard
as she stood her ground, angry and at a loss.

But then the group just in front of her exploded into noisy meet-and-greets with another group and she, blessing her shortness for once, edged forward with them, past the security guard and inside. The crowd had seemed large before, but within the first exhibition room, it was diminished by the room's enormous proportions: oompa-loompas in a room for giants. People spread out and started to cluster into small bands, kissing and laughing.

The roiling anger in her gut that had seen her through the taxi ride and onto the red carpet seemed to have subsided and she felt oddly lighthearted.
Seize the day
, as Tariq used to say. Rohimun lifted her eyes to the room's vaulted Victorian wedding-cake ceiling, eighteen feet high, scrolled and curlicued and coved and acanthused in a multitude of whites: zinc white, antique, palest violet, ivory and cream; a tumbling shadowed richness of tones and shades that leapt up from the deep red walls like seafoam on blood.

And then there were the paintings. Rohimun started to walk around the edges of the room, avoiding the cocktailed people trying to compete by volume alone with Crivelli, Raphael, Michelangelo. Monumental figures lifting, straining, stretching, bulging eyes focused on the utterly immediate or the unutterable vision. This was where she belonged. Flesh was everywhere: huge muscled arms, backs and thighs. The women were no less monumental: gigantic pearly or tawny stomachs, breasts and buttocks, their hair curling and cascading. Nakedness was the obvious and inevitable state. Clothes were an unrestricting, almost ephemeral afterthought: ready to tear apart, fall off, drift away at the slightest movement or, indeed, even an excess of emotion.

Rohimun sighed. Not one thin, hair-straightened blonde amongst them. Or a single skinny-bottomed stockbroker. She wandered further, into the next room, her sandals making pleasant shushing slaps on the marble floor.

The portrait exhibition was not yet open, but she was more than happy to see these paintings first, her old friends. Bodies as landscape, rolling hills of flesh, clouds of hair, the fishy gleam of bulging, still-life eyes. How tired she had been, still was, of her own portraits, of London It-girls, gap-year royals, young MPs with an eye on posterity. She was tired of mixing white lead and yellow ochre and red oxide for rosy or pasty skin tones, then puddling white lead and interference violet for shade. She was tired of long arms in custom-made shirts, little pointy noses and puffy lips that had been made not born, tailored suits and the one discreet piece of “statement” jewelry.
Statement, my arse.
This was not Raphael or Michelangelo, where the body was a natural wonder. This was painting as décor, faces as Plasticine. She may as well have been putting Vaseline on a camera lens. No wonder she wasn't painting anymore.

When Rohimun had had her fill, she walked slowly back to the first room. Simon had his arms tucked around two of the totties, posing for a photo. The camera flashed as all three did the half-gasp so beloved of fashion wannabes. Rohimun grimaced: cameras brought out more fakery than a paintbrush ever did. Or maybe it was just harder to maintain the illusion for the multiple sittings that her portraits took. Something real was bound to show itself in all that time. Although the end result was still largely rubbish.

She turned back to a favorite Raphael, painted in reverse for a Sistine tapestry. The disciples were portrayed as rough and solid fishermen, pulling on nets and gobsmacked by the size of their haul. The delicate Christ figure sat passively at the end of one boat, knelt to by sunburnt, muscled peasants. She remembered this story from school: the prophet Christ telling his disciples to become fishers of men. To leave their livelihoods of honest toil, their families and traditions, for lives of isolation and suffering, glory and miracles.