The House of Hidden Mothers (36 page)

‘Tobes?'

A sigh. ‘Yes?'

‘Are you sad? That she's not me?'

‘What?' Toby's sharp tone made her blink.

‘I mean … I know you're missing out on the whole look-at-my-fat-fecund-wife,-I-did-that stage.' She managed to raise a wry grin. ‘You know, singing to my tummy, feeling the kicks …'

‘Going out at midnight to get you pickles and pineapples …'

‘Rubbing wheatgerm oil into my skin … and other places …'

‘Now, that's beginning to sound like fun,' Toby smirked.

‘Not what you think. One of the dads – the kind that suggest all the expectant fathers ought to wear fake pregnancy bellies so they can really feel what their partners are going through—'

‘I hate him already.'

‘He spent weeks massaging his wife's perineum with the very same wheatgerm oil, so she would stretch nicely and avoid tearing during the birth. I'll never forget when he boasted one week that he'd managed to get a whole fist in. I thought Shiv was going to throw up.'

‘You got your ex to actually attend birthing classes?'

‘Just the one. I used to go on my own.'

‘Well then,' Toby filled the growing silence, ‘seems like you missed out, too. So we're quits. Make you feel better?'

‘I'd feel better if you were … nicer to Mala. I mean, if you stopped being so weird with her. I know this is all weird anyway, but …'

‘I wasn't aware I wasn't being nice.'

‘Then why didn't you come to the scan?'

‘You were there, you didn't need me too.'

‘It's our baby, Tobes. Yours and mine. You shouldn't let your awkwardness with Mala stop you sharing the important stuff with me. Tobes?'

The telephone rang in the corner of the kitchen. They both looked up. It was so rare that anyone ever called them on anything other than their smartphones.

Toby got there first. ‘Oh, hi Lydia!' he answered with genuine warmth.

Shyama stiffened at her name, feeling increasingly uneasy as she caught the tone of Toby's exchange with her. ‘OK … When?… Where? … She's here, do you want to … OK, I will.'

He replaced the receiver.

‘Get your coat. Tara's been arrested.'

There was a disappointing lack of graffiti in the police station cell, Tara decided. She'd seen enough gritty crime series to expect the windowless, white-walled room with a smelly toilet in a corner and the wire-framed bed with a wisp of a mattress. But there had been nothing much to read during the hours she had already been left there: mainly the names of people wanting to let whoever came after them know that they had been there too, scratched randomly into the flaking walls: Kash, Maz and, more surprisingly, Otto. Another nice middle-class kid who had got in with the wrong crowd, sending his parents into a tailspin of panic and soul-searching. Except that Tara hadn't rung either of her parents with the single phone call she had been allowed. Lydia had been her first port of call, maybe because she was worried about one of her grandparents picking up the phone if she called home. It would have been like one of their Skype calls to India, loud hysterical shouting with the juiciest snippets repeated for maximum effect. ‘Prison! Yes, she's in prison! No … pris-on! Jail! With pimps and murderers! Don't tell Thaya-ji! The shock will kill him!' Trying to explain to her bewildered grandparents that she had been arrested for obstruction on a demonstration against female genital mutilation would have been way out of their comfort zone. She wondered where her fellow protesters had been taken. She'd assumed they would all be shoved together in some sort of holding pen, but maybe that only happened in American prisons. Only in the movies did one of the featured support cast turn up with a wry smile and cash for bail.

Her wrists still ached from the handcuffs, her neck from where she had been wrestled from the human chain she had formed with the other women from the group and dragged along the ground. It was a familiar story: a peaceful demo outside an embassy, coordinated by a network of women's organizations, had soon swelled in size as other uninvited supporters turned up, ostensibly to show their solidarity but clearly using the opportunity to promote their own causes. The spirited chanting of the placard-holders was soon drowned out by the megaphones of the professional demonstrators, mostly male and young, fiery with passion and hostile to the police, burning with indignation for all the other global injustices that continued around them. There were so many, once you started counting them – that's when sleep and hope began to leave you. Tara knew this already. She had spent weeks struggling with an overload of nightmare-inducing imagery and statistics. All around the globe, women and girls were burned, bartered, battered, bestialized. The obsessive pull of the internet provided all that information at one click, opening windows into parallel worlds of suffering you never knew existed, and once seen, there was no going back, no forgetting them. What had started as an attempt to understand and contextualize what had happened to her in her mother's kitchen that night had led her initially to a couple of feminist groups based in her university, but they had seemed too small, too earnest, too close to her own department, which she only visited for the odd lecture and to check the post in her pigeon hole. It was on the net that she really found her tribe, other young women reeling from the everyday war on their sex being waged around them, wondering why they seemed to be the only ones who could see the bombs going off, why others around them weren't as scared and exhausted as they were by the scale of this insidious campaign, so common it was almost banal. From those initial discoveries of fellow travellers, Tara was soon linked up to other regional, national and international campaigns: there was a sisterhood out there, not as visible and vocal and fêted as the one Lydia and her own mother had been a part of decades ago, but better connected. They talked to each other across oceans on flickering screens, spurring each other on with a constant dialogue and the sharing of images and ideas. She read blogs and posts from women in Afghanistan setting up secret beauty parlours, schoolgirls in Pakistan defending their right to attend school, mothers in Argentina holding placards for their disappeared children, Indian Dalit women fighting daily abuse by landowners, survivors of domestic cruelty in Chicago. In every country, the scars of ongoing battles lessened her own, eased the prickling of healing skin which gradually hardened into close-fitting armour. Strange how the same machine that had always made Tara feel like an outsider, like the frump in the corner of the party always missing out on something, was now her guide and companion, her portal and her balm, all her loneliness soothed away by its benevolent blue light.

Tara began idly chipping away at a corner of the peeling wall with her thumbnail, hearing raised voices and slamming doors somewhere far along the corridor. She wondered if anyone had turned up to claim her. Lydia had advised her during their brief exchange not to answer any questions until she had a lawyer in attendance. She'd promised to call a couple of solicitors she knew and find out who might be able to come out at this late hour. Tara knew saying ‘No comment' to their questions wouldn't help much; in the end it was her word against the police. She'd followed the usual drill that was drummed into the group before every demo: be like Gandhi-ji and resist peacefully through non-cooperation. Their tactics might have worked if it hadn't been for a breakaway gang of young men – who knew where they were from – their faces obscured by scarves and hoods, who decided to snatch the embassy flag from its pole, breaking down railings in their quest. Someone thought it would be a fun idea to urinate on a nearby statue of some colonial official. Stones from the embassy's rockery became makeshift missiles, cars swerving to avoid the flying debris, ploughing into demonstrators and officers.

‘Stupid macho tossers!' one of the women had spat out during their journey in the police van. ‘Why does it always become about them waving their dicks about?'

There had been other men on the demo, good men whose wives, daughters and sisters had all suffered forced mutilation, but Tara thought it best just to nod and agree, given where she was. She knew she could easily slide into despising all men – oh, it was so easy after everything she had seen. But somehow the face of her grandfather always popped into her head. He was from a generation of men whom you would expect to be possessive patriarchs, and yet all she ever felt when she thought of him was the unflinching certainty that she was respected and loved.

She needed to pee. One look into the cell toilet convinced her to hold on as long as she could. It was getting colder; how long had she been here? No watch, no phone. They'd even confiscated the Mars bar she'd kept for an emergency snack. Would her name hit the papers? Surely they wouldn't throw her off her course – wasn't it a kind of badge of honour amongst students, getting arrested on a demonstration? Bloody well ought to be. She almost smiled, imagining the reaction of her fellow undergrads when they heard. Pictures of her struggling in a uniformed headlock were probably already online somewhere. Inevitably, the departmental whispers about drug addiction had been replaced by the absolute certainty that Tara was now a fully fledged dyke. She'd been ensconced in a booth in the student union cafeteria when she'd heard a familiar drone coming from the next table.

‘She's probably been too scared to come out of the closet because of her religion or something,' Tamsin was speculating over the clatter of trays being unloaded and discarded. ‘But Tara's definitely hanging out with the lesbos. I mean, it all makes sense now …'

Tara had begun quietly gathering her things, ready to make an unseen exit, when the next voice she heard froze her in her tracks.

‘What does?' She could hear the faint sneer in Charlie's lazy drawl. Her heartbeat quickened. She didn't want to see him. She had been doing so well. She couldn't see him now.

‘Oh come on, Charlie. The way she was always so aggressive towards you, for a start,' Tamsin purred back. ‘At first I thought she fancied you … now I can see it was a totally alpha-male-bashing thing. Besides the fact that you can be a complete and utter arse.'

Catcalls and cheers around the table. Charlie had joined in, but his laughter sounded hollow. Tamsin was taking very public revenge on her own private humiliation: the fact was – and by the way, it had never happened to him before – he just couldn't get it up with her any more. She was as winsomely gorgeous as ever, he knew half the lads in the department would be queueing up for a shot at Tammers, if this got out. But he'd managed to convince himself that his recent un-manning was entirely her fault, and fortunately, she had taken the hint and was dumping him in the same way that all his other girlfriends had: with slow-burning, passive-aggressive hostility. He wondered why he'd ever found Tamsin's ethereal flakiness attractive: more and more often recently he had found himself longing for the barbed honesty of the verbal jousting he'd enjoyed with Tara. He missed it in the painfully addictive way you miss rubbing a mouth ulcer with your tongue or picking at a scab. But, as usual, he'd ruined a perfectly good working relationship by having sex with her. And no wonder she hadn't spoken to him since, if she'd been a lesbian all along. She should have said something. It definitely wasn't his fault. It had occurred to him after the act that she might have been a virgin, and it occurred to him again now the whole sapphic theory was being mooted. But if so, why hadn't she said anything? No woman with that amount of gob on her could have possibly been untouched. Why then, he wondered, did he feel a creeping sense of dread every time he thought of her, of that last evening they had seen each other? Why, every time he reached for Tamsin, undressed her, laboured above her, was it Tara's face he kept seeing?

Tara had stood up, placing herself deliberately in view of their table until the laughs and chatter had dribbled away into embarrassed silence. Charlie looked as if he'd seen a ghost. The memory of her had just become flesh before his uncomprehending eyes – how could she have known? Of course, he managed to collect himself; he had an audience.

‘Oh hi, Tara,' he had said smoothly, enjoying the hands over mouths around him. ‘How come you're avoiding us? Something we said?'

‘No, Charlie,' she had replied in a clear, calm voice. ‘Something you did.'

Tara had stared straight at Charlie; she had not blinked, not looked away. She had wanted him to gaze right into her soul and see the damage he had left behind.

Everyone around the table had seen something else, something wholly unexpected: the slipping of Charlie's mask, his constructed cool collapsing like melting wax, the sneer sliding into a slack-jawed stare.

Tara had felt herself rise like fire, like air. She had almost laughed out loud. She had been staring at the monster through the wrong end of a telescope. How small he was, after all. She had turned on her heel and walked – no, floated – out of the cafeteria, and she had been floating ever since. That had been way back in July. It had been a summer of protest, painful growth and self-reclamation. It had brought her here, to this cell. It cushioned her now as she followed her solicitor through the dividing doors and into the foyer of the police station, where her mother and Lydia were waiting.

‘Are you OK? What happened?' Shyama flung her arms around her daughter, shocked at how little of her there was to hold: no cushioned hips, no rounded belly, even her breasts felt sharp and confrontational.

Tara winced, pulling away from her mother's embrace.

‘What's wrong? Are you hurt? She's got bruises … we have to take a picture.'

Shyama fumbled for her phone.

‘We've already done that, don't worry.' The sharp-suited woman with blue-black skin and killer heels was holding out her hand to Shyama. ‘Gina Trotter. Duty solicitor – and Lydia's friend.'