Beauty by Raphael Selbourne Page B

turned and her older brother, Dulal Miah, stood in the doorway, hair flattened and eyes dark with sleep. He was putting on weight – his neck had fattened out and his nose seemed thicker and flatter. He was starting to look like the old man.
    He smiled at his sister.
    ‘All right, sis?’ he croaked, shuffling to the table and sitting down heavily. Beauty put the bowl of porridge in front of him.
    ‘Do you want tea,
Bhai-sahb
?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
    Thanks!
    She filled the kettle with water and threw in two handfuls of loose tea and a piece of cinnamon after it.
    That’s gonna be tasty.
    ‘How was the course?’ he asked.
    ‘Dunno. It hasn’t really started.’ She wanted to say how embarrassing it was sitting next to white people, how the black blokes looked at her and how shocking the things that the white girls said were, but she knew he wanted her to go.
    ‘Stick at it. They might find you a job.’
    ‘Yeah, but I’ve got to do the reading first.’
    ‘That ain’t gonna work.’ He sounded irritated. ‘Didn’t you tell them we tried everything? Can’t they just find you a job?’
    He must have really needed the money; and he was right about the reading. She knew the alphabet, but how letters became words remained a mystery. There wassomething wrong with her, she knew that now. They didn’t need to tell her.
    ‘They’re gonna talk to us one by one tomorrow and see what we want to do.’
    He grunted and spooned
sagu
into his mouth. She put the tea in front of him and went back to the cooker, asking about his work over her shoulder. Things were going OK, he said. They were going to make him a supervisor soon.
    Beauty heard footsteps overhead again and hoped it was her mum.
    Faisal came into the kitchen in another new tracksuit, carrying his new mobile phone. Dulal had had to buy it for him – as payment for doing well at school and staying out of trouble.
    ‘Yo, blood,’ he said to his older brother, slapping him on the shoulder.
    ‘Don’t talk like a fucking
halla
.’
    ‘At least I don’t hang around with them like I saw her doing today,’ Faisal said.
    ‘I wasn’t hanging around with black people. I was saying goodbye to a girl I sat next to,’ Beauty said.
    ‘Faisal, stop shit-stirring or you’ll get a kick. Get me the post.’
    Dulal Miah carried on eating and drinking tea while he opened the letters addressed to his mother and sister from the Department for Work and Pensions. He grunted in satisfaction, put the letters down, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his stomach.
    ‘Sis, don’t bring no more shame on us.’
    Shame? I didn’t bring no shame on no one.
    ‘I aynt shaming you,’ she said.
    ‘Good. Cuz that’ll be the end if anything else happens.’
    What are they gonna do now? Kill me? They already tried that.
    ‘And make sure you help Mum with the washing.’
    Help Mum? She doesn’t do nothing. All right, I can’t blame her for that, she’s my mother.
    ‘Yeah, sure,’ she said.
    She glanced at Faisal and could tell from his fidgeting that he was deciding whether to say more.
    ‘She was smoking Dad’s fags as well.’
    Beauty saw her chance. ‘Did you want them for your white girlfriend?’
    ‘She’s lying,
Bhai-sahb
,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got no white girlfriend. She’s lying like she always does.’
    ‘I told you to stop shit-stirring,’ Dulal said.
    Beauty could feel her older brother looking at her and she waited for the shouting to start, but he didn’t say anything. She turned to face him, but he remained silent. Faisal looked at his brother. What was wrong with
Bhai-sahb
? What he’d just heard was usually enough to send him into a rage.
    Beauty turned back to the cooker. Dulal’s calm, and the cold look in his eyes, worried her more than his shouting. It could mean only one thing.
    Mullah Habib Choudhury.
    Had she missed the signs? Had there been any? She hadn’t heard the phone ringing more than usual, or the