“Going under the knife is never a small thing,” she told Deborah before she left the office to scrub for the surgery. “We’re fighting an antique belief system that damages women, but we’re also asking women to battle their fear.”
Leylo said she was not afraid. Yasir added that he was afraid enough for them both. All of them chuckled, Dr. Weatherall disappeared to prepare herself, and Deborah began as she always did: with a camera ready to shoot what she saw as she spoke to the couple and a digital recorder to document their words.
They’d had a grim time of it, she discovered. Leylo had undergone the cut as a six-year-old. Four other girls had been mutilated that day. She’d tried to run when she heard the screaming, but she’d been caught by her uncle. He’d carried her back and handed her over. She remembered that he said, Do her next, stupid woman, or she’ll run again and I’m not chasing her if she does.
Yasir took his wife’s hand. He spoke quietly of what she’d gone through for the twenty years since she’d been cut: abscesses, poisoning of the blood, bladder infections, cysts. They’d had a child and it had nearly killed her. The child did not survive. “She is a good wife,” he said. “I have not been so good a husband.”
Leylo tutted. This was not altogether true. He had not understood. Neither had she. But now they saw a way to make their lives better.
It was a nurse who came for Leylo. Yasir rose. He took the package his wife had been holding, placed it on the chair she’d been occupying, and put his hands on her cheeks.
“I know that God will be with you,” he said.
While the nurse prepared Leylo for surgery, Dr. Weatherall explained what Deborah would see. She would be rebuilding and repairing the labia, both major and minor, using the young woman’s own flesh. She would also be carefully cutting through the scar tissue left from the removal of the clitoris in the hope, she said, that there were nerves left. If there were, this would allow Leylo to experience some sexual pleasure. If there were not, at least at the end of the surgery and the repairs, she would no longer have a catalogue of reproductive and other issues that had led to excruciating pain for so long.
She concluded by saying, “Leylo’s husband has never seen the damage, you know. It’s not unusual for women to be unwilling to allow it. In Yasir’s case, he knows what was done to his wife and what the physical results were. But as to the visual, no.”
“D’you find that common?”
“Very. The women are often both shamed and ashamed. The shaming is done by those people within their culture who tell them they have to be cut. Then they become ashamed.”
“Of their bodies.”
“Yes.”
“Even though it’s not their fault? I don’t expect any one of them has chosen to be cut up.”
“It has nothing to do with choice. It has to do with comparison, and comparison starts when they finally see what a whole woman looks like.”
EMPRESS STATE BUILDING
WEST BROMPTON
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
After the team’s regular morning meeting, Mark Phinney went up to the Orbit. His claim was a belated breakfast. He knew that he would be believed because the other officers were aware of Lilybet’s disabilities and how often her condition called for an alteration in his daily schedule, with breakfast being part of that schedule. Thus when he told DS Hopwood, “You’ll know where to find me, Jade,” she looked up from her computer and gave him a friendly nod. “I could do with a coffee when you’ve finished,” she told him. “No hurries, though, guv.”
He offered a smile. It was a weary one, produced with effort. He liked Jade. It was not her fault that she did not match up to who Teo had been.
He had no real appetite, but for appearances, he bought a mass-produced biscotti wrapped in plastic that he could pretend he intended to open. Along with it, he purchased a coffee: nothing fancy, nothing possessing a foreign name, but a good old coffee—white—into which he dumped a packet of sugar. He took this to one of the windows, and he tried not to think of the last time he’d been here with Teo. He failed at the effort.
He’d brought her up from the seventeenth floor to unveil the news of her transfer. He’d done so with the belief—foolhardy as it might have been—that she would not do what she could have done, which was to turn him over to those who dealt with allegations of sexual harassment, sexual impropriety, sexual anything at all as long as the adjective sexual was applied to it. He would have been guilty of every single term she might have chosen to use. The fact that he could not and had not been able to escape sexual when it came to Teo was largely why he knew he had to pull whatever strings necessary to place her far, far away from him.