He brought a biro from the back pocket of his jeans. He put the paperwork in front of her. He clasped her hand and folded her fingers round the biro. He said to her, “Once this’s filled out, you got to leave him. Please. You got to, Mum.”
Monifa bent her head. The paperwork shimmered in her vision. She’d tried. She’d failed. And this would be worse. She knew it because she knew her husband. He wouldn’t allow this to pass without his judgement falling upon her. She dropped the pen.
Tani said in a low voice, “Mum, look at what he’s done. Please. Think about what more he can do. This . . . this order here? It can protect Simi from him but it can’t do that now—straightaway like—unless you fill out your part of it.”
He picked up the biro once again. Once again he curved her fingers round it. This time, he guided them straight to the section that wanted filling out. This time, Monifa began to write.
She wrote all of it because she knew that Tani spoke the truth. Even if it meant that she, too, could not now see to Simisola’s cleansing—even in the way she’d planned it—she couldn’t risk Abeo’s taking her away.
When she was finished writing, she placed the biro next to the paperwork. Tani spoke again. “Mum, I got to say this. There’re places for women who have husbands like him, blokes who lay into their wives like he does. You don’t have to stay here. And you can’t stay here once I get this filed. You got to know that. Tell me you know that.”
But Monifa found she had no words. Her soul felt too heavy. Her body was wounded, true, but her psychic wounds ran deep and they felt permanent.
Tani was folding up the paperwork when the flat’s door opened. It was the wrong time of day. They should have been safe. But clearly, Abeo wasn’t finished with Monifa.
He looked from Monifa to Tani to the papers Tani was holding. He crossed the room in three steps, so quickly that Tani had no time to stuff the protection order into his rucksack. Abeo grabbed it. It didn’t take more than a glance at the bold printing at the top of the first page: Application for a Female Genital Mutilation （FGM） Protection Order. Seeing this, Abeo ripped the papers into pieces, threw them at Tani, and launched himself upon the boy. No matter that Tani was inches taller and possessing the strength that came from Monifa’s family, Abeo’s momentum knocked him to the floor, with Abeo landing atop him.
“This would you do!” Abeo drew back his fist. He punched Tani’s face. Then again. And again. With every blow came another shouted word: “Defy. Disobey. Deny a father his rights.”
“Stop it!” Monifa cried.
Tani scrambled for purchase but there was none. He tried to heave his father away, but Abeo knelt upon his arms with his weight on Tani’s chest, pinning him to the floor. He raised Tani’s head and slammed it down. “You go to the market,” he grunted. “You go to Xhosa. You spread lies. You shame me. You shame our family.”
“We—”
“I will teach you.” Abeo drove his fists against Tani’s cheekbones, his ears, his eyes, his chin, his mouth, his neck.
“Stop it!” Monifa got to her feet. She stumbled to the kitchen. There had to be something.
“Fucking son of a whore,” Abeo grunted. “This time I will . . .”
Monifa grabbed the only weapon in sight, the iron with which she faithfully pressed the wrinkles from Abeo’s shirts and from the clothing of his other family. She took it to where he still straddled their son, Tani bleeding so badly that he looked like someone sure to die.
“You will not!” she screamed and the scream unleashed within her a force she didn’t know she had. She swung the iron into Abeo’s forehead.
TRINITY GREEN
WHITECHAPEL
EAST LONDON
Deborah had no real reason to be at Orchid House, so as she crossed the green and walked towards the old chapel, she decided that she would claim she was there to allow the girls she’d photographed to choose which of their portraits they would like to have as a thank-you for posing. But first she had to speak with Narissa, and she hoped Orchid House was where she would be able to find her.
restored! was what had greeted her on the front page of The Source as she descended into the kitchen in Cheyne Row that morning before her departure. The tabloid was being held up by one of the presenters on BBC Breakfast. Her dad was tuned in to the show and, when he saw her as he entered the room with a cantaloupe and a honeydew melon in each hand, he said, “They got that little girl back home, they do.”