Page 20 of Things We Never Said
Theresa was furious. She let me cry myself out and then she marched me back to the store.
Now, Theresa, as you’ll remember, was a pretty full-on feminist. She spent all her free time blockading cruise missile convoys with the women at Greenham Common and she certainly wasn’t afraid of Bilal.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she said to him, once we had entered the store. There were three or four people queuing to pay, but she didn’t give a damn. ‘I want to know why you’re harassing my friend here.’
‘I don’t harass no one,’ Bilal said, continuing to serve the next customer.
‘Yes, you did!’ Theresa shouted. ‘You’ve been rubbing your erect penis against her arse and trying to force her to give you oral gratification.’ She sounded like a lawyer in a television programme cross-examining someone.
The people in the shop were all mortified. So was I. A woman with a child muttered something disapproving and bustled her kid out of the store.
‘My friend, your employee, is married!’ Theresa said, which was a lie at the time. ‘And she’s also pregnant!’
Bilal was speechless. He didn’t know where to look, so he just kept on serving people.
‘Now if I ever hear you’ve said anything inappropriate to her ever again, you’ll regret it because, one, I will tell her husband – and he’s a big man with a nasty temper – and, two, I’ll have fifty women from the S.U. outside your store with banners and placards and we’ll demonstrate until every newspaper covers it and everyone in the community knows what a pervert you are. And, three, I’ll call the police and get you arrested. I’m a law student, by the way, so I do know how to do that.’
Oh, you should have seen her, Sean. She was shaking all that hennaed hair of hers around. She was on fire, and I remember thinking that she’d be some great human rights lawyer one day, which, of course, she turned out to be.
The shop had emptied by now and Bilal didn’t know what to say or what to do, so he just stared at his feet.
‘Is that clear?’ Theresa asked him. When he didn’t reply, she shouted it. ‘IS THAT CLEAR, Bilal?’
‘Yes,’ Bilal mumbled.
‘Come on,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘We’re done here.’
As we reached the door, Bilal mumbled, ‘Fucking lesbians,’ so Theresa spun back to look at him.
‘What did you say?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ Bilal said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘Well, I am a lesbian and you’d do well to be afraid because we lesbians are a sisterhood and we’re mad, bad and dangerous to know. Oh, and Bilal ... don’t even think about sacking her over this, OK? Because the laws on undeclared workers are extremely severe and you’ll end up in jail. And all those beefy men in prison would certainly know what to do with a pretty boy like yourself. Your arse wouldn’t know what’d hit it.’
As we walked home, she put her arm around me. I was still shaking.
‘Is that true?’ I asked, eventually.
‘What, me being lesbian? Not really. I prefer to remain undefined,’ she said. ‘I don’t like to submit to other people’s sexual stereotypes.’
‘No, I meant about going to prison?’
‘Oh. I’ve no idea, to be honest,’ Theresa said. ‘We haven’t done employment law yet. It put the wind up him though.’
I never had a problem with Bilal again. In fact, from that day on, he was always extra-nice to me. And, God, I loved Theresa after that.
It’s just after eleven in the morning when Sean pulls up outside The Cedars care home. He levers himself from the driving seat and places his hands behind his head as he stretches after the long drive.
It’s a beautiful May day – the first time this year that it has actually felt like summer – and as he looks up into the deep blue sky and notices the tweeting of the birds in the tree above him, his spirits momentarily lift.
He scans the car park for April’s Mini and on spotting it – lazily parked diagonally across one of the visitor bays – he pulls his coat from the car and heads indoors.
April, who is sitting in the lobby fiddling with her smartphone, glances up as he enters, returns her gaze to her phone for a fraction of a second and then, once his presence registers, looks up anew. ‘Oh! Hi Dad!’ she says, dumping her phone in her handbag and jumping up.
Sean crosses the lobby to meet her and pecks her on the cheek. ‘You found it OK, then?’
April nods. ‘The GPS did,’ she says.
