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  Or she could do nothing and hope it would pass.

  Ernestine was a coward; she did nothing. The sun sank behind the trees. The bats detached themselves and flew away. She swept the floor and washed her mother-in-law’s hair. She separated her squabbling sons. Her older children came home from school. She cooked them jollof rice and red-pepper sauce. Her husband came home from the fields and put his mobile on the shelf, where it always sat. Grace came home, her books under her arm. She didn’t say a word. Ernestine caught Grace looking at her and Kwomi with an odd expression on her face. Did she know something was up?

  The days passed. Ernestine went out selling her wares but she avoided Adwoa’s house, she couldn’t bear to see the woman. On Wednesday the girls’ football team played a match and Ernestine, working the crowd, made a number of sales. Grace had backed out of the match, saying she didn’t feel well. She was nowhere to be seen, and wasn’t at home when Ernestine returned. At the time Ernestine thought nothing of it, presuming Grace was menstruating. She had too many other things on her mind.

  The next morning, needing to replenish her stock, she rose early to travel into Oreya with her husband. It was hard to believe that only a week had passed since her last visit.

  The sun was rising as they climbed into the bus. It was just pulling into the road when someone yelled, ‘Wait!’

  Ernestine looked out of the window. Adwoa hobbled towards them, one hand clutching her long, tight skirt, the other hand waving the bus to stop.

  Adwoa squeezed herself into the seat behind them. She was dressed in an orange and green batik outfit; her hair was embellished with one of Ernestine’s gardenia clips, and she was perspiring from the unaccustomed exercise.

  Ernestine froze. The harlot greeted Kwomi politely, as if she hardly knew him – she nodded to him as she nodded to the other passengers from the village. Her mascara was smudged and she was breathing heavily.

  She leaned forward to Ernestine. ‘My dear, I’m spitting mad,’ she muttered. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with my brother, the good-for-nothing drunk.’

  Ernestine’s head span. She glanced at her husband but now the bus was moving he appeared to have dozed off. It was all a pretence, of course.

  Adwoa was jabbering away. It seemed to be a family quarrel about a will: ‘… left him some land but he can’t farm it, the rascal’s a cripple!’ The words seemed to come from far off. Ernestine’s mind was busy. Was this a prearranged tryst between her husband and Adwoa? After all, it was unusual for her, Ernestine, to go to Oreya two weeks running. The two fornicators were certainly playing a clever game, Kwomi feigning sleep and his mistress engaging Ernestine in some incomprehensible story about a drunken cripple.

  When they arrived in town Adwoa pushed her way to the front of the bus. Ernestine watched her big, gaudy body work its way through the crowd. She was heading for the phone-charging booth.

  And now Adwoa was standing there, shouting at Asaf, the man with the mobiles, the man who never moved. The man who, it turned out, happened to be her brother.

  People said it was God’s will that Asaf was born a cripple. People said it was an ancestral curse. People said it was just bad luck. Some people had shown him kindness; some had bullied him. Mostly, however, people had ignored him. When he was a child he had begged at the crossroads outside Oreya, where the traffic streamed between Assenonga, the big city, and the north. Every day one of his brothers or sisters would push him along the central reservation and leave him at the traffic lights. He sat on his little cart, his withered legs tucked beneath him. This was a prime spot for the afflicted and fights would break out between them as they jostled for the best position.

  But the worst fights were with his sister, Adwoa.

  Adwoa, who throughout his childhood bullied and teased him. Who stole his sweets and ran away on her strong, healthy legs. Who ridiculed him to the girls. Who left him on his cart, in the rain, while she disappeared into the bushes with her fancy men. Who stole his money and taunted him to come and get it. And who now was trying to steal back a cassava patch their father had left to him in his will.

  A cripple has to develop alternative methods of survival. Over the years, Asaf had learnt to be wily. Of course he was bitter – how could he not be? But he had his wits. Each day, at his stall, he watched people come and go, busy with their day, blessed with their children, people who took it for granted that they could move from one place to another, dance, have sexual intercourse.

  All Asaf had were his mobile phones. They sat there on his table, rows of them, plugged in and silently charging. When they came alive they beeped and twittered and sang. Within them lay the only power he had – the power to settle old feuds, to pay back his tormenters … and to make mischief.

  It was weeks later that Ernestine discovered the truth – that Asaf had lied, that there was no message on her husband’s phone, that the man had simply wanted to take revenge on his sister. Why had he chosen Ernestine and her husband, a respectable, hard-working couple who loved each other? What had they ever done to him?

  She never understood, because she was a woman without vanity. It never crossed her mind that her strong, unadorned beauty had inflamed him, and that he was bitterly jealous of her marriage. For her, beauty was something she sold, rather than possessed herself.

  And soon the whole episode was forgotten. For a few days later Ernestine’s daughter Grace, who had been acting so strangely, drew her mother aside and told her that she was pregnant. The father was a taxi-driver who used to stop at her auntie’s stall to eat her fried fish. He had promised to marry Grace but he was never seen again.

  Poor Grace, so rigid and intransigent … and who, it transpired, didn’t practise what she preached.

  Part One

  Pimlico, London

  I’LL TELL YOU how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.

  I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.

  And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.

  He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.

  I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.

  Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.

  See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.

  Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.

  Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.

  I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spa
niel, there are worse ways to go.

  Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.

  Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf – golf. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the Marie Celeste of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?

  This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.

  I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.

  White Springs, Texas

  LORRIE WAS A woman of generous proportions. She liked to eat, who doesn’t? Nor was she alone. Most of her girlfriends were super-size, they had ballooned in girth over the years, their jaws were always working. They joked, ‘It ain’t got no calories if you eat by the light of the refrigerator.’ Her husband didn’t mind, he said he didn’t mind, he said there was more of her to love. He served in the army and their marriage was one of partings and homecomings. She ate for solace during the long months when he was a blurred face on Skype, and she cooked up a storm when he was home. Between this lay the tricky period of readjustment, this could take a week or more, when their strangeness to each other drained away and they rediscovered their old companionship. She found herself snacking heavily then, just as, long ago, during stressful times, she had smoked.

  So she had put on the pounds. It was hard to believe that she had once been a skinny kid, but then there were few of them around nowadays. Children were heavier, it was a national tragedy, many of them were downright obese. Her own two kids were big for their age, it broke her heart to see them rolling from side to side as they walked, like drunken sailors. Just the other day, when she had to fetch Dean early from school, she had seen him struggle from his chair and lift the desk with him. His face, pink with shame!

  Junk food was to blame. Apparently it was all to do with the presidential elections. Her neighbour’s son, Tyler, was studying chemistry at college. He said the swing votes were in the corn belt, in the Mid-West, so the farmers were wooed by big subsidies, which meant over-production of corn and its by-product, high-fructose corn syrup. Imported sugar was taxed sky-high and this syrup substituted and put into practically every processed food that Americans ate. He said it had a destructive effect on the body and artificially stimulated the appetite, so people had to eat more and more. He said the United States was becoming one vast mouth and would blow itself up.

  Tyler took plenty of drugs and was prone to paranoia. He’d share a spliff with her in the backyard and ramble on about alien invaders. This time, however, he seemed to make more sense than usual so she went online and discovered that it was true. When Todd, her husband, came home she told him that the government was suppressing the facts, due to pressure from the food industry, but he simply tweaked her earlobe and cracked open a beer. Wasn’t America the finest country in the world? He was a patriot and prepared to die in defence of its freedoms, and that included getting fat.

  This was the problem with Todd. Lorrie loved him, they had grown up dirt-poor, they were childhood sweethearts and bound together for life. But he wouldn’t take her seriously. She was still his little cookie, his big cookie, and he wasn’t having her bothering her head with things that were outside her control. His strongest instinct was to protect her. He was the man, the breadwinner; he had served two terms in Iraq and seen his friend’s legs blown off and more, much more, things he would never tell her, though at night he moaned and tossed in his sleep. She had to respect this in him, his unknowable other life.

  Still, it grated. He wanted his family to remain the same for him, home sweet home. It was his security. If anything upset the balance she feared he would disintegrate. His time at home was precious and Jesus he had earned it. More and more, however, Lorrie felt stifled in her little box. He didn’t even want her to work. How could she, when half the time she was a single parent and childcare would cancel out any earnings? And the other half, when he was home, he wanted her there for him. This was his reasoning.

  Money was short, however. They were saving up to move out of their cramped little rental and buy a place in the new subdivision on the edge of town, beyond the military base. They were beautiful homes with three bedrooms, close to Finnegan’s Lake where families could boat and fish. At night Lorrie dreamed she was living there. Surely there was some job she could do part-time, and have cash of her own in her purse?

  And then she saw the ad. It was soon after the conversation with Tyler. She was sitting at the kitchen table, surfing a showbiz website. Her husband was away; the kids were at school. Sunlight streamed through the window; it was mid-morning and already stifling.

  Earn hundreds of dollars a month in the comfort of your own home! Become a sales rep with our fast-growing company! It was accompanied by a group photograph of noticeably sturdy children, black, white and Hispanic. Plus-size kids are missing out. Too often they feel ashamed when there’s nothing to fit them. Our company specializes in fashion-conscious clothes for a more generous body shape. Commission rates were twenty per cent of the retail sales price, rising with the volume of items sold.

  Lorrie felt a jolt of recognition. At last, people understood her children’s distress. The clothes looked great; why not give it a try? There was nothing to lose.

  She felt a rush of exhilaration. Testimonials from other sales reps – moms like herself – spoke of the sums they had earned. Texas, it seemed, had one of the highest child obesity rates in the USA. It was a vast and largely untapped market.

  Lorrie told nobody – certainly not her husband. He was on a training exercise up north and wouldn’t be back for a week. Though she hoped that he would be supportive – after all, there was no risk involved and she would largely stay at home – she didn’t mention it when they Skyped that evening. Maybe she didn’t want his reaction to disappoint her. She would keep her secret to herself for a while – just for a couple of months to see how it went.

  The next morning she painted her nails, the first time she had done so in years. This was stupid, considering she would be doing the job online, but she needed to give herself a boost. She felt she was emerging from a long sleep. She had worked in the past, of course – in stores, in a bar, in the payroll office of one of the big beef ranches down near San Antonio. But that was in another life, before she became a mother and unrecognizable to her former self. She had lost her nerve.

  A lion’s head hung in the lounge. Her husband called it Warrior. He had shot it on safari in Kenya, a boozy and extravagant R&R weekend when he was on deployment in Sudan. That evening, as Lorrie sat in front of her laptop, she was aware of its glass eyes gazing at her across the room. Later she remembered that moment. How she accessed the registration form on the Big Kids website: how she tapped in her social security number and her bank details. How the moth-eaten trophy was her only witness, its gums bared in a grin.

  The next morning the phone rang.

  ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Russell?’ asked a v
oice. He had a thick, foreign accent and said he was phoning from her bank. ‘I’m completing the registration details for the Big Kids Employment Agency and require your username and password to activate the account.’

  She told him. He thanked her courteously and rang off.

  The next day the phone rang again.

  ‘Is that Mrs Russell?’ a man asked. He said he was phoning from her bank.

  ‘Is there something else I’ve forgotten?’ she asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You called yesterday …’ She stopped, puzzled.

  ‘No, madam,’ he said. ‘We haven’t called you. Why I’m contacting you is that something’s come to our notice and we need to check it with you.’

  ‘Check what?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘There appears to be some unusual activity in the savings account you hold with your husband.’

  The money had gone – all their life savings, every dollar. It had been withdrawn during the night.

  Beijing, China

  ‘I’M COMING WITH you,’ said Li Jing. ‘This concerns both of us.’

  She could tell that her husband was surprised. He said nothing, however – just a pause, as he put on his jacket. Then he turned away and picked up the cigarette that smouldered in the ashtray.

  He was thinking how to respond. Jing was a simple village girl, demure and obedient. Her husband was a businessman, a powerful and successful one, and normally she wouldn’t dream of involving herself in his affairs, or laying down the law. But this was something that did concern her, on the most fundamental level. After all, they both wanted a baby. They had never talked about it until recently but no doubt Lei had presumed it would eventually happen. He was standing at the window, checking messages on his mobile, but his rigidity told her that he was taken aback, and trying to work out a reply.