Feeding the Borfimah

Rachel Visits Ainslie

Her long fingernails painted bluish-green, Aisha agitated the decorative stitching on her blouse. "Ainslie's rabbit fix up my marriage forecast, so he can break it again, yeh."

"I heard his rabbit died," Rachel said. She noted the alarm in her friend's dark eyes. "But he kept the head. Which still tells prophecies. If you can believe all'at. Hey, just in case the marriage mafia want to dead you, you stayin at my crib."

The Farm Estate towers loomed over the brick terraces of Lyme Road. Dulled by cloud shadow, the balconies and windows formed a grey mesh hiding the skyline. Rachel had travelled this route to school with Aisha so many times she could walk it on autopilot. With such worries bearing down on her, the All Day Full British Breakfast Cafe might have been crammed with polar bears and she wouldn't have noticed.

"Kip at your hizzle?" Aisha said. "My uncle find me in two minutes. I dead either way, innit." A tear trickled down Aisha's cheek, sparkling in the weak light, and surprised Rachel. Her friend never cried.

Rachel rubbed Aisha's shoulder. "The prophecy probably already changed, yeh? Remember he said that? Soon as he say it, it changes. Maybe into something good."

"We should ask."

Rachel also wanted to ask Ainslie about making a speech to hundreds of super-posh people on Saturday night. Her Dad laughed when she said he should help because he'd blabbed about assassinating the Thai Ambassador. It was just a stupid thing people say when their mother is found dead on a rubbish tip, and now she had to do a speech. "OK, let's go back."

"My Dad say dey rich people in Mumbai," Aisha said, shaking her head as though to clear away her despair. "They don't do bad tings, he say. An after I say what bout all dem statistics on dowry murders, and how de police do SFA, he just tells me to shut eet. Like I still a kid."

What could Rachel even say to all those Thai people? Just repeat that their country murdered her mum and left her on a rubbish heap, over and over for ten minutes? What could she say that they didn't know? Ananda had said some super-important American had been invited along, an expert on the whole thing. But she'd listen politely and not ask any difficult questions.

"Then my dad phone my uncle," Aisha said, stopping in the street. Rachel saw her distress. "He come over, an they hold me up against the wall and say I better marry dis Indian person because it a done deal. My uncle say he bury me alive I refuse. Bury me a-fucking-live."

"Ainslie's living with Candy and Zuri in Meadow. The prophecy must have changed for certain."

Making this speech would be the hardest thing Rachel had ever done; probably three-million-times more difficult than maths homework. What were fathers for, if not to help? At the foot of Barn Tower, Rachel slipped out her phone and texted: "Write the fing speech. U no about Thai prostitutes."

"If dis prophecy not good, I should just jump off de balcony," Aisha said, as they waited for the lift up. "Easy way out."

In the Meadow Tower lift, Rachel pushed the button for the fifth floor.

"Twenty thousand dowry deaths each year, real shit," Aisha said. "A couple of hundred thousand injured. Set on fire, yeh? But if I don't marry him, my uncle say he bury me alive."

"We get on a plane to Russia an say we political refugees. Make some shit up." Rachel glanced at the spray paint tags of LRW gangstas scrawled all over the inside of the lift. She knew all of them.

"Imagine his taste in music, an de clothes. I not doin it."

On the fifth floor landing, Rachel counted the numbers on the doors, but didn't really need to bother. Rachel knocked on the door to Candy's flat.