CHAPTER ONE
She watched her reflection in the empty glass bottle as the truth crept in with the wine in her veins. It curled around her stomach and squeezed tight, whispering words that paused
before they stung, like a paper cut cutting deep: colourless at first and then vibrant with blood. You are such a fucking cliché, it whispered – an accusation, a statement, a fact. The words stung because Zara Kaleel’s self-image was built on the singular belief that she was different. She was different to the two tribes of women that haunted her youth. She was not a docile housewife, fingers yellowed by turmeric like the quiet heroines of the second-gen literature she hated so much. Nor was she a rebel, using her sexuality to subvert her culture. And yet here she was, lying in freshly stained sheets, skin gleaming with sweat and regret.
Luka’s post-coital pillow talk echoed in her ear: ‘it’s always the religious ones’. She smiled a mirthless smile. The alcohol, the pills, the unholy foreskin – it was all so fucking predictable. Was it even rebellious anymore? Isn’t this what middle-class Muslim kids did on weekends?
Luka’s footsteps in the hall jarred her thoughts. She shook out her long dark hair, parted her lips and threw aside the sheets, secure in the knowledge that it would drive him wild. Women like Zara were never meant to be virgins. It’s little wonder her youth was shrouded in hijab.
He walked in, a climber’s body naked from the waist up, his dirty blond hair lightly tracing a line down his chest. Zara blinked languidly, inviting his touch. He leaned forward and kissed the delicate hollow of her neck, his week-old stubble marking tiny white lines in her skin. A sense of happiness, svelte and ribbon-like, pattered against her chest, searching for a way inside. She fought the sensa- tion as she lay in his arms, her legs wrapped with his like twine.
‘You are something else,’ he said, his light Colorado drawl softer than usual. ‘You’re going to get me into a lot of trouble.’
He was right. She’d probably break his heart, but what did he expect screwing a Muslim girl? She slipped from his embrace and wordlessly reached for her phone, the latest of small but frequent reminders that they could not be more than what they were. She swiped through her phone and read a new message: ‘Can you call when you get a sec?’ She re-read the message then deleted it. Her family, like most, was best loved from afar.
Luka’s hand was on her shoulder, tracing the outline of a light brown birthmark. ‘Shower?’ he asked, the word warm and hopeful between his lips and her skin.
She shook her head. ‘You go ahead. I’ll make coffee.’
He blinked and tried to pinpoint the exact moment he lost her, as if next time he could seize her before she fled too far, distract her perhaps with a stolen kiss or wicked smile. This time, it was already too late. He nodded softly, then stood and walked out.
Zara lay back on her pillow, a trace of victory dancing grimly on her lips. She wrapped her sheets around her, the expensive cream silk suddenly gaudy on her skin. She remembered buying an armful years ago in Selfridges; Black American Express in hand, new money and aspir- ation thrumming in her heart. Zara Kaleel had been a different person then: hopeful, ambitious, optimistic.
Zara Kaleel had been a planner. In youth, she had mapped her life with the foresight of a shaman. She had known which path to take at every fork in the road, single- mindedly intent on reaching her goals. She finished law school top of her class and secured a place on Bedford Row, the only brown face at her prestigious chambers. She earned six figures and bought a fast car. She dined at Le Gavroche and shopped at Lanvin and bought everything she ever wanted – but was it enough? All her life she was told that if she worked hard and treated people well, she’d get there. No one told her that when she got there, there’d be no there there.
When she lost her father six months after their estrange- ment, something inside her slid apart. She told herself that it happened all the time: people lost the ones they loved,
people were lost and lonely but they battled on. They kept on living and breathing and trying but trite sentiments failed to soothe her anger. She let no one see the way she crumbled inside. She woke the next day and the day after that and every day until, a year later, she was on the cusp of a landmark case. And then, she quit. She recalled the memory through a haze: walking out of chambers, manic smile on her face, feeling like Michael Douglas in Falling Down. She planned to change her life. She planned to change the world. She planned to be extraordinary.
Now, she didn’t plan so much.
*
It was a few degrees too cold inside Brasserie Chavot, forcing the elegant Friday night crowd into silk scarves and cashmere pashminas. Men in tailored suits bought complicated cocktails for women too gracious to refuse. Zara sat in the centre of the dining room, straight-backed and alone between the glittering chandelier and gleaming mosaic floor. She took a sip from her glass of Syrah, swal- lowing without tasting, then spotted Safran as he walked through the door.
He cut a path through soft laughter and muted music and greeted her with a smile, his light brown eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Zar, is that you? Christ, what are you wearing?’
Zara embraced him warmly. His voice made her think of
old paper and kindling, a comfort she had long forgotten. ‘They’re just jeans,’ she said. ‘I had to stop pretending I still live in your world.’
‘“Just jeans”?’ he echoed. ‘Come on. For seven years, we pulled all-nighters and not once did you step out of your three-inch heels.’
She shrugged. ‘People change.’
‘You of all people know that’s not true.’ For a moment, he watched her react. ‘You still square your shoulders when you’re getting defensive. It’s always been your tell.’ Without pause for protest, he stripped off his Merino coat and swung it across the red leather chair, the hem skimming the floor. Zara loved that about him. He’d buy the most lavish things, visit the most luxurious places and then treat them with irreverence. The first time he crashed his Aston Martin, he shrugged and said it served him right for being so bloody flash.
He settled into his seat and loosened his tie, a note of amusement bright in his eyes. ‘So, how is the illustrious and distinguished exponent of justice that is Artemis House?’ A smile played on Zara’s lips. ‘Don’t be such a smart- arse,’ she said, only half in jest. She knew what he thought of her work; that Artemis House was noble but also that it clipped her wings. He did not believe that the sexual assault referral centre with its shabby walls and erratic funding was the right place for a barrister, even one who
had left the profession.
Safran smiled, his left dimple discernibly deeper than
the right. ‘I know I give you a hard time but seriously, Zar, it’s not the same without you. Couldn’t you have waited ’til mid-life to have your crisis?’
‘It’s not a crisis.’
‘Come on, you were one of our strongest advocates and you left for what? To be an evening volunteer?’
Zara frowned. ‘Saf, you know it’s more than that. In chambers, I was on a hamster wheel, working one case while hustling for the next, barely seeing any tangible good, barely even taking breath. Now, I work with victims and can see an actual difference.’ She paused and feigned annoyance. ‘And I’m not a volunteer. They pay me a nomi- nal wage. Plus, I don’t work evenings.’
Safran shook his head. ‘You could have done anything. You really were something else.’
She shrugged. ‘Now I’m something else somewhere else.’ ‘But still so sad?’
‘I’m not sad.’ Her reply was too quick, even to her own ears.
He paused for a moment but challenged her no further. ‘Shall we order?’
She picked up the menu, the soft black leather warm and springy on her fingertips. ‘Yes, we shall.’
Safran’s presence was like a balm. His easy success and keen self-awareness was unique among the lawyers she had known – including herself. Like others in the field, she had succumbed to a collective hubris, a self-righteous belief that they were genuinely changing the world. You could
hear it dripping from the tones of overstuffed barristers, making demands on embassy doorsteps, barking rhetoric at political figureheads.
Zara’s career at the bar made her feel important, somehow more valid. After a while, the armour and arrogance became part of her personality. The transformation was indiscern- ible. She woke one day and realised she’d become the person she used to hate – and she had no idea how it had happened. Safran wasn’t like that. He used the acronyms and in-jokes and wore his pinstripes and brogues but he knew it was all for show. He did the devil’s work but somehow retained his soul. At thirty-five, he was five years older than Zara and had helped her navigate the brutal competitiveness of London chambers. He, more than anyone, was struck by her departure twelve months earlier. It was easy now to pretend that she had caved under pressure. She wouldn’t be the first to succumb to the challenges of chambers: the gruelling hours, the relentless pace, the ruthless colleagues and the constant need to cajole, ingratiate, push and persuade. In truth she had thrived under pressure. It was only when it ceased that work lost its colour. Numbed by the loss of her father and their estrangement before it, Zara had simply lost interest. Her wins had lost the glee of victory, her losses fast forgotten. Perhaps, she decided, if she worked more closely with vulnerable women, she would feel like herself again. She couldn’t admit this though, not even to Safran who watched her now in the late June twilight, shifting in her seat, hands restless in her lap.
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Jokes aside, how are you getting on there?’
Zara measured her words before speaking. ‘It’s every- thing I thought it would be.’
He took a sip of his drink. ‘I won’t ask if that’s good or bad. What are you working on?’
She grimaced. ‘I’ve got this local girl, a teenager, preg- nant by her mother’s boyfriend. He’s a thug through and through. I’m trying to get her out of there.’
Safran swirled his glass on the table, making the ice cubes clink. ‘It sounds very noble. Are you happy?’
She scoffed. ‘Are you?’
He paused momentarily. ‘I think I’m getting there, yeah.’
She narrowed her eyes in doubt. ‘Smart people are never happy. Their expectations are too high.’
‘Then you must be the unhappiest of us all.’ Their eyes locked for a moment. Without elaborating, he changed the subject. ‘So, I have a new one for you.’
She groaned.
‘What do you have if three lawyers are buried up to their necks in cement?’
‘I don’t know. What do I have?’ ‘Not enough cement.’
She shook her head, a smile curling at the corner of her lips.
‘Ah, they’re getting better!’ he said. ‘No. I just haven’t heard one in a while.’
Safran laughed and raised his drink. ‘Here’s to you,
Zar – boldly going where no high-flying, sane lawyer has ever gone before.’
She raised her glass, threw back her head and drank.
*
Artemis House on Whitechapel Road was cramped but comfortable and the streets outside echoed with charm. There were no anodyne courtyards teeming with suits, no sand-blasted buildings that gleamed on high. The trust- fund kids in the modern block round the corner were long scared off by the social housing quota. East London was, Zara wryly noted, as multicultural and insular as ever.
Her office was on the fourth floor of a boxy grey building with stark pebbledash walls and seven storeys of uniformly grimy windows. Her fibreboard desk with its oak veneer sat in exactly the wrong spot to catch a breeze in the summer and any heat in the winter. She had tried to move it once but found she could no longer open her office door.
She hunched over her weathered keyboard, arrang- ing words, then rearranging them. Part of her role as an independent sexual violence advisor was filtering out the complicated language that had so long served as her arsenal
– not only the legalese but the theatrics and rhetoric. There was no need for it here. Her role at the sexual assault refer- ral centre, or SARC, was to support rape victims and to present the facts clearly and comprehensively so they could
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