In the Company of Strangers by Awais Khan

Author:Awais Khan
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: The Book Guild
Published: 2019-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Bilal

He splashed water on his face to hide the tears. What would his mother say if she found him weeping like a little girl?

‘You are a little sissy,’ she’d say, her tone brokering no argument. ‘You’re not your father.’

He scrubbed hard at his hands, as if cleaning them would wipe away the proof of his savagery, his inhuman nature. He’d beaten her more today than he ever had before. The thought made him want to vomit, but he forced the bile back down his throat.

She had forced his hand. She always did.

He had tried to stop himself when he saw how her body shuddered under his hand – his kicks. Her whimpers had pierced him, but it was as if a frenzy had gripped him, a longing to exact vengeance for all those years of her ineptitude as a wife.

‘Why can’t you understand my love?’ he shouted, bringing his fist down on the mirror hard. Shards of glass flew everywhere. His hand came away bloody, but he didn’t feel a thing.

This wasn’t what he had bargained for. He thought he’d married a living thing, but it took him exactly a year to realise that he’d married a stone. She had no feelings, or if she had, she kept them masked from him.

Her indifference to his business affairs, his preferences, hell, even their children alarmed him. It was as if she just pretended to care, the way she went through the right motions like a bloody robot. He didn’t know her. Even after all these years, he didn’t know her. Sometimes, he caught emotion on her face – real emotion – like the first time she had discovered that he was seeing another woman. It was after Aimen had been born, and having fallen prey to post-natal depression, Mona had distanced herself from him, sleeping in the guest room adjacent to theirs. Looking back, he knew that this depression was what really brought that wedge between them. They’d never been the same again. He had never known then just how many nights she would come to spend in that horrible room. If he’d known, he would have had it demolished.

She had discovered lipstick marks on his collar – stupidity on his part – and that being his first real affair, he had floundered when she had questioned him. Unable to properly answer her questions, he had seen the realisation dawn on her face, the hurt of his betrayal manifest in those almond eyes of hers. Her mouth had tightened, her eyes narrowed as she fought back tears, hands bunching up the shirt she held.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘We were so happy.’

The statement infuriated him. ‘Were we?’ he had replied. He had shaken her by the shoulders, shouting the same thing again and again.

And then the light had gone from her eyes, and when the first slap landed on her cheek, she didn’t flinch. That made him hit her more – the first time he had ever raised his hand to her.

‘Women are wanderers,’ was the first thing his father had told him when he was old enough to understand.

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