Chapter 48

Foreign Shores

Betty

2038

"I don't see what's wrong with living in a squat," Betty insisted. "It's as good a way to live as any other."

"It's squalid and unhygienic," Lakeisha countered.

"Why do you live here then?"

"You know why I do," said Lakeisha as she kissed Betty adoringly on the lips as they lay entangled on the mattress in their shared room. "And if it wasn't you alone, well blame the restrictions your government has imposed on immigrants. Without the right paperwork I'm not allowed to rent anywhere. And if I don't have a legitimate address, I can't get the right paperwork."

"I know," said Betty while stroking her lover's bare dark skin. "The government are such fucking bastards. I don't understand borders and nationality anyway. Why can't people live exactly where they want on this planet? It just seems wrong."

Betty looked around the bedroom that had been so dramatically transformed more or less from the moment Lakeisha began sharing it with her. The older woman had made it much more homely. Her resourcefulness, not to mention her salary as a relief doctor at the Ashton Lovelock Medical Centre, had made a truly squalid room into one that might even be considered bourgeois if Lakeisha's taste in decor had been any less authentically African.

Having a relationship with Lakeisha wasn't that easy for Betty. It wasn't just that her black lover was older than her other friends. It was also that her cultural attitudes were so very different. Lakeisha wasn't the sort of person that Betty might normally meet. For a start, she had a job. They first met at the Medical Centre where Betty had made an appointment to deal with an exotic strain of Chlamydia. At first Betty thought Lakeisha was just another patient and chatted very openly about where she lived and the sort of company she kept. She noticed the woman's eyes widen when she mentioned that she didn't know how she'd got infected since she hardly ever had sex with men these days.

"I'm almost exclusively lesbian," Betty boasted.

"Have you got a girlfriend at the moment?" Lakeisha asked.

"No, not at all. I split up with Alicia ages ago."

"But you see other women, don't you?"

"Of course."

"In that case, shall we meet up for a coffee? I finish at three today. Early shift," said Lakeisha.

Betty almost blushed. This woman was a fast worker. "Yes," she said. "Of course. I'm not doing anything."

"Costa Nero at three thirty. Agreed?"

It was inevitable that after the coffee and then a beer at the Ox & Dragon, Betty would take Lakeisha back to the squat that was her home into which the older woman more or less immediately moved in. Betty was overwhelmed by the pace of change, but there were many ways in which Lakeisha was ideal for her despite the ten year age difference. She was also homeless, although this wasn't at all obvious given her income and generally smart appearance. She'd been living in one of the cheap and rundown lodgings that had proliferated since the housing market last collapsed. It wasn't very clean and it was expensive for what it was so, in comparison, Betty's squat wasn't as bad as all that.

"Have you always been a lesbian?" Betty asked when Lakeisha first placed her hand on hers and suggested that they spend the night together.

"Not at all. I'm not sure I'm really a lesbian now. I'm also a mother and a wife, so I can't always have been a lesbian."

"You got married? How weird. How old's your daughter?"

"Lisa? She finishes secondary school next year."

"Was it a mistake, having a baby and all?"

"You could say that," said Lakeisha. "I feel really bad about coming to the UK without her as well. I'm not as close to my daughter as I ought to be, but it was a way to escape from my drunken idiot of a husband. He was the real mistake. Not Lisa."

"Was it because he was like that you developed a taste for women?"

"What an odd question. Do you like women because of some man in your life, Betty? Were you traumatised?"

"Of course not," said Betty who was shocked by the notion. "I've always liked women. I like boys as well, so it's no big deal."

"It's the same with me," said Lakeisha. "Although if fewer men were bastards I'd probably not bother so much with women. They've let me down so often."

"Me too," said Betty in automatic agreement, although in her life the share of being let down was distributed fairly evenly not just between the men and women in her life, but between herself and her lovers.

Lakeisha was a woman who knew what she wanted and knew how to get hold of it. She'd known very few gaps between successive relationships in the years since her last heterosexual affair, although she'd never had the need to frequent lesbian bars or resort to internet dating. If she saw a woman she liked and the woman was amenable, it was Lakeisha who made all the moves. But she wasn't quite the liberated woman that Betty thought she might be. She didn't like it when Betty had sex with other men and she most definitely didn't appreciate it when Betty had sex with another woman.

"Aren't I enough, Betty?" she asked when she discovered that her lover had spent the afternoon in Tanya's arms.

"We didn't really have sex," said Betty. "I didn't have an orgasm or anything. We just kissed and cuddled."

"On our bed!"

"It wasn't anything we planned."

Although Lakeisha didn't make a scene on this occasion or on the others, she made her disapproval very clear. She also didn't like it when Betty wandered round the house in the nude, but her concern related more to questions of practicality and hygiene rather than decency.