by Annie Murray
‘One son,’ I tell her. ‘But he died. Two years ago. Someone killed him – with a car.’
She nods slowly. As we sit side by side, looking ahead, she takes my hand for a moment. Hers is small, the skin dry.
‘Only one child? No more?’
I nod. I don’t want to have to explain that Paul was adopted. What does it matter? He was my son – the son I brought up, loved, feel I failed in many ways. But still my son.
She strokes my hand for a moment before letting go.
That evening Pat and I go to a restaurant on the high ground overlooking the lake, when it is already sunset. We sit looking out at the boats bobbing on the darkening water, the pale blue arc of the sky fading to orange and rust.
We order beers and spiced vegetables and rice and the air cools so that we need jumpers on. From below we can hear the chatter of pleasure-seekers alongside the lake, the roar of motorbikes and every now and then the clop of hooves, the rowdy screech of a goose.
Pat’s phone beeps and she reads a text.
‘All well?’ I say.
‘Yes – he’s fine. Been playing a lot of golf. He says he’s missing me, though!’ She twinkles at me.
Ian has sent me a few more texts and he seems all right. At the weekend he is going to see Cynthia down south.
‘Are you glad you came?’ I say.
Pat nods. She puts her fork down and sits back. ‘D’you know, I’ve never even been to France.’
We both laugh.
‘No, I know,’ I say. ‘Still, we’ll do more sightseeing in Delhi when we get there.’
‘But yes, I am glad I came.’ She takes a mouthful of beer and holds the glass to her chest. I see the lights at the edge of the restaurant terrace, little bright dots reflected in her eyes. ‘More than glad. I feel . . . as if everything has got bigger. In my life, I mean. But also . . . You know, when you hear about something bad – seeing it is another thing. It’s wicked what’s happened here. Completely wicked.’
I think of Priyanka, her gentle despair.
‘It’s as if these companies can just do what they like, get away with anything. As if they’re not people any more – they’re just these things. Sort of monsters with no faces.’
We sit quietly. The waiter comes and removes our plates. We order tea.
‘D’you think Fred would ever come?’ I say. Because a tiny, poppy-seed-sized idea is beginning to plant itself in my mind.
‘I doubt it,’ Pat laughs. ‘You know how particular he is about everything, and about safety as well. Can you imagine him here – on Aasif’s motorbike? I mean, seriously?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s interested in things, isn’t he? He might love it.’
We start laughing and can’t stop. It’s a rinsing out of the tension, from the awfulness of what we have seen in the last few days. We laugh until we’re hysterical. The waiter, bringing our tea, gives us a concerned look as if we might have become deranged in the few minutes between ordering tea and the prospect of drinking it.
‘Thank you,’ I say, trying to sound sober and sensible.
‘What can we do?’ Pat says, wiping her eyes with one of the little white paper napkins. ‘What can anyone do about all this? I can’t think of anything at the moment – except running.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s the least we can do,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t seem like much though, does it?’
Forty-One
LION’S BREATH
We arrive into Heathrow’s Terminal 5 that Sunday, to find Fred beaming at us in the arrivals hall. He sweeps Pat into his arms, looking relieved, bashful, somehow embarrassed to be the one waiting at home, the passive one, standing there as his wife strides up energetically, loaded with a rucksack almost like a teenage backpacker.
He and I give each other a brief hug as well.
‘I told Ian I’d bring you both back safe,’ he says. ‘He asked should he come, but I said to him, “You get yourself a lie-in, son, you work hard all week.” ’
I smile, knowing that he and Ian would be hard-pushed to manage a conversation all the way from Birmingham to here and that it was better that Fred came on his own.
We make our way to the car park and England’s chill, grey winter wraps itself round me. It feels as if we’ve been away for months.
‘I brought a flask of coffee in case you needed it,’ Fred says, clicking open the doors and lifting our rucksacks from the trolley and into the boot.
‘You sit in the front,’ I say to Pat and she gives me a grateful look. ‘I can have a doze in the back.’
And in the warm comfort of their Hyundai saloon, that’s what I do, as we head smoothly west and north, head home, to the silky muttering of Fred’s satnav.
Ian sees the car pull up and is at the door. He too looks shy and unsure. But as soon as we have said our goodbyes to Pat – See you at yoga? – Ian pushes the door closed behind us, props my rucksack up in the front room and turns to me.
‘Well, home again,’ I say, feeling shy myself.
He comes up to me looking emotional and we step into each other’s arms.
‘Ooh –’ I hold him tightly – ‘it’s so good to be here.’ And it is, although my head has not quite arrived yet. I am still full of jangled energy from a flight and not enough sleep and being somewhere else for ten days. And I have so many things to tell him – but not now, not yet.
‘Let’s have a cuppa,’ I say. ‘Tell me what you’ve been up to.’
We sit at the table in the kitchen and chat for a bit. He says things are going well in the business. He went to see Cynth and she seems keen to get along these days.
‘Yes, I thought at the funeral she was getting over herself a bit,’ I say. ‘And now your mom’s not here she’s got to get in touch herself instead of leaving it to her to tell all the news.’
‘Yeah.’ Ian thinks about it. He smiles suddenly. There is something about him – as if something, slightly, has loosened inside him. ‘It was all right. Surprised me a bit. I s’pose I’d set myself up for her being all – you know. And the lads are all right too – played a bit of football with them and – yeah. It was good, really.’
I reach over and put my hand on top of his, give it a squeeze.
‘Did you go . . . you know, again?’
Ian looks down a moment. ‘Yeah. Course. Took some flowers – for both of them. They haven’t finished Mom’s stone yet, but I made sure it was all tidy and everything.’
Our eyes meet for a moment, hovering above our shared well of grief, and then we look away.
And I tell him things, about the flight, the hotel, the sightseeing we did in Delhi – the Red Fort and Government House, all the Lutyens stuff along Rajpath, the old city, classic Delhi sights.
Somehow, I can’t begin on Bhopal, not in any detail. It feels too much, too emotional. I tell him a few basics about what we did, about Aasif and riding on the motorbikes, which makes him laugh.
‘I’ll tell you about it later properly,’ I say, finishing my tea. ‘And you can see my photos. You’d love it there, you really would. I’d better go and have a shower now, though.’
Ian gets up and takes my hand, pulling me to my feet. He looks down into my eyes and I see my Ian, the Ian who looks at me, full on. He pulls me close.
‘I think I’ll come up with you,’ he says, leaning to kiss me.
I didn’t mean to say any of this – not yet. I planned to tell him all about things, let him get used to the idea, before saying anything.
But by the time we have tumbled on to our bed and made love – slowly, taking care, both there with each other, really there – and are lying together in the cosy bedroom with the side light on, I feel as if we are more together, more us than we have been for a long time. Something in the way of love and trust is knitting itself back together like a cobweb protecting a wound. And lying holding Ian, his arms round me, it all just comes spilling out.
I tell him about the city, the mosques and the huge lakes, the mayhem, the w
orkshops with people welding right by the pavement. And about the clinics, Chingari especially. I feel him listening attentively, as if he really wants to see into where I’ve been.
‘Did you see that boy?’ he asks. ‘The boy in the picture?’
‘No!’ I laugh. ‘I mean, there are so many people. But I did meet a boy called Sanjay . . .’ I tell him about Sanjay and Priyanka, about what happened to her husband’s family.
‘Bloody hell,’ Ian says. The vision of hell that was that night in Bhopal is truly hard to take in if you were not there.
I’m on a roll now. I tell him about the Sambhavna clinic and all they do. And about something that happened while we were there that I have not even told Pat about.
While we were having our tour of the clinic, Pat asked Aasif if she could go to the bathroom. While he showed her where to go, I waited in a corridor, outside some offices, where people were moving back and forth to treatment rooms. While I was standing there, a tall man came out of one of the offices, in jeans and a shirt. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a red-and-white turban wrapped casually round his head. He looked about my own age.
‘Hi.’ He seemed surprised to see me there. He had a kindly expression. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Oh, no, it’s OK, thank you.’ I explained that I was waiting for Aasif.
He asked me the usual basic questions, where was I from, and I told him England, that my friend and I had heard about the clinics because we had run for the Bhopal Medical Appeal.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see – our loyal supporters.’
And because I could tell he was something to do with the place, that he worked here in other words and did not seem to be a patient, out of my mouth came the words, ‘Am I right in thinking that you have volunteers who come to work here?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There are quarters for the volunteers upstairs. You can get information about it from our website. Why – are you interested?’
I realized I must be, because why else would I have asked?
‘I’m not really sure I have anything much to offer,’ I said, feeling pretty silly.
He put his head on one side. ‘Everyone has skills. If you are interested, there is always something you can do.’
Just then I saw Pat and Aasif coming back along the corridor. Pat looked questioningly at me, but Aasif clearly knew the man I was talking to and just wandered up. Pat said hello and off we went, the man saying, ‘Don’t forget to look at the website!’ to me as he turned back to his office.
‘So,’ Aasif said as we walked on, ‘you met Sathyu.’
I looked at him.
‘He runs the clinic. He was very influential in getting it set up.’ He draws us close to the wall and stops. ‘Let me tell you about Sathyu Sarangi.’
By the time he has finished I have heard the story of a young man who, in 1984, was studying engineering in another part of India. When he heard the news of the catastrophic gas leak in Bhopal, he travelled to the city thinking to stay a few days and help. Amid the chaos and great suffering, he and others carried people to hospital and helped bury the dead.
‘In fact,’ Aasif says, ‘he has been here ever since – given his life to this place. He has fought many battles.’
‘He just seemed very kind,’ I say to Ian, ‘and brave. I read about him afterwards. He’s been to the US, trying to get justice for the gas-affected people, and he’s been beaten up by the American police, the Indian police – the lot.’
‘Why would the Indian police beat him up?’ Ian says, bewildered.
‘Good question. You’d think they might be on the side of their own people, but I suppose he was challenging the government or the state or something. There’s not been much sympathy officially in India either. When they built the first little clinic to try and help the gas-affected people, the police had it torn down.’
‘That’s mad.’
‘I know. It really is. But, Ian . . .’ I push myself up on my elbow. ‘I just . . . Look, I’m just going to say this. Why don’t we volunteer? The two of us – we could go over together.’
‘What?’ He looks at me as if I’m insane. ‘What’re you on about? We can’t do that.’
‘We could – we’d be able to sort something out. He said there are all sorts of ways we could help – you can do all sorts of practical things. We could work on the garden if nothing else, they always need that!’
But Ian’s pushing back the bedclothes, getting up.
‘For God’s sake, Jo – live in the real world. It’s all very well you taking off there for a week or two, but that’s not something you can just do. I’ve got a business to run. Not go mucking about like that.’
Ian gets up huffily and I lie back, cursing myself. Why did I just blurt it all out like that?
He disappears into the bathroom and locks the door. Conversation over. Apparently.
Forty-Two
All around me in the cemetery is the sound of rain steadily falling. Everything is green, dripping, the grey stones gleaming in the wet. I’m layered up in jeans, boots, my coat with the collar up, a scarf and gloves. The cold is a shock.
Carrying my two bunches of roses, I go to Paul’s grave first and stand, hearing the tippling of drops on my red-and-white striped umbrella, which creates a tent-like glow around me. There’s no way I can sit on the ground beside him now, as if I’m reading him a bedtime story – it’s far too wet. The summer is gone and the weeds have died back. There are half-withered pink carnations in a jar which Ian must have brought. I bend, balancing the umbrella handle across my shoulder, and manage to replace the dead flowers with the fresh crimson roses. I straighten up again, feeling helpless to do anything else, as I have felt so many times before.
The place rushes in on me again. The last ten days are the longest time I have ever been away from it. A terrible guilt washes through me. Did he miss me? Did he feel abandoned? And I know this is mad because he’s dead, he’s not here. Yet I feel it, overwhelmingly, all the same.
I close my eyes for a moment and the image comes to me of Priyanka, sitting quietly on the playground wall with her dead-in-life son. For a second I imagine Sanjay as he might have been: a sweet, handsome little boy running, playing . . . Another picture flashes in – that messed-up lad Lee Parry, in his prison cell; a lad whose upbringing left him like a booby-trap waiting to be sprung. My heart hurts and I press my hand to it, trying to ease the ache and the thought of them, the thought of all of it.
‘Hello, love,’ I say softly. ‘I’m back. I brought you some flowers.’
Tears run down my cheeks. As if Paul would ever really have wanted flowers. But what else can you bring to someone who is not here except something that blooms and dies alongside them?
‘I’ve been away – in India. I met a lot of children there. What’s happened to them is a terrible, terrible thing. It would’ve upset you.’ Would have. Past tense. Before, I would always have said would upset you. Present, not gone. This makes me cry more – the beginnings of my acceptance, which also feel like another betrayal of him.
I tell him a few things about our trip, then lean over and pat the gravestone.
‘I’ll see you soon, love. I love you. Bye-bye for now, sweetheart.’
I carry the other roses, white ones, over to the Stefanis’ grave. Still the stone has not been taken away to add Dorrie’s name but the little wooden plaque is there. ‘Doreen Stefani, 1929–2015’.
‘Hello, Dorrie.’ For a moment I feel foolishly awkward, as if, because it is their joint grave, Tom Stefani must be listening in on my conversation as well. I don’t even believe in the afterlife, not really – but when someone dies it brings the dead close as if they are all there watching. I tell myself not to be so ridiculous. At least she’s with Tom now – maybe that’s where she really wants to be.
‘We’re back from Bhopal. I wish I could tell you all about it. Well, I can here, obviously, but I’d’ve loved you to hear even though it’s upsetting. I’m not really sure Ian�
�s OK with things.’ Instead of describing our visit I find myself telling her what happened last night.
‘It was really stupid of me. I should never’ve said anything. But then, it was a pretty daft idea anyway, even thinking about it. I knew he wouldn’t want to and why should he? And it was selfish of me, I s’pose. He’s gone through all his life with no dad and now Paul’s gone. And there’s me just sitting around at home now – I really need to help him out, get some sort of job. I might go and ask at Sainsbury’s, just for something on the tills or whatever to tide me over.’
The sky seems to be lightening and I realize the rain has almost stopped. I look across the cemetery, loving the way it’s like a piece of timeless space amid the distant noise of the city.
‘I still haven’t told Ian yet – about his dad. About you, Tom, and what happened to you.’ I feel bashful suddenly, talking to this strange man. ‘It was a really bad thing that happened, Mr . . . Tom. And I do think Ian should know the truth. I’ll get to it, I promise. At the right moment.’
The sun comes out, brightness breaking over everything, lightening all the colours. And I say goodbye and walk back out from the sparkling wet cemetery, into the everydayness of things.
There are hugs all round when I get to yoga the next day. Pat and I are greeted as if we’ve been away for months. But it’s not until we’re at Sheila’s on Thursday that we all have more time to talk.
The six of us are there as usual: Sheila, Kim, Sunita, Hayley, Pat and me. Herbert lies snoring by the fire as usual. Maggie the cat sits nearby, watching us all with a green, unnerving gaze. Sheila fills the teapot repeatedly and we are there longer than usual, catching up. Hayley is loving her course at the uni and says she can probably make most Thursdays as long as she’s not having a work crisis. She seems to be very organized. I don’t ask if she’s quit her night work yet – that’s her business, bless her.
We tell them everything we can think of. They all shake their heads a lot in the face of some of the facts.