Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘When you move up into the next form in school, you need to watch out. Some of the boys in college do nothing but fiddle with their things. Some teachers are even worse. Dixie especially. He’s a pederast.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, although I did not know what he meant.

  ‘The trouble is fellows just give in. Bugger flexes his fat doo-dah and everyone folds up.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Good. Don’t ever stand near him. Even if he asks you to come right up to his desk. Watch out for his hands. He’ll get you to put a string down your trousers and leer like a prick.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m never the favourite in class.’

  ‘People like us never are.’ I hesitated. ‘Like us?’

  ‘You can see beyond, Kairo, can’t you? See better things.’ Jay’s eyes drew back, the pupils shrinking. ‘What do you wish for, most of all?’

  ‘Dunno.’ I could not put it into words. Sometimes, at night, a massive weight would pull me into a dark pit; I wished then for a hand to reach out and save me. I knew every detail of that hand: the long supple fingers, ring-marked, with smiling folds around each knuckle; a smooth palm soothing an interrupted life line; a slender powerful wrist that would winch me back from the brink. Please God. I tried: ‘Maybe I wish I could know what’s going to happen. What I will be.’

  ‘I wish I could make something both beautiful and unbreakable,’ Jay said. ‘When I was seven, my mother gave me a fabulous glass gondola. I could hold it in the palm of my hand. It had amazing coloured drops floating in the glass. She’d brought it back from Venice as a souvenir. She seemed so happy then. I used to stare at it for hours wondering how they made it so smooth and how they got the colours so bright. But then one day, she barged in and grabbed it off my table. She said she couldn’t bear it in the house anymore and threw it out of the window. Smashed into a hundred pieces.’

  ‘She really threw it out?’

  ‘Why she suddenly hated it, I don’t know. My father was the one who didn’t like it.’

  In that moment, watching him, I saw how our imaginations hovered at separate levels, a palimpsest of clouds that seemed to merge when seen from below but which floated at different altitudes: the cumulus, the altostratus, the cirrus. I knew them all. The shapes, the names, even if not the word to describe their interaction any more than our own. Jay’s usually buoyant face had faint creases; some aspect of its structure – the bones – had shifted and cast shadows on the surface of the skin.

  ‘I need to go see Niromi now.’ Jay closed the engine cover and got back in the driving seat. ‘We’ll try the timing again another time.’

  ‘The girl?’

  Jay noticed the awkwardness in my voice. ‘Yeah. You know, Niromi. I’ll drop you off at the top of Jawatte Road.’ I squeezed my eyes tight to stop anything escaping.

  At home, I snuck upstairs and sank into a Western for old times’ sake: purple sage, tumbleweed, cottonwood. Easy riders.

  At a quarter to four, my mother’s colleague, Dilini, arrived to pick her up for bridge.

  ‘Come in for two minutes, have a cool drink. I’ve got to finish this incident report. You won’t believe what happened.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’ Dilini, a tall woman, rarely stood straight; her tone was always inquiring, her posture tipped forward by her unnecessary heels and the impeded height of men she said she was doomed to meet.

  I crawled to my listening post on the landing.

  ‘You know, that fellow with his silly chilli bomb at the reception desk?’

  ‘Why was he dressed up like a gladiator? What was that all about?’

  ‘God knows. All only cardboard armour, but he went berserk. They say he’s from Angoda. Maybe looking for another mental asylum. But the thing is, what the hell was Edmund thinking? He put his ghastly arm around me? Can you believe it? What kind of excuse…’

  ‘Oh, I can well believe that. Once they’ve been on air, they think they can get away with anything. They all imagine they are bigger bongos than they are.’

  ‘Fatheads. Not real men.’

  Dilini snorted in agreement.

  I wanted to be a man like no other man. Tall and lean; I wanted my mother, and my father, to be proud of me.

  After my mother left with her friend, I returned to the ranch in Wyoming until the heavy throb of a pickup truck drew me onto the balcony. Three men got out of the vehicle: two empty-handed, one with a briefcase.

  They fanned out across the road; the mongrel that licked its paws outside the house next door slunk away. It could have been high noon in a different time zone. The one with the briefcase stood in the middle of the road and surveyed the patch of wild trees. ‘You see what I mean, machang? Put the apartment block diagonal and you can really have the windows facing Adam’s Peak.’ He pulled up one of the strands of barbed wire and ducked in. The other two checked the road and followed him in.

  I reckoned I should alert Jay. I slipped downstairs and telephoned his house. Iris answered: ‘Baba gone, not even finished the omelette…’ She put the phone down, not completing her complaint.

  I tried Channa. ‘Can you come? Something sinister is going on.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll be over soon as I can.’

  Channa would not admit it, but I was sure he was doing maths prep for his tutor. The sort of thing a swot would do on a free afternoon between tennis and swimming, or that kind of laudable activity.

  I resumed watch. An hour later, Channa turned up.

  ‘Sorry, men. Had to say hello to this lady my parents had invited for tea – Mrs Walton. She had a lot of info about England.’ He nudged the gate with his front wheel. ‘So, where’s the gang?’

  ‘They’ve gone,’ I said, flatly. ‘You missed the whole shebang.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘A bunch of desperadoes came in a massive jeep and combed through that whole jungle. Definitely planning to build something big, but Jay is completely wrong. They are building apartment blocks, not casinos.’

  ‘A jeep like Jay’s uncle’s?’

  ‘You’ve been in it?’ I knew I should not mind, we were all in it together.

  ‘Guess what?’ Channa changed the subject. ‘My father says someone’s started a new secret joint in Wellawatta. The Giramal Club. With go-go dancers!’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Girls who dance without any clothes.’

  ‘In Wellawatta?’

  ‘In the buff.’ Channa fiddled with the end of his shirt. ‘Mrs Walton’s husband works for the British Council. She said that when they were in Cuba before the revolution, it had been chock-a-block with “colourful places” like that – casinos. Then Fidel Castro came and chased them all to Las Vegas.’

  I had an image of dancing girls of every colour running naked down the street and leaping into ships steaming out of a harbour, and a big man in a beard shaking his fist at them from the shore.

  ‘My father says gambling is not a problem for real socialists.’ I said. ‘Let’s check it out, just you and me.’

  ‘I’ll get some more info.’

  But Channa told Jay first and Jay immediately planned a mission. He came over the next evening in Elvin’s stately grey Humber with Channa already in the front seat.

  ‘Come on,’ Jay jerked a thumb. ‘Operation Wadiya.’

  I got in the back, noting how Channa avoided my eye.

  We drove up to Galle Road and past the ramshackle tea-shops and hopper hawkers. I counted three cars with dud lights. Even if Colombo turned into a Las Vegas one day, I couldn’t imagine the dingy dens with their rows of brown bottles and stacks of betel leaves giving way to glitzy hotels and sparkling gem shops. Could there be neon lights, limousines, billboards and burger joints here? Would everyone wear blue jeans and shake their hips and grow wings? The possibility pleased me less than I expected.

  Jay flicked an indicator and turned into one of the lanes dribbling down to the sea. He drove with the indifference of a big shot, e
lbow on sill, chewing a pellet of paper. The villa at the end of the lane, tipping towards the sea, had a few cars parked outside. Jay stopped several houses away, dimming the lights but keeping the engine running.

  ‘That’s it. The one at the end,’ Channa whispered, taking the role of number one scout. ‘If we go any closer, it might look suspicious.’

  ‘Drive past slowly,’ I said, wanting to show I was braver, wanting Jay to recognise how close my heart was to his own, despite everything. We were the ones who had been on a trail together, shot snipe, caught fish, pipe-dreamed on a raft. The future was ours, nobody else’s. ‘The road goes around the corner and then up the other lane.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jay spat the paper pellet out. ‘Take a good look.’

  As we passed the house, I whispered, ‘Curtains closed.’

  ‘Nothing to see,’ Channa added. ‘Top secret.’

  On the corner, I recognised the rust bucket parked by the telegraph pole.

  ‘Not nothing. That’s our Anglia. My father must be inside.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘They must do betting there.’

  ‘Slot machines, not racing. That’s what Mrs Walton said they had in the clubs in Havana. It’s the fast way to gamble.’

  ‘You said they have naked girls in there. That can’t be true, can it, Jay?’

  ‘They are doing a test run,’ Channa knitted an amalgamation of half-heard adult arguments into an explanation that slowly eased the tension in his face. ‘If they make pots of money at this Giramal Club, they’ll open more. In Dehiwela, Havelock Town, Colpetty. After the elections, my dad says, if Mrs B loses, it’ll be buffet for all. Gambling is the thing. They’ll make it the fashion.’

  I tried to imagine my father’s reaction. He’d be out every night, placing his own bets. Maybe my mother would accompany him. They used to go to places together, she’d once reminisced, in the days when she used to do her nails in bright colours and wear earrings that dangled. The Giramal might become like the famous Italian supper club where jacketed waiters lit candles for dinner and couples ate lasagne with olives. Maybe my father would no longer have to hide behind a hopeless sneer. I wanted his life to become better, and my mother’s. I wanted them both to be happy, as they surely must have been once – like at the time of their wedding photo when they had their hands locked together. Two slim young people in a black and white world with no inkling of the days ahead or the impression they would make. It did not cross my mind that Channa might be wrong and that the Giramal was not the kind of club that we had imagined, nor indeed that the election might spell a radically different future for my father; that the smiles in the photo and their marital grip concealed panic as much as love’s innocent bloom.

  When Jay dropped me back home, he gave me a grownup wink. ‘Find out what’s going on from your dad.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Have a chat, he’s bound to let something slip about this new club.’

  I figured Jay was beginning to forget what it was like to have a father. Maybe, like the way we dream of the future, we also dream up the past, smoothing all the edges for the sake of our present longings.

  Down the road, the Selvarajahs’ dogs started barking. That set another lot off farther down, and soon a rippling circle of yapping and barking drowned out the crackling radio at the back of the house.

  In the weeks that followed, Channa avoided us. At first, in short, strained phone calls he would make excuses citing chores, or relatives and family friends, until eventually he confided, ‘My dad won’t let me out on the roads.’

  ‘Grounded?’

  ‘Not my fault. It’s getting dangerous.’

  ‘Those fellows in the Wolseley?’

  ‘He’s trying to get us all to England by Christmas.’

  ‘My father says everything will be different in the New Year.’

  I had asked my father about the rising chants from loudspeakers mounted on vans calling for rallies, protest marches, strikes; the warnings of impending dictatorship and the demands for early elections. He had dithered between truthfulness and reassurance, both of which he must have wanted to offer me – his only son. He explained how the opposition was angry at the prospect of being muzzled, the government was angry at being stymied on every proposal, the left was angry at its growing impotence, the clergy were angry at being ridiculed or forgotten. ‘We’re heading for a helluva showdown but it may be what we need to make us ponder our fate.’

  Without Channa around, I became Jay’s sole focus. He launched himself into a programme of mentoring overdrive.

  I never learnt so much, so fast, so excitingly, ever before in my life or since. Jay seemed to want to take the whole mechanical world apart and show me how every tiny bit of it worked by itself and in connection with everything else. One day it would be an air pump for the aquarium, another day a radio, or the carburettor of a car engine. We were in a world of our own: goldfish bustled, mynahs chattered, orioles sang. The rasp of malice sharpening its claws on the other side of town did not breach the calm of Jay’s house or Elvin’s rambling grounds. I did not care what was happening anywhere except what was happening between Jay and me.

  ‘Practise, practise, practise,’ was his mantra. My life became a testing ground for something bigger and more important to come. Every day he would get me to drive, teaching me to understand a vehicle as a live animal. Always the red Beetle for lessons so that I recognised all its quirks. No doom could threaten our future.

  ‘Jay really needs a friend like you, sweetie,’ his mother had told me holding my hand in her brittle fingers. ‘A friend for life. Don’t ever leave him, will you?’

  I was determined not to.

  On the last Sunday of November, Jay said he wanted to see how well I could handle a bigger car.

  ‘The Bentley?’

  He laughed, sounding years older, having unconsciously imbibed his uncle’s spirit while pottering in his garages. He put on Elvin’s pukka accent. ‘Not that one, old man. We’ll take out the trusty warhorse. How would you like that?’

  The first time I had seen Jay drive flashed across my mind – coming back from the fabled estate – and how impressed I had been and how much I wanted to be like Jay and take the wheel of the jeep with a champion’s assurance.

  ‘I’m ready for it.’

  ‘We’ll go to the beach – a special beach.’ Jay’s cheeks bunched up as he made a sucking sound: ‘We’ll take Niromi with us. Okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ We had some rapport after the business with the violin at Mrs De Souza’s house. I had kept my mouth shut as she wanted me to, so we must be quits. The monkey in my ear urged me to reveal her girly plans, but at that point in a boy’s life a girl just complicated everything, whatever the greater design. I didn’t know why she had changed the way she looked at me; maybe Jay had reassured her in some way – and she had succumbed as people seemed to do.

  In the afternoon sun, Elvin’s house glowed pink. Jay got me to bring the jeep out of the garage. The warhorse was the heaviest thing I had ever handled; my hands, my feet, my whole body strained with the weight of it.

  ‘Ease up,’ Jay said.

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘It has an engine, you know. Wheels. It’ll roll. You only have to guide it.’

  By the time we got to Niromi’s house on Vajira Road, I felt more in control. I waited in the jeep while Jay popped inside to fetch her.

  Coming out, she led the way, a pale shirt knotted at the waist, tripping up to the jeep with a cheerful, ‘Hi.’

  No secret signals, no indication that she had ever had a cross word to say – or a good one. I figured I too should pretend we had no history: play it cool, acknowledge her manfully. She climbed in the back where I had once sat and Jay jumped into the passenger seat next to me. I checked the rear-view mirror. She’d put something smeary around her eyes and on her lips.

  She grinned. ‘So, Kairo, you can drive?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s a great d
river,’ Jay said.

  ‘I’ve driven a tractor.’ Niromi leant back.

  ‘A two-wheeler?’ Was nothing inviolate anymore?

  ‘Don’t be silly. A real one.’

  ‘No way,’ Jay said.

  ‘It’s true. In Batty. A Massey Ferguson on Uncle Vernon’s farm.’ She laughed, ‘My daddy used to let me steer our car when I was like six.’

  That shut us up.

  Jay’s special beach was far down the coast, past Mount Lavinia, Ratmalana, Moratuwa; it didn’t seem to matter to him, and soon it did not matter to me either. The road hardly had any other vehicles on it. Our lives floated free, all constraints melted. I believed we could do anything we wanted for no reason except a desire to do so. Now, installed as driver, I was no longer a little boy. For the moment, for me, this was no longer a country of confusion, simply a road where a boy could be in control and nothing need ever go wrong.

  After an hour, the road crossed a railway line; the sea loomed closer.

  ‘Slow down,’ Jay leant forwards. ‘Look for a turn-off opposite a Madonna shrine-like thing.’

  Niromi spotted it first. A pale, moony figure draped in a blue cape with a cross in her hand. Marigold garlands and lotus flowers circled her bare feet as though she had reverted to an older religion while standing by the roadside.

  ‘Go straight to the end,’ Jay instructed.

  The red dirt surface of the lane, dipping in and out of craters, rippled with the tide marks of hard rain and small forgotten floods.

  ‘Should I shift to four-wheel drive?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  I yanked the second, shorter gear stick and the jeep juddered as all the wheels engaged.

  The terrain turned sandier; ranawara and lantana scrambled for a sharper, salt-seeded light while coconut trees swayed, rangier, their tops mashed up by the winds that came sweeping in from the ocean. The sky curved with an emery edge. I couldn’t understand why Jay wanted to come all this way when within half an hour night would fall and there would be nothing to see but gnats reeling in the beam of the headlamps.

  ‘At the bottom, take a left and then drive right onto the beach. That’s my favourite spot for a swim.’