It was very late, past three, when a little policeman named Rollow, a sturdy small man standing straight for Abberline, answered crisply why yes, and then stepped back as Sanjay came forward, mouth working, and Abberline asked who, tell us, man.
‘Her name is Mary Kelly.’
‘Where?’ said Sanjay, ‘Where?’
Rollow glanced back and forth from Sanjay to Abberline, then cleared his throat. ‘She dosses, sir, in a room at Miller’s Court.’
Number 26, Dorset Street, was in darkness as Sanjay and the inspector stepped carefully around the house; each breath cost Sanjay an effort and robbed him of hearing, his pulse beat so loudly that finally he stood still, absolutely still, and Abberline’s face was sweaty in the flickering light from a lamp overhead, they looked at each other and they could hear nothing but Sanjay’s hands were shaking, he turned his head carefully, something small buzzed through the light and its shadow magnified spun like a wheel on the walls of Miller’s Court, Sanjay turned his head carefully, not knowing what to look for but examining every brick, the irregular paving stones, the long pipe running up on the wall, and level with his heart there was a small diamond of light, so tiny that it disappeared when he looked directly at it, but when he turned away it appeared again, a point of light in the wall. He stepped up to the wall, one two three, settling his feet on the ground slowly like an embrace, and his outstretched hand found a sheet of glass, a window, and cloth, a window with one pane broken in it, the gap stuffed with rags and letting through just one burst of light, Sanjay bent his face down (feeling a sensation of falling) and leaned close to the glass, pulled softly at the cloth with his forefinger, and the edge of glass stands sharply in his vision and what is beyond is indistinct for a moment but then it swims and clears into a black bag, a square black leather bag which is open and from which protrudes a steel handle, and beyond that on the floor is a pool of blood, there is a bed, on the bed there is a person, a woman but her face has been cut away, the body has been blasted the flesh peeled from the thighs to the bone, and Sarthey is leaning over her in his shirtsleeves, rolled up, he is concentrated and the light shines on his temples and the long forehead, he picks up her hand and places it slowly and surely in her stomach, in the red cavity where her stomach used to be, the room is red, he places her hand in herself, he is speaking, his voice is steady and calm and low, Sanjay can hear each word clearly, Sarthey says: ‘See. See. See, India, this is your womb. This is your heart. This is your bone.’
Sanjay turned, brushing past Abberline, and was at the door pulling at the knob, which would not turn. He held it with both hands and then it suddenly gave way, and he fell forward into the room, past Abberline’s arm which came in through the window, he had reached in and pulled back the bolt, and Sarthey was still intent on what he was doing. Sanjay had the sword-stick out and was thrusting but Sarthey turned and took it from him easily, plucked it from the air and twisted it away, reversed it, Sanjay scrambled back but Sarthey fixed him easily with a stab that caught him through the middle, he sat down suddenly, the blade through him. Sarthey raised a finger at him, admonishing, and Abberline was behind him, swinging a cosh, which made a solid thumping noise on Sarthey’s head, who turned and lifted the inspector off his feet with a swing of his arm and bounced him off the wall to collapse slowly. Sarthey stepped over his shins, to the door, which he shut quietly, when he turned Sanjay saw his eyes, brilliant and calm, and Sarthey stepped back to the bed, from his bag he lifted an implement, a long knife that Sanjay remembered. Sarthey bent over and worked, Sanjay heard small shifting liquid sounds, then Sarthey lifted something up, holding it in both cupped hands, and Sanjay shut his eyes but the image remained and it was useless, he opened them and Sarthey was staring at the thing in his hand (a piece of somebody, somebody, Sanjay thought), a wet knot of tissue and blood and fluids, Sarthey was muttering, ‘Heat, heat, heat,’ an expression of exultation and joy on his face, then what was in his hands began to glow, to burn not with flame but an inner radiance brighter than a thousand suns, it seared the room white and Sarthey flung it away into the fireplace and clutched at his eyes, smoke between his fingers, and yet the radiance grew brighter and then it was unbearable to look at and Sanjay turned his face away. When he looked again there was nothing in the fireplace but a blackened and melted utensil of some kind, and Sarthey was kneeling near the bed, his head in his hands, he raised his head slowly and his eyes had become black craters, burnt and bleeding, but it was the skin on his hands that Sanjay watched with horror, because it was spotting, where it had been hard and uncreased it now grew wrinkled, it loosened and grew old. Across the room Abberline was watching, his mouth working, pressed against the wall, and now Sarthey’s face was changing, his hair was vanishing, his cheeks fell, sores appeared on his neck, and his shoulders lost their bulk and he grew old. Finally he slumped to the floor and lay twisted, his clothes puddling around the shape of the thin limbs, and his face, with its charred holes, gazed straight upwards with a look of insulted and indignant surprise.
Sanjay pushed himself to his feet, and worked at the sword-stick until it fell to the ground, and the clatter it made seemed to start Abberline from a daze: he jumped up, scooped up the weapon, and brought it down in a huge overhead sweep onto Sarthey, and the blade passed through Sarthey’s neck with a dry rustle, easily, and the head rolled to one side, there was no blood, only a little arid exhalation of wind, the fingers on the hand that Sanjay could see crumbled, and collapsed into a fine dust, the body disappeared and the white shirt lay flat on the ground, the fine leather boots lay empty, and still the lips on the head worked, the creased skin jumped back and forth, the nostrils expanded and contracted, and the eyes yet seemed to be staring blindly.
Abberline covered his face with his forearm, and wept: ‘What is this? What is this?’
Sanjay shook his head. ‘He cannot die.’
‘Why?’
‘He has found what he wished for.’
‘What? What was that?’
‘Eternal life.’
The cold air rushing down Sanjay’s neck made his new wound ache, but he felt as if its frigid flow were the only thing holding him back from the black precipice of exhaustion; they were in a dog cart speeding towards the edges of the city, with Abberline driving, and the black bag under the seat with its unspeakable burden, next to a shovel. After what had happened, it seemed to Sanjay that Abberline’s return to practicality was quick to the extreme and therefore hugely admirable: he had muttered under his breath, wiped his face a couple of times, and then he was suddenly walking about the room taking charge; he had stuffed the rags back into the broken window, he had gathered up the sword-stick and its sheath, he had opened the bag and swept up all of Sarthey’s instruments into it, he had lifted the clothes on the floor without flinching, and finally he had brought himself to nudge the head into the open bag, which he then clicked shut. All this time Sanjay had stood with his face to the wall, trying not to look at the woman on the bed, shaking, and when Abberline had tapped him on the shoulder he burst out, ‘Who is she?’
‘Mary Kelly, I presume.’
‘Yes, but who is Mary Kelly?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes. We must be out of here.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes. Are you hurt badly?’
‘I will be all right. But I’m sorry.’
‘I understand. Come.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Will you shut your mouth and come?’
Sanjay let himself be led out; Abberline picked up a key from the table and locked the door behind them, and then they were fleeing, and Sanjay said nothing more but the same words repeated themselves endlessly in his mind: I’m sorry. Now they were on a dark road, with Abberline going recklessly fast, and Sanjay heard another whisper, a succession of words, and he couldn’t tell if it was real, or if his mind was conjuring it up out of the drumming of the wheels, clean, it said, the
world must be clean, clean, clean; Sanjay was tired of listening, and thinking, and he wanted to sleep, but he knew it wouldn’t come yet.
They stopped next to an enormous iron gate, and Abberline led the way over a fence; once on the other side Sanjay could feel grass underneath his feet.
‘What is that smell?’ he said.
‘It’s a cemetery.’
The odour lay over the ground thickly so that there was no escape from it; when Sanjay covered his nose he could feel it burning in his throat, and it was the effluvia of flesh rotting away, the slow dissolution of the tissues and muscles, of the ground permeated by the gasses from human bowels; it made Sanjay’s eyes stream and his stomach clench. They emerged from the bushes, and Sanjay saw the darker shape of a church against the dark sky, its steeple and the soaring reach of the towers; finally Abberline stopped, next to a large mausoleum, and began to dig close to one of its walls, and Sanjay stood looking at the elegant outline of the church, tracing it from one end to another, anything to keep back the memory of the room at Miller’s Court, and he kept his hand over his nose, but all his attempts were useless, and his mind skittered along the edge of madness and rot.
‘Help me,’ Abberline said. He had the bag at the bottom of the hole, and now they pushed the earth back in, and tamped it down, and yet Sanjay heard the voice whispering, clean, clean, clean, but he knew now that he was dreaming it, because the thing in the bag was buried, and that he wanted nothing more than to be away. Finally Abberline finished, and they hurried away, and the horse was shivering against the fence; as they got in Abberline caught Sanjay by the elbow. ‘Is it finished.’
‘It is.’
‘I saw the blade go through you, and yet you are not dead. What are you? What was he?’
‘We were, we were just ordinary people. We were changed by something.’
‘What?’
‘It was distance, I think, and a kind of dream.’
‘Magic? Do you mean to say, over there? In India?’
‘Yes, it was magic all right. But it was never Indian.’
Abberline turned his head away. ‘I must be insane.’
They were jolting along now, and Sanjay had to call over the wind to Abberline. ‘Is there no chance of it being uncovered over there?’
‘No. They won’t dig up that patch. Under that mausoleum, I mean. There’s a member of the royal family buried there.’
When they reached the city it was early morning, and Abberline left Sanjay at the hotel, telling him to wait, to go nowhere, and went back to the station to await the discovery of the body; Sanjay spent the day lying on the bed, always a step away from sleep, his eyes on the white ceiling; he felt as if something was over, as if a curtain had come down, but he had no strength to draw a moral, and so he examined the plaster minutely, understood the intricate tracery of the cracks, the patterns of the trowel-strokes that were still apparent. Finally he could bear the stuffiness of the room no more, and he went out and walked the streets till evening; the noise was enough to distract him, and he paid no attention to where he was going, and when dusk came he found himself in front of a large palace, next to a huge gate guarded by tall soldiers. A number of carriages rolled through the gate, which closed behind them and a crowd of onlookers cheered; the man next to Sanjay turned to him: ‘That was the queen. Queen-Empress Victoria herself.’
Sanjay turned and looked, and the man whose face was sparkling with a huge, excited smile was a very small Indian, a slight man with small shoulders who was wearing a dark evening suit and a tall chimneypot hat; his English was careful and controlled, and for all his efforts had a Gujarati lilt under it; and he was very young, maybe seventeen or eighteen.
‘Yes,’ said Sanjay, and he found himself smiling. He pointed at the book the other carried beneath his arm. ‘Are you a student?’
‘Yes,’ the man said, holding the book up; it was Bell’s Standard Elocutionist. ‘I am trying to teach myself proper English.’ There was something trusting about his face, something innocent and straightforward, despite the stylish suit and the air of attempted dandyism and the huge hat, too large for the head, and impulsively Sanjay reached out and shook his hand, and felt a rush of wonder at the fragility of the bones, the thinness of the hand.
‘Good luck,’ Sanjay said. ‘I am quite sure you will do well.’ He paused, still holding the little hand, and he felt a welling of tenderness that brought tears. ‘May the gods bless you.’
‘Thank you.’ In the gathering darkness the man’s eyes were almost lost, but Sanjay could see they were surprised, and pleased, and that they were liquid and brown, almost black. ‘Thank you. I must go home to dinner now. Good evening.’
‘Good evening.’ As the diminutive figure walked away, Sanjay said, ‘By the way, what is your name?’
But the young man was already lost in the crowd.
Abberline was waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel, and when Sanjay walked in they nodded to each other and walked up the stairs without a word.
‘I must go back to India,’ Sanjay said to Abberline as soon as the door to his room was closed. ‘I must go back and I have no papers. Or no papers that will suffice now.’
‘Why not? I thought you had travelled extensively.’
Sanjay shook his head. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’
‘Not Jones?’
‘My name is Parasher.’
‘You’re not English?’
‘I am. But I am Indian.’
‘How can you be English if you’re an Indian?’
‘It is precisely because I’m an Indian that I’m English.’
Abberline threw up his hands. ‘These riddles and paradoxes are too much for me. I want you away. What has happened here in the past few weeks, that thing in the cemetery, all this has no place in my city. D’you understand? I’m a policeman, a detective, I can’t believe I’m here talking to you. I don’t know who you are or what you are, but I’ll get you the papers and I want you away from my city. Is that clear?’
Sanjay wanted to say, but all this is your city, your London, but he only nodded; he saw curiosity on Abberline’s face, and, stronger, fear, and he understood that the man wanted to ask him questions, but that he was afraid of the answers, and he was glad, because to answer he would have to look back at his whole life, and of this he was afraid. So they said no more to each other that evening, nor the next morning when Abberline brought him a passport and a ticket, or when he saw him through customs at Southampton, walked him to the ship and bid good-bye to him with a nod; they said nothing to each other except farewell.
On the ship Sanjay closed himself in his room and waited out the days; he did not even look out of the port-hole as England vanished, and he paid no attention to the activities on the vessel, or to the people who passed away the time with games of shuffle-board and walks around the deck; he sat on his bunk cross-legged with half-closed eyes and waited. But one day, shortly after they had passed through the Suez Canal, the vibration from the engines ceased and the ship slowed to a halt, and a hush descended, stilling even the holiday-makers, piercing through Sanjay’s careful detachment: it was the silence of death. He went up to the deck, and saw that the sea was flat but always moving with numberless sparks, and a crowd of people was gathered about the stern; when he came up they parted to make way, because there was a mystery about him, the man alone in his cabin, he was pale, and now his hair was losing the dye of London and was whitening again. There was a body stitched in canvas on the deck, and the captain was reading from the Bible; Sanjay asked who it was, and an officer leaned over to his ear and began to whisper: ‘He was a seaman, the oldest seaman. Perhaps the oldest seaman who ever lived. A peculiar fellow. He was on ships all of his life. Literally, that is. He would take service only on liners from India to England, and back again, and only those. But in port, in Bombay or Dover, he never went ashore, he would remain on the boat, waiting until it took to sea again. He was old on this vessel when I came aboard twenty year
s ago, and there were old men who remembered him on other ships thirty years before. He spent his life on the water. Between here and there.’
‘What was his name?’ Sanjay asked.
‘John Skinner.’
‘John Hercules Skinner?’
‘You knew him?’
Sanjay nodded, trying to recall a vague memory of Sikander’s older brother, the brother who had gone to be a sailor, who had never been heard from since, who had vanished into the great sea. Now the officer had hurried over to the captain and they were talking in hushed tones, and then both of them took Sanjay aside.
‘You know this man?’
‘He is my brother.’
They exclaimed in wonder, and agreed eagerly when Sanjay asked if he could see the body; the group of passengers watching buzzed with excitement as the ship’s carpenter cut away the stitching on the shroud and peeled it back. The hair was white, the face was long and angular, and Sanjay had no recollection of it at all, but he could see the resemblance to Sikander, and Chotta, and the captain exclaimed, ‘He looks like you.’ As Sanjay watched he grew aware that something strange was happening to the body, that its outlines were flickering, that the cheekbones were growing translucent, that he could see through the eyelids, that the corpse, in fact, was becoming invisible; the captain must have seen the same thing, because he blanched, shook his head irately, like a man with a headache, and said, ‘We must go on with the ceremony, sir.’ Sanjay drew the shroud over the face, and they closed it up again, and he stayed next to it through the prayers; when they finally let it overboard it barely made a splash in the calm golden sea, and Sanjay turned and walked back below decks, and by the time he was back in his cabin the engines had started again and the ship was making headway.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain Page 58