The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  When he had found what he was looking for, he rose to go. “The chain!” cried the children. “What about your chain?”

  “Keep it,” he said, with royal munificence. “If you find it, you may keep it.”

  The next day, while the old woman was taking her bath, he effected the switch. Then he dropped the snake stone down the disused kitchen well. Not a moment too soon. His wife, catching a movement from the corner of her eye as she split open a coconut, turned to see a ribbon gliding in from the back verandah. Her blade sliced through the air with admirable precision, almost severing the flat head from its body. On examination it turned out to be a rat snake, harmless to men. But that one, as Padma remarked, was only the first.

  For months the dhobi children found themselves unable to pass the spot below the bridge without pausing to scan the stream. Reason said the chain had long been washed away on the current. Still they looked, and stirred the sand with agile toes.

  Then the monsoon arrived and the stream was a braided amber torrent. On the trunk of the massive banyan that grew near the dhobi colony measurements were marked off in white paint. Every day another six inches of bark had been swallowed by the water. A small jack-wood cabinet flashed past, a china face with blue eyes pressed sideways against the glass. Mottled green river lizards, thicker than a man’s arm, appeared in the crowns of trees. It was the season of delirium and miracles.

  “The chain! There!” screamed the smallest child, dancing through mud, oiled plaits whipping around her head. But there was nothing, only light and linked water.

  That his son might ever come to harm filled Sam with terror and rage. He wanted to keep him safe. He wanted him to shine. Icy cords wound about his ribs as the eight-year-old served ball after ball into the net.

  There was worse: the boy was placed thirteenth in a class of nineteen. It was arranged that twice a week after school and every Saturday afternoon Harry would see the new deputy head of the junior school for an hour and a half of coaching. Barlow had been a housemaster at St. Paul’s. A weak chest had kept him out of the army, he said apologetically, and now it had driven him to seek warmer climes. He was a short, fair man who smelled pleasantly of pipe tobacco. His wife had been killed in one of the first raids over London. Once again his tone was apologetic, although it was difficult to see in what way he was to blame.

  Over time, Sam realized that Barlow’s manner was a tic. The schoolmaster could not help sounding contrite: about the shocking-pink gorgeousness of the anthuriums that flared on his verandah in a humus of his own devising, about the tail-end collapse of the Queen’s First XI. It was faintly irritating. Yet the man’s gaze was so level and so desolate. Sam decided that he had never recovered from the ignominy of missing the war. The death of his wife would have compounded the poor devil’s torment. Dulce et decorum: it would not have been an empty tag to a man like Barlow. The diagnosis of another’s infirmity is always gratifying. Sam’s manner toward the Englishman grew expansive, paternal.

  One Sunday, Harry asked if he might stop having coaching. They were in the middle of a slap-up feed of noodles and crab claws at the Mandarin Inn. His father had been talking about his own school days: pranks, a poem that had won a prize. The request had framed itself on Harry’s tongue.

  His father said, not angrily, “Why?”

  Harry considered the clouded water in his fingerbowl, studied the crimson paper globe suspended overhead. He could see it was a reasonable question. Yet he was unable to answer it. Yet his father expected an answer. The instant before paralysis seized him, the smooth amber plane of a waiter’s jaw provided rescue. “I don’t like Mr. Barlow’s mustache,” he announced.

  The schoolmaster’s upper lip, nutmeg flecked with ash, neat as a German park, passed before Sam’s eyes. After a moment, he smiled. “Doesn’t like his mustache! That’s a good one!” There were times when his son appeared intensely alien: no flesh of his flesh but a fierce compression of motives operating from dense opacity. This was deeply unnerving. When it happened, amusement was one of two modes available to him.

  Harry was aware of having stepped to the limit of solid ground. He could not understand how, a minute earlier, his father’s anger had seemed preferable to Mr. Barlow’s mustache. The mistake frightened him. He must not make it again. When Mr. Barlow pressed his mouth against his own, the roughness of his mustache was after all far from unbearable. And those sixty seconds of prickling discomfort were accompanied by a sensation that was at once troubling and agreeable, that returned to stir the core of him as he swung his legs under the tablecloth and sucked sweet white flesh from a scarlet claw.

  For five terms he would continue to visit the Englishman for coaching. Barlow was a gifted teacher, methodical yet intuitive. Harry’s marks did, in fact, improve.

  In the two new nations to the north, Muslims and Hindus were celebrating independence by slaughtering each other. Sam contemplated a row of zinnias beside a path, their rayed petals and flat, gaudy colors. There was nothing sinister about the sight. Yet his breathing tightened. As soon as he opened his eyes every morning it was waiting, an unspecified dread that built through the day like cumulus massing on the horizon. At last he sent his peon to the P&O office in the Fort with instructions to reserve a first-class berth to Southampton and set about scheduling work to accommodate his absence. He had to go while there was still time, before everything changed.

  An obstacle presented itself at this juncture. Harry was recuperating from chicken pox, still scabby about the shins. The virulence had manifested itself in his body with particular intensity. Well after it had peaked, he still tired easily. Now the doctor prescribed rest, a prolonged break from school. There was no question of him entering the boarding house at Neddy’s for three months, as Sam had envisaged. But at the thought of canceling or postponing a journey that had assumed talis-manic status in his mind, he was gripped by apprehension.

  He decided to take the child and his ayah to Lokugama. It was a solution that had the added attraction of being certain to irritate his mother. But the isolation of the place scratched at his nerves. What if Harry should suffer a relapse and require a doctor one night? The telephone was still a rarity in outstations, but he arranged, by dint of barefaced bribery and covert menace, to have a line installed by the time he was to sail. It seemed to him that the very presence of a telephone would keep his son from misfortune, as a man carries an umbrella to insure against rain. He could recognize the argument as one that swam in the sightless depths of unreason. But in everything to do with his son he dwelt in the maze of irrationality and obsession that was the pattern of his love.

  He cranked down his window and surveyed them, an old woman wreathed in fierce blue smoke, a pigeon-toed child in dazzling socks. They had the same eyes: runnels of light set deep under the brow. His heart shivered. He drove away.

  My grandson is a gnome of a boy. A cap of rough black hair, and he is at that unflattering stage when a child’s head is too large for his body. The Obeysekere ears. Sometimes, when Ritzy was being exasperating, I would picture grasping him by those handles and tipping the foolishness out of him.

  The child swings his legs and stares at me. I stare back. What shall we find to say to each other?

  Harry’s finger sank into the waxy yellow brain that sat on the pantry table in a wrapping of leaves. For a week they breakfasted on buffalo curds and that pale-gold sweetness, fresh from the comb. “The test of good honey,” said his grandmother, licking her spoon, “is that it pricks in the throat on the way down.”

  It went to swell the little mound of information Harry was garnering at Lokugama. The powerless can never be certain when the powerful will move against them, nor how they will be required to defend themselves, so children, like servants, put together an ant hoard of guesses and shreds of knowledge; an archive of oddments whose detail a general might envy.

  The boy learned the weekly roll call of beggars, starting with the leprous mother and daughter who presented themselves at
the door every Monday and ending with the man with no legs whose wheeled plank labored up the drive on Saturday at noon. He examined a bandicoot caught in a trap, a rat the length and weight of a cat, whose flesh, his grandmother assured him, tasted like suckling pork when curried. He found the branch of the mango tree where red ants had slung their nest. He watched a monkey with a fringed face and a baby draped around her neck sip from the soup plate that caught drips from the tap outside the kitchen. He knew that a rusting bath planted with marigolds marked the place where Sirisena kept eight rupee notes buried in a Huntley & Palmer biscuit tin. He was privy to the slow vegetable drama of a bo tree asphyxiating in the corded embrace of a ficus. He crawled down a mongoose path beneath a matting of lantana, ignoring everything that had been drilled into him about snakes, and encountered a large dead boy whose green-speckled hands curved around a flute.

  Like all solitary lives, Maud’s had worn itself a smooth groove of routine. Harry’s effect on it was jarring. It was a matter of small things. He sat in a chair she considered hers. She picked up a goblet to pour herself a glass of water and found he had emptied it. Lights left on in empty rooms blazed his passage through the house. A leather pouffe was moved out onto the verandah, a side table shifted. She ate little and rapidly, while he had inherited his mother’s keen appreciation of food, chewing his way through three solid courses long after Maud had put down her spoon.

  Vanity played its part in her agitation. She held herself rigidly in his presence, afraid that her body would humiliate her with the leakings and mutterings of old age. Her stomach thundered and her fingers clenched on the arms of her chair. He was not a beautiful child but he had the gloss of all young creatures. She was sixty-eight years old. Her feet were ropy with veins. She folded her hands into fists to hide ridged fingernails, and grew conscious of the faded shapelessness of her clothes.

  Over the years she had spent at Lokugama, Maud had fallen into the habit of talking to herself. Passing an open door, Harry saw that she was alone. Yet she was addressing someone. It was one of the things about her that frightened him.

  They played Chinese checkers before dinner and cribbage after. Night in that place brought an absolute blackness such as the boy had never encountered. It seemed to him that the jungle stepped closer to the house after dark, when jackals screamed and murdered among the trees. Wheels of insects spun about the weak verandah lights. A tiny gecko fell from a rafter to lie among the counters on the checkerboard. Harry’s mother had shown him how to feed these lizards, with grains of boiled rice impaled on the point of an ekel. He picked up the small beating body and hurled it into the dark.

  Maud insisted that they play for cash. Then she fleeced Harry of all his pocket money. She had spied on his possessions and knew of the clay till, painted to resemble a tomato and weighty with coins, that he kept in a drawer. To count money after lamplight was to attract robbers. He pointed this out. She was waiting for him the next morning, with a rust-red rock. The till had only a single slot. In order to retrieve its contents it was necessary to smash it, an everyday parable about the kinship of loss and gain. Harry placed the tomato on a table and stood back. At the hard torrent of copper and silver, a wire strung tight in him gave.

  The coins in front of Maud mounted, while his own heap diminished. He glanced away, then snapped around. She was whisking a counter into a more advantageous position.

  “Of course I’m cheating,” said Maud. “The question is, why aren’t you?”

  “Pater says you’re shameless.”

  “There, for once, he is quite right.”

  “Jesus Christ!” said Harry, a trifle self-consciously. It marked the beginning of their alliance.

  A little parade stepped from the undergrowth. Chinked light brushed the silky feathers of a jungle fowl’s neck and his arched green tail. Maud halted to watch six brown hens trail him across the path and heard leaves crack behind her. When the last bird had vanished, she raised her voice: “Hurry up—I’m waiting.” The child arrived at her side with a skipping rush of relief.

  There were blue eyes underfoot. Harry ground one into the dirt, taking courage as the petals blackened beneath his heel. The gloomy silence under the trees unnerved him, but not as much as the patter that would break out without warning. “Only leaves,” said Maud, but he was certain that the noise was animate and malevolent.

  Sometimes the same huge whispering enveloped the house after dark. Then he was afraid to lift his gaze from the cards in his hand. His grandmother won easily, narrowed her eyes and mocked him.

  Maud drew the child’s attention to the purple trumpets of rata attana and its poisonous, prickly green fruit. She showed him a talakiriya, a small tree with milky juice that blisters the skin. He learned to pick out the drooping branches of the goraka tree, whose leaves and lobed fruit act as an aperient, and the gray-barked domba that is used for cart poles. In bed at night the names of trees burst in his mind like stars: hingul, tammana, keena, sapu. He knew satinwood as a ball-and-claw sideboard, ebony as a set of admiralty-backed chairs. With his grandmother he stood beneath breathing trees, tilting his face to the heavy green vault above, and had to place his palm against a trunk to steady himself against giddiness.

  One of the spry barbets that flew about the garden developed an interest in Harry. It would follow him around the compound, alighting on a branch or a wall to regard him with fondness. He led his men in a daredevil charge on the golden battlements of an abandoned anthill, and the bird fluttered its wings to cheer their victory. He thought it tracked him on his walks with Maud but could not be sure. The jungle was full of those small green parrots and the kukra-kukra-kukra of their insistent call.

  When the temperature was less than ninety-six degrees, shadows showed violet. In the middle of the day they turned blue. If he stood on the verandah in the afternoon and sniffed, he could smell the heat. “Always going in the sun without a hat,” scolded his ayah. “You will become black like a dirty Tamil person.”

  He stepped along packed red earth beside Maud. In his mind he skirted his grandmother with caution, as if she were a piece of furniture against which he might scrape his shin. The old woman stood fresh-peeled cinnamon quills in jars, drenching the air with scent. She went about the house in bare feet, like a servant. She picked up a drumstick from her plate and sucked flesh from bone with wet noises. Her arms and legs were meshed in silvery scales of drying skin. She said stomach instead of tummy. She cut cigarettes in half to make them last longer. Her nails were unpolished and the color of horn.

  These were confusing signs. He had absorbed, at a very early age, the distinction between a woman and a lady. In his grandmother’s presence these terms slid toward that disturbing category of words he could not at once fasten to a thing: teapot and kettle caused the same queasiness to stir in him, or orange and yellow, ideas that slipped in his mind like a soapy plate gliding through Soma’s fingers on its way to disaster. He had not intended to, but found himself gripping his grandmother’s knotted hand.

  The child’s presence in the house released an unquietness. It was not altogether hostile. A row of mud cakes decorated with crimson petals pulled from a Barberton daisy was set out on a step for Harry one morning. A white pebble winked between each crumbling cake.

  At that hour of the evening when the sky turns inky blue and children are driven in from their games, he heard a soft voice call from the crotons, “Ready!”

  The monsoon rolled in the distance, like thunder. Sweat glued Harry’s shirt to his skin. He was walking along the back verandah, past the room next to his grandmother’s, when he found himself breathing icy air. His ayah had told him that a baby had died within those walls. His head grew hot with fright.

  A boy at school by the name of Rex Ebert had an uncle who had served in Burma. Wounded in action, he had a leg that unscrewed and an artificial eye. Harry had seen him, straight-spined and stiff-gaited, at a cricket match, where he had given off no more than the usual adult charge of menace. Yet R
ex swore that at night his uncle took himself apart entirely, so that nothing was left in his room. It was information Harry would have given a great deal to unknow.

  If he found himself alone he ran, from the dining table to his bedroom, between verandah and pantry. As he fled he kept his head lowered and would not glance to left or right. He sniffed all morning rather than fetch the handkerchief that waited at the far end of shadow-filled corridors. The lavatory was an ordeal in a class of its own, a dank chamber where he crouched on a mahogany seat with his chin tucked on his chest. To look up was to risk facing whatever might be standing in the doorway. He learned to move his bowels every third day, forging a lifelong link between anxiety and constipation.

  Clouds of white butterflies with pale green underwings streamed into the compound one morning, signaling that the monsoon was on its way. The day was as still as a pond but tiny fingers of air stroked Harry’s scalp and set it tingling.

  A clinging odor was remarked on by everyone in the house. The smell came and went at unpredictable intervals and was predominantly sweet, as if a bottle of scent had been left unstoppered in a room. Yet in a moment it could turn foul. The stretching of nerves, characteristic of the season, was thus exacerbated. A dish of fried sprats sprang from the bungalow keeper’s hand. Harry’s ayah sliced open her heel on a shard of bottle glass.

  A formal arrangement of squares was found chalked on the verandah one morning. Hopscotch was a girl’s game. Harry would have scorned it at home. Here he scoured garden beds for a smooth, flat stone. His butta landed in the first, second and third squares. The boy aimed at the fourth until his arm ached. “Jesus Christ!” he muttered, whenever he remembered. At each attempt the stone fell on a line, or outside the chalked squares.

  He lay in his room, working up to the test of courage he had devised. There was no breeze but he heard the jungle creaking. He thought of a story he liked about pirates and flying fish. For a moment he was the boy on the bowsprit, with white birds following.