by Glen Duncan
Ross ignored him. The disgust had thickened. Presumably the way they felt after Mrs Naicker’s. Ram’s shift of interest from gold to fountain pen, wristwatch, rupees. They’d shaken hands with him, like gentlemen.
‘Move,’ he said to Eugene.
‘Don’t make a balls-up of it now.’
‘Give me room.’
As kids in Bhusawal Ross and his gang used to waylay Indian farmers’ boys moving donkeys between grazing grounds. A little terror-posse of Anglo-Indians with catapults and sticks. Hey, we’re taking these donkeys. Even boys older than them offered little resistance. Him and his gang were brown sahibs. They took the animals home sometimes, kept them for a while, got bored, turned them loose. Ross remembered his mother asking, having discovered the bemused animal, ‘Where’s this thing come from?’ and not batting an eyelid when he told her. Just a tut and a dismissive wave. ‘Tie it up in the compound, then.’ Entitlement. Immunity.
‘I’m telling you I don’t like the look of this bugger,’ Eugene said. ‘You better get it right first time.’
The driver, flanked by shamefaced Dick and smirking Stan, approached. Ross glance-checked: no weapons. He wondered if the man was married, had children, suffered a vivid mental image of him hoisting a giggling bright-clothed Pathan infant up on to his shoulders. Some of those kids had jewel eyes of emerald or winter blue. Beautiful.
He wasn’t ready. Normally he’d be drunk. Drunk, it was easy. The man stood and looked at him. There was a moment in which Ross was aware of himself trying to use the disgust, haul it up into his shoulders. Then he was using it. He’d opened his mouth to say look forget it I’ll get money from Robbie when we get back and pay this poor bugger. But instead of saying it he’d felt his hands coming up (curious the way the boxing stance asserted itself even here) and his weight shifting. A right cross started as a certainty in the left big toe. The power of God (or was it the Devil?) there, suddenly. Your father I can understand because of the violent streak, don’t I know? We do good business, the Englishman had said to Ram, shaking his hand, and the boy’s head waggling, okay, okay, sahib. Someone said, ‘Hurry up,’ quietly, just as the driver’s eyes understood. Then Ross hit him.
CHAPTER FIVE
papers
(London, 2004)
Another Monday over with. I’m alone in my bedroom. It’s after eleven. Vince is out. I was supposed, according to my own manful resolution, to ask Tara Kilcoyne the art teacher out today. Spent most of ‘The Second Coming’ inwardly rehearsing, then when I had her alone in the staff room couldn’t do it. The moment came, the moment passed. No one’s responded to my Guardian personal ad yet, either. I must do better, I keep telling myself. At everything.
My bedroom’s heart isn’t the bed, which says only bad dreams, fear, masturbation, loneliness, ending, but an old oak desk Melissa gave me when I moved in. From its brass-knobbed top drawer I remove three buff envelope files, the first marked in my dad’s aggressively ornate hand ‘Skinner’, the second, in my own atrophied italics, ‘The Cheechee Papers’, the third not marked at all. I take them and a freshened glass of shiraz with me on to the bed.
Pasha turned the Skinner file over to me secretly four years ago. Secretly because five years before that he’d promised my mum he’d destroyed it. ‘You’re seventy years old,’ she said to him. ‘It’s utterly ridiculous and it’s got to stop. I mean it. I can’t stand it any more. I don’t know what you think you’d do if you did ever find him. Apart from give yourself a stroke.’ My dad had woken from one of his Night Horrors and she caught him, he later claimed, in a weak moment.
(A word about the old man’s dreams: they’re uniformly violent and absurd. ‘My son, I was being attacked by a bleddy giraffe. And you know what I had to defend myself with? A sandwich.’ You may laugh, but I’ve heard the noises he makes in his sleep, the mewls and whimpers, the ghost-wails, the falsetto moans. You go into the bedroom and he’s sitting up, traumatized. ‘This tiger had cottold of my pant and I’m trying like hell to get away…’ My mother has a dismal back-catalogue of injuries he’s inflicted defending himself against the animals, terrorists, psychopaths and burglars of the unconscious realm. Three or four times he’s hoofed her entirely out of bed. Wildlife programmes are a no-no. Action films. Horror films. Football. Boxing, naturally, since all his youth’s uppercuts and hooks and jabs and crosses are still there, waiting for sleep’s neural liberation. Elspeth’s theory is that he’s planning to murder my mum: he’ll throttle her in the night, then cite the long, exonerating history of nocturnal hallucination to which his family cannot but testify. This strikes a grim chord with my mum, who devours crime fiction by the ton. I’m counting on you, she’s said to Elspeth. I’m counting on you to expose him, darling, if he does it.)
Weak moment or not, Skinner is now a father & son Secret Business and not a word to Mater. My rationalization is that if I hadn’t taken the file (the challenge, my son, the torch, the sword) the old man would have carried on in secret himself; mishap would have been inevitable. I did consider fabricating, maybe even after a few months producing a photocopy of a bogus death certificate to lay the miserable fucker to rest once and for all. I couldn’t, when it came down to it. This is my father’s past. This is my father. Sometimes, through finding out what I can’t do to my parents, I discover I’m not the man I think I am.
Now, dear God, there is Raj Rogue, by Nelson Edwards.
The bulk of the Skinner file is my dad’s work or the work of those he’s hired down the years. Oh yes, private detectives. We were all surprised to find they existed off television. Not that they ever lasted more than a couple of weeks; the prohibitive cost, certainly, but chiefly their failure to inspire Pater’s confidence. Cheh! Detective. All he’s got is a bleddy hat. Maude once dangerously suggested the old man set up his own detective agency. My mother’s eyes closed for a couple of seconds, then opened again. Maude didn’t see it. ‘The first Anglo-Indian detective agency,’ she added. We were in the Brewer Street living room. I don’t know exactly how old my dad was at time, early fifties, I suppose. He looked out of the window, snorted, let the expression of resignation to fate that to us was like a cloud covering the sun appear on his face. I remember a stab of guilt because the silence that followed mapped the restricted dimensions of his life, said there was no room for anything risky and new. My fault. I was the child born ten years after they should have been in the clear. All in a moment the possibility of sharing the fraternity of Kojak, Ironside, McCloud and indeed the great Columbo blossomed and wilted. The silence hung. ‘What?’ Maude said. ‘Well, we could, couldn’t we?’
But the file. Notes, hypotheses, telephone numbers, private dick reports carbon copied from the days before computers. All of which is of secondary importance if Nelson Edwards, author of the 1972 novel Raj Rogue, a flaking and yellowed copy of which has recently been added to the file, is in fact none other than George Edward Nelson Skinner, formerly of Wandsworth, Camden Town, Mile End, Delhi, Bombay, Lahore, Bhusawal, Poona, Wormwood Scrubs and for all I know Timbuktu, the man my father’s been obsessed with for the better part of fifty years.
I found it in a second-hand bookshop near work a week ago, not looking for it, not looking for anything. See? Pasha would say. Doesn’t that prove it to you? By ‘it’ he’d mean Purpose, Design, ultimately God, a narrative intelligence at work. I ought to be grateful. It ought to make writing the book easier.
Like all synchronicities my pulling Raj Rogue from the shelf had its twitch of déjà vu or resonance, an instant in which the world looked like an only partly occluded web of meaning. My mother and father, strangers to each other, unknowingly cross paths in Lahore in 1942. I, Owen Grant Monroe, their last child, pull a book off a shelf in a shop in Wimbledon in 2004. Moments more than half a century and half a planet apart connect. Someone with an insatiable appetite for story, a plot junkie, surely, is doing this. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Nelson Edwards. Aliases hint at identity. My own Sheer Pleasure moni
ker, Millicent Nash, combines my mother’s middle name with my paternal grandmother’s maiden name. Ego tags every pseudonym with a clue. By which reasoning this was hardly a stretch. George Edward Nelson Skinner. Nelson Edwards. Pores and scalp prickling, I paid the twenty-five pence and put the paperback in my jacket pocket. Twenty-five pence. The cover price was only forty-five pence. A Trident Paperback, 1972.
The biographical note is neither here nor there: ‘Nelson Edwards was born in 1922. He has spent many years travelling widely in Asia, and now lives in London.’ There is, however, the author photograph, a poorly executed passport-size black-and-white headshot on the back cover. Fifty-year-old ‘Nelson’ has a bony face (overexposed, its subtleties lost) and a slim, nondescriptly balding head. Moreover, a slight spectacle-lens reflection complicates his eyes. The cleft chin is pure Skinner. But (until I place it in front of Pasha’s scrutiny) the only pure Skinner against which it can be gauged is a grainy photocopy of the mug-shot from his one arrest and conviction for fraud in 1958, with hair, sans specs. He did eighteen months of a three-year sentence, got out, disappeared.
My week’s research has yielded two facts: Raj Rogue went out of print a year after it was published, and Trident, paperback imprint of Dolmen Publishing, was discontinued in 1978. Mercifully out of print, I should have said. Tosh and titillation in execrable prose, a sort of X-rated criminal Bond of the Raj, Clive with sex and drugs. In fact, Clive just moved on a couple of centuries. The appositeness isn’t lost on me, Nelson Edwards, Raj Rogue and Trident being the decaf precursors of Millicent Nash, An Adult Education and Sheer Pleasure, but God’s going to have to do a lot better than that to win me over. The cover is a colour photograph of a gratuitously oiled and deeply cleavaged brown dolly bird in a sari (incredibly, it looks like a white girl fakely browned-up–is that possible?), down on her packed haunches looking into a carpet bag of cash. At the door in the background is a pale-suited out-of-focus man with a gun. Lots of Carl’s Brewer Street paperbacks had covers like Raj Rogue’s, girls with moistly heaving chests or belly-chained midriffs tokenly backdropped by or accoutremented with something suggesting genre or plot: a desert island, a laboratory, a cowboy hat, a machine-gun. My favourite (I spent, cumulatively, years in there) was a dark-haired girl in a partly unzipped black wetsuit top and pink bikini briefs, with her eye make-up running. The cover cut her off just under the plump bulge of her mons. Though I’ve never tried it, scuba diving has since had a profound erotic appeal. As would saris and carpet bags, had Carl owned a copy of Raj Rogue. (Christ, it’s possible Carl did have a copy. Should I phone him and check? Imagine if that were true, Skinner all those years under our very noses…)
There are leads. Dolmen Publishing, first, since it still exists. If Skinner lives and is not yet vegetable, a letter to compose. Ingratiation, fake research project, personal contact, invitation to his home…And then what? What is going to happen if Nelson Edwards is Skinner, if he’s alive, traceable, if, by whatever chicanery it takes, I bring him face to face with my father? What in God’s name is the old man going to do? Pasha’s no cabbage but he’s not the bantamweight he used to be. I took him to see the Ali–Frazier biopic When We Were Kings at a multiplex in Manchester. Returning from the kiosk I spotted him asking directions for the gents. Unfortunately, he was asking the foyer’s cardboard Men in Black cut-outs of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Granted this was before the removable cataract had been removed, granted the lights were low; but, as I pointed out to him, each figure was at least eight feet tall and holding a science fiction weapon. What, I ask myself for the umpteenth time, is he going to be capable of? (Spike Lee more than the fight haunted me after the film, by the way, trivially for mispronouncing the word ‘articulate’ as ‘artikulint’, but chiefly for his diagnosis of our historical ignorance: ‘Today’s young generation, they don’t know anything. Something happened last year, they know nothing about it. These great great great stories, great historic events…And I’m talking about—I’m not talking about 1850s stuff, you know, they don’t know who Malcolm X is, they don’t know who JFK is…and it’s scary…’)
Rain announces itself in soft pits on the window. I look up as if I’ve been shyly addressed. I still have intimations of the planet’s aliveness, occasionally, until my educated self steps in and in a moment quietly re-murders the world. Dead. How can you say that? my dad demands, when I tell him the universe is Godless, accidental, finite, curved. After everything you know…it’s madness. Think of me and your mother…the fate of the thing. If we weren’t meant to meet…I don’t know what. How else can you explain it?
Chance, I’ve told him. The need to see only the parts of a life that make it a story. He just laughs. Even my mum has to smile, the shy admission of her faith in The Plot. I worry about my genes.
I set the Skinner file aside and top up my tumbler.
(Wolf Blass shiraz is £7.49 at Safeways. If the philistine’s zero and the buff’s ten I’m about two. It’s enough. The gnat’s-piss days are behind me but I’m never going to talk about peppery base notes. It was only a couple of years ago I asked for a kitchen wine rack for Christmas. Buying a case still ignites my armpits, conjures for a Western second or two the ranks of famine kids, fly-eyed, balloon-bellied.)
The Cheechee Papers file bulges. Of course it does. Just imagining its contents–the notes, the drafts, the photographs, the certificates, the tickets, the stamps, all the papery memorabilia I’ve gathered to the cause of The Book–releases that brand of paralysing adrenalin peculiar to knowing you can’t do the thing you must do. Fractions in Class Ten, for example. Or getting involved in making the world a better place. I take out a sheet of notes at random.
1687–Letter from EIC (East India Company) Court of Directors to their officials in Madras: ‘…the marriage of our soldiers to native women is a matter of such consequence to posterity that we shall be content to encourage it with some expense and have been thinking for the future to appoint a Pagoda to be paid to the mother of any child that shall hereafter be born, of any such future marriage, upon the day the child be christened, if you think this small encouragement will increase the number of such marriages…’ Pagoda = then 8 or 9 shillings. So deal was loads young Brit. men must fuck. Absence white women (too delicate for voyage & conditions) so native women. Control mixed-blood pop. via marriage, legit. etc. EIC recog. use of mulatto pop. Buffer between colonial pop. and native Indian pop. White cock brown pussy. (Poss title, ha ha.)
My note-taking hasn’t changed much since undergraduate days, retains its sometimes violent poetry. Twenty years in even liminal academia has made me an orderly collator, too, but you wouldn’t know it from these files. There are pages that might have been arranged by a schizophrenic, by Scarlet’s mother, Dinah, for example. The handwritten sheets are a mess. On the same page as the EIC letter is a big red ring with inside it: MEANING OF ‘CHEECHEE’??? followed by the Collins definition: ‘n, pl cheechees (In India, formerly) a a person of mixed British and Indian descent; Anglo-Indian. b (as modifier): a cheechee accent. [C18: perhaps from Hindi chhi-chhi, literally: dirt, or perhaps imitative of their singsong speech]’ and another filled with the smallest version of my handwriting (I have several different styles and flit between them, a habit picked up from Scarlet) I can manage:
‘Anglo-Indian parents commonly indoctrinated their children with attitudes of superiority over Indians and endeavoured to isolate them from intimate association with Indian children…’ (see Gist & Wright p. 39) NB: Dad stole boys’ donkeys. Find place for this.
While a green circle contains:
1920s: ‘In countless representations to the authorities urging more favourable treatment for their people, Anglo-Indian spokesmen lost no opportunity to remind the colonial rulers that during the “Mutiny” Eurasians played an important role in maintaining control of communications and transport, and thus of Britain’s military lifeline…’ (see Caplan Children of Colonialism: 98 & Gidney 1934: 29) Wog-bashing kiss-arsers knew where bre
ad buttered except wasn’t and soon no bread.
A handful of yellow Post-its (and one pink) are stuck to the bottom of this page:
‘The most pathetic of India’s minority groups are the mixed-bloods. They were formerly called Eurasians…They always wear European clothes…They are ostracized by both English and Indians…They always speak of England as “home” though many have never been there.’ (Williams cited in Hedin’s ‘The Anglo-Indian Community’, American Journal of Sociology 40:2 Sept 1934)
The pink one, I see at second glance, has been inexplicably misfiled:
SCHIZOPHRENIA: A severe mental disorder in which there is a loss of a sense of reality and an inability to function socially. No single cause of schizophrenia has been identified, but genetic factors are known to play a part. A person who is closely related to someone with schizophrenia has a significantly increased risk of developing the disorder. Schizophrenia tends to develop in men during their teens or early twenties, but the onset in women may be 10–20 years later.
What the hell is this doing here? I remember (naturally) its origin. I copied it out of a BMA Encylopaedia of Family Health, having discovered that Scarlet had underlined it.
The memory justifies another gulp of shiraz before I detach the Post-it and put it to one side.
Here’s another yellow:
‘Possessing no advantage of birth, breeding or education, it is no surprise that [Anglo-Indians] should be found lacking in moral stamina. With the exception of their lissom bodies and dark flashing eyes, they have little else to their credit…’ (Henry Bruce, novelist–year??? And by the way, ‘Eurasian’ = pun: ‘you’re Asian’–no one but me seems to have noticed this)
And one that used to make me laugh, before—