by Glen Duncan
I don’t want to go home. At home The Cheechee Papers remains a mess. Through Dyer & Haskell I not long ago got a lunch with an editor, Nick Gough, from Gecko Publishing, an opportunity to pitch The Book. ‘What interests me,’ I told him, over devilled quail and roasted asparagus in a Covent Garden restaurant of headachy frosted glass and halogens, ‘is the connection between tiny racial minority and political engagement.’ He chewed and frowned at the tablecloth, not, I thought, very interested. He was in his forties, masculinely built, with the sort of heavy, dark, hawkish good looks that by the time he’s seventy will have become sinister, with eyebrows owlishly curling and a bushel of black hair up each nostril like David Lodge. He had the meaty, open-pored skin and slaked look of a man who’s been eating complex lunches and dinners for years and for years hearing what other people think are terrific original ideas but which he’s heard dozens of times before. Hard to enthuse, touched by his aura of boredom.
‘Part of being an Anglo-Indian,’ I told him, ‘is being a member of a race which to all intents and purposes simply doesn’t register, historically. Too few of us, you see. We’re invisible. What I’m thinking is that this invisibility creates at best a kind of unconcern for the world–since as far as the world’s concerned we’re not here, never were, so it’s not, realistically, “our” world at all–and at worst a ring-of-Gyges relationship to morality.’ He chewed languidly for a few seconds with large, muscled jaws and though he was staring at me I couldn’t shake the conviction that his mind was elsewhere, on Gecko’s receptionist, perhaps, a gingery girl who’d overseen me with occasional tight smiles while I waited for him.
But after swallowing, slowly running his tongue under his top lip and closed-mouthedly burping, he surprised me: ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he said. ‘The market’s in love with mixed race just now, but the market gets bored quickly. How soon before you’d have something?’ I must have looked vague. ‘My sense is you want a deviant protagonist. Ring-of-Gyges, you said. Deviant but nothing too sexual. What you want is: Anglo-Indians–who are they? What are they like? But you do it through the burglar or the bent detective. There’s a crime and mixed-race vein no one’s tapped yet. That’s your best ticket. Unless you want to do the straight historical thing, but that’s limited.’
I went home and pored over the mess of The Cheechee Papers, feeling winded and fraudulent. There are gaps in my historical knowledge, I’d told him. Very large gaps. It’s worse than that: there are gaps in my feelings. I have visions of post-publication interviews: So what does it mean, to you, being an Anglo-Indian? The microphone waits. My head wears the studio lights’ heat like a tight-fitting cap. I open and close my mouth. A technician pinches a sneeze to preserve the silence. All I can think of is my mother and father saying, But it wasn’t like that, Sweetheart…
The staff room’s empty. It looks terminally empty, as if people have fled in a hurry because a tidal wave or comet is coming. There’s a half-drunk cup of coffee on the table and a raincoat on the floor, a knocked-over stack of magazines, a Times with all the downs of its crossword filled in. The two ceiling lights are on. Like the vending machine the room is sad, as if what it’s been offering all these years–oh, not much of a personality, but something–has gone unnoticed and now it’s too late. I must stop this, I tell myself, this whatever-it-is, anthropomorphism or pathetic fallacying, the juvenilization of my experience. The lights being on makes me think with a small colonic thrill of the fast-approaching winter afternoons, dark early, the building’s smell of wet woollens and radiators, outside car headlights probing the fog, the female staff coming in with damp hair and raw nostrils. Childhood’s deep calendar says Halloween, Bonfire Night, snow, Christmas. The empty room itself is exciting, to my latent pointless snoop (I have always thought I might have been a detective); I want to go through the coat pockets, identify the coffee drinker from the lip ring, rootle a handbag or rucksack. It feels good knowing Janet Marsh’s letter is there in my inside pocket. I’m dawdling here partly because I haven’t decided yet how I’ll handle the call. Will I call her tonight, even?
Tara comes in, bringing the world with her. She’s been out for a Marlboro Light and smells of smoke and playground air and the extra-strong mint her tongue clacks against her teeth. Our eyes meet, then she looks away. ‘Niptastic out there,’ she says, vigorously rubbing her upper arms. She’s not wearing a green dress today but a charcoal pinstripe pencil skirt and a close-fitting pink pure wool sweater. Not the knee-boots, either; instead, a pair of dark grey Forties high heels that come all the way up to the capable bare ankle. The look’s Chandleresque, Marlowe’s secretary or the femme fatale’s sensible younger sis. She resumes her seat, her coffee. ‘How’s it been?’ she asks. She hasn’t decided if she’s going to play a round of our game.
‘Usual torture,’ I say, taking a seat opposite her and stretching my legs. ‘Flynn’s just told me we don’t need Orwell’s Ministry of Information because we’ve got popular entertainment instead.’
There’s a pause long enough for me to regret assumed reading. But she closes her eyes and tilts her head back, mentally searching. The white throat’s unignorably there with its matrix of veins, giving me a tingle of vampiric pleasure that makes me shiver, though I muscularly conceal it. ‘Orwell,’ she says. ‘1984, Ministry of…They change history to suit the present and no one’s any the wiser.’
‘Exactly. Whereas, as Daniel will tell you, it’s easier to provide non-stop entertainment so we don’t care what history was like.’
She yawns, and is tardy getting her hand over her mouth so that I’m treated to a glimpse of black-filled lower molars and diminished extra-strong mint on her tense wet tongue before the white fingers arrive with half-hearted ladylike cover. The yawn makes her eyes fill up. For a couple of seconds after it she stares at me through a film of water as if she has no idea who I am or where she is. It’s a glimpse of her stripped of any strategy or art, the sort of silent raw essence out of which she might say anything, like, My God you disgust me you miserable fuck, or You and I are both really going to die one day and be rotten meat in the ground. ‘Yeah, well,’ she says, blinking herself out of it, ‘he’s probably right. I started reading this book not long ago because I didn’t know anything about the whole Israeli–Palestinian thing and I got sick of hearing about it on the news and not understanding it. It was a Beginner’s Guide.’ She leans back in the chair and crosses her legs, tucks her hands under her bum. I imagine the soft suck of the Forties shoe coming off her broad foot, the little release of warmth. ‘Couldn’t follow it,’ she says. ‘I put it down after about fifty pages and thought, No, amazing though it is, I’m actually too thick for this. I need a Thick Beginner’s Guide. You don’t do anything with your brain, it turns to mush.’
Even without all there is tacitly going on between me and Miss Kilcoyne there are a lot of exchanges like this at the Arbuthnot, not quite talking at cross-purposes, but not quite connecting, either. The bulk of staff-room conversation falls prey to slight digression which expands with a fascinating fractal inevitability away from the point. Five minutes is enough to take you to a galaxy far, far away.
‘You don’t want to do anything until you understand what’s going on, do you?’ I say. ‘I mean, if you don’t know the history of the thing how can you know who’s right or what to vote for or whatever?’
‘Unless it’s Bush,’ she says. ‘You’ve only got to watch him for five seconds to know he shouldn’t be in charge of an ice-cream van let alone America. It’s harder with Blair because he’s not so obviously a moron.’ Underneath the Times there’s a two-day-old Independent open at a page showing a frowning Colonel Gadaffi caught mid-harangue. ‘Gadaffi Appeals for Bigley’s Release’, the headline reads. Tara’s right leg is crossed over her left, its long white calf muscle softly spread. Her foot goes up and down above the picture as if on an invisible bass drum pedal. I try to remember if the Americans are still bombing Libya. Can’t. My memory isn’t, I’m forced to conc
ede, what it used to be.
‘And this thing,’ I say, nodding at the paper.
She moves her leg, looks down past it, reads. ‘Oh God, I know. It’s disgusting. Did you see his mum on telly?’
‘I know, I know.’
‘We just…’
I look at her, waiting, but she closes her eyes and slowly, with uglily tightened mouth, shakes her head. Superficially this is her rendered speechless by the horror of the story but in fact it’s a retreat from her own lack of feeling about it and a pause in which she’s weighing up, as she does every time I’m alone with her, what exactly if anything she wants to do about me. I’m not in her league (not laughably not in it, but still, not in it) but her chap ran off with someone else and she’s taking affirmation where she can find it at the moment. She knows all this as well as I do. We’re mutually visible in these encounters.
‘What’re you up to this weekend?’ I ask, tonally letting her know the embarrassing subject of Ken Bigley and the World and being too thick for a Beginner’s Guide is closed.
She opens her eyes and puts her head on one side, like a perplexed dog, then stretches the pose to ease those irresistible mastoids. ‘I’m not sure. My sister wants to go to that Sixties photographs thing at the Tate.’
Her eyes, I now notice and fix for future fantasy, are yellowy brown, surprisingly thin on lashes, though this is what gives them their bald, arousing meanness. There are days when she wears her thin hair up, barretted or stabbed through with chopsticks. On such days you get the neck’s full erotic clout and the lobeless silver-hooped ears going red from the central heating and the pink of her scalp under the lights. She’s annoyed with her man for leaving her. She was waiting for someone better to come along. Now she’s waiting on her own, and in a madwoman way considering–remotely–doing things like having a fling with me. It would have going for it the ease of no illusions. She and I know she’d be doing it as an act of self-disgust, to rub her nose in her misjudgement of him, to give herself a good, sensible slap across the chops. She’s aware, now, at twenty-seven, that life is pretty much doing lots of lousy things you never thought you’d do. Getting to the grave without poverty or psychic fracture is just a case of showing your conscience who’s boss.
She gets up quickly and goes to the sink to wash her cup, and I can tell from her shoulders that the moment to ask her out has passed and that she would have said no in any case.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Mother Country
(The Cheechee Papers: Quetta, Bhusawal, Bombay and Lahore, 1935–42)
Unlike my father, my mother, Katherine Marie Millicent Lyle–Kathy, Katie, Kit, Kitty, but most often Kate–has kept the mystery of her past. Her sections of The Cheechee Papers are busy with question marks, hypotheses, crossings out, ellipses, gaps. While Pasha relies (for sanity, one assumes) on the meticulous retelling of the events of his life, the causal chain that leads from his Then to his Now, the story, my mother dismisses her own vast antecedent tracts with a smile and a shrug.
‘But, Ma, are you seriously saying you have no memories of your life before you were seven or eight years old?’
This will be after lunch in Bolton. The old man will have walked me through Ho Fun’s or the bloodstone or Rockballs or Goodrich for the thousandth time, me furiously scribbling in the Moleskine, while Mater, still nursing the single afternoon port and lemon I bully her into, will be sitting embroidering or doing the crossword or watching Columbo with the sound down low. At some point I’ll have switched my note-taking attention to her. ‘I mean, what about birthdays?’
‘Not that I can remember.’
‘Christmases? A particular present? Your first day at school?’
She’ll lean back in her chair, consider, shake her head. ‘No, not really.’ It doesn’t appear to bother her.
‘I remember my first day at school,’ Pasha will jump in. ‘I got such a bleddy crack on the head from Danglers. First day, even.’
Mater and I will roll our eyes, hers very lightly eye-shadowed and mascara’d. She can still carry it off, the faint dusting of cosmetics. (Other old ladies, it seems to me, apply their make-up like toddlers who’ve raided their mother’s dressing table.) The girl in her has got more not less visible as she’s aged. Granted her small face (two satiny pouches are burgeoning under her eyes) has its soft cross-hatching and the thin-skinned backs of her hands their thickened veins, but for a woman at the end of her seventies she’s astonishingly well preserved.
‘So you’re saying the first thing you can really remember is your father’s death? Nothing before that?’
‘Nothing,’ she’ll say, eyes prettily moist. She feels sorry for me, with my notebook, my files, my agenda. In my childhood there was no peace like the peace of her touch, the cool hands with their silvery-pink nails and ghost of Nivea. Her voice is soft, to her Boltonian contemporaries maddeningly posh.
‘See, Sweetheart, my life began when I met your father and got married and had children. I know that sounds silly to you, but that’s the truth. I didn’t care about anything else.’
In a way it is the truth: wifehood and motherhood revealed themselves to her as boxing revealed itself to my dad, as the identity that had been waiting for her to come and claim it; and if that was all there was to her story it would leave me (and The Cheechee Papers) stymied.
But that isn’t all there was to it. There’s the other thing. The monolithic thing. The thing that keeps me up in the small hours, chopping and changing and filling in the goddamned gaps to get it right. Her story–the Mother material–is turning the book into a nightmare of delicacy and analysis.
‘You don’t mind me writing all this stuff, do you, Ma?’
I’ve asked her umpteen times. No amount of reassurance is enough.
‘About my childhood and everything?’
‘Well, yeah…’ I hesitate. Tread carefully. ‘I mean the other thing.’
‘About me deciding to kill Uncle Cyril?’
‘Yeah. That.’
She looks away, out of the window. It’s the parental look away, into the past, the foreign country. My father’s version of this look comes with a fruity smile. My mother’s is different, evinces triumphal serenity, the deep, humbling peace of realizing that against all the odds she’s survived to have the life she wanted. Then the smile comes, not for herself but for me, the smarty-pants, hopelessly rummaging in ancient history, bothered about it, under its spell.
‘I don’t need to worry about the past. That’s your father’s mania.’
And yours, she doesn’t need to add. But there’s a little undercurrent of sadness. These conversations, the note-taking, the endless retelling, this penetration into the past, this project of the bloody Book reminds her that she has nothing of her parents’ to remember them by. The orphan in her resurfaces, testifies in her eyes when the old man and I are deep into it. His side of the family clinks and rustles with legendary rings and wristwatches, photographs, diaries, letters, fractured certificates of birth and death. My mother has no such talismans, no links to take her back down the chain of her life before marriage and children.
‘You write what you want, Sweetheart,’ she says. ‘None of that can touch me now.’
Write what you want. The permission appals, rushes me to the edge of a nauseous drop. I always step back. It’s true her memory’s no match for Pasha’s or mine. It’s true there are fogs, holes, blind alleys. It’s true I don’t know, as the old man would say, the whole bleddy yarn.
But I know enough.
‘What have I told you about locking this door?’ This is Uncle Cyril’s bungalow in Bhusawal, his bathroom door, his fist pounding–thab-thab-thab–his voice lowered. ‘Open it, I said. Now.’
Kate, fifteen, closes her eyes, feels her chest constrict. Lately he does this, pretends to go out, sneaks back, corners her. The sound of his voice in the first instant shocks and in the next deadens her.
‘Did you hear me or not?’
She’d planned a
quiet hour in the bath (more precisely the Japanned Travelling Tub, Army & Navy Co-op, a luxury from the days of her grandfather’s prosperity) to go over her escape plan, but the day’s earlier events have intruded. This morning at the sodden train station there was a demonstration, British big shot supposed to be going through en route from Calcutta; damp homemade banners–Jai Hind! British Quit Now!–perhaps a hundred people, station staff trying to make cordons, eventually the police turning up and walloping left, right and centre. The male faces had gone ugly in the fight, grimacing and cringeing, made her think of Hell, the indiscriminate wrestling of the damned. One man cradled his broken left arm in his right. Another bent to spit a stretched gobbet of blood and mucus into a puddle. One man with blood streaming down his face walked towards her with both upheld hands (fingers as if holding a pinch of salt) repeating an elaborate why? gesture, directed, it seemed, at her. It had astonished her that Bhusawal had this capacity, that ordinary people could gather and roar and punch the air in unison, make the familiar station platform unfamiliar. ‘Best get out of here, girlie,’ a coffee-breathed Anglo-Indian guard had said, suddenly close in her ear. She’d been standing transfixed, having spotted in the middle of the crowd Kalia, Uncle Cyril’s servant boy. His mouth shouting the slogans had looked enlarged. ‘Go on, pretty miss,’ the guard said, giving her arm a squeeze, ‘rain’s coming again now.’ She’d backed away as the first berry-big drops began to fall and burst. Twenty steps and it was coming down with a sound like raging fire. The dispersing crowd slithered and slipped. A policeman chasing a demonstrator went over flat on his face, got up and lashed out at a snack-seller who was standing nearby looking in the opposite direction. Budgias and pakoras from the vendor’s tray went flying. The policeman hit two, three, four times more, until the vendor was down on the ground, knees up, arms curled round his head, tray twisted on its strap so that it was round his back, savouries squished into the mud. Kate had come home drenched.