Jubilee

by Shelley Harris

  Now Maya stops what she’s doing for a moment and turns to him, smiling also. ‘That is a good catch. Very satisfying.’

  Satish stills his fingers – just a few minutes, be patient – and reaches out to Maya. He touches his thumb to C4, her fourth cervical vertebrae, just below the jut of her skull, buried beneath the warm skin and hair. When she doesn’t shake him off, he traces the length of her spine, letting his hand tilt as the bones undulate beneath it.

  ‘Satish …’

  ‘I know, I know. Just let me …’

  She lets him. She remains pointedly motionless, her work arrested. When he reaches L4, the penultimate lumbar vertebra, the tips of his fingers come to rest inside the beltline of her jeans. He loves the parts she hates, the extra fat she laid down here to have their kids, the little swells of flesh she never used to have, which she will sometimes besiege in brief, doomed bursts of dieting. He wants to stroke her there, but she won’t let him, not now, standing in the halogen light of their kitchen.

  ‘Maya, shall we—’

  ‘Don’t you want to know about my day?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He can listen and clear up, it’ll go that much quicker. He scrapes the food waste into the green bin.

  ‘Asha’s been picked for a dance show. There are only three other girls doing it. She’s very proud.’

  He switches the lights out in the lounge, in the dining room. He calls through: ‘That’s good.’

  ‘She was full of it when I picked her up. She’s going to be a mermaid.’

  ‘She’s done well.’

  ‘Mehul’s not firing on all cylinders,’ Maya says, when he’s back in the kitchen. ‘Trouble in paradise.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He picks up the expensive knife, the one they can’t put in the dishwasher, and takes it to the sink. He turns on the hot tap and water sluices down the blade.

  ‘He’s fallen out with Tom. Playground stuff. I had to do the talk: you know, sticks and stones.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Tom’s been saying things about Mehul. So Mehul came out of school today and he was a bit down in the dumps. That’s all.’

  Satish turns the tap on more. He holds the blade in the gush, tilting it up and down, sending spray over the edge of the sink.

  ‘What’s Tom been saying?’

  ‘Satish,’ says Maya. ‘Let it be. They’re just kids. It’ll be sweetness and light next week.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Maya gives him her head-on-one-side look. Her expression is hard to read at this angle, but it looks alarmingly like compassion. Satish turns off the tap and reaches for the dishcloth.

  She points to her nose and smiles. ‘He said something about Mehul’s nose. He has the Bhatt nose, poor boy, and Tom teased him about it. You know eight-year-old boys, always the witty ones.’

  ‘Just his nose? Nothing else?’

  ‘Yes!’

  He looks at Maya, proudly sporting the Bhatt nose. ‘I like that nose,’ he tells her. ‘It’s a good nose.’

  ‘Thanks. Hey, can you go through the kids’ bags? I need their reading records for tomorrow.’

  The bags lie under the hall table, dumped there when the children came in from school. Maya’s vision for this table owes much to country-house dramas. She imagines an expanse of polished mahogany, a neat pile of letters, a vase of carelessly arranged blooms. Instead, in this inconvenient, servantless world, there is a saucer of unclaimed trinkets, a mound of football cards, and a sagging bag of ballet clothes. Satish drags the kids’ rucksacks out from underneath. Mehul’s reading record (‘The green one!’ Maya calls through) is dog-eared and stained with orange juice. Asha’s can’t be found.

  ‘It’s not in here,’ he tells Maya.

  ‘It must be. It always is.’

  ‘It isn’t!’

  Satish looks in the pockets: snapped pencils, an apple core, a crumpled newsletter. He empties out all the junk and makes a pile on the floor. There’s a sticker promoting road safety, someone else’s tie, a tattered notebook, a cigarette.

  A cigarette.

  Asha has a cigarette in her bag.

  It’s a bit squashed, and shedding flakes of tobacco. It was stuffed into a side-pocket, the last place she’d think her parents would go.

  He holds it away from him as he enters the kitchen. ‘Look.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ says Maya.

  Satish is up the stairs and into Asha’s bedroom before he can think clearly. He shakes her awake.

  ‘Wha—?’

  ‘Sit up.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Papa?’ she says, her eyes wide.

  He turns on the light and Asha hides her face under the duvet.

  ‘Look!’ he tells her. He holds the cigarette up in front of him.

  Asha emerges from the covers and sees what he is holding.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she says.

  ‘Stop that language. Do you know where I found this?’

  ‘It’s not what it looks like. It’s not mine,’ she wails.

  ‘Then why was it in your bag?’

  Maya has arrived and is leaning against the doorframe. ‘None of that, young lady,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not mine. Honestly.’ Asha spreads her fingers in a counterfeit of nothing-to-hide. ‘It belongs to someone else. Someone’s brother!’

  ‘Who?’

  Asha looks from Satish to Maya. She shakes her head.

  ‘I think it is yours,’ says Maya.

  ‘It isn’t!’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘I can’t! If I tell you, you’ll tell their parents, won’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Satish says. ‘You can be sure I will. Do you smoke?’ He waves the cigarette in front of her. ‘I can see you didn’t smoke this one, but do you smoke?’

  ‘No! I never would!’

  They look at her, waiting for more.

  ‘I never would!’ she says again.

  ‘I sincerely hope you’re telling the truth,’ says Maya. ‘How many times have we told you how dangerous it is? And Charlie’s granddad, when he died? You remember why he died?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’

  ‘Do you remember how Charlie felt? Did that have any impact on you at all?’

  ‘Yes! But I don’t smoke.’

  For a second they are all quiet. Satish can hear movement in his parents’ room.

  ‘This,’ he says, making little stabbing motions at the cigarette. ‘This would suggest the opposite.’

  ‘You have a cigarette in your bag,’ Maya tells her. ‘That makes us think you have smoked, or are thinking of smoking. It makes us think that you think it’s OK.’

  ‘It’s not OK!’ Asha shakes her head vigorously.

  ‘Right,’ says Satish. ‘As of now, you are grounded. For two weeks. No going out, no visits from friends …’ Asha starts to cry, ‘… no swimming on Saturday. You can stay at home and help your mum.’

  ‘And we will be talking about your choice of friends,’ puts in Maya. ‘And who gave you that cigarette.’

  Asha slides down into the bed and pulls the covers under her chin. She turns to face the wall and sobs loudly, a sort of showy boo-hoo. Maya snaps off the light and they leave.

  From the kitchen, they can hear her continuing to cry. Maya grimaces. ‘We needed to do that, didn’t we? The shock – ?’

  ‘Yes,’ Satish says. ‘She won’t do that again in a hurry.’

  ‘Do you think she’s actually tried it? I’ve never smelt anything on her.’

  He considers. ‘No. I think she was just being silly.’

  ‘Peer pressure? She’s only eleven … she’s normally so sensible.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Her friends, though …’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  They look at each other, then simultaneously: ‘Daksha.’

  ‘Daksha’s brother?’ says Maya.

  ‘Probably.’ They stand in the quiet of the kitchen. As Satish winds down from the adrenaline rush – the discovery,
the confrontation – the craving asserts itself again. Time for bed.

  ‘Let’s go up,’ he says. ‘Do you want me to do the honours?’

  She hesitates. ‘OK.’

  He always does the honours, it’s part of their night-time routine. She’ll make the packed lunches and he’ll store them overnight in the second fridge, their embarrassing, climate-changing monster. They hide it in the garage. Maya doesn’t like the dusty concrete of the floor there, or the chill of the place, so she always lets him do it. Tonight she sighs and drifts upstairs as he opens the door from the hall and slips inside.

  In the garage, the fluorescent lights take a while to trigger. They make tinny, effortful pings in the flickering darkness. Satish leans against the door while he waits for them to come on: there. He wedges the lunch bags onto the bottom shelf of the fridge, then double-checks the door behind him. It’s closed, and will stay that way. No one is left downstairs and Maya is already padding around in their room above him.

  His briefcase sits on a shelf by the door. He always dumps it there when he gets in. He tells the family he likes it that way, the separation of work and home. He asks them not to touch it because its contents could be important: hospital paperwork, cases to review.

  Maya gave him the briefcase when he first started at Central Children’s. He remembers the smell of leather, Maya running her fingers down its brown flank: ‘Butter-soft’, she’d said. It’s not what they have now, the younger doctors with their messenger bags slung over their shoulders; this is a proper briefcase. Satish feels the seam of the handle pressing against his fingers when he carries it. There’s room inside for all his papers, leather loops for his pens, a buckled front pouch for his wallet. The briefcase also has an inner pocket, discreet enough for his needs. He unzips it.

  There’s the current bottle, in a plastic bag sealed with a clip in case of spillages. There’s a spoon in another bag next to it. He pulls them both out, aware now of the time, of the need to get upstairs before Maya remarks on his absence.

  Satish pours the liquid into the spoon: a precisely calibrated dose. He watches the white solution roll out of the bottle and waits until the spoon is full, over-full, the dome of the meniscus held in tension, then he takes it. There’s a second measure, then he flips the spoon upside down and licks it clean, child-like. The medicine leaves a membrane of sweetness, designed for younger palates, clinging to his mouth. He sweeps his tongue around his gums to rid them of it. In a minute, he’ll wash it down with some water. He fears the smell of it giving him away.

  Maya will be getting into bed now. The memory of her skin is on his fingers. He slips out of the garage, and goes upstairs.

  Chapter 5

  Somewhere in the nebulous hours of the night, Satish is still looking for a convincing origin story. Surely that was the start of it, he tells himself: me and Mandy in the bedroom; that was how it began. It’s a comforting formulation, but he’s not such a fool as to believe it. He knows that by the time Jubilee morning came, things had already been set in motion. The signs were there in the way Sarah’s mum treated him, in Satish’s solitary playtimes at school. They were there in the way people talked to his parents.

  Satish can look back now to those endless meetings about the party: the Entertainment Meeting, the Decoration Meeting, the Food Meeting. He could have seen the signs, if he’d known where to look: there was trouble on the way.

  The Food Meeting was an all-female affair held one Sunday afternoon in the Millers’ sitting room. Satish, at twelve, the weight of impending manhood upon him, felt discomfited by his presence among the women. But, he reasoned, Cai would come too, and Mandy might be round to see Sarah, and they could all go up to her room, so it was OK, really.

  In the event it had not been OK at all, and he had wished himself scrubbed out of the place entirely, because his mother’s contribution to the Food Meeting had been mortifying. In the beginning the discussion had been organised and focused. Mrs Miller had a clipboard. She took notes as the women talked, and was soon able to present them with a provisional menu. Satish, banished with Sima to a corner of the room, spent his time depleting the supply of chocolate digestives and eyeing the door. Where was Cai? The only moment of controversy so far had been Mrs Brecon’s suggestion that, with coronation chicken on offer for the adults, the children should have hamburgers, grilled on a barbecue in her garden. Miss Bissett demurred:

  ‘That seems somewhat American, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we be celebrating our own food on that day, of all days?’ She frowned at her skirt, picking some unwanted detritus – fluff or cat hair – from her knee while the group took this in. When Mrs Chandler intervened, it was with the same effortless batting-away of obstructions that Satish had witnessed in her dealings with her sons.

  ‘We’re having coronation chicken, aren’t we? Think about it: spices from India. Everybody loved that, first time round.’

  ‘That was a tribute from the Empire – quite different,’ retorted Miss Bissett. ‘We have enough American influences in this country already, don’t we?’

  Mrs Brecon pressed her lips together and looked away. Little Colette, squashed up against her on an armchair, glanced quickly at her mother’s face. From the settee Mrs Tominey, Satish’s ally because she let him hop over her fence to retrieve lost balls without asking each time, addressed Miss Bissett.

  ‘Of course I see your point, Verity,’ she said. ‘Quite right. This American nonsense is all over the place. Hard to work out what’s British sometimes. But how many of the children are really going to eat spicy chicken?’

  Mrs Miller glanced at her notes. ‘You know, it is rather a grown-up menu at the moment. What about using good old British beef for the burgers, Verity? Would that be a happy compromise?’

  Miss Bissett’s smile was a grudging admission of defeat, and the conversation moved on to dessert. With the inclusion of beef in the menu, the children’s food had been put definitively beyond Satish’s grasp, and he wondered again about coronation chicken and the pleasures it might offer. Then the sitting room door opened and Cai appeared, beckoning. He’d come into the house quietly, sneaking through the back. Satish went over to him.

  ‘Cai! Nice entry. Are you undercover?’

  ‘What?’ His friend frowned. ‘No, we’re not playing spies. I was just getting some stuff sorted out. Listen, come upstairs. Be really quiet.’

  Satish looked at Sima, and then back at Cai. His hesitation was for form only, and she knew it; cutting her eyes away from him dismissively, she reached for another biscuit. Too young or too old for the other kids in the street, and indentured to her mother, she was used to being the odd one out. Sima usually played in other houses in other streets, with girls she’d met at school. She didn’t expect much from Cherry Gardens, Satish told himself.

  Sarah’s door was shut, a plastic Do Not Disturb sign depicting Snoopy asleep on his doghouse. Satish reached for the handle.

  ‘No,’ whispered Cai. ‘Listen.’

  Behind the door, the girls were playing a record. Satish could hear a bouncy piano accompaniment, a loping drumbeat. He looked at Cai, quizzical.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘David Soul,’ said Cai. ‘It’s completely spastic. Listen.’

  They moved quietly up to the door and pressed their ears to it. The blond fluff of Cai’s hair tickled Satish’s lips and chin. David Soul was duetting with a high-voiced woman.

  ‘It’s a soup recipe,’ Cai told him. ‘A musical soup recipe.’

  Satish tried to make out the words amidst the sound of his own hair rubbing against the door and the occasional thumps and creaks from within. Cai was right. The song was a list of ingredients; he caught a reference to tomatoes and onions. There was mention of garlic. He and Cai looked at each other, world-weary. David Soul exhorted the woman to mash some black beans. Then suddenly the track finished, the needle scraping across the grooves. In the silence that followed, they could hear the girls talking.

  ‘You said he wa
s a seven,’ said Sarah. ‘Most men couldn’t do that. Believe me, I know.’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘I can tell you—’

  But Sarah’s revelation was cut off by a swell of violins. The boys groaned.

  ‘Not this crap again!’ muttered Cai. ‘It makes me want to puke.’ Satish nodded agreement. They’d heard the track incessantly the previous winter. Now here it was again: Don’t Give Up On Us, Baby.

  ‘That stupid film,’ whispered Satish. ‘When he sings behind that fence thing.’

  ‘That spazzy horse,’ said Cai. Satish agreed. A car was cool, a horse was spazzy. He knew that.

  Whatever the girls had been talking about, they’d stopped now and were giving themselves freely to the music, singing along with varying degrees of tunefulness. After a while the boys could hear more movement in the room – were they dancing? Satish could make out soft thuds, and muffled commands from Sarah (‘Now do the thing with your shoulders … No! Like this!’). Satish tried to imagine what was going on in there. They could be acting the song out in dance, like Pan’s People.

  Cai put his fingers down his throat and mock-puked. Quickly, Satish did the same. Then, as David Soul turned his attention to rain and stars, Cai put his hands together: index fingers forward – a pretend gun – and levelled it at Satish. ‘I’m Starsky,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m Starsky. You’re Hutch. OK?’ Cai started doing the tune from the programme. He pointed at the door with his gun. ‘In there.’

  And then Satish realised what he was supposed to do. He didn’t watch the programme much. He hoped he’d remember enough.

  They crept up like the cops did on TV: one each side of the door, guns pointing up. Mandy hit a particularly tricky high note. Cai nodded towards the door handle. Satish pushed it gently down, hoping the girls’ attention was elsewhere. He gave Cai the thumbs up, and Cai jumped round, aiming a kick at the centre of the door. It burst open and they rushed in, more or less as Starsky and Hutch might, accompanied by the gratifying sound of Sarah screaming. She lowered her arms from the beseeching position they’d been in. The door rebounded and knocked Cai into Satish, but he quickly righted himself and held up his improvised gun again, pointing it at the girls, then into the corners of the room.