She offered her face to him, tilting it upwards and closing her eyes. Later, accused by Sarah, she told the truth – he didn’t smell horrible. He did smell different though, gloriously alien and boyish. His lips pressed her skin firmly, leaving a wet trace, a hair’s-width of coldness that soon warmed and disappeared. When he moved away from her, she waited just a beat to see if he would come near again. He didn’t, so she grabbed his hands and stroked the backs of them with her thumbs.
‘Mandy,’ he said quietly, and she could tell: he didn’t know where to put himself.
Before she could get nervous she stepped right up to him, enjoying the luxury of his height, the necessity of leaning up, and anchored his hands so he’d have to let her kiss him on the lips. His mouth was trembling and he didn’t open it, but he let her stay there for a few seconds, and she wondered if he was breathing in her smell, as she was his. I love him! she thought. I really love him!
She was moony and dreamy for the rest of the morning; the kiss had changed everything. She’d kissed two boys and loved one of them and it was a secret. Things went slowly, because she stopped a lot, trying to re-live the moment. When she first knew he was going to kiss her! When he stepped towards her! The way he said her name! Sarah’s visit nearly wrenched her out of that, almost transformed them so they were just two kids snogging, but then Mandy remembered how it had felt, and she took a minute to let it all fall into place again. Sarah might be trouble, though. Mandy should warn Satish; it was a good reason to see him. She wrote the word on the back of a poster and held it up to her window: TROUBLE. She waited for him to come to his window and see it.
Later, when it was time to put out the food Mandy was commandeered by her mum: ‘Can you open the door, Mands? It’s all a bit wibbly-wobbly!’ There were four plates of fairy cakes, thick with icing, piled artfully in pyramids of red, white and blue. Her mum took a platter in each hand, fixed her eyes on her cargo and stepped gingerly out of the front door. She sent her feet out first, nosing for danger with the tips of her shoes before trusting each step.
It’s a lasting memory of the day: her mum stepping stately away from her and out into the street, Mandy’s shift of focus as she caught a movement in the background, on the other side of the road: two fleeting figures running out of Cai’s side gate. Satish was just in front, pelting towards home, and behind him, Cai. It looked as if Cai was reaching out to grab Satish, as if Satish was fending him off, but it was over so fast. As they disappeared her mum turned towards Mandy and tipped her a wink. She smiled back, suddenly unsure whether she’d seen the boys properly after all.
Chapter 21
Satish is with Colette, and she’s hungry. They sit at the back of her favourite café in the unseasonable April heat. It’s sweltering, but he’s been denied the luxury of air conditioning because she doesn’t like the other places in town. She says they’re faceless, corporate, bastions of globalisation and cultural imperialism that leach money out of the local economy and so they’ve come here, where the Lebanese owner flirts with Colette and slips extra baklava onto her plate. Satish can appreciate the upside, but he’s still sweating into his T-shirt and thinking he’d probably be flexible about the cultural imperialism if it bought him a little air-con.
‘Hell in a handcart,’ Colette’s saying. ‘This feels like July, or August. Imagine what the real summer will be like! You’ve heard all the findings on climate change? They say it’s moving quicker than expected. God, I’m starving.’ She shoves a piece of baklava in her mouth.
Satish watches Colette for the signs of addiction: Is she excessively talkative? A tough one to call. He’ll bide his time, drawing her out.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘Asha’s been coming home from school full of it, too. I think they have global warming lessons, or something.’
‘Good,’ she says, chewing. ‘They should. Maybe they’ll do better than we have.’
‘Are you really worried by this?’
‘Are you not?’
‘Well … I …’ In truth, he’s not. Or maybe he would be, but what’s the point of trying to fix the future when there’s enough to do just to make the here and now bearable? But he knows how inadequate this will sound, and he tails off.
‘My friend Harry says we’ll all be dead in twenty-five years,’ she tells him.
‘Your friend Harry’s unbalanced.’
‘Still, though.’ Her coffee has come with a thick head of foam, and she leans towards the mug, tilting it towards her, and slurps the foam off the top. He can see what she’s doing, trying to harvest it without disturbing the coffee underneath.
The other people in this café are overheated, too. They’re dressed in clothes pulled early from storage, or in winter gear stripped down to make do. Their legs are white and tender, their faces flushed. At a nearby table, a man holds a toddler on his lap. The child twists in discomfort, settling, then fidgeting, then settling once more, and her father supports her lightly, maintaining the minimum of contact between them.
Colette is barely clad on top – Satish notes his faintly paternalistic disapproval – wearing little more than underwear, really. He can see her bra strap (black), and there’s a sort of vest thing on top of that. She puts her coffee mug down and he checks the inside of her arm for tracks. There are none.
‘Are you enjoying your tea, Satish? Are you sure you won’t have anything to eat?’
‘No thanks, I’m fine. The tea’s fine.’
There’s a pause. There’s something about the way she organised this get-together, friendly but with a bit of grit to it. When she rang to set the date it felt less like socialising, and more like being called to a meeting. He wonder what’s on her agenda. He knows what’s on his.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘So, here’s the thing: Sarah’s mum – you know she still lives in Cherry Gardens? – she’s been doing research about the photograph. She’s taken it up as a kind of project. Been trying to trace people from back then, so they can be in it.’
He can imagine it – Mrs Miller, ever the Bourne Heath hostess. He thinks of her with her clipboard and her impeccable organisation. He wonders how frantic she’s been about her sick grandson, whether this new project was something to take her mind off him.
‘She’s got in contact with people?’
‘She’s tried to. She’s tracked down Miss Walsh – you remember her?’
‘The teacher?’
‘Yeah. The teacher. She had long hair.’ Colette trails a hand down her throat. ‘She wore these big pendants. God, I had such a crush on her. When the rain came on Jubilee Day she let me shelter in her house. Her boyfriend was there. I couldn’t nail it at the time, but there was this sexual charge around them. I remember the sense that there was something going on I wasn’t part of.’
‘You were six!’
‘I know, I know. My hair was wet because of the rain, and Miss Walsh brought a towel down to dry it. Her boyfriend was sitting there, watching me, and he was smoking or something, because he was holding his hand away from his face and it made his T-shirt ride up, and I saw his, you know, his pubic hair, what do they call it? Crab ladder – I saw his crab ladder. Don’t look at me like that, Satish. I’m sharing, here.’
‘I’m waiting for the point.’
‘It’s just … There was something about him, the way he watched me, just waiting to see what would happen next. No judgements, no intervention. A sort of amorality. You know where else I’ve seen that? Dealers.’
He waits for the confession.
‘Dealers,’ she says again, quieter. ‘The ones I knew, anyway. Do you think Miss Walsh’s boyfriend was a drug dealer?’
‘I think he was an accountant. What do you want to tell me?’
‘Well, Mrs Miller found Miss Walsh but she’s living in Scotland so she’s not going to come.’
On Colette’s plate is her last baklava, a little diamond with grey paste oozing from the middle. He considers reaching out for it, but just as he’s decided to, she takes it hers
elf and bites it in half. As the layers of pastry succumb to her teeth, the whole thing squashes down and the paste leaks out of the sides. Sometimes, they get very hungry. Is this appetite normal?
‘You want?’ she asks as she offers him the remains.
He shakes his head. ‘Who else did she find then?’
‘Hang on.’ She chews slowly, pointing at her mouth occasionally as he waits for her to finish. ‘Sorry about that. The thing is, she’s been trying to trace the Chandlers.’
Lukewarm tea slops on the floor of his mouth. He swishes it from side to side with his tongue. If he didn’t have to respond, if he could hold it in for a while longer, his mouth would cool slightly, and the tea would warm a bit more.
‘Satish?’
He swallows finally. ‘The Chandlers?’
‘Yeah. She managed to find someone who knew someone … you know. You remember how she was? She could find bloody Lord Lucan. Weapons of Mass Destruction.’
‘So, I suppose she found them, then?’
‘Well, she found Paul.’
Paul Chandler, his dense body packed into his school uniform, appears briefly before Satish. He can see Paul’s cold eye, Paul’s jaw adorned with bum fluff.
‘I need some more tea, Colette. You?’
‘I’m fine.’
He goes over to the counter and deliberates over his choice of cake. When he sits down again she hasn’t let it go.
‘So, Mrs Miller found Paul. He moved to Australia a few years back. I don’t know what he’s doing out there.’
‘So?’
‘So … he’s not coming, obviously. But she’s looking for Stephen now. He hasn’t emigrated or died or anything. He’s back down south, apparently. You know, Satish, she’ll find him.’
The Chandlers had left a few months after the Jubilee party. The Jubilee was like a centrifuge, he sometimes thinks, its events sending them all spinning away from the centre: Cai and Colette to South Africa, the Chandlers up north. It wasn’t like that at all, of course, they’d have gone anyway. The real centre was Satish, and they spun away from him all right. In that last half term at primary school, he was alone. He’d have nothing to do with Sarah or Cai, and Colette was too young to be a real friend. Mandy he ignored completely.
Being alone was bearable, but being publicly alone was really hard. Satish found new ways to look busy. He chatted to a bemused Sima on the walk to school. Once there, he avoided the playground altogether; he read books, he helped teachers. At weekends, his mum started to notice that he wasn’t playing out, and he told her he had lots of homework to do. Once the holidays started, he got out of Cherry Gardens altogether most days, taking refuge at Ranjeet’s place. When his mum remarked on that, he told her he was talking to Dinesh about secondary school, and it seemed to satisfy her. Certainly, she never brought up the subject again.
But for all his meticulous planning, he still bumped into the Chandlers from time to time. They shared the same road, of course, and there were those few weeks after the summer holidays when they were all at Bassetsbury Boys’ together. Satish had to steel himself when he saw them coming. He could cope, though. He had a trick. When he saw them, he’d imagine he was armed. He had guns, at least two or three of them, concealed all over his body, like a spy. When the Chandlers appeared, he could feel the guns: knocking against his hip; strapped to his ankle; snuggling under his sock. There was nothing those bigger boys could do that would be a match for the guns. The slightest sign of trouble and they’d find themselves staring down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson.
I’m armed, Satish would tell himself as he spotted Stephen or Paul coming towards him. He’d square his shoulders and his hand would hover near his waist. He’d stare at them, and they’d stare right back, and they’d pass each other like that. But after Jubilee Day, the Chandlers never touched him.
‘You’re right,’ he tells Colette. ‘Mrs Miller will find Stephen.’
‘And then she’ll invite him to the photo. He might come.’ She paused. ‘Bugger, eh?’
And it’s those words that break him. The cunning of it, the disingenuous sympathy. She isn’t using. She’s clean and nasty, and he doesn’t know why. His anger comes out in a rush.
‘Don’t give me that!’ Colette jumps. ‘This was always going to get out of control, wasn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’ she says, her voice perilous.
‘I mean, that you were so keen for me to do this, weren’t you? Well, that’s why I didn’t want to. This was utterly predictable. You should have known it.’
‘It’s not my fault!’ she says.
‘It’s interesting you should say that. Because it is your fault, really, isn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean …’ and he takes a breath, but he needs to lift this rock, see what’s underneath it. ‘I mean that you tell Andrew Ford you’ll make this happen – and I’m still interested in exactly how that came about. Then you track people down. And you call Maya, just to chat about it, all innocence. And you – don’t interrupt me. And yes, before you ask: I’m cross – you break into my house in the middle of the night and spin me a line about your poor, poor, fraudulent father.’
‘Don’t!’
The man with the toddler glances across at them. Satish lowers his voice. ‘And when I still don’t comply, you do this.’ He pulls the note out of his jacket pocket and slides it across the table towards her. Colette looks at it for a second or two, then opens it.
‘Do the photograph,’ she reads. ‘Or I’ll tell your secret?’ She gives the last word an upward inflection: a question. She stares at Satish. ‘What is this?’
‘Don’t give me that.’
‘What the fuck? Did someone send you this?’
‘Don’t bother, Colette. Don’t pretend.’
‘What the fuck?’ she says again. ‘Are you serious?’
Around them, Satish can hear muttered discontent. The man raises his hand for the waiter, but Colette has gone quiet, and she’s looking at the paper that lies between them. Suddenly her expression changes.
‘I don’t believe it!’ she says. ‘You … horrible … bastard!’ She snatches up the note. ‘You think I did this. You think I would do this to you. You nasty little bastard fucker!’
Her forehead and chin and lips are trembling. Pain, or a very good approximation of it, moves across her face like a cloudscape. But he can’t be sure. He presses on.
‘Well … yes, I do. And I’m not the one at fault here. You were very keen for me to do this. You pressured me.’
‘I was upfront with you!’
‘You pushed and pushed.’
‘Not with a bloody blackmail note, I didn’t!’
She shoves it in his direction and starts collecting her things, her scarf, her purse, her mobile, stuffing them into her bag.
‘You stupid, stupid bastard. Don’t you know? I would never do this to you. I’m your friend, you thick bastard. Your friend! And I don’t care about your secret, whatever it is. You could tell me anything, you stupid fucker!’ And she gets up and walks out, pushing back her chair, so that it topples to the floor with a clang.
In the wake of her departure, as heads turn towards him, Satish covers his face and curls forward onto the table. He doesn’t know what to think. The things she said feel true. Real. And if they are, he’s a nasty little bastard, wrong and ashamed – and he still hasn’t found his blackmailer. If she’s lying, then he hasn’t done anything to derail her; he’s just made her angry.
He can hear it scattering down towards him, the shower of stones disturbed from somewhere higher up: this thing isn’t controllable any more. There’s nobody left to remonstrate with, nobody to appease, and there’s only one thing he can do to stop his world from coming apart. He’ll have to do the photograph. He closes his eyes against the thought, but then he remembers what you say to parents when they resist treatment for their child: the alternative’s worse. Now, he follows his own advice. If he doesn
’t do this he’ll be exposed. He’ll lose his job, lose his parents’ respect, maybe even Maya and the kids. So he’ll do the photograph. He’ll do it because the alternative’s far worse.
And the Big Deal that Colette wanted to tell him about, the search for Stephen Chandler? That’s no mystery at all. Stephen will be found. He wants to be found. He has, after all, already sought out Satish; and Stephen found Satish with no trouble whatsoever.
Chapter 22
It happened four months ago. He was at work and he’d left his office for just a moment. When he went back, Stephen was in there waiting for him. Satish didn’t recognise him at first. He registered a man just inside the door, and the man was looking around him as if he wasn’t sure whether he should be there.
‘Hello?’ said Satish. ‘Can I help you?’
He was sinewy, tan-varnished, and although he was dressed formally, it looked all wrong: a surfer in a suit.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Satish Patel?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know whether you remember me. I’m Stephen Chandler.’ He held out his hand.
Satish was ashamed, later, of having recoiled. But it couldn’t be helped, and he found himself out in the corridor.
‘Bit of a surprise, isn’t it? I was in the area.’
‘Were you? Well, I’m afraid … I’m afraid this isn’t a good time. I have patients to see.’
Stephen followed him out into the corridor, stood close. ‘I thought we might catch up,’ he said.
‘I have patients waiting right now. I can’t.’
‘It’ll just take a minute. Can we talk?’
There was a sound from further along, double doors opening as Niamh pushed through them. ‘Tea?’ she said, and he remembered that he’d asked for some.
Jubilee Page 18