There had been a road-rage incident: a man driving too fast down a country lane had yelled at Victor to get out of the way. That was all. Nandini said Victor had handled it well—he had waved the man through, smiled even. He hadn’t lost his cool, which had surprised Nandini. But when they got home, he had sat heavily onto the sofa and died.
“Nothing that a little bit of angioplasty couldn’t have solved,” Preethi had sobbed into the phone.
How ironic, Rohan had thought. Angioplasty is what I do. But he had cried with her.
Angioplasty is what he does. Through the skin he punctures, pushing his catheters in, the push against meat, the squeak, the sighs of machines like sighs of many people asleep in unison. The little balloon goes into the vessel, and pump-pump it goes, and the fatty cells are pushed like portly aunts through a corridor. He was renowned for his steady rate of success. He was renowned for the lives he saved.
Angioplasty is what he does.
•
“Ah! Hello! Hello!” a voice shouted across to them. Rohan and Carl looked around. Carl saw Wesley first and ran to him. He threw his arms around the man, and Wesley hugged him, pulling the child off his feet. Wesley wore pale, dapper jeans and the royal blue and gold Sri Lanka cricket shirt.
“Hello, Uncle!” Rohan said.
“Ro, my darling,” Wesley said, patting Rohan’s cheek, although Rohan was a head taller than he. “You have brought the boy to a great match. We are going to win!” he said to Carl.
Carl elbowed Rohan in the groin. “I told you,” he said as Rohan winced and turned away from him.
“How are you, how are you?”
“Fine, Uncle. How are you? How’s Nil and Ian? How’s Mo—how many kids now? And Vita?” and as he questioned, Wesley told him about Nil and Ian and their children, now in their teens, and Mohan’s two little girls, and Vita’s new job, and her worrying boyfriend, a flashy lawyer in the city.
“Come on, Dad,” Carl said.
“OK. Uncle, this one’s hungry. Maybe I can come and see you tomorrow?” He was sizing Wesley up, noticing the hunched-ness, the loose teeth at the front of his mouth. Heart disease was everywhere, in everyone, since Victor died.
“You know, I was thinking of your wedding just yesterday, Ro.”
“Yes?” He was aware that Carl was listening.
“What a fine day that was. It’s time,” Wesley said. “It’s time to find someone new.”
He had said someone. Rohan noticed the word—it felt like a message. Wesley reminded him so much of his father that as his uncle tiptoed up and smudged both of his cheeks with his lips, tears came to Rohan’s eyes and he was bowled over with love. He let go of Carl and pulled his uncle close into a bear hug, and below he felt Carl hug both of their legs. Wesley did not pull away but patted Rohan’s back gently until Rohan retracted with a sheepish smile. Wesley nodded, and Rohan and Carl strolled toward the burger van.
“What was your wedding like?” Carl asked.
“It was fine. What a fine day that was,” Rohan said. He wasn’t mimicking. It had been magnificent.
•
Mainly he had danced, with friends and uncles and his father and his sister and brother and the whole shebang—the whole lot of them he pulled into his embrace and thrust out again at arm’s length, laughing all the while. He drank champagne from the bottle and toasted his bride drunkenly as she sat quietly and smiled. Earlier she had been told to get out of their car as they were about to drive away, so that the video cameraman could retake her walk up the aisle on her uncle’s arm. He had come especially from Sri Lanka for the occasion—it would be a terrible thing for them to have missed it. Shamini had talked sharply to her daughter, and the immense compassion Rohan felt for Deirdre as he waited silently, surrounded by the white flowers inside the car, was intense: he was struck by the smell of the bitterness of the leaves. They travelled to the reception silently, He wanted to reach over, to hold her hand, but the space between them in the car, a simple seat space, was too far, too wide.
Their wedding had been fine for him. He had never asked her how she had liked it. She told him when they were divorcing. She told him when it was too late.
Really, it had been too late before their parents had made the plan.
It wasn’t an “arranged” marriage. It was just that the parents decided and their children turned up. Deirdre had never had a boyfriend. She was protected, spoilt by her mother. And when he married her, he thought that it was perhaps because Deirdre was a simpleton: perhaps she was educationally challenged, he wondered when they were first alone in his flat. But she was a primary school teacher—how could she be educationally challenged? Then he realised: she was in awe of him. She had no words, nor had he for her. They had known each other for most of Deirdre’s life. In fact, when he was ten and she was eleven months, he had carried her to her mother when she fell over at a party. There was a picture triumphantly shown at the wedding. It was planned, their wedding, and too late to back out of when he woke up to it, and self-satisfied and clever as he was, he had thought he could ride it out, work through it, build a relationship from nothing. He had tried. But she was an indulged, simple creature, and he—he was too busy and too arrogant to try. Now all he felt was sorrow.
Carl said, “How are we doing?”
“Let’s see—Sanath is on 118, Sangakkara on 28. We’re doing great, Carl.”
“OK!” Carl shouted loudly.
“OK!” Rohan said. He was fiddling with his phone. No signal, no message.
Below them the England fans were getting rowdy. A man in the middle with a tall white and red hat started to shout-sing: “Everywhere we go-o …” and the crowd answered:
“Everywhere we go-o …”
“People want to know-ow …,” the man sang.
“People want to know-ow …,” the crowd answered.
“Where we come from …”
“Where we come from …”
They sang out, and as they sang, voices echoed back from across the ground. The man stood on his chair and shouted to all of them: “WE ARE THE ENGLAND!”
“WE ARE THE ENGLAND!”
“THE MIGHTY, MIGHTY ENGLAND!”
“THE MIGHTY, MIGHTY ENGLAND!” and on this line, Rohan joined in, standing up with others in the row.
Carl pulled at his shirt: “Sit down! Sit! That’s not us! That’s not us!” He was becoming upset. Rohan laughed down at him, and as the song waned, he clapped with the others around him. The family in front also clapped, the mother waving her Sri Lankan flag.
“It’s just a little fun, Carl,” Rohan said.
“But we support Sri Lanka,” he said, and he was near tears.
“But we’re for England, too, darling,” Rohan said. “We’re for both of them, mate. We’re for everyone.” He realised then—the child was his. Not his father’s, not Shamini’s, not Deirdre’s alone. Loving him wasn’t enough. He had to take this child on. Take him and remould him, and try and straighten him out.
He put his arm around the boy. “Want to play questions again?”
“All right.”
“I’ll start, shall I?” The boy nodded. But at that moment Jayasuriya was out. A roar went up, and Carl jumped. “Oh, dear,” Rohan said. “It’s OK, son. There’s more batsmen where he came from.”
“I’ll ask questions. Can I come and live with you?”
“Yes. Of course. Do you want to?”
“No. Do you live in a house or a flat?”
“An apartment, we call it in New York.”
“Can we live in Sri Lanka? Papa told me about Sri Lanka.”
“No. I won’t ever live in Sri Lanka. But maybe when you’re grown, you can.”
“Will I ever have a brother?”
“I don’t know. Will Mum get married again, do you think?”
“She might marry Phil.”
“Who’s Phil?”
“Her boyfriend.” This made Rohan fill with warmth and gladness.
“Do you
kiss boys or girls?”
Rohan looked at his son. He did not want to know what Carl had been told. He kissed Carl’s head. “At the moment, I kiss this boy.” This answer was accepted. Sangakkara hit two fours. Rohan stood to clap, and Carl stood, too.
The girls in front held up their Four cards. The younger one stooped and picked up a spare card and turned and handed it to Carl. He waved it in the air.
“We are the England!” the Barmy Army sang below them. And Carl and Rohan joined in. When they sat down again, Carl said, “Can you teach me to dance?”
And Rohan said, “Yes.”
•
When he took Carl home, he said to Deirdre, “Carl has changed his name. He’s now called Karl with a K.”
They were ebullient. They had won. “Er … all right … Come on, Carly. Come inside,” she said, because he was leaning heavily on Rohan. Through the door, Rohan could see the warm apricot kitchen at the end of a dark corridor. Music was playing, and he could hear someone stirring something in a bowl.
“Is your Ammi here?”
“No,” she said shortly. “Would you like to come in? For a beer?” She was straining, but, he realised, she was embarrassed, and it wasn’t her fault.
He didn’t go in. He promised to return tomorrow. I have a date, he said. With my friend Noah. She didn’t look surprised. But before she closed the door, she smiled shyly, came out again, and put her arms about his neck and kissed his cheek. And he hugged her. He wanted to say—Thank you for Carl. It would have been crass, stupid. But she had held Carl within her. And Carl now walked in the world, with Rohan’s heart replicated, and Victor’s smile, and Deirdre’s furrowed brow, and Nandini’s small hands. He had Rohan’s heart, though, and when the child clutched at both their legs, Rohan put one arm down and scooted him up between them, and there he held a heart in his hands, his own heart.
Honey Skin
It was nearly two years after her Hugo died that Dorothy began to think about her body’s decay. And she started to think about sex, too. He had been her only lover for forty years: in his twenties enthusiastic and overpowering, delighting in her body with whoops and slurps, and when they were married, languid and assured, king and queen of their little world. Only when she had had the children and they were tubby and harried did the sex become secondary to their lasting, kindly friendship, full of books and clever talk. When the children left, they resumed more vocally what had been furtive, in fits and starts, obeying the vagaries of the seasons, sometimes in October looking forward to the midsummer madness that always caught them unawares, finding them in bed in the middle of the day, tonguing each other frantically.
For Hugo, the sex was centred about her and her alone. Her body’s changes had only increased his desire, as if each pocket of fat or crease or stretch mark was a decorative proof of his infinite love, as if she were a house that in its subsidence became safer. How odd, she would think, how odd that you can love me more. For Dorothy, sex was an insular game. When they talked of it, and in their forties and fifties they talked of it a lot, Hugo would say—but that’s all women, isn’t it? Women think their way through the process. When he made love to her, he knew she fantasised. Here she lied to him; here she never told what she really thought of. When he asked, when they talked during the actual moments, she made stories up: stories that would excite smart, funny Hugo. Stories about Hugo as a prince, and Dorothy a slave girl. Stories about Hugo being married to an older woman, and she, Dorothy, being the wife’s maid, who fellated him behind a screen. But when she came, the sad truth was that Hugo, in her head, was married to an older woman, to whom Dorothy was in fact making love behind the screen.
Now that she was alone, now that he had vanished into death (a future she contemplated with more and more frequency), she could awaken to the reasons she had lied. It was not satisfactory to think—oh, I was a lesbian all along—because she had not been. She had loved Hugo with an intensity and a fire that raged and burned and nearly destroyed her at times, the bad times when they’d almost parted. She had been fond of him and liked him. She had worshipped his smile, his common touches, his private caresses. There had been no better person for her, and in his death, he had taken her with him and left in her place a dried rind, her body a desiccated, pocked, disfigured old case, which she pulled about like luggage on an overlong journey.
When she woke in the mornings—late—in the house they had chosen together deep in the Cotswold countryside, near enough to a small, lively town full of things to do (he must have known he would leave her soon, she often thought), she would walk about naked, looking through the bedroom window at birds and avoiding mirrors until after her shower. Then she would stand in the steamy bathroom and examine herself. Poor old Tiresias would always spring to mind, with his “wrinkled dugs.” There she stood, the thin bones of her slumped shoulders jutting like already sprouting angel wings. Her short hair boyish, her belly flat and flaccid, its skin falling like rivulets of candle wax toward her thighs. The breasts she could write an essay about. She had lost weight since Hugo died, and where there had been a fullness still ten years ago, now that she was eighty, they stopped being recognisable at all. The gap between the two appendages had widened, the brown skin on the sternum the only part of her chest that was still taut, and this skin was covered in beige, brown, black, and red liver spots. When she looked closely, she could see the tiny hairs there, browner now. “Oh, Hugo,” she would sigh, imagining his hands reaching around her and cradling her body with his own. He would not recognise her now, with the grey hair and the hunch that had arrived back, an old friend from her teenage years before Hugo, before she walked tall.
And once she dressed, pulling on Hugo’s old boxers, a pair of Hugo’s jeans, and one of his old shirts, she was asexual, as old people become. She was just a shuffler, ambling every day to the library, where she would meet Rosemary, her friend in widowhood, met at the library a few months after Hugo went and now a comfortable habit. They read the papers in the morning, then used the computers at lunchtime, jumping from subject to subject with clicks, as if they were young and could keep up.
Well, Rosemary liked to do this, bounding through her genealogy, making visits to great-great-greats like a reverent time-traveller, calling on her long-dead relatives as if they were close friends, telling Dorothy about a front parlour in Birdlip or a rolling journey on oceans that somehow, two hundred years later, still surged the same waves. Dorothy’s family were a mix-up: her father, the son of a British headmaster in Colombo, had never left Sri Lanka, being sickly, and had married a native schoolteacher, Dorothy’s mother, Celie. Celie’s ambition had sent Dorothy off to university in England. Dorothy’s own history was so varied and interesting that she had never required more, and when she had asked, a few names offered up had misdirected and confused her. She wrote to a cousin in Sri Lanka and met her on her only trip back twenty years ago, when she was handed the holiday photos of a maiden aunt from the 1950s. The maiden aunt sitting in the Botanical Gardens at Kandy. This was her genealogy. As Rosemary, woodpeckerlike, tapped away at her family tree, Dorothy liked to play Scrabble on Facebook with her grandchildren: what she and Hugo had started was genealogy enough. At lunchtime, Dorothy and Rosemary went to the bakers’ across the road and had soup and a roll. Then a little shopping and Rosemary would walk back up the hill with her as far as the bend, when Rosemary would go her way and Dorothy would carry on up home. That was weekdays.
At weekends, she stayed in, disturbing her own dust, picking things up and putting them down again, the way they were when Hugo was there. She would sit in his chair to watch the afternoon movie. On Sunday, after church, she ate a chicken or a small joint, and it would last for two or three meals or more, until she found it in the fridge, or on the side, smelly, and she’d throw it away. This life was enough for her.
Her daughter disapproved. Stella was all for coming to the house and clearing out the bits of Hugo that pervaded every room.
“At least give h
is clothes to someone who could use them,” she said in their last telephone conversation.
“No,” Dorothy said, but listened to the reasoning. I am eighty, she thought. I am old enough and wise enough to know what is good for me. Her son called once a week, dutiful, and after the painful silences and the too-bright chatter about “the grandchildren,” as he referred to his own brood, he would say goodbye. It was only in the inflections he used in that word (“Goodbye,” he would say), mocking himself, that she heard Hugo. She heard Hugo’s voice say goodbye once a week.
Perhaps it was a midsummer madness that caused it. She had no feelings about sex, no longing for it, not even a nostalgia, beforehand. But one early June day, walking down to the library in sandals and a pair of Hugo’s gardening shorts, her old sunglasses balanced on her nose like a heavy lamp, she suddenly thought of the women who had fuelled her fantasies of old. So many buxom, large-nippled, creamy-coloured, plump mistresses of her dreams. It made her stop in her tracks to think of the photographs she had glimpsed over the shoulders of other people in newsagents’, and the one or two magazines she had bought herself when in her twenties, telling the newsagent (an Indian lady, Varma) that she had been asked to buy them for her next-door neighbour, who Varma knew was infirm. These ladies were ideals, glowingly pale goddesses, their fingers trailing along blurred blouses and shiny lips, their legs parted to reveal flesh rarely touched by sunlight. The magazines were “soft porn,” Varma had said, quite enough for the old man, and as it turned out, quite enough for Dorothy, too. The porn of today, all over the Internet if required, showed girls of all hues and sizes, splayed up toward the camera in much the same way she imagined that sacrificial goats were slit through the gullet and offered up to silent, distant gods.
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