The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  After that one and only Makati cricket match, everything in Sunny’s life – and in the Philippines – began to change. In August, two grenades exploded at a political rally on Plaza Miranda; habeas corpus was suspended. The newspapers were in trouble. Advertising budgets were cut. Lester became tense and moody. He moved on from the PR agency and took up a new job in corporate communications with a big commercial group.

  Hector was appalled. ‘You’ve got the wrong ascendant, Lester. Why do you want to be a Marcos crony now?’

  ‘This country has been good to us, Hector. We must be generous.’

  Lester had his problems and, at sixteen going on seventeen, Sunny had plenty of his own. Robby’s family had decamped to the south-west of France for the summer and hadn’t come back. There had been no word from him. Tina disappeared at a gallop before Thanksgiving: Anjuli Navaratnam had decided Manila was unpropitious and had bullied her husband into finding a job in America. In the new year, Ricardo overdosed on sweet strychnine and drove his car into Subic Bay; Herbie was sent into rehab. Junior lost at hurdles and several other athletic and emotional challenges. Then after a month of earth tremors, floods and explosions, on 21 September 1972 martial law was declared. Even the editors of the Manila Times and Philippine Free Press were arrested. At the end of that year came the real bombshell for Sunny.

  He was up on the flat roof above the patio, trying out the last of Herbie’s stash that had been solemnly bequeathed to him, and watching the sun collapse behind the skyscrapers of Ayala and Buendia. He was learning to be content on his own.

  Hector came up the drive carrying a bottle in his hand. ‘Lester?’ he called out. ‘You left this at my house last night.’

  Lester was settled into a large wooden armchair on the patio below Sunny, reading the paper. He still assiduously read whatever was printed. ‘That’s yours, Hector. Your bottle.’

  Hector stopped by the potted plants and examined the bottle in his hand. ‘Polish vodka, men. I don’t have this Polish business.’

  ‘You do, Hector. I gave it to you. Nappy brought it. I don’t keep vodka in the house. You know that . . .’

  Hector came up to the patio, walking slowly, shaking his big greying head at the bottle.

  ‘Irene?’

  Sunny hadn’t heard his mother’s name in a long time. He rolled closer to the edge of the roof.

  ‘If it weren’t for that bloody vodka, I might have known what she was trying to do. I could have stopped her, but that damn stuff knocked me right out.’

  ‘It was not your fault, Lester. She was brooding, wanting the impossible. The time had passed for those kinds of dreams. If she’d really wanted to be a performer, she would have gone when she had the chance. She made the choice to end her life, not you . . . Lester, you know if it had not been that night, it would have been another. That Alphonso’s pictures made her think she was already a star. That was the problem.’

  It had not been something wrong with her heart. It had not been an accident. Sunny tried to imagine how she had got to that point. Was it drink? Pills? He remembered looking at her hands in the coffin and how odd they seemed then. Had she slit her wrists? It slowly dawned on Sunny that no matter what Hector said, his father was to blame. She had killed herself because he had robbed her of her future and failed her at her most vulnerable moment. Up on that hot, flat, ugly roof Sunny heard the sound of her piano in his head. Then the hammering of his father’s useless typewriter.

  CHIN MUSIC

  1973

  IN SEPTEMBER 1973, Sunny arrived in London to become a student of engineering. Each day turned colder, darker, as his first true autumn closed in. Manila, those bittersweet years of wavering adolescence, faded into a dream.

  Engineering was a sadly uninformed choice. Although he had always liked playing with machines, and had a reasonably systematic mind, Sunny had yearned to follow Tina to America and study something like flower power. His father said that England was a more wholesome place and refused to discuss it further.

  Sunny had appealed to Hector.

  He shrugged. ‘What with Woodstock and now Watergate, America is impossible, Sunny. You see, your father is becoming keen on more traditional values. Adolescence has never been part of our culture. In England at least he knows you will have the benefit of a society that has a firm grip.’ British institutions at that time, he seemed to believe, were rocked only by the odd scandals of a kinky Conservative. ‘Besides, you like The Avengers, don’t you?’ Hector added.

  Sunny considered Cream, cows on album covers, floating zeppelins and figured England might be worth a try. Even Jimi Hendrix, the demigod of the electric guitar, had gone to London to get experienced. And Tina, he knew, was not for the uninitiated. Engineering happened to be the first offer that came out of a random mailshot.

  His father’s last request before Sunny left Manila was, not unnaturally, to do with words. ‘Will you write?’

  They hadn’t talked much for months. Sunny sometimes wondered if his father had guessed what he’d learnt about his mother, but he never broached the subject. His reply was pointed. ‘I don’t think I’ll be much of a correspondent either.’

  Hector was there. He was always there. But Hector too had diminished in Sunny’s mind. He had kept too much back. Surely, Sunny thought, I could have been told the truth by now?

  ‘Perhaps you’ll send some pictures then,’ Hector suggested. ‘I got you a camera.’ He presented Sunny with a new Rangefinder. ‘Voigtländer. Very good make.’

  London turned out to be a playground of slapstick politics, economic hiccups and constantly replenished cold rain. The IRA tried to make him feel at home with popgun salutes made by men wearing socks on their heads, but shooting in the air seemed to him like pissing against the wind. Sunny ignored all of it and took his cue from those around him for whom Ceylon was only ever a cup of tea, and Manila a type of envelope.

  He started out housed in a rabbit warren off Cromwell Road in West London. Although there were other students living in the building, there were no Filipinos in the vicinity at that time. No hint of the Little Manila that would blossom in Earls Court thirty years later, no sarisari mini-supermarts, no pancit restaurants, no kayung-kóng bars. Nor any Sri Lankans, as they were now known. At least Sunny didn’t see any among his fellow students, although he did find a small Sri Lankan restaurant tucked down a tiny street.

  After the initial excitement of arrival, and being on his own in a great city, he began to feel isolated. Where was the famous ‘my generation’? He made friends with a couple of Malaysian students – Anwar and Karim – and Lydia from Mauritius, but metropolitan life had none of the huggy togetherness, the hippy debauchery he had imagined from the English pop lyrics he’d memorized in Makati.

  ‘How about a game of bridge tonight, Sunny?’ Anwar would tap him on his shoulder every few days. He was a budding business specialist who liked to stick to what he knew best.

  Sunny would feign study overload. ‘Brunel project, man.’ Or, ‘Ruby bloody Tuesday. Materials deadline.’ Anwar didn’t think it was odd.

  Lydia’s idea of a wild time was a romp through Kensington’s museums. She was studying meteorology and liked to measure old rocks. So much for hedonism.

  The combination of frost, fog and the enforced proximity of undesirable strangers in his overcrowded house made Sunny more introspective than ever. It ought to have been conducive to developing more of an affinity with his subject – the study of the inner workings of inanimate objects – but the lectures were soporific. Apart from London’s famous underground, he had hoped that he might be inspired occasionally by outstanding feats of the industrial imagination. The Britannia Bridge of Anglesey, or the Aswan dam. Maybe gain an insight into Windscale. Experiences that would set him apart from the froth-heads of the Vietnam generation. Instead, what he got was a closer perspective on the screw, the bolt and the widget – all examined without the slightest hint of a pun that had been the hallmark of his father’s wordplay.
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  After the move to England his contact with Lester became entirely pecuniary. A father’s cheque repaid with a son’s silence. Hector wrote to say that Lester was turning into a recluse and that a letter would make a real difference. He described how Lester spent long hours sequestered in his office and ignored most of his former friends. He had reduced his socializing entirely to corporate functions, and in those tended to speak only to praise Marcos’s New Society. He had begun to recommend martial law as the solution to all political, social and even domestic problems.

  Sunny sent Hector a postcard of fat men drinking whisky but nothing at all to Lester.

  Swathed in scarves and scratchy wool, he snuffled from Barkers to Harrods, to Harvey Nick’s – the only experiences that came close to blowing his absolutely chilled mind. By the time he found the legendary Marquee and the 100 Club, they were cancelling gigs. London’s lights were beginning to dim due to wildcat strikes and an impending three-day week. Anwar huffed and puffed and declared he was going back to KL until British heating standards improved; Karim, the sweeter, toothier one, tried to make do with a cuddle from Lydia. The one time Sunny thought he might take a photograph, his camera froze.

  Then, a couple of weeks before Christmas, he met Ranil.

  Sunny had seen him often, ducking into a house down Penywern Road. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy in his awkward mac and grey flannels that were inches too short, but he had a friendly face. He frequented the Bestways corner shop where Sunny acquired his milk and munchies and studied the same crowded noticeboard next to the door. One afternoon, standing in the queue, Sunny decided to come out of his shell.

  ‘Christmas, huh?’ He glanced at the packet of mince pies in the other man’s hand.

  Ranil looked blank at first. ‘Theology?’ It sounded as though he was issuing a challenge.

  Sunny tried again. ‘Christmas?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Ranil looked surprised to find the mince pies in his hand. ‘A little treat. Come and join us. Flat 7, number 3, over there on the right. Overseas student, aren’t you?’

  Sunny nodded. ‘From Sri Lanka . . .’

  ‘Me too. Sort of. That’s to say, my dad is. Ranil is my name.’ He extended a hand. He had wide searching eyes, a seafarer’s nose flattened by the wind, and the broad face of a man happy to turn the other cheek.

  ‘Did you say us?’

  ‘Yes. A few of us are getting together. Eat, drink and sing, you know.’

  ‘Sinhala?’

  Ranil laughed in a distracted sort of way. ‘No beach baila tonight, I am afraid. Carols. But we will have mulled wine. You know it?’ He paid for his mince pies. ‘Remember, number 3. OK? Come when it gets dark. Do.’ He dipped his head politely.

  There was a glow in the sky. The old drunk on the other side of the road, a dreamer from Port of Spain, was teetering to carols of his own, his brown homburg ruined by the drip of too many winters out alone.

  Sunny hurried back to his room and wolfed his samosa with the gas fire burning at max. He kicked off his shoes and crouched close, not so much for the heat – for that he needed an oven, not a one-sided toaster – but in the hope that the grease and the smell of cheap spice would be sucked in and spewed out of the broken chimney pots to dissipate with the rest of the winter’s burnt-out days. Sunny sealed the oil-stained brown paper bag in plastic and popped it in the cheap metal waste bin.

  Sunny climbed the steps and rang the bell for flat 7. A sash window, two floors up, opened. Ranil peered out.

  ‘It’s me. Sunny.’ He stepped back down on to the pavement.

  ‘Who?’

  Sunny realized that he hadn’t told Ranil his name and that now it was dark. ‘You remember, we met earlier.’

  ‘Oh, the samosa man.’ Ranil disappeared. A minute later the front door opened.

  Ranil’s room was long and narrow and painted an austere shade of grey. Inside there were two men and a woman in a fug of warm alcohol and mince pies. Choral music rose from a small, oblong cassette player.

  ‘Good tidings, huh?’ Ranil introduced John, Matthew and Rachel. The packet of sacramental pies lay open on the floor between them. They all wore soft, suede desert boots.

  Sunny was handed a mug of spiced wine.

  Ranil’s friends were also studying theology. They had never met an engineering student before, but found Sunny’s garbled stories about the Easter rites in the Philippines more riveting than anything he had to say about widgets. He described thin men with wispy beards carrying crosses from station to station while flagellants whipped themselves over each shoulder and crawled bleeding and wailing along the streets.

  ‘You have actually seen a crucifixion?’ Matthew shook his head in a very Herbie-like wow.

  Although he’d never been to see Ricardo’s friend who got nailed in Pampanga every year, Sunny found it easy, after quaffing a couple of cups of warm wine, to embellish the tale a little. ‘The nails go in here.’ He showed them the centre of his palm. ‘You see stigmata, you know.’

  Rachel’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’

  John and Matthew acted like a pair of narks.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Far out.’

  Ranil seemed to want to adopt Sunny. He had an uncanny knack of making him feel he belonged. ‘You must come home with me, up north. You must have an English family Christmas.’

  Having read Kerouac, Sunny was keen to hitch-hike. Ranil laughed. ‘With a face like yours, my friend, we’d be on Finchley Road until at least the Day of Reckoning.’

  They took the train instead.

  Somewhere near the heart of England Ranil leant across with a question. ‘You like London?’ The Intercity table between them was littered with Mars bars and the News of the World – Ranil’s antidote to an overdose of course work.

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘A bit lonely?’

  ‘Not really. There are lots of people in London.’

  ‘You have a girlfriend back home?’

  ‘You mean in Manila?’ Sunny thought of Tina. ‘We lost touch. What about you?’

  Ranil pulled open his blazer as if to make room for a swelling heart. ‘There’s a girl I know. I’ve known her for years. She’s just finishing school. Then, maybe, she will come down to London.’

  ‘To do theology?’

  Ranil’s face was radiant. He laughed again, bobbing his head. ‘Yes, maybe. You’ll meet her anyway. We all get together over Christmas.’

  At Runcorn they sped over a river of ink, a bridge falling into darkness. The horizon disappeared and a grey grain obscured everything. The train rattled in a void. Sunny shifted in his seat, wondering what lay ahead. It had been a long time since he’d been with a proper family, and he had never been this far north before.

  Ranil’s home was in Oxton, Birkenhead, which he explained was a world away from the great city of slave ships and sugar, the Liver birds and the famous mopheads. ‘We are on the other side of the river. We have docks though, you know, and a park just like Central Park in New York. Only a hundred times smaller. It was the prototype. An experiment.’ He had a childlike smile that often preceded his quick, short laughter.

  His father, Ranil said, had arrived from the town of Galle in old Ceylon to study medicine at Liverpool, and had never left the banks of the Mersey.

  ‘A doctor?’

  ‘He’s actually an undertaker. He failed, you see.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Sunny was slowly beginning to see how in this world one thing led to another.

  Ranil tried to stifle a laugh. ‘You could say we have a family interest in the afterlife.’

  Ranil’s father was at the door the moment Ranil rang the bell.

  ‘Hallo, hallo. Come in, son, come in. And welcome, Sunny, welcome. You are very welcome here in our house, Sunny.’

  Tifus was a round jolly man with a wide, open face. There was no obvious resemblance between father and son, except in the tendency to laugh at unexpected moments. Sunny shook his small, soft, plump hand. �
�Merry Christmas, Mr . . .’

  ‘Tifus. Just call me Tifus. Should be Titus, you know.’ He chortled. ‘Damn fool in the church mistook, you know, the tea for an eff.’ Another laugh burst out.

  ‘Church?’

  ‘The christening, you know. A long time ago now, I know, but I like to explain these things right at the beginning. To lay your mind at rest. Early training. Very important to lay the mind to rest, not just the body. Ha, ha. Now, to more important matters. Have something to drink? Tea?’

  A pale woman in a striped woollen dress appeared from a doorway behind him, wiping her hands on a small checked towel.

  Ranil strode across and kissed her cheek. Like Tifus, she was much shorter than her son.

  ‘I am Ranil’s Mum.’ She didn’t look quite English, but neither did she seem Sri Lankan. ‘Delora,’ she added with a hint of acquired Scouse, and extended a pair of thin arms to greet Sunny.

  A pot of tea was brought into the sitting room and they sat in front of a large TV kept on low, like an open fire. Tifus plied him with fig rolls and Garibaldi biscuits while Ranil gave an eloquent lecture on the limits of knowledge and the metaphysical aspects of living in London. As Ranil expounded, Tifus fell into silent awe.

  Sunny listened with admiration too. Ranil had a way with words that he wished he could emulate without in any way bowing to his father.

  On Christmas Eve, Ranil suggested they go to a pub in New Brighton. ‘You’ll see, you know . . . the talent. And they have music and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Santa Claus?’

  ‘Oh yes, a lot of red noses.’

  The phone rang. Tifus took the call. His voice became serious and businesslike. Delora raised her hands in despair. ‘Tifus always has a call before Christmas. It’s the excitement, you know, old men getting into those tight red costumes. You can count on at least one fatality on Christmas Eve. And, you see, Tifus likes to give the staff the whole of the holiday period off. So he has to go himself.’