The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Beryl, Clara’s mother, looked on Mikey as the saviour of her dotage. ‘You’ll be a doctor when you grow up, Michael, won’t you, buttercup? Look after your Granny when the time comes.’ She had aged since Sunny had first met her. Her strong jaw seemed to have lost its way in the drapery that had been drawn lower each year. She tended to emit her words through clenched teeth, not out of anger but an early training in elocution. Eric, a little hard of hearing, usually ignored her remarks. ‘If you don’t move your lips, my dear, I can’t even guess what you are saying.’

  Beryl quickly got Clara and Mikey up into their rooms with Lemsip for her and Calpol for him. Eric offered Sunny a coffee and said that in his opinion the air in London was very poor indeed.

  ‘You see, you don’t have the north wind, do you, to blow out the cobwebs? And all those tall buildings, they are designed to keep the bad air in the city. Actually, bad planning goes back a long way. You’ve read Pepys? You’ll see the trouble there. Now, Paris, on the other hand, has the right profile. The place could be cleared of an Asian flu epidemic within days. No high-rise buildings.’

  ‘How’s the Chunnel?’ Sunny asked between sips, thinking of the road, the lights and the wheels. Eric was working on a ventilation component for the Channel tunnel project.

  Eric pulled at his chin and waggled it. ‘Ah, yes, you are quite right. You should have been an engineer, Sunny. Getting the air moving is the real trick. It has not been easy. There is still some concern about staleness. How about a stroll in the garden?’

  The Easton garden was a jumbled-up affair. Quite at odds with the measured, precise world of Eric’s professional life, unless one saw it as a permanent construction site, the equivalent of a laboratory where he experimented with wild ideas about wind tunnels, excavations and techniques of earth moving. The sheer magnitude of the disruption to an otherwise unremarkable plot of land suggested that Eric, rather than Beryl, was behind it, but the truth was that both of them vented their frustrations on the garden. It hadn’t always been so. In the early days, Clara had told Sunny, their garden was almost Elizabethan in its graceful artistry. A small raised rectangle with borders of pansies and bright evergreens. A little overgrown in places, but colourful. There had been a slight slope to the lawn that wouldn’t have caused much consternation even for a game of croquet, but as the couple rushed towards their silver seventies, hunting for bizarre comforts to compensate for the history of broken crockery, the alteration had been radical. The slope had turned into a mountain of scrap, bits of building debris had been melded into miniature promontories, holes were dug, filled and dug again, ponds overflowed. There was even a miniature swamp. The two of them – Beryl and Eric – didn’t seem to notice the pandemonium. They only ever saw one bit at a time – a flowering bush, a sunny paving stone, yellow autumn berries – and appeared perfectly happy with the skimble-skamble hazards they’d created out of the thin air of a carefully veiled marriage.

  ‘Dad, why are we here?’ Mikey asked when they had finished tying the last of the tent’s guy ropes.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sunny wasn’t sure if this was one of those grand metaphysical questions that occur out of the blue to some kids.

  ‘Why are we here?’ Mikey donned a grubby fleece and flicked back the hood. He was eight years old. It was the summer of 1994.

  ‘You mean on this earth? Or in Wales?’ They had a pitch on Shell Island, with a good view of the sea and, given a judicious bit of parking, protection from the evening gales.

  Clara popped her head out of the inner compartment where she was untying the sleeping bags. ‘The campsite is a lot cheaper than the other places on offer.’

  Sunny tested a peg. ‘Why we are here is a big question.’

  ‘No, Dad. I don’t mean why are we here. I mean why do we come here? We are not Welsh.’

  Clara squinted as she moved out into the sunlight. Sunny wondered if she was going to tell Mickey of his unexpected conception not far down the coast, below a sky full of swallows, but she seemed absorbed in something else.

  He remembered the farmhouse where Clara was sure it had happened. The slate of the fireplace solid, like a sea of painted ripples. Cool despite the crackling flames. The hearth about three inches thick and made of one stratified piece set into the stone walls at each end. The front edge had been rounded and made safe. The mirror-like surface, the blackness of the rock, had absorbed all his inner uncertainties as simply as charcoal pulls poison from bile. Something more than mica had been metamorphosed there. The slate understood pressure; it could take the spin of the earth and make something beautiful out of it. When he had entered Clara’s warm naked body, he’d felt the air press them into one shape, as it did the hills around them. She said later that she felt something come into being there. Something unstoppable like a balloon released underwater, rising up to the surface, lifting her into a new world.

  What ties a person to a place? He thought of his father finding a home in a fantasy. Makati. Almost a whole life spent somewhere else. His mother giving up her place on earth. Who has a claim on any place? The loudest, the nearest, or the most recent?

  He looked at Mikey. The boy was waiting for an answer.

  ‘I like to come because the sea and the mountains answer something in me. They call it hiraeth here. That’s the word for it.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I can’t explain it. A kind of longing for something that goes to the heart of everything . . . You’ll understand one day. You’ll recognize the feeling.’

  Mikey wrinkled up his nose. He wasn’t convinced. He was a tall lad for his age and when he was unsure of anything his whole centre of gravity would shift; he’d move his head back as if he was afraid. He would look like he was about to topple and Sunny would want to reach out and catch him, steady him, reassure him, show him that the world was of our own making and that there was nothing we should fear in it, nothing that could not be righted, made good. The movement was something he might have picked up from his father, but to Sunny it seemed more to do with the boy’s age, his generation, the tenderness we all begin with.

  The sun slowly sank through a bank of bluish clouds furled on the horizon. Then a quiet circle of pale western light spread over the water. Sunny had a pan of pasta boiling on a small gas Primus outside the tent. He opened a Coke and shared it with Mikey. Clara had gone to the shower block by the main gate.

  The sea was calm. Beneath the surface millions of shells were being swept towards the shore, being crushed as they had been over the ages. Sunny thought about how he had ended up here, in the same place as them, but intact. He wanted to tell Mikey about it, but saw that the boy was looking at the sky in wonder.

  ‘Will we see stars?’

  The sky was clear; the clouds had been pulled right down below the horizon. ‘Yes, we will see the stars tonight.’

  ‘How many?

  ‘Millions. Like the shells on the beach.’

  ‘Which do you like more? The stars or the shells?’ Mikey’s upturned eyes were like young scallop shells, filled with everlasting light.

  ‘I can’t choose.’ It was the combination he liked, and being able to appreciate both.

  The boy nodded, on the brink of something. ‘I like it here too,’ he said. ‘I don’t know whether I would really want to be up there like in a cruiser.’ He twisted his mouth and pulled a face. ‘But I don’t know. It might be really good to be, like, in the stars.’

  ‘Well, you know, in a way we are.’

  Sunny had told his father once how he had no wish to go anywhere, least of all outside their world. He meant the earth – he thought Apollo was a waste of money. Lester had assumed he was talking about the domestic world he had extended for his son from Colombo out to Manila, and was dismayed. ‘You need to know what’s going on,’ Lester had said. ‘It is important that you expand your horizons. Don’t dwell on the problems of the past.’

  After Mikey went to sleep, Sunny warmed himself with a whisky and stared
at the multiplying stars.

  ‘It’s good to be out here,’ he said to Clara when she joined him. ‘Isn’t it?’

  She huddled into the soft velour folds of her dressing gown and mumbled a kind of sleepy agreement.

  ‘Do you think we should move out?’ He poured a drink for her.

  There was no immediate response. Then, she laughed lightly. ‘I thought you said it was good here.’

  ‘Out of London, I mean. Maybe we should move somewhere a little less cramped.’

  ‘The country?’ There had been a lot of Sunday articles about the flight from town to country recently.

  ‘I was thinking that Mikey has known only London.’

  ‘And here. And the other places we’ve been. Liverpool.’ She sounded surprised. ‘You saw what happened to the damson pair?’ A couple – parents of one of Mikey’s classmates – had decamped to Norfolk and re-camped swiftly when they found village life more circumscribed than city life, and damson jam too much to take by the pint.

  ‘Yes. But what about Liverpool? Or this side of the Mersey, where you grew up? Wouldn’t you like it?’

  Clara went very quiet. Her breath misted the air. ‘Would you go back now to your Manila to live? Or Colombo?’

  ‘That’s different. That world has gone. The past was very different. I couldn’t go back.’

  ‘You think Birkenhead has stayed the same? Merseyside?’

  ‘Maybe it has got better? You could be in Wales in less than an hour.’

  ‘I am not going back. Sorry, but that is just impossible.’ She didn’t wait to hear any more. She dumped her cup into the pail of washing-up water and crawled back into the main sleeping section of the tent. She unzipped a sleeping bag and, a few seconds later, zipped it up again.

  Sunny wasn’t sure what to think. He wanted more than he had. Something more. From her, from himself, from the place in which they found themselves.

  In the morning, the sun shone in through the small mesh window on to Clara’s half-covered face. Her hair seemed to whiten in the early light even as the skin on her upper cheek reddened, warmed by the rays. He noticed a brown mole below her left ear that he’d never seen before; perhaps it had grown bigger. The fine down on her neck appeared to have grown too. A cornfield in silk. As he slipped out of the sleeping bag, she moved an arm under the yellow corded edge. Her lips, swollen from slumber, were slightly open. He watched her breathe; the creases in her face rippled. He wanted to kiss her as he hadn’t done in years, but he didn’t want to wake her. There was peace to her sleep that seemed more valuable than the tug of a homeless thought, any fleeting moment of desire.

  In the other compartment Mikey was in as deep a slumber; his young body completely engrossed in growing. Sunny stepped out on to the grass.

  Clara’s preference to stay in London surprised him. He had always thought she would be the one who’d want to leave the city and that he would be the one who would want to stay. He didn’t really know any other place in Britain; everywhere else would harbour such uncertainties of belonging, race and class. There was nowhere that could be said to be his. Birkenhead, where they had some connection – a reason for being there – was the only possibility. That connection though was something rather more for her; not a link but a web constructed by others. Not only her family, but also Ranil’s family, the Veeraswamys, the whole mob would be there, weaving an inescapable net out of the past. It wouldn’t do. He could see that. All those simmering memories of petty parental rows and pointless bickering. But then, he wondered, what is it we are weaving for ourselves between Alexandra Palace and Archway? A safety net for Mikey? For ourselves? Clara liked to keep in touch. Didn’t that inevitably create a web?

  He remembered what the owner of the cottage where Mikey had been conceived had told him. ‘My husband could never leave Wales, you know. He says it is too beautiful. That is the trouble with being born in these parts. You can never leave, you know, until the day you are called, and even then they say you only go into the next valley.’ She’d untied the carrier bag she’d used to cover her head and had shaken off the rain.

  ‘Ah, but I hear your country is very beautiful too. A lovely island you have, is that not so? Never mind, you are most welcome here. We need folk to come. There are not so many of us being born here any more. Never mind the foolishness people talk these days. We all need some healing and this is a good place for it.’

  A place of healing was what Sunny had been seeking all his life.

  He went back to the car and got out his Pentax and an old Hoya 150 mm telephoto lens. He wanted to make a composition again, feel the peace of a scene captured on his own terms.

  Mikey was growing fast. Sunny could sense it. Something frighteningly adult in the way he flinched. The monologue in his head had started. That moment when the world and you are no longer one, but you are in one place and the world is out there, a world on which you keep a running commentary. Animals don’t do it. Infants don’t do it. It comes when you become aware that the commentary is yours and you are talking to yourself. Few manage to break the skin that then forms and return to childhood. Soon, Sunny felt, it would be impossible for Mikey to hear anything he said; his own voice would slowly drown out his father’s, until he learned, too late, that he could no longer hear those who were nearest.

  ‘Daddy.’ He had come up behind Sunny. ‘Daddy, what are you looking at?’

  Sunny lowered the camera. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘The sea?’

  ‘Yes, the sea, I suppose.’

  ‘What’s there? Are you taking a picture?’

  His instinct was to deny it. He was trying to do the impossible, capture a sense of things passing. He had to make a conscious effort to overcome the desire to hide in silence. He swallowed hard. ‘Yes, a picture. I wanted to make a picture of that boat in the middle of nowhere. The sea is so . . . unpredictable.’ He wished he could say something more meaningful.

  ‘Can I see?’ Mikey wanted to see the same thing his father had seen. A patch of sea, a sail brought up close through the magnifying lens.

  ‘Be careful.’ Sunny knew he shouldn’t have said it. He restrained himself from putting the camera strap over the boy’s head. Mikey did it himself. Then he lifted the camera to his eye, holding the barrel of the Hoya in one hand and the light metal body in the other. He let his weight drop to one leg; his elbow rested against his body as he squinted through the viewfinder. He had learnt all this by himself. Sunny had never shown him how to hold a camera. He had never thought to; he wouldn’t have known how to.

  The boy turned the focus ring. ‘There’s two,’ he said. ‘Two boats.’

  Sunny took the camera back and looked again. The boy was right. There were two boats going in the same direction. ‘Do you want to take a picture?’

  ‘With that?’

  ‘What about yours?’ Sunny had given him a small black box Yashica automatic for his birthday. He hardly ever used it. ‘Did you bring it?’

  ‘Oh-oh.’ Mikey made a face, stretching his mouth and lowering his lip the way Clara did. ‘I don’t know where it is.’

  ‘Is it in your bag?’

  ‘Mummy will know.’

  ‘I’m sure she will, but it is your camera.’ Ownership, care, concern. The mantra bubbled in his head.

  ‘I’ll be a camera,’ Mikey said suddenly. He put a fist to his eye and looked through the aperture he made with his fingers and thumb. He clicked his tongue and shut his eyes. ‘There. It’s inside now.’ He pointed to his head. ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘Good. You’ve got it, all right. But if you had your camera and got it in there, then you could show it to us too.’

  ‘You’ve got it too.’

  ‘Yes, but what about other people? Mummy? She’s not seen it.’

  The breeze lifted. It seemed to have given Mikey something; he was more talkative than usual. ‘She’ll see it when she comes out.’

  ‘It won’t be the same.’

  ‘The sea will still be t
here.’

  ‘The boat – the two boats – might not.’ That was the point, Sunny wanted to say. With the camera you had a description of what was in front of the lens, sometimes even of things not there, of absence. It was not like words, with which you must always construct, or reconstruct, or like Clara’s paintings, which were things in themselves. The image on the film was light, just as it was when you held your breath and time stopped. That was all and everything.

  Mikey was waiting for him to continue; Sunny couldn’t find the words. He wanted to say: a real photograph is as true as it gets. ‘The picture on the film is of the moment,’ he said in the end. He knew this didn’t mean much to Mikey. The moment, at his age, was not of great significance; for him, there was the prospect of an abundance of them. A seagull swooped on to the beach below.

  ‘There, get that, Dad. The bird.’

  It flapped away before Sunny could focus. He was too busy thinking about his son and how he himself had so easily stepped back from his father.

  ‘Taking pictures?’ Clara had emerged from the tent. Her dressing gown billowed in the breeze, her hair was in tangles.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Missed.’ Mikey tried to hide his smile.

  ‘What time is it?’ She braced herself against the wind, fast and steady; she seemed to grow stronger before her son.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sunny said. On that bare small island, for a moment, it seemed not to matter.

  The next day they climbed up a hill to see the view of the river merging with the sea.

  ‘This river, where does it start?’ Sunny asked Clara.

  ‘Lots of little ones go into each other. There’s no one starting point.’

  The idea intrigued him. As they stood on the side of the hill, staring down through the branches at the wide pewter-tinged estuary that absorbed the rain seeping out of a hundred hills, drawing water from a thousand hidden springs behind them, around them, and below them, it came to him that perhaps we ourselves begin and end in a similar way. Yes, our bodies begin with one cell and perhaps end only when the last of the billions we’ve grown has been extinguished. But our minds, our conscious selves, like the story we make of our lives, must be something more. A deep but temporary unity – a stretch of river – fed by a network of tributaries.