The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Clara gave Mikey a chocolate bar. Sunny watched him carefully unwrap it and nibble a piece. The boy was lost in thought, his own private torrent of thoughts. Sunny wished he could say something but it was hard enough to hold back the tears.

  On the last day, Mikey spent most of the morning exploring rock pools. He was looking for fish with his little net while Sunny looked for fossils, bits of calcified past to give him a sense of the shape of the world. Clara was up on the dunes, engrossed in her watercolours for the first time in ages. Sunny had a collection of shells and sea gems in a plastic bag – ringed clams, faded molluscs, whalebone and tiny bleached cauliflower sponge heads – but he was beginning to despair of finding anything that could really compete with the slivers of live flesh Mikey was seeking as he crouched on the rocks, poking the green handle of his net into the water. He looked content on his own, as though he needed no one. The gulls in the air were no freer.

  Up on the cliff bells tinkled. A line of people materialized, chanting and hopping like puppets with strings up to heaven. Sunny heard the ‘Hari Krishnas,’ and ‘Ram, Ram,’ and thought of Ranil up in the Himalayas. He wondered if Ranil had been to this beach before, as a child growing up in the northwest of England. Like Clara, he might have sat among the same dunes, come down to these same rock pools to collect shells and soak up the sun. They belonged to the same world.

  Clara, her picture finished, came up to Mikey and stood beside him, stirring the water with her bare foot. He looked up to her and held her hand. A mother and her son. Sunny heard him talking to her but couldn’t catch the words. The sea wind had picked up.

  GROUND GLASS

  1994

  IN HIS Christmas card of 1994, which featured the three wise men, Hector wrote to say that after a lifetime of hesitation he had finally made his most important move. He had married Aunty Lillie. He explained that on the day they had met in Manila for Lester’s funeral, their separate journeys had fallen into perspective. They had seen how their individual quests had been designed so that their paths would one day be brought to a point of true convergence. That point had finally been reached twelve years later in the propitious Year of the Rooster. The wedding had taken place at a small lodge in the misty Sri Lankan hill town of Haputale. They had both joined an eclectic but deeply rooted spiritual group. They were no longer permitted to travel, other than by land: never to touch the cruel sea was one of their precepts. Hector would have loved to bring Lillie to London, but could not now until Adam’s bridge was built to link the island to India, and the Channel tunnel became a reality. It was not a joke. Their idea was to stay put, he wrote, and create an energy centre for world peace on an island of fractured dreams. Aunty Lillie had added a note on a page ripped out of a school exercise book. It turned out to be a prayer for national harmony through a fat-free diet. She’d remained faithful to her principles: ice cream was still a no-no.

  Sunny sent them his congratulations. When he told Clara about the marriage, she laughed, as though they were the young ones, and she and Sunny knew better.

  Clara was also undergoing a metamorphosis. After the summer holidays she had brought out all her old paint boxes that over the last decade had been shoved behind jigsaws, board games and puzzle books. She’d cut up her maternity dresses into smocks and started splashing colours about as if she was back in kindergarten.

  ‘I’ve enrolled in an evening class. Art and Design.’ Her hair was tied back tight. Her face gleamed as though she had been on a treadmill all afternoon. ‘It will help me decide which way to go in the future.’

  ‘What do you mean in the future?’

  ‘I don’t know whether fine arts or graphics is really my thing. I am not going to spend my whole life in Gumbo’s office, you know.’

  ‘Graphics?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Photography as well?’

  In the doldrums after the festive season, Sunny read Hector’s card again and felt unsettled by it. Hector and Lillie had closed a gap, but in doing so had widened the cracks in him. The need to fix the past, to plug the holes, felt intolerable. At a loss, he suggested a family trip to Sri Lanka. ‘You know, I think I would really like to go.’

  Clara shut her London gallery guide and snorted. ‘What? You think now that everyone has been bombed in that place, it’ll all be hunky-dory?’

  ‘The government has changed. The new President has come in on a peace ticket.’ The reign of deaths squads and the dark days of the south and north, the dead and disappeared, were said to be over. ‘There is a ceasefire. No hostilities. Peace talks.’

  ‘Oh, right. What about malaria? Dengue?’ Clara had no intention of going anywhere. She had signed up for the spring session at City and Guilds before she was halfway through her introductory graphics module. The class seemed to give her a real buzz. She wasn’t going to be thwarted by a phoney peace. ‘You don’t want Mikey risking all that, do you?’

  He didn’t want to expose his son to any danger. ‘Fine, I’ll go on my own then.’

  ‘If you must go, I guess it is better now than later.’

  ‘I’ll be back in two weeks. No one comes into the shop at this time anyway.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of the shop.’

  Sunny knew that. But what was there to talk about? The gulf was growing in front of him as well as behind him. He didn’t know how to cross it. He only knew he wanted to do something soon. If nothing else, to see the place of his birth, the country he had lost sight of for more than a quarter of a century, and make it his again. Possibly produce some pictures that would show something more than ruined monuments and moral debasement. He wanted to do it before he got old, before he started forgetting everything, or not caring; before Hector, and even Aunty Lillie, vanished from the world.

  There was no question of staying with Aunty Lillie and Hector. That would have been going too far. Hector had understood and had arranged for Sunny to stay with a niece of his instead – Mrs Adel Fonseka – who ran a guest house in Havelock Town. The room he was given had doors that opened straight on to a sandy garden very much like his earliest stamping ground. It was a pleasant house in a time warp off the main road. Even the phone in the house was restricted and didn’t have an international connection. He had to go to one of the tourist hotels to get a call through to London.

  Adel had the appearance of someone who still lived in the 1950s: stretch-fabric slacks, blouses with big bold buttons, sharp collars, earrings like knuckledusters and hair bunched purposefully, as if she were ready for a morning at a riding school. The impression she gave was one of awkwardly concealed warmth and neurotic household efficiency. She was only a couple of years older than Sunny, but she made him feel like her long-lost son. She had a splendid meal prepared for him, and immediately plied him with beer and spirits.

  ‘Anytime you want to eat just let me know. You can order whatever you like. Our cook Padma is very good. She can make anything. And if you want to have a drink, just help yourself. Beer, liquor, cream soda. The notebook is by the fridge. Just write it in and do a tick. Like a minibar, no?’

  Adel didn’t eat with him; she sat at the opposite end of the dark mournful table and watched. She said she’d already had her meal and claimed that she never touched alcohol at home. Suddenly she bawled out. ‘Mey, koheda vatura?’ An alarmed elderly woman emerged from the kitchen clutching a bottle of chilled water. ‘I’ll take some water,’ Adel explained with a bashful smile.

  For the rest of the evening she interrogated him on his plans. She especially wanted to know when he was going to visit Lillie and Hector. She was very fond of Hector and evidently a little unhappy about the marriage.

  ‘You haven’t seen Aunty Lillie for a long time, no? Not since her joining this crazy group? Or what?’

  Sunny said that he had last seen her at his father’s funeral. Adel was shocked. Sunny tried to change the subject and complimented her on her cook’s liver curry. ‘Very tasty.’

  ‘Not only rice and curry. She ma
kes excellent Wiener schnitzel and chicken chasseur. Tomorrow you like to try schnitzel?’

  ‘I’m out for the day.’

  ‘If you go to Uncle and Aunty, you’ll definitely need something. At least an omelette when you come back. You know they don’t eat, those two. Ramazan all the time. And all the time she is in a really dowdy sari. I don’t know why. Tikak pissu, no? A little mad. I think so.’

  Adel seemed to want to take over his life. The paying-guest scheme was not an economic venture but a kind of kinship game. Her husband had died soon after their marriage; she had no children. Enticing guests into the house was a means of gaining and consuming the family she had longed for, amalgamating husband to son in one go. That first night, after he made his excuses and retired to his room, Sunny found it difficult to sleep. It was not only the heat; the place seemed haunted.

  The next morning, after another huge meal, he set off for Rajagiriya where Hector and Lillie communed with their inner spirits in land-locked sanctity.

  The driver of the hired car was an excitable young man in his early twenties. An excess of curly hair was in constant danger of completely obscuring his vision and large, grey teeth dwarfed the rest of his eager face. When Sunny told him where he wanted to go, the man gave a squawk of delight. ‘My sister there. In Wellampitiya right next door, sir.’

  ‘OK.’ Sunny had no idea of the geography, it was all new territory.

  ‘Coming from England, sir?’ He leant to one side to take the first hard bend as though his old jalopy was leading in the Grand Prix.

  Sunny gripped the dashboard with one hand, his specs with the other. ‘Yes.’

  The driver stepped on the accelerator and the engine gurgled. In a high, nervous voice he asked what had happened to cricket in England, why the white people of the Queen could not play the great game any more. He said he’d heard they were in deep shit.

  Sunny had to confess that he knew nothing of the troubles affecting the England team or any other team. As the car shuddered over a broken stretch of the road, the driver sang the praises of the new Sri Lankan cricket squad. ‘One day,’ he crowed triumphantly. ‘One day to win, sir. Captain first-class. I have my small cousin, sir, he wants to be a champion.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Fourteen. Nothing in his head but cricket. I try to get him a job in a Matara garage. Mechanic, but all he wants is to play cricket by the sea. Now, I think, maybe that is his future. What do you think, sir? Better anyhow than becoming a murderer, no, sir? Everybody knows killing people is bad, but that is all they teach these days.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have to make a living?’

  ‘Professional sportsman. Matara Malli, that’s what they’ll call him.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Name is Piyasena, sir.’

  They got to Rajagiriya after what seemed like a catalogue of reversals, wrong turns and detours but which Sunny was assured were clever shortcuts to beat a number of leftover security checkpoints from the Pope’s recent visit. ‘Anti-LTT.’ Piyasena cheerily dropped the last E and made the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam sound like London Transport rather than a paramilitary organization. At the high-level road he turned to Sunny without slowing down. ‘Now where, sir?’

  Sunny repeated the address and told him he didn’t know exactly where it was.

  ‘That’s no good, sir. I also don’t know.’ They coasted down close to a small kiosk and he yelled out the address at a man dozing behind the counter. ‘Hector, Hector mahathaya?’ he added.

  The man behind the counter picked up a newspaper and fanned himself.

  Piyasena repeated his question and then opened his door to get out. The car began to roll. Sunny pulled the handbrake and shouted. ‘Brake!’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Sorry.’ He twisted around, one foot out, one in, and lunged for the lever, then saw Sunny’s hand on it. ‘OK, sir. No problem. That’s the one.’

  He left the door open and went over to some bystanders, then came back with his teeth flaring up into an enormous grin. ‘OK, sir. All fine.’

  Sunny knew they had found the right place the moment he saw the shrouded house with its wide veranda and large porch where a huge, cream American car lay stranded; surely the only American car of that opulent size for miles around, if not on the whole island?

  ‘Here.’

  The driver slammed on the brakes and Sunny just managed to protect himself with his hands.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ He leapt out of the car. A moment later he ducked back in to pull up the handbrake. ‘Full stop, sir. Flat ground. No problem.’

  Sunny got out and rattled the gate. A dog howled somewhere in the back of the house. No one appeared. He made his way towards the veranda.

  Aunty Lillie was meditating on a mat at the far end. Her face was lowered and only her grey hair tied in a bun was visible. She was thinner and smaller than Sunny remembered, but unmistakable. She was wearing a sari the colour of ash.

  She looked up. ‘Oh,’ she said, as though Sunny was in the habit of popping in every other morning. ‘Sanath, you are here already.’ She didn’t get up from her lotus position.

  A chair scraped on the hard cement floor of the room behind her and a big figure loomed out of the shadows. ‘Ah, so you have made it,’ Hector boomed. ‘Come, son . . . Sunny.’ He ran the words together to cover up his embarrassment. ‘You found us. Good.’

  Sunny rummaged in his bag and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and a large packet of Walker’s shortbread. He gave Hector the whisky, and Aunty Lillie the shortbread. She looked at the packet with some suspicion. ‘Butter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh dear. We don’t eat butter.’

  Hector put a hand on her shoulder. ‘For guests, my dear. With the whisky, for guests.’

  ‘Guests? We don’t encourage guests.’

  ‘I thought chocolates would melt,’ Sunny explained.

  ‘Chocolates have butter.’ Lillie’s voice was brimming with severely tried patience. By now her nephew should at least have learnt the ingredients of confectionery.

  ‘I also brought you a tablecloth.’ Sunny quickly handed her a thin square parcel, gift-wrapped in the West End.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘We thought you might like it. Clara said it cleans very easily.’

  ‘Isn’t she with you?’

  ‘She didn’t come this time. Mikey is in school. I wanted to make this trip on my own.’

  Hector made a humming noise.

  Lillie opened the parcel and unfolded the white nylon cloth with its beaded patterns. She pulled it through her fingers, measuring it by the arm, like someone examining a fishing net. ‘Very thin.’

  ‘Yes. Easy care.’

  She let it drop in a heap next to her and examined the inside of the wrapping paper. ‘This Clara he says is a paper girl. English?’

  Hector shuffled over to the wicker chairs arranged in a small circle in the open lounge. ‘Come, why don’t we sit down on the chairs. Lillie, enough meditating for the morning?’

  Lillie sighed and uncrossed her legs. Putting one hand on the floor she pushed herself up and straightened out. ‘Tea? You drink tea at least.’

  ‘No sugar, just milk.’

  ‘Good. They take a lot of sugar in England, no?’

  ‘Liverpool.’ Hector added with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I remember the sugar money there. Slave trade. What a business.’ He paused, recollecting his visit of all those years ago. ‘And how’s Tifus? You see him at all?’

  ‘I saw him last summer when we went up to Clara’s parents.’

  ‘So, how’s the fellow?’

  ‘All right.’ Then Sunny thought of how Tifus had looked. ‘Actually he’s been a little unhappy about things.’

  ‘Those randy clients not kicking the bucket fast enough for him, eh? Surely he must be up for retirement by now?’

  ‘He likes his work. I think it’s more to do with his son, Ranil.’ Delora had told him that Tifus wanted Ranil to settle down with
a girl as Sunny had, instead of drifting like a cloud in the Himalayas.

  ‘I remember the chap. Far-thinking fellow. Good aura.’

  ‘He’s gone a bit too far . . .’ Sunny was about to say spiritually, but managed to stop himself in time.

  ‘Far is not enough, you see. Far is like deep. Often mistaken as sufficient. But you need to also think wide. You understand?’ He turned to Lillie. ‘That is what we, in our twilight years, are learning. Isn’t that so, old girl? Width. Breadth.’

  She looked out at the broad, dark garden of tangled trees. ‘Who is that fellow at the gate?’

  ‘What fellow?’ Hector started.

  Sunny told them it must be his driver.

  Lillie was outraged. ‘What is wrong with the bus? All you have to do is change in Nawala, no? Hector?’

  Sunny said he didn’t know about the buses, or the whereabouts of Nawala. He needed a car.

  ‘We don’t need a car here, you know.’ She was back in the business of unfair reprimands. ‘Your mother spoiled you. I told her, you’ll become a very lazy boy. Now look what has happened.’

  ‘You have a big American car out there, I saw.’ He wasn’t going to take it. Not at nearly forty, for God’s sake. Boy?

  ‘Ah,’ sighed Hector, happily ignoring the mounting tension. His big face settled into an easy, relaxed smile. ‘You saw it? Beauty, no? I brought it back from Manila. I couldn’t leave it after all those years but, you see, we don’t use it. Petrol is too expensive now, and the tyres went flat. You can’t get those American tyres very easily here. There’s a chap down the High Level road starting a business in spares, but he says it will cost me a fortune. He has to steal them from the damn American Embassy.’