‘You better go and find out what he wants.’ Lillie’s beady eyes were still fastened on the figure lounging by the gate. ‘He probably wants to eat. There’s a kadé up the road he can go to. We have no food. We are fasting today.’
Sunny went and gave Piyasena some money for a bite. He told him he could go see his sister as well as long as he returned by four o’clock.
Back on the veranda Sunny asked Hector about the fasting. ‘Is it like the business with the Señora? The one in Quezon City?’
Lillie’s head jerked up. Her gaunt face hardened. ‘Philippines?’
‘Señora? No, no, we have moved beyond old Zaramazov. Here, Sunny, we are preparing for the twenty-first century. It will be a very important period, you know. They talk about it being the age of China and all that, but that is a misreading. China has lost its way, you see. I was there, after all, at Tiananmen.’
‘You were at Tiananmen?’ Sunny wondered if Hector, like Aunty Lillie, had gone completely loopy.
He smiled. ‘Yes. The bank’s annual meeting. I was retired, but I got the invitation and went. You see, a lifetime of work makes you pumped up with air. You get a little fat, but feel good. Then when you stop working and retire, old as a prune, it all passes out of your backside like so much useless gas. You end up wrinkled up and feeling exceedingly stupid. You should stop working early, you see, or never stop. Your father was very clever, Sunny. He didn’t stop. Anyway, I went to the meeting to get a second wind, as it were. Old Navaratnam came too. You remember our cricket coach, Rudy? Rudolf? I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist a trip to Beijing. It was quite fantastic. Zhao himself came to the ADB meeting and said how they were listening to the young people demonstrating outside, how everything was part of the remaking of China for the new era.’ Hector’s breath was heavy. He gazed up at a couple of sparrows that flew, chirping, into the eaves. His eyes had stopped twinkling. ‘Poor fellow. Poor young people.’
‘Were you there when the shooting started?’
‘Oh, no. The meeting was over by then. The authorities wouldn’t let anyone stay on. Rudolf tried, I remember, but no chance. There was enough commotion for them with Gorby coming from Moscow and all that. But we saw the initial demonstration. That in itself was traumatic enough for Rudolf. You see, he too was an internationalist. While we were waiting for the coach to pick us up from their Friendship Store, he told me, “The ideals of the LTTE are now so corrupted, my only hope is China.” His only hope. And you see what happened. Even there you see how, in the end, the old want to kill the young. Just like in 1971 here. And now those fellows in the jungle. It is the material world that corrupts . . .’
Lillie who had been listening intently to Hector’s reminiscences, suddenly broke in. ‘Politics. Everywhere this politics spoils everything. Evil, these people are evil.’
Hector tried to pacify her. ‘Not evil, my dear. People are not evil, they are misguided.’
‘Don’t be a chump, Hector. Misguided? These gunrunners, these warmongers, these rapists, arsonists, killers, running around with knives and guns and dead people’s bones? They are all spiteful, hateful, evil little monsters. Misbegotten, not misguided. All they want to do is kill.’
Sunny told them he’d thought a truce had been declared. The Pope himself had come, from Manila of all places, carrying doves, pigeons and what-have-you. Peace was possible. Joseph Vaz was canonized. The year 1995, people claimed, was the first window of opportunity in a wall of oblivion.
‘Ha!’ She looked at Sunny in disbelief. ‘Peace? The only peace anybody here wants is a piece of somebody else’s fat cake. Bread and butter, eggs and flour, have made them all go nuts.’
‘On Tuesdays and Thursdays we eat nothing,’ Hector added.
‘I see. Thursdays, too.’
Lillie glared at both husband and nephew and then picked up the tablecloth and knotted it around her fist. They waited for the air to clear, taking in the sounds of cars on the high road, crows by the garbage, the dog in the garden.
After a little while Hector continued. ‘You will be amazed at the number of new bakeries in Colombo.’
‘Is there one nearby? With mas-pan?’ Sunny had a sudden hankering for a sweet bun baked with a meat curry filling.
‘You are hungry? Does your son also eat and eat?’ Aunty Lillie looked appalled at the realization that her brother and his wife had unleashed such avarice into the world.
‘Only cake,’ Sunny retorted with a kind of infantile zeal.
Hector laughed, relieving them from confrontation. ‘A son. My goodness, I cannot believe that you have a boy. How old now?’
‘He’ll be nine this month.’
Hector whistled. ‘I’m trying to remember how old you were when I used to see you in those Makati days.’
‘A little older.’
‘Come, let me show you something.’ He eased himself up and led the way into the darker recesses of the room. There was a small bookcase filled with volumes on the world’s lesser-known religions. On top stood a framed photograph of Mikey that Sunny had sent one Christmas. ‘It is very good,’ he nodded. ‘Very good to see this boy. Does he play cricket?’
Sunny sighed, feeling another twinge of regret. ‘No, we haven’t tried to.’
‘Ah, but you should, you know. Remember how you got us all playing, back in Manila? The Makati XI. Dear me, that was something else. I have been thinking about those days a great deal. So much so that I have become a bit of a cricket bore.’
‘You joined a club?’
‘Oh, no. But I have been following the sport. A very good team is coming up, you know. You watch those fellows. They are getting somewhere. That Ranatunga is not bad. Cunning fellow, despite his size.’ He made the shape of a pot belly with his hand. ‘For me it has also become something quite . . . spiritual. Shall I show you?’
‘Please.’ He was desperate to move away from Aunty Lillie’s critical gaze.
‘Come, we will go through to the other side.’
Sunny followed him.
‘Look.’ Hector pointed at the squashed tyres of his car. The rubber had oozed out from under the rims like fat. The paint had dulled and the glaze was lost in a rash of rust, dust and grime, but there was still something majestic about the car.
‘Yes, it is a Buick. Getting on now, like all of us. This was the last one I had before I left Manila. Even bigger than old Lester’s. You never saw it.’
‘How weird.’ For a moment he thought he could smell the burning peanut oil Beatriz used to use to fry her lumpia, a pungent sweet aroma that would waft into his Urdaneta practice arena, in the garage, outside the kitchen.
‘Even the electrics – the windows are electric, you know – are gone.’ Hector looked disappointed at the car’s failure to maintain itself. He brushed a curled dry yellow leaf off the bonnet. ‘Trouble is the roads in this place are not worth driving on. You’ve seen the state of them?’
‘Potholes?’ There were some terrific ones, worthy of an Indiana Jones film, but Sunny had seen some good new roads too. ‘Not on every road.’
‘That one going to parliament is very good,’ Hector agreed. ‘They certainly fixed that. But everywhere else, if the potholes don’t get you, the roadblocks will.’
He shuffled out of the porch into the back garden. ‘Come, you will like this.’
He headed for a big, brooding tree in the corner. It had a rope hanging from one of the horizontal branches. At the end of it, the old trick with the cricket ball, this time in an orange plastic net.
‘I learnt this from you, remember? You had it in a sock, but I wanted to hear the leather and see the ball. What do you think?’
‘Fantastic.’ Sunny lost twenty-five years at a stroke.
‘You see, I have discovered it is not from the old that you learn, but from the young. Isn’t that so?’
‘I am not so sure.’ There seemed so much that he needed to teach Mikey. If only he knew how, and time was a little kinder.
‘I remember
ed watching you with that ball, practising in your father’s house in Urdaneta. I thought it was blissful. You would be completely lost in a world of your own, hitting that ball in its white sock and waiting for it to come back and be knocked again. That was the state we were all looking for, you know. It is what meditation is all about. You know what I mean?’
‘Zaramazov?’
‘Almost. Except that you must not try too hard. It is not an easy business. Even he, the Grand Master, did not quite know . . .’
‘Zen cricket?’
‘Well, I come and knock it about for a bit and some days I am lucky. I find it. Other days it is just a bloody cricket ball. You want a go?’
‘Later, maybe.’
‘So, tell me, what will you do now that you are here?’ He stooped a little and searched his pockets.
‘I wanted to see what was here. Lay some ghosts to rest.’
‘Ah, yes. That is certainly important in this country.’
‘I’d like to take some pictures.’
‘From where?’
‘Photographs. I want to take some photographs of the place. The country. You gave me my first proper camera. I became a photographer.’ Sunny pulled the small leather-cased Voigtländer out of his bag. ‘You must have known.’
Hector shrugged. Sunny wasn’t sure whether he even remembered the camera.
‘Good. Yes, that is good. My old friend Brendan is a photographer too, you know. A lot of people like to take pictures now. He guides them all over the place on photo-shoots, or something like that. Shooting is the big thing, as you can imagine. War zone and all that. Anyway you should meet him.’
‘It’s OK. I want to find my own angle.’
‘Lionel Wendt was another fellow. And Alphonso. We used to go to their shows. Brendan knew the whole crowd. Lillie and your mother and, of course, Lester knew them too. The same sort of business, no? So, you are going into it as well?’
‘Not exactly. I don’t do journalism. I take more personal pictures.’
‘Alphonso was an athlete, not a journalist. Aesthete, I mean. And what about Lionel Wendt? Very artistic. Naked bodies, coconuts, everything.’
‘I know.’
‘Let me get you Brendan’s number.’ He called out to Lillie. ‘Where is that Brendan’s number?’
‘Why do you want to talk to that lunatic?’
‘Sunny is going to take photographs. He should meet Brendan. When did we last see Lionel’s pictures?’
‘Who?
‘Lionel Wendt.’
‘Where?’
Hector rummaged around a side table in the lounge and discovered the household address book: an old metal case with a spring-loaded lid. Lester had given it to him as a birthday present. Sunny remembered going with his father to Greenhills to get it. Was it Alemar’s, where they had all those bleached American paperbacks and tons of stationery? Lester had been so pleased with the purchase. Sunny could remember him tapping it and saying, ‘Hector really needs something to keep track of people. For an administrator he is an amazingly disorganized fellow. Head in the clouds, all the time.’
Hector chuckled, as if recalling the same days. He slid a small tarnished tab to the top of the faded gold alphabet and flipped it open. ‘Pity old Alpho’s gone. Passed away . . .’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Ah, here we are.’ He picked up the pencil attached to the case and scribbled a number on an envelope that lay on the table. He handed the envelope to Sunny. ‘There. Call the chap. He’ll be only too glad to talk about nudes with you.’
‘Don’t you need this letter?’
‘Why? What is it?’
‘I don’t know. It hasn’t been opened. Looks official.’
Hector retrieved the envelope and ripped it open. ‘Damn fool bank manager. Doesn’t know what he is doing. This is the second letter on a deposit account that I closed six months ago.’ He handed the empty envelope back.
Lillie tilted her chair back. ‘Keep away from that idiot. He has spent too much of his life in a dark room to know anything about anything.’
Sunny wasn’t sure whether she was talking about him, or Brendan.
On the way back to Adel’s, Sunny stopped at a bakery and got a collection of savouries in lieu of his lunch.
Later, in the evening, when he came out to return the plate and glass to the kitchen, Adel waylaid him. ‘You were eating, no?’
‘Just some pastries?’
‘From the Taj? Or Galadari?’
He said it was not from a five-star hotel, just a small bakery.
‘Fab? On Galle Road?’
‘No. Just a small place we passed on the way back from Rajagiriya.’
‘You should be careful, really. Some of these places have things that are weeks old. Especially those savouries. Sweets at least have sugar to keep them.’
‘It was fine.’
She made a scornful face and warned that patties and mas-pan were the worst. ‘Biological time bombs. You must never buy from those roadside dives. If you want patties, just tell me. I can make them myself, very quickly.’ She cupped her hands and wiggled them, patting this side and that.
Sunny promised he’d ask her next time.
‘What about dinner?’
‘I might take a stroll and try the Chinese restaurant at the top of the road.’
‘Chinese? That one is not very good. You should go up to the roundabout. Anyway, listen, instead of wandering around alone like a madcap, why not come with me? I’m going to a demo-dinner at eight o’clock.’
‘Demo-dinner?’ She hardly looked a rebel.
Adel smiled, turning coy. ‘We are all members of this din-din group, and we meet whenever Angie or Arnie come back from one of their trips; they are forever going to Singapore or Bangkok. They have a lovely dinner and demonstrate the latest gadgets they have brought.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, anything. Last time it was this special non-stick frying pan they had found which was amazing. They get all sorts of things. You never know what to expect.’
‘So what? They just show off their latest kitchen toys?’
‘No, no, silly. It is a business. They have a demo and then they sell the thing. You have to buy a ticket for the dinner. Very reasonable and there is a paying bar for the serious drinkers. Tonight it’s at The Tamarind Club.’
‘Could we stop on the way for me to make a phone call?’
‘To London?’
‘If I could.’
‘Oh, you can do that at the club. They are all set up for that.’
The Tamarind Club was based in what had been an early post-colonial residence about ten minutes’ drive away.
Upstairs in a private function room about fifty chairs had been placed in a semicircle, most already filled by habitués in their middle years. Everyone, even the thin ones, looked quite buoyed up, as though the air-conditioning was pumped straight in under the skin. Sunny collected the complimentary drinks: rum punch for Adel, beer for him.
A woman in a green sari came up. ‘Adel, where have you been, darling?’
Adel took a quick gulp of punch and giggled.
Sunny excused himself and went to find the telephone. The timing was just right to catch Clara in London. She was at home preparing prints for her next evening class. Mikey had gone to one of his innumerable parties at the Finsbury Park bowling alley.
‘How is it?’ Clara asked. ‘Have you met them?’
He gave a simplified account of the visit to Rajagiriya.
‘Where are you now?’
He tried to explain the business at the club. ‘And what about you?’
She said she had found another course to go on at Easter. The application had to be in within three days.
‘Good luck.’
‘I want to get a portfolio together. Alex says I’d have no problem getting on to a degree course. He’s been great. So supportive.’
‘Alex?’
‘You know? My teacher. The artist.’
‘Supportive?�
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‘We had a long chat and he says I could do it. He’s very encouraging.’
‘I see. You want to go to art college?’
‘Yes. I really want to do it.’
Back at the house, Adel leant against the door. ‘That hairbrush and massager is the thing for me. Who needs hair curlers in this country, but that de-tention business with the electric massage is just the ticket. I get this ache, you know, sometimes right across my shoulder.’ She turned her shoulder to show where her tender flesh might once have been too taut.
‘You should have bought one,’ Sunny said.
She looked at him dreamily. ‘Ah-ney, Sunny, you gave your wife a son, no?’
‘It is not like a gift . . .’
‘My husband was going to,’ she interrupted and then started shaking her head from side to side, ‘I was young and ready but then he died.’ She swayed forward.
‘Oh, shame.’
‘Impossible to believe it. He was young enough, but heart went kaput . . .’ She was beginning to fall towards him. Sunny steadied her against the door. Her shoulder was soft and round. She gripped his arm.
‘You better go to sleep.’ He prised her fingers off one by one.
‘You think so?’ She looked at him, confused. Her hand trembled in his. ‘Right, then. I suppose I had better . . . Goodnight.’ She drew back and turned towards the stairs.
Sunny went to his room and closed the door. He sat on the edge of the bed and thought of the deceased. His father. His mother. Unrequited love. Hector. Lillie. Clara. Desire.
The next day Adel was as bright and cheerful as ever. She’d had her breakfast early and was busy with shopping lists and phone calls. ‘Put your laundry out to be done,’ she hollered as she left the house.
Outside a coucal was calling; birdsong that Sunny recognized and wondered how he could ever have forgotten. The bird was somewhere high up in the trees next door and its notes bounced from branch to branch. The echoes seemed to bring the world close in to Sunny. He noticed other sounds, high and low: smaller birds, insects. He tried to remember what it had been like to grow up in a place like this. A place full of contrast, light and shadow. The sun’s rays seemed to slice through a hundred shades of green. This was light he understood, intuitively. Would Mikey, growing up with the softer grain of northern light, find it too vivid? Was it a question of latitude? The position of the sun? In Makati, the light had been as bright, but seemed flatter. Perhaps it was to do with the trees. Clara had done her autumn project on Van Gogh’s move to Arles, highlighting the fervour of his description of southern light. Was that what was magnified here?
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