The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  By mid-morning, he decided it was time to go to the house where he had lived with his mother and Lester. The road was not far from Adel’s. He took the Voigtländer and set off on foot. The shade trees disappeared. The heat was stultifying. He found the road, but nothing looked quite the same. He reached number 23, the site of his first home. A small block of flats had taken its place. There was no sign of a garden. Grey concrete had covered what had once been a lawn; breeze-block walls had replaced hedges and fences. He kicked a small stone towards the gate. None of the things that had made up his early world, imprinted as images on his brain, existed any more. Everything had been violated. There was no past – no place, no people – except what he remembered. It frightened him.

  When Sunny went back to see Hector and Lillie again, he found them eating plantains on the veranda.

  ‘Our leading light says we must alternate the fast with the feast.’ Hector held out an offering, which Sunny declined. He asked for a glass of water instead.

  Lillie pointed to a jug perspiring on a side table. It had a saucer placed on top. There were two glasses on a tea-stained doily next to it.

  ‘I got hold of Brendan. He is very keen to meet you, Sunny. Fellow was so happy when I told him about your hobby.’ Hector peeled another small plantain and took a bite. ‘Excellent plantain. You are sure you don’t want one? These are not like those yellow plastic thingamies you get in England.’

  Lillie sighed. ‘Does this Adel give you fruit? If you are going to eat you should have fruit.’

  ‘I had pineapple for breakfast.’

  ‘Pineapple is much better in the afternoon. Morning time you must have plantains.’

  Hector interrupted her. ‘If you have your car and that driver fellow, we can go and see Brendan today. We can drop in for a spot of lunch.’

  Lillie looked horrified. ‘Lunch in that house?’

  ‘He has a cook woman who makes him lunch.’

  ‘She’ll just give you some burnt jahdi and tinpot pol-sambol.’

  Hector smiled. ‘You stay, my dear. I’ll take Sunny.’

  ‘Where is his house?’ Sunny asked.

  ‘Not far.’

  Back in his London shop, Sunny had no trouble dealing with photographers and would-be photographers, but the prospect of visiting a semi-professional of his father’s generation made him nervous.

  Lillie picked up a prayer book and turned a few pages. ‘Why you want to look through a little hole in a box to see what you can see if you just open your eyes, I don’t understand.’

  They sat in silence for a little while. Then Hector yawned and got to his feet. ‘I’ll go and get my wallet. On the way back, we can pick up some fresh bread. If you don’t mind, Sunny?’

  Lillie harrumphed and continued to read.

  Brendan’s studio was enormous. A display cabinet bigger than Sunny’s whole shop held vintage Hasselblads Sunny had only ever seen in catalogues that were themselves antiquarian. He also had a receptionist, a young girl with long wavy hair who was replicated in a couple of the portraits on the wall. Behind her a fridge with a glass door exhibited three small piles of film; on either side hung heavy crumpled black curtains.

  ‘Is the boss in the shooting gallery?’ Hector inquired with a polite nod.

  ‘Mr Amarasinghe? He is here, sir, but can you wait a minute?’

  ‘Of course.’ He turned to Sunny and gave a conspiratorial smirk.

  ‘He is in the darkroom.’ She paused, clearly struggling to add to this information. Then her face lit up. ‘Doing the training of our new staff.’

  ‘New staff?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Srimantha was here before, you remember him sir? He has gone. So now we have to start right from scratch with new staff. Priya came yesterday.’

  She pressed a button on the telephone console in front of her. ‘One moment, sir. I will go and tell . . .’

  ‘Pretty girl,’ Hector mused when she had disappeared. Sunny went over and examined the cameras in the glass case.

  ‘Hallo, Hector.’ The loud greeting was followed by a thunderclap. Sunny turned and found a man about half Hector’s height and at least twice his girth standing with his hands clasped together in front of him. He had an angular mouth that stretched from ear to ear in a sharp grin.

  ‘I thought I’d bring Sunny to meet you, otherwise he’d never make it . . .’

  ‘Very good. Pleased to meet you, Sunny. I knew your father.’

  ‘Hallo.’ Sunny extended a hand. It was not going to be met. Brendan was not a hand shaker. Sunny diverted his hand. ‘Fine old cameras,’ he added, pointing at them.

  ‘Fakes. I get a chap in Maradana to copy them – just the shell. Good, no?’

  Sunny laughed. ‘Great.’

  He was pleased. ‘You appreciate the joke. Tell you what, I’ll get him to make you one, if you like.’

  Hector didn’t follow. ‘What are you chaps so pleased about?’

  ‘The illusion, Hector, the illusion. Welcome to the house of illusions. You want to see the studio?’

  The large room was professionally kitted out with light stands, reflective umbrellas, black backdrops and white tents. ‘We can create anything here,’ he declared. ‘But come, let’s go in the house and I’ll get some lunch sorted. You’ll stay for lunch?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Hector answered for them both.

  Brendan barked out a string of orders to an invisible retainer as they passed through to the main house. He took them into an air-conditioned room with frosted windows and proceeded to cross-examine Sunny about his photographic intentions. ‘You want to do some jungle shooting? I can arrange it. Can’t do Wilpattu, even with the bloody truce, but Yala is possible. You like to try? Leopard? Or how about the Habarana herd in the north? Elephants?’

  ‘I’d prefer to find something different.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I understand. We already have enough animal lovers. No need for another one to go wild. You want human drama? What about Trinco? I took a bunch of journos up there the other day.’

  ‘Tiger country?’ Hector asked.

  ‘Good one, Hector. Very good. But these days, you know, the bloody elephants are far more dangerous. Ten fellows were killed up in Dambulla. Villagers, I mean, not elephants.’

  ‘I wish I could capture what has gone. Disappeared,’ Sunny mumbled.

  Brendan fixed a bruised yellowy eye on him. ‘Like old Lester? You know, a lot of the buggers who’ve been writing in the papers these days have been an insult to your father’s profession. Now finally the media is getting its teeth back, but those thugs recently assaulting Jayantha is very worrying.’

  Sunny was aware that murder and the intimidation of the press had taken place with grim regularity, especially since the late 1980s, but he didn’t feel it involved him.

  ‘I am not into journalism. My father wasn’t either, in the end.’ Sunny told Brendan how he had tried to find the house he’d been brought up in. What he wanted was to take a picture of that house now. Not find an old picture of the house, or to take a picture of what had replaced it, but somehow to recreate it with the camera. He wanted photographs that did more than say ‘I am here’ or ‘that is there’. ‘Maybe something that brings out what is in our minds, even if it is no longer in the world. Or never was . . .’

  ‘Fantasy? Like Guinevere and Lancelot? The Pre-Raphaelites? No more fake truths, only true fakes.’

  The comparison had not occurred to Sunny and came as a shock, especially since he would not have suspected Brendan of harbouring such an interest. He imagined Brendan in his studio with his receptionist draped in silk, her Pre-Raphaelite hair flowing into a garden of sandalwood and cinnamon. A leopard-skin garter.

  Lunch was brought in. It was much as Lillie had warned: coconut sambol, charred segments of dried fish, a curry of unidentifiable bones and a mound of pebbly cold rice.

  They moved over to the glass-top table and sat down. Brendan reached over and helped himself to the rice and then urged Hector and Sunny to do the
same. ‘You know, I am glad Hector brought you over. You are welcome to make full use of the studio any time you like, Sunny. We have all the props. Models too are no problem. They are willing to do anything these days. All it takes is money. Open sesame. Anything goes . . .’

  ‘What about you? What if your life had taken another turn? I’d like to take that picture.’

  ‘You mean, what I would like to have been? King Arthur? Or Parakramabahu the Great?’

  Sunny suggested that with Hector, a portrait in front of the Central Bank building, where he might have spent his whole career if he had not gone to Manila, would be interesting. ‘I’d like to construct the picture as if that had been the life.’

  Hector’s face clouded. ‘Yes, indeed. I wonder what it would have been like.’

  ‘In that case,’ Brendan said, ‘do me as a captain.’ He grinned. ‘Captain of a cricket team.’

  Brendan found his old regalia and got changed in the downstairs bathroom, hissing and cursing at the smell of mothballs. Although neither the trousers nor the shirt fitted, Sunny set him up in the studio in a way that hid the gaps. The receptionist, impressed by the sight of her boss bursting out of his cricket whites, wanted to know what it was all about. When Sunny explained, she said she had always wanted to be a singer. ‘Deep down, that is my really true desire.’

  ‘OK. Let’s pretend you are a pop star.’ Sunny took a very melancholy picture of her that he knew would fulfil Brendan’s Pre-Raphaelite fantasies. All throat, bust and big, moist eyes.

  Hector offered to have a word with a friend to see if they could do him later, in the office of the governor of the Central Bank. ‘That would be a coup.’ The thought brought a smile to his face.

  Brendan wanted to develop the pictures straightaway, but Sunny said, ‘I still have ten shots left.’ He had learned to be careful with money.

  ‘Such patience,’ Brendan said to Hector. ‘Just like the father, no?’

  Adel had placed Sunny’s laundry, neatly ironed, on the bed. The shirts baked paper crisp, the socks carefully coupled, and even the underwear – cotton mesh briefs for the heat, and boxers striped and butterflied – pressed like they’d never been pressed before.

  Adel knocked on the door. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  Sunny said he had been given tea, and thanked her for the laundry. Trying to be discreet, he added. ‘You didn’t need to iron everything.’

  ‘Oh, but you must have your clothes ironed. I would hate to think of you in those, all crumpled up.’

  ‘I could iron . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know they had buttons now. Is that how it is in London?’

  ‘These are made here.’

  ‘Really?’ She picked up a pair of boxers and gently opened it up. She squinted at the label on the waistband. ‘Made in Sri Lanka. Imagine that. Does everybody in England wear them now?’ she purred. ‘Anyway, I’d better leave you to get on with your bath or whatever.’ She placed the garment back on the bed and straightened the fly. ‘There you are. Perfect, no?’

  That evening he declined an invitation to accompany her to Mt Lavinia. He wanted to think about things. Should he make more of an effort with Hector and Lillie? They were the closest links he had to a country he wanted to reclaim.

  He phoned Hector and proposed a trip out together. ‘Good idea. With this damn car out of action, we never go anywhere. I don’t like the buses very much, actually.’ Hector suggested one of Brendan’s safaris. ‘You don’t have to take photos if you don’t want to, but I wouldn’t mind seeing those elephants he goes on about.’

  They settled on a couple of days up at Habarana. Brendan said he would organize everything. He was still chuffed with his stint on the other side of the lens.

  Sunny managed to get one more call through to Clara from the Galle Face Hotel. The time difference and her busy schedule made it impossible to do more. He got her just as she was downing her muesli before the school run. ‘It’s crazy,’ she moaned down the line. ‘Gumbo’s driving me insane.’

  ‘What about this Alex? Your art class?’

  ‘Thank God for that. Alex has this wonderful new project. We’ll be doing all the galleries. I just need some time.’

  That’s what I need too, Sunny thought when he put down the phone. Time. The chance to start again. Real time. Mikey would be nine the week he got back. So many years that he had been too busy photographing other babies, other children, and then locking and unlocking a cubicle full of obsolete machines. He walked on to the veranda and looked out at the huge open park bordered by the sea on one side and the tall buildings of the city at the far end. The ground used to be green, he remembered. Not any more. It had turned sepia. The colour had evaporated like everything else in the past. The ocean looked fierce and dark. Some kids were playing with a bat and a ball, but there were no kites flying in the sky. It made him worry not only about his life but also Mikey’s childhood. That too was passing. Soon the kid would be in double digits. Then nothing of those earlier days would remain, except what Mikey might remember, and the pictures Sunny took, or regretted having failed to take. The thoughts kept swarming around in his head, the mental images he possessed began to fade. There was nothing he could hold on to.

  Panic filled him. His chest hurt. He suddenly wanted to shoot film without stopping. Maybe that really was the only way to keep things from slipping away. He wanted to be back in his house, in his street, in his London, taking picture after picture after picture – Mikey, me, Mikey, me, Mikey, Clara, me. Saving them. Now. Quickly. Before it was too late.

  Catch it, he wanted to say to his son. These years will become as difficult for you to remember as mine are for me. He yearned to be something more to Mikey than his father had been for him.

  ‘Tootle-hoo, Sunny.’ Brendan was in a khaki safari suit, looking quite the successful thug. ‘Dawn patrol, eh?’ He had a brand new Landrover Discovery at the gate. ‘Turbocharged, no?’ Brendan smiled proudly and stroked the leather trim.

  Brendan’s driver had eyes like boiled gumdrops; he preferred sound to sight, the horn to the brakes, and relied on a clarion blast every five seconds to clear the road. Most creatures – human and animal – scattered out of the way and whatever didn’t disappeared anyway with their passing. By the time they got to Hector’s house, the waking life of outer Colombo had been decimated. Hector and Lillie got into the vehicle with no idea of what was in store.

  ‘Lunch in Kurunegala,’ Brendan announced.

  ‘Lunch?’ Lillie hesitated.

  Hector reminded her that it was permitted while travelling, as long as they went by land.

  ‘Essential, my dear,’ Brendan added. ‘You cannot go on an empty stomach.’ Not that he was likely to have experienced such a phenomenon.

  The small wayside inn they stopped at for lunch had been cleaned out of its rice and curry by a coach tour about half an hour earlier. All that was left were some limp Chinese rolls.

  A long hungry hot afternoon drive later, they reached their destination: the Lake View Hotel. Its plain whitewashed walls, sloping gardens and perfectly symmetrical blue swimming pool would have made it the ultimate in modern holiday resorts of the early 1960s. But now even the blistering garden shrubs had a vintage look to them. There were boulders in the drive and the walls at the front had begun to crumble.

  ‘Is this another ruin?’ Hector muttered as he slowly climbed out.

  ‘I thought you would like it, Hector. Old-world. Quiet. Very good for meditative types.’ Brendan lit a cigarette and chucked the match into a gutter. ‘Now, where’s the reception?’ He marched inside and rang a desk bell.

  The main foyer was spacious, with a view of the pool and then the lake in the distance beyond. It had excellent natural light.

  ‘I think the staff might have died some time ago.’ Hector sat down on a rickety wicker chair and contemplated a three-year-old calendar pinned to the wall.

  Brendan rang the bell with extra vigour.

  Eventually a slende
r young man in a mud-coloured shirt emerged from the manager’s office. ‘Major Amarasinghe? Sir, here already?’

  With barely contained excitement the manager showed them to their rooms and then went to ensure that tea was ready.

  Out by the pool, the wind was up. When Sunny came out he found the hotel manager and his waiter pouncing on wafting paper serviettes and sandwiches like a pair of cats. The teapot had half the tablecloth flapping over it, ready to sail.

  The surface of the water in the pool broke in a whoosh. ‘What’s up, men?’ Brendan bellowed through the spray. He bobbed over to the climbing rail.

  ‘Wind, sir.’ The manager grabbed another piece of green garnish as it flew past. ‘At this time it blows hard.’

  ‘Can’t you do something about it?’

  ‘It is not in my power, sir. We have no climate control . . .’

  ‘Windbreaker, man. You know, use a screen.’

  The waiter dived behind him and missed the catch: a scrap of lettuce flew over the boundary parapet.

  ‘Sir, we have a good wall.’ The manager swung around, arms flailing, propelled by the wind. ‘Dining room, sir? Or I can put the tea in the hall inside. Very nice sitting area there. Our Swiss guests used to like it very much.’

  Brendan hauled himself out of the water and picked up his towel. He wiped those parts of his abdomen his small arms could reach without too much effort, and then let the towel flutter over his shoulders. ‘Right. Do that then. How can you eat anything in this hurricane?’

  ‘Not a hurricane, sir. This is our cool breeze.’