The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Isn’t that what this has been?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The last couple of years. You haven’t exactly been rushed off your feet have you, except between that Victoria Wine and the bottle bank.’

  ‘Wines?’

  ‘Whatever . . .’

  ‘You think I should have tried harder with the shop? Is that it?’

  The brown pleats in her eyes were set solid, like glass. Distant. Hard. ‘I think you could just try, Sunny. You give up so easily. Like you have nothing in you any more.’

  ‘Nothing in me any more?’

  ‘Maybe you never did.’

  That was unfair. Uncalled for. She’d spent too many evenings with a brush in her hand. He had plenty inside him. She knew it. Plenty of fluid, at least, of one sort or another. But the world was spinning too fast. There were things that he simply could not handle. It wasn’t that he was pushing his luck, or her. No. The world was pushing in on him. There were empty jam jars and whisky bottles by the tumble dryer waiting to be taken out, old newspapers overflowing from wastepaper baskets all over the house. The jasmine, the geranium and the ficus benjamina were all brown. Maybe it was his fault, but then he thought, couldn’t it also be hers?

  Mikey soon slid from the ‘A Train’ to something he called ‘da real mutherfuckin’ world’ and exchanged the piano stool for the couch. His preferred instrument became the CD, to which Sunny’s usual response was, ‘Can’t you play something that doesn’t thump so much?’ It was not that he wanted a different beat or rhythm; he didn’t know what he wanted, other than a double-fingered Scotch.

  ‘I can’t go back to taking pictures,’ he grumbled to Clara. ‘Nobody wants photos any more.’

  ‘I’m not sure you are right about that. People are really into it these days. Alex says everyone is doing it. We all need to make something, you know, and with the cameras you get now, anyone can take pictures.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Sunny slumped a little lower in his chair. ‘I want a job where I get a wage. Something simple and straightforward like yours.’

  ‘Then why don’t you get one?’

  A couple of weeks later Clara came home with the news that a photo-lab was opening next to the local newsagent. ‘They need staff.’

  ‘You want me to be humiliated?’

  She stared at the fish cakes smouldering under the grill. ‘I think they would appreciate your . . . experience.’

  The owner turned out to be one of Sunny’s first buyers – Freddy Ismail. A man of many investments. A collector. They’d chatted about vintage cameras and he’d enjoyed Sunny’s stories about the pieces he had in the shop.

  ‘I saw you closed the shop, Mr Fernando. No good?’ He was very direct.

  ‘Early retirement. I liked the cameras too much, you know, to let anyone buy them.’

  ‘I remember,’ he smiled. ‘That huge Hasselblad, you wouldn’t part with that for anything, would you? No one could even touch it.’

  Sunny smiled politely. The fake camera that Brendan had given him in Colombo was one of his true treasures. He said he was looking for something to occupy his time.

  ‘It’s all Adobe Photoshop and electronics now. Not like in the old darkroom.’ Freddy added that he wanted to develop a studio. ‘Portraits. You like to be the pro? The photographer, Mr Fernando? A small sideline, not a full-time thing. But I need an older hand, some real expertise to give us an edge in the market. Chips is fine, but you need the human eye, right? Would new technology interest you?’

  ‘Sounds perfect,’ Sunny perked up. ‘I started with portraits, you know?’ It would be a chance to catch up on all those new imaging techniques Clara drooled over, and to gape at something other than the bottom of a glass. They came to an amicable agreement: Sunny would run the studio for him and oversee picture quality three afternoons a week and all day Saturday; Freddy would pay him a regular wage.

  Clara laughed happily, like she used to, when Sunny told her he had a job. Her generous lips bloomed again. They needed no gloss. He knew that. He had always known that. ‘See, they do want you.’

  He remembered everything that he used to feel.

  Things began to look up. Tony Blair was in his first term flush, and seemed an honest enough man to lead the country into a new and beatified age. Sunny had no problem with his earnestness; he hoped some of it might even rub off on the younger generation sloping around the house. Even the London light appeared fuller and freer. And Freddy Ismail’s new digital machines were quite impressive in their own way. At first Sunny didn’t do much more than the occasional passport photograph, which he tried to make a little more Julia Cameronish than the usual booth affair. His efforts were appreciated and soon many of the aspiring actors and party people in the area began to drop in, keen for something quirky to send to an agency or a constituency committee. Some days Sunny felt better even without a drink.

  Clara had been right. Image was back in business. The look. The eye. Software. Art classes for all ages. Mikey’s hair got spiky, his sockets darkened under the lower rims. He walked as though he was being watched; sometimes like the out-of-work actors in front of Sunny’s lens, other times incognito, hooded. Sunny couldn’t believe he was already a real teenager.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked his son one day.

  Mikey was sitting on a stool in the kitchen staring at the fridge magnets they’d bought in Welshpool one year. ‘Have you ever smoked?’ he asked, dissolving back into the little boy he had so recently been.

  ‘I was never much of a smoker.’

  ‘What? Never?’

  ‘Well, I tried a bit. Now and then.’

  ‘Why? Didn’t you know about cancer?’

  He tried to think of something to say about the nature of the tobacco industry, the mistakes of youth, America, vested interests, the economics of development. ‘It wasn’t like now. People did. They just did.’

  ‘You tried to smoke because everyone else did?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Robby was the real smoker, and Herbie, who would’ve inhaled burning beetroot if he’d thought it would make him high.

  ‘That’s so dumb.’ Mikey opened the fridge and took out some milk and poured himself a glass. ‘You know what your lungs look like?’ Sunny watched him drink the milk in one long draught that seemed to last longer than his whole young sweet life. He could see his son’s teeth through the glass, magnified, and a kind of hunger for the unknown that Sunny no longer had. Sunny wanted nothing to do with the unknown. He wanted only the known. The familiar. His chair, his light, his book, his bottle, his glass, his world. Everything in its place, unmoving. Solid. Tremors were for the young.

  ‘So, your friends are smoking?’

  Mikey gave his father a withering look. ‘They were smoking in primary school. It’s just a dumb thing dumb people do.’

  ‘What else?’

  Mikey put his empty glass on the table. ‘What else what?’

  Sunny wanted him to talk some more, but didn’t know where to begin. The boy had opened a window and then closed it again. Sunny remembered how he used to do the same. Open, slowly open, and then in a rush, a panic, close everything down. What are the thoughts you keep to yourself? Which ones do you share? He didn’t know.

  ‘How’s the band?’ But he was too late. Mikey was out of the kitchen, heading for the TV. The dark room of flickering images, one-way talk, electronic signals that one can safely take in from pre-puberty to post-dotage.

  Maybe it was the impending millennium, the closing-down of the twentieth century, or maybe it was simply his age, the point when the big hurdles of thirty, even forty, begin to look rosy in retrospect, something that belonged to youth. Maybe it was the fact that Mikey had entered his teens and Sunny was just beginning to realize what crossing that threshold had meant for him thirty-odd years ago; how there would be no transition quite like that again. Maybe it was the accumulation of disappointments, the dismay at the realization that after all this time he may still not have r
eached the inner core of another – not just Mikey, but Clara too. That he had learnt nothing from the failures of those who had been this way before. Whatever it was, he withdrew further into himself.

  Freddy Ismail, with his aura of effortless accomplishment and prosperity, was a source of some comfort. He was in his early thirties, and right from his muted gold sunglasses to his soft pigskin shoes he was a picture of easy success and cultural compromise. He was always smiling; his teeth more than perfect. ‘Mr Fernando,’ he would say, ‘you are a real A1 artist, sir.’ He’d put Sunny’s portraits up in the shop window. ‘The council should pay us for having these fucking masterpieces adorning the street.’

  Sunny did take some good ones in that first year. As good as any portrait Clara painted. Terry, the actor, for example, in stunning profile. A Caesar staring at a beam of light that would splinter and break, destroying a dream and stabbing him from behind. One beam of light – it was perfect. Olympus. Then Fiona. ‘A little too keen on punt and cleavage,’ according to Freddy, but as mesmerizing as a mermaid when seen from across the street. And Cordelia, in a composition where Sunny had exchanged black for white and discovered a luminosity that rivalled even the great Alphonso’s. Sunny hoped that Mikey might be inspired and go hunting for Shakespeare in the library, or get involved in something really artistic. But the boy seemed completely impervious.

  When he came to choose his GCSE subjects, Mikey shunned all the arts options. ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ Sunny asked.

  He looked at his father in a way that left Sunny in no doubt of what he thought of the question. He was already catching up. He had a long neck and feet too big for his father’s shoes.

  ‘OK, sorry. Stupid question.’

  ‘I want to be an engineer.’

  Sunny wasn’t sure whether this was the time to mention his own disastrous foray. ‘I didn’t think anyone was interested in engineering these days.’

  ‘Isn’t that what Grandpa did?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely. Are you into tunnels?’

  ‘Maybe . . . umm, rockets?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Or, like, bridges. Roads.’

  ‘You want to go places. Be on the move.’

  Mikey looked blank, perhaps having already left the room, with that adolescent habit of slipping from one world to another as if through a sliding door. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Never mind. Technology can be . . . good. You need to be able to make things work.’ Sunny thought he’d plant a seed. Mikey and most of his friends, as far as Sunny could tell, fixed nothing. If anything broke, they moved on. If a cassette got stuck, it was chucked; if a CD skipped, they skipped the track. If a button fell off, whatever it was would stay unbuttoned. A philosophy of ease, true, but it didn’t promise great leaps for civilization. They were nomads, going from one room to another in search of the momentarily cool. No one ever spliced a tape the way he had done to save a Feliciano strum, or an Otis Redding chord. But then cassettes had no screws now, to undo and repair. No little fix-it bits. Widgets were nowhere to be found, except in cans of Guinness. Sunny shook his head sadly. What would happen to the world, when it got damaged? Would they just throw it away? Use and throw. As Kodak did with their 24-exposure egg boxes. He had a sudden yearning for things he could properly handle. Cogs, levers, thumbscrews. Metal cameras.

  ‘Yeah. Right. Or I might just do gigs with a band.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ Clara told Sunny. ‘He won’t turn out like you. He knows what he wants.’ Sunny was not so sure. Kids didn’t seem to know much in this age of disinformation. They seemed mostly to be asleep.

  Mikey’s new friend Benjy was the exception. He was smaller than Mikey, but full of energy. He’d bound up and talk to Sunny, even on the street where the passing world might see him. He didn’t have that shame the young sometimes had of the old. He had become Mikey’s friend in the second year at the big school. He had small eyes and high buoyant cheekbones. One of the first things he said to Sunny was, ‘Hey kumusta, Pops?’

  ‘Where’d you learn kumusta?’

  It turned out that his mother was from the Visayas, in the Philippines. His father, a priest from Connemara, had been on a mission. At the market in Cebu their bicycles had collided and they’d fallen in love. Before the first child was born they’d left both the church and the Philippines; they’d come to live in London and now sold kitchen units in Wood Green.

  ‘Mikey says you have a barong?’ Benjy said. ‘My Dad has one too.’

  ‘Does he wear it?’

  ‘My birthday is the same day as his number one fiesta. For that he gets really spruced, like barong, black trousers, shiny shoes. He’s got cool capice cufflinks.’

  Benjy was not only quick and talkative, he was also good with his hands. In his fingers even a chocolate bar looked like a tool. When Mikey’s Nokia fizzled, Benjy was the one who knew how to fix it.

  Clara was less impressed by the lad. She thought Benjy was a little wayward. ‘He’s got too much free time.’ She, of course, had none: exams, maths, art, correspondence courses . . . Quite apart from her hyper-life as a flexitime mother.

  ‘That’s because he’s quicker than the rest.’

  ‘No. He just knows how to cut corners. Mikey should be careful.’

  As a result, they never met Benjy’s parents, who seemed to Sunny to exist on edge of the Mindanao Sea along with his fantasies of Legaspi, Palawan and Zamboanga, rather than in the slipstream of the North Circular road.

  Every year Freddy Ismail expanded his shop, and 2001 was the third successive year of improvement.

  Sunny had a week off while the shop was being refitted. He was going to use the time to paint the front of the house. Not exactly fine art, he said to Clara, but necessary. The window sills were pitted and cracked; the front door showed more grime than paint. He should have done it in the summer, but he was waiting for his hands to grow steady again. Now there was not much time left; soon the cold weather and damp would make the task impossible.

  ‘Black OK?’ he had asked Clara.

  ‘You have some malaise?’

  ‘Malaise?’ The word had turned in his head like a loose petal blown in from the garden. ‘Malaise? What is this malaise?’ He put down his bottle and grabbed at a passing shadow. Mal might mean bad in most of the EU but it sounded like flower in Sinhala. Where did that leave malaise? He was in a whirlwind. ‘Malaysia?’

  ‘What is it with you these days?’

  In the end they compromised: white window sills, but a dark bottle green for the door.

  The sun shone all morning and it was hot on the front steps. A rose was out, peachy with scarlet wry smiles, a little shaky at coming out so late in the front garden where he’d dumped the summer’s debris of broken trellises and busted pots, but in flower nevertheless. He undid the screws of the brass door handle, and removed the house number and letter-box flap. He spread newspapers underneath. The sports pages had multiplied recently and were good for the main panels. For the nooks and crannies he used the freebie Sri Lankan advertiser he’d picked up from the Tamil shop a few days earlier. The news was not hopeful. The spate of elections on the island had created confusion. Prospects were poor. The official death toll in the long war with the LTTE was over 60,000 men, women and children. Sunny scraped the door with a metal stripper until the small flakes of old paint, crumbs and powder smothered the headlines. The sound of steel on wood was hypnotic.

  By midday he’d taken the worst of it off. Close to the bare wood of the door, nurturing the soot and sun of long-dead decades – the sixties or maybe even the twenties – he discovered an early coat of green paint. He made a mental note to keep a small bit of the door cut to it to show Clara when she got back from work: heritage was instinct with him. The next job was to smooth the surface. Rough paper first and then the fine grade. He’d never paid quite so much attention to preparation before. He wanted to keep it going; the moment, the peace of having just one problem to solve. It took him right
back to his younger days when he could spend hours in front of a picture, or follow a thought – a ball on a string – for days. Hector would have said, ‘Ah, Zen, no?’

  It was not comfort he wanted now, not even reassurance. Simply a quietness. Peace in his mind. Clara seemed more content recently, all her interests feeding each other. Mikey had settled something in his own mind too. Sunny had figured out how many glasses he needed to keep things in focus. ‘We each have our own lives, borrowed as they may be,’ he said out loud.

  Before breaking for lunch he applied a grey primer on the door. There’d be time for it to dry then, before he started again in the afternoon with the dark, deep everlasting green.

  It was only when he’d made his toasted sandwich and sat in front of the TV with a beer that he discovered what was happening. He was just in time to see the first tower fall in New York. He stayed, transfixed by the cameras that had taken over from the commentators. Everyone was bewildered.

  Hours later – two? three? – he heard the front door open. He stepped away from the TV which was stuck in a perpetual loop of showing and re-showing the same unbelievable images of a plane flying straight into a skyscraper. In the hall, Mikey was staring at the grey door. ‘What happened?’ He dropped his school bag.

  ‘The next world war . . .’ Sunny started to say, but then noticed the tears in his son’s eyes; he was struggling to hold them back. ‘You’ve seen what’s been happening?’

  ‘It was a fight,’ Mikey said. ‘Massive fight.’

  ‘You saw TV at school?’

  Mikey’s long neck tensed and he shook his head. He looked at his father as though he had gone crazy.

  Sunny bundled him into the sitting room. ‘Look.’ There was that plane again. An arrow becoming a fireball. He watched what he’d seen too many times already. ‘Look,’ he said again to Mikey who was fiddling with his trainers. Mikey pulled out a tissue and started wiping one of them. His limbs had grown disjointed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sunny couldn’t believe he was cleaning his shoes. Not watching. Not hooked. Not terrified.