Mikey got up and headed for the hall. ‘I have to wash this . . .’
‘Hey, do you know what is happening? That’s a real building.’
Mikey came back, surprised at his father’s tone. He stared unflinchingly. ‘Benjy was in a fight.’
Sunny made a sound conveying sympathy, but the dust cloud on the screen seemed to spread into the room and cover everything.
It was only later that night that he learnt from Clara’s few clipped words what had happened to Benjy. He’d been in a fight with a bunch of Turkish boys near the old shop. Mikey had been in detention and got there only when the ambulance had arrived. Benjy had been rushed to casualty. While Sunny was out at the off-licence, Clara and Mikey had called Benjy’s house but there had been no answer.
‘What about the hospital?’
‘The switchboard kept putting us on hold.’
They didn’t know who else to call.
By the time Sunny went upstairs to say something to Mikey, he was fast asleep. When he came back down, Clara had gone to her computer. On TV the newscasters were beginning to manage the news once more; they had their pictures back under control. When Sunny lay down to sleep that night he couldn’t sort the images of New York from those of Colombo five years earlier. As for little Benjy . . . he didn’t know what to think. Nothing would be quite the same again in their separate worlds: Mikey’s, Benjy’s and his. But then, he wondered, was it ever?
CHOWKIDAR
2002
SUNNY LOOKED at Hector’s letter again: 2002 might be a year to remember.
He showed Mikey the enclosed cheque and told him what Hector had suggested, a good bat. Mikey shrugged. An MP3 player was more his thing than cricket kit.
On the night of his birthday, Mikey went out with a gaggle of odd hoods while Sunny and Clara watched what Sunny called the Bush, Blair and Bin Laden show on TV. The remains of a chocolate cake subsided on the coffee table next to the birthday Cava and Sunny’s nearly depleted Bell’s. Sunny collected the bits of wrapping paper from the birthday presents – CDs, a video, a jumper, a new pay-as-you-go mobile – and stuffed them into a recycled carrier bag.
‘Is that it then? No longer a kid?’ He poured himself another stiff drink.
‘Don’t be silly. There’s summer after summer of exam stress to come. He needs to build himself up to it. I guess you wouldn’t know about that.’
Sunny gagged. She of course had plenty of experience, with her graphics and oil paint and diplomas part 1 to infinity. ‘Mikey? Stress? Maybe over garage and grunge.’
After the news was over, Clara switched off the TV. Sunny handed her Hector’s letter. He would like it to be a year to remember. He began tentatively by saying that he thought it was pretty unlikely that Mikey would want another holiday with them, however sunny the green valleys of Wales might be. Not unless they were going by black Maserati, or the Harlech Festival was headlining So Solid Crew and Barry White reloaded in a striped djellaba. The newly peaceful Sri Lanka of Hector, with its requirement of major capital outlay, was more likely to catch his interest. ‘What do you think? Shall we all go to Sri Lanka this time?’
She read the letter slowly and then sighed. ‘Weren’t there supposed to be peace talks when you went last time? And then, didn’t they just go and launch a full-scale war?’
There had been Operation Riviresa, followed by Operation Jayasikuru and then Rivibala and on and on . . . Yes, he knew that, but things can change. Wasn’t that the lesson he was meant to learn?
‘Second innings, second chance. It’s all up for grabs.’ For him too, perhaps.
‘Yes, and where do we suddenly get the money from? Has Hector sent a cheque for that too?’
Earlier in the day, at the library, he had noticed a flyer for a national photography competition. The first prize was five thousand pounds. Enough to make a real difference for him, for Clara, for Mikey. He had fantasized about it while waiting for another drunk to finish with the newspaper. Now it formed into a holiday in Sri Lanka. A wide screen TV. Bahala na, Robby’s favourite Tagalog expression came back to him. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. Luck. Fate. Or was it bahala na kayo? It’s up to you?
The first day of the first Test match at Lord’s between Sri Lanka and England – Thursday, 16 May 2002 – was glorious. The sun had come out for the Sri Lankan tourists. The temperature soared for the first time all year. The visitors abandoned their thermals and played like they were on the beach at home. Roasting England, as the delighted pundits said, the ones who – countering the loyalty test – favoured the team with the longest names in the game. Perhaps they’d invested too much time practising the pronunciation of Jayawardene, Jayasurya, Muralitharan, to let nationality form a boundary, or maybe they just liked good cricket, sunshine and memories of palm trees.
Sunny was in the studio most of the afternoon setting up some new equipment Freddy had splashed out on with more of his unstoppable wealth. When he came out Freddy chuckled. ‘Hey, you guys are doing all right, eh?’ He’d heard on the radio that somebody had already got his first century – Mahela Jayawardene?
Sunny caught the highlights on Channel 4 and was hooked. He realized then that Hector was right. He had to go to Lord’s and rediscover the passions of his youth. Suddenly the most important thing in the world was to see Sri Lanka play England in a full Test match in London. He had to make his life turn the way he wanted it to, like a true spinner’s ball. It was up to him. Bahala na kayo. His head was throbbing with an excitement he hadn’t felt for years. He got out his vintage Leica and a cleaning kit. He was sure that he would take the perfect picture at the match, a sporting photo which would bag him the photography prize and allow him to breathe easy at last. It all fitted together. He could hardly wait.
‘What’s wrong?’ Clara asked when he went into the kitchen. ‘You want a camomile tea?’ She had an Oxford Street lungi wrapped around her and knotted high on her front. Her hair was up, in a tangle, her shoulders bare and moist after her bath.
Sunny started to dismantle the camera. He wanted it in perfect working order. The viewfinder and the lens absolutely clear. He told her that the match had been on TV. The words tumbled out but didn’t rouse much interest in her. She made her night drink in a mug – a Tate Modern souvenir she liked to hug. His head was pounding. His hands trembled. He put down the camera. The spice rack behind her, crammed with cardamoms, cinnamon and garam masala, was half off the wall. The screws were not right, the wall plugs loose. She pursed her lips for another sip and he remembered everything that had happened in his life. Everything. He saw her again as he had the first time, in Mrs Veeraswamy’s kitchen.
‘You know, sometimes I feel I want to burst open this head of mine and show you what’s inside.’ Sunny leant forward, his elbows on the kitchen table, his fingers stretched out around his skull as though he was about to prise it open. His nails dug into the skin of his forehead. ‘I want it to be yours.’ He looked up and caught her eyes; it hurt him to hold the gaze. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
He wasn’t used to talking like this. From the inside. He hadn’t done it for years. Perhaps he never had. He didn’t like to be the one to break a silence, but at that moment he wanted to say everything. He was too full of words. They were churning, making him unsteady. Drunk. ‘Do you?’ Sunny asked again. His fingers drummed at his head.
Her dark eyes wavered. ‘Mine?’
He glanced down at the camera in pieces on the table, the lens brush and cotton bud, the cheap cut-glass tumbler of whisky next to it. ‘Do you want to come with me tomorrow?’ It felt as though he hadn’t asked her anything so direct in a long time.
She took a sip of her herbal tea. ‘I don’t think so. This is the last weekend to get Mikey revising. And there’s the school concert in the afternoon.’ She put down her mug and picked up a pencil. Her thumb pressed against the middle of it. ‘I want to get a load of paints too, you know, for my new class. I’ll need the car.’
His breath wa
s warm. Too warm. Something was burning up inside him. He wasn’t sure whether there should be more to this moment, or less. Life seemed to have become too fraught. The glass of whisky moved out of focus. She had her life; he had his, even if sometimes it seemed he’d lost his grip. He wanted to ask about her new class. Was it Alex again? Something snagged on the side of his leg – an involuntary contraction of a muscle that pinched the notorious sciatic nerve his father had complained about. Or, maybe, just a premonition of another clumsy step he was about to take. Ever since Hector’s letter arrived he had been tense, as though his body knew that time was running out. He felt he’d fluffed everything; now he just wanted that second chance.
‘OK, take the car. The clutch is slipping, but if you keep a steady speed you’ll be all right.’ He had thought he might be able to make some adjustment, tighten a cable, and save himself the three hundred pounds he would be charged by the local garage. He just hadn’t got around to it. ‘I should have had it fixed. I’m sorry.’
She bit her lower lip. ‘I’ll manage.’
The pencil snapped.
He saw her in the car: that lip drawn in, eyes sharp, sitting high. A determined, exacting driver who, quite rightly, expected things to work as they should. For her, the engine must start at the first turn of the key, the car move smoothly at the press of the accelerator, stop at the touch of the brake pedal. Traffic lights will switch from red to amber and then logically, inevitably, to green in correct accountable unfuckable steps. For Sunny, increasingly, nothing ever worked quite according to plan.
He hadn’t been to Lord’s before; never seen a Test match for real. He had no idea what he might be letting himself in for; his only experience of cricket in England came from country drives and those sleepy affairs behind the tennis courts, off Park Road, that he used to pass with Mikey when he was a toddler: sunlit oaks, a blue sky, a pavilion from the colonial era with picket teeth and gin rims. He packed a bottle of water, a little hip flask, the old Leica with the cleaned Super-Angulon 1:4/21 Leitz lens and a small palm TV in case he couldn’t get into the grounds. He wasn’t going to be alone. If this was the most fun batting team in the world, then the place may be already full – a hundred thousand London Sri Lankans might be there, celebrating the end of the war and the rebirth of Test cricket. It was about time.
He bought a newspaper and took the W7 to Finsbury Park. There was no one on board who looked ready for cricket. Off the bus, he headed straight down the tube like a devout saboteur. He knew he had the look, these days, clean-shaven or not. The dark hue, the loaded eye, the prescription sunglasses. A fruit vendor stared at him with suspicion, as if he could tell they were on different sides.
‘You fail the Norman Wisdom cricket test, right?’ Freddy had chuckled as Sunny was putting away the tripods the previous evening.
‘What’s that?’
‘That bald fella who told us to “get on your bike”. He said vagrants like you and me never support England. We confuse the home team.’
‘Immigrants,’ Sunny corrected him. ‘It all depends who they play.’ He remembered the complexities of loyalty even in the Philippines. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t Norman Wisdom. He was a joker.’
At King’s Cross he made the mistake of assuming the shorter route was the quicker one and got fouled up by the Circle Line; then, at Baker Street, he began to sense something. There were definitely aficionados in his Jubilee line carriage. Solitary types in khaki shorts, carrying small canvas sacks packed with newspapers. Sunny picked out half a dozen of them, each one trying in vain to look inconspicuous. As the train pulled into St John’s Wood they rose from their seats at the same time. Sunny followed them down the platform at a discreet distance. Despite the prospect of sunshine, they did not look like happy people.
As he reached the escalator, festive laughter tumbled down towards him. More fans materialized, donning sun hats, carrying umbrellas, picnic baskets, carrier bags of plonk and beer.
As soon as he got through at the top, he was accosted by ticket touts.
‘Best seats, forty quid.’
‘Today’s last seats.’
Sunny avoided them all and followed the crowd down Wellington Terrace. He noticed that everybody else was ignoring them too. He had no idea of the official price of a ticket; he didn’t even know what one looked like.
He headed down to what had to be the grounds, although it was difficult to imagine where among the villas and luxury blocks it could be hidden. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him, but there was a sense of solidarity. Sides, at that particular moment, seemed not to matter. He was at last that arrow he had always wanted to be: just released, in motion, heading for his proper place. Pure Zen. Clara had her thing; he had his. Perhaps the fact that their lives had slowly separated didn’t matter. He reached the grounds. A queue at least 300 yards long snaked round a bend in the road. Towering above them was a media pod that looked like a spaceship. He joined the queue and heard a roar inside, where something wonderful in cricket had happened.
A Sri Lankan gang in a new Mercedes rolled past, the driver peering out looking for a familiar face to cajole, glancing up at the sky from time to time, ready to take evasive action if a ball came at him out of nowhere, as they are known to do in gardens and stadiums all over the world. Another ticket tout approached the queue. The price had dropped to thirty pounds. Someone in the line called him over. The rest watched as two men examined what the tout had to offer. They exchanged notes and headed for the turnstiles. The man in front of Sunny nudged his companion, ‘Let’s see if they get in.’ They did. The tout disappeared. The queue moved and there was another roar from inside, then a huge collective sigh.
Picture reception was terrible and Sunny’s vintage palm TV couldn’t quite cope with the glare of the sun, but he managed to catch the score and passed it around: 343 for 3. He felt he was joining a religion, or something akin to one. The man next to him explained that Atapattu, a name he pronounced without hesitation, had achieved a milestone. ‘You heard the cheer?’ he explained. The Sri Lankan stalwart had hit a boundary to cross the century-and-a-half mark. Sunny smiled, beginning to understand. The day was looking even better.
When he reached the ticket booth he was told the Compton stand was good. Thirty pounds to be up on top. ‘You can see the scoreboard and the replay screen.’
‘What if it rains?’ The weather report claimed rain was on the way.
‘They won’t play if it rains. You take shelter underneath.’
He collected the ticket and went in. The security guard rummaged around in his bag and pointed out that the water bottle was leaking. The Guardian had saved the camera. The other bottle was safe. Sunny thanked the woman and she wished him luck as though she knew how much he needed it.
Inside the gates he entered a fairground. There were nets to the left, toilets to the right, and people milling about looking at everything but the match taking place in the centre. He found his way to the Compton stand; a metal spiral staircase led to the upper tier. He climbed up into the open and stood amazed before a green lung holding its breath every minute or so, as a ball flew down and a perfect straight bat blocked it. The scoreboard gave the names of the batsmen, the bowler and any fielder who touched the ball. It was a world away from those games Sunny had passed in the middle-distant countryside, where the beer was warm and the mayflies snored and matchstick figures played an indistinct game. The replay screen on the other side ensured that nothing was missed: that boundary thwacked as you bend for your beer, or the wicket that falls as you sink into your paper. The art of the near miss, the spectator’s true sport, was almost impossible. Anxiety – the very heart of art – now had to focus on not missing the actual moment because the camera was always there, never blinking, recording everything for a posterity limited only by technology. It was no longer the case that you might miss it, only that you may not see it as it happened. Sunny found himself intent on every ball. The here and the now. No Clara, no Mikey. No father, no mother.
No other thought.
In front of him, two men in white sun hats were drinking champagne out of plastic flutes. They had been there for a while – the bottle was nearly empty. Their faces were florid, but they kept their ties and blazers on. Beyond them, out at the crease, the famous Sri Lankan batsman Aravinda de Silva was hopping like a bird, patting the earth with his bat, casting quick furtive glances around the field, getting ready to fly. Watch out, Sunny wanted to yell. The bowler, England’s Caddick, was already on his run-up. Only when the ball was released, after a forlorn grunt, did de Silva seem to notice what was happening. Startled, he let fly – another boundary. The two men in front giggled and touched plastic. ‘Cheers.’ When de Silva got to 48 there was an announcement that he had reached a career record of six thousand Test runs. ‘Bloody good show,’ the Englishman on the left said, and poured out the last of the champagne. The stadium wasn’t full, there weren’t many brown faces in the crowd – not the thousands Sunny had expected – but the cheer was loud. Then Atapattu fell for a smart trap and played the hook he’d resisted all morning. Suddenly the knocking back and forth of the ball, the minutes ticking by for no reason, stopped. Everything stopped except the ball, falling. On the field all the players tensed up as one. The trap had been sprung. Trescothick made the catch. The man was given out. The wind changed. Sunny stood with the rest of the stadium to give the batsman his standing ovation as he took off his gloves and shuffled into the pavilion and a page in sporting history.
When lunch was called, the pair in front opened a bottle of red wine and started to munch corned beef sandwiches. Sunny took a quick nip of old gold and went down to see if he could find a Sri Lankan snack. He came across fish and chips, crêpes, burgers and a tikka masala stall. No vadai, no bola cutlis, no lampries.
Then he saw her.
He would not have recognized her if she hadn’t turned. She wore a long brick-coloured tunic that hid her figure and she was chattering. She stopped and looked down her long quivering, gorgeous nose at a white polystyrene dish of golden chips. The oval face was unmistakable, even with the glittering nose stud. She picked up a large square-cut potato, the size of a finger, and put it daintily in her mouth.
The Match Page 21