He adjusted his sunglasses. ‘Tina?’
She must have been ten yards away. She couldn’t have heard him, but she looked up. Her face broadened as she laboured to quickly swallow her chip. ‘Sunny?’ She dabbed off the excess ketchup. ‘Sunny?’
‘Yes.’ He went up to her. Full on, for a moment she seemed a caricature of the young girl in Makati who had tormented his youth. She was still a knockout.
‘Sunny? You haven’t changed a tick.’
Could he say the same to her? What could he say? ‘Tina.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
Sunny shrugged. ‘Neither can I. What are you doing here?’
‘After yesterday, we just had to come back to watch more.’
Only then did he notice her red-haired companion. Steve Thompson grunted a greeting, as apish as he’d been three decades earlier.
‘You remember Steve?’ Tina clutched his arm as though he might slip away to deep square leg.
‘Of course, Steve. How are you?’
‘Good. I’m good. You? Good?’
‘I live here.’
‘Yeah, we heard,’ Tina teased. ‘Goodness, in London?’
Steve leant forward. ‘You like a beer?’
‘Oh, Steve darling, you were going to get the beer, weren’t you? So go. I am so thirsty. Sunny, come, let’s sit. Get him a beer, Steve. Yes?’
Sunny had never heard her say so much. Her voice was full of disbelief at the luck of a charmed life. ‘Sure. A beer would be great.’
‘Foster’s?’
‘Sure. Whatever.’
‘Good. That’s . . . good.’
While Steve donned his anorak and headed for the good beer counter, Tina settled herself into a plastic chair. ‘So, Sunny, how have you been? Tell me.’
‘OK. I’ve been living here.’
‘Married, right?’
‘Not exactly.’ The glare off the white plastic table was almost too much.
‘You have a son?’
‘How did you know that?’
Tina simpered over another chip. ‘I heard. Here, have some of these. They are just so delicious.’
Sunny tried one. They were greasy and seemed to be still frying in the heat of the sun. ‘You don’t live in London, do you?’
‘Oh, no. Just here on a hop about. Steve and I live in Sydney. Tomorrow morning we are off to Paris. We are doing Europe. All the concert halls. I’ve always been mad about orchestras, you know. But we’ll nip back from Berlin for the India-Sri Lanka ODI, next month and then it will be all over.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The One-day International? That’s the real thing. Adrenalin, no? Steve goes crazy with cricket. And now, guess what? Sri Lanka. We’ve just been in Colombo, on the way. Short stop, you know. He loves it. He wants us to move there. We did a quick beach and culture trip. Now all he wants is to play in a sarong and eat coconut. I don’t know what Daddy would say if he heard. I am hoping that when we go to Rome, he’ll see the light. All those saints can surely do something, don’t you think?’
‘How is your Dad? Your mother?’
‘Fine. They are fine. They live in Washington. Very happy. Well as can be expected in these days of the great American siege, and Daddy’s tummy problems. They are both staunch Republicans.’
‘Republicans? What about China?’
She nibbled some more, thinking. ‘That was a long time ago. After we moved to America, things changed. He was diagnosed as having a food allergy.’
‘Soya?’
‘No, seriously. First we thought it was just MSG – monosodium glutamate. Then curry was ruled out too. Cumin, coriander. Onions. Asian cuisine was causing him major problems. You see, he tried to cook for himself. Thank God, he’s stopped that nonsense now. Mom is so happy. And Daddy does smile a lot more. He says he feels healthier. And he was a fan of Nixon, you know. So it all sort of makes sense.’
Steve arrived with the beer. He placed the bottles on the table and sat down slightly apart from the other two, looking sombre.
‘I was saying,’ Tina explained, ‘you’d love to live in some beach house in Sri Lanka, isn’t that right, Stevie? But Daddy doesn’t trust anyone there, not even the place – beach, jungle or sea. He thinks the peace won’t last. War is now everywhere, how can it disappear from that one little place?’
‘They are reopening the Jaffna library.’
‘Yes, Steve darling, but you know what’s going on. With those assholes everywhere, excuse me but warmongers are the pits . . .’
Sunny couldn’t work out what Tina was doing. Why was she talking in this way? It was as though she was hungry for a life that had escaped her. How could she – who’d been such a free spirit, in whom the future had glowed – be so entangled, so stuck, in the world she had started out in? And with Steve? What about women’s cricket?
‘Sunny, you’d never believe where I met him again?’
‘Steve? At the zoo?’
She paused. ‘Why do you say zoo? No, not the zoo. At the library. The State library in Sydney. I was doing research for my thesis – on resins, you know – and there he was. Steve.’
‘Also doing research?’
‘Temporary job. Cleaning . . . Good job.’
‘It was fantastic.’ Tina dug into her dwindling collection of potato chips.
‘Really?’
‘Now we both are into sticky drugs.’
That might have explained something, but then she mentioned the pharmaceutical industry. They both worked for a multinational. ‘Steve reckons he can open a lab in Sri Lanka. Get in on the ayurvedic front before all the patents go. Anyway, what about you, Sunny? What’s been happening with you?’
‘I’ve been here. London. I do a bit of photography . . .’
‘Fantastic. We love taking pictures. Steve, show him the camera we got in Singapore. Show him. He’d love it.’ While Steve fumbled with a leather pouch, she continued. ‘Digital. It does video. Everything. Oh, darling,’ she squeezed Steve’s arm. ‘Do we have those Colombo pictures in there still?’
Steve dipped his head a little lower. ‘That lot was downloaded.’
Tina gave a sexy little whinny. ‘I thought we could keep hundreds, no? What were all those megabytes for?’ Her face quivered, disappointed. ‘You’d never believe who we met there. Never.’ Her eyes brightened. ‘Guess?’
‘Prabhakaran?’ The LTTE supremo had given his first press conference the previous month. Sunny had seen his picture on the net. He could have been a junior game warden in his neat safari suit rather than the leader of the most famous guerrilla army in the world.
‘No, silly. Someone you know. From Makati?’
‘Hector?’
‘Robby! We met Robby, there in Colombo. Can you believe it? He was staying at a friend of my cousin’s. Adel’s. You know her. She said you stayed with her once.’
‘In Havelock Town?’
‘Yes. She talked a lot about you. She really liked having you there. She lurved your clothes.’
Sunny didn’t want to talk about Adel. ‘What’s Robby doing there?’
‘Garment factory. Much to Adel’s delight. But of course you know all about that, no? He said he met you while doing the same thing here.’
Sunny blushed. ‘No, no. I wasn’t in his line of business. We just met, like this. You know how it is. London.’
‘I know. I know. We’ve done Trafalgar Square and the South Bank.’
‘Festival Hall,’ Steve added knowingly. ‘Very good.’
Tina said they had arrived a week earlier and had spent the whole of Sunday on a double-decker tour bus seeing the city at treetop height. ‘I know it like a pigeon,’ she squealed, fluttering her hand.
Steve laughed too, as though they were on honeymoon, or one of Herbie’s illicit substances.
For a moment, Sunny felt a twinge of envy. Not so much for Steve, but for what they seemed to have together. Gladstone’s famous London bus ride, a stroll on the South Bank, an urge to lau
gh at the same time. A shared sense of a mad spinning world.
‘Yesterday, in my opinion, was the best.’ Steve’s fulsome sentence gave Sunny hope. Perhaps there was some divergence in their lives.
He was wrong.
‘Oh, God, yes.’
It sounded like sex. Sunny didn’t want to know.
Steve held Tina’s hand in one fist and lifted his beer with the other. He sipped and smiled at the same time. ‘It could have gone on all night.’
‘But Daddy always said that in England the balls tend to wobble after . . .’ Tina hesitated.
Sunny didn’t know what to say.
‘He would have loved to have been here with us,’ Steve added.
‘Your dad?’ Rudy? Sunny remembered his penchant for group activity.
‘Uh-huh. He is almost all-American. He has completely given up curry and sesame oil, but he’ll never swap cricket for baseball. He would have loved to see Mahela Jayawardene pulling his hundred yesterday.’
‘Cover drive.’ Steve raised his eyes.
‘I understand.’ Sunny finally caught the true drift of their pillow talk. ‘It was a good start.’
‘But this wicket falling before lunch, that is not good news.’ Steve looked into his tumbler, downcast. ‘Not good at all.’
‘The President can give them a pep talk,’ Tina laughed.
‘Which President? MCC?’
‘Sri Lanka’s President, dummy. Chandrika. She’s here. We saw her going into the pavilion.’ She screwed up her mouth and twisted it from side to side as if to suppress her amusement.
Sunny reckoned Tina was joking. ‘What, while the Tigers come out to play in Kilinochchi, she’s here to watch cricket? What about the peace talks?’
‘That’s not her thing, no? That’s Ranil’s business.’
‘Ranil’s?’ Then he remembered Ranil was the name of the Prime Minister in Sri Lanka. He rubbed his temples. The world seemed very crowded.
‘Anyway, whatever the reason, she is here. And the boys need a cheerleader.’
Steve sniggered.
It was announced that the match was about to continue. Tina stood up. ‘Toilets. Then we better get to our seats. Shall we meet here at the break? Sunny?’
‘Sure, teatime.’ He watched them go, hand in hand, both a little wider than before but happy.
Back on the upper tier the two sozzled enthusiasts in the front row were exchanging reminiscences. Sunny listened to their talk, letting the sound of other voices fill the void in him.
‘You ready for a beer now?’ one of them said, as the crowd cheered another boundary.
‘I’ll wait for the next wicket.’
His companion gave a muffled laugh. ‘Another Sri Langk-in wicket? That’s their Arnold? Isn’t it? Poor England. They could do with a bloody crate of beer. Look at Hussain. Looks like a bleeding ghost with all that white sun slop.’
The new batsman looked set to be there for a while. A bored England fielder near the boundary started to practise his golf swing. Beyond the media pod hanging over the edge of the grounds rain clouds were gathering. Somewhere Tina and Steve were watching the same game; the President of Sri Lanka was watching it. Hector might be in a house in Colombo with satellite TV, and maybe Piyasena with his cousin Matara Malli in a vadai kadé off Galle Road. Perhaps even the Tigers’ leader in his camouflaged bunker was biting his nails . . . All watching the same game. Slowly the world, Sunny’s world, was rearranging itself. Those watching would remember this peculiar event for ever; those who missed it would never know its thrill. Sunny saw how Clara and Mikey would be on one side; the others, from the supreme commander to Matara Malli, on the other.
Clouds rolled closer. England’s bowlers – Caddick and Flintoff – seemed revitalized by the smell of rain; aggressive, even from the Nursery End. The crowd started to egg them on, thirsting for a wicket. The batting was simply not exciting enough to hold them, the fans had had enough. By three o’clock the whole atmosphere had changed. Arnold reached his half-century and got his cheer, but something was held back. The deal was off. The crowd wanted blood. The desire was palpable. A supermarket carrier bag wafted over the playing field like a clown’s balloon, misshapen, mocking. With the very next ball Arnold was out – bowled by Hoggard, also caught by Trescothick. Then, within eight balls, Aravinda de Silva was out. ‘By George, they’ve got it,’ the man in the front row yelled. ‘England.’ He switched to beer and passed a can to his companion. By the mid-afternoon interval, they had entered a different world.
Sunny went back to the food court to meet Tina and Steve. They were eating ice creams and looking miserable.
‘Tea?’
‘No bloody Ceylon tea,’ Steve whined. ‘These bloody people don’t serve any good bloody tea.’
‘Yeah. They don’t have any Sri Lankan food either.’
‘No chicken curry, no vadai, no tea. No wonder our boys are so glum.’ Tina licked the vanilla drips off her fingers.
Sunny nodded. ‘They might have had a baila band, at least, and some bottles.’
The carnival atmosphere that had been all pervasive earlier had evaporated. They were at a much darker event now: more like a public execution. The expectation was for wickets to fall, rather than for runs to stack up.
‘You staying until the bitter end?’
‘Oh, yes. Shall we go for a drink after the game? Or a meal? We heard there are some Filipino restaurants in Earls Court.’
Steve endorsed the proposal. ‘Good.’
‘I have to get back, but maybe a quick drink round here.’
‘Sure, sure. A quickie then. We’ll be having an early night anyway. We have to be at Waterloo before seven tomorrow.’
‘Eurostar?’
‘Yes, under the sea we are going.’
Eric would be pleased, Sunny thought. Clara’s father longed for more people to experience the Chunnel.
He noticed raindrops soon after he got back to his seat. The batting had turned to blocking. There was booing. Then, some time before Zoysa hit the only two sixes of the whole match, Sunny got a call on his mobile. It was Clara. The car wouldn’t start; it was stuck at the car park of John Jones’s art shop.
‘The AA card is out of date.’ She sounded incredulous that he had neglected to pay up for roadside rescue.
‘Yes. I was thinking about that.’
The crowd chanted as the bowler pawed the ground. Then he charged . . . ‘Whoooooo-aagh!’
‘What’s happening?’ Clara asked.
‘The mob. They want action.’
‘What shall I do? The gates close at six.’
‘If it won’t start it is the carburettor, not the clutch. You go on to Mikey’s concert. I’ll fix the car and bring it home. I have my keys.’
He asked her to video the end of the match. The team would have to battle on their own. There was nothing he could do about Tina and Steve. He didn’t know where they were sitting. He hadn’t given them his phone number. They had no way of contacting each other. Did it matter? He decided to trust in luck. Fate and destiny. If they were to meet again, they would. At the Oval for the ODI.
When Clara got home, she looked as though she was still upset.
Sunny shrugged. ‘I am sorry about the AA. I’ll sort it out tomorrow. But even they might have missed it. It’s a tiny tube that comes loose sometimes. It only took a minute . . .’
‘Mikey wasn’t there,’ she blurted out. ‘He didn’t come to the concert.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t turn up. It’s not like him to let down his band.’
‘Did you try his phone?’
‘It just goes to voicemail.’
‘Have you tried calling any of his friends?’
‘Not yet.’
Sunny wondered whether it was to do with his French oral, but that was not until Monday. Mikey wasn’t the type to lose sleep over exams. He sent him a text message. ‘Let’s wait and see for a couple of hours.’ Mikey was sixteen. He
could do what he wanted.
Sunny poured himself a whisky and settled down to watch the last of the day’s play, rewound on tape. Fingertip control had its attractions after all. He could stop the action, pause the ball, go back a frame, forward a frame. See the fielder’s howl, the captain’s frown. It may not have been real, but it was almost his game now. The technology was utterly seductive, even if the Zen went, as Hector would say, when you began to identify the player by his face rather than his stroke.
When Sri Lanka got to 555, after some laborious batting, the captain declared the innings.
The bowling, the experts warned, was going to be the problem. There was no Murali – possibly the greatest spin bowler in the world. He was not fit to play. Sri Lanka had never won an overseas Test without him. Vaas, the fast bowler, came out and crossed himself. Involuntarily Sunny did too. Not for them, but for everything else that seemed to be gathering around the edges. Mostly for Mikey. He hadn’t replied to the text. Sunny keyed in another, but resisted sending it. He would wait. Patience. Anxiety must be swallowed. Transformed. The brand of cigarettes Lester had smoked in Colombo was 555. He’d blow smoke rings, one through the other, like ripples of magic breath. The small through the big until another shot right through and dispersed the earlier ones.
At about eight o’clock Mikey finally replied. His message was typically brief. sori about the concert and a c u l8r.
‘He’s OK,’ Sunny told Clara.
They had dinner, each preoccupied with their own thoughts. Halfway through the lasagne Clara asked about the match. ‘Was it any good?’
‘Depends what you mean by good.’
‘Worth going?’
‘It isn’t easy to describe. Bit like a religious experience.’
‘Dad used to play, you know. Every Sunday. Drove Mum nuts.’
‘Was that the problem?’
‘The rows? I don’t know. They expected too much, I guess.’
‘Is that why you expect so little?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
The Match Page 22