The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Anyway, I’m not about to start playing.’

  Sunny went back to the TV to watch the highlights. He drew the curtains and switched on the small lamp on the piano. He got his chair in position and put a cushion for his back and another on a stool for his feet. He poured himself another drink and turned on the telly.

  She pushed open the door and peered in. ‘Haven’t you seen it all?’

  ‘I want to get the full picture.’ To get it into the blood. Somehow it was important. Something had to be important.

  ‘Sounds like an addiction.’

  He settled down to watch the replay of the two sixes that had come, one after the other. Was that when he was on the tube, or in the car park, under the hood, twiddling with rubber hoses? He would have liked to have seen the sixes, two in a row, in real life. He might have taken a seriously good picture. A second chance like that doesn’t come very often.

  Only then did Sunny realize he hadn’t taken a single picture. Not even of Tina, or Steve in his gooseberry anorak. The day had been too surreal; he had been in a trance. He’d completely forgotten the photography competition.

  At midnight he sent another text to Mikey. A reminder. He didn’t expect a reply. Clara had gone to bed. Everywhere small fissures, fault lines, new cracks were widening. Mikey in a world Sunny would never see, Clara in retreat, and then Tina, who had appeared and disappeared – now tucked into some Bloomsbury hotel with her man, watching the replay on a minuscule TV and wondering why he hadn’t turned up at the end of the day. It was not his fault, but Sunny felt he’d made a bad move; been forced to make a bad move by the way things were. He stayed in the sitting room with the TV on, thinking, until the bottle of Scotch was empty. Perhaps it was not so strange for Tina, people appearing and disappearing. Her life still revolved around the people she’d known in her teens: her mother, her father, Steve. She’d moved from country to country but the people in her life remained the same. Clara’s life was surprisingly similar. He’d first met her when she was sixteen; the rest of her circle from that time, and earlier, were still around her. She remained attached, despite her reservations about her parents. She’d discarded no one, except for Gumbo, and easily added new ones like Alex and her painting group.

  Sunny wished he had taken Mikey to the game. But it was too late. Mikey was off on his own already. And tomorrow Sunny had to go to Freddy’s studio. There were appointments to keep. A job to do. There was no guarantee that Mikey would be back before midday, and in any case there were exams on Monday.

  Sunny felt unsettled when he found that Clara was still awake. She was in bed, with a magazine next to her. He put the phone on the bedside table.

  She had the duvet up over her breasts, held in place by her arms. The wall behind the bedhead needed repainting. There was a sheen where his head had touched it for sixteen fugitive years. They had gone for muted tones, all those years ago, when they had been happy to pore over colour charts and furniture catalogues. They had liked the idea of a cosy room; now it seemed dark and unbearably confining. White might have been the better option, even if it had turned grey by now. The whole interior of the house needed redoing.

  ‘I met a couple from Manila.’ He tried to engage her.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Today. At the match.’

  ‘Do they play cricket in the Philippines?’

  ‘They are not Filipino. They are like me. We happened to be there, in Manila, at the same time.’ He remembered how Robby had broken through first, then Hector. Linking the past and the present, a needle flashing in and out with a thread made of memory.

  ‘Will you meet up again?’

  He said he had forgotten to exchange numbers and that in any case they’d be off touring Europe. ‘They just came and went. It was . . . weird.’

  A police car with its siren wailing raced down the escape lane by the park.

  ‘I wonder why Mikey missed the concert.’

  ‘Maybe he got tired of playing the same three chords.’ He checked the phone to make sure it was on signal. The transmitter icon blinked.

  ‘Better get some sleep.’ He turned off the light.

  Another siren sounded in the distance. It might have been better, he thought, if he had gone a little easier on the whisky.

  At about 5 a.m. he heard the front door open and close. The jangle of keys being tossed into a drawer. When he woke again, it was nearly nine.

  He had three appointments and then some enlargements to oversee. There was no TV in the shop, and the lad who worked the machines in the back hadn’t brought his radio. Sunny heard nothing about the match until teatime when he went to the newsagent’s. ‘England in deep shit.’ The shopkeeper’s words created an echo in his head that bounced from Colombo to London. ‘Hussain out, caught by that Sangakkara.’

  When Sunny got home at the end of the day he found that the England team were on their second innings in a humiliating follow on. There were complaints made – unfair wily bowling, a crisis in confidence – and a hint of rain in the air.

  Sunny watched the repeat on TV as though it were live.

  Clara peeped in during a drinks break. ‘Have you talked to Mikey?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘When is the match over?’

  ‘At this rate, pretty soon.’ England had made only 275 in the first innings. They might be all done for less than that in the morning. ‘But there are two more matches in the series.’

  Clara watched Ruchira Perera release a ball on screen.

  ‘He’s met a girl.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mikey.’

  She was smiling.

  ‘It’s not the first time, is it?’

  ‘He looks pretty pleased with himself.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have a French exam on Monday?’

  Clara smiled again. ‘I think he’ll be all right. I don’t know who she is. He wouldn’t say anything, but he did have a big grin on his face.’

  Sunny didn’t see him that evening either. Exam or no exam, it was Saturday night. He hadn’t seen Mikey on a Saturday night for quite some time. He indulged in nonstop televised cricket and even left it on while Clara dished up her latest culinary experiment.

  ‘Will you talk to him tomorrow?’ She released a slice of salmon into a stream of pad thai sauce. ‘Show some interest?’

  ‘Sure, oui.’ The game would be over by the time Mikey woke up, he had no doubt about that.

  Sunday turned out to be not quite so straightforward. The Sri Lankan skipper dropped all his catches. His teammates looked flabbergasted. The wickets refused to fall. England began to build up runs that no one had thought possible. By the time Mikey stumbled down the stairs, rubbing his eyes, Sunny was ready to turn off the TV and rub his own.

  ‘So, who is this girl?’ He had no wish to waste time.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some new girl?’ Sunny added, unsure what else to say.

  ‘What are you on about, Dad?’

  ‘Hope she can speak French. You got an exam tomorrow, right?’

  ‘I know that. You don’t need to tell me that.’ He went over to the piano and started on an unexpected Gershwin tune.

  ‘Good. That’s fine, then.’ He retreated back to the gloom of the TV. He would have liked to have said, just tell me what’s going on, son. But he couldn’t. It was too late.

  The telephone rang. Sunny waited to see if Mikey would answer it. He did. A moment later, he called out. ‘It’s for you, Dad.’

  Sunny took the phone.

  ‘You don’t recognize me, Sunny, do you?’

  ‘Recognize you? Why, of course . . .’ All he needed was another second. One, two, three. The voice was strained, but familiar. ‘Ranil?’

  ‘I’ve only just come back. My father is in hospital. He’s . . . very ill.’

  Sunny sat down. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got here in time to bless him.’

  Sunny wanted to stop him. Stop the voice. Stop everything.
He never cared for telephones. No good ever came out of the wretched machines. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He hasn’t got much longer, they say.’

  Sunny couldn’t imagine Tifus propped up in a hospital bed. Tifus should always be in a room full of people, bounding from group to group offering peanuts and olives, cracking ghoulish jokes about the route from this world to the next. Delora would be devastated. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘She’s being brave.’

  ‘I am so sorry. Clara will be very upset.’

  There was a pause. ‘Is she there? Can I speak to her?’

  ‘Sure. Of course. Let me get her.’

  He went and found her at her computer searching the internet for more vivid fish dishes. He told her what had happened and gave her the phone. He knew she’d know what to say, even though Sunny was the one who had a father and a mother dead.

  The final Test match was going to be at Old Trafford in a month. As the first one looked like it might be heading for a draw – England were batting solidly through the day and aiming for one – the last might be worth watching. Sunny wondered if he could get to it and see Tifus at the same time.

  When Clara came downstairs, he asked her what she thought they should do.

  ‘I don’t think there is anything we can do, except pray.’

  ‘Ranil can do that for all of us. He is the expert.’ It was unnecessary, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘The match is going to be a draw.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘They should have won. The first two days were all theirs. It’s so . . . disappointing.’ Was that the right word?

  ‘It’s only a game. How do you think Ranil feels?’

  Monday’s TV showed a practically empty Lord’s. Tickets were on sale for a tenner. There’d be no touts, no queues. But Sunny didn’t want to go. It would be unbearable. Then, as he watched the TV, Sunny began to see the game in a different light. When he had gone to Lord’s, he had got too excited. Drummed up expectations that could not be met. That was not the nature of the sport. It was not meant to be about expectations. The experience ought to be meditative. Let the captains and the cheerleaders shoot adrenalin and shout and swagger, but not the spectators. Bawling and baying for blood was not the right way to approach this game. The way to do it, he reckoned, was to do it pissed. The pair in front of him had got it right. The game, like life, was at best a slow slide from cold champagne to tepid beer, with plenty of nodding off in the sun when the going got rough. Let us have spin bowlers and googlies. Ignore the bouncers. Get rid of the batsmen’s helmets and stick to crotch boxes. An occasional boundary, a rare six, and for the rest of time boggle and twaddle and take the chance to catch up on news made untroubling by print. Leave off the photographs, the yahoo, the boo, the baila and the witches’ brew. Scratch a ball, stroke a bat, dream the dream. As the master Po-chang might have said: first there was cricket, then there was enlightenment. Then there was cricket again. No change. No big deal. Plain Zen and soda.

  When Mikey came back home from his French exam in the afternoon, he looked like he’d had a better time than the cricket fans had had falling asleep on the stands in St John’s Wood. England had inched to an unglamorous and dispiriting draw that satisfied no one.

  He grunted in a very Gallic way when Sunny asked him about the exam. And that, it seemed, was that.

  Tifus died three weeks later, crushed by cancer of the gut. He’d had a week out of hospital, at home. Ranil was there all the way through. The funeral was set for Tuesday, 18 June, the day after the last Test. Clara and Sunny drove up on the Sunday.

  Sunny didn’t have much hope for Sri Lanka at Old Trafford. There was little point in watching. England had won against Denmark in the football and was into the quarter-final, which in a displaced kind of way he was happy to applaud; nobody talked about the cricket match in which England had reached the ‘comfort zone’ with 512 in the pocket.

  They met Ranil at his house. His hair had turned entirely grey. Not only his hair, but also his skin. His mother was upstairs, resting. Clara gave him a hug and Sunny shook his hand, mumbling vaguely about how sorry he was.

  ‘It’s no great shock,’ Ranil said. ‘In this family we know death.’ He uttered the word with greater relish than Tifus would have used. Ranil looked much bigger. He was broader, thicker. Perhaps taller than he had been before. More comfortable, despite the bereavement. His face was heavier, graver, like that of a man who had seen a lot and learned a lot.

  ‘Can we do anything to help?’ Clara asked.

  Ranil raised his hands, like a priest. ‘Everything has been taken care of. The procedure was all set out and the firm runs like clockwork. I find it fits me, you know. It is like a vocation. I just didn’t know it, until he stepped aside.’

  ‘You’ll go into the business?’ Sunny asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I am the business. I’ve already got a website under way.’

  He offered coffee and Garibaldi biscuits in the sitting room. ‘Dad’s favourites, you know, these squashed fly biscuits. We thought he’d like it if we served them to visitors. It’s the kind of special touch he would have added.’

  Clara murmured praise and approval while Sunny took a bite out of the wafer-thin, gummy biscuit that Tifus had offered him on his first visit. They sat in silence as the intervening years receded in each of their heads.

  ‘So, no more roaming about, then? All that travelling . . .’

  Ranil breathed in slowly as though he needed to fill his lungs before he began. ‘We are all searching, are we not? You remember, I went to the Himalayas. I went to Lhasa. I went to Angkor Wat. I went all the way to Japan – there were no football crowds like there are now, you know, just Shinto. Sunny, I wanted to go to the Philippines too – there was a chap performing miracles in San Fernando, as it happened. I thought of you. But then I met up with a group who convinced me we had to get to Bangor immediately . . .’

  ‘There is always a miracle maker . . .’

  ‘That’s what I reckoned. You will find your miracle when you need it. And now, coming home from a good long stint in Bangor, I find that in this place, in Dad’s business, there is the fit. It is the glove. You understand? My home.’

  Sunny saw that in some miraculous way, Tifus was resurrected in Ranil. When he moved his hands, when he spoke, Tifus was there, the smaller father ensconced within the larger son. Sunny thought of how Mikey was already bigger than him. Am I in him? Is my father inside me, observing? Is he the one in my mind turning the world from pictures to words?

  While Clara rummaged around her parents’ house, Sunny slipped away to Manchester to witness a few overs of the last day of the last sad match at Old Trafford. In the end, he couldn’t help himself. He’d read that it was possibly Aravinda de Silva’s closing innings before retiring from Test cricket. The finality of it all appealed to him. And this time, he reckoned, he might find the photograph he needed for the competition. Something had to happen soon.

  The sun was out as he pulled into the field opposite the grounds. He found his way expertly to his seat in a practically empty row, donned his hat and sunglasses and defiantly opened a bottle of Tiger beer. ‘Play it again, Aravinda.’ He allowed himself a cheer as the batsman hooked and pulled and let fly as though rejuvenated and right back at the beginning of his glittering game rather than the end of a very special career. The batting was better than anyone had expected, and the score crept up. Arnold, with equal finesse, clocked up a good century. By the time the side was out, England had 50 to make from six overs and it didn’t look likely. The match, as Tifus might have said, was a dead cert draw. But then the crowd urged their team and the slow game turned England’s way: the ball flew, runs multiplied. Sunny stayed too long, too late and saw too much. Cruising back down the M62 motorway he went over and over the game. This match, in which he’d told himself nothing mattered, not even the passing of time, had become one where every minute, every ball co
unted as though the future of the world depended on it. He had taken a few pictures but he knew they wouldn’t come close to capturing the apocalyptic spirit.

  He drove back through Liverpool, wanting an excuse to go through the Mersey tunnel, go under water. Think. Not think. Take a picture. A pure picture. The picture. Or sink.

  Opposite the Adelphi he saw that the Army & Navy Stores, where he had gone with Ranil nearly thirty years earlier, had turned into the Kumar Brothers. Would he find hawkers by Bold Street? Betel-chewers by the Cavern?

  Birkenhead tunnel was cordoned off by traffic cones and he had to use the one into Wallasey. When he came out he decided to drive over to New Brighton to see the waterfront. Across the Mersey a string of modern spindly windmills waved their lazy arms. He watched for a while. Then from there he followed his nose towards Birkenhead and Clara’s parents’ house. There were some new housing developments starting up in the richer areas: security fences, road barriers and sentry boxes. It looked as though the world was dividing between the villages of the Domesday book and those of the fast and rich. Veera had been right, all those years ago. Exclusivity had taken root again. An abandoned school was being turned into a site for executive homes trading on small deceits, short memories and mythical heritage: Old School Lane, Tuck Shop Corner. Assorted deadly confectionery.

  He got to the house later than he had planned. Clara asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got lost.’

  Her father, Eric, laughed. ‘Can’t blame you. I heard the score.’

  Sunny explained that he’d driven back through Liverpool and had taken a couple of wrong turnings.

  ‘Not hard to do, the way these town planners keep messing with everything. Except the tunnel, of course. At least that is safe.’

  ‘The Birkenhead one was closed.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Eric looked concerned.

  Beryl said that she’d kept some dinner warm. ‘A little bit of cassoulet. You know it, of course? Although I must say I much prefer Delia’s recipe to this new one.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so late.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Eric was never back from a cricket match in time for his hotpot, were you, dear?’ She turned to her husband. ‘Ever?’ She added a little testily.