The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  He raised his shoulders helplessly. ‘It’s a game where time plays tricks . . .’

  Sunny wore a fat, black polyester tie for the funeral. Clara wore a black hat. So did Delora and Beryl. They could hardly recognize each other. Everyone was boiling; their faces streaming with perspiration. Tears were superfluous. It was a typical Tifus joke. ‘Now you people know what it is like. I did this almost every day – togged up for the pegged-out.’

  At the crematorium, despite the heat, Ranil was calm and commanding. Big and handsome. He guided his mother, accepted condolences, thanked the flock and generally impressed the crowd. ‘He is amazing,’ Sunny said to Clara.

  She smiled. ‘Yes.’

  After the service, everyone was invited back to the house. Ranil had the place decked out in white chrysanthemums and there was a garlanded picture of Tifus in the sitting room. If Ranil had intended a sales pitch, he couldn’t have done better. Some of the older guests nodded as they passed by, as if to make a mental note to put his name down in a codicil on their own exit procedure.

  Several people came up to Sunny. ‘Too bad about the match,’ said one. ‘What happened? I expected more sparkle from your Sri Lankan boys,’ said another.

  Closer friends of Tifus tried to present the bigger picture. ‘Lost the cricket, but won the peace, eh? At least no war and terror any more.’

  Sunny didn’t think the two – cricket and war – were on the same scale, but he accepted the need to look for compensation wherever one could. Delora came and sat on a nearby chair. ‘I am so glad he came back in time.’

  ‘Ranil?’

  Her face tightened as she forced herself to look into a future she could not imagine. ‘And your Mikey is now sixteen. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Yes, GCSEs now. Wants to be an engineer, but music is probably more his thing than serious studies.’

  ‘Funerals are not necessary for . . .’ she stopped. Her eyes trembled as she looked around the room, searching for someone. ‘It is not easy, this dealing with the dead. Neither of us are from here, you know, Sunny, but we made it our home. Poor Ranil has always been looking for something else. He needs that. To be looking. What a barney he had with Tifus the last time. But I understand, you know. After all, I left Wrexham for Liverpool when I was nineteen. Perhaps my mother’s Portuguese blood required a port. Sea air.’

  ‘Would you like some water?’

  She nodded, grateful for anything.

  Sunny brought her a glass of water. Someone else was by her side, speaking about the tribulations of shopping at the new hypermarket. ‘It is not aimed at the single person at all. We become invisible, my dear . . .’

  ‘Here you are. Sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Delora collected the glass in a thin hand knotted with blue veins. She took a slow tiny sip. The water seemed to fill her eyes. ‘That’s good. He always said funerals made for thirsty work.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I had a letter from Hector,’ Delora continued. ‘He must have posted it straightaway. A sweet letter.’ She asked the other woman whether she remembered Hector, the gentleman from Manila who came all those years ago. ‘A lovely man.’

  Sunny drifted into the garden. He wondered how Hector had known about Tifus. Maybe he was on email. He always knew more than Sunny gave him credit for; he should have been the reporter. Hector was close to Lester’s age; then there was Tifus and then Irene. But she went first, then Lester, now Tifus. There wasn’t a pattern to the way we fall. Or was there? Sunny thought of Ranil, Robby, Tina and Clara. The false steps they might each take; the true ones. The batting order. Our lives had been too tentative. Whose phrase was that in his head?

  He saw his mother in her Colombo home, detaching herself from all that had grown around her. Retreating into a still photograph where nothing could touch her; where nothing would change. Where there was no past, no future. A place with music that only she could hear. Why had his father not understood what she was going through? Hector would have understood her artistic temperament. Her need for space. Composure. Peace. Love. To give and to receive. Her fingers were long and beautiful . . . Sunny heard a crashing of chords, the slamming of the piano lid, wood cracking. He is in his childhood garden. He has a bat in his hand. He can’t sing. He can’t play . . . He sees his mother come out on to the balcony in an ivory satin gown, tearing newspapers and casting old scores into the bushes. She is hissing at Lester. ‘What’s this? What’s this? What’s this shit you write for these toady rags?’ Sunny’s ears hurt. He sees a chest, a trunk. Someone has thrown away the key. Why? I don’t understand. I don’t understand why she is doing this. His father says something about money and there is another angry outburst. ‘Don’t you fucking touch me.’ A cloud of ripped newsprint floats in the hot, humid air. Sunny hears another word. Child. Then there is silence. Stillness. He doesn’t hear anything else. Did his father have no better words with which to reach her? Child? Who said it? Did she? What did his father say to her before they were married? Before she died? Sunny realizes there is no one who can tell him what was really said. What should have been said. The right words. Everything had moved out of reach.

  The right words were what he always lacked, despite the syllables sloshing round inside his head. He hadn’t the right words for Clara, for Mikey. For himself. Not for his mother, nor his father. He didn’t know what to tell Delora about her husband, he had nothing to offer Ranil. He watched Ranil speaking to some of Tifus’s colleagues – his now. Clara appeared with a glass of wine for Ranil. They were both in the same picture for a moment, framed by the window. Sunny remembered how he’d first seen them together, the Crisp ’n Dry. It didn’t seem so long ago. She looked like she was closer to where she belonged now, standing next to Ranil. Sunny felt frightened at the way things had turned out, as though someone might have been playing with them. Another game he had not learned or understood in time.

  The first ten days after their return to London were eerily quiet. The sun was warm and summery. The back garden turned to weed. Mikey – exams over – was either asleep or out; Clara was busier than ever between her work, her oils and the internet. When she found Robby’s new online store, she’d frowned. ‘This is really OTT.’ Sunny didn’t look. He didn’t want to hear any more voices from the past. He’d had enough of the dead and departed. He wanted to latch on to something ahead. At the library he saw again the looming deadline for the photo competition; he still had nothing to send.

  He took to walking everywhere with a camera in his hand, in case an angel might fall out of the sky. He had to trust to luck – bahala na – fate. On the days he went to the lab, he would watch with envy as customers trooped in carrying their rolls of 35 mm film, APS cartridges and digital media. He tried to spot competitors, the more sallow, serious types – no holiday snaps there, no baby pics. He even took a photograph of one. A subtle shot of what seemed like hope fluttering at the counter, a shaky hand with loose change, a whispered name. Freddy saw him do it and asked what he was up to. ‘You think we need CCTV in here?’ Sunny told him that he was just trying out a lens. Creative experimentation. That pleased Freddy. ‘Fantastic,’ he said, thrilled at the idea that his shop might be the fount of such spontaneous inspiration.

  Sunny wanted to photograph hope embedded in love. Or love embedded in hope. Something promising despite the true nature of the world. Against the odds. Something more all-encompassing than that Parisian kiss imprinted in a million heads. Something that could be found, just as it was lost, like life itself. Unexpectedly. Undeservedly. He remembered the conversation with Hector in the tea room in West Kirby, his words on love, unrequited and requited. He wished he had captured the hope, love and care in Hector’s face then. His mortality. Could he find it in another face? In another image? Before the end of the month? Ever? Bahala bloody na.

  One evening, on the way back from the library, he took a photograph of the darkening empty road. When he got home, Clara was on the phone. She was laughing. ‘OK, love.�
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  Sunny stored his camera away in the cupboard under the stairs.

  ‘That was Mikey.’ She put down the phone. ‘He’s coming back with some friends in about an hour. They want to watch a video.’

  ‘Might that not be too energetic?’

  ‘I think he might bring the girl.’

  ‘He said that?’

  She shrugged. ‘No. It’s a mother’s hunch.’

  ‘I see. Some mothers do have them, I guess.’

  Mikey appeared with four others. Sunny recognized only Benjy, lankier but as bright as ever. Mikey didn’t bother with introductions, but Benjy did.

  ‘This is my cousin, Vicky. She’s come to stay with us.’ He turned to her. ‘Mikey’s dad knows the Philippines.’

  Sunny asked her where her home was, once more unsure where his own was.

  ‘Cebu.’ She smiled dazzlingly.

  ‘I’m sorry not to have ever visited it.’

  ‘Ai, you must see Cebu. You maa . . . st.’ She stretched her eyes wide and the crucial words. ‘Ree-ally, you have to go to Cebu city.’

  The other two slouched into the sitting room. ‘That one is Daniella and that’s Joe,’ Benjy added. The girl raised a hand in a sort of lame greeting, the boy twitched a shoulder weak from the weight of permanent hip-hop.

  ‘We are going to the match on Sunday,’ Mikey said suddenly, speaking to Sunny after what seemed like years.

  ‘Which match?’

  ‘Vicky wants to see a cricket match. We’re going to the Sri Lanka-India game.’

  ‘At the Oval?’ Sunny had been so dismayed about the looming competition that he’d forgotten the one-day match. ‘You have tickets?’

  ‘A friend of Benjy’s got us tickets. I used Hector’s money.’

  ‘Come with us, Mr Fernando. Plee-ease come. Mikey says you know all about it.’ Vicky peered at him, searching for the words she needed. ‘Benjy’s buddy tol’ us it’ll be reelly, reelly exciting. One-day match. I wanna learn cricket. Back home no one can play.’ She was standing very close to Mikey, slender and sweet. He looked happier than Sunny had seen him since he was about nine. His face had lifted, his shoulders broadened. There was solid flesh where before there had only been space for him to grow into. He was born with Sunny’s face in baby shape; now adolescence seemed to have brought more of his mother to the surface. He stood there, sixteen years old, his hair in highlights, his skin alloyed and his hands remarkably steady.

  ‘Bring missus. She likes the matches, no?’ Vicky added.

  ‘I might see you kids somewhere in the crowd, if I can get a ticket.’

  The next day he managed to get one on the other side of the stadium from Mikey and his friends.

  The day before the match Clara mentioned that Ranil was coming to London. ‘He’s invited us for lunch on Sunday. A special place off the Edgware Road, near where he is staying.’

  ‘I’m going to the match.’

  ‘Another one? You know Ranil does need some support.’ Her voice was sharp.

  ‘I thought he had God at his side.’

  ‘You are one of his oldest friends.’ Clara’s face was losing the summer colour she’d gained recently, as though her blood was gathering somewhere else. Something was not quite right.

  ‘You go. You were the sweetheart.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. That was twenty years ago. Thirty. He is just trying to get us all together again. He wants his old friends around him.’

  ‘That’s the way you see it, so that’s the way it is, huh? Everything according to the gospel of Clara.’

  ‘What exactly are you trying to say?’

  Sunny said he had to go to the match. He had older friends than Ranil to see. And Mikey was going to the match. They’d be there together even if not next to each other. ‘You don’t understand what it means. It’s a roots thing.’ He wanted to say, we could all learn from our sixteen-year-old selves. We should go back for a day. The youngsters in real time; Clara and Ranil, Sunny, Tina and Steve on rewind.

  Clara picked up a biro and drew a rough triangle on the pad that served as her shopping jotter, then started to make bobbles on each corner. She spoke again only after she finished the third one. ‘Maybe we should get married after all.’

  Sunny hadn’t touched a drink all morning. Sometimes he heard voices in his head. He tried not to open his mouth when he was confused, but he had to ask. ‘Why? Why do you say that? Why now? What would be the point of it?’

  ‘Mikey’s growing up. He might beat us to it. Kids these days seem keen on old conventions. Maybe they know something we don’t. Sometimes I wonder if I have been too . . . prejudiced. Maybe it is the right time now for us to renew things.’ She put the pen down. ‘We could even have another baby.’

  ‘At our age?’

  ‘Cherie had one. Or we can adopt. What do you say? It is never too late.’

  Sunny needed a drink. A bloody great eye-opener, he said to himself. And then, aloud, ‘I need to think.’

  ‘Think about what?’

  ‘Thoughts. Us. Everything. What about art school? Your Alex?’

  She blinked. ‘I’ve decided mandalas are enough. I know what I want. I know what is important to me. Do you?’

  The atmosphere at the Oval was extraordinary, the noise level astounding. The stadium throbbed, ready to burst. Even before the toss, the crowd – predominantly South Asian this time – was in a frenzy.

  Sri Lanka batted first. It wasn’t a good start, wickets fell fast, but the play was for runs, runs, runs. Anything cautious was booed. There was no sign of Mikey and his friends, or Tina and Steve. Sunny was in a stand mostly full of Indian supporters, with a handful of neutrals and a small contingent of Sri Lankans two rows back. There were trumpets and drum rolls, klaxons and whistles and rattles and chants and screams. This was cricket at full decibel. A game where every ball was a missile and the field an arena of gladiators. Sunny realized he had known nothing about real One-day cricket. Nothing. These fans had not come to watch but to participate: the players were not kings but servants of the crowd. They existed only to please the crowd. Do their bidding or be hauled off. Earn respect only with every ball; glory from the past was not enough, except perhaps for the legendary Sachin Tendulkar, who raised a cheer every time he moved, even if it was only to snap a bit of elastic.

  Someone in the row behind issued a stern reminder, ‘This is not a Test match, you silly buggers.’ He was one of a Sri Lankan party: two young boys with flags, a girl of about ten, mother, father and several other adults who looked like they might be related. The speaker cradled a box of Banrock shiraz. A large red thermal container in the centre of the row held the rest of the day’s provisions. When the captain finally carved a six over third man with a stunning leap, the whole family jumped to their feet and cheered. The Indian fans around were amazed. ‘OK.’ There was a blast of music to celebrate the boundary; a snatch of ‘That’s the Way I Like It’.

  By 11.30 a.m. the Sri Lankan captain was out – caught by Dravid to a huge roar. ‘Ooh, ah, Indi-ah,’ was chanted again and again until fifteen minutes later, when another wicket fell – lbw. Then a new and more menacing chant: ‘Are you watching, Pakistan?’ India had come from a win over England the day before. Their fans were on a roll. They had Pakistan in their sights. The commentator among the Sri Lankan family clicked his tongue and poured himself some wine. ‘What has happened?’ he moaned. ‘In 1996 we were the champions of the world. What the hell has gone wrong?’

  ‘What goes up, must come down, no machang? Even when you hit a six?’ His companion was a philosopher.

  ‘So what, men? Then you hit another six. What is this looking down business all the bloody time? How will they ever do anything? Everybody in our bloody country blames every bloody body else. No wonder we always end up fighting each other like stupid buggers.’

  The youngest boy in the family, further down the row, took refuge in his gameboy.

  The stand’s Indian cheerleader strutted to the
front. He looked like one of the lads Sunny had worked with in the accounts department all those years ago. This man had probably only just turned thirty. He was small, tubby, prematurely balding. He had a fat beak and a big voice. He gave full vent to a stream of racy chants: anti-colonial, anti-white and anti-Pakistani. The old codgers with the only bottle of fizz in the stand simply raised their beakers at the relatively mild ‘white boys’ taunts, as if recognizing this abuse as juvenilia from the previous century. Everyone was letting go. The cheerleader embarked on a public interview. ‘Hey man, you people ever been to India?’

  The oldest of the bubbly party replied that he had not only been there, but lived in India for thirty-five years. He had been in the railways.

  The cheerleader said that he himself had never been to India. ‘What’s your name, man? Who do you support then? India?’ He doubled up with a loud guffaw.

  ‘Of course. My name is Hutton.’

  The cheerleader turned to the crowd astonished. ‘Hey, Hutton is an Indian, Hutton is an Indian.’ Then twisted it. ‘Mutton, man.’

  The chant was taken up by everybody. ‘Mutton is an Indian.’ Then someone else ratcheted up the tempo. ‘Beckham is an Indian, Beckham is an Indian.’ Then, ‘Becker was an Indian. Becker was an Indian.’ A moment later, ‘Henman will be an Indian. Yarr.’ It was the new badge of honour. All heroes had to be Indian.

  Another wicket fell.

  ‘Look out, Pakistan.’

  The food container in the Sri Lankan row was opened and some vadai and patties were passed around. The man with the box of wine gobbled a snack and stood up in disgust. He was tall and wore a blue, white and gold Sri Lankan cricket shirt. ‘Give us a four, you lazy fellows,’ he bellowed. The cheerleader looked at him in surprise as if ‘lazy fellows’ was the worst curse he had ever heard in his life. He wiped his brow with his sleeve. ‘Whoa.’ Then he took up the chant himself. ‘A four here, a four there, here, there, everywhere . . .’ Suddenly the whole stand was cheering for a Sri Lankan boundary. ‘Come on, you lazy fellows . . .’ Everyone was now Sri Lankan. Another boundary, and a big hurrah erupted. For a moment everything was topsy-turvy. Samosas were passed around from the Indian fans down to the Sri Lankan row with congratulations and a cascade of laughter. The man in the Sri Lankan cricket shirt leant back with a box of patties and offered them around. ‘Hey, you eat meat? Meat?’