Black Bread White Beer
Page 14
Past the pub lamp’s radius, a third of the way into the Green, they find their footsteps melting into blue-black. The terrain underfoot is firm if not entirely smooth. There are no sudden dips to mind, but there are smallish holes dotted around from the dogs which he stumbles into. When she pulls her weight back to balance him, he imagines being saved from sinking sands, or drowning. The way he has acted today, she could just have easily left him.
‘Where are we going? If you’re looking to get home it’s the opposite way.’
‘Almost there. You’ll see.’
Tramping on damp grass. Grateful, she says, for wearing a pair of Liz’s joggers instead of her patent heeled boots. Everything about her gear is practical and outdoorsy, almost as if she knew they would end up here, walking into black.
That afternoon, at the Herald, the Green felt a toy town in its scale: a landscaped miniature amid the wild growth of the working countryside surrounding it. In darkness, it becomes epic. He feels the openness of their surroundings rushing past his shoulders, somehow unclamping all that has knotted and twisted inside him. Black footsteps casting shadows he had not anticipated. Black on deep navy; black on black.
Stealing a glance behind he sees how a shadow has also fallen across the right side of her face; his too, he presumes. They are two half moons walking towards a possible salvation, about to embark upon a spontaneous, hopeful experiment.
It came to him during the last dance, after she stopped crying. It did not matter what she told him: her eating a prawn sandwich on Thursday lunchtime because she had been obsessing over it to the point of worship. The prawns had nothing to do with what happened. He was more cowed by the way she kept it to herself and let the secret fester until it grew to an illogical magnitude. Ashamed really, that he had not had the sense there was something to pull out of her.
‘I’d been pining for the taste for days. Dreaming all week of that sweetness. When I saw the platter at the working lunch, something snapped. And I was conscious of people watching me, even though none of them knew I was pregnant, but I still ate it very quickly because of that. I had two triangles; one after another. And what made it really bad was that they didn’t taste of anything!’
Clarity arrives in the worst way: through her inconsolable tears. What was needed, he sees, what had been missing all day, was support from a force that would not lay blame with shellfish or uncomprehending husbands. A higher power. There was no point in converting religion, no reason in forcing yourself into the realm of whether belief was actually possible, if those processes could not be called upon during these rootless moments.
The Church was never for him. A wedding present to her family that’s all. Even the poor conversion vicar saw that. Ma and Puppa had lost all faith in him praying to the blue and grey gods that childhood incredulity had long since marked incomprehensible. But something was out there, had to be, otherwise how else could they make sense of this? The loss could be explained by science; the healing, not.
‘Why do you think people turn to religion in hard times? As a last resort or because they actually get something out of it?’
‘If you wanted the Church you’re the wrong way, too.’
‘I’m not talking about the Church. I’m asking whether you believe.’
‘In what?’
‘Something outside of ourselves. Think about it.’
Their footsteps become shorter because she is tired and falls a further pace back, stretching their hold to its end point. He moderates himself accordingly, wanting to reach it as soon as possible but without dragging her like a caveman. She must be open and willing to try.
As they pause for her to catch her breath he feels something running over his foot. The tiny movement of a mouse. Its patter across the top of his brogue, less rhythmic, and more a scrabble to somewhere more urgent, strikes him with dumb gratitude. It is an experience that seems impossible had they been in Richmond, even with the scores of rats flooding the tangled miles of drainage.
They are alive in the world, and harnessed to a natural cycle. What they lack in understanding can be gained by learning to command what they have. They are alive, for fuck’s sake. Anything is possible.
‘We lit a bonfire here when we were sixteen. Night of the village hall Halloween party. Me and Rory and couple of others. Pissed out of our faces.’
‘What is it with you and fires?’
‘Don’t know. If you burn the hell out of something you leave something good behind. Something sweeter. Those pujas your mum does. They always start with a flame.’
‘The Catholic Church. They’re big on candles.’
‘And the Jewish Sabbath.’
‘So you’re saying that we should start a fire?’
She laughs, as sweet as the ashes she remembers; turning towards him so that the shadow finally falls from her eyes.
‘It’s something.’
They see the pole before they walk into it; its flat top illuminated by scatterings of village light, and a fistful of stars blearily peeping through the bank of cloud.
‘This is where we dance round the maypole, is it, ’Mal?’
‘No, but we could touch it and get some of its energy. Put your palms on it like this, see? Flat. Both hands.’
His feet are planted firm and wide apart as he does so. Something about the preparing athlete in his posture: head bowed for a few moments and then gradually raised, so that his eyes meet the pole’s highest reaches. He remains unaware that this is what he set out to do until his eye catches the brass ring that clenches the top. Waiting for its reflection, a glint that indicates acknowledgement; approval.
Claud circles him for a few minutes, appraising his movement. He sees on her face, each time he lifts his head from its natural meditative position, an expression of surprise mellowing into a studied wonderment. Through all of their marriage, she never thought him capable.
Though he waits for a cascade of tutting to reach his ears he knows there will be none. She joins him, silently and without question; knowing the impact will be lost if she does not join forces and place herself opposite. The effort shows in the flare of her nostrils, suggesting a re-enactment of locked horns, before she allows her body to relax.
The pole brings them into sync. They have the wind and the trees and the racket from the pub as their white noise. Instead, they acquiesce to a soundtrack taken from bed: of gentle, muscular breathing, and of the clicks and rolls of the other’s body.
‘I wanted to call him Evan Neel. With the Indian spelling. Two Es,’ she says after a time.
‘So you thought he was a boy, too?’
‘From the first moment I found out. I can’t explain it. Isn’t that strange?’
‘Medicine can answer so many things, but the reason for some senses, those gut feelings, can never be traced.’
‘What about you? What would you have named our son?’
‘Haroon. It’s Arabic. My parents would’ve hated it. More coals heaped onto the identity crisis.’
‘I like yours better. Haroon. Beautiful name for a baby.’
It takes little for the scant light to fade: a thicker patch of cloud settling over the Green; curtains drawn in one of the several upstair windows of the cottages opposite the pub. The thick darkness renders them invisible to each other, bar hands on the pole and the outline of their forearms. He follows her lead. Still standing, heads staying bent. Hands now clasped round the pole, prayer-style.
‘What do you feel, Claud?’
‘That the pole’s getting hotter.’
‘It’s our body heat. Means we’ve still got blood running through us.’
‘What else?’
‘I keep wondering how many others have done what we’re doing. Stood here to ask for something. This afternoon I saw the village dogs sniffing around this pole, cocking their leg up probably, but that doesn’t detract from what it is.’
‘Is this what it takes? For us to have another baby?’
‘Could be.’
‘I’m not sure I believe it.’
‘What else is there?’
He feels the trembling in her hands. A fear of the future; both the immediate and what lies further; what is wished for.
Heads bowed, they wait.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to: Stan; Karthika V.K., Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, and all at HarperCollins India; Tabish Khair; Stuart Evers, Nikesh Shukla, Gavin James Bower, Lee Rourke; Alex Clark, Jake Arnott, Ian McMillan, Boyd Hilton, Will Ashon, Edmund White; my family.
Also by Niven Govinden
Graffity My Soul
We Are The New Romantics
First published in India in 2011 by
HarperCollins Publishers India
a joint venture with
The India Today Group
This edition published by
The Friday Project
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © Niven Govinden 2011
Epub Edition September 2012 ISBN: 978-0-00-750317-9
Niven Govinden asserts the moral right to be identified
as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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Cover design: Prabha Mallya
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