The Cybergypsies

by Indra Sinha

  ‘How long?’

  ‘About a year,’ she says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You don’t know him.’

  ‘Ohmygod, ohmygod, what I am going to do?’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything.’

  ‘Does anyone else know?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You were always on the computer,’ she says. ‘I would walk the dogs. Take them for long walks. I met this man. He lived a couple of miles away. I used to stop and admire his garden. He grew lots of herbs. He was just very nice. Very kind, always smiling with something pleasant to say. I don’t know, I didn’t think you cared about me any more. I just suppose I melted. I began to think about what it would be like to be with him.’

  ‘So what are your plans? You and him?’

  For some reason this makes her laugh.

  ‘Eve, when I was a boy, we lived in a place where there were mountains like these. Most of the year they were dry and brown. But then came the monsoon. Overnight the hills turned green. Puddles became trickles, then streams. At first the streams flowed brown and thick, like sweet tea, but after two weeks they’d be clear, full of weed, and crabs, and in the rice paddies there were small inexplicable fish among the stalks. My friend Tom and I, we would go fishing. We had bamboo rods with bits of peacock feather for floats. Sometimes we’d scoop out puddles with cloths, like village boys. We’d get covered in mud, caked with it. It’d get in our clothes and boots and between our fingers and ears and in our hair. Our mothers would get horribly angry. So we had a thing we used to do. We’d go to where the water was falling down the hillside and stand under a waterfall with all our clothes on. We would stand there until we were clean. And we’d feel very virtuous, as if it had washed off everything, mud, naughtiness, and guilt.’

  Rain is beating a tattoo on the car, watery fingers drumming on the roof. I get out of the car and it shouts down on me. Nearby, water is pouring very loudly off the face of the mountain. A few steps to the right, these rocks, this ledge and then . . . A nudge, a shove. I open my eyes. Eve, hair glued to her face, clothes plastered to her body, is standing beside me.

  Dunquin

  The night before we are due to meet Gliomach (if we’ve read his clues aright) we stay at a little hotel near Dingle. At dinner someone begins singing in Gaelic. Others join in until the room is in full voice. At Dunquin, early in the morning, the appointed time, we walk down the steep zigzag of the harbour path to where black beetle curraghs wait. Piled in heaps are lobster pots, the old kind made of withies, bent by old men in peatsmoky rooms.

  ‘Gliomach pots,’ says Eve. This is the place.’

  It must take skill to bring a boat in to Dunquin jetty. The waves come crashing in through rocks like teeth. The sea lifts the jetty’s skirt of weed, probing with insolent fingers into its secret places. A little way off, at the foot of the cliff, stands a hut of whitewashed breezeblocks on which someone has lovingly painted a door, windows, and even curtains at the windows.

  ‘Will you ever tell me about your plans?’

  ‘Oh Bear, you are so ridiculous. There are no plans. How could there be plans?’

  ‘How am I ridiculous? You say you are having an affair. Of course I want to know what your plans are.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was having an affair,’ says Eve. ‘I’m not having an affair. I said I had fallen in love.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But nothing . . . The unfortunate man knows nothing about it. He thinks I’m just a woman with a couple of dogs who sometimes says “hello” over the garden gate.’

  ‘You’ve never been inside the gate?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no. I often wished he’d ask me in, but for some reason he never did.’

  It’s a strange thing,’ says Eve, leaning on the sea wall and looking out towards islands lit by fine sunshine. ‘But the other day, when I told you my secret, it was as though I’d pricked a bubble. It just vanished.’

  ‘You mean you’re no longer in love with this chap?’

  I too lean on the sea wall, feigning nonchalance, watching the gulls dive and defecate.

  ‘I don’t know now that I ever was in love. And that makes me feel miserable. Because if even that was an illusion, a nothing, what have I got to show for all these years?’

  ‘I’m glad if it was an illusion. I’m horribly jealous.’

  ‘Good.’ After a while, she says, ‘I was just doing what you were doing. You went hiding in your imagination. So I hid in mine.’

  A boat is combing towards us in heavy seas, foam churning at her bow. Minutes pass and she looks no nearer. It is a rock. Up there, on the island, we can see whitewashed houses. One of them, surely, is the café where we are due to meet Gliomach.

  ‘Do you think he’s there?’

  ‘No,’ says Eve, who has been reading about the Blaskets. ‘Look, I’ll give you a tour of the islands. That one there is Inishtooshkeart, and right out there is Inishvickallaun. Over there’s the White Strand where Peig’s daughter drowned and the little rabbit island, Beginnish, which they used to say was the gift of the tide.’

  I’ll play you jigs, and Maurice Kean,

  Where nets are laid to dry,

  I’ve silken strings would draw a dance

  From girls are lame or shy;

  Four strings I’ve brought from Spain and France

  To make your long men skip and prance,

  Till stars look out to see the dance

  Where nets are laid to dry.

  But where nets were laid to dry, we never did find Gliomach.

  Gypsy Caravanserai (Alain’s story)

  I’m at a book fair in Olympia, ploughing through lunchtime crowds when a man says, ‘Bear?’ Smiling, a pleasant open face. Wears a name tag that says ‘Alain’.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you? I was married to Clare, who used to play Shades. I met you a few times.’

  ‘Calypso’s husband?’

  ‘Yes, that was it. Calypso.’

  I cast my mind back to the high days of Shades, scan the snapshots of memory for a hundred faces seen at meets. Got it. Yes, I remember him now, how he leant on a pillar with a mug of beer in his hand, quietly watching his pretty wife at the centre of a group of excited young men. Now I know who he is.

  ‘You say “was married”. Aren’t you still?’

  ‘We had a parting of the ways,’ he says, and quickly holds up a hand to forestall my condolences. ‘It happens.’

  Calypso’s husband. Well, I am not surprised they’ve split up. Questions beg to be asked. How did it happen? How did you find out? Did you really never suspect, when she was so blatant? What about that holiday? I think these things and say none of them.

  ‘You knew Clare pretty well, I think,’ he says.

  ‘No better than most,’ I say, immediately pricked by the double-entendre. Does he know that I lay on his sofa while his wife paced up and down smoking and talking about her childhood wearing nothing but a tee-shirt?

  ‘Do you fancy a drink?’ he says, looking at his watch. ‘I’m on the Litvinov stand over there and I’ve got a break coming up. Have you got time?’

  Once again, even after all this time and at God knows what distance, there’s a big muffled drum beating, a disturbance of the breath, those wide green eyes, that shining fall of black spider silk.

  ‘Before you ask,’ he says when he has bought drinks and we are settled at a small table overlooking the throng, ‘let me tell you what you are wondering. You are wondering if I know about you and my ex-wife. The answer is yes.’

  He smiles and raises his glass.

  In moments of extreme embarrassment I catch myself thinking ‘how humiliating this is, it couldn’t really be worse’ before the awful realisation that the moment is still wide open all around me and my tongue is nailed to my palate, vyãghrivasté jarã cayuryati bhinnãghatãmbuvata nighananti. Old age leaps like a tiger . . . amazing how the mind drivels, I’ve said this before . . . in the swam
ps of the Sundarbans, woodcutters wear rubber masks painted with eyes, nose and mouth on the backs of their heads to put tigers off jumping them from behind. With a tiger on your back, you are pinned down, unable to move, unable to breathe.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says with a grin. ‘Shouldn’t have been so blunt.’

  Composing myself, I raise my glass and say, ‘If Calypso – I mean Clare – told you about the day we met, she must have also told you that nothing at all happened.’

  ‘She told me exactly what happened,’ he says. ‘I was angry with her. I told her she should be more careful. It wasn’t fair on you. You weren’t like some who – well, I suppose we regarded as fair game.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Clare was trouble,’ he says, ‘big trouble. She’d been out of order ever since she was a girl. All those stories about her childhood, well they’re half true, partly true. I’ve met her father and stepmother. She didn’t know. They refused to come to our wedding, so I rang up and arranged to meet them, get them to change their minds. But they wouldn’t. They warned me against marrying her. They said, “She won’t be faithful.”

  ‘I said, “I know that.”

  ‘ “She has had dozens of men. She sleeps around.”

  ‘ “I know that.”

  ‘They said, “Don’t you mind?”

  ‘I said, “Of course I mind, but I love her. And I love her exactly as she is, not as she isn’t.”

  ‘I said, “I know everything about her. She’s kept nothing back. She told me stuff that made us both weep. I’m going to marry her.”

  ‘They said, “you’ll never change her.”

  ‘I said, “I don’t want to.’”

  ‘You loved her for what she was?’ I say incredulously. ‘But what was she? Since we’re being so frank, doesn’t it strike you that she was a complete mess?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘A mess is someone who doesn’t know who they are. Clare knew exactly who she was. Most of the men she met tried to make her into something she wasn’t. Take your friends. Chorley wanted to cuddle and protect her. To him, she was a bird with a broken wing. She wasn’t at all. She was terrifyingly strong. For Steve, she was straight out of a top shelf magazine, the randy housewife looking for sex, an adolescent’s dream, a conquest to flatter his ego till he grew out of needing her – she gave him his rites of passage you know – he was a virgin. We laughed about it.’

  Again that inhuman “we”.

  ‘And Morgan?’ I ask. ‘And me?’

  ‘Morgan? Morgan? Oh yeah, I remember. The big gloomy guy. Morgan couldn’t believe she wasn’t pure and immaculate. He tried to make her his goddess. He wanted her to let him worship her. Just as well he never got his wish, it would have destroyed him.’

  ‘It nearly did anyway,’ I say, remembering Morgan’s credit card bills. ‘But in the end it was someone else who destroyed him. And someone else whom she destroyed.’

  I notice that he has not said a word about poor Droid.

  ‘She nearly destroyed you,’ says Alain. ‘I’ve often thought about what happened to you. Like someone coming into contact with a very high energy source, a super high voltage. She was so good at hiding behind those incredible eyes. But whenshe dropped the disguise, you saw her as she really was and the experience nearly killed you.’

  ‘That’s a little fanciful,’ I say, prepared to dislike him now. ‘I had a serious heart problem. It chose that moment to announce itself.’

  He says, ‘There are no coincidences, Bear. Don’t you know that?’

  ‘What about you, Alain?’ I say after several angels have flown past overhead. ‘So you knew. Well we always thought you must. But I have to ask, because it became a legend on the net, how on earth could you go off on holiday with your wife and three blokes you knew she was sleeping with?’

  He seems genuinely amused.

  ‘What’s so difficult? I’ve explained. I loved Clare for what she was, not something she wasn’t. She never hid anything from me. She told me everything about herself. Absolutely everything. We met as students, at university. She had been leading a hellish life. She had done many many things she was ashamed of. I fell in love with her straight away. You understand. Those enormous eyes. Wide open and innocent. She had a talent, didn’t she, for making every man she looked at feel that he and he alone was the centre of her universe. Of course, it wasn’t very long before she slept with someone else. But when she told me, my response terrified her. I just smiled and said, okay, don’t get hurt. I refused to be upset or angry or judgemental. She was amazed.

  ‘She said she’d been slumming it in the gutter and I found her there and picked her up and brought her back from the brink. I told her that I loved her absolutely, which meant without conditions. I loved her just as she was. I said I wouldn’t try to change her or force her to be anything she wasn’t.

  ‘She told me, “Men always seem to want sex and so I give it to them. But they never give me what I want, so I keep on looking.”

  ‘Sex wasn’t a big deal to her. It was something she could take or leave. People who thought she was a tart never understood that. She was the very opposite. In her own way she was a complete innocent. And she was a romantic. She was waiting for someone.’

  ‘She told me she was searching for a soulmate.’

  For the first time he looks sad. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and she told me that she was waiting, quote, for someone who could walk past her defences, find a way through the passages of her mind and the cave-cellars of her emotions until he came to the place where she lived, in darkness, all alone . . .’

  ‘Was that you?’

  He says, ‘Unquote, I hoped so.’

  ‘You helped her, didn’t you? You actually helped her plan the gypsy caravan holiday.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ he says. ‘But if you think it didn’t hurt, knowing she was sleeping with other people, you must be crazy. It hurt like knives, hurt like death. But I never showed it, because if I had she’d have run a mile. She couldn’t bear to hurt me. She loved me, in her way, as utterly as I loved her. That was my consolation. I gave her something she would never ever find again and she knew it. I was her rock, her anchor, her safe harbour. She could go out and have the adventure she craved because she knew I’d always be there to come back to, would always accept, always console.’

  ‘So what happened? What the hell broke you up?’

  He smiles. ‘I met someone else,’ he says.

  Slumming it

  The great room at the Grosvenor House Hotel, in London’s Park Lane, is full of very young men in evening dress and young women wearing the very least that can be defined as evening dress. Waiters are circulating with trays of champagne. This is an advertising awards ceremony. It feels odd to be here, because I have quit my job and left the ad business. Even stranger is that beside me is Sathyu, clad in the garb of Bhopal’s bazaars, wearing an embroidered skull cap and smoking a small Indian leaf-rolled cigarette called a bidi. We are accompanied by an elderly American in a crumpled suit, who never goes anywhere without dragging thirty kilos of books and papers behind him in a wheeled shopping bag (parked, for the occasion, under our table). This is Ward Morehouse, author and tireless campaigner for justice for Bhopal’s gas victims. Each year Ward attends Union Carbide’s annual stockholder meeting. Every year for more than a decade he has intervened to ask, ‘When will this company honour its responsibility to the sick and injured of Bhopal?’ Every year Ward is heckled and each year he goes back and asks his question again.

  The appeal we have launched has raised enough money to open a free clinic in Bhopal. It has also won an advertising award. The latter news could be received with indifference (only the hardcore porn people feel the need to give themselves as many prizes as adfolk do), but I remember that last year, these awards had been televised. I called Sathyu and say, ‘Come, if you can. When we go up to receive the prize, go to the microphone and make a short speech. This is strictly not done, but you don’t know that and we’ll get a fr
ee TV commercial.’

  This, at any rate, is the plan, but as he begins to thread his way to the stage Sathyu whispers ‘Bear, there is no mike!’ The compère, Ned Sherrin, is using a lapel mike. The following exchange takes place, plainly audible to everyone in the room.

  Sathyu: I want to say thank you on behalf of the people of Bhopal.

  Sherrin: Okay, thanks, now you can sit down.

  Sathyu: No, I must say thank you properly. I have come from Bhopal to do this.

  Sherrin: You have received your award, now you must go back to your seat.

  Sathyu: I cannot sit down until I have said thank you.

  Sherrin (annoyed): In that case you’ll have to speak here.

  Ward and I, surrounded by incredulous admen, find ourselves cheering the curious sight of Sathyu leaning forward making his impassioned speech of thanks, announcing the opening of the free Sambhavna Clinic, into Ned Sherrin’s bosom.

  Later, when people are wandering around, a cigar-smoking creative director, one of the big names of the advertising business, on a legendary salary, comes up, ignores Sathyu and Ward, puts his arm round my shoulder, shakes his head and says, ‘Bear, Bear . . . you just don’t live in the real world . . .’

  During my wanderings in worlds, real and unreal, I have often come into contact with currents of pure evil, but I have also known the touch of great goodness. I think of Morgan, unselfish to the point of self-destruction, searching for someone upon whom he could lavish his love. I remember Alastair McIntosh blowing his conch barefoot in the April slush, and how he once came home with me and narrated highland yarns to our saucer-eyed children, and played tunes on a penny whistle. But most of all I think of Sathyu, who lived in a slum, thanking the champagne drinkers at the Grosvenor House.