Sandy eavesdropped on the couple sitting in front of him, recognising an American accent and a broad Australian twang. It was either that or giving in to the fear that the bus would almost certainly crash. The sight of smashed fenders, frayed tyres and twice, a steering wheel, strewn along the sides of the road did little to calm him.
‘A direct connection with the land … so amazing,’ said the Australian male. His ponytail hung over the seat. Intermittent plaits fastened with red braid nestled between the black tangles. Sandy was tempted to yank one and tell him he was talking a load of rubbish. The girl’s hair was cropped so close that Sandy could see the pink tinge of her scalp under the blonde fuzz. He thought of Emily and Matthew, just born, their skulls still soft.
The male’s voice drifted above the engine noise. ‘Too many machines in the west … we’ve lost our way …’
The female voice agreed. ‘Everything here is so spiritual. People here are hungry for enlightenment, not just material possessions.’
The ponytail bobbed in agreement. ‘We can learn so much from them.’
Was this the sort of half-baked philosophy Emily and Matthew were going to preach to him?
He winced as the bus jolted over a pothole. The creases of his shirt were silted in red dust and his mouth was dry. He wiped the face of his watch clean. Five hours to go. Perhaps the bus was not such a good idea after all. It was colder than he’d imagined and his only sweater was jammed at the bottom of his backpack on the rack above his head. He tried, but failed, to summon interest in the fields, the temples and the people. The journey seemed interminable and the villages more or less identical. The same bit of scenery appeared to be on a permanent loop. The bus veered around yet another sharp bend and his head banged against the window. He blinked from the sudden pain and rubbed his forehead. It felt like sandpaper.
Below the road, dust and stones rolled down to a small clearing about five metres away, where a crowd had gathered around an upturned cart. In the few seconds before the bus accelerated, he saw a man clutching a rag to a bleeding gash in his forehead with one hand and brandishing a stick in the other. A donkey was lying on its side, still harnessed to the cart. The man was beating the animal. Half its flank had been ripped open and blood was dripping down its leg beneath the loose flap of skin. The donkey was struggling to stand, but its head kept bashing the ground, its lips curled back as it screamed in pain.
Sandy was close enough to see the yellow froth around its mouth and the stick bounce off bare muscles and tendons. He had to get out and help in some way, to stop this cruelty. But before he managed to straighten, the bus pulled away and the clearing disappeared behind a row of scrappy trees. He looked at his clenched knuckles, the bones white under his skin, and wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing. No one else seemed to have noticed.
All the passengers were dozing, their heads bobbing on their chests. The couple in front of him were fast asleep, her head skewed against the window as the male leaned on her shoulder. He wanted to poke them awake and demand to know exactly how this country and its people was so spiritual, why they would flay an innocent animal alive if they were so aware.
Two more hours. He should have listened to the hotel concierge and hired a driver. This whole bus trip was a mistake, a sentimental idea brought on by an affection for the songs of Willie Nelson and things he’d read about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. He moved his head in circles, trying to get rid of the ache in his neck.
Night fell in a rush. Lamps flickered on either side of the road. Finally the bus lurched into a brightly lit depot in the centre of a town. Sandy sat for a minute, his ears still dinning with the noise of the engine. Half the seats were already empty when he pulled his rucksack down from the overhead rack and left the bus, his eyes watering against the smoke from the rows of food stalls. He was thirsty and filthy.
He was in a large square, teeming with jostling crowds; children trying to sell copies of designer handbags or trays of sweets festooned with flies, men and women humping battered suitcases, and Western tourists struggling with their backpacks. Among the excitable gap-year teenagers shrieking as if they were back in the playground, there was a sprinkling of grey heads and sedentary paunches, some consolation that he wasn’t the only old fool on the road.
Emily had said she and Matthew would meet him at the hotel, but he still searched the crowds for his son’s skinny frame, his daughter’s tall loping figure and her blonde hair. But all the European girls had long hair and all the boys were skinny. Most were blonde and none were his children.
He fished out the piece of paper with the address of the hotel and turned to face the taxi drivers shouting for his attention. The man nearest him grabbed Sandy’s backpack and tipped it into the boot of his tiny dented car before opening the door with a flourish and gesturing for Sandy to get in. Sandy passed him the piece of paper.
‘Hotel Mountain View,’ he said slowly and too loudly.
‘Yes, yes,’ the driver replied, barging into the stream of chaotic traffic. ‘I know. Very good.’
The road was mostly rubble and rock, with intermittent puddles of tarmac hinting at earlier, more prosperous times. The driver shouted at wobbling cyclists and blasted his horn like a Gatling gun. Buses painted in gaudy patterns roared past, with people squashed together on the roofs. On either side of the road were deep open ditches littered with bottles and garbage. Behind the ditches were footpaths and then a continuous row of open-fronted stalls. There were internet and telephone shops next to ones selling pipes and buckets, and stalls selling scrawny chickens with their fragile necks dangling over wooden slabs, then on a corner, a tiny shrine in a stone niche adorned with sunset-coloured marigolds. Emily was right. Everything appeared unreal, as if Sandy was watching a television documentary at home in Battersea.
The driver stopped his car with a flourish outside a hotel down a narrow lane. The mountains were nowhere to be seen. Sandy paid him and dragged his backpack into a filthy lobby decorated with bouquets of dusty plastic flowers. An ancient porter escorted him to a room off the central courtyard. Sandy went straight to the bathroom, looking for the toilet. There wasn’t one, just a black hole in the floor with corrugated metal treads on either side. He’d never be able to crap into that, even if his life depended on it. He gingerly placed his feet on the treads and urinated with care. He looked for a button or a plug to flush, but there was only a bucket of dirty water. At the basin, he washed his hands and face in a trickle of brown water, using the antiseptic gel that Emily had told him to buy, then locked the door and lay down on the narrow single bed, just to be still and quiet after the hours of juddering motion.
He fell asleep and woke with a start almost an hour later. There was still another hour and a half before Emily and Matthew would arrive, so he left his room to wander through the lane, which was crammed full of tourists dawdling around stalls selling scarves and plastic deities.
A boy about twelve, thin like a burnt stick, followed him. He carried cages of birds that drooped on their bamboo perches until he prodded them with a cane to make them flutter their brightly coloured wings. How could anyone be so cruel?
Sandy was beginning to loathe this notion of travelling. He’d never been entranced by the idea of the hippy trail that invariably ended in wearing a smelly Afghan coat on the King’s Road, clutching Herman Hesse paperbacks and boring everyone witless with stories of acid dropped on the tops of mountains. He didn’t even mind not being in Paris in ’68, or never spotting Bill Graham at the Fillmore West, or hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. He’d always felt that his own life was so interesting that he couldn’t imagine a better one in another place and time.
Sandy ignored the boy, but he kept circling and wheedling. If he bought the birds and set them free, it would just encourage the boy to capture more. Sandy became angry and shook his fist. The boy shouted and swore but at last he walked away. Sandy retraced his steps to the hotel and went to his room to wait.
He worried about the boy. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, yet he was on his own at night. Did he have a family to go to, somewhere to sleep? Then he worried about the birds. Where were they? Did the boy feed them? Or give them water? But his real concern was Matthew and Emily, how the three of them would fare together on this ridiculous sentimental journey of his. Penny wasn’t the only one who was sceptical. Tim had warned him not to expect too much. His stomach began growling, then cramping. He rushed into the bathroom and squatted over the black hole.
Chapter 37
The thing about a Harley Street surgery was not so much the expense of an appointment, which was always more than one expected, but the assurance guaranteed by such highly polished brass plaques at the entrance of the building. Jeremy found the right name, pressed a button and announced himself. The heavy black door, glistening with countless coats of black enamel paint, swung open to reveal a small marble tiled hall leading to another set of heavy doors, this time of polished oak.
It was almost impossible to imagine that any malady could strike in a place protected by such impressively solid architecture. Once past the deferential receptionist, he settled himself in what must have been the drawing room, its high ceiling edged with egg and dart cornices, with a large marble fireplace opposite the windows.
He picked up the latest edition of Country Life and waited for his name to be called. The only other person in the room was an old woman who was clicking her teeth. Jeremy glared at her, rearranged one of the many tapestry cushions on the sofa and snapped open the magazine. Every time Jeremy read Country Life, which was not often, he congratulated himself on his good sense never to have lived any part of his adult life outside central London. Tim couldn’t wait to immerse himself in Herefordshire, extolling the virtues of homemade elderflower cordial and long rambles through dung-infested sheep fields. Sandy, egged on by Penny, had done his stint in a rented cottage. Only Peter and Jeremy remained faithful to the capital.
There were times when Rosie, in the full prepubescent horse lust stage, begged to move to the country. He might have eventually succumbed. Already the convenience of shunting family life to weekends and school holidays had occurred to him. But it must have occurred to Isobel as well, because she refused to move outside the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. ‘I’m not having you prowl around London on your own all week,’ she said, dishing up a Marks and Spencer ready meal. ‘The kiss of death to any marriage.’ Two years later, they were divorced anyway.
Jeremy changed position. He thought about Rosie, what she might be doing. His calls were not returned. His emails remained unanswered. Lately, he had taken to ringing her number two or three times a day just to hear her voice on the answering machine, then hanging up just as she finished speaking. She had a lovely voice, husky with a hint of a lisp. He should have moved to the country and taken up riding with his daughter. He and Rosie could have hacked out together, got to know each other.
Losing Rosie, irrevocably it seemed, hurt so much more than the Psst! scandal. He could justify his actions to himself, and lie about them to others, but not to her. Rosie would never again see anything good or decent about him.
Jeremy had always hoped that at some time in her adult life Rosie would return to him. His most secret hope was that they might work together. Often, smoking late at night on the deck of the Jezebel, he had imagined an office with identical desks for him and Rosie, the two of them taking clients to lunch. A double act performed by the corporate elder statesman and his feisty daughter with her fierce green eyes and tumble of auburn hair. He imagined Rosie impressing them with her financial acumen inherited from him.
Jeremy shifted again. It was hard to get comfortable with so many cushions on the sofa. A dull pain banded his middle. When the receptionist called his name, he stood up too quickly and felt faint.
Assurance was all Jeremy wanted. A thorough check-up with all the usual tests would do the trick. It was completely understandable that he felt below par. There had been the undue stress of dealing with that girl, the website and everything associated with it. Although once she had been told that her testimony could be demolished by any first-year barrister, she’d disappeared. It was one less case for the police to deal with. Psst! forgot about him and fastened its teeth in the next scandal.
It helped that Jeremy discovered, through a private investigator hired by his lawyer, that many stories on the website were provided by a financial PR minion whose employer would not take kindly to one of his staff moonlighting for a cyberspace gossip column.
The receptionist showed him into a room full of swagged chintz resembling a decorator’s drawing room from the pages of the magazine Jeremy had just put down. His doctor, Felix Summerscale, rose from behind a huge partner’s desk and greeted him like an old friend. For a moment, Jeremy almost believed him, although they only met in this office once a year. Did private doctors take courses in how to put people at ease? Were they graded for bedside manners along with human anatomy and infectious diseases?
‘Stress,’ said Dr Summerscale, rubbing his hands together to warm them as Jeremy lay shirtless on the narrow patient’s table. ‘The curse of the successful businessman.’ He poked and prodded, listened to Jeremy’s heartbeat and took his blood pressure. ‘Nothing to worry about there,’ he said. ‘But, you know … stress.’ He shook his head.
Jeremy knew stress was dangerous. He had contemplated a stay in one of those Ayurvedic places in Kerala. But that was in India and Sandy was in India. It didn’t matter that Sandy was in the opposite end of the country, almost at the Nepalese border according to Peter and Tim. India was not an option. He also considered that Austrian spa, the one where they gave you Epsom salts and potato soup, and solids consisted mainly of spelt bread that you had to chew forty times each mouthful.
In the end he stayed at home. Every morning he walked down the jetty and caught a taxi to his office. Every evening he reversed his journey. Occasionally he met Tim and Peter for lunch, usually around Sloane Square. Once, coming back from the toilet, he saw their heads, bowed together in furtive conversation, snap apart at his approach. He recognised their false cheeriness at his return. It was how they had behaved towards Sandy. Jeremy would have bet his Ruscha that they were talking about the girl, the website, the whole hushed-up disgrace of it all. It didn’t reach the mainstream press, but they knew. Of course they knew. A week after the Psst! story, Tim had called to ask if he needed any help. Peter wanted to know if he was going to sue. How odd that someone as urbane as Peter didn’t know that it was almost impossible to sue a website. They were always several providers ahead of their pursuers. Jeremy told them that the story was completely false. By tacit agreement it was never mentioned again.
Felix Summerscale was pressing a finger around Jeremy’s navel. It was ticklish and he squirmed.
‘Sorry,’ said Jeremy. ‘So childish, to still be ticklish.’
Summerscale smiled and gazed at the ceiling. He moved his finger up to below Jeremy’s ribs.
‘I sometimes feel bloated,’ said Jeremy. ‘Uncomfortable.’
‘Probably heartburn,’ said Summerscale. ‘But let’s run some tests anyway. Just to be sure. Good thing you’re not overweight. I see you’ve lost a bit since your last visit here.’
He had dropped a few kilos lately, without even trying. At first it was good to see a gratifying roominess in his trousers, to fasten his belt at a different, less worn notch. But then it occurred to him that it wasn’t normal at his age to lose weight without making an effort.
Maria, his cleaner, told him he was looking very trim as she arranged his shirts in neat rows, coathanger hooks all pointing inwards. ‘Maybe you in love, Mr Henderson,’ she chortled. ‘And you missing person who not here for you. Too sad to eat.’
Chapter 38
Damn. He’d fallen asleep and it was already dark. He’d be late for Emily and Matthew. He flapped at the air around him but the buzzing continued, louder, somewhere beneath him. Bloo
dy mosquitoes. His arms were already covered in hard red lumps. The buzzing turned into ringing and he fumbled for his phone.
‘Dad,’ Emily’s voice sounded tentative, far away. But the same sweet high timbre, lifting his heart. He sat up, flushed with pleasure and excitement.
‘Are you downstairs?’ he asked. ‘I must have fallen asleep, so stupid of me. I’ll be down in a minute. Or you could come to the room?’ He was already standing, running his hands through his hair, preparing for the beginning of making everything good and whole again. Everything was going to be all right. Not fine, as in Tim’s psychological terminology, but all right.
‘W-e-ll.’ Emily said. ‘The thing is, Matt isn’t back yet. He went to meet some people, so let’s leave it until the morning.’ She sounded so casual, as if they’d seen each other yesterday. ‘You must be tired. Besides, I’ve got some things to do, at the ashram.’
‘But I don’t have anything to do.’ He was almost shouting. ‘I don’t have anything to do except see you and Matthew. And I’ve spent two days getting here. Why can’t I come to the ashram with you?’
‘Dad,’ said Emily, in the patient but annoying tones Sandy was sure she’d learned at her mother’s knee. ‘I haven’t seen you for months. Ten more hours won’t make such a difference. Get something to eat. There’s a good place around the corner, the Nirvana café. Get some sleep. We’ll come by in the morning, see the sights.’
‘In the morning?’ This was not what he wanted. This did not fit with his carefully tended dream of a joyful reunion with his children. He sighed and flopped on the bed, deflated but determined not to show it. ‘So, then, what time will I see you?
‘Oh, nine or ten. Okay?’
It wasn’t okay, not one bit, even if it was his dream, not theirs. He’d travelled halfway across the world. He’d spent ten hours hugging his knees at the back of a plane, then another ten hours on a clapped-out bus. He’d listened to interminable inane conversations. He’d seen an animal flayed alive.
After Everything Page 23