After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  ‘Dad? Are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘It’ll be great to see you in the morning and you’ll be grateful for the night’s rest.’

  There were voices in the background.

  ‘Got to go.’

  A click, then silence. Sandy sat on the bed, watching flies orbit the ceiling. Something must have got in his eyes. They were watering. He scratched his mosquito bites and swallowed a Zoloft.

  He had to keep calm if this was going to work. Did he imagine that the three of them would waltz around India like some third world reincarnation of the Von Trapp family, singing as they tramped up and down the mountains? He should be grateful for any time Matt and Emily would give him. But he wasn’t. He felt cheated.

  The night stretched ahead of him. He couldn’t keep counting flies until he fell asleep again, so he carefully locked his room and left the hotel. Outside, it was cooler than Delhi, but with the same incessant horn honking. Every stall had its own ghetto blaster, each playing a different track at a distorted top volume.

  He stood at the corner of the lane, trying to work out where to go. Emily had said he couldn’t miss the sign for the Nirvana Café, but he did, and chose instead a small nameless place with a group of noisy Germans clustered around the central table. He was in no mood for culinary exploration and ordered lentils and vegetables. At least they would be cooked. As he waited, he flicked through the pages of his guidebook, just for something to do. Everyone was with someone except for him. He didn’t want company anyway. A plate of glutinous grey stuff flecked with green eventually arrived at his table. It was like chewing glue. He pushed it around his plate, then left and retraced his steps back to the hotel.

  He swallowed a pill and tried to sleep. Someone was snoring in the room below him, jagged gasps for air, rising in tone until they became high-pitched strangled cries. There was an interminable pause before whoever it was exhaled in long and rattling sighs. Outside the manic horn hitters continued, backed by a cast of barking dogs and howling cats. He should have thought to pack earplugs. He would be awake all night. But just before dawn, he fell asleep.

  By 8 am, he had shaved and dressed with care and was sitting in the lobby, his phone beside him, pretending to read his travel guide, trying not to look up every time he heard the door swing open, or the sound of approaching footsteps.

  There were two giant-sized Toblerone bars in his pack, a childhood favourite of both Emily and Matthew. He was wishing he’d brought something more useful when suddenly there she was, standing in front of him, thinner than he remembered, and tanned, but still with that luminous triangle of golden hair.

  It seemed to Sandy that many of his own features had been replicated in her, but in the transmutation had become finer, more delicate. On Emily, his own large nose had been chiselled into something more aquiline. His wide mouth had been plumped into pinker, fuller curves. The invisible genetic sculptor had also taken Sandy’s fair skin and burnished it into a high-cheeked bloom.

  She smelled of earth and sandalwood when he hugged her. Too enthusiastically, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. Over her shoulder, he looked for Matthew. He always did dawdle behind. He wanted to savour the embrace but Emily pulled back, chewing her lip. Irrationally, he was angry with Matt.

  ‘Trust your brother to be running late,’ he said, before remembering his own habit for tardiness. ‘He must have inherited it from me.’

  ‘Matt isn’t running late. I don’t know where he is.’ She slumped beside him, flushed, and began clawing at her hair. In the excitement of seeing her, he hadn’t noticed that her eyes were red, that she’d been crying. ‘He didn’t come back last night and I didn’t see him at all yesterday. We had breakfast at the café and he said he was going to meet some guys he knew in London, hang out with them and be back by the evening. I’ve checked his room. His stuff’s still there, but he’s gone.’

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ said Sandy, trying to calm her. He scratched at a mosquito bite on his arm. It began to bleed. ‘We’ll find him. We’ll go back to the café and ask. Someone will know where he went. He probably drank too much, stayed with someone.’

  ‘It’s not South Kensington, Dad, for Christ’s sake. Not Battersea,’ Emily hissed. ‘This is India. People go missing more often than you think. They fall down mountains, they’re attacked for ten quid in their pocket. You think it looks so safe because there are people like us, loads of tourists and Western cafés and people speaking English. It’s like a parallel world. One path is safe and dandy. Step off that path onto the other one – you never know where it will end up.’

  Sandy felt paralysed. Fathers, proper fathers, were confident, broad-shouldered protectors of their children. They knew what to do in crises. He didn’t have a clue. What had he told them when they were small? Something about retracing their steps? Or staying in the same place until someone found you? Obsolete advice, unlikely to work in a place like this.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ he said, to convince himself as much as her. ‘We’ll go back to the place you last saw him. We’ll ask. Someone must know, someone will have seen him.’ Emily was sobbing. Sandy went to hug her again.

  ‘Not now, Dad, for Christ’s sake.’ She pushed him away. ‘I don’t need a bloody hug. I should have known. He was worried.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘What do you think? About seeing you, of course. It always sets him off somehow.’

  The guilt. Always the permanent stain of the bad parent, the absentee father. He would never be rid of it.

  They hurried through the streets to the café. The sun was already tightening Sandy’s scalp. His eyes itched from the dust as they strode past a queue of women and children waiting with their empty buckets at the public tap. ‘Hello, hello,’ the children cried from behind the folds of their mothers’ saris. Sandy scooped out the coins from his pocket and placed them in a heap next to a statue festooned with marigolds. Emily took his arm and led him away to the square. They stopped to get their bearings. Sandy bought a bottle of water from a stall. He was out of breath and grateful for the brief rest.

  ‘Can’t you get a flask like the rest of us?’ snapped Emily as he drank the water in one long swallow. ‘Just look at the rubbish. There’s no recycling here. You can’t nip down to the bottle bank with your empties or leave them out for the bin man.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ He crushed the empty bottle with his hand and pushed it into his pocket.

  Emily ignored him. She covered her head with an orange and maroon striped scarf. Tendrils of hair escaped around her temples and her neck. Her eyes were closed as if in prayer. The veins on her eyelids bloomed like violets and he had a sudden urge to reach over and caress them with his fingers, make her see something good in him again, the way she used to when she was a child.

  But she rushed off down a lane without a word, leaving him to scurry behind her, out of breath, heart pounding. By the time they reached the café where Matt and Emily ate most of their meals, sweat was trickling down his back. He flapped his T-shirt to stop it sticking to his chest before wiping his forehead and following Emily inside.

  At first he couldn’t see anything, but when his vision adjusted, he saw Emily zigzagging between tables of tourists asking about Matthew. Some people didn’t bother to look up from their laptops. Others were shovelling down pallid eggs and greasy bacon. His stomach churned.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the boy behind the counter. ‘Do you know someone called Matthew? Have you seen him? He is English.’ Every word a register just below panic. The boy regarded him with weary patience and shook his head. At the end of the café, Sandy caught Emily’s eye. She was shaking her head as well.

  In the street, shopkeepers were flicking water from buckets onto the footpath in a half-hearted attempt to settle the dust. There were so many bars and cafés, so many young Western tourists, and no one had seen Matthew. Apart from asking questions, Emily said nothing. Her face was tight, her eyes narro
w.

  Sandy’s face was burning. He should have remembered a hat. He stumbled over the uneven cobbles as they walked through the streets. Emily seemed to glide ahead of him. He caught up with her, the rough straps of his sandals rubbing against his ankles. An image of Matthew, stoned and unconscious, came into Sandy’s head and would not leave. Should they call the police, or contact the embassy? Emily shook her head and kept steady progress, her speech coming out by rote in every new bar and café.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you. We’re looking for someone called Matthew. An English boy. Brown hair. Short. Not very tall.’

  The lanes had narrowed into alleys by now. The tourists had floated away. So had the bars advertising half-price happy hours and all-you-can-eat noodle stalls. Indians now predominated the rows of shops selling electrical fittings and pipes.

  ‘He wouldn’t have come here,’ panted Sandy. One of his toes was stubbed and oozing blood. ‘This area is for locals, surely.’

  Emily shook her head. She kept chewing her lip.

  ‘We’re not on the other path just yet, Dad,’ she said. ‘Tourists come here too. Someone was talking about a place here, a bar. They said it’s somewhere near a temple.’

  But which temple? The place was awash with them, as well as shrines and statues. Every street corner was marked by some marigold-clad deity surrounded by incense sticks.

  ‘There,’ said Emily. ‘Down there.’ She turned off the alley into a dank narrow path, lit at the end by a purple fluorescent light in the shape of a smiling goddess. The smell of incense and stale cooking oil was thicker here. Halfway along, a heap of plastic bags and bottles smouldered in a reluctant bonfire. Sandy coughed and blinked against the acrid fumes. His eyes watered and all he could see for a moment were grey and flickering shadows, then Emily’s scarf gleaming like a sunrise.

  The sign on the carved wooden door said CLOSED, COME BACK LATER, but Emily knocked anyway. Loud, and then louder. She stepped back and Sandy heard the latch give and the door opened, just a crack. Emily pushed past him and into the bar. He remained by the door, uncertain and afraid.

  The room was no larger than a single garage, with a bar in one corner made from stacked beer kegs covered by rough planks. The wall behind the bar was covered with hundreds of tiny mirrors glinting in the dim light of one weak bulb hanging from the ceiling. Shelves stacked with beer and spirits covered the remaining walls. In the corner opposite the bar was a heap of large cushions around a low table littered with empty bottles and full ashtrays. There was the yeasty smell of stale beer and unwashed bodies, then cigarettes and the sweet pungent smell of dope.

  Somewhere a puppy yapped. There was a sudden loud crack, as if someone had thrown something. The puppy began whimpering. Sandy stepped further inside and nearly tripped over a piece of curled-up linoleum, one of many mismatched shapes that made up the floor. His stubbed toe began to throb. He was almost grateful for the pain, to feel something else instead of panic and fear.

  Emily was standing in the empty space looking exhausted and defeated. On one side of the bar was a narrow hall. He hadn’t noticed it at first because of the distortions of the mirrors. At the entrance, he listened. Everything was silent. The puppy had stopped whimpering. He walked in and headed for the hall. At the end was a door, rimmed by daylight. Behind him, Emily’s sandals clip-clopped on the floor. Her breath fluttered against his neck.

  He prodded the door. It fell open into a tiny yard, stacked with crates of empty bottles and cans of cooking oil. A collapsed sofa was pushed against the back wall. Matthew lay sprawled on it with his head half-buried under a pillow. His mouth was crusted with vomit. It was down his T-shirt as well, and his jeans. Still breathing though. ‘Thank you,’ Sandy whispered to himself, stunned by relief.

  ‘He’s all right, he’s breathing,’ he said to Emily. ‘I can’t believe you knew where to find him. You’re amazing.’

  ‘No, Dad,’ she replied. Now that they’d found Matthew she seemed to regain her energy. ‘It’s just a process of deduction.’ She shook Matthew, at first gently, then with more force. He didn’t move. She tapped his cheeks, rubbed his temples and wet the end of her scarf with water from her flask and wiped his face. Sandy fidgeted behind her, heavy and useless.

  ‘C’mon, Matt, wake up, time to go. Matt, we need to get going now.’ It seemed an age before Matthew stirred and opened his eyes. He looked up and smiled, wiped spittle from the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Hey Em,’ he slurred, ‘Angel Em. Thanks for finding me. Sorry.’ His eyes closed, then opened and focused on Sandy. ‘Sorry Sandy,’ he mumbled. ‘Got held up.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Sandy replied. ‘We’re here now, we’ll take you back to the hotel. Everything will be good, you’ll see.’

  The words came out so easily. Why wouldn’t they? It was his own morning-after litany, muttered to himself more often than he could remember. He would pat Matt on the shoulder, tell him not to worry, but not to do it again. Everyone got excessive now and then. No big deal.

  He helped Matthew to sit up and was looking around for his son’s shoes when he heard Emily behind him.

  ‘Oh Matt,’ she said, drumming her fingers against the wall. ‘Look what you’ve done, look at the mess of everything.’

  Sandy helped Matt to his feet and together they limped back through the bar to the path. Emily was overreacting, he thought. Matt was safe. They’d get him back to the hotel. Everything would be all right. Matt would sleep it off and they’d have dinner together, plan some little trips outside the town. At some stage, maybe when Emily was off at one of her classes, he’d take Matt aside and they’d talk about their substance problems. Not quite how he had planned to bond with his son but it might be a good time to apologise. Justin was big on the power of apologies. At the time, drinking his instant coffee in the church hall, Sandy doubted the ability of three words to usher in a new era of family harmony. Now he was prepared to give it a whirl.

  Matt’s head lolled on Sandy’s shoulder. ‘Come on, boyo,’ said Sandy, half carrying, half dragging him back to the lane. ‘We’ll find a taxi, get you back to the hotel, clean you up. You’ll feel better in the morning. Everything will be better.’

  From behind, he heard Emily again. ‘You bloody fool.’

  He hoisted Matt higher and turned around, ready to tell her not to be so harsh, to give her brother a break. But Emily wasn’t staring at Matthew. She was glaring at him. ‘You don’t get it, you bloody idiot,’ she kept shouting. ‘You did this. It’s all your fault.’

  Chapter 39

  Penny had started to look in the mirror again. She didn’t like what she saw. Lines careering from her mouth to her jaw, nests of wrinkles around her eyes and blotches on her nose. If she blinked, she saw her mother’s querulous bleak stare on her own face. She wanted her former self back, the one who had been content with her own company, who didn’t care about her appearance or her body.

  She was also angry with herself that one dinner with a man who was clearly involved with another woman could demolish her so easily. For the first time since she’d moved to France, she was lonely. The woman who only several months ago had sat so happily in the café, congratulating herself to have travelled beyond the morass of children and ex-husbands, was nowhere to be found. Someone else had moved in, a resentful vain neurotic spreading an atmosphere of gloom.

  In a crude attempt to re-establish self-sufficiency, she took to ignoring the telephone, leaving the machine to pick up messages. But one afternoon she forgot and picked it up, just after she’d come in from watering the vegetable garden. The new carrot and bean seedlings were growing with ferocious energy. Each morning she would walk down to her carefully weeded beds to find some of the plants felled by their overnight spurts of growth. Perhaps life exhausted them as well.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, kicking off her shoes.

  It was an annoyingly cheerful Robert and she heard herself agreeing to have lunch with him, and his partner. It would be churlish to refuse. And
it would help her get over her childish crush, to see Robert with her, this woman called Laura. Penny had spent too much time on her own. It would also stop her thinking about the other three in India, remind herself that it was only arrogance which made her think she could control events, be the glue that stuck everyone together.

  ‘What about the café just off the square?’ Robert’s question cut across her thoughts. ‘You told me they have the best gizzards in town. Let’s see how Laura does on the entrails. Half past one or thereabouts?’

  ‘Perfect,’ replied Penny, remembering to smile into the telephone, so she would sound pleased. She scrubbed her nails free of dirt and changed her clothes.

  The path to town was already cracked and dry. A line of industrious ants crawled across the dirt, and bees droned through the last of the spring flowers. A breeze stirred through the pine trees. Above, in the cloudless sky, a buzzard circled. The morning mist had burned away, leaving the blond stone buildings of the town sharply outlined against the darker mountains.

  As she reached the last bend before joining the road, she saw a fallen bird’s nest on the side of the path. It was empty, and broken in two. Nestled among the fine twigs and stalks was a clump of tawny fledgling feathers. She carefully picked them out and put them in the zippered part of her bag. Something for the new doll’s house. A fan perhaps, to set on a table in the drawing room.

  Sarlat was filling with tourists. It was early enough in the season for café and shop owners to smile and welcome the milling groups of ample-buttocked women in shorts and their skinny male companions. By the end of September, proprietors would turn surly, worn down by constant demands for instant coffee and Twinings teabags. For now, they were happy.