The audience joined in. A man slapped his thighs in glee. The Indian woman almost rolled on the ground in hilarity, tears of laughter streaming down her face. The man sitting next to Sandy honked loudly and dug him in the ribs as if to share the joke. Sandy glared at him. Mad, he thought. They’re all mad.
Then there was a clap, abrupt as a gunshot. Everyone fell silent.
‘Now we begin,’ said the lama. He spoke with a light accent. Every word was clearly enunciated.
‘The only certain outcome of life is death,’ he said.
Everyone nodded eagerly, as if such a thing had never occurred to them before this moment.
‘Anger has no eyes.’
Sandy looked up to the roof. It was covered in water stains and in places the plaster had fallen away.
The lama fell silent for a few minutes, and drank some water before continuing with his collection of non-sequiturs.
‘He who is kind becomes rich.’
‘Sleep after a day’s trading.’
‘If a man tells you he is a God, then he is lying.’
There was a murmur of approval after every sentence. Some nodded. Others shut their eyes, their brows furrowed in concentration. Sandy committed their faces to memory, to add an authentic flavour to his planned anecdote. There would be a certain embellishment, of course. A good story inevitably contained an element of exaggeration.
‘Rosheme says, “Let us do whatever we can to bring light into darkness.”
‘He tells us to be patient and kind to ourselves and others.’
The lama shut his eyes again. His head lolled on his chest. His hands fell limp in his lap. The boy tugged at the hem of his robe and his head jerked. He stood up, grasping the boy’s shoulder as he straightened, and clasped his hands together. The audience stood as well, before forming an orderly queue. One by one they approached the lama, solemn and expectant. Some, like the man next to Sandy, were shaking. Sandy recognised the look on their faces. It was the weak-at-the-knees, about-to-inhale-the-fairy-dust gaze that accompanied the appearance of every pop star he’d ever known. It was baloney.
As each person approached, the lama whispered something and patted their shoulder. Everyone returned to their place and sat down, their heads bowed in contemplation. Sandy was the only person not to present himself to the lama. It would have been too hypocritical.
The lama left, accompanied by the young boy. Everyone shuffled out of the temple and reclaimed their shoes. Sandy found his sandals and was about to give a small donation when there was a tap on his shoulder. It was Samten, grinning broadly and taking his arm, as if they were the best of friends.
‘Aha, you do believe, maybe just a bit?’ Samten laughed and waggled his finger as if he’d caught Sandy with his hand in the cookie jar.
‘I’m trying to keep an open mind, for Emily’s sake. And Matthew too,’ replied Sandy. ‘Although nothing your man said in the temple made much sense to me. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood.’
Samten folded his arms. ‘Oh, Mr Ellison. You are too hard on yourself. “Not in the right mood. Doesn’t make much sense.” You should be kind, let yourself out.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Sandy. ‘Let myself out?’
Samten folded his arms under his robes and giggled in that annoying way. ‘We are all in prison in some way, but the plan is to get out, not stay in. You put yourself in protective custody. Scared to be free. Hanging onto the past. No good will come of it.’ He stared at Sandy and repeated himself. ‘No good will come of it.’
Christ, thought Sandy, he knows. Somehow he knows. No, surely not. It’s not possible. But why else would he bring up this business of the past, if he didn’t somehow know?
‘I’ll consider the ramifications of that.’ He could hear the clipped tone of the formal words. The defensive mode. ‘Self-imposed protective custody; well worth pondering. But now I must go because I’m late to meet Emily.’
Samten smiled. ‘Protective custody. There is no need for that. Just be free. It’s as easy as that. Be free. Think on it, Mr Ellison.’
Chapter 46
‘You okay?’ In the rear-vision mirror, the taxi driver rubbed his face anxiously.
‘Perfectly fine,’ replied Jeremy. He thought he might faint. The effort of holding himself upright, walking the few steps across the pavement to the taxi, had produced an exhaustion he had never before experienced. His hands were trembling. His legs were shaking and he was sweating profusely.
‘Just take me to Cheyne Walk please.’ If only he had water. His mouth was so dry.
The driver nodded, then shook his head, glancing in his mirror with every gear change. Jeremy couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not about to collapse on you. And even if I do, the hospital is only a couple of minutes away.’
He wouldn’t leave the boat again, not until it was time to leave for the other place. The other place. He was referring to it mentally as another home, a country bolthole. He was tired of fooling himself. Someone at The London clinic, a male nurse from Glasgow, told Jeremy he would know when that time had come.
Now he regretted the lunch with Tim and Peter. Not that he ate anything, or stayed longer than fifteen minutes. But it was long enough to see the shock and pity in their eyes. He knew they cared and wanted to help. But this thing was easier done alone. The effort of dealing with anyone else’s emotions was too tiring.
Over the past month, he’d quietly shut down his business and arranged his affairs, telling as few people as possible that he had only months to live. It was one of the benefits of a busy corporate life, that he could absent himself without any alarms being raised or questions asked. Everyone, friends included, was used to his frequent short-term absences, his erratic silences and delays in responding to telephone messages and emails. They knew that his most significant and longest relationship was with the deal, any deal; that he would pursue it with a single-minded passion that excluded everything else.
Casual acquaintances were informed he was on a sabbatical in South-East Asia. He’d written letters to Isobel and Sally and told his lawyer to send them at the appropriate time. He would have told Rosie, but Rosie no longer spoke to him. Another letter for the pile. There was one for Matthew. The letter that took longest to write was addressed to Sandy.
In the oddest way, Jeremy found the process of dying from cancer more peaceful than much of his life. The whole thing had been taken out of his hands by a group of rogue cells. When he was first told, Felix Summerscale wearing a forlorn expression, Jeremy went completely numb. When the numbness stopped, he didn’t feel cheated, or angry, or any of the things people were meant to feel when told they had less than three months to live. What he felt was that someone, somewhere, had excused him from duty.
It came to him one night, as he surveyed his shrinking body in the bathroom mirror just before bed, that he imagined the spread of his cancer not as an invisible malignancy, but as something else which was eating away the murderous secret sickness that had been part of him for too long.
He no longer had to worry about himself. He worried about the pain of dying, but not death itself. When he was told that the pain could be controlled, first by morphine tablets, and then by an intravenous feed, Jeremy was relieved. He spent most of his time on a lounger on the deck of the Jezebel in what was left of the summer warmth. Maria cleaned and shopped, organised food deliveries and cleared the refrigerator when it began to overfill. The doctors came and went. There was occasional discomfort, but no pain. All he had to do now was lie in the weak sun and wait.
Chapter 47
They leaned against the wall, already warm from the morning sun, and waited for the bus. Women carrying buckets queued in front of a well with a squeaky ancient pump that was so heavy each woman had to lean on it with all her body weight to pull it down. The ground was littered with boxes of detergents labelled Fab and Wisk, labels Sandy recognised from his childhood.
There was a knee-deep pond on one side, where half-a-d
ozen men in worn underpants washed their hair and waddled around laughing with each other. On the other side were large stone slabs running with suds as tired-looking women scrubbed and pounded piles of clothes, then rinsed and wrung them by hand. A woman paused to straighten her back as she wiped the sweat from her forehead with her hand. Sandy smiled at her and she looked away.
‘Don’t the women mind?’ asked Sandy. ‘The men seem to do nothing but loaf.’
Emily squinted into the distance. ‘Annie says the entire country functions on the unpaid labour of women. But it’ll change. It has to.’
He rummaged in his pack for his flask of tea, poured a cup and sat down on the ground to drink it. The earth was warm and a thin breeze blew dust against the buildings. A pile of rubbish smouldered nearby. There were rusted cans and plastic bottles jumbled with threadbare rags, piles of paper and what looked like human faeces. A building was being constructed somewhere in the distance and there was the sound of jackhammers and tractors.
Even a week ago, Sandy would have been repulsed by the smell and general disorder. He would have felt the grit on his skin and longed for a night in a luxury hotel with fluffed towels and clean sheets, a place where you could drink Coke with ice in the evening and not worry about dysentery the next morning. How quickly he had become used to this town, this country. He no longer had the feeling he was in a Michael Palin documentary. Everything had begun to feel real. He thought of his flat in London, that small sad box, his very own Martello tower, the last line of defence against himself.
There was a small pebble rubbing against his foot and he kicked off his sandals. Already there was a pale imprint on his skin from where the straps crossed over. He was thinking of tattoos and symbols, when he saw Emily laughing.
‘What is it?’ he asked, smiling, but not getting the joke.
‘Oh Dad, look, you’re twice the size of everyone else.’
‘But I’ve been twice the size of everyone else since I arrived in this place,’ he said. ‘I’ve never felt so enormous, not in a superior way. I’m overgrown, over-fertilised or something. I’m too fat. I’m too tall. My feet are too big. I’ve got too much body hair, too many freckles. I can’t help it.’
Emily swung her pack on her back in one graceful movement. Despite her blonde hair and blue eyes, she was at home here in the dust and the heat, while Sandy sweated and scratched at his welts and bites. A group of schoolgirls, neat in their uniforms and plaits, gathered in front of the well. He remembered Emily as a child, shivering in her school uniform, her knees mottled purple with cold.
‘Come on, Dad, get a move on.’ Emily’s voice roused him. ‘The bus is coming. I can hear it.’
A small crowd had formed: women with babies, men carrying sacks of cement with the schoolgirls giggling between them. Above the noise of the jackhammers, there was the wailing sound of a siren and a white minibus, the type used by schools all over London, careered around the bend.
Sandy heaved his backpack on his shoulders, bumping the woman standing beside him. He still wasn’t used to the extra space the pack occupied. Every time he turned, he crashed into something or someone. He apologised to the woman. She scowled and pointed to his walking boots, which were tied to the pack’s straps. She wrinkled her nose in disgust and drew her scarf across her face.
‘What have I done wrong now?’ he asked.
Emily giggled. ‘Sorry, should have mentioned it. It’s the shoes, Dad. Think where they’ve been.’
He hurriedly unzipped his pack and stuffed them inside. A boy, no older than eight, collected rupees, and passengers rushed forward all at the same time. Sandy joined them to clamber on board, so clumsy with his big feet, stepping on bags and grabbing at the roof to keep his balance.
‘Sorry, so sorry,’ he muttered like a mantra. Behind him, Emily was still giggling.
The bus had four rows of seats, not nearly enough for the people pushing to get a place. They crammed and squeezed and jostled and squirmed. Sandy perched between a woman carrying an enormous bag of flour and a man clutching a shovel. The woman leaned against him and he moved forwards, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the seat. A schoolgirl sat down next to the man. Four people in a seat designed for two. Not bad, he thought.
Emily had been carried in the wave of people to the back of the bus, where she sat squashed between women with children on their knees. Sandy managed a contorted turn and gave as much of a wave as his hunched shoulders allowed. She grinned and waved back. Her blonde hair glinted above the dark heads and the dust motes in the air. He counted twenty-three people in a vehicle built for perhaps twelve. Before the driver pulled away, he gunned the engine and glared at Sandy. He muttered to the people around him and they nodded in agreement.
Sandy called out to Emily. ‘What now?’
‘Dad, they’re saying you’re too big and you take up too much room. They say you’ve got too much stuff and they want to charge you for two seats.’
Sandy tried to hunch into his seat and make more space, which made the man next to him drum his shovel on the floor in anger.
‘I know I’m big,’ said Sandy. ‘But there’s not a lot I can do about it now.’ The schoolgirl near him tittered and the bus drove off with a spray of gravel and a blast of its horn.
It was a morning of perfect pale sky and lace clouds. Above them the hills were patterned with emerald rice paddies. Women carrying huge panniers on their backs moved between the fields along narrow paths.
The bus rattled around corners, belching black exhaust fumes. The driver smoked a bidi while speaking on his mobile in one hand and steering with the other. Grit and dust flew in through the open windows. Sandy thought longingly of his bus trip from Delhi with one person to each seat, its regular stops at tea houses and temples. Every half mile or so, the bus braked and everyone lurched forwards while people got on or off. There were more passengers now, twenty-seven. They crouched on the floor and sat on each other’s knees. A man hung out the door, a small girl crouched behind him, clinging to his legs.
Sandy wriggled and managed to twist himself halfway around to see Emily gazing out the window, a half-smile on her lips. The woman next to him scowled and muttered again.
‘Just how safe is this bus?’ he called back to Emily. ‘Should we have got a taxi?’
‘We’re cool, Dad,’ she shouted back. ‘This is the way to go.’
She smiled at him. Thoughts of seatbelts and overcrowding sloughed away as the driver steered them around the sharp bends and up the mountain. The sun danced on the bus’s ceiling.
‘Hey Em,’ he called back to her, as the woman beside him elbowed him in the ribs. ‘We’re riding the magic bus.’ He drummed his hands on his knees and sang, ‘I’m on the magic bus at last.’
‘Dad, you and your pop songs. You don’t even know the right words.’ She shook her head, but she said it with affection. As they neared the town, the rice paddies were replaced by clusters of houses linked by a trail of brown paths. The pines edging the road disappeared. In their place was the now familiar sight of rusted axles, wheels and fenders littering the roadside ditches. There was more traffic and the driver honked his horn as trucks whizzed past.
Sandy heard Emily shout they would arrive in about half an hour. He couldn’t help himself. He punched the air in a gesture of triumph. The woman next to him sighed and drew her scarf across her face. He didn’t care. Despite his discomfort and the heat, he tensed in excitement. Soon he would see his son. The three of them would be together. It would be a perfect note moment that had nothing to do with music.
A truck lumbered past them, a group of men clinging onto the roof and waving like children. The bus accelerated around another corner. A familiar sound cut through the noise. ‘Eye of the Tiger’ from one of those Rocky films. A ringtone. The driver picked up his mobile and took his hand off the wheel.
The bus slewed across the road. Clouds of dust and bits of gravel blew in through the windows. The woman beside him screamed and clutched her
bag of flour. The bus skidded in the opposite direction. The dust lifted and on the side of the road Sandy saw the soft brown eyes of a cow slowly munching its cud as the driver tried to steer out of the skid.
Sandy was thrown against the woman. Her head smacked against the metal window frame. Blood trickled down her head and then her face. Sandy tried to wipe it away, but he was pinned to his seat by the man with the shovel. One of the schoolgirls wailed and Sandy shouted for her not to be scared, that everything would be all right. The bus veered in the opposite direction. The man fell on the floor, still clutching his shovel. Sandy managed to turn around. Behind the cowering heads and terrified faces, he saw the back door of the bus swing open and the row of seats carrying Emily began to tilt. He couldn’t see her face, only her hair. He tried to shove the people away, so he could crawl over the seats to grab her. He twisted and struggled to move but everywhere people were screaming and scrabbling for purchase.
The bus veered again and he banged his head on something sharp. For a brief second he was blinded. But still his hand pushed through the bodies and the arms and the legs. He thought he touched her fingers, thought he felt the small mole at the base of her wrist. He tried to hold onto her, but their hands slid apart. There was a rasping noise, of shearing metal buckling and giving way. Under the smell of engine oil was the metallic tang of human fear.
His vision cleared and he saw Emily gazing back at him. He saw the fine layer of dust on her face and her golden hair spread out behind her. She didn’t look scared. She smiled. Such a beautiful smile, wide and full of trust and hope. Then she was gone, sliding out the door into the valley below.
The bus came to a halt on its side, its wheels stinking of burning rubber. Sandy clambered out and ran down to Emily, falling and scrambling among the rocks. He never remembered how he got there, but he must have got to her somehow. All he remembered was kneeling by her side, seeing the blood trickle from the edge of her mouth, watching her pupils dilate and grow dull before her eyes closed, hearing her breath grow shallow and weak. He stroked her head and saw his hand, wet with blood from some unseen wound.
After Everything Page 29