Writing on Skin

by Sara Banerji

  ‘It’s the leaves, see,’ Slug tried to explain. ‘They look good with each other, but they’re different sizes, different shapes.’

  Gerald said, ‘You’ve put something the wrong colour in.’ He gestured to where sharp spikes of purple salvia emerged through the daze of gold.

  Slug scratched his throat, stared from Gerald to the planting, then mumbled something which sounded like, ‘That’s the point. Anyway you got to take this photo today. You’ll have to ask Anne for a film if you ’ain’t got one.’

  Gerald shuddered.

  ‘A film for your camera!’ screamed Anne. ‘Are you soft in the head or something? What do you want a picture of that awful creature standing in that hideous yellow bit of the garden for?’

  ‘He wants to send it to Hermione, for her to see. To cheer her up,’ Gerald explained nervously. He was longing for the move to Bunty, but various problems had arisen. One was that Bunty was having a financial crisis due to the recession. The other, worse really, was that Slug had grown proprietorial about Hermione’s garden and had begun to see it as his sacred charge to care for it till she got back.

  ‘But Anne is here. She’ll look after it,’ urged Gerald.

  ‘She’ll chop it all down. Plant geraniums, I know her sort,’ grunted Slug.

  ‘I want you to carry me,’ said Rosie to Eshak. She had minced her words during her years of being a Muslim, then a Christian, then a Hindu wife. It had got her nowhere. Since she had made her own way in the world she had taken to saying things outright.

  ‘You want what?’ gasped Eshak, gazing at the mountain of body sunk upon the bed like a heap of soft brown sugar.

  ‘Carry,’ said Rosie crisply, raising a delicate hand and snapping her newly varnished fingers. ‘Don’t you know the word? Lift me in your arms. Transport me round the room.’

  ‘My God,’ muttered Eshak.

  ‘If you do not wish to, just say so. Then you and your wife can leave my employment by the morning.’

  Eshak stepped forward nervously. ‘Really, this is rather embarrassing,’ he felt through her paper-thin negligée for some flesh to get his hands under.

  ‘Come on, you can do better than that, surely!’ snapped Rosie. ‘Get those great black hands under my arse.’

  Eshak, outraged, snatched back his arms, and stood upright glaring with indignation. ‘Madam, what are you up to?’ he demanded.

  Rosie raised herself slowly. ‘Look, your fucking wife has done her damnedest to ruin me. In fact she might have succeeded. I will know by tomorrow whether my clients have abandoned me. I think, therefore, the least thing you can do is to humour me in this matter.’

  Eshak arrived home at nearly midnight, strained with a shock that was both mental and physical. ‘I don’t think I can bear to have anything more to do with that creature, Unity.’

  The feel of Rosie’s flesh had upset him even more than the weight. ‘I felt as though my fingers were going to go right through her. It was like carrying an armful of overripe peaches that kept almost rolling out of my grasp.’

  Unity shuddered as she imagined a single buttock of Rosie Ramsay’s rolling thighless over the polished tiles.

  * * *

  Back in England, Slug was working in Hermione’s garden, and suffering. He did not know if he could stand much more, and wished Hermione would come back soon. It was her absence, he felt, that was making what had once been a pleasant challenge into a period of anxiety and unease. The trouble was he had become torn, nearly shattered by conflict.

  Before Hermione employed him he had been the property of the gang, and had been made to feel secure and needed. Then Hermione had come into his life and had lured him away from a pleasant existence of gargling lager in the High Street while the police looked on with satisfactory disapproval.

  It had been bad enough when the gang had been suspicious of him and Gerald, but now something new had happened and from the efficient way Hermione had dealt with the gang the night they invaded her house, Slug felt that only she would be able to help him now.

  He decided to get Gerald to write a letter to her.

  ‘Dear Hermione,’ he began.

  Gerald was impressed. It was the first time Slug had suggested composing a letter of his own and Gerald felt that his affectionate influence must, at last, be having a civilizing effect. He began to look into a future in which Slug listened to classical music with him, and the two of them visited picture galleries together.

  ‘I am in love,’ dictated Slug.

  Gerald did a little squirm of pleasure, and laying an affectionate hand on Slug’s shoulder murmured ‘Ducky’ in a loving voice before continuing to write.

  ‘She has said she loves me too,’ said Slug. ‘Read it back as you write it so as I know.’

  ‘He says he loves me too,’ smiled Gerald.

  ‘She,’ said Slug.

  ‘I am “he”,’ said Gerald. Had the first little bell of alarm begun to ring inside his brain? It had not occurred to him how highly Gerald valued his affection or he would not have had the courage to continue. ‘Mary says I’m OK and she’ll be my girlfriend if I’ve got the money to take her for … pistos? What’s the name of that stuff, Gerry?’

  Gerald did not answer but instead made a sort of gagging noise.

  ‘Eyetie grub? Pistols? You know,’ Slug tried to explain.

  ‘If I had one I’d shoot you with it,’ hissed Gerald, hurt beyond coherence.

  ‘Pizza,’ said Slug, smiling proudly at having got the word right. He turned and looked for admiration and was amazed to see Gerald’s face had gone white and his expression furious.

  Gerald did not do any gardening nor did he eat any meals for three days after the letter. When Hermione went to India he had taken a room in the house, and Slug would sometimes catch a glimpse of him sitting on the edge of his bed staring into space, white faced and anguished.

  Then on the evening of the fourth day something seemed to happen to the professional gardener. He appeared in the middle of the lawn, found several faults with the way the grass had been mown and the borders weeded and, standing with head high, eyes bright, and shoulders back, began to plan a series of rigid Tagetes plantings for the following season.

  Having felt gratified when he’d realized the cause of Gerald’s angst, Slug felt disappointed that he had recovered so soon and also felt too afraid of the new officious Gerald to dare argue against the hideous orange bedding that was about to engulf his own frothy plantings of mauves, blues and copper.

  He did start to say, ‘But Hermione won’t like…’ then fell silent at the sight of the cold, almost dangerous, look in Gerald’s eye.

  ‘I shall not be here long, Darren,’ Gerald announced to Slug in icy tones.

  My God, thought Slug. How had he discovered his true name? An icy sweat broke out all over his body in fear of Gerald telling the gang.

  ‘I plan to move on,’ continued Gerald, ‘so in the meantime have the graciousness to grant me one last wish.’

  ‘You don’t have to do yourself in because of me, Gerry,’ said Slug, feeling flattered.

  ‘I have no intention of doing such a thing,’ Gerald told Slug contemptuously. ‘I am moving on to a greatly superior position, one in which I will be able to fulfil my real potential. And I wish to leave this garden as its true owner, now deceased, may God rest his soul, Mr Hugh Crombie, would have wanted.’

  Hugh Crombie, thought Gerald, as he strode off without a backwards look, what a man Hugh Crombie had been! Vastly grander and more glorious than Slug, who, he now saw, was positively slobbery. How could he, Gerald, a man of such fine sensitivity, have felt love for such a person?

  During Gerald’s three days of pining since the letter to Hermione, peeping from his window, he had seen Mary leave the house surreptitiously in the evening, and knew that she must be on her way to meet Slug and his gang.

  Mary had changed a lot since she had come to live in England. The sides of her head were now shaved bare and her remaining ha
ir was a brilliant shocking purple. Her nostrils and ear lobes had been punctured with so many little holes, to let in rings, that Gerald had the fanciful idea it would be possible to pull strips off her nose and ears like off a perforated roll of lavatory paper. Written all over her in a language like Braille was the message that she rejected her mother’s values as utterly as she was able.

  On the third day of grieving something had happened to Gerald. It was as though the letter to Hermione had acted on him as a loud noise does to someone dreaming.

  Gerald woke up.

  The pain stung. Humiliation burned like indigestion. But suddenly he found himself looking down the corridors of his own future once again and realized that he had let love cause him to lose sight of his career.

  On that very morning he read in his newspaper that an earl had just bought a large and neglected estate near by. There had been a photo of the man, just the sort Gerald liked: large, strong, bearded, slightly pot bellied.

  ‘“I am proud to be gay,” says the earl’ read the caption below this photo. ‘I pity men who have to make do with the company of women …’ Gerald’s heart began to beat faster. This man would undoubtedly need a good gardener.

  Procuring himself a letter of recommendation from Bunty, who had feared legal consequences by not employing Gerald as promised, he set off straight away to offer his services.

  When Anne began to suspect her daughter was going out with the tattooed assistant gardener, she became quite hysterical and let out high-pitched cries of ‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on her, or I’ll murder you’ whenever she caught sight of Slug. So he had to confine his work to the areas behind trees and bushes where he could not be seen.

  The whole thing made Slug very anxious indeed, and he was desperately hoping that Hermione would be able to protect him. After all this was her house, and he was her gardener.

  ‘I do whatever I want,’ Mary had told him calmly. ‘You needn’t pay any attention to Mummy.’

  But Slug, his eardrums quivering with the angry cries of his beloved’s mother, found it hard not to do so.

  Anne frightened him. He took to sipping the tea sent out from the kitchen very cautiously in case she had put rat poison in it, and to shaking his gumboots before slipping his feet in, explaining to Mary, ‘In case she puts snakes in.’ They both knew who ‘she’ was.

  ‘But I thought there weren’t many snakes in England,’ said Mary.

  ‘You can buy ’em in pet shops,’ muttered Slug, peering into the gloomy cheesy depths of his footwear.

  Mary fell silent, trying to visualize her mother carrying a poisonous snake. Finally she said, ‘My mother wouldn’t buy one. She’s petrified of snakes.’

  But Slug had begun to feel like a hunted man. ‘Well, she’d get the chap in the shop to deliver it, wouldn’t she,’ he said.

  ‘Would the man agree to put it in your Welly?’

  ‘People’d do anything for money,’ grunted Slug. And as it turned out, it was this particular human weakness that saved him.

  On getting Slug’s letter Hermione wrote to Anne from some unheard-of-village in the depths of Bengal.

  ‘If you are not satisfied with the gardener, dear, you can always find somewhere else to live; but now that Gerald has left, Slug will have to be in sole charge of my garden and I will continue to see his wages are paid. And I wish him to be allowed to go about his duties in peace. I know it must be hard for you, living alone, with Rupert out of the country and struggling to save his business from the turmoils of revolution, so I have advised my solicitors to send you a monthly income to keep you going.’ This combination of veiled threat and promised reward did much to ease Anne’s apprehensions.

  She suddenly found herself looking at Slug with a less hostile air. After all, in spite of that frightful outfit he was a man. And a large, young and well-built one into the bargain …

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘I am not going to do this any more,’ said Eshak. ‘I would rather leave and be penniless.’

  ‘Our patients?’ said Unity.

  ‘We’ll find other ways of raising money. We’ll borrow. We’ll advertise in the papers for donations.’

  Unity sighed.

  ‘Couldn’t we go away from here, Ma,’ Tammy joined in. She was eight, and accustomed to being happy.

  ‘We don’t like Mrs Ramsay,’ said Ruth, who was seven. ‘She makes us go on tiptoe all the time.’

  ‘And she’s too fat,’ added Tammy.

  ‘We’ll all go and stay at the clinic in the village for the weekend while we think over what to do next,’ said Unity.

  ‘Oh, yippee!’ cried both children then looked suddenly sad. ‘But it’s only Thursday. We’ve got school tomorrow.’

  ‘You can miss school to cheer you up,’ said Unity, and mixed with Eshak’s expression of relief came one of disapproval.

  ‘They’ll fall behind, like I did. They must go to school,’ he protested. He had only discovered he was behind when he was seventeen. When he realized what an effort he was going to have to make to catch up, he had felt so daunted that he had been tempted not to try.

  ‘You said Dr Das was coming to stay. He might turn up when we’re away,’ Ruth suddenly remembered.

  In the end they left a letter for him with Rosie’s butler. ‘Come and join us in the village.’ After all, it had once been Dr Das’s family home.

  ‘We’ll work out what to do next when we get there,’ said Unity. ‘Something will turn up, I’m sure.’

  But Eshak knew she had become afraid.

  Hermione was dismayed when she found them gone.

  ‘Can’t even tell you where,’ said Rosie Ramsay spitefully, though she knew perfectly well.

  It had always annoyed her when her UK doctors went to the village clinic. ‘If you go to those dirty places and catch something, please don’t expect me to go on giving you wages while you are ill,’ she would threaten.

  This time she was especially furious. She felt that Eshak had reneged on an unspoken arrangement to carry her each evening. She also felt disappointed by his departure, for recently – once or twice, and for the first time in her life – she had felt a little frisson of sexual delight from hands other than her own. It was but a small spark of sensation so far, but Rosie thought that if it was fed nightly it might grow into desire, or perhaps even passion, and she had planned that when Eshak came this evening she would somehow get him to tickle her tits and see where that led.

  Also it was a weekday and the doctors were only allowed off at weekends; she needed their services for the fat ladies of Calcutta who had discovered that Rosie’s was the only clinic of its kind in town. This fact, and Unity’s choking apologies, had brought every one of Rosie’s clients back to her.

  She had gone to the clinic just before Hermione arrived, ready to be magnanimous and to give Eshak and Unity another chance on reduced wages, and she had been extremely peeved to find them absent.

  Hermione was exhausted: thirsty, hot, longing for a bath after two days on the train. She stood at Rosie Ramsay’s door, nearly cried, and knew she would have to find herself another hotel. Probably another one with plastic flowers and tablecloths.

  Rosie had been on the verge of withdrawing, pulling her front door to, when something seemed to catch her attention. She leant forwards, looked carefully into Hermione’s face, and asked, ‘Aren’t you Mrs Crombie? Mrs Hugh Crombie?’

  Hermione gasped. ‘Yes, yes!’

  ‘You came to visit our house when I was eighteen,’ cried Rosie, suddenly animated. ‘Ah, what good days! How great we all were then.’ She paused, gazing at Hermione as though regretting Hermione’s own lost greatness. ‘We lived in Theatre Road,’ she said, then added almost reluctantly, ‘My father worked for Mr Crombie.’

  ‘The tea-company head clerk!’ Hermione suddenly remembered. He had been a frail, bespectacled and earnest Tamil who had, at the time of Diwali, gently invited Hermione to visit his home and see the lights. ‘My wife and daughter
will be glad to serve you tea there, Madam,’ he had said.

  Hermione was starting to remember the daughter now, a plump-cheeked girl with sparkling eyes and pouting lips who had brought her a damp Marie biscuit and a cup of tea so sweet the spoon could have stood up in it.

  She looked at Rosie, suppressing a tiny shiver at time wreaking such massive change, and said, ‘Your father’s Diwali lights were beautiful.’

  Hermione remembered that after the daughter had gone out and the wife was hovering in the doorway, shadow-like, waiting to refill Hermione’s tea and replace her biscuit, Mr Ramaswami confided that he was worried about his daughter.

  ‘She is a Hindu girl of good family and with great prospects; she will be able to make an excellent marriage. But I fear all that may be at risk, for I suspect she is having hanky panky with some young city Muslim man.’

  ‘How can I help?’ Hermione had asked.

  ‘Please put in word to Mr Crombie to get me a transfer back to South India. I have requested him on several occasions but to no avail. But I am sure he will listen to your good self.’

  ‘But why will it be better there?’ Hermione had protested.

  ‘We will get her away from this young fellow for a start,’ the father had said. ‘He will undoubtedly not have the funds to make the journey to Tamil Nadu. And in our home town we will be surrounded by relatives to guard her. And also suitable young Hindu Brahmin men will be there for her to choose from. Which items are lacking in the town of Calcutta. I beg you to intercede for us, Madam.’

  ‘But what if she loves him?’ Hermione had asked dispiritedly.

  Years earlier she had been the daughter protected from the man she loved, and she had never known proper happiness in all her life because of it.

  Shortly after that Diwali, Rossama Ramaswami ran away with the Muslim boy.

  Hermione, in subsequent years, had sometimes thought about Rossama and envied her.

  ‘I am sure you must have been happy,’ she said now, and added inwardly, ‘as I would have been if I had spent my life with Yudhishthira.’ She knew her words were inappropriate but felt too tired and surprised to be able to summon up the correct sentiments.