by Glen Duncan
The Bloodstone Papers
Glen Duncan
For my mum and dad,
with love
Contents
1 Nowadays
2 The Boy and the Ring
3 Headlines
4 The Girl and the Gold
5 Papers
6 The Valuation
7 Personals
8 The Mother Country
9 Lies
10 The Deal with God
11 Witnesses
12 The Tryst with Destiny
13 Suspects
14 The Silk Train
15 Revisions
16 The Sucker Punch
17 Options
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Glen Duncan
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
nowadays
(Bolton and London, 2004)
We don’t remember everything. Just enough to make it difficult.
‘You know the story,’ Pasha says, not seeing the problem. ‘So what is there to tell it? You start at the beginning, go through the middle, then get to the end.’
The two of us sit whisky-loosened in opposite armchairs after Sunday lunch in the retirement flat in Bolton. I make my pilgrimage there once a month bearing Johnnie Walker Black Label (my dad’s switched from Bushmills) and an increasingly unconvincing air of being happy and in control of my life in London, land of News at Ten and, by extension, imminent terrorist attack. My mum’s in the kitchen, ‘getting the washing-up ready’ for me, since I, dutiful son, insist on doing it, which consists of her doing the washing-up, then pretending she hasn’t. For her that’s part of the order of things, along with the pizzazz of Gene Kelly, the unimpeachability of Marks & Spencer and the vandalization of Bolton by its own smoking, swearing and spitting infant yobs, who before we know it will be beating pensioners to death for three pounds forty-seven because they’re not one bit frightened of jail. I used to throw my hands up at such mantras, patiently and with self-congratulation bring forth undergraduate liberal arguments like exquisite bits of origami. She loved it, that education had worked. I used to romance her with reasoning; it kept us in mutually flirtatious cahoots. These days–paying tax, flagging halfway through novels, sleeping with a claw-hammer under the pillow–I make a flaccid noncommittal face and let it go. This, as much as anything, tips her off that All is Not Well with Her Son.
It’s been a good day. Eleven o’clock mass (my monthly faithless gesture for them; there’s a shift in their aura come Communion but I remain empewed and kneeling, face averted), then back to the flat for gold and ruby booze: three wets of Black Label for me and the old man, a long Sandeman’s port and lemon for my mum, drinks accompanied by the moreish nibbles of my parents’ lost past–gathia, choora and seo–followed by a lunch of korma (the dry South Indian version, not the curry house’s coconut jism) with pepper-water and plain Dehra Dun rice. Fresh Pakistani sucking mangos–velvety ovoids in flamy yellows and reds that always look extraterrestrial to me–with Walls soft scoop vanilla ice cream to round off. (I’ve come home to sublime wifely vanilla after years of whoring with mint choc chip and rum and raisin. In all sorts of ways I’m accepting my youth has gone.) Eating temporarily over, the Black Label’s out again.
The air indoors holds its ghosts of chilli and tamarind, but the window’s open, letting in the exhalation of mown lawns from the tiny council-house gardens across the road, as well as the Boltonian base note of exhaust fumes and old brick. They’re built in war zones, these Sheltered Housing schemes. Cheap land. Retirees get to spend their Autumn Years marooned in a sea of paupers, drunks, hookers and thugs. Last month, walking back after midnight from a depressing get-together with an old St Cuthbert’s schoolmate (miserably divorced and mercilessly alimonied, looking straight into a nicotine future of brightly lit pubs and quality porn), I was hello loved on Barrow Lane by a bleach blonde prostitute in a purple vinyl mac and white stilettos. She was fat-calved, with a thick porous face and lashes mascara’d up into tarantulas. Lust began its scurry like a match catching–my loins are of an age and jadedness to be ignited by the poor, the half ugly, the too young, the too old–then checked: these are the streets my parents walk. Chastened, I shook my head in furious refusal and trudged on, disappointed that she didn’t persist.
The old man and I are discussing, for the umpteenth time, The Book. There is the other thing to discuss, our Secret Business, but the drink’s made him forget. I’ll have to find a way of reminding him before I go, or there will be hushed clandestine calls from the downstairs communal payphone, the recent digitalization of which confounds him. My train leaves Manchester at seven; we have only a couple of hours.
‘You know the story,’ he says again. ‘You know all the stories.’
‘Yes, but it’s not just a question of knowing the stories.’
‘Thenwhat?’
Quite. Thenwhat. In the Anglo-Indian–or Eurasian or East Indian or Half-caste or Mongrel or Pariah or Cheechee or Chutney Mary, depending on your angle–idiom, which is to say our idiom, this ‘Thenwhat?’ means: then tell me in what way it’s not just a question of knowing the stories, dunderhead. I, when it comes to the business of The Book, am the dunderhead. They were born before The Camps, The Bomb, The Moon, The Ozone, The Internet, The End of History. For them the big things don’t change: God, Fate, Love, Time, Beginnings, Endings. Good and Evil. Therefore my difficulty. The Book is to be their story. I’ve toyed with The Big Things Don’t Change as an ironic title. Also, since I share Keri Hume’s weakness for portent, The Beige People. Pasha, who likes to get to the indelicate quick of things, prefers Mixed Blood. I can’t quite bring myself to reveal the latest working title, The Cheechee Papers.
‘Whatall do you need to know? Ask me. I remember everything.’ He claims I’ve inherited my superhuman memory from him. (It’s been a lifelong problem for me, remembering everything. What restaurant in Manchester? Maude or Melissa or Carl will ask. The one with the Chinese waiter with the Hitler tash. Christ, you can’t possibly have forgotten. But they have. My sisters, my brother, even Mater and Pater. If I relied on their powers of recollection I’d end up convinced half the details of my past were dreams or imaginings.)
Wearily, I get out my notebook, a Moleskine, since like thousands of others (including, the marketing tells me, Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin) I’ve succumbed to the writerly pretensions of this product. I start with some details. ‘What year did the Great India Peninsula Railway become the Central Railway?’ I ask. I’ve tried to explain: it’s not what I need to know, it’s that there’s so much I’ll never know. They want a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I’ve told them: every beginning is fraudulent, every middle arbitrary, every ending an illusion. It’s the ending that bothers me most. These days I don’t even like the sound of the word. Ending.
My father leans back in his armchair, points his toes until his ankles crack, narrows his eyes, allows his tongue the run of his proudly not false front teeth. He looks good for seventy-nine, a brown man with a side-parted quiff of thin white hair. The right eye’s lost its pep under a blue-grey caul of glaucoma, but the left’s shiny hazel, resolutely feisty. He’d suit a thin white moustache, I keep telling him, go the Douglas Fairbanks route. I’m invested in his looks, naturally. Girls I’ve brought home have flirted with him, surprised at themselves but incapable of ignoring the saltily weathered male flag that’ll still rattle and snap in the right oestral breeze. ‘Nineteen fifty,’ he says. ‘Or possibly fifty-one. Actually it could’ve been fifty-two. Wait. I got my demob papers in…nineteen forty-five…Or
was it…Wait. Bleddy hell…’
Anglo-Indian accents, the old man’s in particular, present a problem. He says ‘shot pants’ for short pants, ‘parr’ for power, ‘lookhyur’ for look here, and ‘bleddy’, as above, for bloody. Years ago my sister Maude and I secretly tape-recorded him. ‘Cheh’ was his response when we played it back. ‘I sound like a bleddy Indian bugger.’
‘And you fought Docherty when you were, what, seventeen?’
‘Eighteen. I’d have been…Yes. Eighteen. He was a wiry bugger with a bleddy ridiculous handlebar moustache. And I’d given away a stone in weight. You should’ve seen their faces, my God.’
‘Which would have been…’ I calculate, make a note. ‘Nineteen forty-three.’
‘Forty-three. Yes. Got him with a straight right, one kutack dead on the point.’
And so it goes. After an hour’s interrogation (with much sidetracking, many tangents, my dull gentle insistence on dates and places) I’ve filled three Moleskine pages.
‘He’ll be asleep in a minute,’ my mum says, when I trade places with her at the kitchen sink. ‘Fascinating afternoons for me, watching him blow spit bubbles there in the corner.’
I wash the dishes and do yesterday’s Sun crossword with her. I’ve given up fighting them about the Sun, too (they both tut and shake their heads at the daily Asylum Seeker fictions: What is this country coming to, I ask you?), a fight which was in any case hypocritical since I’ve always found its cartoon news, topless girls and apocalyptic soccer headlines irresistible and infallibly laxative. The flat is at peace, hyperclean salmon shag pile throughout making its contented presence felt, the window sill’s carriage clock clucking, visible brass innards hypnotically shuffling and reshuffling fragments of caught light. My mum and I eat Marks & Sparks seedless grapes. This is part of the pattern, our quiet couple of hours while Pasha sails his archipelago of kips. It’s where we come into our best alignment. She stops worrying about whether I’m bored. Sometimes we talk about her lost childhood, for The Book. Occasionally something astonishing surfaces (I remember the afternoon she told me about The Deal with God), but not today. Out of character, Bolton offers a baked afternoon of street stasis and monotonous sunlight, a shaft of which falls on my dad’s armchair, that winged and antimacassar’d throne of taupe velour, where he reclines post-prandially unbuttoned, paunch liberated, tartan-socked feet crossed on the pouffe. The hot-pot or kedgeree of our genes is a much revisited subject, but at seventy-nine his body has settled in favour of Indian old man type, short and slim-limbed, with redoubtable belly. It’s not the European gut, beer-distended, pendulous, but a planetary curve, a drum-tight convexity from sternum to pubes. I’ve got the beginnings of one myself, held in check only by my being single and desperately on the pull. With millions of other men I feel a draft of death every time Brad Pitt takes his shirt off on screen.
‘I wish I could sleep like that,’ my mum says, legs tucked under her, arms folded. Her knees make me feel tender, since they seemed so huge when I was small. When I’d had enough of shopping I’d wrap my arms round them to make her stand still. Palliative odour of Nivea or nylon, chilled skin against my lips. She looks tired. Back pain and the old man’s violent dreams ruin her nights. She haunts the small hours, knows the kitchen’s four a.m. murmur, the micro’s LCD glow, the nocturnal personalities of things. ‘You’d think he’d spend his nights wide awake, the amount he sleeps during the day.’
Pasha is indeed unequivocally out of it, tumbler still clutched. (‘Pasha’, by the way, has been, second only to ‘Dearie’ [pronounced ‘D’yurie’], my mum’s nickname for him as long as I can remember. I’ve grown up assuming it means ‘father’ in Hindi. In fact it’s Turkish, and means ‘governor’ or ‘high official’. God only knows how my mum acquired it. There’s no Turkish in our family. Indian, Scottish, English, French–no Turkish, although these days one’s loth to rule anything out. She applies it ironically, along with ‘Squire’ and ‘Bwana’.) I find myself studying his hands, snuff-brown, thin, crazily inscribed, a knot of urgent veins–but elegant. Cool, as his granddaughter says: Grampy, your hands are cool. That’s twenty-year-old Elspeth, my sister Maude’s daughter. (Elspeth tickles him pink. She’s nowadays. Look, Grampy, she says, lifting her T-shirt, I’ve had my belly-button done. This is last month. He drops the evening paper, foreheads his specs, leans forward, peers. Did it hurt? Yeah, a bit. Looks groovy, though, doesn’t it? He inspects more closely, face screwed up, me in the background not sure about Elspeth’s nutmeg-brown and newly jewelled midriff being flashed Saloméishly about like this. I’m The Uncle, after all, he’s The Granddad. But the old man chuckles. Whatall things nowadays, eh? Looks nice, my girl. Have to learn the belly-dance now. At which Elspeth cackles; he tickles her pink. Then specs resettled and attention returned to the Bolton Evening News, of which he hasn’t missed an edition in forty years.)
‘Is everything all right, Sweetheart?’ my mum wants to know. She means my life. Specifically my love life. I’m Sweetheart. Melissa is Angel and Carl is Darling or Carling. Maude is Baby because there wasn’t supposed to be another baby after her. Then ten years later, when the name had already stuck, me, Owen Grant Monroe, wrecking nomenclature, economy, faith in the rhythm method.
‘Everything’s fine, Ma. I’m just knackered.’
‘You’re yawning away.’
‘I’ll sleep on the train.’
We look at each other for a moment in which is all her love and I know and it doesn’t matter what and I know Mum but don’t ask just now I’m not going mad or going to kill myself or anything like that and yes you were a good mother. I imagine her thinking of my life as a large house through which she’s being selectively tour-guided by me: What’s in that room? Can’t go in there, Ma. Oh. What about this one? Sorry, off limits. Oh. Well what about in here? No, Ma, that’s not part of the tour. Deep down she knows: Scarlet left me useless for anyone else. She knows, I know, she knows I know she knows. Thinking of Scarlet, my scalp contracts and blood warms my head as under the heat of a spot lamp. I take another grape.
‘What happened with that waitress you were seeing?’
‘Didn’t work out.’
‘No?’
‘Nah.’
She pauses–details? No, Mum, no details–tuts and rolls her eyes, then looks away out of the window into the ether of all the world’s failed affairs. ‘I always said you’d never get married,’ she says, with a smile of complacent wistfulness. In this soft late light she looks frail and glamorous. Hair colours have come and gone since my unplanned conception turned her grey almost forty years ago but for the last decade or so she’s availed herself of a pale blonde L’Oréal semi-permanent. Because you’re worth it, Ma, I tell her, in line with the current ad campaign. With this, her papyrus-coloured skin and the very light pink lipstick she has a golden, Angie Dickinsonish look. That’s another of mine: Mum, you look like Angie Dickinson, the Police Woman years. She blushes, shakes her head, dismisses, enjoys it.
‘Well, never mind,’ she says, taking another grape. ‘There’s time.’
Hair sticking up all wrong but punctually awake for his four o’clock cuppa, Pasha intercepts me in the hall on my way back from the loo. We’re flanked in the gloom by my mum’s crime thrillers and what amounts to a gallery of framed family photos. He has of course remembered (horrified that he forgot: Bleddy memri these days my son I tell you) the other thing we need to discuss. Our Secret Business.
‘So?’ he whispers. ‘Anything?’
‘Not much,’ I whisper back, lying. ‘He worked for the Gas Board in Croydon for a while, but he left in nineteen sixty-nine. He could be anywhere.’
His shoulders sag. ‘Oh,’ he says.
I can’t bring myself to tell him what I’ve discovered. But I can’t stand his disappointment, either. ‘There’s one old guy there might remember him, apparently, but he’s away on holiday for two weeks.’
‘Who’s this bugger?’
‘Healy,’ I invent. ‘
Eddie Healy.’
‘Oh-ho.’ The alertness returns.
‘Look, I’ll contact him when he gets back, okay?’
‘Okay. What’s his name again?’
‘Eddie Healy.’
‘What are you whispering about?’ my mum calls from the lounge. I give my dad a conspiratorial shoulder-squeeze as I pass him. He’s making a note of the name in his own little black book, also a Moleskine, bought by me, satirically. It was decided at the outset that this would be our secret, mine and his. No point in worrying your mother. Maybe not, but of late I’m doing enough worrying for the three of us. I know I should tell him what I’ve got, what I’ve by sheer chance discovered, but the instinct to buy time is overwhelming. When I’m certain, I tell myself. When I know for sure…
The last hour melts away. God only knows how, but I eat a chocolate choux bun. Choux buns, Viennese Whirls, potato cakes, crumpets, Heinz Toast Toppers. My mum holds my childhood prisoner in the larder. Tastes and flavours explode the past, leave me with the aerated feeling of all the distance between then and now, all the ways I’ve betrayed my earlier selves. I look at photos of myself as a child and think, Christ, I’m so sorry.
We go downstairs to the lobby to say our goodbyes. A few other residents or Old People (upper-cased by me and my siblings because we don’t think of Mater and Pater in the same bracket) are depressingly visible in the communal lounge. These Old People have my mum and dad pegged as Indian (they come from India, after all) or Pakistani, or Portuguese, or Spanish or Italian or Greek, or indeed Turkish. One lady asked my mum if my dad was a Red Indian. Whatever you are, I’ve told them, you’re not white, which means the rest is just conversation.