by Glen Duncan
‘And you wrote the letters where?’
‘In the post office at VT.’ Before boarding the train for Lahore at Victoria Terminus Ross had dashed off two letters, one to Richie Pinto, telling the story of the Goodrich assault, one to Beatrice, telling her everything was fine.
Beatrice, shaking her head, brushing away a tear, smiling, handed him the letter. Richie’s letter, which in his panic he’d put in the envelope addressed to her.
‘Oh, my son, what troubles you bring on your mother,’ Beatrice said, squeezing his hand.
She stayed in Lahore only two days, at a small hotel where nothing–not one single thing, my son–was clean, and at their parting on the train platform handed Ross a small package. ‘Don’t open it now,’ she said. ‘But when you do, remember that your mother is thinking of you, far away, and that when you need her, whenever you need her, she’ll be there.’
He opened the package once the train was out of sight. This, he understood, was what she’d been waiting for, an opportunity to reaffirm that his primary allegiance should be to her, that her love, in a world of accidents and villains and flight from the Law, was the only thing he could rely on. It depressed him, measured precisely the limits of her power in such a world, the vast discrepancy between his future and their shared shrinking past.
The package contained two new pairs of underpants, a comb, a pot of guava jelly, and a twenty-rupee note wrapped round Raymond Varney’s bloodstone ring. Apparently, he had come of age.
CHAPTER THREE
headlines
(London, 2004)
London is no longer interested in me. Its attention when I arrived twenty years ago reminded me of God’s in my childhood, an eye under scrutiny of which I mattered, cosmically. That’s long gone. The capital gave me enough to get me hooked, then turned its back. Gorgeous cruel whore, I used to think (trying to matter at least romantically), but it’s ages since it was even that. The city has no personality, sexual or otherwise. It’s been reduced beyond personification; or rather, I’m reduced beyond personifying it. With London as with God: it was me all along.
It’s after ten by the time I get back to the flat. Vince, my flat-mate, my tenant, is out, most likely risking life and limb in the world of casual outdoor gay sex. The train has bullied me, with buzzing fluorescents and the woeful grammar of its announcements, into sobriety, and though I know a second drunkenness will make me feel terrible I open a bottle of Wolf Blass shiraz and drink a glass, quickly, standing up in the kitchen.
With only me in it my flat speaks through its angles and furniture of a dull and deflated life. In the corner above the fridge-freezer a faint brown-edged area of damp the map-shape more or less of India says: time love loss death nothing. Later to be dismissed as maudlin melodrama, but this is now. A cat knocks something over in the back garden and scarpers with a cartoon yowl. I take the bottle down the hall to my bedroom.
There was a time a couple of decades ago when with only a little help or luck a single working person could afford to buy a cramped or dilapidated flat in London. I had both help and luck. Help to the tune of five thousand pounds (a loan, but one which took me so long to pay back at 0 per cent interest we might as well call it a gift) from Melissa, whose demonically entrepreneurial second husband, Ted, got rich (steam cleaning, industrial coatings) under Mrs Thatcher’s glacial squint. And luck in the form of a full-time lecturing position at University College London only six months after I’d finished my MA. Back then central London never bothered with things much south of Clapham. Tooting, Brixton, Balham, Collier’s Wood; it was all a glamourless blur down there. Now more than a little luck or help is required. The young white laptopped middle classes have come to Balham with their artful casuals and polite terror of the remaining browns and blacks. Little men with designer spectacles and media-industry hairdos push ergonomic prams or cradle babies in Bauhaus slings, praying their bolshy aerobic women won’t draw any big black male attention. I’m not dark enough either to scare the honkies or to expect solidarity from the brothers. Even the Asians know at a glance there’s something, as Tarantino would say, rotten in Denmark. ‘And what colour is Owen?’ my mum once asked a very young Elspeth, having done sky, lemons, the rug, the three-piece suite. My niece considered a moment, head at a precocious tilt. ‘Beige,’ she said, eventually. ‘Like Hovis.’
My kitchen’s India-shaped damp patch is anomalous; the flat everywhere else is well kept, clean, tidy. I’m not normally slack in my maintenance. I know what a shield against the universe’s Godless howl domestic order can be. Last year my upstairs neighbours and I had the building repointed. The boiler’s only two years old. My windows are double-glazed, my floors are stripped, my period features (circa 1900) are nicely preserved. The flue’s open, and for the last few years my solo winter evenings have had, courtesy of a real fire, at least the appearance of contented solitude if not its reality. Ted, who has more favours to call in than the Devil, has sent my way builders, plumbers, electricians and joiners (Turks, Poles, Jamaicans, Greeks, Malaysians, of late a plethora of haggard East Europeans who work with a silent intensity that suggests survived torture. Regardless of their race they all get round to the question of mine: You Iranian, boss? Italian? Little Afghan in you? No? You sure?) and incrementally the shit-hole of twenty years ago has become the twenty-first-century monstrosity of conservative middle-class pretension I and my lodger inhabit today. Everyone, absolutely everyone, with the exception of Vince, keeps telling me to sell. Sell now. Make money.
I’m not averse to making money, but I am congenitally lazy. Also, what will change do except remind me of brevity, ephemera, death? Endings. Vince’s rent pays the mortgage. I teach three and a half days a week at the Arbuthnot College in Wimbledon. I write two pornographic novels a year under the name Millicent Nash for Sheer Pleasure, the erotica imprint of Dyer & Haskell Publishers (a letter from whom, which I’ve been dreading, was among my post gathered and left outside my door by Vince). And, out of I’m not sure what perverseness (I told myself initially it would facilitate meeting women), I work one evening a week in a bar, Neon Hallelujah, just down the road in Balham. A bitty existence, my sisters think. The patchwork life seems ungrown-up to both of them, as does my professional apathy. I squeezed a dozen or so articles out in my first few years, and published one dismal, floundering book, Artists of the Holy Blood about the Catholic literary imagination, then took a series of institutional sidesteps at first calculated to keep myself in the liminal zone of academia, later because I was stuck there whether I liked it or not. Eventually I downgraded to A levels. From time to time at the Arbuthnot College my position wobbles, so far not violently enough for me to do anything about it. Leave the poor bugger alone, my brother Carl says, from the safe distance of Arizona, where he works at some impenetrably abstruse level of information technology. Leave him alone and let him do his thing. What thing? Maude wants to know. He doesn’t have a thing. Three and a half days a week? How is he living? I’ve kept quiet about the Sheer Pleasure sideline, naturally, and the bar. My mum and dad would equate Millicent Nash with the loss of my soul and my sisters would equate Neon Hallelujah with financial ruin. I’m doing something, I keep telling them. I’m writing The Book. It sounds unconvincing even to me.
I drink another glass in four gulps and pick up the letter from Sheer Pleasure.
Louisa Wexford
Sheer Pleasure
Dyer & Haskell
48 Margolis Street
London W1 6AG
September 26th 2004
Dear Owen
A bit worried that you haven’t returned my calls since the new Millicent Nash’s delivery date passed a week ago. Could you get in touch ASAP? Just to reassure me that something hasn’t happened to you?
All best,
Louisa
Adrenalin buzzes through the booze. I pick up the cordless and dial Louisa’s direct line. After the first ring I have to fight the impulse to hang up. What if she’s there? Can’t be; it’s S
unday night. It rings again. Butterflies. Two more times. Then, plum-mily, Hi, you’ve reached Louisa Wexford at Dyer & Haskell. I can’t take your call just now, but if you leave your name and number I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks.
‘Louisa, hi, it’s Owen. Monroe. Got your letter. Listen, sorry I’ve been so crap getting back. I know you must think there’s some dire problem but actually it’s just been a bit hectic because there’s been a shake-up at work. I’m not quite finished with the manuscript but I’m probably just being a wuss. I’ll email it in the next day or two. Hope that’s okay? Okay. Speak to you soon. Bye.’
I put the phone down.
Vince gets in after midnight, by which time I’ve finished the Wolf Blass and opened a bottle of Ernest & Julio Gallo’s Turning Leaf cabernet sauvignon. I join him in the kitchen.
‘So?’ I ask, eyebrows raised.
He gives me the look.
‘Oh God. How old?’
‘Late thirties. South American, at a guess. Hard to say. It was dark. As indeed was his formidable chorizo.’
‘You’re going to get your genitals knifed one of these days.’
‘I daresay, but not by a spic faggot. Can I have a glass of that?’
‘If you’ve washed your hands.’
I pour, we clink, with our habitual silent grim shudder in honour of loveless existence. Swallow. He looks tired underneath the rain-cooled post-coital blush.
‘How were Mater and Pater?’ he asks.
‘Fantastical. My dad went out with two left shoes on the other day.’
He sips, closes his eyes, smiles, relishes.
‘Spent the whole morning with a vague feeling of something being wrong. It was only when he sat down in the bus shelter–with his string bag, his bananas, his Fruit and Nut–that he noticed. They weren’t even the same colour.’
Vince lets one ripe berry of a laugh out.
‘I read this line in Updike the other day,’ I say.
Smile-residue morphs into preparatory wince.
‘“We move forward into darkness, and darkness closes behind us.”’
He closes his eyes again. Vince and I are in a state such that anything, no matter how glancing or tawdry its representation of or allusion to death or love or loss, has the power to reduce us to tears. Soap operas, TV commercials, birthday cards, home-makeover shows. Self-pity and latent sadism. The Nazis, he keeps telling me, were incurably sentimental, filling up over their fat-faced, leder-hosen’d, beaming blond thug-infants after a hard day’s work at the crematoria. None the less my voice wobbles over that second ‘darkness’. Vince, swallowing, keeps his mouth clamped tight.
‘Well, thanks very much,’ he says. ‘Now. A huge spliff, don’t you think?’
Vince has missed, narrowly, he claims, whatever opportunity there might have been in the past for his life hitting its stride. He got a two-one in history from Bristol and never did anything with it. My cog never bit, he says, with the over-articulated lip movements of a Lancashire granny confiding a sexual secret. Now, at thirty-five, he’s in marketing for an academic publisher, on insufficient money to get out of the rental circle of Hell.
‘I’ve got to go to bed.’
It’s two thirty in the morning. Vince and I are each occupying one of the lounge’s two aubergine couches. They’re arranged at right-angles to each other, with a large, intricately patterned kilim rug of maroon and gold covering half the stripped wood floor between them. Opposite me the two alcoves are floor-to-ceiling books I never open any more, since they don’t help with death, with ending. Two faux Moroccan table lamps with bases of what looks like beaten pewter, one on top of the telly, one on a side table, creamily low-light the room. It’s clean, warm, faintly jasmine-incense-scented, comfortable. Meticulously tidied. Game’s up, Vince has said, you’re being outed by your own flat. We’ve watched our recorded backlog of shows. Friends, Frasier, Sex and the City. American television. The great guilty pleasure of escape to a world where everything comes right in the end. However, my adulthood can be switched off only so long: I’m teaching at ten. Yeats. ‘The Second Coming’.
‘Wait,’ Vince says. ‘Have you logged on today?’
‘No.’
‘Hang on.’
He pulls a crumpled scrap of paper from his pocket and unfolds it. ‘“Iraq captors kill American hostage”,’ he reads. ‘“Fear grows for Briton after second hostage beheaded. Plus: Kylie’s prim new look.”’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Go and check if you like.’
Every morning on AOL’s welcome page the News window contains two headlines. A while back Vince and I started collecting the most provocative pairings. We began in the Byronic and if I laugh/’tis that I may not weep manner. Sometimes we still do laugh. Mainly, though, we find ourselves without anything to say, dumbly annoyed not by the inane equalizations but by our still bothering to notice. Neither Vince nor I has ever cared, nor do we care now, about the world, though we go through phases of thinking we do. There’s one of these phases in the offing, I suspect. Recently Vince bought a book by Noam Chomsky called Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. I know he hasn’t started it yet because when he does it’ll be left around the house, tented to mark his page. I don’t want him to start it because I don’t want to start it.
‘Guess which one I double-clicked?’ he calls, when I get to the door.
Mummy-shuffling down the hall to my room, I ruminate on the likelihood of Kylie enjoying sex. It seems remote. She’s acquired that bright deadness. Can someone who refers to herself in the third person ever be alone? Can someone who is never alone have an imagination? Can someone without an imagination enjoy sex?
This is your mind, I think, aware also of a slight catarrhal wheeze; this is your life.
The video footage of Ken Bigley shows him dressed in an approximation of Guántanamo orange. These are my times. This year is turning out to be quite a year. The most powerful nation on the planet is breaking international law. By degrees the planet is assimilating the new situation (which is the old situation, the necessary situation), that the most powerful nation on the planet is international law. The best lack all conviction. I’m not thinking of America, I’m thinking of myself–then immediately remember that I long ago realized that I wasn’t and never would be one of the best. Not taking responsibility for the world means you forfeit your right to complain when the world breaks into your home and rapes your wife and murders your children or imprisons you without charge. Very well. I will not complain. In the meantime leave me alone. No one’s on the Anglo-Indians’ side, I’ve told Vince, because there aren’t enough of us to constitute a side. You need a fucking ethnographic microscope to see us.
These are my stoned circles and drifts, not infrequently–as now–without warning interrupted by paralysing intimations of mortality. Getting into bed (after writing a Post-it and sticking it to my satchel: ‘Ring Dolmen Publishing re: Skinner’) I’m suddenly caught and held by a physical sensation of the certainty of my own death. I feel the centre of myself opening and closing like a huge fish mouth. Either in reality or in my imagination I clutch at my chest. A vast bent wall or tidal wave of deep space, icy and star-filled, is suddenly there in my room; you’re sucked in and in a last grasping second–you did nothing, nothing and now–know it’s as simple as blowing out a match. Ending. I really will one day really die. The guarantee of the planet’s indifferent continuance after my death throbs around me. The collective spirit or personality of television leers in and says, Oh yes, I’ll still be going on: EastEnders, The Sky at Night, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? This is the horror, the endurance of other things, each ignorant not just of your absence but of your ever having been there in the first place.
The fear passes. It always does. Your death’s like the sun: you can’t look straight at it for longer than a second or two. The looming-up momentarily annihilates everything else (like coming), then (like coming) lets it all back in. I drift. Sleep
. Kylie’s prim new bum. Beheadings on the net. Nowadays. We move forward into darkness, and darkness closes behind us. Tomorrow I must organize The Cheechee Papers. But first dreams. First Scarlet. Tomorrow I must do better. At everything.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Girl and the Gold
(The Cheechee Papers: Lahore, 1942)
The gods and goddesses of romance make their inaugural demands. So do certain matters of fact. The first time he set eyes on my mother my father was, as a matter of fact, on wallet guard duty at a corner table in Ho Fun’s Chinese restaurant, eating egg custards and waiting for his three friends to finish getting laid. The custards were anomalous on an otherwise predictable menu (predictably mistranslated, too: small prawn balls of dumpling dip fry in atrocious chilli) but my father was hooked. He was just finishing his second when my mother walked past the window. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was something. Until that moment, syphilis, courtesy of Agnes’s shock tactics, had been much on his mind.
This was Lahore, 1942, five years before the carve-up that would drop it into bloodily newborn Pakistan’s lap; like all cities, nooked and crannied with vice if you knew where to look. Shahi Mohulla or Hira Mandi (literally if now euphemistically ‘diamond market’) in the north-west corner of the Walled City had housed the courtesans of the Muslim middle classes in the glory days of the Mughals. Time had stripped an ornamented transaction to its essence: courtesans had become whores; what used to be exclusive to middle-class Muslim men had opened to anyone whose conscience and purse could cope. The sons of Islam had had to make way for the uncircumcised in every shade from blue-black to cadaver. Ho Fun’s–archly or serendipitously named and positioned–sat opposite Mrs Naicker’s Place (also known as the Lotus House, also known as the Mission, also known–courtesy of the obscure poetry of debauch–as the Ginger Rogers), brothel of choice for young men down from the air force training base at Walton. These were young men. Ross had only just turned eighteen, and of his three fellows enwhored across the street–Stan Ramsay, Dick Mills and Eugene Drake–only Stan was over twenty-one. But India, thanks to the imperious pronouncement of Viscount Linlithgow three years earlier, was at war with Germany et al., and young Anglo-Indian men, mellifluous, Brylcreemed and natty in Oxford bags and bush-shirts, had enlisted. Some, certainly, out of tortured patriotism, some, as in Ross’s case, because they were in trouble and needed to disappear, but many–Stan, Dick and Eugene, for example–with the same breezy expectation they brought to everything under the admittedly up-and-down parasol of imperial endeavour: that it would be a harmless lark from which they’d emerge unscathed with a hatful of damn good yarns. Hitler, if the photos and newsreels were to be believed, was a dwarfish toilet attendant who couldn’t stop shouting in German.