by Glen Duncan
‘What’s the matter with you, men?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You got hurt in the ring or what?’
‘No.’
‘Thenwhat?’
‘Nothing.’
Eugene’s twinkle faltered. He had a core uncertainty about himself and a fear of the world against which perpetual excitable jollity was the only protection. He gravitated to the strong; seeing one of them troubled was like tasting the raw earth of the grave on his tongue. He turned away to cadge a cigarette off the private sitting next to him.
The truck rattled, jounced them, reminded them they were, underneath the packed flesh and blood, skeletons. Earlier they’d seen out of the open back a group of skinny children gathered at the roadside round a dead bandicoot the size of a small dog. One of the boys was stabbing the corpse with a stick; he’d found a nerve which when pressed made a leg twitch. All the other youngsters stood around, rapt. ‘Bleddy kids,’ someone had said, with lying lightness.
Ross knew how Eugene worked, what he needed, but couldn’t shake his own mood. His muscles were irritated. You did something wrong and your body knew. Honour. This afternoon he’d been tempted to let the Tommy catch him with one of the wild hooks (he’d been caught once–once was enough–in their earlier bout, the glove like a wet medicine ball, a head-sound like the smash of cymbals) for penance. In the ring there were moments like glass spheres into which you could step to consider things. He’d considered losing the fight as an offering to God. Bouncing on the balls of his feet while the other man’s roundhouses hurtled past like planets, he raised his inner eyes to Heaven in query. Not enough, God had said. Robbing a boy. Hitting an innocent man. You know that’s not enough. He had known, of course, and so tattooed the Tommy with stinging jabs until he saw his hands drop, then knocked him out with a perfect right cross. God, as if to underline his point, sent a shot of pain through the bruise from the night before, and Ross felt in his knees and scalp the shame of watching the Pathan go down, while before his eyes the Tommy went down the same way, one with honour, the other without.
Eugene was talking to him again, off the back of laughter in the truck. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘The latest from Cawnpore. There are Quit India women demonstrating there. The British don’t want pictures of policemen walloping women in the streets, so they ran a recruitment drive to hire other women to deal with them–and only the prostitutes applied for the job!’
The other men in the truck laughed again. Eugene held his hand round an imaginary truncheon. ‘Well, they’re used to the feel of a solid lathi in their hand, eh?’ More laughter.
Ross smiled, still with his mind elsewhere. He’d dreamed of the girl last night, but only as an occasional vivid presence (the poppy-print dress, the light skin, the curve of dark hair tucked behind her ear) in a clogged mix. The market, Ram’s greasily swiped face, his own father, drunk, lashing out at the Indian cook with a steel ladle and catching him on the back of the head. Whatever the details, the dream’s flavour had been shame. He’d woken with the usual importunate erection but also with his face hot. Shame. As if someone had stripped you, like in those other dreams where you were naked in a public place. He hadn’t forgotten the thrill of how quietly and calmly and collusively the Englishman had spoken to him, as if they’d known each other for years. Without making it obvious, is anyone watching? Certificate of honour.
‘You need a drink,’ Eugene said, grabbing his shoulder and squeezing, which did in separate innocence ease the muscle’s knot.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Ross said. He could have done without the mention of Quit India. At St Aloysius in the last years Indian boys whose parents could afford it had been admitted as day scholars. Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, it made no difference to the Jesuits, who dragged everyone regardless of colour or creed or the 1935 Government of India Act to mass every morning, made sure they learned the responses, crossed themselves, sang the hymns. I believe in one Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. Only at Holy Communion was the line drawn, a rite from which enthusiastic non-Christian boys had invariably to be turned back, always with a look of scowling injury. Storm’s comin, Stan’s friend had said, horsy gnashers gleefully on display over his cup and saucer. We pull out, you buggers are goin to be up shit creek wi’out a paddle.
‘Come on, men, relax,’ Eugene said. Then in an undertone, ‘We’re going to be rich, remember?’
It was a soft, warm evening. The truck dropped them at the Delhi Gate and they went through into the Old City. In the Kashmiri Bazaar half the main street was in shadow. Rickety multi-balconied buildings went up crookedly on either side like precariously stacked dominoes. Between the roofs a clear blue avenue of sky. (These northern skies were a hard, precious purified blue, nothing of the haze or milk you got further south.) Ross loved the bazaar’s jazz of scents and jabbering crowds, the way in spite of chaos details singled you out for fierce, brief intimacy: an old man in long quality white sucked hollow-cheeked on a hookah in a black doorway, his eyes met yours, asked something vague: Is this life? What have you seen? Will we die? Then because such nakedness was unbearable an argument would explode at a paan stall, or pigeons would rattle overhead, or a waiter would upset a tray to a smatter of applause.
‘It’s hereabouts,’ Eugene said. ‘I’m sure it’s around here.’
Was it unbearable? The way the Englishman looked at him had been as intimate as if they were a pair of homosexuals. In the seconds before the blow the Pathan’s eyes had understood, wearily. These moments of pure contact were unbearable, but they were what life was for, until you were ready to go after God in the desert. Which he was not. The girl all hips and breasts in the poppy dress, the clean right cross, Eugene’s slaked chimp face between whores; the key pieces of his life were already set, sufficient, inadequate.
He and Eugene moved through the crowds, elbows, someone’s mouth of huge teeth, laughing, a legless beggar on a trolley, his face with the predictable look of mild constipation. In shafts of sunlight dust languidly spiralled. The three domes of the Golden Mosque were a soft, fiery presence half a mile to the west. Gold spoke to gold; the ingots in his top pocket murmured above his heart.
‘Got the bugger,’ Eugene said.
The shop, squashed between a bakery and a supplier of wedding saris, was more junk than jewels, stuffed birds, garrulous wind-chimes, grandfather clocks, rugs, a central glass counter with beneath it a mind-boggling morass of watch parts, some with mechanisms still tinily in motion, making Ross think of remote creatures on the sea bed, the extraordinary fact of all the little lives that had nothing to do with us. The jeweller was a bald, corpulent, perfumed and much-moled Malaysian, known to Eugene from the reception room at Mrs Naicker’s. It took him less than half a minute to make his determination.
‘Brass,’ he said. ‘Plain brass.’
They looked at him in silence.
‘Worthless,’ he said, with a full-lipped smile.
Ross felt objection rise up in a wave, then subside. You didn’t discover truth, you recognized it. Brass. Of course. Ross felt the tension stringing his muscles snap and die away, loosening him at last. Brass. He wanted to laugh, would have laughed had the secondary realization not at that moment dawned. The Englishman was in on it. They all were. As he stood there listening to Eugene–‘What do you mean, brass? We paid bleddy cash money for this, men’–he saw the beauty of the operation like a woman’s robe slipping from her to reveal her whole naked body, the lovely necessary structure. The fellow on the doorstep. Sahib, is that yours? The plantain fingers of Gobind Singh. (Hadn’t there been dishonesty in that touch? Hadn’t each fingertip pressed a little lie? Your body told you these things but you ignored it.) Not so simple Ram. And the last rotten perfection: the Englishman. For a terrible mad moment Ross wondered if even the girl…But no. She had nothing to do with it. Except as God’s offer, testimony to free will. Instead of going after her he’d followed the Englishman.
‘
What the Christ are you laughing at?’ Eugene said.
But Ross couldn’t for a moment get himself under control. The Malaysian, used to the queer relief of the duped, smiled also. His skin was big-pored, mocha, overlaid with large purplish patches. Something anciently saurian in the heavy jowls and bagged eyelids with their flecks of mole, a pleased patience with human greed, since it was his livelihood.
‘You have I’m afraid been very nicely counterfeited,’ he said, with a chuckle. ‘I don’t like to ask to the tune of how much.’ He gave them mint tea and dry cakes in exchange for the story. The scent of the beverage cut through the shop’s fug of old incense and camphor.
Eugene, devastated, took up the jeweller’s offer of a loan. ‘You can’t get yourself worked up to the thing and then not go and do it,’ he carped. ‘It’s impossible.’ The night of excess premised on the proceeds of the gold, he meant. The Malaysian’s rates were extortionate but Eugene was enjoying the profligacy of hopelessness. ‘What do I care how many per cent?’ he said. ‘I’m damned if I’m going back tonight like a bleddy monk.’
It was cooler in the bazaar. Ross had no appetite for custards at Ho Fun’s, and so meandered west through the old city, skirting the southern flank of the fort, then up through Hazuri Bagh. People in all shades of brown, bony arms and muscled legs and jabbering mouths. There were all these lives.
The evening faithful were gathering at Badshahi Mosque. Ross liked the building, paprika-red stone against the northern blue sky, those pearly domes. A sensuous pregnancy to the Mughal domes, marble dollops of female flesh, the breasts of houris, Allah jadedly reaching down to fondle.
He crossed the Circular Road and went up into Minto Park, where the smell of the lawns was soothing. A young family, father, mother, two small children and a baby in a pram, strolled along a few yards ahead of him. A breeze ruffled their loose clothes, his kurta, her salwar kameez. Two years ago the Muslim Leaguers had met here and passed the Lahore Resolution; even he, still at school in Jabalpur, hadn’t been able to avoid talk of it. That bleddy pinstripe stick insect, his father had said of Jinnah. You mark my words, that bugger will cause more trouble than Gandhi. Ross had only half listened. All the big chaps went to England, Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru, got educated, came back with the ideas. Democracy.
He could go to England. The thought slowed his steps, the realization he’d been carrying it for a long time, ever since Rockballs had said, Olympics, America, anywhere. Anywhere had reduced to England. ‘At least we can go home,’ Stan’s friend had said. ‘Where the fuck are you lot going to go?’ An image of England had sprung up in his mind at the time, derived he now realized from a colour illustration of the cliffs of Dover in a geography book at St Aloysius. The picture showed a white crenellated coast and a hurrying whitecapped sea. Grey seagulls with legs dangling. A blue fishing boat. Everything about it said cold.
The idea of cold was exciting, rain without the monsoon weight and warmth, something that bent in the wind. Was that his destiny? He slowed his pace further. It was a particular pleasure, not quite to stop walking while the idea thickened. Suddenly it seemed that everything that had happened over the last two days had happened to lead him to this conclusion: he would go to England. Plenty of Anglo-Indians already had, whether Stan’s friend knew it or not. But you needed money. Box. Focus, Monroe, and you can go anywhere. All the sweet pussy you want. Don’t repeat that. The rumour about Rockballs was that he was dying, knew it, carried on as normal, something British about that, carrying on making dry, deadpan jokes. There had been an article in The Anglo-Indian Review: ‘If You’re Going, Go Now’. ‘How long do we think it’s going to be before Britain starts tightening its immigration belt?’ the writer wanted to know. ‘Anglos who can provide documentary proof of British lineage on their fathers’ side are currently applying for and getting British passports. This, in the author’s opinion, cannot last. Let the community beware: our Fatherland’s arms will not remain open for ever, and the arms of our Motherland are more likely to crush than to embrace…’
Ahead of him the young mother had stopped a few paces behind her husband to wait for the lagging toddler. She had a coltish face with liquescent black eyes. All the thick, dark hair tied loosely back with a few wavy locks lifted in the breeze. A low shaft of evening sunlight passed through the billowing yellow chiffon dupatta. The child, with nappied bow-legged steps of immense concentration, caught up, took her outstretched hand. She said something to him, melodiously intoned in Urdu, then turned and rejoined her husband.
Ross walked on, very slowly, in the dawdling family’s wake. The laughter had settled his muscles and joints into peaceful omnipotence. It was all there, the limitless potential. He could do anything, leap off the ground into flight.
But a counter-thought was there, too: that God was above, gently stirring the world, that you were free to do anything except escape your destiny, that the story of your life would find you, that you would see it all in the end before death rolled out behind you like an extraordinary tapestry. This, secretly, was his grudging faith.
He would wait and see. And box.
CHAPTER SEVEN
personals
(London, 2004)
Depressing fucked-up ex-Catholic Anglo-Indian M, short, politically ignorant, ethically failed, part-time pornographer, still carrying torch for Scarlet, seeks soulful anal-friendly ex-Catholic Anglo-Indian F, or in other words Scarlet. Send photo.
According to Martin Amis suicide notes are like poems in that all of us flirt with writing one sooner or later. Ditto I say the personal ad. The one above didn’t appear in the Guardian. One full of lies did.
‘I don’t think he knows how to look at me, because his wife’s my friend and now he’s my boss. I don’t mean look at me in that way, obviously—’
‘Maybe not but it sounds interesting. Does he look at you in that way?’
Though it’s not sufficiently warm–an autumn breeze stiff enough to gooseflesh her bare shoulders and make the cloth napkins flap–we’re at an outdoor table at Tiggi’s in Clerkenwell (her choice, as was meeting for breakfast, which she presumably considers less a declaration of desperate availability than lunch or dinner) and this is my umpteenth attempt at sexing-up the conversation. I’ve decided, by my second coffee, that I will, given the opportunity, sleep with her, which really says nothing because I’ll sleep with practically any woman these days. I don’t need much in the way of looks and I don’t need personality at all. Wondering if doing it they’ll look the way I’ve imagined them looking is more than enough motivation. This woman, Stacy, has thick, wavy, hippyish dark hair, green eyes slightly too close together and a nose that has made me think, not disastrously, of a baby courgette.
‘Hmm,’ she says, lips pursed, pantomiming traditional female weariness with men who must get everything round to sex, ‘airnee-way…It’s a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.’
I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. I haven’t had for most of the meal, except that all of it’s been about her. Once or twice she’s caught herself, remembered me, asked me something about myself with such manifest absence of interest it’s been hard for me to keep a straight face (and in any case I’ve lied, since the objective is to get her into bed and keep having sex with her as long as I can or want to, in which case the truth is of no service), but these have been glitches in an otherwise flawless ninety-minute demonstration of self-obsession.
On the Tube to work (at the end of breakfast I said, ‘Shall I call you?’ and she little-girlishly smiled and wrinkled up her baby courgette nose and shook her head: no. It was supposed to look impish and lovable in spite of being no, but in fact I could probably have shot her in the face) I take out the letter that arrived this morning from Nelson Edwards’s daughter.
Dear Mr Monroe
Thank you for your letter of the 15th, which I’m answering on my father’s behalf. I’m afraid, however, that he isn’t well enough to be of help. Good luck with your res
earch.
Regards,
Janet Marsh
Dolmen dropped fiction years ago and now specializes in cookery, computing, DIY and arts & crafts. After fifteen minutes being transferred around the organization’s departments I got a redundantly intelligent, bored, entry-level assistant who was happy to go off on a quest through Paper Records, a joke zone in the bowels of the building, soon to be converted into a directors’ gym. No no, she said, honestly, this is rain in the desert. Tell me more. By the end of the afternoon, having fallen telephonically in love with her, I asked her out for a drink. She said she didn’t think her boyfriend would appreciate it. (Everyone’s taken, Vince says. You look around and there seem to be millions. But every one of those fuckers is taken.) The best she could offer was to forward my enquiry. Moral Exotica: Race in Pulp Fiction, 1945–2000. Hmm, she said. Yeah I know, I said, thrilling. But what do you want? I’m an academic. I’ve got to publish. You don’t have to tell me, she said, my ex wrote his PhD thesis on tantric positions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Are you sure your boyfriend wouldn’t appreciate me taking you out? It was hard for me; she had a flirtatious RP voice which conceded with every phoneme that her current boyfriend was temporary, annoying, wrong. Email me the letter, she said. I’ll print it out and pass it on. Won’t even charge you for the stamp.
The reply’s on business paper. IMS (Information Management Services), Rathbone Street, which if memory serves is somewhere up between Goodge Street and the electronics emporia of Tottenham Court Road. Janet Marsh, Director. Phone, fax and email options. Marsh. So if it is Skinner a.k.a. Edwards, his daughter’s married. But directing a company. Divorced seems more likely, or more appealing. All this while the Tube rocks and screeches (as it did presumably in Japan in the seconds before the sarin nerve gas attack; you can’t dwell) and Tiggi’s continental breakfast of buttery croissants and silty coffee sits not entirely comfortably in my gut. I’m excited, far more by the letter than I was by breakfast. That courgette-nosed woman’s small, inaccessible promise. (The days of women’s infinite promise are over. Now their promise is of an exhaustible, finite kind. I meet a woman and think: in about three nights/six weeks/eight months/two years I’ll have had what there is to be had. Which is of course better than not having it. The upside of a life as dull as mine is that something as little as this letter is a thrill. Obviously I’ll phone her. Janet Marsh, I mean. Two hundred miles north in Bolton, Pasha knows nothing of this latest development. Which is pleasurable, undeniably, perhaps in the way that holding in its shit is pleasurable to a child, if Freud’s right about shit being money or money being shit or whichever way round it is. I imagine the old man’s face when I tell him: Listen, Dad, I’ve tracked down the daughter. Compared to the fools’ gold we’ve had in the past this is a whopping genuine nugget. Information Management Services, I’ll tell him. What the bleddy hell is that? Never mind. She says Skinner’s a sick man. He’ll lean back in his winged chair, fold his hands over his paunch. Oh-ho, he’ll say, with raised eyebrows. Oh-ho, eh?