by Glen Duncan
‘Miss, Thursday night, after midnight, I will be there. When you come we’ll go by the back way to the river and my friends will take us.’
‘Yes,’ Kate said. Given no more than cursory glances from the house’s inhabitants, she’d been led by Kalia into a small side room, the curtained door of which opened on to an acre of shantied scrub. ‘But why would they do that? Your friends–for me, I mean?’
‘They are coming for me. We’re going to do something, some work in Nagpur. In Nagpur there is a place you can stay safely…’ he hesitated. ‘For some time, anyway. I’ve arranged it. I do good work, you see, so have some pull. I never forget you.’ They’d been speaking Hindi but the last two sentences he uttered in English.
Something went into the skillet next door with a sizzle. Onions. Her eyes prickled. She hadn’t liked the way he’d said that, pull, the hint of puffing up. She’d never asked what work, but thought now she knew. She remembered a burned-out military vehicle in the street near Eleanor’s in Lahore. Other overheard snippets and glimpsed headlines, her uncle arguing with Mr Knight next door, They’re saying anarchists, anarchists, but if you ask me Congress is paying these bastards. It’s all bleddy mochis and sweepers, who else?
‘Miss, you should let me do it,’ Kalia said.
‘No. It’s not for you.’
‘But—’
‘It’s between me and God.’
Sister Anne used to say: He tests most severely those He loves most. He knows you. He’ll never give you more than you can bear.
‘If I don’t come,’ she told Kalia, ‘it means I’ve changed my mind, okay?’
‘But what if something’s happened?’
‘Like what?’
‘Something happened to you, miss.’
‘It won’t have. If I’m not there it’ll just mean I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Are you waiting, miss, for your God to help you?’
She looked past him to where a slight breeze lifted the door’s curtain. The light was fading. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘They’ll be lighting the lamps soon.’
Tuesday went slowly. No rain, and a conviction from sky to earth that there would be no more. The town’s collective mind understood, stopped expecting it, went about its business having made, elusively, as if some spell had been cast during the night, the seasonal shift. Her grandfather ate very little at dinner, hobbled off to the veranda straight afterwards. His heart wasn’t in anything, these days. The stroke had left him with a paralysed left arm and a weak left leg, also a droop to the left side of his mouth that slurred his speech. He walked with a stick, needed help with buttons, shoelaces, braces, neckties. His food had to be cut up for him. He’d been diagnosed with angina and, off-stage, to Cyril and Sellie by Doctor Bannergee, as showng the first signs of Parkinson’s disease. All that was not of the body was going bad, too, the mind, the soul, the conscience. He drank more, stewed, muttered, was sometimes found weeping, in the end for himself, Kate knew, though there were half a dozen litanies, mainly I can’t believe after all these years, after all we’ve done that we’re just going to pull out like leaving a bloody camp. ‘We’ were the British. It separated him from her further. He never talked to her about the earthquake, their miraculous survival, ruddy destiny. All they’d shared in the past now gathered and turned as if with a spotlight on the one thing they shared in the present. Cyril. Him. Her.
‘What are you looking at?’ Cyril said.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing. Don’t try’n get smart with me.’
She didn’t respond, began collecting the plates. In the kitchen he came behind her and put his left hand in a tight grip round the back of her neck, pressed himself against her. The cuts from the belt beating hurt. She closed her eyes, forced him to feel her inertia, the deadness past even revulsion.
Nothing. Him silently raging. Time stopped when this happened, asserted the impossibility of anything else happening, ever.
Then, in a complete inversion of reality he kissed the back of her head, as with brisk affection, and pushed himself with a final neck-squeeze away from her. ‘Right,’ he said, slapping his hands together and rubbing them as with eagerness for a challenge. ‘Time to go and skin those poor buggers.’ Billiards. Tuesday night, the Railway Institute. He’d be back late. Three times recently she’d woken in the night and found him standing in her room. Hadn’t known whether he knew she was awake. The light was always behind him, left him in silhouette. She’d frozen, closed her eyes, heard the breathing, some compressed movement. Eventually his steps moving away, the door closing.
She stood still, holding and leaning on the stack of plates, letting her body return by degrees. She washed up, filled the goglets for the night, put the crockery and cutlery away, and went to her room. The waiting was almost over. Now only the murmuring forces lulled her, a rushing stream to the sound of which she was falling asleep. God’s dark-starred face flirted, incessantly. She kept feeling it above her head, kept looking up, catching every time the last shimmer of its dissolution. It was hard to think. Thinking required separation from your experience. But her experience had lost the barriers that made it hers; it bled out, fused and mingled with everything around her. Resisting–several times she tried to haul herself out of the dream–depleted and soon exhausted her. She tried getting thoughts started: If he…I don’t…mercy means even the Devil…but each one frayed into nothingness. She felt immensely heavy in her limbs. The weight was God’s moment by moment increasing interest in her, in what she was going to do.
She got down on her knees to drag the wrapped machete out from under her wardrobe, but found she couldn’t, couldn’t look at it even, and instead lowered herself and lay on her side on the floor. The stone was cold through her nightdress, a brutal bliss, the way an angel might…But again the thought frayed.
Eventually the cold hurt. She got up, turned out the lamp and got into bed. For a while she lay in the dark with her eyes open. Heavy enough, she thought, to crash through the bed, the floor, the ground. She’d go through and watch walls of raw earth racing upwards past her. Hell? Some core of heat miles below her, the faintest edge of which she was already beginning to feel. Well, if she was going to Hell she’d go.
She fell asleep and dreamed. She was on a train and it was night. Not a passenger carriage but the guard’s brake van, no sign of the guard. The door was wide open to the rolling night. A sky of stars stretched down to a line of distant hills. Between the hills and the train a vast empty plain. Suddenly she felt a pain in her side, then lower, in her womb. She lifted her dress to look and there, sprouting from her thigh in a little gobbet of blood, was a small unopened green bud. She pulled it and it came away with a twinge, as if some tiny root had been plucked. She cupped her hands over it, feeling panic starting to rise. As soon as she closed her hands over it it started to get heavier. The dream shifted. She was in the passenger compartments, searching for her mother and father. People kept telling her they’d just seen them, there, but when she looked where they were pointing, no one. Then suddenly there was her mother, coming towards her, squeezing past people, smiling. She said, Oh, God, Mummy look what I’ve done, but her mother just smiled and said, What? what’s wrong? it’s beautiful. She looked down to where it felt like her hands were still cupped around the little bud only to find that they weren’t, and that instead she was holding, uncomfortably, as if it was a sodden cat, a naked, heavy, calm-faced baby.
The dream hung over, added its weight to the leaden unreality into which she woke. At Jesus and Mary once they’d sat her in a chair and blindfolded her. Eleanor, Vera, half a dozen others. Told her that first they were going to make her very heavy, then very light, so light in fact that she would float up to the ceiling. One by one they’d put their hands on her head, increasing the pressure until it was almost beyond bearing, then one by one had removed them. The sensation of lightness had been unnatural. It was if the top of her head was pulling her upwards. Her chair had wobbled, left the g
round, she’d felt herself rising. Her head had bumped the ceiling. Afterwards they’d shown her how it was done. The chair was lifted an inch off the ground by four girls. The ‘ceiling’ was a big dictionary brought down to touch her head.
This, cycling to Sellie’s, was that heaviness, God in tiny increments adding the weight of His interest like their one-by-one hands. She wondered how long she’d be able to keep moving under it.
‘Oh God, Kit, thank heavens!’ Sellie said, rushing up the front path. Her thin face was shiny with sweat. ‘Quick! Quick, go and get a ghari!’
‘What’s wrong, Aunty?’
‘Robbie’s fallen and I think he’s broken his arm. Go on, child, for God’s sake. Hurry!’
It took a while. The nearest ghari stand was a mile and a half away at the market. Robbie getting into it was a miserable sight. He’d screamed at first, Sellie said, then gone very quiet, holding the broken arm. It was as if he and accident had throughout his life been playing a violent thrilling game and accident had suddenly changed the rules. Kate felt sorry for him.
‘What were you doing up on the roof, silly?’ she asked him. He sat next to her, violated. Sellie had stayed back: No no, Kit, you go. I can’t stand the smell of a hospital, honestly I’ll be sick. He wants you to go, anyway, don’t you Robbie? Robbie had nodded, sadly, and it had occurred to Kate for the first time that the boy loved her.
‘Looking for those things,’ he said.
‘What things?’
‘Those green things.’
She didn’t push it. Robbie lived in his own world.
This was better, the morning air a gentle ravishment of her bare arms, shins, throat, face. The day was making the first of its shifts of light, from the dusky peach (which tinted beggars still rolled in their rags like giant bidis, a dog sleepily nosing a drain, someone’s bearer leaning against a porch post, smoking) to bleaching white. Doors were opening, breakfast smells drifting out. A doodh-wallah led two milk buffalo with bony hocks and tunk-tunking bells door to door. Kate, in the pink cardie and the sundress of tiny pale-yellow check she’d made herself, leaned back in her seat with her arm round Robbie’s shoulder. The weight was still on her, God’s hands pressing down on her head. You’re getting heavier, Eleanor and Vera had said, mimicking hypnotists, heavier, heavier…but this was better. And God was a hiss underneath every other sound, and God was an eye that watched her through every detail of the burgeoning morning. Tomorrow, she would be eighteen years old.
While Kate was preparing herself for murder, Ross was preparing himself for bribery and corruption at the doctor’s office.
‘Monroe sahib?’ the doctor’s peon said. Ross, next in the waiting room’s small crowd, got to his feet. Don’t forget the peon, Eugene had warned him. The peon is important. Few pice or a cup of char. Don’t forget.
‘Monroe sahib?’ the peon repeated.
Ross coughed, looked down, slipped him two coins and entered the doctor’s office.
Dr Narayan, whose plump moustache and long eyelashes would have made him handsome if not for the womanly curvature of his face (which combination made him instead a sort of erotic curio, disturbing to both men and women), sat stethoscoped in a short-sleeved white shirt and khaki trousers behind his desk, writing in what looked suspiciously like an accounts ledger. The office smelled of camphor and disinfectant. One wall displayed a large year planner with as far as Ross could see nothing planned; next to it a life-sized illustration of a human male, the left half of the body stripped to reveal circulatory system and vital organs, the right half to show musculature. Light from the one window backing the desk glistened on the doctor’s oiled and side-parted hair. In spite of Eugene’s reassurances Ross was nervous. The peon gestured to the chair. He sat. The doctor continued writing for a few moments (as doctors must, to show your negligibility in comparison to other cases, to remind you their time is precious nectar of which you’re fortunate to be getting a drop) then looked up with a smile. ‘Well then, Mr Monroe, what seems to be the trouble?’
By the time of his demobbed homecoming Ross knew he was going to the Olympics. He’d fought and beaten all the bantamweights in the IAF and half their RAF contemporaries. A Times of India journalist told him to stop wasting his time fighting Tommies. ‘If you want to go to the Olympics,’ he told Ross, ‘fight for India. You’ve already beaten the competition. You want to box for Britain, you’ll have to get bloody papers and citizenship and certified proof of your great-great-granddad’s lilywhite prick. Plus you might get a kicking from some Tommy between now and ’forty-eight. Box for India. It’s your ticket out of here, I’m telling you. And then you tell the promoters there that you want to stay and go pro, they’ll sign you up like a shot.’ Ross had listened. The trials were two years away. In the meantime all he had to do was keep his hand in and stay alive, which meant a job. Which in Bhusawal meant the railway. He’d moved back into the family house in Bazaar Road and his father had got him started as a goods fireman.
Keeping his hand in and keeping a job were, it turned out, one and the same; within three days of his starting on the goods locos both football and boxing managers had sought him out. Word of his talent had been spread not only by the sporting press but closer to home by Eugene and Ross’s older brother Hector (now a passenger guard working the BB&CIR line out of Bombay), who until transferring had captained the GIPR football squad for the last three years. (Bombay’s Hector-gravity was a married woman, Mrs Bernice Gallagher, with whom he was having a self-destructive affair. She was a slender, light-skinned, highly strung Bhusawal girl Hector had gone with, chastely, on and off, but who during one of the offs had suddenly married an English hotel owner she’d met on a day trip to the Ajanta caves. The Englishman had whisked her off to be queen of the Albion in the city. When I was friendly with her before, Hector had confessed to Ross one night, drunk, it was all shut-up-shop down there, you know? A kiss and a cuddle but nothing…And now? Hector had shaken his head. Jesus Christ. You don’t know how it is, brother. It’s the same for her too. Then his face changed. He made the finger and thumb rubbing gesture meaning money. But she wants the bleddy royal life, doesn’t she, eh? Three bags full, memsahib. Oh Christ, you don’t know what this is doing to me. Ross did know, or at any rate had never seen his brother looking worse or drinking more.)
Football was under the eye of Reggie Hodge, foreman of the engineering workshops in Parel, boxing of Clem McCreedy, or ‘Old Clem’, a retired assistant yard foreman and former Inter-Railway Lightweight Champion. ‘Now look here, Monroe,’ Old Clem said, wagging his finger. ‘We’ve heard great things about you so I expect you to bleddy deliver.’ He was a small, round-shouldered man with a brown, mottled cannon ball of a head set off by a snowy moustache. He had no eyebrows at all; punched off, he said, over twenty years in the ring. ‘And I don’t want to hear any cribbing from you about anything, because you’re going to be living the life of bleddy Riley, okay?’
The only problem, as far as Ross could see, was the railway’s attitude to training, namely, that they didn’t bother doing any. He was used to the air force’s no-nonsense regimen: up at 6.00 a.m. for a fourteen-mile run punctuated on the half-hour with push-ups, squat-thrusts and sit-ups. Back to base for breakfast, followed by two hours of co-ordination exercises in the gym. Lunch, then a long rest through the afternoon (tournament boxers had been excused all duties during training: yes there was a war on, yes there were parts to be inventoried, yes there was fuel to be kept flowing, but primarily, primarily, there were fights and football matches to be won) until the evening session at 4.00 p.m.: three rounds of sparring, three rounds of skipping, three rounds of shadow-boxing and three rounds on the heavy bag. Then you were done for the day, limbs humming with the peace of exhaustion, masculinity reverberating like a well-struck bell. The evening’s first drink was a sensuous seduction. But without someone to bark you into shape, Ross knew, you were on your own. Was he up to maintaining, as Rockballs would have put it, his focus?
&nbs
p; ‘And you’re double lucky,’ Eugene told him. ‘You’ll be picked for boxing and football.’ Eugene (innocently enhancing the appositeness of his Quickprick and Sprintfinish nicknames) was a speedy right winger, and had been playing for the GIPR First Eleven since he arrived in Bhusawal three years ago. The night of the common brass diagnosis he’d gorged himself at Mrs Naicker’s, got a dose of clap and, in a panic (he’d joined up under age to escape a violent father and was irrationally terrified that in getting himself treated the truth about his age would come out), decided to desert. Ross, when he’d seen there was no talking Eugene out of it, had agreed to help get him over the barracks wall after dark–but only on condition that Eugene went straight to Bhusawal and presented himself to Agnes for treatment. Sister, Ross’s note said, This is a good fellow and a close friend who’s got himself into difficulty. Please do what you can for him. Agnes had got Eugene treated, but not before giving him the roasting of his life. Eugene had survived, however, and become a friend of the Monroe family. Ross’s father got him fake medical discharge papers (more bribery and corruption) and a job on the GIPR. By the time Ross came home in the summer of ’45, Eugene was a goods driver and Bhusawal was home. (But his Troubles with Women had continued. The great tribulation was an affair with the allegedly ‘professional’ Cynthia Merritt. If she took money from other buggers, I can tell you she didn’t take any bleddy money from me, he’d told Ross. Ross was inclined to believe him. If he had paid for it Eugene wasn’t the fellow to deny it. Cynthia, whom Ross remembered as a small but long-legged woman with a wheaty complexion, extraordinarily large dark eyes and a quiet sexual confidence that surprised and drew you, had, after a row with Eugene, packed up and gone back to her mother’s in Jalgaon a year ago. Eugene, uncharacteristically reluctant to make a yarn of it, left Ross to read between minimal lines. Cynthia had loved Eugene. At first Ross thought Eugene hadn’t loved her. Then the more depressing reading: Eugene loved her but couldn’t, thanks to masculine hypocrisy, get past her reputation. The affair had sewn a thread of self-loathing in him, and to punish himself he’d started courting the large-breasted but perennially furious Mitzi Donnegan. A year had passed. Eugene and Mitzi were getting married.)