by Glen Duncan
‘Well, Doctor, I’m not feeling too good, you know?’ Ross said. The wedding was on Saturday and Eugene was demanding two days and nights debauchery to say farewell to his bachelorhood for ever. Ross, his best man, was required. Which meant getting Thursday and Friday off.
‘Yes?’ Doctor Narayan said.
‘I had vomiting and diarrhoea last night, and I feel a bit shaky today.’ Don’t be too specific, Eugene had said. Keep it general. That’s the understanding. Generality.
Dr Narayan raised his eyebrows but simultaneously lowered his heavy upper eyelids. It looked like a sexual display of the showgirl eyelashes. Alternatively a sign of medical cogitation. ‘I see,’ he said.
‘It’s hard to say, specifically,’ Ross said.
‘Just feeling a bit weak in the guts, generally, yes?’
‘Yes, generally.’
‘Stand up, please. I’ll have a listen to your chest.’
The doctor rose and motioned for Ross to step to one end of the desk. Set in the end of the desk (for a bizarre moment Ross found himself wondering whether such a thing was customized or made like that) was a small drawer, which while listening to Ross’s chest the doctor smoothly opened with his left hand. The hand had the same womanly plumpness as the face.
The peon coughed, and, when Ross looked at him, indicated with a slight nod. Ross dropped two rupees into the open drawer.
‘I think a couple of days rest should see you right,’ Dr Narayan said sleepily, removing the stethoscope from his ears and returning to his chair. ‘Get plenty of fluids and keep your room well ventilated. Please, have a seat while I write you a note.’
Ross relaxed. This was India, money warmly slipped from hand to hand, an impersonal friendship or subscription to a universal religion embracing everyone from princes to peons. Lousy way for a place to run–collapses and breakdowns inevitable–but he wasn’t going to worry. Two years’ cushy living, Inter-Railway champion, Olympic trials, London, promoter, sign up, you’re off. Retire at thirty-five and have all the sweet pussy you want. Don’t repeat that.
Which brought up–increasingly there was no getting away from it–sex. Women. His virginity. He was the only one not having woman trouble because he was the only one not having women. He’d lied to Eugene, elaborated two stories, one of a nurse in Secunderabad during the six months’ flight mechanic’s training after basic at Walton, the other of a stenographer in Allahabad (where he’d been subsequently posted) at a New Year’s office party he and a friend had in uniform gatecrashed. In reality there had been with both these (Anglo) girls what Eugene would describe (with up-and-down eyebrows and chimp grin) as slap-and-tickle. With the stenographer, hurriedly, using hands only, a denouement. A denouement for Ross, at least. She’d said, No, no, pack it in, when he tried to reciprocate. I’m too drunk to feel anything, anyway. It had astonished him that she’d said this, that she knew herself well enough to be able to judge, that she had experience to draw on. It had made her so dirtily alluring he’d persisted, until her gin-flavoured laughter had dried up and she’d said, Look for Christ’s sake it’s not going to work. Come on, let’s get a drink. She’d agreed to meet him the next day but never turned up. He was so convinced something must have happened to her he went back the following evening to the office building and watched from a newsstand opposite. Out she came at five o’cock, laughing with a female colleague, the two of them with linked arms hurrying off before he could think of what to say.
This had relaxed him, too, that there were such women in the world, but at the same time depressed him because he knew he wanted something more, something fierce and private, a contract against loneliness, against, if he thought about it, death. He wanted, he supposed–the word was a shock to him when he arrived at it–love. The way the stenographer had been was exciting in flared-up moments but underneath the sensual pleasure there had been a cold horror of mutual privacy, as if no matter how hard they looked at each other (and most of the time they hadn’t been able to; she’d put her head back in what even then had seemed to him a pretence of enjoyment, so much so that when he thought of it now he imagined her looking at a clock over his shoulder) they would remain separate and unknown. There was only the superficial allegiance, the bodies. If he’d died the next day he’d still be dying sexually alone, having made no real connection with a woman. It made him think of the fights. There were moments in the ring when you and the other man enjoyed a profound mutual visibility and understanding. You made a connection so powerful that neither of you would go to his grave having never seen into and been seen into by another human being. Like that, but with a woman, the other combat that was really an allegiance. That was what he wanted.
‘You don’t understand,’ Hector had said to him, again liquored up (he’d lost weight, Ross noticed; there was a boyish poignancy about his neck and ears and wrists), ‘at that moment…At that moment…’ Hector had closed his eyes and made a face of something like disgust, as if withstanding torture which beyond the pain filled him with ethical loathing for the torturer…‘I’d sacrifice everything, everything. When we’re together like that and she looks at me…’ He’d checked again, a few degrees shy of the drunkenness that burned the last boundaries; checked, shook his head, looked away. He hadn’t needed to finish. Ross had heard it before: when she looks at me like that, in that moment, I’d sacrifice anyone or anything to keep her. Nothing else matters. Whenever this realization had come to Hector it left him in denuded shock, shown him an entirely new version not just of himself but of the world. This was the having false gods before God, why God had bothered making it a commandment in the first place. They’d all grown up imagining the Golden Calf, but it was this, discovering that the price of your soul was the freedom to fuck this woman, to keep fucking her, for ever. Aside from the shock of seeing his brother so much reduced, it showed Ross Bernice in a new light. He’d remembered her as a twitchy girl with a slightly annoyed horsy face and a piercing nasal voice. Now he had no choice but to visualize her under his brother (or was it himself?), equine nostrils flared, legs welcomingly spread, conjuring a look that made you willing to sacrifice everything, everything…The affair was a terrible silent fracture in the Bazaar Road household, his father, Ross suspected, jealous of the intensity, his mother jealous simply of Bernice, who had, in the apocalyptic idiom, taken and murdered her son’s soul. It was anathema to her that her sons must leave home and find women at all, tolerable only if they found women they could learn to despise; then they would seek and receive her allegiance in the despising. (It had been a bad year for his mother, Ross knew. Hector’s desertion; trouble with her hip; Rose marrying a goodfornothing; Agnes turning down the visiting eye specialist from Jabalpur. All this on top of his cock-and-bull story about the ‘robbery’–Mumma there were three of these buggers and I don’t know where this first chap was hiding but when I woke up they’d taken my watch and money as well–of Raymond Varney’s bloodstone ring, which she hadn’t quite, he thought, believed…)
Mulling over all this, with his bought and paid-for sick note in his pocket, he stepped out into the hospital corridor not looking where he was going. Something bumped into his legs. He looked down to see a small boy with his arm in a sling turning and looking up at him. The boy hadn’t been looking where he was going, either.
‘Hups,’ Ross said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Are you all right?’ the nurse asked Kate, reaching out to steady her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just a bit dizzy. No breakfast.’
‘Sit down here for a minute. Doctor, you should have a look at this young lady, I think.’
The doctor, third in rank after Bannergee and Narayan, was a young Muslim with a gentle voice and a soft beard that fringed his face from ear to ear. Would be better with the moustache, Kate thought, but lots of the Muslim men went for the beard only. Made them look like flowers, the face the heart and the beard where the petals would be. She’d forgotten his name already. ‘Oh no, I’m all right,�
� she said, being guided down on to the wooden chair next to the trolley on which Robbie, arm plastered, was perched, having his sling fastened. ‘Just a bit tired.’ Have a look meant examination. She didn’t want that. And in any case the problem was the weight pressing down on her head. It was absurd, but since she’d remembered the game at Jesus and Mary, Eleanor and the girls with their levitation trick laying their hands on her skull and recognized the feeling, the gradually increasing weight of God’s watching her, she’d been unable to think about or feel anything else.
‘Let’s have a look,’ Dr Azad said, getting down on his haunches and peering into her face. The nurse, a Tamil in her early twenties with a tiny pointed face and the large black eyes of a doe, lifted Kate’s wrist to take her pulse.
‘She doesn’t look right to me,’ Robbie said. The business of plastering his arm had brought him back out of misery. Now he sat swinging his legs, intrigued and impressed by this new sling-wearing version of himself. Can I have an eyepatch? he’d asked. The nurse and doctor had laughed.
‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ Kate said. ‘He’s mad.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Dr Azad said, shining a pen torch into her left then right eye. ‘You look a little anaemic to me. Are you eating regularly?’
‘Yes.’
‘She doesn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive, my daddy says,’ Robbie said.
‘Robbie. Shush.’
They found nothing wrong, naturally. Heartbeat, pulse, temperature, all normal. No chest pain, no abdominal pain. Admittedly she underplayed the headache, but what was she going to say? God was pressing on her because he was waiting to see if she committed murder? Dr Azad had other patients to attend to. Robbie would have to come back for a check-up in a week. The nurse told her where the canteen was and recommended a cup of tea and some toast before making the journey back. All this can go on, Kate repeated to herself. All this can go on.
‘Come on, mister,’ she said, taking Robbie’s free hand in hers. ‘Let’s get you home. I suppose you’ll want the day off school for this?’
‘I want pancakes,’ Robbie said.
Suddenly the pressure on her head started to ease. The sensation was so strange it stopped her in her tracks. The hands were lifting, like birds taking off. She took three more steps. Three more hands. Robbie ran on ahead. You’re getting lighter, now, Eleanor and Vera had said, in quavering voices, lighter…lighter…so much lighter…
She was tempted to laugh, but it was unnerving, too, the feeling of lift. Carry on walking and eventually your feet will leave the ground. The thought for the first time that there might, actually, be something medically wrong with her
‘Come on,’ Robbie said. ‘You’re so slow.’
Something’s happening, she wanted to say to someone, anyone. Something’s happening to me. Couldn’t be more than two hands keeping her earthbound. The lightness tingled in her shoulders, knees, ankles, toes. Very vividly she saw herself lifting off, feet dangling, one shoe dropping off, the half-dozen people milling about looking up, mouths open, astonished. God’s interest settled on you gradually but abandoned you with shocking suddenness. That was the thought that at last unravelled: God, with a final glimmer of the wry smile, was turning His attention elsewhere. We’ll play again, Katherine, but for now…
‘Kitty,’ Robbie said, looking back at her, ‘can I have an ice—’
‘Hups,’ the young man said, looking down at Robbie. ‘Are you all right?’
Kate watched Robbie nod. Then the young man looked up at her.
She thought, afterwards: He must have assumed he was making good ground because I kept smiling and laughing. Either that or he must have thought I was simple. The truth was she couldn’t help it; the release from the weight’s pressure, the extraordinary sensation of lightness, of being on the verge of flight. She would have been giddy with anyone. (Robbie said, Why are we walking, for God’s sake? but didn’t argue when she said, Because I want to. He ran on ahead, examining things along the road or having bizarre, truncated engagements with total strangers, content now to accept the broken arm and sling as a novelty rather than a betrayal.)
Why don’t you come to a dance with me next week? And without thinking she’d said, All right. I can’t believe, he’d kept saying, I can’t believe it’s you. She was a you to someone. You had a scratch on your face. How did you get that? I don’t remember, she said. And you were wearing a white dress with poppies on it. It was my mother’s. And you bought pistachios in the market. Did I? And you looked like you might be being followed. And you, and you, and you.
It was a strange shift, as if the world had put out its hand and for the first time since her mother’s death she’d taken it, wondering why now, why never before? Simultaneously understanding that your life had its own secret appointments. The feeling of lightness got in the way of what she thought of this young man to whom she was a you, almost. But not completely. Almost but not completely got in the way of the other thing, too, the accrual of loathed touches, the contagion. Already–him saying he always looked for her in Lahore after that (was that possible?)–she was thinking: sooner or later someone’ll tell him, Cyril Starkey’s niece, poor bitch, you didn’t know? Oh, everyone knows…Already she was getting an inkling of the courage (or indifference) she’d need to give him the facts and nothing else. She imagined herself saying it. I’m telling you now because if you don’t hear it from me you’ll hear it from someone else. How would he react? She surprised herself, leaping ahead with the certainty that there would be a future. He had a good bony face, she thought, life in the deep-set eyes, a look of appetite for the world, something out there. There might be swagger later, when he remembered himself, but for now he was genuinely in the moment. Monroe the surname. She’d heard it; father a driver, brother a passenger guard so Cyril probably knew them, must be where she’d heard it. I cannot believe it’s you, he kept repeating. He must have thought he’d never met a girl so easy to make smile. It’s destiny, he’d said, and laughed. There’s no other explanation. So you’ll come to the Limpus with me next week? Or you know, there’s my friend’s wedding on Saturday. I’m best man. D’you want to come along? Shall I call for you? She thought, afterwards: He must have felt like the cat’s whiskers, asking and me saying yes straight away. He must have thought I was crazy.
She thought all this afterwards, when there was time.
‘What’s happened?’
At the bungalow Mr and Mrs Knight, the neighbours, stood in their front garden, heads inclined as if listening for something. Two full-faced sloe-eyed servants’ children with a hoop and stick also stood frozen in the street. It was almost three in the afternoon. The heat was a soft sustaining presence against her arms and legs. (She’d kept her cardie over her shoulders on the walk back from the hospital–two bruises there was no need for him to see–but taken it off once he’d left her, a hundred yards from her aunt’s at her request.) Sellie, in an idiotic panic, had kept Dalma home from school. Kate had dropped Robbie off and hurried back, wondering if her granddad had managed to feed himself, since he wouldn’t suffer anyone’s help but hers. She’d ridden home feeling the first (disappointing) suggestion that her natural gravity, neither the weight of God’s cold interest nor the giddying lightness of His abandonment, was returning. Details had been here and there vivified as she rode: a red door; two golden dogs lying in the sun; a spices stall with heaped earth-tones powders. Now, as she got down off her bike with sweat cooling in the nape of her neck, this. Dense, static energy emanated from the bungalow.
‘A shot,’ Mr Knight whispered. ‘Shouting, and something like a shot.’
She went cautiously. The tattis were up in the windows, though they needed damping again. In the living room Cyril lay on the floor with his head on a cushion. Sergeant Rhubotham knelt next to him. Cyril’s shirtsleeve had been raggedly cut off. Rhubotham was using both hands to put pressure on her uncle’s shoulder. Two or three trickles of blood crept out from under his palm. The room w
as slightly upset, rattan coffee table knocked over, the painting of the tiger in the river askew, mantelpiece ornaments scattered. Near Rhubotham’s foot, a short, wooden-handled dagger, shiny with blood.
‘What happened?’ Kate said.
Rhubotham got a fright at the sound of her voice, twitched, turned. Cyril’s head lolled towards her with a groan.
‘Miss,’ Rhubotham said. ‘First-aid kit. Have you got one?’
‘What is it? What’s—’
‘Now, please. Or a clean hanky or something.’
Kate ran to the kitchen, came back with the tin.
‘Bandage and pad,’ Rhubotham said. ‘Quickly, please.’
‘There’s no pad.’
‘Just give me the tin.’
‘Oh, God,’ Cyril said, grimacing. ‘Fuck.’
Rhubotham worked fast but not deftly. His hands, Kate observed, were shaking.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Cyril said. ‘Never in a million years would you think a bleddy—’
‘Don’t talk,’ Rhubotham said. Then to Kate: ‘Does anyone here have a telephone?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘You’ll have to go up to the Institute. That’s nearest.’ He hesitated. ‘Wait here a moment,’ he said.
She didn’t wait but followed him through the back of the house. A cricket sprang away as she stepped out on to the veranda. Afternoon light seared the compound. Kalia lay face down on the ground. A small puddle of blood had formed at his side. A few feet to the left a revolver shone in the sun.