by Glen Duncan
Kate thought about it now, standing looking out into the afternoon’s glare, remembering the dream she’d had, the curious little bud from her thigh, the thing that turned out (by the time she found her mother on the train) to be a baby. She’d lived her life by such things, impulses, dreams, instincts, the knotted logic of the Deal with God. She hadn’t told Ross about that. Other people, she knew, didn’t make decisions the way she did, instead worked things out through a sort of mathematics of anxiety, with arguing and jabbering and reading the newspapers. To them the world was…She couldn’t finish the thought. She’d asked him, that night, in pure neutral enquiry, Are you that good? And he’d said, Yes. And it had delighted her that he knew this of himself. She’d said, I want children, and he’d squeezed her hand and said, Well, we’ll have them. How many kids in the world have a father who’s an Olympic champion?
She smiled, remembering it, but felt with the smile’s dissolution a slight resurgence of the depression she’d been feeling on and off all day.
In the confusion it was hard to tell how many people were attacking the train and how many attempting to defend it. It looked initially like a Laurel and Hardy crowd-clash, suitcases and bags flying through the air, exploding on the ground, pots and pans, bed linen, underwear.
‘This is my train,’ Hector said, quietly but as if by Divine intervention audibly in the clamour of shouts and screams. They were between downpours. Ross looked up and saw dark curds of monsoon cloud ravaged here and there by urgent sunlight. The land steamed. He was glad Kate had gone home. For a couple of weeks after the wedding she’d sampled first-class-carriage life with him in the VT sidings. Some bleddy honeymoon, Eugene had said. Ross had watched her around the other wives and men. She was the great Unknown Quotient as far as they were concerned. They were all unnerved by her self-containment. The absence of need for their approval came off her like a subsonic hum. It excited him. His instinct, he told himself, had been sound: it would be the two of them, a flame of private understanding in the world. Already, this season he’d realized he had to force himself to forget her in the ring, to focus on the fights. Their love only added to invincibility, took any strength and made it stronger; the victories filled him with a new pride in how small they were next to the mystery of marriage. Stepping in under the ropes he had to expunge her from himself so that later, when he’d won, he could enjoy the idea that he’d done it for her. The wins were jewels he could drop in her lap, casually, enjoyable beautiful things but next to love, trinkets, trinkets…
‘My driver’s Muslim,’ Hector said. The three men leaned out from the brake (in spite of himself Ross thought of the Three Stooges) and looked down the length of the train. Hindus and Sikhs with hatchets, clubs, tools, knives were swarming the carriages.
‘That’s his bleddy lookout,’ Eugene said. ‘We sit tight.’
Hector, moving with the weary deliberation of a man who’s been got out of bed in the middle of the night to attend to something, jumped down from the brake. Absurdly, he held in his left hand his pair of brass-handled signal flags, red and green, as if with them he might impose a referee’s order on the madness. ‘I’m telling you,’ Eugene said, ‘don’t be so bleddy—’
‘They won’t interfere with us,’ Ross said. His limbs felt full of calm electric strength but when he jumped down after Hector the pain of impact shot through his ankles.
‘You can smell it,’ Eugene said, with tender awe and disgust. Fear, he meant, the passengers’ penned stink. The beauty of such a moment, Ross thought, was that a single clearly felt imperative was enough to cut through it: I have to go with Hector, he’s my brother. Morality in these moments had to be a kind of idiocy. You could imagine God laughing and clapping His heavy hands in delight. That’s it! That’s the spirit!
‘Give me that,’ he said to Eugene. A crowbar had been rolling around under Hector’s box the whole journey as if (it now seemed) advertising its availability should something like this happen. Eugene, pale and sweaty, passed it down. ‘You stay put,’ Ross told him. ‘They’re not coming in here.’
‘Fuck it,’ Eugene said, jumping down with a crunch. ‘I’m not staying in there on my own to be murdered.’
It was a dreamlike procession up to the engine. Eugene, unwilling to rely solely on his fair skin and GIPR jacket, yanked out from under his shirt the gold cross and chain he’d been wearing since his wedding (Mitzi had given it to him as a keepsake, and, he’d uncharitably thought, as further endorsement of conservativism in the bedroom, since it glimmered there censoriously between her breasts) and held it up in front of him. As against vampires, Ross thought, past surprise at what thoughts came and went.
Chaos was human movements sometimes unnaturally speeded up (a Sikh with a perspiring tight-lipped look of concentration repeatedly clubbing the head of a man who between blows, incredibly, babbled and blinked), sometimes unnaturally slowed down (a huge silver blade’s elastic stretch of time slicing through first air then the neck of a man who already looked unconscious on his feet), and sometimes (a bloody-nosed woman gripping a carpet bag being shoved from behind through a window) at their normal speed. There were bubbles of pure silence. Individual screams surprised you, tore off the mass of sound in unique shreds. Chaos was unassimilable. Only fragments could be allowed in. A man naked below the waist lying with his head face down in an open disgorged suitcase. A woman’s severed breast on the track next to a blackened skillet. A man brimful of energy twitchily holding a machete but, paralysed by the wealth of choice, unable to fix on a victim.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Eugene kept saying. ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ…’
No one touched them.
Ross was thinking of Kate, imagining her watching him. After two weeks in the carriage she’d said, I’ll go back. There’s so much we need to get for the house. I want it to be nice for when you’re properly home. Properly home. It was how he’d always imagined it would feel when you found the right woman. They weren’t there yet. The intensity of his feelings making love to her had shocked him. There had been a struggle to get past his own and her obvious nervousness, the shadow (despite his acceptance of the six sentences like a line of stones) of what the bastard uncle had or hadn’t done. But he had crept past it, up (or was it down?) into pleasure, though he knew it had hurt her that first time. After the first time it hadn’t hurt, but she’d observed rather than gone with him. Her watching, the quiet, curious intelligence while she gave her body to him, drove him nearly mad with something, a reaching out towards her.
‘Oh, dear God,’ Eugene said.
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny. The papers had carried Nehru’s speech. These last days the words had made celebratory circles in Ross’s head. She’d gone past the window of Ho Fun’s and the light had flared off her poppied hip and bare shoulder and he’d got up and gone after her. If he hadn’t…Again the if this then thatness of the world buzzed like a consciousness in everything. The priests talked about God’s plan and the assumption was that if there was one it must be good. But you caught glimpses of it now and then–while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom–and saw not that it was good but that it was endlessly, if you were God, entertaining. Ross had overheard Kate talking to a neighbour and caught the words ‘my husband’ and the thrill of it had made him grin. He’d been shaving; there was his familiar face in the mirror, grinning (the lather’s white made your teeth look yellow, a sudden flash of the grave) because she’d affirmed her ownership of him to the public world. The public world was the erotic foil to the private. There was Mrs Vaughn, the front garden, the road, the sunlit town, the words ‘my husband’, and in here, in the house in the dark, was the wealth to which being her husband entitled him. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new…They had added their names–it truly astonished him that he could think this way–to the secret scroll of history’s lovers all the way back to tenderly sinning Adam and Eve. It had made him reimagine Go
d’s last words to the fallen couple as they left Eden: Now you know what there is to know. Go out and see if it was worth it.
It’s worth it, he thought, as Hector sprang forward and he found himself (and Eugene, with a moan) following. He was aware of himself smiling. One of the reasons God was there was so that there would be someone other than you to notice incongruities like that.
What happened next happened with a purged clarity, as if the universe had cleared a space to make every detail of the moment precious. Rain began to fall in drops as big as grapes. Even people being murdered noticed. Suddenly a carriage door flew open, revealing a fair-haired man in a pale suit with his back to them struggling to keep hold of something–a bag or suitcase, Ross inferred–which an unseen adversary fought to wrest from his grip. The back of the linen jacket showed a spatter of blood, as if someone had flicked a paintbrush from top to bottom. Silence rushed up and gathered here. Hector had run on ahead but Ross paused; this also was the way of it: lesser tableaux uncannily arrested you. He thought, Any second now the fellow in the train’s going to boot this poor bugger clean out of the carriage. Presciently: there was the small, distinct sound of a bone breaking. The suited man doubled up (his hand, Ross suspected) and released a groan as of only very slight complaint before being kicked in the solar plexus hard enough to eject him from the train.
He crashed on to his backside and screamed (tailbone) rolling as if in a hurry before coming to rest on his side, pale face frozen in a silent grimace. There was a moment for Ross of mental scurrying, swirl, check, forward grope–then recognition. Without making it obvious, is anyone looking? Long years ago we made a tryst with. Underneath the released adrenalin was the shock of seeing the Britisher’s tight-skinned face without its composure. Two each, yes? It seemed a lifetime ago to Ross. He remembered the queer relief when the Malaysian had pronounced, Common brass. Worthless. The con like a beautiful woman stepping out of her robe. He wasn’t, in his current purity, angry, but he would be as soon as the Englishman opened his mouth, as soon as the voice got to work. In the absence of language there was an honourable solidity to the betrayal. He took a few steps towards the prone and now retching figure but was halted by a shout, a scream in fact, Eugene’s short falsetto; the Englishman, foetal, finished retching and with tenderness laid his head cheek-down in the mud. His face had lost its grimace to the delicate paralysed beatification of being utterly at the mercy of pain.
‘Brother!’ Hector bellowed. Ross turned and ran towards him.
Hector’s driver (and BB&CIR inside right), Saleem Khan, was struggling with a giant purple-turbaned Sikh in tight brown slacks and a bloodstained white shirt who had one hand round the throat of a Muslim woman backed up against the carriage. She was on her tiptoes, one shoe off, toes as if playfully touch-typing the ground, with both hands locked round her attacker’s wrist, bangles tinkling, eyes wide with what looked like cartoon panic. A kirpan lay between two sleepers, its blade being tang-tang’d by the rain. Hector grabbed the Sikh’s throttling wrist and squeezed. Sikh fingers released, but Sikh knee jabbed upwards into Hector’s groin and Hector tenderly genuflected, couldn’t get up. Eugene pushed the Muslim woman away and she ran, open-mouthed and silent, stumbled, fell, got up, ran. There seemed to Ross endless time and space for the watching of all this. Hector looked like a supplicant, down on one knee holding the giant’s hand. Saleem Khan, having grasped the other Sikh arm, could do nothing with it but hold on, jerking as if with irregular electric current. There was all the time in the world for Ross to consider his options, notice that the Sikh’s nose had at some time in the past been broken, that there was a maroon ballpoint pen still clipped to the white shirt’s front pocket, that the left trouser leg’s knee was stained with mud. He lifted the crowbar. You’re going to hit me with that. Yes I am. Where? Not sure yet. You and I know the head, the brain, the centre of operations. Yes but I don’t want to kill you. The knee will be a big problem for me. Yes, the knee. I’m glad we’re agreed on that.
Someone very distantly said, ‘Ross!’ But the crowbar was already in motion. Sorry, Ross thought, remembering the humble look of the patella from Basic First Aid at Walton. Then noticed the Sikh’s eyes flick left. Just before impact. Again very distantly the voice, Eugene’s, surely, saying through the rain’s hiss, ‘Behind—’
Impact. The Sikh’s knee shattered and he tumbled forward with an anti-climactic mewl. Ross found himself on the sodden ground. Saleem Khan leaped over him and rolled away with another attacker Ross hadn’t seen. Hector crawled towards him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Fucking hell,’ Eugene was saying, standing with arms slightly out from his sides, as if he was expecting to suddenly inflate. ‘Christ have mercy.’
‘You’re hit,’ Hector said.
‘What?’
‘Your leg, men,’ Hector said, still struggling to get his breath.
Ross hesitated, conscious primarily of being on the verge of saturation, now that the last threads restraining the rain had gone. There was, now that he came to think of it, something like a line of fire or ice. It took him a moment to locate it. Then he could, and looked. Left leg. Hector took the crowbar from him, adjusted his grip, then swung it hard against the floundering Sikh’s kidneys. Another low mewl. It was as if he was being unfairly put upon.
‘It’s deep,’ Eugene said. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here.’
Thus duper and dupee met again, levelled by injury.
‘Why’d you do it?’ Skinner, the Englishman, wanted to know. This was the hospital in Chowringhee that evening. Ross, not long out of surgery, was still morphine groggy. Skinner (chipped but not broken coccyx, stab wound in the calf ) was lying on his side on a trolley with his smashed wrist in plaster and his broken thumb in a splint. Independence had put hospital beds at a premium. Money was changing hands every minute. Patients were on tables, chairs, the floor. Eugene and Hector, unscathed, had gone down to VT to get a message to the families in Bhusawal.
‘I don’t know,’ Ross slurred, the truth. Get that fellow there, he’d gasped, as Hector and Eugene had carried him back towards the brake. Get him on to the train. Eugene had said, What? are you fucking crazy? he’s dead; but Ross had been insistent. Get him, I know him, he’s not dead. Hector had gone back and with the help of Saleem Khan lifted the unconscious Skinner on board. The raid had ended as suddenly as it had begun. Rioters melted away. The rain stopped and the sun came out. Half-naked bodies looked not murdered but ecstatically spent, limbs spread, lips parted. Blood-puddles gleamed in the mud. The wounded who could be torn from the corpses of their loved ones struggled back on to the train. It was twelve miles to the next waystation, from where a signal was sent to clear the line; with so many in need of hospitalization there was no choice but to go back to Bombay. Eugene had ridden with Saleem Khan in the engine, Hector, still, incredibly, bearing signal flags, in the brake with Ross, Skinner, and half a dozen walking wounded.
‘Your friends said you know me,’ Skinner said. An effort, Ross heard, not to make it sound like an accusation. The hospital was hot and murmuring, its dignity wrecked; doctors needed shaves, nurses’ eyes were lovely with exhaustion. Ross kept rolling to the edge of unconsciousness then lazily rolling back. Time pooled, spurted, pooled. Skinner had asked him something. It might have been an hour ago.
‘You robbed me in Lahore five years back,’ Ross said. ‘Gold bars. Stiffed me out of my mother’s bloodstone ring. It was my fault. I should have gone after my wife.’
Skinner, caught by a twinge in the bashed coccyx, gently jackknifed. Terrible, Ross thought, to see the confident young face ambushed like that. ‘You’re drugged-up,’ Skinner said, trying a slight adjustment to his position, apparently without improvement. ‘They’re going to run out of morphine if this carries on. Someone’s going to make a pile.’
Save his life and he wants to know why, Ross thought. That’s the imperative.
‘Christ, I need a cigarette,’ Skinner said. Five years hadn’t cha
nged him. Still the sharp, waxworkish white face and oiled fair hair, narrow blue eyes, that cleft chin as if God out of creative boredom had nicked him. They’d cut off the left leg of his linen slacks at the knee to get at the wound. The bare leg was blond-haired, thin, here and there bruised. ‘Haven’t got one on you by any chance, have you, a smoke?’
Ross shook his head. The ward’s mumble confused his ears. He’d remembered the voice as classier, suggesting a life of gently exercised entitlement. A layer of that refinement was missing but the aura of up-to-the-minuteness remained, the modernity of the man, the certainty that in his presence you were at the tip of your times.
‘If you’re staying you’d better get used to all this,’ Skinner said. ‘People cutting each other’s bloody heads off.’
Staying? Ross’s eyes closed. Leaden dark-red effort required to open them again. Staying here. In India. Politics. Oh, that. He wanted to sleep. There’d be pain when he woke up, but still, the deliciousness of going under now. He smiled, laughed; his feebleness was funny to him.
‘Yeah, it’s hilarious, I know,’ Skinner said. ‘Well, I don’t remember you, sport, nor any gold bars or bloodstones, nor much else from five years back, but I’m in your debt for not leaving me to get fucking scalped.’
‘I’m falling asleep,’ Ross said. ‘Are you supposed to keep me awake?’
‘What?’
‘Is it safe for me to fall asleep?’
No reply. With an almighty struggle Ross opened his eyes and raised his head. Skinner, having beckoned a cigarette-smoking doctor over, hadn’t heard.