by Glen Duncan
The Wound wasn’t, as Pasha has subsequently made it in the telling, ‘nothing’ (the blade went through the back of his thigh and chipped the edge of his femur, introduced him to doctors’ Latin: gluteus minimus, semitendonosus, semimembranosus) but he maintained ever after it wouldn’t have kept him out of the Olympic trials. If he hadn’t got pneumonia in hospital and gone with it, as he’s fond of saying, to ‘death’s bleddy threshold’, he’d have made it to London in the summer of 1948 and his whole life, as he’s also fond of saying, would have been different.
Against husbandly instructions Kate (and Mitzi) came in from Bhusawal the next day. In the general confusion Eugene recommandeered a couple of abandoned team carriages in the sidings at VT and reported sick, but Hector went back on line, coming home every evening with fresh horror stories. Children gutted, women raped, men’s penises cut off. Murder. The word was too small. Murder was an isolated act, intimately done by one person to another against a background of not-murder. But now murder was everywhere. Now murder was the background. The country had overnight acquired the ability to assimilate the most hellish human cruelties. ‘Who are all these crazy people?’ Eugene asked, repeatedly. ‘I mean, who are they to do such massacring?’ ‘Ordinary people,’ Hector told him. (Kate, overhearing and thinking of the machete, said nothing.) ‘Up north neighbours are killing each other’s children.’ ‘But they’ve got bleddy military chaps there, haven’t they?’ Hector laughed. (Since Bernice had dumped him horror was funny, confirmation, the world going mad in sympathy.) Armed Indian troop carriages had been attached to the rear of refugee trains–until it became apparent that soldiers were Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims first, soldiers second. Reports came back of ‘selective firing’, Hindu and Sikh soldiers firing on Muslim rioters, Muslim soldiers firing on Hindus and Sikhs. The uniforms meant nothing.
‘I remember,’ Skinner said, crutches-propelling himself on to the ward three days later. ‘Lahore. You were in uniform. Bloody—Oh, excuse me,’ to Kate, who sat alongside Ross’s bed. Ross introduced them, watched for the ignition of the other man’s desire, was surprised by its absence, again wondered if Skinner preferred men. ‘I remember,’ Skinner said. ‘You’ve got it wrong, you know. They took me for a ride, too. Wristwatch and bloody fountain pen for a couple of bits of what turned out to be brass. You thought I was in on it.’ He’d been discharged, on the crutches, since his coccyx screamed every time he stood on his own two feet, but instructed to come back for calf-wound dressing changes.
‘You were all in on it,’ Ross said. ‘I lost my mother’s bloodstone ring.’
‘Singh and that little bugger Ram. Took me months to get over the embarrassment.’
‘You said you knew them.’
‘I did know them. Ram was just one of those little chiku boys who ran errands for pice. Singh and I had done a bit of business, and to be honest I came away from it pretty certain he’d stiffed me. Which is why I didn’t…Well.’
Which is why I didn’t mind stealing from him. Quick glance at Ross, the question of how much Kate knew. Two each, yes? The shared molestation. Ross had long ago told Kate the story of the gold (downplaying letting her go in favour of it) and discovered in the telling that no slant disguised the moral kernel: that he was willing to dupe and steal for profit; a child, moreover. Kate hadn’t censured, just left a solid silence round it like a paperweight. She disapproved, he knew, but shared his feeling that the two of them together enjoyed moral exemption.
‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Skinner said. ‘I saw you fight. Damnedest thing. I was at the Inter-Railways finals in Calcutta last year. The whole time seeing you here it’s been niggling me. It came to me last night. It is you, isn’t it? You do box?’
‘Bantamweight. You were there?’
‘I was there. You walked it. Your husband’s a class act in the ring, Mrs Monroe.’
‘Oh yes,’ Kate said. ‘I know.’
‘Starts to look like there’s a higher power at work, doesn’t it?’ Skinner said.
‘Could be,’ Ross said. He was aware of Skinner feeling Kate’s suspended judgement. ‘My mother’s a big believer in fate,’ Ross added. ‘In destiny. That bloodstone ring belonged to her first love.’
‘You still think I was in on it.’
‘Look I’m not saying—’
‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’
‘I’m not saying you were in on it. I’m just…It’s my own bleddy fault, anyway.’
‘If you thought I robbed you, why didn’t you leave me on the tracks? What were you going to do? Wait till I got better, then beat me up?’
Though he’d asked himself umpteen times, lying in bed with nothing to do but listen to the throb-drone of his stitched-up leg, Ross didn’t know the reason. The charm of coincidence, perhaps. God’s capricious hand again. Your life was a story.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Skinner said, looking past them towards the doorway with the calm of a man who’d grown large or tired enough to forgive himself. ‘I’m not, as you might put it, the soul of moral scrupulousness. I’m a businessman, and in business, especially in this country, you’ve got to be prepared to bend the rules. People want something, they come to me because they know I can deliver. You want a pin, you come to me. You want a boat, you come to me. Ask my clients, they’ll tell you.’
Ross glanced at Kate. She’d become, without his realizing it, someone he relied on to explain people. Kate merely raised her eyebrows.
Skinner laughed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just the irony. What I’m telling you is that on another day I might well have been in on it. It just so happened that on that particular day I wasn’t. On that occasion I was, like yourself, well and truly had.’
‘Okay,’ Ross said. ‘Forget it. It was the bloodstone I was bothered about. If you’d still had it I’d have got it back, that’s all.’
Skinner looked out of the window. ‘Never had it in the first place, sport. Probably still got the brass bars somewhere, mind you. Most likely kept them as a reminder that you’re never too sharp to get caught with your pants down.’
‘What business are you in, Mr Skinner?’ Kate asked.
‘George, please. Negotiation, for want of a better word. I bring buyers and sellers together.’
‘Buyers and sellers of what?’ Ross asked.
‘You name it. Someone wants something, I tell them where and how to get it. Agent, consultant, freelance commercial liaison, you can dress it up however you like but in the end it’s just knowing who wants what and how to make everyone feel they got a bargain. You really wouldn’t believe the stuff that’s flying around here at the moment. Typewriters, armoured cars, rare birds, antiques.’
It bordered the ludicrous, this world-weary nous in a man still only in his mid-twenties. Skinner sensed it. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I sound like I’ve been walking the globe for a hundred years. But it’s dog years here for my lot. I came out when I was fifteen. Game’s up now, pretty much. Can’t bear the thought of going home, mind you. It’s like you don’t speak the language any more. Last time I went I was on hot bricks till I got back here. You make your bed.’
The peculiarity, Ross and Kate agreed later, was that he spoke to them as equals. It was what Ross remembered from the first encounter in Lahore, that manner, as if the haze of colour and class had evaporated. You didn’t get that from the British. Risible imitations of it, yes, from the clergy and the progressive well-to-do, but nothing like this clean indifference.
‘He’s not interested in any of that,’ Kate said, later. ‘That’s not what he…’
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s of no use to him.’
‘In his line of work, you mean?’
It was Ross’s sixth day in hospital. He had pneumonia. Rioting had upset the movement of medical supplies; the hospital had been waiting for antibiotics for almost a week. Ross dipped in and out of fever and had these surreally casual speculative conversations with Kate when he was lucid.
Kate spent all her time at the hospital, an unofficial volunteer, made tea, mopped, fetched and carried. Part of her kept asking, What if Ross…? but she silenced it. She must have let it slip that neither she nor Mitzi had brought servants. The next day Skinner had sent a young man, Veejay, beaming, severely hair-oiled and side-parted, very crisp and natty in kurta pyjamas and black plimsoles. ‘No wages, memsahib, wages paid by Skinner Sahib in the full particular.’ ‘Please,’ Skinner had said, when Kate had protested, ‘it’s nothing. It’s really absolutely nothing but my pleasure to do it. Not that it repays a fraction of what I owe your husband, obviously, saving my miserable hide.’ She was never alone with the Englishman except at the bedside if Ross fell asleep; precaution from habit rather than any suspicion of danger. Skinner didn’t seem interested in that, either. She couldn’t make up her mind about him. The Englishness, his version of it–quick, modern, smart, no nonsense, hints of complexity, overall a humorous capableness–seduced. The appeal was that he didn’t seem to care that he was English. Occasionally both she and Ross came to with a start because they knew nothing about him, the entire relationship was absurd. Why did you pick him up? Ross remained vague. I couldn’t not, he told her. I don’t know, it just felt inevitable.
‘I’ll be leaving Bombay in a day or two,’ Skinner said.
‘Your back’s okay?’
‘No, it’s killing me, frankly, but I’ve got business in Jabalpur that doesn’t give two hoots about my back.’
Another week had passed. Antibiotics had arrived. (Hmph, the ward sister said, when Ross thanked God aloud, you’d do better to thank your British friend. Ross and Kate gawped at each other, incredulous. Skinner, when they tackled him about it, was dismissive. Bit of chivvying, he said. Nothing, really, if you know who to chivvy.) Ross had been started on the drugs but wasn’t, as the doctors kept reminding everyone, out of danger. The pain was a tightening strap round his chest and back. In the febrile throes he listened for his sternum going with a dry crack.
‘Anyway, I might not see you again before I go,’ Skinner said. The two men were alone. Kate had gone to get a cup of tea from the canteen. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’ There was no one within earshot but he leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘I know people,’ he said. ‘You want to go pro in England, I can help with that.’
‘I’m not going anywhere like this,’ Ross said. ‘They’ve already told me I’m not going to make the trials.’ The doctors had given him the same answer no matter how many different ways he’d asked the question. That’s all bleddy rubbish, he’d told Kate. They’re making it sound worse so they feel like big shots. That was his mantra. But increasingly in his moments of unoccupied consciousness the truth came and lay upon him like a heavy invisible animal. His jaws tightened and his fists clenched, a rage against its leaden simplicity–then off again into the non-logic of sheer will. These bleddy doctors don’t know anything. I’ll get out of here soon enough. A fellow knows his own body, damn it all.
‘I know, I know,’ Skinner said, patting the air. ‘I’m just saying. There are ways I can help you. I know people. You understand?’
Ross didn’t, but nodded anyway. The other man’s clipped excitement was contagious–laxative, too; Ross, constipated for days from the antibiotics, felt a promising twinge in his gut.
‘I do a lot of business in this country,’ Skinner went on. ‘I mean a lot. You work on the railways, right?’
‘Yes.’
Skinner hung on his crutches. He was wearing another of his seemingly inexhaustible collection of pale linen suits. Always a dark paisley tie with a small loosened knot. Creased embassy secretary or weathered attaché. Bit of chivvying.
‘The point is we can be useful to each other.’
What Ross wanted to say was: What the bleddy hell are you talking about? But the invitation into a sophisticated scheme of things was hard to resist.
‘Look, sport, you know how this country works, don’t you?’
‘Buckshee?’
‘That’s the least of it. British out, it’s going to be a free-for-all. Lot of gains, lot of losses.’
Ross waited.
Skinner stared at him. Then changed tack. ‘I want you to know something,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I believe in fate.’ Invitation again, this time so frankly to intimacy that Ross’s embarrassment bordered the sexual. Skinner laughed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘No excuse for it in a cynical sod like me, but there you have it. Extraordinary business, you and me on the train, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know you’ve played it down since but I feel I owe you my life.’
‘You forget I wanted you alive so I could beat you to death.’
Skinner looked out of the window. Nodded. ‘We’re men, so we have to joke about it, I know.’ He looked back down at Ross in the bed. ‘Let’s just say I remain in your debt, shall we?’
‘You’re not in my debt. It’s nothing.’
Kate came back with three cups of tea, sensed the arrested current. She thought the Englishman looked exhausted.
‘We were just saying goodbye,’ Skinner said. ‘I’ve been under your feet here long enough. I wanted to hang on till the antibiotics came through. I can see our friend’s going to milk this a while yet.’
‘I’m a sick man,’ Ross said.
‘I’d get a move on if I were you, sport,’ Skinner said. ‘Even your wife thinks it’s starting to look like malingering.’
They gave him their address (‘I go through Bhusawal from time to time, if you can bear the idea of me looking you up’) and watched him swing himself expertly away. He didn’t look back. It occurred to Ross that he’d got used to the visits, come to look forward to them.
‘So?’ Kate said. ‘What was all that about?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
suspects
(London, 2004)
AOL News:
23rd October 2004: Charity appeals for hostage’s release: New plea for Margaret Hassan’s release after distressing video.
Plus: Nadia lands top soap role.
30th October 2004: Terror fear over Bin Laden tape: Experts fear new video may signify an impending attack.
Plus: Renée’s dirty secret.
31st October 2004: British UN worker in hostage video: Afghan kidnap victim Anetta Flanigan paraded in video.
Plus: New love for Kerry.
It’s my day off and I’m at Heathrow. I’m not flying anywhere or meeting anyone. I come here to wander around, drink coffee, watch people. Well, where do you feel at home? Vince asked me, years ago, exasperated, because I’d said no, not Bolton, not London, not bloody England. Airports, I told him. Specifically the Departures lounge, where you’re nowhere, where no one has any claim on you, where no one expects anything.
A joke, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. A week later, forcing myself past This is stupid, I took the Tube to Heathrow. I’ve been coming here (and going to Gatwick) ever since.
It’s a strange thing to have sex with someone to establish you’re not going to have any more sex with them, but that’s what Janet Marsh and I thought we were doing last Saturday. She rang and left a message: ‘Hi, it’s Janet.’ Long pause. ‘Give me a call when you get this.’ (There was another message, from Louisa Wexford at Sheer Pleasure. ‘Hi, Owen.’ Sigh. ‘Look, for the money involved we think the simplest thing is to just draw a line under it. You’ll get a letter to that effect some time next week. Okay? It’s all got a bit out of hand and to be frank we want to just get it behind us. Anyway, it means no more unpleasant emails and nasty letters, I hope. Let me know if you haven’t heard anything by the end of next week. Bye.’) I rang Janet and arranged to meet her for dinner in Ladbroke Grove. Putti. ‘It’s expensive,’ she said, ‘but don’t worry, I’m paying. I’m rich now.’
After dinner we went back to her flat in Holland Park, a basement but a big one, with cream carpet, a lot of white, a sofa of teal leather slabs and an open-plan kitche
n–diner separated by a breakfast bar built of those Seventies blueish glass blocks currently enjoying a revival. He, the ex, had been interested in decor, she hadn’t. ‘It used to look a lot better than this,’ she said, noticing the place again through me. ‘I can’t be arsed with all that.’ There were spaces where pictures (I imagined original framed film posters, sub-Miró canvases) had been removed and not replaced. She didn’t, apparently, care about things; she’d wanted the money for the power to control what happened to her. There were round frosted lights set in the bedroom’s eggshell panelling that gave it the snug feel of a ship’s cabin. All evening at Putti the conversation–America; pets; Rome; Lost in Translation; not having children; not being safe on the streets; Friends, Sex in the City, Six Feet Under–had in its avoidance of us, the phenomenon we constituted, said there would be sex later but probably nothing after that, almost certainly no future, no–when you really got down to it–us. She was, as she had been underlyingly that night at my place, sad and excited. Those two currents would run off her for a finite time. Then, since she had money but no faith in the likelihood of love, the excitement stream would die and only the sadness would remain. There had been love, I saw. (Our irises in their tired nebulae concede, if we’ve lost love, that we at least had it to lose.) Janet’s love–not the ex–had gone bad or been destroyed or perverted or betrayed, had suffered one of the love fates–but it had been love. The sadness was of knowing the best of her life was behind her and that there wouldn’t be children–not her own, at any rate. Which still, since she wasn’t stupid, left the money. She wasn’t ungrateful, in fact was filled with a sense of her own well-placedness; but there wouldn’t be love again, or her own children, which meant in the end she’d be dying alone. The spirit of that had already started hanging around on the edge of everything she did.
‘I’ve made some travel plans,’ she said, post-coitally. At the flat we’d had two whiskies apiece, started kissing, gone to bed. We’d gone slowly, patiently and with mutual sensitivity made pigs of ourselves. It was (although we didn’t quite mention it) laughable that we got on so well between the sheets, a mild annoyance since there was no future. It gave us a sod’s law fellowship, as if we were the combined butt of someone else’s joke. Her body was as I’d remembered it masturbatorily (amped-up by the process) in the fortnight between. I’d taken a delicate meditative diversion to her anus, of which she wasn’t, eventually, shy. Already playing the footage back to myself (let her take her own sweet time with the travel plans) I remembered my mum’s birthday at Maude’s, Mater’s response to the concept of anal bleaching, and despite my best efforts laughed out loud.