‘Crazy woman.’ Jay chivvied me. ‘Let’s go upstairs until it’s ready.’
Up in his room, Jay brought out a tripod and then a big heavy metal tube.
‘A telescope?’ I helped him lay it down.
‘If there is a man on the moon, you’ll be able to see even the bumps on his nose with this. I have a moon chart. You can learn the names of the craters. The seas of the moon.’ Jay checked the bracket and screws. ‘We’ll take it up on the roof after our victuals.’
‘But what about the night watch? Shouldn’t we start guard duty for the birds?’
Jay used a cotton swab to carefully clean the eyepiece of the telescope. ‘Uncle Elvin gave me this. It’s fantastic.’
Iris, the cook-woman, called out. ‘Kaama lasstee.’ More of a wail than an invitation to dinner.
‘Let’s go eat,’ Jay said. ‘We’ll do a patrol after that and see what to do.’
Two plates, each presenting a slice of charred bread and a harshly browned omelette riddled with red onion rings, cucumber cubes and green chillies bubbled on the big round table in the dining room. Two small towers of iced water filled to the brim stood next to the plates ready to douse the embers.
‘I’ve never seen a round table like this before.’ Effortlessly the dream shifted from a commando mission to knights in armour.
‘Pater likes the Camelot idea, but we are never all here at the same time. It is an utterly pointless farce. They can’t stand each other. Mater thinks she can play hell but he is going to really blow a fuse one day.’
Iris, one thumb hooked into the waist knot of her cloth, rattled the fruit trolley and asked if we wanted bananas.
‘Nothing, no. Go, woman, scat.’ Jay tucked in, urging me to eat.
She retreated to the kitchen, her tiny bare feet making hardly a sound.
‘This is good. Thank you,’ I called after her, trying to be more chivalrous and in that moment seeing what my friendship might offer Jay and why it should last beyond just cycle rides and pet projects. I could make amends for Jay’s faults: his abruptness, scorn, temper, unexpected weaknesses. More than reciprocity, it gave me almost an advantage.
We finished eating and Jay stood up.
I used my napkin to dab my lips and dropped it on the table the way Jay had done, crumpled up, but then, before following him out, decided to fold it instead and place it neatly by the empty plate. Iris was not the mother, but I wanted her to think better of me.
The moon, still swollen from the adulations of the Poya crowds, let a silvery sheen seep through to the garden coating every surface in lunar breath.
‘Let’s check if the birds are all right.’ Jay led us across the lawn. The cage was silent. The budgies perched in a line: motionless. Jay counted them all silently, folding his fingers one-by-one in several rounds.
Back upstairs, he said, ‘They seem to feel safe enough.’ He fastened a strap to the telescope and hung it over his shoulder. At one corner of the balcony, beyond the rail, he had a rope ladder swinging down from the roof. ‘Time to go see celestial beauty.’
A moment later, Jay was over the railing and scrambling up in the dark. At the top, he slid onto the flat portion of the roof.
‘Come on.’ His face peered over the edge. A torch beam picked out the coir ropes. ‘Grab it and step onto the first rung. You’ll be fine.’
Of course, he was right: I would be fine. I reached for one of the wooden rungs and stepped out, grateful for the dark and that I could see nothing below. Keeping my eyes on Jay, I climbed. Near the top, Jay reached out and hauled me up – the first time, almost the only time, I felt his hand on me.
In the moonlight, the roof rippled never-endingly. Jay had constructed a wooden platform where he could set up the telescope on its tripod. He fixed it and brought the moon into focus and got me to look through.
‘What d’you think of that?’
‘Amazing.’
‘Bashed about, huh? Hardly the White Goddess that Uncle Elvin claims.’
‘I like it, dented like that.’
‘This roof is one of my favourite hideaways,’ Jay said. ‘Everything is yours here. Daytime you can see the church that side, the Arabic garden over there and the sun worshipper in the house beyond our aviary.’
‘There are sun worshippers in Tintin. He follows them to the Temple of the Sun, in Peru.’
‘This one’s French. From the embassy. She likes to sunbathe on her balcony.’
‘In an “itsy bitsy teenie weenie, yellow polka-dot bikini”?’ I half sang.
Jay could not suppress the small muscle curling at the edge of his mouth. ‘No, actually topless. We’ll come up one afternoon, you’ll see. She usually does it on a Friday when the staff go.’
Clouds skidded across the sky rubbing out the stars.
‘Hang on, we forgot the chart. I’ll go get it. You stay here. Don’t go near the edge.’
He swung his legs over and disappeared, leaving me alone in an arena of shadows monitored only by a bruised disc in the sky.
I never believed the stars governed our lives; at least, I don’t think I did then. I am not so sure now. Everything seems to have a shape pulled and turned by an unseen hand. Perhaps the stars are its fingertips.
A light came on in an upstairs room of the house beyond the aviary. A woman opened the French windows and peeked out in a pale bathrobe. I tried to turn the telescope on her but couldn’t lower the tripod enough to get the angle right. The light in the room went out as the woman stepped onto the moonlit balcony. She slipped off her robe and knelt on the floor; another figure appeared and melted down behind her. I could not make out anything more but found the ritual strangely thrilling: the glimpse of her milky face, briefly uplifted, before she bowed.
When Jay climbed back onto the roof, he immediately noticed the lopsided telescope. ‘What happened?’
‘Moon worshippers,’ I explained. ‘Kowtowing.’
‘Who?’
‘Over there.’ Both figures had disappeared back indoors.
‘The embassy lady?’
‘Dunno. She was kneeling, and a man also.’
Jay studied me thoughtfully, but did not say anything. I hoped I had not committed an irretrievable wrong. Confusingly, my nipples ached.
‘Here, check out the chart.’ Jay unfolded a large map and shone his torch on it. ‘Let’s see if you can spot the Sea of Ventura.’
‘What is this rain, rain, rain?’ My mother pulled at the Venetian blinds that had once been her pride and joy. ‘Is it never going to stop?’
‘So, no drought then?’
‘You can safely say there is no danger of that, son.’
It might have been the change in weather, but recently she had become less irritable. My father made up for it by being ever moodier.
‘Bad form,’ he grumbled. ‘Churuchurufying non-stop until the damn road is flooded and that pain-in-the-neck Bandula comes around with another of his daft schemes for dykes, or waterwheels, or what-have-you.’
‘He’s your friend, no?’
‘Thaththa’s friends are all weird,’ I said.
‘Sometimes you have to make allowances. Even a pain-in-the-neck can turn into an old mate over time.’
‘What’s got into you?’ She stacked together the cork tablemats and took them over to the sideboard. The desk-jotter – compliments of the Bank of Ceylon – had a page torn in half. ‘You haven’t lost another bet, have you?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ He searched his pockets for his cigarettes. ‘No racing today.’
‘Why, is it raining in England also?’
Did rain fall differently there? Colder? The drops smaller? Could they rip leaves and buckle gutters in the Somerset and Suffolk I’d read about as they did in Have lock Town?
‘Why not? They are not immune.’ My father stood up and searched his trouser pockets again. ‘Have you seen my cigarettes?
‘You should stop smoking.’
‘What have you done with them?’
/>
‘Nothing. I’m not your ayah. You want to smoke, you smoke. What has it to do with me?’
‘Exactly.’
I don’t know what my parents saw in each other to make them believe they could have a meaningful life together. Were such pairings totally random? Maybe the only choice you have is the choice of a friend. The person who becomes your best friend. Not what happens to them, or to you. I pocketed a couple of ginger nuts from the cookie jar and slipped into the garage where I kept my bike.
Our decrepit Ford Anglia – a yellowing white top with rusty brown edges – stood in the damp concrete box, the tyres ready to crack and the seats already split at the seams where the stitching had come undone. My father did not care. ‘As long as it goes, what does it matter?’ For my mother the problem was how to stop when the brakes were so soft. My brakes were also a worry – on my bike. The uneven rubber pads needed adjusting. From Jay I was learning that a touch of courage, a word at the right moment, a few drops of 3-in-1 oil was all it took to make a difference. As I finished tightening the brake cable, I sensed Siripala watching from the kitchen door.
‘Don’t go out, baba. You’ll catch a cold.’ He reached out.
I shook his hand off.
Siripala grinned in a boxy sort of way. He grinned when he didn’t know what else to do, a strategy of dazed helplessness once but which had settled into sharper, more sinister angles as the months passed and the box emptied of hope.
He had grown up in a village in the south, a few miles beyond Kataragama, and had come to work in our house a year earlier. His schooling had lasted only for a few years, he said, mystified that I had to go to class after class. He proudly claimed to have left such impediments behind – left parents behind – but when I saw him at the beck and call of my father, I understood the fundamental flaw in the argument.
When the rain eased, I headed for Jawatte Road.
The air, heavy with moisture, reeked of wet leaves and washed bitumen; muddy rivulets and filthy drains gushed into each other at every junction. I rang my bell hard and fast, lifting my thumb with a ping. The old cobbler setting out his rickety stall at the corner of Thimbirigasyaya bared one of his rare red and yellow chewed-up grins as I took a low, fast turn. A bus, belching into gear, splashed and honked but I shot ahead. The main road was clear. I could get up a good speed on the long straight strip with its easy rise and fall. The dip near the Bo-tree and shrine had filled up and I sailed through, spraying water like a wild cat. Legs up, just on momentum. Until Jay had turned up, all my true companions sprang from the pages of adventure books, or from comics and films. I would conjure up deserts out of cereal bowls, prairies out of a patch of lawn, oceans out of puddles for them to explore. The men strong and of few words; the women permanently moistened and tantalising for reasons I could not work out. Friendship always an unspoken bond and love a fire that flared at the end of a story, not the beginning.
Near the racecourse, the Radio Ceylon building loomed. My mother was not there at that moment, but I could feel her earlier presence issuing from its mast like a phantom broadcast. I loved the building, the buzz inside, when she used to take me to see the Saturday stars and the faces behind Kiddies’ Korner, the Hit Parade and the Golden Voice. But now, vaulting towards my teens, I only wanted to get to the playing field behind. I took the turn, deftly avoiding a lorry creaking round the bend with a load of cane chairs, and headed down the SSC – the Sinhalese Sports Club – road at the back.
Independence Hall, on Torrington Square, no older than me, pretended to be a monument of antiquity: a grand curved roof floating on ghostly columns that echoed the thousandpillars of a legendary golden age. The national dream it tried to evoke had no effect on me; I had no passion for ancient kings nor the gods of any denomination. My heroes wore blue jeans, they danced to the tunes of Elvis and bounced along with John, Paul, George and Ringo. I rang my bell and started along the bund around the field singing ‘I wanna hold your hand’ at the top of my voice. Beatlemania in my part of town flowed solely from me: I felt I had a lot to make up for. Maybe I could persuade Jay to join me and together start a fan club.
Then, when I got closer to the hall, I saw I was not alone.
Standing by one of the stone lions guarding the hall, her bushy hair tied back behind her head, a proud red shirt tickling the shade, was a girl. She had her eyes trained on the main avenue leading to the square and thankfully not in my direction, but I wished I could be vaporised on the spot. Even from a hundred yards away, she must have heard me careering around, twisting and shouting like a lunatic from Liverpool.
Quickly wheeling my bike behind a tree, I pretended to fiddle with the brake cable and watched.
A few minutes later, Jay appeared coolly coasting handsfree towards her. Before I could warn him, the girl jumped down onto the road waving. Jay came to a stop. They spoke in a way that showed they knew each other. Then she got onto the crossbar of his bike, side-saddle, and he put his arms around her. He set off back the way he had come. He had not seen me. Probably could not see anything with his face buried like that in her hair.
The heart, I’d learnt, was the size of a fist: it pummelled the young dove I’d nurtured inside. As soon as they disappeared, I launched off, pedalling in the opposite direction: back towards the white-domed temple and the lanes where I often hid to numb my loneliness.
The next day Jay called: his voice crackly, urgent, jumpy.
‘Can you come over?’
‘What’s happened?’ I asked, relieved to hear him, worried the girl had replaced me and ended everything: the nightwatch rota, the sunset chases, the secret bliss I had found.
‘We are under attack.’
‘The bird cage?’ I knew at once.
I put away my Motor magazine and rode over.
He was waiting at the top of the stairs, arms folded, face knotted.
‘Who was that girl?’ I plunged straight in.
‘What girl? It’s the cage, man. That’s the problem.’
‘In Torrington Square. You were going double with a girl.’
His jaw muscles loosened; his teeth appeared larger. ‘That’s Niromi.’
Not knowing what else to ask, I repeated her name. ‘Niromi?’
‘Listen, we have a real problem. Some animal has been trying to break open the aviary, going straight for the wire mesh. We have to lay a trap.’ He uttered the word ‘trap’ as though it were one itself: short, sharp and sure.
‘That thalagoya?’
‘No, it’s high up. Come, I’ll show you.’
The damage was at roof level where we had put a sloping section of mesh – now bulging inwards in two cup-like shapes.
‘You have a theory, no?’
‘We have to observe and note down the lie of the land. Can you do that? Note everything you see?’
‘Sure.’ I had developed the habit of writing down all kinds of stuff in a secret notebook. My favourite detective solved cases by making thorough observations and then analysing the facts when she had the full picture.
I scribbled in forensic detail – the mysterious shape in the mesh, the ruffled leaves, the curled bushes – Jay walked around the cage looking for signs of greater danger, an idea forming. ‘Let’s put a decoy bird out.’
I used to do that with my army of plastic soldiers, the Marine Corps or the squad of commandos. Even the plastic bareback riders – chocolatey scouts – with their legs permanently splayed, I could lead into an ambush and then deploy the rest of their side to attack the unsuspecting enemy from the rear. But that was kids’ stuff; putting a live bird out as a lure was taking the game to a whole new level.
As we headed indoors to get the trap, we came across Jay’s father in his chair on the patio. Loose smoke obscured parts of his face.
‘You boys have a problem?’
Jay hotfooted it inside without replying. I stopped. ‘Funny business with the cage. Someone’s been trying to get in.’
‘That is funny.’ Marty laughed.
A fake, private laugh. ‘Safer in than out, eh?’
‘Someone’s trying to get at the birds.’
‘Those bloody budgies? Probably to shut them up. I could wring their bloody necks myself sometimes.’
‘They have no necks.’ The words escaped too soon.
Marty laughed again, quietly, impenetrably. His eyes shifted, half shielded, but his mouth curled beneath the wiry moustaches, unable to hide the sharp gleam of his teeth. ‘You are a clever Dick, aren’t you?’
‘I mean they are tiny.’
‘What is our friend going to do?’
‘Set a trap.’
‘Yes, you do that. Catch the culprit. We all need a mission.’ Marty passed a hand over his face, waving away the smoke. ‘It’s a tough job, keeping things safe.’
Was he making fun of us, or working out a problem? I could not tell. I only wanted to escape his impending barbs.
Marty lifted the short transparent TarGard cigarette holder to his lips and took a long drag. Tar seeped through the slit in the gold filter to fill the sealed end of the holder. Black treacle. ‘There comes a point, you know, when it just is not worth it anymore. You’ll see, one day.’
‘I better go.’ I headed upstairs.
On the balcony, Jay had already uncovered Sunbeam’s old birdcage and started reshaping the door.
‘We’ll do this like a fish-catcher, you know.’
‘A what?’
‘Have you not gone fishing? Set a kuduwa in a stream?’
‘Never heard of fishing with a cage.’
‘Oh, boy, you got a lot to learn. I’ll take you one of these days. For now, you better just watch.’ He undid some of the bars at the front and bent the thin cross wires to point inwards. ‘The trick is to make the cage simple for the intruder to enter but difficult to get out.’ He pushed his hand in, to show how easily it went through but how when he tried to pull his hand out the loose wires dug in. He had to push them back carefully with a wooden ruler to release his hand. ‘How’s that?’
‘But what if the thing going in after the budgie is small enough to creep out again.’ I never felt I was an intruder.
Suncatcher Page 7
