Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘You said my mother thinks it’s a good idea?’

  ‘Definitely.’ Elvin brightened. ‘Your mother and I see eye to eye on this.’

  I saw a small stone in the argument Jay had been building crumble, but it did not faze him.

  My father often complained that the rich were able to organise things to their benefit in ways the poor could not even dream of; he loathed the inequity of it.

  The next day, cruising down Elibank, we passed a new building site. The plot had been stripped of all greenery and filled with heaps of sand and a concrete mixer.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Jay swore. ‘More trees gone. A pair of massive pied hornbills used to nest in that garden. Old Madam Konovsky must have conked it. We’ve got to act fast or soon only those damn crows will be left.’

  ‘But down our road, no one will build in that jungle.’

  ‘Of course they will. We must protect whatever we can. I need the old man to get hold of Bertie’s plot next door: the twenty perches there are a great wild habitat now, but it’s just what these people want.’

  ‘Who want?’

  ‘Come with me. He’ll listen if you’re with me. He says you are a good egg. Both he and my mother think so. I’ve heard them talking about you.’

  ‘Me?’ The idea of Jay’s parents talking to each other about me was hard to picture. I had never seen them in the same room together; they functioned as an optical puzzle where if one became visible, the other disappeared. ‘What? Like in a conversation?’

  ‘In a row about me. You know how he sneers. And how she can mock him. That’s their idea of a conversation. You were a moment of truce. Sometimes they completely lose it. Last night was a humdinger. He smashed a bottle of gin. He gets so angry when he’s with the booze.’

  ‘Attacked her?’

  ‘They can really chuck stuff at each other. If they are stuck together, they both drink like fish and then fight with whatever they can grab. You wouldn’t believe it. I had to clean the whole bloody mess up – gin and spaghetti all over – after they buggered off.’

  I didn’t know what to say. The quarrels at our house were not battles; I never had to scrape bolognese off the walls.

  At Casa Lihiniya, we found Marty facing the round dining table on his own, knife and fork primly aligned on his plate. A tiny gilded coffee cup to hand. No sign of any ketchup spilt.

  ‘So,’ he sampled his coffee with the exaggerated calm of a man who had regained full control of his circumstances. ‘This fellow rope you in to build another playpen?’

  ‘Sort of.’ My catch-all reply that revealed nothing but usually satisfied a grown-up’s requirement of a verbalised response.

  ‘Chicken shed,’ Jay added, keen to establish the terms of engagement. ‘Going to measure up for the chicken shed that you and Uncle Elvin are planning to build.’

  ‘Hold on, son. What planning? I am not agreeing to that preposterous idea.’

  ‘You don’t want chickens?’

  ‘Your bloody budgies are bad enough. I told him, I don’t want his blasted chickens.’

  I saw this might be where I could usefully step in even though I didn’t know if broilers were hens or not. ‘You’d have fresh eggs every day, Mr Alavis.’

  ‘Who do you think is going to be poking around all that muck looking for eggs every morning in this house?’

  ‘But you like eggs, don’t you, Mr Alavis?’

  ‘We live in a town. A town that is halfway to joining the twentieth century. There is an egg marketing board whose job is to provide eggs for us. If my desire was to hunt eggs, I’d live on a farm – outstation where people grow nuts and go bananas. No, grow… Never mind. Point is: in my house, I expect to wake up to the hum of air conditioning and fridges, a cup of coffee – in proper Limoges china preferably. Not bloody cockerels with their doodle-dos and broody bloody hens popping eggs out of their bottoms, or any other damn hanky-panky.’

  ‘So, you don’t want chickens anywhere near the neighbourhood?’ Jay asked innocently.

  ‘You’ve got it, my boy. Your fish are fine, a few budgies chirping at the far end of the garden I’ll tolerate because you are, after all, my son. But five hundred chickens, oven-ready or layers, I flaming will not.’

  Jay pulled the long, curved lobe of his ear. ‘In that case, you’d better move pronto and stop their plans for next door.’

  ‘Bertie’s backyard?’

  ‘Uncle Elvin’s business partners have their eye on that patch too. They’ll be putting chickens right there in no time, Dad.’

  ‘Bertie is a flâneur. Couldn’t care less about a business proposition from Elvin. Now, if it was a Martini at the poolside or a brandy egg-flip…’

  ‘That’s the thing. Couldn’t care less, so he’ll let them do whatever they want if he is just given a case of smuggled champers, no?’

  ‘Did Elvin say they intend to go in with Bertie?’

  ‘If you won’t let them in here, then that’s the obvious next option. Won’t be tea and roses next door. If you want to keep them out, you’ll have to talk to Uncle Bertie first and buy that strip off him before they do. It’s the only way.’ Marty eyed his son with cautious admiration. ‘You are thinking very…’ he pressed in his upper lip with his forefinger, flattening the bristles of his moustaches to coax out the right word. ‘Yes, very astutely. Elvin says sell, but you might well be right, son. This could, in fact, be the time to buy. Extend one’s holdings when all around you men are losing theirs.’

  ‘If you want something, you have to make it happen.’

  ‘Right, son.’ Marty beamed. ‘That’s exactly it. You don’t know how happy I am that you can see that.’

  Cycling over to the milk bar later, Jay made his bike rear, like a stallion, pulling up the front wheel. ‘He’s all talk, the old man.’

  ‘He was impressed. He said you were right.’

  Jay dismissed the idea with a wave. ‘He hopes I might be useful one day for his business, that’s all.’

  The trouble with fathers was that they were always scheming. We lived on an island close to the equator, but our fathers were icebergs: all shiny and smooth on top but with jagged edges lurking out of sight. Jay’s father, like mine, only exposed a fraction of his cogitations, assuming his contempt could be masked by sarcasm. Except, this time, the praise had sounded genuine; perhaps Jay should have been more generous in return.

  At the milk bar, Channa occupied one of Mahela’s new picnic tables, leg pumping up and down in excitement.

  ‘What’s the news?’ Jay asked.

  ‘You really wanna hear?’

  ‘Come on, tell.’

  ‘My dad’s going to go to England,’ Channa blurted out.

  ‘No way. How? Embargo, no? No one can get an exit visa to go anywhere.’

  Mahela slid the chocolate drinks onto the counter. ‘No, no, no. We are not yet the Soviet Union. If you’ve already stashed money abroad, or if you have a sponsor, you can go. And some people have all the luck, no?’

  Channa glowed, lit from inside, his shiny round face a luminous paper lantern.

  ‘What’s the scheme?’ Jay asked.

  ‘Not his scheme. British Council selected him to go on a study tour.’

  ‘But he’s way too old to study.’

  ‘It’s a tour where you get to learn stuff for your job. He might go for a whole year and he said we’ll be able to visit him. In London and Manchester and Nottingham.’

  ‘Sherwood Forest?’ Spellbound, I waited for more place names.

  ‘Yes. Everywhere. After that, my dad says, he won’t have any problem. He’ll have a special qualification no one else here has.’

  Jay circled Channa, studying him from different angles, piecing together a puzzle that had unexpectedly changed shape. ‘How will you go?’

  I wanted to tell Jay everything did not always fit neatly together. Sometimes extraordinary things happened. A light appears, a new star, and it changes the way things are forever. He of all people should know
that.

  ‘Could some people really have all the luck?’ I asked my father, taking a chance on another full-blown lecture. Mahela’s casual fatalism bothered me. ‘Like, how come we don’t have an estate?’

  ‘So, that little pamphlet has piqued your interest after all, young man.’

  ‘Is it the fault of the British?’

  ‘Were you not listening the other day? Nationalisation is simply a restoration to pre-British common ownership. You see, in 1841, or roundabout, those crafty buggers Arbuthnot and Mackenzie expropriated the best agricultural land in the name of the crown and put it up for sale – only thing, they gave themselves the first bite.’

  ‘A land grab?’

  ‘Precisely. Bought huge tracts for peanuts.’

  ‘But Jay’s uncle is not one of them.’

  ‘One of his scheming forebears would have been a colonial lackey and been rewarded with a piece of this or that.’ He ran a finger along the spines on his bookshelf. ‘I have a book here on plantation economics and the colonial enterprise.’ He pulled out a mustard-coloured tome and opened it. ‘The British knew that their future prosperity lay in places like ours.’

  ‘You want me to read that?’

  ‘Perhaps not yet.’ He shut the book and put it back. ‘I’m sure I have another Young Socialist pamphlet that might be more suitable. I’ll find it for you after my bath.’

  The phone rang while he was in the bathroom. One of mother’s friends invited her to make a fourth for a game of bridge.

  ‘Righty-ho. I just need to pick up some groceries from Premasiri’s and then I’ll be over.’ She sang a French song about regret as she quickly jotted down her shopping list.

  ‘Have you ever thought of a trip abroad, Ma?’

  ‘I’m going to Colpetty.’

  ‘British Council is sending Channa’s father to England to do a study tour. If they do it for newspaper people, they must do it for radio people too.’ I waited for a moment, before adding, ‘Then I could come too.’

  ‘Your father would not approve of me going like that, especially not with the British Council.’

  ‘Why? To get a trip like that would be a sign of major good luck. He’d say you hit the jackpot, no?’

  She smiled kindly. ‘Doing well is not a matter of good luck, putha. Channa’s father, Ronny, is a charmer – especially on a dance floor – but he is also a doer. Your father believes that luck is a substitute for hard work but chance is more likely to lead to an accident, not fortune.’

  I could not accept that. She was wrong. Already, from what I had seen, I knew good luck existed and that my father’s faith in it was not misplaced. Accidents had nothing to do with it.

  ‘But don’t you want to?’

  ‘What I want, child, is a fair chance. For you and for me. That’s all. And that darn earring. Where did it go?’ She rummaged around the brass prayer bowl that collected all the mini-paraphernalia of our household: keys, jotters, pencils and coins. She had the knack of reducing all the world’s problems to a single action within her remit. She found the tiny moonstone stud and smiled triumphantly. ‘Anyway, I’m off now. Tell your father I’ve gone to bridge – if he remembers to ask.’

  By the time he came out of the bathroom and called for her, she had left. I told him she had gone to play cards.

  ‘At least she hasn’t gone over to Voice of America.’ He dug out his thick, webbed brown sandals from under a cupboard. ‘I’m popping over to the club for another spot of Russian roulette, or whatever the heck they are playing at today. You should get on with that declension and conjugation business. At your age, it’s the best thing you can do. Learn the lingo of the day.’ He did not say mother tongue. It was not an oversight.

  Wanting a night ride, I cycled over to Jay’s house at full speed, dynamo whirring, cycle lamp blazing. The roads were empty. The sky pleated and starless.

  At Jay’s house, the gate yawned open; I did the two-note signal and climbed the outside stairs to the balcony.

  He had his Dansette on low: I recognised the haunting hit single about not letting the sun catch you crying. Gerry and the Pacemakers.

  Jay lay stretched out on a bench in front of a tank studying a brazen angel fish as it flashed its silver side in the moonlight.

  ‘What’s happened? Didn’t you hear me whistle?’

  Jay inclined his head slightly but said nothing. I was used to that – Jay thinking; when ready, speech would flow.

  In his stillness, the admiration I had felt for him in our early days returned; disquiet always quickly faded in his presence. This evening though, Jay himself seemed to have faded. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles like a child.

  ‘Why are they called angel fish? They don’t have wings. They can’t fly.’

  ‘With those fins, they look like angels?’

  ‘How angels? You see how they poke each other. So aggressive. Flat, one-dimensional, aggressive triangles. A piece of swimming geometry. They should be called angle fish.’ He sounded more angry than heartbroken.

  ‘Sounds too much like angler.’ As I said it, I saw that language – the organisation of words – was infinitely more interesting to me than geometry, algebra and arithmetic. I wanted to understand the meaning of words I had begun to notice: equality and dignity. The meaning of love.

  Jay reached for a small pencil torch and switched it on. He shone it on the largest of the angel fish.

  ‘You know, swimming like that in a tank, the poor bugger looks bloody nervous, like he doesn’t know what might be lurking behind those rocks. Such a safe place, but he doesn’t know it. So dumb.’

  ‘In the wild, it isn’t safe. Like, in a lake he could be swallowed by a croc any sec.’

  ‘They come from the rivers of South America. Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t be safe there. If only he knew the waters have changed. The situation has changed but he’s still stuck, living with his ancestors’ fears. Look, he thinks that leaf is a gourami ready to gulp him, so he takes it out on the smaller fellows. It makes him feel safer, scaring the others. I wish I could make them all feel safe.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you are doing for them? And for the birds?’

  ‘But I can’t. I can’t make it really safe, that’s the problem.’

  The light caught his face as he put the torch away, his eyes smaller than usual, inept, the skin puffed up round the edges.

  ‘The crows haven’t tried anything again, have they?’

  ‘Sunbeam is dead.’ Jay’s voice was hardly audible. ‘I found him keeled over.’

  ‘How dead?’

  ‘Dunno. Guess it happens. Maybe God takes those he loves sooner.’

  ‘That’s love?’

  ‘The love of God; that is what we must climb up to, Uncle Elvin says.’ Jay spoke softly but determinedly. ‘You bury the dead and learn to live.’ He meant learn to live with loss and the inexplicable forces that shape a life, although I did not understand it at the time.

  ‘Will we bury him in the garden?’

  ‘I’ve done it already.’

  I swallowed my disappointment and waited patiently for Jay to conjure up again the small yellow augury that had flashed so dazzlingly on the day we first met.

  ‘He weighed like nothing in my hand. Breath all gone. Just feathers and tiny bones. Could have just crushed him like a piece of paper.’

  I feared then that soon I would lose my friend too. Even at that tender age I had a suspicion of worse to come: unfocused, unbearable loss. A child who knew so little and yet was so sure of inevitable grief. I wished for strong, buoyant words then, the most buoyant words ever known. Words that would make some sense of the growing confusion of our lives.

  When Jay finally spoke again, his voice was tentative; his words devastating. ‘I need to be alone.’

  I climbed down the concrete steps to the bikes and untethered mine from Jay’s. I pushed off without bothering with the lamp; the wheels hissed in the dark. The huddle of fireflies halfway down the lane dispersed, blinkin
g in disarray. I took the long way home, finding comfort in movement.

  At the roundabout, I stopped. The roads were empty.

  I had not seen the girl who’d ridden with Jay since that day by Independence Hall but he had, no doubt, and it troubled me more than I could understand then. If only I could hold Jay back from stepping out of our world – my world – into that adult world that seemed so full of recrimination and regret. A world so messed up that it mistook death for the love of God.

  The glass bowl of the streetlamp swelled with unnatural light.

  5

  At home, despite their bickering, I began to see my parents had a much stronger bond than I had thought. Their arguments were not as bitter as those described by Jay. They stuck together, disconnected from any extended family; no living grandparents, uncles and aunts rare as pink hippos. We were ultra-nuclear in a national maze of creeping family trees where genealogy was the number one protocol. Hunkered down, my father preferred comrades to relatives but relied mostly on an idealistic future. My mother found release by immersing herself in a world of microphones and mellow voices, a musical fantasy that stretched from the Caribbean Beat to the Latin Quarter, and letting off steam at cha-cha-cha. Her ability to flit between separate worlds appealed to me; I wanted to be able to do the same.

  Wearing a fresh Fred Perry shirt and a clean pair of white shorts, I turned up at three thirty on the dot at her tea-break, as I used to do before Jay entered the scene.

  ‘How nice,’ she said and steered me proudly through the double doors. ‘Come, putha. We have new regulations now but you can explore the archive room.’