Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Not never. When you were little he was always storming off.’ He folded the chamois and gave the bonnet another wipe. ‘Don’t worry. Your mother will reel him back soon enough.’

  On our way back to Casa Lihiniya, Jay swore. ‘Bastards. Both of them. Uncle Elvin knows more, no?’

  ‘He’ll tell your Ma, won’t he?’

  ‘You think we all live in a cage?’ Jay asked. ‘A cage you can’t see.’

  ‘Imprisoned, you mean?’

  ‘Nobody cares fuck all.’

  Marty did not turn up that evening. The next day Jay, searching his father’s room, discovered that the roll-top desk had been left unlocked. The drawers had been emptied. The blue cardboard suitcase with the expandable metal hinges that was usually stored above the wardrobe was missing and also the snazzier Sea Island cotton shirts Marty had collected from his trips abroad. Jay pulled out all the drawers. ‘He hates her. That’s what. He hates her and hates me.’

  The news of Marty’s disappearance spread quickly through Colombo’s networks of clubs and card tables. My mother was concerned about Jay but my father said that people of that ilk were always one step ahead. ‘Must be dodging something.’

  ‘I heard he has set up in Thailand,’ she told him in a tone that suggested a wider conspiracy. ‘Another woman.’

  ‘The farther away he goes the better,’ he replied. ‘It’ll take seven years before the tsarina can claim he is as good as dead and get control of all that ill-gotten wealth.’

  ‘Ill-gotten? How can you say that? The poor woman must be in a state. Dilini says he had no money left anyway. He’s left her in the ditch. Serious debt.’

  ‘Rubbish. Poor, she is not. True, the misdeeds of his forebears are not her fault but she married into the pot. Those Alavises, I heard, come from a pedigree line of rogues. The grandfather was the worst kind of feudal caste-clot turned capitalist. Ill-gotten is the kinder way of putting it. How do you think they got all that money? Working in the post office?’

  I thought it my duty to interrupt: ‘Maybe he’s been kidnapped?’

  ‘With his suitcase, you say?’ my father sneered, once more bungling the opportunity to engage across the generations.

  ‘Gangsters might have come and got him to pack his bags for a long journey.’

  ‘Enough Perry Mason,’ my mother said. ‘Instead of those ridiculous detective stories, you better get on with your algebra for your tuition master tomorrow.’

  My father tried to repair the damage. ‘Don’t worry, son. Your friend will be fine. These people have a way of turning any obstacle into an advantage.’

  ‘Isn’t that your ambition too, Clarence?’ my mother shot back at him.

  I left them to brew another useless row and cycled over to my haven – the bookshop on St Kilda’s.

  Mr Ismail, squeezed into a corner, his hair unsprung in places, used both hands to gather the pencil shavings strewn like dazed birds into a neat pile on his desk. In front of him, studiously ignored, a parcel of books lay unwrapped, the brown paper flattened and folded back and held in place by a bottle of Parker ink.

  I slipped past him into the alcoves where the World War II comics and W. E. Johns paperbacks were shelved.

  Mr Ismail sensed my hesitation. ‘What are you looking for today, young man?’

  ‘Don’t really know.’

  ‘Thank goodness. If we always knew what we were looking for, we’d never find anything new, would we?’ He paused, his gaze shifting between the books and me. ‘The thrill of the unexpected, if it is truly uplifting, is hard to beat.’

  ‘You’ve discovered something, Mr Ismail?’

  The smoky lower edges of Mr Ismail’s face – his chin and jawline – were speckled with grey as though a recent fire had razed the surface. He pressed his fingers to the place a few inches from his mouth where the rough deepened.

  ‘I have just realised I’ve been labouring under a serious misapprehension all these years. I’ve always assumed that people are driven by a curiosity at the heart of their being. That when they come here, to my book room, they are curious about the world and are keen to find out things.’ He rubbed the corner of his mouth, lifting it even as his large eyes sank lower into his empty cheeks. ‘But I find now that is not entirely true. You nibble at everything to find out the truth only when you are young. The adult mind just wants to forget, or escape.’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This sad revelation has come, like a kick from a mule, thanks to Mr Jonathan Wright, my vagrant American customer en route to a posting in Mindanao.’

  ‘He’ll come back.’

  ‘Look at them,’ he said and then wagged a finger. ‘Or perhaps you should not.’

  They were not totally unfamiliar: Harold Robbins, for one, I recognised from my father’s bathroom shelf.

  Using the tips of his fingers Mr Ismail pushed the pile away. ‘I knew from his first visit that he had a taste for the racy, but I had hopes that his Peace Corps rucksack might have had room for an essay of Emerson’s, or some Thoreau. Maybe even the sermons of Dr King, or Thomas Merton, or Black Elk – why not? But look at what he has carried all the way from America. You can see from the back covers that he bought most of them in a New York bookstore, except for those two from London and San Francisco. Thank God for Allen Ginsberg.’

  ‘Maybe he hung on to his favourites.’

  ‘Alas, no. He said this was the sum total of his being, although not in so many words. He wants to arrive in Mindanao a new man.’

  The idea that these books had been transported from San Francisco, New York and London by hand was exhilarating to me and compensated for any disappointment Mr Ismail suffered over the content. I understood of course that most of the books in Mr Ismail’s shop came from other places, but it had never struck me that a specific book might have travelled by ship or plane just as a person did, like the mysterious Jonathan Wright himself, to bring peace to troubled minds. What Mindanao, wherever that was, did not apparently need, could be my ticket to a new world.

  ‘Can I get one? Maybe this?’ I picked up a small, square, black-edged book and opened it to a poem celebrating a green automobile.

  ‘I’ve never had one of these City Lights editions here before. I can’t let it go just yet. In any case, you may be too young for that.’

  I checked the bookshelf of older books and recognised the name Engels from my father’s favourites.

  ‘What about this then?’ I pulled it out, intrigued by the title – The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State – hoping Mr Ismail would cheer up seeing that curiosity still lived in a youngster’s mind and that I had a browser’s golden touch.

  ‘Interesting choice. A subject we all ought to understand, young and old. An early edition, I believe, and Mr Engels’ last book. I suspect quite heartfelt, beneath the academic veneer. I suppose any book needs a slice of the heartfelt to keep it afloat.’ Mr Ismail counted the coins I handed over. ‘I have to say, if not for you, my little bookworm, this valiant ship could very well sink.’

  I smiled politely at the weak joke, but as I pedalled away, the worry that it might be true grew in me.

  Term began and I fell into an anxious routine in which I would drop by Jay’s house before going home after school almost every day, unsure of what to expect and what to hope for. Although Jay had said Gerry was all right, his injury preyed on my mind too.

  I didn’t see Sonya, but Jay said his mother was becoming increasingly distraught with every additional day of Marty’s absence. ‘She is going nuts. Completely nuts.’

  It made no sense to me back then. Marty and Sonya seemed to have no real need of each other; why would she care about his absence when he impinged so little on her life? I had no understanding of the compromises by which the adult world found its temporary equilibrium, whether between partners, lovers, families or tribes. In any case, I was more interested and pleased by the fact that Jay wanted to confide in me. ‘What about y
ou?’ I asked.

  ‘She doesn’t understand he’s walked out on her. Just proves he is the bastard I always reckoned he was and she is plain stupid to think that she’s free but he is chained.’

  I had not fathomed, in our boy’s world, how deep an anger Jay had for his parents; even at that point I did not grasp how forcefully it would shape both our vanishing childhoods.

  Elvin was the one who had explained the situation to Jay. Marty had called him from Singapore to say that he had put the formal matters regarding a divorce into the hands of his lawyers; he had asked Elvin to look after the family – Jay and Sonya – until a proper settlement was agreed. Although he had, as Jay put it, funked a showdown, all the temporary arrangements had been meticulously planned.

  Not until the third day after Elvin’s revelation did I see Sonya. She emerged from her room, clutching a bottle, and headed for the patio. Her hair was not good. Approaching a large pot of anthuriums, she stretched out a hand, unsteady but determined, and snapped off the long stamen of the biggest flower. Then she saw me and the moment of triumph receded. She screwed up her face. ‘Don’t you start pointing your damn finger either.’

  ‘Are you all right, Auntie?’

  An awkward scuffle broke out around her mouth and she drew breath. ‘Much better,’ she said. ‘I’m much, much better now.’ She spoke with the conviction of a person who had seen her chances slip permanently out of reach.

  She stumbled and I caught her by the arm. Her perfume was that sweet, yeasty one that I had noticed before, but stronger this time – enough to make me almost gag.

  ‘You want a drink, sweetie?’ She lifted the bottle and examined it. ‘Oops. Maybe not.’

  ‘That’s okay, Auntie. I’m looking for Jay.’

  ‘Me too. Just like his father. Here one minute, gone the next. What are they up to?’

  I said I would go have a look in the garden, by the bird cages.

  ‘Try upstairs. Ask that bloody parrot. Seems to know more than the rest of us all in a pie.’ She poked at her loose, awkward hair; nails lustreless, peeling. Those veins that had seemed like decorations when I first saw them had puffed up. ‘You know, Kairo, the thing is they don’t understand what I’ve had to go through. If my father was alive, he’d never have let them behave like this. He would have got them into line. He appreciated my intelligence. “Not just a pretty face,” he’d say. He wanted me to study and become a doctor or a lawyer. I wanted to, you know. To be somebody. Not just a nobody. But my mother wouldn’t have it – so oldfashioned she thought pleated slacks were made in Sodom and Gomorrah and spelt the end of civilisation even if it was Katharine Hepburn who wore them. If only he hadn’t gone and died first…’ She sat clumsily on a patio chair and looked at me dazed, suddenly unsure of my allegiance in her private war. ‘You never say anything, Kairo. What are you waiting for? Don’t wait so long you miss the bus.’

  I climbed up to Jay’s room. I wanted appreciation too. For anything. From her and from him.

  Sinbad called out from his new perch, ‘Hail-lo. Hail-lo, stranger.’ Then he added, ‘Niromi, Niromi, Niromi.’ He twisted slowly on his perch.

  Two of the tanks were empty.

  ‘What’s going on, Sinbad?’

  ‘What pot apricot,’ he squawked and raised his wings in a slow, solemn shrug.

  From the balcony, I saw Sonya crossing the garden and heading for the aviary: her shoulders bunched, head slung low. At the cage, she fumbled with the padlock; despite Jay’s precautions, she had a key. Once inside, she grabbed one of the sticks Jay had left by the pond and started swatting the air. Then she advanced on a cluster of budgies. Luckily the aviary was big enough for them to scatter out of her reach. After a couple of jabs at the birds, she yelled at them and two flew out of the door she’d left open. She followed them and started poking the branches of the neighbour’s pomegranate tree with the stick.

  ‘Auntie, the door,’ I called out. ‘The cage door is open.’

  She did not even look up.

  I raced down to the garden and across to the cage. The other birds were all huddled at the far end. I quickly shut the door and put the padlock in the ring.

  By the time I caught up with Sonya, she had dropped the stick and was examining the crinkled stripes of a croton; I escorted her, without another word, back to the house.

  Jay strode in from the porch, his long white trousers flapping; he had a pair of black cycle clips in his hand. A tall boy grown taller. He pushed back a drift of hair. ‘What’s happened?’

  Sonya’s wayward body tightened as she braced herself; that once-delicate face puckered by rip lines half-pulled. A cloudiness in her expression suggested she knew there were no soft landings. ‘Are those handcuffs for me?’

  ‘I went to the lawyer with Uncle Elvin to sort out all the stuff about Pater.’

  ‘What can those two do? You should never have brought those birds here. You know he can’t stand them.’ She had her fists bunched and her arms rigid like poles ready to shove into the ground.

  Jay tensed up. ‘What have you done now?’

  ‘He’ll never come back with those birds and the racket they make. You really shouldn’t have tormented him, son.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I had to let them out. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘You let the birds out?’

  ‘You can’t be happy in a cage. We all know that.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tried to calm him. ‘The birds stayed inside. I closed the door.’

  ‘You were with her? You let this fucking nutcase near the birds?’

  ‘No, I just saw your mother when I arrived.’

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘She got upset.’

  ‘I think I might be getting upset.’ He turned on his mother, contorting his face into a cruder, crueller shape than I had yet seen. ‘It’s your fucking fault. You chased him away. Didn’t Uncle Elvin tell you? My father’s gone because of you. Not the bloody budgies. He’s left you for another woman. Do you understand? Another bloody woman. Because he could not stand it anymore. Your gallivanting, your boozing, your heartlessness. He could not stand it. And neither can I.’ His face sank gaunt and tight with the tribulations of a misplaced adolescence, forced growth, a sharpened tongue, a future of faults.

  A sense of foreboding is hard for a young boy to separate from terror, but I felt everything was going wrong and there was nothing I could do to stop the crash.

  6

  At Casa Lihiniya, Jay unleashed a daily barrage of verbal rockets at his mother; in our house my mother chastised my father for his moral disarmament, his gambling and his politics, with a sniper’s precision. His shield was a newspaper; Sonya’s was incomprehension. The low heat that had kept small squabbles simmering in the corners of each house rose; tempers reached boiling point.

  The book I had picked up at Mr Ismail’s on family and property proved to be of no help. I flicked over the pages until a paragraph on the Iroquois caught my eye: Iroquois boys could be brothers even though they might not have the same biological parents. This chimed with my feelings regarding friendship and kinship, but it also suggested that fathers and mothers were interchangeable and that disturbed me. Could what had happened to Jay’s parents also happen to mine, if they were all so connected? Could my father also up and leave? My indomitable mother lose her grip?

  On Sunday night, at the end of the first week in September, my parents had their biggest row. Howls of protest: ‘How, Clarence, how?’ My mother was desperate for a safe home in a country she feared had begun to slide into anarchy. My father’s response was to accuse her of paranoia instead of reassuring her: ‘Always complaining, you are. There is no reign of terror, no?’

  The next day I fled to Jay’s house. Casa Lihiniya was no longer the place of wonder it had once been, but it still offered me respite. It was not, after all, my parents who were fighting there, and my presence usually had a bizarrely benign effect: I did not need to say or do anything. In th
at extravagant atmosphere, my silence drew the venom out like a sponge.

  I found Jay’s mother shaking with confusion. ‘What are you talking about, son? You are the one who made him feel so useless. A son who never lifted a finger to help him, making cage after cage to taunt him. Sin, aney.’

  Jay had shrugged off the role of son and donned the cloak of her intimidator. His voice, like his language, had coarsened with the strains of rancour that I had thought only adults knew how to nurture.

  ‘Lock up this bloody drunk bitch, Kairo. Lock her up before I knock her blathering head off.’

  ‘Help this boy of mine, please Kairo,’ Sonya pleaded. ‘I don’t know what has happened to him. Wanting to lock everyone up. Putting cages everywhere, knocking people’s heads off.’ She always knew who I was, whatever else swam in and out of her consciousness throughout those harsh and damaging days. ‘All I said was that he won’t come back unless we get rid of those birds.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Let’s go. Vamoose.’ Jay stormed out.

  ‘He used to have such a soothing face. So round and kind. My God, I could watch that sweet child sleep for hours. Forget the dips and lows, you know. But now look at him – kicking and kicking like someone else is stuck inside and can’t wait to get out.’ Her eyes amplified her own sense of distress. She stared at me as though everything in her life had been diverted from its true purpose, including me. I wanted to hold her distraught hands in mine and reassure her as only a boy like her son could, but I did not.

  I left her counting faults on her trembling fingers and followed Jay, worried that more anger than love filled his veins and wondering whether he, too, would spin out of kilter soon.

  At the milk bar I hoped to curb his wrath, to remind him of the warning in the Book of Proverbs.

  ‘You shouldn’t swear so much at her. It’s not right. She’s your mother.’

  ‘I can swear at her, and do what I like, precisely because she is my mother. She brought me into the world, so she must face the consequences. If I can’t shout at my mother, who the fuck can I shout at? You?’