Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘You didn’t say anything about a sea-bath,’ Niromi protested. ‘I didn’t bring my swimsuit.’

  ‘Who needs swimsuits?’

  Maybe that was why. So we could undress in the dark and all go in the sea without our clothes.

  I changed gear again and wove the jeep between the bluechipped palm trees, popping sea grapes, onto the beach and stopped on the dry, powdery sand with the engine panting and the surf foaming in front of us.

  ‘Now what?’ My heart had never felt so close to the bone and I did not know why.

  ‘First, we walk,’ Jay said. ‘Up to those rocks. Have to climb to the top, then you’ll see.’

  This time Jay led the way; Niromi and I followed. Me, unsure if I should hold her hand. Not for her sake, but for mine. The soft, relentless sand, the deceptive sea, the serrated light combing the water and the violent strands of the sinking sun rupturing the sky both excited me and frightened me as I became aware that I might be on the verge of too much yearning.

  At the rocks, Jay slipped into tracker mode and gestured for us to climb up quietly over the dry, brown, rubbery sea kelp and whitening barnacles. Niromi clambered ahead; I placed my hands and feet where she had put hers, matching her every move.

  At the top of the ridge, Jay chose a flat rock where we could perch, cross-legged, next to each other. Niromi’s bare knee touched mine, scalding me. The new faint hairs on my leg strayed and lifted, whetted by the sea breeze; my skin tightened. Jeans would have been safer than shorts; I wished I had a pair and tight straps to hold things in.

  Below us, the beach was narrow and steep. The surf rolled softly against it, cushioned and hushed for something momentous and unavailable anywhere else along the coast.

  ‘It’s nice but what are we here for?’ Niromi asked.

  She had tied her hair into a bunch at the back with an elastic band which left her neck naked. The colour had seeped away from it into her shoulders except for a black mole an inch below the hairline which she may never have seen but I had.

  ‘Wait,’ Jay put a finger to his lips. ‘Watch the sky above the water. That’s where it’ll begin.’

  At first, I assumed the storm of dark dots that swirled and swerved across the gloaming sky, a dark, prickly genie of massive proportions shifting its shape from moment to moment, was a phantasmagorical rain cloud, or even a tornado. It banked and flipped and doubled itself and rushed across the water right before us, sweeping across the cove and folding into the line of short-form palm trees while a low wall of sound, of crunching and chirping, began to grow over the vibrations from the swaying coconut lyres. Then another cloud of tiny birds, and another, appeared in the sky. They danced and swirled, like the first, before swooping down into the trees. With each wave, the sound grew louder: a crescendo as the scarlet light in the sky dwindled. Jay whistled with the birds, as if he might be raising their song a note higher, as they raised his, and all the while new clouds of birds descended to merge with those in the trees. Cloud after zooming, twisting, dancing cloud.

  ‘There must be thousands.’ Niromi’s hand strayed and found mine. She gripped it hard, stronger and more charged than I had thought possible for a girl. The clouds of birds coalesced and the patterns dispersed momentarily before others took their place. I noticed she no longer had a ring on her finger; her nails were pink with identical white tips. Her wrist had a bone so round I wanted to cover it with my lips.

  Jay spoke in a rapture of his own: ‘Tens of thousands. Barn swallows. They’ve flown across oceans and continents to be here. Just to be here tonight. Look. Look how they fly.’

  I watched him: the outline of his face, the ridge of his brow, the wide-open eyes, the slope of his nose and slightly turned out lips, the dip of his chin. Then hers, which seemed to match his in every curve and flourish. Could they both be the other half of mine?

  The last traces of the sun blackened and early stars began to speckle the receding dome. The birds fell silent. Huddled in their lines of thirty or forty on each frond of the hundreds of branches, muffling the strings, they became the silent puffs that helped the earth to turn. From our vantage point I saw how they were only one measure of the millions of birds that aerated the earth, wings beating, singing, churning clouds and wondered how in among those millions a grey parrot, or an Atlantic puffin, or an eagle will find a mate they would stay with for the rest of their lives.

  We walked back to the jeep in the glow of silvery sealight, skirting the froth of low waves, each lost in mysterious flights to secret places, my uncertainty sharpened by an unfamiliar slippery desire.

  ‘That was worth it, no?’ Jay pulled out a knapsack from the back of the jeep. ‘To witness that?’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Niromi’s breath sounded heavier than his. ‘Felt they were coming like that just for you. How did you find this place, Jay?’

  ‘Instinct, I guess. I was staying with my uncle at a beach house farther along and I just found it.’ Jay drew his initial in the sand with his foot. ‘One day you’re just playing in the sand, and then suddenly everything looks so different.’

  ‘How long have they been coming like that?’

  ‘Congregating? Hundreds of years maybe. Like those bats, no, Kairo? You remember those bats we wanted to follow? We should still do it, you know. Find out what the hell they are up to.’

  I did not say anything. Things that had seemed almost crystalline a moment ago were no longer clear. The barn swallows in their cloud formations now confused me. The bats in their unresolved straight lines confused me. Jay confused me, and Niromi confused me. The suggestion of swimming naked in the sea with her worried me; driving all the way home in the night worried me. I had not done either before. Skinny-dipping in the pond on Elvin’s estate was not the same. Could I undress in front of Niromi? What does one do with a girl? Jay had not given me any coaching.

  ‘What about the sea?’ I asked.

  ‘You wanna go in?’

  ‘How?’ I saw her chest rising and falling, fish gulping, and felt a stirring; a rush inside clouding everything, singing and clapping. My hand burned. ‘Will you do the driving, going back?’

  ‘It’s a good feeling. A quick dip, then just follow your homing instinct.’

  ‘I haven’t done it at night. Isn’t it scary?’ Not just the driving, but the night currents, the deep sea. The girl and boy thing.

  ‘If you are not ready, you are not ready.’ He pulled out a small flat bottle from the knapsack. ‘I need a drink first.’

  ‘What’s that? Gin?’ Niromi asked.

  ‘Schnapps. Gal Oya Schnapps. Want some? Dutch courage before you jump in the water?’ He laughed.

  They each had a swig.

  I reached out for mine.

  ‘No, not for you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re too young.’

  ‘I am not.’ I snatched the bottle and took a big swig as Jay had done. The alcohol ignited in my throat and made me retch. In one searing second, I hated Jay for making me grow up this way.

  ‘No, please don’t,’ Jay pleaded. ‘No more.’

  The heat in my chest and stomach gave me no courage, only a dull metallic welding of bones to make me sink. A sense of uncaring. I took another gulp before letting go of the bottle.

  The three of us waited in a silence that grew thicker and pricklier. Nobody touched the bottle again. I understood something had happened, or was about to happen, that should not ever happen. Maybe Jay had to kiss her before she took her clothes off. Maybe if I took another sip, I could too. I wanted to. If Jay could, I could too. We were the same. All for one, one for all. I was not a little boy. Not anymore. I could see him roll his tongue in his mouth, running it over his teeth in preparation.

  Then Jay grabbed the bottle and hurled it into the sea.

  The waves had stopped. After the splash, the silence became intolerable.

  ‘I better drive back, no?’ Niromi said and started to climb into the driving seat.
r />   ‘No.’ Jay unclasped her hand from the steering wheel.

  She stiffened for a moment before relinquishing her place. Jay took control without another word. He started the engine and raced it higher and higher until it seemed it might break into a million tiny pieces.

  I curled into the back seat swallowing air. Fighting the urge to drown. Niromi settled in the front; her eyes caught a beam of stray light off the water. She released her hair and shook it. Then she turned to me and I saw she was as seared as I was by the carelessness of the night.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a tone that my mother might have used. Squirming in the dark, I hated the tears I could feel so unfairly welling up. I hated the sun. I hated the moon. I hated what had happened.

  Over the next few days and nights I found it hard to keep Niromi out of my thoughts. Every time I tried to make up with Jay in my mind, she would eclipse him and leave me in a kind of limbo that resolved nothing.

  In my pictorial guide to the story of America, I had been fascinated to discover that Pocahontas was the one who had kept the peace between the Powhatans and the English in Virginia. She had even gone to England and met Elizabeth I. No king to speak of overshadowed the story; she and the Queen were the ones that mattered. I kept thinking about that.

  By the time the December holidays started, things were jumbled up for everyone. My father shot out of the house early one morning, even though it was not a working day for him.

  ‘Have to catch a fellow. Call Quickshaws for a taxi if you need to go out,’ he yelled.

  Before my mother could unleash a word, the car had lurched out with Siripala at the wheel, the routine gone haywire.

  She banged the door to her room shut. I had a bad feeling about the day.

  I set off for the milk bar under a sky swollen with low, dark clouds, but as I approached I noticed the flags and awning had disappeared. The counter folded up, shuttered.

  Not so long ago the milk bar had been our central mooring, the safe harbour where we could not only meet, but where we could leave messages, catch up with the news, anchor and replenish. A neutral place for the three of us – with Mahela watching over us. Now he too was gone. It seemed everyone above a certain age was in danger of disappearing, and the threshold was dropping.

  I stole round the back and peered through the air vents hoping to see the ice boxes and stacks of cups waiting for the milkshake maestro. I did not want things to change so much so unexpectedly. A temporary stop would be all right. A pause to catch your breath, refill a water bottle, but then let things return to those first golden days when even the green caterpillars glowed. I wanted to begin again. With no bad things ever having to happen.

  A crow landed on the roof of the kiosk and started to caw. I threw a pebble at it, but it only flapped back a few paces, as if it recognised me from the time Jay shot its friend and now it had plans. I wheeled my bike down the trail to the spot from where we had viewed the planetarium taking shape and found some comfort in seeing that the building work had not finished yet, concrete rings still jutted out of mounds of earth; bare ribs of buildings.

  I rode over to the other side of the racecourse. The grandstand car park was open. Right in the corner, by the old members’ notice board, Elvin’s Austin Healey stood parked. I started towards it, but then saw Jay was not alone in the car. He was with Niromi. She raised her head from his shoulder and a moment later the two shapes fused into one. The blister in my head finally burst.

  Everything sank to a blur. Everything. First her: the day I saw her by Independence Hall; the day I bumped into her outside the radio station; the time at Mrs De Souza’s house when I knocked over the vase; the drive down to the beach; and the hot slosh of Gal Oya firewater, which I had hoped would prepare me for the worst. Then him.

  Maybe we had to be rivals. Maybe he knew that from the beginning. I began to see Jay’s world might have only ever been make-believe – a playland of phoney conspiracies and plots, stupid chicken farms and ridiculous gambling dens.

  I blazed a circle of anger and hurt to Casa Lihiniya and let myself in through the side door. The cook woman, Iris, was nowhere to be seen. Slipping in under the arch into the garden, I headed straight for the aviary.

  ‘Hail-lo, hail-lo.’ Sinbad rolled an eye.

  I slid the door open. Jay didn’t bother to lock it after his mother left. ‘Vamoose, Sinbad. He doesn’t care. You can go free.’

  I turned on the budgies that had gathered at the far end. ‘Go, go, you dumb mutts.’

  ‘Hail-lo, hail-lo,’ Sinbad mocked. ‘Va-moose.’

  I pulled at the wire mesh. The cage was my cage. Not Niromi’s. Not even Channa’s. I made it with Jay. How could he abandon me so easily? What was the point of attention and affection if they could be switched so easily? Then I panicked that I was turning into Sonya and that I’d be trapped forever like her.

  I fled – cycled hard, brushing aside the hateful everdormant tears, wanting them to drain away and leave me in perpetual drought.

  At the temple close to home, I stopped. The curve of the huge, white dagoba dome rising out of the ground filled the sky. Although this was where a young man had been killed in a riot fifty years earlier, its apparent vast emptiness and impassivity obliterated history. It could swallow more than my anxieties. I yearned to simply stop thinking, to stop the jostling, stop the random fear and even the longing that mystified me. I wanted to cease to be so that I would stop being lonely and yet I did not want to ever die.

  On Sunday, the 13th of December 1964, nearly six months after we had first met, Jay came racing down our road in the Beetle and sounded the horn outside our house. In the ten days or so since the drive to the beach we had not spoken to each other, but Jay acted as if nothing had altered.

  ‘Come on. Final driving lesson. You did fine with the jeep. Tomorrow, you can take this one out on your own.’ He played a dampened tune on the horn.

  ‘Stop horning.’ I found it hard to breathe, to swallow. ‘I’ve got algebra to finish, or my mother will throw a fit.’

  ‘So? They all throw fits. You should have seen the fit Iris went into when I blaggarded her about the birds.’

  Nervously I fingered the chrome trim of the sill. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Damn fool woman left the cage door wide open. They could have all gone to Timbuktu. I gave her hell.’

  ‘Who escaped? Sinbad?’

  ‘Just the two blue budgies. Sinbad kept the others in, although all he says now is va-moose.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sinbad was a smart bird but I wished he would shut up.

  ‘How’s about a quick spin? Go for a Chocolac?’

  ‘Milk bar is closed.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘It’s boarded up. Empty. Nobody there.’

  Jay squashed his round face into a clumsy attempt to display disdain. ‘I’ve gone off shakes anyway.’

  ‘Mahela’s gone.’

  ‘Maybe selling peanuts is more lucrative.’ Jay paused as a prior sense of responsibility pricked him. ‘Unless those thugs in the Wolseley came back and did something.’ He revved the engine, dismissing the thought. ‘Tomorrow then. No excuses, okay?’

  A second later, the Beetle whirred away, drawing down the trees and the bushes of the gardens along the road in its wake. My anger seeped away but I was left uneasy.

  Towards the end of the day, a green Hillman parked right up against the front wall. My father’s friend, Abey, clambered out from the passenger side because he hadn’t left enough room to open his door, and then stood in the middle of the road and stared at his car as if he couldn’t understand how it had arrived there.

  ‘So, where were you today, comrade?’ My father greeted him from the front steps. ‘You didn’t come to the meeting.’

  ‘Sorry, men.’ Abey stretched his neck from side to side, freeing it but losing air. ‘I’ve been composing my resignation letter. Not easy, I tell you. Helluva thing.’

  Abey could usually be counted on to put hi
s friends into a good mood – a dose of liver salts in a cotton suit – but this time barely a bubble broke the tightly tailored gloom that encased him.

  ‘We haven’t even hammered out the constitution for this new party and you are already resigning?’ My father rarely masked his disapproval of political wavering.

  ‘Not from our Giramal People’s Party. Have to resign from the job, no?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My name has been put on the list as a refusenik – you know, for still using English in my memos. What next? Into the clink if you say “how do you do”? All my years of service have been in English. Wasn’t even this country’s independence negotiated in English? All to no avail. So, now I have written my letter of resignation. A damn good one too, in sound English prose that regrettably will not be appreciated by the minister of tomfoolery.’

  From my eyrie at the end of the balcony, I could see both men at the front door. My father’s hair looked thinner viewed from above, his shoulders not as broad as before, his feet splayed out in peeling brown sandals. He nudged aside the brick doorstop and ushered his friend in. ‘We are all dinosaurs, Abey. All these years of dreaming, dreaming in the wrong bloody language. How did it come to seem so natural to us? Is it because of reading? Did reading books only in English blind us? I never thought I was missing anything reading Dickens, Shelley, Auden. Even Tolstoy and Marx seemed perfected in translation. But when I look at that boy of mine, I can see how it shapes everything you see.’

  Curious to know more about the dangers of reading, and its remedies, I slipped indoors too and took up position at my regular spot upstairs.

  Abey, burdened by the practicalities of early retirement, grasped for the consolations of the aggrieved. ‘Trouble is all our leaders are now led by the nose; they can smell the power of the language issue to agitate the masses.’

  ‘The point, surely, is to awaken them. A world language is to be seized, not abandoned.’ My father sniffed. ‘So, you’ve really resigned?’