Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘You should consider your position too, Clarence. These proficiency tests are not going to be scrapped. Maybe they’ll delay full implementation for the technical officers like doctors, but for the likes of us – no reprieve.’

  ‘How to quit? Need the salary, no? My son, after all…’

  ‘You better negotiate something before they kick you out.’

  ‘But why would they do that? I’m not the class enemy. I’m not even Tamil like Shaku.’

  ‘Between you, me and the lamppost, let me tell you, I think that Amirthalingam might be right. If humiliation of the Tamils is the aim, one day the youth really will rise. Next thing, they’ll all be calling for a separate state, not just the extremists. Wouldn’t you? Then we’ll be in helluva bloody mess.’

  ‘Sit, men, sit, will you. You are making me nervous fidgeting so much. Have a drink before that too is banned by the righteous right. And bloody left too. But, no, Abey, I can’t see any appetite for such extremist action, separate state or any kind of Shangri La – theocratic or bureaucratic. Everybody gets humiliated, no, hurt even? But that doesn’t make us all run amok. Maybe confused, but not berserk. It’s all talk. Hot air and fervour. How can anyone understand anything when the language we use has become so warped? Even the word “communal” is now so corrupted.’

  Siripala brought their drinks, ready poured and cleverly cut, clinking chunkily in Johnny Walker freebie glasses. Abey took his with a breezy mix of English and Sinhala. ‘Ah, Siripala. Thank you. Kohomadha?’ He parked his drink with reverence before continuing. ‘You underestimate the pulling power of wrath and fury. You should know better from all those books you read. Frustration, rage – it’s like a locomotive stoked up. But I agree, Clarence, I agree. Right now we do need a new left party, we do – the old parties are corrupted. And I am impressed with the new Giramal Party – a progressive alternative – but with the general election now set for March we have no time to prepare. For me, the tipping point was when the leader of the house spoke. You have to respect the man, no, whether or not you agree with his policies? Ours is not a sensitive tribe, but when he made that speech in parliament, it moved me.’

  My father placed his hands on the back of one of the dining chairs and leant on it; nothing short of an earthquake would move him. But Abey’s remarks about the Giramal being a political party and not a gambling club changed everything for me. All Jay’s theories, and Channa’s, lay exposed as absurd mafia fantasies. I listened on even though I wanted no more revelations.

  ‘You don’t believe that nonsense about “unadulterated totalitarianism”, do you? Press control does not lead to liquidating critics nor, as that venerable whatsit claims, “putting the people to eternal sleep”.’

  ‘It’s a slippery slope. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Nothing to slip. I’ve always maintained, the press barons are the same as robber barons.’

  I could vouch for that, although I had always assumed my father was describing a romantic combination of adventure heroes.

  ‘Clarence, for me that phrase of his, “Whither are we transiting?” hits the nail on the head whichever way you look. That’s the thing, no? We are not here just to gorge ourselves, or feather our nest, are we?’

  ‘Is that what they are all doing?’ My father’s voice dropped, flame extinguished, heat off. He presented his empty cupped hands to his friend. ‘Have we not a more noble purpose?’

  ‘Today is the day,’ Jay said when he came to collect me in the Beetle the next afternoon. ‘The day you go solo.’

  Jay slid over and I slipped into the driving seat. Jay’s face had hardened in places – around the jaw and above his cheekbones. Uneven patches. The beginnings of a beard? I wondered if he’d started to shave.

  ‘Solo? Where?’

  ‘We’ll go to Elvin’s first and I’ll take the Buick – the convertible. Then we do a race.’

  ‘Already?’

  Jay’s face tightened. ‘We don’t have much time left.’

  ‘Why?’

  He hesitated. ‘I’ve found the perfect place. Havelock golf course. It’s deserted. Abandoned. Not a soul there. There’s a fantastic fairway. Nearly half a mile on the flat. We can do whatever the fuck we like.’

  I turned on the ignition. Maybe I’d learn to swear without flinching too. ‘It’s closed because the Royal Colombo has finally opened up its membership, my father says.’

  ‘Bet Wilbur’s got his eye on the land.’

  I eased the car into gear. As you get older do your mistakes become deeper? Can you not help but see plots in accidents, confuse love and desire?

  ‘I heard they are going to build a church there.’

  ‘I told Channa I’ll give him a ride in the Buick. He’s desperate to get out of the house. Sez he can sneak out if we can pick him up at the roundabout.’

  ‘And Niromi?’

  ‘She’s been already.’ He slapped the dashboard. ‘So, let’s go.’

  He didn’t try to guide but let me prove I had regained confidence after the way the drive to the coast had ended. I did not own up and tell Jay I’d been out in our Anglia alone already – practising. I don’t know why I kept it secret. I was ready. A gear change was only shifting a stick; growing up was recalibrating your life. I could feel it happening from my toes to my fingertips. I took the main road to the big house and picked up speed. Jay said nothing, but his cheeks were full and proud.

  On Elvin’s drive, the huge blue convertible was already out, top folded down, polished and gleaming.

  ‘If you are driving that, maybe I should race you in the Austin Healey?’ The picture of Jay in it with Niromi flashed briefly, smarting.

  Jay laughed lightly. ‘Next time. We have to keep the best for next time, no? Anyway, we’ll have to go in that one together first.’

  Jay let himself out and sauntered over to the convertible with the calm confidence of a boy who knew the best was yet to come. The complications receded.

  Jay climbed into the blue car, swinging his long legs over the curved door without opening it and started the massive American engine. The car gave a shiver, preparing to fly. I pressed the accelerator with my bare toe in response and the Beetle whirred noisily. I was in full control, more than I had ever been before. I ran my fingers down the two halves of the hard plastic steering wheel – from twelve to six – to make a circle. Jay cocked a thumb and the blue car eased out, the large whitewall tyres crunching the gravel of the drive. I followed it out of the gate and we set off in convoy, each alone and yet inseparably together.

  Channa was lurking by the bakery near the roundabout. Jay stopped. The bold tail lights glowed. Seeing Channa get in the car, I felt another of those twinges that tighten the knots around the heart. But Jay had trusted me with a car of my own. That counted for more, surely? And soon he would let me drive the Austin Healey, too. Jay gave a blast from his horn and shot ahead in a swirl of flamboyance that belonged in a cinema. I chased after him. Pressed the accelerator pedal halfway and latched on right behind. The road was a blur on each side.

  We flew past the closed-up milk bar, the radio station, Independence Square, leaving behind the crow circles and the flame trees. The convertible swung into the entrance of the disused golf course. I followed in my Beetle and came to a stop, fender to fender. Channa got out and opened the gates. We drove in, one after the other, churning road rubble, right up to the dilapidated clapboard clubhouse. In the rolling emptiness of the fairways I felt uneasy. Not because of driving alone, or trying to keep up with Jay. Just uneasy, seeing the burnt edges of the evening sky, the light beginning to go.

  Jay called out from his car: ‘Drive around and get a feel for the grass under your wheels. I’ll figure out a cool circuit for a race, okay?’

  His words brought back our first trials downhill on bikes, cycling on the racecourse from Mahela’s milk bar. Sunbeam. I stared at the clubhouse trying to recall what my father had said about the golfers who had frequented it. The white paint was peel
ing and two of the windows had broken panes.

  Jay sounded his horn – a brash clarion blast. ‘Okay?’

  I tried to catch his eye but Channa in the passenger seat of the Buick was in the way. Why had Jay brought him? Why did he always let someone come between us?

  I beeped the horn and took off. The Beetle had no trouble on grass and the undulations below the first tee made it seem to soar. At one point, the engine revved as if the wheels were spinning in the air. Accelerator flattened right down to the floor, the needle hit fifty. I crossed to the other fairway.

  The convertible with Jay and Channa in it rushed the forsaken green and swerved between two disintegrating bunkers two hundred yards away while I drove back up to the clubhouse.

  The crows in the trees nearby started up.

  The convertible raced back. Jay stopped it right next to the Beetle. He had one hand on the gearstick and his other arm hanging out, leaving the wheel hands-free.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Cool.’ The Beetle was on form. My next target was sixty and in fewer seconds than Jay had ever managed in our test drives. I knew I could do it.

  ‘You see the mango tree down there? That’s the marker. First one to get down there, circle the tree, do a slalom between the bunkers and make it back here, wins. Channa, you be the judge. You draw the finishing line and stand by it.’

  Channa made a face as he climbed out of the car.

  ‘You’ll need a flag.’ I could see Channa had been hoping Jay would give him a go at the wheel.

  ‘I brought one.’ Channa pulled a yellow school pennant out of his pocket. ‘I’ll go find a stick for it.’

  While he was gone, Jay turned his car to face the mango tree down at the dog-leg. I did the same with mine. The clouds, low and red, were beginning to pile up.

  ‘Hey, you know what I’d like to do with this space?’ he asked from his car.

  ‘Make a race track?’

  Jay blinked and brushed a strand of hair out of his eyes. ‘Make a safari park. Build Noah’s ark out here. We should do that you know, bring pairs of all sorts of animals here. Have elephants and bears and leopards and deer roaming around.’

  ‘No birds?’

  ‘Yeah, birds also. Herons and parrots and peacocks. Swallows. All of them here.’ The soft collar of his pale cotton shirt lay flat and damp on the thin round bone below his neck. ‘Make this place really special.’

  Channa came back with three flagsticks. ‘I found these at the back. You guys ready?’

  ‘Sure.’ All those weeks of cycling, fishing, shooting, driving, practising, was to get me ready for this moment when I could show Jay just who I was.

  Channa stuck two of the flagsticks in the ground five yards apart. ‘First one to get through that wins.’ Wide enough for one car, but not two abreast. There could only be one winner.

  ‘So, let the best man win.’ Despite the difficulties of the last few weeks, Jay’s face still had glimpses of the buoyancy that I had seen when he first wheeled into the church car park on his bike. A kind of glee that kept fighting to burst out.

  I had only a slim chance of winning, but that did not matter. Jay was treating me as an equal already and that counted for more. I should never have doubted him.

  ‘Yours is a V-8,’ I said. ‘A Buick Skylark is a lot faster.’

  ‘On grass, it’s not just speed. Yours is designed for adversity, you know. Rommel used Volkswagens in the desert.’

  Above the noise of the engines, I heard the high screams of parakeets winging between the shreds of the late light in the trees. From the corner of my eye, I caught a spark in the sky: an early star.

  Channa took up his position and raised the yellow flag. ‘Ready?’ I stuck my thumb up. Jay did the same. Channa started his countdown: three, two, one. Go. The flagged dropped and I let go of the clutch. The car jerked, almost stalled but then took off. Jay flew ahead. I fastened on to his tail, racing to forty, fifty, fifty-five, sixty. The mango tree loomed up, Jay took the turn close, brake lights winking in alarm. I went wider, not daring to go as tight as he did. Then I saw Jay’s convertible slide on the long grass, wheels spinning. For a delicious moment I hoped I might get in front, but the Buick Skylark shot ahead with Jay whooping and waving a fist in the air. Channa, at the finishing line, started jumping up and down jabbing the air with his flag. I urged the car faster: hit sixty-five, or at least sixty-three, but by then Jay was through the finishing line. I slowed down, bringing the car in, rolling to the pits of our own Grand Prix track in the lost acres of an unpoliced town.

  Grasping the key to turn the engine off seemed beyond me, and yet the exhilaration in my veins suggested anything was possible.

  Jay got out of the Buick and came over. He leant in and put his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed it briefly. ‘Great stuff. Silver medallist, huh?’

  Was there a touch of disappointment in his voice? Maybe he had hoped his protégé would win. The speedometer, I wanted to blurt out, you should have seen it – the needle quivering – but I played it cool instead.

  ‘So, what now?’

  His face softened. ‘You choose, Kairo. Another race, or we could try chicken? Test your nerve.’

  ‘Like in that movie?’ He couldn’t mean destroy the cars. Elvin’s beautiful cars.

  ‘No, man. Go at each other. A real showdown.’

  ‘I know the score.’ I had read about brinkmanship. Daredevil driving. The Bay of Pigs. Keeping control, not letting go.

  ‘Okay. I’ll drive down to the tree again. We face each other. Then I’ll flash my headlights. On the third flash, we charge. First to swerve is chicken. Stay in line as long as you can, but don’t fuckin’ crash into me.’ He smiled, cracking the small acres of wild sunlit honey.

  ‘Sure.’ If he was up for it, so was I. Who needs the movies?

  ‘I wanna come,’ Channa, ever hopeful, pleaded.

  ‘Okay. Hop in,’ Jay said.

  There was a moment then when I could have stopped the crazy game. It would have only taken one small word: no, stop, wait. One of those slow words that Jay hated to use. But they barely fluttered in my throat as the big blue car rumbled away, the chrome fins sharpened and shining in the heavy yellow sun. I watched it go down the fairway and circle the tree.

  When it came to a stop, the large brazen headlights flashed. From that moment on, everything that happened on that rough patch of land has been in permanent slow motion. The fastest car in the slowest motion. I counted the seconds, the ebb and flow of my confused feelings folded in to form a still moment of grace. I was only a boy but I felt the two of us were bound together by a desire to be more than our uncertain selves. My fears evaporated.

  The lights flashed a second time. A couple of crows swooped into the tree by the Buick.

  I fumbled for the switches: turning on the windscreen wipers before finding the control for the headlamps. A few seconds late, I returned the flash. I kept my foot down on the clutch, racing the engine, talking myself through the actions I needed to do, and shifted into gear. I was ready to be the boy I wanted to be: strong, brave, clear. Ready to prove myself to my mother, my father, Niromi. The convertible seemed to shrug as the engine raced. The third flash of the headlights. I released the clutch as I flashed back and slipped into a dream. I did everything without having to think. All my fears, my hopes, drained away. I did the gear changes as Jay had taught me to, by instinct. My hands were steady. The engine pitched high, pumping. The speedometer needle climbed up, tick by tick. Staring through the windscreen, I put Jay in my sights. We were heading straight for each other. The gap between us in every sense shortening by the second. Ten, nine, eight, seven… hurtling.

  And then, as if on a signal, the crows rose out of the bordering trees, flapping their black capes, cawing crazily, chasing a clumsy coucal out onto the fairway. It lurched into the path of the convertible, flat tan wings on a fat black body. Jay swerved right to avoid it and I swerved in the same direction, following his actions, mirroring him, try
ing to keep my nerve. Jay pulled in some more – hard, too hard, much too hard. The car slewed into a skid, out of control. I manoeuvred out of the way and braked. The blue convertible charged on, vaulted up the front of a bunker, rose in the air as if in a whirlwind. Channa was thrown out of the car as it spun, but Jay stayed stuck to the driver’s seat, girdled, as it landed upside down, smashing the windscreen and crushing the steering wheel into his chest.

  I couldn’t move, I didn’t even open the door. I kept the engine running, thinking I should not have risen to his challenge: if I had not wanted the thrill, if I had been more the kid I should have been, he wouldn’t have been in that car going the way he was, at that speed. We would not have been playing games we should not have been playing.

  A bunch of people on a bus on the main road who had seen the blue car rising in the air quickly swarmed across to surround it. Messages were taken to nearby houses, an ambulance called. Mrs Peiris arrived and took charge of my car. The convertible was a write-off. Channa’s father came for him, and my mother for me. She took me home, stunned and silent as I was.

  There were no recriminations from her that I can remember. She put me to bed and I slept as if I never wanted to wake again. When I did, late the next afternoon, rain clouds had obscured the sun; the world seemed irrevocably altered.

  I found my mother in the kitchen. My father next to her, a newspaper crumpled in his hand, shoulders drooping.

  ‘I have to see Jay,’ I said. ‘Where did they take him?’

  My mother reached out and held me with both her hands. ‘I’m sorry, son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jay is dead.’

  ‘He can’t be.’

  ‘He died before the ambulance reached the hospital.’

  I couldn’t breathe; something was wrong with the air.

  ‘His Uncle Elvin is here, sorting things out.’

  ‘He came from America? Already?’ It was impossible: all lies. Grown-up, adult lies. Jay had warned me: do not trust them. Fucking adults.

  ‘Didn’t he tell you, son? His uncle was coming to take him to a high school over there after Christmas. It was all arranged.’