Granta 122: Betrayal (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

by Неизвестный

  One night, after a particularly lengthy and frustrating wait for a vacant paddleball court, it occurred to me that we could use the suggestion box in pursuit of a fairer system. As we were leaving, I asked at the front desk for a slip and, leaning on the counter, wrote PLEASE CAN WE HAVE AN ADVANCE BOOKING SYSTEM FOR PADDLEBALL? THIS WILL GIVE EVERYONE A FAIR CHANCE AND WILL PREVENT HOGGING OF THE COURTS. I filled in A.’s name at the bottom, showed him what I’d written with what I hoped was a playful flourish and handed it in before he had a chance to object. Outside, bent over the lock on his bike, he looked at me upside down and said, ‘I’m not sure that was a good idea, especially the hogging bit.’ ‘It’ll be fine,’ I said breezily and pedalled off up 14th Street.

  A few days later we returned for another game. The man to whom I had given the complaint slip was on duty again. He always looks pleased to see us. We’re brothers after all and building families is right up there next to healthy bodies and healthy minds on the Y mission statement. ‘Good evening, gentlemen.’ He looked up from the computer where he had just swiped my membership card with a broad, welcoming smile. ‘And how are you guys tonight?’

  I replied that we were fine. He swiped A.’s card and we headed for the stairs down to the changing room. ‘By the way,’ he called out before we began to descend, ‘I told the other paddleball guys about your note. Things should be all right now.’

  We stopped and swivelled round with simultaneity that only brothers and well-trained infantry can affect. As we did so I caught A.’s fleeting look, a study in consternation. ‘Er, what did they say exactly?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, they just wanted to know who you were, so I told them. They said it was no problem . . . You know, they’re brothers too,’ he added as an afterthought, evidently relishing the convocation of fraternal cooperation that he had achieved.

  Before I had a chance to reply, A. called back to me from halfway down the stairs, next to the window looking onto the paddleball court. ‘They’re there again,’ he shouted, before dashing to the men’s changing room with uncharacteristic alacrity.

  We began to get changed, in no rush because we knew it might be a while before we could get on the court. We were down to underpants and socks when familiar voices, still arguing loudly, announced the arrival of the other brothers. I felt myself tensing. A. put his head in his locker, muttering something about having left his watch in his trouser pocket. He looked as if he was about to climb in and close the door behind him.

  One of the brothers, the burlier of the pair, walked up the aisle and started twiddling with the combination on the locker just one away from mine. Silently cursing the luck that had resulted in me picking a locker so close to his, I nodded in his direction. There was no acknowledgement on his part; he merely took out his towel and a plastic bag of toiletries and placed them on an adjacent stool before sitting down heavily on another. I moved my stuff back a couple of feet to give him more room. He looked over, a sneer across his lips. ‘Sorry if I’m HOGGING the locker space,’ he said, spitting out the words. ‘I don’t want to be a HOG,’ he repeated again for emphasis. I shrank back at the vehemence of these utterances and half-turned to A. in search of support. All I could see were his legs and backside as he burrowed still deeper into his locker.

  ‘What do you call that game you play anyway?’ the burly brother enquired in a deliberately sarcastic tone as he slipped off a vest with armholes running from the shoulder almost down to the waist. I noticed with satisfaction that the mass of hair on his chest was whiter than mine.

  ‘Well, it’s our invention really,’ I replied, trying to sound jocular. ‘It’s a sort of British version.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’ I couldn’t see his face now because he was bending down to loosen the Velcro straps on a pair of trainers that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a pimp, all lime green with shiny yellow trimming, but I could tell it wasn’t bearing a friendly expression.

  ‘I mean, you’re supposed to play with both hands and keep the ball low,’ he continued, ‘not send it up into the sky.’

  ‘I know, I know. We’re not very good . . . But it’s the best we can do,’ I mumbled, hoping that humility would encourage him to back off. It didn’t.

  ‘Well, it’s not paddleball. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not paddleball. And –’ his voice took on a triumphal tone of someone delivering an irrefutable logical deduction ‘– it’s a paddleball court. That’s what it says on the schedule.’ He enunciated the word ‘paddleball’ with such emphasis that I almost fell backwards from my stool.

  With that, he took his towel and, not bothering to wrap it around his waist, stood up and headed off for the showers. Only at this point did A. re-emerge from his locker, pulling on his New Balances with evident urgency. ‘I told you it was mistake to hand in that slip,’ he hissed. ‘Now we’ve got a war on our hands.’

  The battle of the brothers over the paddleball court was never resolved. Now that hostilities had been declared, even the previous tactic of hanging around making our presence known through the window of the court was more assertive than either A. or I felt comfortable with. It wasn’t just that we wanted to avoid another confrontation. We both felt that the scorn that had been directed at our version of the game was to some degree justified. It was pathetic that our shots looped so high and that we couldn’t play ambidextrously. Certainly we didn’t want anyone who knew the proper rules to be watching what we were up to. And so we took to coming down to the Y late at night. The facility stayed open till eleven o’clock and we found that if we showed up around 9.45, the brothers and their pals would by then have cleared off and we could have the place to ourselves.

  With the arrival of spring we were able to return to the outside court on 18th Street where the audience, to the extent that anyone took notice of us at all, was more uncomprehending than derisive. Arriving there one brisk April evening we found the park full of kids playing basketball and mothers watching their toddlers on the climbing apparatus. A man dressed from head to foot in what appeared to be black plastic bags, including an improvised beret, which looked uncomfortably hot even for a chilly day, was reading a newspaper on one of the benches behind the water play area.

  A game of five-a-side soccer was underway on one of the ball courts, played by Latino restaurant workers evidently on a break before the evening rush in their kitchen began. They were all dressed in their cook’s uniforms, white smocks and trousers, so it was hard to tell who was on which side. They looked like a campesino army from a Diego Rivera mural. At the other end of the courts was Jimmy, by himself as ever, smacking a ball with his hand against the wall in a lackadaisical fashion. We gave him a cheerful wave from the benches. ‘Hey, how’s it hanging?’ he enquired in his customarily shy manner, without stopping his one-man contest.

  We took the middle court, between him and the soccer players, and warmed up with a few energetic but wildly inaccurate swings. We played for forty minutes or so and, as usual of late, my attempts to deploy the guile and insider knowledge of the older player against the vim and stamina of the younger man were proving fruitless. I had one special move, a crafty serve that I could loop directly down the left-hand sideline so that A. was forced to play a backhand return, the weakest shot in his armoury. It was a tactic that had accumulated many hundreds of points over the years, though I sometimes felt guilty playing it because it seemed tantamount to cheating. But latterly I’d noticed that A. had adjusted his stance so that he started out far over on the side of the court and was thus able to return pretty well anything with his forehand, which was a much stronger stroke. I was three games to one down, my back ached every time I bent to pick up the ball, and I could see that if A. was at this stage vulnerable to anything, it was probably only the ennui of the confident winner. Dusk was drawing in and I was already beginning to think of where we might go for a drink afterwards, a sure sign of tiredness.

  A. served the ball with a mediocre stroke that delivered it invitingly in front of
me. I pounced, aiming my return at the intersection of the wall and ground, the money shot of the effective paddleball player. Whether it was the fading light, my mounting enervation or perhaps a combination of the two, I cannot tell. But the net result was that the ball hit the edge of my paddle and soared skywards, only coming to a halt when it got stuck twenty-five feet up in the fence that ran at an angle along the top of the wall separating the western side of the park from a neighbouring backyard. It took me a moment to realize what had happened but then, looking up, I could see there were a number of other balls, of various colours and sizes, lodged there, together with a variety of sticks and half-bricks that had evidently been deployed, unsuccessfully, to free them.

  I asked A. if he had a spare ball. He went to look in his bag, returning a minute later empty-handed. We were standing there gazing helplessly at the unreachable ball when Jimmy wandered over. He pushed his cap back on his head.

  ‘Let’s try this,’ he said, holding his own ball up for inspection and demonstrating with a practice throw how it could be used to dislodge ours.

  ‘Be careful,’ A. warned him. ‘You might get that one stuck too.’

  ‘It’s cool,’ Jimmy took careful aim and, with an elegant flick of his wrist, hoisted his ball skywards. It missed. He caught it expertly and tried again. After maybe half a dozen shots of consistent accuracy, his ball bounced off the fence perhaps a foot behind ours, and rolled slowly down towards it. The three of us craned upwards in breathless anticipation. Jimmy’s ball had dislodged ours but before we had a chance to celebrate both balls became stuck, nestling next to each other a couple of feet further down.

  ‘Sheeit!’ Jimmy exclaimed, more animated than I’d ever seen him. He squinted up at the wall, his shoulders hunched with frustration.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to buy you a replacement. When will you be down here next? I’ll give it to you then.’

  ‘Hey, no sweat, man,’ Jimmy mumbled. ‘Maybe we can still get them back.’

  He hitched up his voluminous jeans and climbed through a hole in the fence leading to the nearby projects. I’d noticed a rat skeleton there a few weeks after poison had been put down, but it was gone now. In less than a minute he was back, carrying a sizeable lump of concrete. He moved to within a couple of feet of the handball-court wall and flung it towards the stranded balls with the practised arm of a man who must have played a lot of baseball. On the first couple of occasions, he missed altogether and the concrete crashed back into the tarmac of the court. On the third time, it hit the plastic-coated wire just inches from its target. The balls shook tantalizingly but remained on their lofty perch.

  ‘Sheeit,’ Jimmy exclaimed again.

  Now A. stepped forwards, squinting skywards and rubbing his hands together to warm them in the cold of the spring evening.

  ‘Let me have a go,’ he said eagerly and bent down to pick up the man-made rock. His technique was quite different from Jimmy’s. He held the projectile in both hands, thrusting upwards from bent knees with a sharp grunt, as a Highlander might toss a caber at the Perth country fair. The lump of concrete disappeared into the gloom of the darkening sky. By the time it returned to visibility, it was too late for the frantic shout of warning that, in unison, Jimmy and I let out. A. stood below, immobile and directly in its path. A second later he let out a sharp yelp, like a dog being hit by a car.

  My first reaction, and I’m ashamed to recount it, especially because I’m aware I’ve instinctively responded in similar fashion to quite awful accidents that have befallen him previously, was to laugh. Big, uncontrollable gasps of merriment shook me, even as A. fell silently to his knees on the tarmac. I couldn’t help myself.

  I subsequently tried to analyse why I reacted in such a heartless way. Of course, the cruelty of slapstick is always entertaining. And the surge of relief that disaster has struck nearby but avoided you can often create a wave of hysterical relief, a spasm of acute Schadenfreude that may take the form of transient laughter. But I’m uncomfortably aware that I may have a particular capacity for finding mishaps funny when they befall my brother. It’s a momentary pleasure, soon replaced by concern if the incident proves serious. But it’s there and it appears perverse. Why would I especially enjoy misfortune that afflicts someone so close to me? It seems a particular and vicious form of sadism. It harks back to something in our childhood that is difficult for me to talk about.

  The scene is our family home near Liverpool in the north-west of England, a compact detached house where our father still lives today, alone now that our mother has died. The year is 1968. I’m upstairs in my bedroom, desultorily rereading Henry IV Part I for an English O level that I have to resit, having failed it the first time. Through the thin plasterboard walls I can hear from downstairs the sound of the TV, a new acquisition in a household that didn’t get one till long after most of our neighbours. The theme song to Gilligan’s Island, a show I like, strikes up. I abandon Harry Hotspur and amble down to the living room. A., eight years old, is stretched out on the floor, his chin cradled in his hands, staring up at the set. I can hear our mother in the kitchen preparing the evening meal.

  I throw myself on the sofa and A. and I watch Ginger, the Skipper and the rest of the gang caper around their desert isle to intermittent studio laughter. The mid-programme commercial break comes up and I tumble over to where A. is lying, grabbing him by the hair and forcing him to roll over onto his back. I climb astride him, my knees under his armpits, and twist his nose between my forefinger and thumb. I can see his brow furrowing under his Beatle fringe.

  ‘Getoff!’ he squeals. ‘Let me go.’

  ‘So what number is it to be tonight?’ I say in an affected sing-song sort of voice.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he begs, attempting to force me off, quite uselessly. I’m eight years older after all; he doesn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Come on. You know the score,’ I say, smiling down at him. ‘You’ve got to pick something. One to five. If you don’t choose, you get them all.’

  We have a system, my brother and I, a notation of different forms of torture that I can inflict on him at will. Each technique has a number attached to it so that when I ask him to pick a number we both know what it refers to. One is ‘finger bends’ where I interleave my fingers with his and bend them until he believes they are about to break. Two is ‘small spaces’. Here I crouch down low over his face, blocking out the light with my arms and legs, in a way that induces claustrophobia. Three is ‘chest kneely’ where I kneel with my full weight on his chest until he can no longer breathe. This is an especially pernicious torment for someone who, in those days, was acutely asthmatic. The affliction was sufficiently serious for him to be sent for six months to a nearby children’s hospital where he and other fellow sufferers slept in a ward with a roof that could be retracted when the weather allowed, a sort of junior Magic Mountain sanatorium. The other patients included a number of quite rough boys, though none of the family fully appreciated how coarse they were until at breakfast a couple of mornings after A.’s return home he casually requested my father, much to the suppressed delight of my sister and I, to ‘Pass the fucking butter’.

  Number four, ‘hair pull’, is, as its name indicates, more straightforward. Number five, which completes the roster, is the most elaborate and terrifying of all. ‘The banister hang’ requires my marshalling A. to the top of the stairs, no easy task because as we ascend he will struggle like an innocent man on his way to the gallows. Once there I manhandle him over the banister, keeping hold of his ankles so that he dangles upside down over the vertiginous drop to the lower hallway.

  It’s hard to execute number five with my father in the house because A.’s screams will generally attract his attention and a stern order to desist, even if he’s in the garage or garden. But tonight he has not yet returned from work so the full selection is available.

  ‘What’s it going to be?’ I repeat, stretching A.’s ears sideways as an encouragement for a qui
ck decision.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he whimpers. ‘Number two, make it number two.’

  ‘Small spaces’, one of his favourites. I crouch down over his head, practically smothering him with my stomach. He doesn’t struggle but lies there perfectly still, waiting for me to stop. He is rescued by the theme song for Gilligan’s Island signalling the end of the commercial break. I clamber back on the sofa, leaving him where he lies on the carpet. Wordlessly he rolls over and props his head, once more, in his hands. Mum shouts from the kitchen, ‘Here comes Dad,’ and seconds later we hear the front door opening.

  Though he had every justification for doing so, A. never complained about this cold-blooded and sadistic ritual, not then as a child, nor later as an adult. It was left to me to bring it up, in a formal expression of regret, which I delivered over dinner at a Mexican restaurant in New York a couple of years ago. I tried to downplay a gesture that could easily seem grandiloquent by self-mockingly comparing it to Bill Clinton’s apology for the existence of slavery. A. just shrugged his shoulders and muttered, ‘Forget about it,’ as he concentrated on his chile relleno. Now, as he crouched on the floor of the paddleball court, head lowered and breathing heavily, he must have been aware of the deep draughts of mirth I could not contain. It still makes me shudder to think that I could be so unkind at such an awful moment.