The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  “Bizou taught us all that trick. Not really a trick, but show me a man who doesn’t back away from someone whipping himself around like that, and I’ll show you a man who you should be running away from.” Vik didn’t answer, but he also didn’t leave.

  “Bizou, that’s what we call your dad at the card game. No one calls him that at home?” The heavy man walked to the sink and turned the tap on, letting it run without wetting his hands. He wiped them on his pants after he turned the stream of water off. “I thought maybe your mother might still call him Bizou, no?”

  “No. She doesn’t call him anything but ‘your father’ when I’m around.”

  The furred man laughed at this. A rounded tuft of hair protruded from his collar and encircled his neck, like the ruff worn by one of the old British courtiers that Vik had seen in schoolbooks. This ruff was coarse and black.

  “Your dad’s game is still on. You want to go inside and grab my boy, we can all go and pick up Bizou? Maybe he’ll want to take you for the late showing, you can watch the rest of the movie without worrying about Devi popping around.”

  “I don’t know your boy,” Vik said.

  The man eased Vik to the side and went into the lobby, where he just as casually displaced the lean, reeking usher and made his way toward the first-class seats. Vik watched him walk into the altered darkness,11 heard him bark a name: Renga. The boy was propelled outward on a wave of disgusted jeers at this latest disturbance. Renga looked in distaste at his father, and then in horror at Vik.12

  “Take us home,” Renga’s father said. “I want to sleep. And your little friend here is running away from my old girlfriend, so let’s get him to Daddy.”

  The trio walked out of the Rex, into the splashed field of illumination produced by the marquee, which outdid the shine of the pale butcher’s moon. Renga’s father, who had seemed sturdy inside, went legless in the ocean-heavy air, and the boys had to carry him. For the first of many times to come, Vik extracted himself from present discomfort by presenting reality to himself as cinema, watching himself from a gracefully positioned, neutral camera. He saw Renga and himself as the opposite ends of an uneven, three-headed entity that veered across the dirt street in a waltzing rhythm of balance and momentum, juddering over a curb, slipping over patches of tile, arriving at the driver’s door of a delivery lorry where it continued to twitch and fumble, a crippled spider in the shadows, delineated as the forms of two boys supporting a semi-conscious drunk when a passing car bounced light toward them.

  “This your dad’s?” Vik asked, referring to the vehicle. He decided to be all business, to speak in the clipped, efficient language of a heist man from one of the too-few gangster films that the Royal had shown, in order to compress the awkward minutes that awaited Renga and him.

  “It’s your dad’s,” Renga said. Giving a signal and a shrug, he allowed his own father to slide to the dirt in a kneeling position. Renga grabbed at the outside of the man’s pockets until he found the hot metal clump that he was looking for. He keyed open the back door and Vik helped him pour the man onto the narrow back bench, which was covered in cabbage leaves that clung to the torn leather like much-needed patches. Renga’s father grunted when an exposed spring pulled at his shirt and scratched the fat projecting out from his waist. The heat of the man’s body and its liquor-perfumed slickness was familiar to Vik, who often rolled his father onto his side at Devi’s behest.

  Renga got into the driver’s seat of what Vik had finally recognized as one of the three vehicles in his father’s small fleet. Most of the vehicles in Mauritius were just like this one, smoke-belching conveyances that carried vegetables and meat to hotels and Chinese grocery stores. His father’s were the only ones with green steering wheels. Vik had painted all three wheels himself one afternoon. When the bucket of paint that his father had found in the back shed had run out, so had his father’s interest in having a uniquely done-up fleet. The anonymous bucket had been filled with an impressively low-grade variety of house paint, which stuck to skin better than it stuck to whatever surface it was applied to. Renga gripped the wheel beneath this crumbling, unfinished decoration.

  “You can drive?” Vik asked.

  “Sure, I drive. Maybe you should just go home now? I don’t think my dad really wants you to come over, you know, he just talks like that when he’s drunk. Gets hospitable.” Renga laboured over this last word, and Vik suddenly realized from the effort the boy was making that he was speaking in English. They had both been speaking in English, from the moment that Vik delivered his tough-guy question about the lorry’s ownership. It was a way of excluding the drunken father from their discussion, a decision that became conscious when Renga stuttered over “hospitable.” Renga brushed hair off his forehead, and flecks of dry paint clung to the strands.

  “Siva’s in there. Take my ticket stub, join up with him.”

  “Sitting next to him without having to talk sounds good, but your dad is right about my mom. She’s real angry, waiting for me at home. Maybe if I come with my father, she’ll worry about him instead, let me off.”

  Renga reflected. The scenario was beginning to align itself with Vik’s brisk gangster tone; they were scheming. A small boy ran past the driver’s side door and kicked the front tire, laughing and distracting Renga. Renga leaned out of the window and spat hard, far, and clean, an expectoration that Siva would have applauded. The wad landed on the back of the child’s neck. The kid paused and then shuddered forward, bucking the slick saliva off his neck before starting to cry, running into one of the nearby houses. Renga and Vik laughed, and the timing was too perfect for Renga to do anything but turn the key in the ignition and set off, more unsteadily than either boy would have liked, toward his home.

  Renga was tall for his age, and Vik noted that most of that extra length was in the legs that worked the creaking, resistant pedals of the lorry, and in the fingers that urged obedience from the gearshift. The roads approaching Renga’s home were more hole than surface, and it seemed miraculous that the man in the back was able to sleep through the jouncing. He wasn’t properly on the backseat anymore, but lodged between the bench and the backs of the front seats. A cabbage leaf covered the top half of his face: a poorly conceived villain’s mask. Craning his head around the back of his seat to look at the paralytic drunk, Vik wanted to pull the leaf off, but was afraid that a slight, sensuous touch might wake him, even though all the violent juddering of the vehicle hadn’t.

  “Didn’t know your dad worked for mine,” Vik said.

  “Doesn’t,” Renga said, with more insistence than necessary. “They play cards together after market. Sometimes in the office behind your dad’s stall, sometimes at my house if it goes late. They taught me to drive so I can go pick up whiskey, cigarettes. That’s why my dad had the lorry.”

  “But he was at the movies.”

  “Sometimes he forgets where he’s going when he’s drunk,” Renga said, braking to let a pack of dogs cross. The headlights picked out the snarl of the head dog, yellow teeth in a dark face, pink sores blossoming in its fur. The pack loped into one of the patches of jungle that the city had so far forgotten to eat.

  “He forgets he went for cigarettes, goes to the movies instead?” Vik laughed.

  “Yeah,” said Renga. “That’s why they send me. I don’t get distracted by a bright sign. I get the cigarettes and I bring them back, and your dad gives me some of his fucking money.” Vik twitched at hearing Siva’s word in Renga’s mouth.

  “That’s good. Extra money, always good.”

  “Yeah.” Renga pushed his hair back again, this time striking it off his forehead with impact, leaving more flakes of alien dandruff in the strands. Without slowing down, he stopped the lorry all at once, hard enough to unwedge his father in the back and roll him back onto the bench proper.

  Renga left friend and father behind, walking through a courtyard that was between the parked vehicle and a small home that he soon entered. Before long, Vik saw him come out, si
gnaling his friend to come in.

  There were no outdoor lights of any sort, this far from the centre of the city. Electricity in homes, yes, but bulbs were extinguished early in the evening or jealously curtained off, to avoid sharing illumination with the rest of the neighbourhood. Thinking of the pack of dogs, Vik scanned the street before opening the passenger door and running toward Renga.

  “Slow down, idiot,” Renga said, conducting him through the courtyard and into a tiny front room, which seemed to be both a kitchen and a general living area. It was clean, but intensely crowded. Renga paused in front of a cheap piano of the upright variety, similar to the ones Vik had seen in Westerns. He pointed to a man sleeping beneath the abandoned card table, next to the stove. Vik’s father.

  “The other player went out the back. Getting a cab to come back here for you two. Let’s haul him out front,” said Renga. The boys leaned Vik’s unconscious father against one of the gate pillars at the front of the house. In the lorry, Renga’s father briefly surfaced from sleep and gave the waiting boys a curious look, looking entirely sober for a moment, before passing out again. Soon, the loud rock-on-steel scraping of an approaching car brought Renga and Vik the welcome news that their night together was almost over. It seemed the best time to venture a last question, Vik thought, as he wouldn’t risk getting too thorough an answer, or one that was so well thought out that it was false.

  “Your dad called my mother his old girlfriend. You know why?”

  “He was drunk.”

  “I know, yeah, drunk. But why did he say that?”

  Renga saw the cab’s lights cresting the incline that their own lorry had struggled over minutes before. In his relief, he released the brief truth.

  “She was his old girlfriend. She used to do what I did, get cigarettes and whiskey for all of them at the card game, back before either of us was born. Your dad met her here.”

  The boys again shared the dead weight of an unconscious man as they shovelled Vik’s father into the back of the elaborately dented cab. The driver seemed the type to have hand tattoos. Vik checked for them when he got into the front seat for the ride back, but there were none. Vik gave Cinema Rex as the destination address, reaching into the backseat toward his father, removing the wallet from the inside breast pocket. The driver noted the thick wedge of paper in the leather and started to drive.

  Vik’s return coincided with the emergence of the Rex audience, which was released into a delightful miasma of frying oil and the treats it birthed. The vendor carts were so thronged that it made it difficult for the taxi to park, a problem Vik solved by telling the driver to drive straight into his family courtyard. He paid the man from his father’s stack of bills. Devi emerged from the house, swathed in a fresh sari unmarked by the traces of hurled corncobs. When she saw Vik pulling his father’s feet out of the backseat of the cab, she came over to help, first breaking the dignity of her bearing by screaming at the dog in authoritative French, which devolved into Creole when it became clear that the barking, snarling animal wouldn’t subside into peace unless she used words it understood.

  “Bouche to fesse,” she said, lending the words a Gallic crispness that could have been pulled from the lips of one of the dubbing actresses that Vik had heard in the few minutes of film he’d seen that night. The dog was silent, and Vik and his mother pulled his father out of the cab and onto a pile of empty rice sacks. First-class-audience members, overdressed in suits now flecked with grease and flavoured salt, began to filter into the courtyard. With them came a foodcart stink and the ecstasy of a great and mysterious film. They were clamouring for the cab, which Devi thumped brutally until it reversed off her property.

  The crowd followed the car, except for a hunched figure traversing the tiled carpet at the Rex’s exit. She hovered at the edge of the pale light dripping from the open kitchen door, staring at Vik: Aunt Roshi. She was even more tranquil than usual, calmed by a massive ingestion of sugar that had come in the form of three Cokes and a sackful of licorice, the remnants of which she was loosening from the generous gaps between her teeth.

  Devi pointed to the inert form of her husband, and Roshi trundled over to help, after carefully setting down her final, half-full Coke. Vik was waved away. He sat on the vacated stack of rice sacks and watched White walk to the end of his chain, which was long enough to allow him to nose the bottle of Coke onto its side. The dog licked up the spill, and the boy waited for the rest of his family to go to bed. Renga’s father had been right; bringing his own whiskey-sodden patriarch home had deflected, even defused Devi’s anger. The routine she entered each time she ushered Vik’s father out of a binge and into the recovery cycle from late night to early morning, a period in which she always maintained an utter speechlessness, provoked an emotion in her that was quite different from the light, hot rage she would have otherwise flung at her son.

  Vik avoided going out for the rest of the weekend, cutting off his mother’s flare-up before it could begin. He watched crowds enter and exit Cinema Rex from his bedroom window, saw Roshi patronize the establishment twice more before Monday. He felt he had a tacit agreement with Renga to avoid discussing the events of Cinema Rex’s opening night with Siva, but wasn’t able to verify this when the school week began. Renga was absent, an absence that stretched into the rest of the week. On Thursday, their teacher (a slender Frenchman who refused to give top marks to any prose that wasn’t as polished as Flaubert’s) told the class that Renga’s father had died.

  “When?” asked Vik, forgetting to use any respectful niceties of address.

  “The weekend. That is all I know, and all you should know. Renga will perhaps be back on Monday, and I expect you all to have written eight hundred words on de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ by then.”

  “Is it due on Monday for sure, or just whenever Renga gets back?” asked Siva.

  After the news, Siva and Vik felt comfortable around each other for the first time that week, bonded by the invisible presence of tragedy. Vik was sure that Renga’s father had choked to death in the back of the lorry later that Friday night, his throat filling with vomit. This fatal possibility was one of Devi’s most frequently voiced fears, the genesis of the standing command that called for Vik to rotate his own father onto his side during the drunken naps that consistently laid the man on his back.

  “How you think it happened?” Siva asked. “Shot? Maybe by robbers?” Vik nearly shared the vomit-aspiration theory, but decided to hold onto it.

  “Don’t know, but probably something a lot more boring. Heart attack, maybe.”

  “Still sad that way. Sadder, maybe. No story with it.”

  The lorry never returned to Vik’s father’s fleet, which seemed to confirm Vik’s theory.13 While Renga never returned to their lessons with Reynolds, he did eventually return to school. The three boys used their daily breaks to discuss the movies screening at the Rex, a routine that continued until the year that Siva convinced his mother to let him drop out of school and take up a job as a hospital porter.

  Renga was soon to leave the school as well, accepting his early scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He ran into Vik at the Cinema Rex one week before his flight departed the island. Vik had taken to carrying a notepad into the movies with him, which he’d fill with scrawls legible only to himself as he went to see even the most trivial films three, four, five times. Renga was a repeat attendee as well because he had to watch any film at least twice before he could stop being distracted by the plot and could concentrate solely on the way the images aligned with the music. He explained this to Vik, who seemed slightly awed.14

  “And why do you watch these things so many times?” Renga asked.

  “I sit in the different sections, see how the movie comes at me when I’m sitting with different people.”

  “Is it any different?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Seems like a waste of money, no?” Renga asked, smiling to dampen any potential sense of insult. Social gestures like
this were important now; they were both a little older, he needed to practice politeness for Europe, and he’d grown to know Vik much less in the two years since his father’s death and the opening of Cinema Rex.

  “Waste? I get in for free.”

  Renga was about to reply that it seemed like a waste of time, at least, but he remembered his politeness. He said something else instead, and they talked about nothing in particular until the projector awakened and allowed them to be silent.

  1 Renga’s prickliness over his friend’s Chori Chori comment was sublimated into a grammatical nitpick, but it was rooted in his deep, abiding love for that film, which he had seen eleven times over its run at the Royal. He went alone, by arrangement with his music tutor, M. Bouillhet. The tutor allowed Renga to skip every second piano lesson if he could replicate a new piece of music from Shankar Jaikishan’s soundtrack at the next lesson. Bouillhet was a hardline but affable racist who reasoned that it was easier to train a coloured boy to use his natural ear for rhythm and melody than it was to drill him on Bach.

  2 Twenty-nine years after the opening of the Rex, Siva would take his inappropriately young son to a screening of George Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the Australian Mel Gibson film whose relentless action style would go on to dominate 1980s blockbuster cinema. Siva, now a nurse at the second-best hospital on the island, found an accurate visual depiction of his absurd childhood vision of Australian life. The film, in its joyful ridiculousness, served to confirm that his notion of Australia had been pure fiction. He enjoyed The Road Warrior, except the bit when Max’s dog dies, which he felt was an unnecessarily cruel touch.