by Glen Duncan
The lobby smells of industrial carpet and excessively used Pledge. My nose hunts for an undernote of urine (I tell myself it’ll be the last straw if the place ever starts to smell of piss, although what that last straw will precipitate is unclear), but gets only a trace of mothballs and Windolene. I feel a surge of love for the cleaners, inwardly bless them and the distant inventors of conti-pads. My mum, as usual, sheds a few tears.
‘For God’s sake, Ma, I’ll be back in a month.’
‘It’s so quiet when you go.’
‘But I’ll be coming back.’
‘I know, I know.’
It’s not enough. What if I don’t come back? In my arms she’s small, never lets go first. Once it was just the two of us. Watch With Mother. Now hugging her calls up in me remorseless Latin. Scapulae, vertebrae, humerus, cranium. When she dies the world will contain no one who will love me unconditionally. That’s quite a shift. I’m nowhere near ready for it.
‘Ma, you smell nice.’
She sniffles. ‘It’s Dune.’ This is me buttering her up to soften the leaving, we both know, though with her terrible weakness for good perfume she does smell nice, always. She rests her forehead against my shoulder, sighs and holds on to my elbows. ‘Aunty Sheila brought it back from Australia,’ she says. ‘Duty-free.’ Another sniffle. ‘When will we see you again?’
At the door my dad tries to give me twenty quid but I fend him off. I’ve left a twenty of my own upstairs, half under the coffee jar. It’s a routine. I shoulder my bag and begin to walk away, carrying the guilt of every grown-up son from the beginning of time, the guilt of knowing it’s my world, now, not theirs. If they’d been younger when they had me there would have been a period–me in my mid-twenties, say, them in their mid-forties–when the world was ours, together. But by the time I was twenty-five they had already retired.
My first look back at them (there’ll be several before I turn the corner at the end of the street) shows him standing behind her, right hand on her shoulder. She waves, holds a hanky crushed under her nose. The old man gives an upward jerk of his head to remind me of our Secret Business. Don’t forget. Talk to that Gas Board bugger. Keep me posted.
I stop at the corner and wave. Bolton’s gloom-gravity has drawn clouds. The air is lagged. There will be a storm, which is good; they like the big weather, God losing patience. They’ll turn the lights out, stand and watch at the window, listening to the thunder, remembering the first berry-sized droplets of the monsoon darkening the dust, stunned for the thousandth time to think that here they are on the other side of the world, the four kids grown and gone, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, all the past rolled out behind them like the flotsam of a lost liner.
The seven o’clock Virgin train to Euston is crowded, brightly lit, draughty and a-jabber with mobile phone conversation. Only the smell of hot coffee from the buffet offers romance, says this is, after all, a journey through twilit land. My reading options sit on the tray-table: Rabbit Redux; Britain’s Betrayal in India; The Collected Poems of Gillian Clark. I don’t open them. Instead, I sit mentally holding the perennial half-dozen things to feel bad about like a shit hand of cards. A couple have been added. I’m never going to write The Book. I don’t know what it means to be an Anglo-Indian. I don’t care what it means to be an Anglo-Indian. I should have told my dad about Skinner. I should have told my mum about Scarlet. In a month I’ll be thirty-nine. I’ve stopped bothering to look words up and I can’t stop thinking about death.
CHAPTER TWO
The Boy and the Ring
(The Cheechee Papers: Bhusawal, Jabalpur, Bombay, Lahore, 1932–42)
I don’t like beginning my father’s story with the bloodstone ring. Ring beginnings imply ring endings. Lost rings are found, stolen rings recovered; cursed rings detonate their evil, lucky rings work their charm. Rings have mythic baggage, the whiff of Tolkien, implicit narrative tilt. (Except in real life. I wore a few in adolescence, my faux Navajo or Apache incarnation. For at least a year, ajangle with beads and bracelets I told girls at parties I was Geronimo’s great-great-great grandson–efficaciously on two or three occasions, since it got me into their pants. The rings–a turquoise nugget, a Celtic silver band, an abalone crescent moon, a skull and crossbones with tiny obsidian eyes–were part of this teen fiction but none of them meant anything, and now they’re gone.) So I repeat: I don’t like beginning my father’s story with something as plottish as a ring, but it’s inescapable. There was a ring, it did begin something.
Ending something is another matter, and it’s the business of endings–I must also repeat–that gives me the willies.
However.
As a child my father, Ross Douglas Aloysius Monroe, youngest of ten siblings, was fascinated by his mother’s bloodstone ring. The jewel, green chalcedony with blood-like spots of jasper, had been given to her, Beatrice, by her first beau, Raymond Varney, who’d broken her heart (only her heart, she stressed, mantrically, with raised index) by abandoning her for ‘a life of adventure on the oceans of the world’. As she recited this her eyes teared and looked far off, relishing the fierceness of the wound. (Ross’s father, Louis Archibald Monroe, had his own version of the story, namely that Raymond had run off with a Polish prostitute treasured amongst the Bhusawal railwaymen for her apparently miraculous immunity from the clap. Blessed Olga of the Holy Crotch. It delighted my grandfather to repeat this. When he did Beatrice turned her face away and breathed superiorly through her babyish round nostrils.)
She didn’t wear the bloodstone (Ross was drawn as much by the red thud and mineral rasp of the word–bloodstone–as by its object) but kept it in a lacquered trinket box on her dresser. You remind me so much of him, you know, she would incant, taking her youngest’s face between her hands while the boy turned the jewel in the light. ‘Him’ was lost love Raymond Varney, and had it not been for chronological impossibility Ross might have suspected himself the man’s child. When you come of age, my son, Beatrice would murmur, this ring will be yours. She was a small, restive woman with a penchant for ominous utterances. In her mind unrelated things were force-married into mysterious meaning; in this case Ross and the legendary Raymond, but she could make grist of anything–a simple bazaar purchase could be imbued with Fate. Child at that very moment this teapot caught my eye, you know? There was no question. Certain things…She’d leave the rest unsaid, lean back, suck her teeth, chit, turn down her mouth-corners in satisfied submission and look away into the great web of Destiny.
‘But when will I come of age, Mumma?’ Ross asked her one morning, holding the ring up to the window’s ferocious light in which the jewel’s red, gold and green throbbed with apparent sentience. Mother and son were in Beatrice’s bedroom at the Bazaar Road house in Bhusawal. In a week Ross was to go up to Jabalpur to begin boarding school. His brothers, seasoned pupils, had spent hours telling him what a fucking place it was, extreme punishments for littleornothing. There couldn’t, he knew, be many of these moments with his mother left.
Beatrice closed her eyes and lifted her chin, broad little face crinkling with arcane knowledge. ‘My son, these things cannot be specified like that,’ she said. ‘The time comes when the time comes. You will know and I, too, will know. God will give us a sign.’
‘But how will we know?’ Ross persisted, slipping the ring on to his thumb, still years too small for it.
‘Bus,’ Beatrice said, holding up her hand. ‘Trust me. Your mother will know, God willing she lives long enough, with that maniac trying to murder her.’ ‘That maniac’ was Ross’s father: sober, a genial and witty man; drunk, indiscriminately violent. Boozing segued into lashings out, belts across the face, kicks up the arse, cracks on the head with anything that came to hand. The whole household suffered, wife, kids, servants, dogs. Ross loved him but in the face of the rages had built up a charge of anger, a violence of his own with as yet nowhere to go.
‘Enough now,’ Beatrice said, taking the ring from him and putting it back in the box. ‘Go
and comb your hair before you go with Agnes.’
At the mention of his sister’s name Ross’s spirits sank. For weeks his brothers had been warning him–cryptically, with a sickening lack of detail–that this time must come. The interlude with the bloodstone had been the latest in a long line of flimsy distractions. Now, like an outreaching tentacle of Fate, the moment had found him.
Agnes was the oldest Monroe girl, a nurse at the Bhusawal Railway Hospital. Today Ross was to accompany her there for purposes unknown to him. He’d managed to extract a promise that it wasn’t for injections or dentistry, that it wasn’t going to hurt, but there was no fooling his deeper instinct. Mother and daughter had gone into quiet confab that morning on the veranda, fine-tuning this, whatever it was. Whatever it was, he knew he wasn’t going to enjoy it. It wasn’t going to be a treat.
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ Agnes said, as they crossed the hospital compound and Ross quailed with the first inhalation of the building’s ammoniacal stink. ‘All your brothers have done this before you. There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.’
She ushered him into Reception, through swing doors, down a newly plastered corridor and into a low-ceilinged screen-dimmed room with a dozen beds, all occupied. The atmosphere was close, wettish, and though in one corner a glistening punka-wallah somnambulistically pulled, the air sat still and hummed with flies. A smell of runny shit from somewhere, the fruit-sour of diarrhoea. Agnes’s hand between his shoulders pushed him ahead of her. This was the way your legs moved in nightmares, Ross thought, as if space was quicksand. He’d had this nightmare, hadn’t he? Himself being forced towards something terrible?
Agnes, fierily alive, brought them to a halt by a bed in which a man Ross didn’t know sat with knees drawn up and parted, covered only by a single cotton sheet. He was thin, with rough-chopped greying hair and a long-chinned coffee-coloured face set in a look of feeble misery. An open pyjama jacket of maroon and cream stripes revealed an emaciated, hairless chest glistening with sweat. His hands gripped his kneecaps as if preventing their detonation. He looked to Ross as if he was about to burst into tears.
‘Now, Mr Carruthers, as we agreed if you don’t mind.’
In the bed opposite a man sat up, summoned phlegm, spat it–tunk–into a tin can kept nearby, cleared his throat, then lay down again. Ross pressed back against his sister, felt with his head through the starched uniform skirt the hard of her hip and soft of her thigh. Warm. He’d seen all his sisters naked at one time or another; dark hair triangles down there, burgeoning or full-blown breasts, brown nipples. He didn’t know why he thought of it now, nor from where it popped into his head that Agnes was supposed to have gone into the convent, but hadn’t.
‘Mr Carruthers?’ Agnes said. ‘Come along now.’
Another patient in a bed by the window moaned, falsetto. The moan resolved into a whimper, then ended with ‘Jesus Christ have mercy.’
‘Oh, nurse,’ Mr Carruthers said. ‘Nurse…’ He shook his head and began to sob, tearlessly.
Agnes leaned forward and placed her right hand over Carruthers’s left, big-knuckled round his bent knee. ‘Think,’ she said. ‘All I ask you to do is think of the good this will do in the world.’
‘Sweet black cunting hell,’ the man by the window said, carefully.
‘Stop that, Mr Blanchet,’ Agnes said, raising her voice but not turning her head. ‘I have my young brother here.’
Silence from the window bed. Every muscle in Ross’s body pleaded for permission to take him elsewhere.
‘I want you to look at what I show you now and remember it,’ Agnes said, her little green eyes triumphal. ‘Remember it as long as you live.’
Mr Carruthers shook his head again, without conviction. His hands left his kneecaps and went up to cover his face as Agnes drew back the sheet.
The shock of what Ross saw was still with him when he left for Jabalpur the following week.
‘It’s so we don’t get VD,’ his brother Hector told him, as the train pulled out of Bhusawal station. The four Monroe boys, Ross, Gilbert, Alfie and Hector were travelling up to St Aloysius together. ‘You see a fellow’s tullu like that, covered in sores—’
‘Weeping sores,’ Gilbert amended.
‘Weeping sores, and you’ll think twice about any bleddy hanky-panky.’
‘What hanky-panky?’ Ross said, snivelling.
‘“What hanky-panky?”’ Gilbert scoffed. ‘What a baby you are, men.’
‘Leave him alone,’ Alfie said. ‘He’s too young. He doesn’t know about hanky-panky.’
Ross didn’t, and deeply did. ‘Do you know that house with the yellow and red balcony behind the bazaar?’ Agnes had asked him. (He’d turned his face away from the sight of those ravaged Carruthers genitals but with coconut-scented hands his sister had forced it back, while the patient had murmured, Oh, my boy, my boy, look at my condition and think, for God’s sake only think in your years ahead.) Agnes’s grip on his face had tightened. ‘That place where men go in and come out and don’t look at you when they pass?’ Ross nodded. He knew the house, its gravity. His Bhusawal gang periodically surrendered to its pull, sniggered, conjectured, understood precious little except that men went there, that there were women inside, that it was dirty. Whoreshop, Edward Mendez had said, and the word had entered with a vague insinuation. Something like worship. Once, when Ross had sneaked there alone to spy, a young nose-ringed Indian woman with eyes glittering amid excessive kohl had caught sight of him from an open upper window. She’d made a strange face, wide-eyed and showing teeth like a tiger–then lipstickishly laughed and waved at him, bangles jingling. He’d skedaddled. It was as if she’d touched his essential self. ‘Men go and pay money so that they can have sexual relations with the women in there,’ Agnes had said, holding his face between her hands while Carruthers looked down at his poor parts and made a face like the Tragedy mask. ‘But those women are kept as slaves and they are diseased. Do you understand?’ Ross had gone home from the hospital queasy. He had thought that this exposure to horror might have constituted the coming of age his mother had alluded to, that now, having endured initiation, the bloodstone would be delivered to him. But though he’d hung around the lacquered box conspicuously for his remaining days, Beatrice had said nothing more about it.
‘’Course, you’re the last to go, you see,’ Hector said to Ross. Bhusawal was behind them. The carriage windows gave on to sunblasted dry open land dotted with scrub and thorn trees under a bleached sky with one mountainous white cloud reaching up from the horizon like an iceberg. ‘Now there are no more of us left at home with her, Puppa’s going to give her merry hell. No doubt about it, you leaving for school is breaking her heart.’
‘Ripping her heart out,’ Gilbert corrected, seeing that Ross was somehow still holding himself together. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this finishes her.’
It finished Ross, who wept, on and off, the whole three hundred miles to Jabalpur.
The Monroe boys had exaggerated about St Aloysius (that the school name was one of Ross’s own had been seized by his mother as evidence in the case for Fate) but not by much. In his first weeks there he saw pupils routinely bashed, clobbered, kicked, punched, belted and thrashed. Many of the masters were psychotic, but the priests (English-speaking European Jesuits, one or two Indian Christians, a Goan) were artists of pain who’d had years to refine their cruelties. Canings were administered not on the spot but after swimming, with trunks and therefore backsides still sodden. Bedwetters were thrashed and made to walk about in the compound at breaktime wearing their soiled sheets over their heads like cowls. A boy who attempted to run away was captured, thrashed, and had his head shaved completely bald. In Ross’s geography class an unnaturally small boy, Jerry Valentine, failed to identify the three crosses that made up the Union Jack. He was sent outside for two handfuls of gravel upon which, back in the classroom, he was made to kneel upright with his arms stretched out in front of him. A thick book was placed on the
palm of each hand. Father Venanglers (whose nickname, not surprisingly, was Danglers) continued the lesson in his preferred manner, strolling between the desks, but every time he passed Jerry and noticed his hands dropping under their load administered to them (with a look of mild pleasant surprise) two sharp cracks with the cane.
Confession was a twice-weekly obligation. Have you been doing anything dirty down there? This was Danglers’s chief area of interest. Ross only half understood. No, Father. Ah yes, but I know you boys. Make a good Act of Contrition now and leave off those filthy pollutions. Christ died for your sins, my son. You know that, don’t you? Suffered torment and death for your sake? Ross thought not of his own meagre stash of sins but of Father Galliano, or Gurru (from ‘Gorilla’, so named by the Aloysians for his frantic body hair), who came into the dorm after lights out and manhandled certain boys. These boys were known as Gurru’s BCs, Gurru’s Bum Chums. The phonetics had a juicy value, like a brand of chewy sweets: Gurru’s Bum Chums.
Ross slogged through his first two years and felt disproportionately older at the end of them. He was growing into a quick, wiry, muscular boy, small and scruffy but naturally athletic. Maths, geography and biology he could do without effort; the rest of academia was a matter of indifference to him. He had a big-eyed, bony face and sticking-out ears considered parodically available for tweaking and flicking by the priests. He took his share of thrashings but escaped the attentions of Gurru, whose pederasty was reserved for more androgynous Aloysians. He made no mention to his mother of the school atrocities on visits home, and surprised her (ripping out, he imagined, with a cold thrill, the last shreds of her heart) by being baroquely indifferent to their old intimacy. He never asked to see the bloodstone ring. She brought it out, slightly desperate. Try it on, try it on, let’s see if it fits yet. It didn’t. His fingers were still too small, which despite the grand aloofness galled him. Maybe next year, Beatrice said, eyes filling up. Or you could give it to Hector, Ross said, meanly. I’m sure it’ll fit him.
