Jubilee

by Shelley Harris

  Between them, and all along the table, Union Jack plates and cups are set out at neat intervals on Union Jack tablecloths. Here and there, dishes of food have been placed; he can see a pyramid of fairy cakes and remembers their meticulous red, white and blue icing. There’s a platter of small spirals – his mum’s chakli – and, further up, an amorphous pile he knows is the coronation chicken. There, at the point where sharpness is lost and the blurring begins, arms are reaching across to distribute food. Forks are already moving towards mouths, cups are being lifted.

  Outside that charmed circle at the front of the picture, expressions can only be made out with difficulty. Satish sees a woman turning, smiling radiantly towards the camera: Colette’s teacher friend, Miss Walsh. Mrs Miller, Sarah’s mum, is next to her. Those two blobs are Stephen and Paul Chandler, Satish knows for sure. He cannot find his own parents and sister, but he remembers exactly where they were: halfway along the trestle table near the Tomineys, Sima staring longingly down at his end, itching to move.

  The sounds outside Satish’s office have changed again. There are steps, and a gentle knocking, and then silence: Niamh again.

  ‘Come in.’

  She eyes him warily. ‘I’m off now. I really do need to get these to you today.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry about earlier. I had to concentrate. On some …’

  ‘Of course.’ She’s holding the sheaf of papers to her chest and coming over to the desk. Satish sees it in split-screen: Niamh getting closer, the photograph waiting on his monitor. He stands and leans over the desk towards her, reaching out for the papers. She stops far enough away and hands them over.

  ‘Thanks,’ he tells her. ‘See you next week.’ She leaves.

  I’ll get this over with, he thinks. I’ll just look at Cai and me, then I can go. His eye locates the photograph again, moves down past Mandy, towards the front of the table once more. There’s Cai, and then there’s Satish. He’s right at the front of the picture, the key compositional element.

  Cai sits sideways on his chair, his back to Mandy, his face towards the camera, one arm around Satish’s shoulder, the other hand resting a quarter inch from Satish’s cheek in a kind of Morecambe and Wise happy-slap. Satish’s Union Jack hat is about to fall off. It obscures his expression, so that all anybody sees is a comical half-grimace. Out of sight and across the road in Cai’s back garden, the barbecue glows hot, the hamburgers are charring.

  He wonders what it felt like for Andrew Ford, the invisible framer of this scene, resplendent in denim and cowboy boots. Satish remembers the photographer squatting down, feet planted wide apart on the tarmac, holding the camera at roughly the height of his subjects’ faces. He’d grasped the long lens underneath, adjusting it deftly in a motion so suffused with adulthood and competence that Satish was winded by envy. In the end the photograph was the product of chance, Ford reeling off a string of clicks, and Satish doesn’t know which moment this was: the first, the second, the ninth? Ford didn’t ask them to look his way; that was why there was this rag-tag feel, this diffuse attention.

  Chance served Andrew Ford well. After those first, hyperbolic weeks, people stopped caring so much about the Jubilee. The news went back to normal. Elvis Presley died, Satish started at his new school. The photograph found other places to be – in lofts, in scrapbooks, in bins; Satish didn’t care. He wasn’t visiting his neighbours’ houses much any more, but when he did, he’d sometimes catch sight of it. As the months went by, even that lost its impact. Skewered with a drawing pin or propped on a mantelpiece, it curled until all he could see were the things behind the photograph – other pictures, stuff he didn’t care about, writing that had nothing to do with him.

  Then, one day – it was the next summer, a whole year had gone by – a boy in his class brought in a copy of the NME. On the front cover: Riot Act, a new band. They slouched against a wall, avoiding the camera’s gaze, all tight trousers and discontent. Inside was an interview, and a picture of their LP. Satish just looked at it. Then someone said: ‘Shit. It’s Patel.’

  For a minute he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Their record cover was a version of ‘Happy and Glorious’. They’d made the picture look different, but it was the Jubilee photograph all the same. He was in it. The band was in it, too; ragged cut-outs of them squeezed in between the real people. One lolled, smoking a cigarette. Another had his head on the table. Satish could see other changes, too: instead of the Coke, there was a bottle of whisky; Sarah wore a ring of black round each eye; Colette’s flag was burning and they’d put smudges of colour all over the photograph – red on Peter’s lips, red and blue on Satish’s hat. The album was called The Only Language They Understand.

  Satish took the magazine and walked straight out of his prefab classroom, out to the end of the field where there was a gap in the hedge, and on to the pavement. He found a bin a few yards on and stuffed the copy of NME in there, down under other rubbish even though it made his hand dirty, down where it couldn’t be seen.

  Lucky Andrew Ford. With the hindsight that Satish now possesses, he can see Ford’s success as inevitable; a smooth upward curve. After the album cover came profitable outrage: just what did that graffitied photograph, that ambiguous album title, imply? And to use children … Riot Act became huge, and a thousand disenchanted schoolboys leaned against walls, hoping they looked like their heroes. The Bucks Gazette was suddenly a tight fit for Andrew Ford, who was taken up by post-punk London. As ‘Happy and Glorious’ spun away from him (the endless pastiches, the cultural referencing), he became the chronicler of a new England, its underground and – not long after – of Thatcher’s Britain.

  By March 2007, as Satish sits at his desk, ambushed again, Ford can credit to that picture his international reputation, both his wives, and all of his homes He’s planning a major retrospective, Colette says. He wants to take a ‘Thirty Years On’ reunion photograph in Cherry Gardens, a re-staging of the famous image. The Sunday Times Magazine wants to do a feature on the project. He’ll need them, those important six people, but most of all he’ll need Satish. How about it?

  Satish is jabbed by a fierce spike of anger. He can’t believe what she’s asking him to do. He can’t understand how Colette fits in, why she’s mixed up in this at all. He resents having to make any decision, any pronouncement about it. He wishes Ford had never taken up the idea, but Ford knows no more about what happened that day than any other outsider – why should he? Ford looks at his masterpiece and sees, besides the money, the leapfrogging career, only smiling faces, party clothes, the bloody Union Jacks. How could he see anything else? Colette is a different matter. What was she thinking? Maybe it’s this: that what’s past is so long past it doesn’t matter any more. Satish considers the years it has taken to knit these memories into a manageable form and thinks it would be wise for her to fear, for all of them to fear, just as he does, the pulling of the thread that might set them unravelling.

  Chapter 2

  It’s Saturday afternoon and Maya’s in her tracksuit bottoms and vest, bouncing from foot to foot in the hall and breathing out loudly, rhythmically, each time she lands to her right. Her hands are clad in lilac boxing gloves and as she dances and huffs she slams them against each other.

  ‘Come on! Get on with it!’ she tells Satish. ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’

  The second pad is always hardest to get on, his hand immobilised by the first; in the end he traps it under his armpit and slides his fingers in that way. He’s never told Maya how much he hates this ritual, how bemused he is that his wife, this gentle soul, would want to spend her spare time knocking seven bells out of … anything. When she fixes the pad with that focused gaze and lands one on it, he wonders what it’s standing in for. The whole process is unsettling, but it’s dull too, standing there for thirty minutes with his hands in the air. Plus, she looks a bit funny in her lilac boxing gloves and sometimes he has to force himself not to laugh.

  ‘You look weird, Papa
,’ Asha tells him. She’s lounging on the bottom stair, book in hand.

  ‘Thank you, Asha,’ he says. ‘Do you have homework to do?’

  ‘At the end of this chapter.’

  ‘Homework?’

  ‘Just let me finish this.’ Her skinny legs are encased in black, thin tops layered over her skinny torso. She slaps the book face down on the stair and reaches up to tighten her ponytail.

  ‘Right,’ says Maya. ‘You done? You ready? You want a piece of me? You want a piece of me?’

  ‘One chapter,’ says Satish.

  ‘Sati! Any more of that and you’ll distract me,’ says Maya. ‘I might just hit the wrong thing.’ She’s exaggerating her bounces, bobbing from side to side. She dances up to Satish and bops him gently on the chest, on the nose. Then she puts her guard up and he can’t see her breasts any more. He realises he’s been watching them, the way they sit differently in a vest.

  ‘I’m going to start with jab, jab, cross. OK?’ She points to his right pad.

  ‘OK.’

  She starts slowly, pulling back into guard position between punches, naming them as she lands them: jab, jab, cross. He concentrates on what he has to do, the pads at her shoulder height, meeting the blows with a little resistance, a little pushback each time. Sometimes she doesn’t land square, and then his hand is knocked askew, but not too often. It’s flowing nicely now, the crosses coming right across her body, from the back foot to the leading hand, and packing a proper wallop. Under her bare feet, as she twists, the hall rug skews.

  ‘Papa?’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘Did you hear about Daksha’s dad? He’s famous.’

  Eleven years as a parent have taught Satish the art of half-listening. He can catch the cry of authentic fear, the yell of actual pain, and filter out anything less consequential. He’ll never be able to multi-task, but this comes close.

  ‘You know Be My Guest?’

  ‘Umm … no.’

  ‘Papa! God!’

  ‘Asha! Language, please!’ Maya puffs. ‘Right, Sati. Change.’ She frowns at the pad and swaps foot positions. Leading from the other side she starts again: jab, jab, cross. He’d like a cup of tea, he thinks. He’d like a sit-down with the paper. Mehul’s out with his grandparents buying his school uniform and he’d even rather be doing that. Jab, jab, cross. His shoulders are aching.

  ‘Satish? Just watch the angle there. You’re a bit out.’ Maya reaches across to adjust the pad.

  ‘Be My Guest. It’s this TV programme. You know, TV, the thing in the corner? Big screen?’

  Maya snorts. ‘Asha … has … a … point,’ she says.

  ‘Daksha’s dad was on it. There’re four people. They do, like, dinner parties for each other.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It was on last week. Daksha’s dad won. He got a thousand pounds.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘He was in the paper. Daksha brought it in yesterday: Asian Lite. There was a picture of him in their kitchen.’

  ‘Good for him.’

  The pounding against his hands has stopped. Maya lifts her gloves to her head, pushing them over her ears. She frowns.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m trying to tuck my hair behind my ears. Don’t laugh. I can’t do it with these things on.’

  ‘Here, let me help.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he hears Asha say. ‘Daksha’s, like, this celebrity now.’

  ‘No,’ says Maya. ‘You’re just taking the mick …’ but she lets him reach out to her. Giggling, she dips her head forward and he brackets it with the curve of the pads. There’s her face, her hair, the flush and warmth of her, and he strokes across her cheeks towards her ears. There’s nothing to feel, an inch of leather and stuffing between them, and so he has to remember what it feels like, his fingers against her skin, the architecture of her bones.

  ‘Hmm. Not sure how to manage this.’ He pushes at her ears ineffectually. They’re both laughing. There’s a Velcro rip and her glove comes off. He leans down to her, but she turns away and searches the hall table for something.

  There’s a gentle thumping behind them: Asha making her way lugubriously upstairs. She’ll hunker down on the beanbag they keep on the landing – there’s the shingle sound of her sinking into it. She’ll read her book, keeping an ear open for her parents, and send down waspish comments when she feels like it.

  ‘Bingo!’ Maya’s found two of Asha’s hairclips and puts them on: sparkling plastic butterflies, one on each side.

  ‘Good choice,’ Satish says. ‘Didn’t Prince Naseem wear something like that?’

  ‘Enough! Let’s go!’ But now she’s having problems with the glove; the Velcro strap won’t do up properly.

  ‘Bugger!’

  ‘I can hear you, Mum!’

  ‘It’s different for adults!’ Maya calls up. Then she mutters: ‘I’m sick of this. I’ll just be a sec.’

  She goes to the door that links the house to the garage. Satish sees the light flickering.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m looking for duct tape. I just want to … hold on.’ He sees her through the half-open door, peering into the toolbox. He goes to the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Asha?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes. I was serious about that homework.’

  ‘I’ve done my Maths. My War project’s due in …’ But as she’s talking, his attention leaves her again. He hears the lid of the toolbox shut, Maya sighing. He turns to see what she’s up to; she has his briefcase in her hand.

  ‘Wait! What are you doing?’ He rushes into the garage and snatches it from her.

  ‘Ow! What are you doing? I told you, I need duct tape—’

  ‘Well, it’s not in there.’

  ‘I was just clearing this shelf.’

  ‘I don’t like my stuff being moved.’

  ‘There’s all sorts of crap in here. I thought someone might have … hey!’ She reaches across him and emerges, duct tape in hand. She holds it up in front of his face. ‘On your briefcase shelf,’ she says. ‘Behind your briefcase.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t like it, may I suggest you’re overdue a tidy-up?’

  Upstairs, Asha shifts. ‘Chill!’ she advises them. Satish and Maya look at each other. There’s a brief moment of standoff, then she smiles.

  ‘Yeah, chill,’ she says. ‘Dude.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘Chill,’ she repeats. ‘Or your ass is grass.’

  Jab, jab, cross, hook, hook: her hands are coming across at right angles, a side-on impact, and he has to angle the pads down after the first three punches. This takes more concentration, the change in position; it’s easy to miss a beat and mess things up.

  ‘I talked to Sima about your dad’s birthday.’ She slams into the pads on the stresses. ‘She’s got no idea about his present.’

  ‘OK. Don’t talk. Concentrate.’

  ‘I can do both – whoops! It’s good for me. Keeps both sides of my brain working.’

  ‘I’ll think of something for Papa.’

  He sees the angle of her arm, her fierce face behind it, as she hooks across and connects. Upstairs, he can hear Asha shifting in the bean bag. Maya’s finding it harder to talk now; she leaves her words unfinished. Then she stops on a half-hearted cross and leans forward, hands on knees, mouth breathing, reaches out for the water bottle stationed on the windowsill.

  ‘Hold on … Just a minute.’ She swigs and bends over again. Satish stretches his hands behind him, crunching his shoulder blades together. He rolls his head and closes his eyes. No one requires him; it’s a moment of peace. He hears Maya’s breathing slow down and then, just when he thinks they’re about to start again, she says: ‘Colette rang earlier. She told me about the photo.’

  He keeps his eyes closed. What does Maya know? Find out. Carefully.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said Andrew
Ford wants to get all of you together again. She said she’d sent you an email. Didn’t you get it?’

  Instinctively, his hand has moved to the top of his right arm. He finds he’s standing there hugging himself, only he can’t feel anything because of the stupid pad. He opens his eyes. Maya is looking at him quizzically.

  ‘Yes. I got it. What else did she say?’ He uncurls and holds the pads up at shoulder height.

  ‘Put some uppercuts in,’ she instructs. ‘Two, after the hooks. Pads facing down. OK?’

  Jab, jab, cross, hook, hook, uppercut, uppercut, the last two coming towards his chin, blocked by the pads. Once she’s in the rhythm he tries again.

  ‘What did Colette tell you?’

  ‘Ford wants to take another picture. The papers want to do articles. Publicity and fame! She’s very keen.’

  Ford wants? Satish knows what he wants. He wants to give Colette what for. He wants to shout at Maya. He wants them all to be quiet and leave him alone.

  ‘Think I’ll duck out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m too busy. The rotas … it won’t work out.’

  She’s hit her stride and she pounds away, hammering her words into the pads. ‘Everyone’s busy. They’ll be flexible about it.’

  He has to concentrate on placing his hands: three punches upright, two lateral, two facing down. She’s moving faster and he doesn’t want to make a mistake.

  ‘It won’t work out, Maya.’

  ‘It might.’

  ‘I’m not going to do it!’

  ‘OK.’ Jab, jab, cross. ‘How about you tell me …’ Hook, hook. ‘… what’s really going on?’

  His arms jerk sideways and the uppercut slams into him. There’s a blow, his head judders back, and he’s bitten the side of his tongue. Maya’s trying to touch him, but he’s pushing her away.

  ‘Oh God, Sati. I’m sorry. Are you OK?’

  He nods. His mouth fills with the metallic taste of blood. She’s pulling her gloves off. ‘Let me see. Open up …’