Jubilee

by Shelley Harris

  ‘Top Trumps is brilliant,’ Sarah put in. ‘I’ve seen Cai’s Cars pack. It’s great.’

  But Cai wasn’t looking at her. He was facing the other way, towards Mandy. ‘It’s fun,’ he told her. ‘You can play it with me, if you want.’

  ‘Yeah. Great. Maybe,’ and she winked at Satish as she turned away from Cai. ‘Which ones will you get, Satish?’ she asked. Under the counter, her knee nudged against his.

  Out in the hall, he could hear his sister thanking Mrs Hobbes, preparing to leave. ‘Bombers,’ he said.

  ‘Fighters and Bombers,’ Cai corrected.

  ‘Same thing,’ said Mandy, but Satish made a mental note. There were so many things to remember, so many little details to keep hold of. You had to know which music to like, which sport to play, which words you could use to sound cool, and which ones made you sound like a spaz. But he’d bent his mind to it; he’d been doing that ever since he arrived in Cherry Gardens.

  From the outset, displaced from Uganda, plunged into the cold shock of an English autumn, Satish had deployed his resources as quickly and as effectively as he could. He had an eye for detail, and a readiness to be flexible about things. He willed his body to get used to the latitudinal facts of life in Europe; gone was the reassuring rhythm of the equatorial day where the hours of daylight and darkness were measured with an even hand. Here, waking up in the dark, walking home from school at dusk, he could feel the night jostling him. Dampened by the drizzle – what mediocrity! – he thought sometimes of the rainstorms visited on them back home, passionate downpours that hammered the land, then were dried in an hour by the tropical sun. Later, in the aftermath, a cloud of grasshoppers would descend, the slowest of them grabbed by Satish and his friends and offered to the Africans as food. He’d watched, entranced, as they pulled off the wings and ate them straight away. Once, when she was old enough to feed herself but too young to tell their mum, he gave one to Sima.

  These losses were to be borne, but there were good things about England, too. The afternoons might be gloomy, but at least he was allowed to play outside in the growing dark, not ushered in when his mum started getting worried for him; these streets were safe. And then there was the first time he saw milk money being left out: Mrs Brecon put a pound note under an empty bottle, and he watched her front porch, peeping through the hall window every few minutes until bedtime, waiting for it to be swiped.

  ‘It’ll be there in the morning, Sati,’ his dad had said. ‘We’re not in Kampala any more.’

  In Kampala Miss Slater was a graceful oddity at Satish’s school, with her white skin and impeccable deportment. Courtesy had informed all her dealings with the class. Whatever she taught them – although Satish could not, once he had left, recall any specific academic gain – was shot through with politeness and respect.

  The adult Satish looks back on this now with a jaundiced eye; he is intelligent enough to realise how chaotic, how uncivilised was the world in which Miss Slater believed herself to be, therefore how necessary the redress of her invincible politesse. But as a child, Satish just thought she was courteous, and she was one hundred per cent of all the white people he knew. When he was told his family was going to live in Britain, he envisaged a nation of such adults, cordial and refined in all their dealings. And on that particular evening Satish remembered Miss Slater, and then he knew: of course they could leave the milk money out at night.

  Miss Slater’s legacy was short-lived. After he moved to Cherry Gardens, Satish wasn’t thrown by his peers’ behaviour; every kid is used to the casual cruelty of other children. However, sitting alone in Sarah’s kitchen one day, perhaps six weeks after his arrival in Cherry Gardens, Satish heard a whispered argument in the dining room, just the other side of the closed serving hatch.

  ‘What are you doing, Sarah? Why’s he here?’ That was her mum.

  ‘He came home with me after school. Can he …’ That was Sarah, speaking at normal volume. Mrs Miller shushed her. ‘Can he play?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Listen Sarah, Daddy and I think … I’m sure he’s a nice boy, but he’d really be better off with his own people.’

  Satish thought: does she know Uncle Ranjeet? Does she mean my cousin? Mrs Miller continued.

  ‘So I’m going to say no.’ There was a brief silence, and a sigh. ‘He can’t stay. Are you going to ask him to leave, or shall I?’

  Satish, listening, spilt an experimental bead of milk onto the work surface. He placed his glass on top of it and started moving it around.

  ‘He just came back with me after school,’ Sarah repeated. ‘I thought he could …’

  ‘Well, he can’t. And I’m not going to say it again. Now, you or me?’

  Sarah, sullen: ‘You.’

  Satish drew a milky ‘S’ across the counter with the base of the glass. A moment later Mrs Miller came into the kitchen, and he slid off the bar stool to greet her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Satish, but Sarah has to have an early tea today. She didn’t realise. So you’ll have to go home, I’m afraid!’

  Miss Slater had not prepared him for this, though she had prepared him admirably for the courteous exit he managed to make – ‘Thank you very much for having me, Mrs Miller’ – and, he sensed, she might even have been impressed by the unruffled way in which his hostess managed to dispatch Satish from the house. It was a shock, this loss of innocence. Adults could be wicked, even white ones: cruel and rude while appearing to be polite and welcoming.

  His family stayed in Cherry Gardens, became a fixture, and Satish thought Mrs Miller had become more used to having him around. He didn’t go to their house much, but when he did he was allowed to stay. On Jubilee Day, in the rushed final moments before the street party, Sarah’s mum positively welcomed him into the kitchen, letting him take dishes out to the waiting table. When Sarah called him Splatish, he was reminded that she was not an adult yet; she said it to his face.

  Back in Mandy’s sitting room, negotiations about the music continued. Sarah listed the tracks, and Cai volunteered to tape them over the weekend. It was a hotchpotch in the end, because David Soul got in, and so did the Stranglers. Boney M and the Ramones were both included, because nobody would back down.

  When the two boys crossed to their side of the road afterwards, Cai told Satish, ‘I’ve got something to show you. Come over for a bit.’

  Up in his room Cai pulled open a drawer, shoved stuff out of the way, and retrieved something from underneath. It was a paper bag, printed with the red scorpion logo of the local record shop. From it he pulled a square of royal blue cardboard with the familiar cameo of the Queen in its centre, the same oval which now decorated houses and car windows, petrol stations, mugs, soaps. But in this picture the eyes were blindfolded, and the mouth gagged with strips of words seemingly cut from a newspaper, ransom-note-style. ‘God Save The Queen’ it said. ‘Sex Pistols’.

  ‘Paul Chandler bought it for me on Saturday,’ Cai told him. ‘Mum and Dad would kill me.’

  ‘Yeah, they would. How are you going to listen to it then?’

  ‘I’ve already heard it, at Paul’s house. It’s brilliant. Don’t tell anyone.’

  They looked at the single together. It was dangerous; you couldn’t hear it on the radio. But now Cai had it stashed in his sock drawer.

  ‘Better than bloody Boney M, eh?’

  Satish nodded. ‘Yeah, but you couldn’t put this on with Abba and 10cc. They’d kill you.’

  ‘I’ve thought of something, though. My dad—’

  There were feet on the stairs: Colette. Cai ran back to the drawer with the record. Satish went towards the door in case she came in. She didn’t.

  ‘Cai?’ They heard the sound of her fingernails scratching the door. ‘Mum says it’s teatime. She says you should say goodbye to Satish now.’

  Then they heard her pad back to the top of the stairs: a grunt, a thump, a faint squeaking, and Satish realised what she was doing: straddling the banister, getting resistance with her damp palm s
o she could control her descent. Little Colette, sliding all the way down to the hall, hoping her mum wouldn’t catch her in the act.

  Chapter 8

  And now he’s convinced he’s going to be caught.

  There’s nothing concrete he can identify. All his procedures continue as usual. In the three months since he started taking diazepam, Satish has perfected these procedures: the visits to the garage at the end of the day, the swift dose, the evidence tucked away in his briefcase. At work he’s extremely careful, ingenious, even. He visits the drugs cupboards on a strict rotation, and always when no one else is around. He could write his own prescriptions, but that would need careful management: a different pharmacy each time, and scrupulous record keeping. So he’s explored other sources, going to his GP for a consultation. Satish sat in her office and they had talked shop for a bit, while he wondered what to tell her. The truth had seemed too complex, she’d misunderstand. Instead, he cited an upcoming conference and his own pre-speech nerves. They’d laughed about it together. She had prescribed quite happily: blue pills in a blister pack, an adult formulation. He keeps a bottle of water in the garage to wash down the tablets. He has everything covered.

  Satish watches for signs of cognisance in those around him: a searching look from a colleague, a quizzical one from Maya. He checks himself in the mirror frequently, but there’s only him, the way he’s always been. He audits his face, his hands, but there’s nothing to see. He knows it’s coming, though. Someone’s going to find him out.

  The medicine’s not always doing what it should, either, but he won’t increase his dose – he’s strict about that. So here he is, at 2 a.m, downstairs in his lounge and not asleep or even sleepy, trying to keep himself occupied. He’s organising the CD collection (alphabetical, by artist). On the coffee table are piles of cases, decanted from their shelves, and a smaller pile of discs beside them. They’ve become untethered during incidents that will, he knows, be denied by everyone he lives with. He may as well do this himself.

  He’s trying to track down a Robbie Williams case when his mobile phone, filed on the mantelpiece with his keys and wallet, pings at him. It’s a text from Colette: sorry sory sorry there r reasons

  He replies:

  Go to sleep.

  The thing to do is to make sure all the CDs are rehomed, then redistribute the ones which shouldn’t be downstairs anyway. Some of Asha’s have found their way here, and –

  r u awake!?

  Go to sleep. Not an approp

  He struggles with the word, all fingers and thumbs, before giving up.

  Not now.

  The reverse will also be true; there is a growing pile of CDs in Maya’s car. Not all of them have cases, either, so that means he’ll have to match them up –

  hang on

  Satish looks at the phone, waiting for more, but nothing comes. He wonders whether he’s sleepy enough yet: nothing. An itching in the veins tells him he needs to be moving, doing something. He goes back to the pile.

  The CDs are like a chronicle of his life. Of their lives, his and Maya’s. A chaotic one, which won’t be ordered in the ordering of it, Abba next to the Bombay Vikings, Oasis a forerunner to the Pogues. Satish considers a different arrangement, by person, or by chronology. He could trace their years together in this way, from his time as a Senior House Officer back in the early Nineties. He’d noticed Maya at work and had gone to pick her up one night before some group event. Arriving at her room he had heard music coming from behind her door: a foul-mouthed, stomping song he had later learned was called ‘Bottle of Smoke’. The lyrics contained words he’d barely ever said, and yet there she was, listening to it, singing, and thudding: was she pogo-ing? He knocked on the door and the thudding stopped. The music was turned off and Maya appeared: puffed out, flushed.

  ‘Right, soldier,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ His scrotum tingled.

  Maya made everything new. Satish was a dynamic young doctor, and his provenance, to a girl born and raised in Portsmouth, seemed glamorous. After three weeks she saw him naked, the scar on his arm dismissed as a botched vaccination. A year later, he asked his parents to arrange the marriage. They still have the song from their wedding. Satish is looking at it now, ‘Bindya Chamkegi’. Maya insists that the mix is ‘edgy’.

  Then there’s the Sheryl Crow album that reminds him of Asha’s birth, and the Best of Madness CD Maya bought around the time his parents moved in. She’d play ‘Our House’ loudly, and he never knew whether she was being cheerful or ironic, and, it being a tricky subject, he never asked. There’s ‘Brimful of Asha’ which they’d play to their daughter, aged two or three. He remembers Maya dancing with her in the lounge, her face burrowed into Asha’s neck. Mehul had just been born then, a tiny two handfuls. Satish’s lad.

  Satish could order his music like that, in a way strangers would find baffling, a private chronology, starting with the Pogues. Before that, before Maya, there’s not much to speak of. Nearly nothing. Maya has sneaked something in under the wire, though. A couple of years ago she went to a Seventies fancy dress party (flares, platforms, afro wig). Her outfit won her a prize, and here it is: fluorescent yellow, a pink strip of ransom-note letters across the bottom: Never Mind the Bollocks.

  The headphones are the old-fashioned, bulky kind. Asha would crack up, but she’s not here to witness it. Satish puts the CD in, clicks through the tracks to the one he wants. He thinks of Cai going on at him about the Sex Pistols, trying to get through to him:

  ‘I want to play it at maximum volume, yeah? I want it to smash the windows.’

  He’d found Satish in Jennings Field and started this unsolicited proselytising. It was a week before Cai was due to leave for South Africa, and Satish didn’t want to talk to him at all. He got up and walked away, but Cai followed him.

  ‘Listen! When I put it on I can feel my hair standing up and my skin tingling. It makes me … I feel sort of strong, unbeatable. It’s like I’ve got this power and I don’t know what to do with it. I want to destroy things. Do you get it?’ Satish kept walking.

  Now his head fills with the noise of it: ‘God Save the Queen’. At first it’s almost like some kind of Fifties rock ‘n’ roll, then after those early bars, it takes on a raw, anarchic edge. Satish closes his eyes, blanking out the sofa, the coffee table, the flatscreen TV. He tries to see it as Cai did: a grey street, the movement of brown and orange curtains, the sameness of it all, the things he wanted to leave behind. Satish moves to the music: a dipping bob, his fists clenched. He shuffles and twists. What did Cai do? He bounces on his toes, the coiled wire of the headphones slapping against his shoulder. He jumps: knees together, his body an exclamation mark. He is Cai. He jumps higher, raises his hands. He punches the air. He mouths the words, most of them wrong, but he is Cai. This is what he felt.

  The song ends in a messy drum roll, a final percussive flourish. Satish leans against the wall, panting. When he opens his eyes, Colette is standing beside him.

  He yells before he can stop himself, the noise banging inside his head.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mouths. He pulls the headphones off and drops them. They clatter to the floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Sorry! I didn’t want to wake anyone up. I thought you knew I was coming. I—’

  ‘Oh God!’ Anger and fright and embarrassment are tussling inside him. He presses his hand to his chest. Colette steps towards him but he moves away. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I said I’d come. “Hang on”, I said. I texted.’

  ‘But it’s …’ he glances around him ‘… it’s two thirty.’

  ‘More like three. But you were awake. What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m organising my CDs.’

  A laugh escapes her and she claps her hand to her mouth to control it.

  ‘And listening to music. Why are you here? How did you get in?’

  ‘I came in through the garage. Maya lets me, if she’s out.’

  ‘We’re no
t out, though—’ The garage. He pushes past Colette and through the hall, opens the garage door. It’s all there: his briefcase undisturbed, everything as it should be. She’s followed him.

  ‘That was a bloody stupid thing to do, Colette,’ he says, returning to the lounge. ‘And presumptuous.’

  ‘Don’t! We need to talk.’

  ‘About what? We’ve talked. Go home.’

  ‘Satish …’ She looks up at him. ‘You have never, ever turned me away. Don’t send me home.’

  He falters. It’s the most presumptuous thing of all, to remind him of that. The bare-faced cheek. He starts sorting through the discs again.

  ‘We’ve got through worse than this, haven’t we, Satish? Way worse.’

  He’s not so sure. Back then, she was the only one suffering. It was the mid-Nineties, and she’d come to him out of the blue, nearly twenty years after the Brecons had left Cherry Gardens. Skinny with addiction, a cautionary tale, she had turned up on his doorstep. He and Maya had only been married a short while and Maya hadn’t even heard her name mentioned before. ‘You were the only one I could think of,’ Colette had told Satish. Maya had reached past him and pulled her inside.

  ‘You took me in,’ she reminds him now. ‘You helped me get clean. And that’s the thing. That’s why I need to talk to you.’

  This, then. Suddenly, he has to sit down. He lowers himself onto the sofa, takes one breath, two, then squares his shoulders and looks at her. ‘Go on. Say it.’

  ‘OK.’ She sits next to him. ‘To understand all is to forgive all, yeah?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK. It’s about my dad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Andrew Ford thing. It’s about my dad. You need to know.’

  He has to break apart what she’s saying, quickly, and put it back into this new order, an order in which he isn’t about to be found out, to be disgraced. He wants to grin at her, but remembers he’s angry.

  ‘What about your dad?’ he asks.

  ‘Well …’ Colette twitches her head sideways. ‘It’s awful. Things are crap for him right now.’