She handed it over, regarding Stephen with interest – ‘Any for you?’ – but before he could answer, Satish said: ‘No, he’s fine, thanks,’ and pushed past Stephen into his office, leaving him behind.
When he made to shut the door, Stephen bounced it open again. ‘It’s only for a minute,’ he said, shouldering inside and closing it. Satish moved behind his desk.
‘I’m very busy here.’ Satish kept hold of his hot tea. He looked at the sharpened pencils next to the phone.
‘I think I know what this is about – can I sit down?’ Uninvited, Stephen sat in the chair reserved for patients. He was a composite thing, a middle-aged man, and a boy, and – somewhere – the young man Satish had never seen. Lines had been carved into his skin, and it was more than the normal ageing process. There had been sun and wind on him over the last thirty years. Stephen’s hands came to rest on the arms of the chair, and a middle finger rubbed at the finial. Then he shifted in his seat, crossed one leg over the other and plucked at the knee of his trousers. There he was! Stephen, the boy, caught in one of his characteristic quick movements, like a sudden dumping of energy.
‘Look, I think I know why you’re reacting like this,’ he said. ‘I know why you didn’t answer my letters.’
‘I really don’t have the time …’
‘I understand. It was Jubilee Day, wasn’t it?’ He looked cautiously at Satish. ‘All that palaver before the street party? Blimey, that was nearly thirty years ago! What were we like, eh?’ He grinned invitingly, but Satish didn’t respond. Stephen was trying to take more control of his body language now. He slowed his movements down, became carefully expansive. The silence grew, and Satish let it. Stephen’s smile flattened.
‘Just kids, really, weren’t we?’ he continued. ‘When I look back … Well, we all had stuff to be embarrassed about, didn’t we? If it wasn’t your attitude it was your haircut. No point in being young otherwise. What we used to get up to …’ He shook his head and smiled. Still Satish said nothing. Stephen talked on, hauling up more memories, the convenient ones, as he did so. The white noise of the computer filled the pauses.
‘That school. Your mate Cai, footie in the street – do you remember? Different times. Well, we’re all grown up now. And look at you. You’ve done well.’
When he finally stopped, Satish stood. ‘I’m afraid I have to go now,’ he said. ‘Probably best to leave.’
Stephen stood, too, and Satish’s fingertips felt for the edge of the desk.
‘Come on, Satish.’
‘I said, it’s best if you leave.’
Stephen pursed his lips and looked at the floor. ‘You know, you were a lucky bastard, Satish,’ he said. ‘A lucky, smug bastard, some might say. I’m sure you felt hard done by and whatever, but the truth is, you lucked out on Jubilee Day.’
Was Satish suffering from some sort of latency? Certainly, he was a beat behind everything Stephen was saying.
‘Do you know what the halo effect is?’ Stephen went on. ‘It’s what you got that day. They’ve proved it: if people know one good thing about someone, they think they’re good at everything.’ He took a step closer. ‘If they know you’re rich, they’ll think you’re clever. If they know you’re popular, they’ll think you’re successful. Get one thing right – you know, really right – and you get the best jobs and the best partners and money and whatever. You got that.’ He flicks a finger at Satish. ‘You got it from that photo: that’s all people thought about, you at the centre, the Jubilee boy. It made you interesting. It made people notice you. How do you think you got all this?’ His quick gesture took in Satish’s office, the hospital and – presumably – Maya and the kids, miles away and oblivious.
Satish opened his mouth, but Stephen was on a roll. ‘Don’t tell me it was hard work; lots of people work bloody hard, and then they have a bit of bad luck and they don’t get even close to this. That photo started everything. What were you, before that happened? Nobody. So don’t come the martyr with me.’
‘In point of fact—’
‘Oh, come on! In point of fact? Stop being so precious. It was the seventies! Everyone did it, or had it done to them. That’s what childhood’s about. Do you think I escaped?’
Stephen being whacked with his plimsoll, Colette listening on the other side of the wall.
‘Stephen, why have you come here?’
‘You did fine by that photo. The rest of us got fuck-all.’
‘This again? You still want this? You can’t sue Andrew Ford.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Or picket him, or tell the papers about him—’
‘Listen to me. I don’t want to.’ He paused. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’
Satish saw the pelt in Stephen’s hands, dripping; a lump on the floor, muscle and bone.
‘Forget suing him. We can do something else. It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the photograph this year. We could contact Andrew Ford. Suggest a reunion. Bet he’ll do it if you ask.’
There was a stapler on his desk, and glass in the picture frame, and a heavy clock which told him it was just before four. He walked straight past Stephen.
As soon as he was out of the office, he felt better. He pounded along to the end of his corridor, put a hand out to the fire door but heard a hammering of footsteps behind him. He turned quickly; Stephen was jogging towards him, hands held up in mock surrender.
‘Wait!’
‘I have a patient to meet.’
There was a family due in for a preoperative check, a private case. A boy, three months old, large VSD requiring pulmonary artery banding. Satish pushed through the fire door and kept going.
At the end of his corridor was the outpatients’ waiting room, peopled by nervous adults and their charges. Oversized cuddly toys loomed over them, each one a gift from a grateful parent. Stephen stayed quiet as they passed, then he was off again.
‘Hang on, don’t do this. Christ! Just ask him. He’ll pay us to be in it this time – he’ll have to.’
‘I didn’t reply to your letters. Any of them. What does that tell you? I’m not interested.’ Satish looked at Stephen, who was a little out of breath from trotting behind him. ‘I don’t know why you are.’
‘Think about it: money to be in the picture. Money to be interviewed about it. Newspapers, magazines – don’t you think they’ll all want a piece of this?’
‘I don’t want his money. I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’
‘Please.’
They stopped at an intersection of corridors. To have Stephen pursuing him again, even after all these years, even in this public place … Satish took a step backwards.
‘You need to leave now.’
‘We never got our share. And now … It’s been thirty years. How much longer will people still be interested? It’s all right for you, with your posh job and your nice house and that. What about the rest of us?’
‘You’re unbalanced. That’s a professional opinion. Leave me alone. If you care about it that much, ask Ford yourself. See how far that gets you.’
‘I did.’
Satish considered the lift, its confined space, and headed off right instead, up the stairs. Stephen’s voice echoed in the stairwell.
‘I asked him and he’s not interested. Not unless you do it.’
They passed Clare Munroe going down. She nodded a greeting. Stephen was silent until she’d reached the floor they’d just come from, then he started up again.
‘The problem is, he’s not interested in me. He thanked me politely. Do you know what it means, when someone thanks you politely?’ Stephen moved quickly, placing himself in Satish’s way, on the step above him. ‘I bet no one’s ever thanked you politely, have they? It means they’re not interested. If someone thanks you politely they’re showing you the fucking door.’
Satish was finding it hard to listen. He was back in 1977, pulled there by this sense memory, this view of Stephen from below. Not Stephen’
s voice, not his restlessness – not even his smell, which came to Satish now, the cumin smell of sweat – nothing brought back the past like this simple perspective: him being smaller, Stephen being bigger.
‘He doesn’t know who I am. But he’ll listen to you. Even if you don’t need this, the rest of us do. Talk to Andrew Ford.’
Satish sidestepped him and kept climbing. He could see the doors leading to the ward. He opened them and realised that Stephen wasn’t following.
‘Just talk to him!’
The words were silenced as Satish closed the doors behind him. In the waiting area a couple sat close together, a baby lying across the man’s lap. Satish ducked into the disabled toilet and rushed for the bowl, heaving and coughing, vomiting in long, pumping retches. He spat then puked again, grabbing toilet paper to wipe his mouth. For a long time, he couldn’t get up.
Stephen, and the smell of him. Skinning a cat. He gagged again.
It took a while to settle down. Satish made himself breathe regularly, washed his mouth out and waited by the basin.
Then he left the toilet and went to see his patient. He had a job to do.
Later that day on his rounds, Satish had to administer diazepam. Afterwards, the part-empty bottle had seemed like an invitation. He had slipped it into his pocket, telling himself he could bin it later. He transferred it to his briefcase the next time he went to his office, and walked out with it when he left the hospital that night. He kept expecting the security man to come after him, braced himself for the sound of running, shoulders tensed until he turned the corner into the next road. But there was nothing.
When he got home, he’d taken his briefcase into the garage and put the bottle on his workbench. He’d backed away and stared at it for a long time. He could hear Maya in the kitchen, banging around making dinner, fiddling with the volume on the radio. Diazepam: it was what you gave patients to calm them down before a procedure. Kids are infinitely adaptable. When they’re ill, they’re a lot more accepting of things than adults are. It’s what parents don’t realise when their child is first diagnosed, and maybe what ends up being most painful to them: their child’s stoicism. This can sometimes break down though, often in the last few minutes before a procedure, when the kids get scared, want their mums. Diazepam relaxes them and lulls them to sleep. It stops them fighting the inevitable.
When Stephen Chandler came, Satish had known what those kids felt like, that rising sense of panic in the face of uncontrollable events. He’d witnessed it hundreds of times, but when Stephen came he’d felt it, he was feeling it now. He knew if he took a light dose he’d calm down and sleep well that night. His muscles would relax, he’d feel less anxious.
He thought about the perils of self-medication, then he dismissed the thought: it just didn’t apply in this case. If he went to his GP, she’d only end up prescribing it for him, he was sure. It was what you did for anxiety; he was just cutting out the middleman. He had the same training as any other doctor, the same instincts, and in his informed opinion this was fine, a one-off.
He’d calculated the dosage with precision, taken just two spoonfuls – a conservative amount – then tucked the bottle back into the briefcase. No one’s being deprived, he’d told himself, waiting for it to kick in, no one will know.
It took a while for the calm spread of the medicine to reach him. He put Stephen out of his mind: him and his brother, the loose cannons of Cherry Gardens. He thought instead of the others, his memories moving in the clarity of black and white down the table towards himself: Mrs Miller, Miss Walsh, Mandy, Cai, Satish.
Mandy, Cai, Satish.
Chapter 23
Satish is knuckling down. Faced with a choice which is no choice at all (the rock, the hard place) he’s contacted Andrew Ford and agreed to be in the photograph. His decision comes with certain consequences, and here’s one: it’s a Sunday morning and Satish is being borne, laboriously, towards Cai. Maya and the kids in the Volvo, easing forward on the M25. Cai had rung and offered lunch, and Satish had struggled briefly, stacking up excuses, then he told himself: as well now as later, it will give me a chance to make some things clear, and he’d said: All right, then.
On the way he fields Mehul’s questions: Who are we going to see? Where do they live? Why are we seeing them? Why haven’t we met them before?
‘I used to play with Cai a lot when I was a child,’ Satish says. ‘He lived next door and we went to the same school. But he moved away to another country when I was twelve and we haven’t seen each other since.’
He didn’t see any of them. Once he’d started at Bassetsbury Boys’ he fell in with the Nareshes and the Amrits and the Sanjays, bussing over to the next town if he wanted company.
‘You’ll both be famous now,’ says Asha. ‘Will Cai be nice?’
‘I don’t know,’ he tells her, and he sees Maya frowning at him. ‘I’m sure he will.’
But Cai was never nice. More exciting than that, most of the time. More scary sometimes. He had dreamed of a great future for them both – and here it is, on some level: a consultant driving to see a lion keeper for Sunday lunch. Lion keeper. Cai might have been happy with this, had he known. But that wasn’t the plan. The plan was for them both to be spies.
They’d seen The Man With The Golden Gun on telly at Christmas, and after that they only wanted to be 007. Cai’s mum said Roger Moore was rubbish, that Sean Connery was the best James Bond – ‘he can leave his gun under my bed any night’ – but it was too late. They could look like Roger Moore, easy, said Cai, in the Kung Fu scene. He showed Satish how, wearing his pyjama bottoms and dressing gown and striking a Kung-Fu pose. The next day, Satish turned up in slacks and a shirt with the first three buttons undone. Cai looked at him for a long time before saying, ‘Brill! We can both do that, can’t we? See – it’s easy!’
Cai knew all about being a spy, he assured Satish. He’d read about it. When you grow up, there are spies whose job it is to find other spies. When you’re about to leave school they find you. They take you to a secret place, and they show you the stuff they’ll give you, the car and the guns and the gadgets that Q has made for you. There are also beautiful women. They will give you all of this, but you have to say you’ll leave right now. They’ll change your identity and you’ll never see your family again, but it will be worth it because you’re doing it for your country. For the Queen. If you agree to it, they’ll take you away in a helicopter.
‘Which people do they pick?’
‘Us,’ said Cai. ‘They’ll pick us because we’re already interested, and practising, and dressing right. They like people who are good at PE because of all the fights. You’ve got to be good at PE.’
They practised. Satish wasn’t sure about the PE idea, but he tried. At home, they chose their numbers (008 for Satish, 009 for Cai) and had a go at spying, setting each other tasks and reporting back. Satish had to find out what Cai was having for tea without his mum seeing, and Cai had to take one of Sima’s books from her bedside table.
They’d say the lines they heard on TV, drawing a bead on each other with imaginary guns. Cai had a go at doing the title sequence, walking along and then suddenly turning sideways and firing. He tried it a few times, got it down pat.
His friend was right, thought Satish, Cai could be a spy – easy. He wasn’t so sure about himself, though. Weren’t spies meant to be inconspicuous sometimes? When they weren’t facing down a villain or gambling in a casino, weren’t they meant to blend into the background so they could find out secrets? He didn’t fancy his chances much. But in that last winter with Cai he suspended his disbelief and they carried on preparing for the day when, coming home from school, they’d be intercepted by a man in a sharp suit with a glossy car, ready to helicopter them away to a life of gadgets, and guns, and girls.
Maya is bored. She’s slipped off her shoes and put her feet on the dashboard, a bad habit of hers. He thinks about mentioning the airbag, but decides not to.
‘You never talk abo
ut Cai,’ she says to him.
‘I haven’t seen him for thirty years.’
‘I know but there must be childhood things. You still see Colette.’ Not at the moment he doesn’t. ‘I know more about him from Colette than I do from you.’
‘There’s not much to say. He lived in my street when we were kids.’
‘I don’t know what to expect.’
‘Nor do I.’
‘OK then.’
They round a bend and the motorway is glittering with cars. Satish steps on the brake, reaching out to click on the hazard light. ‘Papa!’ says Asha. ‘Careful! I lost my place!’
‘If you look at the road you will see there’s something of a traffic jam,’ he tells her. ‘If I hadn’t stopped we’d have crashed.’
‘You could have done it more carefully.’
‘Eleven going on fourteen,’ mutters Maya.
‘What?’
‘It’s pardon, Asha, and I said you were rude. Be polite, please. Papa’s trying to get us there safely. You shouldn’t be reading anyway. It’ll make you feel sick.’
‘Fine.’ She snaps her book shut. ‘What will I do now?’
‘Well, you could enjoy Papa’s fascinating stories about his childhood. They’re filled with incident.’
‘When will we get there?’ asks Mehul.
‘I have no idea,’ says Satish. ‘Could be twenty minutes, could be another hour at this rate.’ Both children wail in unison.
‘Can we listen to some music?’ Asha asks.
‘Tell us about the incident,’ says Mehul.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He means the childhood incident,’ says Asha. ‘Mum said.’
He tries to crawl forward but stalls. For a few seconds, there’s just the ticking of the hazards, and he waits for what she’s going to say next.
‘No,’ Maya says slowly to the kids, but not taking her eyes off him. ‘I said they’re filled with incident. But I was joking, teasing Papa. He doesn’t have any stories. Do you?’
‘No.’
Jubilee Page 19
