Freeman's

by John Freeman

  I closed the book that was open over my crossed legs. A feeling of anxiety washed over me like a cramp. I tried to keep it at bay but soon I was sniffling. I heard my mother get up from her chair, I listened to her sandals scratching the tile floor as she crouched down, I felt her hand on my shoulder. I wanted to explain to her what was upsetting me, but, even if I had found the words, I wouldn’t have had the courage. I imagined myself saying: “The only thing left in this world is destruction, Mom, and the worst thing we can do is interfere,” but I wasn’t even sure I really believed that, I knew only that the idea had begun to take hold of me. I spoke instead of my father’s heart attack, how it was only beginning to sink in. He’d barely escaped death. I wasn’t ready for him to die. I also told her about my situation at the university, that I even ran the risk of losing my scholarship after failing my qualifying exams on account of a vile, spiteful professor. My mother already knew all about the whole tragedy, we’d talked it over several times via Skype, one of those times being when I was drunk on vodka mixed with limoncello and spoke in all seriousness about sabotaging the freezers that held Cesar’s research supplies, and showing him that he’d fucked with the wrong student. But she listened to it all over again and waited for me to finish before saying anything.

  “Your dad is getting better. The worst is over. And we already spoke about your doctorate, didn’t we, dear?” my mother said with the tone of voice she used in attempts to project her own imperturbability onto others. “Your adviser and your peers understood perfectly the real reason you failed. Didn’t they? You’ll find a way to fix this. Your research is too valuable for them to let something worse happen.”

  She ran her hand through my hair, lifted her eyebrows, and smiled from cheek to cheek. Our conversation might well have ended there, she was right, I would pass on the second attempt, no one had ever heard of candidates failing their qualifying exams twice at the Institute of Chemistry. Cesar’s substitute was a professor who didn’t have anything against me.

  “Mom, do you remember Andrei? My friend, the writer.”

  “Yes, of course. The Duke?”

  “He died yesterday. He was killed in a robbery on Rua Ramiro Barcelos.”

  She began to open her mouth and then her face became all twisted.

  “My god, Aurora, how awful . . .”

  “They shot him in the face so they could take his cell phone.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last night. Near the Hospital de Clínicas. He died around there, I think.”

  “What a tragedy. Every now and then they’d publish something about him in the newspaper. He was quite the success.”

  “He was.”

  “Did they find whoever killed him?”

  “I’m not sure, I don’t think so.”

  “Are you going to the funeral? Did you two still speak?”

  “I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time. Ever since I moved to São Paulo I haven’t really kept in touch with people here.”

  My mother stood up and walked out into the backyard. I went after her and found her staring at the grill. A few meetings and parties with the Orangutan group had been hosted there, barbecues that stretched on into the night and had, on occasion, turned a bit psychotic and semipornographic.

  “I just remembered the bottle of alcohol,” my mother said. One time, Andrei, completely wasted, had tried lighting the grill with a liter of alcohol, producing an impromptu flamethrower that lasted a few seconds and singed some of my mother’s vases full of flowers as well as the hair on the arm of another boy, who ended up in the emergency room. “There was that friend you all had who was always taking off his clothes.”

  “Antero. I’d forgotten about that, he did that all the time.”

  “To your father and me, you all seemed like children still. It was difficult to swallow certain things, but later we got used to it.”

  Thinking about the way we were back then, I also thought we were just a bunch of kids. But we had thought we were adults. More adult than the adults. I could remember in vivid detail the way, on the threshold of twenty, I thought of my parents as children. And now we were all more or less the same thing.

  “Let’s go see how your father’s feeling,” my mother said all of a sudden.

  Together we walked into the house to find him awake on the living room sofa, in his pajamas, remote control in hand, watching the videos of Buster Keaton that he so adored and had collected since the time of VHS tapes. I had given him that collection of DVDs as a birthday present.

  “The doctor said you’re not supposed to laugh,” my mother warned.

  “I’ve already seen this movie five hundred times, I don’t laugh anymore,” he replied.

  I sat down at his side, laid my head on his shoulder, and concentrated on the TV screen for a few minutes. That was the movie in which Keaton plays a young man who has only a day to get married in order to inherit seven million dollars. After he has been turned down by various women, his friends publish an ad in the newspaper for a girl to marry a millionaire groom, and soon Keaton is being chased down an enormous avenue by hundreds of women in wedding dresses. The chase turns absurd, with a mix of cranes, wild acrobatics on cliffs, and a rock avalanche that overtakes the hero and his brides as they scurry down a mountain. What I never managed to tell my father was how Buster Keaton’s unchanging expression directed my imagination toward the muscles of his quick, athletic body, and the indefatigable posture of his characters—always fighting, in their awkward way, against forces that so comically outweighed them—awoke in me an empathy so intense it was easy to confuse it with sexual desire. As a teenager, I would watch the tapes when I was at home alone, the way boys watch porn films.

  There was one scene, however, that disturbed me in a different way. It happened in the closing moments of a film called College. After an entire Olympics of frustrated attempts to participate with a modicum of dignity in campus sporting life, a young college student played by Keaton finally wins over the girl and they marry. They leave the church together and then there’s a series of three shots that pass as fast as lighting. The three images, one after another, can’t last more than five seconds. First we see Keaton and his wife at home with their young children, doing chores around the house. Then we see the two of them much older, sitting side by side in rocking chairs. Then, two graves. And then a title card that reads “The End.” I found that ending absolutely terrifying. It seemed to contain an urgent message: you will bend over backward and swallow your pride to achieve what you want, and you’ll get it, but from that point on life won’t be worth more than three short cuts. The film was over, effectively, before those three shots. When the couple left the church, it was already over. That was the secret tragedy of the film, its hidden subtext, a gesture toward the absurdity that is life. Of course this only increased my desire for Buster Keaton. I had masturbated one or two times dreaming of that melancholy mask and that chest puffed up with naive heroism.

  Sitting next to my convalescing father on the sofa, I observed, with some relief, that my erotic relationship with those films was behind me. What caught my attention at that moment was the film’s unbelievably daring action, a suicidal madness filmed almost entirely without the aid of special effects. My father did not, in fact, laugh at the scenes, just as he’d assured my mother. He stared at the screen with a calm sort of concentration, a frown on his face, sharing in that sweet sorrow. His body had a sharp smell laced with cinnamon, a scent I breathed in with a sense of transgression. My little old man who’d nearly died. I felt so close to him.

  Keaton’s energy, his range, and his unruffled expression were not within our reach, but the pacing of the action that absorbed us was real, the way it gathered speed was real, not only real but realistic; it had been a long time since it had spilled out from the realm of cinema and into our lives, and our end would be composed of three quick cuts that would be difficult to recognize as a chapter of our story.

  My cell phone vibrated
in my pocket. The call came from someone who wasn’t in my contacts.

  “Aurora?”

  “This is she. Who’s calling?”

  “Francine. We’ve never met.”

  But I could remember having read her name in the newspaper article.

  “It’s about Andrei,” she said.

  Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

  Sympathy of a Clear Day

  ISHION HUTCHINSON

  By melon carts and feral cats skinning off adobe walls, we thread the white heat of day on the square, to the café minarets level at our eyes, vapor coils of virgin snow peaks through them, ready to spring.

  Travel is sympathy. Not so, you point at what’s below: birds and monkeys shuck to perform by their cages; snakes rise in fragrant droppings on carpets children squat with whisks while tourist dollars and coins fill baskets.

  Souks edge the lubric traffic. Commerce, from the good cool of this café, prowls and gnaws the city to the bone. Mighty caravans appear still with oaths and murmurs from across the equator, no longer with tents, for cheap hotels proliferate as madly as the war raged for oil. From this height we are in a spell of fabrics, lavender and saffron, those loggias of black soften in the haze glow basalt and move in fluid swaths against shadows.

  Bless Churchill’s cruel, romantic eyes, in one regard, for painting the sky’s fragile lilac and radio wafer, no longer audible, over the bazaar’s broken watercolours. His self-centred ego now turns unseen, incessant drones.

  “To celebrate,” you tell me with mock triumph, “a holiday is to become free for the unaccustomed day: the clear day.” The clear day I repeat, then shudder remembering another phrase, the God-land compressed within itself, and remind you.

  Any reprieve but none from the unredeemable world.

  Weighted voices. Clouds cover the propane tank on the terrace; we come down to go to the desert, that final archive where dragnet of stars blanch at sunset over travellers in slow progress.

  Sunjeev Sahota was born in 1981 and lives in Yorkshire with his wife and children. His first novel, Ours Are the Streets, was published in 2011. His second, The Year of the Runaways, was short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. He is a Granta Best Young British Novelist.

  Good Girls

  SUNJEEV SAHOTA

  ‘Maybe you need to speak to her?’ Balbir said, sliding across to her side of the bed now she’d warmed his spot for him.

  ‘I’ll decide what I need to do,’ Gurdev said. ‘But I’m not forcing her into a nursing home. We’ll just have to look after her here.’

  ‘You mean pehnji and I will have to look after her,’ Kulwant said, in the bedroom next door. ‘Fine! Fine! You look after both the shops and we’ll look after your mother.’

  ‘I’ll help, darling,’ Jagroop said. He’d been so much more conciliatory since she’d discovered the results of their tests. ‘But we’re the Directors. We can’t do that and be on the shop floor.’

  ‘Home help, then,’ Balbir suggested. ‘You can get twenty-four-hour nursing care. One thousand pounds a week.’

  ‘One thousand bhanchod what?’

  ‘We can’t leave her home alone all day anymore.’ Kulwant removed Jagroop’s hand from her thigh. ‘Every day I wonder what I’m going to come home to this time.’

  ‘It was only a bit of flooding.’

  ‘But how much did the new carpet cost? Wouldn’t a nursing home be cheaper? In the long term?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Gurdev said, extracting the comb from his topknot. ‘Off the light. On fours . . . please.’

  The attempts to oust their mother-in-law from the house had been going on for three months, since the day Kulwant had stormed out of her shop, across Burngreave, and into Balbir’s store in tears. ‘They lied!’ she said, and slapped the creased yellow paper so hard on the counter that the chewing-gum stand lost a couple of sticks. Balbir handed her customer his change over Kulwant’s shoulder, then took up the note. It was headed with a stamp belonging to the late friend of the family Dr. Ramasingha, and it stated that without doubt non-conception was due to Jagroop’s poor sperm motility and, furthermore, in all likelihood, his wife was ‘all there’.

  ‘I was cleaning out Mum’s old trunk and I found . . .’

  ‘Don’t cry, sister.’

  ‘For thirty years they’ve let me think it was my fault. All that gossiping behind my back. All those pitiful looks. Just wait till I get my hands on him.’

  But this was news to Jagroop, too. It seemed the only person who’d known the truth was Mum and everyone else had been told (by Mum) that the results had only confirmed what they’d always suspected. That contracting mother pox in adulthood had done for Kulwant. That they’d been tricked into marrying Jagroop to a dead end.

  ‘What names she called me. Half-a-woman. False flower.’

  ‘A desert on legs,’ Jagroop mused, forgetting himself.

  ‘She called me what?’

  ‘But, darling’—this was the first ever ‘darling’ of their marriage—‘this doesn’t change anything. I don’t love you any less.’

  ‘What you mean you don’t—? And take your hands off me! It’s your mother I’m going to strangle.’

  She didn’t confront Mum in the end. Far better, she decided, to remove her from the house, forever. She’d been guilt-tripped into doing every last thing for her—not only her ironing, washing and cooking, but cutting her corns, rubbing Johnson’s baby lotion into her armpit every Sunday, for God’s sake—and now enough was enough.

  ‘But she’s our mum,’ Balbir said.

  ‘Do you want to see Jassi ever again? Do you think you will while she’s living here? Once she’s gone you can talk to Gurdev properly. Like a husband and wife. Without her poisoning your business all the time.’

  That night, with Kulwant’s words high in her mind, Balbir stole away to her bedroom and logged into Facebook under her pseudonym. She had only one friend: her daughter, Jaswinder. There was no little red subscript number beside the camera icon, so Balbir carefully—as if each click risked a detonation—navigated to some recent photographs, freezing on her favourite, of a grumpy-looking toddler in a ‘Frozen’ Elsa dress. As Balbir stared at the image, the ball of pain in her stomach grew, swelled, until it seemed to be showing through the folds of her fifty-four-year-old body, choking up her throat. Typing with only her index finger, she sent Jaswinder a message: hello beti . . . how is zubys cough . . . hope she lots better now. Xxxxx

  All morning Balbir put off making the phone call and setting into motion Kulwant’s latest idea. Instead, she checked the takings against the till roll; refilled the cash machine (squatting like a fishwife in her salwar kameez to drag the screeching thing away from the wall); tallied the scratchcards’ revenue to the display on the lottery terminal; set aside the PayPoint income; flattened the towers of cardboard boxes and carried them to the recycling bin (avoiding eye contact with the lipsticked ten-year-olds who seemed never to attend school); recast the beer shelves in anticipation of the afternoon alkies (a very different breed from the 6 a.m. ones); bagged up the newspaper returns and sealed them in the rusted iron chest on the forecourt; mopped the floor, wiped the counter and scrubbed the shutters, her greying head by now prickly with sweat. Then, with nothing more to do, she flexed her fingers, sounding arthritic cracks, and dialled from the shop payphone, muffling the receiver with the end of her chunni and holding one hand to her throat, as if that would fix her voice at the lower register.