Southall is little India with red London buses—saris, sweets, bangles, box upon box of yellow mangos for sale on the pavements and the green doors of the Methodist Church in the King’s Hall boarded up, its windows grey with dust, its congregation having long since taken flight. The music coming through the open windows of a car stopped next to us at a traffic light is jaunty and breezy and full of little skippy rhythms, and for a moment I feel as if we’ve arrived in a warmer, more colorful place where none of the old rules apply. But then we turn through the open gates of a small industrial park and there, waiting to greet us at the smoke-blackened door of his Fashion Fabrics warehouse, is Mr Chidambaram in a baggy brown suit with trousers that puddle round his feet.
The loss-adjuster puts on a pair of bright yellow Wellington boots and a matching yellow hard hat, the type that builders wear on construction sites. He looks mock-heroic, which suits him. Mr Chidambaram—tiny beside the loss-adjuster, and old and grey and unshaven with the worry of what he’s been through—rolls up his trouser legs to reveal shiny black shoes and spindly but very hairy shins. Together, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they trudge through the wasteland that was once a treasure-house of brightly colored cloths and silks and polyesters, although truly there is not much to see: tangled metal bars, black heaps of sodden and unidentifiable material, shards of glass from the empty window frames. I watch from the doorway, breathing in a stench of drenched cinders that almost makes me retch. The loss-adjuster’s yellow boots make immaculate ridged prints on the ash-covered floor.
After the tour of the warehouse-that-was, we enter the door of an adjacent office-type building, climb a flight of concrete steps, walk down a corridor and enter a room that appears to be a dressing room: there are rows of saris on racks, as if for a chorus of Indian dancers, and also a long bench against one wall, a low round table, a calendar advertising a driving school (‘male and female instructors’) and a TV hanging from a metal bracket. The walls and ceiling are painted pink, the pink a child might choose to paint the flesh of white English people, although if I really was that color I’d surely be in hospital, in an isolation ward. And here, on cue, is a child, a young girl, sitting cross-legged on the floor watching the TV. India are still batting, nudging past 300, taking control of the whole game. Mrs Chidambaram is here too, a large woman wrapped in vivid turquoise emerging from behind the saris. She wants me to sit beside her on the bench, so I do, and she smiles happily and pats my knee. And the men go out.
The loss-adjuster turns as he goes through the doorway, waves his yellow hard hat apologetically in my direction and offers a smile that’s more of a shrug. They are going to talk about money, I know. Insurance policies and accounts sheets and invoices and receipts are going to be taken out of filing cabinets and arranged on the desk in Mr Chidambaram’s office. There will be a cracking of finger knuckles, a chewing of betel leaves, a nodding and a shaking of heads, confusing if you don’t know the code. Enormous sums will be spoken aloud, with seeming casualness. Calculators will be tapped with quick fingers—more numbers, glowing green, added and subtracted and divided. I have an impulse to go to that room and remind the loss-adjuster that I speak Spanish, but perhaps I am better off here.
I tell Mrs Chidambaram that she must be going through a terrible time, with the burning down of the warehouse, but either she doesn’t speak any English or she doesn’t want to talk to me. Fair enough. The child, however, who is called Jeevita, speaks fluent and wonderfully exact English, and is happy to tell me about her pet rabbit, about another warehouse in north London that’s owned by her uncle, and how Sachin Tendulkar is the best batsman in the world and India will win.
Us three women—we are a mini-harem, in the privacy of our own quarters. And yet all the time I sit here I am strongly aware of the presence, or absence, of men. It’s as if, although I’m not cold in the slightest, some man has insisted on lending me his jacket and has draped it around my shoulders.
The only visible men in this room are the ones on the TV screen, doing their stuff. And this remains, however happy they are to explain it and beam at me when I clap at the right times, their stuff. The language—the restrictive code—with all its hallowed jargon; the overload of statistics; the undying heroes of ancient days; the smell of linseed oil, and of the liniments and lotions they slather all over their bristly skin; the locker-room jokes and guffaws; the bruises worn as badges; the bonding from schooldays to prime and beyond. The innocence, the Golden Age: the boys off together on a merry school trip, without girls to distract or confuse or terrify them. The baggy white trousers are not unattractive (and surely more convenient for nursing an erection than crotch-hugging Lycra)—but who washes them and irons the creases?
Oh, but it’s something—isn’t it?—to stand stock-still in the middle of a field as a hard leather ball hurtles towards you at 90 miles per hour. With only a thin strip of wood to fend it off; with only a metal bar screwed to your helmet to protect your eyes, pads over your shins and a plastic triangle around your genitals. At the going down of the sun and in the morning. Something foolish, willful, show-off, as well as brave, but something. Something Alan will pay to watch, and innumerable others of his and lesser ilk: the desk-bound, the bar-huggers, the weary addicts, the paunchy fantasists.
Four! V. V. Laxman cracks the ball across the grass to the rope, and holds his pose for half a second longer than he needs to. Left foot ranged forward, steely-eyed, all the angles of his body in perfect balance, he could be carved in stone on a pedestal in the capital city, alongside the gods and the liberators.
MRS CHIDAMBARAM HAS gone, vanished. Not even a pat on my knee in farewell. The players come off the field for lunch: India are 316 for 5. I ask Jeevita if Indian women play cricket and she is full of information. The captain of the Indian women’s team is Mithali Raj. She scored 214 runs against England in Somerset in 2002. She trained as a classical dancer. She works for the railways.
A sudden hollow gapes in the pit of my stomach: praising this unknown other woman, Jeevita’s eyes shine with an impossibly eager brightness.
Then a scurry of activity is happening around me. Jeevita’s mother calls her name from somewhere distant— a harsh, peremptory voice—and the girl rushes out; the loss-adjuster and Mr Chidambaram walk into the room and smile down at me in approval of my good behavior; Jeevita returns with cushions, throws them on the floor, and dashes away; and finally Jeevita comes back through the door with her mother, both bearing trays with large plastic beakers and plates of food.
We take off our shoes and sit cross-legged on the floor around the table and eat. Mr Chidambaram’s trousers are rolled up even further than before, exposing knees that resemble gnarled and knotted firewood. The beakers contain sugary mango juice. On the plates are sweets: slabs of lime green and orange and pale brown, red whorls, black balls flecked with white. Mrs Chidambaram ruthlessly force-feeds me, insisting I have at least one of everything. Afterwards, Jeevita brings hot wet towels for our hands. As we leave, the players are coming back onto the field.
‘DO YOU THINK—’
‘No.’
‘That I’d make a good loss-adjuster’s companion?’
‘Consort?’
‘Even better.’
‘Oh yes. I’ve known this for some time. Since Edinburgh. When you come into a room, people think they’ve gained something, whatever they’ve lost.’
‘And have they?’
I’m not used to compliments, and they’re nice. They’re an underused genre. The cricket commentators use them all the time—‘That was beautifully bowled,’ ‘He plays that stroke better than anyone else in the game today’—but not face-to-face. Do cricketers blush?
Now I have something to live up to. It’s like having a new job.
The loss-adjuster’s eyes stay on the road ahead. We are driving back into London, the landmarks becoming more standardized as the city jerks by in a series of road-works and traffic lights: Tescos, Boots, signs to leisure centers. I put my h
and on his thigh.
‘What did you think I was asking, when you said no?’
He has to track back. ‘I was thinking you were asking about Mr Chidambaram, whether he’s going to get all the insurance he’s claiming. And the answer, probably, is no. At least, it’s unlikely.’
And the loss-adjuster explains, which is a different genre entirely. The insurance on Mr Chidambaram’s Fashion Fabrics has been organized by his brother, who has his own warehouse and a number of policies arranged through a broker who is a family friend. The premiums seem to have been paid regularly by Mr Chidambaram, but somewhere on the route through the brother and the broker there have been, you could say, delays, and the money hasn’t always gone through to the insurance company.
I almost wish I hadn’t asked. I didn’t ask, actually: the question I did ask was about me. This could mean the end of Mr Chidambaram’s livelihood; it could mean that Jeevita will never have a chance to play cricket for India, or for England. And whatever I can mumble about extended families and support networks will sound callous.
‘Can’t you fix it?’
‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘It’s your job.’
‘I don’t bring things back. I don’t make good. I adjust—so that the outcome, I hope, is one that everyone believes to be fair. Given the circumstances.’
‘You mean it’s all about money, and numbers—add a bit here, subtract a bit there?’ It doesn’t seem very much. Whatever the circumstances.
‘In the end, yes.’
‘And there are laws and rules you have to stick to?’
‘Of course.’
‘So for example, it really makes no difference if what I’ve lost is something I don’t really care about, something I’d forgotten I even had, or something that means everything to me? It’s just about market value?’
The loss-adjuster drives onto a garage forecourt, past the petrol pumps, and stops near the machine where you check your tire pressures. And adjust them, if necessary. He tells me I probably don’t want to know this, which is true, but let’s talk about his work. For the record. And he goes back into explaining mode, which I had so taken for granted was Alan’s, and not this man’s, speciality. Yes, personal value, subjective value even, can be counted in—it’s the part of the job he enjoys most, talking with people, assessing the impact of what’s happened to them and thinking of ways to alleviate it. There are computer programs that help with this. He spends a lot of time on computers, checking policies, working out valuations: desk stuff. In the case of personal injury, there are programs and scales that deal with arms, legs, elbows, fingers—and earlobes, presumably, and testicles and nipples. Two people’s knees are not necessarily of equal value. It depends on so many factors: age, income, future prospects, dependants . . . He tells me about people called forensic economists, and asks me what VSL stands for. Not Very Sober Lunch, not Violent Sexual Libido. The Value of a Statistical Life.
The traffic chugs past: cars, white vans, lorries packed with yogurts or roof-tiles or frozen meat. It doesn’t surge or thunder, it doesn’t race by at a speed to set this stationary vehicle rocking. It keeps to the left-hand lane, it obeys the speed limit, more or less.
Idiot. Who does he think he’s talking to—some first-year student who shouldn’t be on the course anyway?
My hand back on his thigh. What he’s saying is simply that he has a job, and like all jobs it’s often petty and tedious. He doesn’t, for a living, change the world. What he’s telling me, I think, is that he’s not The One, that there isn’t a One, that One is just a number, that he’s a man among men, innumerable men.
My forehead against his neck, my lips against his chin, awkward, reaching. I may not have had it laid out so plainly before, but it’s hardly complicated. What does he think I want? A man among men, yes. Pick a number, any number. This one.
I choose, or am chosen. And am chosen.
He looks at me, and puts his arm around me, and I try not to think he is assessing my value, and I notice, I can’t help it, that as he turned towards me his trouser legs have ridden up.
I wish this wasn’t so. That unwitting exposure. More crude, more revealing, for a man, than his buttons or zip undone. Far more than complete nudity, those two inches of pale taut skin between the top of his socks and the bottom of his trousers make me think of the way of all flesh, and the end of play. And how short the time for play can be. Already those men in white on the green field are younger than me. Already, indeed long ago, for them—if this was not the case they wouldn’t be on TV, they wouldn’t be representing their country—the game has ceased to be play and become work: a job (no less so than loss-adjusting), routine, day in day out, the days and months and years clocked up. They are professionals, with signed contracts. With all the single-mindedness that implies, and the consequences: stress fractures, broken metatarsals, cruciate ligaments, groin injuries—a phrase whose expressive generality suggests some unspecified and lingering STD. Don’t take me there.
He switches on the engine and we move back into the traffic.
But it’s different. The journey back into London seems to take longer than the journey out. (The opposite, surely, to what’s usual: the hours and hours of the drive to Cornwall, Selwyn’s ‘Are we nearly there?’ repeated at least every twenty minutes from the moment we turned right at the end of the street, the missed turn-off on the motorway, the roadworks, the stoppings to pee or to look at the map; and on the way back, the speed towards what is known, the rush to confirm that the cat hasn’t forgotten us.) And it’s even more different when we get back to the flat. We go up in the lift, standing apart, and into the flat, and there’s a new smell, somehow. Cigarettes have been smoked. The TV has been moved into the living room and the figure sitting on the sofa watching it— watching cricket—is Selwyn.
I sort of jump towards him, through the air, and stumble, and the loss-adjuster has to grip my arm.
‘Hello, mum,’ he says. Just that, neutral.
I can’t hug him because he won’t stand up, so I sit beside him. I rest my head on his shoulder, this other man’s shoulder, which yields, a bit. It feels the right thing to do, and is.
‘How long have you been here?’ I ask, quietly, in case it isn’t really him.
‘I got here last night.’
‘You stayed the night here?’
‘On the sofa.’
Something stirs within me, uncoiling—a response, a Pavlovian one—and I squash it immediately. Thank God I don’t have to ask him if he’s got his toothbrush with him, or if he’s had any breakfast. We’re in a different place, somewhere new, and it’s good. Though the old place might be easier.
‘Have you—’
He turns towards me, hugs me, to shut me up.
I LOVE HIS scrapy fingernails, and the scar behind his left ear which no hairdresser has seen for over a year. I love the way he used to walk, even when he knew I was watching him, as if no one was watching him and the world was his own, and I even love the way he walks now, which is different when he knows I am watching him. I love his eyes not being any color at all I can put a name to, so that whenever I think about what color they are I have to go and look at them. I love the fact that he breathes in and breathes out for exactly the length of his lifetime, his own and no one else’s, no more and no less.
And it turns out I couldn’t tell the difference— admittedly at some distance, and on a television screen— between the penis of my own sixteen-year-old boy and that of a thirty-four-year-old trainee accountant.
Who is this boy?
‘WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me?’ I shout at the loss-adjuster, inches from his face. We are in the kitchen. He is making tea or something equally useless and evasive.
‘He said he’d go away if I told you.’
‘But why here?’
‘I think he wanted you to find him here.’
‘But this morning, you knew he was here all the time and you never . . . Why?’
The
kettle has boiled. ‘I think—I don’t know him well enough, yet—I think he tends to sleep in the mornings. He’s sixteen. I do want to, though.’
‘Want to what?’
‘Know him. Get to know him.’
I look at him, this man I have seen not only naked and aroused but in bright yellow boots and a builder’s hat. He is far too calm. He’s about to ask me if Selwyn takes sugar and how many.
‘No, not why.’ I do some re-ordering. ‘How?’
The loss-adjuster looks at me blankly, infuriatingly.
‘How often, for start?’
‘He came yesterday, late afternoon. The first time.’
We look at each other, and I choose to believe him. Even so, Selwyn knew where to come. He must have followed me. How many times? For days. Past the man doing the three-card trick outside the Tube station.
Would I have walked differently if I’d known I was being watched? But I’ve never believed that this thing I am doing is wrong. Not if no one is hurt. So why, if I can look in his math homework book, can’t he look in mine, what I do with my days?
Because it was up to me to show him, not for him to spy.
I turn towards the living room. Not once have I ever gone into Selwyn’s bedroom without knocking first. I shout, ‘Selwyn, you followed me, how could you?’
‘If you shout at him,’ the loss-adjuster tells me, ‘he won’t ever want to talk to you, call you up, confide in you.’
‘If I don’t shout at him,’ I shout back, ‘he’ll never see me as a person in my own right, not just a mother who provides and provides and provides.’
Selwyn is standing in the kitchen doorway. He has that sheepish—for want of a better word—smile on his face, the one that belongs to Alan too.
‘Three sugars, please,’ says Selwyn.
‘Oh,’ says the loss-adjuster. ‘No sugar, I’m afraid.’
‘I went out and got some. It’s in the cupboard over the fridge,’ says this boy who never puts things away in cupboards.
The Rules of Play Page 6
