The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Tifus’s round face clouded over. ‘What do you think, Sunny? Should I give up the coffin lark? Go into security today instead. Follow our Swami Veeraswamy . . .’ Then he broke into his happy smile. ‘I should ask Hector, I suppose. My old teach, eh?’

  The spring term back in London was not easy. Sunny couldn’t focus on anything. As the days grew lighter, he got gloomier. Every move he made seemed to be a catastrophic mistake, the most serious one being his choice of subject. He tried to speak to his tutor about it but got no comfort. The older man squinted at him. ‘Mr Fernando, there is no need to get emotional. Draw a line and carry on. You could become a man your country would be proud to honour. An engineer trained in this department is hard to beat.’ The tutor’s knuckles tapped the message on to his grey Formica desk.

  In desperation, Sunny borrowed Ranil’s books on liberation theology and took an evening class on decision-making for personal growth. He began to suffer from headaches.

  One evening Ranil brought over a thermos of herbal tea. ‘You know, Sunny, if you are having these migraines, maybe you shouldn’t read so much. It is sometimes better to empty the mind, you know, and start afresh.’ He poured some of his foul brew into a mug. ‘Drink this. Then listen to some madrigals. They can be very calming.’

  ‘Ranil, I hate engineering.’ Sunny had no one else to complain to. Anwar had given up on the UK; Karim and Lydia had no time for anyone but each other. ‘I can’t do it any more.’

  ‘So, don’t. Your life is not your life.’ He sounded like a Confucian sage – a horse is not a horse.

  ‘Whose is it then?’

  ‘I mean, your life is more than this.’ Ranil made a grand gesture to include everything in the room.

  The following week Sunny quit his degree. He found himself a bedsit around the corner from Warwick Road and enrolled on an Accountancy and Finance diploma at a private college. Just enough to persuade the immigration officer at Lunar House to renew his student visa for another year. That was all that mattered.

  He continued to meet Ranil regularly for a drink near Gloucester Road. Sometimes he’d invite him back for a takeaway from their favourite corner shop, a couple of samosas and a chicken tikka; occasionally a curry at the Ceylon restaurant opposite the tube.

  Sunny’s new course mates were all misers and without Ranil he would have turned into a full-time loner. Capital Radio was his only other life-saver. It allowed him to be a new kind of Londoner: in touch without anyone to touch. When the experiments with phone-ins started he was completely hooked. For most callers the advice on the radio was the re-heated ‘Hey Jude’ line. Go out, man, and get her. Who? Sunny would cry in response and run through the possibilities. It didn’t take long: Tina? Lydia? Sometimes he’d want to shout out of the windows, or dunk his head in his washbasin of a thousand cracks.

  Lydia, having split up with Karim, had moved to the other side of Hammersmith. Sunny met up with her again, by chance, at the Commonwealth Institute where he liked to go to look at texts on kinship patterns.

  ‘It is good to see you, Sunny.’ She took his hands in hers and squeezed them as if to check for fractures.

  ‘You want to catch a movie?’ Jaws was on at the Odeon across the road. The frights were good and jolted the two of them closer together; she even trembled in her seat and his passion grew, but it wasn’t enough to sustain a romance for very long. Her kisses proved exceedingly sharp, and a little vinegary, while his exuded a fast-acting anaesthetic; within a couple of months they were both looking for a way out.

  ‘This is not working for me, Sunny. I need to feel something more.’ She stopped and chewed her nails. ‘You understand?’

  Ranil, meanwhile, steamed on from religion to philosophy. He embarked on a doctoral thesis on the resurrected muse and received an uncommonly generous scholarship. It allowed him the luxury of a two-room flat off the North End Road.

  ‘I need the space to think, Sunny. Think.’

  ‘Yes, Ranil. I can see that.’

  Sunny, stuck in a cycle of obligatory fails and retries with his accountancy exams, remained in the same bedsit. He got the landlord’s permission to redecorate the room and went for red woodwork and yellow walls.

  ‘Buddhist colours?’ Ranil asked cautiously when he saw it.

  ‘You disapprove?’

  ‘No, not at all. Each to his own.’

  He noticed the photograph that had finally been brought out into the open again.

  ‘My mother,’ Sunny explained. ‘She died when I was very young.’

  Ranil stared at the portrait for a very long time. ‘She certainly had a pianist’s hands.’

  ‘She needed something more . . .’

  ‘Inspiration?’ Ranil sighed as though he understood.

  After a couple of years of drudgery and odd jobs, Sunny managed to gain his certificate and wangle a position as an accounts clerk at Harpo’s, the new department store that had opened nearby. Harpo’s accounts section, like most large ones in London at that time, was an enclave – all the South Asians on the payroll could be found there: junior clerks with circumscribed prospects, an aptitude for mathematics deemed to be their only useful genetic disposition. Sunny felt comforted by the thought that Ranil, at least, was dealing with accounts of a greater magnitude, weighing good against evil in his spartan room. He’d ask him about Nietzsche or the concept of Free Will over a Guinness and then let the stream of incomprehensible words wash the week’s accumulation of double-entry figures out of his head.

  Since Lydia there had been only one other affair. Patsy, a marketing executive for an American firm, who was staying at a Knightsbridge hotel. She had asked Sunny for directions to the Norwegian Embassy. He walked her to the square but the Embassy was closed. She was exuberant, as only a visitor can be, and they’d gone for a drink and after that, with dizzying swiftness, back to her hotel room on the second floor. She’d tuned in to a country programme. ‘Honey, I just love the rodeo.’ She’d wrapped both her hands around his head and got down to it with real gusto. Sunny felt like Superman and woke up the next morning with more eagerness in his flesh than he had felt since puberty. But she had wanted breakfast in bed first and became enraged that the eggs were hard-boiled. When Sunny started to get ready to go to work, she threatened to jump out of the window. ‘You can’t leave me now. Look at this chicken shit.’

  He’d had to call in sick and stay with her for days. Each morning, in the confusion of funky horseplay and unreliable room service, they managed to miss the opening hours of the Embassy and ended up back in the pub and then the bouncy bed. On the fourth morning his back seized up. When she’d hollered for him, he’d hesitated. She got furious and dumped the breakfast in the loo. ‘My flight is at twelve-thirty,’ she snapped and chucked him out.

  Then one weekend in 1979, soon after Maggie Thatcher swept into Downing Street, Ranil asked if Sunny would come and help him paint his flat.

  ‘Why? Because Callaghan lost?’

  ‘Clara is coming to London.’

  ‘Clara? To live with you?’

  ‘Good grief, no. But I need to paint this place before she comes over.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Why, white of course.’

  Sunny imagined Clara entering Ranil’s room and disappearing. The invisible muse. Nothing left but a wrap of cheesecloth floating in the air.

  ‘She’s got a job here. Isn’t that marvellous? At last, we can get started. It was impossible with her waltzing off to secretarial college. Utter madness.’

  Ranil’s plan was to show Clara his newly decorated flat, then go for a drink at the pub.

  ‘What about a meal, at least?’

  ‘You mean at the flat?’ He ate only bread and cheese there, occasionally a slice of ham that might have accidentally found its way into the fridge. It was a place of frugality designed for solitude and high thinking, not romance and, heaven forbid, never anything so vulgar as sex.

  ‘How about the Ceylon restaurant?’

/>   ‘No, not Sri Lankan. One’s ethnic roots is almost the last refuge, you know.’

  ‘Thai, then? That might be good. The Busabong on Fulham Road?’

  ‘A bit dear, isn’t it?’

  ‘You wanted to go out places, didn’t you?’

  ‘London, Sunny, not Siam. Not to be stupidly extravagant. Anyway I wouldn’t know what to order.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Ranil.’

  ‘Will you come too?’

  ‘OK. I’ll book a table for three.’

  Ranil had arranged to meet Clara at Earl’s Court tube, nearer Sunny’s place than his, because he thought it might make a more cosmopolitan impression. He had offered to collect her in his car – a grey Citroën 2CV – but, he told Sunny, ‘She is insisting on making her own way.’

  He arrived at Sunny’s twenty minutes early. ‘Let’s go. Come on.’

  ‘The station is only two minutes away. Have a coffee.’

  ‘No. She might be early. Can’t have her hanging around there with all those odd types about.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ The landmark constants could be scary: the drunk Calypsonian, a Mr Veeraswamy lookalike leering in his brown suit; the giant bearded busker with his shrill penny whistle; the tethered dogs; the muscle-bound twins in their busted leather jackets preening by the off-licence, one always ducking and combing his hair with an elbow up in the air, the other usually striking matches off his unshaven chin.

  When they got to the station Ranil stood at the entrance with his hands clasped behind him as if to banish the damp grime and dull light, and through his sheer presence transform its dingy interior into a sparkling metropolitan hub. His lips moved as though he was arguing with a secret contractor.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sunny asked him.

  Ranil looked surprised, caught out. ‘What? Nothing. Nothing.’ He glanced at his watch and rocked on his toes as though he wanted to spin the earth a little faster. Closer to the moment when she would emerge, floating on a cockle shell up the sooty stairs, illuminating the dark turbulence around them and the underworld beneath with her inner wintry glow.

  ‘Ranil, what happens now?’

  Ranil pulled his crumpled mac tight around him. ‘When she comes, we drive over to the flat. Then your Busabong business?’

  Sunny felt a tremor under his feet as a tube train pulled in thirty, forty, fifty feet below. There were screeches, whistles, the clamour of a carriage retching its guts out. He remembered the alarm and the excitement he’d first felt arriving in London: the promise of metropolitan glamour. The stench of parboiled lives, unwashed clothes, piss and vomit, the eeriness of travelling underground and surfacing in the middle of a zoo. The sudden light. He felt all those dissonant feelings rising again, as though all his protective layers had been unpicked and left him bare to the bone.

  Ranil gasped. ‘Oh, my God.’

  Clara appeared: a luminous face under a dark woollen hat and then a long burgundy coat clutched close around her as though to draw some colour from it. A bell rang underground and the air misted in front of her. She held her head at a slight angle, as though she was listening to someone at her shoulder, until she saw Ranil. ‘Hi.’

  Before Sunny could say a word, Ranil caught her elbow and swung her out on to the pavement. The wind whistled down through trees shuddering to the rumble of tube trains and HGVs. ‘Clara,’ he paused to scowl at a couple of layabouts and steered a path through the rubbish outside the chemist. ‘Shall we go to the car?’

  Sunny couldn’t move for a moment. He clenched his cold fingers and banged his head. He hadn’t managed a single word of greeting. She wouldn’t have known who he was, standing like a moron behind Ranil. In a panic he grabbed a carnation from the station flower stall. ‘How much? How much?’ Without listening to the surprised flower seller’s answer, he dumped a handful of coins on the green baize and hurried after the others.

  He was out of breath by the time he caught them. ‘Welcome,’ he panted, trying to regain some composure. He held out the pink offering.

  She took the single stem and held the scentless flower to her nose. ‘That’s nice.’ She watched the car heaving as Ranil pushed and pulled at the temperamental door. ‘So, where are we going?’

  ‘My place.’ Ranil managed to wrench his door open. He crawled in and opened the other doors from inside. Clara got in the back; Sunny sat in front. Ranil raced the tiny engine and manoeuvred the car out. ‘OK,’ he whooped and let her go, the way one might release a spaniel in a city square. The car lurched out to the main road, swerving, sniffing, stopping and then shooting out into traffic. Clara clung to Sunny’s seat as hers shifted under the acceleration. ‘Sorry,’ Ranil yelled over his shoulder. ‘I must have not done the lock underneath. The seat comes out, you see, for picnics.’

  Ranil’s flat was chillingly austere. The walls, the ceiling and most of the furniture – table, chairs, half-empty bookcases, cupboards – were all plain white. The carpet was a muffled grey. The only colour was provided by a big brown grizzly sofa.

  Ranil directed Clara to it. ‘Please, sit.’

  Clara nudged the sofa, then sank into it, clearly relieved to be on something immobile. ‘Very nice,’ she murmured. ‘Ranil, your flat is very clean.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Ranil shuddered, thrilled that she’d noticed. ‘Just painted, actually.’

  ‘Really?’

  The whiteness of the room added colour to her skin. The old sofa might have given her some shape too, if she hadn’t been wearing such a dark jumper and chocolatey velvet jeans. Only her hand stood out, disembodied, the skin slightly reddening in the barely heated room. She turned towards Sunny but her dark eyes revealed nothing.

  For a long time now Sunny had wavered, unsure of what to do and where to go. His life had seemed pointless. Sometimes he’d think of his father losing his mother – how the two of them had lost faith in each other and perhaps themselves – and wonder which came first. In his life he had never felt he knew anything for sure. There was only a hollowness that swallowed hope too soon; never anything to hold on to. Sometimes he felt like a rudderless boat heading nowhere with no one on board. Now, facing Clara in Ranil’s room, his feelings of despondency began to lift. Something was growing, feeding off her. He averted his eyes and stooped down to straighten his socks; he leant a little closer, hoping to catch some brief quaver in her voice or her breath, maybe a hint of movement in her soul. The smell of cold winter air warming seeped out of her clothes and made his head spin.

  Clara slipped off her shoe and raised her leg up on to the sofa. She hooked the foot behind her other knee and wiggled it. Sunny looked up and discovered that she was watching him. He held her gaze and forced his tongue to move in his mouth and somehow make the sounds of human speech.

  ‘You’ve got a job here, in London?’

  She remained very still. ‘Yes, a small company. They do stationery.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘Not really.’ She paused. ‘I do some typing.’

  ‘But it is a job. I meant that it’s wonderful to get a job these days.’ Truly. Surely. Honestly.

  She asked what he did. Sunny shrugged and mumbled a few words about the department store. ‘A back-room job. Accounts.’

  ‘You get discounts?’

  ‘Yes.’ A door opened. ‘Fifteen per cent for staff.’ He knew it wasn’t Shakespeare, but for him the conversation was intoxicating.

  Ranil, who had been completely spellbound until then, started chuckling. ‘Sunny is such a materialist. Not only does he work there, but he spends all his free time roaming around that crazy shop.’

  ‘Fifteen per cent in a department store is a lot better than ten per cent off a load of waste paper, Ranil.’ She looked genuinely impressed.

  Sunny imagined her among the butter cakes and Chelsea buns of the food-hall bakery, his hand guiding her as he flashed his staff badge to clear the path, fifteen per cent at a time, with the bearing of a . . . stallion.

  Then she tightened u
p as if to draw in her resources – oxygen, light, the moisture within. ‘Sometimes I think I need everything, but I can’t afford anything.’ She opened out her thin, pale, glowing hands and turned to Ranil. ‘Then, I look at a room like this and think, maybe I need nothing. Like you, Ranil.’

  At the restaurant, Ranil floated in a state of blessed contentment. Sunny ordered cocktails.

  ‘Cocktails?’ Ranil queried.

  Clara and Sunny exchanged glances, as though they might already have shared a couple of naughty Mai Tais.

  ‘Speciality of the place,’ Sunny explained, trying to hold back an utterly pointless laugh.

  Ranil frowned. ‘Thai?’

  Clara picked up the menu and mouthed the names of the dishes as though each diphthong held the taste of ginger and sweet basil. The left corner of her mouth had a tendency to lift more than the right, making her look almost impish.

  Sunny tried to pull himself together, and suggested chicken, prawns and the kaeng masaman.

  ‘Noodles?’ Ranil asked.

  ‘If you like. Or fragrant white rice might be nice.’

  ‘Fragrant?’ He could tell she liked the word too.

  The food ordered, they settled down with the long straws of their absurdly colourful cocktails. The glasses, packed with ice and memories of hotter climates, were decorated with glacé fruit and tiny brollies made of toothpicks and coloured tissue: pink, orange, green. The drinks went down fast and were quickly replaced.

  ‘Ranil, do you remember that chippy we used to go to?’ Clara twirled one of the little umbrellas, making a rainbow spin between her thumb and forefinger. ‘On the hill by the corner? You could see the sea.’

  ‘Wallasey?’ Ranil took in half a glass in one suck. His shoulders dropped and he smiled. ‘Jimmy’s.’

  ‘Did you ever imagine then that we’d end up in a place like this?’

  ‘Aw, Clara . . . d’you wanna chip?’ Ranil started to raise his hand but it flopped heavily back on the table. He rolled his eyes as though the useless limb belonged to someone else. She giggled.