The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘I need some air.’ Ranil got to his feet and rushed for the door.

  ‘I can’t marry him.’ Clara was incandescent. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Robby?’

  ‘What?’

  Sunny swallowed hard. He should have learnt from Ranil’s example to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Why did you say Robby? What has Robby got to do with anything?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Robby is gay. You know that, don’t you?’

  Sunny blinked. ‘Right. I see. Actually . . .’ The whole evening, the whole day, was becoming overrun by surprises. His head began to reel.

  ‘He must have told you. His partner? Coming to London was all about it, surely you knew? Weren’t you in bloody school together?’

  For one mad second he decided this was the moment to divulge his own feelings. Then he thought better of it. This was not the right time. Not the right place. They should walk down to Pierhead like in a song, stroll below the stars and the Liver birds and let the spirit move them to speak of things both deep and dear. He knew he was not the best judge of timing.

  When he’d first met Robby in Manila as a kid, he’d been impressed by Robby’s knowledge of women. He seemed to know the ins and outs of female anatomy like nobody else. With Robby there had never been any of the cock-a-hoop finger wagging of his Colombo classmates, he didn’t moon out of windows like the American boys in Makati, lighting flares out of their arses. Robby was the guy who had a scorecard with the name of every prom queen in town on it. He was wild about girls, Sunny had thought . . .

  They didn’t go to Pierhead. Instead they went in search of Ranil. He was sitting on the freezing steps of the Catholic Cathedral, hunched in his mac, his big black shoes bobbing like lost boats.

  She went up to him. It could have been a play, Sunny thought, in which he had forgotten all his lines. She bent over Ranil, illuminated by a street light. A few minutes later they came back together and headed for the car.

  Ranil drove slowly down towards the Mersey tunnel, letting the town famous for its beat and sound, its language and loquacity, slip by in the dull whine and creak of a straining 2CV.

  On the other side, Ranil paid the toll, took the flyover past Cammell Laird’s and headed for home. He dropped Clara without another word. From her house the journey was too short to offer any chance of a post-mortem. In any case Sunny didn’t know whether they should rake over what had happened or let it pass into oblivion.

  Tifus came out of the sitting room. ‘So, the revellers are back. Had a good time, Sunny? I thought you fellows will be going to the clubs. Great night clubs, no? Dancing à gogo and all that?’

  Ranil hurried upstairs, muttering that he had a headache.

  ‘Always the boy has a headache. Thinks too much. That’s his trouble and he never exercises his neck.’ Tifus lowered his head, then rolled it from side to side. ‘You see, you must rotate the head and clear the linkages every day. It is very important. You must do it, Sunny. Make it a habit.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Hector leant forward. ‘How do you manage in your London, Sunny? Can you cook like your Dad?’

  ‘Yes . . . sort of.’

  ‘Pork? Oorumas?’

  Sunny shrugged. ‘There’s Clara. She makes a mean chicken tandoori sometimes when we all meet up.’

  Delora came in and sighed. ‘That girl, she’s going to be one heck of a wife one day. So chic, so smart. And can even cook.’

  Sunny turned back to Hector. ‘I’ve been thinking. I will go and see him. I don’t know why but, somehow, it seems possible now.’ Something in his constellation had shifted in the confusion of the previous night.

  Hector nodded without showing any surprise. ‘Remember the good times?’ He reached inside his jacket pocket and produced a small square photograph of Sunny as a boy, handing Lester a cricket bat. Already two inches taller than him.

  ‘Next month,’ Sunny said to Hector. ‘After the January sales, I can take some time off. What do you think?’

  ‘The sooner the better, Sunny. When the time is right, you have to act fast.’

  In spite of Hector’s urging, Sunny didn’t feel like rushing his return to Manila.

  He met Robby the day before he was going to book the tickets. He wanted to ask him what had happened between him and Tina all those years ago. Was that only a batting partnership after all? If only he had known then what he knew now, life might have turned out so very differently. Or would it? He told Robby about Hector and the decision to go back to Manila.

  ‘Are you going alone?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What about Clara?’ He paused, and then added, ‘And Ranil? They’d both love it.’

  ‘I am going to see my father, Robby. After seven long years . . .’

  ‘Maybe we should go together. I ought to go and sort out a new supplier. The guys in Cebu are no good, and we really want to resuscitate the Filipino tart line. Can you wait until end of Feb?’

  Sunny compromised. He postponed the trip for a week so that they would overlap and have some time together.

  It was a mistake.

  Three days before Sunny was due to leave, Hector called him at work. ‘Hallo, Sunny?’

  ‘Yes.’ He recognized the low, grave voice immediately. He knew what was coming. He was too late. He had left it all too late. Stupidly too late. He was always too late. He knew it. His father, his mother, Aunty Lillie had all complained that he was never on time for anything.

  He was cold. The temperature had dropped. The office was never comfortable. He moved the fan heater closer with his foot.

  ‘I am very sorry, Sunny.’ Hector’s words dribbled down the line and grew faint. ‘So very, very sorry.’

  ‘What happened? What has happened? Tell me.’ Sunny wanted more words. Clearer words. He wanted to hear a voice from his youth, Hector’s voice, if not his father’s. Silence would not do. Not any more. He knew what had happened, somehow he knew, but he wanted to hear where, how, why. He wanted to be told the truth.

  ‘Your father was driving back from Farmers Market. There is so much traffic now, Sunny. It is horrendous. You won’t believe it . . . He must have been trying a shortcut. As he was coming off Aurora Boulevard, some kid in a sports car crashed into him. Smashed . . . I am sorry, Sunny, your father is dead. He died almost immediately.’

  Sunny flew to Manila on the next available flight, in a rush now that it didn’t matter. Hector arranged for Aunty Lillie to come from Colombo. They were all like zombies at first. In his absence Lester seemed all the more maddening, pulling them together for nothing. A dead man in a strange land, pulling strings for no purpose.

  Aunty Lillie had grown thinner and sharper. She stroked Sunny’s cheek as if to measure its fatness, and tutted to Hector. ‘Tut, tut. Just look at this boy, Hector? Look at him.’ She didn’t seem to notice her nephew was no longer a twelve-year-old.

  Partly to assert himself, partly for his father’s sake, Sunny told Hector it would be better if Lillie stayed out of the way. Perhaps in Hector’s house.

  ‘I think that is a very good idea,’ Hector replied. ‘You know, the dear girl would like you to do whatever you think is best. She has her own special arrangements for the next world and you are, after all, your father’s son.’

  ‘Not my mother’s?’

  Hector bowed. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps it is a mistake to see such things as mutually exclusive.’

  ‘Anyway, I think my father should rest here. He shouldn’t be buried next to my mother.’

  Hector understood. ‘Nappy will handle everything. You remember Nappy? Very reliable.’

  The funeral was small, swift and efficient. Manila had changed since Sunny’s early days, but Nappy helped him to find a place for Lester close to the things that he had grown close to, true to the Makati spirit he had so admired. They kept religion out of the proceedings. Only right at the very end did Sunny cry. Hector put his arm around his shoulder. He wept too.

  Nappy an
d Hector managed to ensure that there were obituaries in all the papers Lester had liked to read. After the funeral, Aunty Lillie tried to sound caring. ‘Will you come back home now?’

  Hector cut in. ‘At least he saw you, Sunny. I showed him the picture I took of you in Liverpool. He was pleased to see how you’d turned out.’

  ‘I was stupid not to have come back sooner.’

  The silence stretched out, profound, unfillable. There was nothing anyone could say.

  Later, Hector took Sunny to the bar of the Peninsula Hotel in Makati. He told Sunny more about himself then, with a San Miguel in his hand, than ever before.

  ‘You know, Lester was my oldest friend. We knew each other a long time. We go back before college days. I’ve known him longer than our Liverpool friend, Tifus.’ The sun had not yet gone down in Makati. The sky was deep red, bleeding into the glassy skyscrapers and the trees that had grown old and heavy in their wake. Sunny noticed that there was more of a haze at the end of the day than there had been when he’d lived there. Hector sipped his beer. ‘He was a clever man, your father, but he didn’t always see what was close by. His eye was always on things too far ahead. Do you know what I mean? He always believed that I had no passion. I suppose I have tended to be more interested in inner peace. I never chased things as he did when he was young. He learnt from me to calm down, you know. To be patient. But that was later, when he played the part of the great angler, when things went wrong and he had to find ways in which to cope. At the time he met your mother, he was a different kind of person – actually we met her together at the cricket club before the war. Did you know that? It was the time Bradman visited Ceylon. His last whistle-stop tour. 1948. I saw him, you know. Yes. We shook hands. I was no cricketer, as you well know, but we all went down for the party. You remember Rudolf? Rudy. He was there. Anyway the cricket lads were all with the big man Bradman – he was already a legend, you see. But Lester found a much more interesting proposition that evening in your mother. Irene was there with your Aunty Lillie.’

  Sunny tried to picture it: his father and his mother, Hector and Lillie as youngsters, flirting while the king of cricket was interrogated by bowlers and catchers, dingos and cadgers on the other side of the room.

  ‘I thought Lester would go over to the Bradman congregation. He was always on the lookout for a good story. He had a flair for words, as you know. But he didn’t. Buggered up my pitch instead. I didn’t dare say what I wanted to . . .’ Hector waved a hand over his beer.

  ‘What?’ Sunny wanted to hear more, but Hector seemed to retreat. A kind of peace soothed the lines around his mouth. He ran his fingers down the lapel of his dark jacket.

  ‘Lester often regretted not doing more with his writing. Irene tried to encourage him. She was almost more upset by him squandering his talent than by her own constraints. She felt she was frustrated by circumstance, whereas he had the chance to do something and just . . . didn’t. It was a shame . . . You know, Lester did blame himself for her death. He took it all on himself. Even when you abandoned him. After that he felt he had lost all connection with his past, his present and his future. He’d say he didn’t know why he couldn’t see what was there before him. It wasn’t the drink, you understand, Sunny. It was more like a blindness, a blind spot. He wanted the world, you know, to find the world. Sometimes he said he had only Rosa holding it all together for him.’

  ‘Rosa? What do you mean?’

  ‘Besides me, there was no one else close to him at the end. You see, Sunny, you find only part of the world in yourself.’

  But for Sunny even that small part had been too elusive. And now, at the age of twenty-six, after his father’s death, finding that inner core, his true self, finally seemed possible.

  There wasn’t much of an inheritance – Lester had invested in a lot of dud companies and had been embezzled by the same crooks who’d systematically plundered the rest of the Philippines – but there was enough for Sunny to give up his job at Harpo’s and try for a more satisfying life. Sunny gave himself six months to explore what he could do for himself. He found the Voigtländer camera Hector had given him when he’d first set off for London and felt better for holding it. My mother could have been a star; my father should have been a writer. I will be a photographer. He wrote the sentences in a little black jotter he had started to carry around with him.

  At the beginning of May, Robby called to say Ranil was leaving London. ‘He’s ditched the Ph.D. Needs the inspiration of a new place to discover the meaning of life, he says. He’s off to Nepal to work with a Jesus charity and write poems out of mountain air. Absolutely lóco-lóco.’

  They met up at Max’s, a wine bar, not far from the French Institute in South Ken that Robby frequented. Ranil and Robby were already sipping mint tea when Sunny arrived. He collected a coffee and sat down. ‘So, what’s in Nepal then?’

  ‘I need to separate out the dross, Sunny. Our time is too short. The scholarly stuff, all this context rigmarole is becoming very tedious. In poetry I find something closer to what I am looking for . . .’

  ‘But why Nepal?’

  Ranil smiled. ‘The mountains are there. The first and the biggest. They mean something.’

  ‘For Hillary and Tenzing maybe? But for you?’

  ‘We must all do what we have to do.’

  After Ranil left London on his great quest, Sunny bought a small manual SLR camera, a Pentax MX, an extra telephoto lens and a black leather jacket. Also a load of how-to books. He discovered that great photographers sometimes stumbled into their calling. Robert Capa had a lucky break: no professionals to go to Trotsky’s speech, so he went, and captured the expression of a revolutionary in a single frame. Sunny wondered if he could invent a different persona for himself, just as Capa had, and find a new world.

  To begin with he was obsessed by death, loss, things coming apart. He took hundreds of pictures of wilted flowers, gravestones in Westminster, the flotsam and jetsam of Victoria Station and the sweet slurry of the Thames at twilight. The cameras, the jacket and the growing pile of elegiac images on his bedsit table gave him a curious confidence. He felt able to call Clara from time to time to suggest a walk, sometimes in her woods, sometimes Hyde Park, where he would crouch and artfully shoot the odd duck or deformed pigeon. He’d zoom in on a burka or Burberry, trying to catch the line of one of Robby’s finer basques underneath. He even found that his eyes had improved and he didn’t need his glasses as much as before. The optician said his body was adjusting; he thought it was more to do with his state of mind.

  Clara always seemed pleased to see him and they talked as friends do without revealing what might lie dormant in each other’s minds. She still worked at the same stationery company, but was now PA to the Managing Director – a workaholic called Gumbo.

  ‘And you? You like the freedom from the store?’

  They were in the café by the Serpentine, drinking weak afternoon tea and sharing a jam doughnut. Sunny cleared his throat. ‘I need a bit of time to work things out.’

  ‘You’ll stay in London?’ She wiped the sugar off her fingers with a tissue.

  It had not occurred to Sunny to go somewhere else. ‘Having finally got my permit to stay, unlimited, it’d be crazy to do a Ranil now.’

  ‘Was that difficult?’

  ‘Luck. I just had to hang on. I don’t think it will be quite so automatic in the future with all this xenophobia in vogue.’

  Out on the water, a duck went under arse-up. Sunny didn’t have his telephoto lens, but he went for the picture anyway. He was getting fast at this sort of impromptu shot, winding the film as the camera came up, hitting the green light for the aperture and focusing in one swift action and then the click of the shutter. As it opened again he saw he had caught Clara too in the frame, her eye turning, the curve of her brow, the hint of pink from her nose. He loved her and said so as the duck, in the distance, righted itself.

  ‘The camera or the duck?’

  ‘You,’ Sunny repeat
ed. ‘You.’

  He had never thought it would be so easy. The right words, at the right time, in the right place, were like a key turning in a lock. His heart, and hers, opened.

  Her smile that day, by the Serpentine, was unlike anything he had ever seen before. Warm and wide, it drew him in. He felt moisture on his lips as he kissed her, then tasted on hers the sweet residue of sugar and syrup. He took her hand. Her pulse was strong and fast and seemed to him to spell out both her feelings and the ones rushing through his own veins. Her plain peach jumper glowed.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  She touched his lips with hers again and tightened her hand. They kissed again. Across the water big, bold trees shed their foliage slowly in the breeze.

  All the thoughts and anxieties that had plagued him for years seemed to evaporate. Each second bloomed into a star inside him. He pulled off his scarf and tugged at his collar. He pushed his leg against hers and the table slid a little between them. He pushed it and moved closer putting his hand behind her and pressing her towards him.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Christ, you’ve waited so long, Sunny . . .’

  Sunny took her hand to his mouth, then smothered her face again, then her neck and her throat. The chair on the other side of the table toppled over.

  Clara giggled and pulled him off. ‘Sunny . . .’

  ‘Should we celebrate? What would you like? A concert at Albert Hall? Dinner?’ The words tumbled out.

  She stared at him, searching his face. ‘I like Italian . . .’

  ‘There’s a fancy restaurant in Beauchamp Place.’

  ‘I like to eat Italian naked . . .’

  ‘Spaghetti or tagliatelle?’

  She pulled in her lips. ‘Fettuccine, actually, with just a dab of butter.’