The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘I think I can manage that.’

  They walked through Kensington Gardens, past the roses and a corridor of rhododendrons. Late-flowering shrubs nodded as they twirled past, hand in hand. Sunny’s heart was racing and he wanted to run and throw confetti into the ponds. ‘Hey, slow down . . .’ Clara stumbled as he pulled her along.

  ‘Don’t you want to just shout out loud?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  Sunny laughed. ‘We’ll go to Safeway. They have loads of pasta.’

  When they got back to his room he discovered the bruised foil wrapper he carried in his wallet had cracked open, drying out the rubber inside. While Clara filled the kettle he checked the sealed packet he kept by the Weetabix, but that too was well out of date and no good.

  ‘One thing I forgot,’ he said. ‘I’ll nip out and get some fresh milk for tea.’

  ‘It’s OK. I can have it black.’

  ‘No, no. I need some milk. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  At the corner shop he picked up the milk and a selection of Durex, and on the way back, the last rose – a pale pink – from the flower stall. ‘No red? Why no red?’ Would it do?

  When he reached the door of his room he hesitated. The hall, the doorknob, everything seemed cold. He swallowed hard and opened the door. She was still there. ‘Is the water boiling?’

  Clara’s job was nine to five, but in the London of 1981 even stationers liked to cultivate an air of hyperactivity. Often she had to stay late typing reports, reorganizing and unpicking the mistakes of the day. She and Sunny couldn’t meet every night, and arranged their rendezvous like secret agents.

  Friday-night conversations revolved around Holly, her flatmate, whose boyfriend lived in Sheffield.

  ‘Your wild woods or my mean streets?’

  ‘Holly is already on the coach.’

  ‘OK, I’m on my way.’ The scent of eau de toilette and fabric conditioner at Clara’s was infinitely preferable to the lingering beef stir-fry that steeped the sheets of his bedsit, no matter how hard they sweated.

  In the new year Holly landed a job as deputy head in a school in Doncaster. She left at Easter.

  Before he moved in Sunny said, ‘Maybe we should get engaged?’ He made it sound like a joke, but it was a genuine proposal. He had a desire for order, the ritual of legitimacy. He placed his hand on her back. ‘And get married? What about it?’

  ‘No, Sunny. I don’t think we should.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know I don’t believe in that kind of stuff.’

  ‘You think your parents won’t approve?’

  ‘What have they got to do with it? It’s not like we have to please someone else to please each other. I just don’t want to end up like them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Stuck, rather than together.’

  Sunny thought about his own father and mother, who had ended up being neither stuck nor together. Clara’s parents, Beryl and Eric, seemed to have managed much better. ‘That’s a little harsh.’

  ‘They are trapped by promises they can’t keep, but can’t break either. After I left, they should have too. They’d each have been much better off on their own.’ A thin groove deepened down her forehead, dividing one temple from the other. She mashed her fist up against her lips. ‘You know she’d get so fed up with Dad, she’d throw pies at him.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘She did. And he did too. They’d go mad.’

  ‘What pies?’

  ‘Chicken. Steak and kidney. I don’t know, maybe cottage pies. Sunny, what does it matter?’

  ‘They seem happy enough now.’

  ‘It is like a game they don’t know how to stop.’

  Sunny didn’t think so, but he didn’t know how to explain what he saw as important. He wanted the two of them to be part of something bigger, something that went beyond the individual. Somehow to be able to survive the inevitable wobble that came with time. It wasn’t a game. But he knew that if he tried to describe it to Clara, he’d sound too much like an old-fashioned fool.

  Sunny didn’t bring up the subject again. He quickly learnt what needed to be talked about, and what was best left unsaid. When he saw her brushing her hair, there was nothing much more he wanted, other than for the moment to last just a little bit longer.

  ‘You do know this is real, Sunny, don’t you?’ Clara fished a grey, steaming ball out of a bowl of Chinese soup.

  ‘Wontons?’

  ‘I mean everything.’

  ‘Yes.’ Everything was real, from wontons to futons. More real than ever before. The walks and rambles, the theatre, films, and exhibitions, the embraces, the kisses and the surfeit of fettuccine. He’d never thought he’d live like this. Every time they saw each other, a rush of blood would knock them into each other’s arms, and he’d wonder how he’d become so lucky.

  He joined a photography club in Jackson’s Lane and began to build up a portfolio of city portraits: St Paul’s seen through witch hazel, the black British Museum, old chestnuts. He found a curious satisfaction in trees and buildings. ‘It’s like haiku,’ he said to Clara. ‘Serendipity.’

  She had discovered tantric yoga and became obsessed with serpents. She got Sunny to practise chakra-lifting and eating pasta in different positions. Her firm had diversified into art materials and Gumbo had made her head of stock control. She began to bring samples of cartridge paper, crayons, acrylics and oils back to the flat and make Tibetan mandalas – intricate patterns representing spiritual and sensory evolution. She urged Sunny to do so too.

  ‘I’d like to go to India,’ she said one day between a kundalini starburst and a quick stir of a Mrs Veeraswamy chickpea recipe.

  ‘Where in India? Big place, India.’

  ‘Maybe the north. Follow the Ganges. Go up into the Himalayas and find a yogi.’

  The muscles in Sunny’s chest tightened. He saw Ranil seated high on the rim of Kathmandu valley, in white robes and chappals instead of his mac and school shoes, intoning the lines of his latest erotic verse drama, waiting for this moment. Was she still thinking of him after all this time?

  ‘Why not south? You get sea and art. Buddhism too. We could go to Sri Lanka.’

  She put the lid on the saucepan and patted the centre of her tummy. ‘We could . . . but do you really want to?’

  ‘Actually, yes. I’ve been thinking. I don’t know what it is like any more. So much must have changed in the last few years . . . and there’s roots and all that.’

  ‘You think we could do India as well from there? I have a connection too, you know. On my mother’s side. Her grandmother had an Indian . . .’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ His mind was racing. He remembered Clara’s mother telling him, ‘Many of us have kith and kin around the world, Sunny. It’s the seaport in us. Sailors and storytellers, that’s what we are. We like to reach out to the rest of the world. One of my own forebears was from India. But this doesn’t mean that we’re all the same, does it?’

  ‘Is August a good time? I can get two weeks,’ Clara added.

  ‘Can’t you get an extra week?’

  ‘Gumbo would throw a fit. You know how he hates giving any time off.’

  The very next day, Sunny got hold of some holiday brochures from the Ceylon Tea Centre in Haymarket and tried to wean her off the idea of India and the Himalayas. He found a Sri Lankan travel agent, Boris, who offered a cut-price deal absolutely totally guaranteed, but which would double in price if they stopped over in India. ‘There’s no time to be going back and forth,’ Sunny told her. ‘Anyway, I found a yogi with a beach practice for you.’

  While Clara went into a controlled breathing exercise, Sunny made the bookings and fixed up a couple of hotels. Top of the range in Colombo and a bit of dive, down the coast, that Boris said had the cheapest aromatic oils. The Sri Lankan tourist board had recently started advertising. He could see the beach in his head, an
d the two of them cavorting, carefree.

  Clara saw the news first and called out. ‘Colombo is burning. It’s on TV.’

  The sky was grey on the screen. Dark smoke spiralled out of the place that Sunny could recognize as the town of his childhood. This was not news from elsewhere. These were not atrocities committed in a country of some other world. This was a part of him destroying itself. There are no boundaries in our lives, he thought. There are no borders except in our minds. Who were these murderers? When the BBC reporter described the killing and burning, and spoke of rabid Sinhala mobs hunting out Tamil families, Sunny shook his head, ashamed. He couldn’t understand where these monsters had come from. He felt sick.

  ‘How can they do it?’ he asked Clara. What could make a person throw kerosene over another human being and set fire to him? Watch his skin crinkle and burn? How could they hear the screams, see the flames wrap around a writhing man, smell the burning flesh, and then do it again. Anger? Money? A warped fantasy? Was it the corruption of culture and identity, or plain political thuggery? Vicious barbarity had erupted during the Partition of India. It had been visited upon Vietnam and Cambodia. He knew that. The Nazis had perverted the nature of man. But this was an island he had known. With people – victims and perpetrators – who looked just like him. An island where he and his mother and his father had been born. Surely people should know how to be better by now.

  Each day the smoke grew thicker, and the images sicker, the wounds deeper. He heard of a minibus full of Tamil passengers being burnt; of thirty-five prisoners in Welikade being massacred; of political gang masters leading attacks, burning houses and shops and bussing gangs from district to district. Maniacs and morons were in control.

  Sunny watched things slowly fall apart as his father would have done in Manila back in 1971 when his old world – his Ceylon – had exposed its inner brutality and shifted his ideals for ever out of reach. Then, despite ten thousand deaths and heaps of bodies that clogged the rivers, there had been no pictures shown, hardly any news. The true enormity of what had taken place was slow to emerge. Now, in 1983, decapitations, bomb blasts, mutilations, were being flashed across the world. Corpses could no longer be so easily hidden. Not even in mass graves. And no one could be untouched, untarnished by the savagery unleashed.

  Sunny didn’t want to talk about Sri Lanka again. Or any other place. Not even with Clara. All the world could go to hell, as so much of it was bent on doing. They agreed to cancel the tickets. In August, his Manila was in the limelight with its own bid for blood. Benigno Aquino was gunned down on the airport tarmac when he returned to oppose President Marcos. His death too was captured on film. Everywhere, it seemed, there was a greed for gore.

  Clara saw the wisdom of the east in a new light. She dumped all her yoga books at Oxfam and meditated more on the things that mattered around her: the tensions and struggles of a society under stress, and Sunny’s gradual withdrawal.

  Sunny buried his head in his darkroom, in images that had nothing to do with the news of the day, be it cruise missiles or political assassination. Mrs Thatcher escaped in Brighton; Mrs Gandhi didn’t in Delhi. He began to think that biology, life on earth, had more to offer a person of his disposition. He bought a new macro lens and began to study the traumas of smaller creatures: spiders, moths, the Beelzebubs of lichen groves.

  Then, early in 1985, Robby threw his own little googly. ‘We are leaving London,’ he said. ‘We want to open up in Paris. Spice up Montmartre like we did Finchley.’ His face broadened into one of his huge, carefree grins.

  ‘You can’t.’ Sunny was devastated. Robby was all he had left of his merienda years. That in-between time which had come back to him like an unexpected spring.

  ‘What’s the problem, old paré? Things change. We have to move on.’ He turned to Clara. ‘That’s life, right?’

  ‘I think it’s wonderful. We can visit you. Maybe your incredible hunk will be happier to meet us in gay Paree.’

  Robby grinned. ‘Oh, no. That mystery must remain. Au revoir.’ He blew a kiss.

  Robby knew how to handle life – what to hang on to, what to let go, what to give, what to take. Clara knew too, and Sunny reckoned even Tina must have done in her own way. Ranil certainly knew what was important to him. Sunny wondered whether his mother had ever known – or had she always turned the wrong way? Lester hadn’t really known how to handle anything. As for Sunny himself, how could he possibly know?

  A DUCK’S EGG

  1986

  MICHAEL SUVAN EASTON-FERNANDO was born to Clara on the 25th of February 1986, at the Whittington Hospital off the Archway Road. The birth was said to be easy – although that was not how it looked to Sunny.

  The Filipino nurse who was around most of the time had a thin wire plugged into her ear. ‘Ano, Bibi see!’ She moaned every time he asked her anything. She kept a scorecard of all the dilations on her ward and every now and then she would squeal and cheer. Late on the night of the birth, Sunny learnt it was not to do with an extra centimetre at the cervix, or the glimpse of a nearly born peeping out, but rather the news coming out of Manila on her radio. Cory Aquino was being sworn in as the newly elected leader; Ferdinand Marcos was on the point of reinstating himself against her. Something was about to snap.

  ‘We have twins,’ she announced at one confusing moment, and Sunny developed palpitations to match Clara’s. ‘Twin Presidents, ay naku.’ The nurse cooed and giggled. ‘You know Mister Sunny, how they will both fight for Malacañang now.’

  But she was wrong. The age of peaceful revolutions had finally dawned. People power. Easy births. Everything was painted yellow. Marcos was swiftly evacuated.

  At the time, Mikey’s birth was the biggest thing ever for Sunny and Clara. Adrenalin, anaesthetics, angst. Breaking waters and epidurals. The world was changing and this was the momentous event that needed to be appreciated by all. Sunny called Clara’s mother. ‘It’s a boy. Five pounds twelve and no hair.’

  Beryl repeated the details to her husband Eric. Then she consoled Sunny. ‘He will grow, Sunny. Don’t worry, he will grow. How is the new mother?’

  ‘Clara is fine. Everything is fine. The NHS is wonderful.’

  He also called Tifus and Delora.

  ‘Good show,’ Tifus whooped. ‘I love the sound of a baby. Take it from me, it may seem like yowling now but that is the most fantastic music you will ever hear, Sunny. The best.’

  Clara’s parents visited soon after Clara and the baby came home. Installed in a nearby hotel, they were pleased but wary, in at the deep end sooner than anyone had expected.

  The name Michael went down well. Beryl was delighted. ‘If you had been a boy, Clara, that is exactly what we would have called you.’ There was a lull. Sunny could see her father had questions brewing behind the immediate adoration.

  ‘So, Michael what?’

  ‘Hyphenated.’ Clara replied.

  ‘Pardon?’ Eric glanced at Sunny, puzzled. ‘Not Fernando?’

  ‘We are not into that kind of thing, Daddy.’

  ‘But what about the baby?’

  ‘He will have what he really needs. Not just Sunny’s name.’

  Sunny didn’t entirely agree, but tried not to let her dismissal of old conventions niggle him. He reached for a bottle. ‘Gin and tonic? Ice and lemon?’ He knew when a drink was required. There were some things he had learnt very well from his father.

  A lifetime earlier, when it had been first confirmed that Clara was pregnant, Sunny had set about looking for a house with a third bedroom, a photographer’s attic and a view of some empty London sky. The last of his father’s money was going to provide the first instalment of a proper home for the old man’s grandchild.

  He found the place in Hornsey, not far from Clara’s flat but oriented north rather than south into the city. There was a view of Alexandra Palace and the sky above. The estate agent said it was a good time to buy: prices had stalled briefly in the aftermath of the riots further east in Tottenham, but Cl
ara was more persuaded by the elderly Turkish lady who was selling up. She showed an intense interest in the unborn child and gave Clara packets of herbal medicine and childcare advice every time they met. She’d look over Clara’s bump with an almost familial pride. She left the carpets for free, because she thought the yellow polypropylene in the hall would cheer the baby and wanted to leave her furniture too, a Parker Knoll suite with floral patterns and a pine kitchen table, at next to nothing. ‘What for furniture, where I’m going? And you, I think soon you will have no time for anything.’

  Settled in his house, Sunny had assumed that they would teach the baby to speak, bringing him into a world of bowdlerized English; but it was Mikey who was teaching them a new language. For months that quickly turned into years they were incapacitated and could only speak to other flummoxed first-timers who like themselves lived in a sleep-deprived sub-world of elemental urges and umbilical plugs, who understood that conversations had to be punctuated by sudden squawks and burbles, kutchi-coos and pipi-poos flying between caged playpens and tilted high chairs.

  Sunny had never thought he would go back to engineering – that is to say to the business of applied science and construction design – but that is precisely what he found himself doing. The house had been renovated in the early 1970s by a Struwwelpeter devotee – every imaginable child-unfriendly, baby-unproofed surface, texture, plane, corner and device had been imported into the house. Danger lurked everywhere. ‘It is not easy,’ he confessed to Clara. ‘I’m not handy like your dad.’

  Eric was a civil engineer who had been at the same firm for all of his working life. He said he had been good at drawing but preferred to build things. Doodling and fooling around was not for him. ‘I like to put my time to good use, don’t you?’ He had said pointedly to Sunny at their first meeting. ‘I like to read, of course. History and biography particularly. There is a great deal to be learnt outside fiction.’

  Between the snuffles and the colic bubbles, Clara came to the view that she could not go back to work full-time when her maternity leave was over. ‘Gumbo says I can reduce my hours if I go into the new budget team, but the money will be less.’