A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  The blue had lightened to the pre-dawn grey, which held the promise of another unbrokenly cloudless and hot day. Outside, the scene had changed radically again. Ritwik was going to discover this abiding aspect of London: with one corner turned or a side-street stepped into, the whole landscape could change, from Georgian terrace to postwar prefab, tree-lined red brick suburbia to outbreaks of high-rise council estate rashes with cruel names to their buildings: Ullswater, Windermere, Grasmere, Keswick. The demarcations were sudden and jagged. Even the immigrant quarters changed, as Saeed pointed out driving down Finchley Road, ‘The Jewish people live here.’ This was his first voluntary statement, after Buckingham Palace, about an area of London; Ritwik wondered if the two held equal, not identical, significances in his mind.

  ‘We come near the place,’ Saeed volunteered. They passed an underground station: Willesden Green. He drove on for a few minutes, turned left on Anson Road and parked his car.

  ‘We go out.’ Saeed leaned forward and sideways to open the door for Ritwik, a gesture he found touching and old-fashioned. It was nearly light and the dawn was cool; Ritwik was glad of his thin jumper.

  ‘We walk there. Not far, five minutes. We don’t take car there.’ Saeed was becoming almost talkative.

  They went back to the main road, Chichele Lane. After a few minutes, Ritwik noticed disparate groups of people. It wasn’t as if the journey here had been through utterly deserted streets, but after their relative emptiness, this seemed positively crowded. Men, mostly, standing in little groups, chatting, smoking, huddled, as if sharing a secret or a shame. A few were standing on their own. There were even two women, one with a sleeping baby wrapped around her front in folds and folds of cloth, another one, standing with a pale man, both smoking.

  ‘We stand here. No, not so far,’ he said, as Ritwik tried to go further on, right in the middle of these stray clumps of people. ‘Here, here is OK.’

  Without even thinking, Ritwik marked he was the only person there who was not white. He didn’t have a clue from where these people, standing around disjointedly at this unholy hour of the morning, came, or why they were all gathering here. A queue was forming of men who seemed to speak to each other in the same language. Some of them appeared to know each other. Three men stood out. Like Saeed, two of them wore branded clothes and shoes, either real Nikes, Pumas and Filas or fakes. They had heavy chains around their necks and wore bracelets and rings. One of them had thick golden hoops in his earlobes. They smoked and patrolled the street and the people. Most of the people gravitated to these three men who were more loquacious, more confident than the rest: they were like teachers with their group charges on a school trip. The men chatted, laughed occasionally, sized up the two women. There was a tense furtiveness in the way people looked, or refused to look, at each other, an uneasy expectation, a hairline crack of suspicion and something else Ritwik couldn’t quite place.

  Before Ritwik’s questions tumbled out, Saeed started speaking. ‘They workers, look for work here every morning. This place Job Street. From many places. Russia, Albania, Romania, Croatia, Montenegro’ – Ritwik noted both his surprise and his prejudice at hearing Saeed reel off the names of unusual countries – ‘Yugoslavia.’

  But that country doesn’t exist anymore. A red double-decker bus passed by, bringing the scatter of people together on the pavement. As soon as it was gone, they started unravelling to their former loose alignments. Every time a car or van went down the road, the men stared at it, poised on the edge of some anticipation, almost willing it to stop. A man, darker than the rest, came up to Saeed and spoke to him. The language was unknown to Ritwik but it was obvious what it was from the opening Salaam aleikum. They carried on talking seriously, the language oddly guttural and glottally stopped, with its halting music of sibilants and aspirants joined together. Saeed nodded, the man walked off and returned two minutes later with two young women, girls really; they looked as if they were still in their teens but with a precocious air of composure and resignation about them. They didn’t look up or acknowledge anyone’s presence. Saeed didn’t bother speaking to them; he continued talking to the man. After a while, the man nodded, shook Saeed’s hand and walked off.

  Ritwik didn’t know how these axes were forming in the first place but it seemed to him that Saeed was now in charge of three people, the two girls and Ritwik, just as the three flash men had gathered together their individual groups. Two more young men, obviously known to Saeed, came and joined their growing cluster. Saeed spoke to them in English.

  ‘Hello. We wait for them now. You work in East Anglia or Cambridgeshire today?’

  One of the men, lean, blotchy-faced, with gnarled, veined hands, replied, ‘They take us. We don’t know. We go where they take us.’ His English was heavily accented but in a very different way from Saeed’s. Ritwik felt frustrated he couldn’t place any one of these people but if he were asked to guess the origins of the two new arrivals, he would have put it down to the eastern fringes of Europe, or one of the former Soviet dominions. Some of the men waiting here were so astonishingly beautiful that his eyes kept wandering. Dark hair, fair skin, lean faces, and unreadable, opaque, dark eyes with long lashes. A few others were bony, with spun straw hair, or dark curls, high cheekbones, a throwaway grace to their movements.

  Suddenly there was a stir as some men ran forward to a white truck, which had appeared cruising slowly along the road. Saeed said, ‘Not our work, not us. Stay here.’ The men, seven or eight of them, who crowded around below the driver’s door were scrambling and jostling with each other. Two of the bejewelled men were trying to hold them back and talk to the driver at the same time. From where Ritwik stood, he could neither see the driver nor hear what was going on. After a few minutes of conversation between these men, punctuated by one thickset man trying to push his way to the front and put his hand up through the driver’s window, the leaders stepped back and picked out three men each. The truck driver opened his door, jumped out, and spoke to the leaders. Three of the men who had joined in the scramble when the truck had arrived on the scene went around the front of the vehicle and got in through the passenger door. The driver did a high five with the man with earrings, got into the truck and drove off. Two minutes later, a large white van came up and stopped as the other leader indicated to it, waving his hand. There was a brief conversation with him, the driver stepped out, opened the back door and let the three other men in. Before he drove off, he reached into his pocket, took out a few notes and gave it to the man who had stopped his van.

  The remaining men hung back, some chattering to each other; a couple of them were loud and almost mirthful. The two men who hadn’t been picked up by the trucks were remonstrating with the two leaders, but it seemed in a kind of resigned, humorous way. There were other men who had meanwhile arrived and joined the waiting groups.

  Ritwik turned to Saeed and asked, ‘What’s going on?’

  Saeed said, ‘The men here, they wait for work. When truck arrive, they pick people, one, two, maybe three, maybe more. Depend on the truck. Then they go and work.’

  ‘But what work is it? Where do they go?’ He tried not to let the whole flood of questions spill and drown out whatever willingness Saeed might have to enlighten him.

  ‘Construction. Building work. Some in London, some outside. Some farm work, you know? We do farm work. They come soon. You wait.’

  ‘And who are those three men? Do you know the ones I mean?’

  Yes, he did. ‘They help these men find job.’

  ‘Do these men come here every day looking for work? The same men?’

  ‘Some. Some get work for one day, two day, more, two week maybe. They come again when they finish this job. Some get job only for a day. They come every day.’

  A dark knowledge was slowly beginning to take focused shape in Ritwik’s mind. Saeed’s short, staccato sentences were chiselling out new edges and lines; the picture wasn’t altogether clear, or finished, but Ritwik guessed the flashy m
en were brokers and the people who gathered here in the morning, a bunch of floating labourers, unemployed, perhaps even unemployable, who lived on this day-to-day basis, their horizons bounded on all sides by nothing more than the eternal repetition of nightfall and break of day, sunset and sunrise. ‘Bring the day, eat the day’, as the Bengali idiom had it.

  A white van drove past slowly and Saeed ran after it, managing to thump against one of its metal sides. The van stopped and Saeed went up to the window. He evidently knew the driver.

  ‘I have three, maybe four today. How many you need?’ he asked the driver.

  The driver got out. He was short and stocky, with legs like tree trunks, and bare arms tattooed heavily with a strange device; the overwhelming impression of those drawings on the skin was of dirty, indistinguishable blues and greens. He wore a singlet, a pair of faded cut-offs and heavy, soiled boots.

  ‘Which ones?’ he asked Saeed.

  Saeed pointed to Ritwik, the two men he thought were from Eastern Europe and the young girl Saeed’s Arabic friend had consigned to his care.

  ‘They strong. They work.’ And pointing to Ritwik he added, ‘He speak English. Good English.’

  ‘Look, mate, I need three. For a week, maybe, give or take a day or two’ – for Ritwik, the sounds ‘myte’, ‘tyke’, ‘dye’ stood out – ‘strawberries now, and other stuff, you know.’

  The girl had moved behind the gathering of these five men, reluctant to join them.

  ‘They go where?’

  ‘Cambridgeshire. Twenty pounds each for the day’s job. OK?’

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  ‘Twenty, that’s what I’m giving, not a penny more. If you’re not happy, I can have my pick from any of these people out here.’

  There was a growing interest in the groups of waiting men in this negotiation but it was dispersed by the arrival of two more slow trucks on the road.

  Saeed did some swift calculation in his head. ‘You take?’

  ‘Wha’?’ the driver asked.

  Saeed repeated, this time gesturing towards each of them.

  The driver looked at them slowly, taking them in for the first time, but somehow without any real interest.

  ‘What about the girl and this Paki boy, you Paki aren’t you, I think two will do, you can keep those other two’ – pointing to the east European men – ‘my mate needs some hands in East Anglia, he’ll be coming along in a while, why don’t ya send them over his way.’

  Saeed nodded. ‘OK.’ He turned to the girl and broke out in swift Arabic. It sounded harsh and peremptory and there were a lot of words, certainly many more than he had spoken to Ritwik in the course of the morning. The girl kept her head down, still refusing to make eye contact, yet there seemed to be an odd defiance about that gesture, an insolence that Ritwik couldn’t quite square with the situation she was in now.

  Ritwik turned to the driver and asked him, ‘Will you bring us back here from Cambridgeshire at the end of the day?’

  ‘Wha’?’ That aggressive hurl of a single word, again.

  Ritwik felt intimidated repeating what he had just asked. He rephrased, ‘Do we come back to London at the end of the day?’ Everything hinged on that. He couldn’t go away for the night. Who would look after Anne then?

  The driver looked immensely uninterested. ‘That depends on you.’

  Ritwik steeled himself to ask the original question. ‘Will you be coming back to London?’

  ‘Could do.’

  ‘Could you please give me a lift back here?’

  ‘What d’ya think I am, your fuckin’ taxi service?’ But he said it in a humorous tone. ‘Why d’ya speak posh?’

  The question threw Ritwik. ‘I suppose, I suppose . . . well, I don’t know. I didn’t think I did.’

  Saeed meanwhile was trying to get the driver’s attention by hovering around the edge of their conversation, fidgeting. ‘You take this guy,’ he said, pointing to the wiry young man.

  ‘OK, we leave the girl behind then. Only two today. We’ll see tomorrow,’ the driver said. He turned to Ritwik and the thin man and gestured them to follow him to the back door. He opened it for them and said, ‘In ya go.’

  There was a dirty canvas sheet on the floor and an odd assortment of pails, tins, a large tool box, a hoe, a couple of spades, a few rags, a rolled-up oilcloth and a spare pair of heavy-duty boots. It was dark in there and the only view they would have would be through the glass windows on the back door, if they half-crouched and half-knelt like dogs.

  ‘We don’t have all day, y’know. Get movin’.’ The driver was obviously used to ordering people around.

  Ritwik and the thin young man clambered in and sat down on the canvas. Saeed and the driver exchanged more words: Ritwik couldn’t make out anything from this trap. The van revved up and started moving. Ritwik lurched towards the back door windows and held his palm against the glass in goodbye to Saeed. Saeed hesitated before he put up his hand to wave. The clear morning sunshine had caught his face and turned it a shade of pale gold.

  Anne’s wrinkled parchment-and-bone claw sticks out of the contained pond, clutching the white edge, a parody of some still from a crass Hollywood chiller, while the water laps at the scumringed sides in soundless mini-ripples, which are not ripples really, not the ones neatly, concentrically circling out, but only erratically agitated water. The scum ring acts as a sort of Plimsoll line for Ritwik; he always fills the bath a few inches below that rectangular mark running the entire perimeter, always thinking he needs to give it a good scour but it acts as a guideline. He doesn’t want Anne to drown or get water in her mouth or nose when she reclines her entire length during the twice-weekly bath.

  No bath oil, no foam, no gel, nothing but the spartan bar of ivory Imperial Leather. Sometimes her flailing claws miss the edge and clutch his immersed hand instead. He sits outside, sometimes on his knees, at other times on his haunch, one hand under her armpit – a texturally disturbing combination of dewlap, down and solid rods all holding each other, just about, in a fragile balance – the other hand always free. The hands change roles all the time.

  These are Ritwik’s first experiences of the naked female body: breasts hung down like meagrely weighted crushed leather bags, the weight low down, like a couple of lonely stones at the very bottom of a sack. They remind him of the sad balloons, deflated and shrivelled, at the end of a child’s birthday party. The aureoles are like leaking stains. Everything in her body, the intricately scored map of her skin, her stomach, the pouches under her eyes, her breasts, seems to be having an affair with gravity and cannot resist its pull any longer. Maybe it is the ultimate call to the earth, the flesh impatient to reach where it knows it is destined. He doesn’t dare look at the space between her legs; only in the unwilled and involuntary periphery of his vision are snatches of a sparse, sad, grey tuft to which he always shuts his mind as if the sight is going to bore holes into him and also diminish her.

  Anne is a submerged bird, a creature of hollowness, all air and insubstantiality, the broken doll of her body accentuated grotesquely by the way the bath water refracts her limbs and shrivelled dugs and torso into slightly skewed sizes and perspectives. The Barbour-green inflatable pillow props up her head because she often dozes off in her bath. Sometimes Ugo comes in, sniffs around, sometimes he jumps on to the edge of the bath and sits watching the movements, of water, of hands, with beryl-eyed curiosity.

  Today, Ritwik takes the cream-coloured bar and starts soaping Anne under water, an act he has always found frustrating and futile: the soap doesn’t foam or stick to the body because the water dissolves and disperses it instantaneously. What is the point of soaping if you can’t build up a lather, rub and clean yourself with it, and only then wash it off? Wasn’t it a bit Sisyphean to have it all washed away even as you started? He tried to explain the point to Anne once but she didn’t get it at all. Slowly, the water turns into a milky suspension: dirty grey flakes of scum eddy about and move to the margins in a community. R
itwik hates the oily scum, this stubborn refusal of foam.

  Anne is lying with her head resting on the pillow, her eyes shut. Ritwik is unsure whether she is asleep but he is used to her abrupt tunings out now. If she wants to speak she will. What he is not used to, not yet, is the feel of her crumpled tissue-paper skin against his hand. It is like touching a creature made up only of folds of hide, with the life taken out of it. That, and the pervasiveness of bones. When life wages war, it is as if these two last foot soldiers hold out until the end, stubbornly fighting a losing battle till they have to succumb to the inevitable as well.

  ‘The water’s too hot.’ She hasn’t opened her eyes.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me when I asked you to dip your hand in?’ Ritwik asks.

  ‘That’s because it felt all right to the touch.’

  It is a logic Ritwik understands, so he asks, ‘Do you want me to add some cold water now?’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ And then, after a while, ‘You’ll take that cloth and rub my back, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘That Haq woman has come looking for you a couple of times.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘She seems very curious about you. Asks me all sorts of questions.’

  ‘What questions?’ There is a slight edge of anxiety in his voice.

  ‘Oh, you know. Your parents, your family, what you do, where you were before this, what you will do in life, that sort of thing.’ She opens her eyes; there is laughter in them. ‘But I tell her nothing. That’s because I don’t know anything, do I?’

  ‘Well, Anne, if you ask very politely, I might, I just might tell you a few of the things you are dying to know.’ He is laughing now, a clear and teasing sound in this enveloping miasma of steam.

  ‘Oh, I am not curious,’ she rushes in mock-huffily, in a little parody of his italicized speech. ‘I wonder where you get all these self-important ideas from. I was just making an observation about that nosy Pakistani woman.’