A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

  They are both laughing now, she, in a bass guffaw, he, taking the top notes above this line. Ugo appears, looks at them, sniffs the air and lopes away. By a tacit arrangement, they always leave the bathroom door open during bathtimes, as if closing the door would confer on the event an unwholesome intimacy, which neither of them desired or knew how to negotiate.

  Ritwik rubs the lemon yellow flannel along her back in slow circles. More grey scum, which had come to rest along the points of contact between water and flesh and water and bathtub, swirl about, as if alive, like plankton.

  ‘I think she means to ask you to do something for her but can’t quite bring herself to do it. Probably doesn’t know how to put it. Maybe she wants you to be her mouthpiece,’ Anne says, leaning back against the pillow and closing her eyes again.

  ‘What do you think it might be?’ Ritwik feels slightly apprehensive. He knows Anne is right, as always; she has an uncanny ability to read people like an easy, accessible book.

  ‘I have no idea, but she is quite meddlesome, don’t you think? She keeps asking about my family, my children, my grandchildren, as if she hasn’t heard the gossip. I’ve always found this Indian curiosity about other people’s lives a bit disturbing. Not offensive, mind you, just a bit difficult to get used to. I found it difficult to cope with when I was living in India, the constant staring, the personal questions. I suppose it is natural in places where there is a strong sense of community.’ She slides down a few more inches in the water as if this longish speech has exhausted her.

  ‘What gossip?’ Ritwik asks, unsure whether Anne is going to take this as substantiating evidence of the infamous Subcontinental inquisitiveness.

  ‘What gossip?’ Anne echoes.

  He breathes in deeply and says, ‘You said Mrs Haq pretends as if she hasn’t heard the neighbours’ gossip about you. So I asked what gossip.’

  One, two, three . . . Ritwik measures the pause in heartbeats; it is impossible to predict which way Anne will go.

  ‘There are a couple of people who’ve lived here for almost as long as I have. This place has seen a lot of new people, you know, some moving out, some coming in. The ones who died here, perhaps they passed on gossip to their children, friends, neighbours. I’ve always waited for the time when I would be the oldest person living in Ganymede Road and everyone who has known me for years and years either dead or long gone to a different place. There will be only new people on this street, people with no idea of who I am, how long I’ve lived here.’ She is visibly tiring after this torrent of words, but it is not over, not yet. She sits up a bit, opens her eyes again and says, ‘But gossip’s a weed, it keeps coming back. There is no way one can start with a clean slate.’ She shuts her eyes, cackles, ‘Not at my age. Yours might be a different case.’

  Ritwik doesn’t fail to notice how she has evaded his question, fobbed him off with a non-answer and seen straight through his apology of a life, all in one seamless stream of words. But he won’t give up this time. He repeats, ‘What gossip?’ This has become a game now and he wants to have at least one won set behind him.

  Did they say bad mother failed mother she is sure they did, they still do for all she cares, but is there anyone left from, god, when was it, sixty-six, or was it sixty-eight, no it must have been sixty-six, yes, she is quite sure, but it might just be sixty-eight and they’re not far from wrong for what sort of mother forgets the year of her son’s death, here she is wondering whether it was sixty-six or sixty-eight, shame on her, his brains blown out, a leaking dark jam everywhere, on the desk at which he had sat while doing it, on the wall behind, spattered with blood as if a naughty child had had an accident with a bottle of ink he had been forbidden to touch, no letter, no note, nothing except a forgive me, mother, in the refrigerator a day later when she had gone to look for milk for her tea and the police inspector no constable maybe a curl of paper or is she making this up there was no note nothing only the faint metallic whiff of blood and the tinny smell of internal organs her son’s brain her thirty-six-year-old son’s brain her thirty-six-year-old son who had torn out of her one August afternoon with the monsoon coming down in unforgiving sheets outside the bungalow and the Indian midwife inscrutable dumb in her foreign language and Clare’s ayah all crowding around thirty-one hours for a little head to come out but all tangled up inside and Dr Higgins despairing too unforeseen complications the child who made the beginning and the end unendurably difficult while her contractions racked her as if there were no end and no end to the deluge outside waters breaking everywhere this child who would almost take her life with him while receiving his and then who took his own and a bit of his mother’s forever so there is nothing anymore except that note or did she imagine it to save herself because there was no one else left to do it?

  A difficult child a different child a child who grew up on his own needed very little almost self-enclosed no not the self-enclosedness of a selfish person but of an independent one needed no one needed nothing till the last day when he unravelled everything that everyone had ever thought about him unravelled his assumed self-containedness like a washed skein of recycled wool taught her the last lesson that he too had needed love like everyone else perhaps more for who but the weak among us need love because the strong have everything and she had read him her son her ripped flesh her near-death with the demented Indian monsoon howling outside wanting to carry them both away she and her tangled child she had read him wrong all along misread his silences misread his secrecies his opacity the frequently shut doors the increasingly haunted look a hunted animal looking back on it now she had misread everything and shut the book but the book was now gone taken away irreversibly from her and returned to its sender she would never have a chance to read it again and say yes I understood some of it only now she lives with the abiding incomprehensibility of what she had been given because she didn’t see.

  But she did give him something no not love not the obliterating love he had wanted oh yes she felt it love in pores and arteries and her leaking nipples and in the pit of her stomach but she could never show it to him never for love is a weakness too isn’t it an admission of helplessness so she didn’t not obviously but it was always there and if he was so all-comprehending why didn’t he see it and save his mother why didn’t he so she gave him birds instead those creatures of the air hollow insubstantial through which they communicated their love no she’s wrong again she never communicated anything otherwise he would still be here and she would comfort him in his isolation saying it didn’t matter what he was who he was he was in the end the child who had ripped her apart he was hers always and forever and nothing was going to change it but they had kestrels and oystercatchers and snow eagles and macaws and hoopoes instead. So much love such a lot of air air everywhere for these creatures to live and move and swim in the same air, lower, through which Richard, no more than five, glides through across the green lawn in Simla with a feather clutched in his baby fingers Mummy, mummy, is this a pigeon feather or a dove’s and what are these lovely things at the bottom pointing to the tuft of down feathers a couple of inches from the base of the quill, her bird-loving son a little blond ornithologist angel with who knew a Civil Service career stored up for him all history between then and now gone like a twinkle in the eye a breath a vapour that is the life of man all of it untying loosening free to scatter in the moment when her son’s brains her own innards slither down and crust over a wall and she not knowing what had happened for an uncalibrated moment in time thinking Richard has fallen asleep at his desk and is going to turn around at the sound of her entering the room and say Why don’t you shut the door . . .

  ‘Why don’t you shut the door?’ she suddenly mumbles, startling Ritwik out of his reverie. He was certain she was taking one of her cat naps, mouth open, eyes pressed shut, head lolling on the air pillow, everything in the house still, very still, with only the sound of his hand moving occasionally in the water, accentuating the silence. That barely discernible liquid sound and Ann
e’s dream-soaked words – ‘brain’ and ‘feather’ were the only two he could make out and even those he is not sure about – escaping from her subterranean world out into this alien space.

  ‘Are you cold?’ Ritwik asks her.

  No answer. No movement from Anne.

  ‘Look, you will have to sit up a bit if I get up to shut the door,’ he says softly.

  She moves, an amphibious crab, graceless and pained. Ritwik stands up, shuts the door and sits down by the bath again.

  ‘What do you say to letting out some water and turning the hot tap on for a bit?’ he coaxes her gently back to life.

  She remains resolutely contained in whatever demesne she has chosen to wander in now. Ritwik releases the plug for a minute, replaces it, turns on the hot tap, swirling his hand in the bath all the time to keep the temperature equable. When the water feels right, he turns the tap off, soaps the yellow cloth and lifts up Anne’s breasts and rubs it gently under them, under her armpits, on her shoulders, her thighs, the join of legs and torso, all remnants and residues of what they began life as. The ribcage feels like a very precarious cage, about to unconfigure and lose whatever tired bird it was imprisoning inside, letting it free at last. He is especially shaken, every time, by the craterous area where her breasts started life. He takes up her arms, one by one, puts them on his shoulders and soaps them. Anne wakes up. Her eyes are clouded with a distance that Ritwik can never traverse. When she is in one of these moods, she won’t talk, or interact; she will cocoon in on herself and walk away till she readmits him in her own time, the time dictated by the metronome marking the rhythm of the world she has suddenly slipped into.

  ‘That’s enough, don’t you think?’ she asks. ‘Give me your hands, so I can get up.’

  This is an extremely delicate operation; one false interlocking of fingers on arms, one slippage in any of those myriad surfaces of contact, would spell immediate, even irreversible, disaster.

  ‘OK, take your hands out of the bath so I can dry them.’

  She complies like an obedient child.

  ‘Now leave your hands out.’ She puts them up on her head. Ritwik dries his own hands and arms thoroughly so that there is not a trace of wetness on which Anne’s clutching hands can slither. He puts both hands under her armpits and lets her grip his upper arms: he is a vice, a ball of white-hot concentration. He almost lifts Anne out of the bath, positioning her on to the bath mat, still holding her close, in a near-embrace, till she finds her feet and feels secure enough to disengage herself partially so that Ritwik can towel her dry. He kneels, so that he can do her lower half more efficiently, with a slight quickening of his heart: he must not look, he must not be caught stealing furtive glances at that great unknown. He wonders what Anne feels at this indignity. Does she resent it passionately yet holds her tongue because she has no other option? Does she simply not care? Do you reach an age when things such as enforced nakedness, help with toilet paper and with sluicing the stubborn corners and crevices of the body, count for nothing anymore, the impulse to inhibition just a trivial expression of a long-gone vanity? Would he ever have the courage or the effrontery to ask her directly in one of her more readable moments, perhaps when he is sitting by her bed and reading out The Little Prince or The Owl Who Was Afraid of The Dark to her as the dark congeals outside the windows and a new bird shatters the silence?

  They had peacocks last week, a flutter of cumbersome feathers and raucous shrieks, a sound that still shivers up and down Ritwik’s spine in the same way the scrape of fingernails against chalkboard set off shudders in him. The birds had strutted around on the grass, sending out into the innocent December air their abominable cries as if they had been done an injury, which nothing could reverse or recompense. And then they had flown off or disappeared, leaving Ritwik astounded and Anne, stoical and mysterious, with a vague unsmiled smile playing around her bunched mouth, as if she not only knew the answer to this phenomenon but had in fact brought it into being herself.

  ‘I want my kimono,’ she announces, breaking what seems to Ritwik an interminable silence, for they have each slipped into their unreachable worlds.

  ‘I need to put some powder on you first, don’t I?’ Ritwik slips back into duty.

  ‘All right then, but hurry, please, it’s cold in here.’

  Ritwik reaches for the tin of lavender talcum powder, hesitates a few seconds trying to decide whether he should pour it first on his hand and then smear her or whether he should sprinkle the talc on her directly and then spread it around more evenly. He opts for the latter and realizes immediately that he has made a mistake; he comes to this particular crossroads every bathtime and every time he makes the same mistake, for the talc falls and inhabits the pouches and folds of her skin, stays trapped there, much in the way a powdery drift of snow fills up rills and gullies first. Once again, a bathtime ritual becomes an almost insurmountable logistical problem for Ritwik.

  ‘Hold on to my waist while I do it, OK?’ It is like talking to a child, except the position they are locked in now could be that of lovers.

  She complies again. When the ritual is all over, Ritwik wraps her dressing gown around her and says, ‘Let’s go and look for your kimono.’

  She refuses to take the stairlift and wants Ritwik to help her upstairs. On the way up, an immeasurably long move and somewhat irritating to Ritwik, partly because his desire for pure order and neatness had been scrambled by the foamless scum and the powder in the ridges of Anne’s skin, she asks, ‘How is your job with Mr Haq going?’

  Fucking clairvoyant psychoterrorist. Of course, he does not voice it.

  The lone and level strawberry field stretched far away, but not so far that Ritwik couldn’t see something different at the far end, where it met the horizon, another field of a different crop. In the very far distance there was a disparate bunch of what looked like abandoned ricks and sheds and an outmoded combine harvester or some such farming machine. What took his immediate attention were the acres and acres of green which, on closer inspection, appeared somehow straggly and weak, an anaemic shade of the colour, but he had never seen a strawberry bush before and had assumed it would be a tough thing, more like a sturdy, clipped rosebush and less like this semi-climber. Row after long row of bushes, laid out like disciplined armies, thick with red berries. The berries were not obvious at first but when he first spied them, among the low foliage and on the straw bedding, which had been laid down lovingly under the plants along the entire length and breadth of the plantation, he couldn’t see anything else. Like little red lanterns in the green night, he had paraphrased and then felt immediately ashamed at his cast of mind. And where was this place? Cambridgeshire? Hertfordshire? Berkshire? He had no idea but he wasn’t going to ask in case they thought him snoopy or too inquisitive for his own good. Something told him that too many questions, or even revealing some fluency in English, wouldn’t go down too well here.

  The journey out here had taken slightly over an hour. During the first leg of the drive, Ritwik had frequently clambered up to the back window to get a glimpse of the world outside. As the road had ribboned out in a track of macadam grey, with houses or occasionally fields on either side, he had thought that this was what it felt like to be a prisoner, literally, being taken away in a prison van, watching the other side unspool in relative reverse. Along with this, the jerkiness that came with being in the back of a van had given him a slight sense of motion sickness so, after a while, he had stopped looking out of the window and concentrated instead on dispelling the little waves of nausea.

  He had introduced himself to the young man, his fellow passenger. There had been a difficult and halting conversation, Dusan – that was his name – was taciturn and almost hostile at first and then plain inarticulate, his English still rudimentary. Ritwik had persevered; when ‘Where are you from?’ proved too difficult for Dusan to follow, Ritwik had broken it down to ‘Country?’ and, pointing to him, ‘You’. In the volley that followed, only ‘Albania’ seeme
d decipherable. When Ritwik asked him to slow down, Dusan kept pointing to himself and saying, ‘Albania, Albania’, and then, ‘Home: Macedonia, Live: Macedonia’. An Albanian from Macedonia, Ritwik decided. He found it difficult to place: that was a very fuzzy area of the world map. The interaction jolted along, an erratically dotted movement to the more or less smooth onward motion of the van. At one point, Ritwik asked Dusan his age by pointing to himself first, showing ten fingers twice and then four fingers, then pointing to Dusan and making a vague interrogative gesture with his upturned palm. After two tries, Dusan cracked it and answered, without resorting to counting with fingers, ‘Fifteen.’ Ritwik was sure he hadn’t been able to keep the shock off his face: Dusan looked at least twice his age. His eyes were the eyes of someone who had seen things about life which most wouldn’t want to be shown, a small bunch of lines already making their forking ways out from the corners, his hands gnarled, his mouth lined. The hinterlands behind those eyes contained dangerous terrain, a whole map of misery.

  Over the next three days, the map unfurled a tiny bit for Ritwik to have a fleeting glimpse.

  Dusan and Ritwik had first been taken to a hut and Tim, along with two other men, had explained to them what they were supposed to do. There were instructions about filling up punnets and barrows, returning picked fruit to the shed, the workings of the twine machine, the sizes of fruits to be picked, different sizes in different baskets – Ritwik hadn’t known that fruit picking – so simple, so . . . so . . . pure – could be hedged in by so many rules and dos and don’ts.

  ‘You work until seven and then come to the farm, it’s a mile up that road; one of us will come back with you here and have a look at what you have done. You’ll get paid then. Is that clear? Another thing: don’t eat the fruit. We have a very good idea how much fruit you can pick in twelve hours, between the two of you, and if the weight is any less than our estimate, you get the money taken off your wages. Clear?’