by Glen Duncan
‘What?’ Reece insists.
What can I say? That it’s the feeling of everyone being from somewhere else? That it’s no one knowing I’m here? That in Departures you can see whether a marriage is unravelling? That in Arrivals you can breathe the secondary smoke of love? That in an airport every hello and goodbye marks the beginning or end of a story? That there’s always the possibility that one day, instead of saying, wouldn’t it be incredible if, you’ll actually do it, fuck the whole routine and jump on a flight to somewhere far away where no one knows anything about you?
No. I can’t say any of that.
‘It’s just something I enjoy,’ I say at last. ‘I’m not altogether sure why. In any case presumably I’m not breaking the law?’
As soon as I’ve said this I realize there aren’t many things more guaranteed to piss a policeman off. Reece blinks once, extra-slowly, shorthand for all his years of idiot people trotting out this idiot line. As if it’s ever going to be as simple as that, as if we’d all be sleeping safe in our beds if it was ever as simple as that.
Keogh comes back in and drops my wallet and driving licence on the desk in front of Reece, gives him a look that says legit. Reece slides them over to me.
‘Is that it?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Reece says. He’s bored. I’m a ninny. Some people collect thimbles, some people are obsessed with tulips, some people dig airports.
There’s a general relaxing of muscles in the room as I put my things back in my pockets and get to my feet. Reece doesn’t stand, rocks his chair on to its back legs, shoves his hands into his jeans pockets, yawns.
‘You’re not breaking any law, Mr Monroe,’ he says, through the tail end of the yawn. ‘Unless, of course, we decide you’re loitering. Point is, you keep hanging round airports looking suspicious, you’re going to keep getting questioned. It’s that simple. You’re visible. These are the times, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I suggest you bear that in mind.’
‘Yeah, okay.’
He lets the chair back on to all four legs. I’m thinking, as the panic subsides, that’s another simple pleasure gone. Reece’s mobile rings. The Exorcist, Tubular Bells. He gets up, turns away to answer it, says, ‘Yeah? What did she want?’ And I find myself hurt that he’s forgotten me already, that he’s on to the next thing. It’s like a prostitute taking a call from her next client while you’re still zipping up your pants. Detectives are like that, reveal how small your life is next to theirs of death and evil. They can’t help it. To them we’re all walking around blind.
‘Right we are then, sir,’ Beau says, holding the door open for me. ‘We’ll take you back now.’
Weak-kneed I none the less force myself not to leave the airport straight away. Some tremulous mix of civic indignation and emasculation. I feel as if I might vomit. I buy myself a cold sparkling water and stand, too hot but incapable of taking my jacket off, near the posse of bored drivers. You’re visible. These are the times, right? The drivers are a species: pub hair, slacks, Seventies sunglasses; they serve, but they’ve preserved the little flints of their masculine selves. They have that clipped patience acquired by working-class men who’ve been dealing with the rich for years. ALBERTINE. FENWICK. McGREGOR. DUNN. My hands are shaking. I’m thinking of what a meal I’m going to make of telling Vince tonight, how I’ll play up my sissyness, how he’ll interject every now and then with quiet Withnailian Bastards! or Absolute fuckers.
Passengers from a New York flight are coming through. My usual game is to decide within their first half-dozen steps through the doors which ones are American. The British, especially those returning from their first visit to the US, give themselves away. They look tranquilly humbled and relieved, as if they’ve just lost their virginity or given birth or at any rate gone through a basic human rite of passage. Which they have: seeing America. Something of its dazzle or glare remains in their tired faces. They’ll slag it off in the pub later, all that plastic politeness and righteous self-absorption, the brash narcissistic optimism, the dumbness–but the showgirl glamour and cowboy heft of the place will, whether they like it or not, have aroused them. For a few days or weeks they’ll have been where television comes from, their childhood heaven. Even the globally invariable brands–Coke, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Starbucks–will have had over there an extra throb or razzle derived from being in the land of their birth. Those all-night diners and the way your drink comes on a little napkin and the bargirl calls you honey or hon or sugar and the way the dollars make English notes look like pompous, gouty old aristocrats. More than anything the thrilling currentness, the feeling that every nation on the planet is grudgingly or amorously trying to catch up.
A family goes past, two ginger-haired freckled kids who might be twins, nose-ringed mum with maroon hair in a ponytail, plump unshaven dad in bermudas and a faded Nirvana T-shirt. A tall, gaunt American academic with close-cropped silver Greco-Roman curls and two briefcases. A trio of girls in their early twenties who’ve been on what was supposed to be a spree but one of them, who reminds me of the Cowardly Lion, looks like she’s fallen out with the other two, pushing her trolley a couple of yards behind, red-eared, letting her flip-flopped feet slap. A family of American Asians (Sri Lankans, I guess), him with a compact lightly worked-out body in crisp white T-shirt and new Levis, her in khaki army-style trousers and a black crop-top, slim with a child-widened ass and, I imagine, tits of lovely tautness prone to gooseflesh; the five-year-old, in obligatory baseball cap–no, an entire baseball strip–sitting on the luggage playing an electronic game, looks like an abstracted raja. Then a light-brown racially tricky woman in slender black velvet flares and what I’m guessing is an extraordinarily expensive white shirt comes out pulling a single suitcase with her sunglasses up on her forehead and it’s Scarlet.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Silk Train
(The Cheechee Papers: Bhusawal, 1952)
Ross emerged from the illness declaring that he’d missed his chance and would never box again, but by the beginning of 1949 he was back in the ring (and on the pitch) for the GIPR, and by 1952 he was on course for Helsinki. Helsinki wasn’t London, but the London promoters would still be watching. He was twenty-seven. Five good years, retire at the top. Rockballs’s ‘all the sweet pussy’ had been dropped. There were the kids to consider, even beyond Kate, beyond love. Melissa, conceived not long after his return from Death’s Bleddy Threshold, was three years old; Carl would be a year next month; and they were still only half-heartedly practising the rhythm method. The Armoury Road house had become home, but there was never money left over at the end of the month, which of late had begun to bother Ross. They weren’t poor; they ate and drank, kept Dondi and a cook, went to the Institute dances; Kate made all the kids’ clothes. But Ross’s public conviction that this life was temporary, precursive to the real life of international pro boxing stardom, had a parallel private anxiety; the injury, the accident, the tryst with destiny, the hand of God that had shattered his dream five years ago, had left him with a kernel of doubt which, as the time for the new dream neared, grew into the beginning of paranoia. If he failed at the trials, what then? If they were going to England they’d need money, a lot of it. Where was that going to come from?
Working against this was the throb of peace that simply being a husband and a father gave him. That had come as a shock. Lying awake after Kate had fallen asleep he felt the settled household around him and found himself profanely asking, What else do you need? This is the wealth, all the wealth there ever is. Bugger England. He’d prop himself up on one elbow and watch his wife sleeping.
Kate, it turned out, could sing. She sang at the dances. It had unnerved him the first time he heard her through a microphone. She’d sung ‘Girl of My Dreams’ and ‘Blue Moon’ and later ‘It Had to Be You’. Panic had started in his chest, the audience suddenly attending to her–but it had blossomed into pride: she was his, would go home with him, would go to bed with
him. He was sleeping with Kate Monroe, the singer. She was his wife. Astonishing. ‘How did you know you could do that?’ he’d asked her. She’d shrugged, laughed. ‘I could always carry a tune.’ The visiting band had offered her a job, not realizing she was married, had two children, had no desire to sing for anything else. The bandleader wore round rimless spectacles like Glenn Miller, gave her a card with an address to write to if she ever changed her mind. Walking home she’d told Ross, shown him the card when he’d asked to see it. Again the thrill of threat, that she was, to someone else, Someone Else. God, if He felt you becoming complacent in your riches, gave you a hint of how easily they could be taken away. This more than the grander beneficences was His mercy, though since the mercy went hand in glove with viciousness (Ross remembered the severed breast on the lines that day, how his own wife’s breasts subsequently had shared in the awful pathos, a challenge his lust needed all its cunning to work through) you couldn’t bank on it. ‘You could have had a different life,’ Ross said to her. She laughed again, seeing him unsure of her. ‘I’ve got the life I want,’ she said.
Superficially life in Bhusawal wasn’t much changed. Plenty of Anglos had left in the years leading up to the madness of ’47, but plenty had stayed. Gandhi was dead, shot by a man Hector said had lived for a while in rooms above the Bazaar Road paan shop. Hector had returned from Bombay and was to Beatrice’s delight living back at home and acting as a check on Louis Archibald’s drunken rages. The first time the old man raised his hand to wallop Beatrice, Hector grabbed it and twisted his father into a half-nelson. ‘Not any more, Puppa. You touch her like that again and I’ll bleddy settle you once and for all.’
The events of ’47 had savaged Hector. He’d started taking a fatalistic interest in politics, regularly cutting out clippings from newspapers and journals and passing them on to Ross to read. ‘Community in Peril’, one from the Anglo-Indian Quarterly was titled:
Of all the challenges Anglo-Indians are sure to face in newly Independent India the greatest by far is that of overcoming our own false sense of security. How many Anglo-Indian employees of Railways, Post and Telegraphs are aware that the protection of pre-1947 quotas–quotas to which they owe their jobs, their very lives–was recently secured by only the narrowest of margins, thanks almost exclusively to the efforts of All-India Anglo-Indian Association President Frank Anthony? How many of us are aware that even as the new Constitution is likely to stand these quota safeguards will drop by ten per cent every two years and be wasted out by 1960? The answer is: very few. For decades we’ve lived under the romantic delusion that the Raj would last for ever. Wake up, brothers and sisters! The Raj is no more. Your children and your children’s children will be fighting for their lives under the new Indian Imperialism!
Ross wished Hector would stop shoving these things at him. The Englishman had sold the Albion Hotel and taken the fabulous Bernice back to England the year after Independence. The sudden bitter passion for politics, Ross thought, was Hector’s reaction as much to that as it was to the attack on the train, something for his misery to get hold of and spend itself on. Politics to him, Ross, was as it had always been, an irritant, a disturbance on the periphery of vision. ‘I’m not going to be here in 1960,’ he told Hector. ‘It’s not going to affect me.’
Still, if the Olympic plan failed, if Fate…
‘Stop worrying,’ Kate told him. ‘You’re going to win. We’re going to be fine.’
Eugene and Mitzi, now with two children of their own, had taken a house three doors down from Ross and Kate, where they rowed, continually, about everything except the one thing: the rumour that in Jalgaon Cynthia Merritt had a seven-year-old daughter, fathered by Eugene.
Not rumour, as Ross now knew. ‘There’s nothing like that going on,’ Eugene had confided of his secret visits to Cynthia, meaning sex. ‘I had my chance there and I missed it. But I love that child. I can’t help it. You should see her, men. She’s absolutely a doll.’ Eugene, now a goods driver, was on Rs 250 a month. He, too, was ceaselessly on the lookout for money, specifically money he wouldn’t have to account for to Mitzi. Such money, when it came, was sent to Cynthia for the child, the absolute doll, Dinah.
One Sunday in February 1952 Ross and Eugene sat drinking on the rear veranda of the bungalow in Armoury Road. Kate and Mitzi had taken the kids to the Taptee for a picnic. The heat was a palpable ripple. Bass-droning bees wove in and out of the hanging baskets. Dondi had Sundays off to get plastered with the posse of alcoholics who hung around the southern edge of the market; behind the two men the empty house was attentive. The Munroes’ tan bulldog, Punch, lay on his side at their feet, each eye preserving a crescent of consciousness. Ross hadn’t intended to get a dog–What’s the point if we’re leaving?–but then Hector’s bitch had had pups and when he’d brought one over Melissa had refused to let him take it away.
‘Look,’ Eugene said, ‘it’s a straightforward job. ‘We’ll come out with four or five hundred apiece, minimum. These buggers are in and out like Robin Hood.’
‘It’s always a straightforward job,’ Ross said. ‘It’s always supposed to be a straightforward job. Don’t forget it’s me stopping the bleddy train.’
Eugene had been sitting forward in his chair, elbows on knees, rolling the tumbler of Three Barrels rum between his hands. Now he sat back, went limp, began dejectedly patting his pockets for a Pall Mall. Life with Mitzi had etched two short vertical lines at the start of each of his eyebrows. The missed opportunity of Cynthia was a perennial misery. His ravenous love for the child, Dinah, kept him in a state of strained alertness, as if he was expecting her to appear at any moment.
‘What is the stuff, anyway?’ Ross asked.
Eugene lit up, dragged, exhaled in twin plumes through his nostrils. ‘Fabric. Good stuff, Chinese silk.’
‘Who’s setting it up?’
‘Friend of Chick Perkins. Come and discuss it, at least.’
Chick Perkins was a retired mail guard who’d achieved legendary status by assisting in the theft of a gold parcel ten years ago. Chick’s trial defence rested on his delaying signing the parcel clerk’s book till the last possible moment, then hurriedly signing for three parcels instead of four just as the train pulled out of the station. The parcel clerk, who spotted the discrepancy and managed to get the mail train stopped only half a mile out of the station, swore there were four, Chick swore there were three. An Anglo’s word against an Indian’s. The parcel clerk lost his job, Chick worked on and retired with a decent provident fund. The mystery (that, my friends, goes with me to the grave) was how they managed to get one of the parcels off the train so quickly.
‘You better get this straight,’ Ross told Eugene that evening, walking out to Chick’s bungalow. ‘I’m not agreeing to anything unless the job’s watertight. I’m not joining any gimcrack operation.’ It was always like this. Scepticism, irritation, reluctance, submission. Money.
‘It’s not gimcrack,’ Eugene said. ‘Chick says this bugger knows what he’s doing and Chick’s no fool.’
‘Maybe so but I’m telling you: this is to discuss. This is to consider. Keep that in your head.’
‘What a skittish bugger you are, men.’
‘Listen, I’m not the one with the lovechild to keep in dresses and dolls, am I?’
Eugene flinched, looked over his shoulder. ‘Keep your voice down for God’s sake. And don’t speak about her like that. I’m trying to do my best for the child and you’re putting the bleddy spoke in? It’s all right for you, you married the woman you love.’
This chastened Ross. He could be made to feel sympathy for anyone if it was pointed out that he, not they, had Kate. When he stopped and thought about it, tender, angelic generosity towards the rest of the world swelled in him. Humble details–doorposts, flowers, cigarette butts–brimmed with beauty.
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘Just remember: this doesn’t commit me to anything.’
Thin-necked and glowingly bald-headed Chi
ck, in checked slacks and canary-yellow paunch-hugging polo shirt, opened the door with a bottle of Johnnie Walker in one hand and a foully smouldering Senior Service in the other. Now seventy-two he looked, as always, impishly alert and in leathery good health; an Arabian Nights genie, Ross thought, enjoying suburban retirement. ‘There they are,’ he said, beaming out at them with a gap-between-the-front-teeth grin. ‘There they are at the eleventh hour as usual. Come on come on siddown. See what grog y’all want.’
They went out on to the back veranda. Chick’s wife had died three years before and since then everyone had been secretly touched by his (initially desperate and counterproductive) devotion to keeping up the garden she’d raised and of which he’d been oblivious when she was alive. No one, including Chick, had realized how much he’d loved her until she wasn’t there to love. Chick’s mischievous genie face endured, but with a piercing acknowledgement that his wife, Vera, unobtrusively the great sustenance beneath him, had made all the freedom and roll of his adult life possible.
‘A simpleton could do it,’ Chick said. ‘Seriously.’ It wasn’t the first time he’d set up a job.
‘Just as well we’ve got one, then,’ Ross said, looking at Eugene.
‘How’re the Jalgaon girls?’ Chick asked.
Eugene swallowed his mouthful of scotch in a convulsion. ‘What the bleddy hell—’
‘Oh, come off it, Gene, everyone knows.’
‘My wife doesn’t know, thank you very much. Christ almighty, I’m trying to…I’m trying to do the right thing here and y’all are all putting the bleddy spoke in. I mean why don’t y’all put a notice in the bleddy papers?’
‘Calm down, men,’ Chick said. ‘I’m on your side. Why else am I looking out for these little jobs? You think I need the money?’
‘We know you don’t,’ Eugene said. ‘Sitting on your pile like a bleddy crab. Don’t take your cut, then, if you don’t need it.’
