by Glen Duncan
‘No, dear God.’
‘Just champagne. Do you want to make love before it arrives or after?’
We made love after it arrived. Slower the second time. Better. The best. With her, always. But that we’d ordered champagne at all bothered me. A gesture. Wilful celebration in the face of, etc. She’d already made her decision. I probably fucked it up by being at the airport, gave the Quest for Owen no chance to develop momentum, to exhaust her so that when she finally found me she wouldn’t have the strength to do anything but stay.
‘I gave up,’ I told her, meaning my porn sideline as Millicent Nash, having just confessed it. She lay on her back, legs parted, me at right angles to her with my head resting on her thigh. The hotel bed was big enough for a football team. All beds, I thought, should be this big. It should be the law.
‘How come?’
I hadn’t really known how come until I found myself answering her. ‘This is going to sound ridiculous,’ I said, ‘but it dawned on me that it was something my parents would have thought…dishonourable.’
She exhaled smoke, rotating as she did her slim-ankled left foot until she got the tiny click she was after. A while passed before she said, with a discernible closing of something against me: ‘Yes, well, that’s the beauty of being an orphan. You can be as dishonourable as you like. Not that my mother would have been in any position to pass judgement.’
If I could have reached out in the bedroom’s darkness and pulled the words back into my mouth I would have.
‘You’ve got a strange disease,’ she said, after a pause. ‘The opposite disease to the one everyone else has. You don’t want to put any distance between your parents and yourself.’
I’d forgotten the analysis, the insistence. No mercy, as her gym said.
‘What were you doing on the roof?’ I asked.
‘On the roof?’
‘When the towers were hit.’
She paused. Just long enough for me to guess.
‘Having sex,’ she said. I kissed her thigh. Reached up and placed my hand against the warm flesh of her belly. ‘Not with a client. With the guy I was seeing at the time.’
‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘Let me guess: orgasm at impact. The earth moved.’
‘It’d be a nice story, wouldn’t it? No. We were done, actually, but he was still inside me. We were standing up, me against the parapet looking out over the city, him behind me.’
‘I don’t like this guy, whoever he is.’
‘Was. Owen, your tenses.’
‘Was he wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Never mind. Go on.’
‘We froze, naturally. Shock is shock. I saw those buildings virtually every day for years. Some things, a change in their state seems inconceivable. There’s no equivalent in London, nothing that dominates the city, claims it, defines it in that way. The thing was I thought: This is…This is a world event. This is history being made right in front of my eyes. It still didn’t touch me. What touched me was him inside me, the intimacy of the flesh. I wanted him to stay exactly where he was.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘No, he freaked out. I wish he hadn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to see him again after that. It was a betrayal, because I was sure he’d felt it, too.’
I got up for the ice-bucketed bottle. ‘And this is not your shock-the-guests party piece?’
‘I suppose what I mean is that I still felt outside it even though I was in the middle of it.’
‘You wouldn’t have felt outside it if you were in one of the towers or one of the planes,’ I said, topping her glass up.
‘No, I wouldn’t, you’re right. I would have thought: Fuck, I’m going to die. But I would have also thought: I’m glad I lived for myself, the project of myself. I’d have had no regrets about not having lived for the project of the fucking world. I couldn’t care less about the world.’
Vince, I thought, had a kind of strength. The straight world hurt the gay in a million ways. His parents hadn’t exactly disowned him when he came out but they’d never been the same. It had toughened him, forced the recognition that suffering and justice don’t know what to do with each other, keep missing each other like two people in a pitch-black arena. He’d had to find sufficiency in himself. Scarlet had strength, monstrous strength, derived from accepting her aloneness. She relied on no one but herself. It was either a triumph or a deformity. It was what had always drawn me to her. The people you need most are the people who need least.
‘It’s because they never believed us,’ I said, lying down alongside her. She put her glass on the bedside table and snuggled against me.
‘Who didn’t?’
‘The school. St Thomas’s. When we told them what Gary did to Wally Da-Da.’
She was quiet for a moment, lightly drawing her fingernails around my chest in circles and eights. Then she said: ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘we were witnesses. We testified and they didn’t believe us because we were…well, beige. Bloody Anglo-Indian. It was the first time in my life I’d ever had to take personal experience and make it count in the political world, the school. And the world, the school, said: It doesn’t count. We don’t believe you. Your money’s no good here. Nor Miss Scarlet’s, neither. Ergo, we rejected the political in favour of the personal, tragically or otherwise, for the rest of our lives. That’s what you’re talking about on the roof, isn’t it? Not caring because you’re not part of it? I think all Anglo-Indians feel like that, actually.’
Her hand didn’t stop, but there was something different.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘that “Da-Da” must have come from Idi Amin. He was in the news at the time–for, among other things, sending Christ knows how many Ugandan Asians with British passports back to Blighty. Idi Amin Dada Oumee. Wally Da-Da. Gary must’ve absorbed it from somewhere. Incredible, isn’t it?’
Her hand came to a standstill, rested flat against me. ‘How serious are you?’ she said.
‘About Idi Amin?’
‘About the not-being-believed theory.’
‘Not very,’ I said. ‘Well…No. I mean, I’m being flip, obviously, but there’s something in it, don’t you think? If you have no voice in the arena, then fuck the arena, right?’
‘Owen, that’s not what happened.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean we didn’t tell them. We didn’t testify. Gary cornered us and told us if we said anything he’d break our legs. We were terrified. We told Tyrell we hadn’t seen anything. Don’t you remember? That’s what we agreed.’
I didn’t sleep much during what was left of the night, and when I did drop off woke an hour later, whimpering the scream of another things-speeded-up dream. A birthday party, mine, with strangers seated round a long, festooned table. Suddenly their hair falling out, the B-movie quick shrivelling and flaking away of teeth and flesh. Scarlet sleepily held me, said shshsh, wrapped her fingers in my hair and fell asleep again. I thought about my flat, all the nights there would be without her, without anyone. The golden crumb of comfort having Vince snoring down the hall–and who knew how long he’d be around?
There was love again when the windows greyed with first light (love? Yes, with our limbs wrapped tight and our faces close, the inarticulate admission that at death our last thoughts would most likely be of each other, the one connection life had given), but afterwards silent sadness and the struggle to accommodate in the small business of getting up and showering and dressing the big business of having failed, of Scarlet’s having tested the water and pulled back. My mind ran its loop. Why can’t she…? Because she’s…But why doesn’t she…? Because you’re…
‘This isn’t it, is it?’ I said. Rhetorical question. She stood at one end of the window, looking out over dully lit Kensington, I stood at the other, looking at her. Traffic was drearily up and running, affirming the world’s indifference to the rest of my life without her. Last night
’s woollen dress had been stuffed into the case. Now she wore faded Levis and a black vest. Her feet were bare. I wished she’d put shoes on; then when I left I could imagine her leaving straight after me. The alternative image, her sitting on the couch or lying on the bed contemplating her next move, made it impossible not to think of coming back, seeing her again, convincing her to stay.
‘Isn’t what?’ she asked, resting her forehead against the window pane.
‘The time when we meet and you know that it’s always going to be me. The time when you accept it and stay.’
‘I’m not ready,’ she said. ‘I might never be.’
‘Because I love you and want to marry you and have children and live happily ever after with you.’
‘Something like that.’
‘I know, it’s disgusting. I should be ashamed of myself.’
‘I thought I might be able to,’ she said. ‘But seeing you, I can still feel it. I’d hurt you. You know that.’
‘I’m not the sap I used to be,’ I said.
She turned, gave me a look. Yes you are.
‘We could have breakfast,’ I said.
She came to me, put her arms round me.
‘I’ll come round again,’ she said.
‘Like a comet.’
‘Yeah, like a comet.’
‘You know you’re killing me, don’t you?’
She kissed me and said: ‘You’ll live.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Sucker Punch
(The Cheechee Papers: Bhusawal and Calcutta, 1952)
The letter was waiting when they got back from the fight in Bombay. Ross’s shoulders ached. A cramping tension had driven him nearly mad for the first round. Every additional day the investigation had remained unresolved had wound him tighter. The other man had been good, the worst combination: fast hands and a hard hitter. The first three minutes all Ross’s energy had gone on keeping out of trouble. When he sat down Old Clem had said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Ross rolled his neck, felt threads of tension snapping and immediately re-forming. ‘Can’t get loose,’ he gasped. Clem massaged demonically, saying, ‘Come on, he’s an old woman.’ ‘He’s a fast old woman,’ Ross said. Clem had said, just before the bell for the second, ‘I don’t know if this bugger’s going to drop. You’d better start hitting him. He thinks you’re scared so that’s good. Hell-for-leather first thirty, dodge, then hell-for-leather last sixty. Listen for the shout. Go!’
It went against the grain to throw that many punches. Ross had won almost all his fights with knockouts because he did easily the two things so many fighters found difficult: he watched and he waited. The other man was a system, a pattern, a flawed machine. Time other fighters spent trying to weaken the machine by hitting it he spent learning its moves, finding the gap. There was always a gap. The guard always, without exception, came down. Then you unloaded. Easy as pressing a button. By the end of the second Ross had evened up on points but he still felt tired and tight. ‘Just keep doing it,’ Clem said, again ferociously massaging. ‘You’re scoring, heavily.’ ‘So’s he,’ Ross wheezed. ‘Taps,’ Clem said. ‘Pit-pats.’ Ross looked over to where Kate sat in the second row with the kids. Carl was more or less oblivious to the ring, pointed at and burbled about faces closest to him in the crowd, but Melissa was rapt, standing in the aisle, mouth open. She’d inherited Beatrice’s green eyes, but unlike her grandmother’s the child’s were big and long-lashed. (She was a wilful little thing, tokenly shy with strangers for a few minutes, then off into the unrestrained performance of herself. No amount of adult attention filled the well. He took her to the station running room to be teased and adored by the men, of whom she catastrophically spoke the truth: ‘Uncle Benny, your cap smells.’ ‘Yes, darling, that’s the leather smell you’re getting.’ ‘No, it’s sweat.’ They loved her imperiousness because it went with beauty; laughing, they prostrated themselves before her judgements. Ross enjoyed it, too, let it go right up to the point beyond which it would have soured, started harming her character, then scooped her up and took her away on his shoulders.) He winked at her, but it was too small a detail in the whole by which she was transfixed. She’d remember it later–you winked at me!–but for now there was no penetrating the dream. He wanted the knockout for her. Kate, wiping Carl’s mouth, missed his glance. The bell rang.
The gap revealed itself halfway through the third. Ross’s guard (perversely helped by the tension) was tight and for the last minute of the previous round his opponent had started throwing body shots with his right. Kidneys and ribs. Pain, yes, but prosaic, cumulative, nothing to worry about. Ross watched. Let him keep throwing them. It was tough to keep watching with the kidneys detonating like that, sending those big signals for attention, took an appalling heave of the will. Clem was screaming: ‘Move! Move!’ But if he moved he wouldn’t be able to confirm his suspicion. His suspicion was that the right hooks low to the body were taking his man’s left on a little drift out of position. There it was again. A shade further each time. Getting complacent. How criminals eventually got caught. His corner should have warned him. Two more, Ross thought. Third time, that left’s going to have drifted six inches. That’s the gap.
It was always the same. You weren’t aware of the decision to throw the punch, but suddenly it was in flight and all the sound got sucked out of the world. It seemed to take such a long time that you couldn’t believe the other man wasn’t seeing it coming. The space between the two of you had been waiting for this, the sweet single parabola. It rang a little bell in the universe, one of the infinite harmonics.
Then sound rushed back in and you had to sort it into meaningful bits: the ref’s inhuman count; Clem’s shouts; the crowd’s stirred hive. Afterwards, with everyone making such a fuss, you felt humble, fraudulent, embarrassed by how easy it had been, how at the core of the moment something else seemed to do it for you.
‘What does it say?’ Kate asked. She’d shooed Melissa out into the compound, where Dondi was feeding the half-dozen chickens. Carl, asleep in her arms when they’d arrived, had been put down in his cot.
‘It’s bad,’ Ross said. He handed her the letter and sat down on the couch. The doors were open. Outside the veranda’s stirred-up dust was in sunlit suspension. There was a fresh blue sky, occupied here and there by soft masses of brilliant white cloud, a sort of urgent optimism. Kate read not linearly but in a flicking search for salient phrases. ‘…and whilst we are satisfied that no knowing part was taken in the crime it is the investigators’ view that the incident exemplifies the consequences of slack standards…Without negligence on the part of Mr Monroe the crime could not have been effectively perpetrated…It is therefore incumbent on us to recommend that Mr Monroe be suspended from duty for a period of one month without pay and be denied any promotion for a period of three years, effective from the date of this letter…’ She looked at him. His face had gone little-boyish around the mouth, smacked but too old to cry.
‘That’s not so bad, is it?’ Kate said. ‘A month’s suspension? What’s a month?’
Ross shook his head, held out another, smaller note which had also been in the envelope. Kate took it. Handwritten. ‘…failure to inform the Passport Office would, I’m afraid, constitute negligence on my part. Therefore I have apprised them of the situation, which may bear on your recent application. Naturally, a copy of my report has also been forwarded to the Indian Olympic Selection Committee…’
The terrible weight of the effort she’d need to get him through this for a moment pressed on Kate, the weeks and months and years ahead of treating the poison this would set to work in him. The question was whether love would be enough. Asking it excited and exhausted her, the unknown difficult space into which this would force them to move.
‘The selectors won’t care, will they?’ she said. ‘I mean what do they care? They want you.’
‘They won’t care,’ Ross said. He’d got up and gone to stand in the open doorway, looking out. At the other end of the compound Don
di stood languidly broadcasting feed to the chickens. Ross and Kate had avoided talking of leaving in front of their servant. Kate thought how happy he’d be to know that now he could stay with them for the rest of his days. It gave her a small, sweet pain of the relativeness of things.
‘They won’t care but it won’t make any difference,’ Ross said. ‘It’s the passport. It’s the passport.’
‘But surely if the selectors—’
‘You weren’t there. If he wants to stop me leaving, he can. It’s as simple as that. Rat on your friends or else.’
The day dragged them in and out of the same conversation, Ross oscillating between clipped disgust and maudlin fatalism. The blinding white clouds moved off, leaving a monotonously burning milky blue. Kate struggled with resentment: wasn’t love enough? He had her, the children, friends, a home, comfort. The moments in the dark. Didn’t he know what all that was worth?
‘I love you,’ she said to him, ‘if that helps.’ He was sitting on the veranda with a scotch (the third large one; one more and he’d be drunk). She stood behind his chair with her hands gently pressing his shoulders. His body felt different after a fight, simplified into peace, like an exhausted child’s. She knew he loved her touch on him then. Knew, too, that three scotches could make it an irritant, though he’d take it out on someone else, shout at Dondi or Melissa, go out and savage Eugene, ridicule Hector. It was a risk, the I love you, if that helps, an implicit insistence that it ought to help, ought to be enough. She’d said it partly to provoke the confrontation, get it out of the way so they could move on.
‘It’s not about me,’ Ross said, with a sobriety that surprised her. She waited. He looked down into his drink. ‘What kind of a future do you think there’ll be for these kids?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean there aren’t going to be any jobs. Not for Anglos. What’s Carl going to do when he grows up? Do you know how much boarding fees have gone up since we were at school?’
