Should We Fall Behind, page 25
As the storm raged, she pulled her dressing gown tight around her nightdress and dashed down the landing.
‘Oh my darling, I am so sorry I left you for so long with this horrible noise all around,’ she said.
She switched on the table lamp and sat on the wooden armrest of the chair beside him. His lips were dry and cracked.
‘Oh my goodness, Satish. It’s no wonder you couldn’t sleep, not only with all this banging everywhere but, silly me, I forgot to prepare you for bedtime.’ She gently opened each eyelid with the tip of her finger, lubricated it with eye drops and closed it again, then she swabbed his lips and the inside of his mouth with water. ‘Perhaps now you can drift off, and I will sit by you while you do,’ she said.
She looked around for her reading glasses and picked up Mr Biswas which had fallen to the floor. She flicked through the pages, trying to find where they’d got to.
‘Shall I read to you, Satish?’ She said. ‘Or maybe we can just talk, like we used to in bed at night. Is this a good idea? Perhaps it will help you to sleep. We could say anything to each other in the dark. Do you remember? It was as though you could see into my soul, and I into yours.’ She paused. ‘Am I babbling on? Do you want to sleep? I don’t mind but I want to be here with you tonight. I want to be close by.’
A huge bolt of lightning illuminated the room. It was followed instantly by a huge crash of thunder.
‘The weather is very fierce tonight, darling. It disturbed my sleep. I expect it disturbed you too. I’m so sorry for not coming sooner, darling.’
She sank into the chair and closed her eyes, but continued to speak through the drowsiness.
‘You see, so much happened yesterday. I must have been exhausted by it. I am sorry.’ It was hard to believe how much could happen in a day. ‘I wish I could tell you it all but I am so tired now.’
She switched on a table lamp and a soft glow warmed the room. It was full of the remnants of the life she and Satish shared: a small map of India, framed in gilt and hung next to a shelf of novels, all gifts from her to him and he to her. She scanned the spines: Anna Karenina, The God of Small Things, Love in the Time of Cholera; books they cherished, books which had them both sobbing, holding on to each other for solace, laughing through tears at their own mawkishness. They loved all of these books, separately and together, in a weak reflection of the way she guessed perhaps parents loved their children, totally immersed and then slowly mourning as their lives drifted further and further away. She thought about the letter from the hospice, concealed behind a large framed photograph on the mantelpiece.
‘At least the little girl was safe, hai na?’ she said after a moment.
‘But I am bad, Satish; I neglected the boy in the car. You see, so much commotion and it isn’t just you I forget about. Oh Satish, if you could speak, what would you say? What would you tell me to do? Would you say it is time to let you free, my love?’
She reeled at her own words.
‘I want to go backwards not forwards, darling,’ she said. ‘What I wouldn’t sacrifice for us to be twelve and fourteen again, for you to be waiting for me as I sprint past. I wish we were there in Tilak Nagar with nothing but our lives ahead of us, instead of stuck in this dreadful place where this cruel sickness has stolen you from me. I wonder if we would do it differently, knowing what fate had in store for us? Maybe we would’ve spent less time crying for the things we couldn’t have.’
She opened her eyes and held onto her husband’s arm, squeezing it with a gentle pressure.
‘There is something I need to ask,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do? If you give me a sign, I will do whatever it is you need me to.’
An ambulance screeched past. Rayya closed her eyes again, and, as if waking from a dream, she said, ‘The darkness is wicked. It makes us believe we are free but we are not.’ She leaned back in the chair and yielded to the drag of sleep.
The buzz of the doorbell woke her with a start. She looked around; the table lamp still glowed but daylight flooded in through uncovered windows. It took her a moment to realise she’d slept half the night in the chair.
‘Oh Satish, I am a bad person,’ she said again as she slowly rose. She lifted his lids and picked up her conversation from hours earlier. ‘It was so bad to leave the boy without dinner. Now I will make paratha for breakfast. Surely this will make it up to him. Yes, paratha with radish. Your favourite, Satish. Remember when we last ate mooli paratha together? You had to wipe the butter away from my chin. Such messy food. Such joy to eat only with fingers. To eat as if we were children. Yes, this is what I’ll cook for the boy.’
The doorbell buzzed a second time and she glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. She rapped on the window to let the carer know she’d be down soon and he raised a hand, nervously looking up and down the street for his back-up.
‘Another new one,’ she said, turning from the window with a sigh. ‘Let’s hope this one doesn’t also speak to us as if we are imbeciles.’
31. JIMMY
Daban returned to the car in the evening as promised and Jimmy was pleased to see him. He’d bought beers and insisted they drank one before they set off.
‘You need to be chilled,’ he said. ‘If it’s her or not, either way you need to be chill.’
They sat on the front of the car, leaning onto the cold windscreen, swigging the beer and smoking in silence while Jimmy tried to still his shaking legs.
‘There can’t be more than one Betwa – it’s not a common name,’ he said.
‘I suppose it’s unusual even for round here,’ Daban replied.
‘It’s a river’ Jimmy flicked ash into a small pile on the bonnet. ‘Her name, I mean. It’s the name of a river. I’d never heard of it until she told me.’
‘There’s millions of rivers in the world, Jimmy. No-one’s heard of all of them.’ Daban’s eyes followed a ginger cat teetering on the wall above them.
Jimmy tried to picture Betwa, in the subway just a few weeks earlier with her head against the green and blue wall with the music playing out around her, but her face was blurred, slipping away like dreams in the morning. He could picture the shape of her, huddled up against concrete painted with sharp images of kingfishers and lorikeets.
Together the two men walked the length of Shifnal Road and on to busy Grand Parade, past the sprawling bakery which still teemed with people and smelled of freshly baked bread in the neon glow of the city nightscape. Jimmy tried to imagine the lives of people who dashed by clutching shopping: last minute frozen pizzas, milk, bottles of red wine; rushing home to warm rooms, hot food, company. He thought of the car: stinking and damp. Daban walked in front, able to move with ease through the tumult. People stepped aside to let him pass.
‘C’mon Jimmy, get a move on.’ Daban’s yell was the exact same tone Ant used to rush him along to school. He could never keep up; his legs were weaker now.
The walk up Station Way was longer than he’d expected. Just up the road but it was another area, away from the shops with boxes of tomatoes and green peppers cascading onto slate grey pavements. Rows of checked tables in busy cafes began to fall away as they approached a wide junction. Then a different kind of street emerged, more like the ones he was used to: dull generic stores, glaring cut-price offers, boarded up boutiques and sacks of discarded jumble outside a Save the Children shop. The few people around walked purposefully away from the place.
‘Wow,’ Jimmy said. It was the first time he’d spoken since they left Shifnal road. ‘It’s like we’ve entered another world.’
‘Yeah, well Grand Parade is special,’ Daban said. ‘We could be anywhere now though, right? Bet it’s just the same as your town. Where is that exactly?’
Jimmy only half heard what Daban was saying. Betwa could be within metres, within minutes of where they were. He looked into Poundland: 3-4-1 cans of Monster drink were stacked up as pyramid towers; a backdrop to a Halloween display of cotton wool spider webs and garish plastic pumpkin-faces. He turned away. Halloween wasn’t an occasion he’d thought about for many years. Mostly it came and went, not like when he was young. The last Halloween he remembered with any clarity was when he was a teenager and Ant, dressed in a bin liner, threw the Sunday-best tablecloth over little Jen and pushed her in a shopping trolley up and down the long drives of Orchard Avenue. He turned away from the display.
‘How far is it?’ he asked, heart thumping against his ribcage.
‘Not far, just up ahead.’.
‘I need to wash my face,’ Jimmy said anxiously and Daban disappeared into a newsagents and emerged a minute later with a packet of Kleenex and a bottle of water. Jimmy splashed the icy water on to his face and shook his head, directing the spray away from Daban.
They continued up the high street past an old man slumped in a doorway, partially obscured by an overflowing bin. Jimmy raised his hand in the way men did when they spotted someone wearing the same football shirt. He wondered if the terrible smell which hung about the old guy was the same as others smelt on him. Further up the road, a different smell filled the air: teenage boys huddled around a bench, hoodies and baseball caps pulled up and down over heads and faces, hands shoved deep into pockets. One of them waved and Daban waved back.
‘Do you know everyone around here?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Just about,’ Daban replied. ‘Carlo’s my neighbour. Those kids are part of this place.’
Jimmy breathed in deeply. He’d stopped listening and was looking past the boys towards a scruffy-looking pub on a corner up ahead.
‘That’s the boozer,’ Daban said, pointing to it.
Jimmy’s heart pounded. ‘Will they let me in?’ he said.
‘I’ll go in first. I’ll see if she’s there,’ Daban said.
‘I’m scared.’ Jimmy said. He only realised he’d spoken when Daban’s hand was on his arm.
‘What have you got to be scared of Jimmy, mate?’
‘Everything,’ he replied. It was more than he intended to say.
They carried on walking, up towards the pub, stopping briefly while Daban searched his pockets for coins to throw into the hat of a young busker with an old voice strumming ‘A Simple Twist of Fate’ on a guitar with a broken string.
‘My brother loved this song,’ Jimmy said.
‘Not really my kind of thing,’ Daban replied.
Ten minutes later, Jimmy stood a few feet from Daban outside The Railway Tavern, staring at the ground as a train chuntered past on the tracks beside them.
‘I’m sorry,’ Daban was saying. ‘I should have checked it out myself before leading you to a dead end.’
Jimmy shrugged and stared at the uneven paving stones beneath his feet.
‘Bettina. It’s a similar sounding name,’ Daban said apologetically. ‘An easy mistake. I’m sorry Jimmy mate. I really am. I’ll keep asking.’
Jimmy had no words.
Later, after Daban had taken his leave, Jimmy lay on the car bonnet with his blanket wrapped around him, looking up at the sky, hoping for tiny glints of starlight to break through thick clouds. The busker’s song looped around his head. He tried to picture Betwa again, to remember her face but he couldn’t quite see her. Instead, it was his brother who came, sat next to him on the bonnet, close enough to hear his breath, heads touching, swigging from the cans Daban left behind, whispering into the night about the music which had always managed to rescue them. But Ant, he knew, could never really be anywhere again so he closed his eyes and let the liquid seep through him, filling up empty ravines in the way only alcohol could.
32. NIKOS
The summer Nikos was eighteen, he and Georgios slept out most Friday nights on the hillside above the village overlooking the sea.
‘Why do you want to sleep on the hard ground, amongst beetles and the excrement of goats, when you have perfectly good beds at home?’ Nikos’ father asked them.
‘Let them be,’ his mother replied. ‘Were you never young once? Is this not what boys do?’
She’d prepared packages of koulouri bread, chunks of cucumber, hard cheese, plump tomatoes, stuffed grape leaves and cold slices of roast lamb. The food quickly became sticky in their bags with syrup oozing from Mama Savvides’ freshly baked samali cake. The boys didn’t care: any food was delicious in the moonlight. They sneaked bottles of Keo from the shed behind Georgios’ house and covered them with blankets to wrap around their shoulders later, when the temperature dipped in the early hours. The boys clunked through farms and orchards on their bicycles until they found the right place, always the same spot, coaxed by the beauty of it: a small meadow clearing between sprawling olive groves and dense pine woods staggering up towards the sky. They settled next to a cluster of cypress trees, where grass was more plentiful than scrub-land and views were uninterrupted to the lapis sea ahead and stony mountains behind.
On one such night, at the tail end of summer, the boys lay on their backs and stared at the velvet sky, hoping for shooting stars. Nikos blew a succession of smoke rings towards the slim moon, goading Georgios to compete with him, but his friend was lost in thought and blew his cigarette smoke in one direct trail.
‘Sometimes I think it is the beginning and the end of the world in this place,’ Georgios said,
‘What do you mean?’ Nikos asked, rolling onto his stomach.
‘It’s a feeling, I don’t know. It’s like the land and the sky are calling me. Like I am falling into them both at the same time. When I lie here I know I won’t be going anywhere else. You will travel, see the world, see new things, meet new people. Me, well time will stand still and this land will swallow me up one day soon. I can feel it in my bones. Something, I don’t know what, comes to me in dreams out here, pulling me towards it.’
‘Have you been listening to The Doors again, Georgios?’
‘Oh shut up, Nikos,’ Georgios said, changing his tone. ‘You’re too much of a donkey to understand.’
‘Maybe, because you don’t know what you are talking about yourself.’ Nikos said, teasingly. ‘If it’s not The Doors, then it must be those hippy books you brought home from Larnaca.’ He yawned. The beer made his head light and his eyelids heavy; neither was conducive to philosophical conversation.
‘Go to sleep, Nikos. In the morning we can talk about the shape of Stephania’s backside and Elena’s breasts and the other earth-shattering things which occupy you.’
‘Ah, Elena’s breasts,’ Nikos said. ‘This will be what I dream of tonight. Meanwhile you enjoy your date with Socrates.’
‘Go to hell,’ Georgios said and Nikos knew his friend was angry with him. He would apologise for his facetiousness in the morning.
Georgios woke early the next day, while the peachy sun still lingered on the horizon. He sat up and launched into a different conversation.
‘Who is the more superior, Nikos, as a lyricist I mean, forget about the individual songs, Dylan or Stevens?’
‘It’s too early, Georgios. Go back to sleep.’ Nikos said.
‘Come on. You’re pretending to sleep just because you don’t know the answer.’
‘They are too different, Georgios. You can’t compare an olive with an aubergine.’ He stretched, yawned and rubbed away pollen from his eyes then sat up. ‘How can you just launch into conversation as if the day has been open for business for hours? One minute you are keeping me awake with some heavy shit talk and now you are stopping me sleeping with your insubstantial musical observations.’
‘Of course, neither is quite the poet of Cohen,’ Georgios continued, ignoring Nikos. He rolled up his blanket and walked a few feet away to relieve himself against the bark of the nearest tree, shouting over the splash of his urine.
‘Dylan too is a poet, but of a different school of course.’
‘Shut up, Georgios. It is still night,’ Nikos curled himself into a ball and pulled the blanket over his head. Through the muffle of wool he could still hear Georgios.
‘Well there you are wrong my friend. Look, the sun has a different idea, you lazy goat. Get up and enjoy the day, we never know how long we’ve got on this beautiful earth.’
It was less than a full year later when the chicken sized rock flew out of the sky and hit Georgios on the temple.
Nikos recalled the night on the hillside as he sipped his coffee, looking out at the russet-tipped leaves of the fig tree in the garden. After days of rain, weak sunshine crackled through the clouds and lit up the earth in a new way. It was a very particular kind of light, made up of tiny shimmering dew drops nestled amongst blades of grass, resting on the surfaces of autumn foliage. He thought about the song which had played out from the car and the young man who slept there and had a look of Georgios; it was this combination of music and light which drew out the most reticent memory.
Georgios always wanted to talk with him about music in a way no one else ever did, before or since. This was one of the gaps he’d left. Ourania could take or leave music. She hummed along to show tunes and pop songs on the radio, and she danced with him after retsina if he played records on Kostas’ old turntable. But her eyes only really sparkled if the music was bouzouki accompanying tatsia or syrto dancing in the church hall on celebration days and that was a different kind of music altogether. Kostas loved music too but he had his own tastes: often more flamboyant than Nikos was used to – glamorous and confusing. Other times, Kostas liked to listen to the laments of torch singers; songs which sounded like weeping for voids which could never be filled. Nikos’ own more troubadour tastes had aligned most perfectly with those of Georgios.
When only coffee dregs remained, he walked across the room to the turntable which sat on a small cabinet below a bookshelf. He ran his finger across a layer of dust on the transparent lid and paused before pulling out an album at random from the stack below. When he realised it was Catch A Bull At Four he quickly shoved it back into place but it was too late: the words of Georgios’s last letter swam around his head.
