Thab-thab-thab. ‘Now, I said.’
The monsoon is past its peak. Tomorrow she’ll be back at Jesus and Mary in Bombay. The other girls will be miserable whereas it’s all she can do not to drop to her knees and kiss the polished steps. You’re crazy, Eleanor Silvers said. This is like coming back to jail for God’s sake. In the next mid-term break Eleanor’s older sister is getting married up north in Lahore. Eleanor is allowed to bring one friend from school on provision of a letter signed by the friend’s parents. Kate’s parents are dead. For the last seven years she’s been under the guardianship of her grandfather and Uncle Cyril. She’s written the letter herself, in disguised handwriting. Her grandfather has to sign it. Has to. She’ll go up to Lahore. She’ll never come back. She’ll disappear. Freedom, at whatever the cost. For weeks now the plan has been growing in her like a delicious fever.
‘I’m warning you.’
Kate wraps a pink towel round herself and unlocks the door, which Cyril steps through and slams behind him. He stands in front of her with his hands on his hips. Hair oil, cigarette smoke, old sweat and sandalwood cologne. She feels the change in her radius as if her outflowing life is being reversed and forced back into her, imagines tiny specks of light that should have gone from her into the world being pushed instead up through her nerves towards her heart and brain, where they gather in glowing tumorous clumps.
‘I’ve told you not to lock the bleddy door. What if I want to come in here and shave?’
Always some transparent rationale, some argument. She says nothing because her saying nothing is what he hates. He wants her to argue, to help him get where he needs to get. It interests the detached, analytical part of her that he still has to go through the motions, however farcical or absurd, of justifying himself, that he still lacks the…what? guts?…to walk in and start on her without pantomime. It’s satisfying that her silence leaves him flailing, gives her a height from which to look down at him.
‘Who do you think you are?’ he says, looking everywhere but at Kate. ‘The bleddy Queen of Sheba or what?’ He’s not tall but he’s taller than her, dark-skinned with a long, bony face, Brylcreemed widow’s peak and an apeish outward curve to his mouth. ‘It’s all nakra,’ he says. ‘All bleddy airs and graces.’ He turns away from her and puts his shaving bag down next to the basin. Underneath her anger there’s boredom with his creeping towards his full capability. She knows him, that his denial has mileage yet to run. But that it will run, eventually, is like the weight of another body she’s had to carry on top of her own.
Not for much longer. In her locker at Jesus and Mary there’s a small cache of tinned and dried foods; under a loose bit of skirting in the dorm thirty rupees she’s scraped and hoarded from Christmases and birthdays. It’s nothing, but nothing will have to be enough.
She makes a move towards the door but Cyril turns and grabs the towel where it’s tucked in on itself over her breasts. There’s a second before he pulls it, a bubble of time between them when she looks him in the eye (This is what you are) and his face shows a wobble of horror. Then he yanks. The towel doesn’t come away cleanly but pulls her off balance, towards him. He yanks again (sidestepping, as if her touch would be repugnant), his fingernail scratching her, a distinct, separate little hurt. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he says, turning away, as if her nakedness is a matter of indifference. ‘Your hair’s full of soap.’ He drops the towel on the floor and goes over to the washstand, begins lathering his chin, watching her in the mirror. His tone lightens. ‘Can’t go like that, all soap in your hair like that. Madness.’
Very slowly Kate gets down on her haunches and retrieves the towel, rises and wraps it around herself. The reflex is to minimize movement, as if there’s an invisible delicate shell surrounding her she mustn’t disturb. The bathroom’s one small window of frosted glass holds a lozenge of the day’s between-rains sunlight. This hour alone would have been a private sacrament. The smell of Wright’s Coal Tar soap, the warm tin against her back, the softness of the towel. One by one he’s contaminated the small sensory pleasures of her world.
‘I don’t know why you have to give me such a bleddy headache, you know,’ he says. ‘I mean, this is my house after all.’ Tone lighter still, beginning to cajole. He’ll be jovial in a minute. Without a word she walks round to the far side of the tub, bends, dunks her head hairline-deep, holds it, hears the soap dissolve. She tries to focus on something else; the dress for the wedding (for flight, for freedom), white with a print of red poppies, used to be her mother’s. (Everything else that belonged to her mother has gone, quietly, via Cyril to his sister, Kate’s Aunty Sellie. Jewellery, dancing trophies, clothes, a gold wristwatch, an amber rosary. Aunty Sellie never looks Kate quite in the eye.) The spot where his nail nicked burns. She lifts her head from the water. Parts of her–armpits, throat, wrists, scalp–send little pulsing signals of their own unique vulnerabilities; they’re like children she, Kate, the grown-up, must stop panicking. Shshsh. Cyril wipes steam from the mirror and draws the cutthroat upwards over his lathered gullet with a rasp. Slashed throat gushing blood eyes wide fingers opening and closing dying. She used to shut such images out.
‘This is my house and all I’m asking for is a bit of bleddy…’ Rasp, flick, splat, rinse…‘a bit of bleddy thisthing…’ Respect, he was going to say but she knows certain words die in his mouth. He’s contaminated his own vocabulary, too, lost bits of language like rotten teeth. Without him seeing, she washes the place where his hand met her skin under the towel. She twists her hair into a short rope, squeezes the moisture from it, stands.
He wipes steam off the mirror, looks, sees she’s staring at him. This is what you are.
‘Go on, then,’ he says, making a dismissive gesture with the razor, from which a wad of lather takes flight and detonates on the door. ‘I don’t know what you’re standing there gawping for.’
Kate’s parents died within six months of each other in 1934 in Quetta, her father of a heart attack, her mother of…
(Well, it’s unclear. She went into hospital with tuberculosis. But there were, mysteriously, ‘abscesses’, some medical impasse: If we operate the anaesthetic will kill her, If we don’t she’ll die anyway. My mum’s fragmented recollection. She remembers a visit, her mother saying, ‘You’ve got so tall now…’ Which turned out to be the last words between them.)
I know this is hard for you, my child, Father Collins told Kate, after her mother’s funeral service. It’s the hardest thing anyone has to bear. But you must understand: there’s a reason for everything that happens. God knows everything, you see? He knows the reason why even painful things or sad things must happen to us sometimes. I know you’re very sad and upset because your mummy’s been called to heaven, but just think: she’s with God and the angels now, and she’ll be happy for ever and ever. It’s all right to miss her and to wish she was still here, but always in the end remember she’s gone to a much better place–the very best place you can imagine!
He’d said the same thing at her father’s funeral.
At New Year celebrations there was always someone dressed as an old man to represent the departing year being playfully chased out by a young woman dressed to represent the approaching new one. Kate had imagined God to be something like this old man, white-bearded and touchingly frail-kneed, eccentrically benevolent, with an aura of sadness, distant, aware of you and your prayers but only as one speck in a upwardly drifting swarm of millions. The familial relationship was with Jesus, Mary, the angels, all the interceding martyrs and saints; they knew you, Kate Lyle, personally, and were up on the current events of your life, delighted by your good acts and terribly hurt by your sins. Now, with the deaths of her parents, it was as if God, the real God, was addressing her with the full intensity of His gaze, not old and kindly but timeless and impenetrable (she imagined a giant dark gaseous face in the night sky frosted with constellations), coldly, patiently interested in her. It was a shock, but it gave her a feeling of recognition, too,
as if she’d known this–Him–long ago but for years forgotten.
A curious duality followed: she continued, in church, in her night prayers, superficially addressing Jesus, Mary, the saints and martyrs, the white-bearded, octogenarian version of God the Father. They were all still there, legitimate, real, comforting. But simultaneously she was alive to (and enjoyed a bald dialogue in an idiom of equals with) this newly revealed essence. He was the core round which all the other aspects of Himself hung, needed no prayers, saw you, didn’t love you or hate you but held you under perpetual icy observation.
After Kate’s parents died she was looked after by their neighbours, the Haweses, Edwin and Margot, who were childless and made a strangling fuss of her. She expected her mother back, naturally. One lunchtime, one evening, or more likely one early morning after having been out dancing, smelling of cigarette smoke and night air and perfume. She’d stand on one leg and pull her shoe off with a wince, then the other leg, the other shoe. That was the trick the dead played on you, of making you expect them home again, some silly but ultimately believable explanation for where they’d been all this time.
She’d been told her grandfather was coming to Quetta for her and that she was going to live with him in Bhusawal, but didn’t take the idea very seriously. Then, at the end of May, there was a knock on her bedroom door.
‘Kate?’ Margot said, peeping in. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’
The door opened wider and a tall old man with a flat-topped head of swept-forward grey hair stepped inside. Margot left them alone. (Kate’s bags and trunk had been packed the night before. In with the clothes had gone as many of her mother’s cups and trophies for dancing as could fit, the rest to be sent on. A separate vanity case held all her mother’s jewellery. She, Kate’s mother, had had a passion for it and Kate’s father had loved indulging her: Here, Magpie, look what I’ve brought you. The only thing of Kate’s father’s going with her was a big book of Renaissance paintings, the water-buckled pages of which he and Kate used to pore over in the evenings in silence, only at a very deep level conscious of each other. It was one of the things she’d thought at the funeral, how few words she’d exchanged with him.) She sat on the bed, swinging her legs.
Her grandfather put his hands in his pockets. ‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘D’you know who I am?’
‘My granddad.’
‘Aye. And you’re Kitty.’
Silence. He took a bar of Tarzan chocolate from his pocket. Didn’t offer it to her, just looked at it. ‘Daft in’t it,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d give you this to say hello, so you wouldn’t think badly of me.’
Daft in’t it. Her mother had said: ‘Your granddad’s an Englishman, you know. He talks funny.’ Kate’s interest was piqued.
He hadn’t, so far, been able to meet her stare. Now he looked out at her from under his brows. He didn’t know what to do, she could tell, was trying, awkwardly, to make friends with her. She looked away, not knowing what to do herself. She hadn’t thought about what this would be like, hadn’t believed in it, but here it was. Now the thought of leaving Edwin and Margot, whom she’d known all her life, was a little globe of pain in her chest.
‘Come on for a walk,’ the old man said. ‘You can show me where your daddy used to work.’
He put out his hand. Embarrassed, not looking at him, she slid down off the bed and took it.
It was a long journey south-east to Bhusawal, a night and a day and a night. Kate had grown up around trains but never travelled in a sleeper. The upper bunks folded down out of the wall and a porter came with crisp sheets and bedding. First Class, this was, with fat-tassled curtains and heraldically monogrammed cushions, NWR until they got to Jabalpur, then GIPR. Her first taste of milky sweet coffee. Eating on the move made every meal an adventure: eggs on toast, ball curry, mangos, mulligatawny soup. Her grandfather bought hot snacks from hawkers on the blinding platforms, samosas and budgias and oppers and stuffed naan. Food was an opportunity for them to be in collusion, which Kate first coldly saw that he wanted, then found herself slipping into in spite of herself. He went with her wandering up and down the train. Third Class was a cramped throng of beggarly Indians, all of whom looked depressed or harassed. There was a smell of feet and sweat and food. Kate and her grandfather poked their heads in, looked, withdrew. The journey seemed endless to her. All the windows were down on the carriage doors; at night, dark land and stars rolled past, sometimes the outlines of villages, tufts of fire. During the day, fields, distant hills, mile after mile of featureless scrub. She had no idea where she was. The notion of getting off the train receded. They could go on like this for ever, the sun and stars rolling round, and when you stuck your head out the heroic burnished flank of the engine taking a bend up ahead.
‘Will I go to school?’ she asked her grandfather.
‘Oh, aye, that’s been sorted. You’re to go to school in Bombay.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘That’s a great big place by the sea with marble buildings an’ all that. Gateway to India.’
They had these pockets of conversation. To Kate they might as well have been discussing an imaginary world. Yet there was something she felt him (and herself ) skirting. They both knew and acknowledged in the code of all the other conversation that there was this something else. It was avoidable, temporarily; but Kate could feel him tensing the further into the journey they went. He looked more out of the window, talked less.
‘Bhusawal! Next stop Bhusawal!’
‘How big is your house, Granddad?’ Kate asked.
‘Where we live?’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘Well, it’s a decent enough sized place.’ Then, after a pause in which she realized they’d come to the end of avoiding it: ‘It’s not my house, any road. It’s your Uncle Cyril’s.’
He was on the sun-blasted platform to meet them. Kate’s first sight of the long face with its outward-curving mouth like a monkey’s, the gold ring and white cigarette. He wore silver-rimmed black sunglasses and a heavy watch on a steel strap, a tight white singlet and baggy khaki slacks.
‘What then–have you heard?’ he said to Kate’s grandfather, before hello, before anything.
‘What?’ the old man said. The platform was jittery with the train’s arrival. Around them passengers were struggling with trunks and cases. Snack-sellers were up against the windows, fluttering passenger hands coming out for the quick exchange. The train hissed, quietly, and Kate thought of how she’d kidded herself that she’d never have to get off it. Now it was going on without her, like a horse she’d loved but had to let go.
‘Blaardy hell,’ Uncle Cyril said. ‘They’ve had an earthquake in Quetta, big one, God knows how many killed.’
‘What?’ Kate’s granddad said, squinting. ‘Rubbish. When?’
‘Day after you left there! I’ve been bleddy marking time here, I can tell you, in case you missed the train.’
‘Jalgaon!’ the conductor shouted, strolling past. ‘Pachora, Chalisgaon, Manmad, Deolali, Kalyan and Bombay Victoria Terminus! All aboard!’
‘Who says?’ her granddad said.
‘Came through on the wire this morning. Blaardy hell, I tell you God only knows.’
The train whistled. Mournfully to Kate. Her heart hurt. The heat here made your body a transparent, negligible thing. Earthquakes were Acts of God. He could do things simultaneously, talk to you quietly in one part of the world and heave the land up and swallow houses in another. Kate looked up into the milky blue burning sky, behind which, she knew, the implacable face was watching.
‘Anyway, come on come on, I’ll tell you about it on the way. Is that her trunk?’
They took a tonga pulled by a grey horse with a knotted dusty mane and wet black eyes. The thin sunlit driver was the same deep leathery dark brown as the sunlit bridle and reins. When he smiled at Kate she saw that all his front teeth were missing.
‘Forty Blocks,’ Uncle Cyril told him, and after a tap with the long stick the grey horse
pulled away. It looked effortful to Kate, as if the hooves were too heavy, the big sad head going slowly up and down.
In the following days news of the earthquake came down from the north. Estimates said twenty thousand dead. All but the cantonment area had been destroyed. Kate wondered about her mother’s and father’s graves, imagined them torn open, the coffins pushed up, splintered, a brief glimpse of bodies, then another black heave and them swallowed again.
‘You know what I think?’ her grandfather said to her. Four days had passed since her arrival. Nights, she slept on a fold-out camp bed in his room, which smelled of tobacco and leather and serge and aftershave.
‘What, Granddad?’ She knew he meant the earthquake, couldn’t keep away from the subject. Thirty thousand, some reports were saying now. The papers liked it the more bodies were found.
‘I think it’s God can’t meck is mind up. Shakin things about an turnin everythin topsy bloody turvy. Earthquakes and volcanoes and whatnot. Tidal waves. D’you know what a tidal wave is?’
‘No.’ She didn’t know what topsy bloody turvy was, either.
‘It’s an enormous ruddy great wave that rises up from the sea, ’undreds of feet high, and blots out the sun, and comes slowly nearer and then crashes on t’land and destroys everythin underneath it. Now, you tell me what the point o’ that is. You can’t, can you?’
‘No.’
‘On t’uther and,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘look at me an thee. Here. Alive.’ In small ways he’d made it known to her that his power in the household was limited. She could count on him for low-voiced allegiance against Cyril, but for what beyond that remained unclear. ‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘if things hadn’t happened as they did you wouldn’t be alive here today, would you? If your mother hadn’t passed away I wouldn’t have come for you. Or think if I’d come a day later. One day later. We’d a been swallered up wi’ all them other poor buggers! That’s destiny, that is. Ruddy destiny.’