Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip… double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

  Sanjay looked away carefully from the wall, and two blond children with matted hair and dirty faces were sitting on the pavement, picking at a bone, and above them a large white sign proclaimed ‘Estebury’s Stationery,’ and in the street a large green carriage passed, labelled (on the rear) ‘Omnibus’ in gold letters, and two young women in black hats walked by, there was a man carrying a pick-axe, the street smelt of horse dung, but when Sanjay turned back to the poster the writing was still there:

  My knife is nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.

  Sanjay ripped the poster off the wall and ran, and then as people turned and women shrank away from him he forced himself to walk, holding the scroll of paper firmly against his chest, and he could feel his heart beating against his fingers. At the police station he asked for Bolton, and when the policeman appeared he motioned him to the side of the long hallway and laid the poster on a bench; he pointed at the bottom: ‘Any person recognizing the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest Police Station.’

  ‘What is it, mate? I’m finished now with my shift and off to home.’

  Sanjay wrote across the bottom of the poster: ‘I know this man. I have had occasion to study his penmanship. He was my friend. I am certain.’

  ‘Well, out with it. What’s the name of this friend of yours?’ Bolton was bored now, and he tiredly rubbed the corners of his blue eyes, and Sanjay wondered, don’t you want to catch him? but instead he wrote: ‘His name is Paul Sarthey. He is a doctor. I knew him once.’

  Bolton laughed explosively, and then as Sanjay stared he leaned back against the wall and opened the collar on his dark coat. ‘Sorry But half of London’s been here in the last few days, saying their brother-in-law’s the one, the man down the street is the killer. And now you. Doctor Sarthey’s a friend of yours, is he? Where would a man like that know you?’

  Sanjay wrote, ‘in India, where I served in a native army,’ but it was clear to him that Sarthey was absolved already because of what he had become; according to Bolton he was a renowned Orientalist, a travel-writer of distinction, a trusted advisor to India House on the Eastern possessions, a physician whose practice had included the highest in the land, including the queen’s late mother, he was a man of some property, and above all, he had married well, to the sister of a contemporary from Norgate, a Lady Adelia May Haliburton, and their marriage had been famous in all England.

  ‘Besides, Sarthey’s old now, must be all of a century. This murderer’s so quick he slips away from a hundred of us while the body’s still warm. He kills two steps away from a street full of people, and nobody ever sees him. Do you believe a pensioner so fleet that he skips by all of us? You’re tired, fellow. Get a bed and a bit of sleep.’

  Sanjay wanted to say, the writing’s in me, I know it too well to mistake it, but Bolton walked away, his step weary, and so Sanjay left, the poster folded away into his coat pocket; there was nothing for it, he told himself, but to do it alone, I must stop him, I must. He hurried off to a barber-shop down the street; as a shining razor took the beard off his cheeks, he regarded the face that came up underneath, and certainly, it was not old, but it wasn’t young, it was frozen into some indeterminate imitation of life, and when the dresser poured some greasy dark stuff onto Sanjay’s temples and rubbed it into his clipped hair, a visage appeared in the mirror that was startling in its stark contrasts: the eyes sat like black opals against the matte white of his skin, the hair curved in lustrous black sweeps past reddened lips. A few streets away Sanjay found a haberdasher who provided silk shirts, crimson bow-ties, black coats, grey trousers, polished soft boots, a curious walking stick with a monk’s head as the handle and a long slim hidden blade below, and Sanjay thought as he straightened his collar, damn, I could pass for an Englishman.

  ‘Could I have these packages delivered, sir?’

  ‘That will not be necessary.’ Sanjay started so violently that he knocked over a stack of grey gloves onto the ground, and as the attendant bent over them Sanjay stumbled backwards, his hand over his mouth; the voice had come from his mouth —of that there was no doubt, but it seemed flat and disembodied, and of how it was happening he had no idea, because he could feel no tongue.

  ‘Are you sure of that, sir? It’s rather a lot and it’d be our pleasure.’

  Sanjay turned away (mustn’t let him see the stump) and spoke through clenched teeth (watch the accent): ‘I would prefer not.’ There it was again, strange inflections for an Englishman, a little sing-song, but the drawl was about right, and it was undeniably and concretely a voice; he took up his packages and fled the stares of the shop-keepers, and outside, in a hansom he tried it again: ‘Do you know a good hotel, please?’ It seemed to be coming from his stomach and lower, from the bones of his thighs and the soles of his feet, and the driver’s answer was lost in the tears in Sanjay’s eyes, and the thought that after all the vernacular is not a matter of the tongue alone, that in this strange new world a man had to die and leave behind his native earth to speak a new language.

  That night Sanjay left his hotel and walked the streets of London as an Englishman; he found that if he strode confidently he was stared at but left alone, and he had confidence because he had the clothes of a gentleman, and furthermore he had the sword-stick, and a cosh (purchased that afternoon at a sporting store) in his coat pocket. Besides weapons, he had information: Dr Sarthey, he had been informed by a long entry in Debrett’s, lived now in seclusion after a long period of service to the Empire; his wife had died after thirty-four years of marriage without issue, so the mansion in the West End was managed by servants; Dr Sarthey’s honours were many, including the C.B.E. and the thanks of the crown on more than one occasion; his publications were numerous and essential to the body of knowledge. Sanjay also knew that Sarthey did not entertain visitors, because that evening he had been turned away by a rotund butler who had refused to even enquire with the master, stating instead that the good doctor saw nobody, at all and ever, and no cards or letters either; Sanjay had thought a warning would suffice to prevent further outrages, that the fact that somebody knew would keep him away, and he had even said this to the butler: ‘Tell him I know it’s him,’ but at this the door had clicked shut firmly, and as he had lingered outside a high garden wall a policeman had appeared down the road, and Sanjay understood that Sarthey’s home was truly a castle, and so now he waited in the streets for the man.

  The air seemed to be dense and heavy, so that the yellow lights threw a glowing, blurred haze onto the black walls; a blank window-front gleamed, and Sanjay thought, is it madness, why is he doing this? He tried to remember the woman’s name, the face that he had sentenced to death, somebody’s sister, and he shook in the darkness and had to lean against a cold wall and breathe long gulps of reeking air; no, it is not madness, not that at all, what did I think of in that moment, the pros of this and the cons of that, it is a clarity, a weighing of the advantages and the costs, yes, costs, it’s that, it’s a logic so sharp and inevitable that it cannot be stopped, it’s reason triumphant after all. When his fit of trembling passed Sanjay pushed himself up, steadied his grip on his sword-stick (remembering suddenly his uncle’s tale about a huge knot) and whispered, after a very long time, a little prayer for help to his gods, be with me now, and then he walked on.

  He saw, now and then, women in the street, and he wondered at the poverty that drove them there in the midst of this terror, and of course it was more than hunger, it was the resplendent belief that life has in itself, the certainty that death could be real for everyone else, for you, but not for me; he spoke to these women, and he showed them a plate taken from a book about eminent men, a collection of laudatory essays (the one on the doctor entitled ‘The Discovery of O
rder’) intended to be inspirational; therefore the photograph pictured Sarthey with his chin uptilted, one hand laid across the chest with palm on the heart, there were deep wrinkles etched down from the lips and the hair was now a fine white cloud. Have you seen this man, Sanjay asked, think carefully, have you seen him, but they hadn’t, and when Sanjay said, stay away from him, you must stay away from him, they retreated instead from him —he was unable to keep the urgency from his voice, and he supposed the expression on his face was enough to frighten anyone in the dark, on one of these London nights. But he kept on, from lane to lane until he was faint with exhaustion, his thighs ached and his fingers cramped on the sword-stick; he paused finally by an empty cistern, leaning against a wall with a hand on a thigh, and the complete darkness seemed to reverberate with the harsh rustle of his breathing.

  ‘Well, is it you?’

  The shadow by Sanjay’s right was leaning against the wall in exactly the same attitude as him, left arm on left thigh in mirror likeness, and then Sanjay flung himself away, stumbling on the cobble-stones and falling to the other side of the lane, when he looked up the figure was tall and dark against the sky.

  ‘One of the little harlots told me somebody was looking for my father, an interesting somebody. So interesting I had to leave her alone, lucky thing, and come looking for you. I knew it must be you. My father. Imagine.’ There was a rich laugh under the words, and when the face came forward into a flat sliver of moonlight the teeth were perfect and white, shiny, and the eyes above sparkling in young skin, youthful beyond all dreams, the jawline tight and elegant, the cheeks firm and red and handsome, the step was jaunty, and Sanjay felt the nausea bubble at the blossoming health of it, and he crouched over and vomited into the stones.

  ‘Come, come. And I was so glad to see you. At last, somebody to talk to. Somebody who understands.’

  Sanjay scrabbled in the dirt and his hands found the rigidity of the stick, and in a single motion he drew and lunged, the sword sweeping across the other’s shoulder and chest, but Sarthey wasn’t there, the steel cut across stone showering blue sparks, and then Sanjay backed up the lane, the point swinging from one side to the other, searching for him, but the lane was empty, Sanjay’s eyes still saw the sparks in the darkness, and nothing else.

  ‘Tut. Such vulgarity.’ The voice was from above, and when Sanjay tilted his head back, Sarthey was sitting on top of the wall, one leg crooked over the other, ankle swinging. ‘Of course you want to know how. How one can leap. Which is mundane, what is of the essence is why. Why one becomes free of the earth, boing-boing-boing, spring-heeled as it were, leaping away into the firmament. There was another cutter before this one, did you know that?’ He rose lightly to his feet, and tiptoed along the top of the wall, arms held lightly away from the body. ‘I’m being rude. I should’ve asked, how did you come out of it, I mean, why aren’t you dead? But no matter, I have no doubt that it was something like me. Do you know, from this height, what is most prominent about London is filth? It sprawls about in the most annoying way. In the heart of civilisation there are eighty thousand whores. Rut, rut, rut. I’ve examined it very carefully.’ He twisted his face to one side. ‘O, o have you seen the devul with his mikerscope and scalpul alookin at a kidney with a slide cocked up? O, o, o.’ He laughed. ‘Scientific examination, that’s the secret.’

  Sanjay collected himself, took a running jump at a low wall, scrambled atop, then unleashed a huge back-handed sweep at Sarthey’s legs, and the unchecked momentum of the swing toppled him over to the ground, and this time he saw Sarthey soar effortlessly upwards and over, his coat spreading against the night.

  ‘Don’t be silly. I told you: I’m spring-heeled, I’m light, I’m airy, I’m free. But I remember now, you and your here-to-there stories. You want it explained. All right, I’ll tell you. Start, start from the beginning. Now be still and listen. I’m starting from the beginning. I came back. Was that the beginning? We’ll say it was.’ He was walking lightly on the top of roofs, on window-sills, dancing across walls, and Sanjay had to hurry to keep up with him; he still had the sword-stick, but Sarthey was always a little out of reach, a little too far. ‘I came back to England shortly after I saw you in Delhi. That trick you played was underhanded, but really I got all my material back, I had enough for my book. Did you hear about my book? A Scientific Survey of India and Her People, Her Fauna and Flora? It set me up, my dear fellow, and it is a great thing to be set up as a literary and scientific lion when one is young, quite apart from dinner invitations; suddenly whatever one does acquires a sort of style. One gets a sort of glow, money puts a glitter around you, not money only, success, a hard halo of beauty, I could see it in my mirror, and yet of course it wasn’t only that. It was quite something else, something I hadn’t told anyone, a secret you could say. I put everything I saw in India in my book, except for one thing, can you see what it was? Of course you know: it was the matter of the child. That child who glared, who glowed. How could I believe it? For a time I thought I had gone crazy from the heat, that I had dreamt it out of sunstroke, but then I still had my notes, and I could see my writing was steady, reasoned, no question of it, and so one had to conclude that it had really happened. There was no unbelieving it, and yet I had to leave it out, who would have credited it here, they would have thought me insane, me. So I put it aside and went on with my work, doctoring and surgeoning away, and more to the point, paying attention to the pains of those who mattered, it’s no small matter to manage the social niceties, a properly-concerned look and a skill at dancing will make you more money and fame than knowing how to cure malaria. I was the favourite among certain old ladies for my quick wit, my sallies at the reigning dames of the day, delivered behind the raised wine glass, barely out of hearing of the poor victim, who is grandly unaware that she is being cut to the quick; I loved those balls, the high colour of the military coats, the sparkling jewels, the dancers sweeping across the floor, but in the carriage afterwards, outside the window there was always a glimpse of something, a face, a ragged-fingered figure shivering in a doorway, and always this wrenched me down, creating a feeling so dolorous that I trembled in anger, the unsightliness of it, the mess so oppressive in itself that I would lean back in my carriage and cover my eyes with my hands. I loved the city, its wide, straight boulevards so filled with light, but always, at unexpected moments, there was the hideous bubbling of the underneath seeping through, street Apaches with their snot-covered faces, the smell, the horse droppings on the streets. I was doomed to be dragged down, but I had another secret, a secret inside a secret, and this rescued me; do you know what it was? Can you conjecture? Do you imagine? You cannot. What delivered me was the edge, the blade, the cutting through, when I sliced through the last wall and the child gleamed through I had it, the first cause, the beginning at the beginning and the answer,at the end, the straight line through, the arc, and the universe shivered and for a moment flew into place, it was there and no need to speak of God or gods, I understood. Do you understand? You cannot. But no matter. You need to know what I found out later that afternoon, after you rushed in and fled with the child, no, not in the cadaver but about myself, in myself, it was this: I had become pure spirit, a principle free of this earth, I could fly. I took a walk in the evening, and as it grew dark I turned back to camp, and from the bottom of a river bed I started towards the top, and I stepped lightly over the rocks, jumping from one to another, the water seeping below, and at the last one I looked at the dark edge of the bank above, and jumped, and found myself standing on it, the gleam of the water far behind me. I couldn’t understand it, the distance was great, some thirty feet, and finally I thought that I was sick, fevered, and so I took myself home and to sleep, but the next morning I tried it again and found I could leap —from standing still —a good five yards straight up. Now of course I told nobody, but every chance at privacy afforded me glee in this incredible change, this gift, but soon I discovered it was being taken back from me, every day I grew less rema
rkable, so that by the time I reached Calcutta I was back to my earth-bound existence, dragging my feet like anyone else. It would have been madness to tell anyone, the destruction of a career if nothing else, and so the months passed and I grew to regard the thing as a passing lunacy, a trick of the imagination, an extended aberration of a mind far from home; I was, after all, I told myself often, a scientist.

  ‘At home once again, I devoted myself to my work, I married, in the hurly-burly of everyday affairs and an increasing fame I forgot all about my momentary experience of the mysterious, and when people talked of the supernatural in my presence I scoffed at them, and made a great show of myself as a rationalist of the steeliest order, and I am sure I offended not a few fantasists of the type who like to make each other shiver by tales of monkish ghosts in country houses. But I felt secretly as if I had now a few ghosts of my own: I was given to moodiness, sudden twitches of sentiment that I was unable to comprehend myself, flashes of anger and long periods of the blackest depression, when everything around me seemed as flat as paper and as unsolid, when I fell into a numb silence in which there was nothing except the boredom and nothingness of life; I never understood why this happened, I grew to accept it as the price of intelligence, perhaps, or awareness. It used to take me unexpectedly, I could go from the gaiety of a celebration to this wilderness so quickly and so invisibly that the person I was with, a loved one perhaps, would never know, and they would go on talking, laughing, while I stared at the sickening pink of their gullets and the coarse roughness of their tongue and hated them; it used to happen to me, and it happened to me one evening at dinner, we were supping with friends to celebrate an achievement, a grand success, I had been awarded the Gold Medal by the Society for Scientific Achievement, and we were eating turtle soup and cuts and there was a bottle of Madeira open on the table in front of me, I was happy, when I looked down at the breadth of my shirt front it seemed to me well-filled and solid, and the people I was with were well to know, there was even a duke at the end of the table, and it was all fine, but then as I lifted the bottle to my glass somebody laughed, as I poured and held my silver knife with the other, it was my friend Haliburton, and the sound of it struck me as brutish, no doubt it was not so, because he was a very bred young man, and his laugh must have been handsome, as he was, but it pushed itself against me like some loathsome wet animal, small and leathery-skinned, and suddenly the light howled around me and I was alone by myself in some eternity, I could not bear them anymore, not the table laden with food or the witty talk that flashed, not any of it, I was back in the sweaty hell of Calcutta surrounded by grinning black faces. It was so bad that I pushed myself away from the table, and holding the cloth between my fingers I said, I fear I must leave you momentarily, and before anyone could speak I plunged out of the room, leaving them hubbub-ing, and I was out on the street walking, far, far, very quickly, and suddenly it was dusk; when I took stock I was in some broken-down place I had never been, in a rubbishy yard under a brown house, and so I wiped my face and turned, and trudged down the lane, wanting to find my way back, but then I turned a corner, it was a splintered wooden fence, and leaning against it, face to it, was a woman, and behind her, bent over her back, was a man, heaving back and forth, I stopped, as if in a daze, the man saw me, stumbled back, holding his pants at the waist, fled down the lane, stopping to pick up the cheap bowler hat which fell to the ground, he must have been a clerk or a secretary, but the woman cocked her head at me, still leaning against the wall, not a bit abashed, then she straightened up slowly and as she turned and her skirt fell back for a moment under her there was the darkness, the darkness of creation and pestilential multiplication and I tried to think, think, but she was coming towards me, what’ll it be, darlin’, coom down for a bit o’ slummin’, eh, and she reached up to touch my cheek and there was on her fingers the smell of it, the reek of matter its filthy existence and I shoved her aside pushed it away the atrocity and she fell, cursing and crawling away and the knife was still in my right hand and I bent over and cut a line through the right leg the cloth flew apart and the yellow flesh underneath and she screamed, screamed again, I was still, not moving because it was clear to me now, that intelligence is investigative, I was calm now, I felt strength flooding into me as if somewhere a sluice had unplugged, I knew my purpose was to understand, men came pounding down the street, angry and raising sticks, but I was calm, and I looked at them unafraid, they rushed, and I did not attack, I did not flee, I merely took a step forward, and flew.