A Life Apart (24 page)

Ritwik doesn’t know London at all. This is his first visit to the city so he takes Gavin’s word for everything but only provisionally; he knows he will revise the co-ordinates Gavin
has given him with time. But that bit about Brixton being a different country strikes him, at first glance, as not wholly untrue. Nothing could be more different from the England where he has spent
the last two years. That was a beautiful, pale, homogeneous thing out of every second book written in English, the age of its migrant population stuck eternally in the very early twenties, a white
white white town. Compared with this clash and colour, it was Life-Lite; this is life with all the dampeners thrown to the four winds. This is populated by another people, mostly Caribbeans, Gavin
tells him, with a smattering of African diaspora here and there. He also helpfully adds that it is the crime, drugs, mugging, stabbing and race-riot capital of England: it was the scene of the
most shocking, most brutal
race-riots in the country a mere ten years ago. From the way Gavin says it, Ritwik can’t figure out whether this gives the place extra street-cred or lots of
negative points.

The people here speak a different English, if English it is at all in the first place, for Ritwik cannot understand a word of the loud conversation, punctuated by effervescent laughter sliding
to the outright cackle, that takes place between two enormous women on the seat behind him in the bus. It is the sort of laughter that makes everyone within earshot smile and think nothing can be
very wrong with the world, after all; there is the chaotic music of life about it. He suddenly realizes that he is letting out, very slowly, the breath he has held in for two years. Doesn’t
the notion of feeling at home have to do, first and foremost, with this uncoiling?

The illusion takes a knocking as Ritwik and Gavin walk up Ganymede Road, one of a set of nearly identical roads off Brixton Hill: it is a genteel, late nineteenth-century, redbrick-and-stucco
terrace, each house exactly the same as the next one, with only the ascending and descending numbers, and the different coloured front doors, to distinguish them from each other. Road after road,
with names such as Leander and Endymion, of this bland sameness: step off the clash, mingle and patchwork of Brixton Road and you are in white, middle-class suburbia. But only
mostly
white
and
mostly
middle class – Asmara Eritrean Restaurant, Miss Nid’s Jamaican Take-Away, Lion of Judah Take Away, The Temple of Truth, a clutch of hairdressers with names such as
‘Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow’, ‘Hair Apparent’ and ‘From Hair to Eternity’, all keep redrawing the contours of this amazing pocket of England. To Ritwik this
indicates that there are other such delicious and defiant dissonances scattered all over this country; he will have to keep his ears open for them from now. They were not something he had heard
here before, but now they speak to his blood with an intimacy he finds almost embarrassing, as if he has been exposed as unfaithful, disloyal.

Nothing has prepared Ritwik for 37 Ganymede Road. First of all, it is a detached house in a terrace: it stands out so starkly that Ritwik can’t help reading it as some sort of a coded sign
trying to tell him that life in number 37 is not going to resemble the broad flow of other lives around it. It is narrow and tall, like a slice from a thick, round cake. When they step in and walk
down the narrow passageway to a landing, there is a staircase leading upstairs and five steps leading down to another landing off which open a living room, set back from the front of the house, and
a huge kitchen, beyond which there is a big space that could have been a conservatory once but the glass roof is so smeared and dirty now that it is dimmer than the walled rooms. Beyond that,
Ritwik can see a long garden, dense with knee-high grass and lush, tangled nettles: it is really a scaled-down forest. He could never have guessed, from the thin outside, that the house would open
up like this, room after room, widening from the bottom vertex of a V to its open mouth at the top, much like a wedge.

And then there is the matter of dust. It lies in a thick patina on all the surfaces, sofa covers, bookshelves, tabletops, armrests, mantelpiece, on all the objects in the house – framed
photographs, pictures, the leaves of the spindly weeping fig in the living room, the window frames, bric-à-brac, everywhere. There are dust balls, loosely assembled around hair and fluff and
lint, in the corners of the filthy linoleum-covered kitchen floor. Dust is slowly invading and taking over the entire place. It is like being in a first-world version of the flat he left behind in
Grange Road for a better life, a place where dirt is slowly edging out humans from their space. Everything here is shabby and fading, as if all the colours of things were slowly abandoning a
sinking house. It is a drab, battered, leached affair, with all energy extinguished, a space imploding on itself with neglect and inertia.

And if Gavin hadn’t told him about the cat, he wouldn’t have known what to make of the orange hairs on the sofa covers and cushions, sometimes lying in loose tufts on the carpet,
which can only be described as not neutral, not regulation, not snot-beige, but acoloured. At the same time as his heart sinks to think he will have to live here, he feels so much pity for old Mrs
Cameron in this dying house that his eyes prick with tears.

The last shreds of any doubt Ritwik has about living in this squalor are dispelled when Mrs Cameron pisses in her armchair. He has no idea what has happened and when the old lady gives off her
frightful cackle while wittering on about spilt piss, he thinks her mind has gone down another unknowable alleyway. Even when Gavin gets up to support her upstairs, he wonders briefly about the
abrupt departure and the sharpish tone of her voice when she tells Gavin she doesn’t need his help; he can’t make any sense of it. He sees the darkish, wet patch at the foot of the
armchair but doesn’t notice it.

Suddenly all the pieces fall into place. It must be because he has been trying to work out subconsciously for some time the characteristic odour of the house. The smell seems familiar to Ritwik
but he can’t quite pin it down; it is somewhere just outside the edge of his mind, refusing to come in. Initially he thinks it is just the sour and musty smell of unaired old age and its
attendant detritus, maybe even stuff rotting in the kitchen bin or something similar. And then ammonia, piss, cat, wet patch,
I can wash myself and change into fresh clothes without your help,
no use crying over spilt piss
all fall together in a pattern.

There is no one in the room now so he doesn’t have to check his tears. Once again, they are not so much for this woman who has nearly arrived at the end of her days as for an imagined
future his mother didn’t reach. It is not a future he wanted for his mother but he thinks this is probably how she would have ended her days had she been alive. And yet again, a decision has
already been made for him: he is going to stay on in 37 Ganymede Road and look after Anne Cameron. He will clean up the place, he decides valiantly. He might not manage to make everything unfade,
but he will certainly deal with the dust, dirt, stench and urine-sodden carpets on a war-footing.

One final thing about the haven he has left behind.

He had Heroin Eyes in the toilet cubicle one night. It was a brief, edgy coming together, he remembers now with a dry mouth and a tautness in his gut, an encounter slippery with saliva, semen
and fears. He was so grateful for it that the next time he met him there, weeks later, he was bold enough to whisper, ‘Do you want to come back to mine?’

Gently, gently, don’t rush it, he’s a twitchy butterfly, anything sudden will make him flit
. But the desire overwhelmed the caution.

Heroin Eyes hesitated; through the crack of that pause, Ritwik pushed in, ‘It’s safer than here.’ There was a desperation in him that made him play on the other man’s
fears so unscrupulously.

‘OK, then. I’ll leave first. You follow me out to my car.’ Everything in hot muffled whispers.

Ritwik followed him outside, his chest in a tight knot; he would either come back to his room or run away like he did the first time. There was no telling which one it would be. He was going to
have to play it very carefully.

They got into the car, a clapped out white Renault, which made a clattering racket as it moved along, and Ritwik gave him directions. His name was Matthew – he wouldn’t give his
surname – and he seemed uncomfortable with this sudden intimacy that sharing an ordinary, unsexual space with a cottaging pickup had brought between them. It was somehow a more revealing and
skinless interaction to negotiate.

Ritwik tried to make the odd reassuring comment – ‘Don’t worry, my neighbours are all fast asleep at this time’, ‘I very much have my own privacy’ – but
they petered out in the shallows of his own unconviction. Matthew, meanwhile, drove steadily, giving away nothing except a pheromonal charge of his deep discomfort. Ritwik didn’t dare look at
him sideways or in the rear view mirror in case he upset the fragile balance that had brought this beautiful stranger his way. He had been chosen: that fact alone caused an unpleasantly
effervescent cocktail of euphoria and anxiety inside him. He had to keep a firm lid on the bubbles of helpless, nervous giggles trying to rise to the surface.

Once past the parking lot and the staircase, in which Matthew behaved like a jittery cat, things seemed to ease out a bit. Matthew even smiled as Ritwik drew the curtains first and then turned
on the bedside lamp, twisting it to face the wall so they had only a dim, diffused refraction in which to love.

He was too tall to fit into the bed, which was also too narrow; both of them kept bumping their knees and elbows on the wall against which the bed was pushed as they moved and changed positions.
They tried to make as little noise as possible and spoke in whispers, afraid that they were going to wake someone up in the adjacent rooms. At the end of it, Ritwik hoped Matthew had got out of
himself and felt a little bit of what he had felt.

Afterwards, Ritwik didn’t dare ask him to stay because he was afraid his raw need for this lanky stranger would become so transparent if he spoke out the words; he would surely take fright
and scuttle off. Instead, he arranged the single duvet over both of them as best as he could, draped himself around Matthew and nestled his head in the hollow of his shoulder blade and
collarbone.

‘So what do you read?’ Ritwik asked after a while.

‘Math.’ The knot had loosened somewhat. There was a new languor about him; they could almost be friends talking.

‘Where are you from then?’ Ritwik immediately regretted the question: two consecutive questions after sex could only seem to be an inquisition to an Englishman.

‘Blackpool. Do you know it?’ Ritwik could feel his self-deprecating, apologetic smile as he named his hometown, as if it were a private joke he wasn’t supposed to get.

‘No, I don’t. Is it nice? Isn’t it near the sea?’

‘No, yes, in that order.’

‘Why isn’t it nice?’

‘Have you ever been to an English seaside town? They are havens of the most unimaginable tack.’

Ritwik kept quiet, then casually asked another question, hoping Matthew would not latch on to this crude strategy of extracting information by spacing out and strewing the vital questions among
the innocent ones. ‘So did you do finals this year?’

Ritwik expected a stark ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, which would have made his work slightly more laborious but not impossible. Instead, Matthew, who seemed to have no idea what
Ritwik was leading to, answered, ‘No, I’ll do schools next year.’

OK, second year then. I just need to find out his college.

‘Are you going home for the long vac?’

‘Yes.’ Long pause. ‘I need to. I have a summer job waiting for me.’

Why isn’t he asking any questions? Why hasn’t he even asked my name? Or what I read?
He reached his hand backwards and turned the light off.

Ritwik wished he had kept a firm bolt on his mouth seconds after the next question came out but the cumulative effect of Matthew’s escape through dark alleyways, his refusal to give out
normal information, his wound-up, nervy demeanour, could only have led to this. ‘So you aren’t out, are you?’

Surprisingly, Matthew appeared to be relaxed about this too. ‘No, I’m not.’ Brief but untense. He added, ‘I did join the Gay Pride march last week though. Along with all
of Wadham.’

Ritwik’s mind did silent whoops of joy; the last piece of the puzzle had been handed to him on a plate. He refused to let Matthew realize this so he persisted with the outing questions.
‘You know, this could be the most supportive town to come out in.’

‘Yes. I know. But it’s my parents, you see.’

‘But parents almost always come round to their children’s point of view, don’t they? Eventually.’
What do I know about that one?

‘Yeah, but my parents are very . . . very . . . what can I say . . . conservative.’

‘You might try testing the waters.’

‘You don’t know how old-fashioned they are. I was watching telly with them one evening and there was this shot of two blokes kissing – I forget what programme it was –
and they freaked, kind of. My mother kept muttering “Disgusting, disgusting”, while my father stood up, spat on the telly and turned it off. Then they just sat there, silent and
shaking, with . . . disgust. I suppose.’

There was nothing to say after this. Ritwik curled himself closer around Matthew. As he drifted off, he lost the restraint not to say, ‘Stay. Please.’

Matthew remained silent and awake beside him.

The film of sweat, which joined and divided them where their skins touched, was the only indication to Ritwik how much time had elapsed between falling asleep and Matthew’s swift leap out
of bed on to the floor to get hurriedly into his clothes. He didn’t even have time to assimilate this uncoupling before his eyes adjusted to the bending shape of Matthew pulling on his socks.
By the time he got the words out, Matthew was at the door.