A Life Apart (32 page)

Anne is lying with her head resting on the pillow, her eyes shut. Ritwik is unsure whether she is asleep but he is used to her abrupt tunings out now. If she wants to speak she will. What he is
not used to, not yet, is the feel of her crumpled tissue-paper skin against his hand. It is like touching a creature made up only of folds of hide, with the life taken out of it. That, and the
pervasiveness of bones. When life wages war, it is as if these two last foot soldiers hold out until the end, stubbornly fighting a losing battle till they have to succumb to the inevitable as
well.

‘The water’s too hot.’ She hasn’t opened her eyes.

‘Why didn’t you tell me when I asked you to dip your hand in?’ Ritwik asks.

‘That’s because it felt all right to the touch.’

It is a logic Ritwik understands, so he asks, ‘Do you want me to add some cold water now?’

‘No, it’s fine.’ And then, after a while, ‘You’ll take that cloth and rub my back, won’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘That Haq woman has come looking for you a couple of times.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘She seems very curious about you. Asks me all sorts of questions.’

‘What questions?’ There is a slight edge of anxiety in his voice.

‘Oh, you know. Your parents, your family, what you do, where you were before this, what you will do in life, that sort of thing.’ She opens her eyes; there is laughter in them.
‘But I tell her nothing. That’s because I don’t know anything, do I?’

‘Well, Anne, if you ask
very
politely, I might, I
just
might tell you a few of the things you are
dying
to know.’ He is laughing now, a clear and teasing sound
in this enveloping miasma of steam.

‘Oh,
I
am not curious,’ she rushes in mock-huffily, in a little parody of his italicized speech. ‘I wonder
where
you get all these self-important ideas from. I
was just making an
observation
about that nosy Pakistani woman.’

They are both laughing now, she, in a bass guffaw, he, taking the top notes above this line. Ugo appears, looks at them, sniffs the air and lopes away. By a tacit arrangement, they always leave
the bathroom door open during bathtimes, as if closing the door would confer on the event an unwholesome intimacy, which neither of them desired or knew how to negotiate.

Ritwik rubs the lemon yellow flannel along her back in slow circles. More grey scum, which had come to rest along the points of contact between water and flesh and water and bathtub, swirl
about, as if alive, like plankton.

‘I think she means to ask you to do something for her but can’t quite bring herself to do it. Probably doesn’t know how to put it. Maybe she wants you to be her
mouthpiece,’ Anne says, leaning back against the pillow and closing her eyes again.

‘What do you think it might be?’ Ritwik feels slightly apprehensive. He knows Anne is right, as always; she has an uncanny ability to read people like an easy, accessible book.

‘I have no idea, but she is quite meddlesome, don’t you think? She keeps asking about my family, my children, my grandchildren, as if she hasn’t heard the gossip. I’ve
always found this Indian curiosity about other people’s lives a bit disturbing. Not offensive, mind you, just a bit difficult to get used to. I found it difficult to cope with when I was
living in India, the constant staring, the personal questions. I suppose it is natural in places where there is a strong sense of community.’ She slides down a few more inches in the water as
if this longish speech has exhausted her.

‘What gossip?’ Ritwik asks, unsure whether Anne is going to take this as substantiating evidence of the infamous Subcontinental inquisitiveness.

‘What gossip?’ Anne echoes.

He breathes in deeply and says, ‘You said Mrs Haq pretends as if she hasn’t heard the neighbours’ gossip about you. So I asked what gossip.’

One, two, three . . . Ritwik measures the pause in heartbeats; it is impossible to predict which way Anne will go.

‘There are a couple of people who’ve lived here for almost as long as I have. This place has seen a lot of new people, you know, some moving out, some coming in. The ones who died
here, perhaps they passed on gossip to their children, friends, neighbours. I’ve always waited for the time when I would be the oldest person living in Ganymede Road and everyone who has
known me for years and years either dead or long gone to a different place. There will be only new people on this street, people with no idea of who I am, how long I’ve lived here.’ She
is visibly tiring after this torrent of words, but it is not over, not yet. She sits up a bit, opens her eyes again and says, ‘But gossip’s a weed, it keeps coming back. There is no way
one can start with a clean slate.’ She shuts her eyes, cackles, ‘Not at my age. Yours might be a different case.’

Ritwik doesn’t fail to notice how she has evaded his question, fobbed him off with a non-answer and seen straight through his apology of a life, all in one seamless stream of words. But he
won’t give up this time. He repeats, ‘What gossip?’ This has become a game now and he wants to have at least one won set behind him.

Did they say
bad mother failed mother
she is sure they did, they still do for all she cares, but is there anyone left from, god, when was it, sixty-six, or was it
sixty-eight, no it must have been sixty-six, yes, she is quite sure, but it might just be sixty-eight and they’re not far from wrong for what sort of mother forgets the year of her
son’s death, here she is wondering whether it was sixty-six or sixty-eight, shame on her, his brains blown out, a leaking dark jam everywhere, on the desk at which he had sat while doing it,
on the wall behind, spattered with blood as if a naughty child had had an accident with a bottle of ink he had been forbidden to touch, no letter, no note, nothing except a
forgive me,
mother
, in the refrigerator a day later when she had gone to look for milk for her tea and the police inspector no constable maybe a curl of paper or is she making this up there was no note
nothing only the faint metallic whiff of blood and the tinny smell of internal organs her son’s brain her thirty-six-year-old son’s brain her thirty-six-year-old son who had torn out of
her one August afternoon with the monsoon coming down in unforgiving sheets outside the bungalow and the Indian midwife inscrutable dumb in her foreign language and Clare’s
ayah
all
crowding around thirty-one hours for a little head to come out but all tangled up inside and Dr Higgins despairing too
unforeseen complications
the child who made the beginning and the end
unendurably difficult while her contractions racked her as if there were no end and no end to the deluge outside waters breaking everywhere this child who would almost take her life with him while
receiving his and then who took his own and a bit of his mother’s forever so there is nothing anymore except that note or did she imagine it to save herself because there was no one else left
to do it?

A difficult child a different child a child who grew up on his own needed very little almost self-enclosed no not the self-enclosedness of a selfish person but of an independent one needed no
one needed nothing till the last day when he unravelled everything that everyone had ever thought about him unravelled his assumed self-containedness like a washed skein of recycled wool taught her
the last lesson that he too had needed love like everyone else perhaps more for who but the weak among us need love because the strong have everything and she had read him her son her ripped flesh
her near-death with the demented Indian monsoon howling outside wanting to carry them both away she and her tangled child she had read him wrong all along misread his silences misread his secrecies
his opacity the frequently shut doors the increasingly haunted look a hunted animal looking back on it now she had misread everything and shut the book but the book was now gone taken away
irreversibly from her and returned to its sender she would never have a chance to read it again and say yes I understood some of it only now she lives with the abiding incomprehensibility of what
she had been given because she didn’t see.

But she did give him something no not love not the obliterating love he had wanted oh yes she felt it love in pores and arteries and her leaking nipples and in the pit of her stomach but she
could never show it to him never for love is a weakness too isn’t it an admission of helplessness so she didn’t not obviously but it was always there and if he was so all-comprehending
why didn’t he see it and save his mother why didn’t he so she gave him birds instead those creatures of the air hollow insubstantial through which they communicated their love no
she’s wrong again she never
communicated
anything otherwise he would still be here and she would comfort him in his isolation saying it didn’t matter what he was who he was he
was in the end the child who had ripped her apart he was hers always and forever and nothing was going to change it but they had kestrels and oystercatchers and snow eagles and macaws and hoopoes
instead. So much love such a lot of air air everywhere for these creatures to live and move and swim in the same air, lower, through which Richard, no more than five, glides through across the
green lawn in Simla with a feather clutched in his baby fingers
Mummy, mummy, is this a pigeon feather or a dove’s and what are these lovely things at the bottom
pointing to the tuft
of down feathers a couple of inches from the base of the quill, her bird-loving son a little blond ornithologist angel with who knew a Civil Service career stored up for him all history between
then and now gone like a twinkle in the eye a breath a vapour that is the life of man all of it untying loosening free to scatter in the moment when her son’s brains her own innards slither
down and crust over a wall and she not knowing what had happened for an uncalibrated moment in time thinking Richard has fallen asleep at his desk and is going to turn around at the sound of her
entering the room and say
Why don’t you shut the door . . .

‘Why don’t you shut the door?’ she suddenly mumbles, startling Ritwik out of his reverie. He was certain she was taking one of her cat naps, mouth open, eyes
pressed shut, head lolling on the air pillow, everything in the house still, very still, with only the sound of his hand moving occasionally in the water, accentuating the silence. That barely
discernible liquid sound and Anne’s dream-soaked words – ‘brain’ and ‘feather’ were the only two he could make out and even those he is not sure about –
escaping from her subterranean world out into this alien space.

‘Are you cold?’ Ritwik asks her.

No answer. No movement from Anne.

‘Look, you will have to sit up a bit if I get up to shut the door,’ he says softly.

She moves, an amphibious crab, graceless and pained. Ritwik stands up, shuts the door and sits down by the bath again.

‘What do you say to letting out some water and turning the hot tap on for a bit?’ he coaxes her gently back to life.

She remains resolutely contained in whatever demesne she has chosen to wander in now. Ritwik releases the plug for a minute, replaces it, turns on the hot tap, swirling his hand in the bath all
the time to keep the temperature equable. When the water feels right, he turns the tap off, soaps the yellow cloth and lifts up Anne’s breasts and rubs it gently under them, under her
armpits, on her shoulders, her thighs, the join of legs and torso, all remnants and residues of what they began life as. The ribcage feels like a very precarious cage, about to unconfigure and lose
whatever tired bird it was imprisoning inside, letting it free at last. He is especially shaken, every time, by the craterous area where her breasts started life. He takes up her arms, one by one,
puts them on his shoulders and soaps them. Anne wakes up. Her eyes are clouded with a distance that Ritwik can never traverse. When she is in one of these moods, she won’t talk, or interact;
she will cocoon in on herself and walk away till she readmits him in her own time, the time dictated by the metronome marking the rhythm of the world she has suddenly slipped into.

‘That’s enough, don’t you think?’ she asks. ‘Give me your hands, so I can get up.’

This is an extremely delicate operation; one false interlocking of fingers on arms, one slippage in any of those myriad surfaces of contact, would spell immediate, even irreversible,
disaster.

‘OK, take your hands out of the bath so I can dry them.’

She complies like an obedient child.

‘Now leave your hands out.’ She puts them up on her head. Ritwik dries his own hands and arms thoroughly so that there is not a trace of wetness on which Anne’s clutching hands
can slither. He puts both hands under her armpits and lets her grip his upper arms: he is a vice, a ball of white-hot concentration. He almost lifts Anne out of the bath, positioning her on to the
bath mat, still holding her close, in a near-embrace, till she finds her feet and feels secure enough to disengage herself partially so that Ritwik can towel her dry. He kneels, so that he can do
her lower half more efficiently, with a slight quickening of his heart: he must not look, he must not be caught stealing furtive glances at that great unknown. He wonders what Anne feels at this
indignity. Does she resent it passionately yet holds her tongue because she has no other option? Does she simply not care? Do you reach an age when things such as enforced nakedness, help with
toilet paper and with sluicing the stubborn corners and crevices of the body, count for nothing anymore, the impulse to inhibition just a trivial expression of a long-gone vanity? Would he ever
have the courage or the effrontery to ask her directly in one of her more readable moments, perhaps when he is sitting by her bed and reading out
The Little Prince
or
The Owl Who Was
Afraid of The Dark
to her as the dark congeals outside the windows and a new bird shatters the silence?

They had peacocks last week, a flutter of cumbersome feathers and raucous shrieks, a sound that still shivers up and down Ritwik’s spine in the same way the scrape of fingernails against
chalkboard set off shudders in him. The birds had strutted around on the grass, sending out into the innocent December air their abominable cries as if they had been done an injury, which nothing
could reverse or recompense. And then they had flown off or disappeared, leaving Ritwik astounded and Anne, stoical and mysterious, with a vague unsmiled smile playing around her bunched mouth, as
if she not only knew the answer to this phenomenon but had in fact brought it into being herself.