A Life Apart (33 page)

‘I want my kimono,’ she announces, breaking what seems to Ritwik an interminable silence, for they have each slipped into their unreachable worlds.

‘I need to put some powder on you first, don’t I?’ Ritwik slips back into duty.

‘All right then, but hurry, please, it’s cold in here.’

Ritwik reaches for the tin of lavender talcum powder, hesitates a few seconds trying to decide whether he should pour it first on his hand and then smear her or whether he should sprinkle the
talc on her directly and then spread it around more evenly. He opts for the latter and realizes immediately that he has made a mistake; he comes to this particular crossroads every bathtime and
every time he makes the same mistake, for the talc falls and inhabits the pouches and folds of her skin, stays trapped there, much in the way a powdery drift of snow fills up rills and gullies
first. Once again, a bathtime ritual becomes an almost insurmountable logistical problem for Ritwik.

‘Hold on to my waist while I do it, OK?’ It is like talking to a child, except the position they are locked in now could be that of lovers.

She complies again. When the ritual is all over, Ritwik wraps her dressing gown around her and says, ‘Let’s go and look for your kimono.’

She refuses to take the stairlift and wants Ritwik to help her upstairs. On the way up, an immeasurably long move and somewhat irritating to Ritwik, partly because his desire for pure order and
neatness had been scrambled by the foamless scum and the powder in the ridges of Anne’s skin, she asks, ‘How is your job with Mr Haq going?’

Fucking clairvoyant psychoterrorist.
Of course, he does not voice it.

The lone and level strawberry field stretched far away, but not so far that Ritwik couldn’t see something different at the far end, where it met the horizon, another
field of a different crop. In the very far distance there was a disparate bunch of what looked like abandoned ricks and sheds and an outmoded combine harvester or some such farming machine. What
took his immediate attention were the acres and acres of green which, on closer inspection, appeared somehow straggly and weak, an anaemic shade of the colour, but he had never seen a strawberry
bush before and had assumed it would be a tough thing, more like a sturdy, clipped rosebush and less like this semi-climber. Row after long row of bushes, laid out like disciplined armies, thick
with red berries. The berries were not obvious at first but when he first spied them, among the low foliage and on the straw bedding, which had been laid down lovingly under the plants along the
entire length and breadth of the plantation, he couldn’t see anything else.
Like little red lanterns in the green night
, he had paraphrased and then felt immediately ashamed at his
cast of mind. And where was this place? Cambridgeshire? Hertfordshire? Berkshire? He had no idea but he wasn’t going to ask in case they thought him snoopy or too inquisitive for his own
good. Something told him that too many questions, or even revealing some fluency in English, wouldn’t go down too well here.

The journey out here had taken slightly over an hour. During the first leg of the drive, Ritwik had frequently clambered up to the back window to get a glimpse of the world outside. As the road
had ribboned out in a track of macadam grey, with houses or occasionally fields on either side, he had thought that this was what it felt like to be a prisoner, literally, being taken away in a
prison van, watching the other side unspool in relative reverse. Along with this, the jerkiness that came with being in the back of a van had given him a slight sense of motion sickness so, after a
while, he had stopped looking out of the window and concentrated instead on dispelling the little waves of nausea.

He had introduced himself to the young man, his fellow passenger. There had been a difficult and halting conversation, Dusan – that was his name – was taciturn and almost hostile at
first and then plain inarticulate, his English still rudimentary. Ritwik had persevered; when ‘Where are you from?’ proved too difficult for Dusan to follow, Ritwik had broken it down
to ‘Country?’ and, pointing to him, ‘You’. In the volley that followed, only ‘Albania’ seemed decipherable. When Ritwik asked him to slow down, Dusan kept
pointing to himself and saying, ‘Albania, Albania’, and then, ‘Home: Macedonia, Live: Macedonia’. An Albanian from Macedonia, Ritwik decided. He found it difficult to place:
that was a very fuzzy area of the world map. The interaction jolted along, an erratically dotted movement to the more or less smooth onward motion of the van. At one point, Ritwik asked Dusan his
age by pointing to himself first, showing ten fingers twice and then four fingers, then pointing to Dusan and making a vague interrogative gesture with his upturned palm. After two tries, Dusan
cracked it and answered, without resorting to counting with fingers, ‘Fifteen.’ Ritwik was sure he hadn’t been able to keep the shock off his face: Dusan looked at least twice his
age. His eyes were the eyes of someone who had seen things about life which most wouldn’t want to be shown, a small bunch of lines already making their forking ways out from the corners, his
hands gnarled, his mouth lined. The hinterlands behind those eyes contained dangerous terrain, a whole map of misery.

Over the next three days, the map unfurled a tiny bit for Ritwik to have a fleeting glimpse.

Dusan and Ritwik had first been taken to a hut and Tim, along with two other men, had explained to them what they were supposed to do. There were instructions about filling up punnets and
barrows, returning picked fruit to the shed, the workings of the twine machine, the sizes of fruits to be picked, different sizes in different baskets – Ritwik hadn’t known that fruit
picking – so simple, so . . . so . . .
pure
– could be hedged in by so many rules and dos and don’ts.

‘You work until seven and then come to the farm, it’s a mile up that road; one of us will come back with you here and have a look at what you have done. You’ll get paid then.
Is that clear? Another thing: don’t eat the fruit. We have a very good idea how much fruit you can pick in twelve hours, between the two of you, and if the weight is any less than our
estimate, you get the money taken off your wages. Clear?’

The question of returning to London had assumed such huge proportions in Ritwik’s mind that he hadn’t even taken in most of the instructions. But he hadn’t dared to speak
out.

Just half an hour into picking strawberries – larger berries in one basket, smaller ones in another – Ritwik had realized why the farmers didn’t do it themselves. You had to
either squat or bend, moving like a crab, awkward and hobbling; the first applied unbearable tension on the thighs, the second broke your back. After the first hour, both Ritwik and Dusan had tried
crawling on their knees and moving on fours. By the time it was ten o’clock, they had worked out that the optimal thing to do was a combination of all these movements, each sustained until it
became unbearable, then switching to another one. The sun was becoming fierce, Ritwik had forgotten to get a bottle of water, and his body was being tested in positions and configurations it
wasn’t used to. He hadn’t wanted to think what the aches would be like after a night of sleep.

Where am I going to sleep? In London? How will I get there? In the shed here? What’s going to happen to Anne?

Before midday, Ritwik felt as if he would never walk straight again, his back hunched, the stoop taking its own time to relax and let him ease, very slowly and painfully, up into erect position
again. Dusan, either made of more resilient stuff, or used to such work, had doggedly carried on, needing fewer rests and fewer stretches of the body to its natural and original postures.

When the dehydration headache kicked in, first a slow contracting behind the eyes and then the drilling at the temples and at the back of the head, Ritwik decided that finding water
couldn’t be put off any longer. They walked to the shed only to be disappointed. Dusan explained to him, in broken English, that there was bound to be a source of water somewhere nearby
otherwise how would they water their crop? Ritwik accompanied Dusan, the Albanian boy following some arcane and invisible track understood only by him but he led them, after a meandering walk for
about three-quarters of an hour, to a lead pipe sticking out of the ground with a tap at its mouth and a huge hose of green plastic coiled near it. They drank, mouths to the tap, as if there were
no tomorrow.

As the day wore on, Ritwik realized that Dusan’s English was not as minimal as he had first taken it to be. Perhaps it was nervousness that had inhibited him, perhaps the company of
strangers, but he told Ritwik that he had read English in his school for three years, a school in a small, small village next to a town called Bogovino near the foothills of the Sar mountains, on
the border of Macedonia with Kosovo. Dusan spelt out, like a child learning his first alphabet and getting the vowels jumbled with each other, the names of the town and the mountain, and then
inscribed them on the earth with a hardy point of a piece of straw. When Ritwik asked him what had brought him to London, with a shrug his English disappeared once again. Different variations on
the question, from several angles, only brought shrugs, silence, apparent incomprehension and a subsequent immersion in work.

The other thing Ritwik noticed about Dusan was that he never smiled. Not that there was much to smile about when your body was contorted impossibly, like a whimsically bent metal clothes hanger,
and the sun got more and more ruthless, but normal people smiled when they introduced themselves to each other, or said ‘thank you’, or did any of those unthinking little acts of civil
courtesy or politeness. No trace of those in Dusan; he wasn’t rude or anything, but it felt to Ritwik that there were vast dark clouds moving inside him all the time, darkening his eyes. For
all he knew, he had never learnt to smile at all.

In the numerous silences that marked their fruit-picking, Ritwik battled with discomfort bordering on pain, hunger, headache, curiosity, anxiety and, the biggest of them all, boredom. Who would
have thought that ten to twelve hours in a field of strawberries would become so viscous after the first two that they refused to budge? He filled up the vast spaces between his intermittent
conversation with Dusan thinking about the ways in which Miss Gilby was getting knottier by the day, opaque and locked in her world, a world that often refused him entry. Every time he thought or
wrote of Miss Gilby now, the face of Anne occupied his mind, ludicrously so because his Miss Gilby was stuck at what, forty-five? Fifty? Fifty-five even?

At other times, he populated the emptiness with musings on the politics of the country house poem; the georgic versus the pastoral; the famous English countryside, written and talked about so
much, extolled, loved, and there he was in the middle of it, unable to construct a broader canvas of ‘Countryside’, stuck in a strawberry field which could only be a tiny detail in the
huge picture of the literary construct. Where were the gently rolling green fields, the fields of barley and rye, the hills clothed with forests? And why was it all so close to major roads, so that
the sound of traffic, a steady sea-roar, was always its music, not birds or crickets as the books and poems and essays had deceitfully promised? And what was Dusan thinking about? Where was he?

The next three days gave some sort of an answer to where Dusan went inside his head while his red, sore fingers plucked strawberries, his head bent, his body splayed and hunched at the same
time. But only a type of answer and one, Ritwik felt, he himself had much to do with piecing together into a coherent fabric from the disparate shreds and rags Dusan threw at him.

On the second day, as Ritwik stretched his whole body out on the ground, racked with currents of pain and brittleness and warnings from his lower back and neck, Dusan asked Ritwik who he lived
with, whether he had family in England, if he had lived in this country all his life. Ritwik answered with accurate facts, not a word more than he deemed necessary, but they were all true, if not
the whole truth. There was silence for a long while as Ritwik tried to gather enough courage to ask him reciprocal questions but he hesitated too long and the moment went.

That day Ritwik had come prepared with a two-litre bottle of water, two sandwiches – white bread and cheese and tomatoes bought with the previous night’s twenty pounds – and
two apples, one for himself, one for Dusan. When he offered his food and water to Dusan, the boy looked at him with a dumb surprise, then took them from Ritwik without a word of thanks but with a
touching lowering of the head, as if he were being offered grace by an angel. He also volunteered information about himself, which Ritwik had not dared ask for. He lived in a house with his mother,
two sisters, two brothers, three uncles, two aunts and five nephews and nieces. Full house, absolutely crammed, thought Ritwik, reminded of the hell of Grange Road. When Ritwik mentioned that he
too had lived in a joint family, although not in one as large as Dusan’s, the boy painstakingly explained to him that they all lived in one
room
, not one
house
, one room in a
place called Barnet. The men, all of them, went to work, if they could find some. His uncles worked exclusively in construction and building: there was more work in that field than in farming and,
anyway, this was seasonal, not really a regular job. They did not have proper papers in this country so it was difficult but between the six of them – Dusan, one of his brothers, the three
uncles and one nephew – they managed to survive. Dusan’s mother and her sons and daughters were waiting to go to the United States because she had an uncle in a town there and he was
going to arrange for papers and a house, maybe, who knows, even schools for his sisters and himself, because he would like to be a doctor.

They had waited in England for fourteen months now and, before that, two months in Albania, from which they had had to flee because the police came to their village once, with guns, went
knocking on every door and asked everyone to get out and never come back again. And there was no work to be had in Albania, you could die of hunger and thirst and even a dog wouldn’t come and
piss in your mouth to wet your throat. So they had taken a ship to Bari and then a bus from Bari to Rome and then things got fuzzy and out-of-focus for Ritwik because Dusan wasn’t very clear
about how he and his family had come from Italy to England. There were vague mutterings about relatives in the UK, an Albanian community, promise of work but the narrative ran into the sand. At
this point, Dusan stared hard at the ground and went red-faced and silent. Maybe it was just the sun and the racking pain from fruit-picking. Or maybe Ritwik didn’t pay enough attention, for
the sound of his own blood rushing around in his ears blocked out this boy’s story, a story that exposed his own as thin and tinny. His lot, which he had escaped, appeared as luxury compared
with Dusan’s. He felt small and ashamed and couldn’t make eye contact with the Albanian boy for the duration of their farm experience. Which was all of three days, because he
wasn’t picked up by Tim’s van on the fourth day as he stood on Chichele Lane with loose newspapers and the debris of last night’s kebab wrappers and take-away cartons littering
the morning road.