Black Bread White Beer (5 page)

Ignoring the tightness in his bladder, he stands at the entrance to the Ladies, as he is trained to do. He sees aqua tiles from floor to ceiling and detects the same family of smells as those from the hospital. He does not know what he is waiting for. All the damage has already been done. Besides, he is exhausted with having to be the man of the relationship. He is unsure how much reserve he has left if he is called upon for the second time.

There is a reason Claud discharged herself before he arrived. She wanted to keep all the medical details between herself and the doctor. The dressing is only one secret they share. He suspects others.

‘Wives keep secrets from their husbands,' said his best man on his wedding day. Hari is the expert, shagging one frustrated wife after another; a Lone Ranger, regularly pulling up in his Land Rover at the cafés most of them use after the school run.

Amal is unsure that secrecy can exist in a marriage as
close as theirs. When he has every breath pattern and face pore memorized, predicting how she will toss and turn in her sleep – right then left, curl and back; in the midst of urgent, concentrated sex, in sync, when the concept of possession is anathema, to the point where he feels that he actually becomes her; and when, as he cooks, he knows how each particular food will taste for her, where are the secrets? Where in their airy, uncluttered house can they be held?

He was stupid to think that cleaning was the priority, obsessed as he was with staying busy with his hands. He should have camped outside the hospital, greeting the doctor with chair sweat and a furry tongue. He should have left no opportunities for secrets, not because he is possessive, but because he knows that secrets will hurt them. They have had to make the conscious effort to be transparent with one another. It is one of the essential requirements of a marriage such as theirs, to avoid misunderstandings and the breeding of corrosive resentment. It means therefore that any gripes are put down to superficial, bachelor selfishness, laziness, or lapses in judgement; trifles that can be rowed over and then quickly resolved.

His plan is to wheel her back to the car as soon as she reappears, avoiding the McDonalds concession, KFC, and the children's play area. The precautions, should he have to explain them, are ridiculous. There is no emotional
meltdown waiting to happen in the space between the mechanical fire engine and giant revolving tea cup. She is too empty to do that. He only wants to hide these things from her for as long as he can. Pretend that there are no children in the world, that they are as rare as baby eagles or panda cubs. Make it seem like it is a miracle for everybody.

But something about the new dressing energizes her. She is not to be shaken off, wanting to visit the shop to pick up a token for Pat. The gift store, opposite all that he wishes to disappear, is as claustrophobic and depressing as any he has encountered on the side of the motorway. Still, there is a shine to Claud that the flat strip-lighting cannot diminish; perked up by the piles of outdated CDs and tartan car blankets.

‘Two for £25 it says. I could use one in the car now and give the other to Mum.'

‘It's terribly made. Look at the label. Says it's a wool-poly blend. Listen to how it crinkles up. It's like plastic.'

‘I like them. They're pretty.'

‘Since when have you been into tartan?'

‘It's not a question of being into. Tartan's something everyone's brought up with in Britain.'

Those final two words, randomly chosen to put him in his place. His parents were not born in England. He wouldn't understand. It is something from Sam's repertoire, picked up so thoughtlessly, used so often. She
does not know that she is even doing it; does not know what it means.

‘It might not seem like a big deal, but we cannot do Sunday lunch without Yorkshires. Bring that dinner out from an English pub kitchen and they'd have your balls on a plate . . . Yes, I know it sounds like the cast of Billy Smart's circus, but my daughter really does need four ushers, two page boys, and two flower girls. That's how it's done in this part of the world.'

Bigots do not raise ugliness in their daughters, just a certainty of where their place is, and what is right. For all her education, wit, compassion, Claud is guaranteed to fall into the tartan setting every once in a while, usually when they are snappy and close to argument. It is as natural as temper, right as rain.

He thinks of some of Puppa's friends from the '70s, and their marriages. A stream of white wives crying in Ma's kitchen surprised at being beaten for similar displays of indigenous expression. There are one or two husbands he remembers in particular, chubby Indian beefcakes, stinking of the card table and taking no shit. Filthy tempers. The kind of men who would think nothing of giving the woman a slap beside the lopsided pile of wool-poly tartan blankets.

Slapping is not an option, inconceivable, but there are other forms of cruelty. He can protect her until she is smothered by concern, for example. Or, more easily, he
can throw her to the wolves, leaving her to fend for herself once he remembers that he still needs a slash. A party of school kids are stampeding towards the crisp aisle. Thirty of them, fresh from the cramped hire coach and ready to use their feet.

‘See you at the car. Probably easier.'

He watches as she takes a deep breath, kidding himself that it is the choices between blanket colours which is making her cheeks flush and her arm imperceptibly wobble. Red-green, red-yellow, blue-green, blue-yellow, red-black. He waits only until the first of the children stream around her in their quest for confectionary, seeing how she almost has to force her head to stay directed on the job in hand.

The options are St. Leonards or villages. She chooses villages, knowing where the roads will lead: the cottage outside Robertsbridge where they spent their first weekend together, the antique market at Rye where they chose her engagement ring, the church overlooking Lewes Common where they married. All the significant points in their relationship have taken place in her part of the country. There was never any validity to spending time in Leicestershire.

Up there, in the Midlands, they are all aware of what is
happening, how sons are lost after marriage, cruelly appropriated into the wife's family; the opposite of what occurred to their subcontinental forebears. It is the price paid for marrying English girls, in spite of their vehement protestations to the contrary. But it is a phenomenon not simply restricted to skin tone. Amal's other friends, white-skinned and robbed of voice, are also in the same boat: pussy-whipped. Life is good so long as the missus is happy.

He has lost count of the key events that he has missed: the wedding of a second cousin which clashed with the opportunity for a free long-weekend in Milan, the puja at his auntie's new house to banish spirits being cancelled out because Liz and Sam needed help looking for a new car. It is a long list of incompletes.

It is not that Claud lacks interest in his family – the euphemism for culture, because to call it culture would be to admit there are more than cute gaps between the sexes causing difficulties in their marriage – she keeps a better calendar of events than he does. She reads books about Empire, Partition and fundamentalism, drags him to every shitty Bollywood film that plays at the multi-screen, and calls his mother independently at least once a week. The problem lies in their absence, them not being available the way other people's children are; those who made the decision to stay in around Leicester. Ma and Puppa feel robbed of the opportunity to arrive at their son's house
unannounced, to use spare keys to fiddle and poke around whilst they are at work, and to summarily summon one or the other during the onset of perceived indigestions and illnesses.

There is no cooking daal and roti and leaving them in Tupperware boxes in the fridge, no unofficial, covert fertility blessings they can perform using only a bell and a stick of incense, then hurriedly airing the house before their departure. All they know is that their son and his wife are never around, becoming harder to reach, and that after three years of marriage there is still no grandchild.

Neither subject can be brought up, and they have to rely on jibes from other distant relatives to do the job they do not have the stomach for. They feel too far away from their son to rock the boat. They are at the age where they only want to end phone conversations on a happy note, unsure of what the night will bring. And so they keep their tone as light as they can without breaking into hysteria, leaving Amal to read the neuroses behind every piece of weather observation and gossip.

‘It's been cold, hasn't it,' typically conveys everything.

He knows they were never disappointed in him marrying Claud. A man must pick the woman he wants. There is no alternative in this decade. Raise your children. Let them go. Choose your moments.

Liz and Sam have seen them twice since they announced the news. His parents have not had the privilege of
blessing the stomach, instead made to toast over the speakerphone due to a clashing working weekend, followed by their annual trip to Kolkata. The foremost guilt he feels is that they have been denied the sight of her, of the two of them, glowing with iron-rich supplements, and uncensored optimism. Some of the squealing down the phone expressed that, but not their hope. He still feels ashamed that he did not do enough to accommodate their seeing it. Taken a bloody day off. Gone out of his way. But there was plenty of time, went the rationale, close to a year of congratulations and microscopic study to come from the immediate family.

‘Let's stretch it out a bit, the victory lap,' Claud suggested at the time, not worried about holding back until amnio results and first scans, just wary of the weight of attention, and the likely threat of intrusion. She saw a similar display of the diplomatic back and forth that preceded their wedding, the collection of cells, its rooting inside her, acting as a reminder that family obligations were inescapable. His family, inexorable.

Relaying the news by phone or skype to Kolkata, where aunts, uncles, and layabout cousins would most likely crowd around, effectively erasing all notions of privacy, did not faze him, for there was some comfort knowing that Ma and Puppa now expected his every emotional extreme to be delivered via phone lines. Whatever was not revealed would be passed on at a later date by Hari, a compulsive, unrepentant gossip.

There was freedom in allowing them to hear the faintest marital spat as the state-of-the-art broadband line hissed and crackled, like bone-dry kindling being used to fire up a plus-size cauldron.

‘We are happy with whatever you want to do, so long as you make this baby a child of God, any God,' they said, a week ago, fourteen days after the news had been broken. Broken, like it was a product launch, or international event.

‘Health and happiness are already accounted for. There is no excuse for a deficiency of either in this day and age. But spiritual plans must be consciously put into place. The child will lack a dimension in life if it lives without a God, any God.'

‘Like Aishwarya Rai? I hear they worship her in some parts of London.'

‘Don't make a joke of this, Amal. We're being serious.'

‘I know, Ma. This is something we'll look into. There's plenty of time.'

‘Look into? This is not the scouts or girl guides, Amal. These things have to be decided from the outset.'

‘Ma, Puppa, we will definitely not run away from this. Leave it to me to handle Amal.'

They argued about it later, long after parental fears were eased in Kolkata and the speakerphone, shredded with effort, finally cut out. It was the only time during the twenty-one days that they raised their voices with one another over conflicting plans for the collection of cells.

‘Our baby should have dual teaching, not just made into a Hindu,' Claud begins. ‘They haven't got a right to put pressure on us this early. It's precisely why I wanted to keep a lid on things for as long as possible. To avoid this kind of hoopla.'

What she means is, Liz and Sam and no one else. He wants to shout at her simple-mindedness, this stupid, protectionist woman he has married.

‘This is all rubbish as far as I'm concerned, 'Mal. Neither of us have any interest in God, for a start. We're a pair of healthy, rational atheists who wanted to get married in a great building. Same as everyone else our age.'

‘Who said anything about raising him a Hindu? Didn't you hear them? One God, any God.'

‘Read between the lines, Amal. Are you really that stupid? This is about you becoming a Christian. It's their way of getting back at me.'

‘That's not true, Claud. Ma and Puppa aren't like that and you know it. It hacks me off that you even said it. They have no issue with me being baptized. If anything I think they're pleased that I'm actually showing an interest in religion.'

‘Not theirs, though. They'd rather you followed theirs.'

She spoke like it was that easy; all that he had done. He had given up everything his parents taught him for three-quarters of an hour at a Victorian-built stone altar in Lewes.