Shadow Play (16 page)

‘As for moving back, that's the hard part to answer. The truth is, I was always too afraid of being swallowed up again, and not even the thought of living alongside Ma could outweigh that terror. Your mother was an enchanted article for me; she was a magic carpet, but also a simple life-belt. I saw her as a sign, a gift, an opportunity to begin again in Brazil, unencumbered by my past. I just couldn't let go.'

‘Yes, you could, you let go just a few years later,' he pointed out, looking straight ahead, walking beside me. We were returning to the beach through Ipanema. For some reason, the lights on this particular street weren't working, yet I'd recognized it immediately.

‘Do you remember your baby-sitter Beatriz? She lived here, and I used to drop her off in the evenings.'

‘Yup, right down there, after the next crossing. She's in London now, working in a primary school. She published a book, co-written with a friend: an exchange of letters between them. She wrote from London and her friend replied from here. It's called
Os Fósforos: A Box of Matches
.'

‘Her parents still live here though,' he continued as we passed the house. ‘You should drop in. They'd recognize you. It would please them.'

‘Seb, why archaeology?' I asked after a pause, as we emerged from the neighbourhood a few blocks later and crossed the avenue to the beach.

‘It turns me on, Babs. It really does. You know how Mum likes recreating cities from the twenties and thirties for her movies, and you'd show me all that film noir when I was
younger? Why was that? Because you liked inhabiting that world, even though there was no real connection to the present. You and Mum taught me it's cool to move to new places. Well, I think it's equally okay to move to other times. Just be wherever you feel at home, right?'

‘Of course, bro. I'm just thinking I'm going to have to read up some to make conversation when we meet. I confess it's not been an area of priority thus far. But I'll tell you something odd. The unlikeliest of people once confessed a secret to me, that when he was young he'd yearned to be a pilot, although there was no opportunity for an Indian in those days. And his second preference would have been archaeology. But his father swept all such fancies out of his head, threatened to write him off without an allowance, and forced him into a degree in banking.'

‘I know who you're referring to.'

‘You do? Well, he would have been proud of you. I tell you, he was my own Discovery channel. Everything – Egypt, the Indus Valley, Mexico, Peru, he just lapped it up. He kept clippings from the newspapers. He relished the essays my mother brought home, even though she only taught Class Six. The few things I ever saw him indignant about were errors, factual or presentational, in my history textbook. He once ordered a set of world mythologies as a birthday present when I was eight.'

‘Well, maybe these things do flow through the genes. Look, I'm making no promises. A big part of this is wanting to live once more in New York. I don't really care what subject I pick. We'll see how it goes, Babs, where the hottest chicks are. Maybe you'll see me tempted out of my otherworldly digs by some Gisele or Gwyneth in English Lit.'

‘Well, if you ever swing the other way, just walk over to law school or the MBA programme, because that's where the biggest pricks are.'

Through all this, an earlier remark of his had remained in the air between us, about my letting go of them when he was young, and I responded when we had found a table at a beach-side kiosk.

‘Seb, has your mother mentioned that I've regretted that ever since? Perhaps I began regretting it the morning after. You see, I suffered in those days from a rare condition that afflicts one in many millions. Thankfully it's curable, but it's debilitating while it lasts. It's the illness of ideas. There are milder versions, but I caught the severest form. I sold myself this damn-fool theory that I'd outgrown the limits of individual life, that there was much more potential within me than ordinary human ties, to family, friends and children, could ever satisfy. I took it further. Not only did domesticity have no outlet for my energies, I believed – and even wrote the stupidest pieces about it – that overselling our bonds to the bourgeois family might be seen as an active corporate ruse, to fill our heads with the mundane whilst they carved up the world unnoticed, to turn us into addicted consumers and nail our asses to our loans and mortgages. And finally to saturate our hearts with the narrowest possible definition of caring, focused entirely upon the nuclear family, so that we never reflected upon our connections to each other as a wider society.

‘In a nutshell, I transformed what never demanded to be an either-or into a crossroads for myself, with calamitous consequences. All because of the disease of ideas, because Gandhi said, you have to be the changes you want to see in the world. That is how I took it.'

‘Wow, living Marxism, huh. But in your defence, let it be noted you hardly had any experiences of family worth embracing.'

‘Thanks, bro, very decent of you to mention that. Apart from Ana and Ma, that's true. And yet somehow I chucked out the baby too, meaning you. I managed to lose all of you along the way.'

‘Is the Ovomaltine place still open back there?' I asked, watching the bathers in the distance, and making a mental note to wake up early and challenge Seb to a game of Frescobol. Since, unlike tennis, there were no ground-strokes to chase down, I believed I could still give him a keen run. The last time had been desperately close, about two years before: I'd been let down by some terrifically biased refereeing – Seb's home advantage – by Clara and his grandfather.

‘Yeah, of course, still outselling McDonalds by a mile. Are you thinking of retracing your steps?'

‘Perhaps, perhaps. I wasn't a lot older than you when I first came to Rio. In those days I sneaked down here almost daily, just to gawk. Can you imagine the effect this beach had on a poor starved boy from Calcutta? And many years later, when someone first took us to that Ovomaltine place, I experienced the same craving once more.'

‘Yes, it's there, and so are the omelette places and the padarias and the juice shops. How big a Sunday breakfast are you up for? We could do a brunch crawl?'

‘Well, I will need to celebrate, since by then I will have kicked your ass definitively in our morning title-round of Frescobol,' I replied.

‘The glint of contest gleams in his eye. The insult will not go un-avenged. Same referees as last time?'

‘I think not. How about someone neutral, someone who'll officiate for the pleasure of watching the old master carve up the young stud? Like some passing gostosa we can charm tomorrow morning?'

‘Oh, Babs, I hate to think of demolishing you twice in one morning. Why do you want to shatter your heart as well as your pride? How will you continue living without either of your vital organs?'

‘Did you know J-Lo only has coffee that's been stirred counter-clockwise?' I replied, unable to raise the bar on the trash-talk.

‘Do I dare believe the evidence of my own ears? Are you trying to get down with me? You old humbug, you. I always suspected this was your secret vice: last time I even caught you flipping back to VH1 to catch that Destiny's Child video. I gotta tell you, Mum thought that was hilarious.'

‘Well, I'm not sheepish at all. I would stand up for Beyoncé any day. It would be criminal to be embarrassed about it.'

‘Hmm, she has power thighs. I prefer her waist upwards.'

He knew exactly how to rile me. The argument raged all the way to the long queue at Bob's the Ovomaltine geniuses, though it soon metamorphosed into an even more passionate defence (by me) of Test cricket, when he confessed he never felt the urge to catch up with India's doings on cable. I compared the unfolding of a five-day match to the manifold rhythms of life itself, and to the descriptive passages in Proust that only someone crazy for constant climax would skip (‘What will you be, Seb, a skipper or a savourer?') and finally, in that vein, I
stretched the analogy to tantric coitus, at which point Seb reminded me to curb my enthusiasm, since there was a group of evidently American teenagers in line before us, staring and eavesdropping.

 

As soon as she'd been poured her Jack Daniels with Coke, she'd head straight for any available table for two and settle down to text on her phone, but rarely was she left alone. Some smartass who fancied his chances would inevitably walk over to try, not so much the regulars but the punks who strode in from fixing the road, each of them succumbing to the enticement of the unspoken contest, as if in pre-arranged turns. She always refused to look up from her mobile after the initial brush-off, four or five of them within half an hour at peak-times when they all poured in to wet their beaks, and I think this was what attracted Patty's attention and then her sympathy. Because the second week onwards, she glared down anyone who gave any hint of sidling in that direction, becoming Martina's unpaid guardian angel, her self-installed filter of spam. A month later and Martina was history, but for those three weeks between being a constant novelty and disappearing without warning, she became, how do I put it, a feature of the afternoon that reliably marked the passage of time. Noted with silent satisfaction, like anything peaceful.

It wasn't long before Martina grew aware of this favour and repaid it by remaining at the bar for a few minutes after
receiving her drink, her attention devoted solely to Patty. Just small talk, but a small talk laced with mutual respect, which somehow made itself apparent even to me, though I was too far away to eavesdrop. They resembled each other in some peculiar inner way, nothing to do with their discrete physical qualities. Martina was tall and looked like she scored a lot of coke. Brown hair, small mouth, very urban and frail, not someone who'd usually visit our kind of pub. She would never be in
The Sun
with her top off, she wasn't someone any of us ordinarily fantasized about, yet that is what made her compelling. No one would have glanced at her in Chelsea, she would have even seemed shabby there. But she baffled us by returning daily, five times a week, materializing and disappearing without any context.

It was Patty who introduced us one slow afternoon, perhaps as the one male of novelty value who would never consider bothering her. This obliged me to acknowledge her the next few days with a greeting, and culminated in her joining me in the conservatory that Thursday even though it was obvious I was reading the paper. I was startled, but pleased despite myself. Sure, the pub was full, and all her usual tables had been taken, but she could have just stayed talking to Patty. We didn't have much of a conversation: a nod, an offer by me to hand her a section of the newspaper, Martina declining with a smile so she could text. After half an hour she left. The only outcome of that afternoon was that I too started showing up daily instead of thrice a week, though it wasn't for anything specific. I couldn't have told you what I hoped for: I wouldn't have owned up to the word ‘hope'. Yet I had also noticed that I now added a small smile to my greeting. But no words. Believe it or not, there were never any words.

And out of nothing more, I decided to follow her the next Wednesday. I left the pub two minutes behind her, before drawing closer on the sidewalk, assuring myself I would go no further than the tube station. When she boarded a double-decker, I followed her in but remained downstairs, face firmly in my paper, afraid she'd get off any minute. We continued eastwards for half an hour, and eventually I would have nearly missed her because I began reading again, but managed to alight just in time, concealed behind a small crowd on Stoke Newington High Street. I watched her march decisively down a side street, then another, and enter a house, while remaining at the corner myself: the road was empty and I'd surely have been spotted.

The next time, I left the bar minutes after she'd arrived – so as not to arouse suspicion that we were regularly leaving after each other – and took up position in a kebab shop with a grilled haloumi sandwich and a perfect view of the bus stop. It was more than likely that she would use another route, or that she had only been visiting a friend. But my guess was proved right: that was Martina's home. Now, all I had to do was confirm another suspicion.

Four days later I was back on her street, during the hour I knew she'd be at the pub. I had to be quick, in order to be out of there before she returned. It was a large three-storey row house, which she must have shared with friends and compatriots. For half an hour I walked around the neighbourhood in a random fashion to remain inconspicuous to any observers, while always heading back to the same corner. In that period I watched two girls leave, dressed very similarly to Martina in high boots and skirts, and five lone men knock and enter. There was no other
significant activity on the street, apart from a trickle of school-children trudging homewards in ones and twos.