The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (10 page)

“No! I’m not going to no hospital!”

“You’ve got a nasty cut.”

“Not Casualty!” Muriel’s face throbbed. Her leg hurt, and when she looked down she saw her stockings were torn. “What about my cat?” she said. “They got my keys; what about his food?”

“Fifteen times we’ve been robbed,” said the man. “Fifteen times in two years. These kids have destroyed my business.”

“They got my handbag,” said Muriel. “It only had twenty pound in it.”

“I’ve had enough,” said the man. “I’m packing up and taking my family home.”

“Don’t go!” she cried, grabbing his arm.

“Not now, love. When I’ve sold my shop. I’m going to take them home to India. It’s safe there.”

“Safe?”

“India has a very low crime rate. You can walk the streets in Hyderabad, my hometown, and feel no alarm. I wanted to make a life for my family in England, but what sort of life is this?”

“I’m not going to no hospital,” said Muriel, but already she could hear the siren approaching.

W
here’s Keith?
Muriel wailed silently.
Where’s my boy?
In her distress she had forgotten his phone number. It was in her handbag, of course, but her handbag was gone. Without it her hands felt useless, like flippers.

The policeman looked like Keith when he was young. She had wanted to stroke his cheek. Now he was gone and she was lying on a trolley like last time, it could be the same trolley, with people hurrying past and somebody moaning on the other side of the curtain. The bin said
Contaminated Sharps Only
.

Muriel would have killed for a cup of tea, but despite her asking twice, nobody had brought her one. They had put her in Coventry, because of last time. The big black nurse who took her blood pressure looked like the same one, though you couldn’t always tell. She had yanked the band so tight it hurt.

I’ve been mugged!
Muriel wanted to shout. How dared they? Why had they singled her out—that brief blow that had sent her reeling, that could have cracked open her skull? What had she done to deserve it? And the indignity! Her damp knickers, because she had wee’d herself; the hole in her stockings that exposed her varicose veins and turned her into a bag lady, except she had no bloody bag.

She had felt threatened by them before, of course—the gangs of them jostling in the bus queue; the mad old lady in a poncho who spat at her in the high street. She had seen them smashing car windows and being chased by the police. And then in the hospital it was all foreign people too, jabbing you with needles and shouting at each other over your head. It was like being mugged all over again. Did nobody realize that when you were frightened you wanted your own kind around you?

Muriel hated hospitals. It was this place, St. Jude’s, that had swallowed up her husband. Paddy had entered on a stretcher, never to come out again. She had returned home to an empty armchair and an oxygen cylinder.

She heard voices. “It’s that Mrs. Donnelly again,” said a nurse.

“
The
Mrs. Donnelly?” She recognized the doctor’s voice. “Oh well, we have to treat all sorts here.”

Muriel bristled. How dare he?

They pulled open the curtain and stepped in. It was the tall, gray-haired Indian doctor. “Well well, Mrs. Donnelly,” he said. “So we meet again.”

T
hey sent Muriel home in a community ambulance. It was dark.

Was it only that morning when she had set off for Safeway? Compared to last time, the doctor had seen her quickly. He probably wanted to get rid of her. Cuts and bruises, that was all it was, and a nasty black eye. No X-ray, no overnight stay. A new nurse had dressed her leg: a nice Australian girl.

“I’m not a racialist,” Muriel told her. “Last time, the nurse was ever so rude. They got different manners from us. People pretend it’s not true but they don’t live with them. They don’t know what it’s like, them in their nice houses in Wembley or whatnot.”

There was only one passenger left on the ambulance, an old boy with a Zimmer walker. He was dropped off at the elderly folks’ home down by Peckham Rye. Muriel gazed at them through the window. The old people sat there. A TV was on but they weren’t watching. Some of them had fallen asleep, lolling in their chairs. The chairs were ranged around the walls, leaving the center of the room empty, as if waiting for a significant event to happen.

Muriel leaned her cheek against the glass. It cooled her skin. Soon Keith will arrive, she thought. When he hears what’s happened he’ll drop everything and come over. He’ll know I’m shaking like a jelly. He’ll come over in his big silver Jeep that all the neighbors stare at and he’ll tuck me up in bed. He’s a good boy.

The smell of urine rose from her clothes. Today she felt her age; those thugs had made an old woman of her. She thought: I need somebody to take care of me. The doctor had said that. She had flinched from his brown fingers, pressing her, prodding her, prizing open her lids and shining a torch into her eyes. But he had been kind to her—surprisingly kind, considering. Maybe he had forgotten what had happened last time; so many people made a fuss about the conditions in that place.

The doctor had actually sat down beside her—him, a busy man. “You shouldn’t be living alone at your age,” he had said. His badge said
Dr. Ravi Kapoor
. “Have you considered some sort of residential accommodation?”

“My son’ll look after me.”

“I know a very good place.” He had smiled at her, as if sharing a secret.

“Catch me being stuck in front of the telly with a lot of old bats.”

“I can see you’re a woman of spirit, Mrs. Donnelly.” When the doctor smiled, his face was transformed. Like a lot of those Indians, he was a handsome man. “Anyway, if you change your mind … I’ll get your address from Admissions and send you a brochure.”

There had been something puzzling about this conversation, but then the whole day had been disorienting. Muriel thought: I won’t be beaten. Two kids aren’t going to knock the stuffing out of me.
I can see you’re a woman of spirit
. She hadn’t lived through the war for this.

The war. One day she would tell her son what had happened—the whole story, not the parts she had told before. She had always put it off—tomorrow, the next week. It never seemed the right moment. All of a sudden it would be too late; the events of today had demonstrated that.

The bus jerked to a halt outside her flat. The windows were dark, of course. So were those of her neighbor Winnie; she was away, staying with her daughter in Bromley.

“Sure you’ll be all right?” asked the driver.

Muriel nodded. “I’ll let myself in.” She didn’t want him to see where she hid her spare set of keys.

She felt odd: light-headed, numb. Later she realized it was a portent. She crossed the forecourt to her front door. The keys were there, in their plastic bag behind the tub of geraniums. She thought of the real Leonard, the human one. Like the Indian doctor, he, too, had a smile that transformed his face. Say he had missed his train and taken a later one; say the bomb had fallen on somebody else. Then it would have been Lenny waiting in the flat with tea and buttered toast, ready to kiss her better.

But then, of course, her son would never have been born. The thought made her weightless.

The door swung open. She hadn’t inserted the key. It just swung open.

Muriel stepped inside and switched on the light.

Something was wrong. Surely she had locked the door behind her when she went out shopping, a hundred years ago?

Muriel stood still. She felt a draught—a chill wind from the kitchen. In their vase, the peacock feathers trembled.

The back door was open—that was why. Somebody had been into her flat; maybe they were still there. Muriel stood in the hallway, her heart knocking against her ribs.
Keith, where are you?

She knew she should get out of the flat but she stayed there, stuck. She thought: Those boys, they had my keys. They know where I live.

Then she seemed to be in the lounge. She switched on the light. The bookshelf had been knocked over. The ornaments lay on the floor—her Royal Family mugs, her glass animals. The settee was skewed sideways. Despite the disorder, there was an emptiness in the room. It took her a moment to realize that her TV was gone—the big wide-screen TV that Keith had given her.

Muriel whispered: “Leonard?”

There was no sign of her cat. He must be terrified. Muriel went into the bedroom and opened her wardrobe. He wasn’t there. She bent down, creakingly, and fished out the shoe box. The cash was still there—two hundred pounds, her money for emergencies.

Muriel felt a brief flush of triumph and then she burst into tears.

R
avi returned to an empty house. His wife and father-in-law had left that morning. At this moment they must be thirty thousand feet above Bahrain.

As he walked from room to room, he felt lighter. The invasion had been lifted; his house had been returned to him. There were no signs of Norman’s habitation except some sheets in the washing machine, which Pauline had switched on before she left. There was a note to that effect in the kitchen. Ravi pulled out the damp sheets, stuffed them into the dryer and slammed the door shut. It was as if Norman had never existed. Ravi slotted
Cosí fan Tutte
into the CD player. How fleeting is our imprint upon this earth, he thought. Just a footprint in the sand, and soon the wind will blow it away. Ferrando’s voice swelled out:
“Un’ aura amorosa …,”
a loving breeze brings balm to my soul.

Ravi drew the curtains. He sank back in the sofa and gazed at the armchair, the one occupied by Norman for the past four months. Soon it would revert to simply being an armchair again. How little we leave behind, he thought. He pictured the plastic bags of belongings in A & E: spectacles, a watch. He had lost a patient that day—a motorcycle accident. There had been two muggings (including that Mrs. Donnelly), a lacerated finger, a first-degree burn from a chip pan. So many near-collisions—knives slipping on chopping boards, lorries skidding—it was a miracle that anybody survived into old age at all.
“What about karma?”
Pauline had asked. Like many English people, she was attracted by that subcontinental mumbo-jumbo. He resented her talking in those terms; it was a betrayal of what he had given up his life to do—to restore the casualties of chance, to mend the cracked vessels. Didn’t she understand the most basic thing about him?

It felt odd, sending Pauline to his home country without being by her side. He would have been interested to see her reactions; in her present moody state she could swing in any direction. Besides, India had an unexpected effect on people; one could never predict who would surrender to its allure and who would be baffled and distressed. He himself had returned on a couple of occasions to visit his family, but both times without his wife. The first occasion was when they were going through that rough patch and Pauline had moved out; the second time was when her mother was dying and Pauline had had to remain in England. For reasons Ravi was disinclined to investigate, he wasn’t sorry.

On this occasion, of course, he was simply too busy to go. He couldn’t take time off work, and then there was Ravison Ltd. It was thrilling, to discover in himself this aptitude for business. The very word
business
made his heart beat faster. All his life he had worked in a bureaucracy, ruled by its own caste system, stifled by budgets and management incompetence. Now he felt like a pit pony loosed into the sunshine. Anything was possible—large amounts of money, the power to change things by his own decision. Once the business was up and running, he could even consider resigning from the hospital. He could get up when he liked, he could work the hours he liked. He could travel around the world, liaising with architects under coconut palms. Ravi’s very body felt different, as if unknown muscles were strengthening. Really he should be grateful to that old sod Norman for giving him the idea in the first place.

Dorabella and Fiordiligi were singing of forgiveness.
“Fortunato c’uom che prende …”
Ravi wiped away a tear. He went into the kitchen. Pauline, bless her, had left the fridge well stocked. He pictured her tall, broad-shouldered body and felt a stir of desire. Now that she was absent his wife had reverted, like the house, to her old self—brisk, amusing, undisturbed by the turbulence of the menopause and the presence of her father. Even Norman could be remembered more kindly now—as a cheery old reprobate rather than his tormentor.

Ravi put a fisherman’s pie into the microwave. He was a bachelor again, filled with vim and optimism. After supper he would go upstairs and catch up with work. Everything was going according to plan. The first residents had been installed with only minor problems. Sonny wouldn’t lie to him; they were in this thing together, fifty-fifty.

Ravi tore open a bag of salad leaves and shook them into a bowl. In the old days he would be exhausted when he came home from the hospital. Nowadays, despite double the workload, he was filled with energy. How exhilarating it was, working for himself rather than for other people! He mixed a vinaigrette—walnut oil, lime juice. He even felt tenderly toward Mrs. Donnelly.
“Here I am again,”
she had said,
“turned up like a bad penny.”
She was trying to be cheerful, even though she was shaken. Ravi no longer considered her a racist bigot, more a plucky old bird. After all, the world had changed so profoundly; it must be confusing for somebody of her age. He would send her a brochure, although, as Pauline had said, there was not a hope in hell that she would go. Muriel Donnelly, of all people!

For one thing, she wouldn’t have the money. And then there was her other little problem.

Tossing the salad, Ravi smiled. The old girl was right, of course. They
were
all over the place nowadays; you couldn’t get away from them. Especially, of course, in the health sector. In fact, it was immaterial what country you happened to be in when your time came. Whether you were in Watford or Wisconsin, in all likelihood the last face you would see, on this earth, would be a black one.