The A-Z of Us (14 page)

But now he'd lost a vital email from Vickeray's attorney in New York, and the unpleasant emotions that he'd been protecting himself from were swooping in like dragons. It wasn't anywhere in the system, even though he was sure he'd filed it. He couldn't tell Josephine, the secretary he shared with the two other less senior lawyers in the department. Not yet. She would make a fuss, and Saville would be sure to hear of it.

Why was he so unlucky? Misfortune always befell him. At school, he'd slipped on a newly mopped assembly hall floor and broken his arm the day before the fifth-form ski trip. At University College, Oxford, his block had been the only one to be damaged by the fire in the college kitchens. He'd never won anything in his life – raffles, scratchcards, bets. Raj Singh never played the lottery. He never filled in boxes in newspapers to win cars, holidays or Christmas hampers. When he read about large cash wins, or fortunate escapes from the jaws of raw danger, he nodded slowly to himself. God smiled on others, he knew, not on Raj Singh. Because God had given Raj Singh too much at the outset.

He looked at his finger, wrapped in toilet paper. It was remarkable how easily and effectively a simple piece of paper could cut into flesh. He'd just been pulling documents from the New York file, in his desperate bid to find some evidence of the email. And now it was bleeding again.

Was this another punishment? Was it true, as he'd suspected at moments in his life, that such frequent afflictions were God's way of penalizing him for being born into a life of such consummate ease and privilege? ‘The
luckiest boy in Britain, my son!' when compared to the travails of the average infant in India, especially those unfortunates in the impoverished region of Kashmir (from where his mother proudly hailed).

Where was the bloody email? It could not have simply vanished.

‘Keep looking. It'll turn up.'

Gemma's voice. It was unmistakeable. He'd been hearing it at intervals over the previous ten days. It made him want to scream in rage, and sob with endless tears. She'd betrayed him. She'd told him that she didn't love him. What could he have done? He'd had to leave. Man not a mouse.

Anger returned once more. It was bullshit that he hadn't paid enough attention to her. Did she not realize how hard he was working? There were people at the office (women as well as men!) who saw much less of their partners than he did. He made an effort. He always had. But it wasn't enough for her, she needed more, always more, even though his hard-earned money was paying for her dream house, for the ridiculous expensive fittings, the reclaimed oak floors, the hand-crafted steel staircase, the pseudo-Japanese garden (how his father would cringe, if he ever saw so much concrete, in a country renowned for the greenness of its grass!). Even though his salary allowed her to follow her poorly paid path up the ladders of B-league architecture. Why couldn't she accept that for him to pursue his own (more illustrious) dream, he had to graft a damn sight harder than she did?

‘She doesn't know. She's had it too easy. They don't know what it is to work hard.'

His mother's voice, shrill and absolute. He did not agree wholeheartedly with her (Gemma's upbringing had not been necessarily easy, in its own lonely way, despite the west London affluence). Yet he did resent her, his soon-to-be ex-wife. He'd done all he could to be there for her, at the same time as working hard to succeed in his own career, which let's face it would be beneficial to both of them. He'd told her more than once how much even a junior partner earned, and he'd enjoyed seeing her eyes grow wide with surprised delight.

What did she think? He had to work hard. Didn't she understand that? He had to work harder than anyone, as he alone knew that he would never get any help from any quarter, especially not from a deity with omnipotent powers.

Sitting at the computer, wrapping a clean Kleenex around his bleeding finger, he clicked on to the file in his Drafts folder. The outline contract he'd been writing during lunch-breaks and on his laptop at the hotel in the grim dark hours before dawn appeared. The divorce contract. Singh versus Cook-Singh.

It was fair, he thought, nodding to himself as he scrolled through the points. She would get the house, but nothing more. She'd have to raise finance to finish the work, or sell it somehow. That was not his problem. She was an architect, she could figure it out. She was getting assets approximating to £850,000 once the work was completed. Any judge would consider it more than equitable.

He clicked to close the document. From somewhere cold inside him, he sensed tears welling. Bloody hell! He had not cried in days, not since the last sobbing session
alone in the hotel room in front of a repeat of
Friends
at 2 a.m. He turned his wedding ring round and round, as if it might produce magic, conjuring a happy solution to both the New York email and his marriage from invisibility.

All around him men and women proceeded purposefully about the office, talking quickly, moving with alacrity and sureness. None of them were feeling the emptiness that invaded him now. They were filled with direction and resolve. He hated how lonely they made him feel.

It was an anguish he knew well, from school to university and beyond. It wasn't the early chants of ‘Paki!' or ‘Brown arse!', or the way white people eyed him on the buses in Morden (after all, his ethnicity and background were none of his own doing). Such comments and looks made him feel strong, made him feel part of something (the ‘coloured' community). It was the more personal individual rejections that were clearly snubbing him, rather than his skin or his parents' country of origin, that hurt Raj most.

Last to be picked for football (two other Indian boys were star centre forward and goalkeeper respectively).

Mocked by mini-skirted slacker girls for his thick glasses.

Dumped by Sarah Jenkinson, out of nowhere, the night of the sixth form Christmas party, because she said he was too dull and couldn't dance.

Chastised by his Oxford tutor for ‘not capitalizing on your undoubted strong intellect and pushing yourself beyond what you feel is achievable, into realms that challenge and expand your existing knowledge!'

And now, finally and most spectacularly rejected by his
wife, the beautiful, artistic Gemma. Not because of his race, or his looks, but because he was Raj Singh. The lawyer. The workaholic. The failed husband.

‘I don't love you any more.'

Shame gilded shame. He could not tell his parents. He could picture his mother's face, hear her soft, biting words.

‘Oh, Raji, what did I tell you?'

No one in his family had ever divorced before. But then, as he was sure his mother would point out to every mamma-ji, mammi-ji, masi-ji, massar-ji, chacha-ji, chachi-ji, thaya-ji, thayi-ji, bhua-ji, phuphur-ji, cousins, second cousins, nephews, nieces, family friends and anybody with relatives within the 1,222,243 square miles of sovereign Indian territory, no one in his family had ever married a
ghoree
before. A white woman. Raj Singh had been the first. He'd finally pushed himself beyond, to realms that had challenged and expanded his existing knowledge. And look where it had got him.

He wondered for the sixty-third time if the washing machine incident had started it. Perhaps if he could pinpoint the moment of inception, when everything had started to go wrong, he could retrace the steps and somehow set them right. That was what he was trained to do – to go back through the documents and see where the wording first became ambiguous, or hostile, or just plain confusing.

He'd done the laundry one Sunday afternoon, having been made to feel guilty about his lack of participation in the general household chores (why didn't they get the cleaner to come more often, was his question, one which had been rejected immediately by his wife, who'd informed
him he was, as usual, avoiding the real issue!). He'd put in a bundle of clothes, including items of her underwear, the lacy panties and bras that he still marvelled at, even though he'd lived with her for over two years, lingering to touch the finely stitched lace and silk before placing them reverentially in the 6 kg Siemens drum. Such finery, such delicacy – it seemed a miracle that he, the clumsy, introverted bore should be permitted to fondle such beauty. He'd set the dial to the cooler wash (Raj Singh remembered orders) and left the machine to spin.

He'd forgotten about his red socks. They'd been a present from his mother the previous Christmas. He'd forgotten to separate his wife's white La Perla bra and knickers and her white slips that she wore in bed. When Gemma pulled out the washing from the machine after her bath, she'd called him downstairs. He knew something was wrong, from her quiet, deliberate tone.

She was holding the pink underwear like the entrails of a dead pet. The look of disappointment and disdain on her face was clear. She did not shout (that would have been so much easier to deal with). She was quietly resigned. Sad, even.

‘You're like a leopard, Raj…' she muttered, almost to herself. ‘You just can't change your spots, can you?!'

He had turned without a word and hurried back up the stairs to his computer and the refuge of the latest contract, not angry at her, but feeling the familiar deep despair with himself that he'd got it all wrong, again.

Still he could not find the New York email. He resolved to lay his concerns to one side, to re-focus, to take control once more. He opened the Vickeray contract and tried to
focus on the problematic clause 7. iii, with its deliberately ambiguous position regarding ancillary distribution rights. He read and re-read the lines carefully, allowing himself to be drawn into the exactitude of the terms, delighting in the lengthy, multi-syllabic words that seemed almost mathematical in their placing, so meticulously, so daintily positioned to balance and contrast, a formula conjured by the brightest and most steadfast of British and American legal intellects, until the small black letters in their neatly configured lines seemed to him a perfect riposte to the turmoil in his heart and mind – a chart forged out of chaos.

He changed a couple of words, erased a comma, added a semi-colon, and sat back, momentarily satisfied. Then Josephine strode up to his desk and announced:

‘There's someone here to see you Mr Singh. He says he's a friend,' in a tone suggesting rampant disapproval.

He was shocked and angered to find Ian Thompson sitting in the waiting room. He looked like he'd just stepped from a gym or some suburban shopping mall, in tracksuit trousers with a rip in the side, and a sweatshirt. He was holding a pair of crutches awkwardly, as if embarrassed by them. His right leg was encased in thick white plaster.

‘Hello, Ian. I'm rather busy, I've a deadline. What do you want?'

Raj had an inkling of what Ian wanted and it angered him further. Who did he think he was? Bloody Ross, or fat old Chandler from
Friends
? This wasn't some bloody sitcom, in which cheery buddies shared problems and partners. This was real life. And Ian had crossed an
important line, just by stepping into Raj's office, his sanctuary. By sticking his bloody nose in, where it really was not wanted.

‘Er… I thought we should have a quick chat.'

Raj remembered all the reasons he didn't like Ian. The man seemed to have an old-fashioned sense of
noblesse oblige
about him – it was as if he thought he could go anywhere, talk to anyone, and somehow people would welcome him, and listen. Raj knew such blind bravado well – many of the public schoolboys at Oxford had possessed a similar imperviousness to surroundings, instilled as they were with the belief, from an early age, that the world was indeed their oyster, lobster, clam – in fact their whole all-you-can-eat seafood platter.

‘What about?'

As if he didn't know.

‘Gemma. Your wife.'

Suddenly, Raj had a surge of desire to punch Ian Thompson. It was just a flash – a feeling he'd had only very rarely in his life – a bully at school who'd picked on a small, thin Ghanaian student, a member of the Keble College rugby team who'd stolen his bike at a party, his cousin Sarchin when he broke Raj's Pacman when they were ten. But he'd never hit anybody. His father had always preached restraint over revenge, reflection over reaction. And Raj wasn't going to lose his job just because Ian Thompson hadn't the decency and tact to use a telephone instead of invading his sacred ground.

‘I've got five minutes. Come on.'

They sat opposite each other in the small conference room. He'd noted Josephine's glare as he'd hurried Ian
through the door. He'd have to come up with some explanation. Maybe he'd say this was his wife's cousin, who needed advice about medical malpractice. That way he could appear both caring and knowledgeable.

Ian seemed in a belligerent mood. He sat down slowly, then leant his elbows on the mahogany conference table and glared across at Raj. Raj felt uncomfortable, as he did whenever there was a hint of aggression in a room. He tried to think of something to say to break the tension. Between them sat a bowl of dried fruit – Stephen Chambers's addiction to healthfoods was well known (and ridiculed) in the office.

‘Raisin? Almond?' Raj tipped the bowl towards Ian.

‘I'm allergic to nuts. Remember?'

Raj didn't remember. He withdrew the bowl quickly. He sensed the blood flushing to his neck and cheeks.

‘Sorry. I forgot.'

Ian nodded, once. Raj breathed in, trying to feel like a lawyer.

‘So…' he began, pleased that he sounded measured, yet concerned, ‘what would you like to discuss, Ian?'

Ian laughed, bitterly.

‘You're not being fair. You need to talk to her. You can't just walk off. You've really hurt her.'

Raj could not believe what he was hearing.

‘Let me get this straight? I've hurt her? Have you forgotten, in your misguided attempts to support your so-called friend, that she was the one who told me she doesn't love me, probably never has, and doesn't want to be with me any more?'