Adam's Peak (29 page)

Then Amitha laughed, a low, off-key sort of laugh, and Alec looked more closely. Ernie's fingers were laced together in another hand sign. Amitha lowered one of his own hands from the wall and took hold of Ernie's thumb. Carefully he manipulated its position, then he switched to the wrist of Ernie's other hand and moved it, too. A lesson, it seemed. Ernie had attempted one of the tea taster's hand signs and made Amitha laugh when he did it wrong. Now Amitha was correcting him. The explanation was both straightforward and entirely insufficient, and Alec was suddenly afraid to keep watching. He turned away and marched off in the direction of the P.D.'s bungalow, frowning intensely.

At the mouth of the long dirt drive that led to the road, he stopped and surveyed his calm surroundings helplessly. He wanted desperately to be playing cricket—to have a solid bat in his hands and the promise of a perfect, biting crack of contact to dislodge the baffling scene in his head. Eyeing the distance to the road, he assumed a batsman's stance and swung at the air. Then he ran.

It was well over a wicket's length to the end of the drive, but when he reached the road, he turned left and kept going, in the direction of Nuwara Eliya. He was no longer Alec Van Twest the school cricket champion, however; he was a British soldier, just landed in France, and the entire world was counting on virtuous, fearless men like him to run out the evil Nazis. He ran faster, in spite of the heat. Then he modified his story. The Nazis had retreated back across Europe, into Asia, and were now infiltrating Ceylon with the help of the Japanese. They were planning to reorganize in the hill country, where they thought only ignorant peasants lived (though they were in for a rude awakening). At that very moment, Nazis and Japs were closing in on Nuwara Eliya, and a citizens' alert had been issued. All able-bodied males were being called upon to help fight. Alec wiped his forehead on his sleeve. The other boys his age had been instructed to stay home, but he, Alec Van Twest, was an exception; his remarkable abilities had been noticed. He was brilliant: he'd learned everything there was to know about tea making and would probably be appointed P.D. as soon as he came of age. He was stealthy: he'd been spying on factory intruders, and rumour had it he was on the verge of an arrest. He was strong and fast. Most importantly, he had charisma—an often-ignored but crucial quality. Some men pretended to possess it, but they were fakes and impostors and weren't to be trusted.

Alec's soles rattled against the hard pavement, and he wished he were wearing his tennis shoes. Soldiers didn't wear tennis shoes, of course, but then soldiers didn't generally run long distances on paved roads under the April sun. A few yards up the Normandy beach and into the safety of a village—what could be easier? The road to Nuwara Eliya, on the other hand, was miles long. It was winding and much hillier than it ever seemed in the car. Alec looked over his shoulder and was both impressed and vaguely anxious to see that the P.D.'s
bungalow had disappeared. He ran on, but in his isolation the futility of what he was doing became more and more apparent. At the sight of a fruit stand up ahead, he slowed to a jog, then a walk. His chest heaved and sweat streamed down his face and back. For a moment he couldn't remember what had brought him out on this ridiculous marathon in the first place, but when the scene behind the tea factory came back to him, as confusing as before, Alec feared it would be impossible to get rid of.

He picked up a long, thin branch from the side of the road and whipped it through the weeds growing next to the pavement. He whipped the mercilessly hot air. Then he whipped the outstretched palms of several invisible Nazis. He was about to strike at his brother, for refusing to take him to Nuwara Eliya, when his attention shifted to Amitha and found there a surprisingly fitting target. He pictured the uneducated, unspeaking tea taster leaning over his brother and lashed out with his whip. The stick whistled through the air, and for a second or two the figure in his mind lurched in pain. Then it resumed its position, as if nothing had happened, and Alec was forced to lash out again. Over and over he repeated the process, sweating and grunting, until some people in the back of a passing lorry pointed at him and laughed. Scowling, he threw his whip at the lorry, but the branch flopped unceremoniously to the pavement.

Now just a few yards from the fruit stand, Alec dug in his trouser pockets and came up with enough coins to buy a coconut. There were plenty of drinks in the icebox at home, but the cool, sweet water of a king coconut was the least the world owed him on this infernal day. The fruit vendor was alone at his stand, and as Alec approached him he silently rehearsed his request in Sinhala. It was a habit he'd acquired from his brother, who insisted it was rude always to speak English to shopkeepers and labourers. Right before the carefully chosen words left Alec's mouth, however, he swallowed them back. For through a muddy but powerful logic, the fruit vendor became, suddenly, an enemy, no less deserving of his contempt than Amitha. The two were no different, really, for they both belonged to that tribe of men lurking silently in shadows all over the country, waiting to take over. Both the Tea Maker and Ernie had suggested as much. But while Alec had
previously found the prospect of such a takeover exciting, he now recoiled from it, ashamed that he'd done nothing as yet to combat it.

“One coconut,” he said, in the haughtiest, most disdainful tone he could muster.

“Some fruit too?” the man said. “Nice rambutan? Banana?”

“No.”

The fruit vendor lopped off the top of a fat yellow coconut and offered the bulky drink to Alec. Wordlessly Alec handed over his money then went to sit under a nearby tree, his back against the trunk, his legs splayed. He tipped the coconut, took a few gulps, and stared. Before him was a swooping, sprawling valley of tea, rolling waves of green, dotted here and there with crimson-flowered trees. Far below him a river sparkled, and on the other side of the valley waterfalls rushed down craggy cliffs. The beauty of the scene was so astonishing he wondered how it was that he hadn't ever noticed it, and he sat in a kind of awe. But it didn't last.

Once again the factory scene came back to him, more disturbing than before, and, with it, a vague recollection of a schoolyard conversation with Rohan and Peter. It was then that Alec had learned there are men who do
it
with other men. “Homos,” they were called. Lunatics, perverts. “Up the arsehole!” Rohan had hissed, and the three of them nearly exploded. It was funny at the time, in the way that disgusting things were funny, but now the idea filled Alec with horror. He saw Amitha's hand touching his brother's, his face and shoulders leaning closer, and the source of his uneasiness became clear: the tea taster was a threat. A far more dangerous one than any ordinary labourer or fruit vendor could be, because his true nature was hidden. And though Alec didn't quite believe that his brother would be gullible enough to succumb entirely to Amitha's evil, Ernie was, as their father often said, too easily influenced by other people.

His thoughts now far away from the valley before him, Alec imagined a third Ernie, a secret one, taking up residence in his home, joining the Tea Maker's fantasy Ernie and the Ernie who painted pictures and occasionally took his brother on drives into town. It couldn't work, surely. For even if this new Ernie were a decent chap—and such a thing was clearly impossible—the house would be too crowded.

Alec drained his coconut, and the fruit vendor came over to slice the shell in half. Alec took the halves and scraped the pulp from the inside using a wedge of shell hacked off by the man. When he'd finished eating, he pitched the coconut husks, one at a time, as hard as he could, down into the valley. Then he slumped back against the tree and stared out again at the vast sea of green. He would stay there forever, he thought—or at least a very long time. He would make everyone back home frantic with worry—even the P.D., but especially Ernie, who would have a guilty conscience to begin with and would promise to renounce his sins if only Alec could be found. But within minutes he was restless and his backside was sore. He was still miles from Nuwara Eliya—impossible to get there and back before dinner. And besides, there would be nothing to do in town by himself.

Sullenly he stood up, brushed the dirt from his trousers, and set off down the road. He'd walked several yards when the enemy fruit vendor called to him, and Alec turned, just in time to catch a fat rambutan, drilled at him with terrific accuracy. He looked up, confused, impressed, and a little frightened.

“Good catch!” the fruit vendor called.

Alec hesitated, then called back, “Nandri!”—unsure in his confusion whether he'd thanked the man in Sinhala or Tamil.

As he walked, he examined the rambutan. It was like a sea urchin, pale green spines sprouting from its thick, pink skin. Alec pierced the skin with his thumbnail and tore it away from the pearly fruit, which plopped into his hand, firm and round as a hard-boiled egg. He'd eaten hundreds of these things before, but, just as he had ignored the spectacular beauty of the valley, so too, he realized, had he failed to appreciate the extraordinary weirdness of the rambutan. The whole world, now that he thought about it, was weird and unpredictable. He tossed away the rambutan's empty skin and bit into the fruit. Along with the sweet flesh were tenacious fragments of the woody seed, which marred the fruit's texture, but not enough to make him spit it out.

F
RIDAY MORNING
, on the train, Clare studied the thick, glossy travel booklets she'd collected Thursday during her lunch break. The books described tours to various parts of the world, and each featured a page or two of itineraries with names like “Coconuts, Tea, and Kandy” and “Exploring Buddha's Island.” Unlike her father's dated atlas, the books had photos—images carefully selected to seduce, no doubt, but irrefutably real nonetheless. The pictures gave substance to her fuzzy imaginings, and she savoured them as her city-bound train chugged through the flat west-island landscape. She placed herself in these improved scenes, and the person she saw, strolling breezily in sandals and a bright pink sarong, chestnut hair tied in a loose knot under a wide-brimmed hat, seemed an ideal of Clare Fraser.

At work, she tried to be more practical. Hovering in the guitar section while a teenage boy tested one Fender after another, she forced herself to confront those features of her project that would, sooner or later, threaten to scare her off. She wasn't afraid for her safety. Sri Lanka's political strife was distant and unreal. Her real fear was of regular people, and the necessity of confronting those people every day, relying on them for basic necessities. She could imagine what Emma
would say—not the real Emma, perhaps, but certainly the other one:
You deal with strangers every time you come to work, Clare
.
Not very well, mind you, but you manage. Horrible things aren't going to happen just because you've left home. You could—

But before she could finish, Adam's voice interrupted.
You could be walking down the Boulevard tomorrow and be hit by a truck,
he said, clearly delighted with the irony of his remark. Then he became serious, kind.
You don't need to worry. I'll be there with you.

She allowed him to reassure her. To tell her that people would be friendly and helpful, that neither she nor her luggage would get lost, that toilets would be plentiful and easy to locate, and that she'd come down with nothing more debilitating than a cold. Satisfied for the moment, she turned her attention to her customer, who'd run into difficulty.

“Try an E flat,” she said, and the boy's body relaxed visibly as his song lurched ahead.

At the start of her lunch break, she walked to the passport office to pick up an application. On the way back, she stopped at a photography studio, and a dark-haired man with a thick mustache and a heavy accent took her photo. Peering through the viewfinder and gesturing with his enormous hands, he directed her to move a little to the right, to lift her chin, to sit tall. As he dried the prints with a hair dryer, he nodded, satisfied. “Very nice,” he said. “Very beautiful.” Clare smiled awkwardly, but as she walked back to work, she told herself that perhaps travel could be that easy, and her step quickened with the sensation that her trip had already started.

After lunch, when business was slow and Markus was in his office doing paperwork, she sat at the front counter and began filling out the application. The form gave her a queer, almost joyful, confidence. Inside the designated boxes, she supplied the first few facts—FRASER; CLARE JEAN; 14 • 03 • 1965; MONTREAL—delighted both with the certainty of the bold block letters and numbers and with her government's willingness to be satisfied with such a primitive account of who she was.

She was in the process of converting her height to centimetres when Peter slipped behind the counter. He rested his forearms on the glass and ran his silver tongue stud across his teeth a few times.