Adam's Peak (35 page)

Early the next morning, he asked to be wheeled to the telephone down the hall, where he placed a collect call to his father. It was the first task he'd attempted since hauling himself across the pavement, and the limitations of his body surprised him. His arm immediately grew sore holding the receiver; his foggy mind struggled to remember the phone number. When his father answered, the familiar voice was jarring.

“So, you're fine, son,” he said. “We were concerned when we heard the news of that bloody bombing, but I told Mary you would have been in school.”

Rudy inhaled. “Actually, Dad, I was in the city. I saw it happen.” A predictable silence followed. “They had to take me to the hospital.” He tried to sound alert, alive. “I have a cracked pelvis, but it's not serious. I'm okay. I'll be home in a couple of days.”

“You're coming home?” Alec said.

Again Rudy took a breath. “I mean Wattala home. Aunty's place. But, Dad, tell Aunty she doesn't need to come back for me. I'm fine.”

“Broken pelvis, you say? What happened?” In the background Rudy could hear his aunt, her own frantic questions going unanswered as Alec pressed him further. “What were you doing in the city? It was a school day, no?”

“
Cracked
pelvis, Dad. A three-wheeler bumped into me.” He paused. “I was on a prep. I went downtown to do some errands.”

“My God. Not both of you,” his father muttered.

“Both of who?” Rudy said, then he understood. He softened his voice. “It's okay, Dad. I'm not badly hurt. I'll be fine.” His nurse was leaning against the wall, examining her fingernails. He turned away from her. “They're just being extra-cautious with me, 'cause I'm a foreigner. I guess it looks bad that I was caught up in this.”

The conversation shifted briefly to the details of the event, then Rudy spoke to his aunt. His lies to her weren't too extravagant: yes, he could walk; just a small limp and a few bruises; he'd be back at work soon. When Aunty sent Bernadette to visit him in the hospital, he was
found out, of course, but Bernadette had made it clear she had everything under control.

As his cousin washed the lunch dishes, Rudy's thoughts drifted from his own hospital stay to Susie's maternity ward quarters, the last hospital room he'd suffered before his recent ordeal. He remembered sitting in the vinyl armchair at the foot of the bed, holding the baby and staring with a vague mournfulness at his sister. For it seemed just then that Susie, her long hair mussed, dark circles under her eyes, had become a different person. A mother, a stranger. Even Dad and Adam had seemed different. Somehow the pink-faced, crazy-haired baby in Rudy's arms had changed them all, shifted their very identities, and Rudy had found himself stupidly resenting the tiny creature for the imposition.

He owed his sister a letter. “Write to Susie when you get the chance,” Adam had instructed, generously implying that the only thing interfering with the writing of such a letter was busyness. Adam himself used to call Susie every few days, just to check in.
Used to.
Staring at the ceiling, Rudy fought off images of the frightening hospital paraphernalia that was keeping his brother alive and composed feeble apologies in his head. Then Bernadette returned.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” she called from the bedroom doorway. “You have company.”

Rudy roused himself and squinted. Nisal had arrived. It was time to be Van Twest, the English teacher.

Smiling awkwardly, Nisal ducked past Bernadette and approached the bed, almost on tiptoe. “Apologies for being early,” he said. “How are you?”

“Not bad. Getting there.” Rudy gestured toward the chair next to his bed. “Have a seat.”

While Nisal got himself settled, Bernadette brought in two glasses of iced tea then announced again that she was leaving. Rudy said, “Be careful,” and she shooed him with a flap of her hand, smiling her broad smile.

Nisal loosened his tie. “I wanted to come sooner, but my son and daughter have had school holidays, and ...”

“Don't worry. I wasn't very good company before anyway.”

The math teacher winced slightly. “Terrible business this is, Van Twest. We were so shocked.”

“Yeah, I was pretty shocked too, I tell you.” Rudy laughed, trying to ease the fellow's nervousness. “Not the sort of thing you expect to happen on a walk in the city. Or I guess I should say it's not the sort of thing
I
expect.”

“Muller said you were going to the bank. Is that right?”

“Sort of. I was kind of wandering.”

“You saw the whole thing?”

“Not really. I was walking the other way. Then I heard the guns.”

Nisal shook his head and made a whistling sound. “And then ...? What happened? Big Bang sort of thing?”

Rudy met his colleague's eyes. “It was big.”

Squeamishly, he ventured back to the fateful scene, aware that the time had come to ask about Kanda. The urgency of his nightmares was suddenly with him, and his conscious mind prepared for an end to the chase. He gave himself the news:
Listen, Van Twest. I hate to break this to you, but you weren't the only one from school out in the city that day. Muller didn't want to upset you when he visited the hospital.
He glanced at the painting of Adam's Peak and cleared his throat.

“So, anyway ... how did the term finish off ?”

“Oh, very good.” Nisal relaxed in his chair and sipped his drink. “The heat was getting pretty bad by the end, but we soldiered through.”

“Did that genius kid in grade nine get any more hundreds?”

“Pradeep? Oh, yes. That chap gets nothing but perfect scores! Keeps me on my toes.”

“Amazing.” Rudy shook his head. “Hey, you teach the Selvarajah boy, don't you? Kanda?” Behind the casual demeanour, his heart was pounding.

“Oh yes,” Nisal replied. “Also a bright boy.”

There was no sign in the math teacher's face that anything was wrong, but Rudy had to be sure.

“He missed his last English class before I went out of commission. It was really unusual. I was just wondering if he was around for the end of term.”

Nisal's forehead pinched briefly. “Yes—I'm certain he was there. Hasn't missed any math classes.”

Rudy slumped back against the pillows and closed his eyes.

“Everything all right?” his colleague said.

He struggled to focus. “Yes. Fine. It's just the heat.”

Nisal nudged the fan cage toward him. “You know, I just now remembered. The Selvarajah boy was asking about you. Yes, I think he was worried about you, Van Twest.”

Rudy forced a smile. “Worried about having Muller assign his term grade probably.”

“No, no. He was very concerned. I'm sure of it.”

Again Rudy smiled, a smile of gratitude that wasn't altogether deceitful, but his thoughts were unruly. Now that he had it, this information about Kanda wanted mulling over. But Nisal had travelled more than an hour by train to see him. Shoving aside the brood of questions clamouring for his attention, he sat up straight.

“So ... you still need to tell me about that math theory.”

“Fermat's theorem?”

Rudy had no idea, but he nodded. “Yeah, that's it. I've been waiting to hear it.”

For an instant his colleague eyed him suspiciously, then he smiled and slipped into the kind of enthusiasm that succeeded in convincing teenagers math could be worthwhile. “Well, to begin with, Van Twest, it's the story
about
the theorem that you'd find most interesting. A real character drama. This Fermat, for instance, was not even a professional mathematician.”

While Nisal talked cheerfully about the seventeenth-century French lawyer setting out the proof of a dull-sounding mathematical idea then running out of space in his notebook, leaving behind a mystery that took generations to solve, Rudy half-listened and, despite his attempts not to, thought about Kanda.

He hadn't been hurt; he'd returned to school. In a sense, the pursuit was over. Yet the reason for his excursion to the city remained a mystery. Once more Rudy saw the boy standing on the traffic island. Was he on his way to an innocent appointment? Or playing hooky? Or was it something else? And Rudy himself: had he simply been a victim
of the same circumstantial flukes that had acted on every other person who'd found himself on President Street that morning? In his distracted state of mind, had he followed a young man who simply looked like Kanda? Or had he been lured away? Despite the heat, he shivered. He thought of Kanda's letter, its subtly chastising tone. Had the boy intended to teach him a lesson? And if so, just how severe a lesson? The most extreme possibility seemed preposterous, but he had to allow that his Morgan Hill years had perhaps rendered him incapable of seeing certain things.

He was pondering this, tormenting himself with barely imaginable scenarios, when someone knocked at the front door.

“More visitors?” Nisal said, breaking off from his story.

Rudy shrugged. “No idea.” He was inclined to ignore the knock.

They sat in silence for a moment, then Nisal jumped to his feet. “Sorry, machan! I forgot about your injury. I'll answer it.”

“No, you don't need—” Rudy began, but his friend was already at the bedroom door. “If it's one of the neighbours, tell them I'm asleep,” he called out in a raspy whisper, then he sank back against his pillow.

Waiting for Nisal to return, he listened to the faint rustle of vegetation outside his bedroom window and tried to forget his student. He fantasized that the visitor at the door was Clare. Aunty had told him that she'd shown up at his father's house, once with her mother and once alone. The solitary visit in particular made him jealous, for in his imagination Clare Fraser belonged to him. She received all his rants and uncertainties and pains, and he was unwilling to share her. He'd recoiled from the image of her chatting with his father and his aunt in their Morgan Hill living room, and now, to combat the violation even further, he indulged the fantasy that Clare had come to see him. She'd heard about his injuries and was worried about him. Any moment now she would appear in the doorway, a fairy-like figure (Nisal would have slipped away), and they would acknowledge each other without words. She would cross the room and sit next to him on the bed, their bodies barely touching. He would tell her about his failures, and she would absolve him with a light touch of her hand. Eventually they would be naked. But there'd be no undressing, no coarse grappling with buttons or zips. It would just happen. And then—

He heard Nisal's voice and was jolted back by the realization that his friend had been gone quite a long time. There was another voice, too—a man's—and the two were speaking Sinhala. Rudy considered the possibilities. A neighbour? Another colleague? More likely, it was the “special doctor” the woman next door kept threatening to send over. Rudy began rapidly devising excuses not to be examined by the quack when the thought struck him, chillingly, that the visitor was someone associated with Kanda.

His thoughts flew off, worlds away from Morgan Hill Road.

The boy had been involved somehow in the attack. He'd had a role to play—something he needed to do at the clock tower, a signal of some kind. He knew he'd been followed, that Rudy had seen him, and he'd spoken to his superiors.

Rudy's muscles clenched. His heart thundered. He was back on Janadhipathi Mawatha, in the prickling interval between the gunshots and the bomb. If not for his injuries, he would have bolted for the back door. Instead he sat, frozen, grateful that Bernadette was long gone, insisting to himself that whatever was about to happen to him was only fair. He'd been sheltered too long.

Nisal appeared in the doorway first.

“You have a surprise visitor,” he announced, his manner strangely formal. “I should be leaving anyway. There's a train at two o'clock.”

The surprise visitor had changed the atmosphere of the house. Though Rudy couldn't yet see the man, he was conscious of the commanding presence, the foreignness and fearsomeness of Kanda's world. The air prickled with uncertainty.

“Thanks for coming, Nisal,” he said.

“My pleasure. Thank you for the drink.” He waved. “Get well soon.”

Nisal turned and took his leave of the visitor standing behind him. The man stepped forward into the doorway. He was silver-haired, slender, and had fairer skin than Rudy had anticipated. He wore a white shirt, with a bulge in the breast pocket, and grey trousers.

“Rudyard. May I come in?” he said, and instantly Kanda's world evaporated.

Rudy nodded. “Yes. Of course.”

“I don't imagine you recognize me.” The visitor approached the bed. His face, though old, was unmistakable. Glaringly recognizable. They shook hands, and Rudy's heart continued to race. “I'm Ernest Van Twest,” the man said. “Your father's brother.”

Rudy nodded. “Uncle.”

Uncle Ernie lowered himself slowly into the chair by the bed, his green-brown eyes surveying the room, resting only briefly on his own painting. Rudy stared, conscious that his near-reverential silence could go on only so long, and that he would have only trivial questions with which to break it.
How are you? How was the trip from Kandy? When did you arrive?
But Ernie spoke first.

“I apologize for showing up unannounced. Mary has been ringing me from Canada, trying to get me over here.” He said this matter-of-factly, and it was impossible to tell how he felt about his sister's requests. “I had some business in the city, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone, if you'll pardon the expression.” He glanced over his shoulder, toward the bedroom door. “I hope I wasn't interrupting anything private ... with your friend.”

The obvious implications of Uncle Ernie's remark took Rudy by surprise. Yet they made sense. To Ernie, he was a blank slate.