The Cat’s Table (13 page)

Did I feel guilty that I had not loved him enough? That was partly it. But it was not any thought that broke down the wall, allowing him to come into me. I must have begun remembering, replaying all the little fragments of him that revealed the concern he had for me. A gesture to signal that I was spilling something on my shirt, which in fact had happened the last time I saw him. The way he tried to include me in what he was excitedly learning. How he went out of his way to hunt me down and then remain my friend in England, when he had gone to one school and I to another. I was not difficult to find in the network of expatriates, but anyway he had searched me out.

I have no idea how long I sat like that, by the plate-glass window that separated me from the street, with Massi across from me not saying a word, just her hand reaching out to me, palm turned up, that I did not see and so had not taken. We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them. It had taken me a long time. I couldn’t look at her. I peered beyond the fall of restaurant light into the dark.

‘Come. Come with me,’ she said, and we went up the stone steps of the station to wait for the train. There were still a few minutes and we walked up and down the long platform to its unlit peripheries and back, not a word between us. When the train approached there would be an embrace, a kiss of recognition and sadness that would knock down the door for us for the next few years. We heard the crackle of an announcement and then saw one light beaming down on us.

SOME EVENTS TAKE a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence. I see now that I married Massi to stay close to a community from childhood I felt safe in and, I realised, still wished for.

Massi and I continued to see each other, at first shyly, and then partially to recover the almost lovers we had been in our teens. There was the shared grief of Ramadhin’s death. And then there was the comfort of family. Her parents welcomed me back into their home – the boy, still a boy to them, who had been for years their son’s best friend. So I would often go to Mill Hill and be in the house that I once had escaped to as a teenager, where I used to loaf with Ramadhin and his sister while their parents were at work – in their living room with its television, or in the upstairs bedroom with the green foliage outside. It is a place I could walk through blindfolded, even now – my arms outstretched to gauge the width of the hall, taking so many steps to enter that room by the garden, then three more steps to the right, avoiding the low table, so I would know, when I slipped the blindfold off, that I would be standing in front of the graduation picture of Ramadhin.

There was no one else and no other place I could turn to with my emptiness.

A month after his death, Ramadhin’s family received a consoling letter from Mr Fonseka and they allowed me to read it, for he described our days on the
Oronsay
. He did say some polite words about me (and nothing about Cassius), and he spoke of seeing ‘a luminous academic curiosity’ in Ramadhin. He wrote about how the two of them had discussed the histories of the various countries we had travelled past, and all the natural as opposed to the artificial harbours; how Aden had been one of the thirteen great pre-Islamic cities; how there was an ancestry of famous Muslim geographers who’d lived there before the age of the gunpowder empires. On and on Fonseka’s letter went, in a style that was still familiar to me almost twenty years later.

Fonseka’s passion for knowledge always had within it the added pleasure of his sharing it. It was the way I suppose Ramadhin was with the ten-year-old nephew he had tutored whom I had met at the funeral. Mr Fonseka would not have known I was still in touch with the Ramadhin family, and I suppose I could have surprised him by going up to Sheffield with Massi to visit him. But I never did. She and I were busy most weekends. We were lovers again now, engaged to be married, with all of the formality that families who live abroad insist on. The weight of the tradition of exiles had fallen over us. Still, we should have skipped all of that, rented a car, and gone to see him. But I would have been shy of him at that stage in my life. I was a young writer and feared his response, even though I am sure he would have been courteous. It was after all Ramadhin who he must have assumed had the natural sensitivity and intelligence to be an artist. I do not believe those are necessary requisites, but I half believed it then.

I am still surprised it was Cassius and I who came out of that world and survived in the world of art. Cassius, who in his public persona insisted on using only his argumentative first name. I was more amiable, I had cleaned up my act, but Cassius took it on the road, scorning, snorting at the pooh-bahs of art and power. A few years after he had become well-known, his school in England, which he had hated and which had probably disliked him, asked him to donate a painting. He cabled back, ‘FUCK YA! STRONG LETTER FOLLOWS.’ He was always one of the roughs. Whenever I heard of something outrageous and thrilling that Cassius had done, I simultaneously thought of Fonseka reading about it in the newspapers and sighing at the gulf that existed between fairness and art.

I
should
have gone to see him, our old guru of the hemp smoke. He would have revealed Ramadhin in a different way from how Massi did. But her family had been broken, and she and I were the link to mend it, or at least plaster over the uncertain situation of his death that had left all of them powerless in dealing with their grief. As well, our desires were fed by an earlier time, from that very early morning in our youth when she seemed painted by those shifting green branches. We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie.

Being sisterless and brotherless, I had behaved with Ramadhin and Massi as if they were my siblings. It was the kind of relationship one has only during one’s teens, as opposed to the kind of relationship with those we collide against when older – with whom we are more likely to change our lives.

So I thought.

Together the three of us had crossed those abstract and seemingly uncharted times that were the summer and winter holidays. We’d skulked around the universe of Mill Hill. At the cycle track we reenacted great races – wobbling up the slope, charging down the incline to a sensational photo finish. In the afternoon we disappeared into some
bijou
in central London to watch a film. Our universe included Battersea Power Station, the Pelican Stairs in Wapping that led down into the Thames, the Croydon library, the Chelsea public baths and Streatham Common, sloping from the High Road towards distant trees. (This was where Ramadhin found himself for a while on the last night of his life.) And Colliers Water Lane, where Massi and I eventually lived together. All these places she and Ramadhin and I had entered as teenagers and come out of as adults. But what did we really know, even of one another? We never thought of a future. Our small solar system – what was it heading towards? And how long would each of us mean something to the others?

*

SOMETIMES WE FIND our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname was ‘Mynah’. Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like the slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land. Also it is an unofficial bird, and unreliable, its voice not fully trustworthy in spite of the range. At that time, I suppose, I was the mynah of the group, repeating whatever I overheard to the other two. Ramadhin gave it to me accidentally, and Cassius, recognising its easy outgrowth from my name, started calling me that.

No one called me ‘Mynah’ but the two friends I made on the
Oronsay
. Once I entered school in England, I was known only by my surname. But if I ever got a phone call and someone said ‘Mynah,’ it could be only one of them.

As for Ramadhin’s own first name, I rarely used it, though I knew it. Does knowing give me permission to assume I understand most things about him? Do I have the right to imagine the processes of thought he went through as an adult? No. But as boys on that journey to England, looking out on the sea that seemed to contain nothing, we used to imagine complex plots and stories for ourselves.

Ramadhin’s heart. Ramadhin’s dog. Ramadhin’s sister. Ramadhin’s girl. It is only now that I see the various milestones in my life that connected the two of us. The dog, for instance. I still recall our playing with it on the narrow bunk bed during the brief time it was with us. And how it had at one moment come over to me quietly and fit its snout and jaws between my shoulder and neck like a violin. Its scared warmth. And then with Massi, our fitting together too, cautious and nervous as teenagers, and then quicker and more delirious at our discovery of each other after Ramadhin’s death, almost knowing we could not have come together without it.

Then there was the story of Ramadhin’s girl.

Her name was Heather Cave. And whatever was still unformed in her at the age of fourteen, he loved. It was as if he could see every possibility, though he must have also loved what she was at that moment, the way we might adore a puppy, a yearling, a beautiful boy who is not yet sexual. He would go to the Cave family’s flat in the city to coach her in geometry and algebra. They sat at a kitchen table. If it was sunny they would sometimes have a tutorial in the fenced garden that bordered the building. And during their last half-hour, as a little informal gift, he got her to speak of other things. He was surprised at her harsh judgements of her parents, the teachers she was bored by, and some ‘friends’ who had tried to seduce her. Ramadhin had sat there stunned. She was young but not naïve. In many ways, she was probably more worldly than he. And what was he? A too-innocent thirty-year-old, in the cocoon of that small immigrant community in London. He was not active or knowledgeable about the world around him. He was supply teaching as well as tutoring. He read a good deal of geography and history. He kept in touch with Mr Fonseka, who was in the north – there was supposedly a rarefied correspondence between them, according to his sister. So he listened to the Cave girl across the table, imagined the various spokes of her nature. Then went home.

Why didn’t he break the spell of that high-flown correspondence with Fonseka by mentioning her? But he could never have done that. Fonseka surely would have known how to sway him away from her. Although how much of a realist was
he
about teenage character that can be brutal beneath the veneer? No, it would have been better for him to have confided in Cassius. Or me.

On Wednesdays and Fridays he went to the Cave flat. On Fridays the girl was clearly impatient, as she would be leaving to join her friends when the tutorial was over. Then one Friday he found her in tears. She began talking, not wanting him to leave but to help her with her life. She was fourteen and all she wished for was a boy named Rajiva, someone Ramadhin had met one night in her company. A dubious one, he had thought. But now Ramadhin was forced to listen to all the boy’s qualities and what seemed a caustic and too-casual passion between them. She talked and Ramadhin listened. There had been a sneering dismissal of her by the boy in the company of his friends, and she as a result felt abandoned. She wanted Ramadhin to go to the boy and say something, somehow represent her; he could, she knew, talk well – and that would perhaps bring Rajiva back to her.

This was the first thing she had ever asked him to do.

She knew where Rajiva would be, she said. The Coax Bar. She would not, could not, go herself. Rajiva would be with his friends, and now they were ignoring her.

So Ramadhin went in search of the boy, to persuade him to come back to Heather. He entered that strip of the city – somewhere he would never have gone – walking there in his long black winter coat, scarfless, against the English weather.

* * *

He enters the Coax Bar on his knight’s mission. The place is turbulent – music, loud conversation, and smoke. He goes in, a plump, asthmatic Asian, looking for another Asian, for Rajiva is also from the East, or at least his parents are. But one generation later has a lot more confidence. Ramadhin sees Rajiva in the midst of his friends. He gets close and attempts to explain why he is there, why he is speaking to him. There are many conversations taking place as he tries to persuade Rajiva to accompany him back to the flat where Heather is waiting. Rajiva laughs and turns away, and Ramadhin pulls the boy’s left shoulder towards him and a knife comes out naked. The blade doesn’t touch him. It touches just his black coat above the heart. The heart Ramadhin has protected all his life. There is only the slightest pressure from the boy’s knife, its force no more than the pushing or the pulling off of a button. But Ramadhin stands there shaking in this loud surrounding. He tries not to inhale the smoke. The boy, Rajiva – how old is he, sixteen? seventeen? – comes closer, with those dark brown eyes, and inserts the knife into the pocket of Ramadhin’s black coat. It is as intimate as if he had slid it into him.

‘You can give that to her,’ Rajiva says. It is a dangerous yet formal gesture. What does it mean? What is Rajiva saying?

An unstoppable shudder in Ramadhin’s heart. There is a burst of laughter and the ‘lover’ turns away and, with the swarm of his friends, moves on. Ramadhin goes out of the bar into the night air, and begins to walk to Heather’s flat to tell her of his failure. ‘Besides,’ he will add on his return, ‘he is not good for you.’ He is suddenly exhausted. He waves to a taxi and climbs in. He will say … he will tell her … he will not speak of the great weight he feels against his heart … He doesn’t hear the driver’s question the first few times, coming from the front of the cab. His head bows down.

He pays the taxi driver. He presses the bell to her flat, waits, then turns and walks away. He passes the garden where they have had the tutorial once or twice when it was sunny. His heart still leaping, as if it cannot slow or even pause. He unlatches the gate and goes into that green darkness.

I met the girl Heather Cave. It was a few years after Ramadhin’s death, and was in some way the last thing I did for Massi and her parents. The girl was living and working in Bromley, not far from where I had gone to school. I met her at Tidy Hair, where she worked, and took her to lunch. It had been necessary to invent some story in order to meet her.

At first she said she could hardly remember him. But as we continued talking, some of the specific details she recalled were surprising. Though she did not really wish to go much further than the official, but still incomplete, evidence of his death. We spent an hour together, and then we went back into our own lives. She was no demon, no fool. I suspect she had not ‘evolved’, as Ramadhin had wished her to, but Heather Cave had settled into a life that she herself had chosen. She had a young authority within it. And she was careful, and cautious with my emotions. When I first brought up the name of my friend, she diverted me easily with some questions into talking about him myself. I proceeded to tell her about our journey by ship. So that by the time I asked her again, she knew the intimacy of our relationship and painted a more generous version of him as her tutor than she might have presented to a person who had not known him.

‘What did he look like in those days?’

She described his familiar largeness, the languid walk, even that quick smile he would give out, just once, as he was leaving you. How strange, I thought, that it was only once, for such an affectionate man. But Ramadhin would always leave you with that very genuine smile, so it would be the last thing you saw of him.