The Cat’s Table (21 page)

‘You know what I remember about Mr Gunesekera?’ I said. ‘I remember how
kind
he was. That day you had the welt by your eye, when you came over to our table – you’d been swiped by a badminton racquet, you said. And he reached out to touch it. Perhaps he could imagine how you might have been hurt, that it wasn’t an accident at all, but had been caused by someone, Sunil perhaps, asking you to do what he wanted. You thought Gunesekera was attracted to you, but perhaps he was just concerned for you.’

‘That night by the lifeboat – I can’t remember now – I think he made a move towards me, grabbed my hand. He seemed dangerous. And Sunil and Asuntha suddenly came forward … Let’s stop now. Please, Michael, I can’t do this. Okay?’

‘Maybe he wasn’t attacking you. I think he wanted to look at the cut on your wrist. He must have seen Sunil put that bracelet on you after the pyramid event, breaking the skin, and then rubbing something on it. In fact
he
was the one who was protective of you. And he was killed.’

Emily did not say anything.

‘When I couldn’t wake you the next morning, I kept shaking you, and you said you felt poisoned. Perhaps they’d taken something from Mr Daniels’s garden to drug or confuse you. So you wouldn’t remember. There were poisons there, you know.’

‘In that beautiful garden?’

Emily had been looking down at her hands. She suddenly shifted and stared at me, as if everything she had believed, every foothold for years, had been a lie. ‘I’ve thought all along I was the one who killed him,’ she said quietly. ‘Maybe I did.’

‘Cassius and I believed you’d killed him,’ I said. ‘We saw the body. But I don’t think you did.’

She leaned forward on the sofa and covered her face with her hands. She remained like that for a moment. I watched her, saying nothing.

‘Thank you.’

‘But you were helping them escape. And as a result, Niemeyer and the girl died.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What do you mean, “perhaps”?’

‘Just perhaps.’

I was suddenly angry. ‘The girl, Asuntha, she had a whole life ahead of her. She was a
child
.’

‘Seventeen. I was seventeen too. We all became adults before we were adults. Do you ever think that?’

‘She didn’t even scream.’

‘She couldn’t. She had the key in her mouth. That was where she kept it. After it was taken from Perera. That was what they needed for them to escape.’

*

I WOKE ON the sofa bed, the curtainless living room full of light. Emily was sitting in the armchair watching me, as if noting what I had become after the passage of years, adjusting her assessment of the disobedient boy who had lived near her for a period of time in his youth. At some point the night before, she had told me she’d read my books, and that whenever she browsed through she spent her time putting two and two together – some fictional incident with the original drama that had happened in her presence, or an episode in a garden that was clearly my uncle’s garden beside the High Level Road. We had each changed places. She was no longer the focus of obsessed swains. I was no longer at the Cat’s Table. But for me Emily was still the unreachable face.

A writer, I cannot remember who, spoke of a person having ‘a confusing grace’. With an uncertainty alongside her warmth, that is how Emily has always been for me. You trusted her but she didn’t trust herself. She was ‘good’, but she was not that way in her own eyes. Those qualities still had not balanced out somehow, or agreed with each other.

She sat there, her hair was pinned up, and she was hugging her knees. Her face in the morning light was beautiful in a more human way. What does that mean? I suppose it means I could read all aspects of her beauty now. She was at ease, her face reflected more of herself. And I understood how the darker aspects were folded within that generosity. They did not negate a closeness. I realise that for most of my life the one I have never been able to let go of is Emily, in spite of our disappearances and separations.

‘You have a ferry to catch,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Now you know where I live, come and see me.’

‘I will.’

The Key in His Mouth

EMILY DROVE ME down to the harbour and I walked onto the ferry with the other passengers. She had said goodbye to me in the car, but didn’t get out, though the car stayed there and she must have watched my progress through the glaze of the windscreen that made her invisible to me. I climbed the two flights to the upper deck and looked back at the island, its cottages littering the hill, and by the dock the red car that held her inside. The ferry lurched and we set off. It was cold but I stayed up there on the top deck. A twenty-minute ferry ride that felt like an echo, a small rhyme from the past, as my cousin Emily had been to me during this last day and night.

I once had a friend whose heart ‘moved’ after a traumatic incident that he refused to recognise. It was only a few years later, while he was being checked out by his doctor for some minor ailment, that this physical shift was discovered. And I wondered then, when he told me this, how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us. Emily. Myself. Perhaps even Cassius. How have our emotions glanced off rather than directly faced others ever since, resulting in simple unawareness or in some cases cold-blooded self-sufficiency that is damaging to us? Is this what has left us, still uncertain, at a Cat’s Table, looking back, looking back, searching out those we journeyed with or were formed by, even now, at our age?

And then I thought, for the first time in years, about Ramadhin’s wayward fibrillating heart, that he was aware of, and took such care of during that voyage, treating himself like someone in an incubator while Cassius and I ran about joyful and dangerous around him. It had been so long since that voyage and since those afternoons with him in Mill Hill. But it was Ramadhin, the unwild one, who did not survive. So what was better for us all – an ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts?

I was still on the upper deck of the ferry, looking back over the stern towards that green island. Imagining Emily winding her way back to her new home, so far from the place she was born into. A small cabin on a temperate coast, that she shared sometimes with a man. She had journeyed after all these years to another island. But an island can imprison you as well as protect you. ‘I don’t think you can love me into safety,’ she had said.

And then, from this angle and cold perspective, I imagined the two of them, Niemeyer and his daughter, in the dark water – this still-dangerous and to us unforgiven man who would eternally be that: a Magwitch and his daughter – struggling in the water that was rolling with noise, and heaving from the propeller of the ship that had abandoned them there. They cannot see each other, and he can barely feel her within his arms because of the cold. And breath … time is running out and they surface into the black air and inhale everything into themselves, gasp more breath in. All he must do is not let her go yet, this daughter he cannot see, can barely feel with his blunt fingers. But at least they are in the air now, on the surface, the skin of the Mediterranean, a hint of a moon, a hint of a light on a distant shore.

Niemeyer holds her face in his shackled hands, as he did for that final second on the deck rail to signal their departure. He puts his mouth on hers and she opens her mouth, and with her tongue she pushes the key that had been clenched in her teeth forward, into his keeping. They have difficulty holding on to each other, their bodies being tossed around, and in all that dark sea, the key is something too small and delicate to be passed from hand to hand. As the currents are strong, threatening to pull them apart, he will take the key
himself
from his mouth and attempt to release the lock. So now he lets go of the girl, lets go of the surface, and sinks with the key, alone, focused only on unlocking the padlock with his fingers that are already stiffening from the cold. This is the moment when he will or will not remain a prisoner for ever.

They have told her not to wait for him. She has sacrificed enough. Her father, if he is able to free himself, will follow and find her wherever she is. The historical ports are ringed around them. It is, after all, the great internal sea, discovered centuries ago and inhabited since, where ships navigated by stars, or by the temples on promontories when it was daylight. Piraeus, Carthage, Kuakas. All those coastal city-states of the Aegean, that were gateways for tribes who simply walked there out of deserts or had swum to shore when their ships were wrecked by high winds in a storm. Asuntha moves away. She has posed for weeks in the profile of a person terrified of water. And now, all that held-back youth drives her forward. She lights out for whatever land will hide her until she is found. So that for now what she swims towards is just
somewhere
– to one of those ancient cities that was formed originally because of its existence on a delta or a reliable tide – to make a new life. As we too might do when we make our own landfall.

Niemeyer surfaces again for another breath, and in the darkness, in spite of the night wind, he hears the direction she is swimming in. He sees the
Oronsay
lit like a long brooch, far away, aimed towards Gibraltar. Then he sinks again, not yet free of his lock, whose small, subtle portal is hard for the key to find in this dark water and in the echo and whine of the departing liner’s engines.

Letter to Cassius

FOR MOST OF my life I knew there was nothing I could give Cassius that would be of use to him. And during all these years I have never seriously imagined contacting him. Something about our relationship fulfilled itself during those twenty-one days on the ship. I felt no need (save for a slight curiosity) to know him more. The template of Cassius was clear, at least as far as I was concerned. I knew even then that he would be a self-contained creature, owing nothing. His only gesture outward, apart from our companionship, which was obviously just temporary, was the concern he had for that girl. And when Asuntha disappeared into the sea, I saw my friend, as if burned by an adult truth, retreat further.

An artist with burned hands. What was his life like after that? The last years of his teens must have been a time when he could rely on no one and believe in nothing. It is easy to be such a person when you are an adult, when you can survive on your own. But Cassius, I suspect, lost the rest of his childhood on the ship that night. I remember him standing there for ever, no longer beside us, searching the dark blue fluorescent wash.

I know that without all I have drawn from Ramadhin’s quiet kindness, I would not think of going towards Cassius now. He has become a belligerent force in the art scene. There is easy mockery in him. But that doesn’t matter. He had been a boy of twelve and had taken the step to protect someone with a childhood mercy. In spite of his almost natural anarchy he had wished to care for the girl. Strange. He wished to protect Niemeyer’s daughter, as Ramadhin wished to protect Heather Cave. What happened that the three of us had a desire to protect others seemingly less secure than ourselves?

I thought at first that if I had a title, something like
Voyage of the Mynah
, I might reach him, wherever he was. For he would not know me by my real name. If I had reached Miss Lasqueti in her present home with my nickname, I might also reach him. I have no idea if Cassius reads, or if he scorns reading. In any case, this account is for him. For the other friend from my youth.

Arrival

WE SLIPPED INTO England in the dark. After all our time at sea, we were unable to witness our entrance into the country. Just a pilot barge, blinking its blue light, was waiting at the entrance of the estuary, and guided us alongside a dark unknown shoreline into the Thames.

There was the sudden smell of land. When the dawn eventually lit whatever was around us, it seemed a humble place. We saw no green riverbanks or famous cities or great spanning bridges that might open up their two arcs to let us through. Everything we were passing seemed a remnant from another industrial time – jetties, saltings, the entrances to dredged channels. We passed tankers and mooring buoys. We searched for the heraldic ruins we had learned about, thousands of miles away in a history class in Colombo. We saw a spire. Then we were in a place full of names: Southend, Chapman Sands, Blyth Sands, Lower Hope, Shornmead.

Our ship gave four short blasts, there was a pause, then another blast, and we began to angle gently against the dock at Tilbury. The
Oronsay
, which had been for weeks like a great order around us, finally rested. Farther upriver, deeper inland from this eastern cut of the Thames, were Greenwich, Richmond and Henley. But we stopped now, finished with engines.

As soon as I reached the foot of the gangplank I lost sight of Cassius and Ramadhin. A few seconds had passed and we were separated, lost from each other. There was no last glance or even realisation that this had happened. And after all the vast seas we were not able to find one another again in that unpainted terminal building on the Thames. Instead, we were making our way through the large crowd nervously, uncertain as to wherever it was that we were going.

A few hours earlier I had unrolled and put on my first pair of long trousers. I had put on socks that crowded my shoes. So I was walking awkwardly as we all descended the wide ramp down to the quay. I was trying to find who my mother was. There no longer remained any sure memory of what she looked like. I had one photograph, but that was at the bottom of my small suitcase.

It is only now I try to imagine that morning in Tilbury from my mother’s perspective, searching for the son she had left in Colombo four or five years earlier, trying to imagine what
he
looked like, having been sent perhaps a recent black-and-white snapshot of him, to help identify one eleven-year-old in the horde of passengers coming off the boat. It must have been a hopeful or terrible moment, full of possibilities. How would he behave towards her? A courteous but private boy, or someone eager for affection. I see myself best, I suppose, through her eyes and through her needs as she searched the crowd, as I did, for something neither of us knew we were looking for, as if the other were as accidental as a number plucked from a pail who would then be an intimate partner for the next decade, even for the rest of our lives.

‘
Michael?
’

I heard ‘Michael,’ and it was a voice scared of being wrong. I turned and saw no one I knew. A woman put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Michael.’ She fingered my cotton shirt and said, ‘You must be cold, Michael.’ I remember she said my name so many times. I was looking at first only at her hands, her dress, and when I saw her face, I knew it was her face.

I put my suitcase down, and I was holding her. It was true I was cold. I had been worried up to that moment only of being lost for ever. But now, because of what she said, I was cold. I put my arms around her and my hands were against her broad back. She leaned away and looked at me, smiling, and then moved forward to hold me tighter against herself. I could see part of the world to the side of her, the figures rushing past barely aware of me in my mother’s arms, and the borrowed suitcase with all I owned beside me.

Then I saw Emily stride past in her white dress and, pausing, turn her head to look back at me. It was as if everything had stopped and reversed for a moment. Her face gave me a careful smile. Then she walked back and put her hands, her warm hands, over mine that were there on my mother’s back. A gentle touch, then a deeper press, like some sort of signal. Then she walked away.

I thought she had said something.

‘What did Emily say?’ I asked my mother.

‘Time to go to school, I think.’

From the distance, before she disappeared into the world, Emily waved.