The Cat’s Table (3 page)

THE STEWARD HAD told me that I had a roommate, but so far no one had arrived to take the other bunk. Then, on the third night, while we were still in the Indian Ocean, the lights in the cabin suddenly blazed on, and a man who introduced himself as Mr Hastie entered with a folded-up card table under his arm. He woke me and lifted me onto the top bunk. ‘A few friends are coming over for a game,’ he said. ‘Just go to sleep.’ I waited to see who was coming. Within half an hour there were four men playing bridge quietly and earnestly. There was barely enough room for them to sit around the table. They were keeping the volume down because of me, and I soon fell asleep to the whispers of their bidding.

The next morning I found myself alone again. The card table was folded and leaning against the wall. Had Hastie slept? Was he a full-time passenger or a member of the crew? He turned out to be in charge of the kennels on the
Oronsay
, and it must not have been an arduous job, for he spent most of his time reading or half-heartedly exercising the dogs on a small section of deck. As a result, he had energy to burn at the end of the day. So shortly after midnight, his friends joined him. One of them, Mr Invernio, was his assistant at the kennels. The other two worked on the ship as wireless operators. They played for a couple of hours each night and then left quietly.

I was seldom alone with Mr Hastie. When he turned up at midnight he must have felt I ought to be getting my rest, so he rarely attempted conversation, and there would be only a few minutes before the others arrived. At some stage during his travels in the East, he had picked up the habit of wearing a sarong, and most of the time he wore just that around his waist, even when his friends came by. He’d bring out four shot glasses and some arrack. The bottle and glasses would be placed on the floor, the table cleared of everything except cards. I’d look down from my modest height on the top bunk and see the spread of a dummy hand. I watched the deals, listened to the shuffles and the bidding.
Pass … One Spade … Pass … Two Clubs … Pass … Two No Trumps … Pass … Three Diamonds … Pass … Three Spades … Pass … Four Diamonds … Pass … Five Diamonds … Double … Redouble … Pass … Pass … Pass
… They rarely had conversations. I remember they used to call each other by their surnames – ‘Mr Tolroy’, ‘Mr Invernio’, ‘Mr Hastie’, ‘Mr Babstock’ – as if they were midshipmen in a nineteenth-century naval academy.

Later during the journey, when with my friends I would run into Mr Hastie, he behaved very differently. Outside our cabin, he was opinionated, and a constant talker. He told us about his ups and downs in the Merchant Navy, his adventures with an ex-wife who was a great rider of horses, and his strongly held affection for hounds over any other breed of dog. But in the half-glow of our cabin at midnight, Mr Hastie was a whisperer; he had courteously, after the third evening of cards, replaced the bright yellow cabin light with a muted blue one. So as I entered the realm of half-sleep, drinks were poured, rubbers were won, money changed hands, the blue light making the men seem as if they existed in an aquarium. When they finished their game, the four of them went on deck for a smoke, Mr Hastie slipping back into the room silently half an hour later to read for a while before turning out his bunk light.

SLEEP IS A prison for a boy who has friends to meet. We were impatient with the night, up before sunrise surrounded the ship. We could not wait to continue exploring this universe. Lying in my bunk I would hear Ramadhin’s gentle knock on the door, in code. A pointless code, really – who else could it have been at that hour? Two taps, a long pause, another tap. If I did not climb down and open the door I would hear his theatrical cough. And if I still did not respond, I would hear him whisper ‘Mynah,’ which had become my nickname.

We would meet Cassius by the stairs and soon would be strolling barefoot on the First Class deck. First Class was an unguarded palace at six in the morning, and we arrived there even before a fuse of light appeared on the horizon, even before the essential night-lights on the deck blinked and went out automatically at daybreak. We removed our shirts and dived like needles into the gold-painted First Class pool with barely a splash. Silence was essential as we swam in the newly formed half-light.

If we could last undetected for an hour, we had a chance to plunder the laid-out breakfast on the Sun Deck, heap food onto plates, and abscond with the silver bowl of condensed milk, its spoon standing up in the centre of its thickness. Then we’d climb into the tent-like atmosphere of one of the raised lifeboats and consume our ill-gotten meal. One morning Cassius brought out a Gold Leaf cigarette he had found in a lounge, and taught us how to smoke properly.

Ramadhin politely refused, having his asthmatic condition that was already evident to us and the other diners at the Cat’s Table. (As it would continue to be evident when I saw him years later, in London. We were thirteen or fourteen by then, meeting up after losing sight of each other while busy adapting to a foreign land. Even then, when I’d see him with his parents and his sister, Massoumeh, he was constantly catching every neighbourhood cough or flu. We would begin a second friendship in England, but we were different by then, no longer free of the realities of the earth. And in some ways, at that time I was closer to his sister, for Massi always accompanied us on our journeys across South London – to the Herne Hill cycle track, to the Brixton Ritzy, and then the Bon Marché, where we would race down the aisles of food and clothing, for some reason delirious. Some afternoons Massi and I sat on the small sofa in their parents’ house in Mill Hill, our hands creeping towards and over each other under the blanket while we pretended to watch the interminable golf coverage on television. Early one morning she came into the upstairs room where Ramadhin and I were sleeping, and sat beside me, her finger to her lips to silence me. Ramadhin asleep in his bed a few feet away. I began to sit up, but she pushed me back with an open palm, then unbuttoned her pyjama shirt so I could see her new breasts, which appeared almost pale green from the reflection of trees outside the window. In the time that followed I was conscious of Ramadhin’s cough, the grate as he cleared his throat in his sleep, while Massi, half naked, fearful, fearless, faced me with whatever emotion goes into such a gesture when one is thirteen.)

We left the crockery and the knives and spoons that came with our stolen meals in the lifeboat, and slipped back down to Tourist Class. A steward would eventually discover traces of our numerous breakfasts during a later security drill when the lifeboats were manned and swung over the water, so that for a while the Captain searched for a stowaway on board.

It was not even eight o’clock when we crossed the border from First Class back to Tourist Class. We pretended to stagger with the roll of the ship. I had by now come to love the slow waltz of our vessel from side to side. And the fact that I was on my own, save for the distant Flavia Prins and Emily, was itself an adventure. I had no family responsibilities. I could go anywhere, do anything. And Ramadhin, Cassius and I had already established one rule. Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden. The day had barely begun, and we still had hours ahead of us to perform this task.

WHEN MY PARENTS abandoned their marriage, it was never really admitted, or explained, but it was also not hidden. If anything it was presented as a mis-step, not a car crash. So how much the curse of my parents’ divorce fell upon me I am not sure. I do not recall the weight of it. A boy goes out the door in the morning and will continue to be busy in the evolving map of his world. But it was a precarious youth.

As a young boarder at St Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia, I loved swimming. I loved anything to do with water. On the school grounds there was a concrete channel down which the flood-waters raced during the monsoons. And this became a site for a game some of the boarded boys participated in. We leapt in so we could be hurled forward by the current, somersaulting, flung from side to side. Fifty yards farther along there was a grey rope that we grabbed to pull ourselves out. And twenty yards beyond that, the channel of racing water became a culvert that disappeared underground and journeyed on in darkness. Where it went we never knew.

There might be as many as four of us racing down again and again in the channel waters, one at a time, our heads barely at the surface. It was a nervous game, grabbing the rope, climbing out, then running back under the heavy rain to do it one more time. During one attempt my head submerged as I approached the rope, and I did not come up in time to catch it. My hand was in the air, and that was all as I sped towards the eventual buried culvert. It was my given death, that afternoon in Mount Lavinia, sometime during the March monsoon, foretold by an astrologer. I was nine years old and there would now be a sightless journey into an underground darkness. A hand grabbed my still-raised arm and I was pulled out by an older student. He casually told the four of us off and then hurried away in the rain, not bothering to see if we obeyed him. Who was he? Thank you, I should have said. But I was lying there gasping and drenched on the grass.

What was I in those days? I recall no outside imprint, and therefore no perception of myself. If I had to invent one photograph of myself from childhood, it would be of a barefoot boy in shorts and a cotton shirt, with a couple of friends from the village, running along the mildewed wall that separated the house and garden in Boralesgamuwa from the traffic on the High Level Road. Or it would be of me alone, waiting for them, looking away from the house to the dusty street.

Who realises how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door. Though among ourselves we must have been trying to understand and piece together the adult world, wondering what was going on there, and why. But once we climbed the gangplank onto the
Oronsay
, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults.

Mazappa

MR MAZAPPA SIDLES up beside me, as I am explaining to an ancient passenger the art of unfolding a deckchair in just two moves, links his arm with mine, and makes me walk with him. ‘
From Natchez to Mobile
,’ he warns me, ‘
from Memphis to Saint Joe
…’ He pauses at my confusion.

It is always the suddenness of Mr Mazappa’s arrival that catches me off guard. As I end a lap in the pool he grips my slippery arm and holds me against the side, crouching there. ‘Listen, my peculiar boy,
women will sweet-talk, and give you the big eye
… I am protecting you with what I know.’ But as an eleven-year-old I do not feel protected, I feel wounded in advance with possibilities. It is worse, even apocalyptic, when he speaks to all three of us. ‘When I came home from my last tour, I found a new mule kicking in my stall … You know what I mean?’ We do not. Until it is explained. Most of the time, though, it is just me he speaks to, as if I am the
peculiar
one on whom an impression can be made. In that regard, he may be right.

Max Mazappa would wake at noon and eat a late breakfast at the Delilah Bar. ‘Give me a couple of one-eyed pharaohs, and a Nash soda, will ya,’ he’d say, chewing a few cocktail cherries while he waited to be served. After the meal he carried his cup of java to the ballroom piano and placed it on the treble notes. And there, with the piano chords nudging him on, he introduced and educated whoever was with him to the important and complicated details of the world. One day it might be about when to wear a hat, or it could be about spelling. ‘It is an
impossible
language, English.
Impossible!
“Egypt”, for instance. That’s a problem. I’ll show you how to spell it right every time. Just repeat the phrase “Ever Grasping Your Precious Tits” to yourself.’ And indeed, I never forgot the phrase. Even as I write this now, there is a subliminal hesitation while I capitalise the letters in my head.

But most of the time, he unearthed his musical knowledge, explaining the intricacies of three-quarter time, or recalling some song he had learned from an attractive soprano on a backstage stairway. So we were receiving a sort of feverish biography. ‘
I took a trip on a train and I thought about you
,’ he grumbled, and we thought we were hearing about his sad wasted heart. Though today I realise that Max Mazappa loved the details of structure and melody, for not all of his Stations of the Cross had to do with the failures of love.

He was half Sicilian, half something else, he told us in his un-track-down-able accent. He’d worked in Europe, travelled briefly into the Americas, and gone beyond them until he found himself in the tropics, living above a harbour bar. He taught us the chorus to ‘Hong Kong Blues’. He had so many songs and lives under his belt that truth and fiction merged too closely for us to distinguish one from the other. It was easy to fool the three of us, who were naked with innocence. Besides, there were words to some of the songs that Mr Mazappa muttered over the piano keys one afternoon as the ocean’s sunlight splashed onto the floor of the ballroom that were unknown to us.

Bitch. Womb
.

He was talking to three boys on the verge of pubescence, and he probably knew the effect he was having. But he also imparted to this junior audience stories of musical honour, and the person he celebrated most was Sidney Bechet, who while playing a set in Paris was accused of hitting a false note and in response challenged the accuser to a duel, winged a pedestrian in the fracas that followed, was thrown into jail and deported. ‘Le Grand Bechet – Bash – they called him. You boys will live a long, long life,’ Mazappa said, ‘before you come across such a defence of a principle.’

We were amazed, as well as shocked, by the huge borderless dramas of love that Mazappa’s songs and his sighs and confabulations depicted. We assumed that his career’s fatal tumble was caused by some deceit or by his too-great love for a woman.

Every month, the changing of the moon
.

I say, every month, the changing of the moon
,

The blood comes rushing from the bitch’s womb
.

There was something extraterrestrial and indelible about the verse Mazappa sang on that afternoon, whatever the words meant. We heard it just once, but it remained hidden in us like a stone-hard truth whose bluntness we would continue to veer away from, just as we did then. The verse (by Jelly Roll Morton, I would later discover) was bulletproof and watertight. But we did not know it then, too confused by the directness of it – the words in that last line, its surprising and fatal rhyme, coming so economically after the repetitive opening. We dissolved away from his presence in that ballroom, suddenly aware of stewards up on ladders preparing for the evening’s dance, aiming coloured lights, lifting the arches of crêpe paper that criss-crossed the room. They were snapping open the large white tablecloths to drape them over the wooden tables. At the centre of each they positioned a vase of flowers, civilising and romanticising the bare room. Mr Mazappa did not leave with us. He stayed at the piano looking at the keys, unaware of the camouflage taking place around him. We knew that whatever he would be playing with the orchestra that night would not be what he had just been playing for us.

*

MAX MAZAPPA’S STAGE name – or his ‘war name’, as he called it – was Sunny Meadows. He began using it after a printing error on a poster advertising his performance in France. Perhaps the promoters had wished to avoid the Levantine quality of his name. On the
Oronsay
, where his piano class was announced in the ship’s bulletin, he was also referred to as ‘Sunny Meadows, Master of the Piano’. But he was Mazappa to us at the Cat’s Table, for
sunny
and
meadows
were hardly words that could exist alongside his nature. There was not much that was optimistic or well trimmed about him. Yet his passion for music invigorated our table. He spent one whole lunch regaling us with that duel of ‘Le Grand Bechet’, which had ended up more like a gun battle in the early hours of Paris in 1928 – Bechet firing his pistol in the direction of McKendrick, the bullet grazing his accuser’s Borsalino, then continuing until it embedded itself in the thigh of a Frenchwoman on her way to work. Mr Mazappa acted it all out, using salt and pepper shakers and a piece of cheese to depict the trajectory of the bullet.

He invited me one afternoon to his cabin to listen to some records. Bechet, Mazappa told me, used the Albert System clarinet, which had a formal and luxurious tone. ‘Formal and luxurious,’ he kept repeating. He put on a 78 and whispered alongside the music, pointing out the impossible descants and swaggers. ‘You see, he
shakes
the sound out.’ I did not understand, but was in awe. Mazappa signalled to me each time Bechet made the melody reappear, ‘like sunshine on a forest floor’, I remember him saying. He fumbled within a waxy-looking suitcase, brought out a notebook, and read what Bechet had told a student. ‘
I am going to give you one note today
,’ Bechet had said. ‘
See how many ways you can play the note – growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. It’s like talking
.’

Then Mazappa told me about the dog. ‘It used to come on stage with Bash and growl when his master was playing … And
this
is why Bechet broke up with Duke Ellington. The Duke wouldn’t allow Goola up there, in the lights, upstaging his white suit.’ So, because of Goola, Bechet left Ellington’s band and opened the Southern Tailor Shop, a repair and cleaning operation, as well as a hangout for musicians. ‘This was when his best recordings were done – like “Black Stick”, “Sweetie Dear”. Someday you are going to have to buy all those records.’

And then the sexual life. ‘Oh, Bash was a repeater, often ending up with the same woman… Women of all kinds attempted to discipline him. But you know, he had been on the road playing since he was sixteen, he had already met girls of every clime and purpose.’ Every clime and purpose!
From Natchez to Mobile
…

I listened, nodding with incomprehension, while Mr Mazappa clutched to his heart this example of a way of life and musical skill as if they were held inside the oval portrait of a saint.