The Weightless World (17 page)

I’m staring at the car, trying to catch a glimpse of Asha through the windscreen. If she got out and came to stand with us, I know, I would be able to tell Ess about Alice and Daniel. It wouldn’t matter that she doesn’t believe me, that she thinks the whole thing is a lie, a story, a business strategy; just her being with us would allow me to speak somehow. But she won’t get out, won’t stand with us. And I can’t see her through the windscreen. A great burning hairball of reflected sun obscures her.

I heft my cup in the direction of the car and I say to Ess, ‘I get a sense that things between you two have taken a turn…?’

He smiles. ‘It’s nothing. Just at the moment Asha is ever so slightly annoyed with me. No doubt you’re aware that I clarified for her the place of Reva in our agreement…? Most odd. I
explained the situation to her, in profuse and even pedantic detail, but it didn’t seem to matter. She simply didn’t seem able to find the… proper perspective on the arrangement.’ He nods, then his smile tightens and he says, ‘She’ll buck up. You’ll see.’

Midday is coming, with its heat and light. At the roadside there’s no shade and I’ve forgotten my hat again and Ess has forgotten his. He’s not wearing his sunglasses, either, no doubt afraid they will rob him of his first sight of the car, the distant lancing of sunlight reflected off bodywork, the vehicle in motion with Bill Fancy at the wheel, jaunty, jowly, in baggy shorts and a sweat-patched T-shirt, passing the time on the road with volleys of his decorative whistling, the trills, trebles and warbles of English birdlife, the woman scowling incredulously in the seat next to him, or maybe behind him, in a seat or a cot expensively customised to accommodate her physical fullness, the whole road movie of the two of them getting here, a story to be told and laughed over, backs slapped, heads shaken, puckered lips finally, ruefully kissed, on a scramble of rugs in front of Tarik and Reva’s plain-hidden home… look long enough and you can almost see it, the faraway glint, the single rogue pixel that seems so little to ask, a request so modest it may already have been granted and you have to remember to check that it hasn’t.

It hasn’t. There’s nothing there. There’s not going to be anything there.

No one’s coming. Reva’s dead and Ess has been had.

‘We have to go,’ I say to him, as gently as I can. ‘Harry…’

‘I really don’t think they’ll be long now,’ he says, mildly. ‘I think not more than just a few minutes. Just a few more minutes.’

‘Then we’ll go back, okay?’

‘Go back…?’

‘Go back. Deal with Harry. Deal with Tarik. All that.’

‘Yes, yes. If we must.’

We resume our road-watching for a while. Then I say, ‘You mentioned something about paying him? About paying Bill Fancy?’

‘Paying him, yes.’

‘Did you mean you’re going to pay him, or… you’ve already paid him?’

‘Paid him.’ He nods stiffly. ‘Already paid him, yes. As I said, there were expenses. On account of Reva’s extraordinary condition. And, and on other accounts.’

‘And what was that? What did you pay him?’

‘Everything. Everything I had left. Yes.’

He sits down. After fifteen hours on his feet, Ess sits down in the dust. The way he does this makes me suddenly desperate and when I look back at the road I’m not watching any more but willing, flinging out waves of telekinesis, trying by means of an obscure violent effort of the insides of my head to make it happen, to fill the empty eyelet of the vanishing point, to force the miracle, win that smallest of all mercies…

It doesn’t come. Nothing comes. No one’s coming.

I crouch down next to him. He’s laced his fingers together and placed his hands over his head, like a hat. The face under it is red, burnt, burst, all splinter and scathe.

‘We have to go, Ess,’ I tell him.

The eyes in their crinkles, vast dead bloody ruts.

‘It’s midday. Midday gone. We have to go back.’

The eyes swim then find me and with a desolate effort he nods.

I help him to his feet. We’re walking towards the car when I make two observations. The first is that I’m holding his elbow, leading him along by the elbow. The second is that something strange has started to happen to his face. Ess has noticed it too, and it seems to be causing him some alarm.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, in an absurd bright voice. ‘It’s okay. Don’t worry, Ess, it’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.’

As we carry on towards the car, my hand lightly steering him by the elbow, he nods again, or anyway tries to. But it’s difficult for him, with the convulsions wrenching at the tip of his sunburnt nose, dragging the splintery mask of his face down over his teeth, as if trying to make him eat it, trying to feed him his own face.

Asha drives slowly. It seems pointless to ask her to speed up. Midday has gone, and if Harry really means to take his story to Tarik, he’s already done it.

I glance at Ess, sitting next to me in the backseat, looking out the window with a faint smile. The twitch has subsided but still his features have a pinched, precarious quality, as if it’s only by a concentrated effort that he’s keeping them from slipping loose, changing shape, drifting slackly over his face.

No one speaks. The heat, the glare, the rocking progress of the car lulls me into a heavy half-sleep full of the memory that I stayed awake all last night. I glance at Ess again then I look out the window too, at the seething dust, at the simmering scrub, at the brilliant red billow of a T-shirt above the grey stakes of a dry-dead bush.

Laxman stands behind the bush in his T-shirt and raises his arm in greeting. I have time to register this, to register also that there’s someone with him – someone else huddling behind the bush – then the car rocks past and they’re gone. It occurs to me that I should say something, do something. Stop the car, go back, speak to Laxman – but the moment has passed, the half-sleep is too heavy, the heat, the glare and the silence conspire to hold me in place, fixed among burning seat cushions at the end of the earth.

Harry is packing up his camp. Half of it has already vanished into his backpack, which sits up on the ground with pert independent
life. He’s winding a rope round his forearm as Asha brings the Adventurers car to a halt. He puts down the rope and rubs his hands on his shirt then stands, frowning about himself at the unpacked bits of his camp.

I open my door, stand, and I’m still thinking about how I’m going to get Ess out of the car, how I’m going to manage this whole situation, when I see Ess step quite briskly round the front of the car and set off in a determined way towards Harry. At this point he doesn’t look mad or anything; he just looks determined. I scuttle to catch up with him.

‘Leaving so soon?’ Ess calls to Harry as we approach. ‘Surely not. Stay, stay.’

Harry grimaces. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Won’t you reconsider?’ Ess says, with somewhat sinister cheer. ‘What do you think, Harry? Can’t we twist your arm?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Ess sighs – a sound that has, too, its sinister clink and hiss. ‘But as you’ve got your mind set on it, who are we stand in your way? It’s been a pleasure, Harry. An honour and a boon.’ He extends a hand. Harry looks at this hand warily, but doesn’t take it. He goes on not taking it.

Then he looks up from Ess’s hand to Ess’s face and says, ‘I’m not going right away.’

‘Oh no? You don’t think it’s best to strike while the iron’s hot?’

‘I have some business first.’

‘What business is that then?’

‘I have to speak to Tarik.’

‘Good lord, do you really?’

‘Yes I do really.’ Rubbing his hands again on his shirt, Harry starts with a lumbering step towards the cabin.

‘Do you know, Harry, I’m not sure that’s such a hot idea.’

‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’

‘In fact, Harry, I’m fairly sure there’s no need for you to talk to Tarik at all.’

‘I beg to differ.’

‘No, Harry,’ Ess says, striding after Harry and catching up with him easily, ‘no, my dear chap, don’t
beg
, don’t ever
beg
,’ speeding ahead and turning to block Harry’s path to the cabin door, ‘just do as you’re told and keep your mouth shut, there’s a good chap.’

Ess and Harry stand facing each other outside Tarik’s cabin. Ess, smiling, looks as if he’s perfectly willing to take a bite out of Harry’s neck. Harry looks utterly miserable.

Then the door opens and Tarik is there. Ess starts to say something but it’s too late. Harry has stepped past him into the cabin and there’s nothing for Ess and me to do but follow.

The first thing I see is the flowers. The workbench at the end of the room has been tidied up, the mess of tools and parts cleared away and replaced by a stubby glass vase with three dainty pink flowers in it. For some reason this blows my mind. Where did Tarik find flowers? When did he go to get them? Why has he tidied his workbench and replaced his tools and parts with a vase of pink flowers?

Tarik moves to stand in front of his little altar of flowers, to place his body between us and it, protecting or hiding it. His expression is unclear, but he appears both to want us to leave him alone and to assume that we won’t do anything he wants.

Harry is standing next to him. Ess, still going forward, seems about to walk right into Harry – to try to walk through him, to demolish, dematerialise him. With a startled look Harry puts his hands up and pushes on Ess’s chest. Ess allows himself to be halted. And it’s funny, obviously, because Harry’s this great big guy and Ess is this delicate teeny-weeny but still that’s how it
happens. Tarik looks worried by all this and I guess I probably do too.

‘We’re here to
talk
,’ Harry says, with an entirely mysterious emphasis, glaring at Ess. ‘Everyone’s just here to talk.’

‘We’re all going to have a marvellous chat,’ Ess says, his emphasis ferocious and unmistakable. ‘See if we can’t unproblem a problem or two.’

Tarik seems frozen, looking at neither Ess nor Harry but at some point in between them. He edges backwards against his flower altar.

‘Can we sit? Is that acceptable, Tarik? Are there chairs? I think if maybe we can all just
sit down
…’

Tarik seems frozen. He frowns slightly then sits down on the floor. So the rest of us sit down on the floor.

Harry frowns, knits his fingers together and starts to speak. The voice he starts to speak in is nothing like the voice he’s been speaking in since we first met him. ‘Tarik, what I have to say to you now is hard, and I don’t know how to say it other than all-out and up-front. If my talking that way makes you feel like you want to give me a slam on the nose, you just slam away, you just go right ahead and have at it, you’ll find no quarrel in me.’

Harry glances in the direction of, though not quite at, Ess and me. He smiles, with wet bits of teeth in his beard.

‘The same goes for you gentlemen. I know you’ve reasons of your own for preferring me not to pipe up on this matter, and I understand that you too may wish me some corporeal harm. Well, sure. Let me speak and when I’m done if you gentlemen need in some way to harm me you go right ahead. Only, you know, not too corporeally.’

‘You piece of shit,’ Ess says to Harry, folding his arms, conversational. ‘Oh you fucking piece of
shit
.’

Harry squints inside his specs. ‘That’s as maybe.’ Then he returns his attention to Tarik. ‘I need to talk with you about your wife. About Reva, Tarik.’

Tarik looks at Harry. His face in the cabin’s low light is handsome, sculpted, smooth. He’s dispensed with the rockstar stubble at some point.

‘I have reason to believe, Tarik, that your wife was recently in Kolkata.’

‘Balls,’ Ess says.

‘Not balls. I believe Reva was recently in Kolkata, at an office block on the outskirts of the city and I have evidence to support this belief. I have…’

‘Absolute balls,’ Ess says.

‘That is not so. Tarik, I have evidence which I can show you and which you can see with your own eyes. I don’t pretend to know the intimate details of what these gentlemen have told you…’

‘“Don’t pretend”?’ The contempt in Ess’s voice doesn’t quite carry. ‘All this is is pretending! All of it! Pretending!
Lying
!’

‘If these gentlemen have told you they are in any position to, to, to convey Reva to your
presence
, then I have to say that is not true. No sir.’ He shakes his head. ‘That is not true. I don’t know…’

‘No,’ Ess snarls, ‘you don’t, you don’t know a fucking thing…’

‘… Assuming somewhere along the line there was some confusion, or error, or some form of other willful deception beyond the control of…’

‘Deception!’ Ess takes a desperate in-suck of breath. ‘Like you’re anyone…’

‘… But however that may be, the truth is, Tarik, Reva is not coming here. No one is bringing her here. She’s not coming, Tarik.’

Tarik looks at Harry. He’s like a photograph of himself thirty seconds ago – a replica, a stand-in, while the real Tarik attends to important business elsewhere. It’s not possible to say that this is not in fact precisely what’s happening.

Tarik has dispensed with his stubble and tidied his workbench and replaced his tools and parts with a vase of pink flowers because he thinks his wife is going to arrive. He thinks at any moment an engine will rasp on the plain and the rasp of the engine will become a distantly bucking vehicle and the vehicle will become a slapping-open of doors, a pale skirt of disturbed dust and stepping through that skirt or within it, wearing it like a bridal train, his wife, his Reva, her face and her forgiveness displaced into his future by no more than hours or minutes, no more than moments, close enough now almost to see, to touch.

‘I don’t know any way to say this but all-out. Reva went to an office block in Kolkata last week and the building collapsed…’

‘Oh balls,’ Ess says, with a gasp that wrenches his whole frame. ‘You don’t have to listen to this, Tarik. You don’t have to
believe
…’

‘… And Reva didn’t get out… She was found, I’m sorry to say. Somewhat later.’

‘Fucking
balls
,’ Ess says, and takes a huge gasp.

‘I’m sorry, Tarik. But it’s true. It’s the truth. And I’m just so sorry about that, I really am.’

Ess gasps, stares down at the floor, does not or cannot speak.

If he could speak, he would say something like:
A likely story.
Something like:
Ask yourself one question, Tarik – where’s this coming from? Who’s this holier-than-thou colonial to speak anyway about deception, when it’s perfectly clear that it is he who is bent on deception? He who is inventing distasteful stories for the sole purpose of confusing you, of exploiting you, and cheating us while he’s at it? No, it is only as I told you. Reva is alive and well. She has been staying with family in Goa and even now my trusted associate, my Fancy Bill Fancy, is bringing her to join us. Lend no ear to these vicious fantasies. Your wife
is
coming back to you. She’s almost here.
But he can’t speak. I can speak, I could say it for him. But I don’t and only go on sitting on the floor while no one says anything.

Tarik looks at Harry.

His face, the face of the real Tarik, would show the terrible workings of denial and disbelief through which his soul must now penetrate. But we’re not looking at his face. We’re looking at a photo of his face from a minute ago, the colours already growing lurid and archaic, the textures seeping, curdling.

Ess is right: Tarik doesn’t have to believe Harry. He doesn’t have to consider Harry’s evidence. What is evidence? Anything can be faked by anyone. The technology required is so primitive it’s scarcely even technology any more – it’s life, it’s instinct, the sinewy hardwire of the contemporary animal. Not all the pics and docs and live feeds in the world will add one atom of weight to what Harry has already said and done.

Then the life-size photo we’re looking at, the Tarik image bullioned with imperfection, stutters into motion. The eyes twitch like eyes inside a mask. Like the eyes of horses, with their sepia inner lid, their roiling whites.

‘Get out,’ Tarik says.

Harry nods, uncrosses his legs, prepares to stand. He’s still mostly on the floor when Ess springs at him. Lightly, silently, Ess springs across the floor and throws himself on top of Harry. For a while neither of them makes a sound. Whatever struggle occurs between them is loose-limbed, weak-jointed. Ess reaches for Harry’s face. Harry removes his hands not by pushing them away but as it were peeling them off, one after the other, patiently, over and over again. Ess’s hands waver above his head then drop and then the rest of him drops too. Harry slips back and props himself against the wall. Then there’s a gusting sound, a hovering sound. It seems to be above us, all round us, this sound, then it is only the sound of Ess breathing, of Ess gasping for breath. Harry
seems to be cradling him in his arms, but I don’t think this is really what’s happening.

‘A likely story,’ I say. I say, ‘Ask yourself one question, Tarik…’

‘Get out,’ Tarik says. ‘All of you.
Get out
.’

I stand, go towards Ess and Harry, try to help Ess to his feet. But Harry shakes me off with strange violence. I am still absorbing it, this violence, when Ess himself climbs up between us, white-faced and wide-eyed, manoeuvres us both aside with the points of his elbows, and barely keeping his balance strides across the cabin to the door and disappears outside. We all watch him go, or at least Harry and I do. Then Harry stands, lumbers to the door and steps down and passes outside also. I look after them. Behind me I know there is a clean-shaven man sitting on the floor and behind him a workbench with a vase of deadly pink flowers on it. If I turned and looked I would see these things. But I don’t turn, I don’t look. I go forward on the tap-tapping wooden feet of a fairground puppet and step through the door and pass outside into the useless sluice of the afternoon sun.

Ess is standing in front of the cabin, squinting with a faint sickly half-smile at the far edge of the plain. Harry is standing what appears to be a carefully considered distance away from him, staring at the bit of ground immediately in front of him with no expression whatsoever. I walk straight past them, not looking at them, not acknowledging them in any way, and I go up to the Adventurers car in its patch of swirled silence and pull at the passenger-side door, not expecting it to open, but it opens and I thrust myself inside, pack myself in through the opening like a horrible parcel for speedy delivery.

Asha is sitting in the driver’s seat, where she is always sitting, has always sat. Her hands are crossed at the top of the steering wheel, which I have some memory of being something you’re
supposed not to do. I don’t really know. I’ve never learnt to drive. I’ve never had the presence of mind to take lessons, never had the imagination to picture myself sitting in that seat, operating the life-and-death controls.