‘I thought you were all joking in German. You see, I don’t know the language at all. . Declan’s German, isn’t he?’
It took a few seconds for the pieces to fall into place. She cracked up, laughing, ‘No, no, you’ve got it wrong, he’s from Liverpool, that’s his accent. . Dec’s not German. . oh, that’s so funny, wait till the others hear of it.’ She continued laughing. He joined her, weakly and uncertainly at first, then got swept up in it. Maybe he found it funny as well.
The days are loads, bearing him down. The cold has given him an intractable case of dandruff, but for the first time in his life he has money to go into the shops and buy things for himself, superficial and silly things, things that deal with problems such as dandruff. He has heard of the Body Shop; Jhimli had got her delicious lip balms from that place on one of her numerous trips abroad with her dance company. He can now buy those improbable objects that fill him with wonder: is it even possible to have ginger root anti-dandruff shampoo, a banana conditioner? How can you get butter from mango? He buys stackloads of different types of products. They give him a sense of control over his life: yes, he’s finally grown up, he can choose his own luxury items. He can pay for them himself. They’re going to do him good.
But the embers of hyperacidity behind his breastbone, sometimes up in his throat, won’t be extinguished; at times they flare up into something more unmanageable (he has a supply of Pepto Bismol at hand) but most of the time it’s just a slow burn inside him. He’s convinced it’s caused by eating dinner at six o’clock in the evening. Back home, dinner, when it was at all available, was between half-past ten and half-past eleven at night.
After that absurdly early dinner, he lopes back to his cell and reads in the yellow spill of light, gets up sometimes and paces around, thinking of Christ the knight jousting at a tournament and ending up bleeding. Or of Hunger plaguing poor farmers and helpless little men and women battling with the cold and their masters’ stubborn land. That acid sting surges and falls, surges and falls. When he’s bored and lonely, he looks at the little row of his Body Shop objects, fingers them lovingly, sometimes uncaps a bottle or two and has a sniff. The thought of using some of those things the next day makes him feel all right again. He owns these products. They are bought with his scholarship money and they belong to him. They will protect his face from the legion knives of the February wind, keep his armpits fragrant, free his tangled locks of dandruff. He can have a new body in England, even be a new person. Maybe.
The clock tower chimes out the notes for half past the hour. It’s a melody he knows by heart; he knows he has to wait for another incomplete installment before the full tune is rung out at the hour. Unfailingly, every fifteen minutes, this escalating teasing of three-note and four-note unfulfillment. It drives him mad, this knowing what’s going to come — so trite and mechanical, so unchanging — but having it deferred. The giant horse chestnut tree outside, across the cobbles, is losing its edges and becoming an amorphous looming shadow. Someone has recently told him the blossom of the horse chestnut is called ‘candle’. Candles of horse chestnut, he savours the phrase in his head.
He turns around to walk towards the light switch. His mother is sitting in the armchair near the door.
There is a barely whispered presence in this threshold time of the gathering dark. In a thought-swift instant he understands the expression about hairs standing on end — fear tastes like this; it is the opening of the pores of your face, inside your ears, behind your head.
Don’t come back like this you’re gone you belong elsewhere not here I cannot live on this hinge you’ve just shown me it’s one or the other now or then elsetime elseplace but please please please not me not ever.
He suddenly has an urgent need to piss, but it seems he has grown gnarled, hugging roots into the regulation carpet. How can he bring himself to cross the few feet, past that armchair which is charged with her imagined trace, to the toilet outside? Only by this and by this only:
He must have been six or seven at the time, so it was quite natural to have thought it was a great idea to stick the rubbery gob of chewing gum in his mouth in the hair of Tipshu, the small girl next door. Tipshu didn’t notice until much later. They had to cut off some of her lovely, glossy hair as she brought the house down, howling and crying. Her mother came around for the inevitable complaint, serious words about improper bringing up of children, insufficient discipline that let naughtiness such as this run unchecked.
Ritwik’s mother was out, tutoring children in a couple of houses in the neighbourhood; this was her way of supplementing her husband’s apology of an income. Dida, his grandmother, already at the door eavesdropping on the loud confusion next door, received the complaint much in the way a hungry dog receives leftovers. Ritwik was warned, darkly, ‘Wait till Ma’s back. You’re in for a bad time.’
There was a sudden manic animation that lit up Dida’s eyes like embers from within. She sat in the balcony, keeping a sharp eye out for her daughter, jittery with excitement. No sooner had she spied her at the far end of Grange Road than she limped to the door: she could barely wait for the knock before she opened it and the rush of tales spilled out before his mother had even had a chance to sit down and drink a cooling glass of water, ‘You won’t believe what Ritwik’s done, he stuck a dozen Chiclets in Tipshu’s hair, they’ve had to shave all her hair off. Her mother came to complain to you, she is absolutely livid with rage, shaking with anger, said what kind of discipline is this. .’
The first kick caught him unawares; it happened in the instant of a blink and sent him nearly flying to the niche where the mortar and pestle stood. While losing his balance and skidding across the floor Ritwik caught, in the peripheries of his field of vision, the blur of his mother pulling a belt from the nylon line on which his father’s clothes hung, shabby and limp. He lay on the floor, a foetal quiver of fear, as the first lash from the leather belt cleanly cut a menacing crack through the compact air and landed on him with the sting of fire. The fiery flowers bloomed rapidly across his legs his thighs his back his scalp, now all one clarifying tingle of pain, and his hairs took life in rising to attention to this rain of weals. Maybe he was sobbing maybe crying please spare me spare me I’ll never do it again never again never stop but this was not just any rain of fire, it was a deluge, which didn’t know when to stop, until she put an end to it and instead started kicking his head his stomach his chest then stood on him with her fierce weight of fury. He felt choked and air air was all he wanted to breathe in, air in, not this hollow of nothing of craving to inhale; then there is only dark, only a saving obliterating blackness.
When he wakes up, it takes him a span of viscous, murky time to realize he is in a bed next door, in Tipshu’s house. And the story he pieces together to comfort himself goes something like this: the commotion must have brought the next-door neighbours rushing in, Tipshu’s mother had carried the unconscious Ritwik away to their flat, called a doctor or given him water to revive him, then put him to bed, letting the heave of his residual sobbing subside to a calm, but he doesn’t actually know if it went like that. All he knows is that they can’t put him in a plaster cast for cracked ribs; he has to sit, or lie, and wait it out, still as a forgotten stone in a corner, erased, absent.
He lets the liquid heat of his piss comfort him in its trickle down the inside of his legs and, when his saturated jeans cannot take it any more, watches it leak through pathetically in weak, stuttering drops on to the carpet. He is pissing, shaking and sobbing beside his desk, his room now completely in the grip of the dark. He feels he can never stop this trembling as he makes his way out, fumbling, to the bathroom. It is only much later that he notices how walking past that armchair is no longer a problem, no longer a consuming terror.