Maybe he can will himself to shut the door that has opened inside him. The unsettling thing is that he did not know the door was there in the first place. No, he has to resist this tug. If he can only force himself to concentrate on the traffic around him, he’ll be better; nothing like the tired old game leading to orgasm for a snack of oblivion.
He leaves his cubicle and someone standing at the pissoir neatly moves back and steps in, bolting the door fast. Bastard. He’ll have to hang around in the open now. He feels exposed and it’s not a natural feeling for him, not in this world. Then someone comes out of one of the other cubicles and Ritwik automatically, along with everyone else, looks at him. Very tall and very thin, his exposed collarbones like ridges enclosing two shallow bowls on either side of his neck. I bet if he takes his trousers off, his hipbones will be jut out like promontories in a map: that is Ritwik’s first thought. He marks it with unconscious prescience, for he won’t have either the clarity or the luxury to focus on his thoughts about this stranger again. There are dark shadows under his eyes, as if he hasn’t slept in a long time. Heroin addicts have such leaking darkness around their eyes, that devoured, consuming look, Ritwik thinks.
They look at each other. Ritwik turns away and moves to the urinal, looking back at him once, making sure there is a lot of space between him and the next person standing and pretending to piss. The stranger doesn’t accept the offer, instead he goes and positions himself at the pissoir on the other side of the mirrors. Ritwik’s chest has a plumetting feeling inside it. He leans back to look at him and catches him doing the same.
Who dares, wins.
Ritwik zips up, walks over and stands beside him at the other urinal. Heroin Eyes is resolutely looking down, refusing to catch his eye, but he isn’t moving away either. Ritwik has become brazen — he is straining to get a glimpse of his cock, willing the man to catch a second of the crackle of electricity that he suddenly seems to have developed around him.
It doesn’t work: the stranger buttons up and starts making his way up to street level. Ritwik is unable to let this one go. Almost immediately, he too moves away and follows him outside. The man takes the steps three at a time, bounds up and with enormous strides crosses over to Martyrs’ Memorial.
The man looks over his shoulder: Ritwik has nearly broken into a run now. The stranger quickens his pace, crosses Cornmarket Street diagonally and almost runs into the vaulted Friars’ Entry, between Debenhams and the Randolph Hotel, just behind the bus stops. Ritwik pursues, running now, desperate, heavy with the knowledge that he has scared him off, is scaring him off right now, by stalking him out in the streets, but he can’t stop himself. He runs into the passage too and watches a tall, lanky figure lope away hurriedly, through the uneven patchwork of light and shadows thrown out by huddled buildings, a fair distance from him.
He gives up. His heart is an eel, describing its endless Möbiusstrip dance, over and over again. There is no point going down to the loos now; he is suddenly tired and uninterested. He walks slowly back down Broad Street; a keen wind is whipping up little local whirlpools of dried leaves beside a phone booth. Almost without thinking, he walks into the booth, picks up the phone, and the index finger of his right hand — not he, not the entire person — punches in the freephone number: 328665. As soon as the phone starts to ring at the other end, he slams his receiver down on its metal cradle.
He breathes in and out for a couple of minutes, aware of each inhalation and exhalation, then redials the number. . This time he lets the phone ring. At the fourth ring, a voice answers, ‘NSPCC Helpline. How can I help?’
The voice is so familiar he can see the bridge of fading freckles under her eyes and over her nose if he shuts his eyes. He can’t answer.
‘Hello? Can I help?’ Her voice gentle, ever so kind and gentle.
‘No.’ The word rushes out before he has had a chance to string together other words into a sentence.
‘Do you have anything to say?’ she asks, slightly coaxing now, but still kind.
‘No. . I mean, yes, yes. .’
‘Yes?’
He is shallow-breathing in fairly rapid bursts now. ‘Could you tell me something about about about child abuse?’ Pause. ‘Please.’
There is nothing in her voice, no sharp intake of breath, no silence left hanging for more than its seemly duration, to tell him that his voice has been recognized and his face mapped on to it. But he knows, in the way the telephone receiver seems to have become sentient in his clammy left hand, or by what he suddenly feels to be a slightly different ordering of the air and signals between the two ends, somewhere deep under the ground, in the souls of the cables.
Her voice is collected, unswerved by the new knowledge. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’
Pause. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want to report anything?’
Silence.
‘Whatever you say to us is in strictest confidence. If you choose not to identify yourself, that is perfectly all right.’ The professional words ring strained in his ears. Perhaps in hers as well.
‘It’s it’s about me.’
‘I take it you want to report something about your past?’
Pause. Then a whispered ‘Yes’.
‘Pardon?’
‘Yes,’ slightly louder.
‘Have you talked to anyone else about it?’
‘No, no.’
There is a long silence during which he imagines their words, broken down into constituent letters and then further into electric signals and sound waves, travelling down cables and coalescing into human words again just before they spill out of the earpiece into her ear. He wishes they would remain atomized forever within the cable and get lost in a little black hole along the line and never reach her.
‘Do you want to talk about it now?’ Her voice has become that of a ministering angel’s again.
His throat is a constricted passage of pure obstruction, blocking his words, choking out sound. He is not aware of little guerillas of words escaping this tyranny of his throat. ‘It’s my mother.’
Silence from her.
‘My mother. .’ he tries again.
‘Yes?’
‘My mother used to. . beat me.’
‘What sort of beating was it?’
Pause. ‘Severe.’ That’ll do, he thinks.
‘How old were you at the time?’
He doesn’t answer the question. He could be talking to himself as the refractory words tumble out: ‘Once when I was six I used some abusive term which I’d picked up from god knows where. You know, nothing very offensive. Roughly translated it would mean “child of a pig”. I suppose it has the same heft as “bastard” here.’ His voice is reasoned, calm, almost reflective. He is telling a story now in which he is a character; as raconteur, he manages far better, for it could be someone else’s story. Indeed, it is someone else’s story.
He continues, ‘She was making chapatis, you know, flat Indian bread, on a griddle on open coals. She had a pair of tongs and a metal fishslice sort of thing, which she was using to flip the bread over. As soon as she heard the words, she looked at me and asked me to say the words again, as if she hadn’t quite heard them. I gathered that something was wrong, that the words were bad, so I kept quiet. She kept on asking me to repeat them. Then she reached forward and and and. .’
The barrier of fiction, without any warning, suddenly gives way. The words become painful pushes against a throat sealing up again. ‘. . and she hit me on my thigh with the hot iron spatula.’