Ritwik couldn’t bring himself to think that far. It was enough for now that he should have found a place to stay, a place for free. That had been shaping up as the most consuming problem in his head and now that it was solved he was going to savour it for a little while before that other big problem — a job — occupied all his thoughts.
He looks like a boy, Anne Cameron thinks. He can’t be more than a boy, surely. He is so thin he looks like he hasn’t been given a square meal in his life. Dark, gangly, bones everywhere. The first thing she notices about him is the way his sharp collarbones jut out. The Brazilian man — or is he Scottish? She doesn’t remember but if he is, he speaks English funny, like a foreigner — sits making introductions, which have long passed their need or usefulness. She is not listening to them, anyway. She is thinking of the big sparrow she had seen that very morning, trying to balance on the swinging birdfeeder at the end of her long garden. Anne Cameron is convinced that any smaller bird, say a robin or a tit, would have managed just fine. It is the size of the sparrow that is suddenly bothering her. It was, frankly, enormous, the size of a builder’s fist; she hadn’t seen anything like it before.
‘. . couldn’t really have guessed it was a sparrow if I hadn’t tiptoed closer and watched it for a while.’
The Brazilian man has stopped speaking. The starved boy has looked up sharply at her. The Brazilian man — for the life of her, she can’t remember his name — asks politely, ‘Pardon?’ And to think that he used to live here for, for. . oh many months. .
‘Many months, didn’t you?’
‘Pardon?’ he says again.
‘You lived here for how long? Many months, wasn’t it?’ she asks.
‘Yes, nearly a year,’ he says.
Nicholas, that’s it, that’s his name.
‘Nicholas,’ she fairly shouts.
‘Pardon?’ Again.
‘Your name’s Nicholas.’
‘No, Gavin.’
Gavin? She doesn’t recall anyone called Gavin staying with her. In fact, she doesn’t know anyone of that name. She furrows her brows for a moment but the name doesn’t click or light up. Most of them don’t nowadays.
‘You were saying something about a sparrow?’ he asks hesitantly.
But she has already seen the two men exchange knowing glances. She is not going to tell them. She is going to punish them for thinking she is scatty by depriving them of the morning’s marvel, the fat sparrow. She doesn’t care very much at this moment that she has been speaking her thoughts aloud again.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she says with cold firmness. That conversation is now closed.
‘What did you say your name is, again?’ She looks at the thin boy.
He says something that sounds suspiciously like nitwit.
‘You’ll have to speak up, I’m getting a bit deaf.’
‘Ritwik. R-I-T-W-I-K,’ he says.
She takes a few moments to visualize the spelling and then repeats his funny name. ‘Ritwik. Ritwik. What a. . an. . unusual name,’ she says. ‘What colourful names you have. Do you know, the woman who lives down the road, I think she’s from your country or thereabouts, she once told me that all their names mean something, like. . like. . Lord of Fire or. . Direction, or something. I’m sure she said direction, someone in her family has a name which means direction. You know, north or south, that sort. I can’t remember the names, and they’re all so difficult, anyway. Do you know the Indian word for direction?’
The boy struggles for a while and then says, ‘No, I can’t think of one particular word. There are so many languages in the country, so many different words for one thing, that. . that I can’t give you one right answer.’
‘But you are from India, aren’t you, not from Pakistan or Bangladesh?’ she asks.
He looks up sharply again. ‘Yes, that’s absolutely correct,’ he says.
Nicholas is quiet, sitting with something approaching a smile on his face. He would so like to interrupt but she is not going to let him: he is in disgrace at the moment for being naughty about her miraculous sparrow.
‘You know, you’ — she moves and lifts her head towards the dark boy — ‘you’ll have to keep reminding me of your name. I’ll get it slowly, but you’ll have to help me. I’m not very good with names, I’m getting on in years. .’ Her voice stops abruptly.
The boy remains quiet.
‘If you tell me what your name means, perhaps I shall be able to remember it,’ she says.
‘It means a priest who officiates at a fire sacrifice,’ he answers solemnly. He is embarrassed as well, as if he has said it many times before, with a predictable range of effects, none of them the one he wanted. Nicholas rolls his eyes heavenwards and thinks she hasn’t seen him do it.
‘Ooooh, how grand, how grand, a priest at fireworks. What fun. Do you have religious fireworks in India? You shall have to tell me all about it.’ She has been trying to get out of her battered armchair ever since she decided to punish the impudent Nicholas but hasn’t managed so far. She hopes that if she keeps on talking she can distract them from her failed attempts. And then, halfway through some boring old conversation about laundry and bedpan-cleaning and locking all the doors and not letting the cat out, she will rise like an elegant bird, all grace and brilliant plumage, and flit out in one seamless curve, out of the door, up the stairs, glide glide, swoop balletically into the bathroom and only after she has sat on the toilet will she let her bladder go. .
But, no, she is doing it now on her sofa, the hot, comforting trickle, the gathering wetness under and around her like a leaking amniotic sac; she hopes the men will not notice, or at least not until later, not until she has sat on her piss long enough for it to be absorbed by her skirt and the armchair cover and the thick cushions, but, oh dear, it has somehow managed to be rebellious and trickle over the edge and fall drop by drop at first and then in a halting dribble on to the carpet. She waits for a few seconds, debating whether she should draw attention to it and then has no choice but to ask that Nicholas over there to help her; at least he knows the ropes and where things are. No use fretting over spilt milk. Or spilt piss. She cackles out, ‘Spilt piss, ho ho ho ho, no use crying over spilt piss.’
The priest boy doesn’t seem to react to her words. He stands up, along with Nicholas, when she at last manages to do so herself. Nicholas comes forward to hold her hand and support her brittle steps, crooning, ‘It doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter at all. Now let us go upstairs gently, one step at a time, one step, one step.’
She feels irritated at being treated like an invalid; after all, she has only pissed herself, not fallen down the stairs and broken her hip or her neck or anything silly like that. She says, a shade too brusquely, ‘I know, I know. You know, I can climb the stairs on my own and wash myself and change into fresh clothes without your help,’ while clinging to his arm. She stresses the ‘your’ spite-fully as she strings out these lies. No use scaring off that pretty priest boy at the first meeting; he’ll find out what’s what soon enough. She is going to tell Nicholas that the boy can stay and have him explain things to him.
In her state, the only illusion she can hold on to is that she is letting the boy stay out of generosity, not necessity. As she and Nicholas shuffle out she marks that Nicholas doesn’t turn around to give the boy another significant look.
Almost the first thing Ritwik notices about Anne Cameron’s house is the decrepit state of its interior, as if everything in the house, all the objects and furniture and fittings are sliding, along with their owner, through old age to the final and inevitable stopping and shutting down.