Almost.
Because the first thing that strikes him is Anne Cameron’s age, the imprint it has left on her fragile and crumpling face. The furrows of the skin on her face remind him of the folds of clothes and the way they hang in neat, realistic undulations on old statues of the Buddha from Gandhara that he had read about and seen pictures of in history lessons in school so many years ago. He has never seen skin that reminds him of drapery, never seen anyone look so old. When he touches her hand, it is like a weightless claw sheathed in a loose, papery integument; he could have been touching a bird with light, hollow bones. But her blue eyes are clear and bright, with an occasional tendency to go rheumy. It is Ritwik’s belief already that they don’t miss a thing even when her mind is ballooning far above her immediate physical surroundings. She is so senile that she can’t get Gavin’s name straight but Ritwik has this uncomfortable feeling that she marks every single significant look Gavin gives him throughout the time they are in the living room with her while her mind is doing opaque leaps and arabesques about fat sparrows and being impervious to what he is called.
Ritwik doesn’t know London at all. This is his first visit to the city so he takes Gavin’s word for everything but only provisionally; he knows he will revise the co-ordinates Gavin has given him with time. But that bit about Brixton being a different country strikes him, at first glance, as not wholly untrue. Nothing could be more different from the England where he has spent the last two years. That was a beautiful, pale, homogeneous thing out of every second book written in English, the age of its migrant population stuck eternally in the very early twenties, a white white white town. Compared with this clash and colour, it was Life-Lite; this is life with all the dampeners thrown to the four winds. This is populated by another people, mostly Caribbeans, Gavin tells him, with a smattering of African diaspora here and there. He also helpfully adds that it is the crime, drugs, mugging, stabbing and race-riot capital of England: it was the scene of the most shocking, most brutal race-riots in the country a mere ten years ago. From the way Gavin says it, Ritwik can’t figure out whether this gives the place extra street-cred or lots of negative points.
The people here speak a different English, if English it is at all in the first place, for Ritwik cannot understand a word of the loud conversation, punctuated by effervescent laughter sliding to the outright cackle, that takes place between two enormous women on the seat behind him in the bus. It is the sort of laughter that makes everyone within earshot smile and think nothing can be very wrong with the world, after all; there is the chaotic music of life about it. He suddenly realizes that he is letting out, very slowly, the breath he has held in for two years. Doesn’t the notion of feeling at home have to do, first and foremost, with this uncoiling?
The illusion takes a knocking as Ritwik and Gavin walk up Ganymede Road, one of a set of nearly identical roads off Brixton Hilclass="underline" it is a genteel, late nineteenth-century, redbrick-and-stucco terrace, each house exactly the same as the next one, with only the ascending and descending numbers, and the different coloured front doors, to distinguish them from each other. Road after road, with names such as Leander and Endymion, of this bland sameness: step off the clash, mingle and patchwork of Brixton Road and you are in white, middle-class suburbia. But only mostly white and mostly middle class — Asmara Eritrean Restaurant, Miss Nid’s Jamaican Take-Away, Lion of Judah Take Away, The Temple of Truth, a clutch of hairdressers with names such as ‘Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow’, ‘Hair Apparent’ and ‘From Hair to Eternity’, all keep redrawing the contours of this amazing pocket of England. To Ritwik this indicates that there are other such delicious and defiant dissonances scattered all over this country; he will have to keep his ears open for them from now. They were not something he had heard here before, but now they speak to his blood with an intimacy he finds almost embarrassing, as if he has been exposed as unfaithful, disloyal.
Nothing has prepared Ritwik for 37 Ganymede Road. First of all, it is a detached house in a terrace: it stands out so starkly that Ritwik can’t help reading it as some sort of a coded sign trying to tell him that life in number 37 is not going to resemble the broad flow of other lives around it. It is narrow and tall, like a slice from a thick, round cake. When they step in and walk down the narrow passageway to a landing, there is a staircase leading upstairs and five steps leading down to another landing off which open a living room, set back from the front of the house, and a huge kitchen, beyond which there is a big space that could have been a conservatory once but the glass roof is so smeared and dirty now that it is dimmer than the walled rooms. Beyond that, Ritwik can see a long garden, dense with knee-high grass and lush, tangled nettles: it is really a scaled-down forest. He could never have guessed, from the thin outside, that the house would open up like this, room after room, widening from the bottom vertex of a V to its open mouth at the top, much like a wedge.
And then there is the matter of dust. It lies in a thick patina on all the surfaces, sofa covers, bookshelves, tabletops, armrests, mantelpiece, on all the objects in the house — framed photographs, pictures, the leaves of the spindly weeping fig in the living room, the window frames, bric-à-brac, everywhere. There are dust balls, loosely assembled around hair and fluff and lint, in the corners of the filthy linoleum-covered kitchen floor. Dust is slowly invading and taking over the entire place. It is like being in a first-world version of the flat he left behind in Grange Road for a better life, a place where dirt is slowly edging out humans from their space. Everything here is shabby and fading, as if all the colours of things were slowly abandoning a sinking house. It is a drab, battered, leached affair, with all energy extinguished, a space imploding on itself with neglect and inertia.
And if Gavin hadn’t told him about the cat, he wouldn’t have known what to make of the orange hairs on the sofa covers and cushions, sometimes lying in loose tufts on the carpet, which can only be described as not neutral, not regulation, not snot-beige, but acoloured. At the same time as his heart sinks to think he will have to live here, he feels so much pity for old Mrs Cameron in this dying house that his eyes prick with tears.
The last shreds of any doubt Ritwik has about living in this squalor are dispelled when Mrs Cameron pisses in her armchair. He has no idea what has happened and when the old lady gives off her frightful cackle while wittering on about spilt piss, he thinks her mind has gone down another unknowable alleyway. Even when Gavin gets up to support her upstairs, he wonders briefly about the abrupt departure and the sharpish tone of her voice when she tells Gavin she doesn’t need his help; he can’t make any sense of it. He sees the darkish, wet patch at the foot of the armchair but doesn’t notice it.
Suddenly all the pieces fall into place. It must be because he has been trying to work out subconsciously for some time the characteristic odour of the house. The smell seems familiar to Ritwik but he can’t quite pin it down; it is somewhere just outside the edge of his mind, refusing to come in. Initially he thinks it is just the sour and musty smell of unaired old age and its attendant detritus, maybe even stuff rotting in the kitchen bin or something similar. And then ammonia, piss, cat, wet patch, I can wash myself and change into fresh clothes without your help, no use crying over spilt piss all fall together in a pattern.