A dark knowledge was slowly beginning to take focused shape in Ritwik’s mind. Saeed’s short, staccato sentences were chiselling out new edges and lines; the picture wasn’t altogether clear, or finished, but Ritwik guessed the flashy men were brokers and the people who gathered here in the morning, a bunch of floating labourers, unemployed, perhaps even unemployable, who lived on this day-to-day basis, their horizons bounded on all sides by nothing more than the eternal repetition of nightfall and break of day, sunset and sunrise. ‘Bring the day, eat the day’, as the Bengali idiom had it.
A white van drove past slowly and Saeed ran after it, managing to thump against one of its metal sides. The van stopped and Saeed went up to the window. He evidently knew the driver.
‘I have three, maybe four today. How many you need?’ he asked the driver.
The driver got out. He was short and stocky, with legs like tree trunks, and bare arms tattooed heavily with a strange device; the overwhelming impression of those drawings on the skin was of dirty, indistinguishable blues and greens. He wore a singlet, a pair of faded cut-offs and heavy, soiled boots.
‘Which ones?’ he asked Saeed.
Saeed pointed to Ritwik, the two men he thought were from Eastern Europe and the young girl Saeed’s Arabic friend had consigned to his care.
‘They strong. They work.’ And pointing to Ritwik he added, ‘He speak English. Good English.’
‘Look, mate, I need three. For a week, maybe, give or take a day or two’ — for Ritwik, the sounds ‘myte’, ‘tyke’, ‘dye’ stood out — ‘strawberries now, and other stuff, you know.’
The girl had moved behind the gathering of these five men, reluctant to join them.
‘They go where?’
‘Cambridgeshire. Twenty pounds each for the day’s job. OK?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Twenty, that’s what I’m giving, not a penny more. If you’re not happy, I can have my pick from any of these people out here.’
There was a growing interest in the groups of waiting men in this negotiation but it was dispersed by the arrival of two more slow trucks on the road.
Saeed did some swift calculation in his head. ‘You take?’
‘Wha’?’ the driver asked.
Saeed repeated, this time gesturing towards each of them.
The driver looked at them slowly, taking them in for the first time, but somehow without any real interest.
‘What about the girl and this Paki boy, you Paki aren’t you, I think two will do, you can keep those other two’ — pointing to the east European men — ‘my mate needs some hands in East Anglia, he’ll be coming along in a while, why don’t ya send them over his way.’
Saeed nodded. ‘OK.’ He turned to the girl and broke out in swift Arabic. It sounded harsh and peremptory and there were a lot of words, certainly many more than he had spoken to Ritwik in the course of the morning. The girl kept her head down, still refusing to make eye contact, yet there seemed to be an odd defiance about that gesture, an insolence that Ritwik couldn’t quite square with the situation she was in now.
Ritwik turned to the driver and asked him, ‘Will you bring us back here from Cambridgeshire at the end of the day?’
‘Wha’?’ That aggressive hurl of a single word, again.
Ritwik felt intimidated repeating what he had just asked. He rephrased, ‘Do we come back to London at the end of the day?’ Everything hinged on that. He couldn’t go away for the night. Who would look after Anne then?
The driver looked immensely uninterested. ‘That depends on you.’
Ritwik steeled himself to ask the original question. ‘Will you be coming back to London?’
‘Could do.’
‘Could you please give me a lift back here?’
‘What d’ya think I am, your fuckin’ taxi service?’ But he said it in a humorous tone. ‘Why d’ya speak posh?’
The question threw Ritwik. ‘I suppose, I suppose. . well, I don’t know. I didn’t think I did.’
Saeed meanwhile was trying to get the driver’s attention by hovering around the edge of their conversation, fidgeting. ‘You take this guy,’ he said, pointing to the wiry young man.
‘OK, we leave the girl behind then. Only two today. We’ll see tomorrow,’ the driver said. He turned to Ritwik and the thin man and gestured them to follow him to the back door. He opened it for them and said, ‘In ya go.’
There was a dirty canvas sheet on the floor and an odd assortment of pails, tins, a large tool box, a hoe, a couple of spades, a few rags, a rolled-up oilcloth and a spare pair of heavy-duty boots. It was dark in there and the only view they would have would be through the glass windows on the back door, if they half-crouched and half-knelt like dogs.
‘We don’t have all day, y’know. Get movin’.’ The driver was obviously used to ordering people around.
Ritwik and the thin young man clambered in and sat down on the canvas. Saeed and the driver exchanged more words: Ritwik couldn’t make out anything from this trap. The van revved up and started moving. Ritwik lurched towards the back door windows and held his palm against the glass in goodbye to Saeed. Saeed hesitated before he put up his hand to wave. The clear morning sunshine had caught his face and turned it a shade of pale gold.
Anne’s wrinkled parchment-and-bone claw sticks out of the contained pond, clutching the white edge, a parody of some still from a crass Hollywood chiller, while the water laps at the scumringed sides in soundless mini-ripples, which are not ripples really, not the ones neatly, concentrically circling out, but only erratically agitated water. The scum ring acts as a sort of Plimsoll line for Ritwik; he always fills the bath a few inches below that rectangular mark running the entire perimeter, always thinking he needs to give it a good scour but it acts as a guideline. He doesn’t want Anne to drown or get water in her mouth or nose when she reclines her entire length during the twice-weekly bath.
No bath oil, no foam, no gel, nothing but the spartan bar of ivory Imperial Leather. Sometimes her flailing claws miss the edge and clutch his immersed hand instead. He sits outside, sometimes on his knees, at other times on his haunch, one hand under her armpit — a texturally disturbing combination of dewlap, down and solid rods all holding each other, just about, in a fragile balance — the other hand always free. The hands change roles all the time.
These are Ritwik’s first experiences of the naked female body: breasts hung down like meagrely weighted crushed leather bags, the weight low down, like a couple of lonely stones at the very bottom of a sack. They remind him of the sad balloons, deflated and shrivelled, at the end of a child’s birthday party. The aureoles are like leaking stains. Everything in her body, the intricately scored map of her skin, her stomach, the pouches under her eyes, her breasts, seems to be having an affair with gravity and cannot resist its pull any longer. Maybe it is the ultimate call to the earth, the flesh impatient to reach where it knows it is destined. He doesn’t dare look at the space between her legs; only in the unwilled and involuntary periphery of his vision are snatches of a sparse, sad, grey tuft to which he always shuts his mind as if the sight is going to bore holes into him and also diminish her.
Anne is a submerged bird, a creature of hollowness, all air and insubstantiality, the broken doll of her body accentuated grotesquely by the way the bath water refracts her limbs and shrivelled dugs and torso into slightly skewed sizes and perspectives. The Barbour-green inflatable pillow props up her head because she often dozes off in her bath. Sometimes Ugo comes in, sniffs around, sometimes he jumps on to the edge of the bath and sits watching the movements, of water, of hands, with beryl-eyed curiosity.