Ritwik reaches for the tin of lavender talcum powder, hesitates a few seconds trying to decide whether he should pour it first on his hand and then smear her or whether he should sprinkle the talc on her directly and then spread it around more evenly. He opts for the latter and realizes immediately that he has made a mistake; he comes to this particular crossroads every bathtime and every time he makes the same mistake, for the talc falls and inhabits the pouches and folds of her skin, stays trapped there, much in the way a powdery drift of snow fills up rills and gullies first. Once again, a bathtime ritual becomes an almost insurmountable logistical problem for Ritwik.
‘Hold on to my waist while I do it, OK?’ It is like talking to a child, except the position they are locked in now could be that of lovers.
She complies again. When the ritual is all over, Ritwik wraps her dressing gown around her and says, ‘Let’s go and look for your kimono.’
She refuses to take the stairlift and wants Ritwik to help her upstairs. On the way up, an immeasurably long move and somewhat irritating to Ritwik, partly because his desire for pure order and neatness had been scrambled by the foamless scum and the powder in the ridges of Anne’s skin, she asks, ‘How is your job with Mr Haq going?’
Fucking clairvoyant psychoterrorist. Of course, he does not voice it.
The lone and level strawberry field stretched far away, but not so far that Ritwik couldn’t see something different at the far end, where it met the horizon, another field of a different crop. In the very far distance there was a disparate bunch of what looked like abandoned ricks and sheds and an outmoded combine harvester or some such farming machine. What took his immediate attention were the acres and acres of green which, on closer inspection, appeared somehow straggly and weak, an anaemic shade of the colour, but he had never seen a strawberry bush before and had assumed it would be a tough thing, more like a sturdy, clipped rosebush and less like this semi-climber. Row after long row of bushes, laid out like disciplined armies, thick with red berries. The berries were not obvious at first but when he first spied them, among the low foliage and on the straw bedding, which had been laid down lovingly under the plants along the entire length and breadth of the plantation, he couldn’t see anything else. Like little red lanterns in the green night, he had paraphrased and then felt immediately ashamed at his cast of mind. And where was this place? Cambridgeshire? Hertfordshire? Berkshire? He had no idea but he wasn’t going to ask in case they thought him snoopy or too inquisitive for his own good. Something told him that too many questions, or even revealing some fluency in English, wouldn’t go down too well here.
The journey out here had taken slightly over an hour. During the first leg of the drive, Ritwik had frequently clambered up to the back window to get a glimpse of the world outside. As the road had ribboned out in a track of macadam grey, with houses or occasionally fields on either side, he had thought that this was what it felt like to be a prisoner, literally, being taken away in a prison van, watching the other side unspool in relative reverse. Along with this, the jerkiness that came with being in the back of a van had given him a slight sense of motion sickness so, after a while, he had stopped looking out of the window and concentrated instead on dispelling the little waves of nausea.
He had introduced himself to the young man, his fellow passenger. There had been a difficult and halting conversation, Dusan — that was his name — was taciturn and almost hostile at first and then plain inarticulate, his English still rudimentary. Ritwik had persevered; when ‘Where are you from?’ proved too difficult for Dusan to follow, Ritwik had broken it down to ‘Country?’ and, pointing to him, ‘You’. In the volley that followed, only ‘Albania’ seemed decipherable. When Ritwik asked him to slow down, Dusan kept pointing to himself and saying, ‘Albania, Albania’, and then, ‘Home: Macedonia, Live: Macedonia’. An Albanian from Macedonia, Ritwik decided. He found it difficult to place: that was a very fuzzy area of the world map. The interaction jolted along, an erratically dotted movement to the more or less smooth onward motion of the van. At one point, Ritwik asked Dusan his age by pointing to himself first, showing ten fingers twice and then four fingers, then pointing to Dusan and making a vague interrogative gesture with his upturned palm. After two tries, Dusan cracked it and answered, without resorting to counting with fingers, ‘Fifteen.’ Ritwik was sure he hadn’t been able to keep the shock off his face: Dusan looked at least twice his age. His eyes were the eyes of someone who had seen things about life which most wouldn’t want to be shown, a small bunch of lines already making their forking ways out from the corners, his hands gnarled, his mouth lined. The hinterlands behind those eyes contained dangerous terrain, a whole map of misery.
Over the next three days, the map unfurled a tiny bit for Ritwik to have a fleeting glimpse.
Dusan and Ritwik had first been taken to a hut and Tim, along with two other men, had explained to them what they were supposed to do. There were instructions about filling up punnets and barrows, returning picked fruit to the shed, the workings of the twine machine, the sizes of fruits to be picked, different sizes in different baskets — Ritwik hadn’t known that fruit picking — so simple, so. . so. . pure — could be hedged in by so many rules and dos and don’ts.
‘You work until seven and then come to the farm, it’s a mile up that road; one of us will come back with you here and have a look at what you have done. You’ll get paid then. Is that clear? Another thing: don’t eat the fruit. We have a very good idea how much fruit you can pick in twelve hours, between the two of you, and if the weight is any less than our estimate, you get the money taken off your wages. Clear?’
The question of returning to London had assumed such huge proportions in Ritwik’s mind that he hadn’t even taken in most of the instructions. But he hadn’t dared to speak out.
Just half an hour into picking strawberries — larger berries in one basket, smaller ones in another — Ritwik had realized why the farmers didn’t do it themselves. You had to either squat or bend, moving like a crab, awkward and hobbling; the first applied unbearable tension on the thighs, the second broke your back. After the first hour, both Ritwik and Dusan had tried crawling on their knees and moving on fours. By the time it was ten o’clock, they had worked out that the optimal thing to do was a combination of all these movements, each sustained until it became unbearable, then switching to another one. The sun was becoming fierce, Ritwik had forgotten to get a bottle of water, and his body was being tested in positions and configurations it wasn’t used to. He hadn’t wanted to think what the aches would be like after a night of sleep.
Where am I going to sleep? In London? How will I get there? In the shed here? What’s going to happen to Anne?
Before midday, Ritwik felt as if he would never walk straight again, his back hunched, the stoop taking its own time to relax and let him ease, very slowly and painfully, up into erect position again. Dusan, either made of more resilient stuff, or used to such work, had doggedly carried on, needing fewer rests and fewer stretches of the body to its natural and original postures.
When the dehydration headache kicked in, first a slow contracting behind the eyes and then the drilling at the temples and at the back of the head, Ritwik decided that finding water couldn’t be put off any longer. They walked to the shed only to be disappointed. Dusan explained to him, in broken English, that there was bound to be a source of water somewhere nearby otherwise how would they water their crop? Ritwik accompanied Dusan, the Albanian boy following some arcane and invisible track understood only by him but he led them, after a meandering walk for about three-quarters of an hour, to a lead pipe sticking out of the ground with a tap at its mouth and a huge hose of green plastic coiled near it. They drank, mouths to the tap, as if there were no tomorrow.