His insides are fizzing fireworks of fear; it runs, thick and sluggish, in his feet, his calf muscles, his knocking chest, turning them heavy and light at the same time. Where does this end and hunger begin? Initially, he stays on streets from where running out onto York Way or Caledonian Road would be a short sprint, but the slowly diffusing smoke of the drug inside him obliges with its addictive hits only when he strays into the darker, more remote areas of the maze. The thought of those pimps with the acid bulb explodes in a delicious crackle-and-flash of fear in him. Tonight he will go with anyone and not ask for any money. Tonight it is faceless pleasure he is after.
He walks towards the stretch of water between Camley Street and Goods Way. It is the only way he can live with his fear, exorcizing it in the very place he was pinned down and threatened with the potent, disfiguring hiss of acid. He hasn’t been in these desolate streets for well over six months; surely, the men who assaulted him have forgotten his very existence by now. Small change, that is what he was to them.
He hears footsteps in the next street and instinctively moves into the darker shadow of what appears to be a doorway to an abandoned warehouse. There are no streetlights here, only what meagre illumination reaches from the halogen lights of the Bemerton Estate; one could hardly count the change in one’s hand in it. Two men appear at the end of the street. On instinct, Ritwik flattens himself against the door. One man could be a possibility, two men, almost always trouble: first rule of streetwalking. A few minutes later, he peeps: they are gone. He steps out and moves towards the end where he had seen the men. He moves fast because this area is slightly better lit than where he had hidden.
As if from nowhere, there are two men standing there. Skinny, young, pinched pale faces. One of them is smoking. Ritwik bends his head, concentrates on the road, and increases his pace. He can feel their eyes boring into his back, hears some whispering and then the punch of ‘Paki cunt’, not hurled at him, not yet, but just a casual conversational moment that exceeds and spills over the whispers. Whatever is invisible in the semi-darkness, colour obviously is not one of them. He tries not to panic, not to run, not to register any reaction, and keeps walking at the same pace. Thank god they are not those Albanian pimps at least, he thinks.
The men smell his fear, read his forced nonchalance easily, and gradually step up their abuse.
‘Paki scum, hey you, Paki scum.’ Tentative, even hushed, like a singer trying out his voice in a new venue, testing the acoustics.
‘Fuck off to your slum you Paki bastard you Paki cunt fuck off.’ Louder, bolder.
Ritwik arrives at a crossroads. If he takes a right and runs, runs very fast, he might be able to make it to one of the arteries feeding into the Caledonian Road. But the lane is so dark that he is scared to step in there. He hears running footsteps behind him. He wheels around: the men are within spitting distance. He has no choice; he makes his first mistake by turning into the street nearest him, thinking it will offer him a temporary sanctuary, the cover of darkness, or throw the men off the scent. Fear clouds his thoughts, and when he hears running behind him again, he blindly turns left, right, left, any turning that appears in front of him, desperate to lose himself and confuse the men. There are no niches and corners in the street he finds himself in, panting furiously, although it is darker than Camley Street. He has lost all orientation now. He is so scared that even the slow clang-and-rattle of a train in the background doesn’t give him back his bearings. He is deaf to it; his ears are now wholly given to catching the sound of pursuit.
He hears a low whistle, a short hollering, the sound of more running feet, another whistle, and then, chillingly, the sound of running swells. There are five men now, at least five that he can see, entering his street, summoned like dogs by some ultrasonic signal unheard by the human ear, by the scent of prey. He huddles against a wall, wishing himself invisible. If he could only walk a few feet and slither under the hedge in front of him, he would feel safer but he is certain any movement will give him away.
‘Find the fucking wog. You two run over to that end, we’ll wait here for him. Let’s see where that scum can hide.’ The words are so loud that it seems to Ritwik all perspective, all distance, has been warped and shortened to pack this street and the five men into a little closed chamber. He finds himself shaking all over. He decides to risk it to the hedge — invisibility will save him — and in stepping out of the shadows he makes his second and final mistake.
He has hardly taken two steps forward, intending to crouch down and roll over the distance that separates him from his hiding place, when someone shouts, ‘There he is. Jim, to your left.’
In an instant they are on him. Someone trips him up: he breaks his fall using the palms of his hand. He doesn’t feel the skin scraping off them as he manages to save himself falling on his face, only the pure lucidity of his terror, like some clear afternoon light. They kick him while he is lying down, random kicks, aimed nowhere in particular. One catches him in his groin and he doubles up in pain. There is one on his ribs that takes all his breath away; try how hard he may, he cannot breathe anymore. As he chokes, he feels little popping explosions of light, a thousand lights, of dull, unnameable colour, behind his eyes.
‘Send the fuckers back send those Paki scum away.’ They are almost chanting it now, like a mantra at a ritual, their words resonating in some deep way to the blows they throw out in such aleoritic concord: a kick, a punch to the face, a sickening sound of cracking and crunching of bone. He tries to shout, but the scream is soundless. He doesn’t know whether he should shout for help or beg for mercy. Just before he loses consciousness, Ritwik is granted not the diorama of his entire life flashing past his eyes in an instant but two unrelated moments of clarity: he is struck with wonder at the sheer rage these men are expressing; where is its wellspring? How can one small human harbour a sea of such anger inside him? Why do they not drown under it? The last light is the awareness of the fact that at some point during the chase or the assault, he had wet his jeans. Then he passes into the warmth of darkness.
He doesn’t hear the sharp, cold flick of a metal blade emerging from its sheath, cries of ‘No, Dave, no, don’t be so fuckin’ stupid, let’s fuck off quick, no, Dave, no’, doesn’t feel the swift entries and exits of the knife, doesn’t hear the desperate cry of ‘You daft cunt, what the fuck have you done’ repeated over and over, the sound of five sets of running, escaping feet, as his thin blood trickles out on to this dark corner of a back street that will be forever England.
XIII
Miss Gilby sits on the terrace of the bungalow with a blanket drawn over her knees and soaks up the welcome warmth of the midday sun. It is so quiet that she can almost hear the wheeling of the brown eagle — Ruth would immediately reel off its scientific name, habitat, reproductive habits, nesting characteristics if she were to see it — in the middle distance, against the backdrop of the gleaming ranges of the Garhwal, their tops tipped with white snow that turn flame orange in the afternoons and then blue, an unfathomably dark blue, moments before the silent nightfall.
Ruth has gone inside to ask Mohun Singh to rustle up some lunch. She briefly appears at the door and calls out, ‘Maud, there’s a letter for you. I think it’s from your brother. Shall I bring it out to you?’
Without looking behind her, she answers, ‘If you will be so kind.’ She is intent on watching the gliding arcs the eagle is describing in the clean, thin air. It gives Miss Gilby a vertiginous feeling inside her, as if she were in free fall. Part of that, she thinks, with her characteristic rationality, might be because the terrace of Ruth’s bungalow is poised right on the edge, with nothing between it and the graceful bird but a steep valley of air reaching out over the tops of hills and ranges to the distant might of the Garhwal.