If she wasn’t going to be subtle, neither was I. ‘You’re trying to talk to me about my relationship with my mother, aren’t you?’
‘No, darling, I’m being much more self-involved than that.’
She was probably lying, but I liked her all the same. ‘I’m really not the person to talk to about Ed. I can’t even begin to fathom him. I’ll try not to be unpleasant to him, that’s as much as I can promise. But I’m trying for your sake, not his.’
She sighed then. ‘If he hears that he’ll say, you see, Ma, you’ve gone and done it again. And I suppose I have.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Oh, I hear him. He’s here for lunch. I’ll speak to you later.’ And she hung up.
What an odd household.
The thought had barely crossed my mind when I smiled at the irony. Who was I to talk of odd households, when between the ages of fifteen and seventeen I had lived under the same roof as a divorced couple, his second wife and their daughter? And before that I’d spent all those years shuttling between the picture-perfect normality of life with Dad, Beema and Rabia and the utter unconventionally of my mother’s house with its connecting door to her lover’s garden. How unremarkable those arrangements had seemed to me.
I put down the receiver and sent around an e-mail to a choice group of colleagues, enquiring, ‘Time for a breakout, Chinese style?’ and within minutes I’d assembled a group of three women and two men who were more than happy to join me at the nearest Chinese restaurant for lunch. (That was one of my carefully nurtured talents — the ability to enter a new workplace and almost instantly find people who would provide companionship to speed up the day without demanding anything so emotionally exhausting as friendship.)
Over chow mein, lemon chicken, egg-fried rice and beef chilli dry I brought the conversation around to Ed and everyone rolled their eyes or held up their chopsticks in gestures of confusion.
‘If he was a woman, the letters PMS would be attached to his name like it was a university degree,’ the news anchor asserted, picking off the little pieces of carrot from the egg-fried rice on her plate, and leaving everything else untouched.
‘Oh, he’s sweet enough. Leave him alone,’ said one of the women on the Boond team. ‘You can’t blame a guy for getting frustrated if he’s been working abroad and then has to come back and deal with goats in the budget.’
‘Sorry?’ I said between mouthfuls.
‘Don’t you know this?’ The news anchor leaned in. ‘Whenever there’s some major production in the works the budget includes the cost of several goats — the bigger the production, the more goats. That way, when something goes wrong, a goat gets sacrificed without disrupting the balance sheet. Two goats if the problem is major.’
‘Boond is a seven-goat production,’ the Boond woman said, not without pride. ‘But what with Bougainvillea dropping out, and then waiting to see if Shehnaz Saeed would agree to do it, we’re already four goats down and filming has hardly even begun.’
The conversation moved on from there and I could find no seamless way of bringing Ed back into it. That felt like failure. Later, in my office again, I found myself tracing widening circles on my desk and thinking of them as Eddies. Then, my mobile phone beeped to tell me it had been twenty-four hours since I left Shehnaz Saeed’s house.
It was with a sense of occasion bordering on the ritualistic that I pulled open my desk drawer and lifted out the covering letter. I set it down in front of me, an empty coffee jar filled with pens holding down one corner and the edge of my mouse pad holding down the corner diagonally across from it. It struck me instantly that the handwriting was too deliberately childish, the misspellings too obvious. I am sending this too you, though it could be dangarous for me, because perhaps it is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want. Though. Perhaps. Might. Those were words you’d associate with someone who was more than just marginally literate. And a sentence structure that employed a sub-clause offset by commas — that required a certain level of sophistication.
I felt a moment of satisfaction mixed with contempt. Whoever had written this could have tried just a little harder to make the fiction convincing. And yet… I adjusted the neck of the desk lamp so the light shone on to the letter, and tried unsuccessfully to find a watermark or some other distinguishing feature. And yet, if the intention of the writer of this letter were merely to disguise his (or her) identity, then the plan had been successful. I continued to look at the letter for a few more minutes, but no amount of staring could force it to yield up any clues, so I turned my attention to the encrypted page.
The Minions came again today. That sounds like a beginning.
I held my hands in front of me, as though in prayer, as understanding dawned. Of course. It was written by someone who was trying to write something — the Poet trying to write a story for Rafael Gonzales, perhaps — except his mind was having trouble forming plot and sentences. So he wrote one line, and then he wrote, triumphantly, that it sounded like the start of something.
What more can I say?
But having got his opening line, he didn’t know how to continue. Of course, of course.
Can it be you, out there, reading these words?
That could only have been addressed to my mother. Why? Just to be playful, perhaps. Just to say, I know you can’t resist picking up things I’ve been working on, and reading them. Except, she never did as far as I knew — she always respected the privacy of his work, never read anything until he asked her to.
Something else was troubling me. I looked at the paper again. Why do it? Simply that. Why write in code for any reason except to write letters to my mother that he wanted no one else to read? Yes, I used to write in the code all the time — I wrote stories, wrote letters to my mother, wrote in the steam of the bathroom mirror. But that was only because it gave me the thrill that children get from partaking in adult behaviour that is forbidden to them. It was the most illicit of pleasures to write in code, and then tear it up or rub it out instantly before anyone — anyone — could see. I was a child then, and the flexibility of my child’s mind was able to grasp and learn the code with an ease that defied grown-ups. But for my mother and the Poet writing in code was hard, laborious work; it carried with it the scent of jail cells and dread. My mother told me so after the Poet had died — and I had surprised her then by saying, yes, I know it. I still know the code.
It was supposed to be their secret, just the two of them. But I was eight years old when they devised the code — curious and small; an excellent combination when your mother locks up her study which has grilles outside its window to prevent any grown person slipping through.
In a drawer, in her study, I found a paper on which she had written:
My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.
And below that, two columns. One which listed all the letters of that odd sentence, and another beside it listing letters of the alphabet:
M=A
Y=B
E=C
X=D
C=E
A=F
L=G
L= (Repeated)
S=H
and so on.
It wasn’t hard to figure out after that.
I copied the sentence and the two columns of letters into the mini-notepad with the spy-sized mini-pen which I carried around in the back-pocket of my jeans, and that afternoon I asked, ‘What’s fugue, Mama?’