14
Bibhuti sleeps and Ellen snaps at me when she asks for my help. I take her to the staff bathroom to shower and wash her hair, her stick clicking resentfully down the bright corridors and her arm in mine just one more measure against gravity. She lets me in with her to lift her clothes off over shoulders too stiff to obey her commands. I wipe the sweat from her back with polite imprecision. Revealing her body to me is a necessity she performs without relish. Her body has taunted her ever since illness slumped and slackened it and my remarks on its residual beauty have always fallen on deaf ears. She’s the thing you made for me and I want nothing more than to disappear into her, to be held and sucked in and finally absorbed, but the water runs cold and she cringes and stumbles backwards and it takes all my strength to keep her upright. The feel of her soft against my stomach brings on a nudging that stops her breath. I wait a moment for an invitation that doesn’t come and I pull away. I whisper sorry and wrap the towel round her.
I want to ask her why we stopped trying to impress each other but it sounds like such a childish question. It means the world and it wouldn’t change a thing.
I look down at her feet all misshapen from the diabetes and ashamed of the baby steps they have to take to keep her from falling and I remember how once the world was new to her and so was I. I want her to have what I had in India, a taste of something larger than life. I want her to have always stayed the same as the first time I saw her.
I kneel down and dry her feet where she stands holding on to the sink. I’m very careful. I don’t look up. When I spread her toes and ply the towel between them it should tickle but she’s numb in her extremities. That she feels so little of the world around her strikes me as the saddest thing, and I tell her my crying is in reaction to the ammonia in the floor cleaner they use here.
A nurse follows us back to the room with a needle for Bibhuti and a pot of kheer for Jolly Boy, stolen in kindness from the lunchtime trays. He picks out the pistachios and gives them to me. He knows I like them. We all hold our breaths while the nurse refreshes Bibhuti’s drugs. The old line when she removes it weeps bright red blood and we’ve all agreed to take this as a strong sign of life. We should only start to worry if the blood dries up.
Bibhuti breathes loud and steady, unhurting in sleep. The nurse stabs at his hand in lining up the new needle and beads of fresh blood rise on his skin. I feel it as an outrage. No one else will say it so I do.
‘Can you be careful, you’re hurting him.’
I hear anger in my voice and I’m not surprised by it. If anyone hurts him they’ll answer for it.
No one mentioned the blood. I went through the whole day stained by it and no one had had the decency to tell me. In the office they grumbled and clicked their mice like nothing was different. I stalled at another red light, no one sounded their horn or flashed me to clue me in. I showed a couple round a house and the man’s eyes skimmed over me like I was a body misplaced and found again in the wrong shoes, the woman whispered something to him on the way out that I’d taken for horseplay and made no move to enlighten me. The birds didn’t change their tune.
I came home from work and Ellen jumped out of her skin. She took me to the mirror so I could see for myself. My neck was covered in blood. A thick vivid band of it spread from my ear to my collar.
I couldn’t tell her how it had gotten there. I wasn’t even sure it was mine until I felt it. Then I found the gash. I retraced my steps and decided I must have cut myself shaving in the morning and not noticed. The blood had leaked, unchecked, and dried over the day. I’d been walking around with it, defaced, and no one had said anything. No one had asked if I was alright, everyone too wrapped up in themselves. And I hadn’t had much reason lately to look at myself in the mirror.
Ellen cleaned me up. Her fingers on me drew out goosebumps. I held her to me as she dabbed at the wound, pulled myself in to the softness around her middle. I felt an intoxicating pity for her and her for me.
‘What did you do to yourself?’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m silly.’
We were sexless and hypothetical. Children playing war wounds, finding intimacy in skinned knees and bee stings.
Later on I sat in front of the TV and pushed some meat around my plate. I was shaken and fired up for a killing. I watched a crocodile eat an ox because the ox was too slow crossing the river. There was no urgency there. I sided with the predators.
I changed channels and there was Bibhuti.
He was stripped down to his underpants and straddling three slabs of concrete. He was sleek and fearless and he didn’t flinch when the sledgehammer came down. I watched him take the hit. I heard the crack of concrete and felt the release when the fragments fell away. Someone lifted up the pieces to show that they were broken.
The studio audience applauded the footage. They were shown it again in slow motion and they applauded even harder. There was laughing too but it was the nervous laughter of people who’d just witnessed a miracle and didn’t know how to greet it.
‘Look at this guy, he’s brilliant,’ I said to Ellen when she came in from the kitchen. ‘Look how calm he is. He doesn’t give a shit.’
‘He’s mental. They’re laughing at him.’
‘They’re idiots, they don’t understand.’ I was lost in admiration. I couldn’t put my finger on it but there was something about him that triggered the same nerve in me that fired when I first saw George Best cut a shaky defence to ribbons. It left me bewildered and short of breath. It plucked at my manhood and incited my sense of the magnificent. Ellen didn’t get it. She dunked a biscuit in her tea, swore when the biscuit broke in half and fell in.
Bibhuti’s face was unmoved, his body unmarked. He’d bargained with death and come out on top. He acknowledged this without surprise or ceremony. That’s what impressed me the most. He’d known all along that he was the stronger one. He’d always believed in it as firmly as the ground beneath his feet.
I wanted what he had. He shimmered and crackled and the world bent to his will.
They lifted him up on their shoulders and offered him to their gods but their gods felt unqualified to take him. He looked into the camera. He was looking right at me.
He made a dare.
That’s what it was, pure and simple. He dared me to forget the blood on my neck and my oxen caution and find in myself something unassailable. I sat up in my chair, a strange electricity running through me of decisions made that would change the way my life would turn out. I resolved to find out as much about him as I could, to steal his secrets and make armour out of them.
15
I woke up under floodlights and a sky of unholy noise. Someone hit a four and a celebration jingle thundered around the near-empty stadium. The small pocket of diehards in the terrace below us blew their plastic trumpets and banged their drums. They prodded their giant foam fingers skyward. They weren’t fooling anybody. There were more people on the pitch than in the stands.
‘It should not be like this,’ Bibhuti grumbled, brushing his moustache with restless fingers. ‘Nobody is interested in the state league. It costs more to run the generator to light the stadium than the teams can repay from ticket sales. If there was not a sponsorship agreement in place the entire league would shut down.’
‘Are those real cheerleaders?’ I asked.