‘See, it’s not enough, is it? It’s not satisfying.’
Bibhuti lifted the back end of the car clear of the road. The car tilted away from him and I heard a scream.
I turned to see the girl sliding off the roof. Jolly Boy had recoiled when the car had moved and lost his hold on her. The girl let go of her burden and the snowglobes she’d been holding fell over the side, some smashing and some bobbing away down the incline in the road.
Her mother balled her sari at her hip and splashed after them.
I caught the girl just before she hit the ground. I stretched myself as tall as I could go and kept hold of her. Her little wet hand clutched my neck and I felt my skin prickle from her touch. I carried her to the step and showed her that we were safe from the water. I told her it was alright. She bawled.
I hated myself for not knowing the words that would make her feel safe. I loved myself for saving her. I was a good man. Everyone who was looking could see it. She was my proof, right there in my arms.
She squirmed and her father was there to take her from me. He croaked a thank-you and went trotting after his wife and their fallen goods, the girl bouncing on his shoulder as he stooped to gather up a straggler.
The car rose and lurched forward. Bibhuti stepped the back wheels out of the crater, dragging his plastered leg in a wide radius to keep it clear of danger. He was steaming and pain flared from him in visible flashes. I rushed to his side and bent to grasp the bumper just as he set the car down on even ground.
When I looked up Ellen was standing on the kerb, unsteady and lifelike under the rain. Harshad, straddling his scooter, passed her walking stick to her and waited while she corrected herself. Ellen looked at me. She parted her lips to say something but no words came. I leaned into the car to still the trembling in my legs.
Bibhuti’s wife came out and draped a shawl over Ellen’s head. The women turned and went inside. Harshad rode off through the floodwater, a shameless conspirator. I let the rain fall on me. The bite of it was pleasant on my skin. I breathed my special breath and got ready to explain myself.
26
Ellen threw my wedding ring at me but her aim was poor and it fell at my feet and spun woefully on the floor tiles. I picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of my workout bottoms. They were sticking to me and I didn’t know what day it was. I’d stopped recognising the differences between them. It had felt liberating when she wasn’t here. Now it felt pitiful, a sad sign of the distance I’d strayed from the routine things that had once given me shape. The meals Ellen had cooked for me, the little traditions we’d invented so we could feel like a part of each other despite how far we’d come unstuck. Movie night and bingo and the weekly shop. Sunday night pill counts and Chinese Wednesdays.
I realised, powerfully, that we should have made children when there’d still been the chance of them. I should have given us other things to love that wouldn’t rust shut over time like we had.
Ellen had brought the rain in with her. It hung over our heads in the living room while we all sat dripping in a stiff arrangement, blowing the skin off the tea Bibhuti’s wife had cooked. Ellen’s walking stick stood between her legs. Her special shoes were soaked through and puddles were spilling out from underneath them.
‘I didn’t do it to hurt your feelings,’ I said.
‘What, the walking out or the pretending to be dead?’
Her thin lips trembled as she said this and inflicted the words with a sharpness that had been filed over weeks and years of untold resentment. The sound they made came as a shock. Something hateful floated like wreckage in the blue of her eyes. Her patience for me had died and we were both compelled to mourn its passing with verve and uncustomary honesty.
‘Both.’
She told me I looked like shit. I didn’t argue. Barely any time at all had passed since I’d last seen her, but we were strangers now and I supposed we’d die that way.
‘Was there a funeral?’ I asked her.
‘No. You’re not dead yet. Not officially. The police couldn’t find you. They said you’d probably been washed out to sea.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Your bank statement. The flight and the hotel, it was all there. You didn’t exactly cover your tracks. I booked the same hotel. The man said you’d be here.’
‘I should have paid in cash. I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘Obviously not.’
I told her she shouldn’t have come. Not in this weather. What if the plane had skidded on landing? How could she come all this way on her own, without me to look after her?
She flushed, squeezed her stick tighter. She wasn’t an invalid. She had as much right to be here as I did.
I looked round at the faces of the family and saw that my lie had burned them. Bibhuti was stroking his moustache mechanically, lost in the effort of recalling the last time he’d been so carelessly betrayed. Jolly Boy sat on the floor at his father’s feet and snapped through the pages of the car magazine I’d bought him from the newsstand across the road. He whispered something irreverent to himself that sounded like an assessment of my character.
Bibhuti’s wife was unchanged. I’d offended her irreversibly the moment I’d decided to take a bat to her husband and reconciliation had never been on the cards.
We listened to the wind and the rain battering the windows. When Ellen finally spoke it was to ask me if I was coming home.
I told her I couldn’t.
I told her things had changed and my place was here. I’d promised to do something and I couldn’t leave until it was done. It was something she might not approve of or understand, but it was a special thing, mine and Bibhuti’s, and if I turned my back on it now I’d die a liar.
I told her our plan and waited for a reaction. She said nothing.
Jolly Boy read aloud about the AMG Mercedes and its gullwing doors. His mother went out to the kitchen to bang some pots together.
‘I know it sounds impossible but we will do it,’ Bibhuti said.
‘He’s got this gift, he can’t feel pain.’
‘I can control pain,’ Bibhuti corrected. ‘I have learned to master it. Also I am very strong.’
‘It’s destiny,’ I said.
Ellen coughed up a hairball.
‘I am giving him a cure,’ Bibhuti said, anxious to help my cause. ‘It has worked on others and it can work on him. There is no need to worry. I will save him. But he must stay to complete his treatment.’
Ellen looked at me fearfully. I told her about the cancer. I went through it all, how I’d been feeling and what it was building up to, making the appointment behind her back and feeling the doctor’s hand up there digging around for evidence. Then the referral and the tests and the news. The brave decision I’d made to run before the news could spread and infect her.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked.
‘Because I didn’t want you to have to watch me die. I couldn’t put you through all that. You had your own problems. I just had to get away. I’m sorry.’
She levered herself up from her seat, swatting away my help, and clicked to the kitchen to unleash her feminine sorrows on a sympathetic ear. She paused at the doorway and looked at my face. ‘You should get rid of that,’ she said. ‘It makes you look like a pervert.’
I felt my lip, the patch of fluff growing there. I’d decided to stop shaving in a moment of whimsy, as ham-fisted homage to Bibhuti and as testament to my resurgent manhood. I’d regretted it when the itching had started but I’d kept going with it to save face.
‘Why didn’t you tell me it looked bad?’ I asked Bibhuti.
‘Some things are not meant to be,’ he said. ‘You must discover this as God reveals it to you, I cannot negotiate.’