‘What about our parents?’
‘Is that all you can say? I tell you I find the man of my life and you say what about our parents?’
‘It’s very bad, Priti. Things have gone badly.’
‘You’re so selfish sometimes. Why does everything have to be about you?’
There was a long silence. He realized she could hear his ragged breathing. She knew something was wrong.
‘Arjun? What’s happened?’
‘It’s complicated. And it means I might not be around in the future, so — so, well, Australia is out, OK? You have to promise me you’ll stay and look after Ma and Pa.’
Now it was her turn to be quiet.
‘Sis?’
Her shouting distorted the signal. ‘Oh my God. Why are you saying this? This is so typical. You get to go away and be a bigshot in America. Just because I’m a girl I have to stay and play nursemaid? You’re — you’re a drongo. A sexist drongo. Why shouldn’t you look after them when they get old, eh? Why not you? You’re as bad as Papa.’
‘Priti, please. I’m scared.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve done something. I screwed up. And it means I might not be coming back.’
‘Arjun?’
‘What will happen to them if both of us aren’t there?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Sis.’
‘Oh, Arjun, I knew something was wrong. You’ve been so strange.’
‘I made a mistake, OK. A big mistake. And there’s no way to put it right.’
‘I don’t understand. What are you saying?’
‘You’ll find out. They may come and ask you questions, so it’s better that you don’t know anything. I love you, OK? And you must tell Ma and Pa that I love them too.’
‘But what’s it about?’
Arjun could not answer. He held the phone loosely in one hand, his mouth hanging open like a fish’s as he watched his face appear on screens all around the bus terminal. Madness or a bad dream. Trapped on the other side of the glass. A news report. Cyberterror suspect: FBI releases picture.
Slowly he put the pay-phone handset back in the cradle and turned to face the wall.
In the picture he was smiling, wearing a striped shirt and making the thumbs-up sign. It had been cropped from a snapshot taken at Jimmy’s Brewhouse in Redmond. Taken with Chris’s camera. Which meant they had been talking to Chris.
Sorry, Chris.
He risked a glance back at the TV, which had exchanged his face for images of long lines at an airport check-in. After that there was a comment from a scowling Republican congressman in a striped tie, and then her, Leela Zahir, dancing on a desk in High School Hearts. Not her best film, or even (bobbed hair and a lemon-yellow jumpsuit) her best look, but she still brought his heart into his mouth. Ten seconds of yearning and then over to sports, body-armoured gorillas piling up on the goal line, a seven-foot teenager jumping for a hoop.
What now?
‘You all done there, buddy?’ Pointing at the phone was an elderly African-American wearing a t-shirt advertising a community regeneration programme. Make a difference for Dinwood. For a moment Arjun did not understand. You done for buddy. You down there. He spoke again. ‘You going to use that?’ Arjun shook his head and stepped away. The short walk to the nearest vacant seat was agonizing. Surely around the hall a hundred visual cortices were processing the configuration of his face, subconsciously linking shapes and colours to the mugshot on the news bulletin. Any second now would come the tap on his shoulder, the stern voice telling him to keep his hands in plain view. He hunched up, lowering his head into his jacket, not daring to look up in case he caught someone’s eye.
By the time his bus was announced, the world around him had become both painfully close and infinitely distant. Noises were amplified, every rustling magazine and crying child a potential police siren. At the same time he was cut off from all the other waiting people, the homeless woman in the shower cap, the buzz-cut young army sergeant and the lady with the perm and the puzzle book, as if by a plexiglas panel.
He boarded the bus and sat down in his seat, his guts vibrating as the driver started the engine. He felt faint and realized he was unconsciously holding his breath. He had to concentrate, let it in, out again. Around him people were settling down, a tattooed Hispanic man wadding a jacket behind his head for a pillow, a mother feeding corn chips to her baby daughter. No one was paying any attention to him. It was like magic, a status quo as fragile as a soap-bubble. One move and they would be on him in a pack.
It could not last long now. How many hours of freedom did he have?
When the bus arrived in San Diego, it was getting dark. He knew from films like Inspector 2000 and Run Arundhati Run that speed is of the essence for a fugitive, but something fatalistic had kicked in, some religious aspect of his nature which whispered that whatever would be would be, that his chances were so small he might as well take the opportunity to sleep for an hour or two before he faced the future.
He walked away from the bus-station as quickly as he could, putting two or three blocks between himself and the bustle before turning randomly on to a side street with a convenience store on the corner. He had a momentary glimpse of the interior, the Sikh proprietor bagging up groceries for a customer. Behind him on the wall was a calendar and an American flag and a garlanded portrait of Guru Nanak. In that store and the apartment above it would be rice and paan parag and tapes of Lata Mangeshkar and paper-wrapped cones of incense and steel dishes and Star TV on cable and pairs of worn leather chappals and soaking chickpeas and a family talking a language close to his own, words to go with the faraway smells of ghee and dust and petrol and cooking fires. His heart felt empty, a deflated paper bag.
There was a motel at the end of the block, its tall sign flashing intermittently. Lucky’s Motor Lodge: Color Cable TV Direct Dial Phone Aircon Parking Guests Only. A bored Chinese woman took his money and gave him a lecture in the same unpunctuated monotone as the sign, check-out at noon ice-machine under stairs you break you pay no parties. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and pine disinfectant. He went to the bathroom and broke the heat-sealed wrapper on a plastic cup, filled it with water. It tasted terrible. He considered going back to the convenience store to buy a soda, but suddenly felt so tired it was all he could do to lay himself down on the padded nylon bedspread and close his eyes.
He tried to picture the border, but could see it only as an abstraction, a thick black line across the earth.
When he woke he was disoriented but not scared. At least not at first. The distant traffic noise was soothing and the sound of a TV filtering through the thin partition behind his head was comfortingly familiar, reminding him of his studio at Berry Acres. He sank back against the pillow. Then there was a loud crash outside his door. Instantly he sat upright, every muscle tensed in expectation of the Kevlar-armoured stormtroopers about to burst in. But the crash was followed by laughter, two women holding a joky argument as they kneeled down on the walkway to pick up whatever they had dropped.
The truth of his situation returned, dropping down over him like a bell-jar. He swung his legs on to the floor and rubbed his eyes. Having no idea of the time, he took a peek through the curtains. The sky above the roofline of the motel court was grey and overcast. Dawn or dusk. It didn’t really seem to matter which.
Struck by a sudden urgency, he pulled his laptop from his bag and dug around among socks and undershorts for a little golf-ball camera whose flex he untangled with shaking fingers. He plugged it in and, while he waited for the computer to boot up, placed an upturned waste-paper basket on the bedside table and set the camera on top of it, angling it to capture his image as he sat in a chair in the corner. It was time to explain himself, to face the public.