A Life Apart Read online

  He turns around to walk towards the light switch. His mother is sitting in the armchair near the door.

  There is a barely whispered presence in this threshold time of the gathering dark. In a thought-swift instant he understands the expression about hairs standing on end – fear tastes like this; it is the opening of the pores of your face, inside your ears, behind your head.

  Don’t come back like this you’re gone you belong elsewhere not here I cannot live on this hinge you’ve just shown me it’s one or the other now or then elsetime elseplace but please please please not me not ever.

  He suddenly has an urgent need to piss, but it seems he has grown gnarled, hugging roots into the regulation carpet. How can he bring himself to cross the few feet, past that armchair which is charged with her imagined trace, to the toilet outside? Only by this and by this only:

  He must have been six or seven at the time, so it was quite natural to have thought it was a great idea to stick the rubbery gob of chewing gum in his mouth in the hair of Tipshu, the small girl next door. Tipshu didn’t notice until much later. They had to cut off some of her lovely, glossy hair as she brought the house down, howling and crying. Her mother came around for the inevitable complaint, serious words about improper bringing up of children, insufficient discipline that let naughtiness such as this run unchecked.

  Ritwik’s mother was out, tutoring children in a couple of houses in the neighbourhood; this was her way of supplementing her husband’s apology of an income. Dida, his grandmother, already at the door eavesdropping on the loud confusion next door, received the complaint much in the way a hungry dog receives leftovers. Ritwik was warned, darkly, ‘Wait till Ma’s back. You’re in for a bad time.’

  There was a sudden manic animation that lit up Dida’s eyes like embers from within. She sat in the balcony, keeping a sharp eye out for her daughter, jittery with excitement. No sooner had she spied her at the far end of Grange Road than she limped to the door: she could barely wait for the knock before she opened it and the rush of tales spilled out before his mother had even had a chance to sit down and drink a cooling glass of water, ‘You won’t believe what Ritwik’s done, he stuck a dozen Chiclets in Tipshu’s hair, they’ve had to shave all her hair off. Her mother came to complain to you, she is absolutely livid with rage, shaking with anger, said what kind of discipline is this . . .’

  The first kick caught him unawares; it happened in the instant of a blink and sent him nearly flying to the niche where the mortar and pestle stood. While losing his balance and skidding across the floor Ritwik caught, in the peripheries of his field of vision, the blur of his mother pulling a belt from the nylon line on which his father’s clothes hung, shabby and limp. He lay on the floor, a foetal quiver of fear, as the first lash from the leather belt cleanly cut a menacing crack through the compact air and landed on him with the sting of fire. The fiery flowers bloomed rapidly across his legs his thighs his back his scalp, now all one clarifying tingle of pain, and his hairs took life in rising to attention to this rain of weals. Maybe he was sobbing maybe crying please spare me spare me I’ll never do it again never again never stop but this was not just any rain of fire, it was a deluge, which didn’t know when to stop, until she put an end to it and instead started kicking his head his stomach his chest then stood on him with her fierce weight of fury. He felt choked and air air was all he wanted to breathe in, air in, not this hollow of nothing of craving to inhale; then there is only dark, only a saving obliterating blackness.

  When he wakes up, it takes him a span of viscous, murky time to realize he is in a bed next door, in Tipshu’s house. And the story he pieces together to comfort himself goes something like this: the commotion must have brought the next-door neighbours rushing in, Tipshu’s mother had carried the unconscious Ritwik away to their flat, called a doctor or given him water to revive him, then put him to bed, letting the heave of his residual sobbing subside to a calm, but he doesn’t actually know if it went like that. All he knows is that they can’t put him in a plaster cast for cracked ribs; he has to sit, or lie, and wait it out, still as a forgotten stone in a corner, erased, absent.

  He lets the liquid heat of his piss comfort him in its trickle down the inside of his legs and, when his saturated jeans cannot take it any more, watches it leak through pathetically in weak, stuttering drops on to the carpet. He is pissing, shaking and sobbing beside his desk, his room now completely in the grip of the dark. He feels he can never stop this trembling as he makes his way out, fumbling, to the bathroom. It is only much later that he notices how walking past that armchair is no longer a problem, no longer a consuming terror.

  One cold evening, when his head is badly trying to contain the tumult of words inside it, and with an upper stomach burning slowly, he takes a walk to begin, belatedly, an acquaintance with other streets, other buildings. He starts off with the certainty that he’s going to lose his way, stray into badlands and have trouble getting back to the haven of his college. With every step forward he thrills with this little fear. He walks past shops and streets with people bathed in the sick orange glow of sodium vapour lamps till he feels he has wandered well beyond the High Street. It is on a darker side street off an excessively lit road that he suddenly sees the man looking at him. No, looking, the kind that tells him in a flash that he has been noticed for some time now.

  With that sudden emptying squeeze in his stomach and the drowning out of all noise by the percussion of his heart he knows, he knows he’s been followed, he knows this is going to be a pick-up, that he can walk ahead, turning his head around a couple of times to let the stranger know he knows and that he can carry on following him because he’s interested too; it’s a little courtship dance, like the eight-patterned flight of bees or the choreographed code of birds.

  There is that very familiar dryness in his mouth as he plays out this first movement of the suite with a stranger. It has its unerring, delicious shiver as always, but also an inchoate fear of the unknown: who knows, this is not Calcutta, this is the country of psychopathic serial killers, of thousands of AIDS-infected people, of twisted criminals the papers write about almost every day. What if he is one of those? It was only a few days ago he read about how two ten-year-old boys had led a toddler away to a railway siding and battered him to death.

  Ritwik absurdly splices together unnamed and imagined horrors with the almost mythical accretions around the names of the Yorkshire Ripper and Jeffrey Dahmer. The thought of disease keeps dipping and circling in his head. He marks how unattractive the man is – short, pale, with small eyes, jowls, and a terrible and impossibly black moustache – and he knows with an almost pathological sense of sureness that he’s going to have sex with that man.

  And here he is now, on another dark street – god knows how far and lost he is – unsure whether he has led or been led by this man. The man nods, there is a twist of a smile on his weak mouth. ‘Hello,’ he says.

  ‘Hello,’ Ritwik replies and then, almost out of sheer habit, asks him the very first question people asked each other in Calcutta once they had moved into stage one of the game, ‘Do you have a place we could go to?’ Casual, uninterested, trying very hard not to let the tremor in his knees or the manic thudding of his heart inflect his now slightly phlegmy voice.

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Pause. ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, I do, I’m a student.’ He knows what the next question is going to be.

  ‘Can’t we go back to yours?’

  ‘No, no . . . you see, I live in college . . .’ he deliberately lets it tail off.

  That man is just too unattractive, not what he wants, but the game has begun; in fact, they’re too far in it. For Ritwik, it wouldn’t do to give up now; he’ll be left with that uneasy itch which not seeing things through to their end unfailingly gives him. It’s almost a feeling of déjà-vu, almost, this illusion of choice which ultimately reveals its hand but always too late, this going through with something to its conclusion out of a
misplaced purism. It’s a game, there must be closure, must be. The man seems to understand Ritwik’s constraints about taking him back to his room in college. ‘Oh, I see,’ he says. Silence. ‘I have a car, though . . .’ he adds.

  This is it, Ritwik thinks, the standard opening gambit of a serial killer; you’re powerless the moment you enter his car. It speeds down anonymous highways as your life flashes past you in its aura of lurid orange glow from the streetlights, till you reach an abandoned barn or a hillside cottage where no one can hear you scream except the cold stars and the gently nibbling sheep. He gets into the passenger seat, the fear so indelibly stained with excitement he can’t wash one of the trace of the other.

  The car races along what seems too unfamiliar, too far, for a long time. His nervousness mounts, he starts fidgeting, tries to muffle all the edginess out of his voice as he answers all those unimportant questions, ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What are you reading?’ He recognizes the kick in his insides at the less innocuous one, ‘What do you like doing?’ Maybe he is a mutilator-rapist: he won’t kill but bruise and maim, leave him infected with HIV and he’ll have nothing to take to the police, no name, only a description. But descriptions either become fuzzier with time or lose all their sharpness and certainties under close questioning and the faceless requirements of bureaucratic forms. He must note the number of the car and commit it to memory, but it could easily be someone else’s car, maybe even a stolen one. He tries to concentrate on the names of streets that slip by in an orange blur. On top of all this, the man is really really unattractive.

  He drives down some dark side streets, pulls the car at the end of one and turns off the engine. The street is badly lit and there are some infrequent yellow squares of light where the curtains haven’t been drawn in the houses along each side. It seems completely deserted as well. Ritwik doesn’t feel comfortable here. ‘It’s not really safe, is it? A police car could drive in here.’

  ‘It should be OK.’

  Ritwik insists, ‘Could we go somewhere else? Not a residential street.’

  The man turns the ignition again. This time they drive through darker and darker roads till they reach a place where streets end and it becomes a slightly bumpy ride over crunchy pebbles and gravel. That gives out as well and they’re soon in the wider dark of open space. The countryside, maybe. It’s impossible to make out shapes or contours but it’s better to leave the lights out, he supposes. He lets his eyes adapt to the outer darkness; through the windscreen he cannot so much see as sense a treeless plain with the dull mirror of a stretch of water. The darker hulks take on edges and become caravans. Or maybe they are big trucks. It’s so quiet the slight chink-clink of the chain and keys still dangling in the ignition switch seems capable of bringing people running from all sides.

  In seconds, Ritwik has established that the man is of the type who tries to kiss and stroke and be affectionate first before getting down to business. He averts his face as the man brings his mouth closer to his. In case it appears as too overt a rejection, he puts his arms around his neck and pulls him into a hug. There, no chance of a kiss now.

  They pull their trousers down to their ankles. Ritwik’s rigid cock springs out, slapping his stomach, while the man’s tumescing one just lolls. He bends down sideways, takes Ritwik’s cock in his mouth and starts sucking him off with such full-throated ease that had it been at all possible Ritwik would have been taken inside his mouth up to his entire hip. It’s cramped and uncomfortable and being sucked from that odd angle, rather than from the front, with the man’s bobbing head between his thighs, does not quite make it to his A-list of Top Ten Oral Sex Moments. There is also a subdued whiff of curing leather somewhere; he hopes it’s not from the man’s body or his mouth. He is jerking himself off as he keeps sucking. As Ritwik whispers, ‘I’m going to come soon,’ he lets go of his cock, leaving him to finish off, while he starts to moan, ‘Oh, yeah . . . oh yeah . . . come on then, come, come, shoot your load . . .’ the movement of his hand becoming more and more furious. There seems to be a restless animal in his devouring eyes. Ritwik finds his exaggerated porn-speak so ridiculous that he has to make an effort to subdue the laughter bubbling up from inside, it’s in his throat now, it has to be pushed down down, no he can’t let it come out, can’t come out as he comes all over himself, the little opal pools pearlescent on his dark skin even in the darkness inside and around. He watches with detachment the man bringing himself off, whispering more of those absurdities while eyeing his semen hungrily. Ritwik makes sure he doesn’t come anywhere near his jeans or his legs.

  As if the release of orgasm has freed his attention on to other things, Ritwik suddenly notices the deeper darkening inside the car and wheels his head in panic. The windows are opaque, they are no longer clear glass between inside and outside. There are bodies and faces outside, looking in. His heart thuds in his throat in slow motion; he has no idea how many seconds or minutes elapse before they both realize the shapes outside are not humans.

  ‘Horses,’ the man says.

  ‘What?’ Ritwik’s voice is a blur.

  ‘Horses. The trucks you see, they carry horses. They’ve stopped here for the night and let them out on to the meadow. They’ll carry on tomorrow morning.’

  It takes some time for this to sink in. The animals on all sides are peering in, their noses and muzzle so close that he strains to catch another shade of the dark in a horse’s eye looking in through the passenger window. Their snuffling breath has condensed here and there and trickles down as threads of water. The last residue of panic still courses around in him somewhere. He looks ahead, out of the windscreen, and there, in the clotted blackness outside, notices a shuffling dance of firelight, as if a dozen will o’ the wisps have suddenly erupted from nowhere. His mind isn’t quite working, he can’t understand these suspended points of fireflicker swimming about. The man almost senses his confusion. He lets out a little laugh, ‘See, they’ve come out of their trailers now to take them in. They’re looking for the horses.’

  As if on cue, the silence shivers only a tiny fraction to let a few high up-and-down calls from the searchers escape, then it gathers back again over those truncated shepherds’ notes as if they’d never been. The shapes outside the car begin to move.

  ‘We should go,’ the man says.

  Ritwik nods, unable to speak, but his fear and tension have disappeared. He feels a sense of release, an achievement almost. The man is trying to be affectionate by putting his arms around him and trying to kiss him, again, but only manages an awkward parody of it. He is also muttering some fearful slush in his ears while stroking his hair, ‘You’re Hassan, my prince, my lovely prince Hassan . . .’ Ritwik curls his toes. He starts stroking the man’s face to prepare him for his next move: ‘Could you please drop me off somewhere in town . . . perhaps where you picked me up?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ says the stranger and then lapses into his fantasy again: ‘You’re an Arab prince, your name is Hassan—’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ His words cut in like the lash of a whip. The man removes his hand as if he’s been struck. Ritwik regrets instantly, ‘Look, it’s getting late . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes.’ He turns on the ignition and cuts out the headlights the second they come on. The revving car is too loud. The horses can’t be seen anymore. The searching lanterns seem to have disappeared as well.

  It’s late when he’s dropped off at the corner of Broad Street and Cornmarket Street. It has started drizzling gently; under the sodium vapour lamps it looks like a sad sequin shower without the celebratory glitter. He feels light, not quite happy, but getting there, getting there. While trying to put on his Thinsulate branded gloves, he notices black stains on his palms. He tries to figure out what they can be; they come off when he rubs them hard, and when he sniffs his hand, there is a familiar chemical tang he tries to identify . . . shoe-polish, that’s it, black shoe-wax. He doesn’t know why he instantly thinks that the man had dyed his moustache with it.<
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  He sneaks back into college, almost tip-toeing to his room. He doesn’t want to be seen, or talked to, and then smiles wryly: there’s hardly anyone to notice him or talk to him apart from Gavin and he knows Gavin is working late at his studio tonight. He feels both lonely and the utter banality of this loneliness at the same time. Maybe he’ll tell himself a story, the story of that blue-clad Englishwoman from a film so ablaze with reds and russets and oranges and flame that she had stood out like its principle of meaning, holding out the slender hope that she was going to shore up all the dispersal and disintegration around her. He has no idea why the film, Ghare Bairey, has suddenly come unbidden to his mind, a film he had seen nearly ten years ago in Calcutta, but that fleeting woman, Miss Gilby, who had passed through its frames for all of three minutes, or less, all blue primness and measured politeness, will simply not leave his head. She was so marginal, her presence so brief, vanishing almost before her story began. What if he told her story, which hadn’t been written down or filmed?

  Before he enters his room he goes to the bathroom, scrubs clean his hands, his cock, his mouth and face at the sink. Quietly, very quietly, so that Zoe and Charlotte, in the adjoining rooms, don’t suspect anything. He enters his room, drowning out any surfacing fear of his mother sitting inside and quickly turns on the light. He sits down and writes.