Homesick (3 page)

•

The dancing does not stop. They show off to each other. They dance, brothers and sisters together, they dance because they can. They are exhausted, but they push on, they push each other on, because they are new, they are the ones.

•

“What to do?” Siro says to Nandini. “She is determined to marry him, what to do?”

“Good. Let her make a good marriage,” Nandini says. Wesley and Victor sit with them in the dining room. Many people have gone. Gertie and her brother sit on the opposite side of the table.

“Good, good. These children will never go back,” Gertie says. “Let them make marriages here.”

“But with white fellows?” her brother says.

“Why not?” Gertie asks sharply. “You think once you
give them all this, you can take them back there, take it all away?”

“Why not?” Wesley asks. “They can get used to anything. They are not English. They are
ours
.”

“What rubbish!” Nandini says, and Siro agrees with a nodding of her quiet head.

“What is their mother tongue now?” the brother says.

“What does it matter?” Victor says.

“Language—it is important. What is their mother tongue?”

“Ask me what is mine,” Victor says. “It is the same as theirs. We speak in the language we live in. It is not important.” He sees the yellow fire, as if it were dangerous, this man, dangerous.

“What language do you dream in?” the brother asks.

“Dream?” Wesley answers for Victor. “We live in our dreams. We do not need to dream.” They all laugh.

The children come downstairs. Vita sits on Wesley’s knee. Preethi throws her arm around Victor.

“What is your mother tongue?” the brother says to them both. Clare leans against the doorway. Preethi shrugs. Vita says, “Oh, my God, are you arguing about that stuff again?”

“Do you want to know? I will show you,” Nandini says, and she elbows Siro, and the two of them together poke their tongues out, catching the tips with their fingers. Nandini crosses her eyes. Victor laughs, but he wants to cry.

“We belong
nowhere
,” he says. “But if we belong anywhere, it is
here
. I have chosen
here
.” He stands. “
We
have chosen
here
. And that is it,” he says, flicking his wrist up as if tossing an imaginary cricket ball into the air. “We are
here
.”

•

When everyone is finally gone, and the children are asleep, he and Nandini go to bed. They talk of the brother, of Kumar and stupid Shamini. They gossip and laugh, but when the light is off, he turns onto his side and kisses Nandini on the forehead, on the nose, on the lips. He says, “I was homesick for you,” and she laughs and says, “Silly, you were drunk,” as she rolls over and tucks herself into him, pulling his arm around her, her husband, her
husband
.

A
llsorts!” Basit hears him shout, the young one in the cellar. They call him Allsorts, and it makes him angry, but they all have sweetie names. This makes Rita laugh, when he tells her their sweet names, as if they were not the bastard, nasty fellows he knows them to be. She says, “Sweet names, as if they were sweet on each other!” He loves Rita, loves her joy, the way she has taken him on, the way she wipes her hand across his forehead when he’s angry. The way she loves his boy, his grown-up son, Ali: taking him to work at the hotel, getting him a job so he’s safe away from the men
he
works with.

It’s not real work, not the way Basit worked in Sri Lanka. Over there, he pushed along in his father’s tailoring business, machine-sewing sarongs with a pedal Singer. He drank and gambled. The black sheep. They sent him to England as soon as he had earned the fare. Off the boat he looked like everybody else, but now he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the club: grey shiny suit, sharp as broken glass; hair slicked back in a quiff; white shirt, thin black tie, jacket buttons done up; a cigarette dangling from his lips; and even though they’re inside, the thin sunglasses.

“Allsorts!” the man calls from the cellar.

“Yes, yes,” he says obsequiously, as if startled to hear it.

“Come here, you wog,” the man says. It’s just what they say. “Wily oriental gentleman,” the boss said it meant.
But to Basit, wogs are the black guys. It is short for “golliwog,” and though the black clubs are where he goes when he’s world-sore, unhappy, seeking out the friendships of his first days off the boat, he doesn’t want them confusing him with blacks. He’s not black. He’s a Sri Lankan, a Muslim, from Colombo, not the sticks, his parents from a good family … he said it at the tables once, and one of the big bosses said, “You’re nothing here, mate. You’re what
we
say, all right?” And the other one started laughing and said, “Here, your name’s Basit, right? What about we call him Allsorts?” And they all laughed, and he laughed with them, because he was grateful for the job.

The man is stuck in the cellar. He’s trying to lift a box, looks like a tea chest.

“What you want me to do?” he says. The man looks up; he’s no more than a boy, really. They call him Bullseye because he has a glass eye, an accident when he was doing his national service.

“We’ve got to leg it. They’ll be coming soon,” Bullseye says, and he looks pale.

“Who?” He doesn’t understand why they are here. It’s a small club, all locked up, but Bullseye has a key.

“Look, boss said come over, get this box, and leg it, so that’s what we’re going to do, but you got to give me a hand, all right?”

He can’t help himself, he nods his head from left to right, that up-and-down sideways agreement that was silent acquiescence at home. Bullseye starts to laugh, a little snot shooting from his nose. “You look like a fucking coolie when you do that,” he says, but he means it kindly. Basit moves in to help him, looks at the situation. The stairs down to the cellar are rickety, riddled with worm and shredding
off in pl aces. The ch est is too big for two people to negotiate up the steps.

“Let us empty it?” he says.

“No, mate, boss says we leave it. Nothing to be disturbed. Secret stuff in there.”

When he got off the boat, he had one suitcase, brown leather, which his father gave him. A khaki shirt, brown trousers, and one brown cotton jacket, all of which his father had made on the Singer machine. He headed the way others headed, on the train from Tilbury and then toward the East End. London yielded little. He followed a Muslim once but lost him in the narrow alleyways. His very first night he spent by the river on a bench. He had never felt so cold. But the sun coming up over the Thames was the shivering sunshine of his future: a paradox, the chilly sun, the whiteness, the clear air of it all. This was his home now, this illogical island. It was
his
, he decided that day, and when he stretched his creaking limbs and stood, he found he had grown, and the world so large, so enormous, new and shiny, was inviting.

Bullseye is jammed on the stairs. He can’t move up because his hips are grinding backward against the rickety stair rail. He can’t move down, although his right leg has some traction.

“If you’d helped,” he says to Allsorts.

Basit looks at the boy-man and tries not to laugh. His son, Ali, is about the same age, that indefinable age when boys start to become men, the age when they fall in love, are sent off to war. Ali is cleverer than this boy.

“Wait, will you,” he says. He cocks his head, looks down into the cellar. “We must empty the crate.”

“No. Boss says no,” Bullseye says.

“What is your name?”

“Why?”

Basit shrugs. “I don’t like these names the boss gives us. What did your mother call you?”

“Terence. Me sister calls me Terry.”

He had never known a Terry. It sounded like the name of a woman. The friends he knew were Victors, Harrys, Eddies, Johns. His own name—not even Rita calls him by his own name: he is Basit to Rita, and to his friends.

“Terry,” he says, trying the sound, disliking it. “Terry, you can move?”

“No,” Bullseye says sullenly.

“Ah.” He looks around for something to lever with. Only round-backed chairs, and now he focuses on the room, they too are old, worn. “Then,” he says, wringing out the word into many sounds, “we must empty the crate.”

Bullseye says nothing. It is his fault, but Basit knows it will be blamed on
him
if there is no good outcome. So far, he has only had good outcomes. He has worked for these people for three years, and he covers his back, looks around, triple-guesses every situation. He will not step wrong: the big glittery world he lives in will not break, because he will not let it.

“It is nailed down?” Bullseye says nothing. “Terry,” he says sharply, and he hears his father’s voice.

“Yes,” Bullseye says. “I’ve got pins and needles.”

“What is this?” Pins and needles: he thinks of his grandfather, pins in his mouth; his father, pins cushioning at his womanly chest, maybe entering his skin and he wouldn’t have noticed.

Bullseye doesn’t reply. Basit walks down the stairs. He tries the box lid, and it is tight on. He tries to move it this
way and that, to a sudden shout from Bullseye: “Oi! That hurts!”

Basit takes his knife from his pocket—it is a single-flick knife, ebony handle, blade like silver—and presses the button. “Oi,” Bullseye says and looks straight at him. No trust between any of them.

“It is all right,” Basit says. “Here, watch,” he says. He puts the knife into the gap and levers gently. A nail creaks against the wood. He can smell tea. He is transported briefly … and then back again, to this strange nether place. He can feel Bullseye’s breath on his mouth: the warmth disgusts him, he hates this boy-man, so small and useless, who stands still, stuck, like a ship waiting for Tower Bridge to open.

Basit proposed to Rita by Tower Bridge. Rita was young, vibrant. His first wife had died in Sri Lanka the year before he came to England. His teenaged son, Ali, looked like he was becoming his father: skipping school to go to the cinema, quiffing his hair like Elvis, staying out late and drinking. They put him on a boat to England with an old friend of Basit’s. As if the last of him was eradicated from the island, as if they didn’t want a trace of him left to remind them. And then Rita came along, little Rita, with her curly hair and her Burger pale skin. She was Sri Lankan, a cousin of the friend who accompanied Ali to England. She cooked at a hotel in Fulham, brought home tasty treats for them both. Rita agreed to marry him the night England won the World Cup. As the city erupted they held close to each other: it seemed their city celebrated them, shouted for them, beeped their horns, and yelled for them.

The last nail comes out of the box. Bullseye has said nothing. Basit levers up the nail and the lid comes off. There
is newspaper on the top. He sees the date on
The Times
is 1944. Bullseye holds his breath. Basit pulls the paper off. Inside there are guns. Maybe ten or twelve.

“German,” Bullseye breathes dramatically. Basit stares. He hates the sight of them, their liquorice lustre, their power to mesmerise. He reaches for a wrapped object and tears at the newspaper: it is a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Black Label, the lead seal intact. It looks old.

“Hurry up,” Bullseye says. And suddenly Basit is all action, leaning into the crate, unpacking each weapon and resting it on the stairs. After each gun is lifted, he tries to unjam the crate. It is only when he takes out the last gun and then the bottle that the crate can be shoved back and forth. Eventually he pulls the crate upward, away from Bullseye, and then up the steps of the cellar.

The boys at the Jamaican club got him this job. He tried to set up a proper gambling den with Jules, his Jamaican friend. But Jules was more interested in music, and Basit won too many times. Jules had a friend who knew the bosses. They asked Basit to come to their club on the Old Kent Road, watched him shuffle, deal. Hired him on the spot. Quick fingers, Freddie the Pony said. They couldn’t call him Quick Fingers, because there was a famous croupier up Golders Green way called that, a Jew boy. Basit thought he was in, but he was never really
in
, though if an outsider called him coon or nigger, they’d get it from one or other of the bosses. He was all sorts, yes, but he was theirs, too. And they were fair to their own. He had taken Ali with him on one job, lifting job, taking goods from one lockup to another, and Freddie and some others had given him a bag of chips, told him he was a good-looking boy. One of the bosses looked at him funny, so Basit asked Rita about jobs at the hotel. No funny stuff for Ali.

As the box comes away Bullseye starts to yell. He’s not swearing at Basit, just swearing, shaking his feet, his hands. His voice is loud, so loud that Basit, who is supposed to be the lookout, doesn’t hear the key being tried in the lock. He has a habit of shifting the catch down on Yale locks from the inside. The key is being tried, and he only realises when people start swearing outside the door.

“Terry,” he whispers fiercely. He pushes his hand down into the boy’s face.

“Oh, fuck, oh fuck,” Bullseye says. “What about the back door?”

Basit runs, grabbing a chair, fumbles with the bunch of keys to lock the door, and jams the handle with the chair. He runs back to the cellar steps. Bullseye is handling the guns. He looks up at Basit, and Basit sees how young he is, how frail.

“What d’you think?” Bullseye says, pointing a weapon at Basit.

“Put it back. Come on, put it back and come, will you?” It will take the others five minutes to get to the back of the building; they’ll have to go round the promenade of shops and down the alleyway at the back. They can make it out the front.

“What, leave it here?”

“Yes. Come on.”

“Nah, mate. We may as well stay and be killed. Bosses will have us.”

Basit and Bullseye wrap the guns in the newspaper. They look around for something to carry them in, and there is nothing. They were told to move a box, so they came in their suits with a Ford Anglia Estate that belongs to Bullseye’s dad. Basit is now sweating, but he is also cold. He suddenly hates the boy, Terry. Hates his whining and his
surrender and his wilful waste of his life: why would he do this work in this country when he is white? He could be anything. He is inside the big, wide, gleaming world, and all he needs is education and to work hard. Basit’s hands shake. He hates the boy for his wasted opportunities, the way he hates his own banishment from the world where he could have been something if he hadn’t squandered it all.