Hot Water Man (27 page)

She paid the boy a rupee and watched him walk back down the road, his load swaying. She felt hot and dizzy. The building was freshly painted; it made her wet eyes ache. The door stood ajar.

Trampled sand led up to it, with trampled thorny plants. She walked slowly. Did the boy presume that this, in fact, was her destination? As she neared the door she heard music from within. She felt both torpid and alert.

‘Hello?' She stood on the veranda, speaking rather than shouting. There was no answer.

She stepped through the door, blinking in the gloom. It was a narrow little hallway. Sultan's radio stood on the floor, playing music. There was a chair, made of woven plastic loosened with use, and a wooden table. On it stood a tray with two bottles of Fanta and a dish of nuts. Sultan's shiny black shoes lay on the floor. She was still holding the string of blossoms. She laid them over the back of the chair.

The inner door was ajar. She hesitated, hitching the dupatta around her neck. Was somebody in there? She stepped through the threshold.

It was darker in here. She stood still, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The room was close and stuffy. After a while she could make out detached shapes in the darkness: a cupboard, a chair and a bed, with somebody lying upon it.

She moved closer, quietly. In here it was as still as a shrine. For a moment she thought he was dead. He lay motionless on his back, facing upwards. Sleep made him dignified; his face was calm, its talking ceased. She knelt down beside him, easing off her sandals and laying them on the floor.

He did not stir. Only his lips moved, opening and closing; she heard the small puffs of air from the dreaming life within. One of his hands hung down near her. The other lay across his chest, closed around his packet of cigarettes.

Her eyes were accustomed now to the shuttered dark. She tried to make her mind a blank, and not to wonder if he had expected her to follow him in here. She just remained, hardly breathing, kneeling on the warm concrete. She gazed at his blind face and listened to the sighs of exhaled air. He seemed so saintly in repose. He was no longer Sultan Rahim, he was all Pakistani men, at last oblivious of her. She leant closer; she could smell his hair oil.

In the front room the singing stopped and was replaced by the announcer's voice. Still he did not stir. Just the lips pursing and the hand, over his heart, barely rising and falling. A fly landed on her cheek; she did not dare raise her hand to wipe it away.

Another song began, liquid and eerie, higher and higher, like a bird nobody has ever seen. She thought: I did not find my hot water man. She gazed at the swell of his stomach, shadowed and mysterious, and at the loose folds of his trousers.

She swallowed with difficulty; her throat was tight. Just then he mumbled and shifted over. The cigarette packet fell to the floor. His clothes rustled as he rearranged himself, with a grunt, on to his side facing her. He still slept. His hand hung down, touching her dress. She leant against it.

His hand started moving on her hip. She inched closer, pressing herself against the bed. When she moved, she realized she was wet with sweat. His face was half-buried in the pillow; his hand moved round her, rubbing gently up and down her buttock.

He mumbled something in Urdu. Still asleep, he probably thought she was his wife. She tried to swallow again.

He mumbled again in Urdu. His hand moved more firmly now. She closed her eyes. His hand moved up, and stopped at her belt.

It remained there a moment. He hooked his fingers around the fabric. She did not breathe. Nor, it seemed, did he. She kept her eyes closed. He unhooked his fingers. His hand moved up and down her damp back.

‘You are staying with Sultan.'

It was neither a question or a command; just flat words. She nodded. She could not move to get up and close the door. If she climbed to her feet she would come, clumsily and humiliatingly, to her senses.

She remained kneeling, her face pressed into the thin scratchy wool of the blanket. Something must happen; at last it must. His eyes must be open now; he was unwinding her dupatta. He laid his face on the top of her head. She felt his nose pressing into her hair; he was smelling her, rubbing his face to and fro. Both his arms were around her now, pulling her in so she was jammed against the frame of the bed.

His hands moved quicker now, fluttering over her back and touching her here and there. She shivered. She was wet all over. Still kneeling she moved back and undid her buttons, fumbling with the tight little holes. She took his hand and pushed it down the front of her dress, pressing it against her slippery breast.

Shamime slept with
her face in the pillow. She fell asleep so quickly afterwards. Duke could not bear to look at her body when she was oblivious. He leant over and gently pulled up the sheet around her shoulders. He picked up her clothes from the floor; she always presumed that there was somebody to pick them up and there always was, himself included. He folded them carefully and laid them on the chair – her office clothes, loose chiffon kamize and shalwar trousers, that clothed her with such Muslim seemliness in the company of others.

Above the bed hung the studio shots. Three boys, taken years back. They'd all worn crewcuts then. Grinning, they looked beyond their father into the shadowed room. It was midday and the drapes were closed. In the past Duke had never needed to close them. Though nothing could stop Gul Khan closing them in the evening, he himself had always opened them before he went to bed. He liked seeing the dawn, he always told folks that this was the best part of the day. Soon after that he would be jogging. Except that he had stopped jogging recently; inertia had been creeping up. So I get fat, he thought, so I get a coronary? So, why fight it? So what? So he no longer cared for this body that had betrayed him.

He parted the drapes. Unusually, the day had begun muggy and overcast, monsoon weather. Now the haze had cleared. He looked down North 6th Street. Pleasant modern homes not so different, he had once thought, from West Boulevard, Wichita. A gate opened and a car drove out; in the back sat two Pakistani women, residents of the house. The women here had changed, now that for the past two weeks he had loved one, her black hair catching in his mouth. He did not want to touch these other women; he just knew them. They were familiar to him. In some way he even felt that through them he knew the men too.

Gul was out for the day. There was some family celebration; his sister had produced a boy. That was the reason Shamime and himself had come back here, rather than drive in the evening to the beach hut, the only other place they could be alone. His mind had grown cunning. It dismayed him, that the moment Gul spoke his own thoughts had sped to this room. Gul's gratefulness when given a whole day's leave had sickened him still further. Gul made him feel guiltier than he had imagined. He was very fond of his old bearer who, he was sure, knew nothing. Still Gul carried out his routines, rubbing the beach sand off Duke's shoes and leaving them ready in the wardrobe. Gul had the innocence of the devout, unlike the beach chowkidar who was on to something. This man was a swarthy Makrani; he hung around Duke's car when they arrived at dusk. Duke tipped him generously with soiled notes.

He had always considered himself so straight, but how doggedly he now lied. Once you had told one falsehood, it was so damned easy. He thought sin was punished but nobody found him out. He said to himself: I am an adulterer. He was like everybody else now; most men of his age had experienced that which, ludicrously, bore the same name as what was happening between him and Shamime. Could they possibly feel the same? Young Javed, the Translux architect, had not questioned him when Duke had phoned this morning to postpone their lunch. No thunderbolts had struck. To other folk nothing appeared to have changed – he did his work, he made phone calls, he made conversation with Shamime while other people were in the room. He had arrived in this country thinking he could change the way things worked, like Minnie believed she could change herself by the books she read and the classes she attended; he thought that he had the fibre to do this. Do-It-Yourself Hanson, they called him in Kuwait. He had never betrayed his wife, though Jesus he had been lonely. Even he knew there had been opportunities should he have wanted them. Pleasant career girls on planes; in foreign bars, in foreign cities, women who sat next to him and talked about themselves in flat smokers' voices. Now he could not recognize that man. The voice on the phone to Javed was still oddly his. It sounded the same as it always had, but he was not the same inside. And he was starting to think: what difference does it make? As if he were being sapped by something in the air of this place.

He rubbed his eyes. Her smell was on his fingers. She stirred. He did not want her to wake up. If anything could be simple she looked simple now: just a black tangle of hair. His cool, wily child.

He should have stopped after that first time. He could have forgiven himself that one night. Shamime would have been spared this. Minnie would have understood; it was a moment of passion, not the steady betrayal it had since become. That second time, after the checkers, they had lain here in the terrible intimacy of speech.
When did you first notice me? Was it when I thought it was? Remember when you opened those groceries? I knew you knew I wanted you then. . .
Luxurious, murmured words, painful beyond bearing. That was when the true betrayal had started. One stage worse would be when he allowed himself to compare her with Minnie; this was the one way he had not yet succumbed.

He took his clothes into the shower room. He was normally a hygienic man; today he could not be bothered to take a shower. What had she said that day?
Cleaning the clothes by day and the souls by night.
He sat, slumped on the closed lid of the lavatory. On the shelf Gul had placed his shaving-cream tube in the mug next to the toothbrush. His toothpaste, on the other hand, had been put away into the cupboard. Gul always did that; Duke no longer corrected him. He would always do it. Duke sat there for a moment. There seemed no point in action, if he were going to sin again. He had no will to wash.

He dressed and walked quietly through the bedroom and downstairs. It was one-thirty. He poured himself a glass of bourbon; he was drinking more heavily. Upstairs he heard a gush of water in the bathroom. She was awake. Maybe she had only been faking sleep. She was too complicated for him.

He finished his drink and poured another. Footsteps across the ceiling. She would be sitting at Minnie's dressing-table now. Minnie herself never sat there; she just rubbed some cream into her face at night. Her hair, cropped short as a boy's, never needed attention. But Shamime always spent time over her toilette. He was charmed by this – everything she did charmed him once he had allowed himself to be charmed – once he had fallen and, in falling, pulled her down with him. But a small corner in him was irritated when she was late at work, although she was more efficient than most once she had started. But really he was aching to see her; she tantalized him by her delays. That was the reason he was upset. He was fooling himself to think otherwise.

Up in the air-conditioned bedroom it had been cool. Down here he sweated. He looked at the spines of Minnie's books along the shelves.
Modern Parenthood. The Mid-Life Crisis.
One of them had a set of instructions to repeat to yourself. She had read them out to him, half-jokingly, a little self-conscious: ‘I can change myself; I am what I make myself; I am in my own hands.'

Shamime was coming downstairs. Her high-heels tapped. She looked ready for the office; she had pinned up her hair on top of her head.

‘You old boozer,' she said.

With her a Muslim, the censure had a cultural weight behind it, a disapproval beyond herself. It was not like an American woman chiding him.

‘Don't say I'm driving you to drink,' she said.

‘Honey, it's got to stop.'

‘I know, it's ruining your liver.'

‘I mean, us.'

She smiled. ‘You're always saying that. It's called post-coital guilt.'

‘I mean it now. Please let me mean it.' He pressed his hands to his face. His fingers, that belonged to her. His whole body belonged to her.

‘You didn't seem to mean it an hour ago.'

‘Honey, forgive me. I've got no excuses. I've behaved in a way I wouldn't have believed. I don't know what to say to you. I'd do anything in the world to make it all right. Sammy, tell me what I should do.'

She paused. ‘It's only because your wife's coming back. Three weeks isn't it? Enough time to tidy up. Oh you look so simple and uncalculating. Don't be fooled, folks.'

He could not look up, with her face like that. He rubbed his eyes. ‘I mean it.' His voice sounded choked and theatrical. ‘Shamime honey, it just can't work.'

There was a long silence. He heard the click of her lighter. ‘You mean, I've been your bit of fun on the side.'

‘Fun? You think we've been having fun?'

‘Actually I thought you meant it. Me, muggins that I was.'

‘Of course I meant it. That's the terrible thing.'

Her voice was low. ‘You meant it, with an eye on the fucking calendar.'

‘Oh don't swear. I can't bear to hear you swearing.'

‘Sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities. You think you can fuck me –'

‘Don't, please.'

‘What on earth do you think we were doing? Having a little cross-cultural communication? East-West dialogue? Getting to know the natives? You Yanks always have a nice way of putting things, you'll say a device was detonated when you mean a bloody bomb's been dropped. You call
us
devious.'

‘I don't talk like that.'

‘But you
think
like that. Fooling yourself, but you're even less honest because you believe it through and through.' Her voice cracked. ‘That awful self-righteousness. I thought there was a reason for it once, but you're as shoddy as the rest.'