Jubilee (26 page)

‘Blimey, Satish. What took you? You were ages.’

Her bare legs kicked rhythmically against the divan drawers. Satish watched her for a moment and found his thoughts sliding away from her mum and Mr Brecon and the panic of discovery. There was just the bang-bang-bang of her kicking pulling him backwards through the day to the moment of their kiss. He thought about the wet mystery of it, the softness and the taste, and the embarrassment. How did you talk about it to the girl afterwards? Mandy seemed to be taking it in her stride. A year younger than him, but looking straight at him without shame: no need to do as he did now, removing his gaze to something else, no wobbly hot feeling in her limbs or on her face. Then he thought that she had asked him a question, and that he had been quiet for too long.

‘Just my mum. Stuff to do – you know.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You said there was trouble.’

‘Real trouble,’ she told him. ‘Colette saw us earlier. And her dad. Now Sarah knows. She’s furious.’

Satish took this in. If Sarah knew then there really would be trouble. Sarah was
furious
, Mandy said.

‘Why’s she so angry?’

Mandy did look away now, down at her feet, which were still beating against the side of her bed: one-two, one-two.

‘I don’t know. She just is. She was surprised. She was cross I hadn’t told her.’

Did girls always go like this? he wondered. Angry.
Furious
. He saw, with clarity, the peril he was in. Colette, Sarah, Mr Brecon: the secret leaking out on all sides. Mummy and Papa would hear about it;
that
was furious, he thought bitterly. You want to see angry? Try my parents. It would leak down the street to the school, trickle into the playground. Oh no! It came to him suddenly: Mandy would be in for it too. The unspoken rationale for their secrecy hung over him: she was a girl, and younger. He was an Asian. They were both liabilities. There were lots of ways they could suffer for this; she could be shunned. He’d watched her enough with Sarah to know what that would mean, and he couldn’t imagine – not for a moment – that she’d ever think it was worth it. As for him, he’d kissed a white girl, an English girl. He didn’t want to think of all the things that could be messed up by this. He searched for something to say to Mandy.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he offered, though it occurred to him that she scarcely seemed worried at all. ‘I’ll think of something. Go to the party. It might just – it might just be forgotten.’

Mandy snorted. ‘You should have seen Sarah. I’m fed up with her, anyway. I don’t care what she thinks. She’s not in charge.’

‘Yeah, I know. Look, Mandy, I’ve got to go home, get ready. I’ll see you in a bit.’

At her front door he paused, peering out to check that no one would spot him leaving. Over the way, his own house was quiet. No movement from Cai’s, either. Nobody, he thought, would see him slipping away from Mandy’s place and across the road to home. The door shut behind him with a click, and he legged it.

They’re lying in the dark, each pretending they’ve drifted off, neither fooled by the other; it’s hard to fake that shallow-sleep breathing. Just a little longer, surely, until his dose kicks in. Around them, the house has closed down for the night. They’ve heard his mother’s bedside light clicking off, Mehul has shuffled to the toilet for the last time. There’s the ground bass, felt more than heard, of his father’s snoring.

Beside him, Maya whispers: ‘You can tell me anything.’

He thinks if he waits for a while, he might still get away with it. Then she says: ‘Chocolate?’ The family joke, the word you’ll always respond to, even through strategic deafness, and he laughs, despite himself. The mattress dips as she squirms onto her side.

‘You can tell me
anything
. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Nothing to tell,’ he says. ‘Go to sleep. I’m tired.’

‘Liar.’

‘Go to sleep.’

She moves closer. There’s the warmth of her – and those cold, cold feet. She hooks one over his, her arch across the front of his foot. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Stop me when I’ve got it right. You’ve gambled away all our money, you want to join a circus, you want to be a girl, you’ve lost your job—’

‘Stop it, Maya.’

‘Is it the job?’

‘Please. Sleep.’

She switches on the lamp and he slams his eyes shut, hiding behind his hand: dark red. He lifts his hands and it’s a screen of red-orange. Beautiful. He looks at it as long as he can.

‘Satish, talk to me. Open your eyes!’ When he does, she’s sitting up against the headboard, knees scrunched to her chest. ‘Come on.’

‘
Come on
what? What do you want me to say?’

‘Shush!’ She glances towards the door. ‘Don’t raise your voice. Why make this so hard?’

‘Well, I don’t know what you want from me.’

She pinches her nose and frowns. ‘There’s something wrong. I know there is.’

‘It’s …’ He looks over at the clock. ‘… one o’ clock in the morning and I’ve got work tomorrow. This is silly. It’s disproportionate.’

The wrong word, maybe: too cold, too pompous. It moves her up a gear.

‘I hate it when you do that,’ she says, slapping her hand down between them. ‘You treat me as if I’m stupid.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Yes! As if I’m really stupid. And this is not
disproportionate
. This is … evidence-based!’

‘Evidence-based? Am I some kind of patient, then?’

‘God! I’m just saying … I’m trying to do this in a non-threatening way.’

Something shifts in him. ‘Oh, are you? And if you wanted to be
threatening
, what would you do then, Maya?’

He turns away from her, his legs hanging over the edge of the bed, and doesn’t know what to do next. He can tell from her silence that she doesn’t know either. They stay suspended like this until he thinks she’s about to speak, and finds he’s afraid of what she might say. Then he propels himself forward and out of the room.

The fridge light spills out into the kitchen. He likes the darkness of the rest of the room, the privacy it gives him. It calms him down. He pours himself a glass of juice to give himself something to do, a reason to be down here so he can tell himself he hasn’t just walked out on his wife in the middle of an argument. He hasn’t. He’s thirsty. He puts the glass down and leans over, hands on the counter, head dipping down below his shoulder blades. He’s like that when she comes in.

‘Did you really just do that? Did you just flounce off in the middle of a discussion?’

‘
Flounce?
’ he says, addressing the glass, his hands. (
Discussion?
)

‘Don’t jump straight in and dismiss me. There’s something wrong. Let me—’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘See, right there? Right there, dismissing me. Look: imagine you’re living with someone, and they start behaving oddly. They start … doing things out-of-character.’

‘This is me now?’

‘I think it is. Listen to me. Stuff like … not sleeping so well. You feel them beside you. They can’t sleep. They don’t talk to you so much. They’re withdrawn. Look at me, Satish!’

‘You are blowing this up out of all proportion.’

There’s no warning of his father’s approach, locked into each other as they are. He comes through the kitchen door and into the gravitational pull of their argument, a new satellite.

‘Oh.’ His dad stands at the door, not coming in, not leaving. ‘Sorry. I heard a noise. I wanted some water.’

Maya turns away and fiddles with something by the sink.

‘I woke up,’ his father adds.

‘Yes. We were talking.’

‘Yes.’ His dad edges forward slightly. ‘I’ll just … a glass.’ He moves round them both, leaving a wide berth, as if touching them would set something off. He gets his water then glances behind at them as he leaves.

‘So, I’m
blowing this up out of all proportion
?’ She enunciates with the kind of precision you use when you’re trying not to shout. ‘I’m sure your dad will enjoy mulling that one over. And your mum, come to that.’

‘That’s not my fault. I didn’t hear him.’

Maya steps closer to him. He tries not to step back.

‘Listen to me,’ she says. ‘Because this is important.’

‘Please, let’s just go to bed.’

‘You are withdrawn. You aren’t sleeping.’ She counts it out on her fingers. ‘When you do it’s this dead-to-the-world sleep, and when you wake up it’s like I’ve pulled you from the bottom of a swamp.’ She stops mid-flow, as if recalling something. He thinks she’s foundered, but she plunges on. ‘Something’s wrong. I say things and suddenly it’s the wrong thing, and I don’t know why. I mean, all these years together, and I’ve got used to you and this even keel of yours, and now … what about that time when we were boxing? What was that about? What happened on the way to Cai’s?’

‘You are overreacting. In the morning this will all seem silly.’

‘If you loved someone and you knew something was wrong, you’d do something about it, wouldn’t you? I love you, Satish.’

‘I love you, too,’ he says immediately. ‘Now let’s go back to bed.’

‘So is that it? Is that your response? Is that all I get from you?’

He doesn’t know what to say. He wants comfort, for himself as well as her, wants to do something reassuring but noncommittal. He reaches out to her, but she’s already leaving, and he doesn’t know who moved first, whether she knew he was reaching out and just didn’t want him touching her.

‘Fine.’ She goes over to the door. ‘Fine, but I’m not letting this go. If you won’t believe me in the middle of the night, then sleep on it – if you can. This won’t go away, Satish.’

He hears her treading back along the hall and up the stairs. He can plot her course as she moves above him: into Asha’s bedroom, into Mehul’s. Long silences, absences of movement. Upset as she is, she’ll stay a little longer than she needs to, getting a bit of comfort from her sleeping kids. Then finally back to their room, where she’ll lie awake for a while. There should be a way to make peace without giving her what she wants, but he can’t see how. It’s too delicate a navigation and he feels ponderous, clumsy. He’ll stay down here, keep himself busy.

Because Maya’s right about one thing: he isn’t sleeping, even with the diazepam. He makes himself acknowledge it:
I’ve built up a tolerance
. He hasn’t tried kicking it again, not after that last blackmail note, so he takes it each night and it keeps the jitters at bay, but that’s all it does now. What a bloody idiot, the worst kind: a doctor with a fool for a patient. As it turns out, his body is subject to chemistry, like anyone else’s. Like anyone else, he will suffer now if he stops, an ironic assault comprising just those things he needed help with in the first place – anxiety, panic – only much worse than before. He could raise his dose for some relief, but he can’t bear to – that’s what addicts do, and he’s not an addict. So he’s in limbo, prowling the house at night anxious and sleepless. And the threatening notes … he’s still waiting for the next one. With no idea who his blackmailer is, he can’t tell them:
you win, I’m doing the photograph
. He doesn’t know if they’ll hold off until the reunion, whether they’ll leave him alone after that.

Right now, he’ll find something useful to do; he’ll try to keep going until he’s ready to drop. That’s the key: distract himself for long enough to get tired, so that when he finally falls into bed he will sleep straightaway. No lying there in the dark, worrying over this present crisis, or slipping back into the past – and back, and back – to Jubilee Day.

Cai couldn’t wait for the barbecue. It was the burgers that got him. Even though they were all pinky-red with white bits of fat in them, and cold and a bit slimy, and you could squish them just a little with your fingers so that you left a dent in the greaseproof circle, even though they still had that dead-meat smell, you knew they’d be just lish really soon. The barbecue was burning, getting ready, and he’d asked his mum to get some of those cheese squares, the yellow-orangey ones that tasted creamy, and then he could squish tomato sauce onto it and squash the whole thing down in the bun. When the cheese and sauce dribbled over the edges he would take a bite and get all the flavours and textures at once.

He’d have the first burger. He always made his dad do that, and he didn’t let his mum see, because he liked the insides a bit pink, still a bit bloody, and she’d have said, no, that’s not safe, stick it back on, Peter. He liked to see the bite through the centre, to look at it side-on and see a thin black outside, a brown layer next and the pink right in the middle. That was a good burger. He couldn’t wait. They wouldn’t be on yet. His dad would still be poncing around.
What have you been doing with yourself, then
? Well, wouldn’t you like to know? That’s for me to know and you to find out. He imagined saying it, his hands in his pockets and his chin angled upwards. Dad didn’t like hands in pockets. He didn’t like you dragging your feet or saying
what
instead of pardon, or
bu – er
instead of butter. He didn’t like Satish. Ha! That was for sure.

The thought of Satish made Cai feel sour. He drew his knees up to his chest and hugged them. This was a good place to sit. He could hunker down in front of the gatepost and no one would see him from inside the house, or from the back gate. He could look at other people’s houses and watch people going by but no one at home could find him. Right now he can see the tables all set out. He can see underneath, where the legs and feet will be, and the top, all neat, laid out ready for the party. God Save the Queen? Johnny Rotten would
smash
this party! He’d push all the stuff off the table onto the ground and bash it with his guitar. He’d gob and vomit onto the table. No future! No future!

There was going to be a ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ carnival in London today, Stephen Chandler had said. He’d talked big about it, said he was fourteen now and could easily go. Said he would catch a train and – stuff it! – just leave. But here he was in Cherry Gardens, and so was Cai, because he didn’t know how to get there and his parents would kill him, just kill him, if he did go. If Johnny Rotten were here he would climb a ladder, grab that stupid bunting and pull it all down. He’d swing on it, and rip the flags to bits. Dad would look on, horrified, but not be able to do anything about it. His hands would go up to his mouth, he’d wave his fist at the Pistols. Or he’d be like a teacher, all straight and disapproving, like Bill Grundy on that programme, and they’d all take the piss.