Teranesia (11 page)

Prabir said, ‘I wish I’d met you nine years ago.’

Felix replied without looking up. ‘I was fifteen. You would have gone to prison.’

‘This is a hypothetical: we both get to be eighteen.’

‘That would have been even worse. You wouldn’t have wanted to know me then.’

Prabir laughed. ‘Why?’

‘Oh … I did a lot of stupid things.’

‘Like what?’

Felix didn’t respond immediately; Prabir wasn’t sure whether the question discomforted him, or whether he was
merely concentrating on his work. ‘I used to go out with the sheet off, just to prove I didn’t need it. To convince myself
that I could have lived a hundred years ago, and still got by.’

‘What’s so stupid about that?’

‘It wasn’t true. I’d grown up with it, I didn’t have the skills to cope without it. I knew that, but I kept pushing my luck.’
He laughed. ‘I met this guy in a club one night. He hung around talking to me for about three hours. There was a lot of touching:
hands on shoulders, guiding me through the crowd. Nothing overtly sexual, but it was more than just polite. He was pretty
evasive, but after a while I was almost certain that he was coming on to me—’

‘Three hours of this, and he wasn’t?’

‘I found out later that he had some complicated theory about picking up women. You know: outdoors you can walk a dog as a
kind of character reference, but they don’t let you do that in nightclubs. It’s just a pity he didn’t tell me I was meant
to be playing tragically disabled spaniel.’ Prabir was outraged, but Felix started laughing again. ‘I lured him out into an
alley to see what he’d do with no one else around. I ended up spending a month in hospital.’

‘Shit.’ As Prabir’s anger subsided, a fierce core of protectiveness remained. But anything he said would have sounded melodramatic
now that Felix had reached the point where he could laugh the whole thing off.

‘Madhusree told me about the expedition.’ Felix kept his eyes on the arrowhead. ‘She can’t understand why you’re so set against
it.’

Prabir was about to deny this and stick to his claim of insufficient funds, but then it occurred to him that Felix would probably
offer to help. He said, ‘It’s a dangerous place. There are still pirates all around those islands.’

Felix didn’t contradict him, directly. ‘The expedition’s being led by experienced local scientists; I’m sure they’ll take
sensible precautions. And I can’t think of many places a
biologist would want to go that aren’t potentially dangerous, one way or another.’

Prabir shifted awkwardly on the lab stool. It was easy to laugh off the sense of betrayal he felt, at the thought of Madhusree
and Felix ganging up against him. But when he brushed aside his paranoia and told himself that Madhusree was entitled to seek
other allies – it couldn’t always be the two of them against the world – that realisation still left him feeling almost unbearably
lonely.

Felix looked up and said bluntly, ‘She was a lot younger than you when your parents died. If she’s not worried about going
back, why can’t you just accept that?’ He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘You’re the one who always wanted her to be proud of them.
Now she wants to carry on their work! And even if there’d been no new discoveries … don’t you think she might have wanted
to return eventually? Just to see where everything happened? However much you’ve told her, it’s not the same.’

Prabir said, ‘Can we get out of here? They’re going to give our table to someone else.’

‘Yeah, I’ve finished.’ Felix packed up quickly, then grabbed his jacket. ‘I’m sorry; I’m not going to harangue you all night.
But I promised her I’d talk to you.’

‘And now you have.’

Felix led the way out of the work room, into a maze of corridors. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, talk to her. Properly.
You owe her that.’

‘
I
owe
her?
I’ve only given her eighteen years of my life!’

Felix snorted with amusement. ‘That’s one thing I love about you: you could have given her a lung and a kidney, and you still
wouldn’t be able to milk it for sympathy with any conviction.’

Prabir was caught off balance. ‘Don’t be so fucking patronising.’ The compliment pleased him, but this wasn’t the time to
admit that.

Felix said, ‘This is a good thing for both of you, any way you look at it. And if you think it’s dangerous for Madhusree to
go traipsing through the jungle for a couple of weeks, you can’t have much idea of what most nineteen-year-olds get up to.’

‘Oh, so now you’re the expert on that too?’

‘No, but I can still remember what it was like.’

Prabir had no reply. He’d always imagined that was how he understood Madhusree; by being young enough to remember. But nothing
about his own life at nineteen resembled hers. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d had a child to look after; he’d also had
any adolescent attraction to risk knocked out of him, well in advance. His entire adulthood had been devoid of excitement.
Why should Madhusree have to pay the same price?
The whole point had been to make things better for her, to try to give her something like a normal life.

No, the whole point was to keep her safe.

Prabir stopped dead. There was a dusty display case full of tropical butterflies hanging on the wall, with fading labels that
looked like they’d been produced on a manual typewriter. It had probably been hanging there since some era when this corridor
lay on a route between public exhibits, long before the latest round of rebuilding.

He said, ‘Getting her away from there was the one good thing I’ve done in my life. And now everyone expects me to pack her
bags and buy her a ticket. It’s surreal. Why don’t you just ask me to blow my brains out while you’re at it? I’m not going
to do it.’

Felix backtracked, and saw what he was looking at. ‘What you did was get her away from the war. She wouldn’t be going back
to that.’

Prabir had lost interest in trying to justify himself. He said flatly, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know anything about it.’

Felix wasn’t that easily intimidated. ‘No, but I’ll listen to
whatever you want to tell me. It’d be a fucking lonely world if that never worked.’

Prabir aimed lower. ‘Doesn’t it ever cross your mind that there are things I don’t want you to understand?’

Prabir worked late, to keep his mind blank for as long as possible. He tinkered for five hours with a perfectly good class
definition template for tellers, trying to improve its eye contact and shave a few milliseconds off its response times. In
the end he gave up, discarding everything he’d done, trawling through the automatic backups and erasing them all manually
– the closest he could get to the physical experience of screwing up a sheaf of paper.

As he walked out of the building he felt a kind of defiant pride, in place of the usual sense of regret at his stupidity.
It wasn’t as if he had better things to do. He didn’t want to be with Felix or Madhusree. He didn’t want to be alone with
his thoughts. Numbing himself with a few hours of vacuous make-work every night until he was safely asleep on his feet was
infinitely preferable to taking up alcohol.

Sitting in the bus, he ached all over. He was shivering too, though he’d felt the usual blast of warm air as he’d stepped
on board. With a shock he realised that he probably had some kind of mild viral infection. Despite the change of climate he
hadn’t suffered so much as a cold since arriving in Toronto; the immigration authorities had inoculated him against everything
in sight. But he hadn’t kept up to date with booster shots, and it looked as if some new strain had finally broken through
his defences.

When he entered the apartment, Madhusree’s door was open, but her room was in darkness. Even from a distance, as Prabir’s
eyes adjusted he could see that her desk had been tidied, everything cleared away or straightened into neat piles.

There was a note taped to the fridge. She’d never told him
exactly when the expedition was leaving, but he’d been half expecting something like this for days.

He read the note several times, compulsively, as if he might have missed something. Madhusree explained that she’d raised
part of the money working in a café, and borrowed the rest from friends. She apologised for doing everything behind his back,
but pointed out that this had made it easier for both of them. She promised to reveal nothing about their parents’ work until
she returned and they’d had a chance to discuss the matter properly; in the meantime, the expedition would have to rely on
its own discoveries. She’d be back within three months. She’d be careful.

Prabir sat in the kitchen with tears streaming down his cheeks. He’d never felt happier for her, or more proud of her. She’d
overcome everything now. Even him. She’d refused to let him smother her with his paranoia and insecurity.

He suddenly recalled the night they’d resolved to leave Amita. At the start of the week, Madhusree had announced that her
class had begun studying the civil rights movement. Then, at dinner on Friday, she’d informed Keith and Amita that she finally
understood what their work at the university was all about.

Keith had flashed Prabir a victorious smirk, and Amita had cooed, ‘Aren’t you clever? Why don’t you tell us what you’ve learnt.’

Madhusree had expounded with her usual nine-year-old’s volubility. ‘In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people
in all the democratic countries who didn’t have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the
power and saying, “All these principles of equality you’ve been talking about since the French Revolution are very nice, but
you don’t seem to be taking them very seriously. You’re all hypocrites, actually. So we’re going to make you take those principles
seriously.” And they held demonstrations and bus rides, and occupied buildings, and it was very embarrassing
for the people in power, because the other people had such a good argument, and anyone who listened seriously had to agree
with them.

‘Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and all the other social justice movements were getting
more and more support.
So
, in the nineteen eighties, the CIA—’ she turned to Keith and explained cheerfully, ‘this is where X-Files Theory comes into
it – hired some really clever linguists to invent a secret weapon: an incredibly complicated way of talking about politics
that didn’t actually make any sense, but which spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded so impressive.
And at first, the people who talked like this just hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else
let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out
the driver.

‘So instead of going to the people in power and saying, “How about upholding the universal principles you claim to believe
in?” the people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like “My truth narrative is in competition with your
truth narrative!” And the people in power replied, “Woe is me! You’ve thrown me in the briar patch!” And everyone else said,
“Who are these idiots? Why should we trust them, when they can’t even speak properly?” And the CIA were happy. And the people
in power were happy. And the secret weapon lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone who’d played
a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit what they’d done.’

After a long silence, Amita had suggested in a strained voice, ‘You might not have understood that lesson properly, Maddy.
These are difficult ideas, and you’re still quite young.’

Madhusree had replied confidently, ‘Oh no, Amita. I understood. It was very clear.’

Late that night, she’d snuck into Prabir’s room. When
they’d finally stopped laughing – with their faces pressed into pillows and hands to muffle the sound – Madhusree had turned
to him and pleaded solemnly, ‘Get me out of here. Or I’ll go mad.’

Prabir had replied, ‘That’s what I do best.’

He’d found a job the following weekend. But after six months working three nights a week filling vending machines – telling
Amita he was studying with friends – he’d finally accepted what he’d known all along: part-time work would never be enough.
A week before he graduated from high school, he’d smooth-talked his way into an interview at the bank, and demonstrated on
his own notepad that he had all the skills required for a software development position they’d advertised. When the personnel
manager conceded his technical abilities but started raising other hurdles, Prabir pointed out that his lack of tertiary qualifications
would save them a third of the salary.

He’d gone straight from the interview to a real estate agent, and whispered the news to Madhusree that night by the light
of the TV.

‘We’re heading south.’

Felix arrived just after eleven. As he entered the apartment he explained warily, ‘I just wondered how you were taking the
news.’

‘You knew she was leaving tonight?’

‘Yeah. She thought she had to tell me, because I loaned her some money.’

Felix waited for a response. Prabir recoiled with mock indignation. ‘Traitor!’ He shook his head, smiling abashedly. ‘No,
I’m OK. I’m just sorry I screwed you both around so much.’

They sat in the kitchen. Felix said, ‘She’s going to be independent soon. She’ll have money of her own. A place of her own.’

Prabir was wounded. ‘You think that’s what this was all about? You think I get some kick out of holding the purse strings,
telling her what she can and can’t do?’

Felix groaned, misunderstood. ‘
No
. I just wanted to know what your plans were. Because once she’s supporting herself, you’re going to be free to do anything
you want. Quit the bank. Travel, study.’

‘Oh yeah? I’m not that rich.’

Felix shrugged. ‘I’ll help you.’

Prabir was embarrassed. ‘I’m not that poor, either.’ He mused, ‘If I can hang on at the bank until she graduates, that’ll
be ten years. I’ll have access to part of my pension fund.’ He shivered, suddenly aware of the fact that he was babbling on
about money while Madhusree was flying straight for the one place on Earth he’d sworn to keep her away from. ‘It’s strange.
I didn’t think I’d be so calm. But she’s really not in any danger, is she?’