We try to paddle our way back to the shore
but the beach soon slips beneath the horizon. I think of James, adrift maybe, like me,
waiting on the mercy of the tides. It’s no use. We cannot resist their pull. We
can only lie with our arms dipping like nibs into the water and go wherever the currents
decide.
Minutes pass like hours, hours like minutes.
Time dries in our throats. Flotillas of drinking water appear on the horizon if
I stare at it for too long. The sun becomes what I want it to be – a
giant parasol cocooning me like night – instead of what it is: unbearably bright and
scorching. And all the while we’re floating, riding the roof as if it were the
saddle of a horse, never still.
Night comes. And then day. Time gathers. And
gathers again. Waves bloat and expire.
The heat invades the gap between my waking
and sleeping. I’m afraid that, if I don’t find a way of waking myself, my
mind will drift off with my body to a place with no anchor – no hard, still point on
which to tie thoughts; only thirst.
In a last-ditch attempt to keep myself
awake, I press my hands together in a sideways prayer and extend them towards my
companion. I motion for him to copy me so that our middle fingers are just touching. He
frowns and I go in for the slap, clapping my palm onto the back of his outstretched hand
and letting the sound ring out across the water. A clean slice through the ears. Finally
I am awake.
He whips his fingers away and cradles them
against his chest crossly. ‘
Yenna seyringa? Athu vallithidhu!
’
I smile and hold out my hands again in the
same position. He shakes his head and pushes air towards me to dismiss me. But I keep my
hands where they are and wait.
‘Come on,’ I rasp – throat dry
from the saltwater. ‘It’ll take our minds off it.’
After a few minutes, he mutters something
and presents his hands to me again. Before I can ready myself, he has launched into a
swipe that sends a sting up my arm. ‘See!’ I laugh, with a flinch.
He smiles and tilts his head from side to
side. Then he points to his chest. ‘Ravindra. Ra-vin-dra,’ he repeats,
separating the syllables for me.
‘Alice,’ I reply, offering a
hand. He doesn’t take it and instead presses his palms together under his
chin.
‘Aleece,’ he echoes, trying out
the word on his tongue.
I speak his own name, attempting to roll the
second
r
as he did but not quite pulling it off.
He settles down again on the roof. It is not
long before the silence returns. The heat has baked my clothes dry. James’s shirt,
which I pulled from under his pillow and threw over myself before I left the hotel room,
is stiff with a thick skin of silt. I try to think of where he might be – if he made it
to higher ground.
Did he even see it coming? Or did he just
carry on in the heat with his back turned, oblivious to the water twisting into a fist
behind him? The day had lulled us both with its blue sky and lush greens; we
hadn’t thought it might collapse. We should have guessed our time might be gone
before we had the chance to measure its weight.
It seemed so beautiful – the notion of us
driving for thousands of miles over Persian ruins and Kashmiri meadows. I fell in love
with the trip before I fell in love with him. The idea of it. And those startling eyes
of his, which seemed already to have a bazaar of stories hidden in them before we even
set foot in Istanbul. I knew it would infuriate Mum. His hair. His lack of ambition.
We pooled our savings – from the sale of his
photographs and the money that I had collected from waitressing at Isabel’s – and
bought a second-hand Mercedes 319D. He knew the van would only get us as far as
Pakistan, Kashmir at a stretch. But he said that if we billed the ride as
‘Istanbul to Delhi’, we would soon find paying passengers. And he was right:
every seat was taken within a day of us arriving in Turkey. The cities along the route
were barely even names to me. I had no pictures to go by. Only stories from the
long-haired campers that I had met on the Isle of Wight: how Ararat humbled you and
Gulmarg made you free.
We could live hand to mouth, they said, and
eschew the routines that shackled us at home – forget the mothers and fathers
and the pasts that were not ours to bear. James said life didn’t
have to be linear – a constant accrual of wealth and age. We could care only for the
shoes on our feet and the shifting patch of earth that was our bed. I thought of Joni
and the promise in her guitar. We’d wear the day until the night came, enjoy the
sun-show while it lasted.
I didn’t understand – then – what the
wave would bring. That the cold horror of an irrational ocean would erase every mile of
carelessness we had etched between Turkey, Persepolis, Lahore and Delhi. That it would
throw into doubt the solidity of the future – and sear instead its uncertainty on our
thoughts.
I’d always thought of journeys as
choices – between staying and leaving, between one direction and another. But here,
boats have been thrown violently off course, fishermen dragged by unstoppable currents;
and letters have been delivered deep into reefs where there is not a soul alive to read
them. I’d thought James, like our journey, was a matter of choice: someone I could
fall in and out of love with as I pleased. A person I could marry one day, without a
thought for the next. But now it has nothing to do with me: our togetherness – or our
separation – is in the hands of the sea.
After we met at the festival, James did
everything for me – he found me the job at Isabel’s, moved my things from
Mum’s house to London and fixed me up with a place of my own near Mornington
Crescent, just a handful of roads away from his. We did not act tentatively – as new
acquaintances ought to have done.
James was accustomed to the city – the way
it invaded you with its ebb and flow of clocks and habits. He was not shocked, as I was,
by the siege of wet weather, the paper chain of identical days. Nothing to him was ever
permanent; soon enough he would find a way to move on.
I got home from work early one day – I
always left the café
before he left the studio – and began plotting the
trip he had talked of on the Isle of Wight: something to sustain us. By the time I heard
the doorbell, I had covered the kitchen table with the maps I had bought in
Stanford’s. I pulled back the latch to find Mum, not James, bedraggled on the
doorstep in her old Dannimac jacket and wellingtons.
Nobody in London wears
wellingtons
, I remember thinking.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Alice, thank God you’re all
right.’
She embraced me but I stood still, arms
folded. ‘How did you get this address?’
‘It doesn’t matter. What matters
is you’re okay.’
‘You shouldn’t have
come.’
‘I couldn’t just wait for you to
come home …’
‘I’m not coming home, you know
that.’ I paused, door half closed. ‘And don’t think I’m letting
you in.’
‘I don’t expect – I just wanted
to talk to you.’
‘There’s nothing to talk
about.’
‘Please, Alice, just one
minute.’
I moved from the doorway with reluctance and
she slipped hesitantly inside the flat. I could feel her eyes on the walls and
furniture. I flicked the kettle on while she waited in the living room. It
wouldn’t be long before she saw the maps. There was no point in trying to move
them.
‘I rang,’ she began, ‘to
tell you I was coming. The line wasn’t working.’
‘You didn’t think I’d give
you my actual number, did you?’
‘Alice –’
‘You’re lucky you didn’t
get through. I would have made sure I was out, otherwise.’ I caught her eye
momentarily. She looked wounded – more so than I’d intended.
‘What are these?’ she asked,
with
faux
-composure, pointing to the maps.
‘Maps of Iran and Pakistan.’
‘Quetta … I’ve never
heard of such a place. Is that where he’s taking you?’
‘I’m not being
taken
anywhere.’ I passed her a cup of tea, milky with two sugars, the way she likes
it.
‘You won’t be able to fly, at
least not until you get a proper job.’ She pressed her lips together to stop
herself saying more.
‘Actually, we’re going to drive.
There’s a route that will get us all the way to Delhi – through the places
we’ve dreamt of seeing.’
‘But –’
‘We’re thinking of turning it
into a tourist operation. Regular trips – there’s quite a demand for it, you know.
Among our sort.’
‘You’re not serious –’
‘Deadly.’
She put her tea down on the maps and looked
at me with incredulity. ‘But what about the café?’
‘What about it?’
‘They might make you permanent. That
would be something at least.’
Permanent.
An indeterminate number
of hours spent brewing tea and wiping surfaces began to ink itself onto the map of Delhi
that I had in my mind.
‘Mum, I’m a French graduate. The
café is hardly the be-all and end-all. I want to see things, like James.’
She picked up her tea from the map again,
leaving Tehran imprisoned in a milky ring. ‘But you’ve only known him a
couple of months.’
‘It’s not important how long
–’
‘It’s mad, Alice, that’s
what it is.’
‘I’ve got James, I’ll be
fine.’ I turned from her and spoke into the sink, pouring the rest of my tea away.
Then I flicked the switch on the kettle again to make a cup for James. The sooner she
was gone the better.
‘He probably didn’t mean
it,’ she began again.
‘What?’
‘He probably made
promises … Some men are like that.’
‘You don’t know anything about
him.’
‘I know more about his type than you
think.’
‘Oh, here we go, back to
Dad.’
‘That’s not –’
‘Why can’t you just accept that
I’m happy?’
She paused, seemingly flummoxed by the
question. I stood, breath held, waiting for another outburst. ‘Please don’t
go away,’ she whispered.
The water in the kettle reached its
crescendo and I began to pour it over the teabag in the mug. ‘I’m going,
whatever you say, so you may as well be pleased for me.’ The liquid slopped over
the rim and spilt on the surface.
‘Never mind,’ she murmured,
crossing the kitchen, picking up a cloth and pushing it over the mess.
‘I can do it,’ I snapped.
Something seized me – her impertinence, my anger. So I turned and quit the room. I
grabbed a jacket in the hall – not checking if it was hers or mine – and slammed the
front door behind me. Outside the apartment, I took a right turn and walked briskly to
Regent’s Park. The gates were locked and I was left peering through the bars at
the grass: sparse and wet.
She had no right
.
Back at my flat, James had arrived and
chopped onions and garlic in my absence. He took me out dancing on Fridays but on
Tuesdays we always ate together. Sometimes I cooked for him at his and sometimes he came
here. I walked towards the kitchen. He was browning onions in a pan with the
record-player on. One of the folk songs we had discovered on the Isle of Wight sifted
through the living room when I re-entered: James was humming something about being a
river, which made me smile in spite of my anger at Mum. I removed my jacket, noticing
hers had vanished from the rack. It must be gone eight: what if there were no more
trains bound for Wiltshire? I
knew – in a way that she wasn’t
aware of – how much courage it would have taken her to come to London. On her own, not
knowing if I would let her stay. I walked to the kitchen, looping my arms around
James’s waist from behind. He let go of his breath and took my hands. His touch
still came as a surprise to me – as if I were learning of his feelings for the first
time.
My skirt has dried in uneven pleats, mud
trapped between each fold. Ravindra retrieved it from the water after he rescued me.
When I came round, he covered his eyes and shouted Tamil at me until I had pulled it
over my legs and made myself decent again. It is an old one belonging to Mum – borrowed
once and never given back. I grabbed it from the suitcase without thinking before
running from the wave. The coral-pink pattern is barely visible under the mud. I picture
her wearing it, standing in the garden with laundry at her feet and an empty
washing-line above her head, eyes lost in some arbitrary branch of the magnolia tree.
The smallest of my mother’s tasks were always accompanied by the longest of pauses
– pauses that seemed to lengthen as she got older. I remember the photographs of her
days helping with the silage in Imber. She wore boyish overalls and a big grin; her
hands seemed dirty and busy; and she stood as if it were a struggle to keep still for
the camera. By the time I was born, the busyness had left her. And my only role, it
seemed, was to wake her from each pause and remind her I was there.
As well as my clothes, I have his hollow O
on my fourth finger. I remove the ring and peer through it – a window into more sea and
more sky. I still haven’t grown used to its grip. I am always aware of it. Out
here, with only the sea to hear me, I’m starting to wonder what it means – this
circle. Out here, I can say freely that perhaps I married him for the push – to push us
on to something new: a bright, uncharted territory that wasn’t anything like the
past.
If I make it back home, it’ll be the
first thing she notices. She’ll grab my hand, see the gold and say I’m
headstrong and foolish. That I kick my way through life. But it’s not her place –
she has no right – to tell me how to act.
Ravindra is sleeping. I reach under my shirt
and feel for Mum’s letter in my bra. There is nothing left of it. Somewhere inside
the seasons of the wave, the ink is being washed from the paper. Each of its sentences
is released eel-like into the water.
She is what I would have given you, had I been
a better man.