Dignity Read online

  The next photograph is even older, faded and weak. A grand-looking lady is bouncing a baby on her knee. Beside her stands a woman in a pale sari, whose face could be North Indian. Like Mum’s, like mine. But there’s a shrouded look about her. She shouldn’t even be in the photograph, you can tell. I turn the photograph over. Magda and Mummy, it says on the back. The woman isn’t given a name.

  I only see one more: of men standing in a street somewhere, minding their own business, midway through their lives, with its label on the bottom left-hand corner in that thick, faded scrawl.

  The Natives.

  ‘Damned stupid Indian,’ says her big, rigid house pushing me back out, down its grumpy staircase, out through its rigid hallway and into the garden with its brambles digging, shooting their claws at me as I pass. Magda’s words play back to me, more serious, more fucking heartfelt each time, until every inch of me tightens up against them. I leave it, shed Magda’s house, my pale baby churning in my belly. I half walk, half run back into town, along the streets where the cars are backed up because of some funfair, trying to feel it as hard as I can: the deshness of Bay’s Mouth. But I pass The Crown, and it’s there, stronger than ever, the feeling of what happened when I met Ewan’s mates there for a pint the first time; a smothering feeling, and I can’t get it off me, like a zipped-up body bag. I sit on a bench, looking out to sea. Vertigo.

  That night, Keith, behind the bar at The Crown, had looked a bit nervous when we all walked in, twitching his eyes along the line of them. Some of Ewan’s mates looked pretty hard.

  ‘Mind if we sit in front of the telly, mate?’ one of them, Darren I think it was, asked him.

  ‘No, no problem,’ he said, although the cricket was on and he’d been watching it.

  We sat down on the leather sofas, in front of the telly.

  Ewan introduced me as Su.

  ‘Good to meet you, Sue,’ said the one Ewan introduced as Nathan. And he reached out a hand. Ewan’d told me he had trouble with his eyes after being in service, and I could tell he couldn’t see much. I put my hand in his, and squeezed. He smiled. A nice smile, into the dark.

  The other one, Darren, was OK too. He made some joke about where on earth had Ewan found me.

  But the third, Giles, said nothing, just looked me up and down like some kind of a horse at market.

  He seemed in a bad mood, sullen with his pint, which he downed in a minute or two, then got up and left. Ewan said he’d been like that for a while, grumpy, depressed, but I felt like it was more personal than that. More to do with me. That look made me nothing.

  ‘I mean, the guy has a fucking Union Jack shaved into his hair, Ewan!’ I said, afterwards, when we were back home.

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s racist,’ he said. He didn’t sound that convinced.

  ‘Are you kidding me? It’s pretty much guaranteed, trust me.’

  Then Nathan, the blind one, went cold on me. He could hardly speak to me the next time we met. Turned from flirty to cold. And that, Ewan did seem pissed off about.

  Eventually he told me. They’d been at the pub a few nights after meeting me, and Nathan had practically choked on his pint when he’d realised, from something Ewan said, that I wasn’t white. He had got angry. Ewan came home with a black eye because Nathan had got into a random fight with someone at the bar after that, and he’d had to wade in after him, and got hit by the other guy.

  ‘What the fuck can race mean to a blind man, Ewan?’ I said, holding the ice-filled cloth to his eye.

  ‘He just felt humiliated, Su, because he didn’t know,’ he said.

  ‘So bloody what? What does it actually matter that he didn’t know?’

  ‘I get that,’ he said, ‘I do, but from his perspective …’

  ‘From his fucking perspective, Ewan, I’m scum.’ There was a silence. ‘From my perspective, Ewan, you’re being fucking crap standing up for him at all.’

  ‘We were away together,’ he said quietly. ‘Squaddies stick together.’

  ‘That squaddie is a racist bastard.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ he said, shaking his head. I could see his hands shaking too. Nathan and the others, they mean a lot. ‘He’s just had a hard time, Su,’ he said, trying to reach his arms around me. ‘And now he’s back, and trying to find work, and he’s blind, and there’s just so many people from other countries, and they’re trying to find work too, and it’s tough. He’s all worked up.’

  The way he said it, as if Nathan wasn’t staining me with his blind look.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ said Ewan. ‘It’s only a way of getting on.’

  It took us a long time to get over that. It hurt like hell that it didn’t initially make him as angry and sore as it did me. And he was pissed off with me too, that I didn’t get it, the way the lot of them were his. He belonged to them and they belonged to him, like family.

  I found out much later from Darren that Ewan didn’t leave it there though.

  I’d gone round to Darren’s when Ewan was going through a bad patch. It was after the whole argument between the uni and the benefit people about who was supposed to pay his note-taker for the three hours a week of lectures he needs her. The funding for those things has been cut back, like for everything else, and the uni and the local authority couldn’t agree who should pay. It’s a lifeline to him, and no one seemed to give a shit. He’d not been right all week. The course is everything for him. Fucking everything.

  Ewan hadn’t met me when he was meant to, and I’d got a bad feeling. So it was a relief when Darren’s door opened and his rough face nodded.

  ‘He’s asleep upstairs,’ Darren said under his voice, and opened the door to let me into his dark hallway. ‘I gave him some of my pills.’

  ‘What the fuck?’ I whispered.

  ‘Only sleeping tablets,’ he said. ‘Double dose. The guy needed it, Su.’

  We walked through to his kitchen. There was a pile of plates and cups to be washed. Empty packets of food, and jars of pasta sauce left open. The others had kept up army discipline – their flats were super neat, ordered, sparse. But Darren’s Darren. And he’s let things go. He put on the kettle, though, and gave me an awkward kind of hug.

  ‘He’ll be OK, Su.’ He leaned against the counter.

  ‘You’re sure, are you?’

  Silence.

  ‘He told Giles where to get off, you know,’ he said then. ‘Should bloody well think so too,’ with a grin. ‘You’re our girl, Su.’

  I felt something steadying then, a kind of anchor going down again, into Bay’s Mouth. I was there again. Standing in Darren’s flat. All there.

  Nathan forgot about it all too, once he’d got some proper rehab, got on a back-to-work scheme, and got support from the Blind Veterans. But I haven’t forgotten that he can only put it out of his mind because he can’t see. And even Mum would’ve known what that Union Jack in Giles’ hair meant. It meant that although he had twenty-twenty vision, he couldn’t see me properly.

  Ewan took Nathan up to the rehab centre, a massive old Victorian building that’s been used for that for years. He said it was like being back in the army, all Union Jacks and rank and paraphernalia. The place was brilliant, had everything state of the art, and it was a place you could belong to, as an ex-serviceman.

  Darren was pissed off about it. ‘If you’re blind or an amputee or have PTSD, you get taken care of OK by the charities, but if you’re just a bit fucked up like me, you’re on your fucking own.’ By fucked up, he meant unemployed and a drinker.

  ‘Nathan likes it,’ said Ewan, shrugging. ‘It’ll get him sorted.’

  To me, later, he admitted, ‘It was like going back home or something.’

  We sat in silence.

  ‘But it’s not a home I want, Su,’ he said.

  Ewan wouldn’t go to them for help, not to the military charities.

  He had less to do with Nathan for a while, and neither of us mentioned Giles till I asked, one day when we were walking down the s
eafront at Bay’s Mouth, in the winter sun.

  ‘We’re just different people,’ he said.

  I nodded, disappointed that he put it that way, when what Giles was, was completely messed up.

  ‘And to be honest,’ he added, ‘I’ll never get over all that bullshit with you.’

  I heard it, the ache of it, hurt that dries your mouth, makes you want to kick back against it, that way of seeing that makes you nothing worth speaking to, or acknowledging. And I was so bloody glad he shared it with me. We walked down the seafront, together.

  Now, I pace along the promenade, frantic. Just me and what’s in my belly. We’ve come completely loose from Bay’s Mouth after visiting Magda’s house, and I’ve got it, that vertigo, free floating without an anchor. I try to throw up into one of the drains, retching again and again. But nothing comes up. No one fucking stops. No one asks if I’m OK.

  When I arrive at the hospital to see her, with the bank book still not opened in my pocket, I’m feeling so hot and sick I have to run to the toilet in the foyer. Afterwards I sit on the pan. Breathing. Letting the waves of it settle. I don’t move for about ten minutes till someone knocks on the door.

  ‘You all right in there?’

  ‘Yep, sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m fine,’ leaning against the cubicle wall.

  I flush and then leave. I don’t look at the woman who was waiting, but I can feel her following me with her eyes.

  I walk through the ward, passing several bays of beds before I get to Magda’s. I can hear her ages before she comes into view. She’s busy giving one of the nurses precise instructions for what she wants for dinner.

  ‘But I don’t make the food, love,’ says the girl. ‘That’s canteen.’

  ‘Don’t call me love,’ says Magda, pointed as a dart. ‘Have you taken note of my instructions?’

  ‘Yes,’ lies the girl. ‘Got it.’ She walks off, rolling her eyes at me as she goes.

  Magda looks up, sees me, looks down and starts carefully arranging her blankets.

  ‘This place isn’t what it should be,’ she says. ‘Whatever happened to proper nursing?’ She snorts, then lies back again, weary.

  ‘What’s wrong,’ she’s asking me now. ‘What’s wrong, you silly girl? Why are you loitering? Come and sit down, at least, instead of gawping at me like that. Haven’t you ever seen an old woman before?’

  Damned stupid Indian. These acrid green walls. I can hear the visitors from the next bay laughing, and it echoes between the four walls of my head. And then I can hear the monitor of the old lady opposite, bleeping, bleeping, bleeping. And the edges of it all are curling inwards, turning black, until all I can see is Magda’s face in the middle of the page, saying, ‘Susheela, Susheela.’ And then, ‘Help! Someone. Help her!’

  There’s an arm around me and I’m sitting down next to Magda’s bed in the easy chair. When my head clears enough to think, I recognise that the nurse is busy propping up my feet on some kind of a stool.

  ‘It’s the patients who are meant to be sick, you know, not the visitors,’ she’s saying. She smiles. She has a round, tired face. Freckles.

  ‘Sorry.’

  She grins. ‘It’s all right. She says you’re pregnant,’ motioning to Magda who’s sitting on her bed, next to us, reading a paper. Cool as a cucumber. My mum’s voice says that in my head. Cool as a cucumber.

  I nod.

  ‘How far gone?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’ This is true. The doctor had said something about twelve weeks, but I’ve tried not to think about it. I don’t want to know how old this thing is.

  ‘You should get yourself checked out.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I will.’

  ‘Now just sit tight here for a bit and let it wear off. When the doctor comes round she’ll take a look at you probably. She’s one of the nice ones.’

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ I say. ‘It was just hot.’ And then I remember it, the reason why I came. I look at Magda, sitting under her neat blankets with the newspaper on her lap. Prim as anything, as if nothing’s happening, as if she hadn’t just been shocked by her carer fainting all over her. And I decide not to say anything about going to her house. Not today. I don’t want to look at that bank book with her and see its good news or its bad news. I carry it, a dead weight, like the deadening feeling of knowing those photos and the handwriting on them: The Natives.

  When I get to Dad’s, the book still in my pocket, I’m feeling awful. He takes one look at me, switches off his blaring music, and makes me sit down.

  ‘Good grief, girl,’ he says. ‘What’s up? What on earth’s wrong?’ shaking his head at me with wide eyes. ‘You look awful. You look bloody awful, girl. Are you ill?’

  ‘No, no. Leave me a minute, Dad, I just need some quiet, and some food, and maybe a cup of tea.’ I sit down heavily in the blue armchair, Mum’s favourite seat.

  ‘You know, you could be anaemic,’ he says, getting up to run some water into the kettle. ‘Your mother was anaemic, if she didn’t take those tablets. Without them she’d get so pale and ill.’ He puts the kettle back on its rest and switches it on. ‘Just like you now.’

  ‘No, Dad, I’m not anaemic.’

  ‘B12 injections. That’s what you need,’ he mutters to himself, opening the fridge and getting the milk out ready. ‘B12.’

  ‘I don’t need injections, Dad. I just need a cup of tea and a bit of a sit-down.’

  The kettle boils slowly, and the pressure in the room seems to grow. He gets the cups, brews the tea, adds just the right amount of milk, and sets it in front of me. Then he grabs the sugar bowl and adds a sugar.

  ‘Looks like you need it,’ he says.

  It’s nice. Strong and sweet. I don’t usually take sugar, but this will be good today. Sugar. I take a hot sip, and feel instantly better. I feel strong enough to take the newspaper Dad’s pushing at me across the table. Young faces, angry and ugly, crowding the front page.

  ‘They’re all getting into politics,’ I say. ‘At college all the students are. They’re fed up.’

  ‘Politics is for liars,’ says Dad, batting it all away with his hand. He strokes my hair away from my face. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  When I look up at him, his face has that drawn expression he’d get with Mum.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. It’s a funny thing, telling lies. Kills off little cells in your heart. Sitting here, pretending to read the paper, I have this unsteady feeling, like I’m all a lie – not just the course, or Ewan, or the baby. I’m play-acting my life. How can you let someone love you when you’re doing that? I think of Magda’s fuck-off eyes and her don’t-give-a-shit attitude.

  ‘Dad,’ I say, looking at the empty bottom of the cup.

  He looks up at me.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  The tea he’s holding spills onto Mum’s perfect carpet.

  ‘Oh good grief,’ he says. ‘Good grief.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Twenty satyagrahists sink down to their haunches and begin to scrape the mud with fragments of bamboo. They work to the singing of a hymn. Their mud is collected by a few others and is dumped into a round mud-filter three feet high.

  A yellow liquid stuff – water from the lake – floats in.

  The men hope that the water will settle down, dissolve the salt crystals in the mud, and then trickle out through a bamboo spout from the filter’s side into earthen pots.

  Some of it does, and the earthen pots are then carried off to a bamboo shelter – beflagged as before – where the water is boiled on fires made in mud ovens. In the process the salt undissolves itself once more, and there you are: The whole band’s labours produced in three hours enough dirty and probably dangerous salt to cover a shilling.

  ‘The Salt of Politics’, the Manchester Guardian, 12 April 1930

  There is trouble in India. And there is trouble with hatred in my house.

  I have turned in on myself. At first I wanted B to stay with me as often as he could, despite
the small meannesses that crept into our life, the little ways in which he forbade me suddenly, to be myself. But then the big things happened. Like the time he locked me in.

  Although she made me furious with hatred at first, I’d grown a restrained affection for Mrs McPherson. I could see now how she had become what she was, as I was becoming not unlike her myself. The same hankering for Home. The same bitterness in the face of other people’s spontaneity. The same carefully guarded body. The same unfaithful husband.

  Once, when we were sitting on our lawn, I saw her laugh because two of the kittens came rolling over each other, playing across the grass. She stifled it, but I could see how she must once have been fresher, less dried and pickled and strung out by British India.

  From then on, I tried to make that laugh come more often. I made her little gifts. Just lace and flowers and such things, but I knew how they were valued when her husband was so negligent and left her here alone. I also had her sit for a portrait, and made her as pretty as I could, smoothed out her brow, and had her downturned mouth turned slightly up. She smiled at herself, and hung the picture in their sitting room, though her husband wouldn’t even look at it when he finally came for a visit.

  I also found a man who could tune pianos and I was able to teach her some small minuets on theirs, though it had languished so many years in the sitting room, sweating in the heat and silence, that middle C was never quite tuned to perfection.

  We were playing a simple duet one day when she suddenly stopped. Her hands fell to her lap, and her head bowed.

  ‘Anna?’ I said.

  She remained silent a second.

  ‘We’re moving to Nagpur,’ she said, looking at me with a heavy, passive expression. ‘They’re posting George to work on the new railway line there.’

  Indian life is transitory, so this was to be expected – people were moved, no one put roots down, but twirled on like blown dandelion clocks; but despite this, we had the beginnings of a friendship. She and I both knew it. I was beginning to get to her, to Anna, beneath all that haughtiness.

  She got up, brushed herself down.

  ‘We shall have no use for this there,’ she said abruptly, motioning to the piano. ‘You can have it,’ and she walked out of the door, in her haste almost colliding with one of the servants who had, after a long delay, finally brought in our tea. He was left standing redundantly there with his full tray when I also swept past him, crying, out of the house.