Dignity Page 8

  My phone rings.

  Ewan.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘Hi,’ he says.

  There’s a silence. The sound of him breathing.

  ‘I’m sorry, Su,’ he says. ‘I just can’t. I can’t come.’

  I say nothing.

  We sit together, in the silence. And then I say it, quietly.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  For a second we hold the silence, me at the table, in our local, and he somewhere lost, far away, but still holding on. And then the flat tone sounds, the smell of oil trailing after it, memories of touch leaching into the mottled carpet of the pub.

  I sit. Nirvana blares slowly.

  Eventually Keith comes over. ‘Your fella not coming?’ Motioning to the seat beside me.

  ‘Nope. Looks like.’

  Keith pulls a face. ‘If you want my opinion …’

  ‘I d—’

  ‘I think he’s a prick,’ he says, picking up my half and taking a swig from it. ‘You can do much better.’

  ‘Cheers, Keith,’ I say.

  ‘Never liked him.’ He says it proudly, although it’s not true. He’s always bloody loved Ewan. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ he asks me, looking at my undrunk half-pint. I don’t say anything. My heart thrums a fuzzy beat in my ears.

  ‘Christ!’ he says.

  ‘No. No, I’m not,’ I say then.

  ‘Good bloody job,’ says Keith. He grins. ‘D’you fancy a drink with me then? No one in, could have another.’

  I can’t compute what he’s saying. I just sit there, still, still, and so he leans towards me. ‘I’ve always liked South Asian girls,’ he says, reaching a hand up to my hair. ‘Lovely hair. Lovely skin. Lovely eyes.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m not one of those men who don’t like them. Not at all.’

  I stare at him. His words land finally, hot and disgusting. ‘What the fuck, Keith?’

  ‘What?’ Both his hands held open now, palms to the sky, shoulders shrugging. ‘Just saying: I’m not racist, that’s all.’

  I feel sick. ‘Fuck,’ I say, staring at his red, stupid face. ‘You total fuck.’

  I grab my phone, my bag, throw my coat on, snatch my arm away from him when he tries to hold my wrist to say something else, some dickhead thing, and I run out through the pub’s heavy door. My breath’s too fast in and out of my throat, the door’s heavy. My eyes are hot. I taste salt.

  ‘No harm trying, is there?’ he calls after me as the door swings shut. ‘No harm having a go?’

  Outside I retch into a bin. Keep Britain Tidy, it says on the side. Except someone’s scribbled out ‘Tidy’, and replaced it with ‘White’.

  Chapter Nine

  Where the world has not

  been broken up into

  fragments

  By narrow domestic walls.

  ‘Where the Mind Is Without Fear’, Gitanjali,

  Rabindranath Tagore

  When number three Victoria Drive was abandoned and unloved, after I was left here alone, I made Home from scratch just as my mother had, according to the specifications of The Complete. I did my laundry meticulously, and on a strict rotation. I wasted nothing. I kept accounts of kitchen expenditure. I preserved and did not waste and kept the Empire’s place within my four walls. And I kept those walls standing strong and imperious. The only components missing from the house were servants. And by some cruel twist, I now have those. Except these subjugate rather than serve.

  The girl, Susheela, doesn’t come the next day, or the one after that. The whole week it’s just Annette and Gemma and Clare and the others with their unending procession of dull, anaesthetic names. It’s going from one toilet visit to the next and being fed by rote and being patronised until you almost forget you’re a human being. I nearly let my house of cards topple between all this fuss of women. She doesn’t come.

  There’s nothing unusual in it, necessarily. Often I won’t see one of them for a long time. You never know who’ll come when. Like this Annette, who’s just shaking the rain from her brolly in the dark hallway.

  Annette went off on maternity last year. No one told me if she’d had the baby, was it a boy, was it a girl, was she all right? She was a kindly, plump sort of girl, and I did miss her quietness, and the habit she had, when she had fully dressed me, of patting my right shoulder briefly, gently, with almost-affection.

  I didn’t ask after her, so no one said anything. Then she just walked back in last week, a few hours after Susheela had left. Must have been a year or more since I’d seen her.

  ‘Hello, Magda. Gosh, it’s been a long time,’ said Annette with a grin. She was much slimmer than when I’d last seen her, and looked a damned sight more drawn, because of the little one at home probably. God knows what she thought of the state of me by now. My limbs have less and less connection to me these days. I forget about my body, except when the girls come to move, dress, wash, feed it, and make me remember.

  ‘It’s time for my tea,’ I said to Annette, as tartly as I could. She laughed.

  Later, when we were in the bathroom, Annette found Susheela’s test on the floor, just left there, silly girl.

  ‘Oh gosh,’ she said, to herself. ‘Gosh.’

  ‘Don’t gawp at it. Put it in the bin,’ I said quickly. And she did. A good girl. She put it in the bin. I restart my habit of slipping her some extra money. She restarts her habit of accepting it, despite what the company would say. I’ve a small, dwindling stash of notes, between the mattress and the underlay, enough for a few more tips before I’m done, but not enough to mend much about this house if it continues to come apart at the seams.

  Over the week, the pieces of my house turn slightly, but they’re still wrongly aligned. Like that puzzle brought by the little boy who came. What did he call it? A Rubik’s Cube. My house is like that. Pieces of the house are in the wrong place, and I can’t find a way to line them up again.

  He walked right in yesterday, right through the door without knocking, the boy. One of them had left it open, must have, or he came in through the gaps in the house that Susheela made when she walked out.

  He was small. Must’ve been eight? Or seven, perhaps. Their ages have become difficult to match up. He had bright pumps on. They had very thick plastic soles, which were also very bright. Perhaps lime green? Perhaps. He had a jacket that must have been made of polyester, or another modern excuse for a fabric, because it shone dimly in the light from the window. He had red hair. In he walked, into my sitting room, and stood opposite me.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  He walked towards me. He looked at me for a few long moments. Big, January eyes, dark lashes. In his eyes I saw myself as he did, sitting in my chair, the tartan blanket over my lap.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked me.

  ‘You’re not supposed to ask my age,’ I said. ‘And besides, I’m not entirely sure.’

  ‘What? You don’t know?’ he said. He whistled. ‘You must be well old then.’

  I did smile. I smiled. And I nodded. I don’t do birthdays any more, and no one else does my birthday either, so there is no grand measuring of age each year. But the boy was undoubtedly right. I am becoming extremely ancient. That very morning I had looked at my own hand and could not think how to move it.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked him, pointing at the brightly coloured shape he held in his hand.

  He passed it to me. A coloured cube. Plastic again.

  ‘It’s a Rubik’s Cube,’ he said. He whistled again. ‘Haven’t you ever seen one? You must be well, well old! Even my mum had one!’ He looked pretty excited about it, my great age.

  ‘What’s it for?’ I turned the cube over in my hands, its bright, improbable colours.

  He came and sat on the arm of my chair.

  ‘It’s for making perfect again,’ he said. ‘You make it all one colour on every side. So this side will be yellow and this side will be green and this side will be red and this side wil
l be blue, see?’

  It was hard and cold and awkward in my thin, thin hands. I couldn’t hold it properly to turn it. He took it from me and turned one of its cogs a couple of times to show me. Then he said, quite kindly, ‘You can have it, if you want.’

  ‘Don’t you want it?’

  ‘Nah. My sister gave it me yesterday. She said they used to play with them when she was a kid. It’s a bit boring. I like PlayStation and stuff.’ He turned away.

  ‘But you haven’t solved it.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ turning back to me, shrugging his slight shoulders.

  ‘But that is the point!’ I said. ‘To make it perfect, you said.’ I tried to smile at him.

  ‘So?’ He left the Rubik’s Cube on my lap. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’d better go,’ sounding bored with me already.

  I wanted to ask him where he was going to, or where he came from, or would he come back, but I just nodded, weakly.

  ‘Bye bye,’ he said. And I lifted an arm to wave with my limp, limp hand, as he walked out of my Rubik’s Cube house, into all that future.

  Annette, who they keep sending, gets me breakfast this morning. I drink it, for it’s one of these dreadful energy shakes, and then it’s upstairs to the lavatory, and to rest in my easy chair in the bedroom.

  We have trouble, getting from the wheelchair to the chair. I’m unable. Even with support I am unable to use my legs enough to stand and hold the frame for several minutes and have my chairs swapped beneath me. My breath is short, and then shorter.

  When Annette says, ‘I’ll have to call it in, Magda. You’re a two-person job. They shouldn’t send me on my own,’ I get frantic.

  A two-person job means there’ll be two of these nitwits at any one time, and they’ll talk to each other over my head about what’s going on outside the house. The senselessness. And I will not tolerate it. I heave myself onto the frame.

  ‘Do it!’ I say. And within a few seconds she’s changed the seats beneath me and I’m settled in the easy chair. My chest is as heavy as plumb. When I look at the room, the corners of it are darkened, as if I was looking through a spyhole, as if I wasn’t in the room at all, but standing outside peering in through a crack in the wall.

  As Annette stands at my china sink in the bedroom washing her hands, I can hear static in the room, which must have come in from outside. And when I look at her again, from my chair, she’s broken into little squares. Annette’s coming apart. The room is becoming more diffuse, making the space between me and Annette big and vacuous, so that when her lips move, and I can see her speaking, I can barely hear what it is she’s saying over and over, though I think instantly that it must be my name, Magda. My name, Magda, repeated and repeated, Magda, quicker and quicker until it becomes a vibration that disappears into the little squares.

  Somehow I manage to tell her to leave.

  ‘Get out of here, you stupid woman,’ I say. I say it again and again into the bleak room until I’m sure she is gone. And now I’m alone, and, when I lift the sheet to look at my own legs, they’re disintegrating too, my thighs coming apart into a thousand tiny squares of flesh and bone and blood.

  Chapter Ten

  If you look into any snake’s eyes you will see that it knows all and more of the mystery of man’s fall.

  ‘The Return of Imray’,

  Rudyard Kipling

  We are only married two weeks when I become ill. I don’t tell anyone at first, saying I have stomach pains and taking to my bed. But soon it is impossible to hide. My pelvis aches and I have such an unpleasant stinging pain on urination that I’m afraid to go at all. B has the doctor called, and I am prescribed some medication. They talk quietly about me outside the door.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I ask B, when the doctor has gone.

  ‘It’s just a urinary infection. They’re common here, it should be gone in a few days,’ says B.

  But I notice that the pills I have been given are the same ones I saw him take in Bombay, and I can’t help wondering about it. Have we caught something Indian? I quieten myself, knowing that whatever it is, B will have it made well.

  Mrs McPherson comes to see me, on the third day, when I am much better. When we are finally left alone by the servants, at her request, she is bold enough to ask me my symptoms.

  ‘You mustn’t be squeamish about talking to me,’ she says. ‘I’ve had every single thing going. Most of us have. That’s the way it is in India – one thing after another. If it isn’t typhoid, it’s malaria. If it isn’t malaria, it’s the clap.’ I start when she says this last. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘we mustn’t be naive. Generally our men have been out here for a long time before we arrive.’ She busies her hands around the flowers the servants have brought in, and set, rather tunelessly in vases. ‘Men have needs, Evelyn,’ she says as if she were speaking of the characteristics of a cat, ‘and unfortunately there are plenty of loose women around, white and otherwise, and they are none too clean. None too clean at all.’

  I feel sick at the thought of it. And at the thought that this is what she thinks of B. Luckily she leaves fairly quickly, having delivered her serving of spite.

  The pain is gone within a few days, and although I feel weak and feverish, I start back at my homemaking.

  I do ask B. We’re sitting together on the big chair in the day room. I’m curled into him like a bird in a nest. I listen to his even breathing as he reads over my shoulder from one of his engineering annuals. I try to breathe with him. Three, four breaths. I have adhered myself to him and cannot come unstuck so I endeavour to feel that our bodies make a duet, not a duel. But in our shared breath, no peace. Slowly his body, around me, seems to change from a nest to a vice. I must escape it. I sit up.

  ‘How many women did you have before me, B?’

  ‘Why do you have to ask such things?’ he says, and I feel his body stiffen further. He gestures annoyance by motioning to the side with the engineering text in his hand. The gesture says get off, and feels imperative as he is so used to being obeyed, but I stay seated on his lap, more upright now.

  ‘No reason. I should just like to know.’

  ‘It will only make you jealous,’ he says, pushing me to my feet, and standing up himself.

  ‘So it’s many, many then?’

  He begins to pace. There is something unsettled in him, some fragility or brittleness. He walks to the window, his back to me.

  ‘Evie, there’s no need for you to think of this. Men have needs, for women. That’s the way it is. You know that.’

  In his voice, the slight tremor of fear. Of losing me perhaps? Of losing our dream?

  I nod; I don’t want to lose it either. It’s a long while before he comes back to sit with me. We sit together again, our breath making discords, and I wonder how many, and what kind of women, and whether they were healthy or not, these women whose cells are now part of mine, whose story is a prologue to my own.

  The next morning I find a snake in our bedroom. It’s there, lying across the floor between the dressing table and the bed. I’ve never seen one before. The long muscle of it reminds me of the tubes of hot iron I saw at the smelting plant where my father worked. Men threw the iron around as they hammered at it, and this snake could writhe and flick like those tubes of hot metal if it wanted to. For a moment I’m as solid as cold iron watching the tube of the snake, coiling on the floor. I am as silent as lead too for that moment, and then the tearing sound begins. My own scream.

  It’s Sajid, not B, who rushes in. He sees it and stops still. ‘Still,’ he says to me firmly. ‘Be still.’

  I didn’t know he spoke English. I’m silenced by my own language, so swift from his lips.

  Sajid grabs one of B’s guns from the wall, cocks it, deftly, and shoots the snake in the neck. It is hurt and tries to slither away, but too slow. He goes close, and shoots its flat head, blasting its eyes apart so that something dirty splurts out onto the clean floor. It writhes once and is dead, lying both impossible and mundane
against the dark wood. Sajid comes to me then.

  ‘Shh,’ he says. ‘Shh,’ and I realise that I’m shaking. I fling myself on him, and cry and cry. He doesn’t step away, although I’m untouchable.

  The next minute B has sprung between us, and is shouting at Sajid, and smacking him across the face. Sajid’s saying something in Bengali and, cowering, he leaves by the door. B is about to dive after him, but I grab him, shouting, ‘B. He saved me! That snake …’

  B turns to me, and then looks to where I’m pointing, at the snake’s carcass, its slow blood on our pristine floor. He looks at the snake. Turns to me.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. He killed it before it got to me.’

  B nods. But doesn’t move to go after Sajid and apologise or thank him. He kisses me on the head, his body warm, comforting, but still taut with the tension of his anger. I’m shaking, cold with the shock.

  ‘Come and sit down, I’ll have one of them bring in tea.’ He takes me to the chaise longue and has me lie down, placing a blanket over me as if I’m a small child. And I feel that I am a child here. I know and understand so little. I close my eyes. There’s the muffled sound of servants organising themselves around carrying out the snake, and cleaning up. When they’ve gone, I open my eyes and sit up to take the tea.

  B’s very quiet, tight-lipped.

  ‘He shouldn’t have touched you,’ he says, as he pours the tea himself.

  ‘It was my fault, B,’ I say. ‘I was so grateful, I went to him. He couldn’t avoid it.’ Surely that is understandable? Surely Sajid was in the right?

  B’s look is black. ‘They’re not supposed to touch.’

  ‘Oh B, really that is silly.’

  ‘Their code forbids it, as well as ours. Perhaps we should let him go.’ B is like a small child, sulking.

  ‘B! He just saved my life, for God’s sake!’

  He looks at me. Thinks about it. And nods. So Sajid is safe.