The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read online

  “Let’s go to market,” Renga suggested.

  “You joking? My dad’s got another two hours there, one of his guys will spot me for sure,” said Vik.

  “No, under the market, I mean,” Renga said. The market was located on two extended piers in the main port – one pier was all fish and meat, the water beneath it rank with carcasses and offal. The neighbouring pier, though, the one where fruits and vegetables were sold, was walled off from its tamasic neighbour in order to spare the vegetarian Hindus who shopped there from the sights and odours of animal decay. Depending on where the wind was on a particular day, the separation almost worked. The rocky slope beneath the vegetable pier was usually cool and clean enough, and often occupied only by scavenging gulls and drunks.

  Once the boys were encamped in the shade, gathered on an old sheet that they’d stolen from Reynolds’s front garden, Renga volunteered to go to the surface for a round of cold alouda, if Vik was willing to finance the mission. It was known that Vik was usually rife with pocket money; what was less known is that he had built his stock of cents and rupees by strategically spending time with his father during the man’s Saturday lunches. Vik’s father would come home drunk from that morning’s deal-closing whiskies with the twenty-odd boat captains he traded with. Devi or her sister prepared a sauce in the hour leading up to his arrival, and he’d have a gutted and scaled fish in hand, ready to be fried and flavoured. He had installed a cushioned burgundy couch in the kitchen, in defiance of his wife’s open rage. It had absorbed the odours of a thousand meals, and the pore-filtered effluvium of gallons of Johnnie Walker. Vik’s father would present the fish, strip to the waist, and nap on the couch for twenty minutes, until the table was laid. Unfailingly, the contents of his pockets would transfer themselves to the gaps between the couch cushions; every safety pin, every wadded receipt, and every coin would find its way into Vik’s pilfering hands. Along with the coins, he gathered the trash to lessen his feelings of guilt. Removing rubbish was worthy of some recompense, and if that recompense was to be found among the rubbish itself, so much the better.

  Vik handed a few cents to Renga, who scurried up the slope with enough speed and forward lean to avoid slipping backwards. When he was in reaching distance of the pier, he used his long fingers and the developing muscles in his shoulders to pull himself into the invisible above.5 Siva and Vik were left in uncomfortable silence; their friendship only functioned when Renga was present.

  “So you going to the show tonight?” Vik asked.

  “Fucking yes, man, of course I am,” said Siva, relieved to fall back on ridicule, “Saved one rupee twenty-five, so first-class seat for me.”

  “Oh. How much for the other classes?”

  “What do you care? You’re first class, full-time, man.”

  “I don’t know. My family, we get in free, so I don’t know –”

  “What? You, free? Fuck is that, man, you’re the richest!”

  “Can we speak in French, Creole?” asked Vik, hoping that shifting to a different language would lessen Siva’s hostility.

  “Sure, boss.”

  “My mom yelled at the manager, so yeah, free for us.”

  “Sure,” Siva said.

  “What else have you heard about the opening? I don’t know anything,” Vik said, attempting to place Siva in a superior position.

  “Yeah, I guess you haven’t gotten permission from Mummy to check it out. Yesterday I heard something pretty good.”

  “What?” asked Vik, and Siva pointed upwards.

  “All the best market vendors? They’re going to be posted at the cinema, for the breaks between movies. Right after market close, they go home, right, but then they hitch the carts to lorries, haul everything to the Rex for that break. Poori, peanuts, corn, pineapple with chili chutney. You know, all of it.”

  “Man,” Vik said. Siva was skinny, but spoke of food with a fat man’s relish, slurping his syllables as his eyes filled with lust.6 The next part of their exchange was silent; Siva squeezed the pockets of his thin shorts for a moment and looked at the ground. Vik palmed the seventy cents that remained after his alouda expense, and placed it on Siva’s lap. The money disappeared.

  Just as rapidly, the drinks appeared. Renga dangled upside down from the pier and shouted for Vik to come up the slope and grab the cups. He was holding them with his right thumb and two fingers, which were each stuck a joint deep into the liquid. Vik noticed a scummy aureole of dirt spreading around each digit in the sweetened iced milk, with its delicious jellied strips. He shook the cups to disperse the filth as he descended, also jostling the image out of his mind so he could enjoy the drink.

  Vik was home earlier than usual, but Devi made no comment. He told her the story he’d prepared anyway, an undetailed concoction about an argument with Siva that had caused him to walk home instead of dallying with his two friends for the usual post-tutorial half-hour. Devi relished these tales of disagreement, as Vik had noticed long ago; she was waiting for her son to outgrow his friends and to find new ones, ones that suited her idea of his future.

  “Soon, you’ll understand,” Devi said, her voice lugubrious and laden with the wisdom of suffering. She was sitting on the kitchen couch, allowing her sister to attend to dinner. Aunt Roshi’s contribution to the conversation was the soft plosion of vegetables and meat plunging into boiling oil; she always dropped raw food in from a height, a risk illustrated by the lashing of white scars on her forearms.

  “Understand what?” Vik asked, doing up the top button of his shirt when he noticed his mother’s eyes resting on his exposed chest.

  “Why you and those boys are different.”

  “I already know,” Vik said. In reply, Devi kicked off her left sandal – part of the haul of footwear she’d purchased with the theatre owner’s payout – and sailed it across the kitchen, where it lightly footprinted her son’s stomach.

  “Don’t think you know anything, little one,” Devi said. Her mood seemed to have changed in the moment between hurling the shoe and its impact; she smiled indulgently and waved him to his room.

  Vik parcelled out the small amount of change he had remaining, easing it out of the hiding place in the sliding joint of his bottom dresser drawer. A cockroach skittered over some dropped coins and Vik crushed it reflexively, using one of Siva’s English curses when he saw the mess it had made on his money. He cleaned and examined his haul: twenty-six cents. A small sum, but more than enough for some snacks at the interval.

  Vik’s father didn’t return from the market at closing time, so the family ate without him. Aunt Roshi had improvised a sort of servant’s table in the darkest corner of the kitchen; it consisted of a tall stool facing a piece of scrap lumber that bridged two separate sections of the countertop. She ate with her back to Vik and Devi, her open-mouthed chewing loudly emphasizing the silence at the proper dining table. Devi wasn’t talkative when her husband was this late. That extra half-hour meant that he had decided to have a drink after work, and that drink implied a half-dozen more after it. After three gateaux-piments and five minutes, Vik spoke.

  “Do you think we can reserve seats at the Rex?”

  “Rex? What? The cinema?” Devi replied. “We’re not going to that tonight, too crowded. We’ll wait at home for your father. He likes it when we’re waiting.”

  Vik bit his fork, grinding the metal against his teeth in despair. Devi was punishing him. This wouldn’t have happened if his father had come home on time.

  “But we’re expected, Ma. We have to go.”

  “Who’s expecting you, like you’re the king making a tour? We’re not going.” Devi would have yelled at Vik for neglecting the rest of the food on his loaded plate, but she had stopped eating as well. She waited for the boy to leave the table and then called her sister to clean everything up. Roshi disposed of the vegetables, and loaded meat into White’s bowl.

  The marquee seemed to glow even brighter through the pane of glass in Vik’s window, a cruel illusion. Vi
k’s attendance was required, not optional. Escape from the house was possible from at least three doors leading into the courtyard, but his absence would be noticed within a half-hour. He decided to leave a note explaining where he was and when he would return, and to accept the consequences. Showtime was thirty minutes away, and already audience members were pacing outside what must have been the third-class-ticket window, passing bottles back and forth, arguing and laughing. A few vendor carts had already arrived, and Vik could smell the hot peanuts that the men outside were washing down with rum.

  Roshi was massaging the monstrous veins in her calves when Vik crept past her door. She looked at him without any interest, then returned to her task. Devi was still in the kitchen, so Vik exited through one of the side doors. White was tearing into a gristly piece of curry lamb on the bone, which Vik recognized as one that he had left behind on his plate. The dog looked at the boy no differently than he looked at his dinner, but did not bark or shake his chain. Vik struck out toward the Rex in time to see Renga and Siva enter the first-class doors. The highest-paying segment of the audience was entitled to early entry, it seemed.

  “Hey!” called Vik. He was almost sure that Renga had heard him, that he had held the door from drifting shut behind him for an extra moment, but the boys vanished behind all of the other bodies entering the Rex. Vik rushed the doors, only to have a purple-costumed usher seize the front of his shirt, just above the print that Devi’s shoe had left.

  “No. No,” said the usher. He was short, only a bit taller than Vik, and about twenty years old, with a brushy-looking mustache that belonged in a colder climate. When he spoke, Vik saw that he’d grown it out to obscure the stained stumps that had once been a top row of teeth.

  “I get in free,” Vik explained, graciously tolerating the hand on his shirt, holding his own palms upward in a peaceful, explaining gesture. The usher laughed.

  “Free, free for this one,” he said, talking over his shoulder to someone he thought was there. The colleague he had been turning to was gone, and the usher turned back to Vik with all the humour leeched out of his face.

  “Go to third with the rest of the garbage, beg some money off one of them. Don’t mess up my entryway, got it? Ticket inspector will throw you out, then fire me.”

  The third-class queue had none of the characteristic features of a lineup. It was a roughly circular press of humanity that stank of sweat, liquor, and worse. Vik tried to will the money he’d so casually given to Siva back into his pocket, because it would have been enough to get him to the second-class entryway. He was pushed through the heaving mass of men, feet barely on the ground, eased forward by the damp movement around him. He was able to progress by not shoving back; men would propel him forward in order to yell at the people that had been standing at either side of him. As far as Vik could see, there were no women waiting to be let into the third-class seats. He paid for his ticket and threw his two leftover cents on the ground in a useless gesture of anger. In ten minutes, the film would start.

  The tiles were brilliant under the countless bulbs in the lobby, and the walls were covered by paintings of movie stars, some of whom were so famous and Western that Vik didn’t recognize their names, only their faces. Robert Mitchum was depicted in one, his skin the colour of a banana peel and the lines of his cowboy hat trickily painted to make it project from the wall. Lacking the time to make any further observations, Vik made for the entry that led into the balcony for third-class ticketholders. He walked to the front row, where a man had passed out across two seats. With the experience he’d gained from many stealthy afternoons of manoeuvring his sleeping father on the couch without causing him to wake, Vik cleared the drunk’s drooping limbs from one of the two seats and sat down. Holding his place with a foot on the seat, Vik leaned over the railing to see if he could spot Renga and Siva in the dark.

  His foot was violently slapped off the seat and he lost his balance, falling backward instead of over the balcony. The damp hands of the front row quickly had the boy upright. The ticket inspector’s relief at Vik’s survival was quickly covered by a mask of business. He extended his hand for Vik’s ticket, which he gave back after a suspicious once-over.

  Bottles clinked behind and around Vik as the lights went down. The projector whirred alive before barking out its beam. The movie was in black and white, but the suggested spectrum of colours on the scratched film was limitless. There were children in the film, a grand surprise for Vik, as they seemed to be principal characters in a grown-up story. No songs. A flickering knife. Mitchum’s eyes, barely open most of the time, occasionally flaring in malicious passion. Talk of money. Tattooed knuckles. Mocking songs about the children’s dead father swinging at the end of a hangman’s rope.7

  There was movement in the first-class section. Vik’s eyes panned down from a bedroom scene between Mitchum and Shelley Winters that didn’t bore him in the slightest, despite being beyond his comprehension.8 A smooth and forceful ripple that originated in a back row of the centre aisle was moving forward in a succession of turning, irritated heads. The source of the ripple was Devi, now a black silhouette against the simulated Virginian sky behind Mitchum, the lines of her figure so sharp she might have been scissored from the screen. She was whispering to the person at the end of each row, then craning to examine each incredulous face. If she continued to move forward, she would spot Renga and Siva, and the real noise would start.

  The gnawing immediately beside Vik stopped, and he felt something arc past his ear. A whirling cylinder was twice arrested in the projector beam; once as it travelled upward, and once more during its plunge.9

  The list of expletives from the row where the stripped corncob turned missile had landed began with “Bastard pimp motherfucker” in Creole and ended in angry shushing. Devi recoiled from the language, which came from a seat uncomfortably close to her, and ran back up the aisle to the lobby.

  “Ah well,” said a soft voice beside Vik. “Almost got her. You think she’ll come up here to look?”

  Vik faced the gnawing drunk, scared for a moment that he had sat beside his own father without noticing. The face that looked back at him was half-covered by a thick beard, but the skin that was visible was ochre-dark, the kind of pigmentation that would have prevented him from being the favourite of his mother, or of any mother on the island. Vik checked the man’s knuckles to see if he had Mitchum’s LOVE/HATE tattoos, but only whorls of hair were visible in the darkness of the theatre.

  “Vikram. You know me?” asked the bearded man. “From stories your mother tells, maybe?”

  “No,” said Vik. “Please, can I just watch?”

  “Sure,” said the man, smiling. “We can talk after. Don’t leave too quick.”

  But Vik did leave quickly. He didn’t watch the movie as he timed his run. He only counted minutes, watching the pops of light and sound at the edge of the screen, seeing the lines of wear overlaying the picture, which had developed as the film travelled across continents and through foreign projectors to reach the Rex. Even a failed film like The Night of the Hunter had to make a tour of the first world before it reached the gutter screens of the colonies, and the battering the reels took was as visible and audible as the movie itself. Vik counted minutes. He hopped over the knees on his left as soon as minute five came around, leaving by way of the balcony exit that led to the drink stand. If the bearded man thought he was going for a Coke, he wouldn’t follow. Vik could linger in the bathroom, then perhaps come in and find another seat.10

  Siva was peeing in the steel urinal trough when Vik entered. “Hey,” Siva said, before concentrating on hastening his stream, urging his pee out with frightening rapidity. He still took the time to amuse himself by directing it into different areas of the trough, achieving a marimba-like musical effect. Vik could have hugged him, but even terror of the bearded man couldn’t bring him to violate an ancient code by touching his urinating friend.

  “Where’s your family sitting?” asked Siva, when he had s
haken off. “Fucking noisy in there, animals can’t shut up for ten seconds.”

  “I’m in the third class, alone,” Vik said, pretending to pee as Siva washed his hands.

  “Third? First full up, yeah? Boring film anyway. I’ll see you after.”

  Siva ran for the door, eager to get back to the film, boring as it might be. Vik didn’t let himself beg his friend to stay. But he wished he had when he made his way to the sinks and the bearded man entered.

  “Thought you had run away,” he said. In the caustic light of the bathroom, Vik was able to see that the rest of the man matched his face; hairy and bloated. The arms were too long, and there were ancient liquor stains on his rough cotton shirt. His zipper was undone.

  “You don’t know me?” The man made no move to the toilets. “I guess mother Devi doesn’t tell stories about the people she used to go with before she classed up, first class all the way. I could be your dad, you know, if you were a couple of years older. Me and a lot of guys I know, we could have been your dad.”

  Vik said nothing. He wished he had peed in the urinal, because there was now a real risk that it would happen in his pants.

  “I’m not first class all the way, no. But your dad drinks the same whiskey I do, so maybe the smell, maybe that, reminds your mother of me.” The man’s pants were undone, held up solely by a leather belt. “You don’t like sitting with me?”

  “No,” said Vik. He didn’t know if this was a bold reply or a safe one, but it was the word that leaked out of his mouth.

  “Of course you don’t, because you’re your mother’s boy. So go home.” The man ambled over to the urinal and dropped his pants entirely, exposing ape-strong legs and a coating of fur that looked thicker than the pants around his ankles. When he saw that Vik hadn’t moved, he turned and waggled his penis at the boy. It was as wrinkled and pouched as an elephant’s trunk, but thankfully not as long, or the piss would have reached Vik. The boy backed up; the man held out a placating hand and turned back to the trough to finish up. He was laughing, but without the cackling note this time. He was all avuncular chumminess, and when he fastened up and spoke again, his tone was as placid as the green of the tiles snaking from the entryway and through the lobby into this bathroom, where the supply had finally been depleted. About two feet, at the perimeter of the room, was done in ill-matched purple tiles of different dimensions, probably to the rage of the theatre owner, who would remember all those discarded, shattered tiles stuck into the sandals of a complaining woman.