Adam's Peak (36 page)

“No, no,” he said. “Nisal's a colleague. He just came by to see how I was doing.” He was about to add
He had to get back to his wife
, but he stopped himself.

“Very nice chap,” Ernie said, and Rudy nodded. “Yeah. He's a lovely guy.”

Uncle Ernie crossed one leg over the other and smiled tentatively. “Yes, well, your aunt is terrified you're on death's doorstep, you know. Said you tried to pretty matters up for her.”

Rudy shrugged. “I didn't want to worry her. She's had a lot to deal with.”

He wondered how much Ernie knew of the family's troubles, how much he cared, if at all. He should have been asking about Adam, it seemed. Adam, more than anyone, he should have cared about.

“Hmm. Not a bad idea,” Ernie said. He reached into his bulging shirt pocket and took out a pipe, a box of matches, and a small pouch of tobacco. “At any rate,” he added, “it doesn't seem you fared too badly.”

He added a pinch of tobacco to the bowl of his pipe, tamped it, and struck a match. Each time his lips parted around the stem, they made a faint “p” and wisps of smoke escaped from his mouth. Watching the familiar ritual, Rudy sank into the dry, heavy, old-man smell that used to hang in his grandfather's study. He glanced at the stack of books on his bedside table, among them his grandfather's diary, and recalled his plan to visit Uncle Ernie—the fleeting eagerness to know his lost relative. There were curiosities he'd been impatient to satisfy, gaps he'd wanted to fill, but now he could hardly think of one.

When the pipe was lit to his satisfaction, Uncle Ernie shook the match and tossed it through the open louvres of the bedroom window. Then he rested his right elbow in his left palm and pointed the pipe stem in Rudy's direction.

“So, you've come back. Is this permanent?”

Rudy shrugged again. “I think so. That's the plan anyway.” He anchored himself with his hands and raised his right buttock off the mattress to relieve the dull throb in his pelvis. Returning gingerly to his former position, he added, “I'll be moving from here, though. As soon as I'm mobile again, I'll start looking for my own place.”

Ernie nodded absently. “Ah, yes. Well, that makes sense.”

“Something closer to the city, I thought.”

Uncle Ernie didn't answer. He was again surveying the room.

Rudy fidgeted with his watch strap. “Are there any areas of Colombo you'd recommend?”

“Colombo? I hardly know the place.” Ernie's eyes were now on his painting. “Do you recognize that mountain, Rudyard?”

“Rudy. Everyone calls me Rudy.”

“Yes? Yes, I imagine Kipling has finally gone out of fashion. Good thing.”

“It's Adam's Peak. Sri Pada. You painted it in 1946.”

“That long ago?” Ernie rubbed his collarbone through the open neck of his shirt. “Probably the last time I climbed the thing as well. Have you been up?”

“No ... not yet.”

“Ah, well, you must do it. It's rather spectacular. If you begin the climb at midnight, you reach the top by sunrise.” Uncle Ernie closed
one eye and traced an ascent in the air with the stem of his pipe. “It's a magnificent view up there,” he said, stabbing his imaginary summit. “The season will be done soon for this year, but there's still time. You could—” He looked down at Rudy and lowered his hand. “Well, I gather climbing is out of the question for you just now, isn't it.”

Again Rudy eyed his grandfather's diary. He remembered Grandpa's words—
cavorting
,
giggling, prattling
—and tried to connect them to this newfound uncle. To mention the diary at all was a gamble, he suspected, but in the aftermath of his earlier fears he felt bold.

“I've read about one of your climbs, in Grandpa's diary,” he said. “Aunty Mary passed it on to me.”

Uncle Ernie sucked on his pipe and nodded calmly as he exhaled. “How interesting. I wonder which time that was.”

“My father wanted to go along, but Grandpa thought he was too young.”

“Hmm. Yes. I remember Alec threw a hell of a tantrum every year. It was terribly important to him to be included on that expedition. He wanted to do everything I did. Typical of the younger brother, really. I expect he could have managed the climb. He was an athletic chap.”

This description of his father as a tag-along little brother echoed uncomfortably in Rudy's head. For a moment he saw Adam, bawling over the remains of a stone sculpture in the backyard. He shifted his position.

“Can I make you a cup of tea, Uncle? I need to get up and move around a little.”

Uncle Ernie waved his free hand in front of his face. “No. I'm afraid I can't stomach the stuff. Very inconvenient when I was living in Britain, but there you are.”

Very inconvenient when you were living on a tea estate
, Rudy thought, but in response he only nodded.

“In any case,” Ernie said, “I should be on my way. I'll let Mary know you're perfectly fine.” He stood up slowly, hesitating midway. “You
are
fine, I take it? Managing all right?”

“Uh, yeah. Just fine.”

“Very good. I'll be off then.”

Uncle Ernie emptied his pipe out the window. Rudy shimmied to the edge of the bed, lowered his legs to the floor, and reached for his crutches. Launching himself up, he teetered between opposing urges—on the one hand, to hold the old man back as long as he could, and on the other, to get rid of him as soon as possible. The visit, as it was, seemed either incomplete or a waste of time.

He followed his uncle out of the bedroom. As they neared the front door, and the choice of either planning to see each other again or saying a final farewell became imminent, Rudy silently reproached his aunt for forcing the visit. If he'd had some warning, he could have prepared. For one thing, he wouldn't have seen Ernie alone; he would have arranged for Bernadette to be with him. She would have welcomed her mother's cousin with all the warmth she would accord any family member, and at the end of the visit, she would have seen Uncle Ernie off with strict orders to stay in touch and an invitation to an upcoming birthday party or Sunday lunch. But Rudy had nothing to offer.

At the door, Ernie extended his bony hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Rudy.”

“You too, Uncle.”

“Take care of that hip.”

“I will.”

Uncle Ernie opened the door and stepped outside, and suddenly the balance of Rudy's teetering was thrown off. He lacked Bernadette's resources, but for an instant he discovered her will.

“How long will you be in town?” he said.

Ernie looked toward the lane. “Not long. Another day or two.”

At the risk of sounding like a jilted lover, Rudy blurted his next question: “Will I see you again?”

“I'm afraid not this time,” Ernie said. Then he turned back. “It isn't absolutely necessary that Sri Pada be climbed during the season. When you're feeling up to it, why don't you and I make the journey?”

The tension that had seized Rudy's body earlier hadn't really gone away, but it eased off now. He sank his full weight onto the crutches and nodded.

“Sure. I'd like that.”

April 29, Wednesday
. Hi, Clare. So you
are
still on MHR. I'm not sure how to feel about that. There's something too real about it, I guess. Especially lately. I've been avoiding thinking about home. I got a call from Dad (the serious calls always come from him), and it seems Adam's had a setback. He developed a clot that went to his lungs and fucked up his breathing. I asked Dad if I should come home (knowing full well I'm in no condition to do so), and he said there'd be no point right now. Adam's stable, he said, but he isn't “him-self.” No kidding. Susie sent me an article she dug up on the stages of brain injury recovery (the “Rancho Los Amigos” scale—sounds like a fucking vacation resort), and she highlighted some of the stuff she's noticed in Adam: inattention, aggression, incoherence, irritability, self-centredness, vague recognition of people, etc. Jesus, that sounds like
me.
I think I prefer the Glasgow scale. I don't know, I just don't know. The doctors keep telling Dad and Aunty they have to wait, and that it may be a long time before they know the long-term effects. We (the family that is) are supposed to carry on with our lives as normally as possible, they say. It's a wonder Aunty hasn't hauled off and belted one of them yet. In a twisted sort of way, I'm glad that I can't carry on with my normal life yet. I can imagine I'm keeping up a vigil here in my bed, useless as it is. But when I can walk again, I'm going to go on a pilgrimage.

O
N THE STIFLING TRAIN RIDE
from the city, Clare read her tattered copy of
The Jungle Books
, hearing her father's voice, the way it sounded when he first read her the stories so long ago. Deep and authoritative. But when she reached the part where Mowgli appears, naked, at the wolves' cave, it was her mother she remembered, and the awkward bedtime conversation that had followed Alastair's reading of the strange passage. She'd been lying in the dark thinking about it, wanting to know where
she
came from, wondering if she herself, like Mowgli, had turned up out of nowhere (not naked, though). More importantly, she'd wanted confirmation that, despite what she'd witnessed across the street at the Vantwests' just a few days before, Emma's explanation of where babies came from was fantasy. “How did I come to you and Daddy?” she'd asked anxiously, but her mother's surprising uncertainty meant that she had to explain herself further. “Emma says she knows where I come from, but I don't believe her.” More uncertainty: “What did Emma say, pet?” Horrible awkwardness; sheet pulled up over her face. “She says I came from your stomach.” Then the astonishing reply, delivered quietly and gravely. “Aye, that's right. Well, near my stomach. A separate place, where babies grow.”

Fanning herself with the plastic folder containing her plane ticket, Clare wondered now what sort of awkwardness her mother must have endured that evening in the face of the unanswerable question.
How did I come to you and Daddy?
A few years later, Isobel had bought her a book that explained the biology in simple words and cartoon pictures, and Clare had assumed over the years that her mother was simply uptight, conventionally prim and Scottish. Part of her believed it still, in spite of everything.

Her stop was approaching. Clare put the ticket folder in her bag and knotted her hair in a sloppy bun. Through the window, trees and houses and lampposts whizzed past, then slowed, then finally fixed themselves into the pattern that once had accommodated her so readily. She stepped off the train and into the sun. The air hissed with the razor-like spray shooting from sprinklers across the station building's narrow strip of lawn. Shouldering her bag, Clare headed for the parking lot, which stretched away from the tracks and was lined with shady trees. The hissing persisted—cicadas, probably, but Clare attributed the noise to something else. Behind its quiet, patterned façade, her west-island suburb was hissing with secrets. Not the delightful secrets of classic novels, though—the kind which, the moment they're uncovered, serve to clear up confusion and restore the proper order of things. No—these secrets revealed instead that the lives behind the tidy lawns and façades were messy. Over the years, Clare had caught occasional glimpses of that messiness: the nervous breakdown that confined Denise Carroll to her house for months; Ken Boswell's retarded brother, said to be living in a special home in Verdun; Philip Skinner's bed-wetting problem, which prevented him from going to camp in grade seven. And now: Alastair and Isobel Fraser's marriage of convenience.

Isobel hadn't described it in those terms, of course. In her words, she'd been taken advantage of by her father's apprentice, and Alastair, whom she was fond of, came to her rescue. “Nowadays young women are smarter, not so easily taken in,” she'd said. “Not that he was a bad person—just a typical young man. And I was just very naive.” At that point she'd reached across the kitchen table and placed her hand over Clare's. “But I got a wonderful daughter from my foolishness, and a fine, caring husband. So the story has a happy ending.” And for
thirty-one years she'd kept that story to herself—for Alastair's sake at first, then out of habit, then, finally, from a fear that by revealing the truth, she'd be playing God.

In a patch of shade Clare shook out her hair and searched her bag for an elastic band. She hummed an improvised tune, a diversion from her compulsion to repeat to herself, yet again, that her father was not her father—an idea that left her with the dizzying sensation that she was without substance, in danger of vaporizing on the spot. She told herself it was exactly what she'd wanted—an excuse to jettison the influences of her past once and for all—but she'd envisioned a letting go much different from this. She'd imagined slipping unnoticed out of the pattern of her life and drifting fatefully toward her authentic self, that elusive thing she'd expected to locate in a Paris café or on a train between Barcelona and Madrid. She'd never meant to forfeit her place altogether. When she'd imagined bombs exploding on Morgan Hill Road, it was never her own home that vanished.