Beggar's Feast (7 page)

A year later, he slipped climbing the staircase to his new room. His feet had been made modern: they were bound and fine-looking and useless, shod in black leather shoes that were unyielding hard. James Astrobe, the man in the yellow hat, was ahead of him, smoking, his hands free. Sam tried to brace himself against the wall but his nervous hands slid and smeared and he slipped again, pitching forward. Immediately he crouched to make it seem like he was looking between the steps. Astrobe took no notice. Meanwhile, balling his toes in vain, Sam stared down at a world of dark hard wood and yellow lamplight, a world of long windows that rippled their streetscape pictures and rattled in the wind, of muffled voices waiting behind heavy-looking doors that Astrobe hadn't opened and showed him as they'd gone through the grand house of gleaming silver things—knobs and switches on walls, thin knives and little spoons and little mugs arranged on mirrored trays, bells, a clasped book cover, a heavy-looking brush: all of it looking as if washed in silver itself. His hands had touched nothing as he followed Astrobe, but the very idea of it had made them warm and wet like a clam cracked open by a gull and left on a shore rock. They were still damp when to stand up and keep climbing he pressed off the wall, which was itself firm and cold to touch, not home cold, not the earth-smelling soft dampness of the dung-walled house where once he'd been a boy, and not temple cold, not like the shaded stone floor of the audience hall where Sadhu liked to cool his parts, but a cold that was no respite from the world without: late June in Sydney, wintertime. It had already turned black night and hard air when it was time to shut the office for the day and, for the first time, walk home with Astrobe in winds spun up from the great curving bays that ringed the city.

The room at the top of the stairs was an octagon of shuddering windowpanes. It would be weeks before these became sleeping noises for him, by which point he wasn't sleeping anyway. This was to be his graduation from the pallet in Astrobe's Circular Quay office, where he'd been sleeping since that afternoon, a year before, when he'd broken with Mahinda and the others. He may or may not have seen them since: there were always so many brown boys hanging around the harbour, huddled, bruised, staring. Too timid to try anything else. Astrobe motioned for him to come nearer the glass and then he showed Sam the nighttime city. Below them stretching in every direction was a great electrified blackness. Following Astrobe's hand as it pointed past the fine houses of Potts Point, Sam saw broken successions of small blazing squares, where still some office men were working, and also bright clusters and isolated drops, the streetlamps and evening lamps that marked the walkways and warehouses and moored ships of Circular Quay. Sam tapped a finger against the glass. Astrobe tapped just above the faint smudge he'd made and Sam nodded. The office. The tour continued in a gesturing silence. Both of them generally preferred it that way. After a year of acting as James Astrobe's valet shadow and protector against others like himself, Sam had gained a rudimentary sort of English that was daily improving from his errand- and message-running through the city he now knew better than Colombo, but they rarely used English between them. They had been, from the start, so swift and natural with gesture they were loath to give it up, especially when the other way involved the indignities of learning to share a language: the slow long mouths, the patient restatements, the endless reductions from sentence to phrase, from the name for something to the separate sounds that made the name—an ugly primate mimicry.

Astrobe turned on a desk lamp and the starry city disappeared. He stood next to a portrait hanging behind his desk, his back flat against the wall. It was broadsheet-sized and set in a thick frame that was itself a carved busyness of laurel leaves and fruit-studded vines and each sharp corner a crowded garden of blooming flowers and all of it gilded. Looking at Sam with a smile, Astrobe made a face that monkeyed the stern one beside him. He could be this way when it was only the two of them in the office—brothers making faces under father's nose. Sam smiled. He had already decided he would not wonder why Astrobe wanted to be like this with him, this acting like twin mallis though age money and skin said otherwise. He would not wonder because this past year nothing, nothing of his old squirrel life, had happened to make him kick out and run. But he also decided that when he was the one with a young man smiling to serve at his side—and, after a year of watching James Astrobe run a shipping business out of Sydney harbour, Sam knew that somehow, somewhere, he would make this his work as well—he wouldn't ever be so free and friendly and monkeying, wouldn't ever let such a person as he was now feel the pride of place and secret power that he had come to have with Astrobe. Sam liked him, but it was in the way, in the village, you liked an older boy willing to race you along the banks of the paddy fields and at the same time knew to your bones that he was beneath you for doing it.

He stepped closer to study the portrait, his heavy shoes making a rackety footfall against the wooden floors. The face looked about the same age as Astrobe's and was, like his, white as coconut pulp. And the man was also wearing a yellow hat. The resemblance seemed to end there. The hair in the painting was lighter, a reddish orange like the colour of shaved cinnamon trees, regenerate lives. And everything in the face itself looked stouter, rounder, the eyes, nose, the full lips, which were pursed, as if their owner were trying not to laugh at something the painter just said.

“This,” Astrobe said, stepping forward, his hand reaching back in a gesture of a formal introduction, “is the late Martin Astrobe, my great-grandfather, as he was painted a hundred-odd years ago, by his wife, when he was a rising gentleman in Rose Hill. Looks like a proper Englishman, don't he?”

Sam said nothing. He stared at the round eyes staring back at his, daggers daring him to disagree.

“But can you guess his secret?” Astrobe asked.

“I cannot say,” said Sam, which he thought the greater justice.

“But do you want to know?” asked Astrobe.

“No.”

“Not even why the men in my family have always worn yellow hats?”

“No.”

“Well then, there's nothing left but for you to meet the rest of us,” said Astrobe, a little defeated.

They descended, this time Sam first, the windowpanes warbling behind them. He had wanted to say there was no need to meet anyone. He had already decided he would not stay here a second night, sleeping beneath that portrait's secret gaze, sleeping above what particular secrets of sadness and rage and wrongs were this family's. Which weren't his, weren't anything he wanted to be touched by. For more than symmetry's sake, Sam Kandy would take a man as he asked the world to take him.

He heard the piano before he entered. And when he went in, something tore open he did not know had been there, something that had been waiting all these years to be torn open. She was turned away from him, concentrating on the playing, as seemed everyone else in the room, which had windows taller than any man he'd ever known and drapes that looked finer than even the finest finery he had watched from Galle Face Parade on Sunday mornings, when it had been English wives walking into Christ Church, their laced throats arching in wonder at the long shadow of the new bell tower. He had to do something else with his eyes and so he inventoried the rest of the room. Heavy chairs, heavy lamps, a large patterned carpet, the cluster of flowers at its centre made yellow beneath a light that looked like a giant drop of perfect water. There was a big black dog sleeping in a corner, on its own carpet, a carpet that was thicker than his father's sleeping mat. A fire was burning at the back of a deep stone square, above it a mantel made of the same grey stone, another promenade for their shiny silver things.

“Everyone, please,” said Astrobe. He had talked over her playing! Sam wanted to hate him for it, wanted nothing from the world but to remain in the moment that had just passed, to wither away witnessing the sound and shape of her and her music. But she stopped playing and everyone turned at Astrobe's words—an older woman, a very old woman, a round man about his age, and she did too. She did too.

“Everyone, this is Sam, who's been working for me at the harbour this past year. I may have mentioned him previously. I've decided to let him sleep in the observatory.”

“And why?” one of the women asked.

“Because that's what I've decided.”

“Yes, I see,” she said. Mrs. Astrobe.

“And where is— Sam, is it? Where is Sam from?” asked Astrobe's daughter. Her voice like honey and music.

“Ceylon,” answered Astrobe. “And he understands much of what we're saying.”

“Oh really, Ceylon?” said Mrs. Astrobe and looked at him, smiled, then turned back to the piano, turning the very old woman at the same time. She never so much as breathed his way again. The very old woman, Astrobe's mother-in-law, spoke to Sam once, a few weeks later, after stopping him in a hallway. “They dance with kangaroos in the bush. And when I was a girl, I watched them shave a bear.” And then she walked on.

“Those aren't— Are those Jim's?” asked the round young man, pointing at Sam's shoes but looking at her.

She slammed down on the piano and rushed from the room and the young man followed like some heavy pet, a sloth bear, and also the two women left, and finally Astrobe took a step toward their exit, stopped, then walked away, through yet another doorway, without saying anything to him either. And so Sam was left by himself, the crashing bowel sounds of the piano ringing in his ears, which were burning, wanting more. Everything was. All of it.

“Ha! You thought I meant you, yes? That I'm going to box you up and send you home?” Astrobe laughed until it sounded like he was coughing up metal. He dabbed his monogrammed hanky to his eyes. How vengeful was a man's memory, how conspiring his tongue! He hadn't thought of his Jim in days. They were in his harbour office. It was almost time to walk home. He'd only told Sam that he knew of a freighter going to Ceylon with free space in the hold. That something small could be sent along. Not someone.

“What I am proposing,” he continued, his voice now milder, chastened, “is that you might want to put together some effects to send to your family back home. Am I presuming too much? Just it's that I thought, and I know it's not for you, and it's months off from December, but people are already getting their parcels ready to send to London for Happy Christmas. There's not much left for ourselves in England, thanks to old Martin Astrobe, but I thought it was something you might want to do. Send something home. We could be of assistance.”

Turning over the sudden idea, a year after he'd come to live in Astrobe's house, Sam felt like he'd been walking through a forest watching for songbirds and fallen in a gem pit. “There is family in Ceylon,” he began carefully, oh vengeful memory, oh conspiring tongue, “but they do not live near Colombo harbour, in fact they live far from there and I am not sure how something from here would reach them. But I am grateful, yes.” Each word was a testing step. There could be a hole within the hole.

“Have you a name for where they do live?”

“Yes. Yes, there is a village name, yes.”

“That, and your father's good name, should be enough.”

“Yes, I see.” He would not tell Astrobe what he had told B. in the greedy gloom of his Pettah stall: that his father wasn't a good enough man for a good name. The week before, one noontime at the office, Astrobe had received a visitor—the bookkeeper from a rival shipping agent, who said he wanted to work for Astrobe because his boss was no good and he knew the company was about to fold. Astrobe had Sam show him to the door and then told Sam to avoid boomerang dealers like that. “You don't tell a man you've burned down the house you lived in and then ask if you can come live in his.”

And so Sam wouldn't say a word against his father to Mary's. But he was also, in fact, tempted by the justice and glory of Astrobe's suggestion that he send something to his family, to the village. By the vision of his father opening a crate full of things from a son and a world so far beyond him; things not even the grand walauwa people themselves could have even in the best of paddy and pepper years; things that in an overgrown green emptiness like Sudugama would be worthy of veneration, of shrines, of caparisoned elephants in drummed procession and named first-born sons and declarations of war between houses. Things that, Sam now knew, were to be understood as but trinkets in the great world itself. But as much as Sam wanted this victory, he did not want its cost. Contact. Taint. But he wanted his father, his family, all of Sudugama to know where and what he was now, and he did not. He did not!