Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (13 page)

About half an hour later, he opened his eyes and again looked directly at me, urgently, and then he spoke what would be his last words. I saw in his eyes the panic, and heard it, too, in his voice, when he said, “Zain, Zain.” I stroked and patted his hand. I think he relaxed. It soon became clear that he would not awaken again. Rosita and Lancelot were asked to wait outside the room by the nurses, who were now present all the time. I was allowed to stay at Sydney’s side. I found myself whispering, shamelessly pleading like a
desperate child or a forsaken lover, “Please don’t go just yet, Sid. Sydney, hang on just a little longer, please.”

I brought my lips to his ears and brushed them against his skin as they formed the words, without sound: Sid, I want to say it plainly: Not a day has passed when I didn’t think of you as one of my two mothers. My love for you has never faded.

But I betrayed myself in that moment. For even as I felt an unfathomable love for Sydney, I felt the hurt rise again, that old hurt of having figured so little in the stories he had recently told me, and the new hurt of there being no chance of that changing now.

At the official pronouncement of Sydney’s death, I cursed the wall of irreversible time and my own stunning ineffectualness. I was left with his body in his room—I don’t know for how long—and I indulged myself in all the feelings for which India, my other mother, would have had little patience. I went to the window and pressed my aching forehead against the glass. While the driver of a car in the parking lot below tried and tried again to reverse out of the space in which he was caught, I thought about how this was India’s loss too. And then I had an out-of-place and out-of-time realization, entirely irrelevant. Yet tears fell down my face because of it, and I went and stood at the foot of the bed in which Sydney lay. I wrapped my hand around Sydney’s blanket-covered foot and watched him from there,
doused in regret that he, that she, would never see my mother’s family’s house in Marrakesh. In that moment, it seemed that this irrelevant loss was the most important and regrettable thing.

In a flash I recalled being on our rooftop terrace in Marrakesh. It was just after sunset. On one side of the city the sky was a dark, luminous blue, and on the other it was the colour and sheen of a golden hued pearl. The call to prayer had ended a quarter of an hour ago, but hung in the air still. I leaned on the surrounding wall and watched the cobbled street below. Having cleared during the call, it was coming alive again with men and women and children. I recalled, too, the sense I used to have when I was up there of India’s presence on the far side of the terrace that wrapped around the courtyard below. I would stand where she couldn’t see me, look out and wish that Sid was there with us. I used to think that Sid would understand the people down on the street, that she might even be able to speak with them in their language, that she would have made friends with them.

All of this came in a moment, and along with the regret that Sydney had never seen that house in Marrakesh I felt, inexplicably, a strong remorse, as if this were my fault. And yet, neither India nor I had been to Morocco, to that house, in more than three decades. I hardly ever think of that house anymore, and when I do, I imagine it taken over by the caretaker’s family or occupied by squatters. It was that absurd anachronistic regret which brought home the fact that Sid and Sydney were gone for good.

In my pants pocket was Sydney’s
bayrah
. A nurse had taken it off his wrist on his arrival and handed it to me. Now I squeezed the circle of heavy gold with all my strength. We had intuited, Rosita, Lancelot and I, that this would come to pass, but I saw that, even so, death is untimely, and in the very moment one is inevitably unprepared.

It wasn’t the diabetes or his weakened heart that had killed him, the doctor told me. It wasn’t the years of injecting his body with low levels of testosterone. It was simply the pneumonia which had gone undetected for too long.
Who
had not detected it, I asked, my voice low in volume, but raised in pitch by at least a fifth, betraying my astonishment and disbelief. I broke the silence that followed by saying, “I thought you said that Sydney was strong, I thought you said that he was stubborn.” The doctor said nothing. I persisted. “Is this just the kind of thing you always say?”

“It happens,” the young doctor with the heavy-rimmed glasses explained wearily and turned away. No one was to blame.

One could walk a straight line from the house to the spot by the retaining wall where I used to park Sydney in his wheelchair. How awkward this past tense, and how strange that one so quickly takes it on. But I meandered, delaying my arrival. Once there, I circled it. From our spot—did I imagine this?—came a hint of the cedar and lavender hair oil Sydney used to use. He and I used to spend countless hours sitting there. In the early hours of morning we would watch the pale yolk of sun breach the faint east-coast horizon and the ensuing spectacle of rapidly unfurling sky over the breadth of the island. Sydney used to point in the direction of the southwestern end and the names of villages down that way would dance like mercury on his tongue:
Los Gallos
,
Icacos
,
Bonasse
,
Fullarton
. If he was on the patio and I in my room, and some drama of sky and sea were unfolding, he would call for me to come and watch with him. In the evenings, if it was particularly clear, we would face the other
side of the island and wait to see the sun, like a maraschino cherry, plunge behind and silhouette the Peninsula de Paria that defines the neighbouring Venezuelan coastline. And it was here, the ever-changing spectacle of land, sea and sky as backdrop, where Sydney used to painstakingly relate his stories to me.

Today, there was no such spectacle. Rosita brought me a cup of coffee and then presented a large brown envelope. My name,
Jonathan Lewis-Adey
, was scrawled across it. Sydney had months before entrusted Rosita with the task of locating the envelope, if and when this particular moment should come to pass, from a drawer in the desk in his room and delivering it into my hands. The envelope was a repository for two others, one of which, a fat one, was addressed again to me. Inside, among other documents, was a letter.
My dearest Jonathan
, it began.

My heart beat faster. I expected this greeting would be followed by an acknowledgement of the original relationship between us, or of the newer one that had begun when I first started visiting Sydney here in Trinidad nine years ago. But the words were simple and straightforward and, save for the superlative in the greeting and the line immediately following—
I am sure that, of all people, I can count on you in particular to look after my business
—the letter was without sentiment.

Sydney wasted no time addressing the details of his “business.” I was to first inform Gita, his sister, of his passing. There were phone numbers for her and for her husband, and for Pundit Brahmanandam Rao, who would officiate at
the funeral. Pundit Rao, the letter said, would instruct me in organizing the ceremony’s details. Sydney had already made his arrangements with a funeral home, whose director would procure the death certificate and the other necessary legal papers. His funeral had been paid for—there was a receipt (attached to another enclosed set of papers) dated six months earlier—but its details were to be worked out by the pundit and me. I had only to stick to the budget, Sydney advised in the letter, not because there was no more money than he had paid, but because further expense was unnecessary. Then came the names of the pallbearers. I was not, I noticed, to be one of them. There were numbers beside their names. They had not been asked yet, naturally. That would be one of my forthcoming duties. Sydney had even gone so far as to draft the copy for his obituary that was to be printed in the newspaper.

I had only to fill in the relevant dates and time. I was instructed to open the other attached papers and did so. Among them was a handwritten will, witnessed by Kareen Akal Sharma, a name that meant nothing to me, notarized and dated only a few months previously. I scanned it quickly. It was a simple will, with several mentions of my name, and as far as my limited experience with such matters allowed me to discern, it appeared that I was to take the larger share of his estate, which included, besides the house and financial investments, a number of notebooks in which, he wrote, he had jotted down bits and pieces about his life and which I had full permission to read and to use in whatever way I saw fit. Gita’s son, Devin, along with Rosita, Lancelot and Sankar, Kareen Akal Sharma and the Priority Fund at the T and T Baphomet Private Health Clinic were left smaller sums of money.

It is a strange honour to be the beneficiary of anything, particularly at the expense of the life of a person you love. I swung between feeling considered, remembered and, dare I say, loved and overcome by shame. This was, I suppose, the price one paid to be the inheritor of another’s life. There was a key to a safety deposit box in that envelope too. The smaller second envelope, which I did not open, was addressed to a Mrs. Ula Morgan, under whose name was the full address of a bank in Diego Martin. Sydney’s letter dictated that I was to present myself, with appropriate identification, to Mrs. Morgan at the bank. She was expecting me.

I paused to wonder when this package that included
Sydney’s will and his letters had been prepared, and for how long Mrs. Ula Morgan had been expecting me. Although I had fulfilled Sydney’s expectation that I would come when called, I felt an unnecessary terror that this had happened only by chance, for had it not been for Lancelot’s manner on the telephone, had it not been for my correct reading of his unconscious formality, I might just as easily have second-guessed him and waited a little longer before incurring the trouble and expense of a short-notice flight.

Although I had been directed by Sydney to immediately call and inform his sister, it was my mother, India, I called first. I was surprised by her attentiveness. She asked for details about the three days in the hospital and the upcoming funeral. When I told her that responsibilities for the arrangements were falling on me, I recognized her pensiveness and worry in the silence that followed. She asked if I needed her. I was moved, even as a small recalcitrant part of me felt that she might have assumed rather than asked. So I said that while I was able to handle the situation on my own, perhaps she might want to come to the funeral for Sydney’s sake. There was a pause. Then she replied that he would not have expected it, and besides, Graham—her common-law husband of some twenty-odd years—had not been well lately and she would not feel comfortable leaving him. We exchanged a few polite words before saying goodbye. Some minutes after the call ended, I felt a twinge of regret that I had neglected to ask what was ailing Graham, but I consoled myself that had it been serious she would have told me.

I dreaded the telephone call to Gita. Sydney had lamented that he and Gita were in touch with each other only because he took it upon himself to make short monthly telephone calls. I had a brief reprieve when my call was received by Gita’s housekeeper, who revealed that the family was in England to take care of arrangements for their son Devin’s first year in university. The housekeeper promised to waste no time in contacting them to tell them of Mr. Sydney’s passing.

Some hours later, Gita telephoned. As I fumbled in my explanation of who I was, she interrupted: “Yes, yes. I know who you are. You were a child when you came with your mother to Trinidad.” She made no further attempt at familiarity. She said flatly but politely that as unfortunate as it was, there was no point to her or Jaan returning for the funeral, as they would have to make the trip back to England again immediately. They had not finished all they were doing for Devin there. The phone call ended abruptly, unsatisfactorily.

I was in such a state that the smallest thing could have caused me to brood, and this was not a small thing. But I had to bear up and carry on. Responsibilities, ones that my life until then had not prepared me to handle, loomed. I had never before attended a funeral, yet I was suddenly responsible for organizing one. The pundit Sydney had retained assured me on the telephone that he would meet with me the next day and guide me every step of the way, and that it would all be quite simple. All six pallbearers responded to Sydney’s request as if it were an invitation of
the highest honour. I consoled myself that perhaps I had not been afforded the same honour because I needed to take charge of the general arrangements, and perhaps that was an honour in itself.

Dinner that evening was a strange affair. The table was not set and the food was not placed on it in serving dishes as usual. Instead, the dishes remained on a counter in the kitchen, covered from flies with a tea towel. Rosita handed me my plate and a knife and fork, and I helped myself. I sat at the table, but not in the seat that had come to be mine. And I positioned that chair off to the side, so that I did not face the empty table. I poked at the food on my plate and had a mouthful. Then I poured myself a Scotch and coconut water and went outside to the wall at the edge of the garden. Night had fallen fast. It was already close to twelve hours since Sydney had died. With each passing minute the gulf between then—the time, that is, when I had been with Sydney—and now—the time when I would forever be without Sydney—widened. The pang I felt was partly familiar and partly not. That is, I knew well the time when Sydney was like a beacon to which I always travelled. But this particular present was foreign to me, and I didn’t know how, exactly, to exist in it. I sipped my drink and said aloud, “This is where I bring Sydney. We sit together here in the evenings and chat.” And then I tried out the new present: “This is where I used to bring Sydney. We used to sit out here and chat.” I said, in the familiar way, “Sydney loves to look at the lights below.” Then I said, and listened carefully to the new, cold sound of
it: “Sydney used to come out here with me. We used to sit out here. Sydney so very much liked the lights ahead.”