Running in the Family (24 page)

He drove along Galle Face Green where the Japanese had eventually attacked, by plane, and disappeared into the Fort whose streets were dark and quiet and empty. He loved the Fort at this hour, these Colombo nights, the windows of his car open and the breeze for the first time almost cool, no longer tepid, hitting his face with all the night smells, the perfume of closed boutiques.
An animal crossed the road and he braked to a halt and watched it, strolling at its own speed for it was midnight and if a car would actually stop it could be trusted. This animal paused when it reached the pavement and looked back at the man in the white car—who still had not moved on. They gazed at each other and then the creature ran up the steps of the white building and into the post office which stayed open all night.

He thought, I could sleep here too. I could leave the car in the centre of Queen’s Road and go in. Other cars would weave around the Ford. It would disturb no one for four or five hours. Nothing would change. He lifted his foot off the clutch, pressed the accelerator and moved on through the Fort towards Mutwal, passed the church of his ancestors—all priests and doctors and translators—which looked down on him through a row of plantain trees, looked down onto the ships in the harbour docked like enormous sinking jewels. He drove out of Colombo.

An hour later he could have stopped at the Ambepussa resthouse but continued on, the day’s alcohol still in him though he had already stopped twice on the side of the road, urinated into darkness and mysterious foliage. Halted briefly at Warakapola where the dark villages held the future and gave a Tamil a lift, the man striking up a conversation about stars, and he, proud of that mutual ancestry, discussing Orion with him. The man was a cinnamon peeler and the smell filled the car, he did not want to stop, wanted to take him all the way past the spice gardens to Kegalle rather than letting him out a mile up the road. He drove on, the cinnamon blown out already by new smells from the night, drove dangerously, he couldn’t quite remember if he was driving dangerously or not, just aware of the night breezes, the fall-out from spice gardens he skirted as if driving past vast kitchens. One of the lamps of his car was dead so he knew he was
approaching stray walkers disguised as a motorcycle. He weaved up the Nelundeniya U-turns, then into the town of Kegalle. Over the bridge into Rock Hill.

For about ten minutes he sat in front of the house now fully aware that the car was empty but for his body, this corpse. Leaving the car door open like a white broken wing on the lawn, he moved towards the porch, a case of liquor under his arm.
Moonless
. The absence of even an edge of the moon. Into the bedroom, the bottle top already unscrewed. Tooby, Tooby, you should see your school friend now. The bottle top in my mouth as I sit on the bed like a lost ship on a white sea. And they sat years ago on deck-chairs, young, going to England. In the absurd English clothes they surprised each other with. And then during the heart of the marriage sailed to Australia serene over the dark mountains in the sea, the bed of the ocean like a dragon’s back, ridges and troughs and the darkest eye of the Diamantina crater. This too was part of the universe, a feature of the earth. Kissed in the botanical gardens of Perth, took the Overland train east across the country just so they could say they had seen the Pacific. His Colombo suit fell off him now to the floor, onto its own pool of white and he got into bed. Thinking. What was he thinking about? More and more he watched himself do nothing, with nothing. At moments like this.

He saw himself with the bottle. Where was his book. He had lost it. What was the book. It was not Shakespeare, not those plays of love he wept over too easily. With dark blue bindings. You creaked them open and stepped into a roomful of sorrow. A midsummer dream. All of them had moved at times with an ass’s head, Titania Dorothy Hilden Lysander de Saram, a mongrel collection part Sinhalese part Dutch part Tamil part ass moving slowly in the forests with foolish and serious obsessions. No, he looked
around the bare room, don’t talk to me about Shakespeare, about “green hats.”

The bottle was half empty beside him. He arose and lit the kerosene lamp. He wanted to look at his face, though the mirror was stained as if brown water and rust hung captive in the glass. He stepped towards the bathroom, the yellow pendulum of lamp beside his knees. With each swing he witnessed the state of the room and corridor. A glimpse of cobwebs quickly aging, undusted glass. No sweeper for weeks. And nature advanced. Tea bush became jungle, branches put their arms into the windows. If you stood still you were invaded. Wealth that was static quickly rotted. The paper money in your pocket, wet from your own sweat, gathered mould.

In the bathroom ants had attacked the novel thrown on the floor by the commode. A whole battalion was carrying one page away from its source, carrying the intimate print as if rolling a tablet away from him. He knelt down on the red tile, slowly, not wishing to disturb their work. It was page
189
. He had not got that far in the book yet but he surrendered it to them. He sat down forgetting the mirror he had been moving towards. Scared of the company of the mirror. He sat down with his back against the wall and waited. The white rectangle moved with the busy arduous ants. Duty, he thought. But that was just a fragment gazed at by the bottom of his eye. He drank. There. He saw the midnight rat.

A school exercise book. I write this at the desk of calamander looking out of the windows into dry black night. “Thanikama.” “Aloneness.” Birdless. The sound of an animal passing through the garden. Midnight and noon and dawn and dusk are the hours of danger, susceptibility to the “grahayas”—planetary spirits of malignant character. Avoid eating certain foods in lonely places, the devils will smell you out. Carry some metal. An iron heart. Do not step on bone or hair or human ash.

Sweat down my back. The fan pauses then begins again. At midnight this hand is the only thing moving. As discreetly and carefully as whatever animals in the garden fold brown leaves into their mouths, visit the drain for water, or scale the broken glass that crowns the walls. Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing.

The garden a few feet away is suddenly under the fist of a downpour. Within half a second an easy dry night is filled with the noise of rain on tin, cement and earth—waking others slowly in the house. But I actually saw it, looking out into the blackness, saw the white downpour (reflected off the room’s light) falling like an object past the window. And now the dust that has been there for months is bounced off the earth and pours, the smell of it, into the room. I get up, walk to the night, and breathe it in—the dust, the tactile smell of wetness, oxygen now being pounded into the ground so it is difficult to breathe.

Jennifer:
The poultry farm was very big then. He had thousands of chickens. He had dual-purpose breeds—those that laid eggs but could also be eaten. The Light Sussex, the Rhode Island Reds, the Plymouth Rocks. And he was also the Visiting Agent for the region, inspecting estates and writing up reports on how they were run … I think he was one of the first Ceylonese to become a V.A. But the chickens took up most of his time. I designed a poster for the poultry farm and he got them printed up grandly. And we would dream up these advertisements together for the newspapers. Many were not allowed by the
Daily News
such as “Rock Hill Farms Will Teach your Grandmother to Suck Eggs!” He kept us all busy. I did the correspondence and Susan collected the eggs. It would have been easy to be cut off at Kegalle but he built a world for us there—all those books and radio programmes. We would listen
to “20 Questions”—my god we heard that every week and he loved it and I hated it.

During the day he would invent jobs for which he would pay us. Now and then he would announce “Beetle Week.” We had to catch black coconut beetles, which he then fed to his fowls. Ten cents for the large ones, five cents for the small ones, and we would spend hours sorting them out and deciding if they were large or small. The whole day would be organized like this, with these games. For instance,
cats
. He loved most animals but was aloof from cats. However they always followed him. So if he went into town we would take bets on how many cats would come up to him. And although he disliked them I think he was quite proud of this trait in himself. Cats would cross the street if they saw him coming. When we got into the car he would have to get in first and we would then have to start throwing them out, have to stop them crawling back under his seat.