The Journey Prize Stories 25 (19 page)

“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 shaken 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.

“Bizou taught us all that trick. Not really a trick, but show me a man who doesn’t back away from someone whipping himself around like that, and I’ll show you a man who
you
should be running away from.” Vik didn’t answer, but he also didn’t leave.

“Bizou, that’s what we call your dad at the card game. No one calls him that at home?” The heavy man walked to the sink and turned the tap on, letting it run without wetting his hands. He wiped them on his pants after he turned the stream
of water off. “I thought maybe your mother might still call him Bizou, no?”

“No. She doesn’t call him anything but ‘your father’ when I’m around.”

The furred man laughed at this. A rounded tuft of hair protruded from his collar and encircled his neck, like the ruff worn by one of the old British courtiers that Vik had seen in schoolbooks. This ruff was coarse and black.

“Your dad’s game is still on. You want to go inside and grab my boy, we can all go and pick up Bizou? Maybe he’ll want to take you for the late showing, you can watch the rest of the movie without worrying about Devi popping around.”

“I don’t know your boy,” Vik said.

The man eased Vik to the side and went into the lobby, where he just as casually displaced the lean, reeking usher and made his way toward the first-class seats. Vik watched him walk into the altered darkness,
¹¹
heard him bark a name: Renga. The boy was propelled outward on a wave of disgusted jeers at this latest disturbance. Renga looked in distaste at his father, and then in horror at Vik.
¹²

“Take us home,” Renga’s father said. “I want to sleep. And your little friend here is running away from my old girlfriend, so let’s get him to Daddy.”

The trio walked out of the Rex, into the splashed field of illumination produced by the marquee, which outdid the shine of the pale butcher’s moon. Renga’s father, who had seemed sturdy inside, went legless in the ocean-heavy air, and the boys had to carry him. For the first of many times to come, Vik extracted himself from present discomfort by presenting reality to himself as cinema, watching himself from a gracefully positioned, neutral camera. He saw Renga and himself as the opposite ends of an uneven, three-headed entity that veered across the dirt street in a waltzing rhythm of balance and momentum,
juddering over a curb, slipping over patches of tile, arriving at the driver’s door of a delivery lorry where it continued to twitch and fumble, a crippled spider in the shadows, delineated as the forms of two boys supporting a semi-conscious drunk when a passing car bounced light toward them.

“This your dad’s?” Vik asked, referring to the vehicle. He decided to be all business, to speak in the clipped, efficient language of a heist man from one of the too-few gangster films that the Royal had shown, in order to compress the awkward minutes that awaited Renga and him.

“It’s your dad’s,” Renga said. Giving a signal and a shrug, he allowed his own father to slide to the dirt in a kneeling position. Renga grabbed at the outside of the man’s pockets until he found the hot metal clump that he was looking for. He keyed open the back door and Vik helped him pour the man onto the narrow back bench, which was covered in cabbage leaves that clung to the torn leather like much-needed patches. Renga’s father grunted when an exposed spring pulled at his shirt and scratched the fat projecting out from his waist. The heat of the man’s body and its liquor-perfumed slickness was familiar to Vik, who often rolled his father onto his side at Devi’s behest.

Renga got into the driver’s seat of what Vik had finally recognized as one of the three vehicles in his father’s small fleet. Most of the vehicles in Mauritius were just like this one, smoke-belching conveyances that carried vegetables and meat to hotels and Chinese grocery stores. His father’s were the only ones with green steering wheels. Vik had painted all three wheels himself one afternoon. When the bucket of paint that his father had found in the back shed had run out, so had his father’s interest in having a uniquely done-up fleet. The
anonymous bucket had been filled with an impressively low-grade variety of house paint, which stuck to skin better than it stuck to whatever surface it was applied to. Renga gripped the wheel beneath this crumbling, unfinished decoration.

“You can drive?” Vik asked.

“Sure, I drive. Maybe you should just go home now? I don’t think my dad really wants you to come over, you know, he just talks like that when he’s drunk. Gets hospitable.” Renga laboured over this last word, and Vik suddenly realized from the effort the boy was making that he was speaking in English. They had both been speaking in English, from the moment that Vik delivered his tough-guy question about the lorry’s ownership. It was a way of excluding the drunken father from their discussion, a decision that became conscious when Renga stuttered over “hospitable.” Renga brushed hair off his forehead, and flecks of dry paint clung to the strands.

“Siva’s in there. Take my ticket stub, join up with him.”

“Sitting next to him without having to talk sounds good, but your dad is right about my mom. She’s real angry, waiting for me at home. Maybe if I come with my father, she’ll worry about him instead, let me off.”

Renga reflected. The scenario was beginning to align itself with Vik’s brisk gangster tone; they were scheming. A small boy ran past the driver’s side door and kicked the front tire, laughing and distracting Renga. Renga leaned out of the window and spat hard, far, and clean, an expectoration that Siva would have applauded. The wad landed on the back of the child’s neck. The kid paused and then shuddered forward, bucking the slick saliva off his neck before starting to cry, running into one of the nearby houses. Renga and Vik laughed, and the
timing was too perfect for Renga to do anything but turn the key in the ignition and set off, more unsteadily than either boy would have liked, toward his home.

Renga was tall for his age, and Vik noted that most of that extra length was in the legs that worked the creaking, resistant pedals of the lorry, and in the fingers that urged obedience from the gearshift. The roads approaching Renga’s home were more hole than surface, and it seemed miraculous that the man in the back was able to sleep through the jouncing. He wasn’t properly on the backseat anymore, but lodged between the bench and the backs of the front seats. A cabbage leaf covered the top half of his face: a poorly conceived villain’s mask. Craning his head around the back of his seat to look at the paralytic drunk, Vik wanted to pull the leaf off, but was afraid that a slight, sensuous touch might wake him, even though all the violent juddering of the vehicle hadn’t.

“Didn’t know your dad worked for mine,” Vik said.

“Doesn’t,” Renga said, with more insistence than necessary. “They play cards together after market. Sometimes in the office behind your dad’s stall, sometimes at my house if it goes late. They taught me to drive so I can go pick up whiskey, cigarettes. That’s why my dad had the lorry.”

“But he was at the movies.”

“Sometimes he forgets where he’s going when he’s drunk,” Renga said, braking to let a pack of dogs cross. The headlights picked out the snarl of the head dog, yellow teeth in a dark face, pink sores blossoming in its fur. The pack loped into one of the patches of jungle that the city had so far forgotten to eat.

“He forgets he went for cigarettes, goes to the movies instead?” Vik laughed.

“Yeah,” said Renga. “That’s why they send me. I don’t get distracted by a bright sign. I get the cigarettes and I bring them back, and your dad gives me some of his fucking money.” Vik twitched at hearing Siva’s word in Renga’s mouth.

“That’s good. Extra money, always good.”

“Yeah.” Renga pushed his hair back again, this time striking it off his forehead with impact, leaving more flakes of alien dandruff in the strands. Without slowing down, he stopped the lorry all at once, hard enough to unwedge his father in the back and roll him back onto the bench proper.

Renga left friend and father behind, walking through a courtyard that was between the parked vehicle and a small home that he soon entered. Before long, Vik saw him come out, signaling his friend to come in.

There were no outdoor lights of any sort, this far from the centre of the city. Electricity in homes, yes, but bulbs were extinguished early in the evening or jealously curtained off, to avoid sharing illumination with the rest of the neighbourhood. Thinking of the pack of dogs, Vik scanned the street before opening the passenger door and running toward Renga.

“Slow down, idiot,” Renga said, conducting him through the courtyard and into a tiny front room, which seemed to be both a kitchen and a general living area. It was clean, but intensely crowded. Renga paused in front of a cheap piano of the upright variety, similar to the ones Vik had seen in Westerns. He pointed to a man sleeping beneath the abandoned card table, next to the stove. Vik’s father.

“The other player went out the back. Getting a cab to come back here for you two. Let’s haul him out front,” said Renga. The boys leaned Vik’s unconscious father against one of the
gate pillars at the front of the house. In the lorry, Renga’s father briefly surfaced from sleep and gave the waiting boys a curious look, looking entirely sober for a moment, before passing out again. Soon, the loud rock-on-steel scraping of an approaching car brought Renga and Vik the welcome news that their night together was almost over. It seemed the best time to venture a last question, Vik thought, as he wouldn’t risk getting too thorough an answer, or one that was so well thought out that it was false.

“Your dad called my mother his old girlfriend. You know why?”

“He was drunk.”

“I know, yeah, drunk. But why did he say that?”

Renga saw the cab’s lights cresting the incline that their own lorry had struggled over minutes before. In his relief, he released the brief truth.

“She was his old girlfriend. She used to do what I did, get cigarettes and whiskey for all of them at the card game, back before either of us was born. Your dad met her here.”

The boys again shared the dead weight of an unconscious man as they shovelled Vik’s father into the back of the elaborately dented cab. The driver seemed the type to have hand tattoos. Vik checked for them when he got into the front seat for the ride back, but there were none. Vik gave Cinema Rex as the destination address, reaching into the backseat toward his father, removing the wallet from the inside breast pocket. The driver noted the thick wedge of paper in the leather and started to drive.