The Night Ferry (2 page)

He touches his nose nervously, nods and touches his nose again.

“Do you run every day?” he asks suddenly.

“I try to.”

“How far?”

“Four miles.”

It’s an American accent. He doesn’t know what else to say.

“I have to keep going. I don’t want to cool down.”

“Okay. Sure. Have a nice day.” It doesn’t sound so trite coming from an American.

On my third circuit of the park the bench is empty. I look for him along the street but there are no silhouettes. Normal service has been resumed.

Farther along the street, just visible on the corner, a van is parked at the curb. As I draw nearer, I notice a white plastic tent over missing paving stones. A metal cage is propped open around the hole. They’ve started work early.

I do this sort of thing—take note of people and vehicles. I look for things that are out of the ordinary; people in the wrong place, or the wrong clothes; cars parked il egal y; the same face in different locations. I can’t change what I am.

Unlacing my trainers, I pul a key from beneath the insole and unlock my front door. My neighbor, Mr. Mordecai, waves from his window. I once asked him his first name and he said it should be Yo’ man.

“Why’s that?”

“Because that’s what my boys cal me: ‘Yo man, can I have some money?’ ‘Yo man, can I borrow the car?’”

His laugh sounded like nuts fal ing on a roof.

In the kitchen I pour myself a large glass of water and drink it greedily. Then I stretch my quads, balancing one leg on the back of a chair.

The mouse living under my fridge chooses that moment to appear. It is a very ambivalent mouse, scarcely bothering to lift its head to acknowledge me. And it doesn’t seem to mind that my youngest brother, Hari, keeps setting mousetraps. Perhaps it knows that I disarm them, taking off the cheese when Hari isn’t around.

The mouse final y looks up at me, as though about to complain about the lack of crumbs. Then it sniffs the air and scampers away.

Hari appears in the doorway, bare-chested and barefooted. Opening the fridge, he takes out a carton of orange juice and unscrews the plastic lid. He looks at me, considers his options, and gets a glass from the cupboard. Sometimes I think he is prettier than I am. He has longer lashes and thicker hair.

“Are you going to the reunion tonight?” I ask.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t tel me
you’re
going! You said you wouldn’t be caught dead.”

“I changed my mind.”

There is a voice from upstairs. “Hey, have you seen my knickers?”

Hari looks at me sheepishly.

“I know I had a pair. They’re not on the floor.”

Hari whispers, “I thought you’d gone out.”

“I went for a run. Who is she?”

“An old friend.”

“So you must know her name.”

“Cheryl.”

“Cheryl Taylor!” (She’s a bottle blonde who works behind the bar at the White Horse). “She’s older than I am.”

“No, she’s not.”

“What on earth do you see in her?”

“What difference does that make?”

“I’m interested.”

“Wel , she has assets.”

“Assets?”

“The best.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

“What about Phoebe Griggs?”

“Too smal .”

“Emma Shipley?”

“Saggy.”

“Mine?”

“Very funny.”

Cheryl is coming down the stairs. I can hear her rummaging in the sitting room. “Found them,” she shouts.

She arrives in the kitchen stil adjusting the elastic beneath her skirt.

“Oh, hel o,” she squeaks.

“Cheryl, this is my sister, Alisha.”

“Nice to see you again,” she says, not meaning it.

The silence seems to stretch out. I might never talk again. Final y I excuse myself and go upstairs for a shower. With any luck Cheryl wil be gone by the time I come down.

Hari has been living with me for the past two months because it’s closer to university. He is supposed to be safeguarding my virtue and helping pay the mortgage but he’s four weeks behind in his rent and using my spare room as a knocking shop.

My legs are tingling. I love the feeling of lactic acid leaking away. I look in the mirror and pul back my hair. Yel ow flecks spark in my irises like goldfish in a pond. There are no wrinkles. Black don’t crack.

My “assets” aren’t so bad. When I was running competitively I was always pleased they were on the smal side and could be tightly bound in a sports bra. Now I wouldn’t mind being a size bigger so I could have a cleavage.

Hari yel s up the stairs. “Hey, sis, I’m taking twenty from your purse.”

“Why?”

“Because when I take it from strangers they get angry.”

Very droll
. “You stil owe me rent.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You said that yesterday.”
And the day before.

The front door closes. The house is quiet.

Downstairs, I pick up Cate’s note again, resting it between my fingertips. Then I prop it on the table against the salt and pepper shakers, staring at it for a while.

Cate El iot. Her name stil makes me smile. One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn’t canceled out by time apart. One doesn’t erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they wil change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.

We were born at the same hospital and raised in Bethnal Green in London’s East End although we managed to more or less avoid each other for the first thirteen years. Fate brought us together, if you believe in such things.

We became inseparable. Almost telepathic. We were partners in crime, stealing beer from her father’s fridge, window shopping on the Kings Road, eating chips with vinegar on our way home from school, sneaking out to see bands at the Hammersmith Odeon and movie stars on the red carpet at Leicester Square.

In our gap year we went to France. I crashed a moped, got cautioned for having a fake ID and tried hash for the first time. Cate lost the key to our hostel during a midnight swim and we had to climb a trel is at 2:00 a.m.

There is no breakup worse than that of best friends. Broken love affairs are painful. Broken marriages are messy. Broken homes are sometimes an improvement. Our breakup was the worst.

Now, after eight years, she wants to see me. The thril of compliance spreads across my skin. Then comes a nagging, unshakable dread. She’s in trouble.

My car keys are in the sitting room. As I pick them up, I notice marks on the glass-topped coffee table. Looking closer, I can make out two neat buttock prints and what I imagine to be elbow smudges. I could kil my brother!

3

Someone has spil ed a Bloody Mary mix on my shoes. I wouldn’t mind so much, but they’re not mine. I borrowed them, just like I borrowed this top, which is too big for me. At least my underwear is my own. “Never borrow money or underwear,” my mother always says, in an addendum to her clean-underwear speech which involves graphic descriptions of road accidents and ambulance officers cutting off my tights. No wonder I have nightmares.

Cate isn’t here yet. I’ve been trying to watch the door and avoid talking to anyone.

There should be a law against school reunions. They should come with warning stickers on the invitations. There is never a right time for them. You’re either too young or too old or too fat.

This isn’t even a proper school reunion. Somebody burned down the science classrooms at Oaklands. A vandal with a can of petrol rather than a rogue Bunsen burner. Now they’re opening a brand-new block, with a junior minister of something-or-other doing the honors.

The new building is functional and sturdy, with none of the charm of the Victorian original. The cathedral ceilings and arched windows have been replaced by fibrous cement panels, strip lighting and aluminum frames.

The school hal has been decorated with streamers and bal oons hang from the rafters. A school banner is draped across the front of the stage.

There is a queue for the mirror in the girls’ toilets. Lindsay Saunders leans past me over the sink and rubs lipstick from her teeth. Satisfied, she turns and appraises me.

“Wil you stop acting like a Punjabi princess and loosen up. Have fun.”

“Is that what this is?”

I’m wearing Lindsay’s top, the bronze one with shoestring straps, which I don’t have the bust to carry off. A strap fal s off my shoulder. I tug it up again.

“I know you’re acting like you don’t care. You’re just nervous about Cate. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Lindsay reapplies her lipstick and adjusts her dress. She’s been looking forward to the reunion for weeks because of Rocco Man-spiezer. She fancied him for six years at school but didn’t have the courage to tel him.

“What makes you so sure you’l get him this time?”

“Wel I didn’t spend two hundred quid on this dress and squeeze into these bloody shoes to be ignored by him again.” Unlike Lindsay, I have no desire to hang around with people I have spent twelve years avoiding. I don’t want to hear how much money they make or how big their house is or see photographs of their children who have names that sound like brands of shampoo.

That’s the thing about school reunions—people only come to measure their life against others and to see the failures. They want to know which of the beauty queens has put on seventy pounds and seen her husband run off with his secretary, and which teacher got caught taking photographs in the changing rooms.

“Come on, aren’t you curious?” Lindsay asks.

“Of course, I’m curious. I
hate
the fact I’m curious. I just wish I was invisible.”

“Don’t be such a spoilsport.” She rubs her finger across my eyebrows. “Did you see Annabel e Trunzo? My God that dress! And what about her hair?”

“Rocco doesn’t even have any hair.”

“Ah, but he’s stil looking fit.”

“Is he married?”

“Hush your mouth.”

“Wel , I think you should at least find out before you shag him.”

She gives me a wicked grin. “I’l ask afterward.”

Lindsay acts like a real man-eater, but I know she’s not real y so predatory. I tel myself that al the time, but I stil wouldn’t let her date my brothers.

Back in the hal , the lights have been turned down and the music turned up. Spandau Bal et has been replaced by eighties anthems. The women are wearing a mixture of cocktail dresses and saris. Others are pretending not to care, in leather jackets and designer jeans.

There were always tribes at Oaklands. The whites were a minority. Most of the students were Banglas (Bangladeshis) with a few Pakis and Indians thrown into the mix.

I was a “curry,” a “yindoo,” an “elephant trainer.” Brown Indian in case you’re wondering. As defining details go, nothing else came close at Oaklands—not my black hair, braces or skinny legs; not having glandular fever at seven, or being able to run like the wind. Everything else paled into insignificance alongside my skin color and Sikh heritage.

It’s not true that al Sikhs are cal ed Singh. And we don’t al carry curved blades strapped to our chests (although in the East End having this sort of rep isn’t such a bad thing).

Even now the Banglas are sticking together. People are sitting next to the same people they sat alongside at school. Despite everything that has happened in the intervening years, the core facets of our personalities are untouched. Al our flaws and strengths are the same.

On the far side of the hal I see Cate arriving. She is pale and striking, with a short expensive haircut and cheap sexy shoes. Dressed in a long light khaki skirt and a silk blouse, she looks elegant and, yes, pregnant. Her hands are smoothing her neat, compact bump. It’s more than a bump. A beach bal . She hasn’t long to go.

I don’t want her to see me staring. I turn away.

“Alisha?”

“Sure. Who else?” I turn suddenly and put on a goofy smile.

Cate leans forward and kisses my cheek. I don’t close my eyes. Neither does she. We stare at each other. Surprised. She smel s of childhood.

There are fine lines at the corners of her eyes. I wasn’t there to see them drawn. The smal scar on her left temple, just beneath her hairline, I remember that one.

We’re the same age, twenty-nine, and the same shape, except for the bump. I have darker skin and hidden depths (like al brunettes) but I can categorical y state that I wil never look as good as Cate. She has learned—no, that makes it sound too practiced—she was born with the ability to make men admire her. I don’t know the secret. A movement of the eye, a cock of the head, a tone of voice or a touch of the arm, creates a moment, an il usion that al men gay or straight, old or young buy into.

People are watching her now. I doubt if she even realizes.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I answer too quickly and start again. “I’m al right.”

“Just al right?”

I try to laugh. “But look at you—you’re pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“When are you due?”

“In four weeks.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

The questions and answers are too abrupt and matter-of-fact. Conversation has never been this hard—not with Cate. She looks nervously over my shoulder, as if worried we might be overheard.

“Didn’t you marry—?”

“Felix Beaumont. He’s over there.”

I fol ow her eyes to a tal , heavy-set figure in casual trousers and a loose white shirt. Felix didn’t go to Oaklands and his real name is Buczkowski, not “Beaumont.” His father was a Polish shopkeeper who ran an electronics shop on Tottenham Court Road.

Now he’s deep in conversation with Annabel e Trunzo, whose dress is a scrap of material held up by her chest. If she exhales it’s going to be bunched around her ankles.

“You know what I used to hate most about nights like this?” says Cate. “Having someone who looks immaculate tel ing me how she spent al day ferrying children to bal et or footbal or cricket. And then she asks the obvious question: ‘Do you have any kids?’ And I say, ‘Nope, no children.’ And she jokes, ‘Hey, why don’t you have one of mine?’ God that pisses me off.”