How to Disappear (5 page)

Back at the hotel Big Bertha is cleaning my apartment – at 5 pm. Apologetically I take off my tarry shoes and find a newspaper to set them on. She says ‘To-morrow good sun'. I say ‘To-morrow I leave' and give her some money before she escapes. Again she tries to refuse it, as though suspicious of what it's for.

Lying on the bed, my eyelids gently close – and snap open again. What was that about nostalgia and melancholy being forms of love? They are forms of paralysis! The sense of loss – enough of it! Let the pull of the past be succeeded by the pull of the future and the sense of loss replaced by the sense of expectancy. Our world is embodied contradiction, our lives possible only in the fluctuations of reciprocity, and now it is the turn of the future. Besides, I've run out of books and there is not a proper bookshop on the island. If I stay I shall be forced, like Gregory, to invent my own language, and a private language is one paradox I don't go for. Hot water gushes into the bathtub and shampoo makes fragrant foam. To-morrow – another boat, another destination.

O
OTACAMUND 1975 — There wasn't a cloud in the sky and Rita Wallace, Sarah Moffett and myself were steaming up the side of the Nilgiri Hills in a little blue train. The wheels moved so slowly that sometimes we seemed to be hanging motionless among green coffee plantations, hardly breaking the cool air. ‘Nilgiri' means ‘blue' and by the time we arrived it was evening and blue mists were threading the valleys. First appearances however were a shock. We'd been told that Ooty, Queen of the Hill Stations, possessed houses like those of Sunningdale in the English stockbroker-belt, and that its setting had the airy drama of Northumberland, and that it was the last word in subcontinental gentility. To underline this expectation I had in Delhi come across a book of sepia postcards from its heyday circa 1920 in which Ooty looked immaculate. Yet here we were in some derelict station with a lot of mess going on down by the railway tracks. Rita was a divorcee and a redhead. She looked up at me. Her face in recent days had been blistered by the sun and there was entreaty, even despair, in it. I tried to be encouraging and said ‘I hear there are lieutenants at Wellington down the road.' Her smile was touched with sadness. It was more than fatigue.

A skinny porter in oily turban grabbed our bags, high-stepped across shiny railway lines, and deposited them at a trackside hotel. The matter was literally taken out of our hands but after three days of travelling – we'd left Kovalam on the morning of St Valentine's Day by bumpy bus for Quilon, grateful for the pellets of opium we'd stirred into hot coffee, and took the inland boat at nightfall from Aleppey to Cochin and after that a sleepless but dreamy train journey via Coimbatore to Mettupalayam – and after all that, we had acquired the open-ended fatalism in the eternal present which is said to characterise non-European temperaments, and so had followed the porter submissively.

The large room in which we found ourselves contained half a dozen single beds. It would do for a night. Supper consisted of omelettes with bread, butter and tea at a table in the hallway, and we ate gratefully but without talking. Don't know what the time would have been. But in our dormitory, slumped across the beds, which were all out of alignment and arranged in no purposeful manner, we smoked grass, finished off the Indian whisky, and crashed out. In those days marijuana was easily available every-where for a nod and a wink and a few rupees, and usually came in twiggy clumps wrapped in newspaper, much like fish & chips in the United Kingdom.

In the middle of the night Rita woke me with a scream. She said something had touched her. I said she'd imagined it and we went back to sleep. Some time later she screamed again and said she wasn't imagining it and she could hear something as well – couldn't I hear something, a scraping noise, a crunching noise? Our attention was riveted to the black silence.

‘I can hear Sarah snoring,' I said at last.

Next, with an awful yell, Rita propelled herself across the room and into my bed. ‘I've been bitten, you sod!'

Dutifully I slid out of bed, and went across to the door, and fumbled around on the wall for the light-switch. Before I'd found it, something with claws ran over my bare instep. I froze. Moving the switch frantically up and down and sideways, I managed to get the striplight to flicker into cold life and shot back to bed too. From above the parapet of our blanket, we looked and saw nothing, nothing at all, and so cautiously I crept across the room again and flung Rita's mattress into the air and on to the floor. Holes had been ripped in its underside and tufts of flock stuck out. I lit a cigarette, watched and waited. Before long a black snout, followed by a pair of sharp black eyes, pushed outwards from a hole in the floor near the door and after twitching about a bit the eyes were followed at a squeeze by a plump body. Soon four rats were slithering over the mattress, pulling at the stuff and eating it with prayerlike movements of their paws.

‘Why aren't they afraid of the light?' wondered Rita.

I threw my unfinished cigarette at them. They didn't flinch. I lit matches from a box and threw them too. Our accommodation these past weeks had run the gamut from beach-shack to palace, and there would be rats again, but never a group so bold as these on our first night in Ooty. They weren't hostile but were utterly indifferent to us and their indifference and self-possession were mesmerising. Rita fell asleep again, pushing an assortment of protruberances into my back. In many ways she was much more adaptable than I. It took me three more cigarettes before I could even think of settling down. Sarah had been sleeping loglike throughout, presumably on the Mandrax substitutes we'd found in a Trivandrum chemist.

Sarah Moffett had an American father and an English mother and I was her flatmate in London. We were doing our own wonky version of the hippy trail, following on from some crazy experiences at the first ever Delhi Film Festival. When we turned up at the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi the organisers were kindness itself. They gave Sarah full accreditation as my secretary for the whole fortnight, along with all the perks and allowances which that entailed. Couldn't have been sweeter, and I must attempt to write about it one day because it turned into the most outrageous freebie of our lives. Afterwards the arts editor at the
Spectator,
Kenneth Hurren, said ‘But aren't you coming back to attend to your career?', a view put to me more forcefully by my father six months later. But I thought that's what I was doing. I've always been free-lance. And they knew it was my intention to move on through the East and that my return air-ticket to London was open for a year. Rita Wallace was also a close friend – I'd met her through the transsexual pioneer April Ashley (they'd been bohemians together in Paris in the 1950 s); Rita had been staying with the de Mel family in Colombo and flown to Trivandrum aerodrome to join Sarah and myself for a little adventure.

The local coffee and an argument with the patron, to whom we consented to pay only half the bill on account of the rats, proved bracing, as did the Nilgiris themselves. The more you strayed from the railway station and what was called ‘the native village', the nicer Ooty became. The centre of town is called Charing Cross and from here a policeman on a dais directed what little traffic there was. Beyond it, the purlieus fanned up and about in leafy lanes. Clambering thither in our search for somewhere attractive to stay, somewhere perhaps Sunningdalian, we chanced upon the Emerald Heights Ladies College. They spoke of the poet Browning and said they didn't let rooms and gave us Marmite sandwiches and mugs of tea at a long refectory table which seemed to disappear into the distance. One of the schoolmistresses recommended the Officers' Holiday Home and pointed her finger in its direction. So along one of the lanes in late afternoon we dragged our weary feet and in due course came to a low shingled villa. It spread itself comfortably behind flower-flecked hedges and pine trees and there was a little lodge at the entrance to the drive. Its full name, on a polished brass plate beside the front door, was the Ratan Tata Officers' Holiday Home. It looked divine.

The establishment was under the guardianship of an ex-Indian Army officer who told us to call him Inkie because everybody else did. The charm of the place became even greater when we discovered that Inkie was actively concerned for our welfare, especially for Rita's rat-bite which had swollen up nastily on her calf. Inkie assured us there were no rats in his domain, and having negotiated a rate – the equivalent in rupees of £1.50 per head per day full board – we joined a handful of inmates for a fortnight's rest, and washed and changed for dinner.

That night Rita wore cream muslin, Sarah a floor-length wraparound skirt and plunging granny-top, and I yellow flared trousers and a tight black Spanish jacket with bobbles round the edge. The black jacket had been presented to me on departure by another of our flatmates in London, Frances Shelley. She said it had been a godsend when she was in India, had got her everywhere, and as you know hippy clothing was very trans-gender. It got me everywhere too and the black bobble jacket became my standard evening dress on this travelling-light journey through India and the East. Travelling light, yes, but I was away for ages, and it's amazing how you can cram a whole life into a bag when you're young. It helped that I was skinny. In fact Inkie thought I needed feeding up and said ‘Here you will have an appetite. We are seven and a half thousand feet above sea level.' Well, I'd not lost my appetite as such, but French ‘blues' – the soft uppers manufactured by Smith, Kline & French which Sarah and I bought in local chemists and always had a supply of – have a tendency to render one unhungry (or did – they don't make them any more). We also had the ‘yellows' – Dexedrine – unadulterated uppers; whereas the ‘blues' combined Dexedrine with a dash of downer, so had their contemplative side.

In the dining-room the tallest of the gardeners had also changed, into a red and green jacket many of whose brass buttons had dropped off or almost had. He served us Brown Windsor soup, lamb and three veg, and junket which was scalded on top with cinnamon and nutmeg. The pudding was particularly good, and when we told the gardener so, he said the cook would make us the same again right away.

A famous ornithologist called Major Kashir was on leave and at the next table, trying to slap some table manners into his elder son, a morose boy. The younger son was milder, making no sort of challenge but taking it all in no doubt for the day when his pubic hair sprouted and he'd answer back. The Major's wife leant across to us and asked ‘Are you having a lovely time?'

‘Oh we are,' beamed Rita, ‘apart from my rat-bite.' Mrs Kashir looked horrified, so Rita quickly added ‘Not here! Near the station.'

Mrs Kashir wanted a change of subject nonetheless, and she was also a little embarrassed by the atmosphere between her husband and her sons, so she said to us ‘Come outside a moment. I should like to show you something.'

Since it was more of an instruction than a request, we stood up and walked past our waiter who halted against a background of fake-brick wallpaper, the second junket on his hands. The Major remained seated, brushing potato out of his moustache with a napkin, while the sullen sons were commanded not to move an inch. ‘Not an inch!'

Outside in the garden, Mrs Kashir pointed into the navy-blue night above the conifers and asked ‘Do you see that?'

‘No.'

‘That. Look. There. Above the fourth tree from the left. A star.'

‘Oh, yes. I see.'

‘So it's a star,' said Miss Moffett.

‘My dear – wrong. It's not a star. I've been watching it for several days. It's getting closer.'

Rita shivered inside her shawl – it was February – and asked ‘How much closer?'

Mrs Kashir shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe it will crash into us.'

‘But how do you know it's getting closer?' asked Sarah.

Mrs Kashir pounced. She wanted to mystify us. ‘On Thursday it was over there! Above the eighth tree!' And retied her headscarf and buttoned up the fawn car-coat which she always wore over her beautiful saris. ‘It's definitely not a satellite, one may say, because it takes a zig-zag course, some nights higher, some nights lower. To-night it's higher. And the reason I know it's getting closer is – every night brighter! If you eye it askance, you will see that it is a greenish colour. Can you see that?'

We couldn't.

‘Well, I've been observing it longer than you. It is undoubtedly a mechanical object.'

Rita told Mrs Kashir that her car-coat looked very warm and the lady answered ‘Oh, it is. Terywool, you know.'

We passed a green baize noticeboard in the hall. Sarah nosed among the pinned-up messages and discovered that a jumble sale was happening a few days hence in aid of the roof of St Stephen's Church, and we decided to go along since it was nearby. Inkie told us that Ooty's founder, John Sullivan, is buried in St Stephen's whose arches were taken from the palace of Tipoo Sultan. Also within walking distance, according to the town map, were the Nilgiri Library, the Ootacamund Club, and Spencer's Grocery Store where they sold Dundee Cake, Oxford Marmalade and Cheddar cheese; while to reach the Assembly Rooms, where English and American films were occasionally shown, you had only to follow gravity down a number of stepped paths.

The next morning (amphetamine-orange pee in a bright yellow loo) I felt in need of intellectual stimulus. Rita and Sarah invaded the Junk Emporium in a gothic-revival stableyard opposite the Ratan Tata while I took off for the Nilgiri Library which is a famous institution. It was founded in 1859 and the building resembles a red Victorian vicarage, with a reading room like a school-hall jutting into the rear garden. Inside, the walls were adorned with stuffed tiger and stag heads. Novels, popular biographies and children's books were downstairs while the more valuable part of the collection was upstairs where the Warden, Mr Lincoln Townsend, had his office. He was middle-aged and his manner combined Oxford don with Chief Scout, and it turned out that his family came from Leicestershire. Most impressive was the office itself whose proportions were archiepiscopal. Nobody could sit in quarters like that and be a wimp.