Jubilee (8 page)

There were feet on the stairs: Colette. Cai ran back to the drawer with the record. Satish went towards the door in case she came in. She didn’t.

‘Cai?’ They heard the sound of her fingernails scratching the door. ‘Mum says it’s teatime. She says you should say goodbye to Satish now.’

Then they heard her pad back to the top of the stairs: a grunt, a thump, a faint squeaking, and Satish realised what she was doing: straddling the banister, getting resistance with her damp palm so she could control her descent. Little Colette, sliding all the way down to the hall, hoping her mum wouldn’t catch her in the act.

And now he’s convinced he’s going to be caught.

There’s nothing concrete he can identify. All his procedures continue as usual. In the three months since he started taking diazepam, Satish has perfected these procedures: the visits to the garage at the end of the day, the swift dose, the evidence tucked away in his briefcase. At work he’s extremely careful, ingenious, even. He visits the drugs cupboards on a strict rotation, and always when no one else is around. He could write his own prescriptions, but that would need careful management: a different pharmacy each time, and scrupulous record keeping. So he’s explored other sources, going to his GP for a consultation. Satish sat in her office and they had talked shop for a bit, while he wondered what to tell her. The truth had seemed too complex, she’d misunderstand. Instead, he cited an upcoming conference and his own pre-speech nerves. They’d laughed about it together. She had prescribed quite happily: blue pills in a blister pack, an adult formulation. He keeps a bottle of water in the garage to wash down the tablets. He has everything covered.

Satish watches for signs of cognisance in those around him: a searching look from a colleague, a quizzical one from Maya. He checks himself in the mirror frequently, but there’s only him, the way he’s always been. He audits his face, his hands, but there’s nothing to see. He knows it’s coming, though. Someone’s going to find him out.

The medicine’s not always doing what it should, either, but he won’t increase his dose – he’s strict about that. So here he is, at 2 a.m, downstairs in his lounge and not asleep or even sleepy, trying to keep himself occupied. He’s organising the CD collection (alphabetical, by artist). On the coffee table are piles of cases, decanted from their shelves, and a smaller pile of discs beside them. They’ve become untethered during incidents that will, he knows, be denied by everyone he lives with. He may as well do this himself.

He’s trying to track down a Robbie Williams case when his mobile phone, filed on the mantelpiece with his keys and wallet, pings at him. It’s a text from Colette:
sorry sory sorry there r reasons

He replies:

Go to sleep
.

The thing to do is to make sure all the CDs are rehomed, then redistribute the ones which shouldn’t be downstairs anyway. Some of Asha’s have found their way here, and –

r u awake!?

Go to sleep. Not an approp

He struggles with the word, all fingers and thumbs, before giving up.

Not now
.

The reverse will also be true; there is a growing pile of CDs in Maya’s car. Not all of them have cases, either, so that means he’ll have to match them up –

hang on

Satish looks at the phone, waiting for more, but nothing comes. He wonders whether he’s sleepy enough yet: nothing. An itching in the veins tells him he needs to be moving, doing something. He goes back to the pile.

The CDs are like a chronicle of his life. Of
their
lives, his and Maya’s. A chaotic one, which won’t be ordered in the ordering of it, Abba next to the Bombay Vikings, Oasis a forerunner to the Pogues. Satish considers a different arrangement, by person, or by chronology. He could trace their years together in this way, from his time as a Senior House Officer back in the early Nineties. He’d noticed Maya at work and had gone to pick her up one night before some group event. Arriving at her room he had heard music coming from behind her door: a foul-mouthed, stomping song he had later learned was called ‘Bottle of Smoke’. The lyrics contained words he’d barely ever said, and yet there she was, listening to it, singing, and thudding: was she pogo-ing? He knocked on the door and the thudding stopped. The music was turned off and Maya appeared: puffed out, flushed.

‘Right, soldier,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ His scrotum tingled.

Maya made everything new. Satish was a dynamic young doctor, and his provenance, to a girl born and raised in Portsmouth, seemed glamorous. After three weeks she saw him naked, the scar on his arm dismissed as a botched vaccination. A year later, he asked his parents to arrange the marriage. They still have the song from their wedding. Satish is looking at it now, ‘Bindya Chamkegi’. Maya insists that the mix is ‘edgy’.

Then there’s the Sheryl Crow album that reminds him of Asha’s birth, and the Best of Madness CD Maya bought around the time his parents moved in. She’d play ‘Our House’ loudly, and he never knew whether she was being cheerful or ironic, and, it being a tricky subject, he never asked. There’s ‘Brimful of Asha’ which they’d play to their daughter, aged two or three. He remembers Maya dancing with her in the lounge, her face burrowed into Asha’s neck. Mehul had just been born then, a tiny two handfuls. Satish’s lad.

Satish could order his music like that, in a way strangers would find baffling, a private chronology, starting with the Pogues. Before that, before Maya, there’s not much to speak of. Nearly nothing. Maya has sneaked something in under the wire, though. A couple of years ago she went to a Seventies fancy dress party (flares, platforms, afro wig). Her outfit won her a prize, and here it is: fluorescent yellow, a pink strip of ransom-note letters across the bottom:
Never Mind the Bollocks
.

The headphones are the old-fashioned, bulky kind. Asha would crack up, but she’s not here to witness it. Satish puts the CD in, clicks through the tracks to the one he wants. He thinks of Cai going on at him about the Sex Pistols, trying to get through to him:

‘I want to play it at maximum volume, yeah? I want it to smash the windows.’

He’d found Satish in Jennings Field and started this unsolicited proselytising. It was a week before Cai was due to leave for South Africa, and Satish didn’t want to talk to him at all. He got up and walked away, but Cai followed him.

‘Listen! When I put it on I can feel my hair standing up and my skin tingling. It makes me … I feel sort of strong, unbeatable. It’s like I’ve got this power and I don’t know what to do with it. I want to
destroy
things. Do you get it?’ Satish kept walking.

Now his head fills with the noise of it: ‘God Save the Queen’. At first it’s almost like some kind of Fifties rock ‘n’ roll, then after those early bars, it takes on a raw, anarchic edge. Satish closes his eyes, blanking out the sofa, the coffee table, the flatscreen TV. He tries to see it as Cai did: a grey street, the movement of brown and orange curtains, the sameness of it all, the things he wanted to leave behind. Satish moves to the music: a dipping bob, his fists clenched. He shuffles and twists. What did Cai do? He bounces on his toes, the coiled wire of the headphones slapping against his shoulder. He jumps: knees together, his body an exclamation mark. He is Cai. He jumps higher, raises his hands. He punches the air. He mouths the words, most of them wrong, but he
is
Cai. This is what he felt.

The song ends in a messy drum roll, a final percussive flourish. Satish leans against the wall, panting. When he opens his eyes, Colette is standing beside him.

He yells before he can stop himself, the noise banging inside his head.

‘Sorry,’ she mouths. He pulls the headphones off and drops them. They clatter to the floor.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Sorry! I didn’t want to wake anyone up. I thought you knew I was coming. I—’

‘Oh God!’ Anger and fright and embarrassment are tussling inside him. He presses his hand to his chest. Colette steps towards him but he moves away. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I said I’d come. “Hang on”, I said. I texted.’

‘But it’s …’ he glances around him ‘… it’s two thirty.’

‘More like three. But you were awake. What are
you
doing?’

‘I’m organising my CDs.’

A laugh escapes her and she claps her hand to her mouth to control it.

‘And listening to music. Why are you here? How did you get in?’

‘I came in through the garage. Maya lets me, if she’s out.’

‘We’re not out, though—’ The garage. He pushes past Colette and through the hall, opens the garage door. It’s all there: his briefcase undisturbed, everything as it should be. She’s followed him.

‘That was a bloody stupid thing to do, Colette,’ he says, returning to the lounge. ‘And presumptuous.’

‘Don’t! We need to talk.’

‘About what? We’ve talked. Go home.’

‘Satish …’ She looks up at him. ‘You have never, ever turned me away. Don’t send me home.’

He falters. It’s the most presumptuous thing of all, to remind him of that. The bare-faced cheek. He starts sorting through the discs again.

‘We’ve got through worse than this, haven’t we, Satish? Way worse.’

He’s not so sure. Back then, she was the only one suffering. It was the mid-Nineties, and she’d come to him out of the blue, nearly twenty years after the Brecons had left Cherry Gardens. Skinny with addiction, a cautionary tale, she had turned up on his doorstep. He and Maya had only been married a short while and Maya hadn’t even heard her name mentioned before. ‘You were the only one I could think of,’ Colette had told Satish. Maya had reached past him and pulled her inside.

‘You took me in,’ she reminds him now. ‘You helped me get clean. And that’s the thing. That’s why I need to talk to you.’

This, then. Suddenly, he has to sit down. He lowers himself onto the sofa, takes one breath, two, then squares his shoulders and looks at her. ‘Go on. Say it.’

‘OK.’ She sits next to him. ‘To understand all is to forgive all, yeah?’

‘Go on.’

‘OK. It’s about my dad.’

‘What?’

‘The Andrew Ford thing. It’s about my dad. You need to know.’

He has to break apart what she’s saying, quickly, and put it back into this new order, an order in which he isn’t about to be found out, to be disgraced. He wants to grin at her, but remembers he’s angry.

‘What about your dad?’ he asks.

‘Well …’ Colette twitches her head sideways. ‘It’s awful. Things are crap for him right now.’

So things are
crap
for Peter. Satish finds he’s not uncomfortable with this notion.

‘Do you know where he’s living?’ Colette adds.

‘I know he’s in London. Catford, is it? What does that have to do with the photo?’

‘He’s living in this shitty hostel. I saw him two weeks ago and he wouldn’t even let me come in and see it. Shitty. You could tell. And he hates his job. Do you know how I know everything’s crap?’

‘No.’

‘Because the whole time I was with him, the whole time, all he could talk about was how
great
it was. You know, it’s a positive
advantage
that he and Mum are living so far apart, because it means he can put in a few more night shifts.’ Her fingers stab the air, placing ironic quotation marks around the words. ‘It’s great that he’s working long hours because he says he can just
pay off the debt quicker
.’

‘Well, maybe he’s right. Maybe he just needs to do that for a while, put up with it.’

Her glance is a rebuke. ‘He’s rubbish without Mum. He’s lonely, I think. I know he took that money. He was a bloody fool. She makes him say it, makes him call it … fraud … embezzlement. It’s like part of his punishment.’

‘Colette, it
was
fraud. He did those things. He was lucky, too. The bank could have prosecuted him.’

‘Well, I wish they had!’ Her voice disrupts the air between them. ‘I absolutely and bloody wish they had, because then he would still be in South Africa, with Mum, and he’d probably have had this
tiny
prison sentence which would be much, much more bearable than all these months of pain. Do you know how much he took?’

‘Roughly …’

‘Two hundred and fifty thousand rand. Do you know how much that is? It’s barely sixteen grand. Bloody fool! I wish they
had
prosecuted. They only reason they didn’t was because of the publicity. And she – Mum – makes him come over here because she says it’s easier to get work, but it’s hard, you know …’

‘Colette …’

‘We had lunch. I paid the bill and he was crushed.’ The last word is stretched as her mouth distorts. Suddenly, she’s crying.

‘Oh, no. Don’t do that.’ He imagines Maya waking, his mother coming downstairs. ‘Don’t cry, Colette, come on.’

But she does for a while, moaning softly, and he lets her. He notices his hands are shaking and gets up to close the lounge door. She tails off, sniffs and looks round the room. ‘Shit. I need a tissue.’

He won’t pretend to care about Peter’s predicament, but he has to stop this crying.

‘At least he has you here in England,’ Satish says, bright side. ‘And Cai.’ This triggers a fresh bout of sobbing.

‘It’s awful with Cai. He’s still furious about the whole thing. They’re hardly talking. Nothing’s going to be right until Dad goes home again. Nothing. That’s the problem, Satish. I should have told you about it. I’m sorry. That stupid email—’

‘He’ll work off the debt and then he’ll go home. It’ll happen sooner than you think.’

‘I just don’t know how long he can hold out, or how long him and Mum can be apart and still stay together. I can’t give him any money, I don’t have any, so I thought … that was the only reason I asked you to do the photograph, honestly.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She looks up at him. Her nose is pink and rivulets of mascara run down her cheeks. ‘The money, Satish. Andrew Ford will pay us to be in the photograph.’

‘Listen, Colette, I doubt he’d even consider paying. That’s wishful thinking. He won’t do it.’

‘Yes he bloody will. I told him: we aren’t scenery. We’re people, and we’re the only ones who can do this for him. It wasn’t like that for the first photo, but it is now. He needs us.’