The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (53 page)

I am touched that he has reproduced my letter word for word. I wrote to him a few times after that but never got a reply. I’m glad he omitted that last paragraph, it’s not something I’m proud of. I am less glad that he doesn’t remember holding his grandson’s hand.

The box lies before me now as I type this. The morning sun is heating the hotel windows. I have been up all night, but I am not sleepy. Whatserface has been sent home by taxi. She said goodbye and fuck you very much.

I open the box and out falls a piece of paper I have not seen before. It is in W.G.’s hand and it takes me a moment or two to fathom. When I realise what it is, I do something I have been unable to do since my father’s death eight years ago. I stare at my belly and I start to cry.

In school 35 per cent was considered a pass mark. This was to allow mutts from rich families to progress and to prevent classes overcrowding with repeaters. 50 per cent sounds fairer, if you ask me. If you get more things right than you get wrong, you pass. I look at my father’s list and the markings beside it. He has got 20 per cent. A failure by any measurement.

I look at it again and realise that it is unfair. Items 5 and 10 are beyond anyone’s control. Items 4 and 6 are perhaps real failures and not ones that I can rectify. But the rest, the rest I may be able to mend. If I can do 7, complete 3 and send it to 8, my father’s life will be upgraded to a 5/10 pass mark.

Make that 6/10. A credit pass. It is item number 1 and the fact that it is at number 1 that breaks my heart. It is, in my opinion, the first thing he achieved when I finished reading these yellowed pages. And in this matter, unlike in all others, my opinion is the only one that counts.

If you had told me at twenty-one that at thirty-two I’d be a well-off has-been with a ponytail, I might have contemplated an overdose. My mission was to make an album like
Dark Side of the Moon,
play rock in Rio, win a few Oscars and buy an island. Nothing too fanciful.

After I was dumped from Purple Green, I eloped to Europe with a Swiss receptionist called Adriana. In the next few years, I formed a band called Alice Dali, opened for the Scorpions, had a top 40 hit in Luxembourg, failed as a husband again and did some women who weren’t married to me.

Of Alice Dali’s two albums, one went to number 267 on the US alternative chart. The other was never released. The record label said cheerio, Adriana took the baby and left, and I ended up in Dubai playing jazz with arseholes.

Over the next few years, I had several doses of bad luck and one stroke of outrageous fortune. Its name was The Darkening.

Defying the zeitgeist of morose shoe-gazing, The Darkening had haystacks of hair, lengthy guitar solos and wrote big choruses about cars, bars and guitars. The 80s were due for a revival, and for at least one summer these
lederhosen
-wearing freaks were it.

Their second album featured a ballad called
Poison on a Tray,
a cover of a track by an obscure post-grunge band with a Sri Lankan bass player.

The first cheque I received was more than I’d seen that year playing
Hotel California
in a waistcoat for bored Arabs. When it was featured in that teenage show named after a Californian suburb, I received a cheque for more than all the radio royalties in Luxembourg. When it went top 20 in Canada, I found myself richer than my father would’ve been had he actually placed that bet on Kenya.

Old W.G. made his pension on a lucky wager at sixty-four. His son hit jackpot at thirty-two on what he then thought was his genius. I had hoped it would lead to a publishing deal and a solo album. It would lead to nothing of the sort.

Last year The Darkening split up and
Poison on a Tray
was voted most annoying song of the millennium by that fat git on Radio One.

If I met that twenty-one-year-old now, I’d tell him to practise more and smoke less.

I get down to the serious business of googling the words Pradeep, Sivanathan and Mathew. I find nothing. I google Pradeep and Mathews with an s. There is an engineer from Kerala who has just had a daughter and is looking for anyone from Sacred Heart College, Villupuram. There is a doctor in Sheffield who authored a paper on spinal injuries.

I type Pradeep, Mathew, Sri, Lanka and Cricket, and find that only two Pradeeps have played for Sri Lanka, an A-team player called Pradeep Hewage and Thaathi’s old favourite, Asanka Pradeep Gurusinha. Not much else.

I decide to go to Ari Uncle. He is sitting on a haansi putuwa in his study, watching his grandchildren play video games. He has a smile on his face. ‘Come, Shehan, sit.’

‘Call me Garfield, Uncle. Too many Shehans in the world.’

‘Very good. Very good. Your Thaathi would be happy.’

Ari Uncle carries my father’s cane, but walks with more agility and purpose than old W.G. ever did. He wears a banian and his glasses hang from a string around his neck.

‘Some of these video games are hena violent. Cutting each other up with hammers and axes and all. No wonder all this violence in the world.’

On the screen two dwarves are attacking three wolves with what look like pitchforks. I decline to tell Ari Uncle that there was violence in the world long before video games.

‘Our Jimi also plays these ones. Just a game, no?’

Everyone thinks I named my son after Hendrix or Page or T. Kirk. W.G. thought it was after Jim Laker, Ammi probably fancies it was after Jim Reeves. I named him after James Jamerson, the finest bass player to walk the earth. Jamerson lived in the shadows of Motown, played uncredited on thirty number 1 pop hits, and died an alcoholic. Now you know everything.

‘I of course prefer the car-driving ones. But I’m strange. I prefer test cricket to this 20/20 nonsense. How is the podiyan?’

‘Fine. Fine. Wants to be a footballer.’

‘Very good. He can play for Germany. That was your father’s team.’

‘I read the book, Uncle.’

‘What book?’

‘The Legend of Pradeep Mathew.’

Ari Uncle puts on his glasses and peers at me. I see one lens is cracked and has been cellotaped.

On the TV a fire-spewing dragon enters the frame and the three youngsters scream.

‘Shh. Shh. Don’t shout,’ snaps Ari Uncle.

‘Have you read it?’

‘Of course. I only told your mother to give you to read. She thought you might be offended.’

‘Is any of it true?’

‘Some of it. Most of it.’

‘There is no record of Pradeep Mathew anywhere.’

‘They say his name was erased when the archives were computerised.

‘According to Reggie Ranwala. You believe that?’

‘Sheh … um, Garfield, that’s one of the few parts of the story that I’m sure is true.’

‘So he does exist?’

‘I saw him with these very eyes,’ he says, pointing to his broken specs.

‘Then I want to finish it.’

‘What?’

‘I want to find Mathew and finish the book.’

The youngsters stop their game and look up in shock as their grandfather hugs the long-haired uncle with the tattoo. It’s a long time since I’ve been hugged by anyone. He holds me tight and I do not feel embarrassed. In fact I feel something I have been unable to feel for most of my worthless life.

I haven’t done much writing before. I tried to steer clear of anything Thaathi clung to. I prefer marijuana to booze, football to cricket, music to words. I do not remember the surname of the cricketer after whom I am named. And it pains me at my deepest level to hear someone describe Meat Loaf as modern opera.

I spent all of 2004 recording demos, putting bands together and calling up labels. I even let another man marry my wife and bring up my son in a city oceans away. Sure it stings, but what kind of father would I be anyway? How different can I be from W.G.? I see my son twice a year and while the moments I spend with him are magic, I have considered caning him for listening to Mariah Carey. Soon he will turn thirteen. Soon he will begin to hate me.