Rana Dasgupta - Solo

She takes out her phone and starts to video her feet walking noisily in his shoes.

He says,

‘Bring them back! And stop constantly filming yourself.’

She drags her man-sized feet over to him and sits on his lap. Her camera is still running and she turns it on his face.

‘A woman is supposed to love how beautiful and sexy she is,’ she says.

She turns off the camera.

‘In this country you don’t know anything about love,’ she says pityingly. ‘You import Asian women to love the men and Mexican women to love the children. So how could you know?’

She laughs at his dour expression.

‘You’re good looking and rich. That much you have going for you, Plastic.’ She ruffles his hair. ‘What’s your real name, anyway?’

‘No one calls me that any more.’

Khatuna takes his shoes off her feet, kneels on the floor and puts them on his own. She proceeds to tie the most symmetrical of knots.

Plastic considers the focus she brings to the tying of shoelaces and wonders why he was so annoyed a moment ago.

Since Boris’s launch he has received email threats from Bozhidar Markov in Bulgaria, who is accusing him of abusing Bulgarian hospitality, and Bulgaria itself. His tone is unpleasantly vulgar, and Plastic finds himself brooding on it unnecessarily, even at times like this. He is frustrated by his own high-strung temperament. He wants spontaneity in his days; he wants a woman who is young enough to still know her own feelings, who will put him skin to skin with life. But when he finds her, his instinct is to stifle her and run away.

‘Come here,’ he says, and they kiss, her hand in his ample hair. ‘Let’s go away together. Let’s go to Paris. I’ll take you for the best food you’ve ever had.’

‘Let’s go now. Tonight!’

‘As soon as Boris’s album is finished. Then we’ll go.’

He kisses her again and carries her towards the bed.

‘Fuck me where I can watch you with my other eye,’ she says. ‘The one I have on my back.’

Boris’s album is soon to be released, and Plastic sets up preview concerts for the inner circle. He wants the journalists and critics talking about Boris even before the music hits the market. He sets up gigs in Chicago, DC and LA. Boris takes Irakli along for the ride.

The concerts create a furore, and Boris wants to go out all the time. People like to have him at their parties. They like to touch him, to see how he drinks, how he sits in a chair — and Boris is developing a style for dealing with it. He lets himself be taken here and there.

Irakli loses track. Most nights he ends up cutting loose early, and going back to their suite to sleep.

One morning in LA, Irakli is watching TV alone in the hotel when Boris comes back there with a girl named Lara. She is beautiful unslept. She carries a single yellow rose, which she stands tenderly in a glass of water. She puts her bare feet up on the table and lights a joint. Boris is in high spirits and sings. He says to Lara,

‘This is Irakli. He’s my muse. He’s my mentor.’

He is walking round the room in a goblin dance.

‘Just look at this hotel room!’ he says. ‘A herd of cows could live in here!’

His violin is never far away, and now he plays a rustic jig. Lara passes the joint to Irakli, and it tastes fantastic. He draws from it several times and feels the armchair fold like warm wax.

‘Lara can sing,’ says Boris.

Lara’s blonde hair is in braids and she has a pretty voice. She sings an old jazz song that Boris tresses with his violin.

He says,

‘We were at a party last night with some musicians, and Lara and I made a recording. This guy set up mikes and we improvised a whole session.’

‘It was fucked up,’ says Lara dreamily.

Boris takes a drag of the joint too, but it does nothing to still him. He is so full of energy he cannot sit down. He looks out of the window and says,

‘Who wants to swim?’

‘I do,’ says Lara promptly.

Irakli does not respond. He can feel the vibrations of the world rising through the feet of the armchair, and he does not want to disturb them with his voice.

Boris uproots him unmercifully and carries him out of the door. They get in the elevator, Lara chanting the descending numbers of the floors and drumming them on Boris’s head. Boris still holds Irakli in his arms, and when the doors open on the ground floor he marches him out into the lobby, speeds along the corridors under the arrows saying Swimming Pool , manoeuvres through the narrow exit to the hot LA morning and, breathless, lays him down on a recliner.

‘Now get your clothes off,’ he says, pulling off his own.

Boris and Lara jump into the pool. Boris splashes exuberantly while Lara glides underwater like a stretched white seal. She comes up laughing.

‘The water’s beautiful!’ shouts Boris to Irakli, who is not moving from the chair. The heat is blazing, and he shields his eyes against the force field of the sun. There are parakeets screeching in the palm trees. The grain of his own skin is like a mesh of glistening ravines, and he can smell the sweat gathering in the crook of his elbow.

Through the heat haze, Irakli sees Lara climb on Boris’s shoulders. Boris makes like an angry bull, roaring and snorting and trying to unseat her, but she digs her feet into his flanks and has an arm locked around his head. She is high above the water in her translucent bra and panties, singing defiantly, and she swings a rodeo arm round and round in the air. They struggle against each other until Boris tips her crashing into the water, and for a moment she is lost below a whirlpool. Two parakeets swoop low over the pool, their shining bellies reflecting turquoise. Lara bursts through the water’s surface, puts her arms round Boris’s neck and kisses him. Irakli closes his eyes to a crack, until he sees only the curved horizon of his own cheeks.

‘What are you doing?’ Boris shouts to him. Irakli does not answer, and Boris comes to get him. Wet-stepping over the hot stone, his shadow flashes across Irakli’s face, who flinches. Boris starts to undo Irakli’s clothes: dripping water from his hair on to his burning face and arms, he strips him down roughly to his underpants, picks him up and carries him into the pool. His torso feels clean and cool.

‘How can you be this heavy,’ Boris says.

As Irakli’s body touches the water, it turns to loam. Boris lays him with infinite gentleness on the surface, he holds him there for a long while and draws his arms so slowly away that Irakli does not know the moment when he is floating alone. Boris paddles away to intercept Lara, who is submarining from end to end.

Irakli looks up at the hot plate of the sky, the sun lighting rainbows in his eyelashes. Around him, the white water is duned with lapping blue, and it closes in a creeping tickle over his still-dry stomach. His ears are submerged and all the sounds are deep. He hears the protest of liquid as Lara and Boris fall over each other again, and the altered sound of their distant cries. With washed eyeballs he has new focus, and sees eagles circling in the remote sky — but then the surface floods over, and the palm trees turn molten. He closes his eyes and feels himself drift, his limbs outstretched, and eternity just around the corner. The water removes the impact from things, extracts their sound and colour, and soothes them all.

There’s something amazing about this kind of sleep. There is nothing so calm as the muffled deep.

He is suddenly uprooted again.

‘Breathe!’ shouts Boris in terror, dragging him out with adrenalin strength and laying him on the side of the pool. He slaps his face first one way then the other.

Irakli opens his eyes. He wants to say I’m fine, but he is seized with coughing, and chlorine water pours out of him.