Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

And then there is the matter of dust. It lies in a thick patina on all the surfaces, sofa covers, bookshelves, tabletops, armrests, mantelpiece, on all the objects in the house — framed photographs, pictures, the leaves of the spindly weeping fig in the living room, the window frames, bric-à-brac, everywhere. There are dust balls, loosely assembled around hair and fluff and lint, in the corners of the filthy linoleum-covered kitchen floor. Dust is slowly invading and taking over the entire place. It is like being in a first-world version of the flat he left behind in Grange Road for a better life, a place where dirt is slowly edging out humans from their space. Everything here is shabby and fading, as if all the colours of things were slowly abandoning a sinking house. It is a drab, battered, leached affair, with all energy extinguished, a space imploding on itself with neglect and inertia.

And if Gavin hadn’t told him about the cat, he wouldn’t have known what to make of the orange hairs on the sofa covers and cushions, sometimes lying in loose tufts on the carpet, which can only be described as not neutral, not regulation, not snot-beige, but acoloured. At the same time as his heart sinks to think he will have to live here, he feels so much pity for old Mrs Cameron in this dying house that his eyes prick with tears.

The last shreds of any doubt Ritwik has about living in this squalor are dispelled when Mrs Cameron pisses in her armchair. He has no idea what has happened and when the old lady gives off her frightful cackle while wittering on about spilt piss, he thinks her mind has gone down another unknowable alleyway. Even when Gavin gets up to support her upstairs, he wonders briefly about the abrupt departure and the sharpish tone of her voice when she tells Gavin she doesn’t need his help; he can’t make any sense of it. He sees the darkish, wet patch at the foot of the armchair but doesn’t notice it.

Suddenly all the pieces fall into place. It must be because he has been trying to work out subconsciously for some time the characteristic odour of the house. The smell seems familiar to Ritwik but he can’t quite pin it down; it is somewhere just outside the edge of his mind, refusing to come in. Initially he thinks it is just the sour and musty smell of unaired old age and its attendant detritus, maybe even stuff rotting in the kitchen bin or something similar. And then ammonia, piss, cat, wet patch, I can wash myself and change into fresh clothes without your help, no use crying over spilt piss all fall together in a pattern.

There is no one in the room now so he doesn’t have to check his tears. Once again, they are not so much for this woman who has nearly arrived at the end of her days as for an imagined future his mother didn’t reach. It is not a future he wanted for his mother but he thinks this is probably how she would have ended her days had she been alive. And yet again, a decision has already been made for him: he is going to stay on in 37 Ganymede Road and look after Anne Cameron. He will clean up the place, he decides valiantly. He might not manage to make everything unfade, but he will certainly deal with the dust, dirt, stench and urine-sodden carpets on a war-footing.

One final thing about the haven he has left behind.

He had Heroin Eyes in the toilet cubicle one night. It was a brief, edgy coming together, he remembers now with a dry mouth and a tautness in his gut, an encounter slippery with saliva, semen and fears. He was so grateful for it that the next time he met him there, weeks later, he was bold enough to whisper, ‘Do you want to come back to mine?’

Gently, gently, don’t rush it, he’s a twitchy butterfly, anything sudden will make him flit . But the desire overwhelmed the caution.

Heroin Eyes hesitated; through the crack of that pause, Ritwik pushed in, ‘It’s safer than here.’ There was a desperation in him that made him play on the other man’s fears so unscrupulously.

‘OK, then. I’ll leave first. You follow me out to my car.’ Everything in hot muffled whispers.

Ritwik followed him outside, his chest in a tight knot; he would either come back to his room or run away like he did the first time. There was no telling which one it would be. He was going to have to play it very carefully.

They got into the car, a clapped out white Renault, which made a clattering racket as it moved along, and Ritwik gave him directions. His name was Matthew — he wouldn’t give his surname — and he seemed uncomfortable with this sudden intimacy that sharing an ordinary, unsexual space with a cottaging pickup had brought between them. It was somehow a more revealing and skinless interaction to negotiate.

Ritwik tried to make the odd reassuring comment — ‘Don’t worry, my neighbours are all fast asleep at this time’, ‘I very much have my own privacy’ — but they petered out in the shallows of his own unconviction. Matthew, meanwhile, drove steadily, giving away nothing except a pheromonal charge of his deep discomfort. Ritwik didn’t dare look at him sideways or in the rear view mirror in case he upset the fragile balance that had brought this beautiful stranger his way. He had been chosen: that fact alone caused an unpleasantly effervescent cocktail of euphoria and anxiety inside him. He had to keep a firm lid on the bubbles of helpless, nervous giggles trying to rise to the surface.

Once past the parking lot and the staircase, in which Matthew behaved like a jittery cat, things seemed to ease out a bit. Matthew even smiled as Ritwik drew the curtains first and then turned on the bedside lamp, twisting it to face the wall so they had only a dim, diffused refraction in which to love.

He was too tall to fit into the bed, which was also too narrow; both of them kept bumping their knees and elbows on the wall against which the bed was pushed as they moved and changed positions. They tried to make as little noise as possible and spoke in whispers, afraid that they were going to wake someone up in the adjacent rooms. At the end of it, Ritwik hoped Matthew had got out of himself and felt a little bit of what he had felt.

Afterwards, Ritwik didn’t dare ask him to stay because he was afraid his raw need for this lanky stranger would become so transparent if he spoke out the words; he would surely take fright and scuttle off. Instead, he arranged the single duvet over both of them as best as he could, draped himself around Matthew and nestled his head in the hollow of his shoulder blade and collarbone.

‘So what do you read?’ Ritwik asked after a while.

‘Math.’ The knot had loosened somewhat. There was a new languor about him; they could almost be friends talking.

‘Where are you from then?’ Ritwik immediately regretted the question: two consecutive questions after sex could only seem to be an inquisition to an Englishman.

‘Blackpool. Do you know it?’ Ritwik could feel his self-deprecating, apologetic smile as he named his hometown, as if it were a private joke he wasn’t supposed to get.

‘No, I don’t. Is it nice? Isn’t it near the sea?’

‘No, yes, in that order.’

‘Why isn’t it nice?’

‘Have you ever been to an English seaside town? They are havens of the most unimaginable tack.’

Ritwik kept quiet, then casually asked another question, hoping Matthew would not latch on to this crude strategy of extracting information by spacing out and strewing the vital questions among the innocent ones. ‘So did you do finals this year?’

Ritwik expected a stark ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, which would have made his work slightly more laborious but not impossible. Instead, Matthew, who seemed to have no idea what Ritwik was leading to, answered, ‘No, I’ll do schools next year.’

OK, second year then. I just need to find out his college.