Man on Fire

33

Bibhuti sleeps. His room’s too small to breathe in now. The reporter has been called away to another story and me and Ellen sit in her seat. It’s still warm from her. The corridor light stings my eyes and encourages confessions. Steam rises from the tea in Ellen’s plastic cup. Her fingers curl around it, the knuckles wrinkled like walnuts, and the ring I gave her could do with a polish. She lets me confess, with the doctors buzzing round us. A scream of pain from somewhere behind thin curtains. She lets me confess because she sees the time has come to harvest my prior kindnesses. To bring them in for weighing and then have them argue for me at the last. I’ll need every one of them to speak well of me.

I tell her I’ve heard your voice calling to me. That I’ve been going back over my life and filling all the holes in with you. The way we met, by chance in a dance hall in the dark, out of all those other bodies. It was you pinning me to the ground, I say, keeping me in the right spot so she’d find me.

It was you who made me iron-willed when her old man ran his rule over me and found me wanting, it was your voice telling him we’d made our choice and we were standing by it. It was you putting the words in my mouth when I asked her to make an honest man of me, even though the thing I feared most in the world was making a promise to someone and then having to make it stick.

When she needed kindness it was you who showed me how. What to say to soothe a toothache, where to put my hands to express sympathy or strength of character. It was you who made me believe in her piano dream.

‘I took you, didn’t I?’ I say to her. ‘To the music shop. I wanted you to play. I was good when I needed to be, wasn’t I?’

‘Of course you were,’ she says, and her charity catches in my throat.

‘I just need you to forgive me. Before it’s too late. I’m scared and I need to know I was good. Tell me you forgive me.’

‘Not yet.’

‘When?’

‘When he wakes up.’

Zubin wheels a trolley past us. There’s a body on it covered by a sheet. The smell of charred meat laces the air. The old man’s face is outlined under the sheet. I watch it all the way to the door to see if the sheet will move with the sucking in of a reanimated breath. It doesn’t.

‘I can’t even remember how many times I hit him. How many did we break?’

‘Enough.’ Ellen shudders at the memory of what she’d seen me do. It must have been bad. All I can remember is the first hit. The sound of it, the vibration going up my arm when the bat met the resistance of Bibhuti’s body. The instant release when it broke. Lightness. Looking down and seeing the bat dead in my hand, splinters hanging in the air. Disgust and exhilaration. Dropping it like it was hot. The announcer counting one.

Birds singing and the silver dragon on Jolly Boy’s best shirt. His father’s eyes glossed and cow-waiting. Just waiting for the next one to hit.

My God, I could feel your eyes on me. As death hovered at Bibhuti’s shoulder you came to visit me for the first time. There was a scratching on the air, of new questions. I feel it again now. You’re asking me to beg for your forgiveness. I think Ellen deserves it more than you. She has to forgive me first. Bibhuti has to wake up.

‘I’m knackered,’ I say.

‘Have a sleep then.’

I let myself very slowly fall into her lap. She lets me stay there. The light’s very bright but it’s been a long day. Every day’s long now. I feel her hand on my face but there’s no stroking. Just her fingers resting on me, all done with dreams of music.

The holy men shove their way in before the nurse can stop them. When they see Bibhuti lying there they break into whalesong. Their prayers fill the room with the acrid bigotry of a smoke bomb. They must be the right denomination because Bibhuti’s wife joins in with the song like she knows it, her lips making the words soundlessly. She glides over to them from the window, bathes herself in the light they throw out. Her shoulders rise as if she’s shrugging off a heavy coat. Piety shakes the stiffness from her limbs. The nearest holy man invites her into the circle they’ve formed. They all peer down together at Bibhuti sleeping and breathe their spell over him.

From where I sit it looks like an act of violence. Leering over his lifeless body they’re vultures eyeing up the choicest cuts. The whalesong grows louder. The rosewater comes out and is sprinkled on him roughly. It spatters his face. The nurse stands and watches, the needle still raised where she was about to recharge the morphine drip.

‘Are they saying he’s gone now?’ Ellen asks me. ‘Is this like the last rites?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘No, it can’t be.’

I look around for an explanation but everyone’s plugged into the ritual. Even Jolly Boy’s caught up in it, sitting on the bed beside his father, watching the priests intently, a crouching animal keying itself up to strike.

Bibhuti sleeps. The singing stops and the holy men turn to look at me. This is how it happens, I think. They slip knives from their robes and cut me down in righteous retribution.

I grip the windowsill, something to steady me when the rush comes. I can feel the heat from the fires below. A lone voice shouts out that I’m a son of a whore. I don’t think that’s necessary.

The first one’s on me and he takes hold of my shoulder and jabs a finger between my eyes. The turmeric is a familiar itch on my skin. The prayers start up again. I’m splashed with rosewater too. I blink it out. No one steps in to save me. They’ve got me cornered. One of them’s got spit in his beard from so much arguing with God. His lips are wet with a desire for gift-giving. He wants to forgive me and make me clean. He doesn’t know the first thing about me but he wants to save my soul.

For the first time in my life I feel my soul as a physical thing. It’s a clawing in my chest. It has the weight of a prejudice. It feels like indigestion.

‘They are blessing you,’ Bibhuti’s wife says. ‘I have asked them for this.’

I ask her why. I tell her I’ve already been blessed.

‘They have made my husband a guru. This is very big honour. He is teaching the world, this is what they say. I cannot have anger towards you anymore, it is not good for me. I ask them to bless you again for the rest of your life. Now you will be good. This is all I am asking.’

I thank her. There was never a time when I wasn’t indebted to someone for something. I realise that it’s his debts that keep a man clinging to life. I feel the weight of my soul drop. I swallow it in a moment of panic, like the stone of a fruit. Relief comes after.

Jolly Boy climbs onto his father and shields him from further intrusion. The holy men range their fruits and flowers on the bed, around Bibhuti’s feet. Jolly Boy kicks out at them, sending an orange rolling off and across the floor. He kicks out at the holy men when they get too close. He’s fevered, fighting for his life.

‘He’s not a god,’ he cries. ‘He’s my Baba! Leave him alone!’

‘They do not say he is a god,’ his mother says, trying to soothe him. ‘They say he is a guru. It is different. He is still your Baba.’

‘They can’t take him. Tell them to go.’

‘They don’t want to take him.’

One of the holy men raises his hands in a gesture of conciliation. Jolly Boy lands a foot on him. He backs off.

Bibhuti’s body rocks under the motion of Jolly Boy’s thrashing around. The nurse goes to insert her needle but the holy men heckle her away. They leave, taking the nurse with them. The air behind them is snagged with something horrific, an assumption that Bibhuti will wake up to his new calling and be neutered and lifted by it.

His eyes are swimming again. He’s dreaming of a world without language, before there was a word for death.

I pick up my money and tell Jolly Boy we’re getting out of here. ‘You need a change of scenery, you’ve been in here too long. We’ll come back. No one’s gonna take him. Let’s see if there’s some trouble we can get ourselves into.’

A flicker of a smile but he hesitates, his hand on Bibhuti’s heart.

‘He just wants to finish the dream he’s having. Let’s leave him to it, we can ask him about it when we get back.’

He peels himself off his father and comes with me.

Jolly Boy stays close to me. I lead him under the buzzing lights and the blunt chopping fans. The amputated ghosts don’t see us when we pass through them. Nobody stops us. Nobody feels what we feel.

We go down to the basement. The drums from outside fade away and the air closes in. We reach the orderlies’ room. Zubin looks up from the card game and asks me what I need. I need a way outside. He takes us to the fire exit.

I push the bar and light breaks in. The drums and the screeching come back, but distantly. I peek out. In front of us is a patch of wasteland and trees beyond it. No fires. The sky is smoke-coloured and its consistency when I reach a hand into it is syrup. I’m asking a lot of my legs after days of sitting still.

We sprint for the trees, our breath loud around us. When we make cover we laugh at each other, a secret joining us at the heart. In the darkness of the trees I brush the wet hair from Jolly Boy’s face. I can’t tell him how sorry I am without making more holes in him.

There’s a place down the road where we can get ice cream, he says, on the other side of the trees and then a walk away. He saw it when we were driving in. His favourite flavour might be there, chocolate. He leads the way. I stay behind him, pick through the footsteps he leaves in the earth still sticky from the last downpour. The mud ruins my shoes and I take them off and carry them at my side. The sight of me barefoot making friends with the filth delights Jolly Boy and he follows my example. Nobody chases us. We slow down, take our time in the shade of the leaves.

There’s chocolate ice cream for Jolly Boy and vanilla for me. There are plastic tricycles hung by wires from the ceiling of the shop. Every shop like this must have them. I never saw them ridden, only hanging. They turn in the breeze above our heads as we sit on the kerb to eat. A stillness blows in and we let it enfold us, lick our ice creams slowly with shrewd insistence, like children do who know the world’s waiting on them. Our muddied feet dry in the sun and silence comes. We sift it for fragments of gold.

Gold is woven into Jolly Boy’s hair and when I look at him I see the man he’ll become in his father’s absence. A man made of locked doors and windows painted over. He’ll be a room of dust and stale air, like I was. Maybe love will find him later and crowbar him open, maybe TV will teach him compassion. Maybe out of spite he’ll follow different dreams to his father’s and make a life’s work in falling short of them.

Or maybe a quick end is in store at the point of a needle, a merciful deflation after grief’s bloating. His mother a mountaineer in the landfill fighting the seagulls for his eyes.

He asks for another ice cream. I watch him go to work on it, something sweet to remember me by.

The clouds tussle and heave. Jolly Boy’s shoulders sag and he ages. The ice cream falls from his hand. He’s crying.

‘I was too slow. I should give you the next bat quicker. There are too many. It is my fault.’

‘Don’t say that, it’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything. We shouldn’t have let you anywhere near there. Don’t ever think it was your fault. You’re a good boy.’

His eyes claw for the sky and the peace to be found there in the brewing storm.

‘You could do with a shower,’ I tell him. ‘You’re smelling a bit ripe. I’ll take you when we get back. I’ll get you some new clothes as well.’

‘Okay,’ he sniffs.

‘I smell worse than you do,’ I say to appease him. I pinch my nose and wave a hand in front of my face. ‘Pooey, what a stink. I smell like shit.’

Laughter dribbles out of him. He mimics me, pinching his nose and holding an exaggerated breath, his tear-streaked cheeks swelling like a hamster’s.

The first rain spots the pavement. I hand him his shoes and we head back to the trees.

We go back to the fire-escape door and hammer on it until it’s opened. Zubin promises a change of clothes in Jolly Boy’s size. He takes us to the bathroom and locks us inside.

Jolly Boy makes me wait behind the wall of the shower cubicle, throws me his clothes once he’s removed them. I wash them in the sink while he rinses five days of hoping off, scrubbing until the water runs black.

I catch myself in the mirror and think about growing the moustache again.

Zubin comes back with fresh clothes, taken from various small corpses. Jolly Boy recoils at the idea of stepping into a dead boy’s shoes. Zubin reassures him that all is clean and death isn’t catching. I turn my back while he changes. Zubin gathers up Jolly Boy’s wet clothes and takes them away to hang somewhere. Jolly Boy is reluctant to be separated from his dragon. I tell him that dragons home, it’ll find its way back to him.

When we get back to the room Bibhuti is wide awake and pulling at the drip line that dangles from his arm. It slithers from his vein, glistening with blood. His wife accepts it prudishly and lays it on the sheet. It dribbles the last of its shames onto the cotton and lies still. Bibhuti sees me and recognition floods his eyes.

‘No more painkillers,’ Bibhuti says, his voice garbled and rusty. ‘They are trying to kill me with this poison. I am just now speaking with the fire-eater, he says we can still do it. Come, we must go home and practise. Eleven bats is poor number, we will come back tomorrow and improve on it.’

Jolly Boy is rooted to the spot, his hair still wet from the shower, unsure if what he sees is real or a ghost. His mother asks after his clothes and I tell her the story. She accepts my explanation without really hearing it, her attention flying back to Bibhuti and the terrible thirst he’s woken to. She tips a water bottle towards his mouth. He tries to sit up to take a drink but the effort of it wipes him out and he falls back onto the bed. The sight of him helpless slaps me awake and I rush to his side. He bucks and slithers, impatient to test the honesty of his returning strength. I hold him down as politely as I can until the doctor comes. His skin where I can feel it is hot with life and his moustache tickles my ear.

‘Thank you,’ he says flatly. Nobody else hears it.