Man on Fire

4

The first time I saw Ellen she was doing the twist at the Royal and I was trying not to look jealous of the air that held her up. Sipping on my pint all cocksure in the corner, as scared of dancing as I was of dying, a young man lost in the back-end of the Sixties with no real idea of what I’d end up doing with my life or what kind of fears I’d end up losing my appetite to. I’d wanted to hold someone up, I knew that. To be the solid ground for someone, and maybe the air they lived on if I could make myself gentle enough to be breathed in.

Mum always told me to be gentle, it’s what girls wanted and there was enough trouble in the world as it was.

So I came to the dancehall every Saturday night with the hope of being the gentle one, the one who stood out from all the lacquered warriors in their rollaway collars, the one without the flick-knife wit and the violent moves. And I looked for a girl who didn’t take to violence and who wouldn’t mind that I read books, turning the pages with fingers soft from grammar school and high ideals that belonged behind a desk. I tried to be standout by sticking to the walls, thinking it might draw in a quiet girl from the Tottenham crowd with as much need of a slow unwrapping as me.

But Ellen didn’t need looking after, I could see that straight away. Whatever man danced with her had to give her some room, she was all over the place and her eyes were shut tight in defiance of the four known dimensions. Unafraid of sheer drops and sharp edges she twisted away whatever sadness she’d woken up to, the rum and the music tricking her into weightlessness.

I was hooked and aware of myself. I wanted to be as light as she was.

In between songs she came to me where I was sitting and asked me why I wasn’t getting up. I told her I was happy just to watch. My friends made suggestive noises. I’ve got a drink, I said. I’m not really one for making a show of myself.

Her blue eyes were bolder than mine, she saw all my secrets before I had a chance to hide them with another careful swig from the glass. She saw a stillness that needed shaking up, that’s what she’d say later. She’d call me her snowglobe and I wouldn’t protest.

‘Come on,’ she said, and she held out her hand for me to take. ‘You’re not stuck to that chair, are you? Get up and show me what you’ve got.’

I ended up showing her everything. I promised there was more to come and she was happy to wait for it. If she asked for it now I don’t know what excuse I’d give. All my excuses went up in flames the moment I first saw Bibhuti in the flesh.

He was standing in the middle of the room dripping sweat and smiling saintlike and there were thirty kids lining up to kick him in the balls. They waited patiently for their turns. There was no talking or messing about. Some of the children were very young and they looked comical wearing their concentrating faces, barefoot and disciplined and stiff with training. Bibhuti would wave each one in and they’d bow to him with their little hands curled into a reverent fist. Then they’d arrange themselves into the right stance and step back and plant a kick between their sensei’s legs, true and hard and with meaning attached. Bibhuti would take the blow gratefully and nod his appreciation. Another bow for godspeed and the child would peel away to join their friends in warmdown and Bibhuti would wave the next one in.

Clockwork.

He had a conveyor belt going, smooth and faultless. A thing of hypnotic beauty. It felt like art was being made or history and if I breathed too hard I’d ruin it. I kept my distance. I watched with Harshad from the back of the hall by the badminton nets. There were holes in them I could have put my head through if the mood had taken me.

Bibhuti looked just like I remembered him from the footage I’d seen. Tall and strong, not as bulky as you’d think. Graceful. The full moustache and the dune of thick black hair on his head placed him somewhere in the Seventies, a leftover from the days of strict codes of honour and bad fabrics that gave off extravagant static shocks. In his white karate suit he looked like he should be flying.

The children in his charge kept going and he kept on taking their finest shots without a flinch or a tremble, a strange smile fixed to his face, as if he’d swallowed magic. A little girl was next up. She could only have been six or seven. She didn’t have a costume. She wore a Dora the Explorer T-shirt a size too small and she had a ferocity about her that can only come from a precocious awareness of how close death walks alongside the living.

She let out a blood-curdling cry and went arrowing at Bibhuti, her whole weight directed into a spiteful kick that landed with gruesome precision. Bibhuti absorbed it willingly. He waited for her to meet the ground again before giving her a bow that bristled with good humour. He was a tiger scratching at a spot where a fly had just been.

When the kids had all taken their turn at assaulting him Bibhuti clapped his hands and they fell into a semicircle around him. He bowed to them all, slow and ceremonial, and as one they returned the gesture, their little fists clasped in a warrior pose, little brown toes digging shyly in the parquet. He said something encouraging to them in his language and class was dismissed.

My heart was beating fast. All I wanted to do was take a run at him and give him the hardest kick I could. All I wanted was to be one of those children, to enjoy the immunity they enjoyed, so I could do something bold and unwarranted and not have to answer for it.

‘It is a shame we missed the beginning,’ Harshad said, putting himself in front of me so he could get the first shot at Bibhuti’s attention. ‘The best part is the sparring. The younger ones are very fearless, they will fight until the last and BB is encouraging full contact.’ He nodded to the girl in the Dora the Explorer T-shirt. ‘This one is Kavita. She is defeating all comers. Once she made the other child unconscious. He failed to keep up his guard. He may be damaged in the brain.’

The girl and Bibhuti were deep in conversation. They were probably discussing the best techniques for killing a man without leaving a mark. Having received his advice she strode out of the hall spoiling for another fight, her delicate steps emboldened by her sensei’s approval.

Bibhuti spotted us. He gave me a cagey look and wandered over. Immediately I felt as if I were in the presence of a man for whom the laws of nature had been tweaked. He was made of something different, I could tell. Harshad lowered his gaze, starstruck. While they spoke in their language the hall emptied of all except one boy, who hadn’t taken part in the class but had been watching from the tiered seats. He thumbed lethargically at the mobile phone in his hand.

Bibhuti turned to me beaming, his hand held out for me to shake. My heart beat faster, infatuated.

‘Hello, sir, I am BB. Welcome to my country. You want to help me with my record.’

‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘My name’s John. John Lock. I saw you on TV and I read about you, I think you’re brilliant. I came here from England, I just got here today. I want to help you if you’ll let me.’

I realised how strange and foolish I must have looked to him, tripping over myself trying to get my words out, peeling and tired from the heat and the jetlag and stretching for credibility in holiday clothes. When he looked at me he saw sloping shoulders and pigeon toes and uninvited errands he didn’t have the time to run. I did my best to look convincing.

‘You have seen me before? Was it the AXN special?’

‘Maybe. It was on a programme about world records. The one you did with the sledgehammers.’

‘Right,’ Bibhuti smiled. I’d loosened up a fond memory for him and he drifted to it. He swam around in it for a moment or two. ‘This record is very old. There have been others since then. You have seen them?’

‘Yeah, I saw all the clips on YouTube. Then I read the interview you gave, the one where you mentioned the next record you want to go for and how you needed backing.’

‘And you decided you are the man for the job,’ Bibhuti said.

‘I am. I did. Definitely.’

We smiled at each other. A game of chicken. We both tried not to be the first to break and admit the profound stupidity of my coming here. Bibhuti eyed me up, checking for cracks and defects of character. Under his scrutiny I felt weak and unfortunate, an exhibit in once-firm flesh gone softly to seed.

The silence crept in, punctured only by the Space Invaders sound effects that fizzed from the boy’s phone.

‘I’m not taking the piss,’ I said after a while. ‘I’ve got money. I can show it to you whenever you want.’

The boy saw me then and left his seat to join his father in assessing me. His cautious eyes flickered with amusement.

Bibhuti tousled the boy’s hair and draped an elaborately muscled arm over his shoulder. ‘This is my son, Shubham.’

The boy mumbled a hello. Bibhuti whispered something at him and with a petulant shiver he sent his phone to sleep and slipped it into his pocket.

‘He is a good boy. He must study harder and watch less television.’

‘We all should,’ I said, because it sounded conciliatory.

I’ll tell you later how Shubham became Jolly Boy. It’s not important to the story. All I’ll say for now about the boy is that he wore well the privilege and shame of being his father’s son.

He wears it well today, leaning in gently to swab Bibhuti’s lips, unqueasily parting the lifelines that trail from his father to rest an appraising hand on his forehead. He tells me it’s hot. I say that’s a good sign. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

‘He will be very proud of his father when I achieve my big success. Come,’ Bibhuti said, and he led us out of the hall and down the corridor, passing walls studded with newspaper clippings of his past successes, and bringing us out into the car park where the children gathered to be collected by their parents in a stuttering tide of Toyotas and country-made SUVs whose wing mirrors still bore the protective film stickers of the showroom.

I waited while he returned their greetings, baking in the heat of the Indian dusk as he answered every enquiry into a child’s progress in warfare or the best dietary weapon against gout. They all asked to be introduced to the white man who’d fallen from the sky. I was a curiosity brought to them by a generous god to give a glimpse into foreign fashions and a lucky chance to practise their conversational English.

Bibhuti told them I was his friend from England. That was all the explanation they needed.

Kavita’s father asked me if I knew Lincolnshire. I said I’d heard of it but I’d never been.

‘I have a brother who is a doctor there,’ he said, ignoring his daughter as she squeezed in some last-minute roundhouse practice, aiming her kicks in a relentless procession at Bibhuti’s groin. He parried each one patiently. ‘I have not spoken to him for many years. He accused me of poisoning his dog when we were children. I did not. If I remembered this I would admit to it and apologise but I have no recollection. My brother is a good man, I am very proud of him.’

‘Lincolnshire’s very flat,’ I said. ‘They grow a lot of vegetables there.’

‘This is so?’ the man said dreamily, painting himself a picture of his brother’s place of exile.

When all the cars had gone and Harshad had left us to take a drink in privacy from the leather-clad hip flask he’d brought with him, Bibhuti took me for a walk around the grounds. We skimmed the jogging track that ran beside the Navi Mumbai Sports Association like a dry river. The cricket pitch the track bordered was parched and brown and at the boundary two brown dogs lay sleeping, curled in each other like an indecent pretzel. The evening perched over us, a fat bird laughing at me from the treetops as I clumsily tried to convince Bibhuti with my bearing and my listening that I was the man he’d been waiting for all his life.

We sat down on the grass behind the dogs as one started gnawing on the leg of the other, and I was asked if I believed in God and destiny.

I said I’d never believed in either, but that I was willing to be surprised. I didn’t mean that. I’d made it through sixty years of living without once hearing your footsteps behind me and I had no expectation of ever hearing them. But Bibhuti needed the lie. He needed to feel a closeness to me so my plea would stick. I told him when I’d seen him on TV a light had gone on inside me and I relied on him to presume it was divinity’s hand working the switch.

‘I believe in them entirely,’ Bibhuti said. ‘Everything I do is decided by these factors. If it is God’s will to put you here then I must listen to what he is telling me.’ He closed his eyes as if listening for your voice in the branches. He stroked his moustache in meditation, something I’d learn to be a habit of his in times of inner turmoil.

I waited. The warm breeze felt good on my bare arms. The light dripping down from the sky was different to any light I’d seen before. I caught a whiff of whisky on me and remembered all the miles that were between me and the things I knew. I remembered the feeling of putting on school plimsolls and I saw the cherries on the dress Ellen wore when we rode the Maid of the Mist. There’d been a rainbow behind her, hovering there out of jealousy. She was so bright then that nature had to put on a show to keep up with her.

Ellen sits beside me now, betrayed and asleep with her face pressed into my shoulder. I’m stroking her hair with fingers gone numb from repetition, quietly raging at her capacity for forgiveness and wondering what kindness I should repay her with while I’ve still got the time. So far I’ve got nothing.

Bibhuti tapped me on the shoulder to wake me up. ‘You understand the thing I am planning?’ he asked.

‘You want to break fifty baseball bats over yourself. You need someone to do the hitting. I can swing the bats, it won’t be a problem.’

‘It is not as easy as it sounds. The bats must all be broken. It is not enough just to hit me with them, there is no achievement in that. It will require much strength. Do you think you can withstand the physical side? You are not in good shape, you will need some training.’

‘I’ll do whatever you need me to do. I’m stronger than I look.’

‘I am not a wealthy man. There is no money in my sport, I receive no payment. I do what I do for the love only. There are expenses associated to breaking records, these must be met somehow.’

‘I’ve got all the money you need. It’s back at the hotel. Just under nine hundred thousand rupees, it’s all yours.’

Bibhuti’s eyes widened. Jolly Boy whistled the way he’d seen cartoon wolves whistle. I had them.

‘You must be dedicated and do as I say,’ Bibhuti warned. ‘I will be relying on you for a successful outcome. This is very special to me, my sports career is reaching its peak with this record and I am expecting it to go smoothly. This is very important.’

It was important to me too. More important than I could fully understand at the time. ‘I used to work in a lettings agency — renting out houses. I never had a gimmick like you’ve got, I never had something I could do better than anyone else. Not gimmick. You know what I mean. This is my last chance to do something big, something good, to be useful to someone. I won’t let you down, I promise.’

Bibhuti was looking into my eyes now. I felt every tame and uninspired moment of my life replaying in them. I was ashamed of them all.

‘We will discuss our strategy tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I will meet you at your hotel. You must also stop drinking.’

I told him I would.

Harshad rode a scooter that lacked the glamour touches of my old Lambretta. I had to cuddle him to keep from falling off on the ride back to the hotel. I could feel his bones grinding through his shirt, see the flaky bits on his scalp between the strands of hair that flew loose in the breeze. I held on through the hairpins and kicked out at the streetdogs when they got in the way.