Black Bread White Beer Read online

  BLACK BREAD

  WHITE BEER

  Niven Govinden

  FOURTH ESTATE • New Delhi

  The two men squat tentatively in their dinghy, floating without enjoyment. There was trouble casting off in the meagre dawn light, one man slipping on shit-splattered cobbles and getting his foot in the water earlier than anticipated. His leg twisting up and out at a sharp angle as he struggled for balance, as if teaching his colleague a new dance move. He is still swearing now, like a teenager, loudly, no restraint; deities and mothers are named in vain. There is no one around to take offence because it is too early for anyone to be out in the park. No one, that is, except a sleepless Amal, sitting on a bench partly hidden by trees.

  He watches their nervousness morph into confidence a few metres out, as they paddle with gloved hands towards their destination, the birdhouse in the centre of the lake. Their movements are losing their jerkiness and are becoming smooth and in tandem, a challenge to those Oxford and Cambridge boys who firmly believe that rowing is not a trick that can be learned in five minutes on a glorified duck pond. The man with the dry feet tells a joke that makes the other laugh dirtily. Council-issued fluorescent body-warmers shake with mirth.

  But there is still enough grace to put paid to that. The water, algae-ridden but forgiving, absolves their earlier coarseness. Within a couple of minutes they are silent, allowing these unfamiliar sounds to form their new language: the swoosh of the craft, and the drip of their hands, as they plunge in and out. Amal, who cheers-on the boat race most years from a beer tent near Putney Bridge, whose armchair love of sailing extends to an occasional bit-part within the tourist gaggle which breathlessly applauds the arrival of yachts in European marinas, remains silent, unwilling to intrude. The three of them, absorbed with blending the peacefulness of morning to their differing agendas.

  At the birdhouse, a bulky, unstable plywood construction turning black with rot, the men throw over a thick sheet of netting. Neither wishes to risk unsteadying the dinghy by getting to their feet, so the throw itself is generated from a position on their knees; one that is weakly weighted and only just lands on its target. Not cut to size, it snags on the pointed roof, and falls over the squat, low doorway. The bottom, knotted in places, frayed in others, trails into the water. There is no checking to see whether there are any visitors inside. There are feathers around the decking, and fast collecting in the net, but this means little to them. They are not Wildlife Protection, but Parks Maintenance, there to do the job asked of them, and no more. They look forward to coffee and bacon rolls in the van and a tick on the list that means they are closer to home.

  The netting is of a very dark green, that will appear as black as the birdhouse itself once it weathers, rendering it almost invisible from a distance, from the air. It is also taut, and of a density that a beak would find impenetrable. If there is any concern that a duckling may still be inside, the men do not show it. There is no pause in either paddle movement or direction as they return to bank side, where the van is parked. Only in the final metres does the posture of the dry man shift. His head cranes as far sideways as the balance of the dinghy will allow, the furrow in his brow suggesting a rush job, something overlooked.

  Amal, too, listens for a further layer of sound, over the whoosh and plunge – a crackle, a cry, to confirm all that he suspects. Long after the council van has gone, as he shakes his empty cigarette packet and heads for the park gate, he hears it: the tinny, metallic squall of a youngster, and a rustle of the net. He has the urge to look back, to possibly wade in, and attempt rescue, if rescue is needed, but buries it. Ducks are meat, when it comes down to it. No looking back. He walks away, towards the car, crunching the fag packet in his hand, his teeth repeatedly grazing his lower lip. He is learning that not every life can be saved.

  He should clean the car. Have it cleaned. It must be spotless when he goes to collect her. Most of all, it must smell fresh. Already he is planning on leaving some flowers on the back seat to mask both the dry artificial scent of a new car and their own additions over the past day. Seat leather and metal mixed with her perfume was a heady combination that made the drive to work that much more pleasurable. He could sit through two hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the M25 with a smile on his face just breathing it in. But this new blend, with the additions of rapid, thick perspiration, and a few drops of urine, and blood, bond too heavily with the intoxicating top notes. With every breath he smells both of them; their fear distilled.

  Next to the station is a twenty-four-hour multi-storey car park where two Polish guys offer a valet service from the basement. He has used it a couple of times on commuting days, when he was too late finding a parking space on one of the residential roads. Spotless work, but overpriced. But the car needs it. He feels the urgency of this one task, the stranglehold it seems to have on his guts. He must complete this one productive thing before he meets her.

  He is surprised about the looseness of his wallet, how he has been spending so freely since it happened. Thirty pounds on dinner at a gimmicky steakhouse restaurant because he did not want to eat at home alone; twenty pounds at the petrol station off licence; ten pounds at Starbucks which included the purchase of a big band CD which now sits in the glove box, unopened, and finally the twenty-odd he would be charged at the valet place. Claud would tease him in perpetuity if she ever got wind of the spree, emptying out his pockets and looking for moths. Where are they, she would ask. What has happened to my tightwad husband? Is it your birthday? A leap year? She would have, then. Now, who knows?

  The Pole is already hard at work waxing an Audi bonnet crisscrossed with blade scratches. Amal is relieved to see that he is the same guy from before, wiry and in his mid-thirties, attentive and eager to please.

  ‘Is no problem. Soon as I finish the Audi.’

  As with all men of a certain age there is a brief, flickering appraisal of the state of each other’s bodies and hairline.

  ‘Any chance I can cut in? I’ll pay more if it’ll help.’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I like to finish one car at a time. If I don’t use up the wax while it’s wet, I have to start the whole thing again.’

  ‘Please. I have to be somewhere . . . and it’s important that the car looks nice. Please.’

  The last time he detected a pleading note in his tone was yesterday, something he does not like to remember. Both the timbre and the weakness it implies are detestable. It is a slippery slope. He can see that unchecked, how easy it would be lapse into the same sentiment in everyday situations, from cajoling an officious parking attendant, to queue jumping at the post office. Better to dirty himself with money, folding two twenties and pressing them into the waiting palm of the flexible Pole, only to find his bribery is unwanted.

  ‘You have given me too much. Full valet is twenty. Here, go have coffee with the extra money.’

  His thanks are conveyed through stutter, another bridge to yesterday, when he struggled to communicate with doctors and the nursing staff. He is also conscious of the Pole finding him a halfwit, and loathes that also. The brain is capable of remembering too much; there are too many links. He wants every action and impulse to differ from his behaviour yesterday. He needs everything to be normal, for both of them.

  At the coffee shop he waits, second in line, before ordering double espresso and biscotti, as if he hadn’t taken enough comfort in carbs last night. The caffeine jumps starts him, frighteningly fast, making a mockery of his sluggish constitution. Whilst there are no free tables, there are seats dotted around the floor and along the side bar, but he is conscious of sharing the cramped space with strangers, fearful of the need he has to talk. Once he starts he will not be able to stop. No one has been told about
Claud, and this is not the place to start.

  He takes the biscotti and another espresso back for the Pole.

  ‘OK if I sit in the car? I’m a sad case with nowhere to go.’

  There are places, across the road and closer to Richmond Green, but he is known; the price of three married years of melding into the community. The idea of bumping into someone, having to fall into pretence, to sign whatever petition is being championed that week, to care, almost makes him shit in his pants. All he wants to do is hide.

  The Pole sees the humour of his situation. Makes a series of rubbing movements with a damp cloth across the windscreen.

  ‘Like you’re in the big machine carwash? Sure. I’m finished, anyhow.’

  He has been gone twenty minutes and bar the wheels, the car is almost dry. He holds out the paper bag, shakes it towards the Pole with some urgency because he realizes he now longer wants to hold it, wants to be out of there.

  ‘You drink espresso, right?’

  ‘Where I come from, mothers raise children on hot milk. Tea sometimes, but mostly milk. Coffee is more of a luxury. I know people back home, the older people, who still keep jars of Nescafe hidden under their beds! It’s still that valuable to them. Our vodka runs like water, but coffee is hidden. Is it the same in your country?’

  ‘My parents come from a tea-growing part of the world. I wasn’t allowed to drink anything else.’

  ‘Ha! Thank you, my friend. This is appreciated. You were here before, I think? With the yellow Mini Cooper.’

  ‘My wife’s car.’

  ‘Wife, good. Mini is a fine car for a woman, but a man needs something . . .’

  His lips broom-broom over the open espresso as he cools it. The noisemaking is as loaded as the coffee, macho-aggressive, but casually so, as basic a part of his constitution as the protons and neurons of his make-up. He imagines how easily this must be deployed in other situations, when chatting up a girl, and later, in bed, something only a man who still finds such posturing difficult to summon would recognize.

  ‘This BMW is a better car. It will impress people when you drive to your important meeting. They will say that this is the car of a successful man. And when they notice how clean it is, they will be even more impressed.’

  ‘I’m not working today. I have to collect my wife from the hospital.’

  ‘She is sick?’

  ‘We had a miscarriage. Yesterday.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that, brother.’

  ‘Everything’s fine, well, she’s fine, now. They kept her in only because there was a spare bed. Monitoring her, you know. Procedure. It’s just been a shock.’

  ‘In my country, this is something we do not speak of. It is kept in the preserve of the women.’

  ‘My country too.’

  Automatically, he bows to the Indian gene. Though he thinks of himself as educated and enlightened, it is always the pull of the genes that navigates him through crisis, as if there was a state of sense-making that comes solely from the combined force of his parental cells. Before yesterday, he did not think to analyse such superstition. Now, maybe, is the time for its reappraisal.

  He is probably a couple of years older than the Pole but should know better. He thinks about telling him that the old ways do not work, that the preserve of women is self-denying crap, but does not wish to destroy the mythology of something he no longer has belief in. He does not have the balls.

  His last call to the hospital yesterday was around 11 p.m. After that, he gave himself permission to get stinking drunk. The ward sister lacked her earlier seriousness, lightening his worry. He felt her smiling down the phone on hearing his name, as if she was dying to crack some jokes. He had felt their attention on him, the nurses, checking him out when they wheeled up her to the ward. He was weighed down with empathy.

  ‘Get some sleep, sir. She’ll need all the support you’ve got, tomorrow.’ The ‘sir’, tinged with West Country, and burnished with the weariness of the night shift.

  He fell into a brief daydream, wondering at the sheer amount of work to ensure Claud’s bed-rest. The silent monitoring that takes place while she sleeps. He was reminded not to call until after eight the next morning because they would be busy with the medicine-giving and breakfast. But now he is anxious at not hearing from them during the night, and figures that half an hour earlier will not hurt.

  The ward phone rings out for a good few minutes before the bureaucratic dance begins. A breathless nursing assistant picks up, who then has to summon someone senior because she does not have the recognized accreditations to divulge a patient’s condition. The woman does not put him on hold, instead leaving the receiver on the desk while she searches. All the background noises he hears are purely mechanical, rubber wheels on trolleys squelching on rubber-tiled floors, the clang of dropped cutlery, the repeated slamming of lift doors, the wheezy exhalations of a knackered Hoover. There are no human voices at all, as if they are all holding their breath, bound to silence until the receiver is replaced in the cradle.

  The staff nurse he eventually speaks to is estuary accented, and irritated, though she remains factually precise. Claud was given a light sedative just after eleven to help her sleep through the night, she is having breakfast now, managing a sausage and a portion of beans, she will be discharged around ten o’clock once the doctor has made her rounds.

  He is aware that he should be camping outside, as all good husbands are expected to do, and maybe he would, if the sheer scale of the building, its aura of benefaction and stoicism, did not cow him. Besides, there are practical domestic affairs he must attend to.

  He stinks. Fags, booze, and fried food. No one will understand that he has not been celebrating, that this is his way of coming to terms. He brushes and scrubs like it is his first date. After his shower he passes the broom over the wood floors, and empties the dishwasher. She is unlikely to call the house a tip, will probably not even notice, but if he can do these little things, wipe down the fridge, sweep the path, some good may come.

  For all the modernity of their house, a shrine to an architect’s vision of what can be done to Edwardian glass and brick, they often cannot wait to be away from it. Whenever they have free time they rush into the arms of the outdoors, they, the unadventurous, as if unwilling to acknowledge it was the wrong house in the first place, that no amount of renovation could make it otherwise.

  Past the opening round of house-warming parties, they have seldom used the place for celebration. Every birthday, weekend, festival, is spent abroad or down at her parents’ house in Sussex, a nineteenth-century farmhouse, with its half-acre of mature gardens and a kitchen hearth as wide as a football pitch. It decimates the competition, mocking the faux-authentic picture-book efforts of more suburban homes.

  Claud has tried to make their home a warped twin of Liz and Sam’s house in the village outside Lewes, turning the reclaimed carriage door into a table, juxtaposing the dominant metallic and stone of the kitchen; the argyle knitted rugs thrown over wooden floors; and deco mirror sets in the bedroom, above each nightstand, and across her dressing table, as if, like her mother, she is unconsciously playing the part of a silent movie star, the aspiring city girl trapped by marriage in the country, with only her glamorous trinkets to remind of more sophisticated times.

  That is not to say the house has no warmth. All the homes that line the street have a similar square-fronted handsomeness, and theirs is no different. It is cluttered and lived-in. Radio, television, and the iPod docks do their part in filling space. There is nothing forbidding about the 50’s-style welcome mat on the front step, all sunrise and exclamation point, nor the silver-framed Om hanging above the door in the hall, exuding Eastern peace and radiance. Indeed, he has hurried home most nights, yearning for the sofa and the feeling of Claud cuddling into the nook of his arm and shoulder. But something is missing; they both know it. The arrival of an intangible object or presence that will make sense of their choices and hard work.

  The pile
of magazines cries out for the recycling box. He takes them out, having a final smoke as he does so, lifting one from the packet stashed amongst the upturned ceramic pots that litter the patio’s far reaches. It is the unwritten rule of twenty-first-century gift-giving, that a guest should never arrive without a token for the garden. They have more pots than they know what to do with, filled with plants that need little maintenance, woody herbs and tall reedy bamboos, and neatly patterned around the plot, like a super-sized, organic solitaire. The unwanted remainder should be dumped in the garage by rights, a job that continues to escape his mind, until the point when he’s hiding and retrieving fags. Claud often jokes that they should recycle them as gifts, if only they knew which person had given which pot.

  Ordinarily, when hopes are not being lost he smokes one, two cigarettes a day. It helps. He likes to think that he’s unashamed of needing a crutch, but still goes to pains to conceal it, not wanting her to think that he hasn’t agreed whole-heartedly with her plans: organic food, chemical-free detergents, regular, moderate exercise. Conception is something to be taken seriously, needing as much preparation as a marathon.

  ‘We’re in our thirties, Amal. I’ve messed-up my periods with over-dieting. Your metabolism is slowing to a stop with all that pizza. We’re not single people any more. We have to get a grip of ourselves, make changes.’

  He has read the many printouts she leaves on the kitchen counter, that say an abundance of fish, and Brazil nuts are good for his sperm. Many cloves of raw garlic, too. His breath is pungent enough to wither vine fruits, forcing a dependency on extra-strong mints in the office. Other than red wine, alcohol, particularly beer, is banned. So is masturbation. Bread is gluten free, dairy limited. A glass of water must be drunk every hour; supplements are taken twice a day: a multi-vitamin, iron, selenium, omega 3, and aspirin. His piss is sent off for analysis, his stools discussed most mornings whilst he cleans his teeth, something he never thought he would be doing with a white woman. They spend four weeks on this treadmill before she lets him near her, the time it takes to convince that they have eliminated the worst of their collective toxins. Penance for their self-absorbed, shag-around twenties. He leaves her printouts too, which go unread: studies which show how excessive ejaculation can lead to prostate cancer.