Black Bread White Beer Read online

  He is not trying to rake up the cricket test again, India versus the UK, nor descend into who is better equipped to handle crises, white or brown. He attempts to ignore all that the Indian gene, smart and certain, wishes him to see. He is unable to understand her behaviour, how tears can be stopped so easily, and exploding abbeys discussed so casually. It is only as she talks of her teenage years, scarily textbook in her indie-gothic-fashioned angst, that he realizes how much he needs family around him, just not hers.

  He remembers the fireworks between Ma and Puppa, arguments carrying on late into the night whenever he was late coming home from work; her back shaking with anger when meals were missed due to sudden card games or impromptu offers to fix friends’ cars. He remembers furniture upturned, and plates being smashed, each struggling to grab hold of the other’s throat, one to pacify, the other to exterminate. What he and Claud have is all that he wished for – the opposite of his parents; all comfort and no spark. Everything about their life is mild-mannered, even their arguments. Rowing dispensed no differently than their vitamins, succinctly, and at the allotted hour.

  When he arrives home in the early hours, acting like Puppa, she understands that it is at the behest of Hari. There is a grunt of recognition that he has returned before she rolls over to continue sleep. No, where have you been, shitty arse, as Ma greeted drunk, befuddled, pleased with himself Puppa.

  This is the time to reject simplicity in the face of loss. No more grey, just black and white. Black or White. He wants tears from her, anger, blame. He would rather she laid it all on his door, his taking the eye off the ball, for being so inept in his caring for her, for lacking medical skills and not committing to the required background reading from the moment the test showed positive. He cannot accept all this sitting around and eating cake, even though it was his suggestion. He is ready to hear how he left it all to her.

  Instead, he lashes out at the waitress for bringing dry, stale sponge, not as advertised, and the sandwich on a damp plate which has made the bread soggy and inedible.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you’re having a laugh if you think this is professional catering. Both these plates are an absolute joke. Your next attempt needs to be better than this if you stand any chance of getting the bill paid.’

  The waitress’s shoulders finally relax, enjoying the marked rise in his tone, which is making the other customers shake their teacups nervously, relieved that what she has been waiting for has finally arrived.

  ‘’Mal, don’t.’

  ‘What d’you mean, don’t? Is this acceptable food? Are you happy paying seven pounds for this?’

  ‘This is the way we serve food down here, my dear. No other person has complained about so-called stale cakes to my knowledge. So if you don’t like it, I suggest you clear off.’

  He hears Claud talking to him in a low, vehement tone but does not respond, feeling his genomes putting every single cell into a chokehold. The untutored Indian gene has been allowed to grow rotten within him, ready to fight hostility with hostility. He is ever alert for signs of discord in the day-to-day world, willing to pounce upon sources of hate with their upturned lips and sloppy service until they are ripped to shreds. Others are evolved and can look past milk skin and stale cake, but not him, Neanderthal in his emotional drive. When he suddenly stands up and pushes the offending plates towards the waitress’s face, he acts on impulses that cannot be de-programmed. He is a genetic warrior. He will fight to the death to remove all unwanted aggression.

  When the row is taken indoors, to the kitchen entrance away from the bulk of customers, he is fired-up and feels more alive than he has been all day, alert and ready for a show of strength. The manager is a thin-lipped southern European with a thick carb-fed gut who only wants to diffuse the situation. He looks at the waitress like she is a liability, not needing to hear from any witnesses that she was the first person to start swearing. He only has to look at Amal, arguing to the point of tears, as if every fibre of his being is backing him up. He wants to fight now cry later, but one does not come without the other. In the privacy of the kitchen, away from a waiting Claud, the manager and lippy waitress watch a grown man fall to pieces over two-day-old cake. The bill is waived.

  A dog is crapping outside the gift shop. Its owner, an old girl with thick round sunglasses, tells him to fuck off when he asks her to pick up the mess.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ she says. ‘I don’t tell you how to do things in your country.’

  Claud is looking for something else for Liz. The tartan blankets have been discarded.

  ‘They’ll have to go in the next charity collection. Why did you let me buy that tat? That’s how they get you, the service stations, luring you with their combinations of pretty displays and bad lighting.’

  ‘Is Liz really going to appreciate a Battle tea towel? She’ll have hundreds. We should get going, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘Just wait a minute, Amal. I know you’re still hot and bothered from the café, and want to get out of here, but you’ll have to wait. I need something for my mother.’

  ‘We resolved everything, actually. I’m not worried about being stoned out of town.’

  ‘Your face is red.’

  ‘It was one of those professional kitchens. You know how hot they get.’

  Claud’s face is reddish too; a combined disgust with both him and her defunct motorway purchase. The flush is a good thing, means that her blood is running through her, means strength, although he does not feel that she will welcome the news. Strength equals getting better equals back to normal: mid-thirties, childless, living in a soulless house.

  She takes to a corner that holds the local art; jugs and pots, polka-dotted and looking falsely nautical in their blues, whites, and greens. His time in Battle so far does not share the same bucolic peace advertised by these rough and ready crafts. He cannot help thinking that each flask, tile or pot should have a nail driven through it, or a painted missive saying FROGS OUT, WOGS OUT.

  He is being oversensitive, and a prick; a troublemaker, looking to make ignorant, peaceful lives rattled and unpleasant. He cannot help it. His back is up, hooked like a junkie in the way his chest has been thumping, hard and sharp, ever since he was asked to follow the young fogey waitress down the back to settle his complaint.

  Even in the thick of it, his ears drumming with a sense of insult, he was aware of how the girl’s lips glistened with stray saliva every time she harrumphed in indignation. The wetness of them, as they pursed out, back and forth, surprisingly full and thick, leading to thoughts of what she looked like out of her food-stained tabard, whether he could screw the hate out of her like he’d done with other girls in his bachelor past.

  He is a disgusting pig, a disgrace, but this feeling something, a deep loathing, lust, is unshakeable and continues to power him. He is alive. These sick perversions confirm it.

  There is also a new animation in Claud. Not to say that the act of shopping has awoken something in her, but some aspect of it has played its part, along with the gritty undrinkable milk skin and the sense of purpose in finding something that will surprise and give pleasure to Liz. Maternal approval: a daughter’s greatest battery charger. He should have realized it. There is nothing that a mother’s love is not capable of untangling and putting right.

  She wants one of two paintings that hang on the wall: close oil studies of the castle rock on largish canvases. The thick, crumbly brick packed tightly around a windowless turret shows how time erodes greater than man-made pollutants, appearing on the precipice of decay. But it has been painted pleasingly for tourists, playing with gold dusk light, referring to an unedifying presence, and a vague promise of morning renewal, like the bar drunk’s motto: everything will be all right tomorrow. The painting is untitled but this is what it should be.

  He understands why it makes a good gift for Liz, and recognizes the space on the stair wall where it should hang as Claud describes it. What he cannot make sense of is the stillness he feels as he loo
ks at it. The sensation of his temper slowly diffusing into the brick, absorbed by centuries of stoicism like a stone shock protector, until the heaviness in his upper chest and around his neck dissipates and finally is no longer there.

  They should be giving something more alive, not this dead thing that has drained all his bad impulses. Is this how it will be from now on, presenting dead gifts, stone, metal, abstract, when previously they looked for flowers, plants, and other items designed to warm the soul rather than extinguish it?

  Claud stands on a footstool and half-pulls half-lifts the canvas from the wall, grunting with effort as if she is taking a slab of castle stone with her. The canvas itself is cheaply backed with balsa, light but cumbersome. Even still, something like panic lodges in his throat. She should not be doing this.

  ‘Here. Let me.’

  ‘Get off, ’Mal. I’m fine. Not an invalid yet.’

  They grapple unsurely for a moment, each stubborn to the wishes of the other, standing at either end of the now unhooked canvas fighting for space in the cramped shop – two squabbling removal men. Laurel and Hardy or Morecombe and Wise.

  ‘Let go, I said! You’re going to knock things over the way you’re carrying on.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  ‘Stop mollycoddling me. I don’t need wrapping up in cotton wool. How many times!’

  Her make-up, all four products of it – powder, lipstick, mascara and blush – have made a warrior of her. They are tired of each other, this dance of stepping lightly running its course, now speaking in their office voices, bossy, impersonal and untouched by tragedy. Everyone in the shop has heard.

  ‘Why did you discharge yourself before I got a chance to speak to the doctor?’

  He realizes he is still angry from the café. Nothing in these pastoral arts and crafts or this crappy painting has sedated him. Each wonky piece needles him to the point where it feels like he is lying on a bed of nails. That she is clutching the canvas so tightly, the way he imagines a mother’s hand suctioned onto a toddler’s makes him hate it even more.

  ‘You want to talk about this here?’

  ‘Why not? You’ve already told them that I’m suffocating you, pretty much. I didn’t realize that a man looking out for his wife could be so mortally offensive.’

  ‘It was a busy day for admissions. I told you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just find it hard to believe that they would turf you out on the street before the agreed time, and before a family member arrived. Look at the state of you. Hardly in a fit state to be wandering the hospital left alone.’

  ‘I’ve had a miscarriage. I’m not a mental patient.’

  It is the first time she’s said it. The word clangs around the pottery and metalwork, unclaimed, ringing uncomfortably to nosy ears. Still he is too caught up in his tirade to mark the event, see progress. He only wants to rip the canvas from her and bind her hands so that she is incapable of lifting anything else until she is better.

  ‘They shouldn’t have let you go without seeing me first. They should have seen us together. It was out of order not to.’

  She too speaks quickly, as if talking over him will erase the word, and bring about a collective amnesia. It was a slip of the tongue, not a breakthrough.

  ‘This is the NHS, ’Mal, where the world doesn’t revolve around our little problem. We’re minnows compared to the disease around us. They did what they needed to do. Now it’s your turn.’

  Because everything is about his job, his role in their marriage. He struggles to pinpoint what it is she actually does in theirs, what she brings to the table aside from the born-right of her gender to have the last word.

  ‘You have to take an interest all the time, not just when I’m pregnant.’

  Her accusatory tone forces him into this behaviour. Similar circumstances dictated the late nights at the office or elsewhere during those months when they were supposed to be conceiving. When she spoke and acted like that, unimpressed and dissatisfied with his effort, ready to take him apart with sarcasm, he wanted to be away from her. And for the most part he managed it, dutifully fucking her in the morning when she had reached her optimal internal temperature, necking his pro-biotic and then disappearing to work.

  He knows how this will pan out. When she has recovered her strength, and her tongue, he will be blamed. Neglect of conjugal duties has lost their collection of cells. Staying out late has done this. Lying. He has not paid enough attention to her, has used the wrong detergent on the clothes, has kissed her with warm shellfish breath. If it does not come from her it will fire from Liz and Sam, or even Ma and Puppa. He is the husband. He is not there to be exonerated. It is in the contract.

  She walks out of the shop with the tunnel-vision of a shoplifter. It is left to him to get his card out. The woman at the counter gives him the receipt, a roll of bubble-wrap, and a look of last rites.

  Outside, catching her, a brisk few paces which makes him breathless, she refuses his offer of help, walking ahead of him all the way.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  He does not even try to catch up. It hurt, how her words took physical shape in the air as they were spat out. Part of him hopes she will trip or drop the thing, just so he can be turned to for help, and proved right.

  The BMW is a useless piece of tin crap, squeezing them together in a way that they do not wish to be squeezed. It is a car for couples hooked on contact, who would find roominess in a well or in certain styles of fucking. Common-laws in love, who only feel complete when skin is glued on skin, permeable and permanent.

  Both his car and the Mini Cooper were bought in this spirit, when unions were only ever thought to be happy and unbreakable. Now they need something bigger; a four seater, long and wide. A tank, like the Mercedes S Class, where she can sit at the back and sulk with the painting propped beside her, and he can be left alone, putting his foot down on the series of undulating hills that trail to Lewes.

  The best she can do is wedge the now bubble-wrapped painting between them. From gear stick to ceiling, they are cut off from each other with this mobile Berlin Wall. Only the closeness of the other’s breath, and their scent, can pass through and over flimsy plastic wrap. They cannot see but they can hear: fits and snorts and odd exclamations removed from all recognizable language.

  He hopes that speed will help, that the faster he goes, the quicker their clouds can be shaken off. He is not angry with her, only with himself, suffocating in remorse as thick and impenetrable as the bubble-wrap. His head feels as if it is filled with tiny negative bubbles which need to be popped one by one. Does not listen. Pop. Childish. Pop. Ignorant with no concept of art. Pop. Defective sperm. Pop. Bad choice of husband. Pop. He does not hear her voice until she is in full flow. She is talking on the phone, using his mobile, which lies charging on her side.

  ‘I’ve got Hari waiting on the line, ’Mal. I think you have something to tell him.’

  In his readiness to make allowances, to mourn, he has forgotten what a bitch she can be. If things are not to her liking he will be cut dead guaranteed, from arguing over their choice of supermarket when they first moved in together, to her insistence of being fucked in a yoga position, irrespective of his pleasure, because according to all the literature, it was the best way to conceive. She has this need to be in control of every element or at least to have a well-argued say. Even weather reports are not believed if they do not fall into the scheme of things. It will definitely not rain because it is warm enough for bare legs; there needs to be at least five centimetres of snow because what is the point of spending exorbitantly on getting three pairs of custom-made Uggs shipped over from New Zealand if they cannot be worn before the end of March?

  But phoning Hari is the lowest she has ever sunk, making him feel like a naughty school kid being slapped across the legs for misbehaviour. School ma’am knows best. He hates everything about her slyness, this compulsion she has to put him on the spot.

  Hari is with him, not finding it fun
ny as she does.

  ‘What’s happened? I don’t understand what’s going on.’

  ‘That makes two of us.’

  ‘She said there was bad news. Have things gotten worse?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘You don’t sound like you’re in the hospital, more like a car. Is it an ambulance? Is she being transferred? I heard that some women bleed to death, but not in a hospital surely?’

  Hari’s voice rises with excitement at the prospect of being so close to crisis. Amal pictures his face, consummately metrosexual, expectant, and ready to shoot his load if the details are particularly delicious and nasty. Probably holding a pen in readiness so as not to miss a thing, or speed-dialling on a second phone to reach Ma and Puppa. Even in the tensest moment he can only find this behaviour endearing, worthy of a punch on the arm or a drunken kiss on the forehead. How can he forgive his friend, lurching on the precipice of gossip, and not his own wife? What does that say about his divided loyalties?

  ‘We’ve had a nasty shock, Hari. You should probably sit down.’

  The news he is expected to deliver sticks in his throat, and not just because she is monitoring his every nuance or because he has never been so aware of how comfortable he is with lying, and telling people what they most want to hear. It feels like they are playing with the collection of cells. Pissing on its watery grave. How does indulging in these petty mind games make things any better? None of their behaviour features in the recommended pamphlets on grieving. He hears the sharp intake of breath from the other side of the partition, which tells him that she is not ready to exhale until he has spoken just the way she wants him to. She would probably write cue cards if the painting was not in the way.