Adam's Peak Page 12

  Virtually everyone on the plantation knew about Amitha’s handicap, though they rarely acknowledged it. Alec, for his part, understood that his favourite taster couldn’t hear properly. But he wasn’t bothered by it—unlike Ernie, who once pointed out that deaf people in places like England and America could actually go to school and learn to have regular conversations using their hands. Ernie listened to Amitha’s strange animal grunts and felt pity; Alec didn’t. As he saw it, Amitha was perfectly content with his lot in life. The fact that he couldn’t carry on a conversation seemed of little consequence.

  Alec stuck his head through the tasting room door, but Amitha wasn’t there. The two tasters hovering over the refuse urn were sullen-faced and serious, and the frowns they projected in the direction of the door were not, Alec was quite certain, comments on the quality of the tea.

  He considered going home to listen to the short-wave. Alec liked wars, and over the past three or four years he’d spent hours next to the radio, digesting tantalizing reports of air raids and dogfights, the D-Day invasion, and, best of all, the Allies’ thrilling run-ins with the Japanese air force and navy, close enough to home to present a genuine and serious danger. But the war was growing old and flat. The Nazis had been all but trounced, and reports on the Japanese no longer prickled with the possibility of a comeback. Alec wished he were in England or France; at least they’d been bombed. He kicked the red dirt of his maddeningly tranquil homeland then followed the shade of the factory’s wall to the backside of the building, searching for something of interest.

  6

  IN HIS DREAM, Rudy is back on Morgan Hill Road. He’s crouching in the bushes, watching Clare Fraser and her friends run through the sprinkler on the Frasers’ front lawn. They’re playing a complicated sort of cricket game. Clare is wearing a skirted swimsuit the colour of the sea, and the water curls over her as she bats. Rudy’s mother, enormously pregnant with the brother he’s been waiting for forever, is vacuuming the lawn.

  “Rudy, don’t be shy,” she says. “Go and play with the other children. I’ll be close, close.”

  He shakes his head, not simply because he’s a grown man but rather because he has forgotten how to play cricket. He’ll make a fool of himself.

  The day is boiling, however, and the fan of water surging from the sprinkler suddenly doubles in size and cascades like a fountain. No longer intimidated, Rudy gets up and crosses the street. Clare greets him at the edge of her lawn. She’s an adult now, and the neckline of her swimsuit plunges extravagantly between her breasts. She’s dark, like a Sri Lankan, but Rudy knows she is Clare.

  “Are you coming in?” she says. Her accent is Scottish.

  His eyes meet hers. “Do you want me to?”

  She nods. He’s desperately aroused, but as he fumbles with his belt, he notices that across the street his parents and sister are now in a flurry of activity, packing the car as if for a long vacation. There’s luggage all over the place. His mother waves to him.

  “Rudy, come! It’s time for you and your sister to go to the Pereiras’.”

  Clare eyes him uncertainly.

  “They’re my parents’ friends,” he mumbles. “I have to go. It’s my damn brother.”

  He starts back across the street, but then he is at Mrs. Pereira’s kitchen table with his father and sister, and everything is horribly real—more memory than dream.

  Dad, sitting between Rudy and Susie, massages his forehead with his fingers. He inhales deeply, exhales loudly, then rests his palms on the table. “Your brother was born last night,” he says. “He’s strong and healthy.”

  Rudy stares down at his bowl of soggy cornflakes, trying to will himself away from the oppressively familiar scene.

  “There were problems with the birth,” Dad continues, wearily. “It was—”

  “But you said the baby’s okay,” Susie interrupts, her voice a shaky whisper.

  Dad looks at her, then at Rudy. When he finally answers, it is as if he has jumped from a cliff or a high diving board, hurtling straight-on, with no possibility of turning back. “The problems were with Mum. She suffered terrible bleeding after the baby came out. It was nighttime and there weren’t enough doctors.” Then, like a slap against a hard sheet of water: the news.

  Rudy flinches. He struggles to remind himself that he already knew—that he has lived with this unthinkable announcement for years and has grown to accept it. But the room is suddenly full of noise, and he isn’t certain whose death his father has just announced. Dad suddenly looks far too old for it to have been Mum’s, and in any case they’re no longer in the Pereiras’ kitchen but in their own, with everyone exclaiming over Aunty’s cooking.

  Rudy shouts across the room to his father. “Dad! What did you just say?”

  Dad doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. The kitchen is becoming more and more crowded and chaotic, but Adam isn’t there. Rudy turns in circles, searching for his brother, calling his name. Then he appears in the living room. Draped in a turquoise sari with gold embroidery, he looks strangely beautiful. He combs his fingers through his hair and smiles.

  “Everything’s okay, Rudy,” he says.

  Rudy gasps and laughs. “You’re really okay? You’re out of danger?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Adam steps forward, arms outstretched. Rudy advances to hug his brother, but his father gets there first. Stroking Adam’s cheek with his finger, Dad addresses the crowd of people in the kitchen.

  “The baby will make everything better,” he says. “Look—he has his mother’s eyes.”

  Rudy crosses the living room to the window. Clare, a child again, is sitting alone on her front lawn, and he waves his arms, trying to get her attention.

  A BARKING DOG WOKE HIM. It wasn’t yet dawn, and the room was still mercifully dark. For a second, maybe two, he lay in relaxed oblivion, before the news of the previous day once again hijacked his thoughts: Adam crashed his motorcycle. He’s in a coma. No room for anything else. Rudy mashed his face into the pillow and tried to slip back into the shelter of his dream, but it was no use. The full weight of consciousness avalanched down on him, bringing with it all the impossible details of his father’s phone call. A van on the Boulevard ... a patch of ice ... the General. Adam in a coma. What the hell was a coma, anyway, he wanted to know. He imagined his brother lying under the glare of hospital lamps, his vital signs registered in sharp peaks and blips on a screen next to him. He tried to picture Adam’s face, but the one he saw was Kanda Selvarajah’s, calm and tidy.

  Though it wasn’t yet six o’clock, Rudy rolled onto his back and threw off the sheet. He needed to get away from Aunty’s house. If he went out for a few hours and separated himself from the crisis, things could happen. Dad could call and say that everything was okay, that Adam had woken up. He’d be in the hospital a few days—broken collarbone, a cast on his arm, a beast of a headache—but fine. Rudy’s life could return to the path it was on before, the one where he made decisions and choices, and those were the things that determined the shape of his days.

  He yanked a section of the mosquito net from under the mattress and ducked out of his gauzy tent. As he fumbled in semi-darkness for the school clothes he’d left draped over a chair, his head throbbed dully—a budding hangover from the shots of arrack he’d downed before bed. His cotton shirt and trousers were hopelessly wrinkled and in need of a wash, but he buttoned and zipped nonetheless. With his face stubbled and the shirt left hanging out, the sloppiness would look deliberate. He checked his knapsack for his wallet and diary, then, thankful for the polished cement that didn’t creak underfoot, he crossed the bungalow to the back garden.

  A cat meowed as he stepped outside. He shooed it away, and the dim yard fell silent. Inside the shower enclosure, he brushed his teeth at a small tap sticking out of the shower pipe. Up and down in rapid, vigorous strokes, he worked his way around his mouth, increasingly aware of the stunning complexity of what he was doing. It was a remarkable feat, really—the transf
ormation of an intention, an intangible thing, into a precise and concrete action. He wondered vaguely how it happened. He wondered how the hell he’d ever managed to ride a bicycle, or put together the bookshelves in his old apartment.

  He spat into the drain on the cement floor.

  “Goddammit, Adam.”

  He wished there were a God. Someone he could reason with, or cut a deal with. Look, he’d say, my family’s had more than its share, don’t you think? I know we’re not living in a Calcutta slum or anything. But relatively speaking? Could you just spare my father at least? I’ll pick up the slack. Give me some hellish students, or malaria or something. He stared into the drain. Of course, if there were a God, it was entirely possible that Adam’s accident was a punishment—not Adam’s punishment, but Rudy’s. He’d been a lousy older brother. He’d blown countless opportunities, and God was fed up. No more chances for you, asshole, He was saying, and it wasn’t hard to sympathize. Still, Rudy suspected that if there was indeed a being capable of reversing his circumstances, it wasn’t a pissed-off Old Testament Jehovah. Rather, it was some version of Lady Fortune from the Dark Ages. Fickle, blind, and deaf.

  He rinsed his mouth with a handful of water and shook out his toothbrush. Then he splashed his face, over and over, as if to sluice away the previous twenty-four hours. The water was cool and fresh, but inadequate. He wrenched the tap shut, then slipped back into the kitchen, where he scribbled a note to his aunt and swallowed three Aspirins. It was strange that Aunty wasn’t up yet, but a relief. When he left the house again, he closed the front door noiselessly behind him. Desperate to be away, he jogged up the lane to Vaththe Mawatha.

  The sun was up, but still timid, and the air was comfortable, not yet crowded with the noises and smells and stifling heat that the day would produce. Rudy walked in the shadows with his hands in his pockets, his untucked shirt bunched at his waist. It could have been an ideal morning. The train to the city would be empty, or nearly. The hoppers and tea at the shop near Fort Station would be fresh and hot, and there’d be an unoccupied bench, in the shade.

  Nearing the main junction, he noticed that there was a surprising number of people out walking, all of them dressed up. A young man, whom Rudy recognized but couldn’t name, waved from across the street.

  “Happy Easter!”

  He’d completely forgotten, of course. These people in their Sunday clothes were off to Easter Mass, and it occurred to him then that his aunt, too, had probably chosen the quiet dawn Mass over the more chaotic ordeal that would happen later in the morning. Rudy forced a smile and waved to his neighbour. Then he carried on to the train platform. As he purchased his ticket, the church bell issued an insistent chime, and for a moment he considered abandoning his plan and making a dash for St. Anne’s. But then the rails thrummed, and the approaching train obliterated the call to worship. He boarded the last car and found a seat, far away from other passengers.

  He dozed for much of the journey. When the train finally drifted into Fort Station, he woke from scattered dreams to find that his car had nearly filled. There were several families and groups of young men, everyone now talking loudly and gathering parcels. Directly across from Rudy was a backpacker, a woman with white-blond hair fastened in a thick plait. She was reading a guidebook that seemed to be in German, or maybe Dutch. Rudy glanced down at his own knapsack, with the maple leaf stitched next to the brand name, and guessed that the woman had sat near him deliberately. He looked like a traveller—grubby and tired.

  The train squealed to a halt. Looking up from her book, the woman squinted out the window and frowned. Her expression suggested that she hadn’t been here before, and that the vast, shadowy interior of Fort Station was to her mysterious and vaguely threatening. She reached across the enormous backpack perched on the seat next to her and crammed her guidebook into a side pocket. She had an astonishing number of pockets, Rudy noticed. Her tan trousers sported at least eight of them, and even her grey T-shirt had a zippered pocket across the front, like a kangaroo. She seemed entirely self-contained, as if everything she needed on her journey could find a place in one of her innumerable pockets.

  Rudy stayed in his seat, waiting for the noisy day trippers to finish spilling out. The woman, he assumed, was waiting for the same thing. Her fingers played with the beaded choker around her neck, and Rudy imagined with envy the small worries crowding her mind: Would she find a taxi driver who wouldn’t rip her off ? Would the guest house she’d selected be clean enough? Would it have a room for her? Would this city prove to be what she’d expected, to have what she was looking for, or would it ultimately disappoint? She turned away from the window and her eyes met Rudy’s. They both smiled—distracted, partial smiles.

  When the aisle had cleared, the woman manoeuvred her backpack to the end of the bench. Rudy watched as she squatted and slipped her arms through the straps. He noticed the contour of her biceps and the strip of pale belly that appeared when she raised her arms. She straightened up and fastened the hip belt of her pack, smiling once more in Rudy’s direction—more generously, he thought, as if she’d somehow understood something of his situation. He liked the idea, and it occurred to him that if it were possible—if such a thing could be requested of a stranger—he would ask the woman to go with him to the snack shop. He’d order tea and hoppers for the two of them, then he’d sit beside her on the bench, and together, not talking, they’d watch the rush of city life, connected only by their shared train journey. But of course he couldn’t ask such a thing from this woman.

  He got up, shouldering his small knapsack.

  “Are you from Canada?” the woman said.

  Rudy hesitated. “Yes ... originally,” he said. “Sort of. And you?”

  “I’m from Denmark.”

  “Is this your first time in Colombo?”

  He followed the woman down the narrow passage, his eyes fixed on the collection of small flags she’d stitched to her backpack.

  “No. I was here two weeks ago, then I went travelling in the South.” Her accent was almost English—just an occasional intonation that rang peculiarly.

  “And now? Are you staying in the city?”

  “I thought I’d go to Adam’s Peak. There’s supposed to be a really beautiful view from the top. Have you been there?”

  Rudy swore silently to himself. “No. Not yet.”

  They’d left the train and were now standing on the empty platform. The families and groups of young men had hurried away, perhaps to board the train to Hatton, where it was possible to catch a bus to the base of Adam’s Peak.

  The Danish woman eyed Rudy’s knapsack. “Where are you staying?”

  “I live here,” he answered, his tone more defensive than he’d intended. “Out in the suburbs.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “So you moved here from Canada?”

  “I was born here. My family immigrated when I was a kid, then I moved back.”

  “Then you’re an authentic Sri Lankan!” she exclaimed, and Rudy detected in her expression a blossoming attraction, a predictable route that their encounter could follow.

  He frowned, then laughed. “I don’t know what the hell I am.” He started walking, and the woman walked with him. “Do you need to find a place to stay?” he said.

  “I was going to get a room at Adam’s Peak. My book says they have some rest houses there, at the bottom. Do you know anything about these places? Is it easy to get a room?”

  He thought about lying—telling her the guest houses would be full by the time she got there, or that most of them had already shut down for the season. Heading away from the Hatton platform, toward the exit, he rubbed his stubbled chin.

  “I’m not really sure,” he finally said. “I’ve never been up there. But I know a place here in town that would store your backpack for you—it’s safe—then you wouldn’t have to schlep it along with you. You could just take a few things.”

  The woman considered this for a moment, and it seemed that once again
there was an understanding between the two of them. His last comment, Rudy hoped the woman would infer, was an offer—to take her to a guest house, to tell her a story or two from his childhood, and, provided all went reasonably well, to have sex with her. By noon, she would have an authentic Sri Lankan experience she could take back to Denmark; he’d have escaped his own thoughts for a couple of hours. And, possibly, his father would have called.

  “That sounds like a good idea,” the woman said. “Where is this place?”

  They agreed to walk the two or three kilometres to the family-run hotel on Slave Island. It belonged to the brother of one of Rudy’s colleagues, a man he’d heard about but never met. Rudy offered to carry the woman’s backpack, and to his surprise she accepted. He gave her his own bag and hoisted the backpack, grateful for the distraction of physical work. As they walked, he told her harmless stories of his grandfather’s tea estate, of floating paper boats on the Kelaniya River, of rescuing his sister from the edge of Aunty’s well. He started to tell her about school, and Kanda, then he stopped himself and asked the woman what she did back in Denmark. Physiotherapy, she said, though she’d just recently finished her training and hadn’t yet found a position. She wondered if there were job opportunities in Canada, and Rudy said he didn’t know.

  When they arrived at the hotel, the woman looked at her watch and decided it would be best to postpone the rest of her journey till the next morning. She took a room and asked Rudy if he’d mind carrying her backpack up the stairs. He agreed, provided she’d let him use her shower. She said it was strange that the heat affected him so terribly, considering he was a native. Then she smiled.

  The room was bare but clean, with white walls, a small window, and a pink mosquito net knotted over a pink single bed. Rudy came out of the bathroom with a scratchy pink towel around his waist. The woman had gone back downstairs for two bottles of orange Fanta, one of which she offered to him. He took it from her and sat at the end of the bed.