The Weightless World (7 page)

She laughs.
Ho ho ho.

Yes, Alice still thinks a deal could happen. She doesn’t know that we’ve come to India without any money – that Resolute gave us a dummy code for a bogus account and we don’t have a company penny. Somehow that detail didn’t quite reach her.

I tell myself I’m protecting her, but it’s not true. I’m protecting myself.

While she thinks I might not lose my job, while she thinks I might come back from my business trip richer than Warren Buffet, richer than Bill Gates…

Still fairly surly, not yet committed to trying to recover the conversation, I say, ‘I got Dan a present.’

‘Lucky Dan. What did you get me?’

‘It’s an elephant. Wooden elephant about yay big.’

‘Yeah, but what did you get me?’

‘I’ve not, uh, as yet…’

‘I’m winding you up. You don’t need to get me anything.’

‘I should probably get going. They’re waiting for me.’

‘Oh. All right.’ She nods, blinks. And an expression comes into her face that I can’t immediately interpret: a sort of barbed blank. ‘Same time tomorrow, or…?’

‘Not sure. Probably not tomorrow. I’ll let you know.’

‘You will? Because where you’re going is… fairly remote, isn’t it?’

‘I’ll think of something. Remember, I’m this capable, reliable guy…’

‘Because this isn’t the last time we’ll speak, is it? While you’re out there?’

‘No, no.’ Is it? I haven’t the faintest idea.

‘You know I’m really not bothered about a present, don’t you? I was winding you up.’

‘Yeah, obviously.’

She blinks at me. ‘And I’m not worried about you. I’m not worried about you
one bit
.’

‘I know. They’re waiting for me…’

Eventually she says, ‘I love you, Baldie.’

And I say, ‘And I love you.’

I told Ess and Asha I would meet them back in the hotel reception area at ten past nine, but by the time I leave my room it’s already half past. I imagine Ess, arms folded, narrow-lipped, tapping his foot on the pavement, while Asha down in the street holds the car with a look of calm vindication. Even so, I can’t bring myself to take the lift and pelt down the three flights of stairs, swinging at the turns, passing blur-faced cleaners who seem to howl with maniacal laughter before I have even left their sight.

I spill out into the reception area, gasping, arms flailing, to find Ess and Asha sitting comfortably on one of the couches along the wall, murmuring and giggling over the pages of a glossy lifestyle magazine. I sit and we all wait another half an hour for our car.

Which turns out to be a stocky all-terrain vehicle with the Adventurers logo on both sides and one of Asha’s colleagues, a smiling young man named Cass, doubling as driver for the night. As we join the traffic Ess, Asha and Cass start up a conversation
full of hooting and unintelligible innuendo that is still in progress twenty minutes later when the Adventurers car halts on a street crowded with well-dressed young people and so brightly lit the night air seems made of clockwork – the moving parts of a million mosquitoes.

Asha leads us to a doorway visible at the end of which is the familiar flaming red hell. The doorman, shaven-headed and ear-ringed, refuses us entry. Asha begins arguing with him, with startling ferocity. Ess and I hold back, crookedly grin at each other, flinch from the whirring mosquitoes. Cass, having parked the car, strides up and joins the argument also. Asha and Cass look as if at any second they’re going to attack the doorman, stab him to death and throw his body into the bay. Clearly, for them, our being refused entry to the club is no mere inconvenience: it’s a slight, a smirching of their honour. At last the doorman falls into a nodding reverie then steps back and opens his arms, ushers us quickly into the club, as if this is what he’s been saying all along.

Inside the doorway we pause by a desk at which Asha pays our admission fee – she doesn’t appear to haggle – then pass on to the edge of a dance floor as frenetic as any of a thousand movie images of Ibiza in season. Over the deafening noise Asha establishes that we don’t want to dance, that we want to drink, and leads us up a flimsy metal staircase into a bar saturated with red light and so busy, every seat occupied, we are forced to become one more group standing uncomfortably round a decorative pillar. Ess and Asha talk inaudibly, cooing into one another’s ear like turtle doves, until Cass brings our drinks and the three of them resume or anyway seem to resume the stream of patter they began in the car. Ess indicates me a couple of times – a pointed finger, a sweeping hand – and Asha and Cass look at me and laugh while I pull a face, or shrug, or take a bow.

After a while I tune out and think about Alice. Why did I hurry our call to an end? Because I was already late, or because I was too busy being annoyed with her – annoyed with her remarks about Marie, with her not being more impressed by my having got Daniel a present? Playing back our conversation, with a silent inner crash I suddenly realise why she was wearing that weird blank expression. It was because she was trying not to cry. Because she already understood what it’s taken me until now to absorb fully: that we may not have another chance to speak while I’m out here. The thought of not seeing her face, not hearing her voice, for who knows how long, drags appallingly in my guts.

I have quite an interesting conversation with Cass. He’s a business student, working part-time for Adventurers, with enormously ambitious career plans (‘If I can’t afford to retire before my thirtieth birthday, I’ll consider myself a failure’). He says that for a long time he felt strange coming to places like this, seeing his peers pretend to be American teenagers, imitating the lifestyle tics of the actors in their favourite cable shows; the clumsiness of the imitation, as much as the playact itself, made him despair. Then, he says, a couple of years ago, one evening he came to this self-same bar, and it was different. The Mumbai hipsters were doing exactly the things they’d been doing before, but their behavior was no longer an act. The imitation was so perfect it wasn’t an imitation any more.

‘That was maybe the happiest night of my life,’ Cass says, folding his arms proudly, leaning against the pillar we’re all standing round. ‘For the first time I felt I could believe in my country, my generation. I thought, “In India, progress truly is possible.”’

He’s kidding, in some sense, though I don’t know which. Nonetheless we both laugh.

Cass returns to the bar for more drinks. As soon as he leaves I notice that Harry has joined us, and is standing deep
in conversation with Ess while Asha plays with the settings of her big antique camera. I stand pretending to take part in Ess and Harry’s conversation, though I don’t take in anything either of them says and notice only the peculiar demeanour that the bar seems to bring out in Harry: rapt, alerted, embattled, with raised eyebrows and gritted teeth, though lacking the old-man, interloper quality you’d expect to see there. At last it occurs to me that he’s enjoying himself – that this seventy-odd year old guy is enjoying the bar more than I am.

Suddenly depressed, or disgusted, or something, I push away from the pillar, scramble through the crowd to a doorway leading out onto a metal balcony overlooking the city lights and the black bay. I light a cigarette, sip my orange juice, blink down at the huge greenish clouds rolling in off the water.

‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’

I look up. Asha has followed me onto the balcony, still handling her camera. When I don’t reply she waves at the green clouds. ‘Pollution. Nasty stuff. But so very picturesque. You should take a photo. Do you have a camera? Or do you use your phone? Go on, take a photo, so you may share this spectacle with friends and family back home.’

‘I don’t need to do that,’ I say.

‘Go on. A beautiful image for your loved ones in England.’

‘No,’ I say.
You don’t like it when women tell you what to do
, Alice said. But she’s wrong about that – of course she is. That would be so… that would make me so…

‘Allow me.’ Asha snaps the view with her museum piece and turns to me, smiling stiffly. ‘There. I’ll keep it for you, in case you change your mind.’

‘I don’t think I will.’

Now she waves at my cigarette, as she did at the green clouds. ‘You can smoke inside. The ban isn’t strictly enforced here. Also, I’m friendly with the owner.’

‘That’s good to know.’ I attempt a conspiratorial grin: ‘Actually, I’m smoking out here because I don’t want my boss to see.’

‘Would Ess disapprove?’

Ess. Not Ray or Raymond or Mr Ess. Ess. As if she knows who he is.

‘Ooh, he’d go mad. He’d kill me.’

‘Interesting. You would rather keep this from Ess than face his disapproval?’

My grin is curdling on my face. ‘I don’t really think it’s a big deal.’

‘Interesting.’ She smiles again. In the dining room at the hotel she seemed distinctly middle-aged. Here on the balcony she looks about nineteen. ‘I’ll have to make a Note to Self. “Steven is a person who keeps secrets from his boss and thinks it is quote no big deal unquote.” I’ll have to remember that.’

‘You do that,’ I mutter, with fairly unmistakable hostility, and she laughs.

‘We’re going to be spending a considerable amount of time together over the next few days. The three of us, Ess, you and me. Don’t you think we should be friends?’

I shrug over my cigarette. I take a last drag then flick the butt from the balcony.

‘Yes,’ she says, in an odd, vigorous undertone. ‘Now you have it.’

For a while neither of us says anything. Asha shows no sign of leaving but returns to fiddling with her camera. I light another cigarette and start to regret having been so nasty to her. But what can I say? What subjects, what ground do we share?

‘I was sorry to hear about the bombing,’ I hear myself say. She doesn’t look up. ‘In Bangalore. I was sorry about that.’

‘Why? Did you do it?’ She laughs softly, still tuning her camera – clicking switches, spinning wheels. ‘Don’t be sorry, Steven. This is India. This is the country that explodes.’

At what I take to be first light I go up to Ess’s room and tap on his door. Hearing a distant groan I enter to find the place in disarray, his suitcase open on the bed and Ess in the bathroom, barely covered by his dressing gown, a bottle of skin-care product in either hand, apparently unable to decide which is his and which the hotel’s. ‘Sorry,’ he keeps saying, ‘bad night.’ At first I’m alarmed by his manic appearance – hair on end, face red and tendrilled – then he laughs, and the picture clears, and I relax. Ess’s mania this morning is that of a man almost intolerably excited, not a man capsizing.

I try to help but it’s soon clear I’m only making him worse. By eight o’clock he’s neither showered nor packed. He tells me to go down and find Asha, apologise to her for his delay; when I ask if I should check out also, he agrees warmly, then grins and says, ‘Look out for the farewell party!’

About ten minutes later I see what he means. The hallways are empty, silent, as I pad back down from Ess’s room to my own; then, the second I step out with my shoulder bag and my suitcase, three porters appear from nowhere, jostling each other in their hurry to assist me. Two reach for my case while the third makes a grab for my bag; I have to keep veering away from them, saying, ‘No thank you,’ then ‘No,’ then ‘I said no.’ I start down the stairs, my case bumping over the runners, banging my legs. At each turn more people seem to be waiting for me. I dodge my way past. I think I see the lift attendant, thinly grinning, stepping in front of me. But I step aside and scuttle down and on, teeth
gritted, dragging my case, looking at no one and shaking my head and saying, ‘No. No. No.’

At last I break out onto the hotel steps. I gasp; I could burst into tears or howl with laughter. An Adventurers car – possibly the same one that ferried us about last night – is parked at the kerb and Asha is loading bottles of water into its boot. In jeans, a white vest and an open white shirt, she moves quickly, lightly. Her face, however, is grey and heavy, the brows clenched, the lips an underslept sneer. She looks as if she’s furious with her dreams, furious with her own night’s sleep.

But I don’t quite read it in time and totter down the steps on watery legs, cackling, ‘Nice try, you bastards! Oh, you
bastards
! Nice
try
!’

‘What are you talking about?’ She looks round dourly.

‘They were piling in,
scrambling
in… every picture-hanger and flower-duster in the place… but did I give them a penny? I did not.’

‘You must be proud of yourself.’

‘As a matter of fact, I am.’

‘Are you sure they weren’t just saying goodbye? Wishing you a safe journey?’

‘Do you think that’s what they were doing?’

‘No.’ She gives a short bark of laughter, shuts the boot of the car and starts past me up the hotel steps.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To pay my good friend the manager for your water and your lunch.’ She smiles, with dazzling insincerity. ‘Would you like to come with me?’

‘Uh, no.’

‘I didn’t think so.’ And she turns and strides up the steps into the hotel.

Half an hour later Asha and I are sitting in the Adventurers car, not speaking, staring out our separate windows, when Ess emerges from the hotel. In a silk cravat, his red leather shoes and shop-new khakis, with expensive-looking wraparound sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, he looks like some dinner-party version of a big game hunter. Additionally he’s crowded by the same three porters who tried to assist me earlier, now carrying his suitcase, satchel and various files and folders to the kerbside and grinning as he passes each a fold of notes. Asha climbs out to transfer Ess’s clobber to the boot. I climb out also then have to stand there while he talks to the doorman, shakes his hand, then laughs and embraces him and tips him also and then tips each and every one of his deadbeat friends.

Finally Ess strides down the steps and sweeps towards Asha and me, waiting by the car. ‘Sorry, sorry!’ He shakes his head, despairing of himself. ‘Happily I’ve good reason to believe we’re primed for the off, so I don’t see why…’ He takes his phone from his pocket, shows us its silently flashing screen, mimes shooting himself through the head and sweeps off up the street, clamping his phone to his face with one hand and displaying all the fingers of the other in a way that means ‘Five minutes’.

Asha packs the boot then shuts it again. She doesn’t climb back into the car. I don’t either and we stand, not speaking, watching Ess take his call at the other end of the street.

I’m about to say something when someone behind us says, ‘Good morning.’

We turn. The someone behind us is Harry. In sandals, combat pants, a sort of utility belt, a smeared T-shirt and a canvas fishing hat. Buckled into a backpack that appears to be wearing him more than he it.

Harry smiles at us. Then he stops smiling. Behind his specs his eyes bulge.

‘He told you, right?’ He looks at Asha, then at me, then at Asha again. ‘Raymond told you I’m tagging along?’

‘What?’ The idea isn’t sinking in so much as standing wall-like in front of me.

‘Didn’t he mention it? I’m coming on the road with you guys.’ Harry lets out a titter.

I glance at Asha. Her whole face is tensely closed. She looks furious – but then, she’s looked like that all morning.

‘No,’ I say to Harry. ‘No, he didn’t mention it, actually.’

A little after ten o’clock, we leave the city.

Asha drives. Ess rocks along next to her in the passenger seat. In the back my knees and I share space with Harry and his backpack, which over the course of the morning seems to get bigger and more complicated, to elaborate itself, to threaten at any moment to become something else entirely – a biplane, a hovercraft.

The city unravels in fits. I keep thinking we’ve left it behind then another chunk of it rears up, glassy, blunt-edged, billowing with vast friezes of comely Indian youth advertising insurance deals and broadband packages. Later it’s hotels with drained pools and Faliraki balconies isolated by brown dust and tobacco-tuft palm trees. Later still, the trestle tables and soft-drinks logos of a derelict market, hulks of abandoned farm machinery reclaimed by the earth. Then the last threads twist apart and we’re speeding along a freeway above bleak wetlands, nothing in sight on either side but watered-down sunshine, nothing ahead or behind but traffic and road.

We’ve been travelling for maybe two hours when I glance round at Harry. All but his face is concealed by his polymorphous backpack. I say, ‘You okay there?’

He doesn’t reply or give any sign that he’s heard me. Sitting straight-backed and gazing keenly ahead, he doesn’t appear to be asleep. It’s crossing my mind that he may be dead when I notice he’s wearing his smartspecs again. No, Harry’s not dead. He’s just watching a movie.

‘Harry?’ I say more loudly. ‘Hello? Anyone in there?’

‘Hello, Steven.’ Harry nods, though the fixed cast of his eyes tells me he’s still doing whatever he’s doing inside his smartspecs.

‘So you decided to come along for the ride then, did you?’

‘I was invited. Raymond invited me.’

I nod for a while. ‘It’s quite a commitment you’re making here, time-wise, isn’t it? Won’t they miss you at the school for wayward girls?’

The corner of his mouth tugs down: he knows I’m messing with him. ‘I think Rajeev can hold the fort.’

‘What about the Adventurers guys? Can they spare you?’

‘I’m sure everyone will get along just fine without me.’ It seems he’s said as much as he’s going to, then he continues in an unfamiliar voice, ‘It’s true, I have a broad range of interests, of “concerns”. And yet the defining quality of my concerns is that most of the time they don’t need me any more than I need them.’

‘
Fantastic
.’ I fall silent, let him reconnect with the contained reality of his specs, then start up again, ‘So you’re having a nice time, Harry?’

‘I’d say I’m having a nice time. Are you having a nice time, Steven?’

‘Oh, I’m having a brilliant time, drinking it all in, the scenery, the spectacle of our immediate surroundings. I can’t believe you’re missing this.’

‘Who says I’m missing it?’

‘You’re watching a movie. You’re watching
Turner and Hooch
.’

He does his shrill, sneezy laugh. ‘I’m not watching
Turner and Hooch
.’

‘You’re watching TV. You’re watching
Happy Days
.’

‘If you must know, I’m uploading video to
National Geographic.
’

‘Video of what?’

‘Of this. Of now. The spectacle of our immediate surroundings.’

This should be pretty interesting, I should want to ask lots of questions about it – but somehow it isn’t, I don’t. And after another moment I turn my face back to the screen of the window, with its high definition, its retina resolution of the streaming world.

We leave the freeway and push on through the streets of a brand-new town, white, still, uninhabited. Harry sits up in his seat, cranes about to catch as many elevations of as many buildings as he can: Indian construction, after all, is his thing, or is one of his things. We see men in hard hats and jumpsuits consulting clipboards and taking panoramic shots of the new buildings with their smartphones. A group of handsomely dressed young women stand in frowning conference next to a van with an outside-broadcast look to it.

Then the town retreats and we pass on through a series of much older conurbations, without tourist colours, with the more sombre, hackled textures of the resident life. Chicken wire and planks and bright paper, scraps of magazines, an endless photomontage. At first I’m struck by the ingenuity, the inexhaustibility of these accommodations, but after a while it all just starts to look aimless. Where does any of this lead – where is any of this going? Somewhere or nowhere, nowhere at all?

About one o’clock we break for lunch. Asha halts the car next to a group of boxy concrete buildings comprising a garage, a shop, and a locked and empty cafeteria. We take turns crossing the stony ground to the toilet, a single cubicle accessible by a separate door at the back of the cafeteria, locked also until Asha talks a key out of the unsmiling, flabby, middle-aged man installed at the shop counter, the only staff member we can find anywhere in the complex.

We eat in the car with the doors open. From the boot Asha brings Ess and me each a bottle of water and a sort of cake box whose flaps pluck apart to reveal the packed lunches prepared for us by her good friend the hotel manager: an apple, a banana, a chocolate bar in an illegible wrapper, a box of mango juice with a straw in its own sachet gummed to the side, and a tinfoil-wrapped block that turns out to be a stack of chutney sandwiches. I eat the banana and the chocolate bar, leave the apple (a great boil of brown in it), try the mango juice then leave that as well. The sandwiches I just stare at forlornly until Harry suggests a trade. His backpack is as well stocked as a picnic hamper, and in exchange for my chutney sandwiches he offers cubes of cheese, slices of ham, a bunch of grapes and a chicken leg. After some thought I decide to let him keep the grapes – I’m not
a
thief
– and get stuck in to the rest.

After lunch there’s a slightly nasty moment between Ess and me. Asha announces that she needs to give the car a final once-over and Ess, Harry and I troop back to the shop to wander its un-air-conditioned aisles and kill time while she works. I’m more or less asleep on my feet, shuffling along behind Harry, when Ess points at my face and, with a zigzagging motion of his fingertip, asks somewhat imperiously, ‘What’s all this?’

I yawn. ‘What’s all what?’

‘You’re red. Burnt to a frazzle. When did you manage that?’

‘Must’ve been yesterday. When we were playing football.’

Ess flinches, incredulous. ‘You played football?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’ Was it? Yes: unbelievably it was only yesterday. ‘With Harry and some guys at his school. While you were resting,’ I add, in a queasy voice.

‘Well, that’s… And your back was all right, was it?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘You didn’t have any pain?’

I yawn again. ‘Didn’t seem to be a problem.’

‘Well. That’s… Anyway, you’re burnt. You need to wear a hat. Buy a hat.’

‘From here?’

‘They sell hats.’ He points: a skinny, skew-whiff display stand hung with flops of nylon like decayed fruit. ‘Buy a hat.’

‘I’m not buying…’

‘This isn’t a discussion. Do it,’ Ess spits at me – literally spits at me, lips sparking, eyes throbbing. And for a second I see it again, it blinks on in his cheek again: the graph-paper scar with its ghostly incised lines. Then he turns, his whole face a grey heavy beak, and he struts out of the shop and back across to the car.

The traffic briefly thickens, a braying mass of cattle trucks and tourist buses, and then drains from the road one vehicle at a time. Soon the Adventurers car is the only moving object visible in any direction. Outside the marks of human presence fade away, the remote huts and loose-staked plots, giving way to vertiginously open space, rough and stubbled distance. I try to make out the furthest thing to be seen: a smudgy skyline, like a chute of collapsed smoke. Hills? Mountains? Clouds? A monsoon?

Fairly patiently I wait for the towns to come back, the villages, the huts and plots. An hour later I’m still waiting. The emptiness extending from either side of the road, the scale of it, the eerie, scooped-out quality, the electromagnetic concavity, brings a
trickle of terror. It’s like hanging upside-down from monkey bars; it’s like lying on your back, staring into the sky and imagining what would happen if at just that second the earth gave up its gravity and let you go, let you fall and fall and fall into the waiting blue.

It’s something after five when we get our next break. The instant Asha stops the car, in what looks like the dusty middle of nowhere, Ess thrashes out of the vehicle and stumps away along the side of the road, his phone again clamped to his ear. Diplomatically Asha props open the car’s bonnet and goes about repeating the checks she made less than three hours ago. Harry wanders off somewhere to relieve himself. I do the same and when I get back find myself hanging round Asha at the front of the car, peering over her shoulder, taking little steps towards her then little steps away.