Back at the hotel Ess says he thinks he will spend the afternoon resting in his room, and suggests I do the same. This time I don’t fight him. My shoulders feel locked in an unbreakable hunch and I can barely ungrit my teeth long enough to say I’ll meet him for dinner. As I head up the stairs – the needle-pain in my back still being infinitely preferable to riding up in the lift alone with the thin-grinning attendant – Ess lingers at the reception desk. I suffer no illusion about his ‘resting’. No doubt he’ll spend the afternoon chatting up as many of the staff members as will let him, pressing the flesh of the other guests, holding court in the dining room.
In my room on the third floor I shut the curtains, strip naked and lie spread-eagled on the bed. For a while I listen to the soft throb of the air-conditioning, the raucous gossip of the birds outside the window, the restless click-click-click of the needle in my back. Then I lie spread-eagled on the floor. I fall asleep and wake up surrounded by shadows. In the bathroom, as this morning, I can’t work out how to make the intercom-like apparatus over the bath dispense hot water. My second cold shower of the day. My hair is turning to cardboard but I feel savagely alert. As I change into a shirt and jeans for dinner, I notice that the pain in my back has pretty much disappeared.
The Ess I meet on the roof terrace is a gloomy Ess indeed. We’ve had a setback, he tells me. Asha has called. Her current job – the one with the Spanish clergymen – has overrun and she won’t be able to join us this evening after all. In fact she won’t be able to join us until tomorrow evening at the earliest. While he tells me this he moves his arms lightly, airily, but the disappointment bears down on him, compressing his eyelids and lips.
For Ess the news is a double blow. As much as he’s keen to begin the next leg of our journey, I know he’s been looking forward to seeing Asha again. Since his return from India last year, he’s had a great deal to say about Asha Jarwal, about her professionalism, her fearlessness, her no-nonsense strangeness. Almost daily he has recalled for me his first meeting with her, at the office of the Adventurers tour operators, where (he insists) it was immediately evident that she was in charge, despite her being the company’s youngest, and only female, employee. He recalls that when he approached her at the reception desk, in a clanging, whirring Colaba back street, she glanced up from the report she was jabbing into an old-fashioned desktop, silenced him with a raised finger and a brusque hiss – he acts it out for you, the finger, the hiss – jabbed into place the final characters of her report, printed it out of a choppy printer, frowningly reviewed it, smartly filed it in an adjacent cabinet and then turned and smiled at him with beaming courtesy, as if she had only that second seen him. ‘Like the woman who raised her finger and hissed at me and the one who smiled at me were two completely different people,’ he will say, admiringly. ‘Pure Asha!’
I feel terrible for him. But at the same time I’m delighted. The news that we won’t be venturing into the countryside at first light is indescribably wonderful. Nonetheless I work hard to keep a glum look on my face over dinner, throughout which Ess attempts crestfallen little bursts of conversation. Then we sit for a while with our coffees watching the sky darken and the lights of the city come out, a vast brilliant web growing quickly more complicated.
‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘at least tomorrow we can have another stab at finding a nice gift for your Alice.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I agree enthusiastically. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Have you talked to her? Since we arrived?’
‘We said maybe we’d Skype. About nine-ish. Allowing for the time difference.’
He squints at his watch. ‘It’s nearly nine now.’
‘… Is it?’
‘Go on, scoot. Speak words of love to your Darling.’
Alice and I met, very boringly, through friends.
To be precise, Alice met me through a friend, and I met her through a colleague. A few years ago there was a keen bean in admin called Guy who kept trying to organise work socials: after-hours drinks, weekend walks, all sorts of crap I wasn’t interested in. I formed the habit of deleting Guy’s all-staff emails as soon as they appeared in my inbox, but at last he wore me down and one Friday night I found myself with a bunch of the admin kids in the worst bar in Yeovil. Some of the girls had brought friends, and one of these friends was Alice. A peculiar effect of the bar – the lights, something at the molecular level – forced the two of us into a corner, where I remember we had a pleasant conversation, and where Alice remembers she took the piss out of me for three hours.
‘You just took it,’ she says, ‘just stood there and took it. Hour after hour. Unbending. Unflinching. How could I fail to take pity on you? It was so sweet.’
‘It wasn’t sweet,’ I try to tell her. ‘I just didn’t know what you were doing.’
‘And all that time I was thinking you were so not my type. And that’s true, isn’t it? You are so not my type.’
For the last two months we’ve shared an attic flat in Hawks Rise. It’s the same flat I started renting seven years ago, when I got a job at Resolute and realised I had a weekend to find somewhere to live. Alice tells me the place is far nicer than I deserve, and regularly scolds me for not making the most of it. And so for the last two months she’s been making the most of it – putting in new blinds, putting down new floors, replacing the bed, replacing the cupboards. At present we’re deadlocked over the couch. She wants a new one. I don’t see much wrong with the one we’ve got. ‘But it’s a ghost couch,’ she wails. ‘You can’t sit on it, you just fall right through it. You sit down and it’s like there’s nothing even there.’
She may be right. Alice is very clever. She’s twenty-six, she has a PhD in Politics (Dr Alice Darling) and she teaches at Exeter University. She’s taught there for five years on a knotted string of part-time, fixed-term contracts. Currently she lectures two mornings a week and says fairly often that if the university doesn’t give her anything better soon she’s going to lose her mind and ‘just blow the fucking place up’.
Oh, and she’s beautiful. Did I mention that? She’s beautiful.
One night about a month ago Ess came to the Hawks Rise flat for dinner. It was the first, and to date only, time he and Alice met. He brought a bottle of wine, which he and Alice drank, and Alice made spaghetti Bolognese. I was horribly nervous, but Ess and Alice quickly settled into a favourite-uncle, favourite-niece sort of rhythm and sat talking warmly at the table, Ess surprisingly restrained, modest, moving his brows and smiling gradually as he spoke, Alice gamely listening and twisting the ends of her hair, the really blonde bits, the bits that are practically white. Afterwards she said she thought he was a remarkable man and she didn’t know why I’d had to be such a gibbering wreck all night.
I was pleased; also irritated. Alice thought Ess was remarkable, but only because of how well he was doing, how bravely fighting his illness, how valiantly battling his demons. She’d never known him when he was really remarkable. Which, as far as I was concerned, was the whole point. She should have thought he was remarkable not because he was struggling to overcome a mental collapse but because he was a remarkable man.
Back in my room on the third floor, I keep my Skype date with Alice.
The software’s unfamiliar – neither of us has used it before – but promptly at nine Alice’s grinning contact photo appears in the Skype icon surrounded by aquatically pinging circles, impact rings. I tap the photo and all at once there she is.
‘Hello, Darling!’
‘Hello, Jug-head!’ A reference to my ears, which are not fortunate. An equally likely greeting would be ‘Hello, Baldie!’ – a reference to my supposedly delusional belief that I’m going bald. Only it’s not delusional. For at least six months my hairline has been thinning, withering, turning to feathers and soot. ‘Good grief, I can see you! Your funny little face, your fizzy little eyes…’
‘And I can…’ Then I can’t, her face smearing about in the screen. Sitting on the bed, my tablet laid across my raised knees, I wait until she’s got herself good and comfortable on the ghost couch in our Hawks Rise flat. Finally the laptop sways to a standstill in her lap and there she is, again, grinning, clever, beautiful, looking as if she may cry.
‘How are you, then? Is it shocking? Have you been deeply shocked?’ She laughs. Alice’s laughter is quite a thing, not at all the sound you’d expect to come out of her. It is a boom, a lusty and barrelling ho ho ho. She actually sits there and says, ‘ho, ho, ho’. Like she’s Father Christmas or something.
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘It’s…’ But I’ve no idea what it is, so I just shrug and say, ‘It’s okay. How about you?’
‘I’m fine. Just working.’ Her appearance – chunky non-retro specs, hair tied up in a rubber band, porridge-coloured sweater – tells me she doesn’t mean working as in rushing about campus, delivering lectures and leading seminars, but working as in sitting at her desk with her laptop and her papers and her books, as in thinking. This, I know, is what Alice considers to be her real work: her vocation, her calling.
‘Anything interesting?’
‘I could tell you, but you literally wouldn’t understand the sounds I was making. It’d be like another language to you. Alien clicks and gutturals. Anyway, it’s boring, let’s not talk about it.’ I know also that she doesn’t mean this, that Alice doesn’t for one second believe her work is boring, but I nod and smile anyway. ‘I’ll probably call it a day in a bit, go over and see Dan. Any messages, or…?’
‘Tell him I’m drinking gallons of the water,’ I say.
‘Oh, no!’
‘Gallons of it. Straight out of the tap. And I feel amazing.’
‘He won’t think that’s funny. He’ll just think you’re a dick.’
When Alice’s brother Daniel found out I was travelling to India he spent a lot of time on his computer researching the country, then a lot of time afterwards telling me that as long as I got the recommended shots I would probably be okay as long as I didn’t drink the water. He printed out for me about ten pages of traveller’s advice that all converged in the view that if I ate a leafy salad I was as good as dead. Even in the taxi to the airport I’d got his text: ‘Have a nice time but do NOT drink the water.’ Dan is seventeen and he goes to a boarding school in Exeter. He has MS and no one thinks he’ll see twenty.
Obviously, I’m kidding about my drinking from the tap. Bottled water is my constant companion. And I’m actually less worried by the water than I am by mosquitoes – airborne hypodermics crammed full of malaria. But I’ve been brittled with repellent since the plane, and I take my pill twice a day. I have a net, too, though I’ve not used it yet.
Alice says, ‘And how’s the Grand Poobah?’
‘Ess? He’s having the time of his life. I’ve never seen him so happy.’
‘Are you having the time of your life too?’
‘I’m okay.’ I should leave it at that. But instead I say, ‘Maybe a bit worried about where everything’s leading.’
‘Oh really? Why? You’re doing what you can. What else can you do?’
‘Nothing.’ I give a trembly sort of shrug. ‘There’s nothing else I can do.’
‘And you don’t know. It may be all right. Everything may just… turn out all right.’
‘How is everything just going to turn out all right?’
‘You don’t know. Maybe you’ll get there, and you’ll meet this Tarik bloke, and he’ll show you this machine of his, and… you know… it’ll work.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’
‘But you don’t know, do you?’ Apart from the very first second after I told her about it (‘Ess wants to go to India to buy an antigravity machine’), Alice has maintained an annoying agnosticism on the subject. I’m fairly sure she does it only because from the start I was so definite in my own view (that it’s bollocks – a madman’s dream, a psychotic’s folly). So she wavers, she prevaricates. ‘Who does know any more? These days it’s not obvious what’s possible. Maybe there was a time when everyone knew what was possible and what wasn’t, but we bloody well don’t now. Every other day there’s some sparkly new gizmo, and we all stand round and go Aaah, and ten minutes later it’s just one more fucking thing taking up room in your coat pocket. Look at what we’re doing now. This is videophone, yeah? This is science fiction. This is Blade Runner.’
‘You pulled such a face…’
In the very first second after I told her about it, Alice crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out – hilarious lunacy.
‘Yes I did, but you know since then I’ve had time to reflect…’
Someone knocks on my door.
‘… And I just think it’s not clear any more, the line’s blurred, the ground’s shifted…’
The knock comes again.
‘Someone’s knocking on my door,’ I say.
‘Does that mean you have to go, or…?’
‘That means I have to go.’
‘I love you, Jug-head.’
‘I love you too.’
In the hallway outside my room Ess is waiting. His gloom of half an hour ago has vanished. He’s excited, animated, his eye crinkles beaming.
‘We’re going out,’ he says. ‘Harry called. Drinks at the Oberoi. Are you ready?’
Outside the hotel Ess hails a yellow-hooded cab and we tear away from the kerb straight into the worst traffic jam I’ve ever experienced. Several miles’ worth of motionless vehicles thud their horns as if speaking to each other, as if drolly discussing the blockage ahead. I feel we must be only seconds from catastrophe – shattering windscreens, exploding engine blocks. Nonetheless our driver is calm. Squashed against me on the backseat, Ess peers out at it all cheerfully. I know what he’s thinking: We’re putting an end to the wheel. No more cars. No more traffic jams. No more road accidents. No more roads…
By the time we break free of the jam we’ve left behind the neon squiggles of the city centre and we’re speeding through a district of quiet residential streets – spruce greenery, high walls – then without warning the cab swerves out on to a spectacular coastal road, the Arabian Sea colossally massed on one side, corporate height and glitter arrayed on the other. ‘The Queen’s Necklace,’ Ess confides knowledgeably. ‘Marine Drive. Playground of India’s hyperrich.’ His breath smells thickly of alcohol. He must have had a drink or two – or three, or four – on the roof terrace after I left to Skype Alice.
We leave the cab at the edge of a complex approach system and Ess leads the way into the ethereal enormousness of the Oberoi, the wide spaces serving no visible purpose, a dish of flawless white pebbles here, a freestanding screen of trickling glass there. The place is so luxurious it seems impossible that we’re not going to get kicked out. But Ess goes recklessly striding on and somehow we pass unchecked to a dim bar high above the city, its windows encompassing the splintery sickle of the lighted district below.
‘Raymond! Steven!’ Harry lumbers towards us with open arms. He’s dressed more smartly than he was this morning, in a tweedy brown suit and a checked shirt and bootlace tie, but just the same he looks as if he’s been awake for about fifteen minutes. At least the specs he’s wearing are just specs, wire-rimmed, prescription-lensed.
‘Isn’t this place something?’ he says, once we’re seated at a table with our drinks – his beer, Ess’s whisky, my orange juice. ‘I love it, but it scares the hell out of me. I can only muster the courage to bring myself up here like once every six months. So I thought while you fine fellows were in town…’
‘Oh, it’s magnificent,’ Ess declares, somewhat boorishly, ‘but Harry, you and I must be mindful of my young associate.’ He presents me, with a flourish, as if I were a sideshow exhibit. ‘Remember, this is Mr Strauss’s first visit. His head must be spinning. If we keep swatting him from one extreme to another like this, he may end up feeling overwhelmed.’
Harry looks at me. ‘Are you feeling overwhelmed, Steven?’
I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I say anyway, ‘It’s a lot to take in.’
‘We don’t want him running away with the idea that’s all there is to the place, do we?’ Ess says. ‘Inequitable extremes. Filthy poor and filthy rich.’
‘What place are we talking about now?’ Harry asks, all wide-eyed innocence in his clunky prescription lenses. ‘Mumbai? Maharashtra? India?’
‘Mumbai. I would say Mumbai, certainly.’
‘Sure.’ Harry sips his beer. ‘Though I do think it’s kind of like that.’ He looks at Ess, then at me, then at Ess again. ‘Extremes. Rich and poor. I think that’s kind of the deal.’
‘Harry!’ Ess laughs. ‘We need to educate this young man. It’s our duty, is it not, as his elders and… well, as his elders at least.’ He veers across the table towards Harry in a way that makes me wonder just how many drinks he had while I was talking to Alice. ‘Today we took a stroll along the causeway, and for some time we were shadowed by the most adorable wee beggar girl. Nothing out of the ordinary, but you should have seen this young man’s face! Oh, the pain, the torment! So you see, Harry, it’s nothing less than our duty to explain to him…’
‘Yes, sir,’ Harry says, folding his arms. ‘Uh, what are we explaining?’
‘The complex reality at work here. Certainly to the naïve eye it may appear that the city shows intolerable economic extremes, but that’s only the surface. It is, let’s say, even a form of theatre. The forlorn beggar girl trailing along the street makes for a heart-rending sight, and indeed the heart of many a tourist is rent, and many a guilty rupee ends up folded into that tear-stained little hand. But it’s theatre, is it not? The beggar girl is an actress. She lives in a perfectly decent home on the outskirts of Mumbai and she works for an entrepreneur who drives her to the causeway each day, fits her into her costume, daubs on her adorable smuts, even sources her props. Dozens of them, these wee actresses, walking round with babies in their arms which at the end of the day they hand back with their earnings. Which our canny entrepreneurial friend, let’s not doubt, eagerly adds to his Kalashnikov fund.’ Ess sits back, pleased with the comprehensiveness of his analysis. ‘It’s not poverty, not poverty as such. It’s a business. It’s a trick.’
For some time Harry has been nodding, as if in vigorous agreement. Then he says, ‘When I first came out here I thought that way. Now I just think, “Poor’s poor”. I think, “What the hell. Give money”.’
Ess is speechless. Then he says, ‘But that’s ludicrous.’
‘You’re right.’ Harry makes his open-armed surrender gesture again. ‘It’s a trick, an illusion. What did you say? It’s theatre. Last time I checked, people pay for that, right? For entertainment and all?’
For a moment Ess looks appalled. Then he throws back his whisky and starts to laugh. Harry starts to laugh too, so I start to laugh too.
Ess drinks two more glasses of whisky then teeters off to the bathroom. Harry takes out his phone. I’m happy to see that it’s a piece of shit: not quite the Neolithic axe head Ess makes do with, but a good five generations behind mine. Benignly reviewing its screen, he says, ‘Wow. Your boss is bombed, isn’t he?’
‘He’s on holiday.’
‘I thought the two of you were here on business.’
‘Bit of both. Some business, some pleasure.’
‘I’m not judging. I can only imagine the kind of pressure he’s under. You Resolute kids must be feeling it at the moment.’
‘It’s a bad time for us.’
‘But you’ll turn it around, right?’ He pats my arm without actually touching it. ‘You’ll weather the storm. Hold on for the safe waters and blue skies.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘We’re all going to lose our jobs.’
Ess flounders back to the table and starts telling a long, rambling story that no one listens to. Harry Altman in his wavery prescriptions is wearing a look that makes me nervous. Then, at the nearest thing to a natural break in Ess’s narrative, he strikes. Eyes wide, arms folded, he shifts fractionally forward in his chair and says quietly, ‘You know, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but the question that most interests me is why you gentlemen are out here at all.’
‘Is that so?’ Ess seems surprised.
‘I am really most interested in that.’
‘We told you,’ I say. ‘Some business…’
‘Some pleasure, sure. Though it’s the business part that I’m really interested in. You mentioned you were here to buy…’
‘Fervently so,’ Ess says. ‘Perfervidly here as buyers.’
‘If you don’t mind my asking, here to buy what?’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘oh…’ Suddenly I’m leaning over the table, pressing down on it with the palms of both hands. I’m trying to hide Ess, to cover him, shield him. ‘I’m not sure we…’
‘Now, Mr Strauss.’ Ess grips my shoulder. ‘This is Harry we’re talking to. I think we can deal plainly with our friend Harry, can we not?’
With a woozy hand on my shoulder he signals for me to sit back down in my chair. I sit back down in my chair. There’s nothing I can do, nothing to prevent this from happening, to keep Ess from making a fool of himself, from revealing to this sanctimonious old bastard what a mad and broken soul he is. I cover the bottom half of my face with my hand. I want to cover the top half of it with my other hand, but manage not to do that.
Ess smiles, goggled with drunkenness. He looks as if he might slide out of his chair at any second. ‘We’re here, would you believe, to buy an antigravity machine.’
Now my free hand actually flies up to cover my eyes. At the last instant I redirect it and use the fingers to scratch, stroke, soothe my horribly burning temples.
Harry blinks. Then he says, ‘Okay.’
‘What say you to that, Harry? What say you… to that?’
‘Sure. Antigravity’s an interesting field. There are some great people working in it right now. There’s that Russian fellow, Podkletnov, right? Of course there’s always talk about NASA… And isn’t there an outfit in Switzerland that’s gotten close?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Ess says, swilling importantly in his chair, ‘plenty of people have got close to it. The difference is we have it.’
Slowly Harry smiles. Lost in the straggles of his beard, the smile is hard to make out. It’s nothing, hardly anything at all. But for some reason this smile ignites in me a brief flare of panic, as if the smile is not the only thing he is hiding, as if there is something else, something important, he is concealing about his sack-like person.
I became a builder, he had said. Among, ah, other things.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he says mildly.
Some time after midnight Ess crashes into the backseat of another yellow-hooded cab at the edge of the Oberoi’s forbidding access system.
‘Well I think that was a terrific night, don’t you?’ he says.
‘And isn’t Harry just… a lovely man?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, no, no he isn’t.’