33 West Page 6
They tasted of life before his grandfather had died. They tasted electric.
It was a wonder he hadn’t put on any weight.
Ram saab pulls his face closer to the bubbling wok and decides it is ready. He plunges the first samosa in, and heated bubbles caress it as it fizzes in the wok, cooking quickly. Prakash gasps, Ram saab smirks. He likes being able to shock and awe eaters once more. He remembers the first samosas he ever made, aged 11, to appease his father for getting bad marks at school and to impress a girl he loved, who loved food more than men. He considered himself a chubby chaser and loved feeding girls the deep-fried delights he cooked up in the kitchen. He remembers the way his dad smiled and wiped the grease from his fingers on to the school report, fudging the grades, making the illegible handwritten character assassinations meaningless. He remembers how the girl, Basanti, let him kiss her after her second samosa. He could taste the flakes of pastry in his mouth. To this day, samosa flakes arouse him in some form or another.
Prakash remembers the day his grandmother died. He had promised to take her to bingo, a pastime they both loved seeing as it didn’t involve conversation or language skills of any kind, seeing as the bingo caller now used an electronic number generator. They had got into an argument with his mother and their neighbour about the correct rules for a syndicate. He maintained that the syndicate was legion and all were equal within in, whereas his mother and their neighbour sought to assert, having had the winning houses, that they got a larger percentage of the winnings as they had possessed winning tickets. He was appalled at their behaviour. His grandmother sat quietly in the corner clutching her chest. He had assumed she had cramp from all the felt-pen rubbing on the bingo sheets. By the time they tried to usher her out of the car at her house, she had died, quietly in the front seat, sitting on Prakash’s new Kanye West CD, while he attempted to railroad his mother into giving him back his equal share, now that the neighbour had gone her own way home.
Ram saab lifts the first one out of the wok and places it down on the cutting board to cool. He places another samosa into the fizzle of the oil and watches it brown. Prakash picks up the first samosa and throws it in the bin. Ram saab understands now. The first one isn’t the right one. This is all starting to make sense to him. Maybe, he wonders, it doesn’t matter so much whether the samosa tastes exactly like the grandmother’s recipe. Maybe it’s the process that Prakash wants. He saw how the smell of the sizzling oil made him weak at the knees. Ram saab thinks back to a year after his mother’s death when he had defrosted some of her old okra shaak and reheated it. The smell filled the kitchen with the smell of his mother and his eyes with the water of tears. For a pregnant second mother and son were reunited. It’s not about the samosa, he realises. It’s about the process. It’s about the smells. It’s about the journey. This oral history he is glancing down at, this will live on for generations as the most priceless artefact in Prakash’s house. Ram saab then wonders whether he should be getting paid for this.
They both stare into space, awkward with each other. Ram saab sums up how much he can charge this man for his involvement, factoring in time, cost of ingredients and amenties like gas and electricity, minus how much enjoyment the last two hours have given him. Actually, he thinks, if he’s to do that sum properly, he might end up owing Prakash something. Prakash is wondering how much to offer this great chef that wouldn’t make him think that Prakash thinks he’s a cheap Wembley Gujarati chef, and how much will make him think Prakash is grateful. Neither comes to an agreed figure in their head.
Ram saab lifts out the second samosa, the perfect samosa and places it on the cutting board. It’s the right shade of beige. It’s crisp and glistens with the remains of the oil. Prakash smiles, counting to sixty in his head before reaching down to try it. He picks it up. It smells exactly like grandmother’s samosa. He smiles at Ram saab as they both ingest the aroma, loudly through their thick nasal hairs. Prakash lifts the samosa to his salivating mouth. It smells of her and he is transported back to a montage of memories: hiding in her saree away from arguing parents; her teaching him how to write his name in Gujarati; him reading comics while she watched Neighbours; hours of bingo; mountains of samosas – each one tasting like those moments, like that brilliant amazing time when they would spend entire summers together while his mum and dad worked. His teeth crunch through the hot flaky pastry and a thousand sensations dance into his mouth like a triumphant procession lead by elephants, trumpets blaring, men dancing in concentric circles, women looking demure under their sarees. The filling hits the back of his throat as he chews and in his head, he can see his grandmother walking through the thick crowds of jubilation and he chases her and runs towards her, putting a hand on her shoulder and spinning her around as the sun beats down upon them. She spins around. He swallows. He smiles. It is one. This is it. This is the meaning of life, he shouts in his brain.
‘How was it?’ asks Ram saab, sweating anxiously, using a knife to dislodge cumin seeds from under his nails.
Outside, the Ealing Road carries on bustling as if nothing short of a miracle has just happened here.
HARROW
Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, That I Live in London
Tim Scott
1
I liked this part of the walk. You finally leave the buildings behind and slip down the narrow lane through the trees.
I nodded to a man coming the other way. He was wearing a trilby and looking pretty smug about it. Maybe he even got some kind of Arts Council grant for wearing the hat to keep the tradition alive. I carried on down the path, letting my feet slap on the tarmac. Was it possible to get a grant for wearing a hat? I couldn’t properly decide. Towards my right the sun was setting. I stopped and looked out over the tennis courts and the fields beyond. It was almost as though someone had poured oil on the horizon and set the sky alight. A little further around I could see the running track, and I just made out a tiny figure standing on the far straight. There was something not quite right about this but I couldn’t decide what it was.
‘This way! No Mr Beagle!’ said a voice and I turned to see a woman hauling along a small brown and white dog. ‘He’s part cocker spaniel,’ she said to me as though this was an answer to a question I was about to ask and passed busily on before I had time to settle on a reply. I remembered I had seen her before yanking the same dog up Church Hill though this was the first time she had said anything to me.
The lane led down the hill and was lined with trees that peeled bark. After walking on a little way I looked back, but there was no one there and the stillness of the evening seemed to ratchet up a notch or two. I reached the bottom of Football Lane and turned right, past the empty tennis courts and I stopped to enjoy the grainy haze of the evening dusk, which seemed almost a palpable thing as it hung in the air.
Silence.
I headed in the direction of the woods, intending to skirt past the lake and complete my little circuit back up to Crown Street. But I saw a grey shape on the running track. In the heavy twilight my brain had trouble turning the ragbag of crumpled edges into anything that made sense and so, out of curiosity I drew closer. Eventually I trotted down a little set of steps to the dusty path that ran around the whole of the track in a wide curving oval.
From the path the pile of edges was now on my level and it looked bigger and slightly sinister, rising as it did in a hump at one end, but I still couldn’t determine whether it was simply a tarpaulin or some rubbish that had been dumped. I stepped onto the running track, which had a spring to it and as I walked towards the strange shape I had the weird sensation I was treading on slightly melted tar. My thoughts surged for a moment and I stopped. I felt dizzy and a little nauseous. I blinked. Christ – the past always had the ability to mug me like this. Why was I thinking about Joanne? Why did my thoughts always return to her in moments of stress as though she was some kind of pre-set in my brain?
Joanne would have loved seeing this sunset in Harrow. She didn’t tak
e long to fall in love with the area. Always commenting on the names and giggling because they sounded to her like they had come out of the Hobbit. ‘Pinner Green,’ she’d say pointing to a sign as we passed.
‘Nowhere is called Pinner Green in real life.’ Or, ‘Look! Hatch End. That’s where Mr Toad lives isn’t it? It’s not a real place.’ I think it was because she wasn’t a Londoner that she could constantly find the names so amusing, or maybe it simply was because that’s how she was, always taking a childlike fascination with the world. Maybe the truth of it was, that is why I loved her.
‘Hurry… please,’ said a voice. My consciousness snapped back. The shape wasn’t a tarpaulin. Christ. It was a man collapsed on the track wearing a beige raincoat. He was about twenty feet away.
‘Are you all right?’ I managed to say, but I found it hard to move my legs.
‘Please…Harry.’
‘Look… are you all right?’ I said again still finding a weird kind of inertia had the soles of my feet pinned to the spongy running track.
‘Take this please, Harry,’ said the man and he tried to lift an arm into the air. It reminded me from a scene in a film, or maybe it’s a painting of a battlefield where a soldier holds up the colours of his regiment in a final defiant act.
Finally I managed to move closer.
‘I’m not Harry,’ I said. ‘I’m Martin Evanson. I work for AF architects.’ I have no idea why I said this, but probably I had shifted into automatic and I said it simply because I’d said it before.
‘Oh,’ he said. And then again, ‘oh.’ His face was clean-shaven and his hair gelled back. He had a familiar kind of face. The kind of face that’s comforting in its simplicity and openness. But his skin was horribly pale. Even in the fading light I could see he was in a bad way.
‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Shall I call for a –’
‘No!’ he swallowed. ‘Please don’t! You mustn’t. Take this and go! Please take this. Will you take this for me?’
For the first time I realised he had something in his hand. An envelope.
‘I’m not Harry,’ I said. ‘I’m Martin Evanson. I –’
‘Work for an architect. I know. Please take it. I’m begging you. Please.’ His eyes met mine and they were desperate. I reached out very slowly and grasped the envelope between my finger and thumb and lightly withdrew it from his grasp.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Now run Martin! Run! In God’s name run or they’ll come for you as well.’ And his eyes closed and his head slipped onto the track. I felt my mouth fall open and then a moment later I was aware I was running. Obviously running was the wrong thing to do but I did it anyway and it felt like I was 10 again. It felt like I was going at a thousand miles an hour and the world was just a blur. My heart was virtually exploding and inexplicably I pictured myself talking to Joanne and saying, ‘I could never move from London, the city is as much a part of me as my own heartbeat.’
I reached the edge of the woods gasping for air and began to take notice of what my legs were doing. I had a distant other-worldly memory of sprinting down the track faster than at any time in my life and then I must have lunged head long into the woods which is what sent the roosting birds into the air in a wild exhibition of flapping. Why the hell was I running? What the hell was I doing? I should call the police. I should do anything other than what I was doing at the moment. I tried to focus, but everything was turning slowly around me and my eyes felt like they were floating in my head. My feet locked to the ground and everything ground to a halt. I grasped at the idea that if I got back home everything would be all right again. I had to get back home. I had to just walk out of here the long way down through the park and get home. I lurched sideways and stumbled causing more rafts of birds to take off into the shifting haze of the ink-blue sky.
It was now 9.15pm I made a mental note not to look at my watch again because the time kept shifting in jumps. I had come back, ripped open the envelope, tried to make sense of the contents and then curled up on the sofa and felt like I was shaking. Not on the outside, but on the inside. As though my whole body was minutely vibrating. I didn’t know whether to have tea, whiskey or cornflakes. In the end I had all three. It was a pretty strange meal but it worked to some extent because afterwards I felt strong enough to go upstairs to the top floor and have a long, hot shower. Finally I curled up in bed with the light on looking at the picture of Joanne on the bedside table and fell asleep. I woke once in the night. Turned off the light and then slept through.
2
The next day I called in sick. I had woken feeling empty inside and shuffled down the stairs to the kitchen to try and cook up a proper breakfast of eggs easy-over but I didn’t get the timing of flipping the eggs quite right because my mind wasn’t really on the job. Afterwards I sat on the sofa, turning the envelope over in my hands and seeing if there was anything I had missed the night before. On the address panel it said simply, ‘your move’. Inside was a single sheet of white writing paper and I studied it over again.
The top end of High Street in Harrow on the Hill is a sweeping parade of three storey Georgian and Victorian buildings that canter up the hill towards the church. I had decided to walk even though where I was going was a little way away. Part of the reason was that finding somewhere to park on Crown Street is virtually an occupation. Once you leave a space the chances are you will never find another. It’s one of the few streets I know that still seems grouchy about the whole invention of the motorcar. It’s simply way too narrow and hemmed in as it is, with short unforgiving pavements. There’s only enough room to park a car outside your door as long as you have scoured the show rooms of the country for the thinnest model available. ‘I like this car but do you have it in anything thinner?’ is a phrase people living on Crown Street might have contemplated asking in car showrooms. So I was loathed to give up my car parking space and that was partly why I was walking and not taking my car.
But that was only part of the reason.
When I reached the school I took a little detour into the grounds so I could get a view of the running track down below. It was deserted. There was no police tent; no forensic scientists pouring over the ground dressed in their white baby grow overalls. I felt massively relieved, and headed back up the hill. In my inside jacket pocket was an envelope. And inside was a sheet of paper I had laboured over for around half an hour. I wondered why I was getting involved. Perhaps the desperate look on the man’s face before he collapsed made me feel indebted to him, but what had happened after I left? The image of him lying on the running track came back in a white-hot charge. It was out of kilter with the day-to-day reality of everything around me, and I had to stop and clear my head near the church.
Joanne had attended the services at St Mary’s on the hill. It wasn’t that she was religious, even towards the end, but she loved the peacefulness. And perhaps St Mary’s appealed to her particularly because it’s a little fairy tale of a church nestling as it does among the trees with it’s squat tower topped with an impossibly oversize spire. I had tried to explain to her once how London ran through my veins and that the buildings and the streets knew my secrets better than I did myself and that was enough religion for me. I was a Londoner and I was sure that meant something even if I didn’t know what exactly.
My thoughts caught up with the present again and I found I had reached Kenton Road and the kettledrum noise of London traffic swamped me. I could have probably cut through the backstreets and trusted my sense of direction but I stuck to the main road anyway. When I turned a corner I saw a woman hauling a small dog along the pavement towards me. It was the same woman I had seen the previous evening.
‘Mr Beagle only likes dog snacks in the shape of a bone,’ she said as she passed by me, exactly as before as though this was in answer to a question I was about to ask. I nodded and then turned to watch her disappear before going on. Eventually I reached the Civic Centre and I just stood there like an idiot. There was still time not to do thi
s. There was still time to walk away.
Maybe I stood there for five minutes. I simply stood letting my thoughts have free reign. Eventually I decided there didn’t seem to be any good reason not to go in, so I walked up the steps. Inside there was a musty business-like atmosphere. People bustled backwards and forwards in the heavy gloom, many in suits, and others in casual clothes that seemed to come from another era. I ignored the reception desk and strode towards the far end where the lifts were arranged. I pressed the button on the nearest one and as I waited my mind re-wound to the envelope.
‘Leave your next move for the white pieces in an envelope taped above the buttons in the lift number one in the Civic Centre, Station Road by 12pm tomorrow. The deal remains the same.’
That’s what it had said on the piece of paper and below had been drawn a position in a chess game. I stepped in quickly when the lift arrived and before the doors closed I saw there was a new envelope taped above the buttons with the same familiar writing. I tore it down and opened it. There was a single sheet inside. ‘Tape your move here,’ it said. ‘My next move will be inside a copy of Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, to be found in Pinner Library at 3pm.’
Was this the beginning of something? Or the end of something? What was happening to me?
Back home I was hunched over a chessboard in the living room when the phone rang. I picked up after four rings. It was the office. I tried to sound downbeat and told them it was a stomach upset and I’d be in the next day. They wanted to know some detail about an extension for a house in Wealdstone and I explained it as best I could and then rang off. I had also bought a local paper and scanned it for any news about the guy on the running track but there was nothing. Maybe somebody collapsing wasn’t news. Maybe that kind of thing happened every day.