Black Bread White Beer

This is another thing to mull over at a later date, how easy it is to take comfort in drink. Tomorrow he can repent, today he needs haziness for the drive, a slight, numbing touch to ease the pressure of two hours on a cramped A-road. She needs him to protect her. He needs vodka to make that a possibility, if only he had the bottle to be that kind of man.

Claud is persuaded to take half a sleeping pill so she can sleep most of the way. The siesta time in the house has been a failure. There was no way she was going to relax once she got upset about the toilet. He hears her talking over the cricket, where the wiliness of the subcontinent’s bowling technique crushes the now pedestrian bulldog effort, in a swift display of shock and awe. In spite of the pleasure this gives him, thinking of the blow it must deliver to Sam’s spirit, he still wants England to win. Fuck the cricket test theories, England is his team, is all.

He hears her on the phone before they leave the house. Her voice is low but has lost the dead tone of before. Whoever is on the other end has dragged lightness out of her, something he has had over twenty-four hours to perfect and was unable to accomplish. When he walked down the church aisle three years ago, a newly baptized Christian – a page note to the cricket test, a secondary gesture to please Liz and Sam – he married not just her, but her girlfriends as well; those ready to jump in and complete all the things that he cannot do.

This is his turn to feel the b-a-b-y, a collection of cells ripped from him, no longer their precious secret, but a story to be gossiped about over sweetish cocktails and wine coolers. There was a bitter yet muddled sense of disloyalty after sharing it with Hari, but there is something more agonizing about the permanence of girl talk. With every detail spilled down the phone he feels their child slipping from an imaginary grasp, and disappearing like a dream.

‘I told Jen. She texted me and it all came out.’

‘It’s good that you’re talking about it,’ he says, angry with himself that he is unable to stop feeling betrayed. ‘Jen’s a good person to have around.’

‘I couldn’t stop talking once I started. Sorry.’

‘Nothing to apologize about. It helps to share it.’

‘You should talk to someone too. Ring Hari.’

So talking is advocated, championed, in fact, so long as they do not do it with each other. They sit side by side at the breakfast counter unable to look each other in the eye.

‘I don’t need to speak to anyone. I’m fine.’

Her passive aggression weighs heavily on his shoulders, creeping across his front in a choke-hold. He resists. All too often has she used the same tactic.

I’ve told Clare about the engagement. Do you want to tell someone? Hari? Mum wangled it out of me that we’re trying for a baby. You might as well tell your parents now so that we’re in sync. Or maybe Hari if you don’t want to tell them straight away. But you should tell someone.

It is the most comfortable, easy-reaching tool in her box of tricks, so he understands why she still clings on to it, the way the collection of cells should have stayed attached to her insides.

Her reliance on these things is admirable, how she expects him to call Hari right away, while she is still there, so that every nuance of the conversation can be analysed, then corrected. She was the same last week when he called the service people to get the digital TV box looked at. Bossiness has propelled her through higher education and a fast-track in her career. It gets results. Why should she be any different now? But it should be. Some things should be different between them. He sees how such a move can bang nails into a coffin further down the marriage. His parents. Liz and Sam.

She is crying again as he packs the car. He knows her tears come more from a frustrated place, because he ignored her attempts to call Hari, than anything to do with the lost collection of cells. Office cynicism does not stay in the office. It is a part of every aspect of their home. The muffled package of sniff and sob resonates as loudly as any wailing for the way it follows him outside, but he carries on with packing the car. He speaks quietly to the neighbour about the plumber, and goes about his business; not going to her, knowing she is still not ready to be touched.

Again there is nothing to listen to. She should not be woken on the journey, aside from a gentle tap on the shoulder when they wind up the drive in Lewes. Their story has been concocted. There is no reason to discuss it endlessly. They are making the most of a well-earned long weekend. She is pregnant. They are happy.

Driving through the country will hurt with its constant reminders of plant in bud. Everything has the ability to reproduce but them. He prefers it on the motorway where concrete has killed all life. Black and grey, miles of it, make everything better. It is time to reaffirm his faith in hard, physical objects: the road, his BlackBerry and iPhone. There is nothing to be had in believing in organics.

Six-lane traffic, its smoothness and gentle contours has a blank, hypnotic quality. Something about the road erases, forgives. He sees now why men drive and the attraction of long distances. How two hours on a clear road is probably more therapeutic than a year’s worth of visits to any shrink.

The hospital offers counselling the way doctors hand out pills, automatically, by the handful. How much time did women in the past spend with a psychologist between their pregnancies and miscarriages? Were they given the luxury of a week-off from housework and radio silence from relatives in order to recuperate? People got on with things, then. Everything about their own upset, the clawing in his gut, her muffles, is by comparison lazy, self-indulgent, and most likely, deserved.

But maybe it is in the nature of women to dust themselves down and carry on. He can see her back in the office next week, glued to the BlackBerry, allowing herself no time to reflect. Maybe it is only the men who have let the modern age weaken their resilience, crying into baked goods and wallowing into beer. But everything about her knotted sleep in the car makes that a lie. She feels it all.

Trouble comes when he stops for a toilet break at a Road Chef a couple of miles before the A21. She wakes and follows him, half-running across the car park to catch up, which generates a pang of fear that something might be wrong with her insides.

‘I need to change the dressing. Nothing for you to worry about.’

It is the first he has heard about dressings. All this time he has avoided looking at her abdomen, as he fears this will wound her, though he badly wants to; to study the contours of her body, and look for evidence of smoothness where a bump was once imagined and fussed over. But she is on to him, reads the unsophisticated voyeurism knotted across his brow, and keeps her hands folded over her tummy as she walks. Fingers locked, elbows straight, her moves are geisha, doll-like. She wears a t-shirt and the patterned mohair cardigan he bought her for Christmas. Mohair on mohair. The whole car park knows about it. When she made to get out of the passenger seat, the static squeal bounced from one vehicle to the next.

Ignoring the tightness in his bladder, he stands at the entrance to the Ladies, as he is trained to do. He sees aqua tiles from floor to ceiling and detects the same family of smells as those from the hospital. He does not know what he is waiting for. All the damage has already been done. Besides, he is exhausted with having to be the man of the relationship. He is unsure how much reserve he has left if he is called upon for the second time.

There is a reason Claud discharged herself before he arrived. She wanted to keep all the medical details between herself and the doctor. The dressing is only one secret they share. He suspects others.

‘Wives keep secrets from their husbands,’ said his best man on his wedding day. Hari is the expert, shagging one frustrated wife after another; a Lone Ranger, regularly pulling up in his Land Rover at the cafés most of them use after the school run.

Amal is unsure that secrecy can exist in a marriage as close as theirs. When he has every breath pattern and face pore memorized, predicting how she will toss and turn in her sleep – right then left, curl and back; in the midst of urgent, concentrated sex, in sync, when the concept of possession is anathema, to the point where he feels that he actually becomes her; and when, as he cooks, he knows how each particular food will taste for her, where are the secrets? Where in their airy, uncluttered house can they be held?

He was stupid to think that cleaning was the priority, obsessed as he was with staying busy with his hands. He should have camped outside the hospital, greeting the doctor with chair sweat and a furry tongue. He should have left no opportunities for secrets, not because he is possessive, but because he knows that secrets will hurt them. They have had to make the conscious effort to be transparent with one another. It is one of the essential requirements of a marriage such as theirs, to avoid misunderstandings and the breeding of corrosive resentment. It means therefore that any gripes are put down to superficial, bachelor selfishness, laziness, or lapses in judgement; trifles that can be rowed over and then quickly resolved.

His plan is to wheel her back to the car as soon as she reappears, avoiding the McDonalds concession, KFC, and the children’s play area. The precautions, should he have to explain them, are ridiculous. There is no emotional meltdown waiting to happen in the space between the mechanical fire engine and giant revolving tea cup. She is too empty to do that. He only wants to hide these things from her for as long as he can. Pretend that there are no children in the world, that they are as rare as baby eagles or panda cubs. Make it seem like it is a miracle for everybody.

But something about the new dressing energizes her. She is not to be shaken off, wanting to visit the shop to pick up a token for Pat. The gift store, opposite all that he wishes to disappear, is as claustrophobic and depressing as any he has encountered on the side of the motorway. Still, there is a shine to Claud that the flat strip-lighting cannot diminish; perked up by the piles of outdated CDs and tartan car blankets.

‘Two for £25 it says. I could use one in the car now and give the other to Mum.’

‘It’s terribly made. Look at the label. Says it’s a wool-poly blend. Listen to how it crinkles up. It’s like plastic.’

‘I like them. They’re pretty.’

‘Since when have you been into tartan?’

‘It’s not a question of being into. Tartan’s something everyone’s brought up with in Britain.’

Those final two words, randomly chosen to put him in his place. His parents were not born in England. He wouldn’t understand. It is something from Sam’s repertoire, picked up so thoughtlessly, used so often. She does not know that she is even doing it; does not know what it means.

‘It might not seem like a big deal, but we cannot do Sunday lunch without Yorkshires. Bring that dinner out from an English pub kitchen and they’d have your balls on a plate . . . Yes, I know it sounds like the cast of Billy Smart’s circus, but my daughter really does need four ushers, two page boys, and two flower girls. That’s how it’s done in this part of the world.’

Bigots do not raise ugliness in their daughters, just a certainty of where their place is, and what is right. For all her education, wit, compassion, Claud is guaranteed to fall into the tartan setting every once in a while, usually when they are snappy and close to argument. It is as natural as temper, right as rain.

He thinks of some of Puppa’s friends from the ’70s, and their marriages. A stream of white wives crying in Ma’s kitchen surprised at being beaten for similar displays of indigenous expression. There are one or two husbands he remembers in particular, chubby Indian beefcakes, stinking of the card table and taking no shit. Filthy tempers. The kind of men who would think nothing of giving the woman a slap beside the lopsided pile of wool-poly tartan blankets.

Slapping is not an option, inconceivable, but there are other forms of cruelty. He can protect her until she is smothered by concern, for example. Or, more easily, he can throw her to the wolves, leaving her to fend for herself once he remembers that he still needs a slash. A party of school kids are stampeding towards the crisp aisle. Thirty of them, fresh from the cramped hire coach and ready to use their feet.

‘See you at the car. Probably easier.’

He watches as she takes a deep breath, kidding himself that it is the choices between blanket colours which is making her cheeks flush and her arm imperceptibly wobble. Red-green, red-yellow, blue-green, blue-yellow, red-black. He waits only until the first of the children stream around her in their quest for confectionary, seeing how she almost has to force her head to stay directed on the job in hand.

The options are St. Leonards or villages. She chooses villages, knowing where the roads will lead: the cottage outside Robertsbridge where they spent their first weekend together, the antique market at Rye where they chose her engagement ring, the church overlooking Lewes Common where they married. All the significant points in their relationship have taken place in her part of the country. There was never any validity to spending time in Leicestershire.

Up there, in the Midlands, they are all aware of what is happening, how sons are lost after marriage, cruelly appropriated into the wife’s family; the opposite of what occurred to their subcontinental forebears. It is the price paid for marrying English girls, in spite of their vehement protestations to the contrary. But it is a phenomenon not simply restricted to skin tone. Amal’s other friends, white-skinned and robbed of voice, are also in the same boat: pussy-whipped. Life is good so long as the missus is happy.

He has lost count of the key events that he has missed: the wedding of a second cousin which clashed with the opportunity for a free long-weekend in Milan, the puja at his auntie’s new house to banish spirits being cancelled out because Liz and Sam needed help looking for a new car. It is a long list of incompletes.

It is not that Claud lacks interest in his family – the euphemism for culture, because to call it culture would be to admit there are more than cute gaps between the sexes causing difficulties in their marriage – she keeps a better calendar of events than he does. She reads books about Empire, Partition and fundamentalism, drags him to every shitty Bollywood film that plays at the multi-screen, and calls his mother independently at least once a week. The problem lies in their absence, them not being available the way other people’s children are; those who made the decision to stay in around Leicester. Ma and Puppa feel robbed of the opportunity to arrive at their son’s house unannounced, to use spare keys to fiddle and poke around whilst they are at work, and to summarily summon one or the other during the onset of perceived indigestions and illnesses.

There is no cooking daal and roti and leaving them in Tupperware boxes in the fridge, no unofficial, covert fertility blessings they can perform using only a bell and a stick of incense, then hurriedly airing the house before their departure. All they know is that their son and his wife are never around, becoming harder to reach, and that after three years of marriage there is still no grandchild.

Neither subject can be brought up, and they have to rely on jibes from other distant relatives to do the job they do not have the stomach for. They feel too far away from their son to rock the boat. They are at the age where they only want to end phone conversations on a happy note, unsure of what the night will bring. And so they keep their tone as light as they can without breaking into hysteria, leaving Amal to read the neuroses behind every piece of weather observation and gossip.

‘It’s been cold, hasn’t it,’ typically conveys everything.