GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019/20

VIJAY KHURANA
‘About Suffering’

o the view from the bay

Among the trees on the hill are dotted several white houses in something like the Bauhaus style. When the bay is dark their lights make halos in the forest. When it is a bright day the houses shine newly, whitely. The windows are mostly floor-to-ceiling, though some are small and circular: maybe windows off stairways, from bathrooms or rooms used for storage. When it is a bright day the water is a greenish blue and the houses could be said to mirror the sails of the boats lingering on the bay. In fact, to say there was one placid sail for every house on the hill would not be much wide of the mark, because each house has its own boathouse; they are set in neat rows on either side of the sailing club. The boats are sailed for sport or relaxation by the people who occupy the houses. They drive their cars down the hill and park at the sailing club. Afterwards they stay for drinks or dinner.

The houses are not set close together. From the bay they look as though they are spaced as equally and far apart as the land allows, as though an agreement were made when they were built, no doubt involving a meeting of the community council, and surveyors maybe, with tripods and high-visibility tabards. The roads that link the houses are invisible behind the trees. Occasionally, if the angle of sunlight is right, a car flashes silverly to or from a house. One more thing: there is a water tower, which sits at the very top of the hill, against the horizon. It must be needed to maintain water pressure for the people in the white houses; it is hard to imagine such a structure would be allowed to impose on an otherwise delicate scene unless absolutely necessary. But a wise decision has been made on that score: the water tower has been painted a very pale blue, so that when it is sunny (on most days it is sunny) the structure blends into the sky and is hardly visible from the bay or the shore or the houses’ roof terraces. Only at dusk does the tower seem to glow for a short time, less than thirty minutes, ghostly or perhaps chemically against the near-black trees, the now soft grey of the houses, lit windows, lights of cars on the invisible roads, the dark purple sky, stars. But by that time of day, the boats are usually all moored at the sailing club or back in their boathouses, so it is hard to imagine anyone being there on the bay to see it. Forget about the water tower; it is not important.

ooo the view from the hill

A woman stands at a window on the second floor of a house. She has been standing there a long time, at least an hour, though occasionally she leaves the room for a few minutes or throws herself front-first onto the cream-coloured sofa, which faces away from the window, towards a blank flat-screen. But she keeps returning, putting her face close to the glass, looking. She can see the water, white sails and little white waves. Beyond these, in the distance, far across the bay, is a town where the houses are not large and white as they are here. Most are bare concrete, discoloured. Some roofs are improvised. Larger buildings are split into apartments, their exteriors flecked with satellite dishes and jutting air conditioning units. Little is picturesque about the other side of the bay.

The woman stays here until it is nearly sunset, as one by one the sails move slowly towards the sailing club and drop. Soon there is only one left.

She looks over at the town, which has begun to glow with the promise of evening. She imagines noises there, streets choked with whining mopeds, shouting and laughter in cheap restaurants, glasses being thrust together. Apart from the one at the sailing club, which is usually subdued except for a piano player on Fridays and Saturdays, the woman has not been to a restaurant for a long time. Her bare toes worry at the woollen carpet. The house is silent, though she becomes aware of this only in retrospect, when the air conditioning quietly starts and her calves register coolness from the floor vent. She lets the tip of her nose touch the glass, breathes a cloud onto the window, wipes it away. Her hand makes a squeaking noise, which she finds pleasing. The last boat beats slowly up and down below her. It is a small boat, for one or two people. Many of her neighbours have them. She and her husband have one, and used to sail it every weekend. The woman is not deliberately watching the boat, but her eye is drawn because it is the only thing providing motion, other than the shifting pattern of whitecaps and the darkening gradient of the sky. When she does focus on it, she sees a figure—a man—sitting with one arm stretched to the tiller. He is facing away from her, his free arm hooked as though he is touching his face. The man must only be able to see the white of the sail in front of him, not the beautiful expanse of water or the sunset. Perhaps he hasn’t realised how dark it is getting.

Then the boat turns and her view of him is blocked by the sail.

The woman’s stomach makes a noise, and she tries to think of when she last ate. She remembers the sickly pulp of an overripe banana, and coffee. It must have been this morning. The peel will be in the kitchen bin, she thinks, along with a punctured coffee pod. If she pressed the foot pedal and inhaled the smell, she would probably retch. Would that be in any way productive? Would it have the effect of smelling salts in old films, jerking her back into herself? She is standing so uselessly at the window. She thinks about her husband, whom she does not miss, but who provided her with a certain set of parameters, a frame within which to see herself. Perhaps vomiting would make her feel hungry again, and she could do something normal like defrost a lasagne or order something to be delivered from town. She likes the young, brown men whose mopeds have special boxes attached to keep the food warm. They wear open-faced helmets and tuck their mobile phones inside so they can talk to their girlfriends while riding. They often do not take their helmets off at the door, which the woman used to find rude but now thinks is boyish and endearing. She always tips, but she has a favourite, a boy with an unplaceable accent, young, with a thick mole on his chin and light brown eyes. Their names appear on the app, but she cannot now remember what he is called.

The woman has closed her eyes while thinking this, and when she opens them again she sees the boat moving faster, a few hundred metres from shore. She can’t see the man very well anymore; he is further out and the light is beginning to go. Most people wear bright life jackets—the sailing club recommends it—but she has a feeling this man is wearing the same clothes he would wear on land. He must be a good sailor, confident he will not capsize. She probably knows him.

She notices now that the boat is not meandering like most do, but tacking in neat, almost uniform lines. A meditative course. She gets an urge to move, to go back to the sofa and feel the velour against her arms and face. She should watch television, one of the shows her friends talk about. What about just getting food delivered and watching television until the end of time? She pinches gently the lashes of her left eye, pulling away the grit of mascara and dried tears. The man in the boat stands up. He is still holding the tiller, which has a thin black extension that comes off the wooden part. He is holding that. He looks behind him, directly at the woman. If he were closer she would be able to see his face. She almost certainly will have seen him at a community council meeting or in the sailing club. For a moment it seems he is watching her, and it is possible that he could see her there in the window, as vaguely as she sees him. The man turns and the boat begins to move more rapidly, away from the shore. There is something about the direction that seems unusual. Boats do not normally go that way, straight towards the town. It picks up speed and she feels a prickling of alarm. The wind is nearly behind the boat, threatening to catch the wrong side of the sail. The man is standing. He struggles to keep his balance. That boat is really moving, getting smaller. She thinks he has turned his body towards the shore again, she thinks he will fall, and a second later the boom snaps across the boat and the man disappears. She senses the impact and expects a noise to accompany it, but the room is as quiet as before. She has fogged the glass. She moves to her left, to a new spot, and sees the man in the water. The boat continues in a mild arc, then slows, its sail flapping. The man does not move.

ooooo the view from the shore

The woman stands by the water, the closest parts of which reflect the lights of a silent ambulance. Small waves clap against the sea wall, below the sound of a far-off outboard motor. They are out there, looking for him. For several moments after the man was hit, the woman could do nothing but watch him float serenely on the water. When she got back to the window with her phone, he had gone.

Forty minutes have passed since she called the police. In that time she put a thin coat over her dress, stepped into leather sandals, and located her car key in the clutter on the kitchen island. In the garage her left leg shook as she listened to the slow drone of the turntable.

Each house has one; they are mandated by the community council. The roads are narrow and winding, which makes backing in or out dangerous. ‘Press and forget,’ the operating manual encourages. ‘Simply park within the disc, activate as you leave your garage and your vehicle will be ready to drive away next time you need it.’ But the woman never turns the A-Class around when she arrives home. She wondered briefly if it might be better to walk—to run—but a more assured part of her soothed the thought away. It was the voice of her mother that she used to calm herself. You’re doing just what you should be doing, Darling, she thought in her mother’s voice. Quite obvious it’ll be quicker just to wait for the machine to do what it needs to.

The police have borrowed a rubber dinghy. One officer and the paramedic are somewhere out in the gloom, searching. A small crowd has come over from the sailing club, but the woman stands apart because it was she who called the police. The other officer, a young woman in an unthreatening green uniform, is asking her if she lives alone.

‘My husband’s out of the country,’ the woman says, then she says, ‘We’re separated.’ She has not been telling people this, but something about the situation has made her feel spontaneous.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Ma’am. Do you have friends or family nearby? Anyone you might stay the night with?’

The woman is staring at the red and blue flashes in the water, listening to the whine of the outboard motor.

‘It’s okay, I can go to a hotel,’ she says vaguely. The officer smiles, and the woman feels pitied.

‘Ma’am, that’s not what I mean. I mean it might be a good idea not to be alone after what you’ve seen. You’ve had a shock.’

‘Oh, God,’ says the woman, realising she has said a stupid thing. ‘I’ll be alright. It’s not as bad as all that.’

‘Did you know the individual in the boat? Did you recognise them?’

‘He was too far off. But a lot of us know each other from the sailing club.’

The officer is silent, and the woman turns away from the water to see her making notes in a small book.

‘Can I take your name and contact details?’

‘Sure,’ the woman says. She spells her name out and gives her address and phone number. ‘Do you want my email, too?’

‘Phone is fine,’ says the officer.

She feels she has said another stupid thing.

‘Are you going to want to talk to me about what happened? About what I saw?’

The young officer is looking towards the sound of the dinghy. She has a ponytail secured with a clear plastic hair band. It too reflects the ambulance’s lights.

‘That depends. Is there anything specific you’d like to tell us?’

‘Maybe it doesn’t change anything,’ the woman says through a thickness in her throat, ‘but it looked to me as though he did it on purpose. As though he knocked himself out.’ The woman realises she is crying. She is crying and the officer has put a hand on her shoulder.

‘Why don’t you come in tomorrow and we can discuss giving a statement? We can also arrange for you to see a counsellor if you’d like.’

The woman tries to remember the last person she met who was this nice. But the policewoman is not being nice; she is being a policewoman. The woman thinks about the way the man stood up in the boat, looking over his shoulder towards the shore, showing the back of his head to the boom. Something is said through the radio and the officer walks to the water’s edge. The sound of the motor grows louder. The woman takes the car key from her coat pocket, turns, and sees the silhouette of the water tower just visible against the sky. Cold passes over her, which could be the night, the lightness of the coat, though it brings with it the feeling that, as she watched the tragedy from her useless vantage point, there was something even above her, above all the houses. Something may have been watching her as she watched the man get hit by the boom. Later, she will let the feeling haunt her. She will almost enjoy it. It will feel like a useful distraction.

ooooooo the town

The garage door swings up and in; the woman watches sunlight skim towards her along the cement floor. Her shoes, then her shins, then her black silk shift are illuminated. She squints into the light. She has slept well. Beside the bed are three burst pods of Valium and a half-glass of water stippled with bubbles.

Last night she turned the car around when she got home; there was no hurry to leave the garage. She remembers standing in the near-dark with her hand on the button, watching the outline rotate. She was the only one they let see the body up close, after they’d got him out of the dinghy. Tiny beads of water on him, his eyes closed, skin colouring in the ambulance’s lights. They had him face-up on a gurney—she couldn’t see what the boom had done to the back of his head. Just as she had thought, he was wearing normal clothes: jeans and a woollen sweater, Lacoste sneakers. Such a casual way to leave the house for the last time.

‘Albert Tsurumi,’ she told the police. She didn’t know them well. They had a daughter, Kathy; she had heard that Albert flew back and forth to the city, where he worked for one of the banks. That was all she knew. Kathy must be sixteen, seventeen. The woman had to tell the officers where the Tsurumis lived so they could go and make their call.

She presses the ignition, puts the car in drive, sees her own startled eyes in the mirror, moves off. Another thing about these narrow roads: her husband has always said it was not safe to wait for the garage door to close, in case someone came quickly around the corner, so she has learned to just drive away, trusting her home to yawn shut behind her.

When she gets to the gates at the end of the private road she sees one of the young men from the food delivery company. He is waving his arms and the guard—it is Rebecca today—is shaking her head at him. There is a code, a word that changes every few days, which the resident is supposed to add to the delivery instructions, though many forget or give an old, invalid word. She recognises her favourite, the one whose name she has forgotten. She slows and the boom opens for her but she does not drive through. She hits the button for her window.

‘He’s okay, Rebecca, I know him,’ the woman says.

‘I know him too, Ma’am,’ says Rebecca, her tone adding but that is not the point.

Rebecca has skin so fair it is almost translucent and one long, immaculate black plait. Her black uniform is designed to resemble that of a police officer, though the police here dress in green. Rebecca and the others have strict instructions. If an individual has neither a chip in his vehicle nor the correct code, he may not enter. There has never been a burglary or a disturbance of any kind, and the community council aims to keep it that way. The rider is swiping at his phone, worried perhaps that the food will get cold. He will get a bad rating, no matter whose fault it is, and a bad rating means fewer jobs. Rebecca gives the woman a hard smile and says, ‘Okay, thanks very much.’ Move along so I won’t have to do this with you watching.

But the woman does not move along, and her car, having been stationary for the programmed amount of time, switches its engine off in solidarity. The woman calls out, ‘IRIS,’ making the rider look up, confused.

‘The code today is “iris”,’ the woman says again.

Rebecca sighs. She looks neither at the woman nor the rider, just presses the button to open the boom and walks back into her shelter. The other two then share a smile.

‘My thanks, Madam.’ He taps the side of his open-faced helmet in a kind of salute. ‘Have a pleasant day.’ She wishes she could say his name. That would be like casting a spell. To be able to simply wish him a nice day and say his name, especially in front of Rebecca, would be magic.

The town seems to grow up around the woman as she drives. The glossy trees on either side of the road begin to thin; squat warehouses appear, then billboards. Two lanes become four. The streets are crowded, though mopeds always give way to cars. Power cables are not buried as they are on the hillside, but hang in ad hoc tangles and parabolas between slanting poles. At traffic lights, children sell flowers, magazines, cool drinks. When she tells the guard at the police station she has an appointment, he raises the red and white boom and she drives into the underground car park. She takes an elevator to the second floor, as instructed. As she is led through the hum of an open-plan office, she looks around for the officer from the night before. At a conference table littered with empty take-away coffee cups and blank A4 sheets, a man asks her to explain what she saw.

‘If it were your husband,’ he says, ‘would you want a theory like that being thrown around?’

‘My husband and I are separated,’ the woman says.

‘But you see what I’m saying. It’s a painful thing to have to tell someone. And if you aren’t sure… I mean, it’s not as though he jumped off the water tower.’ The detective clears a space on the table and traces shapes with his hands as he talks. ‘He was in the boat, he was knocked out of the boat… and you were a long way away.’

‘But it was the way he was steering the boat,’ the woman says, surer of herself in the face of this resistance. ‘He was standing up, like this, and he steered downwind so the boom would swing across.’

‘Okay, Ma’am. There’s no need to get so animated.’

‘I wasn’t, I was just… so you could see how it happened.’

‘I’m recommending you get some counselling,’ the detective says. ‘It’s a horrible thing you saw, whether an accident or not. Would you mind filling in a form so we can make that happen?’

She tells him she already has a therapist, then takes the elevator back to her car. Some people want to end their lives, she thinks. She isn’t one of them, and there must be comfort in that, if only she could find it. But it was so terrifyingly simple; to walk out of one’s house and get into a boat. She drives up the ramp into the daylight. She knows what she saw. Isn’t it crueller to hide the truth? Hadn’t her mother taught her that it always turned out badly, one way or the other? Hadn’t her marriage taught her that? She drives with no destination—at times through a sea of mopeds in which no other car is visible. As she gets closer to the dock, she sees a group of delivery riders. They are sitting around a table outside a small bar, their bikes parked in a tight row at the kerb. Some are still wearing their helmets. Her rider, the one from the boom gates, is there. He is laughing with another of the young men, the two of them drinking from small bottles tucked into their palms. The woman decides to pull over. The boy is saying something to his friend, hammering the table excitedly. She wonders if they have heard about the tragedy.

An impulse pushes her from the car before she knows what she will do, or why. It’s a shock when the blip of the A-Class locking causes the group to look in her direction. Their eyes question. Her rider smiles and stands, spreads his arms as though to embrace her. She realises she is frightened.

‘Hello, posh Madam!’ her favourite says. ‘What you doing in the dirty town?’

‘Hello,’ she tries to say.

‘Go back to your house, Madam. I can bring you food.’ The other young man, the one he was talking to, puts his arm around the boy, but the boy shrugs it off. ‘So hungry, so hungry, Madam? Let me provide.’ Her rider turns from her and attempts to pull his trousers down, though a couple of the other men stop him.

‘From our hearts,’ one of them says. ‘There has been more than too much drinking. A celebration.’

‘He got the news,’ says another, shaping his hands around his belly.

They are laughing at the boy, slapping him on the back. An older man says, ‘Time to go home, Nicky. Your woman’s waiting.’

‘Can’t go home until I deliver enough food,’ Nicky says, nearly shouting. ‘Madam must order some fucking food or my children won’t eat.’ The woman backs towards her car. ‘Do you understand?’ he shouts. The other men wave at her in apology. They encircle Nicky and sit him down at the table.

The woman’s hands are shaking on the wheel. She could get him fired, should, would never. She pulls quickly out from the kerb and the mopeds adjust to give her space. She will give Nicky a large tip next time, an impossibly large tip, one that will leave him speechless. You can hardly blame young men for getting drunk now and then. This, she realises, is her mother’s voice again. It will never leave her. Just as long as he doesn’t go riding around like that. And his poor wife when he gets home. She turns the air conditioning up until she is breathing ice. Her hands stop shaking. She needs only to pull herself together, and this can be done at any time. When she gets home she will take a long shower, let the water pelt her shoulders, then go to the Tsurumis’. She will offer her condolences and say nothing about what she saw. The detective was right, there will be enough pain in that house as it is. She remembers that their daughter, that Kathy is no longer at home, that she goes to university somewhere in Europe. She will have to fly back for the funeral. She may be on a plane right now, poor girl.

A diluted moon traces the afternoon sky. From above, the town looks indistinct, covered by a membrane that is part air pollution, part dust, part heat radiating from concrete and bitumen. Only the tarpaulins, which cover so many of the houses, shine. From above they might be swimming pools. Unending streams of mopeds surge through the streets, tenacious as water. But the woman’s car moves as though with a halo around it, because the moped riders all know there would be hell to pay if they accidentally hit a Mercedes.