MONEY TREE (34 page)

She lay for a while tossing over the thought in her head and then rose and went to the door of Anila’s hut. Anila heard her rise and got up to be with her.
Erin explained. Anila smiled in the dark and moved fast and quietly to waken her daughter and explain to her what was required. Erin was embarrassed at the fuss but the little girl was bright-eyed and beaming, willing to guide her through the quiet village. She gripped Aastha’s warm little hand as she was led through the alleys.

Erin
stood outside Ted’s hut, in sudden and uncharacteristic indecision. Under her arm she carried her sleeping bag. It seemed the sensible thing to do; in case they talked for a while and it got cool. And it might be nice mightn’t it, to lie side by side and watch the stars thunder overhead. Aastha tugged at her hand and drew her round the side of the hut to the back yard. She could see the steps leading up to the roof. Aastha squeezed her hand and then was gone into the night.

Erin
stood irresolute at the bottom of the stairs. She knew enough about men to tell when there was an interest. The problem was distinguishing between lust and anything else. She wasn’t sure where Ted was coming from. She didn’t want to be caught in the rebound from his wife. And for herself, the whole romantic thing of being stuck in the back of beyond with starry skies and a common enemy was almost too trite for words. Wasn’t this how she’d gone wrong before, letting her heart rule? But sometimes you had to take risks. Sometimes you had to let the kid inside have her day, or what was the point? It wasn’t that she was going to fling herself on him; just sit and talk, try to make sense of last night and not let the door close.

He was a man who’d let his talents atrophy but his performance the past few days suggested he was retrievable. The drinking had worried her at first, but it didn’t seem as though he did it to excess. And wasn’t it time she let go of the past? She couldn’t go on seeing every bloke who liked a glass now and then as a po
tential drunk and woman beater.

Erin
began the little climb, her heart racing in excess of the gentle exertion. She got to the top and peered round. She felt a jolt. He was sitting facing away from her on the parapet. His big dark bulk stood out clear against the sky. She padded softly towards him then began to worry in case she surprised him and he fell off.

Then she caught the smell. At first she refused to identify it. It was some sort of spice mix, or it was coming from somewhere else. Surely? Then it became unmistakeable, overpowering. By his side on the ledge was an empty bottle. There, by his pack, was a full one. She froze. Past terrors rose and mixed with these new images, and engulfed her. Her heart burst with disappointment. She wasn’t going into that again. She hugged her sleeping bag to her chest and said sod, sod, sod under her breath. She turned and began to creep away, towards the stairs, tears blinding her.   

‘Erin? Where are you going?’

‘Never mind. Just never mind.’

‘Wait. I was thinking - about you - about us.’

She spun r
ound, her pain turned to anger.

‘So you were thinking about ‘us’ were you? But you couldn’t think about us sober, could you?’

‘What are you talking about? That’s not how it was. But what if I took a drink? What the hell’s wrong with that?!’

He swivelled fully round on the parapet and faced her now. She came back across the roof towards him, still clutching her sleeping-bag to her chest.
Her childhood accent broke surface.

‘
Not a thing – in moderation! But from the moment I met you it’s being going doon your neck like you were being hanged in the morning.’

There was something particularly chastising about
a Scottish accent to an American ear. Echoes of Presbyterian probity from high-minded preachers, marshalling their flocks as they pushed back the frontiers of the new world.

‘Trying to save me again, huh? Trying to run my life for me?’

‘Well, look at you! One bottle finished, and another waiting.’

She dropped her bag and reached down and picked up his full one.

‘You don’t know how wrong you are, lady. But then I guess you’d never admit you were wrong. Now put that down.’

‘I’ll put it down all right.’

She yanked at the foil round the neck, and then pulled the cork with a pop. He saw what she was about to do and got to his feet, angered beyond words at her arrogance.

‘Give me that!’

‘This is for your own good! Don’t you see? Can’t you get along without this even for a day?’

Her voice was breaking, somewhere between desperation and fear. They were crouched, facing each other, like wrestlers looking for a hold.
Erin kept his rucksack and bedding between them.

‘Put the bottle down, you stupid broad!’

‘It’s going down.’

She took two quick steps back to the ledge and upended the bottle. His cry of anger was too late to stop the whiskey glugging into the night. He got to her and grabbed her body with his right arm while stretching out to wrench the bottle from her hand. He won it, but it was Pyrrhic. The bottle was empty except for a last inch. He stood back from her, inspected the bottle, then carefully emptied the rest over the side. They stood facing each other, glaring, chests heaving with the tussle.

‘You stupid, stupid, interfering…’

‘Broad. I k
en.’

She’d swung from reckless anger to fear. He didn’t seem drunk, just thoroughly pissed off. He walked away from her as though he might throw her off if he stood any closer. He took up his seat again on the ledge by his bed.

‘Why, Erin? Why? What’s going on here? Why did you come up here? Why that?’ He pointed at her sleeping bag.

‘I … I just wanted to talk. Thought I’d be cold. I didn’t like how we left it last night.’

‘Then you go and do something like that.’

‘You don’t understand. I didn’t wan
t to talk to you when you were fu’ - when you’d been drinking.’

‘What makes you think I’d been drinking?’

‘Well of course you were. The place is littered with bottles. It smells like a distillery. What else…’ She began to run out of words.

He got up and came towards her so that he was again within touching distance. She inched back, cowering, scar
ed he would hit her. Not again. Ted saw the fear in her eyes and was wounded by it, grieved by it. He bent a little at the knees to put him level with her. He smiled as if at a panicked child and whispered.

‘I’m not go
ing to hurt you. See.’

He lifted his big hands. She flinched but held her ground. He extended them and put them gently on her shoulders. He took one last step and kissed her lightly on her lips. So lightly she felt denied.

‘Taste anything?’

‘No. I mean… You mean…’

‘I haven’t had a drop. I poured away the first bottle. I was planning the same with the one you took. We’ve got work to do.’

‘Oh,
bugger.’

Her face co
llapsed and her shoulders fell, her sandcastle wiped out by a wave. Ted took her hand and pulled her over to the corner of the palisade. He took one side of the angle and she took the other. Their knees touched.

‘Tell me,
’ he said.

She shook her head.
‘It’s such a bloody cliché.’

‘
It’s the human condition.’

She sat still for a while. He waited. She let her chest rise and fall, drawing in the night smells, sucking at the stars. Then it
trickled out of her. 

‘
My father was a teacher. We had a nice life, a nice wee house, I went to a nice school in Pollokshaws. South West of Glasgow. But Dad was never happy. Just seemed bitter about everything. I think – I’m sure - there was someone else. He should have left us. Instead, he started to drink. See what I mean? Total cliché.’

‘Not to you.
It was unique to you.’

She
held his eyes for a long second then she told him of the bad years, of the shouting and the violence and the growing debts. The dread each morning as another brown envelope landed on the mat. Her mother bearing the brunt, sheltering her daughter.

‘She just took
it all, you know, like it was her cross to bear. Sometimes they’d make up, and everything seemed all right for a while, then Dad went off the rails again. He lost his job, the bailiffs moved in and took everything we had. I was sleeping on the floor for a bit. Until we lost the house.’

Erin
was silent for long moment, reliving the final wrench. Ted leaned over and touched the back of her hand. She jerked it clear, but then brought it back and touched his briefly.

‘
We applied to the council. All they could offer us was Drumchapel. A tiny wee flat on the 18
th
floor in the middle of nowhere. Away from everyone we knew. All ma pals. Living on benefits until Dad died of liver disease and we were free. Or rather
I
was freed. Ma Mum never got over it. Never shook off his grip.’

The tears
started. They ran down her face and dripped at her nose and made her sniff. He dug in his pocket and passed her a tissue. He listened quietly, and at some point took her hand again. She squeezed it.

‘
I know it’s stupid, an over-reaction, and just because you have a drink doesn’t bring out the latent woman beater in all men.’

She grimaced and borrowed her hand back to wipe both cheeks wit
h her knuckles, like a child. She swallowed and choked through her tears.

‘And normally I don’t ca
re what a man does to his body. Do you see?’

‘Yeah, I see. You ok?’

‘I’m fine, now. Really. Fine. I’m sorry about your bottle, and I’m sorry. . .’

‘
Doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.’

‘Look, thanks for listening. I’m going t
o go now. Best get some sleep.’

She stood up with some resolution. He rose beside her. They dropped hands,
all at once aware of what they were doing.

‘You don’t have to
go, you know.’

‘I
t’s best. Till all this is over, and I know where ma head is.’

He nodded. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Thanks, Ted Saddler. You’re a good man. Goodnight.’

T
hey were quiet with each other in the morning, the quiet of people who’d revealed too much, and not enough. Neither knew how to ask what came next. Erin felt foolish and chastened. Ted was in turmoil. Had they overshot, taken the friendship fork rather than the lover? Was there a way back? He couldn’t read her silence or the sad smile.

There was also the unspoken fear of what lay ahead. The village had taken on a friendlier, more attractive hue, and they were reluctant to leave its simple sanctuary. From the roof of
Ted’s hut they could see the whole length of the valley. Could spot any unusual dust cloud and have 30 minutes to get to the hills. But they’d made their commitments. Meera had phoned Bhopal railway station and had managed to wait-list them on the early morning train to Delhi.

She dropped them at the station, dazed from their early start and the bucking ride. The absence of a guaranteed return ticket forced
Ted to join a scrum at the opaque windows of the booking office. No patient queuing here. No legacy of the Raj. Every man for himself. Brown arms snaked past his reticent white ones, beating him to the attention of the man with the power over life, death or getting back to Delhi’s sanctuary that evening. Abandoning his civilized restraints Ted used his bulk and barged to the front, blocking out all other would-be travellers.

Peering through the smeared glass,
Ted could now see the source of the print-outs taped to the side of the carriages. Ancient dot-matrix printers dashed out their decisions. Clerks crouched in front of battered black and white screens with green columns chugging up and down, telling a man’s destiny. Telling him his wait was over, his wait-list confirmed - possibly - for how could he tell for certain what the Sanskrit on the proffered ticket meant?

But it worked. They embraced Meera and said their goodbyes to her with new fondness. They settled in for the long cold ride, sitting side by side, but alone with their tangled thoughts. Sometimes he dared a touch on her arm to see how she was. It provoked a strained smile and a ‘fine’. He remembered
Ramesh’s gift and tried to immerse himself in Passage to India to see if he recognised the world. What was Ramesh’s point? That Ted was misreading India – and therefore Ramesh himself – just like all white Westerners? Was Ramesh the vilified Dr Aziz? Then who was Ted?

Mostly though,
Ted fidgeted, looking for hit men. Every time a passenger came through the connecting door of the rocking train his eyes ran down the man’s body to check for a knife or a gun. He swivelled if someone was coming from behind and he searched faces for signs of deadly intent.

He didn’t tell
Erin. She was already badly rattled and didn’t need any more anxiety piled on her. As if a death threat from her boss wasn’t enough. Ted tried to keep his mind off the possibility of a knife in his back or a bullet in the head by running over his plan, such as it was, for countering the bad guys. He wished now that they’d made the phone call to Warwick Stanstead the night before, but somehow it had seemed too big an intrusion from that other world.