The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (9 page)

Why had her father changed his mind? Pauline never found out. Fully recovered from his operation, he seemed to be looking forward to his new life in Bangalore. “Raring to go,” he said. He had had his immunizations; he had even sorted out some lightweight clothes from his travels in the tropics and crowed over the fact that they still fit him. Norman’s imminent departure had changed Ravi’s attitude toward his father-in-law; he had become more tolerant of the old boy, almost fond. The day before, he had even managed a mild joke, about buying a new saucepan.

Pauline’s own feelings were mixed. In her present state, the flight itself filled her with panic. What happened if one of her copious periods suddenly began? She pictured the charnel house it would create in the British Airways toilet. Would there be Tampax in India? She had always been curious about Ravi’s home country, but this voyage back to his roots was not the one she had envisaged. She was going to leave her father in a strange land, in the company of people he had never met. It was like taking a child to boarding school—in this case, halfway across the earth—and leaving him there, the new boy in class. She would walk away, eyes swimming. She pictured him behind her, waving his stick in farewell … a small figure, growing smaller.

Pauline eased her way downstairs. She had wedged a Kotex between her legs; the plastic shifted. Her father sat in the lounge, reading the “Deaths” column in the
Daily Telegraph
. He liked to sit there with his morning coffee, totting up the
suddenly
s and
peacefully
s.

She paused for a moment, looking at the blotches on the top of his head. “Good day today?” She indicated the paper.

“Pretty good.” He pointed with his pencil. “Eight of them older than me. Seventy-nine … eighty-two. Only a couple younger and they’re
suddenly
s. Probably poofters with AIDS.”

“Dad!” Norman only totted up men. When it came to mortality, women didn’t count. “Could be car crashes,” she said. “Could be anything.”

It was Saturday. Pauline should be going to the supermarket, but she didn’t feel like moving. There was a silence. She wanted to tell her father so much but she didn’t know where to begin. And he wasn’t going to start, not after fifty-one years.

“Got
punkawallah
in the crossword,” he said. “Chaps who fan you, in India.”

“I wouldn’t mind one of those.” She didn’t say
for my hot flushes
. Though only too frank about sex, Norman was embarrassed by women’s intimate arrangements. She said: “Remember, you can always come home.”

“Not on your nelly.”

“The other people sound very nice,” Pauline said. “There’s a civil servant and somebody who worked in the BBC. A Dorothy Miller. Mostly women, of course.” She thought: They stay alive longer than men.

Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. These damn mood swings. Now that her father was leaving, his possessions already had the power to move her—his slippers in particular. She would have to throw away the piece of paper she had pinned by the front door: Checklist: Teeth. Fly. Bus Pass. Keys.

“Another old biddy left in Casualty,” Norman said, showing her the paper. “Here, on the front page.” He started to chortle. “Remember what’s-her-face, the one who got your hubby into trouble?”

“Muriel Donnelly.”

“Wouldn’t let darkies touch her.” He coughed his smoker’s cough. “Ha! Catch
her
going to India.”

Pauline laughed. “I think we can safely say that she won’t be joining you.”

Ravi came into the room. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

Pauline told him.

“Nothing funny about racism,” he said.

“Oh, don’t be such a prig,” she replied. “You have to admit it would be funny if an old bat like her, who can’t stand darkies, suddenly found herself surrounded by a thousand million of them.”

When Ignorance is shattered, Light overflows, Wisdom arises, the Meditator becomes fully delivered and freed from the bondages of cycles of Birth, Rebirth, Decay and Death … Herein lies the sole object and the very purpose of Meditation.

V
EN
. D
R
. R
ASTRAPAL
M
AHATHERA

W
hen the Queen Mum died, Muriel put up the flags—three of them, stuck in a vase in her window. She had removed them from her Diana shrine in her lounge. Diana was a storybook princess, of course—beautiful, doomed, a deer fleeing the hounds according to that Earl Spencer. The Queen Mum, however, was the real thing—royal to her bones rather than a beguiling traitor. She was special, the most special mum in the world. Muriel’s son Keith made her feel like that. He made her feel like royalty.

The last time Keith visited he had admired the Union Jacks. “It’s to set an example,” Muriel had said, indicating the flats opposite. “To that lot.”

Muriel had lived in Peckham all her life, except for a short and traumatic period during the war. While she stayed put, however, the area had changed around her. The Blitz had been followed by equally savage destruction in the 1960s, when streets had been bulldozed to make way for high-rise blocks. As the years passed many of the families she knew had moved out, to be replaced by blacks. Nowadays crack dealers drove past in convertibles, music blaring, the thuds making her ornaments tremble. Huge girls barged into the
Only Two Schoolchildren at a Time
newsagent’s. They shoved past her, shouting on their mobiles, while she tried to buy a tin of Whiskas. More recently, illegal immigrants had moved in, gray-faced men from God knew where. They stood outside the tube station waiting to be picked up by cowboy builders. Crime statistics were soaring; her nights were punctuated by the sound of smashing glass.

Keith had urged her to move out. “It’s a dump, Mum. Come to Chigwell.” He lived there in some style; he had done well for himself. Muriel, however, was stubborn. She let him buy her a flat on the ground floor of a nice new block, around the corner from where she grew up. She let him fit it out, washing machine, satellite TV. She even took the money Keith pulled out from his wallet, so fat it didn’t close properly, when he visited her. But she stayed where she was. She was an independent woman; she didn’t want to be beholden. And she didn’t want to live anywhere near that snarky wife of his.

The loathing was mutual. When Muriel had been stuck in Casualty, back in May, Sandra hadn’t even been bothered to phone. It was only when Keith got back from Spain that all hell was let loose—newspapers, TV; Muriel did enjoy it. The neighbors made a fuss over her, the ones who could speak English; all of a sudden she was a celebrity.

Muriel loved her son. She had always been there for him. Wives and girlfriends came and went
—“Here we are, gathered together again,”
said the best man at Keith’s last wedding—but they were like driftwood, washed back to sea while Muriel remained, the rock. That was mothers for you. Keith was all she had, Keith and her cat, Leonard. In fact they had a certain amount in common. Both were sleek, handsome and predators of the opposite sex; both disappeared for days at a time on mysterious business of their own—in the case of her cat, returning with a torn ear.

Where did Keith’s money come from? Muriel didn’t ask. He said he was in property, and that was good enough for her. It certainly financed a lavish lifestyle: the house in Chigwell, the house in Spain, the vast silver Jeep-thing in which he arrived to whisk her out to Sunday lunch up west at places where they removed her coat with a flourish as if she had just arrived from Buckingham Palace. In Keith’s presence Muriel was plugged into a different world. His father would have been proud of him. After all, that was what sons were for: to do better than you ever did. Otherwise there would be no sense in it.

Life had to make sense. Muriel was a superstitious woman. She read tea leaves—a lost art since the arrival of tea bags. She scanned the skies of the urban jungle for supernatural omens and read her horoscope in the
Daily Express
. Her life had had its sorrows and though her husband, and the large tribe of Donnellys to which he belonged, had found solace in the Catholic Church, she was suspicious of organized religion and pursued her own spiritual path. Cats understood this. Leonard sensed things; that was why they were close. He was an independent spirit, like herself, in his own feline way.

She had named him after one of her dead husband’s brothers. Leonard had died during a bombing raid; he was returning home from leave, carrying a bag of sausage rolls. She was a young girl at the time. The Donnellys lived next door and it was Leonard she had loved, more than all of his brothers.
When I grow up I shall marry Lenny
, Muriel had thought. His spirit lived on in her cat. She talked to him in a way she had never talked to her husband, Patrick, with whom she had shared a bed for forty-two years until he had smoked himself to death.

Muriel was talking to Leonard now, the day that she herself was to become a crime statistic. No tea leaves had warned her. “I fancy a spot of fish,” she said. “It’s Friday, see, though it’s all the same to you.” She checked her handbag: purse, keys. “Daft picture of Charles in the paper. Paddy called him Jug Ears, remember? We were on the same side, Paddy and me—we had that in common.”

Leonard lay draped over the back of the armchair. The fabric was worn, from where Patrick’s head had rested when he watched the telly. It had remained her husband’s chair; only the cat used it. She stroked Lenny’s fur; he rose to meet her hand. That’s what she liked about cats. They were so easily contented: a chair, a gas fire, a loving stroke. Humans needed so many things to make them happy.

Muriel let herself out of the flat. Pulling her shopping trolley she made her way past the school, the roar of the playground behind the wall. Years ago there had been two fish shops in the high street. One was run by Ron Whiting. She had explained the joke to Keith, when he was little, his hand in hers. Now she had to go to the supermarket, which was farther away: across the main road, down an alleyway—her shortcut—and past what had once been a row of cottages where her friend Maisie lived. They had fed sugar cubes to the milkman’s horse. A man came into the stable once and showed them his willy. When she was sixteen, Maisie had run off with a GI.

The sun came out. It glinted on the broken glass. Her neighbor Winnie went the long way around, by Cressy Road, but Muriel pooh-poohed that. Winnie was such a timid little thing, cowering behind her nets, never emerging after dusk.

Muriel walked past the Dixon’s loading bay. There was nobody around. Why hadn’t Keith phoned? It had been three days now; this was not like her son. He had given her a mobile phone. When she sat on the bus, her handbag throbbed in her lap. But she couldn’t see the little numbers and she never remembered to plug it in. It was hard enough, working out the buttons on her remote.

Muriel didn’t hear the footsteps behind her. She was thinking about her son when a hand grabbed her arm and wrenched it back.

She didn’t feel the pain, not until later. It happened so fast—the wrench, the kick. “Sod off!” she screamed, gripping her handbag. A hand clamped her mouth shut. She smelled the skin; she smelled sweat and fear. Something kicked her again, hard.

Muriel fell over. She hit the pavement heavily. She glimpsed a black face, hood pulled down. He wrenched at her bag and tripped over her shopping trolley. “Fuck!”

Then they ran off. Lying on the pavement, she saw them sprinting down the alley—two kids—and then they were gone.

They had punched the breath out of her body. Muriel lay spread-eagled, her knickers showing. For a moment, she was too shocked to move.

Maybe she fainted, because now a man was bending over her, blocking out the sun. “You all right, love?”

He tucked his hand under her arm and helped her to her feet. Muriel swayed, bumping against him. Her legs kept giving way. Later, she didn’t remember how she got there but she seemed to be standing in a shop, holding onto her trolley as if she were drowning.

“I been mugged,” she gasped, but the words seemed to come from somebody else. Her legs were trembling. And then she was in a back room, this Paki man helping her, and she sat down on a chair. A woman gazed at her. She had a red blotch on her forehead. Muriel’s own face felt sticky; when she inspected her fingers it was blood.

“They took my bag,” said Muriel.

The newsagent gave her a glass of water, but Muriel’s hand was shaking; the water dribbled down her chin. She hadn’t been in this shop before; the one she went to was nearer home.

“They were blacks,” she said. “Not like you. Black blacks.”

“I’ll phone the police,” said the man.

He spoke to his wife in a foreign language. She wore a sari, holding it against her mouth as if she had bad breath. Muriel remembered a girl at school named Annie Jones. Annie had a harelip. When she talked, her hand strayed to her mouth. Nobody had wanted to be her friend.

Muriel’s head swam. The newsagent must have called the police, because now he was picking up the phone again. “I shall call the ambulance,” he said.