The Cat's Table Read online

  Who realises how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door. Though among ourselves we must have been trying to understand and piece together the adult world, wondering what was going on there, and why. But once we climbed the gangplank onto the Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults.

  Mazappa

  MR MAZAPPA SIDLES up beside me, as I am explaining to an ancient passenger the art of unfolding a deckchair in just two moves, links his arm with mine, and makes me walk with him. ‘From Natchez to Mobile,’ he warns me, ‘from Memphis to Saint Joe …’ He pauses at my confusion.

  It is always the suddenness of Mr Mazappa’s arrival that catches me off guard. As I end a lap in the pool he grips my slippery arm and holds me against the side, crouching there. ‘Listen, my peculiar boy, women will sweet-talk, and give you the big eye … I am protecting you with what I know.’ But as an eleven-year-old I do not feel protected, I feel wounded in advance with possibilities. It is worse, even apocalyptic, when he speaks to all three of us. ‘When I came home from my last tour, I found a new mule kicking in my stall … You know what I mean?’ We do not. Until it is explained. Most of the time, though, it is just me he speaks to, as if I am the peculiar one on whom an impression can be made. In that regard, he may be right.

  Max Mazappa would wake at noon and eat a late breakfast at the Delilah Bar. ‘Give me a couple of one-eyed pharaohs, and a Nash soda, will ya,’ he’d say, chewing a few cocktail cherries while he waited to be served. After the meal he carried his cup of java to the ballroom piano and placed it on the treble notes. And there, with the piano chords nudging him on, he introduced and educated whoever was with him to the important and complicated details of the world. One day it might be about when to wear a hat, or it could be about spelling. ‘It is an impossible language, English. Impossible! “Egypt”, for instance. That’s a problem. I’ll show you how to spell it right every time. Just repeat the phrase “Ever Grasping Your Precious Tits” to yourself.’ And indeed, I never forgot the phrase. Even as I write this now, there is a subliminal hesitation while I capitalise the letters in my head.

  But most of the time, he unearthed his musical knowledge, explaining the intricacies of three-quarter time, or recalling some song he had learned from an attractive soprano on a backstage stairway. So we were receiving a sort of feverish biography. ‘I took a trip on a train and I thought about you,’ he grumbled, and we thought we were hearing about his sad wasted heart. Though today I realise that Max Mazappa loved the details of structure and melody, for not all of his Stations of the Cross had to do with the failures of love.

  He was half Sicilian, half something else, he told us in his un-track-down-able accent. He’d worked in Europe, travelled briefly into the Americas, and gone beyond them until he found himself in the tropics, living above a harbour bar. He taught us the chorus to ‘Hong Kong Blues’. He had so many songs and lives under his belt that truth and fiction merged too closely for us to distinguish one from the other. It was easy to fool the three of us, who were naked with innocence. Besides, there were words to some of the songs that Mr Mazappa muttered over the piano keys one afternoon as the ocean’s sunlight splashed onto the floor of the ballroom that were unknown to us.

  Bitch. Womb.

  He was talking to three boys on the verge of pubescence, and he probably knew the effect he was having. But he also imparted to this junior audience stories of musical honour, and the person he celebrated most was Sidney Bechet, who while playing a set in Paris was accused of hitting a false note and in response challenged the accuser to a duel, winged a pedestrian in the fracas that followed, was thrown into jail and deported. ‘Le Grand Bechet – Bash – they called him. You boys will live a long, long life,’ Mazappa said, ‘before you come across such a defence of a principle.’

  We were amazed, as well as shocked, by the huge borderless dramas of love that Mazappa’s songs and his sighs and confabulations depicted. We assumed that his career’s fatal tumble was caused by some deceit or by his too-great love for a woman.

  Every month, the changing of the moon.

  I say, every month, the changing of the moon,

  The blood comes rushing from the bitch’s womb.

  There was something extraterrestrial and indelible about the verse Mazappa sang on that afternoon, whatever the words meant. We heard it just once, but it remained hidden in us like a stone-hard truth whose bluntness we would continue to veer away from, just as we did then. The verse (by Jelly Roll Morton, I would later discover) was bulletproof and watertight. But we did not know it then, too confused by the directness of it – the words in that last line, its surprising and fatal rhyme, coming so economically after the repetitive opening. We dissolved away from his presence in that ballroom, suddenly aware of stewards up on ladders preparing for the evening’s dance, aiming coloured lights, lifting the arches of crêpe paper that criss-crossed the room. They were snapping open the large white tablecloths to drape them over the wooden tables. At the centre of each they positioned a vase of flowers, civilising and romanticising the bare room. Mr Mazappa did not leave with us. He stayed at the piano looking at the keys, unaware of the camouflage taking place around him. We knew that whatever he would be playing with the orchestra that night would not be what he had just been playing for us.

  *

  MAX MAZAPPA’S STAGE name – or his ‘war name’, as he called it – was Sunny Meadows. He began using it after a printing error on a poster advertising his performance in France. Perhaps the promoters had wished to avoid the Levantine quality of his name. On the Oronsay, where his piano class was announced in the ship’s bulletin, he was also referred to as ‘Sunny Meadows, Master of the Piano’. But he was Mazappa to us at the Cat’s Table, for sunny and meadows were hardly words that could exist alongside his nature. There was not much that was optimistic or well trimmed about him. Yet his passion for music invigorated our table. He spent one whole lunch regaling us with that duel of ‘Le Grand Bechet’, which had ended up more like a gun battle in the early hours of Paris in 1928 – Bechet firing his pistol in the direction of McKendrick, the bullet grazing his accuser’s Borsalino, then continuing until it embedded itself in the thigh of a Frenchwoman on her way to work. Mr Mazappa acted it all out, using salt and pepper shakers and a piece of cheese to depict the trajectory of the bullet.

  He invited me one afternoon to his cabin to listen to some records. Bechet, Mazappa told me, used the Albert System clarinet, which had a formal and luxurious tone. ‘Formal and luxurious,’ he kept repeating. He put on a 78 and whispered alongside the music, pointing out the impossible descants and swaggers. ‘You see, he shakes the sound out.’ I did not understand, but was in awe. Mazappa signalled to me each time Bechet made the melody reappear, ‘like sunshine on a forest floor’, I remember him saying. He fumbled within a waxy-looking suitcase, brought out a notebook, and read what Bechet had told a student. ‘I am going to give you one note today,’ Bechet had said. ‘See how many ways you can play the note – growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. It’s like talking.’

  Then Mazappa told me about the dog. ‘It used to come on stage with Bash and growl when his master was playing … And this is why Bechet broke up with Duke Ellington. The Duke wouldn’t allow Goola up there, in the lights, upstaging his white suit.’ So, because of Goola, Bechet left Ellington’s band and opened the Southern Tailor Shop, a repair and cleaning operation, as well as a hangout for musicians. ‘This was when his best recordings were done – like “Black Stick”, “Sweetie Dear”. Someday you are going to have to buy all those records.’

  And then the sexual life. ‘Oh, Bash was a repeater, often ending up with the same woman… Women of all kinds attempted to discipline him. But you know, he had been on the road playing since he was sixteen, he had already met girls of every clime and purpose.’ Every clime and purpose! From Natchez to Mobile …

  I listened
, nodding with incomprehension, while Mr Mazappa clutched to his heart this example of a way of life and musical skill as if they were held inside the oval portrait of a saint.

  C Deck

  I SAT ON my bunk looking at the door and the metal wall. It was hot in the cabin by late afternoon. I could be alone only if I came here, at this time. Most of my day was busy with Ramadhin and Cassius, sometimes Mazappa or others from the Cat’s Table. At night I was often surrounded by the whispering of my card-players. I needed to think backwards for a while. Thinking backwards I could remember the comfort of being curious and alone. After a while I would lie back and look at the ceiling a foot or two above me. I felt safe, even if I was in the middle of the sea.

  Sometimes, just before darkness, I found myself on C Deck when no one else was there. I’d walk to the railing, which was the height of my chest, and watch the sea rush alongside the ship. At times it appeared to rise almost to my level, as if wishing to pluck me away. I would not move, in spite of this havoc of fear and aloneness in me. It was the same emotion I had when lost in the narrow streets of the Pettah market, or adapting to new, undiscovered rules at school. When I could not see the ocean, the fear was not there, but now the sea rose in the half-dark, surrounding the ship, and coiled itself around me. No matter how scared I was, I remained there, adjacent to the passing darkness, half wanting to pull myself back, half desiring to leap towards it.

  Once, before I left Ceylon, I saw an ocean liner being burned at the far end of Colombo harbour. All afternoon I watched the blue acetylene cut into the flanks of the vessel. I realised the ship I was now on could also be cut into pieces. One day, seeing Mr Nevil, who understood these things, I tugged at his sleeve and asked him if we were safe. He told me the Oronsay was healthy, it was only in mid-career. It had worked as a troop ship during the Second World War, and somewhere along one wall of the hold there was a large mural in pink and white of naked women astride gun mounts and tanks that had been painted by a soldier. It was still there, a secret, for the officers on the ship never went into the hold.

  ‘But are we all right?’

  He sat me down and, on the back of one of the blueprints he always carried, drew me what he said was a Greek warship, a trireme. ‘This was the greatest ship of the seas. And even it no longer exists. It fought the enemies of Athens and brought back unknown fruits and crops, new sciences, architecture, even democracy. All that because of this ship. It had no decoration. The trireme was what it was – a weapon. On it were just rowers and archers. But not even a fragment of one exists now. People still search for them in the silt of river coasts, but they have never found one. They were made out of ash and hard elm, with oak for the keel, and green pine they bent into the shape of the frame. The planks were sewn together with linen cords. There was no metal on the skeleton. So the ship could be burned on a beach, or if it sank, it dissolved in the sea. Our ship is safer.’

  For some reason Mr Nevil’s depiction of an old warship gave me comfort. I no longer imagined myself on the decorated Oronsay, but on something more self-sufficient, more stripped down. I was an archer or a rower, on a trireme. We would enter the Arabian Sea and then the Mediterranean that way, with Mr Nevil as our naval commander.

  That night I woke suddenly with the feeling that we were passing islands, and that they were nearby in the darkness. There was a different sound to the waves beside the ship, a sense of an echo, as if they were responding to land. I turned on the yellow light by my bed and looked at the map of the world I had traced from a book. I had forgotten to put names on it. All I knew was that we were going west and north, away from Colombo.

  An Australian

  IN THE HOUR before dawn when we got up to roam what felt like a deserted ship, the cavernous saloons smelled of the previous night’s cigarettes, and Ramadhin and Cassius and I would already have turned the silent library into a mayhem of rolling trolleys. One morning we suddenly found ourselves hemmed in by a girl on roller skates racing round the wooden perimeter of the upper deck. It seemed she had been getting up even earlier than we had. There was no acknowledgement on her part of our existence as she raced faster and faster, the fluent strides testing her balance. On one turn, mistiming a cornering leap over cables, she crashed into the stern railing. She got up, looked at the slash of blood on her knee, and continued, glancing at her watch. She was Australian, and we were enthralled. We had never witnessed such determination. None of the female members of our families behaved this way. Later we recognised her in the pool, her speed a barrage of water. It would not have surprised us if she’d leapt off the Oronsay into the sea and kept pace for twenty minutes alongside the ship.

  We therefore began waking even earlier to watch her roller-skate the fifty or sixty laps. When she was finished, she’d unlace her skates and walk exhausted, sweating and fully clothed, towards the outdoor shower. She would stand in the gush and spray of it, tossing her hair this way, that way, like some clothed animal. This was a new kind of beauty. When she left we followed her footprints, which were already evaporating in the new sunlight as we approached them.

  Cassius

  WHO WOULD NAME a child Cassius, I think now. Most parents have veered from giving a firstborn such a name. Though Sri Lanka has always enjoyed the merging of classical first names with Sinhalese last names – Solomon and Senaka are not common, but they exist. The name of our family paediatrician was Socrates Gunewardena. In spite of its bad Roman press, Cassius is a gentle and whispering name, though the youthful Cassius I got to know on the voyage was very much an iconoclast. I never saw him side with anyone in power. He drew you into his perspective of things and you saw the layers of authority on the ship through his eyes. He relished, for instance, being one of the insignificants at the Cat’s Table.

  When Cassius spoke about St Thomas’ in Mount Lavinia it was with the energy of someone remembering a resistance movement. Since he was a year ahead of me at the school, it felt we were worlds apart, but he was a beacon to the younger students, for he had seldom been caught for his crimes. And when he was caught, not one hint of embarrassment or humility crossed his face. He was especially celebrated after he managed to lock ‘Bamboo Stick’ Barnabus, our boarding-house master, in the junior school toilet for several hours to protest the revolting lavatories at the school. (You squatted over the hole of hell and washed yourself afterwards with water from a rusty tin that once held Tate & Lyle golden syrup. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’, I would always remember.)

  Cassius had waited until Barnabus entered the students’ ground-floor toilet at six a.m. for his habitually long stay, and then, having jammed a metal rod against the door, proceeded to encase the lock with a quick-drying cement. We listened to our housemaster throwing himself against the door. Then he called our names, beginning with the students he trusted. One by one we offered to go for help, then drifted off onto the school grounds, where we had to relieve ourselves behind bushes, and then went for a swim or dutifully entered the seven a.m. homework study class that Father Barnabus had in fact instituted earlier in the term. The cement had to be shattered off with a cricket stump by one of the groundsmen, but that was not until late afternoon. By then we hoped our housemaster would be overcome by fumes, perhaps be faint and uncommunicative. But his vengeance proceeded rapidly. Whipped, then expelled for a week, Cassius became even more of an icon for the junior school, especially after a stirring speech by the Warden at morning chapel that damned him for a full two minutes as if he were one of the fallen angels. Of course, no lesson was learned from this episode – by anyone. Years later when an old boy donated funds to St Thomas’ for a new cricket pavilion, my friend Senaka said, ‘First they should construct some decent bogs.’

  Like me, in order to be accepted into an English school, Cassius had taken an exam overseen by the Warden. We had to answer several mathematical questions based on pounds and shillings, whereas all we knew were rupees and cents. There were also general-knowledge questions, such as how many men were
on the Oxford rowing team and who had lived at a place called Dove Cottage. We were even asked to name three members of the House of Lords. Cassius and I were the only students in the Warden’s living room that Saturday afternoon, and he threw me an incorrect answer to the question, ‘What do you call a female dog?’ He had said, ‘Cat,’ and I had written that down. It was the first time he had actually spoken to me, and it was with a lie. I had known him until then only by reputation. All of us in the junior school saw him as the incorrigible of St Thomas’ College. No doubt it galled the school staff that he would now be representing its name abroad.

  There was a mix of stubbornness and kindness in Cassius. I never knew where these qualities came from. He never referred to his parents, and if he had he would probably have invented a scenario to make himself distinct from them. In fact, during the journey the three of us had no real interest in one another’s background. Ramadhin would speak now and then of the careful advice his parents had given him about his health. And as for me, all the other two knew was that I had an ‘aunt’ in First Class. It had been Cassius who recommended we keep our backgrounds to ourselves. He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient. That is how he saw our little gang existing on the ship. He put up with Ramadhin’s domestic anecdotes because of his physical weakness. There was a gentle democracy in Cassius. In retrospect, he was only against the power of Caesar.

  I suppose he changed me during those twenty-one days, persuading me to interpret anything that took place around us with his quizzical or upside-down perspective. Twenty-one days is a very brief period in a life, but I would never unlearn the whisper of Cassius. As the years went by I would hear of him or read about his career, but I would never meet him again. It was Ramadhin I would keep in touch with, visiting him in Mill Hill, where his family lived, going to matinee movies with him and his sister, or to the Boat Show in Earls Court, where we would try to imagine the deeds that Cassius would commit if he were in our company.