The Cat's Table Read online

  However, Sir Hector de Silva did coerce one Moratuwa ayurvedic to accompany him on the sea voyage and to bring his sack full of locally gathered herbs and some Nepal-grown ummattaka seeds and roots. Thus, along with two established doctors, this ayurvedic boarded the ship. These medical men shared a suite on one side of Sir Hector’s central bedroom, while his wife and his twenty-three-year-old daughter shared one on the other side.

  And so in mid-ocean the Moratuwa ayurvedic opened up his steamer trunk, which contained unguents and fluids, brought out the thorn apple seeds that he had previously immersed in cow’s urine, mixed them with some jaggery paste to disguise the flavour, and scurried down the hall to give the millionaire a cup of this catarrh-like sauce to swallow, followed by a good French brandy, which the philanthropist insisted on. This was carried out twice a day, and it was the ayurvedic’s only duty. So while the two professional doctors looked after the patient for the rest of the day, the man from Moratuwa had the run of the ship, though it was made clear his strolls were limited to Tourist Class. He too must have wandered about the vessel, aware of the lack of smells on the obsessively cleansed ship, until one day he picked up the familiar perfume of burning hemp and followed it to its source on D level, paused at the metal door, knocked, heard a response, and entered to be welcomed by Mr Fonseka and a boy.

  We had been at sea several days when this visit occurred. And it would be the ayurvedic who revealed the last few details of the Hector de Silva story, with hesitation at first, but eventually nearly every interesting detail came from him. Later on, through us, he met Mr Daniels, who befriended him and invited him down to the hold to view his garden, where they spent hours arguing and discussing the forensics of plants. Cassius too made a new friend of the ayurvedic and immediately requested a few betel leaves from the southern doctor, who had brought a cache with him.

  The surreal revelations about the man with a curse on his head thrilled us. We gathered every fragment of Sir Hector’s story and remained hungry for more. We cast our minds back to the night of embarkation in Colombo harbour and tried to recall, or to imagine at least, a stretcher, and the body of the millionaire being carried at a slight tilt up the gangplank. Whether we had witnessed this or not, the scene was now indelible in our minds. For the first time in our lives we were interested in the fate of the upper classes; and gradually it became clear to us that Mr Mazappa and his musical legends and Mr Fonseka with his songs from the Azores and Mr Daniels with his plants, who had been until then like gods to us, were only minor characters, there to watch how those with real power progressed or failed in the world.

  Afternoons

  IT HAD BEEN evident when Mr Daniels offered the three of us betel leaves to chew that Cassius was already familiar with them. By the time he was told he would be going to a school in England, he could already aim a jet of the red fluid through his teeth and hit anything he wished – a face on a billboard, the trousers that covered a teacher’s buttocks, a dog’s head through the open window of a passing car. Preparing for his departure, his parents, hoping to cure this street habit, refused to let him pack any betel leaves, but Cassius stuffed his favourite pillowcase with a mother lode of leaves and nuts. During the emotional farewell in Colombo harbour, as his parents waved to him from the jetty, Cassius pulled out one green leaf and waved it back at them. He was never sure if they saw it, but he hoped they had witnessed his guile.

  We had been banned from the Lido pool for three days. Our assault on it that afternoon, armed with deckchairs, and under the influence of Mr Daniels’s ‘white beedi’, meant that all we could do was skulk the perimeter, pretending we were about to leap in. In our turbine room headquarters we decided to find out all we could about the passengers at the Cat’s Table, sharing any information we had picked up on our own. Cassius reported that Miss Lasqueti, the wan-looking woman who sat next to him at meals, had accidentally or intentionally ‘jostled his penis’ with her elbow. I said that Mr Mazappa, who as Sunny Meadows wore black-rimmed spectacles, did so to appear more reliable and thoughtful. He’d plucked them from his breast pocket and passed them over to me to show they were just clear glass. We all felt Mr Mazappa’s past must have been a furtive one. ‘As the good book says, I have crawled up a few sewers in my time,’ was one of his favourite conclusions to an anecdote.

  During one of our constant palavers in the turbine room, Cassius said, ‘Remember the bogs at St Thomas’ College?’ He was lying back against a life preserver sucking condensed milk out of a tin. ‘You know what I am going to do, before I get off this ship? I promise you I am going to take a shit in the Captain’s enamel toilet.’

  I spent more time with Mr Nevil again. With those blueprints of the ship that he always carried, he located for me where the engineers ate and slept, and where the Captain’s quarters were. He showed me how the electrical system worked its way into every room, and even the way unseen machines spread themselves throughout the lower levels of the Oronsay. I was already aware of that. In my cabin, one extended limb of a driveshaft revolved behind a panelled wall continuously, and I often put my open palm against the permanently warm wood.

  Best of all, he told me about his days as a ship dismantler, and how an ocean liner could be broken down into thousands of unrecognisable pieces in a ‘breaker’s yard’. I realised this was what I must have seen in that far corner of Colombo harbour when the ship was being burned. It was being reduced to just useful metal, so the hull could be converted into a canal barge or the funnel hammered out to waterproof a tank. The far corner of all harbours, Mr Nevil said, was where such destructions took place. Alloys were separated, wood burned away, rubber and plastic melted into slabs and buried. But porcelain, metal taps and electrical wiring were saved and reused, so I imagined those who worked with him must have ranged from muscular men who dismantled walls with heavy wooden mallets to those whose specific job it was to pluck and gather coils of metal and small electrical fixtures and door locks, like crows. In a month they could make a ship disappear, leaving only its skeleton in the muck of some estuary, bones for a dog. Mr Nevil had worked all over the world doing this, from Bangkok to Barking. Now he was sitting with me, remembering the harbours he had inhabited at one time or another, rolling a piece of blue chalk in his fingers, suddenly meditative.

  It was, he murmured, a dangerous profession, of course. And it was painful to realise that nothing was permanent, not even an ocean liner. ‘Not even the trireme!’ he said, and nudged me. He had been there to help dismantle the Normandie – ‘the most beautiful ship ever built’ – as it lay charred and half drowned in the Hudson River in America. ‘But somehow even that was beautiful … because in a breaker’s yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.’

  Miss Lasqueti

  MISS LASQUETI WAS regarded by most of those at the Cat’s Table as a likely spinster, and by us three as having a possible libido (that elbow against Cassius’s scrotum). She was lithe, and white as a pigeon. She was not fond of the sun. You would see her in a deckchair reading crime novels within the rectangles of deep shadow, her bright blonde hair a little sparkle in her chosen gloom. She was a smoker. She and Mr Mazappa would simultaneously rise and excuse themselves after the first course and take the nearest exit onto the deck. What they spoke of there, we had no idea. They seemed an unlikely pair. Although she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in mud. It surprised you because it emerged from that modest and slim frame; we heard it usually in response to one of Mr Mazappa’s ribald stories. She could be whimsical. ‘Why is it when I hear the phrase “trompe l’oeil” I think of oysters?’ I overheard her say once.

  Still, most of the time we had barely a fishhook’s evidence about Miss Lasqueti’s background or career. We considered ourselves good at vacuuming up clues as we coursed over the ship each day, but our certainty about what we discovered grew slowly. We’d overhea
r something at lunch, or witness a thrown glance or the shake of a head. ‘Spanish is a loving tongue – is it not, Mr Mazappa?’ Miss Lasqueti had commented, and he had winked back at her from across the table. We were learning about adults simply by being in their midst. We felt patterns emerging, and for a while everything was based on that wink by Mr Mazappa.

  A peculiarity of Miss Lasqueti was that she was a sleeper. Someone who at certain hours during the day could barely stay awake. You saw her fighting it. This struggle made her endearing, as if she were forever warding off an unjustified punishment. You’d walk past her in a deckchair, her head falling slowly towards the book she was attempting to read. She was in many ways our table’s ghost, for it was also revealed that she sleepwalked, a dangerous habit on a ship. A sliver of white, I see her always, against the dark rolling sea.

  What was her future? What had been her past? She was the only one from the Cat’s Table who was able to force us out of ourselves in order to imagine another’s life. I admit it was mostly Ramadhin who coaxed this empathy from Cassius and me. Ramadhin was always the most generous of the three of us. But for the first time in our lives we began to sense there was an unfairness in someone else’s life. Miss Lasqueti had, I remember, ‘gunpowder tea’, which she mixed with a cup of hot water at our table, then poured into a thermos before she left us for the afternoon. You could actually see the flush enter her face as the drink knocked her awake.

  Describing her as ‘white as a pigeon’ was probably influenced by a later discovery about her: it was revealed that Miss Lasqueti had twenty or thirty pigeons caged somewhere on the ship. She was ‘accompanying them’ to England, but she breasted her cards about her motive for travelling with them. Then I heard, via Flavia Prins, that an unknown passenger in First Class had informed her that Miss Lasqueti had often been seen in the corridors of Whitehall.

  In any case, it seemed to us that nearly all at our table, from the silent tailor, Mr Gunesekera, who owned a shop in Kandy, to the entertaining Mr Mazappa, to Miss Lasqueti, might have an interesting reason for their journey, even if it was unspoken or, so far, undiscovered. In spite of this, our table’s status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

  The Girl

  IF ANYONE APPEARED to be the most powerless person on the ship it was the girl named Asuntha, and it was only gradually that we became aware of her. She seemed to own just a faded green dress. It was all she wore, even during the storms. She was deaf, and that made her seem even more frail and alone. Someone at our table wondered how she had managed to pay for her passage. We watched her once, exercising on a trampoline, and when she was in mid-air, with all that silent space around her, we felt we were witnessing a different person. But as soon as she stopped and walked away, you were not conscious of any agility or strength in her. She was pale, even for a Sinhalese girl. And slight.

  She was scared of water. If she was walking past the pool we’d taunt her by threatening to shove handfuls at her, until Cassius had a change of heart and stopped our doing it. We glimpsed a little mercy in Cassius then, and noticed he began to watch over her shyly from that point on. Sunil, The Hyderabad Mind from the Jankla Troupe, seemed to be looking after her. He sat beside her at meals, at the table where Emily also sat, and he’d glance over to the Cat’s Table, horrified at the amount of noise being made by our group.

  Asuntha had a specific way of listening. She could hear only with her right ear, and then only if someone spoke clearly and directly into it. In this way she would take the tremor of air and interpret it into sound, then words. You could not communicate except by coming intimately close. During lifeboat drills a steward took her aside to explain rules and procedures, while the rest of us were told the same information from a loudspeaker. It felt there were barriers all around her.

  It was chance and nothing more that Emily was sitting at the same table as the girl. And if Emily was the glittering public beauty, this girl was the reclusive one. Gradually they seemed to become friends, and we began to see an intensity in their conversations – the whispers, the holding of hands. It was Emily as a very different soul, when she was with the deaf girl.

  A THIN WASH of morning rain on the decks was perfect. Between Exit B and Exit C was a twenty-yard stretch unhindered by deckchairs. We raced towards it in our bare feet and let ourselves go, sliding along the slippery wood till we crashed into the railing or a door being suddenly opened by a passenger coming out to check on the weather. Cassius felled the ancient Professor Raasagoola Chaudharibhoy during one record-setting projection of his body. The distance could be improved during deck scrubbing. Once the layer of soap was down and not yet mopped, we could slide twice the distance, overturning pails, colliding into sailors. Even Ramadhin participated. He was discovering that more than anything he loved the sea wind in his face. He would stand for hours at the prow, his gaze locked into the distance, hypnotised by something out there or held in some thought.

  If anyone wished to capture the daily movements on our ship, the most accurate method might be to create a series of time-lapse criss-crossings, depicted in different colours, to reflect the daily loitering. There was the path Mr Mazappa took after waking at noon, and the stroll the Moratuwa ayurvedic made when free of his duties with Sir Hector. There were the two dog walkers, Hastie and Invernio; the slow perambulation to and from the Delilah Lounge by Flavia Prins and her bridge-playing friends; the Australian circling on skates at dawn; the Jankla Troupe’s official and unofficial activities; as well as the three of us bursting all over the place like freed mercury: stopping at the pool, then the ping-pong table, watching a piano class with Mr Mazappa in the ballroom, a small nap, a chat with the one-eyed Assistant Purser – looking carefully into his glass eye as we passed – and visits to Mr Fonseka’s cabin for an hour or more. All these haphazard patterns of movement became as predictable as the steps of a quadrille.

  For us, this was an era without the benefit of photography so the journey escaped any permanent memory. Not even one blurred snapshot of my time on the Oronsay exists in my possession to tell me what Ramadhin really looked like during that journey. A blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror, Miss Lasqueti asleep in a deckchair – these are images only from memory. On the upper deck, in Emperor Class, some passengers had box cameras, and they were often captured in their ‘soup and fish’ outfits. At the Cat’s Table, Miss Lasqueti now and then did sketches in a yellow notebook. She may have drawn some of us, but we were never curious enough to ask, an artistic interest not being something we assumed in those around us. She could just as easily have been knitting a portrait of each of us using different-coloured wools. We were more curious when she brought out her pigeon jacket to show us how she could walk around on deck carrying several live birds in its padded pockets.

  Whatever we did had no possibility of permanence. We were simply discovering how long our lungs could hold air as we raced back and forth along the bottom of the pool. Because our greatest pleasure was when one hundred spoons were flung by a steward into the pool and Cassius and I dived in with competitors to collect as many as we could in our small hands, relying on those lungs for more and more time underwater. We were watched and cheered and laughed at if our trunks slipped down as we clambered out like amphibious fish with cutlery in our hands, gripping them against our chests. ‘I love all men who dive,’ Melville, that great sea-crosser, wrote. And if I had been asked to choose a career then, or at any time during those twenty-one days, I would have said I desired to be a diver in some similar competitio
n for the rest of my life. It never occurred to me then that there was no such trade or profession. Still our slim bodies, almost part of the element, dumped our treasure and flipped back in for another helping, hunting underwater for the last spoons. Only Ramadhin, protecting his tentative heart, could not participate. But he would, slightly bored, cheer us on.

  Thievery

  ONE MORNING I was persuaded by a man known to us as Baron C. to help with a project. He needed a small, athletic boy, and he had been watching me dive for spoons in the pool.

  First of all I was invited by him to have some ice cream in the First Class lounge. Then, in his cabin, in order to demonstrate my skill, I was asked to remove my sandals, get on the furniture, and move as fast as I could around the room, without ever touching the floor. I thought this was peculiar, but I leapt from the armchair onto the desk, then to the bed, and swung myself hanging on the door over to the bathroom. Compared with mine it was a very large cabin, and after a few minutes I stood there, barefoot on the thick carpet, panting like a dog. At which point he brought out a pot of tea.