Indian Night

On the night that my brother returned from India, I was busy trying to lose my virginity. It was August, I think, and the day had been hot. In the warm light of late afternoon my father drove his Triumph station wagon to Totnes to meet Martin off the train from London. He had traveled non-stop from Delhi—“Delhi to Dartmouth!” my mother quipped when we all sat around the diner table that night, and she was to repeat it to her friends later, enjoying the juxtaposition of the two names, the inequality in their exoticism, and finding something of interest in the alliteration. Delhi to Dartmouth: our boy had been half way around the world, had escaped the tiny confines of these Devonian hedgerows, and taken a big bird to different worlds. There was a tremor of anxiety in her voice, a murmur of something we all experienced but had not expressed, and had hardly even admitted to ourselves: the fear that he had changed.

What sticks in my mind most vividly is the late evening sun. It remained light until shortly before ten that night, filling us with a restless unease. We ate dinner sitting in the kitchen with the doors open onto the garden. We looked out on the fields of the farm which sloped gently down to the cliffs which, in turn, fell into the cold swell of the English Channel. It had been a burning hot day and the harvest, brought in over the last two weeks, had left a short, golden stubble on the fields in front of the sea. The burnished glow of the fields gave way to the frigidity of the Channel’s blue, and the vapid paleness of the sky beyond. All of these colors remain fixed in my memory, like the wallpaper of childhood-passing-into-adolescence.

My father went to collect Martin alone; there was a feeling that my father’s stolid, solitary presence would be less overwhelming for him after his long journey and after his year away from home. He had left England having finished school. He and his friend Nick, also eighteen, traveled first to Australia, where they worked for a few months, and then continued on to Thailand and India. We had received long letters every few weeks. This was, as some of them said, the first extended period he had spent away from home, and at points in the letters I could detect a nostalgia, a loneliness and a longing for his family. This was a surprise to me, because all I could remember for years was Martin’s fighting with Mum and Dad, and with me; as far as I was concerned he should have been ecstatic to shake us off. Not that I thought he didn’t love us, but in our family we didn’t dwell on affections too much, they were usually expressed obliquely. His letters were mostly full of somewhat turgid descriptions of his activities: We went to Sydney last week… or occasional horror stories: I had diarrhea the whole way to Jaipur, six hours on an Indian train! And although the place names were exotic to us, his actions were familiar, almost commonplace. On the odd occasion he would mention something that stuck with me, something unusual—the ear-cleaning he received from the guy on the corner of the street in Delhi, or the massages they gave on the beach in Koh Samui. Yet there were also passages in which he waxed nostalgic, almost sentimental, about all that he had left behind, when he dropped his guard and forgot the tough, confident world traveler and revealed the son: I miss you all. Sometimes its hard here, and I think of coming home…,even if I’ve had the most incredible time of my life here in Thailand…and for an instant or two you could see him sitting in some cheap hotel room, scribbling on scraps of paper, a lonely eighteen year old boy floating on the world’s oceans. In these distant letters I saw something new about my brother, and consequently about our family, that I had never thought of much before, and the view was unsettling: the unity I had taken for granted was temporary.

Cecile had come over that day. We were young enough to have to ask our parents to drive us the seven miles between each other’s houses. There was no public transport between Dartmouth and Dittisham where Cecile lived, and so our romance had to be monitored to an irritating degree. Sometimes we hitchhiked the distance, riding with young farmers in their Land Rovers, but usually walking forlornly for hours in the deserted lanes. We had spent the day in the cove at the foot of the cliffs, swimming and lying around on the rocks, talking, smoking, and throwing stones into rock pools. While Dad was away meeting the train which had carried the traveler from London, Cecile and I had come in from the cove, had showered, and dripped around the kitchen lazily putting some things together for dinner along with Mum. The awareness that a familiar, yet strange, presence was about to join us lingered in the air like an unasked question.

We had been “seeing” each other for a couple of months now, on and off. I had never really achieved such intimacy with a girl before this. In the few nights we had spent more or less un-chaperoned, we had explored each other’s bodies—within limits, never actually indulging in the final, irrevocable act of intercourse. At least irrevocability seemed an issue for me, but Cecile had experienced the full compliment of sexual activity already, under somewhat cloudy circumstances. I didn’t ask too many questions; I just knew that it involved an older man, and later this made me nervous and sulky whenever I dwelt on it, something to do, I suppose, with the fact that he must have used his age to his advantage unfairly, perversely even.

But Cecile and I had a friendship, and did not have the feeling that we were desperately rushing into something. In fact, I had a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards the great initiation, seeing it as the slow train coming, just around the corner, an unquestionable inevitability. And I felt so much “the boyfriend,” that as far as I was concerned, the sky was the limit with this relationship. I had played the part of the nice young man in front of her mother and step-father—a role which made me highly self-conscious, as I could not help but feel mercilessly judged by them— dutifully sitting at dinner with them from time to time before being released to run off to the pub, or retreat to her bedroom, where we would get high and listen to music, and eventually one of us would start playing with a part of the other’s body: me smelling her hair, or her licking my exposed forearm. These physical exchanges were unbearably pleasurable, and suggested to me that the ultimate act of physical union, the entanglement of our bodies—fucking— would be deliriously, impossibly satisfying, and I was looking forward to it like a bedraggled, starving immigrant standing on the prow of a ship approaching the New World, and freedom and prosperity.

Perhaps in anticipation of this grand event I was developing an acutely critical attitude towards my body. For days at a time I would forego ice cream, or cabbage, or chocolate, afraid of farting around her, and destroying the myth of my perfection, as if her desire was so anemic that it could be destroyed by the merest hint of my earthliness. On one occasion I had been over zealous in combating halitosis and had gargled with industrial-strength anti-septic, only to find Cecile’s mother sniffing the air at dinner and asking whether anyone had been using TCP. She knew it was me, I realized, and I cursed her silently for putting me through this humiliation at the dinner table, but there was no way I would have ever admitted it to her, and she would not have dared to accuse me directly in public. I kept imagining what my mother would have said about my predicament: “How absolutely mortifying!”

When he came through the front door he was, as we had all expected, much thinner. He had walked up the front steps a few paces behind Dad, so Dad had come through the door first, smiling at us in a strange way, as if to say: be cool, he’s here, at least I think its him. His hair was cut short and he was, perhaps against expectations, clean-shaven. This was indeed a surprise for me; it was as if he had cleaned up especially for us at the last minute. He looked a little drawn, and something about his expression suggested that we should be easy on him. We hugged somewhat awkwardly, and he smiled at my mother’s fussy attention to his appearance. He was wearing an ethereal white shirt and pale cargo pants. I searched for clues that this was still Martin, the old Martin, inside this withdrawn newcomer, that the person I had known for all of my sixteen years was still there, even if partially buried by superficial recent experiences which had temporarily severed us. I was jealous of his experiences, an amorphous grouping of people and places that I myself craved. But beyond this was the dim awareness that his recent separation was the tip of the iceberg; it was the beginning of the end of our life as a unit, of eating at the same table, of going on holidays together, of agreeing to the tight-knit interdependence of the family. Martin’s absence, and his subsequent return, would not leave me unaffected, and my anxiety dwelt in the certainty of the fact of this change, and my ignorance about its meaning.

We settled down to chicken, salad and green beans. Martin had self-consciously poured himself a glass of whiskey and water, something that he never would have done before, as if asserting silently that he needed this, that he was used to it, that no-one had better question his right. We didn’t know until later that he had become accustomed to regular doses of much stronger mood-enhancers, and that this, too, was a measure of his separation from us.

And in the middle of this sat Cecile.

“And where did you go on your travels?” She asked Martin, with the formality of a tea-party conversation that came strangely from her art-school appearance. She asked it so casually, as if he had been on a beach vacation for a week; she did not seem to comprehend the profundity of the event, how his mind had been opened like a door and the chaos and beauty of the world had rushed in like morning sunlight in a sleeping room, leaving him with no doubt that things were not as he had thought, that there was a life time of questions ahead of him.

“Oh, India and Thailand and Australia…” He smiled weakly at her, and his eyes darted down to his plate. I knew that Martin felt that talking about his trip on such a superficial level to a complete stranger, what’s more, his little brother’s girlfriend, would trivialize it, and so he played it down, and declined her invitation for full elaboration. Cecile did not seem to be as affected as the rest of us. For her he was a stranger, and so the usual rules of etiquette applied with him. But for the rest of us he was a brother and a son who had taken on a cloak of otherness, who was not, if experience determines personality, who he used to be, who did not conform to our expectations of him. Nevertheless we all asked our questions. It would have been impossible to sit through dinner without maintaining a focus on Martin, his recent past and his take on it. I sat opposite him silently as Mum and Dad directed cautious, easy questions at him. At one point in the meal my mother offered me a plate of chicken, which I declined, prompting her to observe—unnecessarily, I thought— If music be the food of love... It struck me as strange, both because there was no music, and because I wasn’t really thinking about love, at least not about Cecile. It did not occur to me that I wasn’t hungry for that reason. I was busy asking myself complicated and obscure questions about who I was and who I was meant to be.

Cecile and I stole outside after supper. The sky was a deep darkening blue. A perfect stillness lay over the fields and the sea, which lapped gently on the cool rocks at the base of the cliffs. We walked stealthily towards the turkey shed. There were no turkeys in it now, but several years earlier my mother had decided to rear some turkeys and sell them at Christmas. For months the shed had been home to dozens of the white-feathered, frantic-faced birds. Then the day for slaughter came and my mother and her friends who were in on the enterprise systematically butchered, plucked and dressed them all, and at the end of a long, bloody twelve hours, swore to each other never to do it again.

Once inside the darkness of the shed’s interior we stood facing the open doorless entrance. Cecile pulled her soft pack of Camels from her sweatshirt pocket, tapped on its bottom and extracted two cigarettes. She put them both in her mouth and lit them. Then she handed one to me. From our vantage point we could see the house with the lights on in every room. As we smoked we observed Mum and Dad sauntering into the living room, and sitting down in front of the T.V. Dad stuffed his pipe full of Three Nuns tobacco and tamped it down. The television emitted colors and shapes. Mum stood up and moved around the room, going to her desk and looking at something, turning to talk to her husband who was looking at the television. He lifted his head and said something to her. She looked back at her desk, opened a drawer, shuffled around and then closed it.

Meanwhile, in the bedroom above the living room, a light had just come on. Martin moved across the window and stood facing the wall. I couldn’t see what he was doing but I knew that he was standing in front of the mirror above the sink in his bedroom. He was motionless for a few moments, then he turned and looked out of the window, in our direction. For some reason we both flinched slightly and hid the glowing embers of our cigarettes from sight, although he could not see us in this gloom. Then he turned away and disappeared into the depths of the room, like an actor leaving the stage, back to somewhere where he was truly alone.

Cecile’s voice in the darkness said that he was nice, my brother. I agreed and said that it must be difficult being back and stuff. She took my hand and asked me how it was to see him after all this time, and that she thought it must be odd. There was a strange void between us, between her naive and uncomplicated apprehension of the situation, and my tangled and ominous feelings. I threw my cigarette out of the shed.

“Come on, lets go inside.”

In the kitchen we made some instant coffee and chatted idly, then we walked through and watched some TV with Mum and Dad for a while.

“Martin upstairs?” Mum asked, as if we’ve just come down.

“Yeah, I think so. I suppose he’s unpacking.”

My mother looked at the television, my father puffed on his pipe.

“You think he’s O.K.?” She half-whispered, conspiratorially. “He’s awfully thin and quiet.” Both of these observations were true, and they made us all uncomfortable.

“Leave him alone, Darling,” my dad offered gently, “He’s had a very long journey, he’s probably tired and a bit overwhelmed.”

“Yeah, I tell you, I would be too if I’d just got back from India!’’ Cecile chortled into her mug of coffee. After a while we all sauntered off to bed. When Cecile had arrived earlier my mother had shown her where she was sleeping. There was a taut awareness that this might be a moot point, but it was a ceremony that was necessary nonetheless. We walked to the door of her bedroom. I noticed a tightness in the pit of my stomach.

You go on ahead, I’m going to stop in and talk to Martin for a bit, I said. Cecile looked at me. Alright. You two haven’t really had any time alone since he came back...

I pushed open the door to Martin’s room. He was sitting on the edge of his bed with his big duffel-bag half unpacked around him. On the floor were some dog-eared books, some post cards and a couple of journals stuffed with papers. He was smoking a thin, brown cigarette.

“You want a Beedy?” He said, throwing me one of the cigarettes. I lit it awkwardly and the thing crackled as I sucked on it.

“Hmm. Quality tobacco!”

“Yeah, You get used to them, I suppose.” He paused. “She’s nice, Cecile,” he said, looking up. “How long have you been going out?”

“Oh, a month or two. Yeah, we met in May, and we’ve seen a lot of each other over the summer.” I offered this up nonchalantly. I was dying to blurt out that I thought I was about to lose my virginity, and that I very nearly did on a number of occasions, but I had to appear cool and grown up. I wanted him to see that I had changed too, wanted him to sit up and take notice of this different brother of his. I used to play it cool with Martin and his friend Adam, who always used to come over. They would enter the house and I would be watching TV or listening to music and I would act completely nonplused to see them which would always irk Adam, who assumed that the arrival of the big brother with his cool friend would be an occasion for hero-worship, for unadulterated sycophancy. I enjoyed the facade of my preoccupation, the pretense that I was contented with my own scintillating company and that the arrival of “the boys” was not an event of excitement, and their presence not an opportunity to impress or annoy them. Adam would immediately notice my aloofness and find it amusing, “You’re acting cool this evening. What’s up with you?” Immediately I was the center of attention instead of a tag-along younger brother asking for a piece of whatever action was going.

I wanted a return to the state of affairs in which Martin and I were measuring our developments against each other, boasting of our progression towards manhood, our involvement with the world in all of its murky, terrifying depths, and in our need to boast betraying the very fact of our innocence. But it was not going to happen; he had shot ahead of me, into areas I could hardly imagine, and my concerns were childish in comparison. The younger brother he had left behind had not experienced the sweltering heat of India, the exotic touch of strangers. I sat down on the bed opposite him. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes.

Then I asked, “So how is it to be back?” and immediately regretted the question because I knew he would be forced to lie and say it was fine, so as not to offend me, or he would say it was awful and I wouldn’t know what to say. I knew I could not engage with him with anything like understanding, I could not speak the language of adulthood with him and as I sat there waiting for him to respond, looking at him looking at his feet and not at me, wanting to be of some comfort and also wanting him to reassure me, he began to cry, and the sight filled me with terror. And he began to talk. Not really to me, but perhaps to the air around me, using my presence as a reason, a catalyst to speech.

“ I don’t know if I can take it, being back with Mum and Dad,” he said, “its all too weird. You don’t understand, I’ve done exactly what I have wanted to do for the last year; I’ve had this incredible freedom. I’ve been places where nobody knew me, where there was nobody to say, `You’re Martin, I know you; I know you don’t do that; you’re this and not that, you’re x and not y.’” As he spoke I watched his dark hair tightly curled against his temples, his hands motionless on the beige cotton of his knees. His eyes screwed tight trying to force back the tears of humiliation. He must have hated sitting through dinner. I wanted him to stop this; I could not stand to see my older brother reduced to a sobbing heap of confusion, but I knew that I could not offer him any real consolation, and my discomfort at him falling apart like this in front of me combined with the unease I felt at the changes my brother’s state of mind heralded.

I remembered when we were much smaller, I six and he nine, I heard him screaming in the bathroom. I ran to see what had happened and found him standing in front of the mirror, hands over his bloody mouth, shouting, “My toe’s fallen out! My toe’s fallen out!” I couldn’t understand why he was worrying about his toes when he had blood gushing from his mouth. My misapprehension of his problem nonetheless brought upon me a seething fear of body parts dropping off without warning, so that later that night I awoke from a nightmare shouting that I did not want to die. I remembered other occasions when Martin had betrayed the all-powerful image of the older brother. We were staying overnight at some friends’ house. Our parents had all gone out together, leaving six children alone with a dictator of a woman to that we called Bulldog. Before school one morning I was playing around outside with a toy truck. I shouted up to Martin’s window that it was time to go and was greeted with a howl of pain. I could not make out what had happened to him, but when I ran up the stairs I found Bulldog on her knees in front of him, tugging at his fly. The small, purple bulb of his penis was protruding from his shorts which had evidently been fastened improperly.

Later, I creep back to Cecile’s room. The floor is carpeted but I know there are one or two suspect floor boards, and I step warily so as to avoid them. The door is ajar and I push it open slowly so that I can hear the short hair of the carpet stroke its underside. The windows are open and a cool breeze pours through them, causing the curtains to billow lightly like the foresail of a ship on the verge of becalming. I notice it is not so dark; a faint light from the moon illuminates the room, enough to make out Cecile lying under a sheet, curled up with her blond hair falling on the pillow. As I step around the door and close it behind me she stirs and rolls languidly onto her back, lifting her body so as to make room for me in the bed with a naturalness that makes me feel that this is my rightful place, and the time has come for me to take my own journey.

3844 wrds