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The Bloodstone Papers
Chapter One
Nowadays
(Bolton and London, 2004)
We don't remember everything. Just enough to make it difficult.
'You know the story,' Pasha says, not seeing the problem. 'So what is there to tell it? You start at the beginning, go through the middle, then get to the end.'
The two of us sit whisky-loosened in opposite armchairs after Sunday lunch in the retirement flat in Bolton. I make my pilgrimage there once a month bearing Johnnie Walker Black Label (my dad's switched from Bushmills) and an increasingly unconvincing air of being happy and in control of my life in London, land of News at Ten and, by extension, imminent terrorist attack. My mum's in the kitchen, 'getting the washing-up ready' for me, since I, dutiful son, insist on doing it, which consists of her doing the washing-up, then pretending she hasn't. For her that's part of the order of things, along with the pizzazz of Gene Kelly, the unimpeachability of Marks & Spencer and the vandalization of Bolton by its own smoking, swearing and spitting infant yobs, who before we know it will be beating pensioners to death for three pounds forty-seven because they're not one bit frightened of jail. I used to throw my hands up at such mantras, patiently and with self-congratulation bring forth undergraduate liberal arguments like exquisite bits of origami. She loved it, that education had worked. I used to romance her with reasoning; it kept us in mutually flirtatious cahoots. These days—paying tax, flagging halfway through novels, sleeping with a claw-hammer under the pillow—I make a flaccid noncommittal face and let itgo. This, as much as anything, tips her off that All is Not Well with Her Son.
It's been a good day. Eleven o'clock mass (my monthly faithless gesture for them; there's a shift in their aura come Communion but I remain empewed and kneeling, face averted), then back to the flat for gold and ruby booze: three wets of Black Label for me and the old man, a long Sandeman's port and lemon for my mum, drinks accompanied by the moreish nibbles of my parents' lost past—gathia, choora and seo—followed by a lunch of korma (the dry South Indian version, not the curry house's coconut jism) with pepper-water and plain Dehra Dun rice. Fresh Pakistani sucking mangos—velvety ovoids in flamy yellows and reds that always look extraterrestrial to me—with Walls soft scoop vanilla ice cream to round off. (I've come home to sublime wifely vanilla after years of whoring with mint choc chip and rum and raisin. In all sorts of ways I'm accepting my youth has gone.) Eating temporarily over, the Black Label's out again.
The air indoors holds its ghosts of chilli and tamarind, but the window's open, letting in the exhalation of mown lawns from the tiny council-house gardens across the road, as well as the Boltonian base note of exhaust fumes and old brick. They're built in war zones, these Sheltered Housing schemes. Cheap land. Retirees get to spend their Autumn Years marooned in a sea of paupers, drunks, hookers and thugs. Last month, walking back after midnight from a depressing get-together with an old St Cuthbert's schoolmate (miserably divorced and mercilessly alimonied, looking straight into a nicotine future of brightly lit pubs and quality porn), I was hello loved on Barrow Lane by a bleach blonde prostitute in a purple vinyl mac and white stilettos. She was fat-calved, with a thick porous face and lashes mascara'd up into tarantulas. Lust began its scurry like a match catching—my loins are of an age and jadedness to be ignited by the poor, the half ugly, the too young, the too old—then checked: these are the streets my parents walk. Chastened, I shook my head in furious refusal and trudged on, disappointed that she didn't persist.
The old man and I are discussing, for the umpteenth time, The Book. There is the other thing to discuss, our Secret Business, but the drink's made him forget. I'll have to find a way of reminding him before I go, or there will be hushed clandestine calls from the downstairs communal payphone, the recent digitalization of which confounds him. My train leaves Manchester at seven; we have only a couple of hours.
'You know the story,' he says again. 'You know all the stories.'
'Yes, but it's not just a question of knowing the stories.'
'Thenwhat?'
Quite. Thenwhat. In the Anglo-Indian—or Eurasian or East Indian or Half-caste or Mongrel or Pariah or Cheechee or Chutney Mary, depending on your angle—idiom, which is to say our idiom, this 'Thenwhat?' means: then tell me in what way it's not just a question of knowing the stories, dunderhead. I, when it comes to the business of The Book, am the dunderhead. They were born before The Camps, The Bomb, The Moon, The Ozone, The Internet, The End of History. For them the big things don't change: God, Fate, Love, Time, Beginnings, Endings. Good and Evil. Therefore my difficulty. The Book is to be their story. I've toyed with The Big Things Don't Change as an ironic title. Also, since I share Keri Hume's weakness for portent, The Beige People. Pasha, who likes to get to the indelicate quick of things, prefers Mixed Blood. I can't quite bring myself to reveal the latest working title, The Cheechee Papers.
'Whatall do you need to know? Ask me. I remember everything.' He claims I've inherited my superhuman memory from him. (It's been a lifelong problem for me, remembering everything. What restaurant in Manchester? Maude or Melissa or Carl will ask. The one with the Chinese waiter with the Hitler tash. Christ, you can't possibly have forgotten. But they have. My sisters, my brother, even Mater and Pater. If I relied on their powers of recollection I'd end up convinced half the details of my past were dreams or imaginings.)
The Bloodstone Papers. Copyright © by Glen Duncan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
