Last Day of Freedom
by Amita Basu
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
I wait for him by the arcade of advertising columns that used to be a bus stop. Revenues weren’t enough, and anyway the prisons run their own buses, so the city decided buses and bus-stops were profligate. Now women clutching bare throats and pouting bee-stung lips lure us downstreet.
“I say!” says Clive, and — striding forward, eyes fixed on me, seeing nothing but his target — almost steps into Martin’s cartoon.
“Whoa.” Martin rises from his squat, putting out his arms. Clive steps back. Martin transitions from protector of his pavement art to promoter. “Could I draw Your Majesty’s attention to the shameful nexus between democracy and liquid gold?”
Poor Clive, from Uppington where the pavements are mirror-shiny and smooth as dermabraded skin, studies Martin’s pavement cartoon goggle-eyed. An Arab prince, naked except his headdress, is buggering our P.M., who ogles the gold-bags on his nightstand.
Clive recoils. “’Shameful?’” he echoes. “It’s this libel that’s shameful!” He looks around for a constable.
“Hands down, Duke,” Martin laughs. “We’ve still got free speech. It isn’t libel if it’s true. Haven’t you heard about the treaty they’ve just signed in the desert?”
Clive tries to look well-informed; Martin doesn’t hold Clive’s ignorance against him. People inside pride themselves on working distraction-free, ignorant what’s happening till it punches them in the rambutans. Whereas Martin makes his living chalking out a new cartoon every hour of daylight, laying the news under our feet before it cockily climbs the airwaves. Martin’s been a watch-where-you-step political commentator since Clive and I were toddlers. Much of Goodstone Street’s foot traffic is courtesy of Martin. He moves around every hour to keep us alert.
The years have manhandled Martin. Finally, Clive recognises him and sheepishly says how-d’ye-do. As Martin and I catch up, Clive furtively surveys Martin’s weatherworn face, his box of coloured chalks, and the foot passengers who slow down to offer his scatology the tributes of leers, grimaces, and coins.
The coins clink into the porcelain urinal that’s Martin’s collecting-hat-cum-claim to kinship with Art. Already at 10:00 a.m., his urinal is half-full of metal. But Clive shrinks from the unwashed masses and from Martin. Forty years on the same old street.
Martin is 68. Twelve years ago, when he was teaching me to draft figures, he confessed he was preparing a proper exhibition. “I know it’s bollocks, fame and four walls and fancy folk. But the trinket-loving child in me has hankered after an exhibition all my life. It’s time to choke it to death with what it wants.” Martin had been making proper paintings, and saving money, and was planning a self-sponsored exhibition in a private gallery.
I felt sure he’d succeed and get vacuumed into Art. But I doubted he’d enjoy that as he enjoyed this: just drawing and exchanging jeers with viewers. Then a delivery truck — speeding, because there’s never time — killed his friend, and almost killed him. Martin went funny and decided he was off to Bhutan. I couldn’t dissuade him, so I went with him.
We left his money and paintings with a mutual friend, well, my friend, whom I’d introduced to Martin. We spent two years in Bhutan and Nepal and Tibet, teaching English to strange fifteen-year olds: rosy-faced like infants, curious like five-year olds before school chokes joy in the cradle, and earnest like young fathers fending for their infants.
Our students lived in paradise but wanted to learn English, then programming, and move their parents to the metropolis. I “neutralised” their accents and taught them Python, which I’d picked up from a freelance video-game debugger. They taught us to scale the mountains bootless. Martin perched up there, painting, and I learned to read the wind to say when it was time to go.
I was earning my own way, but this trip was Martin’s idea, so Martin decided where we’d go and when we’d move on. I always went along, so he never asked me, “Okay?” Only on our way home did I realise this had bothered me, when I was ringing my friend, the custodian of Martin’s property, to tell him we were coming.
Back home, I was of course with Martin when he discovered my friend had absconded with his assets. Martin got down in the dumps, then remembered his near-death, life-affirming experience, and clambered back up. I was feeling so guilty I was afraid I’d betray myself, so I gave him my savings from Bhutan. So here he is, doing at 68 what he was at twenty. And, fear not, just reader, my destiny found me, too.
“Well, sir, if you’d like to stand and stare,” Martin tells a black-suited man knotting his brows at Martin’s cartoon-of-the-hour, “Perhaps you’d like to drop a little something in my ceramic stand-in for a bank account... Yes, ma’am, certainly the street’s a public space, and your child looks a right angel, but I doubt she’s seeing anything she hasn’t before. Well, darling? Ah, the secret’s out... No, sir, don’t tuck that note back into your pocket and grope your groin for change. I’m a tax-exempt charity, believe it or not. I’ll relieve you of that note and here’s a receipt. I know you’d rather pay for quality art than for that airport they’re proposing mid-city.”
It’s hard to pity Martin. He thrusts in people’s faces the truth that a prisoner could not print, and he entertains them while he’s doing it. He speaks no longer of the fame-craving child he must choke to death. Besides: he’s forgiven me. He sees I acted in everyone’s best interest.
“Look after yourself, you stinking sloth-ball,” he calls as Clive marches me on. “And if ever they let you out, come count coins for me.”
I know which jacket Martin would pick for me. Martin never wanted to send me to prison. But, then, Martin has never been a ladies’ man. He’s never been tempted by all that the right jacket can unlock. I’ll have to pick my own jacket, and my last day is running away from under my feet.
* * *
Past the ten-storeyed Neverland-looking shopping-mall where the public swimming pool used to be, Clive strides towards the auto showroom. His lips and brows draw into two horizontal lines trisecting his face as he marches me away from Martin. It upsets Clive to see people stuck.
“What’re we doing here? Thought your Mercedes was all paid off.”
“It was,” says Clive. He thrusts open the door, I gentle with my fingertips the door’s return assault, and we stand inspecting the pewter panther revolving under the silver shower.
“Was?” I repeat.
“Sold it. Course-I-had-to-sell-it.” Clive doesn’t meet my eye. Fists in pocket, he nods. “Now I’ve one of these.”
I examine the pewter panther. “A Mazda?” No wonder Clive begged off early parole. I open my mouth, watch Clive frowning, shoulders hunched at the slowly swirling siren, and abort my interrogation.
I smell her before I see her. Her geranium perfume, which breeds with the fossil-fuel fibres of her close-fitting suit to spawn a Janus-faced smell: now flowery, now vomity. This one note of Penelope’s bouquet conjures another: the delicate coconut of her dandruff. I’m too far off now to smell her dandruff; for that I’d have to get my nose in her hair or in the comb I stole from her. But the smell of fresh-stale geranium-polyester goes with coconut dandruff, and they both go with Penelope, and it is Penelope, folder in hand, striding towards us.
Heart thudding behind my eyes, blinding them with green-gold half-suns cresting the horizon, I slip off among the rows of cars.
Three years ago, when another friend brought me here to get himself another car, I met Penelope. The zest of independence and a first job radiating from her made her irresistible. We began dating. Three years later, clinging to another precipitous high in the roller-coaster of our relationship, we flew to Greece, Penelope squandering defiantly her accumulated leave, which she’d saved to find another job.
In Greece she spent her days studying temples, her evenings swimming far out into vermin-infested waters, her nights strolling through seedy streets. I tagged along, learning to distinguish columns, administer jellyfish-bite first-aid, and negotiate with scruffy-chinned thugs. Penelope wanted to live like a local so I learned to haggle over produce, shell and de-gut ten shrimp a minute, and find the best room for rent within hours of reaching a town.
Back home Penelope had been a star employee, whalebone-corseted, desperately good, but for six weeks in the Aegean she tried to catch her death. She ran short of money, so I spent our last week as a tour-guide dodging the wrath of the regulars, getting good tips, getting asked for my business card.
Working out there all day, working for Penelope and me both, I fantasised about being with Penelope always. She had get-up-and-go to spare: perhaps she’d make me want to work hard enough to deserve to be the man in her life, not just the man on her madcap holiday. We took turns serving breakfast in bed, deciding which way to head out. I was always planning little surprises, picturing her response for, in love, I was no longer enough for myself to plan for, to tend to, to enjoy the world as.
Copyright © 2023 by Amita Basu
