Blood Ties Page 3

  He was unnerved by the sight; stood for a moment in shock. He was looking not at grief but a soul in agony.

  A few weeks before he had run over a small dog while passing through the Bronx. Instinctively he had driven on, hearing its high-pitched yelps of pain. His wife had insisted he go back.

  As he now slowly moved towards Kirsty he had the same feeling as when he had approached that broken, dying animal.

  “Why, Irving?” she moaned. “Why me? First Kevin, now Garret. All I had. Why me . . .?”

  Irving was articulate only in persuasion. Words of comfort did not come easy. He put his hands on her shoulders.

  She lurched to her feet and he found himself holding her; felt her body shudder as she sobbed.

  “All I’ve got . . . taken. Gone.”

  He murmured into her ear. “Try to be strong, Kirsty. You’ll feel better later.”

  She shook her head against his jacket and screamed. “Later? What is later? I’ve nothing left. Nothing.”

  He felt frustration at his loss for words; his inability to comfort her. He held her close, patting her back as though comforting a child. Finally decided that firmness was the only way.

  “Kirsty honey. It’s a terrible thing but it happened. Your whole luck’s been terrible; first Kevin, now Garret. But when these things happen you have to face it head on. You’re a strong girl – I know that. When you get hit and knocked down you have to pick yourself up. Remember the things that still matter.”

  “What things, Irving? What things?”

  He sighed. “Come on, Kirsty. You have friends, a good job. A life ahead of you . . . Larry . . .”

  She pulled her head back and, looking into her eyes, he knew that neither he nor anyone in the world had the words to comfort this woman.

  “You have to try, honey . . .”

  Her eyes were not puzzled now. There was something else. A realisation.

  “It was me, Irving. I did it. I made him go.”

  She moved away. Fists clenched, body shaking, face ashen.

  “It was my fault,” she whispered hoarsely. “Me! I killed my son.”

  Chapter 2

  In Bombay, on the other side of the world, it was late morning and another person grieved for a lost one. He too sat in his office and he too was a book-keeper. Ramesh Patel was forty-eight years old and one of the tens of thousands of Anglo-Indians left behind after independence. He was unusual in that most Anglo-Indians had British fathers and Indian mothers. His mother had been English and, in the class stricken atmosphere of colonial India, had suffered much indignity at the hand of her fellow countrymen because of her love and marriage with an Indian businessman. Ramesh’s father had died in the communal rioting that followed independence and partition in 1947 and his business had been destroyed.

  Ramesh’s mother had been offered repatriation to England but, with the memory of decades of insults, she had refused. Her husband’s relatives, although not rich, had found them a small house and through a family connection Ramesh had found a job as a clerk or babu with the Bombay Customs. It was poorly paid and continued to be so even when he was slowly promoted to assistant book-keeper. Most of his colleagues supplemented their paltry wages with the all-pervading corruption, but Ramesh, by nature and early parental environment, was an honest man and disdained the frequently offered baksheesh. This caused amusement and some condescension among his colleagues but he did not mind. He was a simple man in attitudes and tastes and he had lived quietly with his mother, who brought in some extra money teaching English literature part time. He had once, ten years before, fallen in love with a girl from Goa, which was then a Portuguese colony south of Bombay. They had wanted to marry but she was dutiful to her parents who, on learning of his financial position, strenuously objected.

  So he had continued living with his mother in the same house outside Muland. His main occupations being the reading of historical novels and seafaring stories; and occasionally having a meal with his friend Jaran Singh, who worked in the city legal department.

  This uncluttered existence came to an end when his mother contracted cancer. It took eleven months for her to die and, towards the end when she lay in the noisy, crowded hospital ward, every moment of agony was transmitted from her body to his brain and when the dignity of death ended it his grief was overlaid with relief.

  Later, while going through her old liner trunks, sorting among bundles of old letters and musty clothes, he found it. A heavy object wrapped in crumpled brown paper and tied with twine. The wrapping came apart in his hands and he was holding a stone sculpture about fourteen inches high. A sinuous woman, full lipped, narrow eyes, palms pressed together. He had a vague memory of seeing it many years before and his mother telling him that it was a last gift from her father, who had been a minor official in the colonial government in the state of Madhya Pradesh. He had died before her marriage and so been spared the shame. It was a slightly erotic statuette and, with the death of Ramesh’s father, it had been put away and forgotten.

  He showed it to his friend Jaran Singh, who had passed by to pay his condolences. Jaran had thought it might have some value and in turn had a friend who knew about such things. He had taken it to him and only the night before had received the astounding news that it was a tenth-century sandstone snake divinity – Nagi, and worth conservatively 100,000 rupees. That sum represented ten years’ salary for Ramesh and his first emotion had been remorse, for with such money the passing of his mother could have been made infinitely more comfortable.

  He stood up from his desk and walked to the window. His office was on the third floor of the Customs House and afforded a panoramic view over the government dockyard and Fort George on the right. Like all government departments, the Customs Service was massively over manned and Ramesh had a lot of free time. Much of it he spent at this window, watching the movement of ships as they passed the anchorage to and from the big commercial docks to the north.

  He loved the sea and ships but it was a cerebral affection, only indulged in his reading. From the library he had borrowed scores of books, usually old, predating the departure of the British. He was familiar with the great voyages of discovery, and the fictional sagas of Forrester and Conrad, and many others. At heart, behind a timid and bookish exterior, he was a romantic.

  He watched a dirty tramp steamer move up towards Alexandra Docks. Then he dropped his gaze to the Customs wharf in front of him. A very old forty-foot motor sailer was moored alongside. It had been there for six months after being impounded when its owner, a Madrassi, had been caught smuggling. In a few days it was to be auctioned. He himself had checked the inventory, what little there was of it. The engine was a Perkins, at least thirty years old and much used. The decks needed repairing and the sails were tattered. But still, as he clambered over her with his clipboard, he had felt the tug of the sea in his entrails and been mildly amused at the feeling. She was like an old lady fallen on hard times, the peeling paint and faded varnish like ragged old clothes. He supposed that the wood of her hull was rotten, that her two stubby masts were cracked under the layers of paint; and that her old engine was like a deceased heart with its valves choked and its chambers worn out.

  Abruptly, looking down at that boat, he pictured his mother in the last weeks of her life. An old woman struggling with a final shred of dignity against the creep of corrosion. From that distance he could not quite make out the faded lettering on her stern, but he remembered it: the name of another goddess – Manasa.

  A thousand miles south of Bombay, Lani Sutowo pushed the bony hand from her young breast, twisted free from the clutching embrace and, with the sound of cruel laughter in her ears, ran out of the back door on to the dusty street. She kept running past rows of tin roofed, wooden shacks until the street petered out into a path of crushed coral. She slowed, breathing deeply, then turned to look back. Apart from a group of children playing on a building site there was no one about. It was mid-afternoon and the majority of the population of Ma
le, capital of the Maldive Islands, was resting from the sun. She walked on towards the edge of the lagoon, a slight, forlorn figure dressed in baggy black trousers and a bleached white blouse. Her black hair hung straight down to her waist. When she reached the sand fringing the lagoon she kicked off her plastic sandals and walked slowly along the edge of the water. She combined the facial features of a Chinese with the golden brown skin of a Sumatran; for her forbears had, in the great Chinese migrations of the nineteenth century, moved from Canton Province in China, first to Singapore and then on to Medan on the north-east coast of Sumatra. Her family had lived there peacefully for over a century until the year before when the Indonesian Communist Party, mainly made up of ethnic Chinese, had tried to overthrow the Sukarno Government. The army had crushed the uprising and during the following six months had stood by while the indigenous population of the archipelago had massacred more than 200,000 Chinese. In Medan alone over 1,500 had died, including Lani’s parents and most of her relatives. An elder brother had managed to get her on to a trading junk heading for Colombo with just enough money for an onward journey to the Maldive Islands where a distant branch of the family would give her succour.

  They had indeed fed her – but at a price of twelve hours a day work in the general store they operated on the outskirts of the capital. She also had to suffer the increasingly insistent attentions of the husband of her distant cousin who had taken her in. She had lived eighteen years but the last one had felt like a lifetime.

  She sat down on a fallen palm trunk and looked out beyond the lagoon to the open sea stretching away towards Sumatra. It evoked no thoughts of home. That was passed; the last letter from a cousin in Jakarta had told her there was no trace of her immediate family.

  She turned and looked towards the town, low and dirty, on the other side of the lagoon. There were few Chinese in this place, just a handful of shop keepers and traders scraping a living. She felt the indifference and contempt of the local people except when the men looked at her curved body. She did not despair. She came from generations of survivors. Somehow she would leave this place.

  A great distance across the Indian Ocean, in the Rub Al Khali – the empty quarter of the Saudi Arabian desert – a drilling crew were working a wildcat well. The temperature was over forty degrees centigrade and the eight men presented an incongruous sight as they sweated on the rig floor making a connection with the next thirty-foot length of pipe. They wore bright orange hats, steel-toed boots, dirty shorts and little else. Their movements looked confused, with much snapping of curt orders from a young giant whose blond hair flowed out beneath his hard hat.

  A length of pipe was lifted from the vedour into the rat hole. Spinning chains wrapped on to it. The kelly broken out, mud washing across the rig floor, curses and orders as the slips were pulled, then she was spinning, and the derrick man was pumping mud and, seven thousand feet below, the bit was turning to the right and chewing into another section of jurassic rock, inching its way to the black gold.

  The floor crew stood back, kicking mud off their boots, laughing at a coarse joke. The blond giant took off his hard hat and, with the back of his hand, wiped sweat from his forehead. He glanced at his watch and grunted in satisfaction.

  From behind him a door opened in a shed and a voice called “Cady!”

  They all turned to see the tool pusher looking with distaste at the mud covering the rig floor. “What’s this shit?”

  Cady’s amiable face hardened. “Hell, ‘push’ – we just made a connection.”

  “So what. You keep the floor clean, you hear. You should know that.”

  “Yeah-and I know that a good driller gets the bit back on the bottom before hosing down.”

  The man in the door sneered. “You know nothing-you’re wet behind the ears. Hell, ten years ago they wouldn’t let kids like you near a rig.”

  He went back inside, slamming the door.

  Cady muttered an obscenity and the derrick man standing beside him grinned.

  “Don’t let the bastard rile you, Cady. He’s just jealous. He was thirty-five before he made driller and spent ten years at it till they made him a ‘push’- Anyway, he doesn’t like Canadians – he married one!”

  Cady shrugged. “Yeah. Well we made that connection in under three minutes. One of these days I’m gonna push his teeth into his cranium.”

  The derrick man grinned again. “You do that.” He gestured upward with his thumb at the towering rig. “And if I’m up the stick I’ll take the Geronimo line straight down and kiss your ass.”

  Cady laughed and looked out to where a steel hawser stretched from the back of the monkey boards down to a safe distance. If a well blew in and a derrick man was up there it was his only safe way out.

  “You do that, Cam,” he said. “I’ll be out of a job so a kiss on the ass is better than nothing – now let’s get this mother hosed down.”

  Chapter 3

  The parcel arrived in the morning, courtesy of the Foreign Service, but Kirsty waited until the evening before opening it, then she cooked a beef stroganoff for herself and Larry. He had brought along a good bottle of wine and talked to her light-heartedly during the meal, trying to break through her preoccupation.

  She had opened the parcel in the bedroom while he watched TV. It was a personal moment and unconsciously he knew he should not intrude.

  As she stacked the dishes he complimented her on the meal and she smiled wanly and carried the tray through into the tiny kitchen.

  He lit a cigarette, then walked over to the TV set. He was about to switch it on when she called his name. He turned to see her standing in the kitchen doorway, the tray still in her hands.

  “He’s not dead, Larry.” “What?”

  “Garret – he’s not dead.”

  Slowly she carried the tray back to the table and laid it down. She had a strange, fixed expression on her face.

  “He’s not dead, Larry – I know it.”

  Larry was watching her with concern. He asked her softly, “How do you know, Kirsty?”

  “I just know it. Since seeing his things it’s been inside me but just now . . . in the kitchen it struck me with certainty . . . he’s alive.”

  Larry sighed. “Oh, come on. Sit down and let’s talk this over logically.”

  She moved to the settee and he sat opposite her, noticing the sudden animation in her eyes.

  “Kirsty honey, be sensible. It’s natural. Getting back his clothes and everything. The sudden re-association . . . But he’s dead

  She was shaking her head vehemently. “No Larry. I know it’s irrational – but I just know. I can’t explain it . . . He’s my son. I can feel him, in my mind and inside me. I know for sure he’s alive. Just as I would know if he was dead.”

  He shrugged. “Kirsty, all the evidence is there. Sorry to be brutal, but many mothers have the same instinct . . . until they see the body. You’ll never see the body, so maybe you’ll have to live with that instinct all your life. I’m no psychologist, but I know that there are many women whose sons and husbands went missing in Korea-presumed dead. They still believe they’re alive somewhere in North Korea or China.”

  “This is different Larry. There are other things. I know they’re incidental and again instinctive, but they’re there.”

  “What things?”

  She got up and went into the bedroom and came back carrying a large envelope, which she handed to him.

  “In there are his passport, some letters, the official report and a covering letter from the US Consul. Read the letter.”

  He tipped the contents out on to the coffee table. The passport was on top. He picked it up and opened the first page. Opposite the photograph of a fresh-faced, fair-haired young man the word ‘cancelled’ had been heavily stamped across the page. Quickly he closed it and picked up the letter embossed with the American eagle. He read the single sheet, then looked up to find her watching him intently.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s a pleasant, comp
assionate letter.”

  “Yes, but more than that. He says that because of the circumstances he interviewed the captain personally and the other crew member. They confirmed the stories they told to the Tanzanian police. He also checked weather conditions in the area at the time and confirmed that they were moderately bad . . . moderately, Larry.”

  “So?”

  “So what he’s not said is that he must have had suspicions – else he wouldn’t have checked that thoroughly.”

  “But Kirsty, it’s his job.”

  “No,” she answered firmly. “It’s the job of the police. I get the feeling he was suspicious.”

  He spread his hands in exasperation. “More instinct.”

  “OK,” she flared. “But he’s my son and in my guts I know he’s alive.” Suddenly she stood up, slapping a hand against her thigh. “The diary.”

  “What diary?”

  “Garret’s diary! He told me he was keeping one-in his last letter from Sri Lanka. It isn’t with his stuff. Why not? He wouldn’t have had it on him when he fell overboard.” She started walking up and down in agitation. “And his watch he would never be wearing that watch – it was his father’s. God, he wouldn’t even wear it to go swimming, though it was waterproof. That’s missing too.”

  “Wait Kirsty!” Larry held up his hand. “Please sit down. Don’t say anything, just listen till I’ve finished.”

  She sat and listened while he talked slowly and patiently. She was going through a natural reaction. OK, so maybe the Consul suspected foul play, but nothing could ever be proved. As for the watch, it was valuable. Maybe they stole it, or it was stolen in India. She was just clutching at straws that weren’t there.

  “They didn’t steal his money,” she said belligerently. “Four hundred dollars was handed to the Consul -just enough to cover an air ticket home.”

  “Kirsty, use your common sense. That would have been too obvious.”