The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [4]
What did bring the two of us together more than anything was Emily’s record collection, with all those lifetimes and desires rhymed and distilled into two or three minutes of a song. Mining heroes, consumptive girls who lived above pawnshops, gold diggers, famous cricketers, and even the fact that they had no more bananas. She thought I was a bit of a dreamer, and taught me to dance, to hold her waist while her upraised arms swayed, and to leap onto and over the sofa so it tilted and fell backwards with our weight. Then she would be suddenly away, at school, far away in India again, unheard from, save for a few letters to her mother, where she begged for more cakes to be sent via the Belgian Consulate, letters her father insisted on reading aloud, proudly, to all his neighbours.
By the time Emily came on board the Oronsay, I had in fact not seen her for two years. It was a shock to recognize her now as more distinct, with a leaner face, and to be conscious of a grace that I had not been aware of before. She was now seventeen years old, and school had, I thought, knocked some of the wildness out of her, though there was a slight drawl when she spoke that I liked. The fact that she’d grab my shoulder as I was running past her on the Promenade Deck and make me talk with her gave me some cachet among my two new friends on the boat. But most of the time she made it clear she did not wish to be followed around. She had her own plans for the voyage … a final few weeks of freedom before she arrived in England to complete her last two years of schooling.
The friendship between the quiet Ramadhin and the exuberant Cassius and me grew fast, although we kept a great deal from one another. At least, this was true of me. What I held in my right hand never got revealed to the left. I had already been trained into cautiousness. In the boarding schools we went to, a fear of punishment created a skill in lying, and I learned to withhold small pertinent truths. Punishment, it turns out, never did train or humble some of us into complete honesty. We were, it seems, continually beaten because of miserable report cards or a variety of vices (lounging in the sanatorium for three days pretending to have mumps, permanently staining one of the school bathtubs by dissolving ink pellets in water to manufacture ink for the senior school). Our worst executioner was the junior school master, Father Barnabus, who still stalks my memory with his weapon of choice, which was a long splintered bamboo cane. He never used words or reason. He just moved dangerously among us.
On the Oronsay, however, there was the chance to escape all order. And I reinvented myself in this seemingly imaginary world, with its ship dismantlers and tailors, and adult passengers who, during the evening celebrations, staggered around in giant animal heads, some of the women dancing with skirts barely there, as the ship’s orchestra, including Mr. Mazappa, played on the bandstand all wearing outfits of exactly the same plum colour.
LATE AT NIGHT, after the specially invited First Class passengers had left the Captain’s Table, and after the dancing had ended with couples, their masks removed, barely stirring in each other’s arms, and after the stewards had taken away the abandoned glasses and ashtrays and were leaning on the four-foot-wide brooms to sweep away the coloured swirls of paper, they brought out the prisoner.
It was usually before midnight. The deck shone because of a cloudless moon. He appeared with the