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By Root 239 0

Wednesdays and Fridays he went to the Cave flat. On Fridays the girl was clearly impatient, as she would be leaving to join her friends when the tutorial was over. Then one Friday he found her in tears. She began talking, not wanting him to leave but to help her with her life. She was fourteen and all she wished for was a boy named Rajiva, someone Ramadhin had met one night in her company. A dubious one, he had thought. But now Ramadhin was forced to listen to all the boy’s qualities and what seemed a caustic and too-casual passion between them. She talked and Ramadhin listened. There had been a sneering dismissal of her by the boy in the company of his friends, and she as a result felt abandoned. She wanted Ramadhin to go to the boy and say something, somehow represent her; he could, she knew, talk well—and that would perhaps bring Rajiva back to her.

This was the first thing she had ever asked him to do.

She knew where Rajiva would be, she said. The Coax Bar. She would not, could not, go herself. Rajiva would be with his friends, and now they were ignoring her.

So Ramadhin went in search of the boy, to persuade him to come back to Heather. He entered that strip of the city—somewhere he would never have gone—walking there in his long black winter coat, scarfless, against the English weather.

He enters the Coax Bar on his knight’s mission. The place is turbulent—music, loud conversation, and smoke. He goes in, a plump, asthmatic Asian, looking for another Asian, for Rajiva is also from the East, or at least his parents are. But one generation later has a lot more confidence. Ramadhin sees Rajiva in the midst of his friends. He gets close and attempts to explain why he is there, why he is speaking to him. There are many conversations taking place as he tries to persuade Rajiva to accompany him back to the flat where Heather is waiting. Rajiva laughs and turns away, and Ramadhin pulls the boy’s left shoulder towards him and a knife comes out naked. The blade doesn’t touch him. It touches just his black coat above the heart. The heart Ramadhin has protected all his life. There is only the slightest pressure from the boy’s knife, its force no more than the pushing or the pulling off of a button. But Ramadhin stands there shaking in this loud surrounding. He tries not to inhale the smoke. The boy, Rajiva—how old is he, sixteen? seventeen?—comes closer, with those dark brown eyes, and inserts the knife into the pocket of Ramadhin’s black coat. It is as intimate as if he had slid it into him.

“You can give that to her,” Rajiva says. It is a dangerous yet formal gesture. What does it mean? What is Rajiva saying?

An unstoppable shudder in Ramadhin’s heart. There is a burst of laughter and the “lover” turns away and, with the swarm of his friends, moves on. Ramadhin goes out of the bar into the night air, and begins to walk to Heather’s flat to tell her of his failure. “Besides,” he will add on his return, “he is not good for you.” He is suddenly exhausted. He waves to a taxi and climbs in. He will say … he will tell her … he will not speak of the great weight he feels against his heart…. He doesn’t hear the driver’s question the first few times, coming from the front of the cab. His head bows down.

He pays the taxi driver. He presses the bell to her flat, waits, then turns and walks away. He passes the garden where they have had the tutorial once or twice when it was sunny. His heart still leaping, as if it cannot slow or even pause. He unlatches the gate and goes into that green darkness.

I met the girl Heather Cave. It was a few years after Ramadhin’s death, and was in some way the last thing I did for Massi and her parents. The girl was living and working in Bromley, not far from where I had gone to school. I met her at Tidy Hair, where she worked, and took her to lunch. It had been necessary to invent some story in order to meet her.

At first she said she could hardly remember him. But as we continued talking, some of the specific details she recalled were surprising. Though she did not really wish to go much further