The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [91]
I thought at first that if I had a title, something like Voyage of the Mynah, I might reach him, wherever he was. For he would not know me by my real name. If I had reached Miss Lasqueti in her present home with my nickname, I might also reach him. I have no idea if Cassius reads, or if he scorns reading. In any case, this account is for him. For the other friend from my youth.
Arrival
WE SLIPPED INTO ENGLAND IN THE DARK. After all our time at sea, we were unable to witness our entrance into the country. Just a pilot barge, blinking its blue light, was waiting at the entrance of the estuary, and guided us alongside a dark unknown shoreline into the Thames.
There was the sudden smell of land. When the dawn eventually lit whatever was around us, it seemed a humble place. We saw no green riverbanks or famous cities or great spanning bridges that might open up their two arcs to let us through. Everything we were passing seemed a remnant from another industrial time—jetties, saltings, the entrances to dredged channels. We passed tankers and mooring buoys. We searched for the heraldic ruins we had learned about, thousands of miles away in a history class in Colombo. We saw a spire. Then we were in a place full of names: Southend, Chapman Sands, Blyth Sands, Lower Hope, Shornmead.
Our ship gave four short blasts, there was a pause, then another blast, and we began to angle gently against the dock at Tilbury. The Oronsay, which had been for weeks like a great order around us, finally rested. Farther upriver, deeper inland from this eastern cut of the Thames, were Greenwich, Richmond, and Henley. But we stopped now, finished with engines.
As soon as I reached the foot of the gangplank I lost sight of Cassius and Ramadhin. A few seconds had passed and we were separated, lost from each other. There was no last glance or even realization that this had happened. And after all the vast seas we were not able to find one another again in that unpainted terminal building on the Thames. Instead, we were making our way through the large crowd nervously, uncertain as to wherever it was that we were going.
A few hours earlier I had unrolled and put on my first pair of long trousers. I had put on socks that crowded my shoes. So I was walking awkwardly as we all descended the wide ramp down to the quay. I was trying to find who my mother was. There no longer remained any sure memory of what she looked like. I had one photograph, but that was at the bottom of my small suitcase.
It is only now I try to imagine that morning in Tilbury from my mother’s perspective, searching for the son she had left in Colombo four or five years earlier, trying to imagine what he looked like, having been sent perhaps a recent black-and-white snapshot of him, to help identify one eleven-year-old in the horde of passengers coming off the boat. It must have been a hopeful or terrible moment, full of possibilities. How would he behave towards her? A courteous but private boy, or someone eager for affection. I see myself best, I suppose, through her eyes and through her needs as she searched the crowd, as I did, for something neither of us knew we were looking for, as if the other were as accidental as a number plucked from a pail who would then be an intimate partner for the next decade, even for the rest of our lives.
“Michael?”
I heard “Michael,” and it was a voice scared of being wrong. I turned and saw no one I knew. A woman put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Michael.” She fingered my cotton shirt and said, “You must be cold, Michael.” I remember she said my name so many times. I was looking at first only at her hands, her dress, and when I saw her face, I knew it was her face.
I put my suitcase down, and I was holding her. It was true I was cold. I had been worried up to that moment only of being lost forever. But now, because