It is a Wednesday or a Tuesday, just one of those nondescript midweek days in February when all you have to look forward to is a weekend spent in bed attempting to stroke your feral cat. It is 1982. At least this you are sure of. You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning’s downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents’ house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone. There you will find, no doubt, a cold potato salad gifted by a kind neighbor, the lingering smell of pipe smoke in the hall, and a delighted expression on the dog’s face when your father opens the front door. You walk slowly, looking down at your sodden loafers, and so it is her toes you see first, bare against the gray slabs of the Edinburgh street, each nail painted orange. She is wearing an orange skirt, and an orange jumper, too. Behind her, there are four more people, all dressed in various shades of orange. Their ages range from about twenty-five to sixty, and yet their faces remind you of the youthful hilarity and sweetness of a school photo: all snaggleteeth, mad hair, and crooked glasses.
The barefoot one darts forward and drops a wet leaflet into one of your shopping bags. She is around your age, the youngest of them. Despite the rain, her neck is grimy. You imagine getting a soapy rag and scrubbing at her.
“Nice mustache,” she says. And then, “Anything good in there?” She is pointing at your shopping bags.
Cream cheese. Wine. A bunch of excessively perky daffodils you bought for your father.
Already she has turned back to the others: the man with a dark beard and a hunter’s eyes; the woman in her fifties with dank gray hair; the young man with a shaved head who keeps whispering to the others; and the tanned, ageless one.
Now the man with the beard and the eyes approaches you.
“Come back with us.” He holds out his hand. You want to take it, but your hands are flaking with eczema so, instead, you pass him a shopping bag, realizing too late that, in doing so, you have accepted that you will now either lose your shopping or follow it home with him.
•
Their place is a typical New Town flat: soaring ceilings and peeling floral fifties wallpaper. It is so similar to the wallpaper in your father’s home that at first your instinct is to run. The barefoot girl, who calls herself Ma, takes your bag from the bearded man, and holds out her free hand for the shopping you are still clutching. You give it to her and watch as she tosses your father’s daffodils into the kitchen sink. She crows over the tins of tuna.
“Four!”
Back at your flat, your cat will be yowling for those tins, but you try not to think about him. There are two people here who weren’t on the street. They look a little younger than you and Ma. You find that you like them. Ma puts the red wine to one side, ignores the shortbread, and scoops a glob of cream cheese onto her fingertip. You copy her and she laughs.
“Be yourself,” she says.
She’s one of those rare things: a woman who is not nice.
The others are hurriedly opening your food. They eat it without thanking you. The one with the beard and the eyes says that his name is Jitendra. You wait for him to ask your name, but he doesn’t. He complains that the wine isn’t white. You apologize and he nods, pours himself a large glass anyway, and tells you that you are handsome.
You sit beside Ma on the floor, clutching a mug of tea. You won’t drink it. The milk is off—you could tell when she poured it. Silk scarves have been thrown over the many lampshades, and a candle is burning low on a coffee table. The whole place is a fire hazard. The air has that sickening smell of dried fruit. It reminds you of the long car journeys you used to take as a child, your parents’ arguments and silences, your father quietly leaving the holiday home in the night, your mother laughing, then crying, then forgetting to cook dinner, so you ate bread and apples and befriended a stray sheep.
Ma strides about the room, waving incense. You want to laugh. You think about what it would be like to kiss her. You feel that you have kissed too few people in your twenty-six years. That time in the work tearoom when a girl pressed her dry mouth to yours and bluntly professed her love—you mumbled words of thanks and scurried off to an early lunch. You knew that she was the type of girl you were meant to take home. Your father would have congratulated you on her looks. Your mother would have complained about how ordinary she was and made your visits difficult. You knew you did not have the stamina for her. She would want things from you.
You take a few inexpert drags on the spliff that Jitendra passes to you. They all start chanting. You are too self-conscious to join in. You can’t help but watch Jitendra. He looks a little like you, except that he has dark hair, hair that makes you think about the comb in your pocket. He sits cross-legged, and he sways, easeful, relaxed. You are not like him at all. The ageless one and a young man with glasses leave for an adjoining bedroom and have sex quietly, but not quietly enough. The others chant for a full hour. Toward the end of that hour, you stop checking your watch and find that you are swaying slightly, that the chant is reverberating in you, even in your feet.
It was probably two months ago that you went alone to the cinema to watch that documentary. You assume that these new acquaintances are part of the same group, because the people in the documentary also wore orange, when they wore any clothes at all. You remember sitting beside the others in the cinema, so rigid and repulsed and turned on.
They stop chanting to eat crackers, and eventually to sleep. You lie down on one of two sofas, and to your surprise you feel comfortable. Ma crawls toward you and plants her palms on your cheeks. Her mouth tastes foul.
Sunrise reveals cobwebs everywhere. You have slept. Right now your cat is probably shredding your bedspread in a ravenous rage. It is time to leave. Jitendra and one of the young ones are up and dressed as if they have jobs to get to, like you; Jitendra even wears a navy suit. He tells you that he is a doctor. You consider asking him to pay you back for your groceries, but don’t. You tell Ma your address, but don’t expect her to remember it, never mind to actually brave the streets of Leith, with the junkies and prostitutes. You chose your flat because it was affordable, and because, up until the age of nineteen, when you moved out of your parents’ house, nothing much had happened to you. At your office, you shuffle papers, send a fax, make tea, open another packet of biscuits, and hand them out. Everyone smiles without quite meeting your gaze, and you realize that you can’t describe in any detail what your colleagues look like—not even the girl who kissed you in the tearoom.
•
After work, you walk over to your father’s house to apologize for not appearing the night before. The garden is a soup of mud and trampled grass. As you expected, he isn’t there, so you leave a note saying, “Tea at Jenners on Sunday. 11:30.”
That evening, Ma coos to your cat. She finds it creepy that you left the plastic cover on your sofa. She says that your flat is oppressive, that she feels unwelcome in the kitchen, but you notice that she feels comfortable enough to empty your fridge, eating what she can and putting the rest in a plastic bag to take away with her.
You ask her what her childhood was like.
“Normal. Why?”
You imagine that she had three older brothers and they were all violent.
•
You meet your father for that tea in Jenners. He looks like himself, clipped mustache, tweed suit, a smoker’s fingernails. He does not shake your hand. Immediately, he begins a monologue about your dead mother: how she hated him when they first met (and on many occasions after they married), what a good lover she was, how irrational she was, how much he adored her. You try to avoid eye contact with the other customers. Your neck feels hot, and you hate that your father has this effect on your body.
“We were like a pair of kittens, climbing all over each other,” he says.
You know you will carry this horrifying image with you for the rest of your life.
“Your shirt is very orange,” he notes, putting his tea down, but he goes straight back to the subject of your mother, and you press the crumbs from your scone into the pad of your finger.
•
You have sex with Ma without kissing her mouth. She doesn’t mention the eczema all over your body. She is wearing an orange silk slip, a dicey choice for February, especially as you keep a fire going only in the little sitting room, because that’s where you and the cat spend most of your time. She tells you that the slip was her grandmother’s and that she made the dye from tree bark she stole from the Royal Botanic Garden. Over the next few weeks, she starts dyeing your white clothes, too, and one day all your dark suits have vanished. You find your best black slacks in a charity shop at the top of Leith Walk and have to repurchase them at an embarrassingly low price.
Ma has told you that she’s “with” Jitendra. You have come to like him. Her Indian name, Ma Maryam, like Jitendra’s, was given to her by the guru. She refuses to tell you the name on her passport. She says that she will change it legally as soon as she has the cash. Perhaps Ma is a student or a trainee something, like most of the others. You haven’t asked.
Jitendra gives you answers to all your questions. A few times, he massages your shoulders as he speaks to you, and you notice that you feel loose, relaxed even, around him. With him you talk, and with Ma you have quite ordinary sex.
You stay at their flat more and more, stopping at home just to feed your cat. In the mornings, before Jitendra goes to his practice and you to the office, you sit with your cups of tea and play draughts. You don’t know exactly when it happens but you find that you are one of them. You haven’t been to the barber in weeks. You have a beard for the first time in your life. You sense that you will soon be let go from work—there have been comments about your wardrobe, and how often you are late—but it doesn’t bother you, even though you know it should. You will have to give up your tiny flat, but you will just move into theirs. It has plenty of room. It will be fine. The only thing that concerns you is your cat. You are not sure how they will treat him. They are careless. No doubt one of them will bring home a plant that’s poisonous for felines. It would be just like them to—on a whim, without checking with you—become indoor-plant people.
One evening, you manage to persuade Ma to get into your bath, because you have seen the state of the bathtub where she lives. She reappears pink and soft and far too young-looking. You realize you prefer her dirty.
Since you started wearing orange, your cat has been treating you with disdain. Sometimes you don’t see him for days. He hisses and spits from under your bed, and you are afraid to get out in the morning because there is no doubt in your mind that he will scratch your bare ankles. You take flying leaps off your mattress, and hurt your knees. Not for the first time, you despair at having somehow chosen a beast that is so vicious—but when you got him, as a kitten, he seemed like all the others.
Your father leaves a message on your answering machine inviting you to a whisky evening. You don’t phone him back.
Out of nowhere, Ma says to your cat, “I used to ignore my father, and now he’s dead.”
It is the most lucid thing she has ever said.
•
Ma tells you, “We’re leaving you soon,” and you struggle not to cry, because you have not even managed to quit your job and move in with them yet.
Ma does not invite you. Jitendra doesn’t, either, not even when you ask him about it. You had thought the two of you were close. You don’t cry. You get a pint with an old school friend, but that is a mistake because all he wants to talk about is your parents, and how much he misses them, your mother—he is so sorry about your mother. You drink too fast and wake up in the morning on your sofa, your feet bare and covered in scratches.
•
At your father’s house, the dog tumbles out the door to lick your ankles. Your father looks tired, and you remember that you didn’t go to his whisky evening. You are holding a cardboard box with a few air holes punctured in the top.
“I forgot you had a cat,” he says, “Come in. Come in.”
You follow. The dog bounces near your feet. You reel off your instructions: feed the cat twice a day, never allow him out of the house, don’t attempt to trim his nails—you will regret it.
It’s just two weeks, you tell the cat.
The kitchen is uncannily clean. When you were a child, the place was always in a relentless state of disarray. There were always raised voices of one kind or another, always dirty cups in the sink and random forks on the sofa.
“Holiday, then?” He lights his pipe.
“With some friends.”
You open the flaps of the cardboard box, and the cat streaks out, leaps up onto the kitchen counter, and begins lapping from the dripping tap. It’s as if he had always lived in this house.
“Don’t worry,” your father says, blowing smoke over your head. “I’ll take care of him.”
•
Oregon: heat ricocheting off solid soil; flies crawling into ears and over toes; stacks of newly planed wood, smelling of sap, ready to build with; warm apples; sex; too much beer; too little rice; filthy children on the verge of killing a butterfly or a mouse.
You are different here. Yes, definitely different. Your Scottish skin is mottled with freckles; the eczema has retreated somewhere, you hope for good. Here you are touched by everyone, skin on skin, almost constantly.
Tonight you are in the meditation hall. You haven’t opened your eyes. You mustn’t, because it would break the magic. No one has used that word with you—magic—but that’s what it is, inexplicable and, at times, terrifying. Despite yourself, you open your eyes, gaze into your lap, and find an erection poking up at you. You wonder whether you can make yourself come without moving, without touch. It feels like an extreme effort to orgasm in this heat. You will let the erection go on, or wither on its own. You have been having sex with so many women. Some who were once lawyers or doctors or scientists. Some younger, like Ma, who were teachers or waitresses or still just daughters when they came here. You have had so much sex that you got a rash—not eczema, it was something else, and you had to leave this place, which you have helped to build, and get a bus to another town to see a doctor who did not know you. To him, you said out loud your new name. It feels like yours now, even though you’d never heard it before your guru presented it to you. You queued, along with many others, just to have a few brief moments with him. You haven’t admitted this to anyone, hardly even to yourself, but you were underwhelmed by the reality of him. Softer, feebler even, than you expected. Nothing like the sharp-eyed creature you saw at a distance.
You think of the evening after you graduated from university. Your father had been drinking at dinner; so had you. You were sitting beside him on the sofa, and then you were getting up to leave, and his arms shot around you and grasped you tight and held on. The next morning, after breakfast, you realized that he had been hugging you.
•
It’s been almost a year, and you rarely think about your cat now, except when you see the white scars on your tanned feet. You know that some people here have sent postcards home, but you have not. There is no point, really. What would you even say, except to ask after the cat?
You have not seen Jitendra since you arrived. You asked Ma when you first bumped into her again, and she shrugged and said that he’d gone back to his family. Sometimes Ma serves you dinner or sits near you in a circle around a fire on a summer night, but beyond that you barely interact with her. You have not had sex with her once since you got here. Often she is with the children; you know that she uses a damp cloth to wipe their faces and hands, and even sleeps in the house that is meant only for children, regularly bellowing at them to “be gentle.” You can’t help noticing that none of them seem to cut their nails. All of them are covered in scratches at different stages of bleeding or not bleeding. In Scotland, Ma did not seem like the maternal type, but here she is ordinary, mundane even. She blends in. You, on the other hand, you are so beautiful now. Your body is bigger; you take up more space. Your skin is smooth, except for the calluses on your hands from sawing wood. Everyone loves you here. Most days you are pretty sure of that. Everyone touches you all the time. For the first time in your life, you experience long, intimate hugs with other men, men who have no interest in fucking you; you have no interest in fucking them, either. But you slap each other’s shoulders after building a new chicken coop. They also wrap their arms around you after meditation. A man kissed you on both cheeks when you woke up shouting one night. At first, it was bizarre and glorious, but now the feeling of this love has become comfortable, lived-in. You are so deeply proud of all of them, and they are proud of you. What you are all doing here is extraordinary. You find yourself reaching for them, too, embracing them, telling them you love them. You find yourself looking up at the sky constantly, even when the sun is blinding.
One evening, you tell a group of children about the pet sheep you briefly had on holiday as a child. A tiny boy pulls your sleeve and says that he wants a sheep. You have no idea where to buy a sheep in Oregon. You don’t tell them about your cat. They don’t seem old enough somehow. You take to rolling the youngest children in blankets and carrying them around over one shoulder. You sense a ravenous need in them to be held. Even some of the older children beg you for a turn, so you enlist other men to help you. You see the brief joy on their grimy faces afterward and wonder if any children have run away from here. You ask yourself who would look for them, if they did, and if they would ever be found. You want to meditate, to empty yourself again. But then the next child comes to you, and says, “Please, big man, hold me.”
•
It’s morning. You haven’t slept, but you’re not sure why. The light is red and the trees purple; the tarmac is warm beneath your bare feet.
You haven’t spoken to Ma in months, but she’s running toward you, empty arms waving.
“Your dad is here,” she says.
You go back to the house you share with some people, smoke a cigarette, eat some peanuts, weed a greenhouse. Stop. You just stop.
•
You go to the guru’s private garden, because sometimes you weed there. Your father is in the garden, kneeling beside him. The guru speaks into your father’s ear, his hand patting and stroking your father’s shoulder, and you feel a lethal rage, because there you are deadheading his fucking roses, and you have never been touched by him, never touched him, not once.
“Malcolm,” your father shouts.
•
You sit on the sun-blistered grass together. His nose is smeared with a white strip of sun cream.
Ma is walking up the road toward the guru’s big house.
“See that girl with the shoes on?” you say.
“What made you think it would work with her?” your father asks.
“What makes you think it didn’t?”
“Hah.”
You know he’s thinking that Ma is like your mother. You are both thinking that it has been three years now without her. Neither of you expected it, not of her. Without ever speaking about it, you had both assumed that she would go noisily, in a freak hiking accident or a plane crash. Not with the quietness of a disease already in her brain; not drugged and almost constantly sleeping. Within a week, she could not speak. Before that, wherever she went, tender and trampling through your lives, there was always the sound of bangle against bangle on her wrists.
You look down at your strong, freckled arms, your hands in your lap. You look up at the sky, its blue mottled by clouds.
You don’t ask how your father found you. Your parents always seemed to know someone in every city. The endless dinner parties. The constant chatter and music. You suppose it was only a matter of time. You laugh.
“How’s my cat?”
“She’s dead.”
“He’s dead.”
A warm hand takes your hand, and you think how nice it is, in the end, to be touched by a man like your father. ♦
