Anil's Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

the labs. Missed the thrill that got knocked into her when they snapped lights on over the aluminum tables.
    The Miami bedroom had the atmosphere of a boutique, with its embroidered pillows and carpeting. She entered the bathroom and washed her face, ran some cold water through her hair, wide awake. She climbed into the shower and turned it on but after a minute came out with an idea. Not bothering to dry herself, she unzipped her travelling bag and pulled from it the large, outdated videocamera she had brought with her to Miami to get a new microphone part installed. It was a secondhand television camera that the forensic team used, a remnant from the early eighties. She used it on sites and was accustomed to its weight and its weaknesses. She inserted a cassette and hoisted it onto her wet shoulder. Switched it on.
    She began with the room, then returned to the bathroom and filmed herself waving briefly into the mirror. A close-up of the texture of the towels, a close-up of the shower water still running. She stood on the bed and shot down at Cullis’s sleeping head, his left arm out to where she had been all night beside him. Her pillow. Back to Cullis, his mouth, his lovely ribs, back off the bed onto floor level, the camera steady, down to his ankles. Walked backwards to take in their clothes on the floor, and then to the table to his notebook. Close-up on his writing.
    She removed the cassette from the machine and buried it under some clothes in his suitcase. She packed the camera in her bag, then got back into bed beside him.
     
    They were lying in bed, in the sunlight. ‘I can’t imagine your childhood,’ he said. ‘You are a complete stranger to me.
Colombo.
Is the place languid?’
    ‘It’s languid indoors. Frenetic outside.’
    ‘You don’t go back.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘A friend of mine went to Singapore. All that air-conditioning! He said it was like being stuck in Selfridges for a week.’
    ‘I suspect people in Colombo would love it to be Selfridges.’
    Their life together was best in these brief quiet times, lazily, postcoitally conversing. To him she was clear and funny and beautiful, to her he was married, always interesting, permanently defensive. Two out of three was not good.
     
    They had met on another occasion, in Montreal. Anil was there for a convention, and Cullis had run into her in a hotel lobby quite by chance.
    ‘I’m sneaking away,’ she said. ‘Enough!’
    ‘Have dinner with me.’
    ‘I’ve got plans. I promised myself this evening with a group of friends. Join us. We’ve had days and days of papers. I promise you the worst meal in Montreal if you come with me.’
    They drove through the suburbs.
    ‘Do you speak French?’ he asked.
    ‘No. Just English. I can write some Sinhala.’
    ‘Is that your background?’
    A no-name plaza appeared on the side of the highway, and she parked beneath the blinking lights of a Bowlerama. ‘I live here,’ she said. ‘In the West.’
    Cullis was introduced to seven other anthropologists, who looked him over carefully and considered his posture to assess whether he would be useful on their team. They seemed to come from all over the world. Having flown to Montreal from Europe and Central America, they had escaped another slide show and were now, like Anil, ready for bowling. Bad red wine from a machine dribbled into small paper cups like the ones dentists offered and was being consumed by them at great speed, along with chips and vinegar and canned hummus. A paleontologist organized the computer-scoring panels, and within ten minutes these forensic celebrities, probably the only non-French-speakers in the Bowlerama, were goblinlike in their bowling shoes, and indeed raucous. There was competitive cheating. There was the dropping of bowling balls onto the parquet lanes. Cullis did not wish for his dead body ever to be touched by such incompetents, who committed so many foot faults. More and more, as the contest progressed, he and Anil rushed