Free The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.’

Miss Lasqueti
     
    MISS LASQUETI WAS regarded by most of those at the Cat’s Table as a likely spinster, and by us three as having a possible libido (that elbow against Cassius’s scrotum). She was lithe, and white as a pigeon. She was not fond of the sun. You would see her in a deckchair reading crime novels within the rectangles of deep shadow, her bright blonde hair a little sparkle in her chosen gloom. She was a smoker. She and Mr Mazappa would simultaneously rise and excuse themselves after the first course and take the nearest exit onto the deck. What they spoke of there, we had no idea. They seemed an unlikely pair. Although she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in mud. It surprised you because it emerged from that modest and slim frame; we heard it usually in response to one of Mr Mazappa’s ribald stories. She could be whimsical. ‘Why is it when I hear the phrase “ trompe l’oeil ” I think of oysters?’ I overheard her say once.
    Still, most of the time we had barely a fishhook’s evidence about Miss Lasqueti’s background or career. We considered ourselves good at vacuuming up clues as we coursed over the ship each day, but our certainty about what we discovered grew slowly. We’d overhear something at lunch, or witness a thrown glance or the shake of a head. ‘Spanish is a loving tongue – is it not, Mr Mazappa?’ Miss Lasqueti had commented, and he had winked back at her from across the table. We were learning about adults simply by being in their midst. We felt patterns emerging, and for a while everything was based on that wink by Mr Mazappa.
    A peculiarity of Miss Lasqueti was that she was a sleeper. Someone who at certain hours during the day could barely stay awake. You saw her fighting it. This struggle made her endearing, as if she were forever warding off an unjustified punishment. You’d walk past her in a deckchair, her head falling slowly towards the book she was attempting to read. She was in many ways our table’s ghost, for it was also revealed that she sleepwalked, a dangerous habit on a ship. A sliver of white, I see her always, against the dark rolling sea.
    What was her future? What had been her past? She was the only one from the Cat’s Table who was able to force us out of ourselves in order to imagine another’s life. I admit it was mostly Ramadhin who coaxed this empathy from Cassius and me. Ramadhin was always the most generous of the three of us. But for the first time in our lives we began to sense there was an unfairness in someone else’s life. Miss Lasqueti had, I remember, ‘gunpowder tea’, which she mixed with a cup of hot water at our table, then poured into a thermos before she left us for the afternoon. You could actually see the flush enter her face as the drink knocked her awake.
    Describing her as ‘white as a pigeon’ was probably influenced by a later discovery about her: it was revealed that Miss Lasqueti had twenty or thirty pigeons caged somewhere on the ship. She was ‘accompanying them’ to England, but she breasted her cards about her motive for travelling with them. Then I heard, via Flavia Prins, that an unknown passenger in First Class had informed her that Miss Lasqueti had often been seen in the corridors of Whitehall.
    In any case, it seemed to us that nearly all at our table, from the silent tailor, Mr Gunesekera, who owned a shop in Kandy, to the entertaining Mr Mazappa, to Miss Lasqueti, might have an interesting reason for their journey, even if it was unspoken or, so far, undiscovered. In spite of this, our table’s status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is