The Things We Thought We Knew

by Mahsuda Snaith

  ‘It is time to move on, Ravine,’ Amma says.

  When I look up, her body has softened. She places her hand on my knee.

  ‘You cannot stay like this for ever,’ she says.

  I lift my tray. ‘I’d like to do my exercise now.’

  Amma looks at the tray hovering before her. She stands up, takes it and leaves.

  There isn’t a constellation for pain, but if there were it would sweep over half the sky and be connected by a hundred stars. Next to it would be two stars, brighter but linked by only one line. That would be the Constellation of Truth and Lies. It would seem like nothing in comparison to the Constellation of Pain but it would always be by its side.

  After Amma leaves I don’t want to look at the black-and-white card sitting on the bedside table. I don’t want to think about the secret I’m keeping. So instead I sit on Amma’s seat and pretend to do my window exercise.

  Children. A police car. Rabid dogs foaming at the mouth and running towards Bosworth House.

  After a while I hear a loud beeping noise from outside. Leaning forward in my chair I see a large white van pull up to the entrance of Bosworth House. The Ahmed boys are kicking a ball around. Mrs Ahmed is wearing her usual baggy clothing, her oval face the only flesh on show, but her customary black garb has been replaced with a thin turquoise fabric.

  I get up to pull my chair closer to the window. My legs, weak from years of inactivity, wobble from the knees down as I drag the seat. I sit back down, watching as the boys weave between the removal men. When Mrs Ahmed begins shouting and jabbing her hands, they pick up their ball and run down the hill.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ I hear Amma call from downstairs.

  I lean back in my seat.

  ‘A police car,’ I call back. ‘And clouds.’

  Police cars are as common as clouds round these parts so Amma continues her tasks without further probing. I move closer to the window, watching my breath fog against the glass, feeling nothing but pressure on my elbows as I lean on the sill. Mrs Ahmed stands stiff at the top of the hill. Mr Ahmed walks to her side, gesturing at the boys. What they don’t understand, what they perhaps will never understand, is that those boys are happy on this estate and, even though the world might tell them otherwise, they want nothing more than the life they already have.

  Seeing them reminds me of us. How we loved this place and everything it contained. Bosworth House. Bonchurch House. Tewkesbury House. We both wanted to live in Battenberg House because we thought it was named after the pink-and-yellow cake we loved to eat, with its marzipan icing and square innards. It was only later that I found out our flats were named mostly after Tudor battles.

  I feel my muscles sink into the seat as I sit back. I try to absorb the feeling of comfort, to burn it in my memory. If the pain were to come back, I would remember this moment. I hear the beeping of the van as it pulls out. Amma wants me to go back into the world but the truth is I’m not ready. I am a derelict flat. Before I can let anyone in, I need to be repaired.

  The Constellation of Killer Toasters

  Last night I dreamt I was on fire.

  I was lying in a bathtub bobbing along the sea. I saw wisps of cloud above me and realized that they weren’t clouds at all but plumes of smoke rising from my body. When I looked down my limbs were alight, every inch of me covered with flickering flames. They were red from the core, edged with searing blue lines that curled as the wind fuelled them. Even though I felt the heat of them and the melting of my skin, I did nothing. I didn’t scream. I didn’t jump in the water. I lay in the bathtub and let myself burn.

  I woke up sweating. There was no smoke and the fire was gone.

  I lifted a finger, stroking it along the hairs of my left arm. It felt light and as ticklish as silk.

  It had taken a long time for Uncle Walter to persuade us that he was your uncle. We’d stood outside your flat still convinced he was a spy who was about to turn a pistol on us. It was only when he pulled a photograph from his wallet – him sitting sandwiched between another woman and Mrs Dickerson – that we believed him. Your mother looked young, hair pouffed up in a frenzy, while the other woman was older, with a small quiff and a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Jonathan prodded the image of the other woman.

  ‘Who the hell is she?’

  The fold beneath Uncle Walter’s chin rippled as he gulped. ‘My mum,’ he said. ‘Your grandmother … or at least she was.’

  Your jaw dropped as Jonathan frowned. Uncle Walter used his handkerchief to pat his brow.

  ‘She died last week,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s why I came to see you all. I wrote to Elaine about it. She must have told you?’

  Jonathan turned to look at us. ‘That’s not proof,’ he said, as though your uncle was not standing right next to us. ‘He could be making it all up. He could have forged the photograph.’

  You twisted your lips. ‘How?’

  Jonathan rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t bloody know, I’m not a …’

  He looked over at your uncle then back at you, cupping his mouth with his hands as he spelt out the word s-p-y.

  ‘I can prove I’m not lying,’ your uncle said, with a loudness that made us all jump. We turned to look at him.

  ‘Elaine’s favourite food is spaghetti bolognese. Her favourite colour is peacock blue. Her favourite film is The Wizard of Oz … though she can never watch the whole thing because it makes her cry.’

  ‘That’s true!’ I said, pointing at Uncle Walter.

  ‘It is!’ you confirmed.

  Jonathan remained sceptical as he pulled the front-door key from his shorts. Yet the proof had been given and he couldn’t argue with it.

  When your uncle came inside he discovered the full extent of the situation. You gave him a guided tour: Mrs Dickerson’s empty room, the makeshift bed Jonathan had made in front of the television and the modest wedge of cash stuck to the fridge with a sticky note reading ‘FOR FOOD AND EMERGENCIES ONLY’. Your uncle turned pale and staggered over to the sofa.

  ‘How long did you say Elaine was gone for?’ he asked.

  Jonathan stepped forward and stuck his chin in the air. ‘As long as she bleeding well likes.’

  He had his arms crossed over his chest in a tight knot that matched the furrows of his brow. The lenses in his glasses were steamed up with condensation that seemed to come either from the heat of the day or the bubbling of his rage.

  ‘How did she die, anyway?’ Jonathan asked. ‘You know, that woman in the photo?’

  Uncle Walter looked Jonathan straight in the eye.

  ‘Electrocuted,’ he said. ‘She was trying to fix the toaster with a butter knife and the electric current stopped her heart.’

  None of us spoke, startled by your uncle’s honesty and the image of a woman poking a butter knife around the element of a toaster.

  ‘That can actually happen?’ I asked.

  Amma warned me of the dangers of everyday household items on a regular basis. The television could blind me if I sat too close to it, the microwave could fry my brain if I didn’t follow the instructions, and the toaster couldn’t even be switched on without her supervision. If she’d been right about that, what else was she right about?

  ‘They found her in the morning, lying stiff on the floor,’ your uncle said.

  He made his limbs rigid to demonstrate, arms held straight as poles against the sides of his body.

  ‘Was her hair standing on end?’ you asked. ‘Like in the cartoons?’

  Uncle Walter relaxed and looked up to the ceiling.

  ‘Not standing on end … but there was a burnt smell from where it got singed.’

  We carried on interrogating him with rapid-fire questions, scared that he would remember at any second that we were children who should be protected from the gruesome realities of life.

  In those five minutes, I found out more about your mother than I’d ever known from being her neighbour. Mrs Dickerson had been thrown out of the family home aged seven
teen, after a volcanic relationship with her mother led to an almighty fistfight.

  ‘It was like WWF,’ your uncle told us, ‘but for real.’

  Police were called, allegations made and the family was split. Uncle Walter only saw your mum a handful of times afterwards and always without his own mother’s knowledge. He would sneak out of the house at night, keeping his head down, trying his best to go undetected.

  ‘I suppose you could say it was like being an s-p-y,’ Uncle Walter said, before looking over at Jonathan and giving him an exaggerated wink.

  Jonathan’s face turned red. He stormed up to his room and slammed the door. Your uncle blinked.

  ‘I only meant it as a joke.’

  We both looked at each other.

  ‘Jonathan doesn’t like jokes,’ I said.

  He tapped his temple, logging the fact in the notepad of his mind. Then he clapped his hands together and rose to his feet.

  ‘Who’d like spaghetti carbonara?’

  ‘A spaghetti what?’ you said.

  I pulled out the mini dictionary from my shoulder bag but the intricacies of Italian cuisine were too obscure for the Oxford University Press back then.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, closing the book.

  ‘It’s the best food ever, is what it is,’ he said.

  Uncle Walter marched into the kitchen, the two of us following behind like baby ducklings.

  This is Amma’s weekly routine:

  Tuesday morning – hop on the bus to the cash-and-carry.

  Wednesday – visit the park to feed ducks leftover chapatti.

  Thursday – visit the doctor’s whether she needs the appointment or not.

  Amma thinks the body is like a car and needs regular MOTs. I tell her that even a car gets a check-up only once a year, but this means nothing to her. The body is more complex than a car, she tells me, and therefore is more likely to break down.

  Do you remember when Amma started wearing trainers? She came to pick us up from school, flashes of white appearing at the bottom of her pleated sari as she walked across the playground. She was wearing a turquoise-and-pink number and it was so hot she wasn’t wearing her usual cream cardigan but had left her dimpled arms bare. I tried not to notice how everyone stared. Leicester may have been a multicultural wonderland at the time, but Westhill Estate was slow on the uptake. I was the only Asian person in the school apart from the Singhs, but at least their family had some sense of subtlety. They wore western clothes and spoke in accent-free voices. They sprayed their children with deodorant in the morning so they could never be accused of smelling of curry. They dressed them in T-shirts and jeans while I still wore the fashion of seventies Bombay: cutesy puffed dresses and oversized colourful jumpers that buried my small body so deeply I had to roll the sleeves up four times to make them fit. Things are different now; having Yusefs, Priyas and Pytors sitting in the same class is as normal as having cold fish fingers in the dining room. But back in the mid-nineties, to advertise your foreignness on Westhill was as good as putting a ‘COME THROW A BRICK AT ME’ sign in your window. At times like that, I was grateful to live on the third floor.

  When I think of it now I should have seen the trainers as a (literal) step in the right direction. At least they were western. But they only made Amma stick out. When you asked me about them I told you the doctor had prescribed them, claiming they helped people with bad backs. This was true, though I never told you Amma didn’t have any back problems. She wore those ridiculous things with air-pockets simply because the doctor had made a fleeting comment about how they helped the alignment of the spine. From then on, flashes of white followed her every step, clashing with her brightly coloured saris. Amma never believed in fashion sense, just common sense, though hers seemed common to no one but herself.

  She still wears those white monstrosities. She polishes them with a strange concoction of vinegar and lemon that stinks up the whole flat. I cough and splutter when she starts spraying, until she cries up the steps, ‘It is only vinegar, shona. It will not kill you!’

  I used to like the fact that, even in these small estate flats, the council built two floors for us to live on. I always thought the stairs made the place feel like a home. They created levels to our lives, gave us depth. But now I’ve grown I realize how few steps there are and the very small distance they reach. I hear everything that happens, smell every stink. In winter I can feel the draught from the hallway. During the week I hear Amma’s telephone conversations in the living room and today, when she comes back from the doctor’s, her whispers and mutters as she ushers her companion through the front door.

  Amma thinks I don’t know about her companion but I smell him every time he walks in. The stale stench of cigarette smoke on his clothes wafts up to me as she rattles with kettles and mugs in the kitchen. I imagine she takes the tea to him in the living room on the same tray she brings me my food on.

  As soon as they close the door they begin to speak in a way that hums through my floorboards. He has a low voice that resonates, smooth and deep like the dull drone of a washing machine on a spin cycle. When he speaks, he speaks Bengali. Many of the words I don’t realize I know until I hear them; a spark of synapses yanking the memories out. I hear the words ‘ji’ meaning ‘yes’, ‘na’ meaning ‘no’, ‘shona’ meaning ‘lovely’ or ‘gold’.

  Amma thinks that her shushing and sneaking is enough to hide her secret from me. But I am the Queen of Secrets and can spot one from a mile away. Besides, Amma’s companion doesn’t want to be kept secret. After she sneaks him in this morning I hear him coughing theatrically as she guides him to the living room. Knowing they’ll have at least two cups of chai before he leaves, I swing my feet out of bed and start testing my body. I pinch myself, stretch my arms out in front of me, clench my fists, march on the spot and roll back on my bed so I can pretend-cycle with my legs. It’s the sound of him counting that makes me stop. The way he’s doing it, so loud and pronounced, is as though he’s playing hide-and-seek. I imagine Amma curled up behind the sofa, the white socks of her feet poking out from behind.

  ek

  dui

  tin

  chaar

  paach

  shoy …

  As he pummels out the numbers, the memory of Amma counting out sweets for me as a child comes flooding into focus. Her fingers dole jelly beans onto my palm the same way she now doles pills onto my tray. When he stops I feel a peculiar sense of loss.

  It’s then that I hear a clattering in the room next door. For a moment I think it’s the Ahmeds. That they’ve lost their millions and have been forced to move back. Then I think that it’s the boys, running away from their mansion and slipping back in. Before I can decide either way, Amma and her companion start talking again, except this time they’re arguing.

  I feel their voices reverberate through the walls, Amma sshhing with a gusto that could make the walls cave in. Her companion becomes louder, rattling out strings of words my brain can’t compute. The noise grows louder until it culminates in fierce shouts that break from the Bengali.

  ‘But when, I ask you? When?’

  When Amma speaks, it’s with shrill, uncharacteristic alarm.

  ‘When she is ready!’ she screeches.

  A clatter of china is followed by an eerie silence. I get under my covers, bury my head beneath my pillow and try not to scream.

  The Constellation of Stolen Souls

  If I could give the world one piece of advice from my time in a lifebed it would be this: watch less television.

  Amma always believed that, like sugar rots teeth, too much television rots the brain. Before I became ill she’d allow one hour of viewing time per day. She didn’t know that when I came to ‘play’ with you in your flat it was often to watch post-watershed episodes of Friends and South Park. Everything changed when I came home from the hospital. For the first week, I lay in bed staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, trying not to exist any more. I thought I’d stop being, that the
pain would evaporate and you’d come back.

  In the second week, Amma decided it was time for me to snap out of it. She bought me toys that would previously have been labelled ‘pointless’, got me new clothes at full price instead of waiting for the sales and cooked me stacks upon stacks of my favourite (chilli-less) foods. Yet still I remained flat on my back on my mattress. Playing, wearing new clothes or eating would have been admitting that I was real, that everything was real and you were gone.

  It was in the third week that Amma hauled the television into my bedroom. As she placed the contraption on my dresser, she began talking through the entire process of setting it up. ‘So the lead goes in here. And you switch it on here. And you tune the channels with this button.’ She was doing it all wrong and knew full well that the more she prattled on the more irritated I’d get. She then tuned all five of the channels (the only ones we could access in those days before digital) in the wrong order. Then, before she left, my devious, cunning mother switched the TV on, turned up the sound, laid the remote control next to me, and left the screen blazing with the local evening news. She placed her face right over mine, looking down at me with a sweeter-than-sweet smile.

  ‘Tell me if you need anything, shona,’ she said, before disappearing downstairs.

  I listened to a report about a minor celebrity opening a hospital ward, followed by a story about the county’s most intelligent guinea pig. I began banging the buttons of the remote control with the ball of my fist. The voices changed. I rolled my eyes down to the screen to see a re-run of Sunset Beach. Amma had banned me from watching this soap, not for any moral reason but because she thought it had a terrible script.

  When Amma returned half an hour later I was sitting upright in bed, staring at the scene of a make-up-clad goddess throwing crockery at a muscle-bound fireman. Amma’s frown was firm so I made sure to smile widely until she shook her head and left.