The Things We Thought We Knew

by Mahsuda Snaith

  I shrug. ‘Not a sausage.’

  I look at Sandy as she takes another drag. The tattoo of Death on the side of her neck shrivels as she sucks in. I shuffle upright in bed.

  ‘Have you heard from …?’ I struggle to say her name, nodding my head towards Sandy in the hope that she’ll finish off the sentence.

  ‘Elaine?’ she says. ‘Or Mrs Dickerson, like you used to call her.’

  She smiles as she says this, still hanging her hand out of the window.

  ‘That used to drive her crazy, that did,’ she says. ‘She wasn’t even married! But yes, I still hear from her. She sends me the odd postcard, calls me up once in a while.’

  I lean back on my pillow. Even though I’ve asked the question, a part of me didn’t want to know, a part of me didn’t want to care.

  ‘She was always so mean to Walt,’ Sandy says.

  When I look at her she’s staring out of the window. She’s gazing out across the estate, scratching her nails up and down her tattoo.

  ‘Even when we were little she’d call him horrible names. Idiot. Fat lump. Lard arse. He’d just stand and take it, bless his heart. Didn’t know any better, did he? Funny, because every time she calls me now she wants to know if I’ve heard from him. Even after everything that happened.’

  She carries on staring out of the window. I watch the fumes spiral out of her mouth, her neck twisting as she turns and leans back against the frame. The way she gazes, eyelashes batting in slow movements, makes her look like a sad Frenchwoman in a black-and-white film. Eventually she turns to look at me.

  ‘You know, you shouldn’t blame him for what happened. Walt was an innocent. Really, he was.’

  Sandy will talk about the various locations she’s had sex with her new toy boy and how Mrs Patterson on the fourth floor is trying to get a breast reduction on the NHS, but never about what happened with Uncle Walter. I try to look quizzical as I shuffle my body up.

  ‘What exactly did happen, Sandy?’ I ask.

  She stands up straight, rabbit eyes scanning the room as though it’s filled with spy cameras and hidden microphones. She quickly stubs her cigarette on the wall outside and pulls a packet of mints out of her jacket pocket.

  ‘Best not to go into it,’ she says, pushing two squares into her mouth. ‘It’ll only upset you.’

  Sandy is neither the sensitive nor discreet type, so I open my mouth to see if I can push it further. But as she jiggles her foot, shoulders held tight to her ears, my mouth freezes. She’s uncomfortable and the only other time I’ve seen Sandy Burke uncomfortable was Christmas Day 1999, when she came to your flat.

  ‘Well, I’d best be off,’ Sandy says, closing the window. ‘Can’t keep lover boy waiting, can I?’

  I shrug my shoulders, bottom lip pouting. She bends forward, prodding my nose with her finger.

  ‘You take care of yourself, missy,’ she says with a wink.

  Even though the action would be more suitable for a six-year-old, it still makes me smile.

  I decide to spend the rest of the day filling out book six of my bumper book of crosswords. I’ve certain techniques when beginning a new puzzle, searching specifically for clues that have definitions in them. These are just like dictionary definitions but in reverse.

  1 across: Too great to assess (12) = INCALCULABLE

  15 down: Glove with long loose wrist (8) = GAUNTLET

  I scan my brain for every word I’ve ever looked up. If I get stuck I check in the thesaurus (it’s not cheating if you still have to think about it). Clues based on specific knowledge are the hardest.

  11 down: Common central spot in fish (8)

  31 across: Spotted motorway leading to Yorkshire town (6)

  Without becoming a fisherman or travelling to Yorkshire I have no way of figuring them out. Sometimes I just put in any word that fits (still not cheating as I’m only playing with myself).

  Later, Amma comes upstairs with my dinner tray and sits down to watch the universe programme with me. As I begin eating dahl and rice I think how nice it was to see Sandy earlier. Her voice wasn’t so loud as to give me a headache and when she told me about her twins swapping identities I even found myself laughing. It’s surprising that sometimes our friends are just the people who stick around. This is no jibe at you, Marianne, it’s just an observation.

  As I bring the lentil-and-rice mixture to my mouth the professor informs us that the sun is going to explode. Not any time soon, but explode nonetheless. Just the idea of this would have caused you panic, giving you sleepless nights, started you jabbering away at me through the wall.

  ‘Cod Almight-flea!’ you’d scream. ‘The sun is going to explode any second.’

  As the professor explains this revelation I think I hear a rustling from next door. I check to see if Amma has noticed but she is so enraptured by the professor, a supernova could combust in the room and she wouldn’t take her eyes from the screen. I press the back of my skull against the partition wall behind me. I think I can feel the slight tremor of movement. I wait for more but my mind must grow bored because I’m soon listening to the professor telling me about the energy of the sun.

  He’s kneeling down in the middle of a desert, holding a piece of cardboard with a square cut out of the middle. As he tosses back his locks, he angles the cardboard so that a small, illuminated square shines on the sand before him.

  ‘This small square of sunlight I’m measuring has enough power to fuel the whole of the United States for a year …’

  As the camera pulls back out, I don’t look at the professor or the little square of energy on the ground but the sun shining behind him. It’s bright and blinding as it hovers in the milky blue sky and I get to thinking about the feel of it. The way it warms your skin. The way it makes you tingle all over as if covered by a woolly blanket.

  15 across: The star which the planets orbit (3)

  12 down: The giver of life, the source of all warmth, the centre, the middle, the core (3)

  As the programme comes to an end, Amma gives me her ‘isn’t he clever?’ expression before she hoists herself out of her seat and leaves. I don’t think she notices the sound of the toilet flushing next door.

  The Constellation of Physiotherapists

  Today a physiotherapist comes and tortures me for an hour. He arrives forty-five minutes late and strolls into my room as though I have all the time in the world to wait for him. I do have all the time in the world but still, he doesn’t know that.

  He asks me the usual questions. If I’ve been doing my exercises, which I say I have; if I’ve started any new medication, which I say I haven’t; whether the pain has changed or is of the same ‘quality’. I tell him it’s ‘status quo’. He blinks at me for a second, the way people do when I use words they don’t expect an eighteen-year-old girl from a council flat to use, before carrying on with his questions. How am I feeling? Am I keeping stimulated? Blah blah blah. If this man knew that he was the only male conversation I have apart from Mr Chavda, then maybe he’d offer something that isn’t so bloody dull. Although some people are dull by nature. Interestingly, these people seem the happiest.

  He isn’t a bad-looking fellow, this physiotherapist. He’s tall and broad with mahogany skin so dark and smooth it reminds me of a polished table top. His short afro hair spins in spirals across his scalp and when he gets close enough I can see the same pattern peeking through the V of his unbuttoned polo shirt. They come right up to his collarbone, those little curly hairs, and I stare at them as if hypnotized. When the physiotherapist takes hold of me, pushing my leg back and forth and twisting my ankle in all manner of movements, I can see the muscles of his arm push up against his rich mocha skin, flexing and bulging in a way that makes me blush. When he leans over me to lift my arm, I can smell the woody odour of his deodorant. I feel a tingle all over as though he’s sprinkling my skin with the fine spray of his scent. I feel many things when I look at this man; physical urges you’d probably prefer not to know about.


  When we were young we wanted to marry pop stars from boy bands but the idea of kissing boys made us retch. Things change as you grow older. Your body wants new things. Boys become more than a mere irritant you’d prefer didn’t exist. You have desires. You have needs. You have a physiotherapist you want to grab by the buttocks and pull close to your breasts.

  ‘You seem different this time,’ the physiotherapist says, sitting down on Amma’s chair. His voice is as rich as his skin, filling every inch of the room.

  I frown. ‘How?’

  He strokes his stubbly cheek with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Almost as though … that is to say, you’re not reacting as much … to the pain.’

  He must see the irritation flicker across my face because he begins talking rapidly.

  ‘Your muscles are less tense, there’s more movement in your joints,’ he says. ‘And you didn’t groan as much as you did last time.’

  There it is: the future of Ravine stretching out before me. ‘You’re right!’ I’ll cry. ‘I don’t feel any pain!’ I’ll watch the pride illuminate the physiotherapist’s perfectly formed face as he explains the possible reasons for my recovery. Then he’ll break the news to Amma in clear medical language she can’t interrupt before he asks me on a date in the city centre. He’ll coax me out into the Big World Outside, holding me by the hand. I’ll fall in love with the physiotherapist, marry the physiotherapist, have babies with the physiotherapist and all will be well with the world because I’ll be living a happy normal life like a happy normal person.

  But of course this isn’t the path I choose.

  I lower my chin as he waits for my response.

  ‘So you can feel what I’m feeling?’ I say.

  The physiotherapist shakes his head. ‘Pain is a very personal experience. That’s why people who suffer chronically from it find difficulty in—’

  ‘From that,’ I say, with a severity that’s reminiscent of our old head teacher, ‘you can suddenly know, through some method of osmosis, every sting, throb and all-consuming agony I feel each and every minute of my day?’

  He drops his head and clasps his hands together. ‘There’s been studies that have shown …’

  ‘Aaaarrrh!’ I cry.

  He jumps back in his seat. I admit the thrill of seeing this Herculean figure startle at my cry only spurs me on further. I begin to scream, with my head flung back and hands clasped into fists. Scream from the base of my belly to the top of my throat. Scream like a child. I must be beetroot red by the time Amma runs into the room.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  I tilt my head forward to see her standing in the doorway with a dripping dishcloth in her hand. I close my mouth and take a deep breath.

  ‘He wanted to hear my pain so I’m letting him hear it,’ I say, before flopping my head back down on the pillow.

  I’ve never dated anyone so I’m unaware of the etiquette, but I’m guessing if I’d wanted to impress this physiotherapist the screaming wasn’t a brilliant move. In all the great love stories of literature and Bollywood, I can’t recall a hero who was seduced by a tantrum.

  The physiotherapist scuttles over to Amma and speaks to her with flushed cheeks that shine against his dark skin and make him even more desirable. He arranges another appointment which he doesn’t even note in his diary and then collects all his equipment in a frantic rush. I try to memorize the feel of his hands on my arm so I have something to reminisce over tonight.

  ‘She has good days and bad,’ Amma says to him at the door.

  Which is as untrue as a lie can get. I have the same days, over and over again. The same walls, the same bed, the same thoughts carouselling around in my head.

  I hear the noise of the birds on the wallpaper squawking, the laughter of the My Little Ponies on the curtains. ‘They all disappear,’ I mumble as Amma leads my only chance of sexual fulfilment out of the door. ‘They all disappear in the end.’

  I woke up last night with the sing-song voice of your brother echoing in my skull. It called for me through the hazy blur of a dream filled with mustard eyes and giant slugs.

  ‘Ravine Ravine, Dictionary Queen.’

  I couldn’t shake it off and my mental retort to Jonathan-Weatherboy didn’t help much. I opened my eyes in a half-sleep and distracted myself with other thoughts: the glow of the streetlamp through the edge of the curtains, the memory of the physiotherapist’s hair curling like springs on his chest.

  I could still hear the faint repetition of my name. It only went away when I switched my bedside lamp on, hauled myself to a sitting position and began writing to you.

  ‘Ravine.’

  You used to whisper my name through the thin partition wall between our rooms, shout it whenever the bell rang for playtime, call it from the top of trees as we played hide-and-seek.

  ‘Raaaviiiiinne!’

  It’s not a real name. You won’t know this because you were used to it, the same way you were used to wearing luminous shorts under your skirts and hearing random weather forecasts from your brother. But you won’t find anyone else with this name because Amma chose it at random. In fact, she chose it from a newspaper.

  It was on the front page the day I was born.

  YOUNG MAN DROWNS IN RAVINE

  You’d think the tragic subject matter would have caught Amma’s attention rather than that six-letter word hovering at the end of the line, but we all know Amma has her own logic. She’d never heard of this word ‘ravine’ before and upon sounding it out, took it as her own. It sounded neither Hindu nor English which, considering Amma’s history, suited her just fine.

  To understand my mother you have to understand her past, a story she has drip-fed me over years, mainly during the worst stages of my illness because this was the only time I wouldn’t butt in. Sometimes I think her life sounds more like scenes from a soap opera than real events, every incident another episode.

  Episode One – A Village Scene in Bangladesh

  Amma’s story began the day her parents sent her to England, aged seventeen, to marry a man she didn’t know. Within their small Sylheti community there were growing fears that their once-obedient daughter was Frankensteining into an unstoppable ‘individual’. The eldest of six daughters, Amma had become such an unruly character that they were convinced no respectable Bengali man would go within a ten-metre radius of the girl, let alone marry her. She tucked the skirt of her shalwar kameez into her trouser bottoms when racing other children (earning her the nickname Baggy Bum Rekha). She swam in the local river with a plastic bag over her hair. She wanted to attend university and gain a professional qualification. This plan was so outlandish for a daughter of a shopkeeper born into a low and humble caste that her parents began to think her mentally unstable. They were positively dancing when the passport photos they’d sent to relatives in England struck gold. A businessman, fifteen years Amma’s senior, was so desperate to marry and create heirs to his empire that he agreed not only to pay for Amma’s flight but also to accept no dowry.

  Episode Two – Arrival in Strange Lands

  My mother lived with her husband (a man she regularly called ‘the fool’) for a total of seven months. His empire turned out to be a small factory tucked in the backstreets of Leicester, its sole purpose being the production of imitation Rubik’s Cubes (aka Roobix Blocks). The puzzle was a hit at the time and his knock-off goods made him enough money to buy a three-bed house in the suburbs. At first Amma had been impressed, not only with the house but also with her new husband, who proved to be polite and courteous and not the great oaf she’d expected. But his best qualities were also his worst. He had lofty ideas and a desperate need to please, a combination that proved an expensive mix. He’d routinely buy Amma red tulips, unaware that such gestures were wasted on a woman who hated things that had no practical use. Then, when she called him a fool for repeating the act, his eyes welled up.

  ‘He always had this face,’ Amma told me, ‘as though he would cry at any se
cond. No wonder no English woman would marry him! But it was a deceiving face, Ravine, to make me think him innocent when really he was nothing but a toerag runaway.’

  Episode Three – The Strange Disappearance of Roobix Man

  My father vanished ghost-fashion three days before Amma discovered me in her womb. It was the scenario every wife fears: my father left the house in the morning to get some milk and never returned. Despite being ruffled by his vanishing, she was free! A woman in her own right in the land of the religiously liberal and morally ambiguous! And with a three-bed semi to boot!

  However, my father had left for a reason.

  The popularity of Roobix Blocks had dwindled dramatically and, in his panic, he’d gambled away all of his assets. My father was so deeply embroiled in the gambling world that he was being hunted down by a gang of muscle-bound loan sharks. Within a matter of weeks my mother was abandoned, pregnant, homeless and penniless in a country that was not her own.

  Episode Four – The Aftermath

  Amma was never one for convention but being a Bengali single mother in pre-millennium Britain wasn’t easy. She had no money to buy herself a ticket home and my grandparents conveniently didn’t answer any of her calls. With no other choice Amma took action. She secured herself a series of small cleaning jobs, taught herself English through scattered overheard conversations, while at the same time handling the day-to-day racism and sexism that was (she tells me) commonplace at the time. With the help of a translator to fill in the forms, she got herself a council flat along with a little extra money from the government to subsidize her pitiful wage. The money was there to help her until she qualified for a better job and I was old enough to snap up a swanky graduate position.

  Amma tells me that the world is exploding with opportunities. She says that it’s never been so good for Asian women: educated at the top universities, taking senior positions in business and politics. She never had those opportunities and I can’t enjoy any of them. Or won’t enjoy any of them. Because of this, I am Amma’s biggest disappointment.