The Things We Thought We Knew

by Mahsuda Snaith

  ‘Four out of ten for pain,’ I say. ‘Maybe less.’

  After much fussing, administering pain relief and testing my temperature, she decides to venture out to the cash-and-carry. I wave her goodbye, pulling out my crossword book to begin a new page.

  It isn’t that I think I’m forgiven; what I did to Stanley was unacceptable. But having written it down, having confessed to what actually happened, I can’t help but feel the lightness on my neck as the albatross is lifted (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was my GCSE text, a poem Mr Chavda stated was ‘beyond my comprehension’. Ha!).

  But enough of that. I have to tell you about Jonathan.

  After Amma leaves for the cash-and-carry I begin to get into a flow with my bumper book of crosswords. Sometimes when this happens I can complete a whole puzzle in less than ten minutes. The letters criss-cross in front of my eyes and for a second I reach my own personal moment of Zen and all is one. I’m in one of these moments, scrawling the letters down wildly on the page, when I hear Jonathan’s voice through the wall.

  ‘Ravine,’ it says. ‘Can you (mumble) me?’

  I sit with my pen poised over the squares. He speaks louder the next time.

  ‘I know you can hear me, Ravine!’ he says.

  I can hear the exasperation in his voice. The same ‘for goodness’ sake’ tone he used when we were children. But your brother’s no longer a child; he’s a twenty-year-old man. When I remember him back then I see a messy-haired, pale-faced brat with glasses three times too big for his face. When I think of him now I see the same brat, but taller. It’s irrational, I know, but in the same way that you’ll never age in my mind, neither will he.

  I can hear a few more mumbles but his voice is low. I reach for the empty glass beside my bed and place it against the wall with my ear on the base. I catch the odd word (give, never, now) until suddenly his voice is loud again, as though he’s right up against the wall.

  ‘All I want to do is talk to you!’ he says.

  I don’t reply, putting the glass down and trying my best to read the next clue on the list. He begins tapping the wall.

  ‘Ravine!’ he shouts. ‘I’m not kidding about!’

  I roll my eyes. As if he, the great grouch of Westhill, was ever known for kidding about.

  The tapping gets louder, faster in pace. The thudding in my chest joins in with the beat. I grow irritated. He’s ruining my good day. Already I’ve lost the flow with my crosswords and I’m beginning to get a headache. He was always a ruiner, your brother. Always finding ways of spoiling, wrecking, destroying. He thinks he can still do this. He thinks he can push me around like I’m still a little girl.

  I look over at Shiva, dancing his cosmic dance of creation and destruction. I think how fitting it would be for me to pick him up by the waist and hurl him through the wall so that he’d smash through the partition and crush Jonathan’s skull.

  The noise stops.

  ‘RAVINE!’ Jonathan shouts. ‘RAVINE!’

  I drop my pen as he screams my name. It’s so loud that I duck down and bury my head beneath the covers, hoping if I stay under – plugging my ears with my fingers – I will never hear that voice again.

  ‘Go away,’ I mumble into the mattress. ‘Go away, go away, go away!’

  He stops screaming. I bite my lip, hoping he hasn’t heard.

  The Constellation of Keeping Hidden

  Amma has her companion over again today. It’s been so long since his last visit that at first I think the gasman has come to check the meter. Soon the familiar rumble of his voice rises to my room.

  ‘Bala asini?’ he says, standing in the hallway.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Amma replies, ushering him quickly into the living room.

  Last night, when Amma came home from feeding ducks I heard her speaking on the telephone. As she was speaking Bengali I assumed she was talking to her companion, but as the conversation continued I realized her tone was too formal, the repeating of phrases almost official. I listened in and tried to pick out the odd few words of English.

  ‘Airport,’ I heard her say. ‘Bangladesh … Tickets.’

  So there it is: Amma is going to leave me.

  After the mollycoddling of my ‘lapse’, the story of her stepping on a snake and the singing of the Bengali national anthem, I’d hoped that we’d grown closer, but she’s pulling away from me faster than ever. No wonder she’s been so keen to get me out of the flat, no wonder she’s been pushing and pushing for me to move on with my life. She wants to leave the flat herself, to get on with her own life. I know I deserve this. I know I should let her be happy. But seriously, what am I going to do without Amma?

  I listen to her companion’s voice as it vibrates through the floorboards. At one point I even hear them laughing. It stings me, that laughter, like the sting of being chosen last in PE.

  After he leaves, Amma comes up to my room. She sits in her chair with a colander balanced on her knees and begins shelling peas with a look of pure innocence on her face.

  Bangladesh. It never occurred to me that Amma would really go back. There was talk when I was younger of her taking me there to ‘discover my roots’, but when I got ill all hopes for that were dropped. But things are changing. She speaks so loudly to her companion now, it’s almost as if she wants me to hear.

  Maybe I should tell her the truth. Drop it on her the way the truth of those tickets was dropped on me.

  I’m not ill at all!

  I sulk for a while as she shells peas, the flesh of each pod snapping as she ploughs her way through the heap. The bursting flesh fills the room with a fine sweet fragrance I can’t appreciate. I try to remember the news update she gave me a few days ago about the volcano in Iceland. It had caused mayhem for European air travel due to the enormous ash cloud that was spouting from its mouth. Was it still spouting? Would all her crazy travel plans be thwarted? Suddenly I wished I’d listened more when she gave me updates, instead of deciding the information was useless to a body unlikely to travel further than this room, let alone out of the country. I look over at Amma as green pearls pop from her fingers.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ I roll my head back and stretch my arms across the bed. I hold my palms up to the ceiling as though lying on a crucifix.

  I can see her look up from her peas out of the corner of my eyes but the shock I thought would be stamped across her face isn’t there. She shakes her head.

  ‘It is not me who wants anything from you.’

  She continues shaking as I remain in my crucifix position. Eventually I roll my head forward. ‘Well, what does he want then?’

  Again, no shock.

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘What for?’

  Amma’s eyebrows spring up as though I’ve asked her the million-dollar question. I drop my head back.

  ‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  When I shift my gaze towards her she doesn’t look angry but tired, as though the very act of speaking to me is draining.

  ‘You cannot hide from the world for ever, Ravine,’ she says as she stands up with her half-shelled peas.

  From the periphery of my vision, I watch her leave. Amma is giving up on me. I can see it in her drooped eyelids, in the way she barely argues with me any more. She has her companion who she dyes her hair and buys new saris for. She’s in courtship; a concept that makes me nauseous. Soon she’ll tire of me completely and begin her own life.

  And she should. I am useless. I am ungrateful. But worst of all I am a liar. As soon as she finds this out, what reason will she have to stay?

  I cannot hide for ever. That’s what Amma tells me. Yet I lie here wishing I could.

  The second time I saw the Soul-drinker was in the cash-and-carry. Amma had taken me there on an ‘educational trip’ one Saturday morning. This was like the times she took me to the park, the market, the Gas Museum or the library. On Amma’s educational trip list, places with free admission ranked at the top.

  �
�If you can’t learn from life, then what can you learn from?’ she said, shovelling scoops of red lentils into a transparent bag.

  I didn’t mind going to the cash-and-carry. It was a colourful place full of exotic items you’d never see in the corner shops of Westhill. This was the place where the Asian community congregated and held their meetings. It was a gurdwara, a temple, a mosque and church all in one, with the added bonus of selling cheap imported goods. When I entered the store I’d gaze at the brown faces wandering down the aisles as though I was an alien who’d just found its home planet. I never resented being the only Asian girl on the estate. Apart from the occasional ‘but but ding ding’ from Bradley Patterson, I was left alone and only noticed the odd confused stare at Amma and her sari-and-trainers combo. Even at school the other children seemed oblivious to my skin colour. The only exception was Luke Judd who once called me a ‘Paki’ during playtime. I looked at him and rolled my eyes.

  ‘I’m not from Pakistan, I’m from Bangladesh.’

  This statement truly baffled him and it was only later when Mrs Jenkins made him deliver a sour-faced apology that I realized he had been trying to be insulting.

  But in the cash-and-carry there were too many people for Bradley Patterson and Luke Judd to offend. There were hordes of other Ammas wearing brightly coloured saris and trench coats, their hair tied neatly into buns. There were men too, hair jet-black against their dark skins, round pot bellies underneath short-sleeved shirts tucked neatly into trouser waists. One of these men could be my father, I thought. All I’d have to do was find a man with a bunch of red tulips and a face that looked like it was about to cry.

  Another reason I liked the cash-and-carry was the fact that Amma didn’t mind if I wandered off by myself. On the estate I always had to hold on to her hand which, at the age of eight, was becoming embarrassing. In the cash-and-carry she became so absorbed with canned chickpea offers and examining mangoes that she didn’t notice when I wandered off to look at chilli crisps.

  I think you would have loved the cash-and-carry. I wish I could have taken you. It was different from the neat Western supermarkets with their aisles perfectly stacked and straight. The cash-and-carry often had boxes of stock lying in the middle of aisles, flickering lights above the checkout and huge towers of goods piled precariously by the door. Spices sat in barrels with huge scoops, spiky vegetables lay in boxes by chest freezers full of pre-made samosas and frozen okra. The Asian population liked their products in large quantities and I’d often find myself measuring my small body against the sacks of rice, drums of sunflower oil and string bags filled with onions that rose as high as my shoulders.

  The day I saw the Soul-drinker I’d been reading the label on a sack of gram flour, trying to find (with little success) the word ‘besan’ in my mini dictionary. When I glanced sideways I saw him hovering in the chutney aisle. He was wearing the same short-sleeved shirt-and-trouser combo as the other men and would have gone undetected if it hadn’t been for the strange way his shoulders were hunched over as he huddled behind the shelves. He was pretending to read a jar of mango and lemon pickle but all the while his eyes were peering over at Amma rifling her way through a box of green chillies. His yellow glare was fixed on her and right then and there I knew that the Soul-drinker was not only after my soul but the soul of my mother.

  I stared at the Soul-drinker with my mini dictionary held tightly in my hand. I held my breath as though your phrase ‘If you don’t breathe he won’t see you’ was actually true. His skin was as dark as coffee beans, tiny dents that looked like craters all across his cheek. He was chewing his bottom lip with vigour, the even little squares of his teeth stained red with what was either the remnants of paan juice or blood. Standing by the gram flour, I assumed it was the latter.

  I don’t know how I got his attention – whether I screamed, dropped my dictionary or if he sensed my eyes staring at him with his supernatural powers – but in the next moment the Soul-drinker was looking at me. Under the shop lights his yellow eyes were as bright as traffic lights, widening with surprise. He glanced over at Amma and crouched down behind the aisle.

  The cowering body confused me for a second before I realized what had happened. I’d caught the Soul-drinker off guard and, in doing so, had drained him of all his power. I released my breath, nearly tripping over a broken coconut and price sticker gun, as I ran squealing to Amma’s side. She barely flinched as I pulled at the fabric of her sari.

  ‘We have to go, we have to go!’ I cried.

  I glanced at the chutney aisle, seeing the head of the Soul-drinker bobbing up to look at us. I looked away so his eyes wouldn’t drain me of my soul, while continuing to tug at Amma’s sari. She whipped the fabric from my hands, carrying on searching through a pile of shelled peanuts.

  ‘We still have ten minutes until the bus comes,’ she told me. ‘Go get yourself a lollipop.’

  When I looked back at the chutney aisle the Soul-drinker had gone. I could see his shirt billowing out behind him as he ran through the sliding doors of the exit. He disappeared within seconds, Amma none the wiser, and even through my relief I was irritated that I’d been the only one to see him.

  ‘But he was just there,’ I said, pointing to where his bobbing eyes had been watching us.

  Amma looked down at me and shoved a fifty-pence coin in my hand.

  ‘Go wait at the till,’ she said.

  As I sucked on a cinnamon-flavoured lollipop on the bus ride home I couldn’t help but stare out of the window in case I caught sight of the yellow eyes following us. Amma chattered on about the rising price of kidney beans as I deliberated our close call. We’d been lucky this time but I couldn’t be sure if we’d be so lucky again. It was then, as we drew nearer to Westhill Estate, that I decided I would do what Uncle Walter would do. I would devise a survival strategy to protect us from the Soul-drinker.

  Last night I dreamt I was at sea. When I looked over the boat’s edge I saw ripples in the water as clear as diamonds, a thousand tropical fish swimming near the surface. When I sat up, I saw the coastline drifting away behind me, a cut rope trailing in the water like a drenched tail. I was free. At last I was free.

  But then I woke up and realized that I wasn’t.

  Secrets are carnivorous. The longer I stay floating on that sea, the sooner those fish will come jumping on board to eat me. Not that there’d be much left to eat. I’ve been shrivelled down to a Stanley-sized blob. Karma, my mother would say, even though she doesn’t believe in such things. But if the Hindus are right, I’m destined to be reincarnated into a wet, slimy slug lifetime after lifetime.

  ‘Ravine, I know you can hear me,’ your brother said through the wall this morning. ‘Please talk to me.’

  I turned my face, trying to hide my tears from the wall.

  Please, he said to me, and it made me cry. I’ve never heard Jonathan say that word to me before.

  The Constellation of Getting Dressed

  I haven’t been able to write to you because I’m waiting for a new notebook. You should see Amma’s face when I ask her for it. The bindi rises so high on her forehead it almost disappears into her hairline.

  ‘You’ve finished the one from your birthday?’ she says. ‘Already?’

  ‘I like to doodle in it. It helps me solve crosswords.’

  Another lie tumbling like rocks off a cliff. Amma sits back in her chair and sighs.

  ‘I have paper you can doodle on. Newspaper and old envelopes.’

  ‘That won’t be enough.’

  Amma looks puzzled, as though I’ve delivered her a genuine conundrum. She holds a finger in the air.

  ‘I have that toilet paper that is too hard to use. I bought it cheap at the cash-and-carry and they won’t take it back.’

  I hear your brother sniggering through the wall.

  ‘No, Amma,’ I say loudly. ‘I want writing paper. Something that won’t fall apart. I’ll even pay for it myself.’

  She looks at me with wide eyes as
I wave to the dresser drawer. She pulls out the piggy bank I made when I was six, ears chipped, snout more like a trunk with an uneven red glaze that makes it look sunburnt. I’ve put all the money I’ve ever been given for birthdays in that bank, as well as the pound a week Amma gives me as ‘pocket money’. (It isn’t real pocket money because it never goes into my pocket. As soon as she places the coin on my palm Amma watches me put it straight into the piggy bank.)

  I reach my hand out for Amma to pass me the pot but she holds it tightly between her fingers.

  ‘I thought you were saving.’

  The more I stretch out, the tighter she holds on. Eventually I drop my arm.

  ‘Saving for what? Besides, a bit of paper isn’t going bankrupt me.’

  Amma continues to look down at the pot. I know I have at least £480 inside so can’t understand her hesitation. She gently pats the head of the pig before placing it back in the drawer.

  ‘No, shona. You will need that money. I’ll pay for the paper myself.’

  She’s gone before I can object, marching straight down the stairs and spraying her trainers with vinegar and lemon before leaving for the shops.

  If the same thing had happened a week ago I wouldn’t have thought twice. Amma is the type of person who’d save for a rainy day if she lived in the middle of the Sahara Desert. But I know about her plans now and suddenly her words are more sinister.

  You will need that money.

  When Amma comes back I hear her shuffling about downstairs before coming up with a new notebook in her hand. Before I can thank her she pulls out a bunch of rolled-up election flyers that have been sprouting like carnations from her petticoat and begins to grin at me. As pills rattle against the plastic tray, Amma delivers me election promises. Labour will halve the budget deficit by 2014, the Conservatives will give the unemployed a ‘hand up, not a hand out’ by reducing welfare dependency and the Lib Dems will scrap university tuition fees. According to the flyers each party is the best choice and all opposing parties are intent on steering the country to rack and ruin. Gordon Brown is miserable and hot-headed, David Cameron too posh to sympathize with us plebs and nobody even knows who Nick Clegg is.