The Things We Thought We Knew

by Mahsuda Snaith

  As I rub the sleep from my eyes and look over at the tray of matar paneer on the bedside table, Amma delves into my wardrobe with a frenzied grin. I watch as she pulls out saris and gowns more suitable for a royal wedding than a general election. Imitation silk and taffeta adorn the foot of my bed, low-cut dresses bought in the ghost of the January sales.

  ‘I’ll wear the red one,’ I say, as the end of my bed is swamped in polyester. ‘The one that goes in at the waist.’

  Amma knows exactly which one I mean. She fails to hide her smugness at the fact I’ve looked through the outfits, grinning as she wiggles her head from side to side.

  When I’m dressed I convince Amma that I’ve taken enough medication and painkillers to be able to walk down the stairs without her support. Each step is greeted with the same enthusiasm bestowed upon a baby learning to walk. Even though I know it’s fraud, I feel pleased when Amma clasps her hands together, the joy welling on her face. As though it’s deserved, as though I’m actually achieving something.

  It’s on the third step that I feel myself wobble. I glimpse the front door and remember the day I went out in this same red dress to meet Jonathan. I picture the world outside, the bright lights, the blank faces, the sea of the unknown. Fear crashes over me in waves, and at the crests of each I feel:

  Like a child dropped into the deep end, I can feel my arms flailing, grappling for the water’s surface as my lungs search for air.

  Amma, witnessing none of this terror, only sees me freeze.

  ‘I knew you should have taken more pills!’ she cries.

  I grab hold of the handrail, the flowers on the wallpaper blurring into a spiral of colour. I hold on tighter as I imagine all the things that lie outside. The metal railings where we saw your Uncle Walter for the first time. The winding path trailing down the hill, peeling paint on the rails, crisp packets blown across the ground. The polling station in the hall of our old primary school where you would do handstands in the dinner queue. The white-painted houses of other flats: Bonchurch House, Tewkesbury House, Battenberg House. Laser and his dodgy car boot. Old Mrs Simmons, even though she’s now dead. Mr Eccentric in his room of ticking clocks. Jonathan.

  It must be Amma’s screeching that brings him out. Goodness knows how long he’s been waiting or what he’s been waiting for, but when he emerges from the living room, Amma’s companion has a cup of tea balanced on the palm of his hand. As the spiralling of flowered wallpaper floats away I see him clearly for the first time.

  The trench coat. The dark mottled skin. The yellow eyes.

  Amma sees the change in my expression and begins to wave her hands in the air.

  ‘Now let us not overreact!’

  But I’ve already turned round, clambering up those three steps and into the bathroom.

  ‘Ravine,’ his voice calls out as I slam the door behind me. ‘Please come back, Ravine. Please come back.’

  When I woke up at the hospital the night after you disappeared, the Soul-drinker was sitting on a high-backed chair by my bed, hands balled up on his lap. If I hadn’t been drugged up on medication, I would have thrown my head back and screamed. Instead, all I managed was enough squirming to hit the side table. The vase on top rocked for a moment and then settled back into place. I wanted it to tumble, to drop to the floor with a dramatic smash.

  The wobbling of the vase was enough to catch the monster’s attention and when he looked up at me I was confronted with the sickly yellow balls of his eyes. Under the brightness of the hospital lights I could see the visible bald spot on the top of his head, the thick-knit multi-coloured jumper that covered his pot belly. He had wrinkles across his forehead that vanished as he grinned. This creature could almost have been human.

  ‘Rekha!’ he cried, eyes fixed upon mine as he stood and waved his hands.

  I tried to get away but when I turned my head the pain was excruciating. I’d never broken a bone, never had a tooth pulled out and though I easily bruised, my body was quick to recover. This pain was so intense that my muscles instantly clenched, my eyes streamed tears and, for a distinct period of time, the world disappeared.

  When I opened my eyes again I found Amma hovering over my bed with two plastic cups in her hands, steam rising up from the rims. Her eyes were large; strip lighting was reflected in the darkness of her irises. Already I could see worry lines setting in the corners of her lids.

  ‘Ravine Roy?’ she said, as though checking I was the girl she’d given birth to in that same hospital.

  I tried to blink the tears from my eyes as the left side of my body throbbed with pain. Each muscle was seizing up, my nerves prickling, my skin so tender that it felt like I was lying on a bed of broken glass. When my vision cleared I saw the blurry shadow of the Soul-drinker walking up behind her.

  ‘Shona.’ Amma was weeping as he stepped closer, moving a hand over her shoulder. ‘My darling shona.’

  Suddenly I found the power to scream.

  It was a shrill, warbling cry and no matter how much Amma tried to calm me, I wouldn’t stop until the monster was out of the room. Even once he was gone, I lay whimpering. It was only later, after a deep sleep and a hot bowl of vegetable soup, that Amma explained it all.

  The Soul-drinker was not a Soul-drinker after all; he was my father.

  I remain locked inside the bathroom. Amma tries to reason with me through the door. She tells me it’s a simple misunderstanding, not the big conspiracy I think it is.

  ‘Your father was simply having some chai,’ she says. ‘He was not expecting to see you.’

  Your father, she says, after years of calling him nothing but a coward and a fool. I stroll up and down the bathroom, testing out the strength of my legs, wondering how far I could run on them, how fast I could get away.

  Amma soon tires of her softly-softly approach and begins hammering at me.

  ‘All he wants is to see you!’ she says, even though she’s just told me the opposite.

  I’ve heard it all before. When my father tried to visit me in the hospital the day after I woke up, I refused to see him. Amma recounted his tales of criminal gangs and threats to his family as though they were proof of his sincerity. She told me about his years on the run, his attempts at tracking her down while remaining undercover. After seven years he opened the newspaper to see a picture of a small Asian girl under the headline ‘CITY SCHOOL WINS VEGETABLE-GROWING CONTEST’. Even though I had no involvement in the gardening feat, I’d been shoved in front of the camera with a marrow in my arms, demonstrating to the rest of the country the diversity of Westhill Primary School. Behind me stood my undeservedly proud mother and at the sight of us, my father felt a swell of pride (he had a daughter!) and a reason to come out of hiding. So much melodrama and high jinks, it could have been in the DVD extras of Amma’s Soap Opera Life.

  When I came home and was put in bed for the rest of eternity, Amma decided it was time for me to see my no-good-disappearing father. She cuckooed the subject at me like a broken clock.

  ‘Are you ready to see your father today, shona?’ she asked, with enough sweetness to give a person toothache.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Another day, another tactic.

  ‘Your father has brought you a present. Would you like him to come up and give it to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to say Happy New Year to your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to hear your father’s good news?’

  ‘No.’

  Eventually she learnt that there was no way I’d respond with anything other than ‘no’ to a question that involved my father. She grew worn out, her smiles sandpapered to frowns and weary expressions that made me feel like a spoilt three-year-old refusing to get dressed. Eventually she stopped asking altogether. I thought he’d given up.

  But no matter how hard I run from him, the Soul-drinker remains champion. This man who went poof out of the air is now worthy of our best crockery and is
allowed to sit for hours in our living room, chanting numbers in Bengali through my floorboards. Amma’s flimsy cover-up of their meetings is now exposed. Sneaking him in, ushering him out, coming upstairs afterwards with the high chin of innocence. Amma knows full well I can hear every tremor in this flat yet still she shoves the whole affair under my nose. She’s daring me to call her out. To interrogate her and demand the truth.

  But I don’t want the truth. I want pretence. Pretence that he doesn’t exist. Pretence that it never happened. But when I saw him in the hall all hope of that was shattered.

  ‘He is your father,’ Amma repeats through the door, as though the more she says it, the more it means something.

  ‘He is your abbah,’ she implores, as though stating the same thing in another language will somehow rewire my thinking.

  I want to explain it all to her but there’s too much to say and it’s too hard to say it. She thinks I should see him, just once. That I have nothing to lose but everything to gain. Unlike you and Jonathan or even herself, I have a father who wants to know me, and for that reason I should give him a chance.

  But I have tales looping round my head, the stories your brother told me as well as the image of the Soul-drinker coming after me in the woods. Childhood fears are the worst type of fears because they aren’t based on logic but a reflex. A reflex so well worn in your brain that all you need is a smell or an image to trigger it; stomach twisting, tension shooting up your cowering shoulders, eyes wide and panicked. The only links I have with that man are based on fear. How can I look at his face without triggering that fear? Without remembering what happened to us? But Amma doesn’t understand this because Amma doesn’t know. She’s never heard of the Soul-drinker, has no idea of the childhood terrors that plague me. She believes I’m being obstinate and that all I need is a bit of nagging to nudge me onto the right path.

  ‘He is a nice man, Ravine,’ she tells me through the bathroom door. ‘You will like him. I know you will.’

  When I was younger she told me he was a soppy fool no English woman would touch with a barge pole. Now he is nice. I put the lid down on the toilet seat and sit down on the chipped wood.

  ‘I don’t want to see him,’ I say, curling my knees up to my chin.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I don’t.’

  I hear my mother sigh and imagine the puffs of her sari sighing along with her.

  ‘It’s been ten years, Ravine.’

  She says this as if ten years is enough time to get over your worst fears. As if ten years will banish the childhood reflex that has followed you into adulthood.

  As I held on to my knees, I let my silence respond. I hear Amma begin to huff and mutter under her breath. I imagine her pulling her shoulders back, lifting her chin.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about you but I am going to vote,’ she says.

  She utters this like a threat, as if she’s told me she’s going to jump off a cliff. I can hear her marching down the stairs, mumbling to her companion and nearly knocking over the coat stand as she collects her belongings.

  ‘Such a stubborn phagol betty!’ she cries up the steps. ‘I don’t know where she gets this stubbornness from!’

  ‘From you, who else?’ I yell back.

  My yelling is interrupted by the slamming of the front door, which is soon followed by another slam as my father chases after her.

  As soon as I say the words I wince. Since my recovery I’ve made one promise to myself and one promise only: that as long as I’m keeping the truth from Amma I will at least try to be kind to her.

  Promises, it appears, are as fickle as the truth.

  The Constellation of Return

  Your mother’s return electric-shocked our world. It’s not that we’d forgotten about her, but as the weeks turned into months her return seemed less and less likely. She was searching for her fortune, we’d decided, starring in Broadway musicals, trekking through Peruvian tombs in the style of Lara Croft. She’d come back one day, yes, but far in the future when she’d jet you off to whatever mansion she lived in and feed you cherry pop and triple chocolate ice-cream. This fantasy helped you to come to terms with your abandonment (there had been a reason, there would be a reward), so the shattering of this fantasy was hard to accept.

  ‘Did you see any tigers?’ you asked her. ‘Did you go up mountains? Did you meet anyone famous?’

  We both watched your mother’s face as we waited for the fabulous tales that would tumble from her lips. She looked over at us with a sly grin.

  ‘Don’t you worry, girls. When you’re older you can have your own adventures.’

  Our expressions dropped. We already had our own adventures, what we wanted to know about was hers. We could still smell the change in her. Summer fruits, exotic flowers – somewhere along her travels she had collected the scents of the world.

  After Mrs Dickerson’s return your uncle became a timid creature. He dutifully cleaned the flat and made you meals every evening but he no longer invented elaborate names for the dishes, or chuckled to himself as he ate. He stopped playing the sleeping bear game with us and wouldn’t show us any more strategies to cope with emergency situations. One time Mrs Dickerson caught him teaching us Italian. She stood beside him, watching with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Non preoccuparti, sii felice,’ you repeated. ‘Non preoccuparti, sii felice.’

  ‘How do you say “mini dictionary” in Italian?’ I asked.

  Uncle Walter glanced over at your mother as she held her hands on her hips. Her eyes were fixed on him as he patted the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief.

  ‘I’ll have to check that one for you,’ he said.

  Your mother chuckled.

  ‘And how do I ask someone if they want to play emergency rooms?’ you asked.

  ‘I’d have to check that too.’

  Mrs Dickerson looked over at your uncle and began to laugh so scornfully that he rose to his feet, telling us we’d carry on the lesson another time. We never did.

  He slept on the sofa and although he still brushed your hair and washed your clothes, Mrs Dickerson was in charge. She organized your outings to the shops, dictated what you could and could not wear, and even gave me a curfew for when I should go home. This, from the same Mrs Dickerson who used to drink herself into such oblivion that you couldn’t wake her for days. Who smashed up the flat whenever the whim took her, grabbing hold of your toys, plates and ornaments, leaving you and Jonathan to clear up the mess. You might have developed amnesia about these events, but I hadn’t. I didn’t trust her, I admit it, and neither did Amma.

  ‘She’ll be gone soon,’ Amma told me as she was peeling onions one day.

  Not one tear rolled down her cheek as she chopped.

  ‘These people who disappear, they have no thoughts of others. They come and go willy-nilly, not thinking about the chaos they leave behind.’

  She waved her knife in the air with such conviction I was scared into believing her. So I waited for your mother to leave. I admit this now because to admit it back then would have upset you. I watched and scrutinized her, searching for signs of potential abandonment. I wanted her to leave. She was bossy and mean, not just to us children (a curfew, for God’s sake!) but to Uncle Walter too. She called him a slob, an idiot, a lard arse. She openly mocked him and, once, threw a dragon-shaped paperweight at his head while we were watching the National Lottery.

  ‘Hey!’ Jonathan cried. ‘Are you trying to kill us?’

  Your mother leant back on the sofa and began painting her nails.

  ‘No,’ she said with a chuckle, ‘just your Uncle Walt.’

  If she’d come back a few months earlier, your brother would have been in on the joke, laughing in the face of your stunned uncle as he clasped his lottery ticket tightly to his chest. But your brother wasn’t at war with your uncle any more.

  ‘If you do that again I’ll knock your block off!’ he said, pushing his chest out and balling his fists.

&n
bsp; Your mother lowered her chin. The light of the television shone bright in the round globes of her pupils.

  ‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’

  You made sure to interrupt before Jonathan gave her an answer. ‘Jonathan’s just saying it’s not very nice to throw things.’

  ‘Especially at Uncle Walter,’ I added.

  Your mother looked at us both as though we’d punched her in the stomach. The blood rushed up her neck like oil spurting up a rig.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Uncle Walter said, sweat trickling over the mounds of his cheeks. ‘It’s a joke, isn’t it? I don’t mind.’

  Mrs Dickerson began blowing at the varnish on her nails as everyone else turned their eyes to the spinning balls on the screen. As she whipped her breath back and forth, I could feel her gaze burning into the side of my face.

  ‘Ravine,’ she said, as the first number was called. ‘It’s past eight. You should go home.’

  I tried to slam the door on the way out but the television muffled the noise. I went into my flat to find Amma had fallen asleep on the sofa with a bowl of unshelled peas on her lap. I cuddled my body up to hers, sinking into her familiar warmth.

  Your love for your mother made you blind. You made excuses for her, told me everything was just super-duper! You thought the world had room for both your uncle and your mother, but I’d seen the look she’d given Uncle Walter on Christmas Day and knew better. All I hoped was that your mother would be the first to go.

  I don’t get up for my bath today. Amma doesn’t pester me as she normally would, frightening me with stories of flesh-eating bacteria and gangrene, but instead allows the smell of vinegar and lemon to float to my door. When she comes up to my room, the toes of her trainers are poking out from a pair of purple jogging bottoms. She sticks her nose in the air.

  ‘I’m going to Blackpool,’ she says. ‘And I won’t be back until tomorrow.’

  I hold the edge of the duvet up to my chin. ‘Who are you going with?’

  She narrows her eyes. ‘Gordon Brown. I hear he has a lot of time on his hands now.’