The Reading List

by Sara Nisha Adams

  ‘Naina,’ he’d whisper to her, ‘how can I swap places with you? How can I tell God to take me instead?’ Mukesh knew what was coming, just like Henry, just like Clare. But he refused to admit it to himself.

  ‘Mukesh,’ Naina said to him one morning. ‘We should talk about arrangements, for after …’ She’d said it softly yet so matter-of-factly. She was hurting him. Henry never let Clare dwell on that moment, on his death, did he? Mukesh wasn’t sure any more; his memory of the story had merged with his own life. Henry was Naina, and Mukesh was Clare. The one left behind.

  ‘Naina,’ he would say, smiling. ‘Don’t you worry about any of that, let’s just enjoy this beautiful day.’ He said the same thing, whether it was stormy outside, or brilliant sunshine.

  ‘We should talk about the girls, what they will need. Priya, and Jaya and Jayesh too. I have things I want to give to them, for when they are older. I should show you.’

  Mukesh just shook his head, sipped his tea. ‘Naina, it is okay. You need to rest, we can do all that another day. Let’s watch something, one of those films, a nice one.’ The words tumbled from his mouth like a waterfall, trying to wash away Naina’s practicality.

  ‘Mukesh,’ Naina’s voice had been stern. Every few days she tried to speak to him, and every few days he dismissed her. ‘We’ve been given time, we should use it.’

  Despite it all, she had never once tried to talk to him about how he should feel when she was gone, what he should do for himself, to bring her back. That was all he had ever wanted to know.

  Now here he was alone, still without any clue as to what he should do now she was gone, left in a lifeless, soulless, bookless house that had once been their home. Naina had given her personality to this house, her heart hung up among her saris, her possessions decorating every surface – fabric and cardigans draped over every chair, books stacked in every corner and jewellery trailed from the bedposts.

  He laid the book down, hopped off the bed and opened some of Naina’s cupboards, pulling out infinite saris, more roughly than he wanted to. He told himself he was looking for books, for something to give Priya to read, but really he was hoping it might bring Naina back to him. As sari after sari tumbled to the floor, he could smell the warm, musty tang of Naina’s perfume. It surrounded him like a cloud. For a moment, she was here again. She was everywhere.

  He was wallowing for no reason – Rohini would want to give him a firm shake, saying, ‘Papa, life must go on. Mummy would have wanted that for you.’

  He lay back onto the bed, looking up at the ceiling, and immediately regretted his decision. Would he ever be able to stand up again? He watched as the cracks in the ceiling grew before his eyes, as cobwebs began to overwhelm every corner of the room, as the shadows cast by the window pane developed into thick, inky-black lines, and he waited, waited for the ink to drip on him, obscuring him completely. He thought back to Henry, to Clare, to a time when his wife lying next to him wasn’t just the wish of a grief-stricken man.

  THE READING LIST

  CHRIS

  2017

  HE FORCED HIMSELF OUT of bed, his head heavy with sleep. But this was progress: it was the first time he’d been awake before midday in weeks. He felt the empty space beside him – Melanie’s side of the bed – and he immediately wanted the ground, the mattress, to swallow him whole and take the pain away. On the floor, a pile of crime books sat staring up at him, taunting him, a thin layer of dust collecting on the top.

  Usually, Chris’s books were all he needed to get himself out of a funk. But when he’d first picked up a novel after the break-up and encountered a detective who was smart, tall, elegant and beautiful – all he could think about was Melanie. She was smart, tall, elegant and beautiful too. He’d shut the book in frustration, hearing the pages slam together. He’d stared up at the ceiling, his eyes unfocused, and stayed like that for the rest of the night, images of her running through his mind. Melanie … happy. Melanie … sad. Melanie, Melanie, Melanie.

  Today, however, he was determined to put Melanie from his mind; his embarrassment, his weakness, his inability to ‘emotionally connect’ with people. He needed to tuck it into a little box, with a tiny wooden lid. He hoped and prayed that something would keep that box shut. He just needed a few hours to forget, to be another version of himself.

  So, he pulled on his trousers – freshly washed ones today, and a new T-shirt, also just out of the cupboard, and headed for Harrow Road. He was in a reading slump, but every day he’d still dragged himself to the library: a little sanctuary in this lonely city. Since the break-up, his phone had been buzzing with messages from friends: ‘Hey, do you and Melanie want to join us for dinner tonight?’, ‘Hi Chris, let’s go for a walk. Joanna is missing Melanie and you!’, ‘How are you? How’s Melanie’s new job going? Hope you’re both good. Miss you guys x’. Melanie, Melanie, Melanie. Everyone loved Melanie; he loved Melanie. But in the library at least he could breathe, he could escape the onslaught of messages, just be for a little while.

  Today, as he sat down in his usual spot, he saw something – a book, just sitting there. Some people were careless, stacking up books to ‘peruse’, never returning the discarded ones to their rightful places, leaving it all down to the library staff. He would do the good deed and return it to the shelves.

  But, as he picked the book up, he saw a Post-it note stuck to the table in its place. He peeled it off, carefully, and brought it close to his face. His eyesight wasn’t as it had once been, before the hours and hours of reading in his dimly lit flat. The Post-it note was covered in handwriting, an elaborate scrawl of letters.

  I know this isn’t your usual thing, but I read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was 21 and going through a hard time – it taught me a lot back then, and I got to see the world through the eyes of a child once more, the good and the bad. It was an escape for me, I threw myself into the world, into the injustices, into the characters, and it was the respite I needed from my own life – for it helped me care deeply about someone else’s. I hope it can be an escape, a bit of respite, for you too. Sometimes, books just take us away for a little while, and return us to our place with a new perspective.

  He brushed the hair out of his eyes. There was no name on the note, no ‘to’ and no ‘from’ – it could be for anyone. But then how could he explain that sudden feeling of being seen? As though someone had read his mind? He looked at the book afresh, his eyes taking in the title: To Kill a Mockingbird. Whoever had written this little Post-it note – had they known he sat here, day after day, wasting his hours wallowing?

  He held the book tightly in his hands, as though imagining it might spring to life and explain it all to him. Nothing happened. No one jumped out from behind the shelves revealing that he was on some comedy show, a ‘Chris, this is your shitty life’ episode. But someone, somewhere, was telling him they’d understood what he was going through.

  He thought about waiting, of saving this book for a rainy day … but today was the day he had vowed to distract himself.

  To Kill a Mockingbird was burning in his hand: read me, read me, read me. There was no other explanation for it – this book, it was a sign. He turned to the first page, forgetting the gentle hum of the library around him, and was amazed how the words didn’t jump around and run away from him. They stayed firmly in place, and soon became nothing but images. As the narrator, ‘Scout’ Finch, introduced Chris to her childhood home, to the town of Maycomb, Alabama, he felt a laugh bubble up in his throat – the quaint quirks of the townspeople, the childlike resilience of Scout’s brother Jem, and their friend Dill … it was another world, and he was so glad of it. When he reached page twenty-seven, which arrived sooner than he could have imagined, he found another note settled there. A whole reading list, of which To Kill a Mockingbird was the very first. This book had kept Melanie from his mind – kept her in that little box, with a tiny wooden lid – so he didn’t have to feel his pain and doubt fizzing through his veins every minute. Those first tw
enty-seven pages had given him something he hadn’t felt since the break-up: hope.

  The list was for him – he knew it.

  He thought of that scripted message at the top: Just in case you need it. He felt like he’d never needed anything more.

  PART II

  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

  by Harper Lee

  Chapter 4

  ALEISHA

  ALEISHA’S WALK HOME FROM the library was accompanied by the sounds of the park – kids playing and crowds of people her age laughing, smoking. She wondered if it was anyone she knew. She wanted desperately to go to the park, have a cigarette, but she’d agreed to be home for Mum, to cook the dinner tonight. She knew she would want spaghetti hoops on toast – her mum’s favourite. But she’d asked for that every day for two weeks and Aleisha was sick of spaghetti hoops. She wanted lamb stew with dumplings now, her Uncle Jeremy’s speciality, even though it was the middle of summer and blisteringly hot.

  She sent a text to Rachel, her cousin, for the recipe (Uncle Jeremy was completely useless with his phone) and got a message back almost immediately – a picture of Uncle Jeremy’s recipe scrawled on the pages of a Delia Smith cookbook. Dad knows better than Delia, for sure, said Rachel. Aleisha’s mum loved her brother Jeremy, and she loved his cooking, so Aleisha hoped and prayed this recipe might be the spaghetti-hoop breakthrough they needed this week. Nerves bubbled in her chest as thoughts flashed through her mind of the best- and worst-case scenarios. Burning the stew – setting off the fire alarm – triggering Leilah’s anger, her upset, her anxiety. Cooking the stew to Uncle Jeremy perfection too had its drawbacks. What if Leilah couldn’t stand anyone else cooking her brother’s stew? What if she shut herself off for even longer? Aleisha drew a deep breath, feeling the hot summer air fill her lungs, and focused on the recipe instead – one step at a time.

  Aleisha zoomed in on Uncle Jeremy’s messy handwriting, and found the list of ingredients, before popping into Variety Foods. She wandered around, picking up the veg she needed, checking, double-checking then triple-checking them against the list, trying to decipher Uncle Jeremy’s handwriting.

  She handed over the money to the guy behind the till and walked out, tapping out a message to Rachel: Thanks so much, Mum’s gonna love this, I’m sure – better than spaghetti hoops.

  Rachel started typing back, then stopped, then started again, but no new message appeared on Aleisha’s screen. Aleisha kept staring, waiting. She began typing a message back – How are you? – and let the words linger before hitting delete, delete, delete. Her cousin was probably busy. She didn’t have time for casual chitchat. She shoved the phone back in her pocket.

  Once she’d picked up the meat from Iceland, she followed the busy bustling high road for five minutes longer than she needed. Partly because she hated the shortcut, lined with huge commercial dustbins always overflowing with rubbish, probably sickly sweet and stinking after the hot day. But, mostly, she was just trying to delay getting home. Home. She wondered what that word meant to everyone else.

  As she turned the corner, she saw that, as expected, every window of their house was pulled shut. Every other window on the street was as wide as it could go, letting out the sounds of the TV, of kids playing Xbox, or a domestic in full swing. Her mum Leilah would be boiling, but she couldn’t stand the outside air leaking in, the inside air leaking out.

  Aleisha unlocked the door cautiously, like one wrong move would set everything on fire. Aidan was already out, gone as soon as that clock struck six – announcing the end of his Mum-shift. Sometimes, when he was at home, he’d spend his time outside on the street in his convertible, which he borrowed their mum’s money to buy in the first place years ago, listening to music blaring through the car’s speakers. Their mum never minded. She barely noticed. Aidan was her golden boy. People in the street would sometimes shout out of their windows to tell him to shut the fuck up, and he’d shout back and say it was a free country, though usually only when his friends were around watching, expecting something from him. Other times he’d turn the music down to a reasonable level of his own accord and continue with his day.

  Aleisha left the shopping bag on the kitchen counter and wandered upstairs to find her mum, knowing she’d be in the same room, in the same position, as she’d left her in the morning. She braced herself as she turned the doorknob.

  Leilah was curled up on her bed, enveloped by a thick winter duvet. Aleisha started sweating just looking at her. Leilah’s eyes were closed and her breathing was deep, but she wasn’t asleep. It was still a bad day for Leilah, but they’d had worse days in the past.

  ‘Mum, I’m going to make lamb stew for tea, ’k? Just how Uncle Jeremy likes to make it.’

  ‘Fine, hun,’ Leilah’s eyes remained closed.

  ‘You wanna open a window?’

  Leilah shrank smaller, disappearing into the bed, as though Aleisha’s words themselves had thrown burning hot pokers into her skin.

  ‘Guess that’s a no.’ Aleisha slammed the door behind her as she left, that ache in her temples suddenly back. The room had already started to take its hold over her; she stomped downstairs to shake it off. She wanted to storm out of the house. She wanted to shut herself in Aidan’s convertible, and blare music at full volume. She wanted the neighbours to scream at her, to yell at her. She wanted to scream back.

  Instead, she slumped into the kitchen, tipped the plastic bag of ingredients onto the counter tops and began to organize everything with a practised calm. She thought of how Rachel and Jeremy always prepared their ingredients before they started cooking – like they were TV chefs or something. Aleisha got into a rhythm of slicing, chopping, measuring – it allowed her something to focus on. She looked up at the clock – seven thirty already. Just under the clock, she caught sight of the ceramic Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit plate in pride of place on the kitchen wall. Aidan had won it when he was about 10 for painting a (not-so-great) picture of Peter Rabbit for the school fair. It had been up there ever since.

  She tapped her phone, her fingers sticky with onion, wondering if Aidan might have sent her a message, updating her on when he might be home later. No new messages.

  She tipped her head back in frustration, her eyes back on the smiling, carefree Peter Rabbit. His little bum shaking his little fluffy tail.

  ‘Aleisha!’ Leilah’s voice was coarse, pleading. Aleisha felt the familiar build of fear charge through her gut.

  ‘What is it, Mum?’

  ‘I need you to come. My feet are cramping.’

  ‘You need to move them,’ Aleisha whispered to herself.

  ‘Please, come here now.’

  Aleisha made her way up the stairs. ‘Mum, you just need to stretch your feet.’ She spoke softly, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice.

  ‘I can’t do that on my own. How can I stretch anything myself right now?’

  ‘This is how,’ Aleisha said, tiptoeing into her mother’s room. She sat on the floor and demonstrated stretching out her feet and her legs. Leilah watched her, moved her limbs gently to imitate the action before sighing audibly and collapsing her hands beside her on the bed.

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  Aleisha stood up. ‘You can. Everyone can do that.’ She smiled, her voice encouraging. ‘That’s like beginner yoga.’ She held her breath for a moment, worried she’d taken it too far … too soon for a joke.

  Leilah frowned at her.

  ‘Maybe you should try a yoga class,’ Aleisha said lightly. She got down to the floor again and tried the pose once more. ‘Limber you up.’

  Leilah let out a single, strained, breathy ‘ha’, raising her eyebrows; Aleisha felt the pumping of her heart soften. Leilah mimicked her daughter’s pose once more, her limbs suddenly coming alive. Aleisha spotted a flinch on Leilah’s face as the cramp shot through her leg, but she continued to stretch. She put her thumb and forefinger together in an ‘o’ shape, ‘aum’, and she began to hum.

  Aleisha closed her e
yes, brought her palms together and spoke in an airy-fairy yoga voice. ‘I hope you enjoyed your practice today.’ Aleisha slapped her own knee, laughing at her mother, at herself. Her mum wouldn’t be caught dead in a yoga class. She perched on the end of Leilah’s bed as her mother let her stretch go and Leilah exhaled a sincere ‘Namaste.’

  ‘Hope that cleared up your chakras for you.’

  Leilah grabbed her left foot. She prodded the ball a few times. ‘Yeah, my chakras are doing okay now.’

  ‘No need for a downward dog then.’

  Leilah began to giggle, her eyes scrunched shut – Aleisha’s eyes were wide, and she laughed too, to cover her surprise. Then, within moments, they were both in hysterics. Leilah’s head lolled back on her neck, her mouth open, a schoolgirl kind of glee ringing outwards. Aleisha watched her. Sun from a gap in the curtain illuminated a stripe of her face. Her skin looked bright, gently glowing. She looked happy. Aleisha took a mental snapshot. She wanted to stall this moment here, for ever. When they were done with their giggling, they sat beside each other in relative peace, a hiccup of laughter escaping here and there.

  When everything was calm, she moved her hand towards her mother’s face instinctively, but with a jolt Leilah moved away before Aleisha’s skin met hers.

  The next morning, Aleisha could hear her brother in the kitchen, frying something. The smell of oil drifted under the gap in the doorway to her room. She shimmied herself out of bed, rubbing her eyes. Her head ached, and she could feel the oppressive heat of the day closing in already. She glanced at her phone, trying to ignore the many notifications from her school group chat, which would just be filled with photos of them sipping cocktails on the beach on holiday. She thought about texting Rachel again, to say thanks for the recipe – Leilah had eaten more than she’d expected in the end – but she left it. Rachel didn’t need thanks. They were family.