by Roma Tearne
They took the tube to Kensington and walked the street where the Samarajeevas had once lived. There was a new owner in the top flat. A new name on the bell, curtains at the window. The woman who opened the front door looked at them in surprise. What had they wanted? They could not for the life of them say. Giulia shook her head, confused. Rohan apologised, hurriedly. They must have got the wrong address. What had possessed them to knock on that door? After that, they looked in the telephone directory. But what name did they want? Samarajeeva? Mendis? Passing the place where Anna had been murdered, they saw, without comment, the unmarked, flowerless pavement. Time had passed with steady inevitability and they took what comfort they could from this fact. London traffic moved with swift indifference all around. They felt small, angry, gagged. Then, silently, for what else was there to do, they took the plane back to Venice.
Depression enveloped them, and gradually, Giulia saw that this was the price they had paid. Rohan changed. Slowly, like the tide submerging the beach, Rohan began to drown. He became morose and irritable. Giulia did not like to dwell on it, but leaving Sri Lanka had broken him in a way that she had been unprepared for. She feared the worst. She feared he would never paint again. And she noticed he was for ever cold. Even in that first high summer, when Venice overflowed with humidity, even then, she saw, he hated the climate. She had come home but Rohan was somewhere else. Every time she delighted in her native tongue she felt his loss keenly. He had escaped with his life but other things had been lost instead. Something had severed his spirit, broken his determination and cast him adrift. And now a strong current was taking him away from her. Helplessly, unable to follow, she watched as he stared out across the Adriatic Sea. She knew it was some other stretch of water that he longed for. Guilt cemented their relationship where once there had been love. Guilt served to make matters worse. And although the Lido filled with the sound of children’s laughter, still he complained, there was not a single conch shell to be found on the beach. However beautiful it was, still this was not his home. Giulia said nothing.
One day she caught him looking through the girl’s notebooks.
‘Let me see,’ she said eagerly, wanting to break the silence, longing to talk.
They had never mentioned their failed trip to London. It had joined all the other untouchable subjects.
‘Look,’ he said grudgingly. ‘All she had were crude graphite sticks, but look at the line of his hand.’
‘Theo was all she ever wanted to draw,’ said Giulia sadly.
‘She’s a better painter than I could ever be.’
He would not have it otherwise. There was nothing she could do. He simply said he could no longer paint.
‘Perhaps when I’ve settled in this place,’ he said restlessly.
But how can he settle, Giulia worried, if he never paints? All around, the lagoon reflected the milky sky. They were surrounded by light, surrounded by safety. There was no curfew. What more do I want? thought Rohan impatiently, trying to shake this sickness off.
‘Maybe she lost our address?’ Giulia said. ‘Or maybe she’s busy now and wants to forget.’
It was possible. But they both knew she was not the sort of girl to forget. And the lurking fear, the unspoken horror, that she might have ended her life finally, added to their guilt.
The year turned. Spring tides came and went and the swallows departed, leaving the city to its storms of mosquitoes.
‘Just like home,’ murmured Rohan, knowing it was not.
That spring they gave up hoping for news, waiting for the letter that never came. Nulani Mendis is a thing of the past, Giulia chided herself sternly. We must learn to live with only our memories. And she cooked fresh fish for Rohan in the way she used to, in Colombo, serving it with hot rice and chilli, hoping to bring some small comfort to him. Meanwhile, he began to go for long walks on the Lido. He wanted to listen to the mewing seagulls, he told Giulia. He wanted to be alone, he said, to think. And Giulia took some comfort in this, hoping his solitude might inspire him to paint again.
The weather changed and it began to rain at night. After days of silence, the rain fell in persistent folds, not like tropical rain at all, but gently, lingeringly. Theo lay awake listening to it. Once he slept all the time, but since he had begun to write things down, sleep eluded him. Often he would remain awake until dawn, thinking, or scribbling in his exercise book, and then falling into an uneasy sleep as the light appeared. He felt safer that way. His memory was returning slowly. A few nights previously he had remembered the post-mortem after Anna’s death. She had been pregnant, he remembered.
His memory had come with the rain. Lying on his bed listening to the house breathe and creak, listening to the heavy drip of water, he longed for some kind of peace. For although his wounds were healing, the tension within him was increasing. He had been here for months. Gerard continued to visit. But the visits had become less friendly. Gerard watched him with open hostility. Instead of asking after his health, instead of bringing him newspapers to read, he had only one question now.
‘You did a good job for the Tamils with Tiger Lily. You’re a local hero, you know. So when are you going to start your next book about our plight?’
Yesterday, annoyed at Theo’s continuing silence, Gerard had asked to see his exercise book.
‘There’s nothing in it to interest you,’ Theo had said. ‘Just things about my wife.’
‘Now, you listen to me,’ Gerard had threatened, flinging the book across the room. He advanced towards Theo who’d shrunk. ‘You are trying my patience a little too much. I don’t care about your precious memory loss. I’m not interested in your deceased wife. If you want to leave this place alive, if you have any hope for the future, then you are going to have start working fast. D’you understand?’ He had paused. And lowered his voice.
‘Start with something small.’ he said quietly. ‘Write me an article for a British newspaper. About the things the Singhalese bastards have done to us. Something with your name attached to it. Forget about your damn memory. I’m trying to help you, Theo, but if you refuse to cooperate, I’m afraid you’ll be removed. Understand? Things will be out of my control then.’
Theo had broken out in a sweat. Gerard stared at him.
‘If you can write another book,’ he said at last, reasonably, breathing deeply, ‘if you can contact your publishers we’ll be able to let you go. If not…’ His voice trailed off.
So he knew now. But what could he write about. That night he lay awake, terrified, imagining metal hooks were screwed into the walls above his bed. Finally, Theo slept fitfully. Then towards dawn something woke him. A sentence was repeating itself in his head.
‘Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world. That is the only thing that interests me.’
And then suddenly, as the dawn light filled the sky, he knew. As though he were retrieving a lost language, he saw them. Rohan and Giulia, standing grey-black in the rain. Coffin-rain, made for the dead. Astonished, he thought, But how could I have forgotten them? Unravelling their names from the tangle of forgotten things, he saw Giulia against a waterlogged sky, wintry and far away. Because there was no one to share his new discovery with, he paced the floor of his room. The Tamil woman, hearing his footsteps came in, curious to see what he was doing.
‘I’ve remembered something else,’ he shouted. But his excitement was tempered with fear. ‘What else is there?’ he cried, forgetting the woman did not understand.
Outside, the upcountry rain, which had held off in the night, began falling again. It brought with it the faint smell of tea bushes and blossom. Sharp bird calls stabbed the air, and dark clouds hid the trees.
Giulia had not meant to spy on him. At least that was what she told herself later. She had been on her way to the fish market when she had decided to take a boat out to the Lido instead. The foolishness of it did not strike her until afterwards, but by then it was too late and she had seen Ro
han. He was not walking on the beach and he was not alone. She stared mesmerised, uncaring that he might look up and notice her. Rohan was laughing. At least, it seemed that way to Giulia from where she stood, drinking her coffee. The woman looked vaguely familiar. As her heart constricted with a sharp stab of betrayal, Giulia saw Rohan reach over and light the woman’s cigarette. Then he lit one for himself. But he’s given up smoking, thought Giulia, bewildered. And she flushed with pain. Moving closer, she searched Rohan’s face. It appeared as that of a stranger. What is it? she thought. What is he laughing about? She could not remember the last time she had seen him laugh. And try as she might she could not see happiness in his face.
Back in their flat, she opened the suitcase with Nulani’s things in it and looked at them. All the small, useless tokens they had brought for her lay untouched, along with the letters she had sent. Some bangles, a lime-green skirt, neatly folded, a bottle of cheap perfume. The sum of a life. There were a few photographs of Theo, one of Theo with Anna, and another one of Nulani’s brother Jim. Giulia stared at them. Suddenly she began to weep, thick heavy sobs.
‘Will he leave me?’ she cried.
This, then, was how it was to end. Anna gone, Theo dead, our marriage finished. Is this how he means to forget all that we have been through together? Throwing me out with all that has hurt him? Is this my fate, now? She had been unable to foresee such an ending. How foolish of her. In the old days, she remembered, when she had first wanted to go to Sri Lanka, he had refused, saying nothing good would come out of it.
‘Oh, Giulia, don’t you understand?’ he had said. ‘My country is damaged. This war will go on and on in the minds of the people long after it is over. They will try to pretend it’s forgotten but how does one forget when your father and your mother and your brother have been slaughtered before your eyes?’
The aftermath of a war was mostly scars, he had told her bitterly. Giulia was crying more quietly now, rocking gently, sitting on the floor beside the tokens from Nulani Mendis’s life. Remembering his warning words. At least, she thought, neither Anna nor Nulani had been betrayed in this way. At least they were loved until the end. Picking up the last letter they had received from the girl, she unfolded it for the hundredth time and stared blindly at it.
‘Jim won’t see me for a while,’ Nulani had written. ‘He is busy with his final exams. Then he has to look for a job. I miss you.’
Suddenly Giulia was galvanised into action. Nulani’s brother had been at Sheffield University, she was certain of it. Someone had mentioned it, Theo maybe, or the girl herself. Why had they not thought to follow this lead? I will find her, thought Giulia. Closing the suitcase, wiping her eyes on her skirt, she picked up the phone. She would ring Sheffield University. And find Jim Mendis.
Later, after the rain had cleared, the light retained a softness, not unlike a spring day in England. And in the afternoon the sun came out. The old woman brought in a plate of fruit. She had placed it on a tarnished metal tray covered with drawings of Hindu gods. As she walked towards Theo something else seemed to come with her but then she grinned her discoloured, toothless grin and he lost the wisp of it again. All afternoon, after that, he was agitated and restless. Something was very wrong. Blood throbbed at his temples, and he started to shudder. Gerard had said he would be visiting but after the scene of the day before Theo was reluctant to see him. By mid-afternoon he had curled into a tight ball of worry, glancing at the door, expecting Gerard to walk in at any moment. But still he did not appear and terror, never far from the surface, rose in Theo. He had begun to feel sick. His leg ached constantly and he wondered if the glasses they had found him were, in fact, the cause of his never-ending headaches. Glancing towards the door, straining for the slightest sound, he paced the floor nervously. A bit later on he vomited. Then he lay on his bed and slept, moaning and tossing feverishly. When he woke the old woman was standing over him saying something. Her voice was insistent and harsh and there was another sound that puzzled him. The woman was talking to him in Tamil. She stood too close for his liking. He felt hot and faint and wondered if a mosquito had bitten him. The woman pointed towards the roof. Theo looked at her through a wave of sickness. He had no idea what she meant. He tried asking her to fetch the radio. But either she did not want him to have it, or she could not understand him. In the end he gave up. In any case the woman was getting too friendly and he felt the need to keep a distance. As there was still no sign of Gerard, Theo picked up his notebook. Rohan, he thought, I must not forget Rohan. I mustn’t lose that thought.
He was staring at his notebook thinking of the books Anna used to keep, filled with her small beautiful handwriting, crushed all together on the page. The look of things had always struck him forcefully. Rohan’s paintings with their faulty horizons sitting uneasily on the canvas, rich and luminescent, had had the same effect. Making the invisible visible, Rohan had said. Had it been Rohan? Or had it been someone else? He felt as though his face was on fire. The sun had gone down completely. The walls of his room, flat and empty of objects, had the effect of cutting him off from the world on the other side. He felt not merely alone but ejected into dangerous isolation. It struck him that he was hardly human, locked up, pounding away in a twilight hell of gunshots and violence. He was certain, something was terribly wrong. Perhaps he was ill with malaria? He began to shake then, with an awful sense of premonition, feeling a clamouring inside him, some struggle beyond his control. And then, in the purest moments of shock, without warning or sound, without preparation, the thought came forward, crashing against him with the roar of the sea. His memory of Sugi. And of the girl.
He must have collapsed. When he came to, it was dark again and he was sitting on the floor. The girl’s face appeared clear and very serene, framed in light, made sharper by his own exhaustion. And he felt at last with shattering horror, the true weight of his loss. He heard a noise approaching from a very long distance and felt it vibrate against him in slow, nauseating waves. It dissolved into the sound of a king coconut being cracked open with a machete. Held between two hands. Liquid gushed between long fingers, cloudy and plentiful. Small, rough-papered notebooks lay on a table, unwavering stories drawn in black lifted off its pages and came towards him. Hither and thither they fell, clamouring for his attention. Sunlight poured into a cracked glass jug, an arm, bare to the elbow, rested by a typewriter. And all around was the fragrance of linseed oil, of turpentine and colour. Rooted to the spot, Theo saw all this as if he watched through a mirror, rising darkly, out of the piano music that tripped down the steps into the tangle of garden light. Somewhere out of sight a gate was clicked open. A silver tray was placed on a table. It held a cup of tea and a glass of lime juice. He saw a man standing beside the table, smiling broadly. Still the noise approached. It was coming from the sky. Voices rose in confusion.
‘I haven’t seen you for four days,’ the girl was saying, her eyes shining, her black hair a curtain against her face, and all the heat of the afternoon gathered into a moment of such sweetness that Theo gasped for air.
‘Where have you been?’ he mumbled, struggling to stand up.
The noise was getting louder. It drummed in his head.
‘Sir, you have been away too long. But not to worry, I have looked after Miss Nulani.’
‘Sugi,’ he said, tentatively. ‘Sugi?’
‘You have a scar. I can feel it as I draw you.’
‘Draw, draw, draw…’
The voices were indistinct. They were muddled with other sounds that he could not understand. He saw the treetops being whipped up by a wind. Maybe a storm was brewing. The beach flashed past him like a mirage, scorching white, lace-edged by water. Someone had knocked the stone lions off their plinth; someone had picked a great branch of blossom and placed it in a jug of water on his table.
‘Was it you, Sugi?’ he asked urgently.
‘Yes, it was me,’ Sugi admitted. ‘We were worried, you were away for so long. We thought something might have hap
pened.’
‘But you’re here, now,’ the girl seemed to say. Her face appeared strangely distorted, and part of the whirling noise outside. He wanted to speak, but his mouth would form no words. He could not move.
‘I have been tortured, Sugi,’ he wanted to say. ‘What do you say to that?’
He wanted to shout, to catch his attention, but the image of Sugi had become indistinct.
‘They showed me no mercy,’ he tried to say, ‘and once that has happened, once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that can ever be your home again.’
But the words that had remained locked within him for so many months could not be voiced. And the pain that he had carried for so long, unknowingly and fearfully, seemed an impossible thing, too elusive and too raw to speak of. A slab of meat. That was what he wanted to say, that was what he had been. That was what he was.
In the darkness that had descended unnoticed, at last, he understood the sound was that of a helicopter. It whirled and chopped the air, swinging closer and closer. Unable to move, he watched as the beam of light swept across the jungle outside.
Oh Christ! he thought. Oh Christ!
And the only real thing that remained forcing itself upon him was the roaring of an engine in his ears, and the heavy sound of falling rain.
15
THE TAMIL WOMAN SCREAMED AND DARTED into the room.
‘Helicopter,’ she said in English. ‘Singhala army.’
The noise was deafening and directly overhead. Theo froze, his heart was racing, his leg a lame weight against his body. Then with one swift movement, with catlike speed, the youth on guard duty was standing beside him. Theo drew his breath in sharply but the youth shook his head violently, putting his hand out to stop him.
‘Quiet, no more noise,’ he hissed. ‘They look for Gerard.’
