Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  So, given Cecelia’s inclinations for half-truths, it’s hardly a surprise that Mary doesn’t believe her when Cecelia says Anil won’t die.

  ‘How can you know that?’ she sniffs.

  ‘Rajan told me,’ Cecelia answers. ‘They’re not going to do anything at the hospital. There isn’t anything they can do.’

  She sits down cross-legged on the grass just as wheels rattle up to the front of the house. A rickshaw’s been hired to take Mary’s parents with Anil to the train station. They’ll be whisked to a KL hospital where a tired doctor will peer down Anil’s throat, tap on his knees and pronounce him perfectly fit in everything but his brain. That doctor will be overworked and seeing a quiet child will be quite a relief for him.

  ‘They can do something,’ Mary insists. ‘Anil’s going to get better.’

  ‘Rajan said you’d say that.’ Cecelia beams, wriggling her plump shoulders under the lace of her second-best dress. She looks sweet in that dress, yellow cotton that’s been trimmed with a bit of ribbon and the hem turned up above her fat little knees. She looks so sweet, in fact, that Mary starts to bristle.

  ‘Why were you talking to Rajan, anyway?’ she demands.

  Cecelia shrugs again and gives her a charming smile. Neither girl is quite as much in love as she thinks, but they won’t let the other one win. They’re at an age to fight over anything, and the more vicious the better.

  ‘Oh, I see him quite a lot these days,’ Cecelia confides, oily with hormones and malice. ‘He comes to my house, you know.’ She examines her fingernails, scratches one of those rosy knees. ‘My mother says she can hardly keep him away.’

  Cecelia’s mother, Yoke Yee, married late in life after working as a brothel-girl in the mountains of Shanxi province and spending her days doing finger-knitting to make ends meet. Yoke Yee’s a cookhouse worker now and she wants something better for Cecelia. ‘You know what’ll happen if you don’t marry,’ she’s told her daughter, ‘you’ll end up with sores on your fingers and God-knows-what everywhere else.’ So Cecelia obediently invites the village boys home for tea, pressing them to take another bourbon cream, a vanilla wafer, a scarf from the finger-knitting she does on those afternoons she’s not ruining her reputation in the flame trees. And then, when Yoke Yee walks out of the room, Cecelia presses the boys to kisses and liberties.

  ‘You oughtn’t to hang over Rajan so much,’ Mary says coldly. ‘He hates girls who do that.’

  Cecelia flushes, tosses her head. ‘Don’t be jealous,’ she says. ‘Just because he doesn’t visit you.’

  This doesn’t go down well with Mary. She’s cross; she’s worried about Anil and she’s secretly jealous of that yellow lace dress that she thinks would look a lot nicer on her own slim frame.

  ‘Leave Rajan alone,’ she orders Cecelia. ‘He’s told me all about what you get up to with boys, and we think it’s – just silly! As though he’d have anything to do with a … with a Chinese jam tart.’

  Inaccurate, perhaps – Mary’s been listening at doors – but heartfelt. Just for good measure, too, she spits on the ground by Cecelia’s feet. It’s a gesture she’s learnt from the beggar children and rubber-estate brats she admires, and she thinks it rather daring.

  Cecelia pauses, raises one eyebrow. ‘Eew,’ she says, brushing her dainty skirts. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  She rises neatly and walks into Mary’s house, flicking grass off that coveted lace skirt. Mary isn’t often at a loss for words and it only takes a few seconds before she’s bounding up to the back door cursing. She jabs at the handle, tugs and twists, and it’s only then she understands exactly what’s happened. Cecelia’s locked her out.

  Three hours later, the sun’s plummeted below the horizon and a brisk wind’s sprung up. The air tastes of tin and grit and the ground has a soggy slap to it. Mary’s crouched in the half-built annexes at the end of the garden, the ones her father put up with a few nails and some hope. She’s given up trying to sleep, and she’s thinking up diabolical revenges for Cecelia. She’ll climb up the bougainvillaea and strangle her; she’ll slip oleander leaves into Cecelia’s morning cups of milk, she’ll pull her hair out and steal her yellow dress.

  Perhaps Mary will do these things, now or in some other time. Perhaps Cecelia – who, after all, by Mary’s account (and what other account could there be sixty years later?) might not even have been there at all – will walk away, happy and healthy, to live to a great age and bring up her own ungrateful grandchildren. But before any of this can happen there’s a noise, echoing over the sound of distant rain. It’s a tidal noise, one she recognizes from her afternoons playing crocodile-bait down by the river. It’s the noise of riverbanks breaking away, of surprised raindrops that had expected to fall on dry land. Mary panics, scrambles up onto a pile of wood and then one bare foot slips down again and this time she feels water.

  The Jelai river, slinking past the garden wall, has oozed over its banks and begun to crawl up the path. It licks Mary’s heels in a friendly sort of way in passing; it takes a breath, it swells, it darkens, and then it surges over Pahang in a riptide flood.

  Amir wakes with water halfway down his mouth, and his first thought is for his prize goats. Mrs Varghese slaps at the waves, frantic, desperate to find her girls in that muck. If she’d left their hair alone she could have dived for them – dragged them out by their plaits – but as it is they’re swept away, one by one, their shaven heads dipping underwater and out of reach.

  In the annexe Mary scrambles from the woodpile onto an old almirah Stephen’s been using to keep his tools in. Everything’s pitch black – no electricity in those days, and kerosene lamps aren’t much good under five feet of water – with the wind kicking little smacks from the surface. The water’s rising faster than she could have thought possible, and she stands on her toes to press her face against the spiky attap roof. Not much chance of help on a night like this, not when nobody even knows she’s there. Something heavy buffets against her legs, nudging her again and again. A piece of driftwood, a catfish, a drowned woman; it could be any of these and Mary gives a little scream. She’s about to slip under the water, her lips pursed upwards to the tiny gap where the roof still holds a cushion of air, when she hears a voice.

  ‘Help … help!’

  She recognizes it, that voice that’s as loud in a whisper as her own is in a shout. It’s Cecelia, nearly hoarse but still crying out somewhere in the main house. Before she can react the annexe roof shudders, rocks as something grinds over it. Above her head, there’s a slap of oars.

  ‘Who’s shouting? We’ve come! Hello, is anyone there?’ It’s Dr Balakrishnan, somewhere out in that darkness.

  ‘It’s me! It’s Mary!’

  A hand plunges in through the hole in the roof, grabs Mary by the scruff of her neck and hauls her out. Lucky for Mary that she’s thin, without any of Cecelia’s firm flesh. She comes out with barely a scratch.

  ‘Ai, girl! You were shouting to wake the dead. So loud!’

  Dr Balakrishnan stands by the boat’s mast, where a kerosene lamp dances and glows. The light’s attracting creatures to the surface, fish and phosphorescent squid and something large and snappish that lurks beneath the hull. Amir-from-the-market’s huddled in the prow, his arm around the only goat left. Back in the kampung his daughters still cling to the stilts of their house, along with one of the convent nuns and the youngest Varghese girl, all of them abandoned for goats or gold or a prettier sister. It’s not easy, being a woman in these times and Mary’s lucky to have got out at all.

  ‘We heard shouting.’ It’s Rajan, folded into a spindly bundle of legs and elbows, slopping water out of the boat using an old tin bucket. ‘You’re lucky we were here.’

  ‘But I wasn’t shout –’ Mary stops.

  She wasn’t shouting, of course, and even if she had been she probably wouldn’t have been heard. She’s not Cecelia, with her vocal reach that can cut through a crowded marketplace. Cecelia, who’s been screaming for an hour an
d now – right now, right when it matters – suddenly finds her throat’s too sore to make any noise at all.

  ‘Is there anyone else here, Mary?’ Dr Balakrishnan steers the boat in a tight circle. The wind’s whipping up, and Mary can see a mass of leeches and spiky-shelled insects struggling in the ankle-deep water at her feet. Add in one more person – say, a plump sort of person, a small friend, perhaps, the kind you might easily miss in all the excitement – and the boat will certainly capsize.

  Mary thinks about Cecelia, who is her best friend and yet so quarrelsome – as Mary puts it – and hurtful. She really, truly ought to be scolded, but Mary wouldn’t say a word against her and so she doesn’t say a word at all. She shuts her lips tight and squats down next to Rajan, rubbing her eyes with her fists. Above their heads the lantern bounces and glares, casting a lurid glow over the drifting tree trunks and occasional splash of a sea creature out of its element. Dr Balakrishnan sets the boat heading due east, to the flood evacuation centres and away.

  In later years this will be known as the Great Flood of 1926. Whole villages will be inundated and – according to local stories – simply carry on their lives underwater, quarrelling and farming and brushing the gills their children soon develop. Corpses will bob in becalmed waters for weeks, rotting away until the graveyards can be bailed out.

  On the other hand, Cecelia will survive. Not quite the same, not quite a friend, and through the long, stalking years, Mary will learn to regret this night. Amir’s daughters will survive, too, and the youngest Varghese girl, and most of the rest of the kampong. Not the convent nun, clinging to a house stilt. Her eyes will have been turned to the heavens and so she won’t see the large, snappish thing swimming underneath her in the water. She won’t draw her feet up and so will plummet down, dragged underwater by the rubbery lips of a monstrous catfish, the sort to live out the last hundred years of its life in an unknown ditch under the schoolroom.

  But Cecelia will survive. More’s the pity, Mary would say. Survival, to Mary, is something you earn.

  7. Friday, 11 a.m.

  The prayer room feels claustrophobic and heavy, as though the air’s run out. I’m still holding Peony’s picture, and an echoing clang from outside nearly makes me drop it. Somebody’s thrown open the compound gate, not even stopping to latch it again. Quick footsteps cross the yard, then pause at the verandah steps. After a second they start to climb, and I realize I’m holding my breath. Ammuma’s stories come back to me – the froggish monster, the spidery drowned women – and then the prayer-room doorway darkens and I see Tom.

  ‘Durga?’ His lips are wet, and I can see the tiny shreds of dried skin clinging to them. There’s a scab of dried blood where he’s pulled some of the skin off, and he looks worried. Scared.

  ‘They paged me last night at the hospital, to admit Mary-Auntie. A cookery fire …’

  ‘No,’ I start to say, but he isn’t listening.

  ‘I went to the ward just now, and talked to Rao. He said it wasn’t a cookery fire. It was the fireworks.’

  He stumbles forward into the prayer room, wrapping his arms around my shoulders. It feels clumsy, somewhere between a hug and a fall.

  ‘I promised you the market ones were good quality. I thought they were, honestly. I didn’t know, I thought – God, I might have killed you both.’

  His throat pulses against my chin, involving me with the rhythm of his breath. I start to shake as I lean into him. Inside, I’m calm – a little still and cold, as though I’ve drunk ice-water in the dark – but that doesn’t seem to matter. There’s an ache where Tom’s body presses against mine, a thread being drawn from my stomach. I drop the photograph and it lands with a thud. Peony, face down on the floor.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ His voice is muffled. This isn’t the kind of thing you say out loud, not if you’re Tom.

  I should tell him it wasn’t his fireworks at all, which are still in the dining room where I left them. But I can’t get any words out. Tom huddles against me and there’s a catch in his breath. I hug him back, and he’s a swoop of muscle in my arms. Hips and shoulder blades and the softness of a stomach bulge hidden under his clothes. Perhaps he has changed, after all.

  ‘It isn’t your fault,’ I say, under my breath. This time, Peony adds.

  He keeps whispering, breathing out guilt as he slips his hands along my collarbone and rubs his lips over mine. Exhaling all that guilt makes room for something else that envelops us as we lie on the floor of the prayer room, two forked and shaking curls with all our fat rolls and strange sprouting hairs on display. Two monsters, holding tighter and tighter and never letting go.

  Mother Agnes once gave us a biology lesson. Ahead of her time, most probably; nuns didn’t approve of that kind of thing in the 1960s. But Mother Agnes was special. She was born without a tongue and brought up in a convent; it took more than a touch of disapproval to stop her. She’d drawn pictures on the board, I remember, chalk outlines of male and female bodies. It looks like a pitcher plant! Peony had giggled. I’m never getting married.

  Which goes to show that at least one of us got things right.

  Tom puts his clothes on again in a shamefaced rush, as though he hadn’t quite noticed they’d come off. He moves shyly, turning his back when he gets to the vest-and-socks stage. Something about him in the light from the prayer-room doorway reminds me of Deepak. Nothing obvious, nothing I could explain. Tom’s smooth where Deepak was rough. Tom’s paler, Tom has more hair, and Tom’s ribs are heavy and solid. Deepak was slender and Deepak was balding and Deepak managed, somehow, to look me in the eye as he told me he was married.

  My eyes flicker to Tom’s bare wedding finger as he ties his shoelaces. Good shoes – nicer than Deepak used to wear – and that sharp suit on top of them too. His hair springs up, light brown and thick as sugar cane. I remember him combing it over his forehead when we were fifteen, schoolboy Tom trying to be John Lennon and only managing Ringo Starr. And the smell of him, the sweat, the salt-and-deodorant that’s on my skin, too.

  I crouch to put on my underwear that lies puddled on the floor. He picks up a marigold fallen from one of the shrines and brushes it against my breast. It’s an oddly intimate, tender gesture and I shiver.

  ‘I’m going to wash,’ I tell him awkwardly. ‘Do you want to … to come?’ I don’t know why I ask. Deepak and I used to shower together, stripping naked under great cascades of scalding water in my hygienic Ontario bathroom. I don’t want that with Tom, or perhaps I do but it looks like I’m not going to be given the choice. He’s got his shoes on already, and he’s zipped and buttoned away.

  ‘I can’t stay long, actually,’ he says. ‘Maybe just a cup of coffee?’

  We walk through into the darkened front room. In the gloom Tom takes my hand between both of his. It feels sweet: a teenage sort of gesture, although as a teenager he’d have done nothing of the sort. He was always far more interested in Peony. That thought makes me jumpy, overflowing with a silly kind of excitement that’s too young for me.

  I want to be aloof and sarcastic, just like Peony was. I want to let him make the moves. But my clothes are crumpled, my hair’s in my eyes and he’s already made all the moves on offer, if the last hour’s anything to go by. Not your finest moment, I tell myself, but I feel a shudder of joy and wonder whether it just might have been.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s been fifteen years since we last saw each other,’ I say. ‘You don’t even know about –’ About Deepak, about Canada, about the way Peony’s smile flickers out at me from mirrors ‘– about anything!’

  He laughs, then puts an arm around my shoulder. He has to stoop, since our heights don’t match any more. They always used to, I remember, and Peony was a scant centimetre shorter. She would have stayed short, I think spitefully. She would have had to stretch to kiss him now, if she’d managed it at all.

  ‘You’ll have your work cut out with the cleaning up,’ he tells me. ‘Was the fire all in the side wing? Once it’s aired out t
he smoke shouldn’t be this bad.’

  Tom, I remember, likes to advise. He walks ahead of me to the dining room and opens the back door. While his back’s turned I grab the bag of fireworks from the dining-room table. The kitchen almirah’s right next to me, and I shove the bag high up on the top shelf. He turns round a second afterwards, as though he’d heard. There’s guilt squatting in the room with us, stringy as spit.

  ‘So Ammuma didn’t tell you I was coming back to Malaysia?’ I ask quickly. I keep my face turned away from him, pretending to be very busy with cups and plates in the kitchen.

  Tom laughs, sitting down in a chair with his legs straddled wide. ‘Of course not. She wouldn’t talk about you, Durga. You have forgotten things.’

  He’s right. Even if he weren’t Tom and I weren’t me – even without Peony’s shadow stitched to our feet – Ammuma wouldn’t have discussed me with him. The best thing you can hear about a girl is nothing at all, she always used to say.

  ‘She didn’t tell me you’d come back either,’ I say, rubbing dish soap onto a plate slightly harder than necessary. Tom just smiles.

  ‘So, do you have any … family here?’ I ask. Wives, girlfriends; women I won’t name for fear of conjuring them up. Cowardy-custard, I hear Peony jeer.

  He doesn’t reply, not at first. He scrapes that chair over the floor, tips it back and then back again – in another moment he’ll be in the almirah with the fireworks – and says, ‘Well, Mary-Auntie’s like family to me.’

  No lovers, then, no ex-girlfriends left alive. Tom’s the sort to prefer a midnight dash, underwear in his pocket as he slips out of the door. I can see it, Tom running for his life and me with one of my hands clasped round the verandah ironwork and the other flailing in mid-air, grabbing for whatever I can get. Undignified, to say the least. That thought brings Peony’s face back to me, smiling out of that strange photograph behind the shrines.