Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  ‘Tom,’ I say slowly. ‘I want to ask you about something. In the prayer room, just now –’

  He looks up warily and I see he’s misunderstood. He’s expecting recriminations and arguments. He’s expecting expectations.

  ‘In the prayer room – it was very … nice, Durga. Honestly.’

  Nice. I store that one away to wring bitterness out of later. In any case he’s already pushing forward with a conversation that’s going to go just how he’d like.

  ‘Now, let me give you a hand,’ he says busily. ‘You’re doing that coffee all wrong.’

  I give in. It’s cowardly, but I can’t bring myself to say her name. And so the coffee carries us safely over the next few minutes, with both of us pretending to share a fascination with brewing times. There are little fusses with filters and granules – Tom, unsurprisingly, has firm opinions on the way this should all be done – and whether or not the milk is fresh. He directs me to bring water, sugar, a teaspoon and tells me where to find them, too.

  When I was growing up the kitchen was Vellaswamy-cook’s domain. Karthika took over three years ago, when Ammuma stopped being able to manage. She’s hung copper pans on the mud-green walls and there’s a dim, aqueous chill over the place. When I open the cupboards in search of coffee I can see they’re almost empty: nothing but mud-clumped stalks of kai lan, Milo, Maggi-noodles and Nutella.

  ‘Do you think this is all Ammuma eats?’ I ask, distracted. It’s so different from Canadian-style refrigerators, full of frozen meat and plastic-labelled vegetables. ‘I don’t know what Karthika’s been spending the money on.’

  Karthika used to cook, until last year. She went missing for six months, then turned up one day with a baby and still no wedding ring or kum-kum in her hair. Ammuma won’t stand for her touching the food any more, so nowadays Karthika comes in to scrub the toilets and bathrooms. Ammuma’s begun to call her the night-soil man, with a fine disregard for detail.

  ‘I hope you’re not nagging at Karthika,’ Tom says, opening the top cupboard for mugs. ‘She’s quite sensitive, you know, Durga.’

  I stare at him. But she’s the servant-girl: the phrase comes almost instinctively. ‘Since when did you care so much about her?’ I ask instead, and he laughs.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen him really smile – a genuine, unpractised grin – and it smooths over the edge of irritation I’ve been feeling. He looks fifteen again when he smiles, and that gives me courage. I don’t want to chatter about servants and coffee and food with him. I want to talk about us, about guilt and growing up. About Peony. He’s the only one who’d ever understand, after all. He’s the other set of footprints on my desert island.

  ‘Tom,’ I say, moving closer to him. ‘When you first came back, was it strange? Remembering her?’

  He raises an eyebrow, puzzled.

  ‘Peony, I mean.’ Her name sends a little shock through the air and I plunge on. ‘Because I see her everywhere. It’s like she hasn’t gone, like she’s been here all along just waiting for me to come back. Ammuma’s even put a picture of her in the prayer room.’

  He coughs. I wonder if he’s going to tell me to forget it. To forget her. It’s just a picture, Durga; she was just Peony. He might even say that it wasn’t our fault she drowned, a fact which is both true and useless.

  ‘That picture,’ he says, fidgeting with his mug. He adjusts the collar of his sharp-ironed shirt and takes another gulp of coffee.

  ‘Mary-Auntie didn’t put it there.’ He sounds very English all of a sudden, very foreign. ‘I found it last year, in your bedroom.’

  ‘In my bedroom? What, my bedroom here?’

  A stupid question. He doesn’t look at me and turns to the sink instead. He turns the tap on, waiting for the choke of air and water to pulse its way through.

  ‘Why would you do that? What for?’

  He leans towards me. ‘So she doesn’t get forgotten.’ He sounds suddenly intense. ‘She matters, Durga. Peony matters.’

  I can feel the increase in heat, feel the skin on my arm prickle as the hairs rise to meet him. Water trickles off his arm and lands, blood-heat, on the back of my hand.

  ‘She died because of us,’ he says. ‘Because of our stupid game. It’s our fault.’

  ‘Tom, I feel the same, honestly –’

  ‘No, you don’t! You ran off to Canada for ten years and you couldn’t be bothered to come back till now. You forgot all about her.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  He’s wrong, I want to tell him, wrong in every possible way. I stayed here for three years after Peony died, and every single day she was there in the stink of the swamp and the shadowed evenings. When I first went to Canada her face showed up in every snowfall and now I’m back here in Pahang she’s lurking behind my bedroom mirror.

  ‘I remember her all the time, Tom. You can’t just assume –’

  He shakes his head. ‘Mary-Auntie’s the same. When I mention Peony she just folds her lips tight – yes, exactly the same way you’re doing now. Acting like she wasn’t important.’

  Which, coming from Tom, is certainly something. It wasn’t me, after all, who ran away back to England immediately after the inquest. Who got to start all over again a thousand miles away without anyone whispering ‘That’s her!’ in school.

  ‘Who said you know anything about how I feel?’ I burst out. ‘How dare you turn up here and try to be some sort of big-man boss when … when – you haven’t even seen me for fifteen years!’

  ‘Durga, I –’

  ‘You always think everything needs to be dragged out and talked about! You always want to be the one in charge!’

  Who died and made you God? Peony asks. Oh wait, she says, I know this one.

  Tom tries to calm me down, but it just makes things worse. I tell him that’s not how things work here, and push his arms away. Just because we don’t talk about something doesn’t mean it’s been forgotten, I insist. So why doesn’t he just fuck off – go on, Tom, just leave – and go and be pretentious and self-absorbed with someone who can be bothered to listen.

  ‘I thought you just said I shouldn’t talk so much?’ There’s such an infuriating expression in his bright blue eyes that for a second I could nearly slap him. My hand’s raised – in another life, in my ordered, sweet-talking Canadian life I wouldn’t be able to believe myself – and then the compound bell rings.

  We stop, rooted to the spot. After a few seconds it rings again, with a cheery ding-DING-ding-DING-DING. I drop my hand and we look away, both of us rearranging foolish faces.

  ‘It’s Mother Agnes,’ I say.

  I recognize her ring. She visits Ammuma a few times each week and since I’ve been back she’s come here every day. She used to be our schoolteacher – born without a tongue but with plenty of opinions, Ammuma said, to make up for it. She stopped teaching a few years ago, and these days she looks as out of place as I feel.

  I look over at Tom. Perhaps it’s exhaustion or the throbbing ache in my head, but even the slight tucks of his chin seem beautiful to me. Skin like a fish, they say here about Europeans, but those creases below his neck look entrancing. Suddenly, I can’t catch my breath.

  ‘I’ll leave,’ he says. ‘I’ll let you talk to Agnes.’

  Our fight’s left me on edge. I’m trembling, with his sweat still on my skin where he held my arm. The lemon-sourness of it makes me want to lick at my own wrists, or bite at his.

  ‘You don’t need to go,’ I say quickly. ‘She’s been here every day, she’s just collecting donations for her left-behinds. She won’t stay long.’

  Mother Agnes took up charity a few years ago, after she left teaching. She works with the left-behinds, as Ammuma calls them. They’re women who slipped through the cracks after the war and the Emergency, who live with their straggling families on the outskirts of the jungle near Lipis. They’ve no schooling, no future, and they’re all – according to Ammuma – as bad as each other.

  The bell rings again – di
ng-DING – and Tom steps back from the kitchen window, as though he doesn’t quite want to be seen.

  ‘Go on,’ he says, giving me a little push towards the door. ‘Agnes will want to ask about the fire anyway. And if she sees us together she’ll only gossip, you know that.’

  ‘What do you mean? Stop pushing me.’ My head’s starting to pound. I’m realizing how tired I am still. I could sleep for weeks. For months, for long enough for my hair and teeth to grow till they swallow me whole. Till I turn into one of Ammuma’s froggish monsters, right here on the kitchen floor.

  ‘Are you worried about being seen with me, is that it?’ I ask.

  Just like when we were twelve, I want to say, and you carved Peony’s name on the outside of the desk and mine on the inside. Just like when you kissed her and not me on the first day of school, just like you always copied off her maths tests and not mine even though she got all her fractions wrong. I rub my eyes, pressing huge white circles into the blackness behind them.

  ‘Of course not,’ he says heartily. ‘I want to see you again. But not here, though,’ he adds. ‘Somewhere private.’

  There’s an unpleasant, used-twice-over ring to that. Deepak used to say it too. I put that thought away, lock it up tight where it can’t do any harm.

  ‘Sunday, when you come to pick up Mary-Auntie,’ he goes on, ‘come to the hospital reception and ask for me.’

  He pulls me closer, gives me a dry, squashed kiss, then breaks away. He hurries through the dining room to the back door just as Mother Agnes rings the compound bell again. By leaning close to the window I can see her, standing there with her quiet mouth and her scandal-filled notebooks. I turn my back instead, looking out of the back door and watching Tom leave. It isn’t so hard, not this time round.

  After Peony’s accident, I barely went outside for weeks. Mother Agnes came to see me, bringing school lessons and homework. She was the one to tell me Tom’s family had left. His parents had packed in the night, she wrote to me; they’d run back to England and left behind whatever they couldn’t carry. A single shoe. A watercolour picture. A pair of spectacles, as though they couldn’t bear to look out through them again. Forced out at dawn, they must have thought bitterly, and after all they’d done for Malaysia. Biting the hand that feeds them, Mrs Harcourt would have wept and I can’t say I blame her. Table manners, like languages, rarely travel well.

  The bell’s stopped ringing. Mother Agnes must have given up. I turn back to the sink and take my time wiping the dishes dry. The palms of my hands underwater are almost as pale as Tom’s.

  Skins are like stories, Mother Agnes used to say, what matters is what’s underneath. A cheerful little proverb, but Ammuma had her own take on it. Peel the skin back, she said, and look for the fangs. I leave Tom’s mug by the side, his name turned outwards. And then I pick up my anonymous white cup and drop it straight in the sink from as high as I can reach. It smashes with a satisfying crack and a slop of pale-brown coffee, and I wonder if Mother Agnes’s left-behinds felt like this all along.

  8. The King and Queen Have Their Say: 1927

  There’s a type of mathematics called category theory. It’s the mathematics of mathematics; the mathematics that describes everything else. The last resort.

  It’s also the simplest. A category is a collection of objects (say a Catherine wheel, a granddaughter, a grandmother and a drowned teenage ghost). And in every category there are relationships between the objects. Guilt, for example, links a granddaughter and a ghost. Or love: a dangerous arrow between mothers and daughters, one that might turn out to have too sharp a point.

  Functors are one step further. A functor takes one category and turns it into a different one entirely. Swap out Durga for Mary, Peony for Cecelia. Swap Ammuma’s dead daughter for a tiger-prince and his frog; the story’s the same however you slice it.

  There are different objects in your new category, if you dare to face up to them:

  Smoke, thick enough to chew.

  A banyan swamp, waiting patiently for the splash.

  A gritty, billowing punch of ash or a smear of greenish slime on your dress. And then, of course, you might add in ambulances, inquests or worn-out young doctors, all with tempers and arrows of their own.

  Some relationships are too hard to define. They pop up where you’d least expect. They’re there; you just can’t see them through the smoke.

  Mother Agnes taught a generation of us mathematics, silently counting and adding up and taking away. She took her classes out into the playground; had them exchanging marbles for sweets and then swapping them back. If Sita gives Nadeem five apples, and Nadeem gives four away to Asha, how many nights will Sita cry herself to sleep? Divide by two, take away the number you first thought of and count up whether anyone really loved her at all.

  If you’re Mary at eleven years old, you don’t put your faith in mathematics. Not once you’ve already survived one flood. Not once your parents have brought your brother home with the news that there’s nothing the doctors can do. Any attempt at treatment would be too expensive, in any case. The numbers don’t add up. If you’re Mary, you might have had quite enough of numbers. You might want to give up on logic and work some bomoh magic of your own. Tell the story your own way.

  Which is exactly what she’s trying to do one evening, three months after the flood. The river’s gone down by now and left the ground spongy, soft enough to swallow anything from a footprint to a village. Tiny green frogs spring from overturned trees, and the banyan swamp seethes with the flicker of tadpoles and leeches. Everything in the garden smells of rotting leaves and blocked sewers. Mary’s in the middle of it all, kneeling in the flower bed.

  She’s playing dangerous games amongst those canna lilies, whispering spells she’s made up herself. She’s stolen a crucifix; she’s scavenged chicken bones; she’s taken magic words from her Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland books. But nothing’s happened. So Mary’s going to play her trump card, her mathematics of last resort. She’s going to retell her parents’ entire marriage. Take the story into her own hands, and see if she can’t make it turn out better.

  If Cecelia were around, she might have talked Mary out of it. But after the flood Yoke Yee forbade her daughter to see Mary again. (See what you get, Mary? With all your stories?) Mary, despite this, considers herself the injured party. Hasn’t she been asked, again and again, about that turbulent night? And hasn’t she insisted sweetly, again and again, that she’d simply forgotten Cecelia was there? At eleven, Mary’s a picture of innocence and the grown-ups, a foot above her virtuous head, immediately agree to believe her. And if they have doubts – private, pit-of-the-night doubts – well, they keep it to themselves.

  So Mary’s trotted on under the gathering storms, concocting her games by herself. Today, though, Rajan’s come to visit. He’s fourteen now, tricky as a civet-cat and what he believes about that night of the flood, Mary will never know. He’s leaning on the garden wall and watching Mary with a glint in his lazy eyes. She squats down, engrossed in positioning the scruffy blue rabbit she’s brought out from her old toy box. Her Sarah-doll is here too, the wooden one with fully bendable limbs. Mary’s too old to play with them, really, but right now she’s poised above them; her grubby knees are spread, her incisors are glinting, and everything is about to become her fault.

  ‘Appa,’ she whispers. The rabbit, now christened, has become her father, Stephen, and she sets him down on a patch of swampy mud. It seeps into his blue fur, leaving him instantly stained and bedraggled. Stephen will never have much luck with dirt after this, will spend the rest of his life sending shirts to the laundry where Letchumani’s father will turn in desperation to saltpetre and cuttlefish bile – firework ingredients if ever there were – to bleach them clean. Mary, you see, is already inclined to meddle.

  While she’s doing that, Rajan grabs the Sarah-doll, bending her into obscene positions and smirking at the sight of her spread-eagled limbs. He’s old for his age, Rajan, and he’s alr
eady persuaded Mary several times to shed her clothes and play doctor down here on the rotting leaf-mould. His probing fingers glide over the Sarah-doll until Mary feels her stomach hum inside as though someone’s loosed a Catherine wheel between her legs.

  ‘Put her down,’ she demands.

  Because the Sarah-doll will be her mother, Radhika, and Radhika’s a well-brought-up girl. She can sing, her English is flawless, her legs are fully bendable and – thinks Mary doubtfully – perhaps she’s hardly going to be impressed by a tatty blue rabbit with its ear half off.

  Nevertheless, Mary hops Stephen up and over a bed of tufty fern and he leaps out into the sunlit flowers of Kerala, and back in time fifteen years. The doll and rabbit catch sight of each other and stop, bewildered by this sudden transformation.

  ‘I – good morning.’ Stephen knows he shouldn’t address an unaccompanied girl; his Manchester engineering firm spent an extravagant sum on training him before letting him loose on the Empire. But he’s hot; he finds the Kerala sun strangely penetrating as it soaks into his fine silky hair and steams his brain. Sweat trickles down his back and pools at his hips and all he’d like to do is get inside, away from all this liquid warmth. Into a cool, scraped-out burrow, he thinks vaguely and wonders why.

  ‘Can you tell me the way back to Trichur?’ he asks.

  Radhika smiles. She’s been watching Stephen come up over that grassy hill for a while now; she knows exactly how he can best get back to Trichur because she’s followed him from there in the first place. She’s clever, Radhika, with her arms and legs.

  She’s also – and this part is Mary’s invention, an extra egg to her mix of fairy tale and memory – the reason Stephen’s out in this heat at all. He left Trichur an hour ago, full of his English desire to take a good country walk. And in the middle of the cool backstreets near the outskirts of Trichur, he saw a white-walled villa barred with an iron gate. Unlike the baking dryness of the neighbouring houses, this one stood in cool, tar-black shadows that dripped like syrup from the coconut trees. A verandah ran around it, fenced in with lacy ironwork as delicate as frost. And behind that frost he saw Radhika.