Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  And then a sense of space. Not quite light, just not-blackness. It’s the edge of Mother Agnes’s village, by the great padang that stretches out with a sucking emptiness. I know where I am now. I used to sit here in the afternoons, those years after Peony died and I couldn’t face school. There’s a deeper blackness of shadow where a flame tree crooks over the grass. I can smell water too, and silt. The floods have been here, not long ago.

  Mother Agnes’s house is twenty metres away. It’s a two-storey brick square, flat to the road and attached to the old school via an open walkway. Nothing frightening there, nothing but the memory of chalk and the gentle smell of childhood bullying. She keeps a scrubby little garden, with a hibiscus flattened under a pouring drainpipe.

  There’s no light on in any of the windows and my torch flashes over a lion’s-head knocker on the door. It’s solid iron and resounds through the house as I let it drop. Echoes race along the street, thump their feet over the bench by the padang and trip each other up. But the house stays dark.

  Nothing else stirs either. The cluster of houses by the crossroads is locked tight; no uncles smoking outside their houses, no aunties trying to soothe sleepless children behind netted windows. And then I realize: the floods. This village lies on a swamp plain, and the Jelai rises faster here than anywhere in Pahang. Everyone’s been evacuated, perhaps hours ago. All that’s left is the river, in a green glassy wall at the bottom of a jungle cut.

  I turn right and walk down the side path. The school’s windows glint back at me and the attap roof tips its hat. Mother Agnes closed it up years ago when she stopped teaching, but those rooms are still crammed full of pigtailed ghosts. These days she uses the building for the left-behinds, as a drop-in centre or a safe place to sleep. The left-behinds are always looking for safety. They’re always dropping, one way or another.

  I step over the brimming drain by the side of the walkway, turning towards Mother Agnes’s house. She always leaves her back door unlocked, even at night. Even during a flood evacuation. She’s proud of it, makes a point of telling Ammuma just how easy it is for one of the left-behinds to come for food, or the sort of help you can’t ask for in daylight. Ammuma disapproves, needless to say. She doesn’t hold with help at any time of day.

  I push the door open and step forward into the laundry room. It’s black inside, and my eyes take a moment to adjust. The room echoes with dripping water and the sound of clothes stiffening as they dry. In the beam of my torch a cockroach rustles in the sink on its back in a centimetre of grey rinse-water. There’s no electricity, and I creep cautiously through the inner door to the study, my torch held high like a baton.

  The study’s so empty and shabby that I recoil. There used to be a bow-legged almirah and a desk with an enviable glass-green lamp. All that’s gone now, replaced with a rickety table and a stack of old National Geographics; Indira Gandhi and Richard Nixon covered in silverfish droppings. It looks bare in here, like a slumhouse. Like poverty.

  The walls are stacked with cardboard boxes, some of them taped down and others gaping. I peer into one: books, tins of food and coffee-jars and musty clothes perfuming the air with the memory of someone else’s skin. Donations for the left-behinds, and now I know where Mother Agnes’s money has gone. Above her desk there’s a list with doctors and bomohs, children’s specialists and lawyers who’ll work for free. They’d need to, I think, looking around the shabby room.

  There’s a neat stack of papers fanned out on the spindly table, inviting me to pry. I sit down on the bare kitchen chair and shine my torch on the top sheet. As I’d guessed, it’s covered with lists for her left-behinds.

  Siti, in Kampung Baha: dolls, toys. Sanitary pads.

  Ali, in Kampung Baha: Toy cars. Picture-books, sweets.

  Puan Hamza, in Kampung Tahan: milk powder, clothes, contraception.

  TOOTHPASTE, in large letters at the top, then in smaller ones: will they use it? Poor Mrs Hamza; poor little Siti, half-grown with her dolls and sanitary pads. I wonder how many teeth they have between them.

  At the edge of the desk there’s a book pushed down against the wall. It’s jammed as far into the corner as it can go, as though Mother Agnes tried to hide it in a rush before she evacuated. I work it free with guilty fingers. The pages crumple and tear, and then the book slips free. I look down, and nearly drop it. It’s her red exercise book.

  This book is Mother Agnes herself, all her secrets and chats and whispered little privacies. I know she uses this when she tells Ammuma her secrets, her regrets, her lumps and worries of the body. I sit there with the book in my hands. She wouldn’t want me to read it, I know that, she wouldn’t want anyone to read it. Even with floods surging at her door, Mother Agnes hid this where she thought it wouldn’t be found.

  I look down at the cover, and open it. This is worse than reading her diary, I understand, worse than prying through her drawers. But I’m doing it anyway, skimming over the pages. A spice of gossip here, an apprehensive confession there. A little bleeding, she’s written, a little pain – and I turn the page quickly before I need to think. And then something right near the end, a recent entry, catches my eye. It looks like another one of those left-behind shopping lists – and I frown. Mother Agnes doesn’t make lists in her red exercise book; she talks.

  Sweets.

  Dolls.

  Socks, five packs at least.

  Some clothes, a blouse or two. T-shirts.

  Floss? (check Cold Storage)

  Robinson’s toys: light-ups? But what about batteries?

  Picture-books. (Maybe pony ones? Little Twin Stars?)

  Little Twin Stars. That gives me a jolt. I turn the page with fingers that are unaccountably sweaty, and see what’s written on the other side.

  Francesca Panikkar, in Kampung Ulu

  I’m cold. My lips feel numb and goosebumps are sprouting on my legs like mosquito bites. It feels like hours that I’ve been sitting here, staring at that page. Floss, I could recite. Socks, five packs at least. Francesca Panikkar, in Kampung Ulu.

  Except that she isn’t. Toys might be in Robinson’s, certainly. Floss, without doubt, available in Cold Storage. But Francesca Panikkar, if she was ever anywhere near Kampung Ulu, was there in handcuffs and under protest and thirty years ago.

  I switch the torch off and sit there in the dark. I must have stared too long, because now I’m seeing colours and starbursts and rings of light. Shapes, faces. Francesca in her handcuffs. And then, out of the past, Mad Ahmad. I remember his drooping eyelids and loose red lips; I remember the burn scars on his neck. He was the only one rescued when the San caught fire. A miraculous survivor, the Straits Times said. They even took his photograph.

  I take a deep breath. Francesca’s an old story, I tell myself. Her picture’s in the prayer-room shrine. She was my Amma-friend. We kept her things in a biscuit tin. All that makes sense, in a sad and twisted way. But this list doesn’t. Dead people – even burnt-up mothers, even drowned housewives and Pahang’s take-your-pick medley of ghosts – don’t brush their teeth. They don’t eat sweets or wear clothes, and if there are any nightmares going round, they’ll be the ones who give ’em.

  Which means this list – brand new, written now, not thirty years ago – is for someone else. Some other child, some other children Mother Agnes would beg, borrow and steal for. Children she’d lie about even in her sacred red exercise book, if that’s what it took to get Ammuma’s interest and her money. Because charity – she’s always said – begins at home.

  The left-behinds.

  I pick the book up again and start to turn through the pages, angrily ripping the edges and glad about it. But there’s nothing else in here except Mother Agnes’s health worries and her money troubles that I’ve no sympathy for, not any more. There’s a chill rage inside me, the sort that’ll build until it lights me up like a firework. Ammuma hates the left-behinds. She wouldn’t give them the time of day, let alone some socks and dental floss. She’d have to be tricked into it; she�
�d have to be cheated and lied to and begged-from borrowed-from stolen-from, because charity – she’s always said – begins at home.

  I wonder just when Mother Agnes decided to do it. Did she see a left-behind girl – like Siti, with her dolls and sanitary pads and all-too-alive needs – that she couldn’t afford to help? Mother Agnes can’t say no to the left-behinds, but perhaps she reached a point where she couldn’t afford to say yes. Did she think that someone else could, if only that someone would take her eyes off her own dead daughter?

  I wonder how long it took to convince Ammuma, who’s halfway to believing in ghosts without being given any encouragement at all. A second chance, Mary, Agnes would have written. That left-behind girl is your daughter, your grown-up-and-dead daughter resurrected; brought back to life with a tomboy grin and dirty knees. It’s Francesca before her hair was cut off; before the Japanese walked in and common-sense and common decency walked out. Before she got herself pregnant and everything went wrong. Francesca in Kampung Ulu, of course, because ghosts in Pahang stay where they died. And charity begins at home.

  24. And Another Princess is Born (A Tale)

  You can’t lie in mathematics. A lie gets you nowhere; tangles you up in your own proof and dumps you out again at the beginning. In mathematics, lies are pointless. In stories, of course, it’s different. Lies are practically required.

  But mathematics and stories need the same things, when you come down to it. A premise, to get you started on your way. An inference or two, to keep you on your toes. And a conclusion, a suck-it-and-see, to tell just how badly you all went wrong.

  So, let’s take a story that Ammuma’s told me again and again. ‘How You Were Born, Durga’: a sweet little tale of beginnings. Let’s stand it up in the light of facts – facts about left-behinds, for example, facts about handcuffs – and see just how well this tale really hangs together.

  Ammuma’s Tale: The Premise

  You can’t argue with premises. They’re not amenable to interpretation; they’re factual and feet-on-the-ground. You can look them up in reference books, you can cite them without fear of contradiction. They won’t get you far, premises, but perhaps that’s no bad thing.

  By the time the war ends in 1945, Malaya’s overrun by competing factions. There are Japanese soldiers stubbornly holding out; there are Malay Wataniah resistance fighters and vindictive British pen-pushers; there are hooligans and rebels and collaborators. And then, of course, there are the Bintang Tiga. Depending on who you ask, they’re Communists, or Malayan independence fighters bent on overthrowing British rule. They’re merciful, they’re terrorists, some of them are your neighbour or your best friend, even though you’d never know it. They’re the jungle guerrillas whose war begins where the road ends.

  The British, of course, don’t agree with Malayan independence. They just got the place back, after all, and they’re damned if they’re handing it over now to a bunch of natives. And so they act, spiriting away the Sultan of Pahang to keep him safe in case any rebel fighters have assassination on their minds. But things don’t stop there. There are still pockets of Japanese soldiers here and there, and when Tokyo learns the Sultan’s gone, it panics. The Sultan’s safety, after all, was in Japanese hands, and if he’s been lost somewhere, then who knows what the victorious British will do in revenge. Tokyo concludes the Sultan must have been captured by those rebel fighters – because where else could he have gone? – and send out a retaliatory force that kills nineteen kampong villagers and Cecelia’s mother, Yoke Yee, before anyone can sort it out.

  It’s a difficult time for everyone, the ten years from 1948 to 1958. Malaya’s only just put down its weapons to celebrate the end of one war and now it’s picking them up again to fight for independence. ‘The Emergency’, this fight will later be called. For ten years there are food shortages, gunfights and curfews. On the street corners where Japanese soldiers used to stand there are now British officials, demanding travel passes and respect. If you blinked, you might have thought nothing had changed.

  By 1954, though, things are slowly becoming calmer. The worst of the Emergency is over, and in just three years’ time Malaya will win independence. It’ll transform into Malaysia, with as many birth pangs as you might expect.

  Ammuma’s Tale: The Inference

  Inferences are trickier; there’s nothing to stop you leaving logic and common-sense behind. ‘We leave this as an inference for the reader,’ a mathematician will happily write. Too trustful, these mathematicians. Too trustful by half.

  Ammuma always insisted 1954 was a peaceful time. By then she’d closed off most of the rooms in the house and the dung-plastered compound yard had been given over to vegetables. A peaceful time, a time of growing and taking stock.

  Mary and Francesca are managing in 1954: they’re making do, they’re raising guinea fowl and growing yams. Francesca is sixteen and nearly grown-up when she delivers her momentous news. She’s sitting on the verandah in her school uniform and scraping the shells from a bowl of hard-boiled eggs.

  ‘What did you say!’

  ‘George and I are going to have a baby, Amma.’

  George is her classmate. Only fifteen, from a St Thomas Christian family and nervous enough to come out in a rash during mathematics tests. He’s not the kind of boy you remember, and Mary has a hard time even picturing his face. Francesca keeps right on shelling the eggs. She’s a pragmatic child.

  ‘But your – your training course. And his university plans – and what about –’

  Mary drops her spade and treads through the vegetable beds to look up at the verandah with her hands on her hips. She has a right to be aghast, after all she’s done. She’s kept a tight hold on Francesca all through the Emergency, only permitting boyfriends with the most impeccable credentials and no Communist leanings. Boys with shining teeth and Brilliantined hair, with sky-high ambitions and life-size finances. And now, with the Emergency nearly over, Mary’s treasured daughter has only gone and got herself pregnant.

  ‘We’ll have the baby first,’ Francesca tells her calmly, and puts a clean egg into her overflowing basket. She’s certainly one for metaphors, this girlish mother of mine. ‘Then George will go to technical college in Ipoh, and I’ll do secretarial training. In KL.’

  Another shock for Mary. KL is a long way from this bungalow in Pahang, with all her daughter’s toys only put away yesterday and those shut-up spare rooms that would be perfect for a nursery. All her hopes, wrapped up in this one girl-chick who might just fly away. She pulls herself together.

  ‘I expect you’ll be wanting me to organize the wedding,’ she grumbles. ‘And at a moment’s notice, too.’

  She’s shocked enough, but not wholly so. There’s a part of her that likes the sound of another wedding; thinks back fondly to her own red-gold sari and the pre-war extravagance of snake charmers. She’ll open up the old annexes to hold the sangeet in, she thinks. Invite friends. Invite relatives, such as they are. No parents, sadly enough. No Anil (and here’s a tangent, here’s a thorny, thickset path: how did he die? Best not inquire; Mary stitches up a new version every time she tells the story and in Pahang, at least, people understand why).

  ‘We aren’t engaged, Amma. George hasn’t asked me.’ Francesca gives a doleful sniff that shoves her heavy breasts together under her outgrown bodice.

  Mary’s jaws snap together. Her fingers curl and her eyes turn to tiny chips of light. She might have learnt patience, but she’s certainly not practising it. Her hiss carries on the wind; the grit of her teeth drowns out the kampong’s evening call to prayer and her flare of anger turns the rice in cooking pots for a mile around to charcoal. It’s no wonder that, within a day, Francesca’s boyfriend George finds himself climbing up those verandah steps in response to Mary’s summons. Poor George; a burnt dinner is only the beginning of his problems.

  ‘November,’ is how Mary greets him. ‘After Diwali. That’s when you’ll marry.’

  It’s an auspicious time. It’s also a
cheap time, snake charmers typically vanishing in the rainy months to coax their charges out of baskets somewhere drier. Mary’s hard-headed; she’s counting her pennies and counting her blessings and counting on George’s proven cowardice.

  And, indeed, after a few pre-matrimonial scuffles, Mary prevails. George is still in school himself, he’s young enough to be quixotic and old enough to be romantic and he doesn’t stand a chance against Mary when she’s made up her mind. An engagement is announced and a house is bought, just on the outskirts of Kampung Ulu. There is, in time, a measured amount of rejoicing. Henna is painted, auspicious dates are forecast and there’s a certain pleasurable bickering over the fit of Francesca’s wedding sari. Mary’s in her element and she has things under control, right up to the point Francesca gives birth three months earlier than she’d foretold, and ruins the fit of her wedding sari for good and all.

  Ammuma’s Tale: The Conclusion

  Conclusions, now – conclusions are where the real difficulties start. You don’t like where you’ve finished up, you don’t like how it’s all been left. And who are you going to blame? The storyteller, that’s who. The mathematician. The monster.

  Ammuma always finished this story with a single phrase: ‘You can’t count your chickens without breaking eggs.’ And the way she told it, something does break inside Francesca. Francesca dies three days after the birth, almost peacefully. Ammuma says there’s even a smile on her face, which is wildly unlikely. Ammuma’s story concludes that I’m a gift. A mistaken gift – the kind of present you’d never have asked for – but one that was somehow welcome all along. No wonder Ammuma steers clear of logic, she’s worried I’ll disappear in a puff of it.