Fragile Monsters

by Catherine Menon

  So that’s Ammuma’s story, and she’ll stick to it for as long as it’s convenient. But let’s postulate – let’s hypothesize – that there might be another story. One that fits the facts better – one that has Francesca ending up in the San in handcuffs, for a start. This story won’t have the same shine, because I don’t have Ammuma’s imagination. I don’t have her ability to add two and two and come up with five or seven or something else entirely. All I have is logic, and a photograph I’m beginning to wish I’d never seen.

  Durga’s Tale: The Premise

  In this other story, perhaps it would all begin badly, right from the start. Mary and Francesca would be at loggerheads, and Mary ironed flat with grief. In this story Anil would have died in prison, his body dumped at the house by an indifferent official. Francesca would have nightmares for weeks, the sort of nightmares that mean she inevitably ends up in her mother’s bed, or a friend’s bed, or any bed at all.

  Durga’s Tale: The Inference

  ‘You’re so old-fashioned!’

  Mary and Francesca are snappish with each other these days. It’s hard for them both, as Francesca’s breasts have swollen and Mary’s flattened, as Francesca’s dreamt of love and Mary’s drunk strong coffee to keep away any dreams at all.

  ‘That’s enough out of you, young lady,’ Mary retorts. Francesca’s sitting at the dining table eating hard-boiled eggs and dropping the shells for the kitchen cats. Mary’s tired these days, sagging under her own sparse flesh. She should feel liberated – like the younger ones do – but as far as Mary’s concerned, the Emergency’s nothing but another war.

  She has a point. Malaya’s barely looked around from celebrating the end of the Occupation before another load of would-be soldiers have plunged them into trouble. The MPAJA – the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army – who coordinated those fluid raids against the Japanese occupiers, stabbing with venomous fangs before gliding back into their jungle camps: well, they’re still here. They’re the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-British Army now, they’re the three-star Bintang Tiga, they’re a liberation army and a Communist militia; they’re bandits and folk heroes and, according to Mary, a bloody nuisance.

  And now the British have begun to uproot whole kampongs and march the villagers away to resettlement areas. These areas are barbed-wire swamps of mud and tree roots, where families labour to build houses only to find next morning they’re six foot deep in floodwater. The resettled villagers are caged in by wire and sentries and searched each morning to stop them smuggling out a single grain of rice for the Communist jungle fighters. When the villagers arrive at their rubber-tapping and farming work empty handed, those same Communist jungle fighters aren’t happy. The British are hanging everyone who smuggles food, goes the saying, and the Communists are shooting everyone who doesn’t.

  ‘That’s enough out of you,’ Mary repeats. Francesca doesn’t answer and Mary stamps away to the kitchen. She opens the cupboard by the chapatti oven, pulls out her pans, and only then notices that the sack of rice that lives behind them is missing.

  ‘Francesca?’ she calls. Francesca’s left the table in a litter of discarded eggshells and gone out to the verandah to do her calculus homework. Francesca’s sixteen, she’s smooth as butter in her starched school blouse and blue pinafore, her temper says she’s trouble and her brassiness confirms it. She’s Mary all over again, and it’s no wonder things aren’t going well.

  ‘What’s happened to the rice?’ Mary asks, folding her arms by the doorway. Francesca pauses, licks the point of an impeccably sharp pencil and begins to write. Proof, she sets down, and then looks up.

  ‘I gave it to the People Inside. The Communists – the fighters. They came here yesterday looking for supplies.’

  Theorem, she writes delicately, a slice of pink tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Francesca! How could you!’ Mary’s aghast. The jungle around the house isn’t hospitable enough for a Communist camp, being full of vicious rattan spines and slippery, unexpected holes where Stephen dug his many abortive wells. But once Francesca starts giving the fighters food, Mary knows they’ll never leave.

  ‘Like mice,’ she snorts. ‘Like rats,’ and Francesca slams down her pencil.

  ‘What do you know?’ she bursts out. ‘You’ve never fought, you don’t care about independence or anything, but they do! They’re brave, and strong and kind, and …’

  They is rapidly slipping into he. The women in my family are like that, full of murky female proclivities. They’re swayed more by the turn of a man’s jaw than the turn of his mind. Mary remembers her own youth, and feels a pang of sympathy for her daughter.

  ‘Is there a boy, then?’ she asks gently. ‘One of the bandits?’

  Francesca sniffs, crunching the wet end of her regrown plait between her teeth, and refuses to answer. If there is a boy – a Communist rebel with wild black eyes and a body like copper wire – then she’s certainly not going to tell her mother. In this version of the story Francesca isn’t tractable; she’ll have nothing to do with those nervous and rashy Georges in her class. She’s on her guard against traps, this Francesca, she’s not going to be snared with weddings and babies. Counter-argument, she inscribes neatly into her calculus book.

  And it’s rather a shame she wasn’t on her guard against anything else, because a few months later – after many gifts of rice and other, less quantifiable things – Francesca is still on the verandah doing calculus homework. But now the problems are harder, the proofs don’t come out so easily and she can barely see her pencil over the bulge in her tight-waisted blue pinafore.

  Beside her Mary shells the hard-boiled eggs for dinner, her lips tight and her fingers tearing off those protective cocoons. The smell turns Francesca’s stomach and sets up a queasy, rushing feeling inside her belly. Her own baby is being unshelled, beginning a long journey to an apartment in KL and a thousand regrets, and there’s nothing Francesca can do about it.

  Durga’s Tale: The Conclusion

  A few weeks before the birth Francesca will go into hiding in the jungle, since a squalling scrap of an infant is incontrovertible proof of consorting with someone. The British soldiers, by then, will have become frantic. They’re seizing hearts and minds, they tell each other, and they keep right on incarcerating the bodies that hold them. Francesca, at risk of being hanged for fraternizing with rebels, will retreat into the rattan spines. She’ll lurk there with her copper wire of a Communist boyfriend and the half-drowned women he’s dragged along to cook and clean. She’ll follow him, her three-star lover, into the jungle near Kampung Ulu. She’ll learn to set off bombs and fire guns and then one day she’ll be captured by the British and imprisoned in the San with all the other fallen girls. She’ll give birth in a room that stinks of blood and piss, and then she’ll catch childbed fever and die in her sleep, leaving Mary with nothing but an ungrateful baby and a basket of eggs for shelling. (QED, Mary. QED.)

  There are alternatives, of course, other stories that would work just as well. In one, Francesca consorts with a British soldier, old enough and pale enough to be her own grandfather. In another the only clue is the oily footprint of an orang minyak jungle spirit outside Francesca’s bedroom and the hallucinations that send her to the San. Stories on stories, and my mother walks through them with a smile and a blue school pinafore. She sheds her virtue at every dainty step. Here she is, creeping into the attic to make love or get herself raped. There she is, strolling amongst half-starved guinea fowl who swallow sand and lay eggs that are nothing but shell.

  We don’t do well across generations, the women in my family. Someone’s feelings are always being hurt, toes are being stepped on and home truths are being told. There’s enough pity in those truths to go around too, which doesn’t mean it always will.

  25. Wednesday, 1 a.m.

  It’s late by the time I get back. Midnight’s slipped past, with its witching-hour devilment and without me even noticing. My legs itch from pitul seeds and
the autograph book bumps against my thigh. When I reach the verandah steps, I stop. There’s a sound I can’t place. A harsh, sawing kind of noise that stops, then starts again and builds up to a cut-off rasp.

  ‘Ammuma?’

  She’s still in her chair where I left her, but she’s tilted. Lopsided, as though she climbed out and couldn’t resettle herself. One of the hurricane lamps has been lit, with the wick turned low. Was she looking for me? Her skin’s washed jaundice-yellow in the lamplight, but I can see a blue tinge to her lips. She coughs, and a thread of blood dribbles down her whiskered chin.

  ‘Ammuma!’

  I shake her. She doesn’t move, even when I shout into her face. She crumples again as I tug her upright. There’s a feeble trickle of air from her mask. I shove my fingers under the rim, but it’s blocked again. Blood coats the inside of the rubber, slimy and stinking. She’s champing steadily, chewing on the inside of her mouth, shredding her cheeks and I’m panicking. Pulling at the mask. Slapping the oxygen tank. My fingers are shaking, trying to unravel the tubing.

  ‘Durga. Gone already, isn’t it?’ The words strain through a sieve of tissue and used-up breath. ‘Woke up. You were gone.’

  The tubing won’t unblock. The mask’s half-torn and slippery with clots. I shouldn’t ever have left her. She’s going to drown in her own blood, and all because I left her.

  ‘We have to go. Ammuma, come on. We’re going to the hospital.’

  For once, she doesn’t protest. Her face is all rims and shadows, white around her nostrils. I heave her from the chair and her legs give way. I catch her, but the oxygen tank slams into the concrete. I jam my hands into her armpits and haul. She chokes, leaning over with her palms on her knees, then summons some air from nowhere.

  ‘Careless, Durga. Always making – some – fuss.’

  If she had more breath she’d elaborate: other granddaughters would manage the whole thing better. They’d have fixed their cars, for a start, so we don’t waste a few minutes waiting for the engine to catch. Their palms wouldn’t sweat as they babbled on and on about whether the road to Lipis was even open or whether it was flooded shut. They wouldn’t swear as they stamp on the accelerator, as they wrench the steering wheel to avoid a raw mudslide near the palm-oil plantations. They’d have come back earlier, they’d never have left in the first place, they’d have thought things through. She conveys all this in the hump of her shoulders, in a huff that uses up the air she doesn’t have. All things considered, she gets her points across pretty well.

  There aren’t many cars on the road, not at this time of night. A few motorcycles swarm up from a side track, skinny men with tired eyes and jackets draped back-to-front on their chests. The Gua Musang road must still be blocked. Nothing’s going to get through tonight and whatever our problems – hypoxic grandmothers, inattentive granddaughters, ghostly mothers – we’ll have to deal with them ourselves.

  Ammuma starts coughing again just outside Lipis. There’s more blood this time, and foamy spit. She dribbles, sucks her cheeks in and then begins to choke.

  ‘Ammuma, hold on. Hold on.’

  Her fists are clenched tight and her legs stuck out straight. I grabbed mismatched shoes from the pile, and one of Karthika’s cracked plastic sandals drops from her toes. She spasms, chokes again and then gets her breath.

  ‘Holding already, lah. You drive only, get us there … safe – instead of – playing tomfoolery.’

  The engine starts to whine as we go round the huge roundabout just outside Lipis. Ahead I can see the curve that’ll take us to the hospital and the fish-shaped fountain by the railway bridge. It’s garish in my headlights.

  ‘Come on, come on. It’s OK, Ammuma. You breathe, it’s going to be OK …’

  I change down a gear. We’re passing rows and rows of motorcycles now. The roads around the hospital are jammed like a termite nest: ambulances and medi-vans and blood wagons that don’t know anything about the darkening hours. Delivery motorcycles slew together, parked in a tangle of wheels that stretches all the way up to the narrow Pahang Club road. A few men stand protectively over them and turn to watch us pass. One of them laughs.

  The car park’s almost empty, with only a few cleaning staff squatting by the phone booths. Their cigarettes are tiny swerving dabs of light. A match flickers to show the gold outline of a chin, the rim of an eye, a flaring nostril.

  ‘Ammuma, stay here. I’m getting them to come, OK? Just stay here.’

  She coughs again, waving one bony hand at me. I push the car door, letting it swing and bounce with a protesting creak, and then I’m running across the car park. My shoes squelch at every step, and my heart slams into my ribs.

  ‘I’ve brought … please come –’ I jerk the double doors open. It’s busy and bright inside, full of patients on stretchers and wide-awake children running through the lobby. The curved reception desk’s covered with stacks of admission papers and plastic-wrapped syringes. A nurse sits there, licking her finger and paging through forms.

  ‘Yes, can I help?’ She looks up with a professional smile.

  ‘My grandmother’s outside. She’s Dr Rao’s patient, she can’t breathe. She was in here before, just a few days ago. But the oxygen tank isn’t working and –’

  She cuts me off, holding up one hand and reaching for the beige phone that sits on her desk. She gabbles instructions down the line – porterage needed and triage free. I find myself staring at her hair. It’s dry and frizzled, spreading like a broken umbrella around her head. A tiny fleck of dust clings to one strand.

  ‘The porters will be here directly.’ She makes a note in one corner of a form. ‘They’ll bring your grandmother in.’

  ‘She can’t breathe,’ I say again. Everything’s slowed down, like the air’s too thick to be pushed aside. The nurse is glass-clear against a blur of sound and light. There’s a line of pimples just at the neckline of her dress, and every time she raises her head the fabric scrapes slowly across them. She’s all raw skin and bleached-dry hair and she doesn’t have time for this.

  ‘Don’t worry. They’re on their way.’

  Her fingertips stray up to that scatter of acne. She dabs at it gently, experimentally, and rubs her fingers together. A minute stretches out like sugar-syrup and then two men come jostling out of a side door. They’re carrying a stretcher, and bursting with greasy, side-swiped laughter.

  ‘Haziq, Ibrahim, we need porterage for an incoming hypoxia.’

  The men stop laughing. Her neck flushes red under their stare and she puts her pen down. Spins round in her chair, with her knees neatly pressed together and waves them over to me. Haziq smiles at me, a burly middle-aged man with a belly held in check by exercise and will.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ I tell him. ‘It’s this way. Come on, quickly. Please.’

  He folds the stretcher down on its wheels, turning to give the nurse a wink. She looks down – blushing, like a teenager – and scribbles something on her notes.

  ‘Calm, slowly now,’ he says to me. ‘We take her to the doctors.’

  They wheel the stretcher close behind as I hurry to the car. Ammuma’s got herself out of her seat and stands peering across the darkened car park. Her hands are on her hips and her chest heaves like porridge on the boil.

  ‘Ammuma, they’ve come, they’ll help you.’

  ‘Plenty time … I’ve been waiting,’ she snaps. ‘Enough only – to mend – this tank.’

  The words come out in between breaths. Whispery, tinged blue by effort. When Haziq takes her arm to help her onto the stretcher she nearly collapses. Haziq straightens her legs and drapes her sari back over her swollen knees. They carry her past the cleaners: men in sarongs picking at a shared bowl of rice with their knees up like flamingos. To them, Ammuma’s only another patient, one more in an infinite series. They watch her go past, indifferently, detached as mathematicians.

  ‘Wait here, please.’

  Haziq pushes the stretcher through the double doors. He turns to me a
nd points at a row of metal chairs. Ammuma looks so small, flat on her back under these harsh lights. She turns her head away from me to stare out into the night. She can’t be doing with this fuss, that head-turn says. With Dr Rao and his impolite stethoscope, with nurses and their questions. Does it hurt when I press here? How about here? When did you last –? What first happened when –? ‘Questions again,’ she’d say. As though the answers ever did anyone any good.

  I watch her wheeled away through heavy swing doors and slump into a chair. My eyes feel scrubbed with exhaustion. The chair digs into my hips, where my skirt pulls tight and lumped from everything stuffed in the pockets. Car keys, a few coins I snatched up from the hall table. The autograph book on one side. The photograph of Francesca on the other.

  I pat the pockets again, then plunge my fingers deeper. The metal arm of the chair jabs against my elbow, but I barely notice it. I can’t find my mother’s plait of hair. It must have fallen out somewhere: in Mother Agnes’s house, in the jungle, even out in the car park. I stand up, digging my hands into both pockets and shaking out my skirt. Brushing myself down, checking pockets and waistbands and everywhere it couldn’t possibly be. I turn round and peer under the metal seats, but the plait isn’t there.

  The nurse looks over at me and dabs at her acne again. Don’t touch it, I want to tell her. Don’t pick at it; you’ll only make it worse. She looks like the sort of woman to appreciate a metaphor.

  The rest of the night passes slowly. I doze in the chair, waking to the flail and scurry of tiny emergencies. A child with measles, a man with stomach pains. People collect on the chairs, becalmed and waiting, and then disperse in flurries of alarm or relief. At one point I wake to hear the noise of metal shutters, and see the hospital café opening. A Sikh man lays out bowls of rice and pieces of wrinkled fruit, but nobody moves. An hour later I open my eyes again, and this time there’s a queue of men in vests and sarongs. Their toenails are sharp against their bare feet and they stink of cleaning fluids.