‘Durga?’
And then I’m awake. Properly this time, cold-water awake. Tom’s crouching in front of me. A stethoscope swings from his neck and he wears an unbuttoned white coat with green scrubs beneath.
‘Durga, wake up. I’ve just been in with Mary-Auntie.’
‘But …’ I’d been expecting Dr Rao, with his heron-limbs and apologetic face. I rub at my eyes, drag my hands over my cheeks.
‘Is she all right?’
He nods, then looks away. He’s uneasy, shifting his weight between his thighs. Europeans can’t squat – they hover, all stretched tendons and creaking muscles – and Tom looks uncomfortable in his too-tight scrubs.
‘I’ll take you in to see her, but … look, we should talk first. We’ll have a coffee.’
He tucks his hands behind his back as we walk to the café. His shoulders are set tight, chilled with disapproval and dignity. He doesn’t ask me how I take my coffee, just orders for us both – yes, sir; nice to see you again, sir – and picks up the cups without a smile. The Sikh café owner shrugs, watching as we scrape into aluminium chairs.
‘How did it happen, Durga?’ Tom asks, when we’re sitting down. ‘The equipment shouldn’t have broken like that.’
‘She bit it,’ I say. ‘It was … no, actually, it wasn’t. It wasn’t an accident. She did it on purpose.’
‘She bit it? What do you mean she bit it? How long ago?’
‘Oh … I – I don’t know. It’s been – I mean, I had to go out this evening.’
He nods. ‘So she did it while you were out?’
I look down at my hands. ‘No,’ I say quietly. ‘I went out afterwards. I thought she was OK.’
‘You did what?’ He looks disbelieving. ‘When she’d already started having breathing difficulties? You should never leave somebody in that condition, Durga. Never. Surely Rao told you that?’
I don’t say anything. Tom pushes a hand over his forehead. He’s tired, spots are breaking out under his jawline and he looks pasty and exhausted.
‘What are you still doing here anyway?’ he asks, sounding distracted. ‘I thought you were going back to KL yesterday.’
‘I was, but the road was blocked.’ That flooded road seems a year ago by now. Sitting in the car, turning to go to Tom’s house, and everything since is disintegration.
His reflection in the polished chrome table top looks smug and self-satisfied, his mouth still square from telling me how I should have managed better with Ammuma. I stare back at him. It’s been the longest night I can ever remember. And now Tom’s sitting there with the calm and cow-like expression of someone who’d never be careless. Who’d never leave anyone to run out of oxygen, Peony adds with a shrug of her thin shoulders. He’s a mirror image, flipped Tom; the opposite of anything real, and I want him to take his fair share of blame.
I met Alice, I could tell him. I met your wife. With her lacy English name I’ve never heard you say once. Not even by accident; not even how you say Peony’s.
And he’d try to explain – no, even worse, he’d bluster and bluff – and I’d be sarcastic, and then he’d say it didn’t matter anyway. And I’d ask what the hell he thought he meant by that, but I’d know. He’d mean Alice doesn’t matter, and I don’t and even Karthika and her baby don’t. We’re not fifteen any more, we’re not bright-eyed and tangle-haired and burnished up by Tom’s unreliable mind. We’re grown-up now and turning into our own grandmothers. We’re washed-up and ended-up, and none of us is Peony.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say instead. ‘I shouldn’t have left Ammuma.’
He leans closer and puts an arm around my shoulder. He feels very hot and there’s a stickiness to his hands, as though he hasn’t rinsed the soap off. He’s had those hands in people’s bodies, I think, pulling out organs and stitching their hides back together again. A wave of dizziness passes and I taste coffee sugar mixed with bile.
‘Come on, Durga, we’ll go up and see her. She’ll be on the ward by now.’
He pushes his chair back and takes me through the swinging double-doors and up the metal staircase behind. On the third floor a blue sign reads ‘Short Term and Emergency’. There’s a corridor leading off it, with more chairs and a few nurses chatting. Tom pushes the first door open and stands there with a practised-in-the-mirror smile, just like a doctor should.
‘Mary-Auntie,’ he says. ‘Mrs Selva.’
There are only two beds in here. Ammuma’s nearest, with pale blue curtains drawn half-round. Mrs Selva must be the woman by the window. She’s propped on wedge-shaped pillows and attached to machines by a tangle of tubes. Rows of faded Christmas cards stand on her bedside table, some so old I can barely make out the design. She stares at me, her eyes newly hatched and tender, then looks away.
‘Ammuma?’
Ammuma’s in a white hospital gown again, and the fabric smothers her. She still looks so much smaller than her size. She looks like a patient, or an invalid. She looks like Mrs Selva.
‘Ar, Durga.’ She sounds weak and breathy. ‘Wait already for hours for you.’
There’s a rap at the open door and a nurse puts her head round. ‘Dr Harcourt, you’re wanted on Ward Nine.’
Ammuma narrows her eyes. ‘Aiyoh, no privacy in here.’ She doesn’t think much of Ward Nine, or their wantings either. ‘People walking in-out, cannot be sitting with my granddaughter without fuss.’
The nurse flushes and Tom gives her a quick, apologetic glance. I don’t care. I’d take every single nurse flouncing away in disgust, if that’d mean Ammuma was back to her old self.
‘I’ll just be outside,’ he says. ‘Call me – either of you – if anything happens.’
When he’s gone I sit down heavily on the bed. The dawn light filters through the window, giving everything a cigarette-ash haze. Ammuma watches me in a companionable silence.
‘Ammuma …’ and then I burst out – ‘I lost Amma’s plait.’
I don’t know where that came from. There are a hundred other things I’d meant to say – practical, logical things – but here in this milky morning light I’ve forgotten them all.
‘I went to Mother Agnes’s house and I dropped it there or in the car park, or …’
I’m shaking, and I can’t stop the words spilling out. Why now, I don’t know: now when she’s safely in hospital and the worst is surely over. Don’t be stupid, Dr Panikkar would say. Pull yourself together, she’d add, as if that was all it took.
‘You went to Agnes’s house?’ Ammuma asks. She doesn’t sound angry, just curious. Her arm snakes out from under the heap of her too-large hospital gown and she takes my hand.
‘I wanted to ask about Francesca and the San. I didn’t know you were choking. I thought …’
She clucks her tongue. ‘Oh, Durga,’ she says. ‘All this mathematics, isn’t it? Always wanting for it to be right, instead of true.’
She sits there quietly then, breathing slowly. There’s a hum from the machines hooked up to Mrs Selva. The three of us are silent, listening to that hum and the squeak of sturdy shoes in the corridor outside. It’s enough, in a way.
After a second Ammuma stretches up, and I feel her stroking my hair. She combs her nails through it, tugging the knots as carefully as she did when I was small. I close my eyes and feel her palm run like water down the length of it. The air’s cool on my scalp as she divides the hair into three sections.
‘And when the sun came up,’ she says in a low, soothing voice, ‘they knew that they were safe.’
‘You used to tell me that story, didn’t you? Almost every bedtime.’
I remember the smell of Nivea, the sound of Flit and the shutters being closed, the dim hallway light blurring through my mosquito net. I twist round to see her, but she puts her palm flat on my shoulder and gently pushes me straight again. She’s known that story for sixty years, her little push says – long before Nivea and Flit and hallway lights – long before she was anybody’s Ammuma at all. Back when she was Mary. Plain Mary, t
hirty-two years old, with a nine-year-old daughter and not much else to show for it.
26. The Princess Returns: 1947
‘And when the sun came up, they knew they were safe.’
Mary finishes with a flourish and a sigh of relief. These days she has to do the best she can with the tiger-prince’s growls, snorting them from the back of her throat. With half her teeth gone she doesn’t have much of a choice.
‘No! No!’ Francesca screams.
Mary doesn’t mind her daughter’s temper; after two years in a Kempetai prison she never even expected to find Francesca again. Mary was one of the last to be released, weeks after the Japanese surrendered. She fought, she wore her fingernails down in scraping at her cell wall and her tongue down in screaming. And that got her nowhere at all, so she cultivated patience and politeness instead. She told herself they’d be fair. (Oh, Mary. Why start believing in fairness now, of all times?)
So, with one thing and another, Mary stayed locked in her makeshift Kempetai cell until the end of 1945. She’d hoped to find that Anil had already been released, but there was no trace of him. All she got for her pains was a chilly, official letter from the government, agreeing to make inquiries into his whereabouts. Didn’t she realize – the letter sneered through its mistyped address and ill-glued stamps – that there’d been a war on? Other people were missing, said the creased envelope. Mary would just have to wait, and the official stamp confirming this sloped halfway off the page.
In any case, Mary had no choice. She’d contracted TB in prison, her skin and lungs damp from stagnant water. She was released on a stretcher and taken to hospital, where it took her three months to talk and another three to stop screaming. And then she was handed her bus fare and a packet of nasi lemak wrapped in a banana leaf. And she came back to Pahang.
The house, when she arrived, was swarming with monkeys. They’d pulled down her father’s ramshackle rooms and moved into the cellars. They’d uncovered the wells, they’d made cubbyholes behind the doors and tucked themselves into the rotting beds. Mary flung them out in furry armfuls and kept right on looking for Anil and Francesca.
She searched for two years, knocking on doors and questioning street-beggars. Francesca? Four years old when … do you remember her? Did you see her? Did you help her? She got nowhere. Mrs Varghese had fed Francesca for a week until her rice supplies ran out and her own children chased the girl back into the jungle. Agnes would have taken her in, of course, but Agnes was in a prison camp herself in Kedah. Yoke Yee wouldn’t have helped, Noor Abi might have but didn’t, and everyone else in the village was mired deep in their own bad endings. Mary ripped that government letter to shreds, set her teeth, and refused to conduct a funeral for her husband or her daughter. Rajan could manage that for himself, she declared, and Francesca – well, Francesca wasn’t dead.
And so on, until an ordinary day in 1947. Mary was in the garden, hacking with a changkol at the tapioca plants. She wasn’t even thinking about Francesca when she heard the voice.
‘No!’
There was a figure standing at the edge of the compound, where the walls had crumbled. A naked figure, stick thin and scarred by ringworm; hair tumbled into a bird’s nest and a distended belly caked in dirt. Mary will never be able to explain how she knew it was her daughter straight away, how every molecule in her blood leapt nearly out of her veins, how she found herself on her knees in the mud with her arms around her daughter and the tapioca plants gone to glory.
It only took a week at home before Francesca made her preferences clear. Pencils instead of dolls. Dal instead of tapioca. A bedtime story she wanted again and again.
‘And when the sun came up,’ Mary repeats obligingly, ‘they knew that they were safe.’
‘No!’ Francesca says again, squirming off her mother’s lap. She squats in the dirt at Mary’s feet, poking at ants with her finger and repeating, ‘No!’
Francesca doesn’t say much else, but that’s hardly surprising. She’s nine years old, and four of those have been spent hiding in the jungle. She’s seen war from a thicket of rattan spines and peace from a vine-fringed ditch. She’s seen her mother taken away and come back to find her bony and utterly, utterly changed. No! is the only word life needs, so far as Francesca is concerned right now.
Mary picks Francesca up and takes her to the shower room. It’s only been in the last few days she could bring herself to let her daughter out of her arms long enough to bathe her. And she repays the effort. She’s beautiful, Mary thinks. She’s the most gorgeous little girl there’s ever been. There’d be no hiding her now, no passing her off as Joseph-the-boy, should it be needed. But it isn’t needed, Mary knows, it isn’t, and she could nearly explode with the sheer, fizzing joy of that.
‘No,’ Francesca observes, splashing the water in the shower-bucket. She squirms against Mary’s knees as Mary trickles palmfuls of water over her. Mary rubs her daughter with a piece of old serge, then braids and plaits her hair. One-two-three, twist, with Francesca protesting all the time. Tonight Mary will tuck her daughter up under the only mosquito net, which by now has holes large enough for a civet-cat to get through. Not that it matters; those years in the jungle have toughened Francesca’s skin until any mosquito would break its nose on her carapace. Francesca will lie there, batting placidly at huge, soft moths. And Mary will tuck her dupatta over her head and finish the story of the tiger-prince and the princess, the one which ends with the sun coming up and everyone safe.
‘No,’ Francesca will say. ‘No.’
(‘But Ammuma,’ I interrupt. Because I can. Because this is, after all, a story. Liable to interruptions, to corrections, to obfuscations and lies and tiny changes. ‘You said you got out of prison quickly. You said it was only –’
‘Didn’t say, Durga. Always with assumptions.’ She gabbles this out triumphantly, sounding uncannily like me. Score one, I think, to Ammuma.
‘And Dr Rao. You said you’d never had TB. He asked –’
‘Yes, and now telling, isn’t it?’
‘But they could have treated you. It was important. You should have said.’
‘Secrets, isn’t it.’ She looks stubborn and mulish. ‘No need for telling secrets.’
Hypocritical, when she can’t hold anyone else’s long enough to melt on her tongue. She pats my hand and settles back against the hospital pillow. One big breath and then she gives a deep, rattling cough. A consumptive cough, weak in the lungs and strong in the throat.)
‘I’m perfectly well. Never been better.’ Mary coughs again, and Agnes flinches slightly.
Of course you are, she prints diplomatically.
By 1954, Agnes isn’t living in the convent any more. The building’s fallen to ruins, mossed with butterflies and wild frangipani. A damn good thing, Mary says, and Agnes is diplomatic about that, too.
She’s sitting with Mary on the verandah, both sipping glasses of well-water and listening to the evening. It’s so still that sounds can be heard from a mile away: children playing with kites in the padang, Mrs Varghese slapping out her chapatti dough and the slippery noise of Arif-the-postman relieving himself on the trunk of a handy teak. In 1947 this peace would have seemed impossible, but since then the Emergency has come and – largely – gone. A handful of deaths in the valley; a handful of resettlements behind the barbed wire of the New Villages. Registration for most, deportation for some and food shortages for all. But life’s nearly back to normal now. A few black areas still bristle with roadblocks and heave with Communists, but none in this valley. There’s room for the smaller things in life here, room for chapattis and poor hygiene.
Why don’t you go and see the doctor anyway? Agnes persists. She doesn’t like the sound of Mary’s cough, or the way her friend has to squint into the fading light. TB can take your eyesight, Agnes knows, but Mary sets her jaw and shakes her head firmly at the suggestion of a doctor.
Or a bomoh … But at that Mary stands and claps her hands sharply together.
‘F
rancesca!’ she calls. ‘Go to the kitchen. Now!’
‘No,’ floats back an answer from the corner of the compound. Francesca’s huddled against the wall and digging her way along the side path. Tunnelling out, or in, depending on how you look at it.
Francesca’s a large girl, now. She’s sixteen years old and heavy-limbed with it. Every night Mary cleans her daughter’s teeth and tucks her in under the mosquito net, buttoned into a fresh pink nightgown with her hair plaited. And every morning Mary wakes to the sound of digging as Francesca – naked, her hair filled with mud and twigs – tries to scrabble under the compound walls and get back to her jungle home. Francesca’s determined to get away and Mary’s determined to keep her here, whatever the cost in pink cotton nightgowns.
‘Don’t talk about bomohs in front of her,’ Mary snaps.
Because Francesca’s already seen a bomoh. Of course she has. What else would you do with a girl who can’t even read, a sixteen-year-old who spends all her time drawing or digging? She’s no interest in books or boys or even the lipstick Mary had hoped to forbid her from wearing. Francesca thinks like a child; she likes pencils and toys and satin ribbons; she likes party frocks and sweets that make her almost too large to fit in them. Mary only got her to the bomoh by bribing her with laddoo and sugary burphi. The bomoh was underwhelming: a gentle man in spectacles and a link-detached house. He greeted them with courtesy and a mild insistence that Mary put Francesca into an institution. ‘No!’ Mary told him, and he raised his eyebrows as though he’d realized where Francesca got it from.
So Mary’s had quite enough of bomohs and doctors, one way or another. But something’s upsetting her tonight, more than usual. Perhaps it’s the strangled quality of Francesca’s grunts, or the way the shadow of a sapling durian tree nudges her daughter’s feet. Perhaps it’s the tricky evening light, the sound of Arif’s bicycle; perhaps it’s nothing at all but hindsight when she tells this story forty years later, but Mary suddenly stiffens.
Fragile Monsters Page 22
