‘Agnes,’ she says quietly, bolt upright in her rattan chair. ‘Someone’s coming.’
Both women freeze; the Emergency isn’t so far gone. Footsteps come down the drive. Strange, dragging footsteps, from feet without any toes. From club-feet, the nails long since pulled off – and the fingers, too, and the lips and tongue that he barely used anyway, and –
‘Anil!’
Standing on the drive is a figure that Agnes wouldn’t have recognized. He’s dressed well, in a suit too large and too thick for his frame. It could conceal a lot of things, a suit like that. Wasted limbs, ulcerous skin, muscles that don’t work and nerves that work only too well.
Mary flies off the verandah to Anil, wrapping him in a hug. He’s so thin that her arms go around him twice, and she has a sudden ugly panic that when she takes them away he won’t be there at all.
‘Where have you been? What’s happened?’ Mary’s hands flutter over him, registering his changed shape. A bulge here, an unaccountable hollow there. Behind her, on the verandah, Mother Agnes knows only too well. She writes a single word on her paper and stands up – tea and handbag tipping to the floor, her armpits moist and her lacquered nails catching the last of the sunset – and she holds up her page.
Leprosy.
Because of course Agnes knows, given the peculiar circumstances of her own birth. She’s delivered her message at last; twenty years too late she’s come out with a prophecy that’s enough to knock the very breath from Mary’s lungs. Leprosy. It means something worse than death, it means shame and isolation and loneliness for ever. It means Mary can’t expect any more visitors, ever, not even Arif-the-postman, who’ll start leaving the letters on a tree stump where the mites and silverfish will get to them before Mary does. No more visits to the night market, no more sharp words with the butcher over his propensity to stretch out the chicken with year-old mutton. No, Agnes thinks, Mary’s life will be changed for ever, and the best thing Anil could have done for his sister is to have stayed away and drowned himself quietly in the Jelai.
‘Don’t be horrible.’ Mary can see all this in the single flicker of Agnes’s calligraphic eyebrows. ‘He’s going to live here and that’s that. You don’t know everything, you and your … your convent-ery!’
Shades of her failed Junior Cambridge exam, perhaps; even at forty she still blurs the odd word or two. She puts an arm protectively around Anil’s shoulders, and feels something crackle under his shirt. She takes a deep breath and plunges her hand in, next to his skin. Eyes shut, of course, my canny young grandmother knows better than to look. She pulls out an envelope, limp and sodden with oil from his body.
Sungai Buloh Leprosarium, it reads. Anil Panikkar, discharged to the streets. Non-infectious.
And there’s a great, glorious government stamp to attest to the truth of the words. This stamp doesn’t slope off the page, it doesn’t ruck itself up in creases or fade where the ink runs out. This stamp has its hands on its hips and it’s proclaiming with all the breath in its lungs that the Panikkar son and heir has finally come home.
It’s an evening of rejoicing after that, an evening of eating and drinking and making merry. A rather silent evening, certainly. Perhaps not so much eating and drinking as would be expected either. So, an evening of the eyes instead.
Mary sits on the top step of the verandah, her gaze fixed intently on her brother. She’s produced a bottle of cod-liver oil for him, to build up his condition, and every few minutes she raises a finger to remind him to take another gulp. The hurricane lamps can flicker and smoke, the kueh can congeal on their plates and the tea go cold; the ghosts of drowned women can clamber out of the wells and stamp their feet till they bring down every durian in Pahang, but nothing will make Mary take her eyes off Anil.
And a pity it is, too. Because as she sits there, eyes on her brother and slapping automatically at mosquito bites, Mary misses rather a lot.
The way Anil looks at Francesca, for a start. When he left he had a boisterous, skinned-knee split-lip thug of a toddler nephew. Now he’s being faced with a blossoming teenage girl, her hair plaited and her body hinting at all kinds of things under a clean pink nightgown. Anil, whose body hints at all kinds of things too, doesn’t know what to make of her. Nephews don’t turn into nieces – Josephs don’t turn into Francescas – and that simplifies things. This girl, then, can’t be anything other than a beautiful stranger. He doesn’t, of course, say a word to her but as the evening express train whistles a drawn-out note in the distance, Anil tumbles head over ulcerated heels in love.
And Francesca herself? Mary strokes her daughter’s hair in the lamplight, feels the flicker and shine of it under her fingertips. Francesca’s watching Anil too, her head turned to him like a fern after rain. The whole time Anil’s been here, Francesca hasn’t said No! once.
Agnes is watching everyone else. She always is: Agnes has grown up quiet, overlooking and overlooked. She sees the love in Mary’s steady gaze, she sees the twining glances of Anil and Francesca and she does her desperate best to keep up her Christian cheer. Agnes will for ever reproach herself for having said nothing that night. She’ll wear herself out with new ways to do penance; she’ll work her fingers to the bone for charity and sacrifice every dollar she makes. But she’ll never make amends – Ammuma tells me now, snapping an elastic band around my plait – for holding that non-existent tongue of hers.
Ammuma brushes the end of my plait against my cheek. ‘That Agnes, ar,’ she says.
She coughs again, and a trail of blood and spittle clings to her chin. Her eyes are dreamy and filmed over. The sun beats in through the windows, and our shadows lie tar-black on the sheets. The whole room seems to quiver with heat, with the low, strong pulse of machines keeping Mrs Selva alive. Ammuma looks desiccated against the pillows, a grinning skeleton held together with oxygen tubing and bad intentions.
‘The war was over for ten years, when Anil-Uncle came back,’ she says. ‘So Francesca was …’
‘Sixteen years, Ammuma,’ I remind her gently and she gives me a black look.
‘Ar, very clever.’ She flicks a finger at my blouse. ‘You think I need to go to some Canada university to wear tight tops and learn to count, is it?’
‘So. Sixteen years. Aiyoh, too old for bothering Anil-Uncle like that. Not a moment for him to drink his tea.’
In fact, Anil has all the time in the world, and more tea than he knows what to do with. Francesca stations herself by the stove, dousing it each morning with enough kerosene to choke it. As soon as Anil’s had his tea, she lets the fire go out. The rest of them, so far as Francesca’s concerned, can subsist on old-food-cold-food-no-food, but Anil must have his hot drinks.
She’s in love with him, drowned in desire until she almost forgets to breathe. She fixes him with her eyes – weeping with kerosene and love – and refuses even to blink. She doesn’t say No! any more and hasn’t for weeks. With Anil’s scent in her nostrils strong enough to slice, there’s nothing she wants to deny.
And Mary is completely oblivious.
‘Anil, the child’s bothering you? You send her away.’
Anil blinks at his sister. They’re sitting together in the back of the compound, squashed together on a garden seat by the cool draught of the bathroom window. Mary coughs, covering her mouth. Blood spatters her palm, and she wipes it casually on her skirt.
‘Anil? Is Francesca bothering you?’
‘Fran-cesc-ca’, Anil says carefully. It’s the first time he’s said anyone’s name but hers, and Mary’s delighted. She leans close and gives him a fierce hug. The movement makes her cough, again, and Anil covers her mouth with a gentle hand.
‘No!’ Francesca’s been crouched in the annexe near the back wall, drawing some of her beautiful, intricate pictures. These pictures are how she talks, these days, people and animals and fantastic landscapes springing out from her pen. She comes striding out angrily as soon as she sees Anil touch her mother. She’s magnificent in the afternoon light, h
er hair tidy for once and cobwebs clinging about her sturdy knees where she’s been crouched on the ground.
‘All right, all right,’ Mary laughs, holding up her hands, and gets up to make room for her daughter. Her cough’s been worrying her lately, and if Anil truly doesn’t mind this puppy-love of Francesca’s then she’s quite happy to leave them to it.
She walks into the kitchen, cool and dim after the brightness of the garden. She coughs again, chokes, then picks up the bottle of cod-liver oil kept on the kitchen almirah for Anil. She takes a cautious gulp. Disgusting, that taste, but it’s done wonders to cure Anil. Already his eyes are so bright and his skin so clear that you’d hardly know he’d had leprosy at all. Perhaps, Mary thinks, it’ll do the same for her cough.
What Mary doesn’t know, not yet, is that she’s the one they should be worried about. Anil’s doctor in Sungai Buloh was conscientious through and through, a Chinese collaborator who poured his heart and his bank account into making amends. There’s no doubt: Anil’s perfectly safe to be around. But Mary, though, Mary’s a different matter. She’s leaving a slime of TB bacilli wherever she goes – when she wipes blood from her fingers or coughs on Anil, when she gulps from his cod-liver oil bottle or offers him a morsel of meat from her own plate.
In a few months Anil will begin to cough, too. His veins – already weakened from leprosy and unsafe doses of cod-liver oil – will strain and begin to leak. He’ll bleed under his skin and from his lungs, coughing up fluid until his tongue starts to swell and his fingers curl. He’ll die within a few weeks of falling ill, on a quiet afternoon with the breeze rustling the durian trees and the chickens pecking up dirt. By then he’ll be so frail that Mary, holding his head on her lap on that cramped garden seat, won’t even notice he’s gone. Not until she hears Francesca wail. No, Francesca will scream from her hiding-place in the annexe where she’s been watching the whole thing. No.
But it’s yes. It’s a yes that will tinge the rest of their lives with regret and if-only. It’s a yes that’ll bury itself and come out years after in the stories they tell and the lies they hold under their tongues. It’s a yes, quite frankly, that Francesca and her mother have no say in at all.
27. Wednesday, 10 a.m.
‘I thought Anil-Uncle died in the war,’ I say. Ammuma’s been plaiting and replaiting my hair all this time, and my eyes feel tight with headache. Mrs Selva watches us from her bed. She’s rippling her fingers like waterweed, imitating Ammuma as she combs.
‘Because of, ar.’ Ammuma snaps the hair-tie around the end of my plait and lets it fall against my back. ‘Because of the war.’
It’s true that she’s always been vague about Anil. She sometimes says he died from wounds, or shock, or old age and even – when she’s not in the mood for questions – that he never died at all.
‘So what happened after he died?’ I’m humouring her just a little. I can’t quite bring myself to believe in that TB. ‘To you, I mean, you and Francesca?’
‘Difficult,’ she says promptly. ‘So much fuss, forms to sign, got certificates and letters.’
‘But what did you do?’
‘Agnes some help, but flighty only. Cannot focus, not so clever for a schoolteacher.’
‘Ammuma –’
‘So much fuss also from her, wrong colour of book it is for her to write, wrong pen. No thinking –’
‘Did you put Francesca in the San?’ I interrupt.
Ammuma stops mid-sentence. She turns away with a heartbreaking, offended dignity.
‘Ammuma?’
She scrutinizes the wall clock, refusing to look at me. Out of the corner of my eye I see Mrs Selva turn over too. Her arms are weighted down with tubes and needles, but her hands still tug away at nothing. Plaiting invisible hair. Soothing invisible ghosts.
After a few minutes Ammuma’s voice comes quiet, cracked as a split cashew nut. Everything inside spilling out, whether you want it or not.
‘Had to, ar. Even my own daughter. So sick, after Anil died. Not her body, Durga. Her insides, her being. She wasn’t safe –’
‘She’d have been a lot less safe in the San!’
Ammuma shakes her head. She doesn’t even scold me for interrupting.
‘She wasn’t safe,’ she says again slowly, ‘to be near.’
She’s facing away from me, limp under the heap of her stiff cotton gown. She turns, with effort, and pushes the gown sleeves up above her elbows. Her burn scar is there, keloided and rope-like, puckering the skin beneath.
‘Always lighting fires. Lighting the stove, making coffee. Trying to bring back Anil-Uncle.’ She rubs at her scar reflectively.
‘When that didn’t work, lighting more fires. Kitchen. Bathroom. Bedrooms. Like you, Durga, last week,’ she adds with a trace of her old sharpness. ‘Always to burn down the house. Get it from your mother.’
I can’t quite catch my breath. ‘Did she – is that how you got that scar?’
Dr Rao asked me about that scar when I brought Ammuma in the first time. Wondering whether I’d done it, though he didn’t ask straight out. No, I should have said. No. You’ve got the wrong generation in your sights.
‘Not so bad, Durga, when she lit fires only in the house. But she ran away. Eight months pregnant, and setting fires in the jungle. Maybe hurting someone, getting hurt.’
Ammuma stops talking then. There’s a hum and clatter from outside as a stretcher wheels past the door. A nurse’s rubber-soled shoes, squeaking with efficiency and the smell of overcooked breakfast from somewhere down the corridor.
‘Agnes drove us to the San,’ Ammuma says very softly. ‘I sat in the back, with Francesca. Told stories.’
She closes her eyes, then says under her breath, ‘And when the sun came up, she knew that she was safe.’
Mrs Selva closes her eyes too, and breaks wind defiantly. Like Ammuma, she’s matter-of-fact about her body. Blood, pains, cramps, the empty-balloon breasts revealed by her hospital gown. She’s seen worse, and most of it’s been right here.
‘So. Enough of questions, Durga.’ Ammuma crosses her arms. She’s had enough of me, of Mrs Selva, of the stink of breakfast congee from the corridor. She’s all in favour of smells and stubbornness, but they’ve got to be her own. She shuts her eyes defiantly. Daylight reveals all the scuffs on the skirting board and the darns at the bottom of the bed-curtains.
I can’t let it go, though. ‘I thought you sent her there just to have me. Because she wasn’t married …’
Ammuma snorts. ‘Couldn’t know who to marry, is it? Some George-boy, Anil-Uncle, Arif-the-postman. Eenie-meenie, it is, like on the playground.’
Anil-Uncle? She gives me a cunning, sideways glance. See, Durga, she’s saying. A woman who seduces her own uncle, well, who knows where she’ll end up? Fallen. Ruined. Scarlet, and wicked and witchy as snakes. Locked up in the San for her own good, and for everyone else’s too; when we dragged her out she was fucking the postman.
‘But you told me my father was a boy, from her school …’
Ammuma gives me a loving smile that doesn’t quite come off. Too much gleam to it, too much fang and impatience.
‘And now I tell different,’ she says. Which is Ammuma through and through. She tells stories; she tells drowned women and Malay housewives and tiger-princes, and she’s told me all along that she’s not to be trusted.
‘More than one way to be right, isn’t it, Durga? Your mathematics, hanh?’
‘But this isn’t … I mean, it’s facts, Ammuma. It’s not mathematics, it’s –’
It’s real life, I’m about to say, and she gives me a triumphant look over her bedsheets.
‘In love, they were,’ she goes on calmly. ‘Your mother and Anil-Uncle. Your mother and anyone.’
‘But …’
‘And then he died. Romantic, all this kissing-mooning, but not right for her. She needs safer. Needs locks on the gates and windows.’
Locks on the gates. I can feel Ammuma wince as she says it, and I squeeze
her hand tight. ‘So Francesca died in there when it burnt down? Oh, Ammuma, I’m so sorry, I’m –’
‘No, Durga!’
As Ammuma says No! there’s a sound from Mrs Selva’s bed. A bubble of foul air forces its way from the tissues of her chest and her ribs begin to cave. There’s a sound like air being blown into a crumpled paper bag, and an alarm goes off on one of her machines. She coughs, making a noise like chickens squabbling, all snapping beaks and wings clapped together. Another alarm starts, blaring in the corridor outside. There’s a thud of feet on the vinyl floor. Ammuma turns to me quickly, her eyes bright and urgent.
‘Still see her,’ she whispers in my ear, a hot gush of words under the howling alarm. ‘My baby one, every month. In Kampung Ulu.’
She gives me a grin – a shocking, toothy flash – and pushes her legs down to the end of the bed. Her lips are closed firmly over her teeth and she’s sitting back now, watching the show.
The machine gives another shriek and Mrs Selva yelps. She’s woken in a flurry, her hair on end and no breath to complain about it with. I jump as the door’s flung open and Tom hurries in with his white coat flapping. He runs to Mrs Selva’s bedside and pushes a code into the machine’s front panel.
The alarm ratchets down a notch, then starts to rise again. Tom turns a dial, adjusting a bag that’s pumping fluid into her withered arm. After a few seconds the alarm cuts out. It leaves the room ringing with silence and the scrape of breath. Mrs Selva’s Christmas cards flutter in the breeze and Tom reaches out to set them straight.
‘Don’t worry,’ Tom says. He sounds professional, all-under-control, but his forehead’s furrowed with tension. ‘All OK, Mrs Selva, Mary-Auntie.’
Neither of them looks convinced. The noise of the alarm seems to have hammered them down, left them flattened with unease. If bodies can fail even here, in the lights and disinfectant of a hospital bed, then how can they be trusted at all?
Fragile Monsters Page 23
