She takes the toothbrush out first, then a packet of sweets and a pair of beautiful drawing pencils. And then, finally, a doll. Nothing special, just an off-the-shelf rubber girl-doll from Robinson’s, but Mary’s carefully chosen it nonetheless. It’s an Indian doll – the ones she brings always are – and they’re always in satin saris. Durga, she’s written on the inside of its blouse collar. Francesca shouldn’t be allowed to forget her own daughter.
‘Fran?’ she calls. Nobody answers. There’s a giggling and a rustle of tiny, jostling bodies peeping from behind the far wall.
‘Let me see!’
‘Don’t push, Divya!’
The giggling gets louder. There’s a knot of children huddling behind that wall: all of them unwanted, all of them more trouble than they’re worth. If Mary looked closely she’d see several pairs of bright little eyes peeking through holes. Sharp noses, pushing themselves round corners; scrabbly little monkey-hands climbing up to get a look at her. Not that Mary does look closely. She’s never had time for the left-behinds.
But then she hears the whisper. She can’t ignore this; it’s real as a cold-water shower.
‘She’s a loony.’
‘Hush. She’ll come after you!’
‘Locks on the gates! Locks on the gates!’
The children tumble away, running back into the jungle, and Mary winces. It’s a sore spot, that game. Bad enough when Durga and her friends played it, but these left-behind brats haven’t got anything right. And now they’ve run off and left silence behind them, full of weighted and waiting expectancy. Outside, a tap drips onto the concrete floor with a horrible, plinking exactitude.
And then she hears it. The sound of cloth sliding on stone, as though someone’s leaned a sizeable rump against the corridor wall and sunk cross-legged to the floor. If Mary looked right now, she might see the flicker of a shadow out there. And if she listened, she might hear a dull noise: water dripping on skin instead of stone. Heavy skin, sagging a little from the years and the lack of a good coconut-oil bath. That’s no wispy ghost out there – as if she’d trail all the way out here for ghosts, when they’re ten a penny in her house – but a skin-bones-teeth-and-fat daughter.
Mary smiles. ‘Fran.’
‘No …’
It’s a familiar word, rolling off a muscly tongue. It’s a word in Mary’s head, or in the world or perhaps even in that liminal no-woman’s-land between the two. But wherever it is, that’s the no of a woman accustomed to using it a lot. A woman who’s had a lot to deny in her life, one way or the other. If only the locks on the gates had worked, thinks Mary, if only locks could keep a daughter right where she was put. She looks at the burnt-out walls. She’s nearly given up guilt these days, but not for this. Never for this.
Because that’s Fran out there, in the corridor. That’s no left-behind four-year-old, that’s a daughter Mary knows in her blood and in her bones. That’s Fran, who must be fifty years old by now but who will always be Mary’s baby one. Fran who loves strangers and drawing pencils, who loves digging tunnels and setting fires.
‘The fire was an accident,’ Mary recites quietly. She does this every time she comes here, in the hope that one day both she and her daughter might believe it. ‘It was an accident.’
Francesca, one way or the other, has always been an accident. She’s been an escape artist, she’s been an arsonist. She’s been a loony; she’s been a story; she’s been a bad girl and she’ll always be the best daughter Mary’s got.
Mary lines her gift-wrapped packages up more neatly. They’re a tempting row at the foot of the bed, but still that shadow in the corridor doesn’t move. She takes the doll onto her lap, dandling it.
‘You remember Durga, don’t you?’ She holds the doll up. ‘Your own little girl – here, like this doll.’
The bed’s uncomfortable, with the springs digging into Mary’s hips. She arranges her sari modestly over her bony ankles. ‘You’d be pleased. So like you, she is. Coming to see me next month for Diwali.’
It’s an effort to contort her tongue back to English grammar. Mary’s slipped into rubber-estate talk, as she calls it, over the past few years. Too much time alone, with nobody but the servant-girl to care. But she tries to speak differently when she’s here, to set a good example. A mother’s work, after all, is never done.
‘At the university still, putting these numbers together faster than you can count.’ Mary hesitates, revises. ‘Faster than I can count.’
She takes another breath, peers into the shadowy corridor. It’s cool out there, dank and wet, with drinking-tanks dripping from every crack. There’s a figure there, she’s almost sure of it; a glint of grey at its head and a swaddle of fat around its waist. These days, Fran’s too old to escape from a locked hospital room; to slip out of her handcuffs and set fire to whatever she left behind.
‘Are you writing in the autograph book?’ she asks into the silence. ‘The Little Twin Stars book? I brought it last month for you.’
No answer, and Mary’s starting to get impatient. ‘You should write in it. So ridiculous, your age and can’t write. Can’t even write a note to say hello to your little girl.’
This time the silence has teeth. A touchy subject indeed, and Mary sighs. Write a note to your little girl: a sentimental, useless thing to have said. Not like her, really. She must be getting old.
‘Sorry,’ she says. She can hear a noise out in the corridor, as though someone’s moving away. Footsteps, followed by a fainter rustle from the lobby, and the barely audible tramp-tramp-tramp of someone walking back up towards the swamp.
‘Fran?’ Mary says, but all she hears is the stirring of leaves against the walls. Francesca’s gone, then, she’s decided she’s had enough. Mary tightens her lips. She has to expect these disappointments, as a mother, and especially as the mother of a disappointment herself.
It’s almost time to go by now. The sun will go down soon, and there’s still an hour’s drive back to Lipis. Thick shadows have crept out from the corners of the room, and mosquitoes have gathered around Mary’s ankles. She slaps them off as she bends to retrieve her slippers. A gecko stares up at her with great, green eyes and through a hole in the roof she can see a few oily stars winking already in the heavy sky.
‘Will come again,’ she says. ‘Soon, don’t you worry. You’ll stay here?’
It’s her secret worry, that Fran will up and leave one day. She has form, after all. She moves on, leaving destruction in her wake.
And then there’s a noise. Perhaps it’s real, perhaps it’s all in Mary’s head. Hard to say, and Mary never will. It’s the sound of a car door slamming, back near the swamp. It’s the sound of a fifty-fat-and-fragile woman crawling into the back seat of a car left abandoned by a doctor who’s breaking his irrelevant heart just twenty metres away. It’s a pencil scratching on paper covered in pastel angels; a picture when writing words is out of the question. It’s Francesca, saying hello to her little girl.
‘You’re a good girl, Fran,’ Mary says into the warm, listening silence. And then – because old habits die hard, and here in Pahang nothing really dies at all – she squats back down on the bed, and pulls her dupatta over her head. Ready or not, living or dead, your daughter’s your daughter all your life.
‘Listen, my baby one,’ she says. ‘There was once a tiger-prince. And a warrior princess, who challenged him to a duel …’
Mary’s good at bedtime stories; spins them out of nothing but leprosy and logic, till they grow big enough to swallow themselves. Those stories have minds of their own, running in the family like a splash of kerosene. Her own mother told them. Karthika still does. Anil would have told them if he’d only had the words, and Francesca might still find a way. She’s resourceful, Fran, with her autograph books and pencils. Cleverer than her daughter, thinks Mary. Mary loves her granddaughter, but she got the measure of Durga years ago. Swap out numbers for words, put in a few categories and count on your fingers; Durga’s no better than the rest o
f them.
29. Wednesday, midday
After this, everyone takes Ammuma more seriously. Tom, in fact, takes her so seriously that he calls up Dr Rao and dumps the whole problem in his heron-like lap.
‘This confusion, it could be very serious,’ we hear him explain out in the corridor, sounding professional to the very ends of his teeth. And then, ‘She’s like family to me.’
Ammuma rolls her eyes. It might have taken her seventy years to figure it out, but she knows her family.
‘Fran drew them for you, Durga,’ she insists in a dry, rasping voice. ‘Your bedtime story.’
Ammuma and I are sitting tight-together in her bed. Over the past few hours she’s been taken away and then brought back, stuck all over with words and labels that don’t seem to have anything to do with her. She’s had a bleed on the brain, Dr Rao explained after one of these tests. A trickle, a lovely and poisonous flood of red exactly where it shouldn’t be. Who would have thought the old woman had so much blood in her?
She’s still Ammuma, despite it all. Tetchy, unforgiving. Calling her brain bleed a ‘burst heart’ and refusing to hear a word of contradiction. ‘Same same,’ she said when Dr Rao corrected her, but different. To Ammuma, her heart and her mind have always been identical.
She’s been talking constantly about Francesca, too. Each time she says her daughter’s name she forgets a little more detail, sending memories spinning with glorious sky-high tosses. There’s a kind of relief shining through her, budding and blooming where the X-rays can’t reach. She’s letting go, and glad of an end to it all.
‘You find Francesca,’ she tells me in a sliding, vague voice, and I agree. I hold her hand and agree with everything she says while Dr Rao mutters at the foot of her bed. He draws up some clear liquid into a drip bag. Ammuma talks urgently while he slides a thin, flexing needle into her arm. She tells me to go to Kampung Ulu. She tells me to search for ghosts and girls and real-and-fleshy women. Her body shakes as the drip pumps its liquid in, and then she tells me to feed the kitchen cats and post her letters before it gets dark. Are you listening, Durga? she says at first. And then her eyelids are drooping, and my name’s starting to slip away. Are you there, Fran? ‘Yes,’ I’m saying. ‘Yes, I’m here.’ Anil? she’s asking. Cecelia? Rajan? Amma? and I’m holding her hand and I’m answering yes.
Later, Dr Rao takes me down to the hospital lobby. My eyes feel scratched and exhausted and my skin’s raw from the air-conditioning. My hair still smells faintly of Ammuma’s Nivea cream.
The hospital lobby looks different in daylight. No more quiet desperation; people stalk right up to the reception desk and rap on it impatiently. We don’t meet each other’s eyes, we daylight survivors in our suits and our get-it-done frames of mind.
‘She must have had high blood pressure for years, Dr Panikkar.’ Dr Rao ushers me into a little closed-off room with a glass door. It’s hot in here, smelling of day-old sweat and baked-in worry. ‘When she choked on the oxygen tube it was the last straw. She burst a blood vessel on the surface of her brain.’
He has a plan of attack, he explains. This medication, that therapy. Fall-back options and alternatives and last resorts. He has so many last resorts. Ammuma’s confusion isn’t the worst he’s seen after a brain haemorrhage, he tells me. He talks about patients who thought they could fly, who thought their bed was a coffin, who lost their language and thought nothing at all. He tells me all these things – which are all worse, which are all much worse – and none of them make it any better.
‘We’ll put her in long-term care here,’ he says. ‘If you’re going back to KL?’
I just manage to nod. I don’t meet his eyes. I can’t explain the sheer impossibility of staying, the emptiness of it all. Ammuma not being Ammuma, Ammuma not being anything but a jumble of wrong names and missed memories, of sponge-baths and stains on the mattress and the hiss of water in the toilet pan at 3 a.m. while I wait outside the door.
Even though I don’t say anything, he still listens. We sit there in silence, and my breath is loud and shaking, and he watches me across the chipboard table. He’s seen a hundred Ammumas – a thousand Mrs Selvas – and he’s heard it all before. Promises to visit, to ring; tiny, niggling betrayals and efforts destined to fall short. He’s heard everything, here in this glassy room.
After a few minutes he gets up and puts an arm round my shoulders. He feels like a coat-hanger, as though there’s nothing under his white coat but bones and simplicity. He stays there a moment, and then the pager on his belt buzzes. He takes it up, looks at it and then sucks in his breath.
‘Wait here a second. I need to –’ And he’s gone, out of the door fast as a thrown stick.
I’m alone in the room, with the air billowing about me. I get up and close the door, leaning my forehead against it as it latches. I’ll come back and see Ammuma every weekend, I resolve. I’ve got the car. I can get back here from KL in just a few hours, even on a weekday evening. The road’s good, I chatter to myself, it’s really really good; it’s so quick to get back here, I mean anyone can do it in just a few hours; it isn’t really like being gone at all. And then I look up through the glass door and meet the gaze of the dry-haired receptionist. She gives me a sympathetic smile.
I don’t know how long I wait in there. I want to go up and see Ammuma, but I don’t know where to find her and I’m scared of leaving this room. Inside here, all I have to deal with are four plain walls and the gentle hum of the air-conditioner. These white-gloss walls won’t tell me bad news and that chipboard meeting table won’t blame me. We’re getting along, this furniture and I.
‘Dr Panikkar?’
But now there’s someone on the other side of the door. A gentle knocking vibrates against my forehead, where I’m still leaning against the wood. I pull the door open slowly and look straight into Dr Rao’s eyes.
‘Durga.’ He takes my hand, edging past me into the room. ‘Please sit down.’
He’s shutting the door, taking a long time about it and carefully clicking the latch into position. He doesn’t want to turn round, I think, he doesn’t want to say what’s in his mouth. And then I know what it is.
‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you. Your grandmother just passed away.’
It’s an hour later. I’m sitting on a more comfortable chair in a quiet green room. There’s a box of tissues on the low table in front of me, and pictures of waterlilies on the wall. Dr Rao’s led me away from my chipboard table and into this room on the fourth floor. It’s the room for grief, I suppose. Room for grief, which is something Ammuma never had.
Tom’s sitting opposite me. He’s found a blue plastic chair from somewhere, but it’s child-sized and makes him look gigantic and cumbersome. He is grieving, he really is; his eyes are reddened with exhaustion and his lips are tight. He’s brim-full, heavy and slow with sadness. She’s meant something to him; they’ve watched out for each other in those fragile silences I wasn’t here for. He’s the grandchild she wished she had, if only she hadn’t.
‘Do you want to see her now?’ he asks.
I don’t answer. Behind my eyes there’s an image of a woman, but it isn’t Ammuma. It’s an old woman, propped up on a wedged pillow. Mrs Selva, I think vaguely. Her lungs failed her once too, she’s trying to tell me; her family did the same. She knew what was coming, that doughty little woman in her tangle of tubes.
I look across at Tom. I don’t know why I’m not crying. Ammuma’s gone, but my mind won’t hold on to it. Instead, I find myself thinking that Karthika never did sweep those outside drains clean. I’ll have to remind her before they overflow again. Ammuma does so hate a mess.
Tom pushes his tiny chair away, coming over to me. He holds my elbow and gets me up tenderly.
‘Let’s go to her.’
He opens the door and we walk out into one of the hospital’s long corridors. Nobody’s in sight, and at the end is a stairway. I let him walk me all the way to it, and then I slide my arm away from him. I know whe
re I need to go from here.
‘Durga!’
I take a step down, and then another, lowering myself carefully from foot to foot. He scampers after me.
‘Stop, she’s upstairs. The floor above.’
One more step down, and then another. Tom follows me all the way to the ground floor, where we had our coffee a lifetime ago.
‘Durga,’ he says again, and this time I do look back. I have to think very carefully what I should say to him, I realize, because this might be the last thing ever. So I choose my words scrupulously, like a mathematician. What matters, after all, is the telling. The telling, and where it all began.
‘I used my fireworks at Diwali,’ I say. ‘Not yours.’
‘Sorry?’
‘They were my fireworks, the ones that started the fire.’
Tom looks at me, opens his mouth and closes it again. ‘But …’
And then I leave him there, with all his beginnings, just inside the hospital doors. This is how last resorts happen, I think, they happen in hot milky sunlight under yellow angsana trees. They happen on ordinary days, to ordinary women and mathematicians.
I open the car door and a puff of hot air escapes. There’s no other traffic as I back out of the car park and it only takes a few minutes before I’m at the big roundabout outside Lipis. A motorbike idles by the verge, propped up on its stand. The rider’s sitting cross-legged on the grass, eating noodles from a Styrofoam container. I look left. Look right. Check my rear-view mirror and see the hospital. A nasty trick, sneaking up behind me like that. Could give a girl a burst heart.
Back on the verge, the motorcyclist looks up in mild surprise. He breaks his journey here every day, and he’s never seen a car turn left at that roundabout before. The left-hand road doesn’t even go anywhere, just out to a swamp in Kampung Ulu where the black areas used to be. It’s not safe for a woman on her own, but by now the car’s nearly out of sight. The motorcyclist shakes his head. You can’t tell these girls anything.
Fragile Monsters Page 25
