Brixton Beach Page 16

  But after all, what does my suffering amount to? thought Sita. Given the thousands of Tamils who are suffering daily.

  ‘Not any more,’ she told him, her face twisting into a smile. ‘Those days are over. It must have been my karma.’

  The rain continued, lightly.

  ‘You mustn’t worry’ Kunal continued, still in Tamil, as though they had been talking for hours. ‘All of it will grow in her, you will grow within her as she matures. I saw it. Today’

  He did not talk of the other things he had seen, the obstructions that would get in the way of a simple life.

  ‘She will go far, far,’ he told Sita, certain. ‘Wait and see.’

  ‘My baby…‘ Sita began, but she could not go on.

  Kunal had closed his eyes. When they stayed closed for a sufficient time, Sita tiptoed out.

  By Saturday morning Kunal’s condition was no better. Bee, Kamala and Sita, much to everyone’s surprise, had taken turns sitting up with him all of Friday night. The doctor arrived, dodging the curfew to look at the leg with what seemed to be a detached air of melancholy. Kunal moaned softly, thrashing about on the bed. He wanted the bandage off. It was too tight. He was too hot; he could not get comfortable. The doctor touched the swollen leg gently. The bandage was caked with blood again. Then without warning and with unexpected force, he ripped the gauze off. Sita, standing beside Kunal, holding his hand, saw the flesh rise savagely up, refusing to be parted from the bandage, clinging for a moment before abruptly letting go of it. She saw it break open again, freshly. Then she saw blood gush out. Kunal screamed and Sita felt a wave of horror and nausea wash over her. The doctor placed the stinging antiseptic swab down on the leg and Kunal cried out. The servant woman appeared with fresh water and the doctor began to clean the wound. When he had finished, he gave Kunal a shot of painkiller. Then the doctor went outside to talk to Bee, leaving Sita to instruct the servant woman on the clearing up.

  When it was done and Kunal had begun to drift back to sleep, Sita too went outside. It was very early. May and Alice were still sleeping.

  ‘What can I do to help?’ Sita asked quietly.

  She was standing against the door and looked very pale. Startled, Bee and the doctor turned round. They had not seen her standing in the shadows.

  ‘Sit with him,’ the doctor said quickly, before Bee could speak. ‘Stop him thrashing about. I’m afraid for the leg,’ he told them in a low voice. ‘I’m afraid of gangrene.’

  Kamala, coming out with a pot of tea in her hand, gasped.

  ‘Ayio! No!’

  The doctor nodded grimly. He knew that the next twenty-four hours would decide things one way or the other and that it was no use contemplating the hospital.

  ‘Wait,’ he told them. ‘Just a little. Don’t worry, yet. I’ll be back this evening. Give him some cothemalli if he wakes. He must drink plenty of fluids.’

  ‘I’ll make some now,’ Sita said.

  She tightened the belt of her housecoat and headed for the kitchen. Kamala looked after her daughter, astonished. The doctor nodded.

  ‘Good,’ he agreed heartily.

  ‘Tell Alice when she wakes I’ll take her to the beach,’ Bee told Kamala abruptly. Then he escorted the doctor out of the house.

  In the kitchen Sita watched the cothemalli tea bubble up. The light outside was achingly beautiful and the sea was flooded with it. When the tea was ready she went in to Kunal who now lay in a transparent sac of pain. Heat was radiating from him. Sita sat down, letting him sip the tea, quietly waiting until his confused delirium subsided a little. She understood everything about this hot crumpled bed of pain. Kunal’s face looked grey and exhausted as he dipped in and out of consciousness. She did not know how long she sat with him. Now and again she stood up and, in the defused light coming in through the shutters, wiped his face. He was handsome. She remembered him only slightly from her younger days, even though she must have seen him quite often. It interested her to see that looking down on a person’s face was different from looking at them on eye level. All his vulnerability fell open like the pages of a book when she stood over him. Had she appeared this way to the nurse on that night? she wondered. All morning, sitting with the coriander tea, waiting for Kunal to sip it, Sita went over the events of her own night of suffering with a calm detachment she had not possessed before. At some point she slipped out into the kitchen to fetch some freshly squeezed orange juice. When she returned his eyes were open and he was staring at her through a thick gauze of pain.

  ‘You are not very old,’ Kunal mumbled suddenly.

  Sita held the glass of liquid to his lips.

  ‘What happened to you can only happen to a woman who is still young. Do you know that? Your husband is young; you are still strong. There will be a life beyond this tragedy; perhaps even beyond this island. Don’t let this hurt get in your way. They will have won if that happens.’

  Sita stared at him. No one had dared to talk to her in this way. Kunal was looking up at her with eyes that burned with a fever, and yet he was smiling. Then slowly, haltingly, hardly aware of doing so, she told him how it was for her, with the love for her dead child trapped within her, inescapably. How day by day, moment by moment, she kept trying to save the child, remove it from harm’s way. And how each time she failed, it became important that she try again. Because maybe, on another occasion, she might succeed. It had become an enactment, she told Kunal, like the ritual of washing her hands before eating. Something she no longer thought about or had any control over. She continued talking to Kunal in this way even though he had gone back to sleep. Speaking quickly as if she needed to get the words out before she was interrupted, before her mother or her father or even the servant woman came in, Sita found she could not stop. For she was certain now that she would never speak of these things to another living person again.

  Kunal dipped in and out of consciousness for most of that day and the next. The doctor came and went. He spoke to them in whispers. Two men had been arrested in the town and then released again.

  The army were doing a house-to-house search further up the hill. They would have to be ready to hide Kunal in the coconut grove. It would be a gamble, but it was better than them being caught harbouring a Tamil. Bee’s jaw was tight with anger.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Kamala cried. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘There is nothing else you can do,’ the doctor said. ‘Not with all your family in the house. But don’t panic yet. It might not come to that.’

  On Monday while Sita was sitting with Kunal once more, Bee took Alice to the village beyond the town. It was a place he often visited in order to paint. The view of the sea was unexpected and lovely here, fringed by coconut palms and with only a few picturesque fishermen’s huts in sight. The doctor had told them to be as normal as they could. So he took his painting things and Alice took her bicycle.

  ‘We’ll be gone about an hour,’ he told Kamala.

  It was late afternoon. The sun had moved some way across the sky. There had been torrential rain earlier that had ceased as abruptly as it had started and now the air was filled with a pearly glow. They walked across the beach on the unmarked sand, both unusually silent, preoccupied with their own thoughts. Bee bent down and picked a small piece of transparent aquamarine sea glass that had caught his eye; pebble-shaped, smoothened by the sea.

  ‘Look,’ he said, giving it to Alice, ‘all its edges have vanished.’

  Alice held the glass up to the light and the horizon showed through it in a dark line. She put it in the pocket of her dress and they walked on. As they approached the hamlet they passed a pile of beach debris. Dead fish and rotting driftwood and old rags, piled into a mound, ready to burn. And beside it, on the sand, a breadfruit lay open; its innards like vomit on the sand. A little further on they passed a roadside shrine and then the huts came into view.

  ‘Can I wait here with Janake?’ Alice asked.

  A group of children, including Janake, were playing beside the thre
e large rocks. They were the same children she had seen on her birthday from her grandparents’ garden.

  ‘I shan’t be long,’ Bee said. ‘I just want to talk to Janake’s mother.’

  The late-afternoon sun drenched the water with discs of light and the rocks appeared starkly defined against the sky. Such was the complexity and confusion of Alice’s thoughts that she barely noticed the children had turned and were looking at her. She could not see, as Bee might have done, had he glanced up from his conversation, that she stood on the brink of an important discovery. That the difference between herself and the group of children playing in the water was slowly becoming clearer. Standing beside the beach debris, with its coconut husks and its rotten fruit, with the smell of sea and weeds all around, Alice watched the little group and in particular Janake as they played. Here they were again, lithely jumping in and out of the shallows, as Janake’s mother listened to news of her relative. And here was Janake, looking his usual happy self. A chisel of loneliness shot through her. She watched for a moment longer, taking in a scene that was vanishing even as she looked, and was saddened without knowing quite why. Janake suddenly looked up. Detaching himself from the group with a shout of welcome, he ran towards her.

  ‘You’ve come to join us? We’re catching the small crabs.’

  She stared. Since Jennifer had stopped being her friend no other child except Janake had wanted to know her. Esther Harris did not count. Esther was almost a grown-up. Eagerly, Alice kicked off her sandals as Janake grabbed her hand tightly. He was bigger than her, thin and wiry, and burnt by the constant exposure to the sun.

  ‘Quickly, before the next wave.’

  The children had found a group of crabs nestling in a hollowed-out bowl of sand close to the rocks. Every time a wave crashed against the rocks, the bowl got larger and the crabs tried harder to scramble up on to the beach.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Janake shouted above the roar of the sea.

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Alice said, not knowing how much to tell him.

  Janake grinned as though he knew all about it.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get in the water.’

  The children were picking up the crabs and putting them into a bucket, but when the bucket became full Janake ordered them to throw the crabs back into the sea. He spoke in Singhalese and was clearly the group leader. After some time the other children grew bored and wandered off. Janake turned to Alice as another wave hit him. The water had soaked his hair and beads of sea-spray shone on his bare chest. He stopped in mid-laugh.

  ‘I wish you weren’t going overseas,’ he shouted abruptly.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Alice shouted back. ‘I hate England.’

  She realised she had said something she meant. Janake was looking at her with the strangest expression on his face.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said, above the roar of the ocean.

  ‘There’s nothing here for us,’ she cried, sounding like her mother.

  He said no more and the waves washed and swirled around their feet.

  ‘It’s your aunt’s wedding soon, isn’t it?’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes.’

  Janake nodded. He would be going with the fishermen to catch the fish.

  ‘Will you come back?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘I want to,’ Alice said, realising all in a rush, with a closing up of the gap in her knowledge, that what she wanted did not always happen.

  She had the strangest feeling of standing at the edge of a beach that dropped steeply a hundred fathoms. But Janake was nodding again. He produced a small penknife from his pocket and showed it to her.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you must carve your name on the rocks. Over there—’ he pointed, grinning at her, his good mood restored.

  His teeth gleamed white. Overhead the seagulls were screaming.

  ‘Let’s walk there, it’s not deep. I’ll help you. Then you will come back. Because ifs a magic trick!’

  6

  THEY DOCKED IN PIRAEUS AT FIVE THIRTY in the morning on the twenty-first of April. Freak, icy winds from the sea swept across Athens. Stepping ashore, Stanley caught his first glimpse of the Parthenon. To his astonishment there was snow on the mountains. Real snow, he thought, disbelievingly, like the snow in Alice’s picture books. His tropical suit was rendered useless in a moment; the wind cut straight through to his flesh as though he wore nothing. He sat timidly in a café and wrote a postcard to his daughter but he had no idea how to describe any of it. The temperature had to be experienced to be believed. Should he say, it was cold like an ice cube? No, he thought, that wouldn’t do, she would simply think of the refreshing coolness of ice cubes, though there was nothing either refreshing or comfortable about this. It made him want to rush back to the hotel.

  During the two weeks of the voyage Stanley had made friends with a Swedish girl on the deck above him. What else could I do when we’re all stuck together? he asked himself defensively. Of course I had to talk to her. When they arrived in Athens she had been given a room next to his in the hotel and this morning they had made a tentative arrangement to meet at some point. Stanley glanced at his watch. He felt as though Sita was watching him. The waiter brought him his coffee. It was in a cup so small that he wondered if he had been cheated, but when he looked around there were others drinking out of tiny cups.

  It tasted bitter and too hot. Stanley stirred two sugar lumps in it wondering what to write.

  The coffee is bitter, he wrote. But not expensive, he added, knowing Sita would read the postcard. He didn’t want her to think he was wasting money.

  One of the engines caught fire. The company have put us in a hotel, which is how I came to buy this postcard. We will probably be here for at least another week. And in the end it will probably take much longer than twenty-one days to reach England.

  He paused, staring outside at the view. All around people were speaking in a language he had never heard before. It gave Stanley an extraordinary thrill, as if he was at last in the real world, to hear a language that was neither Tamil, Singhalese nor English. An ancient language, with no sinister undertones attached. The sun fell weightless and golden on the Parthenon. In spite of his precarious position, here in semi-penniless limbo, Stanley felt weightless too. All the years of struggling against prejudice, the desperate ways in which he had tried first to hide his Tamilness and later, to flaunt it defiantly, were falling away from him. Like dead skin, he thought. He stared at the Parthenon, willing it to fix itself on his mind forever. In case he never came back. It staggered him to see the remains of a civilisation that had vanished exactly in the same way as the ancient Ceylonese city of Polonnaruva. He felt he was living a dream. The ground beneath him moved as if he was still on the ship and he thought of the Swedish woman again. It had amused her to see him brace himself against the cold.

  ‘You should buy some proper clothes,’ she advised, trying not to laugh. ‘Not this paper suit!’

  Stanley was too embarrassed to tell her that the clothes he was wearing had cost him a whole month’s salary. There were many things he was finding difficult to articulate. And perversely, there were other issues that had mysteriously begun to matter less, people who already were beginning to fade. His wife’s face, for instance. Stanley frowned.

  Colombo seems already a long way away, he wrote hurriedly.

  He paused, trying to imagine the postman, wheeling his bicycle slowly up Mount Lavinia Hill in the burning heat, sweat glistening on his face, delivering his postcard to the Sea House, but try as he might the sense of scorching heat eluded Stanley. Instead, the face of the Swedish woman swam back into view.

  In about a week we will be entering the Bay of Biscay, he wrote. Everyone is worried because the purser says it can be stormy there. I don’t want to be seasick again. Please give Mama my love and tell her I will write as soon as I get to England.

  ‘Will you come and see the rock later, Aunty May?’ Alice asked.

  They were in the gar
den. The doctor had been summoned and was having a private conversation with Bee and Kamala. He had been talking to them for ages. Kunal, it seemed, was much worse. Alice had been sent out into the garden to pick the mangoes that had fallen and were not bruised. May followed behind with a basket but she kept looking nervously back at the house.

  ‘What does it say?’ May asked.

  She sounded distracted.

  ‘Alice Fonseka, Age 10, Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka, Asia, The World, The Universe. “The Universe” isn’t very clear,’ Alice said regretfully.

  Even though Janake had gone over the words with his penknife the rocks had been hard to mark. They had got soaked.

  ‘Of course, darling,’ May said. ‘We’ll look at it tomorrow.’

  The servant woman was sweeping the verandah, collecting the dead hibiscus flowers that the day’s rain had reduced to a pulp. As a result of the monsoon the garden had turned virulent. The ground was teeming with insects. There were spiders and lizards, ants and beetles all rushing to feast on the water-drenched fruit and the vegetation littering the ground. A snake slithered past and disappeared in a flash into the undergrowth. No one saw it. May, holding her sari high above the wet grass, dodged the fruit bats that nose-dived, fighter pilot style, in and out of the roof. A few crows protested loudly at the encroaching darkness while the air of waiting increased to a fever pitch. Eventually Kamala called the servant woman in and at that May stopped what she was doing and went inside, carrying the basket now filled with mangoes. They gave off a scent like no other. The doctor, deep in conversation with Bee and Kamala, nodded. Then he strode into the annexe.

  ‘Come,’ Kamala told Alice, taking her hand. ‘Now we must wash these mangoes.’

  Kamala was looking drawn.

  ‘I’m going to the studio,’ Bee said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  And he disappeared. A moment later the door of the annexe opened and Sita let herself out.

  The room in which Kunal lay was in darkness. The doctor stood looking quietly down at him. Slow, muffled garden sounds crept in through the shutters as the doctor walked slowly over and opened them slightly. All the doctor’s gestures were like that: slow and very quiet.