Brixton Beach Read online

  ‘No, I know.’

  Kunal smiled a sad half-smile.

  ‘England will be better than you think,’ he told Alice.

  She did not want to talk of England. Really all she wanted was to go to the beach.

  ‘When you stop worrying, you’ll get to like it there,’ Kunal was saying, but now he was looking at Sita, who had moved slightly apart and stood motionless beside the mango tree, her face pale against the lushness of the leaves. Again Alice had a sense of the tension flowing from her mother. Kunal held out his hand, hesitantly. For a split second Alice thought her mother was going to ignore him, but then she stepped forward and, putting both arms around his neck, she kissed him lightly on both cheeks. After which Kamala and Dias kissed him too and wished him a safe journey.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said, and the word spoken in English had the strangest finality to it. They stood and watched in silence as the car turned around and headed in the direction of Colombo. And then, slowly, they went indoors. There were only three weeks left.

  On the afternoon of the last day, while her mother shut herself in her room, Bee took Alice to buy some fish. The men selling the catch were on the beach, carrying their huge flat baskets on their heads, trailing seagulls.

  ‘You’ll be sailing close to the equator before turning towards colder waters,’ Bee informed her. ‘Tomorrow,’ he added, pointing to the horizon, ‘you will be out there. And I will stand here, at this time, and watch for you.’

  ‘I shall wave,’ Alice told him and he nodded.

  They were both determined to hold on to any certainties they could find.

  Once again Alice had a curious feeling of standing on the edge of that shelving beach, with the sea dropping steeply, fathomless and mysterious before her. If she moved she would fall into the void. The day and all its iridescent loveliness were as insubstantial as a dream. A train rushed across the bay, hugging the coastline. Through the heat haze the brilliant blue carriages and the swaying coconut palms took on an air of unreality, as though they did not exist. Panic struggled in her. It was very simple. She did not want to go to England. A cry, mute and unheard, rose in her heart. And then her grandfather’s voice, already from some distance, came to her.

  ‘So will I,’ he said, quite seriously.

  He was looking crossly at her.

  ‘No more biting your nails, huh!’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, but he didn’t seem to be listening.

  Something was stopping her from breathing. Perhaps she was ill, she thought, and would not be able to go. Bee went on staring at her and then beyond towards the sea. Fishing boats filled their view. Was it her imagination or did the men on stilts stand nearer to the shore? The sea was like crushed sapphires.

  ‘I’m coming back,’ she said again, uneasiness curdling and clutching at her stomach, for he seemed suddenly, unalterably old. ‘You’ll see.’

  She tugged his hand and he nodded. After that he took a long time choosing and buying her favourite red mullet for lunch, even though eating seemed an irrelevance.

  ‘What a bit of luck,’ he said. ‘There must have been a good catch last night!’

  She was puzzled. He talked as if the buying of the fish was of the utmost importance. They walked towards the hamlets in search of Janake, but he was still out with the fishermen.

  ‘He is coming to see you in the evening,’ Janake’s mother told Alice, smiling. ‘Don’t worry, he hasn’t forgotten you are going. He will come.’

  It shocked her that life carried on, regardless of what was about to happen. Janake out in the boat, getting on with his life, just as he would tomorrow and the day after. But where would she be tomorrow? And one day, Bee was thinking, she will be a grown woman. I will not see that. This is the end of my sightline. The rest will be imagination.

  Towards evening, when the house was a frenzy of last-minute packing, they went for a final walk on the beach. Sita had come out from her room and was collecting up the jars of pickles that Kamala was labelling. She looked pale and subdued. The servant wrapped each jar carefully in plastic sheeting and wedged them in the trunk. Then she slipped in a bag of curra pincha, curry leaves, and umbalakada, Maldive fish. There would be nowhere else in the world that Sita would find these ingredients, the servant knew.

  ‘Be careful,’ Kamala said. ‘Make sure it’s wrapped tightly’

  ‘Don’t go too far, Father,’ Sita called. ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘Just up to the hotel and back,’ he promised.

  ‘I’ve finished packing, Mama,’ Alice told her.

  ‘Good girl!’

  Both were speaking carefully to each other as if aware that from now on they would be thrown together for a long time. The house was stifling. Alice tugged at Bee’s hand. She wanted to get out.

  They had walked the same stretch of beach hundreds of times, but tonight was different. Tonight they walked slowly and in silence. Darkness was descending, shadows lengthened imperceptibly and still there was no sign of Janake.

  ‘He’ll come,’ Bee consoled her, puffing at his pipe. ‘Maybe in the morning. He knows what time you’re leaving.’

  Pausing, they watched the late Colombo express rush past. Two kites floated lazily in the rosy sky and the sounds of byla music came towards them on the breeze.

  ‘You’re coming to the boat, aren’t you?’ Alice asked suddenly, but Bee shook his head, sucking on his pipe.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, not tomorrow. It’s important for you to remember this place. If I say good-bye here, you will always remember it.’

  And even though she was dismayed and tried to make him change his mind, he would not be budged. Some time later, when she sat on the verandah, and Bee had disappeared into his studio, Alice asked Kamala.

  ‘Why aren’t you both coming to the harbour?’

  Kamala began combing Alice’s hair. She combed it silently and for so long that Alice thought she would not answer her. Then at last she spoke.

  ‘He can’t bear it, darling,’ she said. ‘He can only just manage to get to the station. Don’t make him.’

  Kamala’s hands moved with soft and wide sweeps against Alice’s head, lingering against the dark hair, combing it into silk.

  ‘But I’ll be back,’ Alice said angrily. ‘Doesn’t he know that?’

  ‘Aha! Look what I have here,’ Bee cried, returning with false joviality.

  He had made a present for her. A painting of the house, and the beach, with the sea glimpsed in the distance. He had used only cerulean blue and an emerald green and most of the light was defined by the brilliance of the white paper so that it seemed as though the land and the water existed within a bowl of sunlight. On the back he had written, For my beloved granddaughter Alice, from her grandfather with his blessing.

  ‘It’s a watercolour,’ he told her, tapping his pipe, watching her. ‘You are going to the land of the most beautiful watercolours in the world. Did you know that?’

  Alice did not know.

  ‘Well, you are, so go and see them for me, when you’ve settled in London. Tell your mother to take you. Look at the Turners and the Boningtons and the Cotmans. I believe you’ll be able to see Constable’s skies, too. The English are the best at using watercolours. You will have to look very closely at them to understand how they use the light.’

  No one spoke. Alice could not bear the look on her grandmother’s face. Almost everything in this house will survive us, thought Kamala. We are already ghosts on this verandah. Each night, when my girls were small, I sat out here, but nothing could have made me imagine this night.

  Outside, the darkness seemed full of ghosts. A bullock coughed nearby and the frogs that lived in the ditches began to croak quietly. Two lizards circled each other under the yellowing light. Tonight was full of insects, the servant complained, bringing in a mosquito coil.

  ‘I wonder where Kunal is,’ Kamala murmured.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be at the Pass by now,’ Bee told her.

  Sita moved
her head slightly. No one could see her face in the darkness. She was thinking of Kunal’s last night and how, when she had left his room, she had found her mother hovering outside, a worried look on her face, ready to hold her as she wept. At last, Kamala had told her, stroking her hair, she had found love. But that night now seemed like a million days ago.

  ‘He must be nearing Jaffna,’ Bee observed.

  ‘I’ll find a way,’ Kunal had told Sita. ‘I’ll come to England somehow, you’ll see.’

  And she had whispered:

  Or I’ll come back.’

  ‘I have the strangest feeling about leaving this place,’ she had admitted to Kunal. ‘Not only am I going to miss you, but I’m going to miss the person I am now, at this time, too. None of us will ever be the same again.’

  And now he was gone, carrying his loss like luggage, his crutch under one arm, leaving her to continue alone. The day was almost over; tomorrow would bring the thing she had waited so long for. She saw how her desire to be gone had set her apart from everyone around her. It had put her into the same category as a person with a limp or an extra thumb. Her aunts used to say it had made her different, had attracted the wrath of the gods. Whenever she had observed any injustice, each time another Tamil was discriminated against, she had thought, I will leave. I will go away to a better life. Stanley had been merely a step in that direction, and the lost baby had compounded the feeling, making her need to flee even more urgently. But she had reckoned without Kunal. Meeting him, seeing his pain, had made her waver, fatally.

  ‘I am too burnt-out to stay and fight,’ she had said.

  ‘You don’t know what courage you possess until you are called to show it,’ he had replied. ‘You are the bravest of women. Wherever you are, here or in the UK, it doesn’t matter; you will remain brave. You represent all the women of this island to me.’

  That was what he had said, lying there in the stifling heat, day after day with his phantom limb. But now the exodus, planned for so long, was almost upon them, and her mother with her mending, and her father in his planter’s chair, sitting as they would tomorrow, was too much for her to bear. A cockroach buzzed past. The servant began sweeping the verandah and all around the simple sounds she had listened to all her life gathered together with great sweetness in Sita’s head.

  Alice sat quietly on the step.

  ‘You’d better go to bed,’ Sita murmured at last and her daughter, without protest, without fuss, stood up and kissed them all goodnight.

  As she climbed into her small bed under the net, Alice heard the tell-tale whine of mosquitoes moving invisibly in the room. Far away in some other part of the bay she heard a heavy thud followed by the plaintive noise of a police siren. It went on and on, an endless hyphenated crying, and it kept her awake for a long time. Her grandparents and her mother were moving outside. Sometimes one of them spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb her, but she could not sleep. Great tropical stars shone over the sea and she wondered once more if tomorrow night she would be able to see the house and her bedroom from the ship. She had made a flag and stuck it on a branch of the paw-paw tree outside her window. She had done it for Janake, but Janake too seemed to have vanished into thin air. For a long time she lay in this way, looking at the stars, until finally she fell asleep and sometime between midnight and dawn she dreamt her grandfather pushed aside the mosquito net and kissed her good-bye. Sighing, she turned over.

  Morning came; the morning of departure. Issued to them with ease, fresh as a newly laundered sheet, clean and ordinary. There was nothing in its arrival that suggested any significance, nothing to prepare them for such a momentous moment. Too late, the day had arrived without fanfare or thunderclap. England, that strange amorphous shadow, had become a reality at last. Sita stared blankly at the sky, joined now so seamlessly to the sea, wondering if it had always looked this way. The morning lay before her in exquisite beauty. Blue softened the water, reflecting the light as never before, piercing and very lovely. She gazed out through her window, a stranger already in her own home, dimly wondering how all the years of her life had led so inexorably to this moment. She was thinking about Kunal. She had not stopped thinking of him. She did not expect him to ring. Realistically, she could not expect to hear news until she reached England.

  ‘I’ll try to telephone, before you go,’ he had said. ‘Before you leave, I want to hear your voice one more time.’

  ‘Don’t promise,’ she had told him quickly, ‘in case you can’t. I’ll write. Every time the boat docks, they post the letters. It will take weeks to get to you, but I’ll write.’

  Kamala was calling. Breakfast was ready. It was no longer possible to bear the dazzling light coming in through the bedroom window. I am nearly on the other side of saying good-bye, thought Sita.

  Alice avoided looking at the sea. Instinct made her turn away, strangely restless to be gone, to be done with the waiting. The servant opened the shutters; there was the smell of milk rice.

  ‘Has Janake come yet?’ Alice asked sleepily.

  ‘Not yet, baby,’ the servant smiled, coming in, pulling back the mosquito net around the cot that Alice had slept in since she had been born. Suddenly she felt stripped of identity. The wardrobe door was open and in its mirror she could see the stag’s head with the bowler hat still on it. If she opened the door a little wider the sea swung into view, sun-lit and very clear all the way to the end of the horizon.

  A good day for sailing,’ she told herself, just as she had heard the grown-ups say.

  The wardrobe door moved and the sea and the sky and the large black spider on the edge of the ceiling tilted out of balance. Somewhere there was another house and another school with a new best friend. But she couldn’t imagine it looking any different from this one. Her grandmother was waiting with a breakfast of the milk rice and half a paw-paw and some fleshy rambutan. An auspicious meal for a journey. Soon, Esther and Dias arrived noisily to say good-bye. They had presents.

  ‘Here, I’ve bottled you some of your favourite seeni sambal to take on your journey,’ Dias said, handing Alice a jar of her famous vegetable pickles.

  ‘You won’t get this in the UK, men. This is to my own devised recipe, child. Your mama will be glad of it, too, especially if any of you fellows get sea-sick!’

  Alice had no idea why they should get sea-sick.

  ‘I’ve got you something, too,’ Esther was saying, and she handed Alice a record cover.

  ‘It’s my favourite Elvis cover, child.’

  Esther, Alice noted, was still trying to be grown-up.

  But she was being kind.

  ‘I’ve got two, so you can have one. And if they sell records in England, you could buy one and put it in this cover.’

  Nobody knew if they sold records in England, but Alice thanked Esther, anyway.

  ‘Here, let me write on it,’ Esther said, snatching it back.

  And she wrote in small curvy letters: Be good, sweet maid, love from Esther.

  ‘Wait, I’ll write something too,’ Esther’s mother said.

  And she wrote, Refuse to promise anything you cannot do, from Aunty Dias.

  Alice took the record cover from her. Then, in the awkward silence that followed, she picked up the jar of pickle from the table. Esther and her mother watched her. The day shifted from one warm tone to another. Orange blossom and temple flowers drifted in from the garden as with a slight squeak the gate opened and Janake came rushing in. He had been cycling with only one hand, he told them, grinning.

  ‘Look what I’ve found you!’

  He gave Alice a small turquoise tin with a lid that wouldn’t open. Esther giggled, covering her mouth.

  ‘What on earth would she want with that on the ship!’

  Janake scowled.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Janake!’ Alice cried, and she threw her arms around him and hugged him. ‘I love it!’

  Janake moved away uneasily, glancing at Esther, but Esther had gone to t
alk to the grown-ups.

  ‘I can’t stand her,’ Janake whispered. ‘I’m not going to talk to her when you’ve gone.’

  ‘I’ll write to you,’ Alice whispered back, ‘when I’m on board ship. And I’ll send you things, too. Will you wave tonight?’

  Janake nodded.

  ‘We’re all going to stand by the rocks and wave at six o’clock, so make sure you’re looking!’

  From inside the house there was a noise and the servant gave a cry. She had broken the clay pot with water in it and Kamala was scolding her.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Janake said. ‘Let’s go and see.’

  Alice felt a small shiver run down her spine.

  ‘Don’t worry, child,’ Aunty Dias was saying. ‘It wasn’t very full and the water fell near the door, so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Is May meeting you at the jetty?’

  ‘How are the newly weds?’

  Everyone was talking at the same time as if to cover up the awkwardness. A neighbour had placed a devil offering across the road. The woven basket looked fresh and tempting. It was filled with mangoes and ambarella fruit and spilt over with rice and freshly fried fish. Beside it was another basket of cut flowers.

  ‘There are new people coming into this place,’ Aunty Dias said in a loud complaining voice. ‘Everything is changing. Yesterday there were two army trucks in Main Street. And they say the curfew will be back now because of the general elections. You know, Sita, it’s a good thing you’re leaving.’

  ‘How are you feeling? About going, I mean?’ Esther wanted to know. ‘Are you feeling anything?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said.

  ‘What a stupid question,’ Janake scoffed.

  He looked suddenly in a bad mood. But it was true, Alice couldn’t feel anything. Janake turned to her.

  ‘Thanks for the bike,’ he said shyly. ‘I’ll look after it till you get back.’

  Alice nodded. Her chest felt tight and she was finding it difficult to breathe.

  ‘You weren’t meant to find it till we left,’ she said faintly.

  ‘It’s nine o’clock,’ Bee called. ‘I’ll put the luggage in the car.’