Brixton Beach Read online

  As September drew to a close, Sita’s optimism began to falter. She had waited patiently, had stopped talking about the absence of post, but now Stanley began to urge her to look in the newspaper for jobs. As her longing for word from home returned she was once more paralysed with unhappiness. Since arriving in London she had written to her parents twice and still there was no letter. Walking back home, having dropped Alice off at school, she felt bitterness rise within her. They had been living here for a whole month. Had Kunal lied to her? she wondered. Had she misread him too? And why hadn’t her father written? Or her mother, or even her sister?

  ‘We’ll write home tonight,’ she had told Alice as she left her at the school gate, giving her something to look forward to. ‘I’ll buy some aerogrammes, huh?’

  She felt a faint sense of optimism at the thought. Taking a short cut through Durant Gardens she noticed for the first time a small blue plaque on one of the houses. Van Gogh lived here 1873-74, she read. The house was tall and elegant. In the basement as she glanced in a woman was lifting a small child out of a high chair. The woman was smiling at the child. Sita walked on. Late summer roses tumbled over a high fence and the scent brushed delicately against her. She felt as though her heart would break.

  When her mother did not come to collect her from school, Alice eventually decided to walk back home by herself. There had been some talk that, once Sita started a job, Alice would have to walk home alone, anyway. Perhaps, thought Alice vaguely, her mother had got a job and forgotten to tell her. There was no one to ask. After some time when the playground had almost emptied, the caretaker began to shut up the building and noticed her standing at the gate. ‘Is your mum late?’ he asked.

  Alice nodded.

  ‘Well, you’d better come into the office and we’ll ring her.’

  Alice shook her head. For some reason she felt ashamed to admit they had no telephone.

  ‘I just live over there,’ she said, pointing. ‘I’ll go back.’

  ‘No main road to cross, eh?’

  Again she shook her head and then she hurried out before he could ask her anything else. The road was empty. Everyone from her class had gone; not that she had any friends there, for although she had tried attaching herself to various groups of children, no one had taken the slightest notice of her. Puzzled, she had not known what to do. It was clear to her, from past experience, that the friendship groups in the class had already formed. Feeling instantly defeated, she withdrew. However she did not altogether dislike school. The art room was very bright and she enjoyed using the powder paints on the rough sugar paper, although here too she felt a difference. Most of the children used the paints straight out of the tub, while Alice liked mixing other colours from the ones she was given. At one point the art teacher had noticed and praised her. It had been a moment of brightness in an otherwise silent, grey day. But the art lessons were only once a week and the playtimes were three times a day. Today they had had PE, which she disliked most of all as it brought her into a more intimate contact with the other girls. The effort of pretending she did not mind being ignored was more exhausting than the lesson itself. But at last it had been over and the bell had rung, signalling the end of the day.

  Crossing the road, Alice hesitated. Never having walked home alone she was not sure if this was the right way. All the houses looked the same. A ginger cat jumped up on a low wall and she went over to stroke it.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Is your name Roger? I used to know a cat called Roger.’

  The cat purred loudly and rubbed itself against her hand. I’d like a cat, thought Alice. Perhaps her parents would let her have one. The thought was a good one. She began to hurry along the road and the cat jumped down and followed her for a short distance before disappearing. But she was going the wrong way, she thought in dismay. She did not remember seeing a postbox here. Turning, she crossed the road and tried to make her way back to the school but the school seemed to have moved. Confused, she stood still. The cat, having lost interest, had disappeared. Her school bag felt heavy. She re-crossed the road and made her way frowning across another street. There was no sign of her own road. Two children playing hopscotch stopped and stared at her. Alice walked on, wanting to cry. She was breathing hard. Looking back she could see the children were still staring after her. Suddenly she began to run. A church clock struck the hour. There was definitely no church near their house and now she had reached a main road. There was no main road near them either. Uncertain, she hesitated, wondering what to do next. Try as she might, she could not remember the name of the road where she lived. Panic fluttered within her. Her shoulder was hurting with the weight of her bag. She had no idea how long she had been lost. What if she never found her home again? She did not want to walk back past the girls playing hopscotch. There was nothing for it; she would have to cross the main road.

  ‘I’ll find the traffic lights,’ she said out loud.

  She had no idea what she would do next. She was at the traffic lights when she saw Sita waving at her.

  ‘Alice! Alice!’

  ‘Mama,’ Alice cried and, forgetting where she was, she stepped straight out into the road.

  ‘Wait!’ Sita shouted. ‘Don’t cross!’

  But it was too late. Two cars flashed their headlights at her, swerving and beeping their horns. There was a screeching of brakes and a sharp glint of metal as Alice ran across the road towards her mother.

  They were both crying. Sita clutched her daughter.

  ‘You nearly got killed! Why didn’t you wait?’

  ‘I thought you’d got a job. I got lost coming home.’

  ‘Oh, Alice!’ wailed Sita. ‘Alice, you’re all I have.’

  She went on crying for so long that Alice fell silent.

  ‘Mama,’ she said, bewildered. ‘I didn’t get killed.’

  But Sita didn’t seem to hear. She was crying in great gulps as she walked, her face averted. Alice swallowed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Sita shook her head, hurrying on.

  ‘I’m sorry I was late,’ she said finally. ‘It will never happen again.’

  And Alice, exhausted though she was, knew with absolute certainty that her mother was talking about something else. Later, after she had had a bath and while Sita was cooking, she saw a letter open on her parents’ bed. Recognising the Ceylon stamp, she picked it up and saw too that it was written in her grandfather’s hand.

  The letter, which had taken Bee several hours to compose and had cost him many sleepless nights, had gone. Nervously, he waited for the reply. But silence had fallen. September drew to a close and the air cooled as the monsoons began again. In October, finally, a letter arrived, but it was from Alice. Very long and rambling, it described the house where they were living and her new school. There were several drawings and a list of all the books she was reading. The letter seemed muffled in some way.

  We have a library in school, Alice wrote. You can take out two books a week. There are books on all sorts of subjects. I have been looking at watercolour paintings. We will be going on a school trip to a place called the Tate Gallery. My teacher says I can see the Turner watercolours there.

  Bee read swiftly on but there was no mention of Sita until right at the end.

  Mama says to send her love and she will write when she can. She has been a bit busy settling in, she said to say.

  The letter was oddly dispassionate. Both Kamala and Bee read it several times, but neither could put their finger on what was missing. May, too, commented on Sita’s silence.

  ‘How can she be so busy she can’t write!’ she asked indignantly.

  ‘Let’s not judge her,’ Kamala told her quickly. ‘Who knows what trouble she’s having with Stanley, or how the news of Kunal’s death has really affected her.’

  Kamala hesitated.

  ‘Your sister’s life has been terrible, May,’ she said softly. ‘Until Kunal came. He was her last chance, you know.’

  No one knew what t
o say.

  Bee wrote back immediately, both to Alice and to Sita, long, loving letters. Another month went by. May had now been married five months and was pregnant. On the day Bee heard the news of the coming of his next grandchild they received two letters from England. I cannot love again in this way, he thought heavily, opening Alice’s first, with trembling hands. Sita’s letter, when he came to it, was brief; its text documentarily plain.

  I’m sorry I couldn’t write earlier. I have been busy getting used to the house and the place where we live. Then we had to find a school for Alice. Anyway, she’s now settled in. The money Stanley earns isn’t enough and I shall get a job as soon as I can. When we do so I think we’ll be able to afford a telephone. England is not as I expected. Things are much more expensive here. People work much harder than in Sri Lanka, but the results are to be seen everywhere. There is a pride in this country in a way we never had at home.

  Bee was astounded. He read the letter in silence to its end. Then he handed it to Kamala without a word and went outside, taking Alice’s letter with him. There was, Kamala saw to her own astonishment, not one single mention of Kunal.

  ‘Perhaps she never got your letter,’ May suggested later.

  She had come over after school to see what her sister’s reaction was.

  ‘Perhaps she still doesn’t know? Have you thought of that?’

  No one knew what to make of it. Then Bee remembered.

  ‘She must have got it, you know, because Alice said something about being sorry Kunal died.’

  It was a pointless discussion. Thank God, thought Kamala, May’s news will give us something different to think of. Her youngest daughter was looking radiant. In spite of all the uncertainties of their future, still she bloomed. Kamala could see that, until this moment, it had not occurred to May to consider the possibilities in her own life.

  ‘I’ve decided to work right up until the birth,’ May told them happily. ‘And I’m going to have the baby at home, just like you, Amma.’

  No one dared to disagree; no one mentioned what had happened with Sita. Calmly, such was her certainty, May told them that she would write to her sister with her own news.

  I wanted you to hear from me, she wrote. I know that in spite of everything that has happened you’ll be glad for your sister.

  When she was alone, Sita re-read her sister’s letter. The distance helped to ease reality. There was no Kunal. She found it hard to remember her past optimism; that naïve belief that she might have seen him again. Strangely, almost immediately after reading her father’s letter, Kunal’s face had begun to blur in her mind. She did not even have a photograph of him. Like her dead child, there was nothing left. It must have happened when they were on the ship, she thought listlessly. The anguish of her father’s letter had been overlaid by the horror of what had very nearly happened to Alice. In spite of her utter desolation, it occurred to Sita that Alice understood what had happened. Later, when she had looked for the letter again in order to destroy it before Stanley came home, she realised that Alice had read it. But what did it matter? thought Sita. Alice, having eaten the hot rice that Sita handed her, had finished her homework and went up to her room to draw. She too was exhausted. Neither of them said another word, but that night, when Stanley had still not still returned home, before she went to sleep Sita had given Alice a kiss and the child had put her arms around her and hugged her. That had been all. By the time Stanley returned smelling of whisky and cheap perfume, a thick sheet of glass had fallen between Sita and her heart. It locked her out, mercifully anaesthetising her with practised efficiency from the pain. It had been a blessing. Stanley had noticed nothing; Sita was already in bed feigning sleep.

  It began to rain during the October half-term. Alice spent most mornings in bed and then in the gloom of the afternoon she would venture a few streets away to the children’s library. It was warm in the library and, as there were no children to stare at her, she would while away a few pleasant hours reading the art books. The leaves had begun to fall in earnest now and it became dark early. Returning home laden with books she would sit in her room and draw the view outside her window, staying there until her mother called her downstairs for dinner. To her surprise, Alice had begun to love her bedroom. It was, she discovered, the warmest part of the house and the only place that really had the sun fall on it. The faded strawberry wallpaper and the threadbare velvet curtains comforted her after the long silent days at school. The room had the added advantage of being far enough from her parents for them to hardly bother to come in, but not so far that she missed any of their arguments. Lying in bed, listening to the muffled sounds of her mother clearing up and her father’s radio, she felt safe at last to let her mind wander back over her life at school. She had made no friends. Last week there had been a new arrival in the class. The girl had recently moved up to London from a place called Poole and the teacher had made her sit by Alice.

  ‘I lived by the sea too,’ Alice had volunteered. ‘It was a very, very blue ocean.’

  But the girl had not been interested and a few days later had made a friend of another child. Alice pretended she didn’t care. Snatches of the past drifted in and out of focus during the long and tedious days that led up to half-term.

  ‘Daydreaming, again, Alice,’ the teacher had said, exasperated, shaking her head.

  ‘You’re weird,’ one of the boys told her, pulling faces at her.

  Confused, Alice had become even more silent, longing for the moment when she’d be back at home, climbing the stairs to her room. And safety.

  Towards the end of half-term Alice noticed something else. Her mother had begun taking out the baby clothes from the shoebox and ironing them. The clothes looked shabby and even the cotton lawn, once so fine, was unremarkable in the wintry light. Alice felt a tremor of shock go through her. She understood with a hopeless sinking of her heart that her mother would never be the same again. Her father, too, was changing. Alice registered that he no longer hid the fact of the strange perfume that surrounded him. And she saw too, without a single word being passed between them, that from now on she would be the one who would protect her mother. So when her mother started taking out the dead baby’s things once more, Alice kept quiet, not drawing any attention to this change, knowing instinctively that Stanley would not like it. Sure enough, her father, who seldom missed anything, soon began to question her mother with increasing anger.

  ‘Why don’t you throw them away?’ he asked her, lying in their double bed piled high with lemon-coloured blankets and eiderdowns, watching his wife fold the wretched things over and over again.

  Alice stood outside the bedroom door, listening intently. It was important that she heard everything. She wanted to be ready to rush in and distract them the moment her parents started fighting. She felt the need to be fully alert, ready to avert a disaster. It was an exhausting business, but she had to do it; it was her job. Two and a half months had passed since their arrival and her parents were arguing more than ever.

  ‘Say something, men,’ Stanley was shouting. ‘Don’t just ignore me. You’ll go off your head again if you don’t talk. Remember how you were before I left?’

  Alice pursed her lips, just as she knew her mother was doing at that moment.

  ‘If you don’t throw them out, Sita,’ Stanley threatened, ‘I will. It’s for your own good,’ he added, sounding uncertain, now. ‘You’ve got to stop brooding in this way’

  Then Alice heard his voice soften as if he was talking to himself. And a moment later, as she strained her ears, there came the eternal sound of her mother’s weeping.

  ‘Your aunt May is going to have a baby’ Stanley told Alice a bit later on, over dinner.

  Alice stared at her plate. Why on earth was her father talking about Aunty May’s baby when he knew it upset her mother so much? She shivered.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘Can I go to bed?’

  They ate in silence for a moment longer
. Sita, her face swollen with crying, appeared to make a huge effort.

  ‘Yes,’ she said absent-mindedly, ‘you’d better go to bed in that case.’

  Janake walked up the hill with some fish and a letter from his mother.

  ‘Go and see how they are,’ his mother had insisted. ‘Mr Fonseka will be feeling terrible after the things that have happened. Go and see them, and give him this letter.’

  Janake’s mother could not bring herself to discuss the events of the last couple of months. The loss of his granddaughter had been bad enough for Mr Fonseka without the news about Kunal. A few days ago, the doctor had visited them. He had come walking on the beach, crossing the railway line at a point some distance away from the level crossing. There were police at the level crossing, the doctor had told them, so he had had to run across the line when the signal was green.

  ‘Be very careful, sir,’ Janake’s mother had warned him. ‘Sometimes the signal doesn’t work. It’s dangerous, you could get killed.’

  The doctor had looked grimly at her. He had come to tell her something, he said.

  ‘I can’t visit Mr Fonseka for the moment,’ he said. ‘I think I’m being watched and I don’t want to lead them to the Sea House.’

  Janake’s mother nodded. She understood.

  ‘I need a message to be taken there. Can the boy do it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No one will question him. Everyone knows he played with Mr Fonseka’s granddaughter. It will be quite normal for him to visit because he misses her.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Janake’s mother said. ‘Don’t worry. I can send them some fish.’

  ‘Good!’ the doctor said, looking relieved. ‘Give him this telephone number. It’s my brother’s number at the hospital; he needn’t be afraid to call it. We’re going to have to find a different safe house for the next refugee. I don’t want the authorities to get suspicious of Mr Fonseka.’