Brixton Beach Read online

  ‘Thatha,’ May said worriedly, when one more Tamil had been dispatched safely to a ship, ‘Thatha, please, you’ve done enough. I want you to stop. These etchings are madness, hiding these people is so risky. I think the neighbours are watching you.’

  For months now, the post had been intermittent. The astrologer who had cast May’s horoscope before her marriage came to visit Bee. He looked grave.

  ‘Maybe you should leave this town,’ he told him tentatively. ‘There are people here who don’t like you.’

  He did not speak of the dark star that lay across Bee’s horoscope, crossing the planet Saturn with the number nine. The astrologer remembered all this from the time of May’s wedding. Nine was important, he told Bee, counting the steps that led down from the verandah to the gate. Nine lizards darted across the wall, and nine moths circled the shade of the single light bulb in the sitting room. May rang her parents daily. Had they had any news from Sita? She had seen the postman walking up the hill, perhaps with a letter for them. But no, there was no news from Sita.

  Then one morning at eleven o’clock all the radio stations were interrupted by a news flash. A senior government official had been assassinated and the Tamil Tigers were claiming responsibility. Shockwaves reverberated around the capital as the government was thrown into chaos. All morning the radio broadcast the news, interspersed with the sonorous chanting of monks, their voices calmly rising and falling, for death, being part of life, did not perturb them. Several hours later, before the country could draw its breath, the Tigers bombed the holiest of Buddhist sites. A truck loaded with explosives rushing towards the sacred temple of the tooth was all it took to destroy three thousand years of peace. Those who watched in horror saw that at last the eye of the storm had appeared.

  Bee listened to the news while he worked on his etching plate. The afternoon sun was low in the sky. In a little while it would be dark and the mosquitoes would descend with the curfew. He watched the etching acid frothing in its tray. After a few seconds the timer buzzed and he lifted the metal plate out and washed it in clean water. Then he began to ink the plate up. He had received a message from his friend the doctor. There was a Tamil man in the wrong place at the wrong time, on the run. Bee looked at his day’s work. The etching was drying between blotters. On the white paper was an image of a naked body lying face-up across a trestle table. Four faces emerged from out of the black mezzotint, staring down at the begging figure. Bee stared at the image intently. He took his pencil out and signed the print. Then he wrote in his neat faint handwriting: The Banquet.

  ‘I’m going up to the Mount Lavinia Hotel,’ he told Kamala. I’m meeting the art dealer there.’

  Kamala watched him go. She knew he was lying but she understood; if she wanted Bee to find a little feeling in his numbed emotions it was through this small seepage of defiance that he would do so. So with an eye blinded with love she left him alone.

  At the hotel Bee ordered a glass of beer and went to a table outside. He waited. There was no sign of the doctor. The light from the sea pierced its way through his thoughts. A small spindly bird hopped on the sand. His heart ached. This war has cursed us, he thought. Staring at the kingfisher-blue sky he thought of Sarath and saw how great his fear had been, how frightened he was of loving again. But Sarath would be fine. Thank God! With his Singhalese father, his Singhalese name, he would be safe.

  After finishing his beer, Bee looked around casually. Then he stood up and left. The barman watched him leave. He wiped down the counter. Under his waiter’s uniform he wore army boots.

  Because for once there was no curfew, they all ate together that night: Bee and Kamala, May and Sarath. Even Namil, having finished work early, joined them. Nobody spoke much and the fish was exceptionally delicious. If I had not lost Alice, thought Bee, when the plates were cleared and he sat smoking on the verandah, I would say it hasn’t been so bad. But I would like to see her one more time, he thought. Afterwards, as they sat on the verandah under a sky punctured by stars, listening to the sweet, soft sound of the Indian Ocean, Bee brought out a pack of cards. No one, not even Sarath, said anything as he began to deal them out. In the light of the lamp that the servant had lit Kamala glanced at her husband’s face. It was unutterably sad.

  The dawn came up like the opening bars of a symphony. It brought the sea into view once more, cleaned smooth by night’s hand. Gradually as the sky whitened it became possible to see the waves rising slowly above the horizon, high and incandescent in the softest of blues, impossible to replicate in paint. They moved one against another, spreading lacy fronds across the sands. And here and there glimpses of wet sand glinted like precious gems. An unseen hand had swept the beach. Slowly the dark line of the horizon began to glow, first with a faint rose, followed by streaks of yellow. And all the while the dark expanse of water turned a glorious, shimmering silver. Some other person will paint this stretch of sea after I am gone, thought Bee, rising to gaze at it. Unusually, he felt refreshed. The arrival of the light could still make him impatient to begin working. Perhaps, he thought, I should go back to painting what I see. Last night’s unexpected tranquillity had left him hopeful. His sleep had been peaceful, uninterrupted by sounds of devil dancing or drums or the thud of an exploding bomb. For once, nothing had disturbed him until the arrival of this slow-spreading, astonishing, dawn. Beside him, Kamala stirred but did not wake. Turning over she snored gently. Quietly, Bee went outside.

  In England the dawn was at least five hours away, he thought, examining his plants, still damp with dew. Last night Sarath had won the card game, laughing gleefully; watching him, Bee had felt a confusion of old emotions from long ago. Unlocking his studio he went in and began examining his etching plates, clean now of all ink, criss-crossed with finely bitten lines, like the palm of his own hand. Staring at them, suddenly he wanted simply to paint again. Taking out a sheet of watercolour paper, he stretched it across a board. Outside an army of enormous red ants marched across the gravel in wavy lines. Bee dipped his brush in a jar of clear water. The ants, moving as one, headed towards the threshold of his studio. Sunlight fell through the open door and on to their transparent, swollen bodies, making them look as though they carried sacs of blood on their backs. With one swift stroke Bee drew his brush across the board, marking the horizon across it forever. Aquamarine pigment bled across the paper.

  He dipped his brush into the water again, completely absorbed in the movement of colour and water. A scene was growing under his hand, seeping out on to the white, rough paper, saturated, fluid and staining. He was so absorbed that he did not hear Kamala’s voice calling out to him, over and over again, from the verandah. He did not notice the columns of ants flattened juicily by a pair of thick-soled boots. Only when the machete above his head came down in the first crack on his skull did he feel anything. Only then as, again and again it smashed against him, did he move, as with a whisper of breath, and the infinite grace of a marionette, he sank to the floor. Beside him the thin line of ants were no more. And in this moment Bee Fonseka was spared the knowledge that Kamala, seeing what was happening, running out towards him, had been gunned down, her cry and her life snapped off.

  Silence. There was only silence. The sun rose fully. It was another cloudless, blank-blue day on this lovely island. First one bird, then another sang their indifferent melodies. Light fell on the leaves in the garden, casting shadows on the gravel where once Alice had stood, where neither Bee nor Kamala would ever walk again. Tenderly the shadows lengthened; it would be many hours before anyone called at the house. More hours still before May and Namil and Sarath would be brought the news by shocked neighbours. It would be a whole day before such news could travel across the oceans to England, and it would take even longer for Sita and Alice to comprehend what had happened. For distance would both protect and abandon them in equal parts, so that their wound would congeal instead of healing. But all this was some hours away. For now, those who would mourn still slept the sleep of innocence, prote
cted for a little while longer. As the blood seeped into the land, and the sea rolled gently in a dazzling bowl of sunlight, all remained still.

  It would be many weeks before the letter itself finally reached them. First there was the incoherent conversation with Namil. Still half-asleep, they struggled, grappling with the unfamiliar voice and the events that were unfolding elsewhere. They tried to picture the scene. Dawn on the coast? The sea? They had not heard its ebb and flow and hiss for years. They thought the sea had been erased from their consciousness. So her sister’s voice, choking and crying, rising and falling across the ocean like an old familiar refrain, invading this drab, dark hall in which Sita stood holding the telephone with both her hands, seemed unreal. Afterwards, Sita had known she had sounded unfeeling.

  ‘What time did it happen?’ she had asked, woodenly.

  And when the answer came back to her, broken up by the line and served up with her own echo, she had insisted:

  ‘What were they doing, up so early?’

  Namil spoke then, telling her unfamiliar things that made her want to scream, enough, enough, but instead she asked:

  ‘When is the funeral?’

  Later, when she began to register the shock, long before there were any tears, she imagined May saying, ‘Have they forgotten how it is here already?’ She imagined May judging her.

  Like her mother, Alice had not reacted much. The sound of her voice echoing back across the telephone line had distracted her too. The hour and the rude awakening had made her clumsy and slow-witted. The line crackled. It was hard to imagine her grandfather’s face, here in the cold, windowless hallway. The magnolia paint, Alice noticed irrelevantly, listening to her uncle’s voice, was peeling in patches. Pink wallpaper showed through like raw flesh. Alice reached out and began to scratch at it a little more, delighted that it came off so easily in her hand. Her mother was speaking on the telephone again; the call would be costing someone a lot of money. This is my home, thought Alice, making a hole in the plaster as though the house was a living, breathing thing, so that her mother, still talking, still holding the phone with both hands, turned to her with a bewildered, half-wild look. Then, when the phone call was finally over (how many different ways was it possible to lament the dead), they wandered aimlessly around the house. Sita, walking into her bedroom, staring at the double bed she had leapt out of moments before, noticing the condensation on the windows, the cold linoleum floor, warm only near the two-bar gas fire, felt her thoughts stumble clumsily about. What sort of reality had she just heard?

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Alice said.

  Silent, slender Alice, with her mane of dark hair and her face pinched with shock, brewing tea as though it were tears. When had Alice the child become so inscrutable? Sita asked herself, bewildered. They drank tea with the electric light switched on and the paraffin heater spluttering fumes. They talked in shocked, low voices, not knowing how to communicate with each other. It had been so long since they had had anything to say.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Alice asked. ‘Should we try to ring them back?’ It was a pound a minute. They could not afford it. Had May wondered why they had never rung before? Had they thought that Sita had plenty of money? Old anxieties surfaced. But in any case, thought Sita as the news renewed itself with another shockwave, her parents were no longer there to judge her. Relief-tinged bereavement. ‘No. They’re not in a state to talk. I’m going to write.’ ‘I thought you said that letters were being opened?’ It was true; those letters that did get through were still being opened. But what harm could words of condolence do? Sita looked at her daughter in the harsh electric light. Sixteen-year-old Alice, nearly seventeen. Here, in this single moment she had shed her childhood, freed herself like a butterfly; become someone else. The eager child was no more. She is almost a woman, thought Sita, surprised, seeing her daughter outlined against the wintry light. Beautiful and remote. Like her father, thought Sita, and unlike mine, she thought again, feeling a small prick of tears; a sensation of a dam that was blocked. Had it happened after Kunal? thought Sita.

  ‘I’ll send flowers,’ Alice said, and for a moment her voice trembled before steadying itself. ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to go out. On my way to school I’ll send flowers.’

  She was thinking she would send white roses. An image of her grandparents burned briefly before her, but she concentrated hard to blank it out. Sita was remembering her sister’s voice, swollen with tears, rising and falling, speaking in Singhalese; the only language possible for their grief. In the background, Sita was certain she heard the sea.

  ‘Did you hear the sea?’ she asked, frowning. ‘In the background, I mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just…I don’t know. It was hard to picture them, the place…’ her voice trailed off.

  Alice nodded. They were both thinking the same thing. Outside, the light had become stronger. Surprisingly, this November day would be sunny. Icy, but with a blue sky. The tea in the pot was cold too and the paraffin heater, having spluttered a few times, went out. They would, thought Alice dully, have to buy an electric fire soon. Stirring herself with difficulty, she went to have a wash. She was due in school in two hours.

  Alice went to the art block as soon as she could. Mr Eliot was washing paintbrushes, a cigarette dangling from his lips as usual. Every now and then he coughed and ash dropped into the sink. Outside in the bright winter sunshine a fight was in progress and once or twice he banged on the window.

  ‘Oy,’ he shouted, ‘pack it in.’

  No one took any notice. Opening the door, Alice rushed in.

  ‘How many times have I told you kids not to use that door,’ the teacher cried angrily.

  ‘Sir,’ Alice said, and then she stopped.

  ‘Oh it’s you, Alice.’

  ‘They killed him…’ she cried before she could stop herself, and then with no warning she burst into tears.

  Sitting in David Eliot’s office she told him the story, slowly, bit by disjointed bit.

  ‘He was my grandfather, sir,’ she said. ‘He loved me.’

  Outside, snow had begun to fall heavily, transforming the playground, muffling the sound of traffic, as Alice haltingly described her last glimpse of her grandparents.

  ‘The sun shone all the way to the harbour,’ she said, and now she was crying in earnest.

  Having started she found herself unable to stop.

  ‘He wouldn’t come to the jetty and when I asked my grandmother, she said he couldn’t bear to.’

  The teacher nodded, saying nothing, waiting.

  ‘I was angry with him, sir, for not coming. I didn’t understand. And then, later, I was angry he didn’t send for me.’

  The lunch break was nearly over. Children lined up, jostling against each other, laughing, while Alice talked to David Eliot about her home, her voice rising in a passionate flood of tears.

  ‘He was the only one who ever loved me, sir,’ she cried piteously.

  Still the art teacher said nothing.

  And I never wrote, not often. I couldn’t.’

  Mr Eliot turned to her with a look of grave pity in his eyes.

  Alice,’ he said at last, when there seemed no letting up of her tears, ‘you are very young.’

  Bemused, she looked at him with eyes magnified by tears and something of his confused thoughts communicated themselves to her.

  Alice,’ he sighed, unable to find the words he wanted.

  Then he put his hand on her thin shoulder and shook her very slightly.

  Alice…do you think you should go home?’

  She didn’t seem to hear; she was too busy shredding a paper hanky.

  ‘Shall I send a note to your form teacher?’ he asked finally. She shook her head violently. The thought of her mother was more than she could bear. David Eliot pressed his lips together. He could hear the whistle being blown.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Miss Kimberley will be here in a minute
…’He cleared his throat, gazing at her hopelessly. ‘I’ve got to teach now. And you better go and wash your face in the girls’ toilet. Come back after school, okay?’

  Alice nodded, wiping eyes that continued to weep.

  ‘Come back and tell me about your grandfather, okay?’ David Eliot said. ‘You are going to be a really good artist one day, you’ll see.

  I promise you. I’ve only had one other pupil like you before. And he wasn’t half as good as you’re going to be. You listening to me?’