Fragile Monsters Read online

  ‘Cecelia, I thought we’d be partners,’ Mary bursts out. She and Cecelia always used to pair up in that tense half-hour before examinations in order to make use of the last – the very last – ounce of their failing bond. Mary would memorize the beginning of every equation and Cecelia the end, their lips moving unconsciously together. But these days, Cecelia won’t play.

  ‘I would have studied with you,’ Cecelia explains. ‘But you were late.’

  Perhaps it’s not surprising. Cecelia, like everyone else in Kuala Lipis, has come to accept that Mary didn’t mean to leave her to the flood. But despite that, she’s still got a lot to forgive her old friend for and she’s always been the kind to hold a grudge. So now she looks right through Mary and turns away, thrusting her chemistry book and her bare knees under Rajan’s nose.

  ‘Test me again?’ she asks.

  Mary turns on her heel with a sob. Her skirt swirls, and some of those irritating pitul seeds fly off to land on Cecelia’s bare knees. Serves you right, Mary thinks.

  She stalks off into the schoolhouse. It’s a solid building, with arched doorways and low windows. The classrooms are bright with sun, and in front of one of the doorways is a nun sitting quietly in those sunbeams. It’s Sister Gerta, who’s come down from the hilltop convent to help supervise the examinations today. Gerta’s spent her whole life in one Malayan convent or other, wearing shirts of undyed cotton and skirts rough as gunny sacks. At twenty years old she sprouted a distressing and luxurious moustache, by twenty-five her chins overlapped and spilled down like dewlaps and now at thirty her face is peaceably ugly. She’s the kindest woman Mary will ever know, and right now her eyes are brimming with sympathy at the sight of Mary’s melancholy face.

  ‘Mary! Child, you can’t go in yet. That’s the examination room.’

  The examinations are being set up in the rooms behind Sister Gerta and two masters inside chat unintelligibly as they lay out papers for the English conversation assessment.

  ‘Come, child, sit next to me here. Everything will be all right.’

  Sister Gerta likes to console. She has a kind of grim cheerfulness, an invincible way of looking on the bright side. She gives Mary a radiant smile and bounces what looks like a bundle of rags on her lap.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mary asks. She sits down, crossing her legs in their sloppy white socks. Next to Sister Gerta’s thick and pasty shins, Mary’s ankle bones look delicate. She admires them for a second.

  ‘This? This is Agnes.’

  Sister Gerta pulls back one of the folds of cloth on her lap, and Mary sees a little face peering out at her. Agnes looks about a year old, with a round Chinese face contorted into what ought to herald an ear-splitting scream. It ought to be loud enough to drown out the English masters, to overpower the murmur of dates and formulae from outside – if it weren’t for the fact that baby Agnes apparently decides against it. She waves her fists instead, she turns purple and arches her back; she has, in fact, a thoroughly satisfying tantrum, and all completely silent.

  ‘She doesn’t make a sound, the cherub. Not one word.’ Sister Gerta bounces Agnes up and down on her fat thighs, and gives Mary one of the sweetest smiles she’s ever seen.

  ‘Neither does my brother,’ admits Mary with a shamefaced little shrug.

  ‘Still, he’s God’s child, isn’t he? And what a good sister you must be to him, too.’

  Mary doesn’t get much praise these days – she’s at that awkward age of knuckly hands and bony knees, of strange new breasts and hips that don’t stay within their bounds. She wriggles a little and blushes, letting Gerta coax out of her that she is looking forward to the examination being over, that she does like English conversational practice, that she would like to be a nun when she grows up. Anna Fuertes, standing at the end of the corridor, gives her a fierce glare; Anna is truly, deeply religious, and she knows all too well that impious little Mary is a sham.

  Sister Gerta, on the other hand, believes Mary implicitly. All her chins beam with delight, and she digs into her scanty blouse to find a sweet and a string of rosary beads. She presses both into Mary’s hands.

  ‘For your darling little brother.’

  Perhaps it’s the rattle of those beads that attracts Cecelia’s attention. Perhaps it’s Mary’s squeak of surprise. Perhaps it’s bad luck, pure and simple. But whatever the cause, Cecelia’s tangled black head pops through the low hall window opposite Mary.

  ‘Mary? Rajan wants you to come and study with us.’

  Cecelia herself doesn’t want it, and she makes that plain enough. Her eyebrows are drawn together in a don’t-you-dare glare that pins Mary to her seat. But then Rajan comes up beside her, looking curiously at both the girls. Mary looks away, but Cecelia twitches her mouth into a witchy little smile. It’s an enchanting curl of her lips, calculated to tell Rajan she’s the sort of girl to forgive floods and failures and every scrap of guilt that’s ever flown into her best friend’s heart.

  And it does the trick. Rajan – who’s practical, who likes his girls inclined to forgiveness and smiles – slips a groping hand under the pleats of her skirt. He frees the very last pitul from her waistband, and it drops to chafe her fat little thighs. Cecelia jumps, half-turns, and the full force of her lovely smile misses Mary and lands straight on baby Agnes.

  Agnes has had a poor enough start in life, so far. She’s only a year old, but her problems began long before she was born. Her problems began, in fact, forty years ago, when leprosy first came to Pahang. It spread slowly at first, then snaked down Mount Tahan in an epidemic. Old men and women died of it, then the young. A few of the prettier girls jumped off cliffs or down wells when they saw the first lesions on their beautiful skins, and passed the disease through the water supply to their plainer sisters. Drowned women in wells: there’s always more than one explanation.

  And into this welter of missing limbs and missing noses came baby Agnes, missing her tongue. Not that that had anything to do with leprosy, other than as the most unfortunate coincidence. Leprosy isn’t hereditary and babies aren’t born with it, but nevertheless that coincidence looked bad for Agnes. Here she was, lying on a blanket and playing with her toes, and it was anyone’s bet when one of them would come off, too.

  The bomohs, of course, said her birth was a message. In those years, the bomohs said everything was a message. Babies in particular, especially those with missing limbs or a frill of superfluous fingers. According to the bomohs, those babies were saying: your padi-crop will fail; your wife will run off with the satay hawker; you will die of leprosy. An offering, the bomohs said – gold perhaps, or some tender roast meat or a brand-new jacket – might just avert the catastrophe.

  Agnes’s parents, though, had nothing to spare. No gold, no roast meat, and the only new jacket was the one they’d bought for their precious baby daughter before they knew she would never speak. But keeping Agnes would be the utmost in bad luck, in sheer wilful carelessness. So they did the next best thing: parcelled Agnes up and turned her into an offering herself. Not to the bomohs, but to the newly opened convent.

  So Agnes, only a year old when Mary first sees her, will grow up silent and religious. Owing to the nuns’ stern conviction that she was never a messenger – such a pagan idea – nothing she says will ever be believed. A storm is coming, she’ll write on her slate, and the nuns will ignore her and go out without umbrellas. Or Sister Margaret is stealing the communion wine, and nothing will be done until four weeks later Sister Margaret turns up dead drunk at Mass.

  And then, when Agnes gets older, she’ll write: God is telling me to build a school. Sister Agnes – as she will be then – won’t even try to convince the other nuns of the truth of this. She’ll take herself off instead to a tumbledown house with blocked-up storm drains. Once there she’ll sweep the floors with palm leaves, darn up the holes in the attap roof and fill the desks with children. They’ll be straight-limbed children, all of them, with clear skin and no diseases at all. Because, at the same time as Mo
ther Agnes is setting up her school, the government will start an initiative of its own.

  The National Leprosy Control Programme will be born in the 1960s, designed to wipe out all those doomed, disfigured women and mutilated men. And as part of the programme, the government will import a doctor into Pahang; in fact they’ll import Dr Harcourt all the way from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine with his wife and ten-year-old son Tom. Tom, whose John Lennon hair will flop in the heat and who’ll kiss Mary’s granddaughter and Mary’s granddaughter’s best friend and anyone else who’ll let him.

  11. Sunday, 12 p.m.

  There are only a few spaces left in the hospital car park, all of them in the full sun. I’m baking in my best silk sari and a pair of jewelled sandals that have been in my room since I was seventeen. They’ve got tighter, or I’ve got fatter, and I can feel a roll of skin peeling off my heel. I spent an hour last night trying to wear them in, pacing up and down the hall that Karthika and I had swept clean. Time enough to talk myself into being more attracted to Tom than I am. Time enough to plan a happy ending, to decide it was love at first sight. By now I’m less certain, first sight being less reliable than hindsight.

  But still, I’m excited enough to arrive early. My heart’s beating faster, with a smile trembling under my skin and a splash of jewels under my dupatta. The nurse behind the reception desk gives me a friendly look. Her white uniform’s too small, bulging at the seams, and her dark skin’s blotched with acne. She looks like someone I can cope with, someone I could even feel sorry for in this glow of best-frock-jewels-lipstick. Poor girl; she can’t help it; she’s doing her best.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m here to see Tom Harcourt. I’m Durga Panikkar.’

  She frowns. ‘Do you work here, Miss … Doctor? Panikkar?’

  She sounds doubtful, as well she might. Doctors don’t shiver like this, like new milk over a flame. They don’t pulse and breathe inside gold-embroidered saris that are just a shade too tight. Doctors, unlike mathematicians, have their bodies sternly under control.

  ‘No, I’m a friend of his. He’s expecting me.’

  She gets out a clipboard, running her finger down the list. She has good nails, neat and well shaped. She’s not the kind to bite at them, to worry herself to the quick. She reaches the end of the list, pauses, starts again at the top.

  ‘I’m sorry, there isn’t anything here. Are you sure he knows you’re coming?’

  I swallow. ‘Yes … yes, he knows. He does know.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t let you up.’ Her smile’s less personal now. I’m becoming a problem. ‘If you take a seat, though, I can get you something to drink. Tea, coffee, biscuits?’

  She sounds practised, as though she’s seen all this before. Perhaps she has. Other overdressed girls, left on her hands to console with tea and cake.

  ‘No, no, it doesn’t matter. I just popped in,’ I tell her. My face is hot and when I give her a smile my mouth feels large and numb. ‘On the off-chance.’

  She looks relieved, and now my lips and cheeks hurt but I keep on smiling. I hold my head up and walk back to the car in my stupid, pinching shoes. I can see the nurses’ hostel, with washing draped over the balconies and steam rising from rice pots inside. Schoolboys are playing cricket out on the soaking fields and a few motorcycles whine past on the trunk road.

  I should have known. I shouldn’t have got my hopes up. It’s not like me to mind so much. I’m a girl for solutions, for logic and making the best of things. Or perhaps I’m not. Perhaps now I’m back in Malaysia I’m going to turn out a different sort of woman altogether, the kind to wear jewels and silks and end up drowning in my own disappointment. How nice to have the choice.

  After a few minutes I open the car door and tie my hair back with a scrunchie from the glove compartment. Scrub my face with my fingertips, smearing my eyeshadow, but there’s nobody to care. I try out another big, bright smile, and then clip smartly across the car park and back to the reception desk.

  ‘Oh – yes?’ The nurse is still friendly, but with a slick of steel underneath. She’s got rid of me once already.

  ‘I’m collecting my grandmother today, too’ I tell her. See, I have legitimate business. I belong. Mary Panikkar, I tell her, to be collected by Dr Durga Panikkar and the nurse’s face clears. She’s just opened her file when a voice comes from behind.

  ‘Aiyoh, Durga, waiting the whole day already.’

  I jump. Ammuma’s in the cubicle behind the nurse’s desk, concealed by a curtain. I wonder how long she’s been there, if she heard me ask for Tom and get turned down. She’s wearing a fresh sari made of white cotton and her hands are bandaged over the worst of her burns. On the chair next to her there’s a polished cylinder with a mouthpiece. The mouthpiece has straps to hold it in place and a transparent container for storage.

  ‘It’s an oxygen cylinder. To help her breathe.’

  Dr Rao pulls the curtain aside and ushers Ammuma out into the lobby. He looks even more tired than before, as though he’s hanging off his own shoulder blades. He puts a hand on her arm as he tells me how to help her change the bandages. Ammuma snorts. After her time in hospital, the look on her face implies, she could perform her own tracheotomy.

  ‘Dr Panikkar, if she …’ Dr Rao pauses, turning away from Ammuma and lowering his voice.

  ‘If she has trouble breathing, call the hospital straight away. Or if’ – his eyes drop to her old burn scar, visible above the bandages – ‘if she’s confused. If she starts talking about her daughter again, or hurting herself …’

  ‘Enough, so much whisper-whisper! All the same, you boys and girls, always thinking everyone’s wanting to hear.’ Ammuma glares at us both.

  As soon as Dr Rao’s out of earshot she scolds me for parking in the sun. ‘With your complexion, Durga. No taking chances.’

  I help her across the car park and she levers herself into the passenger seat. Her shrunken hips nestle amongst a litter of paper and dried-up pens.

  ‘Clever, that Dr Rao boy,’ Ammuma says as we pull out onto the trunk road. ‘Efficient with discharge,’ she says knowledgeably, rolling the word over her tongue. She likes a bit of fuss, likes the paper-and-red-tape importance of being a patient.

  I don’t reply. I’m thinking about what Dr Rao said, if only because that means I’m not thinking about Tom. If she starts talking about her daughter. I look across at Ammuma, so small in the passenger seat.

  ‘Ammuma,’ I start. ‘When I was looking in the almirah I found something. A book.’

  ‘Arre, books only with you. All this university –’

  ‘No, an autograph book, Ammuma. It had Amma’s name in it. Francesca Panikkar.’

  Silence. Ammuma’s staring through the windscreen with as much concentration as if she were driving herself.

  ‘With an address. In Kampung Ulu.’ She doesn’t look up.

  ‘Did you take her there sometimes, Ammuma? Is it … was it somewhere special? You never talk about – and I thought we could –’

  ‘Enough of thought,’ she snaps, so suddenly that I jump and miss a gear change. She’s turned in her seat, glaring at me and on the attack.

  ‘Why are you dressed all fancy-fancy? Think this is an outing, is it?’

  ‘No, I … I …’ Her anger’s come out of nowhere and I’m not thinking straight. ‘I was going to see someone.’

  ‘Hah! Yes, I heard it. You asking for Tom, running after him like some girl on the street.’

  ‘I wasn’t! I mean – he invited me. He asked me to come and so I was –’

  ‘Asked you?’ she interrupts. ‘When is it he’s asking you to do anything?’

  ‘He came to the house on Friday,’ I start to explain, ‘after you were admitted, and –’

  Ammuma cuts me off again. ‘Coming to the house, is it? Talking, inviting, and you let him stay alone with you?’

  ‘No, Ammuma, he was just visiting …’ I tail off; that’s exactly what Karthi
ka said. Visiting, staying with, involving himself. A picture comes into my mind: Tom twined with me on the prayer-room floor.

  ‘And now you’re dressing like a showgirl, waiting to catch a glimpse of him. Spitting into the skies, Durga, always you don’t think.’ She bangs her hand on the car seat. ‘What to do with you? Next day you’ll be asking for marry with some white boy, some Mat Salleh boy, isn’t it?’

  Ammuma dreads me ending up like my mother: unmarried and pregnant and no better than the servant-girl. While I was in Canada she used to read me stories down the phone from the KL papers. The big city, she used to say, where girls drink and dance and hold hands with boys. She chose the stories carefully, to give her opportunities to be shocked. To say things she’d regret later.

  ‘My own granddaughter,’ she mutters, loud enough to be perfectly well heard. ‘Dressing up in a skirt like underwear.’

  I put my indicator on, keeping my expression even. Ammuma gives me a suspicious glance. Granddaughters are hard work, that look says, ungrateful and liable to tangle with the wrong sort. She takes the rubber mouthpiece off her lap and slips it between her lips, where it takes over her breathing for her and blurs the rest of her words.

  ‘… should have taught you better.’

  Should have? Would have? It’s a criticism – somebody’s at fault, somebody’s to blame – but like all Ammuma’s judgements it’s easily missed. She slips them out, somewhere between one breath and the next.

  Karthika’s in the dining room when we get home, with an incense stick burning on top of the almirah. She’s hunched on a chair with her legs drawn up like a chicken about to lay. There’s a glance between her and Ammuma as we shuffle past to the hallway bathroom; a silent call-and-response I can’t interpret. We came to a sort of truce yesterday, all our quarrels broken down under the weight of cleaning that we had to do. She didn’t mention that great-grandmother of hers again. Why would she, when I’m scrubbing floors too?