Fragile Monsters Read online

  It’s a different story when she goes back home, though. Her mother’s now wholly lost in her betel nuts and gin. Each night Radhika traipses barefoot through the scrub jungle, coming back to the house at dawn with her feet swollen and bleeding. She’s trying to find her way back home, or back to something better. Poor Radhika, she’s always been slow to give up hope.

  Stephen’s miserable too. Since Paavai left four years ago Stephen’s been in a state of rage. He takes it out on the house, spending every night renovating and remodelling by the light of a smoky carbide lamp. When Radhika finally returns in the grey and ashy dawns, she could be forgiven for not recognizing the place at all. Stephen blames this house for everything, and traces his personal disasters to its corners and nooks. The puddles under the verandah are Radhika’s smile; murky and unknowable. The sloping windowsills and overhanging vines are Anil’s mind; blurred and shadowed beyond all hope. The dark corridors, the precarious ceilings, the rooms without windows and others without doors, well, they’re the easiest of all. They’re Stephen’s own mistakes, in a very literal sense.

  With a family like that, it’s no surprise that Mary prefers to spend her time at the convent. These days, she only goes back home to talk to Anil. He’s grown handsome and tall, with an eye for pretty girls. He’s only thirteen years old, but if he knew what hearts were then he’d break them. Mary loves him more with every passing year.

  ‘Mary, dear.’ Gerta puts her embroidery down and looks across at Mary through the humid, breathless evening. ‘I’m just going to prepare Agnes her supper. She’ll be in here whining about how she’s hungry soon.’

  It’s a joke Mary and Gerta share, this gentle pretence that Agnes could talk – could nag and whine and complain – if only she wanted to. Agnes is eight now and she’s sweet and sturdy, but she’s never said a word. Nevertheless, Gerta lives in a permanent and excoriating atmosphere of hope. If Our Lord can get off his cross and walk, she says, then Agnes will one day speak without a tongue.

  Sister Gerta lumbers out of the room, heading for the convent kitchen. As soon as her skirts have twitched out of the door a tangled black head pops up outside the window and a hand waves frantically to Mary. It’s Cecelia, looking exactly as she did last time Mary saw her. She’s bent in at a window, she’s baring her sharp little teeth in a friendly smile and she’s about to cause trouble.

  ‘Cecelia!’ It’s so dark that Mary can barely see Cecelia’s face through the open window, just the lace of her dress glimmering in the firefly dusk. Cecelia and Mary have lost touch almost completely in the last few years. While Mary’s been busying herself with needlework, Cecelia’s been expanding her worldly education. She’s been kissing boys in the back row of the Empire cinema, she’s been sucking on cigarettes and stealing nips of alcohol from hipflasks. She’s shallow, she’s tacky, she’s soiled and tawdry, and Mary’s missed her more than she can say.

  ‘Cecelia! I haven’t seen you since –’ Mary hesitates. Since the examinations, she was going to say. Every time she thinks of her failed Junior Cambridge exam she grows bitter. She isn’t used to failure yet.

  ‘Oh, I know, everything’s so rushed these days, there simply isn’t time.’

  Cecelia sounds brittle and sophisticated. Mary’s nearly in awe of her, this girl who used to be her best friend. She’s heard the rumours about Cecelia, of course. Over the last few months the girl’s become far too eager to grow up, to get herself a lover and ask questions later. Anybody who comes to Cecelia’s house is fair game, and more than once a happily married postman or delivery boy has found himself standing by the gate with Cecelia’s busy little hands sneaking around his waist under the pretence of helping him carry a parcel. Cecelia’s out for a husband, or the nearest she can get.

  ‘Come up to the hilltop,’ she tells Mary. ‘I want to talk. I want to tell you everything.’

  Mary’s surprised by this. They’ve barely spoken in the last few years, but now Cecelia’s acting as though they’re still best friends. She always did have an everything to tell, Mary thinks. Mary herself, sitting on a convent chair with her hair uncombed and her legs gawky under an outgrown dress, can’t compete.

  ‘How’s dear little Anil?’ Cecelia asks after the girls start walking up the hill. Mary isn’t sure how to answer. Anil isn’t all that little, for a start, and she doesn’t want to risk him getting in Cecelia’s lip-smacking way. Perhaps that’s why Cecelia wants to be friends again, she thinks. She’s been biding her time, that’s all, until Anil grew up.

  (Mary will later concede that she was wrong about Cecelia, that after being left to sink or swim in the flood of 1926, all Cecelia wants is to keep her distance from Mary’s family. Only later, in her seventh decade and as distant from herself as Cecelia ever was, will my grandmother admit that she might – just might – have made a mistake.)

  ‘I’ve something exciting to tell you,’ Cecelia giggles. The two girls sit down on the grassy hilltop. It’s nearly dark by now, and they can see the lights of Lipis below them. It’s market night, and the busy bazaar is glaring.

  ‘It’s about Rajan,’ Cecelia says, then adds carelessly, ‘Have you seen much of him?’

  Mary shakes her head. These days Rajan’s a fully fledged doctor, a junior member of a government hospital across the valley. He’s a political firebrand, too, and he’s already spent a few nights in jail for protesting against laws that restrict rice cultivation to the Malays. Rajan doesn’t want to cultivate rice – he doesn’t know the first thing about it – but it’s the principle of the thing, he says. He’s big on principles, on equality of income and of opportunity. He’s told Mary all about this, leaning out of the window of his father’s Daimler while she walks to market with a fish basket over her arm.

  ‘Well, I’ve seen quite a lot of him,’ Cecelia says, gloating rather. ‘We’ve been … well, we’re thinking of …’

  Cecelia hesitates. In fact, she isn’t sure what exactly Rajan’s been thinking of. The matter’s been weighing on Cecelia’s mind, waking her at three a.m. (as a durian falls in Mary’s compound, as a bomoh creeps along a jungle path, as Japanese soldiers in Manchuria begin to cast glances at the Malay peninsula). And Cecelia certainly has good reason for being nervous. If Rajan doesn’t start thinking of marriage soon, she could be in a very awkward position indeed.

  ‘You mean … you’re engaged?’ Mary feels bitterness welling into her mouth. So this is why Cecelia’s come to visit her. She hasn’t come to make up; she hasn’t come to be friends again or even to be enemies. She’s come to gloat.

  ‘He actually proposed to you?’

  Mary looks at Cecelia carefully. Cecelia’s lying back on the hilly grass with her knees apart and her white-frocked stomach a little higher, a little rounder than Mary remembers. A little too full to be explained away.

  ‘Cecelia! You haven’t! You didn’t!’

  It’s undeniable, though. Cecelia is pregnant. For a second Mary’s horrified – oh, poor Cecelia, she thinks in a moment of pure sympathy; what has she done?

  ‘It’s Rajan’s, of course,’ Cecelia says. ‘We’re getting married.’

  That curdles Mary’s sympathy. And the worst of it is, she believes Cecelia. There’s a glow about her tonight, a radiant and blossoming beauty because she’s carrying her lover’s child. And that’s a problem – that’s a real problem – because Mary has always held out a forlorn hope that she herself might one day be Rajan’s wife. In the chill of the convent nights Mary’s imagined lying skin-to-skin with Rajan. She’s imagined kissing him, licking him; in her convent bed and her imagination Mary’s gone at least as far as Cecelia. She’s foreseen lust and love and strolls hand-in-hand under the bougainvillaea bushes.

  Now, though, it seems all that will belong to Cecelia. In a hot, hurting moment Mary sees Rajan and Cecelia living in a luxury bungalow with a tribe of half-Indian, half-Chinese babies who look Malay and can therefore move in any world they want. She sees Rajan content at last, and Cecelia on his lap with
a little cat-smile. And Mary sees herself, too, for ever making do with a cold convent cot and a family who’ve no time for her; making do with a mild-mannered future of compassion and good works.

  ‘You trollop, Cecelia! You dirty little whore!’ Mary’s good temper and good works, it’s clear, are going to have to wait.

  Cecelia sets her small teeth. ‘Don’t be jealous,’ she answers. ‘You never loved him anyway. Not properly; not the way I do.’

  She lays a palm on her stomach and strokes dreamily. It’s a clear enough message: Mary might have sailed over the floodwaters with Rajan once, but now Cecelia’s snagged him like a fishing net. Something about that gesture prises Mary open, sparking the tiniest, slightest flicker of her old bond with Cecelia. As the other girl pats her stomach, Mary feels something move inside her own. A wriggling little tadpole, fastened onto her liver and heart. Jatuh hati – falling liver – is what the Malays say for falling in love; and that’s exactly what Mary feels. A swooping, dizzying feeling, because Cecelia has the real thing – Rajan’s wriggling tadpole and liverish love – and Mary cannot stand that, cannot stand it at all.

  ‘You should be happy for me,’ Cecelia says with a provoking little smile. ‘We’re best friends.’

  It’s those last words that decide Mary for good and all. Best friends don’t steal each other’s imaginary boyfriends and imaginary futures, no matter how much in love they are. Best friends are supporting characters, not heroines of another story.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Mary bursts out, and then she’s gone, sprinting down the hill road in her outgrown lace-up shoes. She’s racing past the convent, she’s running past the scatter of houses washed halfway up the hillside. And before Cecelia can even puff herself upright, Mary’s down on the main road and heading to the night market.

  When Mary reaches the night market she stops, breathing hard. Half of Lipis is in there, selling goats and meat and fruit and fireworks to the other half. News and scandal fly about in the brightly lit walkways, with every transaction being accompanied by its own morsel of gossip. Market ladies chatter over washing-up pans behind cook stalls, and jewellery makers stoop over fragments of metal to swap rumours with mining magnates. The noise is deafening, and from where she stands panting out here in the dark Mary can feel the wind of all those words.

  And young Mary knows the power of words. She sets her teeth and tucks her hair neatly behind her ears. Stopping only to polish her shoes on the back of her grubby socks, she steps in through the market door and leans over a stall to whisper delicately in the ear of one of the market ladies.

  ‘Cecelia Lim’s going to have a baby,’ she murmurs, ‘and she says the father could be anybody. Just anybody.’

  She hears the market lady’s puff of surprise at being given this secret, this chewy and tender morsel of gossip. And then Mary takes a prim pace forward and stretches up to hiss the same thing to a group of Tamil rubber workers, who spit secrets as fast as betel-nut juice. She can hear fresh whisperings start behind her, swelled by the clicking of tongues. By the time Mary’s walked all the way through the market, Cecelia’s reputation will be in tatters. Cecelia will be condemned as reckless – her second baby, isn’t it; I heard it was her third and a different father for all of ’em – and dismissed as a hussy who’s got what’s coming to her.

  ‘What a bad wife she’ll make,’ Mary purrs to nobody in particular, and looking through the crowd sees Mrs Balakrishnan – Rajan’s mother – prick up her suspicious ears on the other side of the market. Mrs Balakrishnan frowns, swivels, leans forward to catch the whispers and looks black as thunder. Rajan won’t be marrying a bad wife, Mary resolves, with a comfortable lack of foresight. Not if she has anything to do with it.

  17. Tuesday, 8 a.m.

  The courtyard’s almost invisible behind sheeting water when I wake. Huge raindrops slam down onto the verandah roof and wet my feet with fine, bouncing spray. The prayer room’s been swept and the candles relit, with Ammuma’s sleeping mats piled up in a corner of the verandah. The clock in the hall finishes its chiming: eight o’clock. Time to go.

  Karthika comes out onto the verandah as I shake the stiffness from my legs. She’s dragging a bucket full of dirty water, with her skirt tucked high between her legs. Her bare feet leave splay-toed prints on the concrete floor. She heaves the bucket to the edge of the verandah and spills water in an arc. Without turning round, she takes a deep breath.

  ‘Durga-Miss …’ she says, then stops. She’s frightened, I realize. She’s scared I’ve spent the night chewing over what happened with Tom; gnawing my way through shock and anger until now I’m after revenge.

  ‘Sorry, Durga-Miss,’ she says. She looks down into the empty bucket, standing on one leg. She cradles the other foot like a stork against her bulging knee. She’s swaddled Rajneesh under her flimsy blouse. ‘About last night, so sorry. A mistake is all. A mistake.’

  That shuts me up. Karthika’s cleverer than I thought. She’s learnt to apologize, to grovel, to make excuses before anyone’s asked for them. She’d like to be vicious but if she can’t, she’ll be fragile.

  ‘You’re always meddling,’ I snap. ‘You go into my bedroom, you give Rajneesh my things. You tell lies about my … about Tom-Mister.’

  Karthika looks taken aback. ‘No, Durga-Miss. I didn’t. I didn’t any of it.’

  ‘You’re just jealous. You want to meddle in my life because –’

  Because yours went wrong. That peaked face, all nose and eye sockets, watching from above a mop as I went off to school. Those thin fingers picking fish from the bones I’d left on my plate.

  ‘No, Durga-Miss,’ she insists, more earnestly than I’d expect. ‘Not jealous.’

  She looks down, and I can’t believe it, but there’s a blush creeping up her cheek. ‘Me and Tom-Mister are hati … in love. He says he wants to marry.’

  ‘He what?’

  She smiles, unabashed and clear-eyed and greedy as any well-brought-up young lady. ‘Look, Durga-Miss,’ she insists. ‘Look.’

  She starts undoing the buttons on her blouse. Rajneesh lies tightly swaddled against her ribs and I can see only the pale rind of his forehead. She pulls her blouse further apart to show me his skin gleaming against her flat brown breasts.

  ‘See how fair? Like Tom-Mister … just like.’ Her voice trails off. Gets quieter, more hesitant, as though for the first time she’s hearing just how it sounds. He’s Tom’s son, she’s saying, and I feel sick. Queasy, as the truth slips down like a cold pebble. He’s Tom’s blood and bone – foisted on her – in my bedroom, most probably. How did they do it without Ammuma hearing? Did she want him like I did? Did she not want him at all? She’s my little sister, for what that’s worth.

  ‘So you can stop saying this, all of it,’ she finishes, with a sudden tawdry bravery. ‘I’m not jealous, no need of jealous. Tom-Mister loves me. He says it serious.’

  ‘Karthika …’

  And in the middle of this horror, it’s somehow funny. She looks so small, so fierce. So much like a servant-girl, the old Durga would have thought.

  ‘Karthika, Tom isn’t – you don’t really believe Tom’s going to marry you?’

  She doesn’t reply. Perhaps she hasn’t understood; she’s not at home in English, where her elbows stick out and nothing quite fits. And I’m angry, all of a sudden. At Tom, at myself. At Karthika, who’s had what I haven’t and got what I’d have loved to refuse.

  ‘You’d better stop saying things like that. You need to be modest, in your position.’

  She stares at me, then her face suddenly crumples and she slams her foot against the empty bucket. Her thick toenails crack against the rim and it tumbles away. She balls her fists up in the folds of her too-large red nylon skirt and turns her back on me. I can guess what she’s thinking. Modesty’s no good to her; won’t turn sequins into real gold or a red nylon skirt into a threadwork sari. Won’t turn her into a girl who could have any man she wanted, instead of a girl who’s already had sev
eral she didn’t.

  She stamps over to the sleeping mats, her lower lip pushed out and her eyebrows arrowed. Ammuma would say that I shouldn’t encourage her by talking to her. Give her an inch, Ammuma says, and she’ll take it, too.

  As Karthika pulls the mats together I see something in the corner, a shapeless flop of canvas against the wall. Tom’s bag. I quickly grab it as she stamps out of the room. The canvas straps are dark and stiff with sweat and cologne. Last night comes back to me with an ache in my belly. His fingers on my skin. A lick of his sweat on my tongue. And then Karthika, peering through the door with her eyes bright and vicious as a movie pontianak.

  I hold the bag up, breathing in its smell. There’s an address tag on it, a hospital-issued paper strip, with TOM HARCOURT in bold black letters. The address is Jalan Seroja, one of the streets on the outskirts of Lipis.

  ‘Aiyoh, Durga,’ Ammuma’s voice makes me jump. ‘Should be going already.’

  She’s standing by the verandah entrance watching me. ‘Got packed, is it? Some bag for home?’

  ‘Yes … yes. For home.’ As I say it, I realize I’m going to keep it. I’m going to prop this bag up in the corner of my KL apartment where it’ll slump against the wall and point out my thickening waist and tiny crow’s feet. It’s going to be the first thing I see when I walk in and when I wake up. When Deepak calls to tell me he misses me so much that he’s had to start sleeping with his wife again, then Tom’s bag and I will huddle together and remind each other about all our bad decisions.

  ‘You’re ready to go?’ Ammuma peers up at me, her eyes bright. She hands me a box, wrapped and smelling of food. Keema, mutton curry, brinjal pureed with yoghurt and oozing in its Tupperware. ‘Won’t have time to buy lunch at university.’