Fragile Monsters Read online

  She pushes the food at me – Take, take – and then settles herself into her rattan chair. ‘Will miss you,’ she says quietly.

  She looks tired, sitting tipped sideways with her head resting on her arm. The scar on her forearm looks red, like it always does when she’s exhausted. A memory comes back to me of the hospital, her face all yellow bone and her smoke-sore voice.

  ‘Ammuma,’ I say, then stop.

  I want to tell her I know she misses Francesca. I want to tell her I miss Peony. I want her to admit that china dolls won’t help, nor autograph books – nor raking up the past, come to that. Perhaps that’s what I’ve come back to learn; the ghosts in Malaysia are for good. They’re fragile monsters, these nothings of ours.

  Ammuma just shakes her head. ‘Aiyoh, Durga, always so worry. Of course you should go.’

  ‘You’ll keep putting the dressings on?’ I wrench myself back to the present. ‘And take the antibiotics. They’re in those little boxes for each day. You will remember, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the antibiotics.’ She rolls the word around in her mouth, pleased despite herself. She likes all the fuss of her dressings, the little bottles and finger-dabs of liniment. So far from the Minyak Angin Cap Kapak and Tiger Balm that she usually uses, or the Benedictine Karthika buys from the Chinese grocers.

  ‘And if there’s anything, then you just ring. Any time is fine, Ammuma, the office or at home or …’

  ‘Durga.’ She interrupts, putting her two palms on either side of my face. She smells like herself again, like Nivea and sandalwood soap. She drops a dry, hard kiss on my cheek then pushes me away. She’s on edge. Wanting to get going. Wanting me out so that she can settle down and miss me.

  I go upstairs to change my clothes before I leave. Everything’s sharper today, as though I’m finally feeling at home. I’m starting to remember details that were hardly worth forgetting to begin with. The lace collar on my favourite yellow dress, the dread of school on hot, fresh mornings when I’d forgotten my homework, reading comics while Vellaswamy-cook made lunch. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll be back in KL. Buying yellow blouses that don’t flatter me, and watching the sky for Superman.

  Ammuma waves me off from the verandah. At first the car won’t start, then it lurches forward. Unmarked assignments spill out of my bag into the footwell. They’ll get dirty and there’ll be complaints from students, objections that I’ve missed out a mark. I watch Ammuma recede into the background. She’s a white blur in the darkness of the verandah, and I’m leaving all my memories behind and looking forward, with a kind of joy, to complaints about marking.

  Halfway to Lipis the traffic starts to thicken. The morning’s turned hot and damp as a mouth, and my hands leave palm prints on the steering wheel. Cars crawl along and motorcycles inch up the sides of the road. Everybody looks worried behind the glass of their windscreens. The traffic stops, and a family of children burst shrieking from their car. We’re not moving anyway, but a taxi driver waves at them – Get back in there! – with an impatient hand. Two cars nudge at each other’s bumpers and rage threatens to overflow.

  The sky’s an ugly yellow, lumped with clouds that mean business. I can hear thunder rolling somewhere down in the valleys, and a wind like ripping cloth. A flicker of blue light comes from somewhere further down the road and all of us pause. The mother holding a naked baby. The father with food spilling from his hands. The taxi driver, now expressionless as a movie star. Into this sudden quiet comes a police motorcycle, working its way back against the traffic.

  ‘Turn round!’ he’s shouting. ‘Go back!’

  Nobody moves, of course. There’s nowhere to go. We all sit, stupid and frozen behind glass with our tongues stopped in their chatter. My window’s down and the breeze stirs the papers scattered over the car floor. A drop of rain falls through with a single, ominous plop.

  ‘There are floods.’ The policeman’s stopping at intervals up the line, shouting through his cupped hands. His eyes pop slightly, and his thick neck strains under his turban. ‘The road’s blocked. Go back!’

  ‘Blocked?’ someone shouts.

  ‘Everywhere?’

  ‘To KL? To KL?’

  The policeman doesn’t stop. A dismayed chatter rises behind him.

  There must be a way to get to KL, they’re saying. Most of these people aren’t locals: they’re tourists or businessmen or simply lost. There must be a way out of Pahang, they’re insisting. It isn’t the sort of place you stay.

  But there isn’t another road. The floods have come up fast, bubbling over from wells and drains, and we’re stuck. There’s a headache growing behind my eyes. All around me cars are slowly turning round, backing and filling and making their way along the grassy middle verge. The family dump themselves back into their car seats and the father begins to sound his horn in short, vindictive bursts. The back of my neck pinches, as though someone’s dragged the skin tight. I start the car again, my toes curled tight in their sandals. I wrench the steering wheel around – horns and shouting, ‘Look where you’re going!’ – and the rear-view mirror shows me a long, strung-out bracelet of traffic wrapped tight around Kuala Lipis.

  It’s two hours before the traffic eases. People have peeled off to villages and flood evacuation centres, their tail lights red and affronted. I’ve been looking for a place to pull over for ten minutes, but all the verges are full of motorcycles and broken-down cars. I’m exhausted. I can feel my blouse clinging tight with sweat, and my thighs chafed by the leather car seat. One strip of white line crawls past under my car, then another and another. Someone takes pity, waves me through to the side of the road. Through the windows the drivers look goggle-eyed, staring right through me.

  Up ahead there’s a huge banyan tree, nearly as big as the one out near the Kampung Ulu swamp. There’s a streetlight tangled in its roots. Ghosts lurk in those roots, Ammuma used to say, devils and jungle spirits and plain old murderers waiting to knife you with their parangs. I turn off the engine anyway, and rest my head on the steering wheel. The murderers will have to take their chances.

  When I open my eyes again, I see Tom’s bag slumped in the footwell. Karthika’s sneery little smile comes back to me. He loves me, Durga-Miss, she said, and I could almost envy her. At least she has something to be wrong about.

  Jalan Seroja isn’t far from here, only a few streets over. Practically on the way home. If this were one of Ammuma’s stories, Tom would be waiting for me there. He’d appear from behind a palm tree or abseiling down a wall. He’d carry me into the jungle with a knife between his teeth and my hair arranged to show off my cheekbones. There’d be a map, an escape route. Burn after reading. Swallow in case of emergency. Look before you leap, which good story heroines never do.

  An oniony smell rises from my armpits as I tug the bag up onto the seat. None of that’s going to happen – I don’t have the cheekbones and won’t get the happy ending – but perhaps Tom and I can sit down anyway. Talk about his son; talk about my sister. Have a cup of tea and fish out some drowned women from their wells and swamps. I want to be friends, which should be easier than lovers and might just last.

  And where do I come into it? Peony whispers inside my head, flicking that tangled hair from her sleepless eyes. I have an answer this time, though: she doesn’t. Because you’re dead, Peony, you’re dead and that’s all there is to it.

  Jalan Seroja is a long street, running out past the high bridge. The water’s brown and choppy underneath, and I can see palm-oil plantations in the distance. All those stubby trees whipping their shocks of hair about. I wonder what it’s like to live out there, with the stink of char in your nostrils all the time. It’s solid enough to slice, to cut and cube and chew till shreds of it hang in your teeth.

  The address is just off the main road, down a private drive. A large bungalow stands at the end, two storeys and whitewashed clean behind high iron gates. It has an air of drawing itself up off the ground, refusing to get the tips of its feet dirty. I can see ba
nana plants over the wall, and a froth of bougainvillaea.

  The wind picks up as I climb out of the car. The telephone wires are vibrating overhead, as though there’s a tumbling current up there. Mother Agnes used to say those high-up winds brought ghosts, the kind to slide in through your ears and turn your thoughts inside out. I shake my head; pull myself together. I’ve had quite enough of ghosts for today.

  Inside the compound yard I see a woman bending over a terracotta flowerpot. She’s white, large-hipped, in a pink cotton sundress. Her toenails are polished green and her hair’s blonde, almost white in the sun. Next to her is a bright red convertible, a more-money-than-sense car in the luckiest of colours. My stomach starts to dip.

  ‘Yes?’ There’s a slight Australian lift to her voice, a gluey blur as though she’s stuffed her mouth with meat.

  ‘I’m Dr Panikkar,’ I hear myself say. ‘I’m looking for Tom.’

  ‘Tom?’ She stands up and brushes her hands on the seat of her dress. She straddles the path and nudges a flowerpot behind her with her strong calf.

  ‘Are you from the hospital?’ she asks. She gives me a close-lipped smile and adds, ‘I’m Alice.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, no, I’m from KL. Not the hospital.’

  She tips her head back, watching me. Good eyebrows, the kind you inherit with skin like that and the diamond bracelet that’s tight around her wrist.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Tom’s not here.’

  ‘Oh.’ I swallow. ‘Is he coming back? I wasn’t expecting …’ Her.

  She gives me a hard stare. ‘They aren’t, generally,’ she says, so quietly I might miss it.

  She watches me watching her hands – bare, no ring – and the ghost of a smirk flits over her face. She stands there in front of Tom’s house just exactly as though she belongs. And she does. She’s a wife. She’s a mate. She’s fifteen years wrapped up in a pink-print dress and she’s been here all along, if I’d only had the sense to see.

  ‘Did you say Panicker?’ she asks suddenly. She slurs it, mashing the edges of the name. I turn into one who panics, in Alice’s mouth.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know Mary Panicker then? Lives out past Kuala Lipis?’

  ‘She’s my grandmother.’ I can hear my voice grate, but Alice takes no notice.

  She comes closer, pushing her gleaming hair back. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but she needs a lot more support, you know. She has Tom out there all the time, fetching her groceries or taking her on trips to Kampung Ulu and Pulu and Wulu or wherever. Ridiculous names,’ she adds, nearly under her breath.

  ‘Kampung Ulu?’ A gust of wind ruffles my hair and sends the bougainvillaea stalks chattering against the wall.

  Alice looks impatient. ‘Something like that. She’s got him driving her out there every month.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  Alice’s nose wrinkles like a cat given food it won’t eat. She sighs. ‘I’ll tell him you came by.’

  She’s already turning away. The cloth of her dress pulls tight against her haunches as she steps over her flowerpots. Anyone else would tug it down, with the embarrassed shuffle of a fat woman seen from behind. Not Alice. She swings her legs out, her thighs slapping together, and climbs the house steps without a single glance back.

  I feel battered, as though I’ve been in high seas or a rolling barrel. I walk slowly back to the car, letting Tom’s bag fall on the passenger seat. I’ve come all the way to Pahang and ended up just where I started. A two-minute Maggi-noodle mistress. Handy at the time. Not like Alice, who fits. Alice, who’s tamed the jungle into terracotta pots and sundress prints. It’ll take more than a flood to get her out; the Jelai and I don’t stand a chance.

  18. A Prince and Princess Marry: 1935

  Three months after the rumours about Cecelia begin, the satay man turns up at Mary’s house.

  ‘Cecelia Lim’s left home,’ he tells her. ‘In disgrace.’

  Mary, her lips coated with peanut sauce, stares. She thinks he’s joking, at first. But the satay man gazes blandly back at her, hands her a stick of mutton and shrugs his shoulders. The Lim girl or the Panikkar girl; they’re all the same to him.

  Because Mary, without knowing it, has started a wildfire of gossip. She didn’t mean to, of course. She’d expected a few whispers in the marketplace, an unkind glance or two sent Cecelia’s way. A few small hurts, enough to get her own back – and Rajan, too, into the bargain. If she’d kept her ears open, if she’d known how bad the gossip had got, she might have stood up for her old best friend. But Mary hasn’t been to the marketplace since it all began, and she hasn’t heard a thing. She’s spent these three months quietly, sewing with the nuns or reading in one of her father’s endless corridors. Mary’s been nestled in lonely, forgiving places, and she’s forgotten how much a reputation matters.

  So this news comes as a shock. But she rallies, takes a bite of her mutton and pulls herself together. She knows better than to give in to her feelings.

  ‘Best thing that could have happened,’ she tells the satay man sturdily.

  Sometimes, she thinks, you have to be cruel to be kind. And when the satay man’s news spreads, Mary’s glad to have heard it first. Cecelia and her growing stomach, it turns out, have boarded a bus to KL and they won’t be looking back. The market ladies lick their lips over it, of course. They blame Cecelia’s mother, Cecelia’s friends and her schoolteacher and even Solomon Varghese and his brother-in-law Amir. Solomon and Amir are regarded doubtfully anyway; they take long walks hand-in-hand through the jungle, and exchange hot-eyed whispers through keyholes. After steadfastly making love to each Varghese sister, it seems Amir’s finally found peace in the arms of the brother. Typical, the market ladies huff; the only faithful lovers in Lipis are the boys.

  But Mary can’t bring herself to be completely sorry Cecelia’s gone, not quite. Because since Cecelia rode away on that bus, Rajan’s been paying Mary some definite attention. He turns up every day with his curling moustache and split-legged stethoscope and gives her confident, unregrettable kisses. Rajan moves quickly, and he’s certainly got over Cecelia. Like everyone in Lipis, he’d heard the rumours about her, and he dropped her like a stone. Rajan, unlike Mary, believes in being cruel to be cruel.

  And so Mary isn’t surprised to spot him waving at her one sunny morning soon after she turns twenty. She’s climbed into the casuarina tree to be alone with her thoughts. Mary’s fined down over the last few years, and there’s a suggestion of something needle-like about her. Something hard, like a casuarina, and breakable. Liable to draw blood.

  ‘Mary, darling! How are you?’ Rajan pulls himself up from the ground to the branch Mary’s sitting on. ‘Marooned between earth and sky …’

  Mary rubs her forehead irritably. Rajan’s been doing this a lot, lately, coming out with snippets of poetry and lines from plays. Asking her what she thinks of T. S. Eliot, of women’s rights and the state Europe’s in. He’s filling her mind with education, and Mary doesn’t like it. Poetry reminds her of her failed Junior Cambridge exam, and any mention of women and their rights brings back the image of Cecelia, giggling on a convent hilltop.

  ‘I’m well, thank you,’ she says. Despite all her regrets, Mary still wants Rajan very, very much. It’s partly the musk of sex he exudes whenever he moves. It’s partly the thought that something good has to come out of Cecelia’s exile, otherwise what was the point? And it’s partly Mary’s own father, who’s put up the sort of opposition that makes Mary wild with rage.

  ‘No daughter of mine,’ Stephen has thundered, ‘is going to marry the son of an Indian quack!’

  Stephen’s become thinner over the years, his eyes are redder and these days he barely bothers to finish building new rooms in his house before tearing them down. He’s disintegrating rapidly, becoming a remittance man whose Manchester family want nothing more than for him to stay in Malaya out of everybody’s way. The only person who still loves Stephen is fourteen-year-old Anil, w
ho loyally sleeps in one new room after another as his father builds them, but Stephen barely notices him, and most mornings Anil wakes to the sight of a blue sky and his father dismantling the roof. For Mary, it’s worse. She’s not yet twenty-one; she still needs Stephen’s permission to marry and she doubts very much she’ll get it.

  ‘You’re looking spiffy, old girl,’ Rajan says. The slang is a recent affectation, as are the waistcoat and soft hat, an attempt to slather colonialism over his dark skin. He pulls himself up onto the branch and squeezes close to her broderie-anglaise skirt.

  Mary gives him a sharp look. It’s flattering to have Rajan’s full attention, but every time she looks at him she sees wan-eyed, round-faced Cecelia. And she can’t leave that thought alone.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ Mary asks, compulsively. ‘Cecelia?’

  Rajan knows by now to ignore these questions of Mary’s. ‘Come for a walk with me,’ he says, and takes her hand.

  The pair of them slip down out of the tree to land on the padang grass. A few children are playing cricket on the padang, and their screeching laughter echoes over the field.

  ‘How sweet,’ Mary says, although she thinks nothing of the sort. ‘I love children, don’t you?’

  Rajan beams. He considers this an entirely proper view for a woman. He slips his arm around her waist, guiding her onto a jungle path. They brush aside ferns and low, sliding stalks of rattan. A leech fastens onto Mary’s ankle, filling with blood. She feels hot and itchy, like she might want to cry. Something momentous is about to happen, or perhaps it already has.

  Rajan turns to her in that dappled light and puts his hand behind her head. He pulls her close to kiss her and she feels light and air-filled, as though balloons are colliding inside her belly. The blood rushes to her lips, leaving the rest of her drained and empty. Her fingertips go white and she shifts uneasily from one foot to another, knocking the leech off her ankle in a spatter of crimson blood.