Fragile Monsters Page 16

  Rajan pulls her dress off her shoulders, kissing the tip of each collarbone. His own clothes are coming off too, and Mary shudders. She pulls him to her, then gives a little scream as he drops to one knee. He looks up at her, half-naked, his shirt-tail hanging loose and one sock flashing pristine white against the mud. He’s holding a ring, and Mary fights back a desire to giggle. She’d always assumed proposals would be fully dressed affairs. The sort you might tell a granddaughter about.

  ‘Mary. Will you marry me?’

  When Rajan slides the ring onto her finger her heart beats faster, drumming its heels. That drumming warns Mary that she’s on the verge of disaster, that this is the biggest decision of her life and she must make it now. She thinks of lonely, celibate Sister Gerta; she thinks of trudging to market with a heavy fish basket; she thinks of her future shut up with an incomprehensible mother and an intolerable father and of growing old with nobody to rescue her. And then – because Mary’s open-minded and sees all sides of a question – she thinks of Cecelia, lonely exiled Cecelia who was Rajan’s true love. She thinks of Anil, and how her marriage would leave him alone to face the frailties and doubts of the world. And then, too, she thinks of a durian fruit hurtling down towards a dark-skinned servant-woman who predicted just this dilemma. Bearing all that in mind – and bearing in mind that Mary at twenty is still very young, that she thinks she’s in love and that she has a history of impulsive decisions – she looks up at Rajan to answer.

  ‘Come here, Mrs Doctor Balakrishnan!’

  It’s too late; he’s taken her silence for agreement. He surges to his feet for a gluey, satisfied kiss. His trousers are still at half-mast, her blouse is still around her waist and whatever she was about to answer has been lost in a press of lips and bodies.

  In half an hour’s time they’ll walk back on that jungle trail. Mary will be carrying her shoes in one hand and a spray of bougainvillaea in another. The flowers don’t suit her; their colour clashes with her pale skin and she looks washed out and tired. She’ll look much better in orange blossom, in photos the colour of old tea and a finger-tip veil. She’ll look brave and pure and ardent, as only a young bride should, and for the rest of her life she’ll wonder what might have happened if Rajan had waited just a heartbeat longer.

  ‘Mary. Mary,’ Anil croons. She’s left Rajan at the top of the drive and come back to find Anil sitting on the verandah. He’s rocking himself in a raw and shining new rattan chair and she runs to him, takes him in her arms and feels him wriggle away. He stares at her ankle, where the blood’s soaking through her sock, and his eyes widen.

  ‘It’s just a leech,’ she says, and then – because this should be a celebration, because she needs to share the news with someone – ‘Anil, I’m getting married!’

  Tradition and the law say Rajan should have asked Stephen for her hand in marriage first, they both know that. But tradition also says the mothers should have arranged the match, Radhika and Mrs Balakrishnan putting their glossy heads together over tea and sweets. Plotting so much money in return for Mary’s fair skin, so much kicked back for Rajan’s unsavoury political leanings. Perhaps the wedding wouldn’t have come off after all; Radhika might have smiled sadly, gulped her gin and kept her daughter well out of it all. Perhaps Rajan himself would have taken fright. He might have learnt about Mary’s true character; he might have heard whispers in the markets and five-foot-ways that Cecelia Lim was never that bad, and Mary Panikkar knew it.

  But since Mary and Rajan have arranged it for themselves, there’s nothing to stand in their way. ‘I’m getting married, Anil! But you can come and visit me,’ she adds. ‘It won’t be a bit like Paavai said, I promise …’

  It’s no use. Anil doesn’t talk much, which leaves him plenty more room for thinking, and right now he can see through Mary’s protestations. Rajan won’t stand for a halfwit brother-in-law hanging around, and this might be one of the last few moments Anil will be alone with his sister. So he pushes her away, jumps off the chair in tears and races down the steps and into the jungle.

  Who knows what he was thinking, this strange, quiet great-uncle of mine? Anil, who’s always been more complicated than anyone’s given him credit for, is the kind to fling himself away from trouble. The kind of boy to see it coming, to put his head down and run as fast as he can from this vision of the future, until he runs slap-bang into Paavai’s son Luke, kicking a stone down the jungle path.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Luke asks mildly.

  Luke and Anil look extraordinarily alike, although Anil’s fourteen and Luke is only four. They’re both coffee-coloured, sturdy, with Stephen’s grey eyes and huddled neck.

  ‘Mary!’ Anil bursts out. ‘Mary … marry, Mary.’

  Luke frowns. He doesn’t understand, but he can tell his best friend is terrified.

  ‘Anil-Uncle,’ he says. ‘You and me sit down there.’

  He tugs Anil, now quieter and calmer, along the dappled trail. It’s the same path that Mary and Rajan walked earlier and their footsteps are still plain for Anil to see in the mud. He follows them, head down and eyes wide, and then stops abruptly. There’s a splash of blood mixed in with the leaves.

  Anil yelps; the blood is so red, and it’s soaked into the ground. The leaf underneath squirms and pulses and throbs with a sickening rhythm. If Anil stopped to think, he’d realize it’s only the leech that had been on Mary’s ankle, unceremoniously pushed off by the toe of her patent-leather shoe, and spilling out its last meal as it fell to the jungle floor. Anil should know this, of course, but in his panic he forgets. Luke gives a little scream, and clings to Anil with all the strength of his four-year-old fingers.

  ‘Blood, Anil-Uncle! It’s hantu – it’s ghosts. It’s bloodsuckers!’

  Luke cowers back against Anil’s legs. He’s a superstitious child, and Paavai’s filled his head with tales about drowned women, about lepers and jungle spirits and pontianaks. No wonder he’s confused. The two of them clutch at each other’s hands and back slowly away from that throbbing crimson puddle.

  ‘Ghosts,’ Anil repeats thoughtfully. ‘Devils.’

  Anil will continue to whisper this all night. He’ll still be whispering it in the sleepless dawn when Mary rolls over in her convent bed, thrusts her fists with grim determination between her legs and begins to plan her wedding day.

  Because against all expectations, Stephen has agreed to the marriage: Mary and Rajan will marry in two short months’ time. It’ll be an extravagant wedding with music and snake charmers, with Mary in her jewelled gown and her mother’s rubies. Radhika will sniff back tears and Stephen will escape from the dancing to sit in his lonely study and brood over the newspapers and his letters. And after that, Mary and Rajan will move – for ever, Mary thinks, because at twenty everything is for ever – across the Kinta Valley.

  After Mary’s gone, there’ll be nobody to calm Anil’s fears and hush his talk of devils. The state of Europe will get worse in those years, women’s rights won’t count for much and T. S. Eliot for even less. Stephen – reading about Europe in flames, about men shot against the wall and his own brother’s death from shrapnel while driving an ambulance in France – will never tell his son that devils don’t exist. Radhika, learning in an airmail letter of famine riots and madness in her hometown, will lock herself into her bedroom and scream quietly for days.

  All of this will get into Anil’s dreams. He’ll see splashes of blood in his sleep; he’ll see leeches and snakes that have charmed his sister away. He’ll submerge himself in books he can barely read. He’ll learn about Chinese ghosts and Malay tricksters, about vampires and demons that flap their wings about the roof at night. He’ll open his mind to a world he can’t see or touch; he’ll lose what language he has and gain a reckless, useless sort of bravery instead. With his mind open and his mouth firmly shut, it won’t be long before he makes the worst decision of his young life.

  19. Tuesday, 3 p.m.

  It takes all afternoon to make it back from Tom�
�s house to Ammuma’s. The roads south are still blocked, and there are only a few cars left on the roads. The clouds have thickened, and look like they mean business.

  ‘Durga!’

  The smell of chai and spices drifts out from the verandah, where Ammuma’s sitting with Mother Agnes. They have their heads together over a pile of cheap postcards, scrawled over in clumsy writing. Ammuma told me the left-behinds have taken to dropping their letters at Mother Agnes’s house to save the postage. It’s a point of pride with Agnes never to let them down and so she picks the letters up every day. By the time Arif-the-postman arrives here she’s stamped every letter and told Ammuma every secret in them. Ammuma won’t read them herself; she’ll only give them a shake and smooth them down. She used to be a postmistress herself and nobody – she says now over Mother Agnes’s head with a scalding calm – likes to get crumpled news.

  Mother Agnes is scribbling in her red exercise book – private, those crimson pages, for secrets and confidences only – but drops it when she sees me. She snatches up her blue-for-friendship book instead.

  Durga! she writes.

  She’s in a satin-green kebaya and her eyebrows are plucked into pencil-thin lines. She heaves to her feet as I climb the stairs, bringing me into a powdered hug that smells of perfume and ink. Mother Agnes moves like a much larger woman, always leaving room for extra flesh.

  ‘What is it, Durga? All this coming-going, forgetting something is it?’ Ammuma leans forward. She looks more animated than she did this morning, her eyes bright with secrets.

  ‘All the roads are closed,’ I say. ‘Floods, out by Gua Musang.’

  Mother Agnes turns to Ammuma with a triumphant look. She scribbles another line in her blue exercise book.

  I told you, Mary. They have us on evacuation alert in my village.

  Ammuma clicks her teeth impatiently. ‘Your village is in a swamp. Shouldn’t have built there to begin with.’

  Ammuma drops her slurs when she talks to Agnes, those lahs and arres that pepper her speech normally. Agnes is, after all, a schoolteacher and mustn’t give herself airs.

  ‘You ring your job.’ She turns to me. ‘Tell them what-all is happened.’

  My stomach tightens. When I was at Tom’s house I’d forgotten about work. But now Anwar looms at the other end of the phone line, a gathering thundercloud garnished with a scrap of white handkerchief.

  The phone lines may be down, Mother Agnes writes. She scrawls her letters larger than normal, breathing sympathy from every pen stroke.

  I bite at one of my nails. ‘They can’t be, surely. Not already.’

  Ammuma’s voice follows me as I walk quickly through the front room, dropping Tom’s rucksack by the hall phone. ‘Don’t be foolish, Agnes. Worrying the child.’

  But when I pick the receiver up there’s nothing but silence. Not even static, or the clicking of a connection trying to be made. I put the phone down and scrub at my face with my fingertips. Nothing to be done. In a few hours Anwar will be standing in the office doorway staring at my empty chair, disapproval breaking like waves on the rock of his nose.

  I turn away, feeling my headache tighten. The kitchen radio’s on, which means Ammuma’s sent Karthika home.

  ‘… urgent evacuation will be arranged.’ The radio announcer sounds unflurried, all soft-serve voice and rounded vowels. ‘Residents of Pahang should keep alert for flood updates.’

  ‘Ammuma!’ I scramble back to the verandah. ‘Ammuma, did you hear? The radio was saying we might be evacuated.’

  She snorts, dropping her dignity for a palate-cleansing, phlegmy distaste. ‘Only down Raub, it is,’ she says. What else can you expect? she implies.

  Be patient, Durga, Mother Agnes agrees. Out here nobody takes disasters that seriously. Floods, storms, race riots: when Canada would be in flames, Pahang barely looks up from its dinner.

  ‘Remember the last time, ar. Not doing that again.’

  Ammuma’s smile is humourless. She was last evacuated in 1971, when the government set up tents after the huge Pahang floods. Better off at home, Ammuma decided after two days, and demanded the use of a rescue dinghy instead. They’d let her, too; Ammuma outside being less trouble than Ammuma in.

  ‘Durga, you stay here tonight,’ Ammuma says. ‘No point coming-going like this,’ she adds. ‘Tomorrow all the roads will open, isn’t it?’

  She looks tired, Mother Agnes scribbles.

  ‘Sleeping in a chair only last night,’ Ammuma says self-righteously. ‘Dark circles on her eyes now.’

  Mother Agnes looks up at me with a sympathetic smile and pushes one of the postcards across the table.

  Read this, Durga, she writes in her red exercise book, trying to cheer me up. This girl’s gone to the bad and no mistake.

  That red book bulges with gossip and scraps of paper. She pushes it back inside the straining waist of her skin-tight sarong kebaya. The more rumours she swaps the fatter it gets, tight against her waistband, and soon she’s going to have to change her tailor or let her girls go to the bad without anyone knowing at all.

  ‘No need for Durga to see all that.’ Ammuma slaps her hand down on the postcard and gives Mother Agnes a warning look. She flicks the postcard back across the table, humping her shoulders so I can’t see.

  ‘All this nonsense, and on the back of a postcard too,’ she mutters. ‘No morals, these left-behinds of yours.’

  I slip out through the front room and into the dining room, where I unlatch the almirah door. I pull out Tom’s bag of fireworks from where it nestles on the top shelf. It feels like a hundred years ago that I put it there. Ammuma’s voice rattles on from the verandah, and I walk slowly back through the hall to where I dropped his rucksack. There’s an ache deep inside me, a tearless and gulping ache as I gather all I have of Tom into my two hands.

  Upstairs the bedrooms still stink of smoke. Karthika aired everything out, but the odour still seeps in from the locked side wings. I sit cross-legged on my bare mattress with my feet leaving dirty marks. Everything’s quiet, and the radio’s chatter drifts up from below.

  I unzip the rucksack slowly, imagining Alice’s capable fingers zipping and folding and clicking things shut. Inside there’s an empty crocodile file and a dirty lunchbox. Nothing here except the gone-and-forgotten sniff of reheated noodles. No wedding ring, for example. No family photos, no declarations of undying love for Alice or Peony or Karthika. None for me, come to that.

  I touch the fireworks packets, jumbled into their bright market-bag. He must have gone to some effort, I realize for the first time; he must have made a special trip. That thought brings back the ache, and so I pick up the autograph book instead. It’s tucked into the very top of the bag, and I leaf through it to that front page again.

  Francesca Panikkar,

  Kampung Ulu, Pahang

  Malaysia, Earth, THE WORLD

  Kampung Ulu. Alice had talked about it too; she’d said Tom was taking Ammuma there. I frown, tracing the letters with my finger. They remind me of something, a long-ago something from when I was tiny. Francesca’s old books that Ammuma used to keep in the Amma-tin.

  I get to my feet very quietly. The Amma-tin was an old biscuit tin that used to be kept on a box-room shelf. Ammuma would take it out on special days, when she seemed heavy with sadness. She’d show me strings of beads or a tiny ornament. A teddy bear; a picture-book with pop-up animals inside, and a name and address written in the front cover. Francesca Panikkar. I remember pointing at it and asking scornfully why anyone would bother to write THE WORLD after her address. As if there’d be another world, I remember saying with my tiny arms folded and a sneer in my voice. And I remember Ammuma slapping me and taking the book away.

  I pad softly out of my bedroom. Ammuma and Mother Agnes are still well away with their gossip, ears and eyes closed to everything but the smack of scandal. They don’t hear as I creep out into Ammuma’s bedroom, placing my bare feet edge-down so the floorboards don’t creak.

  Karthika
’s swept the floors upstairs scrupulously clean, leaving a line of dust straight across Ammuma’s bedroom door. Underneath the smoke I can smell Tiger Balm and sandalwood, mixed with the antibiotic dressings from the hospital. The box-room door’s closed and the key is gone.

  I push my hands up through my hair and step back to look around the room. The box room’s never been closed before, and I’ve no idea where Ammuma would put the key. Despite the fire damage, the room’s surprisingly neat. She’s got a place for everything: an almirah for cardigans, a dressing table for medicines, a bedside cupboard for things best kept hidden away.

  I crouch down in front of the cupboard. It’s on the side of the room that was protected from the fire, and apart from a coating of ash it doesn’t look damaged at all. There was an identical cupboard in my room when I was younger. They’re cheap plywood drawers from the sundry store and the lock on mine broke after a few months. You could only open it by smacking it hard enough to dislodge the latch, and so I kept all my secrets in there. Diaries, detention slips, maths tests where I hadn’t topped the class. Ammuma had far too much respect for the furniture to break in.

  I put my hands on Ammuma’s cupboard, rocking slightly, then clip the door sharply with the edge of my palm. The movement comes back to me. Once, twice and then the door swings open. Inside there are a few earrings without backs, a tube of hand cream, a watch strap half-rotted away in the humidity. And the box-room key, large and brass, on a leather thong.

  The box-room door opens reluctantly, pushing against swollen floorboards. There’s a strange, filtered light in here as though oiled paper’s been laid over all the windows. The floor’s littered with curls of dried-up centipedes, and dust from years ago.

  There are two large trunks in the far corner. I remember these: Ammuma kept my Christmas and Diwali presents in there because I wasn’t big enough to open the lids. I used to stand on the attic ladder and watch her over the partition wall as she knelt here with an armful of packages. Not yet, Durga, she’d say, without even bothering to look up. Have some patience, child. And then – on a good day – she’d take out the Amma-tin from the bottom of one of the trunks, and call me down.