Fragile Monsters Read online

  After a four-hour journey the bus humps itself over the mountain roads to a stop just outside Lipis. Mary’s anxious to get off; she’s in a fever of worry and can barely wait for the doors to open. She scoops up Francesca, settles her on her hip and begins the long trudge out to the house. The jungle’s been scorched in places, cut back in others, and Mary’s sure she can see flitting dark shapes in the trees. Perhaps Japanese soldiers, perhaps Communist guerrillas, and she doesn’t know which would be worse. The Tiga Bintang, the three star resistance fighters, have taken some tips of their own from the Japanese and are shooting any collaborators they can get hold of.

  It’s dark by the time she reaches the driveway, and Francesca’s long since fallen asleep. Mary pauses, shifts her daughter to her other hip and takes a deep breath. She walks into the plastered courtyard. She sees the concrete verandah and the banana trees leaning over yet another extension. She sees one of the wells she used to play near and the strange boxy prayer room. And then she sees Anil.

  He’s sitting in the rattan chair, curled with his knees tight to his chest. He’s thin and a scar runs down his face. For a moment she can’t believe that he’s alive and breathing, because the house itself is dark and all about her is the smell of rotting food.

  ‘Anil?’ she calls.

  Anil moves slightly in his chair and raises his head.

  ‘Ma-ry,’ he says slowly, but doesn’t move.

  Although Mary doesn’t know it, Anil’s long since given up expecting her or anybody else to come at all. Stephen and Radhika are both dead – and Anil refuses to think of that, just as Mary refuses to think of Rajan lying broken in a ditch somewhere – and Anil’s been surviving on fruit and well-water. Left alone, the devils have uncorked themselves from inside his head and sauntered about the house poking their noses into things that don’t concern them. He’s shut them up into rooms, he’s locked doors and blockaded passages until the only safe place is out on the verandah, but that hasn’t put them off. So, when he sees his sister walking down the driveway – when he knows she’s far away in Ipoh and irredeemably married – he can only conclude she’s a devil. A Mary-devil and a little-boy devil, dressed in a bright pink shirt.

  They must be ghosts, thinks Anil, a trick of the light. And so he doesn’t move, not even when Mary runs up the stairs and pulls him into her arms. My great-uncle doesn’t believe all he sees these days, and very lucky for him, too.

  21. Tuesday, 4 p.m.

  I wrap the plait of hair back up in a neat roll. Ammuma’s never talked about those days, not straight out. She only ever mentions the war in opaque, allusive words – sometimes even in Tamil or Malay – as though if she tells it differently then this time it might turn out better.

  I stare down at the trunks, crammed with tiny, tawdry presents. Here’s where Ammuma’s grief is, not in her words. She’s been packing it up in dolls and toys, in things the war took from Francesca. And she’s been taking them to Kampung Ulu. I don’t know why. Perhaps because Peony died there; one dead teenage girl being very much like another when it comes to grief. Perhaps not. Perhaps no reason at all but the windy demands of ghosts.

  When I put the plait back I feel something papery stuck to the side of the tin. It’s a yellowed envelope, tucked in one corner. There’s faded tape across the back and Francesca written over the front. Inside are a few photographs, tacky with damp. They don’t look like they’ve been moved in years.

  The first one’s Francesca as a girl, a sepia toddler of three years old with milk-teeth and satiny plaits. And another: Francesca looking like a little boy with short-cropped hair. Teenage Francesca in a copy of the picture from Ammuma’s shrine. And then, startlingly, a colour picture of almost-grown-up Francesca on the verandah downstairs. The steps look polished and swept, and Francesca’s dressed up like she’s going to a party. She must be fifteen or so, but she’s in babyish lace and a satin-sashed party frock. Ammuma’s behind her, leaning forward with her hands on Francesca’s shoulders. The puckered scar on her arm looks fresh, and far worse than I’d have thought, with the skin weeping off it in great sheets. To my surprise Francesca has smaller, patchier scars splashing up her arms too. She looks more helpless than she did in her three-year-old photo. She’s heavier than I expected, with her satin-covered stomach bulging out, and I wonder if I’m in that sepia world too. Biding my time.

  There’s one more photograph, and in this one Francesca’s hugely, frankly pregnant. She’s lying in a starched white bed with metal railings and her stomach curves in a solid arc out from the sheets. There’s a birthday cake next to her, incongruous with its candles and scattered sweets. On the bedside table is a hairbrush, some torn wrapping paper, a brand-new doll, dressed as a princess. Ammuma sits on one side of the bed, holding Francesca’s hand and smiling at the camera. She has to lean over, because Francesca’s arms are scarecrowed above her head with her wrists bent out. The photograph’s overexposed and it takes a moment before I understand what I’m looking at. A metal rail. The shadow of a pillow. And a pair of handcuffs, manacling my mother to the bed.

  I drop the photograph. My throat swells. I can’t breathe, then air scalds its way into my lungs. Francesca stares back at me from her picture. A birthday photograph, although her face gives no clue that she knows what’s happening. She’s blank, her mouth hanging open and a thread of spit lacing between her teeth.

  I don’t know how long I sit there. From downstairs I hear sounds – little, creeping life-noises – but they seem very far away. The wind, the buzz of the radio, a flutter in the corner as a cockroach crawls. Everything’s melting together, blurred as though it’s behind a pane of broken glass. I’m cold, cramped, my fingers clenched tight over a faded envelope and toys scattered in my lap. Ghosts everywhere I look. Ghosts everywhere I don’t.

  Gradually my heart slows down. I sit back on my heels, taking a deep breath. I dump the rest of the photographs back in the envelope, then examine this one more closely. There’s a fascination to it, a squirming horror that could turn the whole thing into a joke, if I let it. Villains and handcuffs and Ammuma at the middle of it all.

  The picture isn’t very clear, but I can just make out some objects piled on the foot of the bed. I rub my thumb over the photograph. It’s a pile of books, tumbling over the taut sheet. Exercise books, in a bleached-out rainbow of colours. Green, mauve, black. Blue, for friendship. Red, for secrets and confidences that she never did keep too well.

  I jump up, grabbing the tin tight to my chest. ‘Mother Agnes!’

  The box-room door rebounds as I fling it open, leaving a dent in the plaster wall. My feet thump on the landing, shaking the house as I run downstairs. Everything’s darker than it should be, and the wind’s rising. As I hurry through the front room I can see a towering lump of cloud. The house seems to be pulling in on itself, shrugging me off like a flea on its skin.

  ‘Ammuma! Mother Agnes!’

  Ammuma’s sitting by herself on the verandah. There are two cups on the table but everything else – letters, exercise books, Mother Agnes with her mincing plumpness – has gone.

  ‘Already Agnes left,’ Ammuma says calmly. Then, as I stare at her, ‘Look, some storm we’re in for.’

  She nods out into the compound yard. Sweeps of rain spit across the driveway, with intervals between them like a held breath. Everything’s damp, my hands sweating where I’m clutching the photograph and a strange, swooping feeling in my stomach as the pressure starts to drop.

  I find my breath. ‘Ammuma? I found …’

  Her lips compress over her outsize false teeth. She’s like a snake, she can taste a brewing fight from a single sip of air. ‘Prying-poking, Durga? You go looking for trouble, you find it.’

  She looks up at me. I’m about to hand her the photograph, but then I can’t. My arm shakes, refuses to move. Once she sees it, I know, there’ll be only a few seconds of my old life left. A minute or two at most, before everything changes and unravels and carries me away like a flood.
r />   ‘I found this autograph book last week,’ I say instead. ‘In Tom’s bag of fireworks. You wrote Francesca’s name in it.’

  Ammuma picks up the book. She stiffens slightly.

  ‘With fireworks?’ she asks, then seems to pull herself together. She shuffles further back into the chair and folds her arms. ‘Gift only. For the shrine, it is.’

  ‘No. It isn’t, Ammuma. The address, you wrote Kampung Ulu.’

  We both look at the book lying in her lap. ‘Ammuma, was … was Francesca in …’

  There’s only one place near Kampung Ulu where people were handcuffed. Where there were locks on the gates. Where there were backwards boys and all-too-forward girls. The San.

  Ammuma sets her mouth obstinately and picks up her cup. ‘In Tom’s fireworks bag?’ she asks again.

  ‘Yes, I told you. Stop pretending –’

  She waves a bony hand. ‘Tom-this, Tom-that, Tom-everything. Words only, isn’t it, Durga? Choking like fishbones on fancy –’

  ‘Ammuma!’

  ‘– on fancy words. Enough –’

  ‘Ammuma, it’s –’

  ‘– enough only to stop flirting.’

  ‘Ammuma!’

  ‘I told you better to stay away from him, Durga,’ she says, sucking her teeth. ‘All very well for the servant-girl to fall on her back,’ she continues, as if to herself, ‘but not so good for my granddaughter to do the same, hanh?’

  ‘I’m not.’ I grab Ammuma’s hands, pulling her round to look at me. Her wrists are like my mother’s, splayed and delicate. My hands clench; Ammuma’s bones slide under her skin. She lets out a yelp.

  I want to stop. I want to let go before it’s all too late and I can’t change my mind. Her skin turns white under my fingers. I wonder if my thumbs will meet, crush those flaky bones to powder and ash as she vanishes and leaves me with nothing but dirty hands. There’s a lusty urge to hit her, to do something I’ll regret while my blood’s singing and I’ll never have this chance again. A curtain of rain sweeps over the roof with a noise like scattering pebbles. Let go, let go –

  ‘I found this photograph, too.’ I fling her hands back down into her lap. ‘In the Amma-tin.’

  She doesn’t look up. Her hands lie limp as eels in her lap. There are two large white patches where my thumbs were clenched over her puckered scar. Every bit of me’s horrified: Dr Panikkar with her how-could-I, and day-time grocery-fetching Durga wailing that I’ve made a mistake and sleepless night-time Durga asking what-was-I-thinking. And so, to put them all back in their place, I pick the tin up and dump it on Ammuma’s lap.

  ‘It’s Francesca, isn’t it? In the handcuffs.’

  Ammuma looks down at the tin, plucking the photograph out. She gives it a quick glance but doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Why is she handcuffed? Did someone put her in the San? Did you? Tell me!’

  Ammuma purses her lips and stares out at the rain. There’s a tiny sink fixed to the side of the house, and it’s jammed with twigs. Water swirls around inside, unable to drain and never getting anywhere. I recognize that look on Ammuma’s face. It’s a shut-door look, a stamped-foot look. It’s Ammuma insisting on black when the world’s saying white.

  I take a deep breath and turn away from her. The verandah floor feels swollen with damp, as though it’s trying to shrug me out. The banana plants around the compound walls are almost flattened, and there’s a milk-coffee look to the sky. The wind rises, then stills. And then, out of nowhere, there’s a tiny crunch and a seeping hiss of air.

  I whirl round. Ammuma’s choking. She’s picked up the mask attached to her oxygen cylinder and slipped it over her head. But she must have done something to it, because it’s smothering her, suffocating her. She claws at the mask straps, letting the mouthpiece slip just a fraction and then she gags again. When she finally draws in a breath, it sounds like fingernails grating on stone.

  ‘Ammuma!’

  She gives another sandpaper gasp and spits out some shreds of plastic. I lunge across the verandah and snatch up her shattered mouthpiece. The tubing pulls tight. Her face tips closer to me and for a second we stare eye to eye. The mask is sliding and wet. It’s coated in saliva and some sticky, greenish fluid. The rubber nodules have been severed and there’s a set of tooth marks on the tubing. She must have inhaled a fragment of the tube. I slam my palm on her back, over and over. She bends over – I’m smacking her spine with my fist – and then a small piece of rubber flies free.

  Ammuma gives a rattling, whistling gasp: she can’t breathe, even with the tubing gone. I jam the mouthpiece back over her lips but the mask must be broken because nothing comes through. She coughs, and this time there’s more fluid. Some blood, something sticky and essential from deep in her guts.

  I thrash the tubing down on the floor. Some clots fly free but the oxygen still isn’t flowing, and Ammuma’s gasps are whooping-cough loud. I stick my fingers in the mask to clear it. Nothing.

  Ammuma’s chest shudders and she convulses. Her arm flies up and points behind me. She’s seeing ghosts, I think wildly: Francesca and Peony standing there with their translucent hands full of broken china and oxygen masks.

  ‘Breathing,’ she gasps, and her head lolls.

  I run into the hallway and snatch up the receiver. It’s still dead and I bang it down. No help, nobody to stop Ammuma drowning right here on dry land as the Jelai floods harmlessly through the back garden. I run back to the verandah and grab her mask again. I thrust my fingers deep into the mouthpiece. Jabbing at it, again and again. There’s something in there, just out of reach. I jam my whole hand in, the skin scraping from my knuckles. Once more, and then I’ve got it. A piece of chewed rubber just like the one in her windpipe. I throw it on the ground, and feel a faint breeze of air from the tube again.

  I press the mouthpiece against her face. Her lips flutter and then she takes a feeble breath. Her heart’s racing under her collarbone, shallow trips that lift up her skin. After a few breaths her lips lose their blue tinge. She lifts a hand to the mouthpiece and holds it herself. It shakes with her tremors, then stills as I watch. The sweat shines on her face and there’s a triumphant cast to the hollows below her cheekbones. Behind her mask, behind those dislodged porcelain fangs, Ammuma’s smiling.

  By evening she’s a little better. The mask seems to be holding, although there’s a patchiness to the oxygen flow that I don’t like. She’s getting less air with every breath. I try the phone every half hour to see if I can reach the hospital but the line’s still dead.

  When I tell Ammuma this she snaps her jaw in satisfaction. She can barely breathe, but she doesn’t want to go into hospital. I can see it in her face, that dread of being trapped in a starched bed until she desiccates into nothing but skin and bone and the feeblest of demands. Ammuma, at least, knows where she belongs.

  Between attempts, I stand at the back door. I’m exhausted, propping myself up with my hands braced on my hips. I can see clods from the riverbanks falling in with a sound like ripping cloth, and the water’s thick and syrupy. The wooden house-panels jam tight against each other and the floorboards give every time I take a step. Chickens cluster under the house – stupid, the first place to flood – the cats are in the attap roof and monkeys cling bedraggled to the palm trees. I think, very hard, about the chickens and the cats and the monkeys. I count them all, and then I start again and I don’t think about anything else. I could pass an afternoon like this or a week or a year. I could pass a few seconds. A minute or two, at most.

  ‘Durga?’ Ammuma calls from the verandah. She’s become restless as the day closes, muttering words I can’t make out.

  The contents of the Amma-tin are still scattered over the table. It’s dim, but I can see the photographs and the Little Twin Stars autograph book. My feet pad on the concrete floor but Ammuma doesn’t even look up. She leans across and touches the photograph gently, with the very tip of her finger. The air tightens: a breeze, a breath, a shifting foundation. This house was
built for giving away secrets, right down to the floorboards that creak under me.

  ‘Wanted answers, ar?’ Ammuma’s voice is thick, and her breath smells of rubber and old spit.

  ‘Ammuma, I …’

  ‘I don’t chatter-chatter secrets for being asked, is it,’ she mutters to herself. Her head sinks down between her shoulder blades. The blanket’s fallen away from her scrawny legs and she stretches out her feet onto the damp floor. And then, without looking up, she exhales a rubber-and-plastic breath and asks, ‘Did I ever tell you about the Kempetai, Durga?’

  22. The Princess’s Sacrifice: 1943

  Ammuma might be a poor patient and a questionable grandmother, she might be inclined to lie first and answer questions later, but she has a gift for storytelling.

  ‘So imagine, Durga; 1943 is no food, is soldiers and sentries. I sing “Kimigayo”, I keep my head down, isn’t it? And in a few weeks only, I’m delivering letters.’

  It was a pitch-black morning, she says, and she was standing outside Noor Abi’s house with the post office gunny sack chafing her shoulder. Anil was waiting at the gate with their shared bicycle, having been too scared to wheel it up the overgrown path to Noor Abi’s shadowy door.

  Strictly speaking, Mary has no business with the post office sack at all. Anil is the official postman, a job that keeps him out of Japanese conscription into the railway gangs. Of course, Anil can’t read or write, so Mary surreptitiously helps him out. She’s tidying up, she tells him as she sorts and files and stacks the letters for delivery; she’s along for the ride, she explains as she pedals madly uphill with Anil clinging on behind. And now she’s standing at Noor Abi’s door on a gritty, raw day with a letter bringing news of a death. It’s not a pleasant task at all, and Mary arranges her face into a suitable sorrow before knocking. A respectable sorrow, befitting someone who wouldn’t dream of steaming open a sackful of letters just to stick her nose in their secrets.