‘Yes well, you’re at uni. She sleeps at the top of this house. It’s not likely she’s going to encounter passing vandals here,’ said Yamuna. ‘If she needs a lock on the door to feel safe, then it’s not a big deal. She should be able to relax. This is her home too now.’ Yamuna sighed. ‘Besides, if Louie needs her, I don’t want her to have to remove a blockade before she can see to him.’
As he walked briskly back to the bus stop, Sahan’s thoughts drifted back to the nanny. She had looked so vulnerable. Completely unlike anyone he’d met before. It must have been that, combined with the sound of her singing that had made such an impact on him. He wanted to protect her. There must be something kind he could do for her.
For the first time in a long time, he felt in a position to help someone. That made him feel strong. After all this time feeling powerless, it was nice to remember what strong felt like.
Chapter Seven
When it came to the end of the first month, Madam said, ‘I need to talk to you.’
Soma immediately felt a stab of alarm. Had she done anything in the past few weeks to annoy Madam? She had done her best, following instructions to the letter, keeping her head down, being as inconspicuous as possible once the baby was in bed. What had gone wrong?
‘Don’t look worried, ‘said Madam, kindly. She motioned for Soma to sit across the kitchen table from her and said, ‘Soma, are you happy here?’
Soma hesitated. Was she happy? She wasn’t unhappy. She missed Sri Lanka with a kind of visceral tug, but she was also glad to be away. Here, she lived in more comfort than she had ever done before. There was always enough food, even at the end of the week. She didn’t have to creep around avoiding her stepfather. And she could sleep, safe in her own room. Her own room! ‘Yes, Madam. I am happy here.’
Madam nodded, as though it was no more than what she was expecting. ‘That’s good. Now, I’ve decided not to deduct the money for your clothes from your salary. So I will pay the full monthly amount into your account. You know how to use a bank account?’
Bank account? People like her didn’t have bank accounts. She shook her head. Rich people never understood. They had so much money they could pay a bank to look after it for them. Everyone knew the best way to save for an emergency was to buy jewellery. She thought of her mother’s necklace, lost somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and felt a wrench of guilt. That necklace was the total of her mother’s savings.
Yamuna sighed and made a note on the piece of paper in front of her. ‘The agency would have sorted it out for you. Fine. I’ll take you to the bank to see someone about it.’
Soma’s mind flicked back to the meagre set of ID papers she had. Someone at the bank was bound to scrutinise them carefully. She had put on a bit of weight since arriving. Would she still be able to pass herself off as the girl on the passport?
‘Please Madam. Do I need to go to the bank? Can’t I just…’
‘What? Keep your money under your mattress? No. You can’t. It’s not safe.’ Madam frowned. ‘Ah. You think you’ll have to pay. Don’t worry, the agency already charged us for setting it up and banks don’t charge for everything here like they do at home.’ She made another note on her list. ‘You’ll be wanting to send most of your money home to your family, I suppose. I’ll show you where the Western Union place is. They will take cash.’
Soma kept her mouth shut and nodded. If she said she wasn’t sending money home, that would sound odd. She didn’t want Madam asking questions about home. The more she told Madam, the more she was likely to let something slip. If suspicions were aroused, Madam might say something to the agency, who would make enquiries… and who knows what that would unearth?
‘I expect you to do your personal jobs like banking and taking money to Western Union on Saturday when you’re not looking after Louie,’ Madam continued. She frowned, as though something had occurred to her. ‘I will show you everything this week. If you want someone to come with you in future, let me know.’
‘Yes Madam. Thank you.’
‘Now,’ Madam pulled out the notebook where she wrote down Louie’s meals. ‘This is what we’ll be making for this week.’
* * *
Yamuna sat on the sofa, with Louie on her lap. They were reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar together. Louie was all smiles and giggles now. She dropped a kiss on his head and helped him poke a finger through the holes in the book.
He was so much nicer now than he had been a few weeks ago. Common sense told her it was just that he was older now, but sometimes she wondered if it was Soma’s influence. The girl and Louie seemed to have bonded. He clearly adored her and she seemed to have infinite patience with him.
She tried to turn the page, but Louie kept pulling it around. ‘Darling, how am I supposed to read this to you, if you keep moving it about?’ she said to him, in English. She always spoke to Louie in English now that Soma was around to speak Sinhalese to him. When he started to speak, she would see about sending him to playgroup a couple of times a week to make sure he spoke unaccented English. She straightened the book.
Louie burst into wails. Yamuna noticed Soma, who was folding baby clothes on the other side of the room, tense. Louie hardly ever cried when he was with her.
‘Oh, hey, okay. Here. Have the book,’ said Yamuna. But Louie no longer wanted the book. She picked him up and cuddled him, nestling him against her shoulder. It didn’t make any difference.
She stood up, joggling Louie, shushing him, as she walked around. Soma continued to fold the clothes, but Yamuna could feel her attention. Listening. It was like a challenge to see if she could soothe her own son. Well she had given birth to this baby. No slip of a girl was going to make her feel inferior.
Shhhh, baby. shhhh.
‘Has he been fed?’ Yamuna asked Soma, even though she knew full well that he had.
The girl nodded.
Yamuna paced and joggled.
Motherhood hadn’t come easily to Yamuna. It had been swift on the heels of her marriage. Bim was fastidious in that as he was with everything. But she hadn’t been prepared. All those things that people didn’t tell you. She’d spent days at NCT classes going over birth plans which the midwives all but ignored. Everything had been focused on the actual event. She wished people had told her more about the real, day-to-day, stuff. Or, even better, if they hadn’t romanticized the whole thing.
By the time they handed Louie to her, she was too exhausted after hours of labour to feel anything. She’d him taken against her, skin to skin, as she had been taught. The midwife rammed him onto a breast. She watched him suckle and felt… nothing. She had expected a rush of hormones; an endocrine reaction that automatically changed her from Yamuna, driven scientist, all round planner and organized person, into Yamuna the mother. Something that turned on a tap of emotion, letting her love pour in. But there was nothing. She’d thought at first that it might have been exhaustion, but hours, days, weeks went by and she felt only the huge burden of responsibility.
She fed him, changed him, burped him and cuddled him. All the things that the book said you had to do, she did. She worked out a routine, then adapted it, adapted it some more. But nothing shifted the block inside her that stopped her from finding that bond. Finally, exhausted, she’d asked Bim if they could hire a nanny. She told him she wanted to go back to work.
It was Bim’s suggestion to employ a girl from Sri Lanka, to give the boy a cultural touchstone. Make sure he understood basic Sinhalese, even if he couldn’t speak it. At the time it had made perfect sense. Someone who knew what they were doing could look after Louie, freeing Yamuna to go back to work and do something she was actually competent at.
But the girl had arrived and formed a bond with Louie instantly. Just like that. It wasn’t fair. Yamuna realised she was pacing fast now. She forced herself to slow down. She shifted Louie’s position against her. He wailed in her ear.
‘Madam?’ Soma appeared next to her. ‘Shall I take him?’ She held out her hands.
Yamuna’s f
irst reaction was to tighten her hold on him. He was her son. She could calm him. She looked at Soma’s face, which had no hint of gloating in it. She looked at the girl’s hands, which were still held out to receive the baby. ‘Fine,’ she muttered and gently handed the boy to Soma. Louie stopped yowling immediately and subsided to a whimper. He buried his face in the girl’s neck.
Soma spoke to him, in that wheedling, high-pitched voice that people used with babies. ‘Shall we go and look at the cars outside the window?’ she said in Sinhalese. She carried him to the window and started to point out different cars.
Yamuna watched as her son, who had been inconsolable thirty seconds ago, peered out of the window, still pouting, but calm. He clearly loved Soma far more than he loved her, his mother. Anger rose, making her face feel hot and her jaws ache. She marched out of the room before she said anything she’d regret.
Storming into the room that she shared with Bim, she sank onto the bed and told herself it wasn’t Soma’s fault. Soma wouldn’t have had a chance if Louie had loved his mother even a little bit to start with. Tears rose, making her eyes ache. Louie was only a baby. What did he know? It wasn’t his fault he had a crap mother.
* * *
Madam took her to the bank on Saturday. Yamuna followed her into the building, a big, open place where people were queuing neatly. Soma had been to a bank before, with the father, when she was very young. It had been a hot, intimidating place with sweaty, uncomfortable people pressing against the counters on one side and neatly dressed people with ledgers and typewriters under lazy ceiling fans on the other. The whole bank would have fit in the entrance of this one.
Somehow the impersonal quiet was terrifying. She gripped the handle of Louie’s pushchair more tightly. Madam explained what they were there to do and that she would have to sign a few documents. Thankfully, she had practised Somavathi’s signature often enough before she left Sri Lanka, that she could replicate it, even under Madam’s watchful eye.
The bank forms were with Madam. In her own handbag, which was slung against her body, under her coat, so that pickpockets wouldn’t get it, she had the passport.
A lady in a smart uniform took them into a small office and got them to sit down. Soma parked Louie’s pram facing the glass partition, so that he could be distracted by the people in the bank outside. He seemed happy enough, chewing on his toy and staring at the bright lights.
Madam explained what they wanted and the lady took the forms and looked them over. ‘Have you got any ID and proof of address?’
Madam handed over some papers. ‘This is the employment paperwork,’ she said. ‘She lives with us.’
The lady flipped through the documents. ‘This should be okay. We have a special account for people who are new to the UK.’ She smiled at Madam, and then, as an afterthought, at Soma. ‘Do you have ID?’
‘Passport?’ said Madam, pointedly.
Soma dropped her bag in her hurry to extract her passport. What if this bank lady saw her for the fraud she was? The man in the airport had been waving people through so fast, he might not have looked at her properly, but this lady had been right in front of her, looking at her face for minutes now.
She found her passport, passed it over and bent down to shove the things that had fallen out of her bag – a hairbrush and her small wallet – back in.
When she sat back up, the lady looked at the passport in her hand and back at Soma’s face. She frowned. The hairs on the back of Soma’s neck stood up on end. This lady could see that it wasn’t the same person.
Finally, the lady smiled again. ‘I’ll just photocopy these. I’ll be right back.’
Soma went limp with relief. Louie dropped his toy and started to grizzle. Soma leapt up to see to him. She must not look guilty or Madam would suspect something was wrong. Thank goodness Louie had distracted her. She gave him his toy back and tickled him to say thank you.
The rest of the process took some time and Madam had to translate things for her so that she understood what she was signing. The woman said they had a translated version in Urdu, which seemed like an odd thing to say. Louie had to be taken out of the pram and given a bottle, it took so long. Finally, they stood up to leave, with a promise that a card would be sent in the post.
As they left, Madam said, ‘Do you know how to use a machine?’
Soma shook her head. She knew that the card went into the machine, from seeing the Ceylan bank advert. Madam showed her how to use the machine, using her own card. The words on the screen were in English. Soma could read them, if she had the time to work it out, but Madam was impatient and quick.
‘See?’ Madam said. ‘If you press this, it tells you how much is in there. You press here and you can put in how much you want to take out. Do you understand?’
Soma nodded. ‘Please Madam, can you write down the words on the screen, so that I can learn them?’
Madam gave her a surprised glance, then a nod. ‘I will do that,’ she said. For the first time there was hint of approval in her expression. ‘You can read English?’
‘Only very slowly,’ said Soma. She knew the letters and their sounds. She could sound the words out, but had no idea what some of them meant.
‘Good,’ said Madam. ‘Now, how about I get you a bit of money to buy your essentials?’
She had no idea what Madam was talking about. She didn’t need money to spend. There was food, and heat, and safety at Madam’s house. She had enough to wear. What more did she need money for? Also, she had no idea what this funny money was worth.
Madam sighed. ‘We’ll get twenty pounds,’ she said. ‘You type it in.’
Soma followed her instructions and was soon holding a purple note. She put it carefully away in her purse.
‘Now,’ said Madam. ‘I’ll show you where you can buy toothpaste and soap and things like that.’
So that’s what she meant by ‘essentials’. She could buy some cream, maybe. Her skin was all dry and grey because of the cold. She thought of the note in her bag. She could buy some cream that smelled nice.
Shopping in England was exhausting. There was so much of everything. At home, she could go into the shop and ask the mudhalali for what she needed. He had only one brand of anything.
When her father died, the shopkeeper and his wife had done her and her mother a hundred little kindnesses – passing on the bananas that were too bruised to sell, the bottle of shampoo that was leaking, packets of soup that were past their sell-by date. All that had stopped when her stepfather moved in.
There was no human connection here. Soma stared at the vast array of soap, paralysed by choice. In the end, Madam suggested she buy the cheapest for now. Grateful to have a solution, Soma grabbed a bar of soap and toothpaste and a tube of cream by Yardley, because she recognized the logo, and followed Madam to the ordeal of the till.
With Madam standing a short distance away, watching, she stood in the queue. Her heart thundered in her chest and her face felt hot. She had to talk to someone in English. She knew how to say, ‘how much is it please?’ In her mind, she’d added up how much her purchases came to. She had to say ‘thank you’ at the end. She took deep breaths.
She noticed the person ahead of her didn’t ask how much, the girl at the till just said hello and scanned everything through the machine. Maybe that’s what she should do. Hand things over and then pay. So long as there wasn’t anything else to say.
By the time it was her turn, she was breaking into a sweat. She pushed the items across. The girl smiled. She said something, which Soma didn’t get. Soma looked around at Madam. The girl repeated it, slowly. Bag. Something about a bag. Soma shook her head. The girl serving her smiled kindly and gestured to the total on the display. Soma handed her the money and took the change. She didn’t actually have to speak. Then, just as she was turning to leave, she remembered and stammered, ‘Thank you.’
The girl at the till gave her a cheerful smile in return.
Soma reached Madam and Louie and felt
like she’d conquered a mountain. Madam, looking amused, said ‘Well done. You’ll get used to it.’
Soma was happy to be praised, but she really didn’t think she’d be able to do that again.
* * *
Yamuna heard the connecting door from the garage open and knew Bim was home. She was sitting in the study upstairs, trying to get her head around the paperwork she had to take back for her return to work. Now that Soma was settled in, there was no reason for her to hang around the house all day. She was increasingly starting to feel like a spare part that was getting in the way of the Louie and Soma show.
Going back to work would be strange, but she was looking forward to it. At least in the lab, she knew what she was doing. It would be difficult getting back into her stride after a break of so many months, but other people seemed to manage it easily enough. She was looking forward to being somewhere where there were other adults to talk to during the day. Immediately, she felt guilty for thinking that.
She hauled herself out of the chair and went downstairs. Bim was standing at the kitchen table, looking through the post she’d left stacked there for him.
‘Have you eaten?’ she said. It was an automatic question. Her mother had always asked her father that if he ever came home late. Unlike her, her mother had always waited for her husband before eating, but Bim’s days were unpredictable. He and Yamuna had discussed this. It was safer to assume he was not coming home for dinner. If he was, he would always call ahead and tell her.
‘Yes. I ate at the meeting,’ he said. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’
This late evening cup of tea was the only thing that felt normal in their lives. Yamuna had imagined married life to be… more interesting. Her friends had all got married and had children a decade before. They talked about their lives with their husbands and there was so much animation there. When she finally got married herself, she hadn’t expected hearts and flowers, but she’d expected a little romance, at least a nod towards love. But Yamuna’s marriage to Bim… it was different. They lived together, they talked, politely. Everything, even sex, was polite and dutiful. Materially, he gave her everything she needed, but emotionally, he seemed incapable of giving anything of himself. There was comfort and respect, but that was it. They had been married for over two years and he still felt like a stranger to her. Unlike her friends, she had a marriage based on practicality. She might have asked for advice, if she’d had anyone close by, but since she was now living in England and far away, she didn’t have anyone she could really talk to. When talking to her friends in rare Skype conversations, she ended up pretending everything was ‘normal’.
This Stolen Life Page 6