On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘On way,’ the nurse reported.

  Jonas eventually appeared, wide-eyed and smiling in fits.

  Martine shrugged. ‘He was wearing Doc Martens. What can I say?’

  Jonas stepped outside the curtain with the nurse. Martine was separated from their low, serious voices. She heard him ask about ‘women’s injuries’. The nurse gave reassuring answers: only the legs, abdomen and groin and an unhealthy dose of shock.

  Jonas handed over a big blue tartan dressing-gown, awkwardly helping her drape it around her vandalised clothes. He took uncertain charge of her medication, trundling her barefoot in a wheelchair out to a private taxi. Fiddling and fussing, he laid her on the back seat.

  They crawled through the traffic, crossing a bridge, the Old Brompton Road, and on.

  ‘Going north?’ said Martine, bewildered.

  ‘To my place, stupid. You’ll get to meet Astrid.’

  ‘I don’t want to be looked after. Stop the car,’ Martine directed. She told the driver grimly, ‘I’m older than he is.’

  The man pulled in, opening the Evening Standard as if he’d had this many times before.

  ‘You’re going to Willesden,’ Jonas quavered, adding, ‘You never talk to me.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with this?’

  ‘You admit it.’

  ‘I don’t admit to anything. Now take me home.’ Martine felt rough now.

  ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to talk to you for months. Let me in some.’ Martine had an urge to vomit. ‘Not here.’

  ‘At my place then.’

  Martine tried to imagine Astrid, the angel she’d still not met who could transform Jonas’s lifestyle with his flatmate from half flat, half jockstrap. And they’d no spare bed.

  ‘Home,’ she said.

  ‘To receive is also to give dammit. Let me be a brother to you for Chrissake.’

  ‘Maybe at home,’ Martine persisted.

  ‘No key. He took your purse.’

  ‘There are locksmiths.’

  ‘OK. Let me stay over,’ Jonas said. ‘I could care for you there, I guess. We can talk.’

  Martine just couldn’t answer. So there has to be more conflict, she accepted, to end up where I want.

  6 Anupama

  Monday 4 February 2013

  It’s 20:54. Martine has just put down the phone on Jocelyn Teague.

  In Kandy town, Anupama’s husband comes in from mucking about with a football with the boys along their lane and Anupama is, as usual, so stirred to see her beloved that her book-signing disappointment crumbles in her mouth into a disjointed anecdote.

  Tailing off weakly, she says, ‘I am absolutely determined still to be a barrister.’

  But from her research into all that, there’s something she hasn’t told him.

  Panting from his games, Asiri takes down one of his cuckoo clocks for mending, damming up his own space within the walls of her textbooks on the kitchen table. ‘As you know, that is OK with me. You finish your A levels. Then, to fund Colombo and the Law College, let us look once more at sponsorship.’

  It’s a long time since the word sponsorship has affected Anupama’s family – since Miss Martine and InterRelate, in fact. And about her plans, he doesn’t know what she knows.

  He says, ‘I have a scheme for you…Remember the lawyer who helped us out with Jayamal’s trouble?’ The trouble is Jayamal’s turtle-poaching, harking back years. ‘Well, the fellow will have contacts. Let us…’

  His plump hands leap on and off the clock gears, carving out tactics on the formica tabletop.

  A phrase springs up at her: Control freak. He has an answer for everything. She thinks, Too many people try to take over each other’s lives – at least, the parts of them that seem useful. Why did Asiri and I have to fall in love? she rails internally, and not for the first time. But she won’t see herself as victim: her life is as much her fault as her husband’s.

  As he plots on, her mind flits away to the moon. ‘Handanandāmāmā, I think I want to turn this new leaf on my own.’

  So far, her life has been mostly endings of different kinds. She’d like it more full of beginnings.

  * * *

  1984

  In August 1984, the young Anupama sought out the moon at the nearest shrine for the Buddha. It was late at night, and raining, and she placed in front of the plaster figure, among the brass lamps and statuettes and jewellery and flowers, a dripping breadfruit root. Her dark eyes found the moon, waning, behind the monsoon clouds.

  ‘Auntie-Uncle Moon,’ she whispered, ‘I believe that letters are not like seeds.’

  The cotton scarf covering her hair was clinging to her head. A forest eagle owl uttered its sinister, low cry.

  Anupama said, ‘You know it is our holidays again. Time for more album facts.’ The owl broke off, exposing the gushing sound of rain. ‘Do you remember the rains recently stayed off for two following days?’ She went on, ‘The grassy patch up the snakely road, with the washing stream on one side and the community hall on the other, was noisy with children delighted to be outside. Jayamal, Mohan, their friends and I were playing a game about goats and a leopard. I was the goatherd. Mohan’s friend Marvan was the leopard, but without warning Jayamal took over. He pushed past me and grabbed Mohan, but to everyone’s surprise the little one shrieked most terribly instead of giggling and wrestling, as normal.

  ‘He screamed, “He’s murdering me!” I tore them apart. He struggled, but I tickled him until he was smiling weakly. He whispered, “Jayamal says that Miss Martine’s letters are his. He wants them, or he says he’s going to kill me.”

  ‘Jayamal is most unpleasant at the moment, to be perfectly honest – but chubby also, and he can barely slap a mosquito. When I said so, it made the little one grin at last.

  ‘That afternoon he helped me plant out seedlings, which some say grow better after you have been in fullness. Later I saw him making a figure from branches, painting a fierce face on a rag. Yesterday the scarecrow stuck out between the eggplants and the chillis.

  ‘I told Mohan on the veranda, “That was a very good idea.”

  ‘He murmured, “It’s to keep all pests away,” his little ankles crossing and uncrossing, not indicating Jayamal, who was lazing on the tyre swing. Auntie, this made me smile; and he grinned also.

  ‘I squeezed him. “Let’s hope it’s going to work.”

  ‘This is what happened tonight. We were sleeping on our mats. Suddenly something made me start. I arose, careful not to wake Upeksha. Looking round in the darkness, I realised Mohan’s mat was empty. I peeped into the room that he should really share with Jayamal. Jayamal was bolt upright.

  ‘He hissed, “I saw him take…I think it was the letters.”

  ‘He jerked towards the door.

  ‘I stole past tatta, sleeping as soundless on the veranda as the Buddha. This rain had started falling. In the vegetable garden knelt Mohan with a coconut lamp beside him. He seemed to be digging.

  ‘I crept a little closer. There was a heap of muddy objects in his lap.

  ‘He was scrabbling at the ground. “Please let them be all right!”

  ‘It was most pathetic, in case you did not see it. He wailed and would not stop. I dropped down at his side. He hugged me. We sat there on the wet soil for a while. I turned to his pile of objects, and helped him carry them in under the flame tree. Then, by the light of the lamp, he showed me what they were.

  ‘Did you see the fearful mess, Handanandāmāmā? Miss Martine’s letters and photos tumbled about. Their envelopes were grimed and soggy. With pieces of coconut shell Mohan had tried to enclose them, making a sort of casket for each one. On the day we had planted together, he had pushed them, without me seeing, into the ground. His scarecrow had marked the central point of their burial, some caskets in the chilli patch and others among the eggplant patch, the turmeric patch and the ginger.’

  Anupama suddenly said, ‘Ex
cuse me, Auntie-Uncle.’

  With steepled hands she chanted a pirith to ward off fears and sorrows. The owl had started up once more, an inauspicious sound.

  At last Anupama finished, and began again, ‘Letters are not like seeds, are they, Handanandāmāmā? I told Mohan, “Nothing can grow out of them.” The pieces of coconut shell had fallen apart, letting the rain in. I asked on a sudden thought, “Did you want to hide them from Jayamal?”

  ‘Mohan hiccupped, “Ever since my accident, I keep expecting more bad things to happen.”

  ‘“And what has planting letters got to do with it?”

  ‘“Planting from full moon day makes the vegetables grow,” he declared.

  ‘“So they say,” I replied – cautiously, Handanandāmāmā, because, please forgive me, this is not yet proved.

  ‘“And fruitfulness is a sort of luck, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m the opal boy: I had an accident and brought bad luck. Miss Martine has no husband, so she needs good luck also. If she got luckier, she might spread it out and send us things, so I thought if I planted her letters…” He really is the most bright boy.

  ‘“But then tonight it started raining…” I suggested.

  ‘“…and now I’ve ruined the letters!” Mohan finished, sobbing once again.

  ‘Moon, they were damaged, but not ruined.’

  Anupama stared into the moonlight, not heeding the rain in her eyes. ‘I wish that letters were like seeds. As you know, Handanandāmāmā, I collect seeds also. A plant grows from a seed. It flowers, fruits and makes seeds in a cycle. That cycle is a fact. If letters were like seeds, they would take a way that we could follow. We could foretell what things will come. But out of Mohan’s letter, no present had arrived.

  ‘Our breadfruit tree does not have seeds; at least, that species does not. It grows, tatta tells us, from an injured root.’ She reached for the root she’d laid on the heap of offerings, its splinters grazing her fingers. ‘We can only grow more roots if we make more cuts. This is a jagged, wounding way towards new life. Its way might be the way of letters. I think I know this. Mohan might suspect, and yet I hope does not.’

  Anupama stumbled up, her wet skirt clamped to her legs. ‘Among the sodden papers, there is a photo on its own of Mohan’s birthday. We are crowding round his cake on the veranda. Then, I still have the smile and rounded cheeks of a baby leopard below the sad eyes of a slow loris – so amma then described them. Now she has told me my jaw is changing, getting lean and growing old to match my eyes. In the same photo, Mohan is looking most enchanting. He was not worried at that time. That was the time before his watch for presents.

  ‘After his accident, we put the photo aside for sending. He must have kept it back.’

  And with those words, Anupama trudged home.

  On a night at the end of September 1984 the moon was full, and Anupama was cooking with Upeksha. Pans of bean curry, green pumpkin curry and rice were clanking; Upeksha was scolding Anupama; amma was muttering from the mat in her own room; Mohan was brum-brumming his trucks on the veranda; tatta was telling Jayamal about a story in the Lanka Deepa; and Anupama realised that, even here, even from indoors, she could turn her mind from what she was doing to communicate with the moon.

  ‘Handanandāmāmā,’ she breathed mutely, ‘Miss Martine’s reasons for sponsoring Mohan have arrived. However, are they truthful? Even at thirteen years, I want to work this out. Mohan is a most adorable boy, most intelligent also, I love him most dearly, but I see more in Miss Martine’s letters. If Miss Martine had been my penfriend, I would have said different things, given and requested more facts.

  ‘She says, “I met a man. The man has gone to Sri Lanka.” These seem significant facts. She also writes, “The man says he is lazy and a coward.”

  ‘She says she believes the man, but deep in her heart she might not.

  ‘These are the reasons she might have chosen my brother:

  Mohan lives here in Sri Lanka, where the man has gone.

  One day Mohan will be a man (unfortunately I will not).

  She thinks Mohan is not a lazy coward.

  She hopes that he will not be, when he is a man.

  None of the above.

  ‘If I had been writing for myself, I would have requested Miss Martine kindly to tick reason 1, reason 2 and/or so forth. However, her answers might be slippery also, much like Mohan’s snakely road.

  ‘Those English letters might have misled us – as might our letters back. However, did we mislead ourselves at first? How should I help the little one, Handanandāmāmā? If I scribe to Miss Martine what Mohan wants, words might come back from her that mislead him or make him worry – or he might be worried if certain words do not come back.

  ‘I could write more than he tells me to – or less – and keep facts from him also, and I doubt that he would notice. But is that idea proper, do you think?’

  7 Martine

  Tuesday 5 February 2013

  Flapping about in her bathrobe to Van Morrison’s Moondance, having picked it pointedly, now Martine’s upbraiding herself. Coward. Tomorrow Jocelyn Teague will give up on you, move on to someone else.

  Yesterday she fed her foetus of raw pastry to the pigeons.

  It’s gone midnight, the same night that the object of her indecision has Facebooked a sister and deleted a message to a missing brother. The moon is still a nudge in Martine’s local city sky. She gurns on another unwelcome one-liner: Definition of insomnia: unable to sleep till it’s time to wake up.

  In the sitting room, an Asian mask and batik hangings line the walls. She starts laying photos on the carpet, not conscious why. A framed montage of her nieces from her bedroom, all phases of grinning and spoilt, little, teenage and grown-up. Next, a snap of her mother in her last years, in a car park, trouser-legs flapping. Her nostrils are flared and red with age; her eyelids give her an exposed look, albino-seeming, without the usual glasses. A mat of thinning hair, the ever-youthful cherub mouth.

  Martine brazens out her mother’s lost scrutiny. Now Astrid and Jonas, Astrid smiling, Jonas not, his arm too tightly round her. The next two shots are some party and some drag show, the details long forgotten. Feather fans and bustiers, false eyelashes swoopy as eagle’s wings. Saila’s there both times, but in the groupings it’s Grand Dame Tattlemouse, Bernard when not in drag, whom Martine studies. The bulk of the genitals strapped out of sight and, in theory, mind.

  She sits back painfully on her heels. Her row of snaps steers right to left towards the masculine. Freddy on a forest walk, turning towards her lens with stolid forbearance, a rucksack strapped common-sensically round both shoulders. Her long-ago first love. Solemn Mohan with a cricket bat, surrounded by an air of isolation. And last a snapshot of her father. She turns it face-down like the one playing card that will bust her. His portrait in the lobby is enough, the large black and white one at his office desk, a tube train on the wall behind him.

  Now she sees why she’s dealing out photos: to grapple with her old problem, her attraction to the male. Scanning, her lineup blurs from masculine to feminine just as the moon blurs from dark to light, its terminator indistinct. It’s not that she doesn’t like women, doesn’t have oodles of women friends. It’s just that…Everything’s a compromise, she lectures herself; so why, when it comes to male or female, do I get so sodding definite?

  She staggers to her feet. Thin moonlight enters the kitchen with her, and her mobile presents new messages.

  Bernard texts, ‘I’m scared, you’re scared, we’re all scared, girl. No one’s gonna expire.’

  The moon’s in its last quarter: night by night its light is fading. For some reason, this makes her more afraid. She thinks of her mother, that she’s no longer there. Beside her, Sancho shifts, giving her his inscrutable eye. She remembers, Sancho goes darker when he’s frightened. That way he thinks he looks less cowering, more certain.

  Impending blackness moves her towards her laptop. She sits down at the table and, trying to feel more
certain, emails Jocelyn Teague.

  * * *

  1984

  Discharged from hospital with Jonas, Martine lay unwillingly on the coloured blocks of her sofa pinioned by Jonas’s dressing-gown. She’d felt pinioned in the white bed in the hospital, pinioned when he’d carried her into the flat. The unwilling sister bride. Absurdly, she’d longed to do her clumsy dancing. She fixed on her feet, shapeless in red bedsocks.

  Jonas shifted on the sofa arm, fingers raking his thighs. ‘I’m going noplace till I know you better.’

  Martine raised a mental eyebrow. Grit: unlike him.

  She snapped, ‘Send me a letter telling about you,’ a Mohan reference he wouldn’t get. She said, ‘I don’t like being tricked.’ First Phil’s tasteless joke, now Jonas was abusing her weakness. ‘And it makes me squirm when people try to help me. Is that confessional enough?’

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘You’re bluffing about staying. You’ve got a job to get back to.’

  ‘People’s kitchen fantasies. They can wait.’

  Martine and Jonas reared their heads at their stalemate.

  ‘You insult me,’ Martine said.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’re implying I’m damaged or something. Everyone’s flawed, you included.’

  ‘That’s not what I said.’ Jonas jumped up and went to the French windows, blinking down at the back of Martine’s building, its aerial view of garden walls and trees and gardens. The moon was out there, ignored. ‘Tell me some things, anything, that made you who you are.’

  ‘Not everyone goes around thinking why they’ve turned out the way they have, you know. Some people get on with living. They’re too busy for all that.’

  ‘Goddamn right. Busy busy busy.’

  ‘Are you saying I don’t have time for you or something?’