On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

‘No. I’m…’ Jonas made a muffled noise. ‘You’re…driven.’ He faltered. ‘Or that’s how you come over. I guess I want to know why.’

  ‘Better driven than the opposite.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. Wish I could be that way. All that nerve. I’m asking for pointers here.’

  ‘Flattery. It’ll get you nowhere nohow.’

  Jonas left the room without explanation. Martine heard him murmuring into the phone, having shut the door. She focused on the room enlargements in her mirrors. She always had to have a door ajar, couldn’t bear the sensation of imprisonment. She pushed down the memories of ten years ago when someone had locked her in a lab storeroom. The school caretaker, who she used to kid around with, had denied it, said he’d have heard her calling if he’d done it, let her out. Five half-term days of thirst, hunger and excreting into beakers, of silence and the dark, in the time before mobile phones.

  When Jonas came back to her she said, ‘So you’ve explained that I’m your hostage. And what does Astrid think?’

  ‘It’s not all about you. Astrid just suggested moving in with me.’ He continued, ‘Stuart says he’s moving on, so…’

  Stuart his flatmate.

  He re-positioned himself on the sofa end; Martine hunkered down in her dressing-gown.

  ‘I still mourn Mom, my birth Mom,’ Jonas began again. ‘Never having had her. I guess that’s why I sometimes seem…dependent.’

  Martine imagined Astrid advising him in her Nordic lilt, ‘You could try not asking, only telling. Trading feelings?’

  ‘More blackmail,’ she snapped. ‘You know my weakness on Mum and Dad, so now you’re heading for that.’

  He didn’t deny it. ‘You let your Mom kind of adopt me. That’s amazing.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Skip your Mum, died giving birth to you, blah blah blah, and Dad’s Merrimac woman with her own kids, not that bothered about you, blah blah, and how my Mum saved you, more blah.’ Jonas twitched. ‘Get to the Dad part.’

  Jonas gave in. ‘I let you keep the wrong picture of Dad.’

  ‘What picture? I was only three when he left.’

  ‘I wonder’ –(‘Go gentle, Jonas,’ Martine decided that Astrid must have advised) –‘I just wonder if you…’

  ‘You think I’m a daddy’s girl? That I’ve glamourised him, across the pond and all that? That I think he’s perfect just because Mum’s said so?’ Jonas didn’t respond. Martine snipped, ‘By the way, you know that for Mum you’re his stand-in, don’t you?’ He still didn’t respond. She said, ‘How dare you presume to know how I feel about him?’

  ‘Now you’re assuming what I was trying to say.’ Jonas cleared his throat. ‘I’m gonna tell you about him.’ Martine fell silent, waiting, heart mysteriously pumping. ‘He has to be early for everything. Drives me crazy. Claims he needs time to get used to situations. Basically he’s a buttoned-up British guy still learning not to be shy – according to Merrimac Mom, anyways.’ Jonas rambled on, and the facts kept on falling. Martine listened. ‘He loves kids, too. Turns to mush when he’s around them, forgets his hang-ups. But he lost interest in me, I guess as I got older. Then Merrimac Mom and her own brood came along.’

  This was all new to Martine. ‘He left me when I was little,’ she said flatly.

  ‘It must’ve hurt him like hell.’

  ‘Dad’s letters stopped when I was eleven.’ Jonas shrugged, clearly not knowing why. ‘Mum tells me’, Martine seethed, ‘when we were still a family, whenever they started an argument, one of them would take me out of the room and shut me in another. After a bit, one of them would come to me and toddle me back in. They did it to shame themselves to stop. But then they would re-start. And the same all over again.’

  Jonas shook his head. ‘Dad told me. He says they moved you around to save you grief. Then he’d stress about you on your lonesome. He said he couldn’t stand either.’

  ‘I wish she’d never told me. Shuttled backwards and forwards.’ Martine mused, a faint light dawning. ‘Small wonder I don’t like wandering off straight lines.’

  The door buzzer sounded.

  Martine brightened. ‘It’s probably someone checking how I am.’

  Jonas made no move to rise.

  Martine levered herself up. ‘OK then, I’ll–…’

  He stood in front of her, blocked her. She struggled, swearing, but eventually sank back. Jonas retreated to the French windows.

  It was night-time. They were oblivious to the moon, a silver rind draped in black clouds above the parapet outline of the roof terrace, wire-brushing the housing estate rows angled towards a slab of low-rise flats. Jonas pulled the blinds, muffling a tide of city noise.

  He fell into the Eames chair, his legs flung out before him.

  ‘Someone’ll ring,’ threatened Martine.

  He got up and flicked out the living room phone cord. ‘I wish we could be…friends. That’s why I’m trying to talk.’

  ‘You think we don’t get on, that I don’t want to?’

  Jonas said, ‘I’m working my butt off here.’ Martine didn’t speak. ‘When you ask me I tell you about my love life. I trust you. I trusted you to get me work.’

  ‘You’re saying I don’t trust you.’

  ‘D’you trust anyone?’

  ‘Look, I don’t even trust myself.’

  ‘Or don’t like yourself.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I don’t like,’ Martine started. ‘My love life, so-called. Hunting for a man. Pretending that I’m not.’ Words were erupting out of her. ‘Getting used to disappointment. Ignoring people’s hints, the clock they’re tapping behind their eyes, as if there’s some imperative about it. The fact there probably is. Laying eggs and banging a gong I never asked for every bloody month. The pain. Dressing myself for it, medicating myself for it, like a wounded gangster. Sorry, but fuck,’ Martine said. ‘Pretending I want a relationship more than sex – unless the bloke wants sex more than a relationship, and then pretending that. Pretending he’s fantastic. Trying not to think how fantastic I’m not. Keeping busy to block that thought. Being on my own or idle, because then I can’t block it. Depending on people like Mum to block it for me…’

  Jonas murmured, ‘She stresses about you.’

  ‘I know that! And how fucking guilty do you think that makes me feel?’ A braying noise came out of Martine. ‘I could tell her what sex does for me. That it pours me away into the man I’m with. That not being myself, not being by myself, is pretty much all I work at. D’you think that’d reassure her?’

  Her hand was spooling tissues from a box now. She listed her reams of failed male encounters, then heard herself describe in gruesome detail how she wanted to be touched and smelt and tasted, and in what way, and more.

  Jonas tried to hold her. She beat him off. He sat, drooping chin on steepled hands.

  All at once, Martine ground to a halt and she thought, vividly as a storm in sunlight, Noah sent a bird over flooded wastes to search for something solid. I’ve just flown the savagest bird. I’m on a vast, empty prow with the memory of its claws, of what I’ve said, anchored in my palm. The useless memory, since I’ve let it go.

  Jonas suddenly walked to the kitchen and stewed them apples with cinnamon, more or less the way she’d taught. Martine was relieved. She’d swamped him with the sump oil of her life, he’d surprised her in the rough grass of his stubbornness. They’d crossed into regions of each other that they’d never guessed were there.

  With things so raw, Martine wanted him gone from her flat. But the fact was, someone had to help her move around. Every night he supported her to the bathroom. There was intimate laundry, things in her bathroom cabinet that made him blanch. Sleeping in her impersonal spare room clearly rattled him after her mother’s, the guilelessness of Mum’s fussy, unsure style.

  Over the days Martine tried to shove back the entrails of what she’d lately exposed. ‘It’s not about sex. I’m not a…I just need…’ ‘Of course I want someone permanent
…’ ‘It’s not that I don’t like being helped, it’s just that I’m not used to it.’

  Jonas twitched, looking unconvinced.

  One day, eating their signature chicken with grilled peppers, he said, ‘Why did you never offer me a home when I got here?’

  Martine clattered down cutlery. ‘I never thought you’d think…You and Mum seemed to feel the loss of Dad even more than I did. And you needing something of her was exactly what she needed.’

  ‘You don’t need me?’

  ‘I don’t know how to answer that at all.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be quite right.’ That was as far as Martine could go.

  She knew she was being stingy with her feelings. To compensate, she found herself admitting, ‘There’s something you don’t know.’ She tried to twinkle at him. ‘I’ve met a boy.’

  She sent him to the study for Mohan’s letters, drawings and photos.

  Swilling them on the coffee table, something came over Jonas. Martine saw it. The drawings roused him especially. His arm crept to his chest and lay there gently clutching. Later he’d tell her that they presented him with a vision of the life he wanted: Astrid and three children. Girls, he’d tell her later, just like in the stories.

  ‘The boy’s not a substitute son,’ said Martine. ‘I still don’t know how I feel about having children.’

  ‘What did you write the little guy about me?’

  She told him. Then he wondered why a boy.

  She shrugged, ‘Why heads, why tails?’

  There was a lot more to an answer that she didn’t know herself, and the question stayed inside her.

  8 Martine

  Tuesday 5 February 2013

  It’s the small hours. In bed, Martine can’t sleep. She lies on her side, switches onto her back, rolls onto her side again. She’s trying to conjure back the Sri Lankan dream that she has sometimes: not just to have it, but to finish it. She fixes on the stimulus of the tropical curtains. She’s shivering. To have the dream she should be steamy-hot, but the heating’s off, and despite two extra blankets, she can’t warm up.

  Sometimes dribs and drabs of the dream trickle into her sleep and trickle away again, unresolved; sometimes the narrative begins and gathers pace before shearing off like fabric; sometimes the dream plays out at length until some logic in her brainwaves refuses to believe in it, and the dream turns on its heel and ambles away from her, whistling nonchalantly to itself. So she has never known the ending.

  She pours more water from a carafe into the glass on her bedside table, drinks it down. She remembers and notes wearily, puzzled, The dream never leaves me thirsty. The dream in its entirety is a problem she hasn’t solved yet; the ending seems a key to something important. One of these nights she has to perfect it, complete it, get it right.

  * * *

  1984–1985

  Martine was supposed to convalesce gently, so Jonas stayed on and helped her, if inefficiently, to a soundtrack of tuneless whistling and bad jokes. She shook her head despairingly sometimes at the void where his self-belief should have been, but she began to see new things in him, tact maybe, or at least the discretion to withdraw, and appreciated him for them. Nonetheless they moved apart again. She slipped into a tunnel, went back to self-contained. The roar of their recent clashes died away. In its wake, there was the odd spark on their lines and a distant rumble.

  One day, Jonas slipped Martine a sheet of paper. ‘Might amuse the little guy.’

  A cut-away map of the Underground, quirky, non-mathe-matical. There was a tube train with an animal face, burrowing through the network, and London landmarks like molehills on the surface.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ smiled Martine.

  She added a stick figure of herself, on her route to work. She wrote a letter to Mohan asking about the civil war, inserted Jonas’s map and sent them on.

  ‘16th November 1984

  ‘Dear Miss Martine

  I did not hear from you a long time. Then your letter came. Anupama took me upways the snakeish road to the temple. We put flowers at the shrine.

  ‘I have a cough.

  ‘Your journey in the tubes is nice and walking on the dots. The head is a melon and the arms are sticks and the legs are sticks.

  ‘My question is “Why are you going in the tubes with ointment? Do you like it?”

  ‘My question is “Do you have a car? What is it?”

  ‘My question is “Describe to me your buses.”

  ‘Anupama has an idea. She can write I ride my tatta’s bicycle, on the behind. I am a king on the cart. I ride with my father only in the village. Tatta is saying very strongly we are not going towards Kandy except Anupama and Upeksha safely on the school bus.

  ‘It was indeed most fearful last year, July. Tatta and senior uncle heard about some people gave bad names to some people. Some cars were fired also. There are some torn people in the tea plantations not far up. Tatta does not talk about it. I request you most ardently do not ask because I am most youthful and I am quite worrying.

  ‘My sister can make punctuation marks and this point is significant: please notice.’

  Martine murmured in distress at her own insensitivity when she received this. She could understand the knockback, but InterRelate soon hammered Mohan’s point home.

  ‘Dear Miss Haslett

  Organisational changes

  I have pleasure in introducing myself as the new Programme Manager.

  ‘Thank you for writing to our London branch.

  ‘We fully understand your concern for the political situation in Sri Lanka and your desire to support your “adoptive family” in troubled times. However, I should be grateful if you would re-familiarise yourself with InterRelate’s rules. These require sponsors to refrain from communicating with “their” children on political matters. Charities such as ours can act, indeed can exist, only thanks to a bond of trust with, and the full endorsement and support of, the government of the day. This necessitates an undertaking on our part to remain politically neutral in all dealings at every level.

  ‘On a positive note, we have been restructuring. This extends to the translation of letters. Our own, expanded team of highly qualified personnel will henceforward interpret the letters between you and “your” family, checking them carefully to ensure that their meanings are as clear as they need to be.

  ‘Rest assured that the welfare of the families is always our primary concern.

  ‘Thank you for this opportunity to make myself known to you.

  ‘Yours sincerely

  Anura de Silva

  Programme Manager, Colombo Office, InterRelate International’

  And yet Martine had only been trying, or so she felt.

  Her return to college was phased in, so even in the new year she had more time to write, and a lingering need for penance made her strain.

  Warned off by InterRelate and Mohan, while sparing the boy hard news such as her mugging, she still tried to elaborate in her letters. ‘Happy New Year! We don’t celebrate much here, but I suspect you do…Here’s a photo of my new Mini. The driver sits very low to the ground. I dodge in and out of the traffic. The car’s so small that it’s easy to park. Mostly it’s quicker to use the tube, though – but it doesn’t hold ointment. We call it a tube because…’

  Writing to him came slowly, mentally and physically. Mohan’s replies surged back. It was an ebb and flow, every four to six weeks: the ebb in Martine’s case, depleting her, because, to her frustration, no sense of connection grew.

  ‘Your letters take a long time. Anupama says not to worry, then I play with my cars.

  ‘Your Mini is fantastic. The tube is nice with no ointment.

  ‘How can you celebrate New Year if there are no new things?

  ‘My question is “How does a tube work? Is it dark inside?”

  ‘What do you like? I like cars, lorries, shrews, cricket, football and Upeksha’s curries – nearly all.

>   ‘About our new latrine. It is called a pour flush. The walls have holes at the top. There is a metal roof. They dug a septic pit. They put in an S-trap. They put in wire mesh. A bucket made a hole in the middle. They poured concrete in around. It dried. They put in a squatting pan. They connected it to the S-trap. We pour water down. I watched the men building. It was nice.

  ‘Mr Semasinghe does not bring your letters now. Mr Mendes from Colombo. He drives a LandRover more than 120 kilometres. Amma says he is the man who came to talk so that you could adopt me. Mr Semasinghe still brings our other letters. It is a change. I ask Anupama why. She says do not worry.

  ‘Tatta and the fathers want a tractor not two bullocks.

  ‘I have thought of another thing I like: machines.’

  Jonas pored over these letters as they got more detailed.

  ‘Now I am seven. I was absolutely not waiting for a present.

  ‘It is nothing important, but my sister has grown big.

  ‘When is your birthday and other special days? How do you celebrate them?

  ‘You told me “I like fast cars, swimming, pigs, the full moon, the colour green, most children and most of my own cooking.”

  ‘That is nice, but I like the part about tubes.

  ‘We celebrate most numerous festivals about the moon. I kindly request you describe your moon festivals.

  ‘I am excited for New Year. A prince will come from the sky riding in a white carriage. He will wear a white crown. He will break through the sea of milk.

  ‘Anupama says “You are making a story. In Buddhism it is about the sun.”

  ‘The ladies will put out the fires except one log. They will wash and clean the house and get all the food and water into the house. The family will wait. We will have sweetmeats and games. Then we can throw firecrackers. Amma will light the stove and boil the milk over. We will throw a present in the well and take up water. We will give presents on betel leaves. We will eat milk rice with plums and sesame seeds. There is a play day with pillow fights and I can hit Jayamal with a bag.

  ‘Firecrackers are loud. I liked them last year. This year, I do not think I will.