On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘God’s sweet bejasus, isn’t that…?’ laughed Charlie, ducking down.

  He’d spotted one of their colleagues with a student, also looking illicit. The others loitered by the box plants, deep in an argument.

  ‘Something else it is then.’ Martine grabbed some purple heucheras and lugged them onto her trolley, hurrying on to lavender and rosemary.

  Charlie lurked behind her, gurgling with laughter. On their way out, he splashed her from the Butterfly Fountain, an ornamental feature in carbon fibre.

  Martine was disappointed with Mohan’s blunt dismissal of his interest, the dragonflies and butterflies, and still longing to talk with him about his native species.

  The next weekend she returned the box, the lavender and the heucheras. Mohan’s landscape letter of a while back was by now unfurling inside her, drawing her towards a different kind of garden, a new start.

  ‘Dear Miss Martine

  The October storm. Your roof is a rubbish heap. You are smiling and shrugging your shoulders. You are saying you will get ferns. My question is why like ours.

  ‘It has been the Cricket World Cup in India and Pakistan. One day it will be in Sri Lanka.

  ‘Jayamal says each match is a war with many battles it can take one bowler or batsman to twist the knife and the wound is bloody, sudden and fatal and tatta says parrot ears remember now stop that.

  ‘You are teaching me English so I will teach you why cricket is interesting.

  ‘Tatta says the cricket field is the hills and mountains and the pitch is the paddy and cricket is a struggle for the paddy. One side is the elephants, rabbits and rats and other hungry animals, the pests and the diseases. The other side is the govigayas* like us. Our captain is a govigaya*. All must eat.

  ‘First the enemy. Sometimes they do not trouble us. Sometimes they come and eat a little sometimes they trample and destroy or blight a lot. That is their side of the match.

  ‘I am saying wait I am trying to write this down.

  ‘Second the govigayas. Sometimes they guard the crop in trees or guard huts. Sometimes they put up electric fences. Sometimes they put down pesticides or poison. This may work or this may take a long time or this may fail.

  ‘I am saying go slower. I need more time like poison.

  ‘The govigayas also try to frighten the other side. They burn fires. If the fires spread wrongly or go out they have not worked. But sometimes the fires do frighten. Or they may use a gun or guns to frighten or destroy.

  ‘In the end if they can harvest enough paddy then they have won.

  ‘Whoever wins the match does not really finish. Australia won but the struggle must go on. It is no one’s fault. All need the paddy. All must eat.

  ‘These are tatta’s words. My question is now do you think cricket is interesting.

  Mohan’

  *Note from translator: govigaya – farmer’

  15 Martine

  Monday 11 February 2013

  Matt has just left, so Martine’s cricket teach-ins are at an end. Since retirement, her mind as buzzing as ever, she can’t get used to the longer hours alone. She doesn’t know who she is when she’s by herself. For her the silent times are the rag-and-bone times, the bits and bobs that she feels she can’t admit to, can’t make into anything.

  She switches on the kitchen radio. An interviewer is talking.

  She scrolls through My Pictures for a photo for Jocelyn Teague. It isn’t easy. These days she avoids being captured on film. And she’s become distracted by doubts: maybe Lemon Tropics brings sun into the guest room in a way that’s try-too-hard. And then the letter bundles in the grey carton, labelled with cricket terms, are now in her head again – or, more telling, the knowledge of what’s revived them. The getting close to Mohan, that boy.

  She moves to the decorated room with the furniture stacked at its centre and takes a snap on her mobile, sending it to Ali. She rings her.

  Ali breaks into song. ‘Bring me sunshine,/In your smile…’

  She groans. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

  ‘Yellow’s not very you.’

  Martine thinks, As time speeds up, so many more things seem uncertain: history, places, relationships; what works for me, what I want.

  Matt’s only just gone, but she’s already missing him.

  ‘Went off the railway tracks, didn’t I,’ he’s confided.

  When he was young and a dick, he told her. He chucked his head, and they grinned.

  He’d picked up on her background in education and told her about the teachers he’d hated, confining his evolution to the school experience: she found that sad for him, but for herself too, what with her background, supposedly trying to improve it. What went wrong could also be about his parenting, she’d thought, but couldn’t ask him about that.

  This Friday, her foreign visitor comes and she’ll be the surrogate parent. When she worked with children she was used to them. Teaching was, up to a certain point, entertainment, yet somehow she’s gone blank about how to entertain a youngster. Surely, at her time of life, she should have learnt the difference between parenting and teaching. She challenges herself, But is there one? Surely only in the degree of love.

  For Jocelyn Teague, she settles on a photo from her retirement do last year. She’s posing as if to twirl in her favourite mint-green skirt, which, admittedly, only just fits her. Artificial light washes out her eyebags nicely, and the lifted wine glass magnifies her smile. Her eyes she knows were wondering whether retirement was the right thing.

  On the radio, the interviewer is following an eighty-year-old woman whose litter-picking rambles have become a way of life. They talk as they stroll briskly up some glen.

  ‘How did you start?’ the presenter asks.

  The woman begins, ‘Tra-la-la. I think it was 1999, dear, and…’, and Martine hears her mother, the way she used to hum, too, in her speech. It feels somehow like sacrilege.

  She wishes the moon was out. Like her mother it’s somewhere else, shrunk into the void, as if to remind her, What you do with your young guest is up to you.

  Parenting. Martine ransacks her brain, How did Mum do it? Before the visit of the object of her decision, she must get her mother’s scarf framed.

  * * *

  Cricket terms

  1987

  Endings and beginnings. Early November 1987. St Mary’s, Battersea. Not HIV, certainly not RIV, but carelessness in a club had done for Phil in the end. Martine hadn’t been there for the accident in Heaven. From a midway row Charlie and she sang pulling faces at each other, groping for the tune to My Song is Love Unknown. She pictured Phil dancing barefoot over that broken vodka bottle to infected cuts and, she hoped, a more permanent, fun-filled, irresponsible heaven.

  She hadn’t gone to the crematorium. Jokes had come to her as usual, inappropriate and clanging. Definition of a cremation: more heat than light at the end of the tunnel. The trouble with a cremation is that for all you may put into it, you don’t get that much out. Not going had only brought guilt that there wasn’t much guilt, because all around her, change was happening. There was a gulf where Phil had been, but an even deeper chasm between that time back then and her present. She was really happy now: happy and fine. That guilt party, with Phil at the piano? It had been three years before.

  She knelt pretending to pray, but she wasn’t sure what there was to pray for. To be thankful for, maybe: a sense of the real Mohan trilled in the back of her head, other-worldly, like her lover’s reedy singing, heard today for the very first time. The moon would be full later that day, she knew, the image of how she felt.

  Many of the Soho Sisters, a familiar tumble of names and faces – Fleur, and Bernard/Tattlemouse and Graham/Araminta and Nev/Old Sal, and Saila Billet-Doux, and the tart, who’d turned out to be named Evie, and several more besides – had decided on a joint tribute: alternating outfits, white and black. They swivelled like dominos to file out of the pews. She thought, unable to stop herself, There’s got to be a be
tter way of getting people together than dying. The sleeves of Bernard’s black jacket were actually printed with piano keys and she grimaced at being schmaltzed out of the building to Michael Jackson’s Black or White. The black note of Matthias was missing: ordained now, he had a spanking new disapproval of the family’s choice of church.

  Bernard approached Charlie, fingering his leather jacket. ‘So this is he!’

  Martine wanted to hurry home, but Ali took her arm. She steered her away from the bow-windowed overhang of the porch. The two of them faced the wide, wrinkled road of the Thames twisting away in the direction of the past evaporating from the roof of Ali’s Pimlico flat.

  Ali burst out, ‘This is probably the wrong place. I’m going to let Conrad make an honest woman of me.’

  Something in Martine stilled. ‘And you’ll be thinking babies.’

  ‘Naturellement.’

  Ali’s eyes rested on a nearby group of moored-up houseboats, railings and gangways with padlocked bicycles aboard, the stolid hulls with their flower-sprigged curtains pressed to dusty windows. She must be awaiting congratulations.

  Martine met her gaze with her usual sideways look. ‘The kitchen-sampler approach to life,’ she remarked. ‘They say it can be very…’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  Beyond the hulks grinding together, a mini speedboat chipped the waves, snagging Martine’s attention.

  ‘Sew in the traditional emblems in the order husband, home, family, pets, grandchildren, then you can rest your eyes for what’s left of your time on earth, let everything go, potter about with the background stitching, the filler.’ She knew she was being naughty. ‘Rewarding: they say it can be very rewarding.’ A realisation came to her: And Ali’s younger than you are, like most of the rest of your friends. ‘I don’t even know how you sew a sampler,’ she conceded pathetically.

  Ali grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Dear patronising bitch.’

  They hugged, Ali bountiful with her forgiveness. Martine heard Conrad behind them, talking to Charlie. But her smile was with the driver of the boat in the grey churn of the water, blinking down to a white pixel in the distance.

  With Charlie around, all new ideas stimulated Martine, so when Mohan’s long-distance cricket lesson arrived quickly, in mid-November, cricket took hold of her. This and Anupama’s jars inspired her to batch the letters of 1986 and 1987, the ones that Mohan had begun to write alone.

  She wasn’t clear from the letters what Anupama’s jars were for, but she liked to think of her not as a Lankan skivvy, drearily bottling chillis or whatever, but using them for some Zen-like ordering exercise, something that pleased her: painting them, maybe, or keeping science experiments in them, as she, Martine, might once have done herself. Anupama must have gained a chink of time with her liberation from what Martine saw as the drudgery of letter scribing for her benefit. Maybe the jars were her celebration of that chink.

  The earlier letters Martine put together with blue ribbon threaded through a gift tag. On the tag she crossed out a birthday wish of Ali’s, inserting the cricket term, ‘No balls’. The later ones she trussed up with string and luggage labels. On the first packet, she wrote in her jagged script, ‘First touch?’; on the other, ‘Through the gate?’ Cricket terms charting three phases in their connection that she hoped and believed she saw. Mohan’s cricket letter seemed a crowning triumph, seemed to share something important. With that he’d surely lowered his guard, let her through the gate?

  These are the three packages now in the carton on her high shelf.

  One weekday evening, the buzzer sounded.

  ‘Plant delivery for Ms Haslett!’ Ali Cockney-hammed through the intercom.

  ‘Right so. I’ll go if you like,’ Charlie offered. He was several hours early: his being there hadn’t been planned.

  Driving to Suffolk to see her sister, Ali had agreed to collect Martine’s plant order for the roof terrace from a specialist local nursery. She appeared at the top of the stairs with a tray of ferns, unfazed by Charlie wading towards her, hoisting himself into his jeans. They smiled.

  ‘I can bring up the rest. Throw us your car keys,’ said Charlie, and went down.

  Martine bobbed about making hot chocolate and finding the homemade gingerbread. She returned to the sitting room as Ali was reaching for the windows to put the fern trays onto the balcony.

  She twisted back, indicating the forest in her arms. ‘Why these?’

  Martine bent over, breathing in chlorophyll, running greenery through her hands. The stipes of some ferns were fleshy, the leaves of others glabrous and hairy. Some felt to her like braid, or waxen ruffles.

  A letter seemed to speak to her. ‘In the high hills are ferns and mosses among the waterfalls.’

  She said vaguely, ‘They’re something different, aren’t they.’

  In her head, in her customary way, she reeled off her shopping. Cyrtomium caryotideum, clean holly fern. Pityrogramma, also from Sri Lanka: cocoa-coloured stipes and waxy yellow farina on the undersides of the fronds. Three Thelypteridaceae, three Hemionitis tomentosa. Cliff brake fern. Maidenhair fern. Bird’s nest fern and lion’s mare fern and Blechnum silver lady: even their English names sounded exotic – and there was that word in her mind again.

  A damp, cold mist was suffused by the city lights and the last of the waning moon, which Martine could sense, even though she couldn’t see it. She imagined how the larger shadowed portion would seem to jut from under the slip of silver, like a coin trick about to be explained. There were new modes of life all round her; her rusty old life was no longer right. With the ferns’ delivery, she felt the onset of something.

  Ali re-entered. ‘You haven’t been to see us the last few Tuesdays. And you haven’t come clubbing either.’

  They carried mugs and plates to the sofa.

  ‘I’ve been with you in spirit.’

  Ali choked on a crumb of gingerbread. ‘Poppycock. I demand an explanation.’

  Martine said, ‘Cock certainly came into it.’

  The real reason was that she’d feared talk of Ali’s engagement. Ali might blather on about it or be quietly smug, or worse, protest that marriage wouldn’t change her, trying hard to seem the same.

  Charlie swung the ferns past them, dissolving into the fog.

  Ali started, ‘It’ll be the same, you know. You and me.’

  Protestations then, thought Martine. She jumped up.

  ‘You’re always in a rush,’ Ali called after her. ‘Sit down and talk.’

  But Martine pushed out through the windows. On his haunches with a torch, Charlie was hitting the ferns thoughtfully with a small pool of fluorescence, reading the plant labels. When she came out he stood.

  ‘I must get on with the planting,’ she said.

  ‘Stenochlaeba palustris’, he informed her, ‘likes to grow in trees. And it can get tall.’ He held his arms up from his sides.

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘And Brake T.G. Walker prefers the clefts of rocks. Marsilea has to be in water, look.’

  ‘Ali’s being…‘

  Charlie said, ‘For the ones you have got right, you’ll need to protect them so. In a herbarium. Which will need building. Drip irrigation, probably: pipes, all that malarkey. Why didn’t you do that first?’

  Martine said, ‘You’re not even a gardener.’

  ‘Nor, I see, are you m’darling. They’re beautiful, so. But some are entirely wrong for here, and you’ve bought way too many.’

  She asked herself, Why do I feel thwarted? I just want to have my own miniature landscape.

  She said, ‘Ali’s getting married.’ She hadn’t told him before.

  Charlie’s arm came round her. ‘Ha. We can escape everything except our own biology. That’ll be you but, in a few years’ time. How old are you, exactly?’

  He’d never even registered that Martine was older. Till then their relative ages hadn’t seemed important. Instantly she saw that, whatever her difference from her friends, he
saw her on their conventional treadmill, just the same.

  She wrote to Mohan, ‘Dear friends of mine are getting married.’

  Hoping to keep him and her focused on the same page, she described wedding customs in England: the bouquet throwing, the foam on the getaway windscreen, the boots and saucepans running on strings behind.

  19 November Martine would never forget. On the 18th, Jonas had rung with his news of the second expected baby. On the 18th, Claire had also told her – too smugly, Martine felt – that she was getting married. But the 19th – for her – that was the unforget- table day.

  In many ways it seemed like others, hanging from a rubber grip with the Standard in a crowded Underground carriage. But the paper showed the ruins of King’s Cross. Thirty-one dead from a cigarette or match. It had happened the previous night, around seven-thirty: she’d passed through the station herself not long before, travelling from a school, taking the Victoria line home.

  A horrific accident, probably. On the train, shocked, she tried to think about change. How it was like fire. How people could want it, or it could happen despite them, or it could start, like the govigayas’ fires in the paddy, because they felt it must. I wanted it, she reminded herself: I chose love with Charlie over the dross of dating. And with a bottle smashed in Heaven, Phil’s dead, whether anyone likes it or not.

  The day before, she knew she’d started change of the third kind. She’d heaped up the way that Ali took the basis of their friendship for granted, and Charlie’s assumptions about her, and Claire’s self-satisfaction with her engagement, and Phils’s death, that ex-fellow spirit, and the sense that even her half-brother was progressing far beyond her. Useful tinder, all. And she’d gone home and waited for Charlie. And while King’s Cross was burning, she’d fucked him like she’d never fucked before.

  The 19th was the day that she could see what she’d done. She’d copulated without her cap on purpose. She’d made a spark because she felt she must.

  16 Martine

  Wednesday 13 February 2013