On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  Matt reappears at the door with the flicker of a grin. ‘Decorator’s back.’

  Martine’s mind flips to the conspirators’ codes of the fertile female. Got the decorators in again. Shark attack, jam doughnut, crimson tide. Decades free of pain and blood loss, she feels, are no compensation for her sense of post-menopausal shrinkage.

  The boy Matt – Martine still sees him as a boy – takes a comic little sideways jump over the threshold, his hand to an imaginary forelock, lifting his things in after him, and her anxious gut stops churning. As he starts the re-painting and they chat through the guest room doorway, gradually her self-doubt melts away. She shows him her mother’s scarf, which at long last she’s had framed.

  This fills up her day nicely. Supper and TV as usual, then it’s time for bed. She doesn’t know if it’s Matt’s doing, but Martine is wishing hard for that dream again. And wonderfully, as she drifts off in her four-poster, it does start. First there’s the work part, all that stuff about water and the mountains; she gets as far as the hotel; then an elephant trumpets, except it’s a baby crying, and someone screams out ‘Matt!’, and there’s blood, and loss, and pain, and it’s scrambling into some acid trip through a looking glass, and out of desperation to uncurdle it, she wakes up.

  And so the dream is not resolved, again.

  * * *

  Inswings

  (Inswing: A bowler’s pitch that moves in towards a batter in the air,

  like a curve ball in baseball)

  1987–1988

  At the end of December 1987, Mohan wrote Martine a letter.

  ‘About your friends getting married. Anupama says tell Miss Martine getting married is different here. I am writing this for Anupama to be nice because [boy’s writing incomplete]

  ‘The lady on your stamp remember. A man on a horse rescued her. She escaped from a fire. Hanuman and Rama rescued Sita. She came through a fire also.

  ‘Tatta was working. Jayamal was playing rugby. I was doing homework at Nalin’s. Anupama had to go washing. Amma started cooking. The fire. Amma burnt in the kitchen.

  ‘No one rescued amma. Tatta says amma has gone to nirvana.

  ‘When can you come.’

  At about the same time, the Saturday before Christmas 1987, the A23 from Brighton funnelled Martine’s car into Streatham High Road then down Streatham Hill. Ragged red-brick frontages crowned a mass of tacky stores that lined the roadside with evening shoppers. The moon was in its new phase, blotted out. Even if it hadn’t been, given her current state Martine’s mind would have tidied it away.

  In the shunting traffic, her new Astra jerked and grunted. Drizzle veiled the dark, and the bright squares of shop windows, and filmed the metal pod of the car. Exhaust smog and the bitter taste of tyre rubber clogged the vents. She hadn’t worked out the car’s finer points so it was hot in there. The showroom-new interior added its reek to Bernard’s Chanel No. 5, and Fleur’s L’Air du Temps, and Saila Billet-Doux’s double dose of AllSpice and musk perfume, and the after-stench of egg mayonnaise from the picnic sandwiches Fleur had insisted on bringing, munched earlier on wet shingle. Hard behind them in Graham’s Golf GTI crawled Graham, Ali and Conrad and a pile of carrier bags.

  Martine’s suggestion, Brighton promenading and Christmas shopping in the Brighton Lanes and beach huddling, had filled up some of her thinking time. But Bernard had split up with his girlfriend, and Fleur was missing her boyfriend, who was away, and Ali was still trying to get pregnant, so the gang’s mood has been up and down and the expedition had been bearable, no more.

  ‘More music,’ chirped Martine.

  In the front Saila, today bare-scalped sporting dungarees over his sailor top, put another tape in.

  ‘Not Vivaldi, you insensitive git,’ muttered Bernard from the back. ‘Something we won’t slit our wrists to.’

  ‘Oops, sorry.’

  Bernard and his vanished Jenny had often made out to The Four Seasons.

  Fleur noisily lipsmacked the horn of his nose and patted his leopardskin jean-leg. ‘Git-ess.’ She was needling Saila. ‘Insensitive git-ess.’

  In Brighton the gang had suddenly all guessed why there were Thailand brochures in Saila’s Soho bedsit.

  ‘I would’ve told y’all,’ snapped Saila. He slotted in another tape. ‘Just not yet.’

  Martine hadn’t told them her secret either. Only Charlie. As time went on, it was accreting physical mass, a tissue-thin coating of lies.

  The Pet Shop Boys launched into Heart, and for that one upbeat song they all joined in, upbeat; but the next track was King’s Cross. Martine’s hand darted out, ejecting it.

  Bernard’s nylon leopardskin seemed to glare at her in the mirror. She imagined its fibrousness, and the window she’d just tried her cheek on was cold and clammy, and when she unpeeled her hands from the wheel they ripped away with a brief feeling of damage; and she was enduring the scurf flakes on Saila’s shoulders almost as much as the dense seed in her belly, low low down. The last few days, ugly sensations had displaced all else.

  Fleur fumed at Saila, ‘Since when do you not trust your friends, you s-s-s…’

  She prodded the back of his neck with a sandcastle flag.

  ‘What’re the timings? I suppose you’d have hormone therapy first.’ Martine tried to brighten the mood.

  Saila mumbled an answer.

  The car was hemmed in by a double-decker. Her prisoner’s claustrophobia mounted. The bus discharged its passengers. No ill-timed jokes this time came to relieve her. She couldn’t ignore her own timings. She couldn’t stop her brain rehearsing, This Wednesday, around 11.15, some doctor at 108 Whitfield Street, London W1 will hand me over to some other woman who’ll also write ‘23 December 1987’ and my name, birthdate and age of 37. I’ll claim not to know the date of conception, but she might pause there, detect in me the thin veneer of a lie. She’ll record 15 November, the start date of my last period. ‘You’ve come to us very quickly’ – I hope she won’t say, ‘too soon.’

  Yanking the wheel, Martine overtook.

  ‘Dunno I’m even havin’ the surgery, goin’ ahead yet,’ Saila snapped.

  Martine asked herself, And which of my two options should be called ‘going ahead’? From the bus exit, a woman with a buggy landed in front of her. The Astra stalled again.

  ‘Once it’s done there’s no going back, look. Who knows how you’ll feel on the other side, like?’ Fleur harangued Saila.

  Bernard began an effeminate rendition of I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue toothbrush, waving the others to join in. No one did.

  Beach grit in the foot well, grinding on Martine’s boot soles. The smell of brine was with them still. She turned the key with a pressing wrist. As the engine expectorated back to life she pictured the second woman at Marie Stopes. She’ll be dressed in blue and green, she foretold with an odd certainty; she’ll be young and small, not unlike a child herself.

  There was a tearing sound, the others ripping something. There were ‘Aha!’s and limbs bumping together and the crumpling of paper and a slurping. Then Fleur’s purple fist was under Martine’s jaw, thrusting an oozing doughnut at her.

  ‘There you go, darlin’. Nice’n jammy.’

  Martine’s throat kicked up resistance. ‘Still full from the picnic.’

  Actually, she’d eaten as little as she could. She pushed the sugared bun away.

  She couldn’t push away more premonitions of Wednesday. That the woman would crouch towards her under a poster of the ova, or the next phase maybe, sectioned through and hanging there in a fleshy, cutaway funnel. That she’d murmur about ‘doing the tests anyway’, and calculate the due date. That Martine’s rebellious brain would replace the desk and chairs of the consulting room with the colours and talcum-powder smells of a cot, mobile and changing mat. That she’d defend herself against the woman’s euphemisms, ‘the father?’, ‘your situation?’, ‘close family, or a friend?’ That she’d answer none of that. Evasive wrappings, building up.
>
  To the left of the Astra, a man stretched up to the rear doors of his lorry. Its back end sloped the way the car was aimed.

  In parallel Martine saw the woman writing ‘Full-time job’, and ‘Father married – no prospect of paternal input’, and…

  Fleur was still carping. ‘What happens to “Bill’n’Coo with Billet-Doux”? Don’t you wanna do drag no more? An’ will Bernie and the rest feel the same about you after? Have you thoughta that?’

  About her problem, Martine had certainly thought. How friends and family and Charlie’s wife might feel.

  Beside her, Saila hugged his bones. ‘Don’t wanna be just what people think of me. Can’t stand it any longer.’

  The carload considered what to say.

  In a Goon voice Bernard took on I’m walking backwards to Christmas. Outside on the road, the overalled lorry man hooked one lorry door open. In the mirror, nearside wing, Martine glimpsed something in the interior of the lorry. It glinted, seeming to shift under the streetlights fuzzed with rain. A tall, metal cage appeared, pivoting slowly then sidling a bit and trundling down the lorry bed, gaining momentum, loaded high with groceries. Beyond the soundproofed capsule of the car someone, some silhouette against the Safeway window, mouthed at the driver. He stopped his move to activate the tailgate, cowering and bracing his raised arms. Martine twisted, compelled to watch; and the trolley halted at the rim, just for a second.

  And she knew that on Wednesday she’d tell the woman briskly, ‘Of course I can cope; I mean, worse things happen,’ which the woman would note as ‘Client masking distress’ or something; and that then she’d gabble, ‘Better me than all the others who’ll suffer if I go through with it.’ And that would be the decision made, her choice framed as a controlled detonation, bearable, a practical plan for going on as before.

  But then the goods cage crashed down, trapping the man’s torso on the tarmac and voiding shrapnel into the road, milk and apples and cabbages and cartons of eggs, smashed eggs – Martine found herself gagging again; and there was ruptured cellophane, paper, cardboard, packaging; and a van, trying to park in front of the lorry, reversing without looking, smacked back into the wreckage. And the Astra sat there shuddering.

  Saila’s door clanged against the cage as he scrabbled from the car. Bernard and Fleur were screaming and pummelling the seats. Martine’s hands wouldn’t leave the wheel. Whatever she’d tried to protect had gone now, whatever it had been. Outside, people ran to help. Inside, she was already with the woman on Wednesday scribbling something like ‘Refused further discussion.’ There on Streatham High Road, she already held dead weight.

  ‘Sorry? What’s so friggin’ funny?’ Saila hissed, his face ducked into the car.

  He thought that she was laughing, she supposed.

  In January 1988 Charlie drove Martine to the clinic. A residential road in Wimbledon. A narrow front garden with a shrub or two. He was considerate in a measured way, but he wouldn’t come in. There were beds in the ground-floor room, one for her, one empty, the other two occupied by teenagers. She offered a packet of wine gums, forgetting they couldn’t eat. The girls glumly ignored her. Beyond the bay window cars sauntered by, a woman walking her dog. The room reminded her of the dorm of a small girls’ boarding-school or some other wrong place, of having taken a backward turn.

  She was whisked to the procedure pleasantly, as if to have a tooth out. The nurse loosely held her hand. Martine thought about touching women. Her girlfriends hugged and stroked her and she hugged and stroked them back. She’d never sought an intimate woman’s touch.

  ‘Treat yourself to something nice when you get home,’ the nurse said matter-of-factly.

  Martine thought, I just have to unblock this minor congestion on life’s route.

  ‘A bath with candles; your favourite music; a lovely meal.’

  ‘He can cook,’ said Martine, joining in the fantasy.

  ‘Bouillabaisse.’ The woman pronounced it oddly.

  ‘Soupe au pistou with aïoli.’ Martine played up the accent.

  Nurse chuckled softly. ‘Boeuf Bourgignonne.’

  After ‘Crepes Suzettes’, Martine remembered nothing.

  When she came round, she knew she wouldn’t recall the staff there. This would become a sleepover to forget. Each visitor would have left a small gift and those who’d supervised would fade into the background. She got a taxi home.

  It was only Charlie who ever knew. Insofar as Martine called it anything to herself, she called it the excision. A medical diagnosis would have been moderate depression, but she didn’t go to the doctor. She felt numb. The option of children had clouded, might no longer even be there; her sense of direction was fogged up.

  And just then came the news of Mohan’s mother’s death, stirring something under her emotional freeze-up, so she revealed, in allegory, what had happened to her.

  ‘The news about your mother made me so sad for you. I’m so, so sorry – and sorry that sorry is my best word. I wish I could come and see you.

  ‘I’ll probably write little you want to read. I’m going to try to talk to you like a mother, a mother you might have had in another place or time. If you were an English boy, for instance.

  ‘When a woman’s expecting a baby it’s a different, new feeling: she’s going to have a better present than she’s ever thought of. She’s alive with it, she feels ill with it; she sees everything as changed. That’s how your mother would have felt about you.

  ‘Then, almost at once, there are threats ahead. Others will have to see him and hold him and know a lot about him; when he comes most people will be happy, but some may be upset or jealous. For these and other reasons he’ll grow and change despite his mother – change in himself, and in her mind. In an eye-blink, he’ll no longer feel like hers; this sudden understanding will break some inner part.

  ‘Even without your mother’s illness, which made her distant from you, she was losing you from way before you were born. Her illness only dug the loss more deep.

  ‘Maybe you wake with your stomach lurching as you realise she’s gone. Try to blot that feeling out. Instead think of your mother with what love and pity you can, because she had that losing feeling long, long before you.

  ‘Upeksha or Anupama or your aunties, probably your father too, will aim to mother you. But you’re changing – growing up. Gradually you’re leaving them, though maybe you haven’t noticed.

  ‘Have you been to the shrine and thanked the Buddha for your mother, and for being her best possible present? She’s still around you somewhere, and she’s missing you so much.

  Martine

  ‘P.S. I’d sign off differently, but it’s not allowed.

  ‘P.P.S. Here are some old cricket centenary stamps.’

  The waiting for his answer was another little lack. Then a letter came, one that was hard to read.

  ‘How could you know about an amma? You are not one.

  ‘You say I am changing. I do not understand.

  ‘Anupama is saying “of course you are changing, we are all changing, every cell in our bodies changes every seven years.”

  ‘She is pushing her nails into her hand. She says she is looking at the cells.

  ‘My birthday was not interesting. I got a camera. It is for all of us and it is not new.

  ‘You must not come. If you come you will go. Stay in London then I know you are in London.

  ‘I forgot to turn your photo on the wall. A dead spirit might have climbed in. My question is are you all right? I dreamt about the paddy. The mothers fried it and we threw it on the road from the coffin to the cemetery. But it was your coffin. It is too far from your coffin to our cemetery.

  ‘Cruz told me about Easter eggs. I would like them. I did not look at the egg they put in amma’s coffin to keep the spirits away.

  ‘I cannot sleep.

  ‘P.S. The stamps are all right.’

  Certain phrases were like a carpenter’s nails, banging into Martine’s hand.

  S
he wrote,

  ‘Dear Mohan

  It’s so important to sleep. I know you’re 10 now, but is that too grown-up to take my suggestion, the only one I can think of at this distance? Ask someone to sing you this – or any lullaby.

  ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, rosemary’s green,

  When you are king, dilly dilly, I shall be queen.

  Who told you so, dilly dilly, who told you so?

  T’was my own heart, dilly dilly, that told me so.’

  ‘This is one my mother sang. Maybe your mother sang to you too.

  ‘Try filling bottles – or Anupama’s jars – to different depths. When you tap them, each will make a different note (you’ll need seven, as the music shows).

  ‘Lavender and rosemary are English plants; they have the tang of our summers. “Dilly dilly” is just English nonsense. You’re the king of course.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about eggs, I’m afraid. Can I use our old joke and say I don’t find them interesting?

  ‘I can be upset, like you; then certain music makes me feel a bit better. I’m not grown-up, even at 38.

  ‘You’ll probably say that a lullaby isn’t interesting either, but try it, just for me.

  Martine

  ‘P.S. Who’s the better cricketer, Ranjan Madugale or Arjuna Ranatunga?

  ‘P.P.S. How are Upeksha, Anupama and Jayamal? Please send them all my thoughts.’

  She wondered, In this state of mind, where does my patience with him come from?

  In their letters, the two of them pushed through as if chewing their tongues with concentration over Upeksha’s sewing machine. If there’d been a treddle, Mohan’s foot would have been stamping it to destruction, but Martine’s letters back stayed gentle. A needle might have been looping their messages together, catching one up with the other, the other with the one, banging them out in a holed yet whole straight line.

  Easter 1988. Martine’s cycle of work, and swimming, and friends, and phoning her mother, and spending time with Jonas’s nuclear family, even her and Charlie, had resumed much the same. Her periods were much heavier and more painful. She blamed the moon somehow. It was punishing her, dragging her bleeds more fiercely because of the excision.