On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  In her crimson bedroom, Charlie rocked her.

  Whenever his wife was away she heard herself whining, ‘Stay the night,’ like a toddler begging for the light on.

  They both called the wife she, like a long line of adulterers. She travelled a lot, training horses in Ireland. She didn’t want a family, contradicting Charlie’s line on female biology, but he seemed content with that.

  Martine never told him that she’d set aside her diaphragm that time. They avoided talk of the excision. A short stare at each other, a wordless clearing of the throat, a particular embrace: in these ways Charlie and she consoled each other for any loss they’d shared – or so she chose to think. She saw that he assumed with nonchalance that, should she ever need one, another chance for children would come.

  Mohan wrote,

  ‘I am not upset.

  ‘I am fully grown up. I am not a king for a cart. There is no prince in the sky in a white carriage. Anupama was right that is a New Year story. I broke the cart. The axe is still sharp.

  ‘I collected toddy bottles with Anupama. She filled them from the bucket. We all sat on the veranda because tatta has still not finished the kitchen even though the fathers started it.

  ‘Tatta cannot [boy’s writing incomplete]

  ‘We listened to Anupama. They said the music was silly.

  ‘Once she had time to sing it. I went to sleep. When she went, I woke. Suddenly it rained. The rains do not sound like arrows, they are flames.

  ‘About Anupama and Upeksha and Jayamal. The mothers are here often. Upeksha is cross. Anupama is tired and working more than Upeksha. The mothers are cross with Upeksha. Jayamal is always busy at school or talking to his friends.

  ‘I am better at punctuation. This point is significant. Please notice.

  ‘About amma. Anupama says she did sing sometimes. I say amma was a big dark lump in the corner.

  Mohan

  ‘P.S. Madugalle is not good when we go international. I wish I was half as good as Ranatunga, or his bat, or the tree that made his bat, or the seed that grew that tree. Etceteraaa, etceteraaa. My English teacher says that.

  ‘P.P.S. Sometimes Ranatunga gets angry like tatta.

  ‘P.P.P.S. Do you really have no dead spirit inside you?

  Enclosure

  ‘Sli-sli- sli-Sleep, baby

  Ba-ba- ba-Babby, baby

  Where has your amma gone?

  She’s gone to fetch your milk

  But the pot of milk is lost, runs downstream,

  With only a flock of cranes overhead to see.

  A M.’

  Martine had long ago forgotten about the variegated Sri Lankan letter voices: how she’s wondered where they came from, what they might have meant. Astrid was expecting another child. Martine didn’t have one. Mohan was reaching out to her now: he needed her, she could see that. Maybe now she needed him. Against the odds, overriding his truculence, she simmered with tenderness, felt…tenderness.

  She started watching cricket on TV, bought the odd cricket magazine, even took out Surrey County membership.

  17 Anupama

  Tuesday 12 February 2013

  ‘My father’s going on pilgrimage,’ says Asiri. ‘We should visit amma.’

  He flexes his short arms with a crack and, with Anupama, leans over the wall at the top of the giant white Buddha on Bahirawa Mountain. Normally she’d be elsewhere, the only adult in long desk lines of schoolchildren at her A-level tuition class, scribbling and paying close attention, but it’s Asiri’s half-day from the Suisse Hotel.

  Below lie the town, the lake, the ants of traffic, the outlines of Kandy prison. The towering tree beside them blocks out the bright lime light, its branches thick with screeching bats, dangling like long, black marrows. It isn’t done for couples to touch in public but Anupama thinks, I desire Asiri’s hot arm round my shoulder, the fingers dallying most invitingly near my breastbone.

  Asiri’s an only child, a mother’s boy – Anupama suspects ever since his illness as a child. She adores his twinkling amma, her little acts of kindness, her tactful self-censorship when Anupama asks for critical comment, but Anupama still baulks at their duty visits because the woman reminds her that she doesn’t have an amma of her own.

  Asiri says, ‘What is it?’

  She thinks, Those most pensive eyes. They squint a bit, but she didn’t fall for his looks: she fell for his sensitivity and thoughtfulness.

  They’ve prayed under the massive seat of the Buddha, in the temple, on the way up.

  When they were chanting their namo tassa she also whispered to the unseen moon, ‘About becoming a barrister I must tell Asiri the truth.’

  Her attention snags on a colony of stick insects stumbling among the branches of a sapling that has forced through the concrete balcony.

  ‘You know what my life was like before we met. After amma left us, with Upeksha gone and tatta drinking and seldom working, I had to do many jobs at home.’ Asiri does know, but listens. ‘I left school after O levels. I worked on our neighbour’s plantation, also.’

  He murmurs, ‘The past. Let’s try to be in the present.’

  Anupama tugs a leaf from the weed, using it to fan herself. ‘Mohan seemed no longer my friend. I did not speak to Miss Martine again. I do not know if she ever discovered my false part in the letters. I had only the Buddha, and the moon, to talk to.’

  Asiri says, ‘Miss Martine would never be told. InterRelate, and Mr Mendes, would have lost face.’

  A couple of American tourists, wheezing from the stair climb, nod in unsmiling greeting then, nestling together, stare into the case of tributes to the Buddha. Asiri’s arm shoots up, pressing a tuft of hair to the crown of his head: he’s conscious of his looks in front of strangers. At his reflex, Anupama observes how one stick creature freezes.

  ‘Thanatosis, it is called,’ she explains. ‘You see? It is feigning death most convincingly. After the letters, before we met, I believe that I was doing the same. Doing merely what I had to do, trying to stay quiet.’

  He laughs. ‘Which for you cannot have been easy.’

  She notes a drunken glaze cross her husband’s face: he wants to do that thing he does, cupping the knot of hair at the back of her head, pinching her chin between thumb and forefinger before stooping to brush her sunken cheek with his lips. He thinks she doesn’t know that when he does this, he also tidies away the hair strands at the nape of her neck.

  ‘But this is now, us.’ Asiri winks his point, nodding down at a male stick insect, thin and spiny, hooked on the back of the female, which is stouter. ‘That’s us.’

  Anupama sighs to the moon, ‘But we two are the problem.’ She declares aloud, ‘I am most glad that we married. You are most adorable and I love you. You have helped my family: Jayamal out of his turtle poaching, and much more; Upeksha with her trouble at Victoria’s Secret, before her boss decided to be honourable and became her husband.

  ‘You have never held me back. You found me work in a legal office for which I typed somewhat badly. However, they were not always fair to their clients. The estate agents were no better: I witnessed money being passed that should not have been. Dishonesty and injustice. So I left, as you know. That was six years ago.’

  Asiri’s listening. ‘But soon you will take your science A levels. Then you can apply to Sri Lanka Law College.’

  Anupama’s gaze alights on another stick insect. How to say what I must say? Gingerly, she lifts the twiglike object.

  ‘Handanandāmāmā,’ she whispers soundlessly, ‘this can be like a test.’

  She drops the creature into her husband’s palm.

  He picks up something from her manner, looking closely and saying almost at once, ‘There’s something wrong with it.’

  It’s coated in a sheath like perished plastic with thin, shrivelled extremities, twitching faintly. Once, she thinks, I would have examined this creature, placed it in a jar.

  She watches her husband.

  She messages sile
ntly to the moon, ‘I hope he sees that the nymph is being strangled.’

  He hesitates, then exclaims and, with nail-bitten fingers, tries to tug the old skin off. Anupama breathes.

  ‘Handanandāmāmā, I thank you and the Buddha,’ she confides mutely. Then she tells Asiri, ‘My love. For the last few years I have been held fast, as if near death. Unlike those other years, I must stop pretending. You may have to save me. You may have to let me go.’

  * * *

  Pie-chucking and slogging

  (Pie-chucking: Poor bowling, slow to medium pace, easy to deflect;

  Slogging: Poor batting, often disregarding technique)

  1988

  ‘21 May 1988

  Dear Mohan

  I’m sorry the lullaby wasn’t very successful. What was that that you slipped in for me, a lullaby of your own? It was beautiful.

  ‘You write as if you hated your mother. I know that isn’t true.

  ‘Loving a person who’s not with you can feel especially hard. If people cry or shout or argue, it can feel as if the fielders are closing in on you while you’re at the wicket, batting on and on. Ranatunga was very young when he began to try so hard. All we can do is try.

  ‘One birthday when I was little my mother gave me a blackboard and chalks. She sat on my special chair, looking too big.

  ‘She said, “Teach me about fairies.”

  ‘(Fairies are tiny winged spirits that English children like to believe in.) I drew on the blackboard and showed her pictures and gave her my best lecture on the subject.

  ‘She said, “So fairies have eight legs.”

  ‘I made a face. “Haven’t you been listening?”

  ‘She said, “And their wings are made of cheese.”

  ‘I saw then she was teasing. She pounced on me and squeaked me in the middle. I remember her hair tickling my nose. That was the best part of our conversation. Remembering a person, trying to see the whole truth of a person, helps to keep them near you, however far away.

  ‘Have you got any stories about your mother and you?

  ‘P.S. Here’s an interview from The Cricketer International.

  ‘P.P.S. But how is Anupama, really?’

  ‘13th June 1988

  Dear Miss Martine

  I did not slip anything in.

  ‘The interview is brilliant. First there is the writer’s question, then Ranatunga and his answer. I read it in English. I am Parrot Ears and also Bullock Stomach different stomachs for different languages: Sinhala, Tamil, Portuguese and English. Also Hindi from the Wimalasiris’ TV. My English teacher says “Vell done old chap, ne?” Please send more cricket writing for my English.

  ‘I do not cry. Sometimes tatta is smiling and sometimes [boy’s writing incomplete] Crying is for [expletive deleted] sots and girls.

  ‘I do not understand about the whole truth of a person. Amma was not funny except when we went to wash with auntie Prema, and amma fell in the stream and pretended she had not.

  ‘About Anupama. She is not at school. She works here and on uncle Kumara’s plantation. About the boys in this family. Jayamal is golden because of winning prizes and being in performances at school, but he is cunning, he does it to be gone. I may be the opal boy, but he is not brave. I come home straight from school and I will try and try.

  ‘Here is a picture.

  Mohan’

  It was a warm June day in 1988 and Martine had run out of alcohol, so she, Astrid and Jonas were sipping drinks outside the Canton Arms on the corner of Aldebert Terrace, her street.

  ‘You will take Gretel and I pee.’ Astrid thrust the baby at Martine but, as its body heat hit her, she thought, This being isn’t mine; also Gretel was a baby, which somehow, abruptly, she knew wasn’t what she’d want.

  ‘’tine!’ Pippi flapped disapprovingly at Martine’s finger antennae behind her baby sister’s head.

  Pippi wasn’t Martine’s either; moreover she was a girl. Suddenly Martine knew that a girl wouldn’t do, wasn’t what she wanted either. She wiggled her ears and made Pippi shriek as the revelations spiked her. Meanwhile she saw Jonas and Astrid taking in the carelessly cropped hair, the few more pounds, the lack of makeup, the shapeless logger shirt.

  On the phone Mum quavered, ‘Jonas says hum-hum, you’re, you seem different. Are you all right?’

  The abortion, the excision, was closed and gone; she couldn’t tell Mum about it, so she couldn’t explain the longing it had set off. Pippi and Gretel weren’t enough, and writing to Mohan helped, but now…She asked herself, What do I want? She assumed that what she had to want was Charlie.

  There was a game in playgrounds then: Contaminator. The It sprinted to tag another child. Once she or he was infected, the two had to hold hands. They raced to touch more children, to expand the chain. It lengthened, swirled around them. Dwindling numbers were free to bounce like molecules. The unclean whirlpool spread from a single source.

  Charlie still wouldn’t stay the night. Martine tried to keep him, suggesting new things: his hair swept back, his fleshy odour confused by a dose of Poison, her scent, clad in her fuchsia dress for instance. She felt she was trying to get a purchase on his masculinity, blatant and foreign, inside the slick bright satin. The moon winked in on them, taunting her with the far side she couldn’t reach, spangling his get-up as he joshed around and blighted the attempt. That led onto role-play clichés, judge and convict, damsel in distress, which again felt like pollution. Which made her oil her fingers, riding him in a male way, repelling him then her. Then they started fretting over which room, which furniture, which sequence of positions. They galloped hard and rough and Martine couldn’t help thinking of racehorses in Ireland, of her putting Charlie through his paces, and he growled, thrashing about, and before Martine could say ‘Let’s stop,’ he threw her.

  She began to think they were competing. Maybe they had been all along, and weren’t trying to communicate at all.

  As the wheel of education turns, the government reinvents it. At the time it was touting multiculturalism and a new National Curriculum. In college, there would be new funds for both. Scenting money and promotion, staff jostled and manoeuvred, tendering for the finance and their futures. Grimly, Martine took proposals to her boss; eagerly, Charlie did the same with his. The two directors and their committees weighed the options. Charlie wouldn’t share his thinking with Martine; they argued about anything and everything.

  One night in early July. Martine’s boss John Brough, Head of Research and Professional Education, invited her to the main lecture theatre. She met Charlie coming out, pressing his lapels out of her way. In the arena the rostrum glared, spotlit. John Brough, who was at the back, gestured her to the stage.

  His muffled words came down, ‘Tell me again why your way and no other. Imagine I’m your jury, if you will.’

  At first Martine thought that he must know about the excision, that he was referring to that. She stilled in the bright white circle. Then she recovered and began her arguments, urging a roll-out of the LIPSS programme into each subject in the planned new curriculum. Talk should be made more important in chemistry, geography, art, history. Brough questioned that there was enough multiculturalism in it. Arguments blundered from her. Her idea was to fund more bilingual assistant training, to celebrate the languages of all pupils.

  Above her she sensed Brough scowling. ‘So we’d be prioritising language over students’ cultural values, their religions, their backgrounds?’

  A stock debate. Which was more crucial: did communication trump culture, or culture communication? She stammered that in language, there was the culture of the message as well as the medium, the word; that you could explore cultural diversity in and through them both. She met with no response.

  As she hurried out, Brough laughed. He stepped out of the dark, and was instead her father, Verdon Haslett.

  Her office had shifted too: the desks were outside the theatre, where Rita, Claire, Lesley, Leanne and Pippa flocked around the seated Cha
rlie.

  She overheard him kidding, ‘Will we move with the times, or stay in the same old rut?’

  He wooed them with a wink. It seemed a jibe at her age, which he now knew. She guessed his proposals had found favour with management; she also guessed he’d take her whole team with him.

  The mound of his hand arrested over a piece of paper. He turned but oddly he was Jonas now, not Charlie. On the page a drawing came up to meet her of the lecture theatre with a man on the spotlit platform, his hair thrown back, exuding macho confidence. There was a figure high in the background. Not John Brough: it looked like Geraldine Bowker, Charlie’s boss, the Head of Teaching and Learning. The fall of seats was thick with flame trees, in red flower. The woman morphed into Bobbie, Martine’s mother.

  A fantasy about work conflict, maleness, parenthood, or was it Mohan’s landscape taking over? Anyway, it seemed like the far side of the moon. Of course it had been a dream.

  ‘9 July 1988

  Dear Mohan

  Your photo made me smile. I barely recognised you. You’re very tall, and thinner than Ranatunga. Are you eating enough? Is that your own bat?

  ‘By the way, I’m sure you are brave.

  ‘I’ve been saving something to tell you. Jonas and Astrid have had another baby, Gretel. Here’s a photo of Pippi, me and her. I gave Pippi the toy pig in the car. Gretel has Jonas’s high forehead. She’s cute, but so is the way Pippi staggers towards me (not often in a straight line) and points at me and everything else. She says some words now. Soon I hope she’ll learn to say my name.

  ‘I was wrong about Jonas: he hasn’t grown up that much. Perhaps it’s because his mother, an American woman, died when she had him (Dad left us when I was three, ending up in the United States). Jonas calls his girls his storybooks-come-true and talks to them like a baby – mind you, so do I.

  ‘Do you say you’re the opal boy because people say they’re unlucky? You’re not unlucky to me.

  Martine

  ‘P.S. I’m researching more cricket writing.’

  ‘30th July 1988