On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  His stare moved from the little-girl frock to the kiss-curl styled for the party. She thought, You dare touch it.

  ‘Looks like grey paint.’

  ‘I missed a bit in the bedroom.’

  An eyebrow shot up. ‘Bordello gone, is it?’

  The adults guessed more about him than Martine wanted. Pippi grabbed his jean-leg. Martine loosened her and hustled them inside.

  As her door levered Charlie out he growled, ‘You didn’t tell me you were adopting.’

  ‘Why would I?’

  These days she told him only work things, when she must.

  He clumped away handling the painted tongues roughly, shaking his head and blurting over his shoulder something pointed about ‘the imperialism of need’.

  This from him, anti-establishment vagabond turned establishment darling. Still, it was damning. She thought, As if I haven’t questioned my motives: whether I’m trying to adopt to express love or its lack; out of a need to give or a need to own, to oppress with my own need. She’d taken to incanting, If I had a boy, I mean really had him, I wouldn’t grip him as I gripped onto Charlie. At least, that was her firm intent.

  20 Anupama

  Thursday 14 February 2013

  Asiri nodded and smiled on Tuesday as Anupama explained; as, over the vast head of the Buddha, the moonless night dropped like a mosquito net while, in the town below, a thousand lights pricked on and traffic headlights crept, outlining the black trapezoid of the lake. Although she knew he was listening, she was thinking, He always reacts behind the news: like one of his clocks, there is a pause, a grinding whirr, before his ‘Cuckoo!’ noise comes out. Sure enough it’s now Thursday, but here she is explaining patiently again.

  At the Buddha, the statistics poured out of her to Asiri; tonight, in the kitchen, she shows him the proof on a print-out. ‘You see. In 2002, the Law College admitted 344 students through the Entrance Examination that I am planning to take, whereas now, the numbers are down to the low two hundreds merely.’

  Asiri abandons the wallpaper paste of her basmati and her bland lentil slop of parippu. ‘What fruit do we have?’

  Anupama continues. ‘Before you speak. You may say that there is also Colombo Faculty of Law, that I might do a law degree there and transfer to Law College to study for the bar in my last year. However, as you see, the Faculty also admits barely two hundred.’ She says, ‘Facts are everything. We cannot deny the facts.’

  Asiri sighs. ‘We have had this conversation.’

  Anupama knows from many previous marital debates that Asiri thinks like his precursor, the young man at that wedding long ago: ‘You think that there is absolute truth? I am not so sure.’

  Asiri says, ‘There is a man in an English novel, by Charles Dickens I think. His motto is “Facts, nothing but facts,” or something similar. But the man is not the author. The author argues that there are two separate things, a wisdom of the head and of the heart.’

  Anupama snaps, ‘And how does that help me?’, plonking down an uncut papaya. At once she mutters contritely to the new, invisible moon, ‘I must be kind. I have to do this right.’

  ‘Very well.’ Asiri looks unruffled. ‘Let us try another English saying, “Knowledge is power.” Sir Francis Bacon, 1597. If the numbers into law study are so tiny for this whole beautiful island, as you say, this land where the need for justice is so strong, that is utterly unacceptable. We should mount a campaign. You should mount a campaign.’

  Anupama unburdens to the moon, ‘All I have ever wanted is a voice. Not my little brother’s, not Asiri’s: mine, my very own voice.’ She explains to Asiri, ‘Understand me, please. I want to fight the battles I can win, and on this one, the laws of probability are against me.’ Asiri doesn’t start slicing the fruit. His teeth bear down on a hangnail, a sign that he is starting to take things in. She continues, ‘I shall of course still take the Entrance Exam. But if I fail, which is most likely…’

  Asiri brightens, raises his head and beams. ‘Of course. You have another plan.’

  ‘The best alternative, as I say, would be to go to England.’

  Anupama thinks, Soon, in Asiri, the rupee piece will drop.

  * * *

  Bringing on a substitute

  1989–1990

  Martine downed quite a few before her fortieth party started.

  Grey clouds filed above the roof terrace like traffic. It was a breezy Sunday but warmish, fine enough to use the birthday barbecue Jonas had built (actually he’d begun it, Astrid had put it together). On the terrace, Jonas lit it with Pippi’s hindering help. The chargrilling carcases in tyres that were hopefully out of Mohan’s range were five thousand miles from smoking sausages and chicken. Martine felt herself revive, with a sudden sense of blessings.

  Friends clattered into the maisonette with presents.

  Her heart lifted at parties, especially her own. She pushed for universal happiness, wading through noise and activity and people, spreading outwards like a firework spreading light. For once she’d brought everyone together: the family, the college team, the core of the Soho Sisterhood, other London friends – although Rebecca, her social worker, couldn’t come.

  Mark 1 arrived at the door and took in her Yellow Brick Road gingham. ‘Very Judy Garland.’

  In fact, most had flouted her dress code, As Young as You Want to Feel, for summer shorts or denim. Among the kitchen and living room masses, still-torn Saila did sport a mullet wig. Mark 2 in a nappy was one idea that Martine should have banned. Leanne had pinned her hair with a token bow. Martine’s mother wore jeans and a T-shirt, a youthful look for her. It was a surreal mix but they made polite if quizzical chit-chat, somehow got along.

  Wherever Martine went she overheard her mother vetting someone with a bemused, ‘How do you know Martine then?’

  Martine heard Bernard answering as she slipped past, ‘Our shared interest in all genders – that and having fun.’

  He didn’t goose her with his hand as she’d expected, his genitals today an unremarkable bump in his stone-washed jeans. As the years went by, he was defaulting more and more from Grand Dame Tattlemouse, gender adventurer, to just another greying, slack-faced man.

  Martine drank, wandering about, the party fragmenting in her head. She backtracked. When I first explained my adoption plans, which surprised this lot more, my news or my sudden concession that I have needs? She’d written many of her friends onto the support network diagram that Rebecca had had her draw, and a well-chosen few had justified her faith in them by vouching for her convincingly at Rebecca’s interviews.

  For Rebecca’s records, Martine had outlined the long phase of blind dating and the short thing with Alec. She’d also given highlights from her love history – leaving out the unsuitably married Charlie and a certain excised child.

  ‘OK,’ Rebecca had accepted, ‘but what if you met someone now?’

  ‘The child would always come first.’ The answer had arrived in Martine’s mouth without any hesitation or forethought.

  She fizzed with impatience for her new adopter’s life, as if it might arrive even that day.

  She registered several of her guests wishing her, ‘I hope it happens for you,’ and toasted each endorsement with a swig.

  Tipsiness took hold of her, distorting the party, breaking it up. In the living room, her fluorescent red sneakers looked inflated with Pippi’s feet inside them, paddling about. Gretel was bawling, she heard. Catching Jonas’s clouded eyes fixed on Astrid and the children, briefly she saw a tremor under the crust of someone’s happiness.

  She began obsessing about the donor of a birthday card that said, ‘There’s a boy out there. Just believe.’

  ‘D’you send this?’ she slurred at people at random, ‘or d’you know who sent it?’

  Someone turned down The Raw and the Cooked; she turned it back up. Ali paid her scant heed, forever shuttling to and fro to the bathroom, changing the longed-for baby, which had finally arrived. Children everywhere.

/>   ‘Have you got Ribena?’ Mark 2’s partner wondered.

  ‘Mum wants some kitchen towel,’ sulked Leanne’s little boy. Stupidly, Martine hadn’t planned for children that day.

  She meandered back, in an alcoholic fog, to the mystery of the card. In her study with a bottle of Tempranillo she started ransacking drawers, peering at documents that might resolve it.

  Eventually she re-emerged no wiser, strolling poker-erect through the living room to find the tired-from-standing on the terrace parapet kneeling to the vivid ferns and mosses in their built-in glass frames. Pippi, agog with responsibility, gave her a dragonfly, self-crafted in translucent fabric, and Martine helped her plant it in the ferns.

  ‘Send in the clowns!’ she yodelled.

  She was still impelled by that card. She toppled away again to the study.

  Her mother stopped on the threshold. ‘What a mess. Whatever the heck are you doing?’

  Martine bundled her papers together guiltily.

  Her mother perched on her desk. ‘Who was that man?’

  Martine burbled something about having scribbled on the Charlie page for too long; that adopting was replacing him with a clean, fresh sheet.

  Her mother started something she’d clearly rehearsed. ‘You’ll feel I’m treating you like a child, but…’

  ‘You’re my mother. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘This adoption. I can’t bear you to…hurt or disappointed.’ Martine’s brain felt out of tune for her mother’s lecture. ‘Your work and social life are, well, your life. A child…change everything. Sometimes, you make decisions so…Are you really sure …?’ Then the tone changed. ‘…probably being selfish…maybe want to keep my single daughter single…Jonas has become the next-generation parent, the provider in this family…How will he feel, or me come to that, when…?’

  They pressed together, mumbling unconceding, reassuring things.

  Martine hadn’t wanted to listen anyway. She slumped in the study and woozily reminisced. After Dad left, whenever I left my bedroom, day or night, it seemed, I’d find Mum right outside the door, looking guilty. Her listening seemed more powerful than just being there: she was being constant, sending out a pulse of constancy, I suppose.

  But people want to be doing: she knew that they found transmission more glamorous than reception. Listening: the LIPSS project, her project, had been intended to foster listening as much as talking, but the teachers that she worked with had rarely taken that on. She feared now that she was much the same.

  Restless kids and flagging adults gradually left between five and six, leaving greasy paper plates and wine-glass rings and children’s fingerprints. Half an hour later, someone was at the door again.

  It was Astrid. ‘The others are playing in Vauxhall Park. Jonas is saying this is hokum, but…Now the people they are gone…’ Downstairs she flitted ahead of Martine, revolving in each room. ‘This will be the boy’s, yes?’ In Martine’s bedroom she mused, ‘You have painted grey: green is better. Place a dish of pomegranates. For children, for fruitfulness.’ Then she tuned in to Martine’s state. ‘Make coffee. I will clean this.’

  Martine burbled, ‘What d’you clean, mean?’, then went upstairs and faffed with the coffee pot.

  From the stairwell, incense suddenly stung her nostrils, then came the sound of incantations. A sense of hilarity mounted.

  Astrid called, ‘Come down in the study.’ Martine obeyed, swallowing giggles. ‘There is not good energy for the boy. Especially here it must be cleaned.’ She accused Martine’s papers, the chaos she’d stirred up during the party. ‘Which writings from people did not go well? They will hold you backwards.’

  Astrid seemed to mean, which papers held malevolent forces? Martine removed the letters from Mohan to a safe place but meekly condemned other messages, the penstrokes blurring before her. Various scribbles from Lucho, including the one ditching Martine and university with broken English excuses about the Shining Path and his Peruvian family. Swimming tips and stilted postcards from Angus, her drug-squad lover and first real swimming coach. Impersonal florists’ cards from Patrick, her flashy diamond broker. Precious words from Freddy, in her imagination during their three years, less of a Kew horticulturalist than a dashing plant hunter-explorer. The only scrap from Charlie, his birthday scrawl of the year before from someone called Chaura-Panchasika, hard to say when you’re drunk: ‘Little lonely one,/You cling to me as a garment clings, my girl’ – double-edged, as he so often was. Freddy and Charlie, her two broken passions.

  The lovers’ words strewn in the study made her reel more. Evidence of so much sex, and some romance. All those encounters had somehow built into decades like train cars then passed along beyond her, a bygone era. Charlie will be the last man, she felt. But is adopting a romance of a different kind? It was a thought she’d scotched before.

  Most toxic were her father’s letters from Milwaukee – especially the last one, from 1957. His woman Phyllie wanted him to move with her and her children to Merrimac by then. Astrid’s presence inhibited Martine’s usual Dad daydream over each airmail, the way she liked to picture him pausing his and Phyllie’s debate about more life changes, withdrawing to some male domain in their Milwaukee house, greasy forelock interfering with his glasses as he bent to the blue page.

  She knew the letter’s words by heart.

  ‘Happy eleventh birthday…little book…One-Liners for No-Hopers… a token that you may find amusing…Jonas still assures you that he’ll visit you some day…You may find it problematic to correspond…It’s testing to express oneself, perhaps especially on the page…my only girl in perpetuity. I’ll persevere with writing. Indeed in my head I do so, at least once daily.’

  That letter was the end with him, she thought, and then, I’ve still got that trashy book somewhere, suspecting that it was where her bad jokes came from. For the first time, there with Astrid, she understood that her father’s stilted language may have hinted that he was in trouble, not just from the lack of her replies but from a lack of words he longed to use. She thought with wobbling perspective, Have all those writings shapen me – or misshapen me – too much? Have I let them?

  From her yellow bag, Astrid took a pouch; she poured out five crystals.

  ‘They will make a grid for cleaning.’ She pointed Martine at the door. ‘Take the bad papers outside.’

  Martine did that, swaying with them on the terrace, the platinum sunlight cooling on her skin. Next thing she knew, Astrid was with her having used the stones somehow, cursing with distinct aspirituality, trying to revive the barbecue with a spilling box of matches; then she had Martine offer it the offending letters and cards. The wind got up. At some point, the moon was overlooking her, a fragile waning dish.

  Martine woke to the sparkles bouncing off a glass of water by the bed in her grey room, still chemical with fresh paint. The moon at the high window, thin and leaning. She no longer felt drunk: more revived. Almost imperceptibly, she had drifted even further into lyricism. Forget the poxy pomegranates, she smiled inwardly; things will all work out.

  She got up. From the window, her dreamy gaze caught a scattering of pale squares on the shrubs and paths of the estate, like discarded postage stamps. She smiled at the moon and made a little joky baying sound. Then she went back to bed.

  Setting off for work in the morning, a page flapped on her front step. It was some prize draw offer. The litter I saw down there last evening wasn’t mine, she wavered –was it? She resolved, Adopting is what matters: not whether yesterday will be a clearly remembered day.

  Like a miracle, Mohan started to empathise about an adopted child.

  ‘Dear Miss Martine

  The boy must learn how to make and mend things. When he is older he can do this for you. Also, he must be healthy and laughing, not angry and sad. He must be 8 or 9. He must like lullabies and cricket. Also, he must adore babies, especially the little girls. Also, he must be able to write.

  ‘I wish [boy’s writing incomple
te]

  ‘About school. I am in the middle of the form except English. In life skills I made a bell and a coconut spoon. I am best at cricket but that is not a subject.

  ‘Here is a match report.

  Eleven-year-old Mohan Liyanage scored a magnificent 439 in our school’s three-day match against St [school name deleted]. It was in the Battle of the Brave. What an incredible match. He faced 421 balls. He hit 12 sixes and 56 fours. That was a nearly triple century in fours and sixes only. He smashed the last record of an under-12 batsman from our school. That record was 401.

  ‘I got 90%. The teacher said “What a corker, ne?”

  ‘That was not true, just my dream.

  ‘P.S. I have not been to the sea. I had a cough when everyone went. On the beach the turtles come to lay [boy’s writing incom-plete]

  ‘P.P.S. I am asking you for Nalin. Do you have games with a computer and a helmet and gloves called virtual reality.’

  Mohan’s proprietorial air made Martine grin.

  Her progress with adoption threaded through the next letters; so, too, did Mohan’s growing up.

  ‘Dear Mohan

  The bridge on the stamp is an aqueduct with a canal boat moving along it.

  ‘Tell Nalin that yes, as far as I know virtual reality games are coming, but no, I haven’t seen one.

  ‘Your match report reads well. I’m sure your batting will be great too, some day.

  ‘We can’t find anyone locally for me to adopt. The next stage is to look around England: there are plenty of boys, so it shouldn’t be hard. Like the catalogue pages I once sent you, a magazine arrives in my post, full of photos and details of children who need a family.

  ‘You have strong views about my coming boy; so do I. I find myself thinking “No” to one child and “Maybe” to another. Then it feels like shopping. I can’t promise he’ll be exactly as you or I would like. I fear we shouldn’t expect to have all the things in our dreams just because in our dreams we find we can. I’m writing in an adult way again. Maybe Anupama can explain.