On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘You’re right though, I shouldn’t tell you what to do. I know you’re bombarded by “advice”. Your mangy old Mum can’t help it. Sometimes she longs to take over the flying for you through all this turbulence.

  ‘Please don’t stop our chats. I don’t care what you say to me – even that stuff about night-time with your magazines. Anything, you can say anything.

  ‘Good luck, darling, whatever you decide.

  ‘Love always

  Mum X’

  ‘18th August 1991

  Quick p.c. Not-so-sunny Spain, but Nathan – fondling bits of yrs truly at this very mo – is my sunshine, so no probs. Got answerphone message before leaving. Menorrhagia? Tranexamic acid? What the bejasus is those? Oh well, if dropping acid stops the monthly heeby-jeebies – and them wanting to rip your women’s bits out, like you say…A girl, eh? Helen sounds promising – ish…Hon, about her tho. Stay hopeful but on an even keel of hope, if that makes sense. (V. poetic, no?!) Talking kids – got a bit of news too. Be happy for us. Be happy-careful for yourself. Bex X’

  ‘29 October 1991

  Dear Martine

  Helen (Belfast), our reference: BGS/27/3

  Our phone call was too quick, but as I said you must give the same answers again onto the new form from the St Anthony Children’s Trust I am very afraid. I know you have given them to us mostly before, but they are wanting to see all of these again, in your handwriting not computerised. So you should write these again and send them to me.

  ‘Also the new answer about why you are now thinking of girls not only boys is important. This is because you are now hoping for Helen of course! Please tell me if you want help with that.

  ‘On the positive side, all seems to be going very well from their side.

  ‘With my very good wishes for that

  Francis (Motti) (as usual!)

  Adoption and Fostering Officer’

  ‘14 January 1992

  Dear Martine and Francis

  Helen, your ref: BGS/27/5, our ref: HR-LR-D-28

  This is to let you know, formally, that we cannot proceed with placing Helen for adoption. This is owing to an allegation she has made concerning her current foster brother. It turns out that at the very least she is more the product of past experiences within her biological family than we had appreciated, and at worst…It is all very sad. Whatever the findings of our investigation, the outcome for Helen is a great deal more work with her before she can be ready, if ever, for a permanent family.

  ‘At least we have informed you at a relatively early stage. Hopefully you can move forward swiftly with other candidates without too much sense of disappointment.

  ‘Wishing you all the best, Martine, for an eventual adoption.

  ‘Yours sincerely

  Jago Penberthy

  Child Placement Department, St Anthony Children’s Trust, Belfast’

  ‘24 February 1992

  Dear Martine

  I have tried to find you on the telephone.

  ‘About what you are saying in your letter. You must be very upset at the moment. Please reconsider again. I am very sure there will be a child somewhere if only you can be patient for a little while longer.

  ‘Perhaps I can help you even more than I have been helping you in these times so far. I will try to find you again on the telephone to give you some hope and more good ideas.

  ‘With my very warm wishes

  Francis (Motti)

  Adoption and Fostering Officer’

  ‘4 March 1992

  Dear Martine

  Closure of file

  Francis (Motti) and I are writing to express our regret that you will not proseed [sic] with seeking a child to adopt for the forseable [sic] future. Francis says you have found the dissa-pointments [sic] rather dificult [sic].

  ‘As he has told you, we will keep your details on our books. You will remain an approved adopter and if you change your mind you can always contact us again.

  ‘Good wishes

  Camilla Nixon

  Manager, Adoption and Fostering’

  ‘8th March 1992

  Dear Martine

  I am sorry about the children.

  ‘Love Pippi X and Mum and Dad and Gretel XXX

  ‘P.S. Pippi chose the elephant and pig theme for the card. Can you read her tracing? The letters are a bit wobbling! Astrid X’

  ‘28th March

  Not at home, or just not answering? No one’s seen you – although we know from Pippa you’re still working some days a week. You don’t answer there either. Conrad and I are miserable for you and without you.

  ‘Will ring buzzer as many nights as I can pop round till you answer.

  Loads of love, Ali XX’

  ‘7/4 5.30 Martine, going home now:-

  Mark 1, Saila, Matthias, Graham, Conrad, Bex, Ali…Not writing their frantic messages down again. Get a new slave or deal. We have other work here at College, you know. Pippa X’

  ‘22 May –7.40 pm

  Hon – Calling by quickly – Nathan and baby in grumbling competition in car. STOP SCREENING MY PHONE CALLS! There’s more to life than work and swimming.

  Bex X’

  ‘18th July 1992

  Martine, Hope you like the postcard. With B With a friend finding old furniture in salvage yards and auctions. Great market! The flowers!

  ‘Come for the weekend again when I get back. Always good to talk, love. Mum X’

  ‘18th December 1992

  To open on Christmas Day

  Martine

  Don’t apologise. I understand you wanting to get away in the holidays. Teachers’ stories of their cute and funny charges must become hard to take. And if you’d come, Jonas’s magic tricks and Pippi and Gretel’s antics, all that “child-centred activity”, as you call it, plus Astrid’s aura-reading, would have grated I expect.

  ‘You said you didn’t want more “things” for Christmas. But when you weren’t looking I got the details from your spa brochure. You’ll just be up and down the pool day after day unless…And vouchers aren’t really things, are they? They’re just ideas for you to choose to give yourself. Flotation might be worth a go. Or I see they sell some gorgeous-looking bath and beauty products.

  ‘When is a “thing” a “thing” anyway? Is love a thing? Is care a thing? We certainly need them enough.

  ‘Here’s one more unwanted gift: advice. (You know I can’t resist.) Don’t try to think about everything, and don’t try not to. Don’t try so hard. Don’t try. Just wait and see.

  ‘With all my love and then some, Mum X’

  ‘4 March 1993

  Dear Miss Haslett

  Your submission to Take Me In

  Of the several stories of non-adoption offered to us recently, yours struck me. It’s a harsh attack on “all those agencies whose work seems to consist of grubbying the dreams of children and adults before rebuffing them”, as you put it. We believe in showing all sides, in being honest with our readership. If you’ll agree to some minor editing, we’d like to publish it.

  ‘The aspects that need attention, in my view, are:

  Your insistence on damping down the hopes of children awaiting families as well as those of potential parents. It’s obvious that it’s a cautionary tale. No need for so many warnings.

  Your references to the murder on a Merseyside railway line of the toddler Jamie Bulger. The case clearly has great resonance for you – has proved some kind of turning-point in your decision not to adopt – but that paragraph is muddled, dare I say a little hysterical in tone. Perhaps we can work on this.

  ‘I include the marked-up text, and look forward to discussing it with you. Please do ring us.

  ‘Yours sincerely

  Rose Barron

  Editor, Take Me In’

  ‘16 March 1993

  Dear Martine

  Your article for Take Me In

  Our phone discussion was useful.

  ‘So your point is that the public face a choice of feeling
either for the toddler as victim or for his two young murderers, also victims – in their case, of a social system that has let them down? And that this strikes you as a parallel for the choices would-be adopters have to make between one child distantly known to them and others, distant and unknown?

  ‘I still wonder if that’s it. You seem to have some Jamie Bulger figure in mind.

  ‘I’m afraid the whole comparison is still a bit abstruse. Given that the murder still features large in the media, it might even provoke the kind of publicity Take Me In wouldn’t welcome.

  ‘All in all I’m still going to cut the paragraph – but the rest is good to go!

  ‘Yours sincerely

  Rose Barron

  Editor, Take Me In’

  ‘13 April 1993

  Dear Martine Haslett

  Letter on adoption

  I was struck by your indictment of our adoption system, and should be pleased to publish your experiences on the World Letters Page.

  ‘Your “enforced abandonment” of a boy in Sri Lanka seems to cast a long shadow. You explain that you feel for him more deeply than you felt for your potential adoptees, but I won’t include that part of your letter: it detracts from the account of the failed adoptions.

  ‘On a personal note, it does make me wonder what you will do next about the Lankan child. I wish you the best with your decision.

  ‘Yours sincerely

  Adam Rotherhithe

  Deputy Editor’

  23 Chasing the wickets

  Some nights, 1993– Thursday 14 February 2013

  Matt has left, the neighbours have filtered away and Martine has retired to bed. Her mother’s silk scarf in its frame is propped in the lobby ready for hanging. She can’t stop thinking about tomorrow’s arrival, which skis her around in her four-poster for what seem hours, until eventually she slides down into sleep.

  There’s a niche on the far side of her bed where pipes have been boxed in, a useful bookshelf. It holds a complete Shakespeare placemarked at Romeo and Juliet, a recent school production that she’s seen. The tab is a strip of bark: according to a Kandyan stallholder, a twig smashed by a leopard. Beside it, an album of recipe scraps, handwritten in Sinhala; a book of folktales titled Mahadenamutta, The Great Know-all of Sri Lanka; and a roughly folded map of Kandy.

  While she sleeps, as a scientist she knows that charged elemental particles run through her skin and blood and bone at 130 miles an hour. The poet in her also knows that her dead mother courses through her at the same time, by a kind of incontrovertible magic. No longer guiding her, but still.

  From New Year’s Day 1993, she began to dream the Sri Lankan dream, her needs travelling to their fantasy conclusion, to the far side of the moon. Tonight, before her visitor, she feels herself plunging into the dream again like a spacecraft gravitating to the moon’s basaltic basins. As she’s drawn under, again she hopes that she will finish it.

  Mohan will be seventeen now, in 1995, Martine dreams, incorrectly. She dreams, I have to dream my way to him, get to him before he makes those key life choices – or before someone makes them for him. I’ve got to help him. She corrects herself to, I’ve got to be there.

  To dream herself in Sri Lanka, near Mohan, she resists playing the part of cultural tourist, a voyeur to the island politics of the time. She must approach him for an authentic reason, obliquely, but with sincere intent; so somehow in her dream, her London life has been scrubbed out. She’s acquired a new qualification, and is now equipped for a serious long-term role: an aid job, close to Kandy.

  ‘The Effects of Third Sector Intervention on Children and Intrahousehold Inequality’ could have been her thesis title during her development studies, preparing herself for aid work: so she dreams. And just supposing it were, then for her the ex-student, Mohan’s unequal position in the Liyanage intrahousehold will have been the product of several things. Of the destructive behaviour, as she has perceived it from the letters, of Mohan’s father; of Jayamal’s apparent dominance in the family, the unfair licence he’s been allowed; and of Anupama’s struggle, according to Martine’s impressions, anyway, within the limits of her home. Is Mohan even still at school? In her waking hours, Martine has read statistics for the island: after the age of twenty-five, his literacy is likely to decline – at least, by her standards. (‘We should do more to foreground the alternative literacies of developing countries. Discuss.’)

  Martine first dreams the aid office, a cement floor, tables and filing cabinets. Through the window, from some sultry, leafy outside, a leonine man regards her, a driver who, in her dreamed aid role, takes her out to the paddy farms. He’s often there, she infills in this dream, and she always calls him Santha. In versions of this dream she’s had before, other people mill and melt, come and go. This time there’s Lakshman, a researcher whose limp is his penalty for army duty and who’s helping her find Mohan; a man and a woman; and other people known to her only as Extension Officer, Plant Protection Officer, Agriculture Animator.

  They circulate round a man whom Martine dream-senses is her boss, solidly built, teak-skinned, with a close-cut beard and wirebrush hair: Gerald, from a metal label in front of him, ‘National Expert, IPM’. She dreams, inaccurately, that he’s the source of the recipes and the folktales by her bed. Integrated Pest Management, IPM. The names of the insects that demand this IPM intervention buzz in Martine’s brain: the yellow rice stem borer, the brown plant hopper, the rice thrip, the gall midge.

  The dream focuses, suddenly pin-sharp, on the detail of a fruit on Martine’s desk, rotund and green and barnacled, similar to the fruit hanging over Mohan in that first photograph. It will soon go soft and mushy. She dreams anxiety at that.

  There’s a map spread out on a surface, anchored at the corners with bottled water. The female colleague overlooking it has a wide smile, like a child’s naïve drawing. The Mahaweli River, on the map printed blue and splashed with reservoirs, parallels a grey road at a distance.

  Gerald mentions something about evaluation sites, and Farmer Field Schools. ‘The trainers will begin to guide the farmers away from the unwise use of pesticides.’

  ‘Guide away’, ‘unwise’: Loaded words, dreams Martine.

  If she did train for this for real, maybe she wrote an essay once: ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal can coopt rural communities into neo-liberal development agendas. Discuss.’

  These people never get on to proper work, though: instead, talk blurs into helping her find Mohan. On the map, Martine’s gaze swerves to the Mist-Laden Mountains, the Dumbara Kanduvetiya, their contour lines like rag-edged fingerprints. They conjure up cloud mist, waterfalls and butterflies, children scrambling for wood.

  The dream rolls into some hazy explanation of Gerald’s that wherever Mohan is, there’s obviously, from the letters, no need of irrigation, of reservoirs, sluice gates and canals. He’s pointing Martine to the wet zone of the mountains, suggesting that it might have a need instead for latrines. Which Mohan’s landscape did. She suddenly sees, So the trail is all about water.

  The people around her swig from water bottles. She drinks deeply from one herself.

  Gerald says, his rasping voice quite clear, ‘Mohan’s family will be anda govigaya, tenant farmers.’

  So tatta and the fathers don’t own their land. Martine dreams that this is something she should have realised. In sleep an image comes to her: a gaunt girl, arms pulling at prickly vines and branches. But she mustn’t waste her dream time on the sister.

  She jolts, limbs starting in sleep. In the office, a man with erica-nut cheeks and a fine line of moustache is shouting like a shot boar, banging the drawers of a filing cabinet, and Lakshman, limping, reasons with the man. She’s aware that the man is Tamil. There’s a sudden change in the atmosphere of the room, and on the Tamil’s face a smile. He clasps Lakshman’s shoulder, and the two young men shake hands. A British gesture, Martine dreams.

  There’s another lurch in time and place, and tonight for once she does dream
on. Now she’s entering the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, about to watch the Esala Perahera. At first she’s disappointed not to be searching for Mohan in the mountains, then is overwhelmed by unexpected excitement: Lakshman thinks that Mohan could be here, not there.

  In the dream, she’s wearing her clover armband under a cream linen suit. Jonas is with her, supporting her search for Mohan. She dreams, All dreams should feel this close to reconciliation. They’re entering an upstairs room together.

  Jonas shouts, ‘Hey!’

  ‘Hey!’ friends imitate, raising hands in greeting.

  There’s Vijitha, an astronomer, and his wife; Thilangani, an astrologer; Lakshman the researcher, who’s organised the room; and Gerald, her new boss from her work. She knows these people, but dream-puzzles that she does: she’s dreaming them, after all.

  ‘Here we are again!’ Vijitha’s wife says in Sinhala, letting out a trilling laugh she sounds as if she’s been practising for years.

  The group is at a lamplit table by the French windows. Some images are sharp and filigree. Waiters are ghosting in and out leaving dishes of peeled rambutans with mint, slices of mango and savoury snacks. At Martine’s sandalled feet, the threadbare carpet is patterned with medallions, gold and red and blue. A chair has been placed for her close to the windows, flung wide to let the night in through the balcony.

  The others talk and laugh. She and Jonas slip into the opening and look. She dreams, I’m on the inside looking out. She seeks the moon and finds it, waxing gibbous, almost poya, its swelling edge embedded in black sky. She can’t focus on the party, turning down the snacks. She can see the throng along the street and hear the masses under her below the hotel colonnades, around the hotel corner, opposite the avenues to the temple. Thousands of voices babbling, the odd excited shout. Fringes of coloured lights swathe the facade of the street.

  She says over her shoulder, ‘Not watching?’