On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  Cigarette smoke roils in the room. Only Jonas is transfixed by what’s below.

  ‘We’ve seen it all before, darling!’ Thilangani shrugs.

  Martine wants to be down there, maybe only metres away from Mohan and his family, but it’s less likely that she’ll spot him on the street than she will up here. Anyway, she’s got only a few old photographs to go on. She dreams her fear: I won’t find him. Or before I do this dream is going to end.

  A glass of mineral water and lime appears beside her, held aloft on a waiter’s tray.

  ‘We know the festival. We always know what’s going to come,’ Vijitha’s wife sips her smuggled-in whisky. ‘At least, I always do.’

  She’s engrossed in a game of vingt-et-un with Vijitha. The astronomer stubs out his Marlboro. She’s like a slow, fat moth, Martine decides, sticking to the light source of husband Vijitha and to speaking in Sinhala, which Jonas doesn’t understand.

  ‘Mmm. “Know”,’ Vijitha muses in English. His imposing head turns in its European suit, addressing Martine. ‘It might be better for science, at least, if more people interpreted the word as something less definite than knowledge. I wonder if you agree.’ His wife demands more whisky. He replenishes her tumbler affably from their half-bottle of Jack Daniels. ‘How often we deviate from truth.’

  Gerald, the boss and IPM expert, nods gravely. Martine smiles at Vijitha’s obsession with deviation and deflection.

  If his wife is a moth in her burnt-orange saree, Martine dreams Thilangani the astrologer as a butterfly in her spotted yellow T-shirt emblazoned ‘Sunday is a Funday.’

  The woman breaks in, also in English. ‘Darlings, one year I was in a stand round the corner, opposite the lake, and I swear, the thing that most entertained me was a pickpocket. He had a stealing rhythm, honest to God. First money, then an item of clothing, then a toy or souvenir, then money, then a piece of clothing, then a souvenir…It was quite something.’

  Vijitha says, ‘Every year is special. Remember the time some of the elephants turned back towards the Temple?’

  Vijitha says, ‘Once, it was in all the papers, the beggars wouldn’t move from…’

  His wife objects in Sinhala, ‘Stop being silly now. When I say we always know, you all know what I mean,’ whereupon Thilangani and Vijitha tease her over the word ‘know’ again.

  Gerald tries to smooth things over. ‘It’s true that even if we were blindfolded, we’d probably guess what was happening.’

  Thilangani laughs, ‘Let’s do it! Our newcomers could tell us if we’re right.’

  Vijitha suggests, ‘We could each predict how soon something out of the way might happen.’

  There are murmurs of approval.

  ‘Or,’ Thilangani enthuses, ‘we could guess what that might be.’

  Gerald twinkles, ‘From what I understand, that’s your province,’ referring to her astrology.

  ‘Camels,’ Jonas posits.

  All laugh, except Vijitha’s wife.

  ‘Fireworks,’ proposes Lakshman.

  ‘Darling! Fireworks would be so beautiful, over the lake,’ says Thilangani.

  Vijitha says, ‘For those without your expertise, precise predictions are difficult.’ His lips purse in a smile. ‘Can we not go with our plan A?’

  His wife glowers, but the others agree, and they begin to bet.

  ‘Ten-thirty-two and three seconds.’ …‘In twenty-five minutes.’ …‘In mole past hair! I haven’t got my watch!’

  The wife says, ‘This is ridiculous,’ unpins a large emerald brooch and places it on the table. ‘I wager this that before something new will be a long, long time.’

  People counter-stake, heaping up assorted matches and lighters.

  Then Jonas breathes ‘Get this!’ which returns Martine to the glittering dark.

  The crowd noise drops to a murmur, and a rhythmic cracking hits the street. Lines of men in Lankyan dress are inching forward, whirling whips and lashing the tarmac, somehow avoiding slashing each other and themselves.

  Lakshman sends a waiter for blindfolds. The whipcrackers herald the procession, promising thunder, lightning and the rains.

  Martine rhymes, ‘Thunder and lightning/Truly bloody frightening.’

  In her dream, for some reason Lakshman is watching her.

  A waiter brings napkins, but they prove too short to use for blindfolds. Another brings dishtowels, and the friends find that they work, and Vijitha’s wife fusses, but at last the group is masked, ready to play. Martine dreams a moment of revelation: that their carelessness of the parade is nothing but tact, a way of letting her search for Mohan in her own private space.

  Music whines, and approaching lights stipple the threshold. Jonas snaps with his camera as files of boys advance revolving, spinning flames, some tossing fire wheels into the darkness and catching them with a bounce, others yoyoing fireballs on wires around their waists. Martine tries to glimpse each shadowy figure, comparing it with the photographs she’s taken from her bag.

  Vijitha’s wife picks up at the light-level change.

  ‘Seven minutes,’ her husband states, monitoring his Rolex.

  ‘This will be the flag bearers!’ she predicts.

  This dreamed Martine understands Sinhala, and translates for Jonas. Acrid smoke drifts into the room.

  ‘Wrong!’ Jonas chimes gleefully, but then corrects, ‘Wait up.’

  Behind the boys, men step out in lines at either side of the road bearing the decorated standards of the ancient Kandyan provinces.

  ‘Next there will be an elephant,’ says Lakshman under his blindfold.

  His voice is quiet, as if he’s also on the alert to any sounds from her.

  Vijitha intones, ‘Thirteen minutes.’

  A clatter of drums and the wheedling of instruments gets louder. Mohan’s family could be drumming; maybe he is himself. Martine’s pulse speeds up in sleep. She dreams, Let me keep the dream; let the dream go on to the end. As Lakshman has predicted, an elephant begins to sway along the street escorted by a mahout and attendants, its headdress studded with lights, in a robe of gilt and red. A bare-chested youth straddles its back, staring up at the flag he’s holding.

  ‘Now the Permunerala,’ Thilangani singsongs.

  ‘Twenty-one minutes.’

  The hubbub from the hotel arcades boils upwards. Thilangani’s right: another sparkling elephant is swinging down the road, the official rider bracing a scroll between both hands.

  ‘This is boring!’ Vijitha’s wife complains, even though, for everyone else, the suspense is building to the impending ultimate, the tusker with its palanquin cradling the symbol of the Buddha’s tooth, on which, according to Lankans, the rains and harvest depend. ‘Make it a race to speak. Martine can be our referee.’

  ‘She’s kinda busy,’ Jonas says.

  Vijitha’s wife gets up protesting, fumbles to remove her blindfold and accidentally pokes Thilangani’s face with her elbow, and Thilangani shrieks, and Gerald concedes that the game isn’t much fun, trying yet again to keep the peace.

  Rows of drummers and musicians are noisily advancing. Martine is breathing fast and shallow in her sleep. In the dream she kicks her unused chair out of the way. Boys are beating dawulas; more boys and men rap tinny thumps and baritone bangs out of the two-cupped tammattammas; yet more blow the globular horanawas, sending out their whingeing, baffled notes. The players bend and turn, keeping their lines. Martine is dreaming the music as something else at the same time: the dawulas are stones knocking in a current, the reedy horanawas, the yodelling of teenage boys as they tombstone into water off a ledge.

  In the room, the friends have removed their blindfolds; tonight in her sleep, Martine struggles with hers. And yet in the dream and out, she isn’t wearing one. She feels Lakshman easing past her into the window as she tries to pull the blindfold off. She senses that he’s scanning the performers. She must get free. She tears and struggles, but now the dream is getting tangled. With one last wrench, she opens h
er eyes in the darkness of her bedroom. She’s back in her flat, and once more the dream has knotted, then frayed and torn and gone.

  24 Play stopped

  1993–1997

  Martine has dreamed this dream, in fragments, since 1993. Actually, in 1993 her real life continued, without poetry.

  By 1993 she’d given up on adoption, bared her feelings to the press and heard nothing from Sri Lanka for three years. Despite the tug of Mohan and Sri Lanka, her far side, she couldn’t leave family, friends, work, social life, depart from her orbit. Something in her said, That would be mad, a slingshot mission. I’ll let my far side stay my far side: let it lie. She neglected the moon, which was not the same as forgetting it.

  In 1993 Jonas and Astrid split up and he took it badly, so Martine spent more time with him; with the girls too, when they came to see him. There were fewer parties to go to, and fewer friends without ties to cook for at her flat, but she filled her diary with meals at their homes, among their growing families, the odd drag show or wedding or christening, and long nights of morale boosting for Saila in his resurrection as Pearl. She saw Charlie with a woman once, walking away from college. That sandy paw on her waist. The woman, his wife, was pregnant. Martine worked harder, swam more often and began to brush up her Spanish in an evening class.

  At Harrow Weald, sometimes she would stay the night, and her mother might take her out flying. On the panel she’d stare at the altitude indicator, her adrenalin cutting in. As they bobbed and wove in the air currents, any slide off the horizontal seemed to set it jabbing. Her problems had come from her swerves, from making radical decisions, she believed. A happy future depends on staying level, she assured herself. She’d keep busy, too busy to think what she’d lost, but she mustn’t move house, change friends, change job: she must do nothing extreme.

  It was a hot day, her mother’s seventieth birthday. Gretel had turned six a while ago, too. Martine had planned a special day for both and Jonas. First there was a trip to the RAF Museum, then Pinner Fair. At last they ended up in Windows Street, a converted garage showroom on the edge of Larkford village.

  ‘It’s as hot inside,’ Mum complained.

  Artificial light blazed out, irradiating them. Strip lights, halogen spots, fairy lights festooning beams. Doll’s houses stood in streets, backlit, many also sparkling from inside. A toddler and her parents, hushed by the display, padded up and down.

  ‘Cool,’ breathed a seven-year-old Pippi inaccurately with her dancing hands, long pale ringlets and vivid stare.

  After an angina scare the year before, Martine was keeping an eye on her mother.

  Crouched level with the girls, Martine enjoyed their baked white faces hypnotised at the house windows, eyes flashing in Pippi’s, Gretel solemn and comical and spiky-haired, still pudding-cheeked at six. Her own glee looked as childlike, she was aware. Far above, it seemed, Jonas, hands in pockets, swayed along the rooftops peering down at them, letting out chortles like a jolly giant who might jolly well soon stamp on them. Avoidance and denial. The errant city-dealer Nick Leeson came into Martine’s mind, still on the run, somewhere in the world, from everything he couldn’t account for. The latest breed of presumptuous British imperialist, Charlie might have said.

  Martine fell for a moss-tiled house with a library, Gothic and dark, or even more, a cottage with diamond panes and wonky half-timbers.

  Gretel’s eyes were hotplates. ‘Marti-ine.’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘Can I have them all?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone in the world could possibly afford that.’

  ‘Ou-ww.’

  ‘Anyway, Dad’s going to make you one, remember. Pick one you think he could copy.’

  With Mum and Jonas trailing after, Gretel began circling, homing in on a cream palace with a rooftop helipad.

  Pippi’s arm hung off Martine’s back as Martine opened her crooked cottage, absorbing the crooked flames in the crooked stove.

  A version of Mohan’s words appeared. ‘A bent cottage would not be nice.’

  Pippi swung her slim frame round her, a compass-point toe divining for something. ‘I want to know…’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Time is going by…’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘When will you be starting to be old?’

  Despite still swimming, her body was changing. To crouch was getting harder, the manic dancing was losing its comedy value and there were more facial creases. Martine registered the harsh side of the compliment, as uncalculated as Pippi’s cheek grinding into hers.

  Jonas scuffed from Gretel to the woman on the till. Martine could hear him trying for a deal on a miniature rocking-horse, a TV and a tiny doll’s house, accessories for Gretel’s eventual mini-palace, but the woman’s only concession was mock-gold.

  ‘The chocolate’s rather soft I’m afraid.’ She held out the foil-wrapped coins, smiling towards the girls. ‘Tell them to eat fast.’

  Martine found herself at Jonas’s lean forearm, smelling his sweat. ‘Don’t want to pry. About Astrid.’

  She saw his hand squeeze round the coins.

  ‘I’m going away,’ he blurted.

  A squirt of dread surprised her. ‘We need you. Mum’s not very well.’

  Jonas countered, ‘She doesn’t need looking out for, not by me.’

  ‘This should be easier,’ stumbled Martine. ‘Maybe if we…We might…’

  ‘Might what?’

  ‘We still make a pig’s ear of talking.’

  He laughed, ‘Right. Pork. So?’

  Martine was flushing. ‘You sound like you mean something.’

  He stacked the coins on the counter, lining up the rims. ‘Folks want perfect. You want perfect. But mostly things’re just not.’ He growls, ‘And leave it about Astrid.’

  Mrs Haslett appeared. ‘No seats.’

  Her breathing was fast and shallow. Martine felt paralysed, but Jonas swung into action, bringing out a stool from behind the counter. The older woman perched on it, gazing up at them.

  ‘Hum-hum. Don’t know what’s the matter with you two,’ she said. She sipped from a glass the saleswoman brought her. ‘It’s me who should need holding together, instead you’re the ones looking tragic.’

  Martine stared at the iron-grey strands stuck to her crown like weeds where a stone had been removed.

  ‘We’re just concerned for you,’ she simplified.

  ‘Lum-ti-tum.’ All at once her mother was brisk. ‘I may have had to stop the flying but I have got other interests.’ Her eyes nailed Martine then Jonas. ‘Bill Kidmay, for instance.’

  ‘Bill Kidmay and you,’ Jonas repeated, eyeing Martine.

  Mum just let them take things in.

  Long ago, the geriatric shorthand of wrinkles Martine has seen once recently in her mother’s kitchen stretching out a gammy leg had done no less than shape her life: the father of her schoolfriend Alice, he’d get them to work out his inventions, a retracting pen-top, a handbag with a shopping section that folded out, not pontificating, asking them questions – real questions, as opposed to ones to which he held the answers – wanting Martine’s and Alice’s advice, treating them like adult thinking beings.

  Mohan’s voice suddenly drifted through her again: ‘No one should only ask. You should also tell.’

  Martine admonished him dumbly, Filling the empty vessel, the behaviourist view of education, is outdated – and, from a post-colonial product, ill-advisedly submissive. Her viewpoint still had traces of Charlie after all this time.

  Mr Kidmay was never a teacher, although he was better than all her teachers put together. He was why she’d become a teacher in the end, and yet when she’d seen him not long since he’d looked at her through his own disappointments, she’d thought.

  ‘I do up a bit of furniture now,’ he’d said.

  From her resting place in Windows Street her mother mused unexpectedly, ‘Your father. It turns out I was looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘Will yo
u…?’ Martine asked.

  ‘Oh!’ she laughed. ‘I like my freedom. No no, tum-tum.’ She pondered. ‘Back to you. I might find it easier not to worry about you separately if you got on better together. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘Unselfish as ever,’ Martine said, touching her arm.

  The girls bounded up. Their hands delved, and reappeared from their grandmother’s safari-jacket pockets with a miniature four-poster, a tiny spinning wheel and a bird in a diminutive gilt cage.

  Gretel made an assumption. ‘Thank you, Gram!’

  ‘Where are these from?’ Pippi handled the bird cage thoughtfully.

  Martine’s mother deflected baldly, ‘By the way, they say my angina’s well under control.’ Without warning she sprang from her stool.

  Jonas stepped back. ‘Weren’t you just sick?’

  ‘Ho-hum. I was just getting your attention.’ The old woman shrugged as Jonas stalked away. ‘Sorry he’s shocked. A little subterfuge.’

  Jonas didn’t go away anywhere after all. Meanwhile in her life, Martine knew something had stalled. One day she visited a secondary school in Tower Hamlets. She rarely went to schools these days. She saw other people’s children often enough, she felt: Pippi and Gretel, and Mark 2’s boisterous offspring, and Leanne’s boy and girl, and Mark 1’s teenage stepkids, and Ali’s only daughter – only child. Working with schoolteachers, as long as it was in college, usually buffered Martine from a sense of all the other children she couldn’t have. But this time she was running a course on teaching scientific investigation, and one of her teachers was doing action research, and had to be observed.

  The teacher met Martine at the spacious new reception, the shined-up face of the school. Hurrying down the hallways, Martine was hit by noise. The children funnelled round her, their shrieks and curses bouncing off the walls. There was that institutional smell of nothing special. The fenestrated corridors seemed to jog past with the spangled light of night-time trains. The gleam of the school approach gave way to grime and grey. Her senses operated in a muffled way, as if ice crystals blurred her. These days she was inured to most sensation, but something about the surroundings intensified her numbness almost to a sensation of its own.