On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘It is indeed most fearful,’ Mohan whispered in her head.

  Samantha had a daughter, Bryony, older than Pippi and Gretel, now eighteen and seventeen. Things turned sour between the girls, and forty-five-year-old Jonas removed from Weybridge back to Harrow Weald.

  Into Martine’s mesosphere, so to speak. Her father was suddenly dead. To her, the news was a brick falling down a well that still hasn’t reached the bottom even now, in 2013. While police were forcing Tamils out of Colombo, her school signed up to the Building for the Future programme. In 2008, the Sri Lankan government launched a large-scale offensive, and an international panel on human rights in the civil war left. There was a new National Strategy. Her staff revamped their teaching plans again. She still avoided Googling about Mohan.

  ‘Stay in London then I know you are in London,’ his ever-present ghost assured her.

  2009, Martine’s thermosphere. The Sri Lankan government captured Tamil Tiger headquarters and overran rebel-held land. London stopped imposing strategies on English schools; instead, it announced, schools must begin to support each other. At her successful school, Martine had a demanding role.

  In July 2010, Martine escorted a school trip to an activity centre on the Costa Brava. The students had just taken their GCSEs. Many had never been abroad; the aim was to help them bond and grow, to enthuse them about staying on at school.

  A girl called Sophie trailed her with sulky questions. ‘No boyfriend?’ ‘You wasn’t on any of the banana boats.’ ‘The problem-solving was boring.’

  Martine smiled and deflected, but Sophie’s grilling began to sap her, turning her hypercritical of herself.

  One beachside morning Sophie’s bikinied shadow, indignant hands on sunken hips, fell across her. ‘Why are you in them cabins? The rest of us is camping. Except Mrs and Mr Alwyn. And Mr Keene and that woman what looks like a prozzy. But that’s probably because…’

  In her overseer’s deckchair, Martine raised her sunglasses. She let a saggy arm drop over the perished elastic thighs she was all too aware of.

  ‘Because I’m old and need looking after.’

  ‘So why are you still teaching us?’

  Martine hauled at her turquoise and orange one-piece. She’d be sixty-one in three weeks and could retire now if she wanted, but what could she do afterwards that would keep her so immersed in all the rigours of the mundane?

  That night the moon was in its third quarter, and she met someone. Overseen by a dozen adults, sixty-two teenagers, boisterous with familiarity and texting and sharing music on their earphones and doing anything to stall organised games, were massed around three campfires on the beach. Cross-legged beside Martine was a man younger by over two decades, tall as a spindle, his features bleached in the firelight. His languorous chat had everyone laughing. Dark, glinting eyes. He introduced himself as the adventure company’s PR Co-ordinator, new to the job, half-Spanish by birth, and there on his first visit.

  Martine gurned. ‘The devil’s work. Or is that advertising?’

  ‘There are fewer negatives than in my previous job.’ He frowned. ‘This is mostly positives.’ He stared at her. ‘More fun, for definite. I like fun.’ Martine grinned. ‘Would you like to have fun later? I could show you the late-night action in town.’

  Sophie’s goading had primed Martine to respond, ‘That sounds great.’

  Later he approached her in the dark, where she waited in the lea of the campsite office.

  ‘Gavin; Gavin Godfell.’ He shook her hand limply, unsmiling. ‘I looked you up. You’re Marianne.’

  She was about to correct him when she recognised his name, registered what he’d done to her over Mohan. A sensation came to her at once muffled and piercing, like a tooth being pulled under anaesthetic. She calculated quickly, If I correct him, he might recall my name, what from. Screw resurrecting Mohan with the ex-jobsworth who curtailed him. She said nothing; then she got curious with curiosity about what kind of person Mohan’s virtual executioner had been.

  On their way to his car he patted his pockets. ‘Sorry. I’ve left my car key in my cabin. Bear with?’ She followed him to a cabin on its own, set between trees. ‘Come in! I’m harmless.’

  Inside was a neat, utilitarian sitting-room. A kitchenette lay off to the left, bathroom and bedroom to the right. Gavin disappeared to the left, a Mission Impossible ringtone sounded and he reappeared, talking in fluent Spanish into a mobile at his ear, balancing a wooden board loaded with sausage and Manchega and a hunk of bread, followed by glasses and a bottle. He laid them out on the low table beside her. Some woman was asking where he was; he made excuses to her about an unavoidable meeting, which he must have thought that Martine couldn’t translate.

  Martine gulped her Rioja, and thought, Fitting, his capacity for lies.

  When the call ended he apologised. ‘But can we talk shop for a moment? Ask you what you think of us before we venture out.’

  As he joined her on the small sofa, Martine raised an eyebrow, recognising a workaholic when she saw one. She remembered his talk of the negatives of his last job. To be charitable, she supposed, one minus could have been stopping my correspondence.

  She blurted, ‘I’m not sure I can help you. I’m not sure I’m myself.’ Abruptly this seemed true. ‘I could give you some blah about your pre-publicity and welcome pack, but I’d only be going through the motions. I don’t regard this as my real life.’

  Unexpectedly, she was sharing: Perhaps because he’s who he is; perhaps because he’s so much younger and I’m away from London, she decided.

  Gavin proffered a large knife. ‘The only one, sorry.’

  Martine hacked at the chorizo, hungry despite their recent fireside supper.

  She struggled to explain. ‘Being abroad must make me feel guilty or something.’

  ‘A destructive emotion.’ Gavin knocked back his wine, staring with his round eyes.

  ‘I should be doing something else. Or more. A job like yours seems play dressed up as work.’

  ‘So much for my client survey.’ Gavin sighed and picked up the knife. ‘But you do like fun?’ he checked.

  Martine shrugged her agreement.

  Gavin said, ‘In that case, I must just…’ He laid the blade down, eyes flicking from it to her face with a small smile. He assured her, ‘Never fear, I’m no bandido!’, switching on Rodrigo y Gabriela and stalking off towards the right-hand rooms.

  To the sounds of his searching and whistling, Martine took out her Galaxy and scanned her messages until, to her surprise, she heard the splash of a shower. She stood up when Gavin came back. His aura of woodsmoke and cigarettes had left him with his clothes; his pallid rib-cage was littered with dark moles.

  ‘Older women are interesting. Their minds.’ His words shocked her with adrenalin. ‘You’re going red!’ He held out a long, almost hairless arm. ‘And now I’d like to kiss you.’

  Martine panicked: I couldn’t expose my body to a stranger now, even if I wanted to. Water was snailing down Gavin’s neck and he was grinning, his extended fingers rigid. He glanced at the knife, still close by on the table. Backing up, Martine fumbled her Galaxy, which fell. She had to stoop to retrieve it.

  ‘No night on the town then,’ she muttered, then rebalanced, struggled with the doorhandle and stumbled into the dark.

  26 Taking the ball

  Christmas 2010

  One day that November, her mother called her. ‘Tum-ti-tum. Now I don’t want you to worry…’

  All over England, Martine thought, parents are reassuring their instantly worried children.

  The weeks went by, and she and Jonas and her mother met and debated with the specialists what best to do for an eighty-four-year-old woman with clogging arteries. Although she was otherwise fit, the answer wasn’t easy at her age.

  Martine’s final earthbound sphere fell away behind her. In Sri Lanka, General Fonseka was jailed on corruption charges, and Mahinda Rajapaksa became Sri Lankan President, unopposed. Two hundred tho
usand were released from detention camps and the war was purportedly over, although thousands of rebels were still held. Martine’s mother needed angioplasty, it turned out.

  It was a snowy Christmas Eve, 2010. Mrs Haslett had had a stent implant at St Thomas’s, which was close to Brandon Towers and had good facilities, Martine had insisted. Her mother was staying at her flat in the best bedroom for rest and recuperation with an air of injured bafflement. She’d brought a tapestry with her, but wouldn’t settle to it. Every day she shuffled in blankets towards the living room window, where she gazed out through the netting on the balcony. She tended to fix on the youths far below among the salt pillars of the tower blocks making snow monsters and bike wheel stencils on any squares of virgin white, with a particular expression on her face.

  Jonas was house-and dog-sitting at Harrow Weald, the snow so heavy now that travelling was difficult. Pippi and Gretel had descended the day before, salving his pique at his isolation. They were having their main festivities that night, according to Astrid’s native Nordic traditions, so Martine and her mother would do the same, Skyping in order to open their presents together.

  Mother and daughter were chafing at each other. While Martine had been last-minute shopping, Ali had called. On her return, Martine had found her sitting with her mother, the two women hunched hugging mugs of tea in a conspiracy of murmuring and frowns. She wanted her mother to herself: suddenly, their time together seemed to be contracting.

  Ali smiled up at her. ‘I was recounting Conrad’s fit.’

  Conrad had had an episode of transient global amnesia, a rare, temporary state in which, for twenty-four hours, he was violently sick, recognised no one, didn’t know who or where he was. Since then he and Ali had been reborn. Conrad had become an exercise fiend and, with their daughter steadily employed and living with her boyfriend, they were selling up for a narrowboat in Shropshire. Martine still couldn’t process that they were leaving London.

  She said, ‘Glad to see you’ve kept Mum entertained.’

  ‘We were both saying how brilliant St Thomas’s has been.’

  Martine hefted the bags hanging from her hands. ‘Sorry, Ali, but Christmas Eve and there’s a lot to do.’

  Ali took Martine’s cue, but ‘There was no need for that,’ Mum said when Ali had gone.

  ‘Sorry sorry sorry,’ Martine said.

  Ever since Spain Martine had struggled with a sense of dwindling, of being squashed into a finite timespan. When on her own, she often fell to cataloguing the essentials of her existence: they included Ali, and especially Mum. A list that didn’t take long, it was a foam that traced where waves had stretched on sand. For Conrad, since his episode, most events and people must also have receded. No wonder Mum stands at the window, she thought. She probably feels the same.

  Once Martine had put the pheasant in to roast, she returned to her mother with ginger ale and cheese straws and a Burgundy for herself, illumined the tree lights and started Carols from King’s on the player, ducking between the swags of cards. The older woman’s balding pate strained at the view above her tortoise back in its trailing mohair blankets, humming tunelessly. Martine whistled tunelessly along.

  Her mother said, ‘Don’t mock.’ She changed tack. ‘Hum-hum. I know, you know,’ she said.

  Martine fretted, ‘Sit down, for Pete’s sake.’

  ‘I would if there were any decent chairs to sit on.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Do I have to spell it out?’

  If her mother had been working up to their mutual fear of parting, Martine saw that she had suddenly backed down. Eyes on a flying bird, her thoughts seemed to flit somewhere else – maybe, or so Martine dreaded, to her growing knowledge through the years of Martine’s sense of utter bereavement.

  ‘I wish I had more cushions,’ Martine apologised, suddenly in a flap.

  ‘I know that you…’ Her mother tailed off, distracted by a plastic bag, flapping below in slush. ‘Hum-ho. I think you know about my little…treats to myself?’ This felt like a detour into a new topic, another taboo topic entirely. The older woman demonstrated with a small beribboned package in her hand. ‘Although this isn’t one really. Ali brought it for you, but she was chatting about me and Conrad and put it back in her bag. I just…’, she searched for the phrase, ‘liberated it.’

  Martine said gruffly, ‘What you do is up to you.’ The present was a silver friendship bracelet. ‘Hmph,’ she said, irrationally ungrateful, channelling her confusions onto Ali.

  Supper disappointed Martine, her mother barely picking at the brandied fruit pavlova. Afterwards, she connected her laptop to her TV, the older woman accepted a chair, there was a bubble burp from the screen and Jonas, Pippi and Gretel tilted into view.

  ‘Wish you were here,’ the girls chorused, the twenty-two-year-old Gretel in a saccharin tone, the older Pippi in a bored one.

  Jonas looked tired and grizzled. ‘Hey. This is our winter grotto.’

  ‘Mum’s hall cupboard.’ Martine glanced at her mother expecting outrage at this, but she was just a bit bewildered.

  In the fake snow scene in the emptied cupboard, Jonas, on a stool, was crushed by Gretel at his side, while Pippi had folded herself onto the floor in front.

  Jonas’s eyes toured his concept. ‘Twigs ’n stuff from the garden. The tree…’

  ‘If that’s Mum’s tree from the loft, you seem to have bent it.’

  ‘We found the spray-on icicles. You’re OK with all this, right?’

  Jonas skewed the webcam. Christmas lights in the homemade grotto threw garish colours onto the white ground of polystyrene chippings surrounding Pippi and two worn toys, a badger and a squirrel, kept by Mum as memories of the girls.

  ‘Those things are Mum’s,’ said Martine.

  ‘Tum-ti-tum. My lights. Oh! And my robins.’ Mum chuckled, unperturbed.

  Jonas began picking gifts from his forest, sparking the girls into interest. Pippi’s boyfriend and Astrid appeared in the corner of the screen. Astrid had come to Harrow for supper. She waved and spoke festive wishes, moving a dishtowel over a plate. Her hands were mehndied, matching her red-dyed hair. With the unexplained chin scar acquired a few years back, she looked worn and strange, Martine decided.

  Pippi’s chapped mouth stretched at Martine’s voucher for accessories, but her sunken eyes were unsmiling, the aftermath of her drug years. ‘Thanks, Martine.’

  ‘Not yet!’ Martine’s mother stopped her reaching for an envelope in their tree, instead persuading her to open a framed photomontage of the nieces.

  ‘Thank you, girls.’ In her tiny flat, she wondered where to hang it.

  The doting grandmother had already bought Pippi new dance shoes and tickets to a show. Gretel, recently made redundant from an office job for the London Ambulance Service, had already got a keyboard for her busking. Their presents were long opened and forgotten.

  In Harrow, Gretel opened the same voucher as Pippi, Jonas one for a gourmet weekend, both of them from Martine; in Kennington, her mother was reading the invitation from Jonas to an outing of her choice.

  ‘Thanks, love. The smaller the gifts these days, somehow the greater the value.’

  ‘I’m going now, Dad, OK?’ Gretel shifted, hugging her hourglass figure, which she considered fat.

  But she’d forgotten the snow, and Jonas had to remind her.

  ‘Anyways, you’ve gotta stay. For the…you-know,’ he said.

  Then, from another envelope, he drew out flying lessons.

  ‘You can start all over again,’ his adopted mother said.

  Jonas’s grin looked unconvinced.

  Martine’s mother opened trial membership of Stanmore Golf Club with six lessons thrown in, Martine’s prayer for a good future. She grumbled something.

  Martine scolded, ‘It could have been bowling.’

  There was a package wrapped in red tissue in the Kennington tree. Inside the paper, Martine discovered a wad of designs sketched out by Jonas and Bill Ki
dmay: to ease book storage in her flat, they were building her a kind of Canterbury. Pleasure filled her.

  Her mother finally passed her the long-delayed gold envelope. Jonas leaned forward, and Gretel shifted in the grotto doorway, letting Astrid in onscreen. Martine slid out a piece of paper. It was a travel-agency voucher for an air ticket to Sri Lanka.

  She shook her head. ‘That was then,’ she murmured. Her mother reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘And this is now. I’m not going, no way.’

  Mohan’s phantom whispered at her, ‘I knew that you would come for me one day.’

  Suddenly he was propelling her through some exosphere. There was a roaring in her ears, and the sound of the others’ protests filled her head.

  27 Line and length

  (Common advice followed, whether wisely or not, by a bowling beginner)

  December 2010– April 2012

  On Christmas Eve the moon was waning, near perfect, yet not quite. After the present giving Martine’s mother didn’t sleep. Her daughter heard her: stifled sounds she didn’t want to identify. She thought, I ought to go to her.

  She wrestled. How can I holiday in Kandy with Mum the way she is? The voucher for the ticket proposed a flight around Easter 2012, the school holidays if Martine still hadn’t retired. It was well ahead, so she could check out Mohan’s location in advance of the flight if she wanted and make arrangements if she wanted, and do away with all excuses. Her mother had researched this, thought things through.

  If I went, Martine told herself, the place wouldn’t be as I imagine. Not all ferns, cascades and dragonflies. How could she look for Mohan? Should she, even? He’d be thirty-four – oddly, like her when their letters first started, the adolescent she still dreamed of long since gone. If she found him, to what purpose? And if she didn’t? Martine chided herself, I shouldn’t have been obsessing about Sri Lanka, dreaming and over-dreaming in my sleep. Convincing myself that I’d built up armour through the years when it’s been the very opposite: when all my protections have just been drifting off.