On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  In the morning she found Mum’s tapestry, finished, outside the door of her bedroom. Not the acorns and blackbird that had been pre-printed on the canvas, but one word, ‘Please.’ But she was already in freefall, had made the decision to go. And of course it would have to be a search, not just a holiday.

  She found a use for Gavin Godfell.

  She rang him, mentioned the Costa Brava and said, ‘You won’t remember me.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he remembered unwillingly. ‘Marianne.’

  She hesitated. Could my wish to see Mohan be the dominant’s sense of entitlement to the weak? Much like Gavin’s last summer to me?

  She dispelled her doubts. ‘Actually, it’s Martine.’

  She went on to explain. She related the years of writing to Mohan, calmly, neutrally, and how Gavin’s letter from InterRelate broke them up. He had no recollection, he said.

  At first his line was ‘Of course that would have been a decision imposed on me,’ but then he became effusive, apologetic, clearly thankful that she hadn’t mentioned their Spanish night.

  At last Martine said, ‘The Sri Lankan troubles are over. I’m going there. I want to know where Mohan is.’

  He said warily, ‘I don’t keep up with things like that, with colleagues from that time.’

  ‘But InterRelate still exists. I see it’s Small World now. You can get in touch, ask them to help.’

  ‘It would take a heap of work…’

  ‘You can persuade someone, a charming bloke like you.’

  Their Spanish night leered at him without her saying more. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Martine next rang up on 18 March 2011, giving a false name to the receptionist, just to make sure he’d answer.

  Gavin said, ‘Oh. You.’

  ‘So what have you found out?’

  ‘It’s difficult,’ he stalled.

  Martine said, ‘I had a mobile if you remember. Actually, I took pictures.’

  And she could have photographed the knife pointed at her, possibly in threat, the pebbledash of moles, the presumptuous hand thrust out. Remembering his dishonesty to some girlfriend on the phone, her conscience easily excused her.

  The following Monday Godfell phoned her. ‘They’re looking. Now back off.’

  In September Mum was well, buoyed up by talk of Martine’s trip.

  ‘They’re busy,’ Gavin sulked on the phone.

  Martine pressed, ‘Give me your Small World contact.’

  ‘You won’t tell them…’

  ‘Give me the contact,’ Martine ordered.

  Sandra Gearing at Small World was keen to help.

  ‘I assure you, we are looking. Since you’re a friend of Gavin’s,’ she glossed. ‘We don’t have an office there these days, but we’ve kept some links.’

  The air tickets were booked now: ‘For next April,’ Martine said.

  ‘And you do know that we won’t let you go alone, that we’d have to get someone to take you to him?’ Sandra Gearing checked. ‘As long as you’re happy with that?’

  Late one afternoon, mid-January 2012, Astrid dropped by, her red roots sprouting out grey.

  ‘Jonas is in a bad case.’

  Martine said, ‘I see the girls, but never you.’

  ‘I’m rather busy with my spirit travellings.’ Astrid blinked. ‘Can you help him?’

  ‘I see him pretty often. Living with Mum and seeing the girls seem to help him.’

  ‘Do you know that he sleeps often on my floor?’

  Martine was taken aback. ‘Does Mum know? Are you two…?’

  Astrid shook her head. ‘He tells her he is seeing friends. As you know, he doesn’t have many.’

  Martine gave herself a talking-to: The promise of a view of Mohan out of my carriage window has blinded me that Jonas’s journey is different.

  ‘Will you take Jonas with you to Sri Lanka?’

  Martine recognised, Part of me would like that. It was soon after this that Jonas entered her dreams of Kandy, always looking for Mohan with her.

  That night was Dr Sketchy’s drinking and drawing night at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. In the main arena space flanked by bars, the Dick Duet sang, a band of near-nude Vikings pole-danced and life models struck tattooed-nipple-and-buttock poses for the left-handed artist competitions. Pearl threw off her usual cartoon masterpieces, but Martine and Bernard drank more than they drew.

  Martine was struggling with the noise and tumult, and Pearl was twitchy. ‘He’s stuck to me again. I know he is. Hangin’ about somewhere outside.’ A man with a beer belly and white goatee, whom Pearl nicknamed the Sticker, wouldn’t let her be, but Pearl had issues, making him even more sinister than that. ‘It feels like he’s a punishment for the boy I used to be.’

  They left earlier than they would have some years back, Pearl starting at shadows.

  ‘Come back to the Towers,’ Martine urged her.

  Pearl refused. ‘It’s me. I shat on nature.’

  Martine sighed inwardly, Pearl is still a weather house, the man and the woman alternately popping out.

  Bernard insisted, ‘See you onto the tube.’

  Passing through the arches of Vauxhall railway, they arrived at the bus station and the tube mouth where the photo-voltaic shelter reared two-pronged into the night. They delivered Pearl to the train then climbed back to the surface. The late-night traffic clogged and roared. The moon’s last quarter lit Martine and Bernard and the wide, light-dappled roadways, but Martine was preoccupied by Pearl.

  ‘I’ll walk home,’ she said, wishing that a stroll could solve Pearl’s problems. She grimaced, ‘She used to be indecisive and now she’s not so sure.’

  Bernard put the back of his elegant hand to his forehead in a mock-weary gesture. ‘We all live with uncertainty of some sort. Her own worst enemy. Always has been.’

  ‘What to do though?’

  ‘There was a time you’d have had a plan.’

  Martine smiled. ‘There was a time you wouldn’t have said “There was a time.”’

  Martine wasn’t sure why Bernard was still talking in his distinctive throaty drawl, lowering that phallic nose to her, unless he expected to come home with her himself. Her pulse rose slightly.

  She sighed, ‘I miss your old queen.’

  She thought, And as much the man joined to her. He looked at her a certain way, she chose to think, but she felt no Dame Tattlemouse chemistry.

  He pouted. ‘You could take her to Sri Lanka.’ Martine considered this second nomination on the same day. ‘Places to go…You’ll be all right to toddle home?’

  They clasped each other and pressed their cheeks together, Bernard smelling of hair tonic and beer, ‘Mwah, Mwah,’ camping it up. He held Martine away from him.

  ‘Girl,’ he winked, ‘you haven’t lost your sparkle. And you still smell fine.’

  Sri Lanka was approaching. Sometimes for Martine, the plan was a sonorous rumble over sleepers towards a destination portentous beyond belief; sometimes, simply a trip to a place she’d like to see with the chance of meeting someone she once wrote to.

  In February 2012 she still hadn’t decided whether to ask Jonas or Pearl to come with her; she couldn’t subsidise both. Then Gretel texted, asking if they could meet. Martine suggested Kew Gardens. It would kill two birds with one proverbial stone, because her recent internet wanderings had uncovered, to her shock, that Dr Freddy Garraway had long ago left Kew’s Tropical Nursery and was working, as she’d liked to imagine when they were together, in the exotic field: the Indonesian islands, to be precise. At last she could go to Kew again, pass through the place where she and Freddy had done more things than meet. The experience might purge her, once and for all, of that gut-wrenching ending. Also, Gretel now worked occasionally digging, laying paviours and sometimes even planting for a garden designer, showing signs that she enjoyed it, so Kew might be an education for her.

  The pair made their way, talking of nothing and something, from the winter displays at Victoria Gate t
hrough the woodland area and past the Temple of Aeolus, stopping at the dun surfaces of the rock garden nicked with Galanthus nivalis, over five thousand snowdrops.

  They ended up under the peaks of the Princess of Wales Conservatory, exploring its tropical regions, the Asian orchids. In the centre, the giant water lily floated on the surface of the raised aquaria. Martine’s mind wandered to an island village far away where ponds must frame the starred petals of lilies. Gretel picked at her jumper layers and stared at the fish through the viewing windows. Martine roused herself, searching for poison-dart tree frogs and baby water dragons, half-considering one as a pet.

  Gretel talked about work. ‘I might be digging a pond soon.’

  ‘The lily used to be in the Water Lily House,’ Martine explained, ‘hence the name. But it didn’t like the old pad.’ Shooting Gretel her angled look, Gretel duly groaned. They consulted her leaflet. ‘Oh. The Lily House is closed. Which doesn’t matter, except that there are ferns.’

  And memories with Freddy there, she thought. But what the hey: those times have gone.

  ‘Different plants get on together,’ Gretel said. She was staring at a pepper vine winding round a tree. ‘Um. Same with people, you could say.’

  ‘I had ferns on my old roof terrace if you remember,’ said Martine. ‘There was one, Ceratopteris, fleshy stipes and stipitate fronds, feathery to you. The literature had it as exclusively aquatic. But it survived in soil for me. Maybe because most others were growing happily, who knows. It certainly wasn’t because of me. It’s an inexact science, gardening.’

  Gretel said, ‘Um. You’re not here.’

  ‘You were saying…’

  ‘Um. That people can get on in different ways.’

  They’d arrived at a banana tree with a pineapple plant spraying leaves beneath. Sensors had triggered mist into the warmth, a heady, fertile atmosphere that previewed to Martine the Sri Lankan climes she was impatient for. She saw this now as the third reason she’d come.

  Gretel continued, ‘Men and women. Um…’

  ‘How about a drink? This place is making me thirsty.’

  ‘Look,’ Gretel burst out. ‘There’s a boy.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Martine, finally taking note.

  ‘We don’t…do anything.’ Gretel kicked a tree.

  Martine moved them hastily towards the exit. ‘Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he doesn’t know…’

  ‘It can’t be just me. People can’t all, can they. Dad and Pearl can’t, surely. I just don’t like it.’

  Martine asked, ‘Have you talked to Astrid?’

  Gretel had, but consulting her mother hadn’t been enough. Martine invented a man from long ago who’d never been physical, an aunt’s love as a lie, while Gretel listened, head down, winding a sweater thread round her finger.

  Then Martine repeated more or less what Astrid had said. ‘We’re all at different places on the sexual spectrum. It’s rare for someone to be precisely on your wavelength.’

  It was only when they reached Kew station that she registered suddenly, ‘What do you mean, Jonas and Pearl?’

  And Gretel told her. Most Sundays, Astrid helped on a Brick Lane stall – tasselled lampshades, dreamcatchers, oriental throws – in exchange for a corner to sell her shamanic wares. Medicine drums, rattles filled with turquoise, jewellery, and the totems she made for fire, earth and air. In the case of water, she adapted plumbing parts.

  One Sunday, apparently Bernard with Fleur and a new girlfriend had passed the stall, half-looking for a gift to make the troubled Pearl laugh. Astrid recognised him vaguely. Between them they’d sorted out why, then got onto Martine and her coming journey.

  ‘I’ve told her she could take Pearl,’ Bernard had said.

  Astrid countered that she’d suggested Jonas. Unexpected rivals, they laughed politely.

  Astrid asked, ‘Why does Pearl need to be going?’

  Bernard said, ‘I’ll bring her here next Sunday, doll. You’ll see.’

  And he had. But as it happened, Jonas, Pippi and Gretel had dropped by the stall as well. Pearl and Jonas had met a few times – and on Labour’s election night, slightly more than met. There that Sunday, in Brick Lane, they started talking again, and discovered they’d got drawing in common, and then they were flirting, and now…Gretel shrugged, implying the upshot. Martine absorbed the news, not knowing what to say.

  A few weeks after Kew she saw Jonas and Pearl together for the first time. She decided that she was happy for them; moreover now, she judged, neither would need her journey. She’d go to Kandy alone.

  With a month to go, Sandra Gearing rang. ‘Can you give me the boy’s name again? And his parents’?’

  So still there was no firm news of Mohan. For the first time Martine began scanning the internet, Facebook and Twitter for signs of him herself, but found no Liyanage family and no thirty-something man who sounded right. She had a ringing in her ears, and sometimes found it hard to breathe when the lifts were broken and she had to climb her stairs. She didn’t go to the doctor, who would have diagnosed high blood pressure. She was still working, still hadn’t retired, kept on giving herself to her students.

  In the school labs she kept her Galaxy on, awaiting Small World news.

  ‘Naughty naughty. Rules on mobiles, Miss.’

  Out of work there was a muted drumroll from friends and family: tactful visits, cautious emails, texts and phone calls.

  The usual gist was, ‘Any sign of Mohan?’

  ‘Stand by,’ ran the gist of her replies.

  Mum emailed, ‘You will tell me? Can I help?’

  ‘You can help me by being patient.’

  Eventually, diplomatically, the drumroll faded out. 30 March was the last day of term. On Thursday the 29th, Martine recon-tacted Small World.

  Sandra Gearing said, ‘When is it you’re going again?’

  ‘Day after tomorrow. This Saturday.’

  On the Friday Sandra said, ‘Give me the time you leave for the airport.’

  If Martine had had more notice of Small World’s lack of competence, she could have done more internet searching herself. But it was Saturday, and she was on a plane now. She had notes on her laptop, and Mohan’s letters with her. If she needed them, she prayed, there had to be researchers on the ground.

  28 Country: the facts

  (Country: Old name for the outfield; if a ball skies into this outlying area, fielders may have longer to make a catch but only by travelling further)

  April 2012

  Sunday 1 April. Martine took in Colombo as fragments: in the airport corridor, the dreamy honeymoon poster luring couples on; the passport queue marked ‘Foreigners’, for her and dreamers like her; the soupy night outside, where moonlight flooded over her; her first tuk-tuk, weaving through the honking traffic along boulevards that repeatedly flashed a folded ribbon sign and the name Dialog, the island’s major telecoms company. The roads were smoother than expected. Mohan was in Kandy and not here though, she was sure.

  She wasn’t booked into a global chain hotel: to her that wouldn’t have been Sri Lanka. Anyway, in big hotels you couldn’t keep your door ajar. Her little Colombo guesthouse specialised in prospectors for adoption. The owner, dapper and friendly, ferried them by car to various convents. Martine thought of Mohan’s Pieter. She met an Italian couple, young and tired and smiling, who were near the end of their adoption journey. In their case she refused to see either irony or hope. A recent couple who’d gone to Kandy had left an umbrella behind, and the owner asked if she’d return it when she got there.

  In the morning she set off from Colombo station, among her luggage her laptop and a locally bought mobile. Lemon sepia tinted the platform offices with their clerks piling papers in slow motion behind glazed bars. The train, terracotta striped, reminded her of 1950s letterhead. People boarded round her, staring. She slid onto a cracked seat, shoving the window down, drinking chilled bottled water to cool off. Wafts of curried snacks, the foreign musk of others’ sweat.

>   She checked any man who passed her against the photos that she’d scanned onto her laptop, just in case. She sat across from a pair of older men, their whites of eyes unblinkingly on her.

  ‘Ayubowan,’ she smiled.

  The train jerked and shook itself forward to periodic crashing sounds like jumping stacks of metal trays.

  On her laptop, she pored over the facts that she’d amassed: Mohan’s family, his schooling, his life, his village; the geography and geology and climatic zones of Kandy, the festivals, the farming. Facts will check me, she told herself; they’ll rein in my expectations, keep things real. I’ll only find Mohan with facts.

  But she couldn’t confine herself to facts. The scenes outside her window seduced her. The bunting of full washing lines in front of shanty shacks. Women sheet-scrubbing on rocks in red-brown streams. Cascades of bougainvillea. Maize and bell peppers butting the fences of cramped gardens. Children’s games in a tangle of mud lanes. A railway worker, a sprat dangling his ragged legs out of the wound-back tin of a train carriage, his home. She rebuked herself for seeing beauty in poverty.

  Among one travelling family, a little boy squirmed and tossed his sister’s plait. The sister huffed, glaring through pebble glasses. The mother nodded happily, holding him still for Martine’s approval. Remembering the early Mohan, Martine turned away.

  Low plains of recently cropped paddy. The odd white punctuation stroke, a heron – crane to the Lankans – standing in citrus sun. The train climbed up through forest. Sheer drops to jungle, and short blackouts through rock tunnels. Her pulse began to elevate. Rainforest filed by the window, a botanical frieze. A group of youths – a similar age to the Mohan she was always trying to find in her dream – broke into song, drumming the carriage wall with the flats of their hands, voices rising and falling, other passengers softly clapping out the beat.

  The boy escaped from his mother, fixing Martine with big brown eyes.