On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  She was so hot it made her ache. She doubled up for a moment. When she straightened, she couldn’t see Santha. The ruin, on the far bend, looked landed from outer space. Concrete, 1960s. Roofless, with unfilled windows and doors. She tottered over the road bridge and stepped inside, into a corridor with sky, and empty oblongs giving onto the view. The view was dizzying, vertiginous.

  Santha appeared. ‘One of your surveyors found this place.’ He smiled. ‘Yet it’s still not on GPS.’

  His arms were folded. There were torn political posters high on the wall behind him.

  Her brain was fuddled. ‘The house?’

  In a corner of derelict floor stood a battered chair, an egg-yolk yellow pod on a stand. Gratefully she dropped into it, longing to sleep for weeks.

  ‘Corbets Gap. Named after Corbet, one of your British.’

  Martine said, ‘I don’t see why we’re here.’

  ‘You talk about the boy, then you talk about water and the mountains.’ Santha sounded mournful. ‘You don’t enjoy yourself in Kandy, see the sights.’ He paused. ‘Maybe here is what you want. Or may find.’

  There was a stabbing behind Martine’s blurred vision. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I thought I wanted my wife and that she wanted me.’

  Martine tried to follow his logic. ‘The woman in the picture?’

  He shook his head. ‘That’s her sister.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I married young. We didn’t know each other. I imagined my wife like Sita, the Hindu goddess, ne? Fertile. Fertile with ideas, not just for children. I thought she was good for me. She thought I was a husband who had run off with the anklet of a princess.’

  ‘I don’t know what…’

  ‘I mean, she hoped I was a somewhat bad man, like a film, a rebel. And richer.’

  ‘Mohan has nothing to do with Corbets Gap,’ Martine said.

  Santha continued, ‘What she liked was to shop and stay at home, reading Ghazal in the Moonlight.’

  Martine glimmered with understanding. ‘You mean you were both disappointed.’

  ‘My wife talked about her sadness to my cousin who plays the piano in Pizza Hut. At last my cousin’s husband told me this.’

  ‘And her sister?’

  ‘My wife and I used to go walking with friends taking photographs of the country, ne? Her sister sometimes came, and once when we came here, she was with us. We talked, and she said she knew something was unhappy, and suddenly I wished for her. I found out what I wanted.’

  ‘Did you…?’

  ‘My wife left me. But this sister was married. It was not honourable to go with her.’ Santha shrugged. ‘I still like this place for helping me to see.’

  ‘Like’ seemed not enough for Santha’s story. Martine pivoted the yellow seat away from him. She felt fiery and exhausted. She scrabbled at her blouse, then her bra, and at once it fell into her lap without Santha seeing, without her knowing what she was doing.

  ‘With the few buses, and the roads, he must live in Raththota, or even closer to Kandy,’ Santha said.

  Martine said, ‘But at the low level of Raththota there’s no paddy.’

  ‘There is another idea,’ Santha said, more gently. ‘A charity might invent letters. They might not be real.’

  Martine’s brain dipped and dived, rebuffing that too.

  She said thirstily, ‘There are the photos, the drawings, his news, his mother dying, his father’s problems, all that. No one would go to those lengths.’

  She felt Santha coming closer. ‘It made you interested. It kept you giving money. They could make up the story and send the same to many people abroad, ne?’

  She smelt Santha right behind her, again that odour of something growing, something crushed, a confusion of saplike vigour and the landscape. ‘I thought you believed the letters.’

  ‘Well, then he lived in Raththota,’ Santha said with determination. ‘Or one of the little settlements that are now part of Raththota.’

  ‘That ugly town with no paddy.’

  Their argument was going round in circles.

  ‘He won’t live anywhere else.’

  The chair was turning, dizzying Martine. Santha was turning it. She registered the turmeric-bright daisy, held out as if to stroke her, before his frown and the pink eyes flaring down at her undress.

  He backed away. ‘Are you…? You are ill, ne?’

  She felt as if fire engines should come. Rivulets coursed between her little, flaccid breasts. She thought, No more mechanical, London life. No tubes and trains and escalators and lifts, doors closing, boats, planes, crowds shifting in interiors. Here’s the opposite, my opposite. No more containment. All interiors blown open or away. Stillness. Waterfalls and ferns nearby; here, crickets and dragonflies. Only a cool, moist vapour is missing here from the exotic landscape I wanted. Understanding surfaced for a moment. Is it this that I’ve been seeking, more than Mohan? Then it slipped away. As she tipped sideways, lost what was happening, she skewed what Santha had said, made of it the best she could.

  ‘He won’t live anywhere else’: But that can’t be Raththota, thought Martine. Mohan isn’t anywhere but at this spot, just here.

  32 No man’s land

  (No man’s land: An area of the pitch where there are no fielders, and where the ball travels, often when mistimed)

  April-December 2012

  Things happened slowly and quickly, as so many crises do. Santha got Martine to a local hospital. Martine had dengue fever.

  ‘It’s nothing but wait, isn’t it. You’ll either die or recover fully,’ the doctor said evenly, prescribing pills, and left.

  She lay in bed there, then at Hilda’s, with Santha a constant visitor.

  Later she’d remember little. Sleeping, jugs of lime juice. And the dreams. The colour turquoise everywhere. Standing in the dock with a partner she didn’t know for the crime of having twins, under threat of execution. The moon, throwing a mountain silhouette over her bed. When feverishly awake she tried to prime herself with images, possibilities that could finish off the dream at the Queen’s Hotel. She couldn’t, as if the doctor had prescribed against it. Sleep rubbed out any sense of failure. When she began to think straight, she craved baked beans on toast in Brandon Towers.

  She slept on the plane ride home, nudging open the door of her flat with an arm that weighed like lead.

  One of her answerphone messages dated from just after her outward flight. ‘Martine, this is Sandra Gearing. I tried your mobile but no joy and I think I must have your email slightly wrong and, sorry, you told me, but I can’t remember exactly when you’re going. We’ve found Mohan. He’s looking forward to meeting you. Please, give Gay in my office a ring. I’m away on a long holiday over Easter. The number’s…’

  Martine couldn’t help recalling her adoption efforts, because this was more bungled bureaucracy. And the mix-up was thin and feeble, without the drama befitting what had been at stake. Dismay was like drunkenness, she discovered: there was a stage where you couldn’t feel any more dismayed. She’d peaked on fury, horror, frustration, misery. She trailed a bin liner from the kitchen into the second bedroom. She emptied the soft toy pigs and china pigs and the pig badges and flying pig mobiles and snowshakers from the two desk drawers that, over the years, these gifts had expanded into. She looked at the mountain of them, couldn’t put them in the bag. She crawled off to bed dry-eyed. From there, she rang her headteacher and resigned.

  The next day she phoned Sandra Gearing, but she wasn’t yet back from holiday.

  Her colleague Gay was discreetly apologetic. ‘If there was any miscommunication, we’re sorry. But Sandra was looking for Mohan in addition to an extremely heavy workload. These things happen.’

  ‘But do they though? But do they?’

  Martine pictured a man in his mid-thirties, his face fluttering like a tobacco leaf, not handsome but with something winning about him, yoyoing from a chair outside a small, painted hou
se, glancing repeatedly at a watch. Maybe a wife and children, washing on the line, a vegetable patch, a log store, special-occasion curry and milk rice rolling their smells out from a dark interior where there was stowed a bundle of letters.

  ‘Can you give me a contact address now, so that I can write and apologise?’

  ‘Sorry. We don’t give out personal data. But of course we’ll send on something, if it’s suitable.’

  Martine had to assure Mohan that her no-show wasn’t her fault. ‘I want to say what happened.’

  The woman wouldn’t budge. ‘We’ll forward it, as long as it’s OK.’

  So the office would censor a message that even hinted at Small World’s failure.

  Before Martine had written, an email arrived, composed in perfect English.

  ‘To: info@smallworld.org.uk

  Sent: 16 April 2012 00:45

  FW: From: Mohan Liyanage

  Subject: Martine not here please send

  There should be more greetings. Because this time, it doesn’t work to call you ‘Dear’. So I call you Martine. Till now I’ve never once called you Martine: just Martine, I mean to say. Both points are significant. Please notice.

  ‘I could ask why you have done this – or not done this.

  ‘I could start, as I used to, “My question is…”

  ‘But I already guess the answer. You have done so many things I’ll never do you probably think you can do or not do anything. The neglect of me, a child to you, will always seem as little as a child.

  ‘Picture a simple threshold. To either side, a water bowl; Sri Lankan lilies of the water, white with yellow centres, floating in them, waiting for our meeting. Still floating now? No one cares. I don’t see them; you don’t see them; neither of us is there.

  ‘Your letters made strange sense sometimes, but now I think they may not have sent right meaning. The words you sent, aiming to be honest, perhaps were corrupted, dishonest all along. They may have abandoned me long since. In which case, this goodbye is overdue.

  ‘I could be wrong. Light works in such a way that our sky looks blue and our breadfruit, bright green although they are not. My sister taught me that long since. So maybe it was not that you deceived me. Maybe it was in translation that your meaning was spilt, as if one person were passing an overfull bucket of water to another, and they onto me, another, so that precious drops fell.

  ‘On my side, I was truthful; I think I was. Then again, perhaps I was not. Perhaps I pretended that you were something to me that you weren’t, and from that falsehood, dreams began that shouldn’t ever have started. Perhaps I’m angry with myself. Anger at yourself is hard to bear.

  ‘Anyway, either you lost me or I lost you – or both; more than our bodies, more than the outsides of what we are: somewhere inside us, our substance leached away.

  ‘This final time I strive to spill no drops. I say, how dare you neglect me, fail me, lose me? Just when I thought I’d got you, why weren’t you there – not least to help me with the fact that you weren’t there?

  ‘I wasn’t safe with you at all.

  ‘My world you’ll never know now: for you it won’t exist. My family is well. My sisters are well. My brother is well.

  ‘I’ll live on without you. And that’s fine.’

  Martine went back to bed and stayed there. The letters were in her bedroom, just tipped out of her luggage. She delved for the cricket photo, the latest one of Mohan. She tried to convince herself, I did meet him, in letters and photos. Maybe even in the flesh: some glimpsed railway worker; that stallholder who sold me the leopard’s bark; one of the smiling staff at the Kandyan hotel; the driver of a tuk-tuk. Then there was the invisible Mohan of that strange journey with Santha. But the thought of near misses didn’t help, and she lapsed into her disillusioned self.

  Martine’s mother’s angina was back, but she and the doctors were doubtful about a second operation. Jonas, at Harrow Weald, was trying to stop Mum doing too much. Speaking to them by phone, Martine tried to rub her Sri Lankan disappointment from her voice. She knew she couldn’t keep it up in person, so didn’t visit.

  Days passed. She had to resolve things with Mohan, in some sense have the last word.

  She laboured over an email, striving, as Small World wanted, to put aside blame. ‘I was just about to write to you…Please, give me a chance to speak…I did look for you when I got there….’

  She sent it on to Small World.

  An answer arrived, this time in Sinhala, with an English translation.

  ‘To: gay.reed@smallworld.org.uk

  Sent: 24 April 2012 08:45

  FW: From: Mohan Liyanage

  Subject: Please send to Miss Martine

  Dear Miss Martine

  Thanks for yr email.

  ‘I C. What a pity it did not work.

  ‘Did U take a plane or did U run away and take a boat then a bus then a tuk-tuk?! Did U bring me a big present?! (LOL)

  ‘I hope U R well.

  ‘Perhaps another time??!! L8r allig8r.

  Mohan’

  The first email was the message that Martine judged that she deserved. It punished her, so it must be true. The second, she decided, is too cruel, even for me. It mustn’t be Mohan; it surely can’t be.

  Its effect on her gave her a dread of more unpleasantness, from Mohan or anyone else. She began to doubt some things, then many things, then everything. How convenient, she anguished, that they only found Mohan once I’d got back to London – maybe because he doesn’t exist at all. She stacked the letters round her on the hot pillows and re-read them, poring over each piece of Mohan’s news and local detail, checking for consistency and plausibility, veering from reassurance to outraged disbelief.

  The words of Vijitha’s wife now taunted her. ‘For us, word of mouth is first and foremost.’

  Perhaps she should have agreed: any written word was flawed. Ironically, a view shared by the email she preferred, the one of the two she was more inclined to believe in.

  In Martine’s mind, her sleeping dreams of working in Sri Lanka and the Esala Perahera seen from a hotel window began to blur with what had actually happened in Sri Lanka. Now, when she dreamed about night-time processions, or a breadfruit overripening, or a dragonfly, she couldn’t distinguish which came from before her trip, which after, which from her net surfing, and which from events. She wondered now, How much were Mohan’s character, his desires, and how much my projections? Who has this boy-man, all these long years, been?

  Somewhere deep, Martine began to comprehend that shame and disappointment had confused in her an email fact with an email fiction. That Mohan’s first email was a figment of her distraught imagination, and never came to her. Tyrants, colonisers, obsessive lovers, domineering parents, correspondents of all kinds can be at their most creative when they feel rebuked or guilty. Martine had conjured the email up: its blame and sheer panache came from her mind’s lurking side, her poetry. It wasn’t even in her inbox, if she’d checked; slowly it receded into a fable in her mind.

  The real one, with its ‘L8r allig8r’, wouldn’t recede. She didn’t re-read it, in fact ignored all emails and screened phone calls, heart banging when she heard her landline’s strains of Für Elise. And yet she was unable to delete the email, let it go. It offered hope that Mohan might exist. One day she made a sub-folder and slipped it in like a cutting into a pot, as if it might one day propagate into something she could face. The letters she meanwhile heaped into the big grey cardboard box where they have ever since stayed. She didn’t notice for a while, but Mohan’s whispers in her ear had also died.

  Days passed. Spring rain and winds whipped the clumps of trees far below her tower, lashing her neighbours with their shopping bags and the teenage gangs indoors. Insomnia, nightmares. She couldn’t go back to Sri Lanka again: she was all out of stamina, even enough to feel disappointed. And her friends were here, and her mother was ill, and…Turning her head on the pillow one way she saw the shelved niche with her books, the Lank
an recipes, and Mahadenamutta, the comic fool; turning the other, she found in her mind’s eye her mother, starey-eyed, unvisited by her daughter, Mohan’s recrimination in another form.

  Martine had restlessness like an illness, intermittent but intense. In the hyperactive spells, she set about her retirement paperwork or did deep cleaning in the flat. One day she went back to her guest bedroom, stuffed the rubbish bag with the pigs and hauled it to a bin on the estate. In periods of deadness, she watched sport on TV, any kind where people lobbed with force, twisted and shoved, broke into a run over a demarcated landscape, disciplined their violence. Standing close to the set, wanting and yet not wanting to join in. Or she lay in bed and ran through her mental index: Damion, Garey, Kumar, Ravi, Johnnie, Kieran, Bobby, Tate, Mohan. She still had an ache for children like them, all boys.

  Her historic claustrophobia worsened, even with the door cracked open. Through sleepless eyes, she glared at her furniture. It suddenly seemed angular and unconsoling, circumscribing and oversized. She hefted chairs and tables and desks and dressing tables and the TV and her bookcases and the Canterbury around her bedrooms and sitting room. She stacked them against the walls as if the corners, like chimneys, would draw them up as smoke. Some offending pieces she exiled to the balcony. She laboured through a day, a night and most of another day. She decided to sell some items, but couldn’t work out which. For the moment, she replaced them where they’d been.

  One stormy morning she turned out her clothes and jewellery. She remembered her armlet, unworn for years except in Sri Lankan fantasy. She couldn’t find the pale-green padded box. She turned the flat over again. It was in an empty Tampax carton in the shower room. When she found it, she stood listening to the thunder and put it back.

  Phone calls with Harrow Weald were hard. With her bridges burnt – love, work, Mohan – Martine talked to her ailing mother with edited honesty.