On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  She thinks, The monks say that liberation, the middle way, is a most supreme effort, an effort to be only. Yet before that, I have to change. I have to change to return me to myself, in order only to be. I am absolutely determined not to fade.

  Anupama walks from the garden into her bedroom, is met by the rumpled bed and blushes: having absorbed her career plan B, Asiri made love to her last night with even more ardour and imagination than usual. Afterwards she heard him in the garden, pacing, clearing his throat. Anxiety always brings on his hypochondria. They’re stuck in the skin of change, half in, half out, not knowing if they’ll survive this. But she’s undeterred. She peels off the telltale sheet for washing, goes to the garment closet and begins to heap a rainbow of her sarees on the bed.

  Suddenly, Mohan gets in touch by text, demanding. ‘What have you decided?’

  * * *

  The object

  Martine’s guest is finding it hard to share the load of luggage, harder to leave with a stranger in full view, struggling up the drive and onto a bus. Dead Moon Circus on the steps, jeering among themselves, not even saying goodbye. Adults never fully understand the adolescent’s sense of power imbalance: no home, car, private bank account, or space of your own, truly yours, to retreat to. Of course you cling to the things that you do own.

  In the well of the bus, standing guard over the bags and fencing gear apart from the seated woman hides all shyness for now. A furtive rosary with the neon bracelet, fingering each feather and each key: sixte, quarte, octave, septime; marche, liement, en garde.

  The tube is dope, grungy in parts, and everyone limits their contact.

  The woman says in a smiling, liquid voice, ‘Call me Martine.’

  Her English is understandable, a relief, and she doesn’t insist on yabbering, which is cool: at a guess, she’s nervous too. Impossible to look at her quite yet. Standing together, gripping the pole, their arms are close. On the flesh of her hand, which is like soggy parchment that’s been squeezed, freckles have spread into discolourations in a way that can’t be seen on old, dark skin.

  The grimy towerblocks are sick, but her flat, seven high floors up, feels stifling. The woman is explaining something about the balcony.

  ‘Meet Sancho.’ She indicates a cage in the kitchen, a green-grey lizard or something.

  Cruel, to keep a creature prisoner like that. She begins to lug the bags through somewhere else. The important thing is to set up the bedroom, appropriate that space.

  34 Breaking in new balls

  Friday 15 February 2013

  From the guest room, drawers slide and bang.

  Martine’s foreign visitor is arguing, either on the iPhone or Skypeing on the iPad seen among the luggage.

  ‘No! I’m not,’ she makes out in that foreign language. ‘Not interested.’

  She discreetly moves away, re-passing the living room, the TV on as homely burble. In the kitchen she squeezes past the cage, opens the oven door and dances a finger off the giving top of a muffin. She takes them out, chocolate and banana, smelling hot and sweet, and lays them on the worktop in the hope her guest will try them. For ease of language, she’d better call them cakes. Her joke fund supplies, Definition of a muffin: a drag cupcake on its day off.

  Through the darkened window she sees a child’s sky drawing, a froth of clouds and pinprick stars glimmering in the light pollution of the city. The moon’s not there: she misses it. She’s just watched the news. Today, over the Urals, its rock pieces streaming like tracer fire, a ten-ton meteor ruptured the sound barrier, crumpling walls, shattering glass and injuring more than a thousand Russians. This same evening, Asteroid 2012 DA14 buzzed over, half a football pitch in size, only seventeen thousand miles from earth. The astronomer in her is interested; the astrologer in her, casting this weekend as a turning point, feels that the moon would have added to her sense of portent.

  She calls out ‘Cakes!’ in the lobby, getting a grunt in response.

  In her bedroom, she leaves the door less open than usual and lies down. She feels wiped out, and yet she’s only just begun this. She stares up at the wardrobe where the carton of letters lies. She tries to recall her mother’s messages, also in the box, but resists reaching for them. That would be to give in to the past, plus I’ll have misremembered things, miss what isn’t there. The creeper pattern on the undrawn curtains looks like a map of dark and broken tracks she’s only partly taken. She never thought she’d end up here, like this.

  Lying at rest, she’s aware of her guest blundering to the kitchen and back, trailing behind the steamy scent of muffin.

  No called-out ‘Thank you.’

  Shy, probably, she excuses. After all, she too is lying there frightened.

  * * *

  Anupama

  Mohan texts Anupama again while driving his tuk-tuk. ‘I said, what have you decided?’ He’s pointedly on a budget, texting rather than calling because he’s requesting money.

  In the spirit of her and Asiri’s decision about Mohan’s plea, Anupama texts too. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Change 2 new phone.’ His text is abbreviations, his Sinhala sloppy. He prods her, ‘The carbonator doesn’t cost much.’

  He can’t wait, impatient for her answer, just like when he was small with his ‘What present will I get? What present will I get?’ or, ‘What date is it today? Will Miss Martine’s letter come soon?’

  He pricks Anupama again. ‘The bottling and distribution will need a little more outlay.’ Slick phrases: Jayamal’s, probably.

  Jayamal is not to be listened to, in Anupama’s judgement. She still blames J for giving Mohan the idea, as a boy, of illegally mining sapphires. J fancies himself as one of the elephants, leopards and bears, a big shot. Since tatta died, having been most courageous with that elephant in the paddy that, with others, went on to wreck the village, J has done anything and everything not to support the family, not to farm with senior father and the cousins up at their new home. Now Jayamal has got Mohan all fired up about selling fizzy water with a hint of guava or mango.

  For J, turtle poaching was merely the teenage warm-up. Lately she’s seen axes and bandsaws in his van. He smirks that he ‘loves the reservations’, and once offered her a Buddha carved out of ebony, origin unknown, at a family discount price.

  It was J who made Mohan feel that he had to compete with him, try his hand at business. When Mohan left school at sixteen, he circled Kandy lakeside with his homemade pestles and mortars and medicine bead necklaces and coconut shell monkeys that hooked in a chain together.

  ‘Retro ethnic’, Jayamal called them.

  But he didn’t earn enough for a stall, or even a barrow. Then there was the job in a tourist shop. It soon emerged that written English was all that Mohan excelled in: he couldn’t speak it comprehensibly, or even read it well. It should have been Mohan’s teacher who was tusked by that elephant.

  Then a friend of a friend loaned Mohan a tuk-tuk, and he transported an American couple around on a honeymoon tour to Galaha, all of his own devising. Luckily, they didn’t talk much. Borrowing the tuk-tuk, driving it without a licence, was illegal, of course. The couple were so ecstatic with each other and blasé with their money that before they left for Houston, they funded him for a tuk-tuk of his choice.

  ‘What’s your answer?’ Mohan texts, still waiting on her financial verdict. ‘Cd B there in 40 mins.’

  The 40 mins is a joke. With Mohan, every time count is 40 mins.

  Anupama agrees. ‘Come to supper.’ She delays what he wants to know. ‘How is yr noisy eggplant?’

  The purple tuk-tuk, purple being his favourite colour, the numberplate including 40, his favourite number. Anupama lays down the phone beside a propped-up A-level textbook opened at the orbits of the earth and sun and moon, and begins assembling the ingredients for a curry.

  She asks the paper moon – which is, after all, the real moon in book form – why 40? Unable to remember. ‘Was it because of that TV show he kept telling us of
, long ago? Kermit en Ali Baba en de 40 rovers, showing off his Dutch accent? He said the show was funny, although I do not think he saw it. Or perhaps it was because of the model number of an aircraft that he liked.’

  With a sudden violent memory Anupama’s mouth drops open, causing her to hurl the beetroots into her bowl of water. ‘Oh! He insisted also that I told Miss Martine that our village, now most sadly destroyed, was 40 kilometres from Kandy, when it was 53. Oh, how I missed it when the family left. Off the snakely road, up our dirt track, hidden by trees.’ In her mind she retraces the long walk down to Raththota, onto the buses towards school. ‘Yes, Auntie-Uncle,’ she rehearses, ‘he was most youthful then. He most definitely asked me to say 40.’ She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘So perhaps his was the first untruth in the letters, not any one of mine at all.’

  Mohan texts back tetchily, ‘I always thank U 4 the tuk-tuk.’

  Anupama and Asiri paid for his tuk-tuk lessons and the bribe to get his test. His job suits him, Anupama believes. At least he’s his own master, and tuk-tuk driving doesn’t demand conversation, in English or any other foreign language: maps and place-names are enough to connect Mohan with his passengers, usually on a Blackberry or mobile.

  ‘Little man,’ Anupama taps out on her phone – thirty-four: she can hardly believe it sometimes –‘you are Kandy’s most famous driver with our only purple tuk-tuk.’

  It’s an automatic reflex to soothe him. But her recent revelation is making her eyes flash now, and her mortar grinds the spices hard and fine.

  ‘Was that yes 2 supper?’ she texts him.

  He lives with J and his family on the other side of Kandy, but J’s wife doesn’t really like him being there. Still not married, he whisks through a blur of girlfriends; she and Upeksha feed him often, sometimes wondering if their fussing has spoiled him for someone else.

  ‘Yr deicison is?’ Mohan misspells.

  ‘I’ll tell u if u come 4 supper.’

  Mohan answers, ‘As long as it is not yr pol sambol.’

  * * *

  The object

  The object uses the woman’s wi-fi code. It’s been cool getting back in touch with everyone, despite the news at home and the row with Dietrich. The bedroom’s tiny but not yellow.

  The woman raps on the door. ‘Food in fifteen.’

  From his dog-and-llama mansion, Dietrich has asked by Skype to be ‘special-more-than-friends’.

  The answer was, ‘I’m not, I mean…Not interested.’

  Best friend Luna has a boyfriend; at Addis Hall many of Dead Moon Circus, let alone the English students, are paired up. It was scary being asked. It’s because it’s the unknown, the coming business of boyfriends and girlfriends.

  Back home, Creepy is in disgrace. Apparently she thought that she saw BS Shit at the bus station and they told the police, and now she thinks she didn’t, and the family has gone mental.

  BF Luna asks on Skype, ‘How goes it at this woman’s?’

  The honest answer is, ‘Not totally crap.’

  The woman calls ‘Suppertime!’ then can be heard announcing to her reptile, ‘Necesito comida, Sancho.’ I need food.

  The woman gestures to a chair in the crowding kitchen and gives the spaghetti one last stir, whacking the slatted spoon on the pot side. Luckily the gross chameleon goes still; you can still smell it though, animal and foreign.

  ‘They said you weren’t vegetarian or anything. Meatballs in tomato sauce. Is that OK?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The woman says, ‘Food is a kind of nutritional textspeak now. When you’re abroad, away from home, I mean. We all understand hamburgers and pizzas and hot dogs and Chinese takeaways, don’t we? Maybe it makes things easier. Less…stressful.’

  She sits opposite, the table so small that their knees knock. She’ll never have been pretty, and the hair is a bit mad. Not everything she says is comprehensible because now she’s talking way too fast. Luckily she hasn’t yet said ‘you lot’ or ‘young people’. The glass table rises up, banging the elbow by surprise as the hand tries to lower the fork to scoop up pasta.

  ‘You must know about my half-brother and my nieces. He’s about to go to America. I’ve got photos. I’ll show you if you like.’

  It needs concentration to avoid slurping, and a moustachio of red sauce.

  ‘There’s a framed scarf in the lobby. My mother’s. She loved flying.’

  The verbal drone is getting annoying. Why can’t people do silence?

  ‘You do not have to talk so much. I’m not here for my English.’

  That shuts her up for a minute; an ashamed feeling descends.

  ‘My parents divorced,’ the woman shares.

  ‘Mine did not. My family is very nice.’ Not a wholly honest opinion, but you have to defend your own.

  ‘So’s mine,’ the woman says.

  The tidal feeling comes, colour rushing up the neck.

  ‘They want the best for me,’ sticking out a sock-clad foot, noticing that there a few small holes.

  The woman says, ‘Most adults would say that they want the best for their children.’

  Out of loyalty the guest won’t mention the suffocating child protection at home, but can’t help agreeing in general terms. ‘My parents say many things like this. The things are rather boring and they do not think what they mean.’

  ‘So you don’t think they’d support you? If you did something they hadn’t expected, for instance?’ Now the woman is being nosy.

  ‘My parents are not at trial here are they?’

  The woman offers more meatballs, and spoons on yet more sauce. For a while they eat in silence, but the desire to agree won’t stay in.

  ‘Sometimes it would be nice to do something my parents would not like. I am trying to be not boring like they are, after all.’ A grin can’t help but spread, probably showing that chipped tooth.

  The woman says, ‘I doubt you’re that. What did you have in mind?’

  It all comes spilling out then. ‘I do not want to find someone special and a regular job and a nice house and settle down and make children. I want to do many things. Especially to travel. Also to be an actor. The other things will come when I am ready.’

  The woman swallows something, maybe an objection. ‘I saw Romeo and Juliet recently.’ She looks a bit lost, as if she doesn’t know why she said that. ‘My nieces both want to be performers, one a musician, the other one a dancer. Method or classical?’

  An admission is needed. ‘I do not know all of your words.’

  ‘Which do you prefer, getting into a role by being yourself or by being someone else?’

  So many questions. The woman can’t seem to stop.

  ‘To be or not to be,’ the visitor laughs nervously.

  ‘To be or to do, to create, to change yourself, I suppose I’m asking.’

  The visitor frowns, throwing back a can of Coke. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  The woman drains her wine, returns her glass to the table. ‘Did you know that some of what you say to me sounds rude?’

  Powerlessness starts boiling up: not at her necessarily. ‘Why do you want to look after me? Why are you doing that?’

  ‘Sometimes you feel you have to give something, do something.’

  ‘I am not for charity.’

  ‘Good, because I’m not a charity. Anyway, no giving is one-way. For example, conversation is giving on both sides. And you sound rude.’

  The guest clatters down the fork and shrieks the chair backwards and slides off in stockinged feet on the linoed floor, skirting the pathetic creature’s cage, out of the tiny kitchen and away. In embarrassment for the usual anger and frustration, more than anything.

  35 Following through

  (Following through: Bowler’s actions to stabilise the body after the ball has been released)

  Friday 15– Saturday 16 February 2013

  Martine stands in the kitchen for a moment. She thinks, Well that was a triumph. And I was going to be so laid
-back. Eventually she washes up. Unopened ice cream goes back in the fridge.

  Now there are bathroom sounds, water sluicing and tooth-brushing, indications of getting ready for bed. She’d hoped to use humour and hasn’t. Tomorrow, maybe, she thinks: tonight she just feels spent. She feeds Sancho more crickets, runs herself a glass of water, switches off the TV, extinguishes lights behind her.

  No Sri Lankan dream arrives, of course: not even the start.

  Later, in bed, she gasps, swimming back into consciousness. A hollow echo from the bathroom, something like a growl. She studies her watch. It’s 06:01 and dark, but then, she’s drawn the curtains, she remembers. No more Mum, she also remembers with a lurch, as she always does first thing.

  An echoing cough from the bathroom, a sharp grunt, then a whoosh into porcelain, an expulsion. The noise propels Martine out of bed. She goes dizzy, sits on the edge. She pushes through golf clubs and suitcases. According to the mirror, her fringe is still as clueless for direction. She staggers towards the bathroom, heart cantering, thinking, That’s my food being thrown back at me.

  Bending to the door she gabbles, ‘What can I do?’

  Her guest goes silent. She can normally deal with attitude – she’s encountered plenty in her line of work – but last night she found it hard. Maybe I started it, she thinks. Giving off some signal about my hang-ups as a host.

  She’s reminded, A pile of vomit walks into the worst restaurant in town and says, ‘This is the place I get most sentimental about.’

  ‘Hello?’ she asks, staring down at her coarse fingers pressing the door.

  The voice is gruff. ‘It’s nothing important. I don’t want a bother.’

  ‘Nothing important’: the phrase has personal significance, she can’t locate where from.

  Her charge mumbles, ‘Your country has mad cows.’

  Anxious about the meatballs, then. Not letting on till now might be a sign of consideration for my feelings, she notes, which would be something.