On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘The only mad cow around here is me,’ she replies. She adds, ‘That was years ago.’

  Into the echo chamber of the toilet, the visitor begins gagging again. Martine has no idea if this is more than foreigner’s paranoia: food poisoning, some real illness, eating disorder? Abruptly she thinks, I’m responsible for this sixteen-year-old.

  She asks, ‘What would you like me to do?’

  Loud spitting, but no answer.

  Martine ponders the gender of the creature behind the door. With a female, at least in theory you can rush in and hold the brow and stroke the spasming back and make soothing noises. With a male, on the other hand, you can’t do any such thing. She wonders if that’s fair.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she calls.

  No answer.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘F…Go away, to be honest.’

  ‘To be honest’: again the phrase triggers something personal, something past.

  Martine shakes the sensation off. She springs up, retrieving a notepad and pen from her bedroom, and hurries back to the bathroom. You gabbled at supper, she tells herself. Just listen, she tells herself; wait. She writes a question mark and an exclamation mark on the top sheet of the notepad, tears it off and slides it under the door.

  After twenty-five thudding heartbeats the note peeps up at her turned over, with a message in her own eyeliner. ‘I AM NOT A CHILD.’

  From beyond the door, in the stink of sick, Martine smells fear. I’m not an adult either, she silently admits. She wishes this insight would stay with her, after all it’s ludicrously simple, and she’s had it many times before. The struggle isn’t learning to be a parent, or resisting being parented: for everyone, it’s the pressure of growing up. We’re all still growing up.

  The gagging loses conviction. A piece of toilet paper appears, on it a crude drawing, a cow on its hind legs with a plate of meatballs in its hoof and arrows of dizziness circling its head. No artist then, she thinks; then, Playfulness equals progress, she can hope.

  She posts back a further message: ‘Tell me what you want.’

  A pause, then another sketch slides out, possibly a jugful of iced water.

  She hurries off, fetching a jug, a glass, two crackers on a plate, a dampened cloth and a box of tissues. She lays them on the carpet. There’s a sniff and rustling, sounds of gathering together.

  ‘I’ll leave the things just here.’

  She gropes along the unlit lobby culminating in the small cube of her bedroom. She finds herself by her four-poster, the metal columns white and cold. She pushes past the golf clubs and crawls under the duvet.

  * * *

  Asiri is out at work. While the beetroot curry is bubbling, Anupama studies. It’s only a day since Asiri finally got the message about their future, but he’s already vanished his cuckoo clocks from the kitchen, as if they’re a reminder that their time together may be fleeting. At last she can spread her textbooks far and wide on the table.

  She keeps the orbit chapter open for the illusion of the absent moon’s support, even though she finds the sciences A level relatively easy. It’s the English that she’s now struggling with. She crosses out the English word ‘faeces’. In English, ‘flowers’ is a totally different word. Then she huffs to a standstill.

  She tells the earth-moon diagram, ‘I cannot concentrate now I have remembered Mohan’s lie to Miss Martine about the distance of our old village.’

  She breathes in and out, long and deep, focusing on the little stone Buddha on the unmoonlit windowsill.

  She tells Asiri by text, ‘Mohan is coming about his fizzy drinks plan.’

  Asiri replies at once, ‘Please B firm. What will U say?’

  ‘Trust me,’ Anupama answers.

  She picks up her phone and rings Mohan, this time to talk.

  ‘What?’ he asks. She can hear the trapped wasp buzz of the Bajaj, and chattering Japanese passengers. ‘Are you going to tell me your answer?’

  ‘You know how you most like the number 40?’

  Mohan sniggers. ‘It wouldn’t be funny if that was how much you and Asiri…’

  ‘You told me to write to Miss Martine that we lived 40 kilometres from Kandy.’

  ‘Did I? When? What’s she got to do with anything?’

  Anupama sees that he doesn’t recall, and understands, abruptly, that a scolding wouldn’t mean anything to him. As for his tone about Miss Martine: she sucks her cheeks.

  She recounts grimly to the printed moon, ‘You will remember that only about a year ago, there was much for my album of facts. We heard that Miss Martine would visit. I had written her all those letters long ago, forming a bond she probably did not know. Now I could meet her. I had my hair cut, and Upeksha’s friend taught me how to improve my makeup. I bought a skirt and blouse with a paisley design. I waited for her, longing to talk about England and injustice, and how we had both changed. We would have a stimulating conversation, even though I suppose I would have had to confess about my part in the letters.’

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ Mohan’s voice fires off over the background traffic. ‘Are you telling me something or not?’

  For once, Anupama ignores him. ‘Mohan had a plan to hang a balloon over the gate at J’s, where he is living, and take Miss Martine to Pizza Hut. I wanted to float water lilies in bowls outside this house, welcoming her here, but never mind: at least he said I could meet her. Then her email came explaining that she had been and gone, apologising most graciously.’

  At last Anupama turns to the phone and Mohan. ‘Last year, when Miss Martine did not come, what did you mean in your email to her saying “Perhaps another time? Crocodile” or something? You asked the translator to say it in English.’ The bitterness of lemons sours her voice. ‘You said it was funny. On your phone you showed me.’

  She remembers, ‘Handanandāmāmā, that email upset me utterly for Miss Martine, and of course for myself, but also because Mohan was concealing how he felt. That she did not come could have disappointed him utterly, it might not have mattered to him, or something in between. I could not tell; he was not going to tell me.’

  ‘Can’t hear you. Dropping these passengers off,’ Mohan shouts. ‘Give me 40 – um, ten mins.’

  And the call is at an end.

  ‘First he makes me lie in the letters, my very first lie of all,’ Anupama wags the dead phone at the 2D moon, ‘then, over the years, he withdraws from me.’

  There’s a sizzling and a burning smell from the curry. She leaps and crosses the kitchen, flapping a towel at the smoke. The cause of her real distress will be here soon.

  * * *

  The object

  The nausea’s gone in the morning, a relief. The light through the little apartment window is grey, like the pearly tiles in the woman’s bathroom, where hopefully – how embarrassing – the sour reek may have faded. There’s the sound of the woman showering.

  On with underwear, and today, as a top layer, the bright green should be OK. It’s cool, having this peaceful time. A smoke or two, some reading, until a plastic object on the ceiling begins a Psycho shriek, and the woman’s tapping on the door and shouting. Swinging it wide, it hits the woman’s knuckles, and there she is gawping in, wearing black leggings and a tunic appliquéd with circles of black and white.

  ‘For crying out loud.’ She pushes into the green sanctuary.

  ‘Who is crying?’ the object asks. Her English is bewildering.

  Cigarette smoke is rolling out between them. They blink at each other. The woman’s outfit looks as if she’s given up pretending something: as if, unlike yesterday’s, it says who she really is.

  A clasp of the elbow, warm and dry, then the woman pounces on the badminton racket, jabbing its handle at the off spot on the ceiling. ‘I asked you to smoke on the balcony!’

  ‘You said something different!’

  They shout over the alarm.

  ‘I said if you had to smoke, I’d rather you smoked on the balcony!’

  Righteo
us indignation wells up. ‘Yes. Now you are perfectly honest! Does that not mean I can also smoke in here?’

  The woman looks thrown. ‘I see. My grammar foxed you!’ She snatches away the latest cigarette and grinds it out on the lip of the water jug.

  It’s a swift action for the object to unsheath the fencing foil and poke it at the device, words rising unexpectedly. ‘You don’t like me. You stay away from me too much.’

  ‘So do you!’ the woman shouts.

  She grabs the ruler on the desk, trying to halt the noise with that.

  ‘You are like an animal in a hole!’ The guest glances at her clothes. ‘Black and white!’

  ‘A badger!’ cries the woman.

  ‘A batcher?’

  The woman hurries out and returns with a golf club, but by then the squeals have stopped.

  They look at each other in the quiet.

  ‘I like this…’ The object has changed the subject to the woman’s tunic, with its circles of black and white.

  ‘And this is very…unusual,’ the woman reciprocates, her fingers hovering proud of the slippery green nylon then whisking round to tuck in the label, which must be sticking up at the back.

  ‘Thank you.’ The object accepts the compliment happily.

  There’s a stillness, then the woman tries an en garde pose with the golf club.

  ‘Your behind foot should be at right-angles to the front one. Go down more. Like this.’ Hips in parallel beside her give an easy demonstration with the foil.

  It’s a laugh to see her knees and biceps femoris strain, trying to squat more deeply. She lunges, but the tip of the club shaft falls away from her, striking the ashtray of folded paper off the bedside table, spraying ash and stubs on the carpet.

  ‘Whoops.’ She drops the club.

  They bend and scoop up the mess with the makeshift ashtray.

  When the woman straightens, now the smoke is clearing, you can see her glancing round, noticing how organised, reorganised, the room is. Along the back of the desk, your row of graphic novels. iPad and iPhone are squared up beside a line of your homework pages, pens and a protractor. Her pot of bright blue hyacinths looked nicer off the narrow windowsill and on the bedside table beside the travel clock and framed family photo, scenting the room with early spring despite the smoke. The bed’s neatly made, of course, with drying towels and your newly washed underwear perfectly folded over the rail in front of the heater. The emptied luggage is flattened, its contents stowed. Even the makeshift ashtray seems to surprise her.

  ‘I have told you. I am grown up.’

  The woman cocks her head at the words, mussing her hair. She picks up the golf club, her guest re-sheaths the foil.

  ‘Breakfast?’ the woman asks.

  36 Women’s cricket

  Saturday 16 February 2013

  ‘One animal is trying to get in and one is trying to get out,’ the sixteen-year-old points out to Martine, waving towards Sancho’s barricaded stare and a battering sound from the balcony.

  Martine has loaded her few kitchen surfaces with juices, fruit, ham, cheeses, salami, croissants, breads, jams, cereals. There are eggs, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms on standby near the hob. She’s run out of places to put things, gone a bit over the top.

  ‘Have you got any more to wash?’ she asks.

  The motherliness of her own question strikes her pleasingly as she leans sideways, looking through the window to see what her guest was waving at. A pigeon’s scrabbling, claw caught in the netting of the balcony. Its beak opens without sound. Feathers fly. Over the years, bird droppings have puttied feather skeletons to the wires. She fumbles, unlocking the balcony door.

  ‘It isn’t caught. When it sees you it will go free!’ shouts her visitor.

  The door squeaks, and sure enough the pigeon takes off, panicking.

  The foreign guest observes, grinning, ‘We’re not animals hiding in our nests at the moment. The batcher and the…’ Martine watches the mental run-through of English beast names. ‘Lizard.’ The adolescent torso is swathed in bright green nylon.

  ‘Badger,’ corrects Martine. ‘But badgers live in setts. And lizards live in holes, on the whole.’

  ‘Is that funny?’

  Martine thinks, crestfallen, Humour doesn’t always translate. Still, she nearly adds, ‘And you’ve still got your holey sock on.’

  The foreign creature runs eyes over the breakfast choices. ‘I want to eat in that other room.’

  Martine has decided that the rudeness is mostly bluster. ‘Sure.’

  ‘What’s English for where all animals must live? And what they must eat.’

  Loading two trays, Martine offers, ‘Cage. Pen. Habitat? Diet?’

  Smoke-brown fingers run along Sancho’s bars, a clangy musical scale. ‘You shouldn’t keep him. It’s not fair to an animal’s nature.’

  ‘I know that now,’ Martine says, handing over a tray.

  ‘You know everything,’ grumbles her visitor.

  Martine, tray in hand, backs against the door of the living room, pushing it open with the sole of her Ugg boot.

  ‘You can sew my sock,’ the voice behind her says, following her with a musty scent, reminiscent of old cupboard spices. ‘My Mum tells me always to save money.’

  ‘I can’t sew.’ Martine suddenly regrets that her mother never taught her. ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘So,’ says the visitor, ‘you don’t know everything.’

  They pick at their breakfast, upright on the rigid tubular chairs.

  ‘What’s this, on the wall?’

  ‘My more everyday face.’ It’s the thovil mask Martine once bought, with its painted cobras.

  Martine’s ward doesn’t smile, just covertly tongues out the salami. And the collection of keys and feathers is still dangling from that wrist. Martine wonders if they have significance. Close-set eyes point at the TV, at Martine and back again, but Martine doesn’t flick it on. They continue wandering among the batik hangings and carved mirrors. Although Martine returned with all those artefacts last spring, it’s taken her a whole long year to hang them.

  ‘You’ve travelled far. I also want to.’

  ‘You said. Although you might find…’ Martine stops herself from lecturing. ‘Where would you like to go later? Shopping? A movie? Do something sporty? Swimming?’

  ‘You have plans for us?’

  Martine can hear resistance.

  ‘You don’t want to go out,’ she says, unable to hide her disappointment.

  ‘This is our nest.’

  ‘We should get some air. I know I need some.’

  ‘There are many things here.’ A dark arm sweeps round taking in the wall coverings, the furniture, the TV, Martine’s own laptop in the corner. ‘I want to stay.’

  Martine imagines silence rearing up at them through all her surface bustle. She thinks, What will we talk about? She tells herself, It’s only like a one-to-one with a student.

  The landline rings.

  ‘Two weeks and counting.’ Jonas mentions America, Martine knows, because he can’t think how to ask about Martine’s visitor.

  ‘Bad timing. Having breakfast,’ she responds.

  ‘Guy or gal?’

  ‘Oh, Jonas.’ She’s told him the answer to this one: she can’t believe he’s forgotten. ‘Could you ring later?’

  She restores the phone to its stand. There’s not much later left. For the umpteenth time she rehearses, When Dad died, Jonas didn’t go to the States; so why leave now?

  After they’ve cleared away, ‘Let’s game,’ Martine’s visitor suggests, descending cross-legged in one smooth movement onto the floor cushions.

  ‘No equipment,’ says Martine, lowering herself stiffly alongside.

  Her guest proposes an anime called Sailor Moon. ‘I get it on my iPad.’

  Martine counters boldly, ‘Or we could talk to each other.’

  She gazes at the teenager who has recently uttered phrases –‘perfectly honest’, ‘nothing importa
nt’, ‘I am grown up’ – that still resonate from somewhere.

  ‘The television is there. We can see a film.’

  ‘Let’s talk,’ Martine persists.

  ‘Actors learn from films and stories. They help me.’

  Martine stays adamant before the coffee-bean eyes under the scowling eyebrows, paler palms upturned in the lap, lost without the normal diversions, iPad, earphones, anything.

  ‘I sometimes think life is all stories. I could tell you one.’ She considers how much. ‘About the longest journey.’

  The visitor’s dry lips purse in a possible sign of interest, but then Martine remembers, You can’t tell anyone anything: people have to make their own mistakes, and knows that there’s no point in telling her whole Sri Lankan tale.

  She can only bring herself to say, ‘A woman knew…let’s say a foreigner. They lost touch. A lot later, she was offered a meeting with…another kind of foreigner. But she didn’t know if she could do it, go through all that travelling again.’

  ‘Where must she travel to?’

  ‘Addis Hall.’ An unwilling laugh explodes from her guest, exposing that chipped tooth. ‘You’d stayed with another guardian the holiday before, but she’d got a family crisis. You didn’t look happy to see me.’

  ‘Your story is a bit crap,’ the guest says, and Martine can’t help grinning. ‘Why was that your longest journey? It wasn’t far.’

  ‘Because the journey to my first foreigner led to you.’

  ‘It’s not a very straight way.’

  ‘That’s true,’ agrees Martine.

  * * *

  Anupama

  It’s the day after burning the beetroot curry – although that could be many days. Anupama is washing up only now, her hands in bubbles. She and Asiri are in a hectic limbo. He came in late last night and ploughed her deeply once more.

  ‘What did you tell your brother, and what did he say?’ he says, chin on her shoulder, asking yet again about Mohan’s madcap project.

  He’s begun to micro-manage her, clenching against uncertainty, and Anupama wails mutely, ‘Auntie-Uncle, I want to reassure him about the future, but I cannot.’

  ‘I said, “I am sorry, little man,”’ she repeats, ‘and he gave a shrug and laughed that my food was horrible as usual.’