On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  Asiri checks, ‘And that was all?’

  ‘No, Auntie-Uncle, that was not all,’ Anupama laments silently, staring at her arms deep in bubbles. ‘Although, yes, I have caused the bubbles of Mohan’s fizzy water to disappear. However,’ she sighs, ‘it was Miss Martine who taught me that evaporation is one of the changes when surface tension breaks. Even in scientific terms, evaporation is the acquisition of a new state merely, so I suppose the inspiration of bottled water may remain with Mohan, in fantasy or somewhere.’

  The bubble image holds her. Yesterday at the top of the escalator in the KCC, she bought a new charger for her mobile, then passed a display of photographs in the nearby glass-walled gallery. Portraits of people eyeing bubbles, apparently of mercury. The people were in white coats.

  The show looked scientific, so she stopped and read the explanation printed large at the entrance. ‘People are spheres floating in the air. The air is a mirrored surface. We reflect each other and our world. The Buddhist life, like the photographer’s, is self-observation and connection.’

  The photos aimed to be both scientific and spiritual, molecules but meditation.

  ‘They made me most irritated,’ she tells the moon in her head.

  Asiri runs a knuckle up her spine from the base, making her tingle. She thinks, Life is all disruption and agitation, and science the study of that agitation. Buddhism may be its tolerance, but the photos seemed absolutely to deny any disturbance, made everything look too peaceful. I waited to dispute with the woman photographer, but an admiring group surrounded her, so I gave up.

  Last night she had it out with Mohan about the 40 kilometres, and he remembered nothing. This made her most annoyed. So then she tackled him again about his offhand way in his email to Miss Martine last spring – his offhand way with her, his sister, also, in sharing nothing of his feelings about the Englishwoman’s failure to appear. He listened to her accusations but just looked blank. Then she told him that she might have to go to England.

  All he said was, ‘Lucky you,’ and after a pause, ‘Actually, I’ve got a mate who could do with a contact there. He can’t get a visa,’ and winked, as if he was J.

  So she said most angrily, ‘If I go, I might find Miss Martine,’ and he looked at her without expression and said, ‘My question is why.’

  Agitation on her side, tolerance – or indifference – on Mohan’s.

  ‘So no,’ she confides to the moon but not Asiri, ‘that was not all.’

  ‘The worst is, I knew that Mohan was right,’ Anupama concludes to her lunar confidante. Asiri is snaking an arm about her waist, and she stiffens. ‘Miss Martine would not be interested in me. A lot of time has passed since we wrote the letters.’ She shakes her head, examining a charred saucepan. ‘Anyway, my anger suddenly left me, because, after all, it was I who agreed to write Mohan’s lie of 40 kilometres. Also our separateness must have started partly because of my deceit in the letters. Furthermore, if I can separate from Asiri, I cannot complain that Mohan separates something of himself from me.’ Asiri’s muscular arm leaves her and slides past her, picking up plates for drying. She smiles sadly to herself. ‘I have always found it hard to allow Mohan the right to self-determination, I suppose. Good barristers must lie as well as tell the truth, so the work should suit me, a master of self-deception and lies.’

  The doorbell jangles.

  ‘It is very early,’ she exclaims to Asiri.

  She leaves the kitchen and walks to the door on to the street. A yellow tuk-tuk is standing there, and leaning on it two friends of Mohan’s, one of them chewing betel.

  He grins with purple teeth, ‘Is Mohan here?’

  Mohan’s more popular than his brother, despite J’s talk of big boys’ play with the elephants, leopards and bears.

  Anupama wipes her hands on her apron. ‘The last time I saw him was last night, very sorry.’

  They chat for a while, then she re-enters the house under the star windchimes that revolve slowly in the heat over the door.

  The tin oval among the tin stars could be the moon, at a pinch; it follows her mind’s eye, remembering. ‘Little man was going down the step and towards his tuk-tuk. Although he is quite tall, his strutting walk reminded me of when he was younger, of how, despite that strut, he used to turn round and look at me most wistfully.’ She reflects, ‘It is most strange how, from the back, you can see some aspect of someone from long ago, yet nothing of them now.’

  * * *

  Kern

  The woman’s half-brother – Jonas, was it? – is on the phone again.

  ‘Yes, Moroccan,’ the woman – Martine – says, rolling her eyes conspiratorially at Kern. They come to rest on her long green nylon dress, the tabard top frilled at the edges. ‘Moroccan family. Lives in Düsseldorf.’

  The woman’s fist does a cranking-handle gesture.

  Kern feeds her information mock-loudly, for the half-brother’s benefit. ‘My father is a mining executive, my mother is a nurse. I have two sisters and,’ she adds smoothly, ‘a brother. We are all very clever.’

  The woman, Martine, grins and nods. ‘Yep. He’s got that.’ She playacts stupid, angling the mouthpiece. ‘Name, dear?’

  ‘Kern!’

  Martine holds the phone away so Kern can register the response.

  Kern hears sounds of incomprehension and volunteers, raising her chin, ‘It means “seed”.’

  Martine repeats, ‘She’s telling you it means “seed”.’

  ‘In Germany it’s a name more for the boys,’ Kern says.

  The half-brother hears that, and says something back.

  The gaze of the woman, this Martine, scuttles to the ceiling. ‘Well, Guardians’ gender rules is gender rules. But you did know…’

  The man says something, an apology?

  ‘Never mind,’ says Martine.

  While he says more, Kern scans the interesting room again, noticing something under the corner of the TV.

  Martine replies, ‘You know me so well.’ The next words are obscure. ‘Your life is up to you…’ She pauses. ‘I don’t.’ She adds softly, ‘No, that’s fine. I’ll miss you, but I’ll be fine.’ Kern tilts her head. Martine is thinking, studying Kern carefully. She grins at Kern. ‘I must go.’

  At the call end Kern gets up, holding the digital print-outs she’s just found. ‘What are these?’

  ‘Pictures of my Mum’s, in store for now; mostly prints, a few paintings. I’m deciding how to sell them.’

  Martine takes and flicks through the documents, looking dazed.

  Knowing that the half-brother is leaving soon, Kern risks an intuition. ‘It sounds like you are free of him but not happy about it.’ She suddenly wants to help. ‘Last night I told a boy I have met at school, well, no, friends is enough. He did not like it, but…’ She pronounces, ‘I think it is good not to need anyone,’ surprised to be sharing that much.

  Martine goes quiet. ‘Need,’ she stresses, repeating. Kern watches her resurface from a thought, then the woman asks, ‘Where do you think the pictures should go? Also there are framed photos, lots, of the family. And a box of ornaments and stuff.’

  Kern looks round. ‘Have not so many things.’

  Martine flinches. ‘I tried that back last spring.’

  Kern is heaving chairs, enjoying it. ‘This is a nice old chair. Put it by the window. It will have the light. Take away the chairs with metal. They are hard.’

  Martine says, ‘Louis the 14th.’

  Kern mentally translates. ‘Not really?’

  ‘I bought them from a man called Louis on the 14th.’

  Kern thinks this is unlikely.

  She studies the floor cushions. ‘These are for young people, not you. Have just two comfortable chairs here, for you and someone, or two friends.’

  She arranges everything like a stage set, the actor in her coming out.

  Martine reels off meaningless names: ‘Claire, Bex, Leanne… Ali, when she’s in town…Bernard, Fleur…Marks 1 and 2… Mat
thias. Pippi and Gretel. I suppose you’re right,’ she says. She murmurs something about ‘an ever more female balance.’ She sighs, helping to stack the tubular chairs in the lobby. Of the banned cushions, covered in Asian fabrics, she suggests, ‘You could take some back to school.’

  Kern thinks this unwise, if not forbidden, but continues, ‘No one can look in, except when they are visitors on the balcony. You don’t need curtains. Take them off for the light and space. The views will be clearer.’

  Martine smiles a complaint. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ Eventually she concedes, ‘Apart from my jungle curtains in the bedroom.’

  Suddenly she takes against the batiks, and the serpent mask too. They work in silence, stripping the walls. Then, pressing against the window, they stare out at the balcony.

  ‘The wiring fence is like a prison,’ Kern says. ‘And it doesn’t stop the birds. If you take it off, you could put a chair outside. There will be sun on you.’

  ‘And moon,’ Martine the woman says, oddly.

  Kern says, ‘Or grow something.’

  Martine mumbles, ‘Potatoes in a trough, maybe, or herbs.’ For no reason, she adds, ‘Not ferns and mosses.’

  She begins to flurry about. ‘I’ve always wanted to do this.’ She grabs a marker from a pot on the TV table and, holding the digital print of a seascape up to the scuffed wall, pens a crude pair of curtains round it. ‘Graffiti,’ she smiles.

  She holds it there with the heels of her hands, studies it close up. Kern looks at it too. In the picture the moon shimmers. Is that a walker on the beach?

  ‘I think I like it,’ says Martine.

  Kern finds Sellotape, more pens.

  She pronounces, ‘Pictures are good in groups,’ but Martine is adamant. ‘I like them spaced. Like windows on a train, look. Or portholes.’

  They’re nearly all landscapes. Martine selects the ones she likes.

  They tape the pages to the walls, let them hang. Houses clustered on a hill. An archway onto a crowded street. A busy square seen from a balcony. Riders on horseback trying to cross a river in spate. Kern feels something developing with Martine as they scribble shutters and curtains with their tongue tips in their cheeks.

  Afterwards, they wash their felt-tipped hands in the kitchen. Kern asks, ‘A garage sale isn’t for garages?’

  Martine grins, her soapy fingers fumbling for the tap. Kern sees that she looks better when she smiles.

  The girl says, ‘I saw a poster in the lift. A garage sale is here tomorrow.’

  37 Match fixing

  Saturday 16 February 2013

  In bed that night, Martine drops like a stone into the old Sri Lankan dream, and it continues where it usually stops.

  Lakshman re-passes Martine at the Queen’s Hotel, retaking his seat. Soon he rises again, calling from the doorway for a waiter. But that mustn’t distract Martine from the dream, from her position at the hotel window. She stares down at the crowded, glittering street, the fizzing smoke, the trooping performers, especially the drummers, still glancing at the photos in her hand.

  Someone calls out from the crowd, ‘Jayamal!’

  A drummer with a drooping lip whips up his head. He nods and grins and, still beating, strays from his path towards the voice, starting an animated conversation in Sinhala.

  Martine thinks her heart has stopped, whether in her dream or outside it. She grips the hotel balcony rail. Her eyes rake the throng below. Several men and boys are shouting to the youth called Jayamal; his responses, in a gruff voice, boomerang back. Jayamal, Mohan’s brother. Mohan’s there among the boys, she’s now convinced. But where? she thinks. But where?

  She searches the heads, windfalls thick over grass, mostly in shade. The moon isn’t sick and pale, as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet would have it. Close to the boys who shouted, almost under the shadow of the balcony, it spills light onto an upturned face. The face stares at her. The widow’s peak is prominent, framing the features, the slant eyebrows are filled out and nearly meet. The eyes are big and glistening, reflections in a raindrop. For a fraction of a second she’s torn between calling ‘Jayamal!’, the one she’s certain of, and mouthing ‘Mohan!’, the one she really hopes for, then a hand from beneath the overhang reaches out to the second face, the special face, and without warning, it’s no longer there.

  ‘Did you see someone?’ Jonas asks, at once on high alert in the window.

  ‘It’s the Gajanayake Nilame now, of course,’ sniffs Vijitha’s lately unmasked wife without turning, without sensing anything different about Martine.

  Martine sits back on her specially placed chair. She hunches, and her head drops into her hands.

  ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘Fuck fuck.’

  She presses her temples. Her friends are on their feet now, flocking round her.

  She pushes up through them babbling, ‘He’s downstairs. I’ve got to get downstairs.’

  Arms grab her, pull her back. Adrenalin surges inside her. She struggles.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Gerald says, ‘and have a drink.’

  ‘I think a drink is coming,’ Lakshman says.

  A waiter shows her a tray. She pushes it away. The men still have her by the arms. They’re smiling. Everyone’s smiling except Jonas, who’s beside her.

  ‘Get off of her,’ he says.

  Lakshman is speaking to Martine. ‘This is one drink you may want.’

  Glances pass between him and Gerald. Somehow he makes her take a seat at the table. She’s aware that all at once, in the room, there are men in thuppottiya skirts, turbaned, their oiled chests shining. One’s a drummer; two are. The waiter takes a tall glass from the tray. It wavers in her eyeline, smeary at the rim and bubbling with tonic, packed with lime. Fingers hold it. The other hand arrives and cups it too, as if it’s a flower and she’s supposed to admire it. The glass descends.

  The waiter isn’t in a waiter’s jacket; instead dark, naked cabled arms rise above her. In the left forearm, a small bone twitches. She follows this to a vein, then the vein up to the face. The face, in the street glossed over by moonshine, she now sees to be acned around the nose and mouth. He’s almost, if not quite, as she imagined. She blames the moon for any difference, for misleading her a bit too far into poetry. He’s wearing a T-shirt, the T-shirt printed with a shield. She thinks, The boy looks terrified.

  She says ‘Ayubowan’, unsure if the sound comes out.

  ‘Dear hello. Madam Lady. Martine Haslett,’ stumbles Mohan in poor English, his voice bell-like.

  Within the shield there’s a lion brandishing a sword, the national cricket crest. The T-shirt’s brilliant white. This isn’t right, she dreams. This isn’t right. Mohan should be as fluent speaking English as on the page, shouldn’t be saying ‘Dear hello’ and ‘Madam Lady’ and ‘Martine Haslett’ but ‘I’m glad you have come at last, I always knew you’d come,’ something articulate. He’s meant to be her counterpart, her best opposite.

  She wakes up. She sees the dream is solved, but not resolved.

  Head on the pillow, she has a sudden memory. When her mother first got her to meet Jonas, she walked into that cluttered Harrow front room and found two men sitting. A compact, athletic-looking, burnished young man rose, laughing and talking brilliantly. Despite having seen photos, something in her wanted her half-brother to be him, not the untidy, twitching large stranger who eventually mustered a faint ‘Hi.’ Her choice turned out to be some African-American neighbour, invited in to help put Jonas at ease.

  She feels hollow. She expects corny jokes but none come. In the dream, she sees, she’s always thirsted for water but never eaten. Somehow she knows that the dream will never return. And that even that wasn’t perfect. She hopes nonetheless that its resolution, which has come nearest to her rugged side, will be archived deep inside her now that she knows it, just as her mother courses through her, cool and clear. Alongside of course must run the other ending, the real one, the journey to Sri Lanka, unfulfilled. She sees she’ll always have to ride t
he cusp between them.

  * * *

  Sunday 16 February 2013

  Whenever Martine sits on a train, she remembers that it’s not just the landscape moving, that she’s not motionless either, though it’s an illusion others succumb to. Whenever she sees the moon, seemingly immobile, she never forgets that it’s turning. She’s a scientist. She’s always felt the world revolving, pushed with it and against it.

  All that urgency, all that resistance, she now feels must stop. This morning, she sees the usefulness of the moon’s invisibility the last few nights. Maybe it’s a message that it’s her new phase too: her future’s up to her.

  The girl Kern is in her bedroom, singing more and more wildly to some foreign song, by now nearly unbothered, so it seems, whether Martine hears her. Martine raises the water jet to Sancho. Maybe, she thinks, Kern’s foreignness is the answer. Maybe all I want is the exotic, some kind of opposition. She has a flashback to Kern’s bedroom: among the lineup of iPad and iPhone and homework pages on the desk, an essay headed ‘Communication and Culture: Otherness module’. My preoccupation with maleness, she thinks, condensed and packaged into a module.

  She thinks of Kern, that she’s quite a character, wonders now what her fuss was all about before the girl came.

  She makes a clear decision. Today we’ll leave Sancho in his cage to go to the garage sale. We’ll reach the lock-ups near the Towers and beg the end of a trestle table and try to punt Mum’s knickknacks, the golf clubs, the unwanted chairs, that boxful of Mum’s thefts. I’ll smile at Kern and watch her, and a few estate boys will circle heedlessly round us. I might pocket a pair of goggles or a Hawkeye model or a compass or something in exchange for Mum’s hideous Woman’s Calling figurine, by sleight of hand, without money being exchanged, without Kern noticing. An illicit trade. An unspoken act, in memory of Mum.

  Acknowledgements

  To Laurie Akehurst, London Transport Museum; Rohanna Burrow, Events Executive, the KiaOval; Jane Bidder (Sophie King and Janey Fraser); Rebecca Cotterell (photograph of hand holding photograph, cover); Chitrupa de Fonseka of the Garden Guest House, Colombo; Edward de Mel, Deputy Residential Project Manager (Agriculture) for the Mahaweli Authority; Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women; Angela Dowman, retired Administrator from the Institute of Developing Studies, University of Sussex; Buddhini Ekanayake of Watermelon Creatives, Colombo; Rosie Eva (moon image, cover); Simon Ffrench; Lizbeth Gale and Tracy Wells, Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives Directorate, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Lakshman Gallage, owner-Manager, the Imperial Hotel, Stroud; Anura Ilangasinghe, Foreign Media Coordinator and Network Officer, Media Bureau, Kandy; Hilary Johnson, literary consultant; Dan Lewis of Five-Fifty (cover imagery); Clare McKeown-Davies; Nalin Munasinghe of the FAO IPM project, Plant Protection Service, Peradeniya, Kandy; Nuno Orsi; Prabash Ranasinghe, the Imperial Hotel, Stroud; Asiri Samaraweera, National Guide with the Sri Lankan Tourism Bureau; Hector Senerath, retired National Expert of the FAO Programme for Community IPM in Asia, Plant Protection Service, Peradeniya, Kandy; Vijitha and Indrani Seneviratne; the staff of the Serene Garden Hotel, Kandy; Andrew Stevenson; Senani Weligamage, Research Officer for the IPM Vegetable Programme, Plant Protection Service, Peradeniya, Kandy; Denushka Milan Sameera Wederalalage (boy of the photograph, cover); and U.I.B. Wijesuriya, Chief Official in Charge of the Elephants of the Pattini Temple, Kandy: for your support, information and help, bohoma stuthiyi, a Sri Lankan tankful of thanks to you all.