Evening comes. Yasmin and Jim — at least possibly Jim, she is not sure, is merely aware of a presence beside her — enter a hospital operating room. Her daughter lies on the operating table, propped up still on pillows, eyeing with serene curiosity the actions of the operating team gathered in white around her. The doctors, Yasmin sees, have removed both of her daughter’s knees and are sewing her calves to her thighs. When they are done, her daughter stands up and walks stiffly around the bed.
Yasmin feels a surge of hope: She’s going to live!
But quickly the hope recedes. She cannot deny what she knows: This evening Ariana will die.
She awoke to a tightness of breath, her daughter still briefly with her: that innocent serenity in the face of horrific knowledge. A sob broke from her chest: a full, liquid emptying.
Jim stirred, switched on the bedside lamp.
She told him, with difficulty, of her dream.
Jim was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Yas, when you look at me, I cease to exist.”
Yasmin made no reply, for she knew it to be true.
70
PENNY HOLDS UP a small book, hard-covered. A child’s book. “But what this doing here?” she says.
Yasmin’s heart skips a beat. A child’s book among her father’s things.
Cyril looks, shrugs.
Yasmin reaches out for it.
“I wouldn’ go jumping to any conclusions,” Cyril says, raising a cautionary hand.
The book slips easily from Penny’s grasp into Yasmin’s. The top part of the cover is ripped away, only the letter “T” left of the title. What remains shows a faded painting, of sky and sun and a solitary feather drifting away, and when she opens it, even with the greatest of care, the spine cracks with the reluctance of age. The first page is blank, but on the second, she sees in the upper right-hand corner a name.
Her name.
Written in an adult hand.
Cyril leans over, says with compassion, “Is not Ram’s handwriting.”
But it will be a few moments before she can tell him that it doesn’t matter. That the book is the first thing since her arrival in the island with which she has felt intimacy. This old book, this old legend.
Icarus.
Cyril and Penny say goodnight. Yasmin gets into bed. The house settles into darkness.
She pulls the sheet up to her neck, the mattress beneath her accommodating itself slowly to her shape.
Already, she thinks, odours have become sufficiently familiar to pass unremarked.
Then, Icarus light on her chest, Yasmin slides easily into sleep.
THREE
I
MORNING BRINGS AN uncertain sky, distant blue hardening behind slabs of grey-bellied cloud luminous at the edges.
Cyril, squinting upwards, says, “At leas’ they have silver linings.”
Penny grimaces into her coffee cup. “God, if he not depressin’, he embarrassin’, you don’ find so, Yasmin?”
She is halfway through her second cup of coffee, the flavour of the fried bread from breakfast still on her tongue. The coffee is dense and sweet, its steam whitened by the condensed milk. It tastes of a foreignness that would not be delicious elsewhere. Only in this landscape of alien greenery lit by an alien light could it give her pleasure. Like an espresso with two lumps of sugar and no milk in a little café near the Louvre. Like an early afternoon beer on the Ramblas.
This coffee, and her enjoyment of it, belong here. She knows they cannot accompany her.
Yasmin asks about her father’s date of birth.
On the year, there is no disagreement — although Penny and Cyril have to work it out between them and settle on a must-have-been.
The month, too, they agree on, after some toing and froing between May and June.
The day, however, cannot be conjured. Cyril remembers seeing several, in articles, in election pamphlets. He once asked his brother which was the correct one. Ram had smiled — that teasing way that he had — and said that if he could identify the right one he would buy him a bottle of the finest Scotch. But Cyril never got the chance to engage the challenge. On the evening after the funeral — a large and boisterous affair, anger wrestling grief to the edge of rampage, “that anger that we still see today, in Ash” — Cyril bought himself a bottle of the Scotch and finished it alone, although he has no memory of having finished it, only of being alone. He turns a baleful gaze on Yasmin.
What, she wonders still, about his hands, his fingers, the lines on his palms? She has always known her hands and feet to be unlike her mother’s, longer and less slender. So are they, then, feminine versions of his? Did he, like Cyril, have long, fine hairs that haloed in sunlight from the edges of his ears?
But there is no point in asking. Neither Penny nor Cyril, she sees, can grasp the weight of such things above the deafening din of the deeds: the shape of a fingernail above the nobility of the act. She thinks: Veneration blinds.
Cyril says, “Maybe we should take care of Shakti today.”
Penny, swallowing, gives a little wave. “Not today, Manager. Remember what the pundit say.”
Yasmin says, “My plane leaves tomorrow afternoon.”
“Tomorrow morning, then,” Penny says with finality.
2
IT WAS DARK in the study. Through the window the night sky pulsed with the lights of distant worlds.
Jim sat behind his desk, Yasmin before it. Neither could say how long they had been sitting like this. The house around them had gone inert. Lamps recessed into the shelves of his bookcases glowed without reach from behind books and bookends.
A stack of bound reports leaned against a trophy won in a recent office tennis tournament. Silver and gold columns separated by strips of red and blue plastic on top of which a little gold figure waved a tennis racket. In the enervation that followed their daughter’s death, he had been reluctant to participate but he had dug deep within himself, past the darkness, and he had done well. He had, one of his colleagues said, beaten the hell out of the ball.
He acknowledged that the trophy was not a thing of beauty, it was garish, but still he had wanted it in the living room. Yasmin, resentful of the object yet jealous of it, refused. She knew that her refusal had hurt him. But she saw it as a trade: a little hurt for a little hurt. And she wondered how it was that they had come to be here: from passion in the dawn to late-night accountings of displeasure.
“There’s a reason for everything, Yas. Even this. You have to believe that.”
“I have to, Jim? Or you have to?”
It had been months. Jim had carried on, his cheekbones growing more prominent, ribs more sharply etched against his skin. And Yasmin too had continued to function, colleagues remarking on her strength, calling her an inspiration. Every week, though, there were new greyed hairs to tuck behind the black.
After two months, her mother had said it was time to deal with Ariana’s room. Yasmin had not entered it since the morning she last sent her daughter off to school.
Slowly she was getting used to the idea of loss: the loss of warmth, the loss of presence, the loss of knowing the life her daughter might have lived. But she could not accommodate her sense of a life unrealized. There were moments when she thought the pain would rip her apart from inside. She felt damaged, a mass imploding. To enter her daughter’s room was, she feared, more than she could endure: to see the hair tangled in her hairbrush; to be reminded of the smell of her; to envision her gestures in the things that she had used.
3
CYRIL, RIGHT EYEBALL wandering askew, says, “She was always like that, you know. From the first time I met her in the library. Great, great ambition. Curious, curious mind. Nothing fazed her. Business, politics, you name it …”
PHOTO: CELIA APPEARS TO HAVE JUST BEEN TOLD A JOKE. HER MOUTH IS OPEN WIDE IN MID-LAUGH, THE TEETH SMALL AND EVEN, HER LEFT EYE OBSCURED BY A SPRAY OF FLYING HAIR. YET — IT MAY NOT BE LAUGHTER. SHE MAY HAVE BEEN STARTLED. IS THAT HUMOUR IN HER RIGHT IRIS, OR AN
UNLEASHED PANIC? THE PHOTOGRAPH HIDES AS MUCH AS IT REVEALS. OR PERHAPS IT IS CELIA HERSELF WHO DOES SO.
He looks away, remembering.
“Then after we got involved we settled into a quiet life, reading, studying, a little dinner in a restaurant from time to time. She was good for me, you know. Calmed me down. We planned to stay on in England after I was called to the bar. I’d join a firm — a small one, nuh, nothing grand — and we’d continue living that quiet life.
“But then one evenin’ some fellas decided they didn’t like my colour, and let me know it with their fists. From that evenin’ on nothing was the same. I couldn’t get my mind to concentrate. I mean, here I was readin’ law and those fellas were still out there runnin’ around free and there was nothing the law could do. All those nice principles, those fancy words: all empty, meaningless. I jus’ couldn’t go on.
“And Celia decided she couldn’t go on in England either. So we came here. But, you know, there was nothing for her here. She tried. She tried hard. But what to do with all that ambition? All that curiosity? She became good friends with Shakti, they use to spend hours together, talkin’ I suppose, nuh. But still …
“Swimming became her outlet. She was a brave lady, you know. She use to go far out past the breakers to where the sea was still and deep, like a huge swimming pool, nuh. And she would swim and swim and swim — she was proud like hell of her strength.
“I use to get kind o’ frighten. She was out so far. What if she hit a bad current? Or got a cramp? But she had a thing about going farther and farther out, challenging herself, nuh. Ram use to joke with her, tellin’ her to watch out for the cruise ships.
“And then one Sunday morning she swam out and didn’t come back —”
Penny, listening quietly, says, “It was a Saturday.”
Cyril shrugs. “I remember it as a Sunday. Don’t matter anyhow. Fact is, she didn’t come back. Who knows why? Current, cramp, shark. Only thing we know is, she didn’t come back.”
Penny says, “Remember what Shakti —”
“Yes, but she was in shock. It didn’t make no sense.”
“Shakti said Celia was tryin’ to swim back to England. She was the last one to see her, you know, far, far out, swimmin’ strong towards the horizon.”
Cyril rubs his eyes. “Oh, God …”
Penny says, “You know what I think? I think is ambition that kill her. Reckless ambition. She jus’ din’t know when to stop.”
Cyril clasps the photo to his chest, his gaze rushing over Yasmin’s shoulder.
In the dining room frantic with voiceless phantoms, she sees a young man’s eyes in an old man’s face. Eyes perplexed and disquieted — manic with the unanswerable question, How is it that I have come to this?
4
THE MOST WRENCHING thing in bringing up children, do you not agree, my dear Mrs. Livingston, is to oblige them to do all those unpleasant things that life offers — the things we really cannot escape …
Yes, yes. Absolutely. Cleaning up their room. Doing their homework. But I had in mind more substantial things. Accepting defeat with grace, for instance. Responsibility for a pet. Dealing with death. It was a difficult thing, for me, you know. Death, I mean. I grew up in a rural area, you see …
No, no, not the countryside. Our island was too small to accommodate the concept. We were not far from a town of some substance. But where my parents lived was, at that time, attainable only on foot. The house stood some way into a cocoa estate, and to get there you had to follow a narrow path from the main road through the plantation. Even on the brightest day little sunlight penetrated to the ground — it was always twilight, you see — and the night was impenetrable. We used torches but the darkness seemed to absorb the light of the flames. And there was no electricity, of course, and the house was lit by kerosene lamps. We had to invent our own entertainment, and in this environment it is hardly surprising that the telling of ghost stories was a favourite pastime.
I was young. I had no stories to tell. But I listened. And from the stories I learnt that the world was as populated with ghosts as with people. They roamed everywhere, malevolent souls who had been improperly dispatched after death, so that they were condemned to wander aimlessly, terrorizing the living. It was said that the cocoa estate was the kingdom of the dead. We children were warned not to venture into it, for we would not return. We were told that only dogs could see them, that dogs could sense the presence of death, and that they would howl when they did. We had dogs, of course, and they howled every night. I was so terrified I would not peek out the window as some of the older children did in hopes of seeing a ghost for themselves. Is it any wonder that I developed a fear of death as paralysing as the fear some people have of cats or airplanes?
I remember, vaguely, the death of some relative. A man who had been run over while bicycling home from work. We were all obliged to attend the funeral. I remember the stifling heaviness of the atmosphere, men standing around smoking and talking in hushed tones, women sniffling and dabbing at their eyes. And I remember when the body was brought to the house. How the men lifted the coffin with gentle, holy effort. How the women began to wail and sob. How the man’s wife, or perhaps his daughter, I am not clear on this, how she lunged for the casket and attempted to throw herself on it. Oh, my dear Mrs. Livingston, my heart speeds up even now, as I tell you of these things, the fear I felt as a child returns to me like hot and cold rivulets shuddering through my body …
Yes, yes, some tea. My mouth has gone dry, as it did that day so many decades ago …
It was at this point that I buried my face in my mother’s dress and would not be budged. I wanted to see no more, hear no more. I would not be calmed, and so was taken away to a quieter place. Shielded.
I acquired the reputation of being a nervous child, and so was shielded further from anything that might upset me. No one told ghost stories anymore.
And yet I wonder …
I wonder whether it might not have been better for my parents to shield me a little less. To help me, you see, get used to the idea of death. But this was not the way of parents at that time, and the urge to shield remains part of the parental condition. I do not blame them. I eventually outgrew the outrageousness of my fear. I learnt how to deal with death through dealing with it in life.
Then my granddaughter died and this question returned to me. The child’s room had to be emptied, you see. I was fearful that it would become a shrine of sorts, her things undisturbed, a home for a ghost. And so, two months later, I insisted the room be emptied. I insisted it be Yasmin’s job, and I agreed to be there to help her. My son-in-law could not remain in the house. He went to his office where, I suspect, he did nothing.
Yasmin’s knees buckled when we entered the room, and she leaned on me for support. I opened up the windows, ripped the sheets from the bed. I forced myself to be vigorous. Yasmin made the effort, bundling the sheets, readying garbage bags. Then she opened the child’s closet. Her dresses were still hanging there. Yasmin gave a little moan, and fell to the floor. I helped her up, led her to the living room and brought her something to drink.
Then …
Well, to be brief, Mrs. Livingston, I finished the job. I emptied the room. I put the clothes and toys and books into garbage bags for donation to a charity. Her more personal effects — her drawings, her play jewellery, the modelling clay which I imagined would still bear her fingerprints — I threw out.
And I wonder still, my dear Mrs. Livingston, did I do the right thing? Might I, in sparing Yasmin, have left a wound unhealed that might have closed more successfully through the execution of the painful duty? Or, to put it another way, have I left ghosts in my daughter’s head?
5
ASH THRUSTS THE tabloid before her without warning and she accepts it automatically, noticing as she does so that his fingers are dark with ink, as if he has recently had his fingerprints taken. The paper is cheap, fibres fat and so damp Yasmin feels that, if she squeezes, it will drip.
>
Her eyes find the words just ahead of his pointing finger:
ASHES RETURN
THE CREMATED ASHES OF MRS. SHAKTI RAMESSAR HAVE BEEN RETURNED TO HER BIRTHPLACE. RAMESSAR, WIFE OF ONE-TIME LOCAL POLITICO VERNON “RAM” RAMESSAR, MOVED TO CANADA AFTER HER HUSBAND WAS KILLED UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES BY
Yasmin turns the page, looking for the rest of the text.
Ash says, “Don’t bother looking. It end there.”
Cyril, sitting across the table from her, studying her, says, “Page five. Imagine.”
Yes. Page five. Interposed between a story of rural incest and another of urban decapitation. Her father’s place in history?
Cyril says, “The hacks moved on a long time ago. And we have no historians.”
Ash says, “We like the tree falling in the forest. If nobody hear it falling …”
Yasmin frowns through the quickening of her heart. She folds the paper in two, hands it back to Ash.
Cyril rises, hands flattening on the tabletop, pressing himself up — as if he is tired or drained, somehow enfeebled. He wavers briefly, then steadies himself. “Come, Yasmin,” he says with a sudden decisiveness. “Let’s go for a drive.”
6
THE CYNICS WERE the ones who said of Celia, Couldn’t she see it coming? And the critics were the ones who asked, Did her own leaves hide truths from her? The cynics were the ones with the smirk, and it was from the critics that one sensed a measure of anguish. Critics are optimists, don’t you think? As for the cynics, I’ve always believed them to be people who have given up. There is something airless about them.
It was a way of laughing at her, you see, of mocking her. I hold it to be disrespectful. Yes, I admit she may have brought it on herself to a certain extent. This reading of the leaves was a parlour game, but its unspoken arrogance aroused resentment. What, after all, is more arrogant than purporting to see into the future of others?
The Worlds Within Her Page 24