The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q

by Sharon Maas

  Granny managed to brave Mum’s wrath and took hold of her. She grabbed her waving arms and brought them down, shaking her, as if to banish the fury. And indeed, Mum stopped shouting and only seethed. She touched Rika’s head with her foot and said, in a commanding voice that brooked no disobedience:

  ‘You will never see him again. I forbid you from going to that house. And you will go to your room and stay there until tomorrow. Go on now. Go on!’

  Rika sprang to her feet, the heat boiling over so that the words spouted red with rage.

  ‘Yes I know all about you! You’re just a horrible, bitter old woman blaming a tiny child for something that is all your doing. Rajan told me everything. I know the whole story. I know all about you and I can’t believe you’re still so full of poison for a thing that happened so long ago and I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’

  She flew at her mother. Dorothea struggled against Rika’s wild fury, holding back her wrists as her fingers clawed at her face. Rika was younger, stronger, pulsing with a might she never knew she had, and wrestled Dorothea to the floor; but Daddy came from behind and, stronger yet, pulled her, still kicking and screaming, off her mother, while Uncle Matt helped Dorothea to her feet. Daddy wrapped his arms around Rika, clamping them to her body, but Rika’s eyes still clawed at Dorothea from afar.

  Granny saw what was coming, and tried to prevent it by lurching at Dorothea. But she was too late. Dorothea swung back her right hand and with a mighty sweep, hit Rika across her cheek. Rika cried out in pain and anger, and Daddy swung her around, out of harm’s way. Uncle Matt pulled Dorothea away before she could attack again.

  Daddy manoeuvred Rika out of the drawing room and there in the stairwell managed to calm her. He led her into the Annex and to her room. Dorothea yelled after her:

  ‘One thing you can be sure of, you’ll never see that boy in your life again!’

  By the time she and Daddy reached her room, Rika’s rebellion had broken. She broke into abject tears, and, convulsed with desperate sobs, sank on to the bed. Daddy sat down beside her, laid an arm around her, and tried to comfort her. After a while she was still.

  Then they talked. For the first time in their lives, Rika and her father talked into the night, breaching subjects that were taboo, digging up the darkness between them and laying it all bare.

  ‘Is it true, Daddy, that …’

  She stopped. She didn’t want to say the words, didn’t want to hurt Daddy; but she had to know.

  ‘That I am Freddy’s daughter, not yours?’

  Daddy, for a moment, looked flummoxed, distraught even.

  ‘How did you – who told you?’ he asked.

  ‘Am I?’

  His voice trembled as he spoke. He took her hand.

  ‘You are my daughter, Rika; I was your father long before you were born. But yes; Freddy is your biological father. That’s why we named you Frederika; in memory of him. You c-c-cannot imagine the horror she lived through – Freddy b-b-bleeding to death in her arms, so soon after his reappearance. It broke her. And then she discovered that she was pregnant. Of course I m-m-married her; and of course I loved you as my own. B-b-but your mother was never the same again. A festering bitterness stole into her heart and ate it up from the inside. She could not even turn to you for comfort, be a mother to you … it was too much. It was like a madness – an irrational, unfair madness, and the only way she could deal with it, I think, was to direct it at those two innocents; Basmati and Rajan. They were victims too, but she didn’t care: they became the lightning rods for her fury. She forced Basmati out of the house. They went back to the Pomeroon, but returned when Rajan won his scholarship and Ma found Basmati that job with your other grandparents.

  ‘All she had was her work, and she poured herself into that. You can’t even begin to understand her t-t-torment. She turned away from God, from family, from everything and everyone that might cause her hurt. She knew that to love means to open yourself up to p-p-pain; she had reached the zenith of that pain and so she could no longer love. Certainly not me. But not even her own child, her own children.

  ‘Yet I think, somewhere deep inside, she can, and does love you, Rika, but in her own way. Her rage is a symptom of that love. It will blow over. It must blow over. Perhaps this crisis is a good thing. It will force her to confront her illogical rejection of Basmati and Rajan. It makes no sense, I agree; but maybe it’s the only way she had of deal with that tragedy, to come to terms with Freddy’s death. She had to blame someone. She blamed God; but she also needed a target.’

  ‘Well, she had a target! What about the man who actually killed him? Rajan’s father? He was to blame, not Rajan or Basmati! What about him?’

  ‘She was out of her mind with grief, Rika. In that state you don’t think logically. She needed someone to blame and hate and he was quickly caught and put behind bars. He wasn’t someone she knew. For her, they were all one: the three of them, the reason for Freddy’s death. She made no distinctions. It was a madness, a blindness. But, maybe, maybe it’s a good thing this all blew up. Maybe it will force her to face that blind spot. I hope and pray that she will find healing. Somehow. You must forgive her, Rika. You must. Understand and forgive.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ sniffled Rika. But one thing she knew: she would not give up Rajan.

  * * *

  Later that night, when all was silent in the house, Rika crept out of her room. She made her way to the telephone and dialled her grandmother’s number. After a while, Basmati answered the phone.

  ‘Basmati!’ Rika whispered. ‘Sorry to wake you up, but can you get Rajan, please? It’s urgent – an emergency!’

  It seemed to take an aeon until Rajan came to the phone. At first all she could do was cry, and then she managed to say,

  ‘Rajan – I need to see you. Tonight! The gate is locked. I need you to come. Come in the back and come to my room. You know the latticework just beneath it? You can climb up there. My window is open. I’m waiting for you. Please come, please!’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘I can’t talk now!’ whispered Rika. ‘I need to talk to you – I need to! In person! Now! Please, please come!’

  ‘OK,’ said Rajan. ‘I’m coming.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  INKY: THE NOUGHTIES

  It would be ‘touch and go’, they said. Not only because of the injury itself – Gran’s head had crashed against the windshield and split open – but her age reduced the chances of survival. Even if the operation itself was successful, there was no guarantee.

  To put it euphemistically.

  In translation, there was a good chance that Gran would come out of this a vegetable.

  Mum and I sat together in the hospital waiting room while they operated on her. We clasped hands, holding on to each other as if to life itself; Gran’s life.

  Gran as vegetable? Unthinkable.

  Alone in the waiting room, as the dark night hours ticked away, the silence grew heavy and oppressive. It weighed down on me in a shroud of foreboding and fear. I had to break it, I had to talk, push it away, keep it far from me lest it choke me; talk-talk-talk, no matter about what. I snatched at every passing thought and delivered a running commentary on trivia.

  But Mum didn’t respond. At first she let out a few ‘umms’ and ‘uh-uhs’ but after a while gave that up too and let me jabber on. I glanced at her; she wasn’t even listening. She sat beside me with her eyes closed, locked in a world to which I had no access; I might break the outer silence but she’d just created her own. I hated her for it. It was so rude, so uncaring! How could she leave me alone like that, alone with my empty nonsensical words! Why couldn’t she fight the silence with me! I wanted to shake her, scream at her, slap her.

  ‘How can you just sit there like a zombie like that, like a block of wood, like a stone, don’t you see, don’t you realise, don’t you care …’

  And then the tears came, great fountains of tears. I pushed them down just as I pushed away the
silence, but they burst their boundaries and they gushed as profusely as had the meaningless words, reducing me to a sobbing, blubbering ball of nothing, bent forward on my chair and almost slipping to the floor.

  Then, and only then, did Mum break her silence. She put her arms around me and drew me close to her and held me in her arms.

  ‘She’s going to be all right,’ Mum whispered. ‘She’ll be all right, I know it. She can’t go. It can’t end like this.’

  ‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!’ I bawled. ‘I treated her like shit. I-I didn’t know how much I loved her! That I cared! I didn’t know!’

  Mum only held me closer. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she murmured, again and again, as if saying the words would make them come true; as if she really believed they were true. I was not so convinced. She could say the words a million times and not convince me. I had seen Gran. I’d seen her head, seen the blood, seen the emergency crew racing with her on a gurney away into the depths of the hospital, taking away my only link with my past, the last tenuous thread I had to my own roots.

  But no. Not my only link. Not my last thread. There was still Mum. Talk, Mum! Just talk! Please talk to me!

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘Tell me about where you came from. Tell me about Gran when she was younger. Tell me what happened. Why you left. Why you ran away.’

  Those were the magic words. The key to break open Mum’s silence. She talked. Mum, always good with words, released them now not on to paper, but to my ears. Her words flowed like water, sweeping away my tears in their stream. She painted a picture with her words, creating for me a living image of a charmed childhood. She took me on a trip to a city of white wooden houses and wide green avenues, where girls in green school uniforms tore around on bicycles, giggling in glee as they wove through the traffic; of jungle creeks far from that city where the water was cool and black; of a marketplace bustling with life, where fat black women sold succulent yellow mangoes and Hindu shopkeepers burned incense before gaudy images of four-armed gods.

  She told me of the great white rambling house she’d called home, with its magical garden, wild with tumbling bougainvillea, fragrant with oleander and rose, a kaleidoscope of colour, shape and perfume. She spoke of wide avenues where elegant horses ridden by straight-backed straight-faced Mounted Police clopped along in convoys, heads nodding and snorting, shaded by glorious flame-red treetops. Birdsong. Sunshine. Rain thundering on thin iron roofs, waterfalls from heaven.

  And people. A big warm woman with black hair that was turning grey, a woman whose very presence warmed the soul and calmed the mind, and a small wiry woman who did just the opposite: the quirky, irritable but much-adored mother she could never please. An absent-minded but kind-hearted father with his head in a stamp album; a wonderful sister as close as a twin; rambunctious brothers as mischievous as monkeys; a beloved American uncle she saw once a year, who came like Santa Claus bearing gifts; nameless children, cousins and friends-of-cousins, tumbling in an abundance of nature. A brown endless ocean and a teenage girl sitting on a wall gazing out at it, dreaming of far-off lands, and swarthy turbaned men who knew all the mysteries of the universe.

  ‘And then’, Mum said, ‘and then I met Rajan.’

  I clung to her words as they echoed through the midnight silence, holding me as in a trance, a bubble of enthralment. Instinctively, I knew we had reached the climax of the story; the Thing they were so keen to keep from me.

  ‘Mrs Temple?’

  I snapped out of Mum’s dream-world. The bubble burst

  I was so immersed in Mum’s story I hadn’t heard his approach, and even after he’d spoken it took me a few seconds to return to earth and the bleak emptiness of the hospital waiting room. Mum was quicker on the ball: almost at the first word, she was on her feet.

  ‘How is she?’

  I blinked and looked up; a man in a white coat was standing above us. I followed Mum’s lead and climbed to my feet.

  Only then did I realise that my body ached all over, in nooks and crannies I hadn’t known existed. My left knee buckled as my feet found the floor, and I stumbled; my knees were numb. The man caught me, steadied me with a kind smile, and then spoke:

  ‘Mrs Temple … I’m Doctor Stone. I’m in the surgical team that operated on your mother.’

  Mum nodded eagerly, urging him to skip the preliminaries. At last he got to the point.

  ‘The operation was successful … she’ll pull through …’

  Mum’s outbreath was audible, and a smile spread across her face. For me, a cloud lifted and I too smiled. I wanted to pounce on Dr Stone and hug him in gratitude, but instead grabbed Mum’s hand; she squeezed it. Her eyes were wet with tears, luminous with pleading, probing hope. At Dr Stone’s next words a curtain fell over them.

  ‘… but we have to wait to find out the extent of the damage. She’s still under anaesthetic, and we won’t know till she wakes up whether there’ll be any permanent – ah – impairment to her mental functions.’

  ‘You mean …? That she could be …’ Mum paused, searching for the right word, but could do no better than repeat the one we were all thinking: ‘brain-damaged?’ There was no handy euphemism, no softening of the truth.

  A mask of exhaustion fell across his face, not so much physical as emotional. He looked as if he wanted to flee. It couldn’t be easy, giving such devastating news to anxious relatives.

  ‘We just can’t predict anything, Mrs Temple. There’s something called shear injury – sort of like breaking the wiring in the brain – that can occur in this sort of damage. Its extent is wildly unpredictable – sometimes a lot, sometimes none. When it's severe, it leaves lasting disability. I've had many, many patients who have had what, according to their head scans, should be modest injuries, just not wake up. Subsequent MRI scans show extensive shear injury. Other patients fly from the back of a pick-up truck at sixty miles per hour and land on their head and end up just fine because they had no brain swelling or shear. The brain's pretty mysterious. At this point we don’t know; only time will tell. She’s an old woman, and it’s been a lot to take; first the accident, then the operation. It’s a miracle she survived at all, another miracle that no bones were broken. We’ve done our best; now it’s up to her. All we can do is hope.’

  ‘And pray.’

  ‘Can we see her?’ My own voice startled me; it seemed not to come from my throat, but from somewhere far outside me, to bounce off the bare walls and echo down the corridors. I felt drained, my body an empty shell containing nothing but a dislocated tangle of aches and pains.

  He flicked his chin towards the corridor that led into the bowels of the hospital.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘But as I said, she’s still out cold. It’ll be several hours till she comes to.’

  He led the way. Our footsteps echoed in the empty hallway, beating a lonely tattoo into the night’s stark silence. I glanced at the hallway clock: 2:47a.m. We passed a nurse, an orderly pushing an empty gurney, an open door from which disembodied voices echoed into the emptiness. Hospitals at night are vaults where fears fester and hopes are bolstered, human emotion swelling in the still sterility as sludge rises in a stagnant pond. I longed to flee, for all three of us to flee, to sit somewhere in the noisy bustle of broad daylight where all would be fine and we could laugh and chat and be normal. Anything but this.

  Gran lying stretched out, still on a gurney, awaiting a further journey and a free orderly, stashed away against the wall of a hospital. Her head was wrapped in white, her eyes closed in the sanctuary of sleep. She looked so peaceful, so utterly innocent, so frail. As if a puff of breath could blow her away. So un-granlike.

  Mum picked up one of her hands. It lay lifeless in her own, as limp as a cast-off rag. She bent over and kissed Gran’s cheek. Her fingertips touched the head bandage gingerly as if trying to gauge what lay beneath, and she looked up, her eyes searching Dr Stone’s for a word of hope and comfort.

  He had none to give. ‘We’ll know more tomorrow
,’ he said. I felt sorry for him. His duty was over, and he too needed sleep. The rings under his eyes had surely grown darker in the fifteen minutes we’d been together, the stubble on his chin more prickly.

  An orderly bustled up with a no-nonsense air. He grabbed the handles of Gran’s gurney, released the brake and pulled it away from the wall. He hardly glanced at us. We were not his duty.

  ‘She’ll be going to intensive care now,’ said Dr Stone. ‘You can go with her, but there’s not much you or anyone can do. You’d better go home and get some sleep. It’s been a long night.’

  ‘I’m staying!’ said Mum, before he’d spoken his last words. ‘Inky, you go home. I’m staying till she wakes up.’

  ‘Mrs Temple, there’s no point. It’ll be several hours. Go and get some sleep.’

  I suppressed a yawn; his words reminded me of my own tiredness.

  ‘Mum, he’s right. We can come back in the morning. You’re exhausted. Let’s go. Please.’ I yawned again, and this time I let it out. It was contagious, Mum’s hand rose to her lips as she, too tried to veil a tell-tale sigh of exhaustion.

  ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But please ring me if she wakes up and I’m not here. I’ll be back as soon as possible tomorrow.’

  I‘d been holding my breath; I could never have left Mum here on her own with Gran, but I was by now desperate for bed. Mum can be stubborn when she wants to be, but sometimes she sees sense. I breathed out, audibly. Dr Stone must have heard it, as he patted me on the back, and smiled in sympathy. I resisted the urge to hug him.

  ‘Bed,’ he said. ‘That’s what you both need. Come back tomorrow; we’ll all know more by then.’ He pointed to the strip of guidance tape on the corridor floor. ‘Follow the yellow lines to Reception; you can call a taxi there.’

  And so we all parted company: Gran rolled off deeper into the hospital, Dr Stone waved goodbye and turned to walk away. I waited for Mum, who stood watching the back of the orderly pushing Gran away. The orderly and his gurney turned a corner. Only then did Mum turn back to me. She took my hand, in hers, caressed it for a moment and gave me a trembling half-smile.