Homesick

by Roshi Fernando

  She said nothing more. He promised to write soon, told her to call whenever she wanted to call. Meg woke, and she put her in the pram and walked down to meet Tony for lunch.

  •

  In October Tony noticed a growth at the base of his spine. He continued with his work and with his reading of his mother’s papers. At first, she treated the growth with as much lighthearted disdain as he did, but she remembered his mother’s dying months, the way she dimmed, diminished. He refused to go to the doctor, and then, when he finally did, it was too late. They amputated a leg, and this seemed to him an easy bargain to make for his life.

  When he was ready to come home, it was clear that he could not return to the flat, so they moved in with his father, Bill. Tony spent his final year sitting in the garden of his father’s sprawling country house, watching his daughter crawl, totter, then walk about in his father’s footsteps, while Louisa sat next to him learning to knit. They talked and loved each other quietly, and gradually came to a peace. One night, after she had helped him into his bed in his father’s study and bathed Meg, she sat at the kitchen table with Bill.

  “Are you tired?” Bill asked.

  “Only a little.”

  “I don’t know how I would get through this if you and Meg weren’t here.”

  She shrugged. She was no good at speculating. She was here, and Meg was here, and that was the only way it could be.

  “I mean—well, Tony and I—we’re really lucky to have you, dear.” He was an old man, maybe seventy or so, she thought. He stooped when he walked, and he had lost most of his hair. Tony had inherited his kind eyes, which smiled at her now. Meg had inherited his doglike smile: an immense swipe across their faces, toothy and honest. He broke down, making a gritty sound and sniffing loudly. She remembered Tony crying the first time she met him. “I suppose, well, you’ve been given a gift,” he said. “You understand people. You know how to—”

  “Tony says I shut things away. But I don’t. I just know that my feelings aren’t as important as his at the moment. I’m not as important—”

  “No. Well, you know that’s not true.”

  “Yes. But it’s useful. It’s what I do.”

  “I just wanted to say—”

  “No, don’t,” she said, embarrassed, upset. She would just like to hold them all, there, in their small, significant space, before Tony was taken, before everything was taken away again.

  •

  Louisa woke up. It was the middle of the night. She was holding Meg tight to her belly and could hear Tony’s shouting. She thought—the morphine dose—and immediately rose, her head dizzy, her arms aching from holding the heavy child. But she could hear Bill’s voice, too. She could hear him talking calmly, saying, “No, darling, no.”

  She sat up, placing Meg’s head on the pillow. When people die, she thought, it is like waiting for a baby. No one will tell you when. They come, they go.

  Tony shouted again: “I hate her!” and she knew, somehow, he would die soon. It was like Margaret: how she got bitter and angry. When she saw her life drift beyond her reach, she turned on Louisa. She said, “Little Lolly, so sweet and fragile. You do nothing! Slavish Lolly, stupid Lolly, dour Lolly, sallow Lolly. Lolly the Dolly. I want to—slam you against a wall and take your life! I want to fill it up with mine! I would live your life better! I would BE!” Her last poem, Louisa thought. And Louisa had taken a cloth and wiped the sweat away, kissed Maggie’s head, stroked her hands and arms, swaying back and forth all the while.

  “No!” she heard Tony shout, and Bill’s calm voice all about him. Meg stirred, and Louisa pulled herself away from her baby, reaching for Tony’s old sweater on the end of the bed. She put it on and tiptoed down the stairs. She stood by the door of Bill’s study, which Tony had inhabited since the illness had crept to his liver and spleen. The violet smell of morphine and sweaty skin seeped out of the crack in the door, and she looked beyond it at Tony crying. He did not feel sorry for himself: it was not in him. It was something else.

  Bill said, “There’s no reason to talk to her. If this is it, son,” and his voice broke, and she saw the gore of snot and tears and grief drip, “then it’s up to us to be the brave ones, isn’t it? She’s here, isn’t she? She had Meg for you, didn’t she?”

  “Fuck it, Dad!” Tony shouted again. “I love her! And she doesn’t love me! She used me! She’s never wanted me. She’s never said it—never demanded: me. I wanted her to look up and only see me. But she saw Mum and me. She saw more than just me. She loved more than just me.” And then he cried. Louisa turned. She tiptoed back. She walked toward the stairs and at the top stood Meg.

  “Dadda crying,” the baby said.

  Louisa nodded.

  “Dadda want me. Dadda want me.”

  “You want to see Dadda?” Louisa asked through her tears.

  The baby nodded.

  Louisa carried Meg into the room, their arms about each other, scared and shy and knowing.

  “Dadda want me,” Meg said loudly confident to Bill.

  Bill sobbed. “Why you laugh at me, Grampy? Lulu, Grampy not laugh at me want Dadda.”

  “I want you, Meggie,” Tony said.

  Louisa carried Meg to the double bed and laid her in the middle so that Meg could lie on her side and look Tony in the eye. They stared at each other, and Louisa tucked the end of the sheet and quilt over the child’s feet and legs. She was soon asleep again.

  Louisa sat in a chair next to the drip, next to Tony. “It hurts,” he said before he too drifted into sleep. Meg woke in the morning when the birds began to sing. She turned to her father and kissed his face, but he was gone.

  •

  The package her father sent to Louisa contained slide transparencies. There were pictures of their holiday when she was six, the picture of the sunrise at the airport in Bombay, the glowworms too, faded lines of light across her small Meg-like face, slides of her in nappies, sitting at tables with pens scrawling, and the detritus in the background of early toys, ornaments, shoes, and coats, like piles of dusty gold to Louisa. Pictures she had never seen of her life before a darkness had fallen and she had lost herself. And in every picture, she smiled or laughed or fell over with guffaws.

  •

  Louisa took the envelope back to the library. A single cream envelope with a few poems by Margaret, and a diary of the fledgling days of Margaret’s love for her. It was in this envelope that she discovered the poem about love, the one that became famous: the one that said, “we search, and re-search, and sometimes, we find what we are looking for.” She burned the diary, of course, and she knew it was a shame, a pity. But what was there to do? No one—not Meg, or anyone else—should know about Margaret’s feelings for her. They belonged to her. And putting them away in an envelope for others to discover was something that she could not do.

  The Terrorist’s Foster Grandmother

  Gertie got on the bus at ten past nine, on her way to see Nandini. Gertie was used to being a widow: it had been more than thirty years since her husband had died. Nandini had lost Victor so recently, the rawness of it was in every word she spoke, every smile that failed. Gertie took three buses there and three buses back, twice a week, in order to sit quietly with Nandini in her kitchen and sip tea. Her arthritis was acting up today, her bad hip aching. The world seemed in pain this morning, jittery. People fluttered on and off the bus, the voices more urgent than usual.

  Since coming to England in the sixties, Gertie had always used buses. Sometimes trains, never the tube. So there had been many bus journeys, too many to even estimate. There were a few memorable ones: with Reggie, when he had his heart attack, and with her foster child, May. May was still there, in her mind’s eye, forlorn and afraid, begging, “But why? Why?” She was twelve years old on that journey back to her mother, and every day Gertie took a bus, she remembered her. Occasionally she surveyed the crowds from her perch on the backseat, looking for a grown-up face that could be May’s. Sometimes she would see a beautif
ul half-black girl with cream skin painted just so with foundation, the eyes blackened with eyeliner, and she would wonder. She would smile, nod from her seat, try to catch the girl’s eye, hoping that May would recognise her, move to her, sit with her as she used to. It was an unrequited passion, a love lost but always hoped for.

  •

  Mumtaz entered the bus at twenty past nine, at Euston. The confusion outside, the sirens: it was a quiet haven inside. He remembered London buses, rides with his mum. It was not his first time back to London—he came with his uncle a few years ago, to a solicitors’, to talk about his parents and about his uncle becoming his proper father. It seemed a long time ago now. Mumtaz still dreamt of his mum sometimes, although there was nothing of her face: just the touch of her, an essence, a smile. And when he daydreamed, he imagined being married, like some of his friends, and having a little girl called May.

  His backpack was heavy. He reminded himself: he was a soldier for Allah, like a sixth-century man, brave and upright, his purpose clear, robustly fervent. He thought of Faisal’s preaching, and instead of making him breathe deeper, stand stronger, he felt dismayed.

  “Bomb Indian businesses,” Faisal had said. “As for Jews—you kill them physically.” All spoken in the warm Jamaican accent of his old London friends’ parents. Indian businesses: but Uncle’s shop was the same as any Indian’s. He had never met a Jew, but were they so different from everyone else?

  Mumtaz moved to the back of the bus, hoping to take two seats so he could rest his backpack. He sat down next to an old smiling woman, who nodded her head as he lowered himself into the seat. He turned to the window, away from her.

  •

  A few days before she took May back, Gertie asked the girl if she remembered how she had been abandoned. She was not supposed to have asked a question as bald as this. No going back to the past, the social worker said. Only positive ways into the future! It upset her, the idea that her history, the generations who had gone before her, could be whitewashed away. What anger she would boil with if she did not know the name of her grandmother, her great-grandmother, the acreages of land in Sri Lanka that had belonged to her family and had been lost to debts or sold. This knowledge of land and people far away was what made her. May knew nothing, her mother had never told her, so Gertie told May her history, gave it to her over the four years they lived together. It seemed only fair to ask: tell me your minuscule moments, tell me about before I was in your life. Tell me it all.

  May had told of a bus journey. A simple one that haunted Gertie for years but now only disappointed, as if the retelling of it diminished her memories of the child.

  “I remember the colour of the bus was green and the seats were scratchy,” May had started. Gertie’s consternation was already rising, but she said nothing, simply nodded. An innocuous beginning. “They said it was a surprise,” May had continued. On the bus now, Gertie could see the small twelve-year-old, her hand resting by Gertie’s own on the same brown velvet settee, in her sitting room in Poplar.

  “They?” Gertie had asked.

  “My mummy and her friend Jim. They both took me. They said we were going to have a picnic, but they didn’t take any food. We went to the very end. You know?”

  “To the bus depot?”

  “Sort of. It was in the country. There were no buildings or people. Just trees. And then we walked, and I held their hands.”

  Gertie could imagine her little eight-year-old legs, thin as a bird’s, skipping perhaps: May had always skipped in the park when she took her. Skipping between them.

  “And then they opened a gate. I remember the gate, it was really big and there was a metal bar that you pulled to open it, and Jim pulled it hard—he used both hands and pulled. And we went into the field, and Mum said to be careful to look out for bulls—to Jim, I mean. But there weren’t any bulls.” Gertie remembers the little shrug, the small smile.

  “And then?”

  “Mummy told me to be a good girl and stay in the field where they said.”

  Gertie knew the rest. They had walked away from the field, got back onto the bus, which, she imagined, had waited long enough for the driver and conductor to have a cup of tea and a fag. And they had driven back to town, to their reality without May. As it was Sunday, they had waited until the next morning to use the phone box opposite their flat to phone the adoption agency to tell them where May was. Gertie did not push the child to say more. But May had continued:

  “A farmer found me in the morning. He put his coat around me. It was lovely and warm. They had puppies in their kitchen, and I thought I would stay there forever. But they didn’t want me. Nobody but you wanted me,” Gertie remembered her saying. And Gertie had clucked at her and got up to turn the light on because it was evening.

  The bus juddered suddenly, and Gertie was thrown forward. The lady in front turned and smiled embarrassedly, and the Muslim man next to her flung himself sideways onto his large bag.

  “What’s happened?” he said hoarsely.

  “Happened? Happened—nothing has happened, has it?” Gertie asked the lady in front of her. The lady nodded, pointed out toward the front of the bus, where a stream of people were walking. Some were running. One person seemed to have soot on his face.

  “What is it?” Gertie said to both her neighbours. Farther down the bus, people were fumbling with their mobile phones. The man next to her said nothing, sitting up and righting his bag carefully, checking something in it, and then placing his hands in his lap. He stared ahead at the people.

  “Something has happened,” Gertie said, and she realised her voice carried through to everyone, as instantly the bus filled with noise of people trying to talk on their mobiles and to each other.

  •

  Mumtaz heard someone say, “It’s a power surge, they’re saying on the BBC—my mum says. A power surge on the tube lines. Six stations, apparently.”

  The woman next to him was old, her white hair in a bun. She looked about her for help, he thought, and he looked steadily ahead. He didn’t want to get involved or start talking. He needed to get to his destination as quickly as possible, as agreed. He could not be looking after stray old ladies. But he stole a glance at her: the white bun was collapsing around her ears, and her broad dark brown face, although concentrating now, seemed kind and jolly. When she spoke, her peggy teeth caught on her upper lip. She sat with her hands folded on her belly-chest. She looked like a grandmother in a story.

  You and your stories, his friends would say. For every moment of truth, of disappointment or disaster, there was a story he could tell. For every rule, for every statement made at his group, there was—in his head—a dream of associated words turned into flesh.

  “We’re a generation of Muslims who have woken up,” a leader at a meeting said, and when he thought of the Muslim young men waking up to perform the great jihad, so that we will rule the whole world, Mumtaz remembered a story from school. He remembered Arthur and his thousand soldiers, buried under a Welsh mountain, waiting for someone to ring the bell that would awaken and summon forth their might. When he first heard the story, it had kept him awake that night: the idea that there were men, real men, asleep but ready, men who had given up life, and given up their death, too, for the cause of what? Their king, their country. It had scared him but made him long for the same purpose. To be part of something. More than anything, that was what he wanted.

  The bus started again. It had let some passengers on, and consequently people had walked to the back, were trying to squeeze in next to him and the old lady. He moved his backpack out of the seating and into the aisle, placed it between his knees. He looked around at the old lady, and she gave him a smile, a sideways shake of the head.

  •

  Renee Chatterjee had told Gertie about the tribes of Britain. She remembered a few of them: Iceni, the tribe of Boudicca; Caledones; the Parisi of Yorkshire. When she looked at crowds of white faces, she thought of them as descendents of these tribes. Sometimes ther
e would be a face that Rembrandt had painted, or Irish blue eyes, and it gave her satisfaction to place them. They were geographically classed, and this pleased her. We are all products of our geography, Renee would say, and more than any religion, this had made sense. Culturally, we are made by the mountains or the streams that we live upon, and our composition is as much a product of these natural influences as of our genes. Her friendship with Renee had given Gertie longevity, for it had given her a purpose. Travel became her passion, and soon she embarked on package tours to African deserts and waterfalls, basking in their alien sun and swallowing their cultural mysteries whole, laughing with their laughter. When she travelled in Sri Lanka, it was easy to understand people in just one look: this one comes from the hill country, that one is from Jaffna, this one is fisherman caste—each one classed, clearly defined, knowing his place. In Britain, it was more difficult. When people got on the bus now, she thought of the modern tribes, the different Asian countries all represented in this crowd, the people from African countries, West Indians, and Europeans. She played a game as they waited in the chaotic traffic for police and ambulances to go by, guessing, guessing.

  She turned to the Muslim boy to her left. After some study of him, she could not place him. The structure of his face was Western. He was brown, yet white. His face was sallow in the way May’s had been; his hair was silkier than hers, though, and darker. He wore it short, with a long, thin beard and moustache. He wore a kufi cap and the customary long shirt, like her father’s pyjamas. He was a devout Muslim, no doubt. Strange, she thought, how much these people had become the main complaint for everyone in Britain, even her own people. They made it difficult for the rest of us, imposing their rules, making people believe that they were all brown immigrants. She tutted to herself. What are we to do if a war is fought between Muslims and white people? Where would we be? She would ask Renee next time she saw her.

  •

  Mumtaz looked at his watch. It was nine thirty. The bus had been diverted, apparently. He could hear people talking on their phones. Some said the signals were jammed, they couldn’t get through. He thought of calling Uncle, to tell him he was OK. But then Uncle would have his new number; he had said his final goodbye, he was now a grown-up, eighteen, in the world. It would be mad to phone just because other people were. But Uncle would worry, because Uncle was always anxious if he was even ten minutes late.