Homesick

by Roshi Fernando

  She had thrown the magazines away, not risking putting them in her own rubbish bags, in case Hugo should tidy the bins for the bin men, as he would sometimes, and find them. She double bagged-them in Sainsbury’s bags, tied the top, and took them to a park bin. At the last moment, she felt a sadness for the lovely ladies she had memorised, dressed as French maids and countesses, and propped the bag against the bin next to a bench, hoping that a lonely man would find them. The ladies were alive to her; they were helpful, kind even. Their bodies, with their warm pink skin, had made her ashamed of her own ugly black, nubby nipples, her beige-brown arms, her servile breasts, which never failed to make Hugo hard. In the middle spread, lying propped on pillows in a state of undress, the ladies’ eyes twinkled with warmth, as if the man behind the camera were a friend, as if he were a husband they loved. As if they could spare a little of their wifeliness.

  The too-large shorts riffled in the wind, and she looked down to her scrawny, lizard-skin legs and her toes, such good friends for so long, now irreconcilably worn and wrinkled. The women in the magazines had been ten, twenty years older than her. They were probably all dead now. It was with indefinable sadness that she thought of the games she made up for them in her head. How they would move with bovine grace through her fantasies, their pudgy toes showing through American tan tights, the only pornographic thing about it all. They would lie languidly on a bed, and she would lie next to them, and as Hugo touched her, she would touch them.

  Walking into town tired her, and she was hot. She stopped for a glass of white wine and some olives at the café at the beginning of the high street. She sat at a table for two outside in the shade and wondered if she would see Rosemary marching through. She drank too quickly, perhaps, and did not order a glass of water. At the next table was a woman in her mid-forties, Dorothy supposed, and she was the type of woman Dorothy had been thinking of. It used to happen like this sometimes. A woman would wander into their working life, a therapist of some sort, or someone who had started up a small shop, and Dorothy would become a friend, in the easy way that middle-aged people of shared experience can. She would ask them their names, pat their hands when thanking them. And that would be all, until the night, in the dark, where their clothes would fall from them, and they would kiss her, when her eyes were closed and Hugo kissed her. Dorothy stood up to pay, but the wine had been stronger than she realised, and the sun hotter. She sat back heavily in her chair. The woman looked over and said, “All right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Dorothy said brightly, “I’m fine.” The woman was honeyed, Dorothy decided. The freckled skin on her forearms shone with perspiration or glittery cream, the expensive rings on her fingers glinting. Her blond hair waved about her face as she stood and walked smoothly over, bending toward Dorothy to smile and ask another question. She said something, but Dorothy did not hear because the top button of the woman’s blouse had loosened and now came undone to reveal a palely freckled cleavage.

  Dorothy thought of the madness of it afterward, as if it were someone else. She reached up, and with one hand brought the woman’s mouth to hers, and with the other, cupped her plump breast. In order to know how it felt, she thought later. It felt as she thought it would, in fact. It felt as beautiful and warm and soft as she imagined.

  When Rosemary picked her up from the police station, she told Dorothy that Stella was on her way to see her.

  “You are a ridiculous old woman. Imagine kissing a young thing like that? You have no taste.” She drove in silence until they entered town again. They drove past the café, now closed up, lights off, a sleeping monument to her folly. From now on it would always be closed off to her. Rosemary stopped her car outside Dorothy’s house and left the engine running.

  “Will you be all right?”

  “Of course. I have no idea what came over me. Ridiculous,” she said, and she gave Rosemary a sad smile.

  Rosemary patted her hand. “We’re all lonely in our own way, darling,” she said. She beeped as she drove away.

  Stella was waiting in the sitting room. She had been crying.

  “Oh, please don’t make a drama of it,” Dorothy said wearily.

  “I’ve made you a gin and tonic and some fish.”

  “All in the same glass? How kind.”

  “Hair of the dog, by the sounds of it.”

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  “Well, you were drinking?”

  “I had a glass! One glass of white.”

  “And look what happened.…” Stella stood, went to the kitchen to see to the fish. On the coffee table, next to the gin, was a photograph album Stella had left open. There was Dorothy’s maiden aunt Megan, sitting on the grass in the Botanical Gardens, next to three friends, all wearing saris, white blouses, and pearls. Their legs curled beneath them, they sat straight-backed, smiling in black and white, the fronds of a palm tree invading the picture on the side, exotic plants she had forgotten the name of swaying above their heads. She positioned the album on her lap and looked closer. Megan’s arm was placed gently around the girl next to her in the picture. Oh, genealogy and genetics are peculiar sciences, she thought, and I hold no truck with them. And yet, Stella? She took her drink to the kitchen.

  “Stella? Why did you never get married?”

  “Why are you asking me today? Why have you never asked before?”

  “Well … because I thought that one day you would tell me. I didn’t want to pry.…”

  “I would stick to that if I were you.”

  Stella turned to the sink, where she was washing a pan. The water arced out and splashed the surface, and Dorothy had to stop herself from saying the things she said—Why do you put the tap on full? or Can’t you be more careful? It would lead to the inevitable snapping and bickering, the tired nonsense they always spoke to each other, a couple of old maids.

  “She thought I was a man,” she said instead.

  Stella looked around, appraising her. She nodded. “You do look like a man in Pappa’s clothes.” She turned back to the sink, wiped down the surfaces with the drying-up cloth.

  “Shall we eat?” she said. Then: “Would you like me to stay? I could move in for a while if you want.”

  They sat at the table, and the things Dorothy never said wanted to come: I am like you, she wanted to say. I loved your father … but—but she nibbled at the plaice and garlicky potatoes and kept her counsel.

  “It’s a very kind offer,” she said eventually, taking her daughter’s hand, “but I think I am fine on my own. I think I will be fine, I mean.” And Stella nodded, and after they had drunk some coffee, she walked out into the night, on her way back to a life that Dorothy had no inkling of, could not even guess at. She had no right to know, she thought. It was Stella’s life. Private.

  When she lay down that night, keeping the curtains open to the moon, she remembered Hugo kissing the back of her neck. “What I love most about you is your smell,” he said. “You smell of honey, you look like honey, I could eat up every part of you.”

  “What are you doing,” she remembered saying, in one of those reveries before she let herself sink into him. “I’m licking your honey skin,” he said. Your honey skin, he said.

  In the middle of that night, she woke to a noise, and she was sweating and she realised that she had been dreaming of the woman in the café and she was near orgasm. After, she listened for the noise again, but it had been her own laughter, and in the dream Hugo had been laughing with her.

  Meta General

  And here is Preethi, off to Sri Lanka, and Simon in the house, not going to work today, unsteady in his mind. Preethi pulling a suitcase downstairs, her mind on other things. The children, all grown up and in their different places: will they be safe without her? she wonders. But they are safe every day, going about their business, one in her last year at university, the other with a lucrative role in advertising. She does not think, will Simon be OK, because she wills him not to be OK. She stops on the stairs, remembers once, at a w
ork dinner, Simon’s managing director saying quietly, “And how do you handle the girls?”

  “Girls?” she had asked, startled. The man smiled salaciously. She looked at Simon then. Looked at his devastating lean toward the director’s wife. Looked at his taking-in of the breasts, the juicy, gravied lips. “They’re welcome to try,” she had said. “He’s nothing without me.” And she’d turned away.

  It was sad to think that that might be true. Preethi, on the stairs, sees his feet in bedroom slippers, sheepskin, bought by her. Was it true? The case bumps each stair, and the day shines in on her, quietly, balancing its rays on her head. She waits a moment, as if waiting to be blessed. Simon sits in the kitchen—look, my kitchen, she thinks. But it is alien to her, this place she created for them both. Alien because someone came in and touched her things. Someone came here, when she was away, and used her cooking knives. Used the fruit knife and didn’t wash it up. She found it under the corner cupboard. A woman sat in her kitchen, ate in her kitchen—who knows, she thinks wildly, sucked him off in my kitchen. She thinks of excited hands tugging at his clothes. And look at him, in his slippers, his hand round a cup. His curls are receding from his forehead, greyness invading the honey brown. At the bottom of the stairs she inspects herself in the mirror, glances toward him, compares them. As separate entities they are fading, their powers less because they are parting. Together they are still a force, she thinks. Together, when they arrive in their expensive coats, with their smart smiles, they are formidable.

  “When’s the taxi booked for?” he calls.

  She doesn’t reply, and he’s used to that. But then she says, “Eleven.”

  “Do you want a coffee?”

  “If I want a drink, I’ll make it.”

  But since he has admitted that she was here, Preethi has stopped using the kitchen. She drinks water from the tap in her bathroom. She buys cold food. Has coffees in cafés. Goes to friends’ houses and admits nothing. Nothing about Simon.

  “Do you remember the barn dance?” she asks him from the corridor. He is silent. She knows he thinks this is another opening to anger. “Do you remember the tall guy I introduced you to?”

  “His name was Freddie. You were at school together.”

  “Yes.” She stops. What use is this? “I should have married him.” As she says this, she sees the photographs in the hall. The boy who is now a man. The girl-child, so warm, so funny. She imagines them as Freddie’s. Imagines them the same, with Simon’s eyes and the curly brown hair that knots across their scalps. He says nothing.

  Passport and ticket check again. Handbag zipped shut, then opened, then shut. And here is Preethi, she thinks, as she looks into the mirror. Here is Preethi, a single woman. Here is Preethi, on her way to Sri Lanka. She looks at her smartly bobbed hair, her still full lips, the cheekbones high in her middle-aged face.

  She hears him stand and flinches away. He will want to say goodbye, perhaps put his arms around her, and it repels her, the thought of him near her. It scares her. She abruptly turns toward the back door, walks out into the fresh, cold air. It has rained in the night, but the sunshine glosses over everything, making it all seem new and tempting. Stay here, in your garden, work it all out, she thinks. And in the past, she would have. Her duty, powered by fear; her ability to think over anger, to not acknowledge pain, all perfectly convenient for Simon. Just keep walking forward with the smile on your face. Don’t bow to it, just throw your shoulders back and smile. She feels the tears in her stomach, pushed there for safety, churning at her gut like a disease.

  The doorbell rings. Let him get it. He calls. He still calls her darling. Does he call her darling, too, so there are no mistakes? She hears him talk to the driver, and she panics, worried that Simon will touch her bag, and then it will have him on it, and all the way to the airport she will worry about his handprint on the handle, and if she takes the bag out of the car, will the handprint transfer to her hand—and she knows any amount of washing will not wash him away.

  Here is Preethi. She sees herself in the mirror take the handbag and the coat-wrap from the hall table. She pulls the front-door key from her bunch and leaves it pointedly there. She has no intention of coming back. When she returns, she will find somewhere new to live. But she has months to think about it. Here she is politely nodding her thanks as the driver takes her bag with his rough, huge hand. And when they are alone, she watches Simon approach her, watches him attempt to move toward her. She skips away, and quicker than a cat, she is through the front door and away from her marriage. And she never looks back, never sees Simon with the tears in his eyes. But she does see the slippers as she passes him, and his hands, his lovely hands, fall as they reach for her. She will remember his hands, as she will only remember the good times, when they loved irrevocably.

  •

  It is the madness of love gone that takes her there—to the sad little paradise island, its understanding lost to itself, the way her own sense of self is lost. Victor, her father, is long dead: she wishes to visit a semblance of him, the old relatives, gnarled like trees in a fairy tale. And the last of them toward the north are travelling away from homes that have been a part of her family for generations. The war is finally defeating them, and just as her anger for Simon is abating and moving toward sadness, so her anger toward the Sinhalese government is becoming stronger, braver. She will travel toward the war, daring it to strike her, knowing her passport is British and untouchable. Maybe she could get a story into a national newspaper? Get a book out of it.

  She stays a few nights in an air-conditioned hotel in Colombo. She has savings in Sri Lanka, the rent from some property of her mother’s. She contacts the people in her little notebook, still puzzling over the pronunciation of names, at times quite happily corrected by sharp receptionists at various offices. She tries to hire a driver, knowing there are few people who will drive to the belt outside the war zone. She makes discreet enquiries. Phones a cousin and then her cousin’s friend, who has contacts in the military. No. She doesn’t want to go that way—the Western way, wearing a flak jacket and looking on from the inside of an air-conditioned vehicle. If she is to go to her father’s village, she will go herself, by bus, train, car.

  Preethi has withdrawn a few million rupees. She has a last dinner in the marble-floored restaurant overlooking Galle Face and the sea. She has ordered an arrack cocktail: arrack, passion fruit cordial, and ice. As the sun sets, she sips and allows the taste to permeate, allows the alcohol to throb into her head: she is Preethi, the woman who has run away. Out there, on Galle Face, boys sail kites, throw balls. They play cricket into the sunset, and she enjoys their show. She realises tomorrow she is travelling into the unknown.

  •

  It is the little boy running who makes her realise: here is Preethi, making her biggest mistake. The boy’s flip-flop comes off as he runs ahead of the bus, and then he falls. He does not get up. As the bus drives past him the dust clouds over his body, so she cannot see if he is dead. She stands. “Stop!” she shouts. The man at the front has heard but ignores her. “Stop! I want to get down.” The man shakes his head vigorously at her; the driver, his eyes red-rimmed, looks at her in the rearview mirror.

  “No stop,” the man at the front says. He is young, maybe the same age as her son. She remains standing.

  “Stop. Now,” she says. They are fifty yards away from the boy. It was the way he carried himself, holding his arm before him. She pulls her bag from the seat next to her. The bus stops in the middle of the road, and she jumps from it. They are near to Vavuniya, the woman on the opposite seat had told her. Her father’s family will live near enough, she thinks. Everything she has passed is familiar and not familiar. She has no idea what she will face. LTTE soldiers everywhere, perhaps. As she jumps from the step of the bus, it pulls away, and her bag is still on it. She yells, “Hey!” and the bus stops again, lets her pull the bag down. She stands in the middle of the street, pulls the handle up on the bag, walks toward the boy, who is pr
ostrate still. She notices the silence as the bus pulls away. Sees houses in ruins around her. She is scared, so scared that she thinks she may wet herself. She reaches the boy. Crouches down. And then she hears the crack in the distance—gunfire? It is the first time she has heard gunfire—ever? No, she heard people shooting pheasant once on a visit to a university friend in the country. It didn’t sound like this—like American war movies, an unreal, make-believe sound.

  The boy is not bleeding, and not dead. His eyes are closed, but he is breathing. The gunfire again, and nearer. She gets low, and his good hand comes up, pulls her over, so that she lies sprawled on top of his legs and in a ditch below him. She feels liquid drench into her blouse, smells the stench of it. Sees its blood-redness seep.

  “Fuck!” she says. The boy holds her down.

  “You wait,” he says.

  “Fuck,” she says, because she has wet herself.

  They lie for half an hour, maybe an hour. The gunfire abates, sounds farther away. He sits up, pulls her up.

  “Come,” he says. When he stands, she sees she was right: his arm is misshapen, the elbow pointing inward toward his body, the forearm is wasted, the fingers thin and bent backward. He takes her hand with his good hand and leads her quickly to a side alley. Everywhere there are red puddles, some still wet, some dried, holes in the walls, a shoe, a slipper. Farther away she can see a leg, single and forlorn.