Brixton Beach

by Roma Tearne

  Janake’s mother nodded once more. She would send Janake this afternoon, she promised.

  So Janake went, taking the fish and the letter. The blistering afternoon light bathed the beach and the sea-heat burned the back of his neck as he walked. A few stray dogs trotted behind, smelling the fish he carried, but Janake turned several times and shouted threateningly, shaking his fists at them and in the end they gave up and wandered off. Since Alice had gone, the children no longer played beside the rocks. Most of them had been rounded up and sent to the local army camp where they would stay until they were trained. All except Janake. He had other plans. And this was one of the reasons he wanted an opportunity to talk to Mr Fonseka. He walked quickly across the burning sand, his feet bare, his head unshaded from the sun. Soon he passed the rocks where he had helped Alice carve her name. Glancing at it, he grinned. Yesterday he had examined it again and her name, carved with his own sharp penknife, was as clear as ever. He had told Alice she would return but since she had left he was less sure. She had vanished with such speed, and the enormity of her journey, never very comprehensible to him, had become unimaginably distant. Janake missed Alice. Right from the start, even when she had been a toddler, holding his hand, taking her first unsteady steps along the beach, he had known that she was different from the other children who played by the fishing boats. After she had gone, after the night when he had seen Mr Fonseka crying on the beach, Janake had moped for a while, staring at the ships eternally placed on the horizon. They all looked the same to him; remote as stars, impossible to imagine what life, if any, they might carry within them. It was exactly how he thought about England. With Alice gone, Janake had no desire to play with the other children; they seemed inferior by comparison. Occasionally he had glimpsed Esther walking up Station Road, but he still loathed Esther and so avoided her. There was a free school in the town now, but Janake refused to go to it. The town itself was full of edginess. Janake’s mother didn’t want her son to be idle. If the army saw him loafing around they would pick him up, so she sent him out once or twice with the fisherman. But whereas once this would have been enough for Janake, these days it no longer interested him. He talked constantly of Alice, imagining what it must be like for her in her new life.

  Alice will be at a proper school with proper lessons,’ he told his mother enviously.

  Weeks passed and Janake became quieter, less inclined to either go to school or out with the fishermen. The only pleasure he took was in reading his English books. In every other way he lacked motivation. It was then his mother had hit upon her idea, the one he wanted to talk about to Mr Fonseka. She had needed an excuse to send Janake to see him, and here it was.

  Janake hurried across the beach with the sun on his back, walking close to the water’s edge, absent-mindedly weaving in and out of the waves to cool his feet. The light beat relentlessly on his eyes, angular and sharp, making him squint. The Colombo express rocked past. The news from the capital was disturbing. All over the city riots were springing up like an epidemic, but after Kunal’s death Janake’s mother had stopped taking any interest in the news. When she first heard what had happened at Elephant Pass she had cried for days, refusing to speak to anyone. Janake too became silent with shock. Then after about two weeks his mother stopped crying and cleaned their hut, grimly turning her face away from what was going on in other parts of the country. She had recently got a job in the hotel kitchen. They would now have a little more money. And that was when she devised her plan.

  ‘Go and talk to Mr Fonseka about it,’ she said, parcelling up the fish and sending him out. ‘Mr Fonseka will tell you if it is a good idea. Go now. And don’t forget to give him the letter.’

  So here was Janake with his parcel of fish.

  ‘Be quick or the fish will go off,’ his mother warned.

  He counted the ships as he walked. Today there were four, all lined up close together, white as swans, their black, beak-like funnels poking into the sky. Having tried and failed to imagine Alice on one of them, he turned away from the sea and climbed the hill towards the Sea House.

  The road was empty; this was the dead time of the day. The gate was unlatched. It was the first thing he noticed. The garden was silent save for the chirping of giant grasshoppers. An air of neglect hung everywhere; dead flowers dropped from the hibiscus bushes on to the cane chairs out on the verandah and a small metal tray with unwashed teacups stood on the table. The house too was quiet. Janake walked around the back, hoping to see the servant woman, but there was no one there. He paused, uncertain whether to go in or not. Clearly there was no one about. Then he noticed the studio across the garden was open and Mr Fonseka was working inside. Janake hesitated. He remembered Alice saying her grandfather never liked anyone except her going into his studio when he was busy. But Alice was no longer here. Aware of the fish wet against his arm and the unopened letter, Janake hesitated. As he stood wondering what he should do, Bee wiped his hands on a rag and came to the door. Janake saw him strike a match and light his pipe. And he saw with a sharp spurt of shock that the old headmaster looked terrible.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, before he could stop himself. ‘Sir, are you ill?’

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Bee said impatiently, not hearing. ‘Don’t just stand there, boy. What d’you want? Is it the cook?’

  Janake swallowed. Mr Fonseka didn’t seem to recognise him.

  ‘It’s Janake, sir,’ he said cautiously.

  Mr Fonseka had a reputation of being fierce if annoyed.

  ‘I know who you are,’ Bee said, irritated. I’m not senile yet.’

  He stepped back, letting Janake in.

  ‘What’s this?’ he added, spotting the soggy parcel Janake was carrying.

  ‘Fish, sir. From my mother. Caught this morning.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ Bee asked, glaring at him. I’m here alone at the moment. Mrs Fonseka has gone to visit our daughter.’

  Janake stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say.

  I’m sorry, sir, my mother insisted. And she gave me this letter to bring to you, from the doctor.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’ Bee said, taking it hurriedly from him.

  He seemed to relax a little.

  All right, go and leave the fish in the kitchen. And wash your hands before you come back.’

  The walls of the studio were hung with etchings. Bee was staring at them when Janake returned. The letter was opened and on his table.

  ‘They aren’t quite right yet,’ he said, seeing Janake looking at them, adding in a different voice, ‘When did the doctor visit?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Well, if he comes again, which I doubt, tell him I’m going to Colombo soon and that I’ll see what I can do to help. Okay? Will you remember that?’

  Janake nodded. The prints on the wall were small, intense images in black and white. In one a girl stood staring at a severed sheep’s head served up on a plate. Behind her a group of children jumped in and out of the sea, silhouetted against the sun. The girl had the unmistakable features of Alice. The whole feel of the image was one of suppressed violence. The black was very solid; the etching marks were furious.

  ‘I wanted to ask your advice,’ Janake said at last, hesitantly.

  Bee appeared lost in thought.

  ‘Sir?’

  Bee turned.

  ‘I was…my mother…’ Janake swallowed. ‘She wanted me to join the Buddhist monks, sir. I would be able to get an education and…’

  He stopped.

  Bee was staring at him. For a moment he thought Mr Fonseka was going to shout at him.

  ‘You see, sir,’ Janake said quickly, ‘it’s the only way for someone like me to get any sort of education. I want to do something for this country. I don’t want to be a fisherman. I would like to be able to help people like Kunal. I would like to do something for the good of this country. We are a Buddhist country, but we don’t behave like Buddhists any more.’
>
  He swallowed.

  ‘I’m nearly thirteen, sir. I want to do something.’

  There was a silence. A thread of a breeze tugged at one of the etchings and it fluttered to the ground.

  ‘One day I know Alice will be able to; she will study in the UK and learn many, many things. But I do know about what it means to be a Buddhist and this is the way I think I can be of help.’

  It was the longest speech he had uttered and Mr Fonseka was looking at him with an expression in his eyes that was hard to decipher. He still looked terrible, but he was no longer frowning. There was something helpless about the way he was looking at Janake.

  ‘That’s a very good idea, Janake,’ he said faintly, at last.

  At the beginning of December in this first year in their new home, Sita got herself a job doing alterations for a dry cleaner. She began mending zips, turning up trouser legs and changing the hemlines of skirts.

  ‘Is this the best job you can find, men?’ Stanley asked her, astonished.

  But Sita didn’t care. She wanted to work from home, in order to be there when Alice returned from school. Unlike her father, Alice loved hearing the comforting sound of the sewing machine. It reminded her of her time at the Sea House. She walked home alone now, no longer getting lost, never again making the mistake of crossing a main road before the lights changed to red. Time moved slowly. She had written two letters to her grandparents since their arrival. She hoped her grandfather would not mention Kunal again and in any case, after her last letter, Alice had become strangely reluctant to write another one. It was difficult to explain her life in England. Then, as Christmas approached, Esther wrote. Her letter came inserted into a greetings card. Alice opened it cautiously. Esther’s handwriting, like her grandfather’s, brought a sharp stab of longing.

  Are you enjoying life in your foreign country? Esther asked.

  And:

  The fighting is very bad now. Mother does not let me go out at all, even with Anton. D’you remember Anton? He wants to marry me!!

  Faintly, Alice heard the strains of fairground music.

  Are your English friends better than the people here? Esther went on.

  Discarded life leapt from the pages of the letter. Another sort of life. The fine curled script, the thin cheap paper, the thought of Esther sitting on the verandah step as she wrote, was too much to bear.

  ‘Nice of Esther to write,’ Sita remarked, her mouth full of pins as she made huge garish-patterned shift dresses for the West Indian women who now appeared regularly at the house, like crows around a rubbish tip.

  Stanley read Esther’s letter when Alice showed it to him but made no comment. Of late, her father spoke less and less.

  Christmas was round the corner. Alice’s school was busy with the nativity play and the carol concert and the Christmas party, but by a stroke of luck and by staying silent, she had managed to avoid being involved in any of them. The days had drawn in. On most days, by early afternoon, heavy low clouds descended, obscuring the light. Alice found this lack of daylight oppressive. It seemed to rain all the time in slow, never-ending motion. The plane trees were now bare and piles of unswept leaves rotted on the corners of pavements. Sometimes on her way back from school she had a fleeting picture of the sea in Mount Lavinia, but mostly she just felt as though she had been living in darkness forever.

  One evening Stanley came home with a surprise for them. It was a television set.

  ‘Now you don’t have to spend all your time in your room,’ he told Alice with a thin smile.

  He smelled of drink and later when she was in bed she heard her parents fighting yet again. Alice stared at the faint outline of flowers on her wall. The shouting increased its muffled anguish, going on for so much longer than usual that she wondered if she should go downstairs. She wanted to shout to them to stop; she wanted to tell her grandfather. He would have known what to do. Sometimes she wanted Bee so badly that the knot in her stomach grew into a physical pain and her head ached constantly. She waited, her body like a coiled spring, for the coconut shells to be thrown and her mother to rush out screaming, but nothing much else happened. Her parents just went on and on, their voices rising and falling to a mysterious rhythm of their own. Finally Alice must have fallen asleep. When she woke it was morning and the house was still.

  She stared at the drawings pinned up on her wall. Most were of Sita and Stanley and the dead baby, but one or two were of Bee and herself. Her father would have flown into one of his rages had he seen them, but as neither of her parents ever thought to come into her room she felt safe from discovery. In the finely tuned sensibilities she was developing, she was beginning to be aware of certain changes in her father. One night she heard the sound of a car stopping and, looking from her window, had seen Stanley get out. The woman driving the car got out too and then she began to kiss him. Riveted, Alice had stared through a gap in her curtain. After a moment her father laughed, pushing the woman away; then he came in. Alice told no one, but the next day she had asked her mother to teach her to cook so that she might help her a little in the house. A few weeks after this incident Stanley asked her to hang his coat up in the hall. Without thinking, Alice slipped her hand into the pocket and took out a piece of paper. Later in her room she examined it. It was a receipt. One bottle of Blue Nun (What was that? she wondered), two chapattis, rice and a chicken curry. She stuck the receipt into the back of her sketchbook. Then she drew another picture of her father and the woman who had kissed him. Listening to her parents row she began to compose a letter to her grandfather.

  I don’t want to live here, she imagined writing. I want to come back to you.

  She would not write that, she knew. Tomorrow, she told herself as she drifted into sleep, I will write to him about the school play.

  On New Year’s Day with the arrival of evening Bee took his usual walk on the narrow spit of beach. Kamala watched from the window, thinking how like a great sea bird he looked. With his wings clipped.

  ‘How beautiful my parents are,’ May observed, smiling at Namil, waiting for her child to be born. ‘Even when they are not together, they remain as one.’

  All three of them remembered Sita, calmly contemplating their collective failure to save her from her fate. I have been useless as a parent, thought Bee. I could not stop her suffering. In spite of all his love for his daughter, Sita had snatched her life out of his safe-keeping.

  ‘Where will it end?’ he murmured, looking at the sea, but the sea gave him no answers.

  My eldest child, Kamala was thinking sadly. She was the one bound up with my youth and my unsustainable hopes. I was very different with May, more realistic, stronger.

  Very soon, thought May, entranced, as her child moved within her, I will feel what they feel about us!

  They sat down to the evening meal together. It was delicious, in spite of the shortage of food and the fact that the cook had gone away to see her relatives further south. Two unset places nudged them silently. There is new life on its way, thought May, both guilty and happy. Fresh life was what was needed in this place. Sita had not written since May had told her about the baby.

  ‘If I had had my way,’ Bee remarked to Kamala later, when they were in bed, ‘no more children would be born in this country. I would let this place rot and prune itself like a garden. And start again, many years from now.’

  Today, as usual, he had been thinking of Alice. Through no fault of her own, the child would drift from him. He could no longer visualise the places she inhabited. Her only letter to date had made him aware that there were things she did not speak about. Was she aware of what she was doing? How could he ever hope to help her and understand her struggles? With what optimism had he expected to keep her close in all that lay ahead? And while I grow old with longing, thought Bee, she will be changing, becoming unrecognisable. One generation could no longer live beside another. That was a thing of the past. But I will never stop loving her, he thought. I will continue as always. The years ah
ead, lost even before they occurred, were suddenly unbearable. Ah! Alice, he thought.

  In the darkness, Kamala searched for his hand. For over thirty years their hands had sustained each other at the start of sleep.

  ‘Don’t think such things,’ she said, very quietly. ‘Don’t tempt fate.’

  January on the island was the most beautiful of months. The heat lessened and the air thinned. It rained, but not in torrents, and the breeze from the sea cooled the coastline. That January the war began drumming again. After months of silence it marched in two/four time. Soon an orchestra would be playing; a two-conductor orchestra without direction. Playing to several different tunes. Ceylon was no more. In its place was a monster that destroyed anyone in its path. The country appeared to be fighting for its life, eradicating the foreign rule with a new, faceless, persona. Bombs went off like firecrackers, killing first one tribe and then another. Newspaper headlines screamed the statistics. Thirteen men in the Singhalese army were killed by the Tigers; fourteen Tamils killed by the army. The dead all looked alike, blackened, burnt, unrecognisable, strewn across the crossroads so their souls would not rest. A deep hatred lay like lacquer over the land, seeping into hitherto tranquil places.

  ‘Fools!’ cried Bee scornfully. ‘The British were here. That’s a fact. Can’t they see they will always present in our collective psyche, one way or another? They will be present in the language, our love of it, our use and mis-use of it. Our tastes, the feelings we have about parks and landscapes. These idiots call it Imperialism, but to me it’s simply a collective memory. They’ll never be able to destroy it.’

  In just six months Bee had aged. He understood that this kind of growing old was different from the sense of ageing he had felt before. Now he felt physically old and helpless. Alice was getting on with life out of sight, her letters crossing with his, losing continuity with the distance. He hadn’t expected any of this. And although he would continue to circumnavigate the world in his mind, in his heart, Bee knew he had given up. Kamala, watching over him, saw she could no longer help him. Their shared life was an illusion, she decided, for what use was any of it if you could not carry another’s pain? But still, in spite of all this, Kamala was less desperate than Bee. Even the rumblings of war affected her less. There was another child on the way, a life to bring a glimmer of hope, at last. It would never replace Alice, but the child would bring its own gifts with it. This was how Kamala thought, whereas the little strip of time left to them both was all Bee saw. So Kamala went to the temple and prayed. She prayed that the wheel of suffering would be stilled and her husband might find peace, that he might see his daughter and granddaughter again. She was beginning to understand, with simple insight that the familiar Buddhist teachings she had always followed were there to make sense of their everyday lives. Of late, she saw clearly, they lived their karma. This grief, the struggle, what else was it, but karma?