Brixton Beach

by Roma Tearne

  ‘Be happy,’ he murmured, as she turned towards him with her sudden smile.

  Was she happy? Her eyes were shining. Life had begun for her, he saw. In the emotion of the moment she put her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For simply everything.’

  And then she was gone.

  In their new home in Brixton, after a honeymoon of a week of cloudy weather in the Lake District, a sudden memory of the Sea House broke over Alice like a squall of monsoon rain. It caught her unawares and took her breath away, floating in the September sky like a kite released from its string. Because of this when they returned she gave their new home in Brixton a name. She called it Brixton Beach.

  ‘What?’ asked Tim, confused.

  He watched her fixing up the sign she had painted. She seemed uncharacteristically determined. He remembered his mother’s warning.

  Are you mad?’ he asked. ‘What will the neighbours think?’

  Far away, beside another, bluer sea, the Sea House creaked slowly in the slight breeze. A plank of wood that had swung loosely by the kitchen entrance gave way and crashed to the ground. Two nails rolled under the paw-paw tree and the haunting view came in through the hole. The sea sent out a sigh, as though it was a mayday signal across the bay. Sita, sitting at her kitchen table drinking tea, dropped her cup noisily. Lately she kept dropping all sorts of things: needles, scissors, pieces of cloth. She cleared up the mess made by the broken cup. Then, with a small sound of relief, now she was completely alone, she went into her bedroom to fetch the dresses of her stillborn child. Recently she had bought a large doll from the market. The clothes, made eleven years ago, were small enough to fit the doll. Taking it out of its hiding place, she began to wash it. After that she dried and dusted it with talcum powder. And began to dress the doll in her dead child’s clothes.

  14

  ALICE LOVED BRIXTON BEACH. Even at the very beginning she knew the house was not the problem. Once she had named it she set about painting the rooms. She painted the bedroom first; a deep aquamarine turquoise. But Tim hated it. It was an unhappy moment and brought on their first argument. Something had to, she supposed, surprising herself with a sharp flash of defiance. She apologised quickly, but the room was already painted. Then, after their disagreement had been brushed aside, she lime-washed the kitchen a delicate duck-egg blue. Feeling the urge to go back to her painting again she decided one of the rooms would be her studio. Tim agreed; he didn’t want her mess all over the house. So she turned the third bedroom into her studio.

  Although,’ Tim said, frowning, ‘where will the visitors sleep?’

  But there were no visitors, Tim’s parents, and Sita too, preferred to be visited in their own homes.

  That was that. The routine of married life commenced. They both wanted it to work. In that at least there was no doubt. Around this time Sita began forgetting to telephone them.

  ‘Why don’t you ring us, Mama?’ Alice asked when she went round with the shopping.

  ‘I don’t know,’ her mother admitted. ‘I think I must have lost the phone number.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Let me write it down, again.’

  On the third occasion, Tim looked at Alice archly. He understood what the problem was.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Alice asked him, a flash of anger crossing her face. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her!’

  Tim grimaced.

  ‘I know she’s a bit young,’ he said. ‘But it has been known to happen. Take her to the doctor.’

  Alice ignored him. Her mother was just fine and she herself was working well. She had stopped making the constructed pieces she had made at art school and was beginning to paint again. As she stood sorting out her colours, she thought suddenly about David Eliot. She had been angry with him because of Sarah Kimberley but, she thought a little wistfully, she would have loved to have a conversation with him about her work now.

  ‘I might build a conservatory,’ Tim said, ‘when we’ve saved up a bit. It will be cheaper if I do it myself.’

  Alice had no interest in the subject.

  They had been married for only three months when a package came through the post with her name on it. Luckily she was alone when it arrived. The parcel contained all the artwork Alice had given David Eliot. Included was the painting she had done when her grandfather had died. A hastily scribbled note was attached with the date of David Eliot’s funeral, which had now passed. His death had come as a shock because she had assumed his treatment was working. The uncharacteristic anger, seen only twice before, welled up in her so powerfully that she crumpled the note up and threw it violently into the bin, along with everything else. Then she burst into tears. Afterwards she rescued the painting, simply because it was of the sea. When she propped it up in her new studio, her anger died down almost instantly. Soon after, she began having conversations with her grandfather. These increased when, a few weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant. The shock seemed to energise the voices inside her head. They swam like great shoals of fish around her. The past, returning out of banishment, was paying her a long overdue visit.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Tim told her, not really listening to what she was telling him.

  His new job and his new status as a father-to-be were preoccupying him. He was pleased, though his mother, when she heard the news, was less certain.

  ‘Alice,’ Tim said, ‘it’s no good, all this living in the past.’

  He paused for a moment, searching around for the right thing to say. He didn’t wish to be too harsh, but sometimes he felt she should stop indulging in all this sentiment.

  ‘The past is best forgotten,’ he told her firmly. ‘You can’t live with a foot in two places. It’s too disturbing.’

  Alice saw he had a point. But, as if they sensed her desire to do away with them, the voices became more insistent.

  Sita received the news of the pregnancy several times over. As always, she kept forgetting about it.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ Alice said after the fourth time. ‘I told you yesterday too.’

  Sita shook her head and swore blind that this was not the case.

  ‘Oh God!’ Alice cried, despairingly.

  ‘I told you,’ Tim replied. ‘I think you should get some tests done. I think you should find out, once and for all’

  But Alice couldn’t bear to.

  ‘Is she doing this to punish me?’ she asked him now.

  Tim shook his head. He had a clearer view of things. It was what Alice liked in him, although he did express himself clumsily.

  ‘She’s going batty, of course,’ he observed. ‘Haven’t you noticed how she forgets everything you tell her? Alzheimer’s, I’d say.’

  He was not speaking unkindly and was unprepared for another of her flashes of rage. But there it was, the word was out. Alzheimer’s!

  ‘Stress can trigger it,’ Tim said knowledgably. And she’s certainly had plenty of that!’

  Alice had a sudden memory of her mother walking in through the gate at the Sea House. The image was shockingly clear. Bee stood behind her mother in dappled sunshine, his face grim. The baby began it, Bee said. And later, Kunal had finished it. Alice swallowed.

  Perhaps losing her memory was no bad thing to happen to her mother, she thought, given that she had no happy memories. Looking back over all the years of her mother’s forgetfulness, Alice wondered if Sita had in some way willed this to happen.

  By and large, Sita ignored the pregnancy. She was still busy dealing with the facts, as she remembered them, of her own failed one. One afternoon when she visited her, Alice was startled to see a row of dolls lined up on the sofa. The clothes looked familiar and seemed at odds with the straight blonde hair and pink skin of the dolls. Seeing her daughter’s face, Sita began to put them away.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you fo
r another hour,’ she complained, without looking at Alice.

  ‘Where are they from?’ Alice asked, confused, but Sita turned her back on her and began packing them away under her bed.

  Alice stared at the familiar yellow and tan eiderdown and the piles of folded clothes that she associated with her mother’s bedroom. Something caught her eye as Sita hastily arranged the bedcovers.

  ‘How many of them have you got, Mama?’

  Sita did not answer.

  ‘Mama,’ Alice cried, alarmed, ‘you’ve got loads more under the bed!’

  Sita refused to be drawn. Pursing her lips, she marched crossly into the kitchen. All the way back to Brixton Beach, sitting on the bus, Alice puzzled over her mother’s collection of dolls. She could not put her finger on what was wrong.

  ‘I never knew she had them,’ she told Tim urgently, later that night.

  ‘Well, maybe you didn’t,’ Tim said reasonably. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  But Alice knew; something was not quite right.

  ‘I think she’s dressing them in the dead baby’s clothes,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Oh Gawd! You really should take her to the doctor, you know.’

  His obvious irritation reduced her to silence. It was only on a subsequent visit that Alice discovered that it was the boxes and not the dolls that were the problem. When next she visited Sita she took a furtive look under the bed. Each box had been lined with white silk. The dolls were lying face up in them. And when Alice put the lids back on, she saw the boxes were coffin-shaped. Trembling, she had no idea what she should do. Her mother had constructed these coffin boxes, carefully, using cardboard and glue. It would have taken hours of work. When had Sita done this? Had she been making coffins while Alice was still living at home? Had she been making them before Stanley walked out? Why had no one noticed? While she was crouched down beside the bed, Sita walked in.

  ‘Satisfied?’ she asked coldly. ‘What are you going to do now? Take them away from me? Tell your husband, Ted?’

  ‘Tim,’ Alice said automatically.

  ‘Tim, Ted, what’s the difference?’ Sita asked nastily, but she too was trembling. Are you going to take them away from me? Answer me!’

  ‘Mama,’ Alice said. ‘We should talk…’

  But what was there to talk about after all this time? Who was to be blamed, who called to account and made to pay for what had been done to her mother? Me, thought Alice, with sudden, clear, insight. I will. And as she grasped the thought, the child inside her sighed and turned over in its sleep. She waited.

  ‘No, Mama,’ she said finally, softly, shaking her head. ‘No one will ever take them away from you.’

  She did not tell Tim. She did not feel it was a betrayal; there were simply some things that she thought were best kept from him. So she remained silent. But she had reckoned without Tim himself.

  ‘You shouldn’t upset yourself,’ he told her reprovingly after one of her visits home. ‘Think of the baby. And,’ he paused, an idea turning slowly in his mind, ‘it might be better if you didn’t see her on your own, any more.’

  ‘She’s my mother!’ Alice cried and, once again, rage swelled unexpectedly.

  And died down again. Tim shrugged and the baby kicked Alice sharply.

  The next time she saw her mother she noticed the coffins had disappeared from under her bed.

  ‘Where are the dolls?’ she asked casually.

  ‘Why?’ Sita demanded suspiciously.

  She had made a cake and iced it with pink royal icing.

  ‘Are you hoping for a girl?’

  ‘No, no, not particularly. We don’t mind what we have,’ Alice said. ‘I think Tim would like a girl, but I don’t care, really.’

  ‘No!’ Sita said, grimly. ‘Your husband isn’t getting his hands on your sister’s clothes. And if you must know, I’ve buried them in the garden,’ she added.

  Alice was frightened. Her mother was getting worse. She decided Tim was right after all and they would have to see the doctor.

  ‘Well, if she does get worse, she’ll have to go into a home,’ Tim said when he heard. ‘There’s no two ways about it. You aren’t going to be able to cope.’

  Alice ignored him. Lately Tim had begun to make her feel hopeless. Was this how her mother had felt for years and years? The shine that had surrounded her marriage had become less bright. She had not bargained for that.

  ‘It’s an old grief,’ the doctor told her, after he had spent time talking to Sita. ‘I would have expected it to pour out at some time or other. It’s just happening now.’

  The doctor made it sound logical and Alice was slightly reassured. She did not tell Tim everything the doctor said. Nor did she speak of the unexpected intrusion of her grandfather’s voice in her dreams. And then, when she had almost come to believe she would remain in this state of swollen, ungainly limbo forever, on a night of velvet stars, without any warning her waters broke and the baby, a boy, was born.

  Nothing had prepared her for it.

  ‘I wish my grandfather could see him,’ she told Tim.

  They had called the baby Ravi. Tim had been inclined to argue, but Alice had suddenly become fierce. She wanted the child to be called Ravi, she told him, in a manner that brooked no argument. Tim had no idea she could be so stubborn.

  ‘Hormones,’ his mother said, pessimistically. ‘It’s a pity, but I’d give in on this one. He can change it when he’s older. No doubt he’ll want to!’

  Alice’s mother looked confused when she heard the name.

  ‘I remember that name,’ she mumbled. ‘Was it your father’s?’

  Tim guffawed.

  ‘No, Mama, his name is Stanley,’ Alice told her patiently. ‘Can’t you remember how you loved the name Ravi?’

  There was no point in bringing up the past, but she wished with passionate longing that her grandfather was alive.

  ‘Just so I could hear his opinion,’ she told Tim, unable to drop the subject. ‘I would have loved to know what he would think of his great-grandson! Although,’ she added, laughing, ‘I could just imagine it.’

  Her face was startlingly animated. Tim stared at her. She looked flushed and desirable, reminding him why he had wanted her in the first place.

  ‘So could I,’ he said. ‘Didn’t he hate the English?’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. It was just that…‘ she paused, struggling. ‘In any case, Ravi is half English, so how could he hate the English?’

  But Tim was suspicious.

  ‘From everything you’ve told me, he might have caused trouble. Best the way things are.’

  Hearing this, she wished she had kept her mouth shut. She had thought Tim would love everyone she loved.

  ‘He was very funny,’ she said faintly, unable to let go of the subject, yet having no means of expressing what she felt.

  The child in her arms woke and cried. It was at that moment, as she rocked him back to sleep, that Alice began to realise how much she longed for the sea again. All her homesickness, dealt with so efficiently for so many years, had, with the momentous event of motherhood, returned to torment her. She felt an urgent desire to replicate those things that once had been hers for the sake of the sleeping infant; her son, Ravi. Sensing the impossibility of making amends, she was glad that at least she had won the right to name him. Ravi, the name of her mother’s forgotten dream-child.

  Thinking this contentment would last, she watched as spring turned slowly into summer and the child grew. Sighing with a happiness of sorts, she believed life had at last moved full circle. Her dreams for Ravi began to grow. At last she had someone to dream for.

  So, our Alice has a son, huh? she imagined her grandfather telling her grandmother. What d’you say to that?

  And she imagined him nodding, for of course he would have been delighted by the news.

  ‘One day I will take you home,’ Alice told her sleeping child. ‘One day I will take you back to where I belong and you will see a sea s
o blue that it will appear joined to the sky, seamlessly. I will show you the rock where I carved my name,’ she planned. Alice Fonseka, Age 10, Colombo, Sri Lanka, The World, The Universe.

  The child opened his dark eyes and in the moment before he cried, she saw herself reflected in them. Motherhood fluttered within her. By the time Tim returned from work, she had lost another day in dreams.

  His wife’s island within its reef of bright waters was out of sight, and life teemed noisily in his own house but Tim was uneasy. His innate sense of order was being eroded. Ravi was what mattered, he insisted, needing to be sure that Alice’s past was erased. Tim knew he would have to be the one to banish it. The two lives could never be compatible. The sea and all it stood for would simply have to go.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said, reasonably. ‘I don’t have a problem with Asians, obviously, and I like the curries. But,’ he added, warming to the subject, ‘at the end of the day…’

  Her heart sank. She was becoming a little too used to the idea of what happened at the end of Tim’s day.

  At the end of the day, I don’t think of you as Asian, not really. You’re British, you’re one of us. You’ve lived here so long you wouldn’t know what to do even if you were forced to go back. In fact,’ he continued, glad she was not arguing with him for once, ‘I guarantee you’d be scared if you were suddenly told to go back to that bloody place!’

  The thought amused him and Alice saw with relief that it was possible to hide all she felt and join in with his laughter. But later on, when he thought she was asleep in front of the television, she heard him telling his mother unhappily that he had married her without understanding this whole Asian thing.

  ‘They’re a bunch of weirdoes,’ he had said. ‘Not Alice, but I mean generally speaking. They’ve got a lot of mumbo-jumbo attached to them!’

  He was silent.

  ‘It’s not Alice’s fault,’ he mumbled, finally. ‘I blame her parents.’

  Tim sounded confused. He had married Alice in good faith, he told his mother.

  ‘It could be a touch of post-natal depression,’ the doctor said, when Alice visited him. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about your dreams. How’s your mother?’