by Roma Tearne
‘Ready?’ he whispered, coming in.
Ben nodded. He picked up his rucksack.
‘Where have you put the money?’
‘Here. In my shoes.’
‘Why not in your rucksack?’
‘No, Ma. It’s safer in my shoes.’
I didn’t argue.
‘Drink some water?’ I begged instead. ‘It might be some time before you get clean water. And always try to clean your teeth.’
My heart seemed to be lodged somewhere in my throat. Breathing was difficult. Tara was pushing something into Ben’s hand. It was, I guessed, a medal of Saint Christopher. And then, what we were all listening for, what we all secretly dreaded: the knock on the door.
‘Look after yourself, Ma.’
‘Don’t worry about her, son,’ Father Anselm said. ‘I’ll make sure she is safe. You take care and get in touch as soon as you are able, huh?’
Tara was crying as he hugged her and then he turned swiftly to me and enveloped me in one of his bear hugs.
‘See you later, Ma,’ he said in Tamil, as he used to do when he left each morning for school.
And he smiled his lopsided smile and raised his hand in farewell. And then he was gone, following the guide, through the back door and out across the compound, past the faint glow of the jacaranda tree, deep into the thicket of trees.
9
SIX THIRTY. THE BUS IS SLOWING DOWN.
‘Cambridge city, park and ride,’ the driver calls out.
I notice he has a husky voice. Ever since this monstrosity of grief has taken over my life I notice all kinds of irrelevant things. Colours appear brighter, voices louder, birdsong more piercing. While all the time life continues regardless, each day arriving with unstoppable regularity, even though I have ceased to want it. The bus draws to a standstill and I see my reflection again, high against the wintry trees. I look terrible, like a circus lioness, broken, like an eagle without wings, speechless as a violin with no strings. The driver leaves his seat and opens up the base of the bus, taking luggage out, putting suitcases in. A small group of people crowd around him, three, four. For a moment I am distracted and wonder to what far-flung corner of the earth they might be travelling. I will never travel this world again, I think. From now on I can only go backwards in time.
When I was a child, an astrologer told my mother I would go to far-off places none of our family had ever visited.
‘Do you mean Trincomalee?’ my sister had asked, giggling.
‘What nonsense,’ my mother had said, sounding annoyed.
The idea of either of her daughters going further than the next village was not to be contemplated.
‘No, no,’ the astrologer said, shaking his head seriously. ‘Much further than that.’
He waved his hand in the air to denote distance.
‘Overseas,’ he said.
But he had not looked happy.
‘The man is useless,’ my mother had said, after she had paid him and he had left. ‘I’m not going to recommend him to anyone.’
‘You never know,’ my father had smiled. ‘She might. After her marriage, now the war seems to be over. Percy might decide to go abroad.’
My mother had not been pleased with that. If she had thought Percy might have had itchy feet, she scolded, she would not have approved of this marriage. Ah, Percy!
A passenger climbs on board, moves slowly in somnolent mode towards a seat. She is a woman with a shawl around her shoulders, and she sits opposite me in the aisle seat. She places a large plastic bag beside her and takes out a flask. I watch through the reflection in the window. The bus starts up.
‘This is the seven-twenty National Express to Heathrow Airport,’ the driver says into the microphone. ‘You are instructed by law to wear your seat-belts. Please also take a moment to read the safety regulations.’
The woman pours tea into the lid of her flask and begins to sip it. She sighs.
‘How do you switch this cold air off?’ she asks out loud.
No one answers. We are moving through another town; houses blind as moles, doors closed, curtains drawn, unwelcoming.
‘Are you all right?’ asks the woman with the flask.
Home is no longer home, I think. The words rise, gloved and folded, opening out, first through my stomach, moving across my body, up through my throat, exploding silently in my brain. Catching me unaware again. Help me!
‘Excuse me, are you ill?’
I become aware of the woman leaning towards me, her watery green eyes fixed on my face. I bend forward, straighten up, try to arrange my features, try to control myself. She is holding something out to me and it is a moment before I realise it is a paper hanky.
‘Do you feel sick?’ she asks again, seriously. ‘Shall I get the man to stop the coach?’
I shake my head, grief, held in for several hours now, is beginning to burst its barrier. I stare with heavy eyes, dimly aware that I am crying.
‘No,’ I say in a voice I don’t recognise as my own. ‘My son has died.’
It is the first time I have uttered the words out loud. Others have said them to me. The man on the telephone, the neighbours, the ambassador who sent the car and met me at Kataynika airport, the officials here in England, the lawyer, Ria, all these people have said it. Over and over again, as if I needed to hear the words, as if hearing such words once was not enough. And in all that time, even though my mind was screaming his name, even though the sound of it brought the blood to my mouth, I could not utter a word. There flashed before me an image from long ago: the little torso lying along my left forearm, the nape of his neck in the crook of my elbow as I soaped him. And how, when I told him how wonderful he was, he would look up at me and listen to the sound of my voice, intently. His one-week-old eyes, shining pools. Then I would feel him relax, as slowly, calmly, he would kick his silky limbs in the water of the blue plastic baby bath. My little swimmer! My son. Help me, God!
The woman is staring at me, mouth slightly open. She is not English but I cannot place her nationality.
‘Madonna!’ she says.
Her voice is warm and soft; horrified. And through the blur of tears, I watch as she offers me a sip of tea from the lid of her flask.
It was a low building they took me to. Low and grey. There were no windows. I will never forget. All my life lay there. When I got out of the car I could not make my feet walk. This then was where they were keeping him. I had not been aware that, until this moment, in spite of everything I had been told, still I had hoped his death was a lie. Such was my desperation to be with him that I had focused only on the journey. I looked up at a sky filled with terror and saw my hope die. Ultimately love has no power, I thought. Ria sat without moving in the car. She had already seen him, of course. It was she who had seen him fall; she was the chief witness.
Ria was his friend. Or so she says. The last person to know him. I nodded to myself. The very thought of the woman, Ria, fills me with a blinding rage. When I first set eyes on her, her coldness, that icy remoteness, was terrifying. The coach speeds silently through a wintry sky that lightens and lightens and makes me think of the broken birds’ eggs Ben used to collect as a child. The memory brings something else to mind but the thought hovers and then evades me. I stare at my hands. They tremble.
‘Have some tea,’ the woman urges.
She hands me the flask, moves her bag up on to the overhead shelf and settles in her seat. When she smiles, her lower jaw, which is bigger than her upper one, sticks out, giving her a strangely resigned air. She is Italian, she tells me. The last thing I want to do is talk to her, but her face calms me, very slightly. The light outside the window is brightening. I am leaving, I think, again.
I will never forget that building. There had been no grass, no plants growing, only earth that had been turned, like a newly dug grave. The bus lurches and stops before some traffic lights. It waits then moves off again, speeding along a smooth dual carriageway. My mind is playing its new game of hid
e and seek. Like a wound that bleeds, it occasionally stops, only to start up more vigorously again. I must expect this to happen all the time from now on.
Ria, I think, my mouth filling with grief. Maria. My son was in a relationship with her.
I hear my breath, uneven and hot. Now it isn’t simply my hands that are shaking. How had Ben got involved with such a woman? She herself never said a word, but I could work it out. It didn’t take much; the row of blown birds’ eggs, the photographs of my son, the clothes, brought by her, washed and ironed, folded. I shake my head. What had they had in common? Questions thrust their way into my consciousness. I noticed her eyes first, so blue and brilliant, almost vitriolic; I couldn’t look at her for more than a moment. I had the strangest sensation of looking down into a dark empty pit at something that was no longer quite human. My next thought was of Tara. Waiting for him at home. I remember thinking, What shall I tell her?
‘Ria saw them kill him,’ I could say.
However terrible it was for her to see it happen, by the time we met at the airport she was composed. There she stood, at the barrier, waiting, with a man from the police commission. And a lawyer too. He will be paid, but not by me.
I shiver, remembering. Arriving has been terrible, leaving will be worse.
‘I am leaving him,’ I whisper inside my head.
The woman in the next seat glances sharply at me. Have I spoken out aloud? I don’t know or care. Closing my eyes, I begin tormenting myself again.
‘Can you imagine?’ I ask myself. ‘Here was a face that I had created.’
Limbs that had been made with the minerals from my own body, love that had created love. Here were the eyes that had opened their gaze for me, closed forever.
I stop, confused. Am I speaking out loud? I can’t tell the difference. Continue, continue, I think. A mouth that smiled first at me, unsmiling now, lips that had spoken their first words, a hand so small that once I held it in the palm of my own. Now motionless. How could a few shots vanquish him so completely? Will I ask these questions forever? For the rest of my life?
‘You have to find a way of explaining this to yourself,’ Eric had said.
I open and close my eyes, again. Not so fast, I say to myself. They had laid Ben on a slab. He was waiting for me to identify him. When he was born I had no need to do this, you murderers, I wanted to scream. He had gone straight into my arms, straight to my breast. Loved, safe, protected. I am crying again in a way that hurt right down in my heart and my stomach. Help me, I want to say. I am in a dark place next to a dark place. I, who hardly ever shed a tear, even when Percy disappeared, now cannot stop. The Italian woman puts her hand on mine. It is warm, soft. Instantly I open my eyes and the tears stop.
‘They shot him,’ I say. ‘Not once, not twice, but several times. Just to make sure.’
The coach passes silently through East Anglia. The Italian woman sits without moving.
I saw the photofit of the man they were looking for.
‘See,’ they said, ‘see how we made the mistake. See how similar they looked.’
It was nonsense; there was no similarity. Could they not see from the way his hair grew, straight up and glossy black, the shape of his beautiful mouth, the smoothness of his skin?
I had gulped for air. I would never have enough air to breathe again. Never.
‘Of course, they did not have any time to notice. Shoot to kill. Kill first, think later.’
The woman beside me sits, head bowed, still holding my hand. I must be talking to her.
‘In my country,’ I say, hearing my voice rising at the mention of home, ‘they kill because of war. You expect them to kill; you are surprised if you don’t get killed. Here, they kill out of terror.’
The woman looks shocked.
‘Do you have a lawyer to fight for you?’ she asks. ‘Is he going to take the matter up?’
Now I am crying so hard that I don’t answer.
‘Whatever you decide to do about this, you must not see it as an alternative to grieving,’ the woman says. ‘You must let yourself lament this terrible chapter in your history.’
I hear her voice through the thick fog of my struggle. All I want, I tell her, or maybe I just think it, is to hear his voice just one more time. Just once; then I will be satisfied. See him walk towards me. He used to say my name with that question in his voice. She is nodding. Then she hands me some paper hankies.
‘What has been lost cannot be comprehended easily. Maybe you will never understand.’
How many ways, I wonder bleakly, would I be crucified by this loss? What power did motherhood have to create such pain? Had I been burnt all over, had I had petrol poured on me, had I been tortured, it could not have been any worse. The bus speeds through a landscape of flat indifference. It is haunted by absence. Bare trees on dead earth. Flocks of birds rising as one from the ground. The whole country is a requiem, I think. This is England. This place I have visited so often in my dreams, this country whose history had so completely been entwined with ours; now, the resting place of my son.
‘Will you take him home? Will they send his body to your country?’
At that the floodgates really open. I tell her there is no question of it. The Tigers would see him as a betrayer of their cause, the army as a terrorist. So no, there was no safe place to bury him at home.
They had led me into a waiting room. Two of them beside me; a policewoman, a pretty young girl with blonde hair, and one other in plain clothes. I remember a green carpet on the floor and a potted palm in the corner, a smaller version of the sort that grow wild at home. I glanced at it. Everything my eyes alighted on filled me with horror. In some parts of Sri Lanka, in the rich Singhalese gardens of the low country, palms grow to magisterial heights. But here, in this room, the pot that held the palm was dry and needed watering, the leaves were dirty green. It will die in this place, I thought, certain. The policewoman was talking to me. Someone, she didn’t know who, had paid for Ben to be embalmed. Her radio crackled. I must have answered because she nodded very slightly. I could see the tension in her face and I wondered what her own life must be like. She was nothing like the police in Jaffna. I could imagine this woman, when she took her uniform off and put her hair down. I could imagine her going dancing with a boy, laughing, eating, doing all those things necessary in order to make human life bearable. Then, as I stood woodenly, shivering in my thin sari, wearing the coat Ria had given me, I heard another sound in the room next door, at first unidentifiable.
‘It won’t be long now,’ the woman in plain clothes said in a low voice.
She had her arm on my shoulder. I could see she did not want me to feel alone. I could see she thought that what I was about to do was a terrible thing and her heart went out to me. Pity crept out from under her uniform in spite of all her professionalism. But a paralysing fear was wrapping itself tightly around my body and I wanted none of it. I wanted no arm around me, no hand touching mine, no word of comfort as I waited to do what I had travelled seven thousand miles to do.
We went in. I do not remember the room at all, except for the fact there were no windows, no natural light. And there was the smell, a strong antiseptic odour when the man in the hospital green stood before me. His lips moved, he was speaking. The policewoman had stayed outside; only the other woman and I approached. Bracing myself, my mind a fearful blank, I walked the immense distance towards the table. The liaison officer was beside me. Unawares I squeezed her hand and I must have said something because she bent towards me and I smelled a faint perfume.
‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘Yes, this is my son. Ben.’
There was nothing in my voice, no feeling, nothing. My heart balanced on its hinge. Yes, it was him. We were meeting again, as we had always said we would. He lay sleeping, as I had seen him sleep so many times in his life, when I would shake him awake, telling him he was late for school, or his interview, or later on for work. Sleep transcended all time zones, I realised. But for the darkening a
round his mouth and the closed eyes, if I too closed my eyes he might still be asleep. Here lay the end of my journey. It is I, your mother, I wanted to say. What have you done, Ben, while I have been waiting for news of you?
Something came out of my heart into my throat and then into my eyes. I stood staring down at him and then I heard the woman beside me say:
‘Take your time, love, stay as long as you want, go out and come back in, if you want.’
I heard her words turn dry and useless in my head. A tight band was holding me together. I shook my head, knowing that while I was here, with these people, kind though they might seem, drones in this lightless room, I would be unable to think.
‘Are you sure, my dear? Would you like to sit down next door and then come in by yourself?’
I shook my head. There was nothing here for me. Nothing could come out of this place that was any good. In order to talk with Ben I knew I would have to leave. Turning, a sound rising in my throat in spite of all I did to suppress it, I let her lead me out.
They gave me his things. His clothes, the wallet that Tara had got for him on the black market. A plastic bag with his clothes and his shoes. It was as though I was back home again, standing at the door, bending over the small parcel that was Percy’s clothes, left there by an unknown hand. Blood-stained, torn clothes, giving me all the evidence I needed of the violence that I suspected but would never prove. So now I was receiving clothes again, in some other place, like a benediction from strange hands. I sensed sympathy in the way the pen was handed to me. I signed my name as proof of who I was. Ma, he used to call me. They did things correctly here, I saw. And I saw, too, that in the end, it amounted to one and the same thing.
10
SEVEN FORTY-FIVE. OUR COACH IS speeding along a smooth dual carriageway. In the distance I see a large town sprawling for miles. There is a big board above the road, warning of delays. I see the sign for London. The passengers on this coach have fallen asleep. Even the Italian woman has closed her eyes. Above us, flashing past on a steel bridge, I see a man walking briskly. He is followed by a large black dog. For a moment both man and dog are silhouetted in a burst of light. Then they vanish. I have flown halfway across the world, travelling through treacherous stretches of jungle in Sri Lanka, careless of danger, forgetting that the urgency was mine alone and that it would make no difference to Ben, whatever I might do, however fast I go. Now every mile we travel is taking me further away from him.