Mosquito

by Roma Tearne

  ‘With time, the scars will all fade,’ the doctor said. He sounded pleased.

  ‘Good,’ Gerard said, heartily. ‘Good. You see, Theo, you’ll soon be fit and ready to start your new book.’

  Theo looked at him blankly.

  ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ Gerard said, laughing. ‘Well, I think you should reread one of them, in that case. Your most famous one, perhaps!’

  And he handed Theo a book. Tiger Lily, it was called. So, he had been a writer. Inside the book, he read, For Anna. He stared at the name blankly. There was a photograph on the back cover that he supposed was of him. He squinted at it.

  ‘Of course!’ Gerard said. ‘You wore glasses, of course. How stupid of me! Wait, men, let me see if we can replace them.’

  Maybe it was because of the new glasses that had been found for him, not quite perfect but usable, that he began to move around more. The house, he saw, was large and shabby, though not uncomfortable. There were two other people in it, the Tamil woman who cooked for him, and outside, discreetly out of sight, was an armed soldier, a boy of about fourteen.

  On the second day that Theo was up and walking, the servant woman came into his room and lifted the blind. Soft light poured in. The woman gave him a mango. She spoke to him in a low voice. Theo did not speak Tamil. He asked her for the time in English.

  ‘Up, get up,’ she said, pointing at the sun. ‘Morning.’

  Later on that same day, she brought him a clock. He had been sleeping for hours, he realised. Maybe days. Fully conscious now, he thought he heard voices. But the gaps in his memory distressed him more than his aching body. He could not leave them alone, probing and fretting over them. Something gnawed away at him, constantly. Or was it someone? He had a feeling there was a missing person somewhere in all this. He decided to read Tiger Lily. Perhaps the answer was in the book. And the name Anna.

  During the long, solitary day, he had discovered an urge to write. But what about, or who to, he couldn’t say. In any case he was easily tired, easily frightened. And his fingers ached constantly. Something marked time in his head like a metronome. It moved almost on the threshold of his thoughts so that he felt himself edging towards an abyss. The sight of his face in the mirror, the man called Gerard, all these things both terrified him and left him curious. Maybe I should read the book, he thought at last, reluctantly opening it.

  ‘No one should be an exile,’ he read. ‘For it is an indignity curiously difficult to overcome.’

  Theo shuddered. A sliver of memory uncoiled itself silently. He read on.

  ‘What can I tell you about the boy? He was a Tamil, brought over from the Indian subcontinent, olive-skinned and handsome. It was meant to be the perfect solution. Except it didn’t work out that way.’

  He felt the stirrings of suspicion. And interest too. The sunlight on the wall beside him fell in a slanted disc. Outside the window the branches of the mango tree drooped heavy with fruit. Something has happened, thought Theo. Again his skin grew taut with fear. He began to smell colours. Crimson lake, he thought. Cobalt blue. The greens and yellows, the browns of the yard outside the window filled him with nausea and intense panic. They were army-camouflage colours, he thought, unaccountably depressed. Suddenly he had the urge to write all this down.

  ‘There is no such thing as freedom,’ he wrote. ‘Nor do I want to have an ideology. I see no sense…To have an ideology means having laws; it means killing those who have different laws’.

  He looked at what he had written. He had no idea why he had written this. Something was scratching away inside his head, struggling to get out.

  ‘Man kills as no other animal kills,’ he wrote. ‘He kills himself, as if under a compulsion, not out of hunger, not because he is threatened, but often out of indifference. We live in a jungle…’

  Again he paused. A thought crawled along the rim of his brain and then slipped maddeningly away. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps it’s to do with the woman I keep seeing. Outside a bird pecked at the air as if it were puncturing it.

  ‘Oh good,’ said Gerard, walking in. ‘You’re up! And writing too!’ His friendliness was terrifying.

  ‘I’ve been trying to remember,’ said Theo slowly. ‘Perhaps you’re right, perhaps I was a writer.’

  Speech, the smallest utterance, was distressing. Every word quivered on the edge of a scream. But Gerard seemed perfectly friendly and one night, after his visit, Theo determined to finish reading Tiger Lily.

  ‘At last he knew the meaning of what had occurred. That the things he had been through were too terrible to utter out aloud. That one part of him had gone ahead while the rest of his mind remained frozen. And he knew too that he had been tipped into an inexplicable no-man’s-land, not of his making.’

  Theo stared at the words, knowing with sudden, sharp shock how the novel resolved itself. Fragments from the past detached themselves and floated towards him. He stopped reading and saw again, with perfect ease, the high-ceilinged room, with its vases of peonies and his desk, littered with papers. There was a cup of coffee beside him; hot, rich, strong coffee. A hand lingered on his arm. And then he saw what must have been his own hand touch the silky cloth, and then the arm, and finally the face of the woman it belonged to. And in the clearest of moments of certainty, he understood that the woman’s name was Anna. Memory flooded over him.

  The house had been shut up for the night. The guard sat near the gate, his footsteps occasionally crunching on the gravel.

  ‘Why am I a prisoner here?’ he said out loud. ‘What else have I forgotten?’

  Panic rose out of nowhere, with a new urgency. He turned out his light and lay rigid in the darkness listening to his own heartbeats and to the faint sound of a waterfall in the distance, thinking of the woman in the silky dressing gown, certain now that Anna had been his wife.

  Towards dawn he slept a little. When he woke it was morning. He saw again that something had been working silently within him. Like a spool of tape threaded through a machine, it replayed itself in slow motion. Anna, he thought. She had died. He had marked the place where she had fallen like a leaf to the ground. He had marked it with flowers. Bunch after bunch, wrapped in foil to stop them withering. Week after week he had gone to the spot, marking it so it no longer remained an unmarked grave. Month after month, long after they said he should have stopped going, long after they said was healthy. He had wondered what was unhealthy about loving. Should his love for her have ceased when her life did? He had gone home after they’d told him she had died. It had been an early-spring day, sharp and cold and with splashes of crocus colour. A day full of birdsong and fresh air. He had registered all that with the curiously detached other part of his brain. Then he had seen her small delicate bra, suspended like some strange beautiful flower, pegged out on the washing line. Hanging out to dry. And without thinking he had taken it down out of habit, and even though it had been washed, even though the sun had dried it, still he could smell the secret parts of her. All this he remembered now. Seeing it like a photograph, still and deceptive, and potent. Opening his notebook he began to write of Anna. Lest he forget.

  I saw you for many days before I spoke to you. In those days you were always laughing. I sat at a table with my book, occasionally glancing up at the blue shirts of the vaporetto drivers. This was their café too, after all. They gathered here whenever they came off duty, shouting at the barmen for their ‘cappuccini’ and their ‘cornetti’ as they walked in through the door. You were there every morning; what you did or where you went afterwards was a mystery to me, but I was struck by the blueness of your eyes and your curly blonde hair among all the dark heads. Beyond us lay the lagoon, blue-green, grey, yellow-tinged, depending on the currents. I didn’t know this then, but the currents had different colours that changed several times a day in spring.

  It was March when I first saw you; still cold but with a hint of the warmth that would come. I remember your long, slim leg, and your small foot balancing precariously in its r
ed shoe. You were Italian, so of course you had no time for sitting. You simply knocked back your macchiato and then you went away again tossing your hair in the breeze. Across the water the sunlight fell on the island of San Michele, the island of the dead. Had I been the true child of my mother, had I remembered the warnings of my country, I would have taken this to be an omen of what was yet to come. But the East, and my troubled homeland, was a thing of the past. I had shed old habits like a lizard sheds its skin. In those days in Venice, I was full of expectations, thrilled by my own discoveries, like any romantic foreigner. Only later would I discover how bored you were by all of it! But to start with, in those first weeks, I knew none of this. And so I watched you, day after day. In reality it was probably only a week before you spoke to me, joining me at my table. You, and Gianni, and Sara. All chatting, all laughing, talking to me in Italian.

  ‘Sei un studente?’

  No, I said, I was writing a novel set in the Renaissance. At this you burst out laughing. A tricky subject, you said. After that I saw you every morning, either by chance or deliberately. I hoped it was the latter of course. Sometimes you were with your friends and sometimes you were alone. When you walked in, your eyes searched the bar, looking for me. Then, when you caught my eye, you pretended not to see me, but I knew, you were glad I was there.

  I found out that you too were writing a book, on the sculptures of Ulysses. I found out you had lived mostly in Rome but that you were here for the spring. And that Gianni was in fact not your boyfriend. Somehow, in the days that followed, I saw a lot of you. We talked, we walked along the Lido, we ate together and finally, inevitably, I went back to your tiny flat, glowing with its art-nouveau lamps, its threadbare velvets, its warmth. And I knew then, this was serious. Afterwards, even years afterwards, after you died and all the flowers I placed on the pavement had been swept away by the road sweepers, still I could remember that first night with the utmost clarity. How could I have forgotten it now?

  And so we continued, you and I. We had both loved others; we had both been disappointed. Maybe that was the reason we felt so complete, together. Maybe that was why our lovemaking was so candid. At the time it was a revelation to me. You were almost as tall as me and as I peeled off the layers of your clothes, revealing the pale glow of your skin, the small mole on your back, the soft downy blonde hair at the entrance to your secret chamber, I knew that for you too, this time would be different. I lost myself in you after that, in the visceral perfume of our two bodies, and the small murmurings and gasps of our limbs together. Later, we both slept but it was I who woke first to stare at you, delighting in watching the innocence of your sleep. How was I to know that many years later you would look this way as you lay dying? Sleeping, not in my arms but alone on a hospital bed. With the same curl of eyelashes, the same fit of lips against each other. This time your eyes never opened. This time I knew I would never again see that flash of piercing blue. This time there would be no tomorrow.

  Theo closed his exercise book. Memory was rushing towards him as though he was parachuting to the ground. He felt his life hung on a thread which at any moment might break. He felt the tension within the house stretch tightly around him. His body seemed to be weeping from an invisible wound. What was love but a memory? How could he have forgotten so much? He was aware that something else, something he could not quite grasp, fluttered vainly within him. But what it was he could not say. What more was there to remember? he wondered fearfully.

  The intrusive roar continued for a moment longer and he realised a radio had been turned on in the next room. There had been a tragedy at Mannar, the voice intoned. Hundreds were left to drown. Villages along the northern coast had been burnt down; women and children hacked to death. A British journalist, some foolish man in search of a human story, having strayed in through the security system, had his eyes plucked out. His captors had released a photograph of him. Appalled, Theo listened.

  ‘Ah,’ said Gerard, walking in, making him jump. ‘You’re up! Good, good. You’re on the mend. Soon you’ll be well enough to start working.’

  ‘Why am I here? When can I leave?’

  Perhaps it was the unfamiliar sound of a foreign voice speaking English on the radio, but he felt some assertiveness, something he might have possessed in another life, return.

  ‘I told you, Theo,’ Gerard said easily, watching him, ‘you’re here for your own safety. Have you begun to remember what the Singhalese did to you yet? No? Well, I’m afraid we need to keep you out here for a while. Consider it a bit of a holiday, if you like, a chance for you to do some writing, to rest, get your memory back even. Don’t worry about it. And try to eat a little,’ he added, with all the appearance of friendliness.

  14

  WHEREVER HE LOOKED, ROHAN SAW THE SEA. Every time he thought of beginning to paint again, the sight of it distracted him. But when he looked closer it was the tropical waters of his home that he saw. The perversity of the human mind never failed to amaze him. He remembered the beach, whitewashed, picked clean, pared down and smooth, a strong breeze scuffing the waves. The water had always looked benign enough, but underneath there were shark-toothed currents lurking. He knew those currents well enough to know that they could pull a man under in seconds. He tried to imagine the catamarans, hide-grey and rotten, half buried in the sand. Husks from long ago, withered and crumbling, was how he recalled them from this distance. Like his life, he thought, staring into space. If he were honest, if he allowed himself a moment’s truth, away from Giulia’s anxious eyes, this was what he believed. And the beach that Rohan saw was always empty. No one fished in that sea any more. No fishermen lifted their boats up and along the sands. The small, dark-limbed urchin boys who had played there no longer filled the landscape, and the sea and the sky belonged only to his dreams. I must paint it, he thought, daily. But he was too apathetic to do anything.

  They had been in Venice for several months and had returned to the old routine of crossing and recrossing the bridges every day, on trips to the fish market, to the bar, to an old favourite restaurant. For hadn’t they lived here together, once, long ago? At first the relief on reaching Venice had outweighed everything else. Sorrow was to come slowly. So at first Giulia was glad. She was glad to be back in an ordered world again. Putting the water on to boil for the pasta, making the sugo of tomatoes, delighting in the fragrant perfume of basil plants. Yes, she was glad of all these things. But then she saw, something had happened to them both.

  On their arrival, desperate to meet up with the girl, they wrote several letters. They had brought her paintings and her notebooks with them and they wrote, giving their new address, telling her they longed to see her again, telling her they had talked about nothing else. At first, they hadn’t worried when there was no reply. Rohan had tried phoning the doctor to find out if he had heard from her. But as usual the line was dead.

  Unpacking their luggage, they reread her letters more carefully, now that they had time on their hands. The letters felt old, as though they had been written in another life. They were full of other time zones.

  Jim has found me a room in a house. Here is the address. There are five other people living here but I never see them. It is dark and very cold. Next week, Jim’s friend has promised to get me a job. The money you gave me will be enough for the moment but soon I will have to find some work. Jim’s friend says there is a newsagent nearby where I can work. I am very tired all the time. But at least because I am so exhausted I can sleep and that helps to numb the pain. Only sleep releases me.

  Reading the letters from this distance made them uneasy. There were things that had slipped their notice before.

  ‘Oh God, Rohan, it’s much worse than we realised,’ Giulia said urgently. ‘We must find her.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ he agreed. ‘She’ll write, don’t worry. We are her only real family now. Her brother is a useless fellow.’

  ‘She’s young. She should meet someone else,’ said Giulia, ‘make another life.’
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br />   And Rohan had agreed again, although he been less certain. He too looked at the letters once more, with fresh eyes.

  Yesterday, I was staring out of my window at some yellow flowers in the garden next door. Something, the old habit I suppose, made me want to draw them. Without thinking, I found a pencil and some paper. I began to draw quite fast, not taking my eyes off the flowers, but my mind must have been somewhere else. And then to my horror I saw that I had been drawing his face again. From memory, as I used to. Do you remember?

  Months passed and their uneasiness grew. Why had she not responded? In all they had written six letters and all of them remained unanswered. Giulia’s distress had grown, so that, really anxious now, Rohan booked two flights to London.

  ‘Wait,’ he calmed her, ‘we’ll go over and find her. We’ll be able to speak freely then. Things will become clearer, you’ll see,’ he promised.

  So they had packed up Nulani’s paintings and put the notebooks into a small bag and left with a confidence that would astonish them afterwards. They had no telephone number for her, just an address. Perhaps, reflected Giulia with hindsight, that was when things in their own life began to fall apart.

  For London was not as they remembered. And the house where the girl had lived was full of new tenants. Bills and circulars sat together in the letter box, but their own letters were not among them. No, they were told, there’s no one of that name here.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the lodger shivering at the entrance, ‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid. Never heard of her. Try the next house.’