Ammuma shoves her teeth out with a clack. They drop into the palm of her hand, glistening with spit, and she puts them on the bedside table. She’s done with talking, she’s done with being questioned, and she’s certainly done with explanations. Mrs Selva, with no teeth to make her own statement with, looks mutely envious.
A few nurses come bustling into the room, their white coats stiff with authority and starch.
‘Thank you, Dr Harcourt,’ one of them says. ‘We’ll take over now.’
She gives him a toothpaste-commercial smile of her own, and holds the door open for us. Tom ushers me out in front of him, but he looks less sure of himself suddenly. He’s been dismissed. He’s not wanted; he’s been replaced by shining hair and lipsticked smiles and competency in skirts.
‘Sorry about all that,’ he says when we’re in the corridor. ‘We’re a bit stretched, you see. Mary-Auntie wouldn’t normally be in with Mrs Selva.’
I don’t see why not. Someone worse off than herself is exactly what Ammuma needs to pep herself up.
‘Hopefully she’ll be out in an hour or so. We’re waiting on the last scan results, but as long as they’re fine she’s good to go.’
‘Sorry?’ I don’t understand. ‘You’re sending her home?’
He nods. ‘We’ll sort out a nurse to help you. Perhaps one of the girls from here, just for a month or so …’
Tom goes on talking, stringing out a future with me knotted firmly in it, but I barely hear him. Back here in Pahang, kicking my feet uselessly and never getting out again. Nursing Ammuma. Having Tom and his wife round for coffee; having Peony around for ever. Having nothing else but a copy of my resignation letter and some maths textbooks I won’t understand any more.
‘I’m not staying,’ I interrupt. ‘I still have to go to KL.’
He blinks. ‘You’re still going back?’
Yes, I tell him, I’m going back to my life, to category theory and proofs and things that stay where they’re put. To Anwar, to Sangeeta, to Deepak with his middle-of-the-night calls and his angry wife. Even if all I end up with is a lifetime of evening classes and quarrelsome silences down the phone line, at least I’ll have come out ahead.
‘Oh.’ He sounds – disappointed. Perhaps Tom was hoping I’d rescue him too, somehow. Run away with him, like Bonnie and Clyde, while Peony and Alice shake their fists in a rear-view mirror. A nurse walks past at the end of the corridor with bobbed hair and strong, bony ankles in white stockings. She takes down something from an alcove and the air fills with splash and the clinking of spoons in medicine bottles.
‘Well,’ Tom gives himself a shake, like a dog after rain. ‘Of course, of course.’ He doesn’t say of course what. ‘We’ll still get her a nurse. And Karthika’s there. Of course …’
Of course, again. At least Karthika can be relied upon, he implies, as if any woman wants that. He stares gloomily down the corridor, with his hands in his pockets like every doctor on TV. It looks false, it looks like he’s playing dress-up in a white coat and a middle-aged body.
‘You can’t send her home,’ I say. ‘She needs to see someone. A psychiatrist, or a psychologist or something …’
‘You don’t want her to be discharged?’ He looks incredulous.
‘No! Look, it’s not that – oh, forget it.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Listen, you’ve been taking her to Kampung Ulu, right?’
Tom looks guilty at that. Jumpy. ‘Who told you –’ he starts, but I interrupt.
‘Well, she thinks she’s seeing Francesca there. My mother. My dead mother, remember? Ammuma thinks Francesca’s in Kampung Ulu.’
Tom stares at me. ‘Durga,’ he says, slowly. ‘Listen. I take her there every month, so she can drop off donations for the left-behinds. Toys and things. Mother Agnes says there’s a whole crowd of kids up in those mountain villages.’
‘Ammuma thinks one of those girls is Francesca,’ I insist. ‘Her baby one, she said. Reincarnated, or a ghost or – or – I don’t know. Agnes told her some pack of lies and now Ammuma really believes it.’
He gives me a look. ‘She’s just going outstation to help a few left-behind kids. It’s nice. It’s normal.’
‘She doesn’t do normal,’ I snap. She doesn’t do nice either. ‘Look, she told me. Just now, she said it was Francesca out there. She said it was her baby one –’
‘And would she tell a psychiatrist?’
There’s a silence.
‘No,’ I admit. Ammuma might be losing her mind, but she’s doing it in a way that’s thoroughly Ammuma. She’ll be practical about it, when she finally does succumb. Demanding. A hands-off, keep-your-distance madness, that’s what she’ll go in for.
‘So,’ Tom says, ‘you’re the only one who says it. You’ve no proof at all.’
‘I don’t need proof. She’s Ammuma; I know her.’
We face each other for a second, squabbling over Ammuma like two cats with a bone. A pair of nurses brush past, rubbing their eyes. Tangled hair, clutching cups of coffee and smelling of a sleepless night.
‘So what do you want me to do?’ Tom asks brusquely. ‘You think she’s hallucinating, so we should just lock her up in here? Like Mrs Selva?’
He rubs a hand through his hair, leaving it bristling with static. ‘No friends, no visitors – because you won’t come, will you, you haven’t for ten years – nothing but a card from some charity every Christmas? “All on Ward Three, Lipis Hospital”, that’s what Mrs Selva’s cards say.’
His words snag on a memory, like fish spiked by a river hook. All on Ward Three, Lipis Hospital, Pahang, Malaysia, THE WORLD.
‘Wait … Tom, hold on – stop talking, shut up, OK – let me show you. Ammuma wrote Francesca’s name. In the autograph book, the one from your fireworks bag. Here …’
Tom raises his eyebrows. He folds his arms, watching me as I tug the autograph book out of my pocket. It’s wedged into a seam, and the fabric twists above my thighs. Tom looks down – a sizzle of a glance – and I feel cold air on my skin. The book looks more battered than before, and the paper’s gluey. It clings to my fingers with a jackfruit stickiness.
‘What …’ Tom stares at it, then frowns in recognition. ‘Where did you find that?’
‘In your bag, the fireworks bag. You were bringing it to her.’
‘Mary-Auntie took that book to Kampung Ulu a few months ago,’ he says, each word careful and clear. ‘It must have fallen out in the car on the way there. I found it last week, under the back seat, when I was with – when I was with a friend.’
With a friend. Strong-legged Alice, no doubt, or Karthika with her sleeves rolled high, or even the bobbed-haired nurse mixing up her innocent medicines. I shove the thought out of my mind.
‘Ammuma wrote Francesca’s name in the book,’ I say again. ‘This wasn’t for a left-behind. It was for my mother.’
I lean over him to point at the inside cover. I can feel his warmth against me, heating as durian in this frigid air.
He barely even looks down. ‘So she scribbled a few pictures in a book. That doesn’t mean anything.’
I stop, my fingers spidering over the pages. ‘What pictures?’
‘In the book.’ He taps it impatiently. ‘I ripped the pages by accident and found the drawings. She must have stuck the thing together with fish glue. God knows how I didn’t smell it on the trip out.’
He thumbs the corner of the last page. After a few seconds the edge curls, then suddenly springs apart. It’s two pages there, thin as rice-paper and glued together. Tom works his finger between them carefully and rips upwards.
‘Here. Careful, in case it sticks back together again.’ He turns the book to show me.
There’s a procession of tiny figures spilling over those hidden pages. All in pencil and all beautifully drawn. There’s a prince, with a mouthful of teeth like knives and tiger stripes running down his sides. A princess, leaping past him with a sword clutched between two of her many arms. Tom moves his thumb then and there’s a city,
all houses and windows and froggish monsters springing from the sagging spine. Of course there is, because this is my bedtime story – this is Ammuma’s story – and what you see is never all you get.
‘It’s only pictures, Durga. Mary-Auntie must have drawn them before she took it out there.’ His voice sounds concerned. Warmer than it was before, as though I’m Durga again and not just a problem on two legs. Or on no legs at all; I’ve sat down heavily on one of the padded green chairs in the corridor and I can’t stand up. My bones feel chilled, hips and knees weak as fractured glass.
Tom brings me a cup of water from the nurses’ station, a chilled pointy cone of paper that starts dripping straight away. The bobbed-haired nurse avoids my eyes. They’re used to devastation in these corridors. They’re used to bad news and worse outlooks, and paper cups of water being handed round.
‘But why? She used to tell me this story, when I was small. She used to tell it to my mother, too. Why would she glue it …?’
He shrugs. I don’t blame him. To anyone else, it’s just a story. It’s a fairy tale, a fable with its own happy ending and not even a whiff of what-happens-next. But that’s wrong, because there’s always a what-happens-next, and a what-happened-before. The what-happened-before is Anil and Francesca, alive and dead and something in between. What-happened-before is a left-behind girl or a vanished best friend. It’s tiger-princes and monsters. What-happened-before spreads like leprosy, with Ammuma as patient zero.
‘Look.’ Tom’s taking the cup from my hands. He drops it in a bin and grips my shoulders.
‘Look, I know you’re exhausted. I know you’re tired. But it’s just a story,’ he says patiently. ‘Maybe she was telling it to one of the left-behinds.’
‘Let me ask her,’ I say stubbornly. ‘I want to know what’s going on. I want to know.’
He doesn’t stop me as I stand up. He lets me go, slumped on the chair with a few inches of tired sock showing. I wrench the door to Ammuma’s room open.
‘Ammuma?’
One of the nurses gives me a look. She pulls Mrs Selva’s curtains around with a quick tug, so all I can make out are shapes moving behind the material, backlit by the window.
Ammuma’s lying flat on her pillows with her arms by her sides. I put the book down gently on her flattened chest and her gaze sharpens. She tenses. There’s a creak of bedsprings and secrets in the air.
‘Ammuma? Did you draw these?’
She turns the pages over, propped up on her elbows. No sign she recognizes anything, from the inscription to the pastel angels. And then she sees the pictures.
She stops. For a heartbeat, nothing else moves. Somewhere a long way away Mrs Selva’s coughing. The nurses are twittering, graceful as birds and Tom’s in the corridor and the bobbed-haired girl is pouring a dosage into a measured cup and wishing her shift was over. Everyone, everywhere else, getting on with their lives.
And then Ammuma swallows.
‘How did you find this?’ Her voice is quiet, and she gobbles slightly. Her words are stripped down, all the ornaments of Malay and Tamil withered into cut-glass vowels.
‘Tom found the book in his car. He said you dropped it there,’ I say.
‘No.’ Ammuma doesn’t even look up. ‘I left it in Kampung Ulu,’ she says. Simple. Certain as two multiply five and five multiply two. Certain as a proof. She’d swear to it, with all the bad language she can summon up.
‘But you drew the pictures? The tiger-prince and the princess, like you used to tell me?’
Ammuma looks up then, her eyes limpid and alert as though everything’s just fallen into place. She doesn’t look old any more. She doesn’t look like a patient, or an invalid or anyone but herself.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Francesca did.’
28. A Princess For Ever: 1985
Francesca did. It’s taken Mary seventy years of listening to finally get her say, and now she’s going to clear things up. Speak for herself, for once.
‘Taking liberties,’ she mutters to herself as the car bounces over a pothole. ‘Everyone prying into things these days.’
She pushes her teeth out with a clack. Tom looks up from the driver’s seat next to her.
‘What’s wrong, Mary-Auntie?’
‘Nothing, nothing. You watch the road, ar. No point getting us crashed already.’
Tom slows down obediently. She’s looking forward to seeing the left-behinds, he thinks. It’s a wholesome, tolerant thought and it’s wrong, as wholesome thoughts often are. He drops a gear, waits as a lorry trundles across the road between two palm plantations. He hates this drive to Kampung Ulu – always has done, he thinks, forgetting it was once a treat. He can smell smoke from one of the new processing plants, and burning rubber from deep in the plantation. In fact, Tom thinks, the whole place reeks of a lack of soap and a lack of civilization.
Mary rolls her eyes. She’s a shameless eavesdropper, listening at doors and listening to hearts. Tom’s thoughts are as clear to her as pebbles in shallow water, and she doesn’t think much of them. ‘Civilization,’ she mutters. So much for this sweat-haired boy in his doctor-lawyer suit. She’s no time for his civilization.
And so they drive on, each with their own thoughts. Past the Lipis trunk road, past a few deserted roadblocks made from barrels and planks, past the first faint, sludgy signs of the Kampung Ulu swamp. Tom keeps up a tactful silence and Mary a quarrelsome commentary.
‘So sharp, ar, braking. Trying to push my head off its shoulders, is it? No, far enough already. Here, stop here.’
They’ve circumnavigated the swamp and they’re on the far side where the San once was. This whole area was evacuated during the Emergency, with villagers snatched up and loaded onto trucks without time to put on so much as a pair of shoes. Since then it’s been deserted, except for the San, of course. The odd itinerant family sets up house here and there, but they don’t stay long. They can smell the blood.
A crumbling wall runs a few metres along the road, all that’s left of the San’s compound yard. Ferns sprout from the edges of the tarmac and the ground’s claggy and drenched. The remains of the San loom over the swamp, chilly and shadowed. Tom feels a vague, cloudy guilt every time he thinks of the games they used to play. ‘Locks on the gates,’ they used to sing, but now he imagines all those poor patients burnt alive in their beds. He’s learnt sympathy in his middle age.
‘Mary-Auntie … hold on, let me get your door.’
He scrambles out of the car but Mary’s already gone, stumping her way down the track with her carrier bag over one shoulder. From here Tom can see mud caking the bottom of her sari and dragging it down stiff as a weighted curtain. He sighs. He’s neglecting a lot of work in order to stand here on the edge of a swamp and watch Mary-Auntie walk away without so much as a thank-you-for-bringing-me. Back in the hospital three little Varghese children have come down with dengue fever simultaneously, writhing in hospital cots with their arms spasming. Tom doesn’t know it, but in just over a week the smallest boy will die and Tom himself will be moved off the surgical team – he should have noticed the first signs during pre-surgical checks, he’ll be told – and onto the wards to look after old ladies and their Christmas cards. No wonder he feels put upon.
And it isn’t an easy trip, either. Mary-Auntie likes him to park right near the swamp, and although he does his best not to look up, he’s always aware of the banyan tree across the water. And the smell, of course. That rot-and-water smell hooks right into his guts and pulls them out through his toes. It brings her back to him.
He approaches the edge of the water with a sideways, crabbish stride. He needs to get at it sideways, he needs to pretend it isn’t there. He sits down to wait, pulling his knees up to his chest and watching the surface of the water, broken only by banyan roots. He thinks of Karthika and the feel of her high, swollen breasts; thinks of Alice too – lovely, legitimate Alice – and pretty nurses who won’t and never will and just might some day. But it’s no good. Wherever he turns he ca
n see somebody’s smile flickering under the water. Somebody’s fingers clutching beneath the surface.
You don’t go away, do you, Peony, he thinks. You mix yourself up in everything, like a drop of dye in water. You stain everything with yourself.
Not half a mile away, Mary snorts. Not much count, she thinks, that boy. Getting that Peony-girl drowned, then strutting back as though nothing happened. He shouldn’t be allowed to get over things so easily. Not when other people – and here Mary switches her thoughts onto a different track, thinking of daughters and granddaughters – don’t ever manage it.
She’s out of sight of the car now, right down amongst the trees. The San looms black and squat in front of her. The gates are closed, but the walls have long since fallen in, and Mary steps carefully over the rusty barbed wire and the scattered blocks of stone.
‘Locks on the gates,’ she mutters to herself, and for a second she could swear she hears a giggle. She steps inside the lobby of the San, through the doors that are jammed open, and looks around. It’s a maze in here, all dead-end corridors and walls that have tumbled down. She passes closed doors and others overrun with crawling vines. A sink drips in the corner, and a flake of rust breaks off as she turns into the largest room. There are a few bed-frames left in here, coated in mud or rusted right through. You can barely see where the handcuffs were.
Mary sits herself down on one of these beds. There’s a heap of rubbish by one wall. Old cooking pots tip over onto plastic sandals, and layers of mouldy cloth melt into each other in a shirt-socks-sarong jumble. Left-behind families don’t look after themselves too well, and every time a new group moves in they scavenge from what’s left.
Mary clacks her teeth in disapproval, and starts to pull gift-wrapped parcels noisily out of her striped carrier bag. Usually there’d be a grubby rag-tag of left-behinds by now, snatching at the toys as though they think they deserve ’em. She doesn’t want her daughter to pick up those sorts of manners, though. Not when she’s old enough to know better.
Fragile Monsters Page 24