The air gets cooler as I drive. The hills are full of wrung-out mist, and I can see flood damage down in the valleys. Water’s bitten away the riverbanks and combed tangled lengths of weed over the rocks. Other rivers flood tidily, retreating with no more than a bathwater ring to show where they’ve been. Not the Jelai, though. It upends, then drags itself away like a cat that’s been sick.
I pass a few plantations, and a police station with skinny caramel-coloured dogs lurking alongside. There are roadside stalls, which I don’t remember from ten years ago, selling king durians and mangoes and bunches of rambutans. My left leg starts to ache from the clutch, but I don’t stop. This is a journey, after all. A few bruises might be expected.
After half an hour I see a blue sign, faded from wind and rain. Kampung Ulu, it reads. There’s an iron lamp-post with a broken bulb, and a bus shelter just beyond. You’d have to wait a long time out here for one to come along. A lifetime, give or take.
I slow down and turn left onto a narrow track. The road feels spongy under my tyres and I start to see slicks of water amongst the trees. The swamp isn’t far away now. I’ve never approached it from this side before, and the top of the burnt-out San gives me a shock when it appears. There’s barbed wire everywhere. It’s rusted and toothy, hissing keep out with every twist and stab.
I can feel sweat springing under my arms as I open the car door. The swamp’s waiting for me, just a few scrubby trees away. I wonder if Tom parked here while Ammuma trudged away with her gifts. I wonder if he sat waiting, knees curled to his chest and Peony wedged under his ribs. I smell rotting weeds and muddy water, hear the sound of hot metal as the car cools down.
I walk to the edge and stare across at the banyan tree. Oily starbursts of mosquitoes rise from the water but nothing else moves. The swamp looks flat, unbothered, as though it could easily wait another fifteen years for me to get to grips with it. You’re wasting your time, Peony whispers. Being dead, she doesn’t bother with manners – and didn’t when you were alive, either, Peony. You weren’t a saint, with your ballpoint tattoos. With your truths and your dares.
My lungs feel slimed, thick and smudged with stink. But I can still breathe, inhale and exhale, and if this is drowning then I can cope with it. I can last another fifteen years, and another fifteen after that. It’s only time, Peony. It doesn’t last for ever.
My legs are rubbery as I walk slowly away, back towards the San. The ground’s wet with rotting leaves and my steps are punctuated with skidding little slips that knock me off balance. It doesn’t seem to get closer, and then I’m there, right outside the building. All the windows are smashed and gaping lidlessly at me. There’s a froth of rubbish around the edge of the building: old clothes and polystyrene containers and the discarded rattle of aerosol cans. Graffiti covers the walls. Fuziah 4eva, it says. SKINZ. Ali was here. This last one is in a brilliant, clear blue, all the letters straight as if Ali had lined them up with a ruler. A boy after my own heart.
It feels as though somebody’s watching me from the jungle. Mad yellow eyes, peering out of feral hair. A stringy woman, with burn scars and a grudge. A Communist guerrilla, armed to the teeth and beyond. A mother or two.
The main doors stand open, almost rotting away. When I step through, the floor sags in a stinking pulp. A few puddles inside are dimpled like pewter with the dip and suck of insects. Two dark corridors lead off the main lobby. I don’t see any rooms, or anything else Ammuma described. I don’t see any bedsteads or handcuffs; any dripping tanks or left-behinds or ghosts. I wonder what else Ammuma saw, in the blood-images of her brain?
As I walk up the corridor it widens into a clean-trodden bare patch. It’s half-jungle and half-room in here, with jagged brickwork up to the height of my knees. There’s a smell – a sound – a movement from the corner of my eye. There was someone here just a second ago. I’m sure of it. I can even smell her: sweat and a between-the-legs stink of old clothes. But she’s gone, somehow. The walls bristle with layers of barbed wire, and the only way out is past me. But she’s gone.
There’s a neat pile of rubbish left by the door. I squat down, raking through it. Scraps and tatters of clothes. Barbie dolls with missing heads. A toy pony, a tin can. A picture book. A grubby doll in a blue satin sari, the kind of toy you find in any sundry store. At the bottom are some pencils and a few scrunched-up bits of paper. They’re soaked through with damp and mould, but the pencil-strokes are still visible. The pages are covered with swirling, fragile calligraphy that nearly makes sense. Like letters, if they were drawn by someone who never wrote a word.
No. It’s a breath of wind. It’s a flicker of movement right at the darkened end of the corridor. Nobody’s gone past me, though, I could swear to that. I don’t even know whether I really heard it, or whether my mind’s beating up fancies like eggs in a cake mix.
Dr Panikkar would know. She always does. She’d stride out down the corridor, hands on hips and face set into a glare. She’d drag out everybody by their ears: ghosts and left-behinds and prison escapees. She’d send the ghosts packing, she’d scrub the left-behinds and set them back down in their places. Dr Panikkar would know the difference between alive and dead and just what’s to be done about it. And she’d do it, too.
She wouldn’t crouch down, picking up one of those pencils and pulling the autograph book out of her skirt. She wouldn’t lick the pencil lead – ugh, imagine the germs – or set it down on one of these pastel-angel pages. And if she did, there’d be a reason. She’d write a note. A letter. Instructions. She’d demand the left-behinds obtain birth certificates and the ghosts furnish themselves with autopsy findings. She’d write something dry, something cramped, a story that never got away.
She wouldn’t draw a river in full flood. She wouldn’t draw a tangle-haired Chinese girl looking over her shoulder, or a handsome boy with a stethoscope watching her from behind. There’d be no durians in her picture, no grandmothers or leprosy, and certainly no handcuffs. She probably wouldn’t even draw a tiger-prince, which goes to show how much she knows.
No. The almost-sound comes once more, and then there’s silence. I close the book and slide it into the middle of the pile of rubbish. I’m leaving my own mark: leaving a garrulous and girlish ghost who’ll answer to Cecelia or Anil or any name that takes her fancy. To Peony. To Mary. To Francesca. To Durga.
I stand up straight and listen, but there’s nothing. No more sounds from the end of the corridor, no more flickers in the sunlight. Just a few echoes – no – spreading through my head and over Pahang. Past Mrs Selva, grimly reading Christmas cards in her lonely bed. Past Karthika, pinning movie-star cuttings to her bedroom wall. Down Gua Musang those echoes go, past the girls in pink hijabs studying behind durian stalls and the cars blasting Pahang FM. Past the university, where Sangeeta’s calls go unanswered and Anwar marks answers incorrect – no, no, no. Overhead and out to KL, where they’re drowned once and for all by the roar of traffic and the thrum of a thousand other lives.
Acknowledgements
I am most deeply grateful for the support and encouragement of my parents, Dr Alexandra Menon and Dr Nanda Menon. Although the characters and events in this book are fictional, the war and subsequent Malayan Emergency was a turbulent and violent time. I’m immensely grateful both for the memories my parents have shared and for their wisdom. I would also like to thank my brother, Anand Menon, for all his interest and encouragement.
My wonderful agent, Zoë Waldie, has been the best guide I could possibly have had throughout the publication process; I have benefited immensely from her warmth, skill and never-ending patience. I’d also like to thank all the staff at RCW, who have made me feel so welcome.
I couldn’t have asked for a more enthusiastic, skilful and tireless editor than Mary Mount. I’m indebted to her for her sensitivity and for her wonderful editorial eye. My thanks must also go to my copy-editor, Trevor Horwood, for his meticulous attention to detail.
My particular and very heartfelt thanks go to
all my writing group friends; their feedback, support and generosity have been immensely helpful during the whole process. Particular thanks to Katy Darby for her admirable teaching skills: without her short-story course I would never have begun to write at all.
I am also deeply indebted to all the staff on the City University Creative Writing MA course, particularly Jonathan Myerson and Clare Allan. Jonathan and Clare have read, critiqued and supported this story throughout all its drafts, and I cannot express how much I’ve learnt from them. And, of course, I’m very grateful to all my classmates on the course for their endless generosity, feedback and support.
My deepest thanks also to Professor Michael Johnson, my PhD supervisor. Michael is an immensely talented teacher, researcher and mathematician, who ‘knows all that there is to be knowed’ about category theory. Any mathematical mistakes in this book are unquestionably mine alone.
Finally, to my wonderful husband Dr Paul Emberson, who is my bedrock and my Pole Star. Paul, this book – like everything else – would be so many blank pages without you.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published by Viking in 2021
Copyright © Catherine Menon, 2021
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ISBN: 978-0-241-98898-5
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