Dignity

by Alys Conran

  Charlotte M. Mason Oh, they’re all so angry when they see us leave. And I’m not listening. And Raja is not listening. And we are just running away and away from them as if it did not matter at all that they are shouting at us, are shouting, ‘Magda, child. Come back!’ And shouting to Raja in Bengali that he’s in trouble. Deep, deep trouble. We are in deep trouble together, Raja and me. And oh! It is such good fun.

  We are running, splashing through the big silly monsoon puddles and all along the street, and then, would you believe it, across the railway line, and down another street where I have never been and which is oh, would you believe it, so dirty.

  It’s what I have always wanted to do. To go to the other side of the railway line! I’m with Raja holding his hand and we’re running. And he is running faster than I am, and holding my hand and so I trip and I fall and oh it is so dirty, so dirty on my poor knees.

  ‘Ugh,’ I say.

  ‘C’mon, madam,’ he says.

  ‘I am not madam, I am Magda,’ I say to him again, but it’s as though he’s not playing the game, for he just says, ‘There is no time for that now,’ and he grabs my hand and begins to run again.

  ‘Are you afraid, are you afraid, Raja are you afraid of them?’

  ‘No. No! Come along, madam, run!’

  ‘Magda!’ I say, stopping sulkily.

  ‘All right, come along, Magda, run. Run!’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I say, beginning to slow.

  ‘They will catch us, madam!’ He looks truly frightened.

  ‘So what? It’s only a silly, silly game.’

  And now Raja has stopped and has turned and is facing me. He looks afraid. He looks afraid and serious.

  ‘It is not just a game, Magda,’ he says. ‘I have to show you something.’

  ‘Why? I’m only here to play.’ I’m here to play a funny game and to run and hide from the servants so that they should chase and chase me through the whole of India.

  ‘You want to see the real India?’ he says, as if, like Mummy, he can hear me think.

  ‘Yes, Raja. Oh yes.’

  ‘Very well, Magda. I will show you,’ he says.

  And there is an angry look in his eye. There is the look of someone furious.

  ‘What is wrong, Raja, what is wrong?’ For he is my friend, but he looks different. Ever since he came to the garden this morning to find me he has looked different.

  ‘Come with me.’

  He is reaching for my hand.

  ‘I don’t want to come.’

  ‘Come with me, Magda.’

  But I have no choice anyway, for his hand is holding mine so tightly, so tightly and he is running, and it’s as if my body is nothing but a kite being dragged behind him along the alley and then out into an open road that has no paving. Along the road there are small houses like the ones we see from the train to Darjeeling, but I’m not on the train and so they are more real. They’re funny, they’re like pretend houses put up only for a day or two, like the one Daddy has had made for me in the garden.

  I am afraid, looking at the men and the women in the houses. Is it all right for them to be in these little houses with so little room? Is it all right?

  ‘Do these people really live here all the time?’ I ask him. We’re walking now, for even Raja needs to catch his breath. ‘What about in the heat? Do they go somewhere to cool down?’

  He looks at me. And he says nothing, he shakes his head.

  ‘I am not!’ I say. ‘I am not stupid!’

  We come to a real street eventually, one with small houses, but at least proper ones. I’m surprised when Raja stops at a house that is just a bit bigger than the other houses. A house that has its own proper windows and its own proper door instead of just holes. He makes me take off my shoes.

  ‘Come inside, Magda. Come after me.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll stay outside. I’m not playing any more.’

  But I can’t remember how to return, how to return to our nice white house on our paved road, for it seems so very far away that it might be impossible ever to return. I’m so far away from Mummy and Daddy and the servants. And again Raja’s hand is holding mine, and I have no choice but to go in.

  The room smells of clean washing and spicy food, and also slightly of something else, a strange smell that reminds me of the times when I finally awake after the bright, fearful, angry dreams which Aashi calls malaria. I am awake and I am in my sickbed. The room smells like that.

  Dust dances in the light that pokes in from the window. And in the line of yellow dust you can see a kind of bed. But it is on the floor. It is a bed on the floor, perhaps? And on it there must be a person, because you can see a heap in the middle of the bedclothes.

  Raja speaks to it. In Bengali, he says, ‘Mother, here is Magda.’

  Aashi?

  I run to the bed. But the person in there can’t be Aashi, because there is only a slow whine. She does not jump from the bed to smile at me and say, ‘Why hello, little ma’am.’ So it cannot be her.

  I step forward.

  I extend my hand, for surely if it is Aashi, she will rise from the bed and call me little ma’am and offer me tea or perhaps lemonade?

  She does not. She only turns over. But I see the mole on the side of her neck, and I know Raja is telling the truth.

  ‘Does she have the dreams too?’

  ‘It is not malaria,’ says Raja. ‘It is something given to her by your father.’

  ‘Daddy says that is not true, and anyhow Aashi has not been at our house all week!’

  I laugh, but then fall silent, thinking of the way Daddy hurt me.

  Raja laughs. But his laugh is angry.

  ‘And besides,’ I say, ‘Papa has not been ill, so how should he have given a sickness to your mother? Papa is perfectly well, and cannot be to blame.’

  Papa cannot possibly be to blame.

  Raja is looking at me. He just looks at me as if I am a strange creature he hates, and not his friend.

  Then Raja leaves the room again – we leave the room, and are back on the street.

  ‘Where shall we go now?’ I ask Raja. But he has turned away from me, and is walking off.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ I ask him again.

  ‘Nowhere, Magda. Nowhere.’

  ‘But where are you going?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  ‘Can you take me home?’

  He stops.

  ‘Don’t you even know where you are?’ he asks me.

  I shake my head. ‘No. No, I don’t. I have only been to school and to the maidan, the bandstand, and to the parks and the riding school and the club,’ I say.

  He looks at me a long while.

  He points a finger to the right and up, and I can see it now, the tall spire of the church, which is not so far from our house.

  ‘But we are close to home!’ I say, smiling. He nods. He doesn’t smile. ‘Only a couple of streets after all!’ I say, looking at the church spire.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ he says. He says it like one of the servants and not like my friend at all. ‘Yes, it is ever so close, madam.’ And then he is gone. Then he is gone, and I only see the back of him, leaving. That is the last I see of Raja for a long while. So I do not get to ask him, where is his papa?

  Of course I do not believe what Raja says. Of course I do not believe that it was my daddy, but when I asked Daddy the first time he got so angry that it makes me think of Raja, of my friend Raja every day. And you would never think my daddy could be so angry and so upset. I am sorry. I am sorry, Daddy. I did not mean it. I did not.

  ‘If you mention this to anyone, you will be in terrible trouble,’ he said. And he hurt my arm, holding it so tight.

  Anwar tells me one day what it was. I have asked him so many times that he tells me.

  ‘Perhaps Raja’s mother got pregnant, Magda,’ he tells me in Bengali. We are speaking Bangla because Mummy is in the next room. She is copying a picture from one of her botany books, copying the ex
act picture from the book out onto a new page. It is a poppy, it is a bright red poppy. She probably can’t hear us. But I do not want her to hear me speaking of Raja. I would rather be slapped for speaking the wrong language.

  ‘Perhaps she was going to have another baby, but it didn’t live.’

  ‘Why? Why?’ I don’t understand.

  I do not understand, but when I ask there is no more information.

  ‘Never mind, child,’ says Anwar. ‘Never you mind.’

  But I do, I do mind. For Raja was my friend, and I saw Aashi, and Aashi does not come back to our house, and Mummy says that Raja will never be allowed to come again because we were so naughty. When I have dreams it is Aashi on the bed, and I wake smelling that room, and when I try to awake her in my hot, yellow dreams, Aashi will not be stirred. She will not wake and their small, impossible house is closing around me.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  In no circumstances whatever will the expression ‘shell-shock’ be used verbally or be recorded in any regimental or other casualty report, or in any hospital or other medical document.

  British army General Routine Order No. 2384, 1917

  Ewan and me get his flat cleared up together. Neither of us is going to college, and we don’t talk about the future, but during our quiet, slow days, what’s between us grows back into itself again, familiar.

  Around the edges of these peaceful days, other kinds of times fizz. I can almost smell them. A chemical smell; burnt. He’s walking across the room one time, when a plane flies over, quite low, and he cowers and cries out. He has a habit of suddenly turning around to look into the corner of the room, behind him, his pupils huge. When the postman comes to the door one morning, he jumps so much that he throws his tea all over himself. I notice that he’s started going through doorways carefully, as if there could be anything, anything on the other side.

  To begin with, I don’t stay over. It feels like a risk. I’m standing by a deep pool, wondering how the water’ll be if I dive in. Will it be cold? Will it feel good?

  But I’ve not really got any ground to stand on anyway. Me and Dad can’t much bear being around each other at the moment. It all takes more facing than we can handle. I can’t think of solutions to his problems and he can’t think of any to mine. When I do hang out at his, we just move around each other in the kitchen like bloody robots, with nothing to say. We avoid talking about the things that matter because we’ve both told so many lies – the baby in my belly, the debts hanging over his head …We can’t find a good place to start unravelling it all from. Our conversations are short and tight.

  ‘Are you still going to college?’ he asks me once.

  ‘Dad, I told you it isn’t business,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but are you going?’

  He cares? His voice is tense with it, the hope.

  With a practised reflex, I give it to him, the new lie he needs. ‘Yes,’ I lie. ‘I’m still going.’

  So I start staying over with Ewan every few nights, telling Dad I’m at Leah’s because I don’t want to talk to him about Ewan at all right now.

  It’s only then that I realise the nights are the worst. Ewan’s dreams are violent, painful even to watch or hear. At night he seems to be trying to call out, over and over. To begin with, I nudge him. But there’s no end to it, and at least if I leave him to the nightmare memories, he gets some kind of sleep. I find myself dreading our bedroom of nightmares. I can only sleep when he’s awake. We have about fifty-fifty each of the night – half for him, half for me.

  I wake one night to the sound of a heavy impact, and leave our warm bed to find Ewan standing in the kitchen, bleeding.

  ‘Fuck, Ewan! What have you done?’ On the wall is the dent his fist has left. He’s hit the wall. He nurses his hand. I take it. An angry bruise is beginning to gather beneath the skin and his knuckles are inflating with hot blood, a small cut in his index knuckle bleeds down his arm.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, looking at it as if it’s someone else’s. ‘I don’t know. Christ, Su, that could’ve been anyone.’

  Between his episodes we go on all right. Neither Ewan nor me talk too much about his past and our future. We just slot back into some kind of sore love. He cooks for me, looks after me in a way, trying, trying. He strokes my shoulder while we sit, watching TV yet again because neither of us can concentrate to read, and he whispers I love yous which I do, I do believe. But he still hasn’t touched my belly, hasn’t listened in to the baby’s movements, which have got more frequent in that distant and close world inside. At night, when I’m at his, I lie awake, listening to my heart drumming too fast.

  He’s beginning to plan. If he works more at the garage he says we can afford to do up the flat, make it suitable for the baby somehow.

  ‘Isn’t that the landlord’s job?’ I ask him.

  He shrugs. ‘He’s pretty useless,’ he says. ‘And if we make him do anything he’ll either put up the rent or make me move on.’

  ‘But what about college?’ I ask him. ‘You’ll not be able to keep up with the course if you work that much. And what about Dad? What the hell is he going to do?’

  Dad’s had a lot of letters threatening to repossess the house.

  Magda’s fierce when she finds out I’ve given up on college. We’re in her long kitchen trying to make blancmange. I’ve never even eaten the stuff and it looks disgusting, and there’s no way she’ll eat it all on her own anyway, but she’s determined. And when Magda’s determined, there’s no space for opinions. She’s especially stubborn these days. I think it’s because she’s holding on so tight. You can feel them, her memories, skulking around the house, getting between her and these walls. Her days have the same sort of ghosted feeling as Ewan’s nights. Physically she’s weaker too, week by week. She rarely lifts her hands from her lap now. Her eyes, though, are as fierce as fucking ever.

  We pour the sickly pink mixture into the mould, and put it in the fridge to set.

  ‘How’s college?’ she asks me sharply.

  ‘Not bad,’ I lie, shutting the fridge on the geriatric weightgain products she gets prescribed by the doctor, but won’t touch.

  ‘You’re lying,’ she says, quick as a flash. ‘You haven’t been going.’

  ‘No.’

  Neither Ewan nor I have even mentioned it to each other. We don’t go in. Just the thought of that butterflying world makes me ache all over.

  ‘Are you still feeling ill?’

  ‘Nausea’s gone. Just tired now.’

  ‘Well then go,’ she says. ‘You’re clever. You need to progress. Baby or no baby.’

  I mutter it.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘Speak up, woman!’

  ‘No point. We’re not going to be able to afford the fees now anyway,’ I say quietly. ‘No bloody way. I don’t want the debt hanging over the kid too.’

  She looks at me hard. She leans forward suddenly.

  ‘You young women don’t realise how hard we had to fight for university education,’ she says. ‘It was terrible. You know the first time I said I wanted to be a chemist, they laughed.’ She coughs a few times, after saying this. Her chest has been bad recently. Mucus, like memories, seems to stick to her more each day, dragging her down.

  ‘You were a chemist?’ I say when she’s finished coughing.

  ‘Yes, and not as in pharmacy,’ she says tartly.

  I must look at her like I think this is bullshit, because she says, ‘Don’t believe me? Go into the study – the door on the left from the hallway.’ She has to clear her throat again. ‘If you can get past the cobwebs, go to the second shelf along; all those journals are mine.’ Through the thickness in her throat, there’s something sharp and bright.

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘Well, I’ve papers published in them.’ She smiles now, sweetly.

  I jump up to find proof of this. I go through the door of the study, like I did before, switch on the light, look for the second shelf along … magazines. I leaf through o
ne of them.

  Sure enough, there it is on the dusty paper, under the bare bulb of the study light. Her name: Magda Compton, PhD.

  I find many, many papers in those journals. Papers and articles on technical chemical processes I can’t begin to understand. I find myself laughing out loud at them. What a bloody wonder she is. Smart as hell.

  When I sit back down with her there’s this edge of triumph to her look.

  ‘You were a scientist?’

  ‘Bloody good one too,’ she says. She’d smack her thigh if she could. She leans forward in her chair, looking at me.

  ‘Go to college,’ she says. ‘For now, just keep going.’

  That night I tell Dad about me and Ewan.

  ‘Dad,’ I say. ‘Ewan and me are back together.’

  There’s a long silence.

  ‘Ewan and I,’ he says, sounding like Mum, or Magda.

  I laugh. And he bloody well laughs too.

  I don’t have to lie about that any more, at least. I take some more of my stuff over to Ewan’s. It’s almost like I’m really moving in, and we’re going to settle down.

  But that night, dreaming, he hits me. He fucking hits me. His hand, suddenly hard and sore on my face, him thrashing against me. I wake into the frenzy of it, and I’m halfway across the room, screaming, in a second. He puts the light on, sits up in bed and stares at me like an animal. We look into each other’s eyes. And for a quick moment, I’m terrified. Scared he won’t know me, won’t stop looking at me like I’m some kind of predator and he’s my prey. He looks petrified of me. And because of that my Ewan looks dangerous. We breathe quickly, we breathe.

  ‘Oh god, Su,’ he says, tears rolling down his face, holding the ice to my cheek in his strip-lit kitchen. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were …’

  ‘I know,’ I say, ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ll work it out,’ he says. ‘Darren says it goes eventually.’

  ‘It’s been years, Ewan. And it’s getting worse. You need help.’ I feel cruel saying it, despite my hot, ice cheek, and despite the look of love I give him, immediately afterwards. In his eyes I can see it, that day when he lost his hearing, a swelled, blastingly loud day, saturated with colour and dry as desert sand. A hurting day.