Brixton Beach (18 page)

When it was done and Kunal had begun to drift back to sleep, Sita too went outside. It was very early. May and Alice were still sleeping.

‘What can I do to help?’ Sita asked quietly.

She was standing against the door and looked very pale. Startled, Bee and the doctor turned round. They had not seen her standing in the shadows.

‘Sit with him,’ the doctor said quickly, before Bee could speak. ‘Stop him thrashing about. I’m afraid for the leg,’ he told them in a low voice. ‘I’m afraid of gangrene.’

Kamala, coming out with a pot of tea in her hand, gasped.

‘Ayio! No!’

The doctor nodded grimly. He knew that the next twenty-four hours would decide things one way or the other and that it was no use contemplating the hospital.

‘Wait,’ he told them. ‘Just a little. Don’t worry, yet. I’ll be back this evening. Give him some
cothemalli
if he wakes. He must drink plenty of fluids.’

‘I’ll make some now,’ Sita said.

She tightened the belt of her housecoat and headed for the kitchen. Kamala looked after her daughter, astonished. The doctor nodded.

‘Good,’ he agreed heartily.

‘Tell Alice when she wakes I’ll take her to the beach,’ Bee told Kamala abruptly. Then he escorted the doctor out of the house.

In the kitchen Sita watched the
cothemalli
tea bubble up. The light outside was achingly beautiful and the sea was flooded with it. When the tea was ready she went in to Kunal who now lay in a transparent sac of pain. Heat was radiating from him. Sita sat down, letting him sip the tea, quietly waiting until his confused delirium subsided a little. She understood everything about this hot crumpled bed of pain. Kunal’s face looked grey and exhausted as he dipped in and out of consciousness. She did not know how long she sat with him. Now and again she stood up and, in the defused light coming in through the shutters, wiped his face. He was handsome. She remembered him only slightly from her younger days, even though she must have seen him quite often. It interested her to see that looking down on a person’s face was different from looking at them on eye level. All his
vulnerability fell open like the pages of a book when she stood over him. Had she appeared this way to the nurse on that night? she wondered. All morning, sitting with the coriander tea, waiting for Kunal to sip it, Sita went over the events of her own night of suffering with a calm detachment she had not possessed before. At some point she slipped out into the kitchen to fetch some freshly squeezed orange juice. When she returned his eyes were open and he was staring at her through a thick gauze of pain.

‘You are not very old,’ Kunal mumbled suddenly.

Sita held the glass of liquid to his lips.

‘What happened to you can only happen to a woman who is still young. Do you know that? Your husband is young;
you
are still strong. There will be a life beyond this tragedy; perhaps even beyond this island. Don’t let this hurt get in your way. They will have won if that happens.’

Sita stared at him. No one had dared to talk to her in this way. Kunal was looking up at her with eyes that burned with a fever, and yet he was smiling. Then slowly, haltingly, hardly aware of doing so, she told him how it was for her, with the love for her dead child trapped within her, inescapably. How day by day, moment by moment, she kept trying to save the child, remove it from harm’s way. And how each time she failed, it became important that she try again. Because maybe, on another occasion, she might succeed. It had become an enactment, she told Kunal, like the ritual of washing her hands before eating. Something she no longer thought about or had any control over. She continued talking to Kunal in this way even though he had gone back to sleep. Speaking quickly as if she needed to get the words out before she was interrupted, before her mother or her father or even the servant woman came in, Sita found she could not stop. For she was certain now that she would never speak of these things to another living person again.

Kunal dipped in and out of consciousness for most of that day and the next. The doctor came and went. He spoke to them in whispers. Two men had been arrested in the town and then released again.

The army were doing a house-to-house search further up the hill. They would have to be ready to hide Kunal in the coconut grove. It would be a gamble, but it was better than them being caught harbouring a Tamil. Bee’s jaw was tight with anger.

‘Oh my God!’ Kamala cried. ‘What shall we do?’

‘There is nothing else you can do,’ the doctor said. ‘Not with all your family in the house. But don’t panic yet. It might not come to that.’

On Monday while Sita was sitting with Kunal once more, Bee took Alice to the village beyond the town. It was a place he often visited in order to paint. The view of the sea was unexpected and lovely here, fringed by coconut palms and with only a few picturesque fishermen’s huts in sight. The doctor had told them to be as normal as they could. So he took his painting things and Alice took her bicycle.

‘We’ll be gone about an hour,’ he told Kamala.

It was late afternoon. The sun had moved some way across the sky. There had been torrential rain earlier that had ceased as abruptly as it had started and now the air was filled with a pearly glow. They walked across the beach on the unmarked sand, both unusually silent, preoccupied with their own thoughts. Bee bent down and picked a small piece of transparent aquamarine sea glass that had caught his eye; pebble-shaped, smoothened by the sea.

‘Look,’ he said, giving it to Alice, ‘all its edges have vanished.’

Alice held the glass up to the light and the horizon showed through it in a dark line. She put it in the pocket of her dress and they walked on. As they approached the hamlet they passed a pile of beach debris. Dead fish and rotting driftwood and old rags, piled into a mound, ready to burn. And beside it, on the sand, a breadfruit lay open; its innards like vomit on the sand. A little further on they passed a roadside shrine and then the huts came into view.

‘Can I wait here with Janake?’ Alice asked.

A group of children, including Janake, were playing beside the three large rocks. They were the same children she had seen on her birthday from her grandparents’ garden.

‘I shan’t be long,’ Bee said. ‘I just want to talk to Janake’s mother.’

The late-afternoon sun drenched the water with discs of light and the rocks appeared starkly defined against the sky. Such was the complexity and confusion of Alice’s thoughts that she barely noticed the children had turned and were looking at her. She could not see, as Bee might have done, had he glanced up from his conversation, that she stood on the brink of an important discovery. That the difference between herself and the group of children playing in the water was slowly becoming clearer. Standing beside the beach debris, with its coconut husks and its rotten fruit, with the smell of sea and weeds all around, Alice watched the little group and in particular Janake as they played. Here they were again, lithely jumping in and out of the shallows, as Janake’s mother listened to news of her relative. And here was Janake, looking his usual happy self. A chisel of loneliness shot through her. She watched for a moment longer, taking in a scene that was vanishing even as she looked, and was saddened without knowing quite why. Janake suddenly looked up. Detaching himself from the group with a shout of welcome, he ran towards her.

‘You’ve come to join us? We’re catching the small crabs.’

She stared. Since Jennifer had stopped being her friend no other child except Janake had wanted to know her. Esther Harris did not count. Esther was almost a grown-up. Eagerly, Alice kicked off her sandals as Janake grabbed her hand tightly. He was bigger than her, thin and wiry, and burnt by the constant exposure to the sun.

‘Quickly, before the next wave.’

The children had found a group of crabs nestling in a hollowed-out bowl of sand close to the rocks. Every time a wave crashed against the rocks, the bowl got larger and the crabs tried harder to scramble up on to the beach.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Janake shouted above the roar of the sea.

‘I’ve been busy,’ Alice said, not knowing how much to tell him.

Janake grinned as though he knew all about it.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get in the water.’

The children were picking up the crabs and putting them into a bucket, but when the bucket became full Janake ordered them to throw the crabs back into the sea. He spoke in Singhalese and was
clearly the group leader. After some time the other children grew bored and wandered off. Janake turned to Alice as another wave hit him. The water had soaked his hair and beads of sea-spray shone on his bare chest. He stopped in mid-laugh.

‘I wish you weren’t going overseas,’ he shouted abruptly.

‘I don’t want to,’ Alice shouted back. ‘I hate England.’

She realised she had said something she meant. Janake was looking at her with the strangest expression on his face.

‘Don’t go,’ he said, above the roar of the ocean.

‘There’s nothing here for us,’ she cried, sounding like her mother.

He said no more and the waves washed and swirled around their feet.

‘It’s your aunt’s wedding soon, isn’t it?’ he said finally.

‘Yes.’

Janake nodded. He would be going with the fishermen to catch the fish.

‘Will you come back?’ he asked after a moment.

‘I want to,’ Alice said, realising all in a rush, with a closing up of the gap in her knowledge, that what she wanted did not always happen.

She had the strangest feeling of standing at the edge of a beach that dropped steeply a hundred fathoms. But Janake was nodding again. He produced a small penknife from his pocket and showed it to her.

‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you must carve your name on the rocks. Over there—’ he pointed, grinning at her, his good mood restored.

His teeth gleamed white. Overhead the seagulls were screaming.

‘Let’s walk there, it’s not deep. I’ll help you. Then you
will
come back. Because ifs a magic trick!’

T
HEY DOCKED IN
P
IRAEUS AT FIVE THIRTY
in the morning on the twenty-first of April. Freak, icy winds from the sea swept across Athens. Stepping ashore, Stanley caught his first glimpse of the Parthenon. To his astonishment there was snow on the mountains. Real snow, he thought, disbelievingly, like the snow in Alice’s picture books. His tropical suit was rendered useless in a moment; the wind cut straight through to his flesh as though he wore nothing. He sat timidly in a café and wrote a postcard to his daughter but he had no idea how to describe any of it. The temperature had to be experienced to be believed. Should he say, it was cold like an ice cube? No, he thought, that wouldn’t do, she would simply think of the
refreshing
coolness of ice cubes, though there was nothing either refreshing or comfortable about this. It made him want to rush back to the hotel.

During the two weeks of the voyage Stanley had made friends with a Swedish girl on the deck above him. What else could I do when we’re all stuck together? he asked himself defensively. Of course I had to talk to her. When they arrived in Athens she had been given a room next to his in the hotel and this morning they had made a tentative arrangement to meet at some point. Stanley glanced at his watch. He felt as though Sita was watching him. The waiter brought him his coffee. It was in a cup so small that he wondered if he had been cheated, but when he looked around there were others drinking out of tiny cups.

It tasted bitter and too hot. Stanley stirred two sugar lumps in it wondering what to write.

The coffee is bitter
, he wrote.
But not expensive
, he added, knowing Sita would read the postcard. He didn’t want her to think he was wasting money.

He paused, staring outside at the view. All around people were speaking in a language he had never heard before. It gave Stanley an extraordinary thrill, as if he was at last in the real world, to hear a language that was neither Tamil, Singhalese nor English. An ancient language, with no sinister undertones attached. The sun fell weightless and golden on the Parthenon. In spite of his precarious position, here in semi-penniless limbo, Stanley felt weightless too. All the years of struggling against prejudice, the desperate ways in which he had tried first to hide his Tamilness and later, to flaunt it defiantly, were falling away from him. Like dead skin, he thought. He stared at the Parthenon, willing it to fix itself on his mind forever. In case he never came back. It staggered him to see the remains of a civilisation that had vanished exactly in the same way as the ancient Ceylonese city of Polonnaruva. He felt he was living a dream. The ground beneath him moved as if he was still on the ship and he thought of the Swedish woman again. It had amused her to see him brace himself against the cold.

‘You should buy some proper clothes,’ she advised, trying not to laugh. ‘Not this paper suit!’

Stanley was too embarrassed to tell her that the clothes he was wearing had cost him a whole month’s salary. There were many things he was finding difficult to articulate. And perversely, there were other issues that had mysteriously begun to matter less, people who already were beginning to fade. His wife’s face, for instance. Stanley frowned.

Colombo seems already a long way away
, he wrote hurriedly.

He paused, trying to imagine the postman, wheeling his bicycle slowly up Mount Lavinia Hill in the burning heat, sweat glistening on his face, delivering his postcard to the Sea House, but try as he might the sense of scorching heat eluded Stanley. Instead, the face of the Swedish woman swam back into view.

‘Will you come and see the rock later, Aunty May?’ Alice asked.

They were in the garden. The doctor had been summoned and was having a private conversation with Bee and Kamala. He had been talking to them for ages. Kunal, it seemed, was much worse. Alice had been sent out into the garden to pick the mangoes that had fallen and were not bruised. May followed behind with a basket but she kept looking nervously back at the house.

‘What does it say?’ May asked.

She sounded distracted.

‘Alice Fonseka, Age 10, Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka, Asia, The World, The Universe
. “The Universe” isn’t very clear,’ Alice said regretfully.

Even though Janake had gone over the words with his penknife the rocks had been hard to mark. They had got soaked.

‘Of course, darling,’ May said. ‘We’ll look at it tomorrow.’

The servant woman was sweeping the verandah, collecting the dead hibiscus flowers that the day’s rain had reduced to a pulp. As a result of the monsoon the garden had turned virulent. The ground was teeming with insects. There were spiders and lizards, ants and beetles all rushing to feast on the water-drenched fruit and the vegetation littering the ground. A snake slithered past and disappeared in a flash into the undergrowth. No one saw it. May, holding her sari high above the wet grass, dodged the fruit bats that nose-dived, fighter pilot style, in and out of the roof. A few crows protested loudly at the
encroaching darkness while the air of waiting increased to a fever pitch. Eventually Kamala called the servant woman in and at that May stopped what she was doing and went inside, carrying the basket now filled with mangoes. They gave off a scent like no other. The doctor, deep in conversation with Bee and Kamala, nodded. Then he strode into the annexe.

‘Come,’ Kamala told Alice, taking her hand. ‘Now we must wash these mangoes.’

Kamala was looking drawn.

‘I’m going to the studio,’ Bee said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

And he disappeared. A moment later the door of the annexe opened and Sita let herself out.

The room in which Kunal lay was in darkness. The doctor stood looking quietly down at him. Slow, muffled garden sounds crept in through the shutters as the doctor walked slowly over and opened them slightly. All the doctor’s gestures were like that: slow and very quiet.

Are you awake?’ he asked. ‘Can you hear me?’

Kunal opened his eyes. He felt very tired with the feeling that he had been struggling for a long time. The effort was suddenly too much. He tried to smile politely, but his lips were cracked and swollen and nothing happened. All he wanted to do was sleep. He had a vague sense that Sita had been reading to him. A book lay on the chair beside his bed. The doctor picked it up and sat down. Then in the same, quiet, soothing way, he began to speak. He spoke softly and Kunal struggled to understand what he was saying. One word repeated itself.

‘Hospital?’ Kunal asked, not understanding.

‘You should be there now,’ the doctor went on saying very gently and slowly. ‘But if we admit you, the army will take you. You will not be seen again.’

His voice dipped in and out of focus like the headlights of a car. He too seemed to be struggling with his own words.

‘You want me to leave?’ Kunal said, understanding.

He had been waiting to be turned out. He knew what danger he was putting this family in. I can hide in the coconut grove, he thought,
until the morning at least. He must have spoken out loud because he saw the doctor shake his head.

‘No,’ the doctor said slowly. In the pale honeyed light from the lamp his face looked drawn. ‘This isn’t what I’m talking about.’

His voice was down to a whisper. It came from a long way off with infinite kindness.

‘I find it difficult to tell you,’ he said.

Still Kunal did not understand.

‘Probably you would have to have the leg off anyway. Possibly in brutal circumstances. The gangrene has taken hold. I will bring the surgeon from the hospital. He can be here by tomorrow. It will take us that long to get the morphine. We will make sure you don’t feel anything during the operation.’

Kunal startled. Terror leapt into his mouth like a fish. It slithered and swam up his throat. It filled his lungs and his nose, stopping him from breathing. He could not understand what steps he had taken to get to this point. And then the horror of what he was faced with, the terrible truth, hit him like a wave. He thought he heard himself crying out. His breath was coming in short bursts. The doctor’s face blurred and changed. His mouth was distorted, the words coming from it slowed.

‘No!’ Kunal screamed. ‘No! No! Please, no!’

When he had finished writing his postcard, Stanley stood up and paid for the coffee.

‘Coffee no good?’ the waiter asked.

Stanley smiled and shook his head. Then he paid for it with some of his precious drachmas and made his way back to the hotel. He would have to get a stamp. On the way back he stopped several times. Each time he caught a glimpse of the Parthenon from a different angle. The cold had worsened to such a degree that he couldn’t stop shivering. He took a wrong turning then tried to retrace his footsteps but turned into a blind alley instead. There was a barber’s shop on the corner; he was sure it hadn’t been there before. Someone spoke to him but he didn’t understand what they were saying.

‘Hotel Patria?’ he asked, but then didn’t understand the reply.

This is ridiculous, he thought. If I can find the Parthenon then I’ll be able to find the hotel. But the Parthenon was nowhere in sight. He turned left. Perhaps he could find the docks and the seafront. The cold had numbed his hands. People were wearing gloves, he noticed. As he walked down towards what he hoped was the seafront, he noticed a small restaurant with an inviting array of meat on sticks and a curious flatbread rather like a roti. It made his mouth water. There were bottles of wine in the window. He was hungry and wondered if he could afford to stop for something to eat. But all he had was a little Greek money and a traveller’s cheque. Hesitatingly he opened the door and went in. The place was empty. Stanley stood, uncertain as to what he might do next. Somewhere in the nether regions, behind a beaded curtain, a radio droned endlessly. He couldn’t understand a word.

‘Hey!’ he called out tentatively. ‘Hello!’

There was no reply. He looked at his watch. It was almost midday. He had told the Swedish girl, Marianna, that he would meet her for lunch. Making a small sound of impatience he walked out of the restaurant. But things outside were no better. To his utter amazement the sun had vanished. The sky had taken on a milky, greyish tone and the small, regular dots of wetness falling on his face were not rain but snow. As for the Parthenon, that might very well have existed in his imagination only. There was no sign of it whatsoever. Grimly, fearing he would die in this place, unable to stand the cold any longer, he went in search of a shop. In order to buy a map and find the Hotel Patria.

Sita, washing the mud-splattered mangoes, listened to the house breathe. It was late. The doctor, having talked to Kunal, having given him something to help him sleep, had left. Alice was in bed and Bee was back in his studio. Sita could hear Kamala out in the garden lighting joss sticks at the house shrine. Both Kamala and May had been praying beside the old statue of Lord Buddha for an hour. They had prayed for Kunal and the ordeal that lay ahead, so that he might have strength to bear those misfortunes he had brought into his life. They had prayed his karma might be good in his next birth. After that, Sita suspected, they would have prayed for May’s forthcoming wedding,
and for her own impending journey. Sita had not joined in the prayers to the Buddha. Her prayers, she knew from past experience, would not be answered. Eventually she heard May going to bed. Their mother was still praying and Sita waited patiently, counting the mangoes and thinking. Earlier that evening, when she had first heard the word ‘amputation’ she told the doctor instantly that she would help as much as she could during the operation. She would help Kunal to let go of what belonged to him. The doctor was relieved. The capacity of the human heart for bravery never failed to surprise him and he accepted Sita’s offer gratefully. Kamala and Bee, he told her, would be best employed fending off any unwanted visitors and keeping the child out of the way.

‘You will make a perfect nurse,’ he had told her, smiling sadly.

Sita finished wiping the mangoes. Half an hour later, Kamala came in and the two women began cleaning. They started with the kitchen. By tomorrow morning they would have worked their way across the house, leaving it spotless. By the time the surgeon arrived, the annexe and Kunal’s room would be ready. Putting a kettle of water to boil, listening to the rhythm of the rain and her mother’s instructions, for the first time in many weeks Sita felt a strange, youthful energy fill her troubled mind.

It rained all that night. Great swathes of water washed everything. Towards midnight Sita insisted Kamala went to bed.

‘We’ve nearly finished,’ she told her mother, still with a curious sense of well-being about her. ‘You’re exhausted. Go to bed. I’m not tired, yet. I can do this last bit by myself.’

Knowing her daughter wanted to be alone, reluctantly, Kamala went. Outside the whole world was veiled in rain. Sita worked on. It was well after midnight before the cleaning was finished. The kitchen had become an oasis of order. No one had cleaned it in this way for years. Fully awake, Sita wandered through the sleeping house breathing in the fresh smells of rain and sea air. She felt exhilarated. Walking quietly through the rooms she had the distinct feeling of a momentous change going on within her. She felt her home, with all its well loved books, its blue-and-white Portuguese plates and carved ebony elephants was imbued with an air of loveliness she had never noticed before. It was as though she were seeing the place for the very
last time. And yet, she thought, at any moment, memory itself might fail her, wiping out this place she had called home. Why had she not treasured it more?