Brixton Beach (33 page)

Sita, coming in from the shops, found Alice staring greedily at the photograph.

‘I thought you couldn’t be bothered with any of that,’ she said sharply.

Alice handed them to her guiltily.

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘I was just curious.’

They said no more on the subject, but that night Alice wrote a brief letter to her grandparents.

She paused, wanting to say more about the art trip and the exhibition at the huge gallery beside the river. She wanted to say that the day had been the best in her life since leaving Ceylon. She wanted to tell her grandfather how the exhibition had enthralled her. That the delicate latex sculptures, the small vigorous paintings and detailed pencil
drawings had reminded her of Bee’s studio and the work he did in it. But when she came to actually write this down she found her enthusiasm dried up even as she wrote. It seemed her happy memory of that day was locked away, refusing to be voiced. All she was aware of was the desperate need not to mention her parents. In the end, unable to think of anything more she signed off lamely sending them her love. It was some time before she wrote again.

Over Christmas, Stanley surfaced once more.

‘Here,’ he said brusquely, handing Sita an envelope. ‘Get yourself a telephone.’

Sita wouldn’t touch the money. What did they need a phone for?

Alice can ring me,’ he told her. ‘Can’t you, Alice?’

Alice shrugged; she had no idea why she would need to ring Stanley. Her father smelled strongly of a new, slightly sicklier perfume.

‘What’s that smell?’ she asked.

‘Incense,’ Stanley said, shortly.

‘Taken up religion, then?’ Sita asked.

Stanley ignored her. He doesn’t care, thought Alice, amazed. However much he hurts her he doesn’t care.

‘You’ve grown,’ Stanley was saying with mild surprise, staring at her.

He lit a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that the house was in a terrible state.

‘Why don’t you get rid of these paraffin heaters and get some electric ones?’ he asked irritably.

Sita didn’t bother to answer him. She lit the gas and put the kettle on the ring. Alice took out a butter cake that Stanley recognised as the sort Sita used to make.

‘Would you like some cake, Dada?’ she asked, the old name slipping out.

She raised her eyes and it was then that Stanley saw, with a small jolt of shock, that his daughter’s face had changed subtly. A faint but unmistakable air of youthfulness, not noticeable before, was evident. He smiled at her and Sita, handing him a cup of tea, saw that
the old Stanley had transferred his affections seamlessly to their daughter.

‘Didn’t you get a Christmas tree?’ he asked, sensing Sita’s hostility.

A Christmas tree?’ she laughed. ‘We’re Buddhists, have you forgotten? Have you forgotten everything about us?’

‘Well, this is a Christian country,’ Stanley mumbled. ‘Your friends must all celebrate Christmas, Alice. Don’t they?’

‘What friends?’ Sita asked him. ‘Your daughter doesn’t have friends; not that you’d care.’

Alice glanced from her mother to her father. Sita’s voice was rising; it meant that she would soon start screaming.

Okay, okay, sorry, men,’ Stanley said. He set his hardly drunk tea down on the kitchen table. Then he picked up his hat.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s the money. Get a telephone put in, will you? Then I can call Alice; see how she’s doing. All right, Alice? Maybe you’d like to come over to my place in Ealing sometime too? See where I live.’

He smiled awkwardly, his eyes pleading with her. Alice, watching them both, was torn.

‘She’s my daughter, after all,’ he added defiantly.

‘Of course!’ Sita said bitterly. ‘And your daughter must meet that woman. See who her father left her mother for. Is that it? Is that what you want? Is that why you’ve come here?’

But Stanley, taking fright, was gone, banging the door shut, fleeing from the accusations of his almost divorced first wife.

In March a letter arrived in time for Alice’s birthday. It was from Bee and had been written before Christmas but had taken three months to arrive. Once again their letters had crossed. Bee’s letter had been censored so that what Alice was left with was disjointed and difficult to understand.

But Bee’s letter, like her own, had become wooden; Alice could no longer hear the sound of her grandfather’s voice.

‘Doesn’t he know Dada has left?’ Alice asked.

Sita looked at her daughter. Since Stanley’s last visit she, too, had become conscious of changes in Alice. Dimly she felt the presence of an inner life, hitherto invisible. It shone faintly in the child’s face, casting a new and tender light not apparent before. Sita registered this change with furtive wonder. There was no one she could share these thoughts with, but a frail, tender motherliness, never until now given an airing, began to work in her. Several times she almost sent a school photograph of her daughter back home so they too might see this change. But each time, at the point of doing so, some timidity always stopped her. Perhaps it was the traces of the absent Stanley that remained in Alice’s face and the shame of his leaving that got in the way. No one in Mount Lavinia had eloped, let alone got divorced.

‘They wouldn’t understand,’ she said with finality, and the subject was never referred to again.

They did not see the years go by after that. Living took up too much of their energy. Another spring, thought Sita, drearily, uncaring. By now it was 1979 and Kunal was merely a dull pulse in her memory. The letters from both sides of the ocean were brief epigraphs of news items. Soon the decade was over, swallowed up by an indifferent world. For Sita, life had begun to feel like a walk across a mental desert. She travelled slowly, with a mind-map that coursed its way along the dried riverbeds of her old life. She would walk this route, she suspected, forever, singing her voiceless, wordless song. She would walk like a bird that had lost its wings. Mute. With her head held steady and her eyes firmly on the arid path. Occasionally something would catch her attention briefly, making her aware of a milky-soft May morning or the cornflower blue eyes of a passing stranger. Then, for a moment, she would find herself in an unexpected oasis. But mostly there was nothing. It was no longer possible for her to move out of her desert territory. She continued to take in alterations from the dry cleaners and had begun to work for a tailor’s shop as well. There was always plenty to do. So that, turning her back on the past, she was content to drift far out into the Atlantic greyness. For
this
was her life now; England in its peculiar way was the only home she needed.

After the Christmas holidays that year Alice found to her surprise that she had won a prize. Mr Eliot had entered one of her constructions for a competition and she had won.

‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ he asked, after he had told her the news.

Alice felt her mouth become stiff with the effort of not smiling.

‘My mother’s a Buddhist,’ she volunteered. ‘We don’t really celebrate Christmas.’

‘Well, anyway, you can inform your mother what a talented daughter she has!’ Mr Eliot said. ‘There’s a photographer coming to take a picture of your sculpture. Have you got a name for it yet?’

Alice looked at the teacher. Overwhelmed, she wanted to run and hide.

‘It’s called
Catamaran House
, sir,’ she said solemnly.

‘Goodness me!’ the teacher said in a friendly way. ‘Pretty
and
talented! Look pleased then!’

She blushed.

January was bitterly cold and in February it snowed heavily. Sita brought two more paraffin heaters. Small birds rested on the fence in their neglected back garden. Alice drew them from her bedroom window. She was a permanent presence in the art room now. A week later, Stanley read about her prize in the London evening paper.

Alice Fonseka attends Stockwell Manor School.

There was a photograph of Alice standing next to her
Catamaran House
.

‘Well, well, well,’ Stanley’s voice came loudly over the newly installed telephone.

He sounded pleased.

‘You’re a bit of a dark horse! Looks like you’re going to take after that grandfather of yours, after all! That should please your mother.’

At school, winning the prize and the newspaper article made a difference, too.

‘Her grandfather is an artist, sir,’ one of the children told David Eliot when he pinned the article on the noticeboard. ‘Alice said he’s quite famous in Ceylon.’

The art teacher nodded. He wasn’t surprised.

‘When did she say that?’

‘Dunno, sir. Last year sometime. She brought a letter from him into Geography. With a stamp of their Prime Minister on it.’

Mr Eliot raised his eyebrows. The next time he saw Alice he questioned her.

‘Grandpa Bee,’ Alice said eagerly, caught unawares by the question.

She stopped what she was doing for a moment. Memories flashed past and the teacher looked sharply at her. Her hair, grown longer in the past few months, was tied up, exposing a slender neck. It made her look older than fifteen and her eyes, when she glanced at him, were almond-shaped and clear.

‘He had a wonderful studio,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I used to make things while he made his prints.’

A printmaker!’ said Mr Eliot with interest. ‘He’s a printmaker? What’s his name?’

‘Benjamin Fonseka. You wouldn’t know him, sir. He painted in watercolour too.’

Her grandfather’s voice was suddenly close by in her ear.
You are going to the land of watercolours
.

‘Good!’ Mr Eliot said, nodding his head. ‘I want to see you paint as well, you know. Not just make objects. D’you understand? When you start on your examination year, I want you to try your hand at watercolours.’

And he went back into his office for another fag, unaware that Alice’s eyes followed him across the room.

B
Y THE TIME
S
ARATH WAS SIX
the war was a worn-out habit on the island. Slowly, the old ways sank under the strain of the conflict as though they were a broken boat shipwrecked on the reef. The Fonsekas had stayed on the boat while others had gone. Sita, having made a raft of her own, was sailing to oblivion. May, examining the crop of grey hair on her head, was saddened to discover how much time had passed.

Two shots from a Kalashnikov and another youth was felled to the ground.

‘Be careful, Sarath,’ May called out in warning several times a day.

Her beliefs and her sense of justice had altered since Sarath’s birth. She continued to teach at the local school at the top of the hill where, ostensibly, nothing had changed. The view from her classroom window had not altered. It was still a sun-drenched, dazzling sea she gazed at. But the Tamil boy who had been dragged from his seat had been dead for many years and her own son had replaced him in May’s heart. Nothing else, she now knew, mattered.

‘Don’t be long,’ she called out. ‘I want you to come straight home from school.’

And Sarath replied for the hundredth time:

‘No, Amma, I won’t.’

Sarath knew, even before he could walk, that he had certain responsibilities. Certain sections of the family guilt were stamped on his
name. At his birth, for instance, his mother had lost her sister’s affection. Sarath knew that. His aunt Sita had not been able to contemplate his birth because it raised the spectre of her dead child. Even though the chances of any of them ever seeing his aunt again were more or less nil, still Sarath felt the family guilt heavy as a gold chain around his neck.

Then there was his cousin, Alice. She might as well have been lost at sea, for all the contact they had with her. Sarath’s mother had told him that Alice’s leaving had broken Grandpa Bee’s heart. Once Grandpa Bee used to paint beautiful seascapes in iridescent peacock colours. But now he just made etchings of disembodied faces that had brought him an official warning. Watching his grandfather, Sarath was aware that he wanted to do something for his country to stop the senseless war. With this in mind, on his seventh birthday, Sarath declared he was going to become a doctor. His parents listened with admiration. Their son reminded them a little of Alice, before she had gone away and lost her anchor.

Bee was watching too. He was watching with caution, keeping his opinions and his memories in a rusty old chocolate tin with the Queen’s crest and the name Ceylon stamped on it. Long ago Bee had decided it would not do to get too involved. Thereby lay heartache. Alice had left behind a hole in his view of the sky through which she had sailed into eternity. Her mother had followed without once looking back. They had made a winter landscape of Bee’s life, here, in the sun. So it would not do, he told himself, to get too attached to the boy. In order to guard himself, Bee took the following precautions: he never walked on the beach with Sarath; he never invited him in to watch him mix his colours; he never told him stories. There was no need for Sarath to stay the night with his grandparents as he lived so close to them anyway. Battling silently with himself, Bee argued that Sarath did not need him in the way Alice had, for both Sarath’s parents plainly adored him. Kamala, understanding perfectly well what Bee was up to, observed all this without saying a single word on the subject. She never commented when he rang May every day to check the boy had got home safely from school.

Newcomers had moved into the town from the city, from the east, from the west and from the more remote parts of the island. The army had established permanent headquarters and there were always patrol cars racing along the beach at nights, playing shine-the-searchlight and round-up-the-terrorists. A rash of corpses appeared all along this part of the coast. Hell with a face on it; lips that would never kiss again, hair with no hands to comb it. In the years since Sita had left, Bee had lost count of the number of Tamils he had hidden, saved, dispatched to Jaffna. Except for Kunal, all had reached their destination safely. The fugitives came at night, silently through the coconut grove, never when the moon was high, in a steady stream of desperation. Mostly they were servants, sometimes as young as fifteen. Always they came via the doctor. The road across Elephant Pass had become impassable. And now, another, fresher activity was running silently across the island; one that no one wanted to talk about. It had not reached the south as yet, but in the eastern province it was big news. Here large white vans had begun to patrol the villages; late at night, under cover of darkness as though they were fishermen fishing with lamps, men in plain clothes rounded up their catch. Door to door they went, house to house, penetrating the night with the beam of their torches. Pouncing when they were least expected. Creating a new terror that would last for many years to come. One day someone would speak of this abuse of human life, but for now they were simply ghost-people disappearing softly through the rustling trees, voiceless and despairing. Those Tamils lucky enough to have relatives abroad tried sticking it out in hiding while they waited for a ticket. They went to England, to Canada, to Australia. Anywhere, really, such was the desperation for peace. But peace was in hiding, too. Bee, walking defiantly across the beach to visit Janake’s mother, sensed it as he stumbled, horrified over the whitened remains of unidentified bones. Saying nothing to Kamala, he put new bars on the doors.

‘Thatha,’ May said worriedly, when one more Tamil had been dispatched safely to a ship, ‘Thatha, please, you’ve done enough. I want you to stop. These etchings are madness, hiding these people is so risky. I think the neighbours are watching you.’

For months now, the post had been intermittent. The astrologer who had cast May’s horoscope before her marriage came to visit Bee. He looked grave.

‘Maybe you should leave this town,’ he told him tentatively. ‘There are people here who don’t like you.’

He did not speak of the dark star that lay across Bee’s horoscope, crossing the planet Saturn with the number nine. The astrologer remembered all this from the time of May’s wedding. Nine was important, he told Bee, counting the steps that led down from the verandah to the gate. Nine lizards darted across the wall, and nine moths circled the shade of the single light bulb in the sitting room. May rang her parents daily. Had they had any news from Sita? She had seen the postman walking up the hill, perhaps with a letter for them. But no, there was no news from Sita.

Then one morning at eleven o’clock all the radio stations were interrupted by a news flash. A senior government official had been assassinated and the Tamil Tigers were claiming responsibility. Shockwaves reverberated around the capital as the government was thrown into chaos. All morning the radio broadcast the news, interspersed with the sonorous chanting of monks, their voices calmly rising and falling, for death, being part of life, did not perturb them. Several hours later, before the country could draw its breath, the Tigers bombed the holiest of Buddhist sites. A truck loaded with explosives rushing towards the sacred temple of the tooth was all it took to destroy three thousand years of peace. Those who watched in horror saw that at last the eye of the storm had appeared.

Bee listened to the news while he worked on his etching plate. The afternoon sun was low in the sky. In a little while it would be dark and the mosquitoes would descend with the curfew. He watched the etching acid frothing in its tray. After a few seconds the timer buzzed and he lifted the metal plate out and washed it in clean water. Then he began to ink the plate up. He had received a message from his friend the doctor. There was a Tamil man in the wrong place at the wrong time, on the run. Bee looked at his day’s work. The etching was drying between blotters. On the white paper was
an image of a naked body lying face-up across a trestle table. Four faces emerged from out of the black mezzotint, staring down at the begging figure. Bee stared at the image intently. He took his pencil out and signed the print. Then he wrote in his neat faint handwriting:
The Banquet
.

‘I’m going up to the Mount Lavinia Hotel,’ he told Kamala. I’m meeting the art dealer there.’

Kamala watched him go. She knew he was lying but she understood; if she wanted Bee to find a little feeling in his numbed emotions it was through this small seepage of defiance that he would do so. So with an eye blinded with love she left him alone.

At the hotel Bee ordered a glass of beer and went to a table outside. He waited. There was no sign of the doctor. The light from the sea pierced its way through his thoughts. A small spindly bird hopped on the sand. His heart ached. This war has cursed us, he thought. Staring at the kingfisher-blue sky he thought of Sarath and saw how great his fear had been, how frightened he was of loving again. But Sarath would be fine. Thank God! With his Singhalese father, his Singhalese name, he would be safe.

After finishing his beer, Bee looked around casually. Then he stood up and left. The barman watched him leave. He wiped down the counter. Under his waiter’s uniform he wore army boots.

Because for once there was no curfew, they all ate together that night: Bee and Kamala, May and Sarath. Even Namil, having finished work early, joined them. Nobody spoke much and the fish was exceptionally delicious. If I had not lost Alice, thought Bee, when the plates were cleared and he sat smoking on the verandah, I would say it hasn’t been so bad. But I would like to see her one more time, he thought. Afterwards, as they sat on the verandah under a sky punctured by stars, listening to the sweet, soft sound of the Indian Ocean, Bee brought out a pack of cards. No one, not even Sarath, said anything as he began to deal them out. In the light of the lamp that the servant had lit Kamala glanced at her husband’s face. It was unutterably sad.

The dawn came up like the opening bars of a symphony. It brought the sea into view once more, cleaned smooth by night’s hand. Gradually as the sky whitened it became possible to see the waves rising slowly above the horizon, high and incandescent in the softest of blues, impossible to replicate in paint. They moved one against another, spreading lacy fronds across the sands. And here and there glimpses of wet sand glinted like precious gems. An unseen hand had swept the beach. Slowly the dark line of the horizon began to glow, first with a faint rose, followed by streaks of yellow. And all the while the dark expanse of water turned a glorious, shimmering silver. Some other person will paint this stretch of sea after I am gone, thought Bee, rising to gaze at it. Unusually, he felt refreshed. The arrival of the light could still make him impatient to begin working. Perhaps, he thought, I should go back to painting what I see. Last night’s unexpected tranquillity had left him hopeful. His sleep had been peaceful, uninterrupted by sounds of devil dancing or drums or the thud of an exploding bomb. For once, nothing had disturbed him until the arrival of this slow-spreading, astonishing, dawn. Beside him, Kamala stirred but did not wake. Turning over she snored gently. Quietly, Bee went outside.

In England the dawn was at least five hours away, he thought, examining his plants, still damp with dew. Last night Sarath had won the card game, laughing gleefully; watching him, Bee had felt a confusion of old emotions from long ago. Unlocking his studio he went in and began examining his etching plates, clean now of all ink, criss-crossed with finely bitten lines, like the palm of his own hand. Staring at them, suddenly he wanted simply to paint again. Taking out a sheet of watercolour paper, he stretched it across a board. Outside an army of enormous red ants marched across the gravel in wavy lines. Bee dipped his brush in a jar of clear water. The ants, moving as one, headed towards the threshold of his studio. Sunlight fell through the open door and on to their transparent, swollen bodies, making them look as though they carried sacs of blood on their backs. With one swift stroke Bee drew his brush across the board, marking the horizon across it forever. Aquamarine pigment bled across the paper.

He dipped his brush into the water again, completely absorbed in the movement of colour and water. A scene was growing under his hand, seeping out on to the white, rough paper, saturated, fluid and staining. He was so absorbed that he did not hear Kamala’s voice calling out to him, over and over again, from the verandah. He did not notice the columns of ants flattened juicily by a pair of thick-soled boots. Only when the machete above his head came down in the first crack on his skull did he feel anything. Only then as, again and again it smashed against him, did he move, as with a whisper of breath, and the infinite grace of a marionette, he sank to the floor. Beside him the thin line of ants were no more. And in this moment Bee Fonseka was spared the knowledge that Kamala, seeing what was happening, running out towards him, had been gunned down, her cry and her life snapped off.

Silence. There was only silence. The sun rose fully. It was another cloudless, blank-blue day on this lovely island. First one bird, then another sang their indifferent melodies. Light fell on the leaves in the garden, casting shadows on the gravel where once Alice had stood, where neither Bee nor Kamala would ever walk again. Tenderly the shadows lengthened; it would be many hours before anyone called at the house. More hours still before May and Namil and Sarath would be brought the news by shocked neighbours. It would be a whole day before such news could travel across the oceans to England, and it would take even longer for Sita and Alice to comprehend what had happened. For distance would both protect and abandon them in equal parts, so that their wound would congeal instead of healing. But all this was some hours away. For now, those who would mourn still slept the sleep of innocence, protected for a little while longer. As the blood seeped into the land, and the sea rolled gently in a dazzling bowl of sunlight, all remained still.

It would be many weeks before the letter itself finally reached them. First there was the incoherent conversation with Namil. Still half-asleep, they struggled, grappling with the unfamiliar voice and the
events that were unfolding elsewhere. They tried to picture the scene. Dawn on the coast? The sea? They had not heard its ebb and flow and hiss for years. They thought the sea had been erased from their consciousness. So her sister’s voice, choking and crying, rising and falling across the ocean like an old familiar refrain, invading this drab, dark hall in which Sita stood holding the telephone with both her hands, seemed unreal. Afterwards, Sita had
known
she had sounded unfeeling.