Homesick (5 page)

“Archee, this way,” she says, pointing down the hill. Archee stops and looks at her.

“We came downhill, now uphill,” Archee says.

“Town?” Preethi says. Archee shakes her head. “I have bought!” she says, and indicates her bag bulging with vegetables and fruit. Preethi glimpses a rare, squinting smile.

They make slow steps up the hill. They are both tired. Preethi looks into each garden gate, into the windows of the houses at brown-tinged lacey curtains, at vases on windowsills. Ahead of them she sees Rose or Olive talking to her mum, and her mum talking, too. Preethi stops and unbuttons her coat. Archee unbuttons hers. They walk on. At the top of the hill, they know which way to go: right. They walk along the road, and although it is unfamiliar, they are both sure. Archee points at bluebells in a garden.

“Snowdrops,” Preethi says confidently. “Blue snowdrops.” (When Rose called her Chocolate Drop this morning, she called Rose Snowdrop, and she was sure that would make them friends.)

“Hungry?” Archee asks. Preethi nods. Archee stops and produces a round, greeny-yellow apple. They continue to walk as she levers small bites of sweet, cold flesh into her mouth, dripping juice onto her coat.

They get to the top of her hill. She is convinced of it.

“Here, Archee,” she says. Archee looks about, as if for someone, something. They go down the hill. Each house is familiar and not familiar. The hill is steeper than she remembers. There is no turn to a white-walled driveway on the corner. There are no rosebushes to fear in the next garden. They are on the wrong hill. Preethi says nothing, but tears start. Her breath is short. Her apple falls and rolls away into the middle of the road, where a cat is grooming its kittens. She looks to the opposite side of the road,
where Darren’s garden gate is green, and it is not there. Archee walks on, looking at each house. They walk to the bottom of the hill. Their house is in the middle of the hill, and Archee has walked to the bottom. Preethi looks up at Archee, the tears now joining the apple juice on the lapel of her coat.

A woman is walking toward them. Archee squeezes her hand.

“Ask,” she says.

The woman wears a long blue coat, a white hat, and small white-framed glasses. She is almost past them when Archee raises her hand and touches her arm. The woman jumps back.

“Yes?” she says sternly.

“Sutton?” Archee says.

“What? What are you saying?”

“Sutton Road?” but she says it like the Soup Dragon, her mouth making extra noises, her mouth making words Preethi understands but the woman does not. The woman looks as if she has swallowed medicine.

“Ask,” Archee says, and pushes Preethi forward. “Tell.”

The woman looks at Preethi. Preethi thinks she looks like a peering spaceman, a stranger in their little world.

Preethi says, “I live at 28 Sutton Road,” and the woman turns around and points to the next hill along, points, turns back, continues on her way. Not a stranger, Preethi thinks. Spacemen
do
go to the Clangers’ moon.

•

When Archee feeds Preethi her lunch, she kneads mackerel curry with lentils and rice and makes little balls on the side of the plate. Each ball is a house in a village, Archee
says, and Preethi thinks perhaps a house on their hill, or a Clanger house—or maybe a house in the village in Sri Lanka where Archee is the headmistress. When Archee feeds the mush into her mouth, Preethi closes her eyes and it tastes of Dragon Soup.

I
t seems,” he says, “the rain coming every day.”

He says “sims.” The girls do not stifle their laughter but burst with a kind mirth in their corner of the kitchen. Their mother turns her face from him, and he knows the stare that silences them: the same grimace her own mother would have given to her. He remembers his aunt’s fierceness, her vicious tongue. “They’re doing no harm,” he says in Sinhala, but his cousin shakes his excuses off, her ponytail tremor the only movement in the dark Edwardian kitchen, the rain the only distant sound. He cannot even hear the girls breathing.

“It
seems
like it rains every day,” Shamini corrects him now. He glances quickly at the girls, and they are waiting for him to repeat the words. They are taller and fatter than girls he is used to in Sri Lanka. The older one has ribbons in her hair, the younger, a fringe, which covers one eye. The skin of their cheeks is taut, as if it is stretched over gourds. He chooses the smaller one, her one eye, and he repeats to her, “It
seems
like it rains every day.” She smiles encouragingly. She must be eight? Her hand comes up, and she pushes the hair from her eyes. She looks at him, and he winks at her. Both girls laugh again. Their mother makes a swipe at the air in front of them, and they stumble up and clear plates and the Pyrex butter dish, the pots of jam, and the golden syrup tin. They are like puppies, he thinks,
watching their bottoms wobble. They are like week-old dogs.

•

Soon, he limps out into the grim London day. He goes to the train station, and, following the instructions Shamini has written, he buys a ticket from the machine. He presses the button for New Cross Gate, then waits on the wrong side of the station, boards the wrong train, and goes most of the way to Croydon. He shows his directions to an African on the train. The African shakes his head. There are no other people he can ask, only white fellows. The African points to the door and to the other train. The door is about to close. He jumps off. He gets onto the other train as its doors slide to, and he stands by them, looking out to the train he just left. The African is at the doors. He smiles, lifts his hand. The African turns away as their double doors smoothly glide in opposite directions.

He watches the rain on his window. He watches the incessant water beyond the window: the steadiness of the droplets on the glass calms him, and he dares himself to reach forward, to follow the route of one of the threads of water. But his hand is scared. His body is frightened of being out alone in this huge, fast world. He sees his reflection when they go into a tunnel and finds it remarkable. It is his face, but his body is in too large a coat, and water is percolating through him, as if he were simply not seen. As if he were a filter for rain.

At New Cross he walks back and forth along the streets, following Shamini’s map. He cannot find the street she has spelt out. He shuffles: his shoes are too big. He sees more Africans, leaning against a car. One of them shouts to him, but he puts his head down and walks more quickly.
He looks behind him, sees they are laughing. He is worried he will lose the station and will not find his way back to Shamini’s. He steps into a road, and a car sounds its horn, but not like in Colombo, where everyone uses the horn. The car is like a bull, shouting an anger. He steps back, looks about, and people are watching him, and people are everywhere.

He does not find the building, but he finds someone who wants him. A man is beckoning him and asks if he wants work. He nods.

“Name?”

“Kumar,” he whispers.

“What?”

“Kumar.”

The man writes it down.

“Your trousers too long. Roll them up. You’re gonna get covered in shit,” the man says. He points at Kumar’s legs, and when he realises he does not understand, he mimes rolling, as if he were winding a clock or wringing a towel. Kumar rolls his trousers up.

“Here,” and the man hands Kumar a fluorescent jacket. It is yellowy-green, the colour of too-ripe limes. Around the bottom edge is sewn an orange strip, its colour as loud as the yellow. Kumar takes off his coat, the one that belonged to Shamini’s ex-husband. He puts on the fluorescent jacket.

“Get in the van,” the man says.

•

Shamini asks, “Lunches made?” The girls nod. “Go, then, go—brush your teeth!” she calls after them. She turns to Kumar.

“How long more with these people?”

“Five days.”

“They are paying you nothing.”

He grunts authoritatively. He knows she will start to nag and to whine if he does not shut her up.

“When will they give you the money?”

They give him the money at the end of each day, but he has told her it will be at the end of the week. He has already bought a present for the younger girl, Lolly: a plastic doll with blond hair and enormous breasts. He has bought ribbons for the older girl. Also a bottle of whisky. The rest of the money he has put into a biscuit box in the bottom of his suitcase. At the end of the week he will give Shamini twenty pounds. That is what they have agreed. He clears the breakfast now. He washes up before he goes out. He waits to hear Shamini’s car door slam, and then he uses the bathroom. Before he leaves the house, he makes Lolly’s bed. He shakes her duvet, breathing in her sleepy odours, picking up her pillow and smoothing the sheet below, holding the pillow against his chest. The bulk of it against him, mixed with the headiness of her aura, makes him hard.

•

It is not raining, and he notices that the park on the way to the station gleams in the sunshine, the way that paddy fields are luminescent after rain in Sri Lanka. He is wearing his work jacket, and he sees there are others with the same jacket working in the park. He will miss the first train, but he goes in. He wanders toward where the gardeners are digging. An African with long, braided hair looks at him and points at the tools leaning against a railing.

“You’re late,” he says.

Kumar takes a fork and, climbing over the knee-high fencing, joins the African, watching him to make sure he knows what he is doing.

“Take it all out, man,” the African says.

Kumar begins to dig.

•

He drinks whisky in the morning, after they have left. He drinks, then dons the jacket. He does not eat, because he has stopped paying Shamini. He drinks more if it is raining. He slurs when he speaks, he has noticed. So he does not speak. At the park, they point at tools, sometimes give him a cup of tea, but he is not earning money. He has walked into their team, employed by the council, with structures of paperwork converting their callouses into the notes and coins in their pockets, and he does not speak or hear enough to understand this magic trick. He earns a small amount cleaning and restocking the twenty-four-hour shop, but they are Tamils, and they don’t like him. They pay him enough to buy a bottle of whisky and a loaf of bread every day. The blurred pictures he sees in this huge world make him feel inured to it. He is used to it, yes, but he is still afraid. His English has not improved. He does not practice, because no one speaks to him, at the park or at Shamini’s house. And the Tamils speak Tamil to each other. He tried speaking Sinhala once, to the boss, and the man looked the other way, frowned.

Lolly’s sister, Deirdre, is causing trouble. A few days ago, he heard her use the word “stinky.” He had watched enough American soap operas to know that this word meant his smell. Shamini ignores him, though. She asked for money at the end of the first week, and then stopped. He knows she owes his father money, and that is why she continues to have him under her roof. He wonders if she needs a man in the house now her husband has left. He does not
question his status in their house any more than he questions the wet air around him.

When he arrives home this evening, the door opens to wailing. He hears Deirdre and Lolly crying in their rooms. Shamini looks glass-eyed.

“What has happened?” he asks her and is surprised at his own words, because they are English words, not Sinhala.

“Some girls from Lolly’s school have disappeared,” Shamini says. He takes the news into him the way he takes in water or whisky or breath. His head tilts this way and then the other, the lines of his mouth pushing down into his chin, his lips pursed in a noncommittal acknowledgment.

“What to do?” Shamini says.

Children go missing all the time in Sri Lanka, he thinks: in Sri Lanka I went missing for a time, and no one cried for me. He removes his jacket and takes it out to the porch to shake it into the dark early evening. He looks down the street at the cars driving fast and the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill. Everything so orderly and smooth, like it is all on the inside, the roads conveyor belts like at the airport, the cars suitcases, the houses people, their eyes staring at him, their mouths pursed in disapproval. He closes the door and comes inside. He goes to the bathroom and washes his upper body under his arms, splashing the water up into his armpits. He looks briefly into the mirror. His eyes are bloodshot, and his hair is long. He has grown a moustache and a beard that looks like coconut husk. Kumar goes to his room and gets his wash bag. Lolly looks out at him as he goes back to the bathroom. He winks solemnly at her. She looks steadily back.

Shamini talks on the telephone after the dinner he
has been invited to join. He hears her hushed voice as he washes up, and he knows she is talking to their family in Sri Lanka. The girls have been sent to bed, and now he sits on the edge of his own single bed, in the box room, in silence. He takes his whisky bottle from his suitcase under his bed and glugs back the remains. The room is blue, and he feels its coldness. The bed is surrounded by tea chests, which have failed to be carried into the attic. The ladder is at the foot of his bed, but he has not been up there, it is not his business, it does not interest him.

He remains on the edge of the bed, waiting for Shamini’s voice to stop, for sleep to come, or morning. When he is at the park, digging earth, he feels happy. Earth is earth, whatever its colour. In Sri Lanka, the earth is red and dusty, as if the setting sun has crumbled like cake, but here the earth feels heavy and is black, wrought from ore. It feels good in his hands, it feels as if he holds people in his hands, people from pasts he has no knowledge of. When he dies, he does not want to be swallowed up by this country, to become part of the heavy blackness. He will go back to Sri Lanka, he thinks, to die. To disappear into dust there, that is his ambition.

•

Lolly comes into the box room. He has dozed off in his clothes, lying sideways on his bed, his feet still in his shoes, still touching the ground. She puts her ear to her shoulder and smiles into his eyes.