Homesick (7 page)

“Nah. Birds don’t belong to no one. I just …” He shrugged.

“Oh.”

Preethi waited. He had called her, and she did not want to go home.

“Wait there, I’m coming down.”

She moved back to give him room and watched him use both arms deftly, his body just like her own: muscular and dependable. As he jumped she noticed a nest that his hair had camouflaged.

“They let you get so near,” she said.

“Yeah, they’re stupid, really. I could be a predator or anything.”

“Do you feed them? Is that how you do it?” He was standing very near her: it scared her, the arm, and his bulk—he was taller than she had imagined. She tipped backward, pretending to lose her balance, and then recovering it three steps away.

“What you doing down here?”

“I dunno,” she said.

“Wanna come and play?”

“Play what?”

“I’ve got a den.”

He led her around the trees and to the back of the flats, across the grounds to the box hedge on the far side. There he had leant branches against the straight-cut shrub, and under the branches were rugs, books, a sketch pad, pencils. Two apples and half a sandwich. He lowered himself under the branches and sat down in the impression his body had left. He crossed his legs and indicated with the arm for her to sit opposite. She sat. He picked up an apple with the two fingers and leant forward to her. She shook her head, but he thrust it still. She reached her hand forward, not looking at the apple, but at his face.

“Go on,” he said.

She took the apple as they stared at each other still, and when her fingers touched his, they were warm. She put the apple to her lips and bit. He smiled. Then he did something extraordinary: he leant forward to her feet and tied her shoelaces, the two fingers on the arm weaving the thick white laces into an extra loop in a complicated route so that the bows on her shoes sat tight and hard, as if her feet were packaged up like two matching gifts.

•

Slap, on the arm, so not
so
cross, she thought. Just one. Stay quiet.

“Did you polish Rohan’s shoes?” her mother asked.

“Yes, Ammi,” and pulling herself in, her tummy, her arms, into herself, she walked toward the door.

“Where are you going?” She recognised the quiet threat in her mother’s voice. “Preethi?”

“I’m just going to get my books, Ammi,” she said. She ran upstairs to her room, rubbing at her arm, saying the same prayer on the dark stairs. She switched the lights on, threw her sheets and blankets back up onto the pillows, smoothed over the coverlet, rubbing her hands along its worn lines.

“Preethi!” she heard Gehan call. He was younger than she, but he knew all his times tables, understood algebra, had started to learn the periodic table in his spare time, to taunt her, she thought. To hurt her. “Ammi says come,” he shouted up the stairs.

She looked at the exercise book of sums her mother had left her that morning. Long multiplications: she had attempted them, then stopped. What was she to do? She took them downstairs. Slap, across the face.

“What did you
do
today?”

“Nothing, Ammi,” she said through the sting of tears.

“Nothing? Nothing! I see ‘nothing.’ Why? Why?” She wanted to reach toward Ammi, say, “Don’t, Ammi, it will be all right,” but she stood still.

Gehan said, “I saw her walking down the hill today.”

“What? I
told
you to stay here,” and slap again. Slap, and Gehan smiling. That was all she saw. Tomorrow she would go out again. Ammi put the book in her hands.

“Upstairs until you’re finished. Finish quickly. Papa is back in half an hour, and we will eat then.”

Rohan came into her room, sat on her bed, and looked over her shoulder.

“What’s two times six?”

“Twelve.”

“Carry the one. What’s four times eight?”

She shrugged. “Thirty-two. Add one. No, add the one.” He waited. “You really can’t do this, can you?” She shrugged again. He dictated the rest of the answers, telling her where to put the carried tens and cross them out. “You must have been taught this—”

“Yes, of course I have,” she said.

“Then why can’t you do it?”

“I just can’t.”

“What
do
you like?”

“Reading. And poems.”

“Yeah, I’d noticed. But apart from that stuff?” She shrugged.

When she went downstairs, Preethi heard Papa in the study. Shyly, she went and stood by the door. Watched him hang his coat and hat, take the bottle from the shelf, pour a glass of the amber liquid, and, as if administering medicine, throw it bitterly against his throat and swallow. He put the bottle and glass back, then turned to the door.

“Hmm, hmm, what are you doing? Why did you leave your sums?” But he asked kindly. She smiled, reached her hand to him. He took his hand from his pocket and, instead of holding her, slipped a pink, cellophane-wrapped boiled sweet into her fingers. He gently turned her from the shoulders and walked her into the kitchen, where Rohan had set the table and mackerel curry and rice were already waiting.

•

“This one, Neville, called me at the office: someone has daubed paint on their front door,” Papa said.

“Everywhere,” Ammi said. “Everywhere, these letters.”

“Hmm.” Papa poured himself another shot of arrack. His eyes were murky already, Preethi could see. Ammi looked at the glass, then turned away, toward Preethi.

“Tomorrow, you will write out all of the times tables. Write them out every day for the rest of the week.”

Papa nodded at Preethi. “Clear now, clear.” He waved his hand at the plates. Preethi jumped up, but the boys remained where they were. Gehan never helped. She and Papa normally cleared and did the washing up together.

“I talked to her teacher last week,” Ammi said. It was old ground, a well-rehearsed speech. “It is not that she is not bright enough.”

“Hmm, hmm,” Papa interrupted. Preethi heard the harsh punishment of the drink, the way he gulped it into him.

“Have you thought she might be dyslexic?” Rohan said. Preethi looked at him: it was very brave, this sudden thought. Unexpected and brave, particularly when Papa was like this. Papa laughed, and Ammi, looking first at Papa, laughed, too.

“What is this ‘dyslexic,’ child? You think you’re at medical school already?” Papa said.

“Ammi said her teacher said she had a ‘blockage.’ I have read about dyslexia—”

“What nonsense,” Ammi said feebly. “Nonsense.” She jutted her chin toward Preethi, to the sink and the pans. “She is a bright girl. No more nonsense,” she said. Rohan took the rest of the plates to the sink, and together they
washed and dried, as Papa unsteadily walked to the sitting room. Soon he and Gehan were laughing with the audience on the television.

•

Sometimes Danny said hello in the playground. Now and then, she sat on the cement kerb at the back of the steps up to the classroom, and he would sit on the opposite kerb, and they would look at the others playing. Gehan wandered alone in the playground, too, but he never played with Preethi. She had friends, but if they played Charlie’s Angels, she had to be the baddie, or if it was a fairy tale, she was the witch. Princesses were always blond, forlornly pallid.

Princes had two straight arms. Kiss chase happened between boys called Philip or Stephen and girls called Jackie or Donna. Danny said there was something dirty about kiss chase. Preethi agreed. A boy holding a girl by her shoulders and rubbing his body against her looked like animals in the park. Danny and she talked about birds, of course, and animals: her cat, his desperate longing for a dog.

“But me dad’s going,” he said one day.

“Going where?”

“Nah,
going
. He’s got cancer.”

“Oh. Does that mean …?”

“Yeah.”

“So you can’t have a dog because he’s got cancer?”

“No. I mean, if he goes, then we’ll move out of the flat. We can’t have a dog at the flats.”

“Where will you move?”

“To my grandma’s in Hampstead. She’s got this posh house, but me mum says it’s just ’cos she’s married well.”

She knew he had told her because he felt the small
loss she felt. What had started so recently would soon be over, this sideways talking, these quiet moments in their school day.

She began to walk home with him. Normally she walked by herself, behind Gehan on the main road. Now she walked down the first side hill and along the adjacent main road, stopping at the sweet shop so they could buy Bazooka Joes and pop bubbles until they got to the trees at his flats. She would come with him to see the nest, then say goodbye and walk up her hill home. Once Sofia called out a name, but it was so rude, so disgusting, Preethi could not even understand it fully, and she smiled at her because she did not know what else to do. She always reached home first, despite leaving after Gehan so he wouldn’t see her walking with the mong.

•

The summer holidays came, and where she would go to school in the autumn term was still undecided.

“What’s cancer, really?” she asked Rohan one day. They were eating breakfast together silently. Gehan had gone out early on his chopper, soon after Ammi and Papa had gone to work.

“It’s a disease,” he said, not looking up from his book. “Sometimes people can survive it, if the doctors catch it early enough. But most people die. Why?”

“Oh, nothing.” Preethi watched him reading. “What’s that about?”

“This? Science and stuff. I
am
starting my O levels in a couple of months.”

“I know. But don’t you want to read stories? I mean, if I knew I had to go and study, you know, all that stuff, I’d spend the holidays reading
proper
books.”

He laughed. “Proper books? What—like
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
or something?”

“Yeah.”

He picked up his book and leafed through: “Says here that Hippocrates named the disease cancer because the conglomeration of cells looked like nesting crabs.”

The thought of it made her feel squeamish. The layers of crustaceans in rows, round like overlapping warts on dirty skin. “Don’t read to me from that book. I don’t want to know about bodies. I’m not like you,” she said angrily.

But he was sunk in, ignoring her, and despite the maths her mother had left her, she walked out of the house, into the sunshine, and sat on the wall. She heard Rohan pad into the sitting room, saw him throw himself down next to the record player. Soon she heard Elvis sing.

She walked down the road to the den. Sometimes Danny wasn’t even there, but she still stayed, hoping, watching the birds fly back and forth from the trees.

•

She fought with both her brothers that summer, Gehan especially.

“It’s your fault we’re not in Sri Lanka,” he said suddenly on a Saturday. Ammi and Papa were marketing in Peckham.

“What do you mean?” Preethi had never considered that they may have gone that year. It wasn’t their year to go, was it?

“Yes, stupid,” he said, watching her lips move as she counted her fingers behind her back. “It’s the third year. We always go every third year. I heard Ammi say that we have to save money, so you can go to the private school.”

“I don’t want to go to private school. What private
school?” Preethi panicked. She had assumed she would go to the local school, the one all the other girls walked to first thing in the morning. She had watched them for years, thinking she would wear their navy skirts, their blue polyester shirts: she would clip her hair back like the teenaged Greek girls across the road.

“It’s
your fault
,” he said again, and she remembered their cousins in Vavuniya, the two boys the same age as she and Gehan: how they would all be shy on the first day, and then … and then! The joy of barefooted cricket, climbing to the roof of their house and spying on their father and his brothers on the veranda, watching their mother sitting at the kitchen table with her sisters-in-law. She thought of food cooked on the open fire in her grandparents’ kitchen and sniffed the air, her eyes closed, as if coconut shells were burning in the sunshine outside the back door. Gehan punched her. She cried out, jumped forward to him, bit his ear, scratched his face. “I
hate
you,” he said, pinching at her body, twisting the flesh on her lower arm.

“I hate you, too,” she shouted, and pulled at his hair. But then she ran into the back garden and round to the patio doors into the sitting room. Rohan lay on the sofa, facedown, his head dangling near the record player. “Gehan punched me,” she said over Elvis.

“Did you hit him back?” She nodded. “Well, then. It’s hot, isn’t it?” The song finished, and he pulled himself up slowly and selected another record from the boxed set. Each sleeve had a picture of Elvis on it: on the one he chose now Elvis grinned sideways, his hair long, around his ears, white shoulders studded with rhinestones. Rohan tipped it, and the record slid in its paper cover into his hands.

“Why do you love Elvis so much?”

“Because he’s … what is he?” he asked sternly.

“The king of rock and roll,” she recited.

“Good girl. Why were you fighting?” He put the record onto the record player. The rhythmic plucking of a guitar, then harmonic backing singers: “King Creole …”

“Because he said”—but Rohan wasn’t listening. “Ro—he said that if it wasn’t for me, we would be in Sri Lanka.” Rohan beat his hand against the black PVC sofa. “Is it true?”

“Maybe,” Rohan said. He glanced up at her. “Ammi wants you to go to a different school. She’s worried you won’t do so well down the road.”

•

As she walked down the hill she wondered why they knew but she didn’t. When she got to the den, Danny wasn’t there. She didn’t want to wait, was anxious suddenly, needed to run and be safe, too. She wanted Danny, though, and for the first time she heard it in her mind that she liked him, that she wanted to see him. She saw some small boys around the back of the flats.

“All right? Which one’s Danny’s flat?”

“Who’s Danny?”

“You know, Danny,” she said, “with the arm.”

“The Flid? The mong?” they asked. She nodded. “Up the top. Number thirty-two.”

She walked up the steps, into the cool cement corridors. As she reached the top of the third flight, she emerged onto the balconied landings and paused to look down to the den. From there, the den couldn’t be seen at all, nor the trees. She walked to the last door and waited a moment before rattling the knocker on the letterbox. Once, then twice. There was no movement. They were out, she thought, so rattled it harder, twice more, then turned to walk back
down. The door was opened suddenly by an old woman, her grey hair short, pulled about. She wore a dark dress, sensible sandals. She had been crying.