Mouthing the Words (7 page)

“I hope you’ve considered the potential outcome of this …”

“She’s always got herself confused with other people. Whenever we used to address her as Thelma, she’d say, no that was Janawee, or Ginniger or …”

“
HEROIN
!” I screamed. “You came back!” Miraculously, in the midst of this crisis, Heroin appeared as my knight in shining armour to rescue us from this awful mess. “Do something, Heroin,” I pleaded. “They won’t listen to me,” I whimpered.

But Heroin stood silent and resolute, perched atop her big white horse, which barely fit the width of our narrow hallway at the top of the stairs. I reached out to grab its reins, but despite its size in our tiny house the reins seemed to be just beyond my grasp. Frustrated at her lack of response, I bleated, “But Mummy …
MUMMY
… what about Daddy?” Tears were streaming down my face now. “What about Daddy? I miss Daddy. When is Daddy coming home?” I wailed.

“Now
that
is Thelma,” my mother whispered to Suresh with a certain amount of relief. “Darling?” she called out through the closed door. “Thelma? Are you OK? It’s OK. Mummy’s here.” But I wondered if it was really her because I had never heard such tender words from her before. I collapsed in a heap under the weight
of
those tender words, shaking there at the base of her door like a fallen lamb, blubbering my eyes out.

She opened the door then and used all her strength to scoop me up from the floor, carried me like a little ball because I was determined to inhale all my limbs, to be tiny and not let anything spill out of me, and pulled me into bed with her. When had she ever done this before? She had her arm around me and was saying, “There, there, pet,” and I was trying to curl myself into her warm armpit because Janawee used to crawl into my armpit when she was upset.

I must have slipped into a coma of comfort for a few minutes because I remember nothing but the warmth and smell of her cotton nightgown, her deodorant’s odour mingled with a peppery sweat. Nothing until she said quietly, “My friend Suresh was just telling me a story, Thelma, to ease my headache,” and I looked up to see Suresh sitting there in his beige linen trousers and his white mandarin shirt with his turban and his beard, in the wicker chair by the window. Slouched down in the chair, gazing dreamily out the window, affecting what was probably a contrived but nevertheless convincing aura of peace.

“Is it true,” he said gently, his gaze not leaving the maple tree outside the window, “that there are no black squirrels in England?”

I peered up at his profile from the safety of the crevice I had nestled into between underarm and breast as he spoke the words, and thought, A nice face,
a
kind face, and I spoke a barely audible, “It’s true.” And he turned toward us then, slowly, with a smile, and the light shone against his teeth, a brilliant gold.

“Mummy,” I whispered. “He has gold teeth.”

“He does have one gold tooth. But you know his whole heart is gold.”

“No,” I scoffed. “How can that be?”

“You’re the one with the imagination, Thelma. When did you start getting so practical?” she asked.

“I remember a little princess who almost lost her imagination once,” offered Suresh. “In fact, when she lost her imagination she found she wasn’t a princess at all.”

“What was she?” I asked quietly, my curiosity aroused. Mum pulled my hair back behind my ear so I could see.

“She was just a mushroom in a field of other mushrooms on the estate of a very wealthy but evil king,” he continued.

“Where?” I asked.

“Ceylon,” he said.

“You mean Sri Lanka,” I corrected him.

“Yes, Sri Lanka. But long before it was Sri Lanka it was ruled by an evil king who used to send his knights to dig up dead bodies and pull out their gold teeth so he could melt them down and fashion gold rings for his fat fingers. His hands were so weighted down by gold that he could barely lift them. His body was so fat that
the
island sunk a little further into the sea each time he took a step. And his face was so ugly … that …”

“Even the sun would hide behind a cloud so as not to have to see him,” I added excitedly.

“Exactly,” said Suresh. “You must have heard this story before,” he teased, smiling at my mother.

“No, I haven’t,” I defended. “I’m just using my imagination.”

“Which is what this story is about,” Suresh continued. “Well, the evil king maintained his empire by sending out ships to capture slaves on nearby islands. The slaves were then forced to serve the empire, and if they disobeyed they were turned into mushrooms for the king’s soup. After a few years the king, because he was such a disagreeable man, had many more mushrooms than he could eat in a hundred lifetimes of soup.

“Now most of these mushrooms had once contained human lives, but most of those lives had been forgotten. They didn’t need to be forgotten, but living in the damp earth for so long, the people inside had forgotten themselves, forgotten their spirits, their essence, lost their imagination and the ability to transcend their present circumstances.

“Except for one little mushroom named Nemeni. Although it was increasingly difficult, she was sometimes able to remember a past when she had been the precious daughter of the good king and queen of the island of Sumatra—before the evil king sent his knights to Sumatra to seize all the little children there
and
bring them back to be his slaves in Ceylon. She was able to remember when she had been happy, when she had eaten rice with brown sugar. She was able to dream, there in the dank and stench of fields of identical mushrooms, of being human, of being real, of being free, and of being uniquely beautiful.

“Now the evil king had decided to spread a plague over his fields of mushrooms because he was overwhelmed (even though he was very greedy) by the amount of soup he had to eat to keep up with the number of enemies he was making. But Nemeni, who had the power within herself to imagine that she could be anything she wished to be, had a plan. She would turn herself into a poisonous mushroom and she would will the king to select her for his soup. She knew this meant that she would be eaten by the fat king and her own life would be lost, but in killing him she would save the hundreds of thousands of other lives contained in those fields of mushrooms.”

“She was very brave,” I marvelled aloud.

“And very smart, too,” said Suresh. “For when the king drank his soup the night before he was to spread the plague, he thought with relief, This is the last mushroom soup I will ever have to eat, but little did he know it was to be the last time he would ever eat anything. He drank the soup like water because he was too greedy and lazy to chew. So Nemeni swam down his oesophagus, deep into his fetid stomach, where she spread her poison round like the rings of Saturn.

“When the king had swallowed the last mouthful of soup, he let out a deep groan of death, and a great burst of wind issued forth from his anus,” [witness both mother and daughter giggling in titillation upon hearing this] “and Nemeni was expelled in one giant rush. Lo and behold, she had, in the course of her travels, transformed into a princess again. Before her, all the mushrooms began to rise up from the ground, bursting forth like new blades of grass, transforming into little people as they grew, each crying, “Nemeni. You are our saviour and our queen.”

“But she was dismayed at the sight before her—hundreds of thousands of identical people, dressed in drab, grey uniforms, while she herself was shrouded in white and gold with perfumed jasmine in her hair. “I do not wish you to be my subjects,” she cried out to the waiting masses. “I wish you as your dreams.” And as she spoke these words the people began to transform into dreams of themselves: white knights and emperors and beautiful queens and friendly dragons and happy children, and mothers with babies, and lovers in each other’s arms.”

The air rang with the words of Suresh’s story.

“The end?” I asked, uncertain.

“The end,” Suresh nodded.

“But aren’t you going to tell me, And the moral is …?”’

“But you know the moral,” Suresh said plainly.

“OK, then. But aren’t you going to tell me something
like
, ‘And to this day, the people of Sri Lanka have never eaten mushrooms again.’”

“No, because they do. And they certainly know how to tell which ones are poisonous.”

“Maybe you’ll be a princess one day,” said my mother, stroking my hair. “Of course you’d have to marry a prince, because you’ve missed your chance at being born into royalty,” she laughed.

“But what if I want to be a lesbian when I grow up?” I said, breaking the reverie that had captivated us.

“Thelma!” my mother reacted, apparently shocked and embarrassed. She pushed me from her slightly in order to get a look at my face. “Where on earth do you get ideas like that?” she demanded.

“Imagination, Ma,” I said. “The power of the mind.”

—

Actually, Binbi, Vellaine and I had been hanging out at the top of the stairs one night when I heard Anika tell Claudio that she thought Pam was a lesbian. The next day when Binbecka asked, “Mom? What’s a lesbian?” Anika said:

“A woman who loves another woman.”

“Can I be a lesbian when I grow up?” asked Binbecka.

“Of course you can, sweetheart.”

“Loves another woman like you love Aunt Irena?” asked a confused Vellaine.

“Well, no, not really. Not the same kind of love that
you
have for a sister or a friend. More like the love you have for someone you are married to.”

“Can I be married to you when I grow up?” asked Binbecka.

“Of course not, Binbi,” mocked Vellaine. “Geez.”

“Well, why not? I want to marry Mommy.”

“That’s sweet of you, honey. But I’m married to Claudio. And I’m your mother. And I’m sure you’ll want to marry someone else when you grow up. And … (she was losing track of things now) I’m not a lesbian.”

“I don’t get it,” said an exasperated Binbecka.

“Then what are you?” asked Vellaine.

“Well. That’s a good question. I’m not sure how to answer that,” she paused.

“Well, now I’m really confused,” said Vellaine.

“That’s OK, sweetheart,” said Anika reassuringly. “Most of us really are.”

—

So that was how Suresh came to live with us. Through a story, through imagination, through my mother’s warm armpit. It still wasn’t clear to me how Daddy was going to cope with this new arrangement. Suresh had gone so far as to throw out Mum’s single bed and build them a new pine bed in the basement. A big double bed, in which there was room for all of us on Saturday mornings.

We would sit there, all reading different parts of the newspaper, and Suresh would explain things to me like
the
conflict in the Middle East and tubal ligation. He was studying to be a doctor and he seemed to me to know everything. He explained to me words like “carnage” and “genocide” and I told him that the rest of the world sounded like a horrible, horrible place and he told me that sometimes home could be the most horrible place of all and I knew that he was right. I knew that diseases started and spread outwards from home and that wars sounded like doors slamming and that the nightmares you could have in your very own bed were the worst places you could ever travel.

But we seemed to be happy now—Willy and me reading the comics and Mum and Suresh doing the cryptic crossword, all of us twisting around in the white sheets that smelled like bleach and bananas, for hours. And Suresh cooking in the kitchen in his white mandarin shirt and turban and sandals. Me rolling out the dough for chapattis, and the wonderful smell of lentil curry and cumin on spinach and potatoes, and even being given a taste of brown beer, and saying “How can you people drink that—it tastes like piss,” and my mother saying:

“Thelma! For a girl with such a sophisticated vocabulary you do choose some vulgar words!”

“Sorry, Mum,” I apologized. “I must have been mistaken. I meant urine,” and she and Suresh laughed.

There was a lot of laughing in those days. And a lot of gardening—not Mum’s precious roses anymore but sunflowers and tomatoes and green vines that spread
over
the ground and burst into long green and fat orange vegetables. And a herb garden, which was my responsibility. I liked slugging best of all—going out at night with the flashlight and startling the slimy grey slugs with the bright light and saying, “There you are, you sneaky bugger,” as I scraped up another with my knife and deposited it in a bag of oil.

It felt like forever, like a whole lifetime, but in retrospect it was only a matter of a few months—a summer that flowed into an autumn which collapsed into a dark and depressing winter when Mum was crying a lot and Willy stopped talking and I looked round and round the house for Suresh but couldn’t find him. I remember an evening when he came into my room and it was strange because he just crouched there in the corner watching me cut out pictures from a magazine for a collage I was making, saying nothing.

“Are you meditating?” I asked him, because he reminded me of Anika there crouched in silence, and he said cryptically:

“If only I could have such peace.”

“Do you want to help me with my collage?” I asked him, hoping that would help.

“I am not an artist like you,” he said sadly. “I am simply a puppet,” he went on. “Not a free man.”

I didn’t understand and I looked up at his face curiously to see he was crying. I didn’t know what to do so I just kept cutting out little pictures and gluing them
onto
bristol board and he kept crouching there, staring at the carpet.

He said, “I’d like you to have this,” and he gave me a little gold ring that coiled round like a snake, just like the one he’d given to my mother.

“What for?” I asked, a little disconcerted.

“For a present,” he said.

“Like a Christmas present?” I asked.

“Just a present for being you,” he said, smiling sadly.

“Well, let me give you a present then,” I smiled, getting up and rummaging through my toy drawer. Trevor the truck—no, I’d forgotten about him, he wouldn’t do. Teddy? No, I didn’t think I could ever part with Teddy. Blondie? Not much of a present for a grown-up man, I thought.