Читать книгу Brixton Beach - Roma Tearne - Страница 10

WHEN THE MOMENT SHE HAD DREADED finally arrived and she saw her mother walking slowly up the garden in her faded orange sari, Alice felt her legs grow unaccountably heavy and turn to stone. Kamala coaxed her out on to the verandah and reluctantly down the steps, a bunch of gladioli thrust out in front of her face. Long after she had forgotten her mother’s lop-sided expression of trying not to cry, Alice remembered the deep, burnt orange of the flowers and the shimmering sea-light. She gave Sita an awkward hug and the scent of the flowers passed violently between them. Dazzling sea colours of a certain unbelievable blueness flew into the house while the sound of the cicadas rose and fell in feverish cadence, reminding Alice of the Buddhist monks. It was Kamala who took charge of the situation, enfolding her daughter in a loving embrace, recalling the day Sita had walked in with the newborn Alice. No one else was capable of much. Within minutes Sita was installed in a chair and a cup of weak coriander tea was in her hand.

‘I’ll put your mama’s flowers in a vase in her room,’ Kamala told the child, smiling encouragingly, aware of some indecision. ‘She can see them when she has her rest.’

Alice nodded. She was a murderer. In the awkward silence that followed, Sita stared straight ahead at the sea. Two catamarans with dark patched sails stood motionless in the distance. Alice stole a surreptitious look in the direction of her mother. Sita had wanted a boy named Ravi but, because it had been a girl, they would have called her Rachel after the child in the film, Hand in Hand. Alice swallowed.

‘Did it hurt?’ she asked eventually.

Without warning her mother began to cry, a thin long howl followed by great choking sobs. Her sari was coming undone. Alice stared at her in dismay, wishing she hadn’t spoken.

‘Mama,’ she said uncertainly, looking around for her grandmother, wishing Janake would come over as he had promised. Sita looked frightening and unfamiliar. Her body was its old shape with her stomach almost flat again. She began to speak in a high, strange voice that wobbled on the edge of hysteria. Panic-stricken, Alice called her grandmother.

‘I thought my legs were being pulled apart,’ Sita was saying through a storm of tears. ‘And then my stomach collapsed. They didn’t let me see her, they didn’t want me to!’

She wrung her hands and her face twisted with the effort of trying to speak while she cried.

‘We have to leave this place, Alice. We must go far away from these murderers. We must go to England. Your dada is leaving first, but we must follow.’

Alice stood rooted to the spot. Her mother looked like one of the puppets she had seen at the fair. Her grandparents, coming in just then, moved swiftly.

‘Come, come, Sita, don’t upset yourself and Alice with talk like that. Let’s take you into the bedroom.’

‘Give your mother a kiss, Alice,’ Bee said calmly, ‘and then she must rest. After that I want you to come with me; there’s something I have for you. I’ve been waiting for the right moment.’

They stepped out into the hot afternoon, and turned towards his studio, a small shadow walking close to a larger one. Her bicycle was leaning against the mango tree exactly where they had left it. Seeing it, Bee stopped and sighed.

‘Child…’ he said.

And then he shook his head.

‘Can I ride my bicycle?’ Alice asked, stalling for time uneasily.

Her grandfather was beginning to sound frightening too. Whatever it was he was about to say, she did not want to hear. Bee nodded absent-mindedly. She wanted him to be angry with the government or her father. She wanted him to look fierce, but all Bee did was continue to stare at the sea. She sensed that Shockwaves were going through him. At last he took a deep breath.

Alice,’ he said, and to her relief he sounded stern. ‘There are certain things you need to know.’

She froze. He knew! She had wished the baby dead and he was going to hand her in to the police. Bee was looking at her. The heaviness that she had been carrying around for days shifted and the sun on her neck was as warm and comforting as a hand. Mango scents from the tree pressed against her. It was such an ordinary day. On the dry parched ground a yellow-spotted gecko moved haltingly, back and forth. Alice watched it until it disappeared under the debris of fallen leaves and then her grandfather’s voice was suddenly very clear and steady in the pause.

‘It is not the end of the world, you know,’ he was saying lightly, as though he was talking to himself. And it isn’t for almost four months.’

‘What?’ she asked, startled.

‘Huh?’ he said gruffly. ‘What d’you think? That you won’t come back, huh?’

When she looked up, he appeared to be laughing, with all but his eyes.

‘It won’t be forever. When this trouble stops, you’ll come back, you know that! Just you wait and see. I shall be right here, waiting for you. Now come, Putha, I want to show you what I’ve been saving for you.’

Are we going to England?’

Bee nodded. His lips were pressed firmly together. They crossed to the back of the house where he had spent his life battling with the wind and the monsoons to create his garden. Most of the plants he grew were in containers he had stolen from the kitchen, much to the annoyance of the cook, who was always complaining to Kamala. Bee never took any notice. Going over to the old cupboard that lived outside his studio beside the murunga tree, he searched inside and handed Alice a small box with drawers attached. When she opened it each compartment held all the seeds he had collected from his garden.

‘See, child, there’s a whole garden here, waiting. I’ve been saving all of them for you. See, here’s a forest sleeping in your hand!’

It was obvious he had been preparing for this for some time, that in fact he had always guessed they would leave one day.

‘So you can take my garden with you wherever you go,’ he told her firmly. ‘And you must grow the plants just as I’ve shown you. Hmm?’

She nodded, silenced. The shadows lying in wait on the edge of her bright looking-glass world jostled with each other, inching a little closer. Certainty was seeping into her like sea water from a hole dug on the beach. Alice stared dumbly. A confusion of thoughts swam in her head. The view of the sea, the yellow-spotted gecko now darting across a branch of the murunga tree, and her grandfather, all the well-loved sights of the slowly baking afternoon became as insubstantial as a mirage. Again her heart flexed with sadness and a faint sense of premonition brushed against her. The rush of the sea was faint as though from a shell held to her ear. Blinking, she observed her grandfather in the mottled shade of the tree.

And there’s something else I want to tell you,’ he was saying, ignoring the look on her face, frowning at her. ‘Having certain thoughts about things won’t make them happen. We all have those sorts of thoughts. Sometimes we have to think them in order to see what we feel, d’you understand?’

Alice nodded as the vomity thoughts moved up her throat. And then subsided back into her stomach. She felt like the blocked gully at the back of the garden. Sometimes the servant poked it with a stick and the dirty water went away. But a blocked gully, the servant had said, was always a blocked gully. You never knew when it might overflow. Her grandfather was looking at her closely, so she carefully put her don’t-care face on. Bee wasn’t easily fooled. She needed to be careful.

‘We all have thoughts, Alice,’ he repeated softly. ‘Understand?’

Again she nodded. Luckily her grandfather had turned and was looking far out to sea again.

‘She should have been allowed to see the baby,’ he murmured. ‘What you don’t see stays in your mind longer. It haunts you. D’you understand?’

Alice waited. It occurred to her that this was another way in which she was changing. Because I’m nine, she decided, I don’t get impatient any more. I’ve learned to wait. She knew that her dark secret about the baby was inside the gully. Out of sight for the moment, at least.

‘This will always be here,’ Bee said, pointing to the view and the garden. ‘Waiting for you to return.’

He spoke fiercely.

‘You know that I will never, never leave you.’

Then his face cleared.

‘I’ll take you for the cycle ride later, after I do a bit of work,’ he said in a different voice. ‘And you can look for Janake.’

But later things got worse. Three weeks was not long in the cycle of recovery. Sita was in a terrible state. Her breasts still leaked milk and she had been warned that the tear in her uterus would take months to heal. Walking was painful because of the stitches and despite constant sedation she slept only fitfully. In the end they moved her bed into her sister’s bedroom so May could talk to her whenever she woke. What frightened Alice the most was that her mother could stay silent for only so long before she began her story again. The family doctor came to call. He had been a friend of the Fonsekas for as long as they could remember. He had delivered both Sita and May. Now he came to examine Sita, to check her wound was healing and to change the dressing. He came just when the four o’clock flowers were closing. Alice tried filling her head with the sound of the sea in order to blot out her mother’s cries. After the doctor had left, Bee called Alice and she wheeled her bicycle over the level crossing towards the beach. They walked without speaking, pausing only at the kade for Bee to buy some tobacco. When she had been younger, Alice used to love to stand at the level crossing watching the express as it roared towards Colombo. Tonight they were late and the train had already gone and the beach when they reached it was empty, scribbled all over with small sand worms. Two enormous gulls walked sedately in front of them, managing to keep a fraction of an inch away from the waterline.

‘I’m going to sit on this rock,’ Bee told her, ‘and draw the view and smoke my pipe. Why don’t you see if Janake is around by the huts?’

He had not told Alice, but he had begun to draw her. The drawings were to be his talisman against the coming departure. The sun had not set and the light had a curious candescence. It hung over the sea uncannily as Alice rode in a wobbling line towards the huts. Janake, when he wasn’t out with the fishermen, helped his stepfather to collect coconuts. Today, to her delight, he was still on the beach chopping firewood. She stood watching him for a moment. He was as much a part of this place as she was, so constantly present in her life that she had hardly noticed him until now. The savoury smell of cooking drifted from one of the fishermen’s huts making her mouth water. Janake, stripped to the waist, raised his arm high in the air before bringing it down on to the log. The way the axe struck the wood looked easy, but Janake was sweating. There was a slowly growing pile of wood nearby. Turning, he saw Alice and addressed her in Singhalese.

‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Why does the tree smell of perfume?’ she asked.

‘It’s a special tree,’ Janake said. ‘It can cure many things.’

He smiled a flash of very white teeth. Then he told Alice the townsmen had finally given his mother permission to chop down the tree. They had needed the permission because of the tree’s medicinal properties. Early this morning the tree men had come and taken the tree down and now his mother wanted him to saw these parts up. Some for firewood and a piece to make a table.

‘I’ve been doing this all day,’ he said. And waiting for you. How is your amma?’

Alice picked up a small chip and smelled it.

‘That’s a medicinal smell,’ Janake told her. ‘The herbal doctors will pound it up and make it into a poultice.’

‘Shall I take some for my mother?’

‘If you like. Ask the cook to grind it for her. Is she bad?’

Alice nodded. She was reluctant to tell Janake how bad her mother was, or that she didn’t want to look at her face. He was a boy who would stop a bus on the road if there were a tortoise crossing. How could she tell him she had caused a death? She frowned. Janake was absorbed in stacking the wood into piles.

‘Can we go to the sand dunes?’ she asked.

‘Okay,’ Janake said without looking up. ‘Wait a minute till I finish this. We can walk to the next bay. You might find things for your collection.’

He was right. They found some old driftwood with paint on it and a piece of blue fishing net.

‘It must have come from one of the catamarans,’ Janake said, examining it.

The wood revealed two colours, one underneath the other. Aquamarine over-painted by cobalt blue. It was scratched and peeling, still damp from the water. The evening stopping train passed slowly by. It was half empty. Glancing up, Alice saw a woman with bright red lipstick eating a samosa. When the train slowed down at the level crossing a man in a white shirt leaned out of an open window and watched them. He smiled and waved at Janake. Alice had a feeling she had seen him before. Then she remembered that he had come to her grandparent’s house during the riots one Singhalese New Year. He had slept in her grandfather’s studio for a few days. He had looked very frightened at the time and then he had gone away. The train began to move off and the man waved at them both.

‘That’s my uncle Kunal,’ Janake said as the train gathered speed. ‘D’you remember him? I was visiting him the week you had your birthday.’

‘Does he live with your aunt then?’

‘She’s not my real aunt,’ Janake said and then he gave a shout. Half buried in the sand was a beautiful piece of wood. He began pulling it out.

‘Oh, can I have it, please, Janake,’ Alice cried excitedly.

‘I’m getting it for you, wait! Don’t pull it, you’ll break it.’

‘Oh! Look!’

‘What are you going to make with it?’ Janake asked curiously. Alice shook her head. She couldn’t say, but she wanted to take it home anyway.

That night, when the household were finally in bed and Sita turned restlessly in her dreams, Bee told Kamala about Alice’s afternoon of foraging.

‘My studio is full of her finds,’ he said with admiration. ‘She’s going to be a maker of things when she is older.’

It was only to Kamala, and under cover of darkness, that he dropped his guard.

‘It’s as if…‘ he paused, ‘the only way she can make sense of what she’s leaving behind is through these random finds. They are her way of finding direction.’

Kamala was silent. What could the child possibly store up? How could she make any sense of what she was losing when she had hardly begun to understand what this place was about?

‘She knows,’ Bee told her stubbornly. ‘She’s no fool, she has her instincts. She knows what matters. And in any case, it won’t be knowledge needed by her for years.’

On their return from the beach Alice, asking him for some glue, had started to make a small construction. Bee had hidden his amazement.

‘Has it sunk in, then?’ Kamala asked. ‘That she will be going.’

How could it have sunk in when even she could not comprehend any of it?

‘What’s all the fuss about? She’ll be back, you’ll see. In no time at all,’ Bee said roughly.

Oh yes, thought Kamala, then why are you so upset? The crescent moon appeared from behind a cloud. The same moon that would shine in England. We will have the moon as connection, Bee told himself, firmly.

‘Dias thinks we should get her to talk about Sita and the baby,’ Kamala told him hesitatingly.

‘Why can’t that woman keep her mouth shut?’ Bee asked irritably. He moved restlessly. ‘I don’t want her trying her hand at British psychology on this family.’

In spite of her sadness, Kamala wanted to laugh. Bee had no idea how he sounded.

‘When she feels the need to, Alice will talk,’ he declared. ‘At the moment all she needs is for us to stay as we’ve always been. There’ll be time enough for change in her life.’

The clock in the hall struck the hour. Outside beyond the trees the sea barely moved. Someone had ironed out the waves. In the distance they could hear the faint wail of police sirens. Tonight the sounds were coming from the direction of the town. This is how it begins, thought Bee, his mood changing swiftly. We are the witnesses of the start but who knows what it will lead to. Yesterday a drunken Singhalese doctor was careless with a Tamil life. Tomorrow will be different again. And what will happen when the Tamils retaliate? What then? In the darkness, Kamala reached for his hand.

‘Children work these things out through their play,’ she agreed, knowing it was her reassurance that he really wanted.

‘She won’t be a child for so very long. The journey…’ he stopped.

When it came down to it, a life without her was unthinkable.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Kamala said, not believing it, frightened too. And anyway, before all of that there’s the wedding.’

They lay side by side, turning over their thoughts, discussing May and her forthcoming wedding which would now have to be postponed, at least until Sita could cope better. May, the easy child, always happy, always laughing thought Kamala. She still laughed. She had been born blessed, with the knack of making her life easy. And now she had picked a loving man. Since the stillbirth, knowing how upset May was, Namil had taken to visiting her every single evening.

‘When is Stanley coming?’ Kamala asked softly, knowing she was on dangerous ground.

Although Stanley had rung most nights to speak first to his daughter and then his wife, he had not left Colombo since the funeral.

‘I don’t care if I never see the man again,’ Bee said. ‘I’m sick of the way he thinks he’s a white sootha.’

He knew he was being unfair, but Bee no longer cared. Stanley did not interest him.

‘I suppose he’s busy at the moment,’ Kamala said placatingly ‘Sita says he has to work overtime at his office in order not to take a cut in his last pay cheque.’

Two moths danced in and out of the window, lighting up the moonlit sky. The smoke from the mosquito coil rose upwards in thin white tendrils.

‘What if he doesn’t send for them?’ Kamala asked, voicing the question in both their minds. ‘What if paying their passage makes no difference? What if he just forgets them?’

Someone was shining a searchlight on the bay and all sorts of colours appeared out of the night.

‘If he doesn’t send for them, it’s simple. They’ll stay here,’ Bee said. ‘But I don’t think it’ll come to that.’

Two days later Stanley came to see them, travelling up the coast by train. It was a Saturday. He brought some chocolate and something called bath cubes sent by his brother for the niece he had never met. Sita sat out on the verandah to talk to him. Even from a distance they looked like awkward strangers meeting for the first time. Not like husband and wife, thought May. Alice, eating her chocolates, watched them. Her mother looked all wrong.

‘You know I’m going to England in April,’ Stanley told his daughter. ‘To get a house ready for you.’

Alice yawned. She was still waiting for Janake to arrive as he had promised.

‘You must look after Mummy for me, huh?’

He was going, he said, to send for them both as planned, in three months.

‘You can come on the boat together,’ he said with an enthusiasm she hadn’t noticed in him before. ‘And there will be a new English school and new English friends. You are a lucky girl!’

Alice frowned. She didn’t want new friends. She wanted to play with Janake and to see Jennifer. A lot of things had happened since she last saw Jennifer. The thought made her frown deepen and she opened her mouth to argue. Seeing this, her mother smiled nervously. Two deep dimples, from her life before the baby, appeared on Sita’s face.

They stayed there long after her smile had gone, as though wanting to remind everyone of what Sita had once been like. Ah! thought Kamala triumphantly, you see, she will be happy again. It’s time she needs, you fool, thought May angrily, looking at Stanley. Why can’t you touch her, you cold bloody fish!

‘Don’t frown, Alice,’ Sita said. ‘We have to get out of this place. The way your father has been treated, what happened to me, all these things mean we can’t stay here any longer.’

The dimples seemed at odds with Sita’s words. A large garden spider ran across the verandah floor making her shiver. There were so many things Sita hated about this place. Things that now would never go away but would only get bigger. Alice was thinking of the baby in her own way. Dead or alive, she saw the baby would have always been a problem. From her mother’s surprising determination and her father’s suppressed anger she could see that leaving had become a reality and there was no room for negotiation. But she understood too, with uncanny insight, the baby would come with them. The servant boy in the house opposite was tuning his transistor radio. The music reminded Alice of the fairground ride on that now distant birthday. A wave of rage, unexpected and frightening filled her chest. She didn’t want to cry in front of anyone, but where was her grandfather?

‘You’ll miss my wedding, Stanley,’ May was saying without sounding the slightest bit sorry.

‘Yes, he will,’ her sister agreed.

‘There have been more riots,’ Stanley said.

He appeared to be challenging them all in some way. He was glad his father-in-law wasn’t present. It was impossible to speak freely in front of him. Pig, thought May. She too was glad her father was absent. Tamil pig! Her father would have read her thoughts and reprimanded her.

‘They killed my child, men,’ Stanley shouted, losing control without much effort.

Watching impassively Alice saw his face had grown darker. Her mother looked like a coconut frond beaten by the rain.

‘Singhalese bastards!’ Stanley shouted, Bee’s absence giving him courage. ‘A wedding is hardly a priority, men. We need to get out before any more damage is done to my family’

The music on the servant boy’s transistor had changed. Alice knew it was the song called ‘True Love Ways’. Esther would be wearing her taffeta dress and dancing in time to the music.

‘The overseas Tamils are fed up,’ Stanley said. ‘I’m telling you, they’re becoming a force. One of these days this damn government will be whipped.’

‘What are they planning?’ May asked, fear leaping like a fish in her throat. ‘What about us? What about the thousands of Singhalese who are innocent, who have no problem with the Tamils?’

But Stanley wasn’t interested.

‘They’re your people, men,’ he said. ‘Speak to the butchers who killed my child. When the time comes, there will be no pity left in us, hah!’

‘Stanley,’ Bee said calmly, ‘you’re speaking like a fool’

He had come in unnoticed. A butcher is a butcher. Don’t forget the doctor who saved your wife.’

But Stanley, either from the strain of keeping his mouth shut for too long, or the confidence brought on by his imminent escape, couldn’t stop.

‘No disrespect, men, but it’s your people who are asking for a civil war. If that’s the case, they’ll get one, just wait a little. Remember that all’s fair in war.’

Sita began to weep silently. Bee took out his pipe and tapped it against the side of the wall. Alice saw his jaw tightening. Then with a visible effort and no change in his voice he spoke.

‘I understand how you feel,’ he said. ‘I know you have to go. The situation is getting intolerable. Of course you must go. But it need only be for a while. There are many, many Singhalese who think as you do. These people will not allow this to develop into a civil war.’

He took out his tobacco pouch and began packing the pipe. He didn’t look at Sita, he did not even look in her direction, but his whole body strained at the sound of her weeping. The transistor music was still playing insanely and the sea had a beautiful silvery line on the horizon. The cook was scraping coconut, and next door the servant boy was sweeping the verandah. A crow cawed harshly in two-part harmony. The sound went on and on turning in the dazzling air. The day had been transformed into a bowl of blinding light. Of the sort that had dazzled their English conquerors, thought Bee, as he stood in the doorway, quietly. It had made the English mad, he had once told Alice.

He had only been half joking at the time and Alice had laughed at the thought of the soothas going mad. But it was true, they had come here to conquer and instead the light snared them.

‘Don’t they have light like us in England?’ Alice had asked at the time.

‘Oh, heavens no! The English went back home blinded, and of course they wrote about our light. The nineteenth century is full of it,’ he had said, grinning. ‘The tropics became a strange, magical place in their imagination after that. They went away different!’

Kamala had laughed. ‘Stop it!’ she had said.

But Bee had continued looking solemnly at Alice, the devil in his eyes.

‘It’s true!’ he had said. ‘They were drugged by too much sensation. Their books are full of it, as you will read when you get older. English gentlemen seduced by the narcotics of jungle love!’

And now she was going there, he thought. He felt ill. She had asked him what it would be like.

‘Will it be different in England?’ was what she had asked. The question had rendered him helpless.

‘I believe it will be,’ he had said eventually. ‘Probably in ways you would not expect. Not better, not worse, you understand. Different. Anyway, you’ll see, soon enough.’

‘Do I have to go?’

That was what she had asked next. But how was he meant to answer that?

‘Listen, Putha,’ he had told her, to keep himself out of the story, ‘this is your first home, you were born here. That’s a powerful thing, don’t ever forget it. But it may not be your last, you understand. And that’s all right, too. It will be beautiful in England even though the difference will surprise you. You’ll just have to search for it.’

Standing in the doorway he recalled that conversation. Wondering if he should have told her what he really believed; that this place with all its tropical beauty was where she should remain. And also that he believed it would make no difference. For although she would leave Ceylon, Ceylon would never leave her. Listening to the rush and crush of waves now he wondered how long it would take for them to see the consequences of such a violent uprooting. And he thought of this small beautiful place, once the centre of his world. Without her it would be the centre of nothing. Stanley’s voice buzzed in his ear like a large bluebottle. With a great effort Bee dragged himself back to the present.

‘Then go for a time,’ he said out loud, without looking directly at Stanley, making his voice as neutral as possible. ‘This situation will not last forever and the change will be good for you all after what has happened,’ he said, thinking too that Alice needed her parents’ attention.

‘But come back before she changes too much,’ he added brusquely, ‘give her an education and then come home.’

And he went outside, as though the matter was settled, to mix some colours for a new print he was making, calling to Alice to come and help him.

Soon after that Sita and Alice went back to Colombo to prepare for Stanley’s departure. Back to the rickshaw-clogged streets lined with ramshackle buildings. A new harsh mood was in the air. As if a whole secret way of life had died while they had been away and the city was now preoccupied with different things. Sita walked slowly. She was still bleeding internally. At the crowded outpatients she queued with other mothers, nursing their babies. The air was filled with a tinnitus of flies as she sat, one more saried woman in a colourful line of reds and yellows against a lime-green wall. Smallpox inoculation had come to Ceylon for the first time. All around them infants screamed. Sita watched dully. She could not understand how a broken heart could still palpitate with such pain. Alice sat quietly beside her, swinging her legs. After her injection they were going to see Jennifer’s mother and the new baby. Then tomorrow she would go back to school. The thought of facing her class teacher Mrs Perris made her nervous. Before she had left, her grandmother had told her again not to worry about telling her friends that the baby had died.

‘Many people lose babies in this country,’ Kamala had said consolingly. ‘You mustn’t worry.’

‘Why should she worry what people think?’ Bee had demanded, overhearing the conversation. ‘Alice has better things to think about. She understands these things happen, don’t you, Putha?’

Alice had nodded and then begun to giggle because her grandfather was tucking in a small parcel at the foot of her bed.

‘What is it? Can I see?’ she said, struggling to get it.

It was a book she had been wanting. Another Enid Blyton.

Waiting in the clinic, watching the other children being given their vaccinations, Alice half closed her eyes, thinking of the Sea House. Her mother stared ahead not speaking. When it was her turn, the nurse told her she was having a tetanus injection as well.

‘Put your arm out,’ the nurse said. ‘You mustn’t forget to collect your smallpox certificate,’ she reminded Sita. ‘You won’t be allowed into England without it.’

Sita nodded.

‘You are a lucky girl, going there!’ the nurse continued, smiling encouragingly.

‘I don’t want to go,’ Alice told her.

She spoke softly and the nurse didn’t seem to hear. The needle branded a small circle of pinpricks on her arm. Alice clenched her fist, saying nothing.

‘There might be a small reaction,’ the nurse told her mother, after which they went out into the burning sun. Suddenly Alice didn’t want to go to Jennifer’s house or see Jennifer’s mother or the baby boy she had just had. The sun boiling down on her hatless head made her feel sick.

‘Why do we have to go now?’ she whined.

‘They’re expecting us,’ Sita said shortly. ‘It will be rude if we don’t go.’

She was carrying a parcel of some of the exquisite dresses made for her own baby.

Jennifer lived in Colombo 7, where the gardens were lush and green and freshly watered. They took the bus, leaving the broken beauty and the chaos of the city. Even the bus appeared subtly different to Alice; emptier, cleaner. Not many people had reason to go to Colombo 7.

‘Look, all the signs have changed,’ Alice told her mother in English.

‘That happened weeks ago,’ her mother said.

Sita clutched her parcel close to her chest. Alice swallowed. She didn’t want her mother to give away the baby dress, but she could see from the expression on Sita’s face it would do no good to bring the subject up. In the last few days, her mother had stopped her terrible crying and Alice was afraid if she mentioned their baby it would all start again.

‘My arm hurts,’ she said instead, hoping to give her mother something else to think about.

Sita ignored her.

‘Don’t scratch it,’ was all she said.

At Ratnapura Road they got off. The streets had widened out and were tree lined and shady. Jennifer’s house was in a cul-de-sac. A manservant opened the gate. Orange blossom and shoe-flowers cascaded over the wall. A water sprinkler was watering the grass and underneath the murunga tree stood a large shiny pram. Some dogs tied up and out of sight began to bark hysterically. Instantly they heard the alarming high-pitched cry of the baby. Sita pulled Alice along sharply, nodding at the servant woman who led them into a large cool room with tiled floors and air conditioning. Things happened in quick and disjointed fashion after that. Jennifer arrived and hugged Alice but couldn’t stop staring at Sita. Alice watched her mother try to give Jennifer’s mother the present, but because she was holding her baby Sita had to put the parcel on the table. Sita looked small and a little frail. It made Alice suddenly very angry. The baby cry was like a siren, urgent and impossible to ignore. Jennifer’s mother laughed delightedly and began to feed him.

‘Take Alice to play,’ she told her daughter.

‘Is it true, you are going to England?’ Jennifer asked as soon as they were out of earshot of the grown-ups.

There was a Russian doll on the window ledge. Alice picked it up and began to take it apart, each doll getting smaller and smaller until the last one was so minute that she fumbled and dropped it.

‘Leave it,’ Jennifer said sharply. ‘Don’t break my things. When are you going to the UK?’

‘In a few months’ time. My dada is going to send for us.’

The baby’s thin cry went on and on in Alice’s head.

‘Does it cry all the time?’

‘Quite a lot,’ Jennifer said importantly. ‘Baby boys are like that, you know.’

She hesitated.

‘Yours was a girl, wasn’t it?’ she asked.

Alice looked at her. She had never noticed how very black Jennifer was. Her lips were so large that their pink insides showed even when she wasn’t smiling. She looks very Singhalese, thought Alice.

‘Your mother married a Tamil, that was the problem,’ Jennifer said, knowingly.

The baby’s cry was less intrusive, now. Outside the window a crow hawked harshly and they could hear the sound of saucepans being scraped. Singhalese voices rose and fell in the hot, lovely air. Without warning, Alice felt she too might start to cry. She wanted to go home. The air conditioning was too cold and her arm was hurting.

‘My head hurts,’ she told Jennifer. ‘I think I’m reacting to the smallpox, you know. I had to have it because of going to England.’

After their hurried departure into the sunlight her arm hurt less. And much later on, in the evening, she listened to her mother recounting the visit.

‘She wanted me to leave,’ Sita was telling Stanley.

From behind the door where she listened, Alice heard her mother’s terrible pleading tone. She was certain Sita’s face was pleading too. It made Alice grind her teeth.

‘You shouldn’t have gone,’ Stanley said, sounding bored.

‘I didn’t want her to think I was jealous. We went to all the hospital appointments together, I had to visit at least once.’

‘Well,’ Alice’s father said, ‘we’ll be out of this hell soon enough. Thank God!’

The next day at school Jennifer avoided Alice. She had made friends with a new girl who had joined their class while Alice had been away. The new girl was called Vishvani and she too lived in Colombo 7. The chauffeur drove Jennifer to school with her.

‘There’s no point in my being your friend,’ Jennifer told Alice. ‘You’re going overseas soon.’

She paused imperceptibly then added: ‘Oh, and by the way, we threw away your mother’s dead-baby clothes. My brother has plenty of things to wear. We don’t need your bad luck clothes.’