B009Y4I4QU EBOK (5 page)

I was bewildered when Anita appeared sobbing in my room. We’d said goodbye to each other after the school Christmas concert weeks before, shouting at our children not to trip on their costumes as they raced down the road. And now? Anita kept telling
me that I had to live, without me she couldn’t raise her girls. Fuck off, I thought.

Steve’s family came to Colombo, again and again. When his brother-in-law Chris began telling me about the memorial service they were planning in London, I asked him to stop. Memorial service? That was outlandish. Still he persisted, asking me to choose some music for the service, cajoling me gently by mentioning that my mother-in-law had remarked, “Well, when Stephen was a boy he liked some band called Slade.” I braced myself and told Chris to play some Coltrane. Just saying that word made my heart convulse. I saw Steve in our kitchen, grilling fish, listening to
A Love Supreme
.

Steve’s sister Beverley sat on my bed wiping her tears. On the morning of the twenty-sixth of December, she had woken up in London, weeping. At the time she hadn’t been able to imagine a reason for this, it was the morning after Christmas, they’d had a typically happy and raucous family gathering the previous day. But before someone phoned her with news of a tidal wave in Sri Lanka, she had been crying. As she told me this, I could only think, her chin, her chin, her chin is Steve’s.

I didn’t want to step out of that room. The only time I willingly raised myself from that bed was to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I brushed
my teeth diligently and often. I shuffled to the bathroom every few hours and carefully squeezed toothpaste onto my brush. I brushed hard. My arm hurt, but I kept going, “giving it some welly,” as Steve would say. I tried not to think of Steve’s words as I looked in the mirror and focused on my frothy mouth. I liked the sound of my frantic brushing, but I hated the toothpaste, it tasted of cloves and made me gag.

I resolved not to leave the house, ever. How can I go outside? Outside was where I went with my boys. How can I walk without holding on to them, one on each side?

There were all those first times. The first time I came downstairs in my aunt’s house, frightened, knowing I wouldn’t see a heap of shoes by the front door, as there was at home. The first time I walked on a Colombo street and couldn’t bear to glimpse a child, a ball. The first time I visited a friend and was nearly physically sick. Steve and I had been here with the boys just weeks before, my children’s fingerprints were on her wall. The first time I saw money, I was with my friend David, who wanted to buy a comb, having come from England without one. I trembled as I peered at that hundred-rupee note in his hand. The last time I saw one of those, I had a world.

There was the first time I saw a paradise flycatcher. I thought then I should never have allowed
my friends to open the curtains in my room. I had been much safer in blackness. Now sunlight splintered my eyes, and that familiar bird trailed its fiery feathers along the branches of the tamarind tree outside. No sooner I saw it, I turned away. Now look what’s happened, I thought. I’ve seen a bird. I’ve seen a flycatcher, when all the birds in the world should be dead.

The first time I saw a photo of my boys, I was unprepared. I was searching the Internet for ways of killing myself, as I often did then, when one click led to another, until the London
Evening Standard
screamed, “I watched as my whole family was swept away,” alongside a large photo of Vik and Mal. That photo, it was taken at school, Malli wore a red shirt, and he was proud. An image I knew so well overwhelmed me now. My mind had not fixed on their faces since the wave, it couldn’t endure them. I fell on the bed and pressed a pillow over my face.

And that headline, “I watched”? I hadn’t spoken to any journalist, I had barely left that room. How dare they? I seethed. If Steve was here, if Steve was here, I’d tell him to go find those
Evening Standard
journalists on a dark night and beat them to a pulp.

Steve and Malli were identified four months after the wave. All that while I’d told myself that they’d
disappeared into the depths of the ocean. Vanished. Magically became extinct. This kept their deaths as unreal and as dreamlike as the wave. Then at the end of April, I was told that they had both been identified by DNA testing. It was just days before Steve’s birthday. He would have been forty-one.

I didn’t know then that their bodies had been exhumed from a mass grave sometime in February. I didn’t know that the DNA testing was being done in a laboratory somewhere in Austria. When I was told they were found, I smashed things into pieces. I didn’t want them to be found now. Not as dead bodies. I didn’t want them in coffins.

I went to that mass grave with David later that year. It was a scruffy plot of land next to a Buddhist temple in Kirinda, a few miles from Yala. Some children from the village rushed over and told me more than I wanted to hear. “The bodies were brought at night, in tractors and bulldozers,” they said. “Some were clothed, some were not. No clothes at all. The people in the village were scared, but the priest in the temple allowed the bodies to be buried. Then the police came one day, some of them were white policemen, and dug it up. They told us not to watch, but we did.”

I didn’t tell them I did not want to hear this. I didn’t walk away. I just listened. It was Steve and Mal they were talking about. Steve and Mal. “My mother
went mad when she saw the dead bodies,” said one of the boys. “We had a
thovila
for her and everything, a
kattadiya
”—a sorcerer—“even came. We had to pay him twenty-five thousand rupees. But she is still not cured. Still mad.”

W
e had left London on the night of the eighth of December. Steve and I worked from home that day. At lunchtime we drove to Muswell Hill, did some shopping. We went to the music store, Vik needed a book for the piano exam he was taking in April. We bought a Keith Jarrett CD,
The Melody at Night, With You
. We shared some chocolate cake at Oliver’s Deli. We popped into M&S because we’d been overcharged for some wine at the weekend, we’d bought three bottles but were charged for five. The cashier asked if we wanted cash back or a credit voucher. Steve said a voucher’s fine, we’ll always come back here. He put that voucher in his wallet.

The school Christmas concert had been the previous night. It was
A Christmas Carol
. Vikram stood at the back and sang listlessly as usual. Malli sat on Steve’s knee in the audience. When they sang “White Christmas,” he sang along. His face was a picture, enchanted by the fake snow falling on the stage. Malli loved all things snowy. I must take him to see
The Snowman
at the Peacock Theatre when we get back from Colombo, I decided then. I’d seen him gasp in wonder when he saw the flying boy and snowman on TV. The next morning I booked four tickets. For the fifth of January.

What I did for my boys never stopped. Now I have to give that all up? During those months and months after the wave, I clutched the side of my bed, reeling with this thought.

But how do I stop searching the Web with Vik for Galápagos tortoises? How do I stop talking with him about dinosaur birds? How do I give up on Malli’s dreams of being a dancer? Or the one who puts on shows? I had only just been thinking I really must get on with teaching him to read and write, that Christmas card he made us in school said “To Mum and Bab.”

Mum. I could hear them. “Isn’t it true, Mum … In a minute, Mum … Oww, don’t turn the TV off, Mum … My leg hurts, Mum.” I wanted to scratch out that word:
Mum
.

The torment of wanting them when they came up close like this. I will kill myself soon. But until then, how do I tame my pain?

I need to prise them off me. But how?

I must stop remembering. I must keep them in a faraway place. The more I remember, the greater my agony. These thoughts stuttered in my mind. So I stopped talking about them, I wouldn’t mouth my boys’ names, I shoved away stories of them. Let them, let our life, become as unreal as that wave.

They had become muffled and distant then anyway. This happened in those first days after the wave. I couldn’t find their faces, they quivered as in
a heat haze. Even in my stupor I knew that details of them were dropping away from me like crumbs. Still, whenever they emerged, I panicked.

I must be more watchful, I told myself. I must shut them out.

I couldn’t always keep this up. I’d find myself tracing their outlines on my bed, remembering their sizes and shapes. They were so real, these imprints, almost warm. I wanted to fix them on those sheets, pin them down.

But I must stop this. I must turn away from them.

T
hey don’t want me to drink. Some cheek, I fumed. My relatives, of all people, hark at them, they who are always reaching for the next Scotch. Over the years, whenever my parents and my aunts and uncles were invited to a dinner party where there’d be no alcohol, it was a family crisis. They’d complain for weeks beforehand. Oh, so difficult, functions like this. They’d plan to meet early that evening and have their fill. And now, some nerve. These same relatives were trying to stop
me
from drinking?

In those early weeks, each evening someone would try to tempt me with a glass of wine. Come on, just one. Or a brandy then. It will relax you, help you sleep. But I refused. I feared it would blur the truth of what had happened. I had to be vigilant. What if, even for one single moment, I thought nothing has changed, that no one is dead?

Then suddenly every evening I was drunk. Half a bottle of vodka down by six p.m., never mind that my stomach burned. Then wine, whiskey, whatever I could stumble around the house and seize. I’d swig from bottles, no time to get a glass.

Now everyone panicked. They locked away the bottles (after they’d had their fill). My aunt hid the keys. Our friend Sarah came from London and emptied whole bottles of Baileys down the sink. You
cow, I thought, such waste. I’d be incensed and try to drink bottles of aftershave, perfume, it’s got alcohol in it, right? Ugh, the taste, I smashed bottles against walls.

Each night I hoped to die from my frenzied drinking. And it diluted my terror of getting to sleep. I knew I had to wake up the next morning and relearn the truth all over again. Sometimes I would guzzle from a bottle on the balcony all night, which was silent but for the flutter of moths. I would plead into the darkness, where are they, bring them back. I rushed inside when the birds began to sing at first light, birds I had to escape. Or instead I’d say to the
kohas
, go on, ramp it up, screech my pain.

If I drank through the night, I didn’t have to dream. Each night I dreamed of fleeing, of running from something, some nights it was water, some nights it was churning mud, other nights I didn’t know what. In these dreams always one of them died. Then I’d wake to face my real nightmare.

With the alcohol I continued to take pills. Though my prescribed sleeping pills were rationed, this was Colombo, and I could go to the pharmacy around the corner, no prescription needed, and stock up. Zolpidem, Halcion, Seroquel. After my evening of drinking, I’d pop two pills, then another two, another four, four more, and two more again, in quick succession. Then a mug of gin. Then another pill, if I could raise my arm to reach for it. The next
morning I couldn’t move, I felt faint when I stood up. I’d be shivery, my blood pressure dropped. My friend Keshini would sit on my bed, hands clasped, and talk sternly about my abuse of central nervous system depressants, I couldn’t go on doing this, my heart would stop. I looked at her blankly. Huh, getting all technical on me, I thought.

I liked mixing alcohol with the pills. It made me hallucinate. I watched plump black worms crawl out from the air conditioner and slide down the wall. Hundreds of them, as slowly they crawled. When I sat on the balcony, I could see a man in a white suit swinging from a tree. I chortled and pointed him out to my friends. They pretended not to be spooked. This was good. I felt crazy, and that’s how I thought I should be. My world gone in an instant, I need to be insane.

Half-drunk and half-drugged, I would search the Internet for images of the wave. Of scenes of destruction. Of dead bodies, mortuaries, mass graves. The more horrifying, the better. I’d gape at these for hours. I wanted to make it all real now, but I had to be drunk to even try to do that. There was also a numbness in me, due not to drink but to a deeper deadness, that I thought was preventing me from being truly insane. I wanted to spear it with these images. I searched on and on, hoping something would shock me into madness.

I kept Googling ways of killing myself. I needed
to know how to do it successfully, I couldn’t mess it up. And each time I logged in to my laptop, I’d think: my password is the only thing in my life that hasn’t changed. I remembered Steve’s password, and I wished I hadn’t. It always was “rosebud” something. Rosebud.

Sometimes I’d panic, in my drugged-up state, about something that seemed very important. Like library books. What am I to do, we didn’t return the children’s library books, I’d keep saying, as I paced, or swayed, up and down the hall. Those books we took out from the Poetry Library in the South Bank. I’m never going back to London, I can’t return those books. I did relish this at times, having something normal to worry about.

My friends took me on short trips away from Colombo, hoping to restrain me a little. It didn’t always work. It was after plenty of vodka and tablets that I made Lester walk miles on a dark deserted beach one night. I knew a place where turtles came ashore to lay their eggs, and I wanted to show him. For more than an hour, I stumbled on that beach—I blamed the terrain, it was not flat, small dunes—I didn’t admit that I suspected we were lost. Lester had seen me with that bottle of vodka earlier in the evening and was concerned. The previous night I’d drunk so much that I’d vomited several times and passed out, and he’d sat by my bed until morning, worried I might choke in my sleep. He thought I
was about to repeat this tonight as well. “What are we doing here?” he kept saying. “There is no one around, it’s too dark.” Finally we did come upon a green turtle, her soft eggs dropped into the huge pit she’d dug in the sand. We weren’t alone now, a couple of German tourists were watching too. I crawled quietly up to the turtle, peered into the pit, held an egg in my palm. It was warm. I thought this was magical. I made Lester have a look, but he’d had enough. “It’s Friday night,” he barked. “I could be in London, I could be down the pub. What am I doing on a godforsaken beach with some Germans, looking up a turtle’s arse?”