Brixton Beach (10 page)

‘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?’