Brixton Beach (19 page)

‘Kunal,’ she said softly to herself.

She had not said his name out loud before. He was teaching her to look, she thought.

For the first time in days she thought of Stanley. He seemed to have disappeared from her mind completely, she saw, becoming part of a betrayal she was trying to forget. The child they had lost had belonged to them both, but she had hardly spoken of what happened with Stanley. Yesterday afternoon, while she sat with Kunal in the hours before they had been told of his impending loss, Sita had felt her tongue loosen once again. To distract him she had brought out her shoebox and showed him the tiny garments that had never been worn. He had watched her silently.

‘You still have Alice,’ he said finally, as she closed the lid of the box.

But Sita had shaken her head. There were dead things buried within her, leaving no room for Alice, she told him. It wasn’t love that was missing. Simply energy to exercise that love.

‘You mustn’t say that,’ Kunal had said feverishly. ‘Don’t underestimate your daughter’s power over you.’

Running her hand across the clean scrubbed kitchen table, remembering the conversation, Sita paused. Kunal did not know yet; one leg did not make up for the loss of another. Yesterday afternoon, after she had closed her box, Kunal had been inclined to talk. His eyes were bright with the raging temperature they could not bring down.

‘I have a story for you,’ he said suddenly.

And he told her about his own family. His parents had lived in Trincomelee once, making a living in the sea.

‘I did not want to be part of the fishing community,’ he said. ‘I was desperate to study and get to the university. But, as you know, when the British left, all education for the Tamils stopped.’

He paused and she gave him a drink.

‘Your father was wonderful to me,’ Kunal told her. ‘He was the new headmaster at St Aloysius. When I went to him and told him my story
he gave me the job on the strength of the unfinished qualifications. That was how I came to teach the fifth standard.’

Things were going according to plan, he told Sita. He sent regular money home even though he couldn’t afford to see his parents often. There had been no prejudice in the school, Bee made certain of that. But then Kunal had fallen in love with a Singhalese girl.

‘Just like you.’

He smiled at Sita, his face taking on a rumpled, blurred look. Sita wondered if he should try to sleep a little. They had married against her parents’ wishes, Kunal told her, and after that he had been determined to get a transfer to Trincomelee. To be close to his own parents in a place where there were other Tamils. He wanted his young wife to have some relatives who cared about her.

‘She was pregnant, you see.’

Bee had been wonderful. He promised to talk to a headmaster in Trincomelee, try to get Kunal a transfer. And in the end that’s what happened.

‘We arrived at the school-teacher’s house one January day,’ Kunal said. ‘We were full of hope, ready to begin our new life.’

The house was small, just two rooms and a bathroom. But the garden was glorious. It was full of frangipani and tiger-striped lilies, he remembered. A paradise with brilliant blue kingfishers darting by the water and air that was clear and smelled of lilac.

‘My wife was very happy. She had been afraid she would miss the sea, coming from the south. But, you know, in Trincomelee the sea is all around.’

So they had started their married life in earnest. Every day Kunal went to the school where he taught, returning late with piles of marking. His wife grew big with their child. His parents adored her and the small community they lived in welcomed them without prejudice. All was perfect. Until, that is, his wife went into premature labour.

‘I had to borrow a car to drive to the nearest hospital, almost fifty miles away.’

Even that had not worried him unduly. It was what he had expected. The drive through the jungle was not hazardous. It wasn’t a particularly
dangerous road, there were no big cats, no elephants. But they had reckoned without the complications of the labour. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself around the baby’s neck, strangling it. And his wife had bled to death.

He finished speaking and Sita hadn’t known what to say. They sat for a long time without speaking, listening to the sound of the servant scraping coconut in the yard. Then Sita stood up and wiped Kunal’s brow. He had fallen asleep again, exhausted by so much talking. Sita had sat on silently holding her shoebox until Kamala came in to relieve her. Later, when she heard about the amputation, she knew what she must do for Kunal.

By the time he got back to the hotel, Stanley was soaking and the snow was beginning to settle. If he hadn’t been freezing, he might have enjoyed the sensation of walking through it but, as it was, all he wanted to do was get out of his clothes. He knocked on Marianna’s door but there was no answer. Possibly she had got fed up with waiting for him and had gone out. He decided to order something to eat in his room and have a bath. His brother had told him that baths were the thing in England and as the ship only had showers this was his first experience of a bath. He ordered his food and turned the tap on. Outside the window the view was changing as though by magic under the snow. Stanley stared at it, mesmerised. He could hardly believe that he could be having such an adventure. In a few short days his world had been transformed like the street outside. Sita, Alice (the postcard to her lay soggily in his coat pocket), his in-laws, even his mother, had taken on the appearance of photographs in an old family album. Why, he wondered dreamily, had he ever thought marriage and a family was the answer?

He bathed. The water was soothing and wonderfully hot, wrinkling his skin, filling him with well-being. Then he drank the beer he had ordered and ate the thing called kebab, which was delicious, not at all like the bland food they were served on the ship. He decided to write a letter to Alice as well. It occurred to him that he would need different clothes if the weather was to remain this bad. Money, thought Stanley, that was all he wanted now. The sooner he got to London and his new
job, the better. He turned his mind to the letter. Taking a sheet of hotel notepaper he began to write.

Stanley paused, frowning. He was almost certain Bee would be shown the letter. He could imagine what Bee would say. Only now he was a safe distance from his father-in-law did Stanley realise how much he disliked him. Low-class Singhalese, he thought, with some satisfaction. Well, he would never see him again, thank God.

He stopped. No point in writing all this to the child. She wouldn’t understand and Bee would see it as a direct dig at him. Well, so what, thought Stanley defiantly Do I care?

I shall have to stop now as I intend to go out and find a stamp to post this letter
.

He had no intention of going out in the blizzard that seemed to be gathering outside, but he was getting bored with the letter.

There was a knock on his door as he finished sealing up the letter. It was Marianna. She held out a bottle and two glasses.

‘Chin-chin,’ she said, laughing. ‘Where were you?’

Stanley stared at her. She was wearing a blouse through which he could see her bra very clearly.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ he asked.

‘What?’ she laughed. ‘Cold? No, this isn’t cold!’

‘It’s snowing outside,’ Stanley said, blinking.

‘Oh Stanley, you are funny! This little bit of snow, it’s nothing. If you want to see snow, you must come to Stockholm. I will take you skiing.’

Stanley continued to look at her foolishly.

‘Until that time, if you let me into your room I have brought some vodka for us to drink.’

‘Oh, yes, yes,’ Stanley said. ‘Sorry, come in. Of course.’

And he opened the door wide, showing her the room with its cosy bedside light and the turned-down bedcover on which he had been sprawling.

Anxiety stretched like a cello string across the house the next morning. Alice woke and heard it play itself out in a long slow series of notes. Kamala woke dreading the sounds the day would bring. A labourer working in the coconut grove was sawing dead wood. Sita woke after only a few hours’ sleep, full of energy. The house seemed to have sandwiched its tension between two thick slices of silence. It was a glittering morning, the sort that followed heavy rain. The sea made little grumbling sea noises and the breeze flicked smartly through the waves, leaving small white pieces of foam in its wake like rubbish thrown from a ship. Already the day had an inevitable feel to it,
thought Kamala, watching Alice come out of her room. The child has changed, she thought. She’s quieter, more obedient of late. The kitchen was scrubbed clean. The house smelled of antiseptic and steam.

‘Two egg hoppers and a swim?’ her grandfather said, intercepting Alice on her way to the kitchen, sweeping her away from the annexe like a leaf caught by a sudden gust of wind. Her aunt May had gone to school and her mother seemed to have disappeared too.

‘Your mama is helping the doctors with the operation,’ said Bee firmly.

Alice glanced curiously in the direction of the closed door. Only silence issued from behind it and her grandfather was impatient to be gone, so off they went down the hill to the bottom of Station Road, waving at the two men in the army truck, even though Alice disliked the look of them. Leaving the house with its quiet control and its morphine-numb concentration and its two doctors, doing what they had to do. On this dazzling, sun-kissed, ordinary day during the last of the south-west monsoons.

The beach was as smooth as a newly ironed sheet, for these days the fishermen no longer dragged their nets over this stretch of sand. The army collected the best of their catch from further up the bay, close to the lighthouse. Alice’s footprints marked the ground like musical notation as they went towards Janake’s house where his mother was waiting for them with hot coconut oil in a blackened
chatti-pot
. Janake, having been out earlier with the fishermen, was now starving.

‘You want to play by the rocks?’ he asked Alice, grinning. ‘After we finish eating?’

They stood outside the small lean-to kitchen licking their greasy fingers. Alice nodded, her mouth full. The egg hoppers were the best she had ever tasted. Janake’s mother smiled indulgently at them both and offered them another one.

‘No, not by the rocks,’ Bee warned. ‘Not today. There might be currents left over from last night’s storms.’

They ate their hoppers and went looking for treasures that might have been washed up by the storm. Bee sat under the shade of the coconut tree on a little mound of sea-grass and began to draw the rib
of a boat that had appeared from the next bay. The sea had thrown up all sorts of things.

‘I want all this wood,’ Alice told Janake.

He watched curiously as she made a small pile of scraps of wood on the beach.

‘What are you going to do with it?’

Alice frowned and Janake let out a loud guffaw.

‘You look just like Mr Fonseka,’ he told her.

The roar of the sea drowned their voices. The wood was old and wet. It had small marks, little flecks of red and turquoise paint embedded in it. She couldn’t explain why this excited her, or why it should conjure up images of this place. She wanted to invent something to do with the things no one had a use for but still were beautiful. She wanted to save these things from extinction.

‘I’m going to make a…thing,’ she said vaguely.

Ideas lurked at the back of her mind. Janake nodded. He didn’t question her further.

‘I’m going to make something too,’ he said, going off to collect debris of his own.

He returned with more wood.

‘Did you see Kunal this morning?’ he asked abruptly.

Alice shook her hair out of her eyes. She had just found an enormous shell at the water’s edge and was busy examining it. It wasn’t a shell from around here.

‘That was probably washed up from some other country because of the storm,’ Janake said, peering at it.

‘The doctors are taking Kunal’s leg off today,’ Alice told him.

Seagulls screamed. The sky seemed endlessly deep, teeming with light. They stood looking at the seashell together, solemnly.

‘What will it be like, d’you think?’ Alice asked, cautiously. ‘Being without a leg, Janake?’

Janake didn’t know. He stood experimentally on one leg and watched the sea pull the sand all around his foot. There were millions of tiny broken shells littering the beach.

‘Do you think,’ Alice hesitated, ‘they have taken it off yet?’

They stared pensively at the waves. Bee raised his head, checking they were safe from the currents. Then he too stared at the sea before continuing to paint.

‘He will adapt,’ Janake said confidently, sounding like a grown-up. ‘He’ll be like the dog that comes near our house. When he first lost his leg under the train we all thought he would die, but after some time,’ he shrugged, ‘he could run as fast as the other dogs on just three legs. After a while, you know, nothing matters.’