Brixton Beach (8 page)

‘Move away, Alice, baby,’ the servant said. ‘You’ll get covered in dust. Why don’t you lie down for a bit?’

Alice went into her room. She didn’t want to be called baby. She stared at the mosquito net hastily thrown aside earlier that morning. She had known this room all her life. It was as familiar as her own hand. The deer’s head that her great-grandfather had brought back as a trophy from England stared down at her. A bowler hat worn by one of her ancestors hung over its face, covering its sad, dead eyes. Alice shivered. The hat had been put there by Kamala years before when a much younger Alice had been frightened by its eyes. No one had ever bothered to remove it, and the deer now stared eternally into the dark interior of the hat. Sitting on the end of her bed, Alice glanced around the room. There was a faint smell of camphor and polish and washed cotton. The lump of clear green glass that she had found on the beach during her last visit stood on the window sill, exactly where she had left it. Everything was as before; only she, Alice Fonseka, had changed. Her guilt hung on an invisible hook in the thickening midday heat. Once, when she had been very small, a servant told her a story about a child who had done something bad. Afterwards, the servant told Alice, every time the child moved, every time she walked or sat down or played in the garden, the devil would walk behind her, dragging his chains. Recalling the story, Alice wondered if she too would be hearing chains soon? She listened, but nothing happened. Through the dazzling bright sea light far down below the cliff came the sound of a passing train. Its echo went on and on.

She stared blankly at the sea. There was no way of explaining her unhappiness to herself. On the beach another group of children jumped in and out of the waves. From this distance they looked like small birds darting about, waving their arms in the air, free. Janake was still nowhere in sight. She watched the boys for a moment longer, hearing their faint laughter. Until this moment childhood had held
no threat for her. But as she stood watching the scene below, for the second time that day, the idea that things had in some irreversible way altered began to take shape in her mind. The sun reappeared with renewed force from behind a cloud. She longed to be down on the white sand, laughing at nothing and getting soaked. She longed to see Janake and have him tease her. Standing beside the open window, recalling her grandfather from earlier in the morning, she emulated what he had done moments before he had seen her. Raising her arms up, letting her body descend slowly to the ground, curiously, she tried to imagine how he must have felt. Such was her absorption that she did not hear the gate bang shut or the footsteps on the gravel. Esther’s face looking up at the window startled her.

‘What are you doing, Alice?’

‘Nothing,’ she said crossly, frowning, standing up. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We heard the news,’ Esther said. She sounded shocked, unsure of herself. ‘Amma sent me to ask if you would like to come over to our house.’

Alice was puzzled. Esther sounded unusually friendly.

‘What’s done is done,’ Alice told her, unconsciously echoing her grandfather’s words.

Esther stared back at her. In the bright paintbox-coloured daylight her dress looked strangely tawdry, the traces of lipstick on her lips, drab.

All afternoon Bee sat helplessly beside his eldest daughter while she slept a drug-induced sleep. Then the doctor who had delivered the baby came in. Together they had watched Sita. Her womb had ripped, her uterus would need stitching, and when she finally began to remember she would have to bear a different kind of pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor had said.

Bee noticed how dark his eyes were, just like pools of rainwater.

‘She’ll recover,’ the doctor had told him, ‘physically, anyway. There will be no more children, but she’ll recover. The stitches will heal, the scars will be hidden, outwardly everything will be in order. I’ve made sure of that.’

He shook his head. Then he told Bee he had decided to leave the island. He was no longer able to stay silent about all those things he was witnessing, he said.

‘I became a doctor so I could alleviate suffering, not add to it. But this place—’ he had lifted his hands in a gesture of incomprehension—’is turning me into a coward. I fear for my wife, my family. I am no longer able to do my duty as I should.’

Bee listened without comment.

‘I’m going to Australia,’ the doctor had continued.

Outside the room the noise of the ward drifted towards them. Bedpans clattering, newborn babies mewling, laughter, even.

‘Yes,’ Bee agreed finally, expressionlessly ‘My daughter will be leaving too. They want a better life for my granddaughter.’

That had been all they had said. The doctor placed his hand lightly on Bee’s shoulder. Then he nodded briefly and left. His face had been full of a grave pity. It had almost been the undoing of Bee.

At dinner that night Esther and Dias came round again and the talk turned on the events of the day. They were all in shock. Looking around at his family, Bee said very little. He still felt numb from this terrible day. Darkness was encroaching. The servant came in silently and switched on the light. Instantly two large orange-spotted moths flitted in and began to circle around the bulb. Alice and Esther finished eating and went quietly on to the verandah, seeming to be swallowed up by the dark garden. They too were quiet. Bee waited until he was certain they were out of earshot.

‘First let them bury their dead,’ he said, turning back into the room.

I am accepting the inevitable, he thought in silent pain.

‘We must let them go in peace to the UK,’ he told Kamala.

‘Something more should be done,’ May said, angrily. ‘Someone should be told, for God’s sake! He should be struck off, Amma. How can we stand by like this and do nothing?’

May was crying again, but this time she was angry as well.

Later, when the visitors had left and Kamala had coaxed her, Alice went without fuss to bed. But she could not sleep. A full moon shone
in through her window and once or twice she sat up and looked out at the sea. She could hear the grown-ups out on the verandah now and she could smell tobacco from Bee’s pipe. The low hum of their voices blended with the drone of the insects.

‘How
can
you?’ Aunt May was asking.

‘We can’t afford the lawyer,’ Kamala said in a low, sad voice.

She sounded as though she too was crying.

Then Alice heard her grandfather tap his pipe against his chair. Until now he had been mostly silent.

‘It isn’t a question of money,’ he said hesitantly, and Alice strained her ears to catch his words. ‘Even if we found the money for the lawyers, and even if the nurse could be called on to testify, who would believe this was done simply because she has a Tamil name? Would anyone believe us? We would be taking on the government doctors. I can’t think of a single lawyer in this country who would want to do that.’

The sound of his voice, quiet and incomprehensible, comforted Alice, so that closing her eyes, finally, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

The funeral took place early on the following Thursday. May stayed with her sister in the hospital. Only Stanley and Bee were present. They paid the gravedigger and Stanley carried the tiny white coffin himself. The scent of orange blossom marked the moment, fixing it in Bee’s mind. Murderers, he thought, as the first fistful of soil hit wood. Then, when all that remained was a fresh mound of earth, they turned without a word and headed for Colombo. The sun was beginning its climb in the sky. The city was wide awake and filled already with the bustle of rickshaws and horns and the sounds of a thousand indifferent lives. Bee glanced at his son-in-law. He had never been close to Stanley; this was, he saw, their closest moment. Driving home along the coast road, in an afternoon of unbroken heat, his mind brimming with images of his daughter’s exhausted face, Bee felt the light, unbearable and savage, scythe across him. Then with its sour, stale smell of seaweed and other rotting vegetation, the day disintegrated slowly before his eyes.

While the funeral was taking place in Colombo, Kamala gave alms to the Buddhist monks. Dias had come to help, bringing her cook with her to the Fonsekas’ house. The priests were praying for the life that had passed briefly by, blowing out like a candle. All morning they had sat cross-legged, head bowed, their tonal chants filling the house as they blessed the white cotton thread. Their voices rose and fell, sometimes flatly, sometimes softly, always with a deep vibration. They were dressed in traditional saffron robes, so starkly bright that even the familiar sitting room with its ebony and satinwood furniture, its old sepia photographs and plants, took on a dreary air by comparison. The heat in the room, in spite of the doors and windows having been thrown wide open, was oppressive and unusually cloying. Janake, back from his aunt’s house, was present with his mother.

‘Let’s go outside,’ Esther whispered. ‘How much longer is this
pirith
chanting going to last?’

No one could eat until the monks had been fed. It was bad form and disrespectful to do so, but the savoury smells drifting out into the garden were tantalising.

‘I’m starving!’ Esther said flatly, and she sneaked off, leaving Janake and Alice on the verandah.

‘Where’s she going?’ frowned Janake. ‘She can’t eat yet.’

‘She’s gone to steal some rice to make chewing gum with,’ Alice told him.

‘What?’ Janake laughed. ‘She’s off her head!’

Alice said nothing and Janake looked at her sharply. He was four years older than her and had known her all her life. Yesterday when he had returned from Peradeniya his mother had told him about Sita. His mother had also told him that Alice was probably going to England because of what had happened. Janake had been shocked.

‘But, Amma, Alice
loves
it here,’ he had cried. ‘And it would break Mr Fonseka’s heart if she went.’

Janake had been present on the first day Alice had been shown the sea as a tiny baby. He had been with her when she took her first faltering footsteps across the sands. It had been Janake who had held her hand, watched over by an anxious Bee. As she grew, it was always
Janake who played with her whenever she visited her grandparents. A few weeks ago he had gone with Bee to buy a bicycle for her. The idea of Alice going to England, of her never being here, was incomprehensible to him. He glanced at her. His mother had told him not to mention the subject to Alice in case she didn’t know, so he couldn’t question her. Alice was staring straight ahead with an unusually serious look on her face. Janake scuffed the ground with his feet and then he picked up a stick and began whittling it.

‘Esther’s a fool,’ he said angrily. He felt both helpless and full of an unaccountable rage.

Esther returned with a handful of hot rice. She squeezed it into two balls, offering one to Janake.

‘Here, have some home-made chewing gum,’ she grinned.

‘No thank you,’ Janake said, scowling. ‘That isn’t real chewing gum,’ he scoffed.

‘Fine!’ Esther cried, tossing her ponytail and offering it to Alice instead.

Alice became aware of a certain shift in the order of things between the three of them.

‘You’re supposed to keep moving it in your mouth like gum,’ Esther laughed, not unkindly. And don’t swallow it!’

‘But it isn’t real gum, and I’m hungry.’

‘Why do you want to be so American?’ Janake asked curiously.

He was watching them with narrowed eyes and Alice had the distinct feeling he wanted to pick a fight with Esther.

‘You should stop trying to be like other people and just be Ceylonese. We are a great country!’

‘This is a boring place,’ Esther said shortly. ‘And in any case, I’m not one of you Singhalese types, men. I’m a Burgher, remember. See?’

She held out her arm, which was several shades lighter than Janake’s.

‘Huh!’ Janake snorted. Alice is fairer than you. Put your arm out, Alice.’

‘That’s because she’s half-caste, idiot. Her father is a Tamil.’

‘So? So are you! Idiot yourself.’

Esther shrugged, losing interest. She stared out to sea. Later on, when she got home Anton, the boy from the fair, was coming to call.

She chewed her mouthful of rice more slowly. Anton had a distant Tamil relative and this made Dias nervous.

‘Just look what happened to Sita,’ Dias had warned. ‘I don’t want that to be your fate. We’re Burghers. Who knows when it will be our turn to be kicked? We should be careful.’

But Esther didn’t care. She would be fifteen soon. She hated this country. She hated the way things were changing, and she did not want to study in Singhalese.

‘But soft, a light shines from the east,’ she murmured.

‘What?’ asked Alice.

Janake began to laugh. Esther was silent. She was thinking of Anton, wishing he had kissed her at the fair. In reality he had grinned and offered her some real American gum. America, that was where Esther wanted to go. Not England.

‘“Gallop apace, you fiery horses,’“ she said loudly, forgetting where she was.

Until the new law had stopped them learning in English, they had been studying
Romeo and Juliet
in school. No one would ever translate it into Singhalese.

‘What are you saying?’ Janake asked.

‘Nothing you’d understand.’

And she turned to Alice instead, for Janake was annoying her.

‘I was just thinking, you know, men, your sister will have been buried by now.’

Alice too was thinking. She wanted to write a letter to Jennifer.
My dear Jennifer
, she wanted to say.
My sister died yesterday. I will be coming back to school soon
. Calling the baby ‘sister’ made a difference to how she felt about it. How odd it all was. A mottled brown, dusty rattlesnake writhed in the dust. Alice imagined her mother in her hospital bed, writhing as if she too was shedding a skin. It occurred to her that, had her sister lived, there might have come a time when the two of them would have sat on the verandah just as she was doing with Esther. Alice would have been the eldest. It was the hottest moment of the day. Her grandfather had still not returned from the funeral. How long did it take to bury someone? Inside the house,
the sounds of pirith had stopped and the food was being brought in. Esther moved restlessly.