Heaven's Edge (24 page)

For the rest of the day we moved in awkward uncertain circles, intersecting only when I went to fill another bucket and had to cross the trench she was digging between
the crop garden and the well. She dug with fanatical determination, heaping the soil around her in a succession of small pyramids.

I wanted to ask her more about Kris and their parents. Why had she never mentioned a brother before? Why had he betrayed their father? How? What was their father really like, for Kris to turn so against him? But I resisted for fear of upsetting her. ‘What is it? What are you digging?' I asked instead.

She wouldn't answer; she continued attacking the earth single-mindedly, the way Kris would sometimes continue with something he was intent on, with no sign of communication. I began to see similarities in the way she moved, the way she gripped a handle. I couldn't understand how could they grow in such apparently different directions.

She wouldn't stop digging until the trench was as big as her. Then she climbed out and went to the remains of the fire where the previous day she had burnt her uniform. She undid her sarong and scooped up all the ashes in it; she carried it, like an offering, to the trench. She laid it lengthways and folded one half over the ash and cinders. Then she buried it all, shovelling back the earth she had dug up, stamping on it with her bare feet.

When she finally finished she crouched down, ready to pounce on anything that might move, her whole naked body wet with her labour.

The sun was setting over the orchard. I didn't know how to reach her. ‘Come to the well,' I entreated. ‘Let me bathe you.' I wanted a hundred pails of water to wash away those tears, her wounds. I wanted her to heal soon, and myself too, and drop all the scabs of her ugly past.

*    *    *

That third night she lay sleepless next to me staring out at the sky, her body tired and yet tense as it must have been for months. I ran my fingers along a weal on her shoulder. She made no response. ‘Are you thinking of Kris?' I asked. She rolled the other way; back taut, hot, choking in pain, or rage. I waited, breathing as close to her as possible until each of our exhalations seemed to be in unison. When her breath was finally steady again, she muttered, ‘I can't sleep. I know I must, but I can't. Every time I close my eyes I see …' Her voice receded.

I tried to hold on to it. ‘You see what?'

Her breath stopped.

‘Tell me. What do you see?'

‘Them. In pieces all over. Lumps burning.'

I saw the bodies of Jaz and Kris before the grenade detonated; but Uva, I guess, saw many, many more. Her dismembered children exploding, spewing blood; her mother, her father.

I waited for her breathing to slow down again before speaking. ‘It is not your fault.'

‘But it is. I should have known better. I should have done something. I let it happen to my parents. Then I let it happen to them, my children.'

‘You can't blame yourself for everything. You did what you could. You are lucky to have survived. There is no wrong in it. We are here now. At least we have each other.' I held her tighter. What more could I say? It would be her words that would heal her, I knew, not mine.

Outside, the leaves of the coconut, the jak, the breadfruit tree shifted in the breeze, unmasking the stars whose light began to pierce the gloom of the night even as they died in their own place. Blood flooded the inside of my head like a tide released by the moon to revive the beach that
was nearly our own. There was pain in each of our breaths; but with every pulse that pushed my blood another fraction further through the cycle of this earth, I felt able to believe a little more that our lives somehow will be replenished.

I saw my mother. She had sunglasses wrapped around her eyes. We were staying in a hotel with pink walls and pine trees in the garden and steps leading down to hot white sand. I remember her mostly from a photograph of that summer. Sitting on a wall, searching the sea through her thick black sunglasses, twisting the loops of a gold thread in her fingers. A wordless figure who made me always feel I was a trespasser in her life. The Mediterranean, I was told, was what she was looking at; she preferred it to any other sea. I remembered Grandma Cleo coaxing her, ‘Penny, my dear, you must give him time. All we can ever give each other in this life is time.'

In the morning, down by the well, I found the monkey scrabbling around Uva's refilled trench. It had pawed away some of the earth and rolled a coconut into a dip at one end, like a skull. When it saw me, it started hooting as if to call up the dead. I was furious. I shouted at it and kicked the coconut out. The monkey hobbled away, chattering.

Uva heard us and came to the railing upstairs. She called out to me, worried. ‘What's the matter? Don't scold the poor thing. What's it done?'

I didn't answer; I was relieved to see that familiar concern on her face again.

With each passing day she seemed to go a little further into the garden. She'd spend days examining the stems, the
leaves, the flowers I had tended. She'd say very little, but I'd listen to every word. I asked her more about what will happen than what had happened. Simple questions about the life of plants: which of them will flower tomorrow, and which next week? Which will produce fruit? And when? I thought it was better to get her to look ahead. It seemed to work. She had no difficulty identifying ones which I had found no trace of in my gardener's annuals. Slowly, as she followed me, she began to pull out weeds, train the beans and the marrow. Sometimes she'd step in and space out the plants that seem destined to become entangled with each other, and succour those that needed more nursing. Soon she was drawing patterns for crossbreeding like some gene-genie on the loose.

By the afternoon though, when the sky turned lazurite, she'd flag; the whole garden would subside. Then, as now, I would sit by her, listening for her breath. The earth itself was in need of repose. In the stillness, the quiet, the sense of being reprieved seemed, for the moment, to alleviate all the suffering of the world. I knew this could not be true, but I needed to believe it might be.

When the sun dropped, and the day became a little cooler, we'd sometimes walk together up to the lake where we had been reunited. I showed her where I first came ashore, where I took apart the aircraft. I showed her my early trails, the signs I had made for her and she pointed out the one that had alerted her. Beneath the tree on which I had carved my first initial, she found a hefty green melon.

‘Is it edible?' I had to ask.

She split it open with her knife. ‘What you have to do is suck it and see,' she explained patiently.

She flicked a few black seeds out of the wedge before lifting it to her mouth and sucking it, hard. The red flesh
turned white. ‘If it is bitter you spit the poison out; if it is nectar you take it all.'

As her skin healed, a residue of that sparkle I had first seen in her by the pond near the Palm Beach Hotel slowly returned to her eyes. When she walked past the empty pool, I wished it were full again, as it must have been once, to reflect her on its undulating surface and fill every element with her moving shape. The emerald pigeons, the flying fish, the baskets of fruit all seemed close once more.

‘What do you think about this pool?' I asked her one evening. She was stretched out on a planter's chair, under the pergola teeming with ever more white trumpets in the failing light; her breasts flat underneath the thin muslin of an old shawl. She had started to listen more, as though at last the explosions in her ears had died away. ‘I wanted to clean it – all that dried algae – and fill it. I had a grand plan: an Archimedean screw, a windmill, a cistern with aqueducts. A tremendous plan, but then I was afraid it might attract too much attention if it was spotted from the air.'

She smiled for the first time since she arrived. ‘A pool would not make such a difference. They say there are old ponds and pools dotted all over from here to the coast. But Archimedean? Why so complicated?'

‘I didn't think I could fill it just using a pail.'

‘What about the pipe? They must have had some system. They didn't have slaves here, did they?'

‘The pipes are there.' I pointed to the grilles on each wall. ‘But there is no tap.'

She shook her head, bemused. ‘I don't know how you've
survived on your own for so long.' She stood up and inspected the stonework around the pool. Then she went straight to a slab at one corner. It was loose. She moved it; underneath was the wheel of a valve. ‘Look, here it is. The inlet from the lake. They must have a pipe up there to divert the waters into the pool. Then, when you want, you open one on the other side to let it drain out. Into the garden. It goes out and lifts up the water table. That is why you have those big trees over there. Those are thirsty trees. You can see how they were growing years ago when this house was once before like your little pleasure dome.' She opened the valve but nothing flowed. ‘We have to find the stopcock up at the lake.'

‘Where? How can you trace the pipe? There is no sign on the ground to show where it goes. I can't see anything. You'd have to be a water diviner.'

Uva stepped back with her hands on her hips, exasperated, but looking much more like her old self. ‘Diviner? No, an engineer. Where would you connect it up?'

She too was a real fixer.

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Where's your map?'

We went over to my painted board.

She pointed out where she reckoned the pipe would be. ‘Let's go.'

It took us less than an hour to locate it. There was another small wheel set in a culvert grown over with maidenhair. She hit the spindle with a stick to loosen it. ‘Be careful,' I warned but the valve opened. I heard the water flow.

We filled the pool to the brim so that when we slipped in, the water ran over and darkened the sand with its abundance. Yellow flowers floated between us. When Uva came out of
the water they stuck to her like the butterflies who had appeared before on their brief, dazzling pilgrimage home.

That evening we ate pumpkin, cowpea and cassava. For fruit she had picked mangosteen and a durian.

‘Have you tried?' She asked me with a hint of the mischief she used to display at the beach.

I was a little apprehensive of the durian's prickly shape and its odour. She scoffed at my reluctance. ‘It is so rare to find these still growing. Even in the old days a really fresh durian was the most sought-after aphrodisiac.'

‘Really?' I was not convinced.

‘Here, try the mangosteen first then.' She smiled again, breaking the purple shell in her hand to reveal snowdrops from heaven.

Later we watched the moon bob in the pool, licked by the flames of the candles I had floated for her.

‘Will we live here for ever?' Her voice slipped over me, her lips warm and thick like an engorged flower.

I held her in my hands and pressed her. ‘Yes.'

‘And when there are no more matches for the fire?'

‘We'll have to keep burning all the time.' I wished, too late, I had not said it.

She rescued a mynah with a damaged wing, and a mongoose trapped in the cowshed. She nursed them until the monkey, the mynah and the young mongoose all ate right out of her hand. She even drew the bees from their hives. ‘I wish I had some milk,' she said and blinked at the look that passed over my face. ‘No, not from me – I was spiked.'

I didn't know what she meant, but I could sense the walls around her early traumas crumbling. She tried to purse her lips, but the words gushed out.

‘During the Emergency, anyone whom the authorities deemed rebellious was sterilised. Spiked. Spayed. It happened at school. First a dart, like yours, you know? Then a scraper. That was when my parents decided we had to escape up into the hills. To Farindola. But Kris wouldn't come. He was mad. He was mad at my father. Kris didn't agree with anything he said or did. Our school system had warped him much sooner than my parents expected; before they realised it. You see, he thought my father wanted to control him. He didn't understand my father was only trying to encourage some spirit, grow back the wildness in us, no? My parents believed that diversity gave us strength; that love grew stronger when it had to hold things together: unity in diversity. It's true. But Kris saw everything differently. For months my parents tried to persuade him to leave the city and come and join us in Farindola. But every time he came he would quarrel and storm off. He didn't see the corruption. He didn't believe that the bush squads who broke the bones of their victims one by one, beat them and burnt them with firebrands, pulped the organs of infants, were officials doing their duty. He saw
us
as the destroyers. He went and informed. They came then with an executioner and took over Farindola for themselves.' She hunched her shoulders, shrinking. ‘All I could do then was to go from town to town like a little hothouse breeder – the last of our line – carrying plants, small animals. Wild viruses to infect their whole regime.' She hammered her knees with her fists and straightened up as though she had to inspire another army.

I was crestfallen. Here, in this garden, I had imagined we might become the beginning of something new. The core of a story told and retold, imagined as I had so often imagined my own parents meeting, or my grandparents – Eldon and
Cleo – discovering, in their inexplicable wartime courtship along the Strand, that yellow birds and dragonflies were not unique to the air currents of their separate island homes. The stuff of legends, like even Uva's own transformation from farmer to warrior to farmer again. I recalled Pushpa, the little girl in the camp, and wished she could have been reborn to us here and have at least a glimpse of a world free from strife.

The animal in Uva's arms whined; she stroked it, calming the mongoose, and herself, down. ‘This little pup needs some real nourishment.'