Mosquito (22 page)

‘Will he leave me?’ she cried.

This, then, was how it was to end. Anna gone, Theo dead, our marriage finished. Is this how he means to forget all that we have been through together? Throwing me out with all that has hurt him? Is this my fate, now? She had been unable to foresee such an ending. How foolish of her. In the old days, she remembered, when she had first wanted to go to Sri Lanka, he had refused, saying nothing good would come out of it.

‘Oh, Giulia, don’t you understand?’ he had said. ‘My country is damaged. This war will go on and on in the minds of the people long after it is over. They will try to pretend it’s forgotten but how does one forget when your father and your mother and your brother have been slaughtered before your eyes?’

The aftermath of a war was mostly scars, he had told her bitterly. Giulia was crying more quietly now, rocking gently, sitting on the floor beside the tokens from Nulani Mendis’s life. Remembering his warning words. At least, she thought, neither Anna nor Nulani had been betrayed in this way. At least they were loved until the end. Picking up the last letter they had received from the girl, she unfolded it for the hundredth time and stared blindly at it.

‘
Jim won’t see me for a while,
’ Nulani had written. ‘
He is busy with his final exams. Then he has to look for a job. I miss you.
’

Suddenly Giulia was galvanised into action. Nulani’s brother had been at Sheffield University, she was certain of it. Someone had mentioned it, Theo maybe, or the girl herself. Why had they not thought to follow this lead? I will find her, thought Giulia. Closing the suitcase, wiping her eyes on her skirt, she picked up the phone. She would ring Sheffield University. And find Jim Mendis.

Later, after the rain had cleared, the light retained a softness, not unlike a spring day in England. And in the afternoon the sun came out. The old woman brought in a plate of fruit. She had placed it on a tarnished metal tray covered with drawings of Hindu gods. As she walked towards Theo something else seemed to come with her but then she grinned her discoloured, toothless grin and he lost the wisp of it again. All afternoon, after that, he was agitated and restless. Something was very wrong. Blood throbbed at his temples, and he started to shudder. Gerard had said he would be visiting but after the scene of the day before Theo was reluctant to see him. By mid-afternoon he had curled into a tight ball of worry, glancing at the door, expecting Gerard to walk in at any moment. But still he did not appear and terror, never far from the surface, rose
in Theo. He had begun to feel sick. His leg ached constantly and he wondered if the glasses they had found him were, in fact, the cause of his never-ending headaches. Glancing towards the door, straining for the slightest sound, he paced the floor nervously. A bit later on he vomited. Then he lay on his bed and slept, moaning and tossing feverishly. When he woke the old woman was standing over him saying something. Her voice was insistent and harsh and there was another sound that puzzled him. The woman was talking to him in Tamil. She stood too close for his liking. He felt hot and faint and wondered if a mosquito had bitten him. The woman pointed towards the roof. Theo looked at her through a wave of sickness. He had no idea what she meant. He tried asking her to fetch the radio. But either she did not want him to have it, or she could not understand him. In the end he gave up. In any case the woman was getting too friendly and he felt the need to keep a distance. As there was still no sign of Gerard, Theo picked up his notebook. Rohan, he thought, I must not forget Rohan. I mustn’t lose that thought.

He was staring at his notebook thinking of the books Anna used to keep, filled with her small beautiful handwriting, crushed all together on the page. The look of things had always struck him forcefully. Rohan’s paintings with their faulty horizons sitting uneasily on the canvas, rich and luminescent, had had the same effect. Making the invisible visible, Rohan had said. Had it been Rohan? Or had it been someone else? He felt as though his face was on fire. The sun had gone down completely. The walls of his room, flat and empty of objects, had the effect of cutting him off from the world on the other side. He felt not merely alone but ejected into dangerous isolation. It struck him that he was hardly human, locked up, pounding away in a twilight hell of gunshots and violence. He
was
certain
, something was terribly wrong. Perhaps he was ill with malaria? He began to shake then, with an awful sense of premonition, feeling a clamouring inside him, some struggle beyond his control. And then, in the purest moments of shock, without warning or sound, without preparation, the thought came forward, crashing against him with the roar of the sea. His memory of Sugi. And of the girl.

He must have collapsed. When he came to, it was dark again and he was sitting on the floor. The girl’s face appeared clear and very serene, framed in light, made sharper by his own exhaustion. And he felt at last with shattering horror, the true weight of his loss. He heard a noise approaching from a very long distance and felt it vibrate against him in slow, nauseating waves. It dissolved into the sound of a king coconut being cracked open with a machete. Held between two hands. Liquid gushed between long fingers, cloudy and plentiful. Small, rough-papered notebooks lay on a table, unwavering stories drawn in black lifted off its pages and came towards him. Hither and thither they fell, clamouring for his attention. Sunlight poured into a cracked glass jug, an arm, bare to the elbow, rested by a typewriter. And all around was the fragrance of linseed oil, of turpentine and colour. Rooted to the spot, Theo saw all this as if he watched through a mirror, rising darkly, out of the piano music that tripped down the steps into the tangle of garden light. Somewhere out of sight a gate was clicked open. A silver tray was placed on a table. It held a cup of tea and a glass of lime juice. He saw a man standing beside the table, smiling broadly. Still the noise approached. It was coming from the sky. Voices rose in confusion.

‘I haven’t seen you for four days,’ the girl was saying, her eyes shining, her black hair a curtain against her face, and all the heat of the afternoon gathered into a moment of such sweetness that Theo gasped for air.

‘Where have you been?’ he mumbled, struggling to stand up.

The noise was getting louder. It drummed in his head.

‘Sir, you have been away too long. But not to worry, I have looked after Miss Nulani.’

‘Sugi,’ he said, tentatively. ‘Sugi?’

‘You have a scar. I can feel it as I draw you.’

‘Draw, draw, draw…’

The voices were indistinct. They were muddled with other sounds that he could not understand. He saw the treetops being whipped up by a wind. Maybe a storm was brewing. The beach flashed past him like a mirage, scorching white, lace-edged by water. Someone had knocked the stone lions off their plinth; someone had picked a great branch of blossom and placed it in a jug of water on his table.

‘Was it you, Sugi?’ he asked urgently.

‘Yes, it was me,’ Sugi admitted. ‘We were worried, you were away for so long. We thought something might have happened.’

‘But you’re here, now,’ the girl seemed to say. Her face appeared strangely distorted, and part of the whirling noise outside. He wanted to speak, but his mouth would form no words. He could not move.

‘I have been tortured, Sugi,’ he wanted to say. ‘What do you say to that?’

He wanted to shout, to catch his attention, but the image of Sugi had become indistinct.

‘They showed me no mercy,’ he tried to say, ‘and once that has happened, once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that can ever be your home again.’

But the words that had remained locked within him for so many months could not be voiced. And the pain that he had carried for so long, unknowingly and fearfully, seemed an
impossible thing, too elusive and too raw to speak of. A slab of meat. That was what he wanted to say, that was what he had been. That was what he was.

In the darkness that had descended unnoticed, at last, he understood the sound was that of a helicopter. It whirled and chopped the air, swinging closer and closer. Unable to move, he watched as the beam of light swept across the jungle outside.

Oh Christ! he thought. Oh Christ!

And the only real thing that remained forcing itself upon him was the roaring of an engine in his ears, and the heavy sound of falling rain.

T
HE
T
AMIL WOMAN SCREAMED AND DARTED
into the room.

‘Helicopter,’ she said in English. ‘Singhala army.’

The noise was deafening and directly overhead. Theo froze, his heart was racing, his leg a lame weight against his body. Then with one swift movement, with catlike speed, the youth on guard duty was standing beside him. Theo drew his breath in sharply but the youth shook his head violently, putting his hand out to stop him.

‘Quiet, no more noise,’ he hissed. ‘They look for Gerard.’

‘What?’

The helicopter’s rotor blades whirled closer. It was about to land. The noise was so great that it wasn’t possible to hear anything else and then the boy threw himself on to the ground.

‘They have guns,’ he said, through clenched teeth.

Theo braced himself, shrinking into a corner of the room. But the whirling continued without attack and the searchlights moved in a circular fashion across the trees again.

‘What’s happening?’

‘They look for Gerard,’ the boy whispered from the floor. He began crawling towards the window.

‘Who?’ asked Theo. ‘Who’s looking for him? Who are these people?’

‘The Chief. He wants Gerard. He told the Tigers, Gerard is traitor. He wants find him. All day they are looking for him. They kill him when they find him.’

The boy spoke in a matter-of-fact way now, as though none of this frightened him.

‘But he’s not here,’ Theo said. He was sweating badly. ‘He hasn’t visited today.’

‘I know. He and Chief have big fight. Big fight!’ The boy seemed to be relishing this. ‘Gerard wants finish from Tigers. He tells world. Now, everyone look for him. Tigers, Singhalese, everyone.’

The boy stood up. The searchlights were back, close up, by the house and the helicopter blew a hurricane of air over the trees. Then they heard a different sound and seconds later a truck drew up. The Tamil woman was whimpering quietly. She had moved closer to the boy and was plucking at his arm but he pushed her away roughly and spoke to her in Tamil. Dimly, in spite of his state of shock, Theo realised the boy must be her son. Through the haze of fear and confusion, he saw she was frightened for the boy and he saw for the first time that the boy was very young. All the time he had been guarding the house the woman must have been frightened for his life. All the time she had served Theo his meals, or grinned at Gerard, she had been worried for the boy’s future. And then he thought, in however many months I have been here, I never cared to ask her name. The thought came to him simply, without the complications of grief or the fear of the past months. The boy was crouching by the window and had cocked his gun. The idea that
they were about to die fixed itself firmly in Theo’s mind. Again the thought was uncluttered by fear. Outside the rain increased. It fell in small dashes on to the glare of the searchlights. Someone was moving against the darkest parts of the garden. Fleetingly he remembered the girl again. She appeared in his mind unsullied by the moment’s sudden real violence and by its terror. He sensed, rather than saw, a figure inch its way along the corner of the bungalow. Somebody, screened by the creepers, was breathing hard, close by. The sound was very loud and rasping as if whoever it was had been running for a long time. As if they were very frightened. Theo understood the sound, and the feeling that went with it. Next to him, the Tamil woman and the boy stood absolutely still, waiting, listening. Suddenly there was a shout, followed by running footsteps and Gerard appeared briefly in the beam of the headlights. Two men in camouflage uniform were dragging his arms back as the helicopter rose swiftly and disappeared above the trees. Now Theo could see Gerard clearly. At some point in the scuffle he had been blindfolded and his hands tied together. His mouth was working but no sound came out of it. As he watched, Theo saw two men force Gerard to his knees and in the light from the truck he saw one of them pull out a cigarette, smoking it silently and with an air of calm. Then the man threw his half-smoked cigarette away and picked up an axe from the back of the truck. With a swift movement, a wide arc of his arm, he brought the axe down sharply on Gerard’s bowed neck. Once, twice, at the third attempt, Gerard’s head rolled to the ground like a coconut.

Afterwards he had no idea for how long the three of them stood there, rooted to the spot. Silent as the dead, themselves. Luck had entered the arena and saved them. Fate had given them a hand. The men dragged Gerard’s body into the back of the truck. They wrapped his head in a green cloth, as if it were
a trophy, and tossed it in. Then they drove off. Not a single shot had been fired. All was darkness once more as the rain continued to fall unnoticed. The old woman began to weep quietly.

‘We must go,’ the boy said at last. In the darkness his face looked unearthly. ‘They will come back. You must leave here. Go!’

Theo stared at him. He was incapable of moving, incapable of speech. His mind and body had seized up as though in rigor mortis.

‘Come,’ the boy urged again, his face calm. ‘I take you to the border. Then we leave. You must go. They might find you here. Just go. Back to your home.’

The old woman nodded. She wiped her eyes and Theo saw, without surprise, that her face too was devoid of expression.

‘Come,’ the boy said again, seeing Theo could not understand. ‘Before they return.’

The old woman began to speak in Tamil.

‘What’s she saying?’ asked Theo. He was terrified.

‘She says we are not normal. We cannot speak in normal voices ever again. Even if the peace comes,’ the boy said, ‘there is no peace for us.’

Together they stepped out into the rain, and hurried away from the house, towards the gate, where a battered jeep was hidden in the undergrowth. The old woman was still muttering and the boy turned to Theo.

‘She says, peace is a jack tree that grows on the blood that has been spilt,’ he said. ‘It is an old Tamil saying.’

All around was an eerie silence. Above was a splattering of stars. The jungle appeared before them in the headlights of the jeep, immense and impenetrable. And as they drove into it, Theo saw that all the time he had been standing at the window, all the time his heart had been tied up with fear, he had been
clutching the exercise books in which were the salvaged remains of his life.

Rohan had begun to paint. Giulia was not sure how this happened, but he had found a small warehouse in Dorsoduro and turned it into a studio. His early-morning trips to the Lido had stopped as abruptly as they had begun. And he was working seriously again. Too much time had been lost already, he told Giulia. He didn’t want any more distractions.

‘People will come and go. Only art survives,’ he told her, airily.

Giulia said nothing. In the end even she had been unable to trace the girl. On the day Giulia had seen Rohan laughing with the unknown woman she had rung Sheffield University in search of Jim Mendis. But there she had drawn a blank. Jim Mendis had graduated a year earlier and moved on. He had left no forwarding address. Next, Giulia had tried contacting a fellow student, a contemporary of his. But the student had only known Jim slightly, and had no idea where he could be or if he had a sister. With no other clue there was nothing else Giulia could do. Perhaps, she thought, sadly, Rohan was right, and it was time to give up on this hopeless cause. The girl had been swallowed up by an indifferent world.

‘Time has passed, events have moved on,’ Rohan said briskly, seeing her looking at the notebooks. ‘Put them away, forget about it now.’

Giulia smiled, agreeing, but the smile did not reach her eyes. Although she did not blame him, Rohan’s coldness towards her brought an unbearable loneliness in its wake. She was glad he was painting again; glad to see him so busy. But every night when he returned home exhausted and preoccupied with his work, she looked for signs of other distractions, fearful of what she might see.

Outwardly Rohan appeared happier. He was relieved to be painting at last. He had missed his work. When he stretched his first canvas he hoped he would be able to pick up exactly where he had left off, using the colour grey, painting the large, soft abstracts he once had. But he found this was impossible. Life had taken him to a different place. So instead, he began to paint in dark austere tones. He painted blocks of flats from which light seeped out and formless human presence, ghosts sitting patiently, waiting for or guarding some unseen treasure. He hardly knew what he was doing. The size of his canvases had become smaller too, partly because of the cramped nature of his studio and partly because what he wanted to say was more intimate, more secretive. He had the strangest feeling of living in a closed box, from which no light could escape. Loneliness preoccupied him, and the blank empty spaces of loss. The twilight world of the displaced interested him in a way quite different from before, the slow disquiet of the homeless. All that had been familiar and certain vanished from his work. The war was embossed on Rohan’s life like a watermark, visible only under close scrutiny. His palette changed. Ignoring the soft tones of the Adriatic, the blues and the greens, he began to use crimson and pink. He refused to look at other colours. Giulia thought the surfaces of his paintings were like bruised flesh, visceral and close to death. But fearful of Rohan’s sudden bursts of anger, she dared not say anything. She was aware he was drinking too much, but she could not stop this either, and whenever they were alone together he became bad-tempered and argumentative. Dimly aware of his new, unspoken dislike of her, Giulia merely hid her own unhappiness under an air of false cheerfulness, refusing to question it. Privately, she believed, the war in Sri Lanka had become her war too. Sometimes on a busy
calle
, in broad daylight, she would become lost in a
daydream, caught up in some unresolved memory. She would stop walking and stand absolutely still as passers-by stepped around her irritably. I’m no use, she would think, rising from her reverie, scurrying home with pounding heart. And it was at these moments that she saw clearly how her husband’s country had wormed its way under her skin, invading her life, incapacitating her. It had carved out its violence on her too, so although she still loved Rohan, showing this love was gradually becoming a complicated and reluctant thing.

When Rohan had done about a dozen paintings, he told Giulia he had decided to find a gallery to represent him. Venice was a small town filled with tourists and the contemporary art available mostly serviced this industry. It was easier to find a meaningless painting in Venice than not, Rohan complained. Then one day he introduced Giulia to a woman. He had met her in the piazza, he said, where he took his morning coffee. The woman ran a small gallery tucked away behind the Calle del Forno. She represented only Venetian artists, serious artists, but, because he lived here, because his wife was from these parts, the woman told Giulia unsmilingly, she was prepared to take Rohan’s work. They were sitting in his studio sharing a bottle of wine. Giulia had a feeling she had seen the woman somewhere before.

A month later two of Rohan’s paintings sold for a substantial sum of money.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ Giulia said, after that first sale. ‘See, there’s hope.’

She spoke sadly, for she now remembered where she had seen the woman before. Rohan pulled a face. He had banished hope.

Two storks nested on the roof of the beach house. There had never been storks there before. Mother, father and the nest waited patiently for the egg to hatch. Maybe they felt the house was
vacant so they felt safer here, or maybe they liked the uninterrupted view with nothing as far as the eye could see. Only Antarctica lay beyond the ocean. The seagulls left them alone; they were too big to be argued with. Inside the house all was quiet but not empty. Inside the house was a life, of sorts. There were small signs, small stirrings of living, ebbing and flowing feebly. For inside the house was Theo Samarajeeva. He was home at last. It had taken almost four years but he was back. He had been back for some time, days, months. Time did not matter much, he had no train to catch, no appointment to keep. Mostly he slept on a bed,
the
bed; it had belonged to him once long ago. It was his again. And he was back now and sleeping on it, all day and all night, hardly ever getting up. There was no one to recognise him and no one to care. There wasn’t a soul around, just the storks. Soon the egg hatched and the baby stork breathed fresh sea air. It breathed the same air as Theo. Neither of them cared much if the air was free. They both just breathed it.

Had Sugi been there he would have told Theo it was good luck to have storks nesting on the roof. Sugi would have seen it as an omen. He would have cleaned the house and polished the floor with coconut scrapings, and made Sir some milk tea, bringing it out to the veranda on a silver tray. He would have fixed the doors and shutters that hung limply on their broken hinges, and then he would have picked up the stone lions that had crashed to the ground. But Sugi wasn’t there. And the house, neglected and vandalised, remained uncared for.

On that first day of his return, Theo waited for Sugi. He had been patient for nearly four years, another day or so made no difference. Sugi would be back soon, he was certain. The girl, he hoped, was somewhere safe, waiting for news of him. He was too nervous to try the lights on that first night; he simply waited. When Sugi did not appear the next day or the next or even the
day after that, he began to stumble around the house, dragging his lame leg against what furniture remained. He opened the tins of food in the larder, which by some miracle had not been stolen, and when he could no longer stop shaking he tried to eat a little. But his throat had closed up to food. Only the bottles of whisky, hidden away with a few documents inside the covered-over garden well, held his interest. And this was how Thercy found him.

Thercy still lived in the town. She was no longer the person she once was, and the town, too, had changed. With new developments further up the coast most of those who lived here now were newcomers, indifferent to its history. Four years and two assassinated prime ministers had altered the way the war was fought. Loyalties had changed, and changed again. Blood had cooled. Four years had buried the past. Only the ghosts stayed on. Thercy was like a ghost, she had meant to leave long ago, but apathy had stopped her. She had aged, walking up the hill wasn’t easy any more, but when she saw a light in the beach house something stirred within her. Something she had never thought to feel again. Thinking of her dead friend, panting, she walked slowly towards the house.