The Worlds Within Her (39 page)

Her name.

Written in an adult hand.

Cyril leans over, says with compassion, “Is not Ram's handwriting.”

But it will be a few moments before she can tell him that it doesn't matter. That the book is the first thing since her arrival in the island with which she has felt intimacy. This old book, this old legend.

Icarus.

Cyril and Penny say goodnight. Yasmin gets into bed. The house settles into darkness.

She pulls the sheet up to her neck, the mattress beneath her accommodating itself slowly to her shape.

Already, she thinks, odours have become sufficiently familiar to pass unremarked.

Then, Icarus light on her chest, Yasmin slides easily into sleep.

MORNING BRINGS AN
uncertain sky, distant blue hardening behind slabs of grey-bellied cloud luminous at the edges.

Cyril, squinting upwards, says, “At leas' they have silver linings.”

Penny grimaces into her coffee cup. “God, if he not depressin', he embarrassin', you don' find so, Yasmin?”

She is halfway through her second cup of coffee, the flavour of the fried bread from breakfast still on her tongue. The coffee is dense and sweet, its steam whitened by the condensed milk. It tastes of a foreignness that would not be delicious elsewhere. Only in this landscape of alien greenery lit by an alien light could it give her pleasure. Like an espresso with two lumps of sugar and no milk in a little café near the Louvre. Like an early afternoon beer on the Ramblas.

This coffee, and her enjoyment of it, belong here. She knows they cannot accompany her.

Yasmin asks about her father's date of birth.

On the year, there is no disagreement — although Penny and Cyril have to work it out between them and settle on a must-have-been.

The month, too, they agree on, after some toing and froing between May and June.

The day, however, cannot be conjured. Cyril remembers seeing several, in articles, in election pamphlets. He once asked his
brother which was the correct one. Ram had smiled — that teasing way that he had — and said that if he could identify the right one he would buy him a bottle of the finest Scotch. But Cyril never got the chance to engage the challenge. On the evening after the funeral — a large and boisterous affair, anger wrestling grief to the edge of rampage, “that anger that we still see today, in Ash” — Cyril bought himself a bottle of the Scotch and finished it alone, although he has no memory of having finished it, only of being alone. He turns a baleful gaze on Yasmin.

What, she wonders still, about his hands, his fingers, the lines on his palms? She has always known her hands and feet to be unlike her mother's, longer and less slender. So are they, then, feminine versions of his? Did he, like Cyril, have long, fine hairs that haloed in sunlight from the edges of his ears?

But there is no point in asking. Neither Penny nor Cyril, she sees, can grasp the weight of such things above the deafening din of the deeds: the shape of a fingernail above the nobility of the act. She thinks: Veneration blinds.

Cyril says, “Maybe we should take care of Shakti today.”

Penny, swallowing, gives a little wave. “Not today, Manager. Remember what the pundit say.”

Yasmin says, “My plane leaves tomorrow afternoon.”

“Tomorrow morning, then,” Penny says with finality.

IT WAS DARK
in the study. Through the window the night sky pulsed with the lights of distant worlds.

Jim sat behind his desk, Yasmin before it. Neither could say how long they had been sitting like this. The house around them had gone inert. Lamps recessed into the shelves of his bookcases glowed without reach from behind books and bookends.

A stack of bound reports leaned against a trophy won in a recent office tennis tournament. Silver and gold columns separated by strips of red and blue plastic on top of which a little gold figure waved a tennis racket. In the enervation that followed their daughter's death, he had been reluctant to participate but he had dug deep within himself, past the darkness, and he had done well. He had, one of his colleagues said, beaten the hell out of the ball.

He acknowledged that the trophy was not a thing of beauty, it was garish, but still he had wanted it in the living room. Yasmin, resentful of the object yet jealous of it, refused. She knew that her refusal had hurt him. But she saw it as a trade: a little hurt for a little hurt. And she wondered how it was that they had come to be here: from passion in the dawn to late-night accountings of displeasure.

“There's a reason for everything, Yas. Even this. You have to believe that.”

“I have to, Jim? Or
you
have to?”

It had been months. Jim had carried on, his cheekbones growing more prominent, ribs more sharply etched against his skin. And Yasmin too had continued to function, colleagues remarking on her strength, calling her an inspiration. Every week, though, there were new greyed hairs to tuck behind the black.

After two months, her mother had said it was time to deal with Ariana's room. Yasmin had not entered it since the morning she last sent her daughter off to school.

Slowly she was getting used to the idea of loss: the loss of warmth, the loss of presence, the loss of knowing the life her
daughter might have lived. But she could not accommodate her sense of a life unrealized. There were moments when she thought the pain would rip her apart from inside. She felt damaged, a mass imploding. To enter her daughter's room was, she feared, more than she could endure: to see the hair tangled in her hairbrush; to be reminded of the smell of her; to envision her gestures in the things that she had used.

CYRIL, RIGHT EYEBALL
wandering askew, says, “She was always like that, you know. From the first time I met her in the library. Great, great ambition. Curious, curious mind. Nothing fazed her. Business, politics, you name it …”

PHOTO: CELIA APPEARS TO HAVE JUST BEEN TOLD A JOKE. HER MOUTH IS OPEN WIDE IN MID-LAUGH, THE TEETH SMALL AND EVEN, HER LEFT EYE OBSCURED BY A SPRAY OF FLYING HAIR. YET — IT MAY NOT BE LAUGHTER. SHE MAY HAVE BEEN STARTLED. IS THAT HUMOUR IN HER RIGHT IRIS, OR AN UNLEASHED PANIC? THE PHOTOGRAPH HIDES AS MUCH AS IT REVEALS. OR PERHAPS IT IS CELIA HERSELF WHO DOES SO.

He looks away, remembering.

“Then after we got involved we settled into a quiet life, reading, studying, a little dinner in a restaurant from time to time. She was good for me, you know. Calmed me down. We planned
to stay on in England after I was called to the bar. I'd join a firm — a small one, nuh, nothing grand — and we'd continue living that quiet life.

“But then one evenin' some fellas decided they didn't like my colour, and let me know it with their fists. From that evenin' on nothing was the same. I couldn't get my mind to concentrate. I mean, here I was readin' law and those fellas were still out there runnin' around free and there was nothing the law could do. All those nice principles, those fancy words: all empty, meaningless. I jus' couldn't go on.

“And Celia decided she couldn't go on in England either. So we came here. But, you know, there was nothing for her here. She tried. She tried hard. But what to do with all that ambition? All that curiosity? She became good friends with Shakti, they use to spend hours together, talkin' I suppose, nuh. But still …

“Swimming became her outlet. She was a brave lady, you know. She use to go far out past the breakers to where the sea was still and deep, like a huge swimming pool, nuh. And she would swim and swim and swim — she was proud like hell of her strength.

“I use to get kind o' frighten. She was out so far. What if she hit a bad current? Or got a cramp? But she had a thing about going farther and farther out, challenging herself, nuh. Ram use to joke with her, tellin' her to watch out for the cruise ships.

“And then one Sunday morning she swam out and didn't come back —”

Penny, listening quietly, says, “It was a Saturday.”

Cyril shrugs. “I remember it as a Sunday. Don't matter anyhow. Fact is, she didn't come back. Who knows why? Current, cramp, shark. Only thing we know is, she didn't come back.”

Penny says, “Remember what Shakti —”

“Yes, but she was in shock. It didn't make no sense.”

“Shakti said Celia was tryin' to swim back to England. She was the last one to see her, you know, far, far out, swimmin' strong towards the horizon.”

Cyril rubs his eyes. “Oh, God …”

Penny says, “You know what I think? I think is ambition that kill her. Reckless ambition. She jus' din't know when to stop.”

Cyril clasps the photo to his chest, his gaze rushing over Yasmin's shoulder.

In the dining room frantic with voiceless phantoms, she sees a young man's eyes in an old man's face. Eyes perplexed and disquieted — manic with the unanswerable question, How is it that I have come to this?

THE MOST WRENCHING
thing in bringing up children, do you not agree, my dear Mrs. Livingston, is to oblige them to do all those unpleasant things that life offers — the things we really cannot escape …

Yes, yes. Absolutely. Cleaning up their room. Doing their homework. But I had in mind more substantial things. Accepting defeat with grace, for instance. Responsibility for a pet. Dealing with death. It was a difficult thing, for me, you know. Death, I mean. I grew up in a rural area, you see …

No, no, not the countryside. Our island was too small to accommodate the concept. We were not far from a town of some substance. But where my parents lived was, at that time, attainable only on foot. The house stood some way into a cocoa
estate, and to get there you had to follow a narrow path from the main road through the plantation. Even on the brightest day little sunlight penetrated to the ground — it was always twilight, you see — and the night was impenetrable. We used torches but the darkness seemed to absorb the light of the flames. And there was no electricity, of course, and the house was lit by kerosene lamps. We had to invent our own entertainment, and in this environment it is hardly surprising that the telling of ghost stories was a favourite pastime.