The Worlds Within Her (21 page)

The night rustled, whispered, trilled a distant chant.

She could smell the grass, the soil, rogue traces of the lilac bush. She knew herself to be alive in a way, with a depth, she had never known before, flesh and mind fusing, weaving themselves into an intricacy of hysteria and desire.

When he entered her, it was as if the glittering sky itself were gathering its immensity into her.

Her body slipped from her grasp, senses soaring.

In a final flash of lucidity, she thought:
He is a man made for moonlight.

It grows hot under the sheets, and stale with her own breath. She stretches her neck, letting her head slip out, to air insensate with enclosure.

She reaches for the water glass sitting on the night table, takes a sip. But the water is too warm, too glutinous. It glides thick over her tongue and down her throat. It does not slake her thirst.

In the distance, the sound of an engine. A car, or perhaps a truck.

She offers herself a deep and steady breathing, but does not open her eyes. She is not yet ready to surrender the sweet moulding of the sheets to her body.

The light that invested the city was cruel: a light that rose from the water with an almost excruciating clarity. A biblical light, Jim once said, the kind of light that could hearten or incinerate.

In the newer suburbs, the light splattered a chaotic brilliance over the unsmudged houses, the fresh lawns, the uncultured shrubs. It left nothing unseen, not the machined beauty nor the spare ugliness, not the possibilities among the clutter.

But in their suburb, older, more overgrown with shrubbery, at a remove from the water, the light extended itself with greater discretion, making its way along streets, past hedges and among houses like a timid voyeur, leaving behind a subtle construction of shadow and revelation, an aqueous and elegant chiaroscuro of privilege.

Summer evenings offered shadows, neighbours distanced by a layered darkness and the occasional congestion of barbecuing odours: scents of singed steaks, potato salads, warmed rolls, cold beer. All the surreptitiousness of the good life ritualized to gentle parody. Even the colours of their houses were muted by bylaw to what Jim declared a reticence offensive only to style. The approved pastels, he once said, were to houses what ketchup was to food.

The suburb had grown steadily through the years, its initial anonymity acquiring a genteel personality that Charlotte, touring the house after the acceptance of their offer to purchase, had deemed “introversion with a slow pulse.” She gave Yasmin a searching look, and Yasmin saw her disappointment.

What? she said.

But Charlotte's hesitations were formless, her unease vague. She said only, “This area. This house. It's all so … safe.”

Yes, Yasmin had agreed. This area, this suburb, was safe. And the house too was safe, conventional. But it was spacious, and not without possibilities. Besides, she said, acquiring it had made Jim feel more anchored.

“And you?”

“You know me, Charlotte.”

Charlotte had nodded, not in approval but in confirmation. “You've found another slipstream,” she said.

And when, one evening, Jim's new security translated itself into a nocturnal adventurousness on the darkened lawn, Yasmin thought of Charlotte and her tendency to underestimate those different from herself.

Charlotte's skepticism she wrote off as jealousy unbecoming a friend.

Warmth and safety. She gathers her fist in under her chin, pulls her thighs in tight against her belly.

She makes herself small. So small she is as if reduced to timelessness.

WELL, MY DEAR
Mrs. Livingston, this is quite the place you find yourself in. So … utilitarian. The curtains do lend a nice touch — even if their giant sunflowers are faded almost colourless. Your son tells me that this is among the best of the private facilities. Hmph! That being so, the public ones must be quite the horror. I mean, my dear, do you know — and you won't believe this — do you know that they drink tea here from Styrofoam cups? Can you imagine anything more barbaric?

Oh, all right, you probably can. And I'm quite aware that this is not a hotel. Still, standards, you know. Life can be so shoddy sometimes …

In any case, we must all do whatever we can, mustn't we. So, you know what I've done? I've brought some of my finest china, two cups and two saucers — you know, the ones with the rose pattern you like so much — and some fine Sri Lankan tea, a silver spoon each, a drop of milk, some sugar packets and a sliced lemon. I know that taking tea is out of the question for you at the moment, but I want to have everything here and ready for you when you … wake up.

Hearing, I am told, my dear Mrs. Livingston, is the last sense to go. I hope you can hear me, my dear, not for me but for yourself. I hold your hand, I even hear your voice, but I have no way of knowing whether you know me to be here with you.

You know, someone once said to me that growing up means realizing that your parents are not indispensable. I have learnt that about my grandparents and my parents, all of whom have stepped into that formless void that awaits us all. I suppose that, in the natural order of things, I am next. You can never get used to burying your contemporaries, you know, for to bury a contemporary is to bury a little bit of yourself. Perhaps for this reason, I'm not afraid of what will one day come. In some ways, it's like anticipating an injection. You know that the pain, if pain there is, will last only a few seconds, the staggering enormity of the end hardly an eye-blink in eternity — but one dreads those seconds more than anything else. I am convinced, you see, that leaving this life is not so bad. Leaving it alone, though: Now that is the horror.

My dear Mrs. Livingston,
can
you hear me?

SHE IS AWARE
that she is not fully conscious; is aware of her senses submerged and hovering.

The sheets lie light on her — on her skin that feels dry and powdery — and the temperature beneath the blankets achieves the cool warmth of Indian summer.

Her muscles lose petulance, grow pliant and calm: She pictures them in gentle palpitation beneath her flesh.

Mummy. Mummy! Make room. Let's snuggle.

Yes, baby, here, come on …

She feels the mattress rock, feels her daughter's warmth against her own, feels her daughter's head on her shoulder, her arm around her …

Ariana.

Then she hears herself mumble: No …

Feels revolt rising within herself. She begins to struggle, muscles suddenly taut and trembling.

Her right arm breaks free, tossing the sheets back, slicing a path through illusion. The air turns rugged, rude on her skin, and yet she must put effort into forcing her eyelids open, effort into seeing and feeling the world around her — the sunlight diffused and whitened, the dresser with its boxes and half-burnt candle, the ceiling scored by hairline cracks — and not that other one that hovers within, as seductive and perilous as the sun to Icarus.

Those hairline cracks. She grasps at their strands swaying sensuously just beyond her grasp like the tentacles of other thoughts.

YOU ONCE TOLD
me, my dear, of the time your husband got up to fetch himself another beer and after a step or two in the direction of the kitchen slumped to his knees. And even as his heart seized up in his chest, the only thing he said was your name.

Your name …

You were his first thought in a situation where you were also the last.

That too, my dear, I have always envied. I never achieved such priority in my husband's heart …

Very kind of you to say so, my dear, but you're wrong. I do know, and my husband himself made it clear to me …

Cruel? No, no, he wasn't brutal about it, he wasn't looking to hurt me. Indeed, I'm certain it never occurred to him that he was hurting me. And once I had understood his message, there was no point in discussing it with him. The message itself was a full-stop, you see.

For me, it began strangely enough, with whispers — and went, from there, to words offered but unspoken. This was one of those moments when you remember precisely what you were doing, no matter how trivial — and I was plucking my eyebrows. You remember that barbaric beauty ritual, Mrs. Livingston? Tweezing out every hair and grease-pencilling back in an arched perfection? In any case, there I was leaning in close to the mirror, when I heard whispering through the bathroom door. There was a light knock and Celia called my name. I told her to come in, and the door swung slowly open. In the mirror I saw Celia, with Cyril just behind her. They both looked stricken. And then Celia told me my husband had been shot.

I don't remember releasing the tweezers, but I remember clearly their crystal clattering when they hit the sink.

They didn't know much more — just that he was alive, and Celia shushed Cyril when he used the word “still.”

At the hospital, the doctor in charge — a childhood friend of my husband's — told us that although he was badly hurt his life was not in danger. He ascribed it to luck. One bullet had passed through his neck, but cleanly, doing miraculously little damage. Another bullet, had it found its mark, would have destroyed his heart — but it hadn't found its mark. A gold medallion — a gift he received for his work in the community — got in its way. The medallion had been bent concave and my husband's chest was bruised, but there was no other damage. His speech-making would be curtailed for a while, the doctor said, and he would for some time appear to give Louis Armstrong impressions, but eventually his voice too would return to normal.

I alone was allowed to see him. An armed policeman stood at his door, and his room, darkened, full of machines and glowing monitors, was in electronic twilight. He was partially sedated, but that part of him that was awake was lucid. He couldn't manage a smile, but his hand responded to mine — recognition, comfort. But then, suddenly, it began to shake. I was startled, I thought something was wrong, and reached for the call button. But he seized my wrist, calmed me — and made me see that he was merely making a writing motion, that he wanted a pen.

I gave him one from my purse, and held up a small notebook so that he could scratch out his words. And what he wrote in shaky block letters was this:
Dawn follows midnight.

Tears came to my eyes. I stroked his hair and whispered to him that yes, indeed, we would have our dawn, he and I, once past all this.

He shook his head, and uttered a growl. I couldn't decipher what he wanted to say. He repeated the growl, with pain — and when his meaning came clear, I thought my heart would explode. What he had said was,
Torch
. Torch, Mrs. Livingston — the symbolic torch of his political life. That was the dawn that would come.

This was the moment, my dear — and you know that I choose my words carefully — this was the moment when I knew my husband to be in some way a monster.

I almost didn't pass the note on, you know. I almost ripped it up. But he had taken the fight out of me, and so I handed it to Cyril, knowing precisely where I stood in my husband's affections.