Brixton Beach (13 page)

He quivered with fright and superstitious thoughts, never far off, made him shudder. Only this morning he had watched as a silver fish had dropped down from the rafters, narrowly missing his face. Stanley swallowed. Marvelling at his good luck, he wished he were safely on the boat to England. The army were aggressively herding people in all directions, looking for a scapegoat. Stanley didn’t want to be noticed. Forcing himself to slow down and behave normally, he began to walk in the direction of home. But then it occurred to him there was nothing to go home for, just yet. Sita would be at the spice mill and after that she had some other shopping to do.

Last night’s unhappiness, his wife’s insatiable obsession in recounting their recent tragedy and the guilt she always induced, exhausted him. It sapped his energy and was slowly driving him mad. When she wasn’t crying about what had happened, she was crying about leaving the island. But then again she didn’t want to stay here either. It was a nightmare and the only certain thing was that, somehow, it all boiled down to being
his
fault. What was he meant to do? he wondered, unhappily. He half suspected she wished she had not married him. Often he wished it too. The wish lay between them, replacing the sex they no longer indulged in. Sita, with her small beautiful face, her delicate frame, her lovely friendly smile, had ensnared him in some distant lifetime and only now did he understand that the things he had once found so attractive were becoming a noose around his neck. Reluctant to spend his few hours in Colombo with her, bone-tired of her neediness and her constant desire for more than he could offer,
he hesitated. They were as different as Eskimos and Greeks, he thought gloomily, dodging the potholes and avoiding the cow dung on the road.

He crossed Pettar, looking nervously around him. The streets here were subdued, people were standing in shop doorways talking softly amongst themselves, fearful. Only further along, near the fort, was life untroubled by the bomb. An old man, a palmist, sat cross-legged on the ground, doing readings. Who could have predicted, mused Stanley following his own line of thought, that the relatively harmless act of falling in love could have had such a disastrous effect on my life. He groaned inwardly, thinking of the added complication of the child. Everyone had warned him of the foolishness of marrying a Singhalese. Courting disaster, Neville had said. Well, he had ignored their advice and now he too was part of the huge melting pot of suspicion and mixed race mess. While slowly, in the face of the Fonseka clan, his excellent sense of self-preservation was being eroded. Well done, Stan, he told himself. Time you left. He began to whistle tunelessly.

By now, it was nearly eleven thirty. Luck had been on his side for once today and he was suddenly badly in need of a whisky. Turning away from the main road, he headed for the docks. Neville was alone in his office.

‘Ah!’ he said, waving Stanley in. ‘Here’s the intrepid traveller! Come in, men, come in. All packed and ready?’

He laughed boisterously.

‘What’s the matter? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost!’

‘There’s been a bomb.’

Neville nodded. ‘Of course, of course.’

‘You heard about it?’ Stanley asked, taken aback. ‘So soon?’

It always amazed Stanley that his friend knew everything that went on in the city without moving away from his desk.

‘I’ve a bit of an emergency on at the moment, you know,’ was Neville’s usual excuse, when asked to join in on any social events. But as far as Stanley could see, these emergencies emerged out of nothing and went away equally quickly. Neville’s business appeared to be conducted exclusively on the telephone, of which there were three in
his office. Every news story came to him in this way. And yet he always had his finger on the pulse, knowing the latest scandal long before anyone else did. He was a useful man to know. When Stanley, for instance, had first applied for his passport it had been Neville who had helped him with the application, making sure it was processed quickly and then, later on, it had been Neville who had told him where to get the cheapest ticket for the crossing.

‘Buy from the Greeks, men,’ he had said. ‘Trust me, they are the cheapest.’

Stanley had trusted him and the passage was booked in a single phone call. It was only after it was fixed that Stanley had remembered Bee wanted Sita’s ticket bought too.

‘Really? Hah, these Singhalese buggers have plenty of money, don’t they?’

And Neville had fixed two more tickets for late July with no other comment, although Stanley had a strong feeling he disapproved.

On the night Sita had gone into hospital, Stanley had visited him quite late. Neville had welcomed him in the usual easy manner and, taking a bottle of whisky out of his safe, had plied Stanley with drink. In the early hours of the following morning it had been Neville who had been first to ring him with the news that Sita had lost the baby. In the panic that followed it had not occurred to Stanley to ask how his friend had known.

Stanley often thought how refreshing it was being in the company of one’s own people. You knew where you were with them.

This morning Neville was in his usual avuncular mood.

‘You look like you need a drink,’ he said shrewdly, taking a new bottle of whisky out of a drawer and a jug of ice from the fridge. The ceiling fan gently moved the papers on his desk. Stanley pushed some books off a chair and sat down. It was well past the middle of the day.

‘I can’t believe I’ll be on the high seas tomorrow, away from this bloody country,’ he sighed. ‘Thank God!’

He had only eaten half the hopper at breakfast and the whisky on an empty stomach was making him feel light-headed. When the telephone rang a few minutes later, Neville answered it in Singhalese.

Stanley sat gazing idly out of the window, not really listening, clinking the ice in his glass as he watched the rickshaw men hurrying on bare feet, spitting betel as they ran. Beyond him the sea moved restlessly in the confines of the harbour, glistening in the sunlight. Soon, thought Stanley, with a feeling of exquisite pleasure, I won’t have to look at this any more. Colombo was so overrated, he thought, and he wondered what it would be like meeting up with his brother after nearly fourteen years. Stanley, the younger of the two, had stayed close to his mother’s side after she had been widowed. The last to leave, never to return, he thought with happy finality. He would break his mother’s heart, he knew, but it couldn’t be helped. In any case, according to his mother it had been Sita who had taken him away.

This morning’s bomb was the second explosion in two weeks. No doubt someone would claim responsibility for it later. Some poor sod from the resistance movement, an uneducated Tamil, would pay the price. Neville finished his conversation and swivelled around on his chair.

‘Another drink?’ he asked, switching smoothly to Tamil.

Stanley shook his head, envious of such fluency. It suddenly occurred to him that Sita might have heard about the explosion and be worried.

‘I ought to go, men,’ he said uneasily. ‘She’ll create merry hell otherwise. I just wanted to say good-bye and thank you for everything.’

‘But you’ve only just got here!’ Neville said in surprise. ‘Was there something in particular I could do for you?’

Stanley hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he could ask again.

‘I was wondering if I could ring my brother?’

‘Of course, of course, men, why didn’t you say? Here, go ahead.’

So Stanley dialled the number and waited. Rajah worked in an office somewhere in London. Having persuaded Stanley to leave the island, he had promised to find him a job. It would not be easy, he had warned, for with Sita and the child to support money would be tight but, Rajah had paused tactfully, there was only one child! A blessing in disguise in some ways. When he had first heard these words, Stanley had felt an enormous lightening of his heart.

‘A bomb went off on the bus this morning,’ he said now, as soon as he heard Rajah’s voice. ‘I just missed it.’

‘Well, it’s time you left,’ the voice answered faintly, after a pause during which Stanley fancied he could hear the sea. ‘How’s Ma?’

Stanley noticed his brother now spoke with a slight accent. He sounded like a lot of the UK returned people, not quite a white man, not quite belonging at home.

‘I haven’t seen her since after the funeral. Have you news about a job yet?’

‘Relax, relax; wait till you get here. Go and visit Ma, give her my love.’

They chatted for a moment longer. When he had finished, Stanley handed the phone back to Neville.

‘He’s doing very well, you know,’ he said, a touch of envy in his voice.

Neville finished his drink.

‘Well, you will too, soon,’ he said casually. ‘The Tamil diaspora are very successful, men. They are also an important part of our fight against all the injustices we are enduring here. You mustn’t forget that either!’

‘Of course not,’ Stanley said automatically, draining his glass.

He should go home, he thought again.

‘Thanks for everything, Neville,’ he said.

They shook hands. As he took his hat off the table, he noticed a book on Marxist theory and a pile of sealed letters with Canadian postmarks.

‘See you,’ Neville said. ‘I’ll try to come to the harbour tomorrow.’

As Stanley closed the door, he saw Neville was already reaching for the telephone.

Sita and Alice had just finished at the spice mill when the bomb went off. There had hardly been a sound, just a muffled thud. Had it not been for her constant worry over Stanley’s safety, the sense of violence brought on by the bomb would have been a welcome relief for Sita. At least a bomb had a certain energy to it. The possibility of danger released some of the tension locked inside her.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said, paying for the bag of chilli powder. ‘I want to check Dada’s all right. He’ll probably ring.’

She hurried out of the mill, dragging Alice behind her. Outside, the sunlight was unnaturally bright, forcing them to screw up their eyes against the glare. Looking up, Alice saw the trees through a filter of fine red dust. A man on a bed of stones begged passers-by for things he would never get. Alice stared at his open, betel-stained mouth.

‘Where did the bomb go off, Mama?’ Alice asked.

There was nothing to be seen, no broken glass, no policemen, nothing. The ambulancemen would gather the scrapings of human life, moving it out of sight quickly and with practised hands. And out of sight would mean out of mind, thought Sita bitterly. For wasn’t it true: what the eye didn’t see did not matter. The phrase was a refrain that never left her. The less she said it, the more she heard it.

‘Come on,’ she cried, pulling Alice sharply by the hand. ‘We’ll walk, it’s safer.’

As they walked they heard the sounds of sirens and ambulances sweeping past, washing over them with an excess of sounds. Sita’s heart was pounding. Pushed and bumped against her mother, Alice dropped her bag of chilli in a hole filled with rainwater. The powder fanned out like coral in an explosion of colour. The city air smelled of a thousand different things: orange blossom hidden in a secret garden, and drains, and the blistering smell of freshly ground turmeric. There was something else, too, something sweet and metallic, like the smell of the fireworks on New Year’s night. They rushed back as quickly as they could.

It was where Stanley, returning home, his breath smelling of whisky, found them. The first spots of rain were leap-frogging on the dusty ground. The monsoon was breaking with a vengeance.

‘Couldn’t you at least ring?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Stanley lied. ‘I had to go for questioning at the police station.’

And they gave you whisky there, did they? While taking down your statement?’ Sita asked.

Her eyes glinted dangerously. Alice watched yet another argument break like the rains. Unlike the monsoons, her parents’ rows never showed any sign of stopping.

That evening, their last together for some time, the meal was eaten in silence. Each of them was deep in their own thoughts. The wind had died down and the rain was abating, leaving faint streaks of washed-out colour against the sky. The dusty sun-faded garden looked as though it had been touched with a coat of paint. Large fruit-bats took up positions on the telegraph line and sparrows that had made nests under the eaves of the house squabbled noisily, but the air of unhappiness inside the house recycled itself over and over again. Stanley glanced nervously at his wife, helping himself to a little more
seeni sambal
.

‘Is there any more mulligatawny left?’ he asked timidly.

It occurred to him that he would never overcome his inbuilt fear of Sita. Her quick tongue paralysed him, making him feel a fool, leaving him no space to hide. Tonight, she seemed to have finished her litany of woes. The irony of this latest row did not escape him. Sita thought he had been to the Skyline Hotel to waste money on whisky. He could not tell her it was Neville who had been his supplier. Stanley sighed heavily. Was there anyone this wife of his liked? Without warning, the lights went out.

‘Good!’ Alice said, pleased. ‘Can I light the candles?’

Her parents didn’t seem to hear. Her mother was already lighting the oil lamp and her father was scraping the last morsel of rice on to his plate. The sound of it was somehow very sad to Alice’s ears. Perhaps her mother thought so too, for she asked him in a conciliatory voice:

‘There’s some fish left, would you like some?’

Alice watched her father curiously.

‘What are you staring at?’ he asked suddenly. ‘It’s rude to stare, especially when someone is eating.’

‘Why?’ asked Alice.

But as always, no one answered her. Her father pushed the last of the food into his mouth.

Alice,’ her mother said quietly, ‘don’t be rude. Haven’t you finished eating yet?’

‘Are we going to the Sea House tomorrow?’ Alice asked. ‘You said we’d go tomorrow.’

‘Stop pestering,’ Stanley told her sharply. ‘Your mother and I have a lot to discuss before I go.’

Are you going to have another fight?’ Alice asked.