Brixton Beach (30 page)

He swallowed.

‘I’m nearly thirteen, sir. I want to do something.’

There was a silence. A thread of a breeze tugged at one of the etchings and it fluttered to the ground.

‘One day I know Alice will be able to; she will study in the UK and learn many, many things. But I do know about what it means to be a Buddhist and this is the way I think I can be of help.’

It was the longest speech he had uttered and Mr Fonseka was looking at him with an expression in his eyes that was hard to decipher. He still looked terrible, but he was no longer frowning. There was something helpless about the way he was looking at Janake.

‘That’s a very good idea, Janake,’ he said faintly, at last.

At the beginning of December in this first year in their new home, Sita got herself a job doing alterations for a dry cleaner. She began mending zips, turning up trouser legs and changing the hemlines of skirts.

‘Is this the best job you can find, men?’ Stanley asked her, astonished.

But Sita didn’t care. She wanted to work from home, in order to be there when Alice returned from school. Unlike her father, Alice loved hearing the comforting sound of the sewing machine. It reminded
her of her time at the Sea House. She walked home alone now, no longer getting lost, never again making the mistake of crossing a main road before the lights changed to red. Time moved slowly. She had written two letters to her grandparents since their arrival. She hoped her grandfather would not mention Kunal again and in any case, after her last letter, Alice had become strangely reluctant to write another one. It was difficult to explain her life in England. Then, as Christmas approached, Esther wrote. Her letter came inserted into a greetings card. Alice opened it cautiously. Esther’s handwriting, like her grandfather’s, brought a sharp stab of longing.

Are you enjoying life in your foreign country?
Esther asked.

And:

The fighting is very bad now. Mother does not let me go out at all, even with Anton. D’you remember Anton? He wants to marry me!!

Faintly, Alice heard the strains of fairground music.

Are your English friends better than the people here?
Esther went on.

Discarded life leapt from the pages of the letter. Another sort of life. The fine curled script, the thin cheap paper, the thought of Esther sitting on the verandah step as she wrote, was too much to bear.

‘Nice of Esther to write,’ Sita remarked, her mouth full of pins as she made huge garish-patterned shift dresses for the West Indian women who now appeared regularly at the house, like crows around a rubbish tip.

Stanley read Esther’s letter when Alice showed it to him but made no comment. Of late, her father spoke less and less.

Christmas was round the corner. Alice’s school was busy with the nativity play and the carol concert and the Christmas party, but by a stroke of luck and by staying silent, she had managed to avoid being involved in any of them. The days had drawn in. On most days, by early afternoon, heavy low clouds descended, obscuring the light. Alice found this lack of daylight oppressive. It seemed to rain all the time in slow, never-ending motion. The plane trees were now bare and piles of unswept leaves rotted on the corners of pavements. Sometimes on her way back from school she had a fleeting picture of the sea in
Mount Lavinia, but mostly she just felt as though she had been living in darkness forever.

One evening Stanley came home with a surprise for them. It was a television set.

‘Now you don’t have to spend all your time in your room,’ he told Alice with a thin smile.

He smelled of drink and later when she was in bed she heard her parents fighting yet again. Alice stared at the faint outline of flowers on her wall. The shouting increased its muffled anguish, going on for so much longer than usual that she wondered if she should go downstairs. She wanted to shout to them to stop; she wanted to tell her grandfather. He would have known what to do. Sometimes she wanted Bee so badly that the knot in her stomach grew into a physical pain and her head ached constantly. She waited, her body like a coiled spring, for the coconut shells to be thrown and her mother to rush out screaming, but nothing much else happened. Her parents just went on and on, their voices rising and falling to a mysterious rhythm of their own. Finally Alice must have fallen asleep. When she woke it was morning and the house was still.

She stared at the drawings pinned up on her wall. Most were of Sita and Stanley and the dead baby, but one or two were of Bee and herself. Her father would have flown into one of his rages had he seen them, but as neither of her parents ever thought to come into her room she felt safe from discovery. In the finely tuned sensibilities she was developing, she was beginning to be aware of certain changes in her father. One night she heard the sound of a car stopping and, looking from her window, had seen Stanley get out. The woman driving the car got out too and then she began to kiss him. Riveted, Alice had stared through a gap in her curtain. After a moment her father laughed, pushing the woman away; then he came in. Alice told no one, but the next day she had asked her mother to teach her to cook so that she might help her a little in the house. A few weeks after this incident Stanley asked her to hang his coat up in the hall. Without thinking, Alice slipped her hand into the pocket and took out a piece of paper. Later in her room she examined it. It was a receipt. One bottle of Blue Nun (What was that?
she wondered), two chapattis, rice and a chicken curry. She stuck the receipt into the back of her sketchbook. Then she drew another picture of her father and the woman who had kissed him. Listening to her parents row she began to compose a letter to her grandfather.

I don’t want to live here
, she imagined writing.
I want to come back to you
.

She would not write that, she knew. Tomorrow, she told herself as she drifted into sleep, I will write to him about the school play.

On New Year’s Day with the arrival of evening Bee took his usual walk on the narrow spit of beach. Kamala watched from the window, thinking how like a great sea bird he looked. With his wings clipped.

‘How beautiful my parents are,’ May observed, smiling at Namil, waiting for her child to be born. ‘Even when they are not together, they remain as one.’

All three of them remembered Sita, calmly contemplating their collective failure to save her from her fate. I have been useless as a parent, thought Bee. I could not stop her suffering. In spite of all his love for his daughter, Sita had snatched her life out of his safe-keeping.

‘Where will it end?’ he murmured, looking at the sea, but the sea gave him no answers.

My eldest child, Kamala was thinking sadly. She was the one bound up with my youth and my unsustainable hopes. I was very different with May, more realistic, stronger.

Very soon, thought May, entranced, as her child moved within her, I will feel what they feel about us!

They sat down to the evening meal together. It was delicious, in spite of the shortage of food and the fact that the cook had gone away to see her relatives further south. Two unset places nudged them silently. There is new life on its way, thought May, both guilty and happy. Fresh life was what was needed in this place. Sita had not written since May had told her about the baby.

‘If I had had my way,’ Bee remarked to Kamala later, when they were in bed, ‘no more children would be born in this country. I would let
this place rot and prune itself like a garden. And start again, many years from now.’

Today, as usual, he had been thinking of Alice. Through no fault of her own, the child would drift from him. He could no longer visualise the places she inhabited. Her only letter to date had made him aware that there were things she did not speak about. Was she aware of what she was doing? How could he ever hope to help her and understand her struggles? With what optimism had he expected to keep her close in all that lay ahead? And while I grow old with longing, thought Bee, she will be changing, becoming unrecognisable. One generation could no longer live beside another. That was a thing of the past. But I will never stop loving her, he thought. I will continue as always. The years ahead, lost even before they occurred, were suddenly unbearable. Ah! Alice, he thought.

In the darkness, Kamala searched for his hand. For over thirty years their hands had sustained each other at the start of sleep.

‘Don’t think such things,’ she said, very quietly. ‘Don’t tempt fate.’

January on the island was the most beautiful of months. The heat lessened and the air thinned. It rained, but not in torrents, and the breeze from the sea cooled the coastline. That January the war began drumming again. After months of silence it marched in two/four time. Soon an orchestra would be playing; a two-conductor orchestra without direction. Playing to several different tunes. Ceylon was no more. In its place was a monster that destroyed anyone in its path. The country appeared to be fighting for its life, eradicating the foreign rule with a new, faceless, persona. Bombs went off like firecrackers, killing first one tribe and then another. Newspaper headlines screamed the statistics. Thirteen men in the Singhalese army were killed by the Tigers; fourteen Tamils killed by the army. The dead all looked alike, blackened, burnt, unrecognisable, strewn across the crossroads so their souls would not rest. A deep hatred lay like lacquer over the land, seeping into hitherto tranquil places.

‘Fools!’ cried Bee scornfully. ‘The British
were
here. That’s a fact. Can’t they see they will
always
present in our collective psyche, one way or another? They will be present in the language, our love of it, our
use and mis-use of it. Our tastes, the feelings we have about parks and landscapes. These idiots call it Imperialism, but to me it’s simply a collective memory. They’ll never be able to destroy it.’

In just six months Bee had aged. He understood that this kind of growing old was different from the sense of ageing he had felt before. Now he felt physically old and helpless. Alice was getting on with life out of sight, her letters crossing with his, losing continuity with the distance. He hadn’t expected any of this. And although he would continue to circumnavigate the world in his mind, in his heart, Bee knew he had given up. Kamala, watching over him, saw she could no longer help him. Their shared life was an illusion, she decided, for what use was any of it if you could not carry another’s pain? But still, in spite of all this, Kamala was less desperate than Bee. Even the rumblings of war affected her less. There was another child on the way, a life to bring a glimmer of hope, at last. It would never replace Alice, but the child would bring its own gifts with it. This was how Kamala thought, whereas the little strip of time left to them both was all Bee saw. So Kamala went to the temple and prayed. She prayed that the wheel of suffering would be stilled and her husband might find peace, that he might see his daughter and granddaughter again. She was beginning to understand, with simple insight that the familiar Buddhist teachings she had always followed were there to make sense of their everyday lives. Of late, she saw clearly, they
lived
their karma. This grief, the struggle, what else was it, but karma?

Meanwhile the Tamils were fleeing for their lives. Slowly they were being pushed back into the north and the east of the island; the nationalist Singhalese concentrated on campaigning against them, while unnoticed by all of them a different violence, simmering quietly in the background until now, began to boil over. It was clear to those who cared: the point of no return was fast approaching.

One morning, soon after the New Year, Bee awoke and went out to his studio. Dawn had just broken. It had been his practice to wake at this hour whenever he could. The best light, he used to tell Alice, was the early light. He remembered how the child used to follow him out, her
eyes full of sleep, refusing to go back to bed. She always wanted to help mix the colour. Both of them, young and old, needed so little sleep. Today the dawn was violet and pink over the sea. Two days ago he had begun some paintings based on the etching Janake had seen. They were part of a series he had called
Alice in Wonderland
. The dealer from Colombo had visited him to see the new work, wanting to know what he would sell. In one painting a small child stood in the doorway of a room watching a man having his leg sawn off. Behind her was the sea, tropical and very blue. The man from Colombo had raised his eyebrows when he saw it. The painting was beautifully executed, the sea shimmered and the whole canvas glowed under the slowly applied glazes. With no hesitation, the man from Colombo had bought the painting outright, even though it wasn’t dry. He had paid Bee cash, telling him to finish the one of the fairground he was working on.

‘I’ll be back,’ he told Bee, nodding, disappearing as swiftly as he had come.

‘I wish you hadn’t called it
“Alice
in Wonderland”,’ Kamala grumbled. ‘Couldn’t you use some other name?’

‘Why not?’ Bee asked. ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’

‘Thatha,’ May said worriedly when she heard, ‘I admire what you are doing, but is it wise? Given the type of people who are around these days?’

May had finished work for the moment. The baby was due in February and the new house that Namil had been building further up the coast near Galle was ready. They no longer went to Colombo. Colombo had become a dangerous place and as May’s confinement drew closer, they had become more cautious. The curfew was in place again. Someone had attacked a train going up-country and two villages in Trincomelee had been razed to the ground.

‘Don’t talk to me about wisdom,’ Bee said angrily. ‘What can any of the local thugs do to me? I am a painter. A
Singhalese
painter. I can do what I like.’

When he had finished two more paintings, in spite of Kamala’s protests, he decided to take them up to Colombo. Because of the shortage of petrol he would go by train.

‘I won’t be late,’ he promised Kamala, seeing the look on her face. ‘Just a quick trip and then I’ll come back straight away.’