Separation, The (31 page)

‘If you prefer.’

She’d be happy to go with Adil. There were fewer associations, and like a snake rising to the charmer’s whistle, she was drawn to him. Whether he’d told her everything or not, she felt she had no choice. This was not the physical passion she’d had with Jack, nor the security that Alec had once seemed to provide. She didn’t yet have a name for it.

‘I’m glad I met you in an ambush,’ she said, as she picked up her bag.

He frowned. ‘You’d recommend it, would you?’

‘No. It’s just that I met Alec and Jack at parties. Look at what happened.’

Adil was exotic, intense, like Malaya itself. She walked over and put a hand on his shoulder, felt the muscles tense beneath her touch, smelt the scent of rain still on his hair. He wrapped his arms round her, smiled, and she realised each time he did, she felt as if the door was opening a little wider.

‘You’re not angry?’

She shook her head. ‘Not any more.’

Who cared about class or colour now? She looked back at herself, caught a glimpse of the woman she’d once been. The one who cared about fancy dress parties, drinks at the tennis club, playing bridge and getting plastered. And despite her doubts, all that mattered now was standing with Adil, and looking out at the full moon casting shadows through a break in the clouds.

A smell of burning drifted through my open window. I’d lost the thread trying to tell the story of our arrival in England, and found myself writing about Billy and me. I wanted to experience things so I could write more realistically, yet the words were dull and the draw of the bonfire was enough to pull me away.

I was wearing holey shorts and an old shirt, and hadn’t bothered to brush my hair. My pixie cut had grown wild during the summer holidays, and the colour had brightened to a flaming orange. Dad insisted I go to the hairdresser, but I wanted to look like Bertha Mason in
Jane Eyre
, my all time favourite book. I was different from other girls, though I’d seen them with their stiff hairstyles and even stiffer clothes, looking all the same. It must be Malaya that made me different, I decided, as I loped off down the stairs.

Outside, plumes of smoke rose from the fire, and at first I didn’t see who was poking it with a long stick. When I got close enough for the smoke to make my eyes sting, I saw Billy look up. He’d heard the crunch of my footsteps above the crackles. We stared at each other, listening to the sound of neighbours’ gossip behind the fence. He was the first to break the awkward silence.

‘I thought everyone was out,’ he said, and swung round to the fire again. ‘Haven’t seen you lately, Emma.’

‘You were working with your dad.’

‘Just for one week, Em.’

I stared at my feet. ‘Everyone is out. I didn’t feel like going.’

He turned and took a step towards me. ‘I called round the other day. Saw your dad. Fleur said she’d tell you, but you never came round.’

I kept my eyes on the debris that Dad had been threatening to clear for weeks.

He shrugged. ‘Have I done something wrong?’

I shook my head. ‘No, of course, not … How are you?’

He didn’t speak, just sighed.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Isn’t that obvious?’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t just march up here and decide to light a fire. If that’s what’s bothering you …’ He trailed off.

‘No, of course.’

He prodded the fire. ‘Your dad’s paying me to do some gardening. Get the place under control in the next couple of months, before winter. He wants it to sell quickly.’

I gaped at him.

‘Didn’t he say?’

I shook my head and listened to the crackling fire, the droning insects, the breeze. All the sounds and smells of early autumn were already there, and now, with a new school year coming up fast, Dad was planning to sell.

‘Aren’t you going to offer me a coffee?’

I felt I couldn’t refuse. In the days when we made go-karts out of old crates, we used to be able to say anything to each other, but now we were no longer just friends and I felt tongue tied. He was cagey with me and I knew it was my fault.

‘If you like,’ I said.

While I made the coffee, Billy hung about the small kitchen, looking out of place. He pulled out a bag of Smiths crisps from his back pocket, and sprinkled the salt from the little twist of paper. He offered me the bag but I shook my head.

‘We’ll have it in my room,’ I said, and placed two mugs on a tray with a couple of custard creams, then headed for the stairs. Half way up I hesitated, hoping he wouldn’t take going to my room as a sign.

The smell of smoke from his clothes came up with us. We sat
on the bed about a foot apart talking about nothing, in the way you do when one of you has something important to say, but doesn’t know how to begin. The only sounds came from Billy crunching the crisps.

He put down his mug and shifted closer. ‘Do you fancy coming down the music shop. There’s a new record I’m after. We could listen together in the booth. One headphone each.’

Before I could reply, he pushed the blond hair from his forehead and kissed me.

I tasted the salt on his lips and pulled away. As I did, I saw his jaw clench.

‘What’s wrong, Em?’ he said. ‘You liked it before. Are you turning square or what?’

I sighed. ‘Billy, I can’t.’

I couldn’t think of what to say. I looked about the room and then at the floor. I saw my notebook had fallen on the carpet beneath my desk. Billy noticed it at the same time, and must have seen the anxiety in my eyes, because he picked it up. I tried to snatch it, but his eyes slid across the page. He held it out of my reach and his face grew rigid. After a while he read aloud.

I need experience to write well; flights of imagination only take me so far. And when it comes to sex, surely nothing beats the real thing. After the first effort, I’m unsure and unsettled, but I begin to see the wealth of experience Billy offers me. What a perfect opportunity to give my characters depth.

I hung my head, and chewed the inside of my cheek.

‘Well. Aren’t you going to say anything?’ He practically choked on his words and stood up abruptly. ‘Bloody hell. How could you, Emma?’

I shook my head, wanting to hide my red face, but I managed to look at him. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Is that all it was? A chance to give your characters depth.’ He spat out the words.

‘No,’ I mumbled. ‘I enjoyed it.’ But I couldn’t make it sound like it was true.

He sat at the end of the bed, looking cut to the bone. Please don’t let him cry, I thought. My motives were complicated and not even clear to me, so how could I explain them to him? Boys didn’t understand how you could really wish for something to happen, but when it did, you found you didn’t want it after all. Mostly they supported their football club and went to matches with their dad. Billy did all that too, but he was different from the others, or so I thought.

‘Billy,’ I started off, in an attempt to defend myself, though the way he looked at me, so mistrustful, almost silenced me. ‘I want to be a writer, so in a way everything I do has two levels.’

He looked steadily at me, hurt showing in his eyes. ‘That’s not the way it works, Em.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You need to live your life for the sake of living it. Write about it later. You can’t live your life just to write. It won’t work, Em.’

‘But can’t I do both?’

He shrugged. ‘You used me, Emma, and made me think you really liked me.’

‘I did … I do.’

He sniffed, and shook his head with a more distant expression, as if he’d made a decision. ‘You can’t treat people like that. It was dishonest.’

He stood up straight and went to the window.

‘Better make the bonfire safe. I’ll see myself out.’

He had such an openly hostile expression on his face, I couldn’t hold back the tears.

‘Your tears won’t work on me, Em. Never had you down as a calculating bitch. Tell your dad to find another gardener.’

After he left, I stood at the window. He patted the fire until it
was only smouldering, and I watched him leave the garden and walk out of my life with his head held high.

I looked at my face in the mirror: at turquoise eyes rimmed with red, and blotchy pale skin. More like Bertha Mason than ever, and scarcely a dazzling beauty. Billy was my one true friend when I came home from school, and I’d made him hate me. I felt ashamed and didn’t know how I could ever make things right again. I didn’t like myself and felt out of my depth, as if by dipping my toe into something grown up, I’d stirred up feelings I couldn’t handle. And it wasn’t as if what I’d written was even true. I did like being with Billy. I just wasn’t ready for things to go any further and I was too stupid to say.

I needed to do something to make myself feel better, take myself in hand, make a fruit jelly or a blancmange for Fleur, clean up the kitchen for Dad. It wasn’t much and it wouldn’t make me a good person, but it might make me feel not quite so bad. Every time I thought about Billy, I had to wipe my eyes. I couldn’t bear that I’d hurt him. Most of all I wondered how long it would take to sell a house, and whether I’d have time to make my peace with him before it was too late.

The memorial service was to be held in the park. Lydia, breathing lightly and full of nervous energy, drummed her fingers on the windowsill. Who was it who said that staying alive in Malaya was like trying to stay alive on swampland? If you struggled it swallowed you; if you hung on you died from heat and dehydration. Was it something Alec used to say? Or Jack? She closed her eyes. The dark green hell of Malaya still terrified her, yet the beauty of it had crept under her skin: the firewalkers, the snake charmers, the villages hidden away, the mists over the jungle.

She let her coffee grow cold as she stared out of the window at wind blowing litter and dust about. She had once needed Alec, Jack too. Times had changed. She’d changed. She checked her watch. It was time to leave and she’d decided to go alone. And when it was over, she’d have to find herself another job, and an apartment of her own, but it would be in Malacca, not Singapore. She wanted to be nearby but could hardly stay at Adil’s for ever.

In the park, Lydia stood apart from women dressed in subdued colours, and gathering in knots of three or four. They fanned themselves with wide-brimmed straw hats, heads close together, and behind their hands they spoke in whispers. The men had already congregated around Ralph, who strutted in a stiff linen suit, then signalled for silence.

As a senior administrator in the new Malaya, he began an impassioned speech about the sacrifice of lives lost to terrorist atrocity throughout the years of the Emergency. He glanced in
Lydia’s direction but she avoided his eyes. She didn’t want to be there, but as this was the final link in the chain since the night when insurgents set fire to the rest house, she owed Emma and Fleur her presence. After the speeches, she nodded at people she knew, moving swiftly past their guarded looks of sympathy, not caring to hear the platitudes that made her feel so hot and angry. She sidestepped Cicely, and shook hands only with Ralph. She had no need of condolence.

Relieved that the ceremony had passed without incident, she was headed for the exit when Cicely approached with a determined look. Lydia guessed there’d be no escape.

‘I know you may not want to talk to me even a teeny bit, but there is someone you absolutely have to meet. No arguments, darling.’

Lydia sighed. ‘For God’s sake Cicely, don’t you ever give up?’

Cicely ignored her, and taking hold of an elbow, marched her across to a tall, blonde woman, who stood alone, smoking a cigarette. Cicely rattled through the introductions. The woman’s name was Clara and she was American. She and her sister had been in Malaya since the war and had both worked for the British Administration. They’d come in search of her sister’s husband, who went missing in the war, and then both had stayed. Sadly, the woman’s twin sister was one of the secretaries who had been living at the rest home at the time of the fire. After the introductions, with a farewell sweep of her arm, Cicely slipped away.

‘You live here?’ Clara asked, in a west coast drawl, looking closely at Lydia.

‘Here now. I was in Singapore.’

‘Cigarette?’

Lydia shook her head. ‘I don’t want to be rude but …’

The woman held up her hand. ‘I’ll get to the point. Do you have pictures of your daughters?’

Lydia took a breath. ‘Yes, but I don’t see …’

‘Please. It will only take a minute.’

She removed her locket and held out the images of her girls.

The woman studied them, then looked up. ‘And you say your girls were there on the night of the fire.’

‘The records were all destroyed, but yes.’

Clara paused while she examined the locket again. ‘I was there the night of the fire.’

‘You must have seen them then.’ Lydia bit her lip.

There was a long pause.

Was this why Cicely had introduced them? So she could talk to someone who’d been there, someone who could bring her a little closer to her daughters, let her into their last days. She found her voice. ‘How were they? Did they seem happy?’

Clara hesitated. ‘Thing is. I don’t recognise them. I –’ She stopped suddenly.

Lydia stared over her head and frowned. The sounds in the park grew louder. Insects hummed, traffic accelerated, and as the steady drone of voices wrapped itself round her, she wanted to be somewhere else.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, holding out her hand for the locket. ‘I can’t do this. I have to go.’

Clara looked at the photos again, shook her head and handed the locket back. ‘A family with two girls was staying before the fire happened, but they moved into a house a week before. There were a couple of other kids.’

Lydia stopped in her tracks. ‘Girls?’

‘Just two boys.’

There was a long pause. Lydia placed a hand on her heart. ‘Can you be sure the family with girls had moved?’

The woman smiled. ‘Absolutely. Even though it was pretty wild that night. My sister had lived there for three months, but quite a few people moved in straight after the warning that the offices in Ipoh were under threat. Luckily the place had been fairly empty up until then.’

This was crazy. The ground beneath her feet was shifting. ‘No other girls at all?’

Clara shook her head.

‘Tell me about the family with girls.’

‘There was the man … two daughters.’ She paused and appeared to be remembering.

Lydia folded her arms across her chest, felt her throat thicken, more nervous than she’d ever been.

The woman’s eyes lit up. ‘I remember. The wife was heavily pregnant. That’s why they left, to be in their own home before the baby came. Like my sister, they’d been at the rest house two or three months. Oh, yeah, the husband was as big as she was. I remember thinking she wasn’t the only one eating for two.’

Lydia thought of Alec, skinny as a rake. ‘So there were no other girls?’

‘It was way past midnight when I left. I signed the book and noticed the last arrivals were at six, just a middle-aged couple, no kids. The party wound up, everyone drunk, sleeping on camp beds in the recreation room. The porter locked up after me.’

She paused.

‘Please go on.’

‘The terrorists surrounded the entire building with accelerants you know, blocked the exits. With so much wood it went up in moments. It was the last time I saw my sister.’ She sighed, but didn’t lower her eyes.

Lydia touched her arm in sympathy. ‘So my girls could only have been there if they arrived in the middle of that night.’

‘Nobody ever arrived by night. There was a strict curfew and it was far too risky. I was only able to leave because I had a lift in a police car. They reckon the fire started about one or two a.m.’

‘If they were there, they’d have already been there for a couple of weeks anyway,’ Lydia said, remembering George telling her
how they’d gone ahead to the rest house. And that was before she left Malacca. ‘You’d be bound to have seen them.’

‘I saw my sister every day for three months, and apart from the family who’d already moved on, there were no other girls during that time. We used to talk about who was staying there.’

‘In that case –’ Lydia’s legs went to jelly. She reached out her hands and Clara took them, held them firm, but Lydia couldn’t finish her sentence, the lump in her throat preventing words.

Clara’s face became very serious. ‘I know it’s a shock, but I’m absolutely sure your daughters were nowhere near the rest house the night of the fire.’

Lydia closed her eyes and felt the breath sucked right out of her. Her heart was roaring in her ears, distorting the sounds in the park as they melted into the background. Clara hugged her, patting her shoulder as she did. Lydia tried to catch her breath again, drew back, kissed the woman on the cheek. The woman smiled.

‘Thank you. You’ll never know how grateful I am,’ Lydia managed to say and walked off into Malacca, her mind shooting off in a million directions.

In the town, babies cried, men shouted their wares, and women gossiped as they walked arm in arm. Yet she didn’t register the distinct noises of the world: the rickshaw bells, the kids playing in the gutters, the music floating down from open windows. She only heard blood pounding in her ears as she fought her way through the current of pedestrians, arms held out, ready to clasp her daughters to her, ready to feel their heartbeats thump. Their heartbeats! Their soft living flesh. In her mind her children’s voices surged and faded. She saw Emma sitting at her desk in Malacca, writing in her journal and smiling in that intense way she had. And so practical, even when Fleur fell in the storm ditch. Dear sweet Fleur.

Whenever the memories came, she felt her eyes smart and had to wipe away the tears. To think that all this time they’d been
alive. So accustomed to thinking they were dead, it was impossible to grasp that they were not – that they
might
not be. They’d always kept their place in her heart, but it was a place that had hurt too much. And she was so used to thinking each day was a step further away from them, that she could not comprehend the turnaround, and that now, every day might be a step closer. She dug a nail into her flesh. This wasn’t a dream. She was wide-awake and getting wet in fine silvery rain.

When the wind got up she thought of Emma, who at the age of three had whirled round on a blowy day and asked in a loud voice, ‘Where does the wind come from, Mummy?’ Lydia told her it came from a giant’s breath. Emma looked at her with narrowed eyes, head on one side. ‘Don’t be silly, Mummy. There’s no such thing as giants.’

When it sank in, she wanted to stand in the street and shout. Give vent to an explosion of joy that set blood pounding through her heart and tears to spill unrestrained. She felt unhinged and ecstatic at the same time, transported to a place where nothing was the way it had been, where life was changed beyond anything she could ever have imagined. A place where your children died and were alive again. Only at the very beginning could she have believed such a thing. When she would wake after dreaming and for one heartbreaking moment believe they were still alive. When the smell of fire in her head had sparked madness in her mind. But now that it had happened, had really happened, she wanted to see Adil. Needed him to convince her it was real.

Only when the town darkened and lanterns were lit did she let herself into his apartment. Her hands shook as she made herself a coffee. If they were alive, as Clara seemed certain, where were they, and what had Alec been up to all this time? It didn’t make sense. Why would he take her daughters and just vanish? It couldn’t have been about Jack. She’d promised it was over and had been certain Alec accepted that. She longed for the sadness to come to an end, and now it might, it really might. But there was
an undercurrent to her joy. What if Clara was mistaken? Or if she was right, what if she never found Emma and Fleur?

She put the coffee down, unable to drink. Was Alec somewhere in Malaya? Somewhere across this seething jungle-cloaked land.

Adil’s building, creaking and squeaking, seemed as restless as her. She opened a window and occupied her mind by watching an old woman shuffle along the narrow sidewalk opposite. But the room began to close in, her skin prickled and her head started to thump. She sat on the floor, knees against her chest and looked out at three stripes of pink cloud that lay across the sky. She thought of the brightly coloured Malayan birds, the shiny fish, the glittering insects. Were her children still somewhere here? Somewhere in Malaya? A zigzag of gold appeared in a space between the clouds and she took it as a sign. They were. She felt sure they were. She stood up. Stared in the mirror. Saw the fear and excitement, placed a palm to her heart, and took several deep breaths.

Adil will know what to do, she thought, and waited, calmer now.

An hour or so later, she turned her head as the door clicked open. He came across to sit beside her. He held her hand and allowed her to sob. When she tried to speak, her voice was muffled by tears that would not stop. But when she finally finished telling him, she looked in his eyes and saw herself reflected there.

‘This is very good news,’ he said.

‘It’s wonderful news.’

She sniffed once or twice and couldn’t keep from grinning. Then, though she was thirsty and her eyes were raw from crying, the tears turned to unstoppable laughter.

He pulled her closer to him. ‘I will do whatever it takes to help you find them,’ he said.

‘What would I do without you?’

‘You’d find a way, but you don’t have to. We will succeed. That’s a promise.’

He lowered his head and kissed her on the lips for the first time.

When he sat with his arms around her, the loneliness that she’d felt for so long dissolved. With a pounding heart, she realised it had been replaced by a sensation of belonging, and for the first time since the terrible day when she believed her girls had died, she felt safe.