Stray Love (16 page)

I missed Kiyomi, Pippa, Stasha. The longing was a wave inside a bowl that tilted back and forth. It rolled from side to side, from person to person. I drew five pictures of Kiyomi from memory. Four of them were terrible. The fifth portrayed her as a ballerina leaping through the air in clunky house shoes. Literally, houses in place of shoes. It was the best one. Satisfied, I folded it up and slipped it into an envelope.

I felt an initial rush of joy when Mrs. Bowne was back on her feet. But it upset me to see her puttering about so slowly in her flannel nightgown, breathless with the slightest exertion, using furniture to get around while she rebuilt her strength.

When Vilma was out, I sat by Mrs. Bowne’s side and read aloud from books. As soon as Vilma returned, I retreated to my bedroom. There, I invented pastimes. I made lists. I assigned double lives to people I spotted walking down the street. I switched the push-pins around on the map so they no longer charted Oliver’s war route but pricked random cities. Osaka, Tampa, Vienna, Toronto. Then I thought, why select cities randomly when I could choose them according to my own wishes. There were so many ways of mapping the world. Famous disasters, spice routes, ancient capitals. I could chart all the places my mother might have lived.

I drew and drew, creating an oasis of silence inside of me. I walked around the house and down the street with my sketchbook held up to my face. I sat on the grass at Kelsey Park and drew families walking and birds flying and scenes that were
so fleeting that I found myself sketching frantically in a state of confusion. At mealtimes, I balanced the book on my knees and mastered the art of drawing undetected under the table. At school, I stood sketching my teammates during PE class, the lone vertical amid a muddy group of footballers. I drew in the dark through Minors Matinees and in the company of James and eventually, once again, Chris, who had weathered my rejection and remained loyal. Irritated by my constant doodling, James tried to distract me by demanding to hear more stories.

“Tell me again about the time Oliver killed the python,” he asked as we walked slowly across the school field.

“It wasn’t a python. It was a king cobra,” I said, still drawing. “And I’ve already told you the story.”

“Come on. Just one more time.”

“Fine.” I stopped. “One day Oliver was in the desert and he didn’t notice that there was a really big cobra slithering through the sand until he stepped on it and the king cobra spread its hood, bared its fangs, rose ten feet off the ground, and it was too late,” I said, and started walking and drawing again.

“What do you mean it was too late? I thought you said he wrestled with it. Marcel? Wait! Marcel!”

T
WO HOURS AGO
Iris woke up in a panic, shouting. I rushed into her bedroom to find her sitting up.

“Where is my mother? … When will she be back?”

Her hands were stretched out in front of her. Bad dreams. She looked like a little girl in her Hello Kitty pyjamas, scared of everything: a shadow in the corner, a dog barking angrily outside. It took some time to pry the bedspread from her fists, to still her hands by holding them with my own.

She is finally back in her room, having been reassured by Kiyomi over the telephone, a warm sea of mother words. A light left on in the hallway.

Tomorrow I’ll keep her home. I find I miss her when she leaves the flat. When she’s out I repeatedly check the clock, counting down the hours and minutes; I put down my pen and pace, refill the kettle, water the ficus, cut more paper on the guillotine. I create stacks and stacks of blank rectangles. I gaze at the white page before me and put off the job of starting an assignment I no longer want.

I am almost certain that Iris has never felt regret—those tiny fish that dart like small shadows beneath the surface of even the bluest water. I hope she stays like that.

B
ECAUSE IT WAS ONCE A STATELY HOME
with a domestic staff, as I said, the house at Copers Cope still had a complicated bell system with pulleys, wires and chains buried in ceilings and wall cavities. When anyone rang the big brass doorbell, the sound zigzagged up to the former servant quarters in the attic, reverberating along the spine and skin of the house. It didn’t ring often, but the clarity of the sound always surprised me.
Ding. Dong.
It sounded like glass and sea and church all wrapped up together.

I was sitting at my desk with a sheet of paper and a horde of pens one Saturday when I heard the bell. A few minutes later there was a knock on the attic door.

“Who is it?” I asked, tapping my pen on my desk, staring out the window at the branches of a tree.

The door clicked open.

I set down my pen and turned around.

It was Stasha, dressed in a white jacket with puff sleeves and pouchy pockets. She looked like an actor playing the part of a cloud.

I stood up, instantly fearful. “Is everything all right? Where’s Pippa?”

“Come on, Marcel,” she said. “Come give me a hug.”

I walked over and held her lightly, not wanting to spoil her nice jacket. But she pulled me in closer, tighter.

“Pippa is fine,” she murmured above my head. “She’s taking a bit of a holiday.”

When she let go, she walked over to the map on my wall. For a few seconds, she hesitated, searching, and finally placed a finger on the “S” that was Vietnam.

She pulled a letter from one of her pockets.

“Has Pippa tracked down my mother?” I asked, suddenly hopeful.

It took her a moment to understand what I meant. “No. But almost as good,” she said with a smile.

Oliver had finally sent for me. His letter explained that he would wire money to Stasha and that she should buy an airline ticket (London–Tokyo–Saigon); a departure date of late May would be ideal. It also said she was not to worry about my safety. Saigon was more tranquil than London. As for Vietnam more generally, it was just a bit of crackling kindling, a few isolated spots of conflict. Hardly a war.

What the letter did not say was that Vilma had telephoned Oliver and requested that he make other arrangements for me. Vilma, who had wanted me gone, had answered my prayers.

“I’m going, just like that?” I asked Stasha.

“Just like that,” she said. “We have two weeks to get ready.”

I hadn’t realized how numb I had been until that moment. At last, with a shudder of relief, I began to cry.

Everything seemed to happen very quickly. I told everyone at school that I was going to join my father. I was brimming with pride. The headmaster agreed to hold my place at Bright House Primary School with the understanding I would be back sometime in the fall. Stasha took me to the doctor, who prepared shots for cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and dengue fever. If anyone had any doubts or misgivings about shipping me halfway across the world to spend my days with a group of alcoholic war correspondents, these remained unspoken.

At Copers Cope, it was business as usual. Mrs. Bowne worked on crosswords. Mr. Bowne reminisced. Ramon made a cream sauce. Vilma washed her hands until they cracked and bled.

A week before I left for Vietnam I was sitting on a climbing structure at school with Chris and James. It was a drizzly day and we were all wearing our V-neck jumpers, watching Malcolm throw sticks at another boy’s head in an effort to knock his cap off.

“Oughtn’t you to study a little before you go?” said Chris, swinging his legs back and forth. “Maybe learn a few phrases. You know, get a pocket guide or something.”

“No point,” said James. “Those Berlitz books are a complete waste of time. My dad had one for Spanish and it was full of bits like:
How many horses died in Cambodia last year?
Total bullshit. Anyway, I don’t see why Marcel needs to learn anything. He’ll probably have his head shot off within a day of arriving.”

“Never mind him,” Chris said to me. “He’s just upset that you’re leaving.”

“Nah,” said James. “I couldn’t care less. Let him rot.”

Chris turned to James. “Why do you have to be so morbid? Why can’t you ever say what you’re really feeling?” Then to me, he said, “We’re going to miss you.”

“Thanks, Chris,” I said, placing my hand on his leg to stop him from falling off the bars and dropping to the ground.

“Oliver says it’s safe, right?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “He thinks it’s an auspicious time for me to go.”

“
An auspicious time for me to go,
“ James imitated with a snort. “Cocksucker. Do you have any idea how you sound to the rest of the world?”

The three of us sat quietly. James pretended he was asleep, snoring.

“You better bring some Panadol,” Chris offered.

I knew that Vietnam was a long, curvy country, more than double the size of England and sharing borders with China, Laos and Cambodia. I knew that it was once considered part of something called Indochina but that Indochina was not really a place, neither India nor China, but something the French colonizers considered in-between—a moggy place. I read that after the French were finally kicked out, the country was split into two, with a Communist government in the north led by a skinny, bearded man named Ho Chi Minh and an anti-communist government in the south run by a rich, stocky man named President Diem.

The reason Oliver was there was the conflict, the long and short of which was that North Vietnam didn’t like the Americans supporting South Vietnam (why have yet another foreign power
running things?) and wanted to put the north and south back together into a single country. The United States and the South Vietnamese army didn’t like this idea and were trying to stop the North. That’s about as much as I could understand.

Beyond that, I knew that Vietnam had a rainy season and swampy lowlands and tended to be very hot and humid. Hanoi was the capital of the north, and Saigon, where I was heading, was the capital of the south. I made sure I knew the capitals.

Five days before my departure, my passport and visa arrived. Ramon and Stasha arranged a surprise tea party, the highlight of which was a visit from Kiyomi. Dorothy popped in and Chris came too, but Pippa could not attend, which both hurt and relieved me. We sat at the table eating miniature cakes and crustless sandwiches prepared by Ramon, laughing at Kiyomi’s stories of her European adventures, which included a description of seeing a chamber group perform Beethoven while seated on actual chamberpots. We ignored Mr. Bowne, whose withering looks were meant to silence us. (“Spooky,” whispered Kiyomi.) Mrs. Bowne chewed a hazelnut biscuit carefully, making granular crunching sounds with her jaw, brushing the crumbs off her blouse and the table. Kiyomi tugged her skirt to hide the fact that the seat of her woollen tights had fallen to her knees.

At the end of the afternoon, after Dorothy had left and I had said goodbye to Chris, I led Kiyomi to the now overgrown conservatory, stepping into the thick, earthy heat. We both took a deep breath, inhaling the thick flower smells. In Mr. Bowne’s absence, the plants had grown chaotically from their clay pots. Everywhere I looked there were leggy stalks, tangles of vine. I noticed that two ivy plants had knitted themselves together.

“Oh, Mish. It’s like a tropical forest,” said Kiyomi, peeling off her tights. “I love it here.”

Sunlight filtered through the grimy glass. The one long table at the centre of the space, an item of laboratory furniture procured by Ramon through his chemistry connections, was littered with garden implements and bulbs that resembled black onions.

While Kiyomi walked around, deadheading a few faded flowers, shuffling an immense fern closer to the window, I opened the hutch and brought out the rabbit, releasing a pungent smell of wet wool and urine. I eased the rabbit onto the table, and fed it a few pieces of wilted lettuce I had brought from the house.

A few minutes later, I was staring at the conservatory door when Kiyomi said, “Is something wrong, Marcel?”

“I was just thinking,” I said, pointing at the rabbit, now cradled across her chest, then at the door. “Do you think it would be cruel?” I paused. “I mean, once I’m gone the rabbit won’t have anyone. Do you think it could survive out there?”

Kiyomi thought for a moment, looking down at the rabbit in her arms. Then she nodded. “I say we let him go.”

Moments later we were standing outside watching the rabbit hop away across the garden.

“Goodbye, rabbit,” I said.

“Bye-bye, cute bunny,” said Kiyomi.

Knowing our time together was drawing to a close, we made our way to my room in the attic.

“Shall we lie down, dear husband?” said Kiyomi, closing the door and looping her arm through mine.

We squished up close on the bed, face to face. Kiyomi gave me a quick kiss on the nose, then on the lips. We didn’t speak. I noticed the faint smell of rabbit on her.

I was concentrating on her eyelashes when Kiyomi slid her
soft hands up inside my shirt and began gently rubbing my skin. Her touch and voice made me feel relaxed and sleepy. She asked if she could have a few of the ink drawings I had done of her. She said she’d pin them to a clothesline and think of me as she watched them blow about in the wind and rain. She said that if I missed England, she would fold the sky up neatly into squares, slip it into an envelope and mail it to me. “I’ll make sure it’s not a grey and damp day.” She told me she had brought me a new felt-tip pen so I would remember: “Never stop drawing, Mish. It’s what you do.”

I closed my eyes and imagined us married one day. We were twenty, forty, sixty, eighty. As we lay there, I worked up the courage to tell her about Pippa’s last letter. The information had been weighing on me all week.

“I think my mother fell to pieces at some point. I don’t know what brought it on, but I don’t think she ever recovered.”

The words were so hard for me to say, and after I said them, I curled up in a ball. Kiyomi used her hands to gently straighten me. Then she hooked her feet around mine to prevent me from re-curling. Her breathing slowed. Mine slowed to match hers. I watched her eyelids. Open. Close.

“Poor husband,” she whispered finally, protectively. She nudged in closer and kissed me on the mouth again.