Homesick Page 5

  •

  The next day in the park, he is sent with a young white fellow, Cal, to the brambles behind the toilets. They tell them to clear it all. When the supervisor walks away, Cal sits on the ground, his back against the wall, and takes out cigarettes. He offers them to Kumar. Kumar takes one, surprised at this kindness.

  “This is fucked,” the boy says. He nods toward the scrubland, where ash saplings and brambles are their painful day ahead. Kumar shakes his head loosely in an indifferent agreement. He smokes the cigarette down to the filter, throwing it into the bushes. He walks to the edge, sees the width of the sharp-thorned creepers, and looks back at Cal, still seated.

  “I’ll watch you, mate,” he says with a laugh.

  Kumar brings the wheelbarrow round and finds gloves and long-handled cutters. He begins to hack into the wilderness, pulling at the weeds with his left hand, grasping loosely so that the thorns do not pierce him through the gloves. He looks back at the white fellow and realises that he will not help. His head is against the wall, his eyes shut. He wears a fluorescent jacket, but it seems for nothing. He wears it for no reason.

  Kumar works swiftly, cutting down woody limbs to the left, to the right, straight ahead, until he has a sizeable patch cleared. He stops, fetches the wheelbarrow, and fills it with the remains he has cut. He pushes this to Cal and, pressing the wheel against his foot, indicates with his head where it should be taken. The young man sucks his teeth but stands and picks up the wheelbarrow and wheels it off. Kumar takes a fork and starts to dig at the roots of the plants he has just cut down. It is heavy, hard work, but the sun is beginning to warm through the clouds, and he becomes sweaty and happy. He removes his fluorescent jacket, takes off his jumper, and puts the jacket on again.

  To the left of the toilets there is a different patch, which seems to have been better cared for. The brambles have been cut back, and there is a sort of tunnel through the saplings, a pathway, perhaps, made by wild animals. When Cal comes back, Kumar points to the other long-handled cutters and says, “You, this place.”

  “Nah, mate. You fucking do it. I’m fucking ill.” He sits back down. Kumar is not angry. It is not his business. He continues with his work, cutting back, cutting down. He wishes he had a sickle or a machete and a mammety, the beautifully shaped spade, folded sideways, that cuts and digs the earth as if it were food on a plate. He feels the sun hotter on the back of his neck, and the sound of the breeze closes his eyes, so that he is home, in the hills, and if he opens his eyes, he will see the startling green of a paddy field.

  “Hey! Oh, my fucking Christ!” Cal shouts, and when Kumar opens his eyes, he sees a paddy field swimming up, but beyond the paddy field is a child’s face, in the black dirt. He stands quite still. The white man is screaming. Below Kumar’s feet, a curly-haired child stares at him, lying in that tunnel of scrub, dead. He steps back.

  Cal has run away, shouting. He looks at the girl. She is brown, her hair black. She is a pretty child. He stands and stares at her. He looks at her hands. Her fingers are long. She has no clothes. He looks away from her body, looks beyond her, and he sees another face, another pair of eyes. That little face is white, and the eyes are blue. There is a white child, lying in the earth. This is what scares Kumar, the blue eyes. He steps back, steps away. He walks backward, still staring, and when the African with the long hair reaches him, he is shaking.

  “Aw, man,” the African says.

  Kumar turns and walks away. No one notices him go. They are all crying because they found the little lost girls. As he walks out of the park, he hears the police sirens. So many, coming in every direction. He stops and watches them descend on the park, halting their cars at angles to the front gates so that cars driving past have to give way to each other. Leaving their doors open and their blue lights circling in the air, the policemen race in like toy men, their arms and legs making clockwork motions. Two men open the main gate wide, and a police van and an ambulance drive in. He turns away and walks up the hill.

  •

  He is arrested four months later. It takes four months because there are no records for him. No one could understand why he would work for free: and then the penny drops. They swoop on Shamini’s house in the middle of the night. It is two or three weeks after he has started touching Lolly.

  When the police interview him, they ask Shamini to be there to translate. She refuses. She hates him. They call in a Sinhala speaker from the local community, a member of the church one of the detectives attends. He whispers the Sinhala words to Kumar, then speaks the English reply loudly, clearly, as if the interviewer is deaf. Kumar thinks his arrest is because of the wrong he knows he has done to Lolly. When he is asked about the lost girls, he says readily that he found them. He says he walked away because he was scared.

  When he is asked why he worked in the park for no money, he replies that he liked working with earth. The translator says, “He is a farmer in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, he planted rice.” This becomes part of his lore, the story the headline writers use. And in prison, they call him Farmer Boy, and Paedo Paddy, and he learns this is a funny joke because only the Irish are called Paddy. They also call him Nonce, and they beat him. Once he is left for dead.

  •

  No one fights for him, because he never claims his innocence. His English improves, and he learns to read books. He takes courses so he may reduce his sentence and be put in a better place in prison. He learns the rules, he learns whom to trust and whom to work for. He buys cigarettes and chocolate and puts on some weight. He showers daily and shaves. In prison, he becomes somebody.

  But he does not forget the moments in the cold box room with Lolly. He lies awake at night and thinks of them, and when he thinks of them, Lolly has blue eyes. He is more scared of this power she and the lost girls have over him than he is of the world outside his door. Prison, in its churning routines, its boredoms and unpredictable violence, becomes—safety. In here, even the rain is safe, even the rain.

  •

  “In Sri Lanka, the rain falls hard,” Kumar tells his English tutor.

  “Write a paragraph about rain,” the man, Jim, says.

  Kumar writes about rain filling streets up like taps filling bowls. He writes about rain that batters coconut-matting roofs, until the roofs tumble and people inside the huts look up into the deep sky, as if they could dive into the sky and swim.

  “This is good,” Jim says. “Now write about when you were a child. Try to write about how things felt, Kumar, how it felt to be in a monsoon, what you heard, how your skin felt.”

  He thinks about how his skin felt. The fingers of water piercing him through, the rattle on the corrugated roofing of the shack.

  “I cannot write about that,” he says.

  “But why?” Jim asks, and Kumar nods his head to and fro, like a nodding dog in the back of a car, Jim thinks. They smile at each other.

  Kumar remembers the day he was carried away, through the flooding streets, and a schoolboy, clutching his shoes, looked at him as he floated past, and suddenly lunged at him, dragged him into his arms, pulled him up onto a wall and then into a temple flower tree. They sat like monkeys, watching the water flow away. Kumar remembers that the boy woke him and carried him down, carried him in his arms until he found people who knew Kumar’s parents. He remembers the boy’s face, straining, and his white uniform murky and wet. He remembers his mother’s cry and his father wresting him out of the schoolboy’s arms. And how his mother knelt at the boy’s bare feet, touching them with her forehead.

  Jim says, “You nearly drowned? In a monsoon? Can that really happen?”

  Kumar nods up and down: he has learned to nod yes properly.

  •

  It is fifteen years until they find the man who really killed the girls, when he does it again. The DNA is matched, and as easy as a flip of a coin, Kumar is released, through a sliding, rackety gate, into the fast-moving world he cannot comprehend. He has rejected the clothes he came into prison with: th
ey remind him of Shamini and Lolly. Lolly frightens him. She will be twenty-three now, and he worries that he may figure in her nightmares as she figures in his. He wears other people’s hand-me-downs, the clothes of those who never left the prison. And he wears his fluorescent jacket, for that, he thinks, truly belongs to him. He goes to the lodgings he has been directed to, using the change they have given him for the bus fare.

  When he has worked on the roads for a few months, his social worker asks him if he would like to meet some Sri Lankans. He is asked to dinner by the local preacher who translated for him, and that way gets a job in a garage, and then on the trains. Up and down to Hastings, seeing the sea every day, and he is happy.

  One day, Shamini is on the train. He nods to her, and she turns her back to him. He is glad not to speak to her, but it is he who paid for her life in England, he wants to say. When I was twelve, they sold me to a German man for the summer.

  She turns back as if she has heard his thoughts, fumbles in her bag, bringing out her purse.

  “No, no. Eppa,” he says—no thanks, in Sinhala, the first Sinhala he has spoken in years.

  But she takes his hand and palms twenty pounds into it, and then she is gone. He looks at the closing door into the wet October evening. He sees only his eyes reflected back at him. He can actually see himself clearly.

  Love Me Tender

  Preethi ran down the hill. And once there, she stopped. Across the road were flats: red balconied blocks, compact and sound. They stood in their own land, laid mostly to grass, with squat elm trees lined up like defending soldiers, their branches cut square and short. She crossed the road and looked closer at the trees: their leaves were new and fleshy, the colour luminescently yellow. Preethi looked into the grounds, wondered if the one girl she knew who lived there might be playing outside. Her name was Sofia. She was younger than Preethi but had followed her home last year, shouting names at her, because Preethi had not been with her usual friends. The grounds were empty: she thought of returning home, to the hall with the black and white tiles, the sun shining through the stained glass of the front door, the clock they had inherited from the previous owners ticking its admonishments from the darkly wooded dining room. And then:

  “Oi,” from one of the trees. She leapt back from the metal railings. “Up here.” She turned to leave. “No. In the tree!”

  She swung herself under the railing, smelling the dog wee and the grass, the sourness of the smooth metal on her hands. She wiped them down her orange dress and, looking over her shoulder and to the opposite houses, walked slowly toward the tree. Her eyes adjusted as she looked up. She recognised the boy: Danny, the mong.

  They called him a mong in school because of his arm. She had never looked closely at it, feeling it to be private, like looking at a man naked. She glanced now, saw its two prongs, and looked away again: a nausea rose in her throat when she thought it could touch her. Above his head birds flitted, sparrows old and young, as if the leaves and branches restricted them like a cage. He concentrated on the birds, recognising, it seemed, or counting, like a miser with coins.

  “Are they yours?” she asked lamely. What was there to say? No one talked to Danny in school. He was talked about: how he could draw animals as if he were tracing them from a book, how he dug up worms in the beds around the playground and carried them in his pocket. How his arm was made by a witch from a chicken wing. How he ran from one corner of the field to the other on the morning in October when the dew-covered spiderwebs appeared, calling to others to look, as the sun came up and steamed them invisible. Stopped a little one breaking a web with a stick with his nasty arm. And the little one cried, afraid he’d touch him.

  “Nah. Birds don’t belong to no one. I just …” He shrugged.

  “Oh.”

  Preethi waited. He had called her, and she did not want to go home.

  “Wait there, I’m coming down.”

  She moved back to give him room and watched him use both arms deftly, his body just like her own: muscular and dependable. As he jumped she noticed a nest that his hair had camouflaged.

  “They let you get so near,” she said.

  “Yeah, they’re stupid, really. I could be a predator or anything.”

  “Do you feed them? Is that how you do it?” He was standing very near her: it scared her, the arm, and his bulk—he was taller than she had imagined. She tipped backward, pretending to lose her balance, and then recovering it three steps away.

  “What you doing down here?”

  “I dunno,” she said.

  “Wanna come and play?”

  “Play what?”

  “I’ve got a den.”

  He led her around the trees and to the back of the flats, across the grounds to the box hedge on the far side. There he had leant branches against the straight-cut shrub, and under the branches were rugs, books, a sketch pad, pencils. Two apples and half a sandwich. He lowered himself under the branches and sat down in the impression his body had left. He crossed his legs and indicated with the arm for her to sit opposite. She sat. He picked up an apple with the two fingers and leant forward to her. She shook her head, but he thrust it still. She reached her hand forward, not looking at the apple, but at his face.

  “Go on,” he said.

  She took the apple as they stared at each other still, and when her fingers touched his, they were warm. She put the apple to her lips and bit. He smiled. Then he did something extraordinary: he leant forward to her feet and tied her shoelaces, the two fingers on the arm weaving the thick white laces into an extra loop in a complicated route so that the bows on her shoes sat tight and hard, as if her feet were packaged up like two matching gifts.

  •

  Slap, on the arm, so not so cross, she thought. Just one. Stay quiet.

  “Did you polish Rohan’s shoes?” her mother asked.

  “Yes, Ammi,” and pulling herself in, her tummy, her arms, into herself, she walked toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” She recognised the quiet threat in her mother’s voice. “Preethi?”

  “I’m just going to get my books, Ammi,” she said. She ran upstairs to her room, rubbing at her arm, saying the same prayer on the dark stairs. She switched the lights on, threw her sheets and blankets back up onto the pillows, smoothed over the coverlet, rubbing her hands along its worn lines.

  “Preethi!” she heard Gehan call. He was younger than she, but he knew all his times tables, understood algebra, had started to learn the periodic table in his spare time, to taunt her, she thought. To hurt her. “Ammi says come,” he shouted up the stairs.

  She looked at the exercise book of sums her mother had left her that morning. Long multiplications: she had attempted them, then stopped. What was she to do? She took them downstairs. Slap, across the face.

  “What did you do today?”

  “Nothing, Ammi,” she said through the sting of tears.

  “Nothing? Nothing! I see ‘nothing.’ Why? Why?” She wanted to reach toward Ammi, say, “Don’t, Ammi, it will be all right,” but she stood still.

  Gehan said, “I saw her walking down the hill today.”

  “What? I told you to stay here,” and slap again. Slap, and Gehan smiling. That was all she saw. Tomorrow she would go out again. Ammi put the book in her hands.

  “Upstairs until you’re finished. Finish quickly. Papa is back in half an hour, and we will eat then.”

  Rohan came into her room, sat on her bed, and looked over her shoulder.

  “What’s two times six?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Carry the one. What’s four times eight?”

  She shrugged. “Thirty-two. Add one. No, add the one.” He waited. “You really can’t do this, can you?” She shrugged again. He dictated the rest of the answers, telling her where to put the carried tens and cross them out. “You must have been taught this—”

  “Yes, of course I have,” she said.

  “Then why can’t you do it?”

  “
I just can’t.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Reading. And poems.”

  “Yeah, I’d noticed. But apart from that stuff?” She shrugged.

  When she went downstairs, Preethi heard Papa in the study. Shyly, she went and stood by the door. Watched him hang his coat and hat, take the bottle from the shelf, pour a glass of the amber liquid, and, as if administering medicine, throw it bitterly against his throat and swallow. He put the bottle and glass back, then turned to the door.

  “Hmm, hmm, what are you doing? Why did you leave your sums?” But he asked kindly. She smiled, reached her hand to him. He took his hand from his pocket and, instead of holding her, slipped a pink, cellophane-wrapped boiled sweet into her fingers. He gently turned her from the shoulders and walked her into the kitchen, where Rohan had set the table and mackerel curry and rice were already waiting.

  •

  “This one, Neville, called me at the office: someone has daubed paint on their front door,” Papa said.

  “Everywhere,” Ammi said. “Everywhere, these letters.”

  “Hmm.” Papa poured himself another shot of arrack. His eyes were murky already, Preethi could see. Ammi looked at the glass, then turned away, toward Preethi.

  “Tomorrow, you will write out all of the times tables. Write them out every day for the rest of the week.”

  Papa nodded at Preethi. “Clear now, clear.” He waved his hand at the plates. Preethi jumped up, but the boys remained where they were. Gehan never helped. She and Papa normally cleared and did the washing up together.

  “I talked to her teacher last week,” Ammi said. It was old ground, a well-rehearsed speech. “It is not that she is not bright enough.”

  “Hmm, hmm,” Papa interrupted. Preethi heard the harsh punishment of the drink, the way he gulped it into him.

  “Have you thought she might be dyslexic?” Rohan said. Preethi looked at him: it was very brave, this sudden thought. Unexpected and brave, particularly when Papa was like this. Papa laughed, and Ammi, looking first at Papa, laughed, too.