Homesick Read online

  “What is this ‘dyslexic,’ child? You think you’re at medical school already?” Papa said.

  “Ammi said her teacher said she had a ‘blockage.’ I have read about dyslexia—”

  “What nonsense,” Ammi said feebly. “Nonsense.” She jutted her chin toward Preethi, to the sink and the pans. “She is a bright girl. No more nonsense,” she said. Rohan took the rest of the plates to the sink, and together they washed and dried, as Papa unsteadily walked to the sitting room. Soon he and Gehan were laughing with the audience on the television.

  •

  Sometimes Danny said hello in the playground. Now and then, she sat on the cement kerb at the back of the steps up to the classroom, and he would sit on the opposite kerb, and they would look at the others playing. Gehan wandered alone in the playground, too, but he never played with Preethi. She had friends, but if they played Charlie’s Angels, she had to be the baddie, or if it was a fairy tale, she was the witch. Princesses were always blond, forlornly pallid.

  Princes had two straight arms. Kiss chase happened between boys called Philip or Stephen and girls called Jackie or Donna. Danny said there was something dirty about kiss chase. Preethi agreed. A boy holding a girl by her shoulders and rubbing his body against her looked like animals in the park. Danny and she talked about birds, of course, and animals: her cat, his desperate longing for a dog.

  “But me dad’s going,” he said one day.

  “Going where?”

  “Nah, going. He’s got cancer.”

  “Oh. Does that mean …?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you can’t have a dog because he’s got cancer?”

  “No. I mean, if he goes, then we’ll move out of the flat. We can’t have a dog at the flats.”

  “Where will you move?”

  “To my grandma’s in Hampstead. She’s got this posh house, but me mum says it’s just ’cos she’s married well.”

  She knew he had told her because he felt the small loss she felt. What had started so recently would soon be over, this sideways talking, these quiet moments in their school day.

  She began to walk home with him. Normally she walked by herself, behind Gehan on the main road. Now she walked down the first side hill and along the adjacent main road, stopping at the sweet shop so they could buy Bazooka Joes and pop bubbles until they got to the trees at his flats. She would come with him to see the nest, then say goodbye and walk up her hill home. Once Sofia called out a name, but it was so rude, so disgusting, Preethi could not even understand it fully, and she smiled at her because she did not know what else to do. She always reached home first, despite leaving after Gehan so he wouldn’t see her walking with the mong.

  •

  The summer holidays came, and where she would go to school in the autumn term was still undecided.

  “What’s cancer, really?” she asked Rohan one day. They were eating breakfast together silently. Gehan had gone out early on his chopper, soon after Ammi and Papa had gone to work.

  “It’s a disease,” he said, not looking up from his book. “Sometimes people can survive it, if the doctors catch it early enough. But most people die. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Preethi watched him reading. “What’s that about?”

  “This? Science and stuff. I am starting my O levels in a couple of months.”

  “I know. But don’t you want to read stories? I mean, if I knew I had to go and study, you know, all that stuff, I’d spend the holidays reading proper books.”

  He laughed. “Proper books? What—like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or something?”

  “Yeah.”

  He picked up his book and leafed through: “Says here that Hippocrates named the disease cancer because the conglomeration of cells looked like nesting crabs.”

  The thought of it made her feel squeamish. The layers of crustaceans in rows, round like overlapping warts on dirty skin. “Don’t read to me from that book. I don’t want to know about bodies. I’m not like you,” she said angrily.

  But he was sunk in, ignoring her, and despite the maths her mother had left her, she walked out of the house, into the sunshine, and sat on the wall. She heard Rohan pad into the sitting room, saw him throw himself down next to the record player. Soon she heard Elvis sing.

  She walked down the road to the den. Sometimes Danny wasn’t even there, but she still stayed, hoping, watching the birds fly back and forth from the trees.

  •

  She fought with both her brothers that summer, Gehan especially.

  “It’s your fault we’re not in Sri Lanka,” he said suddenly on a Saturday. Ammi and Papa were marketing in Peckham.

  “What do you mean?” Preethi had never considered that they may have gone that year. It wasn’t their year to go, was it?

  “Yes, stupid,” he said, watching her lips move as she counted her fingers behind her back. “It’s the third year. We always go every third year. I heard Ammi say that we have to save money, so you can go to the private school.”

  “I don’t want to go to private school. What private school?” Preethi panicked. She had assumed she would go to the local school, the one all the other girls walked to first thing in the morning. She had watched them for years, thinking she would wear their navy skirts, their blue polyester shirts: she would clip her hair back like the teenaged Greek girls across the road.

  “It’s your fault,” he said again, and she remembered their cousins in Vavuniya, the two boys the same age as she and Gehan: how they would all be shy on the first day, and then … and then! The joy of barefooted cricket, climbing to the roof of their house and spying on their father and his brothers on the veranda, watching their mother sitting at the kitchen table with her sisters-in-law. She thought of food cooked on the open fire in her grandparents’ kitchen and sniffed the air, her eyes closed, as if coconut shells were burning in the sunshine outside the back door. Gehan punched her. She cried out, jumped forward to him, bit his ear, scratched his face. “I hate you,” he said, pinching at her body, twisting the flesh on her lower arm.

  “I hate you, too,” she shouted, and pulled at his hair. But then she ran into the back garden and round to the patio doors into the sitting room. Rohan lay on the sofa, facedown, his head dangling near the record player. “Gehan punched me,” she said over Elvis.

  “Did you hit him back?” She nodded. “Well, then. It’s hot, isn’t it?” The song finished, and he pulled himself up slowly and selected another record from the boxed set. Each sleeve had a picture of Elvis on it: on the one he chose now Elvis grinned sideways, his hair long, around his ears, white shoulders studded with rhinestones. Rohan tipped it, and the record slid in its paper cover into his hands.

  “Why do you love Elvis so much?”

  “Because he’s … what is he?” he asked sternly.

  “The king of rock and roll,” she recited.

  “Good girl. Why were you fighting?” He put the record onto the record player. The rhythmic plucking of a guitar, then harmonic backing singers: “King Creole …”

  “Because he said”—but Rohan wasn’t listening. “Ro—he said that if it wasn’t for me, we would be in Sri Lanka.” Rohan beat his hand against the black PVC sofa. “Is it true?”

  “Maybe,” Rohan said. He glanced up at her. “Ammi wants you to go to a different school. She’s worried you won’t do so well down the road.”

  •

  As she walked down the hill she wondered why they knew but she didn’t. When she got to the den, Danny wasn’t there. She didn’t want to wait, was anxious suddenly, needed to run and be safe, too. She wanted Danny, though, and for the first time she heard it in her mind that she liked him, that she wanted to see him. She saw some small boys around the back of the flats.

  “All right? Which one’s Danny’s flat?”

  “Who’s Danny?”

  “You know, Danny,” she said, “with the arm.”

  “The Flid? The mong?” they asked. She nodded. “Up the to
p. Number thirty-two.”

  She walked up the steps, into the cool cement corridors. As she reached the top of the third flight, she emerged onto the balconied landings and paused to look down to the den. From there, the den couldn’t be seen at all, nor the trees. She walked to the last door and waited a moment before rattling the knocker on the letterbox. Once, then twice. There was no movement. They were out, she thought, so rattled it harder, twice more, then turned to walk back down. The door was opened suddenly by an old woman, her grey hair short, pulled about. She wore a dark dress, sensible sandals. She had been crying.

  “What do you want? Oi, what you banging on the door for?”

  Preethi backed away. “Danny,” she said. She moved back more and stopped against the balcony.

  “Get away. We don’t want your sort round here. Go on,” she said. She extracted a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. Preethi looked past her down the dim hallway of the flat and saw Danny standing in the kitchen. He looked at her the way his grandmother looked at her. The arm tucked against his side like a rifle, he stared. Preethi lifted her hand to wave, but he turned, and before the grandmother closed the door, she saw him bring his good hand to his eyes and wipe sideways viciously, as if to swab her away.

  When she walked up the hill, she could see their car parked outside the house, hear the music coming from the sitting room windows thrown open. She walked into the house, looked in the kitchen, in the sitting room. She saw them in the back garden. Elvis sang his way through the trees, to the houses beyond their fence. She watched the four of them: Papa digging a bed over, Gehan swinging from the low branch on the pear tree, Rohan lying on the grass, Ammi hanging washing out. As she walked up the steps Papa saw her, and at the top of his voice he sang, “Love me tender …!”

  Ammi called, “Victor!” and his eyes widened as Ammi’s arm slipped around Preethi’s shoulders, and he directed his singing at them both, his hand splayed toward them. Ammi threw her head back and laughed joyously. Her arm hugged tighter, and she kissed Preethi’s cheek, a deep, hard kiss, as if she really loved her.

  •

  They went to Lewisham that afternoon. In a sports shop buying rugger boots for Rohan, they heard the noise of people shouting rhythmically. Rohan heard it first, one foot tied in a studded shoe, the other in a sock.

  “What’s that?” he asked the young guy unpacking the boxes. They all stood very still, looking toward the glass door. The manager, a small, curly-haired woman, walked out into the sunshine, and they watched her flex her shoulders back, cross her arms, assess, then return. She locked the glass doors, top and bottom.

  “Right,” she said to the family, “in the changing rooms.” Preethi ran toward the door with Gehan: they wanted to see. The noise was louder, and she could see policemen. Across the road, the sign outside the church said ALL ONE IN CHRIST’S LOVE in giant red capitals. A middle-aged woman in an incongruous churchwear blue hat screamed along to the chants, and a policeman fell over. “In the back!” the manager yelled at them. Preethi and Gehan retreated, and the manager took their place. One of the crowd threw a rock toward where Preethi and Gehan had stood.

  “Yaaaaah haaaaaaaaaa!” the manager shouted, putting two fingers up on both hands.

  They waited in the booth at the back, Ammi held tight by Papa, Gehan sitting on the floor, Rohan on the bench and Preethi on his lap. The march went by quickly. It was nothing, her parents said. It was nothing. And when other families gathered to eat with them that evening, Preethi heard them talk only of this nothing and ask each other if they were nothing in this country, if that hatred actually made them nothing.

  •

  A few days later, Elvis died. Rohan cried all day, and in the evening, Papa and he sat in the back garden with the record player, drinking passion fruit cordial and eating Bombay mix and patties. Preethi crept out and sat with them, watching her father top up his glass with arrack, and as the evening cooled, he told them of the Lyons House in fifties Sri Lanka, he and his friends with their Brylcreemed quiffs and pastel shirts, drinking bottled sodas and listening to Presley’s latest hit. He mopped a tear or two at times, and when it started to rain, they sat for a while still, until Ammi shouted that they were all idiots and should bring the damn machine in before it was ruined.

  •

  Preethi still went down there, to the flats: someone had to feed the birds. She took a crust from her breakfast, and when she climbed up where Danny usually sat, the birds would fly about her, eating from her hand, no different in their expectations, and she realised how Danny felt. The birds were a freedom, that was all.

  And then, the day after Elvis died, when she had left the times tables and the periodic tables behind her, Danny came. He looked up at her, startled. His hair had been cut. He wore dark trousers and a proper shirt. And a black armband. They shrugged at each other.

  “D’you want to feed them?”

  “Nah,” he said. He leant against the tree. “I can see your knickers.”

  “Shut up.” She hitched her skirt up from behind, then pushed herself off the branch and landed next to him. “What d’you want to do?”

  “Let’s go to the den.”

  They sat and said nothing.

  “I know what cancer is,” she said. “Shall I tell you?” he shrugged. “It’s clusters of cells. Like crabs.” He didn’t look up.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. He’s dead anyway.”

  “Are you going to get a dog now?” He shrugged again.

  They sat still for a while. And then the arm, covered in its nice shirt, reached to her, and the fingers that she had become used to, the two fingers with the bent nails, touched her belly.

  “Show me your cunt,” he said gruffly. She looked at his face.

  “What?”

  “Show me your cunt.”

  “No.” She sat still, wondering if he would change back to Danny, the boy with the unkempt hair and dirty brown legs.

  “Go on,” he said, and his fingers moved lower, to where her wee came out. “Let me touch it,” he said.

  “No. Get off,” and she hit at the hand, as if it were animated by an outside power.

  “Go on. I want to see,” he wheedled.

  “No.” He pushed toward her, both hands on her shoulders, trying to pin her down. She kicked at him, kicked about as his weight stretched onto her, kicked one of the bowed branch legs of the den, crashing it down. “Get off,” she wailed, and his weight rolled away. He was crying.

  “Paki cunt,” he said. “Fuck off, Paki cunt.”

  She crawled out from under the fallen branches. He was sobbing: she wanted to go back. But instead she walked away and up the hill, hearing that chant, hearing that nothing, saying, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” to herself.

  At home, the house was quiet. She let herself in with the key that hung from the inside of the letterbox and climbed the stairs with her eyes shut against the ghosts. She went to her room and sat at her desk with the periodic table in front of her. She stayed there even when Gehan came crashing in at the front door, pushing his bike into the hall and calling for her to come and make him hot Ribena. He came up to her room.

  “I’m thirsty,” he complained.

  “So, make it cold.” He watched her from the door.

  “Have you learnt any yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been there all day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Liar. I saw you with Danny the mong.”

  She turned angrily in her chair. “Don’t call him that! His dad just died. Don’t call him that.”

  “Make me Ribena,” he whined.

  “No, I have to do my work.”

  When she heard Papa come home, she left her room, stood at the top of the stairs until he had put the bottle back on the shelf in his office. He came out, switched the lights on in the hall and on the stairs, and saw her.

  “Ah, you are ready? Gehan says you have learnt.” Papa smiled. She knew Gehan would have made trouble
.

  “I’m not ready yet, Papa.”

  “Why? Hmm, hmm, come, come,” he said, pulling at the air in front of him. She came down the stairs. Professor of Tamil literature, he had been, he told her once. No good to anyone—sciences, that’s where the power is. She saw that his eyes were bloodshot.

  “Why not ready? Gehan said, all day at your books, good girl,” and he patted her head, pushed his hands into his pockets to find a sweet. There were none.

  He took her into his study. When she was tested, usually, it was Ammi who asked the questions, Ammi who slapped and shouted. “Victor!” she heard her mother call.

  “I am testing Preethi,” he called. Preethi heard her mother come to the hall, heard Gehan behind her. Heard Rohan come out of the sitting room, stand opposite her: she could see his face over Papa’s shoulder.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Al, aluminium.”

  “Good, good.”

  “Cr, chromium.”

  “Yes?” Papa looked back toward Rohan. Rohan nodded.

  “Cb, cobalt,” she said. “Co, copper.”

  “Yes?” again, and Rohan nodded again.

  “No,” she heard Gehan say: “Co, cobalt. Cu, copper.” She could hear Ammi’s short breathing. She looked at Rohan. Papa frowned.

  “This … this is all you have learnt today?” She realised suddenly—I am Papa’s favourite. She thought of the elements on the page, winged and flighty, interchangeable, magical letters, numbers, pecking down, caged in Gehan’s head as if of their own accord, but flying free, far from her own brain: she was lost again. Gehan stood next to Rohan now, and Preethi smiled, defeated, as he watched her with fear. I am Papa’s favourite, she thought again: Gehan had been in the study before, with the door shut. She had seen his crying face, Rohan’s, too. Papa pushed the door to.

  “Again,” he said. She shook her head. “Again,” he said louder. She looked toward the window and waited. The door opened, and Papa turned. Ammi stared, and Gehan smiled a sad, small smile, and something passed between them, a hate: for their parents, for who they were, for this tingling moment of heat and fear.