Homesick Read online

  “Well?” Papa said. He stumbled against a chair as he went back to the door to push them out.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” she said.

  “Sorry?” he screamed, and in a precise movement, bent her almost double and with all his strength beat her on the calves, the backside, the back, until he overbalanced, and Preethi fell to the floor, crying. He landed heavily against the chair, juddering his knee. He looked down at her, bringing the back of his bruised hand up to wipe spittle from his mouth. The door opened, and Rohan came and picked her up, tried to pull her with him to the hall. But Ammi blocked them.

  “You have to work hard,” she said. Preethi watched her mother’s mouth, the way it curled bitterly about the words. “You have to become something. Stop! Stop this crying. When you work hard, you are above everything. Everything. You are free,” and she stepped aside, letting Rohan take Preethi out. Ammi stayed in the study, watched her husband take the bottle down, and Rohan, Preethi, and Gehan stood behind them, in the darkening hall, waiting to be told what came next.

  •

  Ammi took time off from work the next day and took over the supervision of Preethi’s studies. It was a hot but wet day, full of frustrated tears and longing for a time before: when the den was safe, when the study meant sweeties.

  “You’re getting fat, that’s another thing,” her mother said. “You do nothing all day, that is why. Seven times eight?”

  “Fifty-four.”

  “Fif-ty-six,” with each syllable a hurt—pinch, pinch, pinch. Preethi picked up a pencil, wrote it down again. At the kitchen table, the table with the furrows full of toast crumbs, darkly stained oak, hard and unforgiving.

  The doorbell rang and Ammi answered it.

  “Preethi! Someone for you!” She met Preethi in the corridor: “Get rid of him. He is not our sort.”

  Danny stood on the top step. He had his shorts on again, his old T-shirt. Still the same brown legs, but it was not him anymore, his short hair disguising him, his eyes different.

  “What?” she said.

  “I brung you something.” His good hand clutched into a ball, his two fingers resting on top, over the gaps.

  “What is it?” she asked, holding back from him. She stood inside her home, he on the second step down from the door.

  “Look.” He offered her his hands. She shook her head. “Come on. Look.” She walked toward him, couldn’t believe that he would come here, up to her house, just to trick her.

  She leant down, not touching him, and he lifted his fingers. Inside, a fledgling, it looked like, or maybe a fully grown sparrow, weak, scared, dying perhaps.

  “Did you catch it?”

  “No. Found it under the tree. Thought you’d like to look after it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well? Don’t you want it?”

  She told him to follow her to the side of the house and up the alley to the shed by the back gate. She found an old box and some dried grass. They sat in the shade on the back steps, watching it try to fly.

  “Looks like its wing’s broken,” she said.

  He said nothing, then: “I’m sorry,” very quietly. She ignored him, but it was done, and she was glad.

  “Are you going away?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “Dunno. Soon. Before school starts.”

  “Oh.”

  She heard Ammi call from inside.

  “Better go, then,” he said.

  “Yeah. Bye,” she said, but before he stood, she put her hand to his arm.

  “See—not so different,” he said with a smile. He left by the back gate, down the alley and home.

  When she went in with the bird, Ammi told her she should keep it in the shed. And later that week, after her father beat her again, she went out there and crushed it in her hands. When she opened them, she saw its breast still moved, so she pressed hard with two fingers against its throat until it stopped.

  •

  Preethi asked around and found out that Danny and his mum had moved out of the flats, and a West Indian family, the Russells, had moved in. The daughter was called Glenys, and she and Preethi became best friends at the local comprehensive Papa had arranged for her to attend.

  The Turtle

  In the dark they are back to the people they always were, Jenny and Mike with their son, Lucas. They are three stumbling human beings, walking in black air, with multitudinous stars above them, and Jenny and Mike, with Lucas in between, can just be people on holiday.

  With her pashmina wrapped about her, and Mike holding Lucas’s other hand, she feels safer in their family, stronger in her belief in it. The guide with the torch is far ahead, and a group of worthy Germans and Italians walk his invisible footsteps in the sand one step behind. Mike and Jenny and Lucas take their time because Lucas is only four and Lucas does not like the feel of the sand as it enters the holes of his Crocs. “I like wet sand,” he says to Jenny, “but not this sand.”

  “That’s funny, because I would have thought it would be the other way round,” Mike says.

  “No, no, Daddy. It is this way round,” Lucas says. “I think this sand is yucky,” he says to Jenny, conspiratorially. She nods in the dark. “I SAID—” Lucas shouts.

  “Yes, sorry, I heard you,” Jenny whispers. “Remember the deal, Lucas? We whisper, and then the turtles will come out. Do you remember?” she asks urgently. Up ahead, she has seen a few of the Germans’ heads turning toward them.

  “Would you like a carry, littley?” Mike says.

  “No, Daddy,” Lucas says. He has developed a habit of calling Mike “Daddy” in a formal manner, as if addressing a newly bought dog that needs to learn his name. It is done kindly, but Jenny hears it every time as an admonishment to them both.

  “Let me carry you,” Mike continues. “We could catch up and see the turtles sooner.” Jenny feels the change in the air as he stoops to pick his son up. She stiffens as she feels the child’s hand become rigid in her own.

  “No, Mike, don’t—” she says sharply, and it is nearly too late, but he has learnt, from her e-mails and her sobbing phone calls in the middle of the night, to stop as soon as she says no, to do as she says, at least where Lucas is concerned. They walk on, but she feels she is dragging Lucas, and she realises he has let go of Mike’s hand.

  There are dips in the sand, great hollows where her foot thinks there will be ground and instead there is air, and she unbalances two or three times, giggling embarrassedly, without humour. She pulls Lucas down with her once, and he shouts again. Mike lags behind, then comes up unexpectedly at her shoulder, holding her arm with his hand. She wants to shake him off, but she contains the anger.

  They reach the group, and the group acknowledge them, Jenny is sure, with stares and disapprobation, but she can’t see—it is so dark she cannot see her own hand. She looks down at Lucas: his face reflects the guide’s red light and is an ecstasy of expectation. She notices only now that the guide still waits for a group of Japanese who straggle up behind them.

  “Where is the turtle?” Lucas asks, quite reasonably, she thinks. It is a rational request in this circumstance. It is fine for him to ask that, at that pitch of voice. The guide does not reply, simply looks ahead toward the older Japanese couple still struggling toward them. Lucas steps forward and tugs at the guide’s dish dasha. “I said,” he says louder, “where is the turtle?” The guide flicks Lucas’s hand away. Jenny hushes him, takes Lucas’s hand, leads him off into the dark. Mike follows.

  “Can I have attention, please?” the guide says. “My assistant is now looking for turtle. There is turtle nearby, but we have to wait, so please to sit. Sit.…” He gestures expansively. He has wide eyes, a broad smile, satanic in the red-bulbed torch he uses to search out the laying turtles. Mike and Jenny take Lucas up a dune, behind the rest of the group, and kneel gingerly. Lucas does not want to sit.

  “The sand is yucky,” he repeats.

  “Look,” Mike says, “look at the stars,�
� and slowly, with stories about Hercules and Orion, he coaxes Lucas into sitting between his knees. Stars shoot across the wide sky as Mike’s story takes hold. Jenny imagines this as ordinary, imagines they could live here, as Mike wants them to, and she could take for granted stars that traverse the sky.

  Twenty minutes later, when they are starting to cramp and Lucas is beginning to shiver, there is sudden movement, an exchange of texts, and the guide says, “Please! Please! Quiet! There is a turtle very near here! She is in process of laying eggs, please!”

  “Did you hear that, Lucas? We’re going to see a turtle now,” Mike says. Lucas is still with the stars.

  “Lukey, did you hear?” Jenny whispers. “A real turtle!” He is dreamy, tired perhaps. They get up, Mike lifting Lucas to his feet, and Jenny notices he is careful not to do more. She is grateful. The group all stand and murmur. Suddenly Lucas shouts, “We’re going to see a turtle!” and Mike and Jenny gasp, shush him, tell him no. Some of the group laugh. The guide says, “Quiet! Quiet …” He tells them facts and figures about the turtle, how she will not lay until she is between thirty-six and forty-two years old. She is two metres long. She swims back to the same beach every year, and the turtles that are born on this beach will return to lay their eggs. He says the turtle lays, then she covers them in a large mound and goes back to the water. Jenny takes the information and speaks it into Lucas’s ear. Lucas interrupts her sometimes to ask her to repeat the words; she knows he is encapsulating the knowledge. She knows these words will stay now, that each kick of a turtle’s flipper is a neural pathway opened and connected to another in her son’s brain. She is an enabler, that is all, helpless in this assimilation of facts, lacking courage to deny it and make him play, like any other child. She fills him up, day after day, and it seems to make him stronger, seems to make him more.

  “Come, now,” the guide says. “Let us go. But when we approach, be calm and quiet please. The mother lays eggs now! Now!” They follow his torchlight down onto the main beach, falling in and out of holes that Jenny now realises must be old nests. The assistant is squatting next to a hole containing a dark green, hexagonally patterned rock. The rock has a head, which moves from side to side like a toy. Lucas has started to tremble.

  “See, it’s a turtle, Lukey, can you see it?” Mike and Jenny and Lucas stand back, away from the rest of the group, letting Lucas understand.

  “I need to see,” he whispers. He allows Mike to pick him up. Jenny watches him crane forward, his arm carelessly about Mike’s neck. She does not look at the turtle, only at that arm, the skin in full contact with Mike’s skin. It is simply there, and she is nearly faint with not breathing.

  “Come!” the guide whispers to them. “Come and see the eggs!” As they approach, the guide asks others to stand and move away. He kneels again, shows them where they should sit. He takes Lucas’s chin in his hand and points it, just so, like a midwife. “Look!” he says, and Lucas does not object to his touch, simply looks, and there are large pearls dropping from the turtle’s tail, precise and round, a pile of luminescent blobs of matter, perfect in their potential.

  “Oohhhh!” Lucas says wildly. The guide nods, pats Lucas’s head. He does not move them away.

  It was the hottest night of the year, the night Lucas was born. He was stuck in her birth canal, his English head too wide for her. “You are made for round-headed Sri Lankan babies,” the Chinese midwife said. “We need to unhook him. Episiotomy … forceps.” Words mentioned, not understood: she was feral with fear and pain and anxiety for the child. Mike stood between her and the doctor, stood with his eyes to hers, cradling her head as cuts were made, holding her hands as tight as she clung to his, while cold metal plunged high into her abdomen to retrieve the tiny man stuck inside.

  “It hurts, Mike!” she screamed, and he held her, telling her she was the bravest, telling her the baby was nearly there. “Ohhhh!” she screamed.

  And it is this noise she hears when Lucas cries out. It is this red-hot anguish she thinks of, the white light, the blackness inside her skull.

  Jenny looks down at the turtle: there are tears rolling from the creature’s eyes. “She’s crying,” she says to the guide.

  “Yes, tears. But she is secreting excess salt, nothing more. It is not pain. It is not sadness!” He laughs, as if it were a joke. His phone beeps, and he reads the message. “Oh! My goodness! You are lucky group! There is baby here! Baby!” He turns to Lucas. “Come! You see baby?” Mike and Lucas stand and follow the others. But Jenny stays there, in the dark with the turtle, in fellowship.

  Much later, in bed finally, Lucas’s limbs are still, and he settles into her. She holds him close, as if he were a normal child. “My egg,” he says. His T-shirt is damp with sweat in the closeness of the night room.

  “You’re a little egg, all tucked up and safe in our bed,” she coos.

  “No. My egg.” He struggles awake. “Be careful with it. It’s in my pocket.”

  When he’s asleep, she looks in his trouser pockets. There is an egg there, dented, worn by the world, it seems, still pale but its skin dull, dead. Mike is making tea in the kitchen of their suite. She shows him, and he reverently washes out a yoghurt pot, places tissues inside, and puts the egg in, tucking more tissues around it. Its value to Lucas somehow brings them together. Yet, when they go to bed, they say goodnight, nothing more, and stare at the ceiling, listening to the waves outside their window, knowing the sky above them is still full of stars.

  •

  The egg focuses Lucas, Mike thinks. There are fewer scenes than in England. Perhaps Lucas is growing out of it, he thinks, but he knows it is a foolish thought. He has always chosen to ignore the worst of Lucas’s foibles: the way he crawled back and forth on top of the patch that was burnt by a falling iron in the carpet in their sitting room, running his hand along its texture, then crawling, then backing up and doing the whole procedure over and over, as they both watched helplessly. His mouth dribbling from a sticking-out tongue. Jenny’s anxiety made Mike ashamed—of himself, of his family.

  “You were the same,” his mother said when he broached the subject. Had he been? He asked his eldest sister, who was ten when he was born. Had he been madly obsessive, too bright, easily upset? She was part of the problem—she had the same symptoms, so could not provide the solution. “But we did OK, didn’t we?” she e-mailed back. Did we? he wonders. Did we? Jenny and he on this cusp—and his brothers and sisters all divorced or near enough. Lucas is going to be happy, he decides. This holiday, this childhood, this life.

  They wake up early every morning, and Lucas is awake before them, singing in his bed, as if in answer to the call to prayer at five.

  His egg sits by his bed: it is the first thing he sees when he wakes. He has replaced the tissue with sand from the beach at Ras Al Jinz: he brought it back in his jacket pocket. Lucas had taken in everything. The guide said, “The sand of this beach is the mother of these turtles, and it is to their mother they return when they too become mothers!” Lucas’s egg is at the bottom of the yoghurt cup, weighed down by sand. Sometimes he tops the sand up from other beaches, but he is careful not to allow the cup to tip, so that the “Mummy sand,” as he calls it, stays integral to the egg.

  “How can you tell the difference?” Mike asks.

  “Oh, I can,” Lucas says, showing the fineness of the Ras Al Jinz sand compared to the ricelike desiccated shells of the Ras Al Haad sand. He is now an expert on turtles and an expert on sand.

  As they have travelled about, Lucas has held the egg in its carton, with its clingfilm (with holes) lid, on his lap in the back of the car. He has refused air conditioning, preferring the temperature of the car to be the temperature of the warm, dry air of Oman. As they drive past mountain after mountain of pinky-orange rock and plains of sandy earth, Lucas looks steadily and calmly about him, understanding little, “not engaging,” as Jenny puts it, but holding his yoghurt pot. Mike is fine with this. It is fine, he thinks. It is perfectly ordinary f
or a four-year-old child to behave in this way.

  The driving makes Jenny talk to him, and Mike is grateful and quick to reply, so that the friendship that began their relationship is rekindled soon enough. They do not laugh yet, as they used to, but the interest shown and given is enough for Mike to be encouraged.

  “I used to love stick insects when I was his age, you know.”

  “Really?” She smiles. She is the most beautiful of women, pale brown, with her long black hair making her seem paler in this deeply coloured, heavily sunned country. He cannot see her eyes under her overlarge sunglasses, but he has noticed that she has steadily lost weight since Lucas was born, and her wrists are tiny, her cheekbones too prominent. He dares not look at her breasts, her waist. He looks at the empty road as he drives and they speak. He does not dare imagine making love to her.

  When he was offered the job in Oman, he expected her to be negative. The vehemence, though, her downright refusal to contemplate a move, disquieted them both. But the break away from the family, from the pity, from the routine visits to various caring professions: all would be banished, he argued, and we could do it ourselves. It would be just us, he said, bringing up our child. She had not considered it. Had not thought it through, he realised. He took the job. He knew it was the right moment, the right opportunity, and she would follow or she would not. And with the extra money Oman offered, he would be able to pay for Lucas and Jenny to have the life they needed, in Oman or England. There were no other choices. He came to Oman.

  “I had a snail farm,” she says. “I collected snails for a whole week or so—you know, those ugly, grey-brown things that eat everything, and I let them crawl up my arm, and Mum took pictures and thought I was some sort of science genius, but I wasn’t.” He notices a line of sweat-dots glistening on her upper lip. He would like to lick them off. She looks out of the open window.

  “Camel!” she cries. “Did you see, Lucas? Oh, slow down, Mike!” and she puts her hand out and touches his forearm. It tingles; the warmth of her fingers he feels down in the base of his penis. He cannot help his erection, and he slows the car down, stops on the hard shoulder of the highway so she can hang out of the window with a camera, and he adjusts himself and shifts in his seat. Lucas is asleep behind him, and the pot is sideways in his lap. Mike leans over and takes the yoghurt pot, puts it into the drinks holder at the front. He starts the car again.