Fragile Monsters by Catherine Menon (100 books to read in a lifetime txt) 📕

‘She can’t come,’ Cecelia says, all bare-faced lies and lower lip caught between her teeth. ‘She’s brought her brother.’

‘No, wait. I can …’ Mary looks around. There’s a cleft in the path up ahead, just the right size to put Anil down in. But it’s razor-sharp and rocky, and might hold anything at all. Scorpions, spiders, the odd jungle viper or two; she’s heard you never see them until they strike. ‘I can’t leave Anil here,’ she finishes miserably.

Nobody’s listening, though. Rajan’s watching Cecelia, who’s already started to climb. Her monkey limbs are flung wide around the wrinkled bark and she doesn’t look down.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mary hears her say. ‘It’s only Mary. She won’t mind waiting for us.’

Mary scoops Anil a little higher on her hip and kicks at a puddle of wilted blossom. She’s not angry – not yet, not quite – but then she sees Rajan smile. He reaches down so Cecelia can grab his hand and Mary’s stomach swells and drops. She feels a jolt as Cecelia reaches up to his fingers, feels the warmth of his palm on her own skin, and doesn’t like it one bit.

‘My name’s Rajan,’ she hears him say, and then a gust of wind tosses the branches aside. Cecelia’s skirt flips up in that breeze to show a glimpse of her knickers. They’re trimmed with lace, they’re dirty and half a size too small, and Mary’s wearing an identical pair herself. She’s dragged them out of the soiled laundry on purpose, just so Cecelia would have to wear her pair. Mary herself has no compunction about wearing the same underthings for three days running, and Cecelia – cross-my-heart-promised to be Mary’s mirror image right down to the skin – will just have to lump it.

But as that breeze sneaks under the frayed edge of Cecelia’s ruffled skirt, Mary’s stomach squirms. All of a sudden she can’t feel the bark under Cecelia’s knees, or even the squeeze of Rajan’s fingers on Cecelia’s hand. Instead, there’s a stir of interest at the base of her belly, a muscling sort of swell that takes her by surprise.

‘Come down right now,’ Mary shouts up at the tree, and adds for good measure that Cecelia’s a bloodless little mouse in dirty knickers.

But it doesn’t help in the slightest, because this feeling isn’t Cecelia’s. It’s Mary’s own; it’s to do with the way Rajan’s eyes glint with half-hidden interest and his mouth’s stained red with betel nut. Mary spits – she hates the taste, reminding her of Radhika and failure – and feels a ghostly, warning pressure on her lips. One day, she knows, Rajan and Cecelia will be kissing, will be doing a sight more than holding hands up in a tree. Mary, down amongst all those wilted flowers with only Anil for company, bursts into tears for the second time that day.

‘I’ll tell on you,’ she whispers, and wonders if she might have learnt to like betel nut, if she’d only been given the chance.

5. Friday, 5 a.m.

‘Oh my God, a fire? Are you OK?’

It’s a warm morning, still sticky with rain and with a pale glow where the sun’s going to rise. I’ve calculated that it should be six o’clock in the evening in Canada, and Sangeeta will still be in our office. Her office, now. I grip the phone receiver and breathe out. It helps, to have told someone.

‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘A sore throat from the smoke and a few bruises, but that’s all.’

‘Maybe you’re in shock,’ she suggests, rather hopefully.

‘Just some smoke,’ I repeat. ‘And a bruise.’

I’m in one of the phone booths outside the hospital. It’s busy, with muttered conversations or one-sided anguish going on in alternate booths. There’s an etiquette to grief, and we’ve all left as much space between each other as possible. Or perhaps it’s a sense of self-preservation. Bad luck might be catching.

‘It’s my grandmother, though. She wasn’t badly burnt, but –’

I take a deep breath, press my face against the side of the orange cubicle. It smells of metal, and the sweat from people’s fingers.

‘She was asking for my mother.’

‘Your mother …’ Sangeeta sucks in her breath. ‘So she doesn’t … she thinks … she’s forgotten she died?’

‘Yes,’ I say. It’s a little, tight word. It oughtn’t to be big enough for a sob.

‘Oh, Durga.’ Sangeeta’s voice is warm, hardly more than a whisper. I scrub at my forehead, push my hair back where it’s sticking against my mouth.

‘Anyway,’ I pull myself together, take a few sensible breaths. ‘My grandmother kept saying my mother was in the black areas.’

‘The where?’

‘The black areas. It’s what they called the villages that were evacuated during the Emergency, right after World War Two.’

‘Maybe she was evacuated in this emergency thing.’ Sangeeta sounds pleased, like she’s solved the puzzle. ‘Your grandmother might be remembering it.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘She lived with Ammuma. They weren’t evacuated, I know they weren’t.’

There’s a pause, and I add, ‘It wasn’t really evacuation anyway. The British locked all the villagers up in resettlement camps in case they were giving food to the Malaysian independence fighters.’

‘That’s horrible.’ Sangeeta, on her wipe-clean couch in Ontario, passes judgement. ‘I think I’d have preferred the war.’

‘Well, the Emergency was a war, really. We … they – Malaysia, I mean … was fighting the British for independence.’ We. They. She doesn’t notice the hesitation.

‘So why would she think your mother was in these black areas now?’

‘I don’t know! I mean – Amma’s dead. She isn’t anywhere.’

‘I know.’ Sangeeta’s voice is gentle. ‘Maybe you can ask your grandmother a bit more, when she wakes up?’

‘It isn’t that easy,’ I say slowly. ‘She doesn’t like talking about my mother, not usually. She just sort of … tells stories. All made up and exaggerated, like folk tales or something.’

I’m finding it hard to explain. In Canada, all that matters is facts: the who-what-why-when of everyday life.