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

– the froggish monster, the spidery drowned women – and then the prayer-room doorway darkens and I see Tom.

‘Durga?’ His lips are wet, and I can see the tiny shreds of dried skin clinging to them. There’s a scab of dried blood where he’s pulled some of the skin off, and he looks worried. Scared.

‘They paged me last night at the hospital, to admit Mary-Auntie. A cookery fire …’

‘No,’ I start to say, but he isn’t listening.

‘I went to the ward just now, and talked to Rao. He said it wasn’t a cookery fire. It was the fireworks.’

He stumbles forward into the prayer room, wrapping his arms around my shoulders. It feels clumsy, somewhere between a hug and a fall.

‘I promised you the market ones were good quality. I thought they were, honestly. I didn’t know, I thought – God, I might have killed you both.’

His throat pulses against my chin, involving me with the rhythm of his breath. I start to shake as I lean into him. Inside, I’m calm – a little still and cold, as though I’ve drunk ice-water in the dark – but that doesn’t seem to matter. There’s an ache where Tom’s body presses against mine, a thread being drawn from my stomach. I drop the photograph and it lands with a thud. Peony, face down on the floor.

‘I’m so sorry.’ His voice is muffled. This isn’t the kind of thing you say out loud, not if you’re Tom.

I should tell him it wasn’t his fireworks at all, which are still in the dining room where I left them. But I can’t get any words out. Tom huddles against me and there’s a catch in his breath. I hug him back, and he’s a swoop of muscle in my arms. Hips and shoulder blades and the softness of a stomach bulge hidden under his clothes. Perhaps he has changed, after all.

‘It isn’t your fault,’ I say, under my breath. This time, Peony adds.

He keeps whispering, breathing out guilt as he slips his hands along my collarbone and rubs his lips over mine. Exhaling all that guilt makes room for something else that envelops us as we lie on the floor of the prayer room, two forked and shaking curls with all our fat rolls and strange sprouting hairs on display. Two monsters, holding tighter and tighter and never letting go.

Mother Agnes once gave us a biology lesson. Ahead of her time, most probably; nuns didn’t approve of that kind of thing in the 1960s. But Mother Agnes was special. She was born without a tongue and brought up in a convent; it took more than a touch of disapproval to stop her. She’d drawn pictures on the board, I remember, chalk outlines of male and female bodies. It looks like a pitcher plant! Peony had giggled. I’m never getting married.

Which goes to show that at least one of us got things right.

Tom puts his clothes on again in a shamefaced rush, as though he hadn’t quite noticed they’d come off. He moves shyly, turning his back when he gets to the vest-and-socks stage. Something about him in the light from the prayer-room doorway reminds me of Deepak. Nothing obvious, nothing I could explain. Tom’s smooth where Deepak was rough. Tom’s paler, Tom has more hair, and Tom’s ribs are heavy and solid. Deepak was slender and Deepak was balding and Deepak managed, somehow, to look me in the eye as he told me he was married.

My eyes flicker to Tom’s bare wedding finger as he ties his shoelaces. Good shoes – nicer than Deepak used to wear – and that sharp suit on top of them too. His hair springs up, light brown and thick as sugar cane. I remember him combing it over his forehead when we were fifteen, schoolboy Tom trying to be John Lennon and only managing Ringo Starr. And the smell of him, the sweat, the salt-and-deodorant that’s on my skin, too.

I crouch to put on my underwear that lies puddled on the floor. He picks up a marigold fallen from one of the shrines and brushes it against my breast. It’s an oddly intimate, tender gesture and I shiver.

‘I’m going to wash,’ I tell him awkwardly. ‘Do you want to … to come?’ I don’t know why I ask. Deepak and I used to shower together, stripping naked under great cascades of scalding water in my hygienic Ontario bathroom. I don’t want that with Tom, or perhaps I do but it looks like I’m not going to be given the choice. He’s got his shoes on already, and he’s zipped and buttoned away.

‘I can’t stay long, actually,’ he says. ‘Maybe just a cup of coffee?’

We walk through into the darkened front room. In the gloom Tom takes my hand between both of his. It feels sweet: a teenage sort of gesture, although as a teenager he’d have done nothing of the sort. He was always far more interested in Peony. That thought makes me jumpy, overflowing with a silly kind of excitement that’s too young for me.

I want to be aloof and sarcastic, just like Peony was. I want to let him make the moves. But my clothes are crumpled, my hair’s in my eyes and he’s already made all the moves on offer, if the last hour’s anything to go by. Not your finest moment, I tell myself, but I feel a shudder of joy and wonder whether it just might have been.

‘I can’t believe it’s been fifteen years since we last saw each other,’ I say. ‘You don’t even know about –’ About Deepak, about Canada, about the way Peony’s smile flickers out at me from mirrors ‘– about anything!’

He laughs, then puts an arm around my shoulder. He has to stoop, since our heights don’t match any more. They always used to, I remember, and Peony was a scant centimetre shorter. She would have stayed short, I think spitefully. She would have had