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

‘In my bedroom? What, my bedroom here?’

A stupid question. He doesn’t look at me and turns to the sink instead. He turns the tap on, waiting for the choke of air and water to pulse its way through.

‘Why would you do that? What for?’

He leans towards me. ‘So she doesn’t get forgotten.’ He sounds suddenly intense. ‘She matters, Durga. Peony matters.’

I can feel the increase in heat, feel the skin on my arm prickle as the hairs rise to meet him. Water trickles off his arm and lands, blood-heat, on the back of my hand.

‘She died because of us,’ he says. ‘Because of our stupid game. It’s our fault.’

‘Tom, I feel the same, honestly –’

‘No, you don’t! You ran off to Canada for ten years and you couldn’t be bothered to come back till now. You forgot all about her.’

‘I didn’t!’

He’s wrong, I want to tell him, wrong in every possible way. I stayed here for three years after Peony died, and every single day she was there in the stink of the swamp and the shadowed evenings. When I first went to Canada her face showed up in every snowfall and now I’m back here in Pahang she’s lurking behind my bedroom mirror.

‘I remember her all the time, Tom. You can’t just assume –’

He shakes his head. ‘Mary-Auntie’s the same. When I mention Peony she just folds her lips tight – yes, exactly the same way you’re doing now. Acting like she wasn’t important.’

Which, coming from Tom, is certainly something. It wasn’t me, after all, who ran away back to England immediately after the inquest. Who got to start all over again a thousand miles away without anyone whispering ‘That’s her!’ in school.

‘Who said you know anything about how I feel?’ I burst out. ‘How dare you turn up here and try to be some sort of big-man boss when … when – you haven’t even seen me for fifteen years!’

‘Durga, I –’

‘You always think everything needs to be dragged out and talked about! You always want to be the one in charge!’

Who died and made you God? Peony asks. Oh wait, she says, I know this one.

Tom tries to calm me down, but it just makes things worse. I tell him that’s not how things work here, and push his arms away. Just because we don’t talk about something doesn’t mean it’s been forgotten, I insist. So why doesn’t he just fuck off – go on, Tom, just leave – and go and be pretentious and self-absorbed with someone who can be bothered to listen.

‘I thought you just said I shouldn’t talk so much?’ There’s such an infuriating expression in his bright blue eyes that for a second I could nearly slap him. My hand’s raised – in another life, in my ordered, sweet-talking Canadian life I wouldn’t be able to believe myself – and then the compound bell rings.

We stop, rooted to the spot. After a few seconds it rings again, with a cheery ding-DING-ding-DING-DING. I drop my hand and we look away, both of us rearranging foolish faces.

‘It’s Mother Agnes,’ I say.

I recognize her ring. She visits Ammuma a few times each week and since I’ve been back she’s come here every day. She used to be our schoolteacher – born without a tongue but with plenty of opinions, Ammuma said, to make up for it. She stopped teaching a few years ago, and these days she looks as out of place as I feel.

I look over at Tom. Perhaps it’s exhaustion or the throbbing ache in my head, but even the slight tucks of his chin seem beautiful to me. Skin like a fish, they say here about Europeans, but those creases below his neck look entrancing. Suddenly, I can’t catch my breath.

‘I’ll leave,’ he says. ‘I’ll let you talk to Agnes.’

Our fight’s left me on edge. I’m trembling, with his sweat still on my skin where he held my arm. The lemon-sourness of it makes me want to lick at my own wrists, or bite at his.

‘You don’t need to go,’ I say quickly. ‘She’s been here every day, she’s just collecting donations for her left-behinds. She won’t stay long.’

Mother Agnes took up charity a few years ago, after she left teaching. She works with the left-behinds, as Ammuma calls them. They’re women who slipped through the cracks after the war and the Emergency, who live with their straggling families on the outskirts of the jungle near Lipis. They’ve no schooling, no future, and they’re all – according to Ammuma – as bad as each other.

The bell rings again – ding-DING – and Tom steps back from the kitchen window, as though he doesn’t quite want to be seen.

‘Go on,’ he says, giving me a little push towards the door. ‘Agnes will want to ask about the fire anyway. And if she sees us together she’ll only gossip, you know that.’

‘What do you mean? Stop pushing me.’ My head’s starting to pound. I’m realizing how tired I am still. I could sleep for weeks. For months, for long enough for my hair and teeth to grow till they swallow me whole. Till I turn into one of Ammuma’s froggish monsters, right here on the kitchen floor.

‘Are you worried about being seen with me, is that it?’ I ask.

Just like when we were twelve, I want to say, and you carved Peony’s name on the outside of the desk and mine on the inside. Just like when you kissed her and not me on the first day of school, just like you always copied off her maths tests and not mine even though she got all her fractions wrong. I rub my eyes, pressing huge white circles into the blackness behind them.

‘Of course not,’ he says heartily. ‘I want to see you again. But not here, though,’ he adds. ‘Somewhere private.’

There’s an unpleasant, used-twice-over ring to that. Deepak used to say it too. I put that thought away, lock it up tight