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

I swallow. ‘Yes … yes, he knows. He does know.’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t let you up.’ Her smile’s less personal now. I’m becoming a problem. ‘If you take a seat, though, I can get you something to drink. Tea, coffee, biscuits?’

She sounds practised, as though she’s seen all this before. Perhaps she has. Other overdressed girls, left on her hands to console with tea and cake.

‘No, no, it doesn’t matter. I just popped in,’ I tell her. My face is hot and when I give her a smile my mouth feels large and numb. ‘On the off-chance.’

She looks relieved, and now my lips and cheeks hurt but I keep on smiling. I hold my head up and walk back to the car in my stupid, pinching shoes. I can see the nurses’ hostel, with washing draped over the balconies and steam rising from rice pots inside. Schoolboys are playing cricket out on the soaking fields and a few motorcycles whine past on the trunk road.

I should have known. I shouldn’t have got my hopes up. It’s not like me to mind so much. I’m a girl for solutions, for logic and making the best of things. Or perhaps I’m not. Perhaps now I’m back in Malaysia I’m going to turn out a different sort of woman altogether, the kind to wear jewels and silks and end up drowning in my own disappointment. How nice to have the choice.

After a few minutes I open the car door and tie my hair back with a scrunchie from the glove compartment. Scrub my face with my fingertips, smearing my eyeshadow, but there’s nobody to care. I try out another big, bright smile, and then clip smartly across the car park and back to the reception desk.

‘Oh – yes?’ The nurse is still friendly, but with a slick of steel underneath. She’s got rid of me once already.

‘I’m collecting my grandmother today, too’ I tell her. See, I have legitimate business. I belong. Mary Panikkar, I tell her, to be collected by Dr Durga Panikkar and the nurse’s face clears. She’s just opened her file when a voice comes from behind.

‘Aiyoh, Durga, waiting the whole day already.’

I jump. Ammuma’s in the cubicle behind the nurse’s desk, concealed by a curtain. I wonder how long she’s been there, if she heard me ask for Tom and get turned down. She’s wearing a fresh sari made of white cotton and her hands are bandaged over the worst of her burns. On the chair next to her there’s a polished cylinder with a mouthpiece. The mouthpiece has straps to hold it in place and a transparent container for storage.

‘It’s an oxygen cylinder. To help her breathe.’

Dr Rao pulls the curtain aside and ushers Ammuma out into the lobby. He looks even more tired than before, as though he’s hanging off his own shoulder blades. He puts a hand on her arm as he tells me how to help her change the bandages. Ammuma snorts. After her time in hospital, the look on her face implies, she could perform her own tracheotomy.

‘Dr Panikkar, if she …’ Dr Rao pauses, turning away from Ammuma and lowering his voice.

‘If she has trouble breathing, call the hospital straight away. Or if’ – his eyes drop to her old burn scar, visible above the bandages – ‘if she’s confused. If she starts talking about her daughter again, or hurting herself …’

‘Enough, so much whisper-whisper! All the same, you boys and girls, always thinking everyone’s wanting to hear.’ Ammuma glares at us both.

As soon as Dr Rao’s out of earshot she scolds me for parking in the sun. ‘With your complexion, Durga. No taking chances.’

I help her across the car park and she levers herself into the passenger seat. Her shrunken hips nestle amongst a litter of paper and dried-up pens.

‘Clever, that Dr Rao boy,’ Ammuma says as we pull out onto the trunk road. ‘Efficient with discharge,’ she says knowledgeably, rolling the word over her tongue. She likes a bit of fuss, likes the paper-and-red-tape importance of being a patient.

I don’t reply. I’m thinking about what Dr Rao said, if only because that means I’m not thinking about Tom. If she starts talking about her daughter. I look across at Ammuma, so small in the passenger seat.

‘Ammuma,’ I start. ‘When I was looking in the almirah I found something. A book.’

‘Arre, books only with you. All this university –’

‘No, an autograph book, Ammuma. It had Amma’s name in it. Francesca Panikkar.’

Silence. Ammuma’s staring through the windscreen with as much concentration as if she were driving herself.

‘With an address. In Kampung Ulu.’ She doesn’t look up.

‘Did you take her there sometimes, Ammuma? Is it … was it somewhere special? You never talk about – and I thought we could –’

‘Enough of thought,’ she snaps, so suddenly that I jump and miss a gear change. She’s turned in her seat, glaring at me and on the attack.

‘Why are you dressed all fancy-fancy? Think this is an outing, is it?’

‘No, I … I …’ Her anger’s come out of nowhere and I’m not thinking straight. ‘I was going to see someone.’

‘Hah! Yes, I heard it. You asking for Tom, running after him like some girl on the street.’

‘I wasn’t! I mean – he invited me. He asked me to come and so I was –’

‘Asked you?’ she interrupts. ‘When is it he’s asking you to do anything?’

‘He came to the house on Friday,’ I start to explain, ‘after you were admitted, and –’

Ammuma cuts me off again. ‘Coming to the house, is it? Talking, inviting, and you let him stay alone with you?’

‘No, Ammuma, he was just visiting …’ I tail off; that’s exactly what Karthika said. Visiting, staying with, involving himself. A picture comes into my mind: Tom twined with me on the prayer-room floor.

‘And now you’re dressing like a showgirl, waiting to catch a glimpse of him. Spitting into the skies, Durga, always you