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

beautiful. It doesn’t look real, all that silt suspended in the greenish water and the San casting a huge black shadow over it. There are shafts of sunlight tangled up with the ribbons of water-weed and one pale hand pressed against the closed rear window of the car. Peony.

I break through the surface, sobbing. I must have been screaming for a long time, because my chest feels flattened and dry inside. I can’t even take a breath at first. Tom’s come up, too, further out in the swamp. He’s clinging to one of the banyan roots.

‘Get my father,’ he gasps, and dives down again.

He’s going down to Peony, of course. He’ll dive and dive again as I clamber up the bank and stagger towards the path. ‘Dr Harcourt,’ I’ll whisper, while my breath gives out and I tumble to my knees over and over. The leper colony’s half a mile down the road, and by the time I reach it Tom will have dived a hundred times, a thousand times, and Peony’s hand will have peeled away from the window to lie limp in the brackish water. And though I don’t know it yet, I’ll always – even fifteen years later – be able to taste that pandan cake and a slick of Vaseline on my tongue.

15. Monday, 11 p.m.

I don’t sleep that night. Perhaps nobody does. Karthika stays overnight, folded in on herself in a corner with Rajneesh swaddled tight as a steamed bun. She won’t meet my eyes. Don’t worry, Karthika, I want to tell her. From now on you’re welcome to Tom, to top-doctor-lawyer Tom with his handsome suits and pale skin. It’s fifteen-year-old Tom I was after all along, it’s jackstones and first kisses, and love before other people got in the way.

At some point the rains get heavier. The drains are overflowing, Ammuma calls, and Karthika needs to clear them. So out Karthika goes into the blackness, wiping her nose on the back of her hand and with Rajneesh tied under her soaking blouse. I can see her bent double, slapping at the puddles with a palm-frond broom. She stops eventually; there’s no way anyone can clear those drains fast enough tonight. She leaves wet footprints as she squats in the dirtiest, dustiest corner of the verandah. Rajneesh babbles once or twice, then falls asleep neatly and quickly. Like his mother, he knows better than to take up much space.

Ammuma copes best out of all of us. She doesn’t even mention Tom; Karthika must have been too mealy mouthed to get her point across. Instead, she finds me a spare carrier bag to hold snacks for the drive to KL tomorrow. She reminds me how bad the traffic gets on the Gua Musang road, and she even finds a map and plots out different routes.

Around midnight she asks me to put some sleeping mats for her in the prayer room. It’s peaceful in there, amongst the flowers and coins and smell of incense that’s soaked into the walls. A little bit of glitter, a few old friends. Not much to ask for, when you look at it that way. I wonder who she sees at night when she first closes her eyes. Francesca? Me? Nobody, she’d say if I asked. Nothing, an empty space like the middle of a wedding ring or a life-preserver or a whirlpool. All these things are the same, according to mathematics.

I go upstairs and gather the sleeping mats together from where Rajneesh was sitting yesterday in the middle of Ammuma’s bedroom. The door to the box room’s firmly closed and the key’s gone, for the first time I can remember.

And then I slump in Ammuma’s rattan chair. I’m not ready to sleep and I’m secretly glad to hear Karthika’s smothered snores. Ammuma’s snoring too, but much less decorously. Like me, she’s used to sleeping by herself.

After an hour or so Ammuma’s snores start to turn to words. At first it sounds like she’s telling a bedtime story again – I hear tiger-princes in her snorts, and princesses in the silvery, delicate intakes of breath. But no. It’s not a bedtime story; it’s a warning. For me, for Karthika, for Peony; if it weren’t thirty years too late it’d be for my mother, too. Take care, you unwed girls, she warns. Take care, you streetwalkers and kampong brats and university lecturers: you’ll come to the stickiest of ends.

16. And One Princess Remains: 1934

It’s a shame nobody ever gave Cecelia that advice. Stay away from boys, stay away from temptation and danger and the lure of missed chances. But Cecelia wouldn’t have listened. She’s nineteen years old – plump and beaming, head of the matriculating class – when she turns up at the convent one evening in 1934. Mary’s sitting inside with Sister Gerta, their hair stirred by the fan. It’s that luminous and untrustworthy hour just before the rains, when the light’s in the air and not in the sky. The convent lies dim and quiet, with only a few hushed footfalls and the trembling glimmer of a hurricane lamp to show anyone’s there at all.

Mary’s been spending a lot of her time at the convent lately. She likes the clean, white orderliness of it all and she likes being wanted. She hasn’t converted to Christianity yet, and that means she still has an unsaved soul to offer. Sister Gerta licks her lips over that soul. More than once Mary’s woken from her narrow mosquito-netted convent bed to see Gerta sprinkling her with a basin of holy water, in case Mary’s dreaming of baptism. Mary wakes each morning at the convent in a damp and blessed bed but happier than she’s ever been before.

It’s a different story when she goes back home, though. Her mother’s now wholly