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

out of the window of his father’s Daimler while she walks to market with a fish basket over her arm.

‘Well, I’ve seen quite a lot of him,’ Cecelia says, gloating rather. ‘We’ve been … well, we’re thinking of …’

Cecelia hesitates. In fact, she isn’t sure what exactly Rajan’s been thinking of. The matter’s been weighing on Cecelia’s mind, waking her at three a.m. (as a durian falls in Mary’s compound, as a bomoh creeps along a jungle path, as Japanese soldiers in Manchuria begin to cast glances at the Malay peninsula). And Cecelia certainly has good reason for being nervous. If Rajan doesn’t start thinking of marriage soon, she could be in a very awkward position indeed.

‘You mean … you’re engaged?’ Mary feels bitterness welling into her mouth. So this is why Cecelia’s come to visit her. She hasn’t come to make up; she hasn’t come to be friends again or even to be enemies. She’s come to gloat.

‘He actually proposed to you?’

Mary looks at Cecelia carefully. Cecelia’s lying back on the hilly grass with her knees apart and her white-frocked stomach a little higher, a little rounder than Mary remembers. A little too full to be explained away.

‘Cecelia! You haven’t! You didn’t!’

It’s undeniable, though. Cecelia is pregnant. For a second Mary’s horrified – oh, poor Cecelia, she thinks in a moment of pure sympathy; what has she done?

‘It’s Rajan’s, of course,’ Cecelia says. ‘We’re getting married.’

That curdles Mary’s sympathy. And the worst of it is, she believes Cecelia. There’s a glow about her tonight, a radiant and blossoming beauty because she’s carrying her lover’s child. And that’s a problem – that’s a real problem – because Mary has always held out a forlorn hope that she herself might one day be Rajan’s wife. In the chill of the convent nights Mary’s imagined lying skin-to-skin with Rajan. She’s imagined kissing him, licking him; in her convent bed and her imagination Mary’s gone at least as far as Cecelia. She’s foreseen lust and love and strolls hand-in-hand under the bougainvillaea bushes.

Now, though, it seems all that will belong to Cecelia. In a hot, hurting moment Mary sees Rajan and Cecelia living in a luxury bungalow with a tribe of half-Indian, half-Chinese babies who look Malay and can therefore move in any world they want. She sees Rajan content at last, and Cecelia on his lap with a little cat-smile. And Mary sees herself, too, for ever making do with a cold convent cot and a family who’ve no time for her; making do with a mild-mannered future of compassion and good works.

‘You trollop, Cecelia! You dirty little whore!’ Mary’s good temper and good works, it’s clear, are going to have to wait.

Cecelia sets her small teeth. ‘Don’t be jealous,’ she answers. ‘You never loved him anyway. Not properly; not the way I do.’

She lays a palm on her stomach and strokes dreamily. It’s a clear enough message: Mary might have sailed over the floodwaters with Rajan once, but now Cecelia’s snagged him like a fishing net. Something about that gesture prises Mary open, sparking the tiniest, slightest flicker of her old bond with Cecelia. As the other girl pats her stomach, Mary feels something move inside her own. A wriggling little tadpole, fastened onto her liver and heart. Jatuh hati – falling liver – is what the Malays say for falling in love; and that’s exactly what Mary feels. A swooping, dizzying feeling, because Cecelia has the real thing – Rajan’s wriggling tadpole and liverish love – and Mary cannot stand that, cannot stand it at all.

‘You should be happy for me,’ Cecelia says with a provoking little smile. ‘We’re best friends.’

It’s those last words that decide Mary for good and all. Best friends don’t steal each other’s imaginary boyfriends and imaginary futures, no matter how much in love they are. Best friends are supporting characters, not heroines of another story.

‘I’ll show you,’ Mary bursts out, and then she’s gone, sprinting down the hill road in her outgrown lace-up shoes. She’s racing past the convent, she’s running past the scatter of houses washed halfway up the hillside. And before Cecelia can even puff herself upright, Mary’s down on the main road and heading to the night market.

When Mary reaches the night market she stops, breathing hard. Half of Lipis is in there, selling goats and meat and fruit and fireworks to the other half. News and scandal fly about in the brightly lit walkways, with every transaction being accompanied by its own morsel of gossip. Market ladies chatter over washing-up pans behind cook stalls, and jewellery makers stoop over fragments of metal to swap rumours with mining magnates. The noise is deafening, and from where she stands panting out here in the dark Mary can feel the wind of all those words.

And young Mary knows the power of words. She sets her teeth and tucks her hair neatly behind her ears. Stopping only to polish her shoes on the back of her grubby socks, she steps in through the market door and leans over a stall to whisper delicately in the ear of one of the market ladies.

‘Cecelia Lim’s going to have a baby,’ she murmurs, ‘and she says the father could be anybody. Just anybody.’

She hears the market lady’s puff of surprise at being given this secret, this chewy and tender morsel of gossip. And then Mary takes a prim pace forward and stretches up to hiss the same thing to a group of Tamil rubber workers, who spit secrets as fast as betel-nut juice. She can hear fresh whisperings start behind her, swelled by the clicking of tongues. By the time Mary’s walked all the way through the market, Cecelia’s reputation will be in tatters. Cecelia will be condemned as reckless – her second baby, isn’t it; I heard it was her third and a different father for all of ’em – and dismissed as a hussy who’s got what’s coming to her.

‘What a bad wife she’ll make,’ Mary