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

are plucked into pencil-thin lines. She heaves to her feet as I climb the stairs, bringing me into a powdered hug that smells of perfume and ink. Mother Agnes moves like a much larger woman, always leaving room for extra flesh.

‘What is it, Durga? All this coming-going, forgetting something is it?’ Ammuma leans forward. She looks more animated than she did this morning, her eyes bright with secrets.

‘All the roads are closed,’ I say. ‘Floods, out by Gua Musang.’

Mother Agnes turns to Ammuma with a triumphant look. She scribbles another line in her blue exercise book.

I told you, Mary. They have us on evacuation alert in my village.

Ammuma clicks her teeth impatiently. ‘Your village is in a swamp. Shouldn’t have built there to begin with.’

Ammuma drops her slurs when she talks to Agnes, those lahs and arres that pepper her speech normally. Agnes is, after all, a schoolteacher and mustn’t give herself airs.

‘You ring your job.’ She turns to me. ‘Tell them what-all is happened.’

My stomach tightens. When I was at Tom’s house I’d forgotten about work. But now Anwar looms at the other end of the phone line, a gathering thundercloud garnished with a scrap of white handkerchief.

The phone lines may be down, Mother Agnes writes. She scrawls her letters larger than normal, breathing sympathy from every pen stroke.

I bite at one of my nails. ‘They can’t be, surely. Not already.’

Ammuma’s voice follows me as I walk quickly through the front room, dropping Tom’s rucksack by the hall phone. ‘Don’t be foolish, Agnes. Worrying the child.’

But when I pick the receiver up there’s nothing but silence. Not even static, or the clicking of a connection trying to be made. I put the phone down and scrub at my face with my fingertips. Nothing to be done. In a few hours Anwar will be standing in the office doorway staring at my empty chair, disapproval breaking like waves on the rock of his nose.

I turn away, feeling my headache tighten. The kitchen radio’s on, which means Ammuma’s sent Karthika home.

‘… urgent evacuation will be arranged.’ The radio announcer sounds unflurried, all soft-serve voice and rounded vowels. ‘Residents of Pahang should keep alert for flood updates.’

‘Ammuma!’ I scramble back to the verandah. ‘Ammuma, did you hear? The radio was saying we might be evacuated.’

She snorts, dropping her dignity for a palate-cleansing, phlegmy distaste. ‘Only down Raub, it is,’ she says. What else can you expect? she implies.

Be patient, Durga, Mother Agnes agrees. Out here nobody takes disasters that seriously. Floods, storms, race riots: when Canada would be in flames, Pahang barely looks up from its dinner.

‘Remember the last time, ar. Not doing that again.’

Ammuma’s smile is humourless. She was last evacuated in 1971, when the government set up tents after the huge Pahang floods. Better off at home, Ammuma decided after two days, and demanded the use of a rescue dinghy instead. They’d let her, too; Ammuma outside being less trouble than Ammuma in.

‘Durga, you stay here tonight,’ Ammuma says. ‘No point coming-going like this,’ she adds. ‘Tomorrow all the roads will open, isn’t it?’

She looks tired, Mother Agnes scribbles.

‘Sleeping in a chair only last night,’ Ammuma says self-righteously. ‘Dark circles on her eyes now.’

Mother Agnes looks up at me with a sympathetic smile and pushes one of the postcards across the table.

Read this, Durga, she writes in her red exercise book, trying to cheer me up. This girl’s gone to the bad and no mistake.

That red book bulges with gossip and scraps of paper. She pushes it back inside the straining waist of her skin-tight sarong kebaya. The more rumours she swaps the fatter it gets, tight against her waistband, and soon she’s going to have to change her tailor or let her girls go to the bad without anyone knowing at all.

‘No need for Durga to see all that.’ Ammuma slaps her hand down on the postcard and gives Mother Agnes a warning look. She flicks the postcard back across the table, humping her shoulders so I can’t see.

‘All this nonsense, and on the back of a postcard too,’ she mutters. ‘No morals, these left-behinds of yours.’

I slip out through the front room and into the dining room, where I unlatch the almirah door. I pull out Tom’s bag of fireworks from where it nestles on the top shelf. It feels like a hundred years ago that I put it there. Ammuma’s voice rattles on from the verandah, and I walk slowly back through the hall to where I dropped his rucksack. There’s an ache deep inside me, a tearless and gulping ache as I gather all I have of Tom into my two hands.

Upstairs the bedrooms still stink of smoke. Karthika aired everything out, but the odour still seeps in from the locked side wings. I sit cross-legged on my bare mattress with my feet leaving dirty marks. Everything’s quiet, and the radio’s chatter drifts up from below.

I unzip the rucksack slowly, imagining Alice’s capable fingers zipping and folding and clicking things shut. Inside there’s an empty crocodile file and a dirty lunchbox. Nothing here except the gone-and-forgotten sniff of reheated noodles. No wedding ring, for example. No family photos, no declarations of undying love for Alice or Peony or Karthika. None for me, come to that.

I touch the fireworks packets, jumbled into their bright market-bag. He must have gone to some effort, I realize for the first time; he must have made a special trip. That thought brings back the ache, and so I pick up the autograph book instead. It’s tucked into the very top of the bag, and I leaf through it to that front page again.

Francesca Panikkar,

Kampung Ulu, Pahang

Malaysia, Earth, THE WORLD

Kampung Ulu. Alice had talked about it too; she’d said Tom was taking Ammuma there. I frown, tracing the letters with my finger. They remind me of something, a long-ago something from when I was tiny. Francesca’s old books that Ammuma used to keep in the Amma-tin.

I get to my feet very quietly.