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

kampong track’s overgrown and barely visible; nobody’s taken it for years. I used to know this way so well, and now it’s like seeing a familiar face turned shrunken and twisted. Ferns wrap themselves around my ankles, and spider webs plaster my face. I trip on a rattan spine, slashing my leg and landing in a mess of vines and springy little trees. Something blunders into my hair, then tugs itself free. There’s a rustle behind me: footsteps or hooves or claws. I swing the torch. There’s nothing there, or nothing I can see.

I gulp and push myself on. The shadows are on my heels. They’re licking out from behind me, swallowing my torch and I start to run. My feet slam through rotten logs and crusts of mud. Knee-high ferns that cling and soak my legs. Something’s following me, something’s padding in the echoes of my heartbeat. My torch swings wildly over trees and rocks, looming out of nowhere.

And then a sense of space. Not quite light, just not-blackness. It’s the edge of Mother Agnes’s village, by the great padang that stretches out with a sucking emptiness. I know where I am now. I used to sit here in the afternoons, those years after Peony died and I couldn’t face school. There’s a deeper blackness of shadow where a flame tree crooks over the grass. I can smell water too, and silt. The floods have been here, not long ago.

Mother Agnes’s house is twenty metres away. It’s a two-storey brick square, flat to the road and attached to the old school via an open walkway. Nothing frightening there, nothing but the memory of chalk and the gentle smell of childhood bullying. She keeps a scrubby little garden, with a hibiscus flattened under a pouring drainpipe.

There’s no light on in any of the windows and my torch flashes over a lion’s-head knocker on the door. It’s solid iron and resounds through the house as I let it drop. Echoes race along the street, thump their feet over the bench by the padang and trip each other up. But the house stays dark.

Nothing else stirs either. The cluster of houses by the crossroads is locked tight; no uncles smoking outside their houses, no aunties trying to soothe sleepless children behind netted windows. And then I realize: the floods. This village lies on a swamp plain, and the Jelai rises faster here than anywhere in Pahang. Everyone’s been evacuated, perhaps hours ago. All that’s left is the river, in a green glassy wall at the bottom of a jungle cut.

I turn right and walk down the side path. The school’s windows glint back at me and the attap roof tips its hat. Mother Agnes closed it up years ago when she stopped teaching, but those rooms are still crammed full of pigtailed ghosts. These days she uses the building for the left-behinds, as a drop-in centre or a safe place to sleep. The left-behinds are always looking for safety. They’re always dropping, one way or another.

I step over the brimming drain by the side of the walkway, turning towards Mother Agnes’s house. She always leaves her back door unlocked, even at night. Even during a flood evacuation. She’s proud of it, makes a point of telling Ammuma just how easy it is for one of the left-behinds to come for food, or the sort of help you can’t ask for in daylight. Ammuma disapproves, needless to say. She doesn’t hold with help at any time of day.

I push the door open and step forward into the laundry room. It’s black inside, and my eyes take a moment to adjust. The room echoes with dripping water and the sound of clothes stiffening as they dry. In the beam of my torch a cockroach rustles in the sink on its back in a centimetre of grey rinse-water. There’s no electricity, and I creep cautiously through the inner door to the study, my torch held high like a baton.

The study’s so empty and shabby that I recoil. There used to be a bow-legged almirah and a desk with an enviable glass-green lamp. All that’s gone now, replaced with a rickety table and a stack of old National Geographics; Indira Gandhi and Richard Nixon covered in silverfish droppings. It looks bare in here, like a slumhouse. Like poverty.

The walls are stacked with cardboard boxes, some of them taped down and others gaping. I peer into one: books, tins of food and coffee-jars and musty clothes perfuming the air with the memory of someone else’s skin. Donations for the left-behinds, and now I know where Mother Agnes’s money has gone. Above her desk there’s a list with doctors and bomohs, children’s specialists and lawyers who’ll work for free. They’d need to, I think, looking around the shabby room.

There’s a neat stack of papers fanned out on the spindly table, inviting me to pry. I sit down on the bare kitchen chair and shine my torch on the top sheet. As I’d guessed, it’s covered with lists for her left-behinds.

Siti, in Kampung Baha: dolls, toys. Sanitary pads.

Ali, in Kampung Baha: Toy cars. Picture-books, sweets.

Puan Hamza, in Kampung Tahan: milk powder, clothes, contraception.

TOOTHPASTE, in large letters at the top, then in smaller ones: will they use it? Poor Mrs Hamza; poor little Siti, half-grown with her dolls and sanitary pads. I wonder how many teeth they have between them.

At the edge of the desk there’s a book pushed down against the wall. It’s jammed as far into the corner as it can go, as though Mother Agnes tried to hide it in a rush before she evacuated. I work it free with guilty fingers. The pages crumple and tear, and then the book slips free. I look down, and nearly drop it. It’s her red exercise book.

This book is Mother Agnes herself, all her secrets and chats and whispered little privacies. I know she uses this when she tells Ammuma her secrets, her regrets, her lumps and worries of