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

out. ‘You’ve never fought, you don’t care about independence or anything, but they do! They’re brave, and strong and kind, and …’

They is rapidly slipping into he. The women in my family are like that, full of murky female proclivities. They’re swayed more by the turn of a man’s jaw than the turn of his mind. Mary remembers her own youth, and feels a pang of sympathy for her daughter.

‘Is there a boy, then?’ she asks gently. ‘One of the bandits?’

Francesca sniffs, crunching the wet end of her regrown plait between her teeth, and refuses to answer. If there is a boy – a Communist rebel with wild black eyes and a body like copper wire – then she’s certainly not going to tell her mother. In this version of the story Francesca isn’t tractable; she’ll have nothing to do with those nervous and rashy Georges in her class. She’s on her guard against traps, this Francesca, she’s not going to be snared with weddings and babies. Counter-argument, she inscribes neatly into her calculus book.

And it’s rather a shame she wasn’t on her guard against anything else, because a few months later – after many gifts of rice and other, less quantifiable things – Francesca is still on the verandah doing calculus homework. But now the problems are harder, the proofs don’t come out so easily and she can barely see her pencil over the bulge in her tight-waisted blue pinafore.

Beside her Mary shells the hard-boiled eggs for dinner, her lips tight and her fingers tearing off those protective cocoons. The smell turns Francesca’s stomach and sets up a queasy, rushing feeling inside her belly. Her own baby is being unshelled, beginning a long journey to an apartment in KL and a thousand regrets, and there’s nothing Francesca can do about it.

Durga’s Tale: The Conclusion

A few weeks before the birth Francesca will go into hiding in the jungle, since a squalling scrap of an infant is incontrovertible proof of consorting with someone. The British soldiers, by then, will have become frantic. They’re seizing hearts and minds, they tell each other, and they keep right on incarcerating the bodies that hold them. Francesca, at risk of being hanged for fraternizing with rebels, will retreat into the rattan spines. She’ll lurk there with her copper wire of a Communist boyfriend and the half-drowned women he’s dragged along to cook and clean. She’ll follow him, her three-star lover, into the jungle near Kampung Ulu. She’ll learn to set off bombs and fire guns and then one day she’ll be captured by the British and imprisoned in the San with all the other fallen girls. She’ll give birth in a room that stinks of blood and piss, and then she’ll catch childbed fever and die in her sleep, leaving Mary with nothing but an ungrateful baby and a basket of eggs for shelling. (QED, Mary. QED.)

There are alternatives, of course, other stories that would work just as well. In one, Francesca consorts with a British soldier, old enough and pale enough to be her own grandfather. In another the only clue is the oily footprint of an orang minyak jungle spirit outside Francesca’s bedroom and the hallucinations that send her to the San. Stories on stories, and my mother walks through them with a smile and a blue school pinafore. She sheds her virtue at every dainty step. Here she is, creeping into the attic to make love or get herself raped. There she is, strolling amongst half-starved guinea fowl who swallow sand and lay eggs that are nothing but shell.

We don’t do well across generations, the women in my family. Someone’s feelings are always being hurt, toes are being stepped on and home truths are being told. There’s enough pity in those truths to go around too, which doesn’t mean it always will.

25. Wednesday, 1 a.m.

It’s late by the time I get back. Midnight’s slipped past, with its witching-hour devilment and without me even noticing. My legs itch from pitul seeds and the autograph book bumps against my thigh. When I reach the verandah steps, I stop. There’s a sound I can’t place. A harsh, sawing kind of noise that stops, then starts again and builds up to a cut-off rasp.

‘Ammuma?’

She’s still in her chair where I left her, but she’s tilted. Lopsided, as though she climbed out and couldn’t resettle herself. One of the hurricane lamps has been lit, with the wick turned low. Was she looking for me? Her skin’s washed jaundice-yellow in the lamplight, but I can see a blue tinge to her lips. She coughs, and a thread of blood dribbles down her whiskered chin.

‘Ammuma!’

I shake her. She doesn’t move, even when I shout into her face. She crumples again as I tug her upright. There’s a feeble trickle of air from her mask. I shove my fingers under the rim, but it’s blocked again. Blood coats the inside of the rubber, slimy and stinking. She’s champing steadily, chewing on the inside of her mouth, shredding her cheeks and I’m panicking. Pulling at the mask. Slapping the oxygen tank. My fingers are shaking, trying to unravel the tubing.

‘Durga. Gone already, isn’t it?’ The words strain through a sieve of tissue and used-up breath. ‘Woke up. You were gone.’

The tubing won’t unblock. The mask’s half-torn and slippery with clots. I shouldn’t ever have left her. She’s going to drown in her own blood, and all because I left her.

‘We have to go. Ammuma, come on. We’re going to the hospital.’

For once, she doesn’t protest. Her face is all rims and shadows, white around her nostrils. I heave her from the chair and her legs give way. I catch her, but the oxygen tank slams into the concrete. I jam my hands into her armpits and haul. She chokes, leaning over with her palms on her knees, then summons some air