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

hell he thought he meant by that, but I’d know. He’d mean Alice doesn’t matter, and I don’t and even Karthika and her baby don’t. We’re not fifteen any more, we’re not bright-eyed and tangle-haired and burnished up by Tom’s unreliable mind. We’re grown-up now and turning into our own grandmothers. We’re washed-up and ended-up, and none of us is Peony.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say instead. ‘I shouldn’t have left Ammuma.’

He leans closer and puts an arm around my shoulder. He feels very hot and there’s a stickiness to his hands, as though he hasn’t rinsed the soap off. He’s had those hands in people’s bodies, I think, pulling out organs and stitching their hides back together again. A wave of dizziness passes and I taste coffee sugar mixed with bile.

‘Come on, Durga, we’ll go up and see her. She’ll be on the ward by now.’

He pushes his chair back and takes me through the swinging double-doors and up the metal staircase behind. On the third floor a blue sign reads ‘Short Term and Emergency’. There’s a corridor leading off it, with more chairs and a few nurses chatting. Tom pushes the first door open and stands there with a practised-in-the-mirror smile, just like a doctor should.

‘Mary-Auntie,’ he says. ‘Mrs Selva.’

There are only two beds in here. Ammuma’s nearest, with pale blue curtains drawn half-round. Mrs Selva must be the woman by the window. She’s propped on wedge-shaped pillows and attached to machines by a tangle of tubes. Rows of faded Christmas cards stand on her bedside table, some so old I can barely make out the design. She stares at me, her eyes newly hatched and tender, then looks away.

‘Ammuma?’

Ammuma’s in a white hospital gown again, and the fabric smothers her. She still looks so much smaller than her size. She looks like a patient, or an invalid. She looks like Mrs Selva.

‘Ar, Durga.’ She sounds weak and breathy. ‘Wait already for hours for you.’

There’s a rap at the open door and a nurse puts her head round. ‘Dr Harcourt, you’re wanted on Ward Nine.’

Ammuma narrows her eyes. ‘Aiyoh, no privacy in here.’ She doesn’t think much of Ward Nine, or their wantings either. ‘People walking in-out, cannot be sitting with my granddaughter without fuss.’

The nurse flushes and Tom gives her a quick, apologetic glance. I don’t care. I’d take every single nurse flouncing away in disgust, if that’d mean Ammuma was back to her old self.

‘I’ll just be outside,’ he says. ‘Call me – either of you – if anything happens.’

When he’s gone I sit down heavily on the bed. The dawn light filters through the window, giving everything a cigarette-ash haze. Ammuma watches me in a companionable silence.

‘Ammuma …’ and then I burst out – ‘I lost Amma’s plait.’

I don’t know where that came from. There are a hundred other things I’d meant to say – practical, logical things – but here in this milky morning light I’ve forgotten them all.

‘I went to Mother Agnes’s house and I dropped it there or in the car park, or …’

I’m shaking, and I can’t stop the words spilling out. Why now, I don’t know: now when she’s safely in hospital and the worst is surely over. Don’t be stupid, Dr Panikkar would say. Pull yourself together, she’d add, as if that was all it took.

‘You went to Agnes’s house?’ Ammuma asks. She doesn’t sound angry, just curious. Her arm snakes out from under the heap of her too-large hospital gown and she takes my hand.

‘I wanted to ask about Francesca and the San. I didn’t know you were choking. I thought …’

She clucks her tongue. ‘Oh, Durga,’ she says. ‘All this mathematics, isn’t it? Always wanting for it to be right, instead of true.’

She sits there quietly then, breathing slowly. There’s a hum from the machines hooked up to Mrs Selva. The three of us are silent, listening to that hum and the squeak of sturdy shoes in the corridor outside. It’s enough, in a way.

After a second Ammuma stretches up, and I feel her stroking my hair. She combs her nails through it, tugging the knots as carefully as she did when I was small. I close my eyes and feel her palm run like water down the length of it. The air’s cool on my scalp as she divides the hair into three sections.

‘And when the sun came up,’ she says in a low, soothing voice, ‘they knew that they were safe.’

‘You used to tell me that story, didn’t you? Almost every bedtime.’

I remember the smell of Nivea, the sound of Flit and the shutters being closed, the dim hallway light blurring through my mosquito net. I twist round to see her, but she puts her palm flat on my shoulder and gently pushes me straight again. She’s known that story for sixty years, her little push says – long before Nivea and Flit and hallway lights – long before she was anybody’s Ammuma at all. Back when she was Mary. Plain Mary, thirty-two years old, with a nine-year-old daughter and not much else to show for it.

26. The Princess Returns: 1947

‘And when the sun came up, they knew they were safe.’

Mary finishes with a flourish and a sigh of relief. These days she has to do the best she can with the tiger-prince’s growls, snorting them from the back of her throat. With half her teeth gone she doesn’t have much of a choice.

‘No! No!’ Francesca screams.

Mary doesn’t mind her daughter’s temper; after two years in a Kempetai prison she never even expected to find Francesca again. Mary was one of the last to be released, weeks after the Japanese surrendered. She fought, she wore her fingernails down in scraping at her cell wall and her tongue down in screaming. And that got her nowhere at all, so she cultivated patience and politeness instead. She told herself they’d be fair.