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

He thumbs the corner of the last page. After a few seconds the edge curls, then suddenly springs apart. It’s two pages there, thin as rice-paper and glued together. Tom works his finger between them carefully and rips upwards.

‘Here. Careful, in case it sticks back together again.’ He turns the book to show me.

There’s a procession of tiny figures spilling over those hidden pages. All in pencil and all beautifully drawn. There’s a prince, with a mouthful of teeth like knives and tiger stripes running down his sides. A princess, leaping past him with a sword clutched between two of her many arms. Tom moves his thumb then and there’s a city, all houses and windows and froggish monsters springing from the sagging spine. Of course there is, because this is my bedtime story – this is Ammuma’s story – and what you see is never all you get.

‘It’s only pictures, Durga. Mary-Auntie must have drawn them before she took it out there.’ His voice sounds concerned. Warmer than it was before, as though I’m Durga again and not just a problem on two legs. Or on no legs at all; I’ve sat down heavily on one of the padded green chairs in the corridor and I can’t stand up. My bones feel chilled, hips and knees weak as fractured glass.

Tom brings me a cup of water from the nurses’ station, a chilled pointy cone of paper that starts dripping straight away. The bobbed-haired nurse avoids my eyes. They’re used to devastation in these corridors. They’re used to bad news and worse outlooks, and paper cups of water being handed round.

‘But why? She used to tell me this story, when I was small. She used to tell it to my mother, too. Why would she glue it …?’

He shrugs. I don’t blame him. To anyone else, it’s just a story. It’s a fairy tale, a fable with its own happy ending and not even a whiff of what-happens-next. But that’s wrong, because there’s always a what-happens-next, and a what-happened-before. The what-happened-before is Anil and Francesca, alive and dead and something in between. What-happened-before is a left-behind girl or a vanished best friend. It’s tiger-princes and monsters. What-happened-before spreads like leprosy, with Ammuma as patient zero.

‘Look.’ Tom’s taking the cup from my hands. He drops it in a bin and grips my shoulders.

‘Look, I know you’re exhausted. I know you’re tired. But it’s just a story,’ he says patiently. ‘Maybe she was telling it to one of the left-behinds.’

‘Let me ask her,’ I say stubbornly. ‘I want to know what’s going on. I want to know.’

He doesn’t stop me as I stand up. He lets me go, slumped on the chair with a few inches of tired sock showing. I wrench the door to Ammuma’s room open.

‘Ammuma?’

One of the nurses gives me a look. She pulls Mrs Selva’s curtains around with a quick tug, so all I can make out are shapes moving behind the material, backlit by the window.

Ammuma’s lying flat on her pillows with her arms by her sides. I put the book down gently on her flattened chest and her gaze sharpens. She tenses. There’s a creak of bedsprings and secrets in the air.

‘Ammuma? Did you draw these?’

She turns the pages over, propped up on her elbows. No sign she recognizes anything, from the inscription to the pastel angels. And then she sees the pictures.

She stops. For a heartbeat, nothing else moves. Somewhere a long way away Mrs Selva’s coughing. The nurses are twittering, graceful as birds and Tom’s in the corridor and the bobbed-haired girl is pouring a dosage into a measured cup and wishing her shift was over. Everyone, everywhere else, getting on with their lives.

And then Ammuma swallows.

‘How did you find this?’ Her voice is quiet, and she gobbles slightly. Her words are stripped down, all the ornaments of Malay and Tamil withered into cut-glass vowels.

‘Tom found the book in his car. He said you dropped it there,’ I say.

‘No.’ Ammuma doesn’t even look up. ‘I left it in Kampung Ulu,’ she says. Simple. Certain as two multiply five and five multiply two. Certain as a proof. She’d swear to it, with all the bad language she can summon up.

‘But you drew the pictures? The tiger-prince and the princess, like you used to tell me?’

Ammuma looks up then, her eyes limpid and alert as though everything’s just fallen into place. She doesn’t look old any more. She doesn’t look like a patient, or an invalid or anyone but herself.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Francesca did.’

28. A Princess For Ever: 1985

Francesca did. It’s taken Mary seventy years of listening to finally get her say, and now she’s going to clear things up. Speak for herself, for once.

‘Taking liberties,’ she mutters to herself as the car bounces over a pothole. ‘Everyone prying into things these days.’

She pushes her teeth out with a clack. Tom looks up from the driver’s seat next to her.

‘What’s wrong, Mary-Auntie?’

‘Nothing, nothing. You watch the road, ar. No point getting us crashed already.’

Tom slows down obediently. She’s looking forward to seeing the left-behinds, he thinks. It’s a wholesome, tolerant thought and it’s wrong, as wholesome thoughts often are. He drops a gear, waits as a lorry trundles across the road between two palm plantations. He hates this drive to Kampung Ulu – always has done, he thinks, forgetting it was once a treat. He can smell smoke from one of the new processing plants, and burning rubber from deep in the plantation. In fact, Tom thinks, the whole place reeks of a lack of soap and a lack of civilization.

Mary rolls her eyes. She’s a shameless eavesdropper, listening at doors and listening to hearts. Tom’s thoughts are as clear to her as pebbles in shallow water, and she doesn’t think much of them. ‘Civilization,’