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

I open the car door and a puff of hot air escapes. There’s no other traffic as I back out of the car park and it only takes a few minutes before I’m at the big roundabout outside Lipis. A motorbike idles by the verge, propped up on its stand. The rider’s sitting cross-legged on the grass, eating noodles from a Styrofoam container. I look left. Look right. Check my rear-view mirror and see the hospital. A nasty trick, sneaking up behind me like that. Could give a girl a burst heart.

Back on the verge, the motorcyclist looks up in mild surprise. He breaks his journey here every day, and he’s never seen a car turn left at that roundabout before. The left-hand road doesn’t even go anywhere, just out to a swamp in Kampung Ulu where the black areas used to be. It’s not safe for a woman on her own, but by now the car’s nearly out of sight. The motorcyclist shakes his head. You can’t tell these girls anything.

The air gets cooler as I drive. The hills are full of wrung-out mist, and I can see flood damage down in the valleys. Water’s bitten away the riverbanks and combed tangled lengths of weed over the rocks. Other rivers flood tidily, retreating with no more than a bathwater ring to show where they’ve been. Not the Jelai, though. It upends, then drags itself away like a cat that’s been sick.

I pass a few plantations, and a police station with skinny caramel-coloured dogs lurking alongside. There are roadside stalls, which I don’t remember from ten years ago, selling king durians and mangoes and bunches of rambutans. My left leg starts to ache from the clutch, but I don’t stop. This is a journey, after all. A few bruises might be expected.

After half an hour I see a blue sign, faded from wind and rain. Kampung Ulu, it reads. There’s an iron lamp-post with a broken bulb, and a bus shelter just beyond. You’d have to wait a long time out here for one to come along. A lifetime, give or take.

I slow down and turn left onto a narrow track. The road feels spongy under my tyres and I start to see slicks of water amongst the trees. The swamp isn’t far away now. I’ve never approached it from this side before, and the top of the burnt-out San gives me a shock when it appears. There’s barbed wire everywhere. It’s rusted and toothy, hissing keep out with every twist and stab.

I can feel sweat springing under my arms as I open the car door. The swamp’s waiting for me, just a few scrubby trees away. I wonder if Tom parked here while Ammuma trudged away with her gifts. I wonder if he sat waiting, knees curled to his chest and Peony wedged under his ribs. I smell rotting weeds and muddy water, hear the sound of hot metal as the car cools down.

I walk to the edge and stare across at the banyan tree. Oily starbursts of mosquitoes rise from the water but nothing else moves. The swamp looks flat, unbothered, as though it could easily wait another fifteen years for me to get to grips with it. You’re wasting your time, Peony whispers. Being dead, she doesn’t bother with manners – and didn’t when you were alive, either, Peony. You weren’t a saint, with your ballpoint tattoos. With your truths and your dares.

My lungs feel slimed, thick and smudged with stink. But I can still breathe, inhale and exhale, and if this is drowning then I can cope with it. I can last another fifteen years, and another fifteen after that. It’s only time, Peony. It doesn’t last for ever.

My legs are rubbery as I walk slowly away, back towards the San. The ground’s wet with rotting leaves and my steps are punctuated with skidding little slips that knock me off balance. It doesn’t seem to get closer, and then I’m there, right outside the building. All the windows are smashed and gaping lidlessly at me. There’s a froth of rubbish around the edge of the building: old clothes and polystyrene containers and the discarded rattle of aerosol cans. Graffiti covers the walls. Fuziah 4eva, it says. SKINZ. Ali was here. This last one is in a brilliant, clear blue, all the letters straight as if Ali had lined them up with a ruler. A boy after my own heart.

It feels as though somebody’s watching me from the jungle. Mad yellow eyes, peering out of feral hair. A stringy woman, with burn scars and a grudge. A Communist guerrilla, armed to the teeth and beyond. A mother or two.

The main doors stand open, almost rotting away. When I step through, the floor sags in a stinking pulp. A few puddles inside are dimpled like pewter with the dip and suck of insects. Two dark corridors lead off the main lobby. I don’t see any rooms, or anything else Ammuma described. I don’t see any bedsteads or handcuffs; any dripping tanks or left-behinds or ghosts. I wonder what else Ammuma saw, in the blood-images of her brain?

As I walk up the corridor it widens into a clean-trodden bare patch. It’s half-jungle and half-room in here, with jagged brickwork up to the height of my knees. There’s a smell – a sound – a movement from the corner of my eye. There was someone here just a second ago. I’m sure of it. I can even smell her: sweat and a between-the-legs stink of old clothes. But she’s gone, somehow. The walls bristle with layers of barbed wire, and the only way out is past me. But she’s gone.

There’s a neat pile of rubbish left by the door. I squat down, raking through it. Scraps and tatters of clothes. Barbie dolls with missing heads. A toy pony, a tin can. A picture book. A grubby