Homesick (13 page)

Rohan came into her room on Friday evening.

“Ammi’s worried. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“She says you’re always out at friends till six. You always have people calling. Nothing over the last few days. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She looked at his face, beautiful and shining, his vigorous confidence, his joking manner.

“Come on,” he said more tenderly. “You can tell me.”

“I haven’t been to school. I can’t go back.”

Rohan looked shocked. “What is it? What happened? They want you to do fourth term! Have your grades gone down? I can help you—there’s no need to skip school.”

“No, no,” she said miserably. “Someone told a secret, something I told them, and now the whole school knows. I can’t go in,” she said suddenly. “I can’t face it.”

“It’s only a week,
putha
,” he said, stroking her hair.

“You sound like Ammi when you talk Sinhala.”

“Do I?”

She lay down on her bed, and he sat at the end, and neither said anything more. She could hear the silence, could hear dinner being made, and Papa and Gehan coming in, and birds, and children shouting in gardens on the opposite side of the road. He stayed with her for a little longer, and then he went into his room and she heard him put Bowie on and sing along to “Let’s Dance.”

On Saturday, there was a postcard from Freddie. It chatted about nothing, and about Ollie, and she tore it up, because even seeing his name revolted her, made her feel
such anger that if he stood in front of her, she would kill him. On Sunday, Clare phoned again, told her it was time to stop hiding. Told her to bring the
Antigone
notes in, the Oxbridge meeting had been postponed because of Preethi’s sickness, that she would stick by her, it would be OK.

•

That Monday morning was beautiful. Her remorse, her anger, her misery floated above her for the moment when she rode past the chapel, across the roundabout. She wore sunglasses and a white dress, white plimsolls, and slung around her shoulders a purple cardigan. She threw her head back to look at the trees above her, and a window cleaner across the road shouted, “All right, darlin’?”

When she got to the traffic lights at the foot of the hill and saw everyone walking, running, shouting into school, she thought she would die. For them to know this of her. For them to understand her brother so completely, in one filthy idea. For them to think she was somehow part of his profligacy, too, simply because she wanted Ollie. Clare stood on the other side of the road and waved and beckoned, and somehow it was too late to turn back, and she went in.

Everything had changed. Her life and the way she was perceived had changed in two days. As she approached school, girls in the lower forms made way and, as she passed, giggled and whispered. Clare turned sharply to them and hushed them, but Preethi could hear it all about her. She put her head down, and they walked silently to the bike sheds. She saw Cassie and her friends across the field and looked in panic about her. A few of her other friends came smiling toward her. It would be all right, it would be all right. But then, as she walked toward the sixth-form
building, Debbie, a small, fat fifth-former, said to her back, “Your brother been fucked in the arse by a miner: pretty much like the rest of the country, eh?” And all around her laughed out loud. She used her advantage: “All
you people
are degenerate, aren’t you?”

Preethi continued to walk, stride now, toward the block, and then she turned to Clare and shrugged. It would be the easiest way out. She turned back, almost ran at Debbie and struck her hard, across the face with the back of her hand. As the girl reeled Preethi looked around at the other girls, who were gasping and shocked. Then she took another step toward Debbie, who put her hand up to deflect the next blow. Preethi saw her fear, saw her own face in the fear, and still she hit her again, and then again, on top of the head once, until the girl fell to the ground, crying. There were shouts from a teacher, and thundering steps of someone running to her, tangling her arms up in their tight grip, and she was led to the headmistress’ office, where the teacher, a flaky PE sort, sat with her, jigging her knee impatiently and smiling at anyone but Preethi.

•

Mrs. Divorcée, they called her, their headmistress, so full of bouncing, tall energy, certain that the young women at her school would
all achieve
. They would all
be something
. But perhaps not me, Preethi thought.

“Well? Can you explain this behaviour? You realise I have already asked my secretary to inform your parents. You will be immediately suspended for a week, which takes us to the end of term.” She saw Preethi’s face lift with relief. “It will be questionable whether you can come back,” she continued, and to her satisfaction she now saw shock. Preethi
did not speak. “Oxbridge! You would give up a chance at Oxbridge for a petty fight! Surely you would have known this before you let a silly little girl like Debbie get to you?”

“No.”

“Ah. You
can
speak.”

“Yes.”

“Well? What is it about? You
hit
a child—
what is your explanation
?”

“I …” She shrugged.

“Oxbridge!” the headmistress said again. “Look, sit down, sit down.” She bustled to a salmon pink chair. She offered a blue sofa to Preethi. Preethi looked about at the duck-egg-blue walls, the glass-fronted walnut bookcases, the antique desk, and the wide, long windows. Edwardian, she supposed, a place the Schlegels might live in, or Forster himself. She did not think of the violence of her act, or her swollen little finger. She thought of Ollie, and Freddie. Where were they now? Where was she, that girl they had argued over?

“Now, we cannot have this. You must tell me why.”

“My brother,” she started. But she stopped. She had already told one too many people.

“What does it have to do with your brother? Look, can’t you see what you have done? Preethi, look at me. We work
so hard
here. You do”—she bent a dramatic, pale hand to Preethi, as if a ballet dancer, or a good witch, and then brought the hand up and placed it gracefully on her chest—“and
I
do. We work so that women can break through the glass ceilings in all walks of life. Don’t you see? You could be a remarkable scholar! Your English essays, I am told, are extraordinary,
exemplary
. Your behaviour, until now, has been such that, within the one year you have been here, you have made many friends and gained much admiration
from staff. Your dyslexia has never got in your way. All of this adds up to a model student, someone I could not recommend more highly to any university in the land. Come, now, please explain.” She waited in silence, her head turned toward the window, watching the late girls sneaking through the gate and raising her eyebrows. Preethi sat in silence. A clock ticked loudly in the lobby outside the office. She scratched at the texture of the sofa. The headmistress sighed.

“Preethi, our school is like a city, a golden, glorious city. We work for each other, and we work for ourselves. What we give to you is self-worth, your importance in the world. What we want for you is
everything
.”

“Yes.” Preethi had nothing more to say. There was a knock on the door, and Nandini was ushered in. Preethi saw her eyes, fearful and furious. And to her shame, she began to cry.

•

Clare brought her bike back later. She met Rohan at the door and refused to come in. Preethi would not have wanted to see her. Her mother had hit her, and she had spent the day crying in her room. Papa and Ammi went out to see some friends, and now that the exams were over, Gehan went with them. Rohan went up to London to see a play.

Preethi ran a bath, and while it ran, she made a large gin and Rose’s lime and drank it down, without ice as there was none. She smoked a cigarette in the garden, wondering where Freddie was, wondering how he was, how Ollie was. She thought of the kiss, thought of it a million times, the kiss that somehow made her dirtier than her brother. She smoked another cigarette and then went up to the still-too-hot bath. She stepped in, one foot and then
the other, and allowing the heat of the water to encapsulate her skin gradually, she sank into it. She remembered Ollie’s hand as she lay back into the water, looked at her body, which he had stroked through her clothes as if he had owned her, as if he could love her. She left the bathroom door unlocked, and using one of Papa’s new razor blades, she opened her wrists.

•

She was dreaming, and characters, famous people, were all there and talking about her, about fate, about the abyss. There was Mrs. Godfrey, dear Mrs. Godfrey, her English teacher, talking to them all, walking from person to person, facilitating the party. Edwardian dress, with coal-scuttle woven hats, men in tails. There were Ollie and Cassie, holding hands, walking across the grass under a tall oak, and Freddie stood in a corner, waving, beckoning her to join him. And Margaret Schlegel, on the arm of Mr. Wilcox, stopped to talk to Freddie, and Freddie was rude. And then, suddenly, Freddie was no longer Freddie but Prince Myshkin, the Idiot, and it made sense, and she thought, but of course, of course, I should have known. Mrs. Godfrey was saying something, saying something to all the guests, and they were throwing their heads back and laughing, and each time she said it, it was funnier than the last. Preethi tried to get closer, to share the joke, and when she finally stood by Mrs. Godfrey’s elbow, she heard Mrs. Godfrey say, “But you see, the joke is, he was not ‘taking it up the arse’! He was ‘giving him one,’ as they say!” And people laughed around her. “He’s one of us! He’s one of us!” And everyone laughed.

Preethi started to scream. Her eyes tried to open, but they could not. Her mouth moved, and her father and her
mother and her brothers stood traumatised and scared of the screams, and of their own part in her suicide attempt, Victor clutching her bandaged hands, Rohan pressing a button to summon a nurse, Nandini leaning heavily against Gehan.

In her dream she was dressed in a white cotton shift belted with rope. Her hair was braided around her head, and her feet were bare. Wound around her arms were golden cloths. In her dream she walked around the party looking for Rohan, and when she saw him, beyond the fence of the garden, she knew he was dead, and no one would bury him. She looked back at the party, where people still laughed, and climbed over the fence and ran across a field to where the body lay. She took the bandages from her arms and lay them, bloodied and disintegrating, onto his already decomposing body. She dug at the ground, trying to cover the body with crumbling earth. The whole party turned to her at once; she could see they were all chanting, and finally it was a sympathetic chant, but grudgingly so. Some pointed, some shook their heads. She lay down next to him, her lovely brother. Lay down, and then, as if this part of the dream had been the only reality, she woke up.

O
n the morning of her wedding, Nil lay in bed and listened to the noise of the family, the harmonies they sang, the melodies which struck each other awry, until she could hear shouts and laughter. She heard Mohan calling for Vita, Vita answering, “What?” She heard her mother, Siro, in the kitchen, her father, Wesley, in the garden. She listened to his voice. She could see him in her mind’s eye with his two brothers. They would be sitting in the shade of the pear tree, Wesley’s arm carelessly around the back of a grey-tinged plastic chair, telling a quiet story, sipping tea from his old brown mug. She thought of them all as she stretched, thought of her family walking down the aisle with her, a gang of De Silvas laughing and playing as they strutted toward Ian’s more dignified family, waistcoated and behatted, like a set of Etonesque sixth-formers. She lay still and listened again, and heard her two aunts in the kitchen singing with their high voices, and Vita laughing. She heard her mother’s voice on the stairs talking quietly to Mohan, and Mo saying, “Don’t stress, Ma, it’s fine.”

She could hear Mo’s feet coming up the stairs. Nil closed her eyes, holding herself still. He walked into her room, opened the curtains, looked down at the garden, knocked at the open window. She lay quiet. She knew he had turned to watch her. He laughed.

“I know when you’re awake, we shared a room for long
enough,” he said, and he pulled the covers from her. She yelped, pulling them back.

“Go away, Mo.”

“Dum dum de dum,” he sang loudly, “dum dum de dum. Ian’s getting lucky tooo-night …”

“Ah, shut up, would yer?”

She heard her father shout, “Mohan! Leave the child alone!”

Mohan started to leave. Then he came back and sat on the bed. He tousled Nil’s hair. “Are you nervous?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“I would be. Marriage. New house, new life. No Mum to come home to. I don’t know. You’re very young.”

“I’m twenty-three. Mum was married a year by my age.”

“Yeah. Well. Aren’t you worried about all the other ones?”

“I’ve had enough of other ones. Ian’s good enough for me,” she said.

They sat in a steady silence, and then Mohan lay back, his hands tucked under his head, next to her on the pillow. They had shared a bed until she was six. He listened with her to the voices, the singing in the garden, laughter from the kitchen.

“Mum’s stressing,” he said, as commentary. They could hear their mother shouting into the garden: “Wesley! The flowers!”

Nil turned on her side and looked at Mohan in profile.

“I’ll miss you guys,” she said.

“Will you?” he asked, but he didn’t seem to be interested, a little smile on his face as he stared at the ceiling.

After Mo left, Nil lay in her bed for another half an hour and tried to answer his question. She wondered why
on earth marriage was so important at this stage, when men were practically falling into her lap from every angle. She heard another wave of laughter from downstairs. She realised that she took comfort from the knowledge that that other life—of dark crawls across hotel room floors at two in the morning to find her clothes before she made her way drunkenly back down the corridor to her own room—was over. Ian was a good bet. Ian was a freedom, and a shutting-off. He was the groundwork for everything else. But was he love, she wondered? Was he the love that creates laughter, and home, and the tenderness of all of this? And she knelt up in her bed and looked down into the garden, where she saw her father reach out for her mother’s hand as she hurriedly walked past him, clutching Nil’s bouquet.