Homesick (28 page)

When she lay down that night, keeping the curtains open to the moon, she remembered Hugo kissing the back of her neck. “What I love most about you is your smell,” he said. “You smell of honey, you look like honey, I could eat up every part of you.”

“What are you doing,” she remembered saying, in one of those reveries before she let herself sink into him. “I’m licking your honey skin,” he said. Your honey skin, he said.

In the middle of that night, she woke to a noise, and she was sweating and she realised that she had been dreaming of the woman in the café and she was near orgasm. After, she listened for the noise again, but it had been her own laughter, and in the dream Hugo had been laughing with her.

A
nd here is Preethi, off to Sri Lanka, and Simon in the house, not going to work today, unsteady in his mind. Preethi pulling a suitcase downstairs, her mind on other things. The children, all grown up and in their different places: will they be safe without her? she wonders. But they are safe every day, going about their business, one in her last year at university, the other with a lucrative role in advertising. She does not think, will Simon be OK, because she wills him
not
to be OK. She stops on the stairs, remembers once, at a work dinner, Simon’s managing director saying quietly, “And how do you handle the girls?”

“Girls?” she had asked, startled. The man smiled salaciously. She looked at Simon then. Looked at his devastating lean toward the director’s wife. Looked at his taking-in of the breasts, the juicy, gravied lips. “They’re welcome to try,” she had said. “He’s nothing without me.” And she’d turned away.

It was sad to think that that might be true. Preethi, on the stairs, sees his feet in bedroom slippers, sheepskin, bought by her. Was it true? The case bumps each stair, and the day shines in on her, quietly, balancing its rays on her head. She waits a moment, as if waiting to be blessed. Simon sits in the kitchen—look,
my
kitchen, she thinks. But it is alien to her, this place she created for them both. Alien because someone came in and touched her things. Someone
came here, when she was away, and used her cooking knives. Used the fruit knife and didn’t wash it up. She found it under the corner cupboard. A woman sat in her kitchen, ate in her kitchen—who knows, she thinks wildly, sucked him off in my kitchen. She thinks of excited hands tugging at his clothes. And look at him, in his slippers, his hand round a cup. His curls are receding from his forehead, greyness invading the honey brown. At the bottom of the stairs she inspects herself in the mirror, glances toward him, compares them. As separate entities they are fading, their powers less because they are parting. Together they are still a force, she thinks. Together, when they arrive in their expensive coats, with their smart smiles, they are formidable.

“When’s the taxi booked for?” he calls.

She doesn’t reply, and he’s used to that. But then she says, “Eleven.”

“Do you want a coffee?”

“If I want a drink, I’ll make it.”

But since he has admitted that
she
was here, Preethi has stopped using the kitchen. She drinks water from the tap in her bathroom. She buys cold food. Has coffees in cafés. Goes to friends’ houses and admits nothing. Nothing about Simon.

“Do you remember the barn dance?” she asks him from the corridor. He is silent. She knows he thinks this is another opening to anger. “Do you remember the tall guy I introduced you to?”

“His name was Freddie. You were at school together.”

“Yes.” She stops. What use is this? “I should have married
him
.” As she says this, she sees the photographs in the hall. The boy who is now a man. The girl-child, so warm, so funny. She imagines them as Freddie’s. Imagines them
the same, with Simon’s eyes and the curly brown hair that knots across their scalps. He says nothing.

Passport and ticket check again. Handbag zipped shut, then opened, then shut. And here is Preethi, she thinks, as she looks into the mirror. Here is Preethi, a single woman. Here is Preethi, on her way to Sri Lanka. She looks at her smartly bobbed hair, her still full lips, the cheekbones high in her middle-aged face.

She hears him stand and flinches away. He will want to say goodbye, perhaps put his arms around her, and it repels her, the thought of him near her. It scares her. She abruptly turns toward the back door, walks out into the fresh, cold air. It has rained in the night, but the sunshine glosses over everything, making it all seem new and tempting. Stay here, in your garden, work it all out, she thinks. And in the past, she would have. Her duty, powered by fear; her ability to think over anger, to not acknowledge pain, all perfectly convenient for Simon. Just keep walking forward with the smile on your face. Don’t bow to it, just throw your shoulders back and
smile
. She feels the tears in her stomach, pushed there for safety, churning at her gut like a disease.

The doorbell rings. Let him get it. He calls. He still calls her darling. Does he call
her
darling, too, so there are no mistakes? She hears him talk to the driver, and she panics, worried that Simon will touch her bag, and then it will have him on it, and all the way to the airport she will worry about his handprint on the handle, and if she takes the bag out of the car, will the handprint transfer to her hand—and she knows any amount of washing will not wash him away.

Here is Preethi. She sees herself in the mirror take the handbag and the coat-wrap from the hall table. She pulls the front-door key from her bunch and leaves it pointedly there.
She has no intention of coming back. When she returns, she will find somewhere new to live. But she has months to think about it. Here she is politely nodding her thanks as the driver takes her bag with his rough, huge hand. And when they are alone, she watches Simon approach her, watches him attempt to move toward her. She skips away, and quicker than a cat, she is through the front door and away from her marriage. And she never looks back, never sees Simon with the tears in his eyes. But she does see the slippers as she passes him, and his hands, his lovely hands, fall as they reach for her. She will remember his hands, as she will only remember the good times, when they loved irrevocably.

•

It is the madness of love gone that takes her there—to the sad little paradise island, its understanding lost to itself, the way her own sense of self is lost. Victor, her father, is long dead: she wishes to visit a semblance of him, the old relatives, gnarled like trees in a fairy tale. And the last of them toward the north are travelling away from homes that have been a part of her family for generations. The war is finally defeating them, and just as her anger for Simon is abating and moving toward sadness, so her anger toward the Sinhalese government is becoming stronger, braver. She will travel toward the war, daring it to strike her, knowing her passport is British and untouchable. Maybe she could get a story into a national newspaper? Get a book out of it.

She stays a few nights in an air-conditioned hotel in Colombo. She has savings in Sri Lanka, the rent from some property of her mother’s. She contacts the people in her little notebook, still puzzling over the pronunciation of names, at times quite happily corrected by sharp receptionists
at various offices. She tries to hire a driver, knowing there are few people who will drive to the belt outside the war zone. She makes discreet enquiries. Phones a cousin and then her cousin’s friend, who has contacts in the military. No. She doesn’t want to go that way—the Western way, wearing a flak jacket and looking on from the inside of an air-conditioned vehicle. If she is to go to her father’s village, she will go herself, by bus, train, car.

Preethi has withdrawn a few million rupees. She has a last dinner in the marble-floored restaurant overlooking Galle Face and the sea. She has ordered an arrack cocktail: arrack, passion fruit cordial, and ice. As the sun sets, she sips and allows the taste to permeate, allows the alcohol to throb into her head: she is Preethi, the woman who has run away. Out there, on Galle Face, boys sail kites, throw balls. They play cricket into the sunset, and she enjoys their show. She realises tomorrow she is travelling into the unknown.

•

It is the little boy running who makes her realise: here is Preethi, making her biggest mistake. The boy’s flip-flop comes off as he runs ahead of the bus, and then he falls. He does not get up. As the bus drives past him the dust clouds over his body, so she cannot see if he is dead. She stands. “Stop!” she shouts. The man at the front has heard but ignores her. “Stop! I want to get down.” The man shakes his head vigorously at her; the driver, his eyes red-rimmed, looks at her in the rearview mirror.

“No stop,” the man at the front says. He is young, maybe the same age as her son. She remains standing.

“Stop.
Now
,” she says. They are fifty yards away from the boy. It was the way he carried himself, holding his arm before him. She pulls her bag from the seat next to her. The
bus stops in the middle of the road, and she jumps from it. They are near to Vavuniya, the woman on the opposite seat had told her. Her father’s family will live near enough, she thinks. Everything she has passed is familiar and not familiar. She has no idea what she will face. LTTE soldiers everywhere, perhaps. As she jumps from the step of the bus, it pulls away, and her bag is still on it. She yells, “Hey!” and the bus stops again, lets her pull the bag down. She stands in the middle of the street, pulls the handle up on the bag, walks toward the boy, who is prostrate still. She notices the silence as the bus pulls away. Sees houses in ruins around her. She is scared, so scared that she thinks she may wet herself. She reaches the boy. Crouches down. And then she hears the crack in the distance—gunfire? It is the first time she has heard gunfire—ever? No, she heard people shooting pheasant once on a visit to a university friend in the country. It didn’t sound like this—like American war movies, an unreal, make-believe sound.

The boy is not bleeding, and not dead. His eyes are closed, but he is breathing. The gunfire again, and nearer. She gets low, and his good hand comes up, pulls her over, so that she lies sprawled on top of his legs and in a ditch below him. She feels liquid drench into her blouse, smells the stench of it. Sees its blood-redness seep.

“Fuck!” she says. The boy holds her down.

“You wait,” he says.

“Fuck,” she says, because she has wet herself.

They lie for half an hour, maybe an hour. The gunfire abates, sounds farther away. He sits up, pulls her up.

“Come,” he says. When he stands, she sees she was right: his arm is misshapen, the elbow pointing inward toward his body, the forearm is wasted, the fingers thin and bent backward. He takes her hand with his good hand
and leads her quickly to a side alley. Everywhere there are red puddles, some still wet, some dried, holes in the walls, a shoe, a slipper. Farther away she can see a leg, single and forlorn.

“LTTE,” he explains. “Tiger, tiger,” he says. He pulls at her. He is taking her to his home, she thinks.

“No,” she says. “No go this way.” Why speak in this pidgin English, she wonders. Look at Preethi, she thinks scornfully, the posh English lady.

•

Eventually they were picked up and taken to a camp. They ran for two days, three nights, hiding in empty houses, trying disused cars. Thanks to the government shutdown of the media, she had had no idea the war zone had widened this far. She thinks of the journey here, passing normal towns, rural places where people marketed and girls washed clothes in the river. Here, people are only fleeing, running with their belongings wrapped in ripped sarongs, babies on their hips: and sometimes the baby is dead and there is nothing to do but leave it there, on the side of the road, for all to see as they run past.

The boy, Swami, has become hers. She holds his good hand at all times, covers his head with her hand instinctively when she hears gunfire or shelling. As they have been gathered up by soldiers, she has chosen not to speak. She keeps her passport in her knickers; her money she has distributed to others who walked with them. If they are to buy their way out, she thinks they should have equal chances.

And now here she is, old, good-time Preethi, sitting in a tent she shares with three women and two old men, three children and Swami. She looks alien, of course, and people have asked her questions in English, because they
have guessed she must be from elsewhere. One of the older women touches her arm, strokes the skin, and she is ashamed of its fairness, its refinement. There is little to eat, and she does not want food in case she needs to shit: there are only a few latrines, and they are overflowing and stink in the heat. It reminds her of Glastonbury—if only there were Glastonbury rain. She is always thirsty but gives half her water to Swami when they get it. She sometimes thinks of holidays with her children and Simon, when the bottle of water would run low before the car journey ended and she would tell them to ration it, to take small sips, and she would forgo her share, thinking that this is what mothers in tight situations should do. This is what mothers do. She worries about the terror she must be causing her children. She thinks of their lives, torn open by her: like a family photo that she has been cut from.

When she and Swami were on the run, he told her the LTTE wanted him for a soldier. His friends had been taken to fight on the front line. She has told him to say nothing. She is hoping his arm will save him. She has started to teach him her own mutism—talking with her eyes and little nods, shakes of her head. As her fear of being separated from him grows, she becomes stronger. Her other life is no longer real. Her son, her daughter, now seem to be the inhabitants of a glossy magazine; her house in London, Simon—all are dreams. When she sits in the tent, she thinks of her kitchen: its lustrous black marble worktop, its cherrywood cupboard doors, and its gadgetry are now like little fairy tales she tells herself. The Philippe Starck juicer on its three pronglike legs gleaming in the midafternoon sunshine. She thinks of the knife block, takes each knife out and sees the glint of its sharpness. She forgives Simon’s mistress, whoever she is, for not washing the fruit
knife. She forgives her for using the knife and the kitchen and her bed, and her husband. For here Preethi is, in this camp, not using it all, and it seems like a waste. If she were to ever get home, she would take everything out and chop and strain and squeeze and dirty—no, not dirty, for she has had enough of dirt, enough of blood. She would take out the fruit knife, cut a lemon cleanly in half; Sabatier, after all, are the sharpest, are they not? Before she squeezed the lemon in her space-age juicer, she would take the knife to the sink and drop onto it a smidgen of the grapefruit and ginger washing-up liquid and run it under the gas-heated hot water that always steamed from her shiny kitchen mixer tap like a miracle.