Homesick (8 page)

“What do you want? Oi, what you banging on the door for?”

Preethi backed away. “Danny,” she said. She moved back more and stopped against the balcony.

“Get away. We don’t want your sort round here. Go on,” she said. She extracted a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. Preethi looked past her down the dim hallway of the flat and saw Danny standing in the kitchen. He looked at her the way his grandmother looked at her. The arm tucked against his side like a rifle, he stared. Preethi lifted her hand to wave, but he turned, and before the grandmother closed the door, she saw him bring his good hand to his eyes and wipe sideways viciously, as if to swab her away.

When she walked up the hill, she could see their car parked outside the house, hear the music coming from the sitting room windows thrown open. She walked into the house, looked in the kitchen, in the sitting room. She saw them in the back garden. Elvis sang his way through the trees, to the houses beyond their fence. She watched the four of them: Papa digging a bed over, Gehan swinging from the low branch on the pear tree, Rohan lying on the grass, Ammi hanging washing out. As she walked up the steps Papa saw her, and at the top of his voice he sang, “Love me tender …!”

Ammi called,
“Victor!”
and his eyes widened as Ammi’s arm slipped around Preethi’s shoulders, and he directed his singing at them both, his hand splayed toward them. Ammi threw her head back and laughed joyously. Her arm
hugged tighter, and she kissed Preethi’s cheek, a deep, hard kiss, as if she really loved her.

•

They went to Lewisham that afternoon. In a sports shop buying rugger boots for Rohan, they heard the noise of people shouting rhythmically. Rohan heard it first, one foot tied in a studded shoe, the other in a sock.

“What’s that?” he asked the young guy unpacking the boxes. They all stood very still, looking toward the glass door. The manager, a small, curly-haired woman, walked out into the sunshine, and they watched her flex her shoulders back, cross her arms, assess, then return. She locked the glass doors, top and bottom.

“Right,” she said to the family, “in the changing rooms.” Preethi ran toward the door with Gehan: they wanted to see. The noise was louder, and she could see policemen. Across the road, the sign outside the church said ALL ONE IN CHRIST’S LOVE in giant red capitals. A middle-aged woman in an incongruous churchwear blue hat screamed along to the chants, and a policeman fell over. “In the back!” the manager yelled at them. Preethi and Gehan retreated, and the manager took their place. One of the crowd threw a rock toward where Preethi and Gehan had stood.

“Yaaaaah haaaaaaaaaa!” the manager shouted, putting two fingers up on both hands.

They waited in the booth at the back, Ammi held tight by Papa, Gehan sitting on the floor, Rohan on the bench and Preethi on his lap. The march went by quickly. It was nothing, her parents said. It was nothing. And when other families gathered to eat with them that evening, Preethi heard them talk only of this nothing and ask each other
if
they
were nothing in this country, if that hatred actually made them nothing.

•

A few days later, Elvis died. Rohan cried all day, and in the evening, Papa and he sat in the back garden with the record player, drinking passion fruit cordial and eating Bombay mix and patties. Preethi crept out and sat with them, watching her father top up his glass with arrack, and as the evening cooled, he told them of the Lyons House in fifties Sri Lanka, he and his friends with their Brylcreemed quiffs and pastel shirts, drinking bottled sodas and listening to Presley’s latest hit. He mopped a tear or two at times, and when it started to rain, they sat for a while still, until Ammi shouted that they were all idiots and should bring the damn machine in before it was ruined.

•

Preethi still went down there, to the flats: someone had to feed the birds. She took a crust from her breakfast, and when she climbed up where Danny usually sat, the birds would fly about her, eating from her hand, no different in their expectations, and she realised how Danny felt. The birds were a freedom, that was all.

And then, the day after Elvis died, when she had left the times tables and the periodic tables behind her, Danny came. He looked up at her, startled. His hair had been cut. He wore dark trousers and a proper shirt. And a black armband. They shrugged at each other.

“D’you want to feed them?”

“Nah,” he said. He leant against the tree. “I can see your knickers.”

“Shut up.” She hitched her skirt up from behind, then pushed herself off the branch and landed next to him. “What d’you want to do?”

“Let’s go to the den.”

They sat and said nothing.

“I know what cancer is,” she said. “Shall I tell you?” he shrugged. “It’s clusters of cells. Like crabs.” He didn’t look up.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. He’s dead anyway.”

“Are you going to get a dog now?” He shrugged again.

They sat still for a while. And then the arm, covered in its nice shirt, reached to her, and the fingers that she had become used to, the two fingers with the bent nails, touched her belly.

“Show me your cunt,” he said gruffly. She looked at his face.

“What?”

“Show me your cunt.”

“No.” She sat still, wondering if he would change back to Danny, the boy with the unkempt hair and dirty brown legs.

“Go on,” he said, and his fingers moved lower, to where her wee came out. “Let me touch it,” he said.

“No. Get off,” and she hit at the hand, as if it were animated by an outside power.

“Go on. I want to see,” he wheedled.

“No.” He pushed toward her, both hands on her shoulders, trying to pin her down. She kicked at him, kicked about as his weight stretched onto her, kicked one of the bowed branch legs of the den, crashing it down. “Get off,” she wailed, and his weight rolled away. He was crying.

“Paki cunt,” he said. “Fuck off, Paki cunt.”

She crawled out from under the fallen branches. He was sobbing: she wanted to go back. But instead she walked away and up the hill, hearing that chant, hearing that nothing, saying, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” to herself.

At home, the house was quiet. She let herself in with the key that hung from the inside of the letterbox and climbed the stairs with her eyes shut against the ghosts. She went to her room and sat at her desk with the periodic table in front of her. She stayed there even when Gehan came crashing in at the front door, pushing his bike into the hall and calling for her to come and make him hot Ribena. He came up to her room.

“I’m thirsty,” he complained.

“So, make it cold.” He watched her from the door.

“Have you learnt any yet?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been there all day?”

“Yes.”

“Liar. I saw you with Danny the mong.”

She turned angrily in her chair. “Don’t call him that! His dad just died. Don’t call him
that
.”

“Make me Ribena,” he whined.

“No, I have to do my work.”

When she heard Papa come home, she left her room, stood at the top of the stairs until he had put the bottle back on the shelf in his office. He came out, switched the lights on in the hall and on the stairs, and saw her.

“Ah, you are ready? Gehan says you have learnt.” Papa smiled. She knew Gehan would have made trouble.

“I’m not ready yet, Papa.”

“Why? Hmm, hmm, come, come,” he said, pulling at the air in front of him. She came down the stairs. Professor of Tamil literature, he had been, he told her once. No
good to anyone—sciences, that’s where the power is. She saw that his eyes were bloodshot.

“Why not ready? Gehan said, all day at your books, good girl,” and he patted her head, pushed his hands into his pockets to find a sweet. There were none.

He took her into his study. When she was tested, usually, it was Ammi who asked the questions, Ammi who slapped and shouted. “Victor!” she heard her mother call.

“I am testing Preethi,” he called. Preethi heard her mother come to the hall, heard Gehan behind her. Heard Rohan come out of the sitting room, stand opposite her: she could see his face over Papa’s shoulder.

“Go on,” he said.

“Al,
aluminium
.”

“Good, good.”

“Cr, chromium.”

“Yes?” Papa looked back toward Rohan. Rohan nodded.

“Cb, cobalt,” she said. “Co, copper.”

“Yes?” again, and Rohan nodded again.

“No,” she heard Gehan say: “Co,
cobalt
. Cu,
copper
.” She could hear Ammi’s short breathing. She looked at Rohan. Papa frowned.

“This
 … this
is all you have learnt today?” She realised suddenly—
I am Papa’s favourite
. She thought of the elements on the page, winged and flighty, interchangeable, magical letters, numbers, pecking down, caged in Gehan’s head as if of their own accord, but flying free, far from her own brain: she was lost again. Gehan stood next to Rohan now, and Preethi smiled, defeated, as he watched her with fear.
I am Papa’s favourite
, she thought again: Gehan had been in the study before, with the door shut. She had seen his crying face, Rohan’s, too. Papa pushed the door to.

“Again,” he said. She shook her head. “Again,” he said
louder. She looked toward the window and waited. The door opened, and Papa turned. Ammi stared, and Gehan smiled a sad, small smile, and something passed between them, a hate: for their parents, for who they were, for this tingling moment of heat and fear.

“Well?” Papa said. He stumbled against a chair as he went back to the door to push them out.

“I’m sorry, Papa,” she said.

“Sorry?” he screamed, and in a precise movement, bent her almost double and with all his strength beat her on the calves, the backside, the back, until he overbalanced, and Preethi fell to the floor, crying. He landed heavily against the chair, juddering his knee. He looked down at her, bringing the back of his bruised hand up to wipe spittle from his mouth. The door opened, and Rohan came and picked her up, tried to pull her with him to the hall. But Ammi blocked them.

“You
have
to work hard,” she said. Preethi watched her mother’s mouth, the way it curled bitterly about the words. “You have to become something. Stop! Stop this crying. When you work hard, you are above everything.
Everything
. You are
free
,” and she stepped aside, letting Rohan take Preethi out. Ammi stayed in the study, watched her husband take the bottle down, and Rohan, Preethi, and Gehan stood behind them, in the darkening hall, waiting to be told what came next.

•

Ammi took time off from work the next day and took over the supervision of Preethi’s studies. It was a hot but wet day, full of frustrated tears and longing for a time before: when the den was safe, when the study meant sweeties.

“You’re getting fat, that’s another thing,” her mother
said. “You do nothing all day, that is why. Seven times eight?”

“Fifty-four.”

“Fif-ty-six,” with each syllable a hurt—pinch, pinch, pinch. Preethi picked up a pencil, wrote it down again. At the kitchen table, the table with the furrows full of toast crumbs, darkly stained oak, hard and unforgiving.

The doorbell rang and Ammi answered it.

“Preethi! Someone for you!” She met Preethi in the corridor: “Get rid of him. He is not our sort.”

Danny stood on the top step. He had his shorts on again, his old T-shirt. Still the same brown legs, but it was not him anymore, his short hair disguising him, his eyes different.

“What?” she said.

“I brung you something.” His good hand clutched into a ball, his two fingers resting on top, over the gaps.

“What is it?” she asked, holding back from him. She stood inside her home, he on the second step down from the door.

“Look.” He offered her his hands. She shook her head. “Come on. Look.” She walked toward him, couldn’t believe that he would come here, up to her house, just to trick her.

She leant down, not touching him, and he lifted his fingers. Inside, a fledgling, it looked like, or maybe a fully grown sparrow, weak, scared, dying perhaps.

“Did you catch it?”

“No. Found it under the tree. Thought you’d like to look after it.”

“Why?”

“Well? Don’t you want it?”

She told him to follow her to the side of the house and up the alley to the shed by the back gate. She found an old
box and some dried grass. They sat in the shade on the back steps, watching it try to fly.

“Looks like its wing’s broken,” she said.

He said nothing, then: “I’m sorry,” very quietly. She ignored him, but it was done, and she was glad.

“Are you going away?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Dunno. Soon. Before school starts.”

“Oh.”

She heard Ammi call from inside.

“Better go, then,” he said.

“Yeah. Bye,” she said, but before he stood, she put her hand to his arm.

“See—not so different,” he said with a smile. He left by the back gate, down the alley and home.

When she went in with the bird, Ammi told her she should keep it in the shed. And later that week, after her father beat her again, she went out there and crushed it in her hands. When she opened them, she saw its breast still moved, so she pressed hard with two fingers against its throat until it stopped.

•

Preethi asked around and found out that Danny and his mum had moved out of the flats, and a West Indian family, the Russells, had moved in. The daughter was called Glenys, and she and Preethi became best friends at the local comprehensive Papa had arranged for her to attend.

I
n the dark they are back to the people they always were, Jenny and Mike with their son, Lucas. They are three stumbling human beings, walking in black air, with multitudinous stars above them, and Jenny and Mike, with Lucas in between, can just be people on holiday.

With her pashmina wrapped about her, and Mike holding Lucas’s other hand, she feels safer in their family, stronger in her belief in it. The guide with the torch is far ahead, and a group of worthy Germans and Italians walk his invisible footsteps in the sand one step behind. Mike and Jenny and Lucas take their time because Lucas is only four and Lucas does not like the feel of the sand as it enters the holes of his Crocs. “I like wet sand,” he says to Jenny, “but not
this
sand.”