Brixton Beach

‘What’s a nice girl like you doing here?’ he asks.

He has a sudden urge to run his hand across her back and further down. He begins to imagine the places his hand might reach.

‘You should be in my nursing home,’ he says, a little unsteadily.

The nurse, her dark eyes made darker by tiredness, smiles a little.

‘We must see what we can do,’ promises the doctor, thinking how good it would be to have such a lovely face at his private clinic.

And then he goes out into the car park and towards his Mercedes, parked sleekly beside the stephanotis bush, back to his lighted house and his dinner guests.

‘Just one more ride,’ Alice pleads.

She feels as though they have only just got here. The puppet master is beginning another show and the Kathakali Man of Dance can be heard beating his drum. Alice does not want to miss anything. May and Namil hold hands in the darkness, swaying in time to the music as though they were one person and not two. Namil has brought May some bangles that glitter and jangle as she moves. Alice notices her aunt has some jasmine in her hair and her eyes are shining. She thinks May looks even more beautiful than usual. Namil is looking at her solemnly.

All right,’ May says, smiling at them both.

She can hardly keep still; the music makes her want to dance.

‘One more, then we go, no?’

This time Alice goes on the merry-go-round on her own. Slowly her eyes adjust to the faint line of sea and sky as she rides, swaying to the music. Is this what flying is like? Alice wants to move through the night forever, swooping down from the tops of the trees, scooping up the dark water below the cliffs. She can no longer see the faces standing below; all is a blur of rhythm and bright light. Everything reduced to sensation.

The woman screams. She is pleading. The baby inside her struggles, it turns and turns again. In the darkness she sees her stomach heave and rise up in another wave. It turns into a shape too grotesque to be normal. The woman is petrified, she doesn’t recognise her own body. It has become something separate from her, dragging her along into an unknown place. She screams, not wanting to go.

‘Please, please,’ she cries.

Even as she watches, her stomach lurches in a landslide movement to one side of the bed. The nurse who has been holding her is terrified.

‘Wait, I’ll get someone,’ she says. ‘Wait, hold on.’

The young, sweet nurse is crying too in great gasping sobs of panic.

But the woman is past listening. Her cries have changed. They pierce the air, becoming something other than despair, sounding inhuman. They are the cries of an unseen child. The child she once used to be, the child inside her, maybe. In the darkness outside, jasmine flowers open, bursting their pouches of scent. Large spiders move haltingly amongst the leaves of the creepers that grow against the whitewashed wall. This is the tropics; insects and reptilian life flourish. A drum is beating in the distance, its regular beat out of step with the cries of the woman in the hospital bed. The spiders and the snakes move relentlessly through the long grass, deaf to the fact that she is pleading for her life now.

They walk back down the hill carrying their prizes. The moon paints a long silver strip across the ground. The road has been recently tarred and the smell of hot bitumen mixes with the smell of the sea. Alice breathes it in deeply. The fair is following them home in magical bursts of heady lights and smells and cries, and the faint jaunty sound of music. She dances ahead of her aunt, waving her thin arms in the air. The moon picks up her shadow and throws it on to the empty road, turning her into a child on stilts.

Ts this child not tired yet!’ sighs May, pretending despair.

She is swinging Namil’s hand as she walks. She too takes little dancing steps.

‘I’m not a bit,’ Alice sings out in time to the music. I’m never going to be tired because I’m nine today!’

They all laugh. They are still laughing as they reach the house. Bee, who has been working in his studio, comes out to greet the revellers. Kamala is shaking her head and trying to look stern.

‘Come, come, Putha, it’s very late,’ she tells Alice. ‘You must have a wash and go to bed,’ she says, giving the little girl a hug.

Amma, she still has bags of energy,’ May cries in mock complaint. ‘Namil and I have been trying to wear her out with no success!’ she adds, kicking off her sandals and throwing herself down on one of the many planter’s chairs that dot the verandah.

‘Well, I’m taking her to the beach early tomorrow morning, so she’d better get some sleep or she won’t be able to wake,’ Bee tells her slyly.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Alice says, knowing when she is beaten.

Everyone laughs and she follows the servant in, the faint music from the hill still luring her like the tune of the pied piper.

In the last hour, the darkest moment of the night, just before dawn breaks, a doctor hurries into the room. He is a different, younger doctor. He too is a Singhalese; a family man, a father. Capable of hiding his feelings under a mask of professionalism. The woman on the bed has bled so much she is only semi-conscious, and the doctor knows he has not got much time. The baby, the girl child, he knows, is already dead. Later he will fill out the death certificate. Still birth, he will write. And although no one will be watching, his hand will have the faintest tremor; his jaw will tighten imperceptibly with anger. That will be all.

Later, in disgust, he will apply to leave his wretched country, unable to stomach what he has always known. For he, more than anyone, knows that life is cheap in this Third World paradise. It comes and goes like waves on its many beaches. But all of this will happen later. On this long, solitary night the doctor will do his job and deliver another dead child. He will see the baby’s soft downy hair as it comes away on his hands, when he lifts the body out of this woman. The woman, herself semi-conscious now, far beyond tears, has one last request.

‘Let me see her. Please, let me see her,’ she begs.

But the doctor, his face softened by pity, his heart filled with pain, shakes his head. The woman sees the compassion in his face in the growing light of the new day.

‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ the doctor says.

It is his only mistake that night.

2 (#uf6a6cd52-47c7-5f61-b8e7-5bba877b9a78)

DAWN WAS STILL AN HOUR AWAY. The caravan of delights had packed up its brightly coloured lanterns. Dulith the puppet man, long fingers drumming against the side of his truck, headed for the coast road. He was followed by a trailer carrying the carousel horses and another with the stilt-man at the wheel, trailing tinsel through the window. The clowns slept, chuckling softly, traces of make-up still on their grimy faces; and the helter-skelter men, having concertinaed the helter-skelter down to almost nothing, moved their trailer with hardly a sound. Leaving in silence was what they always aimed to do, waking no one, refusing to disturb the children and their dreams. The monkey lay sleeping beside the lion tamer, exhausted and dour, and the lady card reader, having taken his wig off, urinated on to the road from his moving caravan. It was all part of the fun of the fair. It was all part of life for the fire-eater and the shadow dancer and the inflatable man. Another town, another crowd, another group of noisy punters eating freshly spun candyfloss. All in a day’s work; here today, gone tomorrow, with no time for regrets. The sea rose and fell as they hit the coast road, heading north. They would be back in a year; same time, same place, right here on the hill where the short, rough grass would have grown over the chalk numbers that had marked the positions of the rides.

Alice stirred. A telephone was ringing in her dream. It rang and rang again insistently, pushing against the carousel that played out its tune in her head. The feet running across the coconut-polished floors sounded like a thousand galloping horses. It was still dark, the sun had not risen; the mosquito net around her cot was undisturbed. Opening her eyes, Alice saw the sky on the point of being punctured by light. Her dream fled the room, leaving behind a puzzling echo. She frowned, trying to recall the music that played on the merry-go-round, but it evaded her. Nothing moved. Even the sap, bluish-white as mother’s milk, had stopped dripping from the rubber trees in the plantation nearby. But something had disturbed Alice. The edges of a peculiar awareness nudged her gently, like an old shell murmuring, insisting she awoke. She sat up, fully awake, alert now. She was hot and the flower-scented garden was calling out to her, so in a swift movement she threw off the mosquito net, stood on the low window sill beside her bed and launched herself on to the gravel below. It was the water pump dripping outside the gate that had woken her, she decided. Someone had forgotten to turn it off. Further along the garden a long beam of light extended across the ground. With one blow it cleft the garden into two. She saw with surprise that her grandfather was up and working in his studio. Alice hesitated, wondering whether to disturb him. Overhead, the beginnings of dawn poked a hole in the sky. Faint rose-pink light flooded out, spreading across the horizon, seeping into the sea. The air was filled with a selection of newly unwrapped scents from the Jacaranda tree. Alice crossed the gravel in her bare feet and stood on the empty coconut oil drum near the window of the studio. Her grandfather had his back turned to her. He was bent over his etching press, but the studio looked tidy, not at all as it usually did. Black scrim hung neatly on their nails, stiff with dry ink; his cleaned rollers were stacked on shelves above his head and none of his copper plates were in sight. Alice craned her head. What was her grandfather doing at this hour? Something about the angle of his body bothered her and she hesitated for a moment longer, not knowing whether she should disturb him. Bird-arias exploded into the morning. She heard a soft, puzzling sound and then she froze in terror as Bee sunk slowly to his knees. The next instance she toppled over and crashed down into the gravel.

The noise brought him to his feet. He stood in the doorway, a thin man in a white sarong that matched his hair. His face looked strange, as though it was a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together in the wrong way. Confused, she stared at him and it was another moment before she saw with cold, creeping horror that he was crying.

‘Your mother has lost the baby,’ he told her simply, spreading his hands out in front of him.

Seagulls carried his words in circles above her head, their keening cries tangling with the breaking waves so that forever afterwards Alice would be unable to separate any of these sounds from what had been said. Forever afterwards she would connect the lost baby with the birds and the vast drum of the sky pouring out light as though from an open wound.

Time stood still for her as the events fixed themselves on her mind. Gradually, as the sun gained strength, a thin line marked the horizon, separating the sea from the sky. The waves became transparent as lace while the sky continued to lighten. The waves arched their backs, crashing, concussed against the beach. People passed by, silhouetted against the sun. Far away in some other reality a train hooted its way across the coast. It was the Colombo express, travelling up from Dondra, the very tip of the island.

‘Come, Alice,’ Bee said, when he could speak again. ‘The worst is over for her.’

But he looked terrible, making no move towards the house either. Where had they been when Sita had needed them most?

‘Let’s go for a walk on the beach,’ he said finally, taking her hand.

A baby girl, he told her, haltingly. Her sister. Not the brother called Ravi as her mother had hoped.

‘She didn’t live to see the day.’

He was exhausted. A delicate eggshell sheen spread across the water even as they watched. Fishing boats were bringing in the night’s catch, trailing long nets full of silvery cargo through the shallows. An arrowhead of gulls streamed behind, heralding the day with their shattering cries. The fishermen, splashing through the water, dragged the boats on to the beach; then they unloaded the catch and threw it carelessly into the flat woven baskets that would be taken to the fish market later. Dead fish and sea-rot smells drifted on the breeze, swooped on by hosts of fluttering gulls. A sense of unreality hung in the air.

‘The doctor was responsible,’ Bee said. He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘A Tamil child’s life is worth nothing.’

‘I hate Singhalese people,’ Alice told him.

Her voice sounded unfamiliar, uncertain. She was bombarded by emotion, tossed in a cross-current of confusion, feeling she ought to cry. No tears would come. Instead, small evil thoughts danced in her head and swam behind her eyelids. Had the baby been blue like Mrs Perris’s dead husband? Did it cry? And hanging over all her questions, terrifying her, was the memory of the wish she had made. She glanced at Bee. He had stopped walking and Alice now felt a cold wind clutch at her heart.