Brixton Beach

‘What’s done is done,’ Alice told her, unconsciously echoing her grandfather’s words.

Esther stared back at her. In the bright paintbox-coloured daylight her dress looked strangely tawdry, the traces of lipstick on her lips, drab.

All afternoon Bee sat helplessly beside his eldest daughter while she slept a drug-induced sleep. Then the doctor who had delivered the baby came in. Together they had watched Sita. Her womb had ripped, her uterus would need stitching, and when she finally began to remember she would have to bear a different kind of pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor had said.

Bee noticed how dark his eyes were, just like pools of rainwater.

‘She’ll recover,’ the doctor had told him, ‘physically, anyway. There will be no more children, but she’ll recover. The stitches will heal, the scars will be hidden, outwardly everything will be in order. I’ve made sure of that.’

He shook his head. Then he told Bee he had decided to leave the island. He was no longer able to stay silent about all those things he was witnessing, he said.

‘I became a doctor so I could alleviate suffering, not add to it. But this place—’ he had lifted his hands in a gesture of incomprehension—’is turning me into a coward. I fear for my wife, my family. I am no longer able to do my duty as I should.’

Bee listened without comment.

‘I’m going to Australia,’ the doctor had continued.

Outside the room the noise of the ward drifted towards them. Bedpans clattering, newborn babies mewling, laughter, even.

‘Yes,’ Bee agreed finally, expressionlessly ‘My daughter will be leaving too. They want a better life for my granddaughter.’

That had been all they had said. The doctor placed his hand lightly on Bee’s shoulder. Then he nodded briefly and left. His face had been full of a grave pity. It had almost been the undoing of Bee.

At dinner that night Esther and Dias came round again and the talk turned on the events of the day. They were all in shock. Looking around at his family, Bee said very little. He still felt numb from this terrible day. Darkness was encroaching. The servant came in silently and switched on the light. Instantly two large orange-spotted moths flitted in and began to circle around the bulb. Alice and Esther finished eating and went quietly on to the verandah, seeming to be swallowed up by the dark garden. They too were quiet. Bee waited until he was certain they were out of earshot.

‘First let them bury their dead,’ he said, turning back into the room.

I am accepting the inevitable, he thought in silent pain.

‘We must let them go in peace to the UK,’ he told Kamala.

‘Something more should be done,’ May said, angrily. ‘Someone should be told, for God’s sake! He should be struck off, Amma. How can we stand by like this and do nothing?’

May was crying again, but this time she was angry as well.

Later, when the visitors had left and Kamala had coaxed her, Alice went without fuss to bed. But she could not sleep. A full moon shone in through her window and once or twice she sat up and looked out at the sea. She could hear the grown-ups out on the verandah now and she could smell tobacco from Bee’s pipe. The low hum of their voices blended with the drone of the insects.

‘How can you?’ Aunt May was asking.

‘We can’t afford the lawyer,’ Kamala said in a low, sad voice.

She sounded as though she too was crying.

Then Alice heard her grandfather tap his pipe against his chair. Until now he had been mostly silent.

‘It isn’t a question of money,’ he said hesitantly, and Alice strained her ears to catch his words. ‘Even if we found the money for the lawyers, and even if the nurse could be called on to testify, who would believe this was done simply because she has a Tamil name? Would anyone believe us? We would be taking on the government doctors. I can’t think of a single lawyer in this country who would want to do that.’

The sound of his voice, quiet and incomprehensible, comforted Alice, so that closing her eyes, finally, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

The funeral took place early on the following Thursday. May stayed with her sister in the hospital. Only Stanley and Bee were present. They paid the gravedigger and Stanley carried the tiny white coffin himself. The scent of orange blossom marked the moment, fixing it in Bee’s mind. Murderers, he thought, as the first fistful of soil hit wood. Then, when all that remained was a fresh mound of earth, they turned without a word and headed for Colombo. The sun was beginning its climb in the sky. The city was wide awake and filled already with the bustle of rickshaws and horns and the sounds of a thousand indifferent lives. Bee glanced at his son-in-law. He had never been close to Stanley; this was, he saw, their closest moment. Driving home along the coast road, in an afternoon of unbroken heat, his mind brimming with images of his daughter’s exhausted face, Bee felt the light, unbearable and savage, scythe across him. Then with its sour, stale smell of seaweed and other rotting vegetation, the day disintegrated slowly before his eyes.

While the funeral was taking place in Colombo, Kamala gave alms to the Buddhist monks. Dias had come to help, bringing her cook with her to the Fonsekas’ house. The priests were praying for the life that had passed briefly by, blowing out like a candle. All morning they had sat cross-legged, head bowed, their tonal chants filling the house as they blessed the white cotton thread. Their voices rose and fell, sometimes flatly, sometimes softly, always with a deep vibration. They were dressed in traditional saffron robes, so starkly bright that even the familiar sitting room with its ebony and satinwood furniture, its old sepia photographs and plants, took on a dreary air by comparison. The heat in the room, in spite of the doors and windows having been thrown wide open, was oppressive and unusually cloying. Janake, back from his aunt’s house, was present with his mother.

‘Let’s go outside,’ Esther whispered. ‘How much longer is this pirith chanting going to last?’

No one could eat until the monks had been fed. It was bad form and disrespectful to do so, but the savoury smells drifting out into the garden were tantalising.

‘I’m starving!’ Esther said flatly, and she sneaked off, leaving Janake and Alice on the verandah.

‘Where’s she going?’ frowned Janake. ‘She can’t eat yet.’

‘She’s gone to steal some rice to make chewing gum with,’ Alice told him.

‘What?’ Janake laughed. ‘She’s off her head!’

Alice said nothing and Janake looked at her sharply. He was four years older than her and had known her all her life. Yesterday when he had returned from Peradeniya his mother had told him about Sita. His mother had also told him that Alice was probably going to England because of what had happened. Janake had been shocked.

‘But, Amma, Alice loves it here,’ he had cried. ‘And it would break Mr Fonseka’s heart if she went.’

Janake had been present on the first day Alice had been shown the sea as a tiny baby. He had been with her when she took her first faltering footsteps across the sands. It had been Janake who had held her hand, watched over by an anxious Bee. As she grew, it was always Janake who played with her whenever she visited her grandparents. A few weeks ago he had gone with Bee to buy a bicycle for her. The idea of Alice going to England, of her never being here, was incomprehensible to him. He glanced at her. His mother had told him not to mention the subject to Alice in case she didn’t know, so he couldn’t question her. Alice was staring straight ahead with an unusually serious look on her face. Janake scuffed the ground with his feet and then he picked up a stick and began whittling it.

‘Esther’s a fool,’ he said angrily. He felt both helpless and full of an unaccountable rage.

Esther returned with a handful of hot rice. She squeezed it into two balls, offering one to Janake.

‘Here, have some home-made chewing gum,’ she grinned.

‘No thank you,’ Janake said, scowling. ‘That isn’t real chewing gum,’ he scoffed.

‘Fine!’ Esther cried, tossing her ponytail and offering it to Alice instead.

Alice became aware of a certain shift in the order of things between the three of them.

‘You’re supposed to keep moving it in your mouth like gum,’ Esther laughed, not unkindly. And don’t swallow it!’

‘But it isn’t real gum, and I’m hungry.’

‘Why do you want to be so American?’ Janake asked curiously.

He was watching them with narrowed eyes and Alice had the distinct feeling he wanted to pick a fight with Esther.

‘You should stop trying to be like other people and just be Ceylonese. We are a great country!’

‘This is a boring place,’ Esther said shortly. ‘And in any case, I’m not one of you Singhalese types, men. I’m a Burgher, remember. See?’

She held out her arm, which was several shades lighter than Janake’s.