Mosquito

‘Sugi,’ he said softly into the darkness, feeling a sudden sharp sense of belonging. ‘You are my good friend, you know. I feel as if I have known you for ever.’

He hesitated. He would have liked to say something more. Moved by their growing affection for each other, he would have liked to speak of it. But he could not think of the right way to express himself. Sugi, too, seemed to hesitate, as though he understood. So Theo said nothing and instead poured them both a beer. But the warmth between them would not go away, settling down quietly, curling up like a contented animal. He looked at the note again. Underneath the drawing Nulani had captioned it with two exclamation marks. What did that mean?

‘I told you, Sir, the girl understands her family better than you. She is probably laughing at her uncle right now. You must not worry so much. She’ll be able to take care of herself. And tomorrow she will be back, you’ll see,’ he added, cheerfully, for he could see that Theo was less worried now. ‘I’ll squeeze some limes and make a redfish curry. Tomorrow.’

‘I would have liked children, Sugi,’ Theo said later on, calmer now than he had been for days.

Sugi nodded, serious. ‘Children are a blessing, Sir, but they are endless trouble as well. In this country we seem to have children only to carry on our suffering. In this country it’s only one endless cycle of pain for us. Some terrible curse has fallen on us since we became greedy.’

Startled, Theo looked sharply at him. He had forgotten the slow and inevitable philosophy of his countrymen. But before he could speak, Sugi put his hand out to silence him. The moon had retreated behind a cloud and a slight breeze moved the leaves. It reminded Theo of other balmy nights long ago with Anna, spent in the fishing ports along the South of France. Something rustled in the undergrowth; Sugi disappeared silently along the side of the house. Thinking he heard the gate creak Theo stood up. A moment later there was a muffled grunt, the sound of a scuffle and Sugi reappeared, emerging through the bushes, pushing a boy of about fourteen in front of him. He had twisted the boy’s arm behind his back and was gripping him hard. In the light of the returning moon a knife glinted in his hand.

‘He was trying to break in, Sir, from the back. With this,’ he added grimly.

And he held up the knife. He pushed the boy roughly towards Theo, speaking to him in Singhalese.

‘He says he was only doing what he was told.’

‘What were you trying to steal?’ Theo asked him, also in Singhalese.

But the boy would not reply. In another moment, with a swift jerk of his elbow he broke free and vaulted over the garden wall, vanishing into the night. And although they ran out into the darkened road there was no sign of him anywhere. Sugi began bolting the windows and checking the side of the house, shining a torch on the dense mass of vegetation.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, shaking his head, looking worried, ‘I will cut some of it back.’

Tomorrow he would rig up a garden light to surprise any further intruders. The boy was probably just a petty thief, stealing things to sell in order to buy drugs. But still, one could not be too careful. Tomorrow he would make some enquiries in the town. Meanwhile, Sir should go to bed.

After he had lit another mosquito coil and closed the net around himself, just at the point of sleep, Theo realised he had forgotten to ask Sugi who had delivered the drawing from the girl. And he thought with certainty, Sugi was probably right; the girl would reappear in the morning.

She was waiting for him the next morning in her usual spot on the veranda, drawing his lounge-backed cane chair.

‘So,’ he said sitting down, filling her view, smiling, ‘so, welcome back!’

And he seemed to hear the faintest flutter of wings. Small banana-green parrots hopped restlessly in the trees, music floated out from the house, and the air was filled with beginnings and murmurings. Last night seemed not to have happened at all. Her uncle had just left, she said. It was Saturday; there was no school so she had escaped from home. She wanted to work on the painting. Too much time had been wasted by her uncle’s visit. He had come to discuss Jim’s future. The days had been filled with squabbling and the thin raised voice of her mother. Her uncle had not cared about his sister’s distress. He merely wanted Jim to join the organisation he ran.

‘It’s something to do with the military,’ Nulani said scornfully. ‘I think they spy on people, for the army. My uncle said Jim is old enough and it was time for him to give up his studies. He said there’s no time for studying right now, when Sri Lanka needs him.’

‘What?’ said Theo. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes, but Amma does not want this kind of future for her son. She is frightened, she has lost my father, she does not want to lose a son as well.’

Sooner or later, Nulani’s uncle had told them, sooner or later Lucky Jim’s luck would run out. Then what would he do? Better to start now, show which side of the fence he was on. Before questions were asked.

‘So he was threatening your brother?’ Theo asked.

‘Yes, but Amma will not allow it. So they were fighting.’

Sugi brought out a dish of pawpaw. He had been preparing the table for breakfast. He covered it with an indigo cloth. Then he brought out some freshly made egg hoppers and some seeni sambol. And a small jug of boiled milk with the tea. A band of sunlight had escaped from the roof and bent across the table, stretching across the floor. Theo went inside to turn the record over.

‘And you? What did your uncle have to say to you,’ he asked, coming back.

Nulani pulled a face, laughing up at him. ‘I dropped two dishes yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was in a hurry. I thought if I cleared up quickly I might be able to come here. But then I dropped the dishes and Amma shouted at me. So I couldn’t escape.’

‘What happened then? Were you punished or something?’ It all sounded ludicrous.

Nulani shrugged. ‘No. Amma just said, “ What’s wrong with the girl? ” and that started my uncle off again, only this time he began to shout at me. He said I hadn’t been trained properly and I needed a husband!’

‘What?’ asked Theo in alarm.

‘Oh, he’s full of talk,’ Nulani said dismissively. ‘He can’t do anything. And I just ignore him anyway. He told Amma he would find someone suitable for me to marry, but Amma was too angry about what he had said to Jim to worry about me.’

The sky seemed cloudless and suddenly overbright.

‘I don’t have to do what he tells me,’ said Nulani. ‘My father hated him.’

But her father could no longer help her, Theo thought uneasily. Thinking also, in spite of this new threat from the uncle, how glad he was she was here now, and how empty the days had been while she had stayed away, wondering too, what he might do that would be of any help to her. Wondering if the chasm of age and life and experience left room for giving her anything on his part.

‘I haven’t seen you for five days,’ she said, suddenly, and in that moment, it seemed to Theo, the sky had changed and was now the timeless blue of the tea-country lakes.

‘But I have been drawing you from memory. Look, they’re nearly perfect,’ she told him, moving her chair closer and handing him her book. Once again images rose from the pages, tossed carelessly out, those aspects of himself that he barely intuited. There he was smiling, pensive, staring owlishly into the distance, cleaning his glasses. Oh Christ, he thought, Christ! What was this? He looked at the drawings helplessly, feeling his heart contract painfully. Lighting his pipe he drank his tea in silence. Then he stood up and held the door of her new studio open, smiling down at her.

‘Work,’ he said firmly, wanting for some aching, unaccountable reason to touch her long dark hair.

What remained of the morning was spent in this way. Nulani worked on the two canvases that would eventually be the portraits of Theo. The smell of her colours, mixed with the turpentine, filling the house. Outside a monkey screamed and screamed again. The heat draped itself like a heavy leaded curtain across the veranda. They would have to take their lunch indoors. Somewhere in the kitchen Sugi was scraping coconuts. Theo had so far written two sentences towards his new book. The image of the girl wove into his thoughts; it ran with the sound of the piano music from the record, it merged confusingly with the heat outside. Why had he ever imagined he could work in this place? I need the cold, he thought, restlessness stirring in him. He thought of the muffled noise of traffic rising up towards the tops of the plane trees in Kensington. A memory of his wide airy flat returned to him with the mirrors and the pale duck-egg walls, broken by patches of Kandyan red and orange cloth. Once he had been able to work among all that elegance, once he had had another life. Perhaps, thought Theo, perhaps I have no more to say; perhaps this latest book is doomed? Perhaps the sun has sapped my inspiration?

But then he went to get the girl, for the lunch was ready, and he saw the light flickering against the walls of the room where she worked. Her small face was smudged with paint, and it struck him forcefully that no, his book was not doomed at all. For the early-afternoon sun seemed to turn and pivot on a new axis of optimism. Sugi too seemed to have excelled himself with the lunch. All he said was that the market had been good as he set the jug of lime juice down and brought in the curries; murunga, bitter-gourd, brinjal, fish and boiled rice. He was smiling broadly and his previous disapproval of the girl seemed to have evaporated. Nulani, unaware of any difference, chattered happily with him as he brought in the food. But he would not stay while they ate, shyly asking instead if he might take a look at the painting of Sir.

‘Yes, yes,’ the girl said delighted. ‘But Mr Samarajeeva must not see it yet.’

‘Will you stop calling me that!’ Theo laughed. ‘Come back and tell me what you think.’

But Sugi could not be persuaded. He had work to do, he said. He was going to put barbed wire over the back-garden wall, whether Sir liked it or not.

So that it wasn’t until much later, when they were alone and he smoked his cigarette on the veranda with Theo, that he said, ‘She is very talented, Sir.’

They sat for a moment in companiable silence.

‘And she has become too attached to you,’ Sugi said.

All afternoon he had been working on the garden. The heat had eased off slightly, and then the girl, having cleared up her paints, had gone home. Huge tropical stars appeared between the leaves of the plantain trees. The garden was as secure as it was possible to make it, he told Theo. It had not been easy to get barbed wire; in the end, hoping no one had seen him, Sugi had picked up what had been lying around the beach. He was still worried about the boy from the night before, he told Theo.

‘You worry too much,’ said Theo, smiling at him. His affection felt clumsy. Again he recognised his own inability to speak of the growing bond between them.

He is like a brother to me, he thought with amazement. If I believed in it, I would say we had known one another in a previous life. It occurred to him that he would like to give Sugi something to mark his feelings, some tangible thing, a talisman for the future that was nothing to do with payments or employment. But he did not know how, or even what. And then, once more, he found himself thinking of the girl and her extraordinary quiet ability to make sense of all she saw, with delicate pencil lines overlaying more lines. The evening, and the night ahead, seemed suddenly interminably long until the morning. He hoped she had reached her home safely. He worried that she let neither Sugi nor him walk her back. He worried that her uncle was waiting for her. What on earth is wrong with me, he muttered, half exasperated, half amused at himself. I’m acting like her mother. And then he thought, Am I simply being sentimental? Perhaps this is what middle age is about. As he lit the mosquito coil, before he got under the net, he remembered again that he had forgotten to ask Sugi who had delivered Nulani’s drawing the night before.

One morning, some weeks later, Theo decided to visit the temple on the hill. The girl had told him it was very beautiful.

‘You should go,’ she had said. ‘We held my father’s funeral there.’

He had sensed she wanted him to go for this reason and he thought of the irony of it. Burning the man who had already been burned. Mrs Mendis was leaving the temple as he entered. He heard her calling him and looked around for an escape but there was none.