Bad Fruit, page 22
She closes the door behind her and fills the basin, dipping a facecloth in, holding it out to me. I struggle to follow her instructions—lift your arm, the left one, that’s it, now the right—she has to repeat herself over and over because it’s so hard to understand her, as though I’m listening underwater, as though I’ve been in an accident and can only hear sirens. She turns away when I reach under the towel.
When my body’s clean, she asks if I want her to wash my hair. I say “yes.” She sits me on a stool, lifts my hair into the basin. I close my eyes.
I think of hands. One used his to tear my clothes from me, another to make me clean. God, let me think of these people, only these.
35 / SWEATSHIRT
HOW DO YOU COME BACK to yourself when you’re not there? It happens quietly, slowly, like sunlight stealing under the curtains. I start to notice things. The ocher of the guest room I’m staying in that deepens in the sunlight. A sculptural lamp over a mirrored dressing table. A bookcase illuminated with spotlights. Lewis keeps apologizing for the room, but I don’t know why—it’s perfect. Nothing reminds me of home, no unfinished floorboards, no ceramics, no teddies.
Sleep is strange and fitful, the honey walls melding into the Flower Garden, the shed, a bedroom in the emerald house, Goldie’s fur. If I scream, one, sometimes both, will materialize. They let me sleep as much as I want in the first few days, and then gently start waking me up for mealtimes, a game of Spit, a walk around the room until I’m awake at normal hours, though still not out of bed.
Saskia is living with Lewis at The Polar Explorer House, but her hours at hospital are odd, her schedule impossible to follow. Lewis is a constant. He’s stopped going to the orchard, pretending he needs to prepare for lectures, although he’s just worried about leaving me alone. He works at the dressing table, testing his tutorial questions on me: who am I, what is consciousness, am I the same person I was in the past? He says I’m helping, but I know what he’s doing. He’s calling me back. Each thought he pulls from my sluggish mind, each word on the tip of my tongue bids me away from the mute girl in his bathroom.
That isn’t his only strategy. He remembers the book I was reading, The Wonders of Language, and borrows it from his university library, together with other books: Historical Linguistics; An Introduction to Language; Linguistics as Cognitive Science. The words, the concepts flow into me. Slowly, my edges start to sharpen.
In the evenings, one of them cooks, Boy Scout food when it’s Lewis—fish fingers and chips, sausages and peas—more put-together meals when it’s Saskia—sea bass, tuna salad, pasta with roasted vegetables. Some evenings, we watch prerecorded episodes of University Challenge on the small guest-room television, but my attention is too frayed to form answers before the buzzer. Instead, I observe them, the strain in his neck when he rages against the contestants, the quiet way she responds to the science questions. Other nights, Saskia regales us with stories from the ward—a ninety-year-old man who accidentally took too much blood thinner, a ruptured appendix, an absconding patient. Listening to her reminds me a little of Daddy. When that happens, I pretend to need the toilet and press my forehead against the hexagons.
There are still moments when I shut down. When the animal in me that has learned only danger, flies away.
Can I be sure that other people’s sensations are like mine?
I pull the covers over my head.
They invite me to the supermarket, to the farmer’s market, on an expedition to find a new armchair. I shake my head. I can only hold myself together between these sunny walls. But while I refuse to go out, I can’t refuse the gifts they bring back—a purple cauliflower, two types of ferns, doughnuts from a pop-up stall outside Saskia’s hospital. One day, Lewis hauls a plastic bag onto the bed. The contents are separated into three brown paper bags, a scented mango in one, some greengages in another. What’s in the final bag makes my hands tremble. “Do you know what these are?”
Lewis is collecting up my breakfast things. He glances up. “No idea, just thought they looked interesting.”
My heart beats very fast. “They’re mangosteens.” I take one out. It’s the size of a mandarin, with a mottled purple skin, four succulent leaves at the stalk.
Lewis puts the tray down and comes up to the bed. “How do you eat them?”
I turn the fruit on its side, squashing it between my palms. The thick rind bursts open to reveal six snow-white segments, and then I’m in Tiong Bahru market with Mama last year, picking up a golden starfruit, a handful of longan, watching Mama in her element—testing the firmness of the fruit, squabbling over a few cents. At the bus stop, she opened a mangosteen and held it out to me. I shook my head, the color of the skin unfamiliar, a dusty aubergine. “Be brave, you’ll like it.” I did—the crisp, sweet taste filling my mouth.
Am I allowed to miss her? She’s the only person who’d feel the same about this fruit in a London farmer’s market.
You’re nothing.
You’re worthless.
Whore.
Take off her clothes.
Lewis asks me if I’m going to finish the fruit. I drop it into the bin.
* * *
SIX DAYS AFTER I arrive at The Polar Explorer House, I decide to go downstairs. Perhaps it’s the gifts that remind me of the outside world, the Sicilian purple cauliflower, the Indonesian mangosteens, or maybe it’s as simple as not wanting to miss the last day of summer. I can hear a lawnmower on the heath. I push back the curtains. The sky is a cloudless azure.
Saskia doesn’t blink at me being out of bed. “Coming down for lunch?’
I nod. She offers me her arm as I go down, the gleaming white of the stairwell disorientating after living in yellow.
She releases me when we get to the kitchen, gestures to the barstool next to the island. “Lewis is making onion soup. You can help if you feel up to it.”
Brown papery skin slides off his fingers, the onion a bright globe in his hands. He glances at the recipe on his phone. “I need four cloves of garlic thinly sliced. Could you do that?” He nods at the shopping on the kitchen floor. “Just bought some.”
I search the bag closest to me. Under the bulb of garlic, there’s new clothes—an anorak, two packets of black cotton knickers, T-shirts, leggings.
Saskia stops pulling dry laundry out of the tumble dryer. “I picked those up for you. I hope they fit.”
I smooth out the packaging.
“I bought you a few things when you first came, but I thought you could do with some more.” She pauses, and I know something is coming. “You didn’t come with any underwear.”
My fingers throng my waistband. I’m wearing supermarket knickers and a pair of Lewis’s pajama bottoms.
Lewis puts down his knife. “Lily, what happened?”
The lawnmower is still humming outside, the sun streams through the window. The world is carrying on even though the three of us are absolutely still.
I go back upstairs.
* * *
WE DON’T TALK about what happened, but it circles around in my head hundreds of times, an endless laundry cycle.
The next day, I see the clothes.
Saskia is in the guest room, the laundry basket tucked under her arm. She sets it on the dresser. I get up to put them away. I want to do more around the house. She smiles.
They’re in the lowest drawer, the three pieces of clothing I wore when I arrived—a sweatshirt, sweatpants, a T-shirt. I pull out the sweatshirt. My voice is shaky. “This isn’t mine.”
She frowns. “It’s definitely what you came in.”
“It’s not mine.”
“I don’t understand.”
I stare at the clothes.
“Let me get Lewis.”
I lay the sweatshirt over the dresser. It’s black, with a Star Wars logo, the yellow words faded, the right toggle is chewed, and I know why. Jacob chewed it when he got nervous. The sweatpants are his too, an old school pair. I unfold the T-shirt like the secret it is. It’s Julia’s, gray with a purple stain from when she spilled black currant squash on it. When they come, I tell them: “It happened to all of us.”
Lewis’s hand is on the doorframe. “I’m not following.”
I pull the toggle taut. “We were all thrown out naked.”
He holds his breath. “What?”
My breathing is shallow. “I’ll tell you, but I want you to make me a promise. After I finish, don’t say anything, I can’t bear it. Just leave and shut the door.”
They nod.
I tell them about Goldie and the fire and the rape. I tell them what I realized in the Flower Garden, how the flashbacks are the bedtime stories that Mama told me long ago. I tell them that Daddy threw me out naked, that I knew to go to the shed and where to find the clothes. “But they’re not mine. They’re Jacob and Julia’s. Which means, even though I don’t remember Mama doing it, she must have thrown them out too. My brother and sister put them there because they knew she’d do that to them.”
I wait for the click of the door. Lewis and Saskia keep their word, as I knew they would. But on the other side of the door, I hear Saskia crying.
36 / LETTER
AFTER THAT, THE FLOODGATES OPEN. It’s all we talk about at mealtimes, during the day, in the evenings where once we watched University Challenge. Lewis and Saskia are hesitant, anxious of my fragility, but I persuade them that it helps, like dissecting a word, finding its constituent parts, its hidden meaning.
“How did you know I was missing?” I ask Lewis, putting down The Wonders of Language.
He looks up from his laptop, rubs his eyes. “After you left that night, I called and called.”
“I know,” I say, flushed at the memory of my hand on his chest, but he isn’t thinking about that. He bites his lip. “I told myself it was fine, your phone was on at least. But when it started going straight to voicemail, I panicked. I visited Chrissy.”
I prop myself higher up against the pillows. “Did you see Julia?”
“No. But Chrissy told me you’d run away, and the family was frantic.”
Frantic? How long did Mama and Daddy leave it until they raised the alarm? Not until morning, I bet. Not less than the time they left me when I was a child.
“I searched the park after that. All the places we’d been. The time I found you was actually the fourth time I’d tried the Astronomers’ Garden.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lewis shuts his laptop and fixes me a navy stare. “Don’t say sorry. I should’ve found you earlier, searched harder. I couldn’t decide—should I stay in one place for longer or hit as many locations as quickly as possible? Saskia thought I was cracking up.”
Guilt is liquid, poured out by the person to whom it belongs, taken up by someone entirely different. “Lewis, none of this is your fault.”
He slumps in his chair. “There were moments when I could’ve intervened—at the party, when I saw you asleep on the bench, when you told me about the flashbacks … the violence in them … I should’ve asked you what was going on. I should’ve pushed harder.”
“If you’d pushed any harder, I would’ve shattered.”
Mama is a constant topic of conversation—did she stay with Aunt Liling after the fire, how much of her behavior is driven by her past, how much is she responsible for? And then, the most frightening question of all: “Did she kill her father?”
We’re eating dinner in the guest room, but this evening I’ve flung the windows open. Lewis and Saskia exchange a glance, they’re on the lookout for signs of progress. I wish I could give them that, but all I want is the balmy dusk on my skin, the final shafts of sunset. It’s not just me. The neighbors to the right are having a BBQ, and the smell of burgers sizzling on the grill and charred corncobs wafts up over the salad Saskia’s prepared.
“It would explain the intricacy of the lies she told, her complete reinvention of her father,” says Lewis, taking a sip of water. Neither of them drinks or even talks about drinking. They’ve agreed long before I arrived that this is an alcohol-free house.
“That’s not definitive, though,” says Saskia. “The lies could equally be a product of the abuse. Your mother never told you she actually killed him.”
“It’s implied though, isn’t it? She told me about wanting to do it with the lighter.” Below us, children have been excused and are racing up and down the garden, shrieking in delight when some imaginary finish line is crossed.
“Does it matter?” She offers me another helping of salad. I decline. “She was raped, probably more than once. So what if she killed him? He deserved it.”
Lewis clears his throat. “That’s pretty flippant for a doctor.”
She puts down the salad bowl. “And that’s pretty bold for a philosopher who’s never once had to examine a child-abuse case. Do you know there’s a special dye we use in sexual assault to improve the visibility of lacerations? It’s called toluidine blue. The last time I used it was on a two-year-old boy who was abducted for nine hours and then dumped on a motorway.” Her hands make a faltering gesture. “So please don’t lecture me on what I should or shouldn’t be flippant about. I’m not flippant about a child who’s been raped. That’s evil beyond anything a child can do. Even murder.”
The sky has deepened to a cloudless cobalt. “And after that?” says Lewis gently.
“After what?” she speaks, as if to her plate.
“After the child becomes an adult, and she has a child, is she responsible for what she does then? For forcing her children out of the house naked? How much of a pass does May get?”
Saskia doesn’t respond. Even in theory, Mama is divisive.
* * *
SASKIA ASKS ME in that quiet, practical way of hers, for permission to look into some of the questions I had—why I’d forgotten, why I’d suddenly remembered. She took seriously the vow she’d made me in the bathroom—I wouldn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to, “and that includes accepting my help.” Of course, I accepted. She worried that it was too soon, that I might be upset, that I might be disappointed if she didn’t find anything for weeks.
It didn’t take her weeks. It took her one day. She came straight in from work and sat next to me on a picnic blanket. Lewis had lured me into the garden, and I’d agreed to stay for a bit on one condition—no deck chairs.
“I’ve had a chat with a colleague from psych.” She reaches out and squeezes my hand. “What you experienced, memory loss, is completely normal. It’s a symptom of trauma. There’s a study of young girls interviewed in a hospital right after they’ve been admitted for sexual abuse, and then interviewed twenty years later. One third didn’t recall the abuse.”
Lewis, weeding in the beds, pulls off his gardening gloves and sits down.
“I wanted to show you something.” She takes a printout from her bag. It looks like a pencil outline of a brain on graph paper on which ink has been splashed. Julia would enjoy the art of this. “It’s a scan of a brain in trauma. Gray or dark is blood flow or neural activity. But see how these parts are white? When a person is traumatized, certain parts of the brain are disconnected.” She points to two blanked-out sections near the front. “This part gives you a sense of time, and the thalamus here integrates sensations into autobiographical memory. You can see that there’s no activity there.”
“So, during a traumatic event, the brain doesn’t store memories like it normally would?” I ask.
“Exactly. Forgetting is normal. It’s called traumatic amnesia.”
“And remembering?” I imagine dark swells of ink inside the outline of my brain. “If my brain didn’t store what happened in a normal way, how have I remembered?”
“Generally, recall is triggered by something that matches with an element of the trauma. With the first flashback, was there something that jolted your memory? A phrase? An object?”
Mama and I were making Peranakan tarts. We were looking out over the garden, I hate the garden, mostly because of the oubliette … oublier, oblitare, “to forget,” it’s there, in the very nickname I gave it, folded in its etymology. I’ve always known that I’ve forgotten. “The shed.”
“I guess that’s why so much of your memory returned when you were actually in the shed.”
I smooth down the corners of the scan, trace the blanked-out whites. The forgetting was instinctive, an inbuilt obliterating mechanism. Obliteratus, obliterare, “to cause to disappear.” “My body protected me.”
Lewis finally speaks. “It stepped in when no one else would.”
* * *
I HEAR HER before I see her—the creak of the low iron gate, the doorbell. Lewis opens the door. There are raised voices before he slams it shut. He bounds up the stairs. “It’s your sister.”
I’ve called her to me, staring at that stain on her T-shirt, the empty spaces of brain scans, the obverse of prayer, and she has answered.
Lewis’s cheeks are flushed. “Do you want to see her? Because I’m very happy to tell her to go away.” He’s bristling. He shoves his hands into his pockets as if, otherwise, he might punch her, and then I know she’s said something to him, used that clean, flay of the knife.
I put down The Wonders of Language, meet Saskia and Lewis’s eyes. “Do you think I shouldn’t?” The three of us have gone round and round about what I don’t know, what I can’t remember. How often were Jacob and Julia thrown out? How old was I when it happened to me? Did anyone come? Guesswork, speculation, grasping at the fragments, still no closer.
He sighs. “I’ll let her in.”
Saskia looks up from her laptop—she is writing a paper on broad spectrum antibiotics to treat severe sepsis. “Do you want to speak to her in private? We can go.”
“Please, stay,” I say. The memory of me saying those same words in the bathroom when I first arrived passes between us. She grasps my hand.
Julia flings open the door. She’s in full battle gear—high-waisted jeans and a cropped T-shirt that shows off her painfully narrow midriff, her eyes rimmed with kohl. She hurtles toward the bed and flings her arms around me. She’s crying so hard, her words slur into one another. “Has he hurt you? Are you hurt?”
