Bad Fruit, page 24
There is no time, though, to linger over this exhibition of rage. Anything could happen, Daddy could start again, Mama, even Julia. My jaw throbs. I drag over an old bag, drop in my etymology dictionary and a handful of drift glass. The jar of Japanese paper stars is smashed at the bottom, leaking promise into the shadows. Jacob said the number of stars meant different things: 99 meant limitless love; 129 meant everlasting love; 365 meant a whole year of blessings. He’d bought me 365. I fumble for them between shards.
“I’ll start on your clothes.” It’s Julia. Her eyes are raw, her nose is running a little. “If you just take those things, you’ll have nothing to wear.”
“Did you do this?”
She shakes her head. “Mama. She found it two days after you disappeared.” She stifles a sob. “I’ve been in there though, every day … just to be close to you.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I step out of the hole, pick my way over the debris. “She threw us all out.”
She takes a jumper from the wardrobe, plucks a bobble off, drops it with a flick. “Why does it matter?”
I think of the letter I wrote, the powder I poured into Mama’s juice, scissors snipping through fur, the rage coursing through my veins. I need to trace its source, understand its tributaries, or it will burst again. “It matters to me. Help me, Jules. There are things I don’t remember, blanks in my memory … I’m trying to piece them together, but I can’t. How did I know there were clothes in the shed? How many times did it happen to you? How many times did it happen to me?”
She keeps plucking at the material, the movement mesmeric. “Do you know when Jay’s freaking out, this is all he talks about? What Mama did to us?”
I drop to the rug in front of her, our knees touching. “No. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Jay always wanted to, but I made him promise.” Her voice shakes. “Sometimes I wanted to. But most of the time, I thought it was better you didn’t remember. You wouldn’t be like us, rotting from the inside.”
She stares at the corner of the dressing table. “Do you remember Mama throwing Jacob and me out?”
“I remember she left you and Jacob in the hall downstairs, and I would creep down to get you—”
“—No, that’s not right,” she interrupts loudly. She composes herself and traces the outline of the jumper. “She never threw us into the hall. She threw us outside. You would calm her down, and then, when she was asleep, you’d let us back in through the kitchen.”
“I don’t remember.”
She reaches out and strokes my cheek. “I think it’s because you were very small—six, maybe seven. You were letting us into the house a long time before it happened to you. The shed was your idea, you know. You said Mama couldn’t see it from the back.”
“See if he’s there.”
I climbed on top of the radiator in my bedroom, opened the window and stuck my head out. Mama held me around the waist in case I fell. I scanned the garden. Jay’s pale arm waved at me in the moonlight. I nodded to Mama.
She went to her bedroom and shut the door. In her mind, they were safe.
But that was one night.
The next, she insisted that Julia and Jacob leave her property. She paced the windows of the back rooms searching for them in the garden, running a torch along the flower beds, each bush, every tree. If she saw them, she’d march downstairs and pull them from their hiding place, through the side passage and into the front garden. They’d curl under the fir tree or crouch behind the hedge. They were more afraid of Mama than the cold.
The next day, when Mama and Daddy went out, I searched for a better hiding place, one that Mama couldn’t see out of any window.
“The shed is too far to the left,” I speak slowly, as if recounting a dream. “You can only see it from the bathroom if you push your head out of the frosted window above the toilet, and no one was small enough to crawl into the alcove—”
“—except you. You remember?” She presses her knuckles against her mouth. “She only threw you out once, but something was wrong ages before then. She kept calling you to her bedroom, telling you these stories, but there was something off about them because you started having nightmares. Do you remember me telling you to say ‘no’ to her, ‘no more stories’?”
I shake my head.
“The night she threw you out, we tried to get to you. We knew she locked all the doors and took the keys upstairs with her—you told us that—but she’d never done it to you before. We didn’t know where you’d hidden the spare key.”
Under the sink. Behind the dishwasher tablets.
“I threw clothes down for you, and blankets,” her voice is straining, pushing through tears, “but in the morning, they were still on the patio. When we finally got to you, you wouldn’t speak. Mama was so frightened, she wanted to take you to hospital, but Daddy refused. He forged a signature, got you signed off for weeks. Mama nursed you back to health.”
“I thought I had a virus.”
“You had a breakdown. Do you remember begging me to tell Mama I didn’t want to share a room with you anymore?”
I shake my head.
“You wanted to move to the attic. You couldn’t stay in our room, couldn’t look out the window without screaming.” Her left hand grasps her right hand. “After you moved out, you disappeared. You didn’t seem real, not like how you used to be. I’d call you names to get you to react, but you’d just look through me.”
Mama’s girl. Mama’s doll.
“She changed too. She didn’t tell you any more stories. I guess she was worried about breaking you again. And you … you did everything she said, anything she wanted. You started making her spoilt juice and tidying her room, all those Peranakan snacks. You let her change how you looked—your hair first, and then when you started secondary school, the contacts, the makeup. Eight years old and suddenly you were completely different.”
Eight.
I want to shrink into myself, vanish into a single speck where there’s no hurt, no pain, no past. I press my forehead to the rug.
She holds me, shushing me, telling me I’m going to be all right, but it’s such a slip of a whisper against my loud, faltering heart, and then I don’t know if it’s my fault when she starts saying dangerous, deranged things, or if this was part of her plan all along. “Listen to me, listen, I know you’re upset right now, but you knowing, you remembering is a good thing. It solves our problem.”
“What?”
“Mama called me after you disappeared. She’s going to pay for art school, my rent, everything, she didn’t even ask what the art was about, and that was just when you’d run away. Don’t you see? We’ve got her where we want her. We can use this.”
I untangle myself from her. “Use what?”
“What happened to us.” Her face is impassive. “What’s the point in truth unless you can use it?” She smooths down her pink T-shirt. “The things she did to us are like bank deposits, and now it’s time to withdraw. We can have anything we want, study what we want. Just stay. She won’t forget what you think about her, but now you’re in control, you have the power.”
“That’s your solution? To stay? For money?”
She shakes her head, as if I don’t understand. “It’s not just the money. What you said is protection; she can never hurt us again. Any time she tries to piss us off, sublet our flats, refuse to pay our tuition fees, we just mention the shed.” Her eyes are luminous. “Don’t you see? This is our inheritance.”
I’m so frightened then—for Mama, for Julia, for her children and my own—the relentless line of mothers and daughters hurting and inflicting hurt. If I stay, will I have to lie to my own daughter, ashamed of what I’ve endured and what I’ve done? Our inheritance isn’t a degree or rent. It’s a fire. It’s a shed.
I circle my fingers around her wrist, push back her sleeve. Her arm is shockingly light, just bone, no flesh. “Once you blackmail her into giving you what you want, will you stop starving yourself?”
She is ferocious, flinging me away. “You don’t understand anything!”
A memory comes to me, the dance of moonlight on Julia’s back as Mama pushed her outside, the sound she made, like a dying animal. I know the topography of her rage, the contours of her vengeance. But it isn’t a place to stay. I hold my hand out to her, as she once did in this attic, as Lewis has done, in an astronomer’s garden. “Come with me.”
She doesn’t move.
I put my arms around her. For throwing clothes down for me, for standing between me and my father’s fist, for trying to find me in the soil and broken glass, I will always try to free her from this. But she won’t come today.
39 / FIRE AND SHED
WITHOUT MAMA’S TEDDIES, HER BUBBLEGUM pink room is empty and strange, as if she’s in the process of moving out. Clothes litter the floor, the silk embroidered quilt is bunched at the end of the bed, and the window seat is patchy in places where the color has leached out.
Mama is sitting on her bed, her heel bouncing to the side, murmuring to a teddy. It’s not hers—I made sure of that—it’s one of Jacob’s, Brody the Beaver, its tail trailing between her fingers. There was no discernment in her choice, just desperation. He’d sat on Jacob’s bookcase by the door—it was the first teddy she could find. She looks up when I come in. “You’re going?”
I drop my bag down at the doorway and nod.
She wipes her eyes. “I can talk to Daddy if you want. He’ll let you stay.”
I shake my head.
“Because you remember.”
It takes everything in me not to cry.
She combs through Brody’s fur with her fingers. “I worried you might. Sometimes, I was glad I told you, even though you’d forgotten. Other times,” she pulls Brody’s tail hard, “I knew I shouldn’t have.” She hits the side of her head with her palm. “Nothing, stupid, worthless mother. Too much for a little girl, even as a story. I spent years trying to correct it, telling you different things about my childhood, taking you to nice places in Singapore.”
My heart is in my throat. “You lied for me?”
She moistens her thumb and starts shining Brody’s nose. “I thought if I told you better stories, nicer stories, they’d cancel out the bad things, just blot them out.” She makes a rubbing motion with her hands. “Sometimes I came close. So many times, I wanted to take you to see my aunt—”
“—Wait a minute, your aunt? She’s still alive?”
Mama bites her lower lip, nods. “That’s why I go to Singapore every year, to visit her. She’s very old, in her nineties, but she only has me to give her the best, the best care, the best nursing home, and still, it is nothing compared to what she did for me.”
The money, that’s where all Mama’s money has gone. That’s the reason she fights Daddy and Julia, why she’s lied to get us scholarships. The kindest part of my mother has been hidden under so many lies.
“… and I tried once to tell you the truth. I told you about the car accident.”
Sweat prickles my back, I’m struggling to keep everything straight. “You told me your parents died in a car accident, but only your mother died.”
She waves at me impatiently. “Because that’s what it felt like when she died, that we’d all died, we’d all been in a car accident. After that, everything changed. There was no one to protect me anymore, no one to lock me in my bedroom, nothing to stop him coming, coming, coming.” And then I realize lying doesn’t mean to Mama what it does to other people. In the shocking place of open shut, open shut, lies are comfort, lies are salvation, lies are truth.
I sit on the bed, reach out for her. She stares at my fingertips, and then slowly, lays Brody down and clutches them. She knows what’s coming. She knows what I’m going to ask. “Did you kill him, Mama?”
She is very still. “I was eight,” she whispers.
“I know you were a child,” I say gently. “But did you?”
She bites her lip. “Do you think I did?”
“I wouldn’t blame you. What he did was very wrong—”
“—Was it? I’m not so sure. Maybe at that exact moment, it was, but if you take my life as a whole, I think I deserved it. A punishment upfront for the things I’d do. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
I can’t keep hold of what she’s talking about—killing her father, how she treated us, her looping, merciless logic. I want to pin her down, stop her chimeric flutters of confession, but what would be the point? Her refusal to answer that one question betrays her answer to larger ones—will she let me know her or just a version of her? I let go of her hand.
She grabs it, suddenly a child. “Wait, you’re really going? Please don’t leave. Everything is fine now, don’t you see? I’ve learned my lesson—I won’t be bad anymore. The dress, the car accident, nothing like that will happen again. I won’t move to Oxford; it was a silly idea. I’ll be good, I promise, even with Charlie and Francie. Here’s the letter you wrote. That’s what you came for, isn’t it? Take it, I didn’t make any copies.” She hands it to me from under her pillow. It is rumpled a little and smells of her, that warm hint of sandalwood, and I look back on the two of us together—in this bedroom after she came back from Santorini, in Liberty’s, in the silence after the car accident. In any of those moments, I’d have jumped at this offer. But now, when my mother puts everything on the table, it isn’t enough. I don’t want good behavior. I want a real me, a real her. I shake her gently off.
Her gaze falls over Jacob’s sweatshirt. “I don’t know what those clothes are.”
“Let’s not, Mama.” I stand up to go.
“I really don’t know.”
“Mama,” I say slowly, “you stripped me naked. Just like your father did to your mother, just like you did to Julia and Jacob. You did it again a few weeks ago.”
“That wasn’t me, that was your father!”
“Because you told him to!”
She shuts her eyes and shakes her head frantically. “After I told you about the fire, you got sick, you couldn’t go to school, that’s all, I swear. I didn’t do anything to you. Maybe you misremembered. Your memory … it isn’t the greatest.”
I’ve spent so long trying to remember. Now I want to forget this moment when my mother turns the obliteration she inflicted against me. But I don’t think I ever will. Her eyes shut in denial, the dark spray of her lashes are vulcanized in my memory.
The urge to punish is pure and beautiful. I could let it all burn. I could tell Mama how I counted down again and again, waiting for someone to come. I could drag Julia and Jacob in here and damn her with their testimony. I could tell her that Jonathan isn’t interested in her, show her Daddy’s porn collection. I could pour out every last horrifying secret.
But I know better. I’ve seen a way out of wounded and wounding, in a sunny yellow room where a man I’ve betrayed tries to save me, and now, I feel for it as I would a lost thing.
I draw my mother to me. Her skin against my skin, I find her ear. “It’s not happening to you again, Mama, do you know that? Daddy and the poems and Francie—it’s not going to lead to the car accident, what your father did, the fire.”
She gasps against me.
“And those words you always said to us—‘you’re nothing, you’re worthless, you’re a whore’—he said them to you, didn’t he, and you believed him. You believed all the bad things.”
Her heart stammers.
“Listen to me, Mama, it’s very important. I love you, I love you, I love you.”
I pick up my bag and leave.
EPILOGUE
IN THE ROYAL OBSERVATORY, THERE is a dome that houses the Great Equatorial Telescope. Around the dome, there’s a balcony. From here, you can see the entrance to the Astronomers’ Garden where Lewis found me, and the avenue of horse chestnuts, where on a storm-felled trunk, I showed Lewis my arm. Still, there’s no view where everything is visible. The rhododendron bush I slept under and the orchard, once filled with dandelion seeds, are masked by sycamores.
He’s coming. I watch him cross the courtyard, that familiar gait, the tilt of his cap. He stops at the remains of a telescope, turns and raises his hand, half a wave, half a salute. I wave back and wait for him to climb the stairs.
After I left Mama, I walked straight to The Polar Explorer House. I hadn’t seen it for so long from the outside—the small, manicured front garden, the rose light from the library, my room above it on the first floor. The curtains were drawn, but the yellow walls were dark, no one was there. I took it in before pushing the letter through the door. I meant to slip away—to Jacob’s perhaps, or even Francie’s, lay low until I’d formed a plan—but Lewis opened the door. His eyes were wet. “Come here,” he said, and then I was engulfed by his arms, by Saskia’s, drawn again into the civilizing circle of love.
“Finished the reading list?” he asks, a little breathless.
“All done.”
Lewis has only pushed me about a single thing since I left Mama—what I’m going to study at Oxford. “You’re not even interested in Law,” he’d said. “You can’t just drift into the next stage of your life, I won’t let you,” and Saskia backed him up. I told them drifting was exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t going to Oxford anyway; I had no money for the fees. I reminded them of Saskia’s promise: no one would make me do anything I didn’t want to. Saskia said she wasn’t making me—she was just expressing her opinion. Lewis said he was absolutely making me, and he didn’t care because he hadn’t promised. He was tricky that way.
That wasn’t the only thing he’d been tricky about. The Wonders of Language and the other books he took out during my yellow convalescence were on Oxford University’s Linguistics reading list, and he wrangled me an interview with an old friend of his, Dr. Dan Watson, an associate professor in psycholinguistics. I wasn’t sure. The subject was fascinating, but the thought of traveling to Oxford, interviewing, applying for emergency grants, seemed overwhelming when all I wanted was to play out the rest of the holiday in a sunny yellow room.
