Bad Fruit, page 5
She comes down, her hair hanging over her shoulders in wet twists and sinks into the sofa, reaching out to stroke the neck of a huge Peranakan urn, as though it’s a pet. I was with her when she bought it, my limited Mandarin unable to keep up with the numbers flying between Mama and the antique dealer. At the time, I could see the appeal, the cerulean background, the pink phoenix. But thousands of miles away, the colors seem lurid together, the etchings a child’s drawing.
I turn on the TV and set the tray of white rice, topped with sambal bendi on her lap.
“What’s this?”
“Okra with sambal belacan,” I say, suddenly shy. “I found the belacan in the kitchen and thought it would be nice to try something different.”
She lifts a forkful into her mouth and a thousand doubts race through my mind—can she taste that I haven’t used calamansi limes, is there too much chili—but she smiles, and they melt away. “I didn’t know you could cook like this!”
“Does it taste like it did when you were a child?”
She shakes her head at me in appreciation. “Exactly the same! I haven’t tasted this in years!” She puts down her fork and kisses me on the cheek. “My little nonya, my favorite girl, my best girl,” and I want to snatch those words from the air, imprison them in a jar.
“How was your day?”
Mama drags her fork through the rice. “Pierre is trying to bring in a new partner—this Russian who’s friends with his wife.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad. It’s another partner eating into the profits. What if he never brings in any of his own clients? It could take him years to develop his own business.”
“Can Pierre do that?”
“He can do whatever he wants. Don’t you know that? Men always do.”
I press the Pause button. “Listen to me. You’re the best at Regent’s Park Wealth Management. You bring in the most revenue. You’re going to get through this. I believe in you.”
“You’re the only person who does,” she says quietly, and I let out a silent prayer that Pierre doesn’t hire the new partner; RPWM is one of the only environments where Mama is rewarded for being the shark she is. I watch her bite the okra, the starburst of seeds. Julia was right. These are lady fingers. Sliced open fingers. Sliced open hearts.
Two halves of an onion.
Splinters of glass.
Milk spreading between toes.
A woman crumpling against a chair.
“Are you going to press Play?”
I hold my hand over my mouth, gagging on okra, the smell of belacan suddenly putrid. I shove my tray onto the sofa. “I need to lie down. I don’t feel good.”
* * *
HAND OVER HAND, I pull myself upstairs until I’m in the attic. Close the door, lock it, climb into the hole. I’m trembling. Sometimes, just being in the hole is enough to calm me, but not now. I want to be outside smashing into a man—that would take the edge off—but there’s no way I’ll be able to get past Mama.
The walls then. I take a pen, scrawl my favorite quote from Ovid on the cardboard, perfer et obdura, be patient and tough, and then the etymology of “obdurate,” which I know by heart: mid-fifteenth-century from the Latin obdurare, meaning “harden, hold out, persist, endure.” My breathing slows, my mind clears, a gift from my father, the certainty that what’s happening, no matter how terrifying, can be quantified, measured, solved. I can figure this out.
I force myself to recall what’s happened—the flashing images of onions, the broken glass, the milk, a woman crumpling against a chair. I don’t remember these things but maybe I’ve forgotten.
I message Jacob. Julia would call me instantly if I messaged her, ask me what the hell is going on, but Jacob and I do small talk well, linked by a thread of one-line observations and complaints plucked from the fabric of our day—“Man in front of me on the train is watching Peppa Pig,” “Albie just said ‘patriarchy,’ ” “What’s the name of that Japanese biscuit I like?”
“Do you remember me dropping a glass of milk when I was younger?” I type.
“No, why?” he replies.
“Just a random memory.” I can’t ask him about the woman without raising more questions.
“Don’t think so.” There’s a pause and then he writes, “TTL, David’s here,” and I wonder if I’ll get the call later, the one where his voice cracks recounting another day when David, his supervisor, shouts at him for replying too slowly or taking too much initiative. He’s a trainee at a top law firm, he’s done fine in the first six months, but he can’t bear confrontation let alone screaming. Now, he’s sitting with a man who shouts instead of talks.
I say goodbye to him and close our messages. If I can’t remember these images and no one else can, why can I see them? Only one thing can help me. Google.
I open the white oracle of a search bar, stare at the winking cursor while I craft my question: “seeing things that aren’t there.” Twenty million hits. The first few pages help me eliminate various possibilities instantly: I’m not having nightmares because I’m not asleep, neither am I delusional because delusions have an absurd element, like thinking you’re Gandhi or being controlled by robots. I might, however, be hallucinating. The Latin root for “hallucinate” is irresistibly beautiful, alucinari, something you would name a Victorian child. But that’s where the research ceases to be helpful, forking into a slew of either useless statistics or frightening ones. It takes me hours to come to a very simple conclusion: either I’m crazy or I’m very sick.
Around seventy percent of schizophrenics experience hallucinations. I feel strangely grateful; I’m at least in some kind of company. And there are upsides to schizophrenia—if I’m a hallucinating schizophrenic, I’m not bipolar, a small victory to eliminating psychiatric disorders on a very long list. But the symptoms of schizophrenia don’t quite fit; I don’t have disorganized speech, disorganized behavior, and I’m not emotionless or lacking an interest in the world.
There are many non-crazy alternatives: Dementia with Lewy bodies; Parkinson’s; Charles Bonnet syndrome; Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease; temporal lobe epilepsy; lesions. When I find out that lesions include brain tumors, I climb out of the hole, go to Julia’s dressing table and switch on her makeup mirror. It’s long past midnight now, the darkness crowding the bright, circle of light, but I position myself so my whole head is in the reflection and walk my fingers over section by section. I imagine it’s the size of a cherry tomato hidden in the dark furls of my brain, pulsating with its own daily rhythms. I’m seized with the urge to shave my head, I’d be closer to it then, separated only by millimeters of skin and bone, and then I turn off the mirror and go to bed. I won’t let sick make me crazy.
I’d prefer it to be a brain tumor. Hallucinations are a symptom of an advanced stage, so it would be over quicker, a year tops. But schizophrenia frightens me. The worst is not that it’s incurable or that I’m destined for a lifetime of depressive episodes. The worst is that I might never leave. Oxford used to be another pirouette in a perfect performance, but now that I might not be able to go, I realize it’s more than that. It’s somewhere else. Another place.
Morning breaks through the skylight, falling over the eaves, the throng of boxes and clothes. I used to love this time in the attic, the dawn chasing away the dark, the dust turning iridescent. Now I think this is all the beauty that will ever belong to me. Brightening shadows and dust.
I’ll make an appointment with the doctor tomorrow. I’ll deal with this by myself. I’ll go to Oxford. No one needs to know.
6 / DOCTOR
BLACKHEATH SURGERY IS LOCAL, although I haven’t been there in years. Daddy never saw the point. “There’s very little I can’t treat,” he’d say, and we adored him fussing over us because it happened so rarely—his enormous palm on our foreheads, the gentle way he spooned strawberry cough syrup into our mouths, laid antibiotics on our tongues. Even when I caught that virus and was off school for months, I never saw a doctor.
Mama disapproved of doctors’ surgeries for a different reason—germs. “It’s the dirtiest place,” she’d say, and suddenly, my imagination was on fire, I could see them, the millions of writhing bacteria and viruses smeared on doorknobs, sneezed on surfaces, tiny missiles honed on us. Now, as I click on the surgery’s number, I put the speakerphone on rather than holding it to my ear, even though I know the receptionist isn’t sick, that germs cannot travel with sound.
“Blackheath Surgery, Lisa speaking, what’s your name and date of birth?”
I put on my poshest, private-school voice. If there’s one thing Blackheath Girls’ taught me, it’s to speak as if I should be here, rather than deserving it with anything as grubby as a scholarship. How you appear is more important than who you are. “Good morning, Lisa.” I tell her the information she needs. “Do you have any appointments?”
“Any doctor in particular?”
I can hear the tinkle of glass, she’s on the iced coffees. “No, I’d just like an appointment today.”
“No appointments until middle of September unless it’s an emergency.”
“It is an emergency,” I say firmly.
“Can I ask you what’s wrong?”
I watch myself say the words in the mirror, the dark of my black contacts, my smooth made-up cheeks. “I think I have a brain tumor.”
There’s a pause on the line, then typing. She’s pulling up my records. “You’re eighteen.”
“Yes.”
“What symptoms do you have?”
“Hallucinations.”
“I’ve got an appointment with Doctor Aiden at ten-thirty if that’s any good. Can you be here in an hour and a half, dear?”
The “dear” makes me feel very small, very vulnerable. “Yes,” I whisper, my private-school voice ebbing away. “Thank you.”
* * *
THE DOCTOR’S SURGERY is a few minutes’ walk from the village, on a main road roaring with buses and lorries. Even with the noise, this is still the most affluent part of Blackheath. The buildings on each side are not so much houses as mansions transported from the antebellum South—wraparound porches, columns, green shutters, gravel driveways. When I drive by with Mama, she’d say, “Waste of money, they should have bought investment flats,” but her dismissal signals a deeper turbulence within her and within me. Why didn’t our family have enough to purchase investment flats? Why did she interrogate Daddy about any expenditure over £5, and play games with Julia about the rent on her apartment? Surely, she hasn’t spent all her earnings on Peranakan antiques and pink clothes.
I didn’t tell her that her finances impacted me beyond mere observation. Blackheath Girls’ offered four fully paid scholarship places to the brightest girls whose parents couldn’t afford to send them. In my year, it was Tatum, Lucy, Constanza, and me. We suited each other well enough. Unlike Slone and the other popular girls, we never spoke about our families, never invited each other over, poverty was a shield that protected all of us, until two years ago when Mama bought me a pair of diamond studs for my sixteenth birthday. She harangued me until I wore them every day over the summer. By the time school came round, I was so used to them, I didn’t register I was wearing them on the first day of term. The scholarship girls, however, did.
“Fancy,” Lucy said, as we filed back to our form rooms from assembly.
“Birthday present.”
“Crystal?” Lucy had always been the most covetous of us, obsessing about what new toy Sloane had, fantasizing about saving up for this brand of jeans, that designer handbag.
“Don’t know.”
“Cubic zirconia then?”
I shrugged, but I was aware of her eyes lingering on my ears.
She leaned forward to take a closer look and then playfully flicked my earlobe, but in the sharpness of her nail against my skin, I knew she was appraising the stone’s weight, she was jealous, she wanted to hurt me. “How can you not know?”
“Cut it out, Luce,” Connie said.
Lucy ignored her, upturned her palm. “Take them out, I want to see.”
I was vicious before I could stop myself. I slapped her open hand. “Why the fuck would I do that?”
She clasped her hand to her chest, silenced. But Tatum edged forward. “Show them to me.”
“Fuck off,” I said, unnerved. Tatum was the poorest of us, but also the smartest, not like Constanza—who was a polymath—or Lucy—a virtuoso violinist. Tatum was whip smart, someone who could navigate the world with barely anything. Take her uniform. Her parents couldn’t buy the whole set, not even from secondhand sales, so for few months, she subsisted on one pinafore and one shirt. I knew because the shirt had the faintest ring of sweat under the armpit and I saw that ring day after day. Then, she became School Uniform Prefect. I never saw the stained shirt again.
“They’re real, aren’t they?”
“Why do you care?”
She looked at me with hard brown eyes. Her eczema left a whitish patina on her skin and as she stared me down, she smoothed her cheeks to present her best face for my denouement. “I have a theory about you.”
“Nothing better to think about?” The bell rang. Around us, the other girls rushed to get their books out from their lockers, but the four of us were frozen, transfixed on the unfolding scene.
She licked her lips. “Do you know what the income bracket is to qualify for a full scholarship?”
I rolled my eyes, but she was closing in on something, something worth breaching our unspoken rule—we do not pry—and I was losing ground because I didn’t know what it was.
“Less than thirty-eight thousand pounds.”
“How do you know?” As soon as I said it, I regretted it.
“I had to know.” She stabbed her sternum. It made a hollow sound. “My parents can’t read English, so I filled out the scholarship forms. But your dad’s a doctor and your mum’s in finance, you go on holiday to Singapore, you get diamonds for your birthday,” and then her tone changed to a sneer, “you wear makeup.”
My hand flew to the tideline of makeup at my neck. They’d been talking about me, the shade of my face, the paleness of my neck, what a freak I was, perhaps since they first met me, perhaps always.
“How did you qualify?”
“I don’t know,” but I suddenly did, as I watched the righteous blaze in Tatum’s eyes, the drop of Constanza’s gaze, Lucy shifting her feet. Mama had lied on the scholarship forms.
There was no more walking through the park or visits to the museum or summer picnics, not with Tatum and Lucy at least. Constanza tried for a bit, furtive, strained meetings where she made me swear not to tell the others, but these tailed off. I pretended not to care, dissecting meaning in my etymology dictionary, scribbling on the walls of the hole. I wasn’t scared of being ratted out. I was scared of something else: that fleeting, dangerous moment when my friends glimpsed something about Mama I didn’t know. Still, I never asked Mama why she did it. Why she’d lied about how much money she had.
* * *
DOCTOR AIDEN IS Indian, with a pretty plumpness about her. In the warmth, she wears an electric-blue sleeveless dress, no tights, and ballet pumps. She smiles at me from behind black framed glasses. “Have a seat. How can I help?”
I take a plastic chair, careful not to lean back; I want to limit how much of my body touches these contaminated surfaces. The earpieces of a stethoscope hang over the edge of the table. I sit very still to avoid them brushing my knee.
She reads the notes on her computer then looks at me. “You’re having hallucinations?”
I nod.
“How many have you had?”
“Four.”
“Can you tell me what happens in one?”
“Just images. Onions, a smashed glass of milk.” My throat is a rasp. “A woman.”
“They don’t sound like hallucinations to me. Hallucinations are like seeing spiders climbing up the wall or a figure that isn’t there. Do they feel like that?”
I shake my head.
“They sound like flashbacks.”
“Flashbacks? But that doesn’t make sense. The glass of milk smashing, the woman crumpling, I don’t remember these things, I checked with my brother, I’m sure—” As my hands gesture manically, I accidentally touch the stethoscope and jerk away.
“Sometimes,” says Dr. Aiden, kindly, “we don’t want to believe a flashback is ours. Are they upsetting in any way?”
“Not really.” I wipe my fingertips on my leggings and regret it immediately, imagining the germs burrowing through the material onto my thigh.
“How do they make you feel?”
“Can I have some hand sanitizer please?” I point to the dispenser behind her.
She hands it to me.
“A bit panicky I guess.” I squirt out a handful and rub it on my leggings, making sure to cover a circumference wider than where I’d wiped my hands.
“Has anything happened recently? Any changes at home or at school?”
“No. I’m on summer holidays before uni.”
I do my hands next, the palms, the backs, between the fingers. When I look up, she’s watching me in a way I don’t like, as if she’s trying to piece something together, and I wonder if there’s something unfathomably wrong with me that medicine and science are powerless to solve. “If they aren’t distressing and nothing’s happened to you, there’s not much we can do. Are you in pain in any way? Any trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating? No depression or anxiety? Do you feel isolated or withdrawn?”
It’s a dizzying array of symptoms. I say something just to feel curable. “I’ve been a little tired.”
Dr. Aiden visibly brightens. “Ah. Let’s get you a blood test, check your iron levels and thyroid. We’ll give you a call if anything’s out of the ordinary.”
She prints out a blood test form. When she holds it out to me, she leans close. “If the flashbacks get worse, come back and see me. What you say here is completely private. This is a safe space.”
