The Things We Thought We Knew Read online

  Episode Five – …?

  The truth is I am Episode Five. I am the new storyline in Amma’s saga and with my addition the whole production has come to a halt. She wants to direct the rest of the story. She’s been setting the scene for the denouement (cut to folded piece of paper pushed into ballot box) but it doesn’t matter how many plans she makes, how many new exercises she gives me because I am the lead and I am refusing to turn up to set.

  Amma gave me the name Ravine to break from her past. She wanted me to be something different, something new. But it plagues me, this name, because I can never live up to it. Everything is the same for me now. Besides, I don’t want to be different. I don’t want to be the Ravine girl stuck in her flat with chronic pain syndrome. I don’t want to be the Ravine Ravine Dictionary Queen your brother sang about. I don’t want to hear that same song whirling around in my dreams and then hear that name being called through the partition wall of my room when I wake up.

  ‘Ravine?’

  I can hear it so clearly. Then again.

  ‘Ravine?’

  It’s like a ghost calling for me from the afterlife. But once I’ve blinked myself awake, my eyes adjusting to the blankness, the voice has gone. I begin to feel that it’s happened, I’ve become (as you used to say) ‘doolally’. When I look over at Shiva, he looks at me with sorrowful eyes that seem to agree.

  When I wake up, Amma’s face is hovering over mine.

  ‘And how are you today, shona?’ she asks.

  Without even letting me answer, she begins to feel my forehead with the back of her hand.

  ‘You look pale,’ she says.

  I’m about to tell her that I haven’t slept. That I’ve been hearing voices calling my name. That guilt is obviously eating me up and it’s time to tell her the truth. But she carries on before I can speak.

  ‘I suppose screaming at the physiotherapist has tired you out.’

  She pulls out the junk mail from her petticoat.

  ‘I didn’t scream,’ I say.

  She sits down on her chair. ‘Yes. You did.’

  ‘It was part of the therapy. You know, “primal scream” and all that.’

  She looks at me from the top of her eyes with an ‘oh please’ expression.

  ‘It’s a real thing,’ I say.

  Amma carries on looking at me, ripping an envelope open as she holds my gaze. ‘He was shaking when he left,’ she says.

  When she tells me this I feel the same hurt that I used to feel when you took Jonathan’s side all the times I was clearly in the right. I was embarrassed and ashamed, but most of all, I was irritated.

  I dig a finger in my chest. ‘I was shaking too,’ I say.

  This seems to pique Amma’s interest. She places the mail on her lap. ‘And why was that?’

  I drop my hand as I try to stop my chin from trembling. The irritation is being overridden by the embarrassment and shame.

  ‘Can we not talk about this?’ I say.

  She pauses, nodding slowly. ‘Then what would you like to talk about, shona?’ she says.

  I think about this for a second. It’s hard keeping all the emotions in. I’ve built a dam up around me but clearly the walls are starting to crack. I look into Amma’s eyes, deciding if I should do it. If I should tell her the truth.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  When she leaves the room Amma’s shoulders are stooped. I feel hollow, like she has scooped out a part of me and taken it with her. When I hear her rustling around in the kitchen I creep out of bed and kneel slowly before the statue of Shiva. There must be an answer to all this, a solution to make everyone happy that doesn’t involve me leaving the flat and facing the Big World Outside. A solution that doesn’t leave Amma disappointed.

  I press my palms together and close my eyes.

  ‘Dear Shiva,’ I say, and then realize I’m not writing a letter. ‘O great and mighty one,’ I say, which feels forced and stupid. ‘God …?’

  I drop my hands and open my eyes to see Shiva giggling into one of his many hands. I roll my eyes, wondering why Amma didn’t teach me some pujas when I was younger.

  I used to think that all immigrants were as lax with religion as Amma, but the Ahmed children went to the madrasa every day after school. Some nights we could hear their father doing his namaz through the walls and one time, Amma saw the family go crazy when a dog began sniffing at their shoes when they passed it on the stairs. Mr Chavda is a strict Hindu and attends the city temple daily, while the Singhs, who went to our school and wore more Western clothes than you could fit into a shopping centre, carry out fasts during the holy days, eating only nuts and fruit, drinking only water and milk. Once, when you were ill and not at school, the young boy Singh brought in a huge drum he’d used at the Vaisakhi parade to show off in assembly. He banged it so loudly that everyone was sure he’d be told off and applauded when he wasn’t.

  Since her childhood in Bangladesh, Amma has refused to take part in any rituals. Yes, she keeps pictures of the gods around the flat as tokens of nostalgia and yes, she gets binoculars out at Diwali, searching for the Melton Road fireworks from the fourth-floor balcony.

  ‘But I will never,’ she tells me, ‘become a slave to the dogmas of religion and tradition!’

  She said I could choose what I wanted to believe for myself. I wish she’d decided for me. How am I to know if going to church on Sundays, fasting during Ramadan, lighting divas for Diwali pleases God or enrages Him?

  Or Her.

  Or It.

  Sometimes all you want is just one answer.

  I look at the statue of Shiva again and my stomach begins to cramp. He’s looking smugly at me now, as though godliness is oh so easy, oh so effortless. Then I hear footsteps coming up the stairs.

  ‘Do you want a chai, shona?’ Amma calls.

  I turn Shiva to face the wall then leap back into bed.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say in a loud I’M-BUSY voice.

  I pull the sheets up to my chin as her steps retreat, imagining what she would have thought if she’d caught me knelt in front of Shiva. Or, even worse, if she’d caught me jumping back in bed; no shaking, no wincing, no pain.

  The Buddhists believe that life is suffering. I read this in a library book once. I thought that with its calm and meditative approach to life Buddhism might be the religion for me, but after reading that statement found myself slamming the book shut and throwing it on the floor. I didn’t want life to be suffering. I was suffering enough already and the idea of it never ending was enough to make me scream. But maybe the Buddhists are right.

  Life is suffering.

  Life is a struggle.

  Life is crisis after crisis thrown straight at your unenlightened head.

  The Constellation of Rabbit Heads

  Uncle Walter was a successful man, though we weren’t to know this until the unlikely detective duo of Amma and Sandy Burke decided to investigate. Sandy came banging on our door one morning with her twin girls buckled into their car seat carriers. She balanced them one on each arm like a set of scales, asking Amma outright if she knew what was ‘going off’ in the flat next door now that Elaine had gone. To her own annoyance, Amma found she knew nothing. She called me to the door and tried to wheedle information out of me by pinching my cheeks and making me stare into her eyes. After intense interrogation she found I knew as much as her.

  Sandy jiggled the carriers on her arms as the girls began to whine. The balls of her eyes protruded from her shrunken face as she shook her head and clicked her tongue. This was in Sandy’s beanpole days when she was made more out of bone than of flesh.

  ‘Can we trust him? That’s all I want to know,’ she said. ‘You know, what with his problems?’

  Amma’s eyes widened. ‘Problems?’

  Sandy let the question hang in the air then stuck her chin out. ‘Not my place to say,’ she said.

  Amma looked down at me with narrowed eyes, placing her hand on my scalp as though checking – through some subtle
vibration – for the truth.

  ‘Ravine, can this Walter fellow be trusted?’ she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘Suppose,’ I said.

  Amma dropped her hand instantly and rushed to the kitchen. When she came back she had a tub of leftover lentils in her hand.

  ‘This will not do,’ she muttered to herself as she stepped outside and rapped her knuckles against your front door.

  Even though I usually let myself into your flat, Amma wouldn’t let me go in until Uncle Walter opened up the door. When he did, Amma shoved her offering into his chest, which Uncle Walter accepted with so much enthusiasm you’d think he’d been starving for the last week. We remained fixed on the spot until he finally began to nod.

  ‘Come in, come in!’ he said. ‘I was just about to put the kettle on.’

  Sandy Burke pushed past the two of us and made her way to the same dining table she used to sit at with your mother. She placed the girls by her feet and began rocking their carriers with the toes of her trainers, leaning back in the chair as though it, and the whole flat, belonged to her.

  You were sitting at the table yourself with a chessboard in front of you while your brother read a meteorology book on the sofa. You seemed unfazed by the sudden appearance of Sandy and it wasn’t until I came and sat next to you that you snapped out of your gaze.

  ‘I think I’ve nearly cracked it, Ravine,’ you said, then lowered your head as you pressed a finger on each temple, staring down at the pieces.

  You’d won the chessboard in the school raffle that summer. All prizes had been donated by parents and checked by teachers (bottles of vodka and old pin-up calendars withdrawn), which had left a dubious yield. Out of a bounty of one-eyed dolls and broken toy cars, the chessboard had been one of the superior items and, even though the box was battered, two pawns and the instructions were missing, you still treasured the game as if it were brand new. But without instructions we were lost. We didn’t know where the pieces went, how many moves you were allowed or even what the different pieces did. Uncle Walter knew the names of the pieces but nothing else, while Jonathan claimed to know the rules but refused to teach us them because ‘any fool could figure it out’. We’d been trying to do exactly that for the last month.

  As you tried to communicate with the knight via some form of telepathy, Amma began her investigation. She sat up straight, bangles clanking against the table top as she folded her arms. Her questions were swift and direct. Where had Uncle Walter been living previously? Where did he work? How long was he planning to stay? I watched this back-and-forth for some time, perplexed by the things adults wanted to know about each other. The only question we’d asked Uncle Walter was how many stars he thought were in the galaxy and even then he wasn’t able to give us a solid figure.

  At last you connected with the chess piece. You sat up straight, picked up the queen and balanced her on top of the knight as though recreating the act of horse riding.

  ‘No, no,’ you mumbled as the queen fell off. ‘That can’t be it.’

  I pushed the pawns around the board in a fashion I thought fitting, hoping Jonathan wouldn’t get up from the sofa to look at how we were screwing up this foolproof game. He remained indifferent, his book fixed in front of his face, two swirling images of clouds peering out from the cover like a pair of spinning eyes.

  We kept our heads low as Amma continued her Q&A, managing to maintain the appearance of not listening. This is an art mastered by the young, achieved solely by the adult habit of forgetting you exist. My mother hurled an arsenal of questions at your uncle while he responded without aggression or force but with a steady smile and the pure charm and grace of a diplomat. He had no reason to be polite to this nosey neighbour and for this I’m grateful to him. If my mother is anything she’s fair; when your uncle treated her with respect she saw no reason but to treat him the same.

  Sandy Burke was a harder nut to crack. She leant back in her seat, looking at Uncle Walter through the slit of her eyes as though he were a suspect in a murder investigation. As she rocked her twins with her toes, Tony Blair’s eyes flashed up on the back of the carriers. The more she rocked, the more the bumper stickers were revealed. New Labour. New Britain. I pictured people in orange overalls labouring away at British coastlines.

  ‘So, Westhill is good enough for you now?’ Sandy asked.

  There was spite in her tone as she sat, arms folded in a python grip around her chest. Your uncle, on the other hand, grinned so heartily that his round double chin shone like glazed doughnuts.

  ‘It’s like coming home,’ he said.

  ‘It is your home!’ Sandy snapped. ‘Or at least it would have been if it hadn’t been for your stupid cow of a mother, God rest her soul.’

  Her chin wrinkled even with the ‘God rest’. She leant in close to Uncle Walter.

  ‘I know where you’ve been all this time, Walt. Elaine told me everything.’

  Uncle Walter’s face began to flush. ‘Everything?’ he said.

  Sandy shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she said, in an offhand way that seemed to relieve him.

  I looked over at you as you continued to stare at your chess pieces. I checked your face to see if you were absorbing all this vital information. But your attention was fixed on the wooden objects, your eyes not shifting one millimetre.

  I looked back and watched Sandy Burke shove an escaped dummy into the mouth of one of her twins.

  ‘What have you been up to, anyway?’ she asked. ‘How come you never came back?’

  Uncle Walter looked up at the ceiling. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess it all began at army camp.’

  Sandy stopped rocking the carriers. ‘Army?’ she said, cocking her neck back. ‘You?’

  Uncle Walter smiled. He had, so he told the panel, been working in the army for the past six years, based in a camp in Italy. This was where he’d perfected his survival strategies and had picked up the nuances of the Italian language. Since leaving he had written a book on the knowledge he’d obtained and was currently negotiating deals with both British and Italian publishers. He was hoping the book would be released in early March 2000. We were all dumbstruck.

  We’d heard Uncle Walter speaking in quick-tongued dialogue on the telephone, gesticulating with his hands up in the air as he spoke in a language we thought was made up. We only found out it was Italian when you asked him outright. After that you attempted to copy his gestures whenever he spoke it, repeating the words in a fumbled, bumpy manner. The only foreign phrases you’d known before then were ‘jaldi’, which my mother used when hurrying us up, as well as ‘c’est la vie’, which you said when the mood suited you, even though you weren’t 100 per cent sure of its meaning. At the time we hadn’t thought much of the fact your uncle had this bilingual talent – we never realized it was an asset. My mother knew Bengali and Hindi, and that had never seemed to help her. But your uncle’s bilingualism combined with his expertise in survival strategies had brought him success. By the end of the conversation, Amma was looking down at her bowl of leftover lentils with sudden remorse.

  ‘I have made a mistake,’ she said, pulling the Tupperware to her chest. ‘I have brought you the wrong tub.’

  She looked over at me with large eyes made all the wider by the black kohl liner she used to circle the edge of her lids.

  ‘Ravine, shona, go fetch me the lamb biryani from the pot in the kitchen.’

  She moved her head forward in goat-butting movements as though this would hurry me on. I put my pawns down, knowing full well that the biryani she’d made that morning had been intended for lunch and dinner that day. If she gave our food away now maybe we’d have something without chillies in it later.

  ‘It’s just like when we were younger,’ said Sandy, arms loosening. ‘You and Bobby always messing around building trenches. Trying to camouflage that shed of yours.’

  ‘Hideout,’ you corrected.

  Uncle Walter looked down at you before you quickly began moving chess p
ieces around the board.

  ‘You remember that?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course!’ Sandy said. ‘The two of you were glued at the hip. He was always so mardy, though, that Bobby. Took everything so serious. Him and all his plans.’

  When I looked at Uncle Walter his chin had dimpled, eyes glazed with a sudden wetness. Sandy shook her head.

  ‘Who would have thought it would actually lead to something, though?’

  Your uncle released a small laugh as he rubbed his eyes, at which point Sandy, remembering her cynicism, wound her arms back into a vice grip.

  ‘Ravine,’ Amma hissed as she poked me in the side.

  As I slid off my chair, you slid off your own and followed me. Jonathan temporarily emerged from behind his book. He snorted loudly at our inability to do the smallest task without each other.

  ‘You coming, Jonathan?’ you asked.

  ‘I’d rather eat my own snot.’

  I glanced over at Amma, who had never been shy in reprimanding your brother, even in front of Mrs Dickerson, but she was too busy grinning manically at your uncle to notice the comment. As we left the flat I found myself smiling too. I’m sorry to break it to you, but Amma wasn’t the biggest fan of your mother. Yes, she acted civilly to her in passing but within the privacy of our living room her true feelings came out. Mrs Dickerson was an ‘irresponsible fool’. Mrs Dickerson was an ‘egomaniac’. Mrs Dickerson was an ‘alcoholic’. I looked up all these words in my mini dictionary and found none of them were complimentary.

  But things were different with your uncle. That day in the kitchen, my mother’s neck was straight, every betel nut-stained tooth on display, as she sat in the glow of your uncle’s success. She was not being civil when she smiled at Uncle Walter, she was being adoring. And that was a miracle in itself.

  The bunny-killing spree began in the summer of 2007 in the hutches and back gardens of Ruhr Valley, Germany. Rabbit bodies were found stretched out on lawns, drained of blood and beheaded. At first the murders were put down to a rogue fox or large dog. But after the numbers of deaths increased, it was clear that the killings were caused by human hands. Satanists, experts speculated, using Google Earth images to identify their targets.