The Things We Thought We Knew Read online

  Jonathan watched from the corner of the room.

  ‘For shit’s sake!’ he said, as she began spinning us around.

  She was whooping so loudly that she didn’t hear him.

  ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead!’ she sang, do-si-doeing our bodies across the carpet.

  Your mother’s favourite film was The Wizard of Oz so we didn’t pay much attention to the words. Her steps were so quick we almost tumbled over until she suddenly stopped. She looked at the dresser before running over to it and opening all the doors. She was in such a rush that she didn’t notice how she’d upset her own pictures. The metal frames clinked against each other as she opened a small burgundy book with a gold emblem of a lion and unicorn stamped on the cover. As she examined the pages inside she didn’t notice how the photographs of her former beauty – the same ones she polished each Sunday and banned you from touching – had fallen flat on their faces.

  We should have known then that something was wrong.

  Signs of spring: fuzzy green buds sitting on spindly branches outside the window; birds perched on said branches, twittering like maniacs; Amma telling me to stop throwing objects at said window to get rid of said birds twittering like maniacs.

  I’m not always great at spotting the signs. It’s easy to forget the month or day when you’re in a lifebed. There’s a 2010 calendar hanging on the back of my bedroom door, page turned to January, with a giant picture of kittens in a basket at the top, but Amma forgets to flip the month over because she never sees it. When she’s in my room, the door stays open and the calendar is hidden away. And then when she leaves, she closes the door behind her and the calendar remains unseen. This is like life: there are things we think we’ve tucked away but they’re still there, concealed from view.

  Amma comes into my room with a tray of curried breakfast. She comes in three times a day, ambling down the hallway in her sari and socks with a tray of unsuitable food held tightly in her hands. Chapattis round and floury, steaming with heat from the pan. Soft curried potatoes, yellowed with turmeric and splattered with mustard seeds and coriander leaves, a whole green chilli angled on the side. There’s no use telling Amma that chilli isn’t suitable for breakfast. My mother has her own logic which bears no relation to the everyday logic the rest of us use.

  Chapattis = breakfast

  Rice = lunch and dinner

  Curry = all the livelong day

  ‘This is the Bengali way,’ she tells me, knowing full well I don’t know any better. She could tell me swimming in a bicycle helmet is a national custom in Sylhet and I’d have no way of proving otherwise.

  Along with the heartburn-inducing breakfast, Amma brings me a tumbler filled to the brim with mango juice. The tumbler is decorated with red cockerels; she got it free using cereal coupons when I was four years old. Heaven, for my mother, would be a discount store and a handful of coupons.

  ‘Good morning, my sweet eighteen-year-old!’ she says as she comes in.

  I wipe the sleep from my eyes.

  ‘Morning, Amma.’

  She settles the tray on my lap, places my pills in a line like soldiers preparing to march. As I shuffle up in the bed I hear the pills wobble, hard shells clinking against plastic. Amma nudges them back in line in that swift way of hers, putting things back in place before you even realize they’re out.

  Amma sits by the window and watches me. The folds of her sari puff out as she waits for me to have my first mouthful. Once, years ago, I tried pushing the tray away and she near forced the food down my throat, holding my head by the back of the scalp and pushing hot potato to my sucked-in lips.

  ‘Good girl,’ she says as I take my first mouthful.

  Good girl, as though I’m eight and not eighteen.

  I take a sip of mango juice, waiting for Amma to detail her strategy for Getting Ravine Out of the Flat. Instead, she begins her ritual with the letters. Each and every day Amma leans back in her seat, pulls out the post from the waist of her sari petticoat and begins reading me junk mail.

  No, not just junk mail. Sometimes she reads me the bills.

  Amma thinks that if she tells me about a new restaurant opening five streets away, or the money I could save when calling friends (which I don’t have), I’ll somehow gain an interest in the Big World Outside. The world that, for the last few years, I’ve seen only through the squares of windows. Taxi windows taking me to hospital windows, then back to taxi windows that will drive me to the same infernal bedroom window that I look out of each day.

  Sometimes Amma tells me about current affairs. Troops being killed in Afghanistan, conspiracy theories about the death of Michael Jackson. When Barack Obama was elected, Amma blubbered through the whole inauguration as though the President of the United States were in fact her long-lost son. She looked over at me, baffled when I couldn’t muster a tear.

  ‘It is so wonderful, is it not?’ she said.

  I was too busy absorbing the fact that I hadn’t noticed a whole presidential election had been and gone to agree.

  News is seducing; like any other kind of gossip I’m always tempted to listen in. I learnt the consequences a few years back when Amma read an article to me about the bunny murders in Ruhr Valley, Germany. The report left me so disturbed I had recurring nightmares of waking up in a room full of rabbit heads. But here’s what I’ve decided: I have no part in the world and the best thing is to keep it that way. I’m perfectly happy in the vacuum of my room where nothing ever changes. Good old Shiva watching over me from the dresser, My Little Ponies frolicking merrily on the folds of the curtains. Even the squawking birds on the wallpaper are some form of company, despite their evil eyes. Unfortunately, Amma doesn’t agree. She thinks I need to know about every disaster and tragedy that pops up on the news. There is now a ‘global financial crisis’, she tells me. People will lose jobs, families will be on the ‘breadline’, our entire broken country will become a no man’s land, with politicians feeding on the dead corpses of the poor and destitute (i.e. us).

  ‘A postcard!’ Amma says this morning.

  I’m swallowing my pills as she says it and almost choke. When I look up at her, Amma has her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose with an oblong card held in front of her. Morning light filters through the curtains, making the postcard glow. I can see the picture of a tropical beach fringed with a luminous light as she frowns and squints, trying to decipher the words on the back. For a moment my heart holds on to its own beat, making my chest cave in, my stomach tighten.

  ‘“Dear Mrs Roy,”’ she says in her booming read-aloud voice. ‘“We are on the third day of our trip and are having the time of our lives! Here on Primrose Cruises not only do you get the pleasure of an all-inclusive holiday (meals included) but access to sports, bar and leisure facilities. Terms and conditions apply. Already we have been working out at the gym, drinking cocktails at the bar and pampering ourselves in the exclusive Thai spa. Why don’t you come join us by following our blog on www.primrose-cruises.blogspot.com. Wish you were here! Angela and Simon.”’

  Amma continues to frown as she turns the card over in her hand. She peers at me over her glasses.

  ‘Who is this Angela and Simon?’

  I take a deep breath. The pain is vibrating through my nerves, pulsing louder and louder.

  ‘It’s junk mail, Amma,’ I tell her, sliding my breakfast tray to the bedside table, feeling the cramping of muscles in my arm.

  She sits up straight, as though I’ve told her a lie. She examines the postcard closely, pushing the print right up to her nose before running her finger across it. Her brows rise high, lips pouting.

  ‘The type is just like handwriting,’ she tells me.

  I sigh in that way I do to stop myself from rolling my eyes. Amma hates the eye-rolling even more than the sighing and, even though I rarely show it, I love my mother. You know this and so does she, but sometimes I need to prove this to myself with these small acts of kindness.

  ‘The wonders
of a modern age,’ I say, before rolling over and covering my shoulders with the duvet. The pain is throbbing now, a loud, angry pulse that pounds through the left side of my body. I wait to hear the shuffle of Amma’s sari as she rises to her feet.

  ‘We shall start our exercises later,’ she says. ‘I must give you time to digest your breakfast.’

  ‘How generous,’ I mumble as I concentrate on keeping my muscles relaxed.

  I squeeze my eyes closed as nausea crashes through my stomach. I shudder.

  ‘I think we shall start with something small,’ she carries on. ‘Perhaps getting dressed.’

  The bed begins to bob from side to side like a ship lost at sea.

  ‘I’m not getting dressed,’ I say.

  ‘Or walking outside.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  The waves grow bigger and my bed begins to rock violently.

  I open my eyes to see Amma hovering by the side of my bed. I smile at her, hoping I can hide the screaming pain. The room blurs behind her and I close my eyes.

  ‘I will write a list of options,’ she says. Through the ringing in my ears I hear the dull clatter of the tray as she collects it and moves to the end of the room. After ten years, I’ve learnt how to hide my symptoms from Amma, to keep her from worrying, to keep her from sitting at my bedside and mopping my brow. Just as she gets to the door, Amma pauses. I crane my neck, seeing her fuzzy shape standing at the end of the bed. The room is still swaying.

  ‘So much like handwriting,’ she says.

  I imagine Amma holding up the postcard, examining the text again while shaking her head. I don’t look to check in case she looks back and sees that I’d been fooled too, if only for a moment, and that in that moment, my heart missed a beat.

  The Constellation of Lightning Bolts

  I hadn’t realized your mother had gone until the night I heard you crying. All Friday at school you’d seemed just fine. On the playing field you’d rolled out cartwheel after cartwheel, not caring that all the boys could see your luminous shorts flashing at them like an amber light. But when it came to the weekend I suppose the weight of her absence hit you. As I tucked myself into bed I didn’t hear your usual jabbering but a quiet sobbing leaking through the walls. I asked you what was wrong but you pretended not to hear. I knew that you were pretending because your whimpers came to a sudden stop. I imagined you burying your head beneath the duvet, trying not to breathe, stifling your sniffles in the springs of your mattress.

  If I’d ever seen you cry before, it was because of injury not grief. You’d perform one of your ridiculous stunts, pretending to tightrope walk on a wall or racing Jonathan up a tree, and end up with jagged red scrapes down your knees and elbows. You never cried for long, holding on to the sting with one hand as you wiped away snot and tears with the other, hobbling to the nearest adult with hiccuping gulps.

  ‘I shall chop it off with a knife,’ Amma said to you once.

  She performed a chopping action as she spoke, banging the edge of one hand against the other like a cleaver against a board. She then giggled in that ‘tee hee’ fashion you always found so hilarious. You spluttered with laughter while I stood frozen with the image of cleavers in my mind.

  You won’t know this but the night I heard you crying, I crept down the stairs, out of the flat and to your front door. I’d like to say this was pure selflessness on my part, that the sound of your pain caused me so much worry that I couldn’t rest without coming to soothe you. That would be a lie and the last thing I want to do is to lie to you.

  The truth is I came that night because I was so used to your prattling at bedtime I found it hard to fall asleep without it. As the silence soaked the walls, I stared blankly at the ceiling, thinking about how much my body would have shrunk by morning.

  It was Jonathan who answered the door. He had on his thick-framed glasses that covered half his face and thunderstorm pyjamas with lightning bolts shooting out of grey clouds. I used to call him Jonathan-Weatherboy. He hated it, even though he loved the weather, randomly announcing make-believe forecasts that no one had asked for. He sat so close to the television – watching those weather reports, memorizing the language and imitating the gestures of his idols – that we were convinced he would one day fall through the screen. Once, he ordered us to paint him a map of the British Isles so he had something to practise his reports on. He got all flustered when he stuck it to the wall and found Scotland was ten times too big, looking like an infected head, bloated and lopsided upon the dwarf body of England. When we told him the cross in the middle was to mark our location (Leicester – the heart of England) he ripped the map in two.

  ‘What do you want?’ Jonathan asked that night.

  ‘Marianne,’ I said.

  He sighed a dramatic sigh, legs bending and head rolling back as his jaw gaped open. ‘For shit’s sake, Ravine,’ he said, smacking his hand across his face.

  I gasped. ‘She’s crying,’ I told him. ‘And don’t swear.’

  Jonathan looked at me through his glasses as though I were an idiot. ‘No, she isn’t.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘I heard her through the wall. I heard her weeping and sobbing.’

  Jonathan, ignoring my great use of synonyms, screwed up his lips. ‘Bollocks.’

  I gasped and he smiled, smug that he’d got me twice. I stared at your brother through narrowed eyes, ready to punch him in the nose. To look at that boy, you would never have guessed he was your brother. He didn’t have that golden tan you’d inherited from your dad (half-Portuguese, you told me, making you a quarter Portuguese and three-quarters ‘normal’). Your brother was pale and goofy, and he didn’t have that wide rugby-ball grin you had. When your brother smiled, it looked sinister, like he was planning something rotten, which he usually was. His hair was dark, scruffy and distinctly straight while your brown mop glowed golden in the sunlight like a halo. If it hadn’t been for your button noses, no one would have guessed you were even related.

  When I looked over Jonathan’s shoulder I could see the television blazing with grainy images of Jurassic Park. There was a sleeping bag spread across the floor with a multipack of crisps and a bottle of supermarket-own cola beside it.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’ I asked.

  The smugness quickly fell from Jonathan’s face. I grinned, pleased with my Sherlock-like shrewdness as his face knotted into a scowl.

  ‘She’s gone on a holiday and I’m in charge.’

  He jutted his chin out, shrugging his shoulders as though this was no big deal.

  ‘I get to be in charge, you see, because—’

  ‘You’re older and you’re a boy.’

  He didn’t like the way I finished his sentence but I’d heard him say those stupid words so often they sprang from my mouth automatically. For all her wrongdoings I think this was your mother’s worst. She repeated these words (‘because you’re older and a boy’) over and over at your brother until he developed a superiority complex – he wasn’t just better than us, but better than everyone.

  ‘How long is she on holiday for?’ I asked.

  ‘As long as she bleeding well likes,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t swear.’

  ‘“Bleeding” isn’t swearing. It’s in the dictionary. Thought you’d know that, seeing as you’re Ravine Ravine Dictionary Queen.’

  He waved his hands in the air as he fairy-danced my name. I stood there, clinging on to the mini dictionary sitting heavy in my robe. After a while, he dropped his hands, releasing a yawn that was so wide I could see the fillings in his back teeth.

  ‘Go away now,’ he said and then slammed the door in my face.

  I stomped my way back to bed, bubbling with a fury that made me want to shake Amma awake so I could share my outrage.

  ‘Do you know what Jonathan-Weatherboy just did to me? Do you know what the buffoon just said to me?’

  I climbed back in bed and curled into a foetal position. My fingers were clenched so deep in my pillow I could see the bone
s of my knuckles pushing up against the skin in little crescent moons. If it hadn’t been for his voice, I would have ripped that pillow to smithereens. It was only a mumble at first. I sat up in bed, pressing a glass to the wall and squashing my ear against it.

  ‘You’re not crying, are you?’ I heard him say.

  The tone in his voice was inquisitive rather than mocking. I imagined him standing in your doorway with that scrunched-up expression he had on his face when he thought we were keeping secrets from him.

  I didn’t hear your reply. I guess it was muffled by the duvet you must have been hiding under.

  ‘But she’ll be back soon!’ Jonathan cried. ‘For shit’s sake, Marianne, she said she’d be back soon, didn’t she?’

  I heard a mumble as you scolded him for his language.

  ‘I suppose you want to come and watch TV now?’ he said.

  He sounded put-out but the fact he’d invited you, that he’d extended some form of twisted olive branch, was enough to simmer my rage.

  Yet something still felt wrong. The crying, the sleeping bag in front of the television and the lack of jabbering through the wall made it hard for me to sleep. I stared up at the cracks along the ceiling and made a pact. With your mother gone, I’d have to step up. Jonathan may have been older and a boy, but he was also an idiot who couldn’t be trusted.

  Someone needed to protect you, and that person would be me.

  Today Amma makes me walk across the landing to the top of the stairs where I stand for five minutes, staring down the steps. She makes me repeat this four times. By the time I’m back in bed, my body is flinching with the repeat feeling of