moved their trailer with hardly a sound. Leaving in silence was what they always aimed to do, waking no one, refusing to disturb the children and their dreams. The monkey lay sleeping beside the lion tamer, exhausted and dour, and the lady card reader, having taken his wig off, urinated on to the road from his moving caravan. It was all part of the fun of the fair. It was all part of life for the fire-eater and the shadow dancer and the inflatable man. Another town, another crowd, another group of noisy punters eating freshly spun candyfloss. All in a day’s work; here today, gone tomorrow, with no time for regrets. The sea rose and fell as they hit the coast road, heading north. They would be back in a year; same time, same place, right here on the hill where the short, rough grass would have grown over the chalk numbers that had marked the positions of the rides.
Alice stirred. A telephone was ringing in her dream. It rang and rang again insistently, pushing against the carousel that played out its tune in her head. The feet running across the coconut-polished floors sounded like a thousand galloping horses. It was still dark, the sun had not risen; the mosquito net around her cot was undisturbed. Opening her eyes, Alice saw the sky on the point of being punctured by light. Her dream fled the room, leaving behind a puzzling echo. She frowned, trying to recall the music that played on the merry-go-round, but it evaded her. Nothing moved. Even the sap, bluish-white as mother’s milk, had stopped dripping from the rubber trees in the plantation nearby. But something had disturbed Alice. The edges of a peculiar awareness nudged her gently, like an old shell murmuring, insisting she awoke. She sat up, fully awake, alert now. She was hot and the flower-scented garden was calling out to her, so in a swift movement she threw off the mosquito net, stood on the low window sill beside her bed and launched herself on to the gravel below. It was the water pump dripping outside the gate that had woken her, she decided. Someone had forgotten to turn it off. Further along the garden a long beam of light extended across the ground. With one blow it cleft the garden into two. She saw with surprise that her grandfather was up and working in his studio. Alice hesitated, wondering whether to disturb him. Overhead, the beginnings of dawn poked a hole in the sky. Faint rose-pink light flooded out, spreading across the horizon, seeping into the sea. The air was filled with a selection of newly unwrapped scents from the Jacaranda tree. Alice crossed the gravel in her bare feet and stood on the empty coconut oil drum near the window of the studio. Her grandfather had his back turned to her. He was bent over his etching press, but the studio looked tidy, not at all as it usually did. Black scrim hung neatly on their nails, stiff with dry ink; his cleaned rollers were stacked on shelves above his head and none of his copper plates were in sight. Alice craned her head. What was her grandfather doing at this hour? Something about the angle of his body bothered her and she hesitated for a moment longer, not knowing whether she should disturb him. Bird-arias exploded into the morning. She heard a soft, puzzling sound and then she froze in terror as Bee sunk slowly to his knees. The next instance she toppled over and crashed down into the gravel.
The noise brought him to his feet. He stood in the doorway, a thin man in a white sarong that matched his hair. His face looked strange, as though it was a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together in the wrong way. Confused, she stared at him and it was another moment before she saw with cold, creeping horror that he was crying.
‘Your mother has lost the baby,’ he told her simply, spreading his hands out in front of him.
Seagulls carried his words in circles above her head, their keening cries tangling with the breaking waves so that forever afterwards Alice would be unable to separate any of these sounds from what had been said. Forever afterwards she would connect the lost baby with the birds and the vast drum of the sky pouring out light as though from an open wound.
Time stood still for her as the events fixed themselves on her mind. Gradually, as the sun gained strength, a thin line marked the horizon, separating the sea from the sky. The waves became transparent as lace while the sky continued to lighten. The waves arched their backs, crashing, concussed against the beach. People passed by, silhouetted against the sun. Far away in some other reality a train hooted its way across the coast. It was the Colombo express, travelling up from Dondra, the very tip of the island.
‘Come, Alice,’ Bee said, when he could speak again. ‘The worst is over for her.’
But he looked terrible, making no move towards the house either. Where had they been when Sita had needed them most?
‘Let’s go for a walk on the beach,’ he said finally, taking her hand.
A baby girl, he told her, haltingly. Her sister. Not the brother called Ravi as her mother had hoped.
‘She didn’t live to see the day.’
He was exhausted. A delicate eggshell sheen spread across the water even as they watched. Fishing boats were bringing in the night’s catch, trailing long nets full of silvery cargo through the shallows. An arrowhead of gulls streamed behind, heralding the day with their shattering cries. The fishermen, splashing through the water, dragged the boats on to the beach; then they unloaded the catch and threw it carelessly into the flat woven baskets that would be taken to the fish market later. Dead fish and sea-rot smells drifted on the breeze, swooped on by hosts of fluttering gulls. A sense of unreality hung in the air.
‘The doctor was responsible,’ Bee said. He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘A Tamil child’s life is worth nothing.’
‘I hate Singhalese people,’ Alice told him.
Her voice sounded unfamiliar, uncertain. She was bombarded by emotion, tossed in a cross-current of confusion, feeling she ought to cry. No tears would come. Instead, small evil thoughts danced in her head and swam behind her eyelids. Had the baby been blue like Mrs Perris’s dead husband? Did it cry? And hanging over all her questions, terrifying her, was the memory of the wish she had made. She glanced at Bee. He had stopped walking and Alice now felt a cold wind clutch at her heart.
‘I want you to understand,’ Bee was saying quietly, looking directly at her, searching her face. ‘People will think you’re only a child and they will hide things from you. Later they will tell you it was for your own good. But you won’t stay a child forever. And I don’t want you to misunderstand.’
Some of the shock in his voice was replaced with anger.
‘You must know the difference between hating one person and hating a whole race. Don’t make that mistake. The doctor was a man, a pariah man. Not even a dog can be that bad. Chance made him Singhalese, remember that, Alice. He would have been bad anyway’
They walked on silently. I have a dead sister, thought Alice, trying out the words in her mind. She shivered inwardly. Already she felt different.
‘Such a little life,’ Bee murmured.
They were walking along the same road that Alice had danced on just hours before. Now it had become a remote and distant place and everything had changed in a night. The day lay crushed before her. With a flash of insight she realised she was struggling with events beyond her control. She had become a girl with a dead sister. Nothing was certain any longer. They reached the beach. She could hear the sounds of children’s voices carried by the breeze towards her and she saw a few boys pulling a boat out of the water. They were the boys who lived in the little cluster of huts close to the railway line, children of fishermen. Squinting against the sun, Alice watched them silently. Sadness tugged at her, bringing with it a threat of tears. But the tears still would not come and the unmistakable feeling of aloneness made her feel she was no longer part of the beach or these children. Perhaps, she had never really belonged here, she thought in dismay. The sea breeze was making it difficult to breathe and there was a queasy, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wished her old friend Janake would return. The dead sister hung as heavy as a Tamil thora chain around her neck. Other children had had dead relatives, but they had not willed them to be dead. Frowning
