Brixton Beach. Roma Tearne
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But the teacher was only teasing and Alice grinned, knowing this. She had the feeling Mrs Perris hadn’t come out to talk about her.
‘Nobody got much sleep last night,’ Sita said, absent-mindedly pulling her daughter away from the hole she was digging so energetically with her foot.
Alice gave an exaggerated sigh. Her mother’s hair, she thought indignantly, was no better than her own. Strands of it had escaped from its pleat and stuck to her sweaty face. Opening her mouth to comment, she caught Sita’s eye and fell silent, sensing instantly and with perfect understanding that her mother was in one of her tricky moods. Sita was tired.
Her tiredness was a constant uneasy presence, a weight as heavy as the humid monsoon-imminent air around them. It was clear to Alice that it was simply the fault of the wretched baby her mother was soon to have. Alice did not want this baby, she had been hating it from the very moment her mother told her the news. What was even worse was that she was absolutely certain no one else wanted it either. Not long ago Alice had overheard a conversation between Aunt May and her grandmother.
‘There couldn’t be a worse time to bring a child into the world,’ Aunt May had said.
Alice, who was expert at eavesdropping, had been taken aback. She had not realised the grown-ups disliked the thought of it too. So why didn’t they just get rid of it?
‘They cry all night,’ her best friend Jennifer had warned her. ‘You won’t be able to sleep for months and months!’
Jennifer had burst out laughing at the look of horror on Alice’s face.
‘Well, I’ll get rid of it, then,’ Alice had said.
She had spoken offhandedly, hiding her unease.
‘If it won’t behave, no one will want it,’ she added with more bravado than she felt.
The other children in the class had asked her what she intended to do.
‘Kill it, of course,’ she had said without hesitation, making the boys guffaw loudly.
The conversation however had made her a little guilty and she was glad when it was dropped. Then it turned out that Jennifer’s mother was expecting a baby too. Alice scratched her leg, thinking about what she had said, brushing away a mosquito. It had surprised her that both mothers were having babies at the same time.
‘Must be because they’re friends,’ she had said.
‘Oh, don’t be stupid,’ Jennifer had scoffed. ‘Everyone knows men give them babies.’
Jennifer was the class encyclopaedia.
‘How?’ demanded Alice. But Jennifer, having reached the extent of her knowledge, pulled a face, refusing to say another word.
After that Alice had been silent, sharing her dark thoughts with no one, not even her grandfather. She simply hoped the baby would die.
‘I know,’ Mrs Perris was saying in a low voice, moving her head from side to side. ‘Ayio! I heard it on the news. Rioting in Wellewatha, for the second time in a month. This is turning into a witch-hunt against the Tamils. I thought of you last night, child. Is your husband okay?’
She glanced towards Alice, who pretended to examine the scab forming on her knee.
‘Yes, yes,’ Sita said, lowering her voice.
‘Thank God he came home before it started, you know.’
There was a pause and both women fell silent. Then Sita looked around nervously.
‘Did I tell you our passports have arrived?’
‘Really! That’s good news, isn’t it?’ the teacher said encouragingly.
Sita nodded.
At least now we know for certain we can leave.’
Mrs Perris placed her hand on Sita’s arm and squeezed it. Alice looked curiously at them both, not understanding but struck by the look on their faces.
Earlier in the year Mrs Perris had been widowed. The change in her had been shocking. Her husband had been killed in the riots in Jaffna. Everyone agreed he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Alice had wanted to find out what the wrong place was, but again no one would tell her. She tried asking her father but Stanley told her to go away and stop bothering him, and Sita told her not to talk so much.
‘They’re all bastards,’ she heard her father tell her mother.
He was in one of his bad moods at the time. Alice was aware that her father knew all the bastards in Colombo. Even Grandpa Bee was impressed by this fact.
‘Well, Stanley certainly knows a bastard when he sees one,’ she had overheard Bee say.
At the time, Alice had been standing behind the door listening intently, wondering if she too would be able to recognise a bastard if she ever saw one. Bee had been speaking quite softly, under his breath, but even from behind the door Alice had detected a curious note of triumph in his voice. Bee had been unaware that Alice was nearby.
It was only her grandmother, being more knowing, who had shushed him sharply.
‘Be quiet,’ she had scolded. ‘The child might be listening.’
At that, Alice, pretending to be a stork standing on one leg, balancing on the ball of a foot, nearly toppled over. It was true she was always eavesdropping. Listening was something that had become second nature to her; straining her eardrums until they nearly burst, standing with her mouth open behind half-closed doors, worrying a piece of information as though she was a dog with a fallen coconut, coaxing it to split open and reveal its secret. Even Jennifer had congratulated her on her skill.
‘You do have a nose for scandal,’ she had observed.
Alice hadn’t known what a scandal was, but she did know that the world was full of unresolved, interesting stories that everyone conspired to keep from her.
After the bastards had killed her husband, Mrs Perris had eventually returned to school. The children waited curiously to see how she would behave. Thirty pairs of eyes swivelled silently towards the teacher as she walked into the classroom. She wore a white sari, the Kandyian way. It was meant to make her look more Singhalese, but all it did was make her unfamiliar. Every time anyone spoke to her she looked as though she might burst into tears. Very soon the whole class, which collectively was more cunning than people realised, saw that Mrs Perris was completely changed. Once she had been a woman who loved teaching. Now she appeared not to notice when the children misbehaved. The class, working together, seized the opportunity. Led in part by Jennifer, they became unruly. The noise brought out the teachers from the other classrooms, stampeding like a herd of elephants. Everyone wanted to see what was going on in Mrs Perris’s once perfectly behaved class. Some of the teachers tried to stop the noise. Some of them looked at the widow with pitying eyes, as if they were thinking, ‘Well, she’s done for!’ It was as if a gong were sounding in Mrs Perris’s head, stultifying her. I’m finished, it banged.
‘She looks terrible,’ Jennifer declared with conviction, ‘especially around the eyes.’
Alice