and his sandals dusty with beach sand, and his black umbrella faded with the heat. Their father, not foreseeing his own death in the riots of the following June, felt the future of his children grow large in his own mind.
How long was it before she realised the strange masculine world inhabited by her brother was not for her, wondered Theo. Was it when she was still small? Did her understanding come, as all unshakeable beliefs do, not at any given moment but slowly, like seawater seeping into a hole dug on a beach? Lucky Jim could pace his domain freely, marking his undisputed territory, certain of his own image of the future. But what of Nulani?
Sometimes while her brother slept, before the father’s unpredicted death, when they were younger, Nulani told Theo, she would bend over Jim and smell the sugar-sweet baby scent of greenness on his skin, run her finger across an old scar that straddled the rounded grubbiness of his brown leg. Later when she was older, she told Theo, she stole a box of Venus B pencils (Made in Great Britain) from the house of their English neighbour, to draw her sleeping brother. But the neighbour found out and demanded she be punished for stealing. She returned the pencils; two of them were used and broken.
‘All right, Mrs Mendis,’ the neighbour, the Englishman, told her mother angrily, ‘I know it must be hard for you, with your husband dead. But “ render unto Caesar ” and all that!’
He had laughed, without rhythm. Nulani had wondered if that was how the English laughed. She knew she would not be allowed into the Englishman’s house again. She would not be able to play with his daughter Carol any more; she would never be able to touch her shining golden hair.
‘Why did you take them?’ her brother had demanded. ‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said, sounding like the Englishman.
Nulani’s uncle came. Because her father was no longer alive, it was his duty to beat her with an ekel stick.
‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said. They were ashamed of her. The whole family avoided the neighbours now, eyes cast down whenever the jeep drove them about, into the city, to the beach, shopping.
‘See what you’ve done to us.’
Nulani could see. She stopped drawing her brother when he slept. She just looked at him. Her little brother. She was his loku akka, his big sister. Her father had said they would not be close. But no one, she told Mr Samarajeeva, not even the astrologer, had said she would not love him.
And now she came here to draw. Arriving early, leaving late. Always talking. Transformed.
‘Child,’ Theo said suddenly now, drifting back from his thoughts and realising the time, ‘you’ll be late for school.’
When there was no answer he went to look for her at the back of the garden, but then he heard the gate click again.
‘I’m late,’ she called, grinning at him, hurrying off. ‘But I’m coming back!’
And she disappeared up the hill with a wave of her hand.
They swarmed so thickly that they might easily have been mistaken for smoke. Rising swiftly from the water-filled holes dug by the gem miners in their search for sapphire, the mosquitoes seemed suspended in reflected light. For a moment the holes appeared as mirrored surfaces, blue as the sky. Further out towards the coast the rainwater filled the upturned coconut shells, as they lay scattered across the groves. Here the beautiful female anopheles mosquitoes, graceful wings glinting in the sun, landed lightly and prepared to create a canoe of death for their cargo of eggs. The Ministry of Health sprayed the coconut groves with DDT to prevent outbreaks of malaria. The metallic smell drifted and mixed heavily with the scent of frangipani and hibiscus. There had been no epidemic for nearly five years.
Theo liked to spend the morning writing, but lately it had been difficult to concentrate with the girl present. She sat against a wall, almost in the bushes, drawing him. He had tried to make her come inside but she was stubborn and stayed where she was, far back along the veranda, crouching beside the lilies and the ferns.
‘How can you draw like this? You can’t see me,’ he had protested. ‘Why do you want to crouch so low?’
She had refused his invitation and in the end he had just shrugged, leaving her alone, going back to his typewriter in the cool of his study. It was hot. For some reason the fans had all stopped working. Perhaps the generator had broken down again. He would have to get Sugi to look at it. Every now and then as he worked he would look up and catch a glimpse of her faded lime-green skirt translucent against the extraordinary light of the untamed garden. She folded and rearranged herself until from where he sat she was a smudge of green and white and black. He could not see her face; it was hidden by her dark hair. He found her presence disturbing. How was he supposed to work? Surely it must be lunchtime? He half hoped she would stay to eat with him. Sometimes she did; at other times, although she hesitated, an inner tempo seemed to call her, guilt perhaps, a sudden memory of an uncompleted errand for her long-suffering mother. Every time Theo asked her to stay for lunch. He waited, unaware that his breath was bated, for her reply, knowing only his irrational disappointment if she went home.
He had decided then, the best thing to do was to commission her to paint him. It was clear that, once voiced, she would not give up the idea, so one evening he strolled over to Mrs Mendis with the suggestion. Mrs Mendis welcomed him with some aluva and coffee. He told her he wanted to commission Nulani to paint his portrait. He would like to pay her if Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mr Samarajeeva was extremely kind. She just hoped Nulani would do a proper job.
‘The girl is a dreamer,’ said Mrs Mendis. ‘She does not talk much and she is stubborn. If you can get her to do anything it will be a miracle. Most of the time, if there is any work to be done, she disappears. She won’t help in the house or with any of my sewing. How am I to make a living, with no one to help me?’
Having started her complaints, Mrs Mendis found it curiously difficult to stop. Her thin, high voice rose like the smoke from a mosquito coil.
‘I am a widow,’ she said. ‘Has Nulani told you? Has she told you my husband was set fire to during the rioting in the seventies? They threw a petrol bomb at him. Aiyo, we watched as he went screaming down the Old Tissa Road. Fear kept all the people hidden behind closed doors.’ Mrs Mendis waved her hands about in distress. ‘Everyone watched through the shutters of their houses,’ she said. ‘But no one came to help.’
Harsh sunlight had pressed itself on the edges of the house and then Mrs Mendis had run screaming into the street, chasing hopelessly after her husband, but it was too late. He lay blackened and burnt; clear liquid oozing out from his staring eyes, his body charred, the stench of flesh filling her open-mouthed screams.
‘The neighbours came out of the houses then and pulled me away,’ she said.
They had been fearful she might throw herself on to the flames. By the time the ambulance came he was beyond help.
‘Luckily,’ said Mrs Mendis, lowering her voice, ‘my son Jim was somewhere else and did not see his father’s life as it left this world.’
Lucky Jim. ‘He had been so close to his father,’ she said. ‘The shock is still with him.’
Only the girl had been at home. Mrs Mendis wasn’t sure how much she had seen. Always quiet, she became mute after that.
‘She’s difficult,’ said Mrs Mendis, ‘obstinate and odd.’
Theo
