There was no one sitting on the frayed rattan chairs drawn up against the wall, only a line of washing suspended between two palm trunks. Underneath the laundry a row of woven bamboo cages the size and shape of large bell jars each housed a dusty brown hen. The dried mud around the cages was starred with the prints of chickens’ feet and speckled with scattered corn.
Connie tapped on the door jamb. After a moment a woman bobbed up out of the dimness of the interior. She was big, wearing a pink blouse and a faded sarong. Connie recognised Pema’s mother. She placed the flowers and rice on the nearest chair, pressed the palms of her hands together and bowed over her fingertips before murmuring the expected greeting and congratulations.
Pema’s mother returned the salute.
Connie handed over the traditional gifts, flowers for fertility and rice for prosperity.
‘Thank you. Please come inside.’
Connie left her sandals in the row beside the door and went in barefoot. A small fan churned the air, but the room was still stuffy and as hot as a furnace. It seemed to be crowded with people, most of whom were pressed between the two weaving looms that occupied two-thirds of the floor space. A very old woman, perhaps Pema’s grandmother, sat at the bench in front of one of the looms. Her brown hands rested on the unfinished length of
ikat
cloth, and she was so small that her feet dangled six inches short of the treadles.
Everyone bowed to Connie and she returned the salutes,
working from the oldest down to whoever appeared to be the youngest. One of the teenaged girls, a sister, held a baby of a few months, a round-faced infant with the heavy-lidded stare of a miniature deity.
Dewi lay propped up on cushions on a wooden divan. She held a swaddled bundle in her arms. Two or three years back, Connie remembered, she had been hardly more than a little girl, and even now she looked far too young to be a mother. There were purple rings of fatigue around her eyes but her small, even white teeth showed in a broad grin of pride as Connie stooped beside her.
‘Well done,’ Connie smiled.
Before her marriage Dewi had often come over to Connie’s house to drink Cokes or make herself imaginative snacks from the sparse contents of Connie’s fridge, and to giggle over Western magazines. She had a good voice, and loved to sing or la-la the lyrics of pop songs while Connie sat at her keyboard playing the melody and joining in the choruses.
Pema’s mother asked if Connie would care to drink a glass of green tea, and Connie politely accepted. There was a stir of large bodies in the crowded room.
‘Would you like to hold him?’ Dewi whispered.
‘Yes, please.’
Dewi handed the tiny bundle into Connie’s arms. It weighed almost nothing. She looked down into the baby’s sleeping face. One purple-grey fist was bunched against his cheek, and two tiny commas of damp black eyelashes punctuated the wrinkled mask. He looked premature, and also prehistorically ancient. Connie’s throat tightened.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Wayan.’
Wayan or Putu for the firstborn of Balinese families, depending on caste; Kadek or Madé for the second; Komang or Nyoman for the third and Ketut for number four, then
back to Wayan again. That was how it went. No fanciful baby names, even for a girl who pored over second-hand celebrity magazines as eagerly as Dewi did.
‘He’s beautiful,’ Connie told her.
Pema came in with another group of visitors in tow, also carrying flowers and packets of rice. Everyone in the room edged up to make space, and Connie thought that she would certainly melt if it got any hotter. She pressed her lips to baby Wayan’s forehead, breathing in the scent of fresh birth. There was an urge inside her to hold the child more closely, feeling his damp skin against her own, but instead she replaced the bundle gently in Dewi’s outstretched hands.
‘I’ll go outside. To make some room,’ she mumbled. Through the thickets of flowers and staring faces she made it into the air. She was sitting on one of the rattan chairs and watching a large black pig, tethered by the leg to a sapling, when Pema came out with one of his sisters behind him. The sister poured green tea into glasses and handed one to Connie and one to Pema. Pema sat down and they sipped their tea while the pig rooted in the ditch and contentedly grunted to itself.
‘You must be proud, Pema,’ Connie said.
He smoothed back his thick hair. He was small but quite good-looking. Before he and Dewi fell in love with each other, Connie had often seen him with a group of his friends, circling on their motorcycles like a flock of two-wheeled birds and eyeing the tourist girls in their shorts and bikini tops.
‘I am. But I am also worried about being responsible.’
Pema was an apprentice mechanic at a small garage on the road that led down to the coast. He would be earning very little money, which was why he and Dewi were living with his parents. Until the two of them could save enough money to buy or build their own house, they would have
to stay here among the stepped generations of grandparents and brothers and sisters and the various other babies.
‘That comes with being a father,’ she smiled at him. Pema was a good boy, she thought. He was looking at her in that unspecifically hopeful, speculative way that meant he was wondering if her immense, uncountable Western wealth might somehow be harnessed to his advantage.
‘Do you have children, perhaps?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Connie told him.
‘That is a shame for you,’ Pema said, all sympathetic awareness of the divide that now existed between the two of them. He was probably thinking that piles of her money wouldn’t compensate for not having a baby son like day-old Wayan.
There wasn’t much else to say, and neither of them felt the need to make further conversation. They drank the rest of their tea and sat looking thoughtfully at Pema’s mother’s garden of peppers and chillies and coconut palms. Behind a small hedge flies swarmed around the brown haunches of a tethered buffalo.
More people kept arriving. When Connie went to say goodbye, she could only manage to wave to Dewi and blow a kiss from the edge of the crowd. Later in the day, according to custom, the washed placenta would be wrapped in a sacred cloth and the visitors would all witness its burial inside a coconut shell near the gateway to the house.
By the time Connie made it home the afternoon had reached the point where the light was at its ripest. It lay like melted butter over the vast swathe of gently stirring leaves, gilding the fronds of tree ferns and shining on the stippled trunks of palm trees so that they gleamed like beaten silver. Connie went out to her chair on the veranda and sat listening to the trickle of water and the various layers of birdsong.
She let the questions sink slowly to the bottom of her pool of thoughts. In time, as the shoot receded, the sediment of habit would cover up her memories.
Peace lapped round her once again.
She sat for a long time, until the tropical twilight swept up again from the depths of the gorge. As the sudden darkness fell, she wandered back into the house and poured herself a glass of wine. Connie seldom drank alone, but tonight she felt the need for just one drink.
There were no telephone messages. She took a long swallow of wine, and set the glass down on her desk as she switched on her computer. It was days since she had checked her emails. Broadband hadn’t yet reached the village and she wandered out to the veranda again while the unread messages slowly descended from the ether and filtered into her inbox. She drank some more wine and then, counter to her intentions, topped up her glass.
At the screen again Connie clicked through the spam and a couple of emails from London to do with work. There was a message from the leader of the string quartet, thanking her for booking them for the commercial. Connie closed that and her eyes flicked to the sender of the next message.
Bunting
. Her brain had hardly taken it in before her heart was hammering. She looked away from the screen and then back again, but it wasn’t an illusion.
Bunting
.
It was only then that she saw the sender wasn’t
BBunting
, but
JBunting
. Jeanette.
The last time she had seen her sister was four years ago, after Hilda’s funeral.
They hadn’t spoken since then, nor had they written.
That was the last time she had seen Bill, too.
She shouldn’t allow herself to remember their joint history, even to think about him. But what harm did it do to anyone, except perhaps herself?
A message from her sister now could only mean that something was wrong.
With Noah? With
Bill
?
Her mouth was dry and her hands shook as she opened the message. It took two readings before the news began to sink in.
There was indeed something very badly wrong.
Connie read and reread the brief lines.
Dear Connie,
I hope this address still finds you because I want you to hear this news from me, not from anyone else.
I have cancer. I won’t go into detail, but after several months of treatment and having our hopes raised and then lowered again, we were told this week that there isn’t any more to be done. Six months is the estimate.
I am beginning to work out for myself what this means. What does it mean?
It’s very hard for Noah. And for Bill. Both of them are full of love and concern for me, and I feel blessed in that.
There it is. I don’t want anything, except to know that you know.
Love (I mean this…)
Jeanette
Connie lowered her face into her hands. Her forearms pressed against the keyboard and, unseen, the screen split into layers of files. The immediate shock made her shiver. Jeanette had always been there: in her silence, in her brave focus on doing and being what she wanted, her influence most powerful – partly because of its very absence – in all Connie’s past life.
Behind her eyes, images of her sister receded into their remote childhood.
The chair she was sitting in became one of the pine set at the kitchen table in Echo Street. The desk became the knotty old table that had come with them from the flat before, the top half of a house in Barlaston Road, where old Mrs McBride lived downstairs.
Jeanette had planted the idea in Connie that their neighbour was a witch.
– At night, she rides in the sky. If you look, you can see the broomstick in her back kitchen
.
Now Jeanette was sitting opposite her, eleven years old, full of hope and strength in spite of her deafness.
Connie lifted her head. She reached for her glass, and drank the wine.
The computer screen was blinking, asking her if she wanted to close down now.
It took an effort to reopen the email programme. Connie’s fingers felt uncertain on the keys, like a child’s.
She started a new message and typed a single line.
I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight. Connie.
The train from the airport ran past the backs of Victorian terraced houses, irregular and broken like crooked teeth in an overcrowded jaw. There were brief glimpses of clothes lines, cluttered yards, interiors veiled in dingy grey, all pressed beneath a swollen grey sky. Connie watched the terraces sliding past, absorbing the steady flicker of snapshot images from other people’s lives. This couldn’t be anywhere but England.
In an hour, she would be back in her London flat.
She was glad of this interval between the long flight and whatever would happen next.
The backs of the houses were identical, all of them clinging to the curves of railway lines and arterial roads and abraded
by the dirt and noise that rose off them. Their bricks were dark with soot and the wan trees in patches of garden were weighted with layers of grime.
Echo Street was a terrace just like one of these, with a railway line carrying local trains into Liverpool Street, running through a shallow cutting beyond a high fence at the end of the garden.
Connie closed her eyes.
There was lino down the narrow hallway, dark red with paler bluish-pink swirls in it that looked like skimmed milk stirred into stewed plums. The stairs rose steep as a cliff, each tread usually with a sheet of the
Daily Express
folded on it because Hilda had just mopped them yet again. Hilda had a fixation with cleanliness. The smell of bleach always sent Connie hurtling back into her childhood.
In the old flat, Connie and Jeanette had shared a tiny bedroom, the two divan beds separated by a channel only just wide enough for one of them at a time to put their feet to the floor. There was a shelf above each bed. Jeanette’s displayed a neat line of books, whereas Connie’s was silted up with scribbled drawings and broken toys and crushed wax crayons.
But in Echo Street they were to have their own rooms. Jeanette was delighted with hers. As Tony was downstairs helping the sweating removal men to carry in the piano, she stood in front of her door and held on to the knob to show that her sister wouldn’t be admitted. She signed to Connie, folded hands to the side of her head and then clenched her fist to her chest:
my
bedroom,
mine
.
When Connie looked into the room that was to be hers, she saw a narrow box with a window that faced the brick wall of the next-door back extension. The lino on the floor was the same as in the hallway and the only other feature was a tall cupboard built across one corner. She twisted the
handle and saw that the cupboard was empty except for two coat-hangers on a hook. In the dim light the hangers suddenly looked like two pairs of shoulders that had mislaid their heads and bodies, but which might easily clothe themselves on a dark night and come gliding out of the cupboard in search of little girls.
She ran for the safety of the landing. Jeanette’s door stood open by a crack, allowing a glimpse of a bigger room where the sun cast a reassuring grid of light and shadow on the bare floorboards. Jeanette was sitting with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up and her books and magazines laid out beside her. Her fair hair was drawn in one thick plait over her shoulder and she was thoughtfully chewing the bunched ends.