Sonali Deraniyagala - Wave

It tore my skin off to hear a stranger speaking to me from the phone in my parents’ bedroom. When Ma called me in London to ask if Malli’s fever was better or to check on how my biryani turned out, she used that phone. I have to be more fierce. I have to free our house.

I moved on to making sinister noises when the phone was answered. I hissed, I rustled, I made ghostly sounds. The Dutch man spoke with more urgency now. “What is it you want?” he said time and again. “Tell me, please. What is it you want?”

My phone calls made my relatives panic even more. You will be arrested, they said. But Vik and Mal will be so impressed by my ghostliness, I thought. They loved being scary at Halloween. The chords of my “hoo-ooo” were borrowed from the low-pitched howl with which Vik caused gleeful dread among his friends at costume parties. In the weeks before Halloween, our house in London would tremble with bloodcurdling sounds. Now, sitting in bed with the phone on my lap, I remembered how I’d thrilled the boys with my rendition of Hamlet—“ ’Tis now the very witching time of night.” I never got beyond “when churchyards yawn” though, they squealed too much. I don’t want to think about them, I said to myself. I must focus on the Dutch.

More than a month after I started on them, and they still wouldn’t leave. If this was happening to Steve and me, we would have been out of there like a shot, I thought. She’s completely bonkers, we can’t take a chance, Steve would have said, if some woman was stalking us night after night. Vik liked using the word “bonkers,” and I would scold him. He used it in the poem about “Craziness” he’d written in school in that last month. They must have been learning about emotions. The poem began “Craziness is like jelly beans jumping in your head” and ended “Craziness is bonkers and bonkers is the best.”

Even when Steve’s family arrived in Colombo for the first anniversary of the wave, I refused to be distracted from my mission. We were having a memorial service in Colombo, and invitations had been printed. I couldn’t bring myself to even glance at the words on that invitation, but I took one and posted it to the Dutch. If they don’t yet know why I am harassing them, now they will. Surely this will make them understand why they should not stay on in the house. We played The Smiths at the memorial service in the chapel of my old school, Ladies’ College. Of course it had to be “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” For Steve.

I didn’t succeed in ousting the Dutch family. A couple of months into my terror campaign, they changed their phone number, our phone number. And after that first anniversary I began living my days once again in a haze of vodka and Ambien. I was back in my bed, no strength to stand up, let alone to drive a car and go gate-bashing. At times I was mad at Steve. Why don’t you go to the house for a change, Steve. You can rattle their beds and yowl through the windows and send them packing. Having me do the dirty work as usual. Why do I have to be the fucking ghost?

LONDON, 2006

I was dizzy in that room. I felt faint with disbelief. I held on to the seat of my chair to stay upright. I knew what was going on, but I couldn’t absorb any of it. This is London, I kept telling myself. Pall Mall. A room at the Royal Society. That’s where I am. During the two hours I sat in that room, my eyes tried to dodge the screen in front of me. “Stephen Lissenburgh Memorial Lecture,” it said. Steve?

It’s over now, the lecture that Steve’s research institute organized. I could only gaze vacantly at the speaker on the podium. I didn’t hear many words. I was calm while chatting with that crowd at the reception after, though, had a glass of white wine, a quail egg. Maybe I didn’t look stunned.

Now I am with friends at a bar near the Royal Society, the ICA bar. It was my idea to come here. I suggested it, not stopping to think that this is somewhere Steve and I often came.

I am in England? I can’t grasp the truth of this. This is the first time I’ve come back to England, and it is now almost two years since the wave. But the reality of being here eludes me, I can’t focus, I am dazed. And I want to stay this way. If I have too much clarity, I will be undone, I fear. I was in a panic when I walked up Piccadilly on the way to the lecture this evening. I didn’t look around, wanting to somehow disregard my familiar surroundings. I am only staying a couple of nights, I reassure myself, I won’t even notice I’ve been back. And our home in North London, even the thought horrifies me, I won’t be going anywhere near it.

But I am at the ICA bar? I don’t want to know this. Steve and I would come here before going to a movie at the Curzon Soho. We’d have a drink here first and stroll up Regent Street. At the cinema, Steve always had a black coffee, I had a ginger and honey ice cream. Now I stop these thoughts. Because I am about to say, No we don’t have time for another drink. The film starts at seven. Let’s get a move on, Steve.

ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE, 2007

I t was the light that did it. It was the angle of the sun at five o’clock on a Sunday evening in early March on a country road somewhere in Shropshire. It was those sinking rays slanting against a yew tree and glinting on the wing mirror on my side of the car, dazzling my eyes. The hawthorn hedgerows on either side of the road throw long shadows in this light. This light that is so very familiar unexpectedly makes me forget. It makes me forget that I am driving back from Wales with my friends David and Carole. It sends me into our car, Steve at the wheel, the boys at the back. The four of us drive the gentle curves of an English country road as we have done innumerable times before.

For three years I’ve tried to indelibly imprint they are dead on my consciousness, afraid of slipping up and forgetting, of thinking they are alive. Coming out of that lapse, however momentary, will be more harrowing than the constant knowing, surely. But now I am unmoored simply by the familiar light. This is different from remembering them, warily, as I usually do. This is tumbling into them, into our life, into our car. This is slipping up. I can see the tiny starlike crack on the windscreen made by the pebble that shot out of the road and smashed into the glass no sooner than we’d bought the car. The AA road atlas by my feet is trodden and creased. Vik sits behind me, Malli behind Steve. There are two Ribena cartons between them, drained empty so their sides are curved in, the last drops of black currant juice leaking out the straws and staining the seat. Also, a spit-covered core of an apple that one of them could easily have thrown out the window instead of leaving there to roll off and rot under the accelerator pedal. We have to get home and fix their dinner. The rush of Sunday evenings.

Was that a dead pheasant on the side of the road? They are not here, they would have noticed it if they were. They would have said something. Yuk. Cool. When do you think it got killed, Dad? They are not here. But I don’t want to emerge out of them. I want to hover inside our metallic blue Renault Mégane Scénic. Why am I allowing this? I will have to crawl back into reality soon, and that will be agony. Maybe it is the somnolent warmth of Dave’s car that entices me to forget in this way. Now I slip up again, this time voluntarily.

They are sitting quietly at the back, not kicking each other’s shins for a change, no burping contests. Vik sees a gush of starlings wing the air, his eyes trail the whirr of gray filling the sky. But what he really wants to see is a sparrow hawk. Or, better still, a sparrow hawk sparring with a crow. Malli’s nodding off, he always does this in the car, but it’s too late to nap now. “Vik, talk to Malli and keep him awake, sweetheart. He won’t sleep tonight if he dozes off now.” They will run up the stairs to our front door and keep ringing the doorbell even though they know there is no one in. They will fight about whose turn it is to pee first. Steve will suggest that all three of them pee together, and they will do so gleefully. I will ask why one of them can’t use the other toilet upstairs. And I will tell them not to spray the whole bloody place. When they are done, they will use the blue and white hand towel to mop up the floor a little and then hang the towel back on the rail. I will hear their giggles over the gulping and gurgling of the flush. But that’s when we get home. We are still in the car, and the boys are both sitting in their socks because Steve has flung their muddy shoes into the boot.