Sonali Deraniyagala - Wave

Malli is proud of his new hiking shoes, brown Timberlands with thick soles, just like Daddy’s shoes. He didn’t complain and ask to be carried when we walked in the woods today. You have the best shoes, Mal, you lead the way, we told him. He said the small red tags on the back of his shoes glowed like lights and that would stop us getting lost, even on the darkest paths. He set off in front with a purposeful tread, stopping only to test the grip of his soles on an uneven slope or to pick blackberries. The berries were scarce today, the bushes on our path offered only dried-up brown clusters speckled with a few tiny purple beads, which the boys painstakingly picked out and then winced at their sourness when they crushed them between their teeth. Vik stepped on some nettles, and Steve showed him how to rub a dock leaf on his leg to stop the stinging. You always find dock leaves near nettles, he told Vik. We walked a long way today, and Malli didn’t want to turn back once, simply because of his new shoes.

And then I remember. Shoes. Those shoes. I remember those shoes, and my heart shivers. The police took away one of those shoes from my parents’ house when they were trying to identify bodies. They took it for DNA testing. They returned it in a sealed polythene bag, like a large sandwich bag. I am beaten. The one time I allow my family to come alive, and that shoe trounces me. But I want to linger with them. I want to stay in our car forever. Let’s put the boys to bed early and watch The Catherine Tate Show , I say to Steve. I have to plan my lecture for tomorrow morning, but that can wait. What am I on about? The Catherine Tate Show? It wasn’t even on then. That was after our time, we missed all that. Now I have to surrender, I have to squirm back into reality. But daylight is collapsing fast, and the air outside is sharpening, as it always does in early spring. And I can hear a voice from the back of the car say, Is it a school day tomorrow, Mum? And if I turn around …

LONDON, 2008

I t’s a piece of pyrite. Fool’s Gold, they call it, but Vikram always insisted on its proper name. He’d looked it up in his book on rocks and minerals. This small glistening nugget is right where Vik had left it nearly four years ago. On the mantelpiece in the playroom. I pick it up, and I remember. He bought it at the Science Museum. It was our last weekend in London. You can spend two pounds, we told him, and that’s what he chose. My eyes cannot focus on any one thing in this playroom, but the Fool’s Gold, this I can see. And the two red schoolbags, hanging on the door handle as always. I pick up the rock and press it tight into my palm. But I can’t touch those schoolbags, each one now a scalpel.

This is moments after all the wailing in the hallway. Once Anita shut the front door behind us, I was a howling heap on the floor by the stairs. So I had finally done it. I had stepped into our home for the first time since I walked out of there with Steve and the boys that early December evening. Three years and eight months ago, almost to the day. And through much of this time I could think of our home only with dread and fear. In those early months, when I could not lift myself off that bed, I wished it destroyed. I wanted all traces of it erased. Then later I needed the assurance that it was there for me, preserved as we left it. But its existence also tormented me. I shrank away from any talk of it. I shuddered at the thought of seeing it. I couldn’t go back. Even a peek into the house would dismember me even more than I already was, surely. Hollow and barren, that’s what it would now be, our home. But when I finally stopped shaking and heaving in that hallway and leaned back on the banister to catch my breath, my eyes rested on the ceiling, and I was startled. It didn’t seem like we’d been gone at all. That cornicing up there, I’d seen it this morning surely, when the boys came down the stairs, when the mirror on the opposite wall held their faces for just one moment as they leaped off the fifth or sixth step.

Now I walk into every room, sit on the floor. The house is much as we left it. Here is our debris, but it is all intact. All of it. I am bewildered. I can’t join the pieces together. They are dead, my life ruptured, but in here it feels as it always did. They could have walked out ten minutes ago. This house has not lost its rhythm, it doesn’t need reviving. During the past four years, our life here often seemed unreal, vaporous, and maddeningly elusive. But now it emerges and breathes into me slowly from within these walls.

In these years I have only seen a few of our belongings. Friends from London brought a few things to Colombo for me in those early months. Some framed photographs that I couldn’t bear to look at, a T-shirt of Steve’s that I wear at night and that is now threadbare, Clifford the Big Red Dog , which I hid away. And now here is everything. A swirl of images dazes me. I can grasp but a handful.

There is, of course, the evidence of our absence and of when it all ended. The branches of the two apple trees now spread across the width of the garden, we would have pruned them. When I went to the foot of the garden earlier, a startled fox leaped into the neighbor’s lawn through a hole in our fence but kept staring at me, now an invader in its territory. The yellowed Guardian newspapers in the rack in the living room are from the first week of December 2004. Stuck on the wall of our study is a printout of four tickets for The Snowman at the Peacock Theatre on the fifth of January 2005.

There is a pile of unopened Christmas presents on our bedroom floor. I remember now. The presents were given to Vik and Malli by Steve’s family the weekend before we left for Sri Lanka. “You’ll get so many presents in Colombo,” I told the boys. “It’ll be more fun to open these when we get back.” I find a Christmas card sealed in a red envelope, written by Vik to my parents. “To Aachchi and Seeya, we are coming to Colombo on the 8th of December, from Vikram and Malli.” I must have forgotten to post it before we left. And a calendar for 2005 that Malli made in school, with a delicate design of orange and gold dots that he had crafted with a little boy’s devotion. I am in shreds.

But as I drift tentatively around the house, an undertow of calm also tugs at me, drawing me away from the agony, just a little. I can almost slip into thinking that nothing has changed. That we still live here. In the playroom, Malli’s baby doll sits in a stroller as always. His silver tiara is on the mantelpiece and, by the fireplace, his pink ballet shoes. On the floor, a few sheets of A4 on which Vik has written out the score charts of his imaginary cricket matches, Australia v Namibia, Zimbabwe v India, and of course to annoy me, Sri Lanka always lost. The little cloth badge he got for completing his eight-hundred-meter swim just a few days before we left London is on his bookcase. I said I would sew it onto his swimming shorts when we returned. On their wooden blue desk is a poem that Malli and I wrote about a purple-eared creature he named the Giddymeenony, who lived beyond the sea and had a cactus growing on its nose. With a drawing of it and all. In this playroom, they were so secure.

The boys’ shoes are by the kitchen door, dried mud on them still. There is even some onion peel in that clay pot Steve used for cooking beef curry. A shaft of afternoon sun falls across the red sofa in the living room and, as always, I can see dust drifting in the beam. On the floor by the fireplace is the large bronze pot I bought in Cambodia. Malli once did a pee in it. I put my hand inside and pull out some black chess pieces. Upstairs in our study, a dead wasp on the floor, and another wobbling on the curtains, there was always a nest outside this window, and Steve and I were stung a few times. In the boys’ bedroom, a medicine spoon that looks like it was used last night, with crystals of Nurofen syrup. On our bed a few hairs, not mine, Steve’s and maybe Vik’s. Two dinosaur-shaped toothbrushes in the bathroom, and a basket of laundry, Steve’s sarong on the top.