‘Sunday, when you come to pick up Mary-Auntie,’ he goes on, ‘come to the hospital reception and ask for me.’
He pulls me closer, gives me a dry, squashed kiss, then breaks away. He hurries through the dining room to the back door just as Mother Agnes rings the compound bell again. By leaning close to the window I can see her, standing there with her quiet mouth and her scandal-filled notebooks. I turn my back instead, looking out of the back door and watching Tom leave. It isn’t so hard, not this time round.
After Peony’s accident, I barely went outside for weeks. Mother Agnes came to see me, bringing school lessons and homework. She was the one to tell me Tom’s family had left. His parents had packed in the night, she wrote to me; they’d run back to England and left behind whatever they couldn’t carry. A single shoe. A watercolour picture. A pair of spectacles, as though they couldn’t bear to look out through them again. Forced out at dawn, they must have thought bitterly, and after all they’d done for Malaysia. Biting the hand that feeds them, Mrs Harcourt would have wept and I can’t say I blame her. Table manners, like languages, rarely travel well.
The bell’s stopped ringing. Mother Agnes must have given up. I turn back to the sink and take my time wiping the dishes dry. The palms of my hands underwater are almost as pale as Tom’s.
Skins are like stories, Mother Agnes used to say, what matters is what’s underneath. A cheerful little proverb, but Ammuma had her own take on it. Peel the skin back, she said, and look for the fangs. I leave Tom’s mug by the side, his name turned outwards. And then I pick up my anonymous white cup and drop it straight in the sink from as high as I can reach. It smashes with a satisfying crack and a slop of pale-brown coffee, and I wonder if Mother Agnes’s left-behinds felt like this all along.
8. The King and Queen Have Their Say: 1927
There’s a type of mathematics called category theory. It’s the mathematics of mathematics; the mathematics that describes everything else. The last resort.
It’s also the simplest. A category is a collection of objects (say a Catherine wheel, a granddaughter, a grandmother and a drowned teenage ghost). And in every category there are relationships between the objects. Guilt, for example, links a granddaughter and a ghost. Or love: a dangerous arrow between mothers and daughters, one that might turn out to have too sharp a point.
Functors are one step further. A functor takes one category and turns it into a different one entirely. Swap out Durga for Mary, Peony for Cecelia. Swap Ammuma’s dead daughter for a tiger-prince and his frog; the story’s the same however you slice it.
There are different objects in your new category, if you dare to face up to them:
Smoke, thick enough to chew.
A banyan swamp, waiting patiently for the splash.
A gritty, billowing punch of ash or a smear of greenish slime on your dress. And then, of course, you might add in ambulances, inquests or worn-out young doctors, all with tempers and arrows of their own.
Some relationships are too hard to define. They pop up where you’d least expect. They’re there; you just can’t see them through the smoke.
Mother Agnes taught a generation of us mathematics, silently counting and adding up and taking away. She took her classes out into the playground; had them exchanging marbles for sweets and then swapping them back. If Sita gives Nadeem five apples, and Nadeem gives four away to Asha, how many nights will Sita cry herself to sleep? Divide by two, take away the number you first thought of and count up whether anyone really loved her at all.
If you’re Mary at eleven years old, you don’t put your faith in mathematics. Not once you’ve already survived one flood. Not once your parents have brought your brother home with the news that there’s nothing the doctors can do. Any attempt at treatment would be too expensive, in any case. The numbers don’t add up. If you’re Mary, you might have had quite enough of numbers. You might want to give up on logic and work some bomoh magic of your own. Tell the story your own way.
Which is exactly what she’s trying to do one evening, three months after the flood. The river’s gone down by now and left the ground spongy, soft enough to swallow anything from a footprint to a village. Tiny green frogs spring from overturned trees, and the banyan swamp seethes with the flicker of tadpoles and leeches. Everything in the garden smells of rotting leaves and blocked sewers. Mary’s in the middle of it all, kneeling in the flower bed.
She’s playing dangerous games amongst those canna lilies, whispering spells she’s made up herself. She’s stolen a crucifix; she’s scavenged chicken bones; she’s taken magic words from her Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland books. But nothing’s happened. So Mary’s going to play her trump card, her mathematics of last resort. She’s going to retell her parents’ entire marriage. Take the story into her own hands, and see if she can’t make it turn out better.
If Cecelia were around, she might have talked Mary out of it. But after the flood Yoke Yee forbade her daughter to see Mary again. (See what you get, Mary? With all your stories?) Mary, despite this, considers herself the injured party. Hasn’t she been asked, again and again, about that turbulent night? And hasn’t she insisted sweetly, again and again, that she’d simply forgotten Cecelia was there? At eleven, Mary’s a picture of innocence and the grown-ups, a foot above her virtuous head, immediately agree to believe her. And if they have doubts – private, pit-of-the-night doubts – well, they
