‘Fran?’ she calls. Nobody answers. There’s a giggling and a rustle of tiny, jostling bodies peeping from behind the far wall.
‘Let me see!’
‘Don’t push, Divya!’
The giggling gets louder. There’s a knot of children huddling behind that wall: all of them unwanted, all of them more trouble than they’re worth. If Mary looked closely she’d see several pairs of bright little eyes peeking through holes. Sharp noses, pushing themselves round corners; scrabbly little monkey-hands climbing up to get a look at her. Not that Mary does look closely. She’s never had time for the left-behinds.
But then she hears the whisper. She can’t ignore this; it’s real as a cold-water shower.
‘She’s a loony.’
‘Hush. She’ll come after you!’
‘Locks on the gates! Locks on the gates!’
The children tumble away, running back into the jungle, and Mary winces. It’s a sore spot, that game. Bad enough when Durga and her friends played it, but these left-behind brats haven’t got anything right. And now they’ve run off and left silence behind them, full of weighted and waiting expectancy. Outside, a tap drips onto the concrete floor with a horrible, plinking exactitude.
And then she hears it. The sound of cloth sliding on stone, as though someone’s leaned a sizeable rump against the corridor wall and sunk cross-legged to the floor. If Mary looked right now, she might see the flicker of a shadow out there. And if she listened, she might hear a dull noise: water dripping on skin instead of stone. Heavy skin, sagging a little from the years and the lack of a good coconut-oil bath. That’s no wispy ghost out there – as if she’d trail all the way out here for ghosts, when they’re ten a penny in her house – but a skin-bones-teeth-and-fat daughter.
Mary smiles. ‘Fran.’
‘No …’
It’s a familiar word, rolling off a muscly tongue. It’s a word in Mary’s head, or in the world or perhaps even in that liminal no-woman’s-land between the two. But wherever it is, that’s the no of a woman accustomed to using it a lot. A woman who’s had a lot to deny in her life, one way or the other. If only the locks on the gates had worked, thinks Mary, if only locks could keep a daughter right where she was put. She looks at the burnt-out walls. She’s nearly given up guilt these days, but not for this. Never for this.
Because that’s Fran out there, in the corridor. That’s no left-behind four-year-old, that’s a daughter Mary knows in her blood and in her bones. That’s Fran, who must be fifty years old by now but who will always be Mary’s baby one. Fran who loves strangers and drawing pencils, who loves digging tunnels and setting fires.
‘The fire was an accident,’ Mary recites quietly. She does this every time she comes here, in the hope that one day both she and her daughter might believe it. ‘It was an accident.’
Francesca, one way or the other, has always been an accident. She’s been an escape artist, she’s been an arsonist. She’s been a loony; she’s been a story; she’s been a bad girl and she’ll always be the best daughter Mary’s got.
Mary lines her gift-wrapped packages up more neatly. They’re a tempting row at the foot of the bed, but still that shadow in the corridor doesn’t move. She takes the doll onto her lap, dandling it.
‘You remember Durga, don’t you?’ She holds the doll up. ‘Your own little girl – here, like this doll.’
The bed’s uncomfortable, with the springs digging into Mary’s hips. She arranges her sari modestly over her bony ankles. ‘You’d be pleased. So like you, she is. Coming to see me next month for Diwali.’
It’s an effort to contort her tongue back to English grammar. Mary’s slipped into rubber-estate talk, as she calls it, over the past few years. Too much time alone, with nobody but the servant-girl to care. But she tries to speak differently when she’s here, to set a good example. A mother’s work, after all, is never done.
‘At the university still, putting these numbers together faster than you can count.’ Mary hesitates, revises. ‘Faster than I can count.’
She takes another breath, peers into the shadowy corridor. It’s cool out there, dank and wet, with drinking-tanks dripping from every crack. There’s a figure there, she’s almost sure of it; a glint of grey at its head and a swaddle of fat around its waist. These days, Fran’s too old to escape from a locked hospital room; to slip out of her handcuffs and set fire to whatever she left behind.
‘Are you writing in the autograph book?’ she asks into the silence. ‘The Little Twin Stars book? I brought it last month for you.’
No answer, and Mary’s starting to get impatient. ‘You should write in it. So ridiculous, your age and can’t write. Can’t even write a note to say hello to your little girl.’
This time the silence has teeth. A touchy subject indeed, and Mary sighs. Write a note to your little girl: a sentimental, useless thing to have said. Not like her, really. She must be getting old.
‘Sorry,’ she says. She can hear a noise out in the corridor, as though someone’s moving away. Footsteps, followed by a fainter rustle from the lobby, and the barely audible tramp-tramp-tramp of someone walking back up towards the swamp.
‘Fran?’ Mary says, but all she hears is the stirring of leaves against the walls. Francesca’s gone, then, she’s decided she’s had enough. Mary tightens her lips. She has to expect these disappointments, as a mother, and especially as the mother of a disappointment herself.
It’s almost time to go by now. The sun will go down soon, and there’s still an hour’s drive back to Lipis. Thick shadows have crept out from the corners of the room, and mosquitoes have gathered around Mary’s ankles. She slaps them off as she bends to retrieve her slippers. A gecko stares up at her with great, green eyes and through a
