Free B009Y4I4QU EBOK by Sonali Deraniyagala Page B

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 theday. 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 itemerges 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