Page 62 - Raffles09_March2022

After her father had left for work, the girl sometimes let herself into the jungle. She wanted to see what it was like where he’d gone – or, at least, what he might have gone through to get there.
The main stories, of course, were of people who had strayed into the jungle and never come back. But there were stories, too, of people who had gone in and met themselves coming the other way. Recognitions, echoes. It was a strange time; the world was in skew, it must spiral before correcting. Even the village elders who dared the margins for medicinal plants knew, if the air went suddenly still, that you could only stop, throw your face to the sky – the terrified blood surging through your tight throat, standing like a tendon begging to be cut – and wait.
***
They were to look after each other but that did not mean they had to like each other, and they didn’t. She was a good-looking child, perhaps a little glad of her looks – her skin so smooth and fair you could trace, in certain light, the delicate blue net of tributaries beneath. Her nose well shaped and her eyes large, almondine: she resembled no-one else in their family. Her brothers found it funny to make her slap herself – for food, which she cooked for all of them; for permission to be in the same room, permission to leave it. When she passed them, their private joke was to hook her ankle just as it lifted from the ground. She never got used to it – the limbic shock, the world swerved sideways. Such suddenness of stop. She befriended a pack of feral dogs, learning the ways of linked silence, learning to let them go each day to contest their survival, watching them grow from puppies into full bodies. Understanding death, which was non-return. She pored over paperbacks her father brought home, memorising the rhythms of pocked and poetic French. When her father happened upon her with his books, he caned her, then tested her comprehension. Then petitioned his employers to secure her a place at the prestigious lycée in the capital; the full scholarship she earned herself.
“Your mother would have been proud,” he told her upon her departure. He spoke quietly so her two brothers wouldn’t hear. It was a beautiful morning: night had churned up the heavens, leaving the sky dramatic, its clouds oversized and shaken, uplit, electrically aglow. She turned to her brothers, who stood to one side, unable to settle on an attitude towards her. Her mother – what did she have to do with this? Her father, seeing her frown, changed what he was going to say, and instead, reprovingly, said, “She did love you.” And suddenly she was standing at the foot of her mother’s bed once more, it was near the end, they were alone, and her mother, who had always ignored her, was now pointing, beseechingly, to a blanket, each finger of her hand slick and ulcerated, her eyes glistening with pained amazement at her daughter’s refusal, her defiance, and every second that passed was another second she refused her mother the blanket all over again.
At fifteen, she left home – the oddling daughter, the loner, the scholar – breaking irreversibly from her family.
***
In school she worked hard and won respect. But this only set her apart; she was a girl, from the country, from a nothing family, presuming. She held to shyness as alibi. She was not shy but, when she looked about her, she found no friends. And her beauty, which was every day clarifying in her face, set her apart too; she saw, in the eyes of boys and some teachers, an appetency that then manifested as aversion, leaving her to feel, somehow, to be the one in the wrong, the wicked one, just because she was the one who had read Céline, Genet, Montherlant, and knew what they themselves perhaps did not know they wanted to do with her. She was alone.
It was the feeling, she came to realise, of existing outside plot. This is what most perturbed. She had come a long way – geographically, intellectually – but her life, when she looked back
60 RAFFLES MAGAZINE
− EMOTION −
In that moment he hers was a