Read Online Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb - Free Book Online Page B

smell of lentil curry and cumin on spinach and potatoes, and even being given a taste of brown beer, and saying “How can you people drink that—it tastes like piss,” and my mother saying:
    “Thelma! For a girl with such a sophisticated vocabulary you do choose some vulgar words!”
    “Sorry, Mum,” I apologized. “I must have been mistaken. I meant urine,” and she and Suresh laughed.
    There was a lot of laughing in those days. And a lot of gardening—not Mum’s precious roses anymore but sunflowers and tomatoes and green vines that spread over the ground and burst into long green and fat orange vegetables. And a herb garden, which was my responsibility. I liked slugging best of all—going out at night with the flashlight and startling the slimy grey slugs with the bright light and saying, “There you are, you sneaky bugger,” as I scraped up another with my knife and deposited it in a bag of oil.
    It felt like forever, like a whole lifetime, but in retrospect it was only a matter of a few months—a summer that flowed into an autumn which collapsed into a dark and depressing winter when Mum was crying a lot and Willy stopped talking and I looked round and round the house for Suresh but couldn’t find him. I remember an evening when he came into my room and it was strange because he just crouched there in the corner watching me cut out pictures from a magazine for a collage I was making, saying nothing.
    “Are you meditating?” I asked him, because he reminded me of Anika there crouched in silence, and he said cryptically:
    “If only I could have such peace.”
    “Do you want to help me with my collage?” I asked him, hoping that would help.
    “I am not an artist like you,” he said sadly. “I am simply a puppet,” he went on. “Not a free man.”
    I didn’t understand and I looked up at his face curiously to see he was crying. I didn’t know what to do so I just kept cutting out little pictures and gluing them onto bristol board and he kept crouching there, staring at the carpet.
    He said, “I’d like you to have this,” and he gave me a little gold ring that coiled round like a snake, just like the one he’d given to my mother.
    “What for?” I asked, a little disconcerted.
    “For a present,” he said.
    “Like a Christmas present?” I asked.
    “Just a present for being you,” he said, smiling sadly.
    “Well, let me give you a present then,” I smiled, getting up and rummaging through my toy drawer. Trevor the truck—no, I’d forgotten about him, he wouldn’t do. Teddy? No, I didn’t think I could ever part with Teddy. Blondie? Not much of a present for a grown-up man, I thought.
    “The best present you could give me, Thelma, is a little gift from your imagination,” he said.
    I hadn’t thought of that. What a wise man he was.
    “OK, then. I will share Heroin with you. She is a brave Amazon warrior, silent and noble, and she will protect you from all evil,” I said proudly.
    “Well, that is truly the gift of yourself,” he said.
    —
    It was years before I would really be able to understand. Suresh had finished his studies and was returning to work in India, where his marriage to a Sikh girl had been arranged many years before. “But why?” was all I could say, and my mother could give me no other reason than:
    “Because there are some things about which we have no choice.”
    “But don’t you remember Nemeni?” I asked her.
    “I don’t know. Vaguely,” she shrugged.
    “She could choose to do whatever she wanted, to be whatever she wanted to be, remember? Like a mushroom or a princess.”
    “Well, at some level maybe Suresh is doing what he wants,” my mother said.
    “I’m going to marry Suresh when I grow up,” I said decisively.
    “I thought you were going to be a lesbian,” my mother sighed.
    “Well, I changed my mind.”

A Stone Splits
    MRS. RODRIGUES HAD come to our school to teach us music—to conduct choir and orchestra and teach us mnemonics like