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  Sometimes I’d ring the doorbell. At two a.m. Asleep, are we? Not for long, you won’t be. I’ll see to that. I had to keep my finger pressed on that button for many minutes before anyone stirred. No security guard ran to the gate in disarray. He must have taken Ambien, like me, I thought. A light would come on upstairs, in what was my parents’ room, and I’d get back in the car and blare the horn. Or I’d wind down the car windows and turn the music up. More of The Smiths. “Bigmouth Strikes Again” now. I hope you can hear this in there, I said as the car stereo hammered out the words “by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed” in our hushed Colombo street.

  I drove back with a swagger along an empty Bullers Road. I laughed out loud.

  I suddenly felt more in command, not so powerless. Steve will appreciate what I am doing, I thought. Scaring away the Dutch, this is taking some imagination. Steve will be pleased I’ve still got that.

  Alone in the darkness of my car, I was able to let in thoughts of my family. For some moments at least, I didn’t try to quell them. Ringing the doorbell reminded me of Steve’s yarns about playing knockdown-ginger when he was a child roaming his East London council estate during school holidays. He taught our boys to try the prank on me. If I was home when they returned from the park, they’d ring our bell and scram to hide behind the hedge next door: “Shh … Mummy doesn’t know it’s us.” I could hear them now, as I drove through a red light at the Thunmulla junction. I shrank back from their voices. I couldn’t see the road in front of me for wanting them.

  Since I started on the Dutch family, my days livened up. I still woke paralyzed by the chant “they are dead,” but slowly my mind revived. I had to plan for the night. I lay in bed and schemed. Getting rid of the Dutch required serious thought. I’ll go to the house at different times each night, I won’t be predictable. I’ll give you a few nights’ break, my lovely little tulips, and when you think it’s all over, I’ll start again.

  I clasped a seashell in my fist as I strategized, one of those cowrie shells I found in the house before it was rented. On its shiny surface still, Malli’s fingertips.

  My relatives and friends became concerned about my nightly forays. After months of begging me to leave my room, they now tried to hide the car keys. “You mustn’t harass those tenants, they are innocent in this, it’s not their fault,” they’d plead. “You are driving yourself insane.”

  Finally. I was insane. I liked this. And even if I didn’t really believe I was, I welcomed the chance to act as if deranged. I’d been too compliant since the wave, immobilized on that bed, crushed and numb. Everyone’s dead, that’s not how I should be, I should be raving around.

  I began phoning the Dutch family. At night, late. At first I had to force my fingers to tap out that number. They hovered over the keypad as if incredulous that I wasn’t calling my mother. The first few times I called, I said nothing when the Dutch man answered. “Who is this? Who is this?” he kept asking. A chilling silence from me, I thought. Let him think this is a portent of worse to come.

  It tore my skin off to hear a stranger speaking to me from the phone in my parents’ bedroom. When Ma called me in London to ask if Malli’s fever was better or to check on how my biryani turned out, she used that phone. I have to be more fierce. I have to free our house.

  I moved on to making sinister noises when the phone was answered. I hissed, I rustled, I made ghostly sounds. The Dutch man spoke with more urgency now. “What is it you want?” he said time and again. “Tell me, please. What is it you want?”

  My phone calls made my relatives panic even more. You will be arrested, they said. But Vik and Mal will be so impressed by my ghostliness, I thought. They loved being scary at Halloween. The chords of my “hoo-ooo” were borrowed from the low-pitched howl with which Vik caused gleeful dread among his friends at costume parties. In the weeks before Halloween, our house in London would tremble with bloodcurdling sounds. Now, sitting in bed with the phone on my lap, I remembered how I’d thrilled the boys with my rendition of Hamlet—“ ’Tis now the very witching time of night.” I never got beyond “when churchyards yawn” though, they squealed too much. I don’t want to think about them, I said to myself. I must focus on the Dutch.

  More than a month after I started on them, and they still wouldn’t leave. If this was happening to Steve and me, we would have been out of there like a shot, I thought. She’s completely bonkers, we can’t take a chance, Steve would have said, if some woman was stalking us night after night. Vik liked using the word “bonkers,” and I would scold him. He used it in the poem about “Craziness” he’d written in school in that last month. They must have been learning about emotions. The poem began “Craziness is like jelly beans jumping in your head” and ended “Craziness is bonkers and bonkers is the best.”

  Even when Steve’s family arrived in Colombo for the first anniversary of the wave, I refused to be distracted from my mission. We were having a memorial service in Colombo, and invitations had been printed. I couldn’t bring myself to even glance at the words on that invitation, but I took one and posted it to the Dutch. If they don’t yet know why I am harassing them, now they will. Surely this will make them understand why they should not stay on in the house. We played The Smiths at the memorial service in the chapel of my old school, Ladies’ College. Of course it had to be “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” For Steve.

  I didn’t succeed in ousting the Dutch family. A couple of months into my terror campaign, they changed their phone number, our phone number. And after that first anniversary I began living my days once again in a haze of vodka and Ambien. I was back in my bed, no strength to stand up, let alone to drive a car and go gate-bashing. At times I was mad at Steve. Why don’t you go to the house for a change, Steve. You can rattle their beds and yowl through the windows and send them packing. Having me do the dirty work as usual. Why do I have to be the fucking ghost?

  LONDON, 2006

  I was dizzy in that room. I felt faint with disbelief. I held on to the seat of my chair to stay upright. I knew what was going on, but I couldn’t absorb any of it. This is London, I kept telling myself. Pall Mall. A room at the Royal Society. That’s where I am. During the two hours I sat in that room, my eyes tried to dodge the screen in front of me. “Stephen Lissenburgh Memorial Lecture,” it said. Steve?

  It’s over now, the lecture that Steve’s research institute organized. I could only gaze vacantly at the speaker on the podium. I didn’t hear many words. I was calm while chatting with that crowd at the reception after, though, had a glass of white wine, a quail egg. Maybe I didn’t look stunned.

  Now I am with friends at a bar near the Royal Society, the ICA bar. It was my idea to come here. I suggested it, not stopping to think that this is somewhere Steve and I often came.

  I am in England? I can’t grasp the truth of this. This is the first time I’ve come back to England, and it is now almost two years since the wave. But the reality of being here eludes me, I can’t focus, I am dazed. And I want to stay this way. If I have too much clarity, I will be undone, I fear. I was in a panic when I walked up Piccadilly on the way to the lecture this evening. I didn’t look around, wanting to somehow disregard my familiar surroundings. I am only staying a couple of nights, I reassure myself, I won’t even notice I’ve been back. And our home in North London, even the thought horrifies me, I won’t be going anywhere near it.

  But I am at the ICA bar? I don’t want to know this. Steve and I would come here before going to a movie at the Curzon Soho. We’d have a drink here first and stroll up Regent Street. At the cinema, Steve always had a black coffee, I had a ginger and honey ice cream. Now I stop these thoughts. Because I am about to say, No we don’t have time for another drink. The film starts at seven. Let’s get a move on, Steve.

  ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE, 2007

  It was the light that did it. It was the angle of the sun at five o’clock on a Sunday evening in early March on a country road somewhere in Shropshire. It was tho
se sinking rays slanting against a yew tree and glinting on the wing mirror on my side of the car, dazzling my eyes. The hawthorn hedgerows on either side of the road throw long shadows in this light. This light that is so very familiar unexpectedly makes me forget. It makes me forget that I am driving back from Wales with my friends David and Carole. It sends me into our car, Steve at the wheel, the boys at the back. The four of us drive the gentle curves of an English country road as we have done innumerable times before.

  For three years I’ve tried to indelibly imprint they are dead on my consciousness, afraid of slipping up and forgetting, of thinking they are alive. Coming out of that lapse, however momentary, will be more harrowing than the constant knowing, surely. But now I am unmoored simply by the familiar light. This is different from remembering them, warily, as I usually do. This is tumbling into them, into our life, into our car. This is slipping up. I can see the tiny starlike crack on the windscreen made by the pebble that shot out of the road and smashed into the glass no sooner than we’d bought the car. The AA road atlas by my feet is trodden and creased. Vik sits behind me, Malli behind Steve. There are two Ribena cartons between them, drained empty so their sides are curved in, the last drops of black currant juice leaking out the straws and staining the seat. Also, a spit-covered core of an apple that one of them could easily have thrown out the window instead of leaving there to roll off and rot under the accelerator pedal. We have to get home and fix their dinner. The rush of Sunday evenings.

  Was that a dead pheasant on the side of the road? They are not here, they would have noticed it if they were. They would have said something. Yuk. Cool. When do you think it got killed, Dad? They are not here. But I don’t want to emerge out of them. I want to hover inside our metallic blue Renault Mégane Scénic. Why am I allowing this? I will have to crawl back into reality soon, and that will be agony. Maybe it is the somnolent warmth of Dave’s car that entices me to forget in this way. Now I slip up again, this time voluntarily.

  They are sitting quietly at the back, not kicking each other’s shins for a change, no burping contests. Vik sees a gush of starlings wing the air, his eyes trail the whirr of gray filling the sky. But what he really wants to see is a sparrow hawk. Or, better still, a sparrow hawk sparring with a crow. Malli’s nodding off, he always does this in the car, but it’s too late to nap now. “Vik, talk to Malli and keep him awake, sweetheart. He won’t sleep tonight if he dozes off now.” They will run up the stairs to our front door and keep ringing the doorbell even though they know there is no one in. They will fight about whose turn it is to pee first. Steve will suggest that all three of them pee together, and they will do so gleefully. I will ask why one of them can’t use the other toilet upstairs. And I will tell them not to spray the whole bloody place. When they are done, they will use the blue and white hand towel to mop up the floor a little and then hang the towel back on the rail. I will hear their giggles over the gulping and gurgling of the flush. But that’s when we get home. We are still in the car, and the boys are both sitting in their socks because Steve has flung their muddy shoes into the boot.

  Malli is proud of his new hiking shoes, brown Timberlands with thick soles, just like Daddy’s shoes. He didn’t complain and ask to be carried when we walked in the woods today. You have the best shoes, Mal, you lead the way, we told him. He said the small red tags on the back of his shoes glowed like lights and that would stop us getting lost, even on the darkest paths. He set off in front with a purposeful tread, stopping only to test the grip of his soles on an uneven slope or to pick blackberries. The berries were scarce today, the bushes on our path offered only dried-up brown clusters speckled with a few tiny purple beads, which the boys painstakingly picked out and then winced at their sourness when they crushed them between their teeth. Vik stepped on some nettles, and Steve showed him how to rub a dock leaf on his leg to stop the stinging. You always find dock leaves near nettles, he told Vik. We walked a long way today, and Malli didn’t want to turn back once, simply because of his new shoes.

  And then I remember. Shoes. Those shoes. I remember those shoes, and my heart shivers. The police took away one of those shoes from my parents’ house when they were trying to identify bodies. They took it for DNA testing. They returned it in a sealed polythene bag, like a large sandwich bag. I am beaten. The one time I allow my family to come alive, and that shoe trounces me. But I want to linger with them. I want to stay in our car forever. Let’s put the boys to bed early and watch The Catherine Tate Show, I say 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

  It’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 the day. 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 it emerges 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 printout of four tickets for The Snowman at the Peacock Theatre on the fifth of January 2005.

  There is a pile of unopened Christmas presents on our bedroom floor. I remember now. The presents were given to Vik and Malli by Steve’s family the weekend before we left for Sri Lanka. “You’ll get so many presents in Colombo,” I told the boys. “It’ll be more fun to open these when we get back.” I find a Christmas card sealed in a red envelope, written by Vik to my parents. “To Aachchi and Seeya, we are coming to Colombo on the 8th of December, from Vikram and Malli.” I must have forgotten to post it before we left. And a calendar for 2005 that Malli made in school, with a delicate design of orange and gold dots that he had crafted with a little boy’s devotion. I am in shreds.

  But as I drift tentatively around the house, an undertow of calm also tugs at me, drawing me away from the agony, just a little. I can almost slip into thinking that nothing has changed. That we still live here. In the playroom, Malli’s baby doll sits in a stroller as always. His silver tiara is on the mantelpiece and, by the fireplace, his pink ballet shoes. On the floor, a few sheets of A4 on which Vik has written out the score charts of his imaginary cricket matches, Australia v Namibia, Zimbabwe v India, and of course to annoy me, Sri Lanka always lost. The little cloth badge he got for completing his eight-hundred-meter swim just a few days before we left London is on his bookcase. I said I would sew it onto his swimming shorts when we returned. On their wooden blue desk is a poem that Malli and I wrote about a purple-eared creature he named the Giddymeenony, who lived beyond the sea and had a cactus growing on its nose. With a drawing of it and all. In this playroom, they were so secure.