Aruna stirs with the early morning light, just before they come back into Singapore. Two days ago, she didn’t think she would ever wake up with Jazz again, and now as she wakes in his arms, her head nestled against his neck, she is surprised at how normal it still feels, there is nothing controversial, no niggle of disquiet or discomfort, it feels the most natural thing in the world. Her brother enemy. Her brother friend. She finally has the answer she wanted, she is finally going home; she should feel satisfied, or at least content, but instead she feels ambiguous. Instead of feeling full of hope for the future, she is instead thinking only of the recent past. She is thinking that it is late evening back in London, and that Patrick is going to sleep in a flat that is still empty. She is thinking of what she left behind in the other place that she never allowed herself to call home. Like driftwood, she thinks, floating between two worlds.
‘I just wish you’d tell me why,’ Patrick said, at home one evening after work, slicing courgettes for the pasta sauce.
‘Sorry, I’ve got some work to do,’ said Aruna, not sounding nearly sorry enough, and she unplugged her laptop and went to the bedroom.
Patrick put down the knife, turned off his simmering pots, and simply followed her. ‘I mean, is it because my mum said I was a ten-pound baby? Because I’m not sure that’s true.’
‘Of course it’s true,’ said Aruna, instantly annoyed with herself that she’d let him draw her back into the conversation. ‘Just look at the size of you. But it’s not that.’
‘Is it because of how your mum died? Because that wouldn’t happen to you, there’s better monitoring of that sort of thing these days.’
‘No,’ said Aruna shortly.
‘Is it because you think I won’t make love to you when you’re pregnant? Because that’s really not a problem. I’ll just be careful; if you’re careful too, we can make love right up to the end.’
‘Reassuring that you don’t mind making love to a Zeppelin, but it’s not that,’ muttered Aruna. ‘I’m getting really tired of having this conversation, you know; you’ve not let up since we got back from France. Every time you come in from work, it’s like the blade jabbing behind the shower curtain in Psycho, “Baby, baby, baby”, to the tune of shrieking violins.’
‘Is it because you’d have to stop drinking and smoking, and anything else you take on the side, when I’m not about?’ Patrick persisted. ‘Because we can get help with that. If you think it would be a problem giving them up.’
Aruna finally lost her temper. ‘I don’t need your fucking help, Patrick,’ she shouted. ‘I don’t need help. And I don’t need your babies. Now get the hell out of here!’
‘No!’ Patrick shouted back, slamming the bedroom door behind him with a violence that surprised both of them. ‘Not this time. For once in your life have enough fucking respect for me to tell me what’s going on with you. I want you to talk to me. I want you to tell me the truth.’
Aruna laughed hysterically, as she felt herself snap, and her tentative self-control careered wildly away. ‘You really want to know the truth? The truth is that I got pregnant three times with my ex-boyfriend, and miscarried them all. The truth is that you married the dead-baby machine, so if all you want is kids from me you’d better find someone else.’
Patrick’s fight seeped out of him, and he sank down on the bed in shock. Aruna’s bitter confession clearly wasn’t the truth he’d been expecting. ‘Christ, Aruna. Three miscarriages. Why didn’t you tell me before? We need to talk about these sorts of things, you shouldn’t try and deal with this stuff on your own.’ He looked up and saw Aruna was still trembling and pale with fury. ‘How long were you with your ex-boyfriend, to have had three miscarriages?’ he asked.
‘Twenty-odd years, give or take,’ she said bluntly, ‘since we were ten years old. We were at school together.’
‘You’ve been with someone for twenty years, and you never mentioned him to me,’ said Patrick, astounded. ‘You don’t trust me enough to tell me a thing, do you? You don’t want me to know anything about you.’ He hesitated, then asked, ‘Is that why you broke up with him and came here? Because of the miscarriages?’
Aruna shook her head, ‘He just . . . wasn’t available to me any more,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about this, it’s personal.’
‘You’re right, it is,’ said Patrick, ‘which is why we need to talk about it. I mean, what does “wasn’t available” mean? Did he turn out to be gay? Did he get married? Fall into a coma?’ He paused and asked, ‘Did he betray you, let you down, I mean?’
‘I suppose you could say that I let him down,’ replied Aruna, ‘but not in the way you mean.’
‘So, what happened?’ asked Patrick.
‘I just left,’ she said. ‘Left him, left Singapore. I had to. He still doesn’t know where I am.’
Patrick stared at her with an expression approaching disgust, which didn’t suit his blunt good looks, it twisted his face into plainness. ‘You just left? God, you really are a bitch, Aruna. Is that what you do to people you love? Just leave?’
Aruna stepped over and slapped him hard across the face, ‘You know nothing about it,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t you dare judge me. You have no idea how much I loved him.’
‘You’re right. I don’t. I have no idea whether you even love me, when it comes down to it. You’ve never said the words. Not ever,’ he shouted back.
‘I can’t take any more of this, I’m leaving,’ she spat out, and went to open the door, but Patrick took her arm and yanked her back into the room.
‘Not this time,’ he yelled. ‘You’re not just walking out again – you’re going to talk to me this time. We’re finishing this.’
‘Just let me out, you freak,’ she screamed with impotent fury at being so easily manhandled, and picking up the bedside lamp she threw it at him viciously and went for the door again. The lamp smashed harmlessly on the floor behind Patrick, and he caught her and slammed her back bodily against the wall to stop her. And then everything went black as she cracked her head and passed out.
Aruna came blearily to consciousness to find herself in Patrick’s arms while he sat on the floor; he was rocking her against him, and crying helplessly like a lost child. ‘I’m so sorry, darling, I’m so sorry. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me,’ he kept saying. ‘I didn’t mean it, I didn’t want to hurt you, I just wanted to stop you from going. I was angry, I didn’t mean to push so hard. Please don’t leave me.’ Aruna realized fuzzily through the pain that it was oddly poignant to see such a big man so broken down.
‘I know you didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, too.’
‘You shouldn’t be sorry,’ Patrick said, tears still running freely down his cheeks, ‘You tell me about this awful thing that’s happened to you, and I just act like a freak, like you said, because you mentioned your ex-boyfriend. I know you keep saying that I’m not jealous, but the truth is I am. I’m jealous of your past; I’m jealous of before you met me. I don’t know a thing about your life before you came to London. I’m jealous of all the things I know you don’t want to tell me.’
Aruna pulled herself out of his embrace, and moved awkwardly away from him, to lean with her back against the side of their bed. ‘I’m sorry because I’ve done this to you,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken the kindest, gentlest man I know, and turned him into someone who slams his wife against the wall during a quarrel. I’ve made you ugly. And angry. And I’m sorry.’ Her head was throbbing, and she felt bruised and sore down one side of her, especially across her hip bone; she crawled onto the bed, and lay down on top of the covers, with her face up as she fingered the sore lump under the hair.
Patrick leaned across, and brushed his hand across the tender patch. ‘Let me get you some ice for that, to help with the swelling,’ he said. He ran to the kitchen, and came back with the tray of ice cubes, efficiently emptying the ice into a plastic bag, which he held against her head. He pressed his cheek against her limp hand on the bed, and said again, ‘I’m so sorry I hurt you.’
‘I hurt you all the time, and you just sit there and take it,’ she said frankly. For some reason she felt saner than she had in days, the crack to her head seemed to be focusing all her mental energy on the pain, rather than in mixing her up.
‘You don’t hurt me, really. I know you say hurtful things, sometimes, but I also know you don’t mean them,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s something I’ve known for a long time.’ He paused, looking carefully at her face, as though he wanted to say something more, or was hoping for her to say something in response; for a moment the silence was full of the things unsaid between them. The pain in Aruna’s head was sharpening to something white hot and overwhelming. She closed her eyes.
He sat with her for a while, gently tracing her jawbone with the side of his palm, and then eventually he said, ‘I need to tell you something. I didn’t mean what I said just now, either. I want you to know, that I do know you love me. Of course I’d like you to say it, just occasionally, but the thing is, you don’t have to say it for me to know. I see it in all the little things you do, in the way you always leave your hand out of your pocket when we’re walking down the street for me to take, in the way you make those funny side comments and wait to see if I’ll laugh, in the way you hold me in your arms as though you’ll never let me go, in the way you make love to me like there’s never been anyone else. I know you love me. If I died in a car crash tomorrow, I’d die knowing that you loved me; you’d never have to regret not having said it.’
Somehow, the tone of his tender words, soaked in so much undiluted emotion and belief, hurt Aruna more than her head; she wished so much that she could be the person he thought her to be, that she burst into tears and found she really couldn’t stop. Patrick moved beside her onto the bed, and took her in his arms again, and just held her as she cried.
In the middle of the night, Aruna slid out of Patrick’s sleeping embrace, pulled her enormous dressing gown over her bruised body, and went to sit on their garden step as she smoked. She thought about Jazz, whom she had loved and abandoned without a word, because he was no longer available to her; and Patrick, whom she had damaged and wasn’t sure she could love, because she wasn’t available to him either, because she was still filled with the past and always drifting back to her other world, her previous existence. She wondered how many other people she would hurt incontrovertibly in her life, because of the swinging pendulum in her head that told her sometimes she would be very, very good, and sometimes that she would be horrid. She could run away, but she couldn’t escape, and she couldn’t move on. I’m a horrible, horrible person, she thought to herself, I wasn’t always that way, but I’ve become one. The voices in her head that the medication used to muffle, argued that the world might be a pleasanter place without her, and she wasn’t able to disagree.
The next day, Aruna left a note for Patrick, apologizing for everything, again. She apologized for the mess, the one she had left in the kitchen, and the one she had left in his life. She tried to explain that she knew he had been a good husband, and that her unhappiness had nothing to do with him; that in fact, she truly wished she could have allowed herself to accept and return his love, to have been happy for his sake, and have made him happy too. She packed a bag with swimming gear, and went to the Hampstead Heath Ponds, to the lake fringed by beautiful trees, which reflected the sky, with reeds swaying just under the surface. It wasn’t as easy for her as it should have been for the man in Biarritz; she dived, and just came back bobbing to the surface. She couldn’t put stones in her pockets, as she had no pockets, and there were no stones. Defeated by the calm stillness of the ponds, by the beauty of the surroundings, by the curious looks of the local pensioners placidly bathing at the chilly water’s edge in unflattering patterned swimwear with scalps squeezed under scalloped rubber caps, she left the water, got dressed, and went back to their flat. She told herself, told the voices if they were there to listen, that it would be more considerate to everyone if she tried to live. And so her life went on after all; in the weeks and months that followed, she and Patrick continued to make love often and with enthusiasm, they continued to bicker, she continued to reject her medication and self-medicate instead with drink and hash, she continued her academic work and research, and she continued to refuse to discuss the possibility of having a child. Everything continued, until a few days before her first wedding anniversary, when she read a line in a book over breakfast, and then everything changed with the drama of lights dying in a theatre, and a curtain rising to show a different world displayed on a shining stage.
Aruna looks over at Jazz, still sleeping. She takes her medication out of her handbag, and stares at the nondescript bottle, the plain label marked with her name; she remembers how she had once thought she would rather be dead than half-alive. She shakes the bottle experimentally, and with the slight rattle, Jazz stirs beside her; before she can change her mind, she unscrews the top and takes her pills, and then replaces the bottle guiltily as though she has done something she shouldn’t have. It’s better to live, she tells herself, it’s better to have even half a life, to have half a chance for happiness, than none at all. She nudges Jazz gently with her elbow as the train pulls into the station, ‘Wake up,’ she says, ‘We’re back.’