Escape was all Jaya wanted to think about. To be somewhere, anywhere else. She focused all of her mind on the idea. If she concentrated hard enough she could make herself believe she was the girl in the shampoo commercial. Walking free. Sunlight on her face, breeze in her long hair.
Her mother and stepfather would be home soon. She had to wait until the time was right to escape. A bag was stashed behind the woodpile. She’d hidden her slippers by the back door, so that even if her mother heard her leave, she’d assume she was going out to pee. Her stepfather wasn’t likely to wake up, not when he came home drunk on arrak. She winced when she thought of her earlier encounter with him. There would be bruises.
There was no other preparation she could do, so she got back under her cotton sheet and pretended to be asleep.
Her stepfather and mother came home. She listened to them whispering as they got ready for bed. With her eyes shut and her breathing carefully deep, so that they wouldn’t know she was awake, she listened. Her stepfather was snoring straightaway, thankfully. Her mother… it was hard to tell…
That morning she had tried, once again, to talk to her mother about her stepfather’s drinking and the monster he turned into, but her mother didn’t want to hear it. There was a time when she would have fought lions for Jaya, but now… now she seemed care about nothing at all. Not even herself.
No. There was nothing left for her to stay for. She had to leave or turn into a hollow shell of a woman, like her mother had.
Jaya waited a short while and got up. Sticking to the shadows, she tiptoed out of the house she had been born in. Slippers on. Bag on her shoulder. Her stepfather left his bicycle leaning against the side of the house. Who was going to steal it in this place?
She wheeled it down the road, too slowly for the dynamo to light up the bulb in front. Once she was past the houses, she got on and pedalled as fast as she could for the main road. She had time. She would get to the bus stop on the main road well before the last bus, hiding in the shadows until she saw it approaching. The last bus always stopped there to let off people returning from late shifts. She wrapped a thin cloth around her long hair. Hopefully, no one would look at her closely enough to recognize her. Once she got to the bus depot, all she needed to do was wait until the early morning bus to Colombo and buy a ticket out to freedom.
Jaya shuddered. The village, and all its terrors, was three hours of darkness away and, as the bus rattled along at breakneck speed towards Colombo, she was getting further away by the minute. Outside the window, the sea was a menacing layer of black under the moonlit sky. Inside the bus it was humid and stifling. Crammed in between an old woman whose breath whistled as she slept, and an irritatingly chatty girl with a green plastic handbag, Jaya tried her best not to be frightened.
She hugged her own small bag on her lap. Her plan that had seemed so sensible before, now looked frighteningly flimsy. She didn’t know where she was going, or what she was going to do when she got there. Her heart started pounding again. She struggled to breathe herself calm and imagine how this would work.
The money from selling her mother’s necklace would pay for a room somewhere for a few weeks until she found a job. She was young and willing to work hard and she could handle an overlocker machine as well as anyone. She just had to find a sewing mill somewhere and she could pay her way. She wished she could have asked the supervisor in her old job for a letter of recommendation, but she couldn’t have risked her telling someone about it. Running away had to be done in secret. Otherwise, the past followed you and dragged you back by your hair.
Beside her, the girl who said her name was Somavathi, started talking again. Jaya swallowed a sigh. So far she’d heard all about how Somavathi had got a job as a nanny somewhere; about how she had claimed to have looked after children before but it was only a ‘tiny lie’; about how she was going to save enough money to move to Colombo when she came back. Jaya wasn’t really interested, but Somavathi’s chatter was comforting and distracted her from thinking about home, so she tried to pay attention. She let the other girl’s voice wash over her and made listening noises until it lulled her to sleep.
The screaming woke her up. Shards of pain sliced her arm. She flew across a short space and slammed into something soft. And then again into something hard. Everything was battering and noise and pain. For a moment she was weightless, falling. A crash and suddenly everything was muted. Sleep and confusion disappeared to the realisation that she was under water. In the gloom she could make out the window next to her. She pulled herself through. There was faint light above her. She kicked out towards it.
Something tangled with her leg. She looked down. The girl Somavathi was floating, arms out, just below her. One arm had hooked around Jaya’s foot. Somavathi’s hair spread around her like a dark stain… and it seemed to be spreading. Blood. Without thinking, she reached down and grabbed a floating arm and dragged the unconscious girl towards the light with her.
A few moments of flailing in the salty water and her feet hit the sand. There was water and rocks and luggage and… oh, god, people… Still spluttering and coughing, she pulled the dead weight of Somavathi up to the beach. She was still trying to revive her, pressing her chest like they did on TV, when someone gently put a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I think you can stop now.’
The sun rose. Strangers gave her hot, sweet tea to drink and a cloth to wrap around herself. Someone brought her the hard green plastic handbag that had floated its way back to shore, thinking it was hers. Her own bag was nowhere to be found. She had lost her few clothes, her identity card and, most importantly, the necklace she was intending to sell. Her earrings were still on her ears, but they wouldn’t fetch enough money for her to find a room.
A police jeep and a pickup truck arrived. Two policemen took the jeep down to the shore and ordered some of the local fisherfolk to help them pull the bus out of the water. Another two, a man and a woman, went to check the bodies that had been laid out at the top of the beach, where the coconut trees started.
They would come to her and the other survivors soon. With no money and nowhere to go, they would send her back. Panic burned the strength from her bones. He would not be pleased that she had tried to escape. Pain nipped at her from the tiny injuries on her breasts and inner thighs. Why did she think she could escape? He would always find her. He was big and strong and clever and she was just Jaya. A useless chit who asked for trouble. A stain. A piece of filth. He would find her and punish her and there was no escaping him. Jaya clutched the cotton sheet she was wrapped in and started to shake.
At the top of the beach, they covered Somavathi’s body with a white cloth. Somavathi was gone. No one could hurt her. Jaya envied her. If Jaya had died, things would have been so much simpler. Death only happened once.
Somavathi had been so full of hope and now she was gone. Just like that. All Jaya had of her was the handbag. She would have to hand that over to the policewoman in a minute. Jaya looked down. Somavathi would have had money. Maybe even some jewellery. She was the sort of girl who would have kept all her valuables close to her. And Somavathi had no use for any of it now.
Suddenly, Jaya was no longer shivering. There was a thin sliver of hope. Hunching over, so that the sheet around her shielded the bag, she unzipped it. The first thing she saw was a bundle of papers with a passport on top, protected by the plastic bag they’d been wrapped in. She removed the bundle and tucked it under her thigh so that she could return it later. A quick search revealed a purse. She removed most of the money and shoved it in her bra. It wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t take her far enough away.
Putting her hand back in the bag, she probed around inside searching for anything that felt like jewellery. Anything she could sell. Anything. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone approach. Fighting the urge to look up furtively, she dropped the purse back in and let the handbag fall. Pulling the sheet around her again, she started to rock.
A woman hunkered down in front of her. ‘Child, do you want something to eat?’
Jaya shook her head. Her last hope was gone. She didn’t feel hungry, she felt sick. Blood roared in her ears. She couldn’t let them take her back. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
The woman clicked her tongue. ‘Try and eat. You’ll feel better.’ She offered a cracked plate with two slices of buttered bread on it. ‘It’s hot bread,’ she said, as though that made a difference. ‘The bakery sent some loaves.’
Jaya reached out a shaking hand and accepted the plate. The woman watched her eat for a few minutes, then patted her shoulder and left.
The policewoman was coming round, taking statements. Jaya took Somavathi’s documents from under her thigh. She would have to hand these over.
She cracked open the new passport and gazed at the photo that didn’t really look like the girl she’d been sitting next to. The girl in the photo was solemn and still, while the girl in real life was a constantly moving flurry of words and gestures. Jaya glanced across to where Somavathi lay under a sheet, no longer moving. Sadness swept over her. She hadn’t known her, but now she was gone. The only things left that could tell her about the girl she’d pulled out of the water were now sitting here on her lap.
She looked back at the documents and noted that Somavathi was older than her – twenty-five years to her own twenty. With the passport was a letter from an agency telling her where to meet the agency contact in Colombo who would give her the airline ticket to England, leaving the following day. There were other documents in English. She would have to decipher them later. Jaya put the papers back into the bag. This was the job that Somavathi mentioned. Looking after a baby, she’d said. Jaya had assumed it was near Colombo, but it must be in England. To think that Somavathi had all that future mapped out for her – a flight to England, a job looking after a little boy, all that adventure, lost in a bus that skidded into the rocky sea.
Tears sprang up in her eyes and Jaya wiped them away.
‘Are you hurt?’
Jaya looked up to find a woman in uniform bending over her. She nodded and showed her arm. The woman set down her first aid kit and unwrapped the bloody, brine covered cloth that had been used to bind the wound. Soaking a pad with surgical spirit, she efficiently cleaned out the wound, ignoring Jaya wincing. When she’d finished, there was a neat, white bandage on it.
‘Nothing serious,’ she said. ‘Some cuts from the glass only. You must have hit a window.’ Briefly, her eyes flicked out to the wrecked bus, now being hauled out of the water. ‘You were lucky.’
Looking down at the passport and tickets on her lap, Jaya nodded. ‘Lucky.’ Somavathi, with all her prospects, was dead. While she, Jaya, who had nothing but misery to look forward to, was alive. It was such a waste. Such a waste—
‘What’s your name?’ said the woman.
The idea exploded into being sudden and fully formed. The photo in the passport didn’t look much like either of them. They looked similar. If she feigned an overbite, she could pass for Somavathi. Without the paperwork, there would be nothing to identify whether the body was Somavathi’s or Jaya’s, so if only she was reported missing, they would think the body was hers. Even if her stepfather came to see the body, he wouldn’t notice or care that it wasn’t her… But if they caught her… if they caught her, she could be put in jail. Or worse, sent back to her stepfather. He would be very angry about that. But if she got away with it… if she got away…
The woman sighed and repeated her question, louder this time. ‘What’s your name, girl?’
Jaya looked up. ‘Somavathi,’ she said. ‘My name is Somavathi.’