Homesick

Homesick by Roshi Fernando Page B

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Authors: Roshi Fernando
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looked closely at it, feeling it to be private, like looking at a man naked. She glanced now, saw its two prongs, and looked away again: a nausea rose in her throat when she thought it could touch her. Above his head birds flitted, sparrows old and young, as if the leaves and branches restricted them like a cage. He concentrated on the birds, recognising, it seemed, or counting, like a miser with coins.
    “Are they yours?” she asked lamely. What was there to say? No one talked to Danny in school. He was talked
about:
how he could draw animals as if he were tracing them from a book, how he dug up worms in the beds around the playground and carried them in his pocket. How his arm was made by a witch from a chicken wing. How he ran from one corner of the field to the other on the morning in October when the dew-covered spiderwebs appeared, calling to others to look, as the sun came up and steamed them invisible. Stopped a little one breaking a web with a stick with his nasty arm. And the little one cried, afraid he’d touch him.
    “Nah. Birds don’t belong to no one. I just …” He shrugged.
    “Oh.”
    Preethi waited. He had called her, and she did not want to go home.
    “Wait there, I’m coming down.”
    She moved back to give him room and watched him use both arms deftly, his body just like her own: muscular and dependable. As he jumped she noticed a nest that his hair had camouflaged.
    “They let you get so near,” she said.
    “Yeah, they’re stupid, really. I could be a predator or anything.”
    “Do you feed them? Is that how you do it?” He was standing very near her: it scared her, the arm, and his bulk—he was taller than she had imagined. She tipped backward, pretending to lose her balance, and then recovering it three steps away.
    “What you doing down here?”
    “I dunno,” she said.
    “Wanna come and play?”
    “Play what?”
    “I’ve got a den.”
    He led her around the trees and to the back of the flats, across the grounds to the box hedge on the far side. There he had leant branches against the straight-cut shrub, and under the branches were rugs, books, a sketch pad, pencils. Two apples and half a sandwich. He lowered himself under the branches and sat down in the impression his body had left. He crossed his legs and indicated with the arm for her to sit opposite. She sat. He picked up an apple with the two fingers and leant forward to her. She shook her head, but he thrust it still. She reached her hand forward, not looking at the apple, but at his face.
    “Go on,” he said.
    She took the apple as they stared at each other still, and when her fingers touched his, they were warm. She put the apple to her lips and bit. He smiled. Then he did something extraordinary: he leant forward to her feet and tied her shoelaces, the two fingers on the arm weaving the thick white laces into an extra loop in a complicated route so that the bows on her shoes sat tight and hard, as if her feet were packaged up like two matching gifts.
    •
    Slap, on the arm, so not
so
cross, she thought. Just one. Stay quiet.
    “Did you polish Rohan’s shoes?” her mother asked.
    “Yes, Ammi,” and pulling herself in, her tummy, her arms, into herself, she walked toward the door.
    “Where are you going?” She recognised the quiet threat in her mother’s voice. “Preethi?”
    “I’m just going to get my books, Ammi,” she said. She ran upstairs to her room, rubbing at her arm, saying the same prayer on the dark stairs. She switched the lights on, threw her sheets and blankets back up onto the pillows, smoothed over the coverlet, rubbing her hands along its worn lines.
    “Preethi!” she heard Gehan call. He was younger than she, but he knew all his times tables, understood algebra, had started to learn the periodic table in his spare time, to taunt her, she thought. To hurt her. “Ammi says come,” he shouted up the stairs.
    She looked at the exercise book of sums her mother had left her that morning.

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