Ainkaran Sivaaji WELCOME

In the flat where Jennifer Breno and Zara Yeo lived, one marble model of campus topped a table at its centre, planted quietly in the middle of the living room. That was it. A forgotten, slightly blue thing in a room starved of furniture, which made Saaranya Fernando curious. Sometimes dried chewing gum on a newly paved plaza did that, or the odd nick scarring a freshly coated wall; draw focus to its granularity, and never for the right reasons, until such quirks were accepted as just another part of the landscape. She thought it worn, conscious almost, but with none of the piles of people and purview that really brought campus alive.

Not something the girls had bought, Saaranya surmised, nor was it a typical halls’ feature, for there had never been one in Kiaan Lupera’s flat, that she could recall. She loosened the cotton scarf he had gifted her for the holidays, pat-drying the globs of dew it had left behind on her neck, and drew closer to the sculpture. It seemed to grow as she approached, calling to her, this intricately carved body of collapsed and soaring walls, all spry angles and boring edges, but for a carnelian pearl bead on its outer rim that stuck out and was red.

She read and recognised Manchester’s architectural organs and vasculature with the diligence of a seasoned Braille reader. The great library and Student Union building, her preferred sites of escape into worlds both imagined and otherwise, were exactly where they should be, reigning over the neatly trimmed plazas, fed and drained generously by the main street; Oxford Road that is, where they had all protested. But the old quadrangle was missing, and with it, the nauseous smell of ivy she hated. The writing society met for tea there on their weekly pilgrimage, sharing cakes laced with the clotted marzipan icing she craved, harvesting new shoots of daisies while gossiping over Elizabeth Bishop, Javier Marias and V. Akilesapillai. A ghost of a smile arrived when she was reminded of the girls swooning lustily at Kiaan, who went coyly with the flow, borrowing two books he had yet to return, the one time she had compelled him to attend.

Then came the searing screams and a bang, but she was not startled, for she knew the room was deadly quiet. Just like she knew when the whole world had been deadly quiet. Behind the scan of her eyes danced a subtle, mellifluous back and forth, that could only come with knowing too many things. With the cuff button of her Oxford plaid cashmere shirt undone, sleeves rolled up to the bend of her elbows, her hand wandered further in.

Brutish were the gothic towers and belfries stood abreast in replica, although to her, they were no match for the real thing. She went onto translate, under a mutter, the uneven panorama of Church and Stopford building crawling under her synapses, considering the dichotomy each presented, from doctrine to discovery, absolutes to investigation, peace to consensus-building. Dust and moisture were banished from their marble rooftops and pointed spires by fingertips that stung with the chill, squeak after scratch a counterpoint of sorts to the distant, high-pitched purring steam of a kettle reaching boiling point, to the restless whir under Saaranya’s deep breaths. Entranced, her fingers finally found Whitworth Park halls on the model, where she now was, in Jennifer and Zara’s flat, before stopping.

“Two sugars, right?” Jennifer approached.

“Oh sweetheart, thank you! Been meaning to ask, where…”

“No, I owe you a huge thanks, Saar, for coming here on short notice.” All three brass latches and the main locks were double-checked at the front door, before she lent down and made herself comfortable. “Was it Kiaan you were meant to be meeting?”

They sat close together, side by side. Jennifer, coddling her knees towards her core, sat on the last delivery from her mother in Dublin, a velvet cushion, black as slate, supple as sable; her follicles awake over her olive skin, now riddled with goosebumps. Her face was hurting but she tried hard not to show it.

“M’hmm, yeah, I left before he got to Trof’s,” Saaranya sipped, recoiling from the sharp heat and whiff of fresh ginger, “trying to text him but, I might just meet him tomorrow with Zabia and Tyler…”

“Tell him to come here…” Jen spluttered.

“What? Oh, are you sure? I mean…

“Of course I am. I’m really happy for you Saar…”

“Huh, haha no Jen, no, no, no, he’s like a brother to me!” Saaranya let out a small laugh.

“Oh right, yeah, erm, oops, that’s really embarrassing, sorry…I never, erm…”

The sympathetic rub on Jennifer’s back felt good and she conceded a significant smile. Her plaited locks were tossed back, caught before their tips could soak in her hot chocolate. A mouthful she quaffed before her lips were dried, and a long sniff gave away she had a cold. Saaranya’s smile into her tea was frail. The room felt stuffy.

The activist was good at reading people. Sitting back in the flat, she remembered her first visit following the attack; Jennifer wouldn’t speak, lost on the wall. Now, wearing the same creased pink pyjama joggers, her charming dimples had returned to redder cheeks. Her eyes were still bleary and heavy, having not enjoyed much sleep; symptoms of those extra weekend shifts, worked to help pay their bills. But she was far more present and Saaranya took some comfort from this. Cheers of football fans pierced through the open window, carried from the ground floor bar, and they both chuckled.

“He’s your type, I remember…. look at you!” Saaranya glanced at her, grinning. “Clean cut, square-jawed? If you want, I’ll ask him to bring some food over?”

She inhaled, deeply. “Kothuroti?”

“Sounds delicious,” Jennifer blushed, her knees squeezed tighter together as a scarlet rash on them was nursed. “I’d think you hated cooking with the amount of take-out you eat,” she gargled, before realising, “Zara will be done soon, she’d like some too I suppose…”

“Suppose this marble thing was always here, right?” Saaranya pointed. “I’ve never seen one like it anywhere else though…”

“No, Zara brought it in actually,” Jen nodded quietly, “RAG fundraiser prize.”

“It’s pretty. When’s the next RAG week?”

“You can have it if you want,” came a voice, “I was going to chuck it when I move out.”

Zara Yeo walked out of her bedroom and an ice-cold shower towards the pair. Wearing that hungry silence Saaranya long felt around her, scavenging for its fill, yet finicky on words best to say, and how best to say them. She was presented boxes of praline chocolates and wished a Happy Birthday.

“It completely slipped my own mind to be honest, thanks so much for these!” Arms full, Zara deposited her gifts nimbly on a corner table. She rearranged them with graceful poise, humming in a bid to occupy the uncomfortable, wordless hollow that had been created, made more awkward by the fact grace wasn’t really Zara’s style.

“You’re more than welcome Zara, I was thinking to get Kothuroti from the new place down curry mile; Kiaan said they opened big in Massachusetts last May. You really like spicy food right…”

“Isn’t that where your brother Arishan is going?” cut a murmur.

“Yes that’s right, next semester, he’s looking forward to it, poor thing burned the oil past midnight to get in.”

“Gonna help revive the native language there, is he?” came Zara wryly.

Saaranya looked proud through the ambush.

“Massachuset-Wampanoag?” Saaranya asked. “If only! I’m worried and excited, and sad and, all of the above!”

A weak gulp and nervous laughter were committed, but it was a curt cough that finally unsettled the tight knot in her chest. She had not met with her brother in weeks.

“I’ll get Kiaan to go to Eelam Express then…”

“I’m not hungry, but thanks…” Zara sliced. She looked sickly pale, like she had left all her blood in the shower. “I’ve just got back from the gym and still got packing left to do. Would you take a look at it? This new eye patch really itches, it’s so fucking annoying!”

“So you’re definitely leaving halls then?”

The reply was more soliloquy, although the girls couldn’t help search for the question in Saaranya’s face, lips agog. The light switch was dialled to dim. Everything fell under shadow. Squashed shapes coruscated from every direction, in their eyes’ efforts to recalibrate. The moon-kissed brass lock at the door was checked again. Far opposite them, the walls’ heights were swallowed by a long, sloped roof that kissed the floor on its way down, and, by virtue of its skylights, she observed a nifty means by which residents outside could slide and slip, in and out of others’ flats, under the conceit of the dark.

“Focus on a distant object.”

Pulling back the black patch from Zara’s right eye while avoiding the scarred remains of its eye lid was a delicate task, one that required deft, skilled hands, but Saaranya was too tender, and the patch almost snapped back from under her fingers. Jennifer left to make more hot chocolate, and of its own will, Zara’s gaze shifted from her departing housemate to the marble model.

“My friend Jinhai, y’know, the one who calls me Pirate Yeo,” Zara said quietly, eyes narrowing, “he’s taking me and his friends out for my birthday after work, maybe bowling in Parr’s Wood, in Didsbury,..”

The band of her eye-patch held her jet-black hair firm to her scalp like a seat belt. The tension caused Zara’s forehead to stretch, and in this image of near madness, Saaranya admired her beauty, audibly.

“Too good, does he still work at the restaurant?” she asked, shining a pen flashlight from one eye to the next.

“Yeah, Shanghai City, he’s really been there for me, y’know.” Faster, she spoke. “I mean, I’m not ready for dating at all, but, I really like that he identifies with me, his friends call me lil’ chubby Cyclops, y’know?”

They all giggled. “He’s so fine Saar, and…”

“Still no sight in your right eye?”

“Err… no… It’s been gone all summer.”

“…Hmm.. there appears to be consensual pupillary reflex,” murmured Saaranya, “when light shone in left eye, but no direct or consensual pupil restriction with right-eye light stimulation, still fits monocular blindness…”

“Talk English, Saar!”

“Huh? Oh sorry Zara, you’ll need an update on the next scan from your doc….Oh yeah you’re right, he is really good-looking,” Saaranya blurted, thinking better of probing anything intimate between the two, “…enough to convince you to stay in school?”

“Well, my tutor says a sabbatical would be the right thing for me, y’know, and I agree. Not that anything will affect my decision, I’ve got a job lined up, in civil service.” She paused then breathed hard through her nose. Zara bit into her bottom lip, cut a stare outside the window as the dark cast over her face. Saaranya went for the lights.

“How the fuck am I meant to move on here? One of those bastards is still out there, and Jen, well…” Trembling, she repeated “Jennifer…”

“Yeah Zara? Is everything ok?”

Zara’s throat quickly swelled. “It’s nothing. I just can’t be here right now.” Over her eye the patch returned, her stomach plummeted, she clutched at it beneath her crop top and choked. “Fuck this, fuck all of it! Y’know it’s all over campus, in peoples’ fucking mouths everywhere.”

She shivered violently, breathing faster. “I hate my life!”

“Don’t say that Zara.”

“Even my hair is fucking turning white!” came a roar, before a devastating laugh ripped through the air, and then her rage suddenly numbed, swallowing all the sound into an invisible abyss.

A long, serious quiet followed. Then another cheer from the fans in the bar. “You can’t control others’ thoughts. But getting back in the driver’s seat, it’s the hardest, bravest thing,” Saaranya said, grabbing the girl as if in violent prayer, in what was really a pacifying gesture. “Think of all the girls and women who will walk behind you. Listen to your hearts, always. You both can talk to me anytime, you know that?” and she wiped Jennifer’s face dry.

“We couldn’t have got this far without you,” Jennifer Breno said. “I might take a pass on the take-away tonight, sorry, the bakery leaves free pastries out for all Whitworthers at night, will grab a bite then, if you’re around…”

“No worries, Jen,” Saaranya replied. “Kiaan really wants to see me tonight so, I think I’ll head off…”

Zara quickly followed. “I’ll know more tomorrow after some tests, but thanks for looking at it.”

“Ok, we’ll know more soon then, hopefully,” Saaranya smiled. “For now, this Alomide solution, it works for me, a good wash of the eye-patch can’t hurt either.”

“Thank you so much for coming Saar,” Jennifer beamed through an embrace.

“Anytime. Jen – mix some warm milk and honey with a pinch of turmeric for the cold, an old Jaffna remedy my mum swore by,” Saaranya said, swallowing the crack in her voice. “Or a shot of Sambuca!”

They smirked together.

“Have fun tonight, okay Zara?”

“I’ll pass the model on to Kiaan for you if I see him,” Jennifer said behind her, reaching for the lock. “I mean, he can keep it in his flat?”

“There’s no rush, Jen,” Saaranya winked over her hunched shoulder, the books in her sage satchel feeling far heavier than when she had arrived. “I’ll probably see you guys soon anyway, love you…” and the door shut at her heels.

‘The Grove’ bar’s exit led towards newly minted iron gates that scared the pigeons on their swing into Oxford Road, where at last, a phone signal could pick up Kiaan’s thoughts on a reschedule. She swallowed hard and looked down, fighting off the impending mood dive. Tingling anxiety shot from limb to limb as she was jostled between crowds parading their way in all directions, crumbs of free pastry flying from lips locked into their own phones. She looked back, one Jinhai Chan and friends disappearing a stretch clear of the gates. Down her denim pockets she dug, laminated pass at the ready, boarding within seconds at Stopford building bus stop. It wasn’t until alone on the lower deck of Magic bus 142, headed to Squirrel’s, Owen’s Park, in Fallowfield, did she dial a new number. In the flat where Jennifer Breno and Zara Yeo lived, on one replica marble model of campus that topped a table at its centre, a GSM listening bug was activated behind a small carnelian bead that, for a moment, shone a brilliant, luminous red.

***