Skins

Part Twenty One.

She wasn't the man being led to the gallows, or having the chair kicked out from underneath. The strained, coiled secrets slithered around the entire place, a hint of a scandal, sex and lust and God. Edward waved her off. Ironic, she thought. Without realising, she answered herself. The irony's in the geography. Not us.

Us.

The car spluttered to life and she rolled the window up. It smelled like stale tobacco and petrol, evoking images of Bangalore in her mind, of skinny men dressed in clothes too big, with apple shards caught in their throats and black-edged teeth. Taxi-drivers and hotel rooms. That was before It All.

They spluttered past forest and village and slum, the driver occasionally saying in Kannada, 'you're the Australian? I've heard a lot about you. Yes, yes. A lot.' He laughed through the carfumes, enjoying her humiliation.

She was a woman dressed in cotton, ought to have red glass bangles on her wrists.

*

Siddhanth swung to modernism on that day. He smoked the butt of an old cigarette and annotated his psychology textbooks with a leaking fountain pen, smearing over vocabulary referring to the innocence and simpleness of the female mind, while his father hissed at his mother in the room next door.

Flecks of hot tobacco burned holes in the pages. He ground the stump into "vulnerability model", snapped the book shut and burst into the adjacent room. His mother sat on the bed and her husband towered over her, the paisley quilting rumpled, her dark hair hanging about her face. She cried gently.

'What the fuck are you doing?' Siddhanth roared.

His father's jaw trembled as he turned and advanced toward him. He raised his arm slowly and screeched.

'Get out. Get out!'

'No!'

His father's face inched closer until his hot, angry breath ran over Siddhanth's neck.

'Let me tell you once. Don't fuck around with what keeps a roof over your worthless head.'

The moment those words rolled over his father's livid teeth, he raised his fist and punched him squarely in the nose. Waving the red flag of revolution with bloodied knuckles, the confliction returning to his deep collarbones.

'You're the worthless one,' Siddhanth hissed. His father sank to his knees.

His mother watched in dumb horror, and Siddhanth grabbed his psychology textbook, bananas from the fruit bowl, and walked straight-spined out of the house, never to return. He walked Bangalore barefoot and wild. He changed like the monsoon winds.