Half an hour later, as Teacake soars around McEwan Hall, Rani opens Dad’s books and spreads them across the floor. Some of them I recognize, like Raphael’s bored-looking cherubim. Others I’ve never seen before. There’s one of three angels with musical instruments surrounding the baby Jesus; a vivid drawing of four-winged beings attacking a pair of demons beneath a line of neat Arabic script. Rani flicks through the books, telling me about Rossetti, about Van Eyck, about Klee, about artists and movements that I haven’t even heard of.
‘If the artists were right about what angels looked like, maybe they were right about where they were coming from. Look at this.’ She points to a colourful picture of a man in a gold crown and patterned clothes, with sharp wings of red, blue and green feathers protruding from his back. ‘That was painted in 1590 in the Mughal Empire, what’s now India and part of central Asia. And this one . . .’
She grabs another book and opens the page at a painting of the angel Gabriel presenting himself to the Virgin Mary, though she’s suspiciously white for someone from the Middle East.
‘. . . This is by Fra Angelico, painted in Italy in 1426. They’re more than a century and thousands of miles apart, but look how similar the wings are – the colours, the shape.’
There are some similarities, but I don’t see how they’re as alike as she says: the colours of the first angel are so vivid, his wings angular and the feathers thick as organ pipes; the Italian Gabriel’s are softer, the neat lines of pastel blue and harvest yellow complimenting his salmon-pink robes. Like Dad, Rani’s only seeing what she wants to see.
‘I know you could say it’s a coincidence, or that the artists were just copying religious stories or other paintings –’ she runs her finger over the page, tracing the form of the wings – ‘but surely if so many people had such similar visions they must have come from something real.’
Before I can answer, Teacake lands beside us. Rani pushes the first of the books towards her and begins telling her about the paintings, and the Biblical scenes some of them represent. I can’t believe she knows so much. A year ago, Rani’s main interests were trampolining, Haribo and an iPad game about flying koala bears. She seems too young to be obsessing about all this.
She turns to a photograph of a Baroque church. Its ornate ceiling is decorated with a twee mural of angels and saints chilling on clouds; there’s even a Jesus figure balancing on a rainbow.
‘Do you recognize anything?’ she asks Teacake. ‘Does it look like this where you came from?’
Teacake looks at the pictures with interest, her eyes widening when she realizes some of the white and coloured shapes on the page are meant to represent wings. But she doesn’t nod, or shake her head, or point at the clouds and start gabbling excitedly. Soon Rani pouts and turns to the next book, and then the next.
After an hour, we’ve gone through six of the titles, but with no reaction from Teacake other than to parrot our words back to us and recite the first scene of a radio play about selkies.
‘I don’t think she’s following, Ran,’ I say, gently, as she turns to Rembrandt’s Angels. ‘We might never know.’
Her head droops to her chest. When she looks up, she’s crying. ‘Jaya, did Mum kill herself?’
My heart leaps. ‘What? No! Ran, no – how could you think that? It was an accident. You know it was an accident.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ she says. ‘You still haven’t told me what happened. I miss her so, so much.’
The last few words are swallowed by sobs. For a split second I hold back from hugging her – there’s been such a gulf between us for so long – but then I remember who I am and who she is and pull her close. My throat gets tight. I shut my eyes and see rushing water and crumbling rocks and her yellow scarf, snagged on a branch.
Don’t think about it. I focus on Rani: the small pressure of her sobbing body, the tears soaking into my T-shirt. I nudge her so she looks up.
‘Hey. Remember that time we went to the Black Isle for a picnic,’ I say, ‘and a seagull yanked her sandwich right out of her hand?’
Rani gives a bubbly laugh. ‘She chased it halfway down the beach! It’s hardly like she would have eaten it afterwards.’ She sits up and wipes her eyes. ‘Remember when you were wee and she bought that really expensive lipstick and—’
‘And I coloured in both our faces with it!’ There’s a photo of that somewhere: six-year-old me and Rani, just a baby, both beaming, Mac Ruby Woo smeared all over our cheeks and mouths. ‘She didn’t even yell.’
My eyes start to prickle. It makes me almost dizzy, talking like this. Though I think about Mum so often, I never speak about her out loud. But I can tell Rani needs it.
So we talk. We talk about the songs she played in the car, the lullabies she sang when we were tiny. We swap her favourite jokes and worn-out film quotes, the Tamil sayings she’d inherited from Ammamma, all vague and strange in her literal English translations. We talk about her cooking: her creamy aubergine curry, her pad thai, her parippu, her mac and cheese; how the kitchen smelt of bacon on Saturday mornings and of cinnamon or nutmeg when she’d been baking on Sunday afternoons.
We talk about the things we miss most. There are so many: her hugs, her screeching laugh when she was on the phone to Ammamma or her friends in London; the way she’d absent-mindedly braid our hair while we did our homework; the way she smelt of earth and roses after she’d been gardening. We talk about the things that bugged us too, like how she’d always start hoovering just as we’d sat down to watch TV, or how she’d barge into our rooms when our friends were over and start panning through the mess for dirty clothes . . . only now we can’t imagine how those things annoyed us at all. Now we miss them, instead.
And, as we talk, long-trapped memories come floating to the surface. Mum grinning at a lopsided snowman with an orange scarf; her hands peeling a mangosteen in a market in Nuwara Eliya; singing along to a Take That song in the kitchen, a wooden spoon for a microphone. But, with each story, I feel the lack of another: another moment or day that could have awaited her, and now never will.
It’s just so unfair. I only got sixteen years of her, Rani even less. We should be having this conversation in fifty years’ time, with decades’ more memories to add to the list: birthdays, weddings, holidays to France or Sri Lanka or New Zealand. A single moment wiped away that future, and blocked out much of her past. I’ll never be able to ask her what she might have become if she hadn’t got pregnant at twenty, or if she would have been OK with me being gay. I know she would have – she never asked me about boys or girls, but she not so subtly bought me The Miseducation of Cameron Post last summer. Still, I would have liked to talk to her about it.
Eventually we slip into an easy silence, watching Teacake spin slowly beneath the roof. I count how long her flights last: seventeen seconds, twenty-two, nineteen. Her movements are much smoother now – no wobbly take-offs any more. She’s made so much progress.
‘I wish Mum was here to meet her,’ Rani says. ‘She would have loved her.’
‘I know,’ I say, slinging my arm around her neck. ‘Me too, Ran.’
There’s a creak behind us. Calum is in the doorway. He’s not supposed to be here for another half an hour. I feel a jolt of worry, then another of fear, as I think about Allie.
‘You’re early,’ I say. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Aye, grand.’ Calum’s voice is monotone. He dumps his jacket on the ground and walks towards us, squinting at the books. He taps one with his toe. ‘What’s all this?’
‘I was hoping Teacake might recognize something,’ Rani says, as Teacake comes gliding back to the floor. ‘If the Beings look so like the way people paint angels, maybe heaven does too.’
There’s a glint in Calum’s eyes. He drops to his knees and begins turning the pages of the nearest one. He stops on a painting called The Ascension, one of the first few that Rani showed Teacake.
‘Look. See these clouds?’ he says to Teacake. ‘Where you’re from, is it beyond there? Why can’t we see it?’
Something in his tone makes me feel uneasy. Teacake stares at him blankly. Rani starts to tell him she’s already asked her all of this, but Calum cuts her off.