The Visitor

Extract written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). An original piece of modern prose written for revision practice only; not derived from any published or past-paper text.

The kettle had been boiled four times since breakfast, and still Mum hadn't sat down.

'She'll want proper tea,' Mum said, not for the first time, lining up cups that did not match. 'Not the bags. The leaves. In the pot with the chip in the spout, because that's the one Nani always used.'

I did not remind her that Nani had not been in this kitchen for eleven years. I did not remind her of anything, in fact, because Mum's hands were shaking slightly, and there is a particular kind of quiet you learn to keep around a person whose hands are shaking.

Outside, a taxi pulled up in front of our house on Marigold Close, engine idling in the thin Tuesday light. I watched from behind the net curtain as the driver opened the boot and a small, upright woman in a green cardigan stepped out and stood very still, looking up at the pebble dashed front of our house as though she were reading something written there.

'Priya. Door.' Mum's voice had gone somewhere high and tight.

I opened it before the bell rang.

Nani's eyes found mine straight away, skipping past Mum entirely, and she said my name the way nobody else said it, with the stress falling in the wrong place, in the right place, in the place I had almost forgotten was possible.

'You have your father's chin,' she said, 'and my mother's ears. Nobody tells you these things, and then one day there is no one left who can.'

I did not know what to do with a sentence like that, so I carried her case inside instead.

Mum hovered in the kitchen doorway, tea towel wound tight around one hand. 'You didn't say what train you'd got. I'd have come to the station.'

'I am not so old that I cannot find a taxi, Kavita.'

Something crossed Mum's face then, quick as a bird's shadow over grass, and I understood, in the way you understand things without being told, that this sentence was not really about a taxi at all. It was about a girl who had once got on a plane instead of finishing university, and a mother who had not come to the airport to see her off, and twenty years of silence that had somehow both healed and not healed at all.

Nani settled herself at the kitchen table without being asked, in the chair that faced the garden, and looked around the room as if she were checking it against a photograph in her memory. 'Same table,' she said. 'Different family sitting at it.'

'We're still the same family,' Mum said quietly.

'Are you.' It was not really a question.

I busied myself with the teapot, the one with the chip in the spout, and poured three cups, and nobody spoke while I did it, and the silence was not empty the way silences usually are in our house. It was full, the way a held breath is full, of everything that was about to be said, or almost said, or said badly and then said again, better, later, over more cups of tea than anyone in that kitchen could yet imagine.

I set a cup in front of each of them and sat down in the third chair, the one that faced neither the garden nor the door, and waited to find out which family I was actually in.