A Place to Hide E-Book

Kwame Dawes

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 476

Beschreibung

A man lies in a newspaper-lined room dreaming an other life. Bob Marley's spirit flew into him at the moment of the singer's death. A woman detaches herself from her perfunctory husband and finds the erotic foreplay she longs for in journeying round the island. A man climbs Blue Mountain Peak to fly and hear the voice of God. Sonia paints her new friend Joan and hopes that this will be the beginning of a sexual adventure. Dawes's characters are driven by their need for intimate contact with people and with God, and their need to construct personal myths powerful enough to live by. In a host of distinctive and persuasive voices they tell stories that reveal their inner lives and give an incisive portrayal of contemporary Jamaican society that is unsparing in confronting its elements of misogyny and nihilistic violence. Indeed several stories question how this disorder can be meaningfully told without either sensationalism or despair. For Dawes, the answer is found in the creative energies that lie just the other side of chaos. In particular, in the dub vershan episodes, which intercut the stories, there are intense and moving celebrations of moments of reggae creation in the studio and in performance. Dawes has established a growing international reputation as a poet and these are stories that combine a poetic imagination with narrative drive, an acute social awareness and a deep inwardness in the treatment of character. In the penultimate story, 'Marley's Ghost', Dawes's imagination soars to towering myth. Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty five books, and is widely recognized as one of the Caribbean's leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. His next book of poetry from Peepal Tree Press will be 'A New Beginning', a cycle of poems written with John Kinsella. He has been elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Leseprobe

A PLACE TO HIDE

KWAME DAWES

CONTENTS

A Place to Hide

At the Lighthouse

Vershan I: Burdens

Tending Rosebuds

Foreplay

Evening Song

Vershan II: Let Me Go

Flight

Sinatra

In the Gully

Vershan III: Chokota

The Poet

The Clearing

Vershan IV: Burnt Offering

Marley’s Ghost

Vershan V: Scratch Madness

A PLACE TO HIDE

On rainy nights like these she would imagine her house the way he had seen it the first time from the terrace of a house on the hills above Kingston. She had gone there one evening after playing squash with him at the Liguanea Club, playing politics as the other junior managers at office would call it, or playing with fire in the words of her sisters in the church, each and every one of them, like her, a fallen angel. When she pointed to her house in Mona Heights, his response was simple: “Neat.” One of the Americanisms he had picked up at college in Miami.

But what did he mean by neat? She thought now as she tugged her skirt and sat down on the toilet seat. Perhaps it was the tic-tac-toe predictability of the streets, rows of concrete houses, each one like the next, the regimented hedges, the squareness of the civil servants. She knew what he had meant by “neat” but it was hard for her to say it. Neat was everything that she was not; her desk, her blue Ford Escort, her apartment in what used to be the maid’s quarters. She was careless and untidy, or as he used to call her before their separation: “A nasty slob.”

Standing before the mirror in her brassiere, her blouse and skirt heaped in a pile, she traced the dark lines that curved on her cheeks.

She wiped away what was left of her make-up with cool cream and tissue. Her nose, she observed, grew darker the older she got. Thirty now. In ten years it would be a deep mahogany. It was the size. An African stamp. Maroon blood. Sometimes she was proud, sometimes she needed someone else to affirm it. He never did. When he called her “big nose” or “nosifus” they were terms of endearment, he once explained, and she had wondered how he would have felt if she had called him “red skin” or “short ass”. But then, he wouldn’t care – he was blessed with that masculine ability to blame a woman for her perceptions of his shortcomings. He wouldn’t care because she was with him, and that was evidence enough that she was only trying to hurt him. Anyway, she did not have the distance of anger, then. Not like now.

Turning from the mirror she pulled off the brassiere, her breasts resting snugly on her rib cage. He had asked her if there was no way to get rid of the yellow stretch marks that lined her breasts. Before that she had never felt awkward about the marks. Now she was very conscious of them. She rarely looked at her body in a full-length mirror. She threw the damp bra on the pile in the corner and stepped into the shower.

As the water beat her muscles, she allowed herself to think about the day. It had started already, the short-temperedness, the moodiness, and the day-dreaming fantasies that never failed to disturb her. Even on the bus, with her legs held tightly together to prevent the pressure of water in her, at each bump of a pot-hole she sensed a tingling warmth flowing through her body in response to the images that swirled through her mind. It annoyed her that these thoughts were of him. It was during these days that she had most wanted him around, and they had wonderful times when he did come. But he was not going to come. She tried to convince her body that discipline was necessary.

She filled her mouth with warm water and then let it hang open, so the water tumbled out in a smooth flow down her chin. The bathroom grew misty in the heat. Reaching out of the shower curtain, she groped for her panties, feeling the water pound on her back. She was going to wash them with the shampoo that gave them the sweet smell he liked, but then decided to leave them there, sweat-soaked with the day’s tensions.

She stepped out of the shower, careless of the huge puddles she allowed to form on the tiles. She flushed the toilet and watched the pink paper spin in the yellow water as it foamed and then turned transparent. The gurgle of water forcing its way through the tight neck of the bowl changed to a long whining sound. That was her cue to flick the lever until there was another change of gear, this time a high pitched whistling that faded slowly to silence. Then she cleaned her teeth, wiping a clear patch in the thin film of steam that blurred the mirror, catching sight of a mouth full of bubbly foam beneath what now seemed like something gross, a grotesquery of flesh.

She switched off the bathroom lights and moved into the bedroom, which was dark. In bed, small goose-bumps formed on her body. She had left the window open and now looked through the louvres at the dark green mango leaves shaking on black branches. For a moment the dark clouds cleared a patch so she could see the thin pale line of the moon.

The black-green leaves glistened under the amber streetlight when she opened her eyes. The drizzle had waned but had begun again. It was soft on the asphalt and concrete outside and, mixed with the cool breeze from the hills, it was sweet to the nose. She breathed deeply. The smell of rain. She was never able to decide why the rain had that smell. It was like the sweet taste of water in a thirsty mouth.

She was slowly forgetting the hot day, the oily oxtail and rice that still weighed heavy in her stomach. She would not eat now for fear of heartburn that would torment her for the entire night. She was too tired, anyway, to try and make another interesting meal of corned-beef and green peas. She had no more fresh meat in her refrigerator. She wasn’t particularly inclined to buy more meat since he was the one who had to eat fresh meat. He had stopped coming by so she could now return to the ulcer and pain of her old ways of eating and drinking.

A gust of wind swirled around the room, making the curtains flap. A bizarre shadow moved across the walls. She felt droplets of rain blowing onto her skin. She brushed a breast to wipe a drop off. Her hand remained there, her fingers lightly following the tiny bumps. She stretched her legs, curled her toes, her thighs tensing and then relaxing. Then she turned onto her stomach lying on her hand to keep the warmth inside. As she faded into sleep she mumbled to God that he must understand.

She was drifting to sleep when the harsh clanging of a rock on the grill startled her.

She rolled over, looking towards the door, listening. She was not expecting anyone and it was late. She decided it must have been for the old couple in the front house. But she had not heard them come in, which at first made her nervous. Violence was lurking everywhere. But what did she have to fear? She was not mixed up in anything. And although her conscience wasn’t clear, for she had sinned with her body, she could sleep at night, although at times she did not think that she deserved it.

As her body relaxed, the clanging started again.

“Fred open the door, nuh.” The old lady’s voice trembled from inside the house.

“Is by the flat,” her husband’s gravelly voice replied impatiently.

Sitting up, she listened again. She heard swishing of the leaves just outside the windows. She rose quickly, pulling the sheet over her body. She knew somebody was out there. She would hide in the bathroom, she had her robe in there.

“Sarah…” She recognized the voice. Her shoulders tensed. “Sarah! You in there? Open the grill, nuh. Is me. Jacob.”

“Suppose the police see you out there and shoot you? What you doing by my window like a thief?”

“Open the grill, nuh Sarah. Is rain out here yuh know. I’m wet. I’m wet. I’m soaking wet.”

“I’m waiting for you to move. I want to dress.”

“Dress for what? Look, I getting wet, just open the blasted door!”

Jacob Lawson, insurance agent, lapsed Seventh Day Adventist – the man she was secretly seeing for almost a year until a month ago (when he confessed what she had already known but had chosen to ignore: that he was seeing another woman, called Jane Tipman, a brown-skinned physiotherapist he had met on the North Coast, that he was sleeping with this bitch regularly while still making his twice a week visits for sex with her); the man who had arrived when she needed to fall into sin, to blackslide; the man who became her vehicle of rebellion, a tangible man, just the kind of person she had been avoiding for years, keeping herself pure; the man whom she never thought to love but allowed to see her in a way that no other person had – muttered impatiently and moved from the window.

These days, every time he appeared, she found herself rehearsing the year with him, and the transformation it had represented after the five years of holy living. February a year ago marked the five years since her baptism in the overflowing Hope River, some six miles up into the Blue Mountains that loomed over her home. Salvation had come as a New Year’s resolution.

Her father’s first heart attack had shattered the family during the Christmas vacation. She remembered the hours in the hospital, the talks with doctors, the comforting of her mother, the procession of family from abroad to see him as if to pay their final respects, the sick feeling she had eating Christmas dinner with him in the yellow-walled ward of Andrew’s Memorial, the amount she drank and threw up on Boxing Day when she went to a friend’s party to try and forget everything, and the realization that she really loved her father, feared him dying and wanted to find a way to prolong their time together. She prayed a lot during that time.

She convinced her father to go with her to church on New Year’s Eve. Her intention was to have him saved just in case. Things did not quite work out that way. That night she went forward. Her father laughed at her for being silly. She never told him that she was making a deal with God – a simple deal to prolong his life. She never told him that when it was clear that he was not going up, she realized that she would have to go up as a kind of proxy for him.

A month later, she was wading into the river to be baptized. Her father’s grey Austin Minor was parked a mile down the road, tucked into the gravelled soft-shoulder of the winding road. He was in a bar – the kind of dark but reliable watering hole that served, along with the ubiquitous churches, as milestones on Jamaican country roads. He was back to drinking again. Death was not a fear for him. Her salvation was amusing to him.

He was on her mind as she gripped the pebbled river bottom with her feet, desperate to make it to the elder. The tongue-speaking elder, with his gleaming bald pate, his thick and curly beard, and his shimmering skin the colour of olive oil, waited as she moved through the river. It was a bright, blue, cloudless morning, but the river was thick brown, rough and foaming near the rocks – a storm had passed through overnight and the river was still convulsing and shivering long after the rain had dumped its load and passed out to other rivers, other seas. She trembled, afraid of being caught in the undertow, but more afraid of what she was doing – she was giving everything up – that is how she had prayed – giving up her right to choose for herself.

What she was thinking was slightly different – she was making a compact with God. She would give him everything properly, thoroughly, not in the half-hearted way she had done when she was thirteen and then when she was eighteen – all those years when she counted on the accident of her persistent virginity to secure her place in heaven. Now she would give him everything as an investment. She wanted in return some peace of mind, the total healing of her father, his guarantee of a life beyond the grave – a selfish desire on her part, but one that had to be at least half-noble – and, she had to admit, a man for herself.

For five years she was sure that it was her holiness that was keeping her father alive. Then he died. Without warning his heart gave way. He died in the garage, his firm, veined hands covered with the sweet-smelling grass clippings that spurted up from the manual mower he used to keep the lawn neatly level. She found him lying there. She realized something was wrong only when she saw how his right leg was folded under his left thigh.

“Sometimes we can make some bad deals, bwai,” she said to herself as she imagined Jacob walking, stiff-backed and without the slightest bop, around the house.

Jacob was a poor return for those five years invested. Maybe, in retrospect, Jacob was not God’s idea, since, after all, Jacob was what she chose as her own reward after God had let her down. If God had given her the man she had wanted – the good Christian man she had wanted, then Jacob would not have been an issue. If God had saved her father’s life, or at least given her a hope that he was not dying a rum-drinking reprobate, then maybe there would have been no Jacob and none of this sickening feeling of desire and revulsion that she felt at his coming back with his confident sense of entitlement.

Retrieving her thin silk dressing gown from the bathroom, she moved barefooted to the grilled-off porch area, her feet touching the cool water that had formed on the tiles.

As soon as she opened the grill he brushed straight past her, sucked his teeth and headed inside.

Sarah stayed looking out through the grill. She would ignore him so that he would realize that he was wasting his time and disappear. Did anyone hear him knocking? If so, they would be looking now, and with the light behind her she would look like she was naked – ready and waiting. Opening the grill for a man on a rainy night, only one thing could happen – some slackness. Why did he have to come?

Since their big fight a month ago he had not shown his face, phoned or even sent a message. Now he walked in as if he had been there the night before.

In her living room, his clothes plastered to his body, he undid his tie and threw them on her coffee table, unconcerned about her magazines. The thwack of silk on paper startled her and she put on the light. His white shirt was like something draped to dry on a river stone. The regiment of Bics in his Mutual Life Society pocket-holder looked bizarre, like soldiers standing fast for no reason. Even soaking wet, he had that tidy orderliness about him. He stood still, like an impatient teller using a glare to bully and belittle an old lady who had forgotten to sign her cheque.

Finally, he spoke: “I need a towel.”

She caught the scent of sweat and Rightguard as she passed him, tossing off an answer: “You know where they are.”

She sat on her bed and listened as he flicked on the lights and she went outside and turned them off, reasserting her control.

“They’re all dirty,” came his voice from the darkness.

She wanted to respond, but she was ashamed. If she had known he was coming she would have washed. And that was not good. That she still belonged to him embarrassed her.

“I like them dirty,” she declared, a little too late, she thought, to have real impact. She lowered her face in her hands.

She wanted him to go. But why had he come? Something crossed her mind, something about testing and faith and God, but she did not want to hear these things, for they would bring her to a place where she would have to face her choices and she did not want to do this. God is absolute. Her father would have told her to tell him to go to hell. But he always believed there was a way out. He always believed that something better was coming. Her father believed in heaven, but he never planned for it. He just believed that after death, better would come. After the funeral she was angry. And he spoke to her in that ironic manner of his, his white moustache jumping on his dark lips: “What a waste of all that good sweetness and juice in your body, eh? So you still gwine deprive yourself? Girl, live!” He would never talk to her about sex, but what she heard that afternoon as she sat on a rock overlooking the same baptismal river, was his voice, his way of looking at life. She jettisoned absolutes. She embraced her anger and her father’s relativisms. “Sin is a matter of circumstance, babylove. Remember that.”

The month apart had been painful but she was getting there. She had come to some harsh conclusions. She had been depressed for a year and a half. She understood this now. It was as if in that year she was feeling what she had felt under the thick brown water of the river – the moment of panic and anticipation, of helplessness and dependency. She was trusting the elder to bring her back up, but she was quite ready to be dragged down the hill, swallowing water all the way.

The year and a half since her father died, she was buried in that helplessness, and she had been waiting for Jacob to pull her up. God was no longer so reliable.

Once she had decided on God’s fallibility, she discovered a self-assurance that she did not know she had. So when they first met at her office, their banter was playful – she wore the happy air well, a kind of nonchalance about everything, a giddy, confident brightness. She wanted him to trust it and allow what she knew to be his attraction to her to pull him in. She had long decided that she was going to sleep with him. The thought did not excite her – not in that arousing kind of way – but it left her feeling giddy, powerful and lightheaded.

He had been the latest insurance salesman to come through their offices. These guys developed their lists from contacts in churches and from the university. She had gotten on his list and he was working hard to get her to switch policies and go with Mutual Life.

When she teased him about his sexy voice he did not trust her.

“I don’t really deal with backsliders, you know?” he said.

“Who said I’m a backslider?”

“Well, you sounding like one. Not messing with no Christian woman, either,” he smiled. “When it come to the real business, you people don’t know your mind.”

“Oh, I know my mind, baby,” she said and crossed her legs, allowing her skirt to slide up her thighs. To guide his eyes there, she ran her hand along her thigh. She saw his leer turn into a sheepish smile. It was too easy. He was too easy.

For the first few weeks she was convinced that she had won him – that she had controlled it all. For the first time in a long time she was proud of her body, her allure and she even failed to hear the edge behind his teasing. He must have made jokes about her nose from the beginning, but gradually, the jokes began to reach her. No, not gradually. It happened on one of those tender days before her cycle began, when she had spent the entire day feeling sorry for herself and reassuring herself that he would hold her that evening and make her feel good about the day. He came in laughing a lot. Asked why she was so miserable. Who trouble you, eh? Who trouble you? She told him she was “pre” as casually as she could; and he grinned back at her, his hand pressed down on top of her head, twisting it so that she faced him – he did it firmly, her neck hurt. Then he laughed into her face, “Jesum, I should a know. Your nose grow like twice the size when you seeing your period, you know?” Then his smile stiffened, grew cold with just the edge of disgust. He turned from her. “Why you never call me and tell me?” She should have told him to go to hell, told him that all she wanted was for him to hold her and comfort her, told him that in that moment he made her feel like a piece of dirt and he had no right to do that. But she didn’t. She feared that he would walk away, leave her alone. She did not want to be alone that night. “I said ‘PMS’. I am not seeing my period, I am just feeling…”

That night she observed him watching her with uncanny interest as he laboured on her. She could not help thinking that he was staring at her nose, or that he wanted to observe every single reaction he forced from her. He was not enjoying what her body was doing to his, he was testing her, watching for each response, amused at each groan she made, the way her mouth opened. She hated herself for moving and sounding the way she did, but she was trying hard to stop his smug smiling. She moved hard against him, doing everything she could to make him crumble before she did, but she only hastened her orgasm. Each convulsion angered her – the strange pain of not being in control. He watched her, studied her. As she looked away, panting and trembling more than she wanted, he dragged himself through her now over-sensitive flesh, grunting every time she shuddered. “Yuh hurting me,” she lied. Her body was not hers. He stabbed sharply into her, grunted, and chuckled softly. “Man, yuh wild tonight, Christian.” He did not fall onto her. He kept himself aloft, propped by his rigid right arm, and he then climbed off her body, taking care, it seemed, not to let their sweat mingle. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Get me a rag, nuh.” As she walked to the bathroom pulling her robe around her, she knew that this was not going to last.

Had he seduced her just to see what her nose would look like in the throes of passion? Would it swell? Would it quiver? Would her nostrils clamp shut? In the bathroom, with the damp rag in her hand, she stared at her face in the mirror and imagined what he had seen in her face. She was disgusted with herself. She was nothing but a freak, a freak of the worst kind, not the kind that makes a man compliant but the kind that makes him strong, not a sex freak, a circus freak, a fucking ugly bitch. Now what kind of man was that?

So had he come back on this rainy night to remind himself of the sweetness he could muster from seeing her ugly face? He was moving in the place like he lived there, like nothing had happened. She was annoyed, yet not enough to throw him out. The sensation was familiar. It was the sensation of weakness.

“So you don’t have any clean ones, big nose?”

“Jacob, just leave me alone. Just go back to where you coming from and leave me alone. Just leave me. Just leave me. I can’t deal with it tonight.”

“This what?”

“You.”

“So I’m an it, now?”

She heard him move toward the bathroom, grunting as he sniffed at discarded towels. Something in the grunt evoked the animal way he always took her, the way he used her up like food, the way he pinned her down with his hands, keeping his body at a distance, and how, even in her anger and disgust, she still was left with a pathetic sense of worth in being a source of strength and vigour. Even now, right now, despite her annoyance with him, she wanted to be prone again, to throw her head to the side and fight with him as his saliva splashed against her neck, her legs interlocked until he overpowered her and took full advantage and she surrendered her soft pink meat to him.

She was thinking these things when he entered the room.

He threw his shirt on the bed, sighing as if her smell was the most disgusting thing in the world.

“You not tired of living like this?” he asked. “Look at the place. Why you can’t like neat?”

Neat. That is what he had said when she had shown him her house that first time. Neat.

She began to anticipate what he would do after they made love; she had accepted that this would happen. He would shower and wash his underwear and replace them with the ones in his leather satchel, making her feel so dirty, making her feel that he was right for sleeping as far away from her on the bed.

“You were sleeping?” he asked as he slid beneath the sheets. He tugged them and she stood up until he had gathered them around himself. “You coming?”

He raised the sheets.

She slid in beside him, wondering if she should have showered, if that would change anything.

“You very cold tonight,” he whispered as he touched her shoulder. She twitched somewhere deep inside herself. “Yuh still vex with me.”

“Please… look… I don’t feel up to anything. I don’t want to see you.” It was her anticipation of the post-coitus depression she was fighting. She wanted the indulgence, the satisfaction of being touched, but she knew that tonight, the way she was feeling, she would fall into a hopeless depression if she let him touch her, let him do what he wanted with her. What kind of person would that make her? What would it say about her ability to manage her own life? She did not love him, but she needed him. Until now she had felt some hope because she could count the days of not trying to call him, not having to admit that she needed him – those were days of triumph. Now, here he was, back, slipping into the bed with her, and her body was responding as if he owned it. In her head, the lyric of an old song was taunting her:

Make me laugh when I don’t want to,

Are you so strong or is all the weakness in me?

“Why you bother to come here?” she asked him.

“Because…” he said palming her thigh and gently putting pressure on it so that she would open for him.

“Well, I really don’t need this,” she said. Did she sound like she was pleading? She must not sound like she was pleading. His hand was on her stomach now, pinching, accentuating the rim of fat below her navel, the one he liked to tug when he took her from behind.

“You know, Sarah, I should be the one who is vex with you. After what you did? And look at me, now. Making peace when rain falling. Leaving sure for unsure.”

His fingers were inside her underwear, tickling her wiry hairs. How could she let him do this when she knew how it would make her feel when they were done? Like a carcass.

“Are you made of stone?” she asked.

He put her hands between his legs. This was his reply.

“Feel like rock to me.”

He realized that she had not been breathing when she gasped: “And then as soon as you come, it come in like dust, just like your feelings. And then I can’t sleep and you gone to sleep and I have to listen to you snoring. That nuh right, Jacob. That no right.”

“So what you want me to do? Leave?”

“Yes,” she said, but in a sudden intake of breath. There was nothing convincing about it.

He had begun to move against her now.

“I really don’t want to see you, okay,” she tried again.

“Answer the question.”

He slipped his thumb inside her and trailed her wetness up between her breasts into her mouth. She turned her face away and tried to bite him. She missed but he replaced the thumb and let her bite him, then he slipped the throbbing thumb into her vulva, and watched her raise her hips so he could ease himself further down into her.

“Suppose you had teeth down there. Is so you woulda bite me?”

“I’m so angry with you, Jacob. You just wouldn’t understand.”

“And I was angry with you but I forgive you.”

“What goes on in your head? Eh? Can you tell me?” She drew one of her knees up to her ear. He removed the thumb and stretched her open with two fingers. “You forgive me? So I am the dog who caused all this, nuh? Jesus, man… I think… You know I could hate you? You make it so damn easy, you realize that? Who… who… ?”

She began to laugh in disbelief. The more she thought about it, the angrier she became. The flood of anger poured out in a torrent with as she felt her body softening into water.

“You come in here, walk in like nothing happened. For a whole month you don’t say dog to me. Well, I don’t mind, because it is finished; you called me a stinking bitch, a money grabber and announce the end. And then you walk in here like you live here… like… like you own the place, coming to tell me how you forgive me. You know what? Just leave, please… leave. Remember that is you throw dirt at me… Just leave, you hear, because I don’t want to see you, and I don’t want Mrs. Jenny to have to come out here…”

She stopped abruptly. She was trembling. The pain came like a force of tears pressing against her throat.

“Are you finished?” he asked.

“I done say what I have to say.”

He sat up and shifted away from her and pressed his back against the wall, muttering to himself, “End of story. Period.”

And she began to cry, drawn into the recollection of what until now had been their final argument, a month ago. The room had been a mess, sheets all over the floor, evidence of the true slob that she was. They had been arguing about the woman, the physiotherapist, Jane, the one she had always known about, the one he was really mad about, the one he would play squash with, the browning with the pointed nose and straight hair.

He had begun to pull at her body and she had told him she was seeing her period.

“Lie that.”

“I don’t practice to lie.”

“That is why you don’t do it perfect. You nasty, stinking bitch.”

She reached inside her pants behind her sanitary pad and brought out a hand smeared with blood and showed it to him.

“Yuh satisfy?”

He spat at her. She slapped him. He grabbed his face and tried his best to stand up steadily, blinking away the tears. He did not expect it. He did not know how to respond. He stood stiffly, staring at her, the redness smeared across his cheek, the tears streaming down her face and her blood mixing with his sweat on his cheek.

Then, with a silence and calm that she had never imagined he possessed, he walked to the bathroom and she listened through the door to the water and closed her eyes as he walked out of the room without saying a word.

How could I have done that? Sarah thought as Jacob leaned back slowly and drew his foot away from her and tucked it underneath himself, pressing his shoulders into the wall as if he too was remembering the shock of that moment, the smell of piss and sour blood.

Now Sarah wanted to hold him, to reassure him, to say that she was sorry, sorry for being so ugly and gross. She did not ever touch her own blood, not this blood, but she had been provoked and he was good at provoking her, pushing her. He did things like that, like that night soon after they had started sleeping with each other when he had held her head down on him, trying to force her to swallow. That night, she had stood in the bathroom and watched the mixture of her spit and the thick off-white streaks swirl in the water and disappear while he fell asleep in the bedroom, comfortable, assured, as if nothing had happened. She had stayed there after rinsing out her mouth, her whole body seething with the insult, trembling with the relief of being able to breathe. It had been like drowning and he did not understand.

They were always arguing about sex. He wanted it, she wanted something else, something that would make sex end with a pleasure, a sense of peace. He never believed her reasons for not giving him what he wanted. She could not explain anything to him. She had spoiled him, made him convinced that her resistance was merely the annoyance of a woman who was a slut but not willing to admit that she was a slut. And every time he managed to get her to change her mind, every time she came after saying no to him, he was more assured of her whorishness. And when she crawled into herself afterwards, ashamed, angry, he read it as his cue to comfort her, to assure her that he accepted her for what she was. And she knew what he was thinking but accepted the tenderness as something else – as regret, as understanding.

“I am sorry,” Jacob said softly. “I should not have come here tonight.”

She turned away.

“Did you tell her you were coming here?”

“Who?”

He reached out and caressed her with his foot, passing his instep along her thigh, teasingly.

“You take me for such a fool.”

“That is finished, man.” He uncoiled himself and lay beside her and rested his hand on her side, his thumb resting in a sweaty roll of flesh, his forehead wrinkled by the burrs of unprocessed hair along the nape of her neck. “That was nothing. Just sports.”

“Look, you better leave,” she said. Lying together simply like this unnerved her. She was accustomed to resistance. She did not know what it was like to lie with him in comfort, in safety. There was something dangerous in this kind of bliss, she was realizing now. Instead of resting, her body wanted to open itself, to yield up its sweetness.

“I should leave?” he asked, quietly daring her.

“Yes. I want to sleep.”

“And if I am here then we won’t sleep.”

“No.”

“We’ll talk. Yes, we will stay up talking all night. There is so much to talk about.”

And he continued to talk about talking, his tone light but sober, careful not to get too close, not to pressure her as he felt her body deflating then expanding now into his space, languidly, a thing of beauty, the slowness awe-inspiring and at times frustrating, but ultimately satisfying like witnessing the transformation from a rolled bud into a flower.

After he left, Sarah lay down on the bed, staring into the darkness. She listened to the clank of the gate. He had not showered, but the corners of her lips were aching and there was a taste like salt and soap in the back of her mouth. Her stomach hurt with the dull, hollow cramp of loss.

At four in the morning, it was still dark outside. She gathered some things and stepped out into the cool, heavy air and drove up into the hills. Not the hills where he lived, but the hills behind those hills, where it was still possible to sense the presence of God in the shadows of the ferns and cedar branches that shifted in the mist.

From a ridge she gazed down into the river where she had been baptized, raised her chin and saw the reservoir, cool and blue, and the white buildings of the university, her neighbourhood of neatness chopped from view by the angle of the slope.

The path down to the bottom was muddy and slippery, some of the topsoil beaten away by the rain. A mist hung over the valley in the early morning chill and the bushes that glided against her shins and thighs were wet with rainwater and dew.

She pulled a branch from her path and a shower of water fell gently on her face. She slid down the slopes, mud sticking between her fingers. She wiped them on her jeans.

As she neared the river, she quickened her pace. Its sound, bearing the rain waters from the hills, thundered in the valley, yet she could hear the urgent calls of birds amongst the trees.

The water was brown and busy. She watched leaves and twigs race downstream, colliding against the rocks, straining to break free and then hurrying on, till they were pulled down a fall of water over rocks.

She braced herself against the cold and picked her way upstream in search of the pool where she had been reborn. It was just below where the river became a lively waterfall and it rippled in spreading circles where the water crashed. Then it rushed over rocks, heading down river till it disappeared round a bend.

Standing on the bank, she looked upwards again and the hills loomed over her, protecting this green seclusion. She looked around to see if anyone was nearby. Assured that she was alone she took the long white smock from her bag and pulled it over her body. She then pulled off her trousers and underwear, stepping out of both of them at the same time and carelessly throwing them to one side where they landed in the mud.

Under the smock, she pulled the T-shirt off her body, throwing it onto the pants. Then slowly, allowing the hymn that had filled her head in the car all the way up the hills to break forth on her lips, she walked towards the pool.

When the water covered her stomach, she stood still, legs apart and her toes bracing her body against the current in the pebbles and sand at her feet. Looking up, she saw a haze of sunlight glare behind the clouds. The trees dizzied above and a flock of birds darted through the patch of sky, a pool of grey lined by green hills. Still looking up, she shouted above the roar of the water.

She bent her knees. The water closed above her head. The swirl of water on her chest and face was sudden. With her eyes shut tight, dizzying flashes of colour raced through her mind. She stayed under, leaning against the current that battered her body.

On the bank again, she leaned against a tree and watched the river disappear around a corner, taking a part of her. Drenched, she lay on a patch of grass beneath a boulder and felt the earth receive her and began to sing a song of praise. She was alone and yet accepted. She curled her thighs into her breast, keeping her warmth, keeping her warmth. Holding on.

AT THE LIGHTHOUSE

AT THE LIGHTHOUSE

1

“Ready?” Joan said, turning around to face Sonia. Her breasts were now fully exposed as the robe parted, drooping with the weight of a woman slightly older than her twenty-two years, the nipples spread broad and dark. She looked sleepy, as if lulled by the music and the breeze.

“Yes, yes… One second,” Sonia said, hurrying behind the easel after a too long pause staring into Joan’s eyes. “You mind if I smoke? I know you don’t…”

“Enough breeze here to blow it away. Go ahead.”

Reggae throbbed from the speakers behind the bar. The clouds climbed in clumps above each other, moved lazily across the jagged outline of the green hills.

Joan let the robe fall to her thighs.

“You a nervous smoker?”

The question was casual, but Sonia felt the weight of it in her own nervousness. She tried to laugh.

“You could say,” she said, dragging on the cigarette and then quickly tossing it to the floor.

“Uhuh.” Joan said, smiling. “So, you sure this is alright with… what’s her name?”

“Sandra.” Sonia said. “She is on Flora Isle today. Taking the day off.”

“Nice life, eh? I suppose now she don’t have to worry about making money…”

“She said it would be alright until about seven-thirty. She does it every Wednesday. She lets me work here, you know. I’ve done a few landscapes from here.”

“Any like… like this?”

A cool sea wind tickled the raffia curtains that lined the eaves. When the last sugar company went bankrupt, the port went dead, and the lighthouse, after years of disuse, was reinvented as a bar by Claude, a Bostonian who had married Sandra, a local bartender. The marriage had lasted fifteen years, and then Claude got ill. His family – his ex-wife, really – convinced him that he needed to be in Boston near the doctors. He died six months later. The ex-wife was happy enough. In those six months she became his care-giver and Claude was a kind man. He made sure she was looked after. Sandra was left with his beach cottage on the island and the lighthouse. He left her two hundred thousand dollars. It was enough for her and she was still young. Her Wednesday holidays were spent with a young Charlotte banker who had bought a getaway on Flora Isle. Sonia envied Sandra’s gumption and confidence. It was the same thing she saw in Joan. But Joan was far more intimidating because Sonia liked Joan – really liked her.

Joan sat in the corner absently staring out, her bathrobe loosely open, revealing her breasts and slightly pouting stomach, her fingers tapping a tattoo on a pair of conga drums, her eyes following the path of a gull dipping low over the sea.

Will she see me like Sandra saw Claude? Is that what it was about? It had not gotten anywhere near that, but Sonia had imagined it. With Joan it was impossible to tell. Joan was looking out at her island. Sonia followed her gaze knowing that where Joan saw home, Sonia saw quaint, a refuge, difference.

The sea wall was strewn with bottles, coconut husks, old tyres and large metal barrels dumped there by cruise-liners. The quaint capital she always spoke of was really a squalid unkempt village – an old decaying colonial outpost. The roads were narrow; all the houses were covered with rusted zinc roofs that glowed red and silver in the brilliant sunlight.

Sonia pulled at the strap of the loose muslin dress she was wearing. It was impractical for the work she was about to do, but it was flattering to her stomach and allowed her to not wear a bra and still look alluringly modest.

She busied herself with the easel, her sheets of paper, pencils and sticks of charcoal, not taking her eye off Joan – almost as if she expected this girl she had met one day on the beach to suddenly open her arms and pitch her body out of the glassless lighthouse windows and fly.

She kept rubbing the leathery, over-tanned patch of skin on her elbow, a nervous affectation she had developed in her ten years in the tropics. To her friends at home in Chicago, she had changed. She had abandoned her hair to the elements. Wispy and bleached to a pale dirty brown by the sun, it lacked the virginal grooming of her high school prom night. Now she gathered it in bundles under a green and gold tam, and bobbed around in leather sandals, living loose.

As she worked, she kept glancing up at Joan whose eyes had glazed over, enjoying the sensation of being repeatedly struck by the perfect roundness of her face, her tender nose, her pouting lips, cheeks that caught the light when she smiled, the way this solid roundness was given flight by her eyelashes, which curled upwards.

Her casual way with the robe, the way she undressed and slipped it on, neither ashamed nor brazen, suggested a neutrality that could be given direction, that could be steered.

Sonia had first seen Joan three months ago sitting in her two-piece on the beach, rubbing at some tar that had stained her calf. Sonia always came to this beach and she had never before seen Joan. On this island strangers were noticeable, especially black strangers. Sonia had been living and working on the island long enough to have gotten over the peculiar foreigners’ affliction of not being able to distinguish one local from another. She noticed Joan at once. It might have been her neck, its erect assurance – or the oddness of a black woman sitting in the sun as an act of leisure. The long-limbed, dark brown-skinned woman was rubbing vigorously, her body speckled with sand, her breasts gathered together and swelling between her upper arms, shaking slightly; her softly muscular back rising and falling at her aggressive ministrations.

In that moment Sonia felt the vulnerability of this girl-woman, her mouth twisted in concentration, her brows curled with a hint of impatience at the defiance of the stain. This first time was as close as she had come to seeing Joan naked. They had talked that day, and as they spoke, Joan put on garment after garment until she was fully clothed and ready to leave. They became friends, but the clothes stayed on. Sonia spent many late nights sketching that body – the fluent back rippling in the sun.

As she considered this now, the music from the speakers suddenly sounding monotonous and loud, she tried to articulate the meaning of this friendship based on nothing. There were no secrets. No interests. No past. Nothing. Nothing. What was Joan? Who was Joan? Her old lover Helen had asked this on the phone late one night and she had answered: “The most exciting thing that had happened to me in years.”

“Since me,” Helen said.

“Yes, since you,” Sonia smiled. But she was lying. Joan was more exciting than Helen ever was. Helen was predictable. They met in a bar. Sonia had gone to a bar to meet someone. She met Helen. With Helen, it was all about lies of accommodation. Helen still believed that she was Sonia’s first lover. Helen was like Sonia – a convent school trained, Mid-Western woman of Swedish heritage, a feminist failed artist, a closet activist lesbian divorced mother of two. Joan was as different from Sonia as one woman could be from another. It was more than race. When Helen had asked, Sonia was caressing Joan’s lower back with her pencil. She had answered without thinking: “The best thing that has happened to me…”

Today she would say something different: Joan made her want to discover another person’s privacy. Joan revived her curiosity about another soul. Now, for example, she wanted to know how her navel really looked. Jutting or coiled tight in the roll of her stomach? How did she cook? How did she cut her vegetables? What spices did she toss into her pot and how did she stir it? How did she boil her rice?

And how did she sleep? Curled into a fist, on her back, on her side, her long arms clutching the pillow, her mouth half-open with a tender snore?

“You drawing or you posing?”

Sonia looked up.

“What?”

“I feel like I wasting me time.”

Joan glanced out the window and Sonia followed her glance. Joan was looking at the spire of Pastor Mavis’s church. She watched as Joan looked away and folded her arms over her chest. Sonia looked back at the steeple, its severe symbolism staring back like an accusation.

“Nudes aren’t easy,” she said quickly. “The body has so many curves. It’s not like doing buildings.” Nudes aren’t easy when nudes look like you, she thought to herself and smiled.

She was not going to let anything spoil this moment. She never expected this to happen, never expected Joan to pose naked for her, but she anticipated it like a teenager about to get the kiss she had always dreamt about. She anticipated it with the terrible nervousness and strange certainty that something was going to spoil it, take it away from her. She had a strong, inexplicable urge to laugh.

Joan squinted.

“Finish off the cigarette and come back then, nuh.”

Sonia stubbed the Rothmans.

“If we going to do this, let’s do this.”

Sonia made a fuss about the music and went behind the bar and found some Nina Simone, but she began to wonder how the change would affect Joan’s mood, so she put on more reggae. When she returned Joan was naked, the robe rumpled at her feet. Her thighs were spread on the chair, taut. Her pubic hairs were thick curls compactly veed with thin spills on the inside of her thighs. Sonia could not help staring. Her armpits stung.

“What happen, now, Sonia? Put it on back?”

“No. Stay. No lie down. Yes. Lie down on the floor. Spread out. That might be a good idea.”

“So, how you want me?”

“Relaxed… Just a touch of… of vulnerability… You know.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, girl!” Joan laughed.

“Well, do what you want. This will be a ten minute pose.”

“Ten minutes…”

“It will pass quickly.”

“Ten minutes,” she said again, this time almost to herself. Then she turned towards the town again. “I can look this way?”

“You can. That’s fine.”

Joan straddled the chair and hugged its back, then using her feet, she rotated it until all she gave Sonia was a quarter-face.

Joan pouted her lips and used them to point to the steeple. She chuckled. “I wonder whose business Pastor Mavis broadcasting now? Whose nastiness? What lies she telling, eh? They so bad-minded in this rass place. They like to tell people what to do. Flesh is a very slippery thing. Is easy to backslide.”

“I need to see more,” Sonia interrupted. “I prefer if you faced me.”

“I not too comfortable, you know.” She pointed at the steeple. “You ever notice how high that thing is?”

“What thing?”

“The steeple. Miss Mavis steeple. That thing must be the highest thing in Road Town. That way when the spirit is passing over it can be drawn down, like lightning…”

Sonia muttered, “I need you to turn round.”

“Sometimes is like lightning, yes. The way that fire come down and burn you right in there…” She placed her hand on her lower abdomen. “Right in there, till all you can do is shout out.”

“Uhuh,” Sonia said.

“You don’t like when I talk so, eh?” Joan laughed, her hand still on her stomach, her fingers pointing downwards.

“I want to get this thing started. Can you turn around, then I can listen better and work at the same time.” She picked out another cigarette.

“Beg you, don’t smoke. The breeze die down.”

“Okay. Well, let’s get going.”

“You getting impatient.” Joan turned the chair around. She remained straddled. “Better?”

“Can you sit properly, please?”

The flash of pink against the brown was distracting.

“You want to see everything?” Joan said, standing to her full height. She stretched her arms as if to demonstrate that she could show everything. Her armpits were dark with week old infant hairs. “If Sister Mavis could see me now she would kill you.”

“She is just crazy.”

2

But Joan understood it to be more than that.

There was so much that Sonia did not know about Mavis, about Joan.

Joan had left the island a certified virgin when she was seventeen, returning five years later with an MFA, one suitcase, a purse full of antidepressant pills, a leather satchel full of loose-leaves with neatly etched poems – maybe five hundred of them, none longer than ten lines – and a slim chapbook of poems titled Sands that she published with a small independent press in the US.

But Sister Mavis, it was clear to Joan, knew that she had returned with something else, something Mavis could not articulate, could not put her finger on, though she tried. So she concluded, wrongly, that Joan was no longer a virgin.

The truth was that Joan had returned to the island as pure as she had been before she left. The truth was harder for Mavis to accept because the truth was that she had played a part in the spoiling of Joan. Joan had abandoned her virginity with the help of Mavis’s ex-husband who ran a small hotel and wharf on Flora Isle. Mavis had sent Joan there regularly to collect his tithe, which Mavis had demanded in lieu of alimony. Mavis’s holiness was thorough. From the evening of the first visit, Joan was certain that something would happen with this well-kept, breezily dressed man, who could laugh with the kind of abandon that Joan had never seen in Mavis. It was clear to Joan that his laissez-faire manner was more than a personality trait, it was an expression of liberation – the unbelieving joy of a man released from prison. It was contagious, perhaps, because Joan sensed that he could recognize himself in her, and without saying it, that they shared the common language of Mavis’s oppressive presence. Sex for them was an exorcism. Yet Joan felt guilty. After she left Flora Isle and watched the steeple of Mavis’s church coming closer as the ferry bounced on the sea, the giddy freedom was replaced by a heavy shame. When she went to Mavis, confessed and asked for healing, her sin became the text of a sermon.

Mavis’s intent was to destroy her, to shame her. But this rash act, captured in the stuttering vitriol that spilled all over the congregation that morning, showed Joan Mavis’s terrible weakness, her petty humanity. People whispered and stared, but Joan was outwardly unmoved. She understood that each Sunday she sat in the congregation staring back at Mavis would be an act of triumph. Joan went to church every Sunday, refusing to be ridiculed. She became, instead, a spectacle, something to be admired, preferably at close range, a woman on a small island, who would not be shamed. How did she do it? How could she go to carnival and jump-up and laugh with the pan-men? How could she slap Sister Mavis on her full and firm backside and scream “Fire in me wire? Girl, you wasting all that wonderful backside, you know? People will pay for a firm shapely bam-bam like yours!” And she could tell from the sliver of a smile and the half laugh coming from Mavis that she found it hard to be really upset with Joan – that Mavis was stirred in some disturbing way by her daring. She noted the way Mavis’s hand rested just so long on the side of her backside she had slapped. Joan enjoyed the power of that.

Where was her fear of God? Had it left her that morning? She still felt something like guilt when Mavis rose to speak, but this time, that strong woman, that sharp-faced black woman, seemed tenderly small, a wounded creature. She felt guilt because for the first time she knew she could hurt Mavis.

3

Pastor Mavis took the pulpit and gazed across at the congregation with a complex mix of proprietorship and a shepherd’s care. Tall black woman whose ancestors, she knew, were all purebred Africans, so black that the few whites who lived on the island did not even think about tasting their flesh. Now she understood the emotion of the slave master.