The Fullness of Everything E-Book

Patricia Powell

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

Seitenzahl: 380

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011. When Winston receives a telegram informing him of his father's imminent death, his decision to return to Jamaica is very reluctant. The memories opened up by his return tell us why. But twenty-five years in the USA without contact with his family has allowed mutual resentments to mature and trapped Winston in the traumas of his childhood. And when he discovers he has a half-sister no one has told him about, his fury knows no bounds. But it is Rosa, his father's outside child, who in the end offers Winston some focus for his feelings. Told through the perspectives of Winston and his estranged brother, Septimus, the novel becomes the story of their attempts to heal the breach between them, and become the kind of men who might be able to sustain a loving relationship. Powerful, absorbing, always moving and sometimes painfully funny, Patricia Powell's new novel seamlessly combines an intense psychological realism with magical elements that are no surprise to her characters, but will surprise and delight her readers. Tough and unsentimental as it is, the novel has much to say about the power of forgiveness and the possibility of transcending hurt. Patricia Powell was born in Jamaica. She is the award winning author of three novels including A Small Gathering of Bones and The Pagoda. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Mills College in California.

Leseprobe

THE FULLNESS OF EVERYTHING

PATRICIA POWELL

CONTENTS

Winston

Septimus

The Family

For Barrington and for Prudence

WINSTON

1.

It’s way after midnight, way too late to be calling, but the telegram had come which meant either someone had died, someone was about to die and now he had to return home to bury them. He hadn’t been home to Jamaica in twenty-five years, hadn’t dropped his family a line, not even at card at Christmas with money, hadn’t telephoned them either. How they had tracked him down he doesn’t know, but there it is on the kitchen table downstairs, the telegram they sent. Five days ago it arrived, five days he’s refused to open it and every night he goes to sleep there’s his father dead and bloated and floating in the emerald current of the May Pen river towards him. Tonight it’s no different; the dream starts out the same: he’s bathing naked in the river, his brown skin covered with white suds, when the body, which starts out first as a swiftly sailing log, brushes against his legs and then the eyes pop open, big and red and streaked with iridescent veins, and it’s the crumpled face of his father, not dead at all, but frightened as hell and flailing and howling and begging Winston to help me you brute, help me Jesus Christ, help me you piece of dog shit and Winston too stunned to cry bolts up in a harsh yellow sweat, tearing at his shirt and hair, and switches on the light. Around him he sees that all is well, the orchid on his dresser with its bouquet of purple flowers stares at him gentle and kind, the radiators rattle away quietly in their corners, the cat, stretched out on its back, is snoring peacefully at the foot of the bed, and out the window the snow comes down fast and furious and in great reverential silence. He moves the laptop and the book he’d been reading off the bed and onto the floor, he hauls on his slippers and downstairs in the kitchen he switches on the overhead and boils milk in a pan on the stove.

He calls Silas.

It’s almost three, Jesus Christ, you all right, Silas cries.

Listen to this, he moans, tearing open the telegram that arrived five days ago and reading it to his friend. And then he tells him about the dreams.

That’s a sign right there, Silas says wearily – Silas who’s never believed in signs, but maybe all that’s different now that both his parents are dead.

You must go at once, Silas says, go and see your people, fix up things with them. I wish I could come, he says, but I have Chris and Marcus all next month and the month after. Your people could die, he says, and then what, who’d you have to blame then, who but yourself.

He sighs into the night, nodding and shaking his head, thinking of a plane ticket now and a new black suit. Okay, he says to Silas, okay. He’s been the best man at all four of Silas’s weddings and the godfather to his two sons.

He drains his glass of warm milk, sets it down firmly on the counter and looks out into the night at the snow piling up a thick blanket on the hedge of evergreens, on the rosebush to the side and on the ground, which means tomorrow he’ll be shovelling like hell to clear a path just to get to his car. Okay, he says again to his friend and hangs up.

He dials the number on the telegram, listens as the phone rings and rings undignified into the long and empty night. Finally his mother answers

Mother, he cries, it’s me, it’s Winston.

Winston, she moans out slowly, Winston, she moans out again, before her voice breaks down into a million small pieces.

And he sees his mother again as he’d last seen her when the car driving him to the airport pulled slowly away from the house. She was standing on the verandah in a pink crinoline dress and a white hat with the mesh shielding half her face from the sun that was already cocked in the sky and ravishing the morning. She did not wave and all around them was the swirling dust as drought had come and the ortanique trees were bare and the rickety cows lying out in the fields were parched and the fat black crows circling the scrawny brown cows cawed and cawed.

What’s going on, he cries, wanting to sound gentle and kind, but instead everything reels out irritable and impatient. Everything all right?

You father is dying, his mother says, and we want you to come home.

She pauses and he hears his own breath catching.

First it was the useless heart and the valves they implanted to help it pump, she tells him. Then it was the stroke that froze the left side of his body, parked him in a wheelchair. Now it’s the tumour in his brain killing him. The doctor gives him two months, his mother wails, two months. Then she is quiet.

And he thinks of how the cancer bloated and discoloured Marie Jose last year, how it peeled every strand of hair, drew her down to eighty pounds, and probably would’ve killed her if it weren’t for the prayer circles, the chanting, the laying on of hands.

Sorry to hear it, Winston tells her finally, finding it impossible to imagine that great man cut down.

Yes, his mother says, doctor gives him two months, two months his mother says again, then she is quiet. Then she starts up again. What did I do, she barks harshly into his ear. What did we do to you, all these years, twenty-five of them, and not a word, not a line, to your own people. What did we do to you?

He sets the phone aside, impossible to deal with his mother and her anguish, and he pours himself another glass of milk. He picks up the black furry cat that has padded down into the kitchen. The cat is as big as a dog. The cat licks his face with a tongue like a grater and he can still hear his mother’s voice from far away whining into the receiver. He puts down the cat, picks up the phone again. Mother, he cries, cutting through the bitter harangue, mother, and much to his own surprise he finds himself telling her he will come, just like that. Okay, mother, soon as I find time, okay. I will come home.

Somewhere he’d read that if he couldn’t make peace with his first family, then there was no way in hell things were going to work with the second one, that over and over again he’d only be acting out the same damn foolishness. He didn’t believe it at first until he started to look closely and then everywhere he turned it was his mother and his father, or the brother and the dead sister, and there he was like a blasted puppet, as if he had no mind at all of his own. Finally after eight sessions with Dr. Wolf at University Services, he bought a ticket for the Christmas break. He bought a gold watch too for his father, another one for his brother, and a necklace with pearl inlay for his mother. He bought shoes too and shirts, a few summer dresses. He bought tinned meats and boxes of detergent and rice and cakes of soap, all the things relatives from abroad used to take back in large carton boxes. And in the end, what was it that prevented him year after year: the flashflood that put his basement under water, the departmental chair who took ill and begged him to serve in the interim, the page proofs of his book that were due yesterday, the girl friend who’d had the miscarriage?

2.

It wasn’t beneath him to pick up women at bus stops, at taxi stands, in the line at grocery stores, at a bar, singly or in a gaggle. It wasn’t beneath him to pick one up on planes either, especially if she were reading Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel he uses in a history course he sometimes teaches called Africa and its Fictions. That, and the fact that her forehead was big and wide and strong, which told him right away she was smart. He liked bright women. She was not sexy in any conventional way. She was too tall and slim, looked too much like a boy with her hair cut so close to her head; and on her ears and fingers were a multitude of silver rings which he found excessive. Still, he was magnetized by her eyes, one of which had a tendency to wander aimlessly, while the other sparkled in at least four different colours.

When she laughed – which was with great abandon, her head flung back, the roar gushing from her throat, one foot jumping to tap the floor of its own accord – he was reminded of the women back home who sold cloth and hair pins and plastic combs in the open-air markets on Saturdays and who, when the sweetness took them, thundered into the heat, the sound seeming to come up from their bowels and trembling for minutes in the air afterwards. When they talked her head was full to the brim with all kinds of arcane knowledge, ranging from quantum physics to dream interpretation, to Akashic records, to astral travel, holography and crystalline technology; all this so puzzled and hypnotized him, he felt himself bristling with a strange and curious love. When he got scared though, which happened sometimes – because what did she really know of the destiny of souls, what did she know of karma – he focused on her moving heart-shaped lips as they bunched around her teeth and he imagined himself battering them with kisses until they were bruised.

She worked not far from his office, as editor of an independent press started by Christian Scientists; they started fucking right away. For months it was like that, easy, uncomplicated. She didn’t clutch, she didn’t suffocate, she didn’t even want commitment, in fact she wanted nothing at all, not even marriage when he proposed it to her after coming and going for a year. She’d just recovered her life after twelve years of marriage and two stepchildren, she cried, she was in no hurry now to tie it into knots again. She needed time to think, she said, time to find herself, time to figure out exactly what she wanted and how.

This did not put him off entirely, for he was not what you would call a rescuer. He was not a quote, unquote, white knight. He liked a woman who could stand on her own two feet, he liked her with the head settled and clear, he liked her in charge of her own life; he did not like them needy. Women like Marie Jose, women who needed to feel they were in complete control of their lives, as so much had already been taken away, with them a man had to be patient, he had to lie low; he even had to be sly. He had to show he wanted them but then again not come on too strong. He had to not be afraid to show his feelings. In fact it was a bonus if he liked to cry. All this he’d done with women before; all this he could do again. So he waited; after all he was in no particular hurry; there was no ticking clock. Still, in a year he would be forty-six, he already had tenure, even had a little nest egg put away; she was not yet forty, but approaching it swiftly; they could have a child, he was thinking, to replace the one he’d already lost in the miscarriage with Connie several years back.

But as luck would have it, all that talk of family and independence flitted away with one rotten Pap smear. All of a sudden he was driving her to hospital for tests, filling out form after form, sitting up with her under the harsh fluorescent, holding her hand as they waited nervously for results. Within a month they took the entire womb, and if that wasn’t enough, a few weeks later they lopped off the left breast. Five, six times a week now he was at her house drawing baths filled with medical leaves and anointing the lesions that had broken out on her skin. Day after day he was boiling rice and feeding her soup in bed and reading to her at night and holding her as the pain blazed through. Twice a week he was dropping her off at one therapist’s office after another and picking her up again. What was she doing? This friend told her to try Jin Shin Jytysu, that friend told her Reiki, that other friend told her about healing with crystals and if that didn’t work she should pick up shamanic journeying. Week after week, UPS dropped off packets of books on Ayurvedic Medicine, Vibrational Medicine, Auric healings, and chakras. Suddenly the house was full of crystals, huge ones of varied colours and striation, placed in auspicious locations that made him dizzy when he walked by them. A woman wearing a white turban drew strange symbols around the house, rearranged the furniture and put up extra mirrors. Friends with drums, with bells, with feathers and gems sat around her bed, chanted ceremonial hymns, banged their instruments, sprinkled the air with white powder and waved away entities they claimed were hovering around. She changed her diet. She started to hug trees whenever they stepped outside. She meditated four and five hours at a time, and sometimes walked around in a daze, her hands outstretched. There were times he did not recognize her, or she him.

Leave her, Silas said at once. He was a social scientist and had long since dismissed the non-rational.

But how could he leave when he’d slipped into some new and strange and complicated dance with her?

The breed of cancer was so vicious, doctors had her on chemo, on radiation, and an assortment of experimental drugs. She grew gaunt, her skin blistered, her joints swelled, she had boils in her mouth, her teeth went black, her breath smelled of crude oil. One day she got up from her meditation and announced she was no longer going to take the medicine. Just so! She wanted to heal herself, she said.

He looked at her as if she were crazy.

She waved him away like a gnat.

This is nuts, he cried. But he could tell her nothing. Nothing would change her mind. There was Carolyn Myss telling her she could heal herself, there was Deepak Chopra, Barbara Brennan and a whole host of others, including the healer she saw twice a week, who was blind in both eyes, had exceedingly long arms and a polyphonic laugh.

Within weeks though, the bloat and discoloration fell away. Within months, the rust returned to her cheeks, the emerald to her eyes, her appetite resumed full force, she filled out her frocks again as her hips widened, the house reverberated with her wild laughter and every drop of the cancer leaked out of her blood. Even the doctors were stunned. He was too. And all over again he began brimming with his mad and indiscriminate love; she had so much heart he decided. This was true courage. She could stand up to death, meet it face to face and then beat it back. What could he do? Not anything remotely close to that. He was not a brave man. He had run away from the Caribbean, he had run away from his people, he had buried himself like an ostrich in work, as if that would save him forever. They could adopt a child or two, he told himself, his eyes possessed by the possibilities he saw blossoming everywhere again; she could move in with him, they could buy a house together in Spain where she was born; they could marry.

He drives to the Asmara Yoga Studio after office hours to pick up Marie Jose for dinner. He’s not seen her in a week; she’s been travelling to book fairs and conferences for work. But finally she is in the car next to him and he is relieved to have her in his arms again, relieved to have her there solid and strong, and he holds on to her for a long, long time.

Everything is alright? she asks him in that quiet way, her eyes on his face, her eyes slowly reading, what’s new, what’s been going on?

He laughs nervously and begins twisting the knobs on the radio. Same old, same old, he cries. You work too hard. I miss you. He moves quickly over the flushed cheeks, the hair damp and flat on her head, the nose dappled with sweat, anywhere, anywhere but at the offending eye.

Outside the world is the colour of ash; the sky hangs heavy and low above them, and periodically the wind sweeping off the frozen river rocks the car from side to side.

At the restaurant, the waitress waves them to a booth against the back wall near the window that looks out over the dimly lit parking lot and at people hurrying to their cars, shoulders braced against the wind. They order and as they wait, he squeezes her knees underneath the table.

Wouldn’t you like to escape this nasty cold and go somewhere nice and sunny and warm for a change, he says, somewhere where there’s a beach and where you can stretch out under an umbrella and sip some good rum and enjoy the sunset? The truth is he cannot face his father’s rage on his own, he cannot face his brother’s accusations, or his mother’s sadness, and yet he doesn’t want to appear like a tub that can’t sit on its own bottom. She hates nothing more than a weak man, and right now he has to collect himself.

She looks at him with suspicious eyes. What’s this now, she says.

My father is dying, he says, a telegram came. I have to go home. Really, she says softly, a frown starting to crowd her forehead.

When did this happen?

Oh, he says, running his hand through his hair, which has started to thin significantly in the front and middle. He keeps it low, but he might have to do as Silas does, shave the whole head completely. Yesterday, I mean Saturday, I don’t know, he says growing weary again, last week.

The waitress brings bowls of miso soup, warm and slightly salted edamame beans, and a plate of seaweed salad. They unfold their napkins, spread them out on their laps, begin the business of eating.

I know it’s kind of sudden, he says, I don’t even know how they found me. He is growing more and more disgruntled now. But I want to show you my home, he says trying to bring back the grin, the word home sounding suddenly menacing in his mouth.

It’s weird, she says, all this has been going on, and you didn’t even tell me. We talk everyday, she says, and you said nothing.

Well, he says, unable to meet her eyes, his gaze lingering instead at her nose, which is large and sharp.

I mean half the time I don’t know what goes on with you, inside you, I mean half the time you’re so damn closed off. I mean a telegram for Christ’s sake and you’re just telling me now. And we’ve talked everyday for the last week.

Okay, he says, pushing away his food, here we go with the character assassination. Here we go with the fault-finding. He’s been called frozen so many times already and by so many women.

The waitress arrives with the barbecued eel, but no one has an appetite.

I bet Silas knows, she says.

He looks at her and at the concrete set of her jaw and he sees the miserable evening laid out ahead.

Silas knows nothing, he says quietly. This isn’t something you can just blurt out to any and everybody. Silas knows nothing. He nibbles at his eel, clamps his eyes shut as the wasabi bolts through his face. Anyway, he says, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, the truth is, I couldn’t face any of it, he says, but I hope you’ll come with me, he says, so much water under the bridge.

3.

In the boiling heat, at the overcrowded airport in Kingston, he plucks his brother at once from among the multitudes wielding boxes and suitcases, and throwing up in the air long-time-no-see children, and hugging onto old sweethearts and best friends and wailing out into the simmering afternoon and squabbling and laughing. His brother wears a long thin spade of a goatee, speckled now with white. He wears a black three-piece suit way too tight – he looks almost swollen inside it – and a black felt hat with a blue grouse feather.

What to say to his brother after all these years? He does not know, his brother was a boy still when he left, a boy of fifteen. He pumps his brother’s hand long and hard and then he looks past his brother’s shoulders at the long black hearse parked at the curb with the motor still running and a boy, who has his brother’s face, waiting for them in the front. He’s brought shirts for his brother, trousers and shoes, but he doesn’t think anything will fit.

He introduces Marie Jose, and his brother, in a burst of enthusiasm completely uncalled for, sweeps her up in his big arms, spins her as if she is a child, and then sets her down again proud and grinning. There’s nothing on the surface of his face that tells Winston his brother is surprised to see that his girlfriend is white. Perhaps all along he knew it would be so, knew this was to be expected. Winston swallows.

You’d a good flight, his brother asks, heaving their bags into the trunk while the boy, the nephew, who has not stepped out to greet them, waits inside the air-conditioned hearse.

Very good, Winston cries, very well. And then they lapse into an unbearable silence as the car pulls away from the curb and heads into the hushed and mazy afternoon.

He’d asked a graduate student to finish up the fall semester, teach the last few weeks of his classes, and administer and grade the final exams. The departmental secretary he told he’d be gone eight weeks total, until the start of Spring semester, he said, February. He figured he could teach something he’d taught a hundred times already so there wouldn’t be the stress of a new course. He’d cancelled all his appointments and talks, and brought the cat, which was really Connie’s, and the three orchids over to Silas’s house. This was late November.

So, how is he, Winston calls from the back of the hearse, which smells like embalming fluid and sacramental oils, how is he holding up?

Who, the old Lion? his brother cries, watching him from the rear-view mirror and pealing with laughter. Pa’s going to outlive us all, man, mark my words. Outlive us all.

But I thought it was urgent. He hears his voice failing him already. Mother said he only had the few months, I thought.

How else could we have gotten you to come? You didn’t answer the letters, you didn’t write us, what would you have done? His brother is glaring at him now.

Out of the tinted windows, everything is coated in fine yellow dust: the spindly palms lining the roadway and forming an arch, the dilapidated cars racing dangerously on the destroyed roads, the extravagant houses ringed with burglar bars and sheltered behind concrete structures, the faces they pass later on, drawn and malnourished and gaping at the long black hearse barrelling through the rotten streets. Only the glittering sea, running alongside the car on the left, remains blue and unwrinkled.

As if to fill the air with jubilation, his brother slides in a tape and a religious hymn comes hurling out the speakers and immediately his lunch comes rushing up into the back of his throat, almost in his mouth, and he clutches Marie Jose’s clammy hand. I have to be alone, he announces, his face drenched in a malodorous sweat, and a mile from the house he has not seen in over twenty years, his brother pulls over to the shoulder.

The nephew, as if now just noticing him, turns to study him. Winston ignores the boy and opens the car door. Marie Jose’s face is already sewn up and glued to the window. If she’s pissed, she doesn’t say it. How many days he begged and coerced and made promises, but now that she’s here, everything feels harder already.

The hearse lurches away on the newly tarred road and he lopes into the evening, relieved to be on solid ground again. All around him, mockingbirds whistle their jaunty tunes. All around him, fireflies step out early to blink. And he breaks out into a harsh dry bark of a laugh at the way they’d tricked him.

A fork and the road empties into the village square. Music roars out of a shop window. Three men sitting on the bench outside the piazza stares openly at him, with raw, rum-soaked eyes; and he stares back at them sullenly.

All over the world, there is the smell of breadfruit boiling, green bananas boiling, cocoa and St. Vincent yam boiling. Bats shoot through the cyanic blue of the sky. Chickens setting up to roost for the night complain in their foul-smelling coops. And the craven dogs bark and bark all over the valley and into the grey hills surrounding the district.

An old woman in a white frock waits for him at the gate. How long has his mother been waiting there at the gate? Night has fallen. The cicadas have sharpened their song; a mild breeze brings a wave of eucalyptus. His mother’s hands are big and cold. Dew is already falling on her head, and on her breath there is the smell of the broom weed tea for high blood pressure. His mother moans. A deep gash tears at the pit of his stomach and in his arms, his mother now, a frame of bones.

Go and tell your father good evening, she cries, the eyes round like marbles, as the hot, white moon appears from out of hiding.

Go, now. She’s suddenly tight and hard and edging out of his arms and marching ahead of him into the house.

To this day, he still doesn’t remember what he’d said to his father. He doesn’t remember what had ignited it. But he must’ve back-answered him; he must’ve said something nasty. Immediately a shriek tore across his father’s face and his father’s fist shot out knocking him across the room. Windows whizzed by, and outside the windows, his mother’s prized bougainvillea, the clothesline full of his father’s white Arrow shirts, his father’s blue van parked in the carport, and the rope swing in the almond tree where he pushed his sister on Sunday afternoons. Finally he crumpled into the wall. He did not move. His mother was wailing and clawing at her hair. Yes, she said, yes, you kill him now. You kill him with your anger and your violence. And who will it be next? Who?

He did not move. He was exhausted; he wanted badly to sleep. He wanted his bed but his bed felt far away and he wasn’t sure his legs could carry him there. If only the bed could come. The seat of his trousers was warm and he was comforted by this, and perhaps he nodded off, because when he woke again, it was night, and his bed had come and his face and shoulder clamoured with pain and Dr. Anglin was there, and his mother too was there, and he remembered thinking that the minute he got better, the minute he was well again, he was going to leave. And he was never ever coming back. He was going to make them suffer. Suffer. It was a very clear and precise thought and perhaps he said it out loud, because his mother’s beautiful grey eyes filled at once.

She did not speak to their father for two full weeks. Two full weeks she slept on a cot near Winston’s bed. She took time off from the bank and stayed home with him. She bathed and dressed him and wept over the bruised and broken parts of his body. She did not let the housekeeper touch him. She cooked again and again all the dishes he requested, and she fed him off her plate and from the same spoon she fed herself. It was not the first time his father had hurt him, but this was different. Two full weeks she was devoted to him and he loved her back in return, he loved her desperately, and he surrendered himself to this love. Then after two weeks she went back to her husband. Just so! She fussed over her husband at the dinner table, serving him the choicest pieces of meat, filling up his water glass, running to the fridge to get him his stout, looking in his eyes over and over again to check for pieces of herself. After two weeks, her son had become again what he’d always been, her son. But her husband, her husband was again the kingpin. He was her eye and her beating heart, and without him, she was nothing at all. Better to turn a blind eye, better to keep pursed lips while he beat her children. Ten times worse to have that man walk out and have the whole damn world looking on at her empty arms.

He was fourteen years old, but he saw it clear as day, this great betrayal, and it was not just in his family alone, he saw it everywhere he looked now in the village; he saw it every day that there was light. He saw parents turning their backs, parents drawing a mask over their faces so as not to see, parents breaking their word, violating their own laws, perpetrating violence again and again against their own flesh and blood. Those weeks he was laid up, he got a brand new bicycle, an Encyclopedia Britannica set and his own battery-operated record changer and a slew of forty-fives. But what was the point? His father had thrown him into a wall crushing his arm. He couldn’t go anywhere; he couldn’t spend the money he’d also got, or wear the new clothes. He could only stare at the bicycle and at the pictures in his books. His mother, who all along he thought was his friend, had deceived him; she showed solidarity for two good weeks, two good weeks she was vexed with her husband, she didn’t speak to him, but in no time at all she had picked up again with the culprit. Where was the love in all of that? Destroying him one day and loving him the next! Where was the justice?

The cover of the pump organ is lifted and the hymn book, held together with duct tape, is wide open and turned to page sixty-seven, Do You Remember When They Crucified My Lord? The coffee table with his initials knifed into the mahogany, the Morris chairs, the red sofa with the narrow silver legs, the grandfather clock that chimes on the half-hour, the rocker with the embroidered antimacassar thrown over the back, everything the same, as if life had not carried on. The portraits are still on the walls. Oil and watercolour reproductions of his mother’s near white family, and of him and his brother and the dead sister, Althea. The same sculptures by Edna Manley and Colin Garland and Woody Joseph sit out on small narrow tables with spindle legs.

He smells his father before he even sees him and it’s the smell of a man gone completely to rot.

Papa, he says, turning slowly, it’s me, it’s Winston.

He sees nothing in the shadowy darkness, hears nothing, until he backs into the handle of the wheelchair, and then he stops, afraid to turn around, afraid to see the face, half of it frozen now, one of the eyes covered up in white gauze, and the teeth, all of them black with decay. Where is Marie Jose, he wonders, poor Marie Jose whom he abandoned earlier, left her in Septimus’ care.

A little girl appears from one of the rooms wearing a long white shirt, her arms swallowed by the tall sleeves. She has his father’s ears, like bellows, the high dome of a forehead. She slips past him, hoists herself into his father’s lap, wraps her arms around his neck and peers out at Winston with dark almond-shaped eyes that remind him immediately of the dead sister, Althea, and he hears the yap, yap of Althea’s laugh, feels the breeze blowing off the river where he’s teaching her to dog-paddle and breaststroke and to straddle water.

Papa, he says again, taking a long, slow breath, I’m home.

And the room, reeking with the smell of mould and damp and dust and decay, utters no sound at all, only settles itself more deeply into the belly of the earth.

In the kitchen, they have started dinner without him. His girlfriend is there, sipping a mug of bitter bush tea – her stomach probably upset from all the commotion – and wearing a face that says nothing at all and everything. He wishes she hadn’t come. Everything is too raw and gritty here; how is he to protect himself and protect her at the same time? No one pays him any mind; they are absorbed in the slicing of meat, at blowing steam off the hot soup spoon, at sucking the marrow from a bone. He can’t decide if he should sit near his mother or near his girlfriend; either way feels dangerous, as if he’s taking sides. His eyes finally come to rest on his mother’s face, which he can see clearly now in the light. Grey matter has taken over the eyes. Now you have to strain to hear as her voice-box has gone hoarse. The big hands with the long, shapely fingers tremble from nerves – his mother who, on the side, used to take in orders for wedding dresses from as far away as Cuba and Costa Rica. Now she can barely hold her spoon steady, hold the mug she is trying to bring to her lips. He turns away from her eyes, dark inside that face like a cave; he remembers Althea.

Who is the little girl? he asks, still hovering in the doorway, his shadow long and lean and uncertain, and inside his chest tightness fills the entire cavity.

No one utters a word, and he thinks perhaps they’ve not heard him. Septy, he calls to his brother, whose flat, smooth face sweating over his bowl of oxtail soup resembles their father’s so much he has to turn away – the eyes sunken deep into his head, the nose like a fist on his face, the shoulders hunched into his chest. He turns to his mother, whose face has suddenly turned to stone, and then to the nephew who looks like a girl from this angle and in this light. Who is the little girl? he asks the boy, his nephew. Still no one says a word and he thinks, what is this, what is this? Didn’t he see a little girl out there perched on his father’s lap, and he takes off his wire rimmed glasses and wipes them carefully with the tail of his white shirt and sets them on again and fixes his eyes on the girlish looking nephew, who must be part Indian, the gleaming black hair ribboned with so many large curls.

My auntie, the nephew says, looking at him with what looks like a grin beating around his mouth and he finds himself wanting to slap the nasty little grin off the boy’s face.

Your auntie, he says slowly and the boy nods and he’s confused. Auntie, he’s thinking to himself, how the hell, Auntie, and he’s unable to put all the pieces together with this Auntie.

Your new sister, the boy says, Grandpa’s outside child.

Aahh, he says long and loud, as if all has been made clear, and he starts to nod, and at the same time he tries to figure out where to sit now, where to sit and digest this piece of news. So much shame in that green kitchen with the candles hissing and smoking as they steadily burn down into pools of grease and harden on the plates. He turns to find his mother scrunched up inside that tall narrow white dress, looking as if she’s been mourning forever.

He must sit, he thinks, he must sit and relax and digest all of this slowly, except he cannot sit, he cannot relax, he cannot do anything at all, but look at his brother. What you mean sister? he says to his brother, but he’s turning to his mother as well, turning to the boy, his nephew, what you mean his outside child, his outside daughter? His lips are moving, he might even be shouting, but is he even saying anything at all? Nobody is answering, nobody is looking at him; and there is his brother who has spent his entire life underneath their father’s thumb, there is his brother who has never stood up to him, never stood up for their mother, never stood up for anything, all his fucking life, a lackey.

Suddenly he is leaping way across the room and collaring his brother, knocking over his food and upsetting the table. You let him carry on with this shit, same way you let him bring in whoever, mistreat her whenever he likes, you let him. He crashes into the side of his brother’s head with his fists, the brother who has never protected their mother, never stood up for anything, he cracks him on the nose, on the right jaw, until the nephew sends him reeling into a corner, and he crumbles into a chair where he sits with his hands trembling, trying to find the damn breath to still them.

The house now has grown completely still. The boy brings cotton and iodine to Septy. The boy is gentle with Septy, he talks softly to Septy, he settles Septy into a comfortable chair so he can incline his head to stop the bleeding nose. Winston turns away from this picture of a boy and his father and wonders briefly about that other one, that other one nailed to death in his chair and stinking. His mother refuses to meet his eyes and just as well, he thinks, he cannot bear her suffering, has never been able to bear her shame. Wasn’t that why he had kept away all these years – he could not stand to see the way he treated her, and the way she held up year after year, as if this very thing was her calling in life. At Marie Jose, he dares not look. He can only imagine that already she has left him; already she has one foot on the plane. His mother continues to eat, grinding her teeth with tremendous intent, her face unrecognizable to him now, the face like granite.

We should leave, he says, tomorrow first thing, we should go.

They’re in bed now, in the room at the side of the house facing the tank and the tiny cemetery where Althea is buried and beyond that the little Presbyterian stone church he attended as a boy and prepared the sacrament for first communion.

She says nothing, but she doesn’t have to, what’s there to say.

Worst of all was the look on his brother’s face, the look that said to him, you fool, you stupid, blasted, ignorant fool.

Please talk to me, he says, this is not the time for the cold shoulder. There’s all this rumbling near his heart and it feels unbearable, and it’s moving now and sitting on his chest like a great wave, pressing into his sternum.

She chuckles.

And he is so relieved to hear her chuckle, he heaves a great sigh, but immediately grows worried again.

It’s too warm to sleep, and the old rusty fan only makes the air warmer and they’re stretched out side by side, still as boards, and naked underneath the thin cotton sheets that smell of camphor.

He fits his face in his hands, and for a long time they are quiet. Around them the house creaks and moans, and outside the strange singing of an animal. He wanted his brother to fight back, he wanted to be wrong and to have had to buckle under his brother’s fists, but his brother did not fight back, punch for punch, his brother swallowed them down, as if he deserved every single last one of them.

Would you like to open a coning, Winston?

Suddenly he’s irritated as hell with her. Look, he says, harshly, this is not the time. I respect all these spiritual and healing things you do for yourself, he says, but right now is not the time.

That’s fine, she says, that’s perfectly fine. Then she is quiet.

But it’s not fine, he knows that tone, and the last thing he needs now is this punishing silence when he has his mother’s face on his hands.

Look, he says wearily, I didn’t mean...

It’s fine, Winston. I just wanted to help. You’re up over your head, drowning in this family shit. Just wanted to help.

Can you help me some other way, he says, just not this energy stuff right now. He can just see the whole damn thing unfolding, the two of them stretched out there, Marie Jose calling in the entities, and within minutes the heat filling his limbs, one by one, the chatter in his mind coming to a halt, images coming in and stopping by and going on again, images, sounds, his breath, his blood, his body falling down with the weight of inertia.

Can you help me some other way? He begins again. He does not know what to do with this pressure bearing down on his chest, on his heart.

Against the windows, the elaborately decorated sphinx moths beat themselves to death.

You want a massage, she asks, turning to him.

No, he does not want a fucking massage; he just wants this fucking thing to dissolve. No, he says, tightly.

What can I do then, she says, you’re full of rage, you’re acting crazy. I don’t know you. I don’t feel safe around you. What do you want me to do?

Oh Christ, he cries, leaping out of bed and fumbling around in the dark until he finds shorts in his suitcase, hauls them on and yanks open the door with a loud scraping noise. The night rushes into the room along with hordes of singing mosquitoes and flying ants and bats of assorted types and there’s the echo of dogs barking and barking way down deep in the valley and the insects feeding on them and on each other and shrieking. Jesus Christ, he cries, jumping away from the night and slapping at the mosquitoes flying around his head and building nests in his hair. He slams the door. He sits down on the side of the bed trembling. Murky moonlight slopes in on them. Way out deep into the night, an owl calls. His knuckles pound like hell.

I came so I could help, she says. You asked me to come and help you. You have all this rage at your father you’re just lashing out at everyone. Tonight wasn’t a mistake, she says, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. That’s how these things work.

He says nothing. More than all this energy and this spirit, he hates all this psychology. But perhaps she is right. Perhaps Marie Jose is right as always. It’s impossible to think, his mind, his heart; everything inside him ablaze.

I thought things would be different, I thought none of this would matter, I thought, I don’t know, he says, everything is the same.

You haven’t changed?

No, he says. Otherwise none of this would bother me. None of this would matter.

Well, it can still bother you, she says, many things in life will bother you, even after you change, but you can’t just knock down everybody in your way, beat down everybody. How is that different from your father?

So I’m like my father, now, he cries. I take up for my mother and I’m like my father now. This is just going from bad to worst, he thinks. This is just fucking awful.

Well, when he used to beat you because he couldn’t control you, couldn’t bend you to suit him, how is that different from what you’re doing now, striking out at things you can’t control?

That is not what I’m doing, he says. There’s all this iron in his voice now, all this hurt in his eyes now.

Okay, she says. Okay, and then she is quiet.