The Pink House at Appleton

by Jonathan Braham

  Mama giggled and Mrs Moore smiled and added, ‘If you let them.’

  At that moment, Mama knew that she had a friend. Mrs Moore leaned forward and spoke with a tone and expression of pure wisdom. ‘Victoria, you will not settle until the right maid is in the house. Don’t feel sorry for them. Remember, you cannot help every poor girl who comes to the door looking for work. You’ll know when the right one comes along and, believe you me, quite a number of them will come along. Hmm.’

  There was a pause in the conversation as Mrs Moore sipped her coffee, her huge breasts formidable and reassuring. Boyd’s eyes widened. Then Mrs Moore disappointed Mama. ‘We won’t be staying here long,’ she said, looking swiftly and approvingly about the room. ‘Stanley plans to work for a big engineering company in Kingston. We’ll take Icilyn with us. She’ll be cheaper than the Kingston maids and more respectful too, after all the training I’ve given her. Appleton is good for us – free house, furniture and everything – and you can live like a king on a few pounds. But our home is in Kingston. And there’s not a lot to do here. Yes, there’s the club, the odd party, dinners and so forth, and some people getting up to mischief, as they always do, Victoria.’ Mrs Moore laughed loud and long until she wheezed. ‘And sports for the younger ones. Young people need sports. And the Crop-Over Dance, of course, when the bigwigs come up from Kingston and people let their hair down. My niece, Pepsi, comes up on school holidays to keep me company. A bright, lovely girl with a magnificent head of hair. Wait till you see her, just wait. But you must come to the club, Victoria, show yourself.’

  Boyd, moving quickly away from the door at the sound of chairs being pushed back and seeing shocking images of the heaving udders of Mrs Moore, wondered with great imagination at the coming of a girl named Pepsi, and could not wait.

  * * *

  When Papa entered the hall that evening, Boyd was slumped in the armchair breathing hard, Great Expectations opened in his lap. Deep cello music came from the recesses of the Mullard radio nearby. Boyd was thinking, with delicious torment, about the beautiful and heart-breaking Estella, so ruthless towards Pip. He had reached the part on page eighty-nine where Estella takes Pip into a corner and says “You may kiss me, if you like.” You may kiss me! It was so breathtaking for a girl to say a thing like that. But Estella was cold and didn’t mean any of it. Boyd felt Pip’s hurt and yet, especially because of her cruelty, felt a deep and burning attraction for Estella. Even the sight of her name on the page sparked passion, pain, pleasure. He’d felt the same about Lydia Parsons, that haughty girl at Worthy Park Prep, who took away his crayons and never gave him the time of day. Night after night he’d had torturous dreams about Lydia Parsons for that reason alone. She and Estella were the same. He wondered if all pretty girls were like that.

  ‘What’s the matter with that child now?’ Papa asked Mama, closing the bedroom door behind him.

  ‘Who?’ Mama asked.

  ‘Boyd. Who else? He’s sitting by the radio sniffling again.’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter with him,’ Mama said, her tone suddenly assertive.

  ‘You could fool me.’

  ‘He’s just a thoughtful child. Little things affect him.’

  ‘I see,’ Papa said. ‘He stands naked in the rain like a little savage. Sometimes he just sits on the verandah looking into space, and when you say anything to him he bursts into tears. What’s going on in that head of his?’ But before Mama could answer, Papa carried on. ‘He has to learn not to dwell on things. You think I allow this, that or the other to get to me at the factory?’ Papa gave a sarcastic little laugh.

  Mama faced him, surprised. ‘He’s only a child.’

  ‘And he’ll remain a child until he learns to manage his feelings.’

  ‘Did you understand your feelings when you were eight?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t dwell on them. Sometimes you have to put feelings aside and get on with life. And he’s aways hidden away in the garden, doing what, no one knows. Now, that is strange.’

  ‘A little sensitivity doesn’t harm anybody.’

  Papa rolled his eyes and left the room just as the dinner bell went.

  During dinner the small spotted dog, standing outside by the kitchen door, uttered pitiful sounds, lamenting his absence at the table. Not more than six months old, he came with the house, waiting on the front steps, tail whipping in a blur on the day of their arrival. He had sidled up to Boyd, who promptly named him “Poppy”.

  Now Boyd waited impatiently to get to Poppy and the back verandah. The back verandah received the red sunset in late evening. Very often he stood alone in the warm dark, breathing the evening scents, roseapple and jasmine, feeling the quiet and strangeness of a new place, listening to the cautious night noises, and watching the fireflies, the peeny-waalies, approach from the darkness behind the maids’ quarters. And he always wondered, as he stood there, what Perlita was doing in her room with the door closed. Sometimes, from the darkness outside he peeped in, flat against her window, standing on half a brick, expecting to see her slowly undressing, expecting to see a pink slip, her woman’s heavy titties and thighs, slow self-conscious movements, like Mama. But Perlita never took her clothes off. She seemed busy with other things.

  As he waited, Boyd saw the gathering darkness, the peeny-waalies nervously watching, the flowers waiting to breathe their night breath, all awaiting Papa’s departure. He waited too, for Perlita to undress, for Pepsi to arrive, for his tangled feelings to turn into pretty common sense. And from the bathroom he heard Papa’s unrestrained voice, Beecaause you come to me, because you speak to me, beecaause…

  Throughout dinner Yvonne had given Boyd mischievous little glances. Now, as Papa left for the club, his grand tenor waning, his lime-green Limacol cologne wafting in his wake, his brogues firm upon the wooden floor she turned to Mama, who was staring wistfully at Papa’s departing back.

  ‘Mama, Boyd took out his teapot and pee-peed on the ants. And he’s eating the flowers again.’ She was only five years old. At that age every thought turned into words. Barrington, as impatient to get to his scrapbook of footballers and cars as Papa was impatient to get to the club, quickly left the table.

  ‘Eat your pudding,’ Mama told Yvonne, imagining Boyd’s discomfort.

  But Boyd only saw himself in the fragrant darkness of the garden. He was alone with Pepsi, whose face was already the face of a girl he knew, whose strawberry-red lips spoke impossible things, just like Estella.

  Mama saw Boyd in the garden too, but he did not see her. Watching from her bedroom window one day, she had learned something about her son. And she wondered what Papa would say if he knew about Boyd’s peculiar habit.

  * * *

  The first time he tongued the flowers was in the garden at Worthy Park, in a quiet place where no one could see. It was almost like sucking Mama’s titties in the lily-scented bedroom on a hot afternoon. He didn’t know when he stopped sucking Mama’s titties but it wasn’t long ago.

  On that day the roses hung ripe, soft-fleshed, and so mouth-watering that he had simply fallen upon them, the music alive in his head, his skin hot and tingling. He thought of pink tongues and lollipops, and then warm, firm titties, full for sucking. The warmth of the earth rose up and smote him and all around flowers of every colour spread a path for his approach. The hibiscus came first, unwrapped lollipops to be taken in the open, translucent, exotic in the sun, silky and wet upon his tongue.

  The first time tonguing, he did not hear Mama. She called him ten times that day and got no reply. But she was not cross with him when he finally entered the house, fresh from the garden. She was relieved. She saw the dark stains on his lips and judging that he had been gorging himself on otaheite apples again, pointed straight to the washstand where the pink Lifebuoy carbolic soap lay.

  ‘Wash out your mouth,’ Mama said then.

  But there were other times. Mama did not say wash out your mouth when the rain tongued him, falling hard through the trees upon the gr
ass, like horses on the rampage. He remembered the first day in it. The noise of the rain was like voices and music, Christmas paper torn and rustled, filling his ears. It was Mama’s voice calling, but obliterated amid the rushing crystal-clear water. As the skies opened up, he had dashed out the back door, hidden in the violence and whiteness. It was shocking, joyful, making his heart churn.

  ‘Boyd, get out of the rain!’ Mama shouted frantically from the verandah, spying the small dripping shape, the first time it happened.

  ‘’E’s soaked right through, ma’am,’ the maid said, unbelieving, not understanding, grasping at him as he entered the kitchen.

  Barrington said in code, Stop acting like a fool, you. You’re just asking for Papa to give you a beating.

  ‘Boyd, why did you stand in the rain?’ Yvonne asked, genuinely concerned, as he was towelled down, and Bay Rum applied hurriedly and liberally about his body. She helped with the towelling, to prevent him getting pneumonia.

  He only gave a half-smile, inhaling the Bay Rum. The question was impossible. Maybe when Yvonne was eight years old she would know the pleasure of rain, know what it was to be suspended in the universe, at the centre of things, with the mad rushing in the ears, yearning fiercely, deeply seeking, senses fired up, passions like red hot sunsets.

  * * *

  That night, following Mrs Moore’s visit, he could not sleep. It was because of the new house smell, a trembling, delicate pink scent; the new feelings and the waiting for Pepsi. It was because of the moonlight silver on the verandah, the new dog asleep somewhere outside and the little slaps and cries from Mama’s room. Mama and Papa had stayed up listening to the radio, the WINZEE station from America, and talking. He heard when they struggled off to bed in the late hours, when the sky was grey-blue. And he listened at Mama’s door, as he often did, to the whispers and the strange sounds. He could see them clearly through the slit in the door. The moonlight came through the window and splashed the sheets on their side of the room. Papa was on top of Mama and fighting her, slapping her, hurting her. Mama was not fighting back. She was moaning deep in the sheets. He trembled barefoot at the door. He had thought that coming to Appleton would put a stop to it. He’d seen it happen many times at Worthy Park and wanted it to end. Now he knew there was no end to it.

  He went back to bed. But it wasn’t long before he walked dreamily out into the garden, into magnolia. The sun warmed his face and hands and he felt the urgent tug of the music, heard the voices whispering hush, hushh, hushhh.

  When the music called, from deep in the pink core of him where feelings lived, he came into himself. During the evenings, at sunset, when he sat in the chintz armchair listening to the Mullard radio deep in arias and fugues and adagios and burst into quiet tears, he knew it would always be thus. Sometimes he was scared with the enormity of feeling, of not knowing, unable to find expression, drowning in melancholia.

  ‘Miss Mama?’ he remembered Aunt Enid saying.

  Mama had two sisters, Aunt Amanda and Aunt Enid. Aunt Enid had the lemonade voice, frangipani scent and warm caresses. She was unmarried and without children, and loved Boyd. She exuded everything good. He had spent a week at her Kingston house where the garden was lush and a hammock hung from a St Julian mango tree. The days were nectar days and the sun like honey. The mango scents weakened his senses and Aunt Enid came to him in the warm afternoon in the garden, sat with him in the hammock so that they could look back at the house in the background and hear nothing. Her breasts were like soft toffee. He lapped at her and ate her and was smothered by her. And she took him to her without words. They were together in the silence. And there was no aching because there was no anguish. It was the first time he had been away from Mama and Papa. He was six years old.

  ‘Miss Mama? Miss Papa?’

  He smiled at her. She smiled back. She knew. And she stroked the soft part under his chin till he hung his head. He was in paradise, full of secret knowledge, in the music place where words were unnecessary. They slept together in the garden heat in the shade of the mango tree, and were only awakened towards evening by the maid, ringing the bell frantically for dinner.

  * * *

  Mrs Moore visited Mama almost every day during those first weeks at Appleton. She was a lonely woman, Papa said. All her cheerfulness and outward confidence was just a sham. But that meant nothing to Mama. Mrs Moore was a fresh breeze, a happy tune, the therapy she needed. At about ten o’clock each day the front door opened and in walked Mrs Moore, wearing her fruit-encrusted, camel-coloured felt hat and her spicy-camphor perfume. Under the drawing room window in the overgrown garden, Boyd heard the tinkle of cups, the clink of silver cake knives (Mama’s wedding present from her father), the gushing conversation, Mrs Moore’s jolly laughter and Mama’s happy, girlish giggles. He heard the Mullard radio say ‘“Passing Strangers,” by Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan.’ And the beat of his heart quickened because he heard the voices whisper the name of the girl who was coming soon, the girl whose lips were lollipop-red, Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi.

  CHAPTER 3

  Pepsi arrived at the beginning of the half term holidays. Her lips were lollipop-red, just as Boyd knew they would be, and black coils of hair sprouted about her head in magnificent profusion. She spoke about Mr and Mrs Moore as her “Abuelo” and her “Abuela”, and about her school, Excelsior, on Mountain View Avenue in Kingston, where she was in the first form and very good at Spanish.

  When Pepsi first visited, she sat, legs crossed, in Mama’s bedroom, chin in hand, conversing like an adult while Eartha Kitt sang Under the Bridges of Paris with you, I’d make your dreams come true. Pepsi sang too. She was only twelve. When lemonade was served she did not pour it herself but waited, sitting upright, for Perlita. Not that Perlita minded. She was used to this type of behaviour from the alien visitors on the estate and from beatniks (her best description of Pepsi). Pepsi sipped her lemonade, unlike Yvonne, who took great gulps. She retreated to the bedroom with Mama where she hovered like a nurse, pretending that Mama had had the baby. She ran and fetched, applied Johnson’s Baby Oil to all the places where it was to be applied, patted the pillows where they were to be patted and sighed with Mama as if she herself had burdens and unfulfilled dreams. When her job was done, Pepsi tiptoed behind Mama out of the room to languish on the verandah on the white rattan chairs. She languished there while the sun’s rays crept lazily across the tiles, and while Barrington, who had suddenly developed a habit of being very attentive to Mama, stood at the French windows with his hands in his pockets, watching.

  Boyd lingered at the end of the verandah in the long grass, hoping to catch Pepsi’s words, to glimpse her slender legs which ended in brown open-top shoes with loosely buckled straps, and sniff the adult scent of the Pond’s Cold Cream that she wore. Her coming and her presence had already created dramas of epic proportions in his head. And in those dramas she fought with Estella and Lydia Parsons for his special attention.

  ‘Pepsi!’ a voice hollered from beyond the green hedge. ‘Mrs Moore want you!’ It was Icilyn, Mrs Moore’s maid. ‘Pepsi, where are you? Come now, you hear? Pepsi!’

  Poppy rushed to the side of the house, barking hard, fazed by this reckless, disrespectful shouting in the quiet of mid-morning when the only sounds were radio sounds, the sublime voices and music of Housewives’ Choice.

  ‘Pepsiiii! Pepsiiii!’ The voice seemed desperate.

  Poppy was barking himself to death.

  ‘Pepsiii! Mrs Moore want you. Come now. Pepsi! You hear me, chile?’

  Pepsi took the steps down to the garden two at a time. Sunlight splashed her hair. Boyd, Barrington and Yvonne watched the thin-legged figure till it vanished in a dazzle of colour at the garden fence. What manner of girl was this?

  The next day, in the long grass at the far end of the garden, hidden from the house, Pepsi came suddenly upon Boyd and Poppy. She found them gazing into air.

  ‘Do you know what place this is?’ Pepsi asked brusquely.

  Boyd
hesitated. They were a long way from the house, alone in the grass with Pepsi.

  ‘This is where the slaves were beaten by the slave owners in slavery days,’ Pepsi related. ‘You live on a sugar estate and don’t know that? They don’t teach you these things at school because Jamaica is a colony and they want to keep you down, but my cousin who’s at university told me. The women slaves were lashed with cat-o’-nine tails. Their clothes were ripped off.’ Pepsi looked about. ‘Have you ever seen a naked woman?’

  Again Boyd hesitated, trying to make sense of the question.

  ‘Not your mother. Everybody’s seen their mother naked.’

  Boyd didn’t know what to say. He had his secrets and his reserve.

  ‘Have you ever seen a naked woman who wasn’t your mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ Boyd said. Poppy’s tail waltzed slowly as if hypnotised.

  ‘Who?’

  He didn’t want to say.

  ‘Boyd, I said who? Who was it?’

  Boyd was silent.

  ‘It’s your maid,’ Pepsi told him.

  Boyd nodded, with relief. He didn’t want to talk about the fleshy, pink women in the encyclopaedia. He didn’t know how to tell about them.

  Pepsi laughed. ‘Ha, ha. Boy. Spying on your maid. Disgusting. That is what you country boys do, spy on people. You were, weren’t you?’

  Boyd didn’t answer.

  ‘I said you were spying on her. Was it when she was undressing in her room? Tell me. I know what you people get up to.’

  Boyd couldn’t think, the air full of the women’s lotion and earth smells.

  ‘Did you spy on her when she was in the shower?’

  Boyd nodded. She already knew. He had watched Perlita in the shower from a crack in the adjoining cubicle as she shrieked and gasped under the gushing water. It was her joyful shrieking and the rush of the water that had called him to her. He remembered the three tufts of black hair, her bouncing titties concentrating his eyes, the fleshy form that was woman, and he could not, did not want to stop looking. Later in the garden, in the sun amid the hot grass scent, he felt a wonderful but troubling excitement.