Hand Me Down World

by Lloyd Jones

  The inspector sits across from me and stares. I am a small animal in its pen. He has information about that animal. And there I am, captured, caged, the living, breathing example of the creature he has read up on.

  At the zoo the animals stare back. So I look carefully at his white shirt. It is clean and ironed. The top of the collar is beginning to fray. He has seen me looking and once or twice followed my eyes there, tucked his chin against his chest in order to see what I see. He reacts to such a moment like a truck driver discovering a dead end. He will rub at his eyes, rub away the unsatisfactory aspect of the world. Then he will blink at me. He blinks until I am back in focus. I am back where he first saw me, seated opposite, across the table from him. Now he unbends his legs. He sits up straighter, moves himself into the edge of the table. He is back to wishing there was more of me, more to see.

  The inspector’s eyes are olive brown. I remember once waking up beneath a canopy of trees and looking up at a pale sky through overhanging brown branches. Sometimes I think I see two yellow flares. It is the harder set of eyes bursting through to settle in the inspector’s kinder trusting pair.

  His hair is dark. There was a maître d’ at the hotel in Tunisia who used to dye his hair black. You felt he was dying of something. Vanity that has lost the ability to see itself. The inspector’s hair is dark at the roots but lightens towards the ends. The kelp does the same thing in the sea as it rises towards the light. My pale skin is from my mother. Light is wish fulfilment, she used to say. I was born pale but at night I become the night. During the day my skin lightened—and around white people, to my mother’s joy and relief because I would now be saved, my skin became like theirs. When she said her goodbyes she expected me one day to return from the hotel world transformed, as white as the tablecloths. When my baby was born I saw him gifted with my skin. His father looked puzzled. I had to tell him, to put his mind at rest, the baby was still trying out his skin. I laughed at the stupidness of that remark, but Jermayne’s face scrunched up. He looked down at the baby as if it was a problem to fix or solve.

  There are high windows in the visitors’ room. Whenever the inspector stands to leave, the light from those windows finds his hair. What was dark turns reddish brown, his hand brushes the top of his hair as if he too felt that change, then it turns back to dark as he steps away from the light. There are creatures in the sea who are happiest out of the limelight. Stuck in a crevice of rock or mud they stare back at the floating world. Even at the hotel some guests would refuse a table in the middle of the restaurant. The man would look pained, the woman anxious. She might finger her jewellery. The guests sitting along the wall seemed to have everything in the world they could wish for. If only they could have what those people have, a table by the wall on the edge of the restaurant. I imagine the inspector seated at a table by the wall. I imagine the staff confused. No one knows who seated him there, how he came to occupy that table. This is how I arrive at the visitors’ room to find the inspector waiting for me, already seated, his hands arranged with fingertips pointing in and resting on the table top.

  After the yellow flares die his eyes moisten. I find myself wishing I could reach across and touch his moustache—to see if it is as soft and warm as it looks. When he smiles lines break out from the corners of his eyes, and then I will feel pleased with whatever it is I have said.

  He always comes in the same royal-blue blazer. A darker blue would suit him better. A dark blue would better serve his brass buttons. If he’d shown up to the hotel in that royal-blue blazer we would have taken him for a package tourist.

  He wears dark slacks. Whenever he stands to leave I always look to see the overhead lights reflected in his black shoes. Then the lines break out from the corner of his eyes. He knows I know his vanities. That moustache, the creased line in his slacks and his expensive shoes.

  This is also the moment in which he will give me something over and above the cake his wife has made. Yesterday it was writing pads and pens.

  The inspector is not my only friend. But he is my only visitor. Sometimes I think I can feel the heat of the outside day coming off him. That is a gift. The inspector has brought that world inside the visitors’ room with him. Sometimes I see a bit of ash on his shirt front. When he sees me looking he looks down and brushes the ash away; without realising it he has both given and taken away the moment I imagined where he sat alone in the car waiting for the gates to the women’s facility to open.

  Yesterday I came into the visitors’ room to find him as I usually do, already seated, but this time a pile of paper was set on the table before him. That pile of paper is now in my possession. The inspector explained what it was. Testimonies, he said. Testimonies from people I came into contact with or who claimed to know me on my way to Berlin to get my boy back from the baby thief Jermayne. These testimonies I read in one gulp and I felt the same as I did the first time I saw a worm casting. How did a creature so soft and flexible leave behind, almost in passing, something so set and hard?

  It feels like a long time ago now. The day the men in green uniforms came and took me away from the blind gentleman’s house. The men in green were polite to start with, and then silent. Silent as concrete is when used to guard against the wild elements. There was a grille between where I sat in the back of the van and the men in the front. One man sat in the back facing me. But he kept looking away to the small window in the back door. He looked like he would rather be doing something else, boating or playing table tennis. I looked out the same window and saw a patch of grey, a tree. I saw Defoe like some storm-flung thing struggling to hold his feet against a gale. And then I was that same thing I saw, I too was uprooted and now I was being taken in by the authorities. The panic I felt was for my boy. Everything emptied out of me. I felt as light as a husk. I wished I had said something to my boy. The last time I handed him back to Jermayne I said ‘goodbye’, with a lightness and confidence I would see him again soon. And now I was being torn from him. It was happening all over again.

  I often picture him wondering where his mother has gone. Why doesn’t she meet him in the park any more? I wonder how much time will pass before I see him again. I worry about that lost time and how I will make it up to him. I worry about the lies his father will tell. I saw my life with my boy drift away out that back window. As we bumped our way through the unseen city I was back in the deep sea pawing around in the dark. And when the doors of the van were flung open there was a flash and I remembered the same blinding light bursting in on the home I had made under the dinghy on the shingle beach. Riddled with sea lice I looked up at the long dark hair hanging down from a face surprised to see me as much as I was to see her. We both cried out, and as the dinghy dropped back the light of the world above raced away from me. I lay curled up on my side, my cheek against the shingle, and waited. Some light crept under the sides of the dinghy, and then a bit more, a bit more and a bit more, until I saw a woman’s face turned upside down next to the shingle outside of the hull. She couldn’t see me for the dark. She called softly. She could have been calling for her cat. And I couldn’t decide whether to creep out of there in the hope of being led to a saucer of milk or to stay put.

  The side of the dinghy lifted. The blinding light returned. I made a scuttling movement, such as a crab in panic makes. I reached out. I grabbed some clothing and as I dragged her down to the shingle next to me the hull came crashing down over us. It was instantly dark. How strange it was to feel her dry clothing and her hot well-fed breath so close to mine. How strange to have another crawl under my shell. Now I did things I didn’t know I knew how to do. I put my hand over her mouth to stop her shouting. I breathed hotel reception calm into her ear. Slowly her breath came under control. A few minutes is all it took, before I had her trust. Later she would tell me she was relieved when she realised that I was not a man.

  On the other hand, I was not the same person who boarded the boat with its human cargo. When I crawled ashore I had shed that skin. I was changed in
all sorts of ways by the time that woman raised the lid on my sea-rotted body.

  Now and then I peeped out from under the hull. I didn’t want to go back out to the world until it was dark. So we had to wait. Some time passed. More than once the woman began to sob. Each time I calmed her with the hotel voice. Soon we could go. But not yet. I am sorry, I am very sorry, but these are the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and so we must show patience. We talked but not much. When she asked me where I was from I replied, ‘The Hotel Astrada in Tunis.’ I had come ashore in Europe, but where? She was amazed that I did not know. I told her the sea does not recognise countries. It just washes ashore. And that is how I had come to this shingle beach. I had washed ashore with the bits of drift wood and plastics and other debris. You are in Sicily, she said.

  I asked her if she had been to Berlin. She hadn’t, she said. ‘But you know where Berlin is?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Berlin is in the north of Germany.’

  ‘And from here,’ I asked her, ‘how might I get there?’

  ‘Germany? Airport,’ she replied.

  ‘By road?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  She said it was possible. But long.

  ‘What is long?’

  ‘And dangerous,’ she added, if I did what she suspected I had in mind to do. But what is longer or more dangerous than to be left to float in an ocean? I had made it to land, but none of the danger and fear I’d known in the sea had left me, or would leave me. I was still ocean drift, dependent on currents of helpfulness and luck.

  For a long time we lay beneath that dinghy. At some point we heard voices. A man’s and a woman’s. We heard their feet in the shingle. They sat down at one end of the dinghy. We lay below, our skins crawling with sea lice and sand hoppers, listening to their talk above. In the silences between they were kissing. And then I heard a voice I knew. From a mouth that tries to pick up a peanut off the bar with no hands. A look-at-me look-at-you look-at-us voice. A teasing voice, playful. Jermayne was like that. He had paid me the same attention. I wanted to bang on the hull and warn that woman. She should reach down for a handful of shingle and plug the hole of that sorcery. Or laugh—I had tried that with Jermayne when words failed to work. But it only made things worse. It livened him up. My laughter seemed to encourage him. And then I recalled, while listening to the woman sitting on the upturned dinghy, I seemed to like it. Ridicule does not come easily to me. But with Jermayne I discovered I liked the feeling of power it gave me. If I laughed it made him try all the harder. The more he purred and the more his admiring glances shone on me the more grand I became; at the bar by the hotel pool a bigger me was being wooed out of my staff supervisor’s skin. Now I think this must be a trick known universally to men. Because above us I could hear the same thing played out, and even though I didn’t understand a single word I knew its sounds.

  Eventually we heard them stand up, heard their feet crunch away in the shingle. We waited some more minutes. Then I had a peep out the side. It was dark. I saw pretty lights reflected in the black sea. I heard distant voices that were light and happy. I heard glass tinkling. I wondered if a hotel was nearby. While we were under the boat the woman had submitted herself to my authority. I hope it was no more than I intended: firm but kind in a supervisor’s way. From the moment we crawled out from under the dinghy and stood up in the soft night I gave up authority to her.

  For hours we’d lain side by side without knowing the creature we clung to. Now in the reflected night we stared at each other. I looked at her nice dress and her fine wristwatch, while her eyes roamed up and down me. That she appeared as concerned as she did made me worry that I might stick out in some way. Perhaps she hadn’t believed me when I told her how long I’d spent in the water, and how I’d come ashore, bitten as a sodden sea cucumber. Her eyes found my plastic bag. I told her it was my hotel supervisor’s uniform. She looked freshly surprised. She laughed, she said sorry. She laughed again. Then some books lying in the shingle distracted her. She stopped laughing and bent down to pack them in her beach bag. She took me by the wrist and led me across the shingle. For the first time in days my feet landed on warm tarseal or concrete. We were in a car park. And now we were getting inside a car that smelt of hot plastic; then came the thrill of sitting down, of sitting and driving along streets beneath lights I’d seen from out at sea. I did not want to get out of the car. I wanted to keep moving through the world in this way, looking back at people strolling arm in arm, at other cars diving in and out of narrow lanes. I thought of the Italian engineer with the parrot. Why had he given up this for the lane behind the prostitutes’ bar? In the car I saw the woman smile. Seeing that line of pleasure on her face I relaxed all the more. She was not afraid of me. That is also the moment she became my friend. Back at the shore when I stood up out of the shingle was when she saw that everything I’d told her was true. That’s when she must have made up her mind to help. She told me her name. She said, ‘You can call me Ines.’

  She lived in a small flat above a short flight of stone steps. Halfway up those steps I stopped. From another building nearby I could hear music. Someone singing—in Italian. For the first time I felt that beyond staggering ashore I had arrived. I was somewhere.

  Under a hot shower I washed the sea off me and out of my hair. She gave me shampoo, and conditioner to take out the knots. She gave me a white bathrobe to wear. She asked why I was laughing. It was because I felt like a hotel guest. I felt like a tourist. I could hear the washing machine spinning my clothes. I smelt the food before I saw it or tasted it. Rich tomato smells. I ate three bowls. I did not want any wine. Then we sat on a small balcony overlooking the dark shapes of buildings. Beyond the rooftops bits of sea shifted beneath a yellow-and-black sky. I wondered how many of the others were still out there. How many of them were hanging on? How many had drowned? I thought about the man with the box on his lap.

  Up to now only one other person in the world knew about Jermayne. When I told this woman, my new friend, my account sounded different to my own ears. My friend at the hotel who knew about Jermayne and gave advice freely understood my disappointment at losing a man I had thought of as mine. But that part of the story hardly mattered now. And as I told my new friend I felt like I was telling an older part of a story that couldn’t touch or harm me any more. The only part that mattered concerned my boy.

  She asked me why I didn’t go to the police. The answer is simple. It never occurred to me to do so. It never occurred to me that the authorities would help. Now I wonder. It’s hard to think that things could have turned out any worse. If I wanted her to she would telephone a lawyer. She might know what to do. When she said that, I stood up and undid the belt around the bathrobe. I moved towards my clothes on the drying rack. The woman followed me and steered me back to the cane chair. She hadn’t meant to startle me.

  We talked about other things. I told her about the ride in the truck to the boat. I sat in the back with one other woman, the rest were men, bouncing like pumpkins over unsealed roads until we reached the coast where the boat was to pick us up. She asked me many questions. She kept me talking until I had no words left.

  She made a bed up on the sofa. As soon as my head hit the pillow I was asleep. If I dreamt at all I know nothing of those dreams. The night seemed to pass very quickly. When I woke it felt like only minutes ago that I’d stretched out on the sofa bed smiling at the touch of the sheets against my skin. Now I looked up at a white ceiling that I could not remember. Someone was talking. Eventually I realised it was the woman. Though with me she had spoken in English. In her own language she sounded like someone else unknown to me. She was outside. I couldn’t hear the other person she was talking to. For the moment, I didn’t think any more about it. I lay there discovering aches in my body, in my lower back and shoulders. I lay there thinking, I am dry. I am comfortable. This is what it feels to be safe. Then I came back to the woman. I listened some more. She was on the telephone. As soon as I realised that I
sat up. It was early. Early to be on the telephone. My clothes were still on the drying rack. I put on the cotton robe and listened. Why was she talking in that way? In such a way that she didn’t want to be overheard. I remembered last night’s conversation. Was she speaking to the authorities? Why else was she on the phone so early? I made my own conclusions. And when I opened the door and saw her look of surprise I knew I was right. It had been dark inside the apartment. Outside the light was hard and bright. I did not recognise anything about the place. I did not remember climbing those particular steps. I saw the little car in the courtyard but that white car held no memory. All of it was strange. Even the woman who I had only seen in the dark. The strong morning light has turned my friend into a stranger, and we don’t think of strangers as we do of our friends.

  As I reached for the phone she pulled it away from my grasping fingers. I reached again, more determined this time. She lost her balance.

  The court decided that I was responsible for her death. I cannot argue with its decision. If I had not washed ashore. If she had not come to the beach that day or at that hour or walked down to that end where the dinghies lay. There is no end to thinking like this. If I had not been born—that is usually where such thinking leads. But I was, and so was my friend Ines and everything that we had experienced of life was moving us towards that moment on the steps where she has something that I want. I am reaching for that stupid phone as she is pulling away from me. And then? Well, it is like in a film. It is as silly as in a film. Her arm flies up. I see a leg, the edge of the stone, the metal handrail her arm bounced against. I hear her head make an awful sound.