Winsome was hardly paying attention. Although the judge had allowed her to remain seated throughout cross-examination because of the advanced stage of her pregnancy, the weight of her belly was making her back want to break.
Her eyes wandered over the green leather upholstery of the pale wooden benches. From the start of the case the courtroom had felt like an office, an office where everybody else had some reason for being there, some business to do, except her. People walked up to other people and whispered. This was a country full of whisperers. That was one of the odd things about England. Nothing was what it seemed. Everything was camouflaged – buildings especially. Courts masqueraded as offices; blocks of flats were built to resemble multi-storey car parks; their National Theatre pretended to be a prison and the new prisons were disguised as modern college buildings. People too. People concealed their intentions. And the people with power were not the extravagantly dressed ones, the people with power were the dowdy ones. Winsome wondered briefly if Sonia was giving the kids their tea. She had expected to be home by now. The judge, a nondescript man with glasses, was scribbling like a clerk in an invoice department. On the panelled wall over his head was a carved crest mounted on a board the shape of a shield. Woven in and out of crosses, lions and roses were some words that Winsome could not make out. They were written in funny lettering. The first word spelt HONI. Trying to decipher the rest gave her a headache. She had a strange sensation, as if a piece of string was connected from the back of her head to her left eye, pulling it out of focus. Then she heard the judge saying:
‘I sentence you to twelve months’ imprisonment.’
Everyone began to gather their papers together as if the day’s work was over and it was time to go home. Winsome got up and vaguely prepared herself to go home too. A woman in a blue suit was plucking at her sleeve and saying in a kindly tone:
‘Come along, dear.’
Sitting in the green prison van with its horizontally barred windows, Winsome was still unable to grasp what had happened. She somehow felt that the van would drop her off at home on the way to wherever it was going and she would be in time to give the kids their tea. The van threaded its way through the busy main streets of north London and stopped in front of some enormous gates in a high red brick wall. The gates opened and they went through. She and two other women got out. She found herself in an asphalt yard surrounded by more red brick walls. In one of the walls was a small door. Another screw in blue uniform was opening the door with one of the keys from the chain round her waist. She was beckoning to Winsome and beaming at her:
‘It’s all right, love,’ she kept saying, ‘this way, love.’
Dazed, Winsome followed her up some stone stairs to some double doors, the paint round the locks scuffed as if they had been repeatedly kicked. The word ‘RECEPTION’ was written on a sign overhead. In the cubicle where she had been told to undress she stood, hugely pregnant, trying to hold the coarse blue dressing-gown they had given her across her belly.
Then her waters broke all over the grey lino.
She lay in the hospital bed. Everything around seemed so white; the starched, white sheets on the bed; the nurses in their crisp white uniforms; the walls with their shiny white gloss paint. Winsome felt uncomfortably aware of her black face against the white pillows.
‘You’re seven centimetres dilated now. It won’t be long,’ said the ginger-haired nurse. Winsome turned her head away. The whiteness hurt her eyes. The pain was like a bad period pain, a long low ache in the back. Then the other pains started, rolling over her like a steam-roller. She was wheeled into the delivery room.
Back in the ward, Winsome slept. At her side, in his hospital cot, slept Denzil. Twelve hours after the birth, the prison authorities would come to take her and the child back to the prison. Some six hours after she had given birth, Winsome was awoken by the auxiliary cleaner bumping her mop against the legs of the bed. She looked up into the smiling, black, bespectacled face of the cleaner:
‘Gal, you gat one beautiful pickney there. Is it a boy?’
Only half awake, Winsome nodded.
‘Is wha’ yuh gwaan call ‘im?’ The cleaner did not wait for Winsome to answer. She approached the head of the bed and said conspiratorially:
‘No more kids for me, no sah! I done wid dat. Me periods dem stop, you know. An’ lemme tell you, it is worse when dey stop dan when yuh gat dem. It was terrible. Terrible. Pain. Pain inna me belly all de time. An’ the blood – it black. An’ full of someting like cornmeal an’ terrible bits.’
Winsome focused her eyes on the clock at the end of the ward. Seven fifteen a.m. In six hours they would come to take her back to prison. The cleaning woman took her mop and continued to talk:
‘Black women strong, yuh know. Me mudda had me in de carner of a canefield and she was back at work a few hours later. I’m sixty-two. And another ting. Our blood is good and red. White women – dere blood is pale and weak and sarta watery. I seen it wid me own eyes in dis hospital.’ She moved off down the ward with her mop and bucket.
Winsome looked over the side of the cot at the pale, brown baby, his flat puffy face crowned with a light black frizz. He was light-skinned now. He’ll darken up later, she thought. More than anything she wanted to take him home, for the two of them to be reunited with Anita and Chantale. The sheet felt wet underneath her. Pulling back the bedclothes she saw a spreading scarlet stain. It was shaped like the poinciana tree in her grandmother’s yard. She sat up and put her legs over the edge of the bed. Her body still felt big and bulky and misshapen and the stitches pulled inside her. She reached into the wooden locker next to her bed and felt for the hospital issue dressing-gown. She put it on. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of her. She picked up Denzil and wrapped him carefully in the cot blanket, keeping a watchful eye on the nurses. Denzil felt limp and tiny and utterly relaxed. Winsome walked gingerly with him to the swing doors at the end of the ward and let herself through. The large corridor was empty. Uncertain how to operate the lift, Winsome began to descend the stairs holding the rail with her left hand, Denzil tucked into the crook of her right arm. One flight round the lift. A second flight and then she was opposite the main exit. A few more steps and she was outside the hospital.
Three-quarters of an hour later, Sonia looked down from her window into the yard of the flats when she heard the engine of a taxi ticking over. Alerted by a phone call, she had the money ready and ran down to pay off the cab. Winsome was climbing out of the cab awkwardly with the scrap of a baby in her arms.
Winsome rested exhaustedly in the low chair by the television, sipping a cup of tea. Her two daughters plucked and nuzzled and clambered over her and their new brother. Sonia stood at the stove frowning through her square-rimmed spectacles and pushing back the shoulder-length beaded extensions on her hair. The action of the judge in jailing Winsome more or less the day the baby was expected had so enraged Sonia that she dismissed the consequences of helping her. She looked through the doorway at the heavy, defeated shape of the woman in the chair:
‘What are we gonna do?’ asked Sonia. Winsome shrugged. Denzil yawned and she automatically loosened the blanket round him so that he could stretch his legs and kick a little. Then she dozed again. From the kitchen window Sonia saw the police car arrive in the yard. Her heart beat faster. The car remained in the yard, its blue light spinning, while two policemen ran up the five flights of stairs to where Winsome lived. It was the flat above Sonia’s. Sonia heard the sound of the door being forced and then the sound of footsteps wandering about over her head. She watched as they left. Winsome slept. Sonia tried to telephone Junior but there was no reply.
At one o’clock the two women watched with fascination as a picture of Winsome appeared on the mid-day news programme. A suitably grave and concerned newscaster made the following announcement:
‘The Home Office is concerned over the welfare of a twenty-five-year-old woman prisoner who escaped from a hospital in north London early today only ho
urs after giving birth to a baby son. The Home Office fears that the woman may be suffering from post-natal depression and the baby is said to have infantile hypothermia. The Home Office want the woman and child to be returned to custody as soon as possible so that they can be properly cared for and given the attention they require.’
Winsome was sitting upright:
‘What did they say was wrong with the baby?’ she asked Sonia. She unwrapped the child and examined him carefully. He slept contentedly. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with him.’ The words had sounded ominous, like those other mumbo-jumbo words Levi had warned her about in the courtroom.
‘That’s just a trap to get you back into jail,’ said Sonia shrewdly. Winsome hugged her baby and at the same time managed to wipe down Chantale’s face with the corner of a handkerchief:
‘I’ll have to go back in the end, I suppose,’ she said, recognising the inevitable. Sonia wanted to make her outrage known, to make some sort of protest. It was Sonia who began to cry. She sat on the brown leather pouffe wiping the tears from the corner of her eyes:
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t go in for all this Rasta business but sometimes what Levi says is true. They are wicked, evil people these Babylon people. If you’ve got to go back there then we should make one gigantic fuss about it. You must get ‘pon de television and mek dem see what these people dem a do to you. Mek dem see you side of the story.’ In her excitement, Sonia slipped back and forth from cockney to patois.
‘Does Junior know about the baby?’ asked Winsome suddenly.
‘Junior don’t even know you got a sentence yet. Everything happen so quick. I phone him but he ain’ there. What do you think – shall I ring up the television people or do you want to try and stay out?’
‘I won’t be able to stay out long, not with the baby, so you can do what you like. Just let me stay here the night and I’ll go back tomorrow.’
Winsome was enjoying being in a place of colour after the arid courtroom, the drained grey jail and the pristine hospital. Sonia had a brightly patterned red and black carpet. A May breeze was catching and blowing the net curtains and the colour television in the corner of the room was like a burst of flowers. Sonia’s little boy Marlon came to look at the new baby:
‘He’s a nice boy, innit Marlon?’ said Winsome. Marlon nodded.
‘OK,’ said Sonia. ‘I’ll go to the shops. Don’t answer the door.’
During the afternoon, Winsome occasionally peeked out of the window. People came and went in the streets, in and out of the banks, the greengrocers and the hardware stores. Everything appeared to be a mockery of normality. The people looked like extras in a film, acting out everyday life for the cameras.
Sonia shopped, burning all the while with rage.
Winsome gave Denzil his first bath and oiled his little brown body, pleased to administer these rites in an ordinary bathroom, hung with lines of little shorts and T-shirts. At tea-time, she automatically fed the two little girls and Marlon.
‘Can you take care of the girls for me, Sonia?’ she asked when eventually Sonia returned, laden with plastic carrier bags. ‘I don’t want my mum to get her hands on them. She don’t treat them right. But she’ll always help you out with money and so will Junior.’
‘Course I will. Me tek good care o’ dem an’ me bring dem up to see you. And as soon as I find Junior I tell him to come straight down to see you and the baby. Listen Winsome, you’re not just going back like that. It’s disgusting what they do to you. Mek we phone those television people so you go back with everybody knowing just what is going on.’
‘I don’t feel no way about it. Do what you want,’ said Winsome. ‘Phone them in the morning. I’m going to bed for a bit.’
The television crew had difficulty setting up the lights and cameras in Sonia’s small front room with the kids running about and playing. The television journalist who smelt of after-shave lotion asked Winsome to move her chair a little bit further from the window. Winsome noticed how the bright artificial lights drained the room of colour and made everything harsh and pale. She still had a headache. She moved her chair, clutching Denzil in one arm. The production assistant fumbled with her clip-board and tried to prevent Anita and Marlon having a tug-of-war with an electric cable.
‘Now then.’ The newsman was embarrassed now that he was face to face with the silent black woman with the scar on her lip. ‘What I thought was I’d ask you one or two questions and, maybe, ask your friend here what she thinks and then, if you’re going to give yourself up anyway, which you say you are, we could give you a lift back to the prison and take a final shot of you walking into the jail with the baby to sort of finish the story off. If that’s OK with you. I don’t want to put any pressure on you. So is that OK?’
Winsome nodded. Sonia perched anxiously on the edge of an armchair, puffing at a cigarette. The camera started to roll, taking in pictures of Winsome sitting in the low chair with Denzil in her arms and Chantale sucking her thumb and holding on to her mother’s skirt. In hushed and sympathetic tones the newsman asked:
‘Why did you run away from the hospital?’
The lights were white and hot. Winsome became aware of two cold patches of sweat under her arms. She did not know what was required, what to say:
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, barely audible. Her hand comforted Chantale at her skirt. The camera swung from Winsome’s expressionless face to Sonia. Sonia looked bright and defiant. She had dressed specially for the interview in her new, red nylon blouse and her gold chains:
‘I think it’s terrible that a judge should send someone to jail for a year just when she’s due to have a baby. I think it was a wicked thing to do.’ Sonia sounded clear and cool. Winsome just wanted it all to stop.
‘Thanks, that’s fine,’ said the newsman. ‘Let’s pack up now and take all the stuff down to the prison and then we can get that last shot – if that’s OK with you, Winsome.’
Winsome rose awkwardly from the chair and began to collect a few bits and pieces for herself and the baby. Sonia was to stay behind with the other children.
‘God, I feel awful,’ giggled the production assistant behind her clip-board to the director. ‘I feel as if I’d captured a runaway slave or something.’
The cameras trained on Winsome as she walked with the baby up to the main entrance of the modern jail building. She entered the door where the gate-man sat behind bullet-proof glass operating the electronic sliding doors. He grinned:
‘Hello, love. Come back to us, have you? I’ll ring up to the mother and baby unit and get someone to come down and fetch you.’
Winsome sat silent on the bench just inside the entrance.
Two minutes later a blue-uniformed screw appeared to collect her. She had badly permed blonde hair and the face of a retarded schoolgirl. She spoke with a northern accent:
‘Hello Winifred. Oh we are pleased to see you back safe and sound. You were a naughty girl to run off like that. We were all worried to death. Let me have a look at the baby. Ahhhhhh. Isn’t he gorgeous.’
The news item appeared on the early evening news. By the late evening news it had already been replaced by bigger and more important stories.
That night, Winsome slept, worn out, with Denzil by her side, in a cell as cheerless as a public lavatory which someone had made a feeble attempt to decorate with one or two pictures.
The dream came back, but this time a little altered. She dreamt that she was in unfamiliar countryside. The execution must have taken place for she was already dead and being carried in a funeral procession. But she was not in a coffin. The hands of strangers were bearing her body along. Close to, the terrain was rocky and the path narrow, wending its way through bare, hilly landscape. The bearers moved carefully to avoid the big clumps of wild grass. All she could see ahead was the long, empty, winding path. Resting on her chest were some bright flowers. They seemed familiar. She tried hard to remember the names of them. But the names wouldn’t come.
Tuxedo
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT TUXEDO HAS GOOD ideas about as often as a hen has teeth. Which is why Tuxedo is on his own this particular night, crouching with his ear to the tumbrils of a small safe behind the counter of the video shop. The snag is that Tuxedo is not built for crouching lower than a pool table. His left foot has cramp and his blue satin boxer shorts are twisted in his crotch causing him aggravation. On top of all this, twiddling the knobs on the safe is getting him nowhere and he is overcome by a craving for sweet potato pie.
Anybody, from the Frontline to the Backline, could tell you that Tuxedo is jinxed. Take one instance. Yesterday Tuxedo buys a second-hand car for three hundred and fifty, cash. This guy gives him all the documents but when he gets home the log book turns out to be an old parking summons and the car is clearly hotter than Tina Turner; if Tuxedo thinks he has just laid his hands on some pure Jamaican sensimilla, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will turn out to be homegrown from Kensal Rise; even the all-night Kentucky Fried Chicken runs out of corn on the cob as soon as Tuxedo steps through the portals. Anybody could tell you that the day Tuxedo gets lucky will be the day it snows ink. Which is why he has this near-permanent frowning glare on his face, a wicked screw that most people mistake for hostility when in fact it’s the anxious stare of one who knows that God has been up most of the night laying traps for him, sometimes in the shape of things, mostly in the shape of people.
Tuxedo glares at the safe:
‘Come on, you bastard,’ he mutters, then adds: ‘It’s all right, God, it’s the safe I’m talking to, not you.’
Of one thing, Tuxedo is certain. God is white. Once, when he was younger, he had listened to his militant cousin explain how white people had tricked the world into believing that Jesus was white when he was really black and so it followed that God was black too, or at least brown, more likely brown seeing that he was from the Middle East. Tuxedo told all this to his mother who gave him several licks for daring to call God ‘a dutty half-breed’. In the end, Tuxedo came to his own conclusion, simple and to the point. If God isn’t white, how come black people have such a hard time?
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