Shape-Shifter

by Pauline Melville

  ‘Here it is. These men are very important. They are the men who meet every day to fix the price of sugar on the world market.’

  She shows a photograph of dull, sombre-suited men with white faces gathered round a table and points to one of them:

  ‘This is the man who owns the company your daddy works for.’

  I try to look interested but I can feel the time running out. I am right.

  ‘Now what is all this nonsense about the da Silvas?’ she asks.

  ‘I hate the da Silvas. They keep callin’ me “ice-cream face”.’ And I burst into tears.

  Later that night I lie in bed under a single sheet. The doors to the adjoining room are fixed back and I can hear Aunt Rosa talking to Mrs Hunter:

  ‘Look how she fair-skinned, Frank’s daughter. No one would ever know. An’ she complainin’ about it.’ They laugh and lower their voices, but I can still hear fragments. Mrs Hunter is talking in a troubled voice about her brother:

  ‘… the first coloured officer in the British Army … imagine how proud … other officers would not speak to him … the men refused to obey his orders … Some incident … trumped up, I tell you … an excuse … cashiered … the shock that ran through the family.’ I hear the sob in her voice and Aunt Rosa hush-hushing her.

  I creep out of bed towards the open doors. Moonlight floods over the leaves of the Molucca pear tree and spills through the jalousies onto the floor, a dark lake of polished wood. Stepping delicately over it is Salamander, the pale, golden gazelle of a cat, thin with pointy ears. He seems to be dancing some sort of minuet, extending each paw, then with a hop tapping the floor. Delighted, I move to take a closer look. And then I see it. Between his paws is a huge cockroach, a great black ugly thing lying on its back, its feelers moving this way and that. I must have squawked because there is a pause in the conversation, then Aunt Rosa says:

  ‘Get back to bed, chile. If you look out of the window on a night like this you will see Moongazer at the cross-roads.’

  ‘Hullo, ice-cream face.’ It is my father and he is laughing as he lifts me way up into the sky and sing-chants:

  Molasses, molasses

  Sticky sticky goo

  Molasses, molasses

  Will always stick to you.

  My aunts, uncles and cousins are standing round by the wooden lattice at the front of the house. Everyone is laughing and I laugh too.

  Some time afterwards, in England, I am playing with my doll Lucy in a garden full of browns and greys. Lucy’s face is cracked like crazy paving because I left her out in the rain but I love her because her hair is the colour of golden syrup. The cockney boy who lives next door has climbed into the pear tree on his side of the fence and is intoning in a sneery voice:

  ‘Your fahver looks like a monkey.

  Your fahver looks like a monkey.’

  I go inside and tell my mother:

  ‘Mum, Keith says Daddy looks like a monkey. And I think so too.’

  My mother stops beating the cake mixture. She looks sad but not the way she looks when she is sad herself. It is the way she looks when she is teaching me what to be sad about:

  ‘Ahh,’ she says, as if I have grazed my knee. ‘Well don’t tell Daddy, you know he would be so hurt.’

  They are lost, Wat, his father and the ragged remnants of the crew. They are padding the small craft which the Arawaks have named ‘the eight-legged sea-spider’, and they are lost in a labyrinth of rivers, a confluence of streams that branch into rapids and then into more billowing waters all crossing the other, ebbing and flowing. They seem to travel far on the same spot so that it takes an hour to travel a stone’s cast. The sun appears in the sky in three places at once and whether they attempt to use the sun as a guide or a compass they are carried in circles amongst a multitude of islands.

  I am fourteen and back from England for the summer. My friend Gail Fraser has pestered and pestered her mother to cook labba for me before I return.

  Now we sit at the dinner table, Gail’s great-aunt Bertha, her mother, her brother Edmund, and me and Gail. Great-aunt Bertha is a yellowy-skinned woman whose face is all caught up in leathery pouches under her white wavy hair. Gail’s mother is square-jawed with iron-grey crinkly hair and she is too practical for my liking as I judge everybody by how much ‘soul’ they have. My friend Gail is honey-coloured and round as a butterball. She has brown almond eyes and curly brown hair and scores about eight out of ten for soul. We have spent most of the holiday lying on her bed exchanging passionate secrets and raiding the rumbly old fridge for plum-juice. My deepest secret is that I am so in love with her brother Edmund that I could die. Edmund has what I call a crème de cacao complexion, tight black curls, full lips with the first black hairs of a moustache. He is slim and has black eyes that are brimful of soul. I know he would respond to me if he would stop talking about cricket for ONE minute. As it is, I have to be content to breathe the same air as him, which is pretty nice in itself.

  Gail and I are trying desperately not to scream out loud with laughter as great-aunt Bertha chides Edmund for not wearing his jacket:

  ‘My father would not see the boys at dinner without their jackets.’

  Dreadful snorts are coming out of Gail and Edmund is pulling faces. I can’t look up. Gail is heaving and shaking next to me. Great-aunt Bertha turns to me:

  ‘When I was in London I used to look after a sick. She was a real lady. I was her companion. I would have liked to stay in England. I asked to stay but they wouldn’t let me.’

  Gail explodes and runs out of the room. Her mother looks disapproving. I manage to hang on to myself.

  That evening Edmund takes Gail and me in the rowing-boat to the middle of Canje Creek because Gail insists that I drink creek water and I won’t drink from the edge because it’s too muddy and slimy. We row out onto the midnight black and glittering waters of the creek. It is silent apart from a goat-sucker bird calling ‘hoo yoo, hoo yoo’ in the distance.

  ‘This time tomorrow I’ll be in London.’

  ‘What will you be doing?’ asks Gail.

  ‘I don’t know. I might be in a coffee bar with my friends playing the juke-box.’

  ‘Play something for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘ “Blue-suede Shoes” by Elvis Presley.’

  ‘Oh phooey that’s old. They won’t still have it.’ I can tell that she is hurt. I am sitting behind Edmund. I kiss him on the back of his shoulder so lightly he doesn’t notice. Gail grasses me up:

  ‘She kissin’ you, Edmund.’ He ignores me.

  I lean over the edge of the boat, cup my hands and scoop up some of the water. It is clear and refreshing.

  ‘Now you must come back,’ says Gail. ‘Now you’re bound to come back.’ And her voice is full of spite.

  Wearied and scorched, they bury Wat as best they can in the muddy bank of the creek. His father’s demeanour is grim and he says no prayers. They just sit around for a bit. After they have gone, dead leaves, twigs, bark and moss begin to float and fall onto the burial spot, the first signs of rain. Seed-pods plummet and burst on the water and heavy raindrops start to pock the surface of the creek. Out on the lake torrential rains flatten the reeds at the water’s edge. Everything turns grey. Wat’s body, loosened from its grave, begins a quest of its own through the network of creeks and streams and rivers.

  A month later, Wat’s father gives up his search for the tantalising city of El Dorado and writes in his log:

  ‘It’s time to leave Guiana to the sun whom they worship and steer northwards.’

  I am back at last. The old metal bucket of a ferry dips in the sweet brown waters of the Berbice River, passes Crab Island and ties up at the stelling.

  I walk through the town to the house. The Po’ Boy tree is still there but the house looks ramshackle, sagging on its rigid wooden stilts, the wood where the paint has peeled, grey from the sun.

  I haven’t told my aunts I’m coming. I’m going to surprise them. I go up the st
eps to the front door and announce myself through the open slats of the jalousies. There is no sign of life.

  ‘It’s me. Frank’s daughter,’ I say, in case in their old age they have forgotten my name.

  Through the slatted door I see a shape. It is one of my aunts. She doesn’t open the door. I peer through. She is swaying and wringing her hands.

  ‘Avril. It’s me. Open the door.’

  I can hear her moaning softly:

  ‘Oh this is disastrous. Oh this is disastrous. Deep trouble. We in deep trouble.’

  Finally she opens the door. I hear Aunt Rosa’s voice on the telephone, shriller than I remembered it:

  ‘I tell you it’s a plot, Laura. They’re lying to you. They’re all on drugs. Don’ believe them.’ She hangs up and turns around. Both of them are neatly dressed in blouses and slacks. Aunt Rosa’s hair is still in the same black roll at the front but her face has shrunk with age and her eyes are blazing:

  ‘So you’ve come back. I suppose you want our money. Well you’re unlucky. We haven’t got any.’

  We go into the living-room. The place is in dusty disorder. Aunt Rosa stands by the window, angry and troubled:

  ‘I didn’t want you to see us like this. Why did you come? We all busted up over here. The family is all busted up. Laura is in the hospital with some kinda sclerosis. She’s twisted up in the bed like a hermit crab and all the doctors and nurses are on drugs, I can see it in their eyes.’

  Avril is moving about, muttering, picking up things and putting them down again, pulling at the frizzy hair round her dark impassive face:

  ‘STOP STILL FOR ONE MINUTE WILL YOU, AVRIL?’ screams Aunt Rosa. ‘Your niece is here from England. Don’t you remember her? We raised her and then she left.’

  ‘Where’s Auntie Florence?’ I ask timidly.

  ‘We had to send her up to Canada to your uncle Bertie’s. She livin’ in the past. She talkin’ to the dead. She thinks they’re still alive. She anxious and upset all the time. She thought everything in the house was on fire. Even us, her sisters. She saw us burnin’ up burnin’ up like paper, black with a red edge. Paper sisters. She’s turned into a screwball.’

  She moves over to the sofa and sits there gripping her walking-stick and turning it round and round. I try to think of somebody who could help:

  ‘What about the Frasers? Do you still see them?’

  ‘Oh they left a long time ago, Toronto, New Orleans, somewhere. They all left. I didn’t think my brothers would leave but they did. They all left and married white, street-walkin’ bitches. They left us behind because we were too dark.’

  She leans forward and speaks passionately:

  ‘I loved my brothers. My brothers are innocent. It’s their wives that keep them from us. Especially that red-headed bitch that stole Bertie. Mind you, Bertie could charm a cobra. Bertie could charm a camoodie. She drugs Bertie, you know, so that he can’t come back.’

  She sniffs the air:

  ‘I can smell somethin’,’ she says suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Somethin’ I shouldn’t be smellin’,’ she snaps. She is glaring at me suspiciously:

  ‘You don’ look like you used to.’

  ‘How not?’

  ‘You used to have brown eyes.’

  ‘No I didn’t. Look, there’s a photo of me on the dresser. I always had blue eyes.’ I go and get it. It’s dusty like everything else. The sight of it throws her into a venomous rage:

  ‘Just because you’ve got white skin and blue eyes you think you haven’t got coloured blood in you. But you have. Just like me. It’s in your veins. You can’t escape from it. There’s mental illness in the family too.’

  I am shocked. She continues in an unstoppable outburst:

  ‘You sent your father’s ashes back here because he had mixed blood. You were too ashamed to let him stay in England. And you’re blackmailing your cousin over there for the same reason. If anyone finds out he’ll lose his job! Why do you do these terrible things? You were a nice chile. Why do you do all these terrible things?’

  ‘Do you have anything to drink in the fridge?’ My stomach is churning.

  ‘I don’ know. Go and look. Everything’s gone middly-muddly over here.’

  I open the fridge door and recoil. Inside, the contents are webbed with mould from all the electricity cuts. I go back to the living-room:

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll fix for somebody to come in and help you.’

  ‘We don’ want strangers pokin’ their noses in, seeing what’s happened to us.’ She lowers her head then jerks it up:

  ‘Your father’s skin was whiter than mine. If he’d been my colour your mother never would have married him!’

  ‘Rosa. We’re in the nineteen-eighties. Nobody cares about that sort of thing any more.’

  ‘You think I’m crazy?’ she sneers. I go over to Avril to give her a hug. She pushes me away:

  ‘I’m not the affectionate type,’ she says. ‘Oh, this is terrible. This is really awful.’

  ‘AVRIL YOU’RE A DONKEY,’ shouts Aunt Rosa. ‘She’s mentally ill too. She’s ashamed of her illness. She hasn’t left the house for a year. She too frighten’. I do the shopping.

  Everything was fine until January the fifth, then it all stopped.’ Avril starts to mumble a litany of potential disasters:

  ‘What will happen when she leaves? There will be all those people in the street. What will she do? And it might rain. She might get wet.’

  ‘I hope she melts,’ snarls Aunt Rosa.

  Suddenly, she puts her head in her hands:

  ‘I don’ know what’s happened to us,’ she says.

  That night I try and sleep. The room is musty. The sheet is damp with humidity. The mosquito net has holes all over. Through the night I hear one or other of them pacing the house. I half-sleep and doze because it gets into my head that they might set fire to my room.

  It is evening when I reach Georgetown. The great house is just as I remember it.

  The sight of Evelyn at the door fills me with relief. I notice the fine net of grey over her coarse tight curls.

  ‘Goodness, Evelyn. My aunts have gone crazy in New Amsterdam.’

  ‘So I hear. Well you know what they say. All the mad people are in Berbice. You should come back here for good. Not just for your aunts. There is so much to do here to turn this country round.’

  I follow her up the old circular wooden staircase. Sitting on the steps half-way up is a black woman in a loose skirt. Next to her are two sacks marked: ‘US Famine Aid. Destination Ethiopia.’ Evelyn sees my curious stare:

  ‘You are shocked? She’s a smuggler from the Corentyne. We past shame in this country. There are people for whom crime is still a shock. We way past that stage. Way past. That is wheat flour she tryin’ to sell.’

  We go into the large kitchen and Evelyn fetches me a glass of freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice. It tastes deliciously bitter and cool after the hot journey.

  ‘Have you got a match, Evelyn?’ I’m waving a cigarette in the air.

  ‘You din’ bring matches?’ She laughs. ‘You have forgotten what it is like to live in a country that is bankrupt. There is no milk in the country. Dried milk costs twelve US dollars a bag. Money has left the banks. Money is dancin’ around in the streets. The black market rules here now. Come and I will show you which room you are staying in. The others are in a political meeting downstairs. They said they will see you in the morning.’

  In my room I fix the mosquito net. Evelyn is leaning against the door jamb:

  ‘You have everything you need?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks. I’m going to bed, now. I’m exhausted. We’ll talk in the morning.’

  ‘You know,’ says Evelyn, ‘you should stay. If the party could get hold of two hundred thousand US dollars we could turn this country round. I will get it somehow. I am telling you, this place could be a paradise.’

  After she has gone I peer through the jalousies. Outside is a sugar-apple tree and
dragon-tongue shrubs by the brick path below. In the yard I can see the rusted shells of two cars.

  First published by The Women’s Press Limited 1990

  This edition published by Telegram 2011

  TELEGRAM

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  ISBN: 978-1-84659-092-4

  eISBN: 978-1-84659-182-2

  Copyright © Pauline Melville 1990 and 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed in the UK by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX.