The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  “But are they pests?”

  “They does steal, yeah. It in their nature, nuh.”

  “But killing them — a little extreme, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You might. I wouldn’t. You ain’t have to live with them.”

  “You sound as if they scare you.”

  “Them? The little black boys? No way.”

  “I thought we were talking about blackbirds.”

  “Black whatever. And I tellin’ you now — no fockin’ way.”

  His gaze falls to the ground below, eyes flicking through the grass in search of further prey. Swiftly he brings the gun to his shoulder, aims at the ground, fires.

  Down below the grass is disturbed by a sudden frenzied whipping: a lizard, head bloodied, tossing around on itself.

  “Another pest?” she says, voice hardened.

  Reloading the gun, he sucks dismissively at his teeth. Then he takes aim and fires again.

  32

  SOME NEWSCASTS CLAWED their way into her stomach, raking at her until she could feel herself beginning to shred. Today’s, she consoled herself, could not get any worse.

  She steeled her stomach through the ads and the promos, and as she saw the opening graphics on the monitor, gave herself permission to simply read the text as it presented itself on the teleprompter. The lead item was the kind that left no emotional room for ad libbing a personal touch into the text; it offered no scope for editing in a conversational tone even as she read.

  She cleared her mind, and when the red light lit on camera one, when the floor director’s palm chopped her cue, she began to read:

  TRAGEDY STRUCK A BELVEDERE FAMILY THIS MORNING WHEN FOUR-YEAR-OLD MELISSA EDWARDS WAS ABDUCTED WHILE PLAYING IN THE FAMILY’S BACKYARD. HER BODY WAS FOUND FOUR HOURS LATER IN A GARBAGE CAN TWO BLOCKS FROM HER HOME. POLICE SAY SHE HAD BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTED. GARTH ROBERTS HAS THE STORY.

  It was in this yard that four-year-old Melissa Edwards …

  The monitor showed a small backyard crowded with a swing set and sandbox; then the camera panned to the rear of the house — small, detached, a disorder of things that suggested haste rather than poverty — and zoomed in on a window.

  … keeping an eye on her daughter from the kitchen window…

  The window that hung closed and empty now. Yasmin shuffled the pages of her script, trying to keep busy, trying to keep an ear on the report without absorbing its details.

  … turned away just for a minute, but long enough for…

  Her daughter had brought to her an almost manic clarity, the ability to see every possibility of peril small and large, from fingers disintegrating under rocking-chair skids to voices raised in panic from the midst of flaming houses. She had gained a renewed sense of the precariousness of life, the phrase that reporters so often applied to the American vice-president — just a heartbeat away — acquiring an acuteness that went beyond cliché.

  … beaten and sodo…

  The utter helplessness of an infant, and the terrifying trust of a toddler, made the sanctioned execution of those who would harm them no longer seem so repugnant. Her daughter’s vulnerability, she acknowledged, had evoked in her the most primitive of reactions. Holding Ariana, confronting that vulnerability, she knew herself capable, in the child’s defence, of actions otherwise unimaginable.

  Police have arrested a thirty-three-year-old drifter…

  Her view had narrowed; it had simplified. She no longer cared to debate the morality of an eye for an eye, could no longer accept absolution of perpetrators in the larger social picture. “So the guy’s a drifter,” she said sourly to Charlotte standing beside camera one. “Context is no excuse.”

  “Revenge, then, Yas?” Charlotte asked.

  No, not even that. She found herself nagged by a more complex notion: that the brutality of certain acts removed the humanity from the human who had committed them. Execution would not solve the larger problem, she admitted, but it would solve the smaller one: this little cancer, at least, would not kill again.

  … mother is under a doctor’s care. This is Garth Roberts for Newsline in Belvedere Township.

  At the cut to commercial, Charlotte approached the anchor desk. “What’s happening to you, Yas?”

  “I’ve had a child,” Yasmin replied, shuffling her papers, and that child had brought her awareness of aspects of herself she’d never before known existed. What Yasmin did not say was that even as she heard herself expressing these thoughts, she could not believe that she was saying them.

  It was later, well after the newscast was done, after the studio had gone dark, the crew had dispersed and the makeup had been cleaned off, that she could allow her jaws to clench and her hands to shake.

  Charlotte said, “So what is it you want, Yas?”

  Yasmin thought long and hard. “I want my daughter, on awakening to darkness in the middle of the night, to know beyond all doubt that she is safe.”

  When her hands no longer shook, she drove home.

  33

  THAT’S NOT ME!

  The images were over two years old, and her daughter’s reaction to seeing this other self for the first time on videotape was the same as Yasmin’s had been on hearing her own voice from a tape recorder: the known self seemed absent.

  “That is you, honey.”

  Ariana laughed, her joke rewarded by the concern that clouded Yasmin’s face.

  “I know, Mummy.”

  Yasmin saw that she had been teased. Snarling in mock displeasure, she grabbed her daughter and began to tickle her, the laughter shrill and manic in delight. Soon her daughter fought free and ran off, leaving Yasmin with the answer she would have given had the girl been older, the answer she had grown accustomed to over the years in response to the moment of fright — It’s not me! — that had come to her in childhood.

  Yasmin crossed her hands on her lap and let her mind summon the tinny sounds: Hello, my name is Yasmin. Mary had a little lamb… It was without source, sound without context, but the tone recollected in all its strangeness still caused her heart to quicken.

  No, honey, she would have said, that isn’t you. That’s you as you were the moment those images were made. You’ve changed in countless ways, you’re changing every minute — so that person there, that stranger you pretend not to recognize, is not you. She is the You that used to be because every you is momentary, you are an act of ongoing creation.

  And for reasons she could not identify, Yasmin thought of her mother.

  34

  PHOTO: THE DAY MAY HAVE BEEN CLOUDY, OR PERHAPS THE YEARS HAVE EFFACED THE CLARITY OF SUNSHINE BY IMPOSING ON THE BLACKS AND GREYS A POWDERY FILM THAT HAS TURNED THE IMAGES TENTATIVE. THEY ARE LINED UP ONE BESIDE THE OTHER IN FRONT OF A LOW WALL, A CONCRETE FENCE PERHAPS, ABOVE WHICH IS A SKY SO BLEACHED THAT IT SUGGESTS NEITHER COLOUR NOR CONTEXT. THEY STAND IN DESCENDING ORDER OF HEIGHT AND AGE, THREE CHILDREN UNDER TEN, ALL SKINNY, ALL BAREFOOT. THE BOY WHO WAS TO BE HER FATHER, THE ELDEST, OFFERS A HALF-SMILE TO THE CAMERA, AND A SQUINT THAT APPEARS TO BE TRYING TO SEE THROUGH THE LENS TO THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S EYE; THERE IS ABOUT HIM A LACK OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, HIS SHIRT UNBUTTONED, HIS LEFT FOOT RAISED AND PROPPED ON, OR PERHAPS SCRATCHING AT, HIS RIGHT CALF. BESIDE HIM STANDS PENNY IN T-SHIRT AND SHORTS, FACE INEXPRESSIVE, EYES GAZING NOT AT THE CAMERA BUT JUST PAST IT; SHE IS SLIGHTLY PIGEONTOED, BUT THE CURVATURE OF HER SHOULDERS AND THE WAY HER ARMS HANG DOWN HER FRONT TO HER INTERLACED FINGERS REFLECT A CERTAIN UNEASE: PENNY SEEMS NOT TO KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HER BODY. TO HER LEFT CYRIL STANDS AT STIFF-ARMED ATTENTION, HIS SHIRT TUCKED NEATLY INTO HIS SHORTS, HIS FEET PERFECTLY ALIGNED. A TOOTHY GRIN SCREWS HIS FACT INTO A GUILELESS DELIGHT, EYES GAZING WITH FRANKNESS INTO THE CAMERA.

  Penny says, “You know, when he was small, Manager here use to eat dirt?”

  Cyril’s eyes narrow unhappily into a sidelong glance at his sister.

  “Yes, dirt. Imagine!”

  “Ringworm,” Cyril says defensively. “I had ringworm.”

  “Yes, but Ma
nager, man,” Penny says with rising merriment, “you eat enough dirt to feed the worm and plant a garden in your belly to boot.”

  “And who use to feed me the dirt, spoonful after spoonful?”

  “Don’ go blaming me again.”

  “Ey, look, I don’ remember none o’ this, but Ram always swear that it was my loving sister —”

  He falls silent, defence severed by Penny’s laughter.

  Penny says, “When we were chil’ren, we ran around barefoot. We threw stones, we played sword fight with sticks. We climbed trees and fell off walls. We took our scrapes and our parents din’t go crazy. They were too busy, they din’t have time to worry ’bout us every minute. That was the life we lived.”

  Cyril says, “But we went to school, too. And when we din’t do our homework, we got strapped and caned. And they hardly knew about it. That was the life we lived too.”

  “You making them sound negligent. They weren’t negligent, they were busy. Is why they changed so much at the beach, always shouting after us. They had more time to see the dangers.”

  “No, no, don’t misunderstand me. I not saying they were negligent. Is our memory I talkin’ about. ‘That was the life we lived.’ We din’t live a life, Penny. You did, I did, Ram did. If I get your drift, you remembering freedom.”

  “Yes, in a way.”

  “Is not exactly how it stay with me. That was the life you lived. Or the life you remember. I remember climbing the mango tree, and I remember the day Ranjit fell off and shattered his right arm. I remember the months he spent teaching himself to write with his left.”

  “And Ranjit ambidextrous to this day.”

  “Yes, but is jus’ a party trick, Penny. He shattered his arm and it leave him with a lifelong party trick.”

  “So what you have against party tricks?”

  “Nothing. If is a clown doing them.”

  “Is always been your problem, Manager. You always thought anybody who liked a good time was a clown. Remember — Vernon use to say you were born old?”

  “But he din’t really mean old. He meant boring.”

  “Well, anyway, you can’t help it if it in your nature, eh?”

  Cyril acknowledges her words with a grunt and a weave of his head. “Guess not,” he says.

  As Penny, victorious, tugs the box closer and rummages through its depths, Cyril says, “And Shakti, Yasmin — what kind o’ mother was she?”

  35

  IT WAS ONLY after she had retrieved all the hidden chocolate Easter eggs that her daughter, satisfied with the total, ventured the opinion that there was no Easter bunny.

  “Why not, honey?”

  “There’s no Easter bunny town, so the Easter bunny has no place to live. So there’s no Easter bunny.”

  Yasmin glanced at Charlotte. “At least it’s logical.”

  Charlotte gritted her teeth. “Little fascist,” she mumbled. Then she turned to the little girl. “So where’d all those Easter eggs come from?”

  “The store, silly.”

  In her daughter’s realism, Yasmin saw her mother.

  Easter Sunday had never been the occasion of egg hunts in their apartment. From her earliest memory until she was in her late teens, it was a morning marked only by a box placed by her mother beside the cereal bowl on the dining table; in it would be a single large Belgian chocolate egg, inside of which would be a variety of smaller fine chocolates.

  In the late morning, having returned from church, Mrs. Livingston would come by with a small box of what her mother sometimes referred to, with dissatisfaction bordering on disdain, as drugstore Easter eggs, colourfully wrapped chocolates the size and shape of hens’ eggs stuffed with a sweet yellow and white concoction the consistency of stiffening glue. Yasmin would accept the gift with what she later understood to be a baffling pantomime of loyalty: with a show of gratitude to Mrs. Livingston, with a covert glance of disgust to her mother, with a haste in her room to unwrap and consume one or two of the eggs.

  Her mother’s gift would have cost five times Mrs. Livingston’s, but to Yasmin, Mrs. Livingston’s — meant to be devoured rather than savoured — was by far the more appealing. Her mother always assumed that if large sections of the Belgian egg remained weeks later it was because Yasmin wished to relish it for as long as possible. The thought gave her pleasure, and Yasmin never enlightened her as to the true reason. They were lessons — the infantile appeal of a certain crudeness, the keeping of secrets for reasons other than egotism — that Yasmin, on having her own child, did not forget.

  Nor did she forget the nature of her relationship with her mother. She had no memory of hugs and caresses, or of kisses beyond the obligatory. When she was ill, her mother would administer medicines and rub her back and chest with ointment, but there was no sense of companionship, of maternal vigil: her mother would say goodnight with a pat on the head and not look back.

  Later on, they recommended books to each other, told each other of movies to be seen or avoided. An intellectual relationship, Yasmin thought, when she was of an age to flirt with such evaluation — and yet, the closest they had ever come to a theological discussion was the Easter Sunday her mother, seeking to provoke a reaction from Mrs. Livingston, happened to mention that she found the entire idea of Easter — the Crucifixion, the burial, the Resurrection — rather grotesque.

  Yasmin paused on her way to her room: “Gee, Mom, the idea of eternal life kind of appeals to me considering the alternative.” Often her mother appeared to be bullying Mrs. Livingston, but this was the only time Yasmin came to her defence.

  She knew her mother to be what others called a charming woman — Charlotte was always dazzled by her — but charm, she had concluded, required distance in the way that stagecraft did; there was a vital element of wilful illusion to it. To sit too close to the stage was to see the frayed edges of the costumes, the sweaty armpits, the effort behind the illusion. But a certain measure of personal theatre was important to her mother, a woman of affectation but not of pretense. Her airs were meant not for others but for herself. She practised the idea of her life in a way that avoided sham and hypocrisy, happy behind the facades that made her real to herself.

  And yet it was those facades, to which they both played, that denied Yasmin the physical affection whose absence she noticed only when, a mother herself, she felt the hunger to hold her daughter, to feel her warmth and the pulsing of her blood. When she kissed her daughter, she offered more than affection. There was something holy about it. A communion. It was, each time, like conferring a blessing.

  Yasmin was not resentful that her mother had apparently felt none of these emotions. Nor was she angered by their absence. She was simply puzzled by it.

  36

  OUR DEPARTURE FROM England was rather precipitate. One day my husband called me with the news that we had to return home. Within a week we were gone. We had expected to be there for another year or two. There was so much we hadn’t done or seen. But it couldn’t be helped. His political enemies, you see, had found a way of getting at him even there, thousands of miles away from our island.

  Perhaps it was my displeasure at being forced to leave a land to which I was finding myself more and more attached — precisely, I think, because of its strangeness, because of my lack of natural attachment to it. Nothing was expected of me, you see, and so I could make it all up as I went along. I suppose it was inevitable, wasn’t it — that I would fall in love with a land that gave me such freedom. So you see, my dear, that it was England was immaterial. I might have developed a similar passion for France or Spain or Italy. But the passion was there, and it led to a displeasure which — at least at first — caused me to lay the blame squarely at my husband’s door.

  It all began with a cable — a simple, silly cable of greetings to his people back home. A political anniversary of some sort. But that cable, which was of course made public, reminded his political enemies about him. And it gave them an opening. Once they had that opening, that point of vulne
rability — well, my husband in their position would have done the same. He too would have found a way to profit from the situation.

  First came the accusations of betrayal. As a member of our delegation in London, he was expected to represent all our people and not just his people. This cable of fraternal greetings — Just what was his game? his enemies asked.

  Then came the more serious allegations. I have never fully understood what happened. My husband, as I’ve said, did not share the details of his work with me — but there were accusations of bribery. Evil tongues wagged that he had received payoffs from certain British sugar interests — a way of ensuring continued special access to the plantations after independence. Now my dear, my husband was many things, not all of them laudable, but he was not a thief. I did not for a minute believe these accusations, but the truth was immaterial. He could never completely clear his name — all politicians were assumed to be corrupt, you see — but that would not be a hindrance. What mattered was that he return to the island and take up the cudgels. As my husband well knew, ours was a world in which courage was valued over probity.

  He never found out who was the source of the accusations. It was always They say or I hear or Apparently. But my husband suspected someone on the British side of the independence negotiations. It’s all rather Byzantine, but my husband believed that the British and his political enemies back home stood to gain by ensuring he had no political career to return to in the island — so they had conspired to smear him. Nothing from his enemies back home could surprise him, but the British! He had expected better. And yet there was an entire history too, full of ugliness. So the abstract encountered the personal, and this was the beginning of his hatred for the British — a hatred, it must be said, he would cultivate. It was too politically useful to pass up, you see. An easy way to whip up the troops, if you see what I mean. But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?