The man returns, a sheet of paper in his hand. He shows it to Cyril, who examines it with interest. He makes a comment. The man replies, then points to something written on the paper.
Yasmin decides Cyril is checking on some business: accounts of some kind. Her eyes wander to the forest at the far end of the clearing, to the density of its darkness and its promise — threat? — of the inexorable barely contained.
Cyril folds the paper and hands it back. They part company, the man returning to the house, Cyril heading back to the car.
The man stands in the open doorway, framed by shadow. Watching.
Cyril, businesslike, gets into the car, turns the key and drives back through the coconut trees with the same confidence he showed when driving in.
18
THE ROAD AHEAD narrows, asphalt crumbling at the edges, trees rising now as if from beneath the paving.
Cyril says, “Hope it don’t hurt too much.”
To Yasmin’s quizzical glance he says, “Your tongue, I mean. Don’t bite it too hard, nuh.”
She offers a gentle laugh, unable to decide whether or not this is an invitation to inquire.
“His name is Caleb. Built that house with his own hands — no plans, nothing. Just an idea that he manage to expand over the years. He’s a good man, hard worker.”
“A friend?”
“Not really. I help him out a little.”
I help him out a little: yet an unlikely pair.
“We were young when we met. Both had wives and futures we couldn’ see. I was out here with your father, doing some work, nuh. Caleb helped us, he knew the area. Anyway, whenever I was up here I’d stop by, just to say hello. In politics, a little hello once in a while does go a long way.”
And on one of those visits he found that Caleb’s wife had fled, leaving him with two teenaged sons and a young daughter. The boys had already established their own futures with their father, working vegetable plots, rearing chickens, hunting wild game, catching and selling crabs during the season, trapping cascadoo — an armoured fish, he explains, fine-boned and delicious curried — in the swamps.
But Caleb wanted his daughter to have a different life. Cyril remembers asking what he meant by that, remembers the silence that came to him, the way he had scratched at his head in embarrassment: he could not put into words what to him was only the vaguest of concepts. A life away from here, away from the trees and the swamps, a life where she would not be ground down by physical labour as her mother had been. She was only seven, there was time yet to shape a new life.
Cyril had discussed the girl with Penny. Penny suggested waiting a few years, until the girl was ten or so. Then they might be able to find her a position as a maid.
Cyril sighs. “At leas’ she help me understan’ something important,” he says.
So he made arrangements on his own. The girl was boarded with a family in town some distance away — a town with a school where she could be educated. The expenses were all assumed by Cyril. “It was no big deal, you know. Couple o’ uniforms, books, room an’ board. Penny does spend more on Christmas presents.”
That was twelve years ago, and she was now on the verge of graduating from high school. If she did well at the A-Levels — and the school report Caleb had just shown him indicated that she would do very well indeed — then she could, if she wished, go on to study nursing. Through contacts he had maintained from his days in politics with Ram, he had already taken steps towards a modest scholarship for her.
“You’ve seen the house,” he says. “You know how they get water? From the rain, runnin’ down a pipe from the roof to a barrel outside. Look, I can’t pretend to tell you what Caleb life is like. I ain’t know. Or at leas’, I only know what I see. And what I see is things like that barrel full o’ rainwater.”
A sensation of sand comes to Yasmin: the grains fine and warm, moulding themselves to her, a cast for eternity. Ahead, a cocoon of shadow and light.
“You see the distance that girl has travelled?” Cyril says. “You see the distance she can still go?”
And what does Penny think of all this?
“She doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Is nobody’s business. You have to understand. People would jus’ bad-talk me. Is blackmail, or is my love-chil’, or something else nasty. Is bes’ kept quiet.”
Are there others?
A few. Only a few. “People think I’m a useless man, Yasmin. I know they laugh at me, and not always behind my back.” A grimness shapes his face. “But maybe the useless man not so useless after all, eh?”
And for the first time in years, Yasmin feels herself awed. Yasmin asks, “Did he know my father?”
“They must’ve met a couple o’ times. But —”
But: the word hangs there in the warm air of the car, a gentle pulse echoing back onto itself. Yasmin reaches for it, swallows it. Feels it float, fluttering, into her head.
“You see” — and his tone is thoughtful, pleading — “you see, if Ram had a fault it was that he had little sympathy for people who wanted just to make a living. He couldn’t understand them: couldn’t understand how they could be happy with what he saw as a small life, small pleasures. ‘Daily livin’, bringin’ up the chil’ren.’ It was hard on him, pretending to care — because only by promising to make these things possible could he build the larger life he wanted for himself. When Ram didn’t have to pretend, he didn’t. He let others barter the enthusiasm in his place.
“So they must’ve met a couple o’ times. But they wouldn’ remember each other. He wasn’ memorable enough for Ram, and Ram wouldn’ve made himself memorable enough for him.”
19
THE FIRM’S ASSESSMENT was completed two weeks later. The five double-spaced pages were lying on the dining table when she returned home after the newscast. Jim, fixing himself a whisky and soda at the counter, nodded at it. “It’s unsparing,” he said. “As it should be.”
“What does it say?”
“See for yourself.”
She ran through the pages quickly, not bothering to sit, absent-mindedly accepting a sip of his drink.
On the first page, the client’s requirements were reviewed. On the second, Jim’s design was described. On the third, in brutally passive language, all of the design’s shortcomings were highlighted: corners were too tight, pillars too few, margins too narrow.
He said, “If they’d given me a chance, I could’ve saved her.”
“Her?”
“It.”
20
’THIS WAS HIS favourite spot.”
The coastal road has brought them here, to a promontory high on the cliffs she saw earlier. She finds it an unsettling coastline — flat and straight one moment, winding and rising the next; from palm trees and beach to jungle vegetation and cliffs; and everywhere paths hidden from her eye. It occurs to her that, despite her moment of panic in the mountains, she trusts Cyril. But she knows too that she trusts him, in part, because she must. The blind wandering in an alien landscape have no choice but to trust.
It is windy here, the water down below at the base of the rocky cliff choppy and violent, flaying itself against the boulders.
“I don’ know how he ever found it. Hardly anybody else knows about it. This was where he came when he wanted to do some serious fishing.”
“Do you fish?”
“Not since Kamal. But you know what they say about fishing. Is not really about catching fish. Is about being by yourself, letting the mind wander. Thinking, nuh.”
He clasps his hand behind his back and wanders over to the trees lining the far edge of the promontory. “Actually, I only came here once with him. I been back many times since his death. You’re the first person … Even Penny’s never been here.” He walks up to a tree and slaps the trunk. “See this tree?” He turns around to point to another about twenty feet away. “And that one?”
“This happened when we were older. Ram was probably in his early twenties and a couple of his friends were moving
away, to the States. So he invited a bunch of us up here for a night of camping and fishing.
“We didn’t have much in the way of equipment, jus’ a big tarpaulin that we used to make a tent. He ran a rope from this tree over to that one. Makeshift but workable. Then we lit a fire and settled down for some ol’ talk. Had a few beers. Jus’ joking around, nuh. Relaxing. Eating.
“Everybody knew that things were about to change. Once people start moving away, it doesn’ stop there.
“A little later that evening, after the sun set — and it was no big deal, it set on the other side — Ram and some o’ the fellas get out the fishing equipment and set off down the cliff with a torchlight. There’s this rock about halfway down where he used to fish from. It was starting to get cold — the breeze, nuh — so I went into the tent and cozy up with a torchlight and some comic books.
“They came back some hours later, without a single fish — but, as I say, is not the point. They stayed up for a while, talking, having a last beer. And eventually they came into the tent and stretched out too. It was starting to get pretty cold, the wind was picking up, and the tarpaulin was starting to flap in places. Ram had to tighten it down.
“Anyway, some time later that night, I don’t know what time exactly but it was damn late, this loud, booming, cracking sound woke me up. And I don’ mean gently. I remember opening my eyes and wondering what the hell was going on. The wind was whipping, I could hear thunder — and just as some lightning crack, one end o’ the tarpaulin rip right out and fly up into the air like a sail unfurling. Everything started to blow everywhere. Blankets here. Comic books there. You name it. And then, boom! — rain start to pelt down. And I mean buckets and buckets and buckets. In a second we were drenched. Us, tent, food, everything.
“We scramble like devils, running around in the dark picking up this, picking up that. Finally, we jus’ drop everything and headed for the cars. And that’s where we end up camping — in the cars. Wet to the skin. Along with every mosquito in the neighbourhood. For the rest o’ the night all you hearing is slap-slap-slap.
“By next morning, storm was gone, sky was blue, sun was glorious — and all of us looked as if we had chicken pox. Everything was wet, no way to get the fire going, so forget coffee or tea. The bread you had to wring out if you wanted to eat it. I had peanuts for breakfast.
“You know what Ram do? He strip down to his underpants, hang his clothes on the rope to dry, picked up his fishing equipment and headed down to the rock. The rest of us weren’t too happy, I’ll tell you, we wanted to head back. But he won the day. We were here. The weather was nice. Everything would dry out. Jus’ keep on going. So we did.
“You know, Yasmin, years later when he got into politics those fellas were still there. Through t’ick and t’in. And when things got rough, I bet you anything that just about everybody thought about that night right here — that dark and stormy night, as they say — and jus’ keep on going.”
There is no path — or at least, once more, a path discernible only to Cyril.
The way down is precipitous: hard earth studded with stones and chipped rock. She follows quite literally in his footsteps, placing her feet where he places his.
He offers his hand, but she refuses. Should he tumble with her hand gripped in his, he would pull her down too.
Although the waves are far below — their movement an audible suck and splash against the rocks: a liquid rustling — she can feel their power, and the power of the sun above, in the fine spray that lights on her skin and evaporates immediately.
The descent is slow but steady, her eye so fast on the placement of Cyril’s shoes that she is almost surprised when he says, “Here we are.”
Here we are: his fishing rock. She looks at it, sees that it is just that — a rock — and she wonders at her vague disappointment. She asks herself what she expected, and finds she has no answer. It is what Cyril has all along said that it was, she tells herself: the rock from which he fished.
Slate grey and smooth, smaller than she expected but in all likelihood just the lip of a much larger boulder buried within the face of the cliff, it provides adequate room for four people, five at a pinch. But, beginning to feel beyond its geology, she sees that it is a place for one, the world reduced to immodest sky and water. She senses, then, the eloquence of its seduction. Senses herself strangely disarmed, and yet, standing here unsheltered, not exposed.
Cyril, behind her, says, “Look at this.” He is crouched in the far corner, his fingers reaching down to the surface of the rock.
She looks. She sees nothing.
Cyril snatches a handful of earth from the cliff wall, rubs it onto the rock, then brushes it away with delicate sweeps of his palm.
Now she sees it. Or them. Two letters, each about three inches high. Brown on grey. Not letters, she corrects herself. Initials: VR.
Cyril says, “He broke his favourite knife doing this.”
Yasmin goes weak at the knees. A sudden vertigo: She lowers herself to the ground.
Cyril says: “This is as close to him as I can bring you, Yasmin.”
She touches the rock: traces the letters with her knuckles; brushes the earth from them, exposing them.
She reads the gouges with her fingertips.
Her ears detect the bite of steel on rock — and for a moment the letters come as clear to her as the day they were cut.
Only when she feels herself overwhelmed by the need to clasp them, to make them material in her palm, do they dissolve.
Only then, her sight suddenly misty, does she lose them.
And only then does she let herself heave in Cyril’s arms.
21
THE SEA IS held back by a braid of boulders, large, grey rocks intricately veined in white. Cyril has drawn her attention to them with the remark that, were they to return to this spot in a hundred years, they would find the boulders reduced to pebbles. “That,” he says, “is history.”
Their precarious solidity is, however, fitting, for here — a narrow strip of gravelled earth poured and battened down between the boulders and the roadway — seems a precarious perch for a village. If the island were to shrug, Yasmin thinks, it would all tumble into the sea.
They had stopped at what Cyril refers to as a “parlour,” a roadside convenience store. It is no more than a small wooden room with large, open front doors, the planks painted pink; the window shutters, propped open with sticks, green; and the galvanized-iron roof its natural zinc. Despite the bright sunlight, a bare bulb hangs burning from a long cord.
“Mornin’, mammy,” Cyril says heartily to the aged woman seated behind the counter.
She nods in response, too preoccupied with her own thoughts to respond to Cyril’s friendly greeting.
He claps his hands as if in anticipation of a feast and orders lunch. “Two aloo roti, please, mammy. One hot-hot and one —” he glances at Yasmin, a look that is partly in assessment, partly in challenge “— and one medium.”
Yasmin accepts the challenge. “Make it hot-hot,” she says, the words strange on her tongue, like an expression from an unfamiliar language.
Cyril frowns. “You know what you doing?”
“I’ve never met a pepper I couldn’t eat, Cyril.”
“Must run in the family. You sure?”
Yasmin shakes her head. “I can’t exactly back out now, eh? And by the way, since you’re probably wondering — yes, I know what aloo roti is. Curried potato rolled in a kind of pita bread.”
“Now look, Yasmin.” He places his palm on his heart. “If you going to tell me that Shakti used to make it, you going to give me a heart attack. Some things just not in the realm of possibility, you know?”
“No, no. It’s just that back home you can get everything, just about every kind of food imaginable. Including aloo roti. Nothing’s really exotic anymore.”
The old woman places their meal on the counter, the sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. As Cyril pays, Yasmin finds two words echoing in he
r mind: back home. She hears the words shaped by her mother’s voice, she hears them shaped by her own, and she is struck for the first time at the difference in implication: the same words signifying different worlds.
22
DO YOU KNOW, my dear Mrs. Livingston, how some faces suggest the past?
From the photographs she has sent to me over the years, I see that my sister-in-law Penny has grown into a handsome woman, with that edge of severity so many handsome women seem to acquire. And yet, in her face you still see the essential features of the child I never knew and of the young woman who became a close friend. I believe, Mrs. Livingston, that no matter what experience life brings us, the person we were meant to be never disappears. The essential personality, I mean. I believe it has been so with Penny. She is a woman who has endured, despite everything.
No, her life has not been particularly harsh. She has always lived in a certain comfort. But one aspect has always been — how shall I put this? Problematic should just about cover it. You see, Penny was treated by men with a level of deference not accorded the other single women in our circles. I mean, they were always polite, but with the other unmarried women there was often an undertone of flirtation, a suggestion of naughtiness, if you will. With Penny, however, this was never, ever, in evidence, and was the cause of some pain to her. She was not an unattractive young woman, with all of the normal yearnings of her age, but men, I imagine, found the proximity to my husband intimidating. Smacks of cowardice, doesn’t it? Harsh, I know, but I remember too well Penny’s frustrations, her bitterness even, to understand and forgive. Simply put, I do not wish to understand and forgive.
What I remember with great sadness was the regularity, and a certain indiscrimination, with which Penny would develop crushes. She would convince herself of the attractiveness of one available man after another, often men with whom she had little in common. These crushes never led anywhere, of course, and I was the one she would come to, once the failure was clear, to conduct a cleansing post-mortem. All the virtues she had perceived would be turned around, remade into flaws. The men would suddenly be sickly or untrustworthy. The dazzling smile a leer, a shy helpfulness, effeminacy.
The Worlds Within Her Page 27