O’Neal had seventeen children by five women.
He must-a felt like a real man.
Only way he could.
Drusilla was blessed with good hair, red skin, and the kind of exaggerated appendages men in hot countries want to do things to. Soon enough the island’s biggest crook, Maxie Johnson, swept her off her feet and into his palatial yard. By the time Drusilla had three pickney under the age of three, Maxie was incarcerated on another island, Rikers—courtesy of the New York City Department of Corrections.
Sweetness start to sour even before she turn twenty.
Candaisy’s mother, Mrs. Ferguson, was the seamstress all the English women paid to copy the latest European fashions. Her daddy worked sugar in Cuba for seven years to buy a plot of land in the Ovals and returned to get work as a supervisor at the Antigua Sugar Factory. Ferguson had five boys but adored his one and only daughter, Sweet Little Miss Candaisy.
Asseleitha lived in a hut up the remote coast of Barbuda with her widowed fisherman father, two older brothers, and two younger sisters. Wasn’t a few hundred folk on the whole island and most of them was far away in Codrington. She came over to St. John’s when she was twelve, after the baby she had was sent off to New York to be raised by an aunt. Asseleitha got taken in by Candaisy’s mother, who was a distant relative. Even though it meant she now had seven pickney living in a two-bedroom house.
That’s the way it was: women raised each other’s children and nobody expected no thanks. Wasn’t no big deal. Was normal in our world.
All five cronies went to Miss Davis Primary, even Asseleitha, who was older but had catching up to do, seeing as her father had kept her off school.
Merty is wearing a dark blue dress all buttoned up to the neck, almost, but not quite, choking her (un-for-tu-nate-ly), a blue cardigan, gray tights, black lace-ups.
Drusilla’s church attire consists of a purple dress, white shoes, and matching floppy hat the size of an open parasol, which will poke you in the eye if you don’t watch out.
Miss Candaisy’s in a brown polka-dot dress, and she got on her “church wig,” with fluffy auburn curls rather reminiscent of Shirley Temple’s.
As for Asseleitha, that woman is so thin her front and back are interchangeable, and her green beret must-a been transplanted onto her skull, because I ain’t seen her without it.
Carmel’s got on her church uniform of blue pleated skirt and white blouse. She don’t say any version of hello or goodbye to me these days, but I know she still vexed. None of the cronies acknowledge me when they enter. Carmel’s been bad-mouthing me so long they think I am a rotten egg. They all gonna hate me even more when I go leave Wifey.
She nods curtly at Morris before sorting out cold drinks and pouring oil in the frying pan for the three plantain, which has now got to be shared between seven.
Meanwhile, Drusilla is working off her churchified fervor by pacing up and down at the far end of the kitchen, practically swinging her black handbag that’s got a brick-sized Bible sticking out of it, like a slingshot at the Highland Games.
I should be wearing a motorbike helmet in case she sends it across the room.
Merty’s the Don Corleone of the church mafia, and if she’d had her way she’d-a put out a contract on me decades ago.
She sits down at the opposite end of the table, thuggish cannon balls in combat position.
“You see Annie’s granddaughter just now? Tanesha?” she says, hands over stomach.
Here we go . . .
“Who told her a miniskirt was suitable attire for God’s House of Worship? I blame all-a-those disgusting pop stars like that Gaga creature who wears nothing but yellow tape around her private parts. What those no-good whores should remember is . . .” She looks up at the ceiling. “God . . . Never . . . Sleeps.”
Miss Merty, every time you open your mouth I remember why your ex, Clement, dug a tunnel underneath the perimeter wall of your house and escaped onto a passing train many decades ago. You just spent three hours in a church that’s supposed to preach love, kindness, forgiveness, and spiritual enlightenment, so why you come back spewing vitriol?
Used to be worse when Pastor George headed up the Church of the Living Sinners back in the 1970s. Most of them acted like lovesick teenagers around him. Me and Morris called them the Brides of Brother George. None of them questioned the fact that this Man of the Cloth was driving around in a spanking-new saloon Bentley.
Pastor did the rounds of his most sycophantic parishioners in the evenings, treated to their finest meals and finest liquor. Perks of the trade, he once told me with a wink, when I opened the door to him and all but reeled from the gale force of his cologne. Number of times Carmel came back from church spouting stuff like, “Oh, Pastor George delivered a very fine sermon this morning, Barry. All about philanderers, homosicksicals, and moral reprobates.”
She’d raise an eyebrow and give me one of her lingering looks, about which I could write a two-thousand-word essay: interpretation, history, context, intention, insinuation.
I used to say to Morris, “Methinks Pastor Slimeball doth protest too much.” Next thing you know, article appears in the Hackney Gazette about how some rent-boy’s been blackmailing him—had photographic evidence. Soon after, pastor vanished with the church funds.
I try not to mention his name too often in front of Carmel, especially when she’s holding a Dutch pot.
She puts the food on the table, and we all circulate it, passing bowls, cutlery, condiments, and plates. I make a mental note of who is taking more than her fair share. Merty, par exemple, helps herself to five large slices of plantain when statistically we should each have three.
Morris notices too, and we exchange glances about what a greedy arse she is.
He usually sits quietly when the Living Sinners invade, and, because he is not a man of property, they ignore him.
The cronies compliment Carmel on her culinary skills.
“It tastes good, Carmel,” says Candaisy. Unlike Merty and Drusilla, Candaisy’s not got a bad word to say about anybody. All of which makes her more likeable but also agonizingly boring. If you looking for an argument, you end up fighting with yourself.
“Yes, Ma. It bang good,” Drusilla agrees.
The doorbell rings, and my heart sinks. This lot must be the infantrymen, and it’s the cavalry that’s now arrived—the second, even holier-than-thou wave who clean up after church in order to suck up to their latest dreamboat, Pastor Wilkinson, who’s as much a hypocrite as his predecessor.
I’m in luck. It’s my elder girl, Donna, and her boy, Daniel, whom I hardly see from one year to the next these days. Donna looks well vexed that the place is busting with the cronies.
With her scraped-back hair and shiny black tracksuit, she looks more like an off-duty checkout girl for Tesco than a social work trainer for Tower Hamlets. She says hi-hi-hi to everyone, excluding the one male person in the room who gave her life. Carmel must-a been on the phone first thing.
Donna don’t need much of an excuse to give me the cold shoulder anyways. She’s always taken her mother’s side on the bloody battlefield of animosity. I usually feel her disapproval soon as I walk into a room. She thinks I ain’t got no feelings. And when I leave her mother she goin’ despise me even more.
Daniel comes over to give his granddaddy a shoulder-squeeze. This is the boy I used to take to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs, and to the London Aquarium to see the dolphins. Then he lost interest in trips out with Grandy. Just as well. There’s a period between the Terrible Twos and the Terrible Teens when children are delightful company—after that, it’s best you lock them in a basement and feed them food through a coal hole until they leave home.
Look at him now, a sixteen-year-old giant. I wonder if he’ll take my side.
From the start it was obvious that Daniel’s father, Frankie, wasn’t goin’ pay no maintenance, so I stepped in and bankrolled his education. From the age of eleven that boy has never experience
d a class size larger than twelve. Naturally, he’s flying on the Magic Carpet of Private Education all the way to Oxbridge Heaven. Donna has decreed he will study what they call PPE: Politrickery, Pontification, and E-criminal-omics.
Far as she’s concerned that boy is Obama Mark II.
He’s only allowed out Saturday nights and no girlfriends until he’s finished school.
She jokes she’s a benevolent dictator.
I joke she should drop the “benevolent” crap.
“Ease up, Donna. Give Daniel some freeness.”
“Dad, my son is not going to end up a statistic.”
And that’s the problem: too many of our kids do. It can’t be easy being a single mother of a growing lad, a-true.
Daniel fetches two fold-up chairs from the cupboard under the stairs. Comes and sits down next to his grandy.
That makes nine for lunch: Merty in face-off; Carmel, Candaisy, and Morris to my right; Asseleitha and Drusilla to my left; Big Chief and Young Chief side by side. Ain’t goin’ be no stew leftovers for me this week.
I savor a succulent piece of goat, and wash it down with a smooth and replenishing swallow of the Great Tranquilizer.
“Hope there’s some food left,” Donna says, scanning the bowls on the table. She is a lazy cow. All of her life she’s been eating her mother’s meals, but she never reciprocates. Eats Chinese and McCrap. My daughter is most definitely a second-generation bra-burner.
“Mum, is there any wine?”
You want wine? Why didn’t you bring some?
Carmel shakes her head and gets the conversation goin’ again by revealing what Tryphena, one of their acquaintances, confided in her before church: that her eldest daughter, Melissa, has got fibroids. Now Melissa is a GP. We all know this because Tryphena’s been slipping this into every conversation for the past twenty years. Not only a GP but a senior partner in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, as if that puts Melissa and, by extension, Tryphena in direct line to the throne.
“Really? How big are they?” Drusilla asks, barely able to contain her excitement.
Best news is bad news for the media and Miss Drusilla LaFayette.
“They’re inside the lining of the womb, so they can’t easily be extracted. Apparently, as Melissa is menstruating three weeks out of four, she got to have a hysterectomy.”
Superb Sunday lunch conversation you started up, dear, while we’re all eating lumpy tendons of goat.
“She got pickney?”
“No, Drusilla, she hasn’t.”
“Well, once that womb is out, no babies for her,” Drusilla states, adjusting the parasol on her head for emphasis.
Drusilla should apply to join MENSA . . . really.
“You see, these women have brought it on themselves,” she continues, waving her knife and fork in the air. “You can’t cheat nature. Woman should have baby by age twenty-five latest. That way they just pop out like golf balls.”
Merty, who don’t like to be upstaged, looks sternly at Drusilla. “You talking nonsense. Fifty-year-old women can have children these days.”
Lovely . . . I am witnessing a coup d’étits around this very table.
Yes, ladies, slug it out.
Although Drusilla is used to being slapped down by Merty, today she’s determined to fight her corner.
“Yes, they can, but then the pickney comes out with two heads and ten legs, though, isn’t it? Anyways, how we know Melissa hasn’t had abortion? This is how career women carry on. Make baby, kill baby, make baby, kill baby, make ba—”
Merty bulldozes her aside. “Yes, but there’s one person who knows everything.” She points upward. “Maybe He’s punishing her.”
I look over at Carmel and see she is almost having a fit. I have never understood why my very intelligent wife (in spite of her faults) remains loyal to these women.
Carmel was a late-blooming women’s libber: first-generation bra-burner. Not literally, thanks be to God, because my wife’s bosoms has always been supported by sturdy architectural appliances. We both encouraged our girls to get an education and have careers. Carmel herself studied part time. Got herself a degree in business administration and a job in Housing at the Hackney Town Hall. Became uncharacteristically political for a few years, mouthing off about the miners’ strike, nuclear disarmament, even the IRA. I blamed working in a loony-left town hall. But, like all aberrations, her political period passed.
By the time she retired, Wifey was a senior housing manager with two thousand properties under her jurisdiction in Hackney.
Merty’s getting into her stride now; plays her trump card. “And another thing, I hear from very good authority on the grapevine that Melissa is one of those women who lies down with women.”
Yes, you go-wan, Merty. All roads in your dutty mind lead back to sex.
“Yes, I think I heard that too . . . er . . .” Drusilla says unconvincingly, glancing nervously at Merty but determined to continue her bid for power. “What I always say is, if woman was meant to lie down with woman, God would have given woman penis.”
Her problem is that when her mouth speaks, it don’t ask her brain for permission first.
“If Melissa is one of those lesbian characters,” she adds, rising to her theme, “it is an abomination. Does it not say in Romans that if man lies with man as he lies with woman, he will surely be put to death? Same goes with woman-woman business, and even that high-and-mighty pope over there in the Vatican agrees with me on this one.”
Miss Drusilla could be a professional orator for sure, a silver-tongued politician with the power to sway millions with her mastery of the silky art of verbal persuasion.
Meanwhile, neither Drusilla nor Merty notice that Donna is grinding her back teeth. Same way she used to when I told her off as a child.
She opens her mouth.
I can’t wait to hear what comes out of it.
Unlike her mother, my daughter is brave enough to nosedive without a parachute.
Knows her Bible too, seeing as Carmel dragged her to church every Saturday and Sunday for most of her childhood.
“With respect. With respect, Drusilla, Merty.” She sounds like the speaker of the House of Commons. (Ever since she’s been training social workers, she’s got worse.) “God also said that eating shellfish such as shrimp and lobster is an abomination. And Leviticus has all this nonsense in it about how we shouldn’t wear material woven of two kinds of cloth, and that if you curse your parents you’ll be put to death, and that slavery is fine.”
Donna Walker is playing to the gallery, the city, the country, the world.
“Look here, we don’t accept such scriptures, right? Isn’t it crazy to base our opinions on arguments written in Leviticus 3,500 years ago?”
Thank you, Donna, for rescuing your father’s dignity even though you don’t know it.
Lovely silence.
Loaded silence.
Merty and Drusilla look down at their food like it’s steaming-hot excrement.
Carmel is fingering her wedding ring like she never seen it before.
Morris is laughing inside but doing a good job of hiding it from everyone but me.
We goin’ postmortemize this later, big time.
Candaisy is transfixed by the sky outside.
Asseleitha’s head is bowed, like she praying.
I glance sideways at Daniel, who is texting under the table.
Donna continues, “Who cares what Melissa is or isn’t? It her own business. Saint Mark said we’re supposed to love everyone as Christ did, unconditionally and without discrimination. My moral compass is based on various spiritual beliefs syncretized with the core values of Christ’s teachings, the bits that make sense to me, at least.”
Syncretized . . . Moral compass.
Donna has inherited my superlexical gene. Both my girls have. Not that she’d ever credit me for it.
Regarding her so-called spiritual beliefs, Carmel told me years ago that Donna is a secret “goddess
-worshipper,” but she warned me not to let on I knew or Donna would be furious.
“As for some of that outrageous music out there? Buju Banton, Beenie Man, and the rest with their sexist, homophobic lyrics?”
Yes, Donna. You go-wan. Far as she’s concerned, all social ailments lead back to the effect of pernicious music on the youth of today.
“When I hear this child . . . this child of mine listening to that rubbish, I go through the roof. Really, I do. Worse, it’s the middle-class kids who buy this stuff, the wannabe hoodies at his school, the doctors’, bankers’, and lawyers’ children. They’re the bad influence.”
She shakes her head, and Daniel looks up sharply while slyly pocketing his mobile phone.
“Leave me out of it, Mum.”
“Well, I won’t tolerate it.”
“I can listen to what I like.”
“Not on my watch you can’t,” Donna snaps, flinging out her hand and knocking over her glass of Ribena, where it stays, spreading rather metaphorically over the white cotton tablecloth.
Merty and Drusilla, hitherto admonished, perk up at this altercation.
“So, Donna,” Merty seizes the moment, “if Daniel was one of them, an antiman, you’d be happy with that?” She mimics, “Mum, I’d like you to meet my boyfriend. He’s called Giles Smythe.”
Drusilla bursts out laughing. At this point Daniel groans, scrapes back his chair, and looks ready to leave the room, but something holds him back. I want to tell Donna not to answer: she’s playing you, trying to assert her position as top dog. But, oh dear, Donna deflates in her chair. I can hear the air hiss out of her.
What just happened to my ball-breaker daughter? Champion of Human Rights and Political Correctness?
Problem is, Donna was raised to respect her aunties, her elders, especially Merty, her mother’s best and most powerful friend. Somehow Merty just reduced her to feeling like an eight-year-old again.
“I’ve no idea if Daniel is ‘one of them,’ as you put it. If he is . . . it would be up to . . . him.”
Mr. Loverman Page 5