“Typical male behavior. Mum leaves you alone for a few minutes and everything goes to pot. Daniel was deeply hurt that you threw him out onto the street to fend for himself. He could have ended up sleeping rough with drug addicts or become a rent-boy. He’s explained it all to me, and yes, he got a bit tipsy, silly boy, but we all made mistakes at his age. He’s still so young and understandably very upset at your overreaction, but he’ll get over it. I know my son.”
Oh no you don’t.
“The poor lamb really missed me. I can sense it.” She dismounts from her warhorse and slumps into a chair. “He sounded so miserable on the phone. I think he’s realized how much he needs me.”
Yet again me and Maxine bounce eyeballs off each other.
At least one thing is apparent: Daniel did not spill the beans. Maybe he biding his time.
“I’m shattered. Couldn’t sleep on the flight back, because of the squealing piglet next to me. Planes should have a soundproofed compartment for little children, or the hold will do. Max, put the kettle on, I’m dying for a cup of coffee.”
Maxine does an eyebrow shuffle at me, but I give her a quiet nod to do as her sister says.
She makes the coffee and slams it down, which Donna don’t even notice.
“Our primary objective now is to spare Mum this nonsense about Daniel. She’s just buried her father, and the last thing she needs is to return home to a stressful situation. The funeral was bloody awful, by the way. All these money-grabbers turned up posing as his children. Mum’s lawyer saw them off and hired a security firm to patrol the property, because as soon as Mum leaves, they’ll be trying to squat it. It’s just as well one of us was there to help Mum project-manage everything.”
Me and Maxine exchange yet another set of glances.
“She needs our support more than ever. Max, pass the sugar, will you?”
Maxine don’t move from where she’s leaning against the sideboard. Her mission has always been to assert herself by opposing her elder sister. If Donna had become an artist, Maxine would-a become a solicitor. Some folk have to react against something: parents, siblings, government, society. They think they have free will, when all they doing is willfully opposing. Oh yes, I should write a thesis about that too.
Donna’s always envied Maxine’s free spirit, personality, and imagination, whereas Maxine’s always envied Donna her steady career trajectory, annual salary, and pension plan.
Donna gets up and snatches the bowl of sugar from the sideboard.
Donna resented Maxine for taking me away from her those first few years when Carmel wasn’t coping. Two pickney is not a good number. Children in larger families learn pretty sharpish that they only goin’ get a percentage of everything, a quarter, sixth of conversation, affection, treats. When you only got two kids, they can’t relinquish the hope that they might just get everything.
While Donna takes herself to the shops, me and Maxine brave the front room, Carmel’s ancient treasures scattered on the floor amongst cans, bottles, spliff and ciggie stubs. When Maxine opens the windows, a breeze ushers in fresh air to decimate the foul vapors.
She starts windmilling. “The biggest problem is putting things back in their rightful place,” she says, holding a porcelain milkmaid in one hand and a crocheted dolphin in the other. “I don’t suppose you have any idea where these dreadful things go?”
I don’t answer, because a surge of nausea has come over me. I sit down on the settee while Maxine whizzes around. Eventually she notices and levers herself down on the coffee table directly opposite.
“You’re still feeling rough, Daddy?”
“My dear, I have never felt rougher.”
“You’d better lay off the booze. Let this be a warning. You are way too old to be caning it.”
Thanks.
“You’re lucky you’ve got away with it. The Grim Reaper usually comes knocking for profligates like you in their late fifties.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, / That almost freezes up the heat of life.
“Then what are you talking about?”
Be not afraid of shadows . . .
“I feel . . . psychosomatically rough.”
“Really? Okay, explain how you feel psychosomatically rough, using words of fewer than seven syllables preferably. Deal?”
I stare at her and see her clear brown eyes holding me in: steady, strong, warm, almost grown-up.
I can feel myself welling up again, so I avert.
This is the problem with succumbing to the tyranny of tears: once you let them out, they start to abuse your vulnerability.
You tremble and look pale . . .
“What really happened here?” she asks. “I would suggest more than you’ve said.”
I sink down into the settee.
“You were absolutely petrified when Donna was on the phone.”
How the hell she notice?
“I totally know something’s up.”
I hear cars pass outside. I never usually do.
“I mean, it’s not like Uncle Morris not to be nipping at your ankles either. Where is he and why haven’t you mentioned him? He wouldn’t let you go off the rails.”
The rest of the house is silent. Is funny how you don’t notice silence most of the time. But silence is a sound in itself, a-true. Silence is the humming absence of a tangible sound that you can ascribe to something. Actually, you only really experience silence when you dead, although that theory is hypothetical and not one I’d like to put to the test.
A bluebottle comes in through the window and zooms annoying around the room, before exiting again. How can something so tiny aggravate the hell out of the human race?
Maxine comes and nudges herself up next to me. “You could have killed yourself.”
No, I only wanted to numb myself.
“Goneril will be back with the shopping soon, so tell me what I need to know before she does.”
All of this Spanish Inquisitiveness. Why do women always feel the need to go prying into other people’s feelings?
“Maxine, get on with tidying up and leave your father be.” I raise myself.
“No!” She grips my arm tight and forces me back down. “Tell me what happened, or I’ll have to get on the blower to your grandson.”
Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish.
“I’m deadly serious. Talk to me.”
And somehow, when the pressure becomes unbearable, I do. I tell her about me and Morris since way back in St. John’s and how we been carrying on ever since like agents in postwar West Berlin. I tell her he’s got the hump. I can’t tell her I leaving her mother.
Maxine is quiet for once, and when she speaks she picks her words carefully. “Daddy, do you really think I never knew about you and Uncle Morris?” She takes my hand in both of hers. I feel her soft, silky, skinny fingers—so light and warm. “Nothing gets past my gaydar, and you are beyond camp. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?”
Laaard, this girl is a dark horse.
“I first suspected it when I was a teenager. By the time I was twenty-one and going to gay bars, I was pretty sure you and Uncle Morris were an item, but I never felt able to raise it with you. You’re my dad.”
“What about Donna?”
“Daddy, watch my lips: we—do—not—tell—Donna, okay?”
“Maxine, I supposed to shock you, but it is me who is a-shock.”
“I’d say you haven’t been thinking straight for a very long time. You’ve been trapped inside yourself, which can lead to a very distorted view of things. My advice to you is to join a gay pensioners’ club for support, where you can share experiences with fellow old-timers over a gentle game of table tennis or croquet.”
Oh lovely, dribbling in a wheelchair with mi tongue lolling out and a patch on mi pants where I keep wetting meself.
“Seriously, though.” The mischievous imp grins. “You
’ve got to start acting your age.”
Like you?
“To be honest,” she continues with increasing gusto, relishing her Agony Auntie role, “your biggest problem is that you don’t always notice what’s really going on with other people, if you don’t mind my saying.”
So now I’m the solipsist?
“If you’d been paying attention, it would have been obvious I’d be totally cool with your homosexuality.”
The only homo I am is sapiens, dearie, but I hold my tongue. I ain’t got the energy to start up that particular debate.
“What I do have a problem with, how-evs, is that you’ve been cheating on Mum all this time. It’s been bugging me for twenty years.”
“It’s not really cheating—”
“Shuddup, Daddy. It is cheating and, from a feminist perspective, totally out of order.”
“You got a feminist perspective? Since when?”
“All my life, but not in the dungarees, hairy armpits, and donuts-for-breakfast kind of way, obv.”
“Right.”
“Okay, getting back on point . . .”
She realizes she’s been totally off point? A miracle.
“I can see you’re feeling rotten, so I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being you, to make you feel better. Morris was right: you raised me to express myself. And you led by example too. No way was Mr. Barrington Walker going to disappear into the bland sea of homogeneity. You told me never to get hung up on racial discrimination but to turn a negative into a positive; otherwise I’d develop a victim mentality. You encouraged me to break through the tiled roof, as you put it.
“The thing is, Mum will never know about you and Morris so long as Daniel zips it. And a word of caution about Golden Boy: you might want to consider buying his silence?”
Increasingly Maxine turns a sentence into a question by inflection. It is the Californian Cheerleader Disease.
“I took him to Brighton when he was nine, bumped into an old mate, and lost him for over an hour. Had to fork out for a new BMX bike, otherwise he was going to tell Donna. He’s going to make an excellent politician. Be prepared to fork out for a new car for his eighteenth.
“You have to do whatever it takes to keep this from Mum, okay? It will kill her, and then Donna will kill you, and then my family will either be dead or in prison. Great. I only recently heard from an old school friend that Donna got some gangsters to give Frankie a good seeing-to soon after he beat her up.”
I wonder whether I should tell her the drama not over yet—it just begun. I goin’ leave her mother, I goin’ divorce her. Yes, I go do it. I go do it. No more to-ing and fro-ing in my mind, no more cowardice, no more imbalancing the cons over the pros. After what happened with Daniel’s hoodlums, I can’t turn back. It was an accidental catharsis that has led to mental clarity and a deliberate plan.
But how I go tell Carmel, especially without Morris to support me?
“As for Uncle Morris,” she adds slyly, “I think you need to pay him a visit and apologize.”
“What I have to apologize for?”
“For whatever you did to upset him.”
“How you know I did anything?”
“Because I know you. Run along now, put on a pretty dress, and take Uncle Morris a bunch of flowers while you’re at it.”
She’s not wasting no time taking a new kind of liberty.
Maxine stands up and uncoils all snakelike, stretching up and knocking the chandelier with her hands. She looks ridiculous in those heels as she resumes clearing up.
“Maxine, why don’t you slip out of those shoes while you doing the domestics?”
She hops from one foot to the other. “You’re right: my feet are dying a slow death, but if I take them off I’ll never get them on again and I’ve got two meetings this afternoon and the opening of a five-star boutique hotel in Chelsea tonight, owned by Russians.”
She rubs finger and thumb together.
“And on that note,” she says, pretending it’s an afterthought, “I’ve almost finished my business plan for the House of Walker for my Fashion Angel. I’ll bring it round soon.”
* * *
By the time Donna has returned with the shopping and some Chinese takeaway, Maxine has done what she can with the front room and made her excuses after telling us off about transsaturated fats, monosodium glutamate, blocked arteries, and heart attacks.
I see her to the front door.
“Promise you’ll go and see Morris later, all right?”
“Scout’s honor.” I raise a hand, oath-style.
She pecks both my cheeks, the way everyone does these days, as if we’re all suddenly French and Italian. No wonder disease spreads so quickly.
She has to walk sideways down the steep stone steps, with her arms spread out for balance. The fashionable bag over her shoulder is so large she could put herself in it and get someone to carry her.
“Maxine, that camp thing,” I whisper, following her outside, closing the door behind me, “you saying I’m effeminate?”
She laughs me off. “You’re an old Caribbean queen, but don’t worry, most people won’t notice. You’re a dying breed, Daddy.”
Thanks.
She’s talking nonsense of course. Being fanciful again. I goin’ ask Morris.
“Just wait until you meet my gay boys. They will absolutely love you.”
When I return to the kitchen, Donna is humming as she puts away the shopping. She lays out a feast that practically covers the whole table: prawn crackers, spring rolls, chicken-and-sweet-corn soup, sweet-and-sour pork, prawn and bean sprouts, beef with black-bean sauce, spareribs, chicken satay, lemon chicken, crispy duck, mixed vegetables, noodles, special fried rice, egg-fried rice, boiled rice.
“The leftovers will last you a few days,” she says, clocking my astonishment. “Mum asked me to make sure you were eating. See, we really do care.”
We sit down, just the two of us, which, as with her son, never happens neither.
Seeing as Maxine has accused me of not understanding people, I study Donna while she piles so much grub on her plate I’m not sure there’ll be any leftovers.
I come to the conclusion that even though she don’t look her age, she acts older, moving her body like she needs to spray WD-40 on her joints.
How come one of my daughters is prematurely aging while the other one is preternaturally youthful?
Donna’s still got good skin, but her face getting harder, and her eyes are dark fortresses that defy you to enter them. Any potential suitor would have to slay some dragons to get past those ramparts. My daughter been alone too long.
I pile on the rice and beef, pork and chicken, noodles and spring rolls.
“I’m sorry,” she says out of the blue, somewhat defensively.
“For what?”
“For being a bit over the top earlier about Daniel.”
Today is the day of shocks.
“What I mean is, I went overboard and was a bit . . .”
“Rude?”
“I was panicking about Daniel and lost it. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”
Some beef catches in my throat. I prefer it when my girls is disrespectful: at least then I know where I stand with them.
“I’m well aware that Daniel can be a little prick when he feels like it, but he’s all I’ve got.” She keeps stabbing at a pork ball but not eating it. “He’s the only thing that’s mine.”
The only person that boy belongs to is himself. You should-a started saying the long goodbye soon as he hit thirteen. I wanted to tell you then.
“When he leaves home for university, that’s it. He’s said as much. I know he won’t be coming back except to bring his dirty washing . . . the way men do.”
Stab, stab.
“Donna, at least it frees you up to find the kind of nice fella you deserve, someone to treat you good.”
The way she glows makes me wonder when I last spoke nicely to her or showed any real int
erest in her.
“Don’t think I haven’t tried, but I’m not like Maxine, with her anorexic BMI that even black men go for these days—betraying the race. Anyway, there are simply no good, available men out there. The eligible forty-year-olds go for twenty-five-year-olds; the fifty-year-olds are with thirty-year-olds, which leaves the geriatrics for sad sacks like me.”
“That is rather hyperbolic, my dear.” I keep my voice and face compassionate, friendly, unhostile. “I’m sure there are still some good men out there within your . . . appropriate . . . age bracket.”
“I’m the expert here, Dad. And trust me, there aren’t. The good guys are all taken and the rest are either commitment-phobic dogs like Frankie; or too ugly, too old, too poor, too badly dressed, too unfit, too uneducated, too boring, too low-class, too gay, or too into white or nearly white women, which is a whole other issue you wouldn’t understand.”
I don’t know what to say.
Me and Morris often chinwag about how many of our men can’t settle with one woman at a time and how many of our men sow seed, then don’t hang around to watch it flower, like Frankie. It is embedded in our psyche from centuries of slavery, when we wasn’t allowed to be husbands or fathers. We was breeders for the stud farm, and our pickneys’ totemic (and morally criminal) father figure was the owner of the plantation, who held the power of life and death over us.
We living with it today, because it’s corrupted our psychological DNA and disrupted our ability to have committed relationships with each other.
Our men don’t know how to stay with our women.
Our women don’t know how to raise men who do.
Not me, though. I was a good father to my girls. I stayed married beyond the call of duty. And I been a good role model for Daniel. I followed in my father’s footsteps, and no one can call me on that. At least not until now.
As for Donna, there must still be plenty good men out there; she just ain’t seeing them.
Par exemple, about fifteen years ago Carmel told me some very nice St. Lucian fella (a social worker with an unfortunately large nose, apparently) was chasing Donna and asked her out for a drink. At the time she wanted another child but wanted a partner first. She told her mother she turned him down because she didn’t want ugly babies.
Mr. Loverman Page 19