One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  The room had been emptied of anything pertaining to his father. Ruth and his mother must have taken away his father’s things. How could they have been so practical? He realized he was trying not to look at the bed. The sheet might have concealed anything. A sleeping person, a sack of potatoes, a couple of pillows like in those old stories where a child puts them there so he can fool his parents that he’s still fast asleep in bed while he goes off on an adventure. Halfway down something was poking up, just on the right-hand side and William couldn’t imagine what it could be. At the top the single thin sheet clung to his father’s head.

  He pulled up a chair and sat down. He wasn’t sure he would be able to lift the sheet. He felt a moment’s bitterness that he was even expected to. It should surely not have been his responsibility.

  The shape on the bed was now unmistakably a corpse. William had a sudden horror that he would remove the covering and find his father alive. It was hard to believe he wouldn’t. He stood up and took hold of the top of the sheet and peeled it slightly back. He saw the dried-out remnants of his father’s hair, there was no mistaking it. He began to cry. Until now, he realized, he had never quite believed in death, his own or that of those who belonged to him. He had never expected it to have a reality, like this, to be here on a particular day, in a particular room. He couldn’t bear the tension. With one hand across his eyes, shielding them, he unfurled the sheet in a single quick movement, like a magician revealing a bunch of flowers or a rabbit, and then he peered through the latticework of his fingers like a child cheating at hide and seek and looked at the body.

  His father’s eyes were three-quarters open, that was the first shock, staring up at something at the foot of the bed. His mouth was open, too, the lips peeled back over the skeletal teeth, as though in a scream. William’s eyes skimmed his father’s naked, emaciated form, the wizened shrimp of his cock in its nest of grizzled hair. He saw what the strange point beneath the sheet had been, his father’s right arm was raised up, fingers pointing, stiff now from rigor mortis.

  His father’s face, his whole countenance, was one of terror at something, somebody real or imagined, that had come for him in the early hours. Whatever else it had been, this had not been a peaceful death. William stretched out a tentative finger and brushed his father’s cheek. Ice-cold. He stroked his hair. The forehead was clammy. Why had he never done this when his father was alive? He sat down, suddenly exhausted, and stared at the thing before him. Undoubtedly his father’s body, but empty now, the soul, whatever that was, clearly fled. Leaving behind this shell, frozen for all eternity in the last moment of terror. The skin pale and shiny as fine china. He thought of his father’s tanned flesh, all those summers at the beach house, and for no accountable reason he thought of the first weekend Sandy Beach had come, and how his kindly father couldn’t stand the boy but had tolerated him in the mistaken belief he was doing something for his own child. It all seemed so long ago.

  He must have been there an hour when there was a knock at the door. William rose from his chair and pulled up the sheet, pausing for one last look before he let it fall on his father’s face. It was not an image he would ever be able to cover in his imagination. It would be there the rest of his days.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘MISS LUCY, YOU is think pink or purple is look better for me?’ asked Tigua.

  They were having a girls’ night in – that’s what Miss Lucy called it – in Miss Lucy’s house, a few hundred yards along the shore from the village in the opposite direction from the Captain Cook. They were busy pampering themselves with different beauty treatments and trying out new clothes and looks. In addition to Miss Lucy and Tigua there were the latter’s two she-boy pals, Sussua and Lintoa, although Lintoa had protested that he didn’t want to come. What Lintoa would have liked was to spend the evening in the kassa house, although, as Tigua had pointed out, and not for the first time, it was, as the big she-boy well knew, impossible. Girls weren’t allowed in. Besides, even if you didn’t like make-up and experimenting with hairdos, Miss Lucy’s wasn’t a bad substitute. She would give you a can from the crate of beer the plane always brought her.

  Lucy studied Tigua’s outstretched right hand. The index fingernail was painted with pink nail varnish; the nail of the middle finger, purple. ‘Hmm, it’s a difficult one to call. I wouldn’t like to choose. Why not have both?’

  ‘Both?’ said Tigua. ‘How is be possible?’

  ‘Why not do them alternately pink and purple? You know like these two, purple for the thumb, pink for the ring finger and then purple for the, well, purple for the pinkie.’

  Tigua was delighted. ‘Is be good idea. I is like. But I is must start again. Pinkie is must be pink.’ He reached for the bottle of polish remover, tipped some onto a cotton pad and began scrubbing the painted nails.

  ‘What you is think, Lintoa, you is go have you nails like this?’

  Lintoa grunted. ‘Nails different colour is just look one big damn mess.’ He shifted his huge bulk, stretching one of his great paws behind him and fiddling with the upper part of his dress.

  ‘Huh, you is just be grouch like you is always be when you is drink beer,’ said Tigua, who had picked up a lot of vocabulary from Miss Lucy. ‘Beer is never make you is feel good, just grouch.’

  ‘You is be grouch too if you bra strap is dig in you shoulder like mine.’

  You couldn’t argue with that. Bras were getting to be a problem. All four people in the room were wearing the same size of bra which was ridiculous when you compared the slim form of Miss Lucy to the burgeoning bulk of Lintoa. The reason they all had the same size was that all the bras were Miss Lucy’s. She’d given Tigua, Sussua and Lintoa her old ones. The difficulty was that while all four of them had the same size breasts – the A cups being filled respectively with Miss Lucy’s own small pert breasts and in the case of the other three with old rags she’d given them – their backs were of dramatically different dimensions. Even Sussua, who was lightly built for a sixteen-year-old boy, had had to stitch a piece of liana between the strap ends because they wouldn’t meet in the middle any more.

  ‘I is tell you, pretty damn soon I is go take this damn bra off and is walk around bare chest,’ said Lintoa. ‘I is just not care no more.’

  Lucy patted his hand. Poor Lintoa had grown up and most of him didn’t want to be a girl any more. Not for the first time, she told herself that she hadn’t helped matters. It had seemed such a kind thing to do at the time, giving them all bras. But you had to be so careful, in her line of work, where even a badly phrased question could destroy for ever the very thing you were asking about, let alone introducing an alien concept like the bra. She just hadn’t thought it through. The same with the dresses. Tigua had been fascinated by Lucy’s clothes and by the fashion pictures he’d come across in Lucy’s magazines. So Lucy had given them some dresses. The three boys were always complaining that growing their hair long like women’s, wearing grass skirts instead of pubic leaves and putting on make-up was all very well, but how could they really look like girls when their bare breasts confirmed them as flat-chested boys? So she’d given them the bras.

  Not that Lucy herself was much less boyishly chested than they were. You could tell the kind of person Lucy was from her breasts. They were, as we already know, small and pert; challenging little tits, pointy and fierce, as were her nose and chin, although the latter were not so much so as to render her unattractive. All these things, breasts, nose, chin, combined with something sharp about her blue eyes to speak of determination and independence. Here was a woman, they said, who did not give her love easily. Her breasts were the sort to make a man long to reach out and grab them and at the same time cause him to be afraid and want to run away and hide. They were enough to scare the hell out of a man like William Hardt.

  Lucy regretted the Western clothes, and would not have done it again, but she excused herself on the grounds that any damage was temporary and would be corrected in a couple of years when the she
-boys became boys, and also because it had given so much pleasure to them. Although maybe not to Lintoa.

  ‘I is have good mind for throw away this dress and this damn pinchy bra,’ repeated Lintoa.

  ‘You is can burn you bra,’ said Tigua, who’d learned about the phenomenon from Miss Lucy (‘What waste!’ he’d said. ‘All they bras!’), ‘but they is still not let you in kassa house. You is born be girl and is much better you is just get on with be one.’

  ‘Just because I is be born girl, I is not must stay this way. I is have choice,’ growled Lintoa.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Miss Lucy, stroking his arm. ‘You can be whatever you want to be.’

  ‘You is can be pig if you is like,’ said Tigua. ‘You is be one damn sow already.’

  By ‘sow’ Tigua meant the same as ‘bitch’, a word that had no meaning on the island as there weren’t any dogs. Fortunately, at least from a linguistic point of view, the female black bantam pigs had a reputation for viciousness and backbiting that more than matched up to their canine counterparts, so ‘sow’ meant more or less the same thing.

  ‘Well, soon as is be my time for choose,’ muttered Lintoa, ‘I is go be boy. I is go hunt pigs, I is go kassa house and make fug-a-fug with girls.’

  ‘Well I is stay girl, so mebbe you is make fug-a-fug with me,’ said Tigua. He wore his usual big smile as he said it, but no-one laughed. It was no secret that Tigua worshipped Lintoa. It was why he needled him, like a toddler seeking his mother’s attention.

  ‘You is make bloody damn joke,’ said Lintoa. ‘As if I is make fug-a-fug with sow like you.’

  Tigua ignored the jibe. It was too easy for him to score points off Lintoa. He didn’t need it all the time. If he pushed things too far, he’d turn the big boy off him. It was the last thing he wanted to do. He turned to Sussua, who was the quiet one of the three. ‘How ’bout you, Sussua? What you is choose when is come you time?’

  Sussua paused in painting his toenails. ‘I is not be sure. I is really like for be boy. Do all things Lintoa is say. Is like for be papu, for have children. But . . .’ He paused to push a pebble between two toes to keep them apart while he painted the nails in different colours.

  ‘But?’ said Tigua. ‘What is mean that but?’

  ‘But there is be so many pretty dress in Miss Lucy catalogue. Is seem shame for give all they up.’

  There was silence, the kind of quiet where everyone is thinking his or her own thoughts and all of them melancholy. Lucy rose from the floor and walked over to the ancient mahogany sideboard. She cranked up the gramophone and put a record on it. Caruso’s voice soared through the crackle and hiss of the old shellac. ‘Celeste Aida’. Lucy was aware of the measure of selfishness in her friendship for the she-boys that had led her to compromise the purity of her involvement. She had courted their friendship and moulded them into ersatz girlfriends because, well, because sometimes it got so damn lonely being the only Westerner on the island. A tear forced its way from her right eye and slid down her cheek. She wiped it off quickly with the back of her hand and looked at the three boys to see if any of them had noticed. They were all studying their nails so assiduously she knew that they had.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Tell me about the white man?’ she said. ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He is be gwanga,’ said Lintoa, studying a bottle of black nail polish. The other two giggled. ‘He is have hair colour of sun, same as you hair is be, and he is wear eye glasses like Managua.’

  ‘He is have one heavy bag,’ said Tigua. ‘I is nearly break back when I is carry damn thing. Is be mostly full of books.’

  ‘How you is know that?’ said Lintoa, who never missed a chance to challenge Tigua. ‘You is see inside bag?’

  ‘No, but I is see he is take out books. Also what else is weigh so heavy? Clothes?’

  ‘Mebbe,’ said Lintoa. ‘He is go need plenty clothes if he is go swim in they.’

  ‘He went swimming in his clothes?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘No, Lintoa is just make mischief,’ said Tigua. ‘He is walk through water in suit. Is get pretty damn wet.’

  ‘He is still drip when he is reach village,’ said Lintoa. They all laughed again.

  ‘Is he British?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘No, I is not think so,’ said Tigua. ‘He is not talk like you. And he is do funny thing with eyes.’ He imitated William Hardt’s alternate blinking. ‘He is be American, I is think. I is be pretty damn sure that eye thing is be American.’

  ‘If he is be American then most likely suitcase is be full of bombs,’ said Lintoa. ‘Bombs is be plenty heavy.’

  ‘But what about him?’ said Lucy. ‘Wasn’t there anything else you noticed about him?’

  Sussua looked down at her lap, studying her nails which were alternately painted green and purple. ‘He is be plenty damn pretty,’ she said. ‘He is be gwanga and he is do funny eye thing but he is be plenty damn pretty.’

  FOURTEEN

  ‘WHAT FOR HE is be allow in kassa hut when I is not?’ William was surprised to see the sturdy young woman thrust her big mannish face into Managua’s. She looked pretty threatening for a teenage girl, he couldn’t help thinking. And there was something scary about the way her fingernails were painted, alternate red and black. She reminded him of the kind of people you worried might commit random acts of violence when you encountered them on the subway. ‘He is be gwanga, he is not belong here. I is be islander. I is have more right.’

  Managua’s serene expression was fractured. He looked both angry and embarrassed, like a parent who has been shown up by a naughty child.

  ‘You is be quiet!’ he hissed. ‘You is show respect for guest.’

  The girl pushed her shoulder up against Managua’s and for a moment it looked like she might hit the old man, but Tigua shoved her way between them. ‘You is come away now Lintoa, you is not get panties in tangle.’

  ‘Is be all right for you, stupid sow,’ Lintoa replied as she allowed herself to be led away. ‘You is be happy for be girl. Me, I is spend all life want for be boy.’

  Managua and William watched them go, Tigua’s mincing little steps contrasting with Lintoa’s heavy, masculine flat-footed tread, which William somehow thought was due as much to personality as to the fact the former was wearing high-heel shoes and the latter was barefoot. Managua shrugged. ‘I is be sorry. They is drink beer tonight. I is smell in Lintoa’s mouth. Sometimes young people today is not know how for behave. Is be difficult age for girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ said William, thinking, especially for a girl like Lintoa.

  It was twilight and the incident had made them late. Already men were dropping to the ground and slipping into the long bamboo entrance tunnel of the kassa house. This large hut dominated the centre of the village. It was the only round structure and curiously low, the walls a couple of feet shorter than those of the huts circling it.

  ‘Come,’ said Managua. He lowered himself carefully onto his good knee, stretching his artificial leg out behind him, and thence onto his belly. He ducked into the tunnel and William followed, dragging himself along by his elbows, the tunnel roof being too low to permit one to crawl properly.

  It was pitch-dark and William experienced a frisson of fear, a sudden panic that he might be letting himself in for something terrible, a set-up the villagers were tricking him into, a snake pit, perhaps, full of green shoestrings. He became aware of someone behind him in the tunnel and a wave of claustrophobia washed over him. For a second he couldn’t move. Then he felt the hands of the person behind touch his feet and heard a voice.

  ‘If you is plan for make fart,’ it said, ‘I is advise you is not or I is punch you plenty damn good when we is get inside.’

  William had no idea who was speaking or why the man should suspect him of wanting to fart at him but having to deal with this immediate problem brought temporary respite from his fear. He worked his elbows furiously and scrabbled his way forward. There was no obstacle in front to prevent him. Managua was l
ong gone.

  In a few seconds he was through the tunnel. Shakily he stood up and was able to draw himself to his full height. At first he couldn’t see a thing and thought he was in darkness but gradually his eyes grew accustomed to the situation and he saw a fire in the centre of the room that gave a soft red glow to everything. Shadowy figures were moving about, finding places to sit against the walls, making a large circle around the fire.

  ‘You is take time for get here, gwanga.’ It was Managua. The older man’s hand gripped him around the upper arm and steered him towards the wall where there was a small gap between two of the men sitting there. They shuffled either way and Managua eased himself down between them, indicating that William should do the same.

  The circle around the wall of the hut was now complete. Only a couple of men remained standing, dim figures in the firelight. William saw that one was the sour-faced man, Purnu. He and his companion were struggling to roll a large round boulder across the entrance to the tunnel, sealing it off. Again William experienced a moment of panic. He wasn’t sure he could stay in here. As if sensing this, Managua leaned over and whispered, ‘You is not worry, is be for stop spirits escape.’

  William didn’t find this particularly reassuring.

  Purnu and the other man went to the centre of the room and began tipping something from a big wicker basket into a large iron cauldron which sat on the fire. William guessed it must be the kassa seeds Managua had told him about. When the basket was empty, Purnu took a piece of wood approximately the size and shape of a baseball bat and began stirring the pot. The hut was filled with an expectant buzz of whispered conversation. It made William think of the moments before a symphony concert when the orchestra is tuning up while the audience chatters in excited anticipation.