by Jacob Ross
She’d paused for a while and seemed to be counting them, her body leaning slightly forward, a pencil pressed against her lips.
But there seemed to be no logic in the movements of her head, no pattern in her counting, and it took a while before Pynter realised what she was doing. She saw the understanding in his eyes, moved as if to say something, then changed her mind.
She straightened up and called their names, pausing over each to stare into their faces. Then she snapped the register shut, gave the class a last, dry smile and left them sitting there.
They waited until they heard the hard, flat slap of her sandals on the concrete courtyard before turning round to stare, realising with a kind of panic that she hadn’t even told them her name.
‘Lordy, Pynter Bendup!’ Marlis Tillock said, breathless, bright-yed with a grin as broad as a beach. ‘That ’ooman is war!’
And it was Marlis Tillock himself who started it with what looked like a shrug.
By then, they’d grown accustomed to her abruptness. The bright, short-lived smiles. The sullen, red-eyed days when she stared at them and did not talk. The evenings she held them in detention and worked them hard for all the times she came into class and did nothing at all.
Marlis – short, quiet, with the shoulders of a man – was leaning over an equation with Pynter, their heads pressed against each other like two sides of a swing bridge. They were arguing about the quickest way to arrive at an answer that she’d already given them.
A San Andrews boy had leaned over and whispered something in Marlis’s ear. Marlis didn’t look up. He lifted his elbow. Kept muttering over the numbers even after Mikky Coker hit the floor and stayed there. Marlis placed his pencil on the desk and, with a voice that was soft and almost kindly, said, ‘Pynter Bend-up? I tell dat town boy twice already, don’ call me cocoa-monkey.’
He rose to his feet, picked up his bag. He didn’t make it to the door. The teacher was there ahead of him, her back against the door, her eyes still and wide and hostile.
‘Where you going?’ she said.
Marlis moved his hand to say something.
She cut him short. ‘Go to your seat. Right now!’
She gestured at the groaning boy and they helped him off the floor. ‘I don’t know what you said,’ she told him, staring at Coker with narrowed eyes, ‘but I know you said something.’
She faced the class, lifted her hand and stared down it as if it were the barrel of a gun. ‘You,’ she said, ‘you, you, you – remain here after school. The rest of you will leave.’
Twelve had to stay behind and Pynter was one of them. She made them bring their seats together as closely as the desks allowed. She bolted the door and sat on a desk before them. She looked at her watch, threw a quick glance at the window and leaned forward.
‘Fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘No responses; no questions. Put this in your heads. Burn it in.’
She was counting them again, to make sure that they were all there; then she sat back on the desk.
She wanted to know if they knew how long it took for them to get to this school above the ocean. The answer she gave surprised them. More than a hundred years, she said. And they shouldn’t fool themselves; they didn’t start that walk. Which was why she wanted to know why Marlis Tillock had decided to make leaving so easy.
Marlis wiped his sweating face with his palms and hunched in his shoulders. Pynter felt a rush of sympathy for the suffering boy.
‘What is it that finally brought y’all here? Why now?’ she said. ‘Why not before?’ It wasn’t the riots and the burnings and the jail, she said. It was something she was going to show them. She bent down to lift her bag, then straightened up suddenly, the large silver hoops of her earrings tossing against her jawline. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have a better idea.’
When she reached for her bag this time, her hand came out with something. Pynter heard the soft intakes of breath around him, felt his heart flip over. For the pen she was holding up before them had the creamy gloss of Patty’s Sunday earrings. The clip on the cover was a tapering gold arrow pointing downwards at the nib, which glowed in the window light like a drop of liquid fire.
‘Bring the answer to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you this. The first who comes with it, of course.’
She left for last what she’d really called them there to tell them.
‘Some of you will poison the roots you grew from. You’ll walk like them.’ A group of boys were strolling across the courtyard. They were swinging tennis rackets at each other, and laughing. ‘You’ll talk like them. You’ll make yourself believe you’re them. You won’t look back. A few of you might stop just long enough to say thank you to the people that you came from before you walk away to anywhere that is not here. None of you will carry them with you.’
They stepped out into the empty courtyard. The white concrete – blindingly bright by day – had been darkened by the shadow of the school which the evening sun had thrown across it.
They did not speak to each other. Normally, Marlis would have turned to Pynter, waved a hand and offered him a parting grin. Now he was drifting along the concrete verge, his body angled forward as if he were pushing against a wind. Pynter also felt the sluggishness that had settled in his limbs. He glanced back at the classroom to see the upper half of Sislyn Chappel leaning out of the window, her elbows on the sill – much as his mother would do at home. She nodded and Pynter looked away.
All Pynter could think of on the journey back to Old Hope was who this woman was whose eyes so often tried to hold his own, and navigated his body openly, differently – not as Deeka did; not as Tan Cee or his mother either. Not in any way he understood. And as he tried to push those last words of hers away, he felt them settling in his heart like stones.
Scraps of scripture. Lines from the songs the radio played. Pieces of poems. Pictures of places, and faces cut out from magazines and newspapers tossed in the bins of the sprawling white houses that lined the road up to his school. It took him a week to gather them. And at the end of it, he walked into his grandmother’s house, dropped his canvas bag on the floor and said quietly to Peter, ‘Tell Tan Patty to come.’
He laid a coloured sheet of Bristol board across the floor. It was the shade of purple that Patty liked. He placed two red and yellow crayons prettily against each other, sat on the floor and waited.
When his aunt arrived, she saw that he’d prepared for her. She lowered herself beside him much as she’d done that first evening she came to him, and leaned her shoulder against his.
All he wanted to do for this first time was talk, he said. He showed her letters, not as he had learned them from his father but as he had worked them out on his morning walks to school. He told her that each letter was like a little person. It had a shape and size and sound that belonged only to itself. And that sound was its voice, which was different from the voices of all the others. And in the same way that people came together and were family, these letters came together and were words. Then he spread before her the pictures he’d collected, the bits of scripture and the poems, read them to her, and then they argued over what they meant.
The next day he did not send to call her. Patty came high-stepping down the hill, broke off a bit of the sugar-cake she was chewing on, popped a piece into his mouth and admired with him the foliated iris of the large marble she had brought him. But she was worried and he sensed it. He let her talk, and while she did, he took the marker off the floor and wrote.
‘Copy this,’ he said.
She took the pen, fixing it between her fingers exactly as she’d seen him do, threw a quick uncertain glance at him before leaning over the page. She straightened up. He saw that her wrist was trembling. He smiled at her and nodded.
‘What I writing?’ she asked, a little lost, a little worried.
He pointed at the letters.
He could have told her what occurred to him those mornings on his way to school: that she’d been writing all her life and did not
know it. That those long curved lines she made in the dust with sticks when her thoughts were resting on the baby she could not have with Leroy – that was a form of writing. And the little birds, the insects and the butterflies she stitched into those bits of pretty cloth, and the patterns she made in his mother’s hair when she combed and plaited it. If what his father had told him once was true, if writing was nothing more than making marks that meant something, then all the women in Old Hope were writing without knowing it.
Patty leaned forward again, her fingers steadier now. He watched the curve of her back, her hair, thick as Deeka’s, pulled back from her forehead in a lazy pile, the creeping of her hand across the page.
When she finished, Patty lifted her head as if she’d just emerged from under water. She blinked at him. He reached out his hand and slipped his thumb along the ridges of her lips, as she so often did with him. ‘You just write your name.’ He smiled.
She pointed at the paper; shook her head as if she did not understand him.
‘Uh-huh, right there – “Patty Bender”.’
She rose to her feet then, gathering up the paper with her. It crackled in her hands like firewood. Patty was looking down at him now, and even with all that light from the doorway behind her, he could still see her eyes. She stepped out of the door, stopped there a while. Then she was kneeling beside him, her fingers brushing against his throat. He felt the little pendant of the thin gold chain she’d just taken from around her neck grow warm against his skin.
They both said nothing. Pynter watched her swaying back for a while, then stretched himself out on the floor. He closed his eyes and could hear the dull heartbeat of someone chopping trees up in the foothills. Halfway down Old Hope, Miss Muriel was singing, ‘Roooock oof Aaaages’ – the only song she ever sang. Missa Ram’s white jackass was kicking up a rhythm on the road below. And just outside, Patty’s pretty laughter rising, bright and rapid like light over fast water.
They shifted the cooking to later in the evening. Mornings, his mother, Elena, got up even earlier and prepared ‘a lil in-between somefing in advance’, which he chewed on while he sat with Patty.
Elena had moved from peeling the provisions in the yard to finding a lil space on the step, because it was more comfortable, she said. Tan Cee came and sat beside her. And his grandmother wanted to know why they gone an’ decide all-of-a-sudden-so to take up the space that was hers by right since she was the one who always sat there.
By then Patty was reading on her own and getting better fast. Now she was practising to be A Lady, which meant not eating with her fingers any more, chewing very, very slowly even when she told them she was starving, and walking a little more upright than she already did, with a daintier smile, a slightly stiffer neck, and making every word she said sound as though her mouth was stuffed with bread. Till Deeka, in a flush of irritation, raised a finger at her one evening, wanting to know if she was practising for a stroke.
Patty didn’t see the joke, but for the rest of the week they couldn’t look at her without breaking into laughter.
Wait, she told them, wait and see who’ll be skinnin their teeth and laughin, when she got her job in one of them pretty department stores in San Andrews.
Pynter did not know exactly when or why he started talking. Perhaps it was this sense he had each evening of their waiting without words, the knowledge that these days, after work, they had created a little room of silence which they were expecting him to fill. Perhaps it was the last few words that Miss Sislyn had left them with when she’d kept them in that first time. Perhaps it was all of them that came together in his mind the evening he eased himself up off his elbow, picked up a book and made a rolling fan of the pages with his fingers. The movement took their gazes off his face, but only briefly.
His mother’s hands stopped rummaging the rice. Patty shifted her weight and moved closer to him. He couldn’t work out Deeka’s expression. She’d lowered her head and was staring at him from an angle.
He began talking the way his father used to, with his head pressed against the partition, his eyes half-closed, his voice dark and thick and slightly weary.
He told them the story of a whisper – how a little rumour that some wicked so-an’-so name Iago pass on to Missa Othello and make that fella destroy his wife and then ’imself because of it. And what about that old fella who call ’imself a king, the so-an’-so gave his daughters all his land and money in exchange for words. Just words – just for telling ’im they love ’im even if they didn. And the trouble that he caused the child who didn lie; becuz she tell ’im that she love ’im only in the way a daughter ought to. No wonder he went crazy.
There was also that time of other gods, and not-so-different men, when an old man was compelled to roll a boulder up a steep hill. It never reached the top becuz as soon as he almost got there, the stone slipped from him, and he had to begin all over again. He didn even have his own death to look forward to, becuz that old fella was cursed to live for ever.
‘A helluva thing,’ Tan Cee said, quietly appalled. ‘Day make a pusson tired. At the end of it they sleep, not so? Same way with life. At the end of it a yooman been expect a decent rest!’
And always when Pynter finished he felt the change in them: the stillness with which his mother sat with the rice bowl on her knees; that new look in his grandmother’s eyes, as if he were no longer the stranger she’d always made him out to be. And Tan Cee there, her eyes gone vacant, a smile on her face which was not meant for him, because she was still in that place that his words had taken them to.
But Peter did not miss his urgency – the soft-voiced rage that lay behind his words. His brother’s body said so. Said that it was sensing the thing that he, Pynter, was talking them towards each evening.
He was always there, Peter, in the middle of the yard, his hands folded around each other, his eyes drifting to and from the faces of the women as if he were hearing something different from the rest of them which he did not trust. And as the cutting season crept to a close and the tractors began to climb out of the valley, Pynter felt his brother’s eyes settling on his hands as he thumbed the pages of his books more thoughtfully – more and more selectively.
The evening came when Patty picked up the little brown book Pynter always placed beside him in case he needed to refer to it.
‘Aunty-gone,’ she said.
‘An-ti-gon-e,’ he corrected. ‘Name of a girl.’
‘Which girl?’ Deeka’s voice surprised him.
‘Jus’ a girl,’ he said.
‘What about ’er?’ his mother said.
They wouldn’t have believed him if he told them how he came by the little book. He’d found it in a plastic bag against one of the roadside bins he raided for magazines. A woman had watched him from a nearby house, through the slit in a yellow curtain. There were rumours about that house. She was a doctor-woman, they said, chased across the Atlantic by some disgrace a pusson could only guess at, to this rotting place above the road on which he travelled to his school.
This little brown book – he would keep the worst parts back: the bits that they would call an abomination, like what Missa Laius did to Pelops’s son. Like the curse that followed Laius afterwards. Like the thing it made him do to his boy-chile. He would skip those bits. Would start instead with this old fella name Oedipus who owned the lives of all the people under him, in the same way that the man who ruled this island felt he owned the lives of everybody on it. He would start with Teiresias (and if they wanted to know exactly who Teiresias was, he would make them think of Santay) and what Teiresias said to him.
‘He tell Missa Oedipus that one day he goin kill his father, get married to his mother and give her children. Part of the problem was he didn know who his mother was, becuz soonz he born she pass him over to somebody else. She didn want him. She thought that he was a curse. He meet a woman one day. He like ’er. She nice. He like ’er a lot. He married ’er. She give ’im four chilren – two boys and two girls. And
’twas awright until he find out that woman was his mother. Just thinkin about it nearly kill ’im. He so shame he blind ’imself. Take out hi two eye; lef ’ the country to his brother. And from then on he start to walk. He make ’imself a beggar. Left his chilren wiv his brother. He never stop walkin. He never look back. Shame – shame eating him up so much cuz he couldn live with ’imself no more. He just get up an’ left one day an’ never come back.’
It was quiet after he finished the story and then his mother spoke. ‘They teach you ’bout dem wickedness in school?’
He did not answer her. For some reason he was distracted by the smell of the grapefruit tree beside the house. It was in blossom. It never bore fruit. It suddenly reminded him of something.
‘And the girl?’ Patty asked, irritably, urgently. ‘What about the girl?’ She was hugging herself, her eyes on the cover of the book as if she expected it to answer her.
‘Antigone was hi daughter.’ Pynter pushed himself up off the floor. ‘We not eatin tonight? I hungry.’
He stepped out into the yard.
Deeka had eaten quickly, nervously. She’d spent most of the evening poking at the fire. Pynter felt the turbulence in his grandmother. He’d watched it take hold of her from the time she left the steps. The abrupt reaching of her hand behind her head to loosen the coils of hair had confirmed it for him.
His mother and his aunts sat with their heads together. He could barely hear their whisperings.
Peter came to sit beside him. Pynter moved over and gave his brother space.
‘Why yuh have to talk like dat, Pynter?’
‘Like how?’
‘Nobody in this yard don’ talk like that. Even Deeka never talk like dat.’
‘How Deeka talk?’
‘I don’ know … Bad tings,’ Peter said. His voice had risen. It made their mother look over at them. ‘It don’ make a pusson feel good afterwards.’