by Jacob Ross
‘Cuz you bring back Arilon.’ Peter laughed louder.
‘Something wrong wid dat?
‘Dey say you could ha’ never get away if you didn shorten dem arms o’ yours and make them turn to bat wings.’ Peter’s laughter must have reached the foothills.
‘You are my twin. If I am like that then you are the same.’
‘You are my two-win. Ef I um loike thort! You turn speaky-spokey too? Seven months and you talkin as if you got a lump o’ mud in you mouth. Spit it out!’
‘It might fall on you.’
‘Never. I don’ wear nothing dat don’ suit me. What she look like?’
‘Who?’
‘De girl.’
‘Tinelle?’
‘Dat’s she name?’
‘Yep!’
‘Tell me ’bout her.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘What she look like, how she talk, de way she treat you.’
Peter went quiet.
‘She nice,’ Pynter said. Whatever changes they saw in him they’d put down to Tinelle.
‘Like I say, she nice. Brown like one of Uncle Birdie bread. Warm like bread too. That is how I think of her especially. Just warm. She teach me somefing, Peter.’
‘Wozzat?’
He did not know how to say it. The words felt awkward in his head. ‘Tenderness. Y’unnerstand dat? Love an’ violence – dey don’t have to go together.’
When Peter spoke again his tone was gentle. ‘She pretty?’
‘I never hear nobody say she pretty,’ ceptin me. But I know one fella want her desperate like Sylus want Paso life.’
‘S’posin ’twas me who meet her first?’
Pynter laughed.
‘What de hell you laughin at?’
‘I don’ know how to answer dat cuz I don’ know how you’ll mix with her.’
‘You tellin me she too nice to mix wiv me?’
‘Jeezas Christ, man!’
‘Lemme tell you something, fella. If I did meet dat girl before you or even same time as you, she would ha’ been mine. In fact, if I meet her tomorrow and I want her, she’ll be mine. You know why?’
‘Nuh, tell me.’
‘I more of a man than you. That’s why. I no saga boy, no sugar- mouth sweet man. But I’z a man, a big man, y’unnerstan? Is a long time now dat I gone flyin past you. So don’t think dat becuz you got a stupid lil piece o’ red-skin girl in town dat anybody kin own, dat make you special. It don’t, cuz I could take she from you any time.’
‘You jealous, Peter. And you ain’t got no frickin reason to be jealous. Jealousy eatin y’arse and you don’ know what to do with it. You got no reason to be hatin me. Cuz you never had nobody tell you that you not natural, you not born to live, you not good for much ’ceptin for yourself. My life been like a line you draw in de dust with your toe that any wind or any absent-minded hand or foot could rub right off like dat, as if I never been there. They talk about me only in the present, or the past. What I am; what I was. I don’t invite no future tense because what’s the use if I not going to be there for long? So they build everything around you. It always there in their words, in their expectations, in their idea of the future for this family. Dat’s why you ain’t got no flippin reason to be jealous.’
The next day over dinner he told them he was leaving. Elena stopped chewing for a while. Patty smiled at her as if to say that, despite her silence, she could hear her perfectly. And Peter, who from the day Pynter arrived had decided to eat standing with his back against the night, sat down. Windy, who was still avoiding him, placed her bowl on the ground between her feet, got up, stepped out of the rim of light and disappeared.
Elena chuckled. ‘She won’ sleep tonight,’ she said. ‘She’ll walk up and down in that house like her mother used to.’
His mother ate with her fingers, something he had not noticed before.
Patty leaned against him, jostling until he adjusted himself to accommodate her. The beautiful fingers went back to stripping the thigh of the chicken. ‘Fix yuh face, Sugarboy. Cat eat you tongue?’
‘S’pose I did come to stay?’ he said.
‘You didn,’ she said. ‘You fink a few lil ole words could change de truth? And you know what’s good?’ She dropped her voice. ‘I see Elena happy fo’ the first time in years. She believe the trouble finish.’
‘S’not over yet.’
‘Dat’s what your modder feel an’ we should leave her feeling good for as long as it last.’ Patty looked up at him with troubled eyes. ‘Eat in peace. Arilon bring your books up for you from where you left them by de river.’
‘I don’t need them no more.’
‘They yours.’
‘I done the exams. I’m sick of them.’
‘They still yours. Don’t leave them here when you going. Peter! Bring your brother bag o’ book!’
Patty rested a hand on his knee. ‘Another time, Pynto. Another time. I hope everything make sense later. But you got to go. Cross water. And San Andrews nearer overseas than here.’
38
THE NEW YEAR crept in so quietly Pynter hardly noticed when it arrived. San Andrews looked like a picture postcard. Mornings, the grass was wet with dew. The big trees lining Canteen Road were already discarding their leaves in preparation for the dry season.
This, he told Tinelle, would be his nineteenth dry season in the world. Pynter scrawled the year in yellow on a square of paper, underlined the number – 1974 – with a red marker and hung it beside the portraits on her wall.
The island was tossing with a new disquiet, one that had started at the tail end of the previous year. They’d called a great gathering in the hills by the sea, listed twenty-seven crimes against Victor and tried him ‘in absentia’.
They had been generous, they said. They left out the hundred or so ‘atrocities’ for which they judged him indirectly responsible. They’d had witnesses who gave long testimonies. At the end of it, Paso spoke as planned, and told the thousands about another gathering to come, when there would be even more people, this time in San Andrews on the half-mile spread of asphalt that looked out on the harbour called the Carenage. Together they would cripple the island.
Tinelle and Hugo returned from their nightly planning meetings to the breakfast Pynter prepared for them. He’d stood at Hugo’s shoulders a couple of times and learned the way he cooked. Now Pynter watched them eat, hardly taking in the driblets of conversation that animated them.
By the time they finished, he knew what Tinelle’s mood was. He got up then, strolled over to the row of bottles, selected a few and mixed a drink that matched her mood.
Devil’s Tail fo’ tiredness: one and a half ounce light rum. Just one ounce o’ vodka. One tablespoon lime juice. Grenadine – one teaspoon. Measure the same fo’ brandy. Ice: half a cup. Blend dem!
Lounge Lizard cuz she feelin good: half ounce dark rum plus amaretto – same amount as de rum. Nuff Coke. Full up de glass wiv ice. Pour everything in. Nice it up wiv a slice o’ lime. Give ’er with a smile.
Dat need-for-lovin-look. Is Undertow she want: gold rum, gin, lime juice – one ounce of each o’ dem. Half dat amount o’ Creme de Noyaux, or something close. Guava syrup, lime peel. Gwone, Missa Bender, blend dem.
Now add a slice o’ lime.
She upset; she want to sleep. Dat’s Devil-Poison. One ounce Jack Daniels; one hundred proof o’ mountain dew o’ anything really hot. Ice. Shake. Strain everyting. In a coupla minutes, carry ’er to bed.
He showered her. He washed her hair. He lay beside her and read while she slept. Once he pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and wrote some lines he suddenly remembered from the pages of his Uncle Michael’s book.
Where shall this loving lead us …
The rustling of the paper must have woken her. He felt the tips of her fingers on his thigh. She was staring at him with a wide-eyed, wondering gaze. ‘What you doing to me, Pynter?’
He’d smiled at her and closed his eyes.
&n
bsp; Paso had become an incubus on his mind. He lost his appetite and would toss awake at night with worry. He made himself recall whole passages from books. He composed poems in his head and kept them there. His agitation was an illness that was spoiling the way he was with Tinelle.
Not long after that first gathering, he heard Tinelle talking on the phone and he was sure it was Paso she was speaking to. He walked over to her and placed his head against Tinelle’s. She convulsed her shoulders, told the voice she would call back, went into her room and locked the door.
When she came back to him she looked into his eyes. ‘What’s happening, Pynter? What’s wrong? You making yourself sick. Look at you – you lost so much weight, I hardly recognise you. What’s going on with you?’
He held up his hands at Tinelle. ‘I awright, Tinelle. I awright now.’
His words did not convince her. ‘There is something deeply selfish about this too,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s really getting to me. We’ll have more people out there than you can count, and what you do? You killing yourself over Paso. Not Hugo, not me, just Paso.’
She’d gone to the record player and lifted a disc from the floor. She held it round the edges and blew on it. He watched her hands as she dropped it onto the spindle of the machine.
‘We can’t stop this, Pynter. This island already stirred up. Victor stirring one way, so we have to stir the other way or else everybody drowns, including you. We’ve been counting from the time this started. We were counting again last night: the disappearances, the accidental shootings; the people like us who leave their homes to visit a friend or family and never arrive. Not to mention the ones Victor sends back to us so frigged up you could hardly recognise them. Two hundred and seventeen, Pynter. Two hundred and seventeen. I want you to keep that number in your head. Why? Because we insist that this island is not Victor’s back garden? That we want a future different from the one he decides for us? That we don’t want no independence from no England if it means we still kissing England’s arse? I’ll tell you something else.’
Tinelle lifted the record off the player, flipped it over and dropped it back onto the spindle.
‘I’m clear about one thing. You my man, you not my mind.’
He pushed himself up off the chair. ‘Make sense,’ he said. ‘Everyting you say.’
‘Then how come we can’t agree on anything?’
‘Cuz, like you say for yourself, my mind is mine and I will check out whatever try to enter it before I give it a place in there.’
The words came out more fiercely than he’d meant them to. Tinelle and he – they’d suddenly become strangers in this room and the detachment he felt surprised him.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘I want to show you somefing.’ He took her hand and urged her towards the door.
Tinelle’s house stood like the prow of a ship above the Carenage. A few alleyways radiated off the space like spokes in a wheel. From the veranda he pointed at the spread of asphalt down below. The evening sun had bleached it almost white. People drifted about down there like shoals of fish, the reds and greens and yellows of their clothing burning bright like daytime torches.
‘What you see down there?’ he said. He sensed her irritation and ignored it. ‘I see two end of a road that bring you in and out of there. I see five little alley-road that run off it. I see the sea in front of all of dat. I see a trap y’all makin for y’all self.’
Tinelle shook herself and glared at him. He rested a pleading hand on her shoulder.
‘I ask meself: what happm if five thousand people have to get out o’ dat lil place in one go. Eh? My problem is,’ he dropped his voice, ‘I not jus’ thinkin ’bout what Victor an’ Sylus done to people already. Dat’s history. I keep thinkin o’ what dey capable o’ doing. I wish I could stop an’ give meself a easy time.’
Tinelle leaned into him. She slipped a hand around his waist. ‘You worry too much, that’s all. Another week to go and then …’ She elbowed him, winked at him and chuckled. ‘This is all the standing I’m doing for the rest of the day, Pen-Ben. Y’hear me?’
‘Undertow.’ He shrugged and followed her inside.
39
TINELLE WAS QUIET with him the morning of the march, although she laughed easily with Robert and the three young men who came to meet her. They were wearing T-shirts and sandals, their hair so carefully groomed they could have been going off for a lime.
They spoke to each other in lowered voices, which dropped almost to a whisper when Pynter was near them.
‘Look, Pynter, I find this embarrassing. You understand? You have to be with us. Do you understand? If you can’t do that with me, then … ’
‘Then?’ he said.
‘Do I have to say it?’
‘Nuh,’ he said. And then more quietly, ‘I’ll close the door behind me.’
Tinelle jerked her head as if he’d struck her. She looked back at him just once before the green and yellow headscarf disappeared down the steps to the Carenage.
From Tinelle’s veranda he could see everything.
The schools had tipped their children into the streets. They were streaming down the roads towards the Carenage, the sound of their shoes like the lapping of storm water on the warm asphalt, their white tops foaming in the bright mid-morning sun, the coloured ribbons of the girls glittering like coral.
They raised a hum that shivered the air above the town.
There were thousands of them, singing an anthem that looked forward to a time of overcoming.
And Paso was there, a dot in the distance.
The collarless white shirt his nephew wore fluttered in the sea wind like a bit of tissue on a branch. Pynter saw no soldiers. There were no jeeps. At either end of the road were a small cluster of crawling trucks, packed high with crates of soft drinks, the bottles glittering in the sun. It wasn’t what he expected.
There was the crackle of a loudhailer. Somebody announced Paso’s name and when he rose on the crates the crowd erupted. Paso raised a hand and everything went still.
Pynter could not hear him but whatever he said raised a storm of laughter from the crowd. Their laughter brought the chuckles out of Pynter too and made him marvel at his nephew. There must have been six thousand there. It wasn’t as he expected at all. The trucks of soft drinks began making their way towards each other, parting the crowd. The men on the trucks dangled their legs down the sides of the crates, lifted their caps and waved them at the crowd. They were nodding their heads and laughing. The men who’d been standing on the streets just away from them had now joined the crowd. They were also wearing caps.
Pynter followed them the way he’d followed Tinelle’s green and yellow headtie all the way to the space beside the stage. It was easy to trace these men, for they created little eddies in their wake. A strange kind of turbulence it was, because it did not look like jostling. And yet it grew and spread itself throughout the gathering the way wind walked over water.
The megaphone crackled. A man’s voice, bright as a blade, cut through the air and suddenly the stage was no longer there. Just the spreading turbulence.
And all this time, nothing in the sound of the crowd had changed.
But then the guns went off. Even then it was not as Pynter expected. There were no falling bodies, just a mass of milling colours, a rising whirlwind of voices from down below and the awful crack of sun-heated soda bottles exploding on the asphalt. Then the spillage of bodies into alleyways, and the overflow of people into the sea.
Pynter knew that he was shouting, even though he could not hear his own voice.
He was taking the steps in twos and calling Tinelle’s name. He threw himself among the press of limbs and torsos.
And even then in the tearing struggle forward, with the bottles exploding like glass grenades around his feet, the splinters flying everywhere, the fizzing fluid burning in the gashes that they made, he worried for his eyes.
He pressed a hand over his face, his splayed fingers scissoring the world be
fore him.
He found Tinelle pinned against the doorway of one of the stores. She’d lost her scarf. She had one hand over her mouth and with the other she was pushing against the shoulders that were crushing her. He could see the exhaustion on her face. He reached for her just as the tide of bodies began to suck him backwards, and as he stretched for her, a surge of fierceness welled up in his gut. Tinelle was his woman. Every time she’d offered herself to him up there in her house above the harbour, she’d been giving him permission to claim her. Tinelle was his woman. She was all he saw and wanted.
When he got to her he tore off his shirt and covered her head with it. He brought his lips down to her ear and told her what she’d said to him so often in their early days of loving: relax, don’t fight the tide. And by the time they slipped into a side alley the thunder had subsided. They heard the sound of gunshots in the building just above them. Then everything went quiet.
He took Tinelle through the back ways on the narrow stone paths he’d discovered during his night walks. He stopped only when a fit of coughing took hold of Tinelle and doubled her over.
When they got home Hugo was already there. He was sitting on the floor with his head thrown back against the seat of a chair. The only sign of the trouble Hugo had just escaped from were the blood marks on his shoes.
Pynter eased Tinelle down on the cushions. He went to the kitchen, lit the stove and set a pot of water on it. He lifted a couple of towels from her room, returned to the kitchen and waited till the water warmed.
She was exhausted. There were small gashes at her temple where flying glass had struck. Pynter pulled off her shoes and began working on her the way he’d seen the women in his yard do: from her head down. He loosened her hair and picked out the bits of debris. He extracted the flecks of broken bottle embedded in her arms and legs. He wiped her down, Vaselined her bruises, wrung the still-warm towel and folded it around her feet. She barely winced. Her breathing quietened. She was still crying when she fell asleep.