by Jacob Ross
He tended his burning feet the same way he’d tended Tinelle’s. Felt as if some part of his self had decoupled from his body. All he remembered now were Tinelle’s words about his fear for Paso’s life: ‘You’re grieving for a death that you’ve invented.’
Until Paso he’d never understood loss. Not until he’d lived this helplessness and hurting during the few weeks of madness that sent him on his night-time walks through the ghost roads of San Andrews. It amounted to the same thing in the end: hurting for something that could not be rescued or held on to. How much worse it must be then for the women in his yard. For him it had been easier: all this grieving had taken him somewhere; it had led him to accepting something he could not change.
Night was darkening the church towers in the distance when Pynter got up and took his bag. He’d packed only the things he came with.
‘Where you going?’ Hugo said. He went to the doorway and blocked it with his body. ‘Stay with her,’ he said.
‘She’s awright now,’ Pynter said. ‘I got to get home.’ He was thinking of the curfew that was sure to close the island down. In fact it had already fallen, for there was an absence of human sounds out there that came only with the curfews. ‘And like Tinelle done tell me.’
‘I don’t care what she told you. Stay with her.’ Hugo left the door and took a long stride towards him. ‘Like you gone stupid or something, Pynter?’ He was shaking his head and staring at the bag in Pynter’s hand. ‘You make it look so easy, man.’
Pynter shook the bag in his hand. ‘Is what she want. She sleepin now.’
‘She went to sleep knowing that you there. That’s not the same as … I have to spell it out for you? You and him. You’re the same. Pride and ice. Both of you. Y’all even wearing the same face. Me and my sis – somebody’s playing a joke on us, man.’ He reached out suddenly and plucked the bag from Pynter’s hand. ‘Stay with her, Pynter. Please.’
Hugo tossed the bag onto a sofa and led Pynter out to the veranda. The Carenage below was no more than a grey space now, littered with the debris of the day. The sea threw back the glow of the dying sun. On Cathedral Street, the three clock towers struck seven.
‘You take everything somebody tell you in vexation for the truth?’ Hugo said.
Pynter shrugged. ‘Depends.’
‘Even out of love?’
‘Didn see no love in dem words,’ Pynter said.
‘Try hearing with your heart next time.’
He almost told Hugo that those were Paso’s words; that when he heard them first time, they felt like the beginnings of the real alphabet to life. Instead, Pynter said what he believed was the only thing that sat beneath their words now.
‘I hope Paso awright.’
A burst of static pulled their gazes towards the settlements below. They could hear the chords of a guitar and it raised the hair on Pynter’s arms. Bob Marley’s voice – sad and angry and plaintive – rose up into the air:
No sun will shine in my day today
The music stopped abruptly.
They watched the night roll in. In the spreading dark a line of lights were moving out towards the row of islands.
‘Fishing for the missing,’ Hugo said. He sprang to his feet, made a strangled sound and rushed inside the house.
40
PASO DIED SWIMMING.
When Pynter heard, he simply lifted his head at Tinelle and said, ‘He was born on the sea, yunno dat?’
Tinelle would not look at him.
By the next day news of Paso’s death had reached every corner of the island. Pynter paced the living room, pausing occasionally to part the blinds and look down on the town while Hugo and Tinelle slept or cried off their rage in bed. The radio droned on. Pynter barely heard the voice of the announcer, whose reading of the news had become so stilted she was made to do it with a man who interrupted more and more or took over sometimes. He wondered why Victor did not get rid of her altogether since her heart was not in it.
On the third day they broke the curfew in their hundreds to go to see what Victor’s soldiers had done to Paso. There were no tears amongst them either, just the silence and the numbness. Pynter thought that there would be no end to the stream of people making their way up the hill to see his nephew for the last time.
Miss Maddie was sitting straight-backed in a chair when he arrived. Pynter stood before her, touched her briefly on the back of her hand and said, ‘I sorry about Paso.’ As the night deepened, people arrived with masantorches and left them burning in the yard. They went into the house, returned and pronounced Paso beautiful in sleep.
Miss Muriel, Jordan’s mother, lit a fire and began preparing coffee. Missa Ram conjured a bottle of white rum, broke the seal and doused the steps of the house before pouring a mouthful down his throat.
Much later in the night another group of men arrived and made a small circle on the grass. Pynter was interested in these last arrivals, Old Hope’s fishermen, men who’d long lost their fathers and their faith to the sea. They sat and told stories, the drumbeat of their voices drawing people towards them the way the masantorches sucked the gnats into their flames. Pynter stayed for the talk about the two children whose brother–sister love took them to the seashore, where they left everything they owned and swam out to meet the ocean, and whatever else was waiting out there for them. There was never a waste like dat pretty-face fella lyin down so peaceful inside dere, they concluded.
He’d lost a sense of the time when he got up and walked away from the circle.
Pynter wondered about Oslo, the young man whose back he’d almost broken. Oslo had made himself a disciple of Paso. No one had heard from him or seen him. Over the past couple of days, word reached them that Frigo was now in the hands of Victor’s men.
He took Tinelle to the little gully behind his father’s house he hid in as a boy. He told her about the man who used to sing like a rain-bird and the woman who came laughing through the patches of sunlight to lie with him there. He told her how he had called this place Eden and how it had given him the first idea of the promises that lay beyond childhood. Pynter wondered what had happened to Missa Geoffrey and Miss Tilina, whether they’d found another place. There were birds like that. A person tampered with their nest, they moved away and built a new one somewhere else.
It was there that Pynter spoke to Tinelle about the letter Sislyn had sent him. He fished it out of his pocket and showed it to her. That letter, he said, was proof of what he’d been so desperate to have her and her people understand. Sislyn could have given that note to anyone, anywhere on the island, and it would have reached him. The island worked liked that. It was a web of threads. You held any end and shook it, it got felt everywhere else. It meant that there was not a person on the island that another could not get to if they really wanted. He believed that Paso also knew this. There was that look that Paso carried all the time, he said: the certainty of his passing.
41
ONE SUNDAY MORNING Pynter was woken by steel-pan music. It was like nothing he’d ever heard before. It stirred the quietness that had descended on the house in the months since Paso had drowned.
‘Who’s dat pan-man, Tinelle?’
Tinelle threw a quick, hot glance at him. ‘He name Simone. Go on,’ she urged. ‘Ask me another country-boy question.’
‘She your friend?’ he said.
Tinelle would laugh at him if he told her that what he was hearing did not feel like music but a kind of conversation. It sounded like a woman speaking to herself of loss and hope and wanting. It took his mind off Tinelle.
He sat up and pulled on his clothes. Tinelle rose with him and dressed.
They did not take the road but rather the ancient alleyways, the meandering brick roads and stone steps carved into the rocks on which the town was rooted. He stopped beside a stone wall once and held out a hand to Tinelle. She pulled back from him, staring down at his hand as if it belonged to a stranger.
The music had stopped by the time they em
erged amongst houses that sat at the edge of a wide gravelled yard high above the sea. Below them was Cathedral Street, with its rows of flower-draped verandas and the dark indifference of Georgian glass windows and grey stone paths.
Pynter saw the shape of the young woman first. She was standing against the cast-iron railings with her back towards the sea. He felt he knew the exact shape Simone’s face would be, and the way the small birthmark that sat like a tadpole just under her cheekbones would creep up the side of her face as she parted her lips to say hello to them.
Simone uncrossed her legs and straightened up. She was as tall as cane, with eyes like Patty’s.
Pynter extended his hand and brushed her fingers. ‘How yuh, Simone?’
‘I fine, and how you been?’ Simone’s fingers wrapped themselves around his.
‘Awright,’ he answered. ‘I been hearing you.’
He released her hand. The tadpole tremored briefly. Simone leaned forward. Pynter brought his palms to his face and held her gaze. She seemed frozen by the gesture.
Tinelle’s fingers crept up the back of his shirt. Her hand became a fist against his spine.
‘Let’s go, Pynter,’ she said.
He sensed in Tinelle a warning that he’d better kill whatever it was that had made him hold this woman’s gaze like that. He turned with Tinelle, swung his head around just once. Simone had turned around, her elbows on the railings, looking out to sea.
They’d barely arrived home when Tinelle broke her silence – a quiet, deadly rage that made her face go pale. ‘I thought you said you didn’t know her,’ she said, her voice tight with accusation.
‘I didn … I … ’
‘Then how come she asking how you’ve been? That long-neck bitch…’
‘Don’ call her no long-neck bitch, Tinelle!’ His anger surprised him.
‘She got Cecile Younger but she still cutting eyes at you.’
‘You don’ unnerstan. She not … ’
‘But she better watch her arse with me. Y’hear? You too! You mess with Cecile woman, Cecile don’t have no problem messing with you, y’unnerstan?’
‘To hell with Cecil whoever-de-hell-he-is. Gimme a chance to talk.’
‘I say Cecile, not Cecil.’ She’d paused for him to take that in. His face must have registered the surprise because she laughed in his face. ‘That place you come from in the country only teach you life in black and white, not so? Grow up, lil boy!’
‘Don’t call me no lil boy,’ he grated. ‘And don’t rush me neither. Y’hear me? Don’t rush me! You rush me an’ you askin for trouble. Town people got life? What life town people got? You call dat life? Life my arse.’
He stepped out into the yard and slammed the door behind him.
He wanted to walk. He took the road which swept down towards the bridge over the river at the edge of San Andrews. It was a deceitful road, for it did not deliver the easy downhill stroll it promised. He would turn the corner and there, before him, would be the mountains rearing up in great frozen waves. The road would narrow abruptly and begin to rise like a grey serrated scar towards the purple heights, burying itself in the mist up there. That steady, crooked climb delivered the vehicles which dared to climb it to the murderous downward drag of gravity on the eastern side of the island.
He heard the hum of tyres behind him and his heart flipped over, for there was not a person on the island who did not recognise the sound of those high-ridged tyres on hot asphalt. There wasn’t a child in Old Hope who did not understand its meaning, for it had been said to them so often it hummed like tinnitus in their ears. That – that was the sound that Jordan did not hear, or hadn’t been listening out for, when Victor’s soldiers lifted him off Old Hope Road.
The first Land Rover went past him. He caught a glimpse of green caps and an arm hanging out of a window. He was not worried. It was early afternoon and even if the curfew had never been lifted after Paso’s passing, the island had tested it and pushed against it until it finally gave way.
The other vehicle stopped behind him. It was then that he heard the grating of gears ahead and saw the jeep that had just gone past reversing towards him.
He’d always wondered how the soldiers did it. What was it that had made it so easy for Sylus’s men to lift someone like Marlis Tillock off the road, or so many of the others that he’d heard of? Pynter looked about him, was surprised he was so calm. He scanned the high mud banks on either side of the road, the tall wire fences planted on each of them. Of all of the six roads he could have selected out of San Andrews, his feet had taken him down this one.
The door of the vehicle behind him slammed. A man stepped out of the jeep in front. He approached Pynter with a stiff-backed strutting gait, his eyes never leaving Pynter’s face. Others followed him. Pynter learned their language quickly: the pressure on his wrist that urged him backwards, the sharp jerking of their heads which ordered him to enter the back door of the humming van behind, the abrupt finger directed at the metal rise above the rear wheel which meant he was to sit there.
In the busy silence he felt a bitter rising in his chest, a shivering dislike for Tinelle which the smiling man beside him must have mistaken for fear. For it was Tinelle’s goading that had brought him here. Her daily chipping away at so many things inside him. Her puzzling pettishness with him, no different from the way his aunt, Tan Cee, used to be with her husband. These women – he did not understand them. They were strong as God in every way, fearsome when they had to be with every human in the world, except with the men they loved.
Pynter pressed his head against the metal of the van and closed his eyes, navigating the rest of the journey by the movements of the jeep and the sounds outside. He knew they had arrived when the men stopped talking and the vehicle made a sharp turn. There was the sound of tyres chewing into gravel, then they stopped abruptly.
The Barracks throbbed with the voices and laughter of men. The windows were wide open. Two men sat chuckling on chairs beside the doorway. Their laughter died and their faces closed down when they saw him. A young man – all bones and eyes – looked out of a window, rolled slow eyes over him and pulled his head hurriedly inside.
They led him into the building through corridors painted green, with doors that stood half-open, offering glimpses of naked feet and shoulders dark and gaunt as scorched wood. They stopped him at a white door and knocked on it. A voice rough as gravel came from the other side.
They pushed him in and closed the door.
A man was standing with his back against a large window that flooded the room with light. He wore a white shirt, as carefully ironed as the ones Patty went to work with, and pale khaki trousers that matched his sandals exactly.
If this was the man that had come for Birdie all those years ago, Pynter could not remember him. Not the slimness, or the angles that his body made against the light which made him think of Deeka.
Paso had been right about Sylus’s hands. They were slim and long and tapering like river reeds. They were hanging at his sides, the tips of his fingers brushing against each other as if he were clearing them of dust. A tension came off him like electricity.
The man’s eyes were on him. It lasted for ever, that gaze, in which time Pynter’s senses were filled with a rising sense of danger from this slim-boned, dark-eyed stranger who’d murdered his nephew, robbed Jordan of his mind, done something so awful to Marlis Tillock that the sight of it had changed something in John Coker, their headmaster, too. He was remembering the last thing his uncle, Birdie, ever said to them before he escaped the island. That there was not a soldier or jail-keeper in the world who would not destroy a man if he could convince himself that he should do so. These men lived it as a privilege. There was pleasure to be had from that – a man’s power over life.
Which was why, he said, you never provoke them. You never offer them the reasons they are hoping for. In fact, you work on them the other way. You try to remind them of something they felt, or could feel weak for: you widen your
eyes, you soften your face, you pretend stupidity or innocence. You show them that you’re hurting long before they try to hurt you. And if you could make a woman of yourself, you do your best to become one. Or better still, you become their mother, because on this little island there was just one thing that even the wickedest of men held sacred – their mothers.
He’d seen it every time – how a dying island man always fell back on two names: God for insurance, and their mothers for comfort.
‘You the first,’ Sylus said.
‘First of?’
Sylus sat on the table, brought his hands together and leaned forward towards him. ‘You not ’fraid. You make me want to make yuh ’fraid. Whooz yuh people?’
‘Paso was my family.’
Sylus stretched an arm up towards a shelf above him and took down a small brown box. It jangled briefly. The man laid it on the table, slipped his fingers beneath the lid and pulled out a handful of keys. ‘Suh, you come lookin fuh me?’ he said.
Pynter looked Sylus in the eyes. ‘I been wonderin about you, specially since Paso, erm, gone,’ he said. ‘I been wonderin how – how many times you die, jus’ imaginin your own passin. I wonder if it ever bother you, knowin dat it hardly got a pusson on dis island who don’ wish to destroy you. A coupla times, I tell meself I wan’ to meet you, just to ask you dat.’
There was no reaction from Sylus. There was a knock on the door. A thin arm pushed it open. A shoulder appeared. A harassed-looking young man came in with a small red canvas bag. He raised his brows at Sylus, who gestured at the table. The youth left the bag there and avoiding Pynter’s gaze, eased himself out and pulled the door behind him.
Pynter nodded at the bag and said, ‘You kill a man, you add his weight to … ’
Sylus moved so suddenly it caught him unawares. He expected the man to hit him. He’d already imagined that was what the keys were for. Was so sure of it he had to struggle with himself not to bring his hand up to protect himself. He willed himself to remain as he was, even when Sylus closed his fingers round his throat and pressed his head hard against the door. ‘Lissen, fella, you fink you a bad-john? You fink you kin stan’ up in my face an’ gimme yuh shit-talk? You fink I don’ know how to soften you? You play wiv me, I spoil yuh head right now, y’unnerstan?’