by Shani Mootoo
Dinner that evening was a strange affair. The table was not set and the food was not placed on it in serving dishes as usual. Instead, the dishes remained on a counter in the kitchen, covered from flies with a tea towel. Rosita handed me my plate and a knife and fork, and I helped myself. I sat at the table, but not in the seat that had come to be mine. And I positioned that chair off to the side, so that I did not face the empty table. I poked at the food on my plate and had a mouthful. Then I poured myself a Scotch and coconut water and went outside to the wall at the edge of the garden. Night had fallen fast. It was already close to twelve hours since Sydney had died. With each passing minute the gulf between then—the time, that is, when I had been with Sydney—and now—the time when I would forever be without Sydney—widened. The pang I felt was partly familiar and partly not. That is, I knew well the time when Sydney was like a beacon to which I always travelled. But this particular present was foreign to me, and I didn’t know how, exactly, to exist in it. I sipped my drink and said aloud, “This is where I bring Sydney. We sit together here in the evenings and chat.” And then I tried out the new present: “This is where I used to bring Sydney. We used to sit out here and chat.” I said, in the familiar way, “Sydney loves to look at the lights below.” Then I said, and listened carefully to the new, cold sound of it: “Sydney used to come out here with me. We used to sit out here. Sydney so very much liked the lights ahead.”
Nights here, after Sydney and I had eaten our dinner and the kitchen was cleaned and the servants had gone their respective ways, it had become my habit to telephone Catherine. There is one phone in the house, a corded phone located in the kitchen. At least during each call, Sydney used to make his way slowly, on foot, to the fridge for a glass of coconut water or a bowl of the jelly, holding on to the counters and walls as he pulled himself forward with his arms. I sensed his ears trained on my words. What he would have heard was the restlessness of someone who was not without a lover, yet who was, in effect, alone. It always took me several days to a couple of weeks after returning to Toronto to reignite an appreciation for Catherine. She and I have been doing this recalibration for two years now. We have never broached the subject of marriage, but we presume a kind of partnership between us. There is, I am sure, more to us than habit. If she were to meet someone else, I don’t really know what I would do. And who wouldn’t prefer to be the one leaving, rather than the one left?
That first lonely night after Sydney was gone, I waited until Rosita had retired to bed. From Lancelot’s room on the other side of the garage came the low sound of the radio. Only then did I telephone Catherine. I used our old trick: one ring and I would hang up, after which Catherine would return the call so that no cost was incurred on the exorbitant Trinidad end. We would later share the bill. Out of habit I spoke in a low voice, all the while half expecting, despite the irrationality of it, that Sydney might overhear or enter the room. His absence loomed large throughout the house. In my two years with Catherine I had not yet revealed to her the full story of how Sydney and I were related. She knew only that Sydney—not Sid—had been India’s lover for the first ten years of my life, and that, despite the years that had passed since, and the distance between where we lived, I considered him a parent. This was all she knew, and, to my relief, her curiosity had not been piqued. I now told Catherine that Sydney had died and described how, even as I spoke them, those words seemed strange to me. I related how the doctor had announced, “Well, Jonathan, Sydney did his best. He tried his best, man. But in the end he just couldn’t make it.” I asked her if it was more honest and mature to state it plainly as we tended to do, at least in my own Anglo circles, in Canada—to say, that is, that a person had died—or was it better, more respectful and kinder to soften the unfairness with euphemisms: he or she hadn’t made it, had passed away, or as Lancelot cried out in the hospital room, “Sydney gone, Jonathan, his Saviour take him and now he gone and he leave us behind”? Perhaps all of these are more accurate, I said, and died is the shorthand and the euphemism.
Catherine, after an awkward silence followed by an attempt at wordless sympathetic sounds, said, “Will you be coming home right away, then?” I caught myself explaining, as if I were asking permission, that Sydney’s only sibling, Gita, was out of the country, so it had fallen on me to make the funeral arrangements and “tie up the loose ends here.” Attempting to express her sympathy and support, Catherine offered that she thought I was unfairly put-upon to deal with such an unpleasant task that was not my responsibility.
This was my fault: Catherine knew nothing about—about, another euphemism and so loaded—Catherine knew nothing about Sydney; I had not shared with her stories of my childhood with my mother’s lover. I ended the phone call feeling more profoundly alone than I have ever felt, with unusual burdens and obligations, and imminent responsibilities.
By the pale yellow glow of the lamp on my bedside table, I read Sydney’s letter numerous times. My dearest Jonathan. How I held on to the possessive My, and the superlative dearest. How I burdened the phrase immediately following that greeting with my own deep desires: I am sure that, of all people, I can count on you in particular. And how I was pained by the formality of Sydney’s closing words: With the deepest appreciation for the trouble I am asking of you here. Despite my grief I took umbrage with that phrasing, the choice of the word trouble suggesting more distance between him and me than I had ever thought existed, and therefore a slight. But he had ended with As always, Love, S., and this buoyed me. I feel sure that the word always was meant to precisely convey, beyond his passing, his sentiments regarding our relationship. And the word as was surely meant to reassure me of both the past of that relationship, and of the fact that it had continued uninterrupted after he left the house in which he had lived with India and me. The signatorial S was employed, I felt certain, so that I might end his letter however I wished: Sydney or Sid. As always.
I could not sleep. I wondered how it was that night turns over, as it does, without sentiment, that time cannot be stopped or slowed, and that seconds pass and suddenly it is minutes that have passed, and then hours, and soon it will be days and then weeks that have passed. Morning will come, I thought, because that is what it does. And when it comes the sun will shine and the tropical sky will burst with disregard and blueness. Clouds will drift by, because that is what they do. Tourists who have returned to the cruise ships tonight, after a day of shopping in the city or bathing at the beaches, will not have had their hearts broken here and yet they will think they know this place. Tomorrow morning hummingbirds will come to suckle on flowers right beneath these windows, and squawking parrots will pass over the house headed for somewhere else. Stands of bamboo in the hills behind us will wave like giddy teenagers at a charity carwash, and the flames atop the oil rigs will not stop pulsing. They are pulsing brazenly right now.
6
Recently I have found myself calling upon whatever divine beings there might be, thanking them for Rosita, who was then, as she is now, a gift. For example, I had thought that I would wait until after the funeral to go and see Mrs. Morgan at the bank. In my mind, there was no longer any urgency. But Rosita assured me that there would be no rest over the days to come, before or after, as there would be many things to attend to, particularly because I was “from abroad,” as she put it, and would eventually need to return to my own home. I agreed to go the following morning.
I had been restless throughout the night. Five o’clock in the morning arrived and I had hardly slept. The birds in the trees were creating a ruckus. When I went into the kitchen, Rosita was there cleaning, as if it were spring or the night before a Trinidadian Christmas. I sat on the veranda and watched the sea and the sky turn from volatile shades of rubellite to a placid glistening grey. Kiskadees conferred with one another in the shrubs. Parrots in the hills behind the house bickered, every so often a small group of them bursting into awkward flight, headed towards the Swamp. I followed one of them with my eyes—a vain attempt to re
lax, to let go, even if just for seconds—and then another, and then another, until the last black speck it became disappeared into the glare of the sky.
When I returned inside, Rosita had prepared breakfast and set the table as usual, but this time there was only one setting, one placemat, one plate on which sat a matching cereal bowl, and there was one teacup (the usual teacup which I, a coffee drinker, have never used, yet which is always there for me), one cloth napkin, one knife and one fork, one cereal spoon, and one juice glass. The formality of the setting that had previously amused me now unsettled me. I had not questioned Sydney’s insistence on such formality, but I found it fussy and it did not suit me personally. I knew that I should not, at the moment, ask for the table to be set otherwise.
Rosita and Lancelot had already eaten their own breakfasts, but when I sat down they joined me; it was the first time we had ever been at the table together. In our silence Sydney’s presence was evoked. Rosita was unable to suppress her tears.
The banks in Trinidad open at 8 a.m., so I showered and dressed and waited for Sankar to arrive at the house to take me there. After a few minutes, I went into Sydney’s room, and then into his bathroom. I opened the cupboard beneath the sink. There was the usual: bathroom cleaning supplies, shampoo and soaps, toilet paper. There were, too, two large boxes of individually packaged syringes, and smaller boxes of individually packaged needles. I opened the medicine cabinet. Its narrow shelves were lined with orange plastic bottles of varying sizes, containing pills. On the labels were his name: Sydney Mahale. On the inside of the door of the cupboard was taped a sheet of paper on which his daily schedule for taking his medications was handwritten. I knew that the cupboard would one day have to be emptied of the medicines, but for the moment it felt as if the bottles with his name on them were a substitute for Sydney’s existence here, and I dreaded them being discarded. I went to the armoire in his bedroom and unlocked it. I retrieved his knapsack and placed it on his bed. From it I took the stack of letters, and carefully untied the red string that held them together. The first was a yellow sheet of foolscap paper folded into quarters to make a greeting card. A rose was hand-drawn and coloured in red on the front piece. The interior was decorated with S-shaped squiggles made with red- and green-coloured pencils. It read:
To Sid,
Happy Birthday,
From your best friend.
P.S. By now I am sure you know the wisdom of having me as your best friend. The reason I permit you this honour is because of that very wisdom. Happy Birthday, my best friend.
From your best friend,
Zain
I once asked Sydney how he knew Zain, and I remember watching him brighten as the cogs in his brain engaged. He had just turned sixteen, he said. He had transferred over from St. Jude Convent to Zain’s school, San Fernando Presbyterian Girls’ High School. Sydney began to glow as he recalled that first day.
The girls, including Zain, from the class I was to enter, he told me, had lined the never-ending corridor to the Lower Sixth rooms. The corridor had been narrowed by the severity of their crisp starched-white shirts, heavy cotton navy-blue ties, immaculately pleated navy skirts, navy socks and heavy black shoes. Some of the girls had leaned one shoulder into the wall so that an insolent hip jutted into the aisle; others rested their upper backs against the wall, braced by one leg bent at the knee, a foot flat against the cement. Many covered their mouth with their hand as they spoke, some pressed lips to the ear of another, and all trained eyes on me as I passed, the shoosh shoosh shoosh of whispered judgements falling against my back and shoulders like light belt straps.
Yet I managed a brave smile, Sydney recalled. I knew the lineup was to see—not to welcome—me, to see who this new student transferring to San Fernando Presbyterian Girls’ High School in her final two years was.
The teacher walked ahead of me. “Okay,” she said. “Enough of this. You all behave yourselves.” No one budged. At my other school, each girl would have straightened herself—if she had even dared present herself like these girls in front of a teacher in the first place. Behind my smile, my heart had all but stopped beating.
The classroom I entered was empty, yet the room felt stuffy and airless. Mrs. Augusta walked me to the desk assigned to me. She turned to one particular student and called out, “You. Yes, you. Come here, please. Introduce yourself.” I hadn’t noticed this girl in my march down the corridor. But then, I hadn’t looked at anyone directly, hadn’t picked out any faces. The girl Mrs. Augusta had addressed turned to me and said, “I am …” But either I didn’t hear or she purposely mumbled her name, so I had to ask her to please repeat it, and she said her name loudly and slowly, with irritation—Zain—her eyes boring into me. It was as if she were daring me: Comment on it, just go ahead. Instead, I said my name, adding, “Pleased to meet you.” If raised eyebrows could smirk, Zain’s did.
I had been one of the more popular girls in my other school, but now, even before the bell to begin classes rang, I was feeling disheartened. Clearly, the niceties that had earned me points at the convent school were held in disdain here.
Mrs. Augusta let out a sigh of exasperation and said, “Come now, enough. Zain, I am going to leave it to you to show Siddhani around. I expect you to help her with everything she needs. If there’s something you’re unable to do, come directly to me.” Zain sucked her teeth, but only enough to be able to get away with it, and said, “Oh gosh, Miss. Why me?” Mrs. August ignored the question and said, “Okay, stop the theatrics now, and behave like a proper young lady.”
Zain boldly answered back, “You mean, even if I am not?”
Mrs. August looked at Zain sternly but said nothing. I was impressed. That sort of back chat would have been enough for detention where I had come from.
When Mrs. Augusta left, Zain faced me. She sneered. “So, you got expelled or what?”
The lineup of girls outside, awaiting the bell before entering, was intimidating, and so was Zain, even though I felt myself perversely drawn to her.
“No. I want to do art for A Levels, but it isn’t offered at my other school, so I got a transfer here.” It irked me that my tone sounded slightly pleading.
Zain stared hard. She was taller than me by about two inches. I could not read her silence. Then, in a flash, she blurted with equal measures accusation and caution, “Likely story. You see those girls out there? They will find out the truth about you in no time. So no point lying.”
I so wanted her—the desire to conquer my adversary something I had learnt early as a survival manoeuvre—to believe me. My composure thankfully remained steady and I stated flatly, without irritation or fear: “There is nothing to find out. I am telling you the truth.”
I could read the expression in her eyes instantly. She was curious, and I was disarming her too soon for her liking. I was as amused as I was disappointed at how easy this had been.
She did not take her eyes off mine, and I could feel mine tickling with discomfort. She raised her hand to touch my arm, and I felt triumph wash over me. But instead of a friendly touch Zain pinched my skin. I surprised myself when I instantly flipped up that same arm and gripped her wrist hard. I said, in a soft voice, “Don’t do that.” There was no smile on my face now.
But that was when her facade broke, and she was suddenly grinning. I felt her body relax. My grip relaxed then, too, but I did not let go of her hand. I remained unsmiling, suddenly frightened, but not of her.
All this Sydney had related to me in bewildering detail, and his words flooded back to me now. I read the letters as if parched, eager for any bit of new insight into Sydney, unable to let him go. I cut the stack of letters and removed another.
How can you not think Mrs. Rodriguez’s son is not THE most handsome boy you’ve ever, ever, ever seen? I think I am totally in love. I am feeling wild and giddy. Why on earth didn’t I take Rodriguez’s Commerce class? I could have gotten to him through her, don’t you think? His name is Paul, but they call him Dizzy. Dizzy
?! Hmm, I wonder if that is because of what he is, or what he makes others.
Zain
The one immediately following read:
I don’t care, I will convert. Do you think I have a chance? His mother knows I have brains. He can find out for himself what else I have to offer. Which is a lot.
Zain
I read several more consecutive notes.
But, Sid, you are such a prude. Have you never been in love with a single fellow? How can you not think Paul is a total catch?
Z
I know I have a lot to offer because I have a very fertile imagination, which can’t be said of you.
Z
You are not the first to say I am self-centred. And you are not only a prude, you are very stuck-up. I don’t know why I give you so much of my time. I don’t understand you. You spend all your free time with me, but you don’t let me know you. You don’t open up at all. What are you hiding?
Z
Well, it feels like you’re hiding something. I tell you everything that is going on with me, and you hardly ever tell me a thing. I think about you all the time, Sid, but you don’t consider me ever, do you? What does it mean to be a best friend? You have to share yourself. Not just your damn sandwiches and your homework, but YOURSELF. Should I be reconsidering this friendship?
Do you like the flower? I left it for you. But don’t just leave it sitting on your desk, you moron. Put it in some water. There are jars by the sink in the art room. It’s from Mum’s garden. Do you like it?
Z
I put these back and cut the stack again, this time farther along. I neatly arranged the two parts on the bed, so that the letters could be positioned again in their proper order.