The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross

  ‘You were hurting me,’ she said, massaging her wrist. ‘But…’ She rose to her feet and dusted her dress. ‘I didn’t want to spoil it for you.’ She stood looking down at me. A soft chuckle escaped her. ‘And that’s – that’s my problem, right there – Digger is it?’

  In the twilight, with her back against the water, I could not see her face clearly. ‘You won’t forget me, will you?’ she said.

  I remembered the flush of sadness that came over me when she said that.

  I don’t remember what I said, or if I said anything at all. Lately, I felt that same sadness whenever I thought of Dessie.

  16

  For one full week after Malan uncovered Nathan in Easterhall, he sparred with journalists like a shadow-boxer. I didn’t tell him what Chilman said; I just sat back and watched him. The fella couldn’t get enough of looking at himself on the little television he brought into the office. Miss Stanislaus came in, sat at her desk and glared at him from under lowered lashes.

  The days she did not come in, she phoned and said she was spending time with the Sisters of The Children of the Unicorn Spiritual Baptist Church in Pwin.

  ‘That’s what Chilman send she here for? To dance around flagpole and clap she hand?’ Malan wanted to know. ‘S’matter of fact, the case done finish, so we have to consider the implications, ’specially since she can’t find it in sheself to celebrate what the Department achieve.’

  Lisa coughed, excused herself and began shuffling her papers.

  Malan didn’t push it further. I suspected he wasn’t looking forward to another call from Chilman through the Commissioner.

  The atmosphere of the office changed in small ways, although it was noticeable enough to make Malan less relaxed. Pet and Lisa began turning up to work in lovely floral dresses and matching shoes. Pet even procured a handbag, inside of which she peeked and poked her fingers as if tending to some delicate living creature. Me, I bought myself a set of five ties, ranging from bright yellow to magenta. I wore a different colour every day.

  Malan muttered something about ‘the wrong time of the year for carnival’, and his office becoming a Mas Band. We pretended we didn’t hear him.

  Miss Stanislaus was on her way out and I suppose that Pet and Lisa knew it too. Malan wouldn’t have to push her.

  I imagined her walking into the office any day soon to tell us to haul our hifalutin, low-fartin arses. And if the girls and I were lucky, she would finish off Malan with a more in-depth exposé of all the shameful things about himself that he didn’t want the world to know. I was missing her already.

  She phoned me late one evening. ‘Missa Digger, you busy?’

  ‘I just about to head home. Tell me…’

  ‘You kin, erm, take a pusson to Fort Jeudy – I mean, if you got de time?’

  Her voice was strangely distant, as if she were holding the handset some distance from her mouth.

  ‘Fort Jeudy, you say, Miss Stanislaus?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Fort Jeudy was a wide inlet of dark-water that spilled off from the Atlantic and settled in a deep lagoon shut in by mangroves. The dirt road to it ended at a small, partly-hidden, grey-sand beach.

  ‘Missa Digger?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Stanislaus.’

  ‘Take de ting from your desk-drawer and bring it wiv you.’

  ‘You mean, the, erm…’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  She was silent all the way. From time to time, I felt her eyes on me, but when I turned my head she was always staring directly ahead. We had swung into the dirt road when she broke the silence.

  ‘Yuh girlfriends,’ she said, ‘you ever tell dem where you going?’

  ‘Girlfriends?’

  ‘You got two, not so?’

  ‘What make you think so, Miss erm…’

  ‘I not no fool, Missa Digger. I got ears to hear, and I not blind. Mebbe they want you to make up your mind; not so? Mebbe them tired of you jumpin round?’

  I’d stopped the car on the slight incline that led down to the beach. I found myself tapping the steering wheel and looking straight ahead at the gulls squabbling over the water. In the decaying light, the little islands in the near distance were silhou ettes frilled at their base by dimly glinting breakers.

  ‘That’s what you call me here for?’ I said.

  ‘What you think I call you here for?’ Her eyes were on my face, her mouth lifted in a half-smile.

  ‘You tell me,’ I threw back.

  ‘I want you…’ She fumbled in the bag I’d brought and took out the Ruger, ‘to show me how it work.’

  ‘You change your mind about guns?’

  ‘Change my mind? Nuh! I didn make it up till…’

  ‘Till?’

  ‘Till today.’ She opened the door and stepped out of the car, leaving behind a pleasant, lemony trace of her perfume.

  I made her watch me first; then I stood behind her, curved my arms around her shoulders and lightly cupped her hands in mine, partly taking the weight of the gun while I talked her through the motions. Then I stepped aside and studied her face as she lined up the pistol and pulled the trigger.

  I knew it well – the emotion that comes when a trainee raises a weapon and fires it for the first time: the shiver of wonderment, the stupor even, as it dawns on them that they’ve just crossed a boundary – that by aiming that gun and firing at some imagined person, they’ve been nudged a little closer to killing another human, and the likelihood of doing so is far greater than before.

  I didn’t see this in Miss Stanislaus’s expression. I detected it in her posture, the pause after that first shot, the way she lowered her head and refused to look in my direction.

  On the way back we did not speak. I was conscious of her presence in the vehicle beside me, and of some new dimension to our relationship.

  I brought the car to a halt outside the row of croton and hibiscus plants that stood between her house and the road.

  ‘The wimmen in the office missing you,’ I said. ‘They wondering when you coming in.’

  Miss Stanislaus opened the door and slid off the seat. When she was outside she poked in her head. ‘Missa Digger, I miss you lil bit too. A pusson didn mean to upset you. But seein as I start, I might as well finish. Go wiv de girlfrien that give you de most hell – that is my advice. You not always goin to like it, but she’ll make you into a better fella. Even if you kinda nice already.’ She squeezed my shoulder, withdrew her head and closed the door. I listened to her chuckling all the way up to her door.

  17

  I couldn’t figure out what I said or did that could give Miss Stanislaus the slightest indication of what was going on in my mind. I felt the unease I thought I’d detected in Malan when she turned her attention on him.

  A full month after I’d messaged Dessie, she replied to my text saying she would call. The few times she did – often very late at night and very briefly – there was trouble in her voice. And yet, whenever I saw her at the bank, she was radiant. Except that one time when she covered my money with her hand, leaned forward and whispered, ‘You like me, Digger? For myself I mean. You don’t think I have no substance, right?’

  Before I could reply, she smiled at the woman on the yellow line behind me, and was herself again.

  It brought back to mind the hastily truncated call she’d made when I was about to take the plane to London. And there was that Sunday night a few months after I’d returned when a call woke me. I heard soft sobbing, like that of an exhausted child, and I knew straightaway that it was Dessie. Then I heard the phone clatter to the floor, followed by a man’s voice – flat, toneless, close, almost casual – as if he’d picked up the phone and was addressing me.

  ‘Shut up and get up.’

  Dessie stopped crying abruptly, then the phone went dead.

  A couple of days later, I met Lonnie on the road.

  I was on my way home after handling the first real murder case fully assigned to me.

  They’d found the b
ody of an Indian girl floating in the river that ran through a village named Les Terres. It was the rainy season and the river had dug her up from its bank and deposited her in the marshland where it met the sea. My friend, Caran from North Division, had pulled her out along with a cardboard suitcase of her belongings. When I got there, first stage maggots had not begun to do their work, but bombo flies had already lain eggs on the body. I estimated that the victim was exposed for less than twenty-four hours.

  The water had partly dissolved her cardboard suitcase when they pulled it out, along with a crumpled heap of brightly coloured clothing, a pair of white pretend-leather shoes, a plastic hand-mirror and matching brush – the type Syrian and East Indian salesmen sold to plantation villages inland. A small tangle of gold-plated chains and bracelets lay on top her clothes. The girl was no more than sixteen, flimsy as a stick insect. Her slightly misshapen mouth and forehead suggested inbreeding.

  The red silt in her clothing led us a couple of miles up-river, past the cool gloom of an old cocoa plantation where the earth thickened into rust-red clay because of the iron that infused it. We found the remains of an excavation on the river bank about two hundred yards below the village. Despite the heavy rains of the past few days, the teeth marks of the fork were still visible at the edges of the hole.

  ‘We need to find the fork, then ask who it belong to,’ I told Caran. ‘They poor people; the fella won’t get rid of it.’

  ‘What make you think is a fella?’ Caran asked.

  ‘You ever hear a woman kill another woman here?’

  Caran shook his head.

  I looked up at the toss of corrugated iron and bamboo constructions tacked against the hillside. Women worked in sloping kitchen gardens. Children moved in and out of smoking outside-kitchens, their voices high and sharp as bird-calls.

  I pointed at the kids. ‘Most of them inbred: cousin breeding cousin, grandfather makin great grandchild with granddaughter. This whole village dying, and the women always the first to know it. I tell you something, Caran. When women most likely to conceive they avoid their fathers. They cut down on the time they interact with daddy and talk to mammy more. They don’t even realise they doing it. Yunno why that is?’

  Caran shot me a sideways look. ‘Even if I know, Digger, you still goin tell me.’

  ‘Is a precaution against making unhealthy children. Nobody need to tell a woman incest not healthy. Is in her bones. Call it instinct. So! As far as I work out, is either that girlchile was runnin off with a blackfella down there in the valley – in which case, as far as her people concerned, she better off with a dog. Or she refuse the cousin they forcing on her. Or maybe she got impregnated by the father and he can’t take the embarrassment. I betting on the blackfella explanation. Forget about the fork; I got an idea.’

  We climbed the mud path to the village. Children, slim as egrets, flocked the open space. I called out the adults and asked them to stand behind the children.

  ‘I got a story,’ I said. ‘Girl – fifteen or sixteen, same size as this young lady there.’ I pointed at one of the girls. ‘Poopa catch her coupla times talking to one of them blackfellas down the valley. That give him grief, y’unnerstan? He make it plain he don’t like it, but girlchile not listening. She behave like if she rather dead. And yunno, she really rather dead for true. So a coupla days ago – late Tuesday or early Wednesday gone – Poopa say he taking her somewhere else on the island. He say he find a job for her in San Andrews with a cousin who own a shop, or mebbe an uncle or auntie living somewhere on the island. He say things hard, so is better for everybody. So he pack her lil green dress with the white buttons and collar, her nice white shoes with the gold buckles on the side, the bracelets and the chain her mother give her and they take it along with them in the cardboard suitcase.

  ‘And oh! He say she not coming back for a while. Well,’ I stopped and scanned the faces. ‘Poopa didn lie when he say she not coming back.’ I swung an arm in the direction of the swollen river down below. ‘We find her body in the river-mouth this morning.’

  I heard a whimper to the right of me, turned to face the child at the edge of the ragged circle – broad-faced, a rust-coloured head of hair, fingers splayed over her mouth, big eyes brimming.

  ‘What’s your sister’ name?’ I said.

  The girl raised wide uncertain eyes at the woman standing by her. I watched the men, lips locked-down, faces inscrutable as the hills that leaned over their houses.

  ‘What’s your daughter’s name?’ I asked the woman.

  ‘Leyla’, the little girl answered and she couldn’t hold it in any more. She doubled over bawling.

  ‘Where’s he?’ I said. The woman raised a hand towards the upper reaches of the plantation.

  Caran shifted the rifle on his shoulder. ‘Tell him to come down to the station and give imself up.’

  We turned to leave.

  Caran cleared his throat and spat. ‘Tell him if we have to come looking for him tomorrow, he might end up like his daughter. Or he could save me the trouble and kill imself.’

  ‘You didn’t have to say them words,’ I said to Caran.

  We were clear of the red-mud path and on the track that would take us back to Les Terres town.

  ‘Dem coolie hate us, Digger. They think we shit, and look at how dey live. Look what he done to his own daughter.’ Caran adjusted his rifle on his shoulders and glared up at the hills.

  On the way home, I couldn’t take my mind off Leyla. Somewhere in my family there was a runaway daughter too – an East Indian girl-maroon who’d taken flight. She was there in my grandmother’s slim and agile frame, her grace of hands and feet. That runaway girl had passed on traces of herself to me; she’d given me her lashes and her eyes, the hairs on my head and lower stomach that every woman I’d ever been with commented on.

  I was still thinking about Leyla when I saw the woman ahead of me, ambling along the grass verge, her hair pulled out, a red comb in her hand. It was as if someone had opened a door inside me and let in a strong, warm wind. I stopped the car.

  She turned her head, took me in for what felt like a century. Dark, dark eyes. Clean-skinned.

  ‘What you want?’ she said.

  ‘Where you going?’ I said.

  ‘Not far.’

  ‘That’s far enough for me.’ I opened the door. ‘I offerin you a ride.’

  ‘Nuh,’ she said and kept on walking.

  ‘I don’t do this all the time, y’unnerstan?’ My little boy’s voice embarrassed me. ‘I see you and I stop. I don’t even know why I stop. I just stop. Is a ride I offering you, nothing else. You want a ride or not?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  I fumbled under the dashboard for my notepad. ‘Okay, I give you my number. You take it? Take it, please. You don’t even have to call me. Just take it.’

  ‘Then why you givin me your number?’

  ‘Well it might cross your mind, yunno – to jus gimme a call one day. Soon? Just to say “Hello, is me the nice girl you meet on the road last time.”’

  She shook her head, grinned. Teeth white as sun-bleached coral.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  She hung there as if bothered by something, then she looked down at me, a quick dark flash of eyes that took in my face, my hands, the rest of me, my face again.

  ‘Where you live?’

  ‘San Andrews.’

  ‘Who you live with?’

  ‘Nobody. Is me alone. You want to come and check?’

  ‘Nuh.’ She was studying my face again, as if she were trying to read between the folds of my brain.

  ‘What you find?’ I said.

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘You looking at me kinda hard, so I ask you what you find?’

  She flashed her teeth again. ‘Mebbe next time.’

  ‘Next time where?’

  ‘Round here.’ She made a gesture that took in the trees, the sea, the world.

  ‘When?’ I said.

  ‘Whenever.�
��

  ‘Make it evening,’ I said. ‘Who I should ask for when I come?’

  ‘Me,’ she said over her shoulder, and kept on walking.

  ‘No name?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  I drove home in a daze. Woke up, wishing I could hurry the day forward.

  Marais was fifteen and a half miles from San Andrews, the shortest route a rough drive through the mountains, then down the other side.

  Damn fool! I not doing it! No woman in the world worth that kinda hard work. That’s what happen when you just see a dead girl and meet a lovely living one on the gov’ment road straight afterwards. Never mind she nice.

  I would get into my vehicle, decide I was going home, only to find myself driving across the island.

  I patrolled that road every evening after work for two weeks with a picture of the woman in my head. The Walking Girl, I named her; every evening after I came home with no result, I chastised myself for being a jackass.

  The Friday of the second week, I saw her sitting on a root that overlooked the road – red-strapped sandals, a plain sea-green dress flaring at her ankles.

  I pulled up.

  She eased herself off the root, stepped down beside the car, opened the door and sat beside me.

  ‘You know how much time I drive this road in the past coupla weeks?’ I said.

  ‘Fourteen,’ she said. ‘Twice yesterday.’

  I shifted on the seat to face her.

  She twisted her mouth in one of those woman-smiles – sly and satisfied. ‘I wasn hidin; you jus didn’t see me.’

  She dropped a hand on my knee, turned and held my gaze. ‘How else I know for sure you not tryin to play the arse with me?’ She arranged her dress and looked out the window of the car. ‘Besides, it make a pusson want a lil bit stronger, yunno. You taking me with you?’

  ‘For good?’ I said.

  ‘Nuh, I back in my house tomorrow.’

  ‘Jeez!’ I said. ‘Jeez!’ because it struck me that, just so, our courtship was over.