“Well, I declare,” Estelle said, picking up the discussion after Mr. Geary left. “Something really has happened to you, Bernice. First it was the Muslim newspaper that was your bible, and now, it seems like it is The Watchtower and Awake.”
“That is the way life is,” Bernice said. “And anyhow, this is summer, child. So let we fill our guts with some o’ Mr. Geary’s nice curry-chicken, and get merry and drunk this peaceable Thursday afternoon.…” And they did that.
The sun was arrogant enough to suggest, through its glorious golden brightness, that it was going to catch the whole evening on fire. Bernice and Estelle, many hours after they had eaten and had drunk and were merry, were sitting, waiting, watching to see if the sun was going to keep its word. They were silent; almost respectful. The carilloneur’s music was helping to make the evening into a theatre. They were listening; almost dreaming.
“Bells playing hymns? Well, what the hell this white man can’t do, eh? heh-heh-heh!”
“Hymns and songs, darling. This is something you would never see in the West Indies,” Bernice said; and then ridiculed the West Indies, in the way she laughed.
“This is a funny country, in truth.” Estelle then looked up at the clock, which said five-twenty-five; and at the tower. But she couldn’t find the man nor the hands nor the bells.
“And this is why I tell you, Estelle, that I gets blasted vex when I see a pack o’ black people marching ’bout the road, looking like arses.”
The bells were ringing hymns now; and their voices were fresh on Estelle’s heart. They were washing out the problem that lay at the bottom of her womb; and she wished they could wash her clean of all personal problems. “I still can’t believe it is me, Estelle Shepherd, who …”
“Leach! Not Shepherd, child, you are a Leach by name, now, heh-heh!”
“Still, I can’t imagine that I could be here, and a man could be there, up there, playing hymns on bells.”
“Listening to them bells make me think o’ Mammy and death. One day when I was alone in that apartment, I start thinking as if Mammy was really dead, you don’t know that. Christ! and I even thought I had inherit the house in my mind …”
“Listening to that man up there, making me think of life and wanting to live. Life …” You could see how the bells were working on her face. The put a kind of fear on it; a fear for the wonderful power which was in the hands of the carilloneur. They were doing something beautiful to her. Bernice’s face, in her concentration, looked haughty and proud and beautiful, too.
“Ess, what hymn he say he playing now? You recognize it?”
“The Day Thou Gavest …”
“Lord is Ending! Amen.” Bernice said. “That is the hymn they took Pappy to his grave with, you remember, Ess? You don’t remember when they take Pappy outta the sea, drowned, how I cry and cry and cry, and people from all over the neighbourhood came and look in at the hole in the coffin? What a beautiful funeral Pappy had! Old women bowing down their heads low low and saying, Thank God, Pappy going up to his Maker!”
“That is one day I don’t want to remember.”
“Christ, Estelle, the weeping! the weeping and the crying and the singing. And you remember too, that I was the only person who insisted that they buried Pappy while he was still living, and really wasn’t dead yet?”
“He was dead, Bernice. Pappy was dead as hell, too!”
“Yes. But only after I make certain he was really dead, though; not before … and you remember, Estelle, you remember how all the people who couldn’t follow Pappy in mottor cars, stood outside their houses, and the walkers, then the riders on bicycles, then the cars, forty-nine cars Pappy had following him, and everybody was so sorry that Pappy didn’t make the fifty, a round number, ’cause then, that would have been a funeral to end all funerals … Well, listening to the magic and the goodness in that damn bell now, bringing it back to me, as if I was in a theatre watching a movie, two times, from beginning to end.” Bernice started to hum with the bells. Her voice, not a good singing voice, was struggling; and Estelle held her hand, and gave her strength, and joined her, singing. Just then, Henry came across the walk, from the little bridge nearby.
“Goddamn!” he said, surprised to see them sitting there. Estelle immediately dropped Bernice’s hand. He sat beside them, unfolded a large blown-up photograph of three policemen with three night sticks beating up one black woman. “Goddamn! Look at this.” Estelle looked and shuddered. Bernice snatched it from him, folded it in its original creases, tore it into bits and tore the bits into confetti, and then spread them to the wind, as if she was planting seed. “Goddamn, woman, are you crazy?”
“Don’t come here and spoil the peace for me, eh, Henry?”
“I just come from marching.”
“Well, go ’long back and march.”
“I saw you,” Estelle said. Henry sat between them now, listening to Estelle, and very impressed by her interest. He took out a cigarette and lighted it.
“And why you didn’t jump in the line, and shake yuh body-line, heh-heh!”
“It don’t have nothing, not a damn thing to do with Estelle. Estelle is a West Indian, you forget? It ain’t her business, Mister Henry.”
“Goddamn, that is your fight, too, baby! West Indian, Canadian, American, Bahamian — we is all niggers to Mister Charlie!”
“You may be one o’ them,” Bernice said, disdainfully, “but not me. I was sitting down here, listening to the niceness in these bells.”
“Fuck the bells! Excuse me, Estelle.”
“Man, what you say?”
“I say, fuck the bells!” He got up and sat beside Estelle. “You sitting down on the white man grass, in the white man university, listening to the white man playing bells, goddamn, and telling me what? Next thing you are going to tell me, is that you ain’t no more West Indian, you is a goddamn Canadian, and a white one, too!”
Bernice sat up straight, and with great arrogance and scorn, said, “The only way I am going to beat him is to listen to him. And that is why I sitting down here.” Henry ignored her. Never before in his life, had he come to despise a woman so completely as he despised Bernice. Big, black, stupid arse-hole woman, he said to himself. But as soon as he realized he had said that about a black woman, his own people, he was sorry; and he altered his sentiment to: this big stupid woman.
“You see Boysie recently, Estelle?”
“Where Estelle would see Boysie?” Bernice snapped. “That bastard ain’t dead yet. If he ain’t careful, Dots will soon bury him, though!” She was thinking of Brigitte and the policeman’s threat. “Boysie had better watch his pees-and-queus!”
“Shit, woman! you must be having your period! Goddamn!”
“Why you don’t come and find out, if you is a man?”
“Listening to these bells,” Estelle cut in, a little embarrassed, “reminds me of back home …”
“Baby, I won’t tell you what they remind me of …” Before he could finish, he noticed something was happening to Estelle: she seemed to be having trouble breathing. He saw her jerk her neck, the second time (Bernice merely gave her a reproving glance), but he didn’t know that at that moment, vomit had spurted up into her mouth. She held her mouth shut. She looked anxiously at Bernice, and then she wallowed it round in her mouth, debating what to do with it. The taste of slime nauseated her, and she wallowed it into a large ball of spaghetti-worms, and swallowed it back down. She closed her eyes, bent her head slightly forward, and gave it easy passage back down. She clapped her chest twice.
Bernice was mumbling about deaths and funerals again. “I remember the dress I wore to Pappy’s funeral, it was a sharkskin piece o’ material. I had got it at a sale.” The worms were in Estelle’s stomach; and they were beginning to climb again. “You remember the undertaker-man? Well, I will never forget that bastard! Dressed-down in black from head to toenail, he comes and put dirt on top o’ Pappy, and that bitch, when nobody wasn’t looking, unscrew every last piece of the si
lver handles from offa the coffin. Every piece of that silver, he take off and bram! Into his pocket they went.”
“That is the brand o’ West Indian motherfucker we will have to kill off!” Bernice was insulted by Henry’s language, and she said so. Estelle was too busy with her health problems to care. “We got to treat them just how the Mau-Maus killed them, ’cause that is the only way the West Indies will be free, and could ever lift up this blasted emastipated black race, goddamn!”
“Now, that’s the most sensible thing I ever heard come outta your mouth, Henry!” And to show him she approved, she rested her hand on his leg, with the feeling of a warm handshake. Meantime, Estelle was feeling things in her stomach. She tried to jerk them back down. But they came up nevertheless. She got up and went behind a small building that had plenty of ivy strangling it. In that short nightmare trip (in the twelve steps it took her to get there, during which she had covered every detail of her stay in Canada) the vomit had gone back down; and she was thinking she should turn back, and walk back to Henry and Bernice and sit down. But when she stopped, considering (she was thinking of what Sam had said to her the last time they met), something in the vomit changed it mind, and she could barely reach the building, when the slime and the disgust and the hate for Sam within her, rebelled like a storm and she yawked and yaawked and puked through her nostrils and her mouth at the same time; and only God knew why it didn’t come through her eyes. She looked at the vomit, and she thought she saw Sam in it. The bells were ringing still; but she did not recognize the tune. When it was over, she wiped her mouth and blew her nose with the pink tissues which she had taken from the Ladies’ Room at the WIF Club; put powder and lipstick on her mouth, and a whiff of perfume to kill the perfume in the vomit, and went back to them. Bernice was still groaning something about how Pappy looked in the grave. Estelle wished it was her unborn child in that grave. What would Bernice say when she found out that she had taken something, which might put the child in Pappy’s predicament? “Exactly round this time o’ day, I remember, I was standing up beside Pappy’s grave, screeling my bloody head off!” Henry had long ceased to listen: he had developed the art of seeming to be listening, while in fact, he was sleeping. He could sleep with his eyes open.
The bells were not ringing now. Without the bells, they became bored with each other; and with time resting heavily upon them. Estelle was wondering when she would have to vomit again; and thinking of Sam, and the thing inside her. Henry was thinking of his woman, Agatha, because the peace and the stillness of the evening reminded him of his exhaustion and drowsiness after sex with her. Bernice was thinking of a home; of a big stone house on a hill, with a lot of chickens and ducks and pigs running about the yard. Now, at this exact hour, she would be calling her flock, “Chick-chick! chickeer! chick, here!” The man in the tower was thinking of what to play next. The clock said it was six-thirty. Time was here. Time, time, time. And all three of them needed more time: time in which to correct the hour-hands of their mistakes.
You can hear Henry and Bernice breathing heavily. Estelle chews on a blade of grass, to prevent herself from thinking. Two days ago (before Sam mentioned abortion) she had decided to take something; mainly because she could not see Sam’s love changing from winter to spring. Time. Estelle what are you going to do with your time? Time that you need for the baby to be born; to grow in; in which to kill the baby; in which to recover from the murder of birth? And Bernice, what is your time? Time in which to change Estelle’s name to Leach; time in which to look for a husband; time in which to see if there is any point wasting time on the man beside you, yes, on Henry. And Henry, what can time bring you, you old goddamn two-time loser? Can time change time? The carilloneur’s voice had just begun to speak, probably in answer to all of their questions, when Estelle’s mouth was wrenched open and the vomit was all over her silk dress with the red dots (which belonged to Bernice). Bernice felt a few warm sprays on her cheek; and so too, did Henry. Bernice was going to hit her, for being “so damn common,” but Henry intervened.
“This chick is goddamn sick, Bernice, you can’t see that?” Estelle remained sitting, apparently too stunned to move. She sat looking foolishly down at the vomit.
“But look at this bitch, though! Just look!” Bernice said.
The nearest refuge was Henry’s room. Henry was holding Estelle’s left elbow, just touching it, ashamed and embarrassed to be seen walking beside a sick woman. People were looking at them. Time had left them, as the sun had. It went behind a cloud, and as far as Bernice was concerned, it might as well have been one long endless night. As they got near Henry’s room, they passed a man, lying on his back on the front steps of a boarding house, with a transistor radio lying on his stomach, playing Beethoven. Bernice recognized the tune of the Storm movement, and she looked at the man, and in her mind, she kicked the man and the radio into the gutter. “That blasted music!” And once, during their retreat from the bells, Estelle had a violent spasm, and Henry barely got his handkerchief out in time, and held it to her mouth, and the vomit spluttered on the handkerchief, and on his hands and on Estelle’s dress, and some of it dripped into the gutter. It was then that a West Indian man and a white woman were passing; and the man pulled the woman faster on. It was then too, that Henry felt like running away, leaving his handkerchief (white and linen and initialled and perfumed by Agatha), but he didn’t have any strength left. He shrugged his resignation away, and said, “Goddamn!”, and put his arm round Estelle’s waist.
“Blood!”
It was Bernice who saw it first. Henry turned his back on the blood. But Bernice stared at it, as it appeared on Estelle’s dress, like an underground spring; and a million visions of its origins and cause, went through her mind. This is a wicked woman, there ain’t no doubt about it, she thought; this woman done something damn bad and foul. Bernice could see herself losing her job, she could see policemen (whom she hated to the bottom of her guts) she could see her bank account disappearing like snow in the sun, she could see Dots and Boysie and Miss Carmeeta Anne Bushell and Priscilla the nurse, all laughing at her, because of what had happened to Estelle. Most of all, she would lose her job, and she was determined to hold on to that, regardless. Lose her job, and have to attend to Estelle till a baby come? Jesus Christ! whose side you on? The blood was coming still. Estelle was on her back (Miss Diamond had made up Henry’s bed) muttering things, which if they were loud enough, would still not have made sense, either to Bernice or Henry.
“Come, come, Henry,” Bernice said, a new urgency, and a new strength now springing from her, “Come, man, this is one o’ we, and we have to join together now and close-up ranks. We can’t sit down here the whole night whilst this girl bleed ’way herself to death. We got to put our two heads together and do something.” Estelle was losing blood steadily; and probably losing consciousness. Bernice knew what she had done: since she herself had done it once before, in Barbados. It was this feminine sympathy that brought her close to Estelle. Bernice knew what to do: Brigitte had told her. “I tell you, Bernice, darlink, we live in a society with wealths. But I tell you, it is too, a society with crime and a society with unmorality.” They had been drinking imported German beer which Brigitte had brought over for Bernice.
“You see this Marina Boulevard, well, I tell you, darlink, it would shock you to know the married women, the single women, and the divorced women on this street, who go to abortions. They have the money. And they have their own doctor. I see them, because before this job, I work for doctor who do that, and he make millions.” She held Bernice, and leaned over and whispered a name in her ear. Bernice almost dropped her beer glass. “Yuh lie!” she said, her eyes rolling. “Yes,” Brigitte said; and put her glass to her head. “Jesus God!” Bernice exclaimed. “And not for him neither,” Brigitte told her. “Now that is what breaks up marriage, darlink.” Brigitte herself knew the things to do; and she taught them to Bernice.
“I stepping out here a sec,” she told Henry, after making
a preliminary examination of Estelle’s condition. Henry was about to resent it, to question her. “Don’t move.” But he was frightened: suppose Agatha come now, goddamn! Or suppose my landlady come now!
“But where you going?”
“Where the hell you think? To bring back the RCMP?” She looked at him, and saw him so pitiful, and so stupid, that she became arrogant with him. “She is my sister, yuh know.” Still he wasn’t settled in mind. “I have a phone-call to make.”
“Use my phone, then.”
Before she answered, she smiled, and patted him on his back, as she would have patted a child. “Thanks, Henry. You is a kind man. But this is woman-to-woman business.”
“Oh.”
“You understand?” She put her arm round him, and for a very brief time let it remain there. “Now, show me the nearest drugstore. I need a few things, for this girl.” And Henry directed her. The moment she left, he became frightened. Goddamn, a woman bleeding in my bed! and suppose my woman come now (he remembered he hadn’t any woman now; so he put that thought away) suppose Boysie was to drop in now, goddamn! or, or … (He couldn’t think of anybody else; he felt so sad he had no friends, nobody who could make him feel dramatic in this moment) … somebody, anybody could knock now. Since there was no one who could come, possibly, he had to think of other tensions; and he sat as far as possible, from the bed: this goddamn woman, on vacation in this goddamn country and to find herself in a goddamn mess like this, this could kill Bernice; but when I think about it, some o’ these West Indian women think they is princesses and queens and virgins in old age, so it ain’t no wonder a lot o’ white cats screwing left and right, and it ain’t no fucking wonder, tambien, that this bitch here get herself in rough waters. You think she would give me a little piece? You think I could get me a nice black chick, goddamn, in Toronto? You’re crazy, baby? I see every half-pretty black chick shacking up with some goddamn white man, shit! … I wonder if Boysie get piece? Boysie is such a smart Bajan bastard … someone was knocking on his door. He jumped up. He listened. He looked to see whether Estelle was sleeping — or dead — and waited to see if it was Bernice. The knocking continued. (“That goddamn landlady, again?”) but he didn’t recognize the knocking (and something about the perfume that came under the door, told him it wasn’t Bernice), and he looked again to see if the knocking had awakened Estelle (and it had), and then he heard the voice, “Henry? It’s me, Agatha.” He stood a foot or so, away from her, on the other side of the door; and could not, and did not want to talk to her. He wished she would go away. (“This goddamn broad.”) He knew she knew he was home: Estelle had just started to cough.
The Meeting Point Page 29