“Where Petra?!” Ab shouted. “Why you take her from her pickney?”
Eric plucked the toothpick from his mouth and leaned forward. “Tell you what. You see how you and you mother live, and you mek your plans each day, ‘bout what you goin’ to cook, and when you goin’ to eat, and when you goin’ to sleep? You see how you do all that and nobody say to you, No Ab, me don’t think that you should eat right now, or me don’t think that you should sleep right now? Well, the same way that nobody not interfering with your business is the same way nobody not to interfere with mine!” He plopped the toothpick back into his mouth and cocked his head towards the window. “Speakin’ of business, I notice that my chairs pack up outside.”
Ab nodded his head slowly. “Just like you sey, boss, dis is my business, and right now, I and I not interested in havin’ no more tables and chairs in my business.”
Eric laughed again, but this time, there was no humour in it. He looked over at Necka who grinned cheerily back through the window.
“Necka, tell me what you think ‘bout this Rasta here. You think him understand anyting ‘bout business?”
Necka chuckled. “Nah, man, him don’t know a ting ‘bout business!”
Eric leaned closer to Ab and nodded again at the window. “Let me tell you ‘bout business, Rasta. You see that permit, and those tables that you say you don’t want no more? Them cost money! Money that you don’t start pay back yet. Every penny that you make when everybody did sit off in them chairs—every penny that you make was because of me!” He laughed that mirthless laugh again. “Now, what we goin’ to do now is get our business sorted out. You owe me a lot of money, and as of now, you goin’ start payin’ me back each week till I tell you when you finish pay!”
But Ab was not giving up. “It don’t work so, Star!” His locks rocked emphatically. “Tek your chairs and sell them back, man. Me will pay you for your permit!”
Eric shook his head with mock display of sadness and jumped off the freezer. He gave Necka a calm flick of his hand, and the boy immediately gave Mattie an apologetic nod and walked around to the shop door.
It wasn’t until Nola saw the glint of sunlight relecting off the boy’s hand that she realized what was about to enfold, right there … right in front of herself and Mattie. She tried to scream a warning to Ab, but as she opened her mouth, she heard Mattie’s wail of “Murder! Murder!” and saw the woman racing towards the house, her breasts shimmying as she waved her arms.
Nola could not move. She remained staring at the shop window even as the glint sliced through the air. Suddenly, her head spun towards the sidewalk even as one part of her brain screamed for her to stay alert.
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She tried to move from beneath the stifling overlay, but her head was too heavy. The thing was holding her down. A gasp wheezed from her chest and she managed to tear her eyes open, her heart pounding with relief when she saw that it was just a fan beside her, blowing hot waves into her nostrils. Slowly, she pushed herself up unto her arms and cautiously looked around.
She was in Ab’s and Mams’ house, lying on the settee in the living room. She reached up and felt her head. Throbbing! The weight she’d felt was a thick bandage, fastened carefully over a spot on the side of her forehead. She remembered now. She’d fainted and fallen on to the sidewalk when Necka had … Necka … knife! … Ab! She scrambled off the settee and raced through the front door.
Everyone was out there. They all surrounded Mams, and they spoke in hushed tones as the woman rocked back and forth on a chair. Her tam was gone and her locks tumbled freely around her shoulders. Even Aunt May was there, perched precariously on the tree stump on which Mams chopped the wood for coal, patting Mam’s shoulder and shaking her own head in disbelief. Nola’s heart pulsed at the look on their faces. Those grimaces that she recognized immediately—Pain. Terror. Defeat.
“Where is he?” Nola managed to squawk from the doorway.
“What them do with Ab?”
Mams looked up from her chair. Her locks were dark, not bronzed like her son’s, but peppered with white. Their marbled lengths tumbled way past her waist, pooling in her lap as she sat. When she spotted Nola, she beat her chest with both hands, and wailed “Me lion! Me young lion!”
Aunt May waddled over to Nola and took her hand. Nola looked down at the dimpled fingers. “What them do with him?” she whispered.
“He’s in the shop, Nola, but… don’t ….”
Too late. She was already running. They shouted for her to stop, but the hysteria in their voices made her run even faster. She had to see him.
He was still in there, his torso hunched over the freezer, his head on his arm as if he was merely resting.
Nola grabbed her chest. She didn’t know if it was the relief of seeing Ab’s chest moving with the passage of air, or the shock of seeing his head shorn of its locks that sent her head spinning into a faint once again. She grabbed the door jamb to stop herself from falling, and the movement made Ab look up.
There was still the rust of dried blood around his nostrils, and a red slit above his right eye, but he looked nothing as bad as Nathan. What struck Nola more than anything else was how youthful his face looked without the heavy locks around it. Youthful, and so … vulnerable. The chopped hair left on his scalp was almost two shades darker than the sun-bleached locks that had once covered it, making the man before her seem like a stranger. His eyes were the only familiar thing staring back at her, those soulful eyes that had warmed her that day when he’d offered her his fried sprat. They rested now on Nola’s own bandaged forehead, and she saw them pulse with something unrecognizable before he lowered his head once again.
“I tell them nobody must come in here right now!” his muffled voice said.
Nola leaned against the door jamb, her legs made even weaker with the relief of hearing his voice.
“I wanted to see if you was alright,” she said.
His shoulders shook slightly. “Alright? I and I not alright, man. Them tek away my glory. Better them did just kill me, Rasta.”
Nola straightened from the door jamb. There it was again—that word—Glory! The word that culminated the suffering, the pain of life. She felt a pulse of anger as she stared at Ab’s bent head. Even this calm, easy-going Rasta, who’d seemed so—untouchable, ‘the watchman and protector of the street’, had fallen under the pain of trashed glory. How she hated that word!
“Better?” she asked, wondering at the anger that cast the relief aside. “Better them kill you? And what ’bout Mams?! What she would’ a do if them did kill you?”
“What she goin’ do now that them neva kill me? Pay them back for the rest of her life—for some plastic chair and table?!” He sucked his teeth. “You know say Rasta don’t tek nothin’ from nobody? Rasta suppose to know better than dat. Rasta work hard for everyting him have. But I and I fall for the tricks, man! I and I fall for the tricks and now them actin’ like them own the Rasta!”
“All of us fall for the tricks, Ab. Everybody.” She sighed, shaking her head in disbelief. “So what we goin’ do now?”
Finally Ab stood, and Nola flinched when she saw that Necka had left two of the long locks to hang comically down his right shoulder. He looked like a mangled spider.
“What we goin’ do now?” he repeated her question on the expelled breath of a sigh. “I and I have nowhere to go, Princess. This here is what Jah gimme.” He looked around the little shop and sighed again. “What we goin’ do now is pay for the permit, and the tables, and the chairs, till the betrayer sey dat we done pay. Live we life best as we can in the meantime.”
“No, Ab! We have to call the police! We have to make them lock up Eric and keep him away! What him doin’ isn’t right!”
“Princess, you nah talk sense, man. Man like Eric McKenzie have the police in them back pocket. Police nah help Rasta over sweet boy like dat.”
“So what if him never say that you finish pay, Ab? What we do then? Pay him b
ack for the rest of your life, like you say?”
Ab took a deep breath, then bent to pick up his tam from the ground. He studied it for a while before he pulled it over his hacked locks. “Tell Mams to start the cookin’” he said over his shoulder, “Enough time waste already, and the evenin’ crowd soon come down pon us.”
Nola stared disbelievingly as he poured a puddle of bleach on to the freezer and began wiping it down. Eventually she turned to leave, but then she heard his voice, ever so quietly, “Princess … ‘memba what I sey—Rasta don’t defend violence. Rasta leave justice up to Jah. Trust me, Princess, Jah will look after the whole of us, watch and see. Leave people like Eric and Necka and Barry up to Jah. All you can do for me, Princess, is keep your heart clean. When time come to face Jah, I and I don’t want know sey your heart nuh righteous ‘cause of me.”
Nola nodded, and turned to leave, but something caught her eye and stopped her in her tracks. Ab’s prized locks. His bronzed glory, tied into a rough bundle and nailed above the door jamb like a bouquet of drying herbs. Nola stifled a sob and turned to face him again.
He didn’t look up, just continued to wipe the freezer and said, “Leave it to Jah.”
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Like scolded children, they replaced the tables and chairs. As promised by Eric, Necka was there at the end of the week to collect the first installment of his ‘repayment’. As it turned out, Necka collected payment that week not just from Ab, but from every other business that Eric had been ‘helping’—from the bakery, as repayment for a small generator that Eric had ‘contributed’ to them to combat the pesky power outages; from the garage, where Barry had moved into an air conditioned office under his new, Eric-imposed title of ‘manager/watchman’. Eric had persuaded the Mongrel that the garage was in need of ‘protection’ from undesirables who were waiting for the chance to rob it. It was for this ‘protection’ that Eric collected his weekly dues; and from Aunt May, as a percentage of the rentals for Petra’s house.
The whole community developed the shell-shocked expressions of those who’d just been through a war and were not quite sure if another phase of bombings would ensue. For days after Nathan’s and Ab’s incidents, everyone spoke in whispers, as if they’d expected Eric McKenzie to suddenly appear out of the woodwork and pummel them for their treason.
At 18 Palm View Road, on top of the financial strain of Eric’s ‘rental’ collection, everyone waited anxiously for word on Petra. The girl had not visited or called, not even to enquire about Kendra. Nola guessed that it was Eric who had probably laid down the rule of no contact, and she told Aunt May as much, but it did nothing to ease the clamp of the woman’s jaw.
Every greeting in the mornings or evenings was pre-empted by the question, “You hear anyting?” But all eager inquiries were met with the same sad shake of the head.
To top it all, Petra had not taken her medication with her that night, and the little brown vial of tablets sat beside the sterilizer as a reminder of the dark confusion that threatened the girl while she was away. Many times Nola would walk into the kitchen to find Aunt May staring at the vial in her hand.
But, the most surprising thing of all was that Kendra began to thrive. Kendra began to thrive despite the thick tension that surrounded her. And it was mostly because of Nola.
It was the guilt that caused it. The guilt from those words—a teenage girl who drop out of school and smoke weed all day. Those words, and the vision of herself removing the machete from the rafter, were too torturous to live with. She wanted to give up; to throw her arms up at the world and say, ‘Ok, you win! I can’t do it no more. You’re stronger than me.’ She wanted to just curl up until it was all over, but she couldn’t—because she’d been the one to cause it all.
The first thing she had to do was to fight the need for the glaze. It was hard. Sometimes the pain and rage rose so strongly into her chest that she craved the dullness that it granted. She saw them all watching her, giving her the same wary looks that they’d worn as she’d sauntered past in her ganja high. Ab was right—she had to clean up her heart.
Nola buried her shame in the one person who knew no better of her. Kendra. Nola became Kendra’s caregiver. She bathed the child in the mornings, fed her, took her for walks to visit Ab and Mams, and rocked her to sleep when she began her tired whine. She even learned to differentiate the child’s cries.
Since Kendra’s uncooperative tongue made it difficult for clear speech, instead of trying to talk, Kendra would just wail in frustration when she wanted something. Nola learned to interpret the cries—the on and off moans of hunger, the whines of exhaustion, the wails of pain or fright, and the frustrated hiccups of boredom.
It was Nola who discovered that after most of Kendra’s meals, the child was still hungry. Mealtimes always left Kendra cranky and restless. After tackling the bowl and spoon for almost 20 minutes, the baby would just stop eating and moan till a bottle was placed in her mouth.
Nola realized why. The child’s heavy tongue made it difficult for her to accept the spoon, pull the food off, and swallow in sequence. It was just too much coordination for her clumsy tongue, and, as a result, at the end of the meal most of the food lay on the bib instead of down the child’s throat.
Nola decided to try something new. She began to give Kendra her meals before she became too hungry, a half hour or so before her scheduled meal times. Nola tied a bright orange ribbon with a wooden spoon attached to it above the kitchen door, and placed Kendra’s high chair in the middle of the doorway. Throughout the meal, Nola constantly hit the spoon so that the child looked up and gurgled happily at the swinging spoon while she was being fed.
The results were amazing. Kendra, not being ravenous, accepted the challenge of the bowl and spoon in better spirits, and, holding up her head to gaze at the swinging spoon, elongated her squat neck to be able to swallow.
In time, not only did the child’s disposition improve, but her neck and tongue muscles became so much stronger that she actually began to speak.
Nola was overcome. She could not believe that she had actually made such a difference to someone’s life. She could not believe that the smile that shone from Kendra’s face every time she walked into a room, was for her. It was euphoric. The baby came to mean so much to her that there was actually a pain in her heart whenever her mind rested on any business to do with her. Was it love? Was that a type of love, this feeling that caused a combination of a physical pain and a soaring joy? Was that the love a mama felt for her child, or was it just that Nola saw so much of herself in Kendra? Was she taking care of the baby, or was she taking care of the ugly, attention-deprived child she had been? She did not know, but she knew one thing. She would die for Kendra.
The child’s striking steps in her development were such a cause for celebration that it temporarily lifted everyone’s minds off the sadness of Petra’s absence and Eric’s cruel impositions. It wasn’t so much that they forgot about Petra as much as it was that they all came to realize that the girl’s actions had not been selfish after all. They all chose to believe better, and came to the conclusion that Petra had made herself the sacrificial lamb. She was keeping herself away from Kendra in the hope that for Eric, the child would become ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
Aunt May aged. Where her face had been plump and creased by the weight of fat, it now lay in the crumpled folds of a soul sucked hollow by worry. She reminded Nola of a swollen version of Mama.
The strange thing was, the more Nola looked at Aunt May, was the more anger she felt at Mama. Many times she tried to tell herself that it was not Mama at which she felt that surge of rage, but Eric. But, when she slept at night, it was Mama’s face that wafted through her dreams and woke her up with her fists clenched.
Then she realized why. It was because Petra had gone away. It was because Merlene had run away. It was because they’d run away to save their children, and Mama had not.
The anger formed a ball in Nola’s gut.
What was it that had kept Mama there? Why had she preferred to stay and work her fingers to the bone, to allow her face to sag to her chin, while her child was beaten? What was it that made one mama try save her baby, while another stayed and stirred pots?
Fear! Fear! It had controlled Nola too. Fear of pain. Fear of rejection. Fear of failing Mama and Papa. Fear of being different. Fear of being the same. Fear that had done nothing to change anything! Fear had made Mama weak, made not even love for her daughter worth the bargain.
And then it hit her, like the proverbial ton of bricks—It had been in Papa’s eyes too! Just as it had been in the shift of Eric’s and Pedro’s eyes. Fear existed even in the creatures who demanded it of others. It was just a matter of finding what caused it. It was just a matter of finding the right thing to bargain for, and the strength to do the bargaining.
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The idea came to her one night, during one of her kitchen trysts with Olive. The girl was crying, having just learnt that the man with whom she’d been spending most of her time, and who had promised her a big Christmas wedding, was, in fact, already married and about to host his own daughter’s wedding—at Christmas.
That night, as Nola helped her up the stairs, Olive clung to her and slobbered into her neck about men and their trickery. They were all wolves in sheep’s clothing, she wailed.
Wolves in sheep’s clothing! Nola had almost dropped Olive on the stairs. A disguise! That was it! That was what she needed to get closer to the supermarket and to Eric McKenzie. Maybe then she could hear something of Petra. Maybe she could even discover what Eric’s bargaining tool was.
The next morning, she paid Mams a visit. Luckily, the woman did not share her son’s opinion about leaving Eric to Jah, and while Ab was loading the freezer with bottles of freshly made Irish Moss, she called Nola into her room and removed a paper bag from the drawer of her wardrobe.
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