Night Calypso

by Lawrence Scott

  Vincent was late for Theo whom he knew would be looking forward to swimming and fishing. His mind was now on the boy, who was still refusing to return to Singh for lessons. As he passed by the pharmacy, he had seen Christiana and Singh in the the back room. He was going to stop, but then the shutters were closed. How could he challenge Singh? He and Jonah suspected something about Thérèse.

  ‘We’ll win through, Jonah.’ His mind was back on the shooting.

  ‘We have to win, Doc. We have to win. I know that my father never go in the gayelle unless he think he going to win. But you can’t have them Yanks shooting innocent people because they climbing a fence.’

  ‘There’s going to be an inquiry, and there has to be an apology to the family. There has to be compensation. Singh and myself will fight for that. He was a young fella with promise.’

  ‘People not going to take that sitting down. They go remember that shot in the future. Things don’t just go away so.’

  Vincent was exhausted. The whole night had been taken up with nursing Ti-Jean’s fever, bringing down his temperature. Ma Cowey and Sister Marie-Joseph attributed his recovery to their prayers. Vincent had seen these things happen. Sometimes, you were lucky. He thought he was losing Ti-Jean last night. If only he had that Penicillin they were talking about. They had stores of it for the Marines. That’s what they needed from the Yanks and the British, rather than guns and water hoses. ‘We need Penicillin, instead of bullets!’

  ‘What you say, Doc?’

  ‘Penicillin!’

  ‘I hear is a kind of miracle.’

  They pulled along the jetty. ‘Who’s that at the window?’ Vincent asked.

  ‘Must be Theo.’

  ‘Yes. Looked like a girl, though.’

  Vincent and Jonah said their brief goodbyes, neither eager for much conversation or banter. ‘I’ll see you, man.’

  Vincent patted Jonah on the shoulder as he raised himself out of the pirogue onto the jetty.

  ‘Take it easy, Doc. In the morning, please God.’

  The motor was running and the pirogue turned and headed off into the declining light, the shimmer of pink on the water.

  Vincent waved. He read the pirogue’s name; as always, In God We Trust, painted in yellow capitals on the side of the red bow.

  There was no Theo on the jetty fishing. There was no boy in the window under the gable. The verandah was empty. The doors into the drawing room were open. There was a settled gloom in contrast to the brightness of outside.

  There was a quiet overshadowing the house. Theo must be in his room. He must have had a day working at his walls. Must have been a day of cutting up newspapers. He smelt the flour and water paste.

  Vincent put down his bag by the drawing room door. He called once, ‘Theo,’ but there was no answer. He flung his cream linen jacket over the back of a chair, tossed his Panama onto the side table. He flopped into one of the long chairs on the verandah. Soon, he had fallen off into a deep sleep.

  When Vincent opened his eyes, he awoke into a lilac evening. The very last of the light hung over Patos. It took him more than a few seconds to realise what he was seeing in the chair opposite. His groggy mind had read the form as Theo. Now he sat up with a start.

  ‘Hello, yes. Who are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here? Where’ve you come from?’

  The questions tumbled out quickly, as Vincent tried to gain some sense of what was happening, clearing his eyes. The figure was still and silent. Then he turned and called into the house, ‘Theo Theo!’ He was desperate to see the boy, for the boy to come downstairs and put things right. But then, just as he thought that, he again turned back to the figure on the chair and stared intently. He took a long, careful look. ‘My God, Theo, what’ve you done?’

  There was no reply. ‘Theo, Theo!’ Vincent sat on the edge of the long chair and stared. He pleaded and stretched towards the figure, withdrawing his hand just before touching the silken knee.

  Because of the smallness of his frame and his height, he could easily be mistaken for a girl. It was not the red satin dress and the high-heeled shoes and stockings. It was not the green scarf tied into a turban, which yes, did give an exotic impression. It was the face itself, heavily painted with lipstick and rouge and a sweet smelling powder. It was smeared on with a heavy hand. While it gave to the young face a macabre, perverse beauty, a carnival mask look, it mimicked someone older, someone more sophisticated and knowing, who knew what this painted face meant, who this painted face was. This was more than a child dressing up as some character, or a child making a mess of what could be better executed; a boy getting it wrong, not knowing how to apply lipstick and rouge, how to use powder. No, it was deliberate. The heavy hand had painted this lipstick on so that the lips looked fuller and the cheeks looked heightened. This was done by a knowing hand, a hand with intent; a mimic yes, but a mimicking which had a history, and which seemed perverse in one so young. Clearly the figure, as she sat and stared, was a courtesan. He did not think whore or prostitute. He thought courtesan, suggested by her poise, her sophistication, that made Vincent wonder how it was learnt.

  Maybe it was the setting, the colonial architecture mimicking with its lacy fret work the grandeur of older houses, those of an ancien régime, an order of the kind that Theo played at previously with masters and servants, now master and his mistress.

  There was no conversation. He had the distinct feeling that the boy was doing this to entertain him, to titillate him. Where did all these clothes come from? Where had he got the lipstick and rouge and powder? Then he thought, the brown grip. How much more would be produced from that brown grip; a magician’s chest. The boy was like a conjuror.

  Had Theo put on this performance in the friary for Father Dominic? What were his words in that first letter? ‘We need the boy out of the island for a number of reasons.’ Could this be one of them?

  Vincent wanted to touch the boy. Anything physical might give all the wrong messages. The thought frightened him. Thank God no one else was seeing this. What would they think? This was a preposterous scene. He was now fully awake.

  There was still some grey, cloudy, shell-pink light.

  Soon, he would have to go inside and draw the blackout curtains, and light the kerosene lantern. The generators had failed again today. Could not the Yankees, at least, get that to work? Killing a boy on a barbed wire fence! Vincent’s anger returned.

  The familiar tolls of the evening Angelus filled the air. The figure of the courtesan knelt and signed herself with the sign of the cross. She whispered the prayer, ‘The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary and she conceived by the Holy Ghost.’ Vincent watched and listened. He waited for the completion of each stage of the Marian prayer, his own lips moving unconsciously over the words he knew by heart.

  Then he exclaimed, “Theo! Theo!” This was all that Vincent could manage. He leant over to the boy to take his hand. But, at that moment, the figure rose, and went and stood near the ledge of the verandah. He, she, looked out to sea, and then turned back, and looked at him over his, her shoulder.

  The boy was like a young woman. The high-heeled shoes gave him more stature, stretched his legs, gave him hips, and made his bottom jut out. The green turban enhanced his height, elongating his neck. The fast encroaching darkness, the play of shadow and light, gave the sense that the figure was disappearing and then, suddenly again, appearing.

  The courtesan draped herself on the ledge of the verandah.

  The drone of an Albacore in the distance, then its twinkling lights, took Vincent away from the scene for a moment to a bomb-carrying Spitfire with Bernard, somewhere over Europe.

  He had a brother somewhere with his load to drop. The newspaper photographs of the bombed cities and the strafed fields startled the day with their grained memories. His father had talked of the poppies during the earlier war. Mud, shell holes, poppies. Images from far away. From trenches. Little things that bring things back. He could still hear his father draggin
g his leg along the verandah at Versailles. ‘That poor man.’ He heard Sybil’s voice in the kitchen. His father! He used to peep at him, the weak man with his sick leg, through the jalousies of the gallery. Bernard’s hero!

  When Vincent turned from closing the doors onto the verandah, drawing the thin blackout curtains, the masquerade was leaning over the dining room table. As she moved away, the increasing glow of two candles which stood in silver candle sticks, revealed a dinner table laid for two. The table was covered with a white damask linen tablecloth. There was silver cutlery, laid for fish and meat. Crystal wine and water glasses twinkled. At the centre of the table was a cut glass bowl with wild white orchids.

  More of Versailles had been unpacked from the trunks and packing cases under the stairs.

  This was game number two. On what did the boy draw for this drama?

  The courtesan emerged from the kitchen with a small kerosene lantern in one hand, and a tray of hors d’oeuvres in the other, Coquille Saint Jacques in scallop shells. Vincent remembered them, they were a familiar sight on his mother’s dining room table. Theo placed one in front of him, and then the other, in the place reserved for himself, at the opposite end of the table.

  The kerosene lantern’s light flickered on the familiar vases, silver entrée dishes, trays and crystal decanters which used to stand prominently on the sideboard at Versailles with rum, whisky and sherry. Theo had known how to place everything so expertly. His were eyes that had seen these things. As a child, he had observed another hand dusting and cleaning. He had heard a madam instructing her servant.

  But where had he found the figure of the courtesan to accompany the drama of this interior? Yesterday, he might have worn a cap and apron to carry out the role of servant. Today he was not the madam. Who was he mimicking, from where did the history of this mimicry come? He had his Ma Dellacourt stories. Yes, but this performance had the characteristics of a closer observation.

  The courtesan, at the opposite end of the table from him, surveyed the doctor eating while she forked a morsel of Coquille Saint Jacques into her red mouth. In the absence of wine, she got up and filled Vincent’s wine glass with the red sorrel. In doing so, she rubbed her shoulders against his. Vincent froze. They ate in silence, knives and forks clicked on the scallop shells.

  Coquille Saint Jacques was followed by chicken, rice and peas and yam. Vincent marvelled at Theo’s ingenuity, creations out of nothing. The poultry was a mystery. But, a patch of chicken peas at the top of the yard behind the sorrel bushes accounted for the vegetable. He must have been going at this all day.

  After dessert of home-made vanilla ice cream, churned in an old freezer, Theo went to wind up the gramophone and put on a record. The soft saxophone seeped through the room. He lit a cigarette for Vincent.

  The table was cleared. Vincent wondered what would follow. Maybe, Salome and the dance of the seven veils! He was trying to be ridiculous to himself, to deal with the macabre nature of what was going on, engineer his own humour.

  He sat and smoked. The scratchy blues seeped through the house; one of his records collected in London’s Soho. Miss Billie Holliday played over the surfaces, nestled in the crevices of the room, flickered in the candle-lit shadows.

  Theo went back and forth from the dining room into the kitchen, clearing the table. When he leant over the table to brush off the remaining crumbs, Vincent said, ‘Thank you,’ quietly blowing puffs of smoke into the haze of the room, the two candles burning down, the kerosene lantern, humming and flickering, ‘Thank you. It was a delicious meal, a charming evening.’ He chose his words carefully. He played his part.

  The boy needed to be doing what he was doing, and he, Vincent, needed to play this part, so that Theo could in turn play his. If he stopped it, he might prevent some important retrieval. Vincent did not know now how far this game would go, when he would have to stop pretending, and what would be finally demanded. He needed to trust his instincts. This must have happened to poor Father Dominic. Had he been asked to witness something he could not accept, or participate in, something he could not be part of as a friar, something tempting, perhaps, and dangerous?

  Theo stopped brushing the crumbs, leaning across the table. Vincent could see down into the dress, the small frame of the boy. He had not stuffed himself with false bosoms like a pantomime figure. It was the boy’s chest, Theo’s flat brown chest.

  This was Theo, who was nearly always bare backed while he worked around the house, while he fished on the jetty. There was something poignant in seeing the boy’s chest revealed beneath the red satin. He wanted him back. But it might only be possible by allowing this charade to continue to its conclusion.

  The courtesan withdrew, taking with her the damask linen tablecloth, shaking it out, folding it and putting it into one of the drawers of the sideboard. Vincent sat back.

  The music continued to its conclusion, the needle suddenly grating, suddenly discordant. Vincent got up and took the arm away. He replaced it. He went back to his seat and lit another cigarette.

  The noises of the night joined the music of sad love. Fireflies blinked at the window. He got up again and poured himself a measure of rum from one of the decanters on the sideboard. He could hear the clearing up in the kitchen.

  He must have dropped off. He woke with a start, nearly falling off the dining room chair. His cigarette had burnt down and fallen as ash to the floor. His finger hurt. At first he thought that he was on his own. The kitchen was quiet.

  Then he saw that there was a trail of clothes and shoes from the kitchen. The red satin dress, the green scarf, the high-heeled shoes, the stockings like transparent skin, were left where they had been cast off. Vincent followed where the trail led. Theo was curled up in the old soft Morris chair whose fibre was bursting out from beneath the upholstery. Vincent took another sip of his rum. He dozed.

  On waking, Vincent noticed that Theo, curled into the embrace of the Morris chair, was naked. His skin had a sheen taken from the amber light of the room. His head was pillowed by his arms curled under him. He looked like he was asleep. He was an exhausted child, finished with his play, his masquerade strewn across the floor.

  A sudden rain announced a storm, brewing in that stillness and heat of the night. Theo jumped, and then settled back into his still curled up form. Vincent sat and sipped his rum and had another cigarette.

  Gradually, the sea and the wind calmed down. The only sound was the drip drip of water off the roof onto the concrete drain.

  In the quiet of that drip drip that night, Theo’s voice began. Vincent sat up and listened.

  HE HOLD ME close to his face, and she say, Go, go, go to Mister. Mister Coco.

  They play with me.

  Mama hand smooth and smell of soap, blue soap, slimy soap on the shelf by the scrubbing board under the house.

  I smell onion and lime. In bed, under counterpane, sweet and milky, fishy and salty.

  Is it one day when I come in the room and hear her, hear my Mama? Is it that way? Did I get to hear it that way?

  Mama resting by the Demerara window. Mama speaking like she in confession, soft soft, that I stop by the door and turn and sit on the step outside. First, I wonder who she talking to. Who Mama go talk to like this? Not Ma Procop. This is not how she does talk to Mister. Not so. On a good day that is chirpy and giggly. On a bad day is tears, lash and Mister speaking hard. Then I don’t go near that house. When I peep is nobody there.

  Once before, I hear a talk like this and nobody there. That time, Mama on the big bed and she looking at the picture album Ma Dellacourt give her, and she tell me not to touch. I see the picture, but I don’t to go in her press and take that out, where she have it bury under a dress. She say that Ma Dellacourt tell her is her mother dress. Her talk, sad sad. Is so Mama talk to sheself.

  Look at where I find myself? And who I go talk to? A mother, I never remember, but who belly I jump in. Jump from the same seed from the same egg with Louis. The Mama who is this face here, in this
young girl, take out in this picture. They get rid of he. Is Louis self I must talk to about this business. But the old mister get rid of him. The old Mister can’t take two cock in the same yard. Not when one white and the next one brown.

  Look at where I find myself! My brother have to leave the yard since he is a small boy. I abandon in this life by mother and father and dependent on the very thing that trap me. From so long, I trap in this. This is a trap you can’t talk to people about. Is not just that one white and the other black. Is not that one is a Mister and the other is servant in the house. People know well about them things, and they choose to either talk about it, shout it by the stand pipe for people to hear, or laugh about it on the counter when they buy sweet potato and rice, sneer about it over the stall in the market when they choosing tomato and ground provision to take for their pickney them.

  People can choose to say things. But this is a mix up that have the things that people don’t speak about. This have secret that does live under the floorboard in a family house. That does get whisper, maybe, in a confessional, wanting forgiveness, that does get carry as a secret never to be whispered in the minds of mothers and daughters.

  Fathers never talk about these things. Fathers refuse to let these things enter into their mind. Where the fathers? And that boy of mine? The father? Who I could talk to about this, but you, Mother, my pretty mother. You know about this. You were there. You must’ve be there, Alice.

  From what Ma Dellacourt say, is the same thing. All of we in the same thing. You would’ve know what to do. Maybe you would’ve stop this. Maybe we couldn’t stop this. This is how it is. This is how the place make. This is what they does call family in this place. This is what we make, and this is what they make of us.