‘You OK?’ I ask.
‘OK,’ he says in a metallic voice. I’m not sure if he is repeating me or answering my question. His face appears completely vacant. He stares at me for a while and then slowly, deliberately, brings the tips of his fingers up to his nose.
Mother and Meera are almost beside me before I notice them.
‘I want to go home,’ Mother says, her lower body up to her waist soaking wet.
‘She fell in,’ Meera explains.
‘The sea loss it heat,’ Mother says. ‘The waves loss it salt and smell and the jellyfish done melt away.’
We walk as quickly as possible, but Mother has already begun to snuffle with cold by the time we are halfway home. The wind has picked up and the clouds have returned. Inside, I fix Mother a packet of instant hot chocolate, cooling it with milk and testing it before giving it to her. She looks at it with an expression of annoyance on her face, sucking her teeth softly at the powder that still floats on top.
‘Come on, Mother. I know it’s not real cocoa tea. Just try it.’
‘Did he say anything?’ she asks.
‘Who, Mother?’
‘The boy. The ghost.’
I stir her hot chocolate to get rid of the lump. I try but fail to get her to take a sip. I fix a cup of instant coffee for myself and sit without drinking any. I respond long after she would have forgotten the short conversation.
‘Don’t be silly, Mother. There are no ghosts here.’
IT’S BEEN THREE weeks since that evening when I returned from a walk and found Mother in the basement, and I still haven’t found the time or desire to go downstairs and check things out. I don’t usually visit the basement, the oldest part of the house and still essentially untouched since this place was a single-room cottage over a century ago. As a child, I imagined the basement was the natural haunt for monsters. The axe-hewn support beams stained black with age and the modern pipes and wires and conduits twisting crazily about. The sickly yellow from the dangling bulb and the stone and concrete surfaces sweating who knows what. The nameless ache in the air, the dusty light from the slit of a window. The clutter of a past never my own.
I spend only enough time downstairs to retrieve the tin of pictures that Mother had been sorting through. I bring it back up to the living room and sit on the couch, calling Mother over, but she’s distracted at the moment, stooping to pick up something invisible from the floor. Stooping again and again and moving in this way about the room with dogged effort. Her other hand cradling the hidden gleanings.
‘What are you doing, Mother?’
‘There,’ she says, stooping again.
I sit on the couch and have a closer look at the container. It was once a five-pound tin of butter cookies, and it still bears the lines ‘By Appointment to His Majesty, the King’ as well as a Union Jack in vivid white and blue and red. I lift the lid off. Suck of air and an old smell. Inside are lost images.
In the oldest photos, it’s hard to distinguish the image from the condition of the photograph itself. Flesh takes on yellow contagions and limbs are hurt by creases. Feet and hands suffer from frayed edges and expressions fade into vagueness or duplicity. The first set of photos is in black and white, and all are of relatives that I cannot name, though their moods and postures seem strangely familiar to me. The way an elbow is clutched in a hand, the way the back of a wrist is brought up to a cheek. There’s a young woman with achingly beautiful eyes, and some children with spindly limbs and slightly bloated bellies.
There are also more recent ones in black and white. A passport photo, a woman staring back at me with the lollipop effect of her large Afro and thin neck. No smile, wide eyes. Mother’s face as a new immigrant. I find another photo of a young man. He’s posing saucily but with a serious expression on his face, in a beige suit with embroidered stitching on the large collar. The light is gleaming off the solid obsidian of his massively pomaded hair. He looks like some South Asian Elvis.
‘What are you laughing at?’ asks Mother.
‘Come take a look.’
She ignores me and keeps stooping down to search the floor. There are a few photos of me and my brother, both of us looking angry and feeble in Cub Scout uniforms. There is another photo of a storefront. Honest Ed’s. No explanation. Another of snow on a tree branch. A bad photo of Niagara Falls, sunburst and unfocused. An older black and white photo mixed up with some of the newer ones. A boy dangling from the branch of a fruit tree. Mango Julie? Mango vere? Mango starch…?
One of the last photos is in colour but lightstruck and blurred and also with the shadow of a thumb that blots out a corner. It’s of an old woman with a small boy on her lap, and it first looks as though the photographer or the photo itself is grossly at fault. There’s a plastic look to the old woman’s face that can’t possibly be right. Perhaps a trick of shadows or poor light or even just the weathering of time on the photo itself. But the woman has in fact been burned. Her face is a mask and her skin has buckled with heat and then set into something senseless and hard. A puzzle and then an affront. The small boy on her lap is trying to sit still. He’s trying his best not to panic and flee, but his face reveals his struggle. He’s me, of course, and the old woman is Mother’s own mother. You can’t really tell from the photograph, but this was taken in Carenage, during my first and only trip to Mother’s birthplace.
I REMEMBER SO little about that trip to Carenage. A tree branch blanketed with winged ants, the electric taste of some nameless fruit, the percussion of rain on a galvanized metal roof. Other things too. The sour stink of poverty. The heaviness of a history that couldn’t leave. I remember a long walk along a muddy road, the stench of shallow latrines, the chicken with an ugly sore at the base of its tail. I remember the single-room house propped up on narrow pillars against the mountain, and how we entered by sweeping aside the stained canvas that functioned as a door. And I certainly remember the shock of first seeing my grandmother. The impossible face that called me a pretty boy. Such a pretty, pretty, lovely boy.
She was a monster. Someone with a hide, red-cracked eyes, and blistered hands. Someone who would claw her stiffened thumb across her eyes and try to smile through the ruin of her mouth. Someone who knew very well the terror it could bring to a young boy like me, and who was careful not to brush too closely near, or bring her attention too forcefully towards me. That gesture of consideration somehow the most terrible thing of all.
‘She can make us the nicest things to eat,’ said my mother, talking quickly through the tension of the room. ‘Oh she can make us the nicest, nicest things. You think you taste coconut bake and cocoa tea already, child? You think you enjoy coconut bake and cocoa tea already? Well, you ain’t never tasted coconut bake and cocoa tea like Mother here can make. You ain’t never taste something so simple taste so good.…’
Years later, I began to understand the significance of that trip. Mother herself hadn’t returned to Carenage since she was seven, since the accident, since the burning. She had spent the later years of her childhood and early youth with an aunt in the capital city of Port of Spain, and together they had cleaned and cooked in the houses of the wealthy and the rapidly growing middle-class. To Mother, the distance between the two places, Carenage and Port of Spain, always seemed immense, impossible for a child or youth to traverse, just as the distance between Carenage and Canada seemed immense and wholly impossible. Recently, though, Mother had received a letter from her aunt informing her that her mother was dying. Between my parents, there was just enough money for two airplane tickets, and Mother had chosen me to accompany her. Her youngest son, the ever-asking one. So his grandmother could see. And so I would know.
I think some of this was explained to me at the time of the trip, but I don’t know if I absorbed any it. I must have been no more than four or five at the time. Other details of the trip are vague too. For the rest of my life, Mother would insist that there was a blessing. That her own mother cradled sea water over my head. An old, old gestur
e, she described it. Older than any church or religion, older than anything recorded as history. But I simply don’t remember it.
I do remember the trick.
I was alone with my grandmother in the darkness of a Caribbean evening. She bade me to sit before her while she lifted the hem of her skirt to her knee. The scents of molasses and coffee and deeper human things. The sight of her skin, whole landscapes of waste. Here, she said, cupping her hand over mine. That same walnut shell of bone on the inside of her knee. That same rogue tendon, bunching against my touch and suddenly snapping over. With a click. Our body’s trick.
‘My mother too,’ she explained to me. ‘And hers before, and hers before that. Strange bones, quarrels deep in we flesh.’
Her voice was low and soft. Her voice was so sweet.
But I also remember the old well at noon the next day. The one that Mother had always talked about. The heavy splashes of light like syrup upon my head. The smooth handle of the pump and the gush of coolness into the metal pail. I was pumping and passing my hand through the water. Pumping and passing again and again. I was rubbing the cake of carbolic soap over the hand that had touched, pumping and rubbing and passing again. Over and over, unable in any way to control my growing desperation. The stinging and the blistering of the soap.
I’M BROUGHT BACK to the sitting room by a loud thump and the spill of something like sand on the floor. Mother has upset a spider plant while attempting to search for something underneath it. She looks quizzically at the soil threaded with roots, but then turns her attention back to her upturned hand.
‘What have you been picking up, Mother?’
She smiles and approaches as if cradling a palm full of water. She lowers carefully beside me and, above the lid of the butter cookie tin, turns her cupped hand over. Little pinprick sounds. Dozens of fingernail parings.
‘I been looking all over for them,’ she whispers.
IT’S A STORMFRONT, her birthmark. A pressure cell. It’s a gale-force warning for all other parts of her body. The hectic mass of her hair. The creases on the inside of her elbow. The mole on the back of her arm and the silk of skin upon her collarbone. Her breasts and navel and the slip and taste of the core, the deep salt core of her.…
‘OK,’ she says, pushing my face away.
‘What? What’s wrong?’
‘You’re trying too hard,’ she explains. ‘You’re being needy.’
‘I’m being needy?’
‘Just stop being so needy.’
We’re in her room in the attic. We lie naked but apart on our backs for a while. I try again by putting my hand on her stomach but she pushes it away.
‘Do you realize that you’re eternally sad?’ she asks. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be around someone who’s eternally sad? It drains you. It sucks your life.’
I’m hurt by this. I know it.
‘You’re connected to Trinidad, aren’t you, Meera?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I mean, you probably weren’t born there. You probably aren’t any more attached to that place than I am, but you’re connected, aren’t you? I’ve noticed the way you interact with Mother. You understand what she says. You understand her expressions, her names for things. Not perfectly, but enough.’
‘So what? My father is Welsh, and when I visit him in Newport I understand his friends just about as badly. Who cares?’
‘I’m just trying to figure out what you’re doing here.’
‘I’m looking after your mother. She’s a human being who’s been experiencing a few difficulties. Perhaps you haven’t noticed.’
‘But it doesn’t make sense. It never did. Your money situation, for instance. You hardly have any money. Shouldn’t a nurse at least have enough money to buy things for her patients?’
‘I suppose you’ve never looked into funding for home care, have you? Or palliative care in general? Ever been to a ward for patients with dementia? Ever take the time to learn about the luxuries this society provides for women with dementia? Never mind ethnic and poor women.…’
‘Please, Meera. I’m not arguing about anything. I’m just trying to understand. Your books, for instance. Those titles. XML in Plain English? Exhibition and Pet Rabbits? The Yodel in Modern British Literature…? ’
‘Do you want to borrow them?’
‘You know exactly what I’m getting at, Meera. Those books don’t have anything to do with health or medicine. They’re nothing that a nurse would ever need handy. There’s not a single book on dementia or its management in this whole house.’
She quickly gets off the mattress and stands naked before me while binding her hair into a ponytail. She’s so terrifyingly beautiful.
‘I’m not accusing you of anything, Meera. You’re doing incredible work, and it’s not my place to accuse anyone of anything. It’s just that I want to know a bit more about you. We don’t really know each other, do we? We grew up in the same neighbourhood and we’ve never really talked about this. We could just talk a bit more. We could explain.…’
‘Explain?’ she asks.
Her tone makes me stop. She yanks on a shirt and pants.
‘And what would that accomplish?’ she asks. ‘How exactly would anything change?’
WE STEP AWKWARDLY around each other for the next few days, and the mood in the entire house seems to shift. We don’t go on morning walks together and Mother herself seems entirely uninterested in such a thing. I try anyway, spending close to an hour getting Mother into her clothes. We walk outside, the two of us, in an afternoon of pale light, rainclouds growing in the sky, but instead of heading down the road, Mother insists on wandering around to the brush at the side of the house. She spends some time wading through the weeds and thistles and emerges covered in burrs, her hair full of dried thistles and bits of dandelion fluff.
‘Let’s go back, Mother. It’s not a good day for a walk anyway.’
She looks blankly at me before touching her forehead and looking up into the sky. She blinks against another drop of rain.
‘Come on, Mother. Let’s get inside.’
Just before she steps indoors, I take a broom and begin brushing her coat and pants. Meera just happens to be stepping out of the house, and she gestures with her closed umbrella and asks if I should be doing that.
‘Doing what?’
‘Sweeping your mother like that.’
‘She’s covered in stuff from the brush. I’m trying to keep the house clean.’
‘Well, it’s disrespectful. She’s not a kitchen floor.’
I stop brushing and watch Meera walk across the tracks and disappear down the main road. I clean Mother a bit more with my hand and lead her into the house. The coming rain makes it dark enough this morning for me to consider flicking on the lights, but I don’t, and I don’t help her get off her jacket or boots either. Moving to the couch, Mother squelches through a soaked rug since she’s been watering the plastic plants and they’re all now overflowing.
‘Do you want something to eat or what?’ I say.
No answer. Sundowning again. The coolness in her, the darkness in her eyes. She is like that for a while, transforming into something else, but she wakes suddenly and summons me over. I sigh and approach and she reaches up and touches my face, traces my eyebrows. Her eyes go far and she pulls her hand back and slowly leads it up to the thin set of scars on her chin.
‘Let’s just get to bed, Mother.’
She moves her hand down along her jaw to her neck, her eyebrows furrowing. She bends her head slightly and her hairline slips. Her scalp comes off at the back. This has never happened before, no matter how confused she has become. Mother has never let this happen.
She holds her wig and angles her head so she can touch more carefully. I look upon her skull as if for the first time. The glistening pink skin infected with purple and brown. The corrugations and whorls like an organ exposed to the air. A brain obscenely naked and pulsing with life.
‘What?’ she says, her fingers fluttering upon her skull. ‘What you done to me…? What you do to me…?’
I can’t help her right now. I can’t go to her or help her in any way. Mother turns to look in the combined mirrors of the darkening windows, her eyes squinted and then widening at what she sees. She reaches up to touch, and then she starts to weep quietly, her eyes now squeezed shut. This lasts only for a short while, too short for me to snap out of my paralysis. She opens her eyes and touches again, her brow furrowing at something truly unusual. She curls her finger at one of the whorls of crippled skin on her scalp before bringing it forward for both of us to see. There, on her fingertip, a single dandelion spore.
I SPEND FIFTEEN minutes getting Mother’s coat back on and leading her to the door. I turn to put on my own coat and shoes and turn back to see her casually hanging up her jacket again.
‘Mother! We’re going outside. Do you understand? Outside?’
‘Warm,’ she says. ‘It’s so warm.…’
‘It’s cold outside. We’re going outside. Here’s your scarf.…’
The rain still hasn’t come but the wind has picked up. It’s strong and damp and it eats through our clothing. A blustering fall evening. It’s not a good day to take her outside, since the very air seems charged with nervousness and energy. As we move down the cul-de-sac, a flock of dancing leaves and papers moves alarmingly towards us, but I pull Mother along. We reach the sidewalk of the main road, and I feel her grip getting tighter with each step of this journey. I’m unconcerned at how odd we must look to the people in the houses. The first heavy drops of rain begin to fall and we need to hurry, but Mother yanks her hand free.
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