The announcement took her escort by surprise and she tried to chivvy her charge along and down the steps. There were strict rules about Shallow-Grave not having contact with the other women. But Shallow-Grave remained composed and she slowly descended the stairs in her own time. When she reached the bottom, she first looked up at the sky and then knelt to kiss the ground before proceeding calmly on her way. She ignored the admonitions of the prison guard at her side. As she passed the other women, the air became fresh with a zingy, salty sort of smell and they could see her lick what looked like grains of salt from her lips.
For Margot, seeing the gleaming statuesque figure on top of the stairs, with the bright blue sky stretching away behind her, was an epiphany. From that moment on, Margot knew that it was through Shallow-Grave that she would find her salvation.
Shallow-Grave’s diet proved to be a problem for the authorities. Fish was the main fare in the prison, every sort of fish, fish soup that looked like grey fluff floating in the dish, even fish water to drink. But Shallow-Grave found shrimps and unsealed fish distasteful and pushed anything like that to the side of her plate. Rice-pap and bush tea were acceptable to her. Eventually, because of her commanding presence, some of the warders found themselves sneaking in fruit for her.
All the women in the jail craved fresh fruit and vegetables. Fights broke out in the dormitory over whose turn it was to tend the kitchen garden. Although the produce from the garden was scanty and destined for sale elsewhere, it was sometimes possible to smuggle a piece of callaloo or some peppers which, if not eaten, could be exchanged for tobacco. Every morning the inmates recited the Guyana pledge and sang the national anthem. The ration of water was given out each day. Everyone had a five-pound milk tin to hold the water and it was an art to use it effectively.
To the annoyance of Miss Vinny and the kitchen squad, who were taken to bathe in the stone communal bath after Shallow-Grave had completed her ablutions, it seemed that Shallow-Grave had an inexhaustible supply of water, for the whole bath remained damp and glistening with drips. Miss Vinny would suck her teeth at the sight of it.
Miss Vinny was a sixty-seven-year-old ex-Sunday-school teacher and a murderess in her own right. She was one of the longest-serving prisoners and resented the attention and respect that Shallow-Grave attracted. She scowled and fixed her glasses. Her hair, scraped back and tied with a scrap of cloth, stuck out at the back like the bristles of a yard brush.
‘That woman gettin’ favours,’ grumbled Miss Vinny. ‘All this rabble in here. They all criminals,’ she confided to some subdued new inmates who had been relieved to find that, although the dormitory windows were barred, the dormitory was reasonably fresh and airy.
With noises and signs, Margot did her best to obtain what information she could about her new idol. At first, she made contact with Shallow-Grave through her enormous shy smile. Later, she proved her devotion by giving Shallow-Grave cigarettes and fruit which she smuggled through the grille of her cell window. Margot thought Shallow-Grave the most devastatingly beautiful and impressive creature she had ever seen. Shallow-Grave received all this attention graciously as if it were her due. Once Margot found the stub of an old candle and passed it through to Shallow-Grave. In this new passion of servitude, Margot felt herself coming alive again. Anything she could find, she delivered to Shallow-Grave, even if it was the bluey-mauve jacaranda petals shed by the tree just outside the wire netting of the prison enclosure.
Shallow-Grave continued to accept this service as if it were rightfully hers. But she sang more often and some miracle cleared Margot’s ears of the buffeting winds that normally blew there and enabled her to hear Shallow-Grave’s soothing voice:
Them that’s got shall get,
Them that don’t shall lose.
Margot lay on her bed in a rapture. The matter was sealed as far as she was concerned. From then on she was the devoted servant of Shallow-Grave.
Lock-down time was half-past three. Late one afternoon as dusk began to fall over the prison, an East Indian woman known as ‘Catchme Latchmi’ who had been found guilty of smuggling a hundred cans of Nestlé’s milk into the country, hung on to the bar listening to Shallow-Grave singing:
If you can’t see the one you love,
Love the one you’re with.
Miss Vinny was sitting in a sulk on her bed because the newcomers she had befriended were apparently related to a government minister and Matron had insisted that their beds were to be specially made up with fresh blue sheets and pillows in contrast with the other cots. Miss Vinny had only been mollified by finding a Georgetown telephone number in Margot’s kitchen-apron pocket, a number which she intended to use at some time in the future.
Suddenly, Latchmi yelled, ‘Miss. Miss. Come quick.’
Through the window, in the dusk, she had spotted a snake undulating swiftly across the courtyard in the direction of the special cells. Soon, one of the warders was hurrying across the yard with a kerosene lamp. When she opened up Shallow-Grave’s cell, she was greeted by the sight of Shallow-Grave sitting upright in a pink shortie nightie. It took a few seconds for the warder to realise that Shallow-Grave, still crooning, was caressing the brown-and-yellow paw-paw snake as it twined and wreathed around her neck. The warder, shaking with horror, went to report the matter to her colleagues.
From then on, rumour abounded that Shallow-Grave was, in fact, a water mumma.
When Margot was released, she returned to Georgetown to observe Shallow-Grave’s trial. At weekends, unable to bear the separation from her idol, she returned to New Amsterdam. She secured a room in a house in King Street not far from the jail. Margot hoped to be able to catch a glimpse of her idol or smuggle messages to her.
Every Friday, Margot returned to this room. One dark, dingy curtain fluttered at the window. The cupboard on the side was rotting with old woodwork. The bed sheets were patched and greasy with age. The wind brought flecks of grey, cane ash through the window. Tiny weightless flies settled on a pair of the owner’s damp panties, pegged up in a corner to dry. Outside the door, in the kitchen, stood a flaking stove with rusted canisters of gas under the sink. But she was happy. On her first Friday, through the window, she saw a man behaving oddly. He was standing on tiptoe at the side of a wooden house that was barely standing upright. His arm, up to the shoulder, was reaching through a hole in the side wall. Margot could not figure out what he was doing. Then she realised he was fishing around to see if he could feel anything worth stealing.
Something had gone wrong with New Amsterdam. After its heyday in the last century, the town was now in full rigor mortis. It was a town with memory loss. Street names had dropped off and not been replaced. The buildings were wooden skeletons, leaning against each other as if they had a headache. By the stelling where the ferry plied its trade across the Berbice River, the rusting hulks of sixteen abandoned buses paraded their dereliction, one still displaying its destination in faded letters – Crabwood Creek.
Discussion in the town revolved around health. Half the population had been afflicted with a mysterious condition which resulted in everyone producing white shit with lacy fronds.
‘And what is it when you teeth wobble and bleed in you gums?’ asked a man buying a slab of cheesy yellow cake from the bakery.
‘Me na know,’ replied the proprietor. ‘Everybody sick these days. I gat pain an’ I vomitin’ some stuff yellow like lemon. Somebody done this place someting. De whole place gat a spell on it.’
The conversation turned to crime.
‘You hear what happen in New Street? Dey chloroform dem. Dey woke up on de floor. De bed take away from under dem. Everything gone and dey gat dis sweet, strong taste in dey mouth. When dey run for de police, police say dey caan’ come ’cos dey don’ got money for gas.’
Such stories of a town bewitched ran riot wherever people congregated. One girl came out of her bedroom to find a young woman calmly removing all her clothes from a wardrobe on the landing outside. Another man left a pot
of food on the stove for a few minutes and when he returned, the pot of food had been stolen. The town seemed to be in the grip of a nightmare. Worst of all, someone had seen a dog running from the hospital with a package in its mouth. It stopped by a trench to worry the brown parcel open. A nine-inch, semi-transparent human foetus fell out and the dog ran off triumphantly with the embryonic child in its mouth. In the last year, three young couples had crawled under the raised floor of the Catholic church and taken poison.
Margot sat on the bed and tried to work out how to contact Shallow-Grave.
Miss Vinny enjoyed the position of ‘Trusty Prisoner’. She held the privileged and much envied job of cleaning and sweeping out Matron’s office once a week. No one knew how she had obtained the private number of Mr and Mrs Armand Jenkins in Georgetown, but every time she went to clean the office, she took the opportunity to use the telephone. She cherished her new-found relationship with Rita Jenkins. Even though it was a rather one-sided friendship, it calmed Miss Vinny. She liked to feel she had a place in the life of the middle classes. It soothed her ego which had to withstand the myriad humiliations of prison life and gave her a satisfying feeling of superiority. The calls, when she could make them, were the highlight of her weekly routine in jail.
‘Good morning. I just callin’ to find out how you goin’ through.’ Miss Vinny’s face contorted with the effort of producing her best standard English. ‘I hope you not findin’ the rain too wet.’
She was standing with her back to the doorway, her broom in one hand and the telephone in the other. She did not see Matron enter.
‘Put that telephone down immediately.’
Miss Vinny dropped her broom with shock. She hung the telephone back on the receiver without saying another word. Matron escorted her along the faded wooden corridor back to the dormitory, scolding and threatening dire punishments. Immediately, on reaching the dormitory, Miss Vinny was stripped of her trusty’s arm-band.
Miss Vinny did not take well to this new loss of status. She mumbled constantly to herself. She had been taken off duties in the kitchen garden and was similarly denied access to the administrative offices. She was reduced to being an ordinary prisoner. It did not suit her. She began to brood.
And then, one afternoon in the dormitory after lock-down, a strong wind began to blow through the bars and one of the women got up to close the shutters. Miss Vinny, who had been moping on her bed, got up and grabbed the woman’s arm to stop her.
‘I goin’ catch that wind,’ she said. ‘Long time since the wind ain’ catch.’ Her voice had a hard edge of determination. The rest of the women in the dormitory hoisted themselves on their elbows and turned to see what was happening.
Miss Vinny strode over to each window in turn, flinging the shutters open. The jail was not far from the wide Berbice River and the blustering Trade Winds blew through the windows. Soon the room was filled with wind. Some of the women started to remonstrate but Miss Vinny, shaking with what seemed like rage, hurled herself like a tornado from one window to another. For a while she stood at the end window, gulping in enormous amounts of air until she started to breathe fast and heavily in panting wheezes.
And then she reeled over to the centre of the room, her arms extended like a child playing aeroplanes. Her foot stamped down in a regular rhythm and her spine arched. Suddenly, Miss Vinny felt released to do something she realised she had wanted to do for a long time. She no longer yearned to speak to that silly woman in Georgetown. She wanted to do something she remembered her Surinamese grandmother teaching her. The Winti Dance. She wanted to do the Winti Dance. She used the beat of her foot to remember the words her grandmother sang:
Fodu dede, ma a de
Yu kapu en nanga howru
Ma a de.
No sooner had she begun to move around the room than her tongue became empowered with a host of sounds, an extraordinary range of noises. Each new one took her by delighted surprise and affected the movements of her body. Each one flung her into a different position to a subtly changed rhythm. She had tapped into a stream of energy. Sometimes the noise turned her into a tall, powerful man with a limp and sometimes into an undulating, hip-winding woman. At the age of sixty-seven, Miss Vinny opened herself up joyously to the whole pantheon of creation.
As she wheeled around in the centre of the dormitory, Savitri, a heavy woman with dark circles under her eyes, who was prone to depression, rose from her bed, moaning and breathing heavily. She and two other women began to writhe on the floor as if they were trying to slough off their skins. They were tended spontaneously by women trying to ensure they did not hurt themselves and then some of these attendants also began to succumb to the spirits.
By the time the warden had summoned help, most of the women in the dormitory were possessed by an intoxicating and exhilarating frenzy. One or two were in a trance. Only the three newcomers huddled together in a corner, crying, unable to join in.
It took five prison wardens to calm the women down. Some fell across their beds in a state of extreme exhaustion, lethargy or sleep. Gradually, the ecstasies subsided and the prisoners dozed or giggled and looked at one another sheepishly until they too fell asleep to the sound of Shallow-Grave’s voice singing from her cell. That night, the special escort was taken away from Shallow-Grave’s cell in order that as many guards as possible should be available to protect the dormitory from another such outbreak.
Next morning, the resident psychiatrist from the asylum down the road prepared to leave for his weekly visit to the women’s jail. He had fled Singapore after some irregularities in his practice were uncovered. As he left he checked the blackboard in the entrance lobby which had the current figures chalked on it:
In-patients – 63
Out-patients – 143
Escaped – 426
He sighed as he walked towards the jail for his weekly surgery. What could he do with old medicines that had lost their potency? He could not even get hold of the latest scientific papers.
When he reached the jail, he was turned away. Everything was in uproar. Shallow-Grave had escaped.
* * *
It had been Margot’s brainwave to organise Shallow-Grave’s escape. It was she who had concealed her mistress in the toilets below deck as the rusty ferry ploughed its way across the Berbice River to Rossignol. And it was her brilliant idea to secrete Shallow-Grave in one of the many unused rooms of the house in Main Street where the Jenkinses rented their apartment.
At nights, Margot slipped out and padded along the creaking corridors, over the gleaming wooden floors, past the solid circular staircase, to fetch bowls of water, soft towels and soap for her mistress.
In her concealed room, Shallow-Grave reclined on a single bed covered by the deep-rose silken bedspread which Margot had, many times, washed and ironed. Sometimes it seemed to Margot that the purpose of past actions is only revealed later. She had always washed and ironed that coverlet with particular care without knowing why. Now she understood. She brushed and teased her mistress’s black, wiry hair which spread like bladder-wrack seaweed in profusion on the pillow. She massaged her gleaming cheeks, neck and shoulders and Shallow-Grave accepted all these ministrations like an empress.
Beside the bed, the electric fan rolled its head to and fro like a metal sunflower slowly following the sun. Shallow-Grave liked to be kept cool. Margot often bathed her as she lay naked on the bed. She would lift her leg, tenderly washing the private parts that amazed her with their resemblance to a great purple sea-anemone.
Margot slept on the floor between the door and her charge. During the night she would go and purloin what food she could for them both. No one noticed the creaking of her footsteps down the passages at night because the house produced its own creaks and rustles even when there was no one there. They breakfasted on slices of paw-paw, crackers and cheese, whatever she had been able to scavenge. Margot barely allowed her eyes to leave Shallow-Grave’s face as they both ate, so hugely did she enjoy Shallow-Grave’s ple
asure.
Once she took the risk of staying in the kitchen for an extra hour, squeezing the green transparent tears from grapefruit, and brought the juice back on a tray, served in a huge wine goblet with crushed ice from the freezer. Before dawn, Margot carried bowls containing her mistress’s shit and golden urine and emptied them down one of the toilets, flushing it with a bucket of water when necessary.
The house provided everything. There was no need to leave the premises and risk discovery. Margot had become adept at showing herself during the day as usual when she was expected for work. At the day’s end, she pretended to leave and just waited for an opportunity to slip back into her hiding place.
Mostly, they stayed in the room during the day with the Demerara shutters open. The room was too high for anyone to see in from the path below. When there was a power outage and the electric fan stopped, Margot fanned Shallow-Grave with a fan of dried woven reeds that she had found on the floor above. Cupboards of dark-red crabwood with tiny louvred panels stood against the wall opposite the bed. Set in the middle of these was a dressing-table made of ebony. A crystal necklace hung over the supporting strut of the oval mirror. One day, rummaging in the tiny drawers, Margot found the rim of a cameo brooch with the cameo missing, an unopened cigar, several small rouge boxes and old lipsticks.
Shallow-Grave reclined, smoking the cigar. Margot fastened the crystal necklace round her mistress’s neck and delicately rubbed a little rouge in her cheeks then, with increasing confidence, applied some lipstick until Shallow-Grave began to look like a magnificent carnival queen from Rio.
‘Soon we shall go to Brazil. On a Thursday,’ said Shallow-Grave. Margot nodded solemnly. The idea of Shallow-Grave as a queen pleased her mightily. She began to make extraordinary head-dresses, temporary by their nature, of paw-paw skin and avocado peel and red and yellow peppers, which she glued together with astonishing dexterity, before placing them on her beloved’s head. Then she would hold up a silver-backed hand-mirror for Shallow-Grave to admire the result.
The Migration of Ghosts Page 13