We finished our drinks as the wind picked up. The laundry tugged at the lines, the arms of shirts flying in various directions. Everything was new to me and yet ultimately felt the same outlined by my mourning. These tall trees, fruitless and flowerless, were a new dimension, growing without purpose, unfulfilled just as these roads that lead nowhere.
“Where do they sleep?” I asked.
“The peacocks? I will tell you in the morning.” He said this like a very wise man.
“The roof of the second bedroom upstairs leaks. It rains every night. So you will have to sleep with me,” he said not so matter-of-factly.
Upstairs. I can’t even remember it now, twenty years later, but that is not surprising. It was always somehow above us, cerebral, elusive, more like the subconscious than memory, an attic stored away, out of reach, inaccessible but there, more safe and certain than anywhere else. A place I knew you could count on not to be exploited, preserved in layers of its own ecosystem, damp mould or powdering dust, infinitely durable in essence, imploding in its own decay, its “will be’s” grimly yet sedately and infinitely patiently and exactly and truly what it always was.
“Oh well,” I said matter-of-factly.
Spoken or unspoken, the bedroom of our life was the conun-drum — where I should sleep. It always had been, and the fact I would share his room now wasn’t going to solve any aspect of our complicated relationship.
“To Jacob,” he said, rattling the ice in his drink as he lifted it for a toast. “My nemesis. The man who keeps us apart.”
He was always jealous of my father.
I thought of the news I couldn’t bear to share.
“I finished the book,” I said.
“Did you bring it?”
I said I’d give it to him tomorrow.
I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me beyond his lantern as we spoke, or staring blindly at a floor plan of my face he knew by heart. My eyes were always better than his, but now the light played tricks. The kitchen radiated strobes of light from the excitable glow of a humming Tilley Lamp Aesop had hung from a hook. The smell of the roasting bird in the oven reminded me to feel hunger.
Now all the peacocks were gone.
He smoked again. And again. I saw how sad Daniel looked in repose, how much older. His mouth, now grown closed, gave away his concentration; it was as if his lips settled around and contained his thoughts. It was still a sexy mouth, withdrawn and intimate,
“Have I changed?” As I asked, I tried to relax my wrinkled forehead as though he could see my face in the gloom.
“What, fallen into your fault lines?” We both laughed.
“Do you know why I came here?”
“Because I asked you to!” he said.
Because Jacob’s dead, I thought, but I didn’t say.
There was no way to know the heat of the oven, so it was just a waiting game to see what happened to the evening’s meal or the world without Jacob.
Jacob’s dead. If I said it out loud, the words, as they say, would become flesh. We would become Daniel and Lethe in a world where Jacob was dead, words that would go on repeating themselves between us forever. There would be no reprieve, just as there had been none in the world where Jacob wasn’t dead.
I was sorry about Aunty Gilly. He would be sorry about Jacob.
We were full of sorrows.
“We were always orphans,” he said and reached for my hand across the chairs. “I know about Jacob.”
We sat holding the dark of a world without Gilly or Verrie. Without Jacob.
“Yes, my love, you’ve changed. The Lethe I knew smoked and she couldn’t roast a chicken.”
DANIEL
I first saw her from water. It was 1968. She teetered across my morning in high-heeled sandals that made her seem taller than she turned out to be. A childlike, almost androgynous figure, pale yet clearly a local islander. I don’t know how I knew that, but it was something that one knew as one looked at her. She was very thin with comparatively long legs and a cheerful yellow bikini. She had a very small face and wore a lot of black eye makeup which against her pale skin made her face seem haunted. She held her lit cigarette like a pro. No sign of a book. She was with a soulless white Czech-Jamaican who swam for Seacole, the woman’s hall. I knew her. Her name was Blanca and I knew she liked me. Maybe this woman was Czech too. But maybe not, for then the stranger circumvented the pool with caution as though afraid of water. Unlike most foreigners in the islands who consider the water a plaything, many islanders are afraid. That was the telltale clue. Unsteady, unworldly; vulnerable. Ill at ease. That was my first impression.
Who were they to disturb this usually tranquil time? This was my pool before lunch. Before it began to get busy on weekdays. I would do my laps and finish reading Ibsen or Fielding, whoever, before my eleven o’clock class. But then this awkward mystery strayed into sight and I was fascinated and annoyed at the same time.
“Meet Lethe,” Blanca called out.
What a name. Lethe. Lethe was studying English honours, as was I, Blanca explained, joining me in the water. A science student, she had little understanding of the significance of that course designed to offer nothing but English literature, from Beowulf and Chaucer, on to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, the Romantics, all the way to T.S. Eliot, with a single Caribbean course and one optional American one, and of course linguistics and philology. There were no general arts subjects thrown in for good measure — no respite of simple social science — and it was certain that to embark on this course one had to be serious about either teaching literature or writing it.
I pulled myself up out of the pool. The Lethe woman had spread a towel and laid down and was now making herself comfortable like some damn tourist. Nothing in hand to read, she oiled herself and crooked her knees, one hand shielding her eyes, the other feeding herself with the cigarette the smoke of which she inhaled and held on to, awkwardly lifting her sharp shoulders, which slumped a few moments later as she exhaled.
As I approached, I splashed her quite deliberately. Startled, she sat up, holding her cigarette high, anxious it not get wet. A tiny face, pretty but perplexed, remaining perplexed as she gazed at me, her large, deep-sunken dark eyes un-flirtatious and still, something constantly jittery and defensive about the rest of her, making me feel as though she expected me to approach her with a problem — Where is your pool pass? These chairs are for rent. Hand me all your money. No yellow bikinis in this pool.
“Why are you taking English special honours?”
She pointedly wiped the water off her face and neck, then shrugged. “It’s the only thing I love,” she answered in an unmistakable Jamaican accent. She didn’t miss a beat, and stuffed in her mouth a white ball that looked like cotton wool that she’d pulled from her bag.
And that was it. That was her only answer. I had never heard another English honours student give it. They would just study the literary masters, great and small, eking out their opinions like little reviewers, clucking and frowning and agreeing or disagreeing. Most of them would never write a line or have an original thought in their lives. Some would go on to predictable careers as teachers, hoteliers, bankers, far removed from their special honours degree; others be-came drug dealers, brothel owners, addicts, or aging hippies. Steele and Addison, Chaucer or Beowulf, Shakespeare or Walcott, the Seafarer, all buried inside them, a rare meal they once ate, a costume worn once at carnival. They were wasting time wading through pages excruciatingly created by another life. And here was this Lethe who claimed that English literature was all she loved.
And she was Jamaican.
“What’s that you’re eating?” I asked her. “Cotton candy?”
“Marshmallows.” She chewed out the words, retrieving the bag to offer me one.
“No. But I’ll have a cigarette.”
Now she fished inside her emaciated clo
th bag to pull out a pack. It was a menthol cigarette — which I detest to this day — but I thanked her, lit it anyway, and left her in peace.
I didn’t speak to her again that day, leaving her to contemplate the sun as she alternately ate her marshmallows or smoked, later pulling out some sort of wire puzzle that she played, very frustrated by not being able to solve whatever mystery it held. But like Tristan, I’d been struck. I looked for her everywhere on campus, between classes, on the pathways, at the pool each day, at the student’s union at night. I contrived to bump into her and talk to her some more. If all she loved was English, why did she not carry a book? What did she like to read? Why didn’t she swim? Did she have a boyfriend? But I couldn’t find her for days. I thought of asking Blanca, but instinct told me not to show my hand to that woman.Then a week later there she was — Lethe — flat on her back at the bottom of the stairs outside of Shakespeare class. I have no idea why a concerned student chose me to call for help. Lethe was ghostly pale, her miniskirt pulled up almost to her waist, revealing a most unattractive pair of grey panties. Her classmates fell back, recognizing me as her shining knight of rescue. At first her eyes opened, the whites showing hideously, but soon her lids fluttered and she returned perplexed from whatever catatonic moment had taken possession of her.
She tugged modestly at her skirt, even before she asked what happened or where she was or who I was. I bent over her and answered these questions instead. Lethe, it’s Daniel, you fell. She’d fainted, she said. Did she hit her head? No, her back. I asked her if she felt she could get up but she remained distracted by her skirt. Your skirt is fine, I said, and offered to take her to the nearby university hospital. She looked uncertain, and I knew at once that that was exactly what I had to do, it was part of some cosmic consciousness granted me, a world of ours in which I now had a role. I lifted her as gently as I could into my arms — good thing she was light — politely sidestepping an anxious lecturer offering his car and the circle of solicitous students, one of whom kept trying to take her pulse.
I strode across that parking lot with Lethe in my arms in the morning sun — I was Tristan carrying Iseult. It was my proudest moment. I placed my precious sprite in the back seat of the lecturer’s car, and joined him in the front. She was now holding the side of her waist, complaining repeatedly that her back hurt.
Armed with marshmallows, I visited her each day they kept her in hospital, which they said might be as long as a week. She had slipped a disc and they strung her with weights on traction. She was a piteous sight and a bad patient. She whined and complained, clinging on to the arms of every nurse who came to check on her, begging to be taken off what she called “the rack.”
They had to stretch the spine so the disc could heal, they explained. When the inflammation was better and the swelling went down the disc would return to nestle between the vertebrae. But she would have pain for a while, and she would have to do physiotherapy.
Lethe looked at me pleadingly, and when I agreed with them she demanded a puff of cigarette and turned away, sullen.
Her face looked much younger freed of all her eye makeup. I realized her dark eyes were actually hazel.
After two days I arrived to find her sitting on the side of her bed, the contraption dismantled. Ah. My saviour is here, she declared and my heart skipped. But then she thanked me for the bag of sweets which was now opened on the small table beside the bed, lying beside a book on horoscopes. Why was she up so soon? It was long enough, she said. I never knew whether they got tired of her com-plaining or if it was in fact sufficient time. She was again holding her waist with the right hand, her face looking exhausted from pain. She was on a steady dose of codeine and complained that it had constipated her. Normally repelled by such an intimacy, from her it just came as though from an uncomfortable child, as she proceeded to tell me how before the accident she’d left the Hamlet class, how unlucky the play Hamlet was. I couldn’t help imagining her floating down those stairs, a doomed Ophelia. I brought her prunes the next day from the commissary, boiled gently and stored in an old marmalade jar. She seemed pleased when I presented the bottle, and sat there forking them out one by one with her fingers, wiping the juice off her chin with her hospital gown. Her face returned to its familiar perplexed anxiety and when I saw her limping from the bathroom, she shared with me that her right leg at the back had an excruciating pain shooting down from her spine when she moved.
“The sciatic nerve,” she explained.
I didn’t know you were a writer, she said to me another day, when I arrived in time to walk beside her as she again limped up and down the corridor. How do you know I write, I asked, flattered. Although I intended to be a writer, I had never been called one before. She had seen my poem in the university magazine. She was mesmerized by the idea of a plane as a quivering body one entered. She had been thinking about that image since she read it, she said; that it had replaced her facile image of it as steely, inanimate, insensitive, and solid.
“I left England when I was only two months old in a plane with my father.”
I shrugged. I told her I never had a mother.
“Everyone has to have a mother.” She threw back her head and laughed inappropriately, reminding me again of a child. “Mine died,” she added reaching for a cigarette in my shirt pocket. I lit it for her and one for myself.
“Well mine died too.” I nearly added at birth, but turned away instead so as not to blow the smoke in her face. She never asked what I meant.
“Who named you Lethe?”
“My father. After the river. Hoping to wipe out sad memories, I guess. His or maybe mine.”
She returned to her room and I helped her back onto the bed.
“Why do they make hospital beds so high?” she groaned.
“For the nurses! To save their backs!”
I write too, she said. Poems. I believed her, assuming she probably kept a girly diary with little ditties, drawn hearts or suns, flowers strewn at odd moments between romantically childlike lines with simplistic rhymes. And yet “Lethe writes poems” sounded like a big concept. How could a woman named Lethe have smiley suns and doodled hearts? It was the first time I wondered if her name suited her. It was a hushed, reticent name, muted, a name of such natural shadows; a joyless, fibrous, foggy name more cobwebs than edge or shining. But here I was with this rather fragile young woman called Lethe, eighteen years old, she said, with a lot of long wavy hair all tousled, and not a scrap of makeup or sun on her cheeks, tired from pain and limping around, who said she wrote poems.
Let me see some, I said. She shrugged. Maybe.
That night I wrote a short verse for her. Perhaps a little trite, maybe not worthy of her or me, but it expressed so simply what I wanted to say. I took it with me the next day and thought that I’d decide whether to give it to her or not. Probably not. When I got there she was asleep, her arm thrown over a stuffed toy — nose to nose with an old threadbare polar bear showing a grey-and-black-striped button eye; I hadn’t noticed it before. I stayed a while, peaceful, watching her sleep. Her face looked so young and untroubled. I left the poem beside the bear on her pillow.
If suddenly you call my name,
Even from the shores of sleep,
Things would be themselves again,
Sun would be sun, rain would be rain.
The next day when I went to visit her, she and my poem were gone.
LETHE
I woke that first morning to screams. Not a single long scream, not a short, sharp one; it was a series of hideous single screams, a raucous round, one after the other.
Daniel was standing at the door, smiling. He’d brought me coffee. I had insisted on staying in the flooded room so he had wrap-ped plastic over my mattress and it crackled all night.
I reached for the cup as naturally as a yawn at daybreak, when he beckoned me toward the noise through the window with its deep sill.
“That’s their home.” The Samaans tree. The peacocks returned to it at night, though we would never see them. They just slink away in late afternoon shadow.
“They fly up there; each one has its place on a limb.” The screams became more intermittent.
In the delicate dawn, everything looked young. I stared at the peacocks, imagining each one falling separately with its own soft thud, at first dark bundles that unfolded quickly as though brushing themselves off and taking their standing shape. Now they were strutting across the yard looking initially offended till they recomposed their dignity, the female’s much tinier coronet feathers standing abruptly on end, bobbing with their heads.
“How do you know if you don’t see them?”
“Oh, I know.”
He told me they each had an inner clock, never waking exactly at the same time. The screams are a sequence — like labour pains, fast ones, one after the other. Each scream a separate bird.
“It’s not when they wake that they fall to the ground. It is the fall that wakes them. That’s when they scream. As they hit the ground.”
They were able to balance in the dark, but he thought dawn unsettled their inner equilibrium so they’d topple off the limb.
“Each bird: one fall, one awful scream, morning after morning. Have you ever heard anything like it?”
I had not.
I don’t know why, but it made me think of us. A preemptive cry from orphans. In the subtle symbolism of nature, a promise of all the deaths to come.
“Maybe each one wakes the next?”
“So, who goes first?”
I shrugged. “So, where is Othello?”
“He’s usually first down and goes straight off to find Aesop. He thinks he’s human. He waits for Aesop and follows him everywhere. They’re great friends.”
He’d answered my question.
The Black Peacock Page 3