“Humph!” she grunted.
Mrs. H gasped. “What? Tell me.”
“You sure you want to know, Mrs.? It not too nice, nah.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Ivy! Why do you think you’re here?”
“Well, is about The Mister.”
“I knew it! That son-of-a-bitch is still screwing that girl who used to work in the store, not so? I heard a rumor that she’s pregnant. It’s true, isn’t it? Tell me!” Mrs. H picked up a card and flung it in Miss Ivy’s direction.
It was true. Miss Ivy knew the girl well. In fact, until recently, she and nineteen-year-old Gail Archibald had lived in the same yard in Panco Lane. She’d been Gail’s confidante about the affair with Mr. H; and she’d been at the hospital that dread, dread night when Gail had lost the child. She’d eavesdropped as Gail kept calling Mr. H’s phone, begging his driver to pass on the message. And she’d held Gail, letting her cry day after day, when Mr. H didn’t show. Miss Ivy had been the one to call Gail’s mother to say, “Come for your daughter. It look like this thing sending she mad.” And it was Miss Ivy who’d helped pack up Gail’s apartment.
Miss Ivy bent over now, retrieved the card from the floor, slowly, giving bitterness time to drain from her face.
“What the hell is it, Ivy! You’re trying my patience.”
“Ok, Mrs., let me explain. See how the King of Clubs ain’t have no sharp edges? He is a peaceful ruler. That is Mr. H. And you know: King always count as thirteen. Now watch the next card: Two of Clubs. Same suit, so we add: thirteen and two is …?”
“Fifteen.”
“Exactly. That number mean anything special to you or Mr. H? Could be somebody age? Or a date?”
Mrs. H stared into the river landscape hanging on the wall, her eyes darting like she was counting the bamboo. “Fifteen … fifteen?” she mused. “The only thing I can think of is the rally. But I don’t know …”
“The PNM rally?”
“Yes, it’s next Wednesday—the fifteenth. You’re attending, right? It’s his big moment. He’d want you there.”
Miss Ivy tapped her temple, began swaying. “I getting a serious bad-vibes ’bout that date. Let we see if is because of the rally.”
Counting aloud, Miss Ivy flipped fifteen more cards. “Ah! You see? Ten. The most crowded card it have. And is Clubs too. That is the damn thing self! Mr. H need to stay away from all crowds on the fifteenth.”
“But how can he do that, Ivy? We’re in the middle of an election. The Party has set that date for the rally, they’re desperate to win Pleasantview. He can’t just disappear.”
“I don’t know Mrs., but the cards don’t lie. And you see this Clubs on top of Clubs? Is too much black—it mean death. Mark my words, whatever bad breeze going to blow on the fifteenth, it bringing death with it.”
“So what do I do?” Mrs. H grabbed Miss Ivy’s wrist.
Miss Ivy looked down at the lady’s see-through, blue-veined fingers, squeezed together, resembling a nest of wood-slave lizards. In the twenty years she’d worked there, Miss Ivy could count, on one hand, the number of times Mrs. H had ever touched her. Skin to skin. Santa Marta ladies only dirtied their hands like that when they were desperate.
Miss Ivy dropped the meek-and-mild act, looked her ex-boss straight in the eye, her tone losing all its flattery. “Fake sick. Fake injury. Beg him. Bully him. Make the children or the grandchildren bully him. Fuck him, if necessary. Do whatever you have to do. But keep your husband from that meeting.”
CORPORAL SHARPE
“That is everything, Officer. The whole truth and nuttin’ but the truth. I really tried to save the man. You don’t find so?” Miss Ivy dragged the red towel from her shoulder and dabbed her eyes.
“Yes, you did. You real try.” Sharpe said, anxious to get rid of the old lady now. He had a phone call to make. He got up, walked around to her side of the desk and palmed her shoulder as if his touch could heal. “Good work, Tanty. I’ll take it from here.”
Miss Ivy’s body sagged—Sharpe felt it through his fingers—so he helped her up and proffered her fur coat.
Yet she wouldn’t leave. Sharpe had to coax her to the door. And then to the gate. She kept stopping, asking questions—like she couldn’t walk and talk. When were they going to pick up Jagroop? Would they go easier on Silence? Was there a witness protection program for her?
Sharpe told lie after lie. Finally, he locked the station gate and watched Miss Ivy hobble off into the night.
He felt sorry for her. Had she truly possessed the gift of sight, she would’ve grasped what Sharpe had come to understand while she spoke, she would’ve made smarter moves.
Back inside, he grabbed the station phone and called the NEDTF office in Port of Spain. He gave his name, rank, station and asked to speak to the senior officer on duty. He said he’d been asked by the family to enquire into the wellbeing of a detainee: one Gail Archibald. The officer replied that she was well and had begun eating, although she kept babbling some gibberish about a dead baby.
“She really do it?” Sharpe asked, “Just between us old-police, tell me, nah?”
“Yeah, Batch. She confess to everything. But don’t worry: the bitch stark, raving mad. She go get-off.”
Sharpe thanked the officer and hung up. No conspiracy. Gail had acted alone. But still, other shots had been fired on the night of the fifteenth. Sharpe would find Jagroop, unmask him, watch him panic and then offer to keep his dirty little secret. Provided, of course, the coils grew fatter from now on—fat as truck tires—and they would have to follow Sharpe, wherever on the island he was transferred.
Sharpe opened the buttons of his uniform shirt, and rocked back in the chair, staring at the ceiling. He heard no TV in the dormitory, no voices either; the officers were all asleep, he guessed. He lifted the phone again and called his house, knowing full well his daughter would be up studying at this hour. He just wanted to tease her, like he still did sometimes, and say, “Daddy love you, you know? Daddy love you bad, bad, bad.”
Home
Kimberley didn’t know that her estranged father, Mr. H, cloth magnate, up-and-coming politician, had been shot. While he was in Trinidad, sliding from the leather backseat to become a heap on the floor of his car, she was still in self-imposed exile in Barbados, her tongue travelling down the ripples of her “roommate” Rachel’s sculpted stomach.
Kimberley’s bedroom windows were open, letting in the groans of the Atlantic Ocean as it churned and twisted and crashed itself against the brown curves of the island’s south coast. So easy to mistake the sound for Rachel’s pulse, gushing as it climbed her trembling thighs. Kimberley held them up and open, knees in stiff peaks, knowing from experience that resistance heightened the intensity for Rachel. Soon, though, the ocean was drowned by another noise, the kind you might expect to hear at a murder, with Rachel bucking and shaking as if her very life was leaking away.
There would be a few minutes, Kimberley knew, of Rachel being deaf, dumb and blind. That crucial interlude, when Kimberley could satisfy herself. She’d become expert at doing it secretly, noiselessly, with nothing but a tiny lurch and an almost imperceptible gurgle. Rachel must never know—she would misunderstand, read too much into it. She was a Pilates instructor, not a lawyer; she didn’t grasp fine distinctions the way Kimberley did. She hadn’t done the research the way Kimberley had. She didn’t know that a perfectly normal woman, like Kimberley, could experience physical arousal with another woman and not be psychologically aroused. Intent, i.e. mens rea, was everything—lawyers knew this; without it, a person was innocent.
Kimberley was innocent. She was not a lesbian.
She assured herself of this as she rolled her forehead across Rachel’s belly, clutched the bedskirt and waited for her own heart rate to slow.
She had never been the instigator of these midnight trysts—it was always Rachel. And Kimberley only obliged because she wanted Rachel to be happy; they’d been through so much together. When Kimberley was in law
school back home in Trinidad, Rachel had been the first to respond to her ad for a roommate. One look at this pretty, hazel-eyed foreign student with the sun-bleached dreadlocks and wooden necklaces, and Kimberley knew Rachel would not last long in accounting school. But she’d rented her the room anyway. And when Mr. H had thrown them out of the apartment and cut off Kimberley’s allowance, it was Rachel who’d found a new place for them and paid the rent that whole year. And when law school was over, it was Rachel who’d said, “Why you don’t come home with me to Barbados? We got law firms there too, you know.” And it was Rachel who’d asked a favor and gotten Kimberley a job. This new breezy Barbados life, out of Mr. H’s reach, was so different to her life in Trinidad. This was a life Kimberley had herself grafted, from only those things she could control. And she owed it all to Rachel.
So whenever, off-and-on, Rachel came reaching, putting Kimberley’s hands where she wanted her to start, saying—no, almost chanting—“I need it, Kim,” Kimberley found herself doing things she wouldn’t for anyone else but Rachel.
But still, she was not a lesbian. Not at all. Neither of them was. They were Soulmates With Benefits.
Rachel’s hands left Kimberley’s short curls, gripped her arms, tugged. Tonight was about to end as these trysts always did, Kimberley expected: a cuddle, some whispered good-nights, then Rachel would slip from the bed, float away to her own room and, by next morning, it would be as if nothing had ever happened between them. Soulmates With Benefits.
Instead, Rachel mounted Kimberley and used perfect teeth to pluck at the thin strap of Kimberley’s pajama-top.
“It’s my turn, it’s my turn,” she sang, squeezing Kimberley’s breast.
“No, that’s okay,” Kimberley said, trying, gently, to pry her off—as she’d done the few other times Rachel had ever tried to touch her in this way.
“Come nuh, lemme do it,” Rachel whined, nibbling lower and lower.
“No, I …”
Rachel yanked the strap. Kimberley’s breast rolled out sideways onto the sheet, like a dead thing. Rachel swooped down and swallowed the nipple.
“Stop it!” Kimberley’s arms shot out, her skin prickly with a heat she knew well: shame. She’d felt it last week, too: standing naked before the doctor in Bridgetown because her insurance had demanded a physical.
Rachel fell backwards off the bed, her head sounding a dull thud on the floor.
Blunt force trauma. LAWYER KILLS LIVE-IN LOVER: Kimberley pictured the sordid headline as she scrambled up, trying to stuff herself back into the pajama, trying to extend a hand to Rachel, trying to apologize. Her body burned as if she’d been drinking Cockspur rum straight from the bottle all night.
Rachel slapped Kimberley’s palm away and stood. “What the rasshole wrong with you, girl?” she asked, pushing Kimberley. Twice.
Kimberley let her, because a lawyer should be just and fair, because she had assaulted Rachel and a victim should be allowed to retaliate. So, from the edge of the mattress, where Rachel’s last push had landed her, Kimberley stammered, “Sorry, sorry …”
“Cheese d’on bread!” Rachel exclaimed, in her rankest Bajan accent. “So you cyah try just once, Kim? You always gotta behave like somebody killin’ you?” Rachel’s chest heaved. She made fists, then abandoned them, splaying her fingers, clutching for something that wasn’t there.
“Look, I over-reacted. Sorry. But it’s your fault: you surprised me,” Kimberley said.
Rachel had never, ever been this aggressive—not in bed, not in any aspect of their life together over the last three years. Sure, she was a free spirit in many ways—with her essential oils, pottery classes, and the ugly organic vegetables she grew on the balcony—but Rachel had always respected Kimberley’s rules. Personal care items—especially toothbrushes—were not for sharing. Always knock before entering and ask before taking. And, most importantly, no means no.
“I don’ understan’ you,” Rachel said, deflating, finally, onto the bed next to Kimberley. “You does keep nuff noise sayin’ you love me, you love me, but you never want me to touch you. Wha’ kinda love that is?” She bent and picked a pillow off the floor, hugged it tight. In the sunset glow of the bedside lamp, she looked so tortured.
It made Kimberley feel like a bad person.
“I do love you,” she said, sliding closer, stroking Rachel’s cheek. “But I told you before, babe, I’m just not comfortable with …”
“Exposure. Yeah, yeah. You like to use big words like that, and make every damn thing sound so highfalutin … when it really very simple.”
“Look at me, then go watch in the mirror at you. See any difference?” Kimberley said.
“No, don’t start that shyte, this hour,” Rachel replied, shaking her head.
“Watch these hands … two slabs of pork, right?” Kimberley said. This kind of self-deprecation came easily to her. She hated her body, always had.
“Nuttin’ wrong with your hands,” Rachel said, rolling her eyes and fiddling with her silver toe ring.
“See, you can’t understand, because you look like a model. I look like the box the shittin’ stove came in.” Kimberley’s ugliness was ipso facto obvious, so she found it easy to talk about that, instead of the other reasons she didn’t want Rachel to make love to her—those were harder to mention because she didn’t fully understand them herself.
“Stop it, nuh!” Rachel begged, clamping her ears.
“Yup, like Mummy always says: I’m cursed. All Daddy’s Syrian genes—I have them. Short, square, hairy, and just plain …” Kimberley let the sentence trail off and hung her head for dramatic effect, waiting for Rachel to retreat in a fluster of apologies.
But Rachel got up, pillow still in hand, and began pacing the isthmus of carpet between the bed and the closet. “That is bare, feckin’ shyte!” she said. “Is all in your feckin’ head. I try and I say: lemme show you, nuh, babes? But, no, watch we: I still cyah touch you when we in public, I still cyah touch you when we by weself. We just stuck. Is like one big, fleckin’ experiment for you, Kim. Well, I tired. Cor blimey, is time this relationship get growin’!”
Kimberley shut her eyes and squeezed her temples—another habit she’d inherited from her father—reviewing all the anomalies of the last few months. Rachel had broken up with that last guy, Errol the Engineer, in January and things had been different since. Usually, within two weeks, she’d have another man on the scene, but she hadn’t mentioned anyone this time. And she’d been more clingy than usual too: crawling into Kimberley’s bed more often, asking “You love me?” all the time. Other questions too: Asking to accompany Kimberley to work functions (“No!”); trying to hold her hand on Broad Street (“Hell no!”); asking, “Where we goin’ from here?” (“What the ass wrong with here?”)
“You listening to me?” Rachel cried.
The pillow hit Kimberley’s face, then fell to the floor.
Kimberley launched from the mattress to jab her finger into Rachel’s face. “I treat you like an experiment? Don’t talk shit, girl,” she said, then turned on her heel and headed for the door. She was almost there when she found herself marching back to Rachel. “Listen, I know what going on here. Errol fuck-up your head and now you depressed and taking it out on me. But you’s the one experimenting, Rachel. Since we land in Barbados is you who been hopping from dick to dick then running back to me to lick your wounds.” She took two giant steps toward the door again, then two giant steps back. “I been right here all the time. I’ve never even touched anyone else. I don’t ask you nothing, I don’t police what you do with your pussy, because all I really want is your heart. So don’t talk to me about experimenting. You’s the queen of that!”
The fogginess in Rachel’s eyes cleared and something more edgy took its place. She aimed her chin at Kimberley and said, “Awright then. I done experimentin’. Mummy and Daddy invite us to the beach house again. Saturday. We goin’ this time.”
“So you not asking, you ordering me to go?”
/> “Well, you need to come, Kim, because I tellin’ them ’bout us. I mekkin’ it official—since we shuttin’ down the lab and done-ing the experiment, right?”
Kimberley wound her arm around the bed’s tall wooden post, effectively tying herself in place. “Tell them what about us? What exactly?” she asked, in the cautioning voice she used with dishonest clients.
“Kim, them ain’t stupid,” Rachel snarled. “I sure they suspect already. We goin’ start by tellin’ them and, when you see we have their support, I know you goin’ feel different ’bout—”
“About what?”
“You know … coming-out.”
Kimberley’s knees weakened; she leaned hard against the post, causing the bed to creak under her weight. These last few months, all the tiny cracks and chips in Rachel’s usually predictable behavior—Kimberley saw a pattern glinting now. Everything came together to form a hideous, mocking mosaic.
“Rachel, dear,” she breathed the words up from the depths of her patience, “coming-out is for lesbians.”
They locked eyes, both listening, it seemed, to the L-word rebounding off the walls.
“Well, I tellin’ them,” Rachel cried. In that lamp-light, her shriveling brown face was a sapodilla spoiling in the sun.
And in that instant—it must’ve been a premonition—Kimberley thought of Mr. H. Him, standing over the gardener, making sure the sapodilla tree was planted exactly where she (eight-year-old “Kimmy”) had wanted it in the backyard of their family home in Trinidad. And, years later, him kicking her out and calling her a “big, fat, nasty queer”. For a long moment, Kimberley felt herself swept up and swirling in a kind of vertigo of hate, but she wasn’t sure who she was hating. Mr. H? Or Rachel?
She released the bed and took a step toward Rachel, not knowing what to say or do, desperate to pick up the pillow, slam it into Rachel’s face and hold it there until she recanted her stupid, stupid plan to expose their relationship. Rachel must’ve sensed it. She shouldered past Kimberley and ran from the bedroom, across the corridor, to her own.
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