The Final Passage

by Caryl Phillips

  Leila's only other visitor was Mary. But after the funeral it seemed to Leila that her once closest friend had begun to keep her distance and the differences between them were becoming more obvious. Leila would steal a look at Mary as she passed by the window on her way to the shops. She seemed to be getting older with every journey, looking her age, and then tragically, on one journey, looking older than her age.

  Leila's mind followed her, and eventually Mary turned the corner and as she did so Leila's mind turned a corner and she left behind many things. Michael, a man whose feelings for her had been like a knife at her throat for over two years now. He failed not only to see her but to speak to her. His mind, though obviously burdened, was something she was now denied access to. She imagined that day-to-day life was probably as frustrating for him as it was for her, and though she could forgive him for taking temporary refuge in the arms of another woman, and though she could forgive him his drunkenness and abusiveness, she could not forgive him all of these things at once, and she could never hope to understand them if he could not see her, or talk to her even. Her marriage was dead, though it had probably only managed to breathe at all by drawing upon the artificial cylinder of blind hope. His footsteps became more distant, the echoing of his shoes lighter, missing first one beat and then another; until they finally faded altogether.

  Then Leila left England behind, not understanding this country in which a smile could mean six things at once, a nudge on a bus from a stranger either an accident or a prologue to a series of events that might actually lead to your destruction. In England people left bread on their doorsteps and dogs came and passed water on it, and in England it never rained good and hard. Leila could no longer stand and watch the drips fall from her forehead and down into her eyes.

  Mary posed to Leila the hardest part of her new life to consider, for now more than ever before she was white, and Michael's woman was white (the hair blonde). Even without knowing it Mary might hurt her in some way, for she had come too close to Leila, and Leila cursed herself for being foolish enough to allow this to happen. Mary's voice alone, not even her presence, would always worry her, and what now followed would be in Leila's mind as strained and as artificial as their first meetings were honest and spontaneous. Leila thought again of the uniformed women at the train station, then Mary, and then Mary's continual help and generosity, then the women at the station, then Mary again, all in quick succession, trying to root her among cruel and stupid people, but Mary would not stay still. The moments of help and the laughter they had shared came flooding back.

  Then she imagined Michael's woman, then a young Mary, and she tried to make the two of them mix into one, but Mary was not blonde, and Leila's unconscious desire to unravel her friend from such a fate held true. Then she saw Mary pretending to be asleep on the beach, the man talking to Leila, and Leila's mother about to appear standing over them, and this seemed to fit better, but it was the thought of Miss Gordon that finally enabled Leila to drown her friend Mary.

  Miss Gordon could never pretend to be anything other than what she was; a missionary whom Leila had read about in books when she did history back home. Often, when Leila had refused to answer the door, Miss Gordon could be heard knocking on Mary's door and it would be a long while, often half an hour before Miss Gordon's distinctive feet could be heard clip-clopping out of Mary's house and past Leila's window. Betrayal, thought Leila, was perhaps too strong a word to use, but Leila felt cheated by Mary's clandestine meetings. Because Mary talked with Miss Gordon she could be made to fit Michael's woman, the woman on the beach, the uniformed women, and she could lie with Miss Gordon in Leila's mind.

  And Miss Gordon herself; Leila dare not touch her, sure that she would sting her with her bitter concern. Full of good will, she infected Leila and Calvin with it, and when she touched Calvin (which she loved to do) Leila was sure that it was done to see if his skin colour was invented or real, to see if his blood was cold, for as she touched him she always let her hand slide a little as if scraping up a laboratory sample underneath her fingernails. When she talked to Leila in that high Scots voice, she always swallowed either just before or just after the word coloured, as if ashamed of it, and Leila felt sure that when she spoke to her parents about her work she steeled her face when she reached the word coloured, and when she wrote it down she put it in inverted commas. After a glass of wine with her friends, if she had any friends, she probably giggled at the word, but with Leila it always got caught just beneath the centre of her tongue and created more saliva than the rest of the words in the sentence put together. As she had talked more than once with Mary, Leila wondered if Miss Gordon had used the word with her. If she had asked her how she felt about living next to coloured people, and if Mary had offered to make her a cup of tea.

  On this morning a cold wind burrowed down the road, tearing bits of paper out of the gutter and whirling them around like winter kites. Miss Gordon did not call, and Leila made Calvin his breakfast, then tried to encourage him to sleep. She sat patiently with him until his restlessness died down and he closed his eyes. She could tell it was cold outside. She had heard it rain. She felt Calvin's unease was a result of the weather. Leila shivered, the chill running both ways along the length of her spine but settling nowhere. Then she went across to the fireplace where there was enough wood and coal to light just one more fire.

  Leila swept the grate clean and began to twist up pieces of newspaper and lay them down as a base. The bits of wood she arranged neatly and tent-like on top of the paper. Then she took a match to the architecture and watched the whole thing begin to flare up. Holding open a double sheet of newspaper in front of the grate she created a vacuum, and the fire began to rise. She heard the wood snap in pain. Leila decided to clear out the upstairs first.

  She stripped the pillowcases off from the pillows and held one open. Then she took it across to the wardrobe and filled it with all the clothes that she had bought for herself since coming to England. There was not much, just a scarf, a pair of gloves and a jumper. She took out Michael's clothes from the wardrobe, then she emptied her drawer of unanswered and half-written letters. The drawer beneath hers was full of Calvin's English clothes, and she stuffed what she could in the pillowcase until it was full. The room did not look all that different; the furniture was still there, as were the pictures of her mother, but it felt cleaner.

  Leila shut the door and she carried the pillowcase downstairs. She began to feed the fire with the objects and garments that reminded her of her five months in England. The room became warm and Leila began to laugh as she searched everywhere finding new things to drop in the now empty pillowcase. A bunch of plastic flowers, a shopping bag, a small vase, a set of ashtrays; and in the kitchen cups, food, anything. Things that would not burn like cutlery, pots and pans she left, for she did not need to get rid of everything. What would not fit into her suitcase she would simply abandon. And what she would abandon she would not need. As she watched objects flare, then finally die, blacken, then flake, Leila fell asleep, sure that she could hear the sound of the sea. But it was a dull repetitive knocking that woke her, and she moved sluggishly to the door.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  Leila stepped back to let her pass. She shut the door behind her. Mary smiled anxiously as she wandered into the front room, but she had to control herself for it no longer looked like a home, more like a cheap hotel room. She sat heavily on the settee and looked at Calvin who was asleep in his cot. It seemed as though Leila lived in this one room now, for the settee was partially made up like a bed and Leila's things were strewn all over. Calvin's toys and his dirty washing were lying in a heap in the middle of the floor, and there was no heating apart from the signs of a now dying fire in the grate. Gradually Mary forced herself to look across at Leila whose skin, once a milky coffee colour, now looked pale. Leila looked back at her and let a smile break out on her face which seemed to say, ‘So what?’ Mary looked away. For her the day drifted by unused, wasted in sil
ence. Leila, on the other hand, felt alert, convinced that if she turned around quickly enough she would see her mother.

  That night the wind howled. Neither mother nor son slept. They merely waited for the darkness to lift. When it did Leila dressed her son warmly in what clothes remained. She could feel the cold inside the house and she knew it would be even colder outside. Having dressed him, she laid him down on the dry half of the settee (for by now she had grown accustomed to waking up with her thighs smelling and her body damp with urine). Calvin was too cold to smell his mother. He played by himself and waited anxiously for her attention as she pulled on her thin jacket. She came to him and they locked the door behind them. They began their familiar walk through the streets that Leila imagined her husband and his blonde woman so happily wandered when nobody else was around.

  People in the streets were busy, hurrying everywhere. They all rushed, for it was Christmas. The cars slushed past throwing up a spray of melted ice and water, leaving their tracks seemingly indelibly etched into the road. Then another car would come along and scratch the same message, then another, till they became like the people, one huge pattern of individual marks, each indistinguishable from the next, each reduced with the short passing of time from being a proud something to being a distant untraceable blur.

  Leila stopped at a window and listened to her son speaking, though he could not as yet speak. She watched his image reflected in the glass as he spoke with unsurity.

  ‘Mommy, is that Santa Claus there, that man with the white beard and moustache, that man with a red suit and a red face?’

  She held Calvin so he would be able to see better. His short arm freed itself from being trapped between his own small body and his mother's breasts. It pointed out the man he was talking about.

  ‘Him, mommy, that man there with the funny horse.’

  Leila looked at her son, his eyes bright, his face eager for knowledge.

  ‘Yes, Calvin, that's Santa Claus,’ said Leila.

  Calvin looked at her as she confirmed the man's identity, then he looked back at the man.

  ‘Why is Santa Claus white?’

  Leila could not answer her own question.

  ‘He should be coloured. Why isn't Santa Claus coloured?’

  Leila began to repeat herself like a record player stuck into a groove. She tore other parents' and other children's attention away from the man. They just looked at her and moved away, saying nothing.

  ‘Why isn't Santa Claus coloured?’ she whispered.

  She walked heavily up the long hill, then through the tall iron gates. Gothic trees, their roots muscular and visible, lined the drive. The cemetery was empty.

  The stiff wind folded the short grass and the arms of the trees shivered. Leila's breath clouded and rose, and she stood, Calvin in her arms, underneath the now familiar oak tree. She crept towards her mother's grave and knelt. Leila had no flowers. She never brought any, fearful that someone might mistake them as belonging to one of the other occupants, but she had her memories. Underneath where it said the names of the two other people she read her mother's own name and cried. Her mother was more than mere scratchings on soft English stone.

  One day Leila knew she would meet her again and be able to tell her that. If they could not be equals as mothers then maybe they might find equality of some kind in their death. But first Leila would take a boat and leave Michael in this country among the people who seemed to keep him warm in mind and body. England, in whom she had placed so much of her hope, no longer held for her the attraction of her mother and new challenges. At least the small island she had left behind had safety and two friends, and if the price to be paid for this was a stern predictability from one day to the next then she was ready to pay it.

  The child in her body and the one in her arms would never know of Michael. But she was sure that nobody would blame her for this. When the time did come when her children would ask her questions she could not answer, she would take them down to the harbour and wait with them, as the ship lay offshore, waiting. She would watch as they climbed into the small boat and made their way out to the ship and on to England to find a Michael, or men like him who might give them the answers they sought. She would continue to wait for them, holding Millie's hand, both their hair grey and hidden (Bradeth also grey, at home, waiting for Millie), knowing that being her boys (she had never entertained the possibility of a daughter) they would come back to her with the next tide. Then together, the three of them (mother, son, son) would make their way back to St Patrick's and sit and wait for night to fall, having finally, at the end of her day, shared something that she knew was beyond her or anyone else's explanation. Leila looked again at her mother's simple tombstone and from it she drew the extra strength that enabled her to get to her feet.

  Leila left the cemetery the same way that she had come in, through the tall iron gates. On her way home she did not stop to listen to the carols or to buy presents. She walked quickly through the back streets, wanting to keep off the main roads and away from people. Calvin was asleep in her arms and the baby she carried in her body felt heavy.

  The bitter December air bruised Leila's face. She stopped. It was beginning to get dark, and the streetlights had not yet been switched on. The only illumination was provided by the Christmas trees which lit up the windows of the houses in Florence Road. From around the corner a lorry sped into view and hurtled past them. They must have looked strangely eerie in the winter's dusk, standing there unmoving, woman, child, child to be. Then the snowflakes began to spin, first one, then tens of them. Leila watched spellbound. Then she fled into the house and locked the door behind her.

  A speckled, burnished light crept in off the street, piercing the awful inadequacy of the curtains. Leila caught sight of herself in a mirror. She looked like a yellowing snapshot of an old relative, fading with the years. She turned suddenly and saw that somebody had pushed a Christmas card through the front door. She stooped, with Calvin, and picked it up and read it, but it was from nobody.