Hands fidgeted. Feet shuffled. No one spoke. They looked at one another and slipped out of the kitchen, leaving us two alone. The tears spilled out and ran hot and salty down my face. He looked up, holding out his hand to me and when I took it, he pulled me to him, to where he was seated. He put his arms around my hips. He rested his head on my chest, smothering his face between my breasts as I stood close in at his chair. I cradled his head in my arms. Glancing over his head I could see the blurred words I could chant by heart, “Prednisolone, allopurinol, ondansetron, ranitidine” – words written with care on a hand-drawn chart stuck on the fridge behind his chair, his neat red check marks alongside days of the week and frequency of dosage – as if by doing his best with the writing he would be investing in a karma that would make the drugs do their best too. I lifted the end of my jumper to wipe away the tears as they fell on his bare scalp – his hair had been lost months before. Spinal chemotherapy, long needles pumping toxic chemicals into the marrow of his spine, over and over, had further delayed regrowth. His juddering sobs shook my belly. I sat on his lap. His legs were thin bamboo sticks through the fabric of his trousers. Our heads nested on each other’s shoulder, mine on his, his on mine. I could feel his heart throbbing through his chest and mine; I was sure he could feel mine too. How did we get to this?
The disease had crept up on him, feigning a flu that wouldn’t leave, then wasn’t flu any more, but a lymphoma too nascent to be treated. “Maybe you’ll be ready for treatment in about twenty years or so,” they assured. In twenty days, he went into shock as the disease had suddenly become very aggressive. The prognosis remained optimistic.
“He’ll be back home for Christmas,” from the hospital.
“I’ll be back home for Christmas,” from him.
November passed, December started. I came instead and found him gaunt, weak and fragile. I saw he was trying for my sake, for all our sakes, to be more than he had become. It was not meant to go like this. There was no plan for this. We were going through a difficult phase, I had told myself, but in the end, all would be well and we would pick up our life where we had left off. I had vowed to myself that I would make it better, would try to be more deserving of the good things I had been gifted with. Now, all that seemed a naïve, foolish bargain. I had clung to an earlier promise of a bone marrow transplant; we were told that it would not, could not, now be done.
There, in the kitchen, with the chaos of unfinished business around us, he patted my back. How many times had I seen him comfort an unhappy child that way?
“We can do this. OK? We can get through this.”
I kissed the top of his head.
“Yes. Yes. We can do this.”
I stood up, smoothed my hair, splashed my face at the sink and tried to assess where we were and to see what we could salvage of the interrupted pastelle-making session.
He started opening drawers.
“What you looking for?”
“A tablecloth.”
The others came back into the kitchen.
“A tablecloth, you said? This is the only one I have.”
From a high cupboard came the bright green Breton linen tablecloth, embroidered with black and white, a wedding present of ours that we had given her, our eldest, when she set up her own home.
“But it will be spoilt. Get caked up with dough,” I objected.
“Mummy, wasn’t it you who told me that we must make use of everything we have?”
She handed him the tablecloth and he spread it on the table.
“Ladies and gentlemen, close your eyes for a minute and imagine this… St James on a Saturday night. Pavement stalls. Tables spread with white sheets for tablecloths. And the vendors rolling out roti after roti after roti. OK? Open eyes now. Here we go.”
We laughed at that incongruous image and I could sense the warming of the atmosphere in the room at his little joke. Everyone was trying to pretend that my outburst hadn’t happened. I, wanting to make amends by behaving as if nothing was wrong, joined in.
“You think I should light a flambeau? For authenticity?”
He dusted the cloth with flour, gathered up the bits of dough that still clung to the bottle, made a new ball of it, flattened that, laid it on the floured cloth, rubbed flour along the bottle and proceeded to roll out a perfect disc, lifting and turning the dough around until it was as big as a tea plate. The dough behaved. He rolled it over the bottle and flipped it on to a foil square.
“Now, let’s start filling and folding.”
To the busy sounds of a parang CD, we got into our assembly line while joining in the chorus.
“Somos caminantes, tenemos que andar.”
“We are travellers; we must continue on our journey.”
First meat, cooked with generous handfuls of fresh herbs, then raisins, olives and capers, the filled discs folded into rectangular packages, wrapped in foil to make twenty-four plump pastelles. Half a dozen at a time were put to steam in a colander over a saucepan of boiling water. The fragrances of home – thyme, garlic, chives – filled the house and he, stretched out on the sofa, caught my eye and winked. We ate pastelles by candlelight, just for the romance of it. They were pronounced delicious. We drank vodka. We talked of Christmases past and of Christmases to come. I warned them that this year they would not get the customary pillowslip stockings from Santa Claus, a tradition that, if they thought about it rationally, they would agree had continued ridiculously long after their childhood was past.
“That’s up to Santa Claus surely, not you.”
When they became absorbed in a game of backgammon, he and I muffled up to go for a walk. He left his stick behind. We leaned against each other as we stepped into the sharp cold. The drizzly fog had changed to flurries of snow. The black night swallowed all but the feeble streetlights, whose hopeful glow made shifting rainbow haloes through the slowly wafting snow-flakes. Cocooned against the cold, we ambled, arm in arm, along Weller and Sturge, Union and Pepper. As we drifted through Dickensland in a Christmas card scene of cobbled streets, softly gleaming windowpanes and snow piled on windowsills, our breaths made floating speech bubbles of our conversation about Great Expectations – a conversation about resolute Pip and poor Estella who lost the best gift she was ever given. He and I went on this, our last walk together, discussing lives that were not ours. At the end of that story, Pip and Estella parted, promising to continue as friends apart.
We didn’t talk about it, but I think that while we strolled, we were writing our magical end to our own story.
A PERFECT STRANGER
We were not always like this. I mean us, we two. Like this – this one, past the best-before age of three-score and ten; and the other, crystallised dust in a jar, lying in a teak box on the dressing table.
Close your eyes to the sagging skin, the drooping frame, the sparse, man-cut, greying hair and see beneath the girl of twenty-one that you first laid eyes on one Easter weekend, half a century ago, in a granite building atop the hill of a mid-Wales seaside town. And I will see you too, risen from under your blanket of crisp rose petals, faded photographs, curling, grief-filled cards, the yellowing, passionate, desperate notes, written too late.
The first time I saw your face, the world I knew before fell away. I closed my eyes to capture your image, to hold it behind my eyelids, to gaze at it inside my head. I never wanted to lose sight of you ever again.
You remember where we were that day? It was at the men’s hall of residence, where, over the four-week Easter break, third-year students, like you, putting in the extra slog before finals, stayed locked into their little cliques of focused swots, away from the aimless overseas students, like me, with nowhere to go in their vacation time, with little to do but drift around the only welcoming space, an open hall of residence, to carry on moaning in an unending circuit of longing about back home in Uganda, back home in Nepal, back home in Trinidad.
Back home in Trinidad was the conversation between the two men and me as we limed in the
room of the one who was in his final year – he was later to marry a Welsh girl and stay on; the other was a second-year student, bound for a life of success as a diplomat. When the good-natured teasing about how awkwardly I was coping with the strangeness around me took on what I felt was a somewhat more judgemental tone, I flung a pillow at one; he retaliated, I flung it back, harder this time, and it quickly became a pillow fight which I was losing. I left the room with a hurt head and even more hurt feelings.
You know something? Many years later, when you were long gone, I was with our son at a post office in Port of Spain and who should come in but the by then retired diplomat who, when introductions were made, said to my son, “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here.” At which our son gave me a surprised ‘what have you been keeping from me’ look and the diplomat seeing his expression, laughed and said, “Don’t worry, you’re the image of your father. What I meant was, your mother, a friend and I had a fight when we were students and, after she ran away from us, your mother met your father.”
I stumbled to the bathroom – communal baths and showers – closed the door to a bath cubicle, sat on the edge of a bathtub and cried. At first the tears were about the fight, about the unfairness – two ganged up against one – then about being away from anyone who belonged to me – no letter from home for a few weeks, then about the disappointment of no daffodils fluttering and dancing beside Windermere where I had just been on a fortnight’s geology field trip, and about not being able to go up Scafell with the climbers, and that disappointment merged into feeling wretched about my lack of foresight in failing to book a room for when I returned – it was the Easter weekend and the office of the only hall available was closed for business, so there I was, the unofficial and clandestine guest of those two fellow-Trinidadians with whom I had been stupid enough to pick a fight. Not genteel tears rolling silently along damp cheeks, I was sobbing uninhibitedly – loud and hard, full of rage and self-pity.
“Are you all right?” A man’s voice came over the partition wall from the adjoining cubicle.
I hadn’t stopped to think about whether I was alone. I caught my breath and strangled a sob before it could come out of my throat. I didn’t dare say a thing. There was a silence, too, from the neighbouring cubicle, but I could feel a listening presence. I feared even to breathe, lest my breath made a snuffle that could be heard.
“Are you all right?” Softer now, some uncertainty had edged into it.
I was still silent. I wished the owner of the voice would think he had been mistaken. That he had imagined hearing someone crying. I couldn’t leave, I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t go back to my friends. I had no room of my own. In the two cubicles, there was a listening silence that lasted many minutes. Then I heard a swishing and splashing noise, bathwater sloshing against the sides of the bath, followed by a loud whoosh and the noise of water falling from a height. I could work out that the person had stood up in the bath and the noise was the water falling off him. The plug was pulled, water gurgled away. Listening hard I picked up noises like a body being rubbed dry and the slap of slippers on the tiled floor. I heard the click of a bolt being pulled and felt relief; I was certain that my neighbour would just mind his own business and go away. The rap at my cubicle door was soft, but I was startled and didn’t answer.
“You’re not going to do anything you will regret, are you?”
Such worry was in the voice that I had to say something.
“No. I’m not.”
“Would you like to talk?”
When I opened the door, did I stare at you? You didn’t stare at me even though my face was red, eyes red, nose runny, cheeks wet. But could you sense what I was thinking? I think now that you sensed even then that I could love you, a perfect stranger for ever, for you came into the cubicle, closed the door and sat next to me on the edge of the bath. You leaned back, turned on the tap and wet a corner of the towel that you slipped from over your shoulder. You wiped my face with the damp corner and dried it. You sat next to me and asked me nothing. We sat in a long silence. I breathed in a new fragrance from your skin – sandalwood soap, I learned later. I looked down at my hands folded in my lap, at your hands also folded in your lap – long slim fingers, dark hair springing from the backs of your wrists. I looked at your feet, slim and pale in soft, beige felt-looking slippers and at mine, bare and brown, stirrup straps of the chocolate-coloured stretch pants hooked under the insteps. The way you were gave off a sense of security, of completeness, of knowing how to do things the right way, of understanding your world, the one into which I had stumbled, blindfold, picking my way around in error and confusion. I was embarrassed that I had made a fool of myself and had to be rescued. I didn’t dare look at you for shame. After a while, you took my hand and said, “Whatever it is, it’s not that bad.” You were wearing your fawn dressing gown – it served you well for at least a decade more – and from a pocket you took out a black and gold tin of cigarettes. You shook out two. You lit both and passed me one. We sat and smoked. The sweet molasses flavoured Balkan Sobranie calmed and relaxed me. You crushed the glowing gold tips in the lid of the tin, put the blackened stubs in your pocket and closed the tin. You looked into my eyes. I looked into yours for the first time. Green, flecked with gold.
“Are you going to be all right now?”
“Yes.”
SIC TRANSIT WAGON
That afternoon a man she guessed to be about her age called at her front gate. “You selling the wagon?” While his question was directed at her, his gaze was not. It was fixed on his cap which he was holding in both hands, turning it around and around. She too looked at the cap and at his hands. They appeared soft, softer than hers, as if they were reserved for dealing only with soft things. A big gold signet ring on the index finger of his right hand made a rhythmic metallic clink against the brass rivets along the edge of the cap – clink, clink, clink – like a metronome ticking away the seconds while he waited for her answer.
He was just the latest of the string of people who stopped at the gate, almost every month, ringing the bell, calling out, “Hello?” “Anybody home?” They came in twos – one at the gate, the other waiting in their vehicle. The one at the gate said, “I always passing here and seeing the wagon park up. You selling it?” You would think that hearing that question about a dozen times a year for the past couple years, she had a ready yes or no answer. But she didn’t. Because, truth be told, she didn’t know from one day to the next, whether the wagon was for sale.
But each time she said, “Maybe –”, and the man, always a man, answered, “I could come in and take a look at it?” And she, forgetting that morning’s quota of headlines shrieking of kidnapping, murder, rape, burglary said, “OK”, and the passenger emerged. The two of them opened the gate, advanced towards the car, opened its doors and bonnet and trunk, tapped roof and trunk door and bumpers and doors; all the while listening, more carefully than her doctor ever did for her bronchial asthma, to determine whether the car was metal, metal and rust or rust and fill. “I could start the engine?” they asked next and, as the key was always in the ignition, they would start it, rev it, checking the exhaust for black smoke and water droplets.
She was quick to point out the car’s deficiencies, to discourage them. “The air conditioning doesn’t work… look at how much rust on the body… the trunk door won’t stay up… no power anything… it’s twenty-five years old.” They would nod while carrying on with their tapping and tapping.
There was always some story about why they wanted it. It seemed to her that they felt they had to justify their wanting to take the wagon away from her. One older man came barefoot, trouser legs rolled up above his stringy calves, T-shirt neckline ringed dark with sweat and all of him – eyelashes and all – covered with a spray of fine grass cuttings. “This trunk could take mower, bushwhacker, blower, rake, cutlass, gas bottle, everything, easy-easy.” Another saw different possibilities in the trunk – packed with the uniformed bodies of primary
school children, “I could fit four or five in there, a next four in the back seat – that make it four and four eight, two more in front with me, eight and two is ten – ten at least could transport to school in the morning and home in the evening.” One was building a house and could use it to carry blocks, cement bags, gravel; the younger ones were “looking to fix it up” as their first car. One fellow and his partner planned to convert it to a pick-up. “We could get that feller with the welding torch to cut off the top, pull out the back seat and put in two big barrel – we does sell fish.” And then the inevitable, “How much you want?” and her ready answer, “How much you offering?” And, no matter what they said, from her came, “Let me think about that. What’s your number? I’ll call you.” And early next day, “No, sorry. I decided to keep it.”
Because, truth to tell, the wagon wasn’t just a car. It was her car – the first car she ever owned. That gleaming silver 1.8 Toyota Corolla station wagon – foreign assembled, imported at a time when most cars were locally assembled – was extra special. “That is one sick car,” the boys she taught declared. Oh, yes, she had had cars before – she could claim either of the two in the yard. But this car was the first with her name on the “Certificate of Ownership”. It was registered just around the time of her birthday. Your thirties must end with a bang, her still thirty-eight-year-old husband said, presenting her turned thirty-nine gift. She thought of herself as being in her prime of her life, but old, she supposed, to get one’s first car. Growing up, she had never even imagined owning a car – nobody she knew owned one. She didn’t get around to doing the driving test till, at twenty-seven, she was pressured by her first pregnancy, and it was another decade or so before the big deal of that Certificate of Ownership.
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