The Sea Grape Tree

by Gillian Royes

  “And tell the customer who’s coming in that we’re not ready to serve dinner yet,” Eric called, “unless they want corn beef sandwiches.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  * * *

  The dream was as clear to her in the light of day as when she’d awakened earlier in pitch darkness gasping for air. It was a continuation of the dream the night before. In this last dream she’d been an adolescent again, thirteen, she’d known somehow, the numbers one and three clear in her mind. She was wearing the same blue coat, still standing outside the dark church waiting for her mother. A taxi had approached and slowed in front of her, the profiled driver looking out from the murky interior, motioning with his finger, asking if she needed him. She’d shaken her head and he’d driven off.

  Then she’d swung around in a circle on tiptoe, her arms extended, practicing a ballet step, and as she turned she’d blown her breath out through her mouth to see if it steamed up around her, but it hadn’t. Her new patent leather shoes made a grinding sound on the sidewalk and she turned again because she liked the sound.

  Four boys were walking past the closed offices and shops and coming toward her, their voices forced, almost vicious. They’d been drinking, she could tell. One taunted another while the others laughed. They’d started glancing toward her as they approached, and she pulled her coat closer around her. When they passed in front of the church sign, they grew quiet, listening to one boy talking. They were all around the same age, eighteen, maybe nineteen. At the steps leading up to the church, they’d gathered in a circle, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She wanted to run away but she didn’t want to attract attention, and they could outrun her, anyway. They were blocking the gate to the churchyard, the only opening in the black iron fence. A car turned the corner, followed by another. They drove past to the end of the road and were gone.

  The boys started walking toward her with energized, self-conscious steps. Although she couldn’t make out their eyes, she knew they were looking at her, coming straight for her. She stood still, frozen to the spot. One boy said something and the others laughed. They wore leather jackets and greasy hairstyles. The tallest one was in the front, their leader, the only one with brown skin and wavy black hair that he’d tried to plaster flat.

  “’Allo?” he said, and stopped in front of her, his beer breath hitting her in the face. He was a few inches taller than her and had a pimple on his nose large enough to have a shadow. The others circled her.

  “What’s your name, then?” he said, the trace of an accent in the way the words came out. “Something like Jane, innit?” He tilted his head back, tickled by his own wit. The streetlight showed a broken tooth in front. His followers echoed him with their own cocky laughs. She could hear her heart beating in her ears, and she hoped they couldn’t hear. Beside them, the road was silent, dotted on both sides by empty streetlights.

  “Sarah Louise,” she’d answered, trying to control the shake in her voice. They laughed again. Their intensity pawed at the air around her and she knew she was their prey.

  A thump to her pelvis made her hunch forward and look down. The leader, a silver chain still swinging from the belt of his pants, had hit her in her privates with his fist, startling her even though it was muffled by the heavy blue coat. The boy straightened his black-leathered arm to do it again and she took a step back. There were spots of dried cement on his jeans like he was a brickie, a bricklayer’s apprentice. He grabbed her arm and she felt the pressure of his fingers through the woolen sleeve. She tried to pull away.

  “Where you going, Sarah Louise?” he taunted her. “Just having a little fun, right, boys?” She glanced back at the church gate, measuring the distance.

  “Where you going?” the others repeated, touching her, jostling her.

  Sarah had awakened with a jerk and lay in the dark, panting. She wondered where it had come from, this dream so real she could still feel the mental version of the thump. Was it a prediction, a warning? After stumbling to the window, she’d watched the sky turning pale yellow, then pale pink, with a smattering of clouds above the ocean. She’d hung on to the bars and breathed deeply, the air faintly salty from this distance.

  By breakfast, she’d sketched an addition to the growing watercolor painting on the large sheet. It was a view of the ocean sliver above the wall—and the jagged glass. She’d had to draw it leaning against the bars, the drawing board braced with one hand and the free hand sketching. The awkwardness of the position made it difficult to think of the dream and the insult to her privates.

  Clementine didn’t approve. “You can’t make a picture standing up like that,” she said with a scowl. Another Sunday and the Walrus was in a starched purple dress and a matching hat with a wide brim. Another Sunday and ten scratches on the wall. After Clementine left, all was quiet. Then the church choir started up again, the soloist screeching at the top of her voice while Sarah painted bronze glitter along the edges of the broken glass.

  She was sure that the distasteful dream had been inspired, if one could call it that, by the driver, who’d grabbed her chin and tousled her hair the night before, touched her as if he owned her. It had started when he knocked on her door, the first person to do so, the visit coming in the middle of a celebration in the living room. She’d heard people collecting in the early afternoon, until there were about six men’s voices getting gradually louder, as if they were drinking. They’d talked about her. One man had asked about de woman and Batsman had answered that she was cool.

  “She don’t give no trouble,” he’d said.

  There was talk of a birthday, and she’d stood listening, both hands pressed to the door, smelling its cheap varnish, anxious about the change in the number of voices and the volume, surprised that these people celebrated birthdays like ordinary people, rituals with a prisoner in a nearby room. Music had suddenly erupted, a dancehall song that drowned out the voices and vibrated through the tiles into her bare feet.

  The knock had come shortly after. “Who is it?” she’d answered, jumping away from the door.

  “Man-Up.” The driver, using his name for the first time.

  There was nothing she could do but tell the knocker to come in, every visit bringing hope and terror. After sliding the bolts, the driver had pushed into the room along with the throbbing music.

  “You good?” he’d said after he spotted her beside the bathroom door. He was wearing baggy jeans and a black T-shirt, black sneakers. Taller than Clementine and Batsman, he crowded the room, the rough tones of the dance-hall singer a fitting backdrop.

  “I come to tell you something,” he’d announced, slamming the door closed. He swaggered like he’d been drinking and was in a good mood. He walked to her easel and stood looking at the painting, an unfinished box showing a budding leaf projecting from the tip of a branch. “I hear you is a ahtist. Batsman show me the picture.”

  Sarah had pulled down the hem of her shorts, glad she’d worn a bra. “I paint—yes.”

  He’d lifted the board off the easel and walked toward her, examining the painting. “You paint good, yes, man.” His uplifted eyebrows almost vanished into the hairline above his narrow forehead. “Your day almost come, you know.” He’d glanced at her over the board. His face was expressionless except for the tiny muscles making his eyes squint.

  She’d run her tongue over her lips. “What—what do you mean?”

  “You going to get out soon, one way or another, dead or alive,” he’d said with a snorting laugh. He’d thrown the board onto the bed. “First, you have to paint me, though.”

  To Sarah’s slow nod, he’d continued, “I want a nice painting for my sitting room. No pencil drawing, you hear me? I want you to paint it with color. I come back later.”

  He’d departed the room with a smirk and appeared again after dinner, after the other men had left. “You ready?” he’d demanded, and she’d moved to the easel and chair she�
��d set up near the bed. The bare bulb didn’t give enough light, but she’d said nothing, knowing every detail of his face already.

  “We need another chair,” she said.

  “You didn’t need nothing for Batsman.”

  “He didn’t pose for me.”

  After he’d settled on the red velvet chair he brought in, Man-Up straightened his shoulders and turned toward the window.

  “That good?” he’d asked, glancing quickly at her and back into the dark outside.

  “Yes, but—” she said, gesturing to her own neck, and he’d straightened his black shirt under the thin gold chain. Black wasn’t a good color for him, she thought. It didn’t offer enough contrast with his ebony skin, skin almost as dark as that of the bartender who smiled a lot.

  They’d spent an hour in silence except for the few times when she’d asked him to turn more to her or center his chain. She was glad he’d asked her to paint him. She wanted him to see that she wasn’t the begging woman at his feet, but instead a sensible woman who could take the pressure, not make a fuss. Once he got up and left the room without explanation, returning after a few minutes.

  “Tell me—Man-Up,” she’d started when he sat down again, as if she was asking for his opinion on the weather, “why am I here?”

  “I don’t come to answer no questions.”

  She’d caught his eye, looking from her to the window and back again. “I just thought I should ask. You’re holding me here, not—”

  “Don’t ask me nothing,” he’d said, his voice callous now. “I didn’t come here for no fucking interview, you hear me? Just paint the raas claat picture.” He seemed to slip seamlessly from good mood to bad.

  After the drawing was completed and she’d begun to paint, Man-Up had started moving his feet around restlessly between the chair’s legs.

  “You can go now, if you’d like,” she’d said. “You don’t need to be here for the whole thing.”

  He’d stood up and stretched, pulling the T-shirt taut against his stomach with its small spare tire. He’d walked over to look at the portrait. “Nice, nice.”

  She’d kept her eyes on the painting until he reached for her, cupping her chin hard in his hand.

  “You a sweet woman.” The smell of beer had oozed out of his pores. “Anybody ever tell you that you sweet?” She’d tried not to shrink from his touch, stared instead at his teeth and the small spaces in between.

  “And I like your red hair,” he’d added, rubbing his hand roughly over her head. “Watch me, I coming back to take you up on your offer.” Then he’d pushed her head hard to one side before stalking out and bolting the door behind him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  * * *

  In the two-room police station in Port Antonio, Shad slid lower in the rickety chair, waiting for Sergeant Neville Myers to get off the phone.

  “Go to the police,” Danny had said on the phone the day before. “Tell them what you told me.” Shad’s first instinct had been to select a few choice words to describe the Port Antonio police force that never had time for little Largo, but he’d held his tongue and followed the suggestion, even if it meant taking his day off to do it.

  “Yes, ma’am.” His police cousin nodded patiently into the receiver, raising smug eyebrows with each sentence. “It sounding suspicious, you right. But we can’t come and arrest your helper. We don’t have no proof that she stole the ring.” Neville swung his captain’s chair toward the dusty window, adjusting the blue uniform shirt over his belly. Stumpy like all the Myers men, he made up for it with girth and authority.

  The men didn’t like each other. One was the representative of the Constabulary Force (on whose side Neville had invariably fought when they were boys playing in the bamboo), and the other a former renegade and convict, something that had hung in the air between them for the last seventeen years.

  At a smaller desk behind their superior, no computer in sight, two young constables were reading the contents of a file folder, one standing and leaning over the other. The seated youth glanced up at his colleague with a grin, amused by what they were reading. They weren’t making more than two hundred US a month, Shad knew, but the red stripes down their pants seams gave them the right to know people’s private lives. Maybe carrying a gun made it worthwhile.

  “Yes, sir,” Neville said, having disposed of his caller. He spoke wearily, his younger cousin still an embarrassment. “How can I help you?” He creaked back in the old captain’s chair and swung it around, showing all three stripes on his right sleeve.

  “How is Aunt Jasmine?” Shad smiled.

  “She good, getting old,” Neville said. “So what bring you here?”

  “An English lady, she used to come into the bar—”

  “What happen to Beth?”

  “Nothing like that. This woman is a artist, she disappear from Largo.”

  “What you mean she disappear?”

  “She was staying with another artist man in Largo, a man called Roper. You ever hear of him?” His cousin stared back blankly. “Anyway, she was staying there and she just disappear one morning. Her clothes gone, everything gone—well, almost everything—but she never come back and she don’t contact nobody since then.”

  Neville pulled a pad toward him. “What were the circumstances of her departure?”

  “One day they come back to the house and she gone.”

  “No forced entry?”

  “No.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “No.”

  Neville pushed the pad aside. “Pshaw, man. The woman just leave on her own.”

  “She don’t have no money.”

  “How you know that?” Chubby cheeks getting chubbier, Neville shook his head, a man of the world. “She could have money and nobody know. White people don’t talk their business like black people, especially money business.”

  “She don’t just move somewhere else. She don’t know nobody.”

  “The woman get on a plane and leave, you hear me?”

  “Without a passport?”

  Neville frowned. “How you know?”

  “Somebody tell me,” Shad said, swallowing hard. “She leave it in the room on top of a closet.” He could still see the small, blue book hiding at the back of the shelf.

  “She still on the island then,” the sergeant said, rubbing his chin. “She have any enemies?”

  “No, she don’t have no enemies.” Janet intruding into the bathroom didn’t give her an enemy, nor the argument with Roper, not enough to make Neville sound more like a judge. “She not that kind of person, she quiet like. She just go about her business and paint every day.”

  Neville harrumphed. “I think I know what happen. Them artist people like to smoke weed when they come down here. They free up themselves and do all kind of things.”

  “You can’t come to Largo and investigate?”

  “Investigate what, some artist woman who smoke weed?”

  “She not smoking weed, man. She don’t even smoke cigarette.”

  “Trust me, boy, the woman gone off to some Rasta man’s yard to smoke weed. I have a case last year of a woman who never go back to New Jersey, and her parents come down and want us to investigate. And when we check, the woman was living with a Rasta in St. Ann. Them cases easy to solve. We don’t have no time to waste on that kind of business. Is serious business we doing here, catching criminal and thing. We put our lives on the line every day.” Neville’s eyes started to bulge, like when they were playing police and he’d caught Shad in his grip, yelling, I catch you now, I catch you now.

  He poked the desk with a fat finger. “You know is sixty police dead in Jamaica since 2002? This job is not a joke, not no cops and robbers we playing. Is criminals we have out there, mistah! You think we want to run around checking on some woman who don’t come into the bar anymore?”<
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  “She disappear, nobody know where she gone.”

  “Then how come the people she was staying with don’t come in? How come her father don’t call us? How come the British diplomat people don’t tell us to look for her?”

  Shad rose to his feet. “I just saying that things looking suspicious—”

  “You know what the word mean, though? All you doing is looking at detective show on television and you trying to play detective, saying things looking suspicious. Just leave the investigating to us, you hear me, boy!”

  Feeling like a ten-year-old who’d just wrested himself out of a bully’s hands, Shad galloped down the stone steps of the police station, reminding himself to tell Beth not to invite Neville to the wedding. It was one thing to have his idiot cousin suggest that he had a thing going on with the woman, but it was another to talk down to him in front of two green corporals. They were probably laughing at him right now.

  The Jeep didn’t cooperate either. It started bucking near Boston Beach, hiccupping like it was going to shut off at any minute. A mechanic in the gas station told him he had water in the gas tank, and it took another hour to drain the tank and two thousand Jamaican dollars from his wallet. By the time he got back to Largo, he was in no mood to deal with anyone, much less the seamstress waiting for him in the parking lot, her eyes bright with news.

  “You hear from Danny?” Janet greeted him as soon as he stepped out of the Jeep. She was wearing shorts and gold sandals, their last meeting on her porch apparently forgotten.

  “The phone not working since Saturday. They coming to fix it today.”

  She patted the shiny, brown curls cascading to her shoulders. “He coming back.”

  Shad slammed the car door. “What you telling me?”

  “Danny coming on Wednesday, day after tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “He taking me to the American embassy in Kingston to get a visitor’s visa.”