Tell No-One About This

by Jacob Ross

  She would watch them come and go till well past midnight, or till the beast awakened in Daniel’s veins and she had to attend to him.

  At first her interest in Teestone was no more than curiosity about the goings-on of the young. That was in the early days when she knew nothing of the powder. She had seen Daniel suck it up his nostrils a couple of times and believed him when he told her it was no different from a sweet, a new something to tantalise the young; and she thought that it would pass like those little obsessions her boy had developed from time to time, and then relinquished for his books. It didn’t seem to make him ill, and he hadn’t begun to hit her.

  Why she hadn’t thought of going to see Teestone sooner amazed her. Now, she couldn’t wait to meet the young man whom a powder had made so powerful.

  The rest of the day burnt itself out rapidly. When her boy began to stir in sleep, she straightened her dress, left her house and crossed over to Teestone’s yard.

  He came out when she called, his body blocking the doorway. She had to look up to examine his face against the darkness of the door mouth. This she did quickly before bringing her head back down. Now she watched him with her eyes upturned.

  ‘What you want, Miss Lady.’

  ‘I want to come in,’ she said.

  ‘Come in where!’ He glared down at her. ‘Come inside o my house! What you want in my house?’

  ‘Is someting,’ she lowered her voice and her eyes, afraid that he would not let her in. ‘Is someting I want to buy. I kin pay,’ she added hastily.

  ‘I tell you I sellin anyting? What you waan to buy!’ He was still fuming, but his voice, like hers, was lowered.

  ‘I waan some niceness,’ she said flatly, and lifted her eyes at him. He paused a moment, shifted his body and she slipped under his arm. Teestone pulled the door behind him.

  Now that the door was closed, he was transformed, almost another person. Relaxed, smiling, he drew a wooden stool from under the mahogany table in the middle of the room and placed it before her. Carefully, she lowered herself.

  Teestone grinned. ‘Miss Norma, what you say you want?’

  ‘I jus waan some, some of dat ting dat make my son, make my son so happy.’ She halted on the last word, made it sound like the most frightful thing on earth. But she managed a smile and that put Teestone at ease. He seated himself a few feet in front of her. He smiled wider and she noticed the gold tooth. She did not remember him having a gold tooth. He’d had bad teeth, the sort that prised his lips apart.

  His shirt, she also noticed, was of a soft material that hung on him as if it were liquid, made, no doubt, from one of those fabulous materials she had seen in pictures in Grace’s magazines, and in the large stores through whose wide glass windows you feasted your eyes but never entered.

  ‘What you offerin?’ he whispered. For a moment she did not understand him. ‘What you have?’ he repeated.

  She allowed her eyes to wander around the room before easing her fingers down her bosom and pulling out an old handkerchief. It was rolled into a knot. The curl of her fingers holding it accentuated their frailty. There was a scar at the back of her left hand, as if she had been burnt there. She unknotted the bit of cloth to reveal a ball of crumpled notes.

  ‘A thousand dollars,’ she said, and dropped it on the table. It was all she had. The gesture said so, that and her trembling hands. She was never likely to have that much again, for it had taken a lot to get it. One thousand dollars that would have gone to her boy, along with the house and the piece of land that had been in the family for as long as anyone could remember.

  Teestone did not reach for the money. He looked at her with a sudden probing suspicion, as if he were seeing her for the first time, . She was an old woman, in trouble and confused because her son was in trouble and confused. The stupid kind. The kind he despised most: those women who would do anything to please their sons, who never saw the sky because all their lives they were too busy looking down, digging and scratching the earth. It always puzzled him how people like that ever came by money. A thousand dollars? It had always been his! If she had not given it to him herself, her son would have, bit by bit. They were all coming now, these old women. When their children could no longer get to him on their own, they were the ones who came and begged for them. Norma Browne was not the first, and she would not be the last. These days he did not have to do a thing. These days, money made its way to him.

  ‘Hold on,’ he told her, opening the door behind him and disappearing into his bedroom.

  Slowly, her eyes travelled around the room.

  In the centre of a tiny table in the corner there was a framed picture of Teestone, his mother, and the man his mother had lived with, but who, she knew without a doubt, wasn’t his father – although she’d made the man believe he was. To the right of that there was another photo of a child.

  She examined the picture of the baby sitting on a straw mat, staring out at the camera with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed, bewilderment. He hadn’t grown out of that wide, wet mouth, nor indeed those eyes that seemed smaller than they really were, because of the heaviness of the lids. She replaced the picture, cautiously.

  He was rebuilding the house his mother had left him, or rather he was replacing the wood with concrete, which meant erecting blocks against the board walls outside. When they were set in cement he would knock the planks out one by one from inside. Now, even before he’d done that, the wet concrete was seeping through the boards, leaving a pale sediment that left an ugly trace of powder and tiny bits of wood on her fingers. Electrical wires ran everywhere – along the floorboards, the ceiling and the walls. The rumours she’d heard were true. Teestone was bringing electricity to his house. Or he was having that man who came in the long, black car on Fridays – the man they called The Blade – make the government do it for him. A couple of large, soft chairs lay upturned in a corner, completely covered with transparent plastic, and to the left of her there was a gaping hole through which she could see the earth below the house. Perhaps they had opened it up to replace the wooden pillars too. The smell of concrete was everywhere.

  She was still contemplating this scene of devastation when Teestone came out with a small brown bag, the type the shop sold sugar by the half pound in. He did not place it in her hand but on the mahogany table in front of them. She took it up, and for a moment she felt confident, self-possessed.

  She opened the bag carefully and dragged out the small plastic sac that was folded inside it.

  ‘S’not a lot,’ she said, shocked. ‘Not a lot for all my money.’

  Teestone laughed till the fat vein at the side of his neck stood out. She watched it throb and pulse. ‘S’what you expect? Dis, dis worth more dan it weight in gold, y’know dat? More-dan-it-weight-ingold.’ He spoke the last few words as though he’d rehearsed them till they sounded rhythmic and convincing. ‘Ask anybody.’

  ‘Didn know,’ she apologised, and then she brought it to her nose. She froze, fixing very dark, very steady eyes on him. ‘It s’pose to smell like dat? Like, uh, baby powder?’

  Her question had taken him by surprise. The slight narrowing of his eyes and the way he tried to close his mouth without really managing it, confirmed her suspicion.

  ‘It not s’pose to smell o baby powder,’ she told him quietly, a new hardness in her voice.

  Is so it smell, he was about to tell her, and ask her what de hell she know ‘bout niceness anyway, but her directness stopped him. He snatched the packet off the table and went back inside the bedroom. This time he returned sooner, dropped a different packet on the table and sat back heavily.

  Norma took it up and passed it under her nose. She could see by his expression that he wanted her to leave. He was tired, or perhaps, now that his business with her was over, he just wanted to be rid of her. But she was not finished with him yet.

  She wanted to know how she should prepare the stuff and he showed her. Her hands shook when she took the needle to examine the thin, evil thread of meta
l that slipped so easily into flesh. The first time she saw her boy use it, it had made her sick. He had taken it standing and had fallen straight back against the floorboards, his body rigid, like a tree deprived of its roots, doing nothing to break the fall. He’d cut his head badly and did not even know it, just laid there with that smile, that awful inner peace, while she turned him over and tended to his wound.

  In her hand, the metal shone like an amber thread of light against the lamp.

  ‘All of it is for de boy?’ asked Teestone, showing her his tooth.

  Some was for her son, she answered, and well, she was goin to use de rest. Was de niceness nicer if she used all of it in one go?

  No, he told her, and the gold tooth glimmered in the light. If she used more than he just showed her – at that he pulled out a pack of razor blades, extracted one, opened the packet he’d handed her and separated a small portion, working it with the same care that she used to mix medicine for her boy’s illness when he was a child. If she ever used more than that – he pointed at the tiny heap he’d separated – it would kill her.

  ‘Too much niceness does kill. Y’unnerstan?’ He laughed at his joke, lit a cigarette and leaned back against the chair. That too was new, the long cigarettes with the bit of silver at the end. In fact everything about Teestone seemed new. There was not the redness in the eyes, the dreadful tiredness that went deeper than age, the loosening of something precious and essential in the face, the damp surrender of the skin – once smooth and dark and beautiful with youth – to that terrible hunger that made her son strike out at her. Teestone looked fresh and happy and as alert as a cat. Money had made him handsome.

  ‘Could be a nice house,’ she said, looking around the room, smiling the smallest of smiles, happier now than she had been for the past twelve months.

  It was perhaps out of that odd sense of abeyance that she reached out suddenly and fixed Teestone’s collar – or she might have been prodded by a desire to get an idea of what that shiny material really felt like. Her fingers brushed the side of his neck, touching the laughing vein. The young man recoiled with a violence she thought entirely undue.

  She pretended not to notice his outrage, got up slowly and shuffled towards the door. There, she stopped and turned back.

  ‘He lef school last year,’ she told him with a quiet, neutral look. ‘My Dan jus come an tell me dat he leavin school, and I say, “You can’t. You can’t, because you always tell me dat you want to see de world, dat you’ll make me proud and build a nicer house for us when you become someting. You say you know how hard it is for me. How much I does do for you and how much I’ll always do for you.” An he laugh, like he was laughing at someting he know inside he head. He say he don’t need to go nowhere no more to see de world, because he could see it from right dere where he lie down whole day on his back below my house. He tell me what he see sometimes and I can’t make no sense of it. Cos I can’t see inside mih boy head. I can’t make no sense o people walkin over precipice an dem not dyin, o animal dat talk an laugh with you inside your head. I can’t. But he say he see them and it make im happy.

  ‘But is when de niceness get bad,’ she added softly, apologetically, ‘and I can’t do nothing and I just hear im bawl an bawl an bawl, an he start hittin me, dat I does – well I does jus tek it.

  ‘Y’know sometimes he hit me – my son? Hit me like he father used to?’ Her voice had dropped to a whisper, thick and dark and gentle. ‘I let him. I let him till he get tired an fall asleep. He don’ sleep no more like he used ter. Is like someting in he sleep, in he dreamin, beatin him up same like he do with me. All de time. Dat’s why – dat’s why I does…’

  Teestone got up. ‘You get what you want, Miss Lady. Go!’

  He’d already pushed open the door for her.

  She walked out into a close, choked night. There were some girls outside, one or two not more than fourteen years old. Their precocious eyes fell on her incredulously, before turning back to the doorway with that still and hungry gaze she’d seen so often in her son during the quiet times when the shivering stopped and she’d force-fed him, or tried to. She knew all of them. Some she’d even delivered before her hand went funny. As children, she’d kept them for their mothers when they went off to St. George’s for medicine or some necessary thing that their hillside gardens or the sea could not provide.

  At their age, life was supposed to be kinder than it would ever be again – a time of an enormous promise that never lasted long, but was part of growing up. It belonged to that age. Was part of what kept you going for the rest of your life.

  She decided not to go home. Her boy would be there now beneath the house, laid out on his back. He would remain there until she came and brought him in. If she did not feel like it, she would leave him there until some time close to morning when he would beat on her door until she let him in. Tonight he would not touch her because she had what it took to quiet him.

  And that was another thing: he would not beg anymore, or offer Teestone anything for the relief of a needle. Once she saw him beg and it had shamed her. Saw him do it yesterday and it had shamed her even more because Teestone’s refusal had brought him raging to her yard.

  She took the track that ran off from the main road, which used to take him to the school in St. George’s.

  It was a long, hard walk because the rains from the weeks before had made a drain of the mud track and she was forced to steady her progress by grabbing at the bushes at the side. Ordinarily, she would have taken a torch, but she had not planned this visit; tonight, it had suddenly seemed like common sense that she should visit Grace. It was Grace who first told her about how, when he left for school, Daniel got off the bus a mile away, and doubled back to feed his veins on Teestone’s powder. It was Grace who, without moving from her house, had found out where it came from and the nickname of the government man who visited Teestone every Friday night.

  Grace was the only one to whom she spoke these days. Grace who’d had the gentlest of husbands; whose five daughters had all gone away and sent her money every month, from England, America and Canada; who’d offered to buy her son’s uniform as a little present for winning the scholarship.

  The back of her hand was itching – a deep, insistent itch that she could not reach because it was beneath the skin. It was the white scar where the skin had been cut away and then healed very badly. Many people thought she had been born that way, but she hadn’t.

  Grace’s place was neat and small and full of colour. There were large blood-red hibiscus on her curtains and the enamelled bowls, cups, and the glasses in the cabinet had bouquets of flowers patterned all over them. Even her dress was a flower garden. God had given her eyes that shone like bits of coloured glass which, in some moods, were exactly like a cat’s. Three kerosene lamps burned in her room. Their combined brightness gave a stark, shadowless quality to the room.

  Grace settled her down and retreated to the kitchen. She returned with a bowl of soup and handed it to Norma.

  ‘Eat!’ she grunted.

  ‘I done eat already.’

  ‘Then eat again. When trouble eating people, people have to eat back! So take de food an eat!’

  The sweet smell of stewed peas and provision and salt meat almost made her faint. She hadn’t eaten and Grace knew that she was lying. She’d lost her appetite for everything.

  She placed the packet on the table and took up the bowl. Grace looked at the brown bag frankly, a question in her eyes.

  ‘How’s de boy?’ she mumbled, still staring at the paper bag.

  ‘Cost me everything. All that was left – a thousand dollars.’

  ‘What cost what?’ asked Grace.

  ‘That.’ Norma nudged the bag with the handle of the spoon.

  Grace reached for it and opened it. The powder was on her fingers when she withdrew her hand. It could have been the effect of the candlelight on her silver bracelets, but her hand seemed to tremble. Her face went dead. ‘A thousand dollars! Fo’ that?
’

  ‘What money I had left, I draw it out today.’

  ‘Jeezas Christ, you buy dat poison for your boy! You mad!’

  ‘You think so?’ The unconcern in her voice left a chill in Grace’s stomach.

  ‘Where he is?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Below the house. Sleepin. He tired.’

  ‘Still – erm hittin you?’

  Norma stopped short, the bit of meat held between her thumb and index finger. She nodded.

  ‘First the father and den the son. God bless me I don’t have no boychild. But I wish, I wish I had a boy to raise his hand and touch me! Jeezan bread, I wish that if…’ she stopped breathless, eyes flaming in the lamplight. ‘God forgive me, but I’d make dat sonuvabitch wish he never born.’

  Norma smiled, ‘Dat’s de problem. You don’t see? If he’s a sonuvabitch, dat mean I’z the bitch dat make dis son. I don’t wish he never born, but sometimes, sometimes I wish he don’t live no more. To ease him up a bit.’ She looked up apologetically.

  Grace grunted irritably. ‘You – you not goin to let him continue!’

  ‘Nuh.’ Norma licked her fingers. ‘Nuh, I goin stop him. Tonight.’

  The certitude in her voice made Grace lean closer. ‘You goin ter… Jeezas, girl. Jeezas!’

  ‘I not goin to, y’know… But like I say, I think of it sometimes – sometimes, all the time – I think of it. If y’all hear im bawlin, not to bother. Tell everybody not to bother.’ Something in her tone turned Grace’s eyes to Norma’s hand, the one that lay curled up like a bird’s claw in her lap.

  That hand alone was reason enough for everyone to bother. What kind of woman would place her hand between the cogs of a machine so that she could get the insurance to send her boy off to a high-class school in St. George’s? Inside a canemill, besides! And if she could do that to herself for him, what on God’s earth wouldn’t she do to make her sacrifice worthwhile?