Tell No-One About This

by Jacob Ross

  ‘Go easy,’ muttered Grace, taking up the bowl of unfinished food and heading for the kitchen. It was both a warning and a farewell and sensing this, Norma got up.

  ‘If you hear him,’ she started.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Grace answered without turning round. ‘Rum-ancoke is what they call it – mix with something else.’ She called out from the kitchen. ‘They take dat ting and drink down rum right after. Dat’s what make dem mad an beat up deir own flesh-anblood so bad.’

  ‘Ah know.’ Norma curled her hand around the packet. All of a sudden the room felt too bright. She lifted her bad hand above her eyes as if to shade them from the sun. She paused briefly at the doorway, made as if to say something, then changed her mind before slipping out into the night.

  Back home, she helped the boy from under the house and led him to the bedroom. He was quiet and aware of her but she knew that soon he would be shivering. She lit the lamp, undressed him and bathed him, like she used to. The way she thought she’d forgotten. And then she went back to the kitchen.

  There, she carved out a portion of the stuff exactly as she’d seen Teestone do. She knew where he kept his needle, knew what she had to do.

  She went in. Laid the small bag down beside the door. He’d already begun to shiver.

  ‘C’mon Bumpsy, take this for Mammy,’ she said, and he seemed, from somewhere deep inside, to recognise that tone; began curling his shirt ends between his fingers like he used to when he was a child, while he looked at her with a tired, helpless uncertainty.

  ‘Is for you. Tek it from Mammy,’ she urged, her voice soft and angry at the same time.

  He took the needle and she watched him unflinching, while he served himself, so hungry for the ease it offered he was almost sobbing. Then, while he recovered and began floating away from her, she reached below the bed, opened the bag and took out the length of chain and the padlocks she had bought in St. George’s. Still cooing her mummy-talk, she fastened her son against the bed.

  If you hear him bawlin, she’d told Grace – who would, come morning, pass the message on to everyone – if you hear him bawlin, tell everybody not to bother. She knew the bawling would begin soon, or some time in the morning, or perhaps the next day, and it would go on for a long, long time.

  Back in the kitchen she mixed most of what remained of the powder in the paper bag. Finished, she leaned out of her window and observed the precocious girls, the motorbikes, the occupants of the occasional car sneaking back and forth between the road and Teestone’s house.

  Soon the traffic would subside, the lamps go out and the whole world come to a pause while Teestone slept.

  It is a warm, tense night and the great, starless emptiness above her makes her think of futile distances, of the vastness of the world, her own smallness, and the place she feels she no longer has in it. Because a time does come, she thinks, when a woman can only hope for what comes after her – her children and the children that will come from them, that would pass on and on, if not her name, then her blood and perhaps a memory of her – an acknowledgment that they were alive only because she once existed, and that was what does mek life worth someting.

  Her hand is itching again. Perhaps it will rain. Her hand always itches before rain. A low wind stirs the air, shakes the trees above the houses and leaves a smell of cinnamon, swamp and charcoal over the village. As if this is a signal, she straightens up, steps out into the night. Full height, she is much taller than most people have seen her, and she has lost her shuffle as she walks across the yard.

  She remembers the hole in Teestone’s living room and avoids it. In her head, she carries a very clear picture of the house and everything in it.

  The lamp is lit in his bedroom and he is asleep, rolled over on one side and snoring softly. He is naked. One of the girls lies curled up in front of him, also naked, the young hips turned inwards, giving her a curious air of innocence. Sleep has stripped away what remains of the womanishness she wears by day and made of her a child again.

  She kneels beside Teestone and he stirs, perhaps sensing her presence.

  The jab wakes him. He erupts out of sleep, his hand clutching that laughing vein at the side of his neck, but she is strong and she keeps him and the needle there until she empties it of her thousand dollars worth of niceness. Eyes wide, Teestone stares at her. His fist closes on her wrist. It is the bad hand that he is crushing and it hurts. But she offers him a smile – beautiful and alluring – something wonderful to take with him.

  He eases back on the pillow, releasing her, and sighs the longest, most restful of all sighs, his face still incredulous, still profoundly outraged.

  The girl has not stirred from sleep, and for that Norma Browne is grateful.

  She walks out of the house, turns and spits carelessly at the dark before crossing to her yard.

  Before she goes in, she pauses, turns her face up at the sky and sniffs. She could smell the morning. But it is still dark. And the world and the birds down there are very, very quiet.

  AND THERE WERE NO FIREFLIES

  The girl saw the shape of the older woman against the window. She slipped off the bike and in a flush of pique reached over, wrapped her arms around the boy and kissed him long and deep. Her aunt would get a good view of her tight behind and more, she hoped, since she had not bothered to arrange her skirt.

  Joseph muttered something in her ear about tonight and the beach, and though he often said that, or something of the kind, when he dropped her off, she still laughed out loud, so that the woman could hear her, think that it was meant for her, and be suitably appalled.

  The bike leapt away in a faked rage – so like the way Joseph was with her, especially when he made her follow him to the beach. The sound bounced off the walls of the sleeping houses – the Kawasaki’s red brake-lights a glowing scar against the dark. She patted her hair, smoothed her butt, high-stepped beneath the single street light and blew a final kiss.

  When Mariana turned to face the door, her aunt was no longer at the window. She knew what to expect, and the smile that came so easily with her friends was replaced by a grimness in the eyes, ready for the reproach she knew was coming from her aunt.

  The woman irritated her in ways no other person could. Over the past eight months she had concluded, with the disgust of someone who had uncovered something nasty in her food, that her aunt shamed her. This was why she always asked Joseph to wait for her across the street; why she never asked him in; why she visited the houses of friends after school, but never invited them home; why, always, after the throbbing darkness of the nightclub in the south, the hip-whipping wind-downs and smoochy oozes on the dance floor, she would succumb to Joseph’s demands and linger on the beach with him.

  Martha – what kind of name was that? – was waiting for her in the cluttered living room, her thin arms hanging down her sides. The thumb of the left hand made little convulsions against the index finger, but those trembling hands were a threat that would never materialise. They had never struck her, not even as a child. Many times she’d heard Martha explain to the group of country women, who passed on Saturdays to beg for a cupful of iced water, that her sister’s – ‘God-rest-er-soul’ – offspring was not, and never would be, hers to punish.

  The girl thought of the women’s laughter and the stridency of their speech as they drew attention to their basketfuls of fish or fruit above the thundering traffic of the town. Since her immersion in Joseph’s world of parties, cars and light-skinned girls, that rawness had become painful. At times, she wished her aunt, with her high cheekbones and taut, dark skin, framed always by an old headwrap, never spoke at all.

  ‘What time you call dis, Marie?’

  ‘Don’t know, don’t care and my name is not Marie.’

  ‘Where you been with dat boy?’

  ‘My business.’

  The hands convulsed and the girl flashed her eyes at them, then at the woman’s face. She’d already trampled on every taboo in this house, but this, to stare dow
n her aunt, was the best of all her victories.

  Martha shifted her lips. ‘Dat boy.’

  ‘Like I say, is my effin business!’

  ‘He fadder’s a big-time lawyer. Same people like dat fadder ov yours who…’

  ‘So what!’

  ‘He don’t wan de likes o you. Dat boy usin you. All o dem – they usin you. Your mother…’

  ‘My mother dead.’

  ‘Marie…’

  ‘My name is not Marie.’

  The hands convulsed. ‘Mariana, you sempteen. You got your studies to study. You got all your life in front o you. An besides, you still a girl.’

  Those last words – the one thing that Martha had not allowed herself to be bullied out of – had been the last hold her aunt had on her. On the beach with Joseph, she’d worked out her answer.

  ‘I got everything a woman got.’

  If Martha was shaken by those words, she showed it only in the sudden rearranging of her head-tie. ‘Still don make you one,’ she said. ‘This red-boy goin leave you with de selfsame trouble dat dese people boy-chilren does always leave poor-people girlchile with.’

  She stilled her hands. ‘I not strong enough for you. Was not easy to admit that to meself. I didn prepare meself for de pusson you become. You change and I been prayin to God dat you not spoil for good. Is all dat love… It weaken me. But I got a cure for you. Yuh aunt Dalene will have to come.’

  The girl laughed prettily. ‘Don’t know her; she don’t know me.’ That was how Sandra, Joseph’s sister, would have said it. Making words dribble with contempt was one of Sandra’s talents – along with her pride of bearing, her slim-fingered finickiness with food, with clothes, even with the colours she painted on her nails – all talents Mariana emulated, though not without adding her own refinements. For these Joseph seemed to appreciate her all the more, not least with the way she now spoke. This had come easily since she’d learnt to imagine each word as something soft to chew slowly.

  ‘You more like her dan you fink,’ Martha told her grimly. ‘You’ll see!’ She slammed shut her bedroom door.

  The girl was not used to having their arguments end this way. The last word had always been hers. She was the one who closed her door and killed the quarrels mid-shout.

  She noticed straightaway that Martha had been in her room. The towel she’d left lying on the floor had been folded and hung up against the louvres to dry. The dresses she had flung on the bed in fits of indecisiveness were folded and stacked neatly on the pillow. Scattered strap-back shoes were now paired and laid like rows of multicoloured fishes against the wall. She lowered herself quickly to reach beneath the wardrobe until her fingers rested on the softness of the packet she had placed there a few months ago.

  She straightened up, threw her clothes off and turned to the mirror to examine the person there: the face smooth and oval, the dimples of her cheeks that Joseph liked so much. People said her eyes were catlike in the way they curved, large and lake-like in their darkness.

  Beauty was the name that people gave the way she looked. Until recently it had felt like something she did not own, until she found a way to measure it in the brazen glances of the men who passed her on the streets; in the way a pair of eyes would pick her out amongst a crowd of girls and stay focused on her face; in the way her passage through a group of boys stopped their conversation. And, of course, in the value Joseph set on it, how he’d made her careful of her skin, because any blemish there would upset him.

  She felt so utterly unlike Martha, and that other crazy aunt of hers. And she didn’t give a damn about what they said about her mother. What she knew about that woman did not amount to much: an assistant to a head nurse in the hospital, who’d fallen pregnant for the husband of the very same woman she was assisting and who, one year after having her, decided to die from something.

  If anything, it was her father who explained her. She had his hair, not quite as straight, but with an off-black bushiness whose tendency to curl she repulsed with generous swipes of Afro-Glo and Miss Unkurl. At least, mercifully, it was not at all like her aunt’s recalcitrant pepper-seed.

  She stared at her nakedness in the mirror, at the high backside, curved like a question mark, the long legs and hips that flared beneath a waist so narrow she had to take in every skirt she bought. Her eyes paused, with an anxious, questioning reluctance, at the slight rise of her stomach – the part of her that held so many numbing possibilities. She was still curious at what she saw – this body that had recently acquired, almost of its own accord, such power over Joseph and the men who, just two years ago, would not have known that she existed. Still naked, she dropped herself on the bed, reached beneath her pillow for the notepad and HB pencil and began to sketch with the same intensity she had regarded herself in the mirror.

  Sketching was something she just did. The impulse had always been there from as far back as she could remember. A few lateral flashes of the wrist, a swift smudged arc capped by half a curlicue, and there was Joseph crouched above her on the sand. Because no one could have seen her, she was no more than a slight line – the jaggedness of a sensation, the bare suggestion of a presence so faint, it was hardly there – and even less substantial than her aunt whose shape against the window she now scrubbed onto the paleness of the page with rapid, vengeful movements of the heel of her left hand.

  She worked until sweat beaded her hairline and ridged her nose. Its passage down her face onto the page did not distract her. Her wrist was tiring, but there was one last thing she had to do. She drew on what remained of the night’s rancour to imagine a form for the aunt Martha had threatened her with. This was the woman – who had never actually cared enough to show her face – she referred to privately as Magdalene the Mad – a strange and wilful sister who had fled the Kalivini lowlands to live on some godforsaken hill named Morne Riposte.

  Aunt Dalene, Martha had told her as a child, could make herself heard through storms from way up on the hillside where she lived, all the way down to Lower Old Hope, clean and clear as if she speaking directly in a pusson ear. Dalene was nourished by the violence of wind, rain and thunder, Martha boasted. She lit her fire with the lightning from the sky. But why, Mariana wanted to know, would any woman – even if she could talk across valleys and play god with lightning – choose to plant her house way up on the fringes of the forest ,above a wilderness of canes?

  She examined the damp paper, saw that she’d made the woman tall, her hair rolling from her head like rope. Barely a face. All mouth. The limbs all angles.

  Then, reminded of something, she fumbled beneath the pillow for another pencil and just below the place where she had drawn Joseph and herself, she made a final stroke. Red and strong and certain, because tonight Joseph Mayors had hurt her.

  She glared at her drawing of the demon aunt, tore the page away and crushed it in her fist. When she raised her head, the room was flushed with daylight. The town was waking up. She considered briefly pulling the curtains close then decided against it. She drew the sheet up to her chin, shut her eyes and slept.

  Voices pulled her out of sleep, but when she raised her head, the house was filled with silence. Even the traffic of the town had settled down to a sullen deep-throated hum in the midday heat.

  Her eyes travelled around the room and took in the things she had collected and pasted on the walls: the covers of two LPs, one by Third World – a Noah’s Ark of rainbow-coloured creatures in a forest too perfect to be real, the other of a gleaming, long-necked girl standing on blue lettering that simply stated, ‘Bacharach’. There was also a jagged-edged strip of colour snatched in a moment of reckless desire from an encyclopedia in the public library, which reproduced part of an early painting by Cezanne.

  Leaves too. She had collected and pinned an almond’s for the improbability of its redness; an angel leaf for its lacelike delicacy and a periwinkle whose blackened head was like an awkward full stop beneath the rows of sketches she had done.

  She felt a sensation
of heat, and the raising of the hairs on her skin. She realised that there was a presence in the room, a woman by the door.

  She snatched the flimsy cotton sheet over her nakedness and pulled herself upright, a small cry escaping her.

  ‘Dalene.’ The voice arrived, it seemed, from a long way off.

  ‘Dalene,’ the woman said again, raising her voice as if she was not sure the girl had heard her. Eyes travelled the length of the bed and settled on her face.

  ‘Wha – what you doin in my room?’ The girl’s shout was loud enough to fill the house.

  Martha entered running. She closed the door behind her, and leaned her weight against it. ‘Is yuh aunt,’ she said, as if that explained everything. ‘What all dis bawlin for?’

  It might have been the way the light from the louvres fell on Martha’s face, but the set of her jaw seemed firmer, and there was a clarity in her voice that hadn’t been there before. Martha also held her stare. ‘Dalene here, like I promise,’ she said.

  Dalene had not taken her eyes off her. She wasn’t much to look at. Another country woman with the same dark, unsettling muscularity, especially in the arms. Mariana noticed, too, the curious concentration of life they all seemed to have in their fingers – as if forever testing the texture of some invisible bit of soil.

  She was slightly taller than Martha. If there was anything that made her different, it was her carelessness with clothes: a faded, flowered cotton dress, a pair of rubber slippers – the nearest anyone could come to being barefoot, without being barefoot; and the inevitable pair of heavy silver bracelets passed down from God knows how many generations. No wonder she had fled from people into the hills.

  Dalene had once occupied her child’s story-world of trees that sang and lions that quarrelled with spiders. But there were no forests here in town. No sweet-talking, fast-thinking spider that tricked a murdering lion; no half-born or aborted child forever lost to the dark, searching for some woman’s womb to grow in. This aunt had long been relegated to a place of dreams and lies.