Tell No-One About This

by Jacob Ross

  Missa Jacko was in the middle of the group, his thin arms flailing the morning air above his head. Perhaps they had spotted another octopus down there?

  ‘Some thief-an-criminal gone off and take mih fishpot and all the fish that was in it. I goin to murder the dog. I goin to search every house-an-garden. I goin to inspect every latrine in the area. I goin to scrutinise every fishpot in the sea and no matter how much paint dem paint to change it, I goin to find mih property. Is only a stinkin thief could thief de fishpot dat I buy de other day. It was full of fish, I sure o that, else why de hell dey thief it? Eh? I want back all mih fish in mih fishpot. Who de hell dey tink dem is, eh? Who dem tink I is!’

  Sienna’s arrival turned the man’s rum-reddened eyes on her. His hands froze in mid air, her presence presenting him with a new possibility.

  ‘You! You know anyting about my fishpot?’

  She stopped midstride, caught her breath and swallowed a sudden sting of tears. ‘Me? Me! Me tief yuh fishpot? Me! Me? I goin tell my Tanty dat you say…’

  Jacko fluttered his hands at her. ‘Tell yuh Tanty! Tell yuh Tanty… Is only ask I ask, and I ask polite. I didn say…’

  ‘I goin tell she! I goin tell she you say everybody in we family is thief an you goin search from de top o we house to below we bed, an even we latrine an…’

  ‘Jeezas, spare me.’ Jacko turned to the faces around him, his lips shaping an appeal. ‘Anybody hear me say anyting like dat? As God is me witness, anybody hear dem wuds come from me?’

  ‘Wasn’t what you say,’ Anna May cut in sourly, ‘but who is to say is not what you mean? What make you tink is not dat foreign boat down dere dat cut your fishpot rope.’

  Ten pairs of eyes turned towards ‘down there’.

  ‘Down there’ was The Silent. It was a place that yachts liked. They started arriving in November like a flock of great white birds, so tall sometimes their sail-wings seemed to scrape the sky. They would remain there for a couple of days or sometimes for a week.

  A beautiful skiff with a very tall mast was sitting in the middle of The Silent. It must have arrived late at night or in the small hours of that morning.

  ‘So!’ Anna May rolled bright, disdainful eyes at Jacko. ‘What you goin tell me now? Dat Whiteman boat never does cut no fishpot rope?’

  Everything happened quickly then. Martin, one of the younger fishermen, pulled his diving glass over his face and rushed into the water, heading for The Mouth. He began hovering around the edges like an insect at the lip of some carnivorous flower. Then his voice rang out across the water. ‘It down there! Kin hardly see it! Look like it full o fish too.’

  Sienna hit the water in a rapid running dive. The momentum carried her right through to the blue lip of The Mouth. She sucked in hard and arced her body in a tight, downward curve.

  The cold swallowed her whole and bruised her senses. She swam fast towards the dim shapes below, aware of the growing pressure in her chest and eardrums, even as she puzzled at the ease with which she was slipping down the throat of the hole. Her body was telling her what her mind already knew: water should resist. The sea never offered itself up to anyone that easily. But she kept kicking toward the bottom-darkness until she spotted the white blur that was the rope that secured the float to the fishpot. The wickerwork of the pot itself was no more than a patch of paleness somewhere further down. She focused on the rope, kicking harder as she reached for it, frustrated at the way it evaded her grasp by the circling dance it made. She milled her legs furiously, reached out and finally grasped it. Wrapping it around her wrist and ignoring the burning in her chest, she began the struggle upwards. Her efforts to fight the water’s tug, and haul the weight up at the same time, forced her towards the other side and there, suddenly, the water opened its fist and released her.

  Hands were waiting to lift her out and seat her at the back of Ragman’s little boat. There was a dizzying din of voices on the beach.

  They rowed her over and dropped her on the sand. Jacko was examining her like some creature the ocean had unexpectedly deposited in front of him. The morning had become a bright, featureless haze; she could not control her trembling.

  ‘Cold down dere,’ she chattered, gathering her clothes. ‘Real cold.’

  ‘One hundred and ninety,’ Martin said. ‘I count one hundred and ninety.’

  Anna May sketched the sign of the cross across her chest and muttered something, while the rest stared at the fishpot at Jacko’s feet.

  ‘You could’ve dead,’ Jacko muttered. Then after a pause, ‘But nobody can’t say is I who send you.’ He seemed to be addressing the thrashing mass of parrotfish and snappers.

  His words stirred something cold and bitter in Sienna. ‘Dat’s all y’have to say?’

  Jacko shrugged. ‘You didn drown.’

  ‘De fish is mine,’ she said.

  ‘Like hell.’

  Anna May chuckled, and something in that chuckle roused her son. Big and wordless as a boulder, Preeso stepped between the fishpot and the man.

  ‘Not, not even a little one for me?’

  ‘Not even,’ Sienna told him.

  Anna May did not accept the fish Sienna offered. She seemed more concerned to get off the beach, as if she’d sensed a change in the weather. Even Jacko, now that he had recovered his pot, had lost interest in the fish. Their sudden detachment had reduced her effort to nothing, and Sienna remained there facing the sea, hearing again Tan Lin’s awful words.

  That was how the two strangers met her: alone on the beach with a pile of dead fish at her feet, staring at the dark blue patch of water that had left a freezing place inside her. She had not heard them approaching. The first she knew of them was when a voice brushed against her ear. ‘Nice catch.’

  She looked up to see a woman in a sky-blue bikini smiling down on her. Her heart began to race. Perhaps it was because the woman was slim as the dolls Sienna had seen in the St. George’s store that first and only Christmas Eve she’d been to town. Dolls with skin as pale and pure as manioc starch. The woman had their pink cheeks and Lucille’s creamy-yellow hair, and her eyes were made from a patch of perfect sky. Those eyes matched exactly the little stone set in silver, fixed to a very fine chain around the woman’s neck.

  ‘I’m Sue – Sue Kramer. This is John Hedgcoe.’

  ‘Hi,’ the man said. His eyes were very different from Sookramer’s – a dark centre rimmed by a lighter colour, like the eyes of a bird, p’rhaps a seagull. He was barefooted like the woman, a bit taller and, like Miss Sookramer, everything about him was gold, even the hairs covering his limbs and stomach.

  Miss Sookramer held out a hand. Sienna stared at it, then up at the woman’s face. She could not hold those eyes so she fixed instead on the blue of the stone at her throat.

  What was her name? The woman’s voice was soft and musical. Sienna Miller? That was a nice name. Did they all have English names? In which of those houses on the hill did she live? Why did they build their homes on stilts? Did she know the names of the fish at her feet? Where did she learn to dive like that? A whole raft of questions, the answers to which generated even more questions.

  The man, who’d never taken his eyes off her, spoke only when the woman paused for breath. Sienna could not decide whether he was talking to the woman, to himself or her. ‘Nice teeth,’ he said. That was when she was in the middle of responding to one of the woman’s questions. In between another of her replies, he said, ‘Good shoulders, deep ribs’, and something else that wasn’t clear at all.

  Miss Sookramer excused herself and stooped to prise a shell from the sand. The man spoke directly to Sienna for the first time. Did she know why The Mouth behaved the way it did? Did she know that the whole ocean was like that, more or less?

  ‘Warmer water rises to the top, colder water slides below; the way water boils.’

  For some reason, he said, with a quiver of the little gold moustache, the effect was much stronger in The Mouth. Were there others, boys, who could dive l
ike her?

  ‘I’z the best,’ she answered flatly. This made the man laugh and Sienna added, ‘Everybody round here know dat.’

  The man pointed at the small white craft in the lagoon. It was a blinding silver in the morning sun. ‘That one – Cincinnati Dreams – is ours. Ever been on one before?’

  Sienna shook her head.

  ‘Wanna come over later? Susan thinks you’re nice.’

  ‘Tell us what time, we’ll come in the dinghy and get you,’ the woman offered.

  ‘I kin swim,’ she said, flashing a quick glance up at the houses.

  The man was looking out to sea, his eyes so narrowed that all she saw there was a glint. She might have told him that it was Missa Mosan’s little tray of a boat, coming in from his trip out to the reefs beyond Goat Point. She hadn’t remembered Missa Mosan when they asked her if anyone could dive better than she did. But he could not be counted, because everybody knew he’d exchanged his wife’s and children’s souls to the devil for the secrets of the deep. He was not from The Silent anyway, but from that barren place, several hills beyond, that was known as The Waterhole. She also knew that he’d borrowed the eyes of gulls, which was why he saw things from great distances, before anyone else had an idea they were there.

  ‘Well, we’d better be off,’ the man said.

  ‘See yah later,’ Sookramer said.

  They left behind a slight wind full of odours, which came off the sea and wrapped itself around her like a piece of cloth. She sniffed and grinned. She’d taught herself to pry beneath the first fresh layer of any seawind to get at the smells it always carried.

  ‘Look like you conversatin wit de sea!’ Missa Mosan was a little man with a big head and huge hands. He was smiling, as if he’d expected her to be waiting there for him.

  ‘Is true you have a thousan chilren?’ She’d asked this question hundreds of times before, but she knew that if he chose to answer her at all, it would be as if he’d heard it for the first time.

  ‘How much twelve you got in a thousan, Miss?’

  ‘A whole heap,’ she muttered, frowning. ‘Is true you use to have a hundred girlfriend?’

  That was supposed to catch him unawares, but the man grinned toothlessly. ‘What you fink?’

  She shrugged, wondering how he would react if she told him that Tan Lin said she didn know what wimmen saw in this bighead little runt of a man.

  He began tossing things from the boat onto the sand; first his machete, then the oars, followed by his fish-gun, then a crocus bag still writhing with his catch.

  ‘They pretty?’

  ‘They…?’

  ‘Children. They pretty?’

  He rested large and heavy eyes on her face. ‘You know anybody who not?’

  ‘No,’ she answered quickly.

  ‘Which make me ask meself what people who does never have one word to crack with us, what dem want with a little girl?’

  She stared at him tight-lipped, but he did not seem to be in a hurry for an answer. He stepped back and reached beneath the stern of his craft, bringing out something large and heavy, wrapped in a piece of sacking. She watched as he reached into the bag and brought out a shell – the largest she had ever seen, caked with silt and seaweed. But its mouth, now that he’d turned it toward her, snatched her breath away. She had seen a queen shell just once before, but never this close up; even then, she’d never imagined that a thing could be so beautiful.

  ‘Now dat’s pretty,’ he breathed. ‘These belong to de ocean. Her pussnal joolry. She never give dem up without a fight. Every time mih ooman have a chile, she send me off to get one, so I kin risk mih life like her. You gotta go down, down, down, an keep goin till you don’t know top from bottom. You keep goin becuz iffen you tink o de hurtin in yuh ears, iffen you tink one little second dat you can’t reach it, den you never goin to get it. You ever wonder why all de good things in life so hard to get?’

  She nodded.

  He turned the shell to face him, awed it seemed at its beauty. Then he handed it to her. Mosan was looking at her closely when she brought it to her ear. She closed her eyes to absorb its thunder – the suck and surge, the bellow and sigh – to feel the quiet stir of fear and pleasure in her gut.

  Sienna opened her eyes and nodded. What he saw on her face must have satisfied him because he showed her all his gums.

  ‘Like I say, nice tings don’t come easy.’

  He gathered his tackle and placed them in his big canvas bag. With a toss of his head, he muttered, ‘Watch yerself, girl! Some people don’t smile to smile; some-a-dem smile to bite.’

  Mosan’s words did not prevent her from swimming over to the boat that evening. Her uneasiness had washed off the moment she slipped into the water, even though it was the first time she had ever swum in the lagoon.

  Sookramer and the man had drawn the boat closer to the mangroves, so that if people had looked down from the houses on the hill they would not have seen her being lifted aboard by her new friends. There was something nice about the secretiveness of it all – the way everything was understood without being talked about.

  There was still a lot of light left in the sky, and the beach had become a burning strip of silver. The woman turned to stare open-mouthed. ‘Come,’ she said, as if she were dragging herself out of a dream, ‘I’ll show you around.’

  But it was the man who took her around, explaining the difference between cutter rigs, gaff rigs and Bermudan rigs and why their boat was a Vancouver and not a Westerly or an Armagnac. All Sienna remembered was that everything in their boat was tiny and perfect. There was a bed, a stove standing beside a shiny sink, and what looked like a small fridge and toilet.

  The woman gave her something to eat called pasta, a can of Coca-Cola, two lollipops – Chupa-Chups whose wrapping she was going to keep, a big square of chocolate covered in gold paper and a packet of chewing gum.

  They told her about places with pretty names like Albuquerque, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Ohio. They said they liked the way she talked, that she looked very strong for her age, that she had the clearest eyes they’d ever seen. Sookramer had even fingered her hair and marvelled at its softness. She, in turn, had been allowed to touch the woman’s and – although she did not show it – was surprised that it was not as soft as it appeared.

  Missa Jonko took an apple, large as a fist and red like a ripe tomato, which he began peeling with a big knife. He appeared not to be watching her, but she knew he was. In her turn, she pretended not to observe him. It was with something like mild shock that she saw him, with a flash of the wrist, drive the knife into the fruit and toss it in the water. ‘Fetch it and its yours,’ he grinned.

  She leapt after it and surfaced a few moments later with the impaled fruit.

  ‘Great!’ He brought his palms together thunderously. ‘Now you got an apple.’ Turning to Miss Sookramer, he said, ‘I told you she’s got talent.’ And to prove that he was right, he held up a silver coin and threw it a few yards beyond her.

  She did not manage to retrieve it, or the others that he flung so casually overboard. When she surfaced, her face creased with disappointment, she saw that the man was smiling.

  ‘The water flows that way,’ he said, his hand sweeping in the general direction of where the lagoon opened out into the bay and then the world. ‘You can’t feel it but it flows. Always start a little way further up from where you want to go. Come tomorrow.’

  ‘About this time,’ the woman cut in gently, her eyes turned up at the houses on the hill.

  ‘Yep! and I’ll teach you how to dive anywhere, for anything. I’m gonna make you famous. You know why? Because Susan and I, we think you’re special.’

  She realised the man meant what he said as soon as she swam over the following day, because he had a can of coins on deck. Again, they’d drawn the boat closer to the mangroves.

  ‘Y’know what’s great about this game?’ Missa Jonko laughed. ‘I throw em, you git em, you keep em. Remember what I told you yester
day about starting further up? Here we go-oh!’

  That was how, in the evenings that followed, she learnt to anticipate the dizzy spiralling of dimes, the direct plunge of large glass marbles with wondrously foliated irises, the slant of paper knives and nails, the somersault of tiny silver saucers, the twirl of metal rulers, and whatever else the man decided to throw for her. Missa Jonko never seemed to run out of pretty things. It was as if he’d conjured these bright objects from his mind to do his bidding in the water.

  The little cave she’d dug under the tuft of cus-cus grass below her cedar tree above The Silent became a bulging, glittering nest. It held three penknives with the word ‘Kiwi’ written in silver; a fingernail clip that was also a can-opener; a tiny brass box with engravings of naked people that looked curiously flat against the metal; a silver ring with the head of a lion on the top and, most treasured of them all, a round copper case full now with dozens of what the man called half-dollars, and which had been the most difficult to retrieve because he had ordered her to wait until he counted fifteen before she went after them.

  Her days assumed the glitter of these objects. Bright days when she avoided the people who used the beach in the evenings. She developed a protective sheen around herself which guarded her from their stares, their silences, their words. She’d done this after Anna May had spoken to her. It was after her fourth visit to the boat. The woman had crooked a finger at her and Sienna had approached cautiously, since there was no mistaking the tightness in Anna May’s manner, which meant that what she was about to say was going to be hurtful.