by Jacob Ross
‘What you doin on dem people boat? Eh? You know what you playin with? Eh? You dunno is trouble dem people does bring? I wouldn let my Preeso spend five minutes on dat boat. But little girl like you, you across deh all evenin, every day. What yuh Tanty sayin bout all o dat? Eh? Is why I never like dat ooman. She too damn careless. If is somewhere you want to come when evenin come, come to my house. You kin help me do the washin up. You kin sweep mih yard. A little girl like you have good use. I know you strong. I does watch you. But dat boat an dem people! Is warn I warnin you.’ And with that she had walked off.
That was why she would no longer see the stares, hear the words or heed anybody’s crooked finger anymore.
If she didn’t know better, she might have believed that the man had overheard everything that Anna May told her, because from that day his smiles were replaced by a curtness that seemed more natural to him and which she did not mind, because this persistent drill, this daily bidding to slip beneath the shadowy skirts of the lagoon, to retrieve and keep those pretty things had also brought an odd sobriety in her.
Now she did the things Tan Lin asked without complaining, and Cedric’s teasing no longer triggered peppery outbursts. These days, he complained that she ignored him.
If Tan Lin had heard about or noticed her evening disappearances, she was saying nothing, although one night, believing she was asleep, her aunt had brought the lamp down over her and moved it along her body, the way a fisherman would check a craft for dents or weakened seams. Then with a smack of her lips she’d straightened up and left the room.
Sienna had already rehearsed her response, just in case Tan Lin asked. She would say that Missa Jonko was teaching her to dive so that a man in America called Missa Olympics could judge her as the greatest in the world. The presents she would get for that would be made from proper gold. But it meant a lot of practise. It meant diving deeper than anyone had gone before. It meant learning to place a hook around a ring on the box that Jonko had lowered to the bottom of The Silent. It meant understanding everything the man taught her the very first time, because he did not like to repeat himself.
He had her dive until the sky drained of light and the water became too dark for her to see what lay below. It was only then that he allowed her to dry out on that part of the deck he called the coach roof, while she answered Miss Sookramer’s questions.
At first, the woman’s gestures and expressions had been confusing, like some new road whose twists and turns she could not anticipate. She would take in the broad things: the woman’s show of teeth that meant a smile, the laugh that indicated ease, and of course the constant kindness in her voice. But there was also the hurt she sensed behind the woman’s calm, whenever the man’s impatience turned on her. Sookramer liked to laugh, though, and it was this that allowed Sienna to get past the odd way she sometimes said things.
A few days before, in the middle of a laugh, their eyes had met; a small silence descended upon them and they knew they had become friends.
‘Are you coming tomorrow?’
It was Sookramer’s way of telling her to leave. It was what she always said before lowering her voice and bringing a hand up to her mouth. ‘Can you bring me something green? Some leaves or flowers – anything, please?’
Sienna would make her way to the lip of the precipice above The Silent to observe the night creep in from the sea. She would watch the muted cabin lights come on. If it was one of those evenings when the air was very still, their voices would drift up to her. She would stay there until tiredness or the night chill drove them below deck. The yellow lanterns would go out and it would be dark down there, and very, very lonely.
It was their eleventh evening in The Silent and even Anna May seemed less concerned about her visits to the boat. Something else was bothering her. No one had ever known a yacht to remain so long there.
What bothered Sienna was that Missa Jonko had ceased to comment on her diving – it was days since he’d mentioned competing for Missa Olympics.
That evening, she’d slipped into the water and, after hooking up the rope to the ring on the box he’d lowered to the floor of the lagoon, he’d raised his arm, shouted something and sent what looked like a great silver plate skidding across the water. It was no more than a disappearing dazzle by the time she responded. She moved quickly but she could not keep up with the object’s ghostlike plunge. She followed it though, even when she noticed a difference in the way the water felt, even when the cold began to curl itself around her and, like a giant living muscle, the ocean began to shrug her back. It was an odd sensation and she wasn’t prepared for it. Nor was she prepared for the fright that flooded her senses.
She headed upwards, surfacing explosively, choked and mystified because for some reason the lagoon had lost its bottom. The strangeness did not stop there, for when she’d popped her head above the water she thought she’d heard the woman shouting, but when she blinked the water from her eyes, Sookramer was sitting at the front of the boat as relaxed as ever.
‘I didn, I couldn,’ she spluttered.
‘Fergeddit,’ Jonko laughed. ‘Just an ashtray, that’s all.’
‘It didn have no bottom down dere… it.’
‘Aww, c’maan, kiddy. I admit it. I’ve been pushing you. Everybody gits tired. Tell you what, Susie’s gonna make you some of that custard stuff you like and we’ll fergeddit for the day. Okay, Susie? Give her whatever she wants; she’s earned it.’
Back on the beach, it was too early to go home. She was glad to see Jacko struggling under the weight of a basketful of coralfish.
‘How come De Silent have bottom one minute, an next minute it don’t have none, Missa Jacko?’
The man turned his head as much as the basket would allow him. Perhaps he had not forgiven her for keeping all his fish that last time, or the weight of the basket had put him in a bad mood, but his mouth twisted itself around an obscenity before he rumbled, ‘Where’s your manners! Where you come from! What you talkin to me for! Go home, y’hear me? Go home an keep yuh broad-mout’ little black backside quiet. It have more tings in dat water dan nobody round here know anything bout. GO!’
She waited the anger out. ‘Tell me,’ she entreated.
‘Leave me, girl. Is your funeral you askin for!’
She decided to swim back to Jonko’s boat. She hadn’t worked out exactly how she would ask. Maybe the same the way she had asked Jacko, but not forgetting her manners this time.
The ladder was still down and she clambered onto the craft, uncomfortably aware that she had never boarded without their invitation. Sookramer’s cries froze her. They must have heard her because there came a tumbling from below, then abrupt silence.
Jonko emerged, grinning. The sea gull’s eyes were narrowed down and there was a frown above the smile. ‘Forgot something?
She shook her head, licked her lips to begin the question, but he cut in pleasantly: ‘Actually, I’m glad you came back. Got something for you.’ He went below, but soon returned. ‘This – this is for you.’
It was a pair of yellow flippers. New. And by the look of them, her size.
‘Nice, huh? They’re yours, but you’ll have to leave them here. Of course, you’ll keep them when we leave.’
‘Leave?’ She stared into his face, then away to the water.
‘Didn’t Susan tell you? Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Okay?’
He pointed at the flippers. ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you how to use them. See yah.’
She clattered down the ladder so that they could hear her leave.
Jacko had not answered her question out of rage; Jonko for some reason she could not understand. She had no doubt that Sookramer would have told her – Sookramer whose scream she now carried in her head, whose blue-sad stare resembled those of the women of The Silent – only theirs were darker and seemed fixed on things further away. Sookramer, on whose arms and back and legs were those long, red marks she’d said the sun had burned there.
She swam fast in
the sleek and noiseless sideways manner that the man had taught her. She headed for The Mouth. There, she allowed its pull to take hold of her, forcing herself to drift with it until she felt the sucking cold. Then with a violent flash of limbs, a sudden twist of rage, she pulled herself loose from its grip and headed for the beach.
From there, she stared at the little yacht, framed against the dark embrace of mangrove. Everything was quiet; even the gulls seemed to have vacated the sky. Silvery ribbons of clouds hung where the sky curved down and melted into the water. She felt like crying, but was snapped out of it when she heard the engine of Jonko’s dinghy.
She watched it cut a frothing path along the edges of the lagoon. Soon it was heading out of the bay towards the grey smudge that was Krill Island, and in no time it was a small dot on the darkening heave beyond.
She heard her name then, pronounced with the by-now familiar drawl, which she used to find so pleasing. Sookramer, dripping and barefooted, was making her way over the stones which served as a jetty for boats and a place where the children caught whelks, and harassed conga eels. She walked with the daintiness of one of those speckled long-legged birds that visited the lagoon during the Easter months. Sienna did not look up. The woman lowered herself beside her. There was an odour about her – a mild freshness – which Sienna could never decide whether she liked.
‘I couldn’t come up to see you, Sienna. Not the state I was in. Sorry. Hedgehog’s gone over to one of your little islands. Left something out there.’ She stretched out her feet and examined them. They were the colour of one of Tan Lin’s loaves. The toes were long and pink like earthworms.
‘What’s it like up there? Where you live.’
‘Dunno. We live up dere. That’s all.’
The woman laughed. ‘You make it sound like a stroll on the beach.’ Still smiling, she wriggled her toes, pulled her feet in and began picking at the nails. They were painted a silvery blue. She turned her eyes on Sienna, her forehead pleated in a tiny frown. ‘I watch your shapes sometimes, moving against those fires in what I suppose is your front garden?’
Sienna, pretending to be fascinated by what the woman’s hands were doing, did not respond.
Sookramer flung her hair back and released a long, hissing jet of air. ‘Well, there is something terribly warm and close and unconnected about it. A bit like a dream, I suppose. Only you – you make it real. Those fires, is that what you cook on?’
‘No,’ she muttered. ‘We just like fire.’
‘How do you live? No, I don’t mean that – well not like that. What makes your people laugh? How do they love?’ She paused over that, seemed very worried about something, then she added, smiling, ‘I’ve heard it said that different people love differently, although John is one of those who doesn’t believe that people can love at all.’ She began laughing, the way cats mew – a soft, highpitched sound. ‘What frightens you, Sienna? I mean…’ The blue eyes had gone darker, the lips tighter and somehow thinner. Sookramer brought her hands to her face and stared with pleated forehead towards Cincinnati Dreams. ‘I don’t want to waste this chance.’
‘You didn tell me y’all leaving.’ Sienna spoke as if it had never occurred to her before. It hadn’t. Not really. Not until Jonko had said it. These people were like something she had wished for and had woken up one morning to find on the beach. Like a present. Presents did not go away. Presents were things you kept.
Sookramer pushed her hair back from her face and turned to face her. Her eyes had gone a depthless amethyst. She wasn’t smiling now. ‘We have to go. There’s something he left back in St. Vincent. He thought he wouldn’t need it, but he has to come back. He must.’
‘You coming back with him?’
It seemed an eternity before she answered. ‘Only if I, er, if I have to. If I have to protect you from him. He’ll come back and he’ll call you. He’ll offer you more things and you’ll come and do what he asks because, at the moment, that’s what you want to do more than anything. He knows that. What he doesn’t know is why. I’m not sure I know why either, but I suspect that it hasn’t got a lot to do with us. Not all of it. That makes sense?’
‘Lil bit,’ Sienna mumbled. She fixed her eyes on the stone at the base of her throat. ‘He does beat you up.’
The woman sucked in her lower lip and stared across the water. Sienna could hear her breathing, soft like the way she spoke, like the way she walked and touched and laughed. Like she had imagined Lucille, alive and whole.
‘Don’t you have a single idea of what this might be all about?’ The woman swung round to face her. Sienna felt mildly chastised. She shifted her gaze to the red crabs that had surfaced on the sand, their yellow eyes like small revolving flames above their heads.
Sookramer was about to tell her bad things. Things she didn’t want to hear. Everybody was like that. People started off by saying nice things and then as soon as a pusson began believing them, they turned around and spoilt it.
Maybe all Sookramer and Jonko had told her – how good she was at diving, how nice they thought her teeth, how quickly she’d learnt the things they’d shown her – maybe none of that had been true.
‘He does beat you up,’ she repeated.
‘We fight – yes, more and more now – over you.’
Sienna’s eyes widened.
‘Look. You must not come back. You must stay away, d’you hear me?’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s wrong. Because we’re strangers. Because you don’t know us. Because it’s… it’s not a place for you.’
‘Why?’ Suddenly the hot-eyed clenching, the sudden fizz of irritation, which had never been necessary with these strangers, began to rise and clog her throat.
Sookramer’s face and neck had reddened and Sienna thought she was about to cry
‘Because I – I do not want you to.’
‘Missa Jonko want me to!’ She was halfway to her feet when the woman’s hand closed on her wrist with shocking strength. ‘Sit down and listen to me! I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to save your goddamn life! This!’ Her fingers traced a large, furious circle on the sand. ‘This is your lagoon. How d’you call it? Never mind. This – can you guess what this is?’
Sienna squinted at the shape. ‘The boat…’
‘Right.’ Sookramer looked up briefly at the sea. ‘Here! This is where he’s had you diving.’ She made a small circle near the boat. ‘Have you noticed that its getting deeper all the time, that now you’re almost doubling the depth you began with?’
The girl nodded.
‘That’s because he’s shifting that boat every time.’
‘I know.’
‘You know!’ The woman looked at her with wide, bright eyes. ‘Then I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is not about teaching you a better way to do anything. Right? I don’t need to tell you that he’s taking you closer to where he really wants you to go. Do you know where that is? Do you know what it’s like down there?’
‘Course – I been…’
‘No you don’t!’ The woman’s ferocity stunned her. With an urgent sweep of the hand, she cleared the drawing off the sand and began to draw again. She stopped abruptly and with a toss of her hair looked upwards.
‘Look up there. That tree, the one with all the flowers; d’you see that tree?’
She could have told the woman it was her tree. It stood a little way back from the edge of the cliff that dropped abruptly down to the lagoon. She could even tell the woman the way the roots curled out of the soil like a tangle of brown eels and the secret hollow she had dug there for her things.
‘Now imagine the top of that tree is the surface of the water and the foot of it is the bottom. That’s where you dive to normally. Now imagine you’re swimming forward from the bottom of that tree. What happens?’
The girl looked up and then across to where Sookramer indicated. She held the woman’s gaze in terrified, tight-lipped wonderment.
‘Dat – dat’s why! I
t got another…’
Sookramer nodded grimly ‘Yes – another bottom a little way further out. That bottom where you dive to is just the top of, well, a sort of precipice.’
‘A precipice?’
The woman nodded grimly. ‘A precipice – a drop deeper than you can imagine, except it’s underwater. Well, put it this way: there are a couple of ledges, shelves – whatever you want to call them – on the way down. You couldn’t get to the last, er, bottom. It’s too deep, thank God for that. What’s lost down there will stay lost. The weight of the water would kill you. There are eight boxes down there – on the first ledge – with rings on them. The sonuvabitch who dropped them there just dropped them in the wrong place.’
The girl held her breath. She remembered Mosan’s words and the evening talks amongst the adults about boats that dropped crates of gin-an-whisky along the edges of Krill island for other boats that would haul them up at night.
In fact, Missa Jacko and his friends had gone one low-tide night and retrieved a dozen bottles for themselves. But never in their lagoon.
‘Gin-an-whisky?’
‘You’re so goddamn naive, you make me want to cry. In a few places, less than a hundred miles from here, some things are worth a lot of money. More money than you people here will ever earn from selling your bananas. There’s a little canvas bag down there weighted with lead. He didn’t tell me it was there at first, and when he did last night he wouldn’t tell me what’s in it. Money, shit, ice – I don’t know, I don’t care. But he wants it more than all the rest. Enough to think your life is worth it. It’s on the second ledge. After you place that hook around those other boxes, he’ll send you down there last. I know why he’s gone this evening – the sonuvabitch. He’s gone for grease. Do I need to tell you why?’
The girl stared blankly at the blue stone.
‘For the cold. At least you know that much. And then there is the pressure. You won’t feel it straight away. We’ll both be gone by then. But the cold and the weight of the water will hurt you. That…’ She waved tiredly at the sea, ‘That’s nothing. Down there it’s a very different ocean.’