Tell No-One About This

by Jacob Ross

  He steps out the door into the sizzling afternoon. Simeon’s raised voice catches him somewhere between his shoulder blades. He ambles to the jetty, throws his legs over the water, and lets the young man’s laughter cut through him.

  It is early evening and a skimming wind is churning the waters of the channel. From the window of his mother’s house Amos watches the dolphins carouse and feed, the dark arches of their backs stitching the surface in swift arabesques. In a few days even the dolphins will avoid these waters.

  Daphne is coming up the path; at the sight of her he’s already smiling. He enjoys sitting with the schoolgirl, unknotting the problems of calculus and physics she brings him. She’s so fastthinking, so bright, sometimes he thinks he can see the sparks in her enormous, dark-brown eyes.

  She often lingers after his lesson, wanting to know the part of himself he does not speak about. He tells her the same thing every time: it is enough that he’s back in his mother’s house, swapped his shoes for sandals and allowed the salt of the sea and time to locks his hair. America was a careless time and he’s never going back.

  Watching the young girl climb the hill, the white school ribbons bouncing on her head, Amos welcomes the spread of warmth he feels. This girlchile is whole. She knows his shame but does not judge him; does not advertise her body like other lil’ girls her age. Her body is something she lives in, but all her life is in her head.

  Daphne drops herself on the little wooden bench he lays out for her in the yard and scatters her books at her feet.

  ‘No hello from you today?’

  ‘The length of a hypotenuse – how you work that out again?’

  He frowns at her abruptness. ‘Forgot the formula?’ He takes her exercise book and draws a right-angled triangle freehand. Her shoulders are still, her eyes following his fingers on the paper as he explains the theorem, but her hands are busy wrapping themselves around each other.

  ‘What’s happening, Half-Knee?’

  Daphne does not rise to the tease. ‘Tell me about America.’

  He rests the book beside his feet. ‘You don’t want to work?’

  She looks up at him through her braids. ‘I don want to stay on Kara Isle no more, Missa Amos. I wan ter go. I have ter go. I wish dat touris-girl kin take me wiv her when she leave.’

  ‘That tourist-girl not going nowhere.’ He turns his head in the direction of the headland for a moment, then forces himself to focus on the girl. ‘What’s got into you today?’

  ‘My mother say is only white-woman wiv wrinkle dat you like; is true?’

  He grins at her. ‘You sure your mammy say that?’

  The girl is silent. Amos stoops and peers at her.

  Daphne’s made a thicker curtain of her plaits. He’s never seen her like this – hugging herself, washing her hands, leaning away from him, staring at nothing in particular.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘So we wastin time. At least you kin tell me why we wastin time. You come here in a bad mood; I ask you what the problem is; you tell me nothing wrong. Then you start asking all kinda personal questions. I could live with the personal questions, but your sourness don’t make no sense to me. So tell me…’

  The child jumps to her feet and before Amos finishes, she is off.

  Amos watches the white shirt of the striding girl until the high cotton trees hide her from view.

  He looks around him, then at the house. It is the only thing he can think of that would upset her. Daphne tells him all the time she hates his place. She has bad dreams about it, and if she had the strength, she would send it on its way, down to the shingle beach.

  His mother’s house faces the wedge of land that the ocean separated from the rest of Kara Isle. Time and the waters of the channel have sheared chunks off the hill it stands on. Now the house’s sea-facing wall is sheer with the cliff, looking straight down on the stones below. The old white-cedar tree barely holds it up. Most of its roots hang over the edge.

  A knot has risen in his throat. He closes his eyes and for a while is lost in the drumming of the breakers on the northern shore. He rolls a spliff, is about to bring it to his lips and light it when he catches a glimpse of Daphne returning with the same fast stride. Amos hurries to the incline of the hill and waits.

  When she reaches him, she is struggling for breath. Her eyes are wet and rolling. She throws herself at him and it is all he can do to keep her at arms length.

  ‘What’s happening,’ he snaps. ‘What’s going on with you?’

  ‘Si…Simeon.’ She gasps the name, draws breath and pulls away from him.

  He feels his scalp stiffening. He’s looking at Daphne’s twisted face and knows already what she is about to say. ‘Tell me.’

  The child shakes her head, the plaits bouncing wild around her face. ‘He… he won’t leave me alone. Keep followin me an touchin me. Touchin me all over. He won’t leave me alone.’ Her voice rises to a shriek. Now the girl is crouching in the dust, her books scattered about her and she’s covering her face with her hands.

  Amos lowers himself beside her. He touches her shoulders. She looks up at him with wet steady eyes and he’s glad to see the fierceness in them, the quivering outrage. He also sees the fear and it congeals the blood in him. He pulls Daphne to her feet, walks to his door, lifts the long canvas bag he keeps against the frame and slings it across his shoulder.

  He stands before the girl and speaks softly. ‘I sorry. I should’ve seen this comin long time. Is always the lil ones like you that Simeon interfere with, and spoil. The ones who got no father to come after him, y’unnerstan? Pick up your books an follow me.’

  The seafront is quiet when he gets there. He slows down for Daphne; she is out of breath when she draws up beside him.

  Amos adjusts the strap of the canvas bag and walks through Venus’s door.

  Simeon’s cackle draws his gaze to the middle of the room. He is sitting with his friends. Five cans of strong-wine are sweating on the table in front of them. Their conversation is pitched low and they are jostling each other.

  Amos drops his bag. It hits the wooden floor and turns their heads.

  ‘Yow!’ He extends a stiffened a finger. ‘The child tell you to leave her alone. So you do as she say, y’unnerstan?’

  Simeon lifts his head. His cheeks spread out in a big white smile. He is tapping the side of his can and leaning his head sideways. ‘Let ‘er come and tell me that sheself.’ He prods the shoulder of the young man nearest him. ‘She got what woman got, not so?’

  Simeon chuckles at his own joke, pushes out his legs and leans back. He looks much younger than he is; wears jeans that hug his thighs; thick-soled Nikes. His shirt is open at the front; hair cropped down to his skull. A marijuana leaf patterns the right side of his spun-round cap.

  ‘You don’t unnerstand,’ Amos says. ‘I not asking you; I telling you.’

  Someone coughs – a deep, barrel-chested chuckle follows, and suddenly Simeon is on his feet, the back of the plastic chair striking the floor and bouncing. ‘You furrin-talkin-shit-pretendin-you-belong-here. Who the fuck is you to tell me what I mus’ an musn’ do.’ He rolls his shoulders. ‘An if I don’t?’

  Amos has imagined this scene before, many times, with another man somewhere on Main Island, whose face he searched for and couldn’t find in all the gatherings and parties there. Now it’s fine by him that Simeon is about to take that fella’s place. He lifts his bag, draws out his fish gun, slots in the harpoon, drags back the rubber to the furthest notch and aims it. Venus’s hand is in the freezer. She withdraws it slowly, turns around and does not move.

  ‘You didn’t unnerstand me, Simeon. I sorry about that because I going to have to kill you now.’

  Simeon’s eyes grow still and dark and watchful. There is a glaze to his face and his hands are twitching.

  ‘Tell me I lie, Simeon. Tell me I can’t do it.’ Amos tenses his finger on the trigger and he knows he’s going to do it if Simeon draws a breath to speak or lifts a hand. It is clear t
hat Simeon knows this too because the sweat has broken out on his face and neck.

  Amos has no idea how long he is standing there, the spear-gun steady on Simeon’s navel. Something in the man before him gives – a slow crumbling of his face and then his whole demeanour. Simeon is licking his lips and his eyes are straying everywhere but at Amos and the spear-gun.

  A soft hand settles on Amos’s back; then he hears his name. Daphne prods him harder and says his name again. She closes her fingers around his flesh and digs. She is repeating his name and her voice is soft and quavering. Amos shakes himself, steps back and takes her hand. It is tense and feverish in his.

  ‘Sit down.’ He brandishes the spear-gun at Simeon. The man drops into a chair, his upper body folding forward.

  Amos tilts the weapon at the ceiling and releases the tension in the rubber. He backs out with the girl into the street.

  ‘Come,’ he says, dropping an arm on Daphne’s shoulder. ‘I walk you home.’

  They stroll along the lagoon road amid the gurgling of the sea between the mangroves and the pungency of salt-soaked earth. Beneath the trees that fringe the path, red crabs crouch over their holes with pincers raised like pugilists.

  Daphne makes quick, hopping movements while sidling a glance at him from time to time. She slows and Amos slows with her. ‘You was going to do it, not so?’ Her eyes are searching his face, and Amos finds he cannot hold her gaze.

  He brings his hands up to his hair and brushes it. ‘Dunno, Daphne. Maybe…’

  ‘Becuz… becuz of me?’

  He adjusts his bag. He does not want to lie to her. ‘Nuh, becuz of me. I… erm…’ Amos halts on the words, not sure he wants to take this girlchile so far into himself and tell her of the pleasure he got from diminishing Simeon; not sure he wants her to know how easy it would have been to kill him, and how impossible it became the moment he felt her hand on him.

  ‘Your life belong to you,’ he tells her. ‘Nobody else must own it.’

  Daphne pushes herself ahead, stops in the middle of the path and swings around to face him. She is struggling with something. He sees it in her tightened brows and the working of her lips.

  ‘Which is worse, Missa Amos,’ she says. ‘You takin Simeon’ life or Simeon ownin mine?’

  ‘Same thing,’ he says. ‘Each is a kind of death.’

  He watches Daphne take in his words, her eyes focused on some far point beyond his head. She chuckles and shakes her plaits. Girlchile, he thinks, throwing a sideways glance at her and smiling. Always fretting over something, always wanting clarity.

  ‘My mother say you got so much brains, it make you crazy. That true?’

  ‘You sure your mother say that?’

  Daphne grins, rolls her eyes and flicks a foot at him.

  Amos feigns a lunge at her. She swings around, trots ahead, laughing – laughing as if she can’t help it. Her girl-voice is pitched high and bright and lovely. For the first time in a long time, Amos feels something like joy bubbling out of him.

  In his mother’s house above the stone beach, Amos sometimes feels the slow unfolding terror of loneliness. Then, the frenzy of the waters below threaten to rise up and suck him down. Segments of his life return in a sudden backwash and leave him feverish and stranded on his mother’s bed. He sees himself standing on the jetty with his mother and his sister, his suitcase already loaded on the boat that will take him to the airport on Main Island, then on to Florida. It is a dazzling mid-afternoon Sunday. His mother is in her church clothes, shielding her eyes with her hands and looking up at him. The pride is there but it is quiet and his sister, Lillian, has an arm around her shoulder. Neither speaks – the understanding is there in what they do not say. He, Amos, is their investment. The future of his sister – older by a year and brighter – is the sacrifice his mother made for him. Lillian is holding onto him with the other hand, not wanting to let go. Her face is beautiful and open. She has fine dark skin and a smile he’d kill for. In the force of his sister’s grip, Amos understands that she does not share their mother’s faith.

  A person can get lost in America. New York is light and speed and dizziness. Time is not the same there. Time is a sprinter. You either keep up or get crushed. Good intentions die quick deaths amid all that haste and brightness – which push thoughts of home so far behind, you forget you ever had one. If the past could be reconfigured and rebooted like the computers he used to work on there, he would do it now. He would give his life to change things. During his first few months back, he repeated this to anyone – even those who did not want to listen.

  He leaves the house and walks to Astra’s place. Astra has no interest in men, she tells him, but she gets tired of women’s voices. Sometimes she needs a man to break ‘the other silence’, and this makes sense to him. If he meets her on the seafront, she catches his eye with a movement of the head or a finger curled against an ear.

  Astra cooks for him and watches him eat. She seats him on her chair beside the window and massages his shoulders the way a second attends a boxer between rounds. He senses her flow of thoughts by the pauses of her hand and the small breaks in her breathing. Her fingers soon forget themselves and slip beneath his clothing in casual insinuating ways. He believes that she is more interested in these intimacies of touch than in having him inside her; he measures his need by how far he allows her hands to go. Tonight he does not eat her food.

  ‘My sister, Lillian,’ he says.

  Astra’s fingers stop. ‘You sure you want to talk ‘bout Lillian?’ Her voice, which rarely rises above a whisper, lilts with irritation.

  He turns around and looks into her face. It is a mask he cannot read. Astra is still as mysterious to him as she was that first afternoon she fell in step with him on the seafront and let slip from the side of her mouth that she wanted him.

  Astra pulls the window close. Now the floor becomes a faint latticework of moonlight seeping through the board walls. A heavy breath escapes her. ‘You done ask me everything I know, and I tell you everything I know. What more you want?’ Her hands are rough on his nipple. ‘Your sister got crazy over a man from Main Island. Got ‘er belly big for ‘im. He leave ‘er pregnant wid the chile. He thief the lil bit ov money that she and your mother had and disappear.’

  Amos leans back and closes his eyes.

  ‘Lillian not the only woman find ‘erself with child and dunno what to do. You say you never got no letter. People say you shouldn need to get no letter to help yuh fam’ly. But like I keep tellin you, Amos, you didn kill yuh sister. She de one decide to throw sheself in that bad-water over dere. Nobody didn know she carryin all dat grief. Nobody didn know she was goin to do it. That’s what you want to hear? That…’

  Amos leaves the chair and moves towards the door. Astra places herself in front of him.

  ‘I don’ want you to go right now, Amos. I don’. I don’. What bring this on? What happm to you so sudden? Eh? What make you go back and dig up all dem things?’ Her hand tenses on his chest; he feels her breath on his face.

  He lies with Astra in the tight space of her bedroom, the window open once again to the night. Her dark impassive eyes are roaming his face. In the lamplight there is a shifting lustre to them, like moonlight dappling dark-water. Close to morning she will be restless with his presence. He will creep out on soft feet and – now there is a moon – he will take the road to Bowman’s Rise. He will sit in the wind up there, roll a couple of joints and allow himself the sensation of rising outside of the world and drifting unmoored from it.

  Tonight though, Astra’s thrown a leg across his stomach. The prickliness he is accustomed to is replaced by something else. She can’t abide this new resistance of his body to her hands. She wants him to abandon the house his mother died in, return to America and make something of the life he walked away from. Her softvoiced cajoling beats against his silence and the night outside until she exhausts herself and falls asleep against his shoulder.

  She lets him go late morning. Amos follo
ws the stony shoreline until the northern cliffs rear up in front of him. It is late October; the swollen Atlantic has already drowned the rest of the low-lying islands further east. They will surface again in June, but now the stone beaches on the windward coast are strewn with the casualties of mid-ocean disasters. On his way up, he prods the remains of a white shark, the gelatinous mass of a beached octopus, the head of a blue marlin stripped of its flesh – the sockets of its eyes like twin entrances to the cavern of its skull. He tosses back the giant reddish-brown sea worms dumped like deflated balloons onto the pebbles. Those sea-worms tell him that the disturbance is deep down on the ocean floor.

  The trouble is on the surface, too. Where he comes to a halt, the limestone precipice shudders with breakers destroying themselves against it. The westerly winds that snatch at his clothing leave his locksed hair rough with salt. He is glad he was not there this morning to watch the white girl throw herself into the channel. He wonders if she’s made it; imagines her last ride down to the churning cross-tides and feels nothing.

  He takes the hill to his house in long, fast strides and halts at the top to catch his breath.

  He sees her sitting on the stone in front of his door with her back towards him. She’s tied her head with a red bandanna. Her bale of hair is loosely held together by a multicoloured string. She’s taking in his house and his shaded patch of ganja.

  She hears his footsteps, turns, moves her lips as if to speak, then quickly fumbles with her bag.

  ‘Yes?’

  She holds up a cellphone. ‘Can you fix this?’ A soft-voiced, husky drawl.

  Up close, she is not as pale as he thought. Amos is staring at the flesh of her bent elbow. The girl flashes a look at his face, then drops her arm. She tosses back her head and fixes him with a wide-eyed, limpid gaze.

  ‘Delna at the guest house said you fix things?’ She fidgets with the phone.

  ‘What’s it not doing?’ Amos takes it from her hand.