by Jacob Ross
‘Not working.’
‘Charged?’
She shrugs, scuffs the dust with her feet and tosses her head again.
Amos shades the phone with a hand and turns it on. The keys glow briefly; the screen stays blank.
‘You dropped it,’ he says. ‘On something hard.’ He points at the rubber casing. ‘Not sure I kin fix it. Depends.’
‘Are you from here?’
Her question takes him by surprise. He twists his lips, offers her a false smile. ‘Yes, I’m a native.’
He holds out the phone to her.
‘You haven’t tried,’ she says.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Will take some time. Mebbe too much time.’
‘I’ll wait,’ she says and sits back on the stone.
He goes into the house to get his tools, pauses at the window to stare out at the water. He returns and places himself on the doorstep. He is aware of her eyes on him, though she’s pretending to look elsewhere.
It is the kind of job he likes – the meticulous precision of deciphering the traces on a circuit board, the pure logic of their conjunctions.
With the innards of the machine splayed out on his thigh, Amos raises his chin at the woman. ‘You got a pin or something like one?’
She shakes her head.
‘Got to use your finger then.’ He beckons her with a cramped movement of his hand. ‘That came loose.’ He nudges the tiny strap that anchors the screen to the circuit board. ‘You got slim fingers. Push that in.’
She crouches beside him, crabs her fingers and nudges the strap into place, then leans back, the green-gold eyes avoiding his. Amos takes his time replacing the tiny screws. He switches on the handset, scrolls the screen a while, then closes his hand around the phone.
‘How you call yourself?’
She looks puzzled for a moment, then her face relaxes. ‘Oh, my name? Nancy.’
‘How long you plan to stay, Miss Nancy?’ He rises to his feet.
She shrugs. ‘Long as it takes.’
‘And how long is that?’
She shoves a hand in her pocket and pulls out some folded bills. ‘How much is it?’
‘I don’t want your money.’
He can see her tensing. Her eyes are overcast and she’s angled her shoulders away from him. He’s not angry. What he feels is colder – with harder, sharper edges. ‘What’s your name again?’
‘Nancy… Can I have the phone now?’
‘Which part of The States you from?’
‘It’s not your… Okay… Okay – LA – Los Angeles. What’s with all the questions?’
‘Because everything around here make sense, except you.’
Amos wags the handset. ‘Expensive phone. Roaming tariff. Last call you made was six days ago. Same day you got here on a stinkin cargo boat.’
She is scuffing the dust again, her head cocked sideways.
‘So! A young woman – twenty-five… thirty? She comes here to the back ov nowhere on her own – no boyfriend, no family, no friends. She look different. Big eyes – spaced wide. Lips almost like mine; big teeth – perfect white. Nice clean skin. Almost tall as me. Legs long up to her neck. High cheekbones. Hair with shine. Voice carry without no effort. A lil shoulder bag that beat up but expensive. And she swim like fish.’ Amos takes a step toward her. ‘We see girls like you on TV, except TV-girls ain’ got no needle marks running down their arms.’
She snatches at the phone. Amos raises his arm above his head.
‘We got a saying on this island: the sea got no branches to hold onto to save you, y’unnerstan? Last few mornings, I watch you jump off that cliff across there and I keep thinkin of dogs. Yuh see, when dogs catch rabies, or somebody feed them poison, they look for a place to die. Never close to home – unless they can’t help it. Now I askin you, Miss Fancy: what poison bring you here?’
He lowers the phone. She grabs it from his hand. For a moment he thinks she is going to hit him. ‘You’re not nice,’ she says. ‘You’re…’
‘I won’t kiss y’arse if that’s what you mean.’
‘Fuck you too.’ She jabs a finger at his house and then at him. ‘Look who’s talking.’
Hands on his hips, Amos watches her leave – long and gracile in her rage, brightly defined by the afternoon sun one minute, then almost wraithlike in the thick shadows of the ancient cotton-tree hedge. He goes to the drum, scoops a can of water and pours it over his head. His reflection is a wavering shadow in the disturbed water, his locks a corrugated halo. ‘Fuck you too,’ he mutters.
The rest of the day, he’s busy de-soldering capacitors and opamps from components that would never work. Then he goes diving near the seafront until he spears enough fish to keep Daphne’s mother and her children for a week.
He leaves the water when the wind picks up, walks in a slanting drizzle that buffs the rooftops and mutes the voices in the houses further back. Venus serves him quickly with a real smile. The room is full. It falls quiet.
Amos eats with an elbow on the counter, breaking the bread in small portions and popping the pieces into his mouth. Finished, he belches loudly and walks out in the rain.
Astra is standing in the doorway of Hot Head Hair Salon, a plastic bag over her head. She waves with her free hand, waves again and that surprises him. He takes his time approaching her.
Just then the white girl emerges from the side-road that leads to Delna’s Guest House. Amos pretends he does not see her. Nancy does no such thing. She glares at him directly, turning her head as she passes, then lengthens her stride.
Astra has straightened her hair and is wearing silver earrings. She watches the girl walk up the street. ‘You got business with she?’
‘Nuh.’
‘She walk past you like…’ Astra fondles an earring and shakes her head.
She throws another glance up the street. ‘One thing I know for sure, dat lil bitch is trouble. Delna say she bawlin every night, like she meet a thousan demon in ‘er sleep. Stay ‘way from her, y’unnerstan?’
‘You never make no claim on me before, Astra.’
‘I not makin no claim on you now.’ She bares her teeth at him. ‘I jus want to know.’
‘Nothing to know.’
She cocks an eye at him. ‘So, I see you later?’
‘Got things to do.’
She blinks, pulls her brows together. ‘You tellin me no?’
‘I tellin you I got things to do.’ He shakes the bag of fish in her face and takes the lagoon road.
Amos wants to believe that it is the drumming of the breakers that woke him this morning. The rain that started the day before hasn’t stopped. The sky is a purple blanket torn in places by paler streaks of grey. He can barely see the outlines of the jetty down below. The tethered fishing boats along the shoreline are ghostly strips of colour in the day-gloom. He expects this of course – the hurricane season arriving at last, making its presence felt in water, wind and sky. It berthed yesterday, late evening, announcing itself by a change in the quality of light and the raised voice of the ocean. It is more guttural now, coming from some deeper place within itself. Everything that came before – the salt-heavy winds, the rising water, the slowly purpling sky – was a truce before the real thing strikes.
The water of the channel is no longer choppy; it rolls in undulations, the surface smoothed over by the force of its own flow.
The day before, the girl was a white smear amidst the falling rain. Amos knows her pattern now: the impossible dive, the angling outwards to the far side of the channel, the swing away from it with rapid arms, the swift downward sweep.
This morning he tells himself he wants her to die. He wants the relief of knowing she is no longer there; of not being dragged to his window to watch that leap. This is why he’s willed himself to stay in bed. But the grating pebbles on the beach below transfer their restlessness to him and make him irritable.
He abandons his house, strides in the grey light down to the seafront. Main Street is empty,
the houses still held in the mute arrest of sleep. Here, on his own, he remembers the silence that greeted his return – the averted gazes, the avoidance in those faces he grew up knowing. Faces as seemingly oblivious to his presence on the island as if he were a ghost; as if he left no footprint in the dust. And having no one to listen, he fell silent. In those months of emptiness he learned that it is not the loss of love that makes you want to die; it is the withholding of those small acknowledgments that give a person weight and substance in the world.
The women who came to Kara Isle were the ones who noticed him, who sensed his lack. He saw through their northern reticence to the wreckage underneath. It was there in their walk, the way they held their shoulders. Women without anchorage, cast adrift by husbands who had discarded them for younger girls or best friends; or those whose children had no more use for them. Women trying to salvage something.
Such women were alert to his presence almost from the moment they stepped off The Osprey. He would hang out at Venus’s bar, a soft drink in his hand, not saying a word. They approached him with some obvious or senseless question. What was the weather like on the island? Why was it so tiny? Later, their conversation drifted around the ruins of their lives. They took his silence and his nods for understanding, and he measured the extent of the damage done to them by their readiness to step into his place above the precipice, because, like that Scandinavian told him once, they could fall no further. It was never about sex; it was always about being wanted.
And the girl... well, yes… he hadn’t been nice to her at all; in fact he’d been brutal, his words meant to put her off; send her back to where she came from and leave his past alone. He thinks of the dive, the fierceness with which she fights the water and it comes to him that it is the life in her refusing to give in. It overrides the stubborn, bright-eyed wilfulness he saw in her when she brought her phone to him, steering her back to the shingle beach under his house every time. She wasn’t wrong about him either. Look who’s talking.
Amos is breathless when he gets to Bowman’s Rise. Delna’s Guest House lies half drowned in flowering bougainvilleas. Partly folded in by two sides of a wide ravine, the building looks out to the other side of the channel. One of Delna’s two sons is bending over a spade at the front. The other is in the veranda stacking dishes.
Amos rolls a spliff. The wind kills the struck match. He tries again and gives up. To pass the time he traces cloud-shadows on the sea, counts the number of times Delna walks across her yard with a garment, hangs it up and re-enters for another. Frigate birds, like bits of clotted air, chase each other across the water. He stays until the sun begins leaking blades of light through the thick cloud covering, but sees no sign of the girl. He leaves the shadow of the stones and hurries down to the seafront.
Venus is outside her shop gathering empty cans and bottles. She waves at him. ‘Amos, y’alright?
‘Good,’ he says.
She drops the bag of litter and straightens up. She’s fiddling with her headwrap and squinting at him. ‘I been worryin ‘bout you, Amos. I worry ‘bout you all de time.’
‘You saw that erm – that girl?’
Venus frowns at him. ‘Girl – which girl? Ah, you mean de touris’ girl? The one in my place?’
‘Your place?’
‘The magga one from overseas?’
‘Uh-huh, the magga one from overseas.’
Venus smiles at him. ‘She change over to my place. She didn’ tell you? She ask me for a room coupla days ago.’ Venus lowers her voice. ‘One of Delna boys start botherin her. Dem all want to be like Amos. But dem not Amos. Dem don’t got what Amos got.’ Venus’s whole body is quaking with the chuckles. ‘I watch de way she been watching you when you hold-up Simeon in my place. An even if you nearly make me wet meself from frighten, I was glad for it. I say to meself, Lord-God, Amos know how to catch dem wiv or wivout fish-gun!’ A laugh bursts out of her.
‘She there now – in your place?’
Venus nods and smiles. ‘She went walkin this mornin. Come back so damn tired, she gone straight to bed.’
It is late evening. Amos returns from wandering around the island. The town is clattering with rain. Amos wades through the milky light and re-enters Venus’s bar.
Nancy is at the far end of the room. Her hands are on the table, her palms laid flat, the slim fingers splayed wide. Her eyes are trained on them. He ignores the turning heads and weaves his way towards the table.
The girl lifts her head abruptly and her hands go still. Amos pulls up a chair and sits in front of her. He’s conscious of the clink of glass, the scuff of bottles on plastic tables, the shuffling of feet around him.
‘I kin offer you a drink,’ he says, ‘but you going to refuse.’ He passes his hand over his soaked hair, releasing a sprinkling of water.
Nancy looks at the droplets on her arms, then at his face. She places the heels of her hands under her jaw. He wonders what she is thinking. Someone in the room chuckles and he suddenly feels exposed.
‘I come to say I was a lil rough on you. I come to talk to you.’
He pushes back the chair, lifts a hand and drops it. ‘I come to say…’ The words dry up in his mouth.
‘Say then.’ She is speaking quietly. Amos senses no hostility in the words.
‘I here to tell you that tomorrow you won’t make it.’
She creases her brow and smiles. ‘What makes you so sure?’
He sees the challenge in her stare.
Amos rests his elbows on the table and leans forward. He is conscious of the damp clothes clinging to his skin. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘We…’ He gestures at the room. ‘Everybody here know. You see, from childhood we learn the weather the way you learn the alphabet.
June – too soon
July – stand by
August – you must
September – remember
October – all over…
Is a rhyme full ov warning, y’unnerstan? You learn to read the light out there, the things the ocean throw up on the beach. You listen to the sea like how you listen to a person’ voice and unnerstand their mood. You watch the way the water move and know what that mean. This morning you must’ve felt the change, not so?’
Nancy makes a movement with her head. He doesn’t know whether it is in confirmation or denial. He feels exhausted, and a fool. Amos pushes himself off the chair, holds himself still for a while, because he feels unsteady on his feet. He’s embarrassed at the pleading in his voice. ‘Dunno what else to say,’ he mumbles and walks towards the door.
Outside, the rain is replaced by a fine feathering on his skin. The moon is a smudge of brilliance behind the clouds, but there is a glint on everything. He descends the steps to the narrow strip of sand beside the jetty and lowers himself under the sheltering sea-grape trees.
The scuffing of footsteps reaches him and without looking up, Amos draws the blade he carries since his clash with Simeon, and lays it beside his leg.
She comes to a stop above him, her arms folded around herself, then sits on the sand a little way from him.
‘You didn’t finish,’ she says. ‘October all over – what happens in November?’
‘That’s it. No more need for rhyming.’
She is silent for a while, staring out at the nothingness beyond. ‘They talked about you when you left. Said you drowned your sister?’ She leans away way from him. ‘That really pissed Venus. She shut them up. Said you weren’t on the island. She told me that’s probably what made you stand up for the child. Were you really going to kill that guy?’
‘Yes,’ he says, and turns to look at her. He thinks he hears her breathing, despite the coughing of the waves on sand.
‘Thought so,’ she says. She is quiet for a while. When she speaks again, her voice is small and strained. ‘And what do I do next morning? I skip my dip and bring my phone to you. That’s me. That’s Nancy for you. That’s…’ She is scooping sand with her hands and making little mounds around herself.
She shakes her head, raises the scarred arm in front of her. ‘The day I left, I promised myself never to let anything or anyone inside me again.’
‘I grow it myself,’ he says still holding out the joint. ‘Won’t cook your head. It calm the sea inside you.’
She plucks the spliff from his hand, seems to be squinting at the lit tip; then draws on it. Amos gives her a while, watches her body loosen until she drops her elbows on the sand and looks across at him. ‘Some questions want answers… like you and that guy. That’s heavy, you know… It… it wasn’t about the phone. And you weren’t nice at all.’
‘Well, I wasn sure I was going to shoot ‘im; y’unnerstan? I…’
‘Don’t!’ she snaps. ‘Don’t change it now. Don’t polish it!’
A breeze comes off the sea and ruffles the leaves. They glitter like a shoal of netted fish above the girl. Amos builds another spliff, strikes a match, then changes his mind. He drops the flame and watches it die a quick death on the wet sand.
She angles her chin at him. ‘They say that you’re a prostitute.’
‘I don’t do nothing for no money,’ he says.
‘It’s not the only way to sell yourself.’
A spurt of irritation prickles his scalp. He eases up on his elbows and glares at her. ‘What fella done this to you?’
‘Fella?’ she breathes. She stubs out the joint and lies back, her head propped up by a crooked arm. ‘I’ve given a lot of thought to that.’
Nancy rises from the sand – a rapid fluid movement that catches him unawares. She stands above him now, her head tilted towards the sea. ‘Which is worse you think? A mother who never touched you since you were a kid, or the man she replaced your father with, who touched too much? Which one leaves you more fucked-up?’
He is measuring out the words in his head, assessing the weight of each one before he answers, because he thinks that whatever he says right now will make all the difference in the world. He is drawing breath to speak when she swings her head abruptly, her whole body following up the movement and Amos knows it is too late.