Two soldiers from the nearby camp arrived at the house. The dogs barked as the men walked down the slope. They asked if they could borrow one of Pa Tem’s planks. Both men wore standard baggy camouflage trousers, heavy boots and army olive-green T-shirts. The soldiers were part of an army contingent that had been sent to the interior to suppress the independence movement that had spread there. They said they needed a plank because the ground near the camp was marshy.
Pa Tem’s planks were kept lying across the wooden roof-poles under the open eaves of the palm thatch roof. They were there to serve as coffins should any of the family die. The sergeant was a burly man of African descent. He pointed to the plank he wanted and then swung himself up on the beam to help Pa Tem heave it down from the roof.
‘You must be fit,’ panted Pa Tem.
‘I should be,’ replied the sergeant as he manhandled the plank down to the ground. ‘I’m an army sports instructor.’
The two soldiers hoiked the plank onto their shoulders and pushed their way past Suki who was making lemonade.
‘Bring me some of that lemonade. Bring it to the camp,’ ordered the sergeant as he left. Pa Tem grumbled as he watched the men make their way along the track from the house:
‘Dese people does come and tek wha’ dey does like.’
‘That ground is not marshy. It hasn’t rained for months,’ commented Suki. She watched the men go. ‘We will fetch the plank back when they leave.’
She held three lemons in each hand which she had picked from the lemon tree at the back of the house. Now she went over to the wooden table to squeeze them. She added water and spoonfuls of sugar, beating it all together with a spoon in a battered aluminium bowl. She poured the liquid into a red plastic jug leaving the thick white pulp and pips floating on top:
‘Ella you must take these to the sergeant.’ Ella sensed that Suki resented her for not working as hard as the other children. She was not an unkind woman but her manner was brusque. ‘Don’t leave the jug behind. It’s the only one we have. Put on your dress. You can’t go just like that in your panties. The track by the creek will bring you to the road and you can see the camp from there.’
Suki’s scolding tone filled Ella with apprehension. Wearing her blue cotton dress she set off with the red plastic jug, determined not to spill the juice, and walked along the trail down to the creek. One of the dogs trotted a little way behind her dashing off sometimes to follow a scent.
Half-way along the trail Ella came to a halt. From somewhere nearby there came an ominous sound which she could not identify. The reverberating noise grew louder. At first she thought it was an animal growling. She looked up. Some way ahead of her and to her left was a dead giant mora tree. Ten feet up on the trunk was what looked like a seething black ball, two feet wide, whose shape was constantly changing. It hung tenuously from a deep cleft in the tree. The noise was appalling. One sentinel bee darted out and buzzed angrily near her face before returning to the nest. Several other bees flew out of the nest and back in a trajectory of fury. The humming black ball-mass of creatures detached itself from the trunk and became airborne, flying towards her, a long black cloud stretching and shrinking as it drew near her. She threw down the jug of lemonade. Something like a tin-tack drove into her head and then another, then several more down her arms. Instinct told her not to move. The dog, however, began to run towards the creek. Angered by the movement the swarm wheeled with one mind and attacked the dog en masse. The dog yelped and leaped in the air. It howled and shook its head as the bees swarmed into its mouth and over its eyes. It tried to continue running but the ferocity of the bee-attack overcame it. Soon Ella could only see a dog-shaped mass of seething bees on the ground. Somewhere underneath the dog was twitching and quivering uncontrollably. Finally, it stopped and the bees crawled here and there clambering over each other.
Ella remained motionless despite the fact that there were one or two bees in her hair. The swarm suddenly became calm. The air was filled with the scent of lemon. The bees began to circle around her head in a black corona. Instead of the angry buzz the air was filled with a benign hum. Several bees filed slowly up her arm without stinging her. She looked at the jug and the spilt lemonade. Lines of bees were steadily entering the jug, stumbling over the pips and lemon pulp. After ten minutes the swarm re-grouped. The wild bees continued to circle Ella’s head before flying back to the segmented honeycombs in the crevice of the tree. She did not dare look at the corpse of the dog.
When she returned home she told Pa Tem what had happened. Suki dabbed some concoction made from cinchona bark on the stings and put her in a hammock. Pa Tem looked at her with anxiety:
‘That chile gat fever. How come she survive? Those were killer bees – the ones that come over from Brazil. Look at what they did to the dog. She lucky she alive.’
Suki shrugged.
‘Maybe she’s mistress of bees.’
A few days later the body of an Amerindian was discovered nearby. He had been beheaded. Pa Tem’s plank was found at the scene covered in blood. The children gathered round in wide-eyed silence. Pa Tem came over to Suki and spoke in a low voice:
‘I think I should take Ella back. Things aren’t right here. I’m responsible for her. I don’t know what’s happening with the army. It’s something to do with the independence movement and I don’t know which side the army is on. I think that army sports instructor who came to the house might have something to do with all this.’
Suki narrowed her eyes with scorn:
‘This ain’ nothing to do wid no independence movement. The soldiers don’ like we Indians. That’s de trouble. They does kill us for fun.’
Outside a gentle rain was falling. Suki looked out of the window. Her eyes softened with sadness:
‘Dead man’s rain,’ she said. ‘It’s the sort of rain that falls when a good man dies.’
That night Ella lay in her hammock looking up at the grey planks which would serve as her coffin should the need arise. She crossed her arms over her chest and imagined she was already dead and encased in a plank coffin. For a few days she lost faith in words and stopped speaking. The whole panoply of human speech seemed to be a covering up of something else; some other reality about which she had not been warned.
‘She gone quiet,’ said Pa Tem. ‘But her daddy is a quiet sort of chap. Mebbe she take after him.’
It was Marijke who kept her anchored to the human race. Marijke had the inspired idea of joining her in the world of silence. They created a life together without speech. Gradually, playing and miming turned into a game. Marijke communicated warmth and fun and beamed pleasure through her eyes. After a while Ella began to speak again.
It took a week for the boat to arrive that would take Pa Tem and Ella back to Paramaribo. About two hours into the journey they heard gunfire. The toothless old boatman laughed at Pa Tem’s nervousness:
‘That’s not the military. That comes from further downriver. Plantation Roorak. There used to be a leper colony there years ago. Some lepers escaped and tried to make their way back to Paramaribo. They drowned. Their spirits are said to wander around looking for the way to Paramaribo. People fire off guns to frighten the spirits away. Nothing to worry about.’
*
News came that Ella’s mother was well again and Ella could return to England.
‘We’ll see you again,’ said Tanta Marti as she delivered Ella into the hands of the stewardess on the docked ship. ‘Tell your daddy when we save enough money we comin’ to live in Holland.’
Tanta Marti stood waving at her niece from the dock as the Nieuwe Amsterdam sounded its melancholy horn and departed for Liverpool.
Chapter Eighteen
On her return Ella found that they had moved to a council estate in south London. Hubert had come out of the sanatorium and sat on the steps of Lambeth Town Hall until the council officers heard his case. He explained that he was an immigrant, married with a child and suffered from tuberculosis. Within weeks they had been
allocated a flat on the second floor of a council block.
*
Twice a week Ella attended a local ballet class where she could immerse herself in the silent language of dance. That was where she felt most at home. There was only the squeak of shoes, the scratching scrape of toes dipped into the rosin-box and the familiarity of the teacher’s voice counting the beat or calling out instructions for an enchaînement:
‘Glissade. Assemblé. Glissade. Assemblé. Pas de bourrée. Coupé.’
If the steps were complicated the teacher would ask Ella to demonstrate or take the lead. She was not among the brightest at school but her body seemed to have an intelligence of its own. When called upon she could execute the steps, seemingly without effort, and then go back to leaning on the barre and day-dreaming.
One Saturday, when she was thirteen, she came home from ballet class and lazed on her bed. Gradually, she became aware of intimations of some seismic spinning centrifugal force like the deep tugging pull of a magnet in the dark lower anterior of her body. She put her hand down and rubbed herself between her legs. The feeling intensified until it became unbearably delicious and culminated in an eruption of concentric waves of pleasure, as if a stone had fallen into the blackest and deepest of pools and a goldfish was dancing in the centre of the blackness. After that, she discovered that she could make love to almost anything: pillows, hot-water bottles, cushions, even the back edge of the sofa while her parents watched television.
Alice worried that her thirteen-year-old daughter seemed possessed by a sort of lethargy. Apart from attending school and dance class Ella did nothing. She stayed in bed all morning at weekends. She lay in the bath for hours at a time listening to Top of the Pops on a portable radio, her hair floating around her like black seaweed, until the water grew first tepid then cold. Sometimes she drained the bath and lay there as if in an enamel coffin. Late one winter afternoon, when it was growing dark, her mother walked into the bathroom to put out fresh towels. Ella lay prone in the bath. The only light came from the glowing orange bar of the Radox heater fixed to the wall. Although she said nothing, Alice was startled by the beauty of her daughter’s limbs and underwent a sense of shock at the sight of that perfectly proportioned body glimmering in the dusk.
‘Get out of there. That water’s getting cold. You’ll catch your death.’
Ella stood up like a statue with the water dripping off her and Alice handed her a towel, feeling uncomfortably like a retainer in service.
At night in bed Ella ran her hands over the smoothness of herself, enjoying the relaxed pleasure of caressing her own flesh, the curves and dips of her body as she moved and stretched.
Chapter Nineteen
Ella knew that her father was going to die when he started to sing. Alice was away at her sister’s house in Kent. When Ella went with him to the shopping centre at the Elephant and Castle he took her arm and stopped frequently. He sang or hummed under his breath. The doctor had told her that people do this when their heart or lungs are failing. It is an instinctive way of regulating the breath. Sometimes he whistled, which served the same purpose. One day when he and Ella were at home together he stood at the sink washing up with a tea cloth tucked into the waist of his trousers. He addressed by her full name as he always did.
‘Elissa, your daddy is dying. You must help your mother. She has been a good wife to me.’ Ella looked at him but said nothing. She helped him dry the dishes. When Alice returned she bustled around with silent anxiety, tending to her husband, who now sat motionless in his chair for most of the day gazing straight ahead of him.
On the day he died Ella was given the news by her headmistress at school and ran all the way home, anxious about her mother, but also curious at this new experience of death. From the courtyard she looked up to see her mother by the window-sill watering the flowers. Smells of cooking drifted from the windows of the other flats. She dashed up the stone stairs of their block. The door of the council flat was open like the flap of an advent calendar revealing the cheery interior. As she rushed in her mother turned towards Ella with a look of worry and sadness on her face. She held Ella in a warm embrace.
‘What are we going to do now?’ said her mother.
A month later some sort of solution presented itself.
‘We want to enter Ella for a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School,’ said her dance teacher. Alice was doubtful. Dancing seemed a precarious sort of existence. When her sister Doris came to visit, Alice consulted her about it.
*
The two sisters looked alike. They were both sturdily built with frank open faces and Anglo-Saxon blue eyes. Doris sat in the kitchen with all her shopping around her in white plastic bags that bulged out on either side of her like water wings. Alice complained: ‘I don’t know what to do with her. She keeps her nose in a book all day so she can’t see the dust. I don’t know why she reads.’ Alice was a practical woman who suspected that all forms of intellectual activity were some sort of disease. ‘You pick up a book and the next thing you know you’ve wasted three hours.’ Alice took a basket of plastic clothes-pegs out onto the tiny balcony, put a couple of pink pegs in her mouth as she pinned up the washing and came back inside with some dry clothes.
‘You can do some of this ironing for me if you like – while you’re sitting there doing nothing.’
Doris unfolded the ironing-board, picked up the iron and examined it.
‘Steam iron, eh Alice?’ she chuckled. ‘We’re living in the fast lane now.’
Alice took out her sewing-box and fumbled around in it looking for some blue thread to stitch a patch on Ella’s jeans. The potatoes bubbled on the stove. Doris flipped a pillow case over and began pressing the damp corners, while the steam iron sighed its regular mechanical sigh like someone breathing in an iron lung.
‘Maybe she likes reading. She’s clever. She’s got your brains.’
‘I wondered where they’d gone.’
‘My friend Terry’s got a daughter like that. She’s studying something at a university.’
Alice broke off the cotton with her teeth.
‘Studying what?’
‘Something with a terrible name.’
Alice put down the jeans, went over to the stove and prodded the potatoes with a fork.
‘These potatoes are devils for not breaking up.’
‘Potatoes are devils,’ agreed Doris. She watched while Alice juggled pots and pans, releasing clouds of steam into the fizzing bubbling chemistry of her kitchen.
‘Mind you, they say bread is life but so are potatoes,’ said Alice. ‘I miss my Hubert you know. He was a lovely man. Even though we had our differences. He liked rice.’
‘Did you ever think of leaving him for anyone else?’
‘Not really. Why change one kitchen sink for another?’
‘What was wrong with him in the end?’ Doris asked.
‘Same old lungs.’
‘Lungs are terrible things,’ said Doris. ‘What happened to that friend of yours in hospital?’
‘She’s dead too.’
‘What from?’
‘A clogged something. Pass me the masher. Mind you, I believe in anastasia for the old. Anasthaesia or whatever it is.’
Doris passed her sister the potato-masher from the drawer. Alice drained the potatoes in the sink and began to mash them.
‘I wouldn’t mind leaving London you know, now Hubert’s gone. I might come out your way. Move to Kent. I wouldn’t mind Kent.’
‘You’d miss London. You love London.’
‘London was all right till they got rid of the fog.’
Alice stopped mashing for a minute and glanced out of the window: ‘What I love is seeing that washing dancing on the line. I love all that fresh air and wind and the sea and the countryside. I could get a little job working in the fields. Fruit-picking. Do they still have hops?’
‘No. Hop-picking is more or less over now. That’s all gone. We pick whatever is in season. I like it all right but
it doesn’t pay.’
‘Dinner’s ready,’ Alice called out to Ella who was still in bed.
Ella wandered in still wearing her nightie at midday, yawning and rubbing the sleep from her eyes with the backs of her wrists. She pushed her long black hair back with her hands.
‘Look at that lovely hair,’ said Doris admiringly.
‘Go and put something on. Brighten yourself up. Dinner’s on the table.’ Ella drifted out again. ‘She gets that sallow complexion from her father. When she was little I had to put rouge on her cheeks in case people thought I was a bad mother.’
‘It’s lunch now.’
‘What is?’
‘Dinner. It’s lunch in the middle of the day and dinner in the evening. You’ve got to keep up with the times, Alice.’
‘Well, when I was young it was dinner at lunchtime and supper at dinnertime.’
‘Is Iris coming over?’ Doris enquired about their younger sister.
‘Yes. She’s coming tonight. We’ll all have to sleep in my bed. Oh poor Iris. What a life. She’s had a terrible time since Albert died. First Albert dying. Then that mother-in-law chasing her down the street with a carving knife. Then the dog died and all her hair fell out. That was all her dreams through the mangle. But she’s the youngest of us and I still feel I ought to protect her somehow. If only she wasn’t so stubborn. Her place is a mess. All the carpets are damp. I tried to show her how to use the gas card when Albert died. You’re meant to put it in and press Button A. She doesn’t understand it and she’s got no intention of understanding it either. She’s just waiting for big hands from the sky to help her. And she’s got this hand-written notice pinned to the wall: “Beware the fury of a patient woman.”’
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