Shape-Shifter

by Pauline Melville

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Millie’s lips felt dry and split:

  ‘I ain’ havin’ no luck an’ me teeth need to fix. I gat fifty-three dollars. Can you help me, please?’ Her voice sounded like a goat bleating. He regarded the young girl, beads of sweat on her upper lip:

  ‘You tink someone is doin’ you harm?’

  ‘I don’ know,’ said Millie miserably.

  He rose suddenly and went over to a small cupboard. Out of the cupboard he took four eggs intricately tied with black thread:

  ‘I tell you what you must do. See these eggs? Put these eggs under where you sleep tonight and bring them back to me in the morning. That way we find out someting.’ He pocketed the money Millie offered and muttered a polite goodbye.

  Excitedly, she picked her way past the sluggish waters of the Backdam, holding the eggs carefully.

  That night, after dark, she crept down and placed the four eggs by the timber post directly under her bedroom. She glanced over at Selma’s house. It was ominously quiet. She covered the eggs with an upturned colander so that no animal could get at them and placed a tin can on top of the colander so that she would hear the noise if somebody tried to move it. In the morning she was up, dressed and out before her mother had stirred. The eggs were still there.

  Mr Evans was yawning and rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he took the eggs from Millie. There was no sign of the old woman. He broke the eggs one at a time into a shiny aluminium pot. In each egg there shone a glistening sharp needle. Mr Evans pointed them out to Millie:

  ‘Someone put these under where you sleep to do you harm. The eggs has sucked them up in the night. Your luck will change up now.’

  Millie hovered in the doorway. It didn’t seem enough. She wanted him to do something more. Sensing her dissatisfaction, he added: ‘One more ting. Next time you pass a Congo pump tree – mek sure seh you touch it. Lay your hands ‘pon it. Wish and pray to it. Good mornin’.’

  Millie returned home with a feeling of anti-climax in her stomach. Her teeth were no nearer being fixed and she had taken her mother’s money and spent it. Over the next few days she had a gnawing fear that her mother would count the money and find some missing. She became irritable and grumpy. She kept examining her teeth in the mirror. One day she met Jonjo in the street and asked him about Selma.

  ‘She OK now. ‘Cept she don’ speak no more.’

  Millie fretted and fretted. Finally, she went down with a full-blown fever. Her throat was painful and swollen. Her mother fluttered over her with prayers and rubbed her neck with camphorated oil at night. Over a fortnight passed.

  On the first day that she felt properly well, Millie sat out on the front steps. It was cloudy. She was still weak. Her mother brought her out a warm cherry drink and some pieces of sugar cane stripped and cut in three-inch lengths. She bit into the woody stem and sucked the sweet juice letting it run down the back of her throat. At first she did not see it. A piece of tooth sticking in the sugar cane. Then she gave a cry and put her hand to her mouth. She picked out the piece of jagged tooth, dashed the plate away and ran to the mirror with her hand still over her mouth. What she saw was like looking into the gates of hell itself. There was a gaping black hole where half her front tooth had come away.

  She was running. Down Main Street. Past King Street. Out of the town. Somewhere where nobody could see her. The bush. She wanted to hide deep in the bush, pull it round her. Thunder rumbled over the creek. A short burst of rain made her shelter under the wooden porch of a house. Then she was running again. Instead of going over Canje Bridge, she plunged down the banks towards the creek itself. Crying now, she stumbled along the muddy tracks by Canje Creek. Turkey grass and razor grass slashed at her legs. The piece of tooth remained clenched in her fist.

  She came to an enclosed patch of land, bound on one side by the creek and on the other three sides by a tangle of tall bushes, bamboo, cane and wild eddoe plants. Someone had set fire to it to clear the land for planting. Everything was charred and burnt. The blackened stumps of one or two trees stuck up out of the scorched trash on the ground, a burnt mess of coconut leaves and awara tree leaves; a desolate, incinerated place. Millie flopped down on a boulder. After a while the crying stopped, leaving a dull sensation of misery. She stared at her wet brown feet in their flip-flop sandals. The luminous orange nail varnish that someone had told her punks wore in England was flaking off her toes. She bent down and fingered the leaves of a sleep-and-wake plant that had sprung up by the boulder. The leaves curled up slowly as she touched them. The massy protuberance on the tree trunk next to her was an ants’ nest, so she moved to another rock. There she stayed, motionless, head bowed. An hour passed. Tree-frogs were croaking after the rain. Raindrops glistened on the wild eddoes. Slowly, the sun travelled across the sky, gleaming balefully now and then from behind great grey clouds. A chicken-hawk flew down onto one of the burnt tree stumps. It surveyed the scene, turning its head sharply this way and that, then flapped off over the bushes.

  It began to grow dark. The waters of Canje Creek turned a glittering black. Millie shivered at a gust of wind. She got up slowly like someone stiff with rheumatism. Putting the fragment of tooth in her pocket, she bent and plucked some black sage to use as soap. She crushed it in her hand and trod through the marshy undergrowth at the creek’s edge. There, she freshened her hands with the soapy substance from the plant and rinsed her face and hands with creek water. As she turned to clamber back, she looked up and drew in her breath with a gasp.

  On the opposite side of the patch of land stood a gigantic Congo pump tree, its black silhouette outlined sharply against a moving backdrop of grey clouds. The tapering trunk lacked all foliage until the very top where the branches splayed out flat as a pancake. Mesmerised by the sight, Millie’s eyes remained fixed on the magnificent, stately tree. It was without doubt the king of trees, ancient and powerful. It was as though it had sprung up behind her while her back was turned at the creek. Her heart was thumping. The wind rustled the bamboo and cane hedges as she ran across the burnt scrub to place her hands on the cool trunk. She bent her head back to look up once more at the top of the tree and went giddy at the dizzying height of it. Leaning her cheek against the trunk she prayed and wished for everything to come right. After two or three minutes, she fished the piece of tooth out of her pocket, scratched away some earth from the base of the tree and buried it.

  Without a backward glance and feeling more at peace than she had for weeks, Millie left the patch of land and walked home.

  Christine, hands on hips, waited for her at the top of the steps:

  ‘Is where you been, Millie?’ her shrill voice scolded. ‘You din’ pick up Joanne from school. Two hours she waitin’ there. Mummy had to leave her church meetin’ to fetch her an’ the teacher sittin’ there with a face like a squeezed lime.’

  Millie opened her mouth and showed Christine the gap-tooth. Christine was shocked into silence and then remembered:

  ‘Oh, there’s a letter for you from England.’

  Millie opened the letter and screamed with joy. Folded in carbon paper just as she had instructed were two United States twenty dollar bills, enough to pay the dentist’s bill and replace her mother’s money. She flung her arms round Christine, who reeked of onions, and they danced together on the greyish floorboards. In the bedroom doorway, Mrs Vernon stood smiling, flourishing a letter of her own:

  ‘Praise the Lord,’ she said. ‘The timing belt is on its way.’

  As Mrs Vernon said grace that evening, Millie cast a sly look up at the pale, impotent picture of Christ on the wall. She knew without a shadow of doubt that it was the Congo pump tree that had worked her good fortune. Mrs Vernon brought out the bottle of Banko that was kept for special occasions and proposed a toast thanking the Good Lord for their fortune. Millicent Vernon raised her glass and pledged her secret allegiance to the Congo pump tree.

  A Disguised Land

  IT WAS THREE YEARS AFTER WINSOME ARRIVED IN Englan
d from Jamaica that the dream started to come. She was fourteen and the dream was always more or less the same.

  She dreamed she was in England and that she had been sentenced to death. She appeared to be free, standing on the pavement outside a court somewhere in a country town. Small knots of white people stood chatting like parents after a school function. They were always extremely kind to her. In one of the dreams a man drew up beside her in his car. He put his head out of the window and said helpfully:

  ‘Hop in and I’ll give you a lift to the gallows. It’s not far out of my way.’ Winsome felt cold wet patches of sweat under the arms of her dress:

  ‘No. I jus’ walk there. Tank you.’ Her fear seemed inappropriate amongst such pleasantly relaxed people. A taboo caught her tongue and forbade her to say how she felt. Sometimes a woman with two yappy dogs at her feet would apologise for the dogs’ behaviour, as they bounced up at Winsome’s legs, and then turn back to the conversation with her friends. In the dream Winsome was always dressed the way her grandmother used to dress when she went to church in Clarendon; a navy-blue straw hat pinned down on her springy hair, low-heeled shoes with no stockings, a pale blue crimplene dress, white gloves, and she clutched a navy-blue plastic handbag. The white people round her were dressed casually in loose blouses and skirts and sandals, making her feel over-dressed. On a wave of polite chit-chat she was carried inexorably to her execution, unable to protest, unable to shout, silenced by the informal friendliness of those who surrounded her. The dream had variations but the fact that she was to be killed never varied.

  The last thing Mrs Hyacinth Nevins had wanted was for her daughter, Winsome, to come to England despite frequent sentimental references to the longed-for reunion with her first-born child. When the letter arrived with the Clarendon postmark, her heart sank. The spidery writing confirmed her fears. Her mother could no longer cope with Winsome and wanted to send her to England. The reality of her daughter’s imminent arrival caused a mild fury to fizz up in her. She stood with the letter in her hand. She looked at the orange and black patterned carpet in the front room of her council flat. She inspected the glass-topped coffee table adorned with a profusion of acrylic crocheted doilies and she studied the glass-fronted cabinet crammed with china shepherdesses, little figurines and carefully arranged red glassware. Hardest of all she stared at the posed photograph of her three British children by Mr Maurice Nevins that rested on the mantelpiece over the gas fire. She bit her lip and tried to remember what Winsome looked like. All she could remember was a dark, sullen baby who squatted on her knee heavily like a bullfrog about to leap off and flop untidily in another part of the room. She went into her bedroom and sat on the pink candlewick bedspread.

  ‘Jus’ when we get on our feet,’ she said out loud. Then she cussed. She cussed the day she had ever met Winsome’s ‘dyam no good fader’. She cussed her spindly-writing mother for becoming too frail to raise Winsome, and finally she cussed the dark lump of her own flesh who was about to descend on her life and disrupt it.

  Years later, dressed to the nines, Winsome sat in the shabby offices of the Probation Service in Southwark. She was asked about her relationship with her mother. She remembered her mother yelling: ‘Yuh too like yuh dyam no good fader. Stubborn little pickney.’ She remembered her younger brother and sisters teasing her over her Jamaican accent and other children in the playground taunting her until, cornered in the playground by the drinking fountain, she had fought. She remembered telling her mother that she wanted to be a model and her mother crinkling up her eyelids, thick with lizard-green eyeshadow, and saying, ‘Yuh ugly ting. Yuh too hugly!’

  ‘My mum was OK, as it ‘appens,’ said Winsome, unsmiling, to the probation officer, or rather to the typewriter on the probation officer’s desk which was where the answers seemed to be required. She felt a scornful distaste at the woman’s dowdy clothes. Besides which, she looked like a praying mantis. She was thin, her elbows stuck out and her head was held on one side just like the insect. She had a dry and dusty smile as she said:

  ‘I’m sure we can help you get over this little bad patch, dear.’

  Winsome just wanted to get out of the office. She wanted to get back home to her kids.

  Winsome’s two little girls were two of the best-dressed kids in Laverna Court block. They wanted for nothing. And to see that they had everything and that the home was in good shape, Winsome went out kiting. Her boyfriend Junior Watson, baby-father of the two children, provided her with the cheque-books and cheque cards from which he had removed the signature with brake fluid, although the banks were beginning to cotton on to that and making it more difficult to do. In one altercation, Junior had also provided her with an ugly scar on her left upper lip from his switchblade, but Winsome was a big woman and strong and Junior was also left with a bump over his eyebrow that never quite disappeared. Sometimes he stayed the night with her but mostly he returned home to his mother in Shepherds Bush where there was more space. He wore a small diamond in his ear and drove a red Capri, so that was what his friends called him – Red Capri. Winsome’s friend Sonia looked after the kids when Winsome went out to pass the cheques in shops and banks. Junior also provided Winsome with her third pregnancy.

  The dream came and went at intervals. Now it included references to the children. One time, the praying mantis detached herself from one of the groups outside the courthouse and approached Winsome, smiling:

  ‘Don’t worry, Winsome. We’ll look after the children. I will explain to them that you had to be executed.’ Winsome felt embarrassed as she tried to decline the offer:

  ‘It’s all right, thank you. My friend Sonia …’

  ‘But we’ve got all the room in the world,’ said the praying mantis.

  Suddenly, Winsome’s grandmother appeared, bible in hand, saying:

  ‘How many times I haffi tell yuh. Don’ speak with duppies!’

  Winsome woke up in her Peckham flat. The children had crawled into bed and were asleep on her neck and chest, stifling her. No sign of Junior. She could hear the noise of the speakers still hissing in the front room. She heaved herself out of bed, put on a wrap and went to look. Levi, a lanky Rasta friend of Junior’s, was asleep in a chair. She went to pull the curtains, accidentally treading on one of the full ashtrays on the brown carpet. Levi stirred and stretched.

  ‘Where’s Capri?’ asked Winsome.

  ‘’Im gaan,’ Levi yawned.

  ‘You want some plantain and fish, Levi?’

  ‘What kinda fish you gat?’

  ‘Salt-fish.’

  ‘Thas cool. Is mackeral me nah deal wid. De mackerel dem feed offa dead men.’ He shuddered. Then he took off his tam and shook out his locks. As he began to reach down for the little packet of herb on the floor, two-year-old Chantale waddled through the doorway and began to pull on his locks and grab at the Rizla in his hand. He disentangled her gently.

  Winsome went into the bathroom to wash and dress. Junior would probably not come back that day. She regarded her five-month pregnant belly in the mirror. It hardly showed. But she felt sluggish. In the kitchen she poked at the plantain and watched the oil turning a greenish colour in the pan. Levi lounged against the wall behind her:

  ‘Is when you go back to de court, Winsome?’ he enquired.

  ‘The day before the baby is due, would you believe it? I don’t think they’ll do me nothing. Just a fine.’ The plantain spat in the pan as she turned it over. ‘I’ll probably drop this one in the dock.’

  ‘Yuh must watch yuhself in some of dem courts,’ warned Levi. ‘Especially the older courts. They gat certain magic writings on the walls to do harm to black people. Ancient spells fi mek us confuse when we stand in de dock deh.’

  Winsome sucked her teeth and prodded at the salt-fish.

  ‘Fi true,’ he insisted. ‘I see it myself one time. Writings on de wall an’ yuh cyan understan’ it. Babylon writings.’ He took a piece of plantain from the pan with a fork and burnt his lips on it. ‘I don’
wait for de fish, Winsome, I gaan.’ He piled his locks back into the tam and made for the front door. She watched him loping across the yard.

  Later that day, after she had signed on at the dole office, Winsome stood in a branch of Mothercare fingering a little pair of white, kid-leather shoes. She held onto the shoes and flicked through a rack of baby smocks with green and yellow appliquéd rabbits on them. She collected up several pairs of blue and white baby-grows, then deftly removed the tags from everything and went up to the counter:

  ‘Oh, excuse me. I bought these a couple of months ago when I was expecting and I lost the baby and I wondered if you could give me a refund?’

  ‘Do you have the receipts?’ asked the woman.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Winsome summoned tears to her eyes. ‘I was so upset at the time I don’t know what I done with them.’

  The woman behind the counter became embarrassed. There she sat in this temple of motherhood, this shrine to the pastel glories of maternity, laden with coats and baby pillows, crocheted bootees, festooned with little hanging mobiles, kiddies’ duvets and tiny towelling all-in-ones, surrounded by bright plastic rattles, soft cuddly toys and disposable nappies. And here she was faced with this cumbersome black woman with a badly scarred lip, crying because she had had a miscarriage. She gave Winsome a sympathetic look and went to whisper something in the supervisor’s ear. Returning quickly, she totted up the amount of the goods Winsome had handed her, reached into the till and gave Winsome the sum of thirty-eight pounds. As Winsome went to the door she felt the baby kicking inside her. She took a bus down the high street to another branch of Mothercare and paid for one or two items for the new baby. Then she walked home, picking up some okra and pumpkin from the market and stopping to buy a red cardboard bucket of chicken and chips from the Kentucky Fried Chicken as a treat for the kids.

  ‘And my client would like nine other offences against Mother-care to be taken into consideration.’