I am nauseous. The worms are stirring.
I should have known. I have been careless. I should have settled this before it had a chance to grow. I should have settled him before he had a chance to make it happen.
I thought I was dreaming. I stirred slightly to the smell of rum on my lips and a firm grip on my wrists. Then she was there. Had come home early and found us. She beat me till I woke fully. Then she cradled his crying blubber in her steel arms, his jelly skin, his cries for help. Her victim of evil. I was left to clean my own blood. That was the day I began to see roaches, began to smell rum in corners of the house. I thought that I was crazy. That I was just like her . . .
May used to say that two man-rat can’t live in the same hole. She used to say the same for two women. She fears me now. That I have something inside me she could never give him. I want to leave her. I no longer want to carry her with me, nestled in my underbelly, festering below my skin.
They have returned.
May is in the kitchen singing about Jesus, and the pigeon is upstairs looking at the moon. Creeping in the shadows, I can hear him breathing, murmuring songs from choir practice, and snapping his fingers. The light from the sky glimmers on his forehead and the dust from the walls crawls onto his clothes. May’s dress itches my legs, her perfume smells like stale flowers. I am barefoot and I am armed. Clutching a razor, I hope to hurt him with one swipe.
May says the taller the building, the closer to God. The landing is high enough. If I can catch Parker off-guard and squirming, I can push him without resistance. I hope he topples with his face to the soil. The rum is settling. I feel the dirt between my toes, underneath my nails. Between my fingers. Buried in the ground beneath his swinging feet are shards of glass and bits of galvanized steel. Hidden amongst the splintered wood and bits of concrete scattered in the backyard.
Wisps of melody float from the kitchen window below. “Jesus reigns, Jesus saves . . . Jesus is there for you always.”
I sneak behind his silhouette propped upright by bulky arms and coarse fingers. My hands shake as I get closer. Doubts swim through my mind. I can’t do this. What if he hears me? What if he grabs me? The wishy-washy feeling of seasickness, the buzzing of rum fluttering through my eyelids is dragging downwards in my throat. If I can do this, I can mute the voice pacing the stairs of my mind at night. I can bury her forever. I hover over the unmoving figure; he does not sense me.
In a flash, I drop forward. I slice his right arm. He jolts upright, gurgling and slobbering. Before he can scream, I kick the back of his neck. There is blood on May’s dress now, red spilling onto yellow printed flowers. Falling to my knees, I slam my body against his back and push, push. He squawks frantically, arms flapping, “Maaaaay! M-m-maaaaaaaaaay.”
“What de ass you making so much noise for, man?” Then, “Jesus Christ, ah coming up now.”
I grow hysterical, my shins grazing the floor until they sting. Only seconds have passed. He turns and is somehow on his feet. He smiles with sick certainty and swings to kick me in the stomach. I skirt backwards on my bottom, wooden splinters scraping my thighs.
“Marie, what you really think you doing?” he asks calmly. Edging closer, he staggers. Enough for me to spring forward. I hear footsteps. Elbows to chest—“What the fuck?” hurling from May’s throat—I push and push. He falls backwards, his head hitting the floor.
May lunges at me. She claws like someone drowning just beneath the surface. Nails scrape through flesh. She draws blood. I feel teeth. And just like that, I fall.
The sky turns for a long time, and I feel a frenzied kicking inside me. Then I lie watching the sky, the frenzy subsiding to a fluttery squirming. I close my eyes as blood fills my mouth, remembering when I called her Mommy, the times I loved her as a child . . .
Something heavy thuds against my chest. Parker, coughing blood. Everything blurs.
I sense her beside me, hugging his trembling blubber in her plastic arms. I can barely hear her, vaguely bawling, tearing at the flimsy dress with bloodied flowers, a hovering shadow as the black of the night fades to gray. I think she says she loves me.
STANDING ON THIN SKIN
BY OONYA KEMPADOO
Maracas
Trinidad never promised me anything. And I never trusted the confused strutting. From the time I came to visit as a shy child and them lovely Maracas waves chewed me up and spat me out—when I saw teenagers dressing like big people, rich homes flashing TV-style; everybody rushing, buying food, driving and eating and drinking, talk flying, pecong—I told myself, Is a place for adults. I promised I would come back. But it never invited me. No, not once. No matter how many times I came. That’s because it’s always busy keeping up with itself, getting on, carrying on at a rate. Horrendous rates. From Piarco Airport to Port-of-Spain, every time, I could see the mess’a the place right there. All along the road, without shame or design. Ignoring my arrival.
The Customs man looks at my mixed race and says casually, “Yuh come back home?” after Immigration just finished giving me hell. And then the Indian taxi driver is asking if where I’m going is up a hill. “Because my car does cut out on steep hill, like it have something wrong with it, but I don’t like aksing my customer too much’a question before they get in my car.” Business as usual. Down the highway. Shopping malls and disaster housing schemes stretching, factories, fast food chains, mosques, and the Hindu Girls School. It’s always a bad time for traffic. Island of oil, pothole roads packed with cars crawling like lice, under an asphalt sun. At the junction by Nestlé’s compound, diesel dark–skinned vendors comb through heat waves of glittering cars, dripping red pommeracs. Air-conditioned windows roll down, hands exchange cool bills for hot fruit. None for the limping polio beggar, or his black cracked palm. A neutral radio voice offers, “Four victims were murdered in the country’s latest fatality . . . A seven-year-old who survived by hiding under a bed reports that his father and brother were tied up, while his mother and sister were brutally raped by three men and chopped with cutlasses in front of them. All were then shot several times . . . Police say . . .”
The big Indian-style homes with concrete balustrades, lots of sliding doors, fancy wrought-iron and designer “features,” keep their eyes on the road, untrusting. And the patches of farmlands, bordered by Gramoxone-dead grass, lie low. While the white-teeth smiling billboards want to chat. But I never like talking with them—too fake and clever with themselves. To fool them sometimes, I might wave back at Miss World, dressed in her airline uniform welcoming me; cheers with the multirace bunch’a happy people drinking Orchard juice. The rest of it though—from the La Basse dump, leaking human scavengers and smoldering black clouds of corbeau vultures, the shantytown stretching up to Laventille, the marketplace in Sea Lots, to the ex–railway terminal—the place doesn’t give a shit. But, you see the hills behind all of this? Ranging along the north, behind Barataria, Tunapuna, Arima—they are the ones you have to watch. Blue-gray soft in the rainy season, hard and fire-scarred in the dry season, they talk to you. Fanning, waving, calling you. They laugh, spread out, and mock the radio, echoing whatever they hear. They are part of it. The plumage. Trinidad.
“What’s the use of it?” my sister asked.
“What’s the use of it?” the hills laughed.
After all the bacchanal done, the mating season. After the Carnival flu run down your body and left you with a hollow cough. Mas camps collapsed, not a soca on the airwaves. Port-of-Spain is back to its normal self, going about doing the same things again. Post-Carnival sales for shoppers now. Headlines return to the killings and scandal after the feast of colorful, fleshy photos and aphrodisiac ads. Bank workers finished talking about who they saw in what costume, in what condition—gone back to comparing their children’s school passes.
Port-of-Spain is trying to tell me now—anything you want you can find here. Selling itself. This is the New York of the Caribbean, or at least a Miami. Look, there’s arts and entertainment, nightlife and a whole
range of people—cosmopolitan. Get a job or something. Work to buy a car to go to the mall is what you should do. But the Savannah trees and the hills know more about me than that. “You can’t stay,” they say. “You can’t take it in town. Go. But you will come back. Go and learn how your heart walks and the earth talks. But we will see you again. Closer.”
“Don’t worry,” my sister said.
I am back with my child.
“Sheba! Sheba!” The Alsatian doesn’t stop. Play-wrestling with my baby boy, a paw across his chest and his whole little arm in her mouth. But Oliver is laughing and dribbling, pulling one ear. Fur stuck all over his sweaty skin, dog saliva pasting down a patch of hair. A big tongue licks his cheek, slathering. He squeals, little hands fly up to his squeezed-shut laughing face. He grabs Sheba’s mouth and pries it open, trying to shove his whole head inside.
“Ria, your dog’s eating my child!” But it’s okay. Play. The two of them in love with each other as soon as we arrived—a puppy for her, a bear for him. The two of them, sprawling round on the floor of my sister’s house.
“Cheryl’s coming up the hill!” my sister shouts.
Dog saliva’s sliding into Oliver’s mouth, will get in his eyes too. He’s fumbling, pulling big black leathery nipples, sitting up. “Tot-tots!”
The car sounds, scrambles Sheba up and away. I grab Oliver and wipe his face on my skirt, before he tugs off after the dog, running to the gate.
Cheryl had had her baby too. Anika, a cuddly chunksie little girl, almost the same toddler age as Oliver.
“Bella, girl!” Big and warm as ever, “Long time no see! And this is yours?” Anika’s legs try to clamp round Cheryl’s large waist as the dog comes for a pat. “Look at his state!”
And we’re laughing. Oliver laughing, trying to catch the wagging tail, all his hair plastered down, slick with saliva. “Is a real little Indian you have here, girl!”
Filing in together. In the open veranda–living room of Ria’s home. Laughing but keeping an eye on Sheba and Oliver on the floor. Anika stuck in horror to Cheryl’s chest. Filling in the last three years between us. Ria never preached to me yet about I told you so, or what do you expect from a Caribbean black man. But she held the reproach in her neat, pretty features, in sentences stopped just short of it. Never believed me when I said he didn’t hit me. Suspected the violence that I had to save my baby from. Suspected the shouting, cussing abuse.
“What you expec’?” Broad-smile Cheryl must tease. “They only good for one thing. And even dat, sometimes, huh!”
“Just come,” my sister had said. “You know we’re here.”
Maracas Beach we’re heading to in the middle of the week. Just us and the babies and our lucky, good-to-be-women selves. Including my reeling, recovery, begin-again self too.
Now the hills, the hills. Beach. North coast. The road curving, curving. They have you, in controlling heights. Up through the saddle mouth, climbing. Green leaves close in then drop away, swooping back down to the valley. Closing in and carrying us on. Now Trinidad is flaunting, flirting slips of exotic dress. Lipstick-red slivers of chaconia and balisier between wet green. Orange immortelle lace canopy, flickering. Scanty. In the dark shade, pale heliconias bud peach, white lily tongues are wagging. Twisting and winding, the hills rolling a bellè dance. Fertility. Sliding you down a spine, they fling you, catch you breathless in the dip of a waist, hold you close. Clinging to moist, mossy skin. And suddenly, way below, the shiny silver-sea edge of a petticoat flashes, dazzling. Keep crawling along the bank of a neck, tree ferns dripping rain dew, pulling you secretly into intimate island plumage. Driving, slipping through bamboo, between quills, against the skin of a peacock. Sloping along the coast. Further. Drugged with mountain-soft damp breath, the lingering pungence of a cedar tree, we slow to a stop. And taste fresh cocoa flesh again. The jewel pods have been catching the sun. Sweet white pulp, in thick autumn-colored cups. Warm as blood.
A hip of the land lazes against sea—La Vache. And the beaches start pounding the names Maracas, Las Cuevas, Blanchiseusse, marching sleepy villages on and on. Deaf vultures soar high above river mouths, looking for scraps through hazy surf light.
“We reach, Mommy! Beach!” Oliver said.
“We know you had to come back,” the hills said. And they laughed soft. “You see, we accustom. You might as well had eat the cascadura, because you keep coming back. Is okay. Go ahead.” They waved us down the road past the police station, past the food stalls, flagged us into the old public-beach car park. And them hills stayed behind there looking, the whole time we spent on that beach.
An empty day for Maracas though. No weekend piles of cars and picnics, bellies and bikinis parading all shapes and sizes. No vanload of country coolies, with Auntie, Uncle, beti, and fine-fine pickney hiding to eat curry and roti. No fat “Putt’a Spain” people talking loud and stuffing chicken pelau. No hot chicks suntanning, rubbing lotion on their buttocks, pretending to ignore the gold-chain black guys pumping music close by, waving hi to the bleachy surfer boys passing. Not even a beefy bodybuilder in a Speedo or a hairy Syrian, carpet-world on his chest, passing today. The whole long beach almost empty, only the sleeping lifeguards, the red warning flags, and a couple of other people scattered further down.
The hills stayed. And they watched how we went to buy bake-and-shark with chadon-beni sauce and pepper. How we handled the children, trying not to get pepper on them, keeping sand from their mouths. My sister Ria could have fed them much neater if they were hers, but she helped anyway. Cheryl spread out, comfortable with her big size, red skin, and glasses, eating, feeding Anika double. In Ria’s bikini and wrap, I tried to keep Oliver still for a few minutes to eat, to stop him from running off to the water or throwing sand. Feeling a little more breastful cause the bikini fitting good, proud of my flat belly but clumsy still, not sure where to put my legs on the rug.
Or how preoccupied with mothering I’m supposed to be. Ria noticed. And the hills. And Cheryl said let’s take the children for a splash cause Oliver won’t stay. So we headed for the greedy rolling water. Anika not so sure. My boy squeaking and hopping, charging straight into the fizzing foam. While further out, in the big bay, the waves never stopped chanting, pounding blue drums and spume. White foam surging and coasting in, tickling and floating us shallow.
“Jump, Mommy, now!”
The dark hills watched how we held our babies’ slippery limbs, how we coaxed Anika off her mother’s chest over to me, how we let Oliver bump-along tumble onto the beach. Bobbing. Dipping. Little head bouncing, gulping salt. Shrill shrieking, more waves coming noisy and fast. Till we were all shivering and fidgety as the water. “The body of a nine-year-old girl was found this morning among the cocoa trees in . . .”
Currents kept nipping, tugging at my feet, digging ambush holes in the sand, pulling, “Come deeper. Bring your child out here.”
“Let’s get back to the beach,” I told Cheryl. “The kids are getting cold.”
Ria agreed.
And soon as we came out, that treacherous sea calmed down. I damned sure. Drummed smooth, peaceful, with a steady breeze till the sun joined in, slowed down to meet it. Slow afternoon heat. Then we dusted dry sand off sleeping fat cheeks, pulled on warm T-shirts and unhooked bra tops, packed ourselves into the car, and climbed back up into the hills’ bosom again.
PMS day in the art department. Angelica Diaz is the madam of her girls.
“Seven women. Who needs men?” she laughed, gold tooth glinting, crashing bracelet arms and ring-heavy hands onto her desk. “You know what I mean? We manage quite well. Have a seat. And you, Carla, stop passing up and down outside my door! Where is your PMS badge?”
Her desk, like I imagined the inside of her car—a box of tissues, fresh-scent potpourri, a little dog with his head on a spring sitting on a doily. Her office, like the inside of her house—slim gilt-framed cheap prints of stylized flowers; a pink curly vase with an artificial bouquet and two proud photos of perfectly h
andsome children, of course in graduation hat and gown.
“Your portfolio is unusual,” she said. “I mean, is good.” Closed it and jangled her hands up, puffed her cleavage up and down above the desk. “But what you have here has nothing to do with what we need. I mean, you talented, I could see that. You’s a artiste!” She puckered her orange lipstick, raised plucked eyebrows, and blinked mascara-heavy lashes at me. She is one of these women who must sleep fully made up, with foundation, blush, and all. Would wear a frilly negligee over her full-body Spanish-woman shape. Be born with long lacquered nails and take her first steps on stilettos. These kinds of women were born to rule. Right away, they run things.
She looked at me trying to sit up straight like her, put on some of the confidence.
“But you know what? I think you could do the graphics we need, even though you never done these kind of things. What we need most is flip cards. They’re easy, you could pick it up quick. I like how you trying something. Different. You have yuh own kind’a style. And I would give anybody trying a chance . . . Yes, Carla! Yuh still up and down. I said I would give she a chance!” she shouted at the open door.
“You called for me, Angelica?” The tall smiley secretary appeared.
“No, I didn’t call for you. This is Bella. She’ll be joining us soon, part-time.”
The girl smiled welcome. “Another female for the department.”
“Yes, Carla, I wasn’t looking for a man, I had enough’a them and I have a husband now, yuh forget?” Shook her head at me, laughing rich and throaty, patting her piled-up hair vigorously.
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