The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  No one saw Susan Hay enter the hall. Everybody was facing away from her towards the raised table. She did not weigh more than six stone and could barely walk. The green dress that Charles had suggested she wore hung off her like the last winter leaves on a skeletal tree. Her dark-red hair fell to her shoulders in dull greasy clumps. Untended for the past year, thick brown toenails sprouted from the ends of her feet. She had not been able to fasten the straps of her open-toed shoes properly because her ankles were too swollen. She clutched her invitation and looked around for Charles, a rictus smile on her lips.

  As she moved like a murderous ghost between tables littered with crumbs and half-full wine glasses, people, sensing that something was terribly wrong, gradually turned round to look. Guests shifted their chairs enabling her to pass. Some people recoiled in shock as she approached like some living accusation. An iron will had her in thrall. She moved one leg after the other as if she were fitted with false limbs.

  At one time, Susan Hay would have hated arriving late at a formal banquet. Now it did not seem to trouble her in the least. She recognised Mrs Robert Seifert, dressed in a whirl of dark crimson shot-silk, her round face puckered with concern, and managed to nod in her direction, although most of her concentration was taken up with the act of walking. At last she seemed to have found her vocation, committing herself irrevocably to The Great Refusal with a ferocity and determination that no one suspected she possessed. She was fascinated by the directness and honesty of it. Who would have guessed that the answer to everything could be so simple? Do not eat. The god she honoured reciprocated by turning her into a blazing witness.

  Charles Hay watched his wife, transfixed. He could not believe that this creature, who was clearly dying, would attempt to come and sit next to him. He burned with rage. A rippling murmur went through the hall. The Chancellor, disconcerted, looked up from his notes. Alerted by his momentary hesitation, some of the cameramen followed his gaze and then turned their cameras on Susan Hay.

  Charles Hay had gone pale. He stayed still like a traitor, betraying his wife by refusing to stand and show her where he was. It was Robert Seifert who rose and took Susan by the arm – an arm that was almost pure bone. Gently he guided her towards her place. Dinner guests tried not to look as she passed. Charles’ eyes remained fixed on the Chancellor.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, poppet,’ she managed to whisper as Robert Seifert helped her into her seat.

  Charles remained turned rigidly away from her but he could smell her foul breath. He did not turn away completely because he was being televised. After what felt to him like an age, a round of applause signified the end of the Chancellor’s speech. After two other speakers had risen to thank the Chancellor and make their own brief contributions to the evening, the room relaxed into a buzz of conversation. Waitresses moved about with coffee and brandies.

  A dreadful smell permeated the part of the room where Charles Hay and his wife sat. At last Charles managed to recover enough breath to speak.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ he hissed. ‘I’m taking you straight to a hospital.’

  When Susan rose shakily to her feet, uncontrollable diarrhoea had stained her dress and dripped from the chair.

  White with fury, Charles Hay took her by the arm and led her slowly from the hall.

  Erzulie

  ‘I want to get out of here,’ mumbled Mrs Rita Jenkins, previously Miss Rita Rimpersaud, as she lumbered like a tank from the bathroom into the living-room. Her husband stood reading his newspaper against the light from the window. There were tears in her eyes as she repeated the information with a hiccuping sob.

  ‘I want to leave.’

  She had just lowered herself on to the toilet only to have her broad behind greeted by a flight of frogs from the toilet bowl.

  Armand Jenkins lowered the paper and looked at her with the expression of helpless exasperation that he kept in store for such occasions. He blinked at her several times to indicate blameless bewilderment. His wife was the only person who could induce in him this mien of defencelessness, of not knowing quite what to do. He rather enjoyed it. It made him feel like a little boy again. At work, there was no room for any such hints of vulnerability or indecision.

  ‘But, honey, you said you wanted to come – that you were longing to see the old place again,’ he almost pleaded.

  Rita Jenkins sat on the taut surface of a sofa expensively covered in pink-and-mauve chintz. It just managed to resist her weight, indenting slightly. There were three of these giant sofas in the living-room with arms and cushions shaped like stone boulders. The imposing sofas formed three sides of a square which contained a glass coffee table.

  ‘I did,’ she whined, ‘but frogs just jumped out of the toilet. I forgot about frogs.’ She wrinkled her brown nose in distaste. Her shoulders lifted and dropped again. ‘And I miss Sally.’ Their daughter had remained behind in Canada to study garden landscaping. She pursed her lips and tried to look pathetic – difficult in one whose solid expanse of chest formed such an unassailable frontispiece.

  When Rita’s husband had been posted to Guyana to supervise the operations of Omai Gold Mining Ltd, an offshoot of Canadian parent companies, Cambior and Golden Star Resources, she had been delighted at the thought of meeting old school chums again and catching up on their news. At the age of twenty-one she had migrated from Guyana to Canada with her family who were wealthy Guyanese jewellers. Two years later, she married an equally wealthy Canadian mining engineer, Armand Jenkins. Twenty years after that, when her husband’s work required him to spend some time in Guyana, she jumped at the chance to return and show off a little in front of her less fortunate contemporaries.

  On their return, the Jenkinses rented part of an enormous, gracious, old-style house in Main Street. The Canadian company paid for their living area to be refurbished throughout. As the house boasted some twenty rooms, far too many for the two of them, they only used the second floor. The rest of the house remained a dusty monument to the days of its past glory, full of ancient dressers, old local paintings, curios and knick-knacks, including an Amerindian skull the top of which had been carved as a lid for use as a vanity box. There was even a four-poster bed in one room. Rita could be heard schlep-schlepping heavily along the corridors in her half-slippers, checking for dust or disorder in her own quarters. The rest of the house she ignored.

  ‘Either my nose is paranoid or this bathroom smells unhealthy,’ she complained to the housekeeper, Adèle, as she sniffed around the place for bad odours. But, on the whole, Rita luxuriated as of old in the warmth of the climate and the free flow of breezes in the house after her severely air-conditioned abode in Canada. The staff, who arrived daily, outnumbered the occupants by five.

  Back in Guyana once more, Rita Jenkins greeted past acquaintances with warmth, curiosity and the satisfaction which came with seeing how much more prosperous than them she had become. This state of affairs made her bountiful.

  ‘Have it. Keep it. Go on, it’s yours,’ she would say, simpering, smiling and nodding encouragement as one of her friends looked longingly at a silk blouse hanging in the walk-in wardrobe or stroked the head of a small wooden sculpture. From the kitchen, the sound of the mixer whizzing up rum swizzles, in the way that Rita liked them with milk and a little essence of vanilla, signalled the arrival of elevenses. The drinks were usually served on a silver tray in the parlour by Margot, the solid deaf-mute servant employed on a casual basis by Adèle the housekeeper.

  Now it was nine months after her arrival and Rita had had enough. Armand’s contract was for two years. He spent long periods away at Omai, supervising the mining operations. She was bored. The novelty had worn off. She wanted to return to Canada. Apart from the constant electricity blackouts and water cuts, she had recently begun to receive a series of unsettling phone calls on their private and ex-directory number.

  ‘Hello, I’m calling from Berbice.’ The unknown woman’s voice was high and obsequious.

  ‘Who is this, please?
’ a puzzled Rita had enquired.

  ‘Oh don’ worry wid dat. I just want to talk to you. Is your husband there? You’re so nice. How have you been today?’

  ‘I think you must have the wrong number.’

  ‘Is that the residence of Mr and Mrs Armand Jenkins?’

  ‘Yes. This is our private number. If you wish to talk about official business please call the offices of Omai Gold Mining Ltd during office hours.’

  ‘No. It’s all right. I just wanted to have a little talk. How you doing?’

  ‘What is it that you want?’ Rita was becoming slightly unnerved. ‘Is it a visa to Canada?’ Armand Jenkins was known to have influence in obtaining those precious Canadian visas.

  ‘Not really. I just wanted to know that everything is going through OK with you. Just a little “Hi and Bye” call. I’ll check next week and see that things are going along fine. Goodbye.’

  There had been several such calls from the woman Rita Jenkins referred to as ‘the mad lady from Berbice’.

  She sulked on the sofa. Armand had gone back to reading his newspaper. Rita shook off her sandals and planted her broad, bare feet on the floor. Bored and under-occupied, she reached for a chocolate from the blue ceramic dish on the coffee table, persuading herself that she must eat them in order to prevent them melting.

  ‘And then there’s that awful Shallow-Grave case,’ grumbled Rita, shuddering as she put her feet up on the sofa and munched.

  ‘I’m just reading about it,’ said Armand, engrossed in the paper.

  The woman was known as Shallow-Grave because that was the way she disposed of her victims, or alleged victims, along the banks of the Essequibo River.

  The first body to be discovered was that of a sailor who disappeared from his Filipino ship while it was docked for repairs. The ship had been bringing, amongst other cargoes, some of the cyanide compounds necessary for the mining company at Omai. No one could guess how the unfortunate victim had made his last journey from Tiger Bay to the banks of the Essequibo near Supenaam. But one month later, the great tidal river nudged him back to the sandy surface of the river shore about half a mile from the village of Good Hope. Others followed.

  Even in a country with a river for a backbone, where surprise offerings were frequently thrown up to the villagers who lived on its shores, no one was prepared for the assortment of corpses which the river put on display along its edge over the next few months: three fishermen, two foreign seamen and a surveyor who had been measuring the volumetric discharge and tidal flow of the waters. Shouts were raised on the stretch of river between the villages of Makeshift and Perseverance, usually by those doing a spot of night-fishing, as each new discovery was made. There had been eight corpses in all. Nobody knew the total count.

  In Georgetown, where the case was being heard, people flocked to the courtroom to see for themselves the tall, stately woman accused of this string of murders. The public gallery groaned and heaved with men and women sweating, jostling, fanning themselves and jockeying for the best position to catch a glimpse of the woman who stood in the dock.

  She remained elegant and dignified, somewhat aloof, with a cool demeanour that made many of the onlookers in the gallery appear to be more likely candidates for the charges made against her. People strained forward, not only to get a better look, but as if, by reaching closer, they might be able to dip into one of the blackwater creeks of the Essequibo region and escape the broiling heat. The air surrounding her seemed to be of a considerably lower temperature than the air in the rest of the courtroom. When Shallow-Grave leaned forward, the crowd leaned forward. When Shallow-Grave left the room at lunchtime, the atmosphere returned to one of habble and babble and clatter, everyday business and heat, the black radiance of a dark lake having moved elsewhere.

  One woman in the public gallery never took her eyes from Shallow-Grave. It was Margot the sixty-year-old deaf mute who had not missed one day of the trial. Round her broad-domed head, which was slightly too large for her body, she tied the same faded triangular grey headscarf in a tight band so that no hair showed. Her large head made her powerful hands and arms seem disproportionately short and stubby. Her complexion was matt black with a porous quality like pumice stone, which never shone and seemed to absorb heat. Her mouth, pink and wet as a water-melon, always remained slightly open. She wore an old grey sweat-stained T-shirt and sat in the front row with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting on her fists, concentrating intently on the figure in the dock.

  Before she found work with the Jenkins, Margot used to walk every day from Werk-en-Rust to Subryanville to wash and iron for a lawyer and his wife, both of whom did good works. They paid her too little and she left. She took in washing and ironing at home but a nagging pain in her right arm forced her to stop. Now she lived on a pittance made from the few hours of domestic work she could find. Three mornings a week, she helped out in the kitchen of the Jenkinses’ rented house in Main Street.

  The rest of the staff were curious about Margot, not least because she had mysteriously disappeared for a month recently and arrived back without a word of explanation. They also maintained a prurient interest in Margot’s reaction to her Great Disappointment. Everyone knew that for years Margot had nursed an overpowering desire to migrate to Brooklyn. She shook and trembled when she thought of Brooklyn. Brooklyn was her Holy Grail. When she walked the streets of Georgetown, whether in stupefying heat or tropical downpour, her mind and hopes were pinned on Brooklyn. She was what is known as ‘waiting to be sent for’. In other words, a friend of hers had already gone ahead to the United States and had written to Margot telling her that papers had been lodged applying for permission for Margot to join her. That was four years ago.

  From that time on, Margot had received no news, either from the American Embassy or from her friend. Mr and Mrs Jenkins’ housekeeper, Adèle, had once accompanied Margot to the embassy in order to act as interpreter. The two women had inched their way along in a slow-moving line under the blazing sun. But it appeared that the papers had gone missing.

  When they returned to the house, Margot resumed her duties with the other women in the kitchen, squeezing grapefruits and pouring the green juice into a glass jug. Adèle tentatively indicated that perhaps the papers had never been lodged in the first place. The outrage that this suggestion raised in Margot, the look of shocked betrayal on her face, prevented Adèle from ever mentioning it again. Margot had dropped the grapefruit and pounded her fists on the table in a passion.

  ‘Ook-in. Ook-in.’ Her thick lips opened wide and the others glimpsed a stub of pink tongue as she struggled to pronounce the word.

  ‘Ook-in. Ook-in,’ she continued in a shouting grunt. And then, amidst general laughter, the other women noticed that Margot’s face was streaming with tears.

  No one quite understood what was happening to Margot. She did not fully understand it herself. But what Adèle had said struck her with terror as she finally realised she was not going anywhere. With all her daydreams of a future in Brooklyn smashed, she had begun to wander around Georgetown and see, as if for the first time, the situation in which life had placed her.

  She saw streets of tumbling, ramshackle houses, hutches and sheds, slum dwellings tacked together with criss-cross pieces of fencing, and she felt as though she herself had become as dry and sucked of moisture as the sun-bleached grey timbers. Her own headscarf too was grey with wear and sweat. When she chanced to catch sight of it, her large face looked grey, the colour of old lava. The greyness was all around her and everything inside her too seemed to have crumbled into grey dust. Her shoes had more or less disintegrated, peeling open like old, blackened banana skins in their unequal battle against unpaved roads, stones, rains, mud, sun and dust. Every alley had its own stench of frying food, of fly-infested garbage, stagnant pools and rotting planks. She felt like a ghost in her own city. A jumbie. Nobody seemed to notice her. She could have been invisible.

  When she was arrested for trying to sell some ca
ns of paint that turned out to have been stolen, she took no evasive action. She just raised her large head and looked up at the policeman with incomprehension, her mouth open, as if she were raking his face for an explanation not just of her arrest, but of her whole predicament. She had allowed herself to be taken quietly to the lock-up at La Penitence and sat, patient and defeated, through all the procedures that brought her finally to the women’s jail in New Amsterdam to serve a month’s sentence.

  It was in the jail that she met Shallow-Grave.

  Shallow-Grave occupied one of the three special cells reserved for notorious or first-degree criminals. On the few occasions when the other women came anywhere near her – for she had her own special escort – they noticed that Shallow-Grave was always clean and smelt good. There was something sparkling about her. And she sang beautifully, in her cell, with a voice that was sometimes low and husky but ranged upwards to a clear, rippling, thrilling soprano.

  One day when Margot stood in the courtyard with four other inmates, Shallow-Grave was unlocked from her cell and appeared, escorted by a weary-looking, squat prison officer. She was being taken to empty her chamber-pot in one of the four stinking latrines at the top of a flight of wooden stairs to the right of the yard. Margot watched her as she mounted the rackety steps and pulled open the door of the cabin. When she emerged, she stood at the top of the steps, a statuesque figure, with the blue china chamber-pot glinting in the sun. Against the dried dead wood of the latrines, her skin shone a vibrant black. She wore a shoulderless, dark-blue cotton dress, slimline, with a white frill on the hem like the coastal waves of the Atlantic Ocean. As she surveyed the scene from her vantage point, the women below fell silent. And then she addressed them.

  ‘I swear before the sky above and the earth below that I am innocent. I want you all to carry the news when you return to Georgetown and print it in the Chronicle and the Stabroek News. I know what everybody does call me. But my name is Erzulie.’