Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Sophie thought they had had a good evening, and she thought Dottie had enjoyed herself a little. Jimmy had made them laugh so much with his drunken clowning. He even persuaded Dottie to hurl back a rum, and watched with tears of mirth trickling down his tortured face as she struggled for breath. His talk had become dirtier and his laughter less controlled as he got more drunk. Sophie saw her sister shrinking, and saw the moment approaching when she baulked at so much indecency.

  ‘Shut your filthy mouth!’ she shouted. ‘That’s all you men know, you . . . That’s all! You just shut up that kind of shit.’

  Jimmy looked confused, and then was so apologetic that Dottie could not be stern with him any more and ended up laughing a little herself. There was a part of her that was calculating, and, in any case, she had no choice. As he made his affectionate lunges at Sophie, Dottie could see how happy she was after the hardships of the last months. In those months, Dottie would have gladly murdered Jimmy. She would overhear her sister’s prayers, tearfully begging forgiveness and asking that her man should be returned to her. She should have been praying for something terrible to happen to him instead. Dottie was under no illusions about his visit, but her sister was. And after all, everything was so hard that an evening of gentle carousing was not that difficult to bear. She had witnessed enough of them in her early years to learn to bear them, she thought bitterly. Long before they had to put him to bed, she was reconciled to him staying the night. He had stayed once before, but then he slept on the floor by the door with his back to them, but there did not seem much point in continuing that fiction when the fruits of their relationship lay playing peacefully in the cradle.

  Hudson! She had never known such a baby, not that she knew such a great deal about them. Everything pleased him. After he was fed he let out a few discreet burps, filled his nappy obligingly and slept. When he was awake he maintained a whole symphony of good-humoured whines and gurgles, so sustained that it seemed as if there was meaning behind them. At times, he cried out with a passable parody of his own wail, as if he was making a self-deprecating joke. Once he lay uncovered while Dottie was bent over him, anointing his body with oil, and he released a spume of urine which poured over her arm. She could have sworn that a look of embarrassed mortification crossed his face at the indignity he had imposed on her. She watched him lying patiently while Sophie changed him, and then watched him kick his legs in the air with restrained abandon when he was released. Free at last! He was a beautiful gift!

  Jimmy stirred during the night, when Sophie rose to feed and change the baby. She knew that Dottie must be awake too. She always woke for Hudson, and in the late hours they would sit together while she fed him. Sophie was thrilled and a little frightened by the unexpected intimacy of having her loved ones all in the same room, and Jimmy lying in her bed. She had been so surprised that her sister had not made a fuss about Jimmy staying. In the state he was in she could not very well throw him out of the house, but she had even been the one who had propelled him towards the bed, complaining cheerfully about having to put another drunken man to bed. Another? Sophie wondered, and then decided that Dottie was talking about women putting men to bed, and not about herself.

  Sophie hurried over Hudson’s feed, and quickly went back to bed. Jimmy reached out and began to stroke her. As his caresses became more intimate and vigorous, she could no longer restrain heavy sighs of pleasure. She tried to stop him climbing on top of her, out of embarrassment for Dottie, but he ignored her. She did not have the will to fight him, and she spread her legs apart with a mixture of excited anticipation and shame that Dottie would despise her for what she was doing. Her heavy sighs turned to groans, making Jimmy chuckle. But even as the pleasure overwhelmed her, she thought of Dottie lying a few feet away, grimacing with disgust at the vision of her bloated body writhing in this sinful ecstacy.

  In the morning, Dottie was already up and ready for church when Sophie woke up. If the latter felt any surprise she did not show it. She was filled with guilt at the embarrassment she had imposed on Dottie. Jimmy stayed in bed, one arm folded under his head, dozing intermittently while they made ready to leave. The two sisters both avoided his eyes, and hardly spoke to each other. At last they were ready, Dottie waiting at the door with Hudson in her arms. Jimmy called out that he probably would be gone when they got back, but he would call round in a few days.

  On the way to church Sophie tried to say something, but Dottie grimaced and waved her explanations away. What was there to explain? How often had she lain in the dark while Sharon gave herself to some drunk who was paying for her? During the service, Sophie sang with inspired intensity, rocking her child from side to side, and with tears streaming down her face. As the words they sang stabbed her with guilt, she leant on her sister for strength. Dottie put out an arm for her, swaying with her as the words of the songs coursed through them. Pastor Mosiah preached a fierce sermon against the curse of rootlessness, reminding his congregation that they must remain true to their beginnings, and Sophie sobbed as the angry words cut through her.

  Jimmy had gone by the time they got back. Sophie found a five-pound note under the pillow. She looked up and caught her sister’s eye, and they exchanged the briefest of bitter smiles. Dottie added a philosophical sigh as she reached for the cigarette can in which they kept their miserable hoard of cash. She insisted that Sophie should lie down and rest, because it was obvious that the night had tired her. Dottie guessed also that she was in some pain from the way she was walking. While Sophie slept, she took the nappies down the hall to the stinking bathroom to wash them, leaving their door ajar in case Hudson should wake.

  She came back to find the toothless and incontinent Polish woman who lived in the room on the top floor crouching on all fours by Hudson’s cradle. Dottie gently put the bucket down and tiptoed towards the urine-stained figure on the floor. She kicked her with uncontrollable rage when she saw what the woman had done. The woman rolled towards the window, yelping with pain. Dottie went after her, lifted her by the lapels of her congealed coat and shook her with violent hate. She dragged her back to the cradle, and, with one hand still holding her, she reached for the blankets that covered the baby, smeared now with the woman’s excrement. Ignoring Hudson’s howls of fear, she rubbed the excrement in the woman’s face, wanting to wrench her neck off or pierce her eyes.

  ‘You dirty mad bitch,’ she yelled as she hurled the sobbing woman out of the room.

  Sophie ran to pick Hudson up and hush him while Dottie chased the woman upstairs. She heard Dottie banging on the door and screaming violent abuse. In the end she went up to her sister and found her sitting outside the Polish woman’s door.

  ‘Come down, Sis,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s no use sitting there.’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ shouted Dottie, her anger now out of control. ‘I want to break that crazy bitch’s face. It’s not enough that they spit on us and make us clean up their shit for them. Now they want to shit on us. Well, I’m going to sit out here and wait until that dirty bitch comes out then I’m going to shit in her mouth.’

  ‘It’s no use talking like that, Dottie. She’s only a poor mad cow,’ Sophie begged. ‘She don’t know what she’s doing.’

  ‘I think you’re soft in the head, my girl. I’m telling you I’m tired of these dirty white scum spitting on us and shitting on us. And I don’t care how mad she is, I’m still going to twist her filthy head off.’

  Sophie tried to take the dirty blanket from her, but Dottie would not let her. Hudson had stopped crying and was watching his enraged aunt with surprised attention. Sophie lowered herself beside her sister, and the three of them sat in a silence that was only occasionally disturbed by Hudson’s weary gurgles. In the end, his good-natured patience ran out and he started to complain, politely at first, then with greater insistence.

  The Polish woman had plumbed bitter depths in Dottie, and for the rest of that Sunday afternoon and evening she ranted against the injustice of their circumstances. She was t
ired of the life they lived, she had had enough of it. The drunkenness of the previous evening, and all that giggling and heaving in the dark had brought Sharon back with such force that Dottie had lain on her own bed weeping at the tragedy of their mother’s life. And there was Sophie blindly running down the same alley. After Sharon had lived and died as she had, and Hudson had tortured himself to extinction, here was Sophie setting herself up for her bit of squalor. Dottie had sat in Reverend Mosiah’s church that morning and envied the Pastor his certitude and passion, and the congregation their energetic embrace of their words of hope. Something inside her rebelled at the cruelty of the Pastor’s austere joy in misery and oppression. Then when she saw the woman smearing faeces on that little baby, it was more than she could bear.

  They shared a house with people who were so crushed by their lives that they found relief in losing control, just as she had done. The Indian man downstairs, the dirty old coolie as Sophie called him, was living on his own. His young wife had gone away, perhaps back to wherever she came from. No one visited him in his unkempt loneliness. At night, he wailed with misery, a man in his fifties crying like that, calling out names of people between his cries of agony. Their neighbour persecuted him with parcels of rubbish outside his door, and with tight-lipped stares and muttered abuse. She was a short, angry woman who stared resentfully at everyone, as if she suspected them of laughing at her. She dressed like an office worker when she left in the morning, but as soon as she came home she changed into working rags and a house-coat, and set about cleaning. She was the one who moved furniture in the middle of the night.

  On the floor above them, in the cupboard that Hudson had occupied, had moved in a ragged Irish whore. That was how she described herself to them, ‘and proud enough of it too,’ she told them, swaying defiantly in her inebriation. She had come to introduce herself to her neighbours because she didn’t hold with being snooty at her time in life. Dottie had no way of guessing her age, but she could not have been much beyond fifty. Flaccid folds of flesh hung beneath her chin and her under-arms, and lines crossed her brow and cheek-bones in cruel, intricate patterns. They were all immigrants together in this lousy country, she said with a wink. And she always had a special place in her heart for darkies. There was nothing to beat a big, flashy, black punter in her time. Too big? She didn’t think their things were too big. She used to swallow them whole in her day. Before she left, she gave Sophie a long, searching look then nodded towards Hudson. ‘Somebody’s messed your sister up good, hasn’t he?’ she said, heaving agonised sighs as she rose to leave. ‘They’re not worth it, my love. None of the fucking bastards are worth it.’

  Then there was the crazy shit expert upstairs and her army of cats, flea-ridden monsters that plagued the house with their scrounging and their noisy squabbles. She hid from everyone, and crept about the house when she thought there was no one around, looking for a place to empty her chamber-pot. More often she hurled its contents out of her window, making it impossible for anyone, should such an inclination have occurred, to venture into the wild back-garden. At first Dottie and Sophie had gone up to her and tried to tell her about the toilet. The woman had peeped at them through a crack in her slightly open door, weeping as she listened to them speaking to her in a language she did not understand. Dottie leant on the door, gently, to press her into letting them see her properly, so they could talk face to face. She slammed the door shut with sudden violence, but they had seen enough in the brief moment that the door had opened never to want to try and enter her room again. It was not impossible to imagine what might have happened to a woman like her, to reduce her to the state she was in. Dottie felt remorse for the way she had dealt with the crazy woman, the way she had screamed like a mad woman herself. It was just that it had all been too much.

  And they had killed that man in Dallas, because he had wanted to do good for black people, she lamented. And one day they would kill King for calling his people to freedom. Free at last! he had cried, predicting what the future held for them. While he said those words, Hudson was floating dead down the poisoned river.

  ‘It’s like living in Hell,’ Dottie said. ‘Like a kind of punishment.’

  ‘Oh you’re just speaking in anger,’ Sophie protested. ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. We should thank Him for His Mercy and not grumble about our little miseries. He’ll keep His eye on us and make sure we’ll come to no harm.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dottie said sceptically.

  ‘Forgive her, Lord,’ Sophie prayed but could not quite suppress a smile.

  Later that Sunday night, after Dottie had quietened her feeling of remorse and self-condemnation, she sat for a long time adding up figures in the exercise book. When she had finished, she shut the book and put it down beside her on the floor. She watched her sister feeding and playing with Hudson.

  ‘We’re lucky, you know,’ she said. ‘Look at that little man. We’re lucky to have him.’

  Sophie looked down proudly at her little baby.

  ‘But this is no place for him to grow up,’ Dottie said, wiping the smile off her sister’s face. Sophie sighed, thinking that Dottie was about to start again. ‘We’re going to move out of here, Sophie. I’ve been doing some sums. I don’t know how yet, but we’re going to look for a place of our own, where Hudson won’t have to grow up with crazies. We’ll buy a place of our own,’ Dottie said firmly, leaning forward to pick the exercise book up. She waved the book at her sister as if it was proof of the power of her words.

  Sophie looked at her with wonder.

  ‘We can do it,’ Dottie continued. ‘If we put our mind to it we can do it. We saved all that money for Hudson when we had to. We found a way . . . Now we’ll have to try again, for the young Hudson. It’ll be harder this time because we have to get so much more, but we’ll find a way.’

  Sophie nodded, wanting to believe in her sister’s vision, wanting to believe that Dottie would not say they could do it if they could not. ‘We can go and see Reverend Mosiah,’ she said.

  Dottie was taken aback by the suggestion, but after a moment she shrugged. ‘We’ll talk it over properly when we come back from work tomorrow. All right, we’ll go and see the Pastor. I expect he’ll know about buying a place.’

  ‘Perhaps Jimmy . . .’ said Sophie feebly.

  ‘Yes, perhaps Jimmy will.’

  ‘He’ll want to help for Hudson too. He will, Sis,’ pleaded Sophie.

  ‘Yes I’m sure he will,’ said Dottie, smiling to placate her sister. ‘We’ll go and see the Reverend tomorrow night and hear what he has to say.’

  Much later on that night, when Hudson woke up for his early morning feed, and they were drowsily waiting for him to drop off again, they started again about their house. ‘What do you think? Where should we buy our little mansion?’ Dottie asked. ‘Perhaps Hudson has an idea.’

  ‘Where do you think it’ll be, Sis?’ asked Sophie, laughing with pleasure through her weariness.

  ‘One of those nice houses in Clapham,’ Dottie said, thinking of Dr Murray.

  ‘Or a place in Brixton. I fancy Brixton,’ Sophie said, smiling.

  ‘It will be a clean, cheerful house, with plenty of room for our little child to play. It will have a living room, and a drawing room and a nursery. And a real garden at the back.’

  ‘Like a dream house,’ Sophie said.

  They lay talking in the dark after they went to bed. Sophie was asleep before too long but Dottie lay dreaming and planning their new life, pausing now and then to listen to the stealthy sounds of the house.

  Bearing Gifts

  1

  As if suspecting that something was afoot, Jimmy disappeared again, reducing Sophie to tears. Dottie sighed with resignation, but her exasperation was not unmixed with relief. The more Jimmy behaved with what Dottie took to be his habitual cynicism and cunning, the more easily would Sophie be made to understand that she could not rely on this man. For a week or two she was still inclined to defend him a
nd make excuses, and Dottie was forced to be subtle in stoking Sophie’s resentment without winning any sympathy for Jimmy. They were well into the fourth week of his absence before Sophie allowed herself an unrestrained expression of her disdain.

  ‘That man is not worth the trouble,’ she cried. ‘I don’t know what he takes me for. I worry myself sick for him, I pray for his return and he hasn’t even got time to let me know where he is,’ she cried. ‘He’s probably found himself some slut he can live off. That’s the trouble with black men. Just let him come here and I’ll show him what he can do with himself.’

  Sophie stomped around the room, attending to her domestic business with unnecessary violence, sucking her lips with anger at appropriate moments. Dottie shook her head with commiseration, listening with growing relief and rising glee as Sophie abused Jimmy. Before long, she knew, would come the sniffles and in the end Sophie would burst into tears, but it was a start. All that flapping and shouting was Sophie beating about for air, Dottie thought, as Hudson had done in his pained, arrogant way. Dottie had understood that in some part of herself. In the portion of life they had been given to live, they had to beat about quite a bit for clean air. It was not something they could have at will. If they flared their nostrils and filled their lungs, all that they took in were other people’s poisoned, used-up gases. They had to push away and shove off the backsides that were resting on top of them to sniff some real oxygen. But she had never been able to do that. Perhaps she was afraid of the easy and addictive satisfaction of such violence, or perhaps, as she thought, she was afraid and abject before a world that saw no reason to stop torturing her.

  Then, out of the blue, Patterson came to see them, appearing on the first-floor landing. It was the first time that Dottie had seen him, and she was at once struck by how different he was from his brother. Jimmy was small and restless, always inclined to smile and endlessly clowning. Despite his light airs, though, there was something sad about him, as if he was only pretending to be relaxed and happy, and really harboured feelings of inadequacy and expectations of failure just below the animated surface. It had often seemed to Dottie that his good humour had a trace of frenzy in it, that behind the jokes she could feel a tremor of instability. Everything that Dottie had seen him do was charged with hidden resentment.