Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Despite the feelings of sympathy for her, Dottie rushed home from work when Joyce was there. Perhaps the new knowledge of her vulnerability made Dottie less quick to rebuke Joyce’s remissions, but that did not make her any more trusting. Dottie could not get over the worry that Joyce would use the house for other purposes, carry out her filthy business there. When she arrived home, it was usually to find the house in chaos. The two babies would be running about, screaming with hysterical hilarity. Clothes, furniture, kitchen pans would be scattered wherever they did not belong. She would find Joyce slumped in their scantily furnished parlour, her eyes closed to the chaos, with her bag and coat beside her, ready to go. She always looked at Dottie with a superior smirk, and Dottie had taught herself not to mind it, not to rush into placatory smiles. She was only a young girl, she told herself, made bold and brazen by her life of prostitution.

  ‘It’s not worth it for me, coming all the way here,’ Joyce complained. ‘I’m only trying to help. You know what I mean? Cause we’re all in it together. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother. Not for the money you give me. And the bus journey from Balham and that. Anyway, I’m thinking of going to sec’tarial college soon, so I don’t think I can keep doing this.’ If she was still there when Sophie came back from work, she stayed longer to taunt Sophie about Jimmy. She spoke of him as the boy’s dad: ‘Have you had any news from the boy’s dad? He’s doing all right then, is he?’ She used to know him a couple years before, she said. She would grin at Sophie, strutting a little in front of her. It must be one of the small benefits of the work she did, Dottie thought, that she understood the full depravity of men and could sneer at women like Sophie who chose to delude themselves.

  ‘Patterson’s helping you out a lot these days, Miss Sophie,’ Joyce said, using the term of respect with crude irony. ‘He’s always around here these days, isn’t he? This is a nice house you have here. You’re ever so lucky, Miss Sophie.’

  It seemed to Dottie that her sister would never hear the sarcasm in Joyce’s voice. She smiled at the questions and gushed about Patterson, remarking on his kindnesses and making Joyce laugh. She never answered the questions about Jimmy, and appeared unembarrassed by them. There were many times when Dottie was tempted to ask Joyce how her business was, but she was reluctant to invite further enmity from her. She determined early after their move that she would try and find a minder nearer home.

  Their neighbour, Laura, came over to their house every day in the first week, asking them how the day had gone, whether there was anything they needed. They went to her for sugar, or a can opener, the usual little things that get lost with moving. Laura told them to come round for anything if they were stuck, or just for a natter, and not to worry about seeming rude. That was what neighbours were for, she said, especially in this cold country with closed doors. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I first come to this country, my dear. If you speak to anyone they run away and bang their door shut. My husband said it was because they don’t like us Jamaicans, but I think they just like shutting themselves in their little boxes. So you come round when you like, you hear me.’

  Those were days of joy for Dottie, rushing home after work to do a little more unpacking, move things from one place to another until she found the right position. She discovered the loft, and put a chair on a table to look into it. Sophie held on to the chair legs, serenading Dottie with a stream of terrified warnings. Dottie put her head carefully into the dark hole and smelt sharp, clear air. She lit a match but that did nothing more than reveal a huge cavern. In a corner of the roof a little moonlight shone in, which Dottie thought was charming, until heavy rains came a few days later and explained the damp patches in the little bedroom.

  People she worked with wanted to hear a blow-by-blow account of the house and were quick with advice about curtains and repairs. Mike Butler overheard Dottie’s description of her attempt at the loft, and pursed his lips wisely over the glint of moonlight through the roof. He could’ve told her what that meant, if she’d bothered to ask. Soon enough, when opportunity offered itself, he embarked on a monologue about the life-time knowledge of lofts and their eccentricities that he had acquired in his travels. Why, there was a man who built a pond in his loft, Mike Butler pronounced, working himself into a powerful rhythm. He spent hours of every day up there, improving his pond, adding little refinements. It was an obsession. He missed days off work, neglected his family. One day this poor man went up to his roof-top pond to find it had been taken over by a hideous creature with protruberant eyes and enormous whiskers. ‘A creature from the deep,’ Mike Butler declaimed, watching with customary incomprehension as his audience deserted him. He slipped in a warning about holes in the roof, and how they could lead to ceilings crashing down on you, but no one was listening by that stage.

  Laura brought her lawn-mower over during the weekend and taught Dottie how to use it. Her Alsatian dog, whose name was Daisy, stood on her hind legs and peered at them over the garden fence, barking now and then to capture their attention. To Dottie the dog seemed frighteningly fierce, but Laura spoke to her as if she were a gentle child, and stroked and patted her to soothe her fractious nerves. It was to protect them against robbers, she explained, but the poor animal was more scared than they were. Laura was living alone with her daughter, and she was afraid of some badjohn breaking in and hurting them. Her daughter’s father was still in Jamaica, not well enough to travel, Laura said, glancing at Dottie as she said this, to see how she would take it. Later, when they knew each other better, she told Dottie the truth. The man had left them to go back to Jamaica, disgusted with England. The cold, the rain, the endless nights and all the bad-talk he had to accept were too much to him. It was he who had bought them the dog before he left, telling them the three bitches could now live happily together. In any case he had not been much use, Laura said, complaining all the time about colour-bar and about his rights.

  Dottie expected the daughter to be a young girl, but she turned out to be about eighteen or so. She was a trainee nurse at St George’s Hospital, where her mother also worked in the laundry. To hear them talk to each other, and to listen to the authority with which Laura pronounced on medical matters, one would have thought that their situations were reversed. It was the mother who had all the big words, while the daughter stumbled over them. Laura had been training to be a nurse before she came over to join her husband, but she had given that up when she got to England. It had been a difficult decision. She took the laundry job so they could afford to buy their house. Dottie liked both of them, and liked their closeness to each other, and the soft-spoken tones with which they addressed each other. Late at night, she would hear voices on the other side of the adjoining wall, not clearly enough to distinguish the words, but there was no mistaking the even-tempered familiarity of the tones.

  The daughter’s name was Veronica, and two or three evenings a week a young man walked her home from work. He looked very young and wore a grey suit and dark tie. They stood chatting by the front hedge, laughing and leaning towards each other. If they stood there too long, Laura pushed her head out of the living-room window and called her daughter in. Veronica dressed fashionably and wore clever hairstyles, and to Dottie she seemed fresh and happy.

  2

  Sophie started to miss days off work because of her illness, which had got worse over the move to the new house. She had hurt her back lifting a box, and complained that the pain made it impossible for her to do anything at all. She could not even sleep. They thought it best that Hudson should move into Dottie’s room. As time passed she did less and less in the house. In the end Dottie suggested to her that she should take a part-time job, and rest up more until she was better. Patterson would call in on her during the day. It was all very simple now for Patterson, Dottie thought. He did not bother with the Sunday visits any more. He came when Sophie was available and sometimes stayed the night in her room. He helped out with money for the bills, now that Sophie was not earning enough. If there were heavy job
s to be done he volunteered for them. He had fixed all the water taps, and repaired the broken sashes in the windows. He arranged for someone he knew to fix the hole in the roof. He was part of their lives. He asked questions about what they were spending on, where they went shopping, and even where they intended to buy their new parlour furniture. He knew someone who ran a store, and had just received a very attractive suite that may well suit them. He was free with advice, and did not mind being insistent with it sometimes. Patterson and his pen of Balfour sisters, Dottie thought. As she had always feared.

  Some weekends he was there all the time, doing the bits of building work that they wanted done. He wired the loft and helped them clean it out. They found an old trunk full of newspapers and clothes, commemorative editions and old military uniforms. They also found a broken wire bed, twisted and tangled grotesquely on itself. An ancient iron tank had rusted immovably into the beams and side-wall, and would have to stay there until a calamity befell the house. Stuffed into crevices and holes were pieces of rags and strips of soft leather, to keep out draughts and wind-swept snow. All round the loft were scattered the detritus of other people’s lives, and Dottie found its presence intrusive and irritating. Her attempts to remove it, though, only created an unmanageable chaos and filled the loft with dust, driving her away in the end.

  Patterson was very helpful. He found out about grants for them, and accompanied the buildings inspector from the council when he came to look at their house. The two of them talked like friends, ignoring Dottie, who followed them wherever they went. Patterson brought builders to install an indoor bathroom and toilet which the council paid for. He converted the outside toilet into a shed, ripping out the plumbing and re-laying the floor. He worked silently, with methodical and stubborn violence.

  He hardly talked to them most of the time, but when he did he was courteous and firm. He came and went as he pleased. They learnt to ask him nothing about himself or where he went when he was not with them. He taught them simply to accept whatever he chose to do for them, and they learned that he would tell them nothing except what he chose. They knew nothing about his life or what he did for a living other than what they saw or what he told them. Dottie knew that in her own mind she thought of him as an obstacle, as somebody who was often there to appraise and judge what she did. Even when he said nothing it was not difficult to guess his opinion. A sad smile or a weary shake of the head were just as eloquent. She was resigned to his control of their lives. His influence had grown over them and she had known no way to prevent it. In his presence she felt herself diminishing, shrinking.

  Sophie gave up all responsibility for Hudson. Why not have a proper holiday? Dottie thought. Why keep a dog and then bark yourself? Dottie devoted herself to the child. Even though he always ran to Sophie when he wanted comfort, and threw himself at her when she came in from somewhere, to Dottie it was enough that it was she who looked after him. She had to watch that she did not become a tyrant under the guise of her devotion, as she thought she had done to the elder Hudson, assuming that she knew what was good for him. She would make what amends she could to the young Hudson for the ignorant way she had dealt with her own brother. It was the boy who mattered, not Dottie’s feelings or what she thought of his mother. She no longer believed in Sophie’s illness, and she resented the burdens she had to shoulder in its name. As if to anticipate what grumbles she might make, Patterson looked stern when Hudson was being difficult, and he talked earnestly to Dottie about sacrifice. The Reverend Patterson Bongbongbong is in our midst, she sneered, the Pastor of the Church of the Doomed of Horatio Street.

  She found it hard now to listen with any sympathy to tales of the aches and pains that made her sister’s life such a living torment. To mortify herself even further, Dottie listed all the other things she would have been doing had it not been for Sophie and Hudson. She could have gone to college to do some exams. Mike Butler urged her to, and even invited her to meet his wife who was a college teacher or adviser or something, and who would tell her about what was available. He had already told his wife a great deal about Dottie, and she would be honoured to meet her. Dottie politely refused. What was the point? Where would she find the time? She had not even visited the library since they moved, and she still had some books to return. And the reason for her lack of time was so that her sister could stay in her room and play dirty games with Patterson.

  She hated the bitterness she felt. It made her stiff and awkward with resentment, so that she felt as if all the people she met could tell that she was uncomfortable with them and envied them their quiet, normal lives. The misery made her irritable and clumsy, and made it harder to be sociable in the easy-going manner that seemed effortless in everyone else. People she worked with told her she looked ill, and some advised her to leave the job. With all her brains and all the books she read, they told her, she could easily get a job in an office. She hated the resignation she felt, the slow decline. There had not been much to keep her going all her life, but now it seemed that she was losing heart.

  She always found an explanation, a form of words, that prevented her dejection from overwhelming her. At times the words of a song came to her mind, or the memory of a moment of joy, a fragment secreted away against the time of ruin, and for a while the old strength returned as she rejoiced in the miracle of her survival and the sharpness of her faculties. For a while she found again the generosity to make allowances for her sister, and reprimanded herself for her cruelty and selfishness. But then she got back to the house to see her lying in bed in daylight, reeking of perfumed oils and sweetmeats, and she was plunged once again into discontented irritation. To Dottie she seemed to glow with health, yet she was constantly groaning with self-pity. It frightened her that she could be burdened with Sophie all her life, that after all these years they would make a servant of her, a skivvy. It frightened her that she would lose the small independence she had found for herself, so much that her chest hurt with a strange sinking agony whenever she thought about it. It was different when these things were done without bitterness, for Hudson the baby and Hudson the brother, and for Sophie herself.

  Some evenings after she had put Hudson to bed, she hid herself in her room, sitting silently listening to Sophie’s resentful business when she was left on her own by Patterson. She wanted to leave them, find a place of her own. One evening Sophie came in to her. Dottie had been annoyed by something that had happened at work. One of the foremen, a leathery-faced lecher, had put an arm around her waist and kissed her on the neck. She had turned round on him and abused him, barely able to prevent herself from attacking him physically. But what annoyed her was that she had brought her blackness into it. ‘You think that just because I’m black I won’t mind being squeezed up by a dirty old man like you,’ she had said. She knew that the man was like that with all the women, yet she had said that and heard the other women’s indignant grumbles of sympathy grow softer. The words came to mock her with their hysteria. The man had taken advantage, laughing at her. Oh yeah, oh you poor old coon, you. If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, and piss off back to Niggerland, love.

  She had found it impossible to say anything to her sister when she got home, not only because she assumed that Sophie would be unable to understand her hurt, but also because she could not find the urge to be friendly and chatty, could not be bothered to set the scene for her confessions. She had done her chores with a tired, hostile look, signalling to Sophie, and Hudson as well, that she would not respond kindly to any attempts to engage her in conversation. She made Hudson ready for bed unusually early, and bundled him off into his cot in her room, putting down all his attempts at insurrection with unmistakable firmness. Then she retired herself, after giving Sophie a curt explanation. Sophie followed her into her room, making Hudson raise a cautious eye from the pillow, where he had been pretending to be asleep.

  ‘You all right, Sis?’ Sophie asked, standing at the door.

  Dottie was sitting on the bed, a
book in her hand, pretending to read. She smiled, touched by the look of misery on Sophie’s plump features, like a clown’s tears. Sophie smiled with relief and came in. She sat on the bed, and, suddenly overflowing affection, she hugged Dottie. To her own amazement, Dottie began to cry. Sophie crooned to her, rocking her as she held her. ‘It’s all right, honey. Poor, poor lovey. Why do you make yourself unhappy? Oh you poor child.’ Dottie nearly burst out laughing through her tears. She lay in her sister’s arms and found comfort in the childish endearments, but she also thought that Sophie’s was the kind of warmth that was offered without thought, that was given easily. She disengaged herself as gently as she could, so Sophie should not misunderstand her withdrawal. Sophie’s eyes were bathed in tears too, and Dottie smiled at her and stroked her cheek.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ said Dottie, but thought to herself how little hope there was for them, her and her fat, silly sister. ‘I’m just weary.’

  Hudson was not satisfied with these reassurances, or he saw the confusion as an opportunity to extend his bed-time for several hours. He raised such a din, howling and complaining, crying real tears and kicking his cot with fury, that there was no other choice but to let the young khan out of his bed and let him roam the room at will. While they waited for Hudson to tire, they talked a little too. Dottie tried to explain why the job made her so miserable. She hated the way it took her whole day away from her, absorbed all her energies, exhausted her and gave her nothing in return. After a while, Dottie knew that Sophie was not listening any more. She looked bored, as if she had heard all this before and understood its futility. And she had, Dottie thought with some shock. This was what she had been saying for years, in some way or another. Even if she had not used the very words she had used that evening, Sophie had understood her meaning long ago.