Black Jack

by Rani Manicka

  He looked at her strangely. Something about the way she had bade him goodnight. A lost memory broke free: his mother bending down to kiss him, her mouth soft on his cheek. ‘Good night, Beautiful Klaus,’ she whispers.

  He had been so small. So innocent.

  Schooner Klaus turned resolutely away from the memory and made his way toward the other end of the mansion where a masked ball was in progress. Here, all depravity and excess were not only encouraged, but celebrated. He would drink a cup of blood and temporarily forget about the dangerous brown skinned woman until dawn.

  The Brown-Skinned Woman

  London, England

  Bumi awakened on her sofa bed, distressed, having dreamed of her dead father. He had been sitting on the steps of her childhood home in Calcutta, looking unwell and unhappy, but no one else other than her had appeared to be able to see him. He had vanished when she had tried to hug him.

  It was still dark outside, but she could see by the blue light that came from under the door of the boy’s room. Hooking her feet into her bedroom slippers she moved soundlessly to her cramped bathroom. There she switched on the little electric blow heater, and while the room warmed up, stood looking at herself in the mirror above the sink. Two years shy of forty, and already abandoned and alone.

  Once, many years ago, at a banquet held in the manor where she had worked, an English lord had lifted his wine glass to her in an ironic salute. An offer of sorts, but certainly not, ‘Correspond in secret. I am in love.’ Immediately she had averted her eyes to the wallpaper–a Liberty pattern with peacocks, peonies, and pheasants. Better to be a wild bird in the falcon’s beak than to leave the servants’ quarters through that small, unadorned door of shame. As she cleared away his dinner plate, her gaze had been pulled to his fat, be-ringed fingers, drumming on the pristine linen.

  She had understood that haughty gesture too.

  She had been born in India, after her mother had decided that six children were enough and vowed that she would not lie with her beekeeper husband again, unless one of the wild monkeys that roamed the outskirts of their village entered their house through the front door. Two days later a bold monkey did just that. Three generations of her husband’s family had lived in that house and never witnessed such a thing. The baby’s arrival became an eagerly awaited, celebrated event, a miraculous gift from the monkey god, Hanuman.

  She was named Bumi Devi, Goddess of the Earth. Her childhood had been a life cherished and untroubled by cares; running as wild as the monkeys, refusing to eat unless hand-fed, and sleeping with the safety of her parents’ bodies on either side of her. Then one day, when she was ten, she had looked out of a window, and seen the telegraph lines outside her home closely packed with still, silent crows. And every one of them was turned in her direction. Frightened, she had rushed her mother to the sinister sight, but by then they were all gone.

  ‘An ill omen,’ her grandfather had muttered, scratching his withered leg, but who could have imagined that the birds had come to call her beloved father to the next world. That Wednesday he had dropped to the floor with a heart attack. She remembered the funeral clearly, her mother wailing, ‘Take me too, take me too,’ and the cold, stiff feel of her father’s cheek when she had kissed it for the last time.

  Her brothers had taken over the hives, unsuccessfully. They had never learnt to brush the bees aside with their bare hands. Life became hard. Then at seventeen a marriage broker had come a-calling. A London based accountant desired an odd thing- an ‘unmodernized’ bride who spoke some English. She fit the bill. A week after the wedding they had travelled to England. The black cab had stopped outside a two-story, semi-detached house converted into two one-bedroom flats. He had put his key into the door and gone ahead of her, up a creaking wooden staircase to his rented abode. He had crossed the threadbare carpet, thrown open a couple of windows to let the musty odor out, turned to her and made a surprisingly prescient prediction. ‘From this day on, this will be your palace.’

  When he went to work she cooked and cleaned, and afterwards, walked up and down Hounslow’s high street until it began to shut down. His footsteps would sound on the wooden staircase about eight. He would immediately put his briefcase away, divest himself of his office clothes and present himself at their dinner table. Often they ate in silence, neither having anything to say to the other. She knew she was not in love, but she was not unhappy either. As soon as the Home Office returned her passport stamped with a two-year working visa, the Earth Goddess had found herself a job as an office cleaner.

  One day she had come home from work and found him gone from their tiny flat. There had been no note. Just a missing suitcase, a bare space where his clothes had been, and toiletries gone from the bathroom cabinet. But there had been no argument, nothing in his manner to suggest that he was in any way dissatisfied, she had reflected, bewildered. Again and again she had thought of that dawn before she had left for work; of how he had lifted one end of the duvet, called her back into their warm bed, and had his way with her.

  For many months she had gone about in an uncomprehending daze, too ashamed to even tell her mother. She would open the front door and head straight for the bedroom with the hope that he would be there. His return as mysterious as his departure.

  To pay the bills she had worked two, sometimes three jobs. Then, through ignorance, but no real fault of her own, she had become an illegal immigrant. Her temporary visa had run out. Fortunately, by then she had already secured permanent employment in the kitchens of Lord Carrington’s manor. A year and a half later, when the housekeeper of his London flat left, she had been promoted to the post.

  That was when she had got the boy.

  The boy. She would never forget the sweet day. When she had given in to a whimsical desire on her way home from work and followed a rainbow. Well, it had led to a dead-end full of overstuffed rubbish black bags, but turning away, she had thought she’d heard a cry. Later she would come to realize that it could only have been her imagination. She had moved toward the sound.

  Amongst bin bags of restaurant waste she had found a black baby sleeping inside a transparent plastic covering. She had glanced around apprehensively. Her illegal status had made her wary of any situation that involved the authorities.

  Not a soul in sight.

  She had squatted next to the baby. Pinned to its clothes had been a hastily handwritten note, the ink smudged, the letters large and ill formed.

  My name is Black Jack.

  Please help me.

  Strange - a black boy called Black Jack. He was so incredibly still; she had feared he was dead. But he had opened his eyes suddenly and stared steadily at her through the plastic. Never in her life had she seen eyes such as his. Tilted upwards like a cat’s, they were enormous with irises that glinted the way water inside very deep wells does. Looking into them she felt the same mysterious sensation she had once experienced gazing up into the night sky. A nameless, timeless, never-ending connection.

  She had put her hand beneath the plastic and touched his hair. ‘Oh!’ She had expected it to be wiry. It was soft as a cloud. Her hand had wandered to his face. Poor mite was cold. On his chest she had found a small silver cross. A little Christian. When her index finger had skimmed across his palm, he had curled his tiny fingers around it so fiercely that her heart lurched. How could anyone abandon so beautiful a thing?

  It had begun to drizzle and drops of rain fell noisily on the plastic sheet, the sound breaking the magic. A stray thought. What if his real mother changed her mind and came back for him? Hiding him in her clothes she had hurried away, to sit at the back of the bus, a thief. Heart racing, she had stared unseeingly out of the window and decided the story most likely to be believed for her sudden possession of a black baby.

  As it turned out it was a problem she had never had to address.

  Even warmed and fed, he had neither made a sound nor moved a limb of his own accord. How could it be? She had heard his cry and felt his tenacious gr
ip. But those feats were gone, left amongst the rubbish and her imagination. Poor sod had been unable to laugh or cry, or even stretch his mouth into a smile. It had taken him a whole painful hour to drink half a bottle of milk.

  Since medical assistance would have exposed her crime, she had detailed the symptoms that afflicted her boy to Lord Carrington and begged him to find the cure for the strange disease. His probing had led him to believe that it was probably a rare and incurable neurological disorder called locked-in syndrome. ‘He will never walk, talk, play, go to school or have friends. I’m afraid to say he probably won’t have a long life either,’ he had warned gravely from the depths of his great armchair. But the rainbow, she was convinced, had led her to the boy for a purpose. She would be his savior. Somehow she would sort it out.

  When even the paltry capability of sucking at a teat had frozen she had learned to feed him with soft tubes inserted down his throat. In a year the ability to blink or close his eyes, even when sleeping, had been lost. Food had gone in, waste had come out - but for his eyes that followed her around the room with huge curiosity, he was a living statue.

  Instead of buying a cot, which might have alerted her curtain-twitching neighbors, she had ordered a sofa bed for herself and moved the boy into her bedroom. She had always worked long hours, but that hadn’t mattered since he had needed nothing more than the television, left on one of the children’s channels. To feed him she had hired a woman to come in six days a week, at first three times a day, eventually whittling down to just once. Heather was chronically sullen, but, being a benefit cheat herself, could be trusted not to inform on Bumi. She had no love for the boy, but the weekly cash was a lot to her, and she had turned out to be a constant in their lives. The years had passed. The boy had turned six, then ten, and twelve, and yesterday fourteen.

  All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,

  When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.

  - ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’,

  Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (1744)

  Bumi knocked softly on Black’s door before turning the handle and going in. Black lay propped up on three pillows, his eyes turned toward her. He could say many things with those eyes of his. Yes, no, joy, sadness, interest, surprise, pleasure… That moment, he was smiling broadly at her. She approached his bed.

  She used to mind him not being able to speak, but her experiences with the world had taught her that speaking was, in fact, the art of concealing one’s real thoughts. The boy had never lied to her. Still, she was sometimes certain he spoke to her telepathically. Small things. Like, Hello. I love you, Mother. I’m cold, or I like this story you are reading to me.

  She bent forward and kissed his cheek. The whiff of apple puree. Her hands - they were ugly, the knuckles grown large and shiny with hard work - stroked the cornrows on his head. They ended in colorful beads at his shoulders - her handiwork. Many years ago she had taken the Tube to a hairdresser in Brixton to learn how to braid his hair, so different from her own.

  On the TV screen Richard Attenborough was explaining the evening habits of sea lions. Once when he was eight she had come home to find the TV on the National Geographic channel. Assuming it had been a technical glitch she had put it back on Disney, but the next day she had found it back on the Discovery channel. Her astonished eyes found his and found them a-sparkle with excitement. By will alone he had changed the channel setting. Enthusiastically, she had looked forward to other feats of mind manipulation, but many months later she had had to accept that that was the extent of his capability.

  ‘How are you this morning, my love?’ she greeted cheerfully. The large catlike eyes fixed on her, unblinking, intense, sad. In the silence inside her head she listened intently for a reply, but nothing. He had stopped responding to her for some time now. She understood: he was dying.

  He had been dying since the day she had found him, but now she felt him hurrying away faster. Already he was hardly more than a twig in autumn. The thought of life without him filled her with such horror that even the sight of a single crow while going about her day caused her sleepless nights and nightmares for weeks afterwards. Her fingers caressed his arm. Stiff as a bone, crooked at the elbow, and curled inward at the wrist. Some drool ran down the side of his face. She dabbed at it with a face towel and smiled gently. ‘I dreamed of your grandfather last night. He was sitting on the steps of our old home in Calcutta, looking well and happy…’

  With great devotion, as if she was performing a sacred ritual, she began the twice-daily, hour-long process of carefully contorting and manipulating his dead limbs one by one out of his clothes, meticulously cleaning every inch of him, swaddling his bottom and redressing him. It was a source of great pride to her that so many years bed ridden had not left him with a single bedsore. As she administered to him, she recounted all that had happened to her the day before, the people she had met, the things they had said, the gossip she had found inside the glossy magazines on Lady Carrington’s coffee table, and what she had witnessed in the streets from the bus on the way home. And all the while those beautiful, cat eyes never left her face.

  After removing the feeding tubes, she positioned his wobbly head on a thrice-folded towel at an angle to allow the collecting saliva to flow out on the towel and not his clothes. Then she lavished his face with butterfly kisses and bade him goodbye.

  The air outside smelled of winter.

  Bumi shut the door behind her and walked down the street, unaware she was watched by the man living in one of the rooms across the road.

  When she passed out of his range he moved away from the net curtains and put his binoculars away. He rubbed his unshaven face thoughtfully. His relentless obsession had begun late one night when he had spied her leaving her bathroom without even a hastily tied towel. Casual enquiries down the shops and from his landlady had brought the information that she was husbandless and lived alone. True, he had never seen anyone else come out of her door, but he was not convinced that she actually did. For one thing he saw the blue light of the TV every day while she was out.

  He had twenty minutes before he had to leave for work. He lay on his filthy bed, unzipped his jeans, and closed his eyes. First he savored that towelless body in all its glory. Then he saw himself erect and huge looming over her, grabbing her by the hips, throwing her on the bed, and doing to her what he had seen done to the shameless sluts on those special Internet sites he frequented. If she screamed he would gag her; if she resisted he would tie her. He was merciless with her. The bestial urge to have her even when he was limp and finished was so strong that he knew he must engineer a way to realize his needs very soon. Or it would eat him from the inside like a colony of white ants inside a dead wood.

  Houston, this is Discovery. We still have the alien spacecraft under observation.

  - Recording from the space shuttle Discovery

  Until they were irrevocably lost to him, Black followed his mother’s footsteps in the street below. Though he had never actually felt her hands on his numb skin or the kisses she rained on his face and hands, for the next ten hours he would desperately miss her presence. She was his whole world. Every day, he waited for the twilight hours when she would rise, and listened to the muted sounds of her movements around the small flat, until she appeared at his door beaming with goodness. Of late, though, he noticed her smile had become worn and forced, and that she herself appeared encased in a cocoon of barely suppressed dread. It saddened him greatly, but there was nothing he could do.

  He was dying and she knew it.

  Since he never slept while she was in the flat, he let his eyes blur on the ceiling, and with his eyes wide open he slipped off into sleep. The sound of a key in the street door awakened him. Feeding time, Black. Heather’s heavy tread came up the stairs and headed toward the kitchen. She arrived at his side without any eye contact. He recognized the scent on her breath. Once his mother had put one, just one, fizzy drop on his tongue, and said, ‘Coca-Cola, but
it’s bad for you.’

  For the next twenty minutes Heather’s corpulent face hovered over him, silent, efficient, and detached. She left the flat without having spoken a word, her thick shoes clunking dully down the stairs. The click of the street door closing behind her was a good sound. The carefree laughter of small children passing by floated up. A woman scolded. Their sounds faded away. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was 12.30 p.m.

  He watched a documentary, but it was a repeat, and it didn’t hold his interest. Visions of death, his own, kept intruding upon his concentration. His mother had taught him that humans reincarnated incessantly, but he had learned from watching the telly that other religions believed differently. He hoped she was right, for he longed for the chance to be returned as a normal human being.

  The news came on. Automatically he transferred his focus to it. He had an insatiable curiosity about the world outside his room. Often, he watched the broadcasts put out by all the different channels - BBC, ITV, Channel 4, CNN, Aljazeera, Fox, MSNB, and sometimes even the foreign language channels that he could not understand. After the news he flipped through the channels without finding anything worth watching. The occupants of the tree outside his window, a pair of courting pigeons, were returning. He moved his attention to them. He loved watching them.

  He was wondering if he would still be around in spring when their nest was once again filled with noisy chicks, when he experienced a strong fluttering inside his chest. It was something he had never registered in his paralyzed body before and it shocked and frightened him. Was this Death come to snatch him away? His eyes darted to the clock - at least three hours before his mother’s return. He told himself that he was not afraid of dying or what lay beyond, but he must see her one last time. Innocently, he decided to wait for her return before he died. The panic ebbed away and after a while he realized he was not dying, at least, not just yet.