Night Calypso (24 page)

‘Tell me what else you hear.'

‘Doc, I wasn't there, but Jonah
pardner,
Aaron, he tell me the thing start with fellas pelting bottle and stone by Mother Superior office, late afternoon.'

‘Pelting bottle and stone. Man, I think Singh had this thing under control. What else, Lal?'

‘I only telling you what I hear. I ent see nothing.'

‘Yes, I not blaming you, Lal.'

‘There was a service. And when the Archbishop walking back up to the Mother Superior office after the service, they say the children sing sweet. So Doris tell me. But anyway, is then some young fellas, they head hot, begin to pelt stones.'

‘Pelting stones!'

‘They have that new fella with them that just reach from Laventille, the one who playing one of them new steel pan, they say people up Laventille making out of the oil drum. They was to bring it out on the streets for carnival and the Governor ban the carnival. Anyway, they have this fella under the almond tree playing he ping pong.'

‘So?'

‘Well the local police, they tell him to stop, as they having service and he making too much noise.'

‘And?'

‘The fella say he not stopping. He say this is a free country and he playing he ping pong.'

‘Just so.'

‘Just so. You know how them young fellas stop! When the police move to push him on, right so the fight start. Then the fellas who start the marching earlier, come and join in, even more come and join in. They say they lucky to get the Archbishop and the Governor Secretary down to the jetty just in time to take them to the police launch that bring them, otherwise nobody know what might've happen to them. But that ent stop the pelting and the cussing. Mother Superior try and talk to some of the more reasonable ones, and then she take she boat for the convent. Is when it get dark that the real business start.'

‘I tell Singh to take it easy. And now the Yanks involved with the fire fighting. We lucky for that,' Vincent said.

‘Yea, but first they come in with guns, you know, walking around the place with guns, threatening to shoot poor people, yes. You should've be here, you know, Doc.'

‘They can't shoot people. But we must put out the fires. This is one of the biggest risks for all of you, as you know, Lal.'

‘I know what you saying Doc, but people ready to die, you know. Them young fellas ready to die.'

‘Well, at least I hope they put out the fires.'

‘Yes, but now they'll think the place is their responsibility. To come in here any time, like is their yard, and sort things out. They say the British Governor ask them to come in and deal with the matter. You know the British. Them is talk. But the Americans, since the Japs in their tail, they ready to go anywhere they see trouble.'

‘You take care of yourself, Lal.'

‘Yes, but now they'll think the place is their responsibility, Doc.'

Vincent saw the dilemma.

‘You can't do nothing, Doc.' That was Lalbeharry's verdict.

‘There must be something Lal.' But where would he start.

Then he thought of the pharmacy, the records of their research, the painstaking records kept by Thérèse. Would they be going up in flames? He decided to leave Lal and go towards the hospital.

Many were afraid of fire and that was why they were out in the paths, and staying in the open. He had to agree that that was sensible.

If you abuse a people this much, they will abuse themselves and others. Vincent was encouraging some of the older patients to take the children with them to their huts. Of course, all the segregations which they had organised against the spread of the disease were now destroyed. Maybe this would prove something, that quarantines did not affect anything, which is what they thought anyway.

There were screams coming from the direction of the stores. While part of the building was in flames, other rooms were being looted. The screams were because the Marines from their launches were now turning the water hoses on the people rather than on the flames. They were landing on the shore, beneath the jetty, and aiming the powerful water hoses on the looters.

Vincent decided to intervene in this. For while he could see the point, it was dangerous. Patients would be killed, and he did not want this added intervention by the American Marines. He sought out the sergeant in charge of the operation. His pleas were ignored. In the end he had to enter among those being hosed down. He decided to stand at the front of the line, taking the brunt of the pressure, which was forcing him back.

It was then that Vincent saw Jonah coming from among the looters who had transported foodstuffs in a wheelbarrow away from the stores. There was Singh as well. If they were not leading the riot, they were at least supervising it.

‘Jonah!' His voice was lost among the screams and the power of the water. He was helping up patients knocked to the ground, and singlehandedly trying to keep back the soldiers, telling them to concentrate on the fire and leave the patients alone. Eventually, Singh and Jonah saw him and joined his efforts. They were beginning to make some headway in their persuasion. The hoses stopped being trained on the patients.

‘Everything gone ole
mas
.' That was Jonah's estimation. Singh looked worried, but kept silent.

‘Why was I not called earlier?'

‘There was no time to come by you, Doc. What? Get boat, get donkey? Things take off, and before you know it, the people rampaging around. Them children, they not easy, you know.'

‘So what was it?'

‘When people see the preparations for the Governor secretary and the Archbishop, they boil over. They see for themselves. They don't always understand the things that we does talk about. But when they see how the government and the church can make things happen for a visit, and they can't produce food and medicine, they boil over. Women and children the most violent. They pelt the Archbishop you know, right down to the jetty. As they singing
Come Holy Ghost Creator Come,
they pelt him with rock stone. They pelt the Governor secretary. They still keep some control when Mother Superior beg them to stop. We stay right out of it. She tells us to stay out of things today. We stay out.'

Vincent stared at his comrades gravely. He believed them. But he wished it had not happened. He wished that they were not now going to have to start all over again, with trying to get the supplies of medicine and food. But maybe this would do it. Otherwise, they should let the patients die.

‘They should let we die, Doc.' He turned round. It was Ti-Jean on some self-made crutches from guava wood. He looked terrible. He had lost a lot of weight. Vincent could smell his putrefying sores. The poor child!

‘Ti-Jean,' he stopped himself from reprimanding the boy. ‘You look out for the smaller children. Then, I want to see you back at the ward. Do that for me.'

‘Is that I doing the whole time. But…'

‘But?'

‘But pushing fire too. You see them big people, Doc? Where you is all day? We look for you. Someone say Sister Thérèse gone to look for you. She find you?'

Jonah and Singh, who were listening, looked at Vincent to see what he was going to say.

‘Sister Thérèse?' Vincent sounded defensive.

‘She take Elroy donkey and say she going to look for you. She take the back track. She get permission from one of the Yankee fellas,' Ti-Jean continued.

‘I think he take a liking for her. I see him helping she up on the donkey.' Jonah laughed.

‘Jonah.' Jonah loved the
picong.

‘Easy, Doc, you know is joke. I joking.'

He and Singh winked at each other. Vincent was examining Ti-Jean's crutches, ignoring the attention paid to Sister Thérèse. He did not want to have to lie that he had not seen her.

‘So you see she?' Singh asked, casting a glance at Jonah.

Ti-Jean looked on.

‘I think she's down by the lower huts with the older women.'

‘Is so?'

‘I rowed over, leaving the dinghy down by that small beach. I'm sure she's down there helping the older women.'

‘You row?' Singh sounded surprised.

‘Yes.'

‘Why you didn't come on the back track? So she didn't reach you with the donkey?' They were putting him through his paces.

‘I'm sure she's by the huts. In fact, I think I'll go and see her, and see how the women are. Ti-Jean you come with me.'

Singh and Jonah watched Vincent, they smiled.

‘Don't play with fire, Doc,' they called after him.

Vincent turned and waved. He knew what they were saying. He and Ti-Jean changed direction to visit the pharmacy. So Singh felt that he had something on him, Vincent thought. That was it. That was why he could be bold with Christiana. He had kept the girl on the island for love. She was ready to risk it.

As Vincent and Ti-Jean approached the pharmacy, they saw the light on. Vincent's heart leapt. Just what he had imagined, the place had been ransacked.

‘Ti-Jean, you wait here.'

On entering, he discovered Thérèse.

‘Madeleine!' He wanted to take her in his arms. Ti-Jean was at the door.

‘We had the same thoughts.'

‘Is everything alright? Let me have a look.' He joined her at the files with the results of their tests and their detailed records on all the patients.

‘No one's been here, thank God. This has not been their target. This is not what they're against. We should've known that. They've
sense. They know who's responsible for their plight and who wants to do something about it.'

‘You're right, but sometimes I think we get identified with the authorities. We're on the front line.'

‘Well, thank God everything is fine here.'

‘Ti-Jean is outside, maybe we should go to the hospital together. Is everything okay with you, about being here? Or are you feeling that you should be at the convent?'

‘I stayed with the older women for a while, and then I got anxious about here. I got anxious just staying there, not knowing what was happening.'

‘What will you do now?'

‘I don't know. We'll have to wait for tomorrow. I don't know what this night will bring. What has been seen, what others know?' She knew the risks she had taken.

Once Vincent and Thérèse had got up to the hospital, they saw that the night's riots were quietening down.

The children were wandering back from the excitement to their beds. No curfew or blackout restrictions were in operation. This could have been the night for the German U-Boat invasion. Vincent and Thérèse went around the childrens' wards tucking up the boys and girls into bed. Thérèse read one of the children's stories. The lamps burnt in the huts on the hills.

She changed Ti-Jean's bandages. When Vincent went out onto the verandah to smoke a cigarette, she took over the nursing, soothing his brow with Limacol, giving him water to sip. He was becoming delirious with a very high temperature.

Vincent asked Jonah to go to the house to see how Theo had been. Then he came back onto the ward and sat with Ti-Jean again. He and Thérèse kept watch on the ward till dawn. He worried that the boy might develop an infection he could not fight. ‘Oh Alexander Fleming!'

‘What did you say?' Thérèse looked up. She had her eyes closed.

‘Nothing.'

As quiet descended, a gunshot was heard detonating over the island, echoing across Chac Chac Bay.

The Wagnerian concert at Father Meyer’s was blaring from the gramophone on the verandah. ‘Like he going mad, Doc,’ Jonah laughed aloud over the drone of the motor and the strains of the
Gotterdammerung!

A mine-sweeper was passing just across the front of Chac Chac Bay. Never, now, could they delude themselves that they were not at war. The wake was flecked with flame.

Jonah was quiet, and Vincent remained with his own meditation, after an inconclusive meeting with Singh, Mother Superior and Major McGill over the shooting of Eldrige Padmore, one of the young patients. He had not heeded the warning not to trespass into the base. Because of the night of the riot, the troops were taking no chances. This was how the argument ran, as Major McGill described the circumstances of the shooting the night before. Some, thinking back to the burning of Michael Johnson, saw it as a life for a life.

Vincent was late for Theo whom he knew would be looking forward to swimming and fishing. His mind was now on the boy, who was still refusing to return to Singh for lessons. As he passed by the pharmacy, he had seen Christiana and Singh in the the back room. He was going to stop, but then the shutters were closed. How could he challenge Singh? He and Jonah suspected something about Thérèse.

‘We’ll win through, Jonah.’ His mind was back on the shooting.

‘We have to win, Doc. We have to win. I know that my father never go in the
gayelle
unless he think he going to win. But you can’t have them Yanks shooting innocent people because they climbing a fence.’

‘There’s going to be an inquiry, and there has to be an apology to the family. There has to be compensation. Singh and myself will fight for that. He was a young fella with promise.’

‘People not going to take that sitting down. They go remember that shot in the future. Things don’t just go away so.’

Vincent was exhausted. The whole night had been taken up with nursing Ti-Jean’s fever, bringing down his temperature. Ma Cowey and Sister Marie-Joseph attributed his recovery to their prayers. Vincent had seen these things happen. Sometimes, you were lucky. He thought he was losing Ti-Jean last night. If only he had that Penicillin they were talking about. They had stores of it for the Marines. That’s what they needed from the Yanks and the British, rather than guns and water hoses. ‘We need Penicillin, instead of bullets!’

‘What you say, Doc?’

‘Penicillin!’

‘I hear is a kind of miracle.’

They pulled along the jetty. ‘Who’s that at the window?’ Vincent asked.

‘Must be Theo.’

‘Yes. Looked like a girl, though.’

Vincent and Jonah said their brief goodbyes, neither eager for much conversation or banter. ‘I’ll see you, man.’

Vincent patted Jonah on the shoulder as he raised himself out of the pirogue onto the jetty.

‘Take it easy, Doc. In the morning, please God.’

The motor was running and the pirogue turned and headed off into the declining light, the shimmer of pink on the water.

Vincent waved. He read the pirogue’s name; as always,
In God We Trust,
painted in yellow capitals on the side of the red bow.

There was no Theo on the jetty fishing. There was no boy in the window under the gable. The verandah was empty. The doors into the drawing room were open. There was a settled gloom in contrast to the brightness of outside.

There was a quiet overshadowing the house. Theo must be in his room. He must have had a day working at his walls. Must have
been a day of cutting up newspapers. He smelt the flour and water paste.

Vincent put down his bag by the drawing room door. He called once, ‘Theo,’ but there was no answer. He flung his cream linen jacket over the back of a chair, tossed his Panama onto the side table. He flopped into one of the long chairs on the verandah. Soon, he had fallen off into a deep sleep.

When Vincent opened his eyes, he awoke into a lilac evening. The very last of the light hung over Patos. It took him more than a few seconds to realise what he was seeing in the chair opposite. His groggy mind had read the form as Theo. Now he sat up with a start.

‘Hello, yes. Who are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here? Where’ve you come from?’

The questions tumbled out quickly, as Vincent tried to gain some sense of what was happening, clearing his eyes. The figure was still and silent. Then he turned and called into the house, ‘Theo Theo!’ He was desperate to see the boy, for the boy to come downstairs and put things right. But then, just as he thought that, he again turned back to the figure on the chair and stared intently. He took a long, careful look. ‘My God, Theo, what’ve you done?’

There was no reply. ‘Theo, Theo!’ Vincent sat on the edge of the long chair and stared. He pleaded and stretched towards the figure, withdrawing his hand just before touching the silken knee.

Because of the smallness of his frame and his height, he could easily be mistaken for a girl. It was not the red satin dress and the high-heeled shoes and stockings. It was not the green scarf tied into a turban, which yes, did give an exotic impression. It was the face itself, heavily painted with lipstick and rouge and a sweet smelling powder. It was smeared on with a heavy hand. While it gave to the young face a macabre, perverse beauty, a carnival mask look, it mimicked someone older, someone more sophisticated and knowing, who knew what this painted face meant, who this painted face was. This was more than a child dressing up as some character, or a child making a mess of what could be better executed; a boy getting it wrong, not knowing how to apply lipstick and rouge,
how to use powder. No, it was deliberate. The heavy hand had painted this lipstick on so that the lips looked fuller and the cheeks looked heightened. This was done by a knowing hand, a hand with intent; a mimic yes, but a mimicking which had a history, and which seemed perverse in one so young. Clearly the figure, as she sat and stared, was a courtesan. He did not think whore or prostitute. He thought courtesan, suggested by her poise, her sophistication, that made Vincent wonder how it was learnt.

Maybe it was the setting, the colonial architecture mimicking with its lacy fret work the grandeur of older houses, those of an
ancien régime,
an order of the kind that Theo played at previously with masters and servants, now master and his mistress.

There was no conversation. He had the distinct feeling that the boy was doing this to entertain him, to titillate him. Where did all these clothes come from? Where had he got the lipstick and rouge and powder? Then he thought, the brown grip. How much more would be produced from that brown grip; a magician’s chest. The boy was like a conjuror.

Had Theo put on this performance in the friary for Father Dominic? What were his words in that first letter? ‘We need the boy out of the island for a number of reasons.’ Could this be one of them?

Vincent wanted to touch the boy. Anything physical might give all the wrong messages. The thought frightened him. Thank God no one else was seeing this. What would they think? This was a preposterous scene. He was now fully awake.

There was still some grey, cloudy, shell-pink light.

Soon, he would have to go inside and draw the blackout curtains, and light the kerosene lantern. The generators had failed again today. Could not the Yankees, at least, get that to work? Killing a boy on a barbed wire fence! Vincent’s anger returned.

The familiar tolls of the evening Angelus filled the air. The figure of the courtesan knelt and signed herself with the sign of the cross. She whispered the prayer, ‘The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary and she conceived by the Holy Ghost.’ Vincent watched and listened. He waited for the completion of each stage of the Marian prayer, his own lips moving unconsciously over the words he knew by heart.

Then he exclaimed, “Theo! Theo!” This was all that Vincent could manage. He leant over to the boy to take his hand. But, at that moment, the figure rose, and went and stood near the ledge of the verandah. He, she, looked out to sea, and then turned back, and looked at him over his, her shoulder.

The boy was like a young woman. The high-heeled shoes gave him more stature, stretched his legs, gave him hips, and made his bottom jut out. The green turban enhanced his height, elongating his neck. The fast encroaching darkness, the play of shadow and light, gave the sense that the figure was disappearing and then, suddenly again, appearing.

The courtesan draped herself on the ledge of the verandah.

The drone of an Albacore in the distance, then its twinkling lights, took Vincent away from the scene for a moment to a
bomb-carrying
Spitfire with Bernard, somewhere over Europe.

He had a brother somewhere with his load to drop. The newspaper photographs of the bombed cities and the strafed fields startled the day with their grained memories. His father had talked of the poppies during the earlier war. Mud, shell holes, poppies. Images from far away. From trenches. Little things that bring things back. He could still hear his father dragging his leg along the verandah at Versailles. ‘That poor man.’ He heard Sybil’s voice in the kitchen. His father! He used to peep at him, the weak man with his sick leg, through the jalousies of the gallery. Bernard’s hero!

When Vincent turned from closing the doors onto the verandah, drawing the thin blackout curtains, the masquerade was leaning over the dining room table. As she moved away, the increasing glow of two candles which stood in silver candle sticks, revealed a dinner table laid for two. The table was covered with a white damask linen tablecloth. There was silver cutlery, laid for fish and meat. Crystal wine and water glasses twinkled. At the centre of the table was a cut glass bowl with wild white orchids.

More of Versailles had been unpacked from the trunks and packing cases under the stairs.

This was game number two. On what did the boy draw for this drama?

The courtesan emerged from the kitchen with a small kerosene lantern in one hand, and a tray of
hors d’oeuvres
in the other,
Coquille Saint Jacques
in scallop shells. Vincent remembered them, they were a familiar sight on his mother’s dining room table. Theo placed one in front of him, and then the other, in the place reserved for himself, at the opposite end of the table.

The kerosene lantern’s light flickered on the familiar vases, silver
entrée
dishes, trays and crystal decanters which used to stand prominently on the sideboard at Versailles with rum, whisky and sherry. Theo had known how to place everything so expertly. His were eyes that had seen these things. As a child, he had observed another hand dusting and cleaning. He had heard a madam instructing her servant.

But where had he found the figure of the courtesan to accompany the drama of this interior? Yesterday, he might have worn a cap and apron to carry out the role of servant. Today he was not the madam. Who was he mimicking, from where did the history of this mimicry come? He had his Ma Dellacourt stories. Yes, but this performance had the characteristics of a closer observation.

The courtesan, at the opposite end of the table from him, surveyed the doctor eating while she forked a morsel of
Coquille Saint Jacques
into her red mouth. In the absence of wine, she got up and filled Vincent’s wine glass with the red sorrel. In doing so, she rubbed her shoulders against his. Vincent froze. They ate in silence, knives and forks clicked on the scallop shells.

Coquille Saint Jacques
was followed by chicken, rice and peas and yam. Vincent marvelled at Theo’s ingenuity, creations out of nothing. The poultry was a mystery. But, a patch of chicken peas at the top of the yard behind the sorrel bushes accounted for the vegetable. He must have been going at this all day.

After dessert of home-made vanilla ice cream, churned in an old freezer, Theo went to wind up the gramophone and put on a record. The soft saxophone seeped through the room. He lit a cigarette for Vincent.

The table was cleared. Vincent wondered what would follow. Maybe, Salome and the dance of the seven veils! He was trying to
be ridiculous to himself, to deal with the macabre nature of what was going on, engineer his own humour.

He sat and smoked. The scratchy blues seeped through the house; one of his records collected in London’s Soho. Miss Billie Holliday played over the surfaces, nestled in the crevices of the room, flickered in the candle-lit shadows.

Theo went back and forth from the dining room into the kitchen, clearing the table. When he leant over the table to brush off the remaining crumbs, Vincent said, ‘Thank you,’ quietly blowing puffs of smoke into the haze of the room, the two candles burning down, the kerosene lantern, humming and flickering, ‘Thank you. It was a delicious meal, a charming evening.’ He chose his words carefully. He played his part.

The boy needed to be doing what he was doing, and he, Vincent, needed to play this part, so that Theo could in turn play his. If he stopped it, he might prevent some important retrieval. Vincent did not know now how far this game would go, when he would have to stop pretending, and what would be finally demanded. He needed to trust his instincts. This must have happened to poor Father Dominic. Had he been asked to witness something he could not accept, or participate in, something he could not be part of as a friar, something tempting, perhaps, and dangerous?

Theo stopped brushing the crumbs, leaning across the table. Vincent could see down into the dress, the small frame of the boy. He had not stuffed himself with false bosoms like a pantomime figure. It was the boy’s chest, Theo’s flat brown chest.

This was Theo, who was nearly always bare backed while he worked around the house, while he fished on the jetty. There was something poignant in seeing the boy’s chest revealed beneath the red satin. He wanted him back. But it might only be possible by allowing this charade to continue to its conclusion.

The courtesan withdrew, taking with her the damask linen tablecloth, shaking it out, folding it and putting it into one of the drawers of the sideboard. Vincent sat back.