Night Calypso (33 page)

Here, he bring them, their length lying against the length of his leg in his breeches, and now a clutter with all the heap of khaki on the floor behind the door where he kick them. Khaki. Stains of sweat in the armpits of his shirt, in the crotch of his pants, in the seat of his pants, where his bottom sweat. Where I must put my face. He kick them here where I kneel to find their treasure, treasure he call it.

Bring my treasure, in the bundle of clothes whose smell I know so well, so well, so long I find on the floor of his bedroom, but much longer find against my young skin in my Mama’s bed.

Here they is, as I turn to find a glimmer on his face, a glint in his eye to tell me which one he prefer.

One tonight, the smooth one, marbled green and brown, the length of the guava
bois,
or the flexible sting of the tamarind snake.

Each one I hold up, each I test for him with my finger pull along the length, bend and test against my knee, or swish in the air to hear it sing, to show that I concern that he get the best, that he get the one he need, he think I need, he know I need, and I know them, for he train me so.

Then I kneel to offer the switch. I must kneel and I must bow with my bare bottom, my flour bag nightie curl round my ankle
like a pool of moonlight, bow straight against the slat of the board bed with my face in the slat watching the cockroaches crawl on the floor.

I must wait. Wait and not know when it will hit, when it will hurt, when it will sting, when it will go on. If there is a pause, and I lose count and start again, so always it seem it is one, two, three till I reach ten. But I don’t know how many decade I have whispered here, bow and bend over the wooden bed with my face in the slat in the dark with the cockroach which tickle my toe and creep up my leg to nest. A rat chew at my toe.

That is to get him start before the ride, and the gallop through the cane piece. I must turn this way or that way, depend on how he pull his rein, pull the bridle.

Some brother think that is my virtue, my fervour for beating. Is not Friday night.

He knock on the door and say, Sufficient.

Is this Father Dominic?

He sing a song to cheer me up.
Frère Jacques, dormez vous
…
sonnez les Matinas, ding dong dong…

Not a sin to tell in confession. Is not my sin.

No one go believe, no one go know, except the one who put the key in my room. So I is the one who let him in? I is the one who say, yes, to this.

After that tale, Theo lay in the corner of his bedroom. Vincent did not stop the drama as it unfolded. He watched the re-enactment. He was relieved that he had not been invited to participate in this one, as he had done with previous re-enactments. He watched to the very end after all the newspaper cuttings were torn off the wall to make a bed of newspaper in the corner for the boy to lie down, curled like a cashew nut, like a foetus. Like a baby to be born, like a baby in a ditch.

When it was perfectly quiet, when it showed absolutely no signs of starting up again, Vincent went over to Theo heaped upon the newspaper cuttings, sweating, in a fever of his story. His warm body was clammy with the sweat and the exertion of his memory.

The story was what it was, and it had to be told. The burden was
the awful secret of it. That was the pain, the secret of it. Tell it to the world, and a kind of healing would come, retribution and forgiveness. Was that it?

This was the world that had been given to the boy: this doctor who must have reminded him of Mister, the Mister of his tale. When Vincent realised that, he felt so ashamed, so sorry, for what had been done to this son of Mister.

He wanted to go then and there find his own boy, his own son, in the arms of others, hold him and tell him that he was loved by him. He wanted to tell himself that he was loved by him. But why should he be? Why would he want to come to him now? Why would Odetta want him to come to her?

‘Theo, come boy. Come let me hold you. Theo, you are a good boy, none of this is your fault.’

That morning, there was an unusual low tide, the kind of low tide that preceded a spring tide. It was as if all the sea had been sucked out of the bay. There was a dramatic sense of exposure in the naked seabed from where Vincent looked from the bedroom window.

‘Come Theo, let’s go and walk on the sands and see the low tide.’ They walked out of the house hand in hand, passing Madeleine still asleep on the couch.

They came down the steps at the side of the jetty straight onto the sea floor. Vincent had not experienced this tide before.

Theo was amazed. ‘The sea get take away!’ They walked as far as they could, to where the waves were breaking in the warm shallows, alarming the sandpipers in a frenzy at the edge of the ocean.

They talked of tides and the power of the moon.

It was as if the world had changed to what it must have been like when Noah’s flood had subsided. Vincent had not remembered a tide quite like this. The air busy with gulls, skimming over the sandbanks and mudflats. Egrets in flight from the mangroves around Salt Pond alighted on barnacled rocks, stalking and pecking, inquisitive, pedantic in their search.

The dawn had not yet broken.

They let the silence in the wind and the waves wash over them.
It soothed the turmoil of the night. They stooped and collected shells. They found starfish and chip chips, snails and oyster shells. Blue and rust. White and pink. The snails were like white coral, like the bones Theo remembered in the midden.

When they returned to the house, Madeleine had already changed into Sister Thérèse, and left the house.

With the mail boat that morning came a letter from Vincent’s mother in town. Ti-Jean brought the mail to the door of the pharmacy, where Vincent was working that morning on his own. He had seen him struggling up from the jetty on his crutches. He took the mail, noticing that Ti-Jean’s condition had regressed. It seemed like they were not winning that battle. Oh Alexander Fleming! If he only had the stuff, Vincent sighed. Ti-Jean hung back at the door. ‘I can’t see you now, Ti-Jean. Maybe this afternoon. Find Sister Rita, if you need attention.’

‘Where Sister Thérèse?’ The boy pestered like a child, though now, suddenly, he seemed older. Made old by sickness. Vincent thought how he had not noticed his growing up, like he had noticed Theo’s.

‘Ti-Jean, you know Sister Thérèse is working up in Indian Valley now.’

‘Magdalen!’

‘What did you say, Ti-Jean?’

‘Magdalen. Is so the fellas by the almond tree calling she.’

‘Is that so?’

Ti-Jean hung his head. Vincent watched him and realised that he could not feel the pain that he should be feeling with his wounds and sores in that state. This fact always amazed him as he looked at his patients struggling. Half the battle was lost before they had started, because they were not receiving the signals. There was no pain like this body without pain.

‘Come, Ti-Jean. I know you miss her. We’ll talk later. Okay? I wouldn’t bother with what the fellas under the almond tree say.’

‘They say she get
cocobay.
She come like we.’

‘What you mean, Ti-Jean? Come like we?’

‘You know.’

‘What I know Ti-Jean is that we’re all the same, but some of us are ill. You have an illness.’

Ti-Jean lowered his head.

‘We’ll talk later.’

Vincent sat back at his desk by the window. Inserted with the letter was a telegram. He toyed with the letter and the telegram. The letter fluttered in the breeze. Magdalen, he heard Ti-Jean’s voice again. He saw her black hair, falling over her naked shoulders. They would have to make a choice, make a choice and live with it.
Cocobay,
what was Ti-Jean talking about? An irrational fear gripped Vincent. The boy was talking nonsense. He must talk to Madeleine about it. What an idea!

He unfolded the already cut open telegram.

Vincent placed his mother’s unread letter down on the desk, on his left side, with the telegram on his right. He rested his head in his hands for a moment, and then looked up and stared out over Chac Chac Bay. He watched Ti-Jean, the messenger of bad news, retracing his steps to the jetty.

Bernard was not dead. He was missing. ‘Come on, come on.’ Bernard was running away from him in the pasture at Versailles. Bernard was running fast, holding aloft a World War One plane, hurling his model aircraft into the air; the one his father and Bernard had made of balsa wood on the dining room table. What he always remembered was the sound emitted from his lungs, the terrible roar of the plane, and its eventual crash into the hibiscus hedge at the bottom of the pasture. What danger had Bernard gone into? He had been driven by a father who had returned from a previous war with shrapnel in his hip, his mind shattered, but transfigured sufficiently to be his son’s hero, his model; the Empire’s soldier.

Then the thought overwhelmed him. Bernard was missing and he had not got to know him. He had not got to really talk and share a life with his brother.

While he had followed his passion for Odetta, Bernard had dreamt of being an airman. He had sat for hours, it seemed, listening to stories of the front, to stories of Verdun and the Somme. The very words sounded like the distant thunder of the guns. Foreign fields.

All these thoughts and feelings flooded Vincent’s mind as he played with the pages of his mother’s letter, and the stern impersonality of the telegram, telling him that his brother was missing somewhere in Europe.

As he sat there and watched the mail boat,
George the V
^th
,
leave the bay to return to town, he felt himself shaking uncontrollably. There was a terrible croak coming from his throat. There was a stifled sob wanting to break from his chest. His eyes filled with tears, flooded his cheeks, falling onto his mother’s letter. Smudged Quink ink ran along the lined writing paper.

The telegram, with news of Bernard missing in action, fell from the desk in the breeze.

The bay was hot and bright. The coconut palms scratched the air. Cocks crowed and Vincent could hear the end of Singh’s speech under the almond tree. ‘Vote for your rights and your freedom. Tell them Yankees where to go.’ The vote was unanimous. Singh would never give up. The banging of crutches confirmed their intent. ‘Vote for Rehabilitation!’ They would hold Mother Superior to her undertaking to get their wages increased, to get the huts repaired for the married quarters. She would have to get the money from the Colonial Office or from the Americans.

From the window of the clinic, Vincent was surprised to see Theo in the crowd standing next to Christiana. They were smiling and laughing. Then Singh joined them and they all three went off towards the pharmacy. When had the boy learnt about love and got rid of his fear? This must be the gradual, healing magic of his own stories.

The door opened. Vincent did not turn around until he had regained his composure. When he did, he saw that it was Madeleine. ‘Why are you here? You know the rules.’ She, also, held a letter in her hand. The envelope carried innumerable stamps, telling of its travels, its crossing of borders, getting by censors, approved by many different bureaucracies.

‘There’s been another deportation from Drancy to Auschwitz.’

She spoke the names as casually as if they were neighbouring islands. She announced it like it had happened yesterday, paying no attention to the interval between the occurrence of these events and the time it took for the news to travel. She sounded unaware of all the things which could have happened since that news was sent. Time played its tricks with her hope and faith.

‘A sister at Notre Dame du Lac, you remember, the Abbey near Montreal, has a brother in the Free French in London. They managed to get the message through on a convoy which made a safe crossing. He has written a letter, sending it through their organisation’s underground, giving us the most vivid accounts we have yet had. Sister Rita brought it up to me this afternoon. She smuggled it out of Mother Superior’s mail bag. My nightmares are true.’ Madeleine stood at the open door transfixed, blurting out the account.

Drancy, Auschwitz: now the names came from another planet, another life. Thérèse’s father, a prisoner of war, not because he had been fighting and captured, but just because of who he was, a Jew.

His brother Bernard, missing. He remembered a trip to Paris and a train journey through Normandy. Verdun, Somme. His father had said that he must visit those places. Constantly now, this sense of life here and life there, life elsewhere. The West Indian regiment, the Empire. The century was falling apart.

Singh had lectured this morning to his university of hunger of the great Labour Movement, the rights of workers. Vincent saw his patients under the almond tree listening patiently, their rotting limbs, their blind eyes, their legless bodies; casualties of a war that was fought along their nerve ends. This would be his war effort, the life and health of these patients, shunted onto this island with a voluntary nursing force. Who was the war for? Not them. Not Madeleine’s father.

She came to stand at Vincent’s side. She saw the open letter and the telegram on his desk. At any moment, someone else would enter, they thought. She stood with her hands under her scapular like a good nun, her fingers worrying the beads of her rosary which hung at her side, not in prayer, but in agitation. Once she had her habit on, she possessed a certain demeanour. She felt that if she did not hide her hands, occupy them, she would stroke the nape of Vincent’s neck. She would bend and kiss that naked nape which she could see under the white collar of his shirt as she stood behind him. She could see down his brown back to a depth of three vertebrae. She now stood back from the chair.

Vincent continued to stare out to the bay and then down at his mother’s letter and the telegram from the Colonial Office in London.

‘You’ve had news?’

‘Yes.’

She would have to extract it from him. She was so open with her terror, her news. He now felt so angry. He had had to keep back his tears when she entered the room, holding back his emotion. She with her own story, as ever, now irritated him. All these emotions were confused and confusing. He had better sit and not get up and look at her.

‘Is it from England?’

‘Yes, and a letter from my mother.’

Vincent began to fold the letter and the telegram back along their creases and put them into the envelope. ‘Ti-Jean brought them up this morning.’ It was something to say, to fill the silence. He could feel her behind him.

Their minds and hearts were somewhere else, hers with a father and his with a brother. He did not know where Bernard was missing, whether it was over Germany or France. A letter was following. It would take a while. His mother had hope, hope got her over this time. What would get him over this time? Vincent stood up and pushed back his chair. She moved to the door. Vincent turned and looked at her.

‘Don’t leave.’

She stood with her hands on the handle of the door.

‘You are hurt. I can see that. Why don’t you share with me what hurts you? I do.’ She stood looking at him pleading with her eyes, her tears brimming and trickling out of her huge black eyes. The sound of the yard was coming through the open window. They could hear the other sisters and patients walking in the corridor above. Now, suddenly, it sounded as if someone wanted to come into the surgery. Thérèse held the door firmly. She raised one hand to wipe away a tear.

‘It’s my brother. Bernard. He’s missing. My mother had the telegram yesterday.’

‘I’m sorry. To imagine it, the danger of it, those flights. I look at the planes here and I think of the men in them. The body’s so fragile.’ She held up her hands and made as if examining them medically.

‘He had always wanted to fly. Flying excited him. He would’ve been so excited when he went out.’

‘He must’ve been afraid too? Yes?’

‘Yes, I expect he was. No, he must’ve been. I would’ve been. But then Bernard was different, is different. He wanted to go to the war. He was obsessed by my father’s stories, when he told them, when he was capable of telling them.’

‘My father wanted to save life,’ Thérèse declared.

‘I’m sure he will. That must be what he’s doing.’

‘Its a work camp they say, making the best use of people.’ She comforted herself with her explanation.

Again, Vincent focused on the wisps of black hair straying from beneath her veil. He wanted to lean out and touch them, take them between his fingers. ‘Some of your hair has escaped.’ She had begun to stroke the nape of his neck. With his finger, he prized up the edges of the tight cotton cap beneath her veil, a surgeon’s fingers tucking away, preparing to stitch it up. The palm of his hand brushed against her cheek. He held her hand. He was examining her skin. ‘What’s this I hear from Ti-Jean about you having
Cococbay.
’

‘Nonsense. You know how rumour spreads. It’s because of my work in the hills with the very bad patients. I’m fine. Look, look Doctor.’ She held out her hands.

He pulled her close to him and kissed her.

Someone was just outside the door where there was a cupboard with fresh linen. They stood waiting. The cupboard was closed, and then the person retreated down the wooden floor of the corridor. They could tell it was one of the other sisters, by the swish of her habit, the click of her rosary beads. Why were they putting themselves through this?

‘I’ll see you later. You must take extreme care always.’

She smiled closing the door gently behind her.

Back at the house that evening, Vincent continued to think of Bernard. His fear had not hampered his desire to fly. It had propelled him. At that moment, he remembered one of Bernard’s letters. He could not give much away about the actual operations. But he did talk about his feelings. Bernard’s letters to Vincent were more explicit about mess life than the letters he wrote to his mother.

“After a flight I can’t wait to get to the bar. The first pint is the best. I knock it back in one. I’m not complete again until I have that drink, chased by a scotch and then lots of cigs, and another pint and then it really gets going, the stories we tell each other. Some of the lads fight.” He had become so English. “They have to fight to rid themselves of all the horrible feelings. They have to get something out of them. It’s all that fear exploding, all that real pleasure.”

Then, Vincent realised more profoundly that he might never see him again. He missed the life he had not had with his brother.

‘Fear excited him.’ Vincent was very close to Madeleine’s face as she bent over his shoulder.

Transformed from a nun, she wore her forever-blue cotton dress with the forget-me-nots.

‘My fear is in the pit of my stomach,’ she held her hand there.

As if he were her doctor, Vincent turned towards her and pressed his hand on her stomach, pressing his hand, here and then there. ‘Does that hurt?’ he smiled.

‘What’re we doing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Your brother, my father.’

‘Us.’

‘Us.’ They echoed each other.

‘Yes.’

‘Kiss me.’ He heard her soft invitation. He could hardly breathe. He had hardly room to move. They were already so close. He turned his head and touched her lips with his mouth. They each listened to the familiar world out there, conscious of the world beating in their chests. Vincent smelt the
vertivert
which she wore. He smelt the scent of the soap in which her underclothes were washed. He smelt the smell of her sweat. As he kissed her, her body as a nun came back to him; the body he had so long desired. They were back at the boathouse that first time, as if they could not move from there. They rose. He took her dress off, as he had done her habit and her veil, and made a soft bed for them to lie down right there, on the floor of the drawing room. As they fucked hard against each other, a vision of her shaven head came to him as she fell to the floor under him. When they got up they were astonished at what they had done. They stood and looked at Theo, sitting on the jetty, fishing.