The Devil on Her Tongue (18 page)

“I am Shada,” she said. “It means ‘fragrant smell’ in my language.”

I put my head on her chest again, feeling the almost unbearable lightness of her hand on my head. “You have been a good daughter,” she said, and I wept anew.

Through my tears I matched my breathing to hers. It joined us, bringing a strange comfort. Although I had thought my mother as hard as one of the diamonds my father had spoken of, I knew now that beneath my cheek beat a soft, secret heart.

Eventually I lay beside her. I put my arms around her, and her thin warmth was comforting. For the first time in many years, I felt like a child again, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, my mother stared at the ceiling as though it carried a deep, important message, and I was alone in the world.

As the lovebirds twittered, I undressed my mother, layer by layer. She had only ever rolled her sleeves to her elbows as she scrubbed her hands before working with the women. I had seen her bare feet, and occasionally her ankles, but her long skirts usually dragged on the ground.

Now her limbs, so thin, were heavy in death. As I manoeuvred her arm out of the last sleeve and pulled off the ragged blouse, I cried out, my hands flying backwards as if her cool body burned me.

And then I breathed deeply, studying her torso in the morning light. She was covered in images from her collarbone to her pubic bone, down her arms and legs to the elbows and knees. Many sailors’ arms carried pictures of their past voyages and of women they’d left behind, mothers and sweethearts. My mother’s marks were unlike any of those crude depictions. The black of some was dark and deep; others were faded to pale grey. There were stars and crosses, palm trees and snakes, diamonds and feathers and the sun and rows of
links and many, many intricate designs in wondrous detail of beings I couldn’t name. And the moon in all its ages, from thin crescent to full.

“Who were you, Shada?” I whispered, laying her back down and stroking her cheek. “Who were you?”

I washed my mother, and then dressed her in a clean skirt and blouse. I put some of her favourite necklaces around her neck, and strung her wrists with bracelets. I brushed her long black hair and wove bright red poppies through it. I twisted small rocks into a piece of old fishing net and then tied it around my mother’s waist.

After I had dressed her, I folded her hands on her waist before they became too frozen in death. I wanted one more night with her. When darkness came, I lay down on my side on my own pallet, watching her. I drifted in and out of a strange sleep filled with visions. Each time I opened my eyes, I thought my mother might suddenly smile at me, and tell me more, perhaps about the images on her body, or perhaps, again, that she was glad she had been my mother. That she loved me.

I felt a strange calm, watching her still form. It wasn’t grief; I had already grieved too long, wanting what she couldn’t give me, watching her leaving while still with me.

As the sun rose, I waded into the sea, holding her against me as though I were the mother and she my child. In spite of her belt of stones, the water carried her weight, making her light in my arms. When the water was up to my chest, I kissed her cheek, and then straightened my arms. “Here is Shada,” I said into the still air, although I didn’t know to whom I spoke. “Please, take Shada,” I repeated, and then I pushed her as far as I could, watching her float out, out, out on the wave I had chosen for her. As she floated away, sinking gradually, it appeared she raised her head and looked at me, a ruse of the new sun on the undulating, glinting water.

Nevertheless, I slowly waved to her. When the water closed over her, I turned and made my way back to the empty hut.

T
he warning signs for calamity can be so small and insignificant. Clouds approach, the wind changes, there is a sudden shift in the flight of birds. Does one say these are simply the usual portents of an approaching storm, or of a drop in the air temperature? Are any of these occurrences so strange on an island’s hot night?

It was a few months after my mother’s death that I felt this difference in the air as I went to Rooi’s. Living alone had changed me, and more and more I spoke to the lovebirds and to myself. I was often in an oddly unmindful state, not watching and listening closely. This night I chose unwisely, sitting with a filthy, pock-faced sailor and pulling out my box of dominoes. I smelled absinthe as we played, and knew he had brought his own flask with him, drinking the nearly lethal swill instead of rum or wine. I knew full well that absinthe could create viciousness along with drunkenness. Many of the brawls in the inn were caused by that evil brew. But I ignored what I knew.

We played three games. By the third he no longer smiled at me but caught my forearm and turned over my clenched hand, looking for a tile. I opened my hand innocently; it was empty. I had played the game long enough to never be caught using the extra tiles. He rose with a lurch, knocking over his bench and draining his cup, tossing it to the ground, pulling me to my feet. “You’re cheating me. Come on,” he said. “Out behind the inn. You can work for the money you stole from me.”

I shouted for Rooi. He came with two other sailors, grabbed the man and shoved him to the door. I played another few games, and when the last sailor had left Rooi’s, I picked up a candle as I went to the door. “That sailor will have gone back to his ship, won’t he?”

“
Ja
,
ja
, girl,” Rooi said, banging open the door and looking up and down the street. “He was just drunk. He’s long gone.”

My candle held high in the now still night, I counted the skiffs as I passed the wharf; all twelve were there. That meant there were no sailors still loitering, waiting for a ride back. Still, I had a sense of unease, remembering the man’s pupils sharp and tiny as pinpoints, the grip of his huge hand on my arm.

A short distance from the wharf, a steely grip caught my shoulder. I cried out, the box of dominoes falling. I whirled round. In the candlelight, the scarred skin and unfocused eyes were even more frightful.

“Think you can cheat me and get away with it?” he asked, his breath foul.

I swiped at his face with the candle, but he knocked it from my hand as though it were a feather. It rolled in the sand, snuffed out, and the darkness closed in on us.

“Here,” I said, my mouth dry, scrabbling in my pocket and pulling out the coins I’d earned. “Take your money.” I looked over his shoulder, calculating how to duck around him and run back to Rooi’s.

That second of hesitation was my undoing. Before I had a chance to act, he grabbed my arm as he had in the inn, the coins flying into the sand. His anger and the absinthe had made him doubly strong. “You think you can act like a whore and then pretend you’re too good for me?”

When I opened my mouth to protest, he hit me across the face with such force I fell to my knees. He grabbed my shoulders and forced me onto my back, then straddled me and slapped me across the face again with the back of his calloused, meaty hand. I was stunned, blinking up at him. I felt something hard under my palm, and lifted it, smashing the stone into his cheekbone. He yelled a curse, and punched me in my left eye.

There was a scalding explosion and I heard a popping sound and then saw only red in the dark night, and this shock—surely he had blinded me—turned me into an animal.

I screamed as I fought him, scratching and kicking. But such was his strength that he flipped me over with ease in spite of my thrashing arms and legs. He put one hand on the back of my head and held my face into the sand. With his other hand, he forced me to my knees, and then he shoved up my skirt and violated me with shocking brutality. My face deep in the sand, I struggled to turn my head, to take a breath.

I was being ripped apart. Time faded in and out. And then I was on my back again and his hands were around my neck. As I felt myself losing consciousness, I heard someone screaming—surely it couldn’t be me—and then saw, through a haze of red, a number of shadowy forms around me. I believed they were angels, greeting me upon my death. I went to them willingly.

I was carried. Every bump was a knife through my torso. I was moaning, deep in my throat, unable to stop. Eventually I was lowered, and something cold and wet was gently placed on my injured eye. I heard my name, over and over, and finally opened the other eye. Rooi came into view, holding a candle. “All right, then, Diamantina?” he asked, but I felt nothing. “Can you see me?”

I struggled to sit up. But at the movement there was a tremendous pressure in my throat, and a raw ache came over me in such a wave that my stomach churned, and I retched.

“Don’t try to move,” Rooi said, now holding the wet cloth to my mouth. “Lie back down.”

I groaned as I did, and tried to speak, but nothing would come out. The candle came closer, and I had to close my seeing eye against its glare.

“Your neck is all purple—you probably won’t be able to talk or eat for a while. And your eye …”

I slowly reached towards my face, but Rooi stopped my hand.

“Don’t touch it. It’s swollen shut, and there’s a deep cut above it. I think you need to sew it up, because the goddamn bleeding won’t stop. And your face.
Meijn Gott
, Diamantina. Hopefully you haven’t lost too many teeth.”

I couldn’t move my lips.

He put the wet cloth back over my eye, and said something else in a whisper of comforting Dutch. And then there was only blackness.