Authors: Austin Clarke
“Baby, I won’t tell you what they remind me of …” Before he could finish, he noticed something was happening to Estelle: she seemed to be having trouble breathing. He saw her jerk her neck, the second time (Bernice merely gave her a reproving glance), but he didn’t know that at that moment, vomit had spurted up into her mouth. She held her mouth shut. She looked anxiously at Bernice, and then she wallowed it round in her mouth, debating what to do with it. The taste of slime nauseated her, and she wallowed it into a large ball of spaghetti-worms, and swallowed it back down. She closed her
eyes, bent her head slightly forward, and gave it easy passage back down. She clapped her chest twice.
Bernice was mumbling about deaths and funerals again. “I remember the dress I wore to Pappy’s funeral, it was a sharkskin piece o’ material. I had got it at a sale.” The worms were in Estelle’s stomach; and they were beginning to climb again. “You remember the undertaker-man? Well, I will never forget that bastard! Dressed-down in black from head to toenail, he comes and put dirt on top o’ Pappy, and that bitch, when nobody wasn’t looking, unscrew every last piece of the silver handles from offa the coffin.
Every piece
of that silver, he take off and bram! Into his pocket they went.”
“That is the brand o’ West Indian motherfucker we will have to kill off!” Bernice was insulted by Henry’s language, and she said so. Estelle was too busy with her health problems to care. “We got to treat them just how the Mau-Maus killed them, ’cause that is the only way the West Indies will be free, and could ever lift up this blasted emastipated black race, goddamn!”
“Now, that’s the most sensible thing I ever heard come outta your mouth, Henry!” And to show him she approved, she rested her hand on his leg, with the feeling of a warm handshake. Meantime, Estelle was feeling things in her stomach. She tried to jerk them back down. But they came up nevertheless. She got up and went behind a small building that had plenty of ivy strangling it. In that short nightmare trip (in the twelve steps it took her to get there, during which she had covered every detail of her stay in Canada) the vomit had gone back down; and she was thinking she should turn back, and walk back to Henry and Bernice and sit down. But when she stopped, considering (she was thinking of what Sam had said
to her the last time they met), something in the vomit changed it mind, and she could barely reach the building, when the slime and the disgust and the hate for Sam within her, rebelled like a storm and she yawked and yaawked and puked through her nostrils and her mouth at the same time; and only God knew why it didn’t come through her eyes. She looked at the vomit, and she thought she saw Sam in it. The bells were ringing still; but she did not recognize the tune. When it was over, she wiped her mouth and blew her nose with the pink tissues which she had taken from the Ladies’ Room at the WIF Club; put powder and lipstick on her mouth, and a whiff of perfume to kill the perfume in the vomit, and went back to them. Bernice was still groaning something about how Pappy looked in the grave. Estelle wished it was
her
unborn child in that grave. What would Bernice say when she found out that she had taken something, which might put the child in Pappy’s predicament? “Exactly round this time o’ day, I remember, I was standing up beside Pappy’s grave, screeling my bloody head off!” Henry had long ceased to listen: he had developed the art of seeming to be listening, while in fact, he was sleeping. He could sleep with his eyes open.
The bells were not ringing now. Without the bells, they became bored with each other; and with time resting heavily upon them. Estelle was wondering when she would have to vomit again; and thinking of Sam, and the
thing
inside her. Henry was thinking of his woman, Agatha, because the peace and the stillness of the evening reminded him of his exhaustion and drowsiness after sex with her. Bernice was thinking of a home; of a big stone house on a hill, with a lot of chickens and ducks and pigs running about the yard. Now, at this exact hour, she would be calling her flock, “Chick-chick!
chickeer! chick, here!” The man in the tower was thinking of what to play next. The clock said it was six-thirty. Time was here. Time, time, time. And all three of them needed more time: time in which to correct the hour-hands of their mistakes.
You can hear Henry and Bernice breathing heavily. Estelle chews on a blade of grass, to prevent herself from thinking. Two days ago (before Sam mentioned abortion) she had decided to take something; mainly because she could not see Sam’s love changing from winter to spring. Time. Estelle what are you going to do with your time? Time that you need for the baby to be born; to grow in; in which to kill the baby; in which to recover from the murder of birth? And Bernice, what is your time? Time in which to change Estelle’s name to Leach; time in which to look for a husband; time in which to see if there is any point wasting time on the man beside you, yes, on Henry. And Henry, what can time bring you, you old goddamn two-time loser? Can time change time? The carilloneur’s voice had just begun to speak, probably in answer to all of their questions, when Estelle’s mouth was wrenched open and the vomit was all over her silk dress with the red dots (which belonged to Bernice). Bernice felt a few warm sprays on her cheek; and so too, did Henry. Bernice was going to hit her, for being “so damn common,” but Henry intervened.
“This chick is goddamn sick, Bernice, you can’t see that?” Estelle remained sitting, apparently too stunned to move. She sat looking foolishly down at the vomit.
“But look at this bitch, though! Just look!” Bernice said.
The nearest refuge was Henry’s room. Henry was holding Estelle’s left elbow, just touching it, ashamed and embarrassed
to be seen walking beside a sick woman. People were looking at them. Time had left them, as the sun had. It went behind a cloud, and as far as Bernice was concerned, it might as well have been one long endless night. As they got near Henry’s room, they passed a man, lying on his back on the front steps of a boarding house, with a transistor radio lying on his stomach, playing Beethoven. Bernice recognized the tune of the Storm movement, and she looked at the man, and in her mind, she kicked the man and the radio into the gutter. “That blasted music!” And once, during their retreat from the bells, Estelle had a violent spasm, and Henry barely got his handkerchief out in time, and held it to her mouth, and the vomit spluttered on the handkerchief, and on his hands and on Estelle’s dress, and some of it dripped into the gutter. It was then that a West Indian man and a white woman were passing; and the man pulled the woman faster on. It was then too, that Henry felt like running away, leaving his handkerchief (white and linen and initialled and perfumed by Agatha), but he didn’t have any strength left. He shrugged his resignation away, and said, “Goddamn!”, and put his arm round Estelle’s waist.
“Blood!”
It was Bernice who saw it first. Henry turned his back on the blood. But Bernice stared at it, as it appeared on Estelle’s dress, like an underground spring; and a million visions of its origins and cause, went through her mind. This is a wicked woman, there ain’t no doubt about it, she thought; this woman done something damn bad and foul. Bernice could see herself losing her job, she could see policemen (whom she hated to the bottom of her guts) she could see her bank account disappearing like snow in the sun, she could see Dots and Boysie
and Miss Carmeeta Anne Bushell and Priscilla the nurse, all laughing at her, because of what had happened to Estelle. Most of all, she would lose her job, and she was determined to hold on to that, regardless. Lose her job, and have to attend to Estelle till a baby come?
Jesus Christ! whose side you on?
The blood was coming still. Estelle was on her back (Miss Diamond had made up Henry’s bed) muttering things, which if they were loud enough, would still not have made sense, either to Bernice or Henry.
“Come, come, Henry,” Bernice said, a new urgency, and a new strength now springing from her, “Come, man, this is one o’ we, and we have to join together now and close-up ranks. We can’t sit down here the whole night whilst this girl bleed ’way herself to death. We got to put our two heads together and do something.” Estelle was losing blood steadily; and probably losing consciousness. Bernice knew what she had done: since she herself had done it once before, in Barbados. It was this feminine sympathy that brought her close to Estelle. Bernice knew what to do: Brigitte had told her. “I tell you, Bernice, darlink, we live in a society with wealths. But I tell you, it is too, a society with crime and a society with unmorality.” They had been drinking imported German beer which Brigitte had brought over for Bernice.
“You see this Marina Boulevard, well, I tell you, darlink, it would shock you to know the married women, the single women, and the divorced women on this street, who go to abortions. They have the money. And they have their own doctor. I see them, because before this job, I work for doctor who do that, and he make millions.” She held Bernice, and leaned over and whispered a name in her ear. Bernice almost dropped her beer glass. “Yuh lie!” she said, her eyes rolling. “Yes,”
Brigitte said; and put her glass to her head. “Jesus God!” Bernice exclaimed. “And not for him neither,” Brigitte told her. “Now that is what breaks up marriage, darlink.” Brigitte herself knew the things to do; and she taught them to Bernice.
“I stepping out here a sec,” she told Henry, after making a preliminary examination of Estelle’s condition. Henry was about to resent it, to question her. “Don’t
move
.” But he was frightened: suppose Agatha come now, goddamn! Or suppose my landlady come now!
“But where you going?”
“Where the hell you think? To bring back the RCMP?” She looked at him, and saw him so pitiful, and so stupid, that she became arrogant with him. “She is my sister, yuh know.” Still he wasn’t settled in mind. “I have a phone-call to make.”
“Use my phone, then.”
Before she answered, she smiled, and patted him on his back, as she would have patted a child. “Thanks, Henry. You is a kind man. But this is woman-to-woman business.”
“Oh.”
“You understand?” She put her arm round him, and for a very brief time let it remain there. “Now, show me the nearest drugstore. I need a few things, for this girl.” And Henry directed her. The moment she left, he became frightened.
Goddamn, a woman bleeding in my bed! and suppose my woman come now
(he remembered he hadn’t any woman now; so he put that thought away)
suppose Boysie was to drop in now, goddamn! or, or …
(He couldn’t think of anybody else; he felt so sad he had no friends, nobody who could make him feel dramatic in this moment) …
somebody, anybody could knock now
. Since there was no one who could come, possibly, he had to think of other tensions; and he sat as far as possible, from the bed:
this
goddamn woman, on vacation in this goddamn country and to find herself in a goddamn mess like this, this could kill Bernice; but when I think about it, some o’ these West Indian women think they is princesses and queens and virgins in old age, so it ain’t no wonder a lot o’ white cats screwing left and right, and it ain’t no fucking wonder, tambien, that this bitch here get herself in rough waters. You think she would give me a little piece? You think I could get me a nice black chick, goddamn, in Toronto? You’re crazy, baby? I see every half-pretty black chick shacking up with some goddamn white man, shit! … I wonder if Boysie get piece? Boysie is such a smart Bajan bastard …
someone was knocking on his door. He jumped up. He listened. He looked to see whether Estelle was sleeping — or dead — and waited to see if it was Bernice. The knocking continued. (“That goddamn landlady, again?”) but he didn’t recognize the knocking (and something about the perfume that came under the door, told him it wasn’t Bernice), and he looked again to see if the knocking had awakened Estelle (and it had), and then he heard the voice, “Henry? It’s me, Agatha.” He stood a foot or so, away from her, on the other side of the door; and could not, and did not want to talk to her. He wished she would go away. (“This goddamn broad.”) He knew she knew he was home: Estelle had just started to cough.
“Henry, Henry? I know you’re in there.” Henry couldn’t move. (Goddamn! ain’t this a bitch? Man, I never yet stand up in one spot, like this, and couldn’t move, just because of a goddamn woman!) He wanted to open the door and drag her in and throw her on the bed, and give her some good love-blows, for all the worry she had caused him; he even wanted to touch her hand; and kiss her; and sit down and watch her knees which he had spent many hours doing. He began to curse
Estelle in his mind; and Bernice too; and Boysie — for causing all this. Agatha gave the door one final, violent kick, “You bastard! I know you’re in there.” And he followed her disappointed footsteps from his door, to the outer door, to the front door, seven steps … one, two, three, four, five, six, seven … then down the path cluttered with empty beer bottles and cigarette butts and packages, and he waited with her, in his imagination, until she fumbled (as she has been fumbling for the three years she’s visited him) with the latch on the front gate which Miss Diamond promised to repair. In his mind still, is Agatha; and he can see her as she walks to the corner of Baldwin Street, gives one last dirty look at the house and disappears in the late shopping crowds rambling from the Jewish Market and from the bars and stores. Henry opens the door, and looks out. He knows she is not out there. But he has to do it, has to look, for that was his woman, the woman he loved more than he knew.
He closed the door, and returned to the chair, where he had been keeping guard.
“Why didn’t you let Agatha come in?”
“Oh man! That broad’s a real drag, man.” He knows he lies: she knows he lies. “She’s sick, too. Always bugging me, always …”
“Thanks, Henry,” Estelle said. “Boy, look how I causing everybody trouble, eh.”
Bernice returned with the necessary information and instructions from Brigitte, whom she had called; and with the supplies from the drugstore. She even brought two baby-beef sandwiches on kaizer rolls, two butter tarts (one day she ate ten in Eaton’s restaurant) and a package of chewing gum for Estelle. Henry wondered why chewing gum. Bernice shrugged
her shoulders, smiled, and with a little embarrassment, said, “To chew, nuh, man!” He took the sandwiches, smiled and said approvingly to himself, This goddamn woman!