Authors: Austin Clarke
“That’s good, Estelle.”
“I want you to post it for me, tomorrow.”
“That’s all right, Estelle.”
“And Bernice?”
“Yes, Estelle.”
“What you think will happen? I don’t think I’m getting better … you think I’ll have to go to the hospital?”
Bernice moved from the window to the chesterfield, and sat beside her. She began rubbing her back with her bare hands. She got some more rubbing alcohol and used that. Estelle said it made her feel better. Bernice went back to the window. There was another car parked behind the first one. “That’s damn funny!”
“You say something, Bernice?”
“No, child. I just here, talking to myself.” She looks harder now, feeling something is about to happen. She thinks she recognizes something like an aerial sticking up from the roof of the second car. She looks harder still, and sees two forms, two men, sitting in the front seat. Something is going wrong, she says to herself. She looks up at Brigitte’s room, the room is in darkness, and she smiles. But immediately afterwards, she is ashamed of herself for smiling. Christ! she whispers. Two policemen in uniform get out of their car, and inspect the other car. Bernice can see they are talking about it, but she can’t hear. One spots his flashlight all over the car, and inside too, and finally on the licence plate. The other one writes
down something in his book. And then they get back inside their own car. They light cigarettes and wait. The light in Brigitte’s room is still off. Bernice waits, too. Estelle is sleeping now. The room has become frighteningly quiet. She hears a noise. It is Estelle breathing. The policemen smoke and wait. Oh my God! she keeps on saying.
Violence comes to Bernice’s mind. Violence, violence is in the air, like the humidity in the summer night. She can taste it, she can smell it in the heavy breeze coming up to her. A light goes on in Brigitte’s room. The red tips of light go out in the waiting car. And now, Bernice thinks she hears the leather seats creak. They wait. The light in Brigitte’s room goes out again. And when no shadow comes from between the houses; and when the red tips return inside the waiting car, Bernice goes to the princess telephone to call Henry. There is no answer. She is frightened now, she feels alone, she needs company. His phone rings and rings, and still no answer. She dials Brigitte’s number next; and someone lifts the receiver, and before she can speak, a voice says, “Wrong number,” and the phone is slammed in her ears. Bernice lights a match to check the right number; and she finds she has dialled the right number. She dials again. She can hear it ringing (so she thinks) from her bedroom window; but nobody answers. Holding the telephone in one hand, she checks her address book. Lord have mercy, she prays. She moves with the phone to the window: the policemen are waiting. She has an impulse to scream for help, to scream for murder, to just scream, scream for anybody. Control yourself, Bernice, she tells herself, while she dials Brigitte’s number. At last, Brigitte answers. “Yah?” Bernice, feeling the violence before it happens (how did she know there was going to be violence?) almost loses her voice, and has to
whisper, as if she is really whispering across the street, so the policemen won’t hear. “Brigitte? Me! Me, man! Bernice!”
“Yah!”
“He out there! Somebody out there! Two o’ them. In front, in a car.…” Bernice hears when Brigitte rests the phone down on a table, and walks to the window. She looks out to see the curtains being parted slightly. Yes, she says to herself, there the bitch is.
“Thanks,” Brigitte says nervously.
“Brigitte?”
“Yah?”
“
He
, there?”
“Yah?” There is a quiver of nervousness in her answer. Bernice is becoming infected by her terror.
“Brigitte? Look, for Chrissakes, don’t let Boysie come out now, for God sake, Brigitte.”
“Yah.” And the telephone is put down.
Bernice goes back to the window. A policeman gets out; spots his flashlight up to Brigitte’s window; sees nothing; flashes it on the windows of the adjoining houses; sees nothing also; then on Bernice’s window, and gets back into the car. The car lights go on, and the car drives away noisily. Bernice sees lights in Brigitte’s room go on, and then off; and she waits. She leans out and sees only one car.
Run, Boysie, run! Come out, Boysie, boy, come come before they beat you up, and kill you! Come, come, Boysie. Run cross the road now, and even come up here in my place till them two bastards leave. Run out now, Boysie, Boysie, oh Boysie, poor Boysie …
and she leaves the window to call Dots, to warn her about the violence which will be done to Boysie. It is late, past midnight, but she has to call, even if Mrs. Hunter is vexed. The phone rings a long time (“In a way, it is
a good thing, that you are sick in bed,” she says, looking at Estelle, “ ’cause I know where you are, tonight, praise God!”), and while she waits, she adjusts the covers, and smiles. Nobody comes to the phone, and Bernice puts it down just as a tapping on the sidewalk grows louder. She follows the tapping with her nervousness, and when the tapping turns into two men, she is disappointed. The two men are holding hands. They are the men with the two dogs, but this time, without the dogs. They look up at her, at her window, (as they do, out of habit, each time they pass), and she holds her head out of sight (as she does each time they pass). When they are out of sight, the street returns to its violence and silence. “I wonder where those two brutes now coming from?” Estelle hears her talking to herself, and she moves in her bed. Bernice follows the tapping, until it disappears at the south end of the window. Her eyes now accustomed to the darkness, she looks back north, and thinks she sees something move. Something, some-damn-thing, or somebody is moving ’bout out there? The night does not answer her; there is only the dramatic violent waiting; and Bernice, waiting too. Then, from between the houses, comes a shadow, a man, Boysie? The man comes out in front of the house, sauntering (“Brigitte must have given him something damn sweet, heh-heh!”), and just as he turns to look up, to wave goodnight, or probably thanks, or to give Brigitte the all-clear signal (although Bernice sees no one at Brigitte’s windows), two other shadows appear from the shadows, and pounce upon him. “Goddamn!” Bernice hears the man exclaim, but it is muffled by a blow in the mouth. That is his last word. Bernice sees him make a start; sees the two shadows knock him to the ground; and hit him all over his body, in heavy, vicious blows which land in the right, silent, places.
They beat him thoroughly, and they beat him professionally, and they beat him without a murmur. They do it quickly, so quickly, she can’t believe her eyes. One of the shadows runs up the street, and soon afterwards, returns driving the car with the aerial. He parks behind the other car. The shadows lift the man off the ground, and drop him in the front seat of his own car; and then they drive off. And the street returns to its respectable quiet. No light comes from Brigitte’s room.
Bernice saw it happen, all of it, and she didn’t have the courage to lift a finger, to move, to scream, to call for help. She didn’t whisper any advice, as she had done earlier. It was too real; and too much of a dream at the same time. The brutality and the violence. She was still at the window (how long, she could not tell) when the car with the aerial returned. It stopped behind the parked car; a policeman got out; looked up at Brigitte’s window, and then walked between the houses. The light went on in Brigitte’s room; Bernice could see the policeman’s body outlined against the movie-screen curtains; and in a short while, the policeman came out again. “I scared the living shit outta that broad!” Bernice heard him tell his companion. They both laughed. “
She
won’t talk.”
“Well, anyways, we got this bastard, at last.”
They got into their car and drove off, quietly. The other car was still parked. Bernice saw it all. The violence and the brutality. She was about to undress for bed (although she knew it would be hard to sleep tonight) when she glanced at her sister, and saw
her
suffering; and decided that no matter how late it was, she had to call Dots …
suppose that is Boysie out there, dying from those blows, suppose they left Boysie out there, bleeding to death.…
The phone didn’t ring long, before someone answered.
“Dots, Dots? Where Boysie?”
“Christ, gal! You wake me up in the middle of the night to ask me damn foolishness?”
“Something bad happen to Boysie, Dots! Something …”
“Bernice! Boysie is here! He here laying-down side o’ me, snoring like a drunken man. How you mean something happen to Boysie? Bernice, are you going mad as hell?” And in her rage, she dropped the telephone. A chill went through Bernice’s body.
I am losing my mind? Could I be really losing my mind?
She closed the window, and the noise disturbed Estelle.
“Bernice, what time is it?”
“Two just gone.”
“I’ve been thinking, Bernice.…”
“Yes, Estelle.”
“I don’t really want to live in this country, Bernice. This place isn’t made for me … or for you … neither. I think I want to go home.”
“Yes, Estelle.”
“You think you could post the letter to Mammy, in the morning?”
“Let us wait and see if there is going to be a morning, first, girl.”
“In the morning, then.”
Bernice was about to undress in the darkness; but there was no need for the darkness now. And yet she didn’t want to turn on the light, because there was still a man out there, beaten up, and she had done nothing about it, and she felt the light would be too bright a finger pointing at her conscience. Estelle was talking again, and moaning; and in pain.
“Bernice, I am feeling worse.… I have to get something for this pain, man. I have to get something for this pain.…”
She turned the light on, and when she saw the blood in the
bed, she almost lost complete control of herself, and of her senses.
“Jesus Christ, Estelle! … why you didn’t say something?”
Estelle was jabbering all the way down the speeding streets, and the lights were flashing backwards as the cars stopped to let the ambulance through. The siren was crying and Bernice was crying. In all her life in this country, she had seen and heard ambulances whizzing by, crying for the road, and she had seen people stand and wonder, “Who’s in there, this time?” And never once did she imagine the time would come when she would be travelling in one of them.
Estelle had got worse. Bernice had spent half an hour trying to get a taxi. But it was Friday and a bank holiday, and taxis were scarce. She had tried to get Brigitte, and there was no answer. She had tried to get Henry, and there was no answer. She didn’t call Dots. Everything was like a photograph, out of focus, and blurred by speed. The ambulance had come screaming across the Boulevard; and in that death of night and silence, had caused all the lights in the street to be turned on. Never had an ambulance ventured screaming on this Boulevard before! On the way out, Bernice saw a light burning in Mr. Burrmann’s study.
The driver had come to the front door, by mistake; and in spite of Bernice’s instructions to come to the side door. And after that, there was a quick succession of people, faces, comments and gossip; and finally, the siren and the traffic stopping, and the lights speeding into one line of colour; and Estelle muttering.
“I have to go to the immigration people in the morning, Bernice. Sam would be vexed if I didn’t go.… I have to go … he said so, Bernice … did he tell you so?”
“Shh! Don’t talk, Estelle. Don’t talk.”
“I want to have my baby, Bernice, I want to have my baby … when I have my baby, Bernice … do you know … do you think they’re going to take it away … I want to have it, and I have to go to see a gentleman.…”
“Don’t talk, Estelle, we soon get there, so don’t talk.”
They reached the hospital. The Toronto General Hospital, where Bernice wanted Estelle to be a nurse. The attendants rushed her through the Emergency Admitting entrance, and on to another stretcher on wheels. Events and people now ceased to mean anything to Bernice. There was no recognition of reality; just the long corridors of cement shining, and the shining walls and the fluorescent lights, and almost everybody in white. And then the ward, and the doctor, smiling and white and dressed in white; and the questions: Have you any other children, miss? Have you had a miscarriage before? (A miscarriage?) How much blood has she lost? When did the bleeding first become noticeable? How long has she been bleeding? You are her sister, aren’t you? Was there any tissue?
And the head nurse, Priscilla (one of the two young women who attended her welcoming party), now vicious, ferocious, an aggressive nurse, black, tightly built and commenting, “Another black whore! Oh Lord!” to the white nurse who didn’t want to comment on a racial subject, or patient. “They don’t even have any shame!” Priscilla said, making it clear to the white nurse that there are two kinds of black women. And Bernice, standing stupidly and frightened, by the door of the ward, seeing the porters lift Estelle onto another stretcher, and wheel her out of the room to the Operating Room; and Bernice left alone now, with Priscilla, who had forgotten that she had seen Bernice before (“I wonder if I know
this face!”) in Bernice’s own apartment; and who had eaten Bernice’s peas and rice and chicken. The waiting, the waiting, the long fluorescent wait; nurses walking harmlessly, uselessly by, while her sister is lying on a stretcher, dying; and the black one, every now and then, passing near to Bernice, and grumbling purgatory and damnation on her own black race, because it has let her down in front of the white nurses and doctors.
“What you waiting here for?” she snapped, as if Bernice is a dog. “You don’t see they just take her down to the OR?”
“My sister, ma’am,” Bernice said, “I waiting for …”
“Look, we don’t want nobody waiting ’bout here, hear?” she said, cutting off Bernice. “Go down by the Emergency Waiting Room, if you want to wait. That is where you wait, down there. Not here.”
And a white porter came to Bernice, and rescued her; and took her down, by elevator. He showed her the waiting-room near the Operating Room. There was a man waiting there, too. Bernice waited (the man was standing with his back to her) and then a doctor came out, and she stood up, wondering whether this was Estelle’s doctor; but the doctor talked to the man who was waiting. “Why the hell you couldn’t get her here sooner, Sam?” The doctor knew the man. “I’m sorry. But we’re doing all we can.… I’ll call you later, at home.… Will you be home?” Nothing of what was said really registered with Bernice; nothing could register now.