The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (13 page)

The bar was full; not only full, but overflowing. Three or four girls in St Rose’s uniforms sat at the bar giggling and sucking at ice cream sodas and milkshakes, their stools swivelled around to face the gaggle of boys in Saints uniforms fidgeting in the standing space before them, eating hamburgers and hot dogs and drinking Cokes and things like that, and flirting. Rika didn’t know these boys, though she had heard their nicknames: Bonesy, and Rats, Pumpkin and Hotshot and, of course, Jag. Hobnobbing like this in school uniform was of course strictly forbidden. Should any of the nuns or lay teachers pass by there would be deep trouble for all concerned, but school rules were made to be broken; that much Rika knew. Granted, she had never had the chance to break them herself in
this
particular way, because of course no boy would ever speak to her. She was just too ugly and boring. She shrank into herself.

One of the girls was Jen; one of the boys was Jag. Somebody made a joke and everyone laughed. Probably they were laughing at
her
. There was no spare seat at the bar, so Rika turned to walk away; she wasn’t all that keen on a milkshake any more.

But a cry brought her up short: ‘Hey!’ She swung around, frowning; it was a boy’s voice, short and sharp. Not for her, surely? But Jag was looking her straight in the eye, gesturing to an empty bar stool; the business-suited woman next to Jen had left. Jen was frowning, and seemed to be arguing with Jag; the stool was clearly meant for him but no, he was pointing to it and motioning to her, Rika, to come and take it. Rika hesitated. She couldn’t do it; couldn’t take Jag’s stool. Obviously. Everyone was staring at her. She flushed, and hunched her shoulders, and turned to go, but Jag reached out and grabbed her elbow and pulled her to the bar. He turned to Jen and laughed, and bowed and gestured to the stool, and said, ‘You know I’m a gentleman!’ and Rika had no option but to let herself be pulled back and then to slide onto the stool. She flashed a shy half-smile and a mouthed ‘thank you’ to Jag. She glanced at Jen to see if it was OK with her and to smile and exchange a greeting, but Jen only looked away in annoyance.

This was terrible. It wasn’t right to aggravate Jen; clearly she, Rika, had made a grave
faux pas
and needed to vacate the seat and let Jag take it, so she slid off in order to flee but Jag grabbed her arm – again! – and pushed her back.

‘Take no notice of Madam here!’ he said with a grin. ‘Ladies first!’

She looked at him, met his eyes and turned all hot with embarrassment, and looked away again. Jen had turned away from her completely, ignoring her, and everyone was laughing – at her! – and then Jag joined in the laughter and he too was ignoring her. She ordered her milkshake, glad that the attention had shifted away from her, and bent over to fish her purse out of her satchel just as Jen picked up her second ice-cream-soda from the counter. She bumped into Jen’s arm and the soda spilled and landed on Jen’s school uniform.

‘Idiot!’ yelled Jen. Everyone stared and laughed and Rika died a little death. ‘Sorry! So sorry!’ she whispered, and whipped a napkin from the napkin holder on the counter and tried to dab at the glob of ice-cream sliding down Jen’s skirt but Jen slapped her hand away. ‘Just leave it! Go away!’ she snapped, while her friends laughed and Jag himself grabbed a napkin and dabbed at the mess.

‘I’m really sorry!’ Rika mumbled again.

‘Just go away!’ cried Jen, so Rika went. She left her milkshake untouched as well as the coins to cover it on the counter, leapt from the stool and ran, not walked, away from the scene. If only the earth would open up and swallow her, she would be the happiest girl in the world. But, of course, she wouldn’t be in the world any more, would she; and the world would be a better place without her.

T
hat’s
what she told Rajan later that afternoon. After returning home, changing clothes and doing her homework, she slipped through the paling and down the alley and into her grandparents’ yard. Rajan was at the back of the garden, on his knees, pulling up weeds. She sat down on the sandy path beside him. She still smarted all over from the shame of the clash, from the sting of Jen’s words and the overwhelming sense of her own futility.

‘I’m just a waste of space!’ she said to him. ‘Clumsy and – and stupid.’

But Rajan only laughed. ‘You’re clumsy, true,’ he said, ‘but no way you’re stupid.’

‘Mummy says I am. And I’m not doing well at school. All my teachers say so. The only thing I’m good at is English, and maybe French. But everything else …’

She shrugged and let out a long-drawn-out sigh of despair.
Maths,
she thought, the bane of her life, and her downfall. It had improved, indeed, under Rajan’s tutelage, but would it be enough to pass O Levels? No. She reached over and pulled at a couple of weeds herself.

‘You’re bored, that’s all,’ said Rajan. ‘But bored isn’t stupid. It might even be the opposite of stupid.’

‘But everyone hates me. Everyone thinks I’m an idiot. Jen even called me that, in front of everyone. And they all laughed at me. I’m such a bloody fool.’

‘I
don’t hate you. I don’t think you’re a fool. And people call
me
names, too.’

‘Really?’ She was astonished. Rajan seemed so outstanding in every way, so confident, so established in himself; surely he would walk among people as a king!

‘Of course they do! You should hear what the boys at Queens say about me.’

‘What could they possibly call you? You’re bright; brilliant! You’re so …’ She couldn’t find the right word. What was it? Rajan was
different,
just as she was, but in a good way, a superior way, and it seemed to her that everyone must acknowledge that.

Rajan chuckled. ‘Anti-man, fairy, queer, sissy, namby-pamby, pansy, panty-waist … to name just a few!’

Rika was shocked. ‘No! Really?’

He chuckled, and said, ‘What do you think? And that’s not all. What about: coolie-boy, yard-boy, jailbird?’

‘Jailbird?’

‘Because of my father.’

‘Your father was in jail?’

Rajan did not speak for a while. Then he said,

‘I shouldn’t have said that. Forget it.’

‘No! No Rajan! I’ve told you so much about myself. I confide in you so much. You can confide in me! Why was your dad in jail? What for?’

‘For manslaughter.’

‘Really! Oh, wow! How awful! What did he do? Who did he kill?’

But Rajan was not forthcoming.

‘I really can’t tell you, Rika. Sorry.’

Rika felt strong. Here, at last, was something she could do for Rajan. He had given her so much; now she could lend him her support. What an awful burden he must be carrying! He had said, once, that his father was dead; now she wanted to hear the whole story. She softened her voice.

‘Tell me, Rajan. Just tell me. It’s OK.’

‘Rika – I can’t.’

‘You can! You must! Rajan, if you don’t tell me now I’ll never speak to you again! You can’t just tell me a bit of a shocking story like that, and then not tell me the rest! Stop treating me like a baby!’

She put fire into her voice, and into her eyes, and stared him down. Their eyes locked. Finally he looked away.

‘Well – all right then. I’ll tell you the basics, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Well – he killed one of your uncles. Sort of in a fight. It was a huge drama at the time. My mother used to be a maid in your house and – well, it doesn’t matter now. But yes, he was in prison, for manslaughter. And then someone else killed him, in prison, some fight they had. So they call
me
jailbird. Even though I was just a baby when it happened.’

Rika took his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But you know what my Granny says – don’t let’s dwell in the past. We have to move on. I’m glad you told me that story. It makes me feel – closer to you. It must be awful – but, Rajan, it’s past and you’ve made a good life for yourself. Never mind what happened back then. And people are so stupid to call you names because of what your dad did. Just idiots.’

Rajan laughed. ‘You’re right, Miss Socrates! Enough!’ he said, and stood up, clapped his hands to rid them of earth, gave her a hand and pulled her to her feet. They walked over to the Bottom House, washed their hands at the tap, and sat down on their bench. They sat together in comfortable silence; Rajan picked up a book – chemistry, Rika saw it was – and she just gazed into space, musing. It was all very well to offer clichéd snippets of wisdom to Rajan. She now felt embarrassed by the homilies she had offered him – after all, Rajan seemed to have coped pretty well without her up to now, just as he seemed to cope with everything, in his own silent way. Her own present day problems still remained, and she couldn’t shove them into the past as she had advised Rajan. Nor could he solve them for her.

She watched a kiskadee hopping about on the genip tree in the backyard; a lizard, scuttling up the tree-trunk. At her feet, a group of ants were hard at work, carrying a dead spider to wherever it was they stored such treasures. The spider was so much bigger, and heavier, than all of them put together. It was, Rika thought, as if five or six humans were to carry an elephant, lifting it above their heads and marching along with it to the kitchen. It seemed so effortless, so easy. In fact, everything animals did seemed so effortless, so easy. So – natural.

Why couldn’t it be that way with humans too? With her, at least? For Jen and Jag it all seemed so effortless. They were popular and elegant, and popularity and elegance came naturally to them. Whereas she – she had all this internal turmoil, all these thoughts, all these feelings, that made the art of living so terribly hard, so infinitely impossible.

Just thinking about it brought back all the embarrassment, all the shame of today’s incident, the sense of wanting to sink into the earth and disappear, the self-loathing that followed. Why? Why did she have such problems, and others didn’t? Why was she so bloody
different?
Why couldn’t she be like Jen and Jag and all the others? It seemed to her that they were being true to themselves, and she wasn’t. She was just different; weird, and it wasn’t right to be true to weirdness.

But Rajan was weird too. He admitted it. He wasn’t like other boys: even Rika could tell that; but Rajan didn’t seem to mind, and that was the difference between her and Rajan.
To thine own self be true,
Rajan had once told her, and she believed it. But who was that self? Should she be true to that shy, cringing being that curled up in agony at each little slight? That couldn’t be right, could it? She would have to talk to Rajan more about it. He seemed to have all the answers.

H
aving done
her duty in laying the groundwork for the years of drudgery that lay ahead of us, Marion flew off to Canada, abandoning us to Gran. Early on Sunday morning, Mum drove her to the airport. By the time Mum got back from the airport Gran was on the verge of setting fire to her hair, and I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The moment Mum walked in the door, Gran pounced on her.

‘No time, no time, quick march back to de car, we gon’ be late!’

‘Late for what?’

‘Church, man, what you think! It’s Sunday!’

‘Since when you go to church? And I’m not going anywhere. I haven’t had breakfast yet, I’m hungry!’ Mum looked at me, puzzled, and shrugged.

‘She used to be a militant atheist!’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

I could only shrug back at her and spread my hands in helplessness. We’d been at it all morning. Gran had woken me up at 6:30 a.m. She had somehow manoeuvred herself up the stairs all by herself – a first – and into my bedroom.

‘Inky! Inky, wake up! We gotta go to church!’

I’d been just as baffled as Mum now was. I sat up in bed, wiping the sleep from my eyes.

‘Church? What church?’

‘You mean y’all don’t go to church? The eight o’clock service! Hurry up, man, we ‘gon miss it!’

It took me half an hour to explain to Gran that not only did we not go to eight o’clock Sunday church services; we didn’t go to church at all. Though there was a church just a corner away from our house, I had no idea what denomination it was, what went on in there, or if they even had an eight o’clock service. I refrained from mentioning the fact that we were not even Christian. I was not baptised, and when asked, Mum called herself a Vedantist. I was by now extremely adept at navigating difficult issues by omitting certain relevant facts, or rewording others to make them palatable for Gran.

While she was upstairs I got Gran washed and ready for the day – she fretting all the time that we were going to miss the service – and then I helped her down again. After getting her dressed – she insisted on her best Sunday clothes, a navy-blue frock of some artificial silky material, with a white lace collar – I made breakfast for her, and by then it was 7:30. While Gran was eating I made some phone calls to find out if there actually
was
a church service at 8:00. But no one seemed available at this ungodly hour on a Sunday morning; all I got was recorded messages or musak. Gran was by this time quite irritable, shuffling from room to room with her rollator, fretting about how late it was. That’s when I spotted Mum’s laptop, on the dining table, where she’d been apparently been working the night before.

It’s amazing what Google can dig up in just a few seconds: the name of the church, and the times of services. They did indeed have an 8:00 am service. I decided I’d walk Gran over. It couldn’t be more than five minutes away. I’d push her wheelchair into the church, find a good position for her at the back, walk home, eat a nice breakfast, and go and pick her up an hour later.

But then Gran began to fret again.

‘Is a white pastor, or a black one?’

I stared at her. ‘I’ve no idea! Does it matter?’

‘I ain’t going to no church with no white pastor. And de congregation – white or black?’

Again I had no idea. And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I hadn’t heard anything so blatantly racist in all my life, and when Gran insisted I call to find out, I refused – it was just too embarrassing. Gran tried to hassle me into obedience but I put up such a fight that she finally capitulated.

‘All right – give me the phone.’

‘You want to call yourself?’

‘Don’t bother youself. Just give me the damn t’ing.’

I shrugged. ‘Go ahead.’

I tossed her the phone. To my surprise she caught it in mid-air, sucked her teeth, clamped it under her arm, and shuffled off to her room with her rollator. It’s hard to imagine any human being shuffling away with a rollator with dignity, but Gran pulled it off. I don’t know how she did it. Something about the set of her face, the tilt of her chin. Her bedroom door slammed. I made a face at it and went upstairs, slamming my own door. I’d already called every church in London and nobody, just nobody, was answering. I went back to bed. I was still in my pyjamas; might as well make the most of them.

But just a few minutes later I almost jumped out of my skin. She was yelling my name. I swore aloud and called back:

‘What?’

‘Come down here right now!’

I got up and stood at the top of the stairs.

‘What is it?’

‘Get youself dressed and come downstairs.’

‘So you decided to go anyway, white pastor or not?’ If she’d capitulated, I’d stick to the plan: I’d walk her over, as agreed. We were late – it was long past 8 a.m.by now – but if Gran didn’t mind, I didn’t either.

‘Just do as I say. And hurry up.’

I shrugged. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs; I’d shower afterwards. But Gran wasn’t having it.

‘Is so you goin’ to church?’

‘I’m not going to church. I’m just walking you over.’

She cackled in triumph.

‘You think I goin’ to that white-people church? No sirree. We goin’ to a nice odder church, pure West Indian. An’ you not goin’ in that condition. Quick march upstairs and get youself smart. I not introducin’ no scruff to Doreen.’

And, bit by bit, I got the story out of her. All she’d done is call her old friend Doreen. I already knew that all the past week, while Mum and I had been at work, she’d caught up with all her friends and relations in London. According to Marion, there’d been a steady stream of them coming to the house while we were out, and Gran had held court on the living room sofa. I’d not yet had the pleasure of meeting any of them. Now Gran had taken matters into her own hands.

According to Doreen, there was a very nice West Indian church in West Norwood which she, Doreen, attended every Sunday. Lots of singing and dancing, clapping and cheering, just the way Gran liked it. It even had a Guyanese pastor. It was too late for the eight o’clock service, but the ten o’clock one was livelier anyway because that was the one all the families went to, including Doreen’s daughter and niece with their children.

‘You must be joking.’

‘What you mean, I joking?’

‘West Norwood. We’d have to take the train, or the bus. I’m not taking you on public transport with that wheelchair. No way.’

That silenced Gran, but only for a moment.

‘We’ll take a taxi.’

‘Ha! You have money for a taxi?’

That silenced her for another moment. Then:

‘When you mother getting back?’

I looked at the clock, made some mental calculations.

‘It depends on the traffic. Half an hour at the earliest, maybe an hour.’

‘We gon’ wait for she. Much better. She can drive we over. Then she could get the Lord’s blessing after all these years. And meet Doreen, Aunty Doreen to you.’

It turned out to be forty-five minutes. And that was how me, Mum and Gran ended up attending church together that Sunday. There was simply no escape.

I
t wasn’t technically a church
. It was a large hall with a huge wooden cross just beside the wide open entrance. People were streaming in, all in their Sunday Best. Women all dolled up in last century’s formal fashion, boleros and white lace collars and crimplene hats. Men in suits, trousers ending two inches above their ankles, white socks showing. Little girls in frilly white, little boys in sailor suits or bow ties. A trip back in time, or else across the ocean. Or if you wanted to put a positive slant on it, totally retro. Everybody was black.

We were greeted with huge smiles of welcome. You’d think they already knew us, the way they clasped our hands in both of theirs. A tall thin smiling woman in a navy blue dress with white polka-dots and a blue hat decorated with white lace ushered us to a row of chairs near the front; as Gran shuffled forward with her rollator, people smilingly stepped aside to let her pass, like the parting of the Red Sea.

That’s when Aunty Doreen found us. Rushing up, she gasped,

‘No, no, no, I already got chairs for you, on the other side, come dis way, Dorothea, Rika, follow me!’ So Gran turned around and shuffled back the way she’d come and we kind of shuffled behind her and the Red Sea parted again and Aunty Doreen escorted us around the back of the hall to a row of chairs where her entire family was already parked; husband, sons, daughters, aunts, nieces, cousins, grandchildren, even a baby in somebody’s arms. All these smiling faces turned to beam at us as we edged our way into the row; first me, then Mum, then Gran, helped by Mum and Aunty Doreen, then Aunty Doreen herself. I found myself sitting next to a teenage girl totally overdressed in a pink crepe creation and white high-heeled shoes, the sort you find in charity shops, and white lace gloves.

She beamed at me. I made my best effort at beaming back, all the while considering my options of escape. Was it too late? The row behind us was still empty. Could I feign a trip to the toilet – I had seen a WC sign in the entrance lobby – scrape back my chair, and make a mad dash for the door? I wanted to do something – anything – to wipe that beam off my neighbour’s face. What was a girl her age doing in church anyway? She should be sleeping off a hangover from last night’s binge, or turning over in her boyfriend’s bed. It just wasn’t natural. I was glad nobody I knew would see me here.

The pastor walked up the aisle followed by a children’s choir, all of them in white gowns and carrying lit candles, and singing. Arriving at the altar, the pastor held up a hand to bless the congregation, then one by one took the candles from the choir members and placed them in a row of golden candlesticks behind the altar, beneath another enormous cross. The kid’s choir traipsed off to stand in a row immediately in front of a line of women, also in white robes. The choir was complete.

Completely without warning, it burst into song.
“Greet somebody in Jesus’ name!”
the women and the children cried, and next moment I was swept up in a body of sound, a rousting, reverberating chorus, voices bouncing off the ceiling, rising to the skies. ‘
Everybody smile! Jesus loves you!”
the congregation belted out, and if they had been smiling before, then now the smiles burst out of them, and all over the hall people turned to each other, left right, and behind them, shook hands with their neighbours, hugged, kissed, and smiled, smiled, smiled to kingdom come. It was a disgusting, saccharine show of fake jollity. Next to me, Miss Pious turned and held out her white-gloved hand for me to shake. I resisted the temptation to slap it away and instead put mine there, limp and listless, hoping she’d get the message. She didn’t.

‘You must be Inky, Aunt Doreen told me all about you, welcome to Trinity Church!’ she gushed. I mumbled something indecipherable and tried to pull away my hand. Nothing doing. She not only grasped it tighter yet; she placed her other hand on the other side of it, so that I stood there trapped in a white lace clasp.

‘I’m Lily and I really look forward to getting to know you at lunch afterwards!’ she whispered.

‘Lunch? What?’ I replied in shock, but it was too late, the second verse had started and Lily had turned away to join in, her chin lifted and her eyes glazed in a sort of rapture.

And that was just the beginning. I found out that I had entered some kind of revival tent gathering, the kind you find in places like Alabama or Kentucky or even Harlem. The moment one song ended, the next began, with hardly a breath between. These people seemed overflowing with some kind of inexhaustible vigour that escaped their souls through the medium of voice. Some of them had tambourines or castanets or even drums, and if they didn’t, they had their hands and clapped like there was no tomorrow; their bodies twitched and bounced as they sang, as if aching to dance. It was like one huge body of voice, an ocean wave that lifted the lot of us up and merged us into and transported us into some kind of translucent space where nothing existed except a vibrant, rollicking, resonant joy, and try as I might to resist it, I was taken up too, carried up in this surge of sound, that rose and sank and rose again even higher; and in between the waves the pastor cried out
‘Praise the Lord!’
and
‘Glory to the Lord!’.

In one song, the choir leader divided us into four groups and we sang a canon which ended up with the whole room resonating to the clarion cry of
‘Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!’.
That was followed by a quiet hymn in which they all calmed down and the choir leader sang a solo with the congregation singing the refrain.

To my horror, I felt tears gathering in my eyes, running down my cheeks. I struggled against the tears but yet more came. I sneaked a peek at Mum next to me. Her eyes were closed and down her cheek ran a shiny streak, as if a small snail had crawled down it. And in that fraction of time I knew what it was all about, Life and God and everything, and my body tingled and my breath too was gone and tears rose up in my eyes and I wanted to grab hold of Lily and hug her to death, and everyone else in that hall, all these singing radiant people, and I knew, intimately and with absolute surety the meaning of that word, Glory.

It was too embarrassing for words.

A
unty Doreen had prepared
a feast for us all, and I tucked in. Church seemed to have opened a yawning cavern inside me that had to be filled with something more substantial than light, and the sight and aroma of so many dishes, the likes of which I’d never seen or heard of or smelt before, except for that small sample at Brown Betty’s a few days ago, not even under Marion’s crash course in Guyanese cooking, made me almost drool. I ate as if I’d been in jail on a bread-and-water diet. It was a buffet, so everyone grabbed a plate and retired to a sofa or a chair or the garden to eat. Lily had latched on to me permanently, and led me outside, where, with a chicken drumstick, she discreetly pointed out the various individuals she promised to introduce me to later, she said, after the meal. And slowly, slowly as the hours slipped by, I passed from one hearty embrace to the other, and the names of this uncle and that aunt and second cousin so-and-so passed in one ear and out the other. All the women’s names seemed to end in ‘een’. Doreen, Lurleen, Eileen, Marleen, Charleen, Maybeleen. And everybody was Aunty. It seemed that you had to call women of your mother’s generation Aunty So-and-so; everything else was rude.