The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (38 page)

G
ran eventually told
us the whole story of how Uncle Matt saved Rajan, and about the touch-and-go night at the hospital, and how Gran had given blood – Mum was amazed at that and fell all over Gran in gratitude – and how this hotshot brain surgeon from America had sent a plane over from America for Rajan and all kinds of stuff.

‘Basmati flew over the next day,’ said Gran. I noticed how her speech pattern had changed dramatically; she had dropped her heavy Creole accent, just as she had during the Old Girls’ Reunion. I realised now how much of all that had gone before was play-acting on her part. I wondered why; I’d have to ask her some time. Later.

‘We hired someone else to look after my parents, so she could be with him. And then she came back and I went over. We wanted one of us to be always with him, so Basmati and I alternated all the time he was in treatment and rehab. Uncle Matt paid for everything, Rika! Everything! He was so generous! And he got other doctors to work for free as well. Everyone was so wonderful, so generous with their time and their skills. They all did their best.’

‘But he’s brain-damaged,’ I interjected. ‘Was it worth the trouble? The expense? Wouldn’t it have been better to let him die?’

After all, one has to be reasonable, rational. Sometimes it’s better to let a person die, if the only alternative is a life not worth living. But obviously, I was alone with this opinion.

They both glared at me. The both exclaimed, in unison: ‘Inky!’

‘Life is precious,’ said Gran firmly. ‘And in his own way, he’s happy.’

Whatever, I said to myself. I had my doubts, but it wasn’t my place to speak out.

T
he next two
weeks flew by. Of course, I had to see Sal before I left. We had not met for several weeks, and I feared the friendship was crumbling amid the stress of his studies and, in my case, the on-going drama of the Quint, and then Granny’s accident. Sal, who at first had been just as wrapped up in the mystery of the stamp, seemed to have withdrawn himself from my life completely. Looking back; that withdrawal had started just around the time of the
Daily Mail
article. And I missed him. Sal was the girlfriend I didn’t have, and I needed him so much as a sounding block.

But all this time – nothing. No more Sunday visits, no more meals at Wong’s. I hadn’t noticed his absence in my life at first, wrapped up as I was in caring for Gran and keeping up with the rollercoaster of events. We’d had a short chat after Gran’s recovery, but since then—nothing. Now I noticed his absence as a yawning hole in my life. I speed-dialled his number.

‘Sal … can you come down here? Or shall I come up to you? I’ve got to see you,’

‘Why? What’s happening? More drama with Gran?’ He sounded distant, cold even.

‘Yes, it never ends!’ I told him that we were going to Guyana for Christmas. It’s then that I had my brainwave. The words just spilled out.

‘Sal, why don’t you come too? It would be brilliant to have you there! We could discover Guyana together! I’m so excited about going but with you there too it would be so much better! Go on, say yes!’

And I knew he would. Sal loved travel and discovering new places, especially off-the-beaten-track places. This trip would be just the thing for him, for us both; it would be a hundred times more exciting with him at my side.

‘You’ll come, won’t you? You have to come!’ I finished off.

The silence held so long I thought he had hung up on me.

‘Sal?’

‘‘Inky, I’d love to come. But sorry, I can’t.’

‘Why? Why not? Is it the money? Don’t worry about that. We’ll get it together somehow. Maybe your dad could lend you some. It’s just the flight you have to pay for; we can live for free at our old family home. Go on, say yes!’

‘I said, I can’t, Inky. I really can’t. You see ….’

The pause was so long that again I thought he’d hung up. But finally, he broke it.

‘Cat’s coming back,’ he said. ‘The week before Christmas. She doesn’t like Australia, and she misses me. Didn’t she tell you she was coming?’

I
t was pouring
with rain and the middle of the night when we arrived at Cheddi Jagan International Airport. It took ages to inch ourselves through
Immigration and Baggage Claim, but at last we emerged into the hot wet night, all around us, the hustle and bustle of people pushing overladen trolleys into the arms of overexcited relatives. Among the waiting throng stood a sodden man under a sodden umbrella holding up a sodden sign saying ‘QINT’. Gran grumbled about a certain Evelyn who was ‘too lazy to drive to the airport she-self’ and continued to grumble the whole drive down, as was
her wont. Mum, meanwhile, had grown progressively more silent through the entire trip, as was
her
wont. Now, sitting next to me in the back seat of the taxi staring out the window, half-turned away from me, she retreated into complete silence. I don’t know what she was staring at, since there was nothing to see but rain.

Rain! I’d never known a tropical rain, and this was the best of it. Water sluiced down in a virtual waterfall from above, gushing onto the taxi as if it were a rock it would sweep away in a mighty torrent. It was as if some giant in the sky had decided to open the heavenly floodgates. It hammered on the roof of the car and fell in sheets into the darkness outside, swallowing up the countryside. Through the window I could see not a thing but water, could hear not a thing but the roar on the rooftop and, drowned but unrestrained by the rainfall, the whine of Gran’s perma-gripe, directed at the taxi driver.

The car moved slowly, its headlamps cutting a vague white funnel through the rain. The road appeared more as a river, and I wondered at one point if the car would simply sink into a torrent of water, never to be seen again. After a while Gran’s nattering petered out; she had fallen asleep. And so had Mum, leaned against the far door of the back seat. Only I was wide awake, and, of course, hopefully, the driver. The driver turned up the radio; it was Bob Marley, ‘No Woman No Cry’. The car bounced through the rain to the rhythm.

After a while the rain diminished and finally stopped, and we picked up speed. A penetrating, sickly sweet, nauseating smell attacked my nostrils. I thought the driver had let out an enormous fart, and he must have read my mind because I saw his twinkling eyes meet mine in the rear-view mirror. Seeing that I was awake he half-turned to me and said, ‘Diamond Sugar Estate, ma’am. We very near Georgetown now.’

At those words Mum awoke with a jump and pressed her nose against her window, but of course there was nothing to be seen; outside the car it was all still black, though there now seemed a certain greyness to the night signifying that dawn was just over the horizon. Up to this point excitement had kept me wide awake, but now drowsiness crept through me, and I nodded off. Mum spoke her first words to me since we’d left the plane:

‘Inky, why not lie down, put your head on my lap. It’s not far now.’

I was tempted; but if Georgetown was ‘not far now’ and if the rain had stopped and it was going to be lighter there was no way I’d sleep away my arrival. I assumed there’d be a bed waiting for me at ‘home’; until then I wanted to stay awake.

Slowly the darkness began to lift and I could see the outlines of a village, a quaint gathering of frail wooden houses on stilts so thin they looked about to buckle at the knees under their burdens. The houses were completed with rickety staircases, rusty tin roofs, louvre windows with half the lathes missing, and they sat in yards and gardens teeming with growth, all bathed in the unearthly grey light of pre-dawn. The rain had left great expanses of water so that some of the houses seemed to be standing in shallow lakes, while others, built lower and close to the road, huddled in sodden clumps behind overflowing gutters.

A sense of complete alienation washed through me, chilling and somewhat frightening. What was I doing here? This was not my country, not my home. Homesickness flooded me, a deep longing for the familiar colours and smells and noises of Streatham High Street; a longing for Sal. Where was he, what was he doing? Was he back with that bitch Cat, happy at last, all memory of me erased? A deep, ugly, surge of jealousy gripped me.
He’s mine!
I yelled silently at Cat.
You dumped him and I caught him! How dare you claim him back!

Ever since Sal told me about Cat’s return it had been there, coiling around my heart like a vine of thorns: jealousy. And behind that jealousy, deep down, something else. Something I didn’t want to admit. Not even to myself. But I had to.

Love. I loved Sal. Maybe, I always had. And the moment I realised it I wanted to tell him. I wanted to call him and shout it down the phone. So many times, in the days before our departure, I’d stared at his name in my mobile, thumb poised above the dial button. But I couldn’t. I was too proud, or, maybe, too scared. What if he rejected me? He was Cat’s. I’d had my chance and messed it up. Even on the drive to the airport I’d toyed with the temptation; sitting on the plane, waiting to leave. And then I’d taken the plunge. Not called him – I was too much of a coward for that. I’d tapped a message into my phone. Three words. Three words that said it all. And pressed
send.
And switched off my phone.

I loved him and wanted him. I wanted him right here with me, holding my hand, gazing out the window with me as village and countryside gradually morphed into the wider streets and great white buildings of Georgetown.

I
recognised
Central Georgetown from photos I had seen; the Town Hall, the Parliament Building, the Bank of Guyana. I recognised the tree-lined avenue of Main Street, seen up to now only in photos on the Internet. But how familiar!

A few minutes later the taxi drew up outside the huge wooden house I’d seen in Gran’s photos. It was enormous; the photos had not conveyed the sheer bulk of the place, overpowering and commanding, nor the sense of eccentricity captured by its quirky architecture, bits sticking up and bits sticking out. It looked top-heavy, too weighty for the thick columns on which it rested; it perched like a giant bird between folded wings, ready to fly away. A dog barked, and lurched towards the closed gate where it leaped and snarled in welcome.

I fell in love with that house at first sight.

The taxi driver gave three short blasts of the horn as we drove up. Gran opened her car door and just sat there in the front seat waiting to be helped out, apparently still too tired to speak. Mum crawled out of the back seat and helped her out. I got out myself and looked up at the house again and saw a face at a top window. A few seconds later the front floor at the top of the outside staircase opened and a plump woman in a flimsy nightdress, her hair bobbing on her shoulders in two fat plaits, hurried down the stairs, huffing with excitement. She hauled the dog away (his name, I gathered, was Turtle) and tethered him to a leash under the house, and then bustled out of the gate.

‘Granny! Granny! Welcome home!’ she cried, as she ran to the taxi. This must be the notoriously lazy Evelyn who had sent the taxi instead of driving up to meet us: Aunt Marion’s daughter, Gran’s granddaughter, Mum’s niece, my first cousin, though several years older than me. She flung open the taxi door, bent down, and hugged Gran. She was at least three times Gran’s size, and I thought she’d smother the poor thing. Gran let out a little yelp that sounded like ‘help’ but could just as well have been ‘hello’.

By this time I was round the car and standing next to them, and so it was my turn to be folded into that voluminous embrace. As Evelyn, a virtual stranger to me, closed me in her arms with another whoop of delight I found my initial distaste, and the inclination to push her away, shift away in favour of a kind of shy pleasure. This kind of familial affection was totally foreign to me, but it seemed to have a disarming power; there was something so warm, so genuine, and so innocent about it I couldn’t help but be touched. I smiled back at Evelyn.

‘You gon’ to love Guyana!’ she said to me, still holding me. ‘I so
happy
you came! Families belong together! I gon’ to show you around Georgetown as soon as I can!’

E
velyn showed
me a bed and I fell onto it and didn’t awake until – well, I had no idea. The room was dark, the wooden shutters closed, but the louvres were open and through the slots slashes of bright sunlight fell into the room, leaving a striped pattern on the wooden floorboards. I remembered. In the foggy minutes before I fell asleep, Evelyn had unfurled a mosquito net from above and tucked it into the sides of the bed; now, it had been untucked and was curled into a bulky knot hanging above my head. My watch was no help; it said 4.23 but that was English time and I wasn’t sure of the time difference. Four hours? Five? Six?

I rolled to the edge of the bed to grab my handbag from the bedside table. Still groggy with sleep, I fumbled in it until my fingers found the flat metal of my mobile phone. I had a missed call, from Sal. My heart leaped. Ignoring the expense I immediately tried to call back but there was no reception. It must have arrived in the seconds before I switched off the phone at Gatwick.

I needed a pee. I stumbled to my feet and headed for the door; I vaguely remembered the bathroom was on the other side of the hallway. Sunlight streamed into the white tiled room from an open window, and a fresh breeze against my skin made me realise how hot and clammy I was from the journey and from sleep. I peeled off the T-shirt I’d slept in and stepped into the shower. A delicious cascade of cool water sloshed away the skin of sloth and dried sweat and fatigue clinging to my body. I washed my hair with the remains of a bottle of shampoo, rinsed away the foam, and dried myself with a huge fluffy towel. Wrapped in the towel, I returned to my room.

Behind the open sash window was the slanting top-hung shutter known here as a Demerara window. I pushed it open with its pole. A panorama of green treetops and red roofs and blue sky dotted with two or three small, fleecy clouds greeted me. The pert call of a bird:
kiss-kiss-kiskadee
over and over again, gave an unexpected lift to my heart, a clean, joyful refrain that filled me with hope. It was a kiskadee, I later learned: a little yellow bird calling, according to the French,
‘Qu’est qu’il dit?’
The call filled me with delight – I felt a sense of home unlike any I had had before.

And, I realised now, I was hungry, and surely that was coffee in the air?

I turned away from the window, got dressed, and went downstairs. Seated around the dining table were several women, a few children, and a man.

Evelyn sprang to her feet as I walked into the dining room, a corner of the huge open-plan ground floor. She rushed over to me with a cry of joy, took my hand and led me over to the one empty chair. Only after I’d taken a seat did the identity of my table companions register.

‘Hello Inky!’ Mum said breezily. ‘Slept well?’

‘You not going to say hello, Inky?’ said a familiar alto voice. I looked up.

‘Marion!’ I cried, jumping to my feet and running to her chair to hug her. ‘What are
you
doing here?’

‘Last minute decision,’ Marion said. ‘I’ve been fighting the urge to come back ever since I heard you all were coming. Yesterday I gave in and jumped on a plane. I arrived a couple of hours ago. I haven’t even gone to my room yet – see?’

She gestured to a corner of the drawing room, to a cluster of luggage.

‘I gotta go!’ said Gran, speaking for the first time. ‘T’ings to do.’ She was speaking Creolese again. She pushed her wheelchair away from the table and rolled off, disappearing into the hallway. The rooms here were huge; plenty of room for a wheelchair, plenty of turning circles. Evelyn and Marion were chattering away, telling me of all the plans they had to show me around.

‘May I interrupt to introduce myself – David, Evelyn’s husband,’ said the one man at the table. I had hardly glanced at him until now, as he half rose to offer me his hand from across the table.

I took his hand. We smiled at each other; he was a good-looking man of some kind of obscure racial mixture; brown skin, tight black curly hair, a pleasant white-toothed grin. He waved in the general direction of the children.

‘And these are Alison and Nicholas!’ I smiled down at the two of them, shook their hands.

‘Ally,’ and ‘Nick,’ they said simultaneously, correcting their father. With that, breakfast conversation turned to the general chit-chat of family reunions after long separations.

After breakfast Mum said to me,

‘Would you like me to show you the house, Inky?’ and of course I said yes. And so she took me around, up and down stairs.

I noticed she omitted the Annex.

‘
A
nd this
,’ Mum said, ‘is my very favourite place in the whole house. Follow me.’

She began to climb a narrow spiral staircase, which lead into a dome of light. It was a round, window-lined room, with wooden floorboards and a peaked roof. The view was spectacular; a canopy of green from the trees, interspersed with red and silver roofs. In the distance, the Atlantic sparkled silver and grey up to the horizon. The sky was in touching distance. A kiskadee chirruped. It was breathtaking.

‘The Cupola!’ Mum announced. ‘I used to spend hours up here, writing in my diary, writing short stories, dreaming of goodness knows what. I loved this place.’

She bent down, fiddled a bit with a floorboard, lifted it up, and laughed. She lifted what seemed like a bug-eaten ancient child’s exercise book aloft.

‘The novels I used to write!’

She replaced the book with a chuckle and stood up. She closed her eyes and turned in a slow circle, arms spread wide, as if recalling the past. When she stopped rotating she was facing inland, away from the sea. She opened her eyes, and the light fled from her face. She was staring at a house half-hidden in the foliage; there seemed to be a cleft among the trees between our house and that one, giving us an open view.

Mum gazed at the house, almost as if she were in a trance. And then she took a deep, audible breath.

‘Inky, this is it. I need to be alone for a while. I’m going into the Annex. It’s time.’

She turned away and walked back down the stairs. At the bottom, she turned into the corridor that led to the Annex, a room separate from the house but joined to it by a sort of covered bridge.