The Worlds Within Her (43 page)

'WE WERE YOUNG
. I must've been eight or nine. Ram would have been sixteen or seventeen. We were out here for the weekend. Fishing, nuh. A little swimming. Me, Ram and a bunch o' his friends. They brought me along because Ma said they had to. The plan was to spend the night right here, sleeping on the beach — not that Ram and his friends planned to sleep, mind you, they brought along enough beer to last the night — and go home the next day. Not something you want to do these days, by the way. In those days there weren't people running around wanting to cut off your head for no reason.

“Anyway, towards evening I was sitting with my fishing rod just up there, on the other bank, this side o' the bridge. Ram and his friends were a little bit upriver. The water was deeper,
and they were diving off some rocks. They weren't far, I could hear them shouting and laughing.

“Then suddenly the laughing and shouting stop. Dead silence. Then: Splash-splash-splash! As if all of them diving in at the same time. I knew something was wrong. I drop the rod and run through the bush, and when I got there they were all going crazy diving and diving under the water. Real frantic, nuh. One o' them, a fella named Kamal, a long-time friend, had dived in and din't come back up. At first they thought it was a joke he was playing, he was that kind o' fella — but this was no joke.

“I don't know how long it went on, their diving and diving, looking. And then it got dark. Ram wanted to keep on diving and the others had to hold him back. I mean, they even had to throw him on the ground and hold down.

“Then he saw me standing there, scared out o' my mind — and that calmed him down. I remember he started to howl. Fear. Grief. They let him up and he hug me tight-tight, so tight I could hardly breathe — and, I'll tell you, Yasmin, is as if I can still feel that hug. His arms wrapped around me, his whole body shaking. Is the only time he ever hug me like that — but is enough for a lifetime, you know?

“After a while, he let me go. He'd regained his composure, nuh — and it was something to see, I'll tell you. He was calm, in control. As if he'd taken all the shock and grief and packed it away somewhere, and his brain was in charge again.

“That was when he went to talk to the fisherman. The tide was rising, you see. He figured that Kamal had dived head first into a stand o' broken bamboo underwater. The bamboo must've pierced him somewhere — his skull or his neck or his chest — and he was stuck down at the bottom. But the rising tide was going to stir things up, and Ram figured the currents might dislodge the body. And since the incoming water widened the
channel — this channel right here — he needed a seine to spread across, so the body wouldn' float out to sea.

“He came back with his seine. The others had already lit a fire, so they could see what they were doing. They buried two poles deep in the sand on either side of the channel and tied the net between them. Then we sat waiting, everybody around the fire — just over there, nuh — excep' Ram, who waited at the water's edge with a torchlight, looking for his friend's body.

“I fell asleep — fear still does that to me, you know — only to wake up sometime later, probably close to midnight to see all the others standing beside the river. I remember I'd gone from one bad dream to another — I couldn' tell you what they were, not even then — and when I woke up and remembered what had happened I thought I was still dreaming. But there they were, standing right there, kind o' huddling together. I knew right away that I wasn't dreaming — and I knew too what they were doing there.

“The fire was blazing — they'd kept feeding it, nuh, nobody wanted it to be dark — and I remember watching from where I was as Ram emerged from the water with Kamal's body in his arms. Both o' them glistening wet in the firelight. Kamal's arms and legs limp, his head hanging back and rocking, like … Like I don't know what. A wet rag? But a rag was never alive. I just remember a kind o' horror. He had no tension in his body. His mouth was open and I could see plain-plain a big piece of wood sticking from his head. Turned out Ram was right about the bamboo.

“Believe it or not there was a discussion about what to do. A discussion Ram put an end to with some choice words, I tell you. You see, some of the fellas wanted to put him into the trunk. That way we could all leave together. They were afraid, they didn't want to wait while … In the end, they put him into
the car and Ram and one of the others drove him to the police station. There was no hospital here then, you see.

“A week or so later, Ram drove back here to see the fisherman. He brought him a new seine. He felt that the old one was spoiled. So he gave the fella the new seine and asked if he could have the old one. No problem. He took the seine, brought it right here to the riverside, doused it in kerosene and set it on fire.”

TELL ME, MY
dear Mrs. Livingston, are you certain, and I mean absolutely certain, with no tincture of a doubt, that your husband loved you?

You are, aren't you. Then you, my dear, are either unnaturally lucky or perilously trusting, and it is not for me to venture a guess as to which. My, the very thought! To live loved and without doubt: It has a touch of the miraculous, wouldn't you say?

And — now that I think of it — were you as certain of this when he was alive, still a man of flesh and blood, strength and weakness? A man with whom you had to mesh your life day after day?

Yes, of course, I should have known. You are a veritable fountain of certainty, aren't you, my dear? I will admit, though, that I wish I had had a few drops from that fountain when I was younger. There are a few things worse, it seems to me, than living with doubts you can express to no one — hardly even to yourself.

What it comes down to is this: I always knew that my husband held me in a certain esteem, but it was an esteem that had little to do with me. He would have offered it to any woman he had married: the traditional esteem of a man for his wife — for her role, as it were, for the part she played in the fabric of his life. I doubt that his sentiment for me ever went beyond that — he touched me with warmth, but I saw him offer this same warmth to others — yet I have no doubt that this was what protected me from the single-minded cruelty he would occasionally inflict on others …

No, no. Not just for incompetence or failure. Sometimes for no reason at all. It was his way of keeping people in line. Some, the less important ones, he would slip money to, twenty dollars here, twenty dollars there, go off and have a drink, boys. But the others …

I remember one evening a group of them came back to the house after a day running around the island doing whatever it was they did. My husband, Cyril, several of the usual hangers-on. They were tired and sweaty, they had clearly gone deep into the rural areas, probably visiting the cane farmers. They settled in the porch — in chairs, on the floor — and my husband called to the maid to bring whisky and ice. He carefully removed his shoes — they were filthy with mud and God knows what else — and so I went over to get them …

Of course, I could have left them for Amina. But — I'll be frank with you, my dear — this was a little strategic move of my own. I always made sure my mother-in-law saw me cleaning and polishing my husband's shoes. It brought me a little measure of domestic peace, you see. And even after her death, I carried it on. Simple habit, nothing more.

So I went to collect his shoes from him — but he stopped me. He said Cyril would do it.

Cyril laughed — uneasily.

My husband held the shoes out to him: Cyril?

Cyril laughed again — a forced laugh. He was aware of the sudden silence, knew he had become the centre of an unexpected drama. He said, rather lamely, that he didn't wish to take the pleasure from me.

My husband said he had stepped in cow dung that afternoon, and he had no intention of having his wife deal with that: Cyril?

He sat there for several seconds, my husband persisting until I thought Cyril would cry. Finally, Cyril took the shoes and went off into the house to do as bid …

Celia wasn't around. She would not have tolerated it, to be sure, but this happened afterwards, you see. After she had …

Well, in any case, later I asked my husband why he'd done it. He said he thought Cyril was becoming a little lazy, he needed sharpening up, he was taking this manager post of his both too seriously and not seriously enough — by which he meant that Cyril was more in love with the title than with the duties. But I sensed this was just an excuse. I sensed that there was no reason. The truth was, my husband had humiliated his brother because he felt like it.

Imagine, if you can, Mrs. Livingston, living with a man like that — a man respectful of you, or at least of your status, but who would spare no one else, not even his brother. And if he would not spare his brother, what guarantee was there that he would always spare me?

So I envy you, my dear, the certainty you claim to have had in your husband's love. I envy you — and, at the same time, I cannot bring myself to believe you …

But that, undoubtedly, is my problem.

THEY DRIVE ON.

Light succeeds shadow succeeds light. A mirage of coolness and dry sand.

Yasmin thinks: There, I could burrow deep.

At a bend in the road, he slows down. She does not see the track through the palm trees until he has turned onto it — a road of sorts, leading away from the sea. Unpaved, uneven, but he drives with confidence. He knows the way well.

Presently, the trees fall back and they are at a large clearing of moist, beaten earth. At the far end stands a house, raised several feet off the ground on thick wooden poles. The house is old, of wood weathered a rich brown. Many of the planks have warped; the window shutters all hang off plumb. But its state does not suggest disrepair. Quite the opposite: merely age, and the normal ravages of climate.

Cyril parks at the edge of the clearing and asks her to wait in the car for him. He promises not to be long. She watches him walk towards the house, and she finds confirmation in his manner that he is at ease here: his feet know the ground.

When he is halfway there, the front door opens — she glimpses an interior of contained shadow — and a man emerges. He hurries down the stairs with an awkward, stiffened gait. He is tall and rangy — not young, but vigorous in the economical way of those accustomed to a life of hard labour. His attire — hat, soiled khaki shirt and trousers, black rubber boots — conceals him, makes his age difficult to assess.

Cyril is the first to offer his hand, and the man responds shyly with his own. He is not accustomed to such gestures. They speak briefly, then the man turns and lopes back into the house.

Cyril slides his hands into his trouser pockets, his lips pursed in a whistle she suspects is tuneless. He glances back at the car, but does not wave.

The man returns, a sheet of paper in his hand. He shows it to Cyril, who examines it with interest. He makes a comment. The man replies, then points to something written on the paper.

Yasmin decides Cyril is checking on some business: accounts of some kind. Her eyes wander to the forest at the far end of the clearing, to the density of its darkness and its promise — threat? — of the inexorable barely contained.

Cyril folds the paper and hands it back. They part company, the man returning to the house, Cyril heading back to the car.

The man stands in the open doorway, framed by shadow. Watching.

Cyril, businesslike, gets into the car, turns the key and drives back through the coconut trees with the same confidence he showed when driving in.