Closure (10 page)

The landlady stared at him as if he was a new and rare object. Please yourself, she said, and shuffled away from the half-polished room. Do someone a favour, he heard her muttering, as he scooped up the plastic bags. Look what you get.

He bought himself a long coat from a charity shop. The coat had many pockets and, after his Sunday job, he sat on his bed and sewed more into the lining. His Sunday job was at a university, where he cleaned staff offices and found thirty-eight hymens. Some were like bright cherry-red fingernails; one was s-shaped, glimmering wrought iron; he tapped it and heard a ting-ting sound like his mother's bracelet on her kitchen pots. One reminded him of a cat's paw; another smelled like a fresh sea urchin; another like a wet leaf. It didn't surprise him to find that eleven were from women abused by scholarly, well-respected men.

As the numbers increased, anxiety overtook him: the risk of forgetting even one precious story. To forget would be sacrilege. He stole two reams of recycled typing paper from his Sunday job and wrote down the stories of the women and read them at night, trying to commit them to memory. On Wednesday, he was fired from his Wednesday job when he refused to take off his suspiciously bulging coat for the security guard. On Thursday, the landlady left a note from his Sunday job, to say he must not come back – their cameras had recorded his theft of paper.

At his Tuesday job, the boss who was overly familiar left her hymen on the edge of her computer desk.

It was so pretty he mistook it for a small, white daisy. When he touched it, his head reeled with alcohol: cranberry vodka and alcopops. The previous Friday she'd gone around the back of the pub with two men who seemed quite nice; she was sexually aroused but also frightened and when one of them said something lewd and dark, she wanted to run back into the pub but the second one had a hand on her hip and she decided she might as well bite her lip because making a fuss might. Might. Might just.

Hurt.

She found Charu Deol weeping for her, his cheek hard against her computer screen and fired him for the way he looked at her, his face broken open. She said if he told anybody about unfair dismissal, she would say he tried to rape her.

Don't look at me, she said. You don't know.

Charu Deol's head is light and empty as he walks through the early morning sunshine. The coat full of hymens rubs his ankles; the satchel on his back is stuffed with scribbled paper. He is concerned about himself. He has taken to muttering in public places, to stopping men on the road to tell them about women. He needs help. He cannot witness these stories alone. If he could just explain; if he could just ask them, politely, not to hurt anyone; if he could just talk to enough of them, it might stem the tide. Most thrust him away, mistaking him for drunk.

It's not true, say the few who listen when he tells them that it's one in every three women he sees. It's complicated, say the men. What can I do, they say.

He doesn't know.

His skin hurt. He feared it was transparent, exposing his internal organs. This was not a job for one man, not for a man who needed to pay rent, although he found himself less concerned with such banalities. He didn't speak to women at all; he didn't want to hurt or offend them. He found himself respectful with his landlady, since his last harsh words, cleaning not just his own room, but the entire house, including her roof, and digging her backyard until she yelled at him. He was relieved that she was among the unscathed, and marvelled at women on the streets for their luck or stoicism.

One tall lady left a trail of hymen strands behind her like golden cobwebs, a story so long, fractured and dark that he bent over in the busy street and cried out his mother's name. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again; if he could bear to take the risk, now that he was witness. He watched the golden cobweb woman laughing with a friend, swinging her bag, her heels clicking. How was she standing upright? How did they restrain themselves from screaming through the world, cleaving heads asunder, raking eyeballs? How did the universe not break into small pieces?

He became convinced that the hymens in his coat were rotting. Despite their beauty they were pieces of flesh, after all. At other times, he imagined them glass; feared he would trip and fall and shatter them, piercing his veins and tendons. Still, he walked every day and gathered more. They littered his room, piled under the bed and towards the ceiling.

He bought a lock for his door.

On Monday, or perhaps it was Thursday, he took himself to the church that was a law office. The gravestones ached with the weight of early Spring daffodils. The rector found him bent over one of the graves, inserting his fingers into the damp earth, hands going from coat pocket to soil. When he said, Son, can I help you, Charu Deol asked if this was blessed earth, and would it protect blessed things. He clutched the area around his heart, then the area around his neck, and whined like a dog when the rector tried to soothe him.

Can you not see them, Charu Deol said.

What, my son, asked the rector.

Charu Deol grasped the man's lapels and dragged himself upright. He was weeping, and frightening a holy man, but the hymens were thick on the ground like blossom, and the task was suddenly, ferociously beyond him. He released the rector and ran through the graveyard, past clinking, bleeding, surging, mumbling pieces of women.

The hymens were a sea in his landlady's front yard. He crushed them underfoot, howling and spitting and weeping, feeling them splinter, break, snap, squelch under his heels, like pieces of liver. He tried his key, once, twice, again, wrenched it to the left, and pushed inside. The place was quiet, the dull, lugubrious walls mercifully blank, his bed cool against his face.

The landlady knocked and entered. Lawks lad, she said. I'm worried about you. It can't be all that bad, now. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him.

He remembered a son she'd once mentioned; he'd never taken the time to listen. Tell me of your son, he said.

She did, saying that she knew young men. All they needed was a firm hand and a loving heart. The two of them, they'd got off to a bad start, but now she saw he was in need of help. Would he like a cup of tea? He was too handsome a lad to get on so. Charu Deol sniffed, tried to smile, inched forward, put his head on her soft knee. She patted him awkwardly, and he felt a mother's touch in the fingers, and a fatigued kind of hope. He crawled further up her knee, put his face into her hipbone. She smelled familiar. His teeth felt sharp, his fingers sweaty. He could hear flesh outside, beating on the door, crawling up the windowpanes.

He didn't see the hymen inching down her thigh, like a rubied snail, like torn underwear.

GAYLENE GOULD
CHOCOLATE TEA

Dollo can't remember how to make the Chocolate Tea. With an unsteady hand, she pours the viscous condensed milk into the pan and then shakes a carpet of cocoa powder on top. She wonders whether the sweetness might kick off his diabetes. Once they receive the results, she'll be rid of him. But if his disease progresses he'll have to stay. She stops pouring and snaps the lid back onto the cocoa tub.

In the week leading up to his arrival, she'd trawled the one shop that sold the kinds of goods she'd spent the last forty years trying to forget. She dusted tins and packets of carcinogenic items: condensed milk, hard-dough bread and heavily salted fish. She checked their sell-by dates before slipping them into a basket lined with a soiled local newspaper. After his arrival, she'd risen early every morning to fix his breakfast but, of course, he never had a good word to say. The porridge wasn't cornmeal and there was no plantain with his eggs. She explained that too much fried food wasn't good for his condition. He said she'd become too English, which was why she has trouble keeping a man.

She was shocked when she caught sight of Dick at the Arrivals. The breadth in his shoulders was gone and his thin, birdlike neck strained out of an overly large shirt collar. Even his gait, once long and graceful, snapped awkwardly like a rooster's.

When his eyes caught hers, her heart jump-started. His smile suggested he was pleased to see her. She'd gathered up her shopping from between her feet, and pushed her way to the end of the barrier.

By the time she stood in front of him, his smile had slipped into the bitter twist that she remembered well.

“Dollo, you get fat,” he said, his eyes travelling from her face to her feet. She looked down at her widening ankles and soft black shoes deformed by bunions.

“I hope you not going to feed me up so I get fat like you.”

He passed her the handle of his old-fashioned, army-green suitcase. His hands, free now, rested on the space where his firm belly used to be. “You see I like to keep myself fit and trim for the ladies and I don't want you messing with that.”

He laughed briefly before stalking off, clicking his way through the airport. She watched him walk confidently in the wrong direction, noting that his body was, in fact, eating itself up from the inside. She glanced down at her own fleshy bosom.

*

“It ain't ready yet?”

She jumps, turns to find him standing behind her by the kitchen table.

“Almost,” she says, turning back to the stove.

“This here England making you dotish. It's already 8.30. If you'd stayed back home you'd be getting up with the cock. But I forget. Ain't no cock here to wake you.”

She waits for him to finish chuckling over his own joke.

*

The hunger and the heat had left her weak and listless that day. She'd been hiding under the house from the sun, throwing stones at the chickens and watching them dash about, hoping to find grain only to peck at hard grit. Just then his shiny shoes and sharp-seamed trousers (pressed by her sister Jackie, no doubt) appeared. He bent over until his head was upside down, and smiled. It was like the sun had come to rest under the house.

“Want some mauby and rock cake?”

Her body twitched with the promise of sweet raisins wrapped around dense dough, washed down by the bittersweet drink.

“Go fetch me some and I'll give you a piece.”

*

“What time the doctor calling?”

He is sitting straight-backed at the table, his hands worrying the handles of the knife and fork in front of him. Earlier this week, when she pretended her back was turned, she noticed him repeat this gesture a few times – a shaky worrying of the hands. She had learned to never completely turn her back on Dick even though she made it appear as if she did. She had perfected this as a child, along with a quick surreptitious glance that, in a split second, registered all pertinent facts and potential dangers. Both came in handy when keeping a secret watch on her ex-husband, Eric. That's how she first noticed Dick's shaking hands as he picked up the graduation photo of her son, George, from the cabinet shelf.

“He look like his father.”

She had paused, the heels of her palms sunk into the soft dough, which was refusing to firm up despite her aching triceps.

“A good looking boy.”

He sighed happily before slipping into a satisfied laugh and replacing the frame back in the wrong spot. He stretched and sauntered toward the living room door.

“He didn't get any of you, did he?”

She lifted the dough and slammed it hard on the tabletop as the door closed behind him. She marched the breath through her nose until the rise and fall of her chest evened out and her head swam with air. Slowly she pivoted forward, until her forehead rested on the floury tabletop.

*

She holds the little brown nutmeg to her nose, smelling the musky fertileness of the Caribbean, before grating soft flakes from the aromatic seed into the pan.

“This morning they said…”

“I bet you hoping they give me the all-clear so you can send me home.”

She turns sharply to find him watching her with amusement. Slowly, she carries on her stirring.

*

The rich brown earth whirred beneath her bare feet as she hurried down the sunbaked path to Miss Molly's. She'd speeded up, imagining the first mouthful of rock cake and mauby filling her mouth. She'd take a bite and then swill any leftover space with the ice-cool drink. She'd hold onto each mouthful for as long as she could, chewing thirty-three times like Mother instructed, until the sweet and bitter mixture ran down her throat all by itself.

Hands on hips, Miss Molly smiled as she panted up the yard.

“You a mad dog or an Englishman or what?”

It was the first time she had heard that phrase. She'd seen a mad dog once before, down by Barraouallie Beach. It was spinning on itself, white froth spurting from its mouth but she couldn't imagine a red-cheeked Santa look-a-like behaving that way.

In the shadow of the doorway overhang, sweat ran down her face and the front and back of her dress. She waited a second so the words wouldn't pile into each other.

“I come for Dick mauby and rock cake, Miss Molly.”

Miss Molly raised her eyebrows and pushed up her bottom lip at the same time.

“Eh henh,” she said, shuffling into the shadows of her kitchen. “He must be pleased with himself to treat himself so.”

She returned with the pitcher of mauby and a large paper bag in her hands. Dollo had to clench and unclench her fists to stop from grabbing them from Miss Molly's soft, dimpled fingers. Miss Molly held the bag and the jug toward her but, as the girl reached forward, she pulled back half an inch.

“He going give you some for coming all this way?” Miss Molly gave her a suspicious look.

“Of course.”

How dare Miss Molly doubt her brother so – he being a policeman-in-training and as tall and graceful as he was? Dollo folded her arms in a gesture of solidarity with her brother and raised her chin defiantly at Miss Molly.

“Well, that all right then,” she said and handed over the treats. The girl could hardly remember dropping the money into Miss Molly's hand before she was at the bottom of the lane, her eyes fixed on the mauby in the pitcher.

*

“You going to stir that chocolate tea to death?”

The chocolate tea is thick and stewy. Her stomach churns at the thought of so rich a taste so early in the morning. She can no longer smell the citrus from her own cup of Earl Grey turned cold on the sideboard.

*

Dick was sitting on the veranda when she returned. He looked like an ice pop, his crisp white shirt perfectly ironed and his hem hovering above his ankles. His face was not even shiny, the shelter of the veranda keeping him cool. By the time she reached the bottom step, the heat was making her tremble.

He held out his hands without leaning forward so she had to walk right up to him and place the sweating pitcher and the bag in his hands. He took them with a tug.

She had imagined it in such detail that, as he took that first bite of cake and swig of mauby, she closed her eyes. She opened them to see crumbs escape his mouth and a stray raisin roll under his seat.

His jaw worked as he broke the cake up in his mouth and she watched the first few gulps of mauby bullet down his throat. She shivered as a damp itch crawled over her skin, and the empty hole in her stomach threatened to swallow her up.

The bites he took were large. Two, and already half the cake was gone. His Adam's apple rose and fell underneath the pitcher bottom – one, two, three, four, five, six times. When the pitcher came down, it was almost empty.

Her chest was tightening, so she had to breathe quickly around it. He didn't even look at her as he took the third bite, the last piece of cake crumbling into his hand. With the other, he picked up the pitcher and, before tipping it back, smiled at her. More crumbs fell to the floor and the panic rose to her throat. Before she could stop herself she'd said it.

“Dick, give me some, nah?”

*

The cup of chocolate tea is on the placemat in front of him. But still she stands there holding the hot pan. It is heavy. She can feel the warmth of the handle through the tea towel.

She looks down on him just like that other time. This time his hands aren't smooth and long but gnarled and twisted, the top of his fingers bending away from the inflamed knuckles. She notices the black hair dye spilling into his bald patch as he brings the shaking cup to his lips. He takes a long, slow slurp. There's a second of quiet and then half a gulp before the rest is sprayed out onto the plastic tablecloth she'd bought especially for his visit.

“Jesus Lord! You trying to poison me?”

He looks up at her, but the challenge in his eyes has gone and all that's left is the urge in her fingertips. She bounces the heavy, steaming pan in her hand twice.

*

He was looking deep into the pitcher as if whatever he had to consider lay in the bottom. There were wet smiley mauby marks on either side of his lips. His long pink tongue slowly wiped them away. It was while she was imagining the taste of mauby on skin that, without looking up, he slowly held out the pitcher toward her. She hesitated for a moment then reached out.

Before she could touch the cool sweating sides of the pitcher he jerked his elbow, launching the remainder of the juice into her face. The splash took away her breath and blinded her, leaving her gasping. Long after he had gone and the mauby had dripped and dried on her chin, she remained on that spot, trying to put a name to the part of her that had dribbled away beneath the floorboards.

*

The telephone is vibrating, it's face lighting up with each ring.

They stare at it for five rings before looking at each other. She keeps her eyes on his as she places the hot pot on the table and answers the phone. As she listens to the doctor's even voice, she continues to stare into Dick's pleading eyes while breathing in the pungent smell of burning plastic.

In the taxi, on the way to the airport, they sit next to each other on the back seat, their eyes trained out of opposite windows. Only for a moment does she look down into his lap. With shaky hands, he is threading the warm scarf that she bought him.

“When Mother was sick, she was in a lot of pain you know,” he says, his head turned away from her. “We sat with her all through the night and she cried out. One piece of bawling. Like she was coming into the world not going out.”

The car jolts as it turns into the airport, jostling into the right lane for the terminal.

“It make you realise.”

She looks at his hands threading and rethreading the scarf.

“What did it make you realise?”

“That, in the end, all dem things that we hold onto just disappear. Gone. It's like we are born again.”

*

They wait silently in the check-in queue. She can see over the top of his head. At the desk he can't hear the agent properly so she makes sure he has an aisle seat not far from the toilet and that his diabetic meal has been ordered.

At the departure gates she hangs back.

“You ain't coming?”

She shakes her head. “No. I can't go no further.”

He looks confused, his eyes not focusing on anything in particular. His arms hang awkwardly by his side. Around him excited holidaymakers with their newly highlighted hair and Day-Glo clothes grab goodbye hugs and blow kisses.

She places her bag on the floor and walks toward him. She holds out her arms and there is an involuntary spasm of his shoulders, an extraordinary passing of electricity that lights his eyes. She bends forward, drops her hands on his shoulders and slides them slowly down his back. The tiny wings of his shoulder blades and the marbles of his spine feel fragile and she imagines them skinless – bleached and bare. She feels him stiffen beneath her fingers and then, with a tiny crack like the splitting of a wishbone, a minuscule part of him lets go. She holds him like this for a while, like he is her son and she is leaving him at the school gates.