The Worlds Within Her (7 page)

YASMIN, BUCKLING HER
seat belt, says, “What should I call you?”

“Penny will do. Nothing else really fits, eh?”

She puts the car into gear and pulls out quickly. They turn a corner, then another.

Penny says, “You probably don't remember much —”

“Nothing. Not really.”

“Well, you were so young. Three? Four?”

“Four.” Yasmin gazes through the tinted window: at the sidewalk, at houses — cream, white: strangely colourless — cool
and inaccessible behind fences and shrubbery. And she, neither resident nor tourist, aid worker nor investor, senses herself distanced from it all. She thinks of the woman on the aircraft, and she wonders whether her cruelty had issued from her own indefinability, from an unsuspected envy. But she does not wish for greater involvement with, or even greater knowledge of, the world she sees through the window. She is here to fulfill an obligation. And then to leave.

So she turns away from that world and, with her eyes alone, looks at Penny. At her silver hair swept tight on her scalp and knotted into a bun at the back. At the face burnt a rich brown: the nose flat, the lips dark and finely shaped. A face, like her mother's, without wrinkles, unblemished by the years. She does not — as her mother would say — look like a Penny.

She turns suddenly towards Yasmin, catches her gaze. Holds it for a moment, and smiles. Then her eyes fall to the purse on Yasmin's lap. “You didn't bring her,” she says.

“I'm not ready,” Yasmin replies.
Bring her. Bring it.
She is surprised at the depth of her unease.

Eyes on the road, Penny nods.

Yasmin is grateful for that, senses — hopes — that perhaps the warmth of the voice …

And then, with the turning of a corner, they are in traffic. The sidewalks are wider now, crowded with people and ramshackle booths festooned with colourful bric-à-brac. Almost hidden behind them, small stores huddle in the shadows, reminding her of the houses a street or two ago, inaccessible behind their walls and their shrubbery. A bustling street, but not lively. Fidgety, rather, Yasmin decides. Fretful.

“You feel it?” Penny says.

“What?”

“The frenzy.”

“They told me at the hotel things aren't back to normal yet.”

“Yet!” Penny laughs, a cascade of throaty merriment. “Well, is good to know we still have some optimists in this place.”

Farther down the street, the backdrop of stores falls away to a sudden vision of apocalypse: to the broken husks of buildings, to wood turned charcoal, to walls blackened by fire, beams warped by heat. Block after block of the devastation she remembers introducing on the evening news.

Penny says, “They went after the big stores, but of course it just spread all over the place. We could a' lose the whole town. As soon as they surrendered, the fire brigade moved in.”

Yasmin says nothing. There is nothing to say.

The street ends abruptly, branching to either side at a high stone wall. Just above it, Yasmin sees the sea — a brackish blue sprinkled with small boats — and a hazy horizon.

Penny turns right, driving swiftly along the sea road. “How your husband doing?” she asks.

“He's fine. He wanted to come, but …”

“Is not really his place, eh?”

On the left, Yasmin sees the city docks: large rusted sheds, the funnels of cargo ships. At the main gates, there are sandbags, and soldiers in helmets. She says, “He and Mom were close.”

“I know.”

“Maybe he should have come.”

“Don't think I'm pryin', but everything all right with you and Mr. Summerhayes?”

“His name is Jim.”

Penny laughs. “Shakti trained me.”

Yasmin wonders how often her mother and Penny spoke. She wonders how much her mother said, and how much Penny may have embroidered from what she said. She realizes that she
does not, that she cannot, trust Penny. After a moment she says, “Everything's fine.”

HE OWNED A
cat, a bony, manic creature that would not let itself be stroked. It seemed an odd animal for him to have. When he'd mentioned he had a pet, she'd imagined a dog, a golden retriever, a Labrador, something large and gentle. But Anubis slunk around the apartment, scurrying across open spaces, hugging the walls with the stealth of a shoplifter. Small and lean in the way of the chronically agitated, she inserted herself into impossible nests from which she would emerge defensive and aggrieved.

The first time Yasmin sat on the sofa, Anubis announced her presence among the cushions with a yowling exit. The slash of protesting shadow left Yasmin unnerved for several minutes, as the cat, heaving with fright, glared at her from Jim's shoulder.

When he saw Yasmin and Anubis would not be easily reconciled — he had held the cat out to her, its body limp, its eyes malicious; it had growled and spat at her — he said he would exile it to the bedroom. He spoke with dispassion, but Yasmin did not miss the regret — or was it a suppressed dismay? — that wove its way through his words. His consideration for the animal left her perturbed, yet there was something indefinably reassuring about it. She was glad to have Anubis gone.

His apartment was large, conventional in design, with picture windows opening the living room to a spacious balcony, sky
and wooded hills. A discreet glimpse of the expressway that wound downtown reminded her of the night she and Charlotte had ridden it through a raging midnight storm, the speed dangerous, the music deafening. It had been an exhilarating ride, but Yasmin had found herself breathless with fright at the end. His furniture too was conventional, classic, of an unmemorable timelessness. The walls were hung with framed photographs, his successes. He had spoken of his photography, his interest in playing with light, seizing its elements: the moment, he had said, when everything was contrasted, highlighted, clarified. His camera accompanied him on trips to aid not memory but rather exploration — not of people, he had said, but of landscape: to help him see the obvious. And as she scanned the walls, few faces looked back at her. Those that did were snapshots clustered in frames beside the front door, as if they had been ushered in without quite being welcomed. Age and resemblance told her they were of relatives, parents and grandparents, smiles fixed, attitudes posed. Well-to-do people, she decided, respected in their communities, satisfied with their lives. But that was the lie of snapshots, as Jim had said: regrets and dissatisfactions momentarily displaced for the camera.

She moved on. To a wooden frame within which a drainpipe the shade of pewter emerged from a flower box swollen with colour, ran down a lemon wall to the sidewalk, and finally disgorged onto wet cobblestones what looked like gushing water flash-frozen to ice. Beside it, in a brass frame, two walls of unfinished concrete met in the middle, each centred by a clear-glass window, one reflecting rugged, snow-topped mountains, the other a field of thick vegetation. Clever photographs, she thought, well composed, and suggestive of more than the simple pleasure offered the eye.

The next photograph, though, immediately unsettled her. It was, in its details, not an extraordinary composition, merely a rectangle divided into two triangles. The first, forming the base, was of a hill sloping from the upper right corner precipitously down to the lower left; its short grass was bathed in a thick golden wash, as if from the furnace of a setting sun. Filling the space above it, looming impenetrable above its brilliance, the other triangle suggested the darkest of nights, a sky of storm cloud. There seemed a permanence to the darkness, as if the stars would never return, and a desperation to the light, as if it knew itself to be on the edge of extinction. Yasmin hugged herself. It was, in the quiet intensity of its contrasts, a terrifying photograph.

Jim emerged from the bedroom rubbing his eyes. He had changed into jeans and an untucked shirt. “She's calmed down.”

“Oh, she has, has she?” Her tone was flattened by sarcasm. She swallowed, and drew his attention to the photograph.

“Switzerland, about three years ago. Three days of business and two days of hiking. I took exactly five photos. The other four didn't work.”

The pride in his voice prevented her from confessing her discomfort — that would probably have pained him — and it yet insisted that she show further interest. She asked about the technical challenge. Surely he had used a filter to achieve the richness of colour?

“No, never.”

She bit her lower lip, hard. He had told her this before — natural light was a point of honour with him — and somehow she had forgotten. He disdained lamps and flashes and filters of any kind. They effected frauds, he'd insisted, were a manipulation of the light rather than an engagement with it.

“Remarkable,” she said into the ensuing silence, and the emptiness of the remark was apparent to her. She possessed the vocabulary — she could hold her own with the art crowd, with academics, saying much and meaning little — but the anxiety of the moment would not let the words come.

“Know what I like best about this photo?” Jim said. “It can't ever be duplicated. The right time of year, the right time of day, to the second. The right weather conditions. You can't plan something like this. You simply have to find yourself there. The right place at the right time.” He let his gaze linger on it. Then he added, “The story of my life.”

The words hung long between them.

Finally Jim laughed, embarrassed, and the sound of his laughter prompted a mewl of protest from Anubis.

Yet he did not hesitate as he leaned forward to kiss her, a brief brush of lips that quickly gave way, for them both, to a welcoming of passion.

HAVE YOU EVER
greeted someone at the docks, Mrs. Livingston? You haven't? It's terribly exciting, you know. There's a sense of occasion, of — strangely enough — accomplishment. Something to do with the distance travelled and the time required. Nothing like airports, with their air of imprisonment.

But the atmosphere was dampened somewhat that morning, for it was as we stood there on the docks, watching cranes heave nets of luggage and cargo from the ship, that Cyril told
us what had happened in London. About the quiet dinner in the neighbourhood restaurant, the walk back to their flat through the dark, wet streets; the men — three, four, he wasn't sure — materializing out of an alley; the growls of
Black bastard!
and the blows that followed: fists, boots. Celia managed to run for help but by the time she got back with a constable, two minutes, no more than three, the damage had been done. They had broken no bones, but they had smashed the right lens of his glasses. They had damaged the eye, though not irretrievably. Sight would return, but impaired. It could have been worse, Cyril kept repeating, it could have been worse: as if trying to convince himself. But we saw in days to come that the attack had shattered more than his lens; it had shattered his illusions of London, of England and of all that these meant; it had enervated him, and turned him bitter. He still spoke of resuming his studies one day, but it sounded more like a hope than a plan.

Back at the house, my husband and Cyril supervised the hauling of their travel chest up the stairs. It was large, blue metal with leather straps and locks of polished brass, and heavy with clothes, books and knick-knacks — so Celia explained to my mother-in-law, Penny and me, but mostly to me, it seemed, as we sat in the porch waiting for Amina to serve refreshments. They had brought only light clothes, Cyril's law books so he could keep up, and a few things to remind them of England: photographs, prints of the countryside and such.

Presently Amina arrived with a platter of glasses filled with soft drinks and ice. Conversation, of course, had not been easy. Question and answer, everybody terribly polite. And that is probably why I remember the tinkle of the ice in the glasses. It seemed awfully loud in the awkward silence. My mother-in-law motioned Amina towards Celia. Celia sat up, hesitated. And then, with
that painful, apologetic, ornately wheedling manner of the British, which they have passed on to you Canadians, she asked if she could possibly, if it wasn't too much trouble, have some tea.