No Safeguards (9 page)

“Jay, for the rest of that night I had trouble doing my work. That talk was during our four o'clock break. I couldn't find the energy to keep up after that. I was still cleaning when the office staff began entering. When I got into my room that morning, I threw myself onto the bed, pushed my face into the mattress, and bawled.”

She stopped talking for a long time; resting her lungs, I at first thought, but she began to cry.

“What's the matter, Ma?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

She said nothing more about her early days in Montreal that day, nor the next.

Three days later I prompted her and she resumed.

On one of Manjak's no-show nights, they were on the sixth floor of the second building. They'd already cleaned the top four. She was wearing an old skirt, not the loose jeans she worked in, but she hadn't been able to make it to the Laundromat that week. She was bent over a desk dusting it when she suddenly felt Bulljow's body on hers. He'd sneaked up behind her, lifted her skirt and was clasping her breasts so hard, he was cutting off her breath. He pushed her body against the desk with his huge gut, and was twisting up himself to get his penis, stiff and pulsing, up against her buttocks, his breath, acid stink, hot on her neck.

“‘Relax, sweetypie. Anna, honey, relax,' he said in my left ear and nibbled on it. ‘I gon go gentle with you. I been saving up a whole heap o' sweet hot loving just for you. I's hungry for you, honey. Hungry! Relax, baby, relax. I's a sugar ant, Anna. And you is sweet. I can't help it. Give it to me, Anna. I don't want to steal it, Anna.' Foolishness like that, Jay.

“First I froze. Then, when he lowered one arm and fumbled with his fly, I managed to turn around and began to pull away from him. When he wouldn't let go of my skirt, I spat in his face. He let me go then. I ran behind a desk near to a window, picked up a paperweight and hurled it at him. Next a stapler. Then I pulled out a desk drawer and dumped the contents onto the desk; but, as I was about to rush him with it, I realized I could use it to break the glass and holler rape into the street below.

“Bulljow was crouched behind the desk where he'd attempted to rape me. ‘All right! All Right! Calm down!' he shouted. ‘You don' gotta kill me. I only trying to put a lil' sweetness in your bitter life. See? That's the thanks I get. I gives you a job; and now I offers you love, and you refuses it. You ain't even know the ABC of kindness. From now on, I gon keep me tail betwixt me legs, even if I ha' to strap it down. Don' worry; I ain't going bother you no more. You probably have a man in secret anyways. Some fellars do crazy things just for a piece o' pussy, even when it ain't sweet. Yours probably got warts growing in it, anyway.'

“I left the office and headed for the elevator.

“‘Aay! Aay! What going on? You can't leave!' He followed me to the elevator. ‘I alone can't clean this place before daylight.'

“Jay, I was afraid to go into the elevator, in case he came in too. The stairs were a no-no. ‘I finish,' he said. ‘So help me God, I won't touch you no more. I been only testing you to see if you going say yes. I swear. I won' bother you no more. As God is my witness.'

“I re-entered the office. I was trembling. I left for home an hour later. I began to sob as soon as I exited the building. The half-kilometre walk felt like 20. In my room I threw myself onto my bed and continued crying. I have never felt so vulnerable. I was too ashamed to tell Luciana.

“Bulljow phoned me around eleven. He apologized and begged me to come back. He didn't know what got into him. I didn't go the next night. But I returned. I needed the money.

“The night I returned, I told him: ‘You touch me again and I'll cripple or kill you.'

“‘I hear you.'

“He never bothered me after that, but a few weeks later, while we were taking a break — Manjak had cursed him out two nights earlier and left the job — he said to me: ‘You's a damn lucky woman, Anna. Damn lucky. You come to Canada at the right time. There been a time when if you didn't have your papers you couldn't work. Least not legally.' He grinned, nostrils flaring, chops curling. ‘If now been like then, you wouldn't o' been breaking style on me. You would o' been glad to lemme fuck you so you could keep the job. You just got to understand one thing, Anna. I is a man. I is a hot-blooded man.'

“‘And I can be a killer: a cold-blooded killer.' I was sitting about a metre away from him, more afraid of his breath than his lechery.

“He shook his head slowly, with fake pity. ‘Here you go, talking ‘bout killing, when all I want to give you is pure first-class loving. Age don't slow me down at all. Age don't slow me down one bit. Anna, I wants you to understand this: I can't be alone with a woman without wanting to fuck her.'

“‘You love your life?'

“He shook his head and pushed out his lips. ‘Anna, sweety-pie, why you breaking so much style on me? Try me. Your body will trill and your soul will sing. Sweety-pie, I got the ship, and you got the port. I got the cannon and you got the fort.'

“‘And I got the knife, and you got the throat.'

I laughed. Anna did too and paused to catch her breath.

“Jay, his jaw fell, his eyes widened. I had finally punctured that tyre. I knew I was safe after that.

“At the refugee board hearing, my lawyer, Maître Gupta — a beauti­ful South Asian woman: silk-smooth black skin, erect posture, fierce brown eyes, shoulders that said:
you can't intimidate me
— fierce, a tig­ress; she couldn't have been more than thirty. At the hearing she read excerpts of the Vincentian laws authorizing beatings by parents, teachers, and magistrates — Mama had got her solicitor to compile the information and send it to her. Maître Gupta asked the refugee judges, two women: ‘Would you want to raise your children in such an en­vironment?' But even she was surprised when the verdict came: ‘Claim granted!' ‘Honestly, I didn't think you'd get it. It's an argument that's never been successful before,' she later told me. It took two years and three months from the day I applied, and if I include the cost of the divorce, it came up to a lot more than I had. Mama made up the difference.

“I continued working for Bulljow until I got residency status. After that I worked for a cleaning agency three days a week, cleaning homes in Westmount mostly. I followed Luciana's advice and went to night school.

“Grama was excited when she read your letter about going back to school,” I said. I spared her Grama's exact words: “About time. Your mother is finally learning sense. Threw her education away to follow stupid religion. You better not get it in your skull that you can get ahead in life without a decent education.”

“Mama was pleased and sent me the money to come home to see you all. She was anxious for me to establish a connection with Paul. ‘You left when he was two. Now he's four and always asking about you. He's nothing like Jay. Caleb would have found plenty devil to beat out of him.' And so I came home that August.”

I
REMEMBER HER
visit. Vividly. On her second day back home — she was seated on the loveseat in the living room, I was standing by the window giving onto the street, she asked me about Caleb.

“Ma, you won't like what you hear. He's always drunk. He lives in this isolated, dreary place. Lonely, like you can't imagine. You should see the shack. No paint on it, woodlice eating through the wood, huge holes in the flooring, the galvanize rusty and leaking, sea grape, fat pork, and ping-wing all around, hemming it in, the branches and leaves even poking in the windows when they're open. Just a tiny track through the bushes down to the beach where it is. If I don't part the bushes with my hands, they hit me in the face. And when you look out the seaside window, you see these huge, loud, crashing waves rushing ashore like monsters coming to swallow up the place. When a big one breaks the shack shakes. I've never seen anybody on the beach around there. There's where Daddy lives, sleeping on a coconut-fibre mattress without any sheets. It stinks of pee. I think he wets himself when he's drunk. Know what he has in there? A green plastic lawn chair, a primus stove, two tiny pots, a cup, a peeling knife, a spoon, and a vinyl suitcase with a torn hand grip. Not a single curtain in the windows, no lock on the door.

“And when he's not breaking stones, he's drinking strong rum straight from the bottle. I go to see him every six weeks on average. It hurts to see him, Ma. Depending on when I get there, he might be sitting on the steps outside with the bottle of rum beside him or in his hand, or lying on the mattress with it beside him. First, he looks at me as if he doesn't know me. Then his eyes — they're always red — light up a little, and he grins and says to me: ‘You're getting to be a big boy. Can't say your Grama not feeding you all. How's Paul?' Then he'd be silent for a spell. If we're outside, he'd just stare at the grape bushes and ping-wing; sometimes he'd pull a twig, chew on it, and talk to himself like: ‘You never bring Paul. Don't want him to see the drunkard, eh? A true man takes care o' his family. I used to tell my congregation that. Your Grama taking good care o' you and Paul? I can see that,' and he'd nod. Then, Ma, his face would get hard and creased up, and he'd say: “Why did I believe God foreordained me?' And he'd laugh, a cackle: a sound to make you shiver. ‘Foreordain! Crap like me! Your mother should o' follow your Grama's advice: should o' never marry me. Listen to the crap I'm telling you. Forgetting you're a child.' He'd check himself for a moment but would start again: ‘How's your mother doing? You all hear from her often? Tell her I say howdy. She's not a bad woman. I know that now. God knows best.' Then his eyes would focus on me again. ‘Come, give the old reprobate a hug. You ashamed of me, Jay?'

“‘No, Daddy,' I shake my head and say. ‘I'm not ashamed of you.'

“‘You little liar! It's all in your eyes. Don't want to hurt my feelings, eh? You're a good son. I love you, Jay. Don't throw me up, son. I didn't have a father. I didn't. He got my mother pregnant and disappeared. Then she died. Then my aunt and uncle who been raising me, they upped and died too: drowned. I always said I will be there for my children. I always said so.' All this time his arm would be still around me, and the smell of the rum and his dirty clothes would be choking me. At this point, Ma, he would make every effort not to cry, but the tears would flood his eyes. The last thing he says to me every visit is: ‘Leave a phone message by the shop to say when you're coming. I don't like for you to meet me drunk, and don't ever bring Paul without phoning me first.' But, Ma, I leave a message every time, and I know he gets it. But by the time I get there he forgets. Then, if he's sitting on the step, he'd stumble inside, push his hand into a hole in his mattress, and take a few bills and put forty dollars in my hand and say: ‘Now, don't do like your foolish father and spend it on rum.' Ma, sitting on the bus going home, I always feel like if something sucked all the strength out of me, and I tell myself I'm not going back. When Grama asks me how he is, I say all right, and she replies: ‘No, he's not alright,' and sometimes she says: ‘Without women to guide them, some men lose their way in the world. Your father needs a woman with a firm hand.' Ma, don't tell Grama what I've told you. I don't want her to stop me from going to see him.”

Anna patted the seat on her right. I went to sit beside her. She put her right arm around me and pulled me close to her. “We must go see him — you, Paul, and me. Give me the number at the shop. I'll ask him to meet us all in town. If that works out, you, Paul, and I will go out to Georgetown to see him. I don't want Paul to see him drunk.” Then she fell silent.

***

She sounded far away when she resumed talking in her hospital bed. “I barely remember anything about my own father. I remember Mama's second marriage. I was eight. The blue dress she wore, Father Henderson in a white soutane and purple surplice, stating the marriage vows; Mama and Bradley repeating them. Afterwards all the people at the house. Mr. Morris was the emcee — twiglike in a grey herring-bone suit, gesturing wildly, with all that energy he has trouble burning off. Mama's girlhood friend Elma, who fed you and Paul lunch when you went to school in town, organized the cooking and serving. And the speeches, all that stuff that goes on at weddings. Seemed like so much fun.” She clamped her lips, stared blankly ahead of her, and swallowed.

“Then Bradley moved in with us. He brought a whole set of weights that he kept in one of the cellar rooms. He almost never wore shirts. You could see the ridges of muscle on his dark brown body, especially on his arms, shoulders, and belly: hills and valleys, and his veins like termite tunnels crisscrossing his skin. He and Mama quarrelled all the time. He telling her: ‘Not because you married me a pauper, I will let you crow over me. I's still a man and I have my pride.' She telling him: ‘And because you're a pauper doesn't mean I have to become one too. You're too damn lazy! Imagine I have to share-crop the land that Kirton left me! You know the value of bananas and plantain and ginger! You should be cultivating it. Instead all day you're in here lifting weights, and at nights you perfume yourself and out tomcatting — with your jackabats, your war-bins, your sluts. Lifting weights and tomcatting — that's your life. And I have to feed you with my dead husband's assets. You live a sweetman life. You're a gigolo, a parasite!'

“Sometimes Bradley would leave and not come back for two-three days. Once he was gone for a week and returned in the company of Aunt Mercy to beg Mama to take him back.” She stopped talking, pouted her lips, and kept them that way for a long while.

***

Sitting on the loveseat beside her that August when she came back to see us, I told her: “Paul's been asking a lot of questions lately about his daddy, and Grama hasn't been answering him. He wants to know if his daddy is overseas like you. I told him I didn't know. He's puzzled, Ma.”

I picture myself again standing at the entrance to the kitchen and observing Paul staring at her framed photograph that was on the right-hand corner table in the living room. Next Paul looked at Anna. “You're not my mother.” He looked at the photograph again and asked: “You're sure you're my mother?”

“Of course, I'm sure.”

“And Grama — is she
your
mother?”

“Of course, she is, and she is your grandmother. That's why you call her Grama.”

“Jay, come here. Is she my mother?” He stared sceptically up into my eyes.

“Yes, Paul, she is. I remember when she was nursing you as a baby.”

Paul giggled. “She nursed me?”

“Of course, I did.”

“If you say so.” Then shaking his head slowly, he said: “You're not my mother. Grama is my mother. You're
his
mother.” He pointed to me. “Jay, you can have her. I'll have Grama. Carry Jay back with you when you leave. He likes to boss me around.”

“Come, give me a kiss and a hug,” Anna told him.

Paul shook his head slowly, smiling. “I don't kiss strangers. I only kiss my Grama. Kiss Jay.”

I held Paul's hand and pulled him toward Anna. He struggled to get away. “It's true, Paul. She's our mother. Come kiss her.”

Paul shook his head and clamped his lips. “I'll kiss you only if Grama says it's okay.”

“It's okay, Paul,” Grama called from inside her bedroom.

He kissed Anna, but moved sideways when she tried to hug him. “Why didn't you bring my father?”

“Oh, he might come.”

“When?”

“I don't know.”

“Does he live across the sea like you? Will he come in a plane like you?”

“No, he won't. But if he comes we'll see him.”

“How will he come then?”

“In a bus.”

Paul frowned. “Is he going to stay with us?”

“No.”

“Does he hit kids?” He stared into her eyes, hard. “William, Joseph, and Henry, their fathers beat them and leave welts on their skins. They are wicked.”

“No, your father won't hit you. He will lift you up and hug you, and ask you for a kiss, and you must kiss him.”

“Will he hit me if I say no?”

“No, he will not.”

“I won't kiss him if I don't like him.” He went into our bedroom at this point, then returned with three books. “Can you please read me
Winnie the Pooh
?”

Anna read to him.

“Have you ever seen a bear?”

“Only on television.”

“I saw a whole lot of them on television. Teacher Nancy says bears live in cold places. Grama says you live in a country that's cold like the inside of a freezer.”

“Bears live in the forest, Paul, and I live in a huge town with lots of houses and plenty cars, and bears are afraid to come into big towns.”

“Would you like to hear me count?”

She nodded.

He counted to ten, then said: “Hold up your fingers.”

She held them up. He bent two inwards.

“How many fingers do you have now?”

“Six!”

He threw himself on the floor with laughter. “Jay,” he shouted, “Ma can't subtract.”

“You tell me how many fingers then?”

“Eight. And they are not all called fingers. What are these called?” He closed his fingers and pointed his thumbs upward.

“I've forgotten.”

“You're lying.”

“Paul,” Grama called out. “Watch your tongue.”

“You're not telling the truth.”

“Okay. Thumbs. When you add your fingers, your thumbs, and your toes, how many do you have?”

“Twenty.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “That's a baby question.”

***

Staring at the ceiling above her hospital bed, Anna resumed: “I was happy. That trip home made me happy. Happy to see how confident and independent Paul was.” She swallowed and took a long pause. “I was surprised to see how grown and mature you were. Your behaviour, your speech, was so adult. Later, when I took psychology at CEGEP, I knew that you'd already decided it was risky to remain a child. And I knew it was because I went away and left you behind.” She was silent for close to a minute.

“I see now that Paul had already rejected me.

“After Caleb didn't call I got anxious, and, Jay, you said: ‘Ma, we should just go to see him.' He looked haunted. His skin oozed rum. I smelled it every time the breeze blew past him. He looked shorter. His back had slumped, and his knees were bent. Arthritis, I thought. He'd stopped shaving. His scraggly beard and moustache were grey; his hair was a matted mess.”

We'd gone on a Thursday. We met him on the beach whacking away at stones; he was barefooted and shirtless, in mud-splashed green trousers rolled up to just below his knees, his face turned to the Atlantic. We were almost beside him before he saw us.

“How's the Christian soldier?” Anna greeted him.

Caleb smiled, hangdog. “You look good.” He paused. “Take off your shades. Lemme see you good.” He nodded slowly, three times.

“And you should be wearing goggles. I have brought you some.” She went to where he stood at the stone-breaking platform and handed him the paper bag with the goggles.

“Thanks.” He looked inside the bag and nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

She came back to stand beside me.

Caleb turned away and faced the Atlantic. When he looked at us again, his gaze moved from her to me and back again, and the wrinkles in his forehead were deeper.

The day was cloudless, the sun already overhead. Standing on the black sand stretching down the coast for more than a mile, and with the sky and ocean, silvery and blue, behind him, Caleb looked like a pillar of iron rusting in the salt sea air. Every muscle and bone from his navel up was outlined on his bare torso, sunburnt a deep-brown. There were deep rents in his trousers where his buttocks protruded and exposed his beige drawers.

“I feel shame you meet me looking like this,” he said, staring at the ground.

“Well, if you'd phoned back . . .”

He walked around a half pile of broken stones and came to where we stood, a metre and a half away from the stone-breaking platform. He faced me, put an arm on my shoulder, smiled, and said: “Jay,
my
boy.” He stared out at the Atlantic and didn't speak for several seconds. “Many is the days I feel like dropping this sledgehammer and jumping in there” — he pointed to a whirlpool about ten metres out in the Atlantic — “and end it all. But I think o' the pain I would cause him.” He lifted his eyes to stare at Anna, then looked at me. “So I go on living.” He took a deep breath, before repeating: “For you, Jay.” His arm lowered and he pulled me to him as he said it.

“I'm glad to hear it,” Anna said.