The Last Warner Woman (20 page)

Three constables broke down the door, and the village crowded in behind them, handkerchiefs clamped firmly over their noses. They were not prepared for what they saw and would have nightmares about it for years to come. It was not only the sight of Mrs. Young, dead as a doornail in her courtyard garden, her face swollen and black and already beginning to rot. It was the boy as well. He was still there working, stepping over and around his mam’s body as if it were just a bag of garbage. And also it was the garden itself. The most beautiful garden any of the villagers had seen. There were bluebells and foxgloves and marigolds all laid out in their own circles and squares. They knew Mrs. Young had had a black finger. The running joke was that she couldn’t even grow weeds. So it was this brooding, dislikable boy who had grown these flowers, who had arranged them in their patterns, this boy who had left his mother to rot in the middle of all his work, as if this were the only thing she was good for—plant food.

Fifteen years old, and they took him out in handcuffs as if he were his own man. But the coroner soon found the bee in Mrs. Young’s nose, and a forensic analysis determined she had died from a massive allergic reaction. Still, the villagers would never understand why Bruce had not called a doctor, or an ambulance, or the police. Why had he just left his own mam there, dead and rotting, and carried on as if it were nothing? They answered this question for themselves. It was because the boy was evil.

Even the parson’s wife whispered, “Pardon me, but that boy is one sick fucker.”

I know that the pastor’s wife whispered this because she is the one I meet years later and she repeats this very thing.

Bruce Young was passed from hand to hand after that—two months here, two months there. He was at that awkward age where it would do no good to settle him in a foster house. Finally, on his seventeenth birthday, he went back to the village and lived in his mother’s house for a year before selling it and disappearing for good.

Now a nonagenarian, the pastor’s wife has become the pastor’s widow, and she tells me, “We heard he ended up at St. Osmund’s after that. You know the one—the nuthouse. We was all relieved when we heard that, we was. We said, well he finally ended up where he belonged. But would you believe it, he didn’t go there as no patient. Oh no. Fellow just wandered onto the grounds and started tending their gardens, and before long, that sick fucker had got himself a job!”

T
HE FIRST WORDS EXCHANGED BETWEEN MILTON AND
Adamine were, of course, not pleasant, and this began a pattern. They fought about everything. There was the matter of her name. On the way home from the airport Milton had glanced into her passport.

“I thought your name was Adamine Bustamante?”

“It is.”

“But it say Pearline Portious right here. What happen? Is you cannot read?”

“I can read very well, thank you, sir.”

“Well I suppose I can call you anything I want. I can just call you Daisy Cowshit for all you care.”

He didn’t tell her that what he was really upset about was the fact that he had already set an appointment at the register office for himself and “Adamine Bustamante.” He imagined he would look like an idiot in the morning, having to correct his fiancée’s name. What kind of marriage was this going to be when he didn’t even know the name of his bride?

It was her turn to explode when she saw the flat. Milton hadn’t cleared away anything. When he opened the door, Adamine staggered back at the smell, and when the light was switched on she began to unleash such a string of curses that had she been in Jamaica, where people were still charged for indecent language, she would have been broke after five minutes. Adamine went on for an hour. Milton was properly scared. He tried to calm her. He begged her to think of the neighbors. He explained that this was no way to behave in England. She told him to kiss his bumboclawt. She demanded to be sent back home to Jamaica because she wasn’t coming to live in this, no way. Milton, ashamed, began sheepishly to put things in order. Thankfully, Adamine’s anger became a vigorous dusting and wiping and sweeping and throwing of things into the hall, where Milton had simply to catch them and take them down to the bin before the neighbors noticed.

Milton admits he should have been grateful for that at least. But the next morning it was his turn again. This time it was the matter of her clothes. When she woke up and started to get ready to go to the register office with him, she began by wrapping her head.

“What wrong? Your skull crack?” he remarked. “Your forehead bleeding? You have migraine?”

“What is it now, Mr. Milton? What now?”

“But just look on you eeh!” he grimaced. “From you step out of that airport yesterday everybody been looking on you. You will have to learn fast, woman. You can’t wear them kind of things in England. Them will think you is backward or something.”

“What wrong with what I wearing? We is not Revivalists? Is not this what we always wear?”

Milton shook his head violently.

“No no no, darling. Not in England. You will have to find yourself a proper hat if you want to go to church. As for me, I stop go to them jump-up church. They not civilized. You ever see the queen wrapping her head up in foolishness, falling on floor and all them kind of bush-nigger stupidness? You ever see the queen swinging a cutlass in the spirit?”

“I don’t business bout no queen. What queen have to do with who we is? I worship God …”

“Too much talk! Too much talk! I just can’t abide a woman with so much mouth.”

“Listen to me, man. I don’t pay taxes fi mi mouth, so I can say what I bloody well want when I want to say it.”

For the second time Milton clenched his fists and this time he made sure that Adamine saw them.

“I bet you can’t say anything when your lips is cut in two and swell up, though.”

“Oh! Oh! I see now. Is threaten you come to threaten me? But you know that is Father God pickney you threatening? Well then … box me! Box me if you think you is badder than God.”

She didn’t expect it. Milton tells me that he didn’t expect it either. But all the same, he hit her. Straight across the face. The sound was as sharp as lightning. And truth be told, he was sorry that he did it. Not sorry for hitting her, he quickly explains, for he is the kind of man who apparently believes some women need an occasional roughing up or else they just won’t conform. Even Doris had received a good slap now and then. But Milton was sorry for what he saw happen in Adamine’s eyes, something that diminished before him, as if a light had suddenly been switched off. It was as if she had lost her faith in God right then and there—her God who could not defend her from this slap.

He remembered how, when he first came to this country, his faith had been all that he had, the only thing he could lean on, the only buffer he had against all that was thrown at him. It had taken him a long while to lose that faith, and when he did, he had done so on his own. No one had taken it from him. But Adamine seemed to lose hers in just a moment and he was sorry that he was the one who had taken it from her.

F
OR ALL OF MY RESEARCH, FOR ALL THE DRAWERS I HAVE
pulled out and rifled through, for all the hundreds of files I have turned over and over, for all the rooms and houses and hospitals I have gone back to and stood in and tried simply to feel their history, to reach out to the ghosts of that space, for all of the terrible past that I have dug up like a dog anxiously uncovering a fresh skeleton, for all of this I have not yet been able to find a clear photograph of Bruce Young. Always this silent, brooding, flower-loving rapist is turning his back, is ducking under someone’s arms, or is lost in the blur of his own movement. It is as if the world wants there to be no evidence of the man’s existence.

But then, I am here. I exist. That is evidence enough.

To describe him I must therefore do an imprecise kind of science. I look closely at Adamine. She has not spoken to me for days, and yet there is something she can tell me even in her silence. I can look for myself in her. I must decide which parts of me she is responsible for.

I take note of her lips. I definitely have her lips. And also her tiny slits of eyes. And the texture that prevents my hair from ever being straight comes from her own lovely afro. Of course I tan easily, the sun always drawing out from my skin the deposit of melanin that hides under the surface. I have her cheekbones too, and most embarrassingly, her behind. I have grown up into this strange mixed-up mulatto man with a black woman’s behind, broad and high, filling out all my trousers.

I catalogue each of these things and whatever is left, whichever part of me I cannot find in Adamine, I ascribe instead, however inaccurately, to Bruce Young. So I imagine him as tall, and his eyes as green, and his teeth as imperfect, a wide space between his two front incisors. He is Caucasian, of course—that much is obvious even in the blurred photographs. But I think he must have been desperately, desperately Caucasian, so that when the sun does not draw out my deposit of melanin, people have often confused me as white, and even on the days when I am my darkest self, they think that perhaps I am simply Mediterranean. I imagine Bruce Young was pudgy around the midsection, just as I have always been. That he had long, skinny legs and big knees. Adamine would have felt those knees pressed into her sides, the clammy flatness of his hands covering her mouth.

There are days when I like to imagine that once or twice she may have bit down hard enough to pierce his skin and taste the salt of his
O
-positive blood. I would like to believe this, that even if in a small way, Adamine might have scarred my father, Bruce Young.

W
HEN I MEET JULIE ASTWOOD AND REMARK ON THE
size of her office, she explains that she recently qualified to be a nurse practitioner, as if this should make everything clear. It takes a while, but I eventually understand that this position is much more senior than being a nurse, or even a matron. On the wall it says that Julie Astwood has just received her
DNP
—a doctorate of nursing practice. So she is a nurse who is called Doctor. I am confused again, but I decide this is not what I have come to ask about. I want to know about a time, long ago, when she was still simply a nurse. A psychiatric nurse.

I relax in her presence, for Julie has an open face and a kind manner. To get things going I ask her, how did you get into nursing?

She laughs so hard the table between us shakes. I raise my eyebrows.

“It’s a hell of a story,” she warns, “but I’m no longer embarrassed to tell it.”

So she tells me.

Things changed on the day that Marcus Ramsay insisted on putting his fingers inside Julie’s knickers. She was sixteen, and she knew that nothing good would come of this. Such clear insight had bypassed her three older sisters, who had been beautiful girls, but had now become a trinity of overweight mothers, living on the dole, and taking it in turns to look after her. Julie’s own mother had said she was due a permanent break from mothering because she was still in her forties for fuck’s sake and she needed to live something of her life before it was over.

Julie’s three sisters had each had their own knickers violated by a boy in high school and they repeated these stories, competing to see who had the cutest boy and which one had the cleverest fingers. They swooned over these memories of the star footballer, the ace cricketer, the fit skinny lad—and how they had given themselves to him willingly and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again.

But Julie, having observed her sisters and the non-eventful lives they led, pinpointed this moment as a kind of death. The day a boy puts his fingers inside you and you let him, she decided, was the day a girl resigned herself to the most banal of existences. She wasn’t going to let that happen. So when, after class was let out one Thursday, Marcus Ramsay held her back (as he often did) but this time began to put his fingers inside her knickers, Julie Astwood understood the moment. She had prepared herself for this moment. She had to make a decision.

What she hadn’t known, however, was that when those fingers reached inside her pants, she would want them to stay there.

She blushes when she tells me this, that she hadn’t counted on that wetness spreading from inside her. The body betrays you, she says, and I was sixteen.

Julie had to close her eyes, imagine her sisters, imagine their lives as her own, before she grasped Marcus’s wrist tightly.

“No, stop.”

Unlike Julie, Marcus Ramsay did not have any older siblings to learn lessons from. He didn’t understand the pattern of life she wanted to escape; he didn’t know why her hand was suddenly stopping his. It annoyed him. All he seemed to understand was that he was already six feet tall, that his torso was toned, and whenever he scored a goal and tore off his shirt everyone looked at him impressed. He understood that he had an impressive knob that bobbed up and down in his shorts, and this made both girls and boys ogle him even more; he understood that Julie, skinny as she was, was the fittest bird in class, with her long brown hair and pointy little nose and her tits like small melons; he understood that this was what they were supposed to be doing, getting hot and heavy in the classroom, making everyone jealous, not only because they wanted to, but because that’s just how things went, it was the script.

Julie pushed him away as he tried to force his hand.

“No Marcus. I really mean it.”

“What do you mean, no?” he stammered.

It could have been an honest question. The boy simply didn’t understand why they shouldn’t be doing what everyone wanted them to do, and what they wanted to do themselves. And maybe, Julie concedes, if she had found a way to tell him,
because we can be more than this, because this will condemn us to a life that we’re better than,
he would have tried to see things her way. But all Julie knew how to say then was, “Fuck off!”

Marcus’s hands were suddenly on her breasts squeezing them harder than they’d ever been squeezed before. She started whimpering. And Marcus, she swears, was suddenly more turned on. He had stumbled, as it were, into a fetish. But it would only last sixty seconds. His dick was rock solid. (60) “You fuck off!” he growled (50) in a voice he had never used before, holding her awkwardly with one hand, (40) unfastening his trousers with the other, (30) his trousers that fell into a puddle around his ankles. (20) He shoved Julie to the floor, (10) freed himself, and pushed his hardness into her mouth. (0).