Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

“One hundred and twelve pounds. You know, eight stone.”

“And you are how tall? What, five-foot-four? You shouldn’t weigh more than a hundred and four pounds. That is your ideal weight.”

Anyone can see how Vikram misses Maureen — misses her enough to get vexed. But he won’t say anything. He won’t do anything. He is a gentle man.

“You don’t worry, Beta,” says Auntie Kirti. “What that girl did was totally out of order. But you don’t worry about her. I have told my maid to get a taxi and go up there and spend two hours a day every morning until that girl is up and about again.”

“People don’t expect a young lady to get into those sorts of state, do they?”

“Mind your own business, Ambika. I am concerned for the girl,” croons Cheryl. “It seem to me she has not adjusted well. Maybe she will need to go away for a little while until she feels better.”

A single woman soon to be dispossessed of her social status, Maureen tries to think that she is safe. That day when the yard boy walked into her bedroom pretending to ask her an ordinary question — she felt too miserable to move when he came in, too sick to know when he left, and she was too wise to tell anyone how he and his friend materialized on another day when she was lying there unbathed and in a tangle of cotton and grief. Since then she hasn’t trusted the so-called instinct of self-preservation. No, since before.

Maureen knows that someone like her does not really require help. She will not buy a guard dog. How could she manage that kind of beast? She does not talk to the police more than she has to. The police are her in-laws’ friends, and they already check up on her. She knows, when she hears the lock of the back door going. And even the best private security firms would not bring a helicopter to her hill. But armed service is not always what a girl needs to feel secure.

One little thing she can do, and she has done almost straight away, is to have the swimming pool emptied. That gives her a reason to send the yard boy on a few weeks’ holiday. So nice of him to stay and work for her without wages, when she is so difficult. Without the pool needing chemicals and things fished out of it, and with Kirti’s fearful polisher doing her daily stint, the property is kept up at a decent standard. Any more snakes can go in the pool next door.

Vikram keeps smiling. “She needs her space.”

“You need to get out more, talk to some men, boy. Maureen had you shut up there in that house until, like, you gone stupid over she? Why you don’t drop in on Jay and Eduardo this evening? I know they would like to see you.”

Ambika’s drawl. “Eduardo is a barbarian.”

“Shut up, Ambika. Isn’t that what you foreign-educated girls like to say to your elders — shut up ?” Vikram’s ears are packed with bubbles when the womenfolk talk. He can think only of the fresh start in the morning’s electric blueness.

Received wisdom has it that on or near the equator, the day vanishes abruptly, gold to black, without nightfall. At eleven degrees above the equator, for those who care to perceive it, there is a violet hour. Whiskey has been on Vikram’s breath for about three and a half hours by now. His tan is deep, acquired by poolsides that are not his own. His anger surges. The new moon is strung out like a hammock, white by the red of the broadcasting station’s three-point glow.

Does Vikram need an invitation to his own house? It is not without an invitation that the borrowed Toyota Hilux ransacks a path, on full beam, to the heights where that house and wife of his are located. A tipsy giggle ripped apart by mobile phone crackle. “You don’t swim for me anymore? Swim for me tonight.” Then the flatline tone. No hope of a workable signal on that hill.

There are some lessons that a good man would hope not to have to teach. Vikram is equipped with tools for the teaching.

Such ridge-top trees as stayed unburned make ink etchings on the tropical dusk.

Vikram knows this road’s ups and downs. He switches off the engine and the lights. He inches. He coasts. But he can hear singing and talking. That must be in his head. The radio is not on and nobody is about in the neighboring houses, except the high-ranking army couple whose voices are raised as ever on their veranda, a gun making punctuation in the air, all present and correct.

Vikram stops outside his own land. He knows what he has come to do. “My babba. My baby .” He is sobbing and shaking. He is all alone with the feeling of being a man who means harm. This is hateful. He switches on the pinpoint torchlight of his mobile phone — all it is good for in this place where its waves cut up voices.

First, can’t he cool his head? He rubs some whiskey on his forehead. He takes out his wallet and looks at the photo of Maureen, small smiler in an alien landscape. His Beautiful Thing face reasserts itself over its breakup. ( Handsome , the Matriarch says...) He can’t cool his head? The Clarks come off and the Pringle socks. The dark jeans too, he folds them neatly. Those as well? Yes. Now there is only the shirt, only the white vest. The athlete, stripped. It is night, but he needs the touch of blueness. Poised at the edge of the pool, he lets it sink in before he speeds up — the feeling of perfectibility, the anticipation of brightness. It shatters white as the moon, whiter than day.

There is a cry at the moment of no contact with water.

There is a female cry following hard upon the sound of his cry. Maureen.

Will she offer to help? She was expecting something to tidy up now.

If you look at certain hills in other countries — territories that are northern by latitude though seldom by title — any green that you can see might as well be called purple or blue or brown or Venetian-red. The reflections and weave of things prevent the tongue from settling on any adjective, except as a compromise between the dullness of the naming language and the dazzled eye. Here in Trinidad it is different. The green is green. Except when rain gathers, then it is darkness. And except at dawn, when amethyst and terra-cotta slip a glory that is almost cold on the nation’s three defining lines of steep terrain.

Not far from these houses is the kind of area where you see the steps that go nowhere. These concrete or stone steps may go straight up any hill or mountain in Trinidad. You may have seen them, for example, on the North Coast Road, cut into the ferrous rock. On your left you will have had the precipice — the vines, the trees, and the drop down to the gorgeous dangers of the bathing beaches. Your car, like all the other cars, will have been taking the winds and speeding, hoping not to meet another vehicle going the opposite way around a turn. On the right there will have been the chuckling of rain forest — at certain times of year, a waterfall that runs where nobody knows, under fern flooring. On such a route you may have seen the steps starting in a clearing, but then just going — up. Could the end of that vertical be where the true Rastafarians live, those enlightened yogis tenderly raising their pumpkin, plantain, cassava, and marijuana, with as little disturbance as possible to the earth they cleanly and illegally hold? I doubt that’s how it is, but I like the idea of it.

Then again, maybe you haven’t seen those steps. Maybe you took the north coast road, like most of us, dreaming of arrival — a whole ocean, peacock, electric blue.

East Dry River

All eyes of the waiting commuters followed the pair of shorts with the cheeks exposed and the long thin legs that carried them. Three-inch stilettos gave movement an added bounce. The spandex short top with diamond-studded heart motif on the chest was hardly noticed, so interesting was the lower half. Her companion attracted some glances, but her tight mini halter dress drew fewer comments.