Nalo Hopkinson - Midnight Robber

He raised Ione’s hand to his lips and kissed it. He released her. He left them and went to where Quashee and the marshall were standing. Ione rubbed her hand. She looked as though she were going to cry for real, but instead she shook her head and gave a little laugh.

“What a thing eh, Tan-Tan?” she said in a high, shaky voice. “To have two men fighting over me! Ain’t? I think your daddy really love me, sweetheart. I must try to be a good wife to he after this. Is me make him vex, and is me must fix it. Come let we go home, child; I have to dress to puss-foot tomorrow morning, oui!”

On the way home in the pedicab, all Ione’s talk was about how Quashee is a nice man, young and tireless; but on the other hand, how Antonio is a mature man who know he own mind, and too besides, you see how fit and strong Antonio looking nowadays? She ain’t really know which one to wish would win, after them both have them good points.

Tan-Tan was frighten too bad, oui.

“Mummy,” she asked. “Daddy go dead?”

Ione sighed. “Tan-Tan, you does worry too much about stupidness. The machète marshall ain’t go let Quashee kill we mayor, doux-doux. The rules say you ain’t supposed to kill in a Jour Ouvert challenge. For you to win, your opponent have to be hurt too bad to keep fighting, or he have to beg you to stop. Okay? So what you think I should wear tomorrow? I have to look nice for the fight!”

Ione and Antonio had always had a stormy relationship. “Love so sweet it hot,” people said. They quarrelled often. It added spice to the subsequent making up. It was their favourite game. But over the years the sweetness had soured. To keep it juicy they’d had to raise the stakes on the fights. Now they each had too much to lose. Neither would give ground. People used to think that Ione was the one suffering, oui? Cockpit County knew about Antonio and the way he lied about his womanizing. The old people who had seen everything in their lives happen two and three and four times would just shake their heads and mutter, “He going to run aground, just like a Garvey ship.”

People thought say was only wicked Antonio horning Ione, for Ione had been too sly to make anybody know her business.

But the game had gotten stale on her. Once Antonio had become mayor he was soon too busy with the work to pay their games much mind. Some days Ione felt say she could have paraded naked through Antonio’s office with three of her lovers and he wouldn’t notice. Singing with the Jubilante Mummers distracted her busy intellect a little. Being on the committee that organized the annual Mercy Table helped too, but she missed Antonio. She found herself longing for the young people days when the two of them would meet after a day of farming and hold hands and walk and talk in the setting sun and make plans for their life together till the frogs in the wisdom weed bushes were wooing krek-ek! in the dark.

Ione decided to try a new way to catch Antonio’s attention again. She got pregnant. So that is the piece of comess that Tan-Tan had been born into. Two people who loved each other fiercely but had forgotten how to do it without some quarrel between them. Ione and Antonio thought say is baby they were making oui, but they were really only creating one more thing to quarrel over.

It had sweet Antonio can’t done to know he was going to be a father. And it was a good thing he liked the idea, for from the first birth pangs hit Ione, it was as though she realised she didn’t have the taste for hard labour, oui. As soon as she pushed the baby out of her, Ione took one look at it and shouted at Antonio to activate the wet-nurse, purchased to help Ione with the breastfeeding. The midwife Babsie took the baby, held it out for Ione to give it one dry kiss on the tiny cheek, and that was that for mother-love.

Antonio followed Babsie as she went into the next room and parked the baby in the carry pouch of the wet-nurse. The nurse’s calming blue chicle gel body hummed reassuringly. “Is all right,” he said to Babsie. “I go stay with she little bit.”

With trembling hands, he made sure his new daughter was snug and comfortable in the carry pouch. She stopped crying. He guided her mouth to the teat of the wet-nurse. The tiny lips locked on and began to suck.

Antonio sat for two hours straight by the baby’s side. He marvelled to watch the new little thing eat, sleep. Watched her wake crying at the feel of the soiled bedding wadded round her. The wet-nurse had come with instructions. He played the ones for changing the swaddling and followed them meticulously, afraid at every turn that he would hurt the child. He fed her again. Then he sat and stared at her for another long hour.

“I still getting pain,” a voice from the next room said.

“But no more contractions?”

Antonio climbed slowly out of his reverie into awareness. Ione was next door in the lying-in room, talking to the doctor. Is how long he had left her alone?

He jumped to his feet. He picked up the baby and hurried into the next room. His wife’s skin was grey with fatigue, her eyelids-them drooping. Is two hands she was using to hold the glass of water to swallow the pills the doctor was giving her.

Doctor Kong turned and smile at him. “Congratulations, Daddy.”

Antonio looked to Ione, but the cut-eye of contempt he got in return was enough to slice skin, oui. She reached out her two arms to claim her property. Antonio put the baby into them. But Ione grasped her too roughly. The pickney woke up and started to cry.

“No,” Antonio said. “Hold she so.”

“Back off from me. You make any pickney?”

And it was Ione who held her child as Doctor Kong syringed the nanomite solution that would form her earbug into the baby’s ear. From then on, what used to be sweet hotness between Ione and Antonio turned to nuclear war, yes.

Ione would look in on Tan-Tan once a day and pat the tiny shoulder, just a little bit too hard. She would always startle Tan-Tan awake, and the baby would start to cry. Quick-quick, Ione would set the wet nurse on “rock.” “Ssh, baby, ssh. You musn’t cry. Don’t make so much noise, or the Midnight Robber will come and take you away.”

In years to come, the little girl Tan-Tan would ask the eshu to show her images of the Midnight Robber. Fascinated and frightened at the same time, she would view image after image of the Midnight Robber with his black cape, death-cross X of bandoliers slashed across his chest, his hat with its hatband of skulls. The Midnight Robber, the downpressor, the stealer-away of small children who make too much mischief. The man with the golden wooing tongue. She would show him. She would be scarier than him. She would be Robber Queen.

All Ione knew was that she was no good at being a baby-mother. She told her husband, “Hear nuh? You have one pickney now, so don’t expect me to be stretching out my figure trying to make no more for you.”

Antonio pushed out his lip when she said that, and his brow got dark as thunder clouds, but he didn’t say nothing, nothing at all. After that, no sweet words for Ione any more.

Is all right though. Ione had better fish to fry, oui? Mayor Antonio was always bringing sweetie and dolly for his little girl Tan-Tan, but he never had anything sweet no more for his hot-blooded, lonely wife. Ione pitched her cap for a youth named Evan, a tall, sweet-talking swaggerboy. Who coulda blame her? Such a nice boy, so polite, so attentive. Such long, strong legs. She hoped for Antonio to see the glances between them and counter with a passion of his own. The game was on again.

Well, doux-doux, Ione was a woman who got bored easily. Couple months down the road, Evan made his eyes rest too long on a pretty young man he met while playing dominoes. And is not like he and Ione coulda had any fidelity pact, but Ione didn’t want to be one of two people vying for Evan’s loyalty. Next day, Ione abandoned Evan for Franklyn and his green, bitter-melon eyes.