Nalo Hopkinson: Midnight Robber

The pup grumbled again.

“Yes, I coming just now, hold your horses, nuh?” She clambered awkwardly out of the nest, sat straddling the branch while she got her breath. Her centre of gravity shifted almost daily as her belly grew. She’d lost track, was it seven months? Seven and a half? More, maybe? Her back hurt all the time, she couldn’t get a restful sleep. Damned baby. And like it had heard her, it kicked. Ai. Vicious brute’s legs were getting stronger. She swung heavily out of the tree, wincing as the impact of landing made her belly pull at her crotch tendons. The rolling calf pup hurried over to her, making a noise like three grown men with bellyaches. It tried to lean against her leg; she stepped away. “No, you too big, you have to stop that now!” Its armour-plate skin had hardened as it had grown. It could scrape her skin raw. It swiped its spiked tail back and forth, making a thumb-deep groove in the dirt. She slid the choke chain loose from its neck. It shook its blocky tricorned head and lumbered off in search of greenery. One day she knew it wouldn’t come back. Tefa was right, it was old enough. She no longer needed to keep it near so she could watch over it at night. But she didn’t want to set it free. It was the first thing whose life she’d really managed to save so far, the first step in lifting the douen curse from her head. If she let it go and it died, would she have to start all over again?

Tefa had fluttered down from the nest, was giving herself a dust bath to stifle mites. She was kicking up an opaque cloud. Tan-Tan coughed and stepped back, fanning dust away from her face.

Tefa was another one who didn’t have to be leashed to her any longer. There were other daddy tree communities about. Abitefa had made a point of searching them out and warning them not to lay down obvious trails to tallpeople settlements. Humans were curious animals and now that they had really begun to wonder about how douens lived, some brave ones were venturing farther and farther into the bush. Janisette’s posse had made it the farthest so far, but they had become a laughing stock. Almost no-one believed their tale about a tree as big as a mountain that had shrunk to a sapling overnight. Tefa had refused to stay with any of the other douen communities because Tan-Tan refused to join her, or to try and live with tallpeople. Was only a matter of time before Janisette caught up with her. She didn’t want to bring her fate on anyone else. Abitefa should leave her too, in this shadow place between two peoples. And then where would Tan-Tan be? And what about when the devil baby got born?

Circles, her mind was forever going in circles lately and always came back to this. “Tefa,” she shouted, “I going into the settlement it have over there so.”

The dustcloud stopped its dance. Abitefa peeked out. *Why?*

“I need new blouses—the belly poking out again.” Which was only partly true. The last set of clothing she’d got would fit until she delivered. She was just restless, wanted to see people going about their lives round her. She hadn’t checked out this particular settlement yet. She puffed her way back up into the tree—soon she’d have to nest on the ground, and what would she do then? Later, think about it later. From higher up she marked the path of the sun, then jumped back down to the ground. “I go come back by nightfall, all right?”

*Seen. Walk good.*

Tan-Tan marked her way as she went; notching a tree here, building a small pyramid of boulderstones there. Aside from the discomfort of her baby belly, it felt good to exercise her body. Adult exiles to New Half-Way Tree often never came into the full satisfaction of feeling their muscles work to move the world around them.

It took her about two hours to start to see the middle bush that signalled a settlement. She hid her lantern in a shrub at the border of the bush. She thrust her face out of the bush. About a metre sunward was a wisdom weed field. It would hide her entrance and exit from the settlement. Staying in the bush, she worked her way round to it.

There were people who had been working the field this morning. She could see them in a hut nearby, taking shade from the noonday heat and eating their lunch. One of them was holding court with a Tan-Tan story, the one about Kabo Tano and the evergiving tree. Tan-Tan smiled wryly to herself. It was a simple thing to sneak past them through an uncut section of the field.

What a thing those Tan-Tan stories had become, oui! Canto and cariso, crick-crack Anansi back; they had grown out of her and had become more than her. Seemed like every time she heard the stories they had become more elaborate. Anansi the Trickster himself couldn’t have woven webs of lies so fine. She kept trying to discern truths about herself in the Tan-Tan tales, she couldn’t help it. People loved them so, there must be something to them, ain’t? Something hard, solid thing other people could see in her; something she could hear and know about herself and hold in her heart. Know you is a no-good waste of space.

She found the road and asked a passer-by if there was a tailor. There was. She followed the man’s directions through the streets. One or two people looked at her curiously. Some nodded a greeting. She had almost forgotten what the gesture meant. She’d been walking a few minutes when she realised what was odd about this settlement—it was clean. No smell of sewage in the streets. No open middens. Pickney-them only as frowsty as diligent parents would allow.

And this must be the tailor shop here, right where the man had said it would be. The door of the small hut was open. She walked inside. The tailor looked up from his ancient treadle sewing machine. “Good afternoon, Compère. How I could help you today?”

Tan-Tan goggled at him, tipped her sombrero down so its shadow hid her face. “Is okay,” she said in a voice she made deep, and rushed out of the shop.

“What…?”

She didn’t answer, kept moving. What settlement was this? She must have asked it out loud. A young boy replied, “Sweet Pone, Compère.” She hurried by him without thanking him. Her heart was triphammering, the weight in her belly dragging her down. Hurry!

She turned down a side street, found herself in a market. Hurry! Her cape dragged a gutted foot snake down off someone’s counter. She heard its liver wetness smack against the ground. The vendor shouted.

“Pardon, beg pardon,” Tan-Tan apologised. “No time.”

She was half running now, as much as the monster baby would let her. She got her legs tangled in a goat’s leash, overturned a heaped pyramid of halwa fruit. The vendors were shouting at her to take care, the noise was calling attention to her. She ran smack into a little girl child, knocked her bawling onto her behind. “Lady, what the rass wrong with you?” the little girl’s mother demanded to know. She bent to her child.

The girl’s lip was cut, Tan-Tan could see the blood. She stopped. “Oh. I didn’t mean to hurt she…”

“Why you can’t watch where you going?” said the woman. And to the child, “Don’t mind, doux-doux. Is just a stupid lady.”

She was hunting for something to wipe the girl’s mouth with. Tan-Tan bent, used a corner of her cape. “Sorry, sorry.”

Running footsteps. A shadow fell over her. “Compère?”

No running from it any longer. Tan-Tan looked up into Melonhead’s face.

“Take off that cape and hat, nuh? I could see you sweating under there.”

“No thanks, me all right.”

Melonhead shrugged doubtfully. Tan-Tan remembered that expression, the one he got when he didn’t believe her but wasn’t going to push the point. To be looking at his face, so dear to her! She kept imagining brushing it with her fingers. She reached for her glass of wet sugar tree water instead, concentrated on drinking one swallow at a time. She felt nervous, sitting still in a rum shop like this. Keeping on the move was survival. But her camouflage drab worked. People were ignoring her.