Oonya Kempadoo - All Decent Animals

* * *

Firerago’s daughtress had had some drinks and her laugh cackles sparky red, ending in a little smoky cough. “Allyuh is head, nuh. I ain’ able.”

The manager looks at her, tolerant and fond. He and Slinger’s eyes meet above the scattered bursts around her. An outsider’s lovingly patient look, one they shared occasionally whenever one of the exasperating reasons for staying in this place presented itself in fine form.

“Gyurl, we will miss yuh. You going overseas?” Daughtress swings her flushed face round to Ata, then hawks some more phlegm.

Cigarette smoke had laced itself into the mas postmortem garden. Ata looks around for the heavy alabaster ashtray for her stub. “No. Not for now at least. I will miss youall too.”

Leaf eyes and flower tongues lick at her. Does she have a clue of what she’s going on to search for? Does she have it in her?

* * *

Alan stuck the quote onto the wall with a vengeance. He stamped the side of his fist on the masking-tape bulges and smoothed the sheet several times with his palm.

“IS THERE NO RESPECT OF PLACE, PERSONS, NOR TIME IN YOU?” W. SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT.

He struck up another cigarette and stormed out onto the veranda, leaving the trail of smoke to comfort Fraser. “What the fuck else would you expect from a Catholic mother!”

There was no one for him to rage to and he had had to rein himself in all day, for Fraser’s sake. Fraser had asked Alan specifically, before his parents had arrived, to hold it in this time. Fraser had held up through the pivotal day until then, despite the tantrums of his impossibly selfish and narrow-minded friends. Can you imagine cursing a dying man for being selfish! Alan let it out through his nostrils.

When the idiot parents arrived, Alan had tried to kindly withdraw and not intrude, as planned. But she was just ridiculous. Absolutely unbearable, with her whining and fussing and flittering. As Alan sat there in solid support, he was well aware of what he looked like to Mrs. Goodman. He knew her type. He was even charmed by some of them at first, in his early Trinidad days. The lovely high-color ladies, tweeting away into graceful old age. Good-looking old people, he’d give them that, with their matching cheeks of silk and light blush dresses. No sallow, super-creased Aryan skin and cracked crimson lipstick, these ladies and old gents were the antique lace of the town in every sense. From their tasteful leather shoes and Mercedes, to bridge, Trivial Pursuit, and tennis, some of the real ones had all the sophisticated charm of an undocumented time gone by, and their groundbreaking colored-blood participation in it. A time of flying fighter jets, luxury ocean liners, and Venice vacations, working alongside Afro-doctors like themselves in Africa who had never heard of their island. They didn’t need to brag these stories loudly but dropped names like Mick Jagger and Alvin Ailey with the scones being served with tea or ice-cube-swirling whisky. The real ones have style, suave like the ripples of Nat King Cole’s hair and Dorothy Dandridge’s smile, to carry off their brilliant minds and pasts.

Mrs. Goodness was one who aspired and pretended to be real, Alan had decided long ago. One who passed off as genuine to begin with, then unfortunately sold out herself as she spoke. She was positively quivering then as she sat on the edge of the settee next to her son, glaring at Alan. He positioned himself to better portray the devil he knew she saw — an ugly white anti-Christ nastiness who had blatantly corrupted her son and then rubbed it in people’s faces all over Trinidad and Tobago. Even in this difficult moment, he could find no sympathy for her. Alan spread his nasty legs a little wider apart and leaned back in the metal chair.

“I will not come to see you while you are committing suicide!” Mrs. Goodman eventually screamed, jumping upright. “Charles, let’s go! You will not see either of us until you stop this nonsense and cruelty — CHARLES!” Like a bird hitting glass, screeching for her husband to pick her up and escape with her.

Fraser sat still with tears streaming silently, not even attempting to change her mind. His tears had started when she swung into a panic-sermon about going against God’s will. Not once pleading her love for him, but instead carried away in mad flight, in fear, of God. Who the fuck gives a shit about God!

“Do something, Charles, do something!” she shouted. As if Charles could just take all of his clumsy fathering and crack it on Fraser’s head like an egg, cook it up, and somehow make his son whole again. Fraser looked through tears at his father’s eternal fear of his mother that even now didn’t dare diminish.

Alan doesn’t know if it was the memory of childhood nightmares or the lack of his mother’s real connection to him that started Fraser’s tears. Or of course, the full fact finally sinking in, that he is beginning to die.

* * *

Fraser looks out from his bed, feeling himself falling deeper, down. I don’t want to know, don’t feel, don’t sleep. Please. No persons, no time. Place is a throbbing head and eyeball pain, again. Belief smokes tobacco, shaman, fly — with me, to me. Sickly. Place.

He closes his eyes against the glare. Black and Green. Red and Green make Black. Come back. Receive me, retrieve. Purple eyelid patterns, curtain flap, flashing light. Gray, a square, dissolving … I blink lightning bolts, dissolving gaseous pink. Black. Top-lip skin relaxing, sagging. Flap. Slap.

As he slips, he feels his guddupy heart rushaling. Tingaling, in his veins. Nostril hair filtering air, through a dry throat. Hot, tired, breath. Aqualungs thud, with a basketball locked bouncing, hurting, rattling inside. Bouncing. Bone shoes with pink and black laces and rubber toes.

ATA KNEW, the moment she decided she would write, that this is what she was meant to do with her hands — write. Lying next to Fraser, her arm across his frail chest, leg along his now skinny leg, it came to her as he slept. A ghost of a whisper, with the scent of his sharp medicinal breath — she should write. She will write. About this, and Fraser … and an immense guilt, pushed her, hard.

She eased herself from his bed, so afraid to wake him. What kind of person is she? She rushed to the bathroom mirror and looked at herself. Returned to his bedside and stared at his sleeping face and dying body, for a long while. Until she felt like the ghost of a whisper, wrong and inside out but so close … somehow breathing in him, feeling the drugs fading in his veins, his pulse beating in her temples. She understood why he made his choice.

* * *

As Sammy drives her out to Blanchisseuse now, she has the same feeling, and no idea where she’d start. “Writing is a good idea. I’m sure you’d be good at it,” Pierre had encouraged. As distant as he’d been recently, he would not go back on his stalwart promises to support her creative career. “You need to try it. You know I always thought that Carnival work wouldn’t get you very far. Take some time, you need it, from Fraser too — get a little rest at least.” They were all bracing themselves with Fraser. In turns.

Sammy was quiet all the way, he had his moments these days.

“You sure you’ll be aw’right — you alone?” Sammy checks again, as he drops her off at the gate of the seaside cottage. “Leh me go and check everything, okay?”

He enters ahead of her and Ata watches his quick little movements, checking that the doors and windows were not tampered with. Everything in order. “Yuh know anything, you could call me. Even though I far away — I will reach here pronto. I don’ make joke.”

“Thank you, Sammy.” Suddenly thankful for his unspoken understanding and caring.