Golden Child, page 16
Sometimes local words are better, but you have to know the proper word as well, otherwise people in Port of Spain laugh at you for being from the bush. Like when he and Marc Aboud were talking to the girls on the street corner last week after school. ‘Living out in the bush there,’ Renée said – she was the one that Marc liked – ‘Out there where it’s only bush-and-bandits, you does hunt iguana and mongoose and thing? And go out the back to the latrine?’ She cackled but she wasn’t being nasty or anything. He made fun of how she talked too. ‘Yuh does go by obeah-man when yuh sick?’
‘Yea, how you mean,’ Paul replied mischievously. ‘Everybody does go by him. They have particular plants in the forest by us, he could make real good potions. Anything you want, he could find the right plant, and make a potion.’ He spoke in a low voice, the voice you use to tell stories about that kind of thing, and they all drew a little closer.
‘Boy, that is nancy story,’ said Candace. She made like to push him away, and her hand brushed against his stomach, just above the belt.
‘Is true, is true!’ said Marc. ‘Bush-men does have real big things, you know. Because obeah make potion for them!’ He jerked his head towards Paul’s pants. ‘Real big.’ He raised his eyebrows several times at the girls and the girls burst out laughing.
‘How do you know?’ Candace asked. ‘Why you looking at yuh friend’s thing?’
‘I didn’t look!’ Marc exclaimed. ‘I just know! Well, I hear so! Why you think these fellas from all kinda Penal and Fyzabad and Basse Terre so popular when they come up to town for Carnival? You ever see how many women does want to wine-up with them fellas?’ Everybody burst out laughing again. Paul’s tummy was still tingling where Candace’s fingers had touched him.
*
If he was making his own money, he could go up to the fete in Port of Spain. He and Peter already got their tickets – they cost fifty dollars each for entrance and chicken and chow-mein dinner. Before, Daddy gave them the money without any fuss, but then after the break-in, Daddy was mad and he said, ‘All-you could forget about that fete!’ But fifty dollars is a lot of money: a week’s worth of maxi-taxi fare and lunch money put together, and it would be stupid to waste the tickets when they’re already paid for. Paul hasn’t told Candace yet that he can’t go; he’s still hoping maybe he can work something out – ask somebody to give him a lift up to Port of Spain, maybe. Or he could just walk. He could say to Daddy, ‘Fine, you don’t want to drive me? Fine! I’ll walk!’ It would take a long time: four, maybe five hours, but he could pack his clothes and go to Marc’s house to shower first. He can imagine Daddy in a fury, his fists clenched, looking like he can hardly restrain himself from giving him one cuff. ‘If you walk out that door, I don’t want to see your tail back in here again!’ And Paul would shout back, ‘Fine! That’s fine with me!’ but he wouldn’t really mean it. But what’s the point of always trying to please Daddy? Only Peter can please Daddy. Everything Peter does is perfect, and everything he does is wrong. Paul steupses quietly, thinking about it. You see me? I done with that.
For weeks now, he has been looking forward to asking Candace to slow-dance. If it’s going well, he’s been thinking, and if he definitely has fresh breath, he might try to kiss her. He could borrow some of Marc’s father’s cologne: just a little dab, so he wouldn’t notice any missing. Daddy doesn’t have any cologne. He says all of that is nonsense – deodorant and cologne and aftershave and all of that. In their bathroom, all they have is Jergens shampoo and a bar of Lux soap.
If he was earning money, he could buy whatever soap he wants (Imperial Leather, maybe – Father Kavanagh uses Imperial Leather, he can tell by how he smells), and any cologne, as well as the baggies and the Ray-Bans. Maybe he will do it in truth. First he will find a job, and when everything is secure, he will tell Mummy and Daddy he’s not going back to school. Didn’t Mummy tell him, after the break-in, she said, ‘I can’t keep on looking after you. You growing up: you’ll be a big-man just now. You have to look after yourself.’ So he will do it! He will get a job, and he will look after his own self. ‘I can’t keep looking after you,’ she said.
It probably was a bad idea to shout at the men, Paul thinks. He didn’t think the guy would actually come and point the gun at him like that. While the man was holding up the gun, Paul stared straight back at him, giving him one cut-eye, and saying, ‘Shoot me, nuh! Shoot me!’ the same way that when you saunter across a road, you say to the driver honking at you, ‘Bounce me down!’ You have to show people you not just going to take that, just so. But then Mummy came up and pushed him behind her, and then the gun was pointing at her instead of him, and then Paul was scared. And then, after the bandits left and Daddy came home and untied them, Mummy said, ‘I can’t keep on looking after you. You have to look after yourself.’
A couple of cornbirds are moving from tree to tree, making the branches above him sway and crackle as they brush against each other. Dead bits of branch fall, get caught further down the trees; little bits splinter off and shower to the ground. There’s the dull thud of some heavy fruit falling to the ground: not the sharp, knocking sound that a coconut would make; a duller, softer sound, bigger than a mango or a shaddock. A breadfruit, maybe, although he can’t remember any breadfruit tree anywhere nearby here.
He hears the shushing of raindrops landing on the canopy above; just a little drizzle, bouncing off things and splattering at odd angles, willy nilly. He breathes in deeply, filling his nose with the smell that’s rising up from the ground. That is a real nice smell, the rain on dry ground. Already, he feels much better than he did earlier – it’s so nice and relaxing to sit here. He doesn’t say this kind of thing to anybody, not even to Peter, or Father Kavanagh, or Marc Aboud. If he said he liked to walk in the bush, or sit down by the river and daydream like he’s doing now, they would say, ‘God, you turning into Tarzan for true!’ He knows well enough by now what he can say to people and what not to say. Look how just the other day Daddy mentioned St Ann’s again. Daddy said, ‘We should have put you in St Ann’s one-time.’ Paul didn’t say anything, he just switched off his face so he wouldn’t aggravate Daddy, but in his head he was thinking, ‘Go ahead! Try and put me in St Ann’s! I will mash up everybody who tries to lay their hand on me!’ And that night, after Daddy said that, Paul lay awake in bed thinking about how he could run away, if he had to. He could walk to Arima and from there he could get a taxi to take him anywhere in Trinidad. And he could go down south to Icacos or Cedros, and get a pirogue to Venezuela, and then he would really be gone, and Daddy would never find him. Let him put that in his pipe and smoke it.
The parrots are beginning to go in. Sunset already? Just five more minutes, he thinks. Look, the rest of the birds are still out and about, still chattering before it’s time to go in. Five more minutes, Paul says to himself: five more minutes, just to daydream about Candace a little bit more. Maybe he could ask her to the movies. He could call her on the telephone and ask if she wants to go to Deluxe Cinema in Port of Spain. His eyes glaze over, thinking about what it will be like to sit in the velvety seats in the dark, with Candace’s arm on the arm-rest between them.
14
He senses trouble the moment before it starts: maybe he feels the dogs’ hackles rise, or hears the scrape of their claws against the concrete as they dash down the drive. Jab-Jab’s voice: high-pitched, fast, urgent; Trixie making that deep, snarling sound that she hardly ever makes; and Brownie, with a thin high-pitched bark that lengthens at the end to a howl, not directed at the men – because it must be men, for them to be barking like that – but directed somewhere else, towards other people, as if calling for help. Paul is already on his feet. This means Trouble. Big Trouble. Big Big Trouble. His eyes and ears scan the bush; his heart is pumping hard, ready to pelt out of here. But which way to go? Back to the road or onward down the riverbank? There are so many dogs barking that he cannot pinpoint where the danger is; he cannot tell which is the right way to run.
Feet are tramping through the bush, big feet, feet with boots. Handle it, he says to himself. It might just be a vagrant, or a hunter. He sits down again. The men’s clothes are red, green, brown. He stands up. He should have run, but it is too late now. Handle it. Look them in the eye. Act casual. They might just be normal people.
When they appear in the clearing, still twenty, thirty yards away, he is standing on the stone, ready to look towards them as casually as he can, even to lift his chin as if to say hello. But there is no point: they are the same ones as before, he knew it from the way Trixie barked. Even without the sunglasses and t-shirt, he recognises the one who had the cutlass last time: taller, with patchy bits of beard on his cheeks. His hair is the same, scraggly and overgrown. The other one, lighter-skinned, who had the gold tooth – if he put on a shirt and tie, he could look like a Ministry official. Act calm, act calm. Oh, he should have gone in before! If only he had gone in five minutes ago, like he meant to! He glances behind him, at the riverbed with its trickle of water: just a few hundred yards along is a rope where he could climb up to the bridge. But he sees how the dark one’s eyes light up, how the man’s eyes measure the distance between them, how the man scans the ground nearby, looking at which way Paul might jump off the stone: the man wants him to run, so that he can run after him, pin Paul down as if he were a manicou or a lappe. ‘Aye,’ he says. His voice is a little quiet. He tries again. ‘Aye, fellas,’ he says. ‘You’re looking for something?’ The dark man almost laughs: it is almost working. But the serious one lifts one arm and snaps his fingers, as if to tell the dark one to behave himself. The men widen out, break into a run. Paul forces himself to stand his ground. ‘Hey,’ he says. He puts his hands up, as if in surrender, still calm, still smiling. ‘Hey, fellas.’ But it does not work. As the serious man comes closer, Paul tries to look in his eyes: that is the only thing now that might help. But the man doesn’t look back, only grabs Paul’s wrists and pins them behind his back.
It is happening. Someone wraps an arm around his neck from behind, getting him in a choke-hold; there’s the screeching of duct-tape being pulled from a roll. He is struggling without really meaning to. He wants to put his hands up and say, ‘I surrender,’ and to say, ‘I’m not going to fight,’ but he can’t help but try to get out of the grip. He pulls at the man’s arm, manages to get his chin down far enough to bite him. He digs his teeth in and tries to hold on, but the man lands a big cuff on the side of his head and then everything is swimming, and he puts his hands out to stop the ground, but it gets him anyway – whack! And then they’re pinning him to the ground, one by his knees, the other on his back. There’s no need, his body has gone slack.
Everything is dark; stars are dancing in front of his eyes. The duct-tape is sticking to his cheek, screeching over his mouth, winding around to the back of his head, over his ear, and his cheek and his mouth again. His hands are being tied behind his back. The man leans in to bite the edge of the tape: between his teeth are pink flecks of coconut cake.
He is on the ground, trussed up. Way above him, they are discussing something. He wants to pay attention, to catch their names, to find out who they are, where they are taking him, but they seem too far away, impossibly far away. It is like being small again: like being small, and looking up at grown-ups talking, and not following anything they say, and them seeming so very far away. When the grown-ups used to do that – Mummy used to stop to talk to someone she ran into in some crowded place, the mall, or the bank, or in town – he used to hold onto Mummy’s skirt in those moments so that he didn’t get left behind. People used to say it was babyish of him, but Mummy didn’t mind. His head feels foggy. He cannot tell what is real. Is he really five years old, standing behind his mother’s legs? Or is he really on the ground, tied up, his face pressed into the mud?
A foot nudges him in the ribs. ‘Get up,’ the gold-tooth man says. He catches hold of Paul’s arm under the armpit and pulls roughly. ‘Get up!’ Paul tries, but he is still dizzy. And his hands are tied behind his back. It is real. This is real. His heels are really digging into the soft mud; he is really struggling to get his balance. He needs to pull himself together, wake up, try to get out of this. He imagines Mummy walking away – in his hand is a scrap of her skirt, he can just see her disappearing into the crowd. If he runs after her now, he will catch up. The man is yanking Paul up by the arm; his legs won’t hold him up, his feet slip in the mud. He squeezes his hands shut, first one, and then the other: there is no scrap of cloth. This is definitely real. Come on, come on. Handle it! The man is trying to yank him forward by his shoulder; he stumbles, without his arms to steady him.
‘What I said? I said, don’t try no tricks!’ gold-tooth says again. He shoves Paul in the direction the men came from, and gives him a dig in the back to get him walking. Paul walks a few steps, then stops. He turns to face in the direction of home: just there, not far away, Peter is doing his homework at the table, Mummy is getting dinner ready. That is where he must go. That is the right direction. To walk in any other direction is to leave a part of himself behind, to walk out of his old life, maybe to walk out of his life altogether.
‘Where you think you going?’ gold-tooth asks. ‘Go, I said! Boy, I losing my patience with you, you know!’ He grabs Paul by the arm again and spins him round, and gives him one lash with the back of his fist, across the side of his face, by his right eye. Everything goes dim and then he is on the ground again, prickly with dry leaves and sticks. He can tell, somehow, as though it is happening far, far away, that he is being hoisted up over the man’s shoulders, like a dead deer. He catches a whiff, before he passes out, of the tick-shampoo that the cattle-men use, and Drakkar cologne.
*
He is aware, vaguely, of being put into the back seat of a car: of one man at one end, sitting him down on the seat and pushing a shoulder to lay him down; of the other man, at the other end, getting a hand under each armpit to drag him further along. They go to the back, open the trunk, discuss. Their manner is calm, unhurried. They might be discussing whether they have everything they need for a day at the beach. Something is laid over him, a blanket, maybe, or a towel. He closes his eyes. They wind the back windows up, slam the doors shut. The car sinks as the first man gets in; sinks a little more with the other. Doors slam, one, two. The key slides into the ignition, the engine wakes, revs. Pop music plays on the radio.
So this is what it feels like, Paul thinks. This is the part you never hear about. The part after the person disappears. The pictures in the paper, on the News, can only ever show the before and after: the smiling person, a picture taken on a happy day, a birthday party, first day of school, a wedding; and the after – the bodybag being carried out on a stretcher between clumps of bamboo, or the body on the ground, the limbs all askew, something dark on the ground that looks like oil leaked from a car, but which you know must be blood. In between those two moments, the before and the after, is here.
At first, he tries to follow where they go. Straight, left, straight, around. The car goes over a pothole that feels familiar – something about the shape and depth of it, the loose gravel that sprays behind the tyre. But he cannot quite remember where that pothole is: it might be on the road out to Arima, or the back-road out of Tiparo that goes part of the way through the mountains. Straight, left, curving this way, curving that way; he lies on his side, brings his knees further up to his chest to anchor himself down, to stop sliding around. The towel has already slipped off him. The man in the passenger seat glances back; Paul keeps his eyes closed. The radio goes scratchy. There’s the BBC World News on the AM radio; then the fast jabbering sound of a Spanish station. ‘Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya,’ the passenger-man says, mimicking the voice. He’s the joker, the one who had the cutlass when they broke in. A Trinidad station comes back with the sea report: a woman’s voice reads out the times of low tide and high tide in the north, west, east and south, the speed and directions of the winds, the heights of the waves in open areas.
Paul opens his eyes a fraction, looks, blurrily, through his eyelashes. Beige vinyl upholstery. In the seat pocket behind the driver’s side: newspaper, empty juice boxes, a Barbie doll stuck headfirst into the pocket, the legs sticking up. On the floor: squashed Orchard Orange cartons, chewed straws, Sunshine Snacks wrappers – the blue ones, for Cheeze Balls, and the red ones, for Chee Zees. In the passenger seat in the front, the joker rests his elbow in the window, his scraggly hair blowing in the breeze. Through the windows, Paul can see the sky, the still-glowing colour of early-evening blue. The parrots have long gone in.
The car-smell is making him feel sick: a horrible mix of oiled vinyl and air freshener. But his mouth is taped up and he must not be sick; if he is sick, he will choke. He braces his back against the seat, reaches his legs forward and kicks the back of the seat in front. The man turns and looks at him.
‘What?’
Paul tries to speak. He mimics being sick.
‘He’s trying to say something,’ the passenger-man says.
‘What you think he’s trying to say?’ the driver says, irritated. The driver is the one with the gold tooth. ‘What would you be saying if it was you? He’s trying to say, let me go!’ The driver steupses. ‘Treats, sometimes I wonder about you, boy. You ignorant in truth.’
The DJ on the radio announces the next song, ‘Smooth Operator’ by Sade. The driver turns up the volume, hums along.
Paul slides his body towards the door, wedges his toes under the lever to open it. He yanks on the lever, then presses hard against the door with both feet. The men look around: the passenger-man, the one named Treats, reaches an arm over the seat-rest and swipes at him.
‘Stop that,’ he says. ‘Behave yourself.’
The door needs two hands: one to pull the lever, and the other to press against the door while the lever is still pulled. He slides the toes of one foot under the lever, and pulls, and he tries to instruct the other foot to do the opposite, to push. He feels the catch loosen, the door budge a few inches. Treats is swiping at him, but it doesn’t matter: all he needs to do is get this door open and get out of this car. He thinks only of his feet: the left toes must do this; the right toes must do that. The door swings open: the outside, dark greens and browns, rush by in a blur. He tries to wriggle towards the open door. The door swings half-closed, wide-open, half-closed, wide-open. Then the car comes to a sudden halt, and Paul thuds forward into the footwell. The driver-man slides his seat back to jam him in: Paul’s head is caught underneath, the metal struts pinning his head to the ground. It is like that time when he pushed his head through the bars of the front gate at home and then, stupidly, got stuck there. Then, it was a terror of what Daddy might have said that made him squeeze past the pain of the iron bars, feeling the blood trapped in his ears, back through to freedom. He pulls his head free, his skull tingling. Treats gets out, slams the door closed, presses down the lock. The car sinks again as he gets back in. Through the gap under the seat, Paul watches the driver’s feet stepping on the pedals: clutch, gas, first gear; clutch, gas, second; clutch, gas, third. Breeze comes in the windows. One of the men turns up the volume on the radio. The man’s sneakers are muddy. On the left foot, resting on the ground, the shoelace is loose. Slowly, Paul turns over onto his back. Above, he can make out dark spots of mildew on the ceiling. He can see through the driver’s window that it is still light, but only just, the sky a purplish blue, the light draining away like water down a plughole. Already, the street-lamps are on. All over the mountains, the birds will be settled into warm nests. Soon, they will fluff their feathers for sleep, tuck their beaks into their chests; whatever wants to come out at night will be readying itself to come out.
