Golden Child, page 6
As the months tick by, Clyde tries to wait patiently for things to go back to normal as Uncle Vishnu said they would. The healthy baby, Peter, starts sleeping through the night after a few months, but the other one, Paul, still wakes everybody up all through the night, bawling its lungs out. Night after night, the baby wakes up, cries, will not go back to sleep; Clyde sometimes goes out for a drive to get away from the noise. ‘It takes time,’ Uncle Vishnu keeps saying. ‘It’s not abnormal.’ Clyde waits a year, eighteen months; but when the boys are coming up to two years old, they go to Siparia for the hair-cutting ceremony and things get worse.
Later, he wonders why he bothered going to the hair-cutting ceremony at all, why waste his time and money on this superstition and nonsense. Actually, if there is some superstition behind it, he doesn’t know what it is – the truth is that nobody knows what the whole thing is about: why Indian people have this tradition at all, of taking their children to have their hair cut by an old man who, a few times a year, dresses himself in yellow robes and a turban; why it is held next to a Catholic church, when it is supposedly a Hindu tradition; and whether it really is Hindu at all, or maybe it’s actually a Muslim thing; or maybe, in some way that the Indians can’t understand, the Catholics are trying to entice Indian people to become Christian.
Clyde still remembers when his father took him to Siparia for his first hair-cut, years ago: he remembers his father sitting cross-legged on the ground in the shade of a big tree, all the younger men listening to an older man talking, and although Clyde didn’t know what the older man was talking about, he could see that his father was happy, not in a drunken kind of way, but properly happy. Clyde remembers holding a strip of blue plastic ribbon, dancing around a maypole with other children; and he remembers the cotton candy vendor walking around, like a walking tree blooming with pink fluffy flowers, and how he could hardly believe it when his father, who normally refused to spend money on frivolous things, beckoned the vendor over and paid the dollar, and the vendor unclipped the puffy plastic bag from the branch and put it in Clyde’s hands. On the day that Clyde and Joy and Mousey pack up the car to drive the two hours south to Siparia, Clyde has a roll of five dollar and one dollar bills in his pocket, ready to give to Peter and Paul when they get there, for them to play lucky dip and piñata, whatever is on offer, and to dance the maypole and for them to have as much cotton candy as they want. He has been telling them for weeks how much fun it will be.
The church is a normal Catholic church with a big cross on the roof and a statue of Jesus with a golden halo set into the wall above the main door. They don’t park in the main car park, because the priest keeps that for people who are actually going to Mass; they park in the land next to that, already filling up with cars and people and trucks blasting music. Clyde carries the fold-up chair for Mousey and the basket of food that Joy has packed; Joy carries the flask of tea; Mousey holds the boys’ hands. Most of the shady spots are already taken but they find one next to the big tent by the hot-food vendors, and they set themselves up for the day there.
Joy suggests that they go and do the hair-cutting one-time, straight away, so that they can get it out of the way and everybody can relax. They find the hair-cutter and put both boys to line up in front of him. Paul keeps stepping out of the line and trying to cling onto Joy and she keeps taking him by the shoulders and pushing him back. Eventually, Peter holds his hand to keep him in place: the bigger children tease him for being like a girl, and Peter says, ‘We’re twins. And he’s retarded, he needs somebody to hold his hand sometimes.’
Eventually, after Paul keeps running out of the line and keeps having to be pushed back in, another grown-up says, ‘Let him go first, you could see he’s getting anxious.’ Paul is pushed up to the front of the line, and the hair-cutter does his little dance and flashes the scissors around as is his custom, and makes Paul sit on the chair for the hair-cut. Clyde can see it beginning to happen: how Paul’s eyes glaze over, how his hands scratch against his own thighs. Joy hasn’t noticed yet: she’s talking about how the flask of tea has spilt, the bag is all wet. She is rummaging around for a napkin when Paul puts his fingers in his ears and starts to scream. The hair-cutter backs away. The children in the line run to their mothers. Joy puts her hand to her chest. Everyone in the whole grounds, Clyde thinks, all the hundreds of people here, must be staring in this direction. He fights an urge to run back to the car, to get out of here, leave this for someone else to deal with. He forces himself to walk forward.
‘I didn’t even touch him,’ the hair-cutter says, ‘he just started, just so …’
Clyde puts a hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘Stop that,’ he says. ‘Stop it.’ There is no effect. Paul is still screaming; he has fallen into a rhythm: a steady, shrill sound, like an alarm clock, or a police siren.
‘Stop that. Stop it, I said.’
‘Hit him,’ the hair-cutter suggests. ‘You have to hit him. He not hearing you.’
Clyde’s fingers grip Paul’s shoulder. ‘Stop it, I said! Stop it!’ But still Paul does not stop, only scrunches his shoulders further up to his ears. It is all Clyde can do to keep from smacking him across his face, from grabbing his hair and yanking at his head. Instead, in a fury, he picks him up, scrunched-up as he is, and carries him, this shrieking bundle, away. Somewhere on the way to the car, someone – maybe Mousey, maybe someone else – throws a jug of water in Paul’s face, and just like that, the screaming ceases.
Later, when they talk about it, back at La Sagesse Trace, Romesh, Joy’s younger brother, says they should put the child in St Ann’s, the mental hospital in Port of Spain. ‘Put him in there one-time,’ he says. ‘Something wrong with him. Something definitely wrong with him.’
‘Uncle Vishnu said to wait and see,’ Clyde says.
‘Do it now,’ Romesh says. ‘That’s my advice. The longer you wait, the harder it will get for you.’
‘Did I ask for your advice?’ Clyde asks, angrily. ‘Did anybody hear me ask for advice? No! So keep your ideas to yourself!’
Romesh steupses and says to wait and see; one day, he says, Clyde will wish he had listened to him. Clyde goes inside and switches on the TV, turns the knob for the volume up loud to drown out whatever Romesh is saying on the patio. A children’s talent show is on: Clyde lights a cigarette while a little girl in a gold spangly leotard walks on her hands. He tries to remember why he looked forward to this day, why he looked forward to taking the boys to Siparia at all just so someone in a yellow turban could cut their hair. What was the point of it? The girl in the spangly leotard does a sort of dance, with splits and kicks and cartwheels. Clyde can’t think straight: whenever he tries to lay one thought down next to the other, he is interrupted by the memory of the screaming, of the shame of walking through the crowd of staring people to collect his child. A little boy in a checked shirt and tie walks on carrying a recorder and starts to play a tune. The day seems to him now not to have been anything to do with tradition or ceremonies but just a set of ignorant Indian people getting together to stuff food in their mouths and drink alcohol and watch the girls dancing in their sexy saris. A white girl does a ballet dance. An older girl with her hair braided with many ribbons sings a song in a whispery voice. ‘Uncle Vishnu will tell me what to do,’ Clyde thinks. ‘Whatever he says to do, I will do.’ His eyes stay fixed on the screen, but in his mind he sees himself walking to the gates of the mental hospital with two children, and sending one through the gates, and turning to walk away with only one child left.
5
Uncle Vishnu and Mousey are easy to get along with, but the rest of Joy’s family are a different story. They come to Clyde’s house most Sundays and public holidays; they arrive anytime in the morning that they feel like, and they’re often still on his patio at eleven o’clock or midnight. Joy’s older brother, Philip, is a judge who won an island scholarship to study at Oxford; he has a big house in Port of Spain that you would think would be perfect for the family to have lunch in, but they only ever go there once or twice a year because the English wife, Marilyn, doesn’t like all the mess they create. When Clyde and Joy first went to their house – this was years ago, before the twins were born – Philip and Marilyn drank wine out of wine glasses; Clyde felt like a fool drinking his Carib from the bottle. When it was time to eat, Marilyn put out a big cut of roast beef on the table. Clyde and Joy stared at it, and then it was Joy who said, ‘But Philip, why you cooked beef?’ And Philip said, ‘What, I thought you-all ate beef now?’ And Joy said that no, they didn’t. ‘What, but long-time now you-all don’t go to temple or anything – why you still not eating beef?’ And Joy said, ‘Well, we just don’t.’ And the whole thing was an embarrassment. Marilyn said that she was fed up trying to remember who wouldn’t eat beef and who wouldn’t eat pork and that from now on she would only cook shrimp. Philip ended up going out to get Kentucky Fried Chicken instead, and they all went on the patio and ate it out of the box with their fingers, except for Marilyn who sat by herself at the table with her knife and fork and ate her roast beef.
Romesh and Rachel have a big house too, of course – they have that big house down the road there on Bougainvillea Avenue – but Rachel works at her family’s Indian Garments shop in the mall and she says she doesn’t have time to cook for Romesh’s whole family every weekend. And Joy doesn’t like going to their house, because of their dogs. They’re only puppies still, two Alsatians, with woolly paws and sharp puppy teeth, but Romesh beats them to make them bad, and Joy says that before you know it, those dogs will eat up a child in two gulps. ‘I don’t want my children near those dogs,’ she says. ‘I prefer them to be here, where I could watch them with my own eyes.’ And so, the twins never go by Romesh and Rachel’s house to play with their son, Sayeed, and instead Sayeed always comes here. Often, Rachel drops him in the morning before she goes to work, and then collects him again in the evening; during the day, Joy and Mousey feed him and look after him, and when it’s time to bathe, they put him in the shower with Peter and Paul. If Rachel and Romesh go out for the evening, Sayeed puts on one of Peter and Paul’s vests and sleeps in the bed with Mousey.
Clyde doesn’t like them coming here all the time, but Mousey and Uncle Vishnu are always saying that the family must get together, that family is the most important thing. Romesh and Rachel drop in all the time, but Philip and Marilyn haven’t come down in a few months, because of one thing and another. But it’s a public holiday today for Emancipation Day and the whole lot of them are coming over for lunch, which means the morning will be spent in a big frenzy of cooking and cleaning, getting everything ready. While it’s still dark, Clyde hears the clanking of iron pots, the slap-slap of Mousey’s slippers as she moves around the kitchen; when he gets up, a little later, Mousey has already finished getting the roti mixed and kneaded, and the pale balls of dough are lined up on a sheet of wax paper on the counter. Peter is sitting on the white plastic chair that just fits in the gap between the fridge and the rubbish bin, swinging his legs, a Milo-moustache on his top lip.
‘Where’s Joy?’ Clyde asks Mousey.
‘She went in the bed with Paul,’ Mousey says. ‘He started crying when Peter got up.’
Clyde unlocks the back door and sits on the step to give the dogs their morning pat. Trixie gets the step closest to him, proudly breathing her bad-breath into his face, her purplish tongue dripping saliva onto his feet. Through the window just next to him, Clyde hears Joy talking to Paul as she helps him get dressed, one arm through the sleeve, then the other. He tries not to listen: he tries, instead, to look at the greenness all around; everything has come back green again now that it’s rainy season. Peter comes to sit next to him on the step, and Trixie, happy, plants a heavy paw on Peter’s chest, licks his face. Mousey brings his coffee. Clyde has a long list of jobs to do, but it’s still early, and he likes to sit here where it’s cool and watch the sun come up.
‘That’s a golden oriole,’ Peter says, pointing at a big bird, bright yellow with black markings, on the roof of the dog-house. ‘Right?’
‘Is it? How you know that?’
‘It’s in the book Uncle Vishnu brought. And that’s a tanager. A blue-grey tanager.’
‘Oho. Very good.’
A grey bird lands on the grass near the coconut tree, the type of grey bird with black markings around its eyes that make it look permanently vex. (‘Mockingbird,’ says Peter.) The bird gives them a long angry look as if warning them to stay away, then it stabs its beak to the ground, and when it pulls away, a long pink worm dangles from its beak. The bird tilts its head upwards and the worm disappears into its body.
‘How do they know where the worms are?’ Peter says.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It didn’t have to go peck, peck, peck, to find the worm. Did you see? It just went – peck! Did you see?’
‘I saw,’ Clyde says. He looks at Peter, at the smooth brown skin, the skinny little four-year-old legs, the long thin toes that are just like his own, the Deyalsingh toes.
‘Uncle Vishnu might bring some more books for you when he comes today,’ Mousey says. She’s working the grinder, feeding in green leaves of chadon beni, driving the handle round and round, catching the dark green paste from the bottom. ‘Eh? He’s coming late, after the races. But he’ll come. Vishnu always does what he says.’ She holds the grinder steady with one hand, turns the handle with the other. When she’s finished the chadon beni, she grinds handfuls of thyme and chive, and red slivers of a scotch bonnet pepper. She spoons the spices into the Pyrex bowl with the cut-up chicken, and then mixes it all up with her hands.
‘Come on,’ Joy says, walking briskly through the kitchen. ‘Work to do.’ She comes back a moment later with the broom and mop. ‘Peter, you and Paul go outside, please. I have floors to mop here.’
Clyde slides his coffee cup onto the counter and goes down the back-step to get started on tidying up the yard. He starts by the dog-house behind the carport, and works his way round all four sides of the house, scooping up dog-mess with a trowel and pitching it into the long grass in the empty land behind their house. When it starts to rain, he goes inside; he scrubs at the mildewed tiles in the shower, pours bleach down the toilet, hangs the good towel on the rail. When the rain stops, he walks around the yard again, looking at the overgrown hedges, the gap in the fence filled in with a plank of wood, the other gap, the one behind the coconut tree, filled in with the door of an old cupboard. This place always looks messy, he thinks, no matter what he does.
In the front yard, Peter and Paul are crouching by the big hole that the dogs have dug next to the driveway, scooping mud out and slapping it onto the flat concrete.
‘Hey,’ Clyde says. ‘Are those your clean clothes? And you’re playing in the mud?’
‘It’s just mud pies,’ Peter says. He straightens up a bit, looks down at his t-shirt. ‘It’s old-clothes. We’ll wash off with the hose before we come in.’
Paul looks up at him too from beside the muddy hole, his hair all over his face. He won’t cut his hair, since the thing in Siparia: he looks like some kind of madman. Clyde fights an urge to go and get the scissors right now and cut the hair off.
‘Go and make the mud pies in the back,’ Clyde says, walking away. ‘I’m trying to tidy up the place here.’
After he finishes in the yard, he sweeps the leaves off the patio, brings the stack of plastic chairs from the store room and wipes them down one by one. He takes the cushions from the bamboo chairs and shakes them out over the railing, and then he arranges the chairs the way Joy says, alternating bamboo and then plastic, going round in a circle. It’s starting to rain again but he puts on his slippers anyway and walks down the Trace to get ice from the gas station. He passes a few children playing in the ditch: they look like they’ve come through the bush, barefoot and muddy, scratching at insect bites.
‘Playing in the rain?’ he says. He recognises most of them from around the neighbourhood.
‘Yes, Uncle Clyde,’ they say. They tell him about a snake they found in the bush; they describe the colours, the markings, ask him if a snake like that is good to eat. He tells them he doesn’t think so, and to make sure to bash a stick in the grass wherever they walk, in case a snake is hiding there.
‘Yes, yes, we know,’ they say.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Very nice.’
He puts the ice in the sink at the back, where Joy and Mousey do the washing, and then he gets the beer bottles from the fridge and burrows them down beneath the ice to keep them cold. He puts the dogs in the dog-house and opens the gate, and then it’s time to have a little wash and change into his good shirt. When all his work is done, he settles down on the clean patio to read the paper.
Rachel arrives first in her white Subaru, and drives in and parks behind Clyde’s car. While she’s winding up the windows, Sayeed climbs out and makes his way up to the patio, Rachel calling for him to be quick to get out of the rain.
