This One Sky Day, page 14
She rose out of the crouch, slow, slow, hitched her robe up, and looked down. The pum-pum lacked character and detail from this angle. Lovers had the better view. She placed a hand over it. Cors flooded her hips, making them tremble.
Take time, take time!
Warily, she stood upright and parted her legs. Shook her hips, waiting.
The vulva seemed firm.
She jiggled: it might dangle if it came half free, like a child with a full nappy. Horrifying. She jumped up and down. Hopped from one foot to another.
Everything seemed secure. Reattached, the pum-pum throbbed invitingly.
Somewhere, someone began to scream. Anise jumped, startled.
Thunk.
Rassssssclaaaht.
Her pum-pum lay on the shining board floor again, rocking back and forth.
She bent to pick it up, wavered, then shoved it deep into the pocket of her skirts.
The screaming was coming from above her, filling the whole watermelon house and threatening the walls. She ran for the stairs, hesitated, then took them two at a time, clutching the soft contents of her pocket jostling against her hip, only vaguely aware of Mixie running from the opposite direction, too late to avoid their inevitable collision on the landing.
Both women teetered, Mixie near-falling; Anise grabbed her arms and they recovered, gulping breath. Mixie had a tendency to sore throats, perhaps, and she’d had bad acne during adolescence.
Mixie yanked her arm away. The wailing continued.
‘What happen?’ Anise said.
Mixie glared. ‘I don’t know, but my pum-pum just fall out.’ She paused, as if she expected Anise to shatter at the news. ‘I did try ram it back, but it go sideways twice. What is your cors, lady? I never damn well ask you. You bring bad vibes into my house?’
‘Me? It don’t have nothing to do with me. I’m a healer.’
The screaming increased in volume and urgency.
Anise plucked at Mixie’s sleeve. ‘Where are the other … women? If it happen to us, it could be everybody.’
‘Yours fall out as well?’ Mixie couldn’t have sounded more satisfied.
The screaming paused for a millisecond then crescendoed, like a slapped child taking a shocked breath before the roar. Mixie sucked her teeth and strode over to a closed door. Anise followed, her back straightening and determined. Her hands were silver to the wrists, like she’d been dipped, or painted.
12
It took three minutes for Dandu and Sonteine to exchange happy pleasantries and seven more to sneak into the attic. Dirt-streaked and smiling, they found it stiflingly hot and cluttered but just the right place for holding hands and thinking about this Great Big Thing they were going to do tomorrow.
Get. Married.
After some time of handholding, Dandu nuzzled Sonteine’s neck. Giggling and squirming, she settled down between the old lamps and the wine barrels, sighing contentedly as he opened her robe. They were happy with this part: his mouth alternating between her nipples, him looking up to see if his tongue pleased her; rocking against her until he had to roll away, not wanting to stain her clothing. You can do it, Dandu, she’d said two months ago, in such a small voice, on a day when the foreplay was particularly agonising. It hurt you so much. But he shook his head; it horrified him, to take what she wasn’t ready to give. He would be more than these other men.
And who knew what to do, anyway?
He looked down at her: those swollen lips, eyes soft and trusting, smiling a little smile that would be mockery on other women but love on her. She was rocking against him today, pushing her groin into his thigh. That was new. He looked at her dark, shining body, beyond her wondrously familiar breasts. He felt an urgent need for something more, in this eleventh hour. Could he touch her in other ways she liked? Some small proof that he could satisfy her? If she could just let him reassure himself.
He licked oil. He kissed oil.
Her eyes flew wide.
He dipped his tongue into her navel; heard her hips lock. He couldn’t look up at her face, because the fear there would make everything much more difficult. He’d seen it before. It had cost him erections and come back in his nightmares: the panic on that dear face when anything threatened going too far.
Oh, trust me Sonte, he prayed.
He slid his tongue down her quivering stomach. It seemed to both of them that the wind stopped outside, and crickets ceased chirping and the nearby mountain held its breath.
With one sudden, fluid, gentle motion – he would remember it all his life – Dandu lifted Sonteine’s ankles and spread her wide.
Sonteine clapped her hands over her face. It was nothing like the obeah woman’s examinations or the violence of others. But he was looking into her, and she couldn’t watch him doing it. All she could think of was how bare she felt, and did she smell bad, she was so wet, and was he disappointed at how she looked, and would it hurt?
Dandu kissed her stomach, hovering. He was waiting. For her permission.
Slowly, slowly, she let her breath out, in one shuddering, shaky heave. He waited, lips on her stomach. She took one long breath and another and then, because he wasn’t doing anything scary and all she could feel was his comforting hands, not the fingers of a mad somebody, but calm and confident, she told herself everything was fine.
The moment he felt her relax, Dandu slipped his tongue inside her.
Sonteine grabbed his head and pushed her hips so high and hard against his face and moved up and down against the bridge of his nose so fast, it hurt his neck and took all he had to stay there until she stopped moving, gasping and near tears from the intensity of her feelings.
They pulled apart, like sticking plaster, shocked.
Sonteine’s heartbeat hurt her chest. She propped herself up on her elbows. She felt soft all over, and tremendously exposed, but happy as well. She wanted him to come closer and hold her.
‘Dandu?’
He gazed up from between her knees. He looked horrified.
‘Sonte … is … it supposed to do … that?’
*
This was why his father had made him swear to respect her. Don’t force or frighten her, Dandu. Treat her like a lady. Is my friend child. But how could he have guessed his disobedience would have such disastrous penalty? He’d never heard tell of such a thing. After all, her bosom was still intact after months of play.
‘Oh, we shouldn’t have,’ moaned Sonteine. ‘Look at what I gone and done now, oh gods …’
Such a pretty, soft thing, nestled between a pile of papers and a broken lamp from the days his mother collected them. He reached out to stroke the pum-pum, hesitantly.
Well. He wouldn’t let her down.
‘I going stay with you forever, you know that, right?’
‘But … but … what we going do about children?’ wailed Sonteine, sounding not unlike her mother. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the pum-pum since it came free.
‘There is plenty of children around.’ He wasn’t sure what he was saying, but something had to be said. ‘We going find one.’
He tried to soothe her. She insisted he keep it; she couldn’t bear taking it with her, the thought made her teeth chatter. What if she dropped it outta road? What if someone stole it? What safe place could she store it, with her ridiculously prying mother, and all the over-cleaning in her house? There was a maid that was a spy, she was sure of it.
Dandu held her hands and made her recite the names of flowers until she calmed down. He promised to keep the pum-pum in a safe place. They would keep the terrible secret between them. They could take it out and look at it if they wanted and think of a different life they could have had. He didn’t say it, but his mind was working: perhaps if he could find someone to help, to examine the precious thing, they might fix it. But who could be trusted with the pum-pum of the Governor’s daughter?
They stole down from the attic and he sent her back through the window, because time was getting on, and if they were found up there with the pum-pum out-o, it would make everything so much worse.
He should have known he couldn’t handle this sex business. It was a sin and a shame, his abject ignorance.
‘Gods, Mamma going to know,’ moaned Sonteine as she climbed over the windowsill. She was cupping her skirts into her pelvis, like she was holding things together. ‘She always know when I do something stupid.’
Dandu snorted and kissed her goodbye. He was not fond of Mamma Intiasar.
After Sonteine was gone, he wrapped the pum-pum in a piece of bed sheet and went down by the river for a walk, and to look at it carefully. The river was his best thinking place. The sound of liquid trickling past had always calmed him, but it didn’t work this time. His stomach churned acid. He hoped upon hope that Sonteine wouldn’t leave him once she had a chance to think about it. He had never heard anything in this world as rich, as complex and as pleasing as the sound of Sonteine moaning when he put his tongue inside her and made her pum-pum fall out.
Crouched under a tree, Dandu unwrapped the cotton to peek again. Such a pretty thing. He turned it into the light, admiring it, hardly believing it was there. The pum-pum, slippery and young, tumbled out of his hands and into the river, where despite his desperate attempts to retrieve it, it was carried away by the current.
*
Sonteine paced through Pretty Town, biting her lips. Her pum-pum was so often frightened and tightened that when it slipped from its moorings and away from the rest of her body, she had felt momentarily relieved, as if someone had cured her of a chronic pain. But now, with every step forward, her decision to leave it behind felt wrong. She should be all together, like everybody else. She’d been too rash.
Was it her mad quaking that caused the falling? She’d never felt anything like it. None of the good girls talked about things like that, although there were whispers, of course, about the pleasures of lovemaking. But, not that. She shivered; half pleased, mostly worried. Was it Dandu’s fault for opening her up? For putting his tongue inside her? Was it hers?
She looked up to the skyline as she crossed underneath the Torn Poem. She often looked at Mas’ Xavier’s restaurant, especially when she felt stressed or worried. Ever since she was three years old and first heard about the macaenus. She imagined the Torn Poem as a castle of delights, a delectable ending to a myth told at bedtime. Xavier Redchoose was like a single, precious wish, granted to all of them. What could be more special, more luxurious, than a man born to cook just for your individual appetite? He gave you what you needed, and that wasn’t just food: it was inspiration. Everybody said Xavier’s cooking lingered: you could pursue your dreams with renewed fervour, see yourself in a different light; believe in the unachievable. He was the very best of macaenus, she relied on it.
For a long time, she’d hoped for the courage it would take to make love. And she’d become convinced that the act would be entirely possible after Xavier Redchoose fed her.
But even she didn’t expect macaenus food to put a misbehaving pum-pum back.
*
Hah Genevieve Okeiliah Nathan pulled off her old, cracked earphones and nodded at her engineer. He cued up an hour of music as she got to her feet, stretching her stiff spine, rotating her neck. She waved. He waved back. She let herself out of the booth and walked around the squat radio station, with its massive antennae threatening to crack the roof.
He was waiting in her tiny private room, sitting against the wall. His hairline was starting to thin off his fine, high forehead and it made her feel affectionate.
She sat down on the floor beside him and leaned in, so they were nose to nose. His heavy arm lay in her lap. She was thinking about asking him to move it when her pum-pum rolled down her leg and fell between them, like a brown sea sponge.
The smell of salt.
Io struggled to his feet and yanked Hah up beside him. They stood looking down at the pum-pum, fetchingly displayed against the white board floor.
‘What the rass,’ said Hah.
‘You alright?’ asked Io.
‘Well, no.’
Io picked it up. They examined it together. Plump in the right places, creased and glistening.
‘Is like a sculpture,’ said Hah.
‘No, juicier than that. Fresh soursop.’ Io nudged her. ‘It’s alive. Here, hold it.’
She slapped his shoulder lightly, skittered backward. ‘You hold it!’
‘You afraid of your own pum-pum?’
‘No!’
‘Then hold it!’
‘I’m afraid!’
They laughed until their stomachs hurt. It didn’t occur to either of them there might be a problem with reattachment. Io sat between her legs. Hah drew up her robe. Io gently pressed the pum-pum back into her body and crawled in closer to be sure the edges were neat.
‘Io?’ said Hah.
‘Yes?’ His lips twitched.
‘I think since you down there already, you should stay.’
‘Well, since I down here,’ said Io. ‘Already.’
*
In Dukuyaie all the doors in a certain part of that island locked themselves, causing four accidents, seventeen children to cry until they fell asleep and one man to contemplate his sister-in-law’s cleavage. When he tried to seize her breast, she boxed him. One of his teeth fell out and rolled under the bed, where it rotted into a sweet pulp in less than a minute.
13
Xavier marched down Carenage beach, cursing at the top of his voice. The sky felt closer, radiating massive, irreconcilable energy. Damp sand clung to his ankles.
You know him, you know him.
Who the rass had the nerve, the courage, the gall to sing about him on the radio? To call him impotent? And why? Surely no one would object if he went and kicked in the radio station door and demanded Puppa Gyallis give him the singer, the musicians and the songwriter. Before he slapped him, too.
Man who soft. You don’t want no man who soft.
That damn song was going to be in his head all day.
He reached a small cove, sheltered by tangled overgrowth, and sat down, panting. He’d left the pick-up jetty far behind on the other side of the bay and there was nothing but manchioneal bushes and sea grapes over here. The waves rolled in faster, spitting and jagged, the sand littered with broken blue-and-white sea urchin shells. He remembered the moth and grappled for the red pouch, his stomach plunging, but it was still around his neck, just hanging askew. He tucked it back under his tunic, shamed at anyone seeing it.
They’d probably write another rass song about that.
Behind him, someone coughed.
The teenager who’d turned off the radio stood less than five feet away, long gleaming black plait sloping over his shoulder, bare-chested. His pants were creased with grease and salt water.
Indigent.
The boy looked up, unblinking, and Xavier was startled. There were no whites in his eyes. He’d heard that could happen to the indigent over time, but surely this one was too young. It was oddly beautiful.
‘Why you following me, boy?’
‘You even know the man who singing that song about your penis?’
‘No,’ Xavier growled.
The indigent beamed. It was such an infectious, complete expression that Xavier surprised himself by smiling back. The merriment gave the boy a kind of gravitas. Hard earned, that smile.
‘I am not sure what I think about people making art out of mischief,’ said the boy. ‘I am trying to decide. There are many things to consider.’
‘I know how I feel about somebody making a fool out of me.’
‘You feel foolish?’ The boy spat a strand of long, dark hair out of his mouth. ‘But you are not impotent. Maybe the song is a metaphor.’
‘For what?’
‘You never know. People is a complicated something. So is art.’ He spoke with the confidence of the young, who thought everything they said was new.
‘I think in this kind of song, there is not so much complication,’ snapped Xavier.
‘People can be so very simple in a complicated way.’
He didn’t know how to respond to the boy’s open, curious face. Had his mother taught him no manners at all?
‘How you think any of this is your business? What you name, anyway?’
‘Romanza. You might as well talk to me, Xavier Redchoose. Vex-up by yourself is not a good thing. You know there is a special kind of bullfrog in the bush? He swell up when he vex.’
‘What?’
‘You remind me of that bullfrog. If another man-bullfrog take his woman, he swell. If he don’t stop sulk, he burst.’ For the first time, Romanza looked gloomy.
‘You calling me a bullfrog?’
‘I used to try to talk them out of it, but one of them did burst while I was talking to it and I couldn’t get the smell off for a week.’
‘Romanza. You not even give me a family name to prove you come from somewhere.’
Romanza shrugged. ‘Where I am seems more important.’
Don’t underestimate them, was what Des’ree said about the indigent. She’d done walkround in the Dead Islands once or twice, but nary a one had come out to cook in her presence. It made her furious.
‘Anyway,’ said Romanza. ‘I think that song is a good start to a day.’ He coughed and spat into the sand. ‘You can think of anything worse going happen to you today than a man on the radio sing-say your dicky don’t work? Betterment must come.’
Xavier began to laugh. His own brother not trusting him to meet some mystery woman, the fisher-boy’s moth, this ridiculous walkround, as if he was some guaranteed breeder of young, privileged women. If things didn’t pick up, he might as well just lie here and let life burst him like a bullfrog, yes.
Romanza grinned.
‘See it there. Improvement already.’
Xavier laughed harder. He bent forward and found he couldn’t stop laughing. Romanza pounded him on the back. He gasped for air, ribs aflame.
‘Breathe. You think I want people walk-and-talk, say I kill you? These rass people don’t like no indigent already.’
