This One Sky Day, page 23
‘Be quiet.’ He could not recall speaking to a woman so. Much less, obeah.
‘The eaters I have known describe it as a kind of unrelenting sea in the mind. The sea cannot be controlled, you must fall again, eventually. The indigent’ – she stopped and chuckled wryly, as if remembering someone she used to love – ‘we know. We stay close to an eater. We accept ghosts, we accept the rot, we accept the death-smell, we hang the moth until it is ready, macaenus!’ She stepped forward; repulsed, Xavier shuffled backward. ‘Why you think Romanza cleaves to you? He smells it, too. The fool that helped you stop should have told you all this. But maybe they did just want their money.’
‘I said shut up.’ Anise had been the kindest, the best.
Cannonball unwrapped the ghost heel and held it out, naked and twitching. It looked like old soap gone slimy. ‘In my dreams, I am the one who gives this to you, a culinary tour de force. A cure. It saves you. You take it into your kitchen and cook for me.’ She sighed, an ecstatic, repulsive sound. ‘The heel is holy. You lucky we meet today, macaenus.’
‘I told you. I stop with it.’ He sounded thin and weak.
Eleven years, seventy-two days and nearly eight hours ago. With his face in Anise’s lap, he had stopped.
See the dirty moth eater, there!
Cannonball had such pretty dimples when she smiled hard.
‘But, macaenus. You have one around your neck right now.’
She was close to him, hands on his waist, light and sweet-smelling, palms up, insectoid, like every obeah woman. He didn’t know when she had moved. He reached down to push her away; his fingers fell through air. He stumbled.
‘Oh, Xavier.’ Her voice was musical, imploring. ‘You must take one, today.’ Her breath was aromatic against his cheek, one stubby finger plucking the moth pouch free, slithering out from under his tunic, hanging between them. ‘Let me tell you a secret.’ She leaned further in and he let her, for a second, even welcomed her: ‘Heel is better than moth.’
If you see her ghost, kill it, Xavier. That was what his mother-in-law said. Promise me. But Nya was not coming back for saving; she was gone. And he was here. And he was hungry.
Who feeds us, he’d once asked Des’ree.
The ghost heel twirled and writhed when he picked it up. Shame almost made him sag.
Cannonball rocked back, her pink eyes wide, hands patting her breasts. Spittle down her chin.
*
He remembered Anise meeting him at the front door of her yellow house late at night, grabbing him as he lurched towards her. He could feel her heels sliding with his weight as he struggled to stay upright. They tottered to the middle of the room, where he sank to his knees, surrounded by her lamps. In the night and her presence, they were like living, lunar creatures.
He fell, dragging one with him. Heard tinkling glass and felt shards in his palms.
What is it? Anise said.
He lay on the floor, curled on his side. It was easiest and safest. He didn’t want to break anything else. She crouched over him, clearing glass, hands flickering back and forth.
Don’t cut yourself, he mumbled.
He’d thrown away all the moth in the house, banned the indigent with his beribboned boxes, braced himself to do without it. Ever since the old obeah woman folded him up and said she had no love spell. Three days lying in a position much like this, clutching the floorboards. When he dragged himself to the toilet this morning he’d defecated blood, coughed blood, blood in his nostrils, bright red eyes. Blood caked his sandals.
He couldn’t do it alone. He opened his mouth. Anise would surely see the raw roof and the bloated tongue. Her face was grey. Or was it silver?
What is the last kind of moth you take?
What it matter?
Tell me.
Banana moth. He laughed. I ate it slooowly. No more than eating sweets. Subdued yellow wings, marked with brown lines, like a child’s crayon drawings.
He reached out for Anise’s face, but she was on the other side of the room, picking up things, mixing things.
She came back to his elbow and asked him if he could sit up. It took three tries. She made him suck a small, cold sponge; fed him spoons of an acid liquid; rubbed cold oil into his back, temples, scalp. Everything cold, even her hands. He put his face into her hair, and it was cold there, too. She sang and lit a fire, burned incense, asked him for his day-god. He laughed. The god that ruled over his day of birth was Kinteet, god of marriage; depicted in statues, eating his own bottom lip.
She fed the fire blessing papers in his name, asking Kinteet for guidance.
You doing so well, she said.
He opened his mouth to ask her if she was mad and vomited into her lap. She put a salt crystal on the back of his tongue to calm the nausea and humiliation.
Hours became days, shuttered in with her. Tinctures, unguents, the changing of the weather, she over him with a clean cloth, helping him piss, a constant fog of silver around them.
I see you, Xavier, she murmured it over and over again. You just fine.
Yes, she was mad. Perhaps that was necessary.
When he could stand, she took him into the hills, to walk and sweat.
Your wedding, he said. You should be planning. I am so sorry.
I still have three weeks. Plenty of time.
Anise—
Is my cors to help you, Xavier.
Was this between them no more than her job, her destiny? Regardless, he had nothing to offer her. The hills were green, and she seemed to know everywhere that was cold.
And I see you doing your very best.
Best? He found himself raging at her in Entaly’s voice. I not doing my best! I still want it, look at me. Disgusting. He choked on his own words and began to curse.
Keep walking, she said, and walked on and upwards, him gasping for breath behind her. Look at the hills and the plants.
They walked every day. The roof of his mouth healed. He began to talk. He described the forest and the mountains like she wasn’t there beside him, seeing it too. The honey-whisky-coloured leaves. The shapes of clouds. He talked about his garden. The hibiscus looked like it had been bleached in tea and the lemons kept bearing all year and how the sound of his mother’s voice had been so beautiful, singing in the kitchen, splintering the sides of her mouth. Did Anise notice how pomegranates were shrinking? One ponganat, as the children called them, used to feed three boys for the afternoon, big as a watermelon, but now …
He wept.
Anise listened. That sacred gaze. Deep listening; deep attention.
His second time, he told her, how good it had been, at Big Cousin Nester’s house, who kept her moth under her bed. He and Io were there for supper, and she busy in the back: him, like a dog, sniffing-sniffing. Once you took the silk, it called to you, from other people’s hiding places. He confessed a whole childhood of thieving, his face in his hands, Anise’s cool thumb in the back of his neck.
You were a child.
No excuse! I knew better.
No. A child, Xavier.
And when they were done walking out the hills, he found he could pick up a moth between his thumb and forefinger and not be insane anymore.
You fix me?
There was never anything wrong with you. My Xavier.
Mine.
20
Anise watched the men flee after the radio announcement, stumbling and cursing, angry but afraid, as if the whorehouse might by its very nature amplify the mysterious sex ban. Garson pulled up his pants; Blowsnaught skittered after him, winded and bloodied, bowing at Anise as if she might, as the owner of a now-forbidden pum-pum, detonate.
Mixie and Archie crouched, knotted together on the veranda floor.
Archie used his fists to wipe his tears, pulled Mixie to her feet, and spat in her face.
The women went uuuuh! as if he’d gut-punched them. Lyla lunged forward, but Rhita moved just as fast, locking her arms around her sister’s waist and pulling her away. They tussled silently, viciously, elder sister restraining younger, Archie bracing his big-headed walking stick above his head. It would have been a death blow, no doubt.
Mixie fell to her knees, scrubbing her face with both sleeves.
Archie stalked out of the property, head up, gaze straight, skirting one half of the ripped, heavy table that lay in the yard, the other hitched in a custard apple tree.
Anise grabbed Mixie. The younger woman had wrapped her arms around her head, a cowed sculpture. Her eyes were screwed shut; if she opened them to see the shame it might scalp her. Bubbles dived around them, like miniature birds, or butterflies.
Anise guided Mixie back into the house. Laid her down on a velvet chaise longue, murmuring. She trickled energy from the crown of Mixie’s head, across her face, watching her mouth moving soundlessly. She healed a small cut on the back of the woman’s thigh, soothing, rocking. Singing. She checked that Mixie’s pum-pum was truly, safely back between her thighs, trying not to think of Garson’s shuddering body, her touch light and fingers whispering, a benediction.
Still, the eyes so tight shut.
Her own vulva quivered in her pocket. How basic her terror had been, watching it tossed about and threatened by dirty fingers. It was time to put it back where it belonged. She felt its absence like a foreboding, like the dark horizon that heart patients feel before their first attack.
Bubbles. Mixie giggled sleepily, dozing.
Eventually Rhita came in to swap places with Anise, squeezing her forearms in gratitude, curling around her sister’s body, nestling and stroking.
They had been as brave as they could be.
Ingrid would have shrugged and reminded her of the dying women they’d known: running households, husbands, children and veritable empires, with only the occasional tremor on their surfaces.
*
Anise went back to the decimated veranda steps and Lyla, who was examining the potholes in the veranda tiling and sniffing the odour of men.
‘For a moment there I did really think you was going to use my crotches to fuck Blowsnaught,’ said Anise.
‘I would never.’ Lyla began to pick up broken pieces of peachy tile. ‘But there wasn’t no time to warn you.’ She flinched as the tile grazed her palm, blood rushing to the surface of the skin, sucked it, waving away Anise’s concern. ‘I got caught up in the whole of it, but when I realise what he actually want …’ She shook her head. ‘That man was trying to find a whole new way to rape you. I didn’t think anything could surprise me anymore.’
Yes, that was what had happened. Anise applied a bubble to the back of her own neck.
‘You need to take that serious, healer – when somebody bring violence to you. Don’t push it down. Sit with it. Tell people who will hear you.’
Right now, Anise couldn’t think of a better witness than Lyla, but she didn’t say so. They were quiet for a while, stacking the tile bits in a heap.
Lyla plucked at a small hole in the weft of her glorious dress. Anise thought of her on fire, the warm small of her back. Her magic pum-pum was perched on the veranda wall, a gathering of dark flesh and hair. Lyla paused in front of it, shaking her head.
‘Lyla. When you got caught up. You seemed so …’ ‘What?’
She searched for a word. ‘Wanton?’
‘I does get like that.’ Lyla picked up the vulva, turning it over in her hands.
‘You going throw it out again?’ She was absolutely sure that discarding it was wrong.
‘I going bury it under some rock.’ Lyla put it down. ‘I getting a new life.’
‘But you were so …’
Lyla smiled. ‘What more, again?’
‘Irresistible?’
Lyla stroked the thin gold chain on her neck, her tongue between her teeth. ‘You flirting with me, Anise Joseph?’
Anise grinned. ‘See? You can’t help it.’
‘All the more reason to make sure it gone this time.’
‘Maybe if you did just have sex with someone you love …?’
‘Is not a matter of love,’ snapped Lyla. She crossed her arms. ‘What you know?’
Anise hesitated, stung. ‘I don’t know how to talk to you.’
‘Why you have to talk to me any special way? Just talk like you talk to anybody else.’
‘I don’t understand why you throwing away something so important.’
‘But I never asked for your understanding. The pums is not important to me. I tell you already, you just don’t like my answer. It feel good to me that it gone. I am going to have a new life. I don’t have to feel like you. I don’t have to be like you. And just because we different, that don’t mean I wrong, either.’
‘But, Lyla! You were glowing when he pulled it down!’
Lyla’s mouth twitched. ‘Yes, I know! I can be a complex whore, Anise. Gods, leave me nah!’
They scooped up shattered tile, giggling.
‘Anyway,’ said Lyla, ‘you know how man behave when they get this quality kind of love? Them try to do impossible things.’ She snorted. ‘Believe me, I can do without the trouble.’
‘I am never going to agree with you.’ Anise picked a bubble from the back of her leg, rubbed it between her hands and applied it to her temples.
Was Tan-Tan somewhere doing impossible things for a mystery woman? She wanted to feel his arms around her, something different from today’s bastards, smashing, grabbing, entitled.
Who tell you he not that kind of man?
Gods, he was never that kind.
She knew women who insisted you could tame a man only so long and no more. But she didn’t believe that, it didn’t have to be true. Some men, surely, knew how to control themselves? Like Xavier.
Is not any kind of control when a man don’t want you.
Thinking on blasted Xavier Redchoose just made her feel worse.
If you told Xavier Redchoose that a man step to you with violence, he stone-cold kill him, y’know.
‘You alright?’ asked Lyla.
‘Mmm-hmmm.’
He don’t even remember me.
How you mean? You give him back his life!
Lyla looked like she might ask again, but Rhita came out of the house. She sat down in the single intact rocking chair.
‘She still sleeping. I think she know that she and Archie done, this time.’
The sisters sighed.
‘Archie was always an idiot,’ said Rhita.
‘Well, that’s not so true,’ said Lyla. ‘Him was actually alright up to a point.’
‘Really? Which point was that?’
‘Mixie was whoring when she met him. He love her same way.’
‘That don’t make me think any more of him. A good man asks his woman to be better.’
‘He was her client?’ asked Anise.
‘No,’ said Lyla. ‘They met at him friend house or something. She tell him plain in the first hour, she was a whore. They would have celebrate ten years next month. Me and him used to be friends. Sit down right here and drink rum, plenty night. Then our mother did dead few years aback and that’s how Mixie buy the place from the woman who was retiring.’
‘Amplifying the sin,’ said Rhita. ‘Mamma wanted you out of it.’
Lyla ignored her. ‘Archie help her set us up good. Is him interview all the new girls and make sure them get health checks, make sure the clients know how to behave. But he was getting a little funny, last year. Just as we start make big money, he grumbling about whores and whoring.’ Her mouth set. ‘He said some disgusting things about women. I couldn’t believe that was my friend. Mixie start lie down with less man to appease him, but that wasn’t his problem, even if he say so. What he really never like is her independence.’
‘So she left him?’ said Anise.
‘Dash him out, yes. She never like how he was treating her girls. For weeks he come caterwauling at her window. She throw water on him and pretend like she wasn’t hurting. Then he come a few days ago, say he partnered up with Intiasar for the wedding celebration, how we can go up a level with business. Mixie was excited, joking about how when we government approved all the clients going to be rich. I think he did hope it could get her back.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Archie never mention Intiasar say that the publicity generated supposed to be enough for us. They probably right about that, but I know Mixie. She don’t do things for free. She was always strict on that. She never care that other whorehouse doing same thing today. And Archie never want to look bad.’ Her neck trembled. ‘I never even get a lick on that bastard.’
‘Bastard,’ Rhita grunted.
Mixie slid onto the veranda, looking sheepish. She sat down in her hammock and regarded the mess.
‘Backside,’ she said. ‘He mash it bad.’
They all nodded.
A fat wild coney with a pretty snout trotted through the yard, then posed, ears cocked, under a sapodilla tree. Lyla and Rhita caught passing green butterflies and chewed thoughtfully. The coney pulled off one of the green sapodillas and ate it, looking pleased with itself.
‘So Governor make jucky-jucky illegal,’ Mixie said.
Lyla nodded. ‘That man really don’t like whore.’
‘I don’t understand him,’ said Rhita. ‘First he expecting freeness for he married friend, then he put out sex ban?’
Mixie gave Anise a yellow butterfly. A good breed, young and tart on the wings.
‘Butterfly plentiful in this yard,’ said Mixie. ‘Crunchy wings.’ She hooked a passing orange-and-red-striped butterfly with her index finger and popped it into her mouth. It was such a delicate motion that they all stopped to admire her.
‘You always so classy with that butterfly, even when you get drunk on it,’ teased Lyla.
‘I think the sex ban must be because everybody crotches fall out,’ said Rhita. ‘Mixie. You should tell Orange Man about what happen here today. How Intiasar send man to rape us off. That would mash up the stupid wedding.’
‘I wouldn’t know how to find him, my dear.’
‘So you’re not the Orange Man?’ asked Anise.
Mixie grinned. ‘No mam. I am merely a helper.’
‘And you just torture me and wouldn’t tell me.’ It made sense, though. One man could only do so much, but if he had an obliging collective behind him, he could accomplish what Orange Man did. She’d assumed cors, but perhaps it was simply community.
