The Day I Fell Off My Island Page 7

  I looked around the room and wondered whether the old man had taken us to the right place – there was a small oil stove, a single wooden bed, and a table and chairs, each with a different part missing; I was worried that the first person to sit on one might end up in a heap on the floor. Leaning against a wall, a lopsided wooden bookshelf housed several piles of assorted papers, and one battered book called Modern Photography. Frameless photographs of various people were stuck randomly on the stained walls.

  On his return, he looked over us children with a curious expression, as though he’d forgotten that he’d met us only moments earlier. Then he ushered us into a much smaller room, which was very dark but mostly free of clutter. He struck a match and lit two Tilley lamps that hung on opposite walls, flooding the room with warm light. On the right side of the room, two large, shallow plastic tanks sat side by side on a thick wooden shelf, alongside a number of plastic bottles filled with different coloured liquids. In the corner, there was something covered with a large black cloth. The old man carefully removed the cloth, revealing a camera sat on top of a wooden tripod. He lifted the camera and the tripod and carefully placed them in the centre of the room, then climbed on to a wooden crate and stood behind the camera. He spent the next few minutes covering and uncovering the top of his body and the camera with the black cloth.

  ‘Come over here, Miss Violet,’ he said eventually, pointing to a spot about five feet away from the camera. ‘Come, children, join your mother.’

  We walked across and stood on either side of our mother – girls one side, boys the other. The photographer came over to us and physically moved our positions. He placed me to the left of our mother, Patricia to her right, and Sonny and Clifton in front of her. Then he extinguished one of the lamps, returned to the camera, climbed on to the crate and repeated his actions.

  After a long pause he announced, ‘That’s not going to work. I think it will be best to do it outside, in the garden.’

  He gathered up his contraptions and we followed him outside where he asked us to stand in the same formation in front of a sea of tall flowering plants. Then he climbed back on to his crate. ‘When I wave my hand,’ he said, ‘shout Hinglan!’

  He waved and we shouted.

  A bright flash like lightning came from a glass thing with wires, making me blink in shock.

  ‘All done!’ he said, stepping off the crate. ‘You can go off now and look round town, if you like. Come back in a few hours, the picture should be ready.’

  We left Mr John’s house and headed for a field close by, where Mother took our lunch from the hamper and placed it on a rug, which she’d carefully arranged on the grass. For plates she used the sliced banana leaves that Grandma had placed in the bottom of the hamper. Mother had hardly spoken to us on the entire journey and when she had, it was always in the form of an instruction. Now was no different.

  ‘Wash your hands and sit down for lunch.’

  We did as she asked.

  ‘Thank you, Lord, for your bountiful provision. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ we echoed. Then we ate in silence.

  After lunch, we headed to the nearby fish market where my mother purchased the fish Grandma Melba had asked for. When we returned to the photographer’s house, we stared in amazement at the black and white image. I wasn’t sure whether the girl staring back at me actually looked like me, but I could see that Patricia, Clifton and Sonny looked just like themselves, only all their clothes looked white. Our mother stood tall in the photograph, her cheekbones sharp beneath sad-looking eyes. I turned away from the portrait for a moment and glanced up at her and saw a tear the size of a raindrop leaking from the corner of her left eye. She caught my gaze and quickly reached for one of the pretty handkerchiefs she carried everywhere and dabbed it away. Then she thanked Mr John, took the brown envelope containing a single copy of the photograph from his wrinkled hands, and carefully tucked it into her bag.

  ‘Well, then, that’s that,’ she said, and we headed back to the bus stop.

  Chapter 8

  Only a few days had passed since our adventure, but when I returned to school I found it impossible to describe to my classmates the experience of having our photographs taken. Only Opal claimed to have had photographs of her taken before. Everyone else was fascinated to hear about the process. Marva, my other best friend, wanted to know what the camera looked like.

  ‘It was big an black,’ I told her and the other gathered pupils. ‘It had a thick roun glass ting at de front wit a shiny silver ting round it, like a big ring. Then dere was dis little pole ting sticking up wit a silver plate ting stick pon it. In de front of dat was a strange see-through glass ting wit small wire tings inside.’ They all sat and stared at me, confusion etched across their faces. ‘Mi nuh know ow else fi explain it,’ I said, hoping to pre-empt Opal, who seemed increasingly sceptical of my description.

  ‘A lie she a tell!’ she suddenly blurted out. ‘Yuh know how she always love making up stories. I have plenty picture take of mi an de photographer man nuh use anyting dat sound like dat.’

  Anger surged inside me. I was not making up stories. I simply couldn’t find a better way to explain what I had seen.

  My mother spent her final week in the village, before leaving for England, lounging about the house doing very little. She rarely ventured outside and, when she did, within a few minutes she would be heard complaining about what she described as ‘This darn mosquito and fly-infested hell hole!’ However, she was careful not to make any such reference in Grandma Melba’s presence. That would be cussing language, as far as Grandma was concerned, and no child of whatever age would have the temerity to cuss in the presence of a parent. Our mother also probably understood that Grandma loved the village almost as much as she loved her four grandchildren and that it wouldn’t do to hurt her feelings. When I asked Grandma what was wrong with our mother, she told me, ‘Nutting nuh do har. Fi har head jus full wit har travel plans. Dis is a big someting leaving everyting behind.’

  A few days later, Grandpa’s friend Mass Charlie saw our mother off from the island’s main airport. He lived in Kingston, close to the airport, and had agreed to accompany her as a favour to Grandpa. The next day, Grandpa told us that Mass Charlie had said that our mother insisted on carrying the framed photograph of her and her children in her hand for the entire journey. He said that she was barely able to take her eyes off the picture and that he watched her as she made her way across the tarmac towards the plane still clutching it against her chest. And so, with little fuss and no ceremony, our mother was gone. She’d spent less than two weeks with us. She’d brought us some nice things, but shown us little warmth. There were no kisses or cuddles. The only real difference for us was that we’d at last met the person who gave birth to us. Now at least we knew what she looked like, even though we had no idea what she felt like. After she left, all talk about her stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The only thing that changed was an air of sadness that developed around Grandma Melba. I guessed it was because our mother had gone so far away. I knew England was a faraway place, because Grandpa Sippa told me that it was a country on the other side of the ocean – he said it was much bigger than our country and that maybe our island could fit into England at least one hundred times.

  ‘Yuh see dat big jet plane flying high up in a de air?’ he said one day, just before mother departed. ‘A one a dem a go carry yuh mada to Hinglan. De time change, chile. De island young people dem nuh want fi work pon de land. Innah Hinglan, dem nuh hafi work pon de land like we here. Dem ave plenty money dere. De street dem pave wit gold, so dem seh.’

  ‘De plane a go stop an pick har up hereso?’ Clifton asked.

  ‘No,’ Grandpa explained patiently, ‘it not like de car or de bus. Dem have place call hairport on de island, which is jus a big road for de plane to put down an tek off again.’

  Satisfied with Grandpa’s answer, Clifton and Sonny drifted off to play marbles. But I was left with the image of golden streets i
n my head. The only gold I’d ever seen was the ring on Grandma’s finger. I knew it cost a lot of money, because she told me that was why Grandpa left the island several times to go and work in Cuba, so he could earn enough money to marry her properly and put a gold ring on her finger. We children often watched the planes gliding through the perfectly blue sky. We didn’t know how they got up there or how they could eventually come down, and Grandpa Sippa’s explanation hadn’t really helped. The noise made by the planes as they passed overhead was so loud that we would have to shout over each other to make ourselves heard. The thunderous sound was the cue for all of us children to rush to the highest point in the village, cup our hands over our mouths and shout together as loud as we could, ‘Wi beg yuh, please! Drop some money fiwi! Drop some money fiwi!’ And we’d continue yelling until the plane disappeared from sight.

  Chapter 9

  Life in our village quickly returned to normal as we settled back into our routines of chores before school and chores after school. During school holidays we helped our grandparents as much as we were able to on the smallholding. We hated some of the chores, like walking miles in order to find firewood, which once found had to be chopped into small pieces and tied into large bundles that seemed to weigh more than we did. The elaborately wrapped headbands that separated our heads from the wood often felt useless as the weight bore down on our small bodies and caused our necks to disappear into our shoulders. Heavy buckets of water carried long distances had the same effect. Once relieved of the painful load, it would take some time for our bodies to feel normal again. But, despite the hard work, we were very happy children. That is, until one day, about two years after Mother left for England, when everything changed.

  The first signs of wrongness started early in the morning when Percy, our proud rooster – who was a match for any alarm clock – failed to make even the tiniest of squawks. Grandma Melba had woken up anyway, and her first job was to find out what was going on with Percy. She was quick to return from the coop where Percy lived with his harem of twenty-one hens. In her hand she clutched several of his purple and red tail feathers. I gathered from her distressed explanation that poor old Percy had, at some point in the night, been persuaded with a handful of shelled corn to leave his perch and go up to the side of the coop. The holes in the wire mesh were just large enough for him to poke his head through to retrieve the corn. His killer had been waiting. He or she had promptly rung Percy’s neck and ripped it clean off. The wire mesh was then opened up so the thief could retrieve Percy’s headless body. Grandma had stepped on the bloodied head as she made her way up the path. His still-glassy eyes suggested that Percy’s demise had probably taken place less than two hours earlier. We should have heard something, but, sadly for Percy, the hens who would normally squawk like crazy at the slightest disturbance had kept quiet. Grandma Melba knew that this was no ritual killing, but she decided to keep her counsel until she’d satisfied herself as to who exactly the culprit was; she didn’t want any stupid talk of Obeahs and nonsense about people trying to do bad things to the James family. And anyway, she had a pretty good idea about what had happened to her rooster.

  Grandma followed her nose and the odd feather and the trail led straight to Duppy Boy Briscoe’s yard. There she discovered that Briscoe had hacked the bird in two and the old rooster was already bubbling away in his dirty Dutch pot with nothing but a red Scotch bonnet for flavour. Briscoe’s only reaction when he saw Grandma Melba was to start brushing furiously at his clothing. Grandma just sucked her teeth and walked away. Briscoe was a middle-aged man whose odd behaviour had earned him the nickname Duppy Boy because, although in reality he was completely harmless, he sometimes resorted to doing bad things. He had this habit of wandering around the village talking to himself and brushing imaginary creatures from his body, which led many villagers to conclude that he was possessed by a duppy that prevented him from growing into a proper man. No one wanted the duppy to jump from his body into theirs, so it was best that he was left alone. Only the eccentric twins, Miss Merle and Miss Blossom, would stop by his little shack to deliver one of their strange exotic concoctions.

  ‘Him nuh bada fi nyam anyting people give him anyhow,’ Grandma Melba commented, ‘so why anybody fi bada fi give him food?’

  On the occasions that Briscoe stole food from his neighbours, it was usually a fowl or a small goat, depending on how quickly he could execute his plan and make his getaway. But all of this ceased troubling Grandma at around ten o’clock that same morning, when her mind swiftly moved on from the vengeance she’d been planning to something far more concerning.

  Patricia, Clifton and Sonny came running towards her, breathless, their bare feet kicking up red dirt behind them. ‘Grandma! Grandma!’ screamed Patricia. ‘De man a come wit telegram fiyuh.’

  ‘What yuh talking bout, chile? What man, what telegram?’

  ‘De Yellow Man wit de telegram,’ Patricia repeated.

  ‘Pickney! Move from me,’ Grandma said, giving Patricia a little push. Then she slumped down on a nearby rock, shoulders hunched. Her soft dark face took on a look of defeat. Grandma was expecting the worst news, although as yet she had no idea what this news would be, or the nightmare that a few bland words on paper might unfold. Then the Yellow Man rounded the corner and walked over to Grandma.

  ‘Morning, Miss Melba,’ he said.

  Grandma Melba acknowledged him with a nod.

  He took a thin, sealed blue envelope from his pocket and rested it on her lap. Then he looked over at me. ‘Good morning to you, Miss Nurse,’ he smiled.

  I glared at the yellow-skinned man with his one wonky eye. Then I rolled my eyes and moved close to my grandmother. It was the only one of my nicknames that I hated, and it was because the yellow one-eyed man had given it to me. I wasn’t his nurse and, moreover, he’d probably brought my Grandma bad news in his horrible telegram. A long time passed and Grandma was still staring at the telegram. I wished Grandpa would return from over the hill where he was digging yams for dinner. He would have known what to do. Grandma mostly had her own ideas about things, but there were some situations when she couldn’t think of a solution. It was at times such as these that she’d always ask Grandpa’s advice. But he wasn’t expected back for a few hours, so we just had to sit and wait for Grandma to come out of her shock. Finally, Grandma Melba picked up the telegram and handed it to me.

  I opened it and read out the single line of words: ‘Philbert. Arrive. Little Hammon. 3pm. Thursday 8th March.’

  I handed the telegram back to Grandma Melba. Without saying a word, she slipped the crumpled paper into her apron pocket and walked slowly over to the kitchen where she set to work cleaning away the ashes from the previous night’s fire. I didn’t hear her speak again until much later, long after Grandpa returned with the yams.

  That night I crept up to the door that separated my grandparents’ bedroom from the Hall and listened as she vented her rage to Grandpa.

  ‘Why dis man a come a wi yard? Him wife jus join him innah a foreign. A wah him want wit us, Sippa?’

  ‘A how mi kyan tell yuh, Melba? Mi jus as much innah de dark as yuh.’

  ‘Well, mi nuh want him in mi ouse, soh help me God! Mi might do someting mi regret. Sippa! Mi a tell yuh! Mi nuh want dat ugly Satan devil man anywhere near mi pickney dem. Mi kyaan forgive him for de wickedness im do to Violet. Dat chile was nevah de same person after she meet dat devil man.’

  I suddenly realised that the ‘ugly Satan devil man’ was my mother’s husband. My mother had given birth to Patricia two years after I was born. Clifton and Sonny followed in quick succession, but the man who was to become her husband had left for England without knowing that she was pregnant with Sonny. Sonny was already four years old by the time he returned.

  ‘A wah mi did seh from time, Sippa? Him a wolf innah sheep clothing,’ I heard Grandma say.

  Percy’s death suddenly took on the appearance of an omen and it was certainly strange when, one week later, my m
other’s husband arrived at almost the exact time that was written on the telegram. It wasn’t as if the island had a transport system that said the number nine bus would be leaving Spur Hill at such and such a time and would arrive at Preston station at another time.

  He appeared suddenly, as if materialising out of thin air, boldly standing in front of our verandah. Grandma’s mood immediately turned as dark as the swirling clouds that presaged yet another hurricane.

  ‘Afternoon, Miss Melba,’ he said. His mouth barely moved when he spoke her name.

  I stood behind Grandma and watched him as his bloodshot eyes looked beyond her at the house. He was a bulky man in his forties, already greying and balding. He looked, Grandma told me later, exactly as she remembered him. His eyes had always disturbed her. They were too close together and the whites were always red. She thought of him as a man who was permanently angry. She didn’t like him the first time my mother had introduced him in town. She didn’t like him when she reluctantly attended their hurried marriage. And she didn’t like him now. We continued watching him as he shifted uncomfortably from one heavy-booted foot to the other.