Dancing Lessons (26 page)

Without saying anything, but smiling and waving the shaker, the diamonds surrounding her large sapphire ring almost blinding me, she totters grandly to the armchair where she lowers herself carefully. She puts her burdens down on the small side table and then crosses her legs at the knees, leaving me to wonder how on earth she manages that at her age. She pours herself a drink, dropping one of the olives back into the shaker for the second glass, and with glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, and one shoe dangling, she salutes me. And then, between sips and puffs, she talks non-stop about herself or whatever else she is interested in at the moment. None of this “and how are we today” foolishness.

Sometimes she comes with Birdie and they spend their entire time arguing about the name of some girl they knew in school seventy years ago, totally ignoring me, which I like. Poor Birdie is getting so shaky she can't always manage the stairs. This afternoon Ruby comes alone, a vision in silk capri pants with matching pink wedge-heeled mules, and a swirly chiffon top that would outdo any of Matron's for colour and floatability. I don't even bother to listen to Ruby, but I like to watch her, a beautiful, wind-battered macaw, and after her visit I always feel a little better.

I'm actually sick, not pretending as some who know my circumstances might think, a bad flu that I seemed to have got over but which then knocked me down again with a touch of bronchitis thrown in. Now I sound like a macaw. Yet people would expect me to be feeling a lot worse, if only they knew.

Even though I was feeling physically okay, except for a little chestiness, I probably would never have gotten out of that bed, could easily have just given up and died, if I hadn't had another visitor that same day. It was Annie who serves in the dining room and brings my dinner up on a tray for me, so she wasn't a real visitor as she does that every day.

Annie usually lingers, and chatters a bit in a cheerful kind of way, as she goes about adjusting the drapes, checking my bathroom for clean towels, straightening out the room, and generally looking around to see that everything is right, even though it isn't her job. She's good that way. Annie is at least in her thirties, if her fifteen-year-old daughter is anything to go by, but she looks like a teenager herself with her smart little cane rows or intricate locks, tied back on the job, out and flashing once she's changed into fashionable spandex street wear and headed for the bus stop, or waiting for her current taxi driver boyfriend. Annie has delicate features and a trim body that looks stylish even in the ugly green or pink uniform dresses. She is cheerful and cheeky, and often manages to coax a smile out of the most miserable, as if getting smiles all round was part of her duty. I could never understand how anyone with a life so hard could be so consistently cheerful. Three children and a bedridden grandmother to look after. No male help in sight. I guess it's just a question of personality.

I really like Annie, but during the time that I've been lying here, feeling miserable, I've been annoyed by her presence as I have been by everyone's. So whenever she came I would close my eyes and ignore her. Never mind, she always had some sass on her lips before leaving, often along the lines of, “You'd better eat something today, Miss Sam, or you draw down to nutten. See if any of your nice clothes can fit you then. You might have to give them to me.” This was a laugh, as everything I owned would go twice around Annie. I imagined her rolling her eyes and chuckling as she closed the door. Even though I ignored her, Annie's coming was something I looked forward to.

But that evening I heard Annie's soft opening of the door as usual. I shut my eyes and waited for her usual greeting. It never came. I could hear the sounds that told me she had come inside and was pulling up the small table and placing the tray on it, unrolling the napkin from the ring and flapping it open to tie around my neck—for she ignored my protests and insisted on the niceties. But apart from what sounded like a sniffle, not a sound came, and I wondered who it was if not Annie. So I opened my eyes just as she reached towards me with the napkin. I was startled to see such a different Annie from the one I was used to, for her face was puffy and her eyes were red and filled with tears. Our eyes locked as I opened mine and I was so shocked at her state that I spoke. I croaked out “Annie?” before she burst into tears.

“Oh Miss Sam,” she wailed. “You up here. You don't know what is happening out there in the world. You just don't know.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but her agony actually made me sit up in the bed. When she continued to sob, I found myself swinging around to put my feet on the floor and patting a place on the bed beside me.

“Annie, look,” I said. “Leave that.” For she had moved to take the covers off the dishes. “Sit down. Sit here and tell me about it. What is happening? What are you talking about?”

She perched on the edge of the chair, but it took some time to get the story out of her. It was Cookie she said, Cookie's grandson, Trevor, had been shot. By the police.

“Shot dead, you mean?”

“Yes'm. Him and three other youth. In a house over where they live. In Cumberland.”

That name meant nothing to me, but I knew the boy, Trevor. A bright, tall young man who was going to a good high school, was on the athletics and the debating teams, and was the pride of his grandmother who was raising him as his mother lived abroad and had not been heard from in years.

Cookie's real name was Icilda Samms, as I discovered when I helped her to fill out a form, but she was called “Cookie” by everyone. She introduced herself that way, with pride, for she was undisputed mistress of catering at Ellesmere Lodge.

Cookie's forty or so years as a servant in other people's kitchens had taken their toll, for she was overweight, bulbous in shape, and diabetic, her legs wormy with huge varicose veins, bunions peeping out of the men's brown sandals she slopped around in, her round face constantly shiny from kitchen grease. Her snowy white hair under her cap was unstraightened and braided in fat, unfashionable little plaits. Every cent she earned went to keep Trevor and his two younger sisters. Cookie was the opposite of Annie, of a serious and unsmiling disposition, unless the subject was Trevor, when her face became transformed as the frowns creased upwards into smiles. Poor Cookie! The news of this young boy's death was so shocking it pushed everything else from my mind.

“But how? What were they doing?”

“Nothing, Miss. They weren't doing nothing.”

Annie sounded defensive, and I realized why. I had automatically assumed that the boys had to be guilty. I was right, for her voice was rising. “Miss Sam, you know how the police stay aready. Them is murderer! Kill the poor boys them in cold blood!”

“But what was Trevor doing there?” I asked, for I was still trying to sort this out in a rational kind of way. As far as I knew Trevor lived with his grandmother, but where that was in relation to the place where the killings took place I didn't know, for I was not familiar with the city.

“Is Trevor cousin live there, and some other boys. Trevor was visiting his cousin. Police say is bad man living there in the house, druggist, and that one of them shoot a policeman, but nutten nuh go so. Is pure young fellows. The house belong to one of them mother that abroad right now. In New York. She just gone last week to earn a little money to finish the tiling. And now this is what happen.”

Yes, there we go again, I thought. The earthly paradise. That is also where Trevor's mother was last heard from.

“Miss Sam, they just surround the house on every side, with their M16 and then the one name Samson, the bad-man Inspector, just hail them up over the loudspeaker and tell them to come out.” Annie's voice was passionate with conviction. “And everybody say they were coming out with their hands up when the police just rain bullets down on the house. Through the door, the windows, everywhere. Trevor and his cousin was on the front porch already with their hands in the air when they cut them down.”

She stopped then, and I could feel my heart hammering as I tried to visualize the horror of the scene.

“Now the police saying is the boys shoot first. Miss Sam, they go in afterwards and plant gun on them.”

“When was this, Annie?”

She paused to pluck another tissue from the bedside table to wipe her eyes.

“Three days ago, mam. Matron said not to tell you. She going to vex with me. For she say right now your system can't take anything more. I didn't mean to cry, but I can't stop for I thinking, suppose those children was any of mine? But I know how you stay, Miss Sam. You would want to know.”

“You're right, Annie. I'm okay now.” I tried to work my stiff mouth into a smile for her sake. “So where is Cookie now?”

“She just finish up dinner so she must be gone home by now. Still have the little ones to look after.”

“You mean, she didn't take any time off?”

“She take the one day off to go and identify Trevor body. That's all she could do. Mrs. Spence say she should go but she don't want to stop work for she say she would die if she just sit down and do nothing. They wouldn't even let her talk to anybody in authority down there. Mr. Levy trying to help her find out what is what. But nobody not saying nothing. And what the police saying is pure pure lie. Everybody know it.”

She paused for a bit of nose blowing and then seemed to get up some steam, for she waved her hands about and her voice rose higher. “Big big thing, you know, Miss Sam! People talking bout nothing else. How them gun down the poor black people pikni in cold blood. Nothing else on the news but that. Cookie all pon television and everything. When she did go down to view the body.”

Despite the grimness of the story, Annie couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice at the mention of television. She was even smiling a bit, as she replayed the scene. “Same way she leave here you know, Miss Sam, when them come tell her the news. The people from her yard come up in taxi for her for they never want to phone. Same way she on television in her uniform and apron and everything as she rush down there. Don't even take time to tidy herself. Right on the seven o'clock news.”

Then Annie turned serious again and wiped her eyes as the tears flowed afresh. “God know when they will release Trevor body for burial. Post-mortem and all them ting. You wonder why when everybody know what happen already. Is that really burning her up now. When she will ever get Trevor body to bury.”

It was at the word
body
that I burst into tears.

WHO WAS I CRYING
for then? Trevor? Cookie? Myself? I asked myself that question as I lay awake all night, turning it over and over in my mind, refusing to face up to the real reason. It was the first time I had cried, and it had taken me a long time to convince poor Annie that she could leave me, it wasn't her fault, she hadn't upset me, I was upset for Trevor and Cookie. Crying was good for me, as it was for her, for all of us. I told her this, over and over. Then I had to make her swear that she would say nothing to Matron before I could get her to leave. It was true, crying was good, for the next day it got me out of bed and on my feet, though I was still a bit shaky.

But it wasn't the crying that got me up the next morning. It was admitting to myself that I had been living a lie for so long, pretending I was this bona fide lady. Cushioned in this little cocoon my daughter had prepared for me. Buying into the notion that somehow I belonged here in this closed little world. That it was my birthright and the rest was all a mistake. For though I had kept saying I wanted to go back home, in truth the longer I stayed the more I was seduced by the ease of living in a place where people were there to meet my needs. Poor people. Like those I came from. The ones who couldn't afford to take too much time off from work even when their children were killed. A place where comfort and safety could be bought by high walls and wired gates and floodlights and alarms and security systems.

Comfort and security had made me forget about a real world out there, where children are dying every day from drugs or gang warfare, abandonment to the streets or police brutality. That wasn't my world, it is true, that world of urban violence and anarchy. Like many country folk I have been untouched by the violence, viewing it as a city affair, but when I think back to my own little corner of the world, I can see it was there too, waiting to burst out. Hadn't I seen the seeds of rage even in my own son so many years ago? I see it festering in a new generation of children who sit idly on the bridge, watching the world go by, smoking ganja. Armed with guns now, not knives. Just weeks before I left home, our local shopkeeper was shot, and the post office had been held up by armed men more than once. There were rumours of cocaine use and crack houses nearby. Burglar bars were beginning to go up in even the humblest of houses. People no longer sat out on their verandas at night.

When Mr. Bridges said it would be dangerous for me to return home, a woman alone, he was not being sensational. Elderly women who live alone are now prime targets, if the record number killed in the last few years is anything to go by. Many were women of distinction, women of prominence living on their own. Their years of service to the nation, to education or social work, medicine or politics, provided no more immunity to being shot or battered to death than the poor widow living on her mite in the shantytowns.

But that night, following Annie's news, I wasn't thinking of how vulnerable I myself would be back home. I was thinking about how vulnerable I had allowed myself to become, once the hurricane had swept my old life away and deposited me here like flotsam. I had come close to losing the one thing that had kept me going all these years, that had stiffened me against apathy and despair. And that, simply, was rage. After the first few years of my marriage it was a silent rage against my husband and everything that flowed from my connection with him, but over the years since then I have come to learn it was a rage that was probably always in me. Rage perhaps born from that moment my mother ceased to hold me to her breast—or is that too fanciful? Ceased to let me feel her warmth, hear the sound of her voice. Throughout my life I have experienced loneliness, anger, guilt, shame, remorse, and shame again. But only in recent times have I allowed these feelings to overwhelm me, for I have lost my backbone, undermined by the seduction of the soft life, the promise of comfort. The things that I now know were never meant for me.