Dancing Lessons (4 page)

I don't wink back because I believe Babe is the one who laughs hardest at me behind my back. I look down at my porridge and scoop up the first spoonful. I like to behave as if they're not there, though I sometimes follow their foolish chatter. Babe is the one who wears a succession of outrageous glasses that make her look like that singer there, the one who sang at Diana's funeral. That song. Or better still, Dame Edna, the comic I've taken to watching on TV. Though I don't think a comic effect is what Babe is after even if she does have the jowls for it. Babe is one of those women who has spent her life basking in the admiration of men. Don't ask me how or why, but that's the impression she likes to give. And, though there are so few ambulatory or with good enough eyesight around, she still spends her time coyly preening, the hands with the fake fingernails frequently touching the hair, the mascaraed eyelashes fluttering, the silk blouses always tucked in with belts to show off the waist, the pants or skirts tight enough to show what was once a bottom. The sandals. The painted toenails.

They spend the whole time chattering about how they spent their sleepless nights as if this is a completely new topic each time and they don't see each other every minute of every day. I tend to tune back in when they get around to advising on the best cure, Ruby, the vulgar one, usually ending with “A good—always did it. When my Jorge was around.” Then her eyes sort of retreat into her head as she goes into a sulk. Any mention of the long-dead Jorge always brings that on. I pretend not to hear (and I can't bring myself to write the word) but I know my ears turn bright red, which is why Ruby says things like that. She is not known to observe propriety, though don't ask if she doesn't play the Grand Dame if anyone should dare to take what she considers liberties with her. Obviously nobody bothered to wash out Ruby's mouth with soap when she was little. She talks dirty all the time, about the great sexual life she had with this Jorge, who was, I think, husband number three. Nowadays I think she just knocks back the Valium or whatever sleeping pills her doctor prescribes.

Babe, surprisingly, makes no mention of sex or pills, favouring a nightcap of brown alcohol. “It has to be brown, dearies—rum, brandy, or whiskey.” With honey and warm milk, the latter taken up to her room each night in a Thermos. How much does she consume, I wonder, but am afraid to ask. I suppress the thought that Babe is really a sick woman, or has been close to death's door, with at least four major operations to her credit.

Birdie in her muddled way is given to trying everything—pills, alcoholic nightcaps, mint tea, St. John's wort, and listening to tapes of birds twittering in the Amazon rainforest through headphones, after she is exhausted watching TV—though the bird sounds sometimes give her nightmares of huge black raptors swooping down to carry her off, which makes her wake up in fright. Just as she is dozing off. Birdie has a querulous way of speaking, like Archie Bunker's wife in
All in the Family
that I'm seeing for the first time in reruns on TV. But this very hesitancy makes her kind of endearing, a tremulous dove in an aviary with a parrot and a hawk.

I don't bother to tell these people that if they weren't so bone idle they would sleep better, born rich with nothing to do all their lives the lot of them. Where I come from, nobody complained about not being able to sleep, everyone was up at dawn working hard all day so we could hardly wait to fall into bed when night came. There was nothing better to do anyway, no television and such in those days. I'm proud of the fact that I sleep soundly at night and sometimes in the days as well, which I know annoys Matron no end since she is one of those always complaining about not sleeping. One would think there was a plague on Ellesmere Lodge. But her not sleeping is no surprise considering she has nothing to do but mind my business, phoning Her every two minutes. And she always comes flying up here as soon as Matron calls her, you can be sure. You'd think she had nothing better to do, either.

So here it is, the morning after I am supposed to have killed the said gentleman, his ghost was enjoying a hearty breakfast in the dining room . I watched his every move two tables away: orange juice, fish fritters and callallo, fried plantain, two slices of toast, orange marmalade, and two cups of coffee with milk, three sugars each cup. And here we are in Matron's office with her in full flight, her bony arms flapping about in her favourite sunflower-bedecked caftan, the bright orange lipstick already smeared, the eyebrows, pencilled in of course, all the way up to the bangs on her forehead, and the earrings, cascades of seashells, jangling. She claims that dressing informally takes away any hint of the institutional, though her attitude—to me at least—is pure Holloway.

“Im-agine” she is saying now to Her, in this fake manner she has of speaking, as if she has somehow mixed up in her head the speech of two entirely different people. Which is not surprising, since she loves to tell of the wonderful years she spent in “Henglan,” as a nurse she says, and that grand person in her head is clashing with some little country girl not quite jettisoned.

“Im-agine. Ken you believe? After she almost keels that poor gentleman. Meester Bridges. And they are trying to ree-vive him. In his room”—which she makes sound like “woom”—“Mrs. Samphire ‘as the gall. To go to sleep. And snore loudly.”

Everything she says ends on a high note, but “sleep” hits the highest note of all, almost a screech, so we know what's really bothering her, don't we? “In the woom,” she continues. “Right across from his. Middle of the h'afternoon.” There we go again. “Snoring. While he is almost dying.” Lying! That's how she speaks, I swear. Fake accent. Short sharp bursts. Punctuated by eyebrows and earrings.

The two of them are behaving as if I am not in the room, though I have been summoned to appear before this Magistrate's Court, and I'm sitting in Matron's most uncomfortable chair trying not to laugh as Matron's eyebrows crawl like centipedes up to her hairline. Of course She says nothing, or nothing more than is absolutely necessary. Always been like that, even as a child, with that round face pale as the moon and just as forthcoming. A face that never reveals what the owner is thinking is probably what makes for a good television host. For her job is to provoke her guests—“probing questioning,” I think the papers call it—so they'll get all excited, and shout and yell and wave their hands about, while she maintains her cool and speaks in such soft, reasonable tones that the audience is left in no doubt as to who is the upholder of Truth and Justice. Well, maybe some of them hate her for it. Just for being so totally cool in a country where yelling and screaming is the norm. Is she normal? But she does manage to get people to blurt out things they wouldn't normally say—which is exactly the technique she tries to use on me, except, here she has met her match. For I am the great revealer of nothing myself. I say even less. With me it comes naturally.

I don't mean to be bitchy about my own daughter no less, but there she sits each week, Little Miss Perfect, wearing some beautifully crafted outfit, in this wicker chair on this fake veranda with white painted railings and fake palms, a bowl of unmentionably vulgar flowers on top of the glass-topped coffee table which is artistically positioned between her and her guest seated in an identical wicker armchair. The only equality on this show. The chairs are white. The background wall is painted an astonishing shade of blue to mimic some impossible sea or sky, I suppose. It is the perfect foil for her crinkly yellow hair and bamboo skin and the garments in the soft tones she favours; not always so fortunate for those guests whose dark skins or darker suits sometimes fade away into the blue. All the better to chop you to bits, my dear—which she does with razor-sharp precision and immaculately charming voice, perfectly modulated. This show is a new one, called
Quest
if you please, tailor-made for her. Though, I have to say she's good, and she's served a long apprenticeship as a panellist and expert on many other shows, so she is already a household name. She does have a reputation otherwise of lending her name and her time to causes—the Battered Women's Shelter, the Street Children's Fund. She sits on all sorts of cultural foundations and boards. She's certainly not an idler. She's a sociologist. That's what she teaches up at the university.

I've been watching her new show only since I've been here at Ellesmere Lodge. My old television set at home conked out long ago, like so many other things. Not that there was anything worth watching. Here we have a large TV in the lounge, smaller ones in our rooms, and a satellite dish out back, so for the first time I am able to see her in action. Oprah she isn't—though they both have high foreheads, wide-set eyes, and the same sort of gruelling sincerity. But this is a two-bit local station in a two-bit place, even the lighting goes a bit wonky at times. There are no experts to call, no gifts to be given away, and no audience to be seen, though the audience is heard all right, and that's the best part of the show. After she's put her guests through the wringer, in this civilized kind of way, she turns them over to the wolves. While her guest might try to squirm out of answering, it is her job to pin him, for it's mostly men, to the board till he begs for mercy, or gets angry, or charmingly lies, or sulks. There she is, interviewing week after week a parade of idiots who come before her—parsons and politicians, businessmen and contractors, academics and trade unionists, all big fishes in a very small pond. These are all public figures out there, spending public funds or messing about with the public's trust or not messing with the public's garbage collection. They come in smiling, ready to undo the little lady, but at the end of it all they are undone. She does her homework and she knows just when to drive in the barb. The public love her, for the quest is on their behalf, of course, the little people; she of the shining armour is out there fighting their fights without once having to wave her skinny arms about. Don't we love people with the gift of the gab, and doesn't she have it where it counts? On television. She hardly ever opens her mouth to me.

I am proud of her. I beam with maternal pride when others praise her. But she does get my goat when she tries to use her charming technique on me and my business. The Listening Ear. The Voice of Reason. The Quest: Are you okay, Mother? Or, better still, implied, as in: Why can't you settle down and be a good girl and save me all this grief? As she's doing now in Matron's office while Matron continues her silly dance with her hands and eyebrows. As if I'm used to answering to anyone.

I MUST HAVE STOPPED
listening to them, for I found myself pulled back to that other day long ago when I woke up in my bedroom, the house all quiet. I realized most of the day had gone, for the room was darkening already and the sky reddened with a vanishing sunset. I got up to open the door and discovered it was locked. Aunt Zena. She had done it before, locked me in as punishment, though I couldn't remember what for. Once for three whole days. It's only now when I think of it that I wonder if it was those times when my father was off his head that she locked me in. For once I was confronted with the truth of his behaviour, I began to recall other times, fragments of memory throughout my childhood of voices raised, furniture crashing, screams and shouts, an air of tenseness and exhaustion in the morning. I'm wondering now if she locked me in to keep me safe, to keep me from witnessing. But I don't want to believe that, for it would show that she had a caring side and I know she didn't.

This time I didn't even bother to rattle the door, for I knew no one would come, no one would come until they decided to let me out. So I stood still and listened again, and I heard sounds, men's voices mostly, but they were not the usual loud country voices. They were muted, flattened the way voices are when someone has died. I moved to my window when I realized that the voices were coming from that side of the house where there were the clotheslines, the chicken coops, and the mango tree.

MANGO. THAT'S THE FIRST
food he ever fed me, stopping his horse at the Clovelly Cascades and lifting me down, then holding the horse's bridle in one hand and my hand in the other as he led me off the bridle path down to the river. It later became a well-known beauty spot, pictured on calendars and postcards, but at the time it was just part of the wild country we were passing through, with the dirt road zigzagging through the craggy limestone rocks with the occasional windblown, stunted tree, the dusty roadside bush and furze. The sound of the roaring river as we approached, the wild landscape somehow matched my own sense of wildness, of being, finally, in flight. I held tightly to his hand. It was the first time anyone had ever held me since I danced with my father and the feeling was almost too much to bear. I could hardly breathe. I couldn't speak even if I wanted to.

He stepped carefully down the path, and it was only much later that I would wonder how many girls he had led there. But this day I had no such thoughts in my head, for I knew I was the one, the chosen one, the chosen one, as the falls roared out to the pounding of my heart. Cold spray sprinkled us as we walked past the falling water, but I welcomed it, for the day was already too hot. Farther down where the river broadened out and it was quieter, he set the horse free to graze and he hoisted me up onto a flat broad rock. I opened my eyes to a different landscape, green and lush like the Garden of Eden, shaded by the broad-leafed anchovy trees that lined this bank, their trunks hidden by the profusion of wild pines and orchids that covered them, the long roots of wiss tangled up with the philodendron stems that hung almost to the ground like a green curtain. In the damp soil at our feet wild coco leaves held up their heart-shaped faces to the cool spray, and even the small smooth rocks in the river were covered with moss on the shady side.