The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (24 page)

O
ne other person
in the household did not share in the general celebration of Freddy’s resurrection, and that was Basmati. Normally she was a cheerful woman who chattered away with her employer family as if she too was a member, but she had changed. She shuffled around the house, clearing and setting tables, sweeping the rooms, wiping dust-bunnies from the stairs, peeling plantains, grating coconut, taking down the baskets of dirty laundry for Doris, the washerwoman, in a bubble of glumness which made it hard to even look at her. Preoccupied as they were with Freddy, no one noticed. Today, the third day after Freddy’s return, her misery seemed worse than ever. Only Dorothea noticed that today Basmati was wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses. To Dorothea’s experienced eye that could only mean one thing. She said nothing, that first day. She’d noticed a gradual deterioration in the maid’s disposition over the last few weeks and had been quietly watching. She knew the signs. She also knew the husband.

The next day, Basmati was again wearing the sunglasses, and she walked with a limp and moved with such stiffness that Dorothea followed her into the kitchen after breakfast. Basmati stood with her back to the room, washing the wares, her back heaving as she worked.

‘Basmati!’ said Dorothea.

‘Yes, Mistress?’ Basmati’s voice was small, a squeak, really, and she did not turn around.

Dorothea walked up to her and placed a hand on her back. Basmati flinched. She was a short woman who once must have been pretty, one of those sweet-faced East Indian girls with long plaits down their backs and perfect middle-partings, who walked to school in groups of twos or threes, book-bags over their shoulders; invariably, they were good students who worked hard and got top marks. Almost as invariably, they left school early to get married.

Now, Basmati must be in her late twenties, Dorothea calculated, like her. Her mother, Sita, had also worked for the Quints and Dorothea could remember the daughter was near her own age (for she was in the Form beneath her) and would come to the house after school in her Bishops’ High School uniform, sitting quietly on the back steps doing her homework, waiting for her mother. Then suddenly she’d disappeared, only to reappear a few years later when Sita took ill and offered her daughter as replacement maid. The mother never returned to work; a few months later, Basmati had reported Sita’s death and asked for a permanent job.

The first few years she had brought babies and toddlers with her, worked with them around her feet or strapped to her back; quiet, well-behaved children. Though no older than Dorothea, Basmati’s body was now that of a forty-year-old woman, thick-set and lumbering, her face puffy and lined, her dark skin splotched with shadows. She wore a sari, the
palu
tightly wrapped around her upper body, covering both arms and riding up her neck to her hairline.

Dorothea gently turned her around but she kept her face lowered, pushing back the sunglasses as they slid down her nose. Dorothea removed the sunshades and tilted up her chin. Basmati’s left eye nestled in a patch of violent purple.

Dorothea, not saying a word, drew back the
palu.
The skin on Basmati’s arms was a geography map of purple bruises.

‘Who did this to you?’ Dorothea said quietly, but in answer Basmati burst into tears.

‘Mistress, Mistress, please don’t say nothin’, he only gon’ beat me worse!’

Dorothea said nothing, but unbuttoned the woman’s sari blouse and removed it. Basmati’s heavy breasts hung in a limp red hammock of a brassiere; she crossed her arms bashfully over her chest, but Dorothea’s attention was elsewhere; on the back, on the veritable continent of purple and black whose tip reached up into Basmati’s hair and whose nether regions disappeared into the waistband of her skirt.

‘Excuse me!’ Dorothea said, and lifted the hem, torn and tattered around Basmati’s swollen ankles. Under the sari she wore a red underskirt, ragged and frayed, which Dorothea lifted as far as she could, bunching up the extra yards of the sari. Basmati’s thighs were a puffed, swollen mass of bruises.

Basmati moved her hands from her breast to her face and started to sob.

‘Mistress, please don’t say nothin’, please don’t write nothin’. Is all right. It don’t happen too often, only when he drunk.’

‘So, so,
‘only when he drunk’.
And how often is that?’

‘Mistress, it use to be only weekends, Saturday night. But last month he lost he job at the dock and he done use up all the money on rum, and every night he cuffing an kicking me. But mistress, I don’t mind, so long he leave the chirren alone.’

‘And you think I’m going to send you home like this?’

Basmati fell to her knees.

‘Mistress, I begging you, leave me be! Oh Lord, have mercy! If he hear I done tell you, he tell me not to say a word, I don’t want no trouble!’

‘No, Basmati. That’s not the way to do it. The more you say nothing, the more you make yourself complicit in the violence. It has to stop, do you hear me? It has to stop! First of all, you’re going with me to a doctor. And then you’re coming home with me. You’ll stay here for a while. We’ll sort this out together.’

Usually, Dorothea spoke in comfortable Creolese with Basmati. Not today. Today the seriousness of Basmati’s plight dispelled the bantering lilting casualness of dialect with its implicit sense of parity; it called for the sternness of disciplined syntax, as if only authoritative language could translate into authoritative action.

‘We’re going to Doctor Singh;’ said Dorothea, ‘and then you’re coming back here for a rest. No work today.’

‘No, mistress, no! Me chirren, what about me chirren? If I not there he going to beat them!’

Dorothea, dressing Basmati again, said, ‘Don’t worry about your children. I’m going to pick them up after school, bring them all here. They can all stay ‘til we find a suitable permanent home. You’ll be safe here. Just don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.’

‘But, mistress, I got one child at home, the baby. My Aunty does look after he; he name Rajan. I can’t leave Rajan home.’

Dorothea draped the sari over Basmati’s shoulders. ‘I’m going to get him for you. How many children do you have altogether?’

‘Five, mistress, the eldest, a girl, ten years old, going to Bishops’. Two in primary school. A boy in Central.’

Basmati had stopped crying. She was quiet now, and acquiescent, trusting in Dorothea; Dorothea had that effect on troubled people. She now took Basmati’s hand.

‘Then after we get the older children here we’ll go to your place and get Rajan.’

D
orothea reversed
the Ford Prefect out of the yard, over the bridge and on to the street. Freddy closed the gates and got in. It was the first time he had left the house since his arrival. He sat in the back seat, next to Basmati; he had insisted in coming, just in case there was any ‘trouble’, ‘trouble’ being resistance from Basmati’s husband. The presence of a man, he thought, might be helpful.

Dorothea only laughed at that. ‘I’ve done this before,’ she said, ‘and one thing I’ve learned: these husbands are basically cowards. Especially the Indian ones. They bully their wives because they can’t bully anyone else. They’re social failures. When they come face to face with someone who isn’t afraid of them they sag like vines. But come along. You can see me in action. I’ve changed a bit from the shy eighteen-year-old girl you left behind!’

The first outing today had been to collect Basmati’s older children from their various schools: the two youngest girls from primary school in Kitty, one boy from Central High School and the eldest girl from Bishops’, both in Georgetown. Now, the four of them, still in their uniforms, were safely at the dining table being fed afternoon tea by Ma Quint.

Getting the baby – actually, a three-year-old, but they called him ‘Baby’ – was going to be trickier. Basmati and her family lived in the same compound as the Aunty who took care of him during the day. With any luck, her husband would be in a drunken stupor in the back cottage and not notice a thing, but, Basmati said, maybe he wasn’t. She trembled in fear.

Dorothea drove along the length of Lamaha Street and turned left when she got to Vlissingen Road towards the Sea Wall. Basmati lived in Kitty, the first village outside Georgetown up the East Coast. As they entered Kitty, Dorothea lifted her eyes to the rear view mirror.

‘You have to direct me to the house,’ she said, but, not meeting Basmati’s eyes, she half turned to locate her on the back seat. Basmati had hunkered down, her head below window level.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Dorothea said, ‘We’re with you.’

‘Mistress, we just pass de rum-shop where he does drink. I didn’t want he see me in the car.’

‘Well, better he should be there than at home. Come on, sit up and tell me where to go.’

Basmati cautiously raised her head to peek through the window, pulling it down again immediately, like a turtle.

‘Turn left at Lacy Street, two blocks down. Next to the corner shop.’

It was a narrow street, the grass verges untended and overgrown with weeds and bushes, the bridges over the gutters precariously ramshackle, the gutters themselves brim-full with stinking black water, torpid with weeds and refuse. On Basmati’s instructions, Dorothea pulled up outside a one-story wooden house on thin high stilts. The wood of its walls had once been painted white, but now the paint was grey, cracked and peeling. Several of the window panes were missing completely, the window shutters awry on rusty hinges. Behind the house, beyond a tangle of shoulder-high bushes and brambles, a second, smaller wooden house peeped through, on low stilts, one of those two-bedroom back-house cottages that housed entire families.

The front garden was tiny, completely overgrown with a flowerless bougainvillea hedge strangled by a creeper and several other nameless plants. A few rusty garden tools lay neglected among the weeds: a pitchfork, a spade, a rake, a battered metal bucket as if someone, years ago, had attempted work on the garden and then abandoned it in despair. A mangy brown mongrel tied with a piece of frayed rope to one of the stilts broke into a frenzy of barking as they entered the gate and headed for the stairs, which were perilously tilted to one side. The banister lacked several lathes, and wobbled as she walked up, following Basmati, followed by Freddy.

Basmati rapped and entered the front door without waiting for an answer. A bulky woman emerged from the depths of the house, carrying a little boy who stretched out plump arms to Basmati, crying out ‘Mama!’ Basmati gathered him into her arms. The woman looked from her to Dorothea to Freddy, frowning. ‘What happening?’ she asked.

‘Is all right, Aunty,’ Basmati said. Her voice was a nervous squeak, as if she expected her husband to come rushing from a back room. ‘We come to get Baby. Mistress here, she helping.’

Dorothea smiled at Aunty. ‘Dorothea Quint,’ she said, holding out her hand. The woman barely touched her hand with her own limp fingers. She turned back to Basmati and whispered:

‘You better go quick time, I think he at home in the back cottage!’

‘Yes, let’s go,’ said Dorothea. ‘We’ll send for clothes and things later.’ She headed for the door. ‘Bye-bye, Aunty!’

Dorothea led the way out the door into the sunlight, down the rickety stairs. Their coming had already attracted attention. A few neighbours stood on the road next to the car, staring unabashedly. Word must have got out that Dorothea Q had arrived. A young boy wearing nothing but a pair of ragged knee-length shorts shot out from the huddle and raced to the back cottage, zig-zagging between them.

‘Me husband nephew! Quick, quick, get to the car!’ Basmati’s voice squeaked with panic, and her fright was contagious. They reached the gate; the boy had closed it behind him, pushed in the rusty bolt, and Dorothea, the first to reach it, had to struggle to open it again. A man’s shout rang out from the back cottage.

‘Oh Lord, oh good Lord, is he! Hurry, hurry!’

Dorothea took a deep breath and her fear fled. ‘Why should we run away with this child?’ she said to Basmati. ‘You’re his mother. You are leaving that man; he has no right to you. Your body is enough evidence. Let’s have this out right here with him. I’m not afraid.’

‘Oh, mistress, mistress, you don’t know that man, come let we go!’

But Dorothea stood her ground. Arms folded across her chest, she turned to face the man bounding towards them shouting abuse.

He wore a dirty singlet and a frayed pair of limp trousers open at the fly. His hair was long, greasy, hanging over a forehead shiny with sweat. His face was distorted with rage. He flew at Basmati with an animal roar. Basmati cried out and turned her back to him, clasping the child to her bosom. He kicked her, sending her and the boy flying. She managed to hold on to Baby, twisting to protect him from the fall with her own body. Still roaring, the man lunged towards Dorothea. The stench of stale rum encircled him in a putrefying aura. Rage, feral and deadly, burned in his eyes and she yelled out as she too, turned her back to him.

Freddy pounced forward, and with a mighty right-hand blow caught the man on the side of his head. The man staggered backwards, tripped on the metal bucket, and fell to the ground. Stunned, he stared at Freddy, but only for a moment. He glanced to the side, where the garden tools lay rotting, grabbed one of them and leaped to his feet.

Dorothea too leapt forward, aiming for his waist, her arms reaching out to grab him, hold him back. But she was too late. With a brutish bellow he lunged at Freddy, brandishing a pitchfork. Freddy parried, dodged, ducked; there was no way he could get closer. And then he tripped. His foot caught in the battered old bucket, it was Freddy’s turn to plummet to the ground. With a roar of rage the man raised the pitchfork high and slammed it down on Freddy. It plunged into his abdomen. Basmati’s husband let go of the pitchfork handle and sprung away; he flung open the gate and pounded down the road. The neighbourly spectators stared, some at him, some at the commotion within the yard.

Dorothea’s scream was a single frenzied howl. She lurched towards Freddy, fell to the ground beside him. Blood spurted from his belly. She tugged at the pitchfork, trying to remove it, but then thought better of it and ripped off her blouse and shoved it up against the pitchfork prongs; in a matter of seconds it was soaked red.

Everyone screamed: Basmati, Aunty, Dorothea, the child. The little dog strained against its rope in a volley of hysterical barking. Only Freddy, his head now cradled in Dorothea’s arms, did not scream; he barely croaked. His eyes groped through pain to catch Dorothea’s, questioning, puzzled eyes. His lips mouthed words he could not speak, like a dying fish.

Attracted by all the screaming, more neighbours came to watch. Domestic upsets always made good theatre. Hysterical sobs wracked Dorothea’s body, but she managed to look up and scream at the gapers: ‘What you-all staring at!
Call an ambulance! He’s going to bleed to death!’

She turned back to Freddy. Blood continued to leak from his abdomen. She mopped at it helplessly with her skirt. ‘Freddy! Hold on! Please stay with me! Don’t go! Oh my love, my darling, stay with me! Oh God, oh my Lord! Help him! Help him, please! Don’t take him away!’