The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (33 page)

I
t would be
‘touch and go’, they said. Not only because of the injury itself – Gran’s head had crashed against the windshield and split open – but her age reduced the chances of survival. Even if the operation itself was successful, there was no guarantee.

To put it euphemistically.

In translation, there was a good chance that Gran would come out of this a vegetable.

Mum and I sat together in the hospital waiting room while they operated on her. We clasped hands, holding on to each other as if to life itself; Gran’s life.

Gran as vegetable? Unthinkable.

Alone in the waiting room, as the dark night hours ticked away, the silence grew heavy and oppressive. It weighed down on me in a shroud of foreboding and fear. I had to break it, I had to talk, push it away, keep it far from me lest it choke me; talk-talk-talk, no matter about what. I snatched at every passing thought and delivered a running commentary on trivia.

But Mum didn’t respond. At first she let out a few ‘umms’ and ‘uh-uhs’ but after a while gave that up too and let me jabber on. I glanced at her; she wasn’t even listening. She sat beside me with her eyes closed, locked in a world to which I had no access; I might break the outer silence but she’d just created her own. I hated her for it. It was so
rude
, so
uncaring!
How could she leave me alone like that, alone with my empty nonsensical words! Why couldn’t she fight the silence with me! I wanted to shake her, scream at her, slap her.

‘How can you just sit there like a zombie like that, like a block of wood, like a stone, don’t you
see,
don’t you
realise,
don’t you
care …’

And then the tears came, great fountains of tears. I pushed them down just as I pushed away the silence, but they burst their boundaries and they gushed as profusely as had the meaningless words, reducing me to a sobbing, blubbering ball of nothing, bent forward on my chair and almost slipping to the floor.

Then, and only then, did Mum break her silence. She put her arms around me and drew me close to her and held me in her arms.

‘She’s going to be all right,’ Mum whispered. ‘She’ll be all right, I know it. She can’t go. It can’t end like this.’

‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!’ I bawled. ‘I treated her like shit. I-I didn’t know how much I loved her! That I cared! I didn’t know!’

Mum only held me closer. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she murmured, again and again, as if saying the words would make them come true; as if she really believed they were true. I was not so convinced. She could say the words a million times and not convince me. I had seen Gran. I’d seen her head, seen the blood, seen the emergency crew racing with her on a gurney away into the depths of the hospital, taking away my only link with my past, the last tenuous thread I had to my own roots.

But no. Not my only link. Not my last thread. There was still Mum. Talk, Mum! Just talk! Please
talk
to me!

‘Mum,’ I said, ‘Tell me about where you came from. Tell me about Gran when she was younger. Tell me what happened. Why you left. Why you ran away.’

Those were the magic words. The key to break open Mum’s silence. She talked. Mum, always good with words, released them now not on to paper, but to my ears. Her words flowed like water, sweeping away my tears in their stream. She painted a picture with her words, creating for me a living image of a charmed childhood. She took me on a trip to a city of white wooden houses and wide green avenues, where girls in green school uniforms tore around on bicycles, giggling in glee as they wove through the traffic; of jungle creeks far from that city where the water was cool and black; of a marketplace bustling with life, where fat black women sold succulent yellow mangoes and Hindu shopkeepers burned incense before gaudy images of four-armed gods.

She told me of the great white rambling house she’d called home, with its magical garden, wild with tumbling bougainvillea, fragrant with oleander and rose, a kaleidoscope of colour, shape and perfume. She spoke of wide avenues where elegant horses ridden by straight-backed straight-faced Mounted Police clopped along in convoys, heads nodding and snorting, shaded by glorious flame-red treetops. Birdsong. Sunshine. Rain thundering on thin iron roofs, waterfalls from heaven.

And people. A big warm woman with black hair that was turning grey, a woman whose very presence warmed the soul and calmed the mind, and a small wiry woman who did just the opposite: the quirky, irritable but much-adored mother she could never please. An absent-minded but kind-hearted father with his head in a stamp album; a wonderful sister as close as a twin; rambunctious brothers as mischievous as monkeys; a beloved American uncle she saw once a year, who came like Santa Claus bearing gifts; nameless children, cousins and friends-of-cousins, tumbling in an abundance of nature. A brown endless ocean and a teenage girl sitting on a wall gazing out at it, dreaming of far-off lands, and swarthy turbaned men who knew all the mysteries of the universe.

‘And then’, Mum said, ‘and then I met Rajan.’

I clung to her words as they echoed through the midnight silence, holding me as in a trance, a bubble of enthralment. Instinctively, I knew we had reached the climax of the story; the Thing they were so keen to keep from me.

‘Mrs Temple?’

I snapped out of Mum’s dream-world. The bubble burst

I was so immersed in Mum’s story I hadn’t heard his approach, and even after he’d spoken it took me a few seconds to return to earth and the bleak emptiness of the hospital waiting room. Mum was quicker on the ball: almost at the first word, she was on her feet.

‘How is she?’

I blinked and looked up; a man in a white coat was standing above us. I followed Mum’s lead and climbed to my feet.

Only then did I realise that my body ached all over, in nooks and crannies I hadn’t known existed. My left knee buckled as my feet found the floor, and I stumbled; my knees were numb. The man caught me, steadied me with a kind smile, and then spoke:

‘Mrs Temple … I’m Doctor Stone. I’m in the surgical team that operated on your mother.’

Mum nodded eagerly, urging him to skip the preliminaries. At last he got to the point.

‘The operation was successful … she’ll pull through …’

Mum’s outbreath was audible, and a smile spread across her face. For me, a cloud lifted and I too smiled. I wanted to pounce on Dr Stone and hug him in gratitude, but instead grabbed Mum’s hand; she squeezed it. Her eyes were wet with tears, luminous with pleading, probing hope. At Dr Stone’s next words a curtain fell over them.

‘… but we have to wait to find out the extent of the damage. She’s still under anaesthetic, and we won’t know till she wakes up whether there’ll be any permanent – ah – impairment to her mental functions.’

‘You mean …? That she could be …’ Mum paused, searching for the right word, but could do no better than repeat the one we were all thinking: ‘brain-damaged?’ There was no handy euphemism, no softening of the truth.

A mask of exhaustion fell across his face, not so much physical as emotional. He looked as if he wanted to flee. It couldn’t be easy, giving such devastating news to anxious relatives.

‘We just can’t predict anything, Mrs Temple. There’s something called shear injury – sort of like breaking the wiring in the brain – that can occur in this sort of damage. Its extent is wildly unpredictable – sometimes a lot, sometimes none. When it's severe, it leaves lasting disability. I've had many, many patients who have had what, according to their head scans, should be modest injuries, just not wake up. Subsequent MRI scans show extensive shear injury. Other patients fly from the back of a pick-up truck at sixty miles per hour and land on their head and end up just fine because they had no brain swelling or shear. The brain's pretty mysterious. At this point we don’t know; only time will tell. She’s an old woman, and it’s been a lot to take; first the accident, then the operation. It’s a miracle she survived at all, another miracle that no bones were broken. We’ve done our best; now it’s up to her. All we can do is hope.’

‘And pray.’

‘Can we see her?’ My own voice startled me; it seemed not to come from my throat, but from somewhere far outside me, to bounce off the bare walls and echo down the corridors. I felt drained, my body an empty shell containing nothing but a dislocated tangle of aches and pains.

He flicked his chin towards the corridor that led into the bowels of the hospital.

‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘But as I said, she’s still out cold. It’ll be several hours till she comes to.’

He led the way. Our footsteps echoed in the empty hallway, beating a lonely tattoo into the night’s stark silence. I glanced at the hallway clock: 2:47a.m. We passed a nurse, an orderly pushing an empty gurney, an open door from which disembodied voices echoed into the emptiness. Hospitals at night are vaults where fears fester and hopes are bolstered, human emotion swelling in the still sterility as sludge rises in a stagnant pond. I longed to flee, for all three of us to flee, to sit somewhere in the noisy bustle of broad daylight where all would be fine and we could laugh and chat and be normal. Anything but this.

Gran lying stretched out, still on a gurney, awaiting a further journey and a free orderly, stashed away against the wall of a hospital. Her head was wrapped in white, her eyes closed in the sanctuary of sleep. She looked so peaceful, so utterly innocent, so frail. As if a puff of breath could blow her away. So un-granlike.

Mum picked up one of her hands. It lay lifeless in her own, as limp as a cast-off rag. She bent over and kissed Gran’s cheek. Her fingertips touched the head bandage gingerly as if trying to gauge what lay beneath, and she looked up, her eyes searching Dr Stone’s for a word of hope and comfort.

He had none to give. ‘We’ll know more tomorrow,’ he said. I felt sorry for him. His duty was over, and he too needed sleep. The rings under his eyes had surely grown darker in the fifteen minutes we’d been together, the stubble on his chin more prickly.

An orderly bustled up with a no-nonsense air. He grabbed the handles of Gran’s gurney, released the brake and pulled it away from the wall. He hardly glanced at us. We were not his duty.

‘She’ll be going to intensive care now,’ said Dr Stone. ‘You can go with her, but there’s not much you or anyone can do. You’d better go home and get some sleep. It’s been a long night.’

‘I’m staying!’ said Mum, before he’d spoken his last words. ‘Inky, you go home. I’m staying till she wakes up.’

‘Mrs Temple, there’s no point. It’ll be several hours. Go and get some sleep.’

I suppressed a yawn; his words reminded me of my own tiredness.

‘Mum, he’s right. We can come back in the morning. You’re exhausted. Let’s go. Please.’ I yawned again, and this time I let it out. It was contagious, Mum’s hand rose to her lips as she, too tried to veil a tell-tale sigh of exhaustion.

‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But please ring me if she wakes up and I’m not here. I’ll be back as soon as possible tomorrow.’

I‘d been holding my breath; I could never have left Mum here on her own with Gran, but I was by now desperate for bed. Mum can be stubborn when she wants to be, but sometimes she sees sense. I breathed out, audibly. Dr Stone must have heard it, as he patted me on the back, and smiled in sympathy. I resisted the urge to hug him.

‘Bed,’ he said. ‘That’s what you both need. Come back tomorrow; we’ll all know more by then.’ He pointed to the strip of guidance tape on the corridor floor. ‘Follow the yellow lines to Reception; you can call a taxi there.’

And so we all parted company: Gran rolled off deeper into the hospital, Dr Stone waved goodbye and turned to walk away. I waited for Mum, who stood watching the back of the orderly pushing Gran away. The orderly and his gurney turned a corner. Only then did Mum turn back to me. She took my hand, in hers, caressed it for a moment and gave me a trembling half-smile.

‘Come on, Inky’ she said, ‘Let’s go home.’

S
he knew he would come
, and waited for his whistle. And there it was. He must have entered the yard through the alley. It was like a scene in a novel she might have written. She walked to the window and looked down. He stood just below, his face invisible in the darkness and only perceptible when he shone the torch he held in his hand upwards, to her. Behind him the white staves of the metal palings stood out against the blackness. Rajan himself wore dark clothes, which, considering the clandestine nature of their meeting, made sense. The front door was locked, as always. A good thing Devil was in the Pomeroon; he’d have barked the house down.

She had to talk to him, and it had to be here, in her room. She had to hold him, be held by him, feel his arms around her, his breath on her cheeks, his lips on hers.

‘Rajan!’ she whispered, and he whispered back.

‘I’m here!’

‘You have to climb up the lattice. I’ll shine the torch for you. Can you do it?’

Rajan was a good climber. She’d seen him in the mango tree, and scaling the coconut palm in her grandmother’s yard. This lattice, between the pillars of the Bottom House, was nothing for him. She shone the torch down on him and, catching him in the spotlight, signalled for him to climb up.

He switched off his own torch and tucked it into a pocket. She shone hers on to the lattice, lighting the way up for him. Gingerly, Rajan managed to place one foot in a diamond of the trellis; from there, he pulled himself up and searched for another hole with his other foot. Rika guided him with her light. He reached the top of the lattice and stretched his arm towards the windowsill.

At that very moment, Rika’s bedroom door flew open and the light flashed on. Rika cried out and whipped around, to face Dorothea. The torch clattered to her feet. In the darkness Rajan’s fingers groped for the window sill and missed; he lost his balance.

With a yell of terror, he fell backwards.

Rika swung around, picked up the torch and shone it downwards. Her hand shook as she searched the bushes down below for Rajan.

L
ater
, people said that her scream of horror woke the neighbours four houses away, and set off the dogs of the whole city in a relayed volley of barking that bounced back and forth and never stopped until morning.

Rajan lay prostrate on the fence between the two properties. In the circle of light given by Rika’s torch he lay still and silent amidst the bougainvillea that had otherwise broken his fall, covered in blood, half-turned towards her, the crown of his head impaled by the pointed stave of a fence pole, like an arrow shot through from behind.

R
ika’s screams
woke not only the house but the neighbourhood. But after that nobody heard her. The street was in uproar, for rumours of the horror downstairs whipped from house to house and people came like flies to a feast. The house and yard spilled with people on the phone, shouting. Several sirens wailed in the distance and drew louder; a fire engine, police cars, emergency vehicles with lights flashing. People came rushing on foot; cars stopped, blocking the street. Everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Rika, alone in her room, could only surrender to her screams. Wave after wave of naked agony pummelled her to her bed where she banged her head again and again against the pillow, as if she could simply whack it out, knock it from her life, and scrape what she had seen from her soul. Make it unseen. Great guttural howls emerged from her throat, groans she didn’t make herself, animal sounds of a prey hunted down and dying on the jungle floor. Wave after wave of utmost unmitigated anguish, each surge containing the whole of herself, each one a tidal wave sweeping her away in its wake.

And then, suddenly, as if every last emotion, every last drop of torment had been spent in the tempest, there was nothing. Just cold empty reason. A chilling vacuum, a place where noise and inner pandemonium had been and now was cold and empty and chillingly rational.

She had to go.

She couldn’t stay in this house; in a matter of seconds home had become a house of horror. Her room was filled with the blood of Rajan. She had seen the worst sight a human being could see: the death of a beloved.

And she couldn’t stay under the same roof as her mother. She couldn’t even
look
at her mother again, not ever.
Not ever not ever not ever. Not ever.
She couldn’t even stay in this country. She just had to –
go
. With that insight she sprang to her feet, overcome by a fervent need for action; to do something, anything. To get away. Forget. Forever.

Rika grabbed her school bag and emptied it on the floor. She threw some clothes into it: underwear, jeans, T-shirts. She looked around: she possessed so little! She hesitated at the three new LP’s given to her by Uncle Matt:
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Blonde on Blonde,
and
Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.
How could she ever listen to music again in her life? A life that was over. She turned away and opened her sideboard drawer, because there were her true valuables: her passport and bank book, which she still had not returned to Granny’s desk – the only stroke of luck in the cataclysm of this night. She stuffed them into a small leather shoulder-bag, along with her purse and her few dollars of left-over cash.

Before leaving she gave a cursory glance around the room, and there it was,
The Book of Mirdad.
Rajan’s book; she had borrowed it so many years ago and never returned it, and he had never asked for it. That book: the beginning of everything. The only thing she had of his. Should she leave it or take it? If she took it, how could she forget? And yet – if there was anything that would help her make sense of this horror, anything that could begin to bring healing, it was that book. She walked back into the room, picked it up, and stuffed it into her bag.

She couldn’t leave by the front gate; there was too much action there, too many people. She slipped out of the gap in the fence for the very last time and went down the alleyway, into the street. Only once did she look back, and a sickening feeling engulfed her. An ambulance stood on the pavement outside the house. She had heard the wail of its siren, it now stood silent, its lights still flashing. What was the point? She had seen him; seen the stave bursting out of his skull, the blood. She shuddered. Could she ever wipe that last picture of Rajan from her mind? She pushed it away. She would never think of it again. This night had to go. Forever.
She
had to go, forever. How could she even breathe in this place, ever again?

She ran. Ran and ran and ran. North, towards the Sea Wall. Once there, she stood gazing out over the ocean, her body heaving under great deep sobbing, gasping breaths. It was as if there was no air, yet air was all around; the night sky vast and endless and the sea miles away. She thought for a moment of rushing into the sea and never returning, plunging into its waves as it crashed against the Wall, but the tide was out and the seashore was but an endless expanse of dried out hard undulating mud.

Where would she go? The great Utopias of Great Britain, America and Canada were closed to her: she did not have a visa for any of these countries. There was Trinidad, Barbados, one of the smaller islands. Would
they
find her there, bring her back? She’d have to take the risk; her options were limited.

Right now her only option was to run. Along the Sea Wall, she ran, eastwards. She would run as far as it would take her. Run to Suriname. Brazil. Just run and run.

Trixie! She could go to Trixie. Trixie lived in Subyranville, just past Kitty, along this very wall. If she kept running she’d get to Trixie’s house. She’d take this one step a time. One day at a time. One destination at a time. The first destination, the only one she could think of, was Trixie. Trixie would help her escape.

She ran and ran, along the Wall.

The hollow growl of a motorbike seeped into her consciousness, growing ever louder. Then it was right beside her, and not passing. She looked down, still running. Beside her, keeping pace with her on his Yamaha, was Jag. He was yelling something at her. Her name. She kept on running.

‘Rika! Rika, stop!’

She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t stop. She kept on running, along the Wall, faster, faster. The motorbike roared beside her.

Then silence. She realised he had switched off the motor, was doing something with the bike, but that was all behind her. She kept on running; running and crying, sobbing and running. Run, run, run to the end of the world.

Footsteps behind her, on the Wall. She didn’t glance back, but she knew he was there, behind her, catching up. Then his arms were around her. And only then she stopped running, and collapsed in a twitching, heaving, sobbing heap into his arms.

‘What’s the matter, Rika? Why are you here this time of night? It’s so dangerous! Where are you going?’

The words were like a switch, unleashing all her agony, all her rage. She screamed at him.

‘Let me go, let me go, I want to
die!
I hate you, go away! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’

She pummelled his chest with all her might, flinging her head back and forth as the words of loathing and wrath poured out of her. The more she pummelled the tighter he held her, all the while steadying her movement before they both fell off the Wall.

And then she was spent, every last atom of her fury used up, and she fell against him in a sobbing, blubbering heap. In Jag’s arms she sobbed and bawled and howled.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jag. ‘But I’m not all bad. Come.’

And then she let him lead her back to his Yamaha and climbed on behind him and let him take her home; to his home, not hers, for now she was homeless.

T
he next morning
she crept out of Jag’s room while it was still dark. The watchman unlocked the gate for her and she slipped out into the cool pre-dawn. She walked along the Sea Wall back to town; once there she sat gazing out to sea until the sun had risen. The town would be stirring by now. She was hungry but she couldn’t eat. Maybe she could get a coffee somewhere. The bank would open at nine.

She withdrew all her money, changed it into US dollars. Then Rika got on a bus that would take her back the way she had come, but further, up to Ogle airport. At ten-thirty she was able to board a small interior plane to Lethem, in the Rupununi savannah bordering Brazil.

From there it was easy. She crossed the river into Brazil, and got a bus along the dusty road through the Amazon jungle to Boa Vista; from Boa Vista, a small plane to Manaus. From Manaus, the world lay open.

Nobody would ever track her down.

A
month later Rika
, having travelled up the Amazon River into Peru, and from the Peruvian rainforest over the Andes into Lima, wrote three postcards: one to Marion, one to Daddy, and one to Uncle Matt. The message in all three cards was the same: she was safe; they should not worry; and she was never coming home. She did not leave a return address. They would not hear from her again for over a decade.