The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (7 page)

‘Ha! Then beat me now! Come on!’ Her eyes bristled with challenge, and she held up her forearm and open palm.

‘Well, now, you’re a right one! But sure!’

He grabbed her hand and pressed against it. Dorothea pressed back, frowning with intensity. For a full two minutes they wrestled thus in silence; hands clutched and bent arms swollen with muscle. Then Freddy laughed and relaxed, and let her swing his arm down into defeat.

‘Whew, you’re good, for a girl! ‘Course I had to let you win again, ‘cause me Mum wouldn’t like to hear I was beatin’ up the neighbourhood girls. Wouldn’t be a gallant thing to do, for a Quint. But really, now, how did you get so strong?’

His eyes seemed to drink her up, brimming with admiration. Dorothea smiled and looked away.

‘Tennis!’ she replied. She stooped to pick up the secateurs she’d dropped, but Freddy, seeing her intention, bent down and got there before her. Their heads bumped in mid-air.

‘Ouch! Sorry! Are you all right?’ he rubbed his crown and handed her the secateurs.

She giggled. ‘Yes, fine. You?’

‘Oh, sure, I got a head as hard as stone. Just hopin’ I didn’t maim you for life! Now, tell me about that tennis. So you swing a racquet, do you?’

‘Every afternoon, after school. I’m in the school team – we beat St Rose’s in the under sixteen doubles last week. It was in the
Graphic
!’

It was a good thing that Sports were compulsory at Bishops’; Pa would normally never have allowed her to take it up otherwise. But Dorothea had done well, and he had given his reluctant permission for her to join the team.

‘You were in the
Graphic
! With a photo?’

Dorothea nodded.

‘Well, now, I missed that. I’ll have to look for it, and I’ll cut out the photo. I don’t usually read the sports pages, but I will now, now I know you’re famous.’

‘No, I’m not, it was only a school game, but they’re considering me for the national tennis team and if I get chosen I get to play in the West Indian Tennis Championships next year, and
then
I’ll be famous.’

‘Can I come and watch you training, sometimes?’

Those were the words that finally woke Dorothea up. She blushed and looked away, peeling her eyes from the gaze that held hers; black eyes deep and still as rainforest pools and warm as the afternoon sunlight now filtering through the mango tree. She’d talked to this
boy,
this stranger, as if she’d known him all her life, chatted with him right here in the forbidden territory of her own backyard. If Pa saw her, he’d kill them both.

She dropped her voice when she spoke again, this time shy and uncertain.

‘Look, I can’t talk to you, and you shouldn’t be here at all. If my Pa sees me, he’ll …’

‘I told you, he’s out. But we don’t have to talk here. Come on over to my place. You’ve never been inside, have you?’

‘No, of course not!’

Like theirs, the Quint house was made of white-painted timber, and stood on high stone columns so that you reached the front door via an outside staircase, but there the similarity ended, for the Quint house was several times bigger, and just as wild as the family that lived within its walls. Probably it had started out as basic as theirs, and as practical: two stories, with a jutting gallery along the front, a drawing room behind the gallery, a kitchen behind the drawing room, a staircase leading up to the bedrooms and bathroom, above it all a roof of corrugated iron, and all around it windows and jalousies and wooden shutters.

The Quint house had a life of its own. As the family that inhabited it had grown so had the house, with extensions upwards and outwards: a high tower topped by a cupola; Bottom House rooms added on willy-nilly; and even an Annex, a separate little cottage joined to the back of the house by a mid-air passage. The house was an architectural monster, yet fascinating; it made you want to enter and explore, figure out how all its parts fit together, or even if they did at all. It fired Dorothea’s imagination, already well nourished by the piles of novels she borrowed from the library. She could imagine a wicked witch living there, keeping her prisoners victims in the various rooms, or a miser all alone, counting his fortune, or a community of elves, or a headmistress with a boarding school and a horde of giggling girls her age. But actually, truth was better than fiction and the family that lived there was far more intriguing than any witch or gathering of elves. Pa said they were Satan’s brew, and that was enough to whet Dorothea’s appetite.

Now, Freddy snapped his fingers to wake her out of her reverie. ‘Hey, come down from the clouds! You want to come over, meet my family?’

Dorothea met his eyes again. She smiled, flipped her pigtails over her shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘Come on, then.’ Freddy held out his left hand. She took it with her right. He pulled her into the hibiscus bush, pushed away the loose board in the palings and held it as she squeezed through the hole. He followed suit. He took her hand again, and the two of them ran through the alley, along the grass verge that edged the gutter.

The moment their hands joined Dorothea knew that her life would never be the same again.

F
reddy and Dorothea
reached the Quint backyard a little way along the alley. No need to hold her breath to squeeze between the laths; unlike the narrow gap in the van Dam fence, which Freddy had just this day created, the opening in the Quint palings was wide and permanent, for the Quint boys had long ago claimed the alley as part of their property. They might was well have put in a gate.

This yard, like her own, was a profusion of typical tropical trees and shrubs: hibiscus and oleander adding points of brilliant colour; bougainvillea cascading with red and purple clusters; pawpaw and banana palms and two huge mango trees lending shade and concealment. Freddy led the way down a gravel path between the overgrown, unkempt bushes. Two dogs leapt around them, tails wagging, eager to lick Freddy’s face and make her own acquaintance. She laughed, and patted them; she loved animals, but Pa wouldn’t even allow a cat, said he was allergic.

‘This is Parrot,’ said Freddy, fondling the brown one, ‘and this is Turtle.’

Dorothea laughed. ‘What strange names!’

‘I gave them those names when I was about six,’ said Freddy. ‘Everyone else was suggesting boring names like Frisky and Blacky. I wanted them to have really special names. So Parrot and Turtle they are.’

Everywhere, Dorothea noticed signs of the yard’s use and misuse by the Quint boys: a rusting bicycle frame claimed by vines, a weather-beaten, moulding rope-ladder hanging from an overhead branch, and, when she looked up, a broken-down tree-house overhead.

Yards in Georgetown were invariably big, and this was no exception, yet finally they navigated the wilderness and reached the steps leading up to the back door. Freddy turned to her, flashing one of his oversized grins.

‘Come on up and meet Ma,’ he said, and led the way up.

Dorothea had never seen Mrs Quint close up, but from a safe distance she had always been mainly aware of two things about the woman: she has hair as black as an Indian’s pinned up into an unkempt bun, and a huge bosom – a rather terrifying combination. Now, she was confronted with both, and as they entered the kitchen through the Dutch doors, her heart fluttered as she saw the woman’s broad back across the room from them.

‘Hey Ma, look who I brought!’ said Freddy as they crossed the room, and Dorothea’s heart skipped a beat.
What on earth am I doing here in the Quint madhouse?
Pa will kill me,
she thought, and for a moment she contemplated turning on her heels right there and fleeing, back the way she’d come.
Pa will never know,
came the immediate answer, and a delicious sense of autonomy overcame her.

And anyway, it was too late. Ma Quint swung around, a wooden spoon held aloft like a paddle, as if for attack. But then a smile as broad as Freddy’s spread across her face, and she spoke, and Dorothea knew she was safe.

‘Why, it’s that nice little girl from Church, Pastor van Dam’s daughter!’ She exclaimed. ‘Hello, my dear, and welcome to our home! We don’t see many girls around here, so we love them! Is Freddy showing you around? Don’t mind him, he might be a bit crazy, and he shouldn’t have teased you this morning in Church, but he means well, my Freddy; he’s got a good heart, that boy, so I hope you’ve forgiven him! You can call me Ma – everybody else does.’

She had a strange accent, one Dorothea had never heard before. In her young years, in fact, she had known only two extremes of speech with a hundred graduations between them: her father’s clipped, correct English, (which her mother struggled to emulate) and the sing-song dialect of what Pa called the ‘hoi polloi’: Creolese, the native’s talk, the forbidden language. Both her parents kept a strict ear open for any sign of her replacing ‘in’t’ for ‘isn’t’ and ‘dis’ for ‘this’. Ma Quint spoke neither the one nor the other. It seemed to be a melange of the two; the correct words spoken in the warm cadence of Creolese.

‘I went ‘round to apologise, Mum, and you know what, she plays tennis!’

‘Tennis! Really! I used to play tennis as a young girl! Course I had to stop it when I had children. I always encouraged my boys to take it up but none of them did – they preferred football, and cricket and bedlam, strangling each other and tearing off each other’s limbs: that’s boys for you! Now, sweetheart, what can I offer you? Phulourie', just made today? It’s really good. Or something sweet, pine tarts? Let me see what I’ve got.’

She stepped over to a cupboard in the corner and removed a tin, which she opened and offered Dorothea, who murmured a thank you and took one of the pine tarts; triangles of pastry filled with thick pineapple filling.

‘And you must be thirsty, here’s some nice lime juice – or shall I make you some tea?’

Already she was reaching for a glass jug, and without waiting for an answer, poured a glass for Dorothea, but only three-quarters full.

‘And some ice.’

She moved to the kitchen’s Demerara window and unfolded a bundle of terrycloth and several layers of newspaper to reveal a huge block of ice. She chiselled away several chunks, which she then plopped into Dorothea’s glass.

‘There then, that’s you catered for. Go on, have a seat and tell me all about yourself. You’re at St Rose’s, aren’t you?’

Dorothea chewed quickly so she could swallow and speak.

‘No, I changed schools,’ she said shyly, ‘I’m at Bishops’ now.’ Ma Quint seemed not to hear.

‘Those St Rose’s nuns are dragons. I heard of one Sister Agnes, that if you cross her, she makes you kneel on grains of uncooked rice in a corner for a whole hour, while learning a Bible passage by heart! Did you ever have to do something like that?’

Dorothea shook her head no so that her pigtails swung back and forth and swallowed, in preparation for speaking, but again, she was too late.

‘And another girl we know, Lucy, got suspended for a week, because she was seen in the company of a boy, after school, while wearing her St Rose’s uniform, last year! Actually, to be quite honest, it was one of
our
boys, Leo; he was just sixteen, and meant no harm, he was just walking her home, and they were just chatting, but still, rules are rules. It was quite a hullabaloo at the time. Those nuns! Of course, the brothers at Saint Stanislaus are just as bad. That’s Catholics for you. Of course I’m not Catholic, but my husband is. That’s why my boys all go to Saints. But I like to show them the alternatives. I’ve been taking them around to other places of worship these last few weeks, so they can get a feeling for the many ways God can be celebrated. I’ve even taken them to a Mosque and a Hindu temple ... that was interesting. I believe there are as many ways to God as there are humans, and we need to search until we find the shoe that fits, that’s why we came to your church this morning. Your father, now, he’s quite heavy with the fire and brimstone; I don’t think that’s for any of us Quints. How old are you, let me guess, thirteen? Fourteen?’

Dorothea swallowed and finally got a word in. ‘I was thirteen last month.’

‘Ah. Then our Freddy’s a bit older than you, he turned thirteen last July. If we’d known, you could have come to the party; it’s such a pity, you living that close and not being friends with the boys. We could do with some more girls around here, like I said, too many boys … I would have loved to have a daughter, in fact I did almost have one ...’

She stopped, and a great sadness seemed to envelop her, then she continued: ‘We lost her. The only girl and we lost her. Not that I would have preferred to lose any of the boys; no, I love them all dearly and equally, but you know how it is … a mother likes to have a little girl to dress up. So I want you to know, Dorothea, that you are very welcome here, and you must come more often and let me feed you and spoil you like if you were my little girl … though I know you’re not a little girl any more, but we could be friends, couldn’t we?’

Dorothea felt her heart would burst. She didn’t know there were mothers like this. Her own mother – well, the less said the better. People called Emily van Dam née Williamson a she-dragon, and for good reason, as Dorothea knew first hand. She was hard and bony and had eyes that only had to glance over you to give you a shiver of guilt, even if you’d done nothing wrong. Dorothea couldn’t remember having once been hugged by her mother, whereas just talking to this Ma Quint was like being taken into one long warm embrace. She had to resist running up to her and sinking her head against that soft bosom and feeling those big strong motherly arms close in around her. But it was not to be; not today.

Ma Quint wasn’t quite finished. She reached out and ran her fingers along Dorothea’s hairline. There the hair was pulled back so tightly it raised her skin at the roots, stretched her forehead, and pulled her eyebrows up into an expression of permanent surprise.

‘That looks so painful!’ said Ma Quint. ‘Doesn’t it hurt? Those plaits – they’re so tight! Does your Ma do your hair for you?’

Dorothea could only nod. Her crinkly hair was the biggest disappointment of Mums’ life. Every morning the two of them sat before Mums’ vanity mirror while Mums wrestled with that wayward head of hers, railing at the fate that had passed on her own
bad
crinkly hair to her daughter instead of her husband’s
good
, straight hair. Mostly, Dorothea closed her eyes against the pain, and occasionally cried out, but Mums was relentless, not satisfied till every strand was tugged straight against her daughter’s scalp, greased with a good coating of coconut oil and braided it into two tight stiff ropes. More than once Dorothea had been tempted to saw them off where they poked down from the top of her neck.

Kathleen, her younger sister, was lucky; she had inherited her father’s features, and not a single stroke of the tarbrush. Her hair fell in soft brown waves to her shoulders.
Good
hair, everyone said, to go with her fair skin, straight little nose, and lovely bowed lips. Kathleen, the Williamson aunts agreed, was the pretty one, more likely to get a white husband and move up the social scale. Kathleen was the pampered, favoured one, Dorothea, quite literally, the black sheep.

Now, Ma Quint laid her hands around Dorothea’s chin and raised it slightly.

‘Such a sweet face!’ she said. ‘And such lovely big brown eyes! Those lashes! And your skin is a perfect sapodilla brown. She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she Freddy?’

Freddy only cocked his head at the question, and as if to prevent further comments on Dorothea’s looks, grabbed her hand and tugged. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said. Dorothea managed only a quick goodbye wave and a last fleeting look at her new idol before he dragged her out of the kitchen and into the house proper.

For the rest of that afternoon Dorothea enjoyed the unique experience of being shown around the higgledy-piggledy Quint house and introduced to its various occupants. The house was huge; downstairs, there was an enormous living area with dark floorboards polished to a high gloss, and giving off a smell of lemony floor-polish. The room was furnished eclectically; cushioned Morris chairs, each patterned differently, alternating with wicker sofas or high backed wooden chairs grouped around tables. A few mats and rugs were scattered around the room. On three sides of the vast living room were windows, with no wall between them: Demerara windows with their slanting shutters alternating with plain glass, and below them, louvred wooden slats. All the windows were open, and the constant Atlantic-cooled breeze wafted across the room, in and out the windows and doors, fresh and stimulating at once. How different from the dark gloom of her own home, similarly windowed yet with the shutters kept closed to keep out the sun and the heat. Here, the combination of light and breeze immediately lifted her spirits. It was like being in heaven.

Freddy dragged her to the gallery, where she met the dour Pa, reclined in a Berbice chair, legs stretched out along the extended armrests, snoring. A book lay open, spine up, on his chest, rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing. Before Dorothea could stop him, Freddy shook him awake.

‘Pa, this is Dorothea van Dam, from round the corner!’

Pa jumped and the book fell to the floor; Dorothea picked it up and handed it back with a shy hello. Pa only blinked the sleep away and stared, as if to assess the subject of intrusion, before Freddy took her hand again and pulled her away. Upstairs, he led her through a maze of rooms, up and down stairs, and even into the Cupola at the top of the house. Most of the rooms were empty, their occupants out.

‘The only time we’re all in at the same time is early morning and night and Sunday before church,’ Freddy explained. ‘But you’ll meet them all one day.’

She did meet a fair-skinned one, studying for a Chemistry exam, and a dark-skinned one, who had taken apart a radio and was putting it together again, and though Freddy told her their names she promptly forgot them, because there were so many names to remember, and Freddy was telling her all about all of them simultaneously. She wondered how she’d ever tell the brothers apart.

‘Now for Humphrey, the eldest,’ Freddy said. ‘He’ll be with Granpa, in the Annex.’

Freddy led her down the mid-air passageway that connected the Annex to the main house, and there, bent over a large table at the far end, were three men. The first was ancient, obviously Granpa. His thick horn-rimmed spectacles were held together with grubby bits of Elastoplast and wire. He held a magnifying glass in his hand, and seemed not to notice their entry, as he did not look up. The next was a young white man, blond and freckled, age impossible to guess, holding a large open book that looked like a dictionary or other reference book. Next to him, another young man, in his early twenties, perhaps; he too with a magnifying glass in hand. A variety of books, both albums and textbooks, lay open on the table before them, and scattered about the surface were myriad tiny scraps of paper. As Dorothea approached the table she saw that these scraps were postage stamps. The white man and the young both looked up at their approach.

‘Granpa!’ said Freddy loudly, and now the old man turned dazed eyes on her. ‘This is Dorothea van Dam, from round the corner!’ Mumbling a greeting, the old man held out a limp hand for Dorothea to shake, withdrawing it immediately.