The Worlds Within Her (28 page)
Right now we are sitting at a window table in the local pub. We are alone, save for the barman polishing mugs. Through the rain-streaked windowpanes I can see the drops exploding onto the cobblestones, and the dampness causes me to pull my coat more tightly around my shoulders. Ram sits across from me, a mug of beer in front of him. He is absorbed, probably thinking about his work, the papers he has brought along, but which he has left behind at the inn. I sip my tea. Watch him. Watch the rain.
Unexpectedly, he reaches for my hand, enfolds it lightly in his. We do not speak. His touch alone tells me of his awareness. It is enough. And for those long minutes of rain, my dear, here in your land, my pores gasp, my nerves unfold, my soul takes flight.
I have been shown, Celia, what it is to shatter deliciously.
Love,
Shakti
FOR LUNCH, AMIE
brings sandwiches, egg salad, chicken salad, in white bread trimmed of its crust.
She places the platter on a space Cyril clears of the scattered photographs, dozens in black and white and faded colour â but so few take her beyond their stilled moments.
As she eats, Yasmin shuffles through them: her parents at the Coliseum; her father sitting, weary, at the Acropolis; her mother wrapped in coat and shawl beside a river; Buckingham Palace; the Alhambra; her mother in that same coat and shawl â the same day, perhaps, rainy â smiling at the door of a pub, the Beggar's Alms.
Yasmin has been to many of these places, seen many of these monuments. She too has snapshots of similar decomposition â Jim's word â that reveal as little as do these, too hasty, too shorn of personal context to be repositories of memory. They have remained unviewed for years in the albums to which they have been consigned. She looks again at the photo of her mother at the pub door, thinks:
Where we had a drink.
Amie returns with bowls of strawberry ice cream.
Penny says, “I love straw-breeze. Can' get them here any more, though. Only frozen, and is not the same thing, eh?”
For the first time since her return just before lunch, Penny speaks without an edge. She had come in, looked unhappily at
Cyril and Yasmin sitting at the table, at the box and the revealed photographs. Her frown had spoken of betrayal: all that they had done and said untrimmed, unembroidered.
Cyril had said, “Din't know when you were coming back, Penny. Thought we'd start without you.”
Now, though, after long moments of uncomfortable silence:
straw-breeze.
The regret in her voice unfeigned. The hurt â distrust? â has been swallowed.
The power, Yasmin thinks, of the unsaid.
Her parents grin before the Eiffel Tower and, perhaps moments later, offer obligatory smiles to a busker's camera as they enter a
bateau-mouche.
Cyril says, “You know why they call it a
bateau-mouche?
Is not fly-boat as you might think if you studied French in school. Is because they make them in a town called Mouche. Is Shakti who tell me that, you know. Her head was full o' that stuff.”
Yasmin nods. “I grew up with her, remember? Mom liked to impress people.”
“And make them feel a little foolish too, I think,” Penny says.
Cyril purses his lips. “Yes. Maybe. But not in a bad way, eh? Just in fun.”
“Yes,” Penny says, unconvinced. “Perhaps jus' in fun.”
“Or,” Yasmin says, “maybe not.”
Amie collects the bowls and returns immediately with tea.
Yasmin, insisting that she has already eaten far too much, refuses to join Cyril in a slice of his cake. She seeks to placate him with a smile but he chooses not to reciprocate. And neither, she sees, does Amie.
THEY COMPROMISED ON
the Christmas cards. She would write to her friends, he would write to his, and they would divide equally those they had in common.
Hers were done quickly in characteristic scrawl, envelopes addressed, stamps affixed. Greeting cards were not communications she lingered over. Then she sat back and watched Jim. He sat upright at the dining table, working assiduously at the task, fountain pen shaping his cursive script. And it was peering at that script, watching the lustrous black ink dry quickly on the card, that she saw he had written his name first, hers second, their daughter's last. She told herself it was a minor matter, but she knew there had been a time when, writing both their names, he'd instinctively written hers before his.
She turned away, picked up her stack, squared and parted them into a neat pile. She told herself she was being oversensitive,
paranoid,
but she could not forget the importance of little things which, together, lent significance to the inconsequential.
Jim looked up. “Done already?”
She shrugged.
“Got any stamps?”
She pushed them over to him. “But you'll have to lick them yourself.”
CYRIL EXCUSES HIMSELF
: a quick errand. Penny, preoccupied, goes to freshen up.
Yasmin steps out onto the porch, the sun burning down rugged and unhindered with a heat that causes her to shiver.
Ash is standing at the railing awash in sunlight. In his hand he balances a pellet gun. At her approach, his index finger stiffens at his lips, sustaining a silence already established, then swiftly directs her attention to a tree down below.
She sees branches and midday shadows between the leaves. He alone sees prey. “What are you hunting?” she whispers.
“Blackbirds,” he whispers back. “The blacker the better.”
He raises the stock of the pellet gun to his shoulder, levels the barrel into the support of his left hand. Holds his breath, willing himself to stillness, index finger curling around the trigger. Then the gun cracks like a door snapping shut. From the trees a crow flaps unhappily away.
“Are they pests?”
“They all over the place. Some o' the ugliest birds you ever see.” He breaks the barrel, inserts another pellet.
“But are they pests?”
“They does steal, yeah. It in their nature, nuh.”
“But killing them â a little extreme, wouldn't you say?”
“You might. I wouldn't. You ain't have to live with them.”
“You sound as if they scare you.”
“Them? The little black boys? No way.”
“I thought we were talking about blackbirds.”
“Black whatever. And I tellin' you now â no fockin' way.”
His gaze falls to the ground below, eyes flicking through the
grass in search of further prey. Swiftly he brings the gun to his shoulder, aims at the ground, fires.
Down below the grass is disturbed by a sudden frenzied whipping: a lizard, head bloodied, tossing around on itself.
“Another pest?” she says, voice hardened.
Reloading the gun, he sucks dismissively at his teeth. Then he takes aim and fires again.
SOME NEWSCASTS CLAWED
their way into her stomach, raking at her until she could feel herself beginning to shred. Today's, she consoled herself, could not get any worse.
She steeled her stomach through the ads and the promos, and as she saw the opening graphics on the monitor, gave herself permission to simply read the text as it presented itself on the teleprompter. The lead item was the kind that left no emotional room for ad libbing a personal touch into the text; it offered no scope for editing in a conversational tone even as she read.
She cleared her mind, and when the red light lit on camera one, when the floor director's palm chopped her cue, she began to read:
TRAGEDY STRUCK A BELVEDERE FAMILY THIS MORNING WHEN FOUR-YEAR-OLD MELISSA EDWARDS WAS ABDUCTED WHILE PLAYING IN THE FAMILY'S BACKYARD. HER BODY WAS FOUND FOUR HOURS LATER IN A GARBAGE CAN TWO BLOCKS FROM HER HOME. POLICE SAY SHE HAD BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTED. GARTH ROBERTS HAS THE STORY.
It was in this yard that four-year-old Melissa Edwards â¦
The monitor showed a small backyard crowded with a swing set and sandbox; then the camera panned to the rear of the house â small, detached, a disorder of things that suggested haste rather than poverty â and zoomed in on a window.
â¦
keeping an eye on her daughter from the kitchen window
â¦
The window that hung closed and empty now. Yasmin shuffled the pages of her script, trying to keep busy, trying to keep an ear on the report without absorbing its details.
â¦
turned away just for a minute, but long enough for
â¦
Her daughter had brought to her an almost manic clarity, the ability to see every possibility of peril small and large, from fingers disintegrating under rocking-chair skids to voices raised in panic from the midst of flaming houses. She had gained a renewed sense of the precariousness of life, the phrase that reporters so often applied to the American vice-president â
just a heartbeat away
â acquiring an acuteness that went beyond cliché.
â¦
beaten and sodo
â¦
The utter helplessness of an infant, and the terrifying trust of a toddler, made the sanctioned execution of those who would harm them no longer seem so repugnant. Her daughter's vulnerability, she acknowledged, had evoked in her the most primitive of reactions. Holding Ariana, confronting that vulnerability, she knew herself capable, in the child's defence, of actions otherwise unimaginable.
Police have arrested a thirty-three-year-old drifter
â¦
Her view had narrowed; it had simplified. She no longer cared to debate the morality of an eye for an eye, could no longer accept absolution of perpetrators in the larger social picture. “So the guy's a drifter,” she said sourly to Charlotte standing beside camera one. “Context is no excuse.”
“Revenge, then, Yas?” Charlotte asked.
No, not even that. She found herself nagged by a more complex notion: that the brutality of certain acts removed the humanity from the human who had committed them. Execution would not solve the larger problem, she admitted, but it would solve the smaller one: this little cancer, at least, would not kill again.
