The Worlds Within Her (44 page)

THE ROAD AHEAD
narrows, asphalt crumbling at the edges, trees rising now as if from beneath the paving.

Cyril says, “Hope it don't hurt too much.”

To Yasmin's quizzical glance he says, “Your tongue, I mean. Don't bite it too hard, nuh.”

She offers a gentle laugh, unable to decide whether or not this is an invitation to inquire.

“His name is Caleb. Built that house with his own hands — no plans, nothing. Just an idea that he manage to expand over
the years. He's a good man, hard worker.”

“A friend?”

“Not really. I help him out a little.”

I help him out a little:
yet an unlikely pair.

“We were young when we met. Both had wives and futures we couldn' see. I was out here with your father, doing some work, nuh. Caleb helped us, he knew the area. Anyway, whenever I was up here I'd stop by, just to say hello. In politics, a little hello once in a while does go a long way.”

And on one of those visits he found that Caleb's wife had fled, leaving him with two teenaged sons and a young daughter. The boys had already established their own futures with their father, working vegetable plots, rearing chickens, hunting wild game, catching and selling crabs during the season, trapping
cascadoo
— an armoured fish, he explains, fine-boned and delicious curried — in the swamps.

But Caleb wanted his daughter to have a different life. Cyril remembers asking what he meant by that, remembers the silence that came to him, the way he had scratched at his head in embarrassment: he could not put into words what to him was only the vaguest of concepts. A life away from here, away from the trees and the swamps, a life where she would not be ground down by physical labour as her mother had been. She was only seven, there was time yet to shape a new life.

Cyril had discussed the girl with Penny. Penny suggested waiting a few years, until the girl was ten or so. Then they might be able to find her a position as a maid.

Cyril sighs. “At leas' she help me understan' something important,” he says.

So he made arrangements on his own. The girl was boarded with a family in town some distance away — a town with a school where she could be educated. The expenses were all
assumed by Cyril. “It was no big deal, you know. Couple o' uniforms, books, room an' board. Penny does spend more on Christmas presents.”

That was twelve years ago, and she was now on the verge of graduating from high school. If she did well at the A-Levels — and the school report Caleb had just shown him indicated that she would do very well indeed — then she could, if she wished, go on to study nursing. Through contacts he had maintained from his days in politics with Ram, he had already taken steps towards a modest scholarship for her.

“You've seen the house,” he says. “You know how they get water? From the rain, runnin' down a pipe from the roof to a barrel outside. Look, I can't pretend to tell you what Caleb life is like. I ain't know. Or at leas', I only know what I see. And what I see is things like that barrel full o' rainwater.”

A sensation of sand comes to Yasmin: the grains fine and warm, moulding themselves to her, a cast for eternity. Ahead, a cocoon of shadow and light.

“You see the distance that girl has travelled?” Cyril says. “You see the distance she can still go?”

And what does Penny think of all this?

“She doesn't know. Nobody knows. Is nobody's business. You have to understand. People would jus' bad-talk me. Is blackmail, or is my love-chil', or something else nasty. Is bes' kept quiet.”

Are there others?

A few. Only a few. “People think I'm a useless man, Yasmin. I know they laugh at me, and not always behind my back.” A grimness shapes his face. “But maybe the useless man not so useless after all, eh?”

And for the first time in years, Yasmin feels herself awed.
Yasmin asks, “Did he know my father?”

“They must've met a couple o' times. But —”

But: the word hangs there in the warm air of the car, a gentle pulse echoing back onto itself. Yasmin reaches for it, swallows it. Feels it float, fluttering, into her head.

“You see” — and his tone is thoughtful, pleading — “you see, if Ram had a fault it was that he had little sympathy for people who wanted just to make a living. He couldn't understand them: couldn't understand how they could be happy with what he saw as a small life, small pleasures. ‘Daily livin', bringin' up the chil'ren.' It was hard on him, pretending to care — because only by promising to make these things possible could he build the larger life he wanted for himself. When Ram didn't have to pretend, he didn't. He let others barter the enthusiasm in his place.

“So they must've met a couple o' times. But they wouldn' remember each other. He wasn' memorable enough for Ram, and Ram wouldn've made himself memorable enough for him.”

THE FIRM'S ASSESSMENT
was completed two weeks later. The five double-spaced pages were lying on the dining table when she returned home after the newscast. Jim, fixing himself a whisky and soda at the counter, nodded at it. “It's unsparing,” he said. “As it should be.”

“What does it say?”

“See for yourself.”

She ran through the pages quickly, not bothering to sit, absent-mindedly accepting a sip of his drink.

On the first page, the client's requirements were reviewed. On the second, Jim's design was described. On the third, in brutally passive language, all of the design's shortcomings were highlighted: corners were too tight, pillars too few, margins too narrow.

He said, “If they'd given me a chance, I could've saved her.”

“Her?”

“It.”

'THIS WAS HIS
favourite spot.”

The coastal road has brought them here, to a promontory high on the cliffs she saw earlier. She finds it an unsettling coastline — flat and straight one moment, winding and rising the next; from palm trees and beach to jungle vegetation and cliffs; and everywhere paths hidden from her eye. It occurs to her that, despite her moment of panic in the mountains, she trusts Cyril. But she knows too that she trusts him, in part, because she must. The blind wandering in an alien landscape have no choice but to trust.

It is windy here, the water down below at the base of the rocky cliff choppy and violent, flaying itself against the boulders.

“I don' know how he ever found it. Hardly anybody else knows about it. This was where he came when he wanted to do some serious fishing.”

“Do you fish?”

“Not since Kamal. But you know what they say about fishing. Is not really about catching fish. Is about being by yourself, letting the mind wander. Thinking, nuh.”

He clasps his hand behind his back and wanders over to the trees lining the far edge of the promontory. “Actually, I only came here once with him. I been back many times since his death. You're the first person … Even Penny's never been here.” He walks up to a tree and slaps the trunk. “See this tree?” He turns around to point to another about twenty feet away. “And that one?”

“This happened when we were older. Ram was probably in his early twenties and a couple of his friends were moving away, to the States. So he invited a bunch of us up here for a night of camping and fishing.

“We didn't have much in the way of equipment, jus' a big tarpaulin that we used to make a tent. He ran a rope from this tree over to that one. Makeshift but workable. Then we lit a fire and settled down for some ol' talk. Had a few beers. Jus' joking around, nuh. Relaxing. Eating.

“Everybody knew that things were about to change. Once people start moving away, it doesn' stop there.

“A little later that evening, after the sun set — and it was no big deal, it set on the other side — Ram and some o' the fellas get out the fishing equipment and set off down the cliff with a torchlight. There's this rock about halfway down where he used to fish from. It was starting to get cold — the breeze, nuh — so I went into the tent and cozy up with a torchlight and some comic books.

“They came back some hours later, without a single fish — but, as I say, is not the point. They stayed up for a while, talking, having a last beer. And eventually they came into the tent
and stretched out too. It was starting to get pretty cold, the wind was picking up, and the tarpaulin was starting to flap in places. Ram had to tighten it down.

“Anyway, some time later that night, I don't know what time exactly but it was damn late, this loud, booming, cracking sound woke me up. And I don' mean gently. I remember opening my eyes and wondering what the hell was going on. The wind was whipping, I could hear thunder — and just as some lightning crack, one end o' the tarpaulin rip right out and fly up into the air like a sail unfurling. Everything started to blow everywhere. Blankets here. Comic books there. You name it. And then, boom! — rain start to pelt down. And I mean buckets and buckets and buckets. In a second we were drenched. Us, tent, food, everything.

“We scramble like devils, running around in the dark picking up this, picking up that. Finally, we jus' drop everything and headed for the cars. And that's where we end up camping — in the cars. Wet to the skin. Along with every mosquito in the neighbourhood. For the rest o' the night all you hearing is slap-slap-slap.

“By next morning, storm was gone, sky was blue, sun was glorious — and all of us looked as if we had chicken pox. Everything was wet, no way to get the fire going, so forget coffee or tea. The bread you had to wring out if you wanted to eat it. I had peanuts for breakfast.

“You know what Ram do? He strip down to his underpants, hang his clothes on the rope to dry, picked up his fishing equipment and headed down to the rock. The rest of us weren't too happy, I'll tell you, we wanted to head back. But he won the day. We were here. The weather was nice. Everything would dry out. Jus' keep on going. So we did.

“You know, Yasmin, years later when he got into politics
those fellas were still there. Through t'ick and t'in. And when things got rough, I bet you anything that just about everybody thought about that night right here — that dark and stormy night, as they say — and jus' keep on going.”

There is no path — or at least, once more, a path discernible only to Cyril.

The way down is precipitous: hard earth studded with stones and chipped rock. She follows quite literally in his footsteps, placing her feet where he places his.

He offers his hand, but she refuses. Should he tumble with her hand gripped in his, he would pull her down too.

Although the waves are far below — their movement an audible suck and splash against the rocks: a liquid rustling — she can feel their power, and the power of the sun above, in the fine spray that lights on her skin and evaporates immediately.

The descent is slow but steady, her eye so fast on the placement of Cyril's shoes that she is almost surprised when he says, “Here we are.”

Here we are: his fishing rock. She looks at it, sees that it is just that — a rock — and she wonders at her vague disappointment. She asks herself what she expected, and finds she has no answer. It is what Cyril has all along said that it was, she tells herself: the rock from which he fished.

Slate grey and smooth, smaller than she expected but in all likelihood just the lip of a much larger boulder buried within the face of the cliff, it provides adequate room for four people, five at a pinch. But, beginning to feel beyond its geology, she sees that it is a place for one, the world reduced to immodest sky and water. She senses, then, the eloquence of its seduction. Senses herself strangely disarmed, and yet, standing here unsheltered, not exposed.

Cyril, behind her, says, “Look at this.” He is crouched in the far corner, his fingers reaching down to the surface of the rock.

She looks. She sees nothing.