The Worlds Within Her (51 page)

Out in the darkness the drumming resumes, a line of rhythmic explosions.

“But, you know,” Cyril continues, “one thing I can't get away from — Ash and his friends are like Ram's chil'ren. His spiritual chil'ren, I mean. He gave our generation dreams, but we couldn' make them come true. Not without him.” He cocks his head towards the sound of the drums. “You see, Yasmin, that is what does happen to dreams that remain just dreams too long. And is what does happen to frustrated romantics. It ain't have nobody more dangerous. They end up blaming the world for their own foolishness.”

Then he sits back, eyes closed, lips pursed, like a man meditating on the unanswerable reeling in at him out of the night.

THE KNOCK AT
the bedroom door is like a whisper, and she assumes that Cyril, like her, is unable to sleep, that he has seen her light and seeks insomniac companionship. She whispers back her permission to enter.

The door opens slowly and she is slightly taken aback to see Amie standing timidly in the doorway.

“Everything all right, miss?”

“Everything's fine, Amie. I'm just having a little trouble sleeping.”

“If is the knee, miss, maybe I could help.”

Yasmin sees that her sandalled feet fit together as neatly, as perfectly, as the paws of a cat at ease.

“You know about my knee?”

“Mister Cyril, miss. He's a little worried, nuh, he ask me to check up on you.”

“There's really no need, Amie. It'll be fine in the morning.”

Amie holds up a bottle. It is filled with a liquid the colour of dull gold. “A little bit o' coconut oil, miss. It good for making the swelling go down.”

“It's not very swollen.” But she sees Amie's disappointment, is perplexed by it. Relents. “Okay, then. Can't hurt, I guess.”

Amie nods, glides into the room. In the manner, Yasmin thinks, of a nun.

Amie, sitting on the edge of the bed, works in silence at her knee, palms gentle on the tender cap.

The scent of the oil — sweet and rancid, unrefined — thickens the air. Yasmin feels its warmth working its way down into her bone.

Amie works patiently, fingers circling and smoothing, the heel of her palm pressing in on the sides of the kneecap.

Yasmin watches her fingers as they work. Slender, bony fingers, with nails cut so short they appear sunken into the flesh.

And she watches her face, her averted eyes, enigmatic with restraint. At moments her lips assume the vaguest suggestion
of surfacing humour, but the moments are brief, their source unshared and indecipherable.

There are parts of her, Yasmin knows, that can never be unearthed, thoughts that can never be divined. She likes Amie, but she would be unable, if asked, to explain why. If pressed, she would have to say: Because she is unknowable.

Still, she would like to smooth the silence with an easy conversation, but the only words that occur to her — a comment about the heat, about the stillness of the night — seem banal and contemptible. What she would really like to ask Amie is whether she is happy; about the life she has led, and the lives she would have liked to lead. Questions made for late at night, when confidentiality is assumed and trust remains unspoken. Questions she could not possibly put to Amie, sitting there rubbing at her knee.

And then a question occurs to her that she can ask. “Amie,” she says, searching for her eyes.

“Yes, miss.” But Amie does not look up.

“Would you tell me about my parents?”

Amie dribbles more oil into her cupped palm. “They was nice people, miss, especially Miss Shakti.”

“Miss Shakti — Mom — used to say the word nice doesn't mean much.”

“Is how I remember them, miss. Nice people.” She rubs her palms together, coating them in oil.

“And what do you remember about me, Amie? Was I nice, too?”

She runs both hands up Yasmin's shins, fingertips pressing into the flesh beside the bone. “You still like the clouds, miss?” And for the first time her eyes rise to meet Yasmin's.

“The clouds?”

Amie takes her hands away, crosses them on her lap. “You
forget?” She gives a little laugh, as if at her own foolishness, and her voice changes. A warmth comes to it: a voice bereft of tension, edges rounded.

Yasmin feels enveloped.

“Everything was behind the clouds for you. Bird behind the clouds. Plane behind the clouds. You use to like the sky, always starin' up at it as if you looking for something, or as if it had pictures up there.

“And I remember one day you say, Papa behind the clouds. Because he was always gone, nuh, he did leave early-early, before you wake up, and come back late-late, after you was in bed. Papa behind the clouds. People use to say your head was always in the clouds.”

Yasmin smiles. The clouds, the sky. The affinity explained. No, not explained, she thinks after a moment. Given a history — and her father given a title. She says, “I used to call him Papa. I didn't know that.”

“And Miss Shakti was Mama.”

Mama:
Mom, Mummy, Mother. So those other words came later, with the new life.

“You grown up nice, miss. Very nice.” Her eyes hold Yasmin's gaze. “But you ain't change, eh? Not deep inside. You was a quiet little girl. Like you had a sadness deep-deep inside you. And it still there. Deep-deep inside you. As if you knowed things you shouldn't know.”

Yasmin is at a loss for words. She feels exposed, as if Amie has peeled her open and read her entrails.

Amie turns away, embarrassed. She pours more oil into her palm, reaches for Yasmin's foot and begins squeezing and caressing it.

Yasmin feels herself stiffen. A guardedness comes to her, and a growing acuteness of unease. The mood, the sense of connection,
evaporates. Amie's touch now feels alien on her foot, as if the attention that was there before has retreated: as if the mind and the hand are no longer dedicated to the same purpose. She does not protest, though. She does not want Amie to go.

Not yet.

YASMIN WAS A
solitary child, you know. From the very first, she seemed to prefer her own company. She used to love playing with her fingers and toes, pulling on them, tickling them, making herself laugh. On her face there was amazement — the kind of glazed amazement which, in an older person, would indicate idiocy. Sometimes she would tug a foot right up to her nose and peer at her toes with all the fascination of discovery. Or she would spend a great deal of time examining her hands, as if trying to puzzle out how they worked.

One day, watching her play, my husband said, “Look at her. It's almost as if she doesn't believe she exists.”

And I felt then that he had put his finger on it.

AMIE RUNS HER
thumb hard up Yasmin's sole. “Mr. Vernon did have this trick, miss. He take a razor blade and slice through the skin of a orange from eye to eye, five or six times. The cuts was
fine-fine, finer than t'read, you couldn't see them. An' he'd hide it till he needed it — then he'd take it out and squeeze it till it crush. Everybody was always amaze. Of course, he did need strength to do it, but he couldn't really do it without cheatin' a little. I ain't never been able to decide if he was dishones' or if he was smart.”

“Did Cyril know about this trick?”

“No, but Miss Penny … She always keep his secret.”

Even now, Yasmin thinks. She ponders the extraordinary loyalty, and after a moment has a thought that unsettles her. Even now, Penny will let Cyril tell a lie in the name of glory.

“For some people,” Amie adds, “the dead more important than the livin'.” It is as if she has divined Yasmin's thoughts.

The pressure of her fingers tenses onto Yasmin's arch. The tips press into the flesh and they release a sudden electricity that sizzles along her sole into her ankle and toes.

Yasmin yelps.

The pressure ceases. “Sorry, Beti,” Amie says.

THERE WERE — THERE
still are — moments when I would look at Yasmin and think, What does the future hold in store for you? I would try to imagine her at various ages, at ages still to come. To imagine her at my age, and older. To imagine her having lived a life such as we all live: full of joys and pain. I have imagined my daughter an aged woman dying gently …

But this is fantasy, for my question has no answer. Circumstance shapes a possibility every day. Still, I come back to it —
I want to be reassured that my daughter will have a happy and fulfilling life — and I ache at the impossibility of knowing.

To me this is the only mystery that resonates, my dear Mrs. Livingston. Not God, not the afterlife. But the unimaginability of tomorrow itself for those I love.

IT COMES TO
her like a sudden anger, chill and irrational. She pulls her feet away from Amie's grasp, tucks them under her.

Amie looks up in surprise, her eyes wrenched back from another world.