In the Slammer With Carol Smith (20 page)

Still in my hand, like a rent notice. ‘Because I know what’s in it.’

‘He’s not coming back!’

In the bald glare from the nearer bare window I see what I’ve never seen in the shop’s murk. There’s a graining of the skin, a curtaining of the eyes, a maturity of shoulder. She’s not a dwarf; there’s not that foreshortening of the limbs. But a—staginess?—that is not a child’s. A miniature rather, for a family to cherish, even exhibit—and allow to pretend? That young cousin, is he being made to marry her?

‘Why do you ask?’ I say, but of course I know, and why she always carefully calls him ‘the gentleman.’ She has wanted to see his lair, his household, and any other trove she can spy. And why not? Maybe the child I have thought her to be is only in my own head—nobody else has ever said. I have not only lost years perhaps, but the very concept of what children are.

‘Mind telling me what school you go to?’

‘So you’ve caught on, have you.’ She squints at me, as if glad I am smart. Sighs. ‘I did go to that bloody baby-school, puh, high school, for a year. Which will not admit I am overqualified. So I quit. We are all angry. What if I sell my wedding jewelry my aunt left me, buy a motorbike, like my girlfriend in London, and go to be a messenger? I even find a place that will take me. If I will wear a sign and ride in the back. They keep me in then. So in the shop I play the tyke I was when we leave Paddington.’ She has delivered all this with matching mime—clasped hands, upraised head. She spreads her hands, lifting them. ‘But your gentleman—he caught on.’ The voice lowers. ‘He persuades the familee. My father re-a-lee. Because it is his grandmother who was so small, like me. They have plans for me to be a pharmacist—me? I will not spend my life in a shop. Not my American life.’ She sits up, folds her arms. ‘So he here, he tells them: “In my shop,” he says, “her size could be a plus.” And a trouble too, but this he tells only me. He lets me decide.’ She draws herself up, allowing me her true outline, a hint of breasts. The rich laugh that comes from her is full-size. ‘I am senior student in theater, age eighteen—what if the birth certificate says less?—High School of Performing Arts. But that loafer, my cousin, he has to escort me and take me home.’

And out of wisdom on both sides, it would be decreed that she not come here. We are both one of Martyn’s kind arrangements. And there on the table the letter lies.

She’s eyeing it. ‘And how old are you?’ she asks, in the tit-for-tat kids use. There’s more of the child in her than she admits. How do I answer her, I the pretender as well?

‘Older than I look.’

‘That’s what they say in the shop. But younger than him. So very suitable, yet. For the child-bearing.’

‘You’re—out of your skull.’

‘Barmy, that means? No, they are fond of him. They want to see him settled.’

And out of her reach.

What I resent is that she’s making me see Martyn as I see too well he is. I could keep him in absentia until now. ‘He’s forty-six. His mother was almost that when she had him. She’s British. He has a half-brother in the military, who’s pro-apartheid to the gills, has pursued him all over the map, and once arrested him.’ I wave toward the bulletin board. ‘It’s all there.’

‘A—a Brit … Fancee.’ She rallies. ‘May I see the rest of the flat?’

‘Go ahead.’

Once she’s down the hall I open the letter.

Dear Carol:

My mother did not win her election. She thinks she did.

At ninety-two, perhaps she has the last word. My brother and I are at her bedside.

Please keep my plant alive.

Martyn

From the bathroom there is a cry. What silly accident—? She is that small. I rush there.

She’s rapt, in front of the photograph. That array of people, strung out by twos, threes, singles, along their—stockade? In which the old browntone, printed on heavy cardboard, melds all skin? ‘I knew it. I knew it. They are from South India, his people. Like us.’ She stands on tiptoe. ‘Those there.’

I see now that there are two groups. The group she points to? Like the others, their skin color has been assumpted into the cardboard. If they are not all taller, or leaner, theirs is another posture. Both groups are clad for hot weather, and in white, but not alike. ‘And those others?’

‘Servants, perhaps.’ Her bangles shake dismissively. ‘Once we left, we no longer had them.’

I know it’s not Paddington she refers to.

Suddenly I want her out. It’s not only Martyn she’s made me see—the helper, standing at his mother’s bedside. She’s been giving me a character, making me more than I have set myself to be. She has put her hand in mine.

‘Why aren’t you at school?’

Her brows go up. ‘It’s the holiday. We are in recess.… Oh brother — er. I must help the mom … what time is it?’

‘I don’t keep a clock.’

She’s not daunted. ‘You are right. A clock keeps you.’ She shrugs. ‘Not to worry. Let them send for me. So … let’s go.’ She blows a kiss to the photograph.

‘Back to the store?’

‘No.’ She leads me back down the hall, as if the place is hers. Of course it is not mine. I have to keep that in mind. Habit must be watched.

We are at the table where the letter is, like opposing communicants. For a minute we stand so, then I push the envelope to her. She examines the postmark greedily.

‘Pretoria. Where is that?’

‘South Africa. The capital.’ I have long since looked it up. ‘In the South African War, Churchill was imprisoned there.’

‘Ah, him.’

‘But in 1899 he escaped to Mozambique.’ I hope she doesn’t ask me where that is. ‘Then in 1900 it was captured by the British.’

‘Mozambique?’

‘Pretoria.’ I have got all that out of Martyn’s desk encyclopedia, including a brief concluding statement, which she is welcome to. ‘“Half the population is of European descent.

‘But not Martyn!’

My turn to stare.

‘I know what he is, people like them, from the newspapers,’ she mumbles. ‘I wouldn’t say to his face. Nor in front of the others.’

So, continents apart, these passions grow. Hers for him. His for me? I feel it in the letter vibrating on that meager, school-teachery table. All his dumb objects speaking for him. For the helper. Plus this girl he wouldn’t have counted on. He doesn’t count up.

Only I do, ungiving, unresonant. Sticking to my guns, that went off a long time ago.

I push the letter to her.

She reads it. ‘But you don’t have a plant.’

‘My rent. To buy one. But I haven’t paid up.’

‘Ah, a joke.’ But her head hangs; she’s not stupid. She toys with the letter. ‘But look—the postmark was a month ago.’

‘The mail from there is slow, maybe.’ I draw in my breath. ‘Though the news from everywhere is so quick.’

My daily reading has brought me into the world I had forgot. One wider even than the outdoors, the outside. For days I have been wanting to tell someone, anybody, how when I walk down this street on a business day, listening to the lunch-hour crews exchanging telly-movie news-bytes, in the way street-talk does now, a world-news streams to me on the crowd’s own wires, clogging my ears like a fur they sell.

But she does not hear it.

‘So the old lady, his mother, is taking her time to die,’ she says. ‘We have one like that in the family. Nobody loves her, but we are very polite.’ She has found the pile of papers I save and made a tuffet of them, sitting on it with her arms hunched around her knees. ‘So he will stay on. And if I am not careful, I will marry my cousin. At school, they say I am not actress. I am too polite.’

Not too polite to cry. The tears roll down like beads. She doesn’t sob. To hold her is to console me as well. This warm creature, a woman, but fitting in my arms like a child. She has her own handkerchief.

‘And you are so strong,’ she says, jumping up. ‘You talk to no one about yourself. You do not even need to know what holiday it is.’

I have never seen myself like that. And now, more than willing to talk, to people grazed on the street, or next to me in the night niches. ‘Talk? Not locally maybe. That is true. Or not in your store. Because to me you all are like a—a tapestry, that I watch.’

Her chin goes up; she stamps her foot. ‘Yes, that’s what we Asians are to you, aren’t we? Something to hang on a wall. But not to be.’ Her shoe has come off. Like her wishes, it is maybe too big for her.

‘Sorry. That’s what comes of talking too much to a machine.’

‘You talk to it?’

‘I talk to it—yes. But not out loud.’ A work period requires that I sit and think, always addressing that old-model confidante. But I do not always type. Would that be less odd to her, or more so? I am not sure I want to trust her. Not when normality is burgeoning round me like one of those pop-up books, where a page-turning child can slide a castle up from behind its moat, or see dolphins rise and fall in an unending ultramarine.

She has fallen into a reverie of her own. That quicksand of the intensely young. Her head lifts. ‘I was wrong about the drums. They are for anybody … like this place. All the same no-color. And that little office, so empty—sweet. With nobody pushing.… A sleeping beauty place. You belong here. You should stay.’ She looks up at me, then down, in mute sacrifice.

Nobody in my renewing life has yet spoken to me like that. With a child’s kindness—like a freshet. A kindness in miniature, that you carry with you after, a cameo.

I’m no beauty. But thanks.’ I take a deep breath. ‘I have been asleep.’

She is still cherishing the room, his room. ‘But where do you sleep, really? There are no beds.’

‘In my bag.’ It has been pushed into its corner, where it lies ready. The corner nearest the door. ‘Or sometimes—.’ I point down the hall. ‘Or—one of those.’

I can’t tell what she thinks of that. In sudden reflex, she looks at her wrist. Then away.

‘If we wait, a light comes on in the office. At six.’

‘Too long. I better not.’ She would like to. But we don’t have to decide. There’s a knock on the door. She draws back.

‘Your cousin? If it’s him, I’ll walk back with you.’

‘If my mother would come—but they won’t let her.’

‘I could just not answer the door. But telephone to say you’re safe.… And a—a free agent.’ Why do I add that? I know you can’t legislate for a person. Yet it was what they kept telling me.

‘A what?’ She laughs. For a wild moment I imagine that she had been the ‘popsy’ here before I came. A secret visitor. And has come to see the new occupant in their exchanged lair? … In the slammer, in a cell down the row from mine, a woman who was in for having pulled a knife on her rival had been a heroine to the whole facility.

Another knock.

What’s making my heart so light, my walk so graceful? … The style you adopt when you already have a companion with you? Or you are a free agent? I open the door.

The stationer no longer has his eyes lowered to a counter. He is a father, nodding coolly to me, extending a firm arm to her. His glance ranges the room, under brows that meet like a visor. Later he’ll be able to describe it. Maybe to the mother who would have wished to see it on her own.

There is a red welt on his cheek. He has been energized. What he says to her I will never know.

Arm in arm, they seem to be breathing in unison, viewing me from a world that is more than the weather-in-the-streets. A world where events make the seasons: a birth, a marriage, an emigration; death makes the inheritance, cousins are the ligaments. And the house is the core.

She is slipping off one of her glass bangles, a soft, ambery one, shifting it from her wrist to mine. Considering whether to add another. ‘No—’ she says. ‘You would not wish to make a noise.’

In the glass office a time-switch turns on a lamp at six, morning and evenings. At first this had seemed like an intrusion. Causing me on my third day here to certify the time, by the phone. Now I welcome the lamp like a greeting, each time. In prison, as in hospital, the soul becomes a monologuist, no matter how surrounded. The physical speaks louder than any person; we are never deaf to that, even when asleep. At present, on daylight saving time, the outside is still bathed in saffron light.…
There.

The light has gone on; it’s six. The gentle glow from without and within is seamless. An hour when walls melt. When having had company leaves a glow one wants to parlay. Into that haze of chatter and the presence of flesh.

All this is new to me. Or so long gone that memory is outstripped. If this is the norm, I am swimming nude in it.—Say ‘bare-assed,’ Carol. The way slouching the under-under has taught you. Forget your roots. That’s a debt you once owed. You’ve paid up.—

Her last words ringing in my ears like my epitaph, I am digging in the abyss of my bag for the packet I have managed to keep always with me, ignored, yet semi-consciously counted in. Though forgotten, lately, under the slow crunch of the present, that has seduced me, that will do me in?

My fingers scrape bottom, scrounge only loss.… Repeat.… Dense and reliable as the fabric is, it has worn. Will it still save a life? Perhaps—if not as planned.

Here they are. Slipped down between torn lining and canvas—and waiting for judgment day? Dr. Camacho’s postcards.

It’s past six pm of the following day. The beacon light inside ‘Africa’ has flicked on-and-off for wake-up, though I never went to bed. Soon it will switch me to evening. All day long the windows have been sealed or closed against the street. The only sound here is the salesman’s air-conditioner, now and then confirming the temperature and me, with its mm-hmmm. What I am about to do is to add my own noise. For postcards, you only need a pen.

I’ve never used the word processor full-scale. An old model I know, it’s friendly enough. But mind outstrips even those synapses. It’s not a question of speed. Though at times my fingers fly over the keyboard scarcely touching. At times I cannot bear to look at the screen. I have at times recorded with my eyes closed. As for printing out, Martyn’s equipment is on the blink, but I shall not call that repair service.

I prefer not knowing what is stored there, what is lost. Any residue is therefore a reasonable counterpart of what I am: in recovery—a mind.