The Pink House at Appleton (10 page)

‘Eighteen,' Mavis said.

‘Eighteen,' Yvonne whispered in disbelief, her face now puce with the pink powder. ‘You are old.'

‘Not older than your mama,' Mavis replied, zipping herself up, the daisy-patterned frock tight around her waist.

‘Do you have any babies?' Yvonne asked.

‘Babies!' Mavis exclaimed. ‘What ah want with babies?'

‘Mama is having a baby.'

‘You don't know anything,' Barrington told Yvonne, eyeing Mavis as she pulled up her dress around her smooth thighs.

Boyd looked about self-consciously, wanting to tell them what he knew about babies coming out of his teapot, about how Mama and Papa made babies in the night, but restrained himself.

‘Ah'm not ready to have babies,' Mavis said. ‘Ah'm seeing man.'

Again they all stared at her, doubly shocked. They knew the words were meant to be shocking. They resonated with Papa's own words at the dinner table, that maids were
loose
and always
going off
with men who meant them no good. Papa had banned them from singing “Marianne,” the song that talked about
taking man
. It was the forbidden song whose words should never cross their lips. They had no idea why the song should be forbidden but since it was, they lost no time in trying to find out why. But their investigations produced nothing. Mavis knew that Papa had banned it, having listened to the talk as she went from dinner table to kitchen. She was saying nothing. A line from the song, performed by a local band, went,
Marianne, down by the seaside taking
man.

‘What is
seeing
man,
taking
man?' Yvonne's brows were now contorted. Mavis was bound to explain it to them just as she had explained about adultery.

But all Mavis said was, ‘Hush your mouth.' And that was the end of it.

Mavis left the house as it grew dark. She was going off to take men, dance and drink in places where there were coloured lights and thumping music. And men who meant her no good would hold her tight, writhing into the night, smudging her red lipstick.

No one heard when she returned home, but she did, because breakfast was on the table the next morning when they got up, the sun brilliant orange outside the window. Boyd examined her for signs, anything that would give an indication of what happened the night before at that place where she was
taking man
. He searched her out – first her eyes, then her breasts, arms, calves, neck. Was she the same Mavis, their Mavis? He wanted to see the dress she'd worn the night before – was it crumpled, full of alien scents? He knew how Papa's clothes smelled when he was out all night – rum, cigarette, Brookeses sweat and unknown adult odours. He would go to her room.

His chance came during the afternoon when Papa left for the factory. The Sunday sun beat down, the sky as clear as glass, reflecting purple bougainvillea. It reflected the sand-coloured quarters where Mavis pottered about in her slip, sipping electric pink Kool-Aid, trying to recover from the exertions of the night before. Her little Bush radio was tuned permanently to WINZEE not to Radio Jamaica. Her hair was in curlers and her legs folded under her on the bed as she applied new red
Cutex
to her fingernails.

‘Hello, cutie,' she said, as Boyd entered the room.

Boyd sat on the bed next to her. The dress she wore the night before was hanging in the opened closet, crumpled. It burst with mysteries. Her shoes, cast aside, worn out, lay under the closet. She made space for him beside her on the bed, drawing one leg up and sticking out her pink tongue. The strap of her slip slid down her arm revealing a firm breast. She eased the remaining strap down. Then she closed the
Cutex
bottle and placed it on the little side table, fanning her fingers in the air. His eyes never left her titties.

Realising that his eyes were glued to that one place, Mavis jiggled and bounced her titties about. As his eyes widened, she laughed and he giggled, drawing back in a shy way. She thought he looked like an enquiring puppy, darting eyes following a bouncing ball, small body without history, incapable of knowledge, unsullied, like breast milk. She placed a frolicking finger in the centre of his forehead and watched as his eyes narrowed.

Boyd saw the red
Cutex
, sniffed its red scent, felt the warm finger turning in a circle on his forehead. His hand went up involuntarily, slid along Mavis's smooth arm, and reached out, grasping for the taut brown breast. Mavis's giggle was like a prolonged sneeze, and Boyd took away his hand, alarmed at her giggling. Then, with a mischievous gaze, he gingerly returned his hand, patted and stroked her fleshy baubles, softly, gently, delicately, until Mavis stopped giggling and grew quiet. And her radio said,
Even little children loved Marianne, down by the seaside sifting sand.

At dinner that night, Mavis gave Boyd looks that he could not appreciate. She stroked his cheeks as she passed behind his chair and giggled when their eyes met. Mama saw this and smiled affectionately.

* * *

Under the bright Appleton sun, Boyd and Poppy eyed Mavis as she hung the clothes out to dry. They were not alone. Vincent's eyes were upon her too. They watched her against the blue of the sky.
This is the way we wash our clothes, wash our clothes, wash our clothes. This is the way we wash our clothes, so early Monday morning.
Mavis hung out great white sheets, whiter than white from the Reckitt's Blue; sheets that billowed and flapped, their brightness making Boyd and Poppy blink. She held wooden clothes pins in her mouth and her hands were full of damp clothes still smelling of Tide soap flakes. Because the clothes pins prevented her singing, she hummed and moved her head about in wordless rhapsody. Her own skirts billowed up in the wind and she kept bending in a funny dance to hide her exposed knees and thighs. She made Poppy bark with the dance. And when she stared down into the valley where the river reflected blue sky, Boyd stared too, in calm repose, drugged with tranquillity.

Down over the fence he looked, down where the splendid brown cows stood proud in the rolling Appleton fields, so brown and so splendid that they glistened and bristled in the clean Jamaican sun. He looked down past the grey wooden fence and into the white road stretching into the distance, before it vanished in the green of guinep and cashew trees. There in the distant whiteness, like a spot on stretched clean sheets, appeared the dark figure of Mr Ten-To-Six on his black Raleigh bicycle, his head held low.

Mr Ten-To-Six rode on by the lightning-struck, weather-beaten tree at the junction of the estate road and the road from Taunton. He rose up in the saddle as the road ascended two hundred yards to a plateau, descended steeply past the black bulls and the meadow full of daisies and buttercups, down to the rivet-filled bridge over the Black River. Mr Ten-To-Six reached the plateau in a steady zigzag of concentrated brute force, seemed to rest momentarily at the top then free-wheeled down to the bridge, white dust rising behind him. Over the bridge he went and was immediately swallowed up by the embracing cane leaves. But just before he was swallowed up, the sun caught the blade of his cutlass for a split second, and Boyd and Poppy were amazed at the violent flash of white heat that engulfed him. It was as though fire and brimstone had sought him out and struck him to the ground, pulverising him into white dust. Then the road was quiet again and they returned their attention to the exotic figure of Mavis, her frolicking breasts and flamboyant pink tongue, and to Vincent spying on her from behind the trees.

* * *

With the arrival of Mavis, Vincent seemed a new person. He was transformed from a distrustful hunchback into a kindly dwarf.

One day, from his hiding place in the garden, Boyd saw Vincent peeping into the maids' shower room. But Mavis wasn't there. Boyd could see her entering the house. He knew the scene Vincent expected to see because he himself had already seen it: Mavis naked under the shower. She was like the women statues in the encyclopaedia, firm and without blemish, and she had the same three tufts of dark hair, like Perlita and Mama. Unlike Perlita, she didn't shriek under the gushing water. She just hummed.

Vincent's behaviour intrigued Boyd so much that that afternoon he and Poppy observed him keenly as he worked. Vincent worked quietly, head down, at intervals expertly flicking a finger across his lined forehead to clear the perspiration. He was bent at the knees now, weeding the flowerbeds under the drawing room windows, paying particular attention to Mama's forget-me-nots. His short trousers, of a thick green khaki, reached to his knees, showing off huge, rock-hard calves and rough, hairy shins. He was only twenty yet could pass for forty.

‘Does it hurt?'

Vincent turned towards Boyd but said nothing.

‘Your eye,' Boyd explained, pointing.

Vincent was surprised. People never expressed concern about him. Grown men tripped him up when he wasn't looking and little boys took aim with their slingshots when he walked the streets. It was all about his eye. People always assumed that his eye was all there was about him, that he was his eye. It was the only thing people saw when they looked at him. He knew how people made him feel, and it was only because they viewed him through his eye. To them he was a
one-eyed
person. He was much more than that.

‘No, it don't hurt,' he said, straightening up and smiling.

‘Did you get it in a fight with hooligans?'

‘No, ah'm not a fighting man.' Vincent chuckled.

‘How then?'

‘Ah was born wid it.'

‘Born with it? But how?'

Vincent wasn't used to this. He shrugged, not knowing what to answer. There was a long silence broken by the sound of a distant aeroplane. Both Boyd and Vincent gazed upwards. Vincent thought, as he often did, how great man was to put a metal machine in the sky. But you wouldn't catch him going in an aeroplane. Not even that BOAC. He left that to foreign people.

As if reading his thoughts, Boyd asked, ‘Are you going to England to better yourself?'

Vincent smiled. In spite of his natural reticence, the words poured out.

‘Heh, heh. Ah not going to Englan'. Ah staying right here. One day ah will have a little house, a acre of land and a few chicken. And maybe a young woman in the house.' As he said this he glanced slyly towards the kitchen where Mavis was preparing lunch.

Then Boyd asked a question he instinctively knew could be asked of Vincent: Pepsi's question, which could never be forgotten.

‘Have you ever seen a naked woman?'

Vincent, startled, carried on weeding. Since Boyd, he guessed, was only seven or eight years old, he couldn't possibly have asked such a question.

‘Not your mother,' Boyd continued. ‘Have you ever seen a naked woman?'

This time Vincent faced Boyd with an expression of sheer incomprehension but remained silent. Again he returned to his gardening.

‘I saw Mavis under the shower,' Boyd said.

As Vincent looked up, Mavis came down the kitchen steps, her breasts and bottom in a jolly romp, heading towards her room. They all turned to look, in silence, their movements frozen. Poppy left first, as if trailing a scent, his tail in the air, and Boyd quickly followed. When they were gone, Vincent relaxed a bit, staring with juvenile lust at the receding back of the young maid. He swept perspiration from his forehead with a quick flick of his index finger, sighing with delayed astonishment.

Vincent didn't mind at all that Mavis paid him not the slightest attention and was thoughtless in her responses, ignorantly referring to him on one occasion as “That one-eyed Cyclops”. He was grateful to be on the same premises as her, grateful that he could behold her day after day, grateful for the pleasures she stimulated in him. A time would come when he would be able to enter the rum bar in his district of a Friday evening when it was crowded and have those people, the ones who talked behind his back, treat him like a man. But he was rendered invisible without a woman, lacked status, bereft of everything that made a man a man in the place where he was born. Mavis was the woman who could change his life for the better. She was also the pain in his heart. The more she trampled him underfoot, the more he welcomed the pain of her abuse.

After only a month, Mama announced that Mavis was a “good, clean girl”. She had found her maid at last. Papa was well pleased. He knew, from searching Mavis's room, that she was not a thief, from her meals that she was a good cook, and from her behaviour that she was the perfect little companion for Mama. In her first week in the job, Mavis slammed the door in the faces of two Jehovah's Witnesses. And three other women who, judging by their peculiar attire, could only have been Bible women, were sent packing with the words, ‘Mrs Brookes don't need no Bible, clear off!' Papa rejoiced.

He marked the occasion by spending all night at the club, only coming home in the wee hours, quite drunk. He was so drunk that, in the morning, Boyd sniffed the awful vomity fumes as he lay stretched out in the guest room in his sleeveless vest and blue striped boxer shorts, senseless, his nocturnal deeds unknown. Next to the chamber pot of vomit on the floor lay his soiled clothing.

That Sunday, the sun beat down crisp and clear and white oleander blossoms fell like magic snowflakes along the driveway. The valley and the garden gave up fascinating fragrances and on the radio a choir sang,
All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all.
But Mama stayed in her bedroom, sewing quietly, unable to disguise her deepening anxiety, unable to restrain the creeping jealousies. When she came out for lunch, the children saw that her face was terribly drawn. And Boyd was filled with deep remorse because his secret pleasures were immense, his head full of pretty images of the pink girl, full of things bright and beautiful. But that evening, for the first time, he didn't watch the sunset and the darting swallows from his place on the verandah. He stayed in his room wondering at the nature of Mama's distress, not understanding his own.