The Pink House at Appleton (3 page)

‘Miss Mama? Miss Papa?'

He smiled at her. She smiled back. She knew. And she stroked the soft part under his chin till he hung his head. He was in paradise, full of secret knowledge, in the music place where words were unnecessary. They slept together in the garden heat in the shade of the mango tree, and were only awakened towards evening by the maid, ringing the bell frantically for dinner.

* * *

Mrs Moore visited Mama almost every day during those first weeks at Appleton. She was a lonely woman, Papa said. All her cheerfulness and outward confidence was just a sham. But that meant nothing to Mama. Mrs Moore was a fresh breeze, a happy tune, the therapy she needed. At about ten o'clock each day the front door opened and in walked Mrs Moore, wearing her fruit-encrusted, camel-coloured felt hat and her spicy-camphor perfume. Under the drawing room window in the overgrown garden, Boyd heard the tinkle of cups, the clink of silver cake knives (Mama's wedding present from her father), the gushing conversation, Mrs Moore's jolly laughter and Mama's happy, girlish giggles. He heard the Mullard radio say ‘“Passing Strangers,” by Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan.' And the beat of his heart quickened because he heard the voices whisper the name of the girl who was coming soon, the girl whose lips were lollipop-red,
Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi.

Pepsi arrived at the beginning of the half term holidays. Her lips were lollipop-red, just as Boyd knew they would be, and black coils of hair sprouted about her head in magnificent profusion. She spoke about Mr and Mrs Moore as her “Abuelo” and her “Abuela”, and about her school, Excelsior, on Mountain View Avenue in Kingston, where she was in the first form and very good at Spanish.

When Pepsi first visited, she sat, legs crossed, in Mama's bedroom, chin in hand, conversing like an adult while Eartha Kitt sang
Under the Bridges of Paris with you, I'd make your dreams come true
. Pepsi sang too. She was only twelve. When lemonade was served she did not pour it herself but waited, sitting upright, for Perlita. Not that Perlita minded. She was used to this type of behaviour from the alien visitors on the estate and from beatniks (her best description of Pepsi). Pepsi sipped her lemonade, unlike Yvonne, who took great gulps. She retreated to the bedroom with Mama where she hovered like a nurse, pretending that Mama had had the baby. She ran and fetched, applied Johnson's Baby Oil to all the places where it was to be applied, patted the pillows where they were to be patted and sighed with Mama as if she herself had burdens and unfulfilled dreams. When her job was done, Pepsi tiptoed behind Mama out of the room to languish on the verandah on the white rattan chairs. She languished there while the sun's rays crept lazily across the tiles, and while Barrington, who had suddenly developed a habit of being very attentive to Mama, stood at the French windows with his hands in his pockets, watching.

Boyd lingered at the end of the verandah in the long grass, hoping to catch Pepsi's words, to glimpse her slender legs which ended in brown open-top shoes with loosely buckled straps, and sniff the adult scent of the Pond's Cold Cream that she wore. Her coming and her presence had already created dramas of epic proportions in his head. And in those dramas she fought with Estella and Lydia Parsons for his special attention.

‘Pepsi!' a voice hollered from beyond the green hedge. ‘Mrs Moore want you!' It was Icilyn, Mrs Moore's maid. ‘Pepsi, where are you? Come now, you hear? Pepsi!'

Poppy rushed to the side of the house, barking hard, fazed by this reckless, disrespectful shouting in the quiet of mid-morning when the only sounds were radio sounds, the sublime voices and music of
Housewives' Choice.

‘Pepsiiii! Pepsiiii!' The voice seemed desperate.

Poppy was barking himself to death.

‘Pepsiii! Mrs Moore want you. Come now. Pepsi! You hear me, chile?'

Pepsi took the steps down to the garden two at a time. Sunlight splashed her hair. Boyd, Barrington and Yvonne watched the thin-legged figure till it vanished in a dazzle of colour at the garden fence. What manner of girl was this?

The next day, in the long grass at the far end of the garden, hidden from the house, Pepsi came suddenly upon Boyd and Poppy. She found them gazing into air.

‘Do you know what place this is?' Pepsi asked brusquely.

Boyd hesitated. They were a long way from the house, alone in the grass with Pepsi.

‘This is where the slaves were beaten by the slave owners in slavery days,' Pepsi related. ‘You live on a sugar estate and don't know that? They don't teach you these things at school because Jamaica is a colony and they want to keep you down, but my cousin who's at university told me. The women slaves were lashed with cat-o'-nine tails. Their clothes were ripped off.' Pepsi looked about. ‘Have you ever seen a naked woman?'

Again Boyd hesitated, trying to make sense of the question.

‘Not your mother. Everybody's seen their mother naked.'

Boyd didn't know what to say. He had his secrets and his reserve.

‘Have you ever seen a naked woman who wasn't your mother?'

‘Yes,' Boyd said. Poppy's tail waltzed slowly as if hypnotised.

‘Who?'

He didn't want to say.

‘Boyd, I said who? Who was it?'

Boyd was silent.

‘It's your maid,' Pepsi told him.

Boyd nodded, with relief. He didn't want to talk about the fleshy, pink women in the encyclopaedia. He didn't know how to tell about them.

Pepsi laughed. ‘Ha, ha. Boy. Spying on your maid. Disgusting. That is what you country boys do, spy on people. You were, weren't you?'

Boyd didn't answer.

‘I said you were spying on her. Was it when she was undressing in her room? Tell me. I know what you people get up to.'

Boyd couldn't think, the air full of the women's lotion and earth smells.

‘Did you spy on her when she was in the shower?'

Boyd nodded. She already knew. He had watched Perlita in the shower from a crack in the adjoining cubicle as she shrieked and gasped under the gushing water. It was her joyful shrieking and the rush of the water that had called him to her. He remembered the three tufts of black hair, her bouncing titties concentrating his eyes, the fleshy form that was woman, and he could not, did not want to stop looking. Later in the garden, in the sun amid the hot grass scent, he felt a wonderful but troubling excitement.

Pepsi laughed again. ‘You quiet people are the worst. What did you see?'

Poppy had grown tired of the game and had gone off in a rush through the tall grass after a pair of game pea doves.

‘I'm not going to tell anybody. I know what you little boys do. Whatever you tell me is between me and you, okay? When you spied on her, did you see her thing?'

‘Yes,' Boyd replied slowly. He had seen many things.

Pepsi tittered. ‘Do you know what the slave masters did to the slave women?'

‘Beat them,' Boyd said quickly.

‘Don't be stupid! It's what men do to women, don't you know? I'm not making it up. It's all in the books. The slave owner took out his teapot and put it in the slave woman's thing. Then she had babies. Did you know that?'

Boyd shook his head. He couldn't imagine how anybody's teapot could make babies. He only peed with it and knew that when he was bursting he had to go, that Perlita referred to the Vienna sausages at breakfast as “little boys' teapots”, and that Mama always said, ‘Did you wash your teapot?' after his bath if she didn't bathe him herself.

‘It's how babies come,' Pepsi continued. ‘Your mama and papa tell you that babies come from the stork? Well, that's a lie. Nobody comes from a stork. My cousin says that it's just to keep children ignorant. You put your teapot into the woman and a baby grows in her tummy until she has to go to the hospital for the doctors to take it out. My cousin studies biology and told me all about it. Every boy can do it, and every girl. It's how even dogs are born, but they don't have to go to the hospital. One dog gets on top of the lady dog and puts his thing into her, then after a while the lady dog has puppies. Your mama is going to have a baby soon. It's growing in her. But don't tell her what I told you.'

Pepsi drew close to Boyd in the grass. Her presence overpowered him. ‘Show me your teapot,' she said. Her face was expressionless. ‘Show it to me, Boyd.'

It was so sudden and unexpected that Boyd didn't hear it at first, especially as Poppy had reappeared, panting. Pepsi was so close to him that he could feel the hairs on her arms. But it was her eyes, forcing him down, that placed him where she wanted. His eyes fell upon small peeping lizards in the branches above. Their scarlet tongues jerked with astonishment at the scene beneath them.

‘Show it to me,' Pepsi coaxed. ‘I'm not going to tell anybody.'

Her fingers were at his trousers. They were surprisingly cool. Beyond the shade of the trees and the deep grass, out past the thick hedge where the house lay in radiant light, Perlita opened the kitchen door and Poppy, distracted by the possibility of food, raced away for the second time. Pepsi had raspberry breath; she was breathing with lips apart, and Boyd saw the pink of her tongue. Even if he could speak it would be impossible to ask her to stop. The buttons of his trousers were almost undone.

‘Pepsiiii! Pepsiiii!' It was Icilyn at the fence again. ‘Mrs Moore want you. Come now. Pepsiii! Pepsiii! Pepsi, you hear me? Don't be fresh, chile. Come now!'

The last Boyd saw of Pepsi were her slim legs, the wrinkled white of her shorts displaying grass stains, vanishing in the green. He stayed in the grass, in the close quiet, till the wind rustled the leaves, till the factory siren, the
cauchee
, screamed like a pig, lusty and terrible, dispensing the hot steam, finding a voice but not release. And Boyd pondered the many questions in his head but found no answers, only a deep bewilderment.

* * *

Mrs Moore didn't remain much longer at Appleton. At the end of the holidays, she and Mr Moore left with all their furniture piled high in a large Bedford truck, Pepsi waving long into the distance. Barrington wrote to her immediately, a letter of several pages, torn up and corrected a dozen times. Excelsior was the only school for him now, and come September he would take the train to live with the Moores in Kingston. It had nothing to do with Pepsi. Boyd was unruffled. The memory of Pepsi's lips, her lovely girl smell, girl laugh and girl looks, the seductive fearfulness and shocking danger of her were enough for him. He marvelled at the sound of her name,
Pepsi
, and the memory of the songs of the moment, “Under the Bridges of Paris”, “Passing Strangers” and “Honeycomb”, and he could not forget that instant in the long grass when time stood still.

Pepsi did not write back. Barrington returned to pretending to be grown-up, walking about with his hands in his pockets and looking serious with a furrowed brow. He also started to practise
dynamic tension
, something he'd read about in an advertisement featuring Charles Atlas, the body builder, at the back of a Roy Rogers comic.

Mama went back to listening to
Housewives' Choice
while she sewed and leafed through seventy-two pages of
Woman
magazine. But her thoughts were elsewhere.

‘Nothing lasts forever,' she said to a pensive Boyd sitting next to her on the sofa. ‘People come, people go. Everything comes to an end.'

‘Why, Mama?' Boyd asked, feeling the weight of the words.

Mama, seeing his troubled look, tried to restrain herself, but was surprised as the words flowed from her, unstoppable. ‘Well, darling, because it's true. Nothing lasts forever. Mrs Moore and Pepsi were here yesterday and now they're gone. We lived at Worthy Park and now we don't live there anymore. You used to see your Aunt Enid often but now we are too far away. I don't see my mother anymore either. And my father, your grandpapa, isn't alive anymore.' Here Mama stopped, aware that she'd said too much. Boyd said nothing but she sensed the enormity of his thoughts.

‘Is Grandma going to die, Mama?'

‘No, darling, of course not.' It was the only way to reply. She took him to her.

‘Is Papa going to die, Mama?' Boyd's eyes didn't meet hers.

‘No, darling!' Mama cuddled him closer and felt his tension. She kissed his cheeks. ‘Papa will live to a hundred and that's too far away to even think about.'

‘What about you, Mama? And Barrington, and Yvonne? And Poppy, and me?'

Mama gave a forced laugh, cuddled him even closer, and regretted having started the conversation. ‘Don't be silly, my little
peeny-waalie
. No one's going to die. Little children don't die. Everything comes to an end but children are here forever and ever.'

Boyd said nothing more. But the words that mattered so much stuck in his memory.
Everything comes to an end
.
Nothing lasts forever
. And he remembered Grandpa Pratt, who they never saw again.

Mama wished she'd kept her silence, but she'd simply articulated what was uppermost in her mind. She missed Mrs Moore with her floral frocks and her jolly motherly talk and laughter. She missed the coffee mornings and the chance to use her silver service. She missed the social intercourse. And she started to complain that Papa never took her anywhere, not even to the club.

‘What's the hurry?' Papa said.

‘We've been here almost four weeks,' Mama told him, pained.

‘People will think you have nothing to do at home if you're always at the club.'

‘I don't want
always
to be at the club,' Mama replied, frustration breaking her voice. ‘I just want to go there sometimes, meet new people, get out of
this
house
.'

Papa grew tense at once and stopped speaking, hearing the two words that infuriated him. He saw this as a direct criticism of his family management, of his implementation of the Brookeses master plan, which, as far as he was concerned, was receiving his full attention
. Some people would never understand
. He lit one of his Royal Blend cigarettes, breast heaving, dreadfully restrained, reading
The
Daily Gleaner
. The only sound in the room was the vicious snap of the paper as he periodically turned the pages.

An hour later, at his bedroom window, Boyd saw parachuting dandelions fall into the oleander hedge as Pepsi walked away looking over her shoulder at him, her lips hot and beckoning. He also saw Papa get into the jeep and drive off in the direction of Siloah, the nearest town. At sunset, when the night noises were beginning to be heard, when the garden fragrances had drifted into the house, when The Chordettes sang “Eddie My Love” on the radio, Papa returned. He carried a small, mysterious package tied with silver string.