How to Escape From a Leper Colony (10 page)

Violet sat before her sewing machine like a convert and in two days she’d made the bridesmaid dresses all in purple, despite Deirdre’s choice of gold. There wasn’t time to sew a wedding dress at all, so one afternoon Violet and Jasmine went to a boutique. There among the pretty things, Jasmine grew excited despite herself. The dresses were so lovely, she felt like a princess. Maybe she could get married after all. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. She thought that maybe she would talk to Thomas. Maybe he would say something romantic and her chest would swell with love, instead of the doughy feeling that filled her throat now when she thought of having to consummate their marriage.

The dress they chose was too expensive, but they bought it anyway and put it on Mr. de Flaubert’s credit card. With a corset Jasmine’s stomach became totally flat and no one would ever have to know. The gown ballooned into the backseat of the car when they drove it home. The skirt of the dress was wide and fluffy, like a ballerina’s tutu.

6.

And so it is easy for Violet to find Jasmine behind the church, the smoke curling around her like a lover, standing at the cliff, her tutu of a dress flapping about her as she rips it off and releases the corset and finally her belly. By the time Violet grabs her from the edge, the girl is only in her underthings. The wire of the can-can like a guarding loop around her.

Violet holds her daughter until she herself stops crying and the smoke begins to burn her own eyes. She guides her daughter, can-can and all, to the car. They leave the virginal white dress and the useless pillow in pieces behind them. As they are leaving, the fire trucks come screaming. The road is so narrow that Violet has to reverse her vehicle back to the smoldering church—and since they are there, they now have to stay so Violet can answer questions and lie that she has no idea how the church fire began. No idea at all. And she doesn’t even pass an incriminating look at her half-naked daughter sitting like a stone in the passenger seat of the car.

The firefighters don’t address the almost-bride because they think her devastation is too precious to disturb. But really Jasmine is sitting there feeling the thing in her womb churn like a fist of fire. “Another time,” she commands it. And finally the blood burns out of her.

When Deirdre walks into her living room she sees her son and his father ready in their tuxedos. They look at her with their eagerness and excitement, but Deirdre’s face gives something away because Thomas stands as though ready to fight the thing that has hurt his mother. “Sit,” she says. It comes out dry and smoky. The boy sits slowly. Deirdre looks from the father to the son and sees, only now, that the two look unmistakably alike. All she has contributed, it seems, is a slight lightness in color, a slight thinness of the lips, a slight narrowing in the nostrils.

She gestures for them to make room on the couch. “I have something to say.” She takes their hands into her lap. But then all she can say as she looks from one to the other is, “Marriage isn’t everything.”

The future leader of corporations and civic clubs and maybe even the free world stares at his mother as though she is mad, because there she is crying, and he has never seen his mother cry. “What are you saying, Mama? Pop, what is she saying?” Thomas clutches at his groom’s boutonniere until he feels it come loose.

This family has never thrown a Frisbee around together at the beach. They have never sat in a circle and told each other stories. They have never even prayed together except at church. They have never before talked to each other about the divine risks of love.

for Kodjo

We had moved to the mother country from Ghana when I was six. I’d learned English. I dated white girls. And Chinese girls. And one memorable Italian in fourth form. I played football on the junior national team, even though I still didn’t have a British passport. I’d done everything my friends back in Accra talked about over stolen swigs of aktpeteshie. I was going to be a hero. I would play football, representing Ghana in the elite British clubs. Those of us on the junior national team hoped for the World Cup. The chaps looked forward to playing for their nations: England or Ireland. Only a few of us looked forward to playing for places like Cameroon or Jamaica. But we were all mates. Joined by the sport we loved. Singing songs about Margaret Thatcher’s private parts on the bus to games.

Every morning in my parents’ flat in Brixton, I’d wake up before anyone else. Before I brushed my teeth or sipped hot milk, I’d go running in the crisp morning air. Our coach didn’t tell me to do this. I just did it. Sometimes I ran when I didn’t want to. Even when I was sick or tired from studying. I ran. Discipline—I chanted to myself as I passed the kiosks only now beginning to fry johnnycakes for the morning breakfast buyers. Though the smell of dough frying would follow me around town, I was never distracted. We on the junior team were being trained for greatness, but I had a special mission for myself.

My mother didn’t know I ran. Even my nosy know-everything sister didn’t know. My father knew, but not because I told him. Sometimes when I was running out, he was just coming in. We acknowledged each other and he went toward his bedroom, I went toward the front door. He knew discipline. Going to graduate school, working full time. Often, he wasn’t home for dinner. Sometimes when I came back from running, the sweat cold on my neck, he’d be in the living room on the couch. His body deep into the creases, the couch sinking into the floorboards. His shoulders and head leaning into a textbook.

I ran even in the winter. The cold shooting like nails into my nostrils, cracking at the skin of my face. I’d have to rub Vaseline around the corners of my mouth and nose. I ran in the summer and hated it most of all. I had to suck hard on the air. I was sweating before I’d even gone a hundred yards. And still, the air would claw at my insides, burning the place where my throat and chest met. My father always said I should love the summers, being from West Africa. I have always hated summer. I ran because I had to be good. I needed to come to the kitchen table and sit with my parents and sister and know I was the firstborn, the only male child, done good. I wanted my father’s eye of approval. The slap on the chest from my mother’s two hands. Her lovely face, laughing when my team won. My sister asking me for help in maths, calling me Elder Brother, despite her having cursed me for chatting up her pretty friends earlier in the day. Even in Brixton we were always an African family. There was no reason I should contract Canoe Sickness. There was no reason I should find myself emulating a people I had never known. In St. Vincent the Caribs, like Africans, were taken over by the Catholics and other colonizers. Unlike Africans, the Caribs are almost gone.

A Carib often sits in his canoe waiting in quiet, being as still as possible. This is the way they hunt shark. Sometimes the stillness takes over and the man, the husband, the father, the breadwinner realizes that he cannot move. His spear across his lap is sterile despite the poison at its tip. His quiet becomes him and he cannot shout or even whisper. The only way he can fight through this paralysis is by leaning his mind into the sea breeze or breathing into the shadows as they move across the canoe.

Recovering movement takes a long time. Often the sharks have circled and gone. Sometimes the hunters will die of starvation, their entire families starving behind them.

It happened to me. Not in the West Indies, but in London. In my parents’ closet in Brixton, to be precise. For those who suffer from Canoe Sickness, precision is the only way to be saved.

I did do one thing that may have caused the tide to turn against me—made me more susceptible to illness or ill will. I dated Sally Brune. My mother had warned that if I dated a British girl, I might eventually marry one. A British woman wouldn’t know how to comb our young daughter’s hair. My mum would raise her eyes subtly to point out the half-British/half–West Indian girls in the supermarket with knots in their heads. My father said my half-British sons might not respect me. It was hard enough to get sons to look up to their fathers, he said. How much harder if the son had the colonizer’s blood in him? I had dated other British girls before, but Sally Brune was different. A little plump. Blond hair. Brown eyes. A little short with smooth legs that she shaved every day. She was smashing, really. Sally was different because she and I weren’t just talking, I wasn’t just chatting to her. Sally was my girl. I’d asked her after a game—that’s always when I felt most bold. And she’d said yes. Just like that. She started coming to my football practices. Imagine. Hot babe Sally Brune with her little tagalong friends yapping over her head, while she stared out at me.

She wasn’t shy. She was bold, like I like my girls. Sometimes she’d ask why I didn’t run after the ball. Why I let other guys get the goals. I explained to her that I was a defender, not a striker. And she said she figured I was too sweet, too nice and giving. I wanted to tell her I loved her then, but I didn’t. I never did.

My father was rarely at my practices or at my games. But I still respected him. He was a big man. Not so handsome, but he had an air. He was a lecturer by habit and I knew that when he got his PhD he’d be one of those long-winded profs who ramble on and lose people, cracking jokes that the students don’t get. He worked so hard for that PhD. He never got it, though. His visa ran out and they wouldn’t renew it. And we all had to go back to Ghana. But he worked hard. All night out. Mum would leave his dinner in the pot and send us to our studies. She was strong. She raised us, really. It wasn’t until I was already a grown man that I realized she was young as well. That she should have been pursuing dreams, breaking hearts, discovering the world. Not raising us.

Then one evening my father did a weird thing. He came home early. Dinner hadn’t been served. The tomato stew on the stove wasn’t even the dark red my mother said it needed to be before she could add the canned tuna. My sister was putting her hair into curlers. I was trying to study my European history but I kept thinking of feeling up Sally’s tits. Sally wasn’t a slag, she wasn’t letting me go all the way. Which was good for me, ’cause coach warned that shagging before a match could be bad news and I know for sure that some midfielder’s screwing had cost us a game before. So I’m there with Sally’s knockers and Churchill, and my dad comes bursting in.

We’re all surprised. He does a spin. He calls to my mother “Woman, fix my dinner!” in an exaggerated way that makes her kiss her teeth and giggle a little. He calls to us “Offspring!” and he waves his lecturing hand into the air. “Today your paapa is a star!”

There should have been a sound track, someone should have banged a gong. Instead, there was silence. I’d never seen him so emotional. “I finally made it to a film. Children, go to the theatre and watch me. I’ll be there. Representing Africa!” My mother placed a slice of bread and a square of cheese on the table. She smiled boldly and told him to sit. He winked at me as he bit into the sandwich.

I was the eldest so I asked. I didn’t ask well. I didn’t know how to ask. “Paapa. Why were you in a movie?”

“It’s my job, son. It’s what I do to bring money home.” He chewed for a while and we all waited. “I’m an extra. I’m not really a star.” He nodded and chewed. “Perhaps one day I can take the family to a film. Yes?” He looked over at my mother. But her tomato stew had turned dark red. She was dumping in the tuna.

It was a long time before he came home early again.

After he went to bed that night, one of the few times he went to bed before the rest of us, my mother told us that Paapa was working hard. It wasn’t easy finding a job when he wasn’t legally allowed to work. He was in the country on a student visa. All he was supposed to do was study. My sister lowered her eyes. “Can you imagine Paapa out there in the middle of the night, waiting in line in the cold just to get some small part in a foolish movie?” I couldn’t imagine. My sister shook her curlered hair and it made a clattering sound. I felt ashamed of my father, not pity or pride. I looked at my mother to see what she felt. She looked at me and nodded.

My mother was beautiful. I knew that even though I was her son. Not beautiful the way other sons think of their mothers, but beautiful the way a man thinks of a woman. Which is why when Sally told me what she told me, it made my head go loopy for a while.

Our team had just won a friendly and I was feeling strong. I was in my old Puma trainers but my new football boots were slung over my shoulder. I thought maybe today she would invite me to her house to meet her parents, and today I would say yes.

“Your pop said he was in a movie?”

“Yeah. My old man is a joker.”

“Have you ever seen him in a movie?”

“He’s just mamaguying, I think. Giving an excuse for never coming home. He’s studying all the time.”

“So your pops is never home?”

“Nah, babes. But Mums is, so no private place there. Don’t be getting no ideas.”

“So your pop doesn’t even sleep at home?”

“He sleeps all right. But sometimes on campus, you know. He’s a student. Gonna be a doctor of philosophy.”