Pynter Bender (30 page)

‘And if I don't come back?' he said.

She lifted her head at him. He thought she looked afraid. ‘We'll lose Paso,' she said. ‘We'll lose him for good.'

She told him about Paso, how quickly he could make an impression on a group of strangers. It only took him a few days to pull a group of youths together, organise them, leave them with a leader and direction. Then he would move on. No one could motivate people as quickly as Paso. They called him Breeze. Did he know that? Paso travelled everywhere. And for all the years he'd been doing this, Victor and his people did not know what Paso looked like. But when they passed through a village they knew he had been there. They saw it in the gazes of the children. In the storm of stones that met them. Often enough, Paso was what stood between Sylus and many a quick confession. Which was why they wanted him so badly.

‘That's all he worth to y'all?'

‘No,' she said, nudging a thumb at Hugo's door.

Pynter thought how Paso's words had changed over time. ‘Problems' became ‘protests', then finally ‘The Struggle'. ‘Hope-for-Change' turned to ‘Fight-for-Change'. Now it was ‘The Cause'. ‘Get-togethers' were ‘cells' now. We goin to take the island, he had said, as naturally as if he had been announcing the coming of the rains.

Pynter listened to the soft rumble of the sea against the metal hulls of cargo ships in the harbour below. A hot wind shifted the curtains and deposited the smell of diesel in the room. ‘S'big,' he said, staring at the young woman. ‘All of it.'

Tinelle walked across the room and took up one of the coloured bottles. She held it up to the light, shook her head and put it back. She dropped a record on the spindle of the player and music filled the room. She returned to the bottle and poured herself a drink. The glass glinted in her hand like jewellery. Tinelle seemed transfixed by something she saw in the dancing amber of the liquid. Her stillness was like nothing he'd seen before. The window light was foaming down the nylon curtains and dripping along the front of her dress.

She remembered he was there and threw a glance at him. ‘Brahms,' she said. ‘To hell with Moz and Beet. Brahm's my fella anytime.'

She sipped at her drink and parted the curtains to lean out of the window. ‘Paso suggested something else,' she said. ‘I told him it depends.' She talked with her back to him. ‘It starts small, a little hurt, an insult, the place and the way you're born. Some need you didn't know you had. Add that to all the other hurts and needs of everybody else, read the books that say the things you want to hear. Make your circumstances fit. It becomes ideology.'

She tossed her head and chuckled at the drink.

‘Makes me wonder what the little hurt was that started Karl Marx off. For me it was Selima. We went to the same school together. We laughed about the same things, fought over the same fellas, got drunk at the same parties. She was the first to get arrested for a Black Power salute in front of the police station. Her father refused to pay the fine to get her out. It wasn't a simple thing for him. She brought disgrace on her respectable family. They kept her there for two weeks until I raised the money. Something happened in her head in there. She never told me. I think I know what it was.'

She went to sit on the cushions and lifted a finger at the pictures.

‘Yes, there should be a picture there. I put it up but it disappeared. We never talked about it. They never forgave me for not
having eyes and skin like Hugo. Like it was my fault. Dad even asked my mother if I was his child. After me they stopped. They weren't taking any more chances. The burden of progeny – that's what I call it.'

The music died. She looked up as if the silence had alerted her to something.

‘Why am I saying all these things! I …'

‘You awright,' he said. ‘I – I like your inside, what my auntie call yuh candle. By dat, I s'pose, she mean your soul.'

She looked up at him suspiciously. ‘I wasn't asking for no compliment.'

‘I wasn' giving you none.'

People were already making a dash for home before the curfew fell. The waves of thunder that rose up from cars and minibuses added an extra urgency to the decaying day.

As soon as they reached the road, Tinelle hooked an arm around his. ‘You're my fella,' she instructed. ‘We taking a stroll.'

She named the roads as they passed them, explaining where each one would take him. Her directions always led him back to her house. She told him she would show him seven ways to get back there. By the time she finished, he'd counted twelve, including a narrow culvert that would take him straight down to the harbour. This, she told him, was the real San Andrews: the webwork of drains, hidden steps and alleyways that could take a person anywhere without being noticed by the thundering world above.

Now that they had reached the road beneath the Barracks, she tossed her head and waved back at the soldiers in the passing jeeps. She was smiling at the men and instructing him at the same time about the buildings he should look out for: a yellow church, a reservoir with its tall graveyard of rusting pipes, the culvert that ran along it and a filthy drain that snaked between two rows of houses.

She tightened her arm around his slightly when they reached a white concrete road at the entrance of which a couple of men sat with rifles across their laps. Their eyes skimmed his face, paused on hers, travelled down her legs. The men said something to each other, looked up and grinned at her.

They turned a corner. Tinelle lifted her chin at a small overhang of rocks above the road. ‘Up there,' she said. ‘Turn right at the top and go along the line of trees. S'right in front of you.'

Then she turned to face him suddenly. He noticed a trickle of sweat running down her jawline. ‘This is not a storybook, Pynter. This is real, y'understand? Things can happm t'you up there. Bad things.' She tossed her head. ‘Come, I wan' to go home.'

On the way back, Tinelle held his hands much as a parent would a child, and when they were home she dropped herself onto the cushions.

‘You been lyin to me,' he said. He walked over to the cushions and lowered himself in front of her. ‘S'not your brother, Hugo, who run things round here. Is you.'

She shook her head. ‘S'not so.'

‘Why you lying fo' me?'.

‘It's not like that,' she said.

‘What not like that?'

She told him there was Hugo, but also many others he would never get to meet. They had ignored her sometimes and made mistakes. Serious ones. Now they did nothing without asking her what she thought. ‘Some things become a problem, Pynter, if you put a name to them. Y'understand?'

He told her that he did.

‘Paso said some things about you. I didn't believe him. Now …' She shook her head as if to clear it. ‘Your eyes.' She sighed. ‘I can't decide …'

He took her hand. The lines in her palm came together in a wild, fluid convergence – almost as if someone had scrawled a big brown M there and forgotten to wipe it off. Patty told him
once that all a person was and will ever be was written in the turnings of those lines.

‘Pynter Bender,' she said, ‘I never meet nobody like you.'

‘Me neither,' he said. ‘I – I want to be wiv you.'

She pushed herself up from the cushions. ‘You hungry? Hugo's a good cook.' She stood above him for a while, staring down at his face. ‘I look at you and the word that comes to mind is clenched. What's pushing you, Pynter? Because one thing I know for sure now, this is not only about your friend.'

‘Don' know how to answer dat,' he said, and closed his eyes.

They woke him close to midnight. A candle was burning in a saucer on the glass table.

‘My clothes,' he said.

Tinelle got up, but Hugo had already rushed into the kitchen and retrieved them.

Pynter stripped himself before them, and in that moment of tense uncaring he barely noticed Hugo's awkwardness and Tinelle's open appraisal of his nakedness.

‘You miss a button,' Tinelle said. She unbuttoned his shirt and started all over again.

‘Anything I can do, Pynter?' Hugo was holding out a small flashlight. Pynter shook his head. Hugo closed his hand around it. ‘Nice, er, nice knowing you, man.'

‘Same fuh me,' Pynter said.

Tinelle stepped out into the yard with him. He noticed for the first time that she'd changed her clothes.

‘I'm coming with you,' she said.

‘No,' he said.

‘I – I can help you.'

‘No.' His vehemence surprised him. He saw her wince and felt a sudden prick of contrition.

‘Pynter, I know I shouldn't be saying this, but I – I don't want you to go. That – that's how I feel.'

‘You just say you wan' to come wiv me.'

‘That's different.'

‘I don' unnerstan.'

‘Didn expect you to.'

He turned to go. She called his name. Something warm and easy settled in the space between them.

‘Go on,' she said.

He took the stone steps that led down to the sea and then found the drain that would take him to the reservoir and followed that. His shirt was sticking to his skin by the time he crossed the road they'd walked on earlier. Paso was right, it was like daylight up there, with floodlights blasting down from iron poles high above the buildings.

There was a swamp that stood between him and the fence – a high wooden wall with nails sticking up from the top, and packed so closely they were like the teeth of a ragged comb. Pynter followed the fence around, chose a tree and climbed it.

The buildings below him were long and low. They were laid out alongside each other the way those of his school above the ocean were. He saw the shed a little way off to the left. It was quieter than he expected. The sound of an engine came up from the town below, throbbed the air, then faded. A moon, yellow like a slice of pawpaw, hung above the darkness beyond, which was the ocean.

He did not know how long he sat there, his eyes half-closed and listening, wanting to find a pattern to this silence and finding none. The tree he sat in threw a thick shadow just beyond the fence. He thought he would need to climb much higher. He could not be sure of the distance he was from the ground. He scrambled up, pulled in his breath, held it for a while, and jumped.

He hit the ground hard. Something gave way in his left shoulder. The pain curled him up on the earth. He lay there for a while on the damp grass, and then, his mind a throbbing, hurting drift, he pulled himself to his feet and began to move in fast lurches across
the grass towards the shed. The terrible numbness in his shoulders grew heavier. He lifted the bar with his one good hand and eased himself inside.

Arilon lay face down on the concrete floor, his right hand under his stomach, the other stretched out like a dead snake along his side. Pynter could smell his fear. He grabbed his friend and shook him.

‘S'Pynter, Ari. Let's go.'

He shoved his free hand under Arilon's armpit. It was then that the first crushing wave of pain shot down Pynter's side and froze him. He rocked back, closed his hand on Arilon's arm and tugged.

‘C'mon, fella,' he said.

They were out and running. The floodlights were bright enough to give some colour to the grass. They hugged the shadow of the fence.

Arilon was ahead of him, his upper body almost parallel to the ground. For some reason, he was following the curve of the fence while making urgent gestures at Pynter. It suddenly made sense when Arilon swung into the swamp.

Arilon lowered himself beside the fence. ‘Dig,' he croaked.

Pynter barely heard him.

They worked against the stinking water that seeped into the opening they created with their hands. The pain and the smell of the rotting mud made Pynter choke on his breath. ‘Can't go no faster,' he said.

Arilon did not answer him. He threw himself flat on his stomach and with his elbows tucked against his side, began slithering head first under the wire. Pynter followed him.

Then they were out and running again. Arilon, in whichever direction his terror took him. ‘You goin nowhere full-speed,' Pynter growled. ‘I come fo' you, so you follow me, y'unnerstan?'

On their backs amongst the pile of reservoir pipes, they filled their lungs with night air. Arilon cradled his hand against his
stomach. The throbbing in Pynter's left shoulder rocked his body back and forth. From time to time, a whimper came from Arilon like the soft mewling of a pup. Pynter looked up at the moon, then down at the quiet spread of buildings below them. A sudden wind slipped into the rusting pipes and made them hum.

‘Sylus,' Arilon said, ‘I goin to kill 'im, Pyntuh. Fuh sure. One day…'

Pynter turned towards him. ‘What Sylus make you say?'

He had seen the terror on Arilon's face when he rolled him over in that shed. He saw how far his friend was already gone, and the desperation with which he'd dug his way out through the swamp mud and set off in a blind and drunken plunge through the trees. Arilon reached up to his shoulder and tore the sleeve of his shirt away; he tried to grip the cloth between his teeth but he could not do it. Pynter took the strip and wrapped it around the damaged hand.

‘Sylush wanf Pfasho, Fynter. Wanshim vaad,' Arilon said. He was touching his lips with such tentative strokes it looked like he was patting air. ‘Y'hear me, man?

‘Sylus want Paso bad. Dat's what you say?'

‘Like de Devil want your soul.'

The growl of jeeps from the road above pulled them to their feet. Headlights swept the trees. Arilon pressed himself back down between the piles of rusting metal.

‘We awright,' Pynter said. ‘We awright, man. Let's go.'

Pynter did not see Tinelle on the steps until he collided with her knee.