Shape-Shifter (6 page)

‘Mr Evan took a spirit out of Selma.’

‘Did you see him do it?’ The boy nodded and came and crouched on the ground in the shade under Millie’s house. He started to describe what had happened in a monotonous little voice:

‘First he did light a sulphur candle. Then ‘e lock the door and block up the key-hole with a rag. Then ‘e look for all the cracks in the windows and block them up too. All the time, Selma gruntin’ like a hog in a cart.’

Millie tried to imagine Selma like that – Selma, who always managed somehow to emerge from that black pit of a house immaculately turned out, smart as paint. Jonjo continued:

‘Then he put healin’ oil on she hair and knotted the hair so the bad spirit can’ get out that way. ‘E pour oil in she ears too. Then ‘e question the spirit an’ ask it why it troublin’ Selma. Thas when I start feel sick but they wouldn’t let me open the door and come out in case it got out with me. So I jus’ sit under the table an’ cover me eyes wid me hands. When I peep out, ‘e holdin’ a bottle to Selma’s ear. ‘E said some things and call the spirit into the bottle an’ Selma start to jerk. Then ‘e put the stopper on the bottle. Thas when they let me out. I hear him tell Mummy ‘e goin’ put it in cement and throw it in the river.’

‘How is Selma?’ Millie needed to know for sure if this business worked.

‘All right. I tink she sleepin’.’

Jonjo wandered off a little dazed. Millie waited nervously for Mr Evans to come out. It was mid-day. The heat was unbearable. Not many people were out. Eventually, the door of Selma’s house opened just long enough to let Mr Evans out before banging shut again. He paused to wipe his brow and the back of his neck with a white handkerchief, then set off down the street. Millie followed him. Across Main Street. Past the church. Up Crab Street and through a network of little streets that led down to the Backdam. Once or twice Millie tried to call out to him but her voice wouldn’t work.

He lived at the end of a row of old slave logies on the Backdam. She did not want to enter the house. People said the walls were covered in chicken blood and the tap dripped human blood. As he reached his front door, Millie managed to call out:

‘Mr Evans.’ He turned. ‘Mr Evans can you help me please?’

‘Come in, chile.’ He went in through the door. She had no choice but to follow him.

The tiny room was spotlessly clean and neat as a pin. From an armchair in the corner an old black woman, smoking a clay pipe, nodded and smiled. Mr Evans put down his briefcase, lowered himself into the other armchair and leaned back expansively like a bank manager greeting a client:

‘What can I do for you?’ Millie’s lips felt dry and split:

‘I ain’ havin’ no luck an’ me teeth need to fix. I gat fifty-three dollars. Can you help me, please?’ Her voice sounded like a goat bleating. He regarded the young girl, beads of sweat on her upper lip:

‘You tink someone is doin’ you harm?’

‘I don’ know,’ said Millie miserably.

He rose suddenly and went over to a small cupboard. Out of the cupboard he took four eggs intricately tied with black thread:

‘I tell you what you must do. See these eggs? Put these eggs under where you sleep tonight and bring them back to me in the morning. That way we find out someting.’ He pocketed the money Millie offered and muttered a polite goodbye.

Excitedly, she picked her way past the sluggish waters of the Backdam, holding the eggs carefully.

That night, after dark, she crept down and placed the four eggs by the timber post directly under her bedroom. She glanced over at Selma’s house. It was ominously quiet. She covered the eggs with an upturned colander so that no animal could get at them and placed a tin can on top of the colander so that she would hear the noise if somebody tried to move it. In the morning she was up, dressed and out before her mother had stirred. The eggs were still there.

Mr Evans was yawning and rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he took the eggs from Millie. There was no sign of the old woman. He broke the eggs one at a time into a shiny aluminium pot. In each egg there shone a glistening sharp needle. Mr Evans pointed them out to Millie:

‘Someone put these under where you sleep to do you harm. The eggs has sucked them up in the night. Your luck will change up now.’

Millie hovered in the doorway. It didn’t seem enough. She wanted him to do something more. Sensing her dissatisfaction, he added: ‘One more ting. Next time you pass a Congo pump tree – mek sure seh you touch it. Lay your hands ‘pon it. Wish and pray to it. Good mornin’.’

Millie returned home with a feeling of anti-climax in her stomach. Her teeth were no nearer being fixed and she had taken her mother’s money and spent it. Over the next few days she had a gnawing fear that her mother would count the money and find some missing. She became irritable and grumpy. She kept examining her teeth in the mirror. One day she met Jonjo in the street and asked him about Selma.

‘She
OK
now. ‘Cept she don’ speak no more.’

Millie fretted and fretted. Finally, she went down with a full-blown fever. Her throat was painful and swollen. Her mother fluttered over her with prayers and rubbed her neck with camphorated oil at night. Over a fortnight passed.

On the first day that she felt properly well, Millie sat out on the front steps. It was cloudy. She was still weak. Her mother brought her out a warm cherry drink and some pieces of sugar cane stripped and cut in three-inch lengths. She bit into the woody stem and sucked the sweet juice letting it run down the back of her throat. At first she did not see it. A piece of tooth sticking in the sugar cane. Then she gave a cry and put her hand to her mouth. She picked out the piece of jagged tooth, dashed the plate away and ran to the mirror with her hand still over her mouth. What she saw was like looking into the gates of hell itself. There was a gaping black hole where half her front tooth had come away.

She was running. Down Main Street. Past King Street. Out of the town. Somewhere where nobody could see her. The bush. She wanted to hide deep in the bush, pull it round her. Thunder rumbled over the creek. A short burst of rain made her shelter under the wooden porch of a house. Then she was running again. Instead of going over Canje Bridge, she plunged down the banks towards the creek itself. Crying now, she stumbled along the muddy tracks by Canje Creek. Turkey grass and razor grass slashed at her legs. The piece of tooth remained clenched in her fist.

She came to an enclosed patch of land, bound on one side by the creek and on the other three sides by a tangle of tall bushes, bamboo, cane and wild eddoe plants. Someone had set fire to it to clear the land for planting. Everything was charred and burnt. The blackened stumps of one or two trees stuck up out of the scorched trash on the ground, a burnt mess of coconut leaves and awara tree leaves; a desolate, incinerated place. Millie flopped down on a boulder. After a while the crying stopped, leaving a dull sensation of misery. She stared at her wet brown feet in their flip-flop sandals. The luminous orange nail varnish that someone had told her punks wore in England was flaking off her toes. She bent down and fingered the leaves of a sleep-and-wake plant that had sprung up by the boulder. The leaves curled up slowly as she touched them. The massy protuberance on the tree trunk next to her was an ants’ nest, so she moved to another rock. There she stayed, motionless, head bowed. An hour passed. Tree-frogs were croaking after the rain. Raindrops glistened on the wild eddoes. Slowly, the sun travelled across the sky, gleaming balefully now and then from behind great grey clouds. A chicken-hawk flew down onto one of the burnt tree stumps. It surveyed the scene, turning its head sharply this way and that, then flapped off over the bushes.

It began to grow dark. The waters of Canje Creek turned a glittering black. Millie shivered at a gust of wind. She got up slowly like someone stiff with rheumatism. Putting the fragment of tooth in her pocket, she bent and plucked some black sage to use as soap. She crushed it in her hand and trod through the marshy undergrowth at the creek’s edge. There, she freshened her hands with the soapy substance from the plant and rinsed her face and hands with creek water. As she turned to clamber back, she looked up and drew in her breath with a gasp.

On the opposite side of the patch of land stood a gigantic Congo pump tree, its black silhouette outlined sharply against a moving backdrop of grey clouds. The tapering trunk lacked all foliage until the very top where the branches splayed out flat as a pancake. Mesmerised by the sight, Millie’s eyes remained fixed on the magnificent, stately tree. It was without doubt the king of trees, ancient and powerful. It was as though it had sprung up behind her while her back was turned at the creek. Her heart was thumping. The wind rustled the bamboo and cane hedges as she ran across the burnt scrub to place her hands on the cool trunk. She bent her head back to look up once more at the top of the tree and went giddy at the dizzying height of it. Leaning her cheek against the trunk she prayed and wished for everything to come right. After two or three minutes, she fished the piece of tooth out of her pocket, scratched away some earth from the base of the tree and buried it.

Without a backward glance and feeling more at peace than she had for weeks, Millie left the patch of land and walked home.

Christine, hands on hips, waited for her at the top of the steps:

‘Is where you been, Millie?’ her shrill voice scolded. ‘You din’ pick up Joanne from school. Two hours she waitin’ there. Mummy had to leave her church meetin’ to fetch her an’ the teacher sittin’ there with a face like a squeezed lime.’

Millie opened her mouth and showed Christine the gap-tooth. Christine was shocked into silence and then remembered:

‘Oh, there’s a letter for you from England.’

Millie opened the letter and screamed with joy. Folded in carbon paper just as she had instructed were two United States twenty dollar bills, enough to pay the dentist’s bill and replace her mother’s money. She flung her arms round Christine, who reeked of onions, and they danced together on the greyish floorboards. In the bedroom doorway, Mrs Vernon stood smiling, flourishing a letter of her own:

‘Praise the Lord,’ she said. ‘The timing belt is on its way.’

As Mrs Vernon said grace that evening, Millie cast a sly look up at the pale, impotent picture of Christ on the wall. She knew without a shadow of doubt that it was the Congo pump tree that had worked her good fortune. Mrs Vernon brought out the bottle of Banko that was kept for special occasions and proposed a toast thanking the Good Lord for their fortune. Millicent Vernon raised her glass and pledged her secret allegiance to the Congo pump tree.

IT WAS THREE YEARS AFTER WINSOME ARRIVED IN
England from Jamaica that the dream started to come. She was fourteen and the dream was always more or less the same.

She dreamed she was in England and that she had been sentenced to death. She appeared to be free, standing on the pavement outside a court somewhere in a country town. Small knots of white people stood chatting like parents after a school function. They were always extremely kind to her. In one of the dreams a man drew up beside her in his car. He put his head out of the window and said helpfully:

‘Hop in and I’ll give you a lift to the gallows. It’s not far out of my way.’ Winsome felt cold wet patches of sweat under the arms of her dress:

‘No. I jus’ walk there. Tank you.’ Her fear seemed inappropriate amongst such pleasantly relaxed people. A taboo caught her tongue and forbade her to say how she felt. Sometimes a woman with two yappy dogs at her feet would apologise for the dogs’ behaviour, as they bounced up at Winsome’s legs, and then turn back to the conversation with her friends. In the dream Winsome was always dressed the way her grandmother used to dress when she went to church in Clarendon; a navy-blue straw hat pinned down on her springy hair, low-heeled shoes with no stockings, a pale blue crimplene dress, white gloves, and she clutched a navy-blue plastic handbag. The white people round her were dressed casually in loose blouses and skirts and sandals, making her feel over-dressed. On a wave of polite chit-chat she was carried inexorably to her execution, unable to protest, unable to shout, silenced by the informal friendliness of those who surrounded her. The dream had variations but the fact that she was to be killed never varied.

The last thing Mrs Hyacinth Nevins had wanted was for her daughter, Winsome, to come to England despite frequent sentimental references to the longed-for reunion with her first-born child. When the letter arrived with the Clarendon postmark, her heart sank. The spidery writing confirmed her fears. Her mother could no longer cope with Winsome and wanted to send her to England. The reality of her daughter’s imminent arrival caused a mild fury to fizz up in her. She stood with the letter in her hand. She looked at the orange and black patterned carpet in the front room of her council flat. She inspected the glass-topped coffee table adorned with a profusion of acrylic crocheted doilies and she studied the glass-fronted cabinet crammed with china shepherdesses, little figurines and carefully arranged red glassware. Hardest of all she stared at the posed photograph of her three British children by Mr Maurice Nevins that rested on the mantelpiece over the gas fire. She bit her lip and tried to remember what Winsome looked like. All she could remember was a dark, sullen baby who squatted on her knee heavily like a bullfrog about to leap off and flop untidily in another part of the room. She went into her bedroom and sat on the pink candlewick bedspread.

‘Jus’ when we get on our feet,’ she said out loud. Then she cussed. She cussed the day she had ever met Winsome’s ‘dyam no good fader’. She cussed her spindly-writing mother for becoming too frail to raise Winsome, and finally she cussed the dark lump of her own flesh who was about to descend on her life and disrupt it.

Years later, dressed to the nines, Winsome sat in the shabby offices of the Probation Service in Southwark. She was asked about her relationship with her mother. She remembered her mother yelling: ‘Yuh too like yuh dyam no good fader. Stubborn little pickney.’ She remembered her younger brother and sisters teasing her over her Jamaican accent and other children in the playground taunting her until, cornered in the playground by the drinking fountain, she had fought. She remembered telling her mother that she wanted to be a model and her mother crinkling up her eyelids, thick with lizard-green eyeshadow, and saying, ‘Yuh ugly ting. Yuh too hugly!’