Shape-Shifter (7 page)

‘My mum was
OK
, as it ‘appens,’ said Winsome, unsmiling, to the probation officer, or rather to the typewriter on the probation officer’s desk which was where the answers seemed to be required. She felt a scornful distaste at the woman’s dowdy clothes. Besides which, she looked like a praying mantis. She was thin, her elbows stuck out and her head was held on one side just like the insect. She had a dry and dusty smile as she said:

‘I’m sure we can help you get over this little bad patch, dear.’

Winsome just wanted to get out of the office. She wanted to get back home to her kids.

Winsome’s two little girls were two of the best-dressed kids in Laverna Court block. They wanted for nothing. And to see that they had everything and that the home was in good shape, Winsome went out kiting. Her boyfriend Junior Watson, baby-father of the two children, provided her with the cheque-books and cheque cards from which he had removed the signature with brake fluid, although the banks were beginning to cotton on to that and making it more difficult to do. In one altercation, Junior had also provided her with an ugly scar on her left upper lip from his switchblade, but Winsome was a big woman and strong and Junior was also left with a bump over his eyebrow that never quite disappeared. Sometimes he stayed the night with her but mostly he returned home to his mother in Shepherds Bush where there was more space. He wore a small diamond in his ear and drove a red Capri, so that was what his friends called him – Red Capri. Winsome’s friend Sonia looked after the kids when Winsome went out to pass the cheques in shops and banks. Junior also provided Winsome with her third pregnancy.

The dream came and went at intervals. Now it included references to the children. One time, the praying mantis detached herself from one of the groups outside the courthouse and approached Winsome, smiling:

‘Don’t worry, Winsome. We’ll look after the children. I will explain to them that you had to be executed.’ Winsome felt embarrassed as she tried to decline the offer:

‘It’s all right, thank you. My friend Sonia …’

‘But we’ve got all the room in the world,’ said the praying mantis.

Suddenly, Winsome’s grandmother appeared, bible in hand, saying:

‘How many times I haffi tell yuh. Don’ speak with duppies!’

Winsome woke up in her Peckham flat. The children had crawled into bed and were asleep on her neck and chest, stifling her. No sign of Junior. She could hear the noise of the speakers still hissing in the front room. She heaved herself out of bed, put on a wrap and went to look. Levi, a lanky Rasta friend of Junior’s, was asleep in a chair. She went to pull the curtains, accidentally treading on one of the full ashtrays on the brown carpet. Levi stirred and stretched.

‘Where’s Capri?’ asked Winsome.

‘’Im gaan,’ Levi yawned.

‘You want some plantain and fish, Levi?’

‘What kinda fish you gat?’

‘Salt-fish.’

‘Thas cool. Is mackeral me nah deal wid. De mackerel dem feed offa dead men.’ He shuddered. Then he took off his tam and shook out his locks. As he began to reach down for the little packet of herb on the floor, two-year-old Chantale waddled through the doorway and began to pull on his locks and grab at the Rizla in his hand. He disentangled her gently.

Winsome went into the bathroom to wash and dress. Junior would probably not come back that day. She regarded her five-month pregnant belly in the mirror. It hardly showed. But she felt sluggish. In the kitchen she poked at the plantain and watched the oil turning a greenish colour in the pan. Levi lounged against the wall behind her:

‘Is when you go back to de court, Winsome?’ he enquired.

‘The day before the baby is due, would you believe it? I don’t think they’ll do me nothing. Just a fine.’ The plantain spat in the pan as she turned it over. ‘I’ll probably drop this one in the dock.’

‘Yuh must watch yuhself in some of dem courts,’ warned Levi. ‘Especially the older courts. They gat certain magic writings on the walls to do harm to black people. Ancient spells fi mek us confuse when we stand in de dock deh.’

Winsome sucked her teeth and prodded at the salt-fish.

‘Fi true,’ he insisted. ‘I see it myself one time. Writings on de wall an’ yuh cyan understan’ it. Babylon writings.’ He took a piece of plantain from the pan with a fork and burnt his lips on it. ‘I don’ wait for de fish, Winsome, I gaan.’ He piled his locks back into the tam and made for the front door. She watched him loping across the yard.

Later that day, after she had signed on at the dole office, Winsome stood in a branch of Mothercare fingering a little pair of white, kid-leather shoes. She held onto the shoes and flicked through a rack of baby smocks with green and yellow appliquéd rabbits on them. She collected up several pairs of blue and white baby-grows, then deftly removed the tags from everything and went up to the counter:

‘Oh, excuse me. I bought these a couple of months ago when I was expecting and I lost the baby and I wondered if you could give me a refund?’

‘Do you have the receipts?’ asked the woman.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ Winsome summoned tears to her eyes. ‘I was so upset at the time I don’t know what I done with them.’

The woman behind the counter became embarrassed. There she sat in this temple of motherhood, this shrine to the pastel glories of maternity, laden with coats and baby pillows, crocheted bootees, festooned with little hanging mobiles, kiddies’ duvets and tiny towelling all-in-ones, surrounded by bright plastic rattles, soft cuddly toys and disposable nappies. And here she was faced with this cumbersome black woman with a badly scarred lip, crying because she had had a miscarriage. She gave Winsome a sympathetic look and went to whisper something in the supervisor’s ear. Returning quickly, she totted up the amount of the goods Winsome had handed her, reached into the till and gave Winsome the sum of thirty-eight pounds. As Winsome went to the door she felt the baby kicking inside her. She took a bus down the high street to another branch of Mothercare and paid for one or two items for the new baby. Then she walked home, picking up some okra and pumpkin from the market and stopping to buy a red cardboard bucket of chicken and chips from the Kentucky Fried Chicken as a treat for the kids.

‘And my client would like nine other offences against Mother-care to be taken into consideration.’

Winsome was hardly paying attention. Although the judge had allowed her to remain seated throughout cross-examination because of the advanced stage of her pregnancy, the weight of her belly was making her back want to break.

Her eyes wandered over the green leather upholstery of the pale wooden benches. From the start of the case the courtroom had felt like an office, an office where everybody else had some reason for being there, some business to do, except her. People walked up to other people and whispered. This was a country full of whisperers. That was one of the odd things about England. Nothing was what it seemed. Everything was camouflaged – buildings especially. Courts masqueraded as offices; blocks of flats were built to resemble multi-storey car parks; their National Theatre pretended to be a prison and the new prisons were disguised as modern college buildings. People too. People concealed their intentions. And the people with power were not the extravagantly dressed ones, the people with power were the dowdy ones. Winsome wondered briefly if Sonia was giving the kids their tea. She had expected to be home by now. The judge, a nondescript man with glasses, was scribbling like a clerk in an invoice department. On the panelled wall over his head was a carved crest mounted on a board the shape of a shield. Woven in and out of crosses, lions and roses were some words that Winsome could not make out. They were written in funny lettering. The first word spelt HONI. Trying to decipher the rest gave her a headache. She had a strange sensation, as if a piece of string was connected from the back of her head to her left eye, pulling it out of focus. Then she heard the judge saying:

‘I sentence you to twelve months’ imprisonment.’

Everyone began to gather their papers together as if the day’s work was over and it was time to go home. Winsome got up and vaguely prepared herself to go home too. A woman in a blue suit was plucking at her sleeve and saying in a kindly tone:

‘Come along, dear.’

Sitting in the green prison van with its horizontally barred windows, Winsome was still unable to grasp what had happened. She somehow felt that the van would drop her off at home on the way to wherever it was going and she would be in time to give the kids their tea. The van threaded its way through the busy main streets of north London and stopped in front of some enormous gates in a high red brick wall. The gates opened and they went through. She and two other women got out. She found herself in an asphalt yard surrounded by more red brick walls. In one of the walls was a small door. Another screw in blue uniform was opening the door with one of the keys from the chain round her waist. She was beckoning to Winsome and beaming at her:

‘It’s all right, love,’ she kept saying, ‘this way, love.’

Dazed, Winsome followed her up some stone stairs to some double doors, the paint round the locks scuffed as if they had been repeatedly kicked. The word ‘
RECEPTION
’ was written on a sign overhead. In the cubicle where she had been told to undress she stood, hugely pregnant, trying to hold the coarse blue dressing-gown they had given her across her belly.

Then her waters broke all over the grey lino.

She lay in the hospital bed. Everything around seemed so white; the starched, white sheets on the bed; the nurses in their crisp white uniforms; the walls with their shiny white gloss paint. Winsome felt uncomfortably aware of her black face against the white pillows.

‘You’re seven centimetres dilated now. It won’t be long,’ said the ginger-haired nurse. Winsome turned her head away. The whiteness hurt her eyes. The pain was like a bad period pain, a long low ache in the back. Then the other pains started, rolling over her like a steam-roller. She was wheeled into the delivery room.

Back in the ward, Winsome slept. At her side, in his hospital cot, slept Denzil. Twelve hours after the birth, the prison authorities would come to take her and the child back to the prison. Some six hours after she had given birth, Winsome was awoken by the auxiliary cleaner bumping her mop against the legs of the bed. She looked up into the smiling, black, bespectacled face of the cleaner:

‘Gal, you gat one beautiful pickney there. Is it a boy?’

Only half awake, Winsome nodded.

‘Is wha’ yuh gwaan call ‘im?’ The cleaner did not wait for Winsome to answer. She approached the head of the bed and said conspiratorially:

‘No more kids for me, no sah! I done wid dat. Me periods dem stop, you know. An’ lemme tell you, it is worse when dey stop dan when yuh gat dem. It was terrible. Terrible. Pain. Pain inna me belly all de time. An’ the blood – it black. An’ full of someting like cornmeal an’ terrible bits.’

Winsome focused her eyes on the clock at the end of the ward. Seven fifteen a.m. In six hours they would come to take her back to prison. The cleaning woman took her mop and continued to talk:

‘Black women strong, yuh know. Me mudda had me in de carner of a canefield and she was back at work a few hours later. I’m sixty-two. And another ting. Our blood is good and red. White women – dere blood is pale and weak and sarta watery. I seen it wid me own eyes in dis hospital.’ She moved off down the ward with her mop and bucket.

Winsome looked over the side of the cot at the pale, brown baby, his flat puffy face crowned with a light black frizz. He was light-skinned now. He’ll darken up later, she thought. More than anything she wanted to take him home, for the two of them to be reunited with Anita and Chantale. The sheet felt wet underneath her. Pulling back the bedclothes she saw a spreading scarlet stain. It was shaped like the poinciana tree in her grandmother’s yard. She sat up and put her legs over the edge of the bed. Her body still felt big and bulky and misshapen and the stitches pulled inside her. She reached into the wooden locker next to her bed and felt for the hospital issue dressing-gown. She put it on. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of her. She picked up Denzil and wrapped him carefully in the cot blanket, keeping a watchful eye on the nurses. Denzil felt limp and tiny and utterly relaxed. Winsome walked gingerly with him to the swing doors at the end of the ward and let herself through. The large corridor was empty. Uncertain how to operate the lift, Winsome began to descend the stairs holding the rail with her left hand, Denzil tucked into the crook of her right arm. One flight round the lift. A second flight and then she was opposite the main exit. A few more steps and she was outside the hospital.

Three-quarters of an hour later, Sonia looked down from her window into the yard of the flats when she heard the engine of a taxi ticking over. Alerted by a phone call, she had the money ready and ran down to pay off the cab. Winsome was climbing out of the cab awkwardly with the scrap of a baby in her arms.

Winsome rested exhaustedly in the low chair by the television, sipping a cup of tea. Her two daughters plucked and nuzzled and clambered over her and their new brother. Sonia stood at the stove frowning through her square-rimmed spectacles and pushing back the shoulder-length beaded extensions on her hair. The action of the judge in jailing Winsome more or less the day the baby was expected had so enraged Sonia that she dismissed the consequences of helping her. She looked through the doorway at the heavy, defeated shape of the woman in the chair:

‘What are we gonna do?’ asked Sonia. Winsome shrugged. Denzil yawned and she automatically loosened the blanket round him so that he could stretch his legs and kick a little. Then she dozed again. From the kitchen window Sonia saw the police car arrive in the yard. Her heart beat faster. The car remained in the yard, its blue light spinning, while two policemen ran up the five flights of stairs to where Winsome lived. It was the flat above Sonia’s. Sonia heard the sound of the door being forced and then the sound of footsteps wandering about over her head. She watched as they left. Winsome slept. Sonia tried to telephone Junior but there was no reply.