Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw

Patricia Mohammed

Mi Dawta, Mi Dawta

Gwen standing quiet quiet in de front porch as Jessica come in from work. Blood red hibiscus petals and butchered purple bougainvillea making a rough mat on the tiled floor. Gwen have the kitchen knife in she hand, the sharp sharp one she use to cut up goat meat and clean the kingfish that Jessica buy from Papine market.

“What happen here, Gwen? Someone come in? Somebody try to attack you?” Jessica standing there, looking around her house now in shreds, curtains hanging like loose bandages on twisted rails. Lime green pools of Squeezy splashed about on the cedar floor, a trail of broken glass from room to room.

Gwen like she not even there. Her eyes empty like burnt out coals. Her mouth like a Salvador Dali clock rim.

She had come to the house as a helper two years ago. Jessica used to leave notes for Gwen to do the chores and realize one evening, when she find half the meal unprepared, and a scrawl, Mis Jes de bean am bad, that Gwen coulda barely read or write. But Gwen was honest and kind and hardworking, a woman of forty-two who look fifty-nine. Jessica like how Gwen would make her cocoa tea with fresh mint from the garden. She massage Jessica head with olive oil and vetivier for an hour one morning and the headache just gone away.

Gwen like working for people who appreciate her, not the kind that shovel work on she back like she still some slave in a canefield. She prefer people from away who had manners and brought-upsy. Jessica was from foreign, not from Jamaica. Mis Jess treat her good.

For two years now, Monday to Friday, Gwen cross a bumpy track from her galvanize hut to the nearest bus stop on Irish Town hill. Then she take the maxi-van down to Halfway Tree, standing room only this hour of the morning, the pusher shouting “smaal up yuhself, smaal up yuhself” as he shove another body into the back, then a next overcrowded ‘smaal up yuhself’ bus up to Harringdale Crescent. The bus don’t even stop in front of Jessica house, she have to get out at Liguanea and then a five minute walk in the morning sun before she get to the front door. She raise three children this way, working in people house since she turn thirteen. The children dem father never last. The first two stay around long enough to see them pickney born: two boys Jojo and Tobias. She glad to see the back of number one. He use to ‘buse her. The second child father had religion but that never stop him from leaving. She manage to get the two son away from trouble early by sending them to live with a relation in de Bronx that she never visit sheself. She eh hear from them lately, but as far as she know they living and she feel she do her duty by them. Babylon bullets na get time to gun them down in Tivoli Gardens.

The last child father, before she tie she belly, was Bobsieboy. He stay longer than the rest. Maybe that is why Mavis come out so good. She make Mavis go to school and stay far away from boys. Mavis Petersfield, primary school pupil teacher now, boarding by respectable Missis Kent in Newtown, wearing white blouse and bright blue pleated skirt and black closeup shoes everyday, not like Gwen who still wearing washout ganzi and slippers. Gwen would talk to sheself proudly as she scrub another pot to cook the rice and peas for Jessica and Cyrus dinner. She would think proudly, while the turning the pot - Mavis Petersfield: a school mistress one day in Campion college. Mavis, her dawta, who would keep her company in old age. Mavis visit her every other Sunday with cake and sometimes chicken and chips from KFC. Gwen had manage to get Mavis away from the Don in the village two years ago the day after he cut up Mavis hand with a switchblade because she wouldn’t go with him. Gwen send Mavis to live uptown so her dawta could be safe.

The two policeman come early that morning. Gwen still asleep in her house, dreaming of reading the Bible one day when Mavis find the time to teach her. She didn’t cry when they show her Mavis blouse and skirt and ask if she could recognise it. She take it from them quiet quiet. “Like somebody crack a bottle of Red Label wine all over the chile clothes”, she say as if talking to herself. Gwen looking over the clothes like Mavis inside it, the white blouse dirty red and the blue skirt turn mauve in some place. “Mavis uniform need washing” she said. She tell them they must leave it with her. She push the wet clothes into the bag she take to work and rouse sheself up after the policemen gone. She had to get to Jessica house to finish the scrubbing she left yesterday. She took the two bus as usual and find her way to the house in Harringdale Crescent. She walk into the kitchen. Then she pick up the knife and went to work.

fiction

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw

Time

In the empty car park, protected by a fortress of hills from the Paramin valley, the parked flatbed truck is full of neat mounds of mangoes, oranges, pawpaw, portugals, watermelon, pommes de cytheres, and avocados. Her lanky fruit man stands in front of the scales in his usual black tee shirt and faded Levis, a machete in his belt, and the usual wry smile. He doesn’t turn to look at her when she says “good morning”, he seldom responds, focuses on weighing slightly bruised bananas for his customer, a thin old man with stark white hair that looks like a shimmering halo around his dark brown face. The old man smiles at her, pays, takes his bananas, wishes them both a good day in that old-time way, and walks towards the Paramin hills. The old man disappears as he turns the corner, fading like a shadow or a ghost.

The fruit man turns to her; it’s her turn now and for the first time she notices that his index finger is missing from his left hand. It’s strange that she’s never noticed that brown nodule before now; perhaps she had always imagined a finger. The fruit man looks at her without saying a word, she has already selected a heap of Julie mangoes and two avocadoes. He takes them from her, slightly brushing her fingers, puts them in a bag and tells her how much she owes. The transaction is never filled with wasted words or small talk, it is never unpleasant. Her fruit man has the look of someone who knows things about this world that she may never know, he has all the answers, all the secret codes, powers she will never possess in this life or the next. As she puts her wallet back into her handbag she has to stop herself from staring at the missing finger.

Best lunch in the world, her father used to say, Julie mangoes, and avocadoes. All she needs now is something to read because she finished a book last night, it was at the top of the heap, the author, a Jamaican novelist. A critic had described the prose as “athletic” and she liked that. Lean, athletic, sounded kind of sexy. She can’t think of one other book in that box in her new apartment that she wants to read, so she decides to pass by the book shop after the fruit stand.

The hotel car park is empty, so she parks next to the main entrance; the clouds are heavy, grey and angry, - angry clouds – that might work in her poem, so she makes a mental note. She has been working on two poems for her three week creative writing course; “Rain” is the working title of the first poem, but she still isn’t sure about the other one.

Walking into the tiny bookshop, the smell of tobacco, a nice, sweet pipe smell- it made her think of her father again, he smoked pipes. But “nice” is not a good word, she should try to find better words, less common words, “musty” or “woodsy”, much better words. The foreign lady is there, with her leathery puffy skin, her smoker’s yellow hands, hunched over some book hidden below the counter. This foreign lady is often in the book shop but she is not the owner, the foreign lady is helpful but not as friendly as the owner. Ms Foreign Lady doesn’t bother to move from where she is sitting. But no help needed, she knows these shelves well, knows all the spines, all the images on the covers, she can spot a new edition right away. Browsing the international authors shelves she can’t find one title that she hasn’t seen before, but the foreign authors are always few and far between; the book store specializes in Caribbean books. On these shelves there is only one new poetry title, Words from the Heart, the siropy title makes her move immediately to the novels, two new ones from Jamaica and then the usual suspects: Kincaid, Lovelace, Naipaul,etc... The book idea is beginning to fade fast. “Okay thank you” she says to Ms Foreign Lady who mumbles something, barely looking up from her book.

August vacation, no traffic around the Queen’s Park Savannah even at lunch time, - terrific- she thinks, a word her father liked to say. But as if on cue the clouds burst terrifically and the terrific rain begins to pelt down on the windshield, mixed with the heat, the roads have a layer of steam- like fire and water. Thank goodness the apartment bedroom is air-conditioned; when she gets home she plans to eat her mangoes on the floor in the cool room but not before she makes a vinaigrette for the avocadoes. After the meal she’ll drink some drowsy cough medicine (she finished all of the wine the night before) and hopefully pass out for a few hours. There are a few boys in uniform braving the rain as she passes her favourite coconut cart opposite the Queen’s Royal College. Her cell phone starts to ring. It’s somewhere in her bag, she doesn’t try to find it to ID the number and it doesn’t ring a second time but she hears the blip of a text. He must be suffering, good, let him suffer, he’s a dog, a frigging cur. She is getting stronger and stronger every day, every hour. And it has been three weeks since she last saw him. If only it wasn’t raining she would stop for a coconut water, just to kill time, these days she has too much time to kill and her TV died in the move.

Her brother left for New York last Sunday; she feels as though he has taken a good chunk of her courage in that new fancy four wheel suitcase of his. He made her promise at the airport not to go back. “Never liked that jackass,” her brother always referred to him as that “jackass.” “Never trusted him, we see things, we can spot a jackass.” She knows he’s right but she wants to believe he is just being a big brother, protecting her, trying to control her life and her lovers even from his posh Soho apartment in New York. She wishes now that she never confided in him, but the last week had been so horrible, so humiliating she had broken down right in front of him. “Come and stay with me for a while.” Her brother had said, as she was crying across the table from him in a new fancy New York like Italian bistro in the middle of Port-ofSpain. She couldn’t stop the tears even when the waiter brought the meal but her brother didn’t look even slightly embarrassed, he poured her some water and said it again “come up and let me take care of you for a while”.

never really taken her writing seriously. There were no writers, no artists in the family, the family business was business. Her father was the only one who encouraged her, told her to do what made her happy. “Yes, but you can write anywhere can’t you?” “It’s a course, face to face, live … ” “I never understand how you teach writing. ” “You don’t teach it’s more like a … never mind. ” End of conversation. Her higher self knew he meant well but right then and there he was upsetting her. He called later that night, after his flight to New York: “Remember what we spoke about don’t go back. That jackass is no good.”

Now that she’s finally in her apartment with the mangoes and the avocadoes the zest is gone. She isn’t hungry anymore, just wants to crawl into bed. The call wasn’t his; the text was from the telephone company offering her more deals. Why won’t she give this up? The jackass is fine without her, absolutely fine and not alone, probably with that little bitch from the office. And this depression thing, this frigging crying all the time is so tiring, so boring. It’s been three weeks and nothing. She has not heard from him, will not hear from him, he has moved on. Last week she thought she spotted him once with that skinny office bitch around the Savannah stopping for coconut water, but it wasn’t him or the skinny bitch and this frigging August vacation is torture.

Nights are bad enough but the day, the day is worse. She hates when she has to face everyone and say something to them, something that does not give away how awful she feels and looks. Up until last Saturday, she used to work for a lady who sells soap in a stall at a place called The Green Market. She got this job a month ago after chatting with a friend in a yoga class. The friend told her that this lady needed someone to work in a stall selling mainly soaps and other toiletries; artisan kind of stuff. So for the past three Saturdays she’s found herself next to organic people selling organic this and that, she usually spends most of the morning ( because she is supposed to be there from 7am to noon)talking to an Italian- Trinidadian couple who make pesto from everything besides basil. But then last Saturday everything changed, she arrived late, too much to drink the night before, and because of her stale drunken state, or because the owner looked a little irritated at her for being forty minutes late, she decided to quit. She simply told the owner that she didn’t want to work for her anymore, and furthermore the soap business was a waste of time. “Who the hell is going to pay sixty frigging dollars for a bar of soap? No offense I mean I get the local, organic, artisan thing but it’s just soap in the end, just frigging soap that you can buy for ten dollars in the grocery.” Then she went on to confront the owner about the pittance she was being paid, barely enough to buy a chicken roti and a Coke for lunch. The owner reminded her that she was working on commission and that she had only sold three bars of soap in three weeks. But that was basically the end of that. A dead end if there ever was one. The owner had to be one of the calmest people she had ever met, and it had nothing to do with the owner being Rastafarian. The woman was just zen. So Ms Zen calmly handed her a blue hundred dollar bill and told her thank you. No more pushing soap on a Saturday morning, even though she really wasn’t pushing it on anyone. But it just meant another empty day to get through. It wasn’t the money, she had money, sometimes she pretended to her friends who really didn’t have any money that she was as broke as they were, but she wasn’t broke she just lived like she was; a kind of broke- writer image. In the last few years she had inherited money from the sale of two properties in Tobago that belonged to a great aunt. Her brother immediately asked her if she wanted to invest in stocks, he could tell her which ones, even the local stock market would be better than just putting the money under her bed which was not a metaphor, if she had a safe big enough that is exactly where she would have put all of it. But even though the interest rates at the bank were a joke she still put it in the account to add to the money she had gotten from their parents who had passed away within three years of each other.

When they were children she had made a pact with her brother that they would never sell their family home, they had loved it so much but the in last few years, caring for ailing parents had cleared out much of the good childhood memories and so when their father followed their mother they decided to sell. Her brother the businessman lost to the son who couldn’t walk into a house that now only reminded him of what was no longer there. Time, all this talk about how precious it was, time was a frigging curse, time on her hands and nothing to do before the end of August, when she would go back to the private school where she taught art to five year olds. These children that had imaginations beyond the borders of the page, beyond what she could ever offer them.

1:00, 1:20, 2:23, 3:15, 5:30, 6 and so it goes, darkness to dawn. Close eyes, open eyes, see red eyes of clock, monster clock, with the numbers looking back, get up, walk around, go to bathroom, back to bed, lie down, close eyes and try to remember when was the last sleeping pill? 11? 12? Or was it when she turned off the television at 10:45 hoping, even praying for one night, just one frigging night of unbroken sleep. Insomnia, insomniac, restlessness, wakefulness, sleeplessness, all of that but she was suffering from loss, “lostfulness,” that should be a word, she’d coin it, “lostfulness”, meaning those suffering from loss, a loss of any kind, that was why she couldn’t sleep and she was sure that there were many others who suffered from the same malady. One night, or two or even three would have been fine; she had never slept well even when he was next to her, even when he massaged her naked body from head to toe. He had cursed her with his frigging obeah; put a curse on her so she would never find another peaceful night of sweet sleep. The pills sometimes gave her a couple of hours, never more, but it was never a good sleep and she would always get up groggy, foggy. The nightmares had stopped, for now at least. The worst night was not first, or the second but the third night after he left her. That night alone in the new apartment and without her girlfriends for comfort, she tried to fall asleep after a few glasses of wine then finally on the recommendation via text of her best friend she had two shots of Grey Goose. Blame it on the vodka that led her into a nightmare about her brother. They were in their old family home, she was on her parent’s huge bed when she heard her brother’s voice calling for her to come and help him. She got up quickly and went to the door to find her brother stooping on the landing at the top of the stairs, he looked stunned and scared and kept saying he didn’t know what had happened, when she looked closer and tried to reach out to help him to get up she realized that his arms were missing and where there were supposed to be arms there were just stumps and part of his legs were missing as well, cut off at the knees,