Millar The Whale House and other stories

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84523-310-5
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

A boy is killed on a government minister's orders as part of his mission to clean up the country and others made complicit must explore their consciences; a youth gets ready to play his role in the country's lucrative kidnap business; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament: Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, but so too are the lives of those with private griefs: a woman mourning the still-birth of her child; a mother grieving the loss of her breasts and trying to protect her children from the knowledge of her cancer.The stories in this collection range across Trinidad's different ethnic communities; across rural and urban settings; include the moneyed elite (and the illicit sources of new wealth) and the poor scrabbling for survival; locals and expatriates; the certainties of rational knowledge bumps up against the mysteries of the unseen and the uncanny.What ties the collection together are not only the characters who thread their way across different stories, and the intensive focus on women's lives, but Sharon Millar's achievement of a distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic; a keen sense of place and her ability to bring it to the reader's eyes. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for both generous humour and the possibility of redemption.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Millar, Sharon

Leseproben

Isobel

The night Drew had woken her to tell her about the boy there was no more lovemaking. She had taken a sleeping pill to fall asleep again. She woke groggy and waited for him to go to work before she got up. The hot water beating on her head when she showered cleared her thoughts. She would find the boy’s mother and tell her the terrible thing her husband had done. She wore a comfortable pair of shoes; it would take an hour to walk to the hospital where she guessed the woman would be. Drew had taken the car that morning and he would be expecting her to stay at home.

She walked through the cows that grazed under the branches of the large saman trees. The passion fruit vine on the fence that separated their house from the banking complex was heavy with fragrant globes. She walked past the guava trees on the hillock that overlooked the houses of the rich on the coast. From here she could see the hospital on the other side of the savannah, up the street and left off the highway. She timed her breath to her stride, as if she were pacing herself for a long run. The road was quiet, the school rush over, her girls sitting safely in their classrooms; Robbie was having his morning fruit at his grandmother’s home. Behind her, a truck roared up the highway, gears grinding as it picked up speed. She walked faster trying to outpace the memory of Drew’s face. He dropped the children to school every morning, letting her sleep because he knew she liked to read late into the night. He’d probably kept them quiet this morning, packing Robby’s bag and putting Mara’s hair in a ponytail.

She broke into a short run, her breath labouring, as the truck thundered past her, leaving her with a lungful of diesel fumes.

The woman was where she expected. She’d noticed her a few days before, the day she’d dropped Drew to work. She’d seen the violence in the way he’d grabbed the woman’s hand. This had so shocked Isobel, she’d braked the car and called out to him. Now it made sense. And this was how she knew the woman would be here, sitting on a bench outside the mortuary.

They have him, Isobel said when she sat down next to the boy’s mother. They have him inside. I’ll come with you to get him. Come we will go together. She was ready to face Drew. There was no need to tell the woman what had happened; she would be given a sealed casket. She told Carmelita to say that she would return with a lawyer if they did not produce her son. Drew let them into his office, his face even. Had she expected something more dramatic, a scene perhaps or some form of repentance? Instead his quiet acquiescence frightened her. She’d been sure that she had the upper hand, but she’d underestimated him and now it was she who was forced to consider her position. What had she gambled with this move, what must she be prepared to surrender?

The casket is sealed, he told Carmelita. These discrepancies are quite normal. We were due to call you today. I am so sorry for your loss.

Isobel was thrown by his poise, shocked by his ability to lie so easily. This shifting of gears revealed a stranger hidden inside her husband. When she was a child, she’d once slept the whole night with a garden lizard under the blanket. It had made her feel ill to think of the lizard heating up from her warmth.

The casket will go to the funeral home, she heard him say, I’m signing the papers to release the body to the funeral home. You can bury him from there.

When he came home that evening, they did not speak for three days. On the third night, he woke her in the middle of the night.

“Do you know what the fuck you have done?” he asked her. “Do you? You’ve put us all in danger.”

“I don’t want to know, Drew.” She kept her face averted. How much was she prepared to give up? Her marriage? The lives of her children?

The next morning they went on as usual because neither could think of what else to do.

It was only later that Isobel was able to piece together what had happened. The woman had bribed the funeral director to release the casket to her.

“Let me bring the boy home for a last night. Let me feed his spirit one last meal. Let me pack his bag for heaven.”

This is what Isobel imagined Carmelita would have said to the funeral director. It’s what she would have said.

Later Carmelita told her that she had bathed Daniel with lavender-scented water, sponging each laceration and examining every inch of his body. The next morning, she’d asked Father Duncan to reseal his coffin. In the family plot, he settled gently in the loamy dirt grown by generations of flesh and blood. That night, Carmelita had found a gun hidden under some clothes in Daniel’s room. There was no one that she could ask about the technicalities of a gun. It shot when she fired. She’d looked up the address of Dr. Andrew Olivierre. It had taken her less than a week to learn the man’s routine.

*

It still surprised Isobel that neither child had mentioned the attack at the old house. In the aftermath, both girls had been calm. Carmelita had appeared just after midday. The neighbours said she had sat there for most of the afternoon, waiting through a light drizzle under the trunk of a frangipani tree. When Drew pulled up to the gate, she moved quickly. When she heard the first shots Isobel ran towards the echo. By the time she arrived at the gate, Drew had Carmelita pinned against the car. With her arm twisted behind her back, her scapula stood in bold relief, like a broken wing.

Isobel pulled Drew off the keening woman, her hands frantic over his body, feeling for mortal wounds to explain the blood.

Surface wounds, she told him. It’s okay. It’s okay, Drew. It’s just a pellet gun. It’s just pellets. Isobel knew that old women who live in the hills knew how to deliver babies, brew raw medicine, and cook like angels, but they did not know how to use guns. The pellet gun had wobbled in her trembling hands.

“Why you lie? Why you lie about Daniel? You know they kill him. You see how they strip his body and rip it up like a old bed sheet. You see how they knock out his teeth and pull out his nails. I grow that child like a plant. From a seed, I grow him. Why you lie, Mr. Doctor? God don’t sleep. You will rot in hell.”

“Stop it,” said Isobel. “Enough.”

“Miss Isobel. Is his signature. His writing. He signed it. And he had to see what I saw. He knew. He knew what they did and he lied for them. Is pure evil. Pure evil that your husband do that night.”

That night Isobel and Drew made love for the first time since the day she’d appeared with Carmelita. At first they were cautious but soon they held each other with the sharp bites and blind thrusts of an unsettled argument. They were still very good together. But that morning she kept her face averted, throwing an arm over her eyes and turning inward until he left the bed, not wanting to see the scabby marks on his chest.

By the end of the week they had moved to a quiet suburb and changed their phone numbers.

*

Isobel had never lived in the shadow of a mahogany tree. It stood tall, reaching towards the sky, giving off resinous clicks as it stretched its branches over the house. In the evening, the tree turned its leaves to catch the dry season breeze that rode down the valley. If she listened from the kitchen, Isobel could hear the tiny pops as the tree released its cocoa-shaped pods, setting free the little helicopter-spirals. Each morning she collected the spent husks where they lay curled like tiny sculptures on the sloping lawn that ran to the edge of the driveway.

The man who had lived there many years before had raised hibiscus. People had driven from all corners of the island to choose from his rainbow-hued hybrids. It gave her pleasure to return hibiscus to the garden and tuck them neatly into fat, manure beds that she shaped with her garden hoe.

Her new home was deceptive, modestly folding in on itself, presenting a bland façade to the road, but it came from a long pedigree of high-ceilinged, graceful houses that dotted the surrounding hills. It was not like the home of the man who lived across the street, a good-looking brown-skin man they nicknamed ‘The whistler’. His house was contemporary, spare-boned, dramatic.

Below their house was a damp cellar, secured with a temperamental padlock, where Isobel stored the baby bassinet with its elaborate netting and faint scent of vetiver. She had spent her first mornings in their new home in this cool dark cave rooting out hidden treasures from long-gone eras. All the while she hunted, she could hear her neighbour whistling his way through a catchy series of 1920’s dance hits. She heard him sweeping his front-steps as he whistled, a cheerful reassuring sound that reminded her of the nursery smell of boiling rice and butter. When she’d looked out from the cellar, all she could see was the smudge of his broom as it danced in a mist of sunlit dust motes. She’d heard that he was very rich, money made from growing tomatoes, according to the other neighbours.

Isobel and Drew seldom spoke of the incident at the old house. Now days were spent arranging new routines. Once she had built her world on the assumption that Drew was a good man. It was he who attended church with the three children every week. Her oldest, at eight, had just begun to question why Isobel came only infrequently to...