Hand Me Down World (3 page)

One morning she woke to the sound of the shower running. It was very early, yet when Jermayne comes out of the bathroom he is fully dressed. His face alters a little to find her sitting up in bed. He puts on a smile. Yes. A nice smile. A smile to calm the world. He puts a finger to his lips to shush her. They don't want to wake the baby. He sits on the edge of the bed. He bends down to tie his shoelaces. She watches him doing this, wanting to speak, to ask what he thinks he's lost because now he's walking from one corner of the apartment to another. Now he's found it. A baby carrier. It's the first time she's seen it. Now he comes to his side of the bed and picks up the baby. He presses his nose to its belly. He always does that. She likes it when he does that. Jermayne will be a good father, a loving father.

The baby stirs; its eyes are still fiercely shut when it opens its mouth and makes a waking noise. At last they can talk. He says it is time for the baby to get some air. He doesn't want to take him out when the sun is up. It will be too hot. He stresses to her the importance that he get used to different air. So he will take the baby for a short walk. Not far. He doesn't want to tire him out. Just as far as the gardens at the end of the road and back. He holds the baby out to her. ‘Kiss Mummy goodbye,' he says. She kisses the baby's cheek. Then she lies back, head on pillow, hands on her belly, eyes closed. Then she reaches a hand into the space beside her. How strange it is to find that space empty. How quiet the apartment suddenly feels. It feels wrong. She tries keeping her eyes closed but it is no good. There is nothing to mend, no tiredness to collapse into. That's when she gets out of bed. She walks to the window. Maybe she will see Jermayne and the baby, and she does. There they are—well, the top of Jermayne's head. There is also a taxi. The back door opens and a woman gets out. Jermayne hands over the baby and the woman cradles the baby in her arms, rocks the baby, looks at its face for a long time, then she lowers her face into the bundle. Jermayne holds the door of the taxi. He looks up once to the windows of the apartment. Now the woman and the baby get in the back, followed by Jermayne, the door closes, and the taxi moves up the street.

The rest I don't know. I don't know how she spent the hours waiting for Jermayne to return. I don't know what her thoughts were. But, for only the second time in my life, there is a phone call for me. I hear the whole story, and when she comes to the bit about the strange woman waiting by the taxi I know who that woman is; it is the same woman I thought I saw with Jermayne months earlier. They crossed the lobby together. She went into the lift ahead of him. At that moment I felt quite sure they were together. In a hotel you quickly learn who is alone and which ones are couples, and which ones are unhappy. And when you change their sheets you know more still. I never saw that woman again. And remember, at breakfast there was just Jermayne.

But as soon as I hear about the woman getting out of the taxi I see the woman walking slightly ahead for the lifts, and I see Jermayne gesture with his hand for her to go in first, and I see, as if for the first time, the woman open and close her purse, and as the lift doors are closing I see her turn to Jermayne. This is information that sits inside my mouth. Perhaps one day I will spit it out and tell her. But as she is telling me about that woman getting out of the taxi I hold my tongue and at the same time I feel a prickly heat cover me from head to toe. This is my cross to bear. But listen to what I say to myself. If I tell her, I feel I will lose a friend. Because if I tell her she will think she has lost a friend. A friend would have shared such information. Why did I not say something at the time? She will want to know. And I don't know what I might say. Now I do know. I would have said I wanted her to be happy.

It was another two days until my day off. I walked across the city to the apartment. It was very hot. No one else was out. There were cars. But no one was walking. I was walking because I had only enough money for the trip back to the hotel in the taxi.

I was expecting her to be upset. I'm not saying she wasn't. But most people when they are upset will cry or wave their arms about. Not her. She was still, very still. Still as a hotel palm on one of those hot breathless days. I gave her a hug but I can't say I felt flesh, not breathing, living kind of flesh. She lowered her eyes away from me. She would not let me see her or get near to how she felt. Perhaps there was no way of getting closer. I only know she was glad I was there to bring her home to the hotel.

The hotel managers were surprised to find her back on the roster. Like everyone else they had imagined she would move away with Jermayne. They thought of her story as a good luck story. A bit of star dust had fallen out of the sky and landed at her feet. That's how they saw it. I backed up her miscarriage story. The management were kind. They gave her time off. One of the women gave her a hug. A man we hardly ever saw, he had something to do with laundry, he gave her flowers. Soon she was back in uniform, back to supervisor, but there was no going back to that person she had been.

She did not smile at the guests. She looked right through them when they made their little complaints. She did not care. I saw her take a skiff out to the artificial reef. She did that by herself. I would like to have gone out there but she didn't invite me and I didn't ask because these were pilgrimages. I could see her quite clearly, walking up and down that shoreline looking off in the direction of Europe.

One afternoon while I am looking at that solitary figure on the reef Mr Newton from management comes up behind me and whispers in my ear. How would I like to be made supervisor? Well I am still that person today. I don't know what tomorrow will bring. I am happy. I believe in love. I would like some of that to fall out of the sky and land at my feet one day. But before I bend down and pick it up I will be sure of what it is first.

two

The inspector

The boat she paid for stank of fish. She never saw the pilot. There were crew—a few men, always with their backs turned to her— and the others. It was at night and so it was hard to know exactly how many of them there were. But then cargo doesn't ever stop and think to count.

To pay for her berth she had hotel sex with foreigners— counting the Dutchman who had taught her to swim. She had saved money of all denominations and currencies. Some she thought must be Chinese, but also euros and pounds and American dollars. She rolled these notes over and over into a cigar which she slipped inside of herself for safe keeping.

For hours there was just the slap of the sea against the bowsprit. The cargo sat huddled. People from different parts of the continent. No one speaking for fear of being overheard. The danger is around them, thickly layered, ears filled with good hearing, eyes able to pierce the darkest night. They sit with their bundles of belongings. They sit on top of their emptied bowels. They haven't eaten for hours, half a day or more. They have been advised it is better that way.

The slowing of the boat made everyone sit taller. Heads turned. Those seated opposite peered back across her shoulder. That's when she turned and saw the coastal lights of Europe. From the area of the stern there came a loud splash. She watched a black face scramble and clutch a buoy at the side of the boat. The man was still hugging it as the boat pulled away. Now, for the first time, she heard the instructions. Another boat would be by to pick them up. They aren't to worry. They can expect to be in the sea for upwards of an hour. They should hang onto the buoy and wait. There is no need to be afraid. It will work to plan just as it has so many times before. She was reminded of the hotel voice used to placate guests—gentle, reassuring, smiling. The water will soon be back on. It won't be much longer before the electricity is restored. A repair man is on his way to your room. Of course you may drink the water if you so choose but it is not advisable.

There was a splash. Another body writhed in the unfamiliar, and, as before, a pair of frightened eyes receded into the night.

An older man sitting further along the gunwale quietly announces he cannot swim. He is sitting with a box of belongings on his lap, his long peasant arms thrown over it. No one said anything and no one turned to look at the splash he made.

She can at least swim. The Dutchman used to sneak her into the hotel pool at night. He told her to lie in the water and to pretend it was a bed, then he had shown her how to move her arms and to think that the thing she was reaching for lay continually beyond her grasp.

A face wearing a black woollen cap crouches near her. As the boat quietly comes around she sees the buoy. She had taken off her sneakers and is bending down to pick them up when a hand shoves her and she falls on her side into the sea. Briefly, miraculously, she doesn't seem to get wet. She is in the water but it isn't in her. It was just for a split second, something for hope and amazement to cling to. Then all at once the water seeped through her clothing and she thrashed around in the sea at the shock of it until she felt the hard plastic of the buoy.

The boat moved away, and the night and a sense of the void walled up around her. In the unseen distance she heard another splash. From the boat the coastal lights had been clear. Now she can't see them any more. The sea is in the way, heaving and dragging her around the buoy. The buoy is difficult to hold. It is too big, too round. She has to settle for hanging onto its anchoring rope and changing hands whenever one arm tires.

How long was she in the water? What is time under those circumstances? What is an hour? What is ten minutes? Time can be measured in other ways. By the cold. By fear. By the length of time it takes for flesh to turn numb and then to rot and come away from her bones. She began to doubt the words of the crew. Or else something had happened. That was more believable because whatever was supposed to happen rarely did.

She saw the sun rise and draw itself against the sky. The last of the blinking lights died. The sea bulged up, and the line of Europe turned to mist.

The Dutchman had taught her to swim like a dog. ‘Dog paddling.' On her own she had managed only one length. But he'd encouraged her to keep going, to practise. After a month she could do fifty lengths of the pool. Once, to the amusement of a hotel guest who sat the whole time on a recliner with a cocktail, she swam one hundred lengths to win a bet of ten dollars.

Her shoulders ache, her lips are swollen, her eyes hurt. Her skin wants nothing more to do with her. It has lost the silky touch that guests always liked to comment on. Whenever they stopped to pet her she liked to watch the slow marvel of herself emerge in the eyes and face of a perfect stranger.

Late afternoon she made up her mind to swim. She has a plastic bag with her containing her hotel uniform and the sticking knife made out of the birdcage wire. She will take the buoy with her.

The first task is to get the knife out. Despite the hours spent in the sea, her uniform is still dry. Inside the plastic bag she can make out the fold of a sleeve. The knife is rolled up inside her skirt. She has to pick at the knot with the fingers of one hand. Her other hand holds onto the buoy. More than once she lets go of the rope in order to pick the knot with both hands. Each time there is some progress before the sea parts and she sinks. Once when she thought she nearly had it her head was underwater. But that time failed as well and she surfaced—panicked to think her sinking could happen so quickly, so easily, that it could happen with a lapse in concentration. She remembered once seeing a woman chew an umbilical cord off. When she bites the knot off the top of the plastic bag it releases a puff of domestic air, of laundered air.

She has to get the knife out without getting the uniform wet, and then re-tie the bag, not so tightly this time, or so loosely that the sea would get in.

It took an age to work through the mooring rope, a strand at a time; when she cut through the last one the buoy jumped away from her and she had to swim after it. Her body wouldn't do what she wanted it to. It behaved like a board. Every limb felt stiff. Each time she reached the buoy, it moved away at her touch and she had to dog paddle after it. She thought she had lost the buoy, she thought that was it, she had made it this far, so close to land, when her hand came into contact with the trailing rope. Now, at least, she will not sink. The rest will be up to her. With one hand against the buoy and the other clutching the rope she begins to frog kick for the coast.

She was still kicking as the sun went down. She had the awful feeling of moving away from land not towards it. She kept on though, there was no other option. Then at some point in the night she had the opposite feeling. She could feel herself being drawn towards the shore. There were the lights she'd seen the previous night. It is not as far as she had thought.

As a child she drew pictures of the sea and the world above. Where the two met she used to draw a shelf that rose like a hotel ramp for wheelchairs. This is how Europe arrives too. She finds herself in that vapid ghosted water pissed in by dogs and humans. There, a soggy wad of paper. Here, the sightless eyes of a fish-head turning on a coil of memory. After two nights at sea she lifted her face out of the pissy shallows into a soft murmuring air and a row of sunbathing feet pointing out to sea.

One by one the sunbathers raise themselves off their recliners. They sit up, faces behind sunglasses and under white floppy hats. Pointing, she thought, but perhaps not. She struggles up onto weakened knees holding onto the precious plastic bag, manages a few steps, staggering like a crippled old woman. Because of all those people she feels she has to walk, she has to move. She forces a smile onto her tight face, picks a direction and keeps to the wet shingle. If she smiles any harder her face will split. She doesn't allow herself to look up the beach. At the first hotel she used to experience the same flush of guilt whenever she looked too long at the bowl of fruit put out for guests in the reception area. That flush of guilt was a puzzle to her, because it wasn't as though she had wanted for food at the hotel. It was something to do with abundance—and she knew that abundance lay just back from the beach. So she puts on her hotel face and keeps to the shoreline until she leaves the last of the sunbathers.