Shape-Shifter (8 page)

At one o’clock the two women watched with fascination as a picture of Winsome appeared on the mid-day news programme. A suitably grave and concerned newscaster made the following announcement:

‘The Home Office is concerned over the welfare of a twenty-five-year-old woman prisoner who escaped from a hospital in north London early today only hours after giving birth to a baby son. The Home Office fears that the woman may be suffering from post-natal depression and the baby is said to have infantile hypothermia. The Home Office want the woman and child to be returned to custody as soon as possible so that they can be properly cared for and given the attention they require.’

Winsome was sitting upright:

‘What did they say was wrong with the baby?’ she asked Sonia. She unwrapped the child and examined him carefully. He slept contentedly. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with him.’ The words had sounded ominous, like those other mumbo-jumbo words Levi had warned her about in the courtroom.

‘That’s just a trap to get you back into jail,’ said Sonia shrewdly. Winsome hugged her baby and at the same time managed to wipe down Chantale’s face with the corner of a handkerchief:

‘I’ll have to go back in the end, I suppose,’ she said, recognising the inevitable. Sonia wanted to make her outrage known, to make some sort of protest. It was Sonia who began to cry. She sat on the brown leather pouffe wiping the tears from the corner of her eyes:

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t go in for all this Rasta business but sometimes what Levi says is true. They are wicked, evil people these Babylon people. If you’ve got to go back there then we should make one gigantic fuss about it. You must get ‘pon de television and mek dem see what these people dem a do to you. Mek dem see you side of the story.’ In her excitement, Sonia slipped back and forth from cockney to patois.

‘Does Junior know about the baby?’ asked Winsome suddenly.

‘Junior don’t even know you got a sentence yet. Everything happen so quick. I phone him but he ain’ there. What do you think – shall I ring up the television people or do you want to try and stay out?’

‘I won’t be able to stay out long, not with the baby, so you can do what you like. Just let me stay here the night and I’ll go back tomorrow.’

Winsome was enjoying being in a place of colour after the arid courtroom, the drained grey jail and the pristine hospital. Sonia had a brightly patterned red and black carpet. A May breeze was catching and blowing the net curtains and the colour television in the corner of the room was like a burst of flowers. Sonia’s little boy Marlon came to look at the new baby:

‘He’s a nice boy, innit Marlon?’ said Winsome. Marlon nodded.

‘
OK
,’ said Sonia. ‘I’ll go to the shops. Don’t answer the door.’

During the afternoon, Winsome occasionally peeked out of the window. People came and went in the streets, in and out of the banks, the greengrocers and the hardware stores. Everything appeared to be a mockery of normality. The people looked like extras in a film, acting out everyday life for the cameras.

Sonia shopped, burning all the while with rage.

Winsome gave Denzil his first bath and oiled his little brown body, pleased to administer these rites in an ordinary bathroom, hung with lines of little shorts and T-shirts. At tea-time, she automatically fed the two little girls and Marlon.

‘Can you take care of the girls for me, Sonia?’ she asked when eventually Sonia returned, laden with plastic carrier bags. ‘I don’t want my mum to get her hands on them. She don’t treat them right. But she’ll always help you out with money and so will Junior.’

‘Course I will. Me tek good care o’ dem an’ me bring dem up to see you. And as soon as I find Junior I tell him to come straight down to see you and the baby. Listen Winsome, you’re not just going back like that. It’s disgusting what they do to you. Mek we phone those television people so you go back with everybody knowing just what is going on.’

‘I don’t feel no way about it. Do what you want,’ said Winsome. ‘Phone them in the morning. I’m going to bed for a bit.’

The television crew had difficulty setting up the lights and cameras in Sonia’s small front room with the kids running about and playing. The television journalist who smelt of after-shave lotion asked Winsome to move her chair a little bit further from the window. Winsome noticed how the bright artificial lights drained the room of colour and made everything harsh and pale. She still had a headache. She moved her chair, clutching Denzil in one arm. The production assistant fumbled with her clip-board and tried to prevent Anita and Marlon having a tug-of-war with an electric cable.

‘Now then.’ The newsman was embarrassed now that he was face to face with the silent black woman with the scar on her lip. ‘What I thought was I’d ask you one or two questions and, maybe, ask your friend here what she thinks and then, if you’re going to give yourself up anyway, which you say you are, we could give you a lift back to the prison and take a final shot of you walking into the jail with the baby to sort of finish the story off. If that’s
OK
with you. I don’t want to put any pressure on you. So is that OK?’

Winsome nodded. Sonia perched anxiously on the edge of an armchair, puffing at a cigarette. The camera started to roll, taking in pictures of Winsome sitting in the low chair with Denzil in her arms and Chantale sucking her thumb and holding on to her mother’s skirt. In hushed and sympathetic tones the newsman asked:

‘Why did you run away from the hospital?’

The lights were white and hot. Winsome became aware of two cold patches of sweat under her arms. She did not know what was required, what to say:

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, barely audible. Her hand comforted Chantale at her skirt. The camera swung from Winsome’s expressionless face to Sonia. Sonia looked bright and defiant. She had dressed specially for the interview in her new, red nylon blouse and her gold chains:

‘I think it’s terrible that a judge should send someone to jail for a year just when she’s due to have a baby. I think it was a wicked thing to do.’ Sonia sounded clear and cool. Winsome just wanted it all to stop.

‘Thanks, that’s fine,’ said the newsman. ‘Let’s pack up now and take all the stuff down to the prison and then we can get that last shot – if that’s
OK
with you, Winsome.’

Winsome rose awkwardly from the chair and began to collect a few bits and pieces for herself and the baby. Sonia was to stay behind with the other children.

‘God, I feel awful,’ giggled the production assistant behind her clip-board to the director. ‘I feel as if I’d captured a runaway slave or something.’

The cameras trained on Winsome as she walked with the baby up to the main entrance of the modern jail building. She entered the door where the gate-man sat behind bullet-proof glass operating the electronic sliding doors. He grinned:

‘Hello, love. Come back to us, have you? I’ll ring up to the mother and baby unit and get someone to come down and fetch you.’

Winsome sat silent on the bench just inside the entrance.

Two minutes later a blue-uniformed screw appeared to collect her. She had badly permed blonde hair and the face of a retarded schoolgirl. She spoke with a northern accent:

‘Hello Winifred. Oh we are pleased to see you back safe and sound. You were a naughty girl to run off like that. We were all worried to death. Let me have a look at the baby. Ahhhhhh. Isn’t he gorgeous.’

The news item appeared on the early evening news. By the late evening news it had already been replaced by bigger and more important stories.

That night, Winsome slept, worn out, with Denzil by her side, in a cell as cheerless as a public lavatory which someone had made a feeble attempt to decorate with one or two pictures.

The dream came back, but this time a little altered. She dreamt that she was in unfamiliar countryside. The execution must have taken place for she was already dead and being carried in a funeral procession. But she was not in a coffin. The hands of strangers were bearing her body along. Close to, the terrain was rocky and the path narrow, wending its way through bare, hilly landscape. The bearers moved carefully to avoid the big clumps of wild grass. All she could see ahead was the long, empty, winding path. Resting on her chest were some bright flowers. They seemed familiar. She tried hard to remember the names of them. But the names wouldn’t come.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT TUXEDO HAS GOOD
ideas about as often as a hen has teeth. Which is why Tuxedo is on his own this particular night, crouching with his ear to the tumbrils of a small safe behind the counter of the video shop. The snag is that Tuxedo is not built for crouching lower than a pool table. His left foot has cramp and his blue satin boxer shorts are twisted in his crotch causing him aggravation. On top of all this, twiddling the knobs on the safe is getting him nowhere and he is overcome by a craving for sweet potato pie.

Anybody, from the Frontline to the Backline, could tell you that Tuxedo is jinxed. Take one instance. Yesterday Tuxedo buys a second-hand car for three hundred and fifty, cash. This guy gives him all the documents but when he gets home the log book turns out to be an old parking summons and the car is clearly hotter than Tina Turner; if Tuxedo thinks he has just laid his hands on some pure Jamaican sensimilla, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will turn out to be homegrown from Kensal Rise; even the all-night Kentucky Fried Chicken runs out of corn on the cob as soon as Tuxedo steps through the portals. Anybody could tell you that the day Tuxedo gets lucky will be the day it snows ink. Which is why he has this near-permanent frowning glare on his face, a wicked screw that most people mistake for hostility when in fact it’s the anxious stare of one who knows that God has been up most of the night laying traps for him, sometimes in the shape of things, mostly in the shape of people.

Tuxedo glares at the safe:

‘Come on, you bastard,’ he mutters, then adds: ‘It’s all right, God, it’s the safe I’m talking to, not you.’

Of one thing, Tuxedo is certain. God is white. Once, when he was younger, he had listened to his militant cousin explain how white people had tricked the world into believing that Jesus was white when he was really black and so it followed that God was black too, or at least brown, more likely brown seeing that he was from the Middle East. Tuxedo told all this to his mother who gave him several licks for daring to call God ‘a dutty half-breed’. In the end, Tuxedo came to his own conclusion, simple and to the point. If God isn’t white, how come black people have such a hard time?

Anyway, Tuxedo is in this office which is short of space what with the desk and the metal filing cabinets. The light is on because Tuxedo doesn’t much like the dark ever since the school caretaker accidentally locked him in the boiler room where he was hiding because he couldn’t remember the lyrics of the seven-times table. Since then, Tuxedo gets jittery in the dark. So he is tackling his first safe, solo, with the light on in the back of Edwards Electronic and TV Rental shop. As it happens, he has only discovered the safe by chance, stubbing his toe against it while he is in the back of the shop looking for some Vaseline.

The reason Tuxedo is looking for Vaseline is this. He has broken into the shop to get a video recorder for Dolores Burton, his current mainsqueeze. Now all the episodes of
Hill Street Blues
would lead you to believe that during the commission of these minor felonies, people break out in a nervous sweat. Just when the music gets tense and trembly and the camera goes into close-up, you can see sweat streaming down their faces. Not so Tuxedo. His face goes all dry and cracky, especially the lips, which prompts him to put down the video recorder and look in the back of the shop on the offchance of finding some Vaseline or even a little Johnson’s baby oil to rub in his face. And this is precisely what he is doing when the safe attracts the attention of his big toe.

Outside, the August night is warm. The street is still strewn with litter from the market and the sweet glutinous smell of rotting vegetables hangs in the air. The street lamps cast a bilious glow over the row of shops. Parked outside the video shop is Tuxedo’s getaway car, a powder-blue Vauxhall Chevette, the same one he got yesterday. The choice of this particular model, he considers to be a stroke of genius. Any passing beast would think it belonged to an estate agent or a lady doctor. Not that many lady doctors park their cars outside a video shop at three in the morning with the driver’s door open and the sound cassette pumping out into the night air:

‘Trouble you de trouble mi – no I
I woudda jus’ flash me ting.’

The car chants away rhythmically to itself. A few doors down, the burglar alarm in the chemist’s shop shrills montonous and unattended. Tuxedo twists the knobs on the safe impatiently. Nobody is about.

Nobody is about that is except Frankie Formosa, known to his girlfriends as ‘Mr Too Handsome to Work’ who happens to stroll around the corner on his way back from picking up a ten pound draw from Mr Mighty’s Ace Shebeen. He is draining the last drop from a can of vanilla nutriment so he doesn’t at first spot the car. But just as he throws the empty can into the gutter, he sights up the means of transport that would save him a fifteen-minute walk back to Ladbroke Grove. Besides, there is no one around to admire him walking through the streets in his new Tachini tracksuit and trainers to match. Don’t think that Frankie is in any way unfit enough for such a walk. Frankie is always super-plus fit when he comes out of jail because he spends all his time there in the gym. Although this time he could not get all the exercise he wanted on account of a little squirt called Mouth-Mouth. Mouth-Mouth is Frankie’s sister’s boyfriend and it is sheer bad luck that he turns up in jail at the same time as Frankie because Frankie did not really want it known that he was inside for such a minor offence as driving round the streets without a licence and had put it about that he was in jail for the more prestigious and universally popular offence of assaulting a policeman. Then Mouth-Mouth comes in and spills the beans which meant that it was Mouth-Mouth who got assaulted and Frankie had to continue getting what excercise he could in the restricting confines of the punishment block.