There were no trances, no mirrors or bowls of water through which a diviner communed with the spirits as we had been led to expect. There was a piece of paper with some markings, dots. Questions. My mother’s name. I looked up then, expecting to see her once more. At times he counted up the dots. One or two he circled.
A star close to me. A spirit calling my name. Sometimes I thought too much. As if in passing he told me I would never marry.
Marie was full of questions where I had ventured none. But the moriman made as though he was deaf. He drew and scratched on his piece of paper. Eventually he looked up.
‘Somebody is blocking you.’ The words made a loud noise in the sudden silence of the room.
I looked at Marie. I could feel anxiety creeping up under the skin of my back.
‘You know who it is.’ That’s all he would say. I waited uncertainly. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. ‘Come and see me some other time.’ And he got up and left the room.
And that was it. Marie stood up. A moment later I scrambled to my feet and followed her into the light.
I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t that what these diviners always do? It was part of the entrapment. To entice you back. Persuade you to part with your money or some goods you were willing to exchange for the next part of the prophecy. And maybe it was.
An hour after we returned Marie spoke out loud the very thing I had been thinking. ‘Ma Cook,’ she said.
We were cleaning the dormitory. Marie swept. I followed behind scooping up the dirt with two pieces of wood and throwing it into an empty margarine tub. The next time we saw Ma Cook coming towards us down the corridor Marie deliberately bumped her with her shoulder. Ma Cook opened her mouth to curse her, but Marie was there first. ‘I dae nah you head,’ she said.
I dae nah you head? Well, it means, sort of: ‘I’m watching you.’ You could interpret it like that. And that is part of it. Really, it is a warning. A threat and a warning. You had better watch out, should anything happen to me. Or, if you like — wish me ill and ill will befall you.
I would wake up feeling neither happy nor unhappy, but with the sense that something was going to happen. The next moment I’d remember what it was. And the feeling would settle over me like a chill, as though a cloud had passed across the sun.
But after a month the feelings gradually quietened. The dreams and the visit to the market and the moriman all merged into one. Sometimes I really believed that I had dreamed the whole thing. And I would feel relieved. Ah, it was only a dream! Not real but an illusion. Not real but real at one and the same time. And gradually I began to live with the knowledge the same way I lived with my dreams.
The wind changed. At the end of the dry season the wind came from the north, from the desert, and blew for many weeks covering everything in fine red dust. But there were times, when for no reason whatsoever, suddenly it switched and blew straight in off the sea, breathing salt into our hair and coating our parched skin with a viscous film.
I was alone folding clothes on the bunk I shared with Marie. Folding her clothes and mine and putting them in the trunk at the bottom of the bed. Marie was on kitchen detail for the second time in a week.
There are times you know when something terrible has happened, even before anybody tells you. There is a certain stillness. Invisible currents. Strange things happen, small things. Vultures flying overhead in the direction of the sea.
A woman came running, flat-footed, past the walls of the school, clutching at the ends of her lappa to stop it unravelling. Her breasts swinging wildly under her blouse. I can see her still, freeze-frame her at the moment she ran past the gates of the school. These are the things that register in your subconscious. But if you ask me, when did I first realise? I would tell you it was before that. By the time I saw that woman running down the street with her head thrown back and her mouth wide open as though she were screaming, I already knew.
One-Foot Jombee hopped up to the iron gates and looked out. When he came back he was bouncing around, waving his arms. Fleetingly I wanted to laugh, to stop the clutching in my stomach. I feel bad now when I think about that. Moments later he was back at the gate again, this time accompanied by one of the kitchen women. He opened the gate and closed it behind her.
You’ve seen the way birds gather, landing in ones and twos and threes, until there is a whole flock where a short while ago there had been an empty patch of land. People were making their way down to the wharf like seagulls gather to greet the fishing boats as they come in. The noise from the direction of the wharf gradually thickened and swelled until it reached our ears as we sat in class. Until the nuns rose and closed the shutters telling us the sun was too bright that day.
By mid-morning Marie wasn’t yet back from the market.
Lunch was late. I left the girls waiting outside the dining room and slipped away into the road. Not through the main gate, but at the back of the latrines as though I were going to the garden. By now the number of people in the lane was not so great. I joined them on their way, not quite running, not quite walking, as afraid of what was ahead of them as of being left behind.
The sea was laden with bodies. A shoal of strange fish. Those not dragged down by the currents rolled face down in the water. Except one fat woman who floated face to the sky, as serenely as a maiden bathing in a lake. Men in canoes were dragging them out one by one, until somebody had the bright idea of casting a fishing net and landing them all in to shore at once.
Marie!
I pushed through the knots of people gathered on the beach and on the quay. I felt like I was rushing through a dream too fast, waiting to fall into wakefulness. Anybody who had anybody still out there was standing staring out to sea, the water licking at their ankles. The spectators and ghoul-mongers stood up on the new wharf.
I ran down to the shore where the bodies were laid out on the sand. I searched for Marie among the faces of the dead. How ashamed I am now to remember my relief as I gazed at each body and did not recognise Marie. I passed weeping fathers, husbands, sisters, mothers, without a second thought. And after I had trawled the dead I searched through the living. I ran this way and that in the dimming light, peering into the smudged features of strangers’ faces. I found her in neither place.
In time I walked back to the convent and there she was. Lying in our bed. Sister Anthony was bent over her, rubbing her chest with brandy.
Over the days that followed the corpses bobbed up like corks. People had been trapped under the hull of the boat when it capsized. Young men with cloths wrapped around their faces loaded the bodies into barrows and wheeled them up the lane, past the convent. The dead were mostly market women. The water had bleached their skin. The motion of the waves had gently stripped them of their clothing. Hungry fish had nibbled away their fingers and toes. A terrible, sickly perfume arose from the corpses; it invaded the island for many weeks to come.
Every time I heard the rumble of wheels I slipped away to stare. The other girls thought I had a sick mind. I didn’t care. I was driven by the need to know. But the state of the bodies made it impossible to tell. In the end I never knew whether Ma Cook was among them. Or whether Kassila had dragged her down to the bottom to keep her there with him.
The coroner’s report said it was an accident. The change in the wind had shifted the tides and so the position of the sandbank. The boatman had failed to navigate the dangerous new currents. Despite a life working on boats, he never learned to swim and had perished along with the rest. The account was assembled from the stories of the survivors, among them Marie.