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Boys, of course, came back in our lives. By the Fifth Form we had begun to blossom: breasts, hips, thighs, and legs. Lucille, struggling behind me in class, overtook me by wide margins in each of those areas. Her dark skin with its red undertones glowed like a ripe governor plum. The boys noticed and vied for her attention. In Lower Sixth her grades continued to slip, though more drastically. Caught up with the rigors of the curriculum for my A Level exams, I could no longer find the time to help her. Lucille turned to the boys, basking in the adoration they showered on her. Was it because at last she found the approval she had longed for all her life that she didn’t seem to care when she wasn’t promoted to Upper Sixth? A few months later she left for the States, and it was years before I heard from her again.

I know now where Lucille went and what she was doing while I was sitting for my A Level exams. Lucille, who longed for attention and approval, not for what she did but for who she was, succumbed to the hot passion of a boy who did not love her. Ashamed when she became pregnant, her parents squirreled her away to a distant great-aunt in Harlem. Hers is too much a Caribbean story, a story noir, not of guns and daggers, not of high crimes and misdemeanors that cause havoc on the corporeal frame, but a story noir nonetheless, of crimes and misdemeanors against the spirit that feeds “the canker [that] galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons be disclosed.”

Peacock blue

by Vahni Capildeo

Fort George

When your blood fills with bubbles as you come up too fast to the surface from that kind of depth, that’s when you die. Maureen didn’t think of herself as a water sports girl. Twelve months after the honeymoon at the neighboring island’s safe resort (one block down from the unsafe resort where the hurricanes call in on their way north), that was when she and Vikram started their deep-sea diving. That’s their code name for sex like you wouldn’t believe.

It’s always like that now. Something breaks and then a million bubbles fill the space she used to call her brain with blue champagne and her eyes scream out to smile. The first time they went to that kind of depth was right after the first big fight. Even a drunk Vikram is not unsteady on his feet, but a Vikram holding their three-month-old (count it, a wedding-night conception) to his chest saying, Is a reflex. I go dive off the cliff, the babba go close he little eyes an’ hold he breath, and then we go come back up safe an’ sound. That way he won’t ever fear the water. Do not fear! Vikram is here is not Maureen’s idea of someone steady enough to lean on. But it was the deliberate use of dialect that drove her wild. They had met abroad at university. She struck the first blow. Not in front of de child, her big man had begged. Put my child down, Ms. Maureen had ordered. And the child had been dumped in the bassinet, and (not in front of the child) they had incurred each other’s gratitude and forgiveness. As any policewoman could have told her, though no policewoman did, it was her fault. So they made a home, the married lovers.

If the red planet Mars could lift extra color from the vertically aligned points glowing on top of that hill, the points would win out, redder. What else is up there, anyway? A view you’d do better to find in a stack of shopping-mall postcards?

Up there is the national broadcasting station; is an anarchic geographical condition that makes mobile phones yield up and die halfway through their new national anthems; is a road running from named to nameless that you wouldn’t be driving your Toyota Hilux up in a hurry — with or without an invitation — to the isolated mansions where a catalogue’s worth of electronic amenities flashes constant through the earthquake and thunderstorm power-cuts, for such houses have their own generators, satellite dishes, and stashes of firearms that a slender woman can manage two-handed, her feet spurning rugs that must have driven three generations of a weaver’s family blind, azure into amethyst, blood-red into terra-cotta, shipped here to get crapped on by geckos that turn themselves azure, amethyst, blood-red, and terra-cotta in one blink-free flick of the tongue, but still crap black and white.

Requisite woman stretches her long legs in her long skirt. The skirt fabric is officially known as “slinky.” Pity that nobody is there to see why. A genuine crocodile-skin bag emits its silent visual crackle on the teak bar. A choppy little wind makes racing silks of the pool. Similar purplish patterns were recently invoked on the soft skin behind the knees beneath the slinky.

Requisite woman is slender no longer. Four hours hill walking per day “for the sake of her health.” Now she is built. You wouldn’t call that a beaten look.

The garden hose coils up quietly.

The lady knows how to treat herself. That dash of lavender in the citronella candle. How about that more-than-a-dash of vodka in the grenadine cocktail with the ruby glass cocktail stirrer tipping back in it. Angostura. Jeezanages! Another stirrer smashed! Just seven left in the set. Get another, order another, go abroad just to buy another. Go abroad and why come back?

“But he will always come back.” Maureen knows to be tender with beautiful things. Vikram has been a Beautiful Thing surprisingly long, even after the second babba, conceived in fury, blessed their home.

“Look at him now,” she giggles. It’s not the violence. It’s not the betrayal. It’s his vulgarity! Ducking behind next door’s washing line to have bareback sex with the forty-six-year-old, grizzle-chopped maid. Mr. Not-in-Front-of-the-Children. As if children playing in the upstairs veranda won’t cast a glance next door. Is that beautiful? Telling the doctor it couldn’t be from him that his own wife... and then the injections. “It was very uncomfortable,” she enunciates. But the children turned out all right.

True, things go sweetly. Only sometimes they have what Vikram calls “ding-dong quarrels” and the old people call “Tobago love.” Season in and season out, Tobago love stays in fine flower.

Maureen sips the drink and smiles. Mica-flaked lips glitter at the smashed ruby glass on the poolside tiling. She pulls her skirt up above her knees. One leg uncoils. See the Beautiful Thing’s latest artwork? It aches to be critiqued. Bitterness sets in, the chlorine aftertaste to every kiss. (Sip, and sip again.)

This stuff is damned expensive. But he wouldn’t want me to have to work. You can disconnect the wife from the household, but the family’ll keep transmitting to her brain. A sober Vikram maxim. Lucky lovers’ move, to their fortress hilltop, away from Vikram’s poisonous clan. “I made a cry for help. And nooo-body heard me.” What was that his mother had said?

“Look at you! How you get those hard calves? You were a small-small girl when I saw you on the airplane steps five years ago! You become an old hardback woman now! Watch yourself, or you will find you have to think about...”

“About cosmetic surgery, like Kirti?”

“Hush your mouth! Who told you that? Kirti is blessed with a natural beauty. Ever since young she has used the aloes from my garden. You want me to bring you some aloes? You could plant them in your garden, or keep them in the fridge and use them fresh. I could keep bringing them for you, if you want to do that and spare yourself the trouble of planting them. I don’t mind. True, I don’t mind. Aloes is good for all kind of things. But what happen, child? You not listening to me! So, sweetheart, where you going to celebrate your anniversary? Somewhere nice? Tea at La Boucan? Dinner tête-à-tête at Apsara? You know how I am happy to mind the grandchildren, if you two young things want some time to go out and enjoy yourselves while you are young — not like me! Where Vikram taking you for your anniversary?”