YVONNE WEEKES
(for I Farrell)
Clarice lies on her bed motionless, naked, staring up at the ceiling as if through a veil. Her clothes from a few days before lie on the floor. The bed is wet and beginning to smell. Not of pee. But of grief. She does not move. Rather, she is unable to move. Indeed, nothing moves her. She needs a cool glass of water. She remains motionless even through the growing tightness in her throat. She pulls through a deep breath of air and her breath falls. Falls into the sink of her chest. Into the sink of her stomach. Into the sink of the wet bed.
The too bright sunlight streams through the curtain windows and reflects on the hard wood floor. The remains from the KFC she had had delivered two days earlier, sit there while a single fly flits around the box. Fully flourishing spider webs adorn the four corners of the bedroom. Some neighbour is up with the sun, lawn mower cutting grass. It feels like water, not blood in her bowels. Bubbling up and down. Making her seasick. Grief is traveling through her veins. Jumbies dance around the foot of her bed. Good and bad they dance for weeks.
One jumbie pulls on her. She suddenly turns her head to the edge of the bed vomiting the emptiness of her stomach in the enamel basin placed on the floor. She should have been moved by the smell. Clarice would often feel nauseous and gag whenever she smelt certain things. Crab made her wretch; lobster made her puke. Small balls of sweat would form across her head at the smell of conch or mussel. Scavengers. Her stomach recognized scavengers from a distance. So, her inability to move when the room smells like scavengers ought to shock her, even slightly. She feels the tug of another jumbie, picks herself up only because she wants to pee. Water drips from the nape of her neck into the middle of her navel. It feels like worms. Picking herself out of her water tomb she pees and returns to the bed without even washing her hands. She does not look out of the window. She is not interested in the world. The world with its sunlight and smell of rotting cane, bush fire, Sahara dust, and a neighbour’s newly cut grass.
She reflects on all the people she loved. Going. Going. Gone. Gone not like wind. Gone like water sucking down a drain. Sucking sloosh when you pull out the sink stopper followed by quiet. Her cousin’s death was the shocker. She had wailed when she got the news. David and she had spoken only four days before his body was discovered in the shower. They had made extensive plans to travel to Nigeria. Even her ageing mother had gone to Africa before her. Her mother had gone to a cousin’s wedding. Imagine, her old mother who had barely enough pension to live on had been able to save and go to Nigeria for three whole weeks. Clarice would only get there if she could travel with her cousin who had gone before. He was the only family member who had both the means and the will to go there. David had made a list of all the sites to be visited, so she was looking forward to the December break when they would go through London and make the journey. Two weeks was the plan. Travel to London and spend a couple of days with family. Then get on the plane to Lagos. Once in Lagos, there was apparently an hour drive by bus to his sister’s family house. Her only wariness was the long list of vaccines that the country required visitors to take. In her imagination Nigeria would have been amazing.
Amid her thoughts of Nigeria, the phone rings. It shakes her. Rings for a while and then stops. She had chosen Candy by Cameo as her ring tone. It brought back fun memories of London. The days of bell bottom pants, satin hot pants, broderie anglaise cotton slips showing under layered jean skirts, all white dresses under disco balls and naked legs in stiletto heels waiting at the bus stop while snow fell lightly. Those were days of steel for her when nothing touched her. The only thing that was in her veins then was candy. Candy guys. Candy clothes. Candy parties and those flamboyant Cameo men singing in their bright red codpieces and leather tights.
The phone rings again, Cameo sounding persistently in her ears. Clarice’s belly responds like a snake insider her, swish. Living so far away from everyone, the phone is her best friend. She rarely turns it off. She sleeps with it on her bed as with a lover.
After the first death, the death of the sister, she began to have difficulty sleeping. She did not want to take sleeping tablets. But when she started to feel worms crawling under her skin, she decided to visit the doctor who gave her just enough meds to sleep for three days. She dutifully tried the meds and slept deeply for three days.
On the fourth night again no sleep. On the fifth night of no sleep, she mentioned the lack of sleep to a Rasta friend who had called her a few weeks after David had died.
“Sista. How de I feeling? I just say, let me hail you. You want talk?”
“Not sleeping well. Feel like I am struggling in sea water,” Clarice responds mechanically.
Lying there, as if in a trance, Clarice wishes she had learned to swim. Wishes she had not been so afraid of the sea. Begins to blame her parents for not insisting that she and her siblings learn to swim at school in London. Why had they not thrown them over the jetty at Kinsale?
Kinsale is a small village in Montserrat where she lived for a year when they left London in ‘67. Every child in Kinsale could swim except Clarice and her siblings. She would watch the children with envy while driving in the father’s car. The sheer laughter and absolute joy of the other children had been denied them. She wished then she could have simply jumped into the water on a Sunday afternoon. Those Kinsale children were wild children. But she and her siblings were never allowed to mix with them. She heard stories of big people simply throwing or pushing children into the sea and them automatically coming out as swimmers. But not Clarice and her siblings. Always in their socks and shoes. They were not even allowed to walk barefoot in the house. No wonder even now Clarice could barely walk on the ground. In fact, she could neither walk on white nor black sand. Neither volcanic sand nor coral rock. Strange, this Clarice that move ‘bout so much.
When she had returned to England as a teenager, all her friends had already learnt to swim in a pool in Tottenham. Not she. She did not want her afro to shrivel up and shrink. She now remembers that she did not like the smell of the pool. She did not like the smell of the sea either. She used to throw up. To be frank, she is simply afraid of any pools of water. There is a story that her mother likes to tell of her being the only new born baby on the hospital ward who screamed when the nurse was bathing her. Every time her mother told the story at inappropriate times, she would remind her mother that most times she bathed at least twice per day. Every day.
Yet, here she is lying in a pool of her own stench. She returns to the phone call.
“Hello? Hello? You there?” he asks.
“Yes. I am here”
“You not sleeping?” His voice is like molasses.
“No. Can’t sleep. Three deaths in three months. Guess that will do it.”
Later that day, he forwards the number of his brother, with a simple text. “Meet me tomorrow. 2 pm. By the Old Spirit Bond.”
***
The brother was an Orisha. Or a priest or something. After going to psychiatrist. Psychologist. Grief counsellor, Clarice was willing to try anything to sleep. The next day, she met her Rasta brother in town. He walked with her to his brother’s little shop in Temple yard where he delivered her to the smell of wax candles, oils, and ganja. She wanted to gag but she wanted him to believe that she was cool about the visit. Clarice was aware that her armpits were sweating profusely. This type of sweating had never happened to her before. All the places she had travelled to over the decades, she had never worn deodorant. She had worn antiperspirant once and she had developed a huge boil that had to be incised by her doctor. She literally had to go to a sauna to sweat. Or work out hard to sweat. She had travelled to Rome once when it was near 40°C and had never sweated. Deodorant was really a ritual. Like putting on perfume. A just in case. Her sense of smell was both a weakness and a strength. Her son once blamed her for inheriting that same acute sense of smell. His dream of becoming a doctor was dashed when he realized early – thank God — that just the smell of labs made him sick.
Michael was wearing regular clothes. Clarice had half expected to see him wearing African regalia. But he wore a T-shirt with the words Grief is the Price We Pay for Love and a pair of blue jeans. He was also known as Babalu. She wanted to ask what his name meant but felt too foolish to do so. She knew absolutely nothing about African spirituality. With all the concoctions in the room her mother might say she had gone to see an obeah man. He was stringing some pink and turquoise beads when Clarice entered the room but soon turned his attention to her, sitting behind his counter of potions, books about spirituality and beaded bracelets and incense and candles. He invited her to pull up a stool and tell him about the problems she was experiencing. She told him about Caroline and Laurene’s deaths. And David’s. She told him about not being able to sleep. She told him about the fact that despite having travelled all over the world to very hot places, she was suddenly producing all this sweat under her arms. She told him that she felt alone. She told him that she felt that God was being spiteful. She felt alone and unloved. She didn’t tell him that her vagina smelt like rotting fish.
He listened attentively and asked her about her sleep patterns. Was she watching too much news? Did she have a television in her room? Where was her phone when she went to bed? Was she drinking too much wine? Was she communing with God? Why was she angry with God? Finally, he asked her, why she refused to live in the moment. In the now. In the present. The grief is love. Love. Deep love. It’s good.
It was hard listening to him. Every so often he would say, you are not in the present. Listen. Breathe. For her the present is a damn ocean ready to swallow her up.
“Take your phone off your bed. Remove all electronic devices from your room. I want you to put a bowl of water next to your bed. Before you go to sleep. At night. Drink some chamomile tea. Breathe in the moment. Forget about the dead. Remember is just love.”
***
It is a week since she met Michael. The enamel bowl with water lies on the floor. The phone which is on the floor next to it rings. She is mostly ignoring phone calls. Unknown numbers she never answers. She is highly selective in answering these so-called friends. Those praying for her even less so. If they cannot dance in the rain with her, she can do without their pitiful words of condolence. The phone is the bearer of death. The news carrier. Some people relish the idea of announcing deaths. WhatsApp is a curse.
“You hear so and so pass?”
“You know so and so funeral is today?”
“You know that they find de body dead in he house?”
Every ten minutes Cameo interrupted her, singing, “It’s like candy…”
Grief is not like candy. But perhaps it is. If you eat too much candy it will make you sick. It will make you vomit. She fixes her eyes on the enamel basin. White with a dark blue rim. He grandmother had told her she should always have a basin. To wash herself. Particularly when she used to live in cold London. She had bought this basin at a small shop on Swan Street and had never used it. Till now. Her eyes focus on the still water and she wonders if it has become magical. Are the ghosts of Caroline, Laureen and David swimming in it? Have they travelled across the seas to reach her? She imagines a large hole in the middle of her stomach where her intestines used to be. There is the phone ringing again with Cameo breaking her thoughts right at the words, “you’re wrapped up tight”. Finally, Clarice answers the persistent unknown number.
Before she can recognize the voice, she hears, “Why are you lying around unwashed in your own stench?”
It is Michael or Babula. How can he possibly know what is happening to her? She feels like being a bitch to him. Just for the hell of it. But, slowly and miserably, she struggles out of bed.
“I am good, just getting ready for work.” Clarice tries hard to sound light. She believes he is magic and can see her.
“Good. Sister, the only person who you fooling, who you hurting, is yourself,” he says. She is walking towards the shower and turns on the tap. “Instead of balling yourself up, go outside and breathe. If you need to talk again, I here. Remember who you is. You is a Queen. You is love.” Then his voice fades away and the phone call goes dead.
She is filled with a terrible feeling of loss. She hopes he has heard the shower running. She starts moving around. By the time the call ends Clarice has placed the KFC box and its contents in a black plastic bag to be thrown out once she leaves home. She then returns to empty the contents of the enamel basin into the toilet. She places the basin in the shower and allows hot water to run into it.
She turns slowly and recognizes the smell in the bedroom for the first time. She begins frantically hauling the bed linen and scattered clothes into a huge bundle and walks to the laundry room. She throws everything into the machine without realizing some are white, some purple and some coloureds. When she returns to the shower, she notices that even the green lizard that usually follows her around the shower is gone. She watches the water flowing over the basin.
Clarice steps under the shower and remembers her dead. The water scalds her. She hopes it will wash away the smell of death. Allowing the water to run through her locks and scrubbing her armpits viciously, she reminds herself that she needs to breathe. In and out. Inhale. Exhale. She hugs herself. The only thing that is important is the present. Her grief mixed with grapefruit shower gel, falls into the water. She feels the veil floating away from her.
Grief is the price we pay for love. The words come to her in the steam of the hot shower. Perhaps it is something she has always known. A long-forgotten memory. All that dying. Who knew there would be so much dying? Dying and loving. There in the hot shower she feels cool. Cool and light.
She knows she will never forget that sometimes it is the love of a total stranger that saves. She closes her eyes and allows the water to flow over her. Even though she has never liked the sea, she finds herself swimming to safety, swimming to life, swimming to the shores of love.
Note: Cameo is an American funk band formed in 1974. The group is best known for the title track “Candy” from its 1986 album Word Up.
