Here Comes the Sun(46)

“What yuh doing to yuhself, Thandi?” Charles shouts. Thandi can see a part of him in the mango tree just outside the window. She gasps. “How dare you! Yuh have no decency, to be spying on me this way!”

“Yuh beautiful jus’ the way yuh is! Nuh mek di witch fool yuh!”

Thandi clutches her clothes to her chest. “Go away!”

“Ah not g’wan mek yuh do this to yuhself,” Charles says.

“I said go away! It’s my skin.”

Just then Charles loses his balance and falls out of the tree. Thandi rushes to the window, afraid he has broken some part of himself, but he springs up like a cat and sprints through the yard, with Miss Ruby chasing him with the knife.

“Yuh damn pervert! Yuh is a shame to yuh parents! Yuh too out of order.”

Garbage cans overturn, spilling garbage. Fowl scatter around the yard like they lost their heads. The one sleeping dog scampers from its rest spot near the standpipe.

“Bomboclaaaat!”

Charles’s curse triggers a surge of terror inside Thandi. Miss Ruby must have caught him. She fumbles with the zipper on her dress and leaves the money for Miss Ruby on her bench. She runs out the door and into the backyard. Too embarrassed to use the front gate, she squeezes through a small fence that was once an entrance to the sea. Thandi struggles along the seashore toward the rocky incline that will lead her to the bank of the river. This is a longer way home, but she takes it. The castle rises into view. Though unfinished, it is several stories high already, the steel foundation glistening with promise, its shadow closing in on the beach that spreads before it. She hurries along, trying hard to dodge the sun. Everything else is wilting in the drought, but the sun is getting bigger and plumper by the day.

At home, the Queen of Pearl jar is sitting before Thandi, unopened. She touches her face, where the shade is uneven, especially the areas around her eyes and mouth. But what about the rest? When will she be fair like that goddess in the painting? The one that rises out of the oyster shell? Thandi had seen the painting for the first time hanging on the wall inside Brother Smith’s office, to the left of The Last Supper. “She was so beautiful that Botticelli used her as his muse for a very long time,” Brother Smith said when he caught Thandi staring at the painting. She was in awe of the woman’s long orange mane and delicate cornmeal skin. She can only imagine that if you touch skin like that, it melts. To Thandi, that soft pink skin had been part of an already long to-do list: to pass the Caribbean Examination Council subjects, go to university, become a doctor, marry well. Each night she’s been pushing her sketchpad aside, studying hard, falling asleep with her head in her books; pushing away Charles, her pencils, the sea.

She swallows and dips her hand inside the Queen of Pearl cream jar and lathers her face with it.

“Thandi!”

She’s pulled out of her fantasy by the sound of her name.

“Thandi, it’s me!” someone wails outside the shack. She goes to the window and parts the curtains, fingering the embroidered flowers that Grandma Merle sewed decades before she became mute. Charles is standing in the tall grass where Mr. Melon ties his goat to the dying pear tree and where Little Richie sits and plays with himself inside the old tire. Charles’s khaki shirt is open like a cape and his pants bulge at the pockets where he probably stole mangoes from somebody’s yard. His bare feet are crusted with dirt from his swim in the river. His sandy brown hair has grass in it, like he has been rolling around in the bushes too. There’s no blood on him, so Miss Ruby must have missed.

“Ah know yuh in di house.” Thandi plays with the hem of her dress, winding her finger in the thread that has come undone. How can she face him after what he has seen at Miss Ruby’s shack? She hugs herself as though she were still naked and his look could tear down the walls at any moment. “I know yuh can hear me,” he says.

Thandi busies herself. She dusts the furniture, sweeps the floor, fluffs the pillows on the bed that she and Margot share. When she’s overheated from all the movement, she fans herself with a piece of cardboard, grateful that Miss Ruby did not have time to wrap her with the plastic, and relieved to feel just a tingle of cool air. A girlish giggle escapes her as she recalls what Charles called out to her earlier at Miss Ruby’s shack. “Yuh beautiful jus’ the way yuh is! Nuh mek di witch fool yuh!” No one has ever called her beautiful. It is a word she associates with the evening sun when it’s thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, the blushing stars at night, the goddesses in the paintings at school. A word that brings to mind a billowing sheer curtain that rests like a fainting damsel on the back of an armchair—serene, graceful, elegant. She turns to the mirror again to look at her half bleached face.



Later in the week Thandi stops at Mr. Levy’s Wholesale to pick up a few things for Delores. She stays by the fan that blows hot air and the smell of cat piss into the store. She itches to wriggle out of the plastic hidden beneath the uniform. But she won’t give up so easily.

“Wh’appen, sweet girl?” Thandi stiffens when she hears his voice. It’s as though electric wires are coursing through her in this moment, her fingers spread wide, mouth agape. She turns around to meet the jaundiced eyes of Clover, Delores’s old handyman. After he hurt her he gradually came around less and less, until he slunk out of town and disappeared for years. By the looks of things he’s a worse drunk than ever, though still a young man. He sneers at Thandi with the only two crooked teeth in his mouth. His skin is an ashen black that makes it look like it has been dried in the sun. With his knuckles he raps on the counter. “Missah Chin, ah wah tek so long? Gimme a pack ah cigarette!” He shoves a dollar under the opening and leers at Thandi. There is no way for her to move away from him in this small space. She hopes he will get the message and let her be if she doesn’t acknowledge that he’s there. But Clover reaches out and touches her on the shoulder. Always, at this very instant of physical contact, she would wake with a scream. But this is not a dream.