Prisnms Read online

  ALSO BY GARTH ST OMER

  Syrop

  A Room on the Hill

  Shades of Grey

  Nor Any ountry

  J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders

  GARTH ST OMER

  PRISNMS

  First published in Great Britain in 2015

  Peepal Tree Press Ltd

  17 King’s Avenue

  Leeds LS6 1QS

  England

  © 2015 Garth St Omer

  ISBN 13 (PBK): 9781845232429

  ISBN 13 (Epub): 9781845233259

  ISBN 13 (Mobi): 9781845233266

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form

  without permission

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  PART TWO

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The noise I had been hearing in my sleep became, abruptly as I awoke, the ringing of the telephone. I reached eagerly for it. But it was not Peggy calling from California to say she was returning from her vacation. It was Selwyn calling from Texas. Red was dead, he said, shot in the head during a card game. I said nothing. But, after thirty years, the light burst on suddenly again in the nightclub basement filled with empty cartons and the smell of stale liquor and, even before I could disengage from C.B.’s sister, I heard his drunken, “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch,” and felt the excruciating pain, as blinding as the sudden light, where he hit me on the arm I had instinctively raised for protection. My arm hanging limply at my side, my mind splintered into brilliant bits of pain, fear and incomprehension, I was backing away from him even as he raised the iron bar to hit me again. From behind the old ping-pong table which I managed to keep between C.B. and myself, I heard for the first time Beatrice’s screams. Then Paul and Selwyn were in the room and Selwyn was holding C.B. against him from behind with one of his weightlifter’s arms and wrenching the iron bar from him with the other, while C.B. shouted, “Leave me alone. I’ll kill that son of a bitch, that traitor, that mother-fucking double-crosser.”

  My arm, holding the telephone, seemed to ache now as much as it did when C.B. had broken it. And as I listened to the details of Red’s sordid death in an American ghetto, I thought how lucky I was that C.B. – not yet become Red and, until that moment, my best friend – had been no karate expert when he attacked me. For, on that small island in the Caribbean where we then lived I did not have a gun, as his killer had, to shoot him dead with. I heard Selwyn elaborate on Red’s murder but I wasn’t listening to him. I was thinking of Beatrice.

  Several years after her brother had broken my arm, and I was back on the island recovering from the automobile accident that had almost killed me in London where I was a medical student, she told me what C.B. had said to her at home that night – that she had finally fucked his best friend just as she had fucked every other man on the island and all that was left for her to do now was to fuck him, her own brother. She and I were sitting on the veranda of her home above her hairdressing salon, after work. Below us, the Roman Catholics were going to Benediction in the cathedral across the street. Beatrice was waiting for it to be dark so she could meet with her lover. She was happy, she said. Life had been good. Her hairdressing business was prospering. She was building a house (“a huge house, like everyone else these days”) in the suburbs. And now, after all those years, she was going to have a child. She patted her swollen belly which, up to that moment, both herself and I had not commented on. She knocked on wood. The town, she said, was gossiping about her more than ever. Her eyes lit up mischievously. This time they wanted to know who the father of the child was. I thought I had never seen her look more beautiful. I felt the completeness with which she had broken away from the past in which I had left her mired seven years before. I felt she had a new sense of herself, her independence, her freedom from the opinion of others. I was glad she could not have known, looking at my non-committal face, how ashamed she made me feel of the younger man I was who had abandoned her.

  On the telephone, Selwyn was telling me of the arrangements he had made for the funeral. He would fly in from Texas the day after tomorrow to attend it. He couldn’t stay. He had to return soon afterwards. “I’m a working man,” he said. “You know that. Not like you and Paul.”

  I said, “I’ll tell Paul.”

  “He knows. I called him first,” Selwyn said. “At least he’s not out of the country. He’ll be able to attend.”

  He hung up. I lay in the dark, my eyes closed, intensely awake.

  I had not defended Beatrice. I had joined the rest of the small town in condemning her. Listening to all the rumours, I told myself that I despised her for what I heard she had become. In the end, I persuaded myself that I, too, could make her open her legs. And as if enslaved by her new habit and utterly submissive to her new reputation, unaware of my pain or of my unexamined contempt for her, she had laughed mirthlessly and not resisted when I led her from the dance floor. Then, standing with her against the dirty wall of the nightclub basement, her dress pulled up above her waist, I was angrily, inexpertly, trying to imitate all those who boasted what they had done to her, when the lights came on and her brother, my best friend, almost killed me.

  But, during that strange period of our reunion on the island, while my breast healed following my motor accident in England, and I watched her getting happily bigger and bigger with another man’s child, and endured her constant happy talk about its father, the married Roman Catholic whom she said she loved, Beatrice did more than complete my shame and rekindle my admiration.

  One evening, waiting with me as usual on the verandah for it to be dark, she told me she had been raped. She spoke of herself as of a character in a book that we had both read. She told me when, where, and how. She told me by whom. She smiled as though she had forgiven the very respectable man whose name she mentioned.

  I could hardly bear listening to her.

  But, for the first time, I understood her brother’s rage. C.B. had wanted to expose the influential man who had violated his sister, something, Beatrice said, their mother had forbidden him to do. “She preferred to avoid embarrassment for ourselves and for the small Protestant community to which we belonged. She wanted to keep the matter secret. As if,” she added, “the whole town was not already talking about it.”

  This was not true. I was hearing about Beatrice’s rape for the first time. The sickening rumours I had at first refused to believe, then had angrily tried to respond to in the nightclub basement, were not about Beatrice being raped, but about how easy it had suddenly become for men, all men, every sort of man, to sleep with her. On the veranda, waiting impatiently for it to be dark, Beatrice laughed.

  “You must remember I was, like you, only sixteen. No wonder I thought I’d never feel clean again! Of course, he would never have dared if Daddy were still alive. But by then we were defenceless. We had become dependent and vulnerable. You know our story.”

  We all knew it. Her father had falsified the books in the important firm where he was an accountant and been permitted to resign. When he died soon afterwards, the small Protestant community, preoccupied
with keeping up appearances on the largely Roman Catholic island, rallied to help the family. It could not stop the rumours about Mr Wilson’s suicide. But it found Mrs Wilson a job for which she was not qualified but which paid her well; and it raised money to help the family maintain its social position on the island.

  At the head of the salvaging was the respectable man who had raped her!

  “He helped us a lot,” Beatrice said. “We never had to give up our servants. Mamma, God bless her soul, did not want to be ungrateful. She felt indebted. I understood. But not C.B. He never did. You remember!”

  I remembered only too well. Confused and angered by the rumours about Beatrice who had not yet dropped out of school and, in her blue-and-white convent uniform, seemed to me as lovely and as unapproachable as ever, I had withdrawn into my private contemplation of what was so inexplicably happening to her and, though no one else knew it, to me. I did not know that C.B. quarrelled constantly with his mother or raged impotently at home about hypocrisy and “double standards” and a solidarity he qualified as criminal. C.B., Beatrice explained, had promised his mother not to discuss the matter in public and had kept his promise. I knew only that he seemed suddenly to have become contemptuous of all that our small Protestant community had required us to do. He ceased to perform well as a student at the Catholic college, the only boys’ secondary school on the island. He smoked and drank in public. He consorted openly with Roman Catholic women. He publicly frequented prostitutes. I often wanted, but had not dared, to be as rebellious as he was. But C.B., the angry, impotent rebel and I, the angry and confused newcomer, less than a year and a half on the island where my father had come to be a magistrate, became close friends. After he broke my arm, our community made it possible, by their subscriptions, for him to go to his uncle in America. After he left the island, I never set eyes on C.B. again.

  But I heard of him.

  In London, where I was a medical student, I heard that C.B., become Red because of his reddish brown hair and yellowish complexion, a holder of karate championships, had, in a deep rage, killed an unarmed man in a fight. Later, I heard he was involved with narcotics. He was always in and out of jail. Safe in England, as I then thought I was, secure in my achievement, and virtually engaged to Sarah, the daughter of an English peer, I felt that Red was someone I had never known and did not want ever to meet. Beatrice, on the island, had heard the stories, too. C B., she said, had soon stopped answering her letters, which were returned unopened. She stopped writing. She wiped a tear from her face. It was the only time while I waited with her on the veranda that I saw her unhappy.

  But it was not this image of Beatrice saddened about her brother that I took back to England. It was the image of Beatrice preparing to give birth to a child that I wished had been my own, and so radiantly happy that I dared not tell her that I loved and admired her now as deeply as I had once imagined I had done during those early years when she was unaware of my teenage passion.

  After six months of convalescence, though the rent in my sternum was not yet fully mended, I said goodbye to her and returned to my medical studies. I threw myself into my life in London with Sarah and Ekua, as if there were no other place in which I had a past or to which I ever expected to return. When the time came for me to choose between the two women, neither of whom I loved and yet neither of whom I could afford to lose, between the not-yet-pregnant, aristocratic medical student and the pregnant ex-student nurse from Africa, now without a job and living alone in her one-room apartment, the choice was not difficult.

  I had discussed marriage with both. Sarah put it off somewhere in the future, after our graduation. But Ekua, happily pregnant, behaved as if her marriage to me was inevitable, and it had to take place before we left together for Africa. She read to me from her father’s latest letter. She had already been dismissed by the hospital and we had just made love. The single bed sagged beneath our weight and that of our unborn child. Under the sheets, her naked body was warm against my own. Her father thought that she and I were married. He called me his son-in-law. He was waiting eagerly to meet me.

  I was about to graduate. My professors were predicting great things for me. It seemed that I need never know again the uncertainty about the future that my father, by his death, had exposed me and my mother to. But his sudden death, after he had struggled so hard and for so long to succeed, had shown me that nothing that had not already happened was certain, and that the future, no matter how well-planned it was or how brilliant it seemed, was not immune to accident. I knew accident. I had recovered from one. I wanted to avoid accident. I wanted my children to be safer than I had been. Africa, it seemed to me, could not guarantee my children’s safety. And in England, which I considered my home and where I intended to spend the rest of my life, Ekua, tropical transplant like myself, could not have been expected to provide it. Sarah and her inheritance could. And so, one night, soon after Ekua had read me her father’s letter, I put on the perforated condom I had ready in my wallet and made love to Sarah.

  I wanted a quiet wedding. There was no need to let Ekua know that Sarah and I were getting married. But Sarah had endured much for my sake and wanted to avoid any semblance of scandal. We had to marry at once and our wedding had to appear as normal as possible. It was an elaborate affair, full of her relatives and friends. And photographers! I was calm and resigned the next day when I saw a picture of myself in the Times, dressed in tails and morning coat, standing happily next to my new wife. I was only a little surprised, two or three nights later, as Sarah and I were returning home to the house just outside London that her parents had given her, when I saw Ekua emerge onto the drive and stand, big with my child, in the headlight’s of Sarah’s car. Her face was bathed with tears.

  Sarah exclaimed and stepped suddenly on the brake. I jumped out of the car and moved quickly to Ekua. In a loud voice, I asked her kindly, as kindly as I could, who she was and where she had come from. I heard the car door open. I began to wink furiously at Ekua and, in the same loud voice, asked Ekua whether she was lost.

  She did not answer. Big with my child, bearing it low within her beautifully angular body, she stood in the glare of the headlights and looked at me. Then, slowly, she moved past Sarah and myself and headed for the road leading back to London.

  “Do you know her?” Sarah asked.

  I told her with a straight face that I had never seen Ekua before. And, as she disappeared into the night, I shouted that if she were lost and told me where she lived I would be happy to take her home. I had wanted, but not dared, to touch her.

  Sarah said, “That’s very strange. Who do you suppose she is? Is there anything we can do?”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t seem so, does it?”

  I never saw Ekua again. And as days, then weeks, then months passed and I heard and saw nothing of her, I felt more and more relieved, safer and safer. When Richard was born, my contentment and sense of achievement knew no bounds. I congratulated myself. I had chosen well. Ekua, so discreet the night she had emerged onto our drive, would do nothing, I was sure, to disturb my contentment.

  One day, I came home from the hospital where I was a resident and saw my son asleep, as usual, in his crib before the bay window and his mother, my wife, asleep beside him. I bent over and, as I sometimes did when she was asleep, placed my lips lightly on hers to wake her. She opened her eyes, looked sleepily for a moment at me, then spat in my smiling face and handed me Ekua’s letter with the photograph of Ekua and myself, and a photograph of our son, alone.

  Our divorce, unlike our wedding, was quick, quiet and unpublicized. It was not yet finalized when Sarah forwarded to me the letter from Ekua’s lawyer. There was no photograph this time, only information. The child was a boy. (I had known that.) Its name was my own. (I hadn’t.)

  It was born etc. etc. If I wished, I could communicate with mother and with child through the writer of the letter. I went to his chambers. He was an African practising in London. He confirmed that Ekua was his
client. Was she in London? He couldn’t answer that. Was she in England, then? He couldn’t answer that. Back in Africa? He had no comment. His professional reserve did not conceal his disdain. I left him, and decided it was time, too, for me to leave England.

  I had always intended, after I had practised for two or three years, to specialize in gynaecology. So, now, I applied to medical schools in Canada and the United States. When an Ivy League University offered me more money than I had ever imagined I might receive for a fellowship, if I agreed to study psychiatry, I abandoned the idea of studying gynaecology and headed to America, somewhat warily, to become a psychiatrist. I told myself I would remain in America only for as long as I had to. I would be careful. Circumspect. Unlike in England, I would live in America as if there were another country that I loved and to which I was impatient to return.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At first, I was careful. I kept to myself and only accepted the invitations the university gave to all its foreign students. Personal invitations of the sort I had been delighted to receive and eager to accept in England, where I felt I was beginning a new life, I now steadfastly refused.

  I did join a study group with three American classmates – Jonathan, Reginald and Porter. We lived on the same floor of the university-owned building and studied together in one another’s apartments, in rotation, three times a week. Jonathan was a graduate of Columbia, and Reginald and Porter had roomed together at Harvard, so I knew I could only benefit from working with them. But, outside of those working sessions, I tried to have as little as possible to do with any of my new colleagues.

  One day, about a month after I had been in America, as I walked among the crowd outside the University, a man stopped so suddenly in front of me that I could not avoid running into him. I said “Sorry” and tried to move on. He moved too, and blocked my way again. I thought he had inadvertently moved in front of me, looked briefly up at his face, smiled and tried to continue. I thought he looked familiar. Once more he placed himself in front of me; this time I looked closely at him, still unwilling to acknowledge Selwyn behind the elegant three-piece suit, the unfamiliar moustache and full, well-trimmed beard. But I recognized his low chuckle, and when I mentioned his name as if asking a question I feared he might correctly answer, he burst out in the old laugh I remembered.