Melissa Richards is a Trinidadian writer and editor, based in London. She has been a journalist, columnist and occasional book reviewer for newspapers and journals in the Caribbean; and has worked in trade and academic publishing in New York and London.

She is currently at work on a novel about home and identity.

The following are two separate extracts from this work-in-progress.

Email: m_richards@mac.com

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The car jerked up the path, shuddered, and came to a stop in front of the large wooden house. In the momentary silence, it felt as if the rental had expired after the many miles between Port of Spain and Rampanalgas. Bobby, too, felt the effects of the heat and the long drive. The house looked out onto the ocean but here, behind it, the air was warm and still.

In hindsight the whole expedition seemed foolhardy. She’d never been a confident driver and there had been a few near misses driving through Arima. Nerve-wracking enough with just her own two, they were made worse by the addition of Eleanor. She caught sight of the girl’s red hair in the rear-view mirror. She and Maggie sat with a suitcase wedged between them, their adolescent bodies drawn lazily towards each other. Six-year-old Lily sat up brightly on a battered booster in the passenger seat.

Somewhere along the Toco Main Road, Bobby had insisted that they turn the air conditioning off to ‘feel the sea breeze’. In fact, the sea breeze had been no match for the heat of the car. It had made the children silent and inert although now, in the stillness, they were suddenly reactivated.

Are we here?

Is this it?

Where’s the beach?

The questions all came at once as the car doors were flung open and they tumbled out. In their excitement, the teens seemed to forget how to be teens. The tricks of feigned indifference, the practice in keeping their enthusiasms secret from adults, all disappeared. Eleanor, who had mastered these dark arts at an especially young age, now became the giddy youngster she had never been, running up the wooden steps and pressing her nose through the wrought-iron burglar bars and onto the glass behind.

‘Why are there bars?’ she asked.

‘There just always are,’ said Bobby. She took a chance at a playfulness which the older girls seldom tolerated anymore: ‘To keep the children in.’

‘Really?’ asked Lily.

‘No, not really,’ said Maggie. ‘It’s to keep burglars out.’

‘But it is safe, isn’t it?’ asked the younger child.

‘Yes, of course. Perfectly safe,’ said Bobby, feeling her breath catch a little.

While she watched, the children traced a path along one side of the house, following the wrap-around veranda. Lily skipped ahead, her sights on the front of the house where more steps led down to the beach. Maggie and Eleanor made a show of ambling along behind, as if it would be unseemly to run, but when Lily’s feet touched the sand and she began running, they giggled in complicity and ran after her.

Bobby’s instinct was to stop them, thinking of the multiple preparations necessary to avoid sunburn and drowning, but recognised in this an Englishness to be overcome. At the very least, it must be kept in check in front of her sister. In any case, the teens had spent a large part of the journey applying and reapplying sun cream, mindful of their complexions and concerned about sun damage and skin cancer.

‘Maggie! Keep an eye on your sister!’ she shouted, and Maggie stopped long enough to respond with that ‘yes mum’ which implied a rolling of the eyes.

Bobby looked around her. As the children’s voices receded, she became aware of the full tropical symphony: the steady beat of waves crashing against the sand, unrecognisable birds overhead and, closer, the sound of lizards scurrying through the bushes. The ribbon of earth along which they had travelled up to the house gave way to lawn and then lush, wild vegetation. The grass expanse, bright green in some places and patchy and brown in others, was planted with fruit trees and flowering shrubs. Lanky palms extended skyward. And at the garden’s edge stood an enormous flamboyant tree, whose branches spread out towards the house in a welcome umbrella of shade.

She could feel the familiar humidity. Sometimes it could feel like being smacked unpleasantly by hot, wet towels. But standing among so much nostalgia-evoking vegetation, feeling the film of perspiration coat her body, she succumbed to the sensuous pleasure of it. She breathed deeply and the scent was familiar but unplaceable.

The flowers of her childhood were everywhere. Hibiscus grew beside the wooden steps which led up to the house, and across the lawn were chaconia bushes from which flowers stood erect like bright red torches. She wondered if at some point she might find herself plucking the individual blooms from the ixora, like they did as children, to suck the nectar from the flower’s base.

There were patches of grass which had been baked dry by the sun, but she could see secret nooks where the dense plant life meant the sun could find no purchase. These would have been magical places to her and Debbie when they were girls – sites of a multitude of made-up games. She felt a kind of melancholy that she no longer had the childhood luxury of disappearing into one of these hideaways with nothing but her thoughts.

Just then she heard movement and was expecting the children to appear when a short, heavy-set woman emerged from a path beside the flamboyant tree.

‘All you reach,’ the woman shouted ahead of herself.

‘Just arrived,’ said Bobby.

The woman stopped, making no effort to hide her consternation: ‘But I thought the lady say is two Trinis staying.’

‘That’s right. My sister made the booking.’

‘But you from foreign?’

‘Born here, but I live in England,’ Bobby said. She felt there was some requirement to shift the cadence of her voice to authenticate this but didn’t trust herself to the attempt.

‘Oh ho,’ the woman said with some finality. She turned then and began walking up the steps.

Bobby followed, inexplicably shame-faced, and stood behind the woman as she concentrated on a bunch of keys.

‘I’m Roberta,’ she ventured, ‘but everyone calls me Bobby. My sister Debbie is coming up from Port of Spain later.’

‘I’s Miss Jocelyn,’ the woman said, turning from the door and extending a limp hand at a height which allowed Bobby to briefly grasp her fingertips. ‘I does look after the house for the boss lady. I living down in the village. If all you need anything just ask the boys in front of the parlour which part I living and they go show you.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ Bobby said.

She wanted to say more, to slip into a good ole’ talk, but felt anxious about being rebuffed. Silence seemed the best way to maintain their small rapprochement. Instead, Bobby followed her into and through the house, responding with attentive uhhuh’s and ahha’s as she was shown bedrooms and bathrooms, linen and towels. She chanced a ‘yes’ and a friendly ‘okay’ as the workings of kitchen appliances were described.

She wondered where the children were and whether it was irresponsible to leave them so long to their own devices. But as Miss Jocelyn began opening windows and the large wooden louvred doors at the front of the house, she could hear their voices again. Stepping through onto the veranda Bobby could see all three children moving across the sand. Miss Jocelyn, too, looked towards their pale bodies, but made no comment. Finally, with everything open, a process which had involved unlocking multiple metal burglar-proof doors, the woman seemed to have done everything within her brief.

‘So them is the keys,’ she said, as she handed over a large bunch. ‘You’ll tell the lady I in the village if she need anything.’ Bobby realised that the lady was Debbie, who Miss Jocelyn clearly saw as her real client.

‘Thanks again,’ she said, and she watched the woman’s large backside retreat down the path from where she had come.

 

Once Miss Jocelyn was gone, she thought about calling Tom to say that she’d made it safely to Rampanalgas with her female cargo. It would be nice to have him remind her that, after the brief, sad visit for her mother’s funeral, this was the ‘happy trip’. She and Debbie would eat tamarind balls and Chinese red mango and laugh about things they had done when they were girls. Maggie and Lily would be filled up with stories about the granny that they’d know so little of. Eleanor, brought along to keep Maggie company, would be given a glamorous Caribbean holiday for which she would be enduringly grateful. But the time difference meant the mathematics of overlaying their day on his. And she thought better of interrupting him at work.

Instead, Bobby walked onto the front veranda and looked out at the beach. She pulled off her trainers at the top of the wooden stairs and walked down onto the sand with deliberate steps. It was hot, but not scorching, and there was the pleasure of that soft give, as her feet sank into it. She began to walk towards the children, calling out and waving. Lily waved back, flushed and happy. The teens looked up and waved too, then bent and picked up their shoes before the trio began walking towards her. She could see Lily talking continuously, but the wind carried her voice eastwards, out into the Atlantic. The little girl ran, chattering away, kicking up great whiffs of sand as she went. But Maggie and Eleanor walked slowly, each girl deliberately shifting her weight from hip to hip as her feet found purchase in the loose sand. Watching them approach, Bobby delighted in the notion that they were moving with that easy, languorous, rolling of the hips which Caribbean women were thought to use.

Lily ran into her arms and they walked back to the house as the elder girls caught up with them. Lily talked endlessly about a crab that had run over Maggie’s foot. Maggie made a face and complained about the heat.

‘Let’s go in,’ Bobby said. ‘You three should probably be out of the sun for a while.’

At the bottom of the wooden steps, they stopped to wipe their feet and Bobby found herself reflexively wiping one foot against the top of the other to get the sand off, a gesture from childhood perhaps. Lily wobbled precariously, trying to copy, and Bobby sat on the steps and scooped the child onto her lap to dust the bottoms of her small feet. She took a mental inventory of their size and shape as Lily playfully raised both legs and attempted to balance on her mother’s knees.

When Bobby and Debbie were girls, they played a game which involved sitting upright on their father’s chest while he lay in bed. They held his hands and, with bent knees, rested their feet flat on his chest.

‘Rough seas’ they would say, tense with anticipation.

‘Rough seas!’ their father would repeat, as he suddenly began rocking from side to side, trying to shake them off onto the bed beside him. The girls clambered over each other, each wanting a turn, while their mother lay next to them laughing.

She and Tom had played this with Maggie when she was little, at a time when their parenting was still self-conscious, and they were ransacking their own childhoods for things of value to pass on. Bobby remembered their delight when the toddler Maggie began putting her small hands flat against her father’s chest and attempting to push him back, calling out ‘rough seas!’ in a language that only she and her parents understood.

Maggie wouldn’t remember this now, Bobby thought. Nor were there many left to remember these things from her own parents’ lives now both of them were gone.

‘Rough seas’ Bobby said to Lily, rocking her, and the child giggled.

 

Maggie and Eleanor crossed the veranda and went in through the wide double doors that Miss Jocelyn had thrown open.

‘Can we have any room we want?’ asked Maggie, her head disappearing into a large room just off the central living space.

‘There’s a room with single beds for you two,’ said her mother, as Lily ran ahead into another bedroom and jumped onto one of two beds.

‘This one’s mine,’ she sang, making a starfish of herself on the neat, white coverlet.

‘Get off! You have sand on your feet.’ Maggie screamed, entering the room and moving towards her sister. ‘I’m going to have to sleep in that bed, you brat.’

‘Mummy!’ Lily wailed, extending the final syllable to the limit of her breath.

Bobby was aware that any enchantment that had attended their arrival was now dissipating, and they were all already settling into their accustomed patterns.

‘Come on Lily, off the bed please,’ she said, with deliberate patience. Then turning to Maggie: ‘She’s wiped her feet. Please don’t push your sister.’ She pulled Lily off and made a show of vigorously dusting the coverlet.

‘Okay, Mags. Good as new. Why don’t you two have a quick look around and then go get your bags from the car.’

Holding Lily’s hand, she led the child out of the bedroom and back into the large, living room. It was furnished with tasteful wicker furniture of the type found in genteel old hotels in the Caribbean or conservatories in the home counties. Only missing were the faux antique, botanic prints of palm trees and pineapples.

Crossing the room, they investigated a pair of bedrooms which ran down the other side of the house, mirroring the arrangement of those they’d just been into. Then, still holding Lily’s hand, Bobby headed through the kitchen that ran along the back of the house, and out a side door which took them back towards the car where the older girls were already pulling cases out.

 

By the time they heard Debbie’s car coming up the dirt drive, they had unpacked and were back on the veranda. Bobby was flicking through an elegantly presented visitor’s guide. It was full of pictures of refined-looking wooden buildings with jalousie windows and filigree fretwork, set against aquamarine skies. The house was barely five years old, she learned, but its design was clearly born out of fantasies of an old colonial Caribbean. Bobby blushed thinking that perhaps Debbie was seeking to appeal to her new ‘European’ tastes. The house was unlike any that they might actually have holidayed in as children, boxy concrete buildings which sat on raised pillars, always with a wide concrete front veranda but otherwise unadorned. Under one such house, a hammock had been hung in an area eternally in shade. She remembered them taking turns to stretch themselves out on the soft canvas then pulling the ends together to form a cocoon to be rolled over and over; wound and unwound. There was the thrill of the secret world that was the cocoon; her small taut arms holding the ends fast, ever fearful that they might open and she would tumble out onto the ground. She remembered, too, the weight of her sister’s small body when she, Bobby, was the one on the outside, lifting and winding the hammock.

Now, she looked across at Maggie and Eleanor squeezed together in the large hammock hung at the end of the veranda. They sat side by side, bodies thrown back into the soft embrace of the fabric, rocking gently first, then ever faster, so that at moments only their legs were visible and the swell of their behinds pushing through the soft weave. At the sound of a car a single foot was extended, which made contact with the floor sufficient to stop the rocking. For a moment there was a listening silence before the toes crept backwards enough to set the hammock in motion again.

Lily looked up expectantly. She was sitting on the floor arranging a pile of ‘butterfly’ shells she’d found in a basket.

‘Hello-oh,’ Bobby sang at the sound of a car door.

‘Hello-oh,’ came her sister’s voice in refrain.

Their footsteps sounded a drum beat as they moved in opposite directions across the wooden floor. Lily raced forward to meet Debbie in the centre of the large room, then succumbed to a shyness she’d forgotten in her initial excitement. Debbie laughed.

‘But Lils, how you so shy? You don’t remember your Aunty Debbie?’

Bobby stepped forward and the sisters’ embrace was long and tight. Reluctant to let go, she smiled at the tall handsome boy over her sister’s shoulder, aware of the advancing footsteps of the teenage girls entering the room behind her.

 

_____

 

They walked along a loose path, which had been worn down by the footsteps of earlier walkers, although not so much that it would not have been easy to take a wrong turn and end up in the middle of Toco somewhere. It meandered. Sometimes they seemed to be walking parallel to the main road because Bobby could hear cars, or loud music which approached and receded quickly – like the sound of maxi taxis racing by. Sometimes they walked through what was no more than bush, full of razor grass, painful if your skin brushed against it. At other times they zigzagged around columns of bamboo which might extend thirty feet into the air. Dying stems fell outwards. Others seemed to lose faith in their capacity for continued upward motion and bent dramatically. Each large clump spread out theatrically from its centre so that the area was draped with yielding stems covered in thin branches and clusters of blade-like leaves. The wind moving through them created a constant hiss, like rain falling on water, with occasional cracks as the stems knocked against each other.

Bobby marvelled at the variety of greenery; that riot of colour in which the only colour was green. She tried not to think that concealed in the vegetation were unknown threats, rapist or kidnappers. Men who might see a particular opportunity in her daughters’ white skin. She put it out of her mind but still, at intervals, felt the small, painful bite of it, like that of a mosquito. Mostly the walk was beautiful. The children marvelled at it. The older girls stopped often to take photographs, of themselves and the vegetation, judging it with the eyes of those who might see the pictures on their social media accounts.

Even at their age, Bobby hadn’t done much of this. It wasn’t necessary to go out and find the landscape. It was all around you and there were easy, prescribed ways in which it was experienced. Saturdays at Maracas, with a pot of pelau and coolers full of soft drinks and ice. Later, there would be Carib wedged in between the ice, and the soft drinks would have been mixers for rum. Lying with girlfriends in clusters; methodically baking their bodies, front and back; timing their turnings for even crispness.

Then, at intervals, a dip in the sea; walking down to the water allowing a new vantage point from which to see who might be further up the beach. Sometimes, depending on the spot they’d chosen, they might walk along the waterline; see what the lime was like further down the beach. People tended to gather in loose cliques, but a girl like her – that particular shade of red woman – could manage a kind of fluidity, finding a different place on different weekends or sometimes, moving along the beach, briefly on the same day.

These outings featured in Bobby’s teenage diaries. Debbie found some of them clearing out their mother’s house. She took pictures of the entries and they popped up on Bobby’s phone in England. They said things like: ‘Saw Roger Bains’ or ‘Stuart Cipriani sort of smiled at me’. During a call Debbie laughed telling her that, feeding the pages through the shredder, Jonathan had blushed to find written in the margin, ‘Men are like floor tiles. Lay them right the first time and you can walk on them forever,’ her i’s dotted with hearts.

This was written at peak virginity, she supposed. The shredding was a resentment to be eaten, although shredding was an attempt to respect her privacy, at least, even if not from her nephew. She’d left the diaries behind because she hadn’t expected her move to be permanent. But the distance from home had grown exponentially – if not something she’d done, something she’d allowed to happen – and they’d never been retrieved.

In her later teenaged years, there had been some illicit expeditions into the bush. There was an evening which started in one of those large expensive houses along the coast in Regents Park, with Bobby along as cover for a friend. Their host lived in the house with his parents but could not rightly be described as a boy. He and his mate rode large, expensive motorbikes, although that evening, she and her friend had been collected from their homes in a shiny pickup. The men were long-haired, weed smokers who retained their respectability on account of their parents’ wealth. She didn’t remember but guessed that they’d been educated in Miami; their employment based not on this education but on their families’ resources; their futures undoubtedly mercantile.

She remembered following her friend into the house where the man’s father, a shrunken, balding man, sat watching television in a room in which large windows looked out onto the sea. Their polite ‘Good evenings’ were barely acknowledged as they walked through the room and out onto a jetty. From there they could see the lights of the yacht club further down the coast.

They all drank vodka. With nimble fingers the men rolled cigarettes between their fingers to loosen and release the tobacco; refilled the cigarettes with marijuana. They listened to Bob Marley and Led Zeppelin. At some point, past midnight, they walked back through the now empty living room and drove up to Fort George, then beyond it, up to Cumberland Hill to the signalling station for the only television station in the country. The drive meant snaking their way up a narrow, hilltop road. There were no houses, only wild vegetation which sometimes hit the windscreen as they barrelled along. At some point the road became a dirt track, barely visible and in danger of being reclaimed by the bush. They tore along this path until they got up to the tower. It was unfenced, a metal ladder allowing them to access a concrete perch.

Port of Spain was laid out before them, set below the kind of star-filled sky that, Bobby would learn, didn’t exist in London. They could make out the lights of Diego Martin and St James, the dark void of the Savannah. It was beautiful. She knew it at the time. There was that feeling of electricity moving through her, which was her body telling her that while everyone below slept, she was awake and alive, and young. Anything was possible.

She remembered the feel of the cool air, the head from the vodka but fear too, not only of falling from their perch, of the truck plunging off the hillside on the drive home but, like now, of what they would have called bandits. Not so much kidnappers, as these days, but robbers and rapists. Worse than anything would have been the shame. People knowing they were up there, two girls alone, with those men. They were known around as Malice and Dog and when her friend began referring to Malice by his given name, Bobby knew that she was sleeping with him.

 

Now Bobby continued along the path with Debbie and Lily moving steadily ahead of her. She could hear music again. It didn’t race by but persisted, getting louder. Soca, some modern tune she didn’t know. In front of them, the path became wider. The vegetation opened up and they could see a small clearing ahead where cars were parked. The music was coming from a pickup with its doors flung open. As they emerged from the bush, they found themselves at the centre of this clearing, which marked the end of a narrow asphalt road littered at its edges with fallen leaves. The road was overhung with bamboo so that stepping forward they entered the dome of a bamboo cathedral. And the music blasting from the car stereo was a kind of sacred prayer being offered up to the West African gods which inhabited it. Gods in Nikes.

‘Waaay,’ Jonathan said. ‘Moko jumbie!’

The sight was so unexpected that they all laughed.

‘What are they doing, Mum?’ Maggie asked, draping an arm over one of her mother’s shoulders, resting her head on the other, as she looked up.

‘You see them at Carnival. They must be practising for something.’

In front of them the men danced, bare-chested, one in jeans cut off at the knee, the other in long basketball shorts. Their legs were strapped to narrow poles on which they stood eight feet in the air.

Debbie took Lily’s hands and began to wine, bending her knees and moving her hips lasciviously. The child copied, her small hips moving in time to the music. Her aunt laughed: ‘Well this one has some Trini rhythm.’

The music had a steady, pulsing, beat to which the dancers seemed attuned. Bobby felt it too, insistent, like a child pulling at her clothes. There was a kind of charge coming off them. There were people hanging around and sometimes the dancers seemed to be performing for their audience, but at other times they seemed to dance only for themselves. Then one of the men caught sight of them, no doubt recognising them as outsiders. Lily seemed to catch his eye. She had stopped dancing and stood entranced. He began calling out names, doing tricks for her.

‘Butterfly’ he shouted, and he and his partner began flapping their knees in time to the music. They limbo-ed back until their bodies were almost at right angles to the ground, and then wormed themselves up again. At his shout of ‘Lara’ they crouched slightly, bending one knee inwards in an approximation of the famous cricketer’s batting stance.

‘Guitar,’ he said, and each man cradled one of his stilts, playing air guitar as they hopped along the road. Lily’s eyes, too, were on stalks, but this seemed to be the finale. The men ambled over to the pickup and were helped to sit on the roof of it, from where they began to unwrap the fabric which tied their legs into the stilts. At ground level they could see that her admirer was tall, lean but wide shouldered. His head was a mass of long thin janks, pulled tidily together into a bun at the back of his head. Bobby noticed the light sheen of perspiration on his skin.

‘That one’s sweet,’ she whispered to Debbie.

‘You know! And sweet man for sure. He must have woman up and down the village.’

Just then he called out to Lily, causing both women to blush. ‘Family, you like the dance?’

‘She want to have a look?’ he asked.

‘Lily, do you want to see the stilts?’ Bobby asked.

‘Come on,’ Debbie said, chivvying her along.

Bobby laughed. ‘Your Aunty Debbie can’t get over there fast enough.’

Debbie shoved her affectionately as they walked over to the pickup, where the man was unstrapping long, foam pads from his knees. Maggie joined them. Bobby looked back and saw Eleanor and Jonathan sitting beside each other on the grass nearby.

‘Can I see too?’ Maggie asked.

‘Of course, sister. Everybody welcome.’

He put down the foam pads he was holding and extended his hand to each of the four in turn. ‘Earl,’ he repeated to each, grasping their fingers briefly as they introduced themselves.

‘So Miss Lily, which part you living?’

‘I live in London,’ the child said confidently.

‘London, you say? You not from Toco?’

‘No,’ she said, confused.

‘You sure I ent see you buying fish in the market Saturday.’

She giggled.

‘Okay Miss lady.’

There was a moment of hesitation. Gathered around him, it was unclear what there really was to see. The magic amounted to two 2x8s, but he held one of the stilts upright and began describing its construction in a practised way, listing the components as he pointed them out.

‘Four-inch bolts, two-inch bolts, inch-and-a-half ply… Jordans.’ Unexpectedly, he blushed, apparently embarrassed by his devotion to the trainers which had been glued to a platform built onto the stilts. For a moment he cast his eyes down, leaned his head against the stilt and smiled sweetly. Catching each other’s eyes, the women smiled too.

‘Do you ever fall?’ Maggie asked.

‘Fall? Plenty. If you ent fall you ent learn nuttin’.’

‘Too true,’ said Debbie.

‘Why are you a giant?’ Lily asked.

‘Because I’m a god, Miss Lady. I done walk all the way from Africa. Look how far I come and I still walking tall, tall, tall… But you better watch what mammee say because you don’t want jumbie like me coming for you.’

The child wrapped her arm around her mother’s waist. Bobby hugged her. ‘He’s just teasing, Lils.’

‘Yes Lils. I just teasing. You want to be jumbie? I go bring some little stilts to the house for you to try. You ladies like the big house?’

Bobby felt the bite of panic, and a warmth filled her body that her face revealed.

‘Easy, easy. Like is frighten’ you frighten’. I’s Jocelyn son. I know you ladies in the village. Like you forget how Trinis like to maco.’

She surprised herself by relaxing. There was something warm and open about him, even if the stilt business was ridiculous.

‘No, that’s too much trouble,’ she said.

‘What trouble? Jocelyn have me round that house plenty, plenty doin’ jobs. Is little baby stilts the kids does use when they learnin’. Is buss arse you ‘fraid?’

‘No…’

Debbie saved her. ‘Bring it nuh. I’m sure Lils want to try.’

‘Right. We go fix up.’

That settled it. Bobby knew better than to expect a firm arrangement and knew that he might now appear at the house at any time. The four walked over to where Jonathan and Eleanor sat in the shade. Lily ran ahead.

‘Guess what,’ she said. ‘Earl is going to teach me to do stilts.’

‘Really?’ Jonathan said. He looked to his aunt, walking behind the child, and she nodded in confirmation.

He laughed. ‘But Aunty Bobby, you ever see a white Moko Jumbie?’