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Melissa Richards

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 is an extract from this work-in-progress. 

Email: m_richards@mac.com 

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They were still girls when their father died. Bobby remembered becoming aware, suddenly, that he might die, although by the time it happened, months later, she’d forgotten that it could. One Saturday, when she was ten, she was called home from a friend’s house in the middle of the night because her father wanted to see her. This thing of being called home from a sleepover was so unprecedented that later she recognised it as a dividing line that separated her life into old and new. She still had a memory of Aunty Joanie, Gigi’s mother, rousing her, of climbing out of bed and stepping over the bodies of the young girls strewn about the room, of trying to find her things. 

Why had this come to her now, she wondered. The air on the veranda was cool. The sun was rising slowly behind the house but still hidden from view and sitting on one of the low Morris chairs looking out towards the glow of the Atlantic, the light seemed to be something emerging gradually from the water. The waves rolled in disconsolately, as if reluctant to face the day, and Bobby stretched, extending her feet upward and perching her painted toes on the bannister of the veranda. Nothing had the sweetness of the morning, she thought.

He had had a heart attack some weeks before calling home. It was a secret heart attack. He was watching television with the girls lying at his feet, their small bodies getting closer and closer to the screen. Usually he would notice and make them sit further back, or their mother would stick her head into the small spare bedroom which they called the TV room and tell them to move back from the screen. But this evening they settled right up under the small box. They didn’t notice when their father disappeared, only that he had left the room, and they could hear their mother’s raised voice. 

‘Why yuh have to go back into the office now?’ 

Later, when the events of the evening became not an anecdote, but a totem of their father’s impossibility, Bobby would remember their mother saying that she should have known something was wrong because he didn’t drive himself but called a woman who worked for him to come get him. 

‘You know he could feel what was happening just sitting in the chair with the children on the floor in front of him and he didn’t think he should tell me or go to the doctor.’

Exactly what her father had felt was never said, but having left the house he didn’t go back to work. Instead, he made the woman he had called take him to a Christian Science practitioner. As a child, when Bobby thought about what had happened that evening, she imagined that her father had gone to see Mary Baker Eddy. Mary Baker Eddy had written all the books her father had about Christian Science. While Catholics had Jesus and Mary, Christian Scientists had Mary Baker Eddy. She was their link to God, and had existed in Bobby’s mind as an elderly Virgin Mary in sensible shoes. Of course he hadn’t seen Mary Baker Eddy that evening, but her agents were somehow able to sufficiently heal their father for him to be able to come home and calmly tell their mother what had happened. Their parents fought. Their mother shouted angrily that he was going to let Christian Science kill him. In the end it was the heart attacks and the stroke that did it, even though she had saved him from the clutches of Mary Baker Eddy.

No one Bobby knew had ever been called to their father’s deathbed. It had the glamour of a thing that happened in books or films. Nor, back then, could she even think of anyone with a dead father. She could remember a certain watchfulness in herself that preceded this, but perhaps it was that drive home from Santa Cruz that first made her think that it might be worth standing a little outside of her life and looking in. 

That night, the car manoeuvred along the winding road up into the hills which would take them down into Maraval and on to Petit Valley. She sat upright in the front passenger seat, resisting Auntie Joanie’s offer of conversation or consolation, and looking out at the night. The car took the hairpin bend that led up to the narrow passage through the rocks that was called the Saddle. Driving through this rocky passage you travelled over the Saddle. As a child Bobby knew that from here you could follow the road onwards to Maracas Beach, that place where all of Port of Spain seemed to congregate on a Sunday, with pots of pelau and coolers of drinks. She knew this even though, as a family, they never went there. When they went over the Saddle it was to go into Santa Cruz to visit her father’s family, and to her friend Gigi for sleepovers. Her friends’ families went to Maracas all the time. 

But then her family had always been different. Her father was older. Neither of her parents had been born in Trinidad; nor had they married until long after the girls were born. Her father wasn’t a doctor or a banker, or something that had a proper name, nor even worked for a company that anyone would have recognised. As a child, she’d sometimes called him a businessman. In truth, he was a sort of professional collector, of stamps and coins and other things. Later he was a jeweller. These had begun as hobbies, but he was trying to turn them into businesses. No one she knew had a father who imagined that he could turn his hobbies into businesses. In their house was a single painting that he’d done, and photographs he’d taken of scenic locations in Trinidad which she was told ‘Daddy had wanted to paint’, so she thought he might once have been a painter. And when her mother lost patience with him – when she had to convince a man from the electricity company not to cut off the supply but to have a glass of iced water and wait while her father rushed home with a cheque – then she said that he ‘should never have left insurance’, so Bobby knew that that was something that he had done as well.

Alone, sinking into the soft cushions of the chair, Bobby looked at the book unopened on her lap, and remembered the bookish child she had been. She might have been a little odd anywhere, but she was especially so in Trinidad, where children spent all of their time outdoors and where, child or adult, everyone could take the picong. She never could, exasperating her mother, because even the gentlest teasing would leave her in tears. But she knew big words that her friends didn’t and, she blushed to think of it now, had been shameless in using them. Philatelist. Workaholic. Christian Scientist. Illegitimate. They had come from her father. He was at the centre of their family life, although now in adulthood, thinking of raising her own children, comparing her own marriage to that of her parents, Bobby could see that her mother had been the quiet, surprising hero of her childhood. 

They had been the strange family who, despite sitting somewhere on the edge of middle class, had never been to Disneyland; never been to Canada, or seen snow; never went to the beach or played kiddie’s mas. Later Bobby realised that money was the main reason they’d done none of those things, although growing up there was the much stronger sense that their father was short on time. He never said ‘no’, only ‘not now’. There was too much to be done first; all the hobbies to be turned into businesses. In the meantime, he filled the house with unusual things which gave her the sense that their life was rather grand – an antique table, a leather trunk, a gramophone. A tiny, wrinkled Englishwoman sometimes came to the house to bring new treasures, or sometimes to take them away. An antiques dealer – another strange, new thing. There was the suggestion that the things they had were more desirable than the things they did not. If fact, Bobby remembered looking down her nose a little at the friends who had been to Disneyland or had acquired Trapper Keeper ring binders during holidays in Toronto or Miami. Her father had chosen to give them things which were more important, and if a certain mutability was characteristic of these possessions, it was only because this was a necessary part of the ritual of their ownership.

‘Yuh have coffee Bobs?’ she heard Debbie say and, twisting her head round the arm of her chair, saw her sister standing in the open doorway behind her. Her face was still crumpled with sleep and she yawned and extended her arms above her head in a stretch that might have been learned in a yoga class.

‘There’s some there, although probably cold by now. A fresh cup would be great if you’re making.’ 

Debbie turned and walked towards the kitchen and Bobby listened to the sounds which preceded her return, while she herself pulled another chair towards the edge of the veranda and set the low coffee table beside it. Debbie returned with a tray and a mischievous smile and they both sat facing the ocean.

‘Just a tiny bit of coconut bake for the mummies,’ she said, as she set the tray down with all the coffee paraphernalia and two small plates stacked on top of each other, on the top of which was a large square of bake, buttered and sliced.

Bobby laughed. ‘Lily’s not going to be happy.’

‘Plenty left for when she helps me make the salt fish,’ Debbie said. 

And as Debbie set about pouring coffee and putting the soft bread onto the plates, ‘being mother’ as Tom would have called it, Bobby felt unexpectedly moved by their complicity, as if they were still girls, pretending together to be grown-ups.

Their father’s death had set them adrift. For a time it seemed to give their mother a new confidence, as though she had managed to release herself from something pulling her under. Finally she was unentangled and with a few powerful strokes might get herself to some new shore. She set about erasing the evidence of their old life with a ruthlessness of which she had not seemed capable. As an adult Bobby understood that her mother was responding then to a final humiliation: there was no money. All of the insurance policies that their father had bought when he was ‘in insurance’ had been allowed to lapse. And the house, which her parents had lived in even before Bobby and Debbie were born, was not theirs but belonged to the bank, which now wanted it back. There were other, even more adult grievances, which her mother revealed in throwaway comments, as if the final thing to be cast aside was the idealised father. And so all the big things went, but later Bobby would grieve most for the small things. 

No one had bedtime stories in Trinidad. They were another thing that existed only in story books and on TV, like children who wore shoes and socks to play outside. In her own childhood there were none of the specific rituals she used with her own girls to mark the end of the day. She and Debbie spent most of the day out of doors and in the late afternoon were called in from the yard to be fed and scrubbed clean before bed. This involved a bucket with water hot from the kettle, because only cold water came out of the taps. The bath had a flat, tiled bottom and straight sides, like a tiny swimming pool, and they took turns to stand in the empty bath beside their mother, who sat on a little stool while she washed them, using a cup to pour water over their heads. After that they were sent off to say goodnight to their father. Always, he would be sitting in the living room listening to music. It was the room that belonged to the grownups, a place they had to ask permission to play, and in the evenings, it became their father’s special domain. They talked and danced and sometimes were allowed to hold the special treasures, like the figurines and fossils and tiny replicas of antique cars, that sat on shelves around the room. 

But Bobby had a vague memory of a time even earlier. The lights in the room would be turned down and the music would be on and her father would walk her slowly around the room, navigating the maze created by the sofa and side chairs and the large formal dining table, until she dozed off. When they were older, almost too big to be carried, they would sometimes beg their father to ‘walk them to sleep’ and he would dutifully give them each a turn to be carried around the darkened room in his arms. She remembered some of the things he listened to, Connie Francis and Frank Sinatra and the Carpenters and Teddy Pendergrass and Nat King Cole. But in adulthood she longed to have all of his albums, to lay their covers out in neat rows to see if – as in those digital photo collages – out of the multitude of small images, a portrait of her father might emerge.

‘Do you ever think about Daddy?’ Bobby asked, as she and Debbie drank their coffee. 

‘Girl, sometimes. Yuh know Bobs, sometimes I look at Jonathan and see him, but we were so little is hard to remember.’

‘That must be where Jonathan gets his height from, I’d guess.’

‘Yeah, I suppose so. Mummy couldn’t help. She really ent remember him at all by the end.’

‘Well, she was his widow for much longer than she was his wife.’

‘Too true. But when I tell you how many times I took in pictures into the home to see if she’d remember something. But she en know who he was.’

‘Didn’t know who who was?’ said Lily, appearing in her nightie behind Debbie’s chair and easing herself down onto her aunt’s lap.

‘Our daddy. We’re talking about our mummy and daddy,’ said Bobby.

‘Who are both dead,’ said Lily.

‘That’s right,’ said her mother. 

‘So you’re orphans,’ said the child matter-of-factly. 

Debbie laughed. ‘Lils, yuh too funny. What I going to do without my dou-dou when you go back to England.’ She squeezed the child, and Lily nuzzled into her. 

‘You’re making Mummy jealous. Do I get a little “good morning” cuddle too?’ Bobby asked, extending her arms.

Debbie released the child, but as she began to stand, pulled her back suddenly onto her lap. She did this repeatedly as Lily, laughing, tried to get away. Eventually, she let her go and the child rose and wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck for a moment.

Debbie stood and began piling things back onto the tray. ‘Okay, breakfast! Who’s helping me make the saltfish?’

‘Me!’ said Lily, escaping her mother’s grasp.

The child, who at home would not eat onions or tomatoes and only fish out of a box that had been cut into neat fingers and commercially breaded, set off behind her aunt to help prepare a fish to be eaten uncooked with onions and tomatoes, which needed to be soaked overnight to be edible. 

The sun was almost up now and Bobby could feel the heat beginning to rise. They were at that point in the holiday where they had settled into the rhythm of the place and home felt far away. There were moments when she could forget that she had another life and imagined that she always lived like this, moving through the lazy days thinking only of her pleasure. She listened to Debbie instructing Lily in the kitchen and the child’s keen questions, and then she heard the gentle pulse of footsteps across the wooden floor of the veranda. Maggie appeared wordlessly and fell into the chair beside her, but when Bobby looked at her, she rose and pushed the small coffee table out of the way, so that she could move her chair closer, making it flush with her mother’s. In her ear a small, white plastic bud revealed that she was already moving around in a secret world of music to which Bobby had no access. Maggie sat and rested her head on her mother’s shoulder and Bobby embraced her, silently kissing the top of her daughter’s head.