Now that I was actually inside, the opportunities for backing out seemed to evaporate in an instant and the necessity to speak, to act, grew suddenly pressing. I took a deep breath. ‘I know a girl,’ I said.
Missy’s smile vanished. ‘You’ve got a girl in trouble?’
I looked up, startled. ‘Not me.’
She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t have figured you’d get into a mess like that.’
I wasn’t sure how to take this. Sure, I wasn’t exactly handsome. I sat up straighter, tried to meet her gaze squarely, looked away again too fast. ‘What if she can’t keep it?’ I said. My voice sounded weak, childish.
‘Wait a minute! Is this about one of the Morelos boys?’ she cried suddenly.
I felt the heat shoot up to my face. I looked down at Missy’s feet. She wriggled her toes, like someone might drum their fingers on a table. ‘No,’ I said. I heard her snort.
‘What are you lying to me for? You think I can’t tell?’ she said peevishly. ‘Well, I can guess which one. Anyway, what does the girl want?’
I spoke quickly. ‘I was just asking. You know, I thought, if it’s early and if there are some herbs. I mean, they’re just herbs, they wouldn’t make her really sick, right?’
‘They put you up to this?’
‘I’m not a kid.’
Missy glared at me. The room felt hot, closed in, and I fought the urge to dash to the door and wrench it open. The sound of a coin rapping on the counter of the sari-sari store broke into the room. Missy got up. She jabbed a finger at my stool, anchoring me to it. She slipped behind the partitioning curtain, pulling it closed behind her. I heard her greet someone loudly, cheerfully, and shortly the sound of boxes scraping, things being shoved aside. I looked around at the shelves again, at the herbs and pastes in relabelled jam and coffee jars. Uncle Bee had catalogued their contents for me once. I tried to replay his voice. He had intoned as if he were reciting a poem, or perhaps that was just how I remembered it. Kataka-taka, angelica, for toothache, boils and burns; Niyog-niyogan, Burmese creeper, for intestinal worms. Nuts and seeds and roots, for body odour, dandruff, hair loss; for pains in the head, teeth, eyes and joints; for piles and for snake-bite. Remedies for a broken heart or to make a person fall in love with you. Or for girls in trouble to get rid of their trouble before anyone could ever guess, before the trajectory of their lives changed forever. But though I could almost feel again the grain of that morning, the details remained hazy, unreliable. I reached out and ran my fingers along a line of jars, up and down, my fingertips marking out the level of their contents. How easy it would have been to take what I needed had I even known what it was. My hand dropped to my side again.
Missy swept back through the curtain and sighed throatily at the sight of me, as if my presence brought to mind some tedious chore momentarily forgotten. She stared at me, her eyes unexpectedly soft, ignoring the jars behind me. It wouldn’t even have occurred to her that I might have tried to steal what I’d come for and, at the thought, a feeling of gratitude almost like a physical weakness washed over me. Missy walked through into the kitchen, returning quickly with a glass of water. She held it out to me. ‘Drink,’ she said. ‘It’s a hot day. You don’t look so good.’ The glass was beaded with condensation, the water chilled from the Frigidaire. It felt good in my hand. I took a sip. My mouth was dry and the water had a pleasant sourness to it. ‘All of it,’ Missy said. ‘Or you’re waiting for a little umbrella and a straw?’ I gulped some down. ‘You want to help anyone, you help yourself,’ she continued. ‘You don’t have to fix other people’s troubles for them. I said the same to your father.’ I reddened at the mention of my father. I looked up at Missy but her face had an obstinate set to it.
The sound of another customer came from the store hatch but Missy, calling out to them, stood over me as I finished drinking, her arms crossed, brows stitched into a frown. I made a show of draining the last drops noisily, holding the glass up for her to inspect. She smiled, her mouth closed.
‘You have any more errands or it’s back to class now.’ She said it flatly, a statement not a question. I started to get up, then sat down again lightly, perched on the edge of the stool. I’d been too easily dissuaded, I thought. I looked up at her. ‘No,’ she said firmly, as she turned away. ‘You care about that girl at all, you tell her to come talk to me. Now, you get straight back to school and I might forget I saw you.’
She seated herself again at her store hatch, looking out over the alley. In the slanting yellow light that filtered into the dark interior, the back of her head had a stubborn solidity.
I hurried away along the alley, eager now to be out of sight. On reaching the corner I glanced back and caught the slightest movement within the lean ellipse of Missy’s face. She’d stuck out her tongue at me. She leaned forward over the counter and waved before settling back to be obscured at last by a fan of Mr Chips packets.
I made as if to walk uphill in the direction of the school. But a few steps on from the corner, hidden by Primo’s store, I stopped and turned again seawards to where, in the distance, the afternoon sun picked out the whitewashed planes and roof thatch of Jonah’s office. Idly I imagined chancing upon Uncle Bee as he stepped out of a jeepney or browsed for herbs under the eaves of the market hall. Beyond the jetty, the fine blue cloth of the sea was studded with boats, white lines of surf trailing from them like pulled threads. Dotted about in the shallows, the jetty boys were at work. Involuntarily, I found my eyes searching for my father and, though from this distance I couldn’t have been certain that the dot I recognised was really him, just the knowledge that he was among them disheartened me, as if he might, even from so far away, fathom what I was up to and disapprove. I turned once again to face uphill but I was far from resolute.
I cast a final look into the mouth of the Espiritista alley and at that moment I saw the figure of Missy Bukaykay step off her stoop and manoeuvre around a deep rut in the track before heading off briskly in the direction of Colon, midwife’s bag in hand. I stood and watched till she was out of sight. I almost wished I hadn’t seen her leave. When she was gone I walked back to the Bukaykay shack, uncertain, even as I neared it, of what I was going to do.
The store hatch was closed and the front door shut. I sat down on the stoop. There were people about as always but I kept my eyes down, inspected the blistered turquoise rectangle of the step framed by the dry brown skin of my feet. The sun was hard and the texture of my skin was as clear as wood grain. In contrast, my thoughts were like fragments of conversation heard through water. I stood up and tried the door. It was locked, and the relief that coursed through me left the crown of my head prickling. The act of standing and the warm metal of the door handle seemed to bring me back to the surface of things. The noise of Esperanza boomed again. I felt sick. My hands were sweating. I rubbed them on the legs of my shorts and sat back down. I looked up at the door. It was hardly sturdy enough to withstand me for long if I was determined, I thought. The shack, like most of the neighbourhood, depended as much on the proximity of other dwellings, on being overlooked, on the renown of its inhabitants, as it did on locks and bolts for its security and I suppose it was so rarely left empty. I’d have time enough to look through the shelves, read labels, find something, anything, that might trigger a memory — or take a handful from each jar, work out what I needed later on. I tried to imagine doing it, but the Joseph in the image seemed flimsy, like a sketch or a cartoon. I wondered why, when I had no trouble imagining a more substantial Joseph driving Suelita around in a red American convertible of the kind I’d seen in one of Aunt Mary’s photographs. Niagara! I stayed on the stoop. People passed in front of my eyes first one way and then the other, a few glancing incuriously at me and, though there was probably no suspicion in those glances, their eyes made me feel ashamed. Yet I was also a little excited. I’d never stolen anything in my life and for now I indulged myself with the possibility of it as I sat, cradling my head in my hands, palms over my eyes as if preparing for the moment I might act without hesitation.