‘Jeez-us. Are you praying?’ Suelita’s voice was disdainful. I looked up to see her in front of me in her school uniform, her weight thrown onto one leg, school bag propped on her opposite hip, like a woman might carry a child. I hadn’t even heard her approach. She regarded me coolly, the same eyes as her mother’s. ‘You want to wait inside, or you’d prefer to sit out here like a badly placed urn?’ Her arm swept a glamorous curve through the air like a movie actress flaunting a cigarette holder, and she fluttered her eyelids, smiling as if she’d said something smart. I stared at her. The gesture was ill-suited to her. If she’d been BabyLu, I thought, or even Lola Lovely, it would have been convincing.
For a few seconds she held her posture, her hand poised in its arc like a hovering gull, awaiting a response which was slow in coming. Until, discomfited by my silence, her smile grew stiff. Seeing it, I snatched at something to say. ‘Where exactly would a well-placed urn sit?’ I cast my eyes about the stoop for show. I’d intended to put her at ease, perhaps by providing her with another clear shot at me, but I’d miscalculated, for when I looked up again, her expression was combative. She rearranged herself, throwing her weight onto the other leg. The action snagged her skirt and drew it up by a fraction on one side. It took some effort not to look at the extra centimetre of skin. She smiled again, and the icy bow of her mouth suddenly made me want to grip her wrist and pull her roughly to me. I’d never allowed myself such a thought in her presence before. What might she have said, I wondered, if she’d known that only a moment ago I’d been thinking about breaking into her home and stealing from her parents? I stood up, a feeling like electricity in my fingertips. Her smile widened. She had dimples. I’d forgotten how good they looked. My hands dropped to my sides. She stepped forward to climb the stairs of the stoop, brushing past me, the cloth of her sleeve rasping against my shoulder as she passed.
She waited in the open doorway, her eyes shadowed now by the eaves. ‘Why are you here, anyway?’ she said. For the shortest instant I imagined asking for her help. She waited. ‘Did an owl peck your tongue out?’ she said at last.
‘Everyone knows you’re smart. So what?’
Neither of us had expected my response. Suelita’s cheeks pinked and she pursed her mouth. She considered for a moment before she said, ‘I skipped history. I waited on the other side of Esperanza till I saw her leave.’ Her eyes were on me as I took this in. ‘If you’d been Rico, you wouldn’t have waited before you tried the door and then you wouldn’t have sat down again.’
I felt hot suddenly, the sun ruthless on my head. ‘He’s a hero,’ I muttered.
‘He’s a jerk.’ But she looked about as she said it. I felt a brief flare of pleasure.
Suelita shook her head and the movement seemed to leave a void that I spoke quickly to fill. ‘First time in a long while I haven’t seen him here. He’s almost worn the bench thin.’
‘So?’
‘I guess he hasn’t got what he’s hoping for yet.’
She pouted at me. ‘If guys were trains, he’d be the one heading for the broken bridge.’ She leaned back against the doorframe and looked out across the alley. I turned to follow the line of her gaze, took in the dismal alley with the traffic of Esperanza flowing across its mouth. She’d have been greeted by this same vista every day of her life. ‘You’re all the same.’ She sounded bored again. ‘I listen out for long enough and eventually I hear the dud note. With him at least it was straight away.’ She looked directly at me as she said this. I had a sense of things dropping away from me.
We stood for a long moment without speaking. We might only have been a couple of inches apart. ‘Why is it,’ she said at last, softly, ‘that Fidel never had to learn to cook but I did?’ The question felt almost too prosaic for the moment, though of course she was right to ask it.
‘If I was a train … ’ My mouth refused to form the rest of the sentence.
Suelita started to laugh, her teeth flashing, mouth open, the moist rose of her tongue as fascinating and remote as a sunset. ‘You want to come in anyway?’ she said. I wished she hadn’t said anyway.
I thought about it long enough that when I finally gave my answer her eyes were intent on me. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Suit yourself.’ But she sounded surprised.
I was smiling as I walked away but with neither pleasure nor amusement. I had cut short with a single word the only time we might ever be alone together. I imagined her eyes on my back as I moved through the alley, but when I looked back from the brink of Esperanza, the door of the shack was closed and she was gone.
Sea Blue, Blood Red
My father leaned forward, his forearms resting on the pew in front. He stared up at the life-sized wooden Jesus on his cross. Jesus’ paint was peeling and his robes, which had once been a blue the colour of the sea out over the reefs, had faded to early-morning sky or, in places, chipped away altogether to reveal the grain beneath. It had been a while since my father had brought me here and I hadn’t rushed to remind him. He’d been quiet all the way from the jetty but, looking at him, I was sure he had something to say. There was no one else here now. He’d waited for the last person to leave and still he glanced anxiously at the door, fingering the bamboo pendant about his neck — another cross with a minuscule Jesus on it, which I remembered playing with as a kid, hopping it up a mountain of peas that my mother had asked me to shell.
‘Missy says you asked about … some girl.’ He said the last two words delicately. I felt my skin bristle. I should have realised she’d go to him. He waited and when I didn’t say anything he added, ‘You don’t have to fix anyone else’s mistakes, Joseph.’
He watched me as he said this and though I knew I shouldn’t have, I said, ‘Why is everyone so sure it’s not my mistake?’ The question rang out louder than I’d intended in the close air of the chapel. My father’s face grew livid. His grip tightened on the wood of the pew till the skin over his knuckles was stretched and pale. He looked up at Jesus, his eyes apologising for his son.
‘You think it’s a joke?’
I slumped back in the pew like a child. ‘You took in Lorna. That wasn’t your mistake,’ I said quietly.
‘What has this to do with her? I’m older than you. You’re at the beginning of your life.’ In fact, I felt at that moment as if I were at the end of it, as if everything was worn out. I looked about me at the shabby chapel. I could imagine a hundred places I would rather have been with my father and yet I’d obligingly followed him here. I waited for him to say something else but he closed his eyes and bent his head to pray. I sat without moving, my hands balled in my lap until he’d finished. When he was done, he stared up at Jesus again, at the hands and feet bleeding red paint, and said with an air of finality, ‘Missy won’t help you. Neither will Bee. You stay out of other people’s trouble.’ And he started to his feet before he’d even closed his mouth again, afraid perhaps of allowing me any chance to respond. I thought to myself that he might just as well have stayed seated, for his words alone left no room for mine. He inched round into the aisle, his knees still bent, for the pews were placed too close together in order to allow Jesus a little more leg-room. My father’s shuffling movement seemed suddenly comical and I looked away quickly. He straightened up and moved down the aisle to where Jesus’ arms seemed to embrace the candle stand and the donation box beside it. My father plucked out the stub of the taper he’d placed in the stand earlier. The candles were cheap and, having sagged almost immediately in the heat, had spilled their wax over the side of the stand onto the floor, exhausting themselves too quickly. He tossed the stub into a nearby pan. When the pan was full, the wax would be melted down, the wicks picked out, the candles refashioned so that they could bleed their gritty whiteness over the floor again in a day or two. He rubbed his fingers together and, seeing him do it, I rubbed mine too, imagining the greasy feel of the cooling wax as it clouded and flaked off his fingertips. He lit another taper and pushed it into place, throwing me a look. This one, his eyes said, is for you.