Something complicated happened to Daddy’s face. Tan-Tan imagined being shut inside the dark box, no choice to leave, no room to move, drowning in your own sweat. Skin burning with from your own stinking piss, from the flux of shit running down your leg. Like crêche teacher had told them. Like her nightmares.
Antonio didn’t say anything for a while, just leaned on Tan-Tan as he walked, blowing a little from the exertion. Then he looked sideways at One-Eye and asked, “So how the rules go that allyou have in this place?”
One-Eye laughed. “I see you is a man does figure the odds fast. That go do you good. You have to understand, Antonio, that this is a prison colony. The Nation Worlds send all of we here because them ain’t want nothing to do with we. Either we do something them ain’t like, or we ain’t do something them would have like we to do.”
Antonio didn’t say anything.
“Now you,” One-Eye continued, “I mad to know is what make them send you here with a pickney. But by we code, you can’t ask people why them get exile, but people could choose to tell you. You could share confidences, seen? Me, I lose my temper one day and beat up the lying, cheating, motherass mongrel who call himself my business partner. Bust him up bad before the sheriffs reach.”
“You tell me wasn’t the first time you hit he, neither,” Claude interrupted. “Nanny and your Mocambo decide you too violent.”
“But I woulda do it again too. That ain’t any way to do business.”
“I stab a man who thief my woman,” Antonio said boastfully. Tan-Tan looked up at him. His eyes were bright. She remembered the sight of Uncle Quashee after Daddy had stabbed him; lying flaccid in the dust of the fight yard with his breath sticking in his throat. “Me and Daddy fool them,” she said. “We run—”
“Hush up your mouth, Tan-Tan. This is big people story.”
Stung, Tan-Tan pressed her lips together. They pushed out into a pout. Pride. She could just hear Nursie saying it. One-Eye frowned at her, flashed a strange look at her daddy, then said:
“Is just so. Most of we get send here because anger get the better of we too often. Almost any other crime the Grande ’Nansi Web could see coming and prevent, but Granny Nanny can’t foresee the unpremeditated, seen?”
“Seen,” Antonio muttered thoughtfully.
“A whole planet full of violent people,” Claude told them.
“Everywhere? The shift towers send people to the poles too?”
“We nah know. Nobody have time for go exploring. Hard enough staying alive right here so. Granny Nanny sentence we to live out we days in hard labour.”
“When I reach New Half-Way Tree,” One-Eye said, “life in Junjuh Town was madness, you see? One set of comess. Everything you had, somebody else ready to take it from you. And take your life too, if them had them way. You couldn’t close eyes and sleep in peace come nighttime. So when me and Claude find each other”—he flashed a warm smile at Claude—“we lay down some ground rules and we find two next people to help we enforce them: no fighting; if somemaddy mark goods as them own, nobody else could claim them; if somemaddy beat their spouse, the spouse could leave and go to a next somemaddy, and them could take them own goods with them. Anybody who break a rule, is the box the first time for them, and a hanging the next time. Oh, and it have one more: is only we could enforce the rules.”
“How allyou get away with that?”
“Wasn’t easy. We had was to stand up for weself more than once, and we always have to mind each other back. Is so I lose this eye, oui? But is only my one eye gone; the man that start that argument never draw breath again to start a next one. After a while, people come to see that we judgement fair, that we don’t cheat them. I the one who usually make the judgements. And I listen to both sides before I make a decision. So Junjuh people acknowledge me as sheriff, and the next three people as deputies.”
“And no Nanny to watch everything you do. No web nowhere.” Daddy sounded like a man in prayer.
One-Eye grinned. “No nanoweb to mind you, but no-one to scrutinize you either.”
Tan-Tan was bored. Chichibud and his friends had finally caught up with them. She patted his shoulder to get his attention.
“Chichibud, your wife coming to meet you?”
The douen men laughed and clicked their claws together tick-tick-tick. Claude guffawed too. Tan-Tan didn’t understand what she had said to sweet them so.
“Pickney-child,” One-Eye said, “the day I see a douen woman must be the day I go drop dead. Chichibud does talk about he wife like she is the living goddess; Pastora Divina sheself come down to Earth. Don’t it, Chichibud? But none of we ever see she, nor any other douen woman. Douen don’t live among we, and douen women don’t come among we.”
“Them ’fraid oonuh too bad,” one of the douens said, arching a reptilian head towards One-Eye. “Them tell we allyou ugly like duppy!” And he laughed shu-shu, covering one eye with his hand to imitate the man he was speaking to.
One-Eye scowled. “All right, enough fête.” He waved his hands at the douen-them to make them go away. “Go back to work.”
One-one, they all left, except Chichibud and the two helping him. “We have to do for him, Master,” one said to One-Eye. “He too lame to carry all this by heself.”
“Hmm. All right.” He spat onto the dirt path.
“You have to watch them all the time,” One-Eye told Antonio. “Them like children.”
Chichibud said nothing. He pulled his sharp bush knife from his waist and started cleaning in between his fangs-them with it.
In a few more steps they reached a bungalow that had a white flag waving on a pole out in the front. The two douens laid the mako jumbie beak halves down in the dust beside the house. They skreeked at Chichibud and left.
“This is where Doctor Lin does stay,” Claude told them. He led them up the front steps. No house eshu clicked on to greet them. It felt strange, wrong.
It had a girl, older than Tan-Tan, sitting in a rocking chair on the verandah, rocking and singing to herself in a little girl voice. She held on tight to a tattered rag doll, so old that most of the embroidered stitches that had sketched its face were gone. Tan-Tan remembered the many dollies that Daddy had bought for her. She’d left them all behind; dollies that walked and talked and thing, and Babygreen, the special one, the one whose clothes would change colour when Tan-Tan ran a special wand over them. She missed them. Her heart hurt when she remembered all the things she missed.
The big girl in the rocking chair had her hair in two fat plaits on each side of her head. As she rocked she held on to one plait and twisted it round and round in her fingers. When she saw the procession, she grinned sloppily and called out, “Good evening, allyou. Allyou come to see Doctor Mummy?”
“Yes, Quamina,” Claude said gently. Then quietly: “She ain’t have all she wits. Lin tell we she have the mind of a four-year-old.”
Antonio stared at Quamina, his lip curling up in disgust. Tan-Tan didn’t understand. If the big girl was sick, why didn’t they fix her?
One-Eye said, “She did even worse than that when she was little. Born bassourdie, and she couldn’t learn to walk good, or talk; only wetting up sheself all the time.”
“And what happen to she now?” Antonio whispered. He looked like he’d stepped in dog do-do.
Claude answered, “Asje, my douen, bring some bush tea for she. He tell Lin she must make Quamina drink a little every morning. Next thing you know, Quamina start to talk!”