“You have a next partner?” he asked.
Enough. “Is what it have with you, eh? All you could think about is partner this and partner that? You and me story never start, now it finish. It finish when you come with dogs to hunt me.”
The hurt and shock on his face wrenched at her. “Me? Hunt you? Tan-Tan, I follow One-Eye to try and make sure he ain’t do away with you right there!”
Horse dead and cow fat. She wasn’t going to believe no anansi story.
Melonhead must have seen the doubt on her face. “Is true! Me and Daddy come back later that night to try and find you. I come back next morning, and the morning after that. For a week I went back to that same place, hoping to find you. Then I think say you dead.”
An old grief saddened his face. No, not so old; it had only been seven months, eight? since she’d seen him last. To her it felt like years.
“You don’t believe?”
She sighed. She had no business with regret. “Seen, I believe you.”
“So what make you ain’t come to find me?”
“Janisette hunting me down.”
“What?”
“I can’t rest any one place, seem like she have people in every settlement who she pay to look out for me. She think I kill Daddy in cold blood.”
“Rahtid. Nobody in Junjuh think that. Everybody know say him been beating you like dog from since.”
They all had known? “Worse than that.”
“Worse how?”
Shit. That had slipped out. “Never mind. You not going back to work?”
But he wouldn’t leave her, wouldn’t be distracted. He pressed her for details of what had happened that night, how she’d survived in the bush this long. She wove half-truths, trying frantically to keep her own story straight. She’d thought Antonio was going to kill her with blows, had lashed out blindly with her new knife. She’d run away into the bush, had climbed a tree to throw the dogs off the scent. She’d made her way to other settlements somehow, had begged and borrowed and stolen and had been settling down when Janisette had found her.
Nothing about the rape. Certainly nothing about Chichibud and Benta, or about the daddy tree. She had drunk tree frog blood; drunk douen people’s secrets with it. She owed them her silence.
Melonhead bought her lunch. They laughed and talked over a meal like they hadn’t done in so long. Quamina had been well when Melonhead left Junjuh, though she would still cry with missing Tan-Tan. Aislin too. Glorianna had given birth to twin girls, fathered by Rick. “Two pickney pretty for so, you see? I help Daddy sew the nine night-gowns for them, from lace Quamina make.”
Shooting the breeze with Melonhead was sweet. Tan-Tan realised that she didn’t want to leave his company, didn’t want to go back to her cold nest in the bush with no humans for company. Guilt flared at that thought. Abitefa was her friend.
“Oh! Let me tell you this one, Tan-Tan! You go like it, for it have your name in it. Long time, Tan-Tan the Robber Queen used to live on the moon…”
The thing in Tan-Tan’s belly kicked and rolled like Jour Ouvert morning. “Nah man, pretend story that. Tell me, tell me… how people here does cook foot snake meat. After it so rank.” He obliged. She breathed again.
The shopkeeper brought them mug after mug of sugar tree water, bowls of salted dry-fried channa peas. Other patrons of the rum shop smiled indulgently at them as they sat with their heads together. She and Melonhead talked and talked, her spinning lies, him caught in their web.
The sun was beginning its descent down the bowl of the sky. If she wasn’t back at the nest by daylean, Abitefa would be frantic. So would the rolling calf pup. “Come Melonhead, make I walk you back to the shop. Must be time for you to lock up and go home.”
“Is right there so I live.”
But the shop she’d seen was one room with a narrow pallet bed rolled up in the corner. “What, you not keeping house with nobody?”
His face crumpled. “Tan-Tan, like you don’t understand. I been grieving.”
So had she, for so many things. “Come, I walk you back.” He looked at her, sighed, shook his head, lips pressed hard together as though he were keeping words in. He got to his feet.
She stood. Felt like the blasted duppy pickney had grown in the few hours she’d been sitting there. She stretched out her legs, did her best to affect the walk of someone who wasn’t pregnant. She would be an easy target if people thought her ability to move was hampered. They walked along the main street. She saw new deportees, identifiable by the softness of people unaccustomed to physical work and by the distant, frantic look of the newly headblind. But for the most part people looked content; thin and wiry from manual labour, but healthy. The basics were there: running water nearby, a market, and the tradespeople—healer, carpenter, blacksmith, Melonhead the tailor. Runner people skills flourished in Sweet Pone. People greeted Melonhead happily, called him Compère Charlie. So is that was his name. He kept stopping to introduce her to people, till she had to take him aside and explain how she couldn’t afford to have people start to recognise her. His face fell, but he said nothing. They kept walking. “You like living here?” Tan-Tan asked him.
“Yes, man. These people working hard to build a new life, you know? We nearly finish putting up a Palaver House where we Mocambo could meet people and talk. We even have a little library! Nearly a hundred books! Them solar-powered texts could run forever if we care them right.”
Books, manuals. So many they had! No wonder people could develop skills here, they had books to teach them. Tan-Tan noted how Melonhead said “we.”
They were at his home. A neat pile of folded clothing lay on his pallet. He shook the pieces open. They were tiny, a child’s clothing made from unbleached fabric. “Rehan must be bring these while I wasn’t here. Is his little boy pants these, I recognise the tear I mend from when he fall down and bust he little knee open on a rockstone. Look, the bloodstain never come out. Is my stitches these.”
Proudly, he showed her the small pair of pants, the neat, well-made stitches that darned the torn edges of fabric back together. “Nothing ain’t wrong with them, so the pickney must be just outgrow them again. I have to let out the hems for he.” Tan-Tan had a brief flash of a girl with her face, dancing and laughing in the sunlight. She used to be a pickney too, who would tear out the knees of her pants while playing. She shut the vision out, moved to look round the rest of the hut. There was nothing much to see beyond Melonhead’s orderly tools: needles, awls, thimbles, scissors, a small spinning wheel.
Melonhead inspected the rest of the clothing, noting a rip here, a missing button there. He folded the clothing, unfolded it again, draped it over a chair. He looked uncomfortable. “Um, you want to stay little bit?”
“No thanks, I have to go.” Did he look relieved?
“Where you staying?”
She sighed. “Don’t ask me, Melonhead, I done tell you I have to live in secret, I don’t settle anywhere for long. I will come and visit you again, seen?” She turned to leave.
“I could come with you?” he asked quietly. At her look he blustered, “Not to stay or nothing, not to give you grief, just to walk you back to your home, talk to you little more. Then I leave you alone, promise. So long I ain’t see you, girl.”
Home. He thought she had a home. This was breaking her heart, this longing. “You could hike in the bush?” she said, before she could have time to think about what she was offering.
“Nanny save we, is bush you living?”
She couldn’t stand the pity on his face. “Bush today yes, a different place next week, maybe bush again the week after that. Is so I does live, take it or leave it.”