I rewind and replay as I walk down streets and into walls of cloth and skin and people and ‘excuse me’s and late-afternoon confusions of pavement and sky.
Once, when I was listening to this song at the bus stop, out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman staring at me, I saw a woman lift her hand to touch me, and when I looked at her it was Chabella. I pushed the headphones down and she smiled uncertainly and said, ‘I almost didn’t recognise you. But after all I thought, No, that girl looks like me.’
Another time, when I arrived at band rehearsal listening to this favourite song of mine, I lifted off my earphones gingerly and cupped my hands to my ears, expecting blood.
5 roots people
One day in Habana, the day that would end in nochebuena
(the good night, Christmas Eve)
Yemaya, in love with Cuba, went walking in La Regla, repeating after the Columbus in her mind’s eye, ‘This is the most beautiful land I have ever seen.’
The day was hot but gentle; beneath its healing steam lay granite, decrepit wood, rocks gloved in blanched sand. The harbour water caught sunlight in layered hoops of petrol-coloured dirt and tried to keep its clarity secret, but the divers told. Small, earth-brown boys kept bobbing up, their backbones hacking out of their skin, hair plastered to their heads, coin pouches around their waists rattling as they added new handfuls of slick bronze to their store.
Aya gathered up her seven skirts — blue lacing silver lacing more blue — and raced herself. She ran past irregularly spaced palm trees, looming with their tops drying out. She ran past a woman clothed in a swarm of toddlers; the woman cooked corncobs on a charcoal-heated griddle with her skirt hitched up around her knees. With her other hand, she kept her children from cooking themselves on her pan.
Yemaya didn’t even stop
(though she felt a pull and a fuzzy, bite-sized happiness like a kiss on the nape of her neck)
at the small household shrine, strung and nailed to a house’s doorway, that was meant for her. Ignored, Our Lady of Regla pouted sweet and pink from a ribboned cage of sea lavender and long-funnelled trout lilies, and cowrie shells with fluted mouths.
Aya stopped at the watchmaker’s parlour — here, a man with hair dreadlocked like a powerful man, like a babalawo, made watches and clocks, squinted over tiny, intricate mechanisms with pincers and thin magnets and hammers the size of Aya’s little finger. His clocks were not ordinary, but he sold them at carelessly cheap prices out of his living room. This watchmaker, he spoke exactly like a Cuban — but he said he was not Cuban.
Yemaya saw that, amongst old, knotted mahogany clocks with glazed faces, new clocks peeped out. Their faces were plain, mounted on block-like bases with hands of beaten brass that drove the minutes forward on their glint. Anyone who stood too close to see the time on one of these clocks felt a wafer-thin breeze from elsewhere, a colder place, a higher place. The watchmaker, a scattering of sawdust in his hair, waited for her at the counter with his fingers folded over some secret in his palm.
‘Hold out your hand,’ he said, smiling. He looked at her as if he thought her beautiful, and this was rare, and this made Yemaya trust him. She held out both her hands, cupping them to carry away sweetness, and he chided her: ‘Greedy. One hand is enough.’
His gift was a loose knot of seeds. They looked like oval woodchips, but something green slept inside them. She wondered what a drop of her vanilla would do to them, and stowed them thoughtfully in the pocket of her top skirt before she remembered to say thank you.
Her watchmaker said, ‘One day, not now, they’ll grow for you, and show you what it is that you most desire. Remember, won’t you?’
She nodded, and he told her then that he was going home. ‘But you must keep those seeds safe. Another time, many years ago, I gave some seeds such as these to a woman as a gift. What this woman most wanted was children, but she was barren. When she spoke of children, I saw how much of her life these dream children had already taken. She knew so much about them, and so little about anything else. She had decided she wanted two boys and a gentle girl, the two boys to take care of the girl and keep each other company. And they would all love each other. I had some of these seeds, and —’
‘Where did you get them from?’ Aya asked, eagerly.
With a wounded stare, the watchmaker said simply, ‘They are mine.’
She raised her hand in apology. He continued: ‘I told her to plant and water them, and to wait and see. She came back to me one month later, shaking. “Those seeds,” the woman said, “are growing.”
‘I said, “Of course.” Her face –
‘She said, “Children. Children are growing from the seeds.”
‘I said, “Of course.” Then I asked her, because she wanted me to ask, what kind of children. But she shook her head. She just shook her head. She couldn’t explain. How many are there? Three. Just as many as she’d wanted. I saw such fear in her. . she asked me what to do, then answered herself. She would leave them buried, her children; maybe that way they would die before they could properly draw breath. A cruel thing — I told her so. But she kept saying, “It is better this way. It is better this way.” ’
The watchmaker stopped speaking — Aya saw that he was lost. She pressed his hand.
‘What kind of children are better left buried?’ he asked her.
She tried to guess the end of his tale, the moral of it. ‘Did you dig the children up?’
He did not.
‘Did she take pity?’
‘She dug them up in their ninth month, and they fled her. They must have known that she never wanted them to draw breath. Children know, and when they know. . it is terrible.’
‘They fled her? How do you know?’
The watchmaker gagged, gaped, put his hand over his mouth, then seemed to recover himself and pretended to wipe dust from his face. ‘I saw them.’
Aya’s vanilla didn’t make the watchmaker’s seeds grow, and neither did plain water. When she dug up the seeds and pocketed them, she wondered whether it was because she didn’t yet know what she wanted.
Dominique and I were good friends until we lost interest in each other. We had only really been friends because she lived two doors away. Then she moved, and nothing. Chabella was disappointed in us both: ‘You’re black girls, as good as sisters!’
Chabella made me phone Dominique a couple of times. I wasn’t allowed to mention that I had phoned against my will. Dominique phoned me a couple of times as well. It was excruciating for us both, and then we were allowed to stop. Even after I stopped, it was awkward for a little bit.
Dominique was in my class from primary school right up until we left sixth form for university. Either I had never looked at her properly, or her face receded beneath the swathes of her hair until I forgot it. Dominique is from Trinidad and she had beautiful hair, soft and thick, which her mother, like mine, banned her from straightening and helped her comb out into a fan. People teased her about it all the time and called her ‘picky head’. Dominique took the name calmly, without offering any insults of her own, which I couldn’t understand. But then some people give off a strange sense of preoccupation, as if there is something in their lives so important to them that they have to keep it silent, and close. And to keep this thing close, they make sacrifices.
Of course, Mami loved Dominique’s hair. And she loved Dominique, who ate everything Mami served at dinner with genuine relish. Dominique tried to teach me some of her sunny, rolling patois. I couldn’t pick it up, but I offered to teach her Spanish. She said, ‘No thanks.’