“Oh, sure! Mommy went to Bourda whenever they could.” For the first time since he’d come, Amir’s accent slipped through. He corrected himself: “I remember it fondly.”
Father passed the magazine back, and Harry took it gently. He didn’t care much for cricket—sacrilege, if you were to ask the other boys at school—but he knew his mother had, and that was enough.
“Thank you,” he said, glancing up to Uncle Amir.
“My pleasure.”
“Well,” Father said, pushing himself up from the table and giving a mighty stretch, “your Uncle and I have some things to talk through. You should get to bed, my boy. We’ll have a long day tomorrow.”
Harry was in no way looking forward to a long day at the sugar mill, but he gave Father a quick smile, thanked Uncle Amir again, and closed the dining room door behind himself.
The beast flexed its long fingers, pushing a little deeper into the warmth of Harry’s groin, and settled its tongue against the lining of his stomach. There were whole hours when Harry would forget the beast was there at all, hours when he could let his mind wonder at a life that was not consumed by its needs. But it would pop another vein, gorge itself on his blood, his bile, his mucus—and then heal his broken body. He suffered it all without so much as a bruise.
Instead of getting to bed, he eased open the kitchen’s side door. Majid was still there. He had his apron on while he washed grease out of dishes, his face buried in a cloud of steam rising from the sink.
“Oh!” He started when he heard the door close behind Harry. The dishes clattered back into the sink. “You scare me, boy!”
“I’m sorry, Majid. I’m just looking for a little food, if you have any left,” Harry said, playing at coyness as best he could. “Sometimes I’ll just get a little peckish at night.”
“You not eat?” the cook replied testily, cracking open the icebox. “Look how skinny you are, boy.”
“I ate. I’m just still hungry.”
Majid wrapped yesterday’s roti and a hunk of leftover tilapia in paper towels, then put it all on a small plate. Harry took the plate, and the cook returned to the dishes in the sink.
Food in hand, he headed upstairs. Father and Uncle Amir had retreated to the drawing room. He watched for a moment as their shadows moved behind the door’s frosted glass inlay; their voices were pleasant, muffled baritones.
He padded along the hallway at the top of the stairs as softly as he could. The door to Mother and Father’s room was just ajar and the lights were off. The hallway grew darker the further he went along, until he came to his room at the very end. He pulled the door just shut behind himself, slow, then switched the lamp on.
The room had been his for the twelve years he’d lived in this house, but it had been Mother’s collecting room before then. She had a fascination with the tropic wildlife, a real naturalist’s eye, as Father said. She trapped insects—damselflies, dragonflies, orange-spotted butterflies, blister beetles, darkling beetles, velvet ants, boring weevils—and pinned them to huge sheets of Styrofoam leaned against the walls. She’d refused to relocate the collection when Harry moved in, so he’d grown up with them here. Year after year, the bugs’ hollow carcasses would be eaten away by mites, but there was an infinite number of insects in the jungle and Mother never tired of finding more.
Harry was allowed the two bottom drawers of the dresser in his room; all the others were filled with longhorn beetles and boxes of pins. In the very bottom drawer, tucked in a corner behind his always freshly starched school uniforms, he kept the few things he had that reminded him of his birthmother: a fishing hook, a photo of her in front of her old house, and now, The Cricketer. On his knees, he took out the photo. She wasn’t especially beautiful. Her skin was dark—at least, because of Father, Harry was light enough to pass as British—and, like Uncle Amir’s, her front teeth stuck out when she smiled. But his only memories of life with her were golden, sweet things—memories that didn’t include the beast.
“This is disgusting, you know.”
Mother stood in the doorway. Harry shoved the picture back into the drawer, slid it shut. She stepped into the room, blocking the lamplight, and reached a finger down to the plate of food. She flicked the corners of the paper towel apart, revealing the heaping roti and half-eaten fish.
“What’re you going to do with all this?” She adjusted the bow at the neck of her powder-blue nightgown, pulling it breathlessly tight.
“I get hungry at night.”
“You should be eating downstairs. With a fork and knife. At a table.” She crinkled her nose at the lukewarm tilapia, covered it again. “I’ll tell Majid not to let you upstairs with food anymore.”
She left, and Harry closed the door tightly this time. Even cold, the roti smelled of garlic and mustard oil—he had to stop himself from reaching out. He was hungry now, but the beast would be much hungrier before the night was over.
He turned the light out and lay on top of his sheets. He listened until Majid finished in the kitchen, Uncle Amir said goodbye, and Father had come upstairs and eased the bedroom door shut behind himself and the house was entirely silent, entirely still.
Harry packed the food into his schoolbag, slung it over his shoulder, and made his way downstairs. He knew just which floorboards would groan under his weight, just which stairs would squeal in the early morning’s dusty quiet. He never left through the front door—the clunk of the deadbolt as it slid open would wake Mother from her shallow sleep—so he padded down the hall, to the kitchen. Majid was long gone by now, back in his home with wife at the far end of town. The kitchen had a door that opened onto the backyard so Majid could take garbage out unseen by Harry’s parents. Harry gently opened this door, left it unlocked, and slipped into the warm night.
The waxing moon split the world into pale grays and slanting darkness. No light came from the queer, square houses of the compound, but even in the dark Harry knew his way across the lawns and to the break in the wooden fence that separated British families from the town itself.
The beast lurched as soon as he stepped onto the street and the fence hid the compound from view. Harry expected this, though. He feared, sometimes, that the beast knew his mind as well as his body; he stayed up some nights imaging that if it pressed its long tongue to curve of his brain it could taste his intentions in the sparking of his synapses.
The beast settled, pressing its weight into his bowels, and Harry walked on.
Provenance was a long city, a strand of streets and homes clinging to the hem of the Demerara’s silty waters. He walked to the river’s edge, turning off of the paved roads and onto smaller, muddy paths, and continued west. The city changed the further out he went. The British Officers’ groomed, orderly houses gave way to smaller homes: squat, wooden constructions, balanced on stilts, that overlooked the swollen river and the jungle beyond.
He finally had to stop just before he reached the docks. He could stand a little pain from the beast: a clip of its teeth, a prick of its fingers. But it grew more incensed the further out he went, sinking its fingertips into the knobs of his spine and drawing its teeth over the tendons holding his kneecaps to their muscles. He fell heavily onto his hands and knees, his breathing labored.
He slid the backpack off and took out the tilapia and roti. He ripped off a chunk of the roti and crammed it into his mouth, barely chewing before choking it down and readying another fistful. He felt the beast heave upward out of his stomach and reach its greedy jaws to the base of his esophagus. It downed the food heartily, thoughtlessly. Harry ate and ate until there was only a thin layer of roti remaining and the beast had settled back into his intestines, gorged for a time.