He came to a narrow pier at the end of the street. It rocked gently with the current, the water sloshing beneath. A girl, Alice, stood at the far end. She raised a hand to wave; Harry smiled and waved back.
“Wasn’t sure you’d make it,” she said when he got to the pier’s end. She sat back down, dangling her bare feet over the edge.
“Every Friday.” He took a seat beside her and scrounged a lighter out of his backpack. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Alice slipped two loose cigarettes out of her jeans pocket. She was an Arawak, one of the people who lived in the jungles before the blacks and coolies were brought by the British, and before the British, too. She lived on the other side of the river with her brothers, who fished the Demerara by night.
She put a cigarette between her lips, and Harry fumbled with his lighter, rubbing his thumb raw against the wheel.
He didn’t care much for girls at school—another failing in the eyes of his cricket-obsessed classmates—but Alice was different. He wasn’t sure that what he felt for her was sexuaclass="underline" she was older than him, and boyish, too, with her close-cropped hair, square face, and jeans. She smoked with a practiced, world-weary ease, and when he first told her that he’d never even lit a cigarette before she did not laugh or condescend; she simply showed him how.
Harry finally got a steady flame from the lighter and he lit the cig, breathing in deeply. He let the smoke settle in his chest for as long he could stand. The beast was quiet while the tobacco lingered in his throat and pricked his gums; for the time it took for the cigarette to burn itself low, Harry could try to forget that his body was not his own.
“My father’s taking me to the mill tomorrow,” Harry said after a while. “He wants me to be ready to work with him when I’m done school.”
“Is that what you want to do?” she asked.
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
Swarms of gnats hung low over the river, rising and falling as if touched by the breath of an unseen giant. A fish broke from the water, leaping high in a flash of silver, its sinuous body curved with the effort of flight. When it fell it hit the river with a crack like a gunshot.
“It’s not such a raw deal,” Alice said, tilting her head to look at him. “You’ll have all the money you’d need, and a job lined up. Better than fishing this river for money. Better than cutting cane.”
“You know,” Harry said, regretting he’d brought up the mill at all, “I’ve never been on the other side of the river. At least not since my mother died. It’s so long ago, I don’t remember.”
Alice laughed her dry laugh. A cloud covered the moon, and for a moment the only light came from the reddened ends of their cigarettes.
“I’m not sure you’d like it. It’s not like Provenance. No shops, no bakeries, no buses to take you to school.”
She pulled her feet out of the water and positioned herself closer to Harry, her elbow on the pier and the back of her head cupped in her hand. She looked up at him, and smoke drifted lazily from between her lips. Her eyes flickered upward, made contact with his. The urge to lean down and touch her—to just kiss her—overtook him suddenly, and he slid his hand along the pier’s pulpy wood, closer to hers.
The thought must have occurred to the beast, too, for it rumbled awake out of its nicotine-coated sleep. Its fingers pried clumsily at the bottom of his esophagus; its tongue slithered up, soft and wet.
Harry let it rise in his throat. He felt a warmth spread through his chest, a confidence he’d never before possessed; he felt he could lean down now and kiss her on the lips and it wouldn’t change their friendship, wouldn’t change that at all, it would only—
A motor rumbled downriver. Alice sat up, pulling herself away, and the dream collapsed. The beast slithered back, dragging any confidence Harry might have felt down with it. Alice took a last, long pull, then stubbed out the cigarette on the pier.
“Sounds like my brothers are almost back. You’d better get going.”
“Yeah,” Harry said, giving a small, false smile. He felt the heat of his face going red; he couldn’t let her see the shame that filled hollow where the beast had been. “Time to get home, anyway. Thanks for the smoke.”
He put his lighter back in the bag, waved goodbye, and started back down the pier.
The beast had been with him from the time before he was. It found its skin off the stone-cradled coast of Baleswar and took teeth from the mouths of sightless catfish slicked in the muds of the Hooghly; it found fingers in the splintered iron wreck of a sunken steamer—those half-eaten Company men suspended in the deep watched, unseeing—and then pushed onward, upstream, to break the surface off Kolkata’s restless, sweat-streaked banks. Its lips—what practiced, deceitful lips—it pinched from a gora in a white cotton shirt and crisp straw boater, bent at the waist over the rail of a ferryboat, his clean-shaven face so close they all but kissed as it rose to meet him.
On the banks it found a Bengali farmer, a devout Muslim and a newlywed, too, and it buried itself deep inside him. It stayed with him for a year, in guileless sleep, until the man and his wife sailed that unbordered ocean to a place they knew nothing of, a world they could hardly imagine but was richly described by their sahibs and Her Majesty’s Officers.
One night when the ocean churned and the ship’s passengers cowered in darkness, all lanterns gone out, the merchant lay with his wife. The beast slicked itself inside the man’s heavy cock and spread itself inside his wife and when, at last, they emerged from the belly of that ship and stepped onto Georgetown’s streets, the beast lived inside yet another: a child who would be born to this unknown country, this ancient jungle.
Father had a motorcycle that had been brought by ship from London; a sleek, chrome-buffed Norton Manx painted a royal oxblood and fitted with all the most fashionable accoutrements. Though the sugar mill was only just over a mile from the house, Father still drove the bike there and back every day.
“She’s got enough space for the both of us,” he assured Harry as they readied themselves the following morning. “Just be certain to hold onto me good and tight—they need to have another go at paving this road.”
They puttered down the main road slowly, Father steering around rain-filled potholes but still managing to hit bumps and stones that jarred them both. The other officers’ homes spun by, just beyond the wooden fence, and when they had passed the compound he took a turn that put them on a dirt road that traced the edge of the river. Indian and Arawak fishermen worked the banks, hauling crab pots out of the water, throwing nets, dragging buckets out of their mud-streaked boats that writhed with the morning’s catches: eel, chiclid, bushymouth catfish, snook, croakers, and lungfish as long as Harry’s arm.
This flew by them, too, and soon they were past all the houses, past the docks. Harry knew they were close when they came to the prison: a building as uncannily tall as it was narrow, set back from the road, with rows and rows of blacked-out windows. A hundred years past, maybe more, it had been one of the colony’s first sugar refineries; its thick walls and iron-barred doors made it a prime candidate when the British decided the city needed holding cells.
Father’s mill was just back from the prison, over the railroad tracks. It was, from what Harry could see beyond the stepped fence running the perimeter, like a small city itself. Several small, shack-like buildings encircled a three-story, whitewashed structure with a slanted roof. They crossed the fence, and Father slowed the motorcycle.
The mill was already busy. Sweating men—Indian and black alike—heaved six- and eight-foot bundles of sugarcane out of the backs of trucks parked in the lot. They pressed the cane along what looked like a low gate that was banded together by a long iron bar along its top. The bottom of the gate swung inward, and the loose cane fell onto a conveyor that rolled it into the mill. Men stood on the other side of the low gate, huge bamboo rakes in hand, pulling the cane down onto the conveyor belt.