A Cup of Pee - Excerpt 11

When we got home, things were different from what I expected them to be. I was sent into the bedroom to take my clothes off to be beaten.
Christopher shook his head as I oozed past him and said, “Doan know why Esther left she children with you, look at this one,” he smiled and nodded in my direction.

Mammy called me ‘that one’ or ‘this headache’ too, but never by my name unless she was shouting for me when I was in another room. So at first I thought he was siding with her, but then I looked at him and saw that he was smiling, and became even more confused. You never knew exactly what to expect with Christopher, he had very big lips, so smiling, snarling, snickering – they all sort of rolled into one when they reached his lips.
“She locked up in the house all day,” he continued. “Bony, malnourished and pale, she is. She don’t go nowhere, don’t do nothing, don’t even smile.”

“When was the last time you smiled, little girl?” he turned to me.
I started to answer, even though I had nothing to say. I’d learned that you always answered. Always.
“No?” he asked.
“When was the last time you laughed, eh?”
Again, I started to answer, with no words in my mouth.”
“No?” he asked again.
“Do you ever laugh, eh?”
By this time, I realised that he was asking what my English teacher called rhetorical questions, so I made no attempt to say the answer my brain held captive.
No! No! No!
“See,” he turned back to Mammy. “She waiting to escape just like we all waited to get away.”
“You don’t dare get on my nerves now,” Mammy replied.
“Look at the neighbours’ kids, they all runnin’ ‘round, and playin,’” Christopher continued as if Mammy had said nothing.
“I doan believe in keeping neighbours close, I like keeping them at arm’s length,” Mammy cut in.
“Maybe they keeping you at arm’s length,” Christopher said. “Ever thought ‘a that?”
The two of them could never live in a house together and not argue. Theresa said that they were too much alike to ever get along. She said that Mammy let Christopher get away with lots of bad things, so he runs wild sometimes.

I had a feeling he wasn’t making things better for me, but for the time being, I was thankful I could put off the shame of taking my clothes off. He seemed to be baiting her just to get her angry. I wasn’t sure why.
“You destroy us, that not enough for you, so now you destroying yuh grandchildren,” Christopher continued, “turning them into mad people.”
“I hope when you get yuh children, they talk to you the same way yuh talk to me. I am yuh mother I had fourteen of you, yuh shouldn’t talk to me like that.”
“You always talk ‘bout having fourteen children, how many us alive? Eh? Seven! Only seven!” Christopher shouted.
“I sorry I had yuh,” Mammy shouted back. “You bad seed!”
“I didn’t tell you to get pregnant again for the married man. He tek you to court and disowned Theresa when you ask him for child support, and a year later, you had me. Not my fault. Blame you self.”
“I want you outta my house tomorrow!” Mammy barked at him.

But why didn’t she hit him?
“Yeah, use me money out then chase me away. See if you can get rid of me. I staying until I want to go.”
Mammy suddenly looked at me and shouted, “You like this, no, people blaming me for you.”
I was keeping my distance because I knew that there was always a way for the blame to find its way to me. I didn’t want to be like the cat, so I put my head down and moved towards the wall by the front window.

“This is what you like, no, me getting blame for you,” Mammy said, stomping over to where I stood willing my body to become invisible, but before I knew it, she had slammed my head into the wall. Part of my head hit the wall but my forehead met the window frame and the room went dark for a minute. Christopher put on his shoes and left, slamming the door.
“Wait till he get his children,” Mammy said.

Little did any of us know, he would die child-less.
Christopher came back in the early hours of the morning and peed in the wardrobe. He was drunk. I woke up and saw him at the cupboard, I heard the wet noise but it didn’t register. Mammy woke up too, but not in time to stop him. At least he had got a cup from the kitchen and held it under the pee. That might have helped, except it was a tiny cup, and he peed lots of pee.
From that night on I felt like he was my friend, because even though I went to bed with a sore head, he had saved me from the shame of once again having to strip down to my bare skin, in order to take my beating.
He didn’t know, or did he? That although the beating hurts, taking it naked was steadily sweeping my eroding soul into a sea of dry, aching dust.
Flying away . . .
Sailing away . . .
Light as a feather . . .

The Day Mammy Broke My Face: Excerpt 3 - Sunday's Child

“Go downstairs and bring that wood!” Mammy shouts, while pointing at an old abandoned wood at the bottom of the stairs.
I take the steps one by one, and walk into the dry dirt at the bottom of the stairs. My bare leg brushes by the lemon grass bush whose leaves we use to make tea. I feel the stinging cut from its sharp leaves, but don’t react.

Instead, I glance at the wood. It had been used to patch up the chicken coop a long time back, so it has nails sticking out from various parts of its used body. I walk past it to look for another, a smaller one maybe.

“Ah say bring that one! Look! Doan try me faith here today!”
“But . . .” I can’t follow that with anything else, I don’t think. My mind is a muddy trench with hidden boulders. I’m drowning in the confusion. Why? Why? Why?
I see my fingers pick up the wood, the one with the nails sticking out from it, into all those different directions.
Maybe she only wants the wood, maybe it’s not to beat me with at all. She won’t beat me with a wood with nails in.
Yeah, she just wants the wood for something else . . .

* * *

She is beating me everywhere, as she chews on her bottom lip. The top of the stable door is open, letting some warm air into the room, which is packed with the furniture from the rest of the house – ‘general cleaning’ stuff. She’s holding in her hands, both hands, a piece of wood which is fatter than my arm. I can hear ‘conk’, ‘conk’ as the wood hits my bony parts and it makes a kind of ‘ta’ sound when it contacts with flesh. I reel over with pain and the pressure of the heavy wood on my body, it pounds on my fingers as I move my skinny arm up to my face.

I’m sure that one, or all of them are broken. The sound’s so loud inside my head. I stumble backwards into the wall, from the sheer force of the hit, and the pain. Ta! Ta! Conk!
But I don’t scream out.
“Stretch out yuh hand!”
I try, but when the wood’s about to connect, it yanks itself back.
“Stretch out yuh hand!”
I try – the other hand this time – the wood connects.
Too late.
“Stretch out yuh hand, I tell yuh!”
By now the smell of hate is so frothed in the woman’s nose – the tall woman standing by the stable door whom the child is looking up to – that she grabs the tiny arm and makes the hand stay put.
I weep like a baby, but not loudly, my dry mouth hardly open.
I cry my soul free, but more on the inside than out.
I hold my hurting hand with the other, as I look up again, this time to see if there is a chance of forgiveness.
Then one of the nails connects with my face.
It sticks into flesh.
That was then.
* * *

Back to now:You know, when Christopher came to visit, he brought some big records to play on the little portable record player which my mother had brought to Guyana about a year ago. She’d only brought one needle with it, so it doesn’t work very well now. It sticks into the records just like the nail stuck into my flesh.

“Jailhouse, Jailhouse, Jailhouse, Jailhouse, Jailhouse, Jailhouse,” it would go. Then Mammy would send me to lift the little thingy up so that the record could move from the stuck position and keep on playing. If I didn’t move it far enough, it would stick again, “Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock, ock, ock, ock, ock,” so I would have to lift the thingy again.

Christopher had also brought a small record, he said it was called a 45. It was a song about the Jonestown cool-aid stuff, but the one he liked best was the big yellow, double one by Bob Marley. He said that the record only looked yellow, but it was really gold, because Bob Marley sold so many of them.

All the words of the songs were written out on the jacket. Mr. Bob Marley seemed to be very, very clever. His words are so sweet, I’d never heard anyone talk about such great things before.
“Schism,” he said on his record. I asked what it meant, but Christopher didn’t know.
“Schism, schism, schism, schism, schism,” Mr. Marley went for a long time before Christopher sent me to lift that thingy.

* * *

Back to then again:
Mammy pulls the thingy, then bright red blood starts to spurt out of my face. Theresa drops the bowl of rice she’s cleaning, screams and runs me to the shower which is at the back of the kitchen, and begins to wash the blood away. But it keeps coming and coming and coming.
Why won’t it stop!
Theresa is only a young teenager so she doesn’t know what to do. I am crying and she is running the water, but the red water keeps on escaping.
My eyes watch me bleed down the drain hole.

“Ah can’t get the blood to stop, Mammy!” Theresa stars shouting and crying. “Ah can’t get it to stop!”

I’m shivering, but not from cold. I’m sure that this is where I die. After hungrily clawing unto this lifeless life for so long, I still die.
I still die?
I still die?
I feel a faint coming on, as the red water runs down into wherever drain water goes.
Christopher is awaken again, this time by all the noise, and gets up to see what all the commotion is about, he sees us in the shower, and tiptoes on the wet, wooden floor outside the little enclosure. He looks at me for a while, then step in on the concrete and says, worried like, “Ah didn’t know yuh had so much blood in yuh mon.” He tiptoes out again, but we - Theresa and I - still cry.

Mammy comes to the shower door now and says to Theresa, “Stop running the water now, yuh want she to bleed to death on me hands?”
Theresa takes me out and gives me a towel to put on my face. She uses it edge of it to dry her eyes.

* * *
Back to now:I didn’t know which part of my face was cut, I thought it was my eye at first but I could still see, so it had to be my nose. I couldn’t feel any pain on my face, how was that possible? I knew that there was pain in my back where I got some of the beating, but none on my face.

“We gat to finish this cleaning,” Mammy said. “Ah warn you, to stretch out yuh hand, but you too stubborn to listen to me. Let that be a lesson to yuh, that next time I give yuh a message, mek sure yuh deliver it.”

“Wot message?” Christopher asked. He was well into his morning body-scratching ritual, while looking for something to have for breakfast.
“Ah send she to go and wake you. If she wasn’t so stubborn, she wouldn’t be standing there like an idiot with a towel on she face.”
Christopher turned to me, “Is that when you come in and shake me out me sleep?”
I nodded my head.
“Ah tired mon,” was what he said. Then he turned away to put the tea pot on the stove.
Mammy said nothing.

SURVIVING THE BREAK-IN: Excerpt 1 - Sunday's Child

Loud, crashing, splintering sound, then broken glass on my face!
Oh Gawd! What’s happening to us!
Franc is crying. Mammy is screaming, “GET UP! GET UP!”
I’m still half asleep. Theresa is shaking my kite-like, little frame, “ANN! ANN! They breakin’ in! Run!”
Franc starts to scream. She is now in spasms, I know her mouth’s open, but ah can’t hear anything but a hissing “whoop.” I wait for the next burst of scream. It comes, and with it I am lifted out of my bed and rushed out of the room. The last thing I see in the shadow of the street lamp as I’m dragged from the bedroom, is a dark boot stepping through the now-broken window pane, into the bedroom, and unto my bed. The owner of the boot is holding a cutlass in his hand. Mammy won’t like that. No shoes allowed in the house!

* * *
In the safety of the living room:
“Ah think he went back out, he only want to scare us,” Theresa whispered, grasping the baby, as we all stood trembling together in the living room.
“It’s the two of them!” Mammy shouted. “Derek wid him!”
I knew who Derek was straight off, he was our Land Lady’s crazy-hair son who’d run away from the prison. I supposed that the other one was his sister’s equally fugitive husband. Mammy always said, “Them’s dangerous people to get mixed-up with.”

One time Theresa had asked her, “Why you say that?”
Mammy had a very long answer to that. I can’t remember all that she said, but one thing that stood out in my mind was when she explained that the Land Lady was a dark spirits’ worker, and that people went to her when they wanted to put bad spells on someone.

“Ann, you go out the back door and call fuh help,” Mammy instructed me, jerking me back into the terror before us.
“No, doan send her out,” Theresa pleaded. “They still in front there shouting. One of them can easily run under the house and find her on the back steps.”
“No!” Mammy said, “They won’t hurt a child. Go, shout for help, Mr. Barry will come.”
“But yuh said that Derek is a murderer. She can’t . . . I’ll . . . I’ll go,” Theresa told her.
“You make the baby keep quiet!” Mammy shouted. “Go!” she said, and she and I crept through the dark kitchen to the back door.
She shoved me out.
Then I heard the bolt click.

* * *
No longer in the safety of the living room:
I am screaming before I can hear my own voice. I am wailing and crying, I am spewing like a volcano – a lava of tears running down my face.
“Help! Help! Somebody please help us!” The louder I scream the harder I weep. My body wants to do this so much. I don’t know why I’m weeping, my voice is breaking, but it’s not because of the shouting. It’s because I’m crying so hard now, I can barely say ‘Elp.’ I am exposed and only have moments before the two men walk under the house and come to deal with me.

I almost imagine footsteps getting nearer and nearer, closing in on me. I think of all the things they could do to me, and I see my half-grown body chopped up into tiny pieces, with the cutlass the person who stepped into the bedroom was holding. A bizarre voice in my head which was shouting louder than I ever could, ask, “But would that be so bad?”

I am shivering in the hot night air, feeling the not so foreign hand of fear take hold of my heart and squeeze and squeeze. I know my heart’s going to spurge its contents all over the hand in seconds. That’ll teach it.
I look for the men through my tears, while I reason with that voice, ‘But see, I am only little.’
‘Is that why I catch yuh thinking of dying?’
‘I doan want to die, please, I doan want to die. I’m really only little.’

Heavy tears stream down my face, and it’s then I hear him. I hear him blowing his whistle through the curtain of the night. It’s got to be Mr. Barry! By the time he reaches our house still dressed in his pyjamas, he has most of the street behind him.

* * *

Later:The two men had run away, leaving us with a bedroom full of glass and a lifetime’s worth of fear.
We survived the night of terror with the mad men from the prison. We all packed a little bag, Theresa packed two, one for herself and another bigger one for the baby. We slept the rest of the night in Mr. Barry and his wife Shirley’s living room. I couldn’t go to school the next day because the police wanted to question everyone who lived in the house.

“So we start from the top and tell me what happened,” said the big puffy policeman. I thought of him chasing after criminals and wondered how hard he would puff after 5 minutes of hard running.
Mammy began, and told them how the Land Lady’s son and son-in-law smashed our window with their cutlasses, but the police wanted to know how we were so sure it was them. Of course Mammy saw them clearly and they didn’t hide who they were either.

“So what did they say to you?” the big one asked again.
“They shouted down the house and cursed us about our so and sos, and then said we’d better move soon or else.”
“Or else?” he asked again.
“Or else they will do worse than break a window,” Mammy answered.
“Did they enter the house at any time?” the smaller policeman asked but his voice must’ve been very loud, because even Theresa heard him.
She said, “One of them stepped into the bedroom but ah think he went back out because he never come through the bedroom door. Ah think their voices were coming from outside all the time they were here, even when Ann was outside.”


“Who’s Ann?” Big puffy said, and my heart leaped into the wall of the visibly bony chest which held it inside my body.
“Me niece here,” she said, pointing at me.

‘Please don’t ask me, please don’t ask me, I not allowed to talk when grown-ups speaking. Besides I don’t know nothing.’ I screamed in my stupid head like I always do, too afraid to say anything out loud.
“What were you doing outside child, you obviously saw their cutlasses, you . . .”
“Well,” Mammy cut in. “She rushed out shouting for help, and then Mr. Barry come ‘round and they run away.”
“Mr. Barry? . . . Oh the P.N.C. Neighbourhood-Watch chap from up the street,” he answered his own question.
“So,” the little, loud-voice policeman said, turning to Mammy. “At which point did you call the police?”
“We doan have a phone, you see,” Mammy answered. “Mr. Barry went back home when he was sure they were gone and called you.”
“I think we have enough to charge these men with aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon, breaking and entering, and disturbing the peace, maybe more. Just one more thing, do you know why they want you to move?” the bigger policeman asked at last.

“They doing it for their mother, they just come out of jail and she send them,” Mammy said. A tiny ball of spit appeared on her bottom lip, and when she said, ‘them’ it transferred unto the upper lip. “She got someone else she want to rent the house to, and she want us out. I pay her rent, and when she tek me to court, the magistrate said she got no grounds for throwing me out, that she got to wait until I find somewhere else to live. She threatened to get me out in the court yard.” Her ball of spit – which I named ‘blit’ - rested finally on her top lip.
“As the magistrate said, she can’t throw you out.”
“But ah can’t stay here now, can I? And she know that, she show me what they can do. I got a young lady daughter, and if anything happen, you know how fast gossip will travel ‘round this place about what shame happen to me.”

“We are very sorry,” said the bigger policeman. “We will do what we can. Do you have anywhere to stay?”
“No, but Mr. Barry say that we can sleep in his living room until the end ‘a the week.”
“Then what?” he continued.
She shrugged, dejected like. Even I could see that she knew this was far from the end. I found that I wasn’t scared. I had buried worse than this inside the soft bits of own body. After all, I didn’t even get beaten today.
“Strange,” said the smaller policeman, “How people will destroy their own property.”