Ants and Lizards Running Around

Kerry Furukawa

After my 16-year-old and I have quarreled about where she will go for sixth form, I go on my own tour of the school that wears the blue skirts, the school she insists on going to. I assume she only wants to go there because some of her friends do. Which is not a bad reason, but not the best one either. She says she wants a change of scenery. We can travel for that, I say. Just continue at your current school, they’ve had a sixth form for years, they know what they’re doing. The blue school used to have a sixth form for years, too, my daughter says, they’d just been taking a break.

It is a mediocre school, I think, but don’t say. Why did they have to take a break in the first place? There is no way I can win. I just tell her I’ll go to see what the blue school is like. What do you mean, she says, you pass there every day. She has a point. But I have never been to the compound, and more importantly, I am sick of the argument. I just shut up and, with nothing to shoot down, she does too.

I take a day off to go and see the blue school. My daughter is at a friend’s house. This is how she has been spending her summer – friends’ houses, beach trips, waking up long after my husband and I leave for work, lazing on the couch. I would do those very things if I were her. But I am not, even though I have been. I once also had a wide-open summer after fifth form where all I had to think about was how to have fun.

The woman in the office, who wrinkles her nose to push up her glasses every few seconds, says Sure, you can go and take a look. The doors should be open and there’s nobody else here. She does eye me a bit oddly at first. But I tell her that I want to make a decision before all the spaces are taken and that I also can’t get any other days off from my job at the tax office. Government worker to another, she relents.

Go around to the back and walk until you see some steps, she says. Climb the steps and you will see two small buildings, then a larger one on a hill – that’s the sixth form block.

I do as I’m told. After the steps, there is a slope, narrow with a pleasant incline. The path is bumpy, with tufts of bush between stones. Rather than being a school block, the structure on top is dwelling-like, and looks as if it might have been a Great House once. It has a wraparound verandah with a double-sided staircase. Even without venturing into the rooms, it is plain to see that it is old. Nothing like the more modern, purpose-built buildings below.

I am tempted to be mad. To wonder aloud to the woman in the office, and even the principal, if this is the kind of place parents are paying their money (and taxes!) to have their children educated in.

But there is something about a breeze that starts playing around on my skin that pulls me away from wrath. It shimmies around the verandah and flows into the rooms. Above the blackboard in the front room, a string of cobwebs does a quick Jonkunnu dance – just like some of the ones I would fix my eyes on as a child – spiritedly darting lanky gray limbs here and there to a rhythm carried by the breeze.

At points, the wooden floor inside the schoolhouse feels like it might give in. Of the five rooms, the largest and most decrepit is at the back. It is empty, as if there were no current plans for it. I don’t look for or see any toilets. The house is too small to have been a main home, I finally decide, maybe it was one of Massa’s other houses. From the back step, I look out at clusters, towers, and mini plains of green, so dense, like a green wall. My mind wanders before latching on to a thought. I am sure they would have provided a good place for me to jump from my body and run to, back when I was little. My preferred destination had always been the banana grove behind our house, where the trees that delivered fruit were chopped down by the same man from beneath whose body I wanted to slip away. That sparse grove was the safest place I had known.

I return to the schoolhouse verandah to see the woman from the office making her way up the slope in her white short-sleeved jacket. I blink away my grandmother waddling toward the door in her best Sunday suit with two red strips on the breast pocket.

The woman stops when she sees me, and says, loudly, through the quiet, Oh I was just coming to check on you. You were up here so long.

She waits for me to join her, hands akimbo, eyes popping out over the glasses she hasn’t bothered to adjust. It’s so cool up here, I tell her.

Yes, we are sure the students will love it. You know how teenagers get hot.

At the bottom, I thank the woman, tell her we’ll apply by the deadline and decide I’ll drive the long route home, slowly and with the windows down. I feel like I want to be inside myself just a bit longer today.

But what good can this lead to? If I don’t think too much about those things that happened many years ago, it’s not so hard to move forward in a normal way. But the moment I encounter a whiff of a memory of the smell I’ve been trying to un-smell for thirty years, remember the places I couldn’t truly escape to, it becomes necessary for me to be there again – my body pressed into the red rug in my grandparents’ living room, staring up at the zinc ceiling and making sure to keep quiet so no one would hear us.

I am smoothing my daughter’s new school uniform over the ironing board. Before this, I was doing some of the same round-the-house things I’ve been doing every day this week. And since it is the last week before my daughter starts sixth form, activities like making sure the dressmaker has sewn her uniforms properly are in the mix.

Having tugged here and there on the bright blue skirts to see if anything came apart, I set up the ironing board and wait for the iron to get hot. This is the first and only time I will ever iron my daughter’s uniform. I don’t need to, but everything feels so much like an end.

The pointy tip on the dark grey face of the iron tugs at my memory. It reminds me of something I’ve seen over and over again. And must see again. I unplug the iron and go straight for a box with photos, located on the bottom of the bookshelf. In the photo I am looking for, the very edge of a roof juts into the frame behind four gleaming faces. Along with three men, only one of them a close friend at the time, I am sitting at a wooden table on top of a mountain. Why did I ever climb a mountain with three men? It didn’t even occur to me at the time that I should have been a little concerned. Or perhaps I was, and I’d brushed it off and gone anyway.

While we were climbing up the mountain that day, I was thirsty, but I also needed the toilet. There were no toilets until the peak, so I just drank some sweet, icy stuff and kept holding it. I didn’t think for a minute that there wouldn’t be any running water at the top. After all, we were in Japan, where storing water in pans and using pit latrines – like we did when I was a child here in Jamaica – were things I had never heard of.

At the top, without even putting my bag down on the table where we would later take that sun-filled photo, I made my way to the toilet. It smelled. And it smelled familiar. The fixture seemed normal enough – white and egg-shaped, unlike the concrete square with a wooden seat that we had when I was a child. But this was also just a shit hole, which explained the smell.

Without relieving myself, I returned to the others, smiled for the photo, and three hours later, when we finally made it down the mountain, I used a flushable toilet that did not remind me of the place where I first saw blood on my panties.

I suppose many people do, in fact, first see blood on their panties in a toilet. When I was growing up, many people in our area also had pit latrines, just like we did. But I was ten, and that blood wasn’t my period. Nap time had just finished, only I (or the person whose dull thrusts led to there being blood on my panties) hadn’t been sleeping. Now, after all these years of living, and throughout them all, I’ve come to see, believe or accept, that men having sex with children in their families is also not that surprising.

At some point, I am finished with the ironing. Three skirts and five white shirts are hanging in my daughter’s closet where her old uniform – the same except that the skirt had been green – used to hang. The box is back on the shelf, the photo back between otherwise forgotten moments of time.

The breath in my nostrils was not mine alone. It smelt of cigarettes and ganja and sharpness and it filled my head. The air rushing through my ears sounded like a dog panting and whimpering and squealing all while trying to be quiet. When the air flowing through me was mine alone again, the animal sounds were gone, but the smell hung to my inner walls.

All the times before and after that time became that single smell. Sometimes on a beach when I was watching everybody’s things, or in a club when my favorite song was on, or the moment I cheered my daughter on as she took her first steps, I remembered, and quickly forgot, that I had also tasted that breath. Even after I stopped remembering all its notes, I still had the memory of once being able to. The other smell, the one that came from between me and this man, the smell I washed from my body and cream-colored panties, rests right above my mouth. 

Was it my mother who knew first? She was working abroad back then, and occasional calls on somebody’s borrowed phone were only so we could hear each other’s voices. Was it my grandmother who knew? She had raised three girls, grandchildren from her two daughters off looking for greener pastures. Or was it my aunt, whose words I still remember, ‘Mi can’t believe di same ting happen again.’ I am still scared to ask who she meant. Who could have done the same thing and to whom? I am scared because I believed then, as I do now, that I already know the answer.

When I was older, but still young enough to feel that it was OK to talk about those kinds of things, I told a man from our family. Maybe the first man – second – who knew of it. We were going on a trip somewhere on one of those very indistinct bright days where the sun can make even detritus seem beautiful. You see this kind of day often, but the bedazzlement of the air always gets your attention.

He was driving us to a place with zip lines and bobsleds, an adventure park for tourists. After spending months working in the UK, my relative had wanted to do some fun things on his trip home to paradise. I was in university at the time, which meant I was essentially free. Wow, he said when I told him about it. That’s terrible, he said, shaking his head, pulling in his upper lip, extending the lower. Very terrible. He didn’t ask any questions. Even now, I wonder why no one did. Were they afraid of what they might find out? Were they worried they would have to do something about it? Sometimes I still wish somebody would ask me some questions. That day, I zipped and flew and howled until I was tired, wanting exhaustion to replace the uneasiness within my chest.

I ask my daughter to tell me about her day. She and her friend Carina visited Carina’s grandfather in a neighboring parish.

The man is hilarious, she says. Quick-mouthed with a reputation for liking younger women.

I immediately think this is an opportunity to ask her. It will ruin the mood, but I don’t care. Did he try anything with you?

She laughs. Try what? He’s 93!

Anybody else ever try anyting with you yet? Anybody older?

To this, she jolts her head back from the neck. After a moment, she says no, nobody has ever tried anything with her. Nothing more finds my tongue and she starts fiddling with her phone.

The verandah we had when I was a little girl was not unlike the one I have now. But there was no grille or high walls apart from the one that closed off the living room from outside eyes. A window and front door interrupted the stretch of grey, unpainted concrete that faced the street. At night, we sat around and listened to stories from our grandmother about aunts or distant female relatives who always knew trouble was coming because their ‘belly bottom’ – a body part one only became aware of when it was time to fret – started to burn. Some of these nights were as clear as the water in our steel drums, but most were so black we could only imagine what lay out on the street in front of us. Or in the rooms behind us.

When my daughter was around three, she, my husband and I spent a night in that house. There was electricity there by that time. But with all the land hanging around and there being more bush than other houses nearby, when the lights were off, it was the same thick blackness as always. The house was full for my grandmother’s 96th birthday celebrations the next day. My husband, daughter and I slept in one of the same beds I must have slept in as a child. We had intended to just drive down in the morning, but no, some other relatives had said, come early, we want to spend some time with the baby.

The man was still there. He slept in the room he had always slept in. This is family. We greeted each other, as we still do even now if we happen to meet. He said some things maybe to, maybe about my daughter. We had stopped having conversations that weren’t necessary a long time before that. Whenever the family gathered, I was the only one who seemed unable to laugh freely in this man’s presence. Maybe the others didn’t know what he’d done to me more than one time. Maybe I hadn’t told them about the blood, and so they thought what he’d done was ‘harmless,’ like I sometimes say of the shopkeeper who would grab and squeeze parts of my preteen body. Or maybe my family had simply forgotten. After all, nobody had sat me down and questioned me about it, no special person from any office anywhere had come to talk to me. My mother, the only person who might have known to hug me, was not there.

After it all came out, my grandparents continued to go to church, send us to school, and keep us fed. And I continued to be a child, until I wasn’t anymore. It was as if they thought that if it was ignored, it would simply just disappear. Still, I didn’t know how anybody could forget, so I vowed that my indifference toward the man, my complete reluctance to speak on any topic concerning him, would be my way of reminding them all. Whether they are reminded of anything is unknown to me.

On that morning of my grandmother’s birthday celebration, I slipped out of bed before the wood fires were started for huge pots of soup, curry goat and rice and peas. Dew was still on the ground and smokiness from some charcoal kiln in some bush somewhere trickled through the freshness of the air. A few things had changed since I was a child – three mango trees reduced to one, two new orange trees, no more ackee trees. The pit latrine was covered in overgrowth and there were now toilets inside the house.

I was brushing a bit of loose soil off my grandfather’s tomb when I heard footsteps. My husband was coming toward me and nodding in the way he does when he guesses I’m thinking about something. He was alone.

What’s wrong, he asked when he got closer.

You leave her by herself?

Plenty people in the house. She’s still sleeping anyway.

I went back and sat on the bed until my daughter woke up. By afternoon, the yard was full of the rank smell of goat meat made pleasant by spices, and the voices of people with full bellies. My daughter went from aunt to aunt, uncle to uncle, cousin to cousin, playing and telling stories everybody pretended to understand. Sitting on her chair in a corner on the verandah, my grandmother fed my daughter endless pieces of fried chicken. The bigger kids gave her balloons, cotton candy, and rides on their shoulders. In the evening, she fell asleep five minutes into the drive back home.

Sorry about this morning, I said to my husband, after we had talked about how the people behaved, how happy Mama looked, and how good the food was. Then I told him everything. About all the nap times and night times. About the blood. How worried I was for our daughter.

How can you be in the same place with him?

I shrugged.

Think you could ever tell her when she’s older? I don’t want that man anywhere near her!

I looked out the window and saw the same things I had always seen there – more trees than houses being slowly overtaken by darkness.

Friday before her new school starts, and we are home alone. My daughter is sitting on the verandah doing lord knows what on her phone. I can see her from the window in the living room, where I am leafing through some of her new textbooks. Sometimes she looks up and out onto the street. Beyond our gate and the narrow road is nothing but the neighbor’s yard. On both sides of their yard are other yards, as there are beside ours. We are used to this scene, but I wonder what she sees. It is around four, a time when she would have been leaving school during the term. A time when I would be getting ready to leave work, pick her up, or respond to her message that she didn’t need to be picked up. Before the exams and the break, those messages had been coming in more often.

In my own summer before sixth form, I had my first real kiss in the dark under the apple tree by a gate not very different from the one my daughter is now facing. Has my daughter, like all my friends back then, done more with boys? A shame, a true shame that I don’t know. Did my friends’ parents know? She must have done something. This summer alone she’s spent a few nights (supposedly) at friends’ houses.

I’ve stopped reading her history book and I’m simply staring at my daughter’s back. Soon, she will start spending her days in that schoolhouse overlooking the forest I wished I’d had to hug me when I was a child. The breeze sweeping through the schoolhouse will become too familiar to her to invite reflection. As her teen years end, she will start feeling the freedom of doing almost anything she wants, within and without those ancient walls. For a while, it won’t matter much what has happened before or even what she might cause to happen. She will joke, and dance and argue like nothing else matters. All of that is still waiting for her.

Before I start making dinner, I go to the little garden outside for some thyme, and find the day is still just a day. Like any other. Sun and sky in their place. Dry leaves on the ground, ants and lizards running around. Too normal and recurrent to remember. Or forget.