A fair amount of sunshine

8th May 1960: A fair amount of sunshine. Wind north-east to south-east, mainly moderate – fresh.

The sea is a mad grey dog on an elastic leash. I step away from its foaming mouth, keep well back, don’t let it catch me. Hindy copies the crazy English children, pushing her toes into pebbles, burying her feet, waiting for the waves to gobble them up. She’s trying to look warm so Daddy don’t make her come out of the water. There are pimples on her arms but she still glows orangey-pink like day breaking over Runaway Bay. Even if Daddy catch her trembling in the sea he won’t be vex for long. None of us can hold bad feeling against Hindy. I try but it’s hard, what with the sun rising in her forehead.

Pushing toes into pebbles

“It’s cold” I say, hugging myself and stamping my feet over and over on the same spot. The air sucks water from the sea sprinkling my lips with salt. “Let’s go back.”

“Soon come” she says, turning away from the waves towards me. To my right, planks of wood form a wide wooden path on stilts that stand ankle-deep in grey-brown seawater. Half way along the path, and on and on to the bottom, are shacks on both sides and strings of coloured lights hang in children’s w’s, looping from the top of one building to the other. Golden horses spin in a slow circle, rising up and down on poles as they turn. Riders hug their necks and rise up in the saddle and fall back down. Elvis is singing. People walk out onto the platform with long empty hands and come back with carrot-orange fish in see-through bags, pink candyfloss and dried-up coconuts fit for pigs.

“What’s candyfloss made of?” I shout. I’m about to ask again when Hindy says quietly without turning her head,

“Spun sugar.” I’m not sure if I heard her answer from inside myself, or outside. I don’t want a sweet thing to remind me of my sister’s hair but it does. When we used to play little white girls she could flick, toss and shake without a towel on her head. She the only coloured girl I know who can brush her hair. She takes after Mother’s side. High yella Mother’s friends call her, for she’s light-skinned like Grandma Myrtle. I sweat and tug and rake, watching Hindy brush her hair one hundred times with the silver-backed brush Grandma Evadnee didn’t give me. (There was a mirror to match and she didn’t give me that either, not because Hindy was prettier with more need of a mirror, but because she didn’t want to break up a set, she said.)

I pull on one of my thick fuzzy plaits and wonder how old I got to be before Mother lets me cold straighten my hair blow-in-the-wind smooth. Hindy is holding the skirt of her dress bunched up against her thighs like there might be ackee shells or pea skins in her lap; it makes her legs seem longer.

Hindy is tall, tall, tall. She flew up overnight like a banana tree. Press the stick down hard onto her head and the mark on the wall is still over six feet. If there was a fair share at birth eight and a quarter of her inches should have come my way. She is mostly leg. Daddy says when we born Grandma Evadnee tell him about a tribe in Burma called Padung – giraffe women. I asked Mummy. She rolled her eyes and said, don’t pay them no mind. But looking at Hindy’s legs stretching out of the sea, it seems Grandma Evadnee is right again.

“Next time Daddy gets a bonus we should ask for something different.” I say stroking my cheek that feels cool and rubbery like a cold-boiled egg and wondering why everything, even my own skin has to be so different in England. A wave curls up Hindy’s shin. She bites her bottom lip and closes her eyes. At least I am outside. Because that’s another thing that bothers me – the way English people, even when they go out they are really going in, to pubs, or café’s or cinemas, before rushing home to their damp brick houses to be inside again. What a way they love to squeeze the whole of their life into small rooms. All cooped up.

Someone screams and laughs in the same long breath. Hindy opens her eyes and says,

“We’ll ask to go to the funfair. I heard they have Dodgems and Ghost Rides and sausages in tall buns with ketchup. Besides, who can’t have fun at a funfair?”

“You think they’ll let us go alone?”

“Harriet, you always asking for permission, sometimes you have to take what you want,” she says kicking the sea.

I look up behind me. The beach is at the bottom of a slope. I can’t say how far in feet or yards, but a couple minutes walk uphill is a wall. In front of the wall rows of grown-ups sit in deckchairs. My eyes pass over different shades of grey; mackerel-grey, concrete-sky-grey. Even the donkeys – trotting along, carrying jump-up children and shitting on the way – even they are the colour of grey washed stones. I didn’t know you could miss colour like you miss loved ones. Sometimes I don’t think I can stand it. I long for red. I ache for orange.

Different shades of grey in the sky

Parked on the pavement, above the wall, looking down on the beach, next to a stall with Whelks and Cockles written across the front is a raggedy white hut with peeling paint. Through the window a fat woman with rings on all eight fingers passes out a cup of tea with two plastic-wrapped biscuits on a mint-coloured saucer. Green china is all over. The adult’s not holding cups and saucers in their hands have them by the side of their canvas chairs. It’s like Grandma Evadnee said when I asked her about England, tea, tea, tea.

“I don’t see Mummy and Daddy,” I say, but my words are carried off by the wind. A skittle-shaped bird flies past.

They call the beach seaside in England. The seaside has no sand or trees. I close my eyes; imagining the feel of sand-burnt feet hitting the sea. Feesh, feesh, shouts the dreadlocks with thick white teeth walking along the seashore with a ribbon around his neck holding a tray of pink goggle-eyed snapper and bearded goat fish.

“Indyanarriet, come ‘ere quick time.” When Daddy calls we must be in his sight by the time his tongue clicks at the end of our name. If I am busy I act as if I can’t hear him. Daddy prefers deafness to rudeness.

I never tire of the sound of our name. I don’t mind my half being behind hers. It’s her birthright. She came first, slipping out and into her name. Mother says I was hidden behind, mistaken for fluid, pushing against a nerve near her spine and her back never felt righted again. Grandma Evadnee said my birth wrong-footed Daddy. It took him two weeks to recover from the shock of being robbed of a son twice, and after Mummy stopped cooking for him when he wanted to call me Marcus, then stopped washing his clothes when he switched to Mosiah, he called me Harriet because she might not have been easy on the eye, but she led the slaves outta captivity. And when Mummy started cooking and cleaning again because Harriet sounded pretty when you said it after Hindy and a capital H was her favourite letter to write down, I got my name.

“What, you can’t hear Daddy calling?” I ask, knowing she heard and isn’t ready to go. Two children been creeping towards Hindy, sideways like soft-shell crabs. The youngest of the two, a toddler, is close enough to touch her, but Hindy going on like she don’t notice, even though he’s burning up the beach with his red hair.

“Hair,” says the little boy stretching a hand; white and soft like an unbaked wedding roll.

“Let’s build a sand castle,” says his sister swinging a yellow bucket with a spade in it.

“Hair.” Hindy collapses her legs down and crouches. Her skirt wetting up in the sea. The boy touches her hair. His hand springs away. He tries again, this time holding on, pulling gently. He is standing up steady, so his sister lets him free but stands guard. The baby babbles happily with a few recognisable words thrown in here and there. Things like this happen to Hindy. She is coloured and talk fast like all of we, but the seats next to her always get taken on buses; she is the kind of ‘different’ people move towards.

A fully-dressed woman shoots past me; running into the sea like she catch-a-fire; her flame-coloured hair a frozen wave. She steps over the baby, unaware that doing so can stunt his growth.

“Naughty,” she says pulling the baby away from Hindy, but he won’t let go and my sister’s head is being dragged towards the baby and his Mother. Hindy unlocks his fingers to free them both. The baby screams, his face a squashed custard apple. The woman doesn’t look at my sister. She treats Hindy like a door her baby has caught his fingers in.

“Dirty,” she says, holding his hand in front of his face. Clutching the baby to her chest she marches away, ignoring her daughter running by her side. Hindy cuts her eyes and breathes in as if she is pulling up bad words to fling after the woman, even though our Mother says we mustn’t cuss ignorant people, they will get used to us, and until they do turn the other cheek.

“Tell me how Grandma Evadnee dealt with people she didn’t like.” On the ground is a sea sponge or a small animal’s brain.

“Not liking don’t come into it.” I say. I bite the inside of my right cheek and press my lips together, not wanting to tell her, because nothing is free. There is always a payoff somewhere and although she’s two minutes older I’m tempted to hold back, for her sake, because it’s the person asking who must bear the consequences. In truth, sometimes I don’t want to share, not even with Hindy who is almost myself. But I’m thinking of the way that woman said ‘dirty’ like she was teaching her pickney something important. It was the same way Mother said ‘hot’ when she blew on our green banana porridge. And those lessons last long, long, long, because even now at my big age I catch myself blowing out fast and saying hot when I scald myself.

I look at Hindy bowed in on her self. Hindy’s always been red-eye over the things Grandma Evadnee taught me. She called me a witch once and I ran breathless to Grandma Evadnee asking her to name the thing she was showing me. She carried on patting cow-lick dumplings. We all call it different, but I’ve never cursed God. She chopped a groove into the middle of the dumpling with the side of her hand. It all runs into the same thing, she said tearing off more dough to begin again.

“Take sawdust, a piece of garlic and alum and grind it all together.” I leave out the bluestone. It’s years since I told her this one and I can’t remember what I left out the last time. “Shape it into a body and hold it together by tying string over and over. The person you trying to fix – lay it under her mattress. She will never have peace in her house and nothing with her husband will go right as long as they sleep in that bed.” Hindy straightens up and looks at me. A short time passes before she says,

“You forgot to say: lay the doll with its head to the east and the feet to the west, like a dead person should be buried, following the sun; against the life of the person it’s under.” And then she smiles and is like someone mashed the sun with a fork on her brow and orangey-pink is spread all over. She thinks she’s caught me out, but I skin teeth with her because her colour reminds me of redwood verandas and early morning mint tea and because I’m shocked at the correctness of her memory and because I was right to follow my mind and leave out the bluestone.

“Indyandarriet” Daddy calls. I widen my eyes at Hindy.

“Coming,” she says pulling the heavy sea between her ankles. Six strides and she is beside me. She smoothes her dress with the flats of her hands. The flared skirt suits her, not me. It is not, as Daddy keeps saying, because I am different; it is because I am not the same. When I am big-woman-grown I will ask Mrs McCalla what Hindy is having made and I will choose a pattern that is the opposite. I hand Hindy a towel. She dries between her toes and rubs salt water from the front of her legs and behind her knocked-knees. Until last year I made fun of her knees but there’s no point since I found out Monroe has the same problem. They share the same walk, and like Marilyn my sister wears misfortune well.

The stones on the beach force the whole of my legs to work; my calves pull tight, even my toes help; curling and releasing to keep me upright. I link arms with Hindy for balance. We pass a family sitting on a brown blanket eating bendy sandwiches with mean fillings. The Father’s legs sprawl out from under the pages of the Sunday People like trashed Coca-Cola bottles. The daughter smiles and I know she’s exactly seven from the size of her teeth. Grandma Evadnee taught me to tell age from teeth, and a woman born with a caul over her eyes who dreamt lucky numbers and kept horses taught her. I walk around seaweed. Shells crunch. Hindy’s elbow jabs against my ribs as we walk; our four legs as two. Hindy waves at our parents the way Princess Margaret did when she married the pictures man, in a small circle as if air cost money. We are bent over laughing, stumbling towards Daddy. Mother looks tired and cold. She has looked that way since we reached England and stepped off the platform at Liverpool Street station.

“You pickney can’t stop the skylarking?” Mummy says gripping the temples of her forehead. Our laughing when she can’t share the joke annoys her, annoys everyone we have ever known. We are not allowed to be too noisy in England; we must play music low, talk calm, and not be bursting out with laughter all over the place. Every time Daddy comes into focus his face is bigger and angrier. We laugh harder ‘til I can’t breath. Tears are rolling and all the while I’m thinking of Hindy’s royal wave and Daddy’s mad-as-hell face. I tilt my face to the sky and gulp giant breaths to quiet myself.

Strange big-bellied birds are flying over my head, flapping white wings and crying like somebody took something from them.

“Seagulls,” Hindy answers, before the question leaves my mouth.

The Seagulls