searingedrock

The avocado tree has termites, mom said.  These were what she called subterranean termites, burrowing deep underground, eating at everything, even concrete.  At least in my young mind I envisioned them as millions of tiny nanobot destroyers, and I would wake up one day with an arm or leg chewed off.  I remember accidentally knocking the top of my closet and it caved right in; hollow.  Inside were the creatures, nondescript, lightly coloured things, fat, with a sheen.  They had found their way from hell right into my bedroom.  Nothing was safe.  I became obsessed and followed the termite trail along the cupboard corners, the wall, down to the floor and out the back window where it wound away to a nest I imagined, under the house.  I took mom's termite spray and doused the cupboard, the walls, the corners and ceilings.  I was 10.  I imagined them on my body and had trouble sleeping.

Maracas Beach stretched out like it does, powdered white sand, green waves, midnight blue in the distance. In the summer of that year I went with Keith to the annual swim meet across the bay. He wore his bright green Speedos and I went over to the shark-and-bake huts quickly to escape him. The event was one the upper echelons attended and in which their children competed. In this you saw how separate we were from the rest of the island. I came with my friends; we didn’t come with parents. Instead Laura made her boyfriend drive us and we watched the swimmers come ashore dripping in the sun, embarrassed, tired. Parents threw towels on them and they stood around with fellow swimmers, touching the numbers on their chests, looking at the water with respect. The winners would be the ones chosen for the national teams. They all went hand in hand here; the school, the scholarships, the national teams, the prominence, the networking. Most times they just left for other places and never returned. I stood there with Laura and Shara, feeling the sun on my bony 15-year-old back, staring at the water. It looked cold but I waded slowly in, allowing bits to acclimatise, gasping as it touched between thighs, continuing until I was drifting, fighting currents and diving under curling green monster waves. Swimming out further beyond the breakers we rose on bright green swells, young legs suspended, looking down on the stretch of beach in the sunlight as we laughed and laughed.

Under a wave there is silence and noise all at once, tossed in swirling sand and pushing you down. Once I was pummeled by a wave and dashed chin first onto the sea floor, grazing chin and tumbling into a foaming churning mass, not knowing which way was up and running out of air as my body was curled and shoved. You rise, gasping, to see another merciless wave crashing over you and sometimes there is real fear that there in the ocean, standing next to friends in the sun, you could drown, it could happen. From where you are the shore looks so far away and danger so close to you. Sometimes you can’t think about retreat, surrounded by currents you daren’t turn your back on them; all you can do is face wave after wave, diving deep under the trouble, below where all is dark and quiet, cloudy, holding breaths until there is a lull and you retreat, quickly in jumps, and safe on the sand you forget how bad it was, how scared you were, and you laugh. Maracas is known as the most popular beach in Trinidad. It is the Sunday hangout for Trinidad’s suburbia, along with the other north coast beaches. As a child when returning from a day at the beach I would lie motionless on my bed and still feel the swell of the ocean, still surging with some imaginary tide. I would empty the sand from my swimsuit, powdery white, and wriggle toes into them gleefully as evidence I hadn’t imagined it.

She walked into the park last night, air finally cold and sharp, intending to write and smoke and feel guilty.  The trees blocked out the streetlights and created a cavern of darkness; she was walking into nothingness.  She  thought she would just walk at first, allow her eyes to adjust but she went straight through, reaching both hands out blindly, helplessly, stumbling and making a racket.  She felt the trees and all their cold griminess and thought she was one of them, just more frail and wretched.  She sat at the base of one of the dark trunks and lit up the world with a dull red flicker.

Aunty Nell was my youngest aunt, she never seemed like an Aunt because she was only eight years older than me (and I was already almost big mih self at 12). On evenings by the porch outside with mosquitoes singing and frogs beginning to croak, and the crapaud (crap oh), little tiny frogs that warbled down by the river, Aunty Nell sat on the porch steps in her faded shorts and cotton blouse she'd made and laughed so hard while talking on the phone. In the summer the evenings always lasted for ages and ages and I felt sometimes when she laughed that it was like the other natural sounds and remained as a breeze even in silence.

Bit by bit she stopped talking on the phone; once she stayed quietly on the phone for almost an hour, not talking. I didn't understand what was happening to her but she seemed sad most times. One day she brought home a frog; a tiny crapaud, delicately green and slightly moist. She kept him in a shallow basin of water with rocks so he could climb to the surface; how she fed him I have no idea. As time passed and I followed her about mournfully, with eyes wide and wondering she seemed to see me suddenly, she stared through and at and past me. 'Jilly you are going to be beautiful.' Even though I was in big school and I already saw boys who looked back at me and even though I was almost an adult now I still ran to her and hugged tight and for all my bigness my head was still level with her shoulders.

Mother told me that Aunty Nell going to be a mother too. I remember the day Aunty Nell had her baby. She was big, skin tanned a ruddy brown but pale around the eyes and mouth. 'Jilly don't forget froggie.' she passed her hand over my head and then was gone.

I was home alone because I was big enough; besides mom would call when everything was finished. Then the frog died. One second I saw it, all shiny and moist and breathing, the next it just stopped, poised upon the rock like a froggie statue. Just then the phone rang; it was mother, and Aunty Nell had had a boy, his name was Sapo. Aunty Nell was ok but very weak.

I stared and stared at the crapaud frozen on the rock.

There was a gate once.  All angles and ragged wood it leaned slightly, one hinge rusting and the latch didn't fit into the bar anymore.  It hung open most times on warm still days and on gusty hot days it swung tiredly into the dent right above its catch with a shuddering bumping noise. 

There was a time in hot stillness and radiating heat when a hand, soft with youth, pushed on it, gently.  Creaking, it swayed, swung aside and it said with a quiet creaking, 'Who is there? Who is so kind?'.  The hand answered by resting, holding, and drew away slowly.  After the hand followed a rustling and another softness, the brush of cotton against jagged wood.  There was no snarling on the gate; the fabric slid slowly over and across and around; the gate stood only, quietly and wonderingly at this new thing.  After the hand had passed it pulled the gate to and lifting the latch, placed it firmly in its catch.

The gate knew only what touched its rough countenance and waited patiently for another sign of this new thing.  It felt the warm wet trickling of dogs and the streamless tiny battering of dust and the spattering of rain and impatient mens' hands and boots, its hinges only creaking in reproach.  And when the wind blew it banged ceaselessly in tired anger.  But in evenings it remembered the softness and hung open silently, waiting and wondering.

I see the same view in the evening through the kitchen window of the office and somehow wish I could paint it, all messy with blobs and with the wires to show the knotted heart of the new train terminus - no covering walls yet, just insides all twisted and flickering with tiny torches.  the building stands black against violent pink and purple.  Flashing lights hover suspended in the sky and pass slowly, blinking its way to another metropolis.


In the building adjacent to ours there are no blinds in the windows and I stare straight through to others stuck behind small computer screens, alternatively talking on the phone, slumping forward on their elbows, staring some more at the computer fulfilling the demands of the hive.  I'm but another bee.  But what pollination can this stagnation possibly bring?


There is a tinge of apocalypse to the afternoon.  This weekend will be bitterly cold with a chance of snow. 

At the top of the Exchange Building of Aberdeen city one stares through floor-length windows to the harbour with its dull icy coldness and to the bright red, orange and yellow of the ships that dock there.  Across the bay at the top of another building, past grey and yellow stone through another pair of windows one can see suited shapes moving in a similar boardroom, staring also into the harbour.  This morning the sun gives life to the sea and warmth to the sky.

The bounty of the sea, of the rock that bears it and the oil below it.  We are the harvesters of the sea, labourers and workers and those who are nourished by it.  We see nothing but our hunger and feel nothing but our fear of it. 

Ten years go, in the heat of a highschool classroom in a hot island country, we studied geography; below the still breeze of a loud ceiling fan we were told about population growth, ceilings, natural disasters, stagnation.  War. 

What would we do if the light dies and order withdraws?  What mercy from an Eastern nation that is ravenous and unstoppable?  There is a change coming.

It is strange how the debris of colonialism wash upon our shores like shipwrecks leaving us to wonder what it must have been like, to pretend.  The stone cathedrals built to replicate some northern twin far away, stories of the batimamselle, the fine young French lady with her petticoat and fan, the Spanish and the English.  Our school was run by the Dominican sisters, ten of which were ravaged in a fire in the mid 1800s.  To wander in the old wing of the school is to smell dust and wood and to imagine cries of agony and prayers. The air is very heavy and cold.  One can almost hear voices.  I never went there alone.  With our Catholic mass and our holy rosaries and our little bazaars we were very colonial.

We cling now to a webbed mesh of the high and low, the new and old, the black and the white.  We sing those songs, all of us, the dispossessed.  When we dance it is with true abandon because we have been abandoned.  We set upon ourselves within our sea-ringed walls like caged beasts.  Out of this experiment there is the secret of the universe; the inevitable collide, and the resolution, but it will be a long time coming.

By the sea the girl sits with one hand on her stomach and the other on the chest of her lover.

Further down the beach the fishermen are drinking and ogling the young girls who bathe in the ocean in their bras and panties.

The lifeguards sit in their yellow shorts and red vests and scan the water, chatting with people who perch beneath their towers.

By the sea the girl arches so as to capture the sun in the valley between her breasts, meanwhile staring into patchwork of blue and white sky until her eyes tear with the effort.

In between the ebb and flow of water she raises herself onto the body of her lover, gripping with arms and legs and with eyes until he can bear no more and kisses her. And the waves continue, and the people continue.