The boy and his father were living in a small village near to Yallahs. They worked in Mr Ho Choy’s grocery. The old shop was gone. The boy did not know why there had been a change of fortune but his friend Rufus told him his father had pledged the shop in a mahjong game and, unable to pay the debt, had been forced to hand it over. Once again they had tied their mattresses to the truck, packed their clothes and whatever goods were left, and gone off into the night, along the yellow dust lanes, past moonlit banana fields and coffee groves, the storm debris of branches cracking under their wheels.
Mr Ho Choy was an old man who limped behind the counter. He had white whiskers and a bald head. He was kind to the villagers, who all had credit with him, and his business had grown from a simple grocery to a sprawling store that sold hardware and timber, with a rum shop attached and a kitchen selling snacks. He lived with his wife in a large white house half a mile away and allowed the boy and his father to sleep in the shop’s back room, among the sacks and crates.
A makeshift curtain split the room in two and on the other side, Linda Bloomfield, the shop’s servant, slept with her two small children. She was young and very black but reminded the boy of his mother with her wide doe-eyes and the coils of plaits she wore wrapped above her ears. Her children whimpered and cried and the boy lay awake listening to Linda’s cooing. The soft lull of her songs floated out of the window into the blue night, reminding the boy of his mother’s singing. Sometimes the boy awoke to hear another noise – not children, but something animal behind the curtain, a low grunting, rhythmic and breathless, and a woman’s soft cries. The boy sat up and looked over at his father’s empty cot, the bare sheets crumpled in the moonlight.
He was thirteen now. He didn’t go to school but worked all day in the shop, often left alone with Mr Ho Choy when his father was sent to Kingston for goods. He was grateful, always, to be out of his way. His father still beat him, his violence sudden and chaotic.
One night he had been reading the newspaper to his father in the back room of the shop. The news told of workers demanding more wages and rioting at the sugar factory in Westmoreland. People had been killed. Caught up in the injustice, the boy blurted out a curse: ‘Damn the factory owners! The workers have a right to stand up for themselves.’ Before he could continue reading, the blow struck his ear. His father’s left fist first, then his right, again and again as the boy stumbled round the lamp-lit room, trying to duck the punches, until finally he lay on the floor, curled against the bare feet kicking his back.
Sometimes the boy would wake in the morning, the first light sloping up the wall, to find his father sitting on his own cot, bent forward and staring at him, a brooding look on his face. Before the boy could speak, his father’s hands would be on him, pulling him up and pushing him towards the door, the two of them in a strange, silent dance, out across the yard and towards the trees. There was no one else awake to see the man dragging the boy, naked but for his shorts, fallen to his knees and clawing at the dirt. There would be rope, the boy’s body tied to the trunk, and then his father’s punches, quick in succession, sharp jabs to his back and sides, the boy’s cheek scraping on the bark, his body waking up to pain, the snap of his father’s belt before the buckle whipped against his thighs. Sometimes his father neglected to tie him, but he still leant there, nailed to the tree by the force of his father’s fists.
Afterwards the boy watched his father’s back heaving as he walked away, out of breath. He would bend to wash his hands in the bucket on the veranda, as though the boy had dirtied him somehow, as though he needed to be rinsed off. He never looked back. The boy would pick himself up from the ground, slowly unfurling. He never cried. He would go inside and dress slowly and carefully in the back room, examining the bruises already showing on his torso, dark blooms on his skin, dabbing the bright cuts with a cloth. Then the day would begin, as though he had just risen.
♠
One day he was alone minding the shop, leaning on the counter, his mind busily running over the accounts, only vaguely aware of a small child skipping back and forth in the yard outside the door. Customers came and went and each time they left the boy would look up to see the child, a boy of five or six, playing hopscotch, throwing a stone into the dust, the sound of his counting just audible. The boy looked down again. Then suddenly the child was before him, bare-chested, his nose just touching the counter, his grubby fingers gripping the wood. ‘What you doing?’ the child asked, looking at the ledger, the pen in the boy’s hand, then immediately, ‘My mummy says we brothers.’
‘Hmm?’ The boy looked up, pretending not to hear. ‘Take your hands off the counter.’
‘I’m your brother,’ the child said proudly. ‘I’m Kenneth.’ His smile showed his pink gums and the threat of a nervous laugh rippled in his thin chest. The boy took him in – the pretty face below his scalp shaved and scarred by a careless razor. They had the same slant eyes, the same cheekbones, the same nose. He could see that what the child said was true. But quietly he said, ‘No,’ looking him in the eyes, ‘is not true,’ and then a whisper: ‘Your mummy is lying because she don’t know who your daddy is, I promise you.’
Something flickered in the child’s smile and the boy pulled himself up a little taller behind the counter until he loomed above the child blinking up at him.
‘Yes, we brothers!’ he insisted.
‘Get out my shop,’ the boy said, pronouncing each word carefully. ‘You’re no brother of mine.’
‘Yes, my mummy said!’ The child looked hurt. ‘We brothers. Same daddy, the Chinaman.’
The boy pointed at the doorway, spoke louder. ‘Out! Get out of here!’ The child turned to the door, then slowly back to the boy and said simply, ‘Because we look the same, you can’t see?’ and he walked fast out the door and began to run, across the yard and through the gate. He was barefoot. The boy watched him disappear along the road.
He had seen his own face so clearly in the smaller boy’s he couldn’t bear it, and didn’t know what it was he couldn’t bear, the sight of his own self, or of his father. And how many children did his father have with girls from Mocho, Hearts Ease or Yallahs? Linda Bloomfield’s belly was growing and he knew what was in there. How many others, a mile away or thirty miles away? Did he pass them on the road, these children who were not owned like he was, who had loving mothers to care for them and time and leisure to throw stones into the dust, hopping back and forth in the midday sun?
♥
Mr Ho Choy was kind. He helped out the poorest in the village, didn’t chase credit if he knew a family couldn’t pay it, give small loans of cash he knew he wouldn’t see again. He had worked hard, had enough for himself and could afford to be kind. He was kind to the boy too, as though he could sense the sorrow in him, could see below his clothes the scars and marks put on him by his father. When the shop was quiet, and the boy’s father gone to trade, he showed him card tricks – the boy following the queen in Three Card Marney, pointing at the card he knew must be the one because his eyes told him so, even as he knew Mr Ho Choy had somehow swapped it. ‘You sure, you sure?’ the old man laughed in his croaky voice, turning the cards over, fooling the boy again.
Mr Ho Choy was old but his hands were nimble. They were small, strangely pale and reminded the boy of the fragile shells the tide washed up in Yallahs Bay. Mr Ho Choy showed the boy how to hold his fingers still and pressed together, curving his palm just so, to hold a card out of sight, then how to flick his wrist so quickly a swap could not be seen. The boy practised this manoeuvre for hours at the counter, until he too could do the three-card trick.
Some nights he sat outside the shop with the village men, their rum and beers and dominoes set out on the table. He would take out his cards and the men would gather round, one by one trying their luck against the boy, tossing him a penny to deal the three cards face down side-by-side. Then slowly at first, the boy would slide the cards around, swapping them into each other’s places, but always turning them over to show their faces. He knew the banter needed for the trick, the constant talk the confidence man should spin a punter. ‘So there she is,’ he’d say, turning the queen, ‘and there she is again.’ His audience hummed and ahhed along, bent towards the table, the punter’s eyes fixed on the boy’s hands moving the cards faster and faster until finally they came to rest. ‘Now which one is it?’ the boy would ask, looking up, and the fellow would point to a card with conviction, his eyes wide, and say ‘That one! It has to be that one,’ and ‘I haven’t looked away – I know it’s the queen!’
‘You sure, you sure?’ the boy would ask, before turning the card to show a three of hearts or two of diamonds. ‘No way! No way!’ the man cried, outraged but half laughing, and the other men slapped their thighs and shook their heads. All evening, they would play the boy, drunker and drunker, but more determined to outwit him. And sometimes he let them win, enough times to keep them playing, their pennies knocking against each other in his pocket.