Snapshots

Aunt Mary had two sons. The youngest, Benny, was only a few months my junior and commandeered me as a playmate soon after my arrival at the boarding house. We played together after school and at weekends, in between my duties and his piano lessons or his math and Spanish tuition. The games were his inventions and he managed to press entire worlds into fragments of time. We were time travellers, sailors, ninjas, flailing manfully at each other in the garden. Benny was always the Admiral, the Master. I suppose I minded it, but I knew my place, and besides, these were adventures I could never have created by myself.

One summer we made amphitheatres in the yard out of stones and trapped insects to battle in them. The smaller, more sluggish creatures were invariably mine, though they mostly just crawled away so there were no actual victories and it became simply which bug could break out of captivity first. When I was called in to work, he continued to play. I watched through the window as the arenas became more elaborate, with galleries, moats, drawbridges and pennants. I saw how the building became the pleasure and the insects were forgotten.

Over the years, as my duties increased and Benny’s interest in drawing and komiks developed, we played together less, but we remained comfortable in each other’s company. Sometimes he sat and read in the kitchen, folded like a seabird on an old stool, his back against the stone wall, reading out loud while I washed pans or ironed clothes. Other times he sketched me as I worked, asking me to stay in a pose until my limbs ached and he was still only half done.

His brother, Dub, was four years older than us and the age gap was enough to make him mysterious. Dub had always been good-looking, but there came a point in his late teens when something inside him just switched on and after that it was hard not to look at him. He filled out, held himself differently. In a room full of people, he was often the centre. ‘Like his father,’ America said, eyeing the girls that had started to dawdle by the gate on the way back from convent school. ‘More cream than coffee.’ If Dub noticed, he didn’t show it. He spent most of his time with a guitar, writing the songs that he was sure were going to make him famous.

When he was sixteen he learned to ride a motorcycle, which caused quite a ripple in the household, impressing Benny and I but dismaying his mother, even though it was a mosquito in comparison to the one he exchanged it for later at Earl’s garage when he turned eighteen and came into a little money. After the bigger, better bike, and after his schoolfriends left for university, Dub’s crowd changed and he started hanging out with the bikers that gathered at Earl’s. They called themselves the Wolf Riders Dub’s idea, from some komik Earl had brought back from the States for Benny the year before. At nineteen, Dub started working at the garage and the plan for him to go to college just fell away. It happened in a roundabout way, after Earl came back from the States with an electric guitar.

It was the first time Earl had been to the Bougainvillea. I’d never seen him up close before. I knew him by sight, had seen his pale body bent over an engine in the dark interior of his garage, his baseball cap backwards over his greying blond head. He was bigger than I’d expected and white from several months back in his home town. He made the settee look small. ‘Seattle,’ he said, looking straight into my eyes, ‘is our rainiest city. Period.’ He made a cutting motion with the flat of his hand.

Earl’s manner was open; when he talked, he looked at each of us in turn. If he made any distinctions between us, it wasn’t apparent. I struggled to meet his eyes when he was talking to me, but I was sure it only made him stare at me for longer.

Aunt Mary greeted Earl politely and sat in the sala while he and Dub talked. Earl was a kind of American she wasn’t so familiar with. ‘An ex-USMC mechanic, ma’am,’ he said, and I thought he sounded rueful. ‘I went home after my discharge, but kind of drifted back and wandered round your fine archipelago for a few years before finally running aground here.’ He slapped the upholstery, at which Aunt Mary looked alarmed. ‘In Puerto,’ he added and stretched his arm out across the back of the seat again. Aunt Mary smiled at him. There were a lot of Earls in the Philippines. They often ate and drank in the same places and could be overheard sometimes complaining about how Puerto wasn’t like Pittsburgh or Reno because you couldn’t get this or that.

Earl leaned forward and pushed the guitar towards Dub. ‘The exact same model,’ he said. It was a beauty. A second-hand Stratocaster; warm, dark wood with a high gloss. I would have loved to touch it. It was that sort of object, asking to be picked up to complete itself, but I knew it was off-limits to me. It wasn’t like the piano, a piece of furniture that required polishing; it was a part of the body. I’d never seen anything like it, but when Dub picked it up it looked to me like he’d always held it. I watched him as I served out the coffee and calamansi juice, loitering afterwards in the doorway as Benny ran a careful, supervised finger along the guitar’s neck.

‘It was very expensive, Earl?’ Aunt Mary said doubtfully.

‘Sure,’ whistled Earl. Then, understanding, he said to Dub, ‘You can work it off at the garage.’ He turned to Aunt Mary and, smiling, said, ‘He’s not bad with a spanner. A little training and he could make a career of it.’

Aunt Mary laughed carefully. Dub said, ‘You bet,’ his fingers already forming chords, picking quietly at the strings.

‘Dominic is due to go to college soon,’ Aunt Mary said.

‘Just till I’ve paid Earl back for her, Mom,’ Dub said without looking up. Aunt Mary folded her hands on her lap. This wasn’t a negotiation she would attempt in front of an audience.

Dub didn’t move from the sala for the rest of the afternoon and, in between my chores, I watched him. By the evening, he had a notepad in front of him and a pencil behind one ear, and he sang softly to himself as he scribbled things down.

He started to grow his hair long, down to his shoulders. He’d run his hands through it when he took off his motorcycle helmet, or smooth it down with the shell-handled comb that he kept at the ready in his jeans pocket. Other times, he’d lean over and shake the entire top half of his body before throwing his head back to let his hair fall into place. One day Aunt Mary, tired of reminding him to trim it at least, turned her attentions to mine instead, at which America sat me down firmly on a kitchen stool and took the scissors to it. ‘Not too short,’ I said as she wrapped a sheet round my shoulders.

‘You want me to leave it longer here, maybe a nice fringe?’ she said, and I knew she just meant to cut it as short as she could so as to leave the longest interval before she had to do it again. She pushed my head forward and I felt the cool metal of the scissors at the nape of my neck. From the sala came the sound of Dub singing. His voice was a little rough at the edges. Maybe he sang that way on purpose because the music he liked best was what was huge in London and the States, he said, and it was called punk. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. In our house, my father had mostly played Sam Cooke, Rey Valera, Elvis Presley.

‘You like that?’ America said, waving the scissors in the direction of the sala.

I hesitated. ‘Sure.’

‘What do you know? You never had any taste. That’s why you don’t know that your hair suits you short.’

We didn’t have to endure Dub’s punk for much longer. A month after he started work at the garage, he took to writing love songs.