What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

on me. He would probably say I pushed him, which I didn’t do, but I knew he was a wicked boy and would tell a lie on me. So I went to sleep without any food and I hid from him the next day.

I was eight years old. When no one tried to beat me for pushing him, I was sorry I left him and went to look for him by the boat. He was still lying there beside the rotted boat. His hand was over his eyes. I called him, I said, “Hey boy!” but he didn’t move his hand from his eyes. He didn’t answer me. So I pulled his hands, and his open eyes stared at me. I said, “What you trying to pull, you asshole!” Then a bee flew out of his ear and stung me on the mouth. I saw the merest smile on his face. I screamed and started running. My lips became swollen instantly, and I vowed never to talk to that boy again. He disappeared. No one looked for him. Except me, sometimes. Just to see if he was sorry for playing the horrible trick on me. If he had only once appeared to me, I would have maybe said sorry myself. Anyhow, I did not miss him, and as days went by I did not miss him even more.

A month or two went by, and on a day when I was tired from the wear and tear of cuffs and scratches from the other children, I went to the rotting boat to see if my friend was still there. He wasn’t. But he had left his shirt there, and the zipper from his pants. The place where I last saw him seemed bleached out, grass ripped up. Of course, it took me years to figure out that the fall had practically killed him and that I’d done the rest. A clouded leopard probably ate him, or perhaps the rats that roamed the camp like we refugees. Perhaps in all the days that I hadn’t returned for him, they had taken small bites of him and little by little he was dragged away. But I chose to think of him then as nothing but a trickster. Perhaps I was afraid someone would think I had hurt him and they would beat me or send me away to another camp where my parents could not find me. After all, they were soon to come for me, so I had to stay quiet.

Then there were the beatings at the camp. You could get a beating from anyone. And for someone like me with no one to retaliate, I was like a bed mat on a line. I can’t tell you how many beatings I got. That boy used to hit me. So, I played dumb. I was dumb. They let me go finally with a beating. By now you would understand I was not a lovely child any more. My legs had sores, places I picked and picked and ate the skin off. I was unwashed, and lice were plentiful in my head. I scratched and scratched until my head was bruised and scabby.

Pulau Bidong was cluttered with ramshackle buildings, small lean- to shops and houses, barracks really—some stilted, some open to the weather. Every day more people came, getting off the boats, walking the wooden pier with whatever they salvaged, sometimes only their arms swinging, one foot in front, one behind. There was nothing to do all day but stand around or find things to eat. I would jump off the pier to relieve the itchiness of my head. So I learned to swim, and one day a woman approached me. She used to run the shop where drink was sold. She said I was a good swimmer and she had a job for me. She told me I would have to swim out to a boat and bring back a plastic bag for her. She told me to wait at the pier until the sun went down. And so I began my first career. The woman gave me food in exchange and tar for my head lice. She was not a pretty woman, she had a cleft palate—her mouth was cut in two. She was nothing like my mother that I remember, nor my sisters. Her fingers were dirty, and she tricked me and gave me less than what she said, but that was fair. Who was I?

Who was in charge? I didn’t know, how would I? The strong, the cunning, the smart, those who could run fast, those who could hold their breath, those who had money and gold, cigarettes and chocolates, those who could talk; anyone who had a knife or gun or stick. Don’t ask me about authorities. They were the authorities. The woman and her gang and the other gangs who fought her. I was glad she took me under her wing because that is how I met the monk and my fate.

The monk told me many stories. When I first met him, he looked me right in the eye and told me this one. There was a boy once who lied a lot, the monk said, he lied until his teeth were green and he stole and he was wicked. One day he went to fetch wood and he met some tiger cubs and he played with them until he was bored, so he decided to break their necks to see how it felt. When he did that, the mother tiger saw him and let out a roar and came racing toward him. He was so scared he flew up into a tree. The mother tiger saw that the cubs were almost dead and she went and got some leaves from a special tree. She chewed them up and spit the mixture on the little tigers and soon they sprang back to life and the mother tiger took them home. So the boy climbed down and dug