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

earlier to spend some time with him. Now he sounded petulant, wounded. She, of course, had forgotten about his gig.

“Don’t say that, babe.” She touched his roughened face, then took his guitar and walked him to the door. “I’ll stay over Sunday, cool?”

Reiner was reassured.

Jackie stood on the sidewalk, watching the van pull away, muttering to herself, “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” With Reiner, she knew who she was, separate and apart, in command of self. With Oku, she was on that train, liquid and jittery and out of control.

NINE

A MAN ONCE JUMPED in front of a subway train, embracing his three-year-old son. What it must have felt like to be held like that, simultaneously clasped to a bosom and thrown against a devastating object. Why had he taken the boy with him? Why did people kill their children or their girlfriends or their wives or their parents before killing themselves? Why did they not simply take themselves—was it some spite against another, against the world? How does one maintain spite so late, so close to perhaps the one solitary moment one had?

The next week Carla saw the funeral on the television news. What a mess he’d caused—now a lot of people had to put things right, had to mourn him, to bury him, to pick out his funeral clothes, carry his coffin, weep for him. Their lives would be altered forever. His wife had to feel guilt over what she might or might not have done, there would be rumours about how she was to blame. Carla would have gone alone, taken only herself and not in so public a way either; she would have simply disappeared, a well-planned disappearance so that no one would know that she was gone in that way but perhaps only gone on a trip, moved to a new city or country. She would have left letters to be mailed over time, arranged phone calls, she would have left a definite route to another life being lived. She would inconvenience no one. That’s how a suicide should be done. It should be a disappearance. A happy disappearance.

What Carla herself remembered from St. James Town was the odd stirring of the air on the balcony. Something bad had happened and no one would be coming back and this was all a spectacle, it was awful and it was also wonderful, an occasion. She remembered smiling as if it was a prize or an enviable event, though all through it she had walked around with the baby in her arms. No one could pry him loose from her. If they tried, her screeching reached the street twenty-one storeys below, even when her father tried. Especially when he tried. She was not supposed to give the baby to him, she said, her child’s scream piercing him. Through the dense walls, over the balcony, sirening down the railings, through the discarded summer furniture, the thrown-away carpets, the derelict skates, lamps, beer bottles, the forgotten cardboard boxes, the dried pots of annuals, through all the dreams apartment dwellers store as garbage on their balconies until the next summer. Her screams travelled and fell to the knob of grass at the front of the building, radiating out to wherever Angie might be. She would not stop screaming until she was left alone with her brother in her arms. Then her screaming subsided, and in a minute, the threat forgotten, she was thrilled again at the occasion of having someone die in her own house.

She was five then, twenty-three now. And she could still hear a telephone ringing, which she could not answer because she was holding the baby for Angie; the front door slam, then open—the baby was hers. Her mother had given him to her. Had passed the bundle of him gurgling to her. She had been singing along with the radio, “Trains and boats and planes …” She had a pencil in one hand and a last mouthful of doughnut in the other and she was conducting an invisible choir when her mother out on the balcony had said, “Carla, stop that noise, sweetie, and come and hold the baby.”

Her mother, Angie, always had her hold the baby when she potted plants on the balcony. She potted impatiens and marigolds and morning glories. She tried a grapevine once and after a few years there were tiny sour green grapes. Carla loved those grapes. She loved to wear the same clothes as her mother. She especially loved a purple velvet skirt. Angie had the skirt. Carla had a dress of the same velvet. Angie sewed a green bear at the front.

“Now put the pencil down, sweetie, don’t get it in his eye. Okay, take him inside now. Careful, careful. Hold him carefully.”

Carla’s stepmother, Nadine, works at Mt. Sinai Hospital, but she wouldn’t be in the line of nurses outside grabbing a smoke; she didn’t smoke. Carla’s mother, Angie, smoked though. She was in Carla’s mind yesterday and today, but she wished that she remembered her mother more clearly. Then she might know what to do about Jamal.

Over the years, despite her efforts to hold on to the memory, her mother faded and faded until all Carla had left was the certainty that Angie had existed and the violent loyalty she owed her. There was a small photograph of Angie that she had been allowed to keep as a child. A woman in blue jeans and a checkered shirt with dark shoulder-length hair. The photographer had caught her with her mouth about to say something—a sentence unfinished—her eyes were happy, laughing. She was in a park, a dog and a man and a tree were in the far background. Her skin was pale, and there was a mole on her left cheekbone. Carla had memorized her face.

Jamal, of course, could not remember their mother. Because he was still a baby when she died and it had been Carla’s job to tell him about Angie. Her small recollections weren’t