Black Juice Read online

  After too long—‘He is killing him!’ Winsome whispered—Bard Jo threw the boy out of the house onto his stripes. Mothers came running and took him quickly to his own house, but still there remained on Dot’s memory—on the memories of all those kids so that they could never talk about it—the back of that boy, furrowed and weeping like a scored peach from shoulders to thighs, beige dirt patching the slime of it, and the piece—whether dirt or boy they didn’t know—that fell from him as the mothers gathered him up.

  That boy had always been strange and not talked much, but after that day no one heard a sound out of him. He hardly came out of his house, and even when his back had healed over, he moved all bent and carefully as if the cuts were still fresh.

  Dot stayed a favourite of Bard Jo’s. He didn’t know why. He feared it was some kind of terrible trick the Bard was planning, to calm and please everyone until the time came for Dot’s beating, so that the beating would be a more shocking and frightening thing. Dot could see no reason why he should be favoured above Winsome, whose mother worked so hard and whose father spread the Bard’s wisdom every time he opened his mouth. Or above Fanty and Toad and all those cousins, who were like a lot of little Bards running around.

  ‘WHAT ABOUT WHEN YOU FIRST SAW MY DAD, then? Was that special?’

  ‘No.’ Bonneh laughed. ‘We were children and I hated him. He was one of those Simpsim boys. They were noisy and thought too much of themselves. I hated the lot of them.’

  ‘So how did you get round to marrying one of them?’

  ‘Well, I looked at Morri again, didn’t I? With new eyes.’

  ‘And your heart turned over?’

  ‘No, no. I just knew. Our parents were bringing us together, and I knew that it would work all right. He had ears, you see.’

  Dot laughed. ‘As no one else did?’

  ‘He knew how to use them. He was a very careful man—until all that warring nonsense caught him up. You can hear too much, you know. You can think yourself able to do more about things than you really can.’

  ‘Don’t tell me lessons,’ sulked Dot. ‘Tell me about him.’

  She laughed and went on sorting beans.

  ON DOT’S TWELFTH BIRTHDAY, his mother put new white robes on them both and took him to the Bard’s house.

  ‘That’s a fine boy, Bonneh,’ said Winsome’s mother as they passed. Dot’s mother had Ardent on her back. Girls didn’t have a middlehood; but if they had, Ardent wouldn’t have got it anyway. Ardent wasn’t going anywhere.

  When he came out his door, the Bard looked startled at Bonneh, then up and down Dot as if the boy were an entirely new kind of creature.

  ‘My boy is twelve today and ready to move between child and man,’ said Dot’s mother.

  The Bard recovered himself. ‘Twelve already! From a babe in arms, as I remember him.’ He looked Dot over as you would judge a skinny sheep that had wandered into camp out of drought. Dot hadn’t been at all sure about this. He said nothing, looking at the Bard’s neat feet.

  The Bard reached forward and pinched his shoulder to make him look up. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We go to market tomorrow, but Dot may sit with us tonight, to listen and learn.’

  Bonneh touched Dot in the small of the back. ‘Thank you, Bard Jo,’ he said, and looked down again.

  They went back to their house and took off the robes. Dot’s mother made grilled bean-pats for breakfast while Dot sat against Ardent, feeling miserable.

  Bonneh put the platter in his lap and kissed him. ‘Don’t want to be a man, Dot?’ She sat to her own pats and smiled her eyes at him.

  ‘If I were a girl, I could come and work with you.’

  ‘Aah. You always can, anyway, if you want. You’re a little different. He won’t be hard on you like his own children.’

  Dot pushed some bean between Ardent’s teeth and didn’t answer.

  WHEN DOT ENTERED THE TEA-TENT THAT NIGHT, the Bard’s older sons looked at him as he had known they would.

  ‘How is Dot here?’ some said.

  ‘He turned twelve.’

  ‘As I said,’ said Pedder, ‘how is Dot here?’ and that caused some laughter.

  Dot sat behind the other children in the tea-tent. He drank half a glass of tea, sweetened for his childish palate; even so, the bitterness puckered and numbed his throat, and he was still forcing down sips when the others were burping and clattering their glasses back onto the tray.

  The Bard took up the Three’s box. He swung open the little brass door-hook, and the House sagged its pleated cardboard walls over his knee. Dot didn’t know whether it was the House or the Bard that gave out the dry gasp.

  The Bard closed his eyes. His hands and wrists grew very large and beautiful against his lamplit white robes. Dot had never seen the Bard work before, but now he saw, with a sip of the tea trickling and burning into his stomach, the state of excellence to which his mother’s hands always aspired. The Bard had poor tools to work with—a broken box, puffing dust, two cow-bone keys—but his hands knew them so well that he could reach into the House and draw out, from its seemingly empty rooms, first Anneh, who was Mother of all mothers, then Robbreh, who began and ended Anneh’s thrumming, and gave it shape and purpose.

  The Two were much, much louder right here in the tea-tent. Robbreh was in the ground, beating under Dot’s seat, and in the air, thudding at his skull; Anneh was like black treacle dividing against his brow, streaming around his head.

  By the time the Bard found Viljastramaratan in the deepest corner of the House, Dot was unable to think his own thoughts. Viljastramaratan, being coaxed out by the Bard’s fine, giant hands, was like a string threaded with little blades, being pulled through Dot’s head. The child spun and squealed and wheedled, pitching its voice higher and higher.

  Around Dot, the middle-boys and the men closed their eyes and swayed on their seats. Their faces shone with sweat. As wide-eyed Dot saw this, he felt fear spring and steam and sprout all over him, so strong he could no longer lift the halffull tea-glass to his lips, for fear the child Viljastramaratan would notice him, would turn in its dance and show him its awful squealing face.

  Very slowly the child’s voice began to be muted, to giggle less, to be woven into the deeper and calmer songs of the Mother and the Father. There came moments when Viljastramaratan’s voice was indistinguishable within the music, and those moments lengthened, until Dot realised with shivering relief that the child was gone for the night, leaving behind it space for Dot to be Dot again. He lifted the glass to his mouth, caught the whiff of nightmare on its lip, and lowered it again without sipping.

  The music finished; the Bard closed up the House. He spoke, but relief was running so strong in Dot’s veins that he hardly heard him; all he could think was how pleasant, how gentle and sensible the Bard’s voice sounded, after Viljastramaratan’s racket, after the Mother’s and Father’s humming and beating. The Bard talked in a soft chant about the Three, and how all the goodness of the world fitted into this dusty box, the working mothers, the fathers steady at the centre with all the wisdom. And how all the evil of the world danced also out of this same box, like a swarm of children and madmen running wild through the streets of a big town.

  To Dot, the Bard seemed to say the same thing over and over; he listened for the Three’s names in the chant, hoping each time that this would be the last invocation. But the Bard showed no signs of ceasing, and the others still swayed and were silent, as if the Bard’s voice were also a kind of awful music that was to be endured, and after a while Dot gave up hope and dozed off.

  Very late in the night, he woke. The middle-boys were getting up all around him. Winsome’s cousin Lute stooped for the tea-tray. Hurriedly, Dot clinked his glass onto the tray as it rose, when he had meant to replace it quietly when no one was looking. Yellow tea still swung in the bottom of the glass.

  Lute looked from the glass to Dot. ‘You have to drink all of it to see any Meaning,’ he said scornfully, and he turned away with the tray.
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  Dot went home by himself and lay awake angry. All night, while he’d endured the singing, the women would have rocked babies by their own fire and murmured together, then one by one retired to sleep, when they chose. The house’s starry eye looked down at him; his family’s breathing—Ardent’s thick and snuffly, Bonneh’s steady—made the house seem alive, and he never wanted to leave the inside of that creature.

  But that was middlehood, wasn’t it? He wasn’t a baby any more, was he? Wasn’t a child. Dot curled up on his side and crooked his arm around his head, like Ardent, and fell asleep that way.

  DOT DIDN’T PLAN TO LEAVE. How could he? There never was such an idea. It was only that two days later, when the men came home from market, their returning woke Dot, and when they had settled, and there was no more movement outside, Dot was still awake. He rose and stood outside, under the tilted stars. And then he was walking without having decided to, following the fathers’ trail, which was quite clear in the starlight. He carried nothing, not even a thought, away with him.

  HE REACHED THE WORLD MIDMORNING. His body was stumbling with thirst and confusion by the time he saw the town’s blocks and domes lifting out of the plain, but his gait firmed and his stance straightened as he approached them.

  The market was over, of course, so the town was not the bustle he had expected. There were people about, but not a pushing crowd; there were animal-smells and food-smells, but they came one at a time as he passed along the streets, were not piled upon each other and inseparable. There were wonders—houses sheathed in pink-veined stone; penned animals feeding on bought-fodder; a purring, rolling vehicle that required no beast and no slope to move it. Every person wore the kind of cloth the Bard always railed against: a whirl of bright stripes with some emblem set all over—a crowned head, a burst of flowers, an embellished cake on a stand. And everyone wore gold or jewels about their person, the women great collars and earrings, the men heavy bangles and finger-rings. The more Dot saw of these adornments, the more he felt as if the Bard himself were walking at his shoulder, as if the old man was parading him, white-clothed and righteous through the evil world. Dot wanted to shake the Bard’s hand off his shoulder; he wanted to hide in stripes and emblems himself. He wanted to be a gaudy townsperson, who if he saw the Bard shining along the street would find him strange, and cast him just such a curious look as that woman had given him through her fringe of beads, and bite back an uncertain greeting, as had that tall boy in the turmeric-yellow trousers and azure swing-shirt.

  Dot had never felt so hungry. There was a drinking place in the empty square; he filled his belly with water and sat to collect himself. Then he walked on and on, almost to the far edge of the town, which took him until early afternoon. There he found a tree dangling mangoes at him over a wall, fruit lying ripe and burst open on the road below. Three mangoes, and his mind was a little less lost; he cleaned his face and hands at a pump and went on.

  Shortly thereafter he came to a goat-pen. There were more goats in the pen than Dot had ever seen in his life. Leaning over the fence to admire them, he noticed, straight away, six or seven that were languid and scruffy about the mouth.

  He went up to the man at the door of the house next to the pen.

  ‘Who owns these goats, that they’re let to be in such condition?’

  ‘Why, the Baroness owns them,’ said the man mildly. ‘But what condition would that be?’

  ‘Well, several are quite bad with the mouth-rot. You’ll want to get them some rash-leaf, if the herd is to see out the winter.’

  The man was to become a friend called Kooric, but My, what a blunt and old-fashioned way of talking you had back then, he would say. But blunt or no, Dot knew more about goats than anyone in the Baroness’s employ, and Kooric organised for him to be taken into her house. He was to learn worldly ways in return for his knowledge—knowledge of goats and gardens at first.

  And of course, once your questions started, laughed Kooric, no one could keep up with you! You must know everything that a merchant does, or a cleaner of wash-houses, or a soldier, or a weaver, or the children of the slums playing Devil-Dare; you must drive every jintny or tractor and visit every fair; you must be six hundred people in one!

  Show some kindness: he was starving, father, said Kooric’s son Samed. They had kept him pure and holy all his life, and now he must stuff his mouth with handfuls of dirt. And he poked Dot mid-robe with a be-ringed finger.

  IT WAS ON A VISIT to an even larger world that Dot found the House of the Many. Walking through the terrible rottenwater smell, the smoking-fish smell of Port-of-Lords, with Kooric and Samed, he saw it in a display window, on a stand covered with black velvet. Where the House of the Three was made of worn brown wood, the Many’s seemed to have grown into its curves of blood-red glass, trimmed with silver lines. Where the Three’s had two yellow teeth, the Many’s bore a full set, dazzling plasticky white, slippery black and, at the other end, a grid of black buttons. Where the Three’s rooms were joined with a cracked fan of brown paper that shed dust, the Many’s had moist-looking red leather.

  Dot went on careful feet to the window. The House glowed within. The Bard would abhor it; his beautiful hands would scorn to caress its newness. Where would be the virtue in making such easy music, with such a wealth of notes at your disposal? Dot had the feeling he was breathing in, and breathing in, feeding the laughter in his chest without ever letting it out.

  Before too long, Kooric and Samed came back for Dot and moved him on, but that afternoon, while everyone slept, he came back to the shop to see if the House of the Many gave him the same feeling. If anything, it was stronger without the others there; he stood a long time with his hand on the glass, gently, inaudibly whooping to himself, gazing on the object that locked together the plainness of his past life, and the lustre and luxury of his present.

  ‘You play accordion, do you?’

  The man had come out of the shop, was halfway through a cigarette. He was as neat as the Bard, as sober-looking as the Bard, but dressed Western, in a dark suit and a white shirt, the tie the only jewel on him, a knot and band of ruby that changed to emerald with the light.

  Dot shook his head and went on looking.

  The man finished smoking. ‘Come inside,’ he commanded. ‘I’ll show you.’

  Which is how Dot came to be seated under a window, drawing the Many out of their gorgeous House, easy as honey, multitudinous as the wavelets on the harbour-water. And how when night fell and the man released him, he walked back through the streets of Port-of-Lords with his ears full of the new music, and his eyes full of the little dusty place, the river-muddy place, where dwelt Winsome and those others, and Ardent, and Bonneh his mother.

  He spent none of the money he had brought to Port-of-Lords, even while Samed and Kooric went mad in the markets, holding up cloths against him and urging him to buy. He held onto almost all his earnings in the next months until his second visit to the port, when he gave his savings to the accordion-man.

  ‘HARSH COUNTRY,’ said Samed. His sunglasses had orange mirror-lenses that reflected the car windows, across which glided spine-tree and horizon.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Dot. ‘Though I hadn’t thought so until you said.’

  ‘But there’s nothing, nothing. It makes you thirsty just looking. And so boring.’

  ‘Boring?’ Dot laughed. ‘You don’t know boring. Boring to you is pausing between sweetmeats, or running out of women to woo.’

  Samed grinned in a satisfied way under his blind orange eyes. He was dressed very gorgeously to go among the Bard’s people. He hadn’t believed there was a place, that wasn’t a hospital, where people wore plain white. No one else had believed Dot, either, when he went hunting for white cloth to make his new, man’s body—and Samed’s as well—some Bardclothes. The best he could do was plain Western white trousers and a loose-shirt with white-on-white embroidery. His arms felt light and naked without their rings and cuffs.

  ‘Is that the place, sah?’
said the driver.

  ‘Already? Why, yes, it is. But go slowly!’ Dot said alarmed. ‘We’re rushing towards it.’

  And so they crept towards the houses, slowly enough for Dot to see piece by piece that things were not as they had been. The goat-pen had fallen in; there were only three goats tethered to posts among the houses. The Bard’s house, the little one to which it had been such an honour and a terror to be summoned, was a broken half-cylinder of mud-bricks, all the thatch gone, nothing inside. The tea-tent on its slight rise was only the posts and strings and a few shreds of cloth blowing from the nails. Dot had forgotten how every thing, living or not, was the same milky-coffee colour.

  ‘Oh, Dot,’ said Samed. ‘This is not a place for children.’ Dot knew Samed was thinking of the garden he grew up in, a moist world of caves and ferns and pools and cushions, lit with the colours of everyone’s clothes, set here and there with decorative town foods. He knew Samed was craving a guavaand-ice, in a tall glass with straws and a spoon. He knew that there was a good reason he had asked Samed to come, but caught here between his excitement and this sick feeling, he couldn’t recall it; he thought he ought to have come alone, perhaps on foot, carrying nothing. He ought to have tried harder to find white cloth; even he was too odd and ornamented for this place.

  They stepped out into a stunning white heat. Dot felt the pupils of his eyes contract, and was almost blind for a few moments. The driver switched off the engine, and Dot was deaf as well, his ears stuffed with the silence.

  The shapes resolved into people beside their doors—mothers and children only. From the farthest house emerged a mother with a rifle. She stood and assessed the car and the people who blossomed from it, then reached back into the house and propped the rifle there.