This morning Miss Lizzie came to the river with an ugly mouthful of words for him. She saw him there and laid her basin down. She moved her lips as if she was about to speak and then, without a word, she turned her head down to her washing. He could sense the heat in her; it came out of her skin like smoke. And soon enough she began tossing words over her shoulders at him.
‘What he doing here! What it want ’mongst big people, eh? Why dem don’ go an’ play with devil-chilren like theyself? Eh?’
It was a river morning, brimming with sunlight, the kind that made everything glitter and vibrate, and above the babble of the water he could hear the leaves of the bamboo shu-shuing like so many people making polite conversation. A shower of dragonflies, little strips of foil, drew his gaze away from her, and when he looked round to her again she’d left her patch of stones and was moving towards him. His heart began to race because she’d never looked so mad before. Miss Elaine called out her name and Miss Lizzie swung her head around, her arm flashing out behind her as if to squash a fly.
She was breathing hard when she reached him, and all he could feel was her hate, like the sting of the sun on his naked skin. He turned his eyes down to where her feet were in the water, studying the busy weave of light around her ankles. The other women were saying nothing.
‘Whapm, you born without a tongue too? Say something. Talk! You can’t talk?’ She turned towards the others. ‘What kind o’ people make funny chilren so? I hear he come from beast not yooman been. Dat so? Dat’s what your modder get from sleepin wid de Devil, y’hear me?’
He unfolded his legs from under him, shifted his gaze towards her face, worked his mouth because something hard and choking had caught itself inside his throat and he could not get it out.
‘Leave ’im, Lizzie. Is trouble you askin for,’ Miss Elaine said.
Miss Elaine reminded him of his Aunt Patty – tall and brown and wavering like the bamboos. She had moonshine eyes too, large and shiny white. Miss Elaine had coiled the red dress she was wringing around her arms. It ran like a snake from her shoulder, the water was spilling onto her chest.
Miss Lizzie laughed. ‘My arse! Trouble from who? Dat Bender tribe don’ frighten me. Your ever see yooman been with eye like dat? Look at ’im, black like sin with whiteman eye!’
Before he realised it, he was running through the canes, the saw-edged leaves cutting at his face and arms and legs. And then he was running home across the field of stones that took him all the way down to that thick green copse of almond trees, Miss Lizzie’s laughter trailing behind him like an accusation.
Aunt Tan Cee’s hands woke him that night. Most times he chose to sleep on the long wooden bench in the place they called the kitchen which no one ever cooked in. He slept on his back with his eyes wide open, they said. His twin brother, Peter, told him they shone like polished marbles in the lamplight.
Tan Cee had unbuttoned his shirt without his knowing. She’d brought the lamp down close to his skin. With the other hand, she was passing a warm, damp cloth over his chest and arms and stomach. Pynter looked back at her through slitted eyes. She stroked her thumb across his brow and he felt a warmth seeping into his head.
‘Tell me what happm,’ she whispered.
All he could see were her arms and face framed by the blue headwrap she always wore. The rest of her had melted into the darkness beyond her shoulders.
‘Don’ wan’ my eyes no more,’ he said. ‘Wish I never have dem.’
She eased herself backwards. The lamplight dipped and fluttered and the whole room seemed to teeter with the flames.
‘Which you prefer, Sugarboy? If Santay come to take back your eyes, yuh’ll agree to give dem back?’ She lifted the cloth from his stomach and brought her face down close to his. She smelt of plant things – nutmeg oil, and the bay leaves she picked to make him tea. ‘You still got your baby eyes, that’s all. Ever see how baby eyes look? Just like yours – light like a whiteman eye. Time goin come when all dat daytime sun goin darken dem, like how fire darken wood. If whiteman used to born an’ live here, you think he eye not goin to get dark too? Just give it time, Pynto.’ Her fingers traced the welts across his arms and the small gashes on his face. ‘You not goin tell me what happm down dere, not so?’
She came to her feet as if lifted by some invisible hand behind her. Now her face was a dark full moon above him. ‘Well, Elaine done come an’ tell me.’ She’d pulled her lips back so that he could see her teeth. ‘Come Saturday, you’n me goin down dere together.’ And suddenly she was no longer there, just the scent of nutmeg oil and the throb of her thumb above his eyes.
The throb was still there when he climbed to the top of Glory Cedar Rise next morning to get nearer to the sun. To turn his face up towards it and outstare it. But the sun was a hot metallic eye that didn’t blink, and so it left a burning ember behind each socket in his head and reduced the green of the world to a charred and shapeless darkness.
His eyes stared back at him from the glass of the cabinet in his mother’s hallway, the enamel of the cups in there, the flake of mirror above her bedhead, the water in the buckets brought home from the standpipe by the road. From the liquid, broken light of running river water. They stared back at him, pale like a washed-out sky, from behind the red curtains of his lids; were still staring back at him on Saturday, when Tan Cee arrived, placed a hand between his shoulder blades and steered him down towards the river.
He could hear his naked feet pounding like a heartbeat against the earth and feel the sweat running down the drain of his back. He could smell the danger rising from his aunt as she pushed him along the winding path towards the women.
He was thrust by his aunt’s hard hand among the swirl of voices: Miss Maisie’s teasing, Miss Lizzie’s laughter, bright and sharp like a blade against a stone. The chorus of chuckling and curses and the quietness that always surrounded Miss Elaine. Miss Elaine – tall and bright-eyed, under the bamboos as usual – another red dress coiled around her elbow as if she’d never left the river.
Tan Cee left him standing in the water and walked towards the bank. The sun was a hot sheet on his skin, and the swirling cold water numbed his feet. He wanted to call to her, but the tightness in her face stopped him – that and the little knife that appeared in her palm, curved like a fingernail. Miss Lizzie saw it too. Her eyes followed the arc of the tiny blade as his aunt’s arms darted among the shrubbery, slipped through stems, gathering leaves.
The women turned their heads back down to their washing, their large round shoulders hunched against the day. In the midst of all of them, Miss Lizzie seemed alone, her unblinking eyes fixed on his auntie’s face. Pynter turned towards the women and shivered. The silence among them was dense and tight and terrible.
Returning from the bank, his auntie walked through the water towards him. She dropped the herbs on a stone beside his feet, tossed a handful of water on them and bent down to crush them with the heel of her palm. The plants surrendered their odours, which prickled like needles in his nostrils. And when the herbs had been mixed into a green and oozing paste, Tan Cee reached out and dragged him towards her. He was aware of her hands at his armpits, of his feet leaving the water, his body being lifted onto a tall stone so that all of the river lay before him, and all of the eyes of the women.
She dragged his shirt from his shoulders, slipped his short trousers past his knees, and now he was naked, and he wasn’t embarrassed or afraid.
Pynter stood there with her propping him up, still shivering in the heat, looking down at himself as if his body no longer belonged to him: his small penis dark and curved like a bean-pod; his stomach round and tight and smooth; his navel a tiny hill which his grandmother