“You’re a bigger devil,” Delores says. “Worse than the devil driving us out of our country.” The room quiets, its occupants waiting to see which way the conflict will go. Verdene walks up to the bar and stays, her body stiff with determination. Realizing she’s undeterred by their bullying, and sick with their own troubles, everyone returns to clutching their bottles of liquor to wet their parched mouths and throats, completely drained and powerless as they were before.
Thandi stares out into the darkness as Margot brushes her hair. Like old times, she’s sitting between her sister’s legs absorbing the comfort of the gentle strokes, the mild scrape of the bristles on her forehead as she bends her head back, the sheesh-sheesh sound of hairs being pulled from the roots and tickling the back of her neck soothing. Thandi is sitting with her knees pressed to her chest and her arms encircled around them. It’s dark except for the kerosene lamp that Margot uses to see what she’s doing, and the wood fire that burns nearby, the flames crackling in the cool night air. Margot is humming a song Thandi doesn’t recognize. Earlier Thandi had heard her mother and her sister whispering about her, their hissing fight stirring from the back of the house. She knows it has to do with her being withdrawn over the last few days. Delores went out to get more eucalyptus leaves from people who have the trees in their yards, to boil for Thandi’s bath. They want her back to her old self as graduation approaches, but her ache is deeper than any she has ever felt. It’s deeper than her bones. A soul ache that rattles her already fragile body so great that it knocks her down and yanks her under the throes of a restless sleep. When she’s awake, all she can do is try to recall those dreams that were swept away by the turbulent waves. In her waking moments the water closes quickly over the place where Charles disappears, though Thandi can still feel him—the pressure of his body on hers.
Margot gently parts Thandi’s hair into sections and applies Blue Magic on her scalp like a balm. Thandi inhales the familiar scent, which mixes with her sister’s. She closes her eyes and just feels Margot’s fingers massaging her scalp.
“You told me dat yuh didn’t have a boyfriend,” Margot says gently.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“We agreed.”
Margot begins to massage Thandi’s scalp again with the oil. “Now look at all the pain he caused you, when this is supposed to be the happiest time of yuh life.” Her voice is as soft as the hair on Thandi’s shoulders. “I’ve never seen you like this. Thandi, yuh have to snap out of it. He’s not coming back. This is the kind of thing that mek women go mad, yuh see all those mad people in di streets wid their hair like thundahclouds an’ privates exposed? They get like that because they expected too much. Nothing lasts forever, Thandi.” She picks up the comb and resumes her languid strokes. “Delores used to give me baths.” Margot’s voice cracks. “I was sick too. Sick wid the same t’ing. Over a girl who told me I was pretty.” Margot chuckles at this. “Ached all ovah my body. Ah couldn’t explain what was happening to me. Nothing Delores did could get me back to myself. I didn’t know what it was then that made me so . . .” She pauses when Thandi turns around to look at her, flame dancing in her eyes. “I was young. And na?ve,” she says. “But I knew something was inside me. Felt it here.” She puts her hand to her belly. “It was like a ball of fire. Delores thought the baths would heal the sickness. She thought all sorta things. Even took me to ah obeah woman to get rub down wid oil an’ black magic concoction. Di woman gave me goat blood to drink in a soup an’ I ran. But there was nothing that coulda get my mind off her.”
“What yuh saying, Margot?”
“I neva thought of myself as di devil,” she says.
Thandi gets up from between her sister’s legs, and stands in the dark.
Margot looks up at Thandi from where she sits, the red dress she wears between her legs. “I mean, I was a child. What did I know? Maybe I thought it was something special because I was shown love an’ affection that I never got from my own mother.” Margot shrugs. “Delores made sure I came to my senses.”
“How did she do that?” Thandi asks, the questions swirling inside her head. She makes out Margot’s face in the light from the flames and the kerosene lamp next to her.
Margot shrugs, avoiding Thandi’s eyes. “She put me in situations where I . . .” Margot’s voice trails off as though the words are stuck in her throat. “I met new people—men—who offered me a lot more. Delores introduced me an’ they liked me.”
“But you were—”
“Young. The cure. That’s what Delores said. Di first one was a man who gave her six hundred dollars an’ in return she gave me to him. It only made me sicker. But dis sickness was different than the first—the first had to do wid losing someone I cared for and who cared for me. The second had to do wid losing myself. But it worked. Because I couldn’t hurt no more. I could no longer feel. It’s been easier that way.”