Miss Ruby stops her rubbing and frowns. “Yuh all right?” she asks. Thandi hugs herself and crosses her legs. A wave of shame washes over her.
“Uhm. I’m fine,” Thandi utters in a small voice, avoiding Miss Ruby’s eyes. “Why?”
“Yuh jus’ made a noise.”
“It wasn’t me.”
Miss Ruby begins to wrap the plastic around Thandi’s chest. But she still has a look of concern when she pauses again to study Thandi. Just then something shatters outside, and she hears her name: “Thandi!” Miss Ruby stops what she’s doing, leaving the plastic dangling. Thandi leaps to the other side of the room to seek cover and Miss Ruby grabs a knife—one she once used to cut the heads off fish she sold—and opens the door of her shack. The door bangs on the zinc. She looks from left to right; then, up in the quivering branches of the mango tree, she sees Charles. “Hey, dutty, stinkin’ bwoy! Don’t mek me cut yuh backside t’day! If me eva catch yuh, me will kill yuh!” she screams.
“What yuh doing to yuhself, Thandi?” Charles shouts. Thandi can see a part of him in the mango tree just outside the window. She gasps. “How dare you! Yuh have no decency, to be spying on me this way!”
“Yuh beautiful jus’ the way yuh is! Nuh mek di witch fool yuh!”
Thandi clutches her clothes to her chest. “Go away!”
“Ah not g’wan mek yuh do this to yuhself,” Charles says.
“I said go away! It’s my skin.”
Just then Charles loses his balance and falls out of the tree. Thandi rushes to the window, afraid he has broken some part of himself, but he springs up like a cat and sprints through the yard, with Miss Ruby chasing him with the knife.
“Yuh damn pervert! Yuh is a shame to yuh parents! Yuh too out of order.”
Garbage cans overturn, spilling garbage. Fowl scatter around the yard like they lost their heads. The one sleeping dog scampers from its rest spot near the standpipe.
“Bomboclaaaat!”
Charles’s curse triggers a surge of terror inside Thandi. Miss Ruby must have caught him. She fumbles with the zipper on her dress and leaves the money for Miss Ruby on her bench. She runs out the door and into the backyard. Too embarrassed to use the front gate, she squeezes through a small fence that was once an entrance to the sea. Thandi struggles along the seashore toward the rocky incline that will lead her to the bank of the river. This is a longer way home, but she takes it. The castle rises into view. Though unfinished, it is several stories high already, the steel foundation glistening with promise, its shadow closing in on the beach that spreads before it. She hurries along, trying hard to dodge the sun. Everything else is wilting in the drought, but the sun is getting bigger and plumper by the day.
At home, the Queen of Pearl jar is sitting before Thandi, unopened. She touches her face, where the shade is uneven, especially the areas around her eyes and mouth. But what about the rest? When will she be fair like that goddess in the painting? The one that rises out of the oyster shell? Thandi had seen the painting for the first time hanging on the wall inside Brother Smith’s office, to the left of The Last Supper. “She was so beautiful that Botticelli used her as his muse for a very long time,” Brother Smith said when he caught Thandi staring at the painting. She was in awe of the woman’s long orange mane and delicate cornmeal skin. She can only imagine that if you touch skin like that, it melts. To Thandi, that soft pink skin had been part of an already long to-do list: to pass the Caribbean Examination Council subjects, go to university, become a doctor, marry well. Each night she’s been pushing her sketchpad aside, studying hard, falling asleep with her head in her books; pushing away Charles, her pencils, the sea.
She swallows and dips her hand inside the Queen of Pearl cream jar and lathers her face with it.
“Thandi!”
She’s pulled out of her fantasy by the sound of her name.
“Thandi, it’s me!” someone wails outside the shack. She goes to the window and parts the curtains, fingering the embroidered flowers that Grandma Merle sewed decades before she became mute. Charles is standing in the tall grass where Mr. Melon ties his goat to the dying pear tree and where Little Richie sits and plays with himself inside the old tire. Charles’s khaki shirt is open like a cape and his pants bulge at the pockets where he probably stole mangoes from somebody’s yard. His bare feet are crusted with dirt from his swim in the river. His sandy brown hair has grass in it, like he has been rolling around in the bushes too. There’s no blood on him, so Miss Ruby must have missed.