NESSA

 Nobody born ah vagrant, she heard an old woman say years ago. She didn't so much say it as announce it to the audience around her as she lifted her skirt and spread her legs by a stand pipe in the People's Square. Most of the lunchtime crowd kept moving but some stayed to laugh and point and to remind Nessa of shame.

Nobody born ah vagrant. This vagrant life gave her so much time to think, to think and to remember. She remembered the time before. When she walked the road, men would call out to her. Oh Gawd, dahlin' or a Come, lemme suck yuh like ah mango. She even caught a couple women staring at her, seeing sorrow in the eyes of some and others had the same hunger that was in the eyes of men. It was different for her, now. Man and woman alike pretended they couldn't see her. Walking past as if she is not there, whether she was begging or not. Yet they all managed to walk far enough away that they never touched her, as if her scent kept the world at arm's length. Not an accidental bump, not a touch, nothing to know that she is real.

She remembered it was different before. They all wanted to touch and she denied them, most of them. There was the one, the government man, the minister man. She had won a pageant. Nothing large, nothing fancy, a regional thing for teenage girls. And he promised her a house. And they wrote about her in the newspaper for the first time. A nice story about how she did her own makeup and how her mother made the dress. When she came off the plane, they had a couple cameras and she saw herself on the news, too. She was a queen. That is what they said. How could she not listen?

That was when she met the minister man. The minister man promised her a house, more than a house. Fuh my princess? Ah castle, he said.
Princess? She asked herself in her head. The people love me. I am a queen.
Every time they were together he asked her about something to do with the house and touched her a little more.
How yuh want the windows, with his hand on her knee.
And the doors, how yuh want the doors and dem, rolling her nipples in between his fingers.
I know how to open doors, and he pressed two fingers on the front of her panties and she could feel the fabric getting wet and sticking to the folds of her, thighs loosening, knees relaxing. He damn well know the last thing she could think about then is doors!

Yes, she was a woman now. She was getting a house. She had a man that sending car for her to take her shopping. She had a man that really knew how to open doors. He said when some big-shot friend of his heard about the plan for the house, he wanted to sponsor her designer clothes and shoes and makeup.

Yes, I is woman now!

She started to do the thing with him that woman do with man. In the after, when they were quiet and she had her head on his chest listening to his heart, she would answer him. She would tell him about the windows and doors she liked. And the oven she wanted in the kitchen for her mother. He said yes to everything, his heart only sounding confused when she started to talk about a garden and he told her, well, no, there is no yard. Another time she told him what she wanted, what she really wanted, was a full length mirror. Again his heart made that strange skip in beat that told her no when she asked about a yard but then it steadied and he say yes, we will do that as a separate thing.

She dreamt about it.
She saw herself coming down a curved staircase with a thick, wooden spiral of a bannister. She saw herself in a bigger room, and in her own wing of the house, far from her mother so she could do what she wanted with who she wanted when she wanted.

She boasted about it.
Anytime she saw anybody she knew, she found some way to slip it into the conversation.
Yes girl, he say house yuh know? Me and mammy set!
When the neighbours from the other apartments came around with their smiles she saw the jealousy in their eyes and she knew their wonderings.
Buh why she?
She nice eh... buh she eh so nice, and she was glad.
Now she was getting a house and they will see her and her mother in the papers.

She waited on it. It was delayed, he said, because the kind of roof she wanted meant they had to take the first one off and get one hand made and she felt like a queen. It was delayed again because of a shortage of paint to fix the spots where the new roof had scuffed the walls and she still felt royal. When the day of the handing over was finally there, he sent a car for her and her mother. She was surprised when they were taken to his office. Why not to where the house was? She figured he probably needed to have some sort of official picture taken with them for the papers. She was a woman now, she knew how these things worked. When she walked in the office and saw the four foot high dollyhouse she didn't feel like she knew so much. Her mother let out a sound that came from her mouth, her nose and belly at the same time, and she felt the same thing too. Like all the air in her just wanted to rush out from anywhere there was a hole.
The man give me ah dollyhouse? All the talk about windows and doors and house for a queen? This was the castle?

And it really was nice. It was the exact colour she imagined. When you pushed your finger, you could open the front doors easy, easy and see inside. Here was her staircase and glorious bannister. There were little windows and doors to match the ones she asked for and miniaturized pieces of furniture. The exact six-burner oven, just smaller. The roof was glorious, spires and gables and spines. It really was nice, but not something you gifted a big woman when you were telling her you are building a house, no. Not even a little bit.

She walked around the whole thing. Inside she wanted to fold up like the first time she was on the Tobago Ferry, before she found out about Gravol. Sea sick? She see sick. Shame started to grow in her belly and weakened her knees making them want to buckle. She kept her expression plain and looked straight ahead because she can't bear to watch her mother. She walked around the whole thing and saw a little plaque with something official about the Government gift to its 'Queen'. And next to it, larger than the house itself, a full-length mirror.
It have to be a fuckin' joke, ent? In the mirror she finally sees the look on her mother's face.
How he could...all de talk 'bout house and castle... and is dis?

How yuh could do dis tuh me! She hissed.
Still seeing her mother's face in the mirror, seeing the face looking incredulously at her little girl, now big woman, as she shouted and jumped on the minister man. She scraped at his eyes telling him don't look at me. She clawed at his hands because dem things is not to touch me again. She picked up a pair of scissors from his desk and went after his manhood because man like you is never to touch no woman. And she jumped, ready to swoop down for his neck with the same scissors so she could cut the head from the snake.
YOU IS AH SNAAAKE!

It was a proper feast. The exact kind of bacchanal Trini people loved to sweeten their mouths with. The. Shame. Is not that her mother didn't know what her daughter was really doing when the government car dropped her home late at night. It's a next thing, though, when everybody knows. Nessa's mother got a lawyer which made the minister man nervous so, he paid her mother some money. The prime minister quietly re-shuffled his cabinet and minister man was gone. In a week it was out of the newspaper and some other scandal was the focus but you couldn't tell that to Nessa or her mother. The. Shame. From the neighbour on the corner to the heart of town. The. Shame. She trying to do things as simple as buy bread and man asking when was she having the party to bless her new house. Old friends from school asking her when they could come and sleep over. All of them mocking, half smiling and asking if she had a butler in her castle. The look on her neighbours' faces...The. Shame. The same newspaper that wrote about how she did her own makeup and called her 'Queen', that same newspaper, was first to break the story. The. Shame. All around her, all she saw was shame and pain, even from her mother. The last time she looked her in the eye was when she caught it in the mirror, since then she can't meet neither gaze nor glance.

Shame. It shuffled and slithered from person to person. Shape-shifting, changing, sweetening her sins with each re-telling. Some had her in orgies with powerful men, some said she was pregnant and the minister forced her to get an abortion. It crawled to everywhere she went, so she tried staying home to hide from it, until, one night, it silently and confidently came in through her window, set down its bags and began to live with her. At first it was a small thing that she could hear scuttling about in the corners. It grew quickly, though, so that it could no longer just be contained in her room. It moved restlessly through the house at night. They would find it in the kitchen at breakfast every morning, the room heavy with it as it slept. Even the sunlight on clear mornings would be dimmer, as if bending around a huge tree. They ate separately and in silence, for fear of waking it.

Shame followed her, lapping at her heels. She hated being indoors with it. It made her feel as if the room she was in was gradually getting smaller, as if she was being swallowed by a growing chorus of whispers. She learned that whispers are not just soft things, that whispers can be sharp things that cut deeply and scar. At night, she could only sleep if her windows were open so she can hear the sound of sirens, traffic and night creatures to hush the voices crammed into her head and give her a sense of a bigger, wider space.

Shame nested itself into strands of her hair. It clawed its way into her throat and seized her voice. At night she slept outside especially on full moons in the dry season. She craved the vastness of the sky on her skin, its touch as soft as a lullaby. Where her face was once smooth there were lines now. The corners of her eyes and lips made her look older than she was. She liked this new face, it made her feel anonymous, like it would be easier to lose herself in the dark of the city. She stopped washing herself because it would mean washing away the soil and dirt that she has carefully built around herself. Each patch, splash and splotch a new piece of armour.

The shame had gotten so big that it stayed with both her and her mother even when they no longer slept in the same place. On the mornings when they were reunited, their eyes still barely met. Her mother worried. She saw the space opening between them and was afraid. Shame pushing them away, two boats heading to different shores. She was afraid too, because she does not know where her Nessa is sleeping. Or so she chose to know. Outside clung about Nessa, a scent of open sky and filth and the sourness of spilt milk. Nessa's scent reminds her of the dump and clouds of vultures circling. She begged her, she cried, she raged. She used the money from the minister man to pay for counselling. She searched for her some nights and begged her to come home. None of it worked. Nessa was only coming home for the odd meal, still not speaking and smelling worse and worse. In her desperation her mother set up a little altar in the house and got candles that she kept lit in front of tiny statues of Jesus and Mary when her daughter leaves, and keeps lit until she returns. She hopes for her to not roll into a crack in the pavement while she sleeps under the open sky and be lost forever. The day comes when she does not light them anymore just like she does not see Nessa anymore.

~~~

At first Nessa would sleep under the bandstand in the People's Square. She was a novice and didn't understand that so public a place, even though the square was closed at night, was only short term lodging. Besides there were others there too, like the old woman who liked to wash her vagina in public. This was where she got her first, proper sick. There would be more but you always remember your first. What she ate was cold channa and aloo and some wet crackers that she found in a box behind a roti shop. Mango season had just finished and for two nights she walked around town looking for something to eat. The first night she scorned piles of garbage, she was still fresh, green as they say. She slept through the next day and woke up the next evening feeling like her whole body was just eyes, mouth and belly. Oh, God! Her belly! Like a cavern, maybe if she opened her mouth bats fly out, her belly. She didn't even have a brain. Arms and legs moving, belly telling everybody what to do and directing the eyes to lock on to anything that looked like food. The first thing she saw was the aloo on the ground. Calling her, with its solidness, its non-fruitness. You try eating only mango for a whole mango season. Not two hours after, her same belly that told the eye and mouth to eat the aloo, was now ready to throw it all back out. It came out her mouth, her nose and her arsehole. She cramped so bad she couldn't do anything but roll out of her mess, or try to.

When the municipal men came the next morning, with their anger and shaming she was surprised at her own shock. What else was she expecting? That they would gently wake her and ask if she wouldn't mind moving to somewhere else? One of the three of them doused her with a bucket of cold water. By the time she recovered from getting woken up like that and opened her eyes, the bucket was rolling between their feet and they were beating broomsticks on the ground and each shouting over the other.
Come allyuh.
Get up! Get up!
Ah set ah pee and shit all over de place. Allyuh livin like dawg inside ah here.
Out! Out! Out!
Doh make we call de police!
Out!

They all ran off in different directions, like when you scatter chickens. It was rainy season and finding somewhere dry to sleep was hard, and for nothing was she going back home. Not in a cage with Shame as a master. She preferred out here, even if to fly meant to starve, to die.

She thought she found something, when she came across a nice corner underneath a bank. The bank itself was massive, taking up half the block, and the security post was on the other side of the building. Most importantly, it was dry. She fell asleep, and it was sweet. Until one in the morning. At one in the morning a security guard making rounds found her and woke her up by 'tickling' her ribs with his baton.
Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye!
Yuh cyah sleep here gyal!
Move! Move! Move! Move!

The next night, she found a dry spot in a park next to the library. She thinks about what her life was like before, when the library was important because of its books but now it was because it blocked most of the wind and rain. She settled in. Within thirty minutes she heard someone approaching, not knowing if it's friend or foe her guard went up.
Ah'm Dexter. But everyone calls me D, he said, in the too-sour, too-sweet, washed in fresh water, tamarind ball twang of a deportee.
D dipped into his pants and pulled out a box of day old chicken wings.
I'll share em, he said.

Nessa still new to the streets and still not knowing nothing is for free. He tells her why he was deported. He was framed, of course. He was innocent, of course.
But, you know, sugar, I prefer being a bum here.
And he actually made her feel good about it, because she never thought about having to do what she was doing now, in winter. Or that there were places she could go and get armloads of mango and eat her belly full. Not all year of course, but he was right. Imagine being homeless in America, or London? After seeing her guard go down amid him telling her lies about his dreams and plans for the future, D positions himself between her and open space and pulls his cock out. She stares at it and it stares back at her angrily with one glinty eye. He is hard. She screams, without commitment at first but it is rising in her. By the time she has broken an old beer bottle on the ground it is a full scream.

Bad-lucky. Nessa was bad-lucky. The thing with bad-lucky people is when you least want to see police is exactly when you see police. As Nessa came out of the shadowy park, she and her scream came face to face with a police jeep and its occupants who were just sitting there, staring at her. One by one they filed out, two headed into the park and the driver stayed with Nessa. When they found D he has a gash across his palm.
She was gonna cut my shit man, I'm telling you. Crazy island bitch!
So is wha? She try to cut you up, jus so? Wha yuh do? Eh? Said the driver, and then, to Nessa.
And you? You eh have ah house? Niiicce lookin' gyal like you? Wha you doing out here?

Neither of them responded. One might be bad-lucky, both might be homeless, but they both not stupid. When you live on the street, you don't answer back police. So the driver sucks his teeth.

Look...up de road with you! Both D and Nessa make to shuffle off.
No, no. Not you, Darkie. And like the bank guard from before and so many others she would meet after, he used his baton to poke at her, prod at her, smiling with it, not hiding his enjoyment.
You going in the back dey, and with the same baton he points to the back of the jeep.
As they drive through Port-of-Spain, his is the only voice in the van.
So why you on the road, Darkie? You don't know how dangerous it is out here for a nice lookin lil ting like you?
Dem fellas mus be vex with me how I bring you in the van. Even with you in the back dey you have the whole inside smelling stink. But dem is two young boy. When you reach my age, fellas, yuh will see. One good bathe and scrub down, and this one? This one could be a princess.
They did not see her wince.

The drive was shorter than she expected not that she knew where they were going. It turned out to be a short trip from one side of town to the other. Everything was running through her head, the way the driver was talking. The way the two younger officers would steal glances at her over their shoulders. Appraising her, almost. What were they planning to do? Take her to his house, or maybe to the station, to bathe her down in front all the police and show her off?
Come, Darkie. Again, with the baton, touching the inside of her thigh and when she gets out he sinks it into her buttock and uses it to push her forward.
God girl! It nice and fleshy! He says this to her with his eyes firmly on the point of his baton as he prods her flesh. When he addresses the man coming toward them, his gaze is still fixed.
Ah bring one fuh yuh boy, ah real princess. Call mih when yuh bathe she!
He leaves her with an attendant and throws this over his shoulder with a laugh that the attendant returns. And it begins again.

So how you end up on de road girl? You eh have no house to go to?
Look. Yuh see here? Dem officers coulda leave you on de road, but dey bring you here. You could get help here. This is the Center fuh allyuh, right? And yuh could get ah lil assistance from the government but you have to give me some information...
What name? No answer.
Date of birth? Address? Still, no answer from Nessa.
He shrugs at her silence and motions for her to enter the doors behind him.
Well, enjoy, Princess. Morning shift go deal with you.

She walked through the doors and the first thing she noticed was the shit on the ceiling and she wanted to tear her skin off. The ceiling was closing in on her and she was in this box of a room with other people. She walked along the edges of the box, found a door, pushed it and ended up in a stairwell. The emptiness of the echo of her steps in the stairwell welcomed her. The air smelled like copper, rain and burning molasses in blackness. She relaxed and eased into the feeling of being alone until she heard two voices. She leaned over the railing, looked up and saw in the darkness a couple floors above, the glow of a cherry being passed and realised this was the source of what she was smelling. She thinks she knows what it was and she thinks she knows not to smoke it. And still, she found herself going up toward the voices when they called down to her.

The two faces looked the same in the dark so 'Nessa thought they were sisters. But then one was calling the other Mama, so she thought mother and daughter until Mama started calling the other one Papa. When they asked her name and she said 'Nessa, they laughed for almost a full minute because it rhymed, and offered her a hit as a reward for the joke. She took it. As she sinks-floats she thinks, Crack in a stairwell, Ma.

~~~

Time heals all wounds but sometimes it opens them up before closing. Sometimes you roll yourself up into a ball, hide from the world and cry it out. Sometimes pain seeps into forgotten places and parts to raise the memory of a thing, like how the first rains after the dry season raise the scent of wet in the place again. Other times, you find something that helps you forget. Even if you only forget for a little bit, that bit is enough. Time. Time and pain and shame. Things a person could go through, like iron through a forge.

~~~

It is night, she is coming back. The streets are ink-black. Tires hiss on the wet pitch. She's still a little high and she drifts. She thinks while she walks, walking like she is thinking, moving quickly, nervously, from one thing to the next.

Headlight reflections, off the wet road. She still gets high now, is high now. Never stopped, not since that first day. In the stairwell with Mama and Papa. The pain has been softer since she's been a piper. The pain has been softer and her body has gotten harder. Her back and forearms and legs are knots of muscle. Her grip is like iron.

She must eat, now. She thinks, before she has to hunt, again. She is a night scavenger, shadow moving through shadows. Eating of the shadows, getting high in the shadows. In the shadows she is reborn, she transcends.

She knows the iron grip, she must always think about her hunt, about how she'll get high. When the breaks come, her mind goes to her mother. To life, to love, to how there was a time she herself thought she would be a parent. She doesn't know if her mother has been burnt or buried so sometimes she walks through the villages of the dead and reads the gravestones looking for messages. When she is like this, lost in thought sometimes crying and drifting as she does, she does not even see. Stepping out of the cemetery, she did not see.
I eh see she! Is what the driver said, too.
If you see the saga boy sitting on the pavement. Head in his hands, worrying about his insurance.