LITMIR.BIZ

       8

      THE NEXT MORNING he got up and told his father he dreamt of screaming people.

      ‘You wasn’ dreaming,’ his father muttered, ‘I hear them too last night – Harris and Marlo.’ The old man’s face was thoughtful. ‘Only Harris I was hearing, though. And Harris the one you never hear at all.’

      Harris and Marlo lived in a two-roomed house at the bottom of his father’s hill.

      Fridays especially, nights in Upper Old Hope were reduced to a small room and Marlo was the hurricane inside it. Pynter had quickly grown accustomed to these weekly brawls, although the first time he’d heard Marlo he couldn’t bring himself to sleep. No reply ever came from Harris. And if, as his father told him that first time, it was a case of one man warring with himself, he used to wonder at the sense of it.

      A few times, after a particularly violent night, he woke early, crept out of the house and sneaked down to the road.

      Harris eventually came out, saw him standing there and, without breaking stride, waved his hat at him, ‘Hello, young fellow. How’s the Old Bull?’

      ‘Not bad,’ he answered as he watched the tall man’s body follow his feet up the road till he disappeared around the corner.

      Pynter wished he would grow tall enough to be able to step out of his own little house like that, stretch out his long legs like Harris and sway, not from side to side, but in a kind of roundabout way, as if the rest of his body were fighting to keep up with his feet.

      Harris was the tallest man he’d ever seen – the highest in the world. Always in the same loose khaki trousers and shirt that had been so bleached by wear and washing they were almost white. He wore his felt hat slanted down over his greying eyebrows, though it was never low enough to throw a shadow on his smile.

      Harris was one of those men who’d travelled to the oil refineries in Aruba and returned a couple of weeks later to tell Old Hope how he’d taken a fall and got tangled up among the vast spiderweb of steaming pipes there. He would have died, had actually died in fact, when a pair of hands to which he had never been able to put a face had reached through the steel and dragged him out. That night he cut through the high fences that locked in the thousands of working island men, ‘borrowed’ a rowing boat and, without water, food or sleep, spent months ploughing a passage through all kinds of high dark seas and hurricanes to his little house in Old Hope.

      ‘Look at the height of the man,’ Manuel Forsyth laughed. ‘What you expect from Harris – not tall tales?’

      But these stories only made Harris taller in Pynter’s eyes, so that sometimes on mornings, just when the night chill lifted itself off the valley floor and seeped like drizzle through his thin blue shirt, he would creep out of his father’s house and tiptoe down the hill to receive that special early-morning greeting.

      For this – just the sight of Harris, the rolling head, the long windmilling arms, the big yellow grin, the pale felt hat bobbing like a wind-rushed flame above the tops of the rhododendrons at the roadside – for all this, the early-morning coldness nibbling at the skin of his back and arms was more than worth it. Even standing in the rain.

      It was raining the morning the slight quiver in his chest was replaced by something else – a smell and something more. A sensation on his skin.

      Coming out of the house, he saw something squeezing itself through the doorway. It took a while before he realised it was a man. He did not move, not even when the great boxlike head lifted with some effort and swivelled towards him. Not even when the small red eyes fell on him and narrowed, and the man’s lips – purple-dark and thin – seemed to curl themselves around a curse.

      The heavy hands drifted to the dirty leather scabbard at his side. Just then Pynter caught the scent of the man. He began backing up the hill.

      Marlo’s eyes did not release him until he reached the top of his father’s road. He lowered himself on the steps, struggling with his breathing and the sudden urge to cry.

      ‘Dat’s Butcherman Marlo.’ Manuel Forsyth pulled his lips in slowly. ‘Don’t go near ’im, y’hear me?’

      From then on, those mornings became a gamble. Pynter did not know who would come out first and it didn’t occur to him to wait for Harris after Marlo. In fact, he never saw Harris come out after Marlo, so that sometimes he imagined it was the same man that the night had transformed into something else.

      If it were Marlo, he would hold his ground for as long as his thumping heart allowed him. He would keep his breath in while the dark, knuckle-curled head lifted and skewed itself around. Then his legs would propel him up the hill to the safety of his father’s steps.

      He knew now that the thick red man with the curly hair and bloodshot eyes was the father of all butchers. That the abattoir in San Andrews left the biggest bulls to him: the frothing, red-eyed animals that chewed through their ropes and broke their chains and routed San Andrews with their rage. When that happened, they sent for Marlo.

      And if, from time to time, someone decided to leave one of those animals too loosely tethered, or deliberately forgot to draw the bolts of the steel pen, it was so that they could watch the town take to the top of walls and barricade itself behind the closed glass doors of stores while Marlo placed his back against some building on the Esplanade, or planted his legs like tree trunks in the middle of the market square, his head lowered like the animal’s, his shoulders twitching, his right elbow bent so that his finger barely grazed the leather at his side as the animal charged. And at the very last moment, with a movement that the men would recall over dinner in words that would disgust their women and thrill their children, Marlo would call the length of sharpened steel to his palm. He never missed an animal’s heart whenever he reached for it with that knife.

      ‘Men like blood,’ his father told him quietly. ‘Some o’ them jus’ don’ know it.’

      ‘I don’ like blood,’ Pynter answered earnestly, staring at the milkiness in the old man’s eye.

      ‘That’s becuz you not a man yet,’ his father muttered softly.

      ‘Rain fall last night too. Dry-season rain. Mean a lot more heat to come. It still wet outside?’ His father’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts. Through the window he could see that it was drizzling, but he said he was going outside to check.

      There were people gathered by the roadside when Pynter got down there. Harris’s house looked tired and rain-sogged against the giant bois-canot tree that supported it. The door was partly open and the window facing the road hung on

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