Image by Andrés Nieto Porras. Shared via a Creative Commons license.

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“Rita bloody Marley.”

She poured herself an inch of gin, waved a bottle of tonic water in its general vicinity, and squeezed a lime in the glass before plopping a couple of ice cubes into the viscous mixture. Her face looked the way I’d expected it to when she tasted it, but she seemed to find it satisfactory and took another sip.

“They all had this idea in their head that they could get away with it. Rita bloody Marley.”

Another sip. By now I could smell the raw, bitter gin, the sour lime. It made my mouth water, but she drank it down and made herself another. Well Tante Alice was getting her vitamin C in, for sure, I thought. Pity about her liver.

You’d never guess, looking at her, that this woman drank as much as she did. She was one of those delicate looking, light-skinned, middle-class black Caribbean women of a certain age, one who wore tidy dresses and had most of her own teeth, who pronounced her tee-aiches: always “that”, never “dat”, always “there”, never “dere”. Even now, when I was the only visitor she had, she was always pristine and polite, as if ready to drop everything and head to a tea party at a moment’s notice.

I only came to do the washing, to tidy up her husband and to make a week’s worth of food in five hours, freeze it and leave. It was all she could afford; she was my aunt and I would have done it for free but she wouldn’t hear of it. She paid me minimum wage, which didn’t do much to offset my costs as a full time university student. My real payment came in the stories she told as she followed me around the house, sipping her gin and tonics and growing increasingly jolly or bitter, depending on the day, depending on her mood and his.

When Uncle Peter was good, she was horrid. She hated his good days. They made her bitter and the nearest thing to rude you’d ever get from her: a kind of snide, sarcastic flippancy in which everyone became “Darling”, said in a malicious drawl that made one feel an inch tall. As in, “Darling, if you don’t cook the rice better than that I’m afraid I’ll lose my remaining teeth. Please don’t sacrifice dentistry in the cause of quick cooking, darling.”

When he had bad days, she was cheerful and whimsical. “Oh, don’t bother about the rice. I’ll cook it myself when I’m ready to eat.” Which was a lie, of course. She wouldn’t turn on the stove anymore; it was microwaved food or nothing for her these days, hence my weekly pilgrimage to her home to stock the fridge and freezer.

And today, while I steamed broccoli and carrots, boiled whole wheat pasta and sautéed chicken breasts in heart-healthy olive oil, she puttered around in my wake describing cocktail parties that had taken place forty years before.

“Could you imagine, darling?” she drawled. “This insignificant little man flirting with that creature right in front of me. And had the gall. The absolute. Gall. To compare her to me. As if, darling. Some kind of guttersnipe from deepest South. You couldn’t understand a word she said. Magnificent hair, though. Amazing what blue soap and coconut oil can do.”

And another sip of gin later, she was reeling into another story about her unfaithful, ungrateful husband.

“When he was sleeping with the maid—Malarial Maria, do you remember her?—he would think he was so clever. Always giving her extra money for ‘medicine’. As though I couldn’t count. Silly bastard. ‘But darling,’ I’d say, ‘why are we giving Maria another loan? Surely her malaria is better now.’ And he’d brush me aside and put another blue note into her pay packet. Which was really my pin money, you understand. A hundred dollars was so much money back then. He was taking money out of my pocket to give to his whore. And, darling, she was such a terrible cook. Couldn’t even make pelau.” She shuddered delicately.

“I’ve never even seen you eat pelau,” I reminded her.

“Darling, but I love pelau! Such a perfect mélange of rice, coconut milk, pigeon peas, caramel colouring, meat and veg! It’s wonderful!”

“I didn’t know you felt that strongly about it. And here am I cooking steamed chicken breasts and broccoli.” I smiled ironically; the food was doctor’s orders. Tante Alice had a list of meal options taped to the fridge, and most of the items on the list were steamed or roasted, high fibre and low fat. I would bet that anything cooked in coconut milk was absolutely out of the question.

“But, darling, that’s his menu. I can eat whatever I want! Don’t tell me you’ve made me suffer all this time for no reason, darling.” Perfectly manicured pink nails fluffed her white hair. She had told me she went to bed in curlers every night but still wore a satin negligee to bed. She slept alone in a bedroom adjoining his, had done so since I started helping her out four years before when he had the stroke. Her bedroom was immaculate, with ruffled sheets she changed herself, and different sets of lacy curtains I hung for her four times a year.

Back when I started coming every week she hid the gin in a pitcher in the fridge. Now she no longer bothered to pretend that her afternoon drinks were anything but gin-soaked lime juice.

Melting ice tinkled in her crystal highball glass as she shook it to mix the drink. “Darling, you have to make me some pelau. This instant. Do it at once.” And she propped herself up on the stool next to the kitchen island to make sure I did.

“But we don’t have any coconut,” I protested. It was true. “You can’t make pelau without coconut.”

“I’ve heard it can be done with regular milk.”

“Yes, but.”

“But?”

“If you’re doing it, do it right, my mother always said.”

She took a drink and slid off the kitchen stool. “So true, darling. What a clever baby sister I had. Next time you come, bring a coconut.”

 ***

Tante Alice was perfectly coiffed as usual when I came the following week. Uncle Peter was having a terrible day. His bedroom stank of urine. He glanced at me with glassy eyes as I changed his damp sheets and sprayed Lysol on the plastic mattress cover underneath him. “Are you… Maria?” he asked in a halting voice. He sounded like someone struggling to remember not just names, but words themselves.

We both jumped when the front door slammed shut. A breeze, I told myself.

Tante Alice came to the bedroom door, glittering crystal in her hand again, and a half smile on her coral lips.

“You’d want Maria to see you like this, Peter? With your limp dick swilling around in pissy diapers? Oh, Peter.” Her laughter tinkled like the sound of the ice in the glass.

Crestfallen, Uncle Peter covered his face with a shriveled hand.

“Oh, buck up, Pete! Your nice young niece will take care of you. She’s cooking pelau today!”

He said nothing, but a look of such revulsion crossed his face that I jumped back. His good hand shot out, snakelike, to clutch my wrist. I couldn’t read the look in his eyes, I told myself, changing the sheets and airing out the bedroom.

“Before we were married my pelau was the best in the country,” Tante Alice boasted loudly, following me with my armload of stinking sheets to the laundry room. Her thirty-year-old washer still worked, and she refused to replace it. I think she secretly had a crush on the repairman who came to service it every six months, but she would never admit it.

“Let’s just say he keeps my pipes in excellent order,” she would joke, winking and sipping her gin. “Working pipes are terribly important to a housewife, you know,” she added with an angelic look on her wrinkled face.

The sheets went into a tub of hot water with bleach and detergent. They’d come out smelling like roses and I’d make sure to leave them where she could find them, but I knew that the next week I’d come back to find Uncle Peter in much the same condition as I’d left him. She changed his diapers, fed him, but that was it. She left his false teeth floating in the glass beside his bed, wouldn’t even turn on the TV to let him watch the news anymore. She claimed she wasn’t strong enough to change his sheets, but we both knew better.

Revenge is best served cold. Cold and damp and smelling like week-old piss.

 ***

A whole fryer. I jointed it, then cut each piece until I had a bowl of bony chicken fragments each about an inch cubed. I washed them in lime—“Of course you can, sweet girl! My limes are your limes!” Tante said cheerfully—and seasoned them in onion, chive, garlic, soy sauce and thyme. I set the chicken in the fridge to marinate and returned to Uncle Peter’s bedroom.

I checked his medication on the bedside table, the baby aspirin and digoxin for his heart, and the thousand other pills and potions his doctor prescribed for his wasted right side and withering left side. He’d lost weight steadily since I’d been working for them, and I didn’t doubt he was now willing himself to die. His toothless mouth hung open a little, drooling from a corner, as I dusted and mopped the beige room that had become his only vista. I’d suggested Tante Alice turn the bed so at least he’d see the window, but she’d said, “Darling, don’t be silly. What does he need with a view? He was a pilot for forty years, for God’s sake. He’s had enough spectacular views to last a lifetime.” Another sip of gin. “And enough women, too. All those lovely air stewardesses, flying such friendly skies.”

She scoffed into her gin.

“Rita bloody Marley.”

 ***

Creole meat stews in the Caribbean are coloured rich brown with caramelized sugar. You throw meat into oil and bubbling browned sugar, and turn the sizzling pieces in the caramel until each one is coated in this colouring. It’s bittersweet, and gives savory stews a saccharine undertone. Carrots, pumpkin, onions and tomatoes add to the sweetness, and in a pelau, the coconut milk tops it off with a creamy finish. It was practically a national dish. Anybody could cook a pelau, and I didn’t fool myself that mine was anything special. But you wouldn’t imagine that from Tante Alice’s reaction.

I placed a steaming plate in front of her, with the traditional spoonful of coleslaw at the side. Her expression was rapturous. When she had finished a tiny second helping, she set her plate aside and patted her mouth with a paper serviette.

“Whew! What a pelau!” A sip of gin. “You know,” she stage whispered, “he hates pelau. Absolutely hates it. The last time I cooked it he took the whole thing, pot and all, and tossed it out the window, right into the yard. The neighbours…” She blushed. “It was so embarrassing.”

I passed the record player on my way to Uncle Peter’s bedroom. I knew he loved music; he had left a pristine record collection in the living room. She never played them, as far as I knew, but she kept them neat and tidy, arranged firstly by order of name of performer, then name of record. Every now and then I’d find one out on the buffet, but I couldn’t imagine Tante Alice playing it. I sometimes wondered what she did with them. Perhaps just looked at the artwork for old times’ sake? Swooning at Brook Benton or Nat “King” Cole in their sepia toned photographs, so debonair and dashing?

Uncle Peter had been as handsome. He still was, in the big wedding photo she had on the buffet. She wore a crown and veil over a white maxi dress and he wore a tuxedo. The black middle class in wedded bliss, circa 1960.

“It’s pelau,” I murmured to him. “She said you hate it.”

He shook his head, opened his mouth like a grave.

Using the back of a spoon I mashed the rice and peas as best as I could before I shoveled the mess into his mouth. He gummed the food with tears in his eyes.

“Maria,” he said again.

I shook my head. “Not Maria,” I reminded him. “Abby. You used to dance with me on your feet when I was a baby. Gina’s little girl.”

“Ahhhh…”

“Abby.”

“Ah. Bee.”

“Yes. Abby.”

His moist eyes flashed to the bedside table.

“Water.”

He dribbled it down his dirty pyjama top, glanced at the cluttered bedside table again.

“Abby,” he said. “Kill.”

“What?” I thought he’d said he was ill. Or perhaps I wanted to think that.

Withering or not, the hand that gripped my wrist was hard as steel.

 ***

I bathed him. Tante Alice watched, sipping the G&T as she leaned on the bathroom door. Even when I struggled with his slippery dead weight in the half-full marble tub, she didn’t budge to lend a hand. Eventually I flopped him back on the bed; he was as clean now as I was sweaty. He closed his eyes as I put him in fresh diapers, but that steel grip didn’t flinch.

 Back in the kitchen I parceled out pelau for Tante Alice, but boiled yams, dasheen and cassava for Uncle Peter. He would have that all week, with steamed vegetables and minced beef. Boring, but at least it wasn’t pelau. Tante Alice saw me putting the root vegetables into covered bowls.

“Darling,” she snapped, “whatever are you doing?”

“I just thought—“

“Darling, nobody needs you to think. Next time, ask before you think. I don’t pay you to waste my food, you know.”

I bit my tongue.

While folding the clean sheets, I heard her small, stealthy footsteps behind me. I didn’t turn around, even when she shook her glass pointedly. The tinkle of the ice against the crystal was a sharp as a cleared throat. She started talking to my back.

“He beat me, you know. He might have seemed all continental charm and effortless good looks to you, but it was just a shell. A sham. He was an animal. A beast.

“I blame Rita Marley.”

“You keep saying that. What on earth do you mean, Tante?” Finally she had my full attention. I put the sheets down and looked her in the face.

“Rita Marley. She let Bob do whatever the hell he wanted. She even sang backup on ‘Stir it up’, for God’s sake. What more humiliation could there be than for a man’s wife to sing on the song he wrote for his outside woman? And yet, there she was, oohing and ahhing as that bastard sang a love song for another woman.”

The glass in Tante’s hand was shaking now.

“And when you confront them about their stinking whores, they beat you on top of it.

“No woman no cry, my ass.”

She dropped the heavy highball glass to the floor. It shattered, bathing my feet in splinters and gin.

 ***

“Tante?” I knocked on her bathroom door. She’d locked herself in. I could hear her bawling through the thin plywood layers.

“Just go away, darling. I’ll be all right,” she said, in between howls.

I changed my clothes in the laundry room, having swept away the shards of crystal and wiped up the spilled liquor.

On my way out I stopped to glance in on Uncle Peter. Again, he gripped my hand. “Abby.”

I shook my head gently, prised his hand off mine.

I let myself out.

Just as I climbed into my car, I heard music turned up loud. It was Bob Marley singing “Stir it up.”

—-

Lisa Allen-Agostini is a writer and editor from Trinidad and Tobago. An award-winning journalist with a weekly column in the T&T Guardian, she is the author of the tween action-adventure novel The Chalice Project (Macmillan Caribbean, 2008) and co-editor of Trinidad Noir (Akashic Books, 2008). She was short listed for the Hollick Arvon Prize for Caribbean Writers in 2013 and was the inaugural Dame Hilda Bynoe Writer in Residence at St George’s University, Grenada, in 2014. Her poems and short fiction have been published in sx salon, Susumba’s Book Bag, Tongues of the Ocean, She Sex, and Wasafiri.