A short story, as featured in, Undergrowth: UEA Undergraduate Creative Writing.
.
Orchard Beach: A Series of Portraits
It is almost imperceptible, beginning when the spring rots into summer and the plump fruit that lined the boughs now sits at the roots, fermenting into a sweet spicy liquor that sends the seagulls looping though the air. The people of The Bronx leave the dirty heat of New York for Orchard Beach.
*
Sweating bodies pile into subway carriages. Mom ushers them in, shamelessly yelling instructions, in a way only Mothers can. She sits herself down with her youngest on her lap, her oldest sitting beside her and Maria before her. The train pulls away from the station and she hooks her finger into Maria’s belt loop to steady her. The little girl holds a rolled up towel purposefully under her arm. From the other arm hangs a plastic grocery bag. Inside, white-bread sandwiches, home-made sunscreen, iodine and baby oil and brightly coloured juice boxes upon which hosts of smiling animals congregate. Maria likes animals. Every so often she swings her head, making her little pink hair bobbles clatter together.
*
Jamaica, where barefoot boys with soft muscles and hard feet skirt the tide, chewing on sugar cane, or holler to sailors for odd jobs far beyond their physical capability which they stoically attempt a few times before collapsing on the ground in fits of giggles. The tide swells against the shore like it has since the beginning of time and tall limber palm trees submit to the breeze, curving their spines languorously. Only the disorder of man could interrupt the soft inhalation-exhalation of the land.
The war came in 1939 and the men left, chasing stolen pictures, in flickering black and white, of boyhood adventure and 1886 Rifles. Gone with the tide, and with them, the music. Back then, the bands that played at weddings, baptisms and other town gatherings would consist of a gaggle of men somewhere between sixteen and thirty years old . They packed up that music in bags and suitcases, tucked it into pockets. The stillness came and the soft muscled, hard footed boy was left sat slumped on the sand, the sugar cane hanging limply out of his mouth.
*
He stands outside the apartment building throwing bits of gravel at the window, Paulo’s cheesy like that, Tiffany thought to herself. She leans her head out, her hair falling forward and yelled down ‘shut up you asshole, you’ll wake my mom!’, but she’s giggling. They break into a run down the sidewalk, in case they miss them, her always running a little ahead and looking back to laugh. ‘Eh! Eh! We’re here’. They clamber into the convertible, shined up last night, two in the front, three in the back. Her perched on Paulo’s lap. hiked up skirts, naked thighs, paper-bagged glass bottles, and him, thanking God for every bump and swerve in the road, and her, with a devilish look in her eye that he wouldn’t know until he was a little older.
*
And so, that soft muscled, hard footed boy grew a little older and found a girl who felt like home. He borrowed a suit and bought a pair of scarlet coloured suede shoes and her mother altered her wedding dress, a little shorter, a little fuller, and they were married in a chapel by the sea. And when they had left, the birds ate the rice and all was as it was and ever had been again and days became weeks became months.
*
The morning rises and spins into noon and the children return to where their families congregate beneath umbrellas for melted chocolate bars and potato chips. Only a few young stragglers are left, darting and skipping along the shore, dodging her as she walks slowly up and down the beach. None of the children know Lady and yet each and every one of them unconsciously but unquestionably treats her with an inexplicable deference. Her black bikini is laced with brown leather cord, her parasol is of a matching brown and rests upon her shoulder like a halo. Among the jewelled trash and candy-coloured bikes she is the cool wet earth beneath the shadow of the tree. Her Mother, sitting further up on a plastic garden chair, turns to her sisters and says ‘Oh isn’t Lady a funny one’ but children just have a way of knowing.
*
That was until he came home one night with fizzing, wild eyes. She finally slammed her hand down on the kitchen table. ‘What! What then! Out with it!’. And he did, like a guilt-ridden and apologetic young child he spilled out his dreams. And she was raised up right wasn’t she, and she’d taken those vows hadn’t she? Till death do us part. So she followed him, just like those young men before them, out with the tide.
*
As the sun edges further towards the horizon, the Taylor children begin to tire, one by one abandoning sand-castles, or sand-igloos or other indistinguishable sand-constructions. Until each one sits cross legged in the semi-circle around Gramma in patient anticipation. Even the youngest know there’s no use in rushing her. A few minutes pass until she cracks open one almond kernel eyelid. ‘Now, you all know that ‘fore I had your Momma I lived down in Atlantic city’, she begins slowly, ‘now down there they got a beach, lot like this one, whites fist ones to call it Chicken Bone Beach in the beginning I think, anyway, soons everyone was callin’ it that an’ no one could remember what its real name was to begin with, well they called it that cos sure enough, whole beach lined with chicken bones, height o’ summer it was pretty dangerous, kids running round with no shoes on, getting themselves cut up, place half swarming with gulls, fighting for scraps. Now these white folk would walk on past the beach shaking their heads, used to say it was cos negro folk so dirty, leavin’ they trash about like that, they’s animals, they’d say, and it’d sure seem that way, huh, but you ever go to a white folk beach and you might notice something’ and she opened her mouth just a little and gave a soft cackle, ‘sees white folks’ beaches had men that’d turn up in the evenin’ and pick up all the litter’, ‘here, it’d never occurred to us that those white folk had been spreadin just as much trash about, they just had people to clean up after ‘em!’.
*
She made a home for them, out the grime and the darkness of Harlem, but the children stood outside, kicking cans and looking perpetually lost.
And then Moses came, and led us all out of Egypt, to the Promised Land.
His name was Robert Moses, a perpetually suited man with sloping eyebrows. In 1947 he slammed his pen down on a city map and the towering grey waves were parted. Whole neighbourhoods were torn aside, replaced by one mile of silver beachfront, made, not by the will of God, but the hand of man.
*
Kevin dug his fingers into the wet sand and looked up at his big brother sitting beside him, a little straighter, a little higher. It had always been this way, in every memory Selassie had towered over him, even after Kevin had started to catch up. Selassie and before that King and before that Jonathan. Selassie had always recognised the malleability of a name, something one could shed like skin. Skin. A quivering flag in green, yellow and red and the profile of Lion upon it. The Letters K and G in unsteady gothic lettering which the brothers shared. Two teardrops, one filled, one unfilled. And Kevin, R.I.P 1994 – 2009 inked onto his skin. Selassie sat alone on the sand and looked out before him. His eyes fell upon some indistinguishable piece of humanity, glittering and red, discarded at the mouth of the ocean, swallowed by the froth and carried out with the tide.
*
The Puerto Rican woman next door first told her about it. That Sunday, after church, she had prepared their lunch, packed their towels and they’d travelled out to Orchard Beach. Humans, drawn to the water by some growling prehistoric desire and a more conscious longing that painted the inside of their eyelids in shining aquamarine blue. And so, the people of The Bronx had carved out their own migratory pattern. Not some colonial quest set out upon by men clasping weapons and hunting for gleaming things trapped in rocks, men with money in their eyes and blood on their hands. No, they came like children, led by their soul. Noah picked up each of his children, one on either shoulder and walked out, into the tide, and his wife followed.
That Pink Suit 