Black Cake: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t take her with him, not with her mother’s brown face and long nose and her English talking. Probably, he hadn’t said more than a word or two to Covey in Hakka since she was still in nappies. She would never find herself a husband over there. Cho! He was wasting his time, he knew, fretting over a girl-child who was already getting fresh with him. Talking back in that modern way, instead of doing as she was told. He suspected that Covey was already a lost cause. Still, he stayed.

The Bay
     
    U ntil the bay became famous, they had it all to themselves.
    Pull, pull, pull.
    No self-respecting islander would go out there on a weekday without a boat or surfboard, only Covey and her friend Bunny.
    Pull, pull, pull.
    From time to time, the movie stars and writers who kept homes farther up the coast would come by with their glamorous friends and stretch out on the sand, but most afternoons, the beach was deserted when the girls arrived.
    Pull, pull, pull.
    On Sundays, Covey and Bunny behaved like the other fifteen-year-old girls, strolling along the shore in their matching two-piece swimsuits, poking sticks into beached jellyfish, burying each other up to their necks in sand, eating fresh snapper and cassava cakes cooked on an open fire by Fishie and his wife, and washing off their fingers in the breakers afterward.
    Fishie was an institution around there. He’d been selling lunches made with his freshly caught fish since Covey’s and Bunny’s own fathers had been young boys. He’d seen Bunny’s father go to war for Britain and come back across the oceans to raise his two children, unlike some of the others who’d turned right around and gone back to England or Wales or what-have-you. He’d seen Covey’s pa grow from a skinny likkle ting, as he’d told Covey more than once with a chuckle,to a skinny big ting. And now, these boys were men, holding court around Fishie with bottles in their hands and arguing about the island’s independence from British rule.
    Some weekends, when Covey’s pa wasn’t full of drink, he would drive the girls and their friends up the coast to the falls. They’d run under the cascade, yelping from the cold rush of the water. Look at me, Pa! Covey would shout. Look at me! It was a good day when she could get him to throw back his head in laughter and slap the side of his thigh. It was a good day when she could feel that she was still more important to Pa than a bunch of smelly roosters fighting to the death.
    Then on weekdays, Covey and Bunny would pull on their swim caps and Covey would revert to her truest self.
    Covey was in the water at the swim club when she first saw Bunny. Covey had been treading water, going over the lines of a passage she’d memorized to recite at school. Just then, Pa’s friend Uncle Leonard walked in with his daughter, Bunny.
    Uncle Leonard let go of the girl’s arm and gave her a slight shove toward the instructor. Just concentrate, Bunny, he said, then walked away as Bunny took a few awkward steps forward. Covey had never seen her before, they went to different primary schools, but she had seen Uncle Leonard pull up to the house in his white van to pick up Pa. Back then, Mummy was still around and she’d heard Mummy kiss her teeth and mumble under her breath every time he and Pa drove off to the cockfights.
    At the pool, Bunny did everything the instructor said with a worried look on her moon-shaped face. She didn’t have any of the basics but she caught on fast. Then one day, Bunny’s mother came to watch and she smiled. Covey and the other kids looked over at one another in surprise. Bunny had the brightest smile that any of them had ever seen on a girl. Not even Covey’s mother had teeth like that. As time went by, Covey saw that, apart from the smile, Bunny had something else. Once she started swimming, she never seemed to get tired.
    Bunny started walking back with Covey to Covey’s house after swim club. The two of them would sit side by