If I Had the Wings

By Helen Klonaris

Growing up gay is fraught with constraints and even danger in the small Greek-Bahamian community that feels its traditional culture and religious pieties are under threat. The main characters in Helen Klonaris's poetic, inventive and sometimes transgressive collection of short stories confront this reality as part of their lives. Yet there are also ways in which young women in several of the stories search for roots in that tradition – to find within it, alternatives to the dominant influence of the Orthodox church. These include attempts to make connections between their Caribbean lives and the figures and narratives drawn from Greek mythology.

Klonaris focuses closely on family relationships, in particular the compexities of father/daughter relationships – ranging from over-bearing authority, absence and incest. Klonaris's characters are very much part of the wider realities in Bahamian society, including the presence of unregistered immigrants from Haiti, and the interplay between fear, repression, hypocrisy and resistance in the relations between the state, the churches and the LGBT community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781845234058

Helen Klonaris

Helen Klonaris is a Greek-Bahamian writer and teacher who lives between the Bay Area, California and Nassau, Bahamas. Her nonfiction and fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies including Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writings, edited by Thomas Glave, Caribbean Erotic, edited by Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Weir, Let's Tell This Story Properly, edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Haunted Tropics: Caribbean Ghost Stories, edited by Martin Munro, and The Racial Imaginary: Writers and the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda. Most recently, her short story "Cowboy" was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Helen is the co-editor with Amir Rabiyah of the anthology Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, published by Trans-Genre Press, 2015.

Book preview

FLIES

It was the day before the lowering of the Union Jack and Marjorie St. George was having trouble breathing, even after she had dusted. Her difficulty in drawing a full breath coincided with the whirring of a fly in slow circles across the wide expanse of her living room.

Marjorie St. George did not like flies. But killing them presented a dilemma, because she loved God, and God said thou shalt not kill. Marjorie St. George was meticulous. She loved God meticulously. She kept her heart clean like the rooms of her house. The walls and ceilings shone white, the terrazzo floor gleamed, the silver was polished weekly, and the old Victorian furniture was dusted thrice daily, once following breakfast at six, again after morning rush hour at eleven, and once more after six in the evening, when the rush of cars across the island had slowed and dust off the streets had settled. Her prayers began after the dusting; she could only pray when surfaces were shiny, clean, and the room free from intrusion.

Lord, this is your servant Marjorie. She coughed, cleared her throat and began again. Lord, it is me here. I have been having the dreams again, the ones I told you about last week… She broke off to squint at the black speck hovering next to the cabinet. Her living room had not seen a fly in over twenty years. It took a few moments to realize what the speck was.

She wanted to continue, Lord… it is always the same in the dreams… me one standing on a pristine shore, and in the distance a rumbling, in the distance a great wave… but the whirring sound of the fly grated through her insides, the clean and shiny spaces there, and disturbed them. She shuddered, held a hand to her throat, rubbing her neck anxiously as she followed the fly’s movements, its landing on her white settee, waiting there for her to make a move. She bowed her head, clenched and unclenched her hands, then, I’m sorry, Lord, it seems I have a visitor.

Marjorie prayed on her knees, in front of the television, which was, of course, off. She struggled to her feet, took the fly swat off its perch on top of the TV, and manoeuvred herself close enough to swat the fly in one deft move.

She was eying the fly, holding the fly swat aloft, thinking God did not want her to kill. She thought the fly was staring at her. It looked smug. It had no right whatsoever to her settee, and seemed to be daring her to prove it wrong. She watched it rub its tiny front legs together. Her arm, bent at the elbow, hovered in mid air. If she killed the fly, she would have to ask God for forgiveness. But why should He forgive, knowing she had premeditated not only killing the fly, but asking for His forgiveness? That was cheating. Still, flies were dirty creatures and God must know this. They lived off the dead and dying. They craved the stench of decay, of waste. Perhaps God had not created everything. Perhaps maggots and flies and roaches and rats had given birth to themselves, out of man’s filth. Perhaps all these years God had been testing her.

She had been six years old when she bolted out of the house looking for her cat Delilah. Delilah kept her secrets, remembered everything she could not. But on this day Delilah didn’t come. Marjorie found Delilah under the cherry tree, decapitated by neighbourhood dogs, mauled and left to rot in the sun. Flies swarmed over the carcass. When disturbed by her choked cries, they had flown in a black wave across her pallid face, their tiny pin legs and tongues poking at her lips and cheeks, the insides of her nose, her eyelids, her straight yellow hair. She had screamed and run all the way back to the house, past the lime and dilly trees, past the tool shed and the mango trees, and the wheelbarrow half filled with dirt, to the three steps leading up to the back door, pounding her small fists and weeping for her mother to let her in. It was Rosemary their maid who opened the door for her, Rosemary who sat her next to an open window in the kitchen and told her to breathe till she could catch herself again.

For days she had not been able to get rid of the scent of the rotting cat and the sensation of pin legs and tongues on her lips and eyelids, no matter how many times she washed her face with soap and hot water, dabbed her lips with rubbing alcohol, splashed ammonia on her hair and hands, (as she had seen her mother do after Rosemary kissed her cheek and prophesied she would be unable to carry more children.)

Marjorie became virulently opposed to flies, and anything resembling them. She would not eat Rosemary’s raisin bread or crab and rice, nor her mother’s black currant preserves. At picnics on the beach or at lunch on the patio, she discarded cheese sandwiches flies had hovered over, or, God forbid, rubbed against with their pin legs and tongues.

An only child, Marjorie lived with her parents until their deaths, a month apart. She had been forty-five then, unmarried, and now, at sixty-seven, she lived alone in the same house, caring for it meticulously.

Now here she was, in what had been her parents’ living room, wheezing, fly swat held aloft, her right arm and shoulder aching with indecision. She’d never used the swat before, a long white and turquoise plastic thing she had purchased at the Stop ’n Shop years ago, just in case. Her doors were never left open, and the jalousie windows were screened and kept all but shut. Flies lived in other places, not inside Marjorie’s four walls.

She tried to take a deep breath, but her chest felt constricted. She was dizzy. Her fingers tingled. In that moment it seemed that a light shone brightly inside her (not fiercely like a hurricane flashlight cutting through the dark, but calmly, like a cloudless sunrise, like the ones in pictures with Jesus holding out his hands to say, Come). In the light she saw that God had been waiting for her to see the truth – that flies had come from sin, from man’s nature, not His. Not only was it forgivable to kill them, but necessary.

The fly must have had some prescience. It jumped and flew in a wide arc across the back of the settee to the opposite side, making infinitesimally small lunges at the fabric before settling in on all six of its legs. Marjorie felt confident now of her movements, even though she was breathless. She focused her gaze on the fly. Her hand and arm held high, she moved stealthily towards the opposite shoulder of the settee. She and the fly watched each other. They waited. Marjorie breathed shallowly through her nose, scarcely blinking. The fly rubbed and twitched, but before it could rub its measly legs together once more, she brought the swat down with such force the fly was transformed instantly into a black smudge on the settee – which took her the better part of twenty minutes to scrub clean with Palmolive dish liquid and Blanco bleach. She would have to learn to swat with less force. If she did that, regardless of their natures, she could give them a proper burial in the back yard. Yes, that would be the right thing to do, after all.

Instead of getting better, Marjorie’s breathing troubles worsened. She blamed this on the flies who intruded regularly now. The summer’s unusual humidity had caused her walls to sweat, and dust to stick to them in grimy grey-brown rivulets. Though she herself had not been to the Independence Day’s festivities (why should she, her father’s party had lost, and the country taken over by people he’d said would never be fit to govern), she had heard the heat had been unbearable. Since then, the heat and the flies confirmed that things had taken a turn for the worse. All the more reason to keep a clean house. She spent her mornings listening to For God So Loved the World on BBC radio, squatting next to an aluminium bucket of hot soapy water, sponging dirt from the walls and the many framed portraits of her father in his barrister’s robes and wig; her father and other honourable ministers standing outside of the House of Assembly; her father’s parents, Henry and Helen St. George; the premier, soon to be ex-premier, Sir Rupert Sands; and of course the Royal Family. She took particular care shining the glass behind which Prince Charles, on a recent visit to the island, waved and smiled boyishly. Her mother’s side of the family had taken no pictures and so there were none of them on the walls. It was for the best, her mother used to say, let bygones be bygones. As a child, she had misunderstood the word, thinking the spaces between pictures, where the walls were white and absent of memories, were the bygones her mother referred to. As she scrubbed away now at the rivulets streaking these in-between parts of the wall, she permitted herself a brief moment of curiosity about her mother’s people, and why she had never learned their names or set eyes on their faces. Her curiosity quickly turned to frustration and then a strangely familiar despair. She scrubbed harder till even the white paint began to disappear, leaving the wall soft and grey like disembodied thoughts emerging from a forgotten time.

Later, when the walls broke out in fresh sweats, and the afternoon dust settled in thin layers across all her surfaces, Marjorie, urgent and restless, began her ritual cleansings afresh. In the dirt outside, small mounds were evidence of her suffering and her diligence. But still, her breathing was shallow, and her chest hurt when she inhaled.

Her only respite came at night, when she could lie propped against her pillows, staring up at the ceiling and considering which cupboards in the kitchen needed airing, in which corners of closets she had seen a build-up of soft grey fuzz and which necessities she would buy the next day from the Stop ’n Shop.

Perhaps because she paid such close attention to the house, she noticed other things: the slow evaporation of moisture from her skin into the night’s heat. How as she lay there, staring at the ceiling, she could feel her skin stretch and thin, so that when she brought a hand to her face, (she thought a fly had grazed it), her cheek had the feel of a dried banana leaf. She lay awake listening to her heartbeat slow like her mother’s antique clock, the one that stood in the dining room foyer, a golden collection of star-shaped wheels and gears, underneath a clear glass dome, that turned and clicked and chimed on the hour. By the hour she felt the folds around her eyes sink backwards into her head, the whites of her eyes bulge. In the pause between hours, between the turns and clicks of the old clock, she could feel her hair falling out quietly against the flowered pillow case.

In the morning she collected the long silver strands, dropped them into the toilet and flushed. She watched as they swirled and spiralled down the porcelain bowl into the liquid darkness and stench of the septic tank. Then she remembered the bottles of Pine-Sol and Murphy’s Wood Soap, the packets of new yellow felt cloth, and the boxes of mothballs that needed to be bought.

In the days that followed, afraid of suffocating, Marjorie screwed the jalousie windows open and left the front door ajar a few seconds longer than she ordinarily did on her trips into and back from town. Soon, throngs of flies hummed and jackknifed through the lemon-scented air, came to rest on top of the television, the back of the settee, and on days that were particularly still, deliberately brushed against her lips and ear lobes so that she shivered and curled her hands into brittle fists.

She abandoned the washing of the walls to the task of killing flies. There were not enough hours in the day or days in the week to kill them all. Fly swats hung purposefully on door handles, nestled strategically between cushions, rested vigilantly on the toilet tank within easy reach of her groping hand. But for each fly that she swept into a dustpan and dropped into a hole in the ground, ten more surged in as the front door opened and closed. Because she could not keep up with the dust or the flies, and it hurt to breathe, she had abandoned speaking her prayers out loud. The dead flies would speak for her. Mounds littered the backyard like anthills. Like so many deranged breasts.

Her own breasts hung precariously from her exhausted frame. At night she lay unclothed because the chafing of her nightgown against her dry-leaf skin had become unbearable. Staring at the ceiling (away from her wasting breasts that hung off to the sides, so gaunt she thought they might tear off and slither to the floor), she could hear the crawl of wetness down the walls, the careful trickle of dust particles, fanning delta-like across their surface. She could feel, as if it were her own skin, the stretching of limestone and cement and the first appearance of a crack running lengthwise from floor to ceiling in the living room; how this gave permission to others to branch off and multiply across the walls of the house; how the trickle of wet and dust found the slight openings and felt its way into them, reaching for larger spaces. She knew there were puddles of thickened grime collecting in the crease between the wall and floor, in corners where she had not swept or mopped in months. She could smell the stale dust