Collected Short Fiction Part 38

The shop girl took a step backwards and I hurried out through the other door into the shock of damp heat, white light, and gutter smells. Hooray for air-conditioning. My mood had taken possession of me. I was drunk on more, and on less, than alcohol.

The money began to leak out of my fingers. This is part of the excitement; money became paper over which other people fought. Two dollars entrance here; one dollar for a beer there; cigarettes at twice the price: I paid in paper. Bright rooms, killing bright, and noisy as the sea. The colours yellow, green, red, on drinks, labels, calendars on the walls. On the television intermittently through a series of such bars, Gary Priestland, chairing a discussion on love and marriage. And from a totally black face, a woman's, black enough to be featureless, issued: 'Well, I married for love.' 'No, she married for hate.' Laughter was like the sea. Someone played with the k.n.o.b on the set; and the thought, perhaps expressed, came to me. 'It is an unkind medium.'

In bright rooms, bright seas, I floated. And I explored dark caves, so dark you groped and sat still and in the end you found that you were alone.

'Where is everybody?'

'They are coming just now.'

In an almost empty room dim lights, dark walls, dark chairs the man sitting at the edge of the table invited us to come close up to him. We all six in the room moved up to him, as to a floor show. He crossed his legs and swung them. 'Is he going to strip?'

Confusion again. The door; the tiled entrance; the discreet board: BRITISH COUNCIL.

The Elizabethan Lyric

A Course of Six Lectures

I always feel it would be so much better if I could wait to pick and choose. Time after time I promise myself to do so. But when the girl came and said so sad it seemed to me 'I am going to screw you,' I knew that this was how it would begin; that I wouldn't have the will to resist.

PRIDE, flashed the neon light across the square.

She ordered a stout.

'You are an honest girl.'

'Stout does build me up.'

TOIL.

The stout came.

'Ah,' she said, 'my old bulldog.'

And from the neck label the bulldog growled at me. With the stout there also came two men dressed like calypsonians in the travel brochures, dressed like calypsonians on the climbing road to the hotel.

'Allow me to welcome the gentleman to our colourful island.'

CULTURE.

'Get away,' I shouted.

She looked a little nervous; she nodded uncertainly to someone behind me and said, 'Is all right, Percy.' Then to me: 'Why you driving them away?'

'They embarra.s.s me.'

'How you mean, they embarra.s.s you?'

'They're not real. Look, I could put my hand through them.'

The man with the guitar lifted his arm; my hand went through.

The song went on: 'In two-twos, this gentleman got the alcoholic blues.'

'G.o.d!'

When I uncovered my face I saw a ringed hand before it. It was an expectant hand. I paid; I drank.

A fat white woman began to do a simple little dance on the raised floor. I couldn't look.

'What wrong with you?'

And when the woman made as if to discard the final garment, I stood up and shouted. 'No!'

'But how a big man like you could shame me so?'

The man who had been sitting with a stick at the top of the steps came to our table. He waved around the room, past paintings of steel-bands and women dancing on golden sand, and pointed to a sign: Patrons are requested to abstain from

lewd and offensive gestures

By order, Ministry of Order and Public Education

'Is all right, Percy,' the girl said.

Percy could only point. Speech was out of the question because of the steel orchestra. I sat down.

Percy went away and the girl said gently: 'Sit down and tell me why you finding everything embarra.s.sing. What else you tourists come here for?' She beckoned to the waitress. 'I want a fry chicken.'

'No,' I said. 'No d.a.m.n fry chicken for you.'

At that moment the band stopped, and my words filled the room. The j.a.panese sailors we had seen their trawlers in the harbour looked up. The American airmen looked up. Percy looked up.

And in the silence the girl shouted to the room, 'He finding everything embarra.s.sing, and he d.a.m.n mean with it.' She stood up and pointed at me. 'He travelling all over the world. And all I want is a fry chicken.'

'Frank,' I heard a voice whisper.

'Leonard,' I whispered back.

'O boy, I am glad I've found you. I've had such a time looking for you. I have been in so many different bars, so many. I've got all these nice names, all these interesting people I've got to a.s.sist and give money to. Sometimes I had trouble getting the names. You know how people misunderstand. I was worried about you. Sinclair was worried about you too.'

Sinclair was sitting at a table in the distance with his back to us, drinking.

Caught between Leonard and a demand for fried chicken, I bought the fried chicken.

'You know,' Leonard said confidentially, 'it seems that the place to go to is The Coconut Grove. It sounds terrific, just what I am looking for. You know it?'

'I know it.'

'Well look, why don't we all three of us just go there now.'

'Not me at The Coconut Grove,' the girl said.

Leonard said to me, 'I meant you and me and Sinclair.'

'What the h.e.l.l you mean?' She stood up and held the bottle of stout at an angle over Leonard's head, as though ready to pour. She called, 'Percy!'

Leonard closed his eyes, pa.s.sive and expectant.

'I'll be with you in a minute, Leonard,' I said, and I ran down the steps with the girl who was still holding the bottle of stout.

'How you get so impatient so sudden?'

'I don't know, but this is your big chance.'

The open car door at the foot of the steps was like an invitation. We got in, the door slammed behind us.

'I've got to get away from those people upstairs. They're mad, they're quite mad. You don't know what I rescued you from.'

She looked at me.

So it began: the walking out past tables; the casual stares; the refusal to walk the hundred yards to the hotel; the two-dollar taxi; the unswept concrete steps; the dimly lit rooms; the cheap wooden furniture; the gaudy calendars on the wall, mocking desire, mocking flesh; the blue s.h.i.+mmer of television screens; Gary Priestland, now with the news of the hurricane; the startling gentility of gla.s.s cabinets; the much-used bed.

And in lucid intermissions, the telephone: the squawks, the slams.

So it began. The bars, the hotels, pointless conversations with girls. 'What's your name? Where do you come from? What do you want?' The drinks; the bloated feeling in the stomach; the sick taste of island oysters and red pepper sauce; the airless rooms; the wastepaper baskets, wetly and whitely littered; and white washbasins which, supine on stale beds, one a.s.sociated with hospitals, medicines, operations, feverishness, delirium.

'No!'

'But I ain't even touched you yet.'

Above me a foolish face, the poor body offering its charms that were no charms. Poor body, poor flesh; poor man.

And again confusion. I must have spoken the words. A woman wailed, claiming insult and calling for brave men, and the bare wooden staircase resounded. Then among trellis and roses, dozens of luminous white roses, a dog barked, and growled. The offended black body turned white with insult. The same screams, the same call for vengeance. Down an aisle, between hundreds and hundreds of fully clothed men with spectacles and pads and pencils, the body chased me. To another entrance; another tiled floor; another discreet board: ALLIANCE FRANcAISE.

Art Course

Paris Model

(Admission free)

And the glimpses of Leonard: like scenes imagined, the man with the million dollars to give away, the Pied Piper whom as in a dream I saw walking down the street followed by processions of steel-bandsmen, singers, and women calling for his money. At the head he walked, benign, stunned, smiling.

The day had faded, the night moved in jerks, in great swallows of hours. Lighted docks had wise and patient faces.

The bar smelled of rum and latrines. The beer and some notes and some silver were pushed at me through the gap in the wire-netting. My right hand was gripped and the black face, smiling, menacing, humorous, frightening, which I seemed to study pore by pore, hair by hair, was saying, 'Leave the change for me, nuh.'

Confusion. Glimpses of faces expressing interest rather than hostility. A tumbling and rumbling; a wet floor; my own shouts of 'No', and the repeated answering sentence: 'Next time you walk with money.'

And in the silent street off the deserted square, midnight approaching, the Cinderella hour, I was sitting on the pavement, totally lucid, with my feet in the gutter, sucking an orange. Sitting below the old straw-hatted lady, lit by the yellow smoking flame of a bottle flambeau. On the television in the shop window, Gary Priestland and the Ma-Ho Four, frantic and mute behind plate-gla.s.s.

'Better?' she said.

'Better.'

'These people nowadays, they never have, they only want.'

'What do they want?'

'What you have. Look.'