Collected Short Fiction Part 39

The voice was mock American: 'Man, I can get anything for you?'

'What do you have?'

'I have white,' the taxi driver said. 'I have Chinese, I have Portuguese, I have Indian, I have Spanish. Don't ask me for black. I don't do black.'

'That's right, boy,' the old lady said. 'Keep them out of mischief.'

'I couldn't do black or white now.'

'Was what I was thinking,' the orange lady said.

'Then you want The Coconut Grove,' the taxi driver said. 'Very cultural. All the older shots go there.'

'You make it sound very gay.'

'I know what you mean. This culture would do, but it wouldn't pay. Is just a lot of provocation if you ask me. A lot of wicked scanty clothing and all you doing with your two hands at the end is clapping. The spirit of the older shots being willing, but the flesh being weak.'

'That sounds like me. After mature consideration I think we will go to The Coconut Grove.'

'And too besides, I was going to say, they wouldn't take you in like this, old man. Look at you.'

'I don't know, I believe I have lost you somewhere. Do you want me to go to this place?'

'I don't want nothing. I was just remarking that they wouldn't take you in.'

'Let's try.'

'In these cultural joints they have big bouncers, you know.'

We drove through silent streets in which occasionally neon lights flashed PRIDE, TOIL, CULTURE. On the car radio came the news of midnight. Terrific news, from the way it was presented. Then came news of wind velocity and temperature, and of the hurricane, still out there.

'You see what I mean,' the taxi driver said when we stopped.

'It has changed,' I said. 'It used to be an ordinary house, you know. You know those wooden houses with gables and fretwork along the eaves?'

'Oh, the old-fas.h.i.+oned ones. We are pulling them down all the time now. You mustn't think a lot of them still remain.'

Henry's was new and square, with much gla.s.s. Behind the gla.s.s, potted greenery; and behind that, blinds. Rough stone walls, recessed mortar, a heavy gla.s.s door, heavy, too, with recommendations from clubs and travel a.s.sociations, like the suitcase of an old-fas.h.i.+oned traveller. And behind the door, the bouncer.

'Big, eh?' the taxi driver said.

'He's a big man.'

'You want to try your luck?'

'Perhaps a little later. Just now I just want you to drive slowly down the street.'

The bouncer watched us move off. I looked back at him; he continued to look at me. And how could I have forgotten? Opposite The Coconut Grove, what? I looked. I saw.

Ministry of Order and Public Education

University College

Creative Writing Department

Princ.i.p.al: H. J. B. White

Grams: Olympus

'You don't mind going so slowly?' I asked the driver.

'No, I do a lot of funeral work when I'm not hustling.'

No overturned dustbins on the street now; no pariah dogs timidly pillaging. The street we moved down was like a street in an architect's drawing. Above the neat new buildings trees tossed. The wind was high; the racing clouds were black and silver. We came to an intersection.

'Supermarket,' the driver said, pointing.

'Supermarket.'

A little further on my anxiety dissolved. Where I had expected and feared to find a house, there was an empty lot. I got out of the car and went to look.

'What are you looking for?' the taxi driver asked.

'My house.'

'You sure you left it here? That was a d.a.m.n careless thing to do.'

'They've pulled down my house.' I walked among the weeds, looking.

'The house not here,' the taxi driver said. 'What you looking for?'

'An explanation. Here, go leave me alone.' I paid him off.

He didn't go. He remained where he was and watched me. I began to walk briskly back towards The Coconut Grove, the wind blowing my hair, making my s.h.i.+rt flap, and it seemed that it was just in this way, though not at night and under a wild sky, but in broad daylight, below a high light sky, that I had first come to this street. The terror of sky and trees, the force at my feet.

II.

I used to feel in those days that it was we who brought the tropics to the island. When I knew the town, it didn't end in sandy beaches and coconut trees, but in a tainted swamp, in mangrove and mud. Then the land was reclaimed from the sea, and the people who got oysters from the mangrove disappeared. On the reclaimed land we built the tropics. We put up our army huts, raised our flag, planted our coconut trees and our hedges. Among the great wooden buildings with wire-netting windows we scattered pretty little thatched huts.

We brought the tropics to the island. Yet to the islanders it must have seemed that we had brought America to them. Everyone worked for us. You asked a man what he did; he didn't say that he drove a truck or was a carpenter; he simply said he worked for the Americans. Every morning trucks drove through the city, picking up workers; and every afternoon the trucks left the base to take them back.

The islanders came to our bit of the tropics. We explored theirs. Nothing was organized in those days. There were no leaflets telling you where to shop or where to go. You had to find out yourself. You found out quickly about the bars; it wasn't pleasant to be beaten up or robbed.

I heard about Henry's place from a man on the base. He said Henry kept a few goats in his back-yard and sometimes slaughtered them on a Sunday. He said Henry was a character. It didn't seem a particularly enticing thing. But I got into a taxi outside the base one Thursday afternoon and decided to look. Taxi drivers know everything; so they say.

'Do you know a man called Henry?' I asked the taxi driver. 'He keeps a few goats.'

'The island small, boss, but not that small.'

'You must know him. He keeps these goats.'

'No, boss, you be frank with me, I be frank with you. If goats you after ...'

I allowed him to take me where he wished. We drove through the old ramshackle city, wooden houses on separate lots, all decay, it seemed, in the middle of the brightest vegetation. It scarcely seemed a city where you would, by choice, seek pleasure; it made you think only of empty afternoons. All these streets look so quiet and alike. All the houses looked so tame and dull and alike: very little people attending to their very little affairs.

The taxi driver took me to various rooms, curtained, hot, stuffed with furniture, and squalid enough to kill all thoughts of pleasure. In one room there was even a baby. 'Not mine, not mine,' the girl said. I was a little strained, and the driver was strained, by the time we came to the street where he said I would find Henry's place.

The brave young man looking for fun. The spark had gone; and to tell the truth, I was a little embarra.s.sed. I wished to arrive at Henry's alone. I paid the taxi driver off.

I imagine I was hoping to find something which at least looked like a commercial establishment. I looked for boards and signs. I saw nothing. I walked past shuttered houses to a shuttered grocery, the only clue even there being a small black noticeboard saying, in amateurish letters, that Ma-Ho was licensed to deal in spirituous liquors. I walked down the other side of the street. And here was something I had missed. Outside a house much hung with ferns a board said: Premier Commercial College

Shorthand and Bookkeeping

H. J. Blackwhite, Princ.i.p.al

Here and there a curtain flapped. My walks up and down the short street had begun to attract attention. Too late to give up, though. I walked back past the Premier Commercial College. This time a boy was hanging out of a window. He was wearing a tie and he was giggling.

I asked him, 'Hey, does your sister screw?'

The boy opened his mouth and wailed and pulled back his head. There were giggles from behind the ferns. A tall man pushed open a door with coloured gla.s.s panes and came out to the veranda. He looked sombre. He wore black trousers, a white s.h.i.+rt, and a black tie. He had a rod in his hand!

He said in an English accent, 'Will you take your filth elsewhere. This is a school. We devote ourselves to things of the mind.' He pointed sternly to the board.

'Sorry, Mr-'

He pointed to the board again. 'Blackwhite. Mr H. J. Blackwhite. My patience is at an end. I shall sit down and type out a letter of protest to the newspapers.'

'I feel like writing some sort of protest myself. Do you know a place called Henry's?'

'This is not Henry's.'

'Sorry, sorry. But before you go away, tell me, what do you people do?'

'What do you mean, do?'

'What do you people do when you are doing nothing? Why do you keep on?'

There were more giggles behind the ferns. Mr Blackwhite turned and ran through the coloured gla.s.s doors into the drawing-room. I heard him beating on a desk with a rod and shouting: 'Silence, silence.' In the silence which he instantly obtained he beat a boy. Then he reappeared on the veranda, his sleeves rolled up, his face s.h.i.+ning with sweat. He seemed willing enough to keep on exchanging words with me, but just then some army jeeps turned the corner and we heard men and women shouting. Overdoing the gaiety, I thought. Blackwhite's look of exaltation was replaced by one of distaste and alarm.

'Your colleagues and companions,' he said.

He disappeared, with a sort of controlled speed, behind the gla.s.s panes. His cla.s.s began to sing, 'Flow gently, sweet Afton.'

The jeeps stopped at the unfenced lot opposite Mr Blackwhite's. This lot contained two verandaless wooden houses. Small houses on low concrete pillars; possibly there were more houses at the back. I stood on the pavement, the jeep-loads tumbled out. I half hoped that the gay tide would sweep me in. But men and girls just pa.s.sed on either side of me, and when the tide had washed into the houses and the yard I remained where I was, stranded on the pavement.

Henry's, it was clear, was like a club. Everybody seemed to know everybody else and was making a big thing of it. I stood around. No one took any notice of me. I tried to give the impression that I was waiting for someone. I felt very foolish. Pleasure was soon the last thing in my mind. Dignity became much more important.

Henry's was especially difficult because it appeared to have no commercial organization. There was no bar, there were no waiters. The gay crowd simply sat around on the flights of concrete steps that led from the rocky ground to the doors. No tables outside, and no chairs. I could see things like this inside some of the rooms, but I wasn't sure whether I had the right to go into any of them. It was clearly a place to which you couldn't come alone.

It was Henry in the end who spoke to me. He said that I was making him nervous and that I was making the girls nervous. The girls were like racehorses, he said, very nervous and sensitive. Then, as though explaining everything, he said, 'The place is what you see it is.'

'It's very nice,' I said.

'You don't have to flatter me; if you want to stay here, fine; if you don't want to stay here, that's fine too.'

Henry wasn't yet a character. He was still only working up to it. I don't like characters. They worry me, and perhaps it was because Henry wasn't yet a character a public performer, jolly but excluding that I fell in so easily with him. Later, when he became a character, I was one of the characters with him; it was we that did the excluding.

I clung to him that first afternoon for the sake of dignity, as I say. Also, I felt a little resentful of the others, so very gay and integrated, and did not wish to be alone.

'We went out,' Henry said. 'A little excursion, you know. That bay over the hills, the only one you people leave us. I don't know, you people say you come here to fight a war, and the first thing you do you take away our beaches. You take all the white sand beaches; you leave us only black sand.'

'You know these bureaucrats. They like things tidy.'

'I know,' he said. 'They like it tidy here too. I can't tell you the number of people who would like to run me out of town.'

'Like that man across the road?'