He stepped back from the hug. ‘I’m married,’ he said, unhappily. ‘And I have a son.’
She was only momentarily taken aback.
‘I thought someone as nice as you wouldn’t be on their own.’
To keep at bay the feeling that elements beyond her control had shifted in some subtle way to do with mistiming and that a whole unravelling process had been set in motion, she teased him while absorbing the implications of what he had just said.
‘See how much you upset me by storming off like that. I’ve got fever because of it.’
‘Of course I stormed off. Wouldn’t you? Love gone a fish, I thought. Come, let me put you to bed.’
He took her to bed, loosed the mosquito net and helped her back in. Then he sat on the side of the bed under the net with her.
‘When I was downstairs, I nearly cried because I thought I’d lost you.’
‘And whose fault would that be, may I ask? Who stomped off?’
He bunched up the cotton pillow behind her head, still holding her in his arms.
‘I’m so frightened of losing you. Once, when I was about fourteen, I was playing football. It was one of those matches when I was playing really well. Everything was set up for me to score. I was given a beautiful short pass. The goal was more or less open in front of me. The goalie was way over to one side. It should have been easy and I slipped. I wanted so much to please everybody and I knew how important it was.
‘And it seems to me that my life has always been like that. Just when everything is waiting there for me, I fail. I don’t seem to have the killer instinct. Either my confidence fails me or, in my nervousness, I try too hard. I think that’s it. I try too hard.’
He kissed her mouth.
‘You’ll get my cold.’
‘I want everything you’ve got. I want to make love to you now.’
‘But I’ve got fever.’
‘Don’t you get randy when you have fever? I do.’
He undressed and slipped into the hot bed.
The temperature let loose an extravagant energy in her body. The fever was like another lover making love to her at the same time as Chofy. The illness was exhilarating. Every time Chofy kissed her for too long, she was unable to breathe and snatched her head away to open her mouth for air. His body became as hot as hers until they both lay there, slippery, drenched with sweat and exhausted.
Chofy slid out of the bed. He went and heated some water and made her a hot drink with rum, limes and Demerara sugar. He came back with it. The misty gauze of the mosquito net softened the outlines of her body’s curves as she lay there. He thought it was like looking at her through a waterfall.
‘You lookin’ rosy. You look like a mermaid,’ he whispered.
He lifted up the net and gave her the drink. She sniffed and reached for a handkerchief.
‘I still want to be with you, you know,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens. You have opened my life up for me. Nothing could make me go back to where I was before.’
He stroked her hot head as she sipped the drink.
‘Look. I found some sandalwood oil on a shelf. Let me rub you with it.’ He started to rub the oil into her neck and shoulders and over her breasts.
‘What is your wife like?’ she asked, putting the drink down.
‘I think the marriage is over. It’s been dead for a while. She is younger than me. That’s unusual for us Indians. We usually marry older women.’
‘Why is that?’ snuffled Rosa, resting her head in his groin and holding on to his bent knee as he worked the oil down into the front of her body.
‘I don’ know. They say that young girls are more interested in status than sex. They use sex to set themselves up for life, to hook a partner, not so much because they like it. It’s the older women who really enjoy it. We don’t have mirrors much, or magazines or pictures or images. We like the real thing. I don’ know why. It’s just our custom.
‘Loving time done, I suppose,’ he said, sadly, as he finished and put the stopper on the bottle.
She groaned and then lifted her head up.
‘Who says so?’ she croaked.
Eventually, they fell into an exhausted sleep.
The Amerindian Hostel
The gate of the Amerindian hostel in Princess Street remained locked at night. Amerindians coming to town from the bush for one reason or other could obtain a few nights’ lodging there for a small fee.
The hospital had rung the warden earlier, telling him to expect three new arrivals. The Lokono Arawak warden, a short, anxious man, was new to the job and determined to make a success of it. He waited up late for the new arrivals. The office was small and stuffy. He took a Bristol cigarette from the pack in his top shirt pocket, paused and then lit it. Cigarettes were precious. He allowed himself one cigarette a day. There were four left. He would not be able to afford more until the end of the week.
Long after midnight, when Rosa and Chofy were both fast asleep on the other side of town, the warden heard the sound of voices and the squeaking of the front gate. He made his way along the dingy corridor and stepped out into the night.
The black woman employed as a guard opened the tall metal gate. Two or three of the wives in residence, babies in their arms, came out on to the verandah to see who had turned up so late.
A woman in her thirties and two men stepped through into the forecourt. There was an unmistakable expression of gravity on their faces.
The oldest member of the party was a skinny shrimp of a man in faded pink shorts that were held up by a belt tied with a bit of string. He was barefoot. On his head he wore a frayed straw hat with its wide brim turned up. Under the brim, the warden noticed a pair of bright eyes in a shrivelled face with healthily clear skin. At his side, the warden was more concerned to notice, he carried a shotgun, the barrel of which reached up to his shoulder.
The warden ushered them into his office where the old man leaned his gun against the wall and they all sat down wearily to face him across the desk.
‘I’m sorry we can’t offer you refreshment. The kitchen is closed now. But we have a water tank in the courtyard if you need to drink.’
They all shook their heads in refusal.
‘How is the boy?’ the warden asked, screwing up his face and leaning forward across the table as if he were a deaf man listening for an answer.
‘How is your son? Tell me what happened,’ he asked the woman with concern.
‘Bad.’ Her voice was tremulous. ‘The doctors don’t know if he can live. He has very terrible injuries and his spine is shattered in two places. They tell me he will be paralyse if he lives.’
‘Oh my. Oh dear. Oh I’m sorry to hear that’ The warden shook his head sympathetically. He paused for a second and then offered them each a cigarette which they accepted gratefully. ‘But what happened exactly?’
The woman sat with her hands in her lap and continued without lighting her cigarette.
‘The Hawk Oil men are prospecting in our area. They have divided the land up into grids. Every hundred yards or so they drill and explode dynamite twenty yards under the earth. It is not supposed to break the surface. But sometimes it does and then again some of the oil men does use dynamite to blow up fish in the rivers.
‘I don’t know what exactly happen but my son had set a maswali fish-trap in a sidestream and built a little dam further down. In the morning he went to check it. We heard the explosion. The next thing we knew, one of our neighbours was running along the trail, running in the hot sun, shouting shouting shouting for us to come. And we found Bla-Bla by the river. Two fish still in the trap. Blood everywhere. The bones of his legs laid bare. Kaboura flies, sandflies and mosquitoes swarming all over him.’
The warden glanced over at the old man with concern. A transparent tear was wriggling from the outer edge of his eye down his cheek and his lower jaw worked in a fierce, grinding motion to maintain control of his emotions. The warden looked back to the other man who showed no feeling as the
woman pushed back her dark hair with one hand and continued the story.
‘We managed to get him on to a Hawk Oil plane that was flying down. They let us come on it. This is my grandfather. My father has stayed at home to look after the farm. And this is my husband’s cousin who came to find us at the hospital when he heard the news. My husband is not at his lodgings and we can’t find him, so he doesn’t know yet.’
The old man wiped his cheek with the back of his fist.
Tenga acknowledged the old man’s distress calmly.
‘Grandfather is very close to the boy. He’s getting old. That’s why he finds it difficult to control himself. He can speak English but he prefers Wapisiana or Portuguese.’
The warden took out his register from the drawer.
‘I must enter your details in this book, then I will show you where you can sleep. You want to rest now? What will you do? Go back to the hospital in the morning?’
The woman looked uncertain.
‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully.
The warden wrote down the day’s date in one column and the time in another.
‘What is your name?’
‘I am Marietta McKinnon. My grandfather here is called Joseph Correia.’
‘Village?’
‘Moco-moco.’
‘Region?’
‘They call it Region Nine. We call it Rupununi.’
‘Tribe?’
‘Wapisiana. But we livin’ in a Macusi village.’
‘My name is Tenga McKinnon,’ said the younger of the two men. ‘I live in Pakuri but I’m Wapisiana too and I think I had better stay here tonight to look after these folk.’
‘You’re meant to stay only for three days, but I’m sure we can stretch that if you need to be here for longer.’ He turned to the old man. ‘Why did you bring your gun along, Grandfather?’
The old man looked blank.
‘He’d been shooting bush-hog,’ answered Marietta. ‘A whole herd of wild hog wandered into the village. In the morning mists one of the children looked out of the window and thought they were jumbies and woke up the whole village. The hogs had come down from the Kanaku Mountains. My son wanted to go hunting with the men but he went to check his fish-trap first. Grandad still had his gun with him when we lifted Bla-Bla on to the plane.’
‘Well. They won’t let you walk round the streets of Georgetown with that. Leave it in your room when you go out. It will be safe. There’s not much theft in here.’
‘You’re Arawak?’ enquired Tenga cautiously.
‘Yes. From the north-west originally. I don’t speak Macusi or Wapisiana. I don’t even speak much Arawak.’
‘That guard on the gate,’ asked Tenga, ‘is to protect us from the coastlanders or to protect the coastlanders from us?’
The warden laughed.
‘Both, I think. I only just got this job lately. I want to nice up the place, you know. Make it somewhere special where our people can come. I been cleaning out the toilets and bath-house. One of the fellows staying here helped me. You should have seen the place. Disgusting. We were on our hands and knees for three weeks scrubbing the bathrooms. Come. I’ll show you your rooms. Tread carefully now. There are no lights out here. As it’s so late, and you’re family, I goin’ put you in one room for tonight and then you can move into the women’s quarters tomorrow,’ he told Marietta. ‘Do you have your hammocks?’
‘Yes,’ replied Marietta, almost overcome with exhaustion.
A boy of about eleven with his arm in a plaster cast was slinking shyly along the corridor, his back to the wall.
‘How are you, Harold? That arm mending? You should be in bed.’
The boy remained silent. They walked past him and up some stairs. The warden opened the door of a hot, concrete cell with disintegrating plaster on the walls. He flashed his torch around the room to let them see what was there. The torchlight sent some cockroaches scurrying for the dark and illuminated two iron-frame beds, a geography of stains on the old mattresses. Under the window stood a table with a faded red plastic jug on it. Apart from that the room was bare. He directed the beam to where there were hooks for their hammocks on the wall.
‘This is it. I wish you good-night. And I will be hoping and praying that the boy is all right.’
‘Where do you think Chofy can be?’ Marietta asked Tenga. They had gone from the hospital to his lodgings. The people there said Chofy only came back there now and then. Tenga shook his head. Then he told Marietta that Chofy might be in a certain big house in town.
‘You must take me there,’ she insisted.
‘We’ll go there tomorrow before we go to the hospital.’
‘No. We’ll go there now,’ insisted Marietta.
Tenga looked at her anguished face and agreed to take her.
‘Why do you think he is there?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure that he is there,’ Tenga prevaricated. ‘He made friends with someone there.’
Marietta was too distressed and tired to take in what he was saying. Her grandfather had already slung his hammock and was asleep.
The guard let them out of the gate. Tenga and Marietta set off across town. The night was warm and quiet except for a steady, muted chorus of frogs. When they reached the house, they asked the watchman if Chofy McKinnon was there and explained that his son had been badly injured. Tenga waited outside. The gateman showed Marietta the stairs which led to the attic, an expression of malicious satisfaction on his face.
She walked up the two flights of stairs, feeling her way in the dark, and tentatively pushed open the door to the attic. Some light from the moon spilled in through the windows on to the floors of polished greenheart wood. She stood where she was and called his name. Her voice sounded nervous and a little cracked.
‘Chofy. Chofy.’ She tried to overcome her embarrassment and called a little louder. ‘Chofy.’ Perhaps she would wake other people up. She waited for a few minutes. The house felt enormous and strange to her. She began to sweat with nervousness.
‘It’s me. Marietta. Where are you?’
She walked on further through the attic.
‘Chofy?’
There was a thump and a scuffling noise from just ahead of her. Chofy came towards her, out of the shadows, naked, from the other end of the attic.
‘What’s happened? What are you doing here?’ He had his pants in his hand.
Marietta stood still. He switched on the light and blinked at her. The sight of her square figure standing there made his heart pound. He looked at the solid reddish-brown arms hanging at her sides, the gleaming black hair and the rough red triangle where the sun had caught the V-shape neck of her brown cotton T-shirt. She looked to him like a figure moulded entirely from red Rupununi clay, utterly out of place in these surroundings.
‘What is happening?’ she asked. ‘What are you doing here? There has been a terrible accident. Bla-Bla is in hospital. They say he might die.’ Tears began to roll out of her eyes.
She looked past him and saw a movement behind where he stood.
‘Who is that? What is happening?’
Chofy was too shocked to answer. Marietta moved past him to the place where the bedroom was divided off. She saw Rosa sitting up in the bed, the sheet pulled up to her neck.
‘Oh. I am sorry,’ said Marietta, confused. She stepped back to where Chofy stood pulling on his pants.
‘Well, I can see now what you have been doing. You don’ care no more about Bla-Bla and me.’ She turned to go away.
Chofy was standing there shaking his head.
‘Tell me what has happened to Bla-Bla,’ he begged.
‘The Hawk Oil people blew him up. He has head injuries. He is not conscious. His spine …’
Marietta sat down on a wooden chair and wept silently, wiping the tears away with the heel of her fist. Chofy came and knelt by her.
‘Come. Are you staying at the hostel? We will go back there. Or should we go straight to the hospital now?’
‘They won’t let us in now. It is too late. They said they would ring the hostel if he got worse, but I had to leave and find you.’
‘Well, let us hurry back there now.’ Chofy felt for the keys to his bicycle padlock. ‘How did you find me here?’
‘Tenga brought me.’
Chofy went back briefly into the bedroom and said a few words to Rosa. Then he walked with Marietta to the stairs.
The sight of Bla-Bla festooned with tubes, his hair still sticking up like a manicole leaf although his head had been split open and shaved behind his right ear, left Chofy feeling cold and numb. Marietta and her grandfather stayed behind in the hospital while Chofy and Tenga went to find them some food.
Outside the hospital, on the dried-grass verge by a stinking ditch, he and Tenga had a furious row in the blazing heat of midday.
Tenga blamed Chofy for deserting his own people.
‘But it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had been in the Rupununi or in Georgetown. It was an accident. It would have happened anyway,’ said Chofy.
‘You don’t understand. You know what they are saying? One of the Americans saw a little boy in the area and he pointed to the danger spot and shouted: “Chofoye. Chofoye.” He said he was trying to warn him. He thought it was an Amerindian word for explosion. Bla-Bla must have misunderstood and run towards the spot because he thought his father had come home. The stupid Americans didn’t even realise he spoke English – let alone that we all have different languages anyway. And you come to town and mix with these people. You find some fancy piece to sleep with while everybody at home struggling to keep things going. You make me sick.’
Chofy became silent. He felt so guilty.
They collected up some food and went back to the hospital. Marietta and her grandfather came out to eat and Chofy and Tenga took their turn at the bedside.
Bla-Bla drifted in and out of consciousness. He did not recognise his father or mother. When he was conscious, he burbled in Portuguese and Wapisiana and asked for water and he talked to a man he could see in the corner of the room, who had a parrot sitting on his shoulder.
The Ventriloquist's Tale Page 29