Shape-Shifter

by Pauline Melville

  ‘I don’t understand why there needs to be an observer,’ said Jane, angrily. Afreet sighed and scratched his bushy head:

  ‘Oh dear, I thought you’d understood. Think of tomorrow’s crossword puzzle. The answers to it are already in your head.

  But the answers make no sense now, not until the questions are posed. The puzzle brings out one correct answer from the soup of answers in your head. Just the same as the human observer brings out one version of reality.’

  ‘Why can’t one of you stay and observe me?’

  Widdershins intervened delicately:

  ‘I think that is a question better left aside for the moment.’

  ‘Well what will it be like to be both alive and dead at the same time?’

  ‘Horrible,’ said Hoodlum. Widdershins stepped quickly forward nearly tripping over Afreet who was searching for his box of photons.

  ‘I think, my dear, that it would be rather like a dream. You frequently find such duality in dreams and it is not at all unpleasant. You know that someone is both your father and the newsagent simultaneously. In a dream it would feel quite acceptable to be dead and to be weeding the garden at one and the same time. We can leave a note for your boss asking him to come and wake you. I’m afraid that Hoodlum, Afreet and myself are inveterate gamblers. I hope you will not disappoint us by refusing this option.’

  ‘I’ve got no choice,’ said Jane and then added, bitterly: ‘I knew mathematics would bring me to this.’

  Hoodlum, Widdershins and Afreet looked somewhat abashed. Jane shut her eyes. She heard Afreet whispering something and shutting the tin box. Then the three of them tiptoed out of the room closing the door softly behind them. They left a polite note for Mr Denby explaining that Jane’s alarm clock was not working and would he go up and wake her if she was late for her nine o’clock appointment.

  At break of day, three figures could be seen walking through the park, one of medium height, one tall and waving his arms about and the other extremely short. They crossed the grass and disappeared into the dawn mist.

  Next morning, Mr Denby arrived to find the salon unopened and Mrs Reynolds waiting outside. After reading the note, he climbed up the stairs and knocked at the door of the flat. There was no reply. He let himself in with the master key. There was no sign of Jane Cole. The divan bed had not been slept in. The remains of a fish supper lay on the table. He noticed a white sock and shoe on the floor next to what looked like a little pile of soot. Then he went back downstairs.

  All morning, in the salon, the talk was about the reliability and unreliability of young girls.

  Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water

  LORNA FLED FROM JAMAICA AND CAME TO LIE in my London flat for a year recovering from Philip who had gone back to his wife. She arrived with two bulging suitcases and chicken-pox:

  ‘I can’t bear to live on the island while he’s there with her.’ The tears were extraordinary. They spouted from the outermost corners of her eyes. When she blinked they squirted out. She consumed quantities of Frascati wine and swallowed all the pills my doctor could provide. Sometimes I heard her shouting in her sleep. Every so often she managed to haul herself by train to the provincial university where she was completing a thesis on the sugar riots of the thirties. I imagined her, this white-looking creole girl, jolting along in a British Rail compartment that smelled of stale smoke, weeping and puffing at cigarettes and staring out at the grey English weather which she hated. In the end:

  ‘I’m going back,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going back too, to Guyana.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I want to see my aunts before they die. They’re old. And I want to spend some time in Georgetown, in the house with Evelyn and the others. I miss the landscape. Perhaps I’ll buy a piece of land there. I don’t know why. I just want to go back.’

  ‘Eat labba and drink creek water and you will always return’, so the saying goes.

  Once I dreamed I returned by walking in the manner of a high-wire artist, arms outstretched, across a frail spider’s thread suspended sixty feet above the Atlantic attached to Big Ben at one end and St George’s Cathedral, Demerara, at the other. It took me twenty-two days to do it and during the whole of that time only the moon shone.

  Another time, my dream blew me clean across the ocean like tumbleweed. That took only three days and the sun and the moon shone alternately as per usual.

  We do return and leave and return again, criss-crossing the Atlantic, but whichever side of the Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side.

  I am splashing in the waters of the lake at Suddie. The waters are a strange reddish colour, the colour of Pepsi-Cola and the lake is fenced in with reeds. The sky is a grey-blue lid with clouds in it – far too big for the lake. Opposite me on the far side, an Amerindian woman sits motionless in the back of a canoe wedged in the reeds. She is clutching a paddle.

  They say that the spirit of a pale boy is trapped beneath the waters of one of the creeks nearby. You can see him looking up when sunlight penetrates the overhanging branches and green butterfly leaves, caught between the reflections of tree roots that stretch like fins from the banks into the water.

  ‘So you’re going back to the West Indies,’ says the man at the party, in his blue and white striped shirt. ‘I was on holiday in Montego Bay last year. How I envy you. All those white beaches and palm trees.’

  But it’s not like that, I think to myself. It’s not like that at all. I think of Jamaica with its harsh sunlight and stony roads. Everything is more visible there, the gunmen, the politics, the sturdy, outspoken people. And I think of the Guyanese coast, with its crab-infested mud-flats and low trees dipping into the water.

  ‘You’ve got all that wonderful reggae music too,’ the man is saying. But I don’t bother to put him right because the buzz of conversation is too loud.

  The pale boy’s name is Wat. He is standing on the deck of a ship at anchor in the estuary of a great river, screwing up his eyes to scan the coast. The boards of the deck are burning hot underfoot. The sun pulverises his head. His father, leader of the expedition, comes over to him and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder:

  ‘At last we have found entry into the Guianas,’ he says.

  Wat’s heart beats a little faster. This is it. Somewhere in the interior they will find Manoa which the Spaniards call El Dorado. They will outdo the feats of Cortes and Pizarro. They will discover

  The mountain of crystal

  The empire where there is more abundance of gold than in Peru

  The palaces that contain feathered fish, beasts and birds, all fashioned in gold by men with no iron implements

  The pleasure gardens with intricate replicas of trees, herbs and flowers, all wrought in silver and gold.

  He gazes eagerly ahead. There is mud, green bush, river and more bush stretching as far as the eye can see. And there are no seagulls. Unlike the coast of England where the birds had shrieked them such a noisy farewell, this coast is utterly silent.

  The body of an Amerindian is falling through the mists, a brown leaf curling and twisting downwards until it reaches the earth with a thud like fruit.

  A low mournful hoot signals the departure of the SS Essequibo as it steams out of the Demerara into the Atlantic.

  A young man of twenty-one braces himself against the rail taking deep breaths of the future. There is not much of the African left in his appearance, a hint of it perhaps in the tawny colour of a complexion mixed over generations with Scottish, Amerindian and Portuguese. He lets go of the rail and strolls towards the prow of the ship. His eyes never leave the horizon. Not once does he look back as the land recedes away behind him, because

  In England there is a library that contains all the books in the world, a cathedral of knowledge the interior of whose dome shimmers gold from the lettering on spines of ancient volumes.

  In England there are theatres and concert halls and galleries hung from ceiling to floor with ma
gnificent gold-framed paintings and all of these are peopled by men in black silk opera hats and women with skins like cream of coconut.

  In England there are museums which house the giant skeletons of dinosaurs whose breastbones flute into a rib-cage as lofty and vast as the stone ribs inside Westminister Abbey, which he has seen on a postcard.

  This is what will happen.

  He will disembark in the industrial docks of Liverpool to the delicious shock of seeing, for the first time, white men working with their hands.

  For a year he will study law at the Inns of Court in London.

  In the Great War of Europe, two of the fingers of his left hand will be torn off by shrapnel. A bluish wound will disfigure the calf of his leg. The thundering of the artillery will render him stone deaf in one ear and after a period of rehabilitation in Shorncliffe, Kent, he will be returned to his native land where his mother, brothers and sisters wait for him on the verandah. He brings with him a letter signed by the King of England which his mother frames and hangs in the living-room. It says:

  ‘A Grateful Mother Country Thanks You For Your Sacrifice.’

  They are drenched with spray, Wat, his father and six of the crew, clinging to the rocks at the base of the giant falls of Kaeitur, a waterfall so enormous that it makes the sound of a thousand bells as the column of water falls thousands of feet to the River Potaro below. Each one of them is exhausted, but above all, perplexed. For two weeks they have travelled up river led by an Arawak guide. Before they set off they explained carefully to him through an interpreter that they were seeking the mountain of crystal. And this is where he has brought them.

  ‘I’m coming on November the sixth,’ I yell down the phone to Evelyn. ‘I’ll go to see my aunts in New Amsterdam for a couple of days then I’ll come and stay with you.’

  ‘That is good.’ Evelyn’s voice is faint and crackly. ‘Bring a Gestetner machine with you. They need one at the party headquarters. Really we need a computer but that costs thousands of dollars. We’ll pay you for it when you reach.’

  ‘OK Evelyn. I’ll see you in two weeks’ time. I can’t wait. Bye.’

  ‘Bye. Don’ forget ink and paper.’

  I lie back on the bed wiggling my toes and thinking of Evelyn. She is a stockily-built black woman of thirty-six, a financial wizard in the pin-ball economy of the country. She will never leave. Her house is set back a little from the road. On every side of its white-painted exterior, tiers of Demerara shutters open, bottom out, stiff sails designed to catch the least breath of wind. I try to imagine whereabouts she is in the house. She has a cordless telephone now so she could be anywhere – in the kitchen perhaps or wandering about upstairs. When the Trade Winds blow the upper floors of the house are full of air encrusted with salt and at night the house creaks like a ship resting at anchor in the city of wooden dreams, a city built on stilts, belonging neither to land nor to sea but to land reclaimed from the sea.

  Beneath his father’s framed certificate from the King of England, a slim youth of nineteen leans his back against the dresser thinking:

  ‘If I don’t get out of this colony I shall suffocate.’

  A problem has arisen over his leaving. His father and Mr Wilkinson, his employer, are discussing it in the stifling inertia of mid-day. His father is frowning and flexing the stubs of his two fingers, as if they have pins and needles. Mr Wilkinson is one of those gingery, peppery Englishmen whose long stay in the tropics has sucked all the moisture from him, leaving a dry sandy exterior. He too is frowning at the piece of paper in his hand.

  ‘The trouble is with this damn birth certificate. The transfer to London went through all right. The Booker-McConnell people in London agreed to it, then, out of the blue, they ask for his birth certificate. Just a formality I suppose. All the same …’

  His voice tails off into silence.

  On the birth certificate, under the section marked ‘Type’ are written the words: ‘Coloured. Native. Creole.’

  The young man’s eyes are solemn and watchful as he waits for his elders to find a solution. He has a recurring nightmare which is this: that Crab Island, the chunk of mud and jungle in the estuary of the Berbice River, grows to such enormous proportions that it blocks forever his escape from New Amsterdam; that he is forced to stay in the stultifyingly dull town with its straggly cabbage palms and telegraph poles whose wires carry singing messages from nowhere to nowhere. He awakes from the dream sweating and in a claustrophobic panic.

  In London there is jazz and the Café Royal.

  In London you can skate across the Thames when it is frozen and there is snow snow snow in a million crystal flakes.

  In London there are debonair, sophisticated, cosmopolitan men. It is impossible to be a real man until you have been to London.

  He watches them sip their rum punches by the window. In the silence, music drifts up from the phonograph playing in the bottom-house:

  The music goes round and round

  Oh oh oh, Oh oh oh

  And it comes out here.

  Gazing at the three of them with blank disdainful eyes is the portrait of an Amerindian.

  Mr Wilkinson continues, embarrassed:

  ‘Frankly, I don’t expect it will make any difference, but I wouldn’t like there to be any foul-up at this late stage. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Have you got his baptism certificate? They don’t put all this rubbish on the baptism certificate. I’ll write a letter to London saying the birth certificate was destroyed by a fire in the records office. I’ll enclose the baptism certificate instead. That should fix it. They won’t bother once he’s there.’ He takes another swallow of his drink. ‘I suppose they have to be careful. It is the City of London after all, where they set the Gold Standard for the world.’ He winks.

  The great and golden city is to be discovered in the heart of a large, rich and beautiful empire. The city is well proportioned and has many great towers. Throughout, there are laid out goodly gardens and parks, some of them containing ponds of excellent fish. There are, too, many squares where trading is done and markets are held for the buying and selling of all manner of wares: ornaments of gold, silver, lead, brass and copper; game, birds of every species, rabbits, hares and partridges; vegetables, fish and fruit.

  In all the districts of this great city are many temples or houses for their idols.

  In one part of the city they have built cages to house large numbers of lions, tigers, wolves, foxes and cats of various kinds.

  There are yet other large houses where live many men and women with deformities and various maladies. Likewise there are people to look after them.

  In some of these great towers are hollow statues of gold which seem giants and all manner of gold artefacts, even gold that seems like wooden logs to burn. Here dwell men who deal in markets of coffee and sugar and vast numbers of other like commodities. They have eyes in their shoulders, mouths in the middle of their breasts, a long train of hair grows backwards between their shoulders. They sit on finely-made leather cushions and there are also men like porters to carry food to them on magnificent plates of gold and silver.

  In the uppermost rooms of these towers, which are as we would call palaces, sit stockbrokers, their bodies anointed with white powdered gold blown through hollow canes until they are shining all over. Above their heads hang the skulls of dead company directors, all hung and decked with feathers. Here they sit drinking, hundreds of them together, for as many as six or seven days at a time.

  I am squatting on the verandah in the hot yellow afternoon making spills for my grandfather. I tear strips from the Berbice Advertiser as he’s shown me and fold them carefully into tiny pleats. In the yard is the Po’ Boy tree which is supposed to be lucky. Children late for school stop to touch it and recite:

  Pity pity Po’ Boy

  Sorry fi me

  If God don’ help me

  The devil surely will.

  My grandfather rests in his chair, one foot up on the long wooden arm. I want
to please him so I place four spills for his pipe on the wicker table at his side but he hardly notices. I try to peek at the hand that has two fingers missing but it is folded in his lap in such a way that I can’t see properly.

  Aunt Rosa comes out of the living-room to give me a glass of soursop:

  ‘Tomorrow your daddy is coming to take you back to England.’

  ‘England. England. England,’ I dance along the verandah.

  ‘Come in out of the sun, chile. You’re gettin’ all burnt up. I will take you over to the da Silvas to play one last time.’

  I stop short, filled with apprehension and start to scuff my shoe on the floor:

  ‘I don’ want to go.’ I follow her inside where it is darker and cooler:

  ‘What is this foolishness? Why you don’ want to go?’

  I don’t want to tell her. I try to distract her attention from the da Silvas:

  ‘What does my daddy do in London?’

  ‘He works for Booker-McConnell, of course, in a big building called Plantation House in the City of London.’ There is a note of pride in her voice which encourages me to lead her further away from the subject of the da Silvas:

  ‘Will you show me the photograph of the men in London again?’

  Aunt Rosa goes over to the large, carved oak dresser. She is darker than my father but with the same large creole eyes. Her black hair is in a roll at the front. On top of the dresser are some of my favourite objects: a tumbler full of glass swizzle sticks, a bell jar, glass goblets and, best of all, a garishly painted wooden Chinese god with a face like a gargoyle and a chipped nose. I hang around the edge fingering the carved roses while Aunt Rosa rummages in the drawer: