by Sam Selvon
‘Have another sherry,’ I say, procrastinating desperately. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’
‘I will come to the point,’ she say. ‘You will vacate this room to me. It’s possible for a man to live in the basement, but a woman has her pride. It will suit you admirably. Having rose from zero you have little needs. You’ve only been indulging yourself with all these luxuries.’
‘You can’t be serious!’ I ejaculate.
‘You’ll also be able to keep an eye on things for me,’ she say. ‘There are some genteel whites who pass and fling literal shit through the window. I haven’t been successful in catching any of them myself.’
I make a strangling sound, commingling it with other torturous cries.
‘Reduced to cleaning up white shit!’ I gasp. ‘You can’t prove a thing, Brenda.’
‘Couldn’t I?’ she mock. ‘Between me and Paki we’ll send you down the river for a long stretch.’
‘Aha!’ I cry, ‘now I know you’re bluffing – you don’t have any truck with him.’
For answer she went in the corner and do the very same handstand that Paki did, irregardless of her skirt falling down like a parachute and exposing the shadowy V of her treasury.
Little more remains to be said. Galahad offer to swap his basement room for mine, as he wanted to be stationed at headquarters, but I wanted, like a stout-hearted British captain, to go down with the sinking ship.
‘Ah Moses,’ he say contritely, ‘what a let-down you have suffered.’
‘What can I tell you?’ I say, kicking aside a batch of Lamming’s Water For Berries that was in my way to stand up by the window. I looked out over the back garden, remembering Faizull and the slaughter of the lamb. Them was good days, comparatively speaking. ‘There is no god but Mohammed,’ I mutter.
‘What?’ Galahad ask.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘What news from the bridge?’
‘He’s doing the Rapid English Course now,’ he say. ‘I am helping him with pronunciations, you know what an awful accent these Northerners have.’
‘And Jeannie?’
‘A bit of a problem, Moses,’ Galahad confide. ‘She always wants to have a bath when I’m there, and insists I should scrub her back if he isn’t around. What can I do but comply?’
I surveyed the miniature jungle I could see out of the window, wondering if I should start from scratch all over again, forage amongst the undergrowth and grub for acorns and truffles.
Only once, up to the time of writing, did Robert deign to visit me. I opened my heart. ‘Well come and welcome,’ I say, hoping the greeting might stir a wisp of fond memory.
‘Cut that shit out,’ he say, stumbling over a stack of Power, the new paper, and a big crate of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. ‘I’m only here because I’ve got a small query you might be able to clear up.’
‘Glad to be of service, Robert,’ I say humbly. ‘Speak your piece and depart before you become contaminated.’
‘It’s about the conjugation of verbs,’ he say. ‘How can you tell which is transitive when the pluperfect is irregular, and the past participle is superlative?’
‘You stump me there, Robert,’ I admit. ‘Verbs was never my forte, particularly the irregular ones. But my! You’ve certainly made great strides!’
‘Haven’t I?’ He couldn’t help a bit of strutting. ‘I bet I can write better memoirs than you!’
I didn’t make a direct reply to that one. I merely shrug and say, ‘Quien sabe?’
‘I’m doing French too,’ he say, ‘but I haven’t come across that one. What with our entry into the Common Market, it will stand me in good stead.’
‘I cannot tell you how pleased I am,’ I say. ‘You will go far, Robert, like children’s shoes.’
‘Yeah. Well,’ he look around the storeroom, books and papers and a pighead I did salvage from a demonstration to make a little souse, and a pair of Brenda’s dirty panties hook up on a chair from an interlude the night before. ‘How goes it with you?’
‘Things are black, as you can see,’ I say, ‘but every dog has his day. I’m sorry I’ve nothing to offer you, unless you’d like a cup of tea and what’s left of the toad-in-a-hole I had for supper?’
‘No. I’ve eaten. It’s all right. Well, I guess that’s it, then.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘that’s it.’
‘Good luck.’
‘You too.’
One final word. It occurs to me that some black power militants might chose to misconstrue my Memoirs for their own purposes, and put the following moral to defame me, to wit: that after the ballad and the episode, it is the white man who ends up Upstairs and the black man who ends up Downstairs.
But I have an epilogue up my sleeve. For old time’s sake Robert still knocks one with Brenda on and off. What I plot to do is to go up top, and not only inform Jeannie of his infidelity, but arrange for the both of we to catch Master Robert inflagrento delicto, when I will fling down the gauntlet.