The Migration of Ghosts
Page 4
Mrs da Silva tries to uncork herself from the mini-bus doors. She steps into a nearly empty street and looks round in anger.
She adjusts her spectacles and announces, ‘The police are wicked. Look how they frighten people away.’
Last year, she had descended into the street dressed as Nefertiti to be greeted by cheers from stall-holders and breakdancers, smells of sizzling jerk pork and general street uproar. Disgruntled, she goes to the truck and checks that the seventy-eight portions of escoveitch fish, one hundred and thirty portions of fried chicken, coleslaw, and bread rolls, are safely in the back alongside the two hundred cartons of tropical fruit juice.
She squints up at the sky. The weather is warm and dull. It might even rain. In a pouch hanging round her neck is a medicine bottle filled with Old Oak rum. She screws off the top and takes a small sip.
The music strikes up from the truck and the sixty-odd masqueraders of Rebel War Band take up position in a disorderly manner in front of the sound truck. The band moves off. Mrs da Silva has placed herself at the front with the devil men who are in harness attached to the dummy trundling along in his canoe. Around her are the Mabaruma warriors with their nose-rings, blow-pipes and bows and arrows. Behind all these are the Ciboney tribe dressed in dazzling yellow leotards with fans attached to their backs. Then come the black tree-frogs, each one partnered by a green tree-frog, followed by the lime-green lizards.
Crowds now line the pavement on either side and Mrs da Silva begins to concentrate on allowing the tingalang pangalang of the music to enter her bones. She shakes her body, shimmying to and fro, and stamps her feet down in the hip-swinging carnival shuffle. Mrs da Silva shimmying is like an earthquake in motion. She takes another tipple of rum. Quite soon she begins to feel better. Before long her head-dress has turned back to front and her spectacles are at an odd angle, but the puddle of gloom that has been swilling at the bottom of her stomach for several months begins to evaporate.
She shimmies backwards and deliberately steps hard on Mrs Bannerman’s foot.
‘Sorry, daalin’.’ Smiling sweetly over her shoulder, she shuffles forward again, singing along whole-heartedly as the volume of sound on the truck is turned up:
Oh I want to get a divorce
Because my wife she looks like a horse …
Suddenly, the truck lurches to a halt and the music skids down an octave to a stop. The members of Rebel War Band gradually cease dancing and look around to see what’s happening. The band behind pulls slowly out and to Mrs da Silva’s disgust, Rebel War is overtaken by a collection of giant sea-shells and shrimps who slowly waver alongside with tentacles and antennae dipping and bobbing.
‘Every year it’s the same. Every year it’s the same thing,’ shrieks Mrs da Silva. She elbows out of the way a skeleton with a policeman’s helmet pushing a cart who just happens to be passing and makes her way back through the revellers towards the sound truck.
‘Keep calm, Mummy. We just got to put more juice in the generator,’ Cuthbert explains apologetically, his painted devil’s face sweating and screwed up with strain. The stewards lower the rope that keeps the band intact and contained. Disgruntled frogs and lizards, who were just getting into the swing, sit on the kerbside. Mrs da Silva stands guard impatiently over the store of food stashed in the back of the vehicle.
Finally, they get going again. The sun puts in an appearance. Grey skies lighten into blue.
With judicious manoeuvring, they slot in again between the Perpetual Beauty Band of shrimps and sea-shells and Jet Jewels, a band that has brought the Haitian spirit of Baron Samedi to the streets of England. Pinned to their shoulders, the men bear giant effigies, of Baron Samedi in top hat, gloves and dark glasses. The women wear the downy feathers of white sensa fowl and a section of great white butterflies prances delicately along covered with powdery snow. At their side a fifteen-foot-tall stilt-man in glittering white rags and a white mask makes threatening, darting movements towards them all with his white-gloved hands.
In Rebel War Band, Mystery Mandy, whose second name no one knows and who materialises only once a year at carnival, is drunk again and lying on her back in the road, lifting her pelvis up and down. One of the other girls straddles her and their bodies gyrate together, then everyone piles on top, until she disappears in a mass of winding hips and the crowd pushes in close to witness this outrageous act of simulated group sex on the streets of Notting Hill until all the revellers spring apart and dance off down the road, grinning and laughing.
Mrs da Silva beams around at everybody. She has been winding what little waist she has all morning, stopping to walk when she becomes too short of breath. It is turning out to be a good carnival after all. The only mishap has been when her young niece Dawn collapsed in agony and was last seen being handed over the heads of the crowd by the St John Ambulance Brigade, like a canoe bobbing on water. People argue over whether it’s peritonitis or a perforated ulcer but Mrs da Silva guesses that it’s just period pains. She has some St John’s bush at home which she will take round if the pains don’t cease by the next day.
They stop for lunch, pulling into a pre-arranged side street of tall and seedy white-painted houses with flaking porticoes. Eager hands reach for portions of fish and chicken and cartons of drink. Mrs da Silva stands beside the truck supervising the distribution of the food which, like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, multiplies itself to feed everybody.
On the road again, hot and breathing hard, Mrs da Silva pounds and shakes through the afternoon, sweat gleaming on her forehead in the sun. For the first time since his departure, Mrs da Silva has forgotten about Pastor Fritz. She feels as if some old, unused engine has kicked into action again. And it is still in working order. She feels good. Once a year, the centre of the street is her rightful place. She looks up at the houses on either side and at the onlookers who are crammed in the windows, balancing on parapets, putting their feet up on the ledges and balconies as they tilt bottles of beer towards their mouths. Mrs da Silva waves joyously although her feet are beginning to ache.
Cuthbert da Silva is driving the truck at snail’s pace in order not to trap members of the band under its wheels. He watches his mother move backwards and forwards. The windscreen is covered with bits of confetti and gold dust. He is just peering ahead when his mobile phone rings. He puts it to his ear and can’t hear a thing above the song which is belting out from the back:
Kingston hot hot hot,
Kingston hot hot hot.
‘What? I caan’ hear.’ He bangs the machine on his lap, controlling the vehicle with his left hand.
He can’t hear a word but he knows what it is and slams on the brakes.
‘Scoobie. Take over this vehicle. I gotta find the hospital.’
Scoobie slides into the driver’s seat and watches Cuthbert’s three-pronged trident work its way through the crowd.
Twenty minutes later a muscular devil with stubby horns, fork, a black-and-red torso and painted legs stuck with tufts of goat hair is queuing up at the reception desk of St Mary’s Hospital, asking where the labour ward is.
Two hours later, a tiny infant, fifteen minutes old, opens his eyes briefly in the delivery room, looks up from his father’s arms and knows that life is going to be a nightmare.
Back on the carnival route, the band has found its second wind and dances relentlessly on. Lulu Banks takes up position on the truck with a megaphone.
‘Rebel War Band. Get into your sections, please. We are approaching the judging point. Get into your sections, PLEASE,’ she screams. ‘Mabaruma men and devils first – pushing the dummy. Then Ciboney and Mabaruma women. Then tree-frogs. Lizards at the back.’
Mrs da Silva is taken by surprise at the announcement. She has somehow worked her way to the back and is firmly wedged among the green lizards. She hacks her way out with a cassava. She gets back in front. Three shrimps with huge antennae have fallen back from the float in front and are wandering amongst the Mabaruma warriors.
Lulu’s eyes are shining with tears of hysteria. Mrs da Silva attacks the offending crustaceans with her grater and sees them off. The band proceeds to the judging point. Mrs da Silva is now leading the band, head thrown back, arms stretched out in front of her as if she has just triumphantly levered herself off a crucifix. She doesn’t see the uniformed policeman, who only just avoids being absorbed into the oscillating copper mushroom that is Mrs da Silva. The jangling music pumps out and she sings along:
Shut you mouth, go away,
Mamma look a booboo deh.
That’s you mamma there. Oh no,
My mamma can’t be ugly so.
For the five minutes it takes to pass the judging point, the sections are in their correct order and everybody winds and smiles and looks cute and bows to the judges on their rostrum but Lulu Banks is sobbing because the dummy, which had all along looked too serious for the occasion, has chosen that moment of all moments to make a suicide bid and throw itself from the canoe.
‘GET THE DUMMY BACK IN THE BOAT.’ Lulu throws down the megaphone and collapses weeping and hyperventilating in the back of the truck next to the unconscious Mandy.
‘You all can do it yourselves next year.’ A trail of tears glistens down her cheeks. Someone hands her an aluminium bottle of rum and fruit juice.
Mrs da Silva’s eyes are almost closed in ecstasy.
‘Let the police hit themselves up they own backside,’ she chortles defiantly as the band plays. ‘This is Madness.’
Past the judging point, the hill slopes upward and Mrs da Silva, puffing heavily, slows down to a walk.
Striding alongside Rebel War Band, apologising as he steps on the toes of the crowd, is Mr Norman Foster, Mrs da Silva’s neighbourhood postman. Dressed as a headmistress, he is wearing pink lipstick, a hairnet and respectable tweeds. He puts on a spurt in order to catch up with her.
Norman Foster is a Jamaican of the patriarchal variety, with a sprig of a moustache and stiff bearing. He has always considered carnival to be foolishness, a batty-man business instigated by crazy Trinidadians, probably because of the inferior quality of their rum. However, he knew that Mrs da Silva played maas religiously each year and he sensed that this might be his only chance to woo her. The problem was that he did not belong to a band and all through the summer, pride and raised hackles at the thought prevented him from asking how he might join the Rebel War Band.
All heroes must go through an ordeal to win their lady. Norman Foster had left it too late to join Mrs da Silva’s band. His retirement had gone through the week before. His loneliness bore down on him as he realised that he would no longer pass Dolly da Silva’s front door twice a day on his postman’s round and he appreciated for the first time how much of his emotional life revolved round the possibility of seeing her.
And so, on the morning of carnival, with some anguish, he went up to his bedroom and took his wife’s clothes out of the cupboard where they had remained since her death four years earlier. He laid them on the bed, went down on his knees beside the bed and spoke.
‘Hilda. I want fi you to help me one more time. I know you wouldn’t want me to be lonely. I tink I have a chance with Mrs da Silva. I don’ want fi you to be jealous. I always have the greatest respeck for you. But I tired to keep struggling on my own here. I hope you could hunderstand.’
It seemed to him that the clothes said yes.
Norman Foster proceeded to dress up in his wife’s large tweed skirt, a pale-pink sweater and the jacket which matched the skirt. He put on a lipstick he had discovered in one of her old handbags and donned a hairnet. Then, in an act of hitherto unhinted-at courage, Norman Foster, senior postal officer with the Royal Mail, strode down the path to his front gate and stepped out into Victoria Road, Hornsey. Looking neither to right nor left and with his eyes fixed far ahead of him, he marched down the road and caught a bus to Westbourne Park Road, ignoring the stifled giggles of the other passengers. He then spent most of the day pushing through crowds, booming sound systems and patty stalls, scurrying up and down, having his feet trodden on, anxiously scanning the floats and trucks. His bottom had been pinched twice before he caught sight of Mrs da Silva.
‘Mrs da Silva.’
Without breaking her step, she turns to see who is calling her.
‘Mrs da Silva.’ She looks at him, puzzled, panting and still shuffling gaily forwards.
‘It’s me, your postman.’
She peers at the anxious, tweed-suited, hair-netted figure running along beside the band and her face cracks open ito a big smile.
‘Mr Postman. You look like you could do with some refreshment.’ She takes the flask of rum from round her neck and hands it to him. Gratefully, he takes a swig.
‘Mrs da Silva.’ Made dizzy by the joyous cacophony of the music and the gaily wobbling figure in front of him, he seizes his chance.
‘Mrs da Silva, you lookin’ splendacious. I live on my own and I am quite lonely. I would like to call on you one day. I am retired from the Post Office now and I don’ have too much to do.’
‘Come in the evening on Thursday,’ Mrs da Silva shouts over the noise. She always sits with her feet in a bucket of hot water for two days after Bank Holiday Monday’s carnival.
Then: ‘Stewards, please to lift up the rope and let in the postman.’
Norman Foster ducked under the rope and for the next half an hour Rebel War Band is led by a smiling Mrs da Silva accompanied by a rather prim-stepping, school-mistressy creature with a moustache who seems quite overcome by the occasion.
It is dusk when Rebel War Band comes to the finishing point under the concrete and steel arches of the Westway. Amid a dereliction of giant golden insects and collapsed angels, Mr Foster says goodbye to Mrs da Silva and goes home, his heart singing.
On Thursday evening, Mrs da Silva answers a rap on the door. The butter-bean soup is bubbling gently and enticingly on the stove.
She looks through the peep-hole and then shouts through the door, ‘Are you pretty?’
‘I believe so,’ smiles Mr Foster, standing in the drizzle.
‘Are you the same pretty person I dance with on Monday?’
‘The very same,’ says Mr Foster coyly. And Mrs da Silva opens the door, a plate of soup in her hand, to welcome him in.
The Duende
On the morning of the fiftieth anniversary of her husband’s death, Doña Rosita awoke and decided to do things differently.
She left her old, iron-frame bed in the corner of the room and went over to the jug and bowl of water on the table beneath the window. After she had washed, she splashed herself over with the water as if blessing herself from a font. Truly refreshed, wiping herself with a towel, she crossed the room still wearing her nightdress. The bed creaked as she sat down heavily on the edge of it. She looked at her feet on the wooden floor. A slip of sunlight lay slantwise across them.
Outside, the neighbourhood dogs set up their usual harsh barking as her son-in-law herded the sheep along the dusty yellow road past the rusty corrugated iron of the cowshed and towards the fields. Prickly pear climbed higgledy-piggledy along the stone wall where the flock passed. A yellow road and a yellow wind, thought Doña Rosita. Later in the morning, under the blazing sun, the road would turn white.
For several minutes, Doña Rosita examined the bare feet placed firmly apart on the worn wood of the floor. Despite her eighty-two years, her feet remained as flexible as those of a young woman. Their appearance was gnarled and twisted like an olive tree. But, she thought, as she wriggled her toes, even the most ancient olive tree still has sap running. That’s what gives the touch of greenness to the grey. Her feet felt lively. She studied them and flexed the right one up and down on the ball of her foot. Yes. For some reason, on this particular morning, her feet felt strong and independent as if they had a will of their own.
‘Today, I shall go wherever you carry me,�
�� she addressed her feet, and then cackled, ‘as if I could go anywhere else, come to think of it.’
There were only three articles of furniture in the room: the high bed with one blanket, whose sheets barely needed straightening because she moved so little in her sleep; the table which served as a washstand and an old dark wooden wardrobe by the door. The lack of other furniture gave these three items a sombre weight, an importance of which Doña Rosita was unaware as she moved slowly from one to the other, carrying out the various functions with which she prepared for the day.
Four black dresses hung in the wardrobe. She lifted one from the rail and frowned at it. She had first worn black as a thirty-two-year-old woman after her husband’s sudden death. Then other people had died, sporadically, but in an endless succession – friends, relatives, neighbours – and she never again found the opportunity to be dressed in colour. Since that time she had been obliged to wear nothing but black. All the dresses were the same length, down to her knees. All had the same V-shaped neck and sleeves that came halfway to her elbows. Because of many years’ wear, they all carried the sharp tang of sweat beneath the arms, despite careful laundering. When Christmas came or a saint’s day, she put a comb in her hair which had grown silver in the time since that first death and fastened three handsome strands of jet beads around her neck. On special occasions, she would also take out her black-lace fan – the one with the ivory inlay – from the top of the wardrobe.
Whenever one of the dresses wore out, she took the bus and made a pilgrimage to Jerez de la Frontera. First she would visit her friend Alba who worked in the dark interior of her husband’s draper’s shop.
Alba’s complexion intrigued Doña Rosita because it was so unlike her own. While they sipped milky coffee from glasses in silvered containers and nibbled biscuits, the two women discussed the affairs of their households, and Rosita always marvelled afresh at that creamy white skin, soft like dough, and at the pale brown of her friend’s eyes. When they were younger, Alba’s brown hair reached halfway down her back and she would perch on a bolt of cloth like a mermaid at the bottom of the ocean. Then, throughout the years of their maturity, childless Alba, married to a gnome of a man who played trumpet in the local band, served coffee from her chair, staying just out of reach of the sunlight that fell through the door from the street outside. In later times, a younger woman served in the shop but Alba remained seated in the shadows. Through sitting for so many years in the dark among the piled rolls and bolts of cloth, Alba had managed always to avoid the midday sun and it seemed that the sole purpose of her life had been to win a victory over this solar enemy, who would now never find an opportunity to affect the pallor of her skin – although liver-spots had done a certain amount of work on her face as she grew older.