The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  The oval watch on the heavy chain was uneven around my lawyer’s neck and it shone like a large teardrop. Her hand felt heavier now. The heaviness of the hand became the total weight of my body.

  “Do you have anything to say to me?” She seemed to be in a hurry. Perhaps she had another man to defend.

  I shook my head.

  “Good!”

  I nodded.

  “If you’d like me to talk to the judge and tell him what you’ve been telling me about your grandmother . . .”

  I shook my head.

  “Good! Because you’ve already been sentenced.”

  “Can I talk now?”

  “You can’t talk now.”

  All the way back out, into the past of the dust and the fumes and the mysterious music with its heavy gavel on thick skin, travelling over the details of the previous journey, small people walking backwards, their faces punctuated and cut up into pieces through the perspective of the chicken wire and bars, I was now sitting between two new police officers. They were protected from me. Both my hands were tied behind my back with handcuffs. I could not stand up to face the former journey and see the progress of the curving steel of the streetcar tracks, or the potholes in the city streets, or the hairpin bends I was now taking. The yellow panel truck slid off the parallel steel lines and forced me against one of the two police officers who twinned me in the locked embracing manacles. His hand touched mine to keep me upright and from falling on my face; and the force of that touch jerked my recollection to that path through fields of sugar canes and hedges of guinea grass and peas, winding like this road, more voluntary but disciplined, in the firm grasp of my grandmother’s sticky hand as we walked that last mile to face the church.

  CANADIAN

  EXPERIENCE

  He passed in front of the oval looking glass in the hallway on his way out to go to a job interview, his first in five years. His eyes and their reflection made four. He stood looking at himself, laughing, and seeing only a part of his body in the punishing reflection the glass threw back at him. He was cut off at the neck. He laughed again. This time, at the morbidness of his own thoughts. The knot of his tie was shiny with grease. He did not like himself. He was not dressed the way he had hoped to appear, and his image was incorrect. This made him stop laughing.

  So he went back upstairs to his rented room on the second floor at the rear of the rooming house. His room was beside the bathroom used by the two other tenants on that floor, and the actress on the third. He wanted to inspect his hair in the better light in the bathroom. But before he reached it, he heard the spikes of a woman’s heels clambering down the rear staircase; and as he listened, they landed on the muffling linoleum in the hallway; and before he could move, the bathroom door was shut. He was not laughing now. It was the actress. She was between parts, without money, and she spent more time in the bathroom when she was waiting for auditions than on her parts after she was called.

  He unlocked his door and left it slightly open, to wait his turn. He wanted the actress to know he was next in line, but he didn’t want her to feel she was welcome. She liked to talk, and talk bad things about her friends, her father, and her stepmother, and laugh about her career, for hours.

  He had to change his clothes. He thought of what else he had to wear. Suddenly, he heard the heavy downpour of the shower as the water began to rain. So he closed his door.

  The heavy ticking of the cheap clock became very loud now. It was the only one he could afford, and he had bought it in Honest Ed’s bargain basement nearby. He had got it mainly for its alarm, not for its accuracy of time, which he had to check against the chimes of a rock-and-roll radio station. And he listened to this station against his better musical taste whenever he wanted to be punctual, which was not often. For he had been between jobs a long time.

  This morning he had to be punctual. He was going to a job interview. It was on Bay Street in the business district of banks, brokerages, and corporations. For all the time he had lived in Toronto, this district had frightened him. He tried to pacify his fear of it now by laughing at himself.

  The job he was hoping to get was with a bank. He knew nothing about banks. He was always uncomfortable and impatient whenever he had to go into one. The most he had ever withdrawn was twenty dollars. The most money he had ever deposited at one time was fifteen dollars.

  For three months now he had been walking the seven blocks from his rooming house on Major Street to the reference library on Asquith Avenue to sit in the reading room, to watch the women, and to peruse the classified advertisements in the pages of the three daily newspapers, searching for a job. The Star contained about ten pages of advertisements which the paper called “Employment Opportunities.” He was looking for a job, but he was still able to laugh at his plight. The Sun had three pages. Sometimes he would see the same “employment opportunities” in this newspaper as in the Star’s pages, and he would laugh at their stupidity of duplication. He needed a job. And the Globe and Mail, which he heard was the best newspaper in the country, carried three pages. He did not like the Globe and Mail. There was no laughing matter about its print, which was too small. And it dealt with subjects beyond his understanding and interest, and even if he could smother a laugh about that, he found its small print bad for his deteriorating eyesight; and this made him depressed and bitter. Besides, the “positions” which the Globe and Mail advertised were for executives, executive directors, industrial engineers, administrators, and managers of quality assurance. He did not know what they meant. But he knew he wanted a job. Any job. His clothes had been in the cleaner’s for three months. And his diet, which had never been balanced, was becoming even more topsy-turvy with each succeeding month of joblessness.

  It was, however, with an irony he himself could not fathom, but about which he smiled, that in the very pages of the Globe and Mail, he had seen the advertisement of the position for which he was promised an interview this Monday morning at ten.

  His noisy clock, with a silver-painted bell on it—and white face and black luminous numerals of the Roman kind—said it was nine o’clock. His room was still dark.

  The Globe and Mail’s ad read

  We require an energetic junior executive to take a responsible position in our bank. The successful candidate must have a university degree in business or in finance, or the equivalent in business experience. Salary and benefits to be discussed at interview. Reply to the 14th floor, 198 Bay Street.

  He was a man past thirty. But he could not, even at his age, argue about taking this “junior executive” position, because his desperate circumstances were forcing this stern necessity upon him. Junior or senior, he had to take it. And when he got it, he knew it would not be a laughing matter. Necessity would make him bitter, but thankful.

  He had only to remember his old refrigerator, which took up one-eighth of the floor space in his room, and which hissed and stuttered whenever he turned on his electric hot plate. The refrigerator contained a box of baking soda, which the talkative actress had told him would kill the smells of food; and on the top shelf, cold water in a half-gallon bottle that had once been full of grapefruit juice; a half-pint carton of homogenized milk, now going bad; his last wieners from Canada Packers, like three children’s joyless penises; six hard slices of white bread in soft, sweating plastic wrapping from “Wonder Bread,” which was printed below the blonde-haired child who persisted in smiling on the package. And three bottles of Molson’s beer. In these circumstances of diving subsistence, he knew he had nothing to lose—and nothing to laugh about—concerning the “junior executive” position.

  He did not come to this country to attend university. Experience of the world, and his former life at home in Barbados, were his only secondary education. He had come here against his father’s bitter wishes. But he was not unschooled. He had attended the St. Matthias Elementary School for Boys, Barbados. For Boys, he wanted to remember to impress upon his prospective employers, since he was not a believer in the
North American practice of having boys going to school with girls. He was a staunch supporter of the British system of public-school education. And even though the St. Matthias Elementary School for Boys was not, in fact, a public school, it was, nevertheless, a school that was public.

  He laughed at his own cleverness of nuance and logic. Besides, no one in Toronto would know the difference. Toronto has Upper Canada College for boys, Trinity College School for boys, Bishop Strachan School for girls, and Havergal College for girls. Boys with boys. And girls with girls. His logic was so acerbic and sharp, he was already laughing as he heard himself telling them that St. Matthias Elementary School for Boys was a . . .

  But he stopped himself in the tracks of his hilarity: “I had-better leave out the elementary part and just tell them St. Matthias School for Boys.” It was a satisfactory and imaginative rendering of the facts. Bay Street, if not the whole of Canada, he had discovered in his time here, was filled with people of imagination. The actress had been telling him that imagination is something called a euphemism for lies.

  But he couldn’t take the risk of failure. Failure would breed cynicism. Instead, he had said on his application that he was educated at Harrison College, “a very prestigious college for men in Barbados, and founded in 1783, which produced the leading brains of the leading leaders in books and banking, of the entire West Indies.” Had he twisted the facts a little too much? Laughter and reassurance about the imaginative men on Bay Street, liars, as the actress called them, and who became quick millionaires, told him he had not stepped off into fraud. Not yet.

  In spite of his lack of formal education, he still considered himself well-read. Newspapers, magazines, the Star newspaper, and Time magazine did not escape his daily and weekly scrutiny, in the reading room of the public library, even long after he had fallen upon the debris of the country’s unemployed, in decreptitude. “Decreptitude” was the word he always used to the actress when they talked about their lives, to make her laugh about the apparently irreconcilable differences between her and her own society, and also to impress her that he was not a fool. He had heard the word first on television.

  And he listened to CBC radio and shortwave broadcasts of the BBC World Service, and watched four television news broadcasts each night: two Canadian and two from America. And he never missed 60 Minutes from New York. Except for the three times, consecutive Sundays, when he had lain flat on his back, fed off the public welfare system, on a public ward in the Toronto General Hospital “under observation” for high blood pressure.

  “Pressure in my arse!” he told the actress, who visited him every day, as he explained his illness.

  In the eight years he had spent in this country, he had lain low for the first five, as a non-landed immigrant, in and out of low-paying jobs given specifically to non-landed immigrants, and all the time waiting for amnesty. One year he worked distributing handbills, most of which, because of boredom, he threw into garbage pails when no one was looking, and laughed, until one cold afternoon in February when his supervisor, who did not trust immigrants, carried out a telephone check behind his back, only to discover that none of the householders on the fifteen streets he had been assigned to had ever heard of or had ever seen the brochures advertising “Pete’s Pizza Palace, free delivery.” After that mirthless firing, there were three months during which he laboured as a janitor for the Toronto Board of Education—incidentally, his closest touch with higher learning; two months at Eaton’s as a night-shift cleaner; then two months at Simpson’s as an assistant shipping clerk; until the last job, five years ago, held along with Italians, Greeks, and Portuguese, cleaning the offices of First Canadian Place, a building with at least fifty floors, made of glass, near Bay Street, where he was heading this morning.

  He laughed to himself as he thought of his former circumstances. For he was ready for bigger things. The murmuring refrigerator could not, within reason, be any emptier.

  So with the bathroom next door still occupied, he looked at himself, at the way he was dressed. It was nine-fifteen now. His bladder was full. Whenever he had important things on his mind, his bladder filled itself easily, and more unusually heavy, and it made him tense.

  He wished the pink shirt was cleaner. He wished the dark brown suit was a black one. He should not wear a yellow tie, but no other ties he had would match the clothes on his back. And he knew through instinct and not through Canadian experience that a job of this importance, “junior executive” in a bank, had to be applied for by a man dressed formally in black.

  Laughter, his father had told him many times, a smile at the right moment, melts a woman with even the meanest temperament. He tried this philosophy now, and his attitude changed for the better. He put more Vaseline on his hair to make the part on the left side keener, for he had dressed in the dark. And now that the autumn light was coming through the single glass pane, which he could not reach even standing on a chair and from which he could never see the sidewalk, he could see that the shirt he had thought was slightly soiled was dirty.

  The morning was getting older, the time of his appointment was getting closer, the hands of the bargain-basement clock were now at nine thirty-five, and he had only twenty-five minutes left to go; and he had to go badly but couldn’t, because the actress was still inside the bathroom, singing a popular song. He could hear the water hitting against the bathtub and could imagine her body soaked in the hot beads of the shower, and he could see the red-faced ugly blackheads painted red, at the bottom of her spine. He had asked her once what they were, and she had told him “cold sores.” He thought they had something to do with winter, that they came out in winter. He laughed each time she told him “cold sores.” He could see them now, because he had seen them once before. Yesterday too, for thirty-five minutes counted by his loud, inaccurate, cheap alarm clock, he had heard the torrents of the shower as she washed herself in preparation for an audition.

  He had nothing to do now but wait. The shower stopped like a tropical downpour and with a suddenness that jolted him. He opened his door. He listened. Mist floated out of the bathroom door, and he brushed through it as if he were a man seeking a passage of escape through thick, white smoke. And as he got inside and could barely see his way to the toilet bowl, there she was, with one leg on the cover of the bowl, which she had painted black, bending down, wiping the smell of the soap from between her legs and then the red, rough dots of bruises on the bottom of her spine, which she insisted were cold sores. When she named them first, he thought she had said “cold stores.” He could understand that. “Cold stores,” “cold storage”—it was enough to make him laugh.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  He could not move. He did not answer. He could not retreat.

  “Close the door and come in.”

  The mist came back, thick and sudden as fog swallowing him, debilitating him, blinding him, and he lost his vision. But he could see the lines of four ribs on each side of her body, and her spinal cord that ran clear as a wemm, with the dozen or so cold sores, fresh as the evidence from a recent lash.

  “I have an audition in an hour, so I’m washing myself clean. You never know what directors’re going to ask you to do.”

  He retreated to his room and closed the door. No mist or even warm sores could confuse him now; and he inspected the clothes he was dressed in, unable to change them, and worried about his interview, refusing all the time to think of the naked actress, and ignored her knocking on his door. Whenever he refused to answer her, she would leave a note on his door in her scratchy, left-handed scrawl.

  But this time, when he reopened his door to leave, she was standing there, and he passed her, wrapped in the large Holiday Inn towel she had brought from Sherbrooke and which barely covered the red sores at the bottom of her spine. The two small nipples of her dropped breasts were left bare to his undesiring eyes.

  “You’re too black to wear brown,” she said. He passed her as if she had the plague. “If you don’t mind me saying so,�
�� she shouted at his back, moving away from her down the stairs.

  This time he did not look at himself in the oval looking glass in the hall. He just walked out of the house. He wished it was for the last time.

  The people at the bus stop are standing like sentries, silent and sullen. They look so sleepy he thinks it could be six o’clock. But a clock in the bank beside the bus stop says ten minutes to ten. He hurries the crowded bus on, with the urging of his anxiety.

  The only sound that comes from the larger group of people going down into the subway is the hurrying pounding of heels on the clean granite steps and the rubbing of hands on the squeaking rails, polished like chrome. More people are coming up out of the subway at greater speed, as if they are fleeing the smell of something unwholesome below. He can smell only the fumes of the trains. And he wonders if it is his imagination. For he knows that the trains run on electricity. It must be the smell of dust, then. Or the people. Or the perfumes.

  He watches a woman’s hand as it wipes sleep and excreta from the corners of her eyes. He thinks of the actress, who cleans her face this way.

  But it is still September, his month of laughter along the crowded sidewalks, amongst the fallen turning leaves. And the furious memory of growing grass, quicker than the pulse was in summer, is still in the air. There are no lambswool, no slaughtered seals, no furs, no coats yet to cover the monotony of women’s movements, which he sees like the single-mindedness of sheep, one behind the leader, in single file downwards into the subway and in double file upwards.

  He boards a crowded subway car and stands among the sardines of silent, serious people. Where he is, with both hands on a pole, he is surrounded by men dressed in grey and black. Some are darker and richer than others. Some of the women too are dressed in grey, some better made and better built than others. All the men in this car hold briefcases, either on their laps or between their shoes. And the women carry at least two bags, from one of which they occasionally take small balls of Kleenex.