The Final Passage

by Caryl Phillips

In the bedroom the mattress was now covered with a bedspread, with sheets, with blankets. The two pillows were in pillowcases. The broken panes were neatly covered by cardboard. The panes that were intact were clean. The room had curtains and a lampshade, it had a bedside table and a cot for Calvin (which he was sleeping in at the moment). Leila watched over him and made sure he slept peacefully.

  ‘Leila!’ Michael shouted, but though Leila heard him she did not answer. For the past hour she had lain in bed staring at the ceiling whose cracks looked aged, like the veins on a dead leaf.

  ‘Aggh?’

  She heard him fall over and she sat bolt upright. She looked to make sure he had not woken up Calvin. The moonlight crept into the room and she lowered herself back into bed and waited. Calvin was still asleep.

  Michael held one hand against his temple and swore. He had hurt his head as he fell through the door. He sat on the settee and looked at the glowing embers in the fireplace until his head stopped spinning. Then he launched himself upright and began to stumble upstairs. He turned the lights on in the bedroom.

  ‘It's the right house I'm in or what?’

  Leila did not answer. She pretended to be asleep, and Michael sucked his teeth, then turned out the light before taking off his clothes and sliding into bed beside her.

  ‘Leila’ he whispered, breathing beer into her ear. But she was sleeping. So he propped himself up and breathed it into her face.

  ‘Leila?’ Michael forced his hand down between her legs and prised them open. Then he hauled himself on top of her, unable to take any of the weight himself. As Leila moved, scared she would be crushed, Michael again reached down his hand. But it was no good. He leaned over and vomited beside her head, catching the edge of the pillow and running back some of the vomit into her hair. Then, having emptied his stomach for a third time, he lay unconscious and draped across her like a dead whale. Leila heard him beginning to snore but she dare not, in fact could not move. She looked at the side of his head and waited until morning came. But, when morning did come, Leila was finally asleep and Michael left the house without waking her up.

  Michael climbed past the flat caps, through the mud-caked boots, and went to sit on the top deck of the bus. Across the aisle from him were two men, both of whom were as fat as armchairs and both of whom had veins and moles sketched on their faces in random patterns of ugliness. Michael thought they must be brothers. He arched forward and looked out of the window. Then a sudden escaping cloud lit up the cold day. He thought this might be a good sign for the interview.

  The girl was painting her nails. She sat, one leg tucked underneath the other, behind a desk with a bulky typewriter on it. Her face looked like a mask, her features simple and hard.

  ‘You saw the job in the paper?’

  Michael nodded. She tossed her head in frustration.

  ‘Well, go on. Go on in or are you waiting for something?’

  Michael sat on the near side of the man's cluttered desk and felt the silent mockery. Occasionally Mr Jeffries (his name was on a plaque) took a drink from the cracked mug of tea that stood by his right hand, but it was a few moments before he addressed Michael directly.

  ‘Have you ever been to prison or to a courtroom in front of a judge?’

  Michael shook his head.

  ‘How many wives, one or two?’

  ‘One.’

  Mr Jeffries smashed his cigarette dead and smiled gently. Michael followed the slight curl of the man's lips.

  ‘You're ready to start straight away, are you?’

  Michael nodded and Mr Jeffries stood up. For a large man he moved easily, as if his shoes were made of velvet, the carpet of some cloud-like material. Without turning around Michael had no idea of how close to him the man was.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Michael stood.

  As they crossed the courtyard Mr Jeffries shouted to an Englishman in overalls, ‘You can put up the ‘COLOURED QUOTA FULL’ sign now.’

  The man turned his thumb skyward.

  As they neared the large brick building Mr Jeffries began to speak again.

  ‘Now then, do you know what a paper clip is?’

  Michael nodded.

  ‘Well, all you have to do is to scoop up as many of them as you can hold in your left hand, and holding a small box in the other hand, put them in. I hope you've got that.’

  Again Michael nodded.

  ‘Now, I don't expect . . .’

  Suddenly the man's words were drowned by the noise of thundering machines. Mr Jeffries looked around, then gestured with both arms to the only other coloured man in the building. Michael's ears began to hurt.

  The tea break was tolast fifteen minutes and Edwin went to get them both a cup of tea. He was a short man with a bald patch shining in the middle of his head which made him look like a powerful black monk. His nylon shirt was buttoned from the collar down to his chest, then for some reason it buttoned no further and just flared out into a tent-like finish. His pants were held up by a belt which seemed to bear no relation to the loops that were there for it to be threaded through. He looked casual, but affable, and he returned with two hot dirty-looking cups and sat.

  ‘You know you do favour a chap I used to know, but them is the sort of people who come from nothing back home to be even bigger nothings over here, so I glad you're not family to them.’ Michael smiled nervously.

  ‘So how long you been over here now?’ asked Edwin, kicking off some dirt from his workboots.

  ‘Close to a week now.’

  ‘Well, all you need to remember is they treat us worse than their dogs. The women expect you to do tricks with your biceps and sing calypso, or to drop down on one knee and pretend you're Paul Robeson or somebody.’

  Edwin took a long loud sip on his tea.

  ‘English people do wear overcoats in the summer and short jackets in the winter and mark my words good, don't put no money in no chocolate machines on the tube platforms for it's just a way of robbing off a coloured man's money.’

  Edwin paused and thought. Then he looked up at Michael and spoke quietly.

  ‘Though of course you not going make any money here. And before you been in this job a week you going start dreaming of home. And I don't mean dream, dream, I mean nightmare, dream. And then, unless you watch your step, before you know it you soon be going out in the evening and meeting the kind of coloured man who like to tell everyone he's Brazilian, that he's Pelé or somebody.’

  ‘Who's Pelé?’

  ‘Young boy, sixteen or something, just win the World Cup for Brazil in Sweden or some place.’

  Edwin paused a moment, then grinned.

  ‘I hear Swedish women nice, boy.’ Again he paused. ‘But I don't want no son of mine kicking no damn English football. He going be a cricketer, like his father.’ Edwin was interrupted by the screaming of a hooter. He stood and encouraged Michael to finish his tea.

  ‘By the way, what you think of Jeffries?’

  ‘I don't know,’ said Michael, draining the cup.

  Edwin took the cup and laughed.

  ‘Well, you better know. He's a cunt and he's going to call you names, man, and you going to behave like a kettle for without knowing it you going to boil. It's how the white man in this country kills off the coloured man. He makes you heat up and blow yourself away.’

  That evening Michael joined Edwin and his two friends at the newly opened Caribbean Club. Edwin had said that he preferred it to the pub, and as they eased their way down the concave steps Michael heard music.

  Edwin's friends sat at the far side of the dingy, deserted club. For an hour they all talked loudly. Then Edwin pushed the table away from him and shifted his glass, as if making room for plans. But there were no plans, just more idle talk.

  Eventually Michael left the club and stepped out into the black night. The driving rain lashed down, only visible when it speared past the lamp-posts or broke the surface of the slack water puddles. He lowered his head, turned up his collar and bega
n running.

  Back at Florence Road he fumbled noisily at the lock, unable to direct the key into the door. He sat on the doorstep, his head pounding, before trying again. His already strengthening hangover was not Edwin's fault, but by tomorrow morning he would have learned how to blame Edwin. The key went in the door.

  Already England was more than Michael had dared hope for. On the ship his mind had ached trying to arrange the words of his grandmother, the memory of his grandfather, and the warnings of Footsie Walters' brother Alphonse into a meaningful pattern. He seldom thought of Bradeth, for he doubted if he would see him again before the grey years. As he gave him the bike Michael had sensed that Bradeth knew this too. In addition, Bradeth had neither the wisdom of age nor the luxury of experience to help now, so Michael put him to the back of his mind. It was the immediate future he found himself having to deal with, not the past. But as the days slipped by, and the ship edged its way towards England, Michael came to admit that his future might not include Leila, in the same way that his present did not include Beverley. If England was the place that Alphonse Walters had led him to believe it was, then how much energy could he afford to waste continually patching up this newly repaired but still leaky marriage? The more he thought about it, the more he realized the nurturing and pretence would have to stop. On the threshold of a new life, he could not afford to fail in fulfilling the wishes of his grandparents.

  And now, as he began to drag himself up the stairs, he could hardly wait for the next day to begin. Michael spun the ring his grandmother had given him around on his finger, and again he thought of his grandfather. There was no chance of his leaving this country with nothing, that was certain. How much he left with seemed to depend totally upon how much he wanted, and how hard he was prepared to try. This being the case Michael would sleep soundly and defend his mind against thoughts of Beverley or Leila or the children.

  *

  It was some weeks later that Leila put the cup of tea in front of her neighbour, ashamed that she had nothing better in which to give it to her. She had called around to see if she could offer Leila any help but, as the minutes ticked by and the woman relaxed, it became clear that she really wanted to talk. Leila did not resent this.

  ‘Well, what did you think it would be like?’ asked Mary, as she put more wood on to the fire.

  ‘I don't really know. I thought it would be much warmer than this.’

  ‘Ah, well, there you are. This is the summer and you just wait till you get to January and February. It was awful last year. I used to say to Harry – Harry's my husband – I used to come home and say to him how I'd seen some of you, coloureds that is, shivering by the bus stops and I just wanted to go across and hug you and say, “don't worry, love, you'll get used to it.”’ She laughed. ‘I never did, though.’

  ‘What does Harry do?’

  ‘Oh, he does alright for himself these days. He works in a factory, foreman though, but he used to have a stall on the market when I first met him. And then there was the war when he was overseas, France most of the time. You do know about the war, don't you?’

  Leila smiled. For a moment Mary did not know whether to be embarrassed or annoyed. In the end she was neither as she just stared at the laughing girl.

  ‘I was only small when the war was happening, so I don't remember much, but they told us about it at school.’

  ‘What I meant, though, was that you didn't have any actual fighting where you were, did you, or did you?’

  ‘No, but I think we used to see the planes going overhead sometimes, German ones as well. My mother used to tell me they were just big flies in case I was frightened. But other people in my village used to dance around singing, ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. The bigger ones, that is.’

  The fire began to rise and its glow caught Mary's face and picked out the lines of her age.

  ‘You used to live in a village?’

  Leila nodded, unsure as to whether she had ended their friendship by her confession.

  ‘What was its name?’

  ‘St Patrick's, after the Irish saint. I think there must have been some Irish people there at some point.’

  ‘You mean some Irish people used to live in your village?’

  Leila looked at Mary and wondered to herself how she was possibly going to explain this. At school her teachers had already done their best to confuse what little history of the island there was, and she had never really worked out for herself the relationship between the English, the Irish, the French, the Portuguese, the Africans and so on. The teachers had talked about each group as if it had made the most important contribution to the history of the island. If Leila said to Mary that Irish people had been there, then she knew she would be giving the wrong picture, even though they had, but she could not really tell the truth. It was too complicated, even for her.

  ‘Some Irish people used to live there, a long time ago, but I don't think any do now.’

  ‘Were they eaten? I don't mean now, I mean a long time ago,’ asked Mary. ‘They might have done something wrong.’

  ‘I don't think anybody ever ate anybody whatever they did,’ said Leila, ‘but they used to kill each other.’

  ‘Just like the war over here. Though God only knows what some of them got up to in the desert. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that lot ate each other.’

  Mary came and sat down by Leila. She stretched her legs, rubbed her thighs and sighed. Then she began to chuckle.

  ‘You know, this reminds me so much of when I moved in with Harry into our house. We thought we'd won the bloody pools.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The pools. The football pools. Don't worry about it. It's just a funny way we folk have of throwing our money down the drain every week and hoping some of it will come flooding out when we turn the taps on.’

  Again she laughed to herself.

  ‘Do you have any children?’ asked Leila.

  ‘Hah! Do I have any kids? Two of the beggars, though, they're at an age now when I shouldn't have to worry too much about them. The oldest one, Kevin, he's twenty, and Val's sixteen. They've both got jobs, and a home, and boyfriends and girlfriends, but from the way they go on you'd think we were back in the thirties all of a sudden. The world at their bloody feet and all they do is moan, or in the case of our Kevin, moan and dress up like a bloody clown in his teddy boy gear. You want to be thankful you've only got one and he's not big enough to answer you back as yet. If I were you I'd start to train him up now. Buy a big stick and everytime he opens his mouth clock him one on the head. That'll save you so much trouble you'll thank me in ten years' time.’

  They both laughed, and Leila looked across at Mary who closed her eyes, though her shoulders still rippled. She was friendly and helpful, but she puzzled Leila, for she could not work out why she would want to be so towards a total stranger. But then Leila thought of home, and what would happen if Mary had moved into St Patrick's with her family, or into Sandy Bay, or any place on the island, and suddenly it did not seem so strange.

  That afternoon they went shopping and Mary's shopping bag looked as if it was going to burst at the seams. Leila could carry no more, both arms stretched and still stretching, making her feel sure that if she did not put down her bags her knuckles would soon be scraping the sidewalk.

  ‘Look, love, I can't go any further.’ Mary slumped on to the bonnet of a parked car. She rested her feet up on the rear bumper of the one in front of it.

  ‘It's alright for you but I'm an old woman, Leila. There's hardly any life left in these old pegs now.’

  ‘You're not old,’ said Leila, as she rested down her bags on the bonnet with Mary's. ‘You're just tired. We must have walked miles.’

  ‘We've walked a mile and been pushed three, I reckon. Let's get out of this madness and have a cup of tea.’

  Leila watched as Mary slipped off a shoe, squeezed her toes, then slipped her shoe back on. She did the same with her other foot, then stood up and picked up her bag.
/>   ‘Well, come on then, I'm the tired one, remember.’

  Leila grabbed at her bags and tagged on to Mary like a daughter to a mother.

  The café was almost empty. They sat heavily. At first the young girl behind the tureens and yards of silver piping seemed oblivious to their presence. The girl wiped her nose on the sleeve of her once white coat. Then she emptied some rusty looking tea out of a huge tin pot and into one of the sinks before making theirs.

  ‘No doubt by the time I get back Kevin'll be complaining about his food and Harry will be sat there looking at me as if it's nothing to do with him.’

  Mary took a sip of her tea and went on, ‘My mother was right. “It'll take the war for the buggers to realize how important we are,” she used to say, “but as soon as Hitler hangs his clogs up we'll be back skivvying and scurrying like there's nothing in our heads.”’

  They sat together, Leila drinking her second cup of tea and trying to imagine what Mary and Harry talked about when they were alone; Mary staring out through the steamed-up window. Then Leila touched Mary on the arm and threw her back into the world.

  ‘Have I been asleep?’

  ‘No, just daydreaming,’ said Leila.

  Mary stood and picked up her heavy bag. She opened the door and the roar of the rush hour traffic startled them.

  At home Leila dropped her two bags on the kitchen floor and took Calvin to sleep upstairs. Then she made herself a coffee and again she waited for Michael, whose remoteness continued to grow with every day. These days he just seemed to use the house as a place in which to change his shoes and clothes. What it was he was thinking she had no idea, and whether or not she could be of any assistance to him seemed, at this stage, an irrelevancy. In England, and without Beverley, he still did not want her. But until he spoke with her she would let him remain as a passenger on the same train, in the same carriage. She knew she would have to wait to find out his destination, unless of course something forced her to get off the train before him.

  *

  It was some weeks later that Leila noticed people were beginning to retreat into themselves and wear long coats. The leaves were falling from the trees.