At her birthday party, nobody brought a present. People only brought themselves. She smiles – presence is presents. Words are magic, she thinks; they can exchange meaning when you’re not looking. What she would have to exchange at the party is not words but a present. How would she do that? Maybe she could use magic? The most magical word of all, as everyone knows, is “Abracadabra”. In books there are magicians who can wave a wand and things appear and disappear just by saying that word aloud. Could that word bring a present to exchange in a flash? She closes her eyes and says it aloud, “Abracadabra!” When she opens her eyes and there is no prettily wrapped package on the pavement in front of her, she is really not surprised because she doesn’t have the magic wand.
A sweet-lime hedge has pushed through the railings further on, and, as she runs her ruler along, it bruises the tiny white flower clusters, sending up a sudden piercing sharp-sweet citrus scent which causes her to pause and bury her face in the crushed blossoms, inhaling their fragrance. But she starts back when, from the other side of the fence, two dogs snarl, forcing their muzzles through the hedge, baring their teeth, trying to snatch her ruler. “Stop that stupidness, child,” comes a loud, stern voice; then, spoken more softly, more conciliatorily, “Madam, is only those children from the school down the road. They don’t have no brought-upsy.” Through a gap in the hedge she sees the speaker, a woman, whose features are lost in the shade of a big tree. She seems to be wrapped in a big, startlingly white apron. The little white cap perched on her head reminds the girl of the nurses in the Colonial Hospital where she had spent two weeks because of the long red ridges that rose like tram tracks wherever her nails scratched her skin. The doctor said it was a deficiency, but everybody else said it was “mad blood”. The doctor gave her an iron injection in her bottom every other day. She thinks the iron must have settled under the needle pricks because she has still got eight hard black and blue bruises, big like pennies. But not the kind of pennies she would need to buy a present to take to the class party. She smiles at her own silly thought.
The woman in the cap and apron is pushing a little girl on a swing. The little girl looks like one of the cherub angels in St Francis Church. She is pink. Her soft, soft yellow hair lifts like wings behind her when the swing goes forward. Her pink hands hold on to the swing chain and the frilled hem of her white see-through dress hangs down from the seat. Red ribbon threads its way like red dashes through white eyelet lace around the puffed-sleeve cuffs and the rounded collar. A wide red ribbon is tied in a big red bow at the back of her waist and its ends float up behind her. On her stuck-out feet are red shoes with a cross-strap and white socks folded over at her ankles. She looks like something from a fairytale storybook. Storybook… she muses… a storybook is a good present. She has one at home. Father Christmas brought it last Christmas. The little girl’s high, clear voice cuts through, “Push harder, Mabel. Push harder!” She continues on to the end of the school street where it meets the wide, busy road that runs around the Savannah.
Look right, look left, look right again, she chants, crossing the road to the pitch walk. Today there are three men sitting on a bench under the cannon ball tree. They call out to her as she passes by, “Chick, chick, how is the chickie today?” She pretends not to hear. Mammy has warned her not to talk to strange men. Are these strange men? She doesn’t know them, but she sees them every day. Mammy has also said that she mustn’t be rude to big people. Is walking fast and not answering being rude? Pappy may think so. He has told her that those men are special taxi drivers who take guests from the big hotel wherever they want to go and, as Pappy drives a taxi too, he may be friends with them. Pappy knows about hotels. He told her that when people who stay at the hotel go to the dining room, they have a list of food to choose from. She was amazed.
“I wouldn’t choose. I would say, just bring everything.”
“And how you paying for that, Missy?”
“You mean you have to pay? Even if you living there?”
“In life, you have to pay for everything.”
She supposes, as she rattles her ruler along the savannah railings, when you small, is big people who have to pay for everything. Just last week, the man from Sports and Games came in the yard asking for Mammy and when she said that Mammy not there, the man asked whether that was her mother’s bicycle and when she said yes, he said, “Yuh Mammy behind on the payments, so I taking back the bike.” When Mammy came home, she just flopped down on the steps, like the tyre on the front wheel of the bicycle that had been left home that day only because it had a puncture. She said, “The Lord doesn’t give you more than you can bear.”
Would asking Mammy for money to buy an exchange present be giving her more than she could bear? If Mammy doesn’t have the money, then she, not the Lord, would be giving her more that she could bear. The Lord knows about everything that is going to happen to you before you know it yourself. Maybe he would step in before the load gets too heavy? Could she depend on the Lord to be paying attention at that very moment and warn her? But he was so busy with everyone to look after and she was so small that she may not matter enough to get his attention. All this guessing is making her head feel confused.
She crosses from the savannah to the Queen’s Park Café, look right, look left, look right again. She hurries past to avoid seeing the tempting toolum, Kaiser balls and tamarind balls in the glass case – she has already spent her penny on a guava syrup press. Ah want ah penny to buy tambran ball, Kaiser ball. Gimmee a penny to buy tambran ball, Kaiser ball, she sings to herself as she skips round the corner. She stops at the bridge over the Dry River, climbs onto the lower rail and leans over, looking down at the trickle of water in the inner channel of the paved riverbed. Some boys are playing bat and ball down there, using a stone and a coconut branch. Mammy warned her to keep away from stone throwing. Stone don’t have eyes.
Miss Carmichael’s granddaughter, Esmé, has one real eye and one glass eye. Miss Carmichael has not spoken to her son-in-law for eight years because a nail he was hammering into a piece of wood glanced off from under the hammer and caught Esmé’s right eye when she was just two. Miss Carmichael is proud of Esmé’s pretty, long, soft hair, which she got from her Indian father, but she doesn’t like the glass eye that she also got from him. In the last school holidays, Esmé and her mother came to stay with Miss Carmichael. She had played dolly-house in the yard with Esmé. She had wished then for a real plastic dolly tea-set to play with, instead of an old milk tin and a calabash. She found it hard not to look at Esmé’s glass dolly-eye while they played. “It’s rude to stare at people who have something wrong with them,” Mammy had cautioned.
Her dearest wish now is to get a pink dolly in a white organdie dress with puffed sleeves and a frill at the hem and red shoes and a big red waist sash and bow, and long yellow hair. The dolly would have blue glass eyes that open and close when she is lifted upright or put to lie down. A dolly is such a big, such an enormous present, that she imagines only Father Christmas could give it. If she prayed to Father Christmas, would he remember that she prayed to him for a dolly looking just like the little girl on the swing or would he get her prayers mixed up and give her instead the dolly tea-set she had prayed for?
The girl is just passing Seemungal’s Variety Store, a one-door establishment. Her eyes flicker idly across to the glass display case which fronts onto the pavement. She expects to see the usual array of pencils and rulers and sharpeners and copybooks. But her breath is trapped fast behind her ribs when she sees what Seemungal has laid out today: a row of small beaded purses, pink and yellow, with patterns of flowers and leaves picked out in red and green beads. At the top, each little purse has a shiny little gold zip, pulled by a plump silky tassel, looking as soft and gleaming as an angel’s wing. She does not think she has ever seen anything so exquisitely beautiful. Seemungal’s lady is sitting on a stool behind the display case. The girl feels the lady’s eyes pressing on her as she leans over the glass case to see the little
purses more clearly.
“I tired telling allyou children to don’t lean on the glass case,” Seemungal’s lady grumbles, in an irritated, sulky voice.
The girl steps back on to the pavement. She keeps on peering and tries again. “You could let me see one of the purses?”
“What happen? You can’t see them from where you standing? You blind or what?”
If I was blind, I wouldn’t be able to see what I asking you to see a little closer, she answers, but only to herself in her head. She looks at Seemungal’s lady’s face to check whether she could read people’s minds and guesses maybe not. She peers more closely through the display case, careful now not to lean on the glass. Her fingers tingle as she imagines them running over the beads, her fingertips reading the neat, straight lines in which the tiny, perfect bead balls are arranged.
“Is how much for the purse?”
She is ashamed to hear her voice coming out so small and shaky. Seemungal’s lady has picked up a grey rag and is using it to rub circles on the top of the glass display case. She is wiping the spot where the girl was leaning over. She looks intent on her task, as if something indelible would be left on the glass if she doesn’t clean it at once. She doesn’t look at the girl who begins to wonder whether she is invisible or made of glass herself. After a long pause, Seemungal’s lady gestures with her chin towards the corner of the display case where there is a piece of paper, a torn-out piece of ruled exercise book page, with writing on it in pencil. She reads “12c.” Twelve cents. That is a lot of money. She has no money of her own. Some days she gets a penny to spend at school and she spends it at once. Even if she gets a penny every school day from the following day, and does not spend any – she does a quick calculation – twelve cents is still six days’ worth of pennies. She doesn’t have six school days left before the party and the presents exchange. Maybe she could ask Mammy for twelve cents to buy it. But that depends on Pappy visiting and giving Mammy money. What else can she think of? Maybe if she does not go to cinema on Saturday coming and the next Saturday, Mammy could let her have twelve cents instead? But, when she goes cinema, she takes the little ones, and if she doesn’t go, they can’t go alone, and they wouldn’t have their treat, and it would all be her fault. She steals a glance at the purses again, the pretty pink ones, the pretty yellow ones. She knows that anyone who gets that pretty pink purse, or that pretty yellow one, would be so happy. She hopes that she gets something as precious as that little purse when it is her turn to pick a present from the bag next Friday.
Seemungal’s lady has sat down again. She makes a loud steups, sucking her teeth long, loud and moist, all the while tapping the heel of her sapat on the concrete floor.
“Yuh buying something or not? If yuh not buying anything stop blocking the door. It have people who want to see inside.”
The girl looks around for the people who want to see inside and whom she is blocking, but sees nobody. Still, she tears herself away from the apparition of the display and continues her journey, hurrying on to Nennen Clara’s yard.
Four one-room houses rise on wooden stilts above a bare beaten dirt yard. From a patch of weeds at the base of the lamppost, a vine climbs. The angled afternoon sunlight picks out dense bunches of delicate lacy coralita flowers, the same pink as the pretty little pink purse. The crinkly, heart-shaped leaves are draped in huge drooping swathes along the electric wires and over the roof and wall of a fifth precarious structure in the background. The strong smell that surrounds that building announces that it is the latrine. From it, a thin stream flows through the yard where a straggle of clean-neck and frizzle-fowl chickens strut, fluttering up against one another as if to see who is tallest. They wander about, jerking their heads forward and pecking aimlessly in the softened earth. Nennen Clara’s house is the first on the left. She looks up at the doorway where a pink lace curtain hangs. She calls out, “Afternoon, Nennen, afternoon. I reach for the children.”
Chubby one-year-old Tony peeps out round the curtain. He was christened Anthony after St Anthony, the saint you pray to to find lost things. Three girls born one after the other while Pappy prayed for a boy. St Anthony answered his prayers and found Tony for him. She wonders where Tony had been lost. Maybe God had a package of children for Mammy and Pappy and sent the girls down first. She wonders what would have happened if Tony had pushed himself forward and come down before she did. Would Mammy and Pappy have wanted more children or would she and Lynette and Caroline have been left behind like the time Mammy, coming home from market, left behind a bag full of ground provision that she had pushed under the seat of the bus? Mammy took another bus to the terminus but the people in charge down there said that they didn’t know anything about no provision left on any bus. They said maybe the provision was found and taken away by somebody else.
Would that have happened to them, to her, if Tony had come down first? What if Mammy and Pappy didn’t pray for the girls afterwards? Would she have been given to some other person? Maybe she could have been that little girl Mabel was pushing on the swing. With the golden hair and white dress with the red sash. Her own hair is black and curly. Why do some people come out looking one way and other people another way? God decides that, she knows, but how does He choose which children to put with which parents? Did you have to be specially good before you were born, when you were still in heaven with God, to be sent down with golden hair to parents who had a swing in the yard and a white dress with a red sash waiting for you? She tries to imagine a time before she was born, when she still had a chance, but she can’t.
Nennen Clara comes to the doorway and Tony hides behind her dress, which hangs straight and loose from her bony frame. The girl can’t tell what colour or colours the dress is because the pattern is washed out and everything is just smudges of grey. Lynette and Caroline, faces sticky and snotty from the cold that kept them from school today, shake the wooden steps as they run down to the yard while Nennen follows carrying Tony and a paper bag. She transfers Tony to the girl’s left hip and puts the bag in her right hand.
“The bottle in there. It still dirty. We didn’t get any water in the standpipe today. He didn’t drink all the flour pap. He not himself at all today. And tell your Mammy, don’t forget me Saturday.”
The four set off for home past the little park. Tony is hot and heavy on her hip; his head rests on her shoulder and he has dozed off. She slides a glance across to the little tree the governor’s lady-wife planted in the park the month before. A low picket fence, as high as the tree, has been put up around it. She remembers the police band playing and everybody standing stiff and still, singing “God save the King”. The governor’s lady-wife was wearing a black and white flowered dress with a wide white belt, white high-heeled toeless and backless shoes and a big white hat. She remembers that, at the time of the tree-planting, she had somehow got the confused idea that the governor’s lady-wife was Mrs Simpson, the woman the king gave up the throne for in the old newsreels. At the planting ceremony, one of the men handed the lady a small silver shovel and she put some dirt around the roots of the little tree that another man had put down into the hole for her. The governor’s lady-wife had on long white gloves reaching above her elbows.
She had never seen real gloves on a real person before. What if she pulled out a pair of long white gloves from the bran tub bag next Friday? She stifles a laugh as she imagines the ridiculous scene. People wearing gloves belonged in films, like Grace Kelly, or like the burglar or murderer in detective stories who was being careful not to leave fingerprints at the scene of the crime. In those stories, the criminal always slipped-up at the last minute – took off his right glove to light a cigarette and then move an ashtray with his bare hand or turned on a kitchen tap and picked up a glass to fill it with water. The governor’s lady-wife did not take off her gloves. The girl supposes she had to keep them on to keep her hands clean. How do things like a tree or a shovel or another person’s hand feel when you’re wearing gloves, she wonders.
&
nbsp; At the Chinese shop, she takes five hops bread “on trus’”. “Lemind your Mammy tomollow is Fliday,” Uncle Lio says as he writes something in Chinese on a small square of brown paper, the size that he uses to wrap half-cent salt, and he hooks the new paper onto the bent-up end of hanging wire, crowded with curling brown paper slips.
At home, she takes off her wide-brimmed Panama hat and hangs it over the dressing table mirror. She gets out of her dark blue school overall and her white school blouse and drapes them over the back of a chair, for tomorrow. She puts on her home-clothes: last year’s outgrown school overall – short, washed-out and a little tight. She takes off her dusty watchekongs – she will blanco them later – and her socks, saved too, for the next day.
She steps with bare feet onto the cool, worn linoleum floor of the kitchen, the right-hand half of a shed behind the main house. She dips a pot of water from the galvanised bucket in the sink and rests it on the oilcloth-covered table. What colour will Mammy choose for the new linoleum and oilcloth for Christmas? She strokes the faded pattern of apples and pears on the blue oilcloth. She has read many fairytales with apples in them. She even knows what apple tastes like. Last Christmas Mammy bought four red ones. She sliced and shared them among the children, one apple a day for four days. She has never seen a real pear nor read any stories about one, except in the carol about a partridge in a pear tree. One card that came last Christmas had the whole song printed on it. She learnt the words by heart and could sing along whenever Rediffusion Radio played it. The card had a picture of a small tree with a bird on top and one pear dangling from a branch below. The pear and the bird were outlined in gold. Where did they get a pen with gold ink? Is there really such a thing as gold ink? Which would she rather have, gold ink or a little pink purse or maybe even a real pear?
She looks at her right hand, index and middle fingers stained at the last joint where they touch. School ink is blue-black, poured each morning by the monitor into white porcelain inkwells set into exactly-the-right-size holes that punctuate the grooves in the tops of the long desk-and-bench furniture shared by half a dozen little girls. The ink does not wash off easily and the smudges last through the weekend, marring her otherwise pristine Sunday-best appearance at Mass and Sunday school, to be refreshed on Monday morning. Mammy says it’s a good thing the uniform is dark blue because she can’t imagine how she manages to get the ink on her skirt, too. The girl hasn’t confessed that, when the nib catches on a long, blue-black ink clot fished from the bottom of the inkwell, she wipes the pen in her skirt, and not on the tightly rationed pink blotting paper that sits in the class stationery cupboard. She doesn’t know how she got to be so untidy. It adds to Mammy’s problems and she wishes she could be neater, like Uncle Lio’s daughters. When they come home, their overalls are as clean and as sharply pleated as when they stepped out of the shop in the morning.
Sic Transit Wagon Page 3