Sic Transit Wagon

by Barbara Jenkins

  How old were the children then? The oldest, eleven, the middle, seven, the youngest, two. She has a photo of them standing by that new car, the little one sitting on the bonnet, the others standing, flanking, outside the house on the hill where they then lived. She remembers the drama of that picture being taken. Husband, meticulous, in charge of the Canon, arranging the children. By the time he had got the composition just right, they had lost all interest in the proceedings. But they wanted to please, and so they were captured smiling. The eldest, a little apprehensive, the middle one not wanting to be in a picture at all but cooperating to get it over with, the little one happy to be sitting on a car bonnet and having her picture taken.

  The wagon transported these three, one neighbour’s three, and another neighbour’s two to the Botanic Gardens, to school, to parties and to the beach. There were bikes and trikes, kites and balls, flippers and armbands, goggles and masks, swimsuits and wet towels, bats and racquets and kiddies’ carnival costumes. Market days saw bags of navel oranges and grapefruit for homemade juices for lunch kits, coconuts for water and sweetbread, baskets of fruit and vegetables and fish. Pink and blue day-old chicks won at bazaars, guinea pigs, rabbits, tropical fish, baby manicous, budgies, ducks, cats and dogs were moved around in the wagon as were bags of soil and manure, plants, tools, lawn mower and bushwhacker. The back of the wagon was the mobile sixth-form reference library for her subject and, in the El Niño-inflicted drought decades, it served as the family water cart – brined-pig-tail buckets filled daily at standpipes were ferried home for cooking, washing, bathing and flushing.

  The wagon taught the two older ones to drive. Those were the happy years, she thinks now. Husband fashioned two squares from a piece of thin ply, sanded the surfaces, rounded the corners, applied one, two, three coats of white gloss enamel paint; on each, drew on an “L” using a ruler, set square and pencil, painted the “L” in red, pierced two holes at the top, ran cutlass wire through the holes, fastened the L plates to the front and rear bumpers, sat in the front passenger seat and invited the eldest to sit in the driver’s seat. “But Daddy, I can’t drive.” “That’s true; but you are going to learn.” When it was the middle child’s turn, his “I’m not going with him” decided that she was the one to fasten the L-plates to the wagon and be the accompanying adult. The youngest turned seventeen on one side of the Atlantic while she and the wagon were on the other, and there was no husband on either side. Ah, yes. But it was the youngest, driving the wagon many years later, who suddenly shouted, “Look, look, look at the dial – 99 996. 9.” And she was the one who drove round and round the block to eat up the decimals, slowing down as if running out of gas, eyes on the meter, pulling up, stopping and clapping and shouting, “100000 miles!”

  Years before, when they moved to the house where she now lives, the wagon ran shuttle trips, carrying everything. They had lived in the old house for more than two decades and it took six months to leave it with the wagon ferrying between the houses. It would overheat, the needle trembling over the red H zone, enforcing a rest while the engine cooled down, so she could say goodbye to one house and hello to the other. Those were the months when she would feel herself unable to get enough air, and, in the kitchen of either house, she would catch hold of the edge of the sink with both hands, press her fingertips into the cold stainless steel, blanched knuckles straining the skin taut, her thumbs pushing hard against the sink rim. She would cling on to stop herself from falling, from screaming, from disappearing. Unfinished gasping yawns fought against her efforts to get a breath in. Empty! Empty! she would command herself. And she would squeeze her belly muscles and push air out in long slow whooshing exhalations through her nostrils until there was nothing left, and the incoming breath would find her mouth and glide in on its own in hiccupping gasps as she gradually released her belly and eased out the panic attack. She took the wagon to the radiator works and they gave the radiator what she thought of as an acid bath, purge and enema to remove whatever was causing the blockage in its circulation and the needle stayed out of the H zone thereafter. She remembers marvelling at the ease with which mechanical maladies could be remedied.

  By the time of the move, the wagon had already taken the first child to the airport after every university holiday and brought her back home at the end of term. A year after the move, the second child followed. Too soon, it would take her mother on her last trip to the airport and her husband on his last journey in Trinidad. She went away then and left the wagon for almost three years, parked and unused on the grass in front of her house. She was shocked on her return to see how subdued it looked, sitting low to the ground. The tyres had been flattened by the weight of the body. The paintwork was no longer bright silver but dull and scabby, mottled grey like leprous skin. The daily roast under the vertical sun had cracked the dashboard plastic and pale foam oozed from cracks in the seat covers like flesh from open wounds. It pained her to see the result of her neglect. She sat in the driver’s seat, pulled down the mirror, and, for the first time in years, she looked closely at her face, running her fingertips across the furrows in her forehead, smoothing them out, pushing up with flat palms the skin of her cheeks to iron away the creases that channelled alongside her nose and down to her mouth. Amused at the sudden and positive transformation, she smiled, letting the smile do the face-lift this time. She exhaled, patted the steering wheel, and got out.

  When the middle child had returned home some years later, bright T-shirts hid the oozing foam of the seats; new tyres and a new battery had made the wagon hum on the road again, and the middle child was happy to claim it. He and his partner had the body painted orange and designed new chocolate, blue, orange and yellow striped seat covers, piled surfboards on the roof rack, and the wagon was rejuvenated. When that adventurous pair took it from Chaguaramas to Guayaguayare and Matelot to Cedros, the wagon turned heads. People everywhere stared, waved and called out, “All you selling that car? No? Well, when you selling it, call me.” The ashtrays filled up with scraps of paper bearing phone numbers. But, when their child was born, the wagon didn’t fit their life any more. “The seatbelts at the back can’t take a baby’s car seat… we tried all the car accessories places… nobody can change these belts for the right ones.” And so the wagon came back home to rest, an object of curiosity to passers-by. Eventually, the battery died, the rust erupted through the new paint, and a slick of mould dulled the interior. Still the enquiries continued; the pantomime of calling out, showing, taking numbers and refusing offers went on for almost two years.

  Then, in the week of the anniversary of her widowhood, she had been feeling her husband’s presence very intensely; she had been consciously trying to tap into the sense of order and practicality that her daily life had lacked in his absence. She remembered that before he had even an inkling of the disease that was to take him, he’d been trying to get her to agree to sell the wagon.

  “It’s more than twelve years old now,” he’d insisted; “let’s get you a new car – another wagon.”

  “But it’s not giving any trouble,” she’d countered. “Why get rid of it?”

  “You going to wait till it starts to give trouble?”

  On the anniversary day of his death, the midday post brought a sheaf of white envelopes. The logos announced a phone bill, a water bill, an electricity bill and a cable bill. She recognised the insurance broker’s renewal notices for the two cars. Two cars, she said to herself, two cars to insure and fix up and take for testing… one on the road, one parked up… that can’t make sense. She surveyed them both as she opened the post, reading it right there in the carport, placing the envelopes and their scanned contents on the trunk lid of the “on the road” car. The parked-up wagon, its wing mirrors besmirched with bird droppings from the kiskedees that perched there for their morning preening, its rear window coated with a deep layer of Sahara dust, looked neglected, unloved. It hurt her to see it like this, to know that this time she could have done better by it. She picked up t
he post, walked through the kitchen, continued along the cool dark corridor to the bedroom of her marriage, and dropped the post on the low trunk at the foot of her bed where her husband’s photo smiled at her. She stood and, looking at the photo, said silently to him, it’s starting to give me trouble, so should I…? She searched his face. Did his smile broaden? Did he wink? She thought so. She leaned over and touched his face, saying in herself but to him, yes… you’re right, it’s time. She pulled open the drawer that still housed his handkerchiefs and socks, chose a pair of his tennis socks and retraced her steps to the front yard.

  There, with one old tennis sock as a glove in one hand, hosepipe in the other, she rubbed over the wagon’s body – the scarred roof with its run-off grooves and loose chrome strip, the lacklustre doors, the heavy trunk door, the chrome metal back bumper missing one end-rubber, the windscreen, its rubber seal gone rigid, the still bright bonnet, the chrome radiator grille, the two round faithful headlamps – never changed a bulb in a quarter century, the heavy chrome metal front bumper dimpled at one end – they don’t make them so again, the number plates with their faded numbers and letters, the hardly-worn tyres. At the end she stood, away from the wagon, her wrap clinging and dripping around her body, her face and hair streaming.

  She had hardly had a shower and changed when the bell at the gate rang and there was this little, plump man with the plump, soft hands holding a cap. He wore a benign, gentle smile as if not altogether in the here-and-now. She saw that the rim of his cap had pressed a deep ring-shaped dent into the back of his Friar-Tuck Afro hairstyle, as if his halo fitted too tight. She smiled to herself.

  “Yes, it’s for sale. You want to come and look at it?” He nodded, came in and simply strolled around the wagon, smiling all the while.

  “You want to look inside? It can’t start because the battery run down.”

  “No, I see what I want to see already.”

  “This car never give me a day’s trouble in twenty-five years.”

  “I know. I hear about this car from your mechanic. I does sew clothes for his madam. I bringing my own mechanic tomorrow.”

  Next morning he was at the gate with his mechanic and a battery. They changed the battery, changed the plugs, put in some gas, ran the engine for a few minutes and drove the wagon away with a promise to meet at the Licensing Office the following day to make the official change of ownership.

  When she saw the wagon in the inspection queue next day it was already somebody else’s. There was this stranger in the driver’s seat – an absent-minded looking man in his mid-sixties, wearing a cap. He motioned her to get in beside him, but she turned away to hide the revulsion she felt, not at him, but at herself. She felt as if she was agreeing to the putting down of a beloved, loyal pet who had become inconvenient and she couldn’t bring herself to face the betrayal by looking in its eyes or stroking its head one last time. When they left Licensing he said, “I bringing it for you to see when I fix it up. I see you don’t want it to go.” She nodded, too choked-up to speak, and went off to the bank with her thirty pieces of silver.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Barbara Magdalena Lafond was born in Belmont on 4th December 1941, the first of Yvonne Lafond’s four children. In 1953, she won an exhibition to St Joseph’s Convent, POS, then Trinidad’s most prestigious Catholic secondary school for girls. On graduating, she accepted a teaching position at the school for a further two years, leaving the country in 1962 on a government scholarship to read Geography at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.

  In April 1965, in her final year, she married Paul David Jenkins, a fellow graduate. They settled in Cardiff where Barbara obtained her Diploma in Education and worked as a supply teacher. In 1969 their first child, Rhiannon was born. In 1971 they had to relocate to Trinidad to fulfil the terms of her scholarship that required her to teach in the government secondary school system for five years. This period extended until her retirement some twenty-six years later. Meantime, the Jenkins family grew with the birth of Gareth (1973) and Carys (1978). In 1995, while the two older children were in the UK and the youngest still at school in Trinidad, Paul died of cancer in London.

  In addition to teaching, Barbara was involved in the preparation of textbooks for schools in the CARICOM region to combat the negative impact of HIV and AIDS; and in giving a Caribbean voice to textbooks written originally for African audiences.

  Since 1998, she has belonged to a book club, and served on the executive of the local Dyslexia Association. She is a chorister with the Lydian Singers and Steel, one of the country’s foremost choirs, led by the legendary Pat Bishop until 2011, and committed to outreach and community building.

  From the year she read all the books in the small, one-room public library in Belmont, books have always been at the heart of her life. Alice Munro, Graham Greene, Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, Jean Rhys, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Le Carre sustained husband and wife. The dusty relics of these forays, crammed into bookshelves everywhere, are now so much a part of her life, she thinks it would be impossible to part with them.

  Her writing life was always an unobserved backdrop. Letters to pen-pals selected from the back pages of American comic books, letters back home in the first UK decade, letters to her in-law family in her Trinidad years and to her children while they were students in the UK were a normal part of life in the era of expensive land-lines before Skype.

  Real writing came much later. It was around 2007 when two female friends invited Barbara to join them in a creative writing exercise. They met once a month, to read and to critique whatever they had produced. Out of that experience came the embryos of some of the stories in this collection. She asked a young friend and neighbour, Nicholas Laughlin, editor of the Caribbean Review of Books, to read one of her stories. He reported that he really liked it and encouraged her to apply, successfully, for a place at the Cropper Foundation Residential Creative Writing Workshop in 2008. In the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2009 her entry was highly commended. She won their Caribbean Region Prize in 2010 and 2011, was shortlisted in the first Wasafiri New Writing Prize, 2009, and winner of their Life Writing Prize, 2010. This was followed by The Canute Brodhurst Prize for short fiction 2010, from The Caribbean Writer, winner of the short story competition, Small Axe, 2011, winner of the Romance Category, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest, 2010, and the inaugural The Caribbean Communications Network (CCN) Prize for a film review of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, 2012.

  In 2010 she enrolled at the University of The West Indies, St Augustine Campus, to read for the MFA in Creative Writing under Professor Funso Aiyejina. She graduated with high commendation in 2012.

  Barbara now lives in Diego Martin, an outer suburb of Port of Spain. While it can take upwards of an hour to commute to the city through almost stagnant traffic, exhaust fumes, gridlocked intersections and a dull urbanscape, going in the opposite direction for about the same distance takes her through fishing villages, brisk salty breezes, rainforest-clad mountain and sea views to the greeny-gold waters of Macqueripe Bay in just twelve minutes. She leaves early morning critical decision making to her car. Hot afternoons find her in a shady verandah, stretched out in a Colombian hammock, with a tumbler of coconut water fortified with rum in one hand and a good book made out of paper and imagination in the other.

  OTHER RECENT TRINIDADIAN FICTION

  Raymond Ramcharitar

  The Island Quintet: Five Stories

  ISBN: 9781845230753; pp. 232; pub. 2009

  Raymond Ramcharitar’s vision is rooted in Trinidad, but as a globalised island with permeable borders, frequent birds of passage, and outposts in New York and London. One of the collection’s outstanding qualities is that it is both utterly contemporary and written with a profound and disturbed sense of the history that shapes the island. As befits fiction from the home of carnival and mas’, it is a collection much concerned with the flesh – often in transgressive forms as if characters are driven to te
st their boundaries – and with the capacity of its characters to reinvent themselves in manifold, and sometimes outrageous disguises. One of the masks is race, and the stories are acerbically honest about the way tribal loyalties distort human relations. Its tone ranges from the lyric – Trinidad as an island of arresting beauty – to a seaminess of the most grungy kind. It has an ambition that challenges a novel such as V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, but is written with the anger and the compassion of a writer for whom the island still means everything. In the novella, “Froude’s Arrow”, Ramcharitar has written a profound fiction that tells us where the Caribbean currently is in juxtaposing the deep, still to be answered questions about island existence (the fragmentations wrought by history, the challenges of smallness in the global market, race and class divides) and the scrabbling for survival, fame and fortune that arouse the ire of Ramcharitar’s acerbic and satirical vision.

  Keith Jardim

  Near Open Water

  ISBN: 9781845231880; pp. 168; pub. 2011

  These stories present, in writing that is both meticulous and poetic, a Caribbean world of unparalleled natural beauty, and societies that seethe on the edge of chaos, where crime encompasses both the rulers and the ruled, and where representatives of the state are as out of control as the youth Cynthia witnesses hacking off the hand of an old woman in a casual robbery. We enter this world through the perceptions of both those struggling for survival at the base of society and members of the old elite facing the consequences of past privilege in the reality of present insecurity. The stories stare hard into the abyss, at times taking us to hallucinatory places where nothing is certain. What is certain is the energy and precision in the stories’ subtle edge of moral rigour in exploring the inner lives of those who fail to see that their “minor” deceits and evasions contribute to the “fire in the city”. In such sympathetically drawn characters as Nello, the former car-thief now trying to do the right thing, or the memorably eccentric Dr Edric Traboulay with his intimate relationship to the natural world, we are offered glimpses of possibility. This is fiction that calls a society to see itself clearly, though about the revelatory power of writing the author is modestly ambivalent, as the powerful title story so shockingly reveals.