Collected Short Fiction (47 page)

‘It’s only for happenings. No scenery or anything. Audiences walking across the stage whenever they want. Taking part even. Like Henry’s in the old days.’

‘Hurricane coming,’ Henry said.

‘It was all Gary’s idea.’

‘Not the hurricane,’ I said.

‘Even that.’ She gazed at the screen as if to say, look.

Priestland, Priest, was lifting back his head. From details of death and destruction on other islands, details delivered with the messenger’s thrill, he was rising to a type of religious exaltation. And now there followed not the Ma-Ho girls with their commercials but six little black girls with hymns.

She looked away. ‘Come, shall I take you home?’

‘You want me to see your home?’

‘It is up to you.’

‘Hurricane coming,’ Henry said. He began to sway. ‘All this is over. We all become new men.’

‘Repent!’ Priest cried from the television screen.

‘Repent?’ Henry shouted back. ‘All this is over.’

‘Rejoice!’ Priest said. ‘All this is over.’

‘Why run away now?’ Henry said.

‘Why run away?’ Priest said. ‘There is nothing to run to. Soon there will be nothing to run from. There is a way which seemeth
right unto a man but at the end thereof are the ways of death. Repent! Rejoice! How shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation.’

‘Emelda!’ Henry called. ‘Emelda!’ To Selma and to me he said, ‘Not yet. Don’t go. A last drink. A last drink. Emelda!’ He wandered about the kitchen and the adjoining room. ‘All these plastic flowers! All these furnitures! All these decorations! Consume them, O Lord!’

Mrs Henry appeared in the doorway.

‘Emelda, my dear,’ Henry said.

‘What get into you now?’

He unhooked a flying bird from the wall and aimed it at her head. She ducked. The bird broke against the door.

‘That cost forty dollars,’ she said.

He aimed another at her. ‘Eighty now.’

‘Henry, the wind get in your head!’

‘Let us make it a hundred.’ He lifted a vase.

Selma said, ‘Let us go.’

I said, ‘I think the time has come.’

‘No. You’re my friends. You must have a farewell drink. Emelda, will you serve my friends?’

‘Yes, Henry.’

‘Call me mister, Emelda. Let us maintain the old ways.’

‘Yes, Mr Henry.’

‘Vodka and coconut water, Emelda.’ He put down the vase.

The black girls sang hymns.

‘You let me in that night, Selma,’ I said. ‘I’ve remembered that.’

‘I remember. That was why I came.’

Emelda, Mrs Henry brought back a bottle, a pitcher and some tumblers.

Henry said, ‘Emelda, after all this time you spend teaching me manners, you mean you want to give my friends glasses with hairs in it?’

‘Then look after them yourself, you drunken old trout.’

‘Old trout, old tout,’ Henry said. And then, with shouts of pure joy, the hymns pouring out in the background, he smashed bottle, pitcher and tumblers. He went round breaking things. Emelda followed him, saying, ‘That cost twenty dollars. That cost thirty-two dollars. That cost fifteen dollars. In a sale.’

‘Sit down, Emelda.’

She sat down.

‘Show them your mouth.’

She opened her mouth.

‘Nice and wide. Is a big mouth you have, you know, Emelda. The dentist could just climb in inside with his lunch parcel and scrape away all day.’

Emelda had no teeth.

‘Frankie, look at what you leave me with. Sit down, Emelda. She and she sister setting competition. Sister take out all her teeth. So naturally Miss Emelda don’t want to keep a single one of she own. Look. I got to watch this morning, noon and night. I mad to hit you, mouth. Mouth, I mad to hit you.’

‘No, Henry. That mouth cost almost a thousand dollars, you know.’

‘All that, and the world ending!’

‘Rejoice!’ Priest called from the television screen. He lifted the telephone on his desk and dialled.

The telephone in Henry’s kitchen rang.

‘Don’t answer,’ Selma said. ‘Come, our bargain. Our first evening. Let me take you home.’

Hymns from the blue screen; screams from Emelda; the crash of glasses and crockery. The main room of The Coconut Grove, all its lights still on, was deserted. The thatched stage was empty.

‘The perfection of drama. No scenery. No play. No audience. Let us watch.’

She led me outside. People here. Some from The Coconut Grove, some from neighbouring buildings. They stood still and silent.

‘Like an aquarium,’ Selma said.

Low, dark clouds raced. The light ever changed.

‘Your car, Selma?’

‘I always wanted a sports model.’

‘The car is the man, is the woman. Where are you taking me to?’

‘Home.’

‘You haven’t told me. Where is that?’

‘Manhattan Park. A new area. It used to be a citrus plantation. The lots are big, half an acre.’

‘Lovely lawns and gardens?’

‘People are going in a lot for shrubs these days. It’s something you must have noticed. You’ll like the area. It’s very nice.’

It was a nice area, and Selma’s house was in the modernistic style of the island. Lawn, garden, a swimming pool shaped like a teardrop. The roof of the veranda was supported on sloping lengths of tubular metal. The ceiling was in varnished pitchpine. The furnishings were equally contemporary. Little bits of driftwood; electric lights pretending to be oil lamps; irregularly shaped tables whose tops were sections of tree trunks complete with bark. She certainly hated straight lines and circles and rectangles and ovals.

‘Where do you get the courage, Selma?’

‘This is just your mood. We all have the courage.’

Local paintings on the wall, contemporary like anything.

‘I always think women have a lot of courage. Imagine putting on the latest outrageous thing and walking out in that. That takes courage.’

‘But you have managed. What do you sell? I am sure that you sell things.’

‘Encyclopaedias. Textbooks. Inoffensive culture.
Huckleberry Finn
without nigger Jim, for ten cents.’

‘You see. That’s something I could never do. The world isn’t a frightening place, really. People are playing a lot of the time. Once you realize that, you begin to see that people are just like yourself. Not stronger or weaker.’

‘Oh, they are stronger than me. Blackwhite, Priest, you, even Henry – you are all stronger than me.’

‘You are looking at the driftwood? Lovely things can be found in Nature.’

‘But we don’t leave it there. Lovely house, Selma. Lovely, ghastly, sickening, terrible home.’

‘My home is not terrible.’

‘No, of course not to you.’

‘You can’t insult me. You are too damn frightened. You don’t like homes. You prefer houses. To fit into other people’s lives.’

‘Yes. I prefer houses. My God. I am on a treadmill. I can’t get off. I am surrounded by other people’s very big names.’

‘You are getting worse, Frank. Come. Be a good boy. Bargain, remember. Let me show you my bedroom.’

‘Adultery has its own rules. Never on the matrimonial bed.’

‘Not matrimonial yet. That is to come.’

‘I have no exalted idea of my prowess.’

‘You were always lousy as a lover. But still.’

‘What language, Selma. So snappy, man. Let me put on the old TV. I don’t want to miss anything.’

The man on the screen had changed his clothes. He was wearing a white gown. He had abandoned news; he was only preaching.

He said, ‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way.’

As if in sympathy with his undress, I began unbuttoning my shirt.

In the bedroom it was possible to hear him squawking on. On the bed lay a quilted satin eiderdown.

‘You are like Norma Shearer in
Escape.
’

‘Shut up. Come. Be good.’

‘I will be good if I come.’

Our love-making was not a success. ‘It was bad.’

‘Drink is good for a woman,’ Selma said. ‘Bad for a man. You prepared yourself too well today, Frank. You waste your courage in fear.’

‘I waste my courage in fear. “Now
look
what you have done.” ’

‘Explain.’

‘It was what a woman said to me many years ago. I was fifteen. She called me in one afternoon when I was coming back from school and asked me to get on top of her. And that was what she said at the end. “Now
look
what you have done.” As though
I
had done the asking. Talking to me as though she was talking to a baby. Terrible. Sex is a hideous thing. I’ve decided. I’m anti-sex.’

‘That makes two of us.’

‘All I can say is that we’ve been behaving strangely for a very long time.’

‘You started it. Tell me, did you expect me to keep our bargain?’

‘I don’t know. It is like one of those stories you hear. That a woman always sleeps with the man who took her maidenhead. Is it true? I don’t know. Is it true?’

‘It is,’ Selma said, rising from the bed, ‘an old wives’ tale.’

In the drawing-room the television still groaned on. The black girls sang hymns. I went to the bathroom. The mat said
RESERVED FOR DRIPS
. On the lavatory seat there was a notice, flowers painted among the words:
GENTLEMEN LIFT THE SEAT IT IS SHORTER THAN YOU THINK LADIES REMAIN SEATED
THROUGHOUT THE PERFORMANCE
. An ashtray; a little book of lavatory and bedroom jokes. The two so often going together. Poor Selma. I pulled the lavatory chain twice.

The wind was high.

‘Selma, be weak like me. Henry is right. Priest is right. It is all going to be laid flat. Let us rejoice. Let us go to the bay. Let us take Henry with us. And afterwards, if there is an afterwards, Henry will take us to his pretty little island.’

‘There are no more islands. It’s not you talking. It’s the wind.’

The oil lamp which was really an electric lamp was overturned. Darkness, except for the blue of the television screen. And the wind drowned Priest’s voice.

Selma became hysterical.

‘Let us get out of here. Let us go back to town. In the street with the others.’

‘No, let us go to the bay.’

Henry sat among disarrayed plastic flowers, in a deserted Coconut Grove.

‘The bay!’

‘The bay.’

We drove up and over the hills, the three of us. We heard the wind. We ran down on to the beach, and heard the sea. At least that couldn’t be changed. Once the beach was dangerous with coconut trees, dropping nuts. Now most had been cut down to make a parking lot. Standing foursquare on the beach was a great concrete pavilion, derelict: a bit of modernity that had failed: a tourist convenience that had served no purpose. The village had grown. It had spread down almost to the beach, a rural marine slum. Lights were on in many of the shacks.

‘I never thought you could destroy the bay.’

‘We might have a chance to start afresh.’

We walked in the wind. Pariah dogs came up to wait, to follow fearfully. The smell of rotting fish came fitfully with the wind. We decided to spend the night in the tourist pavilion.

Morning, dark and turbulent, revealed the full dereliction of the beach. Fishing boats reclined or were propped up on the sand that was still golden, but there were also yellow oil drums on the beach for the refuse of the fishermen, whose houses, of unplastered hollow-clay bricks and unpainted timber, jostled right up to the limit of dry sand. The sand was scuffed and marked and bloody like an arena; it was littered with the heads
and entrails of fish. Mangy pariah dogs, all rib and bone, all bleached to a nondescript fawn colour, moved listlessly, their tails between their legs, from drum to yellow drum. Black vultures weighed down the branches of coconut trees; some hopped awkwardly on the sand; many more circled overhead.

Henry was peeing into the sea.

I called out to him, ‘Let us go back. It is more than I can stand.’

‘I always wanted to do this,’ he said. ‘In public.’

‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Selma said. ‘It is never very good in the morning.’

It hadn’t been good.

We drove back to the city. We drove, always, under a low dark sky. It was early, yet the island was alive. The streets were full of people. Their first hurricane, their first drama, and they had come out into the streets so as to miss nothing. All normal activity had been suspended. It was like a continuation of the night before; the streets were even more like aquaria, thick with life, but silent. Only the absence of the blackness of night seemed to have marked the passage of time; only that and the screens, now blank, of television sets seen through the open doors of houses – some still with useless lights on – and in cafés doing no business.

Then it was night again. The useless lights had meaning. Against the black sky blacker points moved endlessly: all the birds of the island, flying south. It was like the final abandonment. We were in the midst of noise, in which it was at times possible to distinguish the individual groans of houses, trees, and the metallic flapping of loose corrugated-iron sheets. No fear on any face, though. Only wonder and expectation.

The television screens shimmered. Priest reappeared, tired, shining with fatigue, telling us what we already knew, that the end of our world was at hand.

‘Behold,’ he said, ‘now is the day of salvation.’

The city responded. Faintly at first, like distant temple bells, the sound of steel orchestras came above the roar of the wind. The pariah dogs, and those dogs that lived in houses, began to bark in relay, back and forth and crossways. Feet began to shuffle. Priest railed like a seer, exhausted by the effort of concentration. He railed; the city was convulsed with music and dance.

The world was ending and the cries that greeted this end were cries of joy. We all began to dance. We saw dances such as we
had seen in the old days in Henry’s yard. No picking of cotton, no cutting of cane; no carrying of water, no orchestrated wails. We danced with earnestness. We did contortions of which we had never thought ourselves capable.

We saw Blackwhite dancing with Leonard. Blackwhite not white, not black, but Blackwhite as we all would have liked to see him, a man released from endeavour, released from the strain of seeing himself (portrait of the artist: the tribal subconscious), at peace with the world, accepting, like Leonard. We saw Bippy, Tippy and Chippy arm in arm with Pablo, Sandro and Pedro, as though the wooing that had begun at The Coconut Grove had gone on all night: a gesture now without meaning, a fixed attitude of ritual in which news of the hurricane had caught them all. Occasionally the men from Foundationland pleaded with Blackwhite. Still, without malice or triumph, he spurned them, and did stylized stamps of simple negation: a private man, at last. As on a flat stage, stretching to infinity before our eyes, infinity the point where the painted floorboards met, companionship and wooing and pursuit and evasion played back and forth before us. But Leonard, obstinately dancing, dancing with earnestness, like the man anxious to catch the right mood and do the right thing: Leonard remained, in spite of his exertions, what he had always been, bemused, kind, blank. Arm in arm he danced with Blackwhite whenever they met; and Sinclair, big, heavy Sinclair, swung between them. And the tourist teams of the day before: the happy now like people who had forgotten the meaning of the word, which implied an opposite, the embittered, oh, infinitely less so. And for me, no terror of sky and trees: the courage of futility, the futility of courage, the empty, total response.