The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (60 page)

He didn’t go. He remained where he was and watched me. I began to walk briskly back towards The Coconut Grove, the wind blowing my hair, making my shirt flap, and it seemed that it was just in this way, though not at night and under a wild sky, but in broad
daylight, below a high light sky, that I had first come to this street. The terror of sky and trees, the force at my feet.

2

I used to feel in those days that it was we who brought the tropics to the island. When I knew the town, it didn’t end in sandy beaches and coconut trees, but in a tainted swamp, in mangrove and mud. Then the land was reclaimed from the sea, and the people who got oysters from the mangrove disappeared. On the reclaimed land we built the tropics. We put up our army huts, raised our flag, planted our coconut trees and our hedges. Among the great wooden buildings with wire-netting windows we scattered pretty little thatched huts.

We brought the tropics to the island. Yet to the islanders it must have seemed that we had brought America to them. Everyone worked for us. You asked a man what he did; he didn’t say that he drove a truck or was a carpenter; he simply said he worked for the Americans. Every morning trucks drove through the city, picking up workers; and every afternoon the trucks left the base to take them back.

The islanders came to our bit of the tropics. We explored theirs. Nothing was organized in those days. There were no leaflets telling you where to shop or where to go. You had to find out yourself. You found out quickly about the bars; it wasn’t pleasant to be beaten up or robbed.

I heard about Henry’s place from a man on the base. He said Henry kept a few goats in his backyard and sometimes slaughtered them on a Sunday. He said Henry was a character. It didn’t seem a particularly enticing thing. But I got into a taxi outside the base one Thursday afternoon and decided to look. Taxi drivers know everything; so they say.

‘Do you know a man called Henry?’ I asked the taxi driver. ‘He keeps a few goats.’

‘The island small, boss, but not that small.’

‘You must know him. He keeps these goats.’

‘No, boss, you be frank with me, I be frank with you. If goats you after …’

I allowed him to take me where he wished. We drove through the old ramshackle city, wooden houses on separate lots, all decay, it seemed, in the middle of the brightest vegetation. It scarcely seemed a city where you would, by choice, seek pleasure; it made you think only of empty afternoons. All these streets look so quiet and alike. All the houses looked so tame and dull and alike: very little people attending to their very little affairs.

The taxi driver took me to various rooms, curtained, hot, stuffed with furniture, and squalid enough to kill all thoughts of pleasure. In one room there was even a baby. ‘Not mine, not mine,’ the girl said. I was a little strained, and the driver was strained, by the time we came to the street where he said I would find Henry’s place.

The brave young man looking for fun. The spark had gone; and to tell the truth, I was a little embarrassed. I wished to arrive at Henry’s alone. I paid the taxi driver off.

I imagine I was hoping to find something which at least looked like a commercial establishment. I looked for boards and signs. I saw nothing. I walked past shuttered houses to a shuttered grocery, the only clue even there being a small black noticeboard saying, in amateurish letters, that Ma-Ho was licensed to deal in spirituous liquors. I walked down the other side of the street. And here was something I had missed. Outside a house much hung with ferns a board said:

Here and there a curtain flapped. My walks up and down the short street had begun to attract attention. Too late to give up,
though. I walked back past the Premier Commercial College. This time a boy was hanging out of a window. He was wearing a tie and he was giggling.

I asked him, ‘Hey, does your sister screw?’

The boy opened his mouth and wailed and pulled back his head. There were giggles from behind the ferns. A tall man pushed open a door with coloured glass panes and came out to the veranda. He looked sombre. He wore black trousers, a white shirt, and a black tie. He had a rod in his hand!

He said in an English accent, ‘Will you take your filth elsewhere. This is a school. We devote ourselves to things of the mind.’ He pointed sternly to the board.

‘Sorry, Mr—’

He pointed to the board again. ‘Blackwhite. Mr H. J. Blackwhite. My patience is at an end. I shall sit down and type out a letter of protest to the newspapers.’

‘I feel like writing some sort of protest myself. Do you know a place called Henry’s?’

‘This is not Henry’s.’

‘Sorry, sorry. But before you go away, tell me, what do you people do?’

‘What do you mean, do?’

‘What do you people do when you are doing nothing? Why do you keep on?’

There were more giggles behind the ferns. Mr Blackwhite turned and ran through the coloured glass doors into the drawingroom. I heard him beating on a desk with a rod and shouting: ‘Silence, silence.’ In the silence which he instantly obtained he beat a boy. Then he reappeared on the veranda, his sleeves rolled up, his face shining with sweat. He seemed willing enough to keep on exchanging words with me, but just then some army jeeps turned the corner and we heard men and women shouting. Overdoing the gaiety, I thought. Blackwhite’s look of exaltation was replaced by one of distaste and alarm.

‘Your colleagues and companions,’ he said.

He disappeared, with a sort of controlled speed, behind the glass panes. His class began to sing, ‘Flow gently, sweet Afton.’

The jeeps stopped at the unfenced lot opposite Mr Blackwhite’s. This lot contained two verandaless wooden houses. Small houses on low concrete pillars; possibly there were more houses at the back. I stood on the pavement, the jeep-loads tumbled out. I half hoped that the gay tide would sweep me in. But men and girls just passed on either side of me, and when the tide had washed into the houses and the yard I remained where I was, stranded on the pavement.

Henry’s, it was clear, was like a club. Everybody seemed to know everybody else and was making a big thing of it. I stood around. No one took any notice of me. I tried to give the impression that I was waiting for someone. I felt very foolish. Pleasure was soon the last thing in my mind. Dignity became much more important.

Henry’s was especially difficult because it appeared to have no commercial organization. There was no bar, there were no waiters. The gay crowd simply sat around on the flights of concrete steps that led from the rocky ground to the doors. No tables outside, and no chairs. I could see things like this inside some of the rooms, but I wasn’t sure whether I had the right to go into any of them. It was clearly a place to which you couldn’t come alone.

It was Henry in the end who spoke to me. He said that I was making him nervous and that I was making the girls nervous. The girls were like racehorses, he said, very nervous and sensitive. Then, as though explaining everything, he said, ‘The place is what you see it is.’

‘It’s very nice,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to flatter me; if you want to stay here, fine; if you don’t want to stay here, that’s fine too.’

Henry wasn’t yet a character. He was still only working up to it. I don’t like characters. They worry me, and perhaps it was because Henry wasn’t yet a character—a public performer, jolly but excluding—that I fell in so easily with him. Later, when he became a character,
I was one of the characters with him; it was we that did the excluding.

I clung to him that first afternoon for the sake of dignity, as I say. Also, I felt a little resentful of the others, so very gay and integrated, and did not wish to be alone.

‘We went out,’ Henry said. ‘A little excursion, you know. That bay over the hills, the only one you people leave us. I don’t know, you people say you come here to fight a war, and the first thing you do you take away our beaches. You take all the white sand beaches; you leave us only black sand.’

‘You know these bureaucrats. They like things tidy.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘They like it tidy here too. I can’t tell you the number of people who would like to run me out of town.’

‘Like that man across the road?’

‘Oh, you meet old Blackwhite?’

‘He is going to type out a letter about me to the newspapers. And about you, too, I imagine. And your colleagues and companions.’

‘They don’t print all Blackwhite’s letters. Good relations and all that, you know. He believe he stand a better chance with the typewriter. Tell me what you do to provoke him. I never see a man look as quiet as you.’

‘I asked one of his boys whether he had a sister who screwed.’

Amusement went strangely on Henry’s sour face. He looked the ascetic sort. His hair was combed straight back and his narrow-waisted trousers were belted with a tie. This was the one raffish, startling thing about his dress.

Henry went on: ‘The trouble with the natives—’

I started at the word.

‘Yes, natives. The troubles with the natives is that they don’t like me. I don’t belong here, you know. I am like you. I come from another place. A pretty island, if I tell you. I build up all this from scratch.’ He waved at his yard. ‘These people here lazy and they damn jealous with it too. They always trying to get me deported. Illegal immigrant and so on. But they can’t touch me. I have all the
shots in the palm of my hand. You hear people talk about Gordon? Black man; but the best lawyer we have. Gordon was always coming here until that divorce business. Big thing. You probably hear about that on the base.’

‘Sure, we heard about it.’

‘And whenever I have any little trouble about this illegal immigrant business, I just go straight, like man, to Gordon office. The clerks—you know, those fellows with ties—try to be rude, and I just telling them, “You tell Alfred”—his name is Alfred Gordon—“you tell Alfred that Henry here.” And everybody falling back in amazement when Mr Gordon come out heself and shaking me by the hand and muching me up in front of everybody. “All you wait,” he say, “I got to see my old friend Henry.” And teeth.’

‘Teeth?’

‘Teeth. Whenever I want to have any teeth pull out, I just run up to old Ling-Wing—Chinee, but the best dentist we have in the place—and he pulling out the teeth straight way. You got to have a philosophy of life. Look, I go tell you,’ he said, ‘my father was a good-for-nothing. Always gambling, a game called wappee and all-fours. And whenever my mother complain and start bawling out, “Hezekiah, what you going to leave for your children?” my father he only saying, “I ain’t got land. I ain’t got money. But I going to leave my children a wonderful set of friends.” ’

‘That’s a fine philosophy,’ I said.

‘We all have to corporate in some way. Some people corporate in one way, some corporate another way. I think that you and me going to get on good. Mavis, pour this man a drink. He is a wonderful talker.’

Henry, sipping at rum-and-cokes all the time, was maudlin. I was a little high myself.

One of the Americans who had been on the excursion to the bay came up to us. He tottered a little. He said he had to leave.

‘I know,’ Henry said. ‘The war etcetera.’

‘How much do I owe you, Henry?’

‘You know what you owe me. I don’t keep no check.’

‘Let me see. I think I had a chicken pilau. Three or four rum-and-cokes.’

‘Good,’ Henry said. ‘You just pay for that.’

The man paid. Henry took his money without any comment. When the man left he said, ‘Drink is never any excuse. I don’t believe people ever not knowing what they do. He not coming back in here. He had two chicken pilaus, six rum-and-coke, five bottles soda water and two whiskies. That’s what I call vice.’

‘It is vice, and I am ashamed of him.’

‘I will tell you, you know.’ Henry said. ‘When the old queen pass on—’

‘The old queen?’

‘My mother. I was in a sort of daze. Then I had this little dream. The old man, he appear to me.’

‘Your father Hezekiah?’

‘No. God. He say, “Henry, surround yourself with love, but avoid vice.” On this island I was telling you about, pretty if I tell you, they had this woman, pretty but malevolent. She make two-three children for me, and bam, you know what, she want to rush me into marriage.’

The sun was going down. From the base, the bit of the tropics we had created, the bugle sounded Retreat. Henry snapped his fingers, urging us all to stand. We stood up and saluted to the end.

‘I like these little customs,’ he said. ‘Is a nice little custom you boys bring with you.’

‘About this woman on the pretty island with two or three children?’

Henry said, ‘I avoided vice. I ran like hell. I get the rumour spread that I dead. I suppose I am dead in a way. Can’t go back to my pretty little island. Oh, prettier than this. Pretty, pretty. But she waiting for me.’

We heard hymns from the street.

‘Money,’ Henry said, ‘all you girls got your money ready?’

They all got out little coins and we went out to the pavement. A tall bearded man, white-robed and sandalled, was leading a little group of hymn-singers, six small black girls in white gowns. They were sweet hymns; we listened in silence.

Then the bearded man said, ‘Brothers and sisters, it is customary on such occasions to say that there is still time to repent.’ He was like a man in love with his own fluency. His accent was very English. ‘It is, however, my belief that this, at this time, is one of the optimistic assertions of fraudulent evangelists more concerned with the counting of money than what I might call the count-down of our imminent destruction.’ Suddenly his manner changed. He paused, closed his eyes, swayed a little, lifted up his arms and shouted, in an entirely different voice: ‘The word of the Bible is coming to pass.’

Some of Henry’s girls chanted back: ‘What word?’ And others. ‘What part?’

The white-robed man said, ‘The part where it say young people going to behave bad, and evil and violence going to stalk the land. That part.’

His little chorus began to sing; and he went round collecting from us, saying, ‘It is nothing personal, you understand, nothing personal. I know you boys have to be here defending us and so on, but the truth is the truth.’