Collected Short Fiction (31 page)

Before you had time to say, ‘Doctor, I have a pain—’ he would be writing out a prescription for you. And again you had to wait for the medicine. All the Health Office medicines were the same. Water and pink sediment half an inch thick.

Hat used to say of the Health Office, ‘The Government taking up faith healing.’

My mother considered the Health Office a good place for me to go to. I would go there at eight in the morning and return any time after two in the afternoon. It kept me out of mischief, and it cost only twenty-four cents a year.

But you mustn’t get the impression that I was a saint all the time. I wasn’t. I used to have odd fits where I just couldn’t take an order from anybody, particularly my mother. I used to feel that I would dishonour myself for life if I took anybody’s orders. And life is a funny thing, really. I sometimes got these fits just when my mother was anxious to be nice to me.

The day after Hat rescued me from drowning at Docksite I wrote an essay for my schoolmaster on the subject, ‘A Day at the Seaside’. I don’t think any schoolmaster ever got an essay like that. I talked about how I was nearly drowned and how calmly
I was facing death, with my mind absolutely calm, thinking, ‘Well, boy, this is the end.’ The teacher was so pleased he gave me ten marks out of twelve.

He said, ‘I think you are a genius.’

When I went home I told my mother, ‘That essay I write today, I get ten out of twelve for it.’

My mother said, ‘How you so bold-face to lie brave brave so in front of my face? You want me give you a slap to turn your face?’

In the end I convinced her.

She melted at once. She sat down in the hammock and said, ‘Come and sit down by me, son.’

Just then the crazy fit came on me.

I got very angry for no reason at all and I said, ‘No, I not going to sit by you.’

She laughed and coaxed.

And the angrier she made me.

Slowly the friendliness died away. It had become a struggle between two wills. I was prepared to drown rather than dishonour myself by obeying.

‘I ask you to come and sit down here.’

‘I not sitting down.’

‘Take off your belt.’

I took it off and gave it to her. She belted me soundly, and my nose bled, but still I didn’t sit in the hammock.

At times like these I used to cry, without meaning it, ‘If my father was alive you wouldn’t be behaving like this.’

So she remained the enemy. She was someone from whom I was going to escape as soon as I grew big enough. That was, in fact, the main lure of adulthood.

Progress was sweeping through Port-of-Spain in those days. The Americans were pouring money into Trinidad and there was a lot of talk from the British about colonial development and welfare.

One of the visible signs of this progress was the disappearance of the latrines. I hated the latrines, and I used to wonder about the sort of men who came with their lorries at night and carted away the filth; and there was always the horrible fear of falling into a pit.

One of the first men to have decent lavatories built was Hat, and we made a great thing of knocking down his old latrine.
All the boys and men went to give a hand. I was too small to give a hand, but I went to watch. The walls were knocked down one by one and in the end there was only one remaining.

Hat said, ‘Boys, let we try to knock this one down in one big piece.’

And they did.

The wall swayed and began to fall.

I must have gone mad in that split second, for I did a Superman act and tried to prevent the wall falling.

I just remember people shouting, ‘O God! Look out!’

I was travelling in a bus, one of the green buses of Sam’s Super Service, from Port-of-Spain to Petit Valley. The bus was full of old women in bright bandanas carrying big baskets of eddoes, yams, bananas, with here and there some chickens. Suddenly the old women all began chattering, and the chickens began squawking. My head felt as though it would split, but when I tried to shout at the old women I found I couldn’t open my mouth. I tried again, but all I heard, more distinctly now, was the constant chattering.

Water was pouring down my face.

I was flat out under a tap and there were faces above me looking down.

Somebody shouted, ‘He recover. Is all right.’

Hat said, ‘How you feeling?’

I said, trying to laugh, ‘I feeling all right.’

Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘You have any pains?’

I shook my head.

But, suddenly, my whole body began to ache. I tried to move my hand and it hurt.

I said, ‘I think I break my hand.’

But I could stand, and they made me walk into the house.

My mother came and I could see her eyes glassy and wet with tears.

Somebody, I cannot remember who, said, ‘Boy, you had your mother really worried.’

I looked at her tears, and I felt I was going to cry too. I had discovered that she could be worried and anxious for me.

I wished I were a Hindu god at that moment, with two hundred arms, so that all two hundred could be broken, just to enjoy that moment, and to see again my mother’s tears.

1955

AND BLUEY
is the hero of this story.

At first Bluey belonged to the Welsh couple in the basement. We heard him throughout the house but we hardly saw him. I used to see him only when I went down to the dustbins just outside the basement window. He was smoky blue; lively, almost querulous, with unclipped wings, he made his cage seem too small.

When the Welsh couple had to go back to Wales – I think Mrs Lewis was going to have a baby – they decided to give Bluey to Mrs Cooksey, the landlady. We were surprised when she accepted. She didn’t like the Lewises. In fact, she didn’t like any of her tenants. She criticized them all to me and I suppose she criticized me to them. You couldn’t blame her: the house was just too full of tenants. Apart from a sitting-room on the ground floor, a kitchen on the landing at the top of the basement steps, and a bedroom somewhere in the basement, the whole of the Cookseys’ house had been let. The Cookseys had no children and were saving up for old age. It had come but they didn’t know.

Mrs Cooksey was delighted with Bluey. She used to lie in wait behind her half-opened door and spring out at us as we passed through the hall; but now it wasn’t to ask who had taken more than his share of the milk or who had left the bath dirty; it was to call us into her room to look at Bluey and listen to him, and to admire the improvements she had made to his cage.

The cage, when I had seen it in the basement window, was an elegant little thing with blue bars to match Bluey’s feathers, two toy trapezes, a seed-trough, a water-trough and a spring door. Now every Friday there were additions: Mrs Cooksey shopped on Friday. The first addition was a toy ferris wheel in multi-coloured plastic. The second was a seed-bell; it tinkled when Bluey pecked at it. The third was a small round mirror. Just when it seemed that these additions were going to leave little room for Bluey, Mrs Cooksey added something else. She said it was a friend for Bluey. The friend was a red-beaked chicken emerging from a neatly serrated shell, all in plastic and weighted at the bottom to stay upright.

Bluey loved his toys. He kept the chicken and shell swaying, the trapezes going, the ferris wheel spinning, the seed-bell ringing. He clucked and chattered and whistled and every now and then gave a zestful little shriek.

But he couldn’t talk. For that Mrs Cooksey blamed Mrs Lewis. ‘They’re just like children, d’you see? You’ve got to train them. But she didn’t have the time. Very delicate she was. Just a romp and a giggle all day long.’

Mrs Cooksey bought a booklet,
Your Budgie
, and kept it under the heavy glass ashtray on the table. She said it was full of good hints; and when she had read them, she began to train Bluey. She talked and talked to him, to get him used to her voice. Then she gave him a name: Joey. Bluey never recognized it. When I went down to pay for the milk one Saturday Mrs Cooksey told me that she was also finger-training him, getting him to come out of his cage and remain on her finger. Two or three days later she called me in to get Bluey down from the top of the curtains where he was squawking and shrieking and flapping his wings with energy. He wouldn’t come down to calls of ‘Joey!’ or to Mrs Cooksey’s cluckings or at her outstretched finger. I had a lot of trouble before I got him back into his cage.

The finger-training was dropped and the name Joey was dropped. Mrs Cooksey just called him Bluey.

Spring came. The plane tree two back-gardens away, the only tree between the backs of the houses and the back of what we were told was the largest cinema in England, became touched with green. The sun shone on some days and for an hour or two lit up our back-garden, or rather the Cookseys’ garden: tenants weren’t allowed. Mrs Cooksey put Bluey and his cage outside and sat beside him, knitting a bed-jacket. Sparrows flew about the cage; but they came to dig up Mr Cooksey’s cindery, empty flowerbeds, not to attack Bluey. And Bluey was aware of no danger. He hopped from trapeze to trapeze, spun his ferris wheel, rubbed his beak against his little mirror and cooed at his reflection. His seed-bell tinkled, the red-beaked chicken bobbed up and down. Bluey was never to be so happy again.

Coming into the hall late one Friday afternoon I saw that Mrs Cooksey’s door was ajar. I let her take me by surprise. Behind her pink-rimmed glasses her watery blue eyes were full of mischief. I followed her into the room.

Bluey was not alone. He had a companion. A live one. It was a green budgerigar.

‘He just flew into the garden this morning,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘Really. Oh, he must have been a smart fellow to get away from all those naughty little sparrows. Smart, aren’t you, Greenie?’

Greenie was plumper than Bluey and I thought he had an arrogant breast. He wasted no time showing us what he could do. He fanned out one wing with a series of small snapping sounds, folded it back in, and fanned out the other. He could lean over sideways on one leg too, and when he pecked at a bar it didn’t look so strong. He was noisier than Bluey and, for all his size, more nimble. He looked the sort of budgerigar who could elude sparrows. But his experience of freedom and his triumph over danger had made him something of a bully. Even while we stood over the cage he baited Bluey. By shrieks and flutterings he attracted Bluey to the ferris wheel. Bluey went, gave the wheel a spin with his beak and stood by to give another. Before he could do so, Greenie flew at him, flapping his wings so powerfully that the sand on the floor of the cage flew up. Bluey retreated, complaining. Greenie outsquawked his complaints. The ferris wheel meant nothing to Greenie; in his wanderings he hadn’t picked up the art of making a wheel spin. After some moments he flew away from the wheel and rested on a trapeze. He invited Bluey to the wheel again. Bluey went, and the whole shameful squabble began all over.

Mrs Cooksey was giving little oohs and ahs. ‘You have a real friend now, haven’t you, Bluey?’

Bluey wasn’t listening. He was hurrying away from the wheel to the red-beaked chicken. He pecked at it frenziedly.

‘Just like children,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘They’ll quarrel and fight, but they are good friends.’

Life became hard for Bluey. Greenie never stopped showing off and Bluey, continually baited and squawked at, retaliated less and less. At the end of the week he seemed to have lost the will even to protest. It was Greenie now who kept the little trapeze going, Greenie who punched the seed-bell and made it ring, Greenie who filled the room with noise. Mrs Cooksey didn’t try to teach Greenie to talk and I don’t imagine the thought of finger-training him ever entered her head. ‘Greenie’s a big boy,’ she said.

It gave me some pleasure to see how the big boy fretted at the
ferris wheel. He shook it and made it rattle; but he couldn’t make it spin.

‘Why don’t you show him, Bluey?’ Mrs Cooksey said.

But Bluey had lost interest in all Mrs Cooksey’s embellishments, even in the plastic chicken. He remained on the floor of the cage and hardly moved. Finally he stood quite still, his feathers permanently ruffled, shivering from time to time. His eyes were half-shut and the white lined lids looked tender and vulnerable. His feet began to swell until they became white and scaly.

‘He’s just hopeless,’ Mrs Cooksey said, with surprising vehemence. ‘Don’t blame Greenie. I did my best to train Bluey. He didn’t care. And who’s paying for it now?’

She was contrite a few days later. ‘It isn’t his fault, poor little Bluey. He’s got ingrowing toe-nails. And his feet are so dirty too. He hasn’t had a bath for a long time.’

I stayed to watch. Mrs Cooksey emptied the glass ashtray of pins and paper-clips and elastic bands and filled it with warm water. She turned on the electric fire and warmed a towel in front of it. She put a hand into the cage, had it pecked and squawked at by Greenie, pulled Bluey out and dropped him into the water in the ashtray. Instantly Bluey dwindled to half his size. His feathers stuck to him like a second skin. He was rubbed with carbolic soap, rinsed in the ashtray and dried in the warm towel. At the end he looked damp and dishevelled. ‘There you are, Bluey. Dry. And now let’s have a look at your nails.’ She put Bluey on the palm of her left hand and held a pair of nail scissors to his swollen feet. A month before, given such freedom, Bluey would have flown to the top of the curtains. Now he lay still. Suddenly he shrieked and gave a little wriggle.

‘Poor little Bluey,’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘We’ve cut his little foot.’

Bluey didn’t recover. His feet became scalier, more swollen and gnarled. A paper-thin growth, shaped like a fingernail, appeared on his lower beak and grew upwards, making it hard for him to eat, impossible for him to peck. The top of his beak broke out into a sponge-like sore.

And now even Greenie no longer baited him.

In summer Mr Cooksey did something he had been talking about for a long time. He painted the hall and the stairs. The paint he used was a dull ordinary blue which quickly revealed
extraordinary qualities. It didn’t dry. The inside of the door became smudged and dirty and all up the banisters there were streaks of sticky blue from the fingers of tenants. Mr Cooksey painted the door again, adding a notice:
WET PAINT PLEASE
, with the
PLEASE
underlined three times. He also chalked warnings on the steps outside. But after a fortnight the paint hadn’t dried and it looked as though the door would have to be painted again. Mr Cooksey left notices on the glass-topped table in the hall, each note curter than the last. He had a good command of curt language. This wasn’t surprising, because Mr Cooksey was a commissionaire or caretaker or something like that at the head office of an important public corporation. Anyway, it was a big position: he told me he had thirty-four cleaners under him.