When the Singing Stops (10 page)

‘How much?'

‘One thousand. He only a small one. But he be a mighty spirit.'

‘Five hundred.' Madison reached into her pocket and showed him one of the bills she'd tried to change in the bank. ‘This or nothing.'

She hoped he'd take it. Suddenly she desperately wanted the tiny frog.

The man took the note. ‘I only take dis because I know dis one belong to yo.'

‘Be seein' yo, bro,' said the driver starting the engine. And as they swung into the traffic he went on. ‘Dat man is good. One of de best I know. He hardly ever come down to town. Yo lucky day eh?'

‘I just love it. I feel this little frog is symbolic for me.' She recalled the carver's words that she had ignored as the spiel of a salesman. Strange he should say that, she thought, repeating the words to herself. ‘You know dat I mek dis for yo. Dis frog is yo destiny.' She wondered how that could be.

‘It ain't just any frog. Dat one is gold Kaieteur frog. He be . . . what yo call it . . . not many left now.'

‘Endangered? This species is in trouble like America's eagle and Australia's koala?'

‘I couldn't say about dem. But our gold frog is a rare creature. Most beautiful in de world. But all de frogs is disappearing everywhere in de world.'

‘I think it's the same back home. Why is it, do you suppose?'

‘Dey say de water, de air, de land, all be poison. Here de jungle is being wrecked many many places. Government has let in logging companies and now dere's a big gold mine called Columbus. All dat sort of action. No good for de Amerindian people or de forest where dey live. But dis country got ta make money somehow. Like all of us.' He returned to his recollection. ‘Man, seeing dat little frog was someting. It got eyes like diamonds I saw once.'

‘Where was that?'

‘On a tributary of de mid-Mazaruni River.'

‘What were you doing there?'

‘I'm really a pork-knocker.'

‘What's a pork-knocker?'

The driver laughed. ‘He be a man who looks for diamonds. Used t'say dey lived on wild pigs. Most are up de big rivers. Some of dem are wild men, dey don' come out much. Dey meet in camps and de buyers fly up. I do a bit of gold prospecting too. I got malaria so I've bin workin' in town doin' dis while I get better. I'll be goin' out again. De interior calls yo. I like bein' in de forest and on de river. And I hope I make a big find and den I can send my boy Denzil to a good school. Now, here's de bookshop, what yo looking fo?'

‘Maybe a book or two about Guyana. And I need a couple of maps. One of the city and one of the interior. Who knows, I might go exploring.

Everyone keeps telling me how beautiful the interior is.'

‘But it's hard to get around. Especially for a lady. I don't tink dey'll have de sort of maps yo mean.'

The Universal Bookstore was a small shop by Australian standards and there were few books about any subject beyond the Americas. Madi was interested to see a wide range of locally produced poetry books and novels by Caribbean writers. She picked up two novels by Roy Heath and V.S. Naipaul. Next to them was a book by Shiva Naipaul. She opened it at random and her eye fell on his description of the thinly disguised fictional country he called Cuyama . . .
‘a mongrelised ghost of human beings living in a mongrelised ghost of a country
. . .' Did this apply to Guyana today?

She went to the boy perched on a stool in the doorway, and asked if they had maps. He directed her to a girl behind a counter who looked blankly at Madi. She went to another girl leaning by a stand of school supplies and repeated the question. The girl slowly shook her head as if this seemed to be an odd request. ‘Then I'll just take these.' Madison handed her the three novels and was immediately directed back to the girl behind the counter. The blank-eyed girl laboriously wrote out the names and authors of each book in full, copying the detail carefully, before writing the price beside each
one. She handed the paper to Madison who looked at it, clearly puzzled.

‘So what do I owe you?'

‘Take it to the cashier, please,' said the girl, pointing at yet another girl ensconced in a small cage-like structure. This cashier added up the cost of the books, wrote the amount in the space on the docket and showed it to Madison. ‘Three thousand and twenty, please.'

Madison paid. But before she could collect the books, a stamp had to be glued to the docket, initialled by the cashier and handed back with the change. Madison took the docket back to the girl behind the counter. The docket was then checked before the books were handed over. Madison smiled incredulously as the sales ritual concluded. ‘Do you have full employment in this country?' she asked, trying to keep a straight face. The sales assistant just looked at her uncomprehendingly.

Madison stepped out into the searing sunlight and reached for her sunglasses. Across the street a big open-air market was bustling with sellers who squatted before heaps of fruit and vegetables. Leaning wooden stalls were hung with cheap brightly coloured household wares like brooms and plastic bowls. Madi's eye was caught by a hammock strung across the front of a stall.

‘What's the market called?' she asked the driver who materialised beside her.

‘Dat's Bourda Markets. Good for food tings. Yo want to go and look?'

It suddenly occurred to Madison that she hadn't seen a taxi meter in the cab. ‘How's my bill running with you? Is this going to cost me a fortune?'

He smiled easily. ‘No, I make a round trip, fair price. Don' worry yo'self. Come, I'd better walk with yo in there. Watch yo bag.'

‘I was looking at those hammocks.'

‘Ah yes, from Brazil. Yo'll need a hammock if yo're going to de interior. Tie 'im between trees. But dere's a better place to buy dem. I can take yo to de Amerindian shop.'

‘As I'm here, maybe I could walk around for a few minutes.' She liked the idea of having a tall burly man in tow as they walked through the narrow lanes formed by the vendors. ‘Look, my name is Madison Wright. Maybe we should introduce ourselves.'

He smiled widely and offered his hand. ‘Dat real nice, Miz Wright. I be Lester Styles.'

They turned into another lane crowded with baskets of food. But there was not a huge variety of fruit and vegetables. ‘What are those?' She pointed to a lump of pale brown legumes spread on a grass mat.

‘Cassava. De bread of de Amerindians.' Lester explained how cassava was starchy and the staple food of the tribes. There were no potatoes, just edoes and yams and breadfruit, and a large pale fruit called a plantain that looked like a banana. ‘Yo fry or boil dem to eat. Some people mash dese ones. De Amerindians
make many tings with de cassava, strain de juice for a drink, very strong, and make flour or eat like potato.'

Madison picked up a bunch of long green snake beans. ‘I like the look of these. What's the most common dish people eat here?'

‘Oh, souse, pepperpot, black pudding and pepper sauce on ever'ting.' He picked up a handful of red chillies. ‘Dese make pepper sauce. Very hot.'

‘What else goes into pepperpot and souse other than chillies?'

Lester liked the idea of being a tour guide and warmed to the task with smiling enthusiasm as they headed back towards the taxi. ‘Pig face, ears, pigs' feet, cassareep, cow heel. Very strong smell. Cassareep comes from cassava, pepperpot is Amerindian dish.'

Madison grimaced. ‘It doesn't sound very appetising to me.'

‘Oh, and yo must eat labba and drink de black water,' Lester added encouragingly. ‘If yo do dat, yo den come back to Guyana.'

‘What is it? Some magic potion?'

‘Labba is about the size of a small dog, like a big rat. Black water is creek water. We call it black because it's dark, from the minerals and roots. But it's clear, it's sweet, good for drinking.'

Madison looked dubious. ‘Don't know that I'm into eating rats. But clearly I have a lot to learn about this country.'

When they reached the taxi, Lester opened
the door and Madi slid into the back. ‘Yo want to learn about Guyana, heh?' He spoke seriously and gave her an earnest look.

Madison looked at this man she'd met only two hours earlier and who now seemed like an old friend. ‘Yes, I think I do.'

‘Okay, we go to de library,' he announced. ‘Don' worry, won't take long.'

The taxi swung around a corner and Madison gasped as she stared out the window. ‘Wow, look at that!'

‘What, where?'

‘There! Those flowers, the waterlilies in the canal!'

A broad canal in the middle of the street divided the traffic. It was choked with massed pink flowers, their proud fat heads on long stems bobbing above the flat sea of green leaves that smothered the surface of the rank water.

‘Dey be lotus.' Lester swerved into the side of the road and stopped.

‘Do the lotus have a perfume?'

‘Don' know. We see. I show yo someting.' Heedless of the passing traffic he leapt out of the car and skipped to the edge of the sloping verge, followed by Madison. Lester leaned over to reach for a flower, slithered and slipped a little and squelched into black mud that covered his gym shoes.

‘Ooh, be careful.' Madison kicked off her
sandals. ‘Wait, I'll help you.' She inched along and went to Lester who was ankle deep. She held out her hand. ‘Are you stuck?'

‘A bit. I was trying to get dat bud, see de green pod.' She held his arm as he reached far out and grabbed the cup-shaped pod with its seeds sewn in slit green sacks. Cars honked but they ignored them. ‘Look in here, de seed . . .' He squeezed a plump seed from its hole and peeled away the outer layer to reveal a white kernel which he popped into his mouth. He took another. ‘Here, yo try.'

Madison bit into the seed. ‘It tastes like a nut, a cashew, sort of. Very nice. Thank you so much. Very kind of you to go to so much trouble for me.'

Back behind the wheel Lester took off his muddy shoes and socks and wiped his feet with a rag from under the seat. Madison sat in the back picking the seeds from the lotus pod. ‘They are stunning. Those flowers are as big as soup bowls.'

‘Wait til dey dry, den try dem.' He put on his shoes minus the muddy socks.

The library was a beautiful white colonial building. They went to a reception desk where a girl checker took their bags and gave them a numbered receipt. ‘Keep yo money with yo,' whispered Lester.

They walked up a sweeping staircase to the
upper level where shelves of books were protected by small mesh barriers. One of the librarians in a drab mud-coloured uniform approached them. ‘What yo interested in, politics, animals, history?' she asked conversationally.

‘What do you have on travel in Guyana, like to the interior?'

The girl looked blank. ‘Yo don' know de titles of de books?'

‘No.'

‘Man, how I know what to get when I don' have no names?' Her head rocked from side to side in exasperation.

‘Can I just look along the shelves?' asked Madison, stepping through the small opening in the mesh towards the shelves of books. She had to step around a bucket, one of many scattered along the aisle between the books. Glancing upwards Madison saw damp patches on the sagging ceiling.

But the lethargic girl suddenly sprang into action, barring her way. ‘No public in here.'

‘Why not?'

‘Rule. I get de books, dat de rule. Wot yo want?'

‘I don't know! I just want to look and see what looks interesting.'

‘No titles, no books. Dat's de rule.'

Madison looked to Lester in desperation. He pointed at a book. ‘Dere, dat blue one. Dat's one. Give us dat.'

‘Dat blue one, dere on de shelf?'

‘Yeah man. Dat one, de blue one up dere.' Lester spoke as she did, pointing at a book. He gave Madison a wink as the girl reached for it. Flipping through pages, Lester stopped and made an extravagant reaction. ‘Yeh, man dis be de one. Hey, yo photocopy, okay?'

With the pages carefully memorised, the girl disappeared into a back section to photocopy. ‘Okay, yo go look.' Lester propelled Madison into the musty rows of books. ‘See what yo can find.'

This seemed like madness but she swiftly glanced up and down the racks and was soon immersed in a collection of colonial and pre-Independence books on Guyana. In the travel section there was little and what there was seemed very dated. Obviously no one in recent times had bothered to write about the delights or otherwise of travel in Guyana. She noted that most of the contemporary books were political, extolling the virtues of former socialist leader Forbes Burnham's government, and had been published by his government.

She was about to turn away when a title caught her eye.
On the Diamond Trail In British Guiana
by Gwen Richardson. It was an old volume and Madi blew a small cloud of dust from it before opening the copyright page. She saw that it was published by Methuen of London in 1925. She turned to the mildew-spotted title page to reveal a grainy black-and-white photograph of a young woman that made her gasp lightly in amusement and, she realised at once,
admiration. It was clearly a studio photograph taken in the staged style of that period, but there was something more about the image that captured Madison's complete attention.

The young woman was handsomely attractive but it was her dress that made the picture exceptional—a long tweedy but stylish black skirt, high boots, a pocketed blouse, a bush hat set at a slightly rakish angle, a scarf at the throat and a Colt .45 held confidently in her hand.

‘Whacko, Gwen!' exclaimed Madison softly and Lester stepped forward to look over her shoulder.

‘Oh man, dat some lady dat one,' he said with exaggerated melodic intonation that made Madison smile. ‘She a real colonial lady to be sure.'

‘Colonial lady?' queried Madison.