Shape-Shifter (22 page)

‘I’m coming on November the sixth,’ I yell down the phone to Evelyn. ‘I’ll go to see my aunts in New Amsterdam for a couple of days then I’ll come and stay with you.’

‘That is good.’ Evelyn’s voice is faint and crackly. ‘Bring a Gestetner machine with you. They need one at the party headquarters. Really we need a computer but that costs thousands of dollars. We’ll pay you for it when you reach.’

‘
OK
Evelyn. I’ll see you in two weeks’ time. I can’t wait. Bye.’

‘Bye. Don’ forget ink and paper.’

I lie back on the bed wiggling my toes and thinking of Evelyn. She is a stockily-built black woman of thirty-six, a financial wizard in the pin-ball economy of the country. She will never leave. Her house is set back a little from the road. On every side of its white-painted exterior, tiers of Demerara shutters open, bottom out, stiff sails designed to catch the least breath of wind. I try to imagine whereabouts she is in the house. She has a cordless telephone now so she could be anywhere – in the kitchen perhaps or wandering about upstairs. When the Trade Winds blow the upper floors of the house are full of air encrusted with salt and at night the house creaks like a ship resting at anchor in the city of wooden dreams, a city built on stilts, belonging neither to land nor to sea but to land reclaimed from the sea.

Beneath his father’s framed certificate from the King of England, a slim youth of nineteen leans his back against the dresser thinking:

‘
If I don’t get out of this colony I shall suffocate
.’

A problem has arisen over his leaving. His father and Mr Wilkinson, his employer, are discussing it in the stifling inertia of mid-day. His father is frowning and flexing the stubs of his two fingers, as if they have pins and needles. Mr Wilkinson is one of those gingery, peppery Englishmen whose long stay in the tropics has sucked all the moisture from him, leaving a dry sandy exterior. He too is frowning at the piece of paper in his hand.

‘The trouble is with this damn birth certificate. The transfer to London went through all right. The Booker-McConnell people in London agreed to it, then, out of the blue, they ask for his birth certificate. Just a formality I suppose. All the same …’

His voice tails off into silence.

On the birth certificate, under the section marked ‘Type’ are written the words: ‘Coloured. Native. Creole.’

The young man’s eyes are solemn and watchful as he waits for his elders to find a solution. He has a recurring nightmare which is this: that Crab Island, the chunk of mud and jungle in the estuary of the Berbice River, grows to such enormous proportions that it blocks forever his escape from New Amsterdam; that he is forced to stay in the stultifyingly dull town with its straggly cabbage palms and telegraph poles whose wires carry singing messages from nowhere to nowhere. He awakes from the dream sweating and in a claustrophobic panic.

In London there is jazz and the Café Royal.

In London you can skate across the Thames when it is frozen and there is snow snow snow in a million crystal flakes.

In London there are debonair, sophisticated, cosmopolitan men. It is impossible to
be
a real man until you have been to London.

He watches them sip their rum punches by the window. In the silence, music drifts up from the phonograph playing in the bottom-house:

The music goes round and round
Oh oh oh, Oh oh oh
And it comes out here.

Gazing at the three of them with blank disdainful eyes is the portrait of an Amerindian.

Mr Wilkinson continues, embarrassed:

‘Frankly, I don’t expect it will make any difference, but I wouldn’t like there to be any foul-up at this late stage. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Have you got his baptism certificate? They don’t put all this rubbish on the baptism certificate. I’ll write a letter to London saying the birth certificate was destroyed by a fire in the records office. I’ll enclose the baptism certificate instead. That should fix it. They won’t bother once he’s there.’ He takes another swallow of his drink. ‘I suppose they have to be careful. It is the City of London after all, where they set the Gold Standard for the world.’ He winks.

The great and golden city is to be discovered in the heart of a large, rich and beautiful empire. The city is well proportioned and has many great towers. Throughout, there are laid out goodly gardens and parks, some of them containing ponds of excellent fish. There are, too, many squares where trading is done and markets are held for the buying and selling of all manner of wares: ornaments of gold, silver, lead, brass and copper; game, birds of every species, rabbits, hares and partridges; vegetables, fish and fruit.

In all the districts of this great city are many temples or houses for their idols.

In one part of the city they have built cages to house large numbers of lions, tigers, wolves, foxes and cats of various kinds.

There are yet other large houses where live many men and women with deformities and various maladies. Likewise there are people to look after them.

In some of these great towers are hollow statues of gold which seem giants and all manner of gold artefacts, even gold that seems like wooden logs to burn. Here dwell men who deal in markets of coffee and sugar and vast numbers of other like commodities. They have eyes in their shoulders, mouths in the middle of their breasts, a long train of hair grows backwards between their shoulders. They sit on finely-made leather cushions and there are also men like porters to carry food to them on magnificent plates of gold and silver.

In the uppermost rooms of these towers, which are as we would call palaces, sit stockbrokers, their bodies anointed with white powdered gold blown through hollow canes until they are shining all over. Above their heads hang the skulls of dead company directors, all hung and decked with feathers. Here they sit drinking, hundreds of them together, for as many as six or seven days at a time.

I am squatting on the verandah in the hot yellow afternoon making spills for my grandfather. I tear strips from the
Berbice Advertiser
as he’s shown me and fold them carefully into tiny pleats. In the yard is the Po’ Boy tree which is supposed to be lucky. Children late for school stop to touch it and recite:

Pity pity Po’ Boy
Sorry fi me
If God don’ help me
The devil surely will.

My grandfather rests in his chair, one foot up on the long wooden arm. I want to please him so I place four spills for his pipe on the wicker table at his side but he hardly notices. I try to peek at the hand that has two fingers missing but it is folded in his lap in such a way that I can’t see properly.

Aunt Rosa comes out of the living-room to give me a glass of soursop:

‘Tomorrow your daddy is coming to take you back to England.’

‘England. England. England,’ I dance along the verandah.

‘Come in out of the sun, chile. You’re gettin’ all burnt up. I will take you over to the da Silvas to play one last time.’

I stop short, filled with apprehension and start to scuff my shoe on the floor:

‘I don’ want to go.’ I follow her inside where it is darker and cooler:

‘What is this foolishness? Why you don’ want to go?’

I don’t want to tell her. I try to distract her attention from the da Silvas:

‘What does my daddy do in London?’

‘He works for Booker-McConnell, of course, in a big building called Plantation House in the City of London.’ There is a note of pride in her voice which encourages me to lead her further away from the subject of the da Silvas:

‘Will you show me the photograph of the men in London again?’

Aunt Rosa goes over to the large, carved oak dresser. She is darker than my father but with the same large creole eyes. Her black hair is in a roll at the front. On top of the dresser are some of my favourite objects: a tumbler full of glass swizzle sticks, a bell jar, glass goblets and, best of all, a garishly painted wooden Chinese god with a face like a gargoyle and a chipped nose. I hang around the edge fingering the carved roses while Aunt Rosa rummages in the drawer:

‘Here it is. These men are very important. They are the men who meet every day to fix the price of sugar on the world market.’

She shows a photograph of dull, sombre-suited men with white faces gathered round a table and points to one of them:

‘This is the man who owns the company your daddy works for.’

I try to look interested but I can feel the time running out. I am right.

‘Now what is all this nonsense about the da Silvas?’ she asks.

‘I hate the da Silvas. They keep callin’ me “ice-cream face”.’ And I burst into tears.

Later that night I lie in bed under a single sheet. The doors to the adjoining room are fixed back and I can hear Aunt Rosa talking to Mrs Hunter:

‘Look how she fair-skinned, Frank’s daughter. No one would ever know. An’ she complainin’ about it.’ They laugh and lower their voices, but I can still hear fragments. Mrs Hunter is talking in a troubled voice about her brother:

‘… the first coloured officer in the British Army … imagine how proud … other officers would not speak to him … the men refused to obey his orders … Some incident … trumped up, I tell you … an excuse … cashiered … the shock that ran through the family.’ I hear the sob in her voice and Aunt Rosa hush-hushing her.

I creep out of bed towards the open doors. Moonlight floods over the leaves of the Molucca pear tree and spills through the jalousies onto the floor, a dark lake of polished wood. Stepping delicately over it is Salamander, the pale, golden gazelle of a cat, thin with pointy ears. He seems to be dancing some sort of minuet, extending each paw, then with a hop tapping the floor. Delighted, I move to take a closer look. And then I see it. Between his paws is a huge cockroach, a great black ugly thing lying on its back, its feelers moving this way and that. I must have squawked because there is a pause in the conversation, then Aunt Rosa says:

‘Get back to bed, chile. If you look out of the window on a night like this you will see Moongazer at the cross-roads.’

‘Hullo, ice-cream face.’ It is my father and he is laughing as he lifts me way up into the sky and sing-chants:

Molasses, molasses
Sticky sticky goo
Molasses, molasses
Will always stick to you.

My aunts, uncles and cousins are standing round by the wooden lattice at the front of the house. Everyone is laughing and I laugh too.

Some time afterwards, in England, I am playing with my doll Lucy in a garden full of browns and greys. Lucy’s face is cracked like crazy paving because I left her out in the rain but I love her because her hair is the colour of golden syrup. The cockney boy who lives next door has climbed into the pear tree on his side of the fence and is intoning in a sneery voice:

‘Your fahver looks like a monkey.

Your fahver looks like a monkey.’

I go inside and tell my mother:

‘Mum, Keith says Daddy looks like a monkey. And I think so too.’

My mother stops beating the cake mixture. She looks sad but not the way she looks when she is sad herself. It is the way she looks when she is teaching me what to be sad about:

‘Ahh,’ she says, as if I have grazed my knee. ‘Well don’t tell Daddy, you know he would be so hurt.’

They are lost, Wat, his father and the ragged remnants of the crew. They are padding the small craft which the Arawaks have named ‘the eight-legged sea-spider’, and they are lost in a labyrinth of rivers, a confluence of streams that branch into rapids and then into more billowing waters all crossing the other, ebbing and flowing. They seem to travel far on the same spot so that it takes an hour to travel a stone’s cast. The sun appears in the sky in three places at once and whether they attempt to use the sun as a guide or a compass they are carried in circles amongst a multitude of islands.

I am fourteen and back from England for the summer. My friend Gail Fraser has pestered and pestered her mother to cook labba for me before I return.

Now we sit at the dinner table, Gail’s great-aunt Bertha, her mother, her brother Edmund, and me and Gail. Great-aunt Bertha is a yellowy-skinned woman whose face is all caught up in leathery pouches under her white wavy hair. Gail’s mother is square-jawed with iron-grey crinkly hair and she is too practical for my liking as I judge everybody by how much ‘soul’ they have. My friend Gail is honey-coloured and round as a butterball. She has brown almond eyes and curly brown hair and scores about eight out of ten for soul. We have spent most of the holiday lying on her bed exchanging passionate secrets and raiding the rumbly old fridge for plum-juice. My deepest secret is that I am so in love with her brother Edmund that I could die. Edmund has what I call a crème de cacao complexion, tight black curls, full lips with the first black hairs of a moustache. He is slim and has black eyes that are brimful of soul. I know he would respond to me if he would stop talking about cricket for
ONE
minute. As it is, I have to be content to breathe the same air as him, which is pretty nice in itself.

Gail and I are trying desperately not to scream out loud with laughter as great-aunt Bertha chides Edmund for not wearing his jacket:

‘My father would not see the boys at dinner without their jackets.’

Dreadful snorts are coming out of Gail and Edmund is pulling faces. I can’t look up. Gail is heaving and shaking next to me. Great-aunt Bertha turns to me:

‘When I was in London I used to look after a sick. She was a real lady. I was her companion. I would have liked to stay in England. I asked to stay but they wouldn’t let me.’

Gail explodes and runs out of the room. Her mother looks disapproving. I manage to hang on to myself.

That evening Edmund takes Gail and me in the rowing-boat to the middle of Canje Creek because Gail insists that I drink creek water and I won’t drink from the edge because it’s too muddy and slimy. We row out onto the midnight black and glittering waters of the creek. It is silent apart from a goat-sucker bird calling ‘hoo yoo, hoo yoo’ in the distance.

‘This time tomorrow I’ll be in London.’