The Mimic Men (17 page)

Seeing her now, the embroiderer of my house colours, so unsuspecting, I felt secret added to secret, weight to weight. But with lucidity and the ordinary light of day the shame passed. Just before lunch I put on the vest with the red badge and covered it with my shirt. And I was surprised by a feeling of high pleasure when, after kissing my mother on the fern-hung veranda of our old-fashioned timber house, I stepped out into the street and was alone, free of mother and sisters, without a father: myself alone. The camera was in the sky. I was a man apart, disentangled from the camouflage of people. The street, usually to me so dull, was now an avenue to wonder.

But when I came to the residential area in which Isabella Imperial was set, something of the Saturday-afternoon lassitude of silent, wide-open houses made itself felt. My jumpiness returned; I was powerless to check it. And as soon as, entering the college grounds by the side gate, I saw the tents and the marquees and the carefully dressed men and women and boys and girls – hundreds of preparations like my own – I felt again the unimportance of my endeavour. My courage ebbed and was replaced by a type of weariness.

The sports began and the grounds were presently a confusion of unrelated and apparently private activities. The patient long distance runners plodded on unnoticed as if fulfilling a vow; there were practice sprints and practice
starts and real races at the same time; you turned here and saw the long jump, you turned there and saw the high jump. Scattered about the bustling semi-nude were calm, fully dressed groups conversing or drinking. I saw my rivals. Many had their parents with them. Many were already stripped and displayed embroidered badges as fussy as my own, which was still hidden by my shirt. So many private preparations! When the announcement came, and the boys ambled over earnestly to the starting line and one or two made stylish practice starts, I knew I would never join them, not for that race or the others. They lined up; a master looked them over with a revolver in his hand. My decision was made; my weariness and feeling of unimportance vanished. The revolver was fired and the race was run. It was the hundred yards; it was over quickly and aroused little attention. The master was already himself running off somewhere else, silver whistle in his mouth, his tie flapping, a scribbling pad in one hand and the revolver in the other. I joined the traditional scrimmage for free ice-cream. Then I wandered about the marquees. After some time relief turned to insipidity and at the end, out of boredom as much as anything else, I took part in the four-forty handicap for the whole school – a free-for-all, no entrance fee or signing on required, small boys given a hundred or even two hundred yards’ distance – and so with the whole school, a moving multicoloured mangrove of legs, I ran, one pair of legs among many, my house badge still below my shirt. I dropped out and melted unnoticed into the crowd at the centre. Some of the carefully dressed men were now a little beaten up with drink and indulging in a final boisterousness; the girls were tired; the faces of the women were shining. But amid the traditional clowning of the four-forty there was still a pocket of official gravity, much shuffling of papers and comparing of notes: the prize-giving was to follow. The crowd was drifting towards the tent with cups and trophies.

I did not stay. My mother was waiting for me when I got home. She asked, ‘Well, what happened?’

‘I didn’t win.’

And on Monday morning my form master said to me, in front of the class, ‘That was a very sporting gesture of yours on Saturday. Though I had no doubt you would do the right thing.’

So the reputation as a sportsman not only endured but was enhanced; and the day became another of my secrets which I feared I might give away in my sleep or under chloroform, before an operation.

I wanted no more secrets like this, no more Saturday afternoons poisoned by a feeling of shipwreck and wrongness among crowds. I had already begun, as I thought, to simplify my relationships. But I had begun too late. I was too far sunk in the taint of fantasy. I wished to make a fresh, clean start. And it was now that I resolved to abandon the shipwrecked island and all on it, and to seek my chieftainship in that real world from which, like my father, I had been cut off. The decision brought its solace. Everything about me became temporary and unimportant; I was consciously holding myself back for the reality which lay elsewhere.

I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city. It is one of those sayings which, because they deal with the particular and the concrete, like the instructions on a bottle of patent medicine, can appear flippant, except to those who have experienced their truth. To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder. From an early age, almost from my first lesson at school about the weight of the king’s crown, I had sensed this. Now I was to discover that disorder has its own logic and
permanence: the Greek was wise. Even as I was formulating my resolve to escape, there began that series of events which, while sharpening my desire to get away, yet rooted me more firmly to the locality where accident had placed me.

M
Y
father became the possessor of a second-hand motorcar. It was one of those baby Austins of the thirties, quaint even at the time, which we in Isabella, more used to American motorcars, called matchboxes. I believe my father bought his car with an interest-free government loan: his duties in the Education Department required him to travel. On the street my father already had the engaging reputation of a bottle-breaker and café-wrecker; the arrival of the baby Austin, emblem of respectability and steadiness, turned him into a type of eccentric squire. They called him a ‘radical’. On Isabella this was a word of approval; it described an unconventional person or someone who was a ‘character’. With the car and all its attendant dignities and anxieties – petrol-buying, servicing, a constant commerce with inept but impressively greasy mechanics – a change came over my father. His interest in the world revived. He spoke more loudly at home and in public and he became possessed by an odd passion for wit. He repeated your sentences out of context and laughed; he replied to questions by asking absurd questions of his own; he took your phrases and turned them into awkward questions and laughed. It was disquieting. He wore a fixed, ugly grin whenever he was at the wheel of his car, his head slightly raised, his hands in the position recommended by the instructors, his lips parted. He would sing to himself while he drove; he was deter
mined then to find humour and interest in everything. It was fatiguing.

At the same time he made some effort to draw his family together and to restore his prestige as its head. To keep us at home at week-ends he instituted a ‘family lunch’ on Sundays. We normally ate in a haphazard but satisfyingly private fashion, each person helping himself from the kitchen as from a hotel buffet. It was at one of these uncomfortable mass lunches – the last, as it turned out – that he embarrassed us by making a formal little speech.

He said: ‘It is good for all the members of a family to be together from time to time, breaking bread. I feel it strengthens the bonds of the family. The family is the unit which is at the basis of all civilization and culture. This was something I learned as a boy from the greatest of the missionaries who came to this island, to whose home, as I believe you know, I was admitted more as friend than student.’

It was bizarre, and not only because it was the first time I had heard him refer to his past. My sisters were on the point of giggling and I was fearful for my father’s sake. The mood was too high-pitched and good to last. My mother was enjoying it, though; she liked the sound of the words. She ate slowly, staring at her plate; tears came to her eyes and threatened to fall. Tears came to my father’s eyes as well. My sisters noticed and became grave.

‘There is no need to tell you, educated one and all, that life is brief and unpredictable. Here today, for example, we all sit, a complete family, each close to the other, each knowing the other well. Do you know that this might be the last time we do so? Do you know that in the years to come you might look back to this very moment and see it as one of the most important moments in your life? One growth reaches perfection and produces another. Nothing stands still. Our meal today is a type of perfection. I would like us all to be silent for a little and think about this moment.’

He was overcome by his own words. He hung his head over his plate and I could see the tears running down his cheeks. We finished our meal in miserable silence.

Afterwards he became sadly gay. It was a continuation of the same unusual mood. He said we should dress; he was going to take us out for a drive. ‘Family outing, family outing,’ he said, pretending to make a joke of it, applying to his new mood his new style of humour. My sisters and I were not excited. Cars – real ones: our mother’s father’s – were not unfamiliar to us and we didn’t care for a Sunday family outing. That was something we associated with other people: packed second-hand family cars, polished like treasure, going slowly nowhere in particular, with powdered and beribboned girls looking out at pedestrians and fighting back a smile. But there could be no denying my father. We dressed and squeezed into the car and hoped we wouldn’t be recognized. There was some trouble about getting the car to start. This gave us hope, but not for long. On my father’s instructions we all got out, my sisters, mother and myself, and ‘rocked’ the little Austin. The engine gave a kick and came confidently to life. We were relieved, though, that my father didn’t take us on the usual Sunday afternoon circuit of the city. He drove us out of the city; and then our relief was balanced by anxiety about the ability of the ticktocking little engine to take the hills which, away from the narrow coastal strip, were numerous and steep. We listened to the beat of the engine and to my father’s commentary about the areas we drove through.

We drove along narrow rough roads into the valleys of our eastern hills. We went through purely mulatto villages where the people were a baked copper colour, much disfigured by disease. They had big light eyes and kinky red hair. My father described them as Spaniards. They were a small community, exceedingly poor, separate even in slave days and now inbred to degeneracy, yet still distinguished by
an almost superstitious fear and hatred of full-blooded Africans and indeed of all who were not like themselves. They permitted no Negroes to settle among them; sometimes they even stoned Negro visitors. We drove through Carib areas where the people were more Negro than Carib. Ex-slaves, fleeing the plantations, had settled here and intermarried with the very people who, in the days of slavery their great tormentors, expert trackers of forest runaways, had by this intermarriage become their depressed serfs. Now the Caribs had been absorbed and had simply ceased to be. We were not far from the city – the little shops stocked familiar goods and carried familiar advertisements – but it was like being in an area of legend. The scale was small in time, numbers and area; and here, just for a moment, the rise and fall and extinction of peoples, a concept so big and alarming, was concrete and close. Slaves and runaways, hunters and hunted, rulers and ruled: they had no romance for me. Their message was only that nothing was secure. We drove through abandoned, blighted cocoa estates and my father showed us the beauty of cocoa trees. We came out into the Indian areas, the flat lands where rice and sugarcane grew. My father spoke of the voyage, so recent but already in our strange hemisphere so remote, which the fathers and indeed some of the people we saw had made from another continent, to complete our own little bastard world.

‘O God, Pa!’ one of my sisters cried. ‘You knock that lady’s bucket out of her hand.’

He had. The woman was at the roadside standpipe, bucketless, a picture of shock and amazement. My father looked back to see. And at that moment I saw a cyclist, leaning on his bike and chatting on the verge, suddenly, with the briskness of a character in an animated cartoon, twist the handle of his cycle out of the path of the Austin.

‘O God, Pa! Look where you going.’

It was the irritation in my sister’s voice which annoyed my father, the irritation which broke into his own high-pitched mood and mocked it. He fell silent, and in silence we drove on for some time. He began to mutter to himself and to bite his lower lip. He always overacted, even when his emotions were genuine.

The winding road straightened out on an embankment lined at the foot of each steep slope with poui trees. The sight of the straight empty road seemed to decide my father.

‘Bitches!’ he said, taking his hands off the steering wheel and accelerating.

We shot across the road and rolled swiftly down the embankment. A split second separated this abrupt deviation from my sisters’ screams. We rolled swiftly – but to me it was all in slow motion – towards the trunks of the poui trees. The baby Austin model had its points, though. We went straight between the tree trunks without touching. A series of soft grassy bumps, and the car came to rest, slightly on its side. The engine cut out and there was silence until my sisters remembered to scream again. Abandoning modesty, they scrambled out of the car as fast as they could and climbed up to the road, getting such purchase as they could out of grass and weeds. They said they had no intention of driving back to the city with my father; they would walk until they found a bus or a taxi. My mother called them back, not to make them change their minds, but to give them money for the journey. Her manner indicated that it was her own duty to stay with the Austin, come what might.

It didn’t take much to right the Austin. And presently we were pulled out by a passing lorry, with whose driver and driver’s family – all brilliantly dressed, all in the cab: their Sunday afternoon outing as well – my father exchanged the lightest of banter. We picked up my sisters. They had already begun to wilt a little and scarcely needed to be persuaded; they also welcomed the opportunity to abuse my
father. My father ignored them; he sang all the way back. But as soon as we were home he became morose. His face was drawn; the pouches under his eyes went dark; and the unusual mood of the day now showed itself to have been a type of hysteria. He locked himself in his room, answered none of my mother’s calls, and didn’t come out even to have a cup of tea.