The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  He has just swayed farther from the steadying pole for moving balance as the train turns, and is standing over a woman cleaning her eyes and her nose with a red fingernail. And immediately, as his eyes and hers meet, she drops her eyes into the pages of a thick paperback book, as if her turned eyes would obliterate her act; and then she takes a white Kleenex from her handbag.

  The second bag he sees some women carrying is larger than a handbag, large enough, he thinks, for rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. The men do not read; they watch the women’s legs. And they look over their shoulders, between their shoulders, and down into their bra-less bodies, and their eyes touch the pages of the novels the women are reading; and, not certain of the enlightenment and pleasure to be got from this rapid-transit fleeting education, the men reluctantly allow their eyes to wander back to the pages of the Globe and Mail, which seem to hold no interest for them. Their eyes roam over the puny print of the stock market quotations, the box scores of the Blue Jays baseball team, and the results at Woodbine Racetrack.

  If his own luck had been really luck—and something to laugh about—the actress told him once, he could win thousands of dollars on a two-dollar bet, as easy as one, two, three. When she told him, “One to win, two to come second, and three to come third,” he laughed, thinking she was memorizing lines of a play she was auditioning for.

  He had been living with so little luck in his life—three months with no money and no hope of any—that he could afford to dream and to laugh as he dreamed, and fill his empty pockets with imagined wealth.

  A man beside him shakes out the pages of the Globe and Mail to the racing results: “and in the fifth race yesterday at Woodbine, the first three horses to come in 1, 2, and 3 paid $15,595.03 . . .”

  The jerk of the train stopping pushes him against the metal pole and awakens him from his dreaming. When the doors open, he is at his station.

  The air is cool. He can feel his shirt like wet silk against his body. He pulls the lapels of his jacket together to make himself feel warmer. The sun shines blindingly, but weakly, on the tall office buildings that surround him. He is walking in their shadow, as if he is walking in a valley back in Barbados. The buildings look like steel. One facing him, built almost entirely out of glass, shimmers like gold. Its reflection of his body tears him into strides and splatters his suit against four glass panels, and makes him disjointed. It is the building he is going to enter.

  The elevator is crowded. The passengers are all looking up at the changing numbers of the floors. He looks up too. He can hear no breathing. A man shifts his weight from one black alligator shoe to the other. A woman changes her brown leather handbag and her other, larger bag, made of blue parachute material, from her right arm to her left. He reads BIJOUX, which is printed on it. There is only the humming of the elevator; then the sound of the doors opening; then feet on the polished floor outside; the sound of the doors closing; a deep breath like a sigh of relief or of anticipation for the next floor; then the humming of the next ascent and then silence. The elevator stops on the fourteenth floor. There is no thirteenth. He is at the front, near the door, when it opens. Five men and women are beside and behind him. Facing him is glass and chrome and fresh flowers and Persian rugs and women dressed expensively and stylishly in black, with necklaces of pearls. And chewing gum. It is quiet in the office. Deathly quiet. So he stands his ground.

  BANK is written on the glass.

  “Getting off?” a man beside him asks.

  He stands his ground.

  The door closes, and he goes up with the five of them and finds himself, gradually, floor by floor, alone, as they slip out one by one. The elevator takes him to the top. The door does not open. And when it starts its descent, he is feeling braver. He remembers the new vigour he used to feel at the end of three hours working with wax and mops and vacuum cleaners with Italians, Greeks, and Portuguese, going down the elevator. He will ride it to the bottom.

  No one enters, even though it stops two times in quick succession. And then it stops once more, and the door opens, and he is facing the same office with BANK written on the glass, cheerless and frightening, and seeing the same chrome, the rugs, and the black and pearls of the women. Just as he moves to step out, the closing door, cut into half, and like two large black hands, comes at him. He gets out of the way just as the blue eyes of one of the women approaching the elevator door to see what he wanted are fixed upon him. Those blue eyes are like ice water; his are brown and laughing.

  “. . . this stop, sir?” is all he gets to hear of the woman’s flat voice before the two black palms, like a shutter, have taken her eyes from his view and her words from his hearing.

  “And you didn’t even go into the office?”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  “Sometimes when I’m auditioning, I get scared and get butterflies.”

  “There was so much wealth!”

  “Are you a communist? I wish I had money, money, and more money. All I think about is money. But here I am in this damn rooming house with a broken shower curtain and a leaky bathtub, trying to be an artist, an actress. Do you think I’ll be a dedicated actress because I live in all this shit? When last have I had a steak? And a glass of red wine? Or you?”

  “I have some wieners.”

  “Wieners, for Chrissakes!”

  Her flat voice and icy manner killed the kindness in his suggestion.

  “The people on the subway looked so educated, like everybody was a university graduate. And not one person, man or woman, asked me if I needed directions.”

  “For Chrissakes! How would they know you don’t have Canadian experience?”

  “They looked on me and at me and through me, right through me. I was a piece of glass.”

  “Must have been your brown suit.”

  “Everybody else was in grey or black.”

  “I hope I get this part. Just to get my hands on some money and rent a decent place. But what can I do? I even get tired taking showers in a bathroom where the water leaks through the curtain. My whole life is like a shower curtain. That leaks. Oh, the landlady was here. Fifteen minutes after you left. She tells me you have to give up your room on Friday. So I tell her not to worry, that you got a job today. And you didn’t even go into the office! She wants you to pay two months this month. But you didn’t even face the people!”

  “With all that glass and steel and chrome?”

  “Do you want me to tell her you’re not in? You could always slip out without paying the rent, you know. I’ve done it lots of times. In Sherbrooke and in Rosedale. God, I nearly broke my ass racing down the metal fire escape, carrying my box of French-Canadian plays. Everybody skips out on landlords. Try it. She’ll never find you in Toronto! The one in Rosedale hasn’t found me yet. And here I am, desperate to be an actress and make enough money to move back to Rosedale . . .”

  “When she’s coming back?”

  “Seven.”

  “She coming in three hours? Are you saying four o’clock, too?”

  “You could come to my room. I don’t have to do the audition. I can skip it. There’s a small restaurant on Church Street where a lot of television and radio types eat, and I’m thinking of applying for a waitress job there. It’s an artistic restaurant. I’ll even slip you a steak if I get the job.”

  “She said she’s coming back at seven?”

  “My room is open to you, as I say. Be free. Feel free. Don’t you want to be free? Where could you go, anyhow?”

  In his hands is a glass with a pattern on it that advertises peanut butter. It has dried specks like old saliva around the mouth. He passes his fingers around the mouth of the glass, cleaning it; and when it looks clean and is cloudy from his handprints, he pours the first of the three Molson’s into it. He sits on his bed. There is no chair in the room. Only his television set, which he sits on when he is not watching 60 Minutes or the American news. His dangling feet can barely touch the floor. On the floor is linoleum, with a floral pa
ttern. “Rose of Sharon,” the actress had told him. “I was a whiz in botany at Jarvis Collegiate.”

  The sun is brighter now. He can smile in this sun and think of home. He is getting warmer, too. A shaft of dust plays within the arrow of September light that comes through the window. It lands at his feet. The light and the particles of dust on the bright leather of his shoes attract his attention for a moment only. He smiles in that moment. And in that moment, his past life fills his heart and shakes his body like a spasm, like a blast of cold air. His attention then strays to the things around him, his possessions, prized so fondly before, and which now seem to be mere encumbrances: the valise he brought from Barbados and carried through so many changes of address in Toronto; heavier always in winter when he changed rooms, when he carried it late at night on his shoulder, although each time that he moved, he had accumulated no more possessions; the two Christmas cards that the actress had mailed to him, even though she was living in the same house, placed open like two tents and which he keeps on top of a wooden kitchen cupboard, used now as his dressing table. “TO GEORGE, AT XMAS” is written in ballpoint, in red, on each, in capital letters; and an unframed colour photograph taken in Barbados, and fading now, showing him with his father and mother and two younger brothers and three sisters: eight healthy, well-fed Barbadians, squinting because the sun is in their eyes, standing like proprietors in front of a well-preserved plantation house made of coral stone, covered in vines so thick that their spongy greenness strangles the windows and the doors. The name of this house in Barbados is Edgehill House. His present residence has no name. It is on a street named Major. It is a rooming house, similar in size, in build, and in dirt to the other houses on the street.

  He drains the beer from the peanut-butter glass and refills it. He throws the last bottle into the plastic garbage pail, and the rattle of glass and tin is like a drunken cackle. Inside the garbage pail are the classified pages from the Globe and Mail, some shrivelled lettuce leaves, an empty milk carton, and the caps of beer bottles. He thinks of the woman in the bank’s office, dressed in black, with the blue eyes. He thinks of the flowers and the glass in that office and of flowers more violent in colour, growing in wild profusion, untended, around Edgehill House, where he was born in a smiling field of comfortable pastureland.

  His father never worked for anyone in his whole life, never had to leave the two hundred and eighty acres of green sugar cane and corn to dirty his hands for anyone’s money.

  “Work on this blasted plantation, boy. Put your hands in the most stinking dirt and cow-dung on this plantation, and it is a hundred times more nobler than working at the most senior position in a country where you wasn’t born!”

  His father said that almost every day, and more often when he learned that his son was emigrating to Canada.

  “You call yourself a son o’ mine? You, a son o’ mine? With all this property that I leaving-back for you? You come telling me you going to Canada as a immigrant? To be a stranger? Where Canada is? What is Canada? They have a Church o’ England up there? Canada is no place for you. The son of a Barbadian plantation owner? This land was in our family before Canada was even discovered by the blasted Eskimos and the red Indians. Seventeen-something. A.D.! In the year of our Lord, anno domini. Who do they worship up there? And you come telling me that you going up there, seeking advancement as a immigrant? In Canada? Your fortune and your future is right here! In this soil. In this mud. In this dirt. ’Pon these two hundred and eighty-something acres o’ cane and corn!”

  It is six-thirty now. Thirty minutes before the landlady is to arrive. He locks his door. He stands outside in front of it, like a man who has forgotten something inside. There is a red thumbtack on the door. The actress pins it there whenever she leaves messages that she thinks require urgent replies. Whenever there’s a thumbtack on his door, he thinks of the red cold sores on her back, and it makes him laugh. He does not know why; he just laughs.

  He climbs the stairs to go to her room. He can see a red thumbtack on her door, even before he reaches it. It is similar to the one he has left behind on his own door. She has written his name in red capital letters on a folded piece of lined white paper. He pulls the paper from the tack.

  I got the waitress job at the restarant. He smiles when he sees she has spelled “restaurant” without a U. Your steak waiteth. She has signed it Pat.

  He did not throw away the balled-up message, even hours afterwards, in all the walking he did that night, until he was standing on the platform of the subway at the Spadina station, where he is now.

  He looks to his right and then to his left, and there is no one in sight. Across from him, across the clean cement that is divided by a black river of hard dirty steel, are two large billboards. One advocates “pigging-out,” and the other tells women about Light Days Tampax. Suddenly, into the frame of these two boards riveted to two steel pillars comes a lone passenger, who stands on the platform and waits to take the train going in the other direction.

  He does not know why he is in this station and why he has entered on the platform for southbound trains.

  South is the office building with the glass and the flowers and the women dressed in black and BANK written on the glass. South is Bay Street, where no one walks after the Italians and the Greeks and the Portuguese have cleaned the offices and have left to take the subway north to College Street. South is nothing. South is the lake and blackness and cold water that smells of dead fish and screaming children’s voices in the short summer, and machines and boats and grease.

  The balled-up note from Pat, written on its soiled paper, smelling of the ointment she uses for her cold sores, was in his fist when he first reached this spot where he is standing now. He is standing in the centre of the platform, the same distance from the left end as from the right.

  A rumble grows louder. Chains and machinery, iron touching iron, steel rubbing steel, the sound of the approaching train. He can never tell at the first sound of this familiar rumbling, out of a darkened tube, whether it is coming from his left or from his right. He always has to wait longer for the greater roar. Or if it is nighttime, watch for the first glare on the tracks.

  He thinks the roar is coming from the southbound lines. He feels more at ease for a moment, and braver, and he even laughs, although he doesn’t know why. The man on the other side stares at him from his seat on the brown vinyl between the two advertising boards, and the man remains, querulous with his staring, until his train moves northwards.

  He is alone again. And more at ease. He moves to the end of the platform, nearest the tube through which the train will emerge, to a spot where he could see it clearly. He wants no surprises. He wants to see it the moment it appears out of the blackness. The blackness that is like the south and the lake. And he wants no one else to see him. He wants to be alone, just as he was alone in the descending elevator in the office building.

  How comfortable and safe and brave he had felt travelling and laughing and falling so fast and so free, through the bowels of that glassed-in building!

  He hears the rumble. He hears the sound of steel or iron—metal, anyhow—and the low screech of the train trying to emerge out of the darkened, curved tube.

  He thinks of Pat. So he throws the balled-up note onto the tracks. And that act is her being thrown out of his life, along with her red-corpuscled sores. He sees the note fall. But does not hear it reach the surface of the black river of hard dirty steel below him. He does not hear it reach the tracks. He cannot gauge any distance now. Cannot gauge any face. The paper is very light. Almost without weight. Definitely without purpose and love.

  But the train is here. Its lights reflect off the tracks, which now are shining and getting wider as the ugly red engine, like her sores, approaches. He knows that the train is as long as the platform, half of which he has already paced off. The train is here. And just as its lights begin to blind him, he makes his own eyes pierce through that weaker brightness and fixes them on the driver, dre
ssed in a light brown uniform. He sees the driver’s face, the driver’s happy eyes and his relief that this is his last trip; and he himself laughs to an empty platform and station that are not listening, and he steps off the platform, just having seen that his own eyes, and the driver’s, make four.

  I’M RUNNING

  FOR MY LIFE

  She was in the bedroom when he touched the door, and did not enter. She had heard him come home earlier; had heard the front door open and close, and had panicked. She had thought of running downstairs. But she had changed her mind. He would see her; and catch her; and ask for explanations, even though he knew it was part of her job to clean the bedroom; and she knew she could not satisfy him with her explanations. She knew she would be fired. She feared being fired. She wanted to enrol in a night class at George Brown College, doing something to improve herself; and even though she had not, and could not decide which course she should take, she knew she had to take some courses, to upgrade her life in this city. And she wanted to buy Canada Savings Bonds, to invest in the future. And she wanted to take a trip to New York City with Gertrude, who liked plays and art galleries; while she, she knew, wanted to visit Harlem and Brooklyn, where she had friends. And she wanted to bring her savings up to a figure when she could more easily face the bank manager; and afterwards arrange a loan for a down payment on a small house in the East End, although she hated the East End, but the East End was the only place in this city where a woman like her, living on her own, making next to nothing in wages, could afford to have a roof over her head that she owned, before, as she always said, “God ready to take me to my grave, and the cold earth in this place become my roof everlasting!” She feared being fired before she had made a woman of herself. She wanted time. And she became sad to think that she could be fired just like that: she, who had worked for him so long; too long; too well; in dutiful, efficient, faithful service. She was like a member of the household.