The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  But after these hiatuses of dance, free as the perspiration pouring down his face, his wife would be put to bed around midnight, high up in the elevator, high off the invisible hog of credit, high up on the Chargex card, and Griff would be tense, for days. It was a tenseness which almost gripped his body in a paralysis, as it strangled the blood in his body when the payments of loans for furniture and for debts approached, and they always coincided with the approaching of his paycheque, already earmarked against its exact face value. In times of this kind of stress, like his anxiety at the racetrack, when the performance of a horse contradicted his knowledge of the Racing Form and left him broke, he would grumble, “Money is naught all.”

  Losing his money would cause him to ride on streetcars, and he hated any kind of public transportation. He seemed to realize his blackness more intensely; white people looking at him hard—questioning his presence, it seemed. It might be nothing more than the way his colour changed colour, going through a kaleidoscope of tints and shades under the varying ceiling lights of the streetcar. Griff never saw it this way. To him, it was staring. And his British breeding told him that to look at a person you didn’t know (except she was a woman) was infra dig. Infra dig was the term he chose when he told Clynn about these incidents of people staring at him on the streetcars. The term formed itself on his broad thin lips, and he could never get the courage to spit it at the white people staring at him.

  When he lost his money, his wife, after not having had dinner nor the money to buy food (the landlord locked the apartment door with a padlock one night while they were at a party), would smile that half-censuring smile, a smile that told you she had been forced, against the truth of her circumstances, to believe with him that money was “not all, at-all.” But left to herself, left to the ramblings of her mind and her aspirations and her fingers over the new broadloom in her girlfriend’s home, where her hand clutched the tight sweating glass of Scotch on the rocks, her Scotch seeming to absorb her arriving unhappiness with the testimony of her friend’s broadloom, or in Clynn’s recreation room, which she called a den, in her new sponge of happiness, fabricated like the house in her dreams, she would put her smile around her husband’s losses, and in the embrace they would both feel higher than anybody present, because, “Griffy dear, you were the only one there with a Master of Arts.”

  “I have more brains than anyone there. They only coming-on strong. But I don’t have to come on strong, uh mean, I don’t have to come on strong, but . . .”

  One day, at Greenwood Racetrack, Griff put his hand into his pocket and pulled out five twenty-dollar bills, and put them on one race: he put three twenty-dollar bills on Number Six, on the fucking nose—to win, eh! (he had been drinking earlier at the Pilot Tavern); and he also put two twenty-dollar bills on Number Six, to show. He had studied the Racing Form like a man studying torts: he would put it into his pocket, take it out again, read it in the bathroom as he trimmed his moustache; he studied it on the sweet-smelling toilet bowl; he studied it as he might have studied laws in Britain; and when he spoke of his knowledge of the Racing Form, it was as if he had received his degrees in the laws of averages, and not in English literature and language.

  And he “gave” a horse to a stranger that same day at Greenwood. “Buy Number Three, man. I read the Form for three days, taking notes. It got to be Number Three!” The man thanked him because he himself was no expert; and he spent five dollars (more than he had ever bet before) on Number Three, to win. “I read the Form like a blasted book, man!” Griff told him. He slipped off to the wicket farthest away; and like a thief, he bought his own tickets: “Number Six! Sixty on the nose! Forty to show!” And to himself he said, smiling, “Law o’ averages, man, law of averages.”

  Tearing up the tickets on Number Six after the race, he said to the man who had looked for him to thank him, and who thanked him and shook his hand and smiled with him, “I don’t have to come on strong, man, I mastered that Form.” He looked across the field to the board at the price paid on Number Three, and then he said to the man, “Lend me two dollars for the next race, man. I need a bet.”

  The man gave him three two-dollar bills and told him, “Any time, pardner, any time! Keep the six dollars. Thank you!”

  Griff was broke. Money is naught all, he was telling the same man, who, seeing him waiting by the streetcar stop, had picked him up. Griff settled himself back into the soft leather of the new Riviera, going west, and said again to the man, “Money is naught all! But I don’t like to come on strong. Uh mean, you see how I mastered the Form, didn’t you?”

  “You damn right, boy!” the man said, adjusting the tone of the tape deck. “How you like my new car?”

  The elevator was silent that evening, on the way up to the twenty-fifth floor; and he could not even lose his temper with it: “This country is uncivilized—even the elevators—they make too much noise; a man can’t even think in them; this place only has money but it doesn’t have any culture or breeding or style, so everybody is grabbing for money, money, money.” The elevator that evening didn’t make a comment. And neither did his wife: she had been waiting for him to come from work, straight, with the money untouched from his monthly paycheque. But Griff had studied the Racing Form thoroughly all week, and had worked out the laws and averages and notations in red felt-pen ink; had circled all the “long shots” in green, and had moved through the “donkeys” (the slow horses) with waves of blue lines; had had three “sure ones” for that day; and had averaged his wins against heavy bets against his monthly salary: it was such a “goddamn cinch”! He had developed a migraine headache immediately after lunch, slipped through the emergency exit at the side, holding his head in his hand, his head full of tips and cinches, and had caught the taxi which miraculously had been waiting there, with the meter ticking; had run through the entrance of the racetrack, up the stairs, straight for the wicket to bet on the daily double; had invested fifty dollars on a long shot (worked out scientifically from his red-marked, green-circled, blue-wavy-lined Form), and had placed “two goddamn dollars” on the favourite—just to be sure!—and went into the clubhouse. The favourite won. Griff lost fifty dollars on the first race. But he had won two dollars on his two-dollar bet.

  “I didn’t want to come on strong,” he told the man, who was then a stranger to him. The man could not understand what he was talking about, and he asked for no explanation. “I didn’t want to come on strong, but I worked out all the winners today, since ten o’clock last night. I picked them, man. I can pick them. But I was going for the long shot. Hell, what is a little bread? Fifty dollars! Man, that isn’t no bread, at all. If I put my hand in my pocket now, look . . . this is bread! . . . five hundred dollars. I can lose, man; I can afford to lose bread. Money don’t mean anything to me, man; money is no big thing! . . . Money is naught all.”

  His wife remained sitting on the Scandinavian couch which had the habit of whispering to them, once a month, “Fifty-nine thirty-five owing on me!” She looked up at Griff as he gruffed through the door. She smiled. Her face did not change its form, or its feeling, but she smiled. Griff grew stiff at the smile. She got up from the couch. She brushed the anxiety of time from her waiting miniskirt (“My wife must dress well, and look sharp, even in the house!”), she tidied the already-tidy hairdo she had just got from Azan’s, and she went into the kitchen, which was now a wall separating Griff from her. Griff looked at the furniture, and wished he could sell it all in time for the races tomorrow afternoon: the new unpaid-for living room couch, desk, matching executive chair, the table and matching chairs where they ate; desk pens thrown into the bargain the salesman swore he was giving them, ten Friday nights ago down Yonge Street; scatter rugs, Scandinavian-type settee with its matching chairs, like Denmark in the fall season, in style and design; he looked at the motto, “Christ Is the Head of this Home,” which his wife had insisted upon taking as another “bargain”; and he thought of how relaxed he had felt driving in the man’s new Riviera.
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  He took the new Racing Form, folded in half and already notated, from his breast pocket, and sat on the edge of the bed, in the wisteria-smelling bedroom. The wife had been working, he said to himself, as he noticed he was sitting on his clean folded pyjamas. But he left them there and perused the handicaps and histories of the horses. The bundle buggy for shopping was rolling over the polished wood of the living room floor. The hinges on the doors of the clothes cupboard in the hallway were talking. A clothes hanger dropped on the skating rink of the floor. The cupboard door was closed. The bundle buggy rolled down from its prop against the cupboard and jangled onto the hardboard ice. Griff looked up and saw a smooth brown, black-maned horse standing before him. It was his wife.

  “Griffy dear? I am ready.” She had cleaned out her pocketbook of old papers, useless personal and business cards accumulated over drinks and at parties; and she had made a budget of her month’s allowance, allowing a place in the tidied wallet section for her husband’s arrival. The horse in Griff’s mind changed into a donkey. “Clynn called. He’s having a party tonight. Tennish. After the supermarket, I want to go round to the corner, to the cleaner’s, and stop off at the liquor store for a bottle of wine. My sisters’re coming over for dinner, and they’re bringing their boyfriends. I want to have a roast. Should I also buy you a bottle of Black & White, Griffy dear?” . . . They’re at post! They’re off! . . . As they come into the backstretch, moving for the wire . . . it’s Phil Kingston by two lengths; Crimson Admiral; third, True Willie . . . Phil Kingston, Crimson Admiral, True Willie . . . but Griff had already moved downstairs, in the direction of the cashier’s wicket: “Long shot in your arse! Uh got it, this time, old man!” True Willie is making a move. True Willie! . . . Phil Kingston now by one length, True Willie is coming on the outside! True Willie! It’s True Willie!

  “It’s almost time for the supermarket to close, Griff dear, and I won’t like to be running about like a racehorse, sweating and perspiring. I planned my housework and I tried to finish all my housework on time so I’ll be fresh for when you came home. I took my time too, doing my housework, and I took a shower so I won’t get excited by the time my sisters come, and I didn’t bother to go to my yoga class . . .” It’s True Willie by a neck! True Willie! What a run, ladies and gentlemen! What a run! True Willie’s the winner, and it’s now official! “ . . . and I even made a promise to budget this month so we’ll save some money for all these bills we have to pay. We have to pay these bills and we never seem to be paying them off and the rent’s due in two days—no, today! Oh, I forgot to tell you that the bank manager called about your loan, to say that . . .” It’s True Willie, by a neck!

  Griff smashed all the furniture in the apartment in his mind, and then walked through the door. “Oh, Griffy dear! Stooly called to say he’s getting a lift to the races tomorrow and if you’re going he wants you to . . .”

  Griff was standing in the midst of a group of middle-aged West Indians, all of whom pretended, through the amount of liquor they drank, and the “gashes they lashed,” that they were still young black studs.

  “Man, when I entered that door, she knew better than to open her fucking mouth to me! To me? Me?” The listening red eyes understood the unspoken chastisement in his threatening voice. “Godblindyou! She knew better than that. Me? If she’d only opened her fucking mouth, I would have . . .” They raised their glasses, all of them, to their mouths, not exactly at the same time, but sufficiently together to make it a ritualistic harmony among men. “As man!” Griff said, and then wet his lips. They would, each of them, have chastised their women in precisely the same way that Griff was boasting about disciplining his. But he never did. He could never even put his hand to his wife’s mouth to stop her from talking. And she was not the kind of woman you would want to beat: she was much too delicate. The history of their marriage had coincided with her history of a woman’s illness which had been kept silent among them; and its physical manifestation, in the form of a large scar that crawled halfway around her neck, darker in colour than the natural shade of her skin, had always, from the day of recovery after the operation, been covered by the neckline of each of her dresses. And this became her natural style and fashion in clothes. Sometimes, in more daring moods, she would wear a silk scarf to hide the scar. “If my wife wasn’t so blasted sickly, I would’ve put my hand in her arse, many times! Many times I’ve thought o’ putting my hand in her arse, after a bad day at the races!” He had even thought of doing something drastic about her smile and about his losses at the track and at poker. It was not clearly shaped in his mind; and at times, with this violent intent, he could not think of whom he would perform this drastic act on. After a bad day at the track, the thought of the drastic act, like a cloud over his thoughts, would beat him down and take its toll out of his slim body, which itself seemed to refuse to bend under the great psychological pressure of losing, all the time.

  He had just lost one hundred dollars at Woodbine Racetrack, when one evening as he entered Clynn’s living room, for the usual Friday night party of Scotch and West Indian peas and rice and chicken, which Clynn’s Polish wife cooked and spoiled and learned how to cook as she spoiled the food, he had just had time to adjust his shoulders in the oversized sports jacket, when he said, braggingly, “I just dropped a hundred. At Woodbine.” He wet his lips and smiled.

  “Dollars?” It was Clynn’s voice, coming from the dark corner where he poured drinks. Clynn was a man who wouldn’t lend his sister, nor his mother—if she was still alive—more than five dollars at one time.

  “Money don’t mean anything, man.”

  “A hundred dollars?” Clynn suddenly thought of the amount of Scotch Griff had been drinking in his house.

  “Money is naught all.”

  “You’re a blasted . . . Boy, do you lose just for fun, or wha’?” Clynn sputtered. “Why the arse you don’t become a groom, if you like racehorses so much? Or you’s a . . . a paffological loser?”

  “Uh mean, I don’t like to come on strong, or anything, but, money is naught all . . .”

  “Rasshole put down my Scotch, then! You drinking my fucking Scotch!”

  And it rested there. It rested there because Griff suddenly remembered he was among men who knew him: who knew his losses both in Britain and Canada. It rested there also, because Clynn and the others knew that his manner and attitude towards money, and his wife’s expressionless smile, were perhaps lying expressions of a turbulent inner feeling of failure. “He prob’ly got rasshole ulcers, too!” Clynn said, and then spluttered into a laugh. Griff thought about it, and wondered whether he had indeed caused his wife to be changed into a different woman altogether. But he couldn’t know that. Her smile covered a granite of silent and apparent contentment.

  He wondered whether he hated her, to the bone, and whether she hated him. He felt a spasm through his body as he thought of her hating him, and not knowing about it. For so many years living together, both here and in Britain; and she was always smiling. Her constancy and her cool exterior, her smiles, all made him wonder now, with the Scotch in his hand, about her undying devotion to him, her faithfulness, pure as the sheets in their sweet-smelling bedroom; he wondered whether “I should throw my hand in her arse, just to see what she would do.” But Clynn had made up his own mind that she was, completely, destroyed inside: her guts, her spirit, her aspirations, her procreative mechanism—“Hysterectomy all shot to pieces!” Clynn said cruelly—destroyed beyond repair, beneath the silent consolation and support which he saw her giving to her husband, at home among friends and relations, and in public among his sometimes silently criticizing friends. “I don’t mean to come on strong, but . . .”

  “You really want to know what’s wrong with Griff?” Clynn’s sister, Princess, asked one day. “He want a stiff lash in his backside! He don’t know that he’s gambling-’way his wife’s life? He doesn’t know that? Look, he don’t have chick nor child. Wife working in a good job, for decent money, and they don’t e
ven live in a decent apartment that you could say, ‘Well, rent eating out his sal’ry.’ Don’t own no record player. Nothing. And all he doing is walking ’bout Toronto with his blasted head high in the air! He ain’ know this is Northamerica? Christ, he don’t even speak to poor people. He ain’ have no motto-car, like some. Well, you tell me then, what the hell is Griff doing with the thirteen thousand Canadian dollars a year in salary? Supporting racehorses? No, man, you can’t tell me that, ’cause not even the most wutless of Wessindians living in Toronto could gamble-’way thirteen thousand dollars! Jesuschrist! That is twenty-six thousand back in Barbados! Think o’ the land he could buy back home wid thirteen thousand Canadian dollars. And spending it ’pon a racehorse? What the hell is a racehorse? Thirteen thousand? But lissen to me! One o’ these mornings, that wife o’ his going get up and tell him that she with-child, that she pregnunt . . .” (“She can’t get pregnunt, though, Princess, ’cause she already had one o’ them operations!”) “. . . Anyhow, if his wife was a diff’rent person, she would ’ave walked-out on his arse long ago! Or else, break his two blasted hands! And she won’t spend a day in jail!”