The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  When Griff heard what Princess had said about him, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t have to come on strong, but if I was a different man, I would really show these West Indian women something . . .” He ran his thin, long, black fingers over the length of his old-fashioned slim tie, he shrugged the grey sports jacket that was a size too large, at the shoulders, into shape and place, wet his lips twice, and said, “Gimme another Scotch, man.” While Clynn fixed the Scotch, he ran the thumb and index finger of his left hand down the razor edge of the crease in his dark brown trousers. He inhaled and tucked his shirt and tie neatly beneath the middle button of his sports jacket. He took the Scotch, which he liked to drink on the rocks, and he said, “I don’t have to come on strong, but I am going to tell you something . . .”

  The next Friday night was the first day of fete in the long weekend. There hadn’t been a long weekend in Canada for a long time. Everybody was tired of just going to work, coming home, watching CBC television, bad movies on the TV, and then going to bed. “There ain’ no action in this fucking town,” Clynn was saying for days, before the weekend appeared like raindrops on a farmer’s dry-season head. And everybody agreed with him. It was so. Friday night was here, and the boys, their wives, their girlfriends, and their “outside women” were noisy and drunk and happy. Some of the men were showing off their new bell-bottom trousers and broad leather belts worn under their bulging bellies, to make them look younger. The women, their heads shining like wet West Indian tar roads, the smell from the cosmetics and grease that went into their kinky hair and on their faces, to make them look sleek and smooth: all these smells and these women mixed with the cheap and domestic perfumes they used, whenever Avon called; and some women, wives whose husbands were “getting through,” were wearing good-looking dresses, in style and fashion; others were still back-home in their style, poured in against their wishes and the better judgement of their bulging bodies; backsides big, sometimes too big, breasts bigger, waists fading into the turbulence of their middle age and their behinds, all poured against the shape of their noisy bodies into evil-fitting, shiny material, made on sleepy nights after work, on a borrowed sewing machine. But everybody was happy. They had all forgotten now, through the flavour of the calypso and the peas and the rice, the fried chicken, the currychicken, that they were still living in a white man’s country; and it didn’t seem to bother them now, nor touch them now. Tonight, none of them would tell you that they hated Canada; that they wanted to go back home, but that they were “going to make a little money, first”; that they were only waiting till then; that they were going to go back before “the blasted Canadian tourisses buy-up the blasted Caribbean”; they wouldn’t tell you tonight that they all suffered some form of racial discrimination in Canada, and that that was to be expected, since “there are certain things with this place that are not just right”—not tonight. Tonight, Friday night, was forgetting night. West Indian night. And they were at the Cancer Club to forget and to drink and to get drunk. To make plans for some strange woman’s (or man’s) body and bed, to “spend some time” with a real West Indian “thing,” to eat her boiled mackerel and green bananas, which their wives and women had, in their ambitions to be “decent” and Canadian, forgotten how to cook, and had left out of their diets, especially when Canadian friends were coming to dinner, because that kind of food was “plain West Indian stupidness.” Tonight, they would forget and drink, forget and dance, and dance to forget.

  “Oh-Jesus-Christ, Griff!” Stooly shouted, as if he was singing a calypso. He greeted Griff this way each time he came to the club, and each time it was as if Stooly hadn’t seen Griff in months, although they might have been together at the track the same afternoon. It was just the way Stooly was. “Oh-Jesus-Christ, Griff!” he would shout, and then he would rush past Griff, ignoring him, and make straight for Griff’s wife. He would wrap his arms around her slender body (once his left hand squeezed a nipple, and Griff saw, and said to himself, “Uh mean, I won’t like to come on strong about it, but . . .” and did nothing about it), pulling up her new minidress above the length of decency—worn for the first time tonight—exposing the expensive lace which bordered the hem of her slip. The veins of her hidden age, visible only at the back of her legs, would be exposed to Griff, who would stand and stare and feel “funny,” and feel, as another man inquired with his hands all over his wife’s body, the blood and the passion and the love mix with the rum in his mouth. Sometimes, when in a passion of brandy, he would make love to his wife as if she were a different woman, as if she were no different from one of the lost women found after midnight on the crowded familiar floor of the Cancer.

  “Haiii! How?” the wife would say, all the time her body was being crushed. She would say, “Haiii! How?” every time it happened; and it happened every time; and every time it happened, Griff would stand and stare, and do nothing about it, because his memory of British breeding told him so; but he would feel mad and helpless afterwards, all night; and he would always want to kill Stooly, or kill his wife for doing it; but he always felt she was so fragile. He would want to kill Stooly more than he would want to kill his wife. But Stooly came from the same island as his wife. Griff would tell Clynn the next day, on the telephone, that he should have done something about it; but he “didn’t want to come on strong.” Apparently he was not strong enough to rescue his wife from the rape of Stooly’s arms, as he rubbed his body against hers, like a dog scratching its fleas against a tree.

  Once, a complete stranger saw it happen. Griff had just ordered three drinks: one for his wife, one for himself, and one for Stooly, his friend. Griff looked at the man, and in an expansive mood (he had made a bundle off the long shot in the last race at Woodbine that afternoon), he asked the stranger, “What’re you drinking?”

  “Rum, sah!”

  “I am going to buy you a goddamn drink, just because I like you, man.”

  The stranger did not change the mask on his face, but stood there, looking at Griff’s dark green lenses. Then he said, “You isn’ no blasted man at all, man!” He then looked behind: Stooly was still embracing Griff’s wife. It looked as if he was feeling her up. The man took the drink from Griff, and said, “You is no man, sah!”

  Griff laughed; but no noise came out of his mouth. “Man, that’s all right. They went to school together in Trinidad.”

  “In my books, you still ain’ no fucking man, boy!” The stranger turned away from Griff; and when he got to the door of the dance floor, he said, “Thanks for the drink, boy.”

  The wife was standing beside Griff now, smiling as if she was a queen parading through admiring lines of subjects. She looked, as she smiled, as if she was under the floodlights of some premiere performance she had prepared herself for a long time. She smiled, although no one in particular expected a smile from her. Her smiling went hand in hand with her new outfit. It had to be worn with a smile. It looked good, as usual, on her; and it probably understood that it could only continue to look good and express her personality if she continued smiling. At intervals during the night, when you looked at her, it seemed as if she had taken the smile from her handbag, and had then powdered it onto her face. She could have taken it off any time, but she chose to wear it the whole night. “Griffy dear?” she said, although she wasn’t asking him anything, or telling him anything, or even looking in his direction. “Haiii! How?” she said to a man who brushed against her hips as he passed. The man looked suddenly frightened, because he wanted his advance to remain stealthy and masculine. When he passed back from the bar, with five glasses of cheap rum and Cokes in his hands, he walked far from her.

  Griff was now leaning on the bar, facing the part-time barman, and talking about the results of the last race that day; his wife, her back to the bar, was looking at the men and the women, and smiling; when someone passed, who noticed her, and lingered in the recognition, she would say, “Haiii! How?”

  A large, black, badly dressed Jamaican (he was talking his wa
y through the crowd) passed. He stared at her. She smiled. He put out his calloused construction hand, and with a little effort, he said, “May I have this dance, gal?” Griff was still talking. But in his mind he wondered whether his wife would dance with the Jamaican. He became ashamed with himself for thinking about it. He went back to talking, and got into an argument with the part-time barman, Masher, over a certain horse that was running in the feature race the next day at Greenwood. Masher, ever watchful over the women, especially other men’s, couldn’t help notice that the callousedhand Jamaican was holding on to Griff’s wife’s hand. With his shark-eyes he tried to get Griff’s attention off horses and onto his wife. But Griff was too preoccupied. His wife placed her drink on the counter beside him, her left hand still in the paws of the Jamaican construction worker’s, whom nobody had seen before, and she said, “Griffy dear?” The man’s hand on her manicured fingers had just come into his consciousness, when he wheeled around to give her her drink. He was upset. But he tried to be cool. It was the blackness of the Jamaican. And his size. Masher knew he was upset. The Jamaican reminded Griff of the “Congo-man” in one of the Mighty Sparrow’s calypsoes. Masher started to laugh in his spitting kee-kee laugh. And when Griff saw that everybody was laughing, and had seen the Congojamaican walk off with his wife, he too decided to laugh.

  “It’s all right, man,” he said, more than twice, to no one in particular, although he could have been consoling the Jamaicancongo man, or Masher, or the people nearby, or himself.

  “I sorry, suh,” the Jamaican said. He smiled to show Griff that he was not a rough fellow. “I am sorry, suh. I didn’ know you was with the missis. I thought the missis was by-sheself tonight, again, suh.”

  “It’s no big thing, man,” Griff said, turning back to talk to Masher, who by now had lost all interest in horses. Masher had had his eyes on Griff’s wife too. But Griff was worried by something new now: the man had said “by-sheself tonight, again, suh”; and that could mean only one thing: that his wife went places, like this very club, when he wasn’t with her; and he had never thought of this, and never even imagined her doing a thing like this; and he wasn’t sure that it was not merely the bad grammar of the Jamaican, and not the accusation in that bad grammar . . . But language is a funny thing, a man could kill a person with language, and the accusation can’t be comprehended outside of the structure of the language . . . Wonder how you would parse this sentence, Clynn . . . A Jamaican fella told me last night, “by-sheself tonight, again, suh.” Now, do you put any emphasis on the position of the adverb, more than the conditional phrase? Griff was already dozing off into the next day’s dreams of action, thinking already of what he would tell Clynn about the accident: Which is the most important word in that fellow’s sentence structure? “By-sheself,” “again,” or “tonight”?

  “Never mind the fellow looks like a cane-cutter, he’s still a brother,” Griff said to Masher, but he could have been talking into the future, the next day, to Clynn; or even to himself. “I don’t want to come on strong; he’s a brother.” The CBC television news that night dealt with Black Power nationalism in the States. The Jamaican man and Griff’s wife were now on the dance floor. Griff stole a glimpse at them, to make sure the man was not holding his wife in the same friendly way that Stooly, who was a friend, would hold her. He thought he would be able to find the meaning of by-sheself, again, and tonight in the way the man held his wife. Had the Jamaican done so, Griff would have had to think even more seriously about the three words. But the Jamaican was about two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and mackerel and green bananas. “Some other fellow would have come on strong, just because a rough-looking chap like him held on—”

  “Man, Griff, you’s a rasshole idiot, man!” Masher said. He crept under the bar counter, came out, faced Griff, broke into his sneering laugh, and said, “You’s a rasshole!” Griff laughed too, in his voiceless laugh. “You ain’ hear that man say ‘by-sheself tonight, again’? If I had a woman like that, I would kill her arse, be-Christ, just for looking at a man like that Jamaikian-man!” Masher laughed some more, and walked away, singing the calypso the amateur band was trying to play: Oh, Mister Walker, uh come to see your daughter . . .

  Griff wet his lips. His bottom lip disappeared inside his mouth, under his top lip; then he did the same thing with his top lip. He adjusted his dark glasses, and ran his right hand, with a cigarette in it, over his slim tie. His right hand was trembling. He shrugged his sports jacket into place and shape on his shoulders . . . Oh, Mister Walker, uh come to see ya daughterrrrrr . . .

  He stood by himself in the crowd of West Indians at the door, and he seemed to be alone on a sun-setting beach back home. Only the waves of the calypsonian, and the rumbling of the conga drum, and the whispering, the loud whispering in the breakers of the people standing nearby, were with him. He was like the sea. He was like a man in the sea. He was a man at sea . . . Tell she I is the man from Sangre Grande . . .

  The dance floor was suddenly crowded, jam-packed. Hands were going up in the air, and some under dresses, in exuberance after the music; the words in the calypso were tickling some appetites; he thought of his wife’s appetite and of the Jamaican’s, who could no longer be seen in the gloom of the thick number of black people; and tomorrow was races, and he had again mastered the Form. And Griff suddenly became terrified about his wife’s safety and purity, and the three words came back to him: by-sheself, tonight, again. Out of the crowd, he could see Masher’s big red eyes and his teeth, skinned in a mocking laugh. Masher was singing the words of the calypso: Tell she I come for she . . . The music and the waves on the beach, when the sun went behind the happy afternoon, came up like a gigantic sea, swelling and roaring as it came to where he was standing in the wet white sand; and the people beside him, whispering like birds going home to branches and rooftops, some singing, some humming like the sea, fishing for fish and supper and for happiness, no longer in sight against the blackening dusk . . . She know me well, I had she already! . . . Stooly walked in front of him, like the lightning that jigsawed over the rushing waves; and behind Stooly was a woman, noisy and Trinidadian, saying “This par-tee can’t done till morning come!” like an empty tin can tied to a motor-car bumper. All of a sudden, the fishermen and the fishing boats were coming back to shore, climbing out of their boats, laden with catches, their legs wet up to their knees; and they walked with their boats up to the brink of the sand. In their hands were fish. Stooly still held the hand of a woman who was laughing and talking loud: “Fete for so!” She was like a barracuda. Masher, raucous and happy, and harmless, and a woman he didn’t know, were walking like Siamese twins. One of his hands could not be seen. Out of the sea, now resting from the turbulent conga drumming of the waves in the calypso, came the Jamaicancongo man, and Griff’s wife.

  “Thank you very much, suh,” he said, handing Griff his wife’s hand. With the other hand, she was pulling her miniskirt into place. “She is a first-class dancer, suh.”

  “Don’t have to come on strong, man.”

  “If I may, some other time, I would like to . . .” the man said, smiling and wiping perspiration from his face with a red handkerchief. His voice was pleasant and it had an English accent hidden somewhere in it. But all the words Griff was hearing were I know she well, I had she already . . . by-sheself again, tonight . . . and there were races tomorrow. His wife was smiling, smiling like the everlasting sea at calm.

  “Haiii!” she said, and smiled some more. The Jamaican man moved back into the sea of people, for some more dancing and fish. The beach was still crowded; and in Griff’s mind it was crowded, but there was no one but he standing among the broken forgotten pieces of fish: heads and tails, and empty glasses and cigarette butts, and some scales broken off in a bargain, or by chance, and the ripped-up tickets of losing bets.

  Masher appeared and said into his ear, “If she was my wife, be-Christ, I tell you . . .” and he left the rest to the imagination.

  Griff’s
wife’s voice continued, “Griffy dear?”

  Masher came back from the bar with a Coke for the woman he was with. When he got close to Griff, he said into his ear, “Even if she was only just a screw like that one I have there . . .”

  “Griffy dear, let’s go home, I am feeling . . .”

  “. . . and if you was something,” Masher was now screaming down the stairs after them. Griff was thinking of the three little words which had brought such a great lump of weakness within the pit of his stomach.

  “Masher seems very happy tonight, eh, Griffy dear? I never saw Masher quite so happy.”

  “. . . you, boy! . . . you, boy! . . .”

  “Masher, Haiii! How?”

  “If it was mine,” Masher shouted, trying to hide the meaning in his message, “if it was mine, and I had put only a two-dollar bet ’pon that horse, that horse that we was talking about, and, and that horse behave’ so, well, I would have to lash that horse, till . . . unnerstan?”

  “Griffy dear? Masher really loves horses, doesn’t he, eh?”

  They were around the first corner, going down the last flight of stairs, holding the rails on the right-hand side. Griff realized that the stairs were smelling of stale urine, although he could not tell why. His wife put her arm around his waist. It was the first time for the day. “I had a great time, a real ball, a lovely time!” Griff said nothing. He was tired, but he was also tense inside; still he didn’t have the strength or the courage, whichever it was he needed, to tell her how he felt, how she had humiliated him, in that peculiar West Indian way of looking at small matters, in front of all those people; he could not tell her how he felt each time he watched Stooly put his arms around her slender body; and how he felt when the strange Jamaican man, with his cluttered use of grammar broken beyond meaning and comprehending, had destroyed something, like a dream, which he had had about her for all these fifteen years of marriage. He just couldn’t talk to her. He wet his lips and ran his fingers over the slim tie. All she did (for he wanted to know that he was married to a woman who could, through all the years of living together, read his mind, so he wouldn’t have to talk) was smile. That goddamn smile, he cursed. The sports jacket shoulders were shrugged into place and shape.