The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

“Here’s to Golden Acres!” Sammy said. “Jeez!” His laughter was a blend of coughing and a splutter. He clapped his chest. “Golden Acres!” His words were like two plates dropped on cement. He held the bottle, and his hand grew tense around its neck, and the blue veins swelled in that hand and became prominent, as if they were about to burst, as if he was about to break the neck of the bottle. “Jeez!”

  He unscrewed the bottle. After he poured himself a drink, he placed the bottle on the table, and his hands relaxed, and his body relaxed and went almost dead; all feeling went from his face, and the skin looked like sagging layers of leather, his eyes like the circles left by the two glasses of water on the table. He sat like that, his hands dropped to his sides, and breathing heavily. “The bottle,” he said, lifting the glass, “and my cigars”—taking a package of White Owls from his pocket—“is the only two things they left me with. Best two things in the world. Keeps me from going mad. Or killing that bitch. Or setting the place on fire.”

  He did not know if Sammy meant Golden Acres or his aunt’s house.

  “So you’re selling this place!” He filled up his bottle with Canadian Club and then put his bottle into his breast pocket. He forced life out of his body and sat limp, summoning another thought about Golden Acres before taking on the exertion of talking. “You coming to Golden Acres? You coming to be a goddamn inmate like me?” He was dead again.

  Sombre and flushed with the rye, he watched Sammy slide almost onto his back, slouched under the weight of his memories and the drink. Sammy sat up, poured a large drink from the Canadian Club bottle, and said, “You sixty yet?”

  “Sixty-one,” he lied.

  “Jeez!” Sammy said, and immediately he appeared younger. “Better be going.” He seemed very sad now, and resigned. He took something from his other breast pocket and sprayed it into his mouth. “Jeez! You’re from Jamaica, ain’t it?” He sprayed his mouth a second time.

  “Barbados.”

  The smell of peppermint lingered on the verandah long after he left.

  The new week began like a Dutch bulb in bloom. His foreman had approved his transfer. And he spent the rest of that Monday morning amongst children and flowers in Sibelius Park. He did not care that they had given him only one helper. He was within sight of his home.

  The saleswoman came twice that day with prospective buyers, all of them wealthy even by appearance. But he had now changed his mind about selling the house and was about to tell the saleswoman when she smiled and said, “I’d like a spare key. You shouldn’t have to leave your job to let me in.”

  All that night he drank and went from room to room, pulling the blinds shut as a watchman closes doors. He retraced his steps, room by room, and turned off all the lights except those in her bedroom. He walked around the bed many times, each time crossing his reflection in the oval mahogany mirror on the bureau laden with her beads. He could not conquer the space in the rest of the house, and so he confined himself to the small room, the thirdfloor bedroom. But he could not sleep.

  He went down to the first floor and sat in his favourite chair in the dark. He held the shoebox with her jewellery in his lap. He sat and drank and spent a long time sifting through the box, letting the strand of pearls fall through his fingers, until it slithered to the end where she had attached a silver cross. He had not noticed this before.

  When the telephone rang, it was already morning and he was still in the chair, dressed in his green work clothes. The contents of the box were scattered on the floor, but in his hand was the cross.

  “Congratulations!”

  He did not know what time it was. He did not recognize the voice. Then, he thought it was his wife talking to him. But it was only the telephone. He thought he had just dozed off.

  “Good morning!”

  The voice was more pleasant now.

  “I have a buyer for you.”

  It was the saleswoman. “We’re coming over right away. You have an offer to sign. What a lovely day!”

  She arrived just as he was leaving for the park. The buyer came through the door without greeting him, and immediately praised the possibilities of the house. “Great! This wall will come out! The whole wall. I’ll townhouse it. These stairs have to go. A winding staircase right here. Right up to the third floor. After I tear out a couple more walls, you know, open it up to let it breathe . . .”

  He could feel the dust in his nostrils, and his sinus returning, and he relived the first years of his ownership of the house when this was a working-class street, before it was transformed by renovation trucks, heating trucks, gas installation trucks, contractors’ trucks, and garbage trucks.

  “How soon can you move out?”

  He had given the buyer immediate occupancy.

  “The sooner the better,” she said.

  He could see the line of her brassiere. He could see the line of flesh above her bikini panties. And he could see the complete outline of her panties. They were not the same colour as her lightweight dress. Although he had signed, he still did not like her.

  He went back to his park. As he cleaned the garden beds, children threw Frisbees into the air, and some of them landed beside him.

  He had cut the last thread of his connection.

  He looked up and saw them leaving.

  Children walked gingerly in and out of his garden beds at the far corner of the park, and each time a ball or a Frisbee landed, he threw it back to them. The black-and-white soccer ball came to him, and at the last moment it swerved away. “Pardon!” As he bent down to kill a grub, he watched a young man stomp on a cluster of Dutch bulbs, trying to pick up a Frisbee. A dog stepped lightly through the bed of chrysanthemums and bent down. But before the thin brown sausage was out of its shivering body, he threw a rake at him.

  He looked across the street and saw two vans parked in front of his house. One was marked TEPERMAN RENOVATIONS and the other MARVEL LANDSCAPING. Disregarding the rake and the children and the dog, he rushed across the street. He couldn’t believe they would come so soon!

  The buyer and the saleswoman and the men from the renovations and landscaping companies were walking through rooms, pushing furniture aside, measuring, running lines of cord along walls and making small dots with a pencil. He was standing just inside the front door. Their voices came down to him from her bedroom. They did not know he was home. He heard their gleeful voices, sounding surer, it seemed, than his own fifteen years ago when he acquired the house.

  “You got it for a song!”

  Their footsteps were over his head.

  “I’ll take care of your kickback.” He recognized the buyer’s voice.

  “I didn’t tell him you were a developer.” He recognized her voice.

  They were coming down now. She was the first to appear. She saw him standing there and she flashed a smile.

  He went back outside. He discovered that they had walked through his garden beds. Chalk marks that roads department men make on sidewalks when they’re measuring for sewers were all along his walk.

  He had left her memory inside. And he had left her shoebox, and all her clothes, her private accumulation of fifteen years. And now these strangers were drawing lines on the walls of her bedroom and along the floors she had walked so silently and painfully on. Their hands had touched her bed. And their footprints were in his flower beds.

  He heard the front door bang. The saleswoman was running out behind him. He walked away without answering.

  Back in the park, he sat on a bench. Children were all around him.

  She came out ahead of the three men. The buyer stood with his arms akimbo. The two workmen shook hands and drove off. She left in her silver-grey BMW. Only the buyer remained. He moved from one side of the house to the other, bending down at basement windows, all the time jotting things in a book. At last he left. But he saw him come back in a black Cadillac, drive slowly up to the house, stop, and then move on. The buyer passed beside him sitting on the bench in the park.

  A dog was
at his feet, licking his construction boots. It was the same dog he had chased earlier. The dog came closer and sat between his boots.

  As the warmth went out of the day and the children ran home, as if a bell of hunger and obedience had summoned them, he was left alone in the park with the dog still sitting between his muddy boots. The flowers seemed to make one last shiver before the night air bent them slightly for their long sleep. All around him lights came on in houses, but he remained sitting there, motionless in the large sea of grass as the park seemed to turn into a lake and he was anchored to the bench which moved only with his imagination.

  Sammy would already be in his room for the night, with a bottle of rye under his pillow for company and warmth.

  He could no longer see his house, for it had become submerged in the same darkness in which he and the dog sat. But he imagined it was still there.

  The shoebox was all he would take to his new place, whether that place was the rooming house or Golden Acres.

  The dog jumped up beside him on the green bench and put its head between his legs.

  Shapes moved in the windows on the border of the park. The dog nudged closer to him to say goodnight with a warm licking tongue, or goodbye, and was soon lost in the darkness. His eyes followed its first trotting steps in the shadows and then could not find it among the trees and the tool shed.

  He got up and collected his tools and took them into the shed. He walked to the far corner of the park where his helper had left the lawnmower; he rolled it backwards and locked it up. He walked the few dark yards to his house, but when he stood in front of it and saw its own darkness and absence of life, he turned away and walked instead to Bathurst Street. He bought a bottle of ginger ale, a bottle of Canadian Club, and some cigarettes. He went along Bathurst, just walking and thinking, until he found himself beside Golden Acres. The entire building was ablaze with fluorescent lights. He wished he knew which was Sammy’s room. He walked to the front door, past the nurse sitting at a desk reading the Star. “You’re getting in rather late,” she said.

  He was climbing the stairs, looking into empty rooms where the lights were fierce as in the lobby. In one, there was an old man motionless on a small white bed. In another, an old woman was sitting upright on a white sheet and her lips were moving. There was no other sign of life on that floor. He walked along another corridor, hearing only his construction boots on the grey linoleum, until he reached the top floor. It was noiseless there too. He retraced his steps. On the way out, the nurse looked up and nodded and said, “Oh, you’re just visiting . . .”

  He was back on the bench in the park. The dog had not returned. He opened the door of the tool shed. The bulb in the small cement room was weak and he tripped among the hoses. He moved some tools aside and some snakes of hoses and forks before he found the can which contained gas for the lawnmower. He filled an empty bottle and left. He walked slowly with the three bottles, ginger ale, rye, and gas.

  He entered his house and left the front door wide open. He turned on the lights in each room, right up to the third floor. He went back to the kitchen and poured himself a rye and ginger, and sat with the shoebox on the kitchen table. The house was quiet. The house was bright. He had missed Sammy’s room. Perhaps it was the one in darkness.

  He took the bottle with the gas back to the third floor and, just as he would do with plant fertilizer in his own garden or in the park, he sprinkled the gas around the edges of the rooms, one room at a time, some on the bed, some on the white crocheted doilies she had made, all down the stairs to the first floor. He doused the kitchen and the bathroom more lavishly, more carefully, as if he was coaxing young plants. He washed his hands under the cold-water tap with Sunlight soap. It felt as if small snakes or worms were pulling at his skin, as if his skin was tightening.

  Now he could not find his cigarettes. He could not find his matches. He didn’t know which floor to light first. He hadn’t thought about that. Should he light the third floor, and then run down to the second, and then the first, and then run outside and go back to the shed, which he had forgotten to lock? In twenty years he had never been so careless.

  He took another drink. He always had to take a second drink to help him unknot a problem. The cigarettes and matches were on the table. The shoebox was hiding them. Was she in the room with him? She was always there to tell him where he had misplaced his cigarettes. She was always so careful!

  He lit the cigarette. He threw the match into the sink. He got up with the shoebox and his drink. And immediately, as the glass touched his lips, so too did the flame kiss the gas and fly up and engulf him; and before he could think of where the front door was, the explosion came.

  He could not move. He could not see. He could not cry out. There was no smoke. Only the orange of fire, bright as the colours of spring in the park. And the last thing he heard, or thought he heard, was the terrified yelping of a dog, arrived too late, scampering from the rage of the fire.

  THEY’RE NOT

  COMING BACK

  On the second night, the day after it happened, the house was dark. She was surprised to hear the six o’clock news on television as she closed the front door. She could not remember whether she had left the television on for security or whether she’d wanted to hear voices in the empty house when she came home. The bottle in the big brown paper bag nearly slipped from her hand. The liquor store closed at six. The bottle was her sustenance for the night. She was a Catholic. She went to church irregularly, but devoutly, if that is possible. And always, she read books of devotion at night or The Lives of the Saints, especially when she needed something steadfast in her life. She was doing well: confident in her new job; saving when she could; dressing smartly; and she kept in touch with her friends and family. What grieved her was her husband.

  She’d always said it was a bad marriage, but she could offer no certain act, no one thing for blame. She knew she was unhappy. And that was the only important thing. When she’d left him in the house—her house, the house her parents had “given” them for one hundred dollars—she said it was a decision she’d made three years earlier. But she’d taken with her, though she’d tried differently, countless problems from the small renovated bungalow, built in the same style as the one she now rented: she’d taken with her pains and anger from the past two years; unpaid bills and balances on his credit cards, personal debts now changed into consolidating loans; her fifty percent obligation to all these debts; and the two girls, one sixteen, the other nine.

  The new house was now full of their absence. The girls were as beautiful as their mother, though larger in their limbs, and more mature and grown-up than their ages suggested. It showed on their faces and in their actions, just as their mother’s pains and anger showed in her face. And the fact that they were not here tonight, welcoming her, as they did every other night, with complaints about the school day and each other, filled her with anxiety. She was a woman waiting for something bad to happen. She did not know what it would be, but she was certain it would happen. And there was the emptiness.

  Five days ago he’d said he would come and take them from her, and drive them to their former home, now his, with his new young daughter, only two months old, and his new woman, their stepmother, who occupied the space she had said was sacred, the space that was the result of the sweat that had poured off her father’s face while he worked for twenty years digging trenches, lifting heavy objects until the strain pulled something in his body and made his testicles grow large, the size of a grapefruit. Her father and mother had given her the small bungalow as a wedding present, marrying that “bastard Kit, ’cause I can’t tell you I like the bastard and the way he treats my daughter”; and it was where her mother and father had lived, in the basement, for the first years of his retirement, until they moved to a little place in Florida for six months. They lived in a home for the aged the other half-year.

  Yes, five days ago he said he would come and take them. It was an experiment. It was for the sake of th
e two girls. The elder child had told her mother she wanted to live with Daddy. The previous Sunday, when he’d brought them back earlier than usual because he had “things to do,” just as she was preparing a dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes with thick brown gravy, the older daughter declared, “I want to go live with Dad.” She heard the words go into her heart, into her abdomen, into her womb. She went over and over all the things she had done in the sixteen years of her daughter’s life, doubting her method of bringing her up, doubting whether she had put the child to lie on the right side, the correct side, whether she should have persisted and fed her from her breasts in spite of the gland problem that had developed. No one ate more than the first spoonful of supper, and then the roast beef and mashed potatoes with thick brown gravy were shoved aside.

  “Can we go to the store and get chips and bubble gum?” the sixteen-year-old said.

  She knew what it meant for them to come home from school at three or half-past three five days a week and find the bungalow empty, with the lights turned on for company, and the radio blaring out their favourite rock music. She knew what it meant for two young girls to be in this neighbourhood in this house that stood in a long line in the long street, identical to the others in red brick; and she knew too what it meant for them to be alone in the house, large and eerie on this side of the street of men who did not go to work during the day, men who worked during the night and were home during the long, boring, and tempting day.

  A man of forty-nine had entered a bungalow when the single parent was at work, taking possession of both the house and the child. It was on the front pages and on television. The little girl was fifteen years old. Blood stained the street for months while mothers wrung their hands and the police, diligent as worm-pickers, trudged in the snow and found nothing but a brown plastic hair-comb. She knew how it felt. She knew how it could happen. She had left her children alone one night to meet a man. During the passionate hour with the man she had bristled with resentment because she did not have the leisure to enjoy making love, which she loved to make, and was filled with guilt and doubt: could the sixteen-year-old look after the nine-year-old, and remember to keep the television loud, and remember not to answer the door, and if she answered the telephone, remember not to say, “Mom is not here,” but say, “She’s busy at the moment”? Those fears had left her shaking in all her limbs, so long untouched, so long tense, so long pure.