In this City

by Austin Clarke

  “Slave? Well, Jesus Christ, woman!”

  “Please, May.”

  “You said master and slave.”

  “I mean power imbalance. You know what I mean. We watched it on television together, for nights!”

  “What the hell is this power imbalance, when I talking woman-to-woman about being close to a man. I fooped a man, Gerts. Can’t you get that in your damn head!”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Well, try harder.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “I thought you would know.”

  “You’re not going back in that house.”

  “And why not? I have a business lunch to prepare for, tomorrow.”

  “After he raped you? Are you crazy? You’re going to report this, this assault, to the police. That’s what you’re going to do. You are in no shape to, you’re in no shape to, to, to . . .”

  “A sin, Gerts. A sin, yes. Fornication, yes. Perhaps, adultery. But not that, Gerts. I’m not any vic, what you call it, the victim. I’m no damn victim, Gerts.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “I’m no victim, Gerts. Don’t call me a victim.”

  “God, May.”

  “I don’t know how it happened. And I don’t know why.”

  “These things do happen,” Gertrude said. “Everyday. On television. And in real life.” She drained her glass. She took up her friend’s handbag. And made ready to leave. “These things happen.” And saying this, Gertrude made the first gesture of friendship since they had been sitting in the bar. She reached out her hands, and placed them over May’s, and tapped May’s hands with her own; and then started rubbing them, sideways, and upwards and down-wards. May continued crying. The tears dropped at the edge of her glass; and when she saw that, she moved the glass to evade the water. But she had moved her face also, and one long drop kissed the surface of the rich brown liquid. The tears continued without effort, without her trying to stop them. And she did nothing to wipe them away. And they started to fall on Gertrude’s fingers, and she too, caught up now, in the soft, sad, passion of the moment, allowed the tears to fall on her hands. “We’re going to fix that fucking bastard!”

  TRYING TO KILL HERSELF

  The snow had buried every landmark and identification and clue she was accustomed to, that helped her to distinguish her rooming house from the other houses that lined her street. When the snow fell like this, and when it was night, she was lost in whiteness. The whiteness was the same thickness all along the short street. The tree in front of her house were covered with the same thickness of snow, like clotted paint, thick as that on the Christmas card that bore the tragic information.

  She walked very carefully, very slowly in the misery of the deep snow. Why am I still in this city? Instinct or fear warned her to slow down her already cautious steps; and this second sense helped her to reach the three-storey rooming house where she had been living for five years. Every part of it, but for the six front windows, was covered in snow. No light came from the windows. And suppose, just suppose, I was a woman who drinks! She stood where she was, to make sure.

  “Eh?” It was a man walking close behind her, ploughing into the holes she had left, thinking she was talking to him.

  “God bless you, son,” and she waited for him to pass, to be alone once more with her thoughts. She followed him in the deep channel of pounded snow, wide enough really for only one person to walk. Look at this blasted snow! And if I were a person who drinks, and coming home to this, how would I find my way home? She looked at the houses along the street, and saw no difference, no distinguishing mark in their character and build. Back home, we build each house different from all the others, to bring out the personality of the house and the owner. But up here, every house is made to look the same. Just like the people. Lord, look at this thing!

  She crunched the snow, soft and unresisting under her heavy weight, thinking, as she descended into the darkened steps to her basement apartment, that she must get out soon, out of this underground living, this confining hole; and as her weight crushed the snow, she could not really know at that moment that she walking on wooden steps, so deep was the snow. Lord, don’t let me die here, in this city, and to be buried in the snow! She stopped a moment under the eave which was not well built and which was not repaired properly by the landlord, for it kept out nothing, neither snow nor rain. And she made up her mind that first thing in the new year, first thing come the new year, I moving from this basement ’cause basements’re where animals should live, not human beings, a place where you put distant cousins to sleep on a weekend. Lord, I can’t figure out some of these recent rich West Indians with their big house-and-land up in the suburbs, furnished for a king, and when they invite you to a party, shove you straight down into the basement to dance and drink liquor with curry goat and rice, holding on to plastic cup and paper plate and plastic fork, all night long as the reggae music breaking your eardrums because your feet must not touch their broadlooms. She was determined to look for a better place.

  The short sentence on the Christmas card, the terrible message, caused her to be nervous and agitated, and she had some difficulty getting the key into the hole. Everything was white. Even under the eaves, repaired three times so far for the year, by the landlord. She couldn’t see, it was so white. But she could feel and guess at the opening.

  The smell of the apartment, closed up all day, came at her with a rush of blood to the head. But it was a welcomed scent of life. Not like the extreme cleanliness, that smell and feeling the smell gave her, when she went to work at the hospital, and on the subway platform and the streetcars and buses. She always felt that the people who used them had no life. Not that she preferred the nastiness of places like New York and their subway. I must take a trip there, before I go to my grave. But why am I thinking about grave and death, even before I have lived a decent life in this city?

  Incense which she burned before she left for work, placing it in the soft dirt in the green plastic pot of her favourite diefenbacias, and left burning like a spirit in her absence, and the incense she burned the moment she returned, to help kill the lingering smells of her profession, and especially too when she cooked curry chicken, the incense filled her nostrils. And there were other smells: the elbow grease and the thoroughness of the detergents and sprays that changed the smell of her cooking into the faint fragrance of heather. And of course, the scents from the green bottles on the water tank of the toilet, left with their mouths agape, their grey wicks like unhealthy tongues. And of Limacol she used to rub her arms and legs and her forehead, when she felt a touch of the flu coming on. And that of her perfume, which sometimes she left open, in her rush to be punctual. The smell of close acquaintance with a room, with a chair, with the floor which was not level and which was covered in linoleum, over which she had placed scatter rugs, and which leaned in two directions from the front door, all throughout the apartment to the bathroom at the back.

  The first thing she did after lighting two sticks of incense she bought from a black man dressed like an African in white robes and a white skull cap, and who called her “Sister,” and to whom she said, without a smile, “I’m old enough to be your damn mother, boy!” was to stand and inhale the rising wriggling smell of the line of smoke, and then sneeze loudly and violently. And then she took the Christmas card from her handbag. She placed it on the tall, unpainted walnut dresser in her bedroom. Her bedroom was cluttered. It was the area curtained from the rest of the large room, the living area, by a bellow-like cream screen made of leatherite. She closed this screen like a concertina, pulling it out, until it reached the latches which she locked religiously one time, and opened one more time, making certain her body was safe and could not be seen in the squeezed-off small congested room, from the window which was level with that of the neighbours. Too many oddballs roaming the streets, and for a woman like me . . . She leaned the Christmas card against a bottle of Limacol. Beside it were several bottles t
hat contained creams and lotions, and bottles and vials of pills for headache, for blood pressure, and for the small woman’s problem she suffered from, from time to time.

  Back in the living area, she sat on the sagging couch. The couch was placed against the wall that she shared with the people on her left side, as she came through the door; the east side; the side that was her left, depending upon whether she was facing the couch, or had her back towards it. She turned her back towards the couch very often, in Christian disapproval, almost every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, after eleven o’clock from the neighbours on her left side, “that blasted side,” as she called it, when they turned up their stereo and played it full blast, and doused her in reggae and rap music, “that heathen music,” as she called it, that they played and played and laughed and shouted to, and she knew they were drunk, and behaving as if they had not left the West Indies too long, and were now living amongst decent people. It played and played and pounded her body and mind with its unrelenting beat, and drove her mind to murderous thoughts. But she never complained to them. She was too much a Christian-minded person. Never knocked on the wall with a broomstick. Never refused to say, “Good morning, my dear,” to the father, or the mother, or the strapping sons and pregnant daughter when she met them in the early morning, stiffened against the cold in their thin clothes, dressed in the winter as if they were still back in Trinidad; or when she saw them bright and blazing in colours of the summer, as if they were going to a picnic in the Caribbean with all that noise, or marching in the Caribana parade.

  Beside the couch, covered with a printed cloth down to the floor to hide the stain and the tear that ran to the floor, a cloth of frayed edges like tassels, over the deep green broadloom type scatter rugs and carpets, was a table covered by the same printed cloth. The cloth had a design of roses. Red roses. Roses of Sharon. She loved roses. And that was one reason why she was so drawn to the Christmas card and its message which dealt with a Mr. Johnson from Jamaica, who had himself been attending his roses in his backyard, and talking to them as any gardener would, when a neighbour who was not from Jamaica and did not know roses or gardeners or decent people, told the police there was a mad man in the backyard talking as if he was crazy, going mad over the bed of red roses. That is what happened to Mr. Johnson. That terrible thing. She looked at the Christmas card, and passed her hand over her Bible. A vase with more red roses, those artificial ones. And a book, Women, which a patient had given her, as a birthday gift last year, for being nice to her after an operation. A small panda, which she had bought for a child on the ward and had not remembered to take it to work. And a larger teddy bear, which her girlfriend had bought for her for Christmas, last Christmas. She slept with the teddy bear between her legs, to give her warmth and keep her company.

  She opened her Bible.

  She opened the heavy, dog-eared book at Hebrews, to chapter one. She passed her little finger on the right hand, a pointer for her weak eyes, over the first verse, over the second verse, mumbling the words in rapid speed to herself. When she passed her pointing finger over the third verse, it was what she wanted. She began to read aloud.

  “ ‘. . . when he had himself purged our sins’ . . . Yes, Lord . . . ‘sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high’ . . . Praise his name . . . ‘being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.’ Your precious word! ‘For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee’ . . . I am thy humble daughter. ‘This day have I begotten thee?’ Lord, if only your word had said forgiven, instead of begotten!”

  She closed the Bible. She went on questioning the use of begotten for forgiven, wondering if the man who wrote the passage could have made a mistake.

  “Now, I am going on my two knees before you, Lord, to ask for forgiveness for what I’ve done. And to pray for Mr. Johnson and his wife, poor soul. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name, Thy kingdom come . . .”

  When she rose, after lapsing into a longer impromptu prayer than could have been written in no Bible, or Prayer Book, she brushed the lint and grains of dust from her knees. But she was still in her winter coat. She began to feel the warmth in the room. For her, temperature was always was always like life, like warm blood. She left her thermostat always at eighty degrees Fahrenheit, from October until June, in all the five years she lived in this basement. Even if I was paying to heat this place outta my own pocket! And from July until September, she kept it at seventy.

  It was now time for the telephone; and she reached over and got it. Living alone for so many years, loneliness never really touched her, and made her sad, not so long as she had her Bible and her white Solo telephone, with three extension cords added to the original curled length. She bought them one Saturday afternoon from an Indian discount store on Bay, and made them the topic of conversation that night with Millicent when she saw she could walk from the front door to the toilet bowl in the bathroom at the back of the basement.

  “Girl, how you this evening?”

  It was six. Millicent was on the other end, indulging with her, in their nightly conversation. She would put the world right tonight, as she did every night, discussing her work, the hospital, the doctors and nurses and the patients; Millicent’s employers, life, things, and before the end of their conversation, which lasted sometimes for two hours, while they cooked and sometimes burned the rice while talking, happy and laughing and swimming in the sweetness of gossip, the conversation would end, always, on themselves: women. Tonight, her voice was low and unhappy; her spirits dampened from the message on the Christmas card.

  “Well, my dear, some thoughts passed through my head today, on account of what happened to Mr. Johnson, that I had to prostrate myself before my Maker and ask Him what things coming to, in this damn city.”

  Seven-thirty came quickly. Millicent would be in her small kitchen, cooking peas from a can, mashing Irish potatoes which she liked, and which she ate every day, and frying steak which she also liked, round steak, and which she cooked with little or no salt and less pepper, “the pressure, you know,” she explained; and smothered in ketchup, thick as mud. And a bottle of imported beer. Lowen-brau. And before bed, which was punctually at eleven, a glass of Hennessy brandy. Millicent had no time, and no guilt about not saying her prayers before she flopped into her bed.

  “The snow today, eh? Deep enough to bury a man. And I haven’t even taken off my winter coat since I got home. You still seeing Percy? Percy talking marriage yet?”

  She smiled and listened to her friend tell her about the three women Percy has, and how if Percy doesn’t get his act together, “One o’ these days I might have to kill that son of a bitch! I going with the same man six years, keeping myself clean for that man, and he not thinking marriage?”

  She stopped talking and listened to Millicent’s voice; and when Millicent stopped talking, she too remained silent, and listened to Millicent’s breathing, gauging her anger, and her battle with Percy; and Mr. Johnson came into her own thoughts, and she held the Solo, and listened and thought and could utter no word, as if the weight of the words she wanted to speak but could not, were too heavy. Still, she did not speak. And still, she did not end the conversation. She could almost hear the distance from the centre of the city up to the suburbs where Millicent lived, in the noise of the silence the Solo was making. It was like this sometimes. When she just needed to know there was someone at the other end of the telephone, but incapable of continuing the conversation. Millicent called her crazy for doing this. Millicent asked her if she had something on her mind, when she did this. And she said, “I know it’s bad manners to be like this, but I have nothing to say, child. Nothing do I have to say.” It was some time before she realized that Millicent had had enough, and had hung up on her.

  She unbuttoned the three buttons of her winter coat, and loosened the blue scarf round her neck; and pulled the deep blue woollen blouse out of her brow
n polyester slacks, making herself more comfortable; and after doing this, she was no more comfortable, for her tam-o’-shanter of green, red and black, which she had knitted herself, and had put a large round ball of blue wool in the middle of the skull, was still on her head. When she realized that the telephone was dead, she was cut off from the rest of the world, feeling as if she was cut off from a friend she had loved all her life, forsaken in the harsh decision of that kind of termination, and not being able to call, to hear the person’s voice, but not to speak, just the desire to hear a human voice, but feeling the hurtful pain of being cut off, since there was a new number “at the customer’s request, unlisted,” she sighed. How could people be so cruel?

  She dialed again. She kept all her telephone numbers in her head; and sometimes she dialed a number, not knowing at the out-set whose it was, but recognizing the voice the moment it answered, and then the long inexhaustible talk; her work, the hospital, the doctors and nurses and the patients; and Lee’s employers, life and things.

  “But Lee, you didn’t read in the Star that there was three bullets? Three. Not one, dear, but three. There was three bullets fired in that poor man’s head. The first one missed. And hit the ’luminium lid clear off the pot ’o rice and peas his wife was cooking that Sunday. You know those strong, fat red beans Jamaicans cook in their peas-and-rice? What a crime, eh, girl! That thing ’bout the ’luminium lid off the saucepan o’ food, is the first ounce o’ truth I heard from all the things that I read and that come over the radio and on the television. When I sit down in here at night, and watch the Journal every night at ten o’clock, and see these things, I got to shake my head. I talked to everybody I know and still can’t get the truth outta nobody. Until I received the Christmas card. No. No, I don’t know who sent me the card. But until I got this card I was not an inch further to the truth. I would say that the police is guilty of ’ssassination, plain and simple. I had cooked some of this same rice-and-peas for you once, didn’t I? Yes, man. We was watching the baseball game that Friday night, when George Bell hit the gran’ slam. That same night the police fellow came on the television asking for more bigger guns to protect the police from criminals like Mr. Johnson. Criminals who threaten their lives with a garden fork? My dear, I bet you when the truth does come out, and it may take years before the truth come out, I bet you, Lee muh-dear, that they confess and admit before some commission that all Mr. Johnson had in his hand was a lil spade, made outta tinning, before those two police gunned him down. This city turning into Miami Vice. Now, the very police asking the public to permit them to bear more bigger guns to bore more bigger holes in innocent people.”