In this City

by Austin Clarke

  “It’s Marco, man.”

  He closed the book, after putting a bookmark between the pages; the bookmark was a sliver of Kente cloth; and replaced it into the shelves, which took up two complete walls in his small room. The shelves were crammed with books. All the books were paperbacks. All the books dealt with black people, and were written on black subjects, in fiction, philosophy, religion, art, culture and his favourite, biography. He kept his school texts under the bed, on the floor.

  “BJ! Man, it’s Marco!”

  He was not impressed by the impatience in the voice, and before he went to the door he rested the Gaulois cigarette into an ashtray, he lit some incense, and he turned down the volume of John Coltrane playing “A Love Supreme.” He put his housecoat on, and went to the door. The ashtray was a square crystal one, which his father had bought eight Christmases ago and had never used. His father did not smoke.

  “Fuck, man!” Marco said, stomping one foot after the other, on the worn coconut-husk mat. “It’s fucking cold out here, man!”

  BJ looked at Marco sternly.

  “Sorry, man.”

  A trace of a smile came over his thin lips as Marco remembered his aversion to foul language. So, he opened the door wider, and Marco squeezed between the post and him, and went in, and stomped one foot after the other, although his sneakers were already wiped clean on the mat. He hunched his shoulders, and pushed his hands into his jeans side pockets and said, “It’s fucking cold, man!” Under his arm were newspapers.

  “You should control your emotions better than that.”

  Marco looked cowed, and said, “Sorry, man. But it’s all right for you, man.”

  The embraced, touching bodies, and slapping each other on the back three times, as if they belonged to an old fraternity of rituals and mystery. They let go of each other, and did it a second time, with their heads touching the other’s shoulder. It was Italian, and it was African, and it was this that joined them in their close friendship for the past nine years. They saw each other every day, either at school or here, in BJ’s room. Their parents never met. And did not know of their sons’ deep friendship. And it never occurred to either of them that they should bring their parents into their strong bond of friendship. BJ’s mother went to every school event that required a parent’s presence. And Marco’s mother and father attended them too. But they never met.

  BJ went to the small square table in a corner with an African print covering it, and on which he had put a large leather-bound copy of the Holy Qur’an. Two glasses and a bottle of vodka were on the table. Ice was already in the glasses. He had been expecting Marco. The ice was already melting.

  “Punctuality,” he told Marco, “is also not an Italian characteristic, although we are blamed for inventing CPT.”

  “Fuck, man! Gimme the drink!”

  And BJ poured two strong vodkas. He had not forgotten the orange juice, but he could not risk taking it earlier out of his mother’s fridge, just in case. He did this now, and when he returned, Marco was sitting in a straight-back chair with his drink already at his lips. He poured each of them some orange juice.

  Coltrane was at the stage in his song, chanting “a love supreme,” over and over. Marco joined in the chanting. His voice was deep for his age, eighteen, similar to a bass.

  “A love su-preme, a love sup-preme,” he chanted. “Nineteen times, fuck, you say he does that. Sometimes, you don’t know, BJ, but I feel he’s gonna sing it maybe twenty times, or eighteen times! Fuck!”

  “Unless your concentration diminishes, Coltrane won’t.”

  “Fuck!”

  BJ went back to the table, brushed a piece of ice from it, and ran his hands over the cover of the Qur’an. It was covered in brown paper, cut from a bag from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario weeks ago, when he went to pick up his weekly supply of vodka. He was seventeen then. But he looked older. He always looked older. This did not fool the manager at the LCBO store around the corner from his home, and he knew it; so to save the embarrassment, he used forged identification, including a schoolmate’s birth certificate. He felt guilty about doing this, on the first three occasions; but it was the style of the times. Only last week he read in the Star that the police had caught five immigrants working illegally under false names and with forged social insurance numbers. It was the way of the times. And he was a born Canadian, so, “Fuck!” Marco consoled him, and himself. On the brown paper cover he had printed HOLY BIBLE. On the bedside table, beside his single bed that had an iron bedstead, he had placed the Bible, just in case. He read the Bible, too. His mother had given him the Bible. But he devoted his devotions to the Holy Qur’an. Coltrane was now into the second part of his song. The music came out at them with equal balance and power, even though he had turned down the volume, out of the four speakers. The speakers were four feet tall and more than one foot in width. He had built them himself. The other components in the stereo, he and Marco had reconditioned from spare parts and odds and ends thrown out by neighbours up in North York. Every piece but the CD player they had reconditioned themselves.

  “Did you check out the things for me?”

  “Yeah, man,” Marco said. He was almost perfect in the speech of black people. It came out easy and almost natural. “I got me the Form, man.”

  “Well, let’s spend a few moments scrutinizing the entries, and adding to our fortune.”

  “All these books. Fuck. Man, you’s something else! All these books!” Marco would busy himself by taking out a book, flipping its pages, replacing and repeating this until he had touched almost every book in the shelves. And he did this to allow BJ to concentrate on the Racing Form. “You’re like, like a walking ’cyclopedia, man. And also a genius at the track. Fuck!”

  “All it takes is concentration, Marco. I’ve been telling you this for years. Concentration. And dedication.”

  “I gonna give you something Italian to read. You know anything about Italian classics? Man, I gonna lay some Italian literature on you one o’ these days. Like Dante, man.”

  “Third shelf, sixth book from the right. Second bookcase.”

  The book Marco picked out was Seven Systems of Dante’s Hell.

  “Fuck! I didn’t know he wrote this, too!”“

  “Imamu Baraka wrote that, Marco. That’s a different inferno,” BJ said. “My mother is fine. She didn’t ask for you this morning.”

  “Fuck!”

  “This morning she pushed my door and greeted me in her usual way, ‘You!’ I pretended I was sleeping, but all the time I could see her face and the worry in it, and the worry in her body about her work, and I was pretending I was sleeping. I was up all night, reading.”

  “This black power shit?”

  “As a matter of fact, Marco, I was reading Shakespeare.” Marco got up from his chair and went to the bookcase. He knew this one. This one was, in a way, his favourite bookcase for it contained books he too liked. The bookcase was made from unpainted dealboard, sawed and cut by him and BJ; and it occupied the space in the wall between a window and a cupboard. It ran from the floor to the ceiling. BJ liked everything in his room to run from the floor to the ceiling. It had something to do with perspective, he said. Marco did not understand, and said, “Fuck!” to show his sentiments. If his room were larger, BJ knew that they would have built the speakers from the floor to the ceiling. In this shelf in the bookcase were books by Shakespeare, which Marco liked and did well in, in school, preferring Romeo and Juliet – “Fuck! Not because I’m Italian, man!” – and As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice, which they stopped studying in school the term before he reached that grade. BJ preferred Henry IV and Othello, “because you’re black, right? Fuck!” But BJ told him, “because it contains the best and, perhaps, the most noble of Shakespeare’s noble poetry. I don’t even like the character Othello. Iago is a more realistic character. I see Iagos every day in class.” And to all this, all Marco said, years ago when they had this conversation the first time, was “Fuck!” They
have had this same conversation many times since. And Marco uses the same single word to express his sentiment.

  “Today is the last day. I suggest we go out with a bang. But how many classes would you miss if we got there for the first?”

  “Lemme see. Biology? Physics? English? And basketball practice.”

  “I will do your Biology and Physics assignments for you. Or we can do them together at the track.”

  “Fuck!” Marco said. He rubbed his hands as if he was cold. He poured himself another vodka and orange juice.

  For young men, for eighteen-year-old boys, really, they had an enormous prodigity for alcohol, which is the term BJ used laughingly, when they would sit in his small room and consume half of a twenty-six ounce bottle of imported Absolut Vodka; and if his mother had returned home and had seen them, she would shake her head in pleasure at their hearty living for orange juice. “You two boys don’t know how good I feel to see you drinking orange juice instead of all this damn Coke and Pepsi!” And after these long bouts, their speech was not even slurred.

  “Did you remember the Globe?” BJ read the Globe everyday. He read the racing tips first. He read the sports section second, the editorial third, and the foreign news section fourth. He read nothing else in this newspaper.

  “Woodbine, here we come!” Marco said. “They’re at the post! Fuck!”

  “Should we invest a hundred each? What is your opinion, Marco?”

  “A hundred bucks? Fuck! Why not, man? I deposited yesterday’s winnings in my account. Those tellers’re weird, man. She look at me with all that bread as if I was a drug dealer! Fuck, man!”

  “Today’s the last day, man,” BJ said. Marco noticed the tone of his voice.

  “You all right, man?”

  “You have to do something with the money in your bank account. Something. Some thing. And we have to think about the car, too.”

  “Today is the last day, man. So if we lose . . .”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “Sorry, man.”

  BJ went to his dresser, a narrow, tall piece of furniture which his mother had bought at the Goodwill Store on Jarvis Street, to save money, and when he had stained to make it look like mahogany. It looked like a mahogany antique piece of Georgian furniture, although he did not know that. It had five drawers. In the top drawer, under his handkerchiefs which his mother starched and ironed and folded into four, he kept his cash, arranged in denominations in ascending order, inside a box that contained cheques from the bank. He opened this drawer now, and took from it a metal box that had a key. He brought the box to the bed and unlocked it. There were four boxes that used to contain cheques in the metal box. They were full of bank notes. No note was smaller than a ten. He did not count his money every night, but his memory was good, and he knew that with the withdrawals and the deposits into his private “safe,” that he had five thousand, three hundred and five dollars in it. He could not tell his mother about this. He could not offer to lend her money, not even when he saw her moaning and crying and cursing his father for having abandoned them; not even when her rent of four hundred dollars a month was in arrears. And sadly, not even when she had to postpone her registration for one month, and never caught up, in the Practical Nursing course at George Brown College. She would kill him to learn that he had so much money, in her house, in all the time she was seeing misery, in all those days when she had to cut and contrive. But he had prepared for her. At such a young age, it seemed ominous, too adult, too final a thing this preparation by someone so young. He had opened a savings account in her name, at a different bank from the one she used. Marco put his winnings in a chequing account. But he kept his in cash.

  “Here’s twenty tens, Marco. I’ll take twenty, too. This is the last day, so I’m staking you. What we win, we keep. What we lose, well . . .”

  “Fifty percent of our winnings should still go in the kitty, man. Fuck!” It was their business arrangement. And they stuck to this code, like members of a gang. “And look for a long shot, man!”

  “There’s no such thing, Marco. No such thing. My father went to the races every day. Faking illness from work. And family crises and emergencies. He had to be there. In summer and winter. He even walked there, once. Not to mention the times he had to walk home. And he bet on long shots because he was a gambler. He was a gambler. And was greedy. He was a fool. A damn fool. He thought he could get rich from the track. We are different. We are investors. Don’t ever let me see you betting on a long shot! Long shots are for racetrack touts.”

  “Why can’t we use the car?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you it’s not safe to be driving that kind of car in Toronto? It’s safer to drive it in Montreal.”

  “Oh man! What’s the point of having the wheels and not using it? Fuck!”

  “Have you told your parents you own a white BMW? Or more correctly, a fifty percent share in a 1992 white BMW?”

  “Well, fuck no, man! For them to execute me?”

  “Exactly! My mother doesn’t even know I can drive. As long as our friend respects our confidence, the car will remain parked in her underground garage in Scarborough. Now, I have to make my salats.”

  “Make your salads, man. Make your salads. Fuck.”

  “Are you going to respect my religious principles? Or are you leaving?”

  “I’ll respect your salads, man. I’ll respect your praying, man.”

  The Timex watch on BJ’s write began to buzz. It was the hour for prayer. Marco poured himself a vodka quickly, wanting to stop the racket of the ice cubes in his glass and the sound of the vodka pouring out of the bottle, now almost empty, before BJ began his prayers.