V. Naipaul - The nightwatchman's occurrence book - and other comic inventions

‘Take him far,’ Baksh added. ‘Far far.’

‘All right,’ Foam said, with sudden irritation. ‘All right, don’t rush me. I going to take him so far, he not going to offend your sight or your heart.’

Mrs Baksh almost cried. ‘Is only since the elections that this boy talking to me like that, you know.’

Baksh saw a chance to redeem himself. ‘Boy, you know you talking to your mother? Who carry you for nine months in their belly? Who nurse you?’

Mrs Baksh said, ‘Why you don’t shut your tail, Baksh?’

‘The two of all-you quarrel,’ Foam said, and went downstairs.

He took a clean gunny sack, held it open and rolled it down to make a nest of sorts; lifted Tiger from his box, using newspaper to keep his hands clean, and put him in the nest.

Herbert tiptoed down the steps.

‘Ey, Herbert. Come down and throw away this dirty box somewhere in the backyard. It making the whole house stink.’

‘Foam, what you going to do with him?’

Foam didn’t reply. His irritation lingered.

Tiger sprawled in the nest of sacking, heaving with hiccoughs.

‘Foam, Tiger going to dead?’

Foam looked at Herbert. ‘No. He not going to dead.’

‘Foam! You not going to kill him?’

He didn’t know what he was going to do. When he had spoken to Nelly Chittaranjan about Tiger, it was only to make conversation, to stop her from crying.

Tiger made choking noises.

Foam stood up.

‘Foam! You not going to kill Tiger?’

Foam shook his head.

‘Promise, Foam. Kiss your finger and promise.’

‘You know I don’t believe in that sort of thing.’

‘Don’t kill him, Foam. You don’t believe in this obeah business, eh, Foam?’

Foam sucked his teeth. ‘That boy give you the top?’

‘Rafiq?’ Herbert brightened. ‘Yes, he give me the top.’

‘Good, throw away that old box. It stinking.’

Herbert touched Tiger’s nose with the tip of his index finger.

Tiger’s eyes didn’t change; but his tail lifted and dropped.

*

Nelly Chittaranjan hadn’t been thinking when she agreed to meet Foam that evening and take the dog. Now, sitting in Teacher Francis’s drab drawing-room and only half listening while he talked, she wasn’t so sure about the dog or about Foam. She didn’t believe the dog existed at all. But the thought of meeting a boy at night in a lonely lane had kept her excited all afternoon. She had never walked out with any boy: it was wrong; now that she was practically engaged, it was more than wrong. Mr Chittaranjan was modern enough in many ways — the way he had given her education and the way he furnished his house and kept it shining with new paint — but he wasn’t advanced enough to allow his only daughter to walk out with a boy before she was married. Nelly didn’t blame him. She knew she was being married off so quickly only because she hadn’t been bright enough to get into one of the girls’ high schools like La Pique. Thinking of La Pique, she thought of the Poly, and then she thought of Harbans’s son, the boy she was going to marry. She had seen him once or twice in Port of Spain when she had gone to stay with her aunt (the wife of the barrister, the donor of the chromium-plated ashtray in Chittaranjan’s veranda). He was a fat yellow boy with big yellow teeth, a giggling gum-chewer, always taking out his wallet to show you his latest autographed picture of some American actress, and you were also meant to see the crisp quarter-inch wad of new dollar notes. Still, if she had to marry him, she had to; it was her own fault. She would have preferred the Poly though. Teacher Francis had met someone who had actually been. There were dances at the Poly! Foam didn’t even know what the Poly was. But he was no fool. He couldn’t talk as well as that Lorkhoor; but Lorkhoor was a big show-off; she preferred Foam. Foam was crazy. Those sunglasses. And those long speeches he shot right off the reel, just like that. She had wanted to laugh all the time. Not that the speeches were funny; it was the over-serious way Foam spoke them. And yet he could never make her feel that the whole thing was more than a piece of skylarking. A boy trying to be mannish! And making up that story about a dog, just to meet her!

Teacher Francis had to pull her up. ‘But what making you laugh all the time so for, Miss Chittaranjan?’ Teacher Francis reserved standard English only for prepared statements. ‘I was saying, the thing about shorthand is practice. When I was studying it, I use to even find myself writing shorthand on my pillow.’ That was how he always rounded off the lesson.

Nelly looked at the dusty clock on the ochre and chocolate wall. It was twenty past eight; she was meeting Foam at a quarter to nine.

But this was the time when Teacher Francis, the lesson over, his coat off, his tie slackened a little lower than usual, liked to talk about life. He was talking about the election. A bitter subject for him ever since Lorkhoor had, without warning or explanation, deserted him to campaign for Preacher.

‘This new constitution is a trick, Miss Chittaranjan. Just another British trick to demoralize the people.’

Nelly, her pen playing on her pad, asked absently, ‘Who you voting for, Teach?’

‘Not voting for nobody at all.’

‘You talking like the Witnesses now, man, Teach.’

He gave a sour laugh. ‘No point in voting. People in Elvira don’t know the value of their vote.’

Nelly looked up from her pad. ‘It look to me that a lot of them know it very well, Teach.’

‘Miss Chittaranjan, I don’t mean nothing against your father, Miss Chittaranjan. But look at Lorkhoor. Before this election, I did always think he was going to go far. But now …’ Teacher Francis waved a hand and didn’t finish the sentence. ‘Elvira was a good friendly place before this universal suffrage nonsense.’

‘Teach! You mean to say you against democracy?’

He saw he had shocked her. He smiled. ‘Is a thing I frown on, Miss Chittaranjan.’

‘Teach!’

‘I am a man of radical views, Miss Chittaranjan.’

Nelly put down her pen on her notebook. ‘My father would be very interested, Teacher Francis.’

He saw the notebook. ‘Miss Chittaranjan! You been taking down what I was saying, Miss Chittaranjan!’

She hadn’t. But she snapped the book shut and rose.

‘I was just throwing off ideas, Miss Chittaranjan. You mustn’t think I is a fascist.’

She prepared to leave. ‘ I don’t think anything, Teacher Francis. But if my father hear that you don’t approve of democracy or the elections, he wouldn’t approve of me coming to you for lessons, I could tell you.’

It was what Teach feared.

‘I was just talking, Miss Chittaranjan. Idea-mongering. Fact is, as a teacher, I have to be impartial.’

‘I know what you mean. You want to play both sides.’

‘No, Miss Chittaranjan, no.’

She didn’t wait to hear any more.

He wandered about his bare, cheerless government house, feeling once again that, since the defection of Lorkhoor, Elvira had become a wilderness.

*

Ravine Road was pitch dark. There was no moon, no wind. The tall featureless bush hunched over the road on one side; on the other side the dry ravine was black, blank. When Foam turned off the headlamps, all the night noises seemed to leap out at the van from the bush, all the croakings and stridulations of creatures he couldn’t see, drowning the heaving of Tiger on the seat next to him.

Then the noises receded. Foam heard the beat of a motor engine not far away. Soon he saw headlights about two hundred yards down the slope where the road turned. The vehicle had taken the corner too quickly: the headlights made a Z. Then Foam was dazzled.