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

I remained with him on the bed most of the time.

He said to me one day, ‘You got the coloured pencils?’

I took them from under the pillow.

He said, ‘You want to see some magic?’

I said, ‘What, you know magic really?’

He took the yellow pencil and filled in a yellow square.

He asked, ‘Boy, what colour this is?’

I said, ‘Yellow.’

He said, ‘Just pass me the blue pencil now, and shut your eyes tight tight.’

When I opened my eyes he said, ‘Boy, what colour this square is now?’

I said, ‘You sure you ain’t cheating?’

He laughed and showed me how blue and yellow make green.

I said. ‘You mean if I take a leaf and wash it and wash it and wash it really good, it go be yellow or blue when I finish with it?’

He said, ‘No. You see, is God who blend those colours. God, your father.’

I spent a lot of my time trying to make up tricks. The only one I could do was to put two match-heads together, light them, and make them stick. But my father knew that. But at last I found a trick that I was sure my father didn’t know. He never got to know about it because he died on the night I was to show it him.

It had been a day of great heat, and in the afternoon the sky had grown low and heavy and black. It felt almost chilly in the house, and my father was sitting wrapped up in the rocking chair. The rain began to fall drop by heavy drop, beating like a hundred fists on the roof. It grew dark and I lit the oil lamp, sticking a pin in the wick, to keep away bad spirits from the house.

My father suddenly stopped rocking and whispered, ‘Boy, they here tonight. Listen. Listen.’

We were both silent and I listened carefully, but my ears could catch nothing but the wind and the rain.

A window banged itself open. The wind whooshed in with heavy raindrops.

‘God!’ my father screamed.

I went to the window. It was a pitch black night, and the world was a wild and lonely place, with only the wind and the rain on the leaves. I had to fight to pull the window in, and before I could close it, I saw the sky light up with a crack of lightning.

I shut the window and waited for the thunder.

It sounded like a steamroller on the roof.

My father said, ‘Boy, don’t frighten. Say what I tell you to say.’

I went and sat at the foot of the rocking chair and I began to say, ‘Rama! Rama! Sita Rama!’

My father joined in. He was shivering with cold and fright.

Suddenly he shouted, ‘Boy, they here. They here. I hear them talking under the house. They could do what they like in all this noise and nobody could hear them.’

I said, ‘Don’t fraid, I have this cutlass here, and you have your gun.’

But my father wasn’t listening.

He said, ‘But it dark, man. It so dark. It so dark.’

I got up and went to the table for the oil lamp to bring it nearer. But just then there was an explosion of thunder so low it might have been just above the roof. It rolled and rumbled for a long long time. Then another window blew open and the oil lamp was blown out. The wind and the rain tore into the dark room.

My father screamed out once more, ‘Oh God, it dark.’

I was lost in the black world. I screamed until the thunder died away and the rain had become a drizzle. I forgot all about the trick I had prepared for my father: the soap I had rubbed into the palms of my hands until it had dried and disappeared.

*

Everybody agreed on one thing. My mother and I had to leave the country. Port-of-Spain was the safest place. There was too a lot of laughter against my father, and it appeared that for the rest of my life I would have to bear the cross of a father who died from fright. But in a month or so I had forgotten my father, and I had begun to look upon myself as the boy who had no father. It seemed natural.

In fact, when we moved to Port-of-Spain and I saw what the normal relationship between father and son was — it was nothing more than the relationship between the beater and the beaten — when I saw this I was grateful.

My mother made a great thing at first about keeping me in my place and knocking out all the nonsense my father had taught me. I don’t know why she didn’t try harder, but the fact is that she soon lost interest in me, and she let me run about the street, only rushing down to beat me from time to time.

Occasionally, though, she would take the old firm line.

One day she kept me home. She said, ‘No school for you today. I just sick of tying your shoe-laces for you. Today you go have to learn that!’

I didn’t think she was being fair. After all, in the country none of us wore shoes and I wasn’t used to them.

That day she beat me and beat me and made me tie knot after knot and in the end I still couldn’t tie my shoe-laces. For years afterwards it was a great shame to me that I couldn’t do a simple thing like that, just as how I couldn’t peel an orange. But about the shoes I made up a little trick. I never made my mother buy shoes the correct size. I pretended that those shoes hurt, and I made her get me shoes a size or two bigger. Once the attendant had tied the laces up for me, I never undid them, and merely slipped my feet in and out of the shoes. To keep them on my feet, I stuck paper in the toes.

To hear my mother talk, you would think I was a freak. Nearly every little boy she knew was better and more intelligent. There was one boy she knew who helped his mother paint her house. There was another boy who could mend his own shoes. There was still another boy who at the age of thirteen was earning a good twenty dollars a month, while I was just idling and living off her blood.

Still, there were surprising glimpses of kindness.

There was the time, for instance, when I was cleaning some tumblers for her one Saturday morning. I dropped a tumbler and it broke. Before I could do anything about it my mother saw what had happened.

She said, ‘How you break it?’

I said, ‘It just slip off. It smooth smooth.’

She said, ‘Is a lot of nonsense drinking from glass. They break up so easy.’

And that was all. I got worried about my mother’s health.

She was never worried about mine.

She thought that there was no illness in the world a stiff dose of hot Epsom Salts couldn’t cure. That was a penance I had to endure once a month. It completely ruined my weekend. And if there was something she couldn’t understand, she sent me to the Health Officer in Tragarete Road. That was an awful place. You waited and waited and waited before you went in to see the doctor.

Before you had time to say, ‘Doctor, I have a pain—’ he would be writing out a prescription for you. And again you had to wait for the medicine. All the Health Office medicines were the same. Water and pink sediment half an inch thick.

Hat used to say of the Health Office, ‘The Government taking up faith healing.’

My mother considered the Health Office a good place for me to go to. I would go there at eight in the morning and return any time after two in the afternoon. It kept me out of mischief, and it cost only twenty-four cents a year.

But you mustn’t get the impression that I was a saint all the time. I wasn’t. I used to have odd fits where I just couldn’t take an order from anybody, particularly my mother. I used to feel that I would dishonour myself for life if I took anybody’s orders. And life is a funny thing, really. I sometimes got these fits just when my mother was anxious to be nice to me.

The day after Hat rescued me from drowning at Docksite I wrote an essay for my schoolmaster on the subject, ‘A Day at the Seaside’. I don’t think any schoolmaster ever got an essay like that. I talked about how I was nearly drowned and how calmly I was facing death, with my mind absolutely calm, thinking, ‘Well, boy, this is the end.’ The teacher was so pleased he gave me ten marks out of twelve.