Oonya Kempadoo - All Decent Animals

* * *

Ata drops Pierre off to work the next morning. Fraser’s breakfast is ready, Thomas will see when he wakes, and SC has offered to come in, since she was off from work. As Ata drives, she realizes that she misses the working-morning routine, the feeling of knowing, as you dress, the workforce is dressing too. The solid, reassuring comfort of a lot of people doing the same thing with you. Riding out the door, into the car, the street, bus, going to work. Good, hearty industriousness. Pierre’s shaven jaw, her shower-wet hair, that fresh facing-the-morning feeling can only compare, slightly, to the travel rush. No independent work at home can give you that.

They pass some little schoolchildren with their faces greased and shining, gazing away their sleepy freedom before the heat begins. Ata swerves off the Savannah and stops behind the line of cars dropping off teenage girls in blue-and-white uniforms. They step out, chatting and flinging hair and rucksacks about casually. They carry a confident ease of the bright and middle-class with them, into Bishops’ conventlike compound. These are the ones who would soon be the sharp women parking their own cars and stepping, in high heels and tight skirts, into offices close by. No doubt about it, in the way they laugh with each other. They already own the morning. Ata always notices Pierre’s reaction: he can’t resist peering at them and smiling.

“Well, at least there’s always a cheerful sight at this hour. More than I could say once I get inside the building. God, I don’t know how some of the most sour-faced, civil-servant types get a job in there.” He scrambles his bag from the backseat as Ata pulls up outside the U.N. building.

“They must be good at paperwork.”

“Of course, no shortage of that!” He pecks her cheek, tells her not to worry herself ’cause he can see she’s building up to something, and bundles himself off.

She smiles. Somehow, he has a way of carrying on with his strange gait and hunch, as if he’s still in a cold country, battling a heavy coat and blizzard. His gray furry tail disappears through the doors and she drives off, getting the hint from the security guard who always behaves as if it’s the Queen’s palace he’s guarding, with his special U.N. Security training orders.

Ata switches on the radio as she heads west against the traffic for her meeting with God of Design and the manager. The last bit of the day’s brutal headlines hits her, then soca. Both too harsh. She turns off the radio and flows with the mindless, familiar hum of the traffic and the stream of caffeine-buzzed faces, gliding behind glass. She isn’t feeling it this year. Like how some people don’t feel Christmassy until the actual day, she isn’t feeling the pre-Carnival vibes. Ata knows it’s with good reason, with all that is going on, but she’d heard about some donkey foolishness, from the camp. No mind for nonsense now. Maybe it’s time she quit, like everyone else, eventually.

The stupid man is weedy-whacking the whole flicking yard again as she walks in. He likes to annihilate every blade of grass, and slice up bare dust where there’s none. He doesn’t even stop when someone’s passing ’cause he can’t hear a thing with the racket. He and the robowhacker are one. And, like any other man with a machine, he loves feeling the power in his hands, vibrating, as he slowly creeps up to a fresh, unsuspecting bush. Covered in grass crumbs, he moves forward with relish, grinning when he catches sight of Ata scuttling into the hangar. Worse than bachac ants or locust.

“Slinger couldn’t make it,” the manager greets her, loud over the grass eater’s din. “Let’s go in the office.”

It was true about the Donkey Rally business, but in Ata’s mood the story isn’t even funny. Pure nonsense. The manager asks how Fraser’s doing and Ata says she has to get back home soon. Amen is right. Ata isn’t fazed. She receives the concept description and sketches for T-shirt prints, makes her notes, and says nothing. Little bits of gravel spray the windowpane as the madman nears the building, and she stares at the manager’s dull face. She can imagine the state of Design God’s brain, he doesn’t have to say any more.

* * *

“Scampishness! Scamps! All’a, or plenty’a we heroes is scamps — dat is what I telling you. Governor Chacon surrender Trinidad to the English without a shot ! And furthermore, he play kiss-ass to the next scamp, Picton, yes, dat nastiness Kernel Picton, Governor Picton — ent yuh know Picton Street?”

Sammy’s quick brain had start putting two and two together long before now, driving all about, as many hours and radio listening as possible. Programs sponsored by the library or university, or We T’ing hour. Anything to keep his brain occupy and busy. Now, in the rumshop on Independence Square, first time back after certain things had occur in his life, the ole boys hardly notice him ’cause they well into a piece’a ole talk.

“When you really check it, dat is it — we inherit scampishness. Picton, he receive half-pay as captain for twelve years, even when Abercromby leave him in Port’a Spain. And…”

Abercromby Street — downtown, vital, but dirty — has a few bars of course, but also goods shops, hardware, old strong buildings. Abercromby couldn’t be so bad, Sammy thinks, is the Belmont taxi one-way route out of Independence Square. But, they say, maybe he bribe the coward Chacon. Sam amaze himself, that he could find similarities between the historical characters and places, streets, named after them. He would look into this further, check it out with Father McBarnette.

“Cipriani is the next one. He, they teach you in school, he set up de first Workingman’s Association, say he was for de people — but he was on de white man side too.”

Cipriani College and then the boulevard, broad and clean, came to Sam. He like how this thing playing out in his mind like a detective movie, enthrilling and guessy, giving him things to think about.

“Scamp. Dat wasn’t Cipriani statue right here in de square?” another taxi driver ask.

“Yeah, boy. That’s why Sparrow had to sing about it—’cause was more bacchanal before they take it down—’bout if they should keep it or not. People was only destroying it and breaking off hand and foot and t’ing.”

Little, scrawny Oh Yes pipe up from the next table. He always tired and look like he can’t raise heself, only to get in his car and move the gear stick, but hear him, “Oh yes, I is one’a them who break off de man hand, self!”

“You boy, Oh Yes?”

“Why not? Oh yes. Me self. One night, I lash it with a piece’a two-by-four, oh yes. Captain Arthur Cipriani — I give him licks, oh yes!”

Sammy have to laugh at how the man looking so proud and satisfy with heself. “But you not easy, Oh Yes!”

A next man clap him on his back and he grinning, settling back against the cool wall.

One of them start singing Sparrow song. “ I am made of steel and concrete, my address is downtown Frederick Street … Stand quiet and discreet, de sweetness of the oil drum round the street — that’s where I am to be. Cipriani Statue in de heart of town…”

“Where they take it and throw it?”

“Who knows? But de joke of it is dat now, they put up a statue’a Sparrow.”

“Where?”

“Where?” One taxi man tap the next driver on his head — they realize he mean Lord Kitchener statue, recently erected in Saint James roundabout. “Don’ get tie up, boy. Yuh too young.”

Sammy young too but he know things, his brain making connections same as a professor — speed speed.

“That’s de same thing Sparrow say, ‘ Schooling to make me a blughead mule … educate to make comedians, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall … and Dan … is de man … in de van. ’”