Oonya Kempadoo - All Decent Animals

“Kojak, eh?” The young fool will make this thing drag out.

“Yuh know Telly Savalez on TV?”

“How he go know dat?”

“Well, Burrows shave he head, keep on a dark glasses, and always have a lollipop in he mouth, just as Savalez. And he have a finney hand — was somebody he do wickedness to. And one day when Kojak walking alone — he uses to like to walk about in rough places without escort, to show he is man — well, de fella brackle him, break he arm, and push him in he car, wind up the window on he hand. Man, he drive him all’a about Port’a Spain with him so, before he let him go. Well, of course, dat was the wrong mistake he make — next day the Flying Squad search all over the country and find him and shoot him and put a gun in he hand. From then on everybody ’fraid Kojak and he shave he head and t’ing. Just used to kill off criminals as he ketch them.”

* * *

“Duke sing about it. ‘ How many more must die…’ ”

* * *

It don’t look like they would get back around to finish off with the prime scamps countdown from Silver Fox Panday to present PM Manning. But Sammy can’t think of much, offhand, that was named after them anyway. Audrey Jeffers? She have a lil’ piece’a highway over so. Sam had hear on the radio she was a good woman who had work hard for poor people and like feeding them and things so, set up school lunches and de same Breakfast Shed down by the waterfront. Good food. Cheap. And cooling mauby drink. A good woman.

In his mind. In his mind, Sam driving again. So he decide he should leave. Them talky ole boys didn’t even miss him when he gone. And Sam glad they don’t know nothing about his private state a’ffairs.

FETE SOUNDS CLASH with the gentle Sunday afternoon. They had all had breakfast together out by the pool, almost like how it used to be; Pierre crunching toast and reading the papers, Fraser eating slowly, drinking in the morning with his eyes; Ata shifting her focus between the lines of Isabel Allende, Fraser’s face, Pierre’s distracted form, and the facing hills.

The hills like to play mas with the fete noise. Sound-play is their bacchanal. They bounce, smack, drum the rhythms back and forth until they’re a tangled mess. Now the insistent soca bass marches its vibrations through the whole house and across the lawn. The hills’ mouths open wide and splatter it back out on them, laughing. The MC screams at the crowd and a twangy claw scratches the valley, slicing a cheek. There is no escape from the echoing massacre of noise.

“ Take a jump, take a jump, take a jump right now — it’s Ka-nee-val…” The hills swallow the words but Ata and Fraser know the tune. They watch, from the birdeye perch of the garden wall, down to the busy glitter of thousands of cars parking near the Oval cricket ground.

“And they’re only just now starting up,” Pierre laments.

Fraser takes the beating on his chest as the bands of sound come up the hill. His eyes gleam. “It’s remarkable, it comes right up.”

“Every bloody year. Every sound.”

“The price you pay for the view. No obstruction and the hills behind us…” Ata turns to face them again and can feel the boo-doom boo-doom , bouncing off her chest, thumping her back.

The infernal Donkey tune starts and the horns blare up the racket louder. The DJ replays and replays the effect. Hill-teeth start gnashing and Fraser and Ata’s eyes meet and fire up, she shaking her little skinny self on the wall and he riding his head round his neck … “ bacchanal in Port’a Spain, whoa whoa…” A breeze wipes the words and raucousness away from the hills for a second, cleans their palate. Ata leaps off the wall and they head back across the lawn. You have to join in or run, and Pierre had tried to join once but was completely out of place. Pierre was not one to revel in the authenticity of a place and do like the locals do. He leaves that for the wankers he thinks are wannabes. He nurtures his aversion to loud noise and eye for everyday beauty instead.

“It’s not so bad on the actual Carnival days when it’s on the Savannah — it’s the stupid fetes that lead up to it. Especially when there’s one right below us in…”

“Boissiere Village or Stollmeyer’s Castle.”

“The windowpanes literally rattle.”

“ Whoa whoa … godong godong … buddup buddup…” Ata rollicks up and clowns around on the grass, for them to laugh — dangling limbs like a moko-jumbie stilt walker. Pierre is not amused.

“You better take him out, Ata. Don’t feel youall have to stay — go,” Fraser insists. “I have my lovely nurse now and Terence is coming later, to take me for a cru — a drive, a drive.”

Thomas comes grinning out to meet them. “Is loud, eh? You could barely hear de TV!” Skinning teeth big, as if it’s a God-given miracle, turning and admiring the hills as the echoes dribble around them.

* * *

Ata goes with Pierre, to the little beach house they rent sometimes, in Blanchisseuse. He chose to drive, glad for the company and her decision. He thought she had wavered for a moment, but she chose peace over noise. They pass through the concrete-box suburbs that lie trapped, scorching in the valleys around the town. Squeezing through Maraval, up to the ridge where the housing stops, out, and winding over the hills of the North Coast. Pierre glances at Ata staring out the window.

She looks and tries to listen to her heart and mind, and what they could tell her about where she should be, what she should be doing, creating, making, mas, design, what? All she hears is landscape whispers. The road, curving, curving, heights controlling. Green leaves close in then sweep away, down to Santa Cruz Valley. Closing in again, they carry you higher. Then Trinidad is revealing slips of her exotic dress. Lipstick-red slivers of chaconia and balisier, between wet green. Orangey-red immortelle. Pale heliconias, white spathiphyllum tongues in the dark shade. Twisting and flirting, the Northern Range dances the car along her spine. Fling and catch, in the dip of her waist. Clinging, holding on to moist mossy skin. Suddenly, way below, the shiny, silver-sea edge of a petticoat flashes. And up the back of her neck — banks of tree ferns dripping rain-dew, pull them into the intimacy of island plumage. The bamboo parts as they drive, slipping between quills. Against the skin of a peacock.

Further along the coast, she breathes in deeply and through the mountain-cool air, detects a distant, pungent cedar scent. The town ideas and worries have disappeared and she asks Pierre to stop for fresh cocoa flesh. The jewel pods have been catching the sun, warming sweet white pulp in their thick autumn-color cases. Pierre doesn’t like the stuff. He watches her savoring it, but still she stays silent. A hip of the land lazes the sea: La Vache. Beaches pounding names, Maracas, Las Cuevas, Blanchisseuse. Vultures soar above mute villages. And Ata waits for her answers.

* * *

Fraser’s new lightness of weight gives him spring and hope. Maybe he could live with this, the dialysis part. The expensive cocktail of drugs for HIV is another thing, but with more research, things would get better. They expect more years of life. He still hasn’t contacted any of his past lovers and has only said to Helen, and therefore to the others, he will handle it. They watched closely, to see if there was any change in Terence when he visited, or any old friends suddenly appearing. None so far. Mother kept visiting, in her padded oblivion, and became almost a relief, some sort of embodiment of public normality for them all. His father kept his distance whenever he could but peace can be made when strength comes.

The nurse gives him a boost too. He loves her uniform and stockinged, white-shoe containment. The way her belt cinches her gabardine waist and her buttocks suggests an African shelf, but is smoothed over by the material, sealed in. Even her hair, stitched on, perfectly even short braids. Nothing out of place. The strict routine she created worked better than any medicine. Charm and cheerfulness, appropriate disappearance just when it was needed, and supreme calm. A godsend, he calls her, and they all blessed doctor-friend for finding her. “Nurse Armor,” they say when he shuts himself off with her, “Nurse Amour” when he waxes on.